My Swordhand Is Singing

For my father

Once, they were as plentiful
as the blades of grass in the meadow

Eastern Europe—early seventeenth century

The Land Beyond the Forests

The Song

There is a land beyond the forests. A land so beautiful that as you stand at the edge of the trees and gaze across the pastures to the snow-brushed mountains, you know that heaven is surely but a step away. From this land comes a song, and from the song comes a story. A story of murder.

Down from the mountains one day came three shepherds. They had been in the high pastures for weeks with their flocks and were glad to be heading home, but in the minds of two of the shepherds, there was death.

The third shepherd, the youngest of the three, and maybe the richest and maybe the most handsome, knew nothing of this, until one of his lambs, the smallest lamb, that he had saved from dying in a late spring snow, came to him and warned him of the plot to kill him.

Now the shepherd looked sadly at his lamb, and said:

“If this is true, then I am doomed to die. But, my faithful creature, do this for me. When they have killed me, tell them to lay my bones somewhere close by, and bury my pipes with me, so that when the wind blows, it will play a tune and my sheep may come near, and my dogs too.

“Tell them not that I am dead, but instead that I went to marry a princess from a distant land. Tell them how a star fell at my wedding, tell them how the sun and moon came down to hold my bride’s crown, tell them how the trees were my guests, and the mountains my priests. How birds were my fiddlers, and stars my torchlight.

“But if one day you meet a white-haired woman, my mother, my old mother, tell her simply that I went to marry a princess, there on Heaven’s doorstep.”

And so it all came to be.

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Eastern Europe—early seventeenth century

The Song

1.
Deep in the Woods

2.
Slivovitz and Snow

3.
The Suicide’s Burial

4.
The Goose

5.
St. Andrew’s Eve

6.
The Dulcimer’s Melody

7.
Sheep and Wolves

8.
The Shadow Queen

9.
The Eternal Return

10.
Refusal

11.
Visitors

12.
Closer

13.
And Closer

14.
Creeping

15.
The Waters of Chust

16.
Agnes

17.
The Wedding of the Dead

18.
At the Threshold

19.
Turnings

20.
Hands in the Dark

21.
Threads

22.
Calling

23.
Things to Cover Our Dead

24.
The Hut

25.
The Winter King

26.
Escape

27.
The Island

28.
The Dream of the Queen

29.
Ancestors and Hostages

30.
The Elders

31.
Village Talk

32.
Stillness

33.
Tomas

34.
The Camp

35.
The Approach

36.
Ordeal

37.
The Sword

38.
The Song of the Miorita

39.
Resurrection

40.
A Perfect Shade of Green

Author’s Note

About the Author

Also by Marcus Sedgwick

Copyright

1

Deep in the Woods

When he fell for the fifth time, when his face plunged into the deep snow, when his hands burnt from the cold but he didn’t care, Radu the woodcutter knew he was going to die. Somewhere behind him in the darknesses of the forest he could hear the man who had attacked him. He was scared now, almost too scared to move, almost too cold to run anymore, but still he knew something was wrong. Something that should not be.

He got up and stumbled on desperately, sending snow flying in little spurts. Even here among the thickness of the trees it lay heavily on the ground, whisked and funneled by the east wind into strange hills and troughs, like white beasts lurking at the foot of the birches.

Radu looked behind him, but could see nothing. Nothing but the vast unfathomable forest. It was said you could ride from Poland to Turkey and never leave the trees behind, but he knew that wasn’t true. Nothing could be that big! Not even the MotherForest.

He stopped for a moment, listening hard, but all he could hear was his own panting as he sucked air into his painful chest. He no longer knew where he was, though the forest had been his home all his life. His hut and his village were far away. He looked around, straining to recognize anything, but all he saw were a hundred thousand silver birch trees.

A branch cracked, and with horror Radu’s eyes snapped back to his pursuer. Now that Radu saw him again, he knew what was wrong.

“In the name of Jesus and the Forest…”

The words fell dead in the softness of the snow, but even as they did Radu turned and began to run, lurching wildly from tree to tree. His right hand left a smear of blood on the paper bark of a birch, but that wound was irrelevant now. It was such a short while since he’d been cutting wood with his axe. The axe that lay somewhere in the snow, its blade stained with blood, already frozen. His blood.

He hit another two trees, but barely noticed, and suddenly he realized where he was. Close to Chust, where his fellow woodcutter Tomas lived in a hut outside the village.

For a fleeting moment a flame of hope ignited in his heart. He had run fast, the village was only a short way through the trees, and he could no longer hear his attacker behind him.

But then Radu rounded a tree and ran straight into him.

The man was not tall, but he was fat. Bloated. His skin was as white as the trees around them. There was dried blood at the corners of his shriveled mouth. It had taken Radu all this time to recognize him.

Radu took a step backward, his fur boots brushing through the snow. He tripped over an unseen root, but kept his feet. He lifted a hand and pointed at the man.

“But Willem. You’re dead!”

The man lunged forward and shoved his hand like a knife into Radu’s chest, feeling for his heart.

“Not anymore,” he said.

And now it was Radu who fell dead in the softness of the snow.

2

Slivovitz and Snow

Peter trudged behind his father toward Chust, shivering as he went. Their hut lay a little way behind them, outside the village itself. St. Andrew’s Eve was still a few days off, and the snow was strong already. It would be a brutal winter. Through the cold Peter could smell his father; even the biting wind could not rid him of the constant reek of slivovitz and beer.

“Did you know Radu well, Father?” Peter said, simply so that there was something to say. His father didn’t reply, and Peter knew the answer anyway. They didn’t know anyone well—until they had come to Chust they had never stayed in one place long enough to know anyone at all. But Peter was aware that his father had helped Radu, the woodcutter from Koroceni, once or twice in the last year. Sometimes even the most solitary of woodcutters needed help felling a large tree.

The edge of the village was in front of them.

“Hurry,” said Tomas. “They won’t wait for us.”

“They can’t be starting,” said Peter. “I can’t hear the church bell.”

His father spat into the snow, but didn’t look around.

“There won’t be bells at a suicide’s funeral.”

He walked into the village, through a small gate in the rickety birch paling that marked the boundary. The fence, no more than knee-high, and capped by a ragged thatch, was designed to stop chickens from wandering too far. It ran right around the settlement, marking its perimeter; apart from a few fields, everything beyond it was forest. In places along its length, as here, were gates with little roofs.

Peter hesitated at this gateway. It wasn’t just that they weren’t liked in the village; there was more to it than that.

“Suicide?”

Peter ran after his father, and caught up quickly. The ground was a mess of frozen mud and slush, and his father was unsteady on his feet, as usual.

“Be quiet,” Tomas said, glaring at his son. He nodded at the huts, and Peter understood that he should not have spoken. That was all right. Peter was used to silence, used to keeping his own company; thanks to his taciturn father, most conversations Peter had took place in his own head.

Two sour-faced old women stood in the shadow of a low doorway. They spoke under their breath to each other and stared at Tomas and his son—a heavy man who looked older than he probably was, and his strong, young boy.

Peter knew they were not liked, and the village had little to offer. There was something bleak and unsettling about the place, something almost menacing, though Peter could not have put it into words, and yet for all that Tomas seemed content to stay. And in truth, Peter was happy to stay too. They finally seemed to have put down some roots after years and years of moving, and besides, there was Agnes.

They hurried on, down the slight hill that led to the area laughingly called “the square,” as if this were some great city in the south and not a godforsaken village in the middle of nowhere. Chust was home to no more than two hundred people, but here in the center there were houses in place of huts; a few of them had two storeys. As they went, Peter kept an eye out for Agnes, but it was not a day to be abroad unless you had business to attend to. They passed the end of the street where she lived with her mother, still in mourning after her husband’s death. Briefly Peter slowed his pace, hoping for some sign of Agnes, but there was none.

Slipping from the far corner of the square, a small track squeezed between two of the larger houses in the village, the priest’s house and the feldsher’s house. That way led to the church, which lay on a rise beyond. Peter could see its sagging wood-tiled roof with the onion-dome tower on its back, halfway along, like a boy riding a pig, but he was surprised when his father strode away toward the other side of the square.

He paused, and then understood. He should have known better. Radu was a suicide; there would be no bells, and there would be no holy ground for him either. Peter hurried on.

His father was nearly at the far side of the village.

“They think he killed himself?” Peter asked.

Tomas said nothing.