by Jason Graff
The traveling life was not easy. One faces many tragedies in the course of such an existence. It breeds the kind of fear and superstition that too often ruled our kumpania. And it now bubbled in the morning air like the call of so many small birds between the peels of Boval’s bell.
We gathered at that early hour where the dinner cookfire normally burned on the day of the communal meal. Its black logs sent wisps of smoke up into the weak morning light. There was a general chatter as usual before one of those gatherings, but this one had an anxious edge vibrating in the air, one punctuated by gasps and whispered prayers. I just hoped whatever he was to tell us would be brief, as I was excited to spring the surprise nestled in my boot on Fifika.
“My family, please, please,” Boval said, trying to calm and quiet us, “we haven’t much time to waste. I have been informed that our work here is finished. The boyar has sufficient crates of his home earth to take with him on his journey into the West. He has invited us to partake of his stocks for our travels and does not demand we leave hastily. But, we should begin to pack up. The next work we might find in the world will not wait for us.”
My heart sank at this news. Once again, my days with Fifika appeared to be coming to an end just as I began to revel in them. I had no idea where we were headed next, but it was certain that the location would not offer me the chance to bend my head at her side over the words of Blake and Wordsworth. When the meeting had ended, I began to follow her. I could feel the paper scratching against the skin of my ankle. At the door of her vardo, she paused, turning to look at me. I bent down to retrieve my letter but made it no further. Her gaze froze me. I said nothing to her, not even as she waved goodbye and soon disappeared inside her vardo to begin preparing for departure.
That afternoon, I clung close to Papa, despite his protests. Helping him was the only thing I could think of that would take my mind from my morning cowardice. I ran into the courtyard of the castle, for I had learned from my time inside which of the locked chambers the stacks of grain, barrels of fresh water, and Tokay were stored. I impressed Papa by carrying the heavy burlap sacks of barley and wheat all on my own. He didn’t even caution me not to strain myself, so evident was my strength.
“My son, think little of what you have heard here of curses. Your mother is tied to old ways of thinking. She will treat your differently now, but it is only because you are a man,” he said as I helped him in rolling a water barrel along the flagstones of the castle’s courtyard. “You will go back to working with the men at our next work stop.”
I smiled proudly and thanked him. I did not wish to disappoint him by mentioning how much I would miss my time with Fifika. Once we had secured our load, I helped Papa by getting behind the cart and pushing it over the sodden earth. We made slow progress, and I began to tire. When we paused, we noticed Aberama saddling his horse in the camp’s outer circle.
“You should help with the grain and water,” Papa told him. “There will be time to tend to your riding horse later.”
“I’m leaving ahead of the caravan,” he told us.
“What?” Papa asked.
“I cannot spend another minute here. I must leave. I must leave before night falls.”
“But we all have to help, Aberama, it is common law. You know this well.”
“Leave me alone. Take your son back to your vardo.”
Before he could climb upon his steed, Papa grabbed him by the arm and shouted, “Deserter!”
Their wrestling and shouting brought other members of the kumpania around. At first, Aberama kept Papa at bay with wild, swinging punches. Papa evaded them and was able to duck inside of the blows and take Aberama in a headlock. I leapt to my father’s defense when Aberama threw a series of punches that thudded into the small of Papa’s back. He managed to shove me to the ground, but the attention he was forced to expend upon my advances sufficed for Papa to bulldog him to the ground.
“Enough, enough,” Boval admonished, helping first me to my feet, then pulling Papa and Aberama apart. “What is the meaning of this? We must prepare for our departure.”
“He is leaving now, without assisting anyone else in their preparations.”
“Is this true?” Boval asked of Aberama. “You know that the single men, without children, must help others prepare to leave.”
“Aberama, without any children,” sniggered one of the elders.
“I have to leave,” Aberama said again, his voice cracking.
“You cannot until our preparations are finished,” said Boval. “Aberama, where will you go? How will you survive without our help? We all help each other. We are not like Westerners.”
“You do not understand,” Aberama said, his eyes glowing with wildness. “I have to leave. If I stay…” His eyes narrowed, hollow and black, as he rested his head against his horse’s flank. His mighty body suddenly went limp, and he closed his eyes.
“Is the Flower Pot once again secure?” Boval asked the other elders.
Though not yet repaired, it was decided that Aberama would be taken to the Flower Pot and put under watch until it was time to leave. As I helped Mama prepare our vardo, I was aware of Aberama’s grumbling; again, it sounded so animal-like. Once or twice, I peeked out the window to find the men guarding him pacing nervously.
Later, I heard a cry from outside. I raced to the window and in the glowing sliver of moonlight, saw two wolves savaging one of the guards. The other guard had either been eaten whole or had fled in fear. The one left behind flailed his arms about, begging, as though the gray and white wolves playing tug of war with his body could understand him. The scene was terrible, but I could not avert my eyes. I thought maybe the thin mountain air was having some effect on my senses, that I was imagining things.
No sooner did I have this thought, than the cub who I had seen before in that very spot appeared. She looked right at me, her golden-green eyes growing, and she growled a growl of one learning to be fierce. Then, she turned and began eating the guard’s innards, which had spilled across the ground.
Soon enough, Boval, Papa, and the others appeared on the scene, their knives drawn. The wolves let go of their meal and growled before fleeing up into the hills. Fearing as much for the wolves as the others in my kumpania, I summoned up my courage and slipped out of our vardo to join the search.
After much climbing, my legs, fit as any boy’s, finally began to fail me and burn. I dropped my hands to my knees. The air thickened into a milky murk, until I could not see but a foot before me. I extended my hand. The fog swallowed it. In the distance, pebbles scattered underfoot. A wolf howled. Its cry shot through the darkness of the night, pushing the gentle hush of evening far away. There was no sign of the others on the path I chose. Still, I kept climbing for reasons I could not yet know.
Just before dawn, I came to a place where the mist thinned and there, I saw the three wolves: one gray, one white, and the cub. They sniffed the air. The white wolf bared her teeth and fled. Fear filled me. My legs went limp as horses’ tails. The same huge gray wolf that had surely killed Chik growled low and long. It had the same crooked snout, the same broad chest, and powerful looking haunches. It sat back on its hind legs and howled a howl that had all the power of the night behind it. I turned to run. My weakened legs betrayed me there, high in the Carpathians. I fell, striking my head, and soon, a darkness even heavier than that carried by the night descended upon me.
C
hapter Eight
“Why are you afraid?” I heard Fifika’s voice in the near distance sometime later as I came back to the world, the early rays of dawn just sprinkling the mountainside. “Safe here, Father,” she said. “We are safe here. Safer here than anywhere else. Don’t you see? Will you really run off and leave me, again? Now, we can be together. We can be what we truly are. Let the rest of them run and keep running. We are home here. After what happened, we cannot go back to them.”
As my mind returned to the living world, I found my vision blurry and my head ached. I
must have struck a rock on my fall. I was glad to be alive, gladder still that my Fifika was close enough for me to hear her.
Fifika came and took my head in her lap. She patted my hair and sang a wordless melody, which soothed me. I hadn’t noticed before how they shared the same greenish-gold eyes, the same full lips, the same hair as dark as a moonless night. I pulled myself from Fifika’s lap using the hand Aberama kindly offered me; a more powerful hand, I had never felt. It was a good thing that he hadn’t really been able to land a punch on Papa. With me standing, he crouched down and began whispering to Fifika. She nodded, looking at me with the same seriousness she showed in every situation that she felt to be important. How my heart still swells whenever I get that look, even now.
And it was there, looking over that darkened landscape, that Fifika initiated me into the mystery of her line. A truth that those who traveled with us were either ignorant of or, as in the case of the elders, complicit in the conspiracy of its concealment. For their family story, hers and Aberama’s, which is now mine to tell as well, began as many stories or our kind did: with a child of whom violence and warfare had made an orphan. Many generations before, a young girl named Charani lay on the very ground where we were, cowering not far from where my head had just lay in her great-great-great-great-granddaughter’s delicate care.
Back then, the kumpania had come to work for the boyar’s ancestors, rebuilding the parts of the palace that had been destroyed in the last assault of the barbarian hoards of the East. No sooner had work begun, when another wave of bloodthirsty warriors made their stealthy approach. Before a proper warning could be sounded, they swarmed the camp, their cutlasses making crimson ribbons of everything and everyone in sight. Somewhere amidst the blood-soaked horror and madness, Charani was separated from her mother, father, and brothers. Though only a child, she was wise enough to keep still and play dead. Once the screaming had stopped and the terrible roar of the army’s horses had gone, she picked up her head. She saw the bodies of people she knew, whole families, even children, strewn in pools of thick blood, marking the ground like islands of corpses in a red sea. Not far lay her parents and siblings all hacked to pieces, their flesh shredded like meat. It was then that Charani wept, wept and wailed with the kind of forthright sadness only a child is capable of giving back to the heavens. Her cries echoed off the vast walls of the Carpathians, carrying her misery high and far.
As darkness fell on that terrible day, she began to make her way to the castle, knowing she could depend on the kindness of the Dracula family. She could only hope that the family had survived. And so, Charani picked her away long that gruesome trail, festooned as it was with the innards of those she knew as her only family. How she managed to keep going is yet another testament to the courage of the young.
She had not made it far before, out of the darkness, a wolf appeared right before her, blocking her path, its glowing eyes alive in the night. It did not growl nor show its teeth, but Charani trembled with fear all the same. When the beast approached her, she froze, trying again not to move or make a sound. It sniffed at her hair, then down to her feet. In doing so, Fifika surmised in her telling, the wolf must have smelt the hunger and fear of the child, which could not have been much different than the hunger and fear of one of her own cubs. Then, the mother wolf lay down on her side, offering the child her teats. At first, Charani could only kneel before the beast and run her hand through its luxurious fur. Then, as if reading the beast’s intentions in its glowing eyes, she tucked into it and began to suckle. Upon that first taste of wolf’s milk, a strength unlike any she ever knew came flooding into her body, filling every fiber of her being. And so it was that she was adopted by the first Wolf Mother.
Charani came to share the same protections as the rest of the wolves, thanks to the boyar’s family. She hunted happily and dined on the rats that it was the wolves’ task to exterminate. That was how the wolves originally came to be favored by the family Dracula. For along with being carriers of disease, the rats were also the only creatures bold enough to enter that land unbidden.
Orphaned and alone, Charani found a new family among that mother wolf’s pack. As the legend went, she felt at home surprisingly quickly for a young girl. The other cubs took part in her grooming and played with her in way that was just rough enough to help her grow strong and wild. Still, she spent those first few nights with them in her child body, vulnerable and weak, aware that she was not one of them. Her cub brothers and sisters protected her and she became something of a talisman for the pack, for the rest were all wolves who until then only knew to fear humans, but now they had one in their care.
After a few weeks came a clear night, the sky big and empty except for the moon. It took only a sliver of light shining in Charani’s eyes to turn them the golden-green of her new mother’s and unleashed the wondrous beast that had been growing inside of her since she had first fed on wolf milk. On that night and all those like it to come, she became one of them: fearsome, wild, and brave.
In time, she proved the most adept hunter of the pack. No animal was safe when she or one of her brother or sister cubs were hungry. She could track an animal from miles away and surprise it with a strike like lightening. Her reputation soon spread amongst the beasts of that land, and she was accorded a status that even the most fearsome of her kind struggle to obtain.
Many years passed, but in time, what remained of her kumpania was called upon to return and fix the ramparts which had been newly damaged by the same hoards who had so thinned their ranks. Such is the way of our kind in this world that we cannot always choose our work and must repair the scene of some tragedy of which, too often, we were the victims. There were no women in the company on that return journey, and only the bravest of the men dared to return to the site of so much misery and bloodshed, most of whom were only boys during the slaughter and knew of it only in survivor’s stories.
Their arrival marked the first time that Charani had felt the pull of the human world since her change. It was best embodied by a strong young boy named Yanko. He wore his hair long and had a beard, which gave him something of the appearance of a wolf. During the times when she was in her human form, Charani could not help but follow him around. Not that Yanko minded. He did not fear her wild looks the way so many others did. So, it was in his company that, with tears in her eyes and a howling in her heart, Charani left the enchanted land and lived again amongst mankind.
When they rejoined the kumpania proper, their love soon began to fade. Even when she was a human, Charani felt the powerful wolf inside of her growling and clawing at her soul. She could not remain true to her Yanko and was much feared by the other women of the kumpania, who called her all the names given to women who, as Fifika put it in telling me, crave what is deemed too much freedom. In time, Charani took to defending herself physically, making a name for herself as a fierce combatant. Like her great, great, great grandson, Aberama, she too spent her fair share of time in the Flower Pot.
In time, the kumpania as a whole returned once again to the land of the boyar. The tales of the slaughter now seemed to be exaggerations of a prior generation, for to live freely one must gird oneself against the past. On the night the moon was a sliver, Charani escaped into the hills, once again a wolf amongst her own kind. There, she knew she was safe from the humans and their human needs. Here, in this land, she could be free. She could be who she truly was.
“And so, we too must start to be free, to be our own masters,” Fifika said, taking the hand of her father once her story had ended and rubbing it against her cheek. “We cannot return to the kumpania after what we’ve done.”
“I will learn to be as strong as you, my child,” Aberama told her. “I will not desert you again.” He looked back to where we’d come from, where the kumpania would soon be going. It was the past, the West. “All my life, I have run from the truth about myself. It has caused me to neglect my children, to fear the others, even to fear myself. But I see that you are right. We ha
ve finally found a place where we have nothing to fear. We are safe here.”
“Yes, we are,” I replied and stood next to him, glancing toward not only my past, but my whole life to that point, to which I knew I’d never return.
As the wagons prepared to leave that night, I got myself well lost with Aberama and Fifika high up in the black mountains. Other wolves, inhabiting high mountain caves, directed our little pack with their calls. We found a network of caves well off the mountain paths. It seemed certain that we would be free there.
C
hapter Nine
If the kumpania had sent a search party to look for me, they did not strain enough to call attention to their efforts. I suppose everyone had had enough of searching for those lost to wolves on those mountain paths. I would've expected Papa to look even if it meant being left behind, but I don’t think he did. Maybe he'd given up hope or had been convinced by Mama that I now carried some kind of curse. Losing one’s children was something our people are tragically well prepared for, certainly far more than most.
Our people cannot afford to be so sentimental. The purest nature of our existence is moving on, not dwelling on…shall we say, the early arrival of inevitabilities. Life does not end for our people when the road claims a young person.
From where we crouched in our cave home, I could see the last of the vardos leave. There was nothing to do but wave goodbye. I was sure that I would never again travel with them. In that moment, I think, I should have felt some regret, some sadness, something other than joy at being left behind. But no other feelings were able to break through, for I had finally been admitted into Fifika’s life, her true life.