by Tim Pratt
“Go I must. My husband calls to me.
“When will you be back?”
“She’s not coming back,” Ventsei said. “Are you, Baba Metza?”
“Clever boy, clever boy,” Grandmother Bear said with a chuckle under her sadness. “I would tell you, before I go, about the eagle. He is a creature that flies between the worlds, from the mountain heights to the underworld depths. He drinks from the lake of the water of life that lies at the end of the earth. And he is the helper of heroes.”
The last thing Milena ever saw of Grandmother Bear was her honey-sweet smile as Baba Metza said:
“Watch for the eagle, Ventsei.”
When they got to Ventsei’s little house, his mother was hurriedly shoving clothes into suitcases. She’d sewn her lips shut with white thread and wouldn’t say anything to either of them. She handed him a packing case and gave his shoulder a push.
Milena tiptoed behind and held her breath as they passed the stolnina. The little alcove held burning candles in red votives even during this rip-and-upheaval. The icons hanging on the walls returned Milena’s tentative glance with black eyes rimmed in gold paint.
She hurried to follow Ventsei to the little back room that had been his grandfather’s. He knelt by the dresser and opened one of the drawers. Milena stayed in the doorway; she hadn’t been invited in, and anyway, the room smelled of ashes and burned-up secrets.
“Will you take your trains?” she finally asked.
“No.”
“Your teddy bear?”
“I don’t think so.”
“What will you take then? I’ll help you pack.”
“It can all stay.”
“Then what are you getting?”
“His matches.” Ventsei put them in his pocket and backed out of the room. He took her by the elbow and pulled her through the kitchen. Great tears rolled down his mother’s cheeks, but she paid them no mind, not even when they dripped on the photographs she held in trembling hands.
The children went into the little yard behind the house.
“Will you help me with the wood?” Ventsei asked.
“But you should be packing—” Milena started to argue, but he cut her off with a sharp look.
“Baba Metza said to pile the wood high. And that’s what I’m going to do, with or without your help.” Ventsei filled the wheelbarrow full and rolled it over the packed snow with a bump-bump-bump around to the front of the house. Melina hefted a log under each arm and followed him.
Ventsei’s house formed one side of a small square; he headed to the very center, and Milena added her logs to the pile he made. Ventsei restacked the wood the way his grandfather had, criss-crossing logs so they would burn hot and even. Then he got to his feet, knees crusted with ice, and headed back to the woodpile. Milena trotted after him, not wanting to stay in the square by herself.
By the time they came back with more wood, Ventsei’s neighbors had ventured out. Wearing hoods and scarves, silent and grim, they appeared with more logs and helped with the stacking. They worked alongside the children, at first saying nothing but eventually driven to speak.
“For Gavril,” Yuliana said.
“For Krasimir and Pavil,” Ianka added.
“The nestinar will speak to them when the fire burns down, yes?” Zlatka asked.
“I don’t know,” Ventsei said, his voice low. “But I will try.”
“Ask,” Zlatka said with a hard swallow under her many headscarves, “if they are well.”
“Ask,” Ianka said, “if they will ever return.”
“You know the answer to that,” Yuliana scolded. “Ask instead what we should do without them.”
Milena trotted back and forth until her legs and back ached. Splinters riddled her mittens, and her whole skin prickled. But she didn’t stop, driven as she was by the desperation and grief of those around her.
And all the while, she wondered if her own Tatko or Mama would be taken away by the ghosts that had visited all the others. Fear hummed in her blood; perhaps they’d been taken during the day, and her house would be dark and empty, the door standing open . . .
She swallowed a sob, and Ventsei looked up from the mountainous stack of wood. His dark hair fell into his eyes; when he brushed it back, it was as though he peered into her soul.
“They’ll be fine. They’re—” but he bit off the words with a glance around him and didn’t finish.
Milena fell to her knees next to him. “They’re what? Tell me, Ventsei. Please. What were you going to say?”
“They’re safe. You don’t have to worry.” He reached out and squeezed her arm. “They’re members of the Party.”
Milena thought of her parents’ party clothes: the black suit and the coat with fur around the collar. Mama’s diamond necklace. The long, dark car like a sleek panther that came for them. How tired they often seemed, and stuffed full of secrets after a night at a party. She’d always thought parties such fun. But no more.
“Ventsei,” Milena held his hands in hers. “Are you certain you can do this? Walk across the fire, I mean. What if you burn up?”
“Don’t ask questions,” Ventsei said as he struck a match and held it to the pyre. “Simply watch and believe.”
More people gathered as darkness fell: those who had been at school and at work. A few scuttled indoors like roaches afraid of the light, but most of the neighbors formed a ring around the bonfire. Bagpipes crooned and wailed. The memories of loved ones taken gathered in the smoke; wavering figures in gray that sent shudders down Milena’s back.
Ventsei disappeared into the press of people and returned carrying the ceremonial drum. “I will not use the icons . . . but I would have you play this for me.” And he handed it to Milena.
She accepted the instrument with great reluctance. “I’m too little.”
“Those are not the words of a girl who talks to bears,” Ventsei chided. By now, the fire had died down and only the embers remained. “I would have you do it. You can’t make nothing out of something—”
“But I can make something of nothing,” Milena finished.
“So make a loud noise for me.” Ventsei took a deep breath, and he stepped out onto the coals.
Milena found her heartbeat and his in the drum. She pounded the taut-pulled leather with the flat of her hand, unable to look away. Ventsei tread in the short, even steps of the tipane, on the whole length of his feet.
She didn’t disappoint him; the beat of the drum was strong and loud. Milena lost herself in it, as Ventsei lost himself in the dance. Everyone else was chanting, holding up their hands. Voices climbed in the old songs. Young and old called to those who had died, to those who had been taken.
The ghosts gathered along the edge of the crowd and watched with empty holes for eyes and grim mouths. They wore the dark shadows like cloaks, and the sight of them startled Milena so that she nearly missed a beat; heartbeat, drumbeat. Her breath was in her throat, and she wanted to scream to Ventsei to run. But her friend looked at her, into her, through her. His lips moved—
Drum harder. Drum faster.
And because he was older, because Grandmother Bear trusted him so, Milena did as he told her.
“Speak to us!” someone cried. It might have been Zlanka or Yuliana. And one by one, the hazy gray memories moved forward to embrace those who mourned them, to whisper in the ears of those left behind.
Ventsei reached out and grasped her by the hand. With a swift tug, Milena too was on the embers. And then they were running down the road, past the school. They tossed riddles like red, rubber balls over the stone walls, but they did not stop. They galloped over cobblestones and onto the dirt path through the forest. They dodged trees and leapt over fallen logs until finally they stood on the top of the hill behind Grandmother Bear’s forest.
The eagle hovered overhead and then dipped down. Ventsei’s mother clung to its neck, and she motioned to her son.
“I have to go.” Ventsei’s words matched Milena�
��s thudding heartbeat and the memory of her hand against the drum.
“How will I find you, when I grow up?” Her tears were rainbow orbs that rolled down the mountainside.
“One last riddle, then.” Ventsei clung to the eagle and smiled down at her. “A world without people, cities without houses, forests without trees and seas without water.”
She knew this one, and each tear she shed held a laugh. “A map.”
“There is no hero without a wound.” Ventsei touched a finger to his chest. “Mine is in my heart, leaving you. Don’t forget me.”
“I could never—”
But the eagle flapped its mighty wings, and they were gone, borne aloft on the wind. Milena blinked once, twice, and they were gone over the horizon.
And she was back on the village square, with the drum still in her hand, looking at the empty space where Ventsei had danced across the embers. The villagers had fallen silent. The ghosts were gone, thwarted by Ventsei’s escape.
Milena hit the drum. “For Gavril.” And twice more. “For Krasimir and Pavil.” And one last time. “And for three generations of nestinari taken from us.”
Her parents pushed through the crowd, and Tatko caught Milena as she fell, exhausted, into his arms. Mama took her by the hand and cried big, silent tears.
“What happened?” her father demanded as he bore her through the deserted-night streets.
“Ventsei left,” Milena told them. “He’s gone where the eagle flies.” She looked up at the night sky, where only one star burned. “And I will go to meet him . . . as soon as I find the map.”
When not scribbling, Lisa Mantchev can be found on the beach, up a tree, making jam or repairing things with her trusty glue gun. Her stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, Fantasy Magazine, Aeon, and Abyss & Apex. More will be appearing soon in Japanese Dreams and Electric Velocipede. She is currently at work on the third novel in the Théâtre Illuminata trilogy. You can Taste the Bad Candy at her website, www.lisamantchev.com
THREADS OF RED AND WHITE
Lisa Mantchev
Ventsei hiked the hill trails to remind him of that place long lost to him. The fragrant spruce and fir were the same as those he’d left behind, and their roots reached for the heart of the mountain with gnarled, patient fingers.
Time had passed since the eagle had landed on foreign soil and deposited a young boy and a woman who could not speak. The boy wandered far, the soles of his feet still burning with the dance. His mother followed three steps behind, a silent shadow whose grief faded-to-lingering with each step.
They drifted both north and west until they found a place where Ventsei could breathe without the air catching in his throat; a place where both the mountains and trees whispered “home” in his adopted language.
Tereza looked from mountain to forest, and she pulled out the first of the stitches that sealed her lips shut. Every year after that she removed one more, until the only thing that prevented her from speaking was her decision to swallow her words rather than give them voice.
Twenty stitches pulled; twenty years gone, as though they were no more than a series of heartbeats, a hand coaxing a rhythm from the stretched-skin surface of the ceremonial drum.
Ventsei counted out twenty paces and turned to look back at the lone set of footprints he’d left in the snow. He had the park to himself when the others scattered during the lunch hour. It sounded too fanciful to say that he’d rather feed his soul, and so he said nothing when he put on the pair of sturdy boots he kept under his desk.
Today, the boughs filtered the thin light of winter’s-end, and he was glad of the down-filled jacket over his starched cotton shirt. Spring was a dream to this place, still decorated in blue-tipped frost, and most of the wildlife had not yet roused from under that blanket. Though there were claw-marks high in the trees, they were not fresh.
The bears still slept.
He hoped that among them was a once-brown bear now white with snow and sorrow; that Baba Metza had also found her way to this tranquil place—
“Dobar den.”
He spun about, feet skidding on the ice. “Izvinete . . . I mean, excuse me.”
“No need to translate for me, Ventsei.” An old woman sat upon a rock—one he’d passed only moments before. Wearing innumerable layers and a frown, she leaned on a stick of forged iron and looked about her with an air of condescension. “You have done well for yourself here, the winds tell me.”
“I’m sorry for not greeting you by name,” Ventsei apologized, wondering how someone so old and so crooked could have climbed the incline. “Are we acquainted?”
“We are that,” she said but didn’t elucidate. “You’re a doctor, the winds whisper. A specialist.”
“An internist, yes.”
She harrumphed, but her breath did not crystallize in the freezing air so much as it danced away in a flurry of snowflakes. “Internists know everything, but don’t know how to do anything.”
“My grandfather used to say much the same,” Ventsei said, with a smile despite himself. “And surgeons don’t know anything, but know how to do everything.”
“And there are those who both know nothing and can’t do anything,” she added. “So maybe better to be an internist, eh?”
“I thought so, Baba . . . ” He allowed the word to trail off, waiting for the stranger to supply her name.
“You don’t recognize me? You’ve been gone too long, too long.” He didn’t answer fast enough for her liking, and the stranger’s stormy expression summoned thunderclouds. “You walk these paths and see the other forests, the other mountains.”
Ventsei nodded, though his neck was stiff. “That is true.”
She slanted a gaze at him that was sharper than a kitchen knife. “You wonder if that silly bear escaped the hunters’ rifles and the gypsies’ leashes.”
“I don’t deny it, although how you know—”
She interrupted with a rush of words that was like an ice-fed stream down his back. “And your thoughts stray to little girls with pink mittens. You wonder what it would be like to have married a nice Bulgarian girl, one who speaks the language you confine to your dreams.”
Ventsei flinched as though she’d struck him and bit his tongue to keep from answering; his mother’s son, indeed.
The stranger cackled with unexpected laughter that called back the sun. “You have nothing to say to Baba Marta, eh?”
The chill spread along Ventsei’s limbs. “My apologies, Grandmother March.”
She snapped her wizened fingers at him. “Hold out your hand.” Ventsei did as she bade him. “Twenty years without wearing a martenitza, it’s a wonder you’re not dead from bad luck.” She tied threads of red and white about his wrist as she hummed. “White for purity of snow, red the setting sun.” She tied the knot tight. “It must be worn until you spot the first stork of the year.”
It must be worn to appease her, so that winter passes and spring arrives. “There are not many storks here, Baba Marta.”
She turned Ventsei’s hand over and his gold wedding band glinted. She hissed and shoved him away. “Stupid thing, what have you done?”
He rubbed it with his thumb, as he often did to reassure himself it was still there. “You are wise. I doubt I need explain it to you.”
Grandmother March rose from the boulder and slapped him twice in quick succession. “Once for forgetting the rites of the season.”
Ventsei rubbed the burning spot on his cheek. “And the second?”
“I intended you for another,” she said as she hobbled away. “You made promises to her.”
Yes, he had made promises. And his regrets about those left behind had a way of tinting all his memories; his past was the same crumbling brown of old paper, and as likely to fall apart if handled roughly.
Grandmother March didn’t take her leave of him, but she added, “She will be disappointed.”
Ventsei had to step off the path to give chase.
The blo
od ran, as did he. He slid down the mountain, ripping his jacket down one arm and scratching his face on naked thorns.
In the ravine, the forest lost all familiarity. The trees Ventsei had counted as friends were now strangers, and the river—a crooked finger when viewed from above—showed hairline fractures in its frozen surface.
Grandmother March could not be wholly displeased if the ice was melting, but the martenitza tightened around his wrist.
“Who will be disappointed, Baba Marta?” Ventsei called as he threaded his way through the firs: the slender elha.
“You think to keep pace with lightning?” Grandmother March taunted him from the other side of the stream.
Ventsei rested his hands against his thighs as he tried to catch his breath. “What are you doing here? Now, after so long?”
“There was no reason to come any sooner,” Baba Marta said. “She traded me twenty years, and twenty years I collected.”
“Who traded you twenty years?” But he knew.
Baba Marta’s face crinkled with a sly smile. “Your Milena made a beautiful samodiva.”
“You changed her into a wood nymph.” It was not for him to question, he who had counseled with bears and escaped upon the eagle’s back. His fruitless searches were now explained, why no one knew what had happened to her. “In exchange for what, Baba Marta?”
She whistled low through her teeth. “You were the one so fond of riddles. ‘”A world without people, cities without houses, forests without trees and seas without water.’ Answer your own question.”
The wound on Ventsei’s heart opened just a little. “A map.”
Baba Marta raised a hand. “I offered gold.” Coins spilled through her wizened fingers. “And I even offered back the years.” The coins turned into discs: pocket watches dangling by thin chains before they hit the snow and disappeared with a hiss. “But she would have nothing but the map. So I gave it to her. And now she’s come, looking for you.”
Ventsei took a step forward and heard the ice crack under his boot. “Milena’s here?”
