by Mike Carey
So many disasters in so short a time caused people to ask what curse had fallen on my family, and what sin it could have been that had brought the curse down. My father, made furious by such wicked gossip, told them to mind their own affairs. And so they did. A circle cleared around our house, as though there was plague within it.
Dimut was the only one who still called on us, and still greeted us when we walked abroad. What’s more, he proposed to me again. He didn’t mind, he said, if I was cursed. He’d rather be cursed with me than blessed with some other woman.
I’m ashamed to say this, but I took his kindness badly. It looked like pity to me, and I told him sharply to take his nonsense to someone who had the time to listen to it.
But his words set me thinking. Up until then I had thought of these troubles as belonging to us all alike – to my mother and my father, my sisters and brother as well as to me. Only when Dimut said ‘if you are cursed’, meaning me and me alone, did I begin to wonder if this could possibly be true.
And once I had thought that thought, I had to know the answer. I asked my great-uncle’s wife, Ghuda, what steps I should take to find out a curse, and she told me a very powerful finding spell. I can’t tell it to you because it belongs to my people and isn’t mine to give, but I can tell you it involved the blood of the moon and the shadow of a cat that had eaten its own kittens.
At this point a wail of protest rose from Magda, who was sternly shushed by the other ghosts. ‘Drozde’s rules!’ they whispered, and the dead girl subsided with bad grace.
I bled the moon, and walked the outline of the cat’s shadow. I did ten other things besides, and as the thirteenth thing I turned in my own footsteps to see what was behind me. If there was a curse on me, it should have been standing or lying there upon the ground, plain to see. But there was nothing. Nothing at all that I could see.
I laughed with relief.
And then stiffened in horror, because another voice laughed alongside mine.
‘Who’s there?’ I cried.
‘Who do you think?’ said the other voice. And the cruelty in its tone made me shake like a spider’s web in a rainstorm.
‘The devil from the well,’ I said, because somehow I knew that that was who it was.
‘Give me my name.’
‘Shin!’
‘Yes. I am Shin, and I will hound and torment you until you go mad and die by your own hand.’
‘But why?’ I wailed. ‘I danced for you!’
‘Ah, but you danced with stupid, skittish and disrespectful thoughts in your mind. The dance is meant to be tribute to me. Yours was mockery.’
‘I didn’t mean it as mockery!’
‘All the same,’ the devil said, ‘that was how I took it.’
I was aghast. I knew now what I’d done, and that all the terrible things that had happened were due to my transgression. I had already blamed myself for Venni being maimed, and for the loss of my family’s wealth and honour, but the dead goats were my fault too. And worst of all, I had visited madness on my mother.
I spent the night on a bare rock over a precipice. I was dazed with guilt. A hundred times I thought to cast myself down into the abyss, I hated myself so much – and Shin encouraged me to do it, telling me that I would never know any peace in this world until I was dead.
But I endured, somehow, and in the morning I went before the elders. I told them what I had discovered, that the demon from the well was persecuting me and all the people I loved. I begged them to allow me to dance before the well again, or failing that to try to appease Shin with some other offering.
They refused outright. As far as they could see, they said, the sin was mine and the punishment was also mine, which was right and good. Since Shin hated me, he would probably not be happy to see me dance again. And if they offered further sacrifice, Shin might come to expect it in future years, which would be a burden to all the people forever. Better to let things run their course.
They told me that I was banished. They told me to expect no help or welcome from the people, then or ever.
I was weeping with grief and rage when I left the elder circle. I almost walked into Dimut, who had been waiting for me the whole time. He told me again that he loved me and would be happy to marry me, even with the demon’s hatred and the banishment thrown into the bargain.
The boy was clearly mad. But his bravery and his devotion warmed and cheered me. And Goddess, I was cold and miserable then! It would have been easy to fall into his arms. But it would have destroyed him. I could feel Shin’s breath on my shoulder. If I showed any fondness for Dimut, I would only be teaching the demon where to strike next.
‘Don’t you have anybody else to bother?’ I shouted at him. ‘Do you have to be crawling around my feet all the time? A dream told you that you loved me, and you believed the dream. Wake up, and see the truth. I won’t be yours until the river wets the treetops!’
I left him there and turned my steps towards home. But I heard the demon’s steps echoing mine, and my loathing of him rose in me like a flood. I began to run.
I ran into the forest, where the thorns are thickest. They tore my skin to ribbons, but it did not avail me. ‘I’m still here!’ Shin chuckled. ‘Nothing you can do will shake me loose.’
I ran into the desert, where the sun beats like a hammer. I pushed on through the heat of the day, letting it burn my skin red and black, but it did not avail me. ‘I’m right at your side,’ Shin gloated. ‘You’re wasting your time.’
I ran to the cliff edge where I had sat the night before, and jumped from rock to rock over drops so steep they made the breath stop in my throat, but it did not avail me. ‘I like it here,’ Shin sighed. ‘It’s very cosy when it’s just the two of us.’
I stopped running then, and sat me down and thought. Was there any place in the world that would be easier for me to bear than him? Any place where I might cast him off? At first I could think of none. But at last a strange inspiration came to me. Blasphemy and disrespect had brought me to this terrible situation. Perhaps they could save me too.
I jumped to my feet and began to run again. I ran to the flood plain, which – this being high summer – was an endless wasteland of cracked mud. I sought a place I knew, and when I found it I stood my ground.
‘What did that achieve?’ Shin jeered. ‘It was barely a stroll to me, while you seem to have used up the last of your strength.’
It was true that I was exhausted, but I defied him anyway. I spat on the ground at his feet. ‘You are nothing!’ I shouted. ‘Your power is so weak, a baby could topple you!’
That seemed to anger him. ‘You little animal!’ he growled. ‘Your mind isn’t big enough even to imagine my power! There is nothing like me in the world!’
‘Nothing like you,’ I agreed. ‘But many things greater than you.’
‘No! Nothing! Nothing greater!’ His voice was right in my ear now, as though he stood at my side and leaned his head forward to disgorge his answer at me.
‘Yes there is. There is the goddess!’
‘Panafya? That dull-eyed cow! I’d smack her head right off her shoulders if she ever dared to cope me! I’d rip her heart and lungs and lights out if she so much as—’
‘IF SHE SO MUCH AS WHAT?’
The voice that cut across Shin’s was so vast and loud it was like a mountain falling on us – and yet so musically beautiful that my arms, which I had raised to cover my ears, remained frozen in the air halfway.
Panafya rose before us, a tower of water with a face that frowned down on the demon and on me from the zenith of the sky.
This was her place. The place where the river flows in autumn and winter and spring. But in high summer there was no water there to show where it ended or began. When I had spat, I had prayed a summoning – water of any kind being a right offering to the river goddess. I had brought her there so that she might hear Shin’s blasphemy against her, if he could be coaxed into uttering one.
‘Panafya!’ the
demon gasped. ‘Great one! I … I meant no insult!’
‘THEN WHY INSULT ME? WHY DRAG MY NAME THROUGH YOUR STENCHING MOUTH AT ALL?’
I saw Shin now for the first time, as the goddess’s gaze stripped him of all his protections and disguises. He was not as impressive as I had imagined him. He was a good deal taller than a man, but his limbs were gangly and pocked with sores, and the splintered teeth in his grimacing mouth stuck out in all directions like sticks of kindling on a bonfire.
But water, not fire, was his nemesis.
Panafya raised her hand – she had not had a hand until then, but she had one to call on when she wanted it – and brought it down. A great wave kicked us, as hard as a wild horse kicks, and knocked us off our feet.
I heard Shin wailing and begging as he was dragged under.
I saw river weeds wrap around his arms and legs and throat to still his struggles.
I saw the silt of the river bottom swallow him like a mouth.
Then I saw only sparkling lights and encroaching darkness, because I was drowning.
But strong arms embraced me, and lifted me to the surface, where I gulped and wriggled like a fish on a line. It was Dimut, of course. We rode out the flood tide, he and I, each in turn giving strength to the other when the other seemed ready to give up and slip under. We held each other more tightly than we had in our lovemaking.
When the deluge abated, we lay in each other’s arms in the clinging mud, so spent that for a long while we could not even speak. When we could, Dimut asked me again to be his wife, and I said yes. We did not need a marriage tree.
‘We’ll go away,’ he said, ‘and find another people who will take us in. We’re young and strong, and we can work. Someone will want us. Or else we’ll start our own tribe, somewhere in the hills where there’s a lake for the goats to drink from and wood to make a house.’
It was a pleasant dream. But I liked the river plain, I loved my family, and I had a better idea.
I went back to Khethyu. To my people. I told them Shin was dead, by my hand. I told them the goddess had risen at my bidding, even in the bone-dry summer, and shown her winter face.
I told them that Dimut and I were to be numbered among the elders now, and that anyone who said no had better be a strong swimmer.
We lived long here. We had thirteen sons and daughters, and ten of them lived. So many were the generations of my children that they called me Arinak Imat Basya – thousand-times-blessed Arinak.
But they called me Demonslayer too, and I liked that name better.
After the story was done, and the ghosts had thanked Arinak with their silent applause, Drozde felt compelled to ask the question that was uppermost in her mind. But she was conscious, too, of the etiquette she was gradually learning.
‘Thank you, Arinak, for your story,’ she said. ‘It was well told, and though your world seems very far from mine you brought it closer to me.’
The pale spectre threw out her arms and ducked her head in a strange, exaggerated bow. ‘That was my only wish,’ she said. ‘Ia, Drozde. Ia, Pokoj and my new tribe. My death tribe.’
The cue fell convenient to Drozde’s purpose, and she picked it up with alacrity. ‘You said you lived on this ground,’ she said. ‘Did you mean right here?’ She pointed at the faded wooden tiles that made up the floor of the ballroom. ‘Did you live and die where we’re standing now?’
Arinak seemed uncertain of how to answer. She thought for a moment, then made a circular gesture with both hands. ‘We lived all through the valley,’ she said, ‘and in the hills on both sides of it. Panafya was our life, so we stayed close to the river. My home when I was wife and mother was quite far from here, on the western bank by Scowling Brow. But Shin’s well was here.’ She pointed towards the rear of the house. ‘It still is, of course, though he’s long gone. And this was where I died. I fell down one day – the day of my fifth granddaughter’s naming – and I died where I fell.’
‘And was buried here?’ Drozde ventured.
Arinak shook her head emphatically. ‘No indeed. We Khethyu buried our dead close to where the river rises, at Six Spring. The running water …’ She seemed to grope for a word. ‘It makes things clean. All sorts of things. Even souls.’
‘The river still followed its old course through the Drench in those days,’ the ghost of Meister Gelbfisc observed. She probably means Zielona Góra.’
At the mention of the river being moved from its place – presumably a terrible sacrilege for Arinak – she covered her eyes and fled. Meister Gelbfisc was widely censured under the rules of Drozde, which were recited again with as much gusto as before.
‘Why do you name your manifesto after me?’ Drozde demanded. She had held her peace through the tale, but felt free to speak now. A thought occurred to her. ‘Was it my puppet shows that gave you the idea for this game of storytelling?’
The ghosts seemed shocked and perturbed. ‘It’s not a game!’ Magda exclaimed. ‘Drozde, don’t say that, not even as a joke! It’s everything!’
‘How we live and who we are,’ another ghost confirmed. He was a slight but very handsome man in a military uniform that – Drozde saw now – was quite different from the uniforms of the soldiers in the company. Was he, like Arinak, a warrior from a long-ago time, or a soldier from another country who had fought and died here? Because dying here, she had come to realise, was the crucial requirement for membership of this group. Pokoj was home to those who had breathed their last breath within its grounds, whether they’d lived there formerly or not.
‘But still,’ she persisted, ‘why do you say I made it up?’
All the dead faces looked uncomfortable, and Magda’s most of all. ‘It’s easier to say that,’ she ventured, ‘than to explain. Explaining is hard, and you … someone … It’s …’ She pursed her lips, frowning with a child’s ferocious seriousness. ‘We’re not supposed to tell it yet,’ she said.
‘When, then?’ Drozde asked.
‘After you know some other things.’
‘And you can’t just tell me the other things now?’
Magda shook her head.
With a loud tut of impatience, Drozde turned her back on the group and walked away; she had no more energy for these intrigues tonight. Their pleas and protests and frantic apologies faded quickly behind her.
14
Lieutenant Klaes made his observations, and then his plans.
The girl Bosilka’s employment in the burgomaster’s household seemed to involve no regular hours. She went there most mornings and stayed through the serving of the midday meal, but after that each day was different. She might leave immediately or stay to do some other work, whether cleaning floors, washing clothes or feeding the chickens in the little yard in front of the house. On market days (Thursday in Narutsin and Tuesday in neighbouring Stollenbet) she did Dame Weichorek’s shopping. On Sundays she herded the younger children to church while the parents and the oldest son walked ahead in solemn state.
Klaes planned to make his approach on market day, taking advantage of the crowds and the general atmosphere of openness and holiday. But when it came to it he found he couldn’t commit himself to an exploit that was so open to a dishonourable interpretation. Despite August’s suggestion, he had no intention of paying court to this woman. She was young and naïve and, although he knew the colonel thought otherwise, he was convinced that she had never been wooed before. Attentions of that sort from him, an officer in the Austrian army, would probably turn her head, and he drew the line at breaking a country girl’s heart for the sake of his commission. Yet if he accosted her on a market day, anyone watching would assume at once that his mind was set on some sort of dalliance.
So he waited until Sunday, and went to church. None of the other officers in the company would be there, because this was a Protestant church in which the anti-papist revolutionary Jan Hus was thought of as a third Saint John alongside the Evangelist and the Baptist. Klaes suspected Hus had been more rogue than saint, but h
e held to his parents’ faith insofar as he held to any at all. Low church was good church, wherever you found it.
The little stone chapel was full to the brim with the stolid citizenry of Narutsin. As Klaes walked in, he felt rather than heard the shift in volume which indicated that a dozen conversations had been halted by his entrance. He was the only soldier there. He knew he had a few co-religionists in the detachment, but clearly that morning they were not feeling devout – or else, perhaps, they were more fiercely partisan. Whatever the reason, it left Klaes as a conspicuous flash of military green in a sea of homespun greys and browns. He hurried to an empty pew at the back, desperate to escape the collective gaze of the townsfolk. Nobody seemed inclined to join him there.
Bosilka was in the front row along with the burgomaster’s family, and she noticed him at once. She seemed surprised to see him there, and perhaps a little curious. She stole several glances at him before dropping her gaze each time back to her hymnal, which she was surely holding for propriety’s sake only. It was vanishingly unlikely that she could actually read.
After the service, as the congregation filed out into the churchyard, Klaes fell in with the girl as if by accident. ‘This is shocking to see,’ he said, aiming for a bantering tone. ‘A woman your age with such a large family. And with no husband in sight.’
It was a weak joke, but he thought it was a harmless one. He expected the girl to blush a little and to hasten to explain her relationship with the children, which would be a doorway or entry point for discussion of other things related to the life of the village. And he would then be halfway to his goal.
Instead Bosilka put on a vexed expression and turned away.
‘Well, well,’ Klaes pursued. ‘Doubtless you’ve suitors enough. Or more than enough. Is this a subterfuge then? To seem a mother hen, with chicks, the better to fright away random cocks?’
