Anasztaizia slipped her shoes back on and met the rest of the household in the chapel to pray the rosary. She exchanged a brief glance with Gazsi then knelt beside her father before the candlelit altar.
The lady’s mourners crossed themselves in unison and said, “In the Name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.” Each lifted their prayer beads and clasped the crucifix in their fingers. Rather chilling, Anasztaizia thought, to witness so mindless a recitation of prayers.
“I believe in one God, the Father almighty creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord. He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended to the dead. On the third day, he rose again. He ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of the Father. He will come again to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen.”
Anasztaizia believed in almost none of those things. The words tasted like ash in her mouth.
“Our Father, who Art in heaven Hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.”
Her father had given himself to weeping again. She felt not sympathy for him but shame, and thought she might be sick right there in the chapel.
“Hail Mary, full of grace, The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”
Gazsi announced the mystery upon which they would pray, but Anasztaizia barely heard him as her attention drifted toward the chapel door. A flash of shimmering green silk, like the wing of an exotic bird, caught her attention. The trader nodded and smiled, his face awash in light though Anasztaizia saw no torch in his hand. She blinked; he had already receded into the shadows. She focused again on the prayer lest her father be roused from his grief long enough to notice her inattention, which would be just her luck.
They prayed the Our Father again. The Hail Mary again. “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, World without end. Amen.” But the doxology brought no respite, only another mystery to contemplate. It could go on for hours. All night, if Ispán Gergo willed it. As if an omnipotent God should defend to this lowly man his reasons for taking the lady from him.
When the praying of the rosary at last finished, Anasztaizia’s knees announced their displeasure with a loud pop. Her back creaked as she shuffled out of the chapel and to her room once more. Anasztaizia drained the goblet of water then set it on the sill and curled up beneath her quilts. “Hail Sophia, full of the True Light,” she whispered, “Joined with your Divine Consort, You are the Image of the Virgin of Light, The Spirit of Truth comes from you; Holy Sophia, Mother of the Anointed, Bless and anoint us now, and in the time of our transition, Receive us and illuminate us in the In-Betweens. Amen.”
She put out the candles, but fear of what might watch her from the shadows kept her from sleep.
~
Atop a white wagon drawn by the castle district’s two finest horses, the lady’s corpse lay inside a wooden box carved with scenes from the royal wedding. Gazsi followed behind the wagon, swaying a large bell back and forth. Poor men Ispán Gergo had paid to hold the tapers and torches walked along Bodi’s dusty main road to guide the lady’s soul to Heaven. Villagers poured forth from their homes like wasps from a disturbed nest and filed into procession behind them.
In observance of the Mass, Gazsi wore a sleeveless cloak over his usual floor-length belted tunic and a stole over his shoulders. He read the Missa pro defunctis as he stood beside Lady Katinka’s grave, a hole dug beneath one of the stone slabs in the church floor. Given Anasztaizia’s rudimentary understanding of Latin, despite the priest’s best efforts, half the words made no sense to her. She tried to muster some sort of emotion, to set an example of controlled grief expressed effortlessly by the court and the villagers, but could not. The lady was little more than a stranger, a ghostly shadow that occasionally flitted into her life. Now she was gone. Anasztaizia mourned her no more than she mourned the mice the chamberlain poisoned in the bailey’s kitchens.
Leaving the tailor no time to fashion a dress, the chamberlain had outfitted Anasztaizia in one of the gowns gathered from the back of her mother’s wardrobe. She hated it more than her own ill-fitting dresses, like wearing the dead woman’s skin. The dyed wool made her arms itch. Her cone-shaped hat kept slipping down over her hairless forehead, and the veil tickled her nose.
Her father was staring at her. When their eyes met, a bewildered expression passed over the ispán’s face, as if he’d just awakened from a trance. He turned his head to wipe away a tear. Anasztaizia returned her attention to the open casket and its woodcut depiction of the joyous royal marriage. Her mother had been fourteen, her father already a young man of twenty-one. The lady’s face bore a serene smile, for she was simple and obedient. Out of all the other noblewomen who danced at his ball, the lord had chosen her as his bride. Now, washed and dressed in funereal linen, her face was turned to the East. Toward God, who would have her no matter the lord’s sorrow.
The hair on the back of Anasztaizia’s neck prickled. Her father’s stare burned into her, but she could not bring herself to meet it again.
Chapter Three
Mami wore her favorite golden bracelets and her floral perfume as if expecting a visit from a long-lost friend and not the thing that would erase her from existence. Death, tangible in its presence, lingered in the deepening shadows at the corners of the room. Tea light candles burned on either side of St. Sarah, whose serene brown face gazed upon Mami from beneath her crown. Tristan sat on the bright red quilt covering Mami Treszka’s bed—red, the color of luck and sometimes of funerals. Momma did not allow it anywhere else in the house.
“I had so many things to tell you,” Mami Treszka said in the quiet moments she and Tristan spent alone together that day. “You must find Zsofika’s journals. I kept them for you in a safe place. They…”
She was dead before another word tumbled from her lips.
Momma would call someone to take the body away and prepare Mami for burial, and burn her things in the fireplace. Momma clung to no other part of their culture, this only because of what had happened to Daddy. Momma would not allow them to keep anything or even to speak Mami’s name. They were lucky Momma did not sell their house now that someone had died in it. Jinny was the one member of their family the dead had not tainted, and she must be protected.
But Tristan vanished before any of that happened.
~
High Park North was a neighborhood once comprised mostly of Polish and Ukrainian immigrants, hard-working people like Momma who had learned English and made sure their children received an education. It grew ever more popular and expensive thanks to the appeal of its Tudor, Edwardian, and Victorian-style homes with their French doors, fireplaces, and stained-glass windows, not to mention the Park itself. High Park North was a Gadže paradise, one in which Tristan increasingly felt she did not belong but not because of her culture.
The men who patronized the tailoring shop in which Momma worked often asked her on dates, but she refused them all. She raised her girls and cared for Mami Treszka, and that, she said, was enough for her. She had few friends and did not often leave the house other than for her job, except on the rare occasions when Rosa talked her into a girls-only dinner. Tristan found an excuse to leave the room any time Rosa stopped by, no matter how briefly. She couldn’t face her when the mere thought of her former teacher churned up a typhoon of misery, humiliation, and regret.
“Your daddy wo
rked hard,” Momma said, apropos of nothing as she stumbled in through the back door after one such dinner. She always got that way when she had been drinking, when alcohol dissolved the barrier she’d erected between her memories and her conscious mind. It wasn’t the first time Momma had drunk too much. She kept a bottle of brandy hidden—or so she mistakenly believed—in the corner of the linen closet beside her bedroom.
Tristan, wishing she’d gone to bed instead of agonizing over her stupid algebra problems, laid her pencil down in her math book.
“They didn’t care.” Momma made clumsy swipes at the tears that left black mascara trails down her cheeks. “They spit on him. All they saw was Rom. All they saw was a thief and a Gypsy. They didn’t see a father, a husband, with a house and a business—Tristan, why must you look at me that way?” She ran upstairs in tears.
Mami Treszka guided them into her room and tried to explain what she could, starting with the people in a yellowed photograph atop her sideboard. “Once, a long time ago, there was a terrible thing called the Porajmos, led by a terrible man who wished all the Romani to be gone from the world. Even before the Porajmos, we were enslaved, deported, sterilized, executed. Half the Romani in Europe, and quite probably more, fell to him. In 1944, they deported us to Auschwitz because the Porajmos was a hungry beast craving more and more of our blood. I lost my grandparents that year. I was four years old.” She nodded toward the photo, and a tear glistened in the corner of her eye. “They sent us to the camps with our Jewish brothers and sisters. We thought people would feel sympathy for us after that. But no one did. Few saw beyond the legends of thieves and fortune-tellers.”
“The Holocaust,” Tristan said. “We learned about it in school. But they didn’t talk about the Romani. Why not?”
“That is the question we must keep asking until someone finally answers us. Some men hurt your daddy very badly, right in his own front yard, and left him there to die. Your mother found him. What happened to him happened because, for many Gadže, the Porajmos never ended. That is why she acts this way, and I cannot be angry with her. She is afraid, and she has every reason to be. But we mustn’t let men like that take away who we are, as they tried to for so many centuries. We must always remember where we come from.”
Tristan regarded the photo. To her knowledge, only one picture of her father existed, in a frame hidden in her mother’s nightstand. She’d found it one day—snooping, she admitted it—while Momma was at work and Mami Treszka had been occupied with making dinner. Now and then Tristan sneaked into the master bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed just to study his portrait. He was so handsome, with black hair curling over his forehead and the tips of his ears, and a radiant smile barely contained within the glossy paper. Tristan had his eyes, large and almond-shaped.
She understood then why Momma couldn’t stand the sight of her. Tristan looked at her through the eyes of her dead husband.
~
Going to the park wasn’t much of a plan, but it was nearby and a place to clear her head. Tristan skirted the edges of the recreational area, with its gardens and playground and zoo, in search of the dirt trails leading into the depths of the four hundred-acre woodland. It might as well be another world, despite its location in the heart of the city. In the daytime, she’d usually make her way to the intersection in the middle of the park. Past the pond where, if you stood close enough to the edge, you might feel the glare of waterlogged ghosts, then past the ornamental gardens to the Grenadier Café. She’d listen to people arguing in West Indian patois, and she’d call Jinny to join her for coffee.
I can do this. I can sleep out here until I figure something out. It was like camping, except without a tent. Or food, though she could kill something if it came down to that. Her stock in trade, such an unfortunate talent.
Tristan adjusted her travel bag over her shoulder. Her Chuck Taylors kicked up dust along the trail that had not seen rain in many days thanks to an early fall drought. Fading sunlight streamed through the trees, setting the red and orange leaves ablaze. Most people had left the park, and they certainly weren’t walking the trails so close to dusk. But Tristan had never been afraid of the night nor of the things living in it.
She found a spot not far from one of the ponds, threw her bag on a pile of leaves, and nestled herself between two large roots. Water lapped against an unseen shore. The scent of dying leaves clung to the crisp air, and as the wind whispered through them, they communicated in their secret language of rattles and rustles. Mami Treszka had believed people could understand the trees’ speech, if only they learned how to listen, for the spirits lived in them and in all the elements of the earth. “We are all born with the gift,” she said. “Make good use of it.”
Tristan gazed up through the canopy at the quarter moon. An eternity passed, and though the forest grew dark, the moon did not track across the sky as it should have. There were no stars.
I’ve fallen asleep. But what a strange dream.
A large shadow emerged from the other side of the woods and lumbered across the path, stopping just a few meters from Tristan. An impossible thing, a brown bear whose size should have made a considerable racket as it shuffled through the trees. But as it stared at her with unearthly eyes, it did not issue as much as a grunt or a whine. It did not even breathe.
The bear swiveled its head as if motioning her to follow, then walked away down the trail.
Tristan fell into step behind the creature, which led her to the pond. Fish leaped from the moon-dappled water thronged with the ghosts of dead soldiers. A lone figure as tall as a young tree stood on the opposite shore, and perhaps it was a tree except it had begun to move.
The bear was gone.
Tristan reached for her fighting knife, but it too had vanished.
No weapons. No fighting. We are one.
The giant apparition from her dreams. It stood before her, clad in animal skins and some kind of reddish paint, its hair nearly identical to hers.
But it was not an “it” at all. The apparition was human, its face just a girl’s.
I call myself Shapa. The girl’s mouth did not move. I was the first Hunter. And yes, I am always with you.
“Who made you?”
I do not know what he was or where he came from. I know only that sometimes those born with evil inside are called to fight that evil. When I died, I sent my spirit out to find others worthy of my power. I have brought you into my world to share the story that belongs to all of us.
The park vanished, and awareness of her own body slipped away. For the first time, Tristan found herself watching the world behind someone else’s eyes.
~
The endless valley, flanked with hills into which time had carved an infinite number of caves, stretches out before her. She walks for many days, uncertain where to go. No other band risks taking her in, no matter how the men assess her and determine her size must prove a direct correlation to her hunting prowess, or that she would bear them the healthiest of children. Superstition had entered the world, and all the bands in the valley are aware, for talk flows as freely as trade, of her own clan’s curse.
Even the great saber-toothed cats, which carried off children who strayed too far from the watchful eyes of their mothers, began avoiding her band’s encampment. As the shaman beat a trancelike rhythm on her deerskin drums and another female elder played a bone pipe, the group painted on the walls of their caves and sculpted bears made of clay. They slashed the totems with arrows and worshipped the relics, hoping the spirits found them worthy of a good hunt. But the animals did not come, no matter where the clan walked. They never located enough fruits, nuts, and insects to feed the entire group. No other bands they encountered traded with them, lest their misfortune contaminate those other tribes, and the nearest river from which they might fish was several days’ journey.
She was a natural target for their anger, if only because she was different. She is brown-skinned like the rest, but a diffuse pallor emanating from within
tinges her flesh. Her hair, coarse and black like theirs, does not fall straight over her shoulders but juts from her scalp like leaves on a tree. And she is huge. She stands over two heads taller than the band’s women, as tall as the largest men.
The curse that has fallen upon them surely stems from her. The shaman said that during the ritual blood drinking after a successful hunt, she must have absorbed the animal spirits for her own benefit and incurred their wrath. This is why they left her behind, for her affront against the Great Bear endangered the entire band.
What would they think if they knew that, without the blood, her insides tear themselves apart? A core of fire in her belly divides and races down her limbs, up into her head, until she is aflame with agony and privation. She kills what animals she finds, always thanking their spirits for the food and skins they provide her, but it does little to satisfy her body’s craving for the blood of her own people.
They do not know she has seen the one who did this to her, the evil spirit that came to her mother in the night and replaced her mate’s seed with magic.
Neither her hand ax nor the arrowheads used on the totems are enough to cleanse the band of his taint. Nor is his death, should she succeed, enough for them to accept her back into their ranks. She must find her own way. She must discover if there are more like him, and put an end to them lest others suffer.
Those of My Kind Page 2
