Being a Green Mother (8 page)

But he did not know the Llano itself, or the source of the Gypsies. “But perhaps the Gypsies of Germany can help you,” he suggested.

In Germany they had a problem. Consumption had taken out a chief, and the officials had buried his body in a pauper’s grave and driven the wives out of town. The women were bedraggled and absolutely filthy. “But I can get you water!” Orb exclaimed.

As one, the three women shook their heads in negation. “We may not wash or touch water until his body has disintegrated completely in the earth,” one explained.

So it was that Orb learned of the Cult of the Dead. All Gypsies followed it, including those of France and Spain; there had been no death in the vicinity when Orb was there, so she had not encountered this then. When a Gypsy died, all his scant possessions were burned along with his corpse; in that manner his women were freed of their geis and could be clean again. But when the authorities interfered, their plight was severe. “We can not even feed the grave,” they said. For it was the custom to set food on the grave, so that the spirit of the deceased would not go hungry.

Orb stayed the night with them in their tent, though the smell was thick. But no sooner had she fallen asleep when she was awakened by a commotion outside. She scrambled up with the woman and peeked out.

There stood a bedraggled man, dirt sifting from his beard. “Faithless wives!” he cried loudly. “Why have you not brought me food? Are you trying to starve me?”

It was the ghost of the dead man. The women fell down in terror, crying. The ghost advanced angrily on them, making as if to strike. Orb stepped out, acting before she knew it. “It is not their fault, Gypsy!” she cried in Calo. “The townsmen won’t let them near the grave!”

The ghost turned on her. “Who are you?” he demanded.

“Just a woman in quest of the Llano,” Orb said bravely. How could she be debating with a ghost?

“Impossible!” he said. “Even I do not know the Llano! How can you, an outsider, seek it?” He took another step toward the fallen women.

Orb did not know what else to do, so she sang. She started a Gypsy tune, projecting her magic with it.

The ghost paused again, evidently daunted. He did not move till Orb stopped singing.

“There was a man like me, who died,” he said then. “His family could not burn him or his horse, because it was raining and they had no fire. But one among them knew a fragment of the Llano, and she sang it, and the pyre heated and steamed and finally burst into flames, and destroyed it all, and he rested in peace, and his wives were clean.” Then he faded out.

The women scrambled up. “You saved us!” they exclaimed.

“Only for tonight,” Orb said, troubled. “Will the ghost really hurt you?”

“Oh, yes, he was always an angry man in life, and death has not sweetened him. We must feed his grave!”

“Or better yet, burn his body,” Orb said.

“Yes! But how can we do this? The police—”

Orb feared that she would get them all arrested, including herself, but she had to try. “Perhaps he has told us how. I will try to help you. Can you burn his body if you are given access to the graveyard?”

“If the police let us. But they will not.”

“Perhaps they will. We’ll try it tomorrow night.”

On the following night they drove the Gypsy wagon to the town, making as little commotion as possible. They parked at the edge of the graveyard. The family members set to work digging at the gravesite, while Orb settled herself with her little harp and waited.

The police were alert. Within the half hour they arrived in force. Burly policemen charged up to the graveyard.

Orb began to sing, accompanying herself on the harp. Her magic flung out, touching the moving men.

The men stopped, listening. They stood about her, doing nothing else. The Gypsies, beyond the range of her full magic, continued working.

Orb sang song after song, keeping the policemen mesmerized. In due course the corpse was out, and the pyre built. The fire started, and then blazed high, and the stench of burning meat wafted out.

The ghost appeared. “That’s more like it!” he exclaimed. Then, as his body crumbled into ash, he faded out.

Orb stopped singing and playing. She rejoined the Gypsies as their wagon pulled out. The police still stood, bemused, looking at the open gravesite and the pile of embers.

They went to the nearby river, and the women stripped and plunged in, desperate to get clean again. Then they set about washing their clothes.

Finally, shivering, naked, they wrapped themselves in blankets from the wagon. “You did it!” one exclaimed. “If that was not the Llano, it was akin!”

“It was not the Llano,” Orb said. But she was quite pleased with herself.

Hungary was the land of Gypsy music. World renowned composers and musicians were here, and Gypsy orchestras toured the country. Historically, the top composers of Europe had drawn upon Gypsy music, popularizing it as their own. Schubert, Brahms—the beauty of their music owed its share to melodies the Gypsies had possessed before them. The Hungarian pianist Liszt had transcribed Gypsy music as the Hungarian Rhapsodies.

Here the Gypsies were known as Tziganes. They had been here before the Magyar conquest, and the Magyars sought to profit by mingling Tzigane blood with their own. When the Tziganes resisted, laws were passed requiring Tziganes to become Christians and to marry only Magyars. This drove many Tziganes out of the country, into Russia and Poland and Germany and France, in one of their great historical diasporas. Many did pretend to accept Christianity, decorating their wagons liberally with crosses, but at heart they
believed in no religion but their own. They were required to settle in houses and desert their own language; this caused another exodus, for no true Gypsy could be anchored in one place long. They were accused of cannibalism and severely persecuted for it, their denials being taken as confirmation of the charge.

Still they survived, and their facility with metal and wood greatly benefited the sedentary culture around them, and their music shaped that culture. It seemed that every blacksmith was a Gypsy, and every musician a Gypsy, too. The greatest of contemporary Tzigane musicians was Csihari, a violinist who was said to be able to charm the souls of the living and the dead.

So it was to this Gypsy Orb went. But no Gypsy of the region would tell where to find him. She was an outsider they termed “Ungar,” or “stranger,” not to be trusted. She realized with flattered bemusement that they took her for a Gypsy; her command of the language and customs had enabled her almost to pass as one of them, despite her honey hair. Perhaps they took her for a crossbreed, as Gypsies frequently married outside their culture. Yet it seemed that they held foreign Gypsies in greater contempt than they did the mundanes.

She came to a village where the Tziganes were especially surly—an extremely unusual state for this normally happy people. “What is the matter?” she asked.

“Csinka defiled the water!” she was informed gruffly.

“What?” Orb asked, startled by the similarity of that name to that of her friend Tinka.

“She walked over the underground pipe that brings our water,” the woman explained indignantly, taking Orb’s exclamation as outrage. “Now we have to forage at great range for our needs. It’s a terrible inconvenience.”

Orb sought out Csinka. The woman was almost suicidal in her chagrin. “I lost my way—I had a big package to carry and I didn’t see where I was going, and before I knew it I had stumbled over it,” she confessed tearfully.

In the Gypsy culture, in some regions, women were fundamentally unclean; Orb had learned this along with the language, but had not encountered it before. The onus was worst at the time of childbearing; the woman’s clothing of the time would be burned. But her nether region could be
suspect at any time. Thus she could not step over copperware without defiling it, and the same evidently applied to buried water pipes. No one here would drink the water that Csinka had defiled by her passage over the pipe.

Orb knew better than to argue the merit of such a custom. Such things varied from tribe to tribe and from region to region, but were honored tenaciously where they held. But by her definition Csinka was innocent, and she wanted to help. “I once helped a woman to burn her husband’s body,” she said. “Perhaps I can help you, too.”

For an instant Csinka’s eyes lighted. Then despair resumed. “There is no way. We cannot lay a new pipe.”

“But if I can banish the defilement on the present pipe—”

“Are you a sorceress?” Csinka asked with interest.

“No, only a musician, of a sort. I came to meet Csihari, but they will not let me see him.”

“Nobody sees Csihari!” Csinka said. “He sees whom he will, and only whom he will.”

So Orb had gathered. “Perhaps if I sing him a song, he will come.”

Csinka shrugged. “He might. But how can this remove the defilement from the pipe?”

“It is my hope that the music will do that.”

Csinka shook her head, not understanding. But Orb made her show the place where she had inadvertently stepped over the pipe. Then, in the middle of the day, Orb set up a chair at that spot, sat on it, and began to play her harp.

She sang a song of water: of mountain springs, clear flowing streams, shining ponds, and deep pure lakes. She spread her magic out, not to an audience, but to the water in the pipe below her, willing it to respond, to assume the purity of the water of which she sang.

An audience formed, as was always the case when Orb sang. Gypsy men, women, and children, the Tziganes, standing and listening. She continued singing, songs of clean water, rendering them as well as she could in Calo. The audience continued to grow, until it filled the street.

When Orb first touched the water with her magic, she had felt the defilement of it; anyone who drank it would be sickened, and clothes washed in it would remain unclean. The soul of the water reeked of its special pollution. But as she
sang, interacting with it, it clarified, until it became as clean as the water she sang about. She had not suspected she could do this until the need arose and had not been sure until she actually felt the response of the water, but now it was certain. The magic of her music had this power.

She paused and gazed across the audience. “The water is undefiled,” she said. “Who will drink it now?”

They merely stood, not accepting this. After all, she was sitting right over the pipe, continuously defiling it herself.

“I touched it with my song, and it is clean,” she said. “It will not hurt you. Drink of it and see.”

“I will drink of it!” Csinka exclaimed. She went to the tap on the pipe that rose from the main line and filled her cup and drank.

She stood and was not harmed. The water had not sickened her.

“She is not harmed because she defiled it!” a man said. The others nodded; it was no test.

“But
I
am over it now,” Orb pointed out.

Point well taken. They glanced at each other, uncertain.

“You need this water,” Orb said. “I am a woman; my body defiles it. But my music counters the ill, and this water is pure. Who else will drink of it?”

But no one trusted this. No one volunteered to try.

Was her effort to fail, even though the water had been restored? Orb did not know what else to do. Reluctantly she got up and put away her harp.

“I will try the water,” a man said from the edge of the crowd.

Heads turned. There was a murmur of awe as a handsome, well-dressed middle-aged Gypsy marched forward to the tap. He turned it on, put his cupped hands under, and drank from them. Then he let the remaining water fall, turned off the tap, stood untouched. “It is good water,” he said.

Then the others came and tried it, too, and agreed that the water was good. The curse was off it, and they could return to their normal existence.

“Oh, my lady, thank you!” Csinka cried, tears of gratitude flowing.

“Thank this man,” Orb said. “He believed when the others did not. He made them accept it.”

“Because I knew,” the man said. “I heard the music, like none before.”

“Thank you,” Orb said. “May I know your name?”

“You did not know?” Csinka asked, amazed. “He is Csihari!”

Orb’s jaw dropped. “But you would not meet me!” she exclaimed to the man.

“I had not heard you play.” He put out his elbow. “Come to my wagon, and I will play for you.”

Orb took the arm. They walked down the street, the others giving way before them, until they reached the musician’s wagon. There he brought out his violin and played an extemporaneous theme, and it was the most beautiful music Orb had heard. Again an audience gathered, but it did not matter; Orb had ears only for the singing violin. How well justified was this Gypsy’s reputation!

When he paused, Orb glanced at her own harp. “May I?”

Csihari made a gesture of acquiescence and started another melody. Orb settled herself on the ground, set up her harp, and played it, making counterpoint to his theme.

The magic spread out, animating the faces of the listeners in a widening circle. Violin, harp, and the hidden orchestra: a duet with a mighty accompaniment. Not a person moved; all were enraptured.

Then Csihari stopped and set down his violin. “Enough,” he said gruffly. He gestured at the audience. “Leave us.”

In an instant, it seemed, the crowd had dissipated, and the two of them were alone. “You are not Tzigane,” the musician said. “What did you want of me?”

“I seek the Llano.”

“Ah, the Llano!” he breathed. “I should have known!”

“I am told that I may find it at the source of the Gypsies,” Orb continued. “But I am having trouble finding that source. I thought you might know it.”

“I know the source, but not the Llano. I fear that even there you will not find what you seek.”

“But if it is Gypsy music—”

He shook his head. “The Llano is not ours. We only dream of it, no closer than any other. We long for it as our salvation, but it is denied to us.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You have not then heard the Story of the Nail.”

“Nail?”