Black Spring

by Alison Croggon

  Lina didn’t seem to have moved: she still stood in the centre of the room. Damek threw himself towards her, intending perhaps to pick her up and carry her out by main force, and she simply lifted her hands in a gesture of prohibition. It was as if he’d run into a wall. He fell stunned to the ground.

  “I said, go away.” Lina’s voice was hard and expressionless.

  Damek looked up, and to my surprise I saw tears in his eyes. “Why won’t you listen?” he said.

  “I’m not the one who is deaf,” said Lina.

  “I couldn’t bear it if you died,” he said. “Without you, the sun is dark in my eyes. Without you, the world is a desert of thirst, with no spring anywhere. Without you, I have no soul, no life. Don’t you understand?”

  For a moment Lina faltered, and I saw doubt fleet over her expression. Then she smiled, and it was such a smile as I picture on Satan’s face as he looks over his cohorts in hell: sweet and beautiful almost beyond imagining, and yet expressive of a diabolical will.

  “I’ll not die,” she said. “And even if I did, do you think you would be rid of me? Do you think I would not beat in your heart, Damek, and look out through your eyes? Why do you keep demanding what is already yours? Are you so greedy?”

  Damek slowly scrambled to his feet. “Come with me, Lina,” he whispered. “I beg of you.”

  “No.” She turned away, dismissing both of us. “I’m tired. Come back tomorrow, and we’ll talk.”

  Damek glared at her with sudden hatred. “Damn you then,” he said. “Damn your stupidity and damn your petty arrogance. Damn you to hell.”

  He turned on his heel and walked out of the room. I heard his footsteps receding down the stairs, and the slam of the door as he left the house.

  Lina stood still as stone, listening to his departure. And then she swayed and fell to the floor in a faint, even as I ran to catch her.

  XXXVIII

  My mother had come upstairs when Damek left, and she helped me carry Lina to her couch. We set about chafing her cheeks and waved hartshorn under her nose, but she did not revive. After a half-hour of no response, we became anxious: her breathing was faint and her face was bloodless. I ran downstairs and told the groom to ride for the doctor, instructing Irli to mind the door, and then ran up to her room again. I poked up the fire and we undid her stays gently and dressed her in warm nightclothes and laid her in her bed. At last this roused her: she blinked and opened her eyes.

  “Anna!” she said. “How strange! I thought I had fallen into the well.”

  “You should take care of yourself,” said I. “You are still sick.”

  “Nay,” she said, and struggled to sit up. She could not, and lay back on her pillow. “Why am I so weak? Where did Damek go?”

  “You sent him away,” said my mother. “And quite right.”

  She seemed stricken by this news. “I sent Damek away?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Don’t try to sit up, Lina; you should rest.”

  As we spoke, I heard with relief a hammering on the front door. “That’ll be the doctor,” I said. “He must have been close!”

  “I don’t want to see the doctor,” Lina said petulantly. “There’s nothing wrong with me…”

  I ran onto the landing so I could speak to the doctor before he saw Lina, and I heard voices rising from the hallway. My heart stopped. It wasn’t the doctor: it was the Wizard Ezra. Irli must have let him in. I cursed myself: in my anxiety over Lina I had completely forgotten Damek’s warning. How could I have been so thoughtless? Irli was only a child, and she couldn’t be expected to defy a wizard demanding entrance. I stood frozen on the landing, gripped by total panic. Then I ran back into the chamber. There was no way of bolting the door, as Damek had broken it earlier, and my first confused thought was to move Lina into another room.

  “It’s the Wizard Ezra!” I hissed at my mother, as I hauled off the bedclothes and attempted to pick Lina up.

  My mother went pale and crossed herself. Lina pulled herself up, supporting herself on the bedstead, and stared at me.

  “Ezra?” she said. “In my house?”

  “Hurry,” I said, desperately trying to push her out of the room. I could hear heavy footsteps on the stairs already.

  Lina swore obscenely and shook me off. “I don’t care about Ezra,” she said. “Stop behaving like an old woman, Anna.”

  “Lina, he wants to kill you!”

  She laughed shakily. “As if he can!” she said. I stared at her: she was holding herself upright by force of will, and looked as if she were on the verge of collapse. I judged that she would have trouble defending herself against a moth.

  I opened my mouth to argue, but at that moment Ezra strode through the door. He came in wrath, his staff held out before him like a weapon; his white hair flew about his head and his eyes were bottomless black pits in his face that seemed to suck all light out of the room. Despite my terror, part of me watched in wonder: he was such an incongruous figure in this feminine chamber. I realized that I had never in my life seen Ezra indoors: I had only ever seen him at the door or striding over the fields or through the streets of the village. It was as if a wolf had invaded the bedroom.

  He stood framed in the doorway, and my mother and I cowered against the wall. He didn’t even glance at us: his whole attention was on Lina, who stood before him in her nightgown, her knees shaking with weakness, white-faced and vulnerable and small. He didn’t shout: he spoke quietly, with a dreadful deliberation that made the hairs stand up on my neck.

  “Serpent of Satan!” he said. “I bring the judgement upon you. I bring fire to burn you and water to drown you. I bring iron to pierce you and salt to cleanse you. I bring the tooth of the wolf to cut out your tongue and the wing of the owl to blind your eyes, and I bring the curse of my heart against the filth and evil of your soul.”

  He raised his staff, and Lina staggered backwards as if he had struck her. Until then I had been frozen to the spot, but when I saw Lina fall back, a blind fury rose within me. She looked so fragile and ill, and the injustice of it smote my heart, so I scarcely knew what I was doing. I threw myself at Ezra and grasped his jerkin and shook him, crying at him to leave my mistress be.

  He stepped back in surprise. For an awful moment his eyes met mine, and there was such malignance in his gaze that I thought I was stabbed to the heart. I fell back against the wall as if I had been thrown, although he hadn’t lifted a hand against me, and slid to the floor.

  Lina scrambled upright. She no longer looked small and ill: now she loomed in that tiny room, and a viciously bright light seemed to emanate from her form, banishing all shadows. Her hair was coiling about her face like a nest of snakes, and her eyes were violet fire. On her face was an expression of such demonic hatred that I recoiled.

  She merely lifted her right hand, and the wizard stood transfixed, unnaturally still: some seizure had afflicted him and he could not move a muscle. His mouth and eyes were wide open, and his hands were arrested mid-gesture, so that he seemed caught out of time: only his eyes, rolling in his head, showed that he was conscious. His attitude was one of complete terror, and that in itself was frightening. In that moment, I remember, the room went completely silent, as if all sound were sucked away; I couldn’t even hear the beating of my own heart.

  As I watched, every loose object in that room – the water jug and basin, the oil lamp, the chamber pot, the bedclothes, Lina’s undergarments, the fire irons, even the nursing chair – became airborne, spiralling around Lina’s head, so that she seemed the centre of a nightmarish domestic whirlpool. The Wizard Ezra’s eyes were now rolled up in his head, so I could only see the whites. Then Lina flung her arms out in a violent gesture, and the objects flew at the wizard with terrible force. Those that were brittle, smashed; I heard a loud crack as the chamber pot broke against his skull, and the wizard fell over, tangled in the linens and blankets as in a diabolical net. Then everything went still, except for my mother, who cringed against the wall, sobbing and
shaking, and I realized I could hear my heart again, hammering in my chest.

  I stared at the carnage dully, too dazed to react; but then I saw that the broken lamp had spilt its oil and set fire to the fabrics. Within moments it was blazing merrily. I realized that if I did not act we would all be burnt to a crisp, and somehow I tore the brocade curtains off the bed and with them stamped out the flames. When I had finished I stood for a short time, regaining my breath. Lina had collapsed, so I picked her up, and dragged her onto the stripped bed. She was so still and white that at first I thought she must have died, but if I laid my ear to her mouth I caught the faintest breath, and her heart was fluttering lightly in her breast, fast as the heart of a bird. Then, unwillingly, I checked the wizard. I saw at once that he was dead: the poker had been driven through one eye with such force that it had pierced his skull, pinning his head to the floorboards. There was a deep depression on the side of his head, and blood was seeping out of his mouth and ears. Despite the evidence of my eyes, I felt for his heartbeat, trembling the while that he might wake and grasp my hand.

  “He’s dead,” said my mother, who had crept up beside me. Her face was ashen, and I’m sure mine was the same.

  “What shall we do?”

  She stared at me, shaking her head, but had no answer. I drew the charred bed-curtain over his face, so I did not have to look at that terrible sight, and we crawled away from his body. My mother caught my hand, and we sat together on the floor of the destroyed bedroom, unable to move. I don’t know how long we sat there. Everyone else had run out of the house when Ezra arrived, in fear of their lives; no one came to disturb us until the doctor arrived. He walked through the wide-open front door and came straight up to the bedroom. He stared at the destruction and his lips tightened, but he made no comment. He checked Lina’s pulse and sighed. Then he whipped the cloth back from the wizard’s body, and as quickly covered him again. There was clearly no need for his ministrations there.

  He went downstairs, returning quickly with a bottle of plum brandy and some glasses. He poured a large glass for my mother and myself, and insisted we drink it all. Then he poured one for himself, and that’s when I noticed that his hands were shaking.

  XXXIX

  Perhaps you are wondering why, when I saw her terrifying capacity for violence, I did not leave Lina’s employ at once. The truth is that I was never personally afraid of her; the wizard’s death appalled me more than anything I had seen in my life, yet afterwards I felt, if anything, more loyal to my mistress. Lina could exasperate me beyond measure, and she often alarmed me, but I never thought her a monster. It is easy too to forget how young we were! All of us, Lina, Tibor, Damek, myself, were scarcely out of childhood. What hope did we have, even the most self-willed of us, of ruling our own destinies? When I look back, I wonder what we might have been, had we been born into another world. But that is almost the same as wondering how our lives might have turned out had we been completely different people.

  In the end, I was the most fortunate of us all, and that because I was the least important: there is a luck in being born ordinary. As I had no fortune and no status, I had the more freedom to be myself: it mattered little to anyone beyond my intimates what I did. Lina, on the other hand, was scrutinized by all eyes from the moment of her birth; all her life she had been the object of attention, and there was not one person she knew, including myself, who had not attempted to shape her wild being into a more biddable form. She was like a thorn tree which to its misfortune is bent into an espalier against a wall, and which cannot but betray its spiky and unruly nature, no matter how sternly its growth is pruned and directed.

  That day I understood that Lina’s extreme behaviour was forced by circumstance, as much as by her wild nature. Left to herself, she might have found her level, but tormented as she was by others, tugged now this way, now that, she could never attain the balance within herself that she so sorely needed. From her birth, she was thought to be unnatural, a demon, a monstrous creature who must be destroyed. If she had not killed Ezra, he would have murdered her: was she then to offer her throat to his knife, like a lamb to a butcher? If Ezra had succeeded in his aim of killing Lina, no one would have lifted a hand against him, for he had the weight of the Lore in his hand. If a man had defended himself as Lina had, no one would have said a word, because that man would have been a wizard. The affair would have been considered “wizard-business”, and thus none of our own.

  Lina’s only real crime was to be born a woman, with powers and instincts that were thought proper to belong only to a man. She was not the first, and certainly not the last, in her situation. Yet I knew her well, and for all her faults, which I understood better than anyone, I could not think her unnatural. Why should any of us be deemed monstrous for heeding the simple bidding of our hearts? Why do we bow before the chains that bind us, spilling our blood into the coffers of the king and strangling the longings in our breasts? Is that the real reason why someone like Lina must not be suffered to live, because her mere existence reveals our private, unadmitted shame, our poverty of spirit?

  These questions burst on me that day with the force of a revelation. It was as if a veil was removed from my sight: I perceived everything afresh, like one newly born. I had always felt for Lina the compassion and love of a sister; now I felt too the loyalty and indignation of our common sex. She ignited an anger within me which has never been quenched, at the rank injustices of this world.

  The wizard’s body was taken away that afternoon – with some difficulty, I remember, as the poker that affixed his corpse to the floorboards was driven right through the wood – and Lina herself was removed to a spare room, out of the wreckage of the bedroom. She seemed dead herself; she did not wake or move all that long day. I was in a daze, attending to my ill mistress while also attempting to cope with the distress and shock of my mother and the servants. It took all my powers of persuasion to stop the servants leaving at once.

  Tibor arrived home in a panic, having heard that the Wizard Ezra was intending to kill his wife; when he was told what had happened, and saw Lina lying white and still on her bed, he withdrew to his room and would not come out. I think he simply did not know what to do. I didn’t know what to do either, and would have been glad to shut myself up and demand to be left alone, but since everyone turned to me, and there was no one else, I had no choice but to take charge.

  Damek arrived not long after Tibor, in a state of some dishevelment and distress. He insisted on seeing Lina, but I would not permit him into her room. I was in no mood for his bullying. I told him she was deathly ill, and his presence at such a delicate time would do more harm than good, and then I angrily asked why he did not take up his responsibilities as Lord of Elbasa and calm the villagers, otherwise the entire population would be at the manse with pitchforks and brands. At this he stared at me hard, and to my surprise left without further argument. I think he did as I demanded; certainly, no mob turned up at our doorstep, as I had half expected might happen over the next few days. I wondered too when we would hear from the wizards. Ezra had been the only wizard in Elbasa, and it would take at least a day for news to reach the other clans. Again fortune was with us: the day after the wizard’s death came the first heavy snowfall, and I judged that since communications would be delayed, I need not fear a response for a few days, at the very earliest, and perhaps not at all that winter. There was little enough to be thankful for, to be sure, but I was grateful for that small mercy.

  Lina herself lay insensible to everything, as the wind whirled the snow about the chimneys. She showed no outward sign of harm, aside from a bruise on her temple; but her breathing was barely perceptible, and she hardly stirred. After two days of this, I was beside myself with worry. The doctor showed me how to give her nourishment, soaking a rag with broth so she would not choke. This was a time-consuming and difficult task, and I was grateful when Tibor came out of his room and offered to help nurse her. In the sickroom he proved gentle and surprisingly skilful
, which I put down to his mother’s teachings, and I sighed again for what might have been. Strain and grief had made him gaunt, and his eyes were red-rimmed. He looked a man in the grip of terrible sorrow, although our conversation was limited to practicalities and he said nothing of his feelings to me. Sometimes, from the hallway, I overheard him talking to Lina, as if she could hear him, but I could never make out what he said.

  Lina regained consciousness on the third day, but that was scarcely an improvement: with consciousness came the high fever that I had been dreading since she was brought to bed with the child. The first I knew of it was in the small hours: she screamed and threw off her blankets, waking me up, then scrambled off her bed. I leapt up to attend to her, and she flinched away from me in horror.

  “I’ll not come now!” she cried. Her voice was hoarse and cracked. “Back! Away from me, foul ghoul! Take your net elsewhere!”

  “It’s me – Anna! Come, Lina, back into bed – you’ll catch a chill!”

  She blinked and, to my relief, recognized me. “Oh, Anna, I thought you were Death come to claim my soul! I saw him there with his net and scythe, just where you’re standing – his eyes were burning, Anna, burning cold—”

  “Now Lina, it’s just a bad dream. Look, there’s only me!” I put my arm about her shoulders. Her skin was clammy and cold, and her entire body was shaken by violent tremors. Her nightdress was drenched and in the candlelight her face glistened with mingled sweat and tears.

  “I don’t want to die. What will happen to me when I die? Why must I die?”

  “You won’t die, my dear, but you must get back into bed. Come now … come, I’ll sing you to sleep.”

  She took my hand like a child, and the trust in that small gesture wrung my heart with fear and pity. I wiped her face, wrapped a shawl around her, and poked up the fire that was slumbering in its embers. She permitted me to change her clammy nightdress and to tuck her back into bed, and at last she drifted into slumber. I dared not sleep after that, and sat up and watched her. She did not wake again, but she stirred often and muttered, and sometimes she cried out. Mostly I couldn’t understand what she said, but she twice called for Damek, and once she seemed to be speaking to Tibor.