Petar Oseku sat at the head of the table, his back as straight as a poker, and lifted his cup with what seemed to me a mysterious elation. He had then thirty days of truce, his last as a free man: after that, he was the living dead. He could be killed at any time, as he took his goats to pasture, or tended his crops, or simply walked along the village street to meet a friend to play cards. I don’t think it even occurred to him to take refuge in the odu, in that way escaping his fate; in any case, doing so would only hasten the doom for his sons, since the vendetta would then pass to his closest kin.
I have often wondered what that must be like, constantly to feel death stalking you, its charnel breath brushing your cheek, its skeletal footsteps dogging your own. Does such a man spend his entire waking life in a chill of sweat, and each night in restless dreams? The waiting must be anguish in itself; perhaps the murderous click of a rifle in the clear air would arrive as unutterable relief. As the vendetta burned through the village, I watched each sentenced man with, I confess, an almost indecent curiosity, and it seemed to me that my uncle was of all of them the most dignified, in death as he was in life.
Petar Oseku died a week and two days after the truce lifted, the first death of that black spring. He was shot on a goat path outside the village: the killer was Lovro’s brother. The rapid revenge was, no doubt, driven by Lovro’s brother’s own grief and anger as much as the impatience of youth, and perhaps its swiftness was merciful. I think this boy was no more than nineteen years old when he was killed in his turn by Petar’s oldest son.
The mechanisms of vendetta are slow. Rather than the quick fever and agony of plague, its effect on a village is like the wasting disease which gradually strips the flesh from the skeleton over months and years. The outcome is ultimately the same, but as it runs its course the village adjusts and continues with the routines of living. Perhaps this is also how people survive: after all, you cannot think about death all day, however heavily its presence weighs upon your mind, or you would go mad.
So it was that, after the initial excitement of fear and anger (this latter mainly directed towards the village of Skip), those of us not directly affected returned to our ordinary lives, and the presence of vendetta faded to the background. For me, this meant lessons and household duties, and in the thoughtlessness of childhood these immediate concerns overlaid any anxieties I might have felt about the vendetta. Lina began to adopt some of the manners of a lady; her father had managed to impress upon her the signal importance of behaving with at least some propriety. Both Lina and I were approaching the threshold of womanhood, and we no longer played as the small children did, boys and girls all together, but gathered with our own sex. I began to look upon boys with a bashful but not indifferent eye.
The exceptions to this separation were Damek and Lina, whose intimate friendship seemed, if anything, more strong. They broke all our childish rules of association, but they were an exception that we simply accepted: girls didn’t play with boys, but Lina and Damek were different. The adults cast a less tolerant eye. On occasion the pair still disappeared together for a whole day, leaving before dawn with food stolen from the kitchen to make their lunch. Not even the Lord Kadar’s displeasure could stop them, and he was more and more displeased.
Once, after a particularly stern scolding, I found myself comforting Lina, who had thrown herself in despair on her bed. When she stopped sobbing, I asked her why she kept opposing her father’s will, when his anger made her so unhappy.
“It’s so unfair!” she said, lifting her tear-stained face from her pillow. “If Damek and I were both boys, nobody would take the slightest piece of notice.”
“But you’re not a boy,” I said.
“No, I’m not. It’s the unluckiest thing in the world.” She sat up, wiping her hands over her eyes. “God must hate me so, to make me a girl.”
“It’s not as if you and Damek can’t talk together at home,” I said reasonably. “Nobody would say anything then.”
Lina sat up, her eyes blazing. “I hate being stuck in this house like a – like a broody hen or a sow in a sty. Don’t you feel it, Anna? Sometimes I can’t bear it. I just have to get out or I’ll burst.”
Usually I had little patience with Lina’s overdramatic statements, but this struck a pang of empathy. I too felt the walls closing in around me as womanhood approached. I hesitated, unsure what to say, and Lina clutched my hand.
“Sometimes I want to feel the wind in my face and the rain in my hair and earth on my feet. I want it so badly that I could die with wanting… And when Damek and I are out in the plains without a single house in sight, with the sky above in all its changes and the rock beneath us, going down further than you could ever imagine, and us between them as light as blossom, I feel so alive! Then I’m free, Anna… It’s the only time that I’m free…”
Not only what she said, but the passion with which Lina spoke, went beyond my understanding. I felt the same disquiet that had ambushed me years earlier, when I had glimpsed Damek’s adoration of Lina; perhaps it was a dim presentiment of what would follow. Unconsciously I pulled my hand away and sat back, and Lina stared at me, the light ebbing from her face.
“Oh, go away,” she said at last. “You don’t understand. You’ll never understand. Damek’s the only person who knows what it’s like. The rest of you are all sheep.”
I was used to Lina calling me names, but this hurt me. She refused to say anything more, and since her distress seemed to have abated, I left her there.
For all its intimacy, Lina and Damek’s relationship was not more than cousinly; but her father began at this stage to feel some concern about its future implications. He had accepted this cuckoo into his house more generously than he might have, and treated him fondly. Damek was interested from the beginning in the mechanics of money – the legacy, I’m sure, of a childhood blighted by poverty – and he badgered the Lord Kadar to teach him about the running of the estate. Lina’s father wasn’t nearly as interested in accounts as Damek was, but the boy’s hunger to learn amused him. They sometimes spent hours closeted in the master’s study; I suspect that he thought that Damek could make himself useful when he grew up, as steward of the estate. He certainly wouldn’t have welcomed the notion of Damek as his son-in-law. It was then that he began to speak about sending Lina south, to pursue an education appropriate to her social standing.
This proposal created a major squall. Sending Lina to the southern estate was a sensible idea from many points of view, not least because it seemed that her witch powers were beginning to be manifest. Lina had no idea how to work spells or charms – in fact, her father had forbidden her even to think about exploring her abilities, and had told her that if she felt anything witch-like, she was to suppress it at once. Unusually for Lina, she made no signs of defying her father; I think that in this case she understood that his prohibition was in her best interest.
Even so, she couldn’t hide her nature. Sometimes in moments of extreme emotion a faint shimmer seemed to inhabit her skin, and once, when she teased me to distraction and I slapped her face, I was thrown against the kitchen wall without her laying a finger on my body. Our squabble stopped immediately: Lina was as astonished as I was, and helped me up with unaccustomed meekness. We pretended nothing had happened and never mentioned it again; I think we were both equally shaken.
In the south witches were not persecuted, even if they were considered, with a couple of notable exceptions in the city, to be of lower status than their male counterparts. If Lina were living on the southern estate, the master could have hired a wise woman to teach her the witchlore, and perhaps she might have found a useful way to spend her time and her powers.
Lina’s response to this suggestion was violent and absolute. She refused point-blank to leave the Plateau, if it meant leaving Damek behind. Even the mildest hint of moving would summon one of her fits, which as she grew older were at once less frequent and more frightening. She would scream at her father as if she were possesse
d by a demon, and then run off and lock herself in her bedchamber. We would stand anxiously outside her door, listening to her violent sobbing, but she would answer no one. Not even Damek could persuade her to open her door; until her father promised that he would not, for the moment, consider such a move, she would speak to no one. After two or three such incidents, the idea was quietly dropped.
And there things stood. Lina’s life – and the lives of others – might have turned out a lot better had she been sent to the south. But if wishes were horses, I would be a great general. It’s no use sighing for what might have been.
Despite such occasional explosions, life in our household continued uneventfully. The master seemed to have reached an accommodation with the Wizard Ezra, and there were no more disturbing interviews between them; we thought at the time it was because Ezra was busy with the vendetta, and was no longer concerned with the trivial business of a young witch in the village. My mother in particular was greatly relieved; for all the trouble Lina caused her, she was fond of the child, and would have been grieved by her suffering.
The year after the vendetta started, our finances improved considerably. Having spent almost a year in the Red House kicking his heels, the master embarked on one of his extended trips as soon as the roads cleared in the springtime. His departure left Lina desolate, and our household to manage the estate without him, which, to tell the truth, was somewhat easier in his absence. The master was never more than dutiful in his management, if you understand me. My father became steward of the estate, and between him and my sharp-eyed mother, there was more care given to detail than the master could ever be bothered to deal with. So it seemed that we prospered, like a man with an illness deep in his body that nevertheless leaves him looking hale, even if the flush in his cheeks betrays a deadly fever.
XVI
Now I come to a time which remains among the most painful of my life so far; I still cannot think of my fourteenth year without suppressing a sharp anguish. It is well said that troubles are never lonely.
As Petar Oseku was a close blood relation, I should have known that it was only a matter of time before vendetta touched my own family. Perhaps, underneath, I did know, and kept the knowledge from myself; perhaps it was simply that I was young, and so consumed by the minor joys and sorrows of my life that I never thought of looking beyond my own concerns. The world of my girlhood is so far away, and there is much I have forgotten, but I find it difficult now to believe that I was then so blind.
Whatever the reason, it was a shock when my father was named to avenge the death of Johannik, Petar Oseku’s middle son. His youngest, Orlu, was still to cross the threshold of manhood, and my father was Johannik’s oldest male relation. My parents had known since the vendetta was first declared that it would be that way, unless the wizards of the two villages negotiated a blood settlement. For complex legal reasons that no one except the wizards understood, the Wizard Ezra had declared at the beginning that this would be impossible; and so the relentless logic of the vendetta reached into my own house. It was again the beginning of winter, two and a half years after Petar Oseku died.
My mother and father had not thought to warn me of this danger, out of a feeling of mercy perhaps, or because they assumed I would already know; although I think it most likely that it was because they considered me too young to be included in the conversation. And so, when the bloodied sheet was hung from the Red House (the back window, because the house belonged to the master, and not my father), it came like a bolt of lightning out of a blue sky. I had been on an errand, to buy some eggs from Fatima, and I was walking slowly, taking care not to swing my basket, and watching my step in case I tripped. I arrived at the back courtyard, unlatched the gate and looked up: and there was the sheet, hanging like a blasphemy from our own window.
I knew at once what it meant. I don’t know how I didn’t drop the basket then and there, but I did not: instead, I carried it into the kitchen and placed it with special care on the table. My mother was preparing a lamb casserole with lemon and egg sauce, and she thanked me and took the eggs as if that day were the most ordinary in the world. I remember the light that shafted through the door fell coldly on her face, and her skin looked waxy and slightly blue, as if she were a corpse herself. She said not a word about the sheet, not a word about my father. Her face was closed and stern, as expressionless as a rock.
That night, when I went to bed and cried until there were no more tears to cry, she came in when she thought I was asleep and stroked my hair; but that was the only time through those endless months when she thought to treat me with gentleness. My father acted much as his brother had, and refused to hurry his task; shortly after the sheet was hung, the winter snows blocked the roads, and earned him a respite. Every day when I walked out of the door, I saw the sheet, frozen stiff and hung with icicles, and every time I shuddered. All that long, dark winter death hung over our household, bruising the very air with dread.
My mother was never the most demonstrative of women, but that winter it was as if her soul withered inside her. She became a different person: harder and less forgiving. It was a lonely time for me. I felt as if she had abandoned me and had wandered off into some rocky, barren place where I was unable to follow her. Sometimes I hated her. Other women were softer with their daughters, and I would watch them from the corner of my eye with burning envy, as they held their girls in their arms and kissed their faces. Oh, I have long forgiven her; it was sorrow that froze the loving woman inside her. But it made a hard time harder for me.
I wasn’t close to my father; although he was fond of me, I knew that he had always wanted a son, and to have only a single child, a daughter at that, was a trying disappointment in his life. Sometimes after a night of drinking he would beat my mother, but in that he was no worse than many of the men in the village, and better than some, since he never hurt her beyond a few bruises. I was, if anything, afraid of him. I’m not sure that I ever really loved him. But for all that, he was my father, and I didn’t want him to die.
Lina was not so insensitive as to crow with excitement when the vendetta came to the Red House, but she couldn’t conceal her interest. Vendetta was something that excluded her, and she hated that: she always wanted to be at the centre of everything. I turned to her in my loneliness, and our friendship, which had become a little distant in the previous couple of years, blossomed again under her quick sympathy. I think she really did feel sorry for me, and did her best to console my grief; she could be a charming and thoughtful companion when she chose.
Curiously, perhaps, I found most solace in Damek’s company at that time; he said very little, but there was something in him that responded with profound empathy to another’s suffering. One day he found me weeping behind the woodstack, where I had hidden after some hard words from my mother. I was insensible to his presence until he laid his hand upon my shoulder, which made me jump. I looked up through my tears, embarrassed to be discovered, and he squatted down and offered me a kerchief to mop my face.
“It won’t hurt so much in a while,” he said gruffly, when my sobs had subsided.
My awkwardness vanished, because I knew that Damek wouldn’t tell anybody that he had found me crying like a baby. “It doesn’t feel like it,” I said at last.
“It always feels bad to begin with,” he said. “But then you get used to it, and it’s not so bad.” I wanted to ask him how he knew, but stopped myself; we all knew Damek never talked about his past before the Red House. He stared at his feet, as if he were looking there for more words, and we sat in silence for a while as I gathered myself together.
He helped me up and studied my face. “Nobody would know you’ve been crying,” he said. “Better that way, eh?” He smiled, and I gave him a wobbly smile back. He had a very sweet smile, I remember. After that I sometimes sought his company when my spirits oppressed me. He never asked questions: we would merely talk idly of this or that, until I felt better. It was simple kindness, and I have never forgot
ten it.
Perhaps you will find this difficult to understand, as Damek has since become so cruel: but maybe the cruellest people, those who are most crafty in the ministration of hurt, are those who fully understand what it means to feel pain. I sometimes wonder if that boy lives somewhere inside Damek still, or if Damek murdered him in his manhood. If he did, that might have been his worst crime.
When the thaw came, my father went to kill his man, and duly travelled to the palace to pay the Blood Tax, and on his return we held the honouring feast. You will no doubt find it strange of me, given what I think and believe about the vendetta, but when I looked at him sitting at the head of the long table with the soft flush of rushlight on his face, I was proud of him. It was the only time in my life I felt such a surge of affection towards my father; he was gentle with me that evening, and called me his dear as he stroked my cheek. I treasure that memory still, since it is one of the few times in my life when I felt some sense of redemption in our relationship. It is one of the paradoxes of the north, that the vendetta, the evil thing at our heart, is what brings out our most noble character.
The day after the truce elapsed, my father was shot dead on the road just outside the village. As with most of these killings, it occurred at dawn. The news was brought to us by Johka of the Low Pastures, who found his body. I remember it vividly: Fatima had just arrived with eggs and gossip for my mother, and I was making a tea, when there was a knock on the kitchen door. Johka was standing on the threshold, clutching his hat in his hands, and before he said a word, all the blood drained from my mother’s face. Fatima nodded to Johka, indicating that this was women’s business, and he mumbled his sympathies and went away. My mother stood, unseeing and unhearing, as Fatima took her elbow and made her sit down. It was only then that she began to weep.
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