Black Spring

by Alison Croggon

  I don’t remember much of the journey, except that it was very slow and that it seemed to rain every day. I sat on the cart, numb with cold and misery, hating everything. Our arrival in Elbasa surprised me out of my glums, all the same: even though the master was to follow us later, the whole village turned out to welcome us back, crowding into the square in their best church clothes, which looked rude and strange to my southern eyes. In the north, a village without its lord is a village abandoned. No matter the scandal that attached to the master’s wedding and his dead wife and, even more, to his witch-eyed daughter, blood is blood: and in this country, blood is everything.

  I met my grandparents and uncles and aunts for the first time, and my cousins gave me dark looks and stuck out their tongues behind the backs of the adults, which made me act likewise and earned me a cuff from my father. Perversely, this had the effect of cheering me up: it seemed children up north were not so different from children down south, for all their crude clothes and muddy boots. I kept a wary eye out for the upland wizards, of whom I had heard much, and was disappointed when I saw no one who looked in the least wizardly; but there was some entertainment to be had from watching Lina, who took my breath away with her audacity. She ignored the children, and greeted the town dignitaries with the gravity of a highborn lady of the south. Such was her seriousness, nobody dared to smile: even at ten years old, Lina’s sense of entitlement was a kind of enchantment in itself, persuading others to see her as she saw herself. There was much jostling among the peasants, because everyone wanted to get a sight of the witchborn daughter of the master, and she knew it too, and played up to it.

  After the necessary speeches, which seemed to my mind quite unnecessarily long, we went up to the Red House. I think I fell in love with it at once because, even though it was small, it reminded me of the home we had left behind. The master’s grandfather had built it to please his southern wife, a delicate lady from the city who, so the story runs, quickly withered in the harsh plains and was carried away by the consumption in only a few short years. He bought the estate in the south when she was in her illness, and moved there hoping she would recover, but by then it was already too late. Some still whisper that it was back then that the rot set into the Kadar family. Black Country people do not trust southerners, begging your pardon; they consider them dishonest, weak and immoral, since they do not live by the Lore.

  My master’s father did much to rescue the family reputation, and lived an unexceptionable life. He married a hard northern woman who ruled the household with a hand of iron and had no truck with any southern fripperies. She moved the principal household to the manse, where Damek lives now, but she kept a canny eye on the accounts, and for all her disapproval of the south, didn’t sell the profitable southern estate.

  So my family were to live in the Red House, caring for Lina, and here too was the master’s residence; the rest of the household was to move to the manse, and run the estate from there. There was much coming and going between the two households in those days.

  One difference from our southern home I noticed right away, and it brought home to me more than anything else that we were in a place of unknown perils: every threshold was crowned with iron, and above every window was a sprig of rowan. It was, my mother told me, to keep out evil spirits; and because of the way she said it, I felt a run of goosebumps trickle down my spine.

  I didn’t have to wait long for my first sight of a wizard. The next morning there was a hammering on the front door, as if someone were beating it with a stick, which was in fact the case. I was in the kitchen with my mother and the cook, peeling turnips for luncheon, and I remember my mother started and dropped her knife. She must have known at once who it was, must in fact have been expecting it; and my father was out in the fields and the master not yet come. She stood up, gathering her skirts around her, and went to answer the door. She didn’t forbid me to follow, which I am certain she would have done if she had not been so distracted, and I was alive with curiosity, so I dogged her heels through the hallway and peeked out from behind her as she opened the door. I’m sure my eyes were as round as saucers.

  Outside stood a tall man who looked at first just like an ordinary highland shepherd: he wore a thick jerkin of unwashed wool and leggings of leather, and his rifle was slung across his back. The only signs of his vocation were the stout blackthorn staff that he carried, and the starveling boy who stood silently beside him, so pale and thin I thought he must be ill, and despite the cold weather dressed in rags through which his skin showed white. I stared at the strange pair and clutched my mother’s hand, at which point she noticed I was there. She reached behind her to give me a slap, for my cheek.

  “Greetings,” she said. “The Wizard Ezra, is it?”

  “Aye.” The man lifted his head and met her eyes, and I felt my mother flinch. I couldn’t stop looking at his face, which was as harsh and craggy as the mountains themselves: he had a nose like the beak of an eagle, and skin the colour of walnuts, weathered by wind and rain and sun, and a great scar ran across his face from one side to the other, across his nose, as if someone had slashed him with a knife. His eyes were like black obsidian: you could see nothing through them. “Aye, it is the Wizard Ezra,” he said. There was a cold contempt in his voice, although his face was without expression. “Where is your master?”

  “My master is not yet come, as you must know,” said my mother. “And my husband is in the fields.”

  “Will you not ask me in to await their coming?”

  “Nay,” said my mother, and her voice was shaking. I had never seen my mother afraid, and it started a tremble in my own heart. “That I will not. You have no business in this house.”

  The wizard smiled, but there was no mirth in it, and somehow I knew my mother had won the first round. “I know you keep the witch child here,” he said. “And that is an abomination, and of my business.”

  “She lives under the king’s pardon!” said my mother shrilly. “You may not touch a hair of the child’s head, and well you know it!”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Do not think yourself above the Lore, woman. Nor your brat there.” Here he directed me a look of such venom that I felt myself go cold all the way through, as if the blood in my veins had turned to ice water. I was suddenly terrified, and could not move a muscle: I stared back like a rabbit before a fox, my heart pounding, until he turned his gaze away and released me. “I come to deliver a message, is all. On this matter there is truce between the king and the wizards, yes. Take care the truce is observed, else blood is the answer, as it should have been in the beginning.”

  “The truce will be observed, if it is in my power to observe it,” said my mother. “And you may not curse me or mine.”

  “It’s not for you to say what I may or may not do,” said the wizard. “It is a matter for the Lore. It would be well to remember that.” He turned on his heel and strode off without looking back, his boy stumbling after him.

  My mother leant against the doorpost breathing hard, watching him all the way down the path and out of sight; and then she scolded me roundly for following her to the door. I said nothing at all, because I had just been frightened out of my wits, and I didn’t know why. When we were in the south some of my friends had scoffed at the northern wizards, claiming they were charlatans who frightened the ignorant and superstitious peasants, but any scepticism I might have felt had vanished in the moment when the Wizard Ezra had looked at me. I remembered the stories of how wizards could turn a man’s bones to water, or his marrow to hot lead, so he would die slowly in twisted agony; those stories no longer seemed far-fetched. When my mother had finished telling me off, I went back to the kitchen and finished peeling the turnips. I was burning with questions, but I knew even then that no one would answer them.

  VIII

  The master didn’t travel with his household, preferring to avoid the bustle and inconvenience. It was some days before he arrived, and I remember that it rained almost constantly; great thi
ck mists rolled down from the highlands so that sometimes you couldn’t see six steps out of the windows all day, and a little boy herding goats was lost in the plains and frozen to death. Despite the weather, my father spent almost all his time with the livestock to avoid the chaos indoors. I think the rain relieved my mother’s mind, because Lina could not go outside and get into trouble; at the same time it meant we were constantly under her feet. She had so much to do that she was sharp with us, so we tried to keep out of her way.

  Lina was incandescent with impatience to see her father. She flew to the front window every time she heard footsteps or hoofbeats, and every morning she stated that he was definitely coming that day, and every evening she went to bed limp with disappointment, worried that he had become lost in the mist and died of cold, like the goat-boy. Her impatience infected me as well, and in my free time we made a game of it, running to the front room, even when we only imagined the sound, and driving my mother to distraction. She was setting up the household to her satisfaction, and in between was catching up with her own relations, whom she had not seen for ten years; there was a lot of news (most of which, when I was forced to listen as I sat in the kitchen peeling carrots, I found very boring) about who had died and who had been born and who had married and who had bought the short field down in the village south, or how Old Wanda had lost her mind finally and had been seen talking to the sheep on the high road, thinking they were her dead brothers, and so on.

  Then, quite suddenly, the clouds lifted and a morning dawned fresh and sparkling, so the raindrops hanging from the buds on the bare hazels shone like jewels from a king’s ransom. For the first time since we had arrived you could see the mountains in the distance, and I went outside and stared at them: they looked black and forbidding, jutting up into the sky out of the plains as sheer and dangerous as the steel knives in the kitchen; but I saw that they were beautiful too, and they sent a shiver through my soul. In that moment I remembered that I was born an uplander, and I felt the hard bones of this land beneath my feet and the high pale sky above me. I knew then that, for better or worse, this was my own country, and I belonged here.

  At breakfast, Lina predicted confidently – as she had every day before – that her father would arrive that day. This time she was right: he arrived late that afternoon, when it had begun to rain again and shadows were gathering into nightfall. Lina was beginning to coil herself up into a tantrum of disappointment, and was picking a quarrel with me, poking me as I was trying to do my chores and generally being tiresome. She heard a horse coming up to the house, and then a rap on the door, and she started up, her face glowing with hope and excitement, and rushed to the door, with my poor mother wringing her hands behind her, telling her to mind her behaviour. She flung open the door violently and then teetered on the threshold, stunned with disappointment. Instead of her father, a boy stood on the step, wrapped in a cloak against the chilly rain.

  “Who are you?” asked Lina rudely. “And where’s my father?”

  The boy stared at her sullenly and didn’t answer. And then the master strode into view – he had been giving instructions to the groom – and she forgot her disappointment instantly and ran into his arms. He swung her up and kissed her and then set her down and said, “Lina, here is a companion for you. Damek, this is my daughter, Lina. Lina, this is Damek, who will be your foster-brother from now on.”

  I turned involuntarily to my mother, who was unable for a moment to hide her astonishment, and I knew she had been given no warning of this new charge. Lina stared at the boy, as amazed as the rest of us. “But I don’t want a foster-brother!” she said at last.

  “Nevertheless, you have one,” said her father, and there was a grim edge to his voice that took the light out of her face. “And we have been riding all day, and are tired and hungry and wet, and I want to come into the house. If you will permit us to get past you, Lina.”

  My mother, flustered and perhaps a little angry, led the two travellers into the house, and took their sodden cloaks and sat them down at a table, which she laid with earthenware pots of soup and a casserole and fresh bread and tankards of beer; and for a while, there was no talk, just some serious eating. We had already had our supper in the kitchen, Lina with the rest of us, but I was allowed to wait on the master and pour his beer, and Lina sat at the table with both of them. There was a stormy expression on her face, and she darted hostile glances at the boy, who took absolutely no notice of her at all. She was jealous that he had spent all day with her father, and she blamed him for spoiling her joy at her father’s return.

  When he had eaten his fill, the master called the household to the dining room, and we welcomed him home. He had, as always, brought gifts for the children: for me it was a little deer carved out of wood, and for Lina it was a red scarf, beautifully embroidered in the way of the north with bright threads in curious patterns. She held it to her cheek, and her brow cleared; she loved pretty things.

  “Now,” said the master to the household. “I want you to meet Damek il Haran. He is fostered to me by the king, and will be a brother to Lina. He is of royal blood, and will be attended as a noble, and treated kindly by you all.” Here he gave Lina a stern look: her black glances had not escaped him.

  The boy stared unsmilingly back at the servants, and nodded distantly without saying a word. Lina scowled at him, but he ignored her, which lowered him further in her eyes. He certainly wasn’t an immediately likeable boy, and he looked none too pleased to be in our house; his expression was clouded with what looked very like resentment. His proud manner obscured his good features: he was in fact handsome and strongly built, with thick black eyebrows, dark eyes and a sensuous mouth. He lacked the white skin of a noble, possessing instead the swarthy hue of a shepherd, which made me think he must be of mixed blood.

  “I shall have to find a room for him,” said my mother, which was as close as she came to expressing her annoyance at having to house another soul in a house that was already too small. “Perhaps Lina and Anna can share again.”

  “They are too old to share a room,” said the master. “Lina is of an age when she must begin to mind her position.”

  My mother forbore to answer that it would be even more improper to put Damek in Lina’s room, whatever the propriety in rank, but I knew she was thinking it. Instead she sighed, saying that for the moment he would have to sleep in the room usually occupied by the master’s manservant, and said nothing more. The next day she cleaned out a small room she had just filled with odds and ends from the southern estate, sending them on to be stored instead at the manse, and turned it into a bedroom for Damek. That was only the first of the inconveniences he represented for our household.

  That first night he didn’t endear himself to anyone. I noticed the shadows underneath his eyes, and excused his manner as exhaustion, but even so, he displayed little inclination to be pleasing company, and answered any question with a monosyllable or a grunt, if he bothered to answer at all. His stubborn indifference confirmed Lina in her dislike, and she too became sulky, as if each were competing to be the most ill-mannered. This angered her father, although he wouldn’t rebuke her in front of us and instead gave her stern looks, which only had the effect of making Lina sulk more.

  This threw a pall of gloom over the company, and we retired rather earlier than was usual. As Lina and I washed ourselves before bedtime, she made a face at me. “What do you think, Anna? Isn’t he the most horrible boy? And he is to be my brother! The shame!”

  I answered that perhaps he was just very tired, and might be more friendly on the morrow, when he had had some rest. Lina tossed her head.

  “I think he has a soul as black as pitch,” she said. “And even if he was nice as nice and sorry as sorry, I won’t be friends with him. I don’t believe he has royal blood at all. I don’t know why Papa has to bring him here. He’ll just spoil everything.”

  That was hard to argue with, after the evening we had just enjoyed; but it wasn’t my place to comment
, so I said nothing. I went to bed and before sleep overtook me spent some time wondering who Damek was, and why my master had chosen to foster such an ill-favoured boy.

  Such wondering became a common hobby about the village, but we never did find out his provenance: he was heir to no house that anyone could discover, even though the king claimed him as kin, and that meant that he had no part of the royal tax as his birthright, and no fortune of his own. He appeared to have no mother, and indeed said later that she had died when he was a little boy and that he didn’t remember her, although it is hard to say whether that was the truth, or whether he simply didn’t want to acknowledge that he was of low birth. It is most commonly supposed that he is one of the king’s bastard children, perhaps of a favoured mistress, since the king acknowledged him, but he may have been a by-blow of any of the near relations of the royal house.

  I should explain that fostering used to be a means of making an alliance among the various factions of the northern nobility; male children would be exchanged between houses as guarantees of peace. But it was a custom that was dropped long ago, and fostering is all but unheard of in these present times. It must have been a condition of the king’s pardon that the master fostered this child, although he never explained one way or the other. If Damek was indeed a bastard child, which seems most likely, then it was as close as may be to an insult, and certainly no child was sent in return. Perhaps it was just a fancy of the king’s, that he could at once solve an inconvenience of his own and saddle the master with a responsibility that was in fact a royal rebuke. All agreed that it was at best an odd arrangement, and the old women shook their heads and said no good would come of it.