Carpathian Devils

by Alex Oliver

  The trees parted and he came out of their shade into a hay meadow glorious with flowers. In its center five wagons were drawn up in a circle about a small fire. In the distance, a group of men were working around what looked like a small portable forge - turning a sheet of metal into a bulbous, cauldron-like shape.

  The wagons had been topped with arching structures of willow withies, covered in tarpaulins. As he watched, a couple of naked toddlers tumbled out of one, and out of another came a woman with her flower-embroidered blouse tugged down so she could nurse her child.

  It was one of the toddlers who spotted him, bounding to his feet and pointing. A grandmother, by the fire, hushed the boy without looking in Frank's direction. But now the other toddler had seen him and was shouting, being backed up by an increasing chorus of the younger children.

  Frank understood that the adults didn't want to help him. He carried on walking anyway, because he had no other choice. When he had staggered past some invisible boundary that marked the edge of their concerns, all the faces in the camp turned towards him together and he was struck with the thought that he had suddenly become real.

  "Help me," he choked around the hot sand in his throat. "Please."

  The nursing mother put her child into the older woman's hands. Both of them wore wary expressions, closed up around private thoughts, but she still came and put a small, calloused hand under Frank's elbow, held him up with almost a man's strength, and helped him stagger the final hundred yards to the fire and fold himself down beside it, gasping, shivering and weeping with relief.

  For a long, quiet moment, he did nothing but sob. Someone passed him a glass of mint and sorrel tea, and he sipped and sniffled until the fit passed. When it did, the young woman took away his glass and tapped him on the head, making him look up smartly into the older woman's gaze.

  "Who did this?"

  He shook his head, swayed as the movement seemed to dislodge his brains and make the world swirl around him. "I don't... Up in the hills, I think."

  "Who are you?"

  The bald question shocked a word out of his mouth before he had time to think. “Frank,” he said, and for a moment all the pains went away in the realization that he had recovered his own name. Should there be a second name with it? A family name? That, he couldn't recall no matter how he tried. “I... they hit me in the head. It's all... I can't remember.”

  "Hm," she turned to one of the older girls, who was squatting on her heels under one of the wagons, and spouted something rapid-fire in a language he didn't recognize. The girl gathered two friends and took off into the largest wagon, returning with a sheet, tweezers, a cake of hard soap, and a pot decorated with painted flowers. Her little helpers carried more cloth, gray with use and age.

  "He looks Saxon," the younger woman had her hand in his hair, pulling the lengthy curls of it out as if to demonstrate her position. He saw with some surprise that he had blond hair, the color of freshly sawn oak. His bared body was milk pale, very different from his companions' brown skin, black hair, dark thoughtful eyes. "A villager? Or a visitor?"

  "A foreigner," said the old woman, drawing water from a barrel into a cauldron and setting it over the fire. "You heard his accent." She pared a little of the soap on top and gave the remainder back to the child to be placed carefully away. He gathered it was a treasured thing and felt a great shame that it was being wasted on him.

  "Speak some more, stranger, so that we can hear what you are."

  "I..." He could think of nothing to say. Even less so when the younger woman laid hands on his bare skin, turning him to examine his injuries, tutting at what she saw. "Is it bad? It feels bad."

  "Where?"

  "Here," he hovered his hand over the worst pain. "They shot me here. I can feel the bullet, lodged inside... I think a few ribs are broken. Apart from that it's mostly bruises and my head, up here where..." a flash of rifle butt descending, and he cringed, "he hit me with a gun. There were lots of them. And they were laughing."

  "Hm," the old woman gave the hint of a smile. "That kind of game, we know well. So. It's not so bad. You'll live." She pried apart the edges of his shoulder wound with dirty fingers, took hold of the shot with the tweezers in her other hand, and tugged. Frank bit through his lip at the pain, but managed not to cry out.

  Then she dipped a cloth in the soapy water. "This will sting, but it will help the cuts not to fester, so you must bear it." He felt fragile, as though too hard a breeze might shake him apart, but her matter-of-factness was comforting, telling him that others had survived such things, that all was not yet lost. So he endured the cleaning and the bandaging without protest or flinching, feeling better for it.

  By this time the youths of the group had begun to return from every direction: girls from the riverbank, laden with herbs and the roots of reeds, boys from the fields with slingshots through their wide belts and rabbits dangling from their hands. There was a great deal of talk in that language he couldn't follow, and even more staring. If he tried to catch any one person's eyes in return he found their gaze slid away; not obviously enough to give offense, but regularly, implacably, letting him know they were not interested in making friends.

  "What are your names?" he asked, belatedly, as the young mother helped him into the clothes they'd brought for him - big, baggy, once-white shirt and flimsy once-white trousers. "I should know who to thank." He put together the scrupulous care with the soap and the fact that their young people had been out scavenging in hedgerows for their food, and felt again a gnawing of guilt. They had so little and he was making them give it to him. "I should know who to repay."

  "We are nobody." The old woman smiled again, wise and harsh. "We belong to Vacarescu. We are his slaves, and slaves have no need of names, or payment. It is enough that we are permitted to live, and to serve."

  Did she say this because she thought him some kind of spy? She thought that even after receiving all this help, after they had saved his life, he would give them up to some sort of punishment? "I can carry no tales except of kindness," he insisted. "Who would I betray you to? I have nowhere to go. I have no one to turn to. No family, no nation, barely even a name."

  "I am Constanta." The younger woman handed him a rabbit and a knife with which to skin and gut it. "And this, our mother, is Lyuba who is married to--"

  Lyuba cut her off in a flood of angry speech that made him lean in and pay attention to the rhythm. Something practiced in him stirred with interest, trying to pick out individual words, listen for repetition and patterns. She saw him doing it and snapped her mouth shut, hard, giving him the first overtly hostile look he had had from these people. But he understood it better now - he was a master stumbled defenseless among slaves. Whatever he individually had done or not done, they must look at him and see the enemy.

  "You will not be alone for long," Lyuba said sternly. "You are not a person whose death is shrugged over like a dropped pot. They will come looking for you. When they do, you will tell Vacarescu that we are good servants and loyal. That is all we wish or need of payment. You will not give him cause to punish us, and you will not give him our names."

  "I swear it," he said, holding his hand as though it rested on a book. "I have so much to thank you for, I will say nothing to harm you. I swear it."

  After this, he chopped meat for a while, in an ever increasing daze. He was just awake enough to eat a bowl of the resulting stew and drink another cup of brackish tea before someone snorted at the sight of him and he was picked up, walked carefully across the camp and put to bed in one of the wagons.

  The mattress was stuffed with straw, laid out over a bench of small cupboards, painted like the pot with vivacious flowers. He looked up at overlapping canvas that billowed slightly with passing breezes, and a moment later - or so it seemed - he opened his eyes to find everything around him had grown dim. The light of the camp fire threw silhouettes of angry men against the bowed top of the wagon and there were voices shouting. Lubya's and Constanta's, and two o
r three men's voices.

  "You are a disgrace to my name and to all our ancestors! Yes, be gone with you, and Frank? I am not expecting you to return. Do you understand? You are no longer welcome in this house."

  He breathed in, sharp. Seized up as the incautious movement struck through his ribcage like a saber. His eyes prickled, and he pressed the heels of his palms to them to hold the tears in, devastated and still not sure why. Who had said that, and why? What terrible thing had he done to deserve all this?

  It didn't matter. The voices were still wrangling outside. Now was not the time to worry about himself. He pushed himself to his feet and staggered the short distance to the door. Everything in him flinched from more anger, more fighting, more pain, but he pushed the fabric aside nevertheless and limped down the steps with as much pride as he could gather.

  The argument cut off with his appearance and all the faces turned to him.

  He took a cautious breath, and resolved not to be selfish. "If you're arguing about me, be assured that I do not wish to cause you any difficulties. Tell me what I must do."

  "We cannot keep you here," said an old man's voice. The patriarch who stepped into the firelight had long white hair and a sweeping mustache, his face lined with hard wear, but there was nothing infirm about him. "Not in the night. You are bleeding still. They will smell it and come for you. You will bring them to us and we will be lost."

  Wolves, Frank thought. Or bears perhaps. He looked around at the children asleep by the fire, and bit down on his internal scream of 'but what about me?' They were clearly not the first people in his life to want him gone.

  "Of course. I'll... Which way? Maybe I can make it to the nearest town."

  Even Constanta smiled at this. He hoped with approval, but he thought truly it was relief, and his belly filled with a despair that seemed familiar.

  The elder came to him and turned him by the shoulders, pointing him toward a gap in the hedge at the other side of the field. "Go there. You will find a path which slopes upwards through the orchards and out onto the foothills where the goats graze. When you come to the shrine at the crossroads, take the path which leads upwards. At the top of the hill you will see below you the bridge and the lights of Bircii village. They have stone walls to defend them. It may be that you can make it in time. With the help of God, it may be."

  It had the weight of an epitaph. Frank swallowed. As he braced himself, he found a cane pressed into his hand. One of the women wound her headscarf around his waist as a sash, and a hank of rye bread was tucked into it, along with a cross of ash-wood that the whittler had been working on.

  Thanking them all, Constanta a little more warmly than the rest, he leaned heavily on the cane and shuffled back out into the dark.

  It was marginally easier to walk now, with his ribs bound up and his shoulder padded. The cane he'd been given was lighter than it looked. There was a hole down the center of it that made him think it was the outer part of a sword-stick, orphaned from its blade. It was certainly an improvement on the heavy branch that had supported him as he limped into camp.

  For a while, he made good progress, following a level, grassy path through lanes of flowering trees, their white and pink blossoms gathering a silvery sheen in the blue twilight. The landscape teased Frank with familiarity as he walked. He kept thinking he remembered these fields, until he raised his head and saw the looming indigo bulks of the mountains beyond. Then he knew that although he had no idea where home was, this wasn't it.

  The breeze picked up as he emerged from the shelter of the trees. The colors had begun to drain from the world - he saw all now in shades of white and blue - and behind him there came a yellowish bony light from a swollen moon at the level of his shoulders.

  The air that had been balmy with spring sunshine now nipped at his fingers, as if it had wound down from the high mountain ice. No sign yet of a crossroads or a shrine, and his knees had begun to feel loose, the sinews of his legs badly attached to the bones, threatening to slide apart with every step.

  But even as he thought this, he caught sight of something white up ahead, and yes it was a small house-like shape topped with a white cross. In an alcove in its center, bunches of wilted flowers lay on a platform in front of a carved figure of which the halo was the only part he could properly parse.

  By the time he reached the top of the first hill, the sky was black. Not even his slowly adapted eyes could pretend night had not fallen. His chest was red-raw and bruised with every breath, and but for the stick he would have fallen a dozen times.

  When the land evened out he had to stop, fear of wolves or not, and lower himself to his knees to breathe and pray and sob a little at the hardness of life. It was when he had finished his entreaties and fallen silent that he heard a voice ahead of him, a woman singing in a sweet whisper, as sad as his own thoughts.

  His mind clutched at the sound as if rescued. It gave him strength to stagger to his feet and lurch on down the path towards it. He could see something now that wasn't a tree, something standing upright in the center of a hollow on the other side of the peak, brushed with starry pallor.

  His footsteps faltered just as the song faded into silence. The tall thing's head turned towards him - or at least, a shrouded shape atop what might have been shoulders swung around at the sound of his approach. It bore some resemblance to the saint he had just passed - a long sweep of pale drapery and a blurred nothing for a face. It was crowned in flowers, and only the fact that it did not move towards him kept Frank from bolting away, spooked by the eeriness of it.

  "Help me," it said. "If you are man and not devil, help me please."

  It sounded like a woman, young and frightened. Frank swallowed his night fears and limped closer. The white pillar of her resolved into something that both made sense and only disquieted him more. This was no animated statue, but a woman in a white shift with a bride's long veil over her head. It covered her face, fell to her knees and made her look like an upright corpse in a winding sheet. A circlet of flowers added a grotesquely festive touch to the fact that her hands were bound behind her, secured fast to a sturdy post embedded deep in the ground.

  "What on earth...?" Frank exclaimed in a language he didn't recognize. He folded back the veil from the woman's face, revealing a glitter of tear tracks, a tumble of loosed pale hair, and a gleam of impatiently bared teeth. “Who are you?”

  "My name is Mirela. Please, the rope. Free me. They're coming. They'll take you too if you're out here. I can help you fight. Quickly!"

  The bonds were a bewildering mixture of cords. He managed to pull free the knot of heavy rope, though his bruised fingers shook and cramped by the end of it. Beneath it, a second layer of white cords were so tight around her wrists he could see, even in the darkness, that her hands were swollen and dark. They felt cold to the touch. The loops of her bonds were cutting off the flow of blood.

  These cords were made of something soft, slippery and fine, and the knot had pulled so close he couldn't get a fingernail into it. He fumbled, tugged and cursed while the woman hissed with pain, but the bonds held and at last he had to reel away, clutching his beaten fingers to his chest and curling protectively over them. "I can't!"

  "Do you have no knife?"

  "No." He scanned the hilltop wildly for tumbled rocks. There was a kind of rock that could be split to make a sharp edge. He remembered this. But the hillside was smooth under goat-cropped grass, and he could see no convenient stone. "Why have they done this?" Frank asked. "What have you done, to be left out for wolves?"

  "Wolves?" she laughed at him, sharp and high. "It is not wolves I fear. It is Vacarescu to whom I am sacrificed, and if you do not move fast he will have you too. "

  The bride's crown and veil made some sense to Frank now. Oh, he thought, repelled. It was some feudal droit de seigneur he interrupted? The lord of the region exercising his right to bed a new bride before she went to her husband? Repellent, certainly, but surely something these girls were raised to expect
- and therefore something that should not provoke such pleas and struggling. "I'm sure it won't be that bad," he said. "Not worth pulling your hands off for."

  "Idiot!" she hissed, struggling harder. "Your stick. Break it - it may be there will be a jagged edge."

  A pale blur passed over Frank’s head with a whirring noise. Cold air struck directly down and chilled his spine. With it came fear, a blind animal panic, as of a rabbit in a trap. He set his foot in the center of the sword stick and bore down with all his weight. It cracked through, and there were indeed three sharp points left where the lower part broke from the upper.

  He got the most promising of these under the white silk bonds and sawed with all the strength in his numbing hands.

  "Oh," said a voice, out in the night's shade, a voice he could not find a body for. "Fair maiden, thou hast a swain." A man's voice, deep and cold, strangely accented. "And he also is fair. Perhaps your village will be spared for this generosity. I do like it when folk give me more than I require--"

  The cord caught on the sharp edge, frayed and broke. The woman seized Frank's wrist and bolted with him down the hill.

  The unseen man laughed. "Shall I tear his throat out before you and give you to sup?"

  A deeper darkness lay at the bottom of the hill. Trees, Frank saw, stumbling at the end of his strength in the woman's grip. The skin of his back felt the threat behind him like a million driven-in pins, but he couldn't move any faster, couldn't leap away doe-like as the young woman could. He could feel from her grip on his arm - the impatient hauling - that he was slowing her down.

  "Go!" he said. "I can't run any faster. I can't make it. Go! I'll distract him."

  She dropped his wrist at once, picked up her skirts in one hand and sprinted away, and the white hot pain in his chest made him stop and gulp air to cool the agony. If he turned slightly, he could feel the man's gaze on his face like the touch of metal left out in the snow.

  "How swift it makes your heart beat, when you run from me," said the voice. Panic punched Frank in the chest, for by the sound it was far closer to him than he had expected. He strained his eyes, and saw a tall shape against the sky of stars - broad shouldered, its head rounded below, rising into a black cylinder. A walking shadow almost the shape of a man, with a glint of two pale, cold eyes in the shade, and very white teeth.