A Gypsy Song (The Eye of the Crystal Ball - The Wolfboy Chronicles) (3 page)

Sara ate greedily.

“What does that mean?” she asked with her mouth full.

Moeselman looked like he could burst with pride.

“It means you are very special,” Settela said with a smile while she put her arm around Sara.

Sara got up and stood in front of them. Moeselman, who was not used to this kind of audacity in his presence, uttered a deep guttural sound.

“What if I don’t want to?” Sara said.

Moeselman got up from the ground too. He stood big and mighty in front of her like he would do to anyone trying to defy him.

“You will!” he said.

Sara snorted. She did not like it when anyone tried to tell her what she was supposed to do or not. She never cared for what anyone thought of her, not her teachers, not her classmates and she had never obeyed many of her parents’ rules. She was not about to change that now. No one told her what she should or shouldn’t do.

“No, I won’t,” she said and felt the dangerous feeling of anger rising from deep inside of her.

“That is not your decision to make,” he said and looked at Settela. “Tell her she has to obey!”

“Well, I am not going to,” Sara said and stomped her feet with her arms crossed in front of her chest.

She hardly finished the last word before everybody in the clearing got quiet. The music stopped and the people who were dancing froze in the middle of a movement.

They all stared at Sara and her plate that was hanging from the air in front of her face.

“Moeselman, look,” Settela said and pointed at the plate.

In that instant Moeselman changed his expression and apparently forgot all about their fight. He smiled with great pride and ran towards Sara. He picked her up and held her high up in the air.

“This is my daughter, Sara,” he roared to the rest of the tribe. “She truly is The Mighty One!”

As he did, a wave of cheers and rejoicing went through the people. Music was playing again and women danced with fluttering skirts.

As Sara soon would find out for herself, Gypsies or Romanies are an amazing and very unique people—the only group of people living in every corner of the earth without the benefits of power, money, armies, or ever fighting a war. Wherever you travel, to the plains of Hungary, the steppes of Siberia, the gates of Marrakesh, the highlands of Guatemala, or the frozen tundra of Alaska, everywhere you'll find Romanies. They are always on the move and have an ever abiding need for freedom and independence. Where did they come from, you might ask? Some believe they are the last survivors of Atlantis. Others suggest that their ancestors are the people of the biblical town of Babel. To the Romanies it does not matter. They readily learn the language of their host country, but no government and no monarch has been able to break the Romani spirit, not with gifts of land and seed and not with brutal persecution.

Romanies have a deep and abiding respect for creation—for Mother Earth, and for life everywhere, in all its variety. Therefore, they gather only those leaves and flowers or only those portions of a root, bark or fruit that is really needed. If every part of the plant is needed, they will leave some portion in the ground to ensure its new growth. And they will always make sure to thank the plant for the gift it has given and for its efforts to keep our planet alive.

Furthermore, Romanies are at one with the spirits alive in every flame, tree, breeze and stone. As they sit around a campfire, romance and hope of a golden future beckon to them. As they have for centuries, the elders tell the young of their age-old traditions and the spells that can bring love, health, wealth and happiness. They are friends of moonlight and magic, superstition and prophesy, and they believe that if a spark flies from a campfire they know a surprise is on its way.

Sara and the tribe traveled for days, and as they did, Sara grew more and more fond of her new family and way of life. People were nice to her and she finally got to see the world that she had been so eager to explore. She found rest for a while and the north wind seemed to be leaving her alone.

The tribe traveled all over most of Europe, her parents told her, and performed at the marketplaces everywhere. They never stayed more than thirty days in the same place.

Everybody in the tribe had something, a talent, an act that they would perform and thereby earn money to get by.

Her dad, Moeselman was a fire eater. He would place burning torches in his mouth to extinguish them and sometimes he would even breathe fire like one of the dragons in Sara’s books. His performing name was Moeselman, the master of Hellfire. And he had everybody’s deepest respect (especially the children that stared at him with open mouths and eyes bigger than the wheels on their caravans) when he entered the stage and swallowed the burning fire.

Her mom was a sorceress. That is what she would call herself. She could make potions and put spells on people (only good ones, though, those that would bring them prosperity and keep the evil spirits away) and she read their future in their hands or in her cards. (She was very good at reading Sara’s mind, too, but that was more a mother’s instinct than it was magic.)

The most amazing thing to Sara was that her mother could heal people’s illnesses with herbs. Wherever they went, she cured hundreds of village people who were sick and she never took any money for doing it (though it was often offered in gratitude) because tribal tradition said it would be most unlucky to do so.

“Herbs, vegetables or fruit barks of every kind are the remedies, the salves which nature have sent to the Romani to heal the ills,” she would tell Sara. “It is for us to use them.  To neglect nature’s cures is to turn away our greatest treasure.”

Her grandmother—and Sara’s great grandmother—lived and traveled with them in the wagon. She used to be a sorceress, too, Sara was told. But not anymore. She had gotten too old, someone said (but no one knew how old she really was, not even herself.) She had lost the ability, the rumor had it. Sara didn’t talk much with her since all the old lady spoke was Romani, the language of the Romani people.

She was a small woman. She’d been born small and then she had four collapses of the spine in her back and now she was so hunchbacked that no one had seen her face for years.

Over the months, Sara got to know a lot of people who were very different from people where she’d come from. There was the extremely strong man who lifted weights, the tiny woman who trained and performed with the mighty elephants, the man with the dancing bear, the belly dancers, the illusionist who made things disappear and reappear in places you would never have expected, the snake charmer who used music to control his snakes, the bearded lady and the temptress in her tent about whom it is said that no man can ever go in without being seduced.

All of them were funny and happy people. All were making a living by using their talent that was given to them in birth.

And then there was the Wolfboy. Sara was told to never go close to him. He lived in a cage that he only left when he was secured on a leash and only one man was crazy enough to hold him. That was Moeselman.

“You stay as far away from that boy as you can,” he would say to her.

Now, Moeselman wasn’t used to dealing with children, so he didn’t realize making such a demand would only make her even more curious.

It was said the Wolfboy was a beast trapped in a boy’s body. That when the sun went down or if he smelled blood he would turn into a vicious beast, a werewolf and then no one was safe. That was why he had to stay in a cage.

At the marketplace, Sara’s dad would take him out and show him off on the stage, making people shiver with fear of the beast inside of him that might show by the smell of human blood. The fear of something this innocent. A young boy no more than fourteen who would all of a sudden turn in to your worst nightmare. That was always the highlight of their show, and the one act that made most people throw money at the stage. He was a regular moneymaker and the tribe wouldn’t survive without him.

At night he would keep Sara awake. He would howl at the moon and groan all night. It sounded like he was crying, Sara thought, and one night it became too much for her and she left the caravan without anyone noticing and she went to see him.

She sneaked across the site where the bonfire had been and then as silently as possible she neared the cage. But when she got there, she noticed that it was empty. And then she heard him. He was howling again, filling the forest with a mourning sound. But she could not see him. An owl stared at her from a tree and high in the sky behind it was a full moon. Sara felt her heart pounding in her chest as she walked backwards to the caravan and climbed into bed.

That night she didn’t sleep. She listened to the howling and wondered. In the morning, she stormed out of the caravan as soon as the sun had risen just to find the boy back in his cage sleeping like a baby, looking innocent when he lied there all curled up on the floor of the cage. All day she kept an eye on him and his every move. From a distance naturally. And several times her eyes caught his, looking all boyish and innocent, but he didn’t fool her. She knew what he was up to.

The next night she tried again. When everybody in the caravan was sound asleep, she carefully opened the door and went outside. She went to the cage again only to find it empty like the night before. And then there was the howling in the forest that gave her the chills. This time she thought she also heard a sound from inside her parents’ caravan so she hurried back. Since it was only Moeselman groaning in his sleep, she jumped back into her bed again, her heart beating like crazy.

The third time she waited until later in the night. She walked so fast that she made more noise than was wise, but she didn’t care. She wanted to see the Wolfboy as he got back from doing what he did in the forest. She wanted to see him.

And then she did.

He ran out of the forest and towards the cage, a big wolf with no tail running on only two legs like a human. Sara froze and stood still without making a noise and still the wolf sensed her. He stopped and looked straight at her. Her heart was threatening to jump out of her chest. His mouth was covered in blood from some animal he must have been eating. Or maybe it was from a human?

What would he do next? Jump her?

He walked closer to her and she could hear his heavy breath that sounded a bit like a horse. He stood in front of her looking like he might jump at any moment and devour her in a second.

And then she stared right into his eyes and saw something: the eyes of a boy. The very sad eyes of a boy not much older than her.

“I swear I will kill you if you touch her.”

The voice came from behind her. It  was Moeselman, and he was pointing a big rifle at the wolf.

“Get back in your cage,” he said while stepping closer to the wolf still holding the rifle in its direction.

The wolf didn’t move but just stared at Sara.

“Now!” he yelled.

The eyes let go of Sara’s and the wolf obeyed. A few seconds later he was back in the cage and locked in. Sara couldn’t help but stare at him as he spun a few times around in the cage and then lay down as she had seen dogs do.

Moeselman looked at Sara.

“Don’t ever do that again,” he said.

She shook her head.

“If you are scared, he will smell it right away,” Moeselman said when they walked back to the caravan. “Then he will be dangerous. It is best  not to show fear in front of a werewolf.”

“I will remember that,” Sara said.

Moeselman then sighed. He stopped and put his arm around Sara and squeezed her tight. “Always remember what I tell you. The woods and mountains are filled with scary creatures. Especially at night. Never show any fear when you meet them. Is that understood?”

“Understood.”

Moeselman yawned.

“Good. Now let’s get some shuteye.”

The following days, Sara couldn’t pass the cage without staring into it. Every once in a while she would meet the Wolfboy’s eyes and see that same look she saw that night. She couldn’t figure out if he was an animal in a boy’s body or if it was the other way around. Even in the daytime when he had a human shape his appearance was animal-like, with his big, bushy eyebrows that met at the bridge of the nose, the long and curved fingernails, low-set ears and swinging stride.

But the eyes always seemed to belong to a boy. A lonely and sad boy trapped inside the body of a beast. And she couldn’t help but wonder how he had become like this. How did anyone become a werewolf?

One day she asked Moeselman and he told her that he didn’t know how Wolfboy had become werewolf. He was like this when they found him.

“Where did you find him?”

“At a marketplace. A guy had caught him in the forest and was selling him. But who would want to buy a werewolf? He would just end up killing you in your sleep.”

“So why did you?”

“Because I looked him in the eyes and saw exactly the same as you did the other night. I saw a boy. I couldn’t just leave him there. People were throwing rocks at him and yelling stuff at him. I guess you can say I felt bad for the boy.”

“Doesn’t he have a real name?”

“Sure. It is Sami. But everyone here calls him Wolfboy.”

Sara was glad that the big Moeselman had a big heart to match. And from that night on she was no longer scared of Sami in the cage. She never went out to see him in the night, but she would sometimes wake up and listen to him howl at the moon.

From time to time she would get an urge during the daytime to go and talk to him in the cage, but she always stopped herself when she remembered her father’s words.

THE THIEF

In the fall
, the forest turned brown just before all the leaves fell off the trees. The wind started to blow and brought the winter with it.

“These are the hard months for the Romani,” Sara’s mother explained.

In the winter most of the marketplaces were closed for business since people stayed home, and if they went to buy something they would hurry back home and wouldn’t take their time to stop and watch a performance.