Black Spring

by Alison Croggon

  As the spring turned towards summer the rains abated, and it was as if a heavy lid had lifted off our heads and we could stand tall and breathe freely. The Plateau was then at its most beautiful. I know you think it a grim and ugly place, but to my partial eye even its winter dress has a rugged grandeur. When the many-hued grasses are strewn with wildflowers dozing in the sun, and the mountains rise in the distance like benign gods, their grey shoulders thrusting into white plumes of cloud, I think even you would think that the Black Country is a misnomer. Then this place is all colour and light. The air has a special clarity which picks out the edge of every blade of grass and gives all colours a muted radiance, so that each object seems to glow from within. There is no place like it in the world.

  For all the relief of the sunshine and the general harmony in the house, there was a troubledness to this time that, looking back, seems like a foreshadowing. The Wizard Ezra again came to our house, and although he was not permitted over the threshold, the master spoke with him for some time. I was polishing the table in the front room, and could not help but watch them with fascination, ready to duck if either turned my way. I couldn’t hear what they said, but both were stiff and angry. I thought the master won that encounter: finally the wizard turned and stalked back down the path, dragging his poor little mute in his wake.

  I assumed the argument was about Lina, who was oblivious to the scandal her presence caused. Her behaviour was outrageous even if she had not been a witch; when she was free of lessons or the other tasks like needlepoint that my mother considered essential to the qualities of a lady, she ran wild about the estate with Damek, and would come home with her dress torn and her hair in tangles. She was now reaching an age where these actions in a girl are seen as the signs of a wanton, and are a dishonour to her household. Even the master, who in the softer regions of the south had looked on Lina’s behaviour with a lenient eye, began to be alarmed: in the north, such behaviour is not merely ill-advised, but dangerous.

  The chief peril was, of course, the Wizard Ezra. Like most northern wizards, he used his powers seldom, but when he chose to exercise them it made a lasting impression. Not long after I witnessed the argument with the wizard, one of the labourers on a neighbouring farm, a man called Oti, made some slanderous comments about the Usofertera clan. He was known as a simpleton, and at the time was much the worse for drink, or even he would never have said such things in a public place. A man less prideful than Ezra might have thought the incident beneath his notice, but, unfortunately for Oti, word reached the wizard’s ears, and retribution was swift.

  The entire village was summoned to the square to witness this poor man’s fate. The master, to Lina’s deep chagrin, forbade her to go, and my mother likewise refused his summons, out of loyalty to our house. As for me, like all the rest of the village children, I was beside myself with curiosity (not unmixed with fear) and made sure I turned up at the appointed time, safely hidden behind my uncle.

  Oti was dragged out into the middle of the square, his arms tied behind his back, and was made to stand on a makeshift platform, so we could all witness his punishment. There followed a long and dull speech, in which the Wizard Ezra expatiated on Oti’s crime, which, he said, betrayed not only the Usoferteras, but the entire vocation of wizarding, and which deserved the most summary retribution.

  My eyes were fixed on Oti; I could see his limbs trembling from where I stood. His face was absolutely white, and it seemed all his features – aside from his eyes, which were stretched wide open so that the whites around his irises were visible – had sunk back to his skull. His terror was so pitiful that I started to cry, trying to be as quiet as I could, as I was fearful I might attract the wizard’s attention. I began to feel very sorry that I had come, and yet I didn’t dare to steal away.

  At last the Wizard Ezra stopped talking, and a dreadful silence filled the square, as if everyone there was holding his breath. The silence was broken by a thin, tearing shriek. I knew it was coming from Oti, but I could not see why: neither he nor the wizard had moved a muscle. He kept on screaming, the same high, horrible note, for what seemed like an eternity, writhing against his bonds as if he were in the most unspeakable agony. I was as baffled as I was appalled, for I could see no reason for his distress.

  Then, just as suddenly, Oti was struck silent, although he still twisted as violently, and a spark shot out of his throat. Within moments a torrent of flames was pouring from his open mouth, and almost at the same instant I smelt burning meat. I realized with a clutch of nausea that I was watching this man being consumed from within by fire. Even as I watched, his skin blackened and split open, so that briefly it appeared as if flames were shooting out of every part of him, surrounding him in an infernal aureole; but almost at once he ceased to have a human shape, and the house of his body twisted and collapsed, until the whole was consumed to ash.

  The fire burned with such ferocity that the whole process, from the moment that Oti began to scream to the dying out of the flames, took less than five minutes. The platform where he had been standing was barely touched: it was marked, my friends told me later, only with scorch marks where his corpse had fallen. Myself, I had no desire at all to examine the site: I ran off from the crowd and was violently ill, and for months afterwards could not pass the spot where Oti had burned without feeling sick with horror.

  After that, I needed no persuasion that there was good reason to fear the Wizard Ezra. I suspect now that this demonstration might well have been for the benefit of the Lord Kadar, to impress upon him the perils of crossing a wizard’s will. I think the master took note: certainly, he employed the tutor shortly after this incident, telling us that he was ashamed of the ignorance and rough manners of his charges.

  The tutor, Mr Herodias, was well chosen. A tall, thin-lipped man who affected a pince-nez, he was in truth a bit of a dandy: he was an exotic sight indeed in our village when he ventured out for his regular Sunday stroll, with his polished boots, embroidered waistcoat and carefully folded neckcloth. But his effete appearance belied a steely will that even Lina found difficult to bend. He was impervious to her sulks and threats and indifferent to her charms, and she was never able to deceive him. She was the most difficult of his charges: Damek was a stolid pupil, neither enthusiastic nor rebellious, and I was frankly studious, which exposed me to Lina’s mockery.

  Calmly and coldly, with a switch on his desk, which he didn’t hesitate to use, Mr Herodias set about instilling an education into even the most recalcitrant of subjects. He rented a small but comfortable cottage in the village, and walked up to the Red House every morning, swinging his switch around his legs, and calmly returned home each night to eat his supper. We spied on him sometimes, peeping through his window in the evenings: he always sat in his front room, sometimes reading, but mostly writing in a book. We never dared to ask him what he was writing about; the rumour was that he was a naturalist and was writing a treatise on butterflies, but I never heard the truth of it.

  His presence gave our lives a routine that summer that I, for one, found at once stimulating and comforting. Although all of us had been taught our letters, our ignorance was profound; as I’ve already said, the two years Mr Herodias spent at Elbasa I count as among the more precious gifts of my life. He opened for me the universe of books, and through books I have been able to address the gaps in my knowledge. I have continued his education all my life. I have wondered whether that odd, cold man knew what he gave me; sometimes, thinking back, I am sure he did. For this reason, I remember that summer as a happy time. But that is an entirely selfish memory; if you mention the same year in the village, you will see people shudder and cross themselves. That was the year the vendetta came.

  XI

  Because I am a woman, what I say counts for little in the world. But all the same, I watch and I think my own thoughts, and if I say little, it’s not because I have nothing to say. A wise woman, as they say here, keeps her face in a shell. If I were to speak some of my thoughts f
reely, it would be cause enough for a curse to be set in my flesh, or for a knife to open my throat. People here think the vendetta the central mystery of the Plateau: none dare speak against it, out of pride and terror. It would be like denying our own souls. Vendetta is at the heart of our honour. Here in the bitter north, where scratching a living from the soil is for most people the height of aspiration, a man who has no honour has nothing.

  When the vendetta comes to a village, it is a calamity. It is worse than flood or fire, worse than the tempest that sweeps down from the mountainside and tosses about trees and walls and houses as if they were the playthings of a child. It is more like a plague which, instead of flaring for a brief deadly moment, leaving the survivors in peace to mourn and bury their dead, stays virulent for years, for decades, even for centuries. It’s a fatal malady of the blood that slowly, inevitably, destroys whole families, whole clans, whole villages. I’m sure you’ve passed through some of the hamlets where vendetta has burned until there is no one left: the fields are returned to the wild, with weeds waist-high where once there were crops and vegetables, their stone walls tumbled and broken through lack of anyone to mend them year after year; the houses are empty, their roofs fallen in, the paving stones cracked where saplings have split them open, the wind and the rain their only guests. All that is left is perhaps a mad old woman with her chickens and scrawny goat, stubbornly clinging on because she has nowhere else to go.

  Vendetta is a black vine, a parasite that fruits only graves. But it is a crafty predator: if all the Plateau were in vendetta, there would be no one left for it to devour, and vendetta itself would die out. And so it sets one seed here, another there: never too much, never too little. Over the centuries, there is no village that vendetta has not harvested, taking its tithe of death; yet at any time, it will be only a few families who suffer.

  The death of vendetta is a special death. Vendetta is not the accident in which a man slips and falls from the side of a mountain, or is bitten by an adder, or where a child is lost in the snow of winter and is found days later clutching his staff, his face blue and icy. It is a death of honour, and a man’s household is judged by how he faces his fate. It is at the heart of the Lore and its ritual, and is behind the authority of wizardry. And this is why, although it is a calamity we dread and fear, northerners never complain against vendetta: it is as much part of us as the ground beneath us, as the cycle of the seasons. To speak against the vendetta is a blasphemy, like pitting your face against the will of God.

  Vendetta has, like everything here, its stern courtesies, and its laws are intricate and ancient. As it is about honour, it is the concern of men: women might suffer its cruelties, but they are not permitted into its workings. At root, for all the complicated rulings around it, vendetta is brutally simple. It begins with the murder of a man (the murder of a woman is considered a crime against property, not against honour). After a murder there is forty days’ truce; then the man deemed responsible for the crime may be killed at any time. The murderer must pay in two ways: with the Blood Tax, and with his life. His death must be at the hands of the victim’s nearest male relation. Once the killer is slain, however, the avenger must in turn pay for his crime, the second murder sparking the third, and so on.

  During the forty-day truce, the killer must travel to the king and hand to him one hundred silver pieces. To fail to pay the Blood Tax brings undying shame upon his name and upon his family. The royal treasuries depend on vendetta. It will not surprise you that those of royal blood are exempt from vendetta: the laws that apply to peasants do not apply to them. As farmers tend their crops, so the king tends his populace, growing fat on the shedding of blood.

  The penalties for those who do not pay are severe indeed: after he is killed by hanging, a dishonourable death, the defaulter’s hands and feet are cut off so that he will never find his way to heaven, and he is buried at a crossroads as if he were a suicide. If his family or nearest relations still fail to pay the tax, any property they own may be confiscated and their homes burned to the ground, and they are banished. Their shame is absolute and may never be gainsaid. So you can imagine the ruinous lengths to which people will go to pay the tax. I know of no one who has not done so; but I have heard many stories of those who have bankrupted themselves, or have even sold their daughters and sons into slavery, in order to raise the money.

  The wizards do not partake in the Blood Tax, but as they administer the legalities of the vendetta, they stand to gain as much as those who do. It is the root of their absolute spiritual authority over the people of the Black Country. You know, I am sure, that each village has its wizard, and that the wizard’s word is law. Their judgement is final; each wizard carries the Book of Truth, which has more authority here than the Bible, and the wizards’ rulings are known among the people as the Law of the Book. The wizards live humbly, eschewing worldly wealth, and for the most part spend their time dealing with petty disagreements: whether one man has stolen another’s goats, for example, or whether a boundary is three feet nearer a river than another man claims. Such punishments as were visited on the unlucky Oti are rarely administered, but the dread of them underlies the obedience paid to the wizards. I am sure they have other duties, but they are unknown to anyone outside their order: they keep their ranks closed, and to reveal the secrets of their magic is punishable by death.

  There is much I don’t know: what the bond is, for instance, between the wizards and the royal family. Then there is the constant war between the church and the wizards, both of which have strong claims on the royal house and fight jealously for its notice. The priests think the wizards are godless, and the wizards believe the priests are frauds imposed on the north by some fiat of the south. The latter assertion has enough truth to ensure that church attendance in the north is regarded as a matter of social appearances, while true God-fearing is reserved for the wizards. In the Plateau, Christian piety is, begging your pardon, secretly regarded as a sign of disloyalty, even though there wouldn’t be one soul in the Black Country who doesn’t believe in the wrath of God and the torments of hell, and who doesn’t cross himself for fear of the Devil or call for the Last Rites when he is dying.

  I will leave you to contemplate these contradictions yourself: some mock the northerners as heathens and pagans, but that seems as inaccurate to me as claiming that they are pious Christians. There are those who say that the king placates the wizards because there would be an insurrection if he did not, and I think there is a truth in that; but it doesn’t account for the whole. If nothing else, it demonstrates that human beings are complicated creatures, and that even we stern northerners demonstrate an elasticity of being which might surprise the dogmas of city folk like yourself.

  I don’t mean to say that wizards are evil, even if they are feared: to be stern is not to be unjust. But some wizards are dark in their power. The Wizard Ezra was one of those: a bitter rage seemed knitted in his very bones, and what in some was a harsh justice, was in him cruel and vicious. He was not above using his powers for private ends, although wizards are supposed only to deal in public law. It is well known that he cursed a girl of the village when he was a young man because she would not have him: he set a cold spell in her bones, so she was twisted and distorted with agony, and her beauty was destroyed. It is a byword here, when speaking of impossible things, that it is like asking mercy of a wizard, yet there is still a difference between those who are pitiless and those who revel in the pain they cause.

  To my mind, the northerners are like cattle that run willingly into the pen where they will be slaughtered for the table of their lord. Worse, we will fight to the death for the right to fill the coffers of the king with our own blood and to kiss the feet of the wizards who spit on us. I know you southerners think the vendetta a strange and romantic thing, and that your poets speak of it as part of the harsh and tragic beauty of the north, but I see no romance in it. I see a savage transaction which keeps the poor in their place, the wizards in their power and th
e kings in their comfort.

  I should not say these things, even to a stranger. But I have watched and suffered, and this is what I believe.

  XII

  The vendetta at Elbasa began undramatically enough. You might have seen the tinkers and the men who travel from one end of the Plateau to another, offering their wares and labour in return for a few coins or their keep. There are many such in the Black Country, men without a household or a village who have nothing to call their own except the skill of their hands or the strength of their shoulders. I know that in the south, these travellers are considered to be beneath contempt and treated as outcasts. It is not so here: they have the dignity of their names and their strong bodies, and even when a village cannot offer them work, honour demands that they are given a roof and a meal before they move on to the next village.