40
A Perfect Shade of Green
Days pass, whether you want them to or not. For Peter the days passed slowly, but nonetheless, one day winter had gone.
The Gypsies stayed on through the winter, living in the clearing just as they had before. Every day, Sofia would visit Peter and Sultan on their little island.
Peter, his mind drifting, seldom spoke on these occasions, but Sofia would talk to him anyway, tell him of news from the camp, and from the village. She told him that when St. George’s Day arrived, they would be on their way once more. This was a piece of news that Peter had taken in.
One day, as Sofia cooked some soup on the stove in the hut, Peter got to his feet abruptly.
Startled, she looked at him.
“What is it?”
“Come with me,” he said.
He took her by her lovely brown hand and gently led her out, and around the side of the hut, to the toolshed.
“Look,” he said. “That was the first thing I found.”
Sofia shook her head, not understanding what he meant.
All she saw was a row of tools. Saws, chisels, hammers, gouges, laid out on a bench in a neat line.
“He was never like that,” Peter said. “The tools were always a mess. Whenever he finished with something he’d leave it where it fell. If he put things back in here at all, he’d leave them all over the place. But when we came back from the village—that last day—this was the first thing I found. At some point, when he and Milosh and the others were waiting for the hostages’ attack, he came out here and tidied up the tools.”
He hesitated, then asked, “Why did he do that?”
Sofia shrugged.
“He knew,” she said. “He’d already decided what he was going to do. He did it for you, because you brought him back to himself.”
What happened after Tomas fell from the horse was a blur to Peter. He knew he had rushed to his father, that he had taken his father’s sword and fought for him, but he couldn’t remember the details.
He knew they had won. He remembered that the villagers came rushing out from their houses, among them Teodor and Daniel, who fell on their knees in thankfulness before Peter and the Gypsies.
And then there was Anna, old Anna, whom everyone feared. Even she came and begged forgiveness from them all.
“What can I do to thank you?” she wailed.
Milosh had told her.
“Stand up,” he said.
She did so, a puzzled look on her face.
“Turn around,” he said, and the old woman complied.
Before she had turned back, Milosh had snatched the sword from the ground beside Tomas, and with a single stroke had cut Anna to the ground.
There had been shock and outrage. But only at first, as Milosh gently rolled Anna’s body face down.
There he pointed out what no one else had seen, or at least understood. The old woman’s back was covered in sawdust.
“From a coffin,” he explained. “That was why she didn’t want to help us. She was one of them! She was guiding them, infected perhaps by the Shadow Queen herself…. I would have understood sooner, but we didn’t know they could move by daylight.”
Milosh had turned to give the sword to Peter.
“This is yours now,” he said, but Peter shook his head.
“No,” he said. “I don’t want it. It’s what my father didn’t want to be. Let me give it to you. You will need it. You can use it.”
Milosh nodded.
They buried Tomas in the very graveyard from which the epidemic had first sprung, now truly a place of final rest, thanks to their efforts.
Finally, St. George’s Day came, and with it, Sofia came to see Peter for the last time.
It was a beautiful spring morning, full of bursting hope. The trees were heavy with leaves, and flowers had leapt into life in the meadow. Peter was sitting on a tree stump on his island, thinking how the early green of spring was the most perfect of the year, when into his vision walked Sofia.
“May I come over?” she called.
Peter waved and she crossed the bridge.
Beyond her, Peter saw the Gypsy caravan on the path through the trees, and knew the day had come.
“Don’t say anything,” he said as she came close.
The smile softened his words, but Sofia still ignored him.
“Why don’t you come with us?” she said.
“I can’t,” Peter said. “You know that as well as I do. This is my home. I belong here, in the home my father and I built. I want to stay.”
Sofia hung her head.
“Besides,” he went on, “who’d cut their stupid wood for them?”
He nodded toward the village.
Despite herself, Sofia laughed.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Wherever we need to. Wherever we hear of hostages that need to be freed. But first we are going to roll through the forest, and eventually we will find the meadows that lie beneath the mountains. They will be full of flowers and bees, and the rivers will be full of fish. We’ll stop there for a while and rest. We’ll sing, and make music.”
“It sounds wonderful,” said Peter.
“It is.”
“God bless you.”
“And you, Peter.”
She stepped forward, and finally closed the gap there had always been between them. She kissed him, and then they both heard laughter from the caravan.
She pulled away, blushing, and without another word, walked back to her future.
As she went, she sang, and Peter heard the final verse of the Miorita float into the air, where the shepherd marries a princess from the heavens.
He watched as she climbed aboard the cart and sat next to her uncle, and they disappeared into the trees.
Peter wandered back to the hut, but he found his eyes pricking and his head full of sorrow. Deciding he needed to be busy, he walked around to the toolshed, intending to sharpen the axes. There on the bench, as before, everything lay in neat and tidy rows, but suddenly he saw something he had missed before, a small rag, twisted into a ball. He picked it up and a tiny object inside the cloth fell into the sawdust at his feet.
He bent down and picked it up.
It was a carving, a small wooden carving.
Of a goose.
When his father had carved it, Peter didn’t know, but he knew it was for him. Tomas must have left it with the tools as he and Milosh and the others waited.
Peter knew what it meant.
His mind drifted back to the first day when he’d seen Sofia arrive in the square. Something had tugged at his heart that day, but he had not known what it was. Now, suddenly, he knew. It was right in front of him, in Sofia, in his hand, but until this moment he just hadn’t seen it.
It was their life, their nomadic life. He thought he was tired of traveling all his life, always on the move with his father. But now he saw that it was the only life he knew. It was the life he wanted. He looked again at the carving, identical to the one his father had made for him on his fifth birthday. He saw it not only as an apology but as a message, and knew that it was time to fly away again, like the geese.
And just like the shepherd in the song, he had a princess waiting for him.
Gently, he tucked the goose into his pocket.
“Sultan!” he cried, running to the stable, and Sultan came.
He flung himself onto the horse, and they hammered away over the bridge.
“Wait!” he called. “Wait! I’m coming with you!”