She had made fine baskets, before the painful gnarling of her hands had forced her to rely upon fortune telling as her sole means of income. And so the old woman expended a great deal of time and patience in teaching him this skill. Her efforts were rewarded twofold: not only did the boy learn to weave a tight and graceful basket, but she found that people were exceptionally eager to buy them. This was particularly true if the customers saw him working to make more baskets, with his eyes gazing without focus upon his dark world and his sensitive hands in constant motion. The old gypsy woman needed only to perch in the caravan doorway and watch that he was not swindled.
Thus, before the first year in her service had passed, he could do most all the household chores she needed. He got the fire going in the morning and cooked the breakfast. He fetched the water and the firewood from wherever it was, once she had led him to it for the first time. He washed the dishes and the clothes. Later, he also learned to harvest the willow and the reeds and prepare them for weaving into baskets.
But the boy needed her to tell him such things as when the clothes were clean. He needed the old woman to take him around and show him where everything was when they first arrived at a new camp or town. And while he could drive the caravan on the open road with her directing, she had to take the reins whenever they got to a village.
The old woman thought of him and treated him as her son and never regretted the price she had paid for him, while the boy certainly looked as though he could be her great-grandson. His skin was of an olive complexion, quickly browning in the sun, and his hair, curly as a lamb's back, was nearly as black as hers once was. His unseeing eyes were large and unclouded and the warm, slightly red-hued brown of oak leaves in the fall.
The old woman never asked him his name; she called him by the Romany name Bireli. She did not make him wear anything to indicate that he was her property nor did she ever contradict anyone who referred to him as her grandson. But Bireli never forgot he was her servant. He never forgot that he could not survive on his own without her and that she could sell him again should she choose to. He was deeply grateful to her that she had made him as capable as she could, and even more grateful to her because she never beat him as the gypsy man had and as his father had before him. The old woman never once raised her hand to him or even her voice, except to call him from a distance. Though he did not forget his position, he soon came to love the old woman in the same familial way that she loved him.
The boy's other senses developed enormously from being relied on and used so extensively.
His sense of smell was so acute that when the old woman learned that Bireli could also make money for her through the time-honored gypsy profession of horse-curing, it was also discovered that he could diagnose many of his patients by scent. Fully half of the horses he was able to cure, he determined the ailment having done little more than smell the animal's breath.
His sense of touch was, if anything, even more highly developed: over the whole of his body, but especially in his hands and feet. Whenever he was awake his hands were in motion, partly to inform him about his world, but also because his many chores ensured that he always had work to do from the moment he arose until he lay down to sleep.
His feet told him more about where he was in relation to where he was going than any other organ or part of his body. The feel of the earth from finest silky silt through various rockinesses, the textures of different kinds of plants as he walked upon them, changes in the ground's temperature or dampness all helped Bireli determine where he was and if he was straying from where he wished to be.
Only he knew how keen his hearing was. He had learned much of what he knew of treatments for horses from overhearing the conversations of other horse-curers as they talked around their campfires at night. As he grew older, he knew from their whispering that the gypsy girls avoided him because they could see he would never amount to much and because they did not know how to flirt with someone who could not see their charms. And he listened to the wind and learned things from it whenever it spoke.
Bireli loved to listen to the wind. He listened to the wind no matter how softly it blew, and as time went on he became increasingly proficient in its many languages. With his body and nose he could ascertain the wind's speed and direction and what weather was following behind it. But it was with his ears that he could understand what the wind blew through when it was near him: rushes or sedges or reeds; short or long grasses; pines, cedars, or larches; walnuts, olives or oaks; poplars, sycamores, or birches, and whether these leaves were dry or turning colors. When the breezes allowed, he knew the locations and types of all the trees around him. And when the wind blew with much steadiness, he could hear the very shape of the land he was in: where the hills lay, which way the valleys ran, and whether the land was much covered with trees.
The old woman's horse had decided shortly after he began taking care of her that she liked the boy. It wasn't long before she stopped leaning upon him while he cleaned her hooves and while he felt over and around her frogs to make sure he had missed no packed mud or stones. She enjoyed his thorough brushing of her coat and how he would stroke her face and neck and body afterwards to check again for any dirt or burrs that might cause the bridle or harness to rub her wrong. She never made him search for the rope or the tether stake to find her. As soon as he was near enough she would trot up to him with a whicker of greeting to blow in his face and nuzzle his shirtfront.
Bireli came to like the traveling life. He enjoyed the old woman's company and the horse's affection. He didn't mind most of the tasks he needed to do. Because the caravan was only one small room within, he was outside most all of the day and, weather willing, the night, too. The old woman had no love of the cold and so she kept them to places where the weather tended to be dry and sunny much of the year. Whereas for Bireli, his greatest pleasures were the warm kiss of the morning sun upon his face and shoulders and the cool caresses of the evening breeze after a long hot day.
As the years passed, Bireli grew into a beautiful young man, as innocent of this fact as he could possibly be, while his owner became, just as steadily, a far more ancient and wizened crone than she had been when she purchased him.
And then in the midsummer of his tenth year of service he arose one morning and went out first to move the horse's tether stake and check that she still had water. He gave the mare's long neck a vigorous scratching. She hung her lower lip in deep pleasure and rested her head on his shoulder. Then he followed the string that ended at a stick he had driven into the ground at a good place to draw water from the creek and fetched the water for the caravan. He followed another string out to another stick that marked the location of the shallow hole that served as their latrine and when he came back he kindled a fire and put on the porridge. When it was done, he knew that something was wrong.
The old woman was not up yet.
She didn't often arise before he did, but always she was awake and stirring by the time he finished making the breakfast. He went to her bed at the back of the caravan and felt for her. He found that her body was cool already, but not yet stiff.
Bireli stood for a while, with his hands upon the cold old woman, too stunned to shed a tear. But he wept when he lifted her, shocked back into grief at how small and light she was in his arms.
He carried her out of the caravan and laid her upon the grass in its shade. Camped alone as they were, Bireli knew he could not, at the height of summer, fulfill the gypsy custom of burning the old woman in her caravan, so he took up the shovel he used for digging and filling their latrines and firepits and dug a grave for the gypsy woman.
It took him the rest of the morning to make the hole. After he buried her, he replaced the sod on the site as best he could. Then he moved the mare's tether stake again and refilled her water bucket. When he finished that task he sat down near the horse for company. He sat there the whole of the afternoon and the evening as well, marooned on a small island of familiarity in an infinite black ocean.<
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Bireli slept with the horse that night. During his long periods of wakeful worrying, he listened to the horse grazing about him, free of all cares.
He sat next to her for much of the next day, too, unable to think of a way he could proceed. He wondered how long it would be before someone chanced upon him there and what would befall him when that occurred. He was still sitting by the horse, despondent and afraid, when a wind spirit passed by above him, singing a song to herself as she blew through the willows that lined the creek.
As this was the first person to come his way, Bireli leaped up and called after her, “Wait! Please, wait! Please stay and talk to me!"
The wind spirit was so startled he heard her, so startled he knew she was there, that she swung around to investigate him. She tousled his hair and rumpled his clothes, and he stood there with such an unfocused yet perceptive expression in his eyes that she thought at first that he could see her. But soon enough she realized he could not see anything at all.
"You can hear me? Understand me?” she asked, swirling around him to get a more complete picture of this most unusual human.
"Of course I can hear you,” Bireli answered. “How could I fail to hear such beautiful singing?” Unable to locate her because she moved ceaselessly about him, he put out a hand to touch the spirit. “Where are you?"
The wind spirit looked at that hand, brown and solid, groping in the air for her. Moved to thoughtless pity, she reached out to touch him. And was surprised again, deeply surprised, when the fingers of his hot human hand curled securely around her own.
Stayed by his warm grip upon the cool tendrils of air that were her hand, the wind spirit gazed upon him anew. She was enchanted by the strange, if pathetic, earthbound density of him, the compelling furnace of his mortal body, and most of all by his sweet demeanor as he waited for her to speak again.
It passed through her mind that this was a very bad idea. That there was good reason why none of her tribe had had any dealings with human people for a good many years. Many centuries in fact. It passed through her mind, very quickly, very breezily, that the lore of her people contained many sad and ancient stories of those few wind spirits who had tangled with humans.
Those thoughts came and went, quicker than she could reflect on them. And quicker than she could reflect on it, she leaned in close, feeling that curious ephemeral heat of him up and down the whole of her, and kissed Bireli on the cheek.
She did not know that she was the first to kiss him so. She knew only that she was further enchanted by the rising blush of blood that crept up beneath his sun-darkened skin and by the minute leap in his body temperature that felt anything but minute to her.
She wriggled her fingers loose from his so that she might explore him more fully. While she did so she buffeted him with questions, about himself, his name, and how he managed to get about the world without seeing.
He told her his name was Bireli and that the old woman he served had just died. She had been his eyes, he said, and he could not move from this spot without someone to guide him. Then he asked the wind spirit what her name was.
She whispered it into his ear—and was enraptured when she heard his tongue, which had stammered shyly over his own story, pronounce faultlessly the many susurrous syllables of her name.
Without any consideration of the matter, she kissed him again, this time upon his warm soft lips and said, “I will guide you."
Never in all the hundred years of her young life had she seen such a smile, such a smile that was all for her. The wind spirit was smitten.
Bireli was delighted, and his relief was boundless that the wind spirit had offered to help him in his most helpless hour. But otherwise he felt it no more miraculous that she had come to him, that he had held her hand, than if some gypsy girl had finally taken some notice of him.
Because he had no idea how such matters were usually conducted, he did not find forward the wind spirit's impetuous advances. Bireli's embarrassment quickly melted away before his happy thankfulness. He responded to her with each of his heightened awarenesses ready to receive all sensation of her.
The wind spirit was captivated by the effect she had upon him. She discovered that her slightest touch could make this beautiful lad shiver and tremble. She brought the blood rushing to his face again and again only to cause it seemingly to desert his head altogether. She dizzied him and weakened his knees, then, wrapping her long limbs around him, she whirled him in a dance of trust, of abandon and enthrallment. With her, his vital young body could feel, as it had not felt in years, the pure physical joy of movement, fast and assured. Long before the dance had ended, long before the two had tumbled as one into the grass, he was as breathlessly in love with her as she was with him.
That was how the wind spirit became his guide.
When he needed to go to a market or a fair, she clung close to him and directed him as he drove. Once there she would usually leave him and mingle with her own kind while he conducted his business. If he was familiar with the place, he remembered where the shops and stalls were that he might need to visit. If it was new territory to him, a few inquiries usually got him whatever he required to find his way around.
Even when his spirit left him alone in the towns, she never abandoned him completely. Once, at a horse fair, three men approached him and asked him to come away with them and look at a sick horse. He went with them, and though things did not feel right to him, there was a horse in the dusty barn and it was ailing. Bireli smelled the horse's breath, ran his hands over every inch of the animal, and listened to its stomach. He told the man who owned the horse that its illness was nothing that one gallon of olive oil poured down its throat wouldn't cure today, but that improved feed and reduced work would allow the horse to serve him better for many years to come. Then he asked for his usual payment.
Bireli did not see the looks that passed between the men. He heard their bodies, though, as the men shifted their weight on their feet. He heard the sibilant sound of hands adjusting grips on objects made of wood and iron—just before they all heard the wind spirit come shrieking around the sides of the barn and begin heaving at the old building's roof.
"Surely!” he called out over the roaring tempest and the suddenly screaming horse, “You mean me no harm! Surely, you would not risk your lives trying to cheat a poor gypsy!"
The men exchanged an entirely different set of glances. Their hands shook as the wind stopped tearing pieces off the barn at the precise moment that they put aside their makeshift clubs. All knew of the supposedly magic curses of cheated gypsies, but none had ever heard the like of this. The owner of the horse paid Bireli quickly, and with a grudgingly muttered thanks.
Sometimes, though, Bireli had to wait a long time for his wind spirit to choose to come back to him, though she was careful never to leave him stranded in a town overnight. Whenever she returned to him, her own heart soared to find him patiently waiting and listening for her approach. Then she would guide him to a campsite where they could be alone.
Bireli did not mind that she never guided him to a camping spot that had anyone else about. It did not occur to him that the gypsies would have concluded that Bireli was possessed if they heard him always talking to the air or saw that there was forever a breeze stirring about him no matter how still it might be everywhere else. Bireli only knew that he was just as happy with the quiet neighbors of wind and water, plants and animals around him. The wind spirit was an unrestrained, even careless, lover, and Bireli was well aware that human neighbors would have certainly minded the bang and clatter of things being upended and knocked off their hooks and the creaking of the caravan as it rocked on its axles during the night. He and the old woman had often experienced noisy neighbors and lovers camped too close to them.
Bireli knew that since the death of the old gypsy his fortunes had taken a dramatic upward turn. He was hardly any richer in coin, but he was free now and the uncontested owner of a tiny home and a twenty-two-year-old horse.
Bireli also saw no reason to mind that his lover was never still the whole night through. He did not care if he ever got more than a string of brief naps, often with long interruptions, every night for the rest of his life. He was young. He was strong. He was in love for the first time. He didn't need to sleep.
But he did need to work sometimes. There were things he had to do to maintain himself and his horse. The wind spirit had scant respect for these necessities and would often tease him unmercifully as he tried to work. She would play with his hair and murmur things into his ear, she would send little zephyrs of herself up his sleeves and trouser legs. Sometimes, she would stop him three or more times to flirt with him in the course of completing one simple task. Occasionally she would bring him to his knees, shuddering with desire, and nothing more would get done until he satisfied them both.
Bireli was pleased that he so pleased her and wished that he could be with her whenever she wanted. He took joy from every aspect of her company. But when he really had to work he found that he had to close himself off to her. He would put on a long-sleeved shirt, fastenened all the way up to his neck, and tie the cuffs of his sleeves and trousers snug to his wrists and ankles with string. When the wind spirit saw the snugged cuffs she would usually fly off to wander the skies a while—not exactly angry, but certainly not happy either. And Bireli would do his work and miss her tremendously and worry that she might never return—until she came back to him.
FSF, May-June 2010 Page 26