Black Spring (2 page)

The wizard’s bearing was arrogant to the point of insolence, and he walked with the long steps of one unused to narrow spaces; I noticed that even in that crowded street, people scrambled out of his way. He cast his flashing eyes around him, his mouth tight with contempt. As I walked past him, staring in my curiosity, I unwittingly met his eyes, and my heart went absolutely cold; for a moment I almost thought he had stabbed me. Filled with an inchoate terror, I managed to pass him by and turned the nearest corner almost at a run. There I stopped, gasping for breath, at a loss to explain the panic that had so briefly possessed me.

Yes, everyone knew of the curses of the wizards of the hinterland, and of the Blood Laws and their vendettas. But, after all, it was the reason I wanted to go there, to see for myself the savage customs of those parts. There, my friend told me, life was stripped to its most essential: every action was inscribed with the sigil of death, and the hinterlanders, man and woman, obeyed its implacable laws unquestioningly. There, my friend said, waxing lyrical as he often did after a number of wines, life found its true, obsidian meaning.

“But stay away from the women,” he said again, looking at me narrowly over his glass. “Unless you too wish to be drawn into its tragic mechanisms. For there is no escaping the northern laws once you excite their attention.”

I recalled this conversation as I gazed at the Black Mountains, whose somber weight even from this distance oppressed my heart. For a moment I regretted my decision to come to the Plateau; I was on the verge of telling my coachman to turn and head south again, back to the orchards of my youth. But something in me — perhaps the thought of my friend’s unspoken mockery should I return so swiftly — rebelled at my hesitation. And so I said nothing but bowed my head to enter the low door of the mean inn, where I was to enjoy my mean luncheon.

I arrived at Elbasa two days later, on a day of cold, soaking rain. The Plateau, or what I could see of it through the veils of gray water, looked especially desolate and friendless. My spirits began to fail; I wondered what could possibly have possessed me to visit this cheerless part of the world when perhaps I could have been lying in the pleasure barges of the Water City or wandering through the incomparable artworks in the museums of the City of Light.

We passed several small villages, each of them, as my friend had said, no more than half a dozen houses. The houses were built of the black basalt of that region and were humble dwellings for the most part, slant-roofed and tiled with gray slate. Few of them had more, I judged, than two or three basic rooms. Despite my friend’s assurances of comfort, I began to feel rather less sanguine about the house that awaited me in Elbasa.

The only items of real interest along the road were the stone towers outside some of the villages. They stood like grim fingers pointing skyward, windowed only with glassless slits covered with shutters, sometimes reaching to four stories high, but thin and narrow: they could not have been more than ten paces square at their base. These were, I knew, the
odu,
the houses of refuge where a man with the vendetta on his head could live unmolested but exiled from human society, emerging at night in the hours of amnesty to gather food. Fascinated, I wondered how many poor souls lived out their years cooped in darkness inside these comfortless places, and whether that life was really any better than a quick death by bullet on an empty road.

Spring was yet to visit the Northern Plateau: the fruit trees were stunted and innocent of blossom, and the flat grasses sere and yellow. The only green was the dark dress of some ragged-looking and solitary pine trees. Forlorn goats and damp chickens picked their way around the village middens in an apathetic fashion, and I saw the occasional dumpy woman, clothed in black from head to foot, going about the household tasks. Outside every village was a simple unfenced graveyard, with graves framed by squares of stone. Quite frequently, I saw single memorials by the road, nowhere near any visible habitation, gray cairns of rock dark with rain. After a few miles punctuated by these melancholy signs, I began to feel that I was traveling through a single vast cemetery.

On the road we passed very few people; there was the occasional darkly clothed traveler on foot, trudging stoically onward, his head bowed against the rain, his rifle slung across his back, draped in sacking to protect it from the rain. I stared dully out of the carriage window, bored and cold, my spirits increasingly oppressed.

We were passing yet another solitary walker when he glanced up incuriously at the carriage and briefly met my eyes. My breath stopped: although he was a young man, and of considerable beauty in the dark-browed fashion of those of the hinterland, he seemed a living corpse. His eyes were absolutely devoid of light, and his features pale and insensible as carven marble. The rain ran unchecked down his face, as if he really were a statue. My heart quickened as I noted the white band he wore around his right arm. This, then, was one of the Dead; my first sight of those who walked under the sigil of the vendetta. The band around his right arm indicated that he had killed a man but was still in his month of grace; after the month passed, the band would be worn on his left arm, and he could meet his death at any time in the daylight hours. Unless, that is, he took refuge in the
odu,
fated never to see the sun again.

I looked back as his lone figure dwindled into the distance, struck to the heart by the man’s tragic beauty. He seemed indeed like an angel of death, walking through a landscape of the dead. For the first time I began really to understand my friend’s words about the Northern Plateau. But perversely the sight cheered me: perhaps, after all, I would find something to interest me in this godforsaken place.

My carriage clattered into Elbasa’s tiny central square shortly before dusk that same day. A few vagrant sunbeams peeked through a low rent in the clouds and lent the square a little shabby warmth. While my coachman ventured off into the rain for directions to the house, I contemplated Elbasa gloomily out my carriage window. On one side of the square was a tavern, on the other what I presumed to be the house of the mayor. In the middle was an ancient and stunted lime tree, still bare of leaf, a forlorn version of its gay southern cousins, and underneath that a worn stone seat by a rank pond of blackish water choked with rotting leaves. A grimy shop and rows of shuttered houses completed the melancholy impression.

After almost a week of constant travel, I was anxious to leave my carriage and settle into a comfortable house. I longed for a hot bath and then a glass of Madeira by a roaring fire before I fell gratefully into a comfortable bed. That I managed to get these things at the end of my journey was, I confess, a source of considerable astonishment.

My friend’s report had not erred: the house I had leased for the spring months was indeed luxurious by the standards of the Northern Plateau. It was but a little way out of the village and set at a pleasing angle on a low rise, which was the closest they came to a hill in these parts. It could not escape the usual pines, which sheltered the house from the harsh winds that often swept down from the mountains. It was known as the Red House, because it did not have the ubiquitous slate roofing but cheery clay tiles, which someone must have imported at great trouble and expense from the South. As I peered curiously out my carriage, I saw the last of the day’s light touching its roof, making it appear almost luminous, and it seemed to me miraculous to see such a thing in this dour landscape of grays. I could also see a butter-yellow light streaming from the windows, and my heart lifted.

Once inside, I met the couple who kept the house, a taciturn and courteous man named Zef and his wife, Anna. They were respectably dressed and mannered, locally bred but well trained, and although the house was not large — running perhaps to six or seven main rooms — it had about it an air of order and prosperity which was already a little alien to me, accustomed as I had become over the past few days to low-roofed inns with mattresses more notable for their livestock than their softness. Although it felt a little foolish in these polite surroundings, I carefully anointed the thresholds of the house and my pillow with a droplet from the phial Aron Lamaga had given me, as had become my habit since reaching the Plateau. To complete my satisfaction, I found that Anna was a superior cook: she made a dish of tripe and onions that evening that nourished the soul as much as the flesh. You can imagine how I congratulated myself on having found such an oasis of civilization in this rude country; with what relief I lay down that night between fresh linen sheets; and how, before I drifted off into well-earned slumber, I turned my mind with a fresh excitement to the prospects of my new situation.

T
he morning of my arrival, after an excellent breakfast of blood sausage and chitterlings, I was sufficiently restored from the rigors of my journey to contemplate my surroundings with some degree of amicability. It helped that, after days of driving rain, the day dawned clear and bright. The pale sunshine of early spring struck blindingly silver off the puddles and made of the wet grass a wealth of trembling prisms. I stared out my bedroom window as I dressed. It overlooked the back of the house, which boasted a wintry vegetable garden and the compulsory stunted orchard, and in the distance I could see the Black Mountains, clearly visible today, although their craggy heights were shrouded by mist. I found myself humming the mournful but beautiful ballads of my childhood about the shepherds of the Land of Death. The songs made me think of the youth I had seen the day before: he could scarcely have reached full manhood, but his face seemed ageless, as if death had already lifted him out of the stream of time.

I inspected my dwelling, which I had not had the energy to look over the night before, and confirmed my feeling of satisfaction at my situation. Indeed, it was perfect. The kitchen was large and well supplied, the amenities modern and well ordered. There was a pleasant dining room, furnished with surprising taste, a formal drawing room, a sitting room adjacent to my bedroom upstairs, and an attractive breakfast parlor downstairs at the front of the house, which captured all the morning light. In this room stood an elegant mahogany writing desk, surely the best piece of furniture in the house. I immediately requisitioned the parlor for my work room; I had brought with me several projects which I hoped to complete in my time here, including the almost complete manuscript of poems which I have promised to S——. I thought of the lady who had inspired a good number of the poems; it was almost the anniversary of our first meeting. I confess to a moment’s weakness as I remembered a certain gesture, a certain turn of her head which displayed the graceful curve of her neck, and for a while I toyed with the idea of dedicating the book to her (I need only use initials, after all), but I discarded the notion almost immediately, since it would be taken as proof of an ardor which for me has now grown cold and which I have no wish to revisit.

After noon I found myself restless and spent some time in the kitchen speaking to Anna, as I was more and more curious about the history of this house, which was so atypical of the dwellings I had seen in the Plateau. She told me that its owner, who was known only as Damek, lived not far away, less than two miles’ walk.

“Well, then!” I said. “I should, as a dutiful tenant, pay him my respects!”

“I fear, sir, that he might be from home,” cried Anna with what seemed to me a certain confusion.

“It would only be courteous,” said I. “And if he is not home, I have wasted no more than my time. I feel as if I should enjoy a walk.”

“I think, sir, that the weather will turn later,” Anna answered. “A storm can blow down from the mountains in a trice, and with a savageness as you lowlanders are not used to. And even if it is but a short distance, storms are no pleasure to walk in.”

She looked as if she might say more, but instead turned to her cooking. My curiosity was piqued by this exchange; I felt that Anna was concealing something from me. I stepped outside to sniff the air and saw that the skies were clear and blue and showed no sign of unrest. So it was that a short time later, despite further attempts at dissuasion from Anna, I left the house, armed with meticulous directions (and checking that my silver ring was still on my finger, in case of unexpected meetings with Plateau wizards or the like). I found myself following a path that was little more than a goat track, which wound its way through scrubby fields of cabbages and barley in the direction of the Black Mountains.

I passed around a dozen sad memorials — the crumbling cairns of stones that signified where some luckless man had met his death — which seemed excessive for such a humble goat path. Then I remembered that my friend had told me that some two decades before, Elbasa had been under vendetta. “Vendetta can go on for generations,” he said. “But in this case they found some way to stop it before it killed every man in the village.”

It was, at first, as pleasant a stroll as I had anticipated, but as I neared my destination, I began to realize that my housekeeper’s warning had been well founded. The temperature fell abruptly, the wind began to gust in uneasy jumps and startles, and I saw to my alarm an ominous bank of purple cloud devouring the sky with an astonishing rapidity. I wrapped my coat closer around me and hurried on, keeping an anxious eye out for the house which, according to my directions, should soon appear to my left. It was with some relief that I spotted a gleam of light in the gathering darkness of the storm — it was only midafternoon, and yet the sun had all been eaten up, so that it almost seemed like night — and hurrying on, I found myself at the doorway of a large farmhouse just as the first drops of rain began to fall.