29
Ancestors and Hostages
When Peter woke, it was to the sound of singing. Someone was singing the Miorita, but as he opened his eyes he realized that it was he. Had he been singing in his sleep?
Tell my murderers
To let my bones lie somewhere close by,
By the sheepfold here so my flocks are near,
On the open ground so I’ll hear my hound….
Tell not a breath of how I met my death,
Say I could not tarry; I have gone to marry
A princess—my bride is the whole world’s pride.
That stupid song! It was even in his dreams now.
Peter opened his eyes and found he was lying in bed. He swung his legs to the floor and sat up, rubbing his head.
Suddenly he knew what it was about that song that annoyed him so much. It was the weakness of it. The meekness. The way the shepherd gives in, without even trying to fight his murderers. Peter couldn’t understand it, giving in to fate, to death, without even trying to stop it. Surely you had to be stronger than that, to survive? To live?
Tomas was nowhere in sight. The shutter was open and Peter saw bright, burning daylight beyond, though he had no idea what time it might be. Daylight. How he had longed for it! How he wished it would never grow dark again! What had Sofia said?
“There can be no evil by daylight.”
He stood up, unsteady on his feet at first, unable to get the Miorita out of his head. He thought about the end of the song, where the shepherd marries the princess from the stars. That’s the story he tells his lamb to pass on to his mother. To stop her from grieving, from being hurt. Peter understood that. If only he hadn’t hurt his own mother. It had been his first act in the world. His birth, her death. If only he could have saved her from harm! And though he knew he was guiltless, the guilt still came.
The full meaning of the ending was lost to him—a cloud he could not penetrate. Nonetheless there was something about the story that was pulling him in. The princess. A wedding to the cosmos. A place and a purpose in life, even in death.
No.
He killed his thoughts, tired of it all.
Peter put his hand above the stove. Still warm. Gradually everything that had happened came back to him, right up to the moment when he had collapsed. Someone, presumably Father, had put him into bed. But how long had he slept? His belly ached with hunger, so maybe it had been a long time.
He felt awful. He was hungry, his head hurt, his legs ached, but he had to ignore all that, because there was something he had to do. The something was to look for Agnes, and now he remembered the shock of finding her prison hut empty when he returned from the graveyard.
“By the Forest!” Peter said aloud. “What is happening here?”
He needed his father. He checked the toolshed and found that his father’s axe was missing. Had he actually gone to work? Without Sultan?
His father was useless as a source of physical help, but Peter instinctively knew that what Sofia had told him about Tomas was all true. If only Tomas would admit it, then maybe he could help Peter to understand the things he’d seen. In the hut, in the graveyard, in the forest…
All he really wanted to do was harness Sultan to their cart, put Tomas and everything they owned onto it, and ride far, far away. Peter had once heard there was a country to the west by the sea, a warm country where grapes as large as apples hung from endless vines. Maybe they could just ride and ride until they found it.
But Tomas was out somewhere, Peter had lent Sultan to the Gypsy girl, and there was Agnes to find. If anything had happened to her…
He closed that thought because the end of it puzzled him, and was not what he wanted to feel.
Then he remembered something else.
The sword.
Sofia had talked about a sword and now, after all these years, Peter knew what was in his father’s box without even opening it. He looked around the room until his eyes fell on his father’s mattress. That was where it was.
He took a step toward the bed, then hesitated, thinking about a small wooden goose, and the tears he had shed when Tomas had destroyed it.
But no.
There should be no more secrets.
Guiltily, he stepped forward and lifted the mattress, feeling with his other hand for the box.
There was nothing there.