32

Stillness

Peter brooded. Tomas drank. For days neither of them stirred from their own little island.

Something had changed.

For a year or so, Tomas and his son had enjoyed a period of relative comfort and simplicity. They had stopped running and found a place to live, with plenty of work to be done, and for some of that time Tomas had even been sober enough to do some of the work.

Not anymore. Everything was closing in around them, the way snow clouds sometimes enveloped the mountains and the forest. The flakes that fell from the clouds were the purest white, but the clouds themselves were darker than confusion, darker than death.

Tomas had spoken only once. He’d been staring out into the forest from the door of the hut, when without warning he said, “We may have to move on, Peter.”

That was all, and he would say no more, despite Peter’s questions and pleading. Peter was left running over in his mind everything that had happened, again and again, struggling for the answers he desperately craved.

 

The day after Peter had been thrown from Anna’s house, the day he had seen Agnes, they had a visitor.

Peter was stirred from his mood by the sound of hoof-beats on the bridge.

He went outside to find Sofia leading Sultan home.

“You didn’t come for him,” Sofia said.

Peter shrugged.

“I had things to do,” he said.

“There,” she said, smiling. “I looked after him. As I promised.”

Peter took Sultan’s reins willingly enough, but didn’t speak.

Sofia watched him stable the horse and come back to the front of the hut. She tried again.

“It was kind of you. To lend him to me,” she said. She hesitated. “It was good of you to…trust me.”

Peter turned to her.

“I did trust you, Sofia,” he said. “But then I found your uncle telling the village Elders all about my father. My father just wants to be left alone. You had no right to do that.”

“I am not responsible for what my uncle does,” Sofia snapped. “But that is not the point. It is hardly important what anyone knows about you and your father. My people went to talk to the Elders about the threat from the Shadow Queen. They went to offer their services in the name of the Winter King. You can’t hide on your little island forever, Peter.”

Peter waited for her to finish, then went back inside.

“Thank you for returning Sultan to us,” he said quietly as he entered the hut.

Through the door he heard Sofia.

“The Miorita, Peter. You should understand it.”

He heard her gentle footsteps retreat across the bridge, the bridge to their little island.

Damn her! Peter thought. What did she mean by that? The Miorita? What had that to do with anything? And yet, it was not only the Gypsy girl who had got under his skin. That song had too.

“You should understand it.

What did it mean?

 

After that brief encounter, Peter had spent the hours lying on his bed, ignoring Tomas as he opened jar after jar of rakia, thinking about Agnes, about the forest, and Radu and Stefan. About Sofia.

And yes, about the Miorita too.

 

After three days, Peter’s body rebelled. His mind might have been drifting rudderless like a raft on the open sea, but his body was used to hard work and he was restless. Finally, on the third morning, he practically threw himself out of bed and pulled his boots on so violently that even Tomas raised an eyebrow.

“What are you doing?” Tomas asked.

“Going to work,” Peter said. “It’s all I know.”

He grabbed his axe and put Sultan into the harness of the cart, and they lurched off into the depths of the snowy forest.

Peter didn’t particularly care where they went, but at the back of his mind was a tree that he and Tomas had been going to fell some weeks before. It was a huge old birch and it would take days to saw and chop it all, but Peter just wanted to see it fall, and smash to the ground. His body cried out for it. And he wanted this wood to fall, not to carve but to burn.

After an hour or so they found the tree. They were far into the depths of the forest, but it was a sunny morning, and for a short while it was possible to believe that midwinter was more than a few weeks away. Peter tethered Sultan to a tree some way from the birch, more from habit than necessity. His horse was by far the most reliable thing in his life. That, and possibly the forest, though recent events had made him begin to doubt that the forest was always benign.

Peter sized the tree. Even from the ground it looked vast, and he had learnt in his career as a woodcutter that no matter how big a tree looked in the air, it would be twice as big when it was on the ground. He tried to circle its girth with his arms, and could only just brush his fingertips against each other.

He stood back, made a silent prayer of thanks to the forest, and then swung his axe as if his life depended on it.

Wood chips rained around him, and around his feet the snow was rapidly covered with the spoil from his axe.

Something possessed him as the axe flew through the air faster and faster with each stroke. He formed a perfect undercut in less than twenty strokes, and freed the opposite side of the tree from its sheath of bark. Then he began the real work, making the cut that would bring the monster to the ground, exactly where he wanted it.

Still the blows from the axe fell, and nothing could have stood in its way, not twenty men, and least of all a tree, even one that would keep a family warm for a whole winter. A vision of his father thirty years ago came into his mind—in King Michael’s army, fighting the Turks. And maybe other, more deadly enemies.

Peter’s axe fell. Tomas’s sword swung.

Both cut their foe to the ground, blow after blow after blow.

 

Suddenly Peter stopped. He had been so hypnotized by the swing of his axe that he’d barely noticed how far he had cut. The trunk where he’d been chopping gave a deafening crack, as if lightning had struck nearby. The tree moved. It had begun to go.

Peter stood back, knowing he had done enough. How slowly it moved at first, its motion barely perceptible as it inched its way from the sky! There was another crack as the timber split under its own weight, and then the tree came with a rush, leaning into the air, finding nothing to support it, and accelerating downward till it hammered into the snowy floor of the forest.

The ground shook.

Sultan whinnied and Peter looked over at him.

“That’s all for today,” he said. On any other day he would have begun the process of sawing logs short enough for Sultan to drag home. The cart was empty and waiting, but Peter wanted to do no more work. He had escaped from the torpor of the hut, and felt his body come alive once more. More than that, he had been in control, and it felt good.

 

Peter never knew how it happened, but suddenly he saw something glinting in the snow. Looking closer, he saw it was an axe, and immediately, instinctively, he knew whose it was. It had belonged to Radu.

Suddenly he was filled with dread, seeing the axe as an omen.

His exhilaration at felling the tree evaporated, for he was certain, as certain as he had ever been of anything, that his father was in trouble. At that very moment.

Even as his blows had struck the tree.

He freed Sultan from the harness, and leaving the cart and the fallen tree where they were, galloped home.