My Swordhand is Singing Page 13

Seeing no help from anyone, Tomas rolled onto his side, then scrambled to all fours. He raised his head, and trunk, and knelt. He put one foot flat in the snow, and pushed for all he was worth. He stood.

  “No, Milosh. I am not hurt,” he said. “I am dying. But my swordhand is singing. I will take the sword into the village, and put an end to it.”

  Milosh dropped his head, unable to meet Tomas’s stare.

  “Please, Father,” Peter said. “Please don’t.”

  Tomas turned to his son, his face pale with pain.

  He spoke softly, so that only Peter could hear.

  “I have been a bad father to you. Please give me the chance to be a good one.”

  Tears welled in Peter’s eyes, and he wiped them away with the back of his hand, but he looked his father in the face, and nodded.

  “We will help you,” he said.

  “The song!” Sofia cried. “We can help you with the song!”

  Tomas nodded.

  “Then let’s be ready,” he said. “We have the sword. Milosh, you have six men here. More in your camp. Peter, my son. Sofia. And we have the song! If only I had a horse. Peter, you should have seen me with King Michael! When we rode our warhorses into battle, the ground itself shook with fear!”

  “But look!” said Sofia. “You do have a horse! Sultan!”

  They all turned and saw the old white horse walking serenely through the trees toward them, his head nodding as he came.

  Tomas laughed.

  “What do you say, Sultan? Can you manage it?”

  Sultan snorted.

  39

  Resurrection

  They made an extraordinary sight, but there was no one to see them as they made their way through the forest, toward the stricken village.

  At their head, a fat, red-cheeked man rode a stocky white horse. The rider and horse formed the point of an arrow, as behind and to each side walked his friends. His son. His dead comrade’s brother and daughter. Others of their kind, maybe twenty in all.

  They saw no one, and no one saw them.

  They reached the village.

  They walked down the long main street that led to the square and still they saw no one. Not a word was spoken, and the silence in the streets was absolute.

  They arrived in the square, and stopped.

  And now they came.

  From every alley and street, they came. Those whom the Shadow Queen had brought from the ground.

  They did not come slowly. They ran, they hurtled toward the man and his horse.

  “Sing!” he shouted.

  They sang, twenty voices in unison, with full lungs and loud voices. The hostages began to falter and hesitate, slowing in their great number. But still they came on. And there were scores of them.

  The rider knew the moment had come.

  He looked down to his son, and smiled.

  He kicked the horse into action.

  “Sultan!” he cried. “Hah!”

  Away he rode into the fight. Behind him, the singing voices lifted higher and higher, reaching out to protect him as he darted this way and that through the crowd, the sword flashing in the failing light in the square.

  Bodies began to pile all around him, bodies that lay still, that did not wish to leave the ground anymore, and as he fought on through the grappling hands and the clawing fingers, he saw that he would die.

  There was nothing for Tomas now.

  Not the singing.

  Not the square.

  Not the dead.

  Not even Sultan.

  Just the sword, which flew so fast that the air itself was cut in two.

  But the hands grasped and grappled and there were too many. He was pulled from Sultan’s back, landing clumsily in the mud.

  From a seemingly vast distance, he heard a cry.

  “Father!”

  Peter. It was his son, sprinting to be beside him in a moment. Dimly, Tomas saw Peter snatch the sword from the ground and begin to swing it wildly about him. The hostages faltered, shocked by the fluid energy of the boy, by his strength.

  Tomas’s eyes were closed now, but in his mind he could see Peter twisting and stroking the blade from side to side.

  “That’s it,” he whispered. “That’s it. Feel it!”

  In his heart, he heard Peter’s reply.

  “Yes, Father. My swordhand is singing.”

  Tomas found himself staring at nothing but a bright white light that seemed to open in the sky above him, pouring down onto the blade, bathing him in joy.

  Joy that he had been good, one last time.

  That he had given.

  That he was a good father, with a good son. It was the joy of completeness.

  Even as Peter swung the sword for the last time, and gave rest to the last of the hostages, and fell to his knees by his father, the joy was irrepressible.

  As Tomas died, his heart was singing, and a smile spread across his face.

  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!”

  Author’s Note

  Most people are familiar with the whys and wherefores of the vampire, but few realize how far a journey this nightmare figure has made. Today we can recognize a vampire in film or book by pointed canine teeth, a cape maybe, or an accompanying bat. The suave, sometimes overtly attractive vampire of modern myth is very far from the original revenants of the folklore where these creatures originated. In fact those first vampires are more like zombies with a bloodlust—either horrific bloated corpses returned from the earth, or beings indistinguishable from their former living selves (and what a dangerous thing that would be). Sometimes even the bloodlust is absent; one vampire’s preferred sustenance was noted to be milk! In many instances it is impossible to distinguish between the vampire and what we would know as the werewolf.

  In writing this book I sought to capture the flavor of the early reports of vampirism, from the well-known case of the Shoemaker of Silesia in 1591 to the unnatural dealings of Peter Plogojowitz in 1725, via a myriad of less popular stories collected from various Eastern European countries: Pëtr Bogatyrëv’s studies of the Subcarpathian Rus and Alan Dundes’ unsurpassed anthropological collection The Vampire: A Casebook repaid their reading many times over. I also urge you, if interested, to read Paul Barber’s Vampires, Burial, and Death, which presents a well-argued theory using forensic pathology on the possible biochemical origin of many of the traits of the vampire.

  To make a coherent story I had to pick and choose from among hundreds of stories, many of which flatly contradicted one another—for there are almost as many types of vampire as there are vampire stories. One example would be the vampires’ reaction to light: in some stories they may appear only at night, in others they are immune from any potentially destructive power of this force for good. Even giving vampires a name is not a simple thing; here are just a few of them: krvoijac, vukodlak, wilkolak, varcolac, vurvolak, liderc nadaly, liougat, kulkutha, moroii, strigoii, murony, streghoi, vrykolakoi, upir, dschuma, velku dlaka, nachzehrer, zaloznye, nosferatu—this last, quite familiar to us, is the vampire’s name in that most unholy of vampire lands, Transylvania, literally the Land Beyond the Forest. Transylvania is in fact a beautiful place, with mountains, pastures, and forest just as described in this book. And it is here that the stories of the Miorita, the Wedding of the Dead and the Shadow Queen would be familiar to local people, though again I have had to take certain liberties for the sake of the story. Nowadays we know all these fabulous stories of the undead to be myth, though it might be wise to remember that there are still some people who do not agree with this conclusion. Even in the first few years of this new century, stories have emerged from Romania of modern-day belief in vampires; in 2004 the relatives of a Romanian man were prosecuted for exhuming his corpse, burning his heart and drinking the ashes in water because they believed he had been visiting them in the night….

  About the Author

  Since Floodland won the Branford Boase Award for the best first children’s novel of 2000, Marcus Sedgwick’s books have been short-listed for many awards, including the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award, the Blue Peter Book Award, the Carnegie Medal, and the Edgar Allan Poe Award.

  By day he works in children’s publishing, and by night he is the drummer in a rock band in Brighton. He lives in Sussex with his wife, Pippa, and has a daughter, Alice.

  About My Swordhand Is Singing he says: “It was fascinating to discover the original folklore that gave birth to the vampire lege
nd. No snowy graveyard is left unvisited, no corpse undisturbed, no spell unspoken, no date with destiny unmet. But it’s not all gloom; there are misery and horror, too.”

  ALSO BY MARCUS SEDGWICK

  The Book of Dead Days

  The Dark Flight Down

  The Dark Horse

  Floodland

  The Foreshadowing

  Witch Hill

  Published by Wendy Lamb Books

  an imprint of Random House Children’s Books

  a division of Random House, Inc.

  New York

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text and illustrations copyright © 2006 by Marcus Sedgwick

  Originally published in Great Britain in 2006 by Orion Children’s Books

  All rights reserved.

  WENDY LAMB BOOKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  www.randomhouse.com/teens

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at www.randomhouse.com/teachers

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sedgwick, Marcus.

  My swordhand is singing / Marcus Sedgwick.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: In the dangerous dark of winter in an Eastern European village during the early seventeenth century, Peter learns from a gypsy girl that the Shadow Queen is behind the recent murders and reanimations, and his father’s secret past may hold the key to stopping her.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89084-0

  [1. Supernatural—Fiction. 2. Murder—Fiction. 3. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 4. Vampires—Fiction. 5. Romanies—Fiction. 6. Villages—Fiction. 7. Superstition—Fiction. 8. Europe, Eastern—History—17th century—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.S4484My 2007

  [Fic}—dc22 2007007051