Black Spring (12 page)

Once her family was destroyed, the duty would pass to the next male blood relative, until the curse had killed the men of the next family, and then the next. There was no peasant in the village who was not related to the Oseku household, even if it was some distant cousinship. The vendetta would burn through all the bloodlines of our village, leaving in its wake a desolation of graves. Beside them would stand a line of empty-eyed women, their faces hardened by sorrow, shivering against the cold wind in their ash-colored rags. So my aunt wept silently for herself and for everyone she loved, and her husband sat beside her with his face turned to the wall, and they said nothing to each other, because there was nothing to say.

T
he forty-day truce passed, and Petar Oseku was clearly in no hurry to kill his man. As custom demanded, his wife hung the sheet on which Surinam’s blood-weltered body had been laid from the top window of their house. It was a constant reminder of duty, and it flapped and snapped in the wind as the year turned toward winter. I crossed myself every time I passed: the sheet was like a shroud, and its rattling voice in the bitter air had a deathly sound.

My uncle had until the stain faded to take his revenge. The blackened clots washed off and the marks faded to brown and then to an ever paler rust, but still Petar Oseku didn’t make his move. All the same, he wasn’t idle. He was gathering money for the Blood Tax: being a man of forethought and thrift, he made arrangements to cover not only his own payment but that of his sons as well. He sold an orchard of almond trees, his most valuable property, as well as a couple of family treasures, including a small clock designed like a temple with tiny golden cherubs flourishing trumpets at each corner, and he put the money aside. Even if his household were stripped of its modest wealth, his wife and daughters would not now wander homeless.

By then winter had its bite on the plains, and soon the roads would be snowed out. Winter was considered as good as a truce, since travel was impossible. Strictly speaking, Petar Oseku should have pursued the vendetta with all possible speed, but since it was not his own blood that he was avenging, no one, not even the Wizard Ezra, would look askance if he took his time.

The snows came early that year, harbingers of a season of vicious blizzards punctuated by long, ice-bound nights. It was more than two months before the roads opened again, and in that time Petar Oseku made his peace with God. As soon as the spring melt came, he hefted his rifle and went, as a dutiful northern man, to preserve the honor of his family and his village. After he had shot Lovro, he immediately traveled to the King’s Palace to pay the Blood Tax. When he came home, we held the honoring feast for him. It was the first I ever attended, if not the last, and was one of the few times that Lina envied me. As she was of royal blood, and therefore exempt from the laws of vendetta, she was also forbidden from its celebrations.

The honoring feast is a strange affair: proud and grieving and darkly joyous, all at the same time. We sang the mournful, keening songs of vendetta and garlanded Petar Oseku’s neck with spring flowers, and he was in that moment a king, because he had kept faith with his honor, and so honored all of us. The least admirable man blossoms into his manhood at these events; I have seen mean and vicious spirits attain a grace that was otherwise unimaginable. A good man could seem like a demigod.

Petar Oseku sat at the head of the table, his back as straight as a poker, and lifted his cup with what seemed to me a mysterious elation. He had then thirty days of truce, his last as a free man: after that, he was the living dead. He could be killed at any time, as he took his goats to pasture, or tended his crops, or simply walked along the village street to meet a friend to play cards. I don’t think it even occurred to him to take refuge in the
odu,
in that way escaping his fate; in any case, doing so would only hasten the doom for his sons, since the vendetta would then pass to his closest kin.

I have often wondered what that must be like, constantly to feel death stalking you, its charnel breath brushing your cheek, its skeletal footsteps dogging your own. Does such a man spend his entire waking life in a chill of sweat, and each night in restless dreams? The waiting must be anguish in itself; perhaps the murderous click of a rifle in the clear air would arrive as unutterable relief. As the vendetta burned through the village, I watched each sentenced man with, I confess, an almost indecent curiosity, and it seemed to me that my uncle was of all of them the most dignified, in death as he was in life.

Petar Oseku died a week and two days after the truce lifted, the first death of that black spring. He was shot on a goat path outside the village: the killer was Lovro’s brother. The rapid revenge was, no doubt, driven by Lovro’s brother’s own grief and anger as much as the impatience of youth, and perhaps its swiftness was merciful. I think this boy was no more than nineteen years old when he was killed in his turn by Petar’s oldest son.

The mechanisms of vendetta are slow. Rather than the quick fever and agony of plague, its effect on a village is like the wasting disease which gradually strips the flesh from the skeleton over months and years. The outcome is ultimately the same, but as it runs its course, the village adjusts and continues with the routines of living. Perhaps this is also how people survive: after all, you cannot think about death all day, however heavily its presence weighs upon your mind, or you would go mad.

So it was that, after the initial excitement of fear and anger (this latter mainly directed toward the village of Skip), those of us not directly affected returned to our ordinary lives, and the presence of vendetta faded to the background. For me, this meant lessons and household duties, and in the thoughtlessness of childhood these immediate concerns overlaid any anxieties I might have felt about the vendetta. Lina began to adopt some of the manners of a lady; her father had managed to impress upon her the signal importance of behaving with at least some propriety. Both Lina and I were approaching the threshold of womanhood, and we no longer played as the small children did, boys and girls all together, but gathered with our own sex. I began to look upon boys with a bashful but not indifferent eye.

The exceptions to this separation were Damek and Lina, whose intimate friendship seemed, if anything, stronger. They broke all our childish rules of association, but they were an exception that we simply accepted: girls didn’t play with boys, but Lina and Damek were different. The adults cast a less tolerant eye. On occasion the pair still disappeared together for a whole day, leaving before dawn with food stolen from the kitchen to make their lunch. Not even the Lord Kadar’s displeasure could stop them, and he was more and more displeased.

Once, after a particularly stern scolding, I found myself comforting Lina, who had thrown herself in despair on her bed. When she stopped sobbing, I asked her why she kept opposing her father’s will, when his anger made her so unhappy.

“It’s so unfair!” she said, lifting her tear-stained face from her pillow. “If Damek and I were both boys, nobody would take the slightest bit of notice.”

“But you’re not a boy,” I said.

“No, I’m not. It’s the unluckiest thing in the world.” She sat up, wiping her hands over her eyes. “God must hate me so, to make me a girl.”

“It’s not as if you and Damek can’t talk together at home,” I said reasonably. “Nobody would say anything then.”

Lina sat up, her eyes blazing. “I hate being stuck in this house like a — like a broody hen or a sow in a sty. Don’t you feel it, Anna? Sometimes I can’t bear it. I just have to get out or I’ll burst.”

Usually I had little patience with Lina’s overdramatic statements, but this struck a pang of empathy. I too felt the walls closing in around me as womanhood approached. I hesitated, unsure what to say, and Lina clutched my hand.

“Sometimes I want to feel the wind in my face and the rain in my hair and earth on my feet. I want it so badly that I could die with wanting. . . . And when Damek and I are out in the plains without a single house in sight, with the sky above in all its changes and the rock beneath us, going down farther than you could ever imagine, and us between them as light as blossom, I feel so alive! Then I’m free, Anna. . . . It’s the only time that I’m free. . . .”

Not only what she said but also the passion with which Lina spoke went beyond my understanding. I felt the same disquiet that had ambushed me years earlier, when I had glimpsed Damek’s adoration of Lina; perhaps it was a dim presentiment of what would follow. Unconsciously I pulled my hand away and sat back, and Lina stared at me, the light ebbing from her face.

“Oh, go away,” she said at last. “You don’t understand. You’ll never understand. Damek’s the only person who knows what it’s like. The rest of you are all sheep.”

I was used to Lina calling me names, but this hurt me. She refused to say anything more, and since her distress seemed to have abated, I left her there.

For all its intimacy, Lina and Damek’s relationship was not more than cousinly, but her father began at this stage to feel some concern about its future implications. He had accepted this cuckoo into his house more generously than he might have and treated him fondly. Damek was interested from the beginning in the mechanics of money — the legacy, I’m sure, of a childhood blighted by poverty — and he badgered the Lord Kadar to teach him about the running of the estate. Lina’s father wasn’t nearly as interested in accounts as Damek was, but the boy’s hunger to learn amused him. They sometimes spent hours closeted in the master’s study; I suspect that he thought that Damek could make himself useful when he grew up, as steward of the estate. He certainly wouldn’t have welcomed the notion of Damek as his son-in-law. It was then that he began to speak about sending Lina south, to pursue an education appropriate to her social standing.

This proposal created a major squall. Sending Lina to the southern estate was a sensible idea from many points of view, not least because it seemed that her witch powers were beginning to be manifest. Lina had no idea how to work spells or charms — in fact, her father had forbidden her even to think about exploring her abilities and had told her that if she felt anything witch-like, she was to suppress it at once. Unusually for Lina, she made no signs of defying her father; I think that in this case she understood that his prohibition was in her best interest.

Even so, she couldn’t hide her nature. Sometimes in moments of extreme emotion a faint shimmer seemed to inhabit her skin, and once, when she teased me to distraction and I slapped her face, I was thrown against the kitchen wall without her laying a finger on my body. Our squabble stopped immediately: Lina was as astonished as I was and helped me up with unaccustomed meekness. We pretended nothing had happened and never mentioned it again; I think we were both equally shaken.

In the South, witches were not persecuted, even if they were considered, with a couple of notable exceptions in the city, to be of lower status than their male counterparts. If Lina were living on the southern estate, the master could have hired a wise woman to teach her the witchlore, and perhaps she might have found a useful way to spend her time and her powers.

Lina’s response to this suggestion was violent and absolute. She refused point-blank to leave the Plateau, if it meant leaving Damek behind. Even the mildest hint of moving would summon one of her fits, which as she grew older were at once less frequent and more frightening. She would scream at her father as if she were possessed by a demon and then run off and lock herself in her bedchamber. We would stand anxiously outside her door, listening to her violent sobbing, but she would answer no one. Not even Damek could persuade her to open her door; until her father promised that he would not, for the moment, consider such a move, she would speak to no one. After two or three such incidents, the idea was quietly dropped.

And there things stood. Lina’s life — and the lives of others — might have turned out a lot better had she been sent to the South. But if wishes were horses, I would be a great general. It’s no use sighing for what might have been.

Despite such occasional explosions, life in our household continued uneventfully. The master seemed to have reached an accommodation with the Wizard Ezra, and there were no more disturbing interviews between them; we thought at the time it was because Ezra was busy with the vendetta and was no longer concerned with the trivial business of a young witch in the village. My mother in particular was greatly relieved; for all the trouble Lina caused her, she was fond of the child and would have been grieved by her suffering.

The year after the vendetta started, our finances improved considerably. Having spent almost a year in the Red House kicking his heels, the master embarked on one of his extended trips as soon as the roads cleared in the springtime. His departure left Lina desolate, and our household to manage the estate without him, which, to tell the truth, was somewhat easier in his absence. The master was never more than dutiful in his management, if you understand me. My father became steward of the estate, and between him and my sharp-eyed mother, there was more care given to detail than the master could ever be bothered to deal with. So it seemed that we prospered, like a man with an illness deep in his body that nevertheless leaves him looking hale, even if the flush in his cheeks betrays a deadly fever.