Black Spring (5 page)

M
y return, limping and bloodstained, to the village of Elbasa created in its own small way a sensation. The proprietor of the shop even came out of his dingy premises to witness open-mouthed my exhausted stumble over the cobbled laneways toward the Red House, and a couple of the mangy dogs crept up and sniffed me. I saw several faces peering out of dark windows, and in the narrow street a woman grabbed a small boy nearby and whispered in his ear, whereupon he took off as fast as his fat legs could carry him, to bring the news of my reappearance — as I found when I arrived there — to Anna at the Red House.

My absence had, it seemed, created much consternation. Most of the village had known of my intention within an hour of my departure and after much discussion had decided that I was doomed. Heads had been shaken and judgments pronounced on the foolish city dweller who so stubbornly had insisted on visiting the Devil himself. My survival must have been, therefore, a source of considerable disappointment, but I have no doubt that the sorry spectacle I presented would have been some compensation.

I was past caring what anybody thought. When I shambled up the path to the Red House, Anna and her husband were already at the door. I have never been more grateful for simple kindness: they took me inside, and I found that Anna had prepared a hot bath and laid out fresh clothes, and there was a delicious-smelling breakfast already cooking. Anna inspected my leg, pursed her lips, and carefully cleaned it. I confess that I luxuriated in their fussing over me, although it was behavior which would normally have made me irritable.

I bathed, ate, and then, exhausted, fell asleep in the chair in front of a fire in the pleasant front room as I was reading a book. When I awoke, I was feverish, and Anna, despite my protestations (I had no great confidence in the skills of the northern doctors), became anxious and sent for the doctor, who lived not far away in the village. He arrived late in the afternoon and proved to be a lugubrious man of about sixty who took my pulse and looked under my eyelids and then inspected the bites on my calf. My nervous inquiries elicited the fact that he was city-educated, and I relaxed a little. He pronounced that I was suffering from nervous shock and a chill, and that the wounds were slightly inflamed and likely to be infected, but with proper care should heal famously. He bled me and left a draft for me to take that evening, saying that I should be confined to bed for a week and that he would call the following day.

I found myself feeling bored and peevish, but mostly I was consumed by curiosity. Who were those people in that house? I had been educated to expect rustic manners and primitive behaviors among the peoples of the Land of Death — or the Black Country, as they call it themselves — but I had also been told that they were, by their own lights, people of strict propriety. They were bound by the Law of the Book, which governed their every interaction, from property rights to the Blood Laws. Damek, to the contrary, seemed utterly lawless, beholden to no rule but his own tyranny. Had I not been told he was a relation of the king? Did that mean that he held himself above the harsh laws of this place? What could explain his wild behavior before I left that cursed house? And, most teasingly, who was the witch in the mirror? If indeed I had not hallucinated her in a fever, as I was half inclined now to believe . . .

Anna has at least solved the puzzle of Damek’s mad cries for his wife that ghastly night: it turns out that the Lina whom I met at the farmhouse is in fact the daughter of the woman for whom he was calling with such passion and who is now long dead. The confusion comes from the custom in the North of naming the oldest child after its mother or father, according to its sex. Moreover, Anna is convinced — a thought that chills me to the marrow — that the witch I saw in the mirror was no hallucination, as I have half convinced myself, but the spirit of the older Lina.

Now that I am no longer in danger, the strongest sensation I feel is a powerful curiosity. I have determined to quiz Anna about Damek: she has lived all her life in this place and must know its stories. I remember how she turned my queries about my landlord when I suggested that I visit him, and I fear that a natural reticence might prevent her revealing this country’s secrets to an outsider like myself. On the other hand, she has been much more forthcoming since my return. I fancy she might believe that the wounds on my leg have earned me the right to satisfy my interest.

M
any people say that Lina was born evil. They wrong her: Lina was as innocent as any baby is when it first opens its eyes on the world, and there was a spark within her that remained innocent until the last. If she was wicked, it was this pitiless world that made her so. All the same, there’s no disputing that ill omen attended her birth. On the night she was born, the moon was in its dark phase, and a comet blazed its trail across the night sky. It was visible for a week, its brilliance weakening every night as the new mother sickened and died of the blood poison. She gave Lina her name and her first suckle, and after that she was too busy dying to take much interest in the infant, whose care fell to my mother, but lately lain in with me and with milk enough for the two of us. My mother, named Anna like me, was then newly married to my father, a stableman and farmhand in the household’s employ; after Lina’s birth, she was quickly elevated to chief housekeeper, which was a post she filled for the rest of her life.

So it was that Lina and I were milk sisters. We played together as children before the duties of the household took me away from that intimacy, and it was made clear to me — although seldom by Lina, who for all her touchy pride never really took note of such thing — that she was of high blood and I only of the servant class. Even so, our friendship continued until her death. And so there was a closeness between us that was often less of servant and mistress and more like a kind of cousinship, an intimacy that was, I confess, often as much trial as pleasure. I loved her dearly, not least because I had no sisters or brothers of my own, and I was one of the few people to whom she would attend. But with that love came much grief.

Lina’s father, the Lord Georg of Kadar, was a distant cousin of the upland king and so a beneficiary of the royal tax, from which came much of the family’s wealth. I should explain that royalty in the highlands is a different matter from nobility down south — older, for a start, tracing its lineage back to the dark years and, so legend says, before that to Judas Iscariot himself, arch-traitor to Jesus our Lord. One would think such lineage would shame a family of so much pride, and certainly — perhaps out of some sense of propriety — it is not marked in the genealogy of the royal family Bible (which I have seen with my own eyes, when I once had the duty of dusting it). On the other hand, in the ancient chapel in the family manse — not the chapel which is in use for regular worship, which is far grander — there is a fine stained-glass window in the central place above the altar that certainly portrays Iscariot. He stands with his face downcast. In one hand he holds the bag that contains the thirty silver coins with which he betrayed Christ, and from the other dangles the rope with which he hanged himself. Inscribed on the stone plinth where he is stood are the words: “Error is the road to God.”

Some heretics have argued that Iscariot was the true Christ, because it was through his abjection and treachery that man was redeemed by the Savior, and without his action, God would not have seen His will done. I see you look shocked? There was once a cult that believed it, and may still be, for all I know; most of its acolytes were burned by the Inquisition, but it may still thrive in the Plateau, away from the eye of the Orthodox Church. Such things are possible here. And whether that ancestry is real or no, the royal family of the North holds it as true, and perhaps this says as much about them and their wealth as anything I could tell you: most particularly, of their twisted pride and their obscure shame, which are twined together as inextricably as mating adders. Though as is never said but sometimes thought, there are many reasons they might be considered cursed, and their ancestry the least of them.

Lina’s mother, who was named Lina Usofertera, was a daughter of a powerful clan who count among them the most feared upland wizards. Her marriage to the master was a union of passion, and most impolitic. It was said afterward that she cast a spell over the Lord Kadar; according to report, he certainly acted as a man bewitched, and ranted and raved until he had his way and his bride. After his wife died, my mother told me, the master was maddened with grief, and but for her intervention would have killed himself by his own hand. When he came to his senses, he took himself and his new daughter away south, swearing he would never return to the highlands. My mother said he always blamed the wizards for his wife’s death.

Of course, the wizards, who enforce the Lore, and the kings, who take the Blood Tax, are the two chief powers in the Black Country, and it might be said that they have many interests in common; however, in practice each keeps to its own, and the families never intermarry. The master married Lina’s mother against the wishes of the king himself. The king forgave the master his transgression a few years after Lina’s birth, when he called him back to the Plateau, although the king’s later actions showed that his forgiveness held a modicum of poison. In marrying the master, Lina’s mother defied her own family as well, as the clans don’t hold with mixing their blood with the royal family. Some, including the master, believed that her death in childbed was the result of a curse from her father’s cousin, the Wizard Ezra, who was the most implacably opposed to the marriage; others claimed further that this curse was a pact between the king and the Usoferteras. All these rumors are impossible to sort out one from the other, and the truth is anybody’s guess. This is a country where secrecy is the chief rule, and so gossip blossoms here like nowhere else.

When Lina was born, she had the blue eyes of a new babe, and in any case the household was all at sixes and sevens because of her mother’s death and her father’s madness, so no one except my mother took much notice of the motherless scrap. It wasn’t until her sixth month that her eyes attained their violet color and showed her true nature. If she had been the daughter of any man but the Lord Kadar, she would have at once been abandoned naked on the hillside to die of exposure and her poor little corpse left to feed the crows, like every other baby girl born a witch in these parts. But by then, Lord Kadar had driven south with his household, and he said that he would be damned if he would kill his only daughter out of some black upland superstition. As some said later, recalling those words, if the Lord Kadar wasn’t damned, his daughter was.

The southern estate is a small property by the sea which is famous in a minor way for making wine, and there the household repaired until Lina and I were ten years old. We had some of our happiest hours playing in that low, wide house, with its vine-twisted verandas and red terra-cotta roofs, tumbling among the chickens and peahens scratching in the yard, or swimming in the tiny half-moon bay that lay beyond the garden. My mother cared for Lina as if she were her own daughter, treating her no differently from myself, and the master was kind, although he inspired me with the awe due to his authority. If he brought treats home from his travels, he never forgot me. I recall that as a blessed time, drenched with sunshine and laughter, although no doubt my memory tricks me: certainly, I was a contented child, and I think for Lina it was the only untroubled period of her life.

Lina’s character was evident from early on. We all knew she was a witch — which was not such a bad thing down south, where they do not kill their witches — but she showed no early sign of magic. There was, however, no disguising her eyes, which were the vivid violet of the witchborn and were large and luminous, surrounded by thick, long lashes. She was a startlingly lovely child, but oh! so willful; she would lose her temper in a trice over anything that crossed her. Sometimes she would scream with rage until she vomited, setting the entire household in a fright, but then without warning the storm would pass, leaving her sunny and biddable, as if nothing had happened.