*
The woman presented short handwritten menus which neither Burns or Elsie could read. They sat near the open door, in the glare of the grotesques. Burns thought to ask if the building opposite was a chapel, but the woman only made polite sounds without trying to speak. They attempted to glean some meaning from the menus, until the woman took them back and gestured reassuringly.
She was pleased when they put the bronze cups from the street seller on the table. She carried them to a cabinet near the kitchen door, where she topped them with drink from a long carafe. She returned with the drinks and set them on the table. Burns pointed suspiciously at his cup, and asked, "Yava?"
The woman shook her head, gestured for them to try it, and without waiting, turned to enter the kitchen. Burns let Elsie try the drink and waited until she toasted approvingly, then took a sip -- it was wine, or a local variant, heavy and sweet, with spices that complicated the residual taste of woods and grasses. He suspected this was stronger than typical wine. It left a warm trail through his chest and in his stomach. There were also tendrils of smokiness to the drink, but Burns wasn’t sure if that was the incense floating from the apparent chapel.
The woman returned within minutes with two deep plates. Until then, Burns hadn't noticed her hands. The fingers pinching the plates were stunted and stout, and reminded him of pig's feet. He tried not to stare. Perhaps mindful of her deformity, the woman set the plates before Burns and Elsie and tucked her hands to her sides in a single practised flourish. She noticed they had both almost finished the wine-like drink, and went to the cabinet to bring the carafe back to their table. She made another gesture as if to present the meal a second time, when Burns glimpsed her hands again -- they were stout and coarse, but not the crude extremities he had first seen. The woman left for the kitchen again.
Burns looked over the plates. "I suppose they believe in getting right to it, no starters or nibbles."
The woman had served them the same meal. Crusted slices of bread along the wide rims of the plates surrounded a stew of root vegetables and dark meat. Even by the end, Burns wasn’t sure what animal the meat had come from -- not lamb, not beef, though in turns it tasted vaguely of both. Burns hazarded venison, while Elsie guessed they were eating horse. She'd eaten horse before, she told him, during a stint in Africa before she started college, before they had met. This was one of the times when Burns couldn’t tell if Elsie was joking: she offered little for him to decide.
Nevertheless, the meal was wonderful, the stewed meat was as soft as the fresh bread and succulent, the sauce creamy and warming. Left within the mix were shelled boiled eggs no bigger than the top of Burns' thumb, which Elsie moved to one side of the plate without eating. She claimed she'd worry they were the eggs of the black wrens. Burns ate everything on his side, then scooped the eggs -- six of them -- from Elsie's plate, telling her she should be more adventurous.
"You're so manly," she kidded.
The carafe of Rodenje wine combined with the dish's seasoning to create more intricate and pleasing flavours. If this was horsemeat, Burns said, it was a pity they couldn’t buy it in a supermarket back home.
He watched the building opposite during the meal. The restless black wrens landed on gutters and narrow window ledges, and fluttered around the grotesques. Several poured through the door. Maybe they nested in there.
Someone move inside the building, carrying candles from one wall to another. Burns glimpsed white clothing and a dark hood, and wondered if the figure was a priest. The grotesques could indicate a building of local significance. It struck him that Rodenje was within the sphere of the Orthodox Church, yet he hadn't seen a single Christian symbol during their walk.
They finished the meal and took a while to finish what remained in the carafe, content (drunk, Burns supposed) to let the day dim and the air cool and for the meals to settle. The woman appeared again when they both finished their drinks. Burns wondered what telepathy had summoned her at the appropriate time. He considered requesting another carafe, but decided its denseness and the fugue it concocted in his chest and mind might invite a hangover, if overindulged.
As the woman collected the plates, Burns put what he assumed to be more than enough cash on the table -- fifty deri. The woman at first eyed the notes as if distrustful of Burns, causing him to wonder if he needed to lay down more cash. The woman balanced the plates on one arm, and reluctantly tweezed two notes from Burns' offering, a five and a ten, which she balled into her fist before walking from the table.
Once she pushed back into the kitchen, Burns shrugged, and returned the remaining notes to his wallet. "I suppose that's it," he said.
Elsie wondered about the bronze cups. "Should we take them?"
"Nah. It's back to the hotel for us."
Orphans.
"That was a treat," Elsie said once outside, and kissed him.
He felt obliged to apologise again, "for earlier. It's just my head is cluttered with what I need to do for the book."
Elsie patted his chest. "I know. I won't get in the way, I promise."
Maybe the alcohol loosened him enough to say, "I'm just not sure why you came." Feeling as if he'd made some vague accusation, he added, "It won't be enjoyable for you, if I'm working most of the time."
Elsie took a moment before answering. "I think things will change once this is out of the way. Don't you? You'll be a professor--"
"Without a guaranteed job."
"-- it'll be the start of something new. We might look back on this and think this is where things changed. Or do you think that's strange?"
Elsie was intimating deeper concerns, but the Rodenje wine had given Burns a daydream-like aloofness. "I think it's strange that I've come here on the tail of a few ancient rumours and an idea my college professor had thirty years ago, in the hope of making a career from things I'm not sure anyone can prove." He eyed the door between the grotesques. "Would you mind if I take a peek in there?"
Either the remaining wrens had flown inside the building or they had flown away. Bronze bowls similar to those they had drunk from were set below the doorway grotesques as if the creatures might sup. Burns hesitated at the threshold, wondering if he verged on trespassing.
Small candles against the interior walls had the contradictory effect of illuminating the bricks while thickening the shadows at the centre of the room. Burns made out plain chairs arranged in a row near the door, but what little else he saw had him wonder if the interior dipped with the hill alongside the building -- that might explain the odd vertigo he felt.
A voice from inside said, "Hello," and a young woman came forward. He'd mistaken her thick black hair as a cowl, and the strips of white cloth wrapped around her as a robe -- she wore the cloth like bandages from her chest to her calves. She had led the dancers through town earlier, Burns was sure of it.
Burns turned to bring Elsie closer, feeling that together, this intrusion might seem less cumbersome. Elsie smiled, while the young woman continued to watch Burns. He started to say, "I'm sorry if we're intruding--is this a chapel?"
"All of Rodenje is a chapel during the festival. I was praying to the Lady."
Elsie asked, "Is the Lady the Virgin Mary?"
Burns looked impatiently at her -- it had to be -- until the woman said, "No." To Elsie, she said, "You look like a tourist. You arrived today?"
"How did you know?"
The woman smiled, and turned to Burns. "You look nothing like a tourist. I think you are on a mission."
"Why do you say that?"
"Scholars look the same." Her guess surprised Burns. She said, "You look," she waved a hand over her face, "the same, like you came from the same town."
"The other scholars were Irish?" Elsie wondered.
Burns was impatient to get more details, but the nationality of the other scholars didn’t concern him. The woman shrugged again, and Burns registered something in her stance and attitude that reflected his impatience.
Despite the drow
siness from travelling, the strong wine, and the heavy meal, Burns was intrigued. He was also weary of what the woman had said, and had to ask, "Those scholars, do you know what they studied?"
"They tried to study the Lady." The woman shrugged. "They learnt little. What will you do with what you learn? Will you teach it to others?"
"That depends on what I learn. We saw you dancing outside earlier, didn’t we?"
The young woman smiled. "Yes, that was me! That was part of our festival to the Lady. Today, we had to search for the Orphan."
Burns thought of the subtly unsettling child he'd found staring at him. "Did you find the Orphan?"
"Finding him is not part of the festival." The wrens darted between the rafters. The woman said, "We call those the little orphans."
"Can I ask why you pray to the Lady?"
Before the woman responded, Elsie guessed, "For the Orphan's sake."
Burns almost asked her to let the woman answer. He was hardly going to base his research on Elsie's guesses.
"No," the woman said. "We offer hope for the true Orphan, but he is lost. The horned bastard saw to that. I pray for the old flesh to pass. Now, I must return to my offerings. My duties are not over."
Burns wanted to ask more -- questions scrambled for attention -- but frustratingly, Elsie was already stepping past the grotesques to return to the street. He quickly asked, "Can I talk with you about the Lady some other time? Will I find you here?"
The woman said, "Yes. Here or another chapel." She stepped forward, bringing the scent of bitter leaves -- and the fragrance of seasoned Rodenje wine -- closer to him, before she put a hand to the door, and tipped it shut to steer Burns back.
Candlelight.
"Was that informative?" Elsie asked while they walked back to the hotel.
"I'm not sure. She took the festival stuff a bit seriously. I thought she was a bit rude, actually."
"I think she was trying to flirt with you."
"I didn’t get that."
"She was definitely teasing you."
"I wonder how much she really knows."
"You're worried about those scholars she mentioned?"
"Someone could have cottoned on to this place's history."
"Why would she know any of that? How old is she, seventeen?"
"Or they could have come here and found nothing. I'm not sure which is worse."
"You said this place is ancient, right? There could be any number of reasons for researchers to come to Rodenje. Anyway, you said the basis of the proto-gargoyle was such an old myth that only a handful of references exist anywhere."
"I only ever talked about it with Professor Kingston. Right now, it won't even qualify as a myth. Most of it is educated guesswork. I hoped it might have become some almost forgotten folkloric character, but this Lady might be one of the proto-gargoyle's oldest splinter personalities."
"That's encouraging, isn't it? You came to study a dead religion and find part of it is still around."
"The original religion is so old, it couldn’t still be around. Even if it was, the older and more ritualised a religion gets, the further it moves from its core ideology. And it's difficult, separating the stages of the proto-gargoyle's development from the minor deities and spirits associated with it. What that girl mentioned about the Orphan has me interested, though."
"What was that about, anyway?"
"In one of the myths, the proto-gargoyle had a suitor, an unidentified god."
"A god without a name? That wouldn’t be the horned bastard she mentioned?"
"That was a bit strong, wasn’t it? What I know comes from a manuscript found in Turkey in 1854. It was in bits, but it mentioned he had a domestic with the Lady, and ran out on her."
"Went to the shop for a bottle of milk, and never came home? Maybe he was a bastard."
"He also snatched their child when he left. She searched for a thousand years, but never saw her son again."
"A one-thousand years old son? I think she had mothering issues."
"Well, gods can't change, can they? It's part of an eternal existence. They don’t do God of Vengeance one day, and God of Get Over It the next. She kidnapped mortal children to replace her lost son, but it never worked."
"So her missing child is the Orphan? That doesn’t add up, does it? Shouldn’t both parents have died?"
"The Lady found the husband after a few hundred years, but he'd killed their child so it couldn’t usurp him, and hid the soul in a forest animal. Don’t ask me why. Gods did that kind of thing. She dismembered him, and fed him and any man that worshipped him to the animals in the same forest. Before that, the story goes there were no carnivores in the world, but instances of creation are typical of most myths -- a tragedy that affects a god affects the cosmos. They can get very Shakespearian. So, pop goes the old man. She's a harvest goddess, among other things, so she dies once a year."
"That's what the woman back there meant by praying for the old flesh?"
"Wish I knew. Before the Lady is reborn, she gathers all the souls who died since the last harvest to judge their faith in the afterlife, so that might be part of it. Maybe she evolved in local superstition into some Christian saint. It wouldn’t be the first time regional and Catholic superstitions merged."
Elsie shrugged. Burns wondered if she knew it mirrored the gestures of the woman in the chapel. "She didn’t look very Christian to me, but that's your department," she said.
"Oh, yes. I forgot you grew up ignorant."
"I grew up an atheist Protestant educated by farmers' wives in a small Catholic town."
"They probably did what they could with you."
"Ha! Like put me in the corner during Catholicism class, or imply what a dick I was during history class."
"You've a dick?"
"It's the only thing I took from Catholicism class that's devoutly Catholic. It never works. Don't worry. The boy I took it from probably doesn’t miss it anymore."
"Ouch."
"So, what did you say about me being an ignoramus?"
*
Between the streets, they saw the sun sink behind the forested hills, and realised the town had no street lamps. The moon was a scratch in the sky. Candles left in ubiquitous bronze bowls on window ledges helped. Elsie wondered if this was the town's method of illuminating their streets, a communal gesture. She liked it, while Burns thought dusk and the candles gave the aged streets an oddly organic look, like dried skin.
From the countryside, through the throaty passages of the streets, they heard faint cries. Low forms scattered across the hills, but given the distance, Burns couldn’t tell what made them seem awkward despite their speed. He thought they sounded startled or in pain.
"They must be wild dogs," he said.
While the night was warm, Elsie held her arms together. "They sound like old women crying, don’t they?"
"I suppose they're a little creepy."
Burns wasn’t about to admit they were lost. He knew the hotel was near the edge of town, but didn’t like the idea of wondering near the border -- not with the dangerous wildlife he'd read about, and not with those wailing mongrels.
-- if something happened to us here, he thought. They were strangers who couldn’t speak the language, in a remote town without much in the way of modern technology. He wondered about police stations, hospitals -- he'd seen none. Then again, with almost every building looking like its neighbour, they could have walked by either.
-- we won't need the emergency services, he told himself.
"Burns?""
"Hmm?"
"You've gone strong silent type on me."
"Sorry. Just thinking."
He realised he was a few paces ahead of Elsie, and waited to take her hand. She had her iPhone out, and put it back into a pocket. Burns guessed she also worried they were lost and checked the reception, though he didn’t know who she might call for help.
She said, "Thinking about your other Lady?"
"I'm thinking it's
a shame so much of the town looks alike. Architecture can tell you a lot about the history of a place."
They turned a corner to what Burns expected to be another twist in Rodenje's web of lookalike streets, and faced two burning torches mounted on either side of their hotel's entrance. The torches altered the look of the building, made it seem older.
"And I thought we were lost," Elsie said.
The torches stank of paraffin. Like the outdoor candles, they were probably part of the town's festival, but this was a hotel. In the lobby, Burns expected electricity. Instead, there were more candles.
The same receptionist sat behind the long desk. He looked up and past Burns, Burns thought to watch Elsie. Burns was about to step into his view, before realising he was making sure Elsie had closed the door against the street. On the desk, Burns saw a set of roughly carved rocks spaced between acrid incense and candles in bronze bowls. Soot blackened the rocks. From their oval form, Burns guessed they represented the black wrens -- the little orphans, as the woman in the chapel had said. He made a mental note to ask about this later, but for now, he wanted to know what kind of hotel he'd booked.
"Why aren’t the lights on?" As he indicated the ceiling, he realised there were no light fixtures -- none on the walls, either. "You must have electricity?"
"No. Not in Rodenje." The man fidgeted, and a shadow across his left eye didn’t move with the restless candlelight. Burns thought it might be soot, but noticed the man's red eye, how it watered, and wondered if it was an injury.
"Nowhere has electricity? That's not possible!"
"We use these," he gestured to the candles. "You have them in your room."
"I can't run my laptop on the light from a candle, can I?"
"I can give you more candles?"
"What?"
Elsie spoke from beside him. "We can take care of this tomorrow, can't we? You're not going to work this late anyway, are you?"
Dead Birds: The Dark Orphans Collection Page 3
