I Kill Monsters: Fury (Book 1) (28 page)

I was born to a poor peasant family on the
Pannonia Plain in the seventeenth century. The people of my village
were no better or worse than others, before or after them. Perhaps
they were somewhat more ignorant and parochial than their
contemporaries. I did not know. My master was ahead of his time,
yet he would not live to see the time he was ahead of. And here I
get ahead of myself. Forgive me.

When my father and mother were betrothed, the
Roma Maleva predicted they would have five children. My mother bore
eleven, which seemed to give lie to Maleva’s divination, but only
eight of us survived infancy. Of those eight, only five lived
through childhood. Maleva, it would seem, had been correct. I was
the second youngest. My mother did not survive the birth of my
little sister. I remember the women of our village, assisting in
the birth, I remember them weeping. My father, as I recall, shed no
tears. He loved my mother, but he was inured to a life of hardship.
My little sister, the one whose life owed itself to the life of my
mother, was christened Sasha Mikhailovna.

Both father and mother felt affection for us,
I believe, though their expressions of this affection were stunted.
Their lives were harsh and short. They were mere appendages to the
land. My earliest memories are of the land. From a basket, I
watched my parents and siblings work it. I was swaddled on my
mother’s back as she seeded it. By four years of age I was working
it myself, doing what little chores I could. By six I was bringing
in the crops with my parents. By eight I was working nearly as hard
as any man or woman in my village, alongside my father and brothers
and sisters. Mother had passed by then, and Sasha watched us from
the basket.

Our lives coincided with the rise and fall of
the sun. Up at dawn, asleep shortly after dusk. Disease and plague
were frequent visitors, stealing off the old and young, the hearty
and infirm. Death did not discriminate. Winters I remember
especially well. They were brutal and cold, as the winds howled off
the Carpathians. They were a season of privation and dark. Even the
swamp froze over, great icicles hanging from the trees,
crystallized stalactites. Summers granted little respite, as they
were infernally hot and humid. Not unlike this one.

There was little time for my brothers and
sisters and I to be children, to play. Childhood was not then
recognized the way it would come to be in later centuries. There
was no sanctuary in our earliest years. Yet the human spirit,
despite all evidence to the contrary, so often perseveres and
refuses to be tamed. We found time for frolic, my siblings and I.
We found a place. A stream ran through the lord’s vast property. My
brothers and I amused ourselves with tall tales and flights of the
imagination, claiming the stream a tributary of the mighty Danube.
In its cooling waters we repaired after many a long, hot summer
day, cavorting past the dusk and well into the early evenings. Our
walk home from the stream in the dark would see us pressed close to
one another, frightened but excited.

Night, you must understand, was a time of
dangers, real and imagined. The howls of wolves drifted down to us
from the Carpathians. An offensive stench wafted from the marsh
bounding one half of the road out of our village, a noisome odor
that all steered clear of. There were creatures in this swamp,
especially at night. Creatures none of us wished to encounter. Not
all predators, however, walked on four legs. Though the roads were
crude and rudimentary, there were travelers and passers-through,
and not all were to be trusted, or so we in my village believed and
were taught. We were a narrow-minded people set in our ways.
Foreign ideas were to be feared as much as the bodily harm a
stranger could inflict.

The old Roma, Maleva, did more than divine
the future. She was also the teller of tales, and her stories
enthralled the young and old of my village on many an occasion. Her
accounts of creatures to be feared and revered evoked trembling and
elation. Gathered close about, a somber mien to her haggard face,
Maleva would regale us with tales of beautiful Rusalka, underwater
princesses known to lure unsuspecting men to their watery deaths in
the lakes and rivers of the Plains. She told us of the Domovi,
guardian spirits of the house and hearth, creatures with an
affinity for horses and capable of conversing with horse and bovine
both. She warned us that should the village seek its downfall it
should look to the swamp, and we eyed the mists that rolled in off
those wetlands with the dawn with apprehension.

My brothers and I especially enjoyed Maleva’s
stories of revenants, of moroi and strigoi, what are called
upyr
or vampire. She told us of
eretiks
, those who,
in their lives, had turned their back on the Church and were doomed
to return from the grave. She warned us of the
eretik’s
eye
and its gaze that could lure one to the crypt. Mysterious
deaths—and in the late seventeenth century,
most
deaths were
mysteries to us—could be the return of a
upyr
to feed.
Maleva told us of the existence of Sabbatarians and
Dhampir
,
men and women who could destroy vampires. Because none of my
brothers and sisters were born on a Saturday and neither of our
parents were Roma, we hearkened as Maleva impressed upon us the
importance of aspen wood in the crafting of stakes. Her stories
scared us, even Leonid, my oldest brother. Little Sasha was much
too young to understand the stories and, as we listened and huddled
close, she would pet Maleva’s dog, which basked in the
attention.

The supernatural was a recognized fact among
my people. The lord oversaw his land, God His Heaven, and the
bishop his see. We the damned toiled away upon the soil. The
supernatural was accepted, yes, but not without limitations. I
remember well the visit to our village of a leper and how he was
chased from our lands into the swamp, cursed as ill-fated. Maleva
said the village folk had acted well, that they had pleased God in
expelling His afflicted son. She had been at the forefront of the
man’s expulsion, a fact that I would have cause to dwell upon
sometime later.

Maleva was respected and feared by most in my
village. Only one man openly dared to challenge her powers, Feigl,
the Ashkenazi. Unlike my parents and most others, Feigl was
somewhat educated. He was literate. Yet with his literacy came an
arrogance and conceit. Though Feigl was bullheaded and opinionated,
he was tolerated because the lord of the land favored him. His own
father came to our village following the Khmelnytskyi uprising,
wherein a hundred thousand of his people were destroyed. What Feigl
and his father had done to ingratiate themselves to the lord was
unknown to us, though the subject of much conjecture.

Feigl’s three sons were much like their
father. Gerald, Ezra, and Symeon were haughty and scornful. Their
mother, my own told me shortly before her death, had passed
following the birth of Symeon. Symeon himself had nearly perished.
The midwife had had to reach into the birth canal with her two
hands and dislodge him. In the process, she crushed his skull
somewhat, an injury that never fully healed. Perhaps because of
this, Symeon was especially malformed and of sub-average
intelligence.

When my mother died birthing Sasha, it never
once crossed my mind that there was a connection between their
family and ours. Perhaps, if I had been positively disposed to
Feigl and his brood, I would have looked upon this coincidence as
portentous, though it was in no way such. But I quickly learned to
loathe the boys and their father, and I failed to recognize even
the coincidence, a coincidence which was understandable as death
for women bearing children in those days was not a rare
occurrence.

Feigl’s children were louts, and worse, they
were bullies. Their father enjoyed the protection of the lord of
the land more so than any other, and this favor was not lost on the
children. Feigl’s boys were thin and scraggy and only badgered
those they felt weaker than themselves. Because we numbered five
and were often encountered together, Gerald, Ezra and Symeon chose
to ignore us. But I always noticed the way they looked at my
brothers and sisters as we passed, the contempt in the eyes of the
Feigl’s eldest. It was distaste accompanied by patience, as if
Gerald were waiting for something, for some later time.

The boys were a nuisance around the village.
Like their father, they appeared to do little work. Their days
seemed given to mischief and frolic. As they grew older their
antics grew increasingly mean-spirited. What in their youth could
be dismissed as childhood indiscretions and immaturity, soon gave
way to planned malevolence. By the summer of the new Lord’s
arrival, most of the men and women in my village avoided Feigl’s
sons. The Sabbath, when Feigl would lock the three with himself in
their cottage, was a day of respite for the remainder of the
village.

When Maleva’s dog went missing, my brother,
Leonid, told us to
watch
, that Gerald and his brothers were
behind its disappearance. I remember
knowing
my brother was
correct, and I remember the look on the face of little Sasha as she
considered the possible fate of the animal she had loved. She was
five and I do not think she understood death. A passing farmer
discovered the dog’s carcass on the outskirts of the swamp and
returned it to Maleva. I am told that Gerald, Ezra and Symeon were
passing on the road when the farmer handed the remains to Maleva.
Ezra said something to his older brother, who laughed. It was
apparent the dog had suffered before its death. It was eviscerated
and its forelegs broken.
Wolves
, Ezra called out to Maleva
as she stood with the body in her arms.
You
yourself
have
so
often
warned
us
of
the
swamp
.

But Maleva
knew
. As sure as she knew
the sun would rise in the morning, she knew these boys passing by
on the road and feigning innocence were responsible for the
pre-meditated torture and murder of her dog. When she berated the
second eldest, Ezra, the father came immediately to her cottage and
called her a witch. Such an accusation had the potential to carry
more than mere sting in those days. But Maleva laughed at Feigl,
who continued to rant at her and shake his fist. Later I would come
to understand that Feigl bore Maleva ill will because she had
rebuffed his advances. Though significantly older than Feigl,
Maleva was a single woman in a village where women who were not
even teenagers were spoken for. What Feigl saw in the old woman, I
know not. I was a child. I knew nothing then of carnal knowledge,
of the ways of the heart and love.

The lord was often absent from his land. One
day word reached the village that he had passed in a distant clime,
victim of plague. To call the lord’s home a castle would be
granting it a dignity the structure itself did not warrant. After
years of vacancy, even when the lord drew breath, his home had
fallen into disrepair. In the spring following the fall in which
Maleva’s dog met its end, my brothers and I would pass the
dilapidated house and wonder if the rumors we had heard—from our
parents, from the elders—that the property and land would be passed
along to one or more boyars bore any truth.

That spring, the spring of my ninth year,
when the temperature invited it, we would steal away from home for
an hour at evening to the stream, frolicking in its chilled
shallows. Many a night we encountered Ezra or Symeon or, on
occasion, all three of Feigel’s sons, who, emboldened for whatever
reasons, began taunting us with insults in their own tongue.
Leonid, all of fifteen years, shepherded us closer and urged us on,
ignoring the heckling and invective hurled our way.

One such night, having passed Feigl’s cottage
and withstood the indignities cast upon us from its inhabitants, we
noted that construction had commenced on the manor house. It looked
like a full day’s work had been completed. None of us would have
known, as we were in the fields with our father the entire day. Yet
it looked like a refurbishing of the manor had begun. My brothers
and sisters and I were proud and apprehensive. Proud because we
identified with the land and anyone that oversaw it, and we felt
that the renovation of the property would somehow make us all
better. But we were also somewhat frightened: did this
reconstruction augur the arrival of a Muscovy boyar, and if such
were the case, how might he treat us?

That evening we cavorted in the stream and
spun fantasies of the new owner. He had served none other than the
Patriarch of Constantinople, my brother, Viktor, said. No, wagered
Leonid, he had cut his teeth admirably during the Bohemian Revolt
following the Defenestration of Prague. Leonid had meant the
Second
Defenestration of Prague of course, and his quip
about cutting ones teeth would recur to me.
Posh
, my older
sister, Mina, dismissed, offering that this was obviously a man of
some cultivation who would find our village sorely lacking and,
like the lord before him, spend little to no time among us.

My little Sashichka, not a trace of fear in
her voice, called our attention to the stranger observing us on the
bank. Though the day had given to night, the moon illuminated our
surroundings. The man squatted there, watching us, unconcerned. How
long he had perched there, observing, we had no clue. His garb was
clean and well cut, unlike our peasant rags. His footwear appeared
fine leather, and his cloak, though not ostentatious, looked to be
of the finest threads. We had never seen his like before.

Dobri
den
, he greeted us in our
language, though his accent was decidedly foreign. Viktor took his
cue from Leonid, who had frozen still, and I mimicked Viktor. Mina
stepped in front of Sasha, but my little sister, bless her heart,
returned the greeting. The man on the opposite bank stood, and as
he stood he smiled and spoke to us. As I listened to his voice I
registered what I could of his physicality. He was of ordinary
height, and there was a fluidity to his movement, a grace and
effortlessness of motion.