It was over quickly, for whatever small comfort that brought. Anasztaizia did not move as the ispán rose and adjusted his clothing.
“I have matters to discuss with the treasurer. Clean yourself up before supper is brought to you.” He did not glance back as he closed the door.
She lay motionless for several hours with pain as her companion. No supper came. The bed sheets were damp and soiled, though the bleeding stopped after a time. When she found the strength to sit up, a sharp pain pierced her groin. The red marks on her wrists and inner thighs were deepening into bruises. She choked back the bile in her throat in fear that vomiting might cause even more pain.
She was a wicked girl. A wicked, stubborn girl who might have spared herself punishment if she’d been a proper lady, an obedient daughter. Her body corrupted with the taint of intercourse, she was unfit for the Light. He must have known of her preparations for the baptism. He knew precisely how to ruin her.
Anasztaizia barely heard the door open. He could do no worse to her unless he meant to kill her, which at that moment was a fate to which she consented. He had already robbed her of all that gave her life meaning.
It was Dorika.
“We’re too late,” she gasped, rushing across the room.
Anasztaizia’s shoulders sagged with relief.
“Lady, forgive me. I did not think it would come to this.” She clasped Anasztaizia’s hands in her own, her cheeks wet with tears. That Dorika would even touch her surprised Anasztaizia, for she barely felt like a living thing at all. He had severed something in her, thieved some vital part of her humanity. The gentle contact of Dorika’s rough, red hands was all that prevented Anasztaizia from collapsing into lunacy.
“Árpád and Gazsi and I are taking you from here. Tonight. We’ve been planning it for some time; we just needed to scout the patterns of the knights and the watchman before we could move safely. Never mind that bootlicking chamberlain. I didn’t know Gergo would… We only knew he intended to marry you. We thought he would at least wait until… And we’d have you gone by then…” Dorika covered her face with her hands. “I wanted to protect you, Lady. I have failed.”
“It’s all right,” Anasztaizia whispered. She was not angry, not even with Gazsi for hiding their plans from her. Of course, they would tell her at the last minute, lest any of the staff loyal to the ispán get wind of it.
“If I had known sooner… But another time. Come. Take nothing with you but your cloak. We will get you bathed when we are safely away. Árpád and Gazsi are waiting.”
“Dorika…shall I still find the Light? Even though he has defiled me?”
Dorika pursed her lips but did not respond as she gathered Anasztaizia’s cloak. The silence wounded her more than her father ever could.
Anasztaizia rose from the bed, and Dorika put an arm around her waist. Her legs wobbled like a newborn foal’s. The pain in her pelvis declared its presence with each step, rendering her unable to walk without wincing. They passed her father’s room. His snores drifted from beneath the partition and into the hallway. Her heart began to race, but Dorika calmly guided her away.
Árpád stood at the head of the stairs. He gathered Anasztaizia into his arms and carried her all the way down to the bailey. She hadn’t guessed a court fool to be so strong, and handsome at that. No wonder Dorika loved him so.
“Dear God,” he murmured, “what has the beast done to you?”
“He was keeping a promise.” Anasztaizia closed her eyes, the thump of each step sending a small tremor of pain through her body. In their tiny house within the bailey, Árpád lay her down on a pallet—she wondered, before the ache interrupted her thoughts again, how two people fit on such a small bed—while Dorika fetched water from the cistern outside. Gazsi gathered vegetables and dried meats into a sack.
Cool water sloshed against her lips and down her dry throat. “Easy,” Dorika said. “Not too fast or you’ll be sick. Árpád, have you got the costume?”
“Right here, love.”
Costume?
“We’ve enough food for two or three days, and I’ve filled the canteens,” said Gazsi. “Take what coin you can carry, but we must travel as light as possible. We ought to be able to find work once we get where we’re going.
“The sooner we leave the better. The knights are in the barracks and the watchman should be on the other side of the gatehouse, if he isn’t sleeping on the job by now.”
Árpád lifted her again. Dorika and Gazsi followed close behind, carrying their provisions. He set her down only to open the thick wooden gate separating the castle from the gatehouse. The gatehouse itself was dark, even with torches sputtering on either side of the walls. Rats screeched as the party passed, their shiny button eyes glimmering within the shadows. Anasztaizia glanced up at the murder holes and wondered if guards with rocks or burning wood awaited their passage.
There was only one portcullis to open, because no one cared enough about the ispán’s lands to attack the castle. “I will open it just enough for us to crawl through,” said Árpád. “Hopefully the noise will not be enough to awaken the lazy lout above us. Lady, do you think you can manage it?”
“Yes…I think so.” The excitement of running away strengthened her and, despite the pain, she stood unassisted. The lady freed from the tower, no prince required. And what prince could devise so daring a rescue? They risked their lives for hers. They had always been her true family.
Dorika and Gazsi were already on their bellies. Anasztaizia joined them on the damp ground, taking in the sweet scent of the earth. The wood of the portcullis creaked once as Árpád pulled the lever, but not as loudly as she feared. It would be a tight squeeze, and she imagined the gate falling down to impale them.
“Go, now!” Árpád whispered. Dorika and Gazsi tossed the sacks of food, blankets, and clothing through first and then scuttled through side-by-side, followed by Árpád and Anasztaizia. Footsteps stirred above them. “Stay down. Do not get up until we reach the tree line.”
Crouched like thieves, they crept through wet grass and mud, through dog shit from her father’s hounds and horse manure from the knights’ steeds. The Gemenc Forest, impenetrable and sinister, loomed above them. Another castle district lay beyond it, across a valley carved out by the Duna River. Anonymous as she’d been, no one would recognize her no matter what costume Árpád and Dorika had concocted. But she did not mind becoming someone else.
The trees closed in behind them. The castle faded from view, and Anasztaizia tasted freedom for the first time in her life.
Chapter Ten
He may have been a good man in life, but what returned to Momma three nights later was not a man, and certainly not her husband.
Zsofika sat alone in her hut at the end of the road. She passed freely between worlds whenever she chose, and learned to commune with her guardian spirits at such an early age that the clan declared her i drabarni before her thirteenth birthday. They celebrated and revered her.
A scream sliced through the chilly spring night. Zsofika lifted her head, her trance shattered, and snatched up the hazel stake lying beside her on the floor. She dashed outside and unchained Jal, who had chosen bear form again, his most powerful shape. Together they ran down the road to Mami Treszka’s house, where Momma and Jinny had stayed since Daddy’s funeral. Momma did not want to return to the home she had shared with him.
Jal burst through the front door and down the hall to Momma’s room. Mami Treszka gathered a wailing Jinny into her arms and carried her into the kitchen. Zsofika entered the room right behind the huge brown bear, who reared up and pawed at the air. A threatening roar issued from the depths of his body. A man, or something in the shape of a man, pinned Momma’s arms down and thrust violently into her, oblivious to the heels she drove into its back and thighs, deaf to her screams. It snapped its jaws at her and slavered long strings of saliva onto her chest, having forgotten any recollection of its former life in its compulsion to obey those two most primal urges
, eating and mating.
Tristan twisted fitfully in her sleep. Sweat soaked the sheets beneath her. She did not want to know him like that, but she had nothing else of him. This monster, the last vestige of her father.
Jal grasped the creature by the back of its shirt and flung it onto the floor. Momma curled up against the wall, inconsolable, the contamination already working its way into her womb. She scraped her fingernails into the light blue paint and hiccupped a prayer of forgiveness. Zsofika scowled at the thing pinned to the floor by Jal’s massive front paws. His claws punctured the creature’s jacket and shirt, through its pale flesh, and thick dark blood seeped onto the wood. The dead man thrashed and spat out guttural syllables unlike any human speech.
Zsofika pushed her foot over his mouth. “Miro!” She slammed the wood through the center of his chest, but it was not enough. Momma pressed her face against the wall and squeezed her eyes shut. She winced at the sound of the stake piercing through him, straight into the floor, a sound of coagulated blood and torn flesh. The sound of her husband dying right in front of her, again, as if she did not already relive the day each waking moment.
“Jal,” Zsofika said. She held the corpse’s legs for leverage and nodded.
The bear grasped the dead man’s head between his paws, twisting and turning until he tore it free. Jal rolled the body into his mouth and carried it out to the backyard. Zsofika, grasping the head by its curly hair, followed. Cold white stars dotted the sky. If any neighbors had emerged from their homes to assess the commotion, they had since gone back to bed. They would visit in the morning, and Momma would lie to them, as she must.
Zsofika tossed the head into the fire pit, and Jal released the corpse from his jaws. She struck a match and dropped it into the pit.
When Zsofika returned to the room, Momma was nearly catatonic. She stared into the space ahead of her, seeing nothing, acknowledging no one. Blood dotted her tattered clothes, and more dribbled from between her legs.
“He has brought marimé to this house,” Zsofika said. “We must burn everything he has touched.”
“Even me?” Momma’s voice was as soft as the wind through the grass.
“What did you do, Luludja?”
She said nothing.
“Luludja!” Zsofika grasped her shoulders and joggled her until Momma burst into sobs again and slapped her hands away. “What did you do?”
“What anyone would do! But what do you know of love? What will you ever know? You live on what that—that thing, whatever it is, brings you. Alone.”
Zsofika pursed her lips and placed her hands over Momma’s stomach. That the love of which Momma spoke eluded her was never her choice to make. Some fates might be changed, but hers was not one of them.
Mami Treszka appeared in the doorway. “Jinny is asleep. What is it, Zsofika? What do you feel?”
“It has begun. Luludja, you cannot stay in this village, not like this. They will know. They will cast you out.”
“And just where will I go?”
“There are many Romani in Canada. Take her with you.” She cocked her head toward Mami Treszka. Mami furrowed her brow but did not argue.
“I will make our travel arrangements tomorrow morning,” Mami said. “We have enough money from the sale of the shop. Zsofika, you will sell the houses.”
“Yes, Daj.” Zsofika returned her attention to her sister. “I can heal the wounds, but there is nothing I can do for what is inside you. The herbs will not work. You understand this.”
Momma gave half a nod.
“You know she will be like me.”
Her eyes became two sheets of glass, and her lips trembled. She did not speak again.
By the next afternoon, Momma, Jinny, and Mami Treszka were on a flight from Budapest to Toronto, never to return to the village. And never to see Zsofika alive again, for just days later she went to her death on the haunted hilltop. No one ever tried to recover her body.
~
I know all about bad dreams. They are the only kind I ever have.
Someone had followed her. Someone had spotted her in the forests, or on the riverbanks, and discovered her secret. But secrets had no place in the village, and tradition did not care that she was just thirteen years old.
She is an ogbanje, her mother declared. I always knew. This child has been born to me nine times, and eight times she has died. Do you see the scar on her leg? My last child bore the exact same mark! The spirit will not stop tormenting me until we have performed the ritual.
“The ritual.” Such a quaint euphemism. An initiation, a cure, a promise to the girl’s future husband. They required only the flimsiest of excuses to make its necessity fit any purpose they desired.
Her parents gathered the beaded doll handed down to her to ensure fertility, the stones she’d collected from the riverbed because she thought them pretty, and her dead siblings’ clothing she’d worn until she outgrew it, and they burned it all. These were her iyi-uwa, her way of returning to the world to persecute her family. I should have done it sooner, said her mother. I should have ended this cycle years ago.
That evening, amid bells and dancing to invoke the gods, and Blessing’s tears for the few things she thought belonged to her, the woman came to take her away.
Blessing walked the dusty path beside the woman, past the rounded mud brick huts with their thatch-grass roofs and through the throng of villagers to the outbuilding at the end of the road. Sweat clung to the back of her neck and under her arms, dribbled down her flat chest and pooled in the small of her back. The drums beat out an ancient rhythm in a language only the gods understood, the gods who allowed this. Perhaps she had prayed to the wrong one, to the Christian god of her parents, recent converts. The old gods still held sway there. They had forsaken her.
The woman set out a bucket of water to chill in the night air, though it would never be cold enough. Then she closed the door and instructed Blessing to sleep, for with the morning light came the blood of cleansing.
Kept awake by sinister thoughts and the woman’s snores, Blessing stared at the ceiling. Mosquitoes buzzed around her face. She didn’t bother swatting them away; they did not relent until they had feasted on her. And besides, experience had taught her malaria could not kill her.
Why had I not sensed someone nearby? The gibber of monkeys and the patter of rain through the leaves might stifle a normal person’s hearing, but she tuned out all unnecessary noise. Have I gotten so careless already? No one was supposed to know about the hunt. She should have tracked down her betrayer, drowned them in the river, and let the waters carry evidence of her secret out to the sea. Blessing did not trust a single human, not even as her forays into the darkest parts of the countryside existed solely to protect them.
This was how they repaid her.
~
In the morning, Blessing’s parents and the rest of the village, crammed against the walls like timbers holding up the structure, assembled for the ritual. The woman retrieved the bucket of water and then stripped off Blessing’s clothes. Instinctively she covered her private parts, for her parents’ new god valued humility, but the woman’s assistant yanked her hands away. Exposed her for the last time as a whole girl before the woman doused her with water already warmed in the sun. She meant for it to stop excessive bleeding. Blessing had seen it countless times in her brief life. Few refused the ritual even when given the choice, because no one wanted to be an outcast.
The water ignited a shiver in her like a trail of gasoline set aflame and raced along her skin, leaving gooseflesh in its wake. She wanted to be brave. She desperately reached inside for the strength that drove her to hunt the things that would kill these very people. She refused to give her audience the satisfaction of weeping.
The woman’s assistant held Blessing’s arms from behind so her hands were pinned to her back. Instinct urged her to fight—she was created for battle—but it would only worsen the situation. The woman pushed Blessing into a sitting position so two others,
one on each side, could stretch out her legs and press them against the floor.
Blessing appraised the woman who had slept in the hut with her. She learned her trade from those who came before her, and she was one of the most important people in the village because of it. They paid her well. But Blessing dared her to look into a girl’s eyes, truly look, and justify this butchery. Justify cutting away a part of God’s creation, as if they could determine better than he could how a woman should appear or what she should feel.
The woman held a shard of blood-flecked glass between her thumb and forefinger. With her other hand, she pried open the still-hairless folds between Blessing’s legs.
A great black tsunami of pain roared through her. The faces of those who watched, who cheered and applauded as blood spurted from the severed flesh and onto the woman’s hands, blurred into one indistinct mass of brown skin and black hair. Her legs twitched and quivered with the need to escape despite the hands holding her down. She clenched her teeth, but tears as hot as fresh blood streaked down her face while she lay imprisoned in a gray wasteland, where pain ruled as the bloodiest of dictators.
The woman stuck two fingers into the wound and felt around for any residual tissue. The world swam out of focus again, and Blessing drew upon the last of her will not to vomit though her throat burned with acid. Fingers probed raw meat until satisfied she no longer possessed any parts resembling a man’s. Then crude catgut stitches sewed together her already tortured skin, and when Blessing beheld the bloody red mess between her legs, she thought she might let one of the demons take her life.
~
It should have been enough that they had stolen part of her body from her. But when the village pastor came to visit and pray with her three days later, he delivered a devastating yet expected proclamation.
“Your mother says, aside from the unclean part now gone, it is as if you have never been touched by the knife. Do you realize what this means?”
Those of My Kind Page 7
