The entire village was summoned to the square to witness this poor man’s fate. The master, to Lina’s deep chagrin, forbade her to go, and my mother likewise refused his summons, out of loyalty to our house. As for me, like all the rest of the village children, I was beside myself with curiosity (not unmixed with fear) and made sure I turned up at the appointed time, safely hidden behind my uncle.
Oti was dragged out into the middle of the square, his arms tied behind his back, and was made to stand on a makeshift platform, so we could all witness his punishment. There followed a long and dull speech, in which the Wizard Ezra expatiated on Oti’s crime, which, he said, betrayed not only the Usoferteras, but the entire vocation of wizarding, and which deserved the most summary retribution.
My eyes were fixed on Oti; I could see his limbs trembling from where I stood. His face was absolutely white, and it seemed all his features — aside from his eyes, which were stretched wide open so that the whites around his irises were visible — had sunk back to his skull. His terror was so pitiful that I started to cry, trying to be as quiet as I could, as I was fearful I might attract the wizard’s attention. I began to feel very sorry that I had come, and yet I didn’t dare to steal away.
At last the Wizard Ezra stopped talking, and a dreadful silence filled the square, as if everyone there were holding his breath. The silence was broken by a thin, tearing shriek. I knew it was coming from Oti, but I could not see why: neither he nor the wizard had moved a muscle. He kept on screaming, the same high, horrible note, for what seemed like an eternity, writhing against his bonds as if he were in the most unspeakable agony. I was as baffled as I was appalled, for I could see no reason for his distress.
Then, just as suddenly, Oti was struck silent, although he still twisted as violently, and a spark shot out of his throat. Within moments a torrent of flames was pouring from his open mouth, and almost at the same instant I smelled burning meat. I realized with a clutch of nausea that I was watching this man being consumed from within by fire. Even as I watched, his skin blackened and split open, so that briefly it appeared as if flames were shooting out of every part of him, surrounding him in an infernal aureole, but almost at once he ceased to have a human shape, and the house of his body twisted and collapsed, until the whole was consumed to ash.
The fire burned with such ferocity that the whole process, from the moment that Oti began to scream to the dying out of the flames, took less than five minutes. The platform where he had been standing was barely touched: it was marked, my friends told me later, only with scorch marks where his corpse had fallen. Myself, I had no desire at all to examine the site: I ran off from the crowd and was violently ill, and for months afterward could not pass the spot where Oti had burned without feeling sick with horror.
After that, I needed no persuasion that there was good reason to fear the Wizard Ezra. I suspect now that this demonstration might well have been for the benefit of the Lord Kadar, to impress upon him the perils of crossing a wizard’s will. I think the master took note: certainly, he employed the tutor shortly after this incident, telling us that he was ashamed of the ignorance and rough manners of his charges.
The tutor, Mr. Herodias, was well chosen. A tall, thin-lipped man who affected a pince-nez, he was in truth a bit of a dandy: he was an exotic sight indeed in our village when he ventured out for his regular Sunday stroll, with his polished boots, embroidered waistcoat, and carefully folded neckcloth. But his effete appearance belied a steely will that even Lina found difficult to bend. He was impervious to her sulks and threats and indifferent to her charms, and she was never able to deceive him. She was the most difficult of his charges: Damek was a stolid pupil, neither enthusiastic nor rebellious, and I was frankly studious, which exposed me to Lina’s mockery.
Calmly and coldly, with a switch on his desk, which he didn’t hesitate to use, Mr. Herodias set about instilling an education into even the most recalcitrant of subjects. He rented a small but comfortable cottage in the village and walked up to the Red House every morning, swinging his switch around his legs, and calmly returned home each night to eat his supper. We spied on him sometimes, peeking through his window in the evenings: he always sat in his front room, sometimes reading but mostly writing in a book. We never dared to ask him what he was writing about; the rumor was that he was a naturalist and was writing a treatise on butterflies, but I never heard the truth of it.
His presence gave our lives a routine that summer that I, for one, found at once stimulating and comforting. Although all of us had been taught our letters, our ignorance was profound; as I’ve already said, the two years Mr. Herodias spent at Elbasa I count as among the more precious gifts of my life. He opened for me the universe of books, and through books I have been able to address the gaps in my knowledge. I have continued his education all my life. I have wondered whether that odd, cold man knew what he gave me; sometimes, thinking back, I am sure he did. For this reason, I remember that summer as a happy time. But that is an entirely selfish memory; if you mention the same year in the village, you will see people shudder and cross themselves. That was the year the vendetta came.
Because I am a woman, what I say counts for little in the world. But all the same, I watch and I think my own thoughts, and if I say little, it’s not because I have nothing to say. A wise woman, as they say here, keeps her face in a shell. If I were to speak some of my thoughts freely, it would be cause enough for a curse to be set in my flesh or for a knife to open my throat. People here think the vendetta the central mystery of the Plateau: none dare speak against it, out of pride and terror. It would be like denying our own souls. Vendetta is at the heart of our honor. Here in the bitter North, where scratching a living from the soil is for most people the height of aspiration, a man who has no honor has nothing.
When the vendetta comes to a village, it is a calamity. It is worse than flood or fire, worse than the tempest that sweeps down from the mountainside and tosses about trees and walls and houses as if they were the playthings of a child. It is more like a plague which, instead of flaring for a brief deadly moment, leaving the survivors in peace to mourn and bury their dead, stays virulent for years, for decades, even for centuries. It’s a fatal malady of the blood that slowly, inevitably, destroys whole families, whole clans, whole villages. I’m sure you’ve passed through some of the hamlets where vendetta has burned until there is no one left: the fields are returned to the wild, with weeds waist-high where once there were crops and vegetables, their stone walls tumbled and broken through lack of anyone to mend them year after year; the houses are empty, their roofs fallen in, the paving stones cracked where saplings have split them open, the wind and the rain their only guests. All that is left is perhaps a mad old woman with her chickens and scrawny goat, stubbornly clinging on because she has nowhere else to go.
Vendetta is a black vine, a parasite that fruits only graves. But it is a crafty predator: if all the Plateau were in vendetta, there would be no one left for it to devour, and vendetta itself would die out. And so it sets one seed here, another there: never too much, never too little. Over the centuries, there is no village that vendetta has not harvested, taking its tithe of death, yet at any time, it will be only a few families who suffer.
The death of vendetta is a special death. Vendetta is not the accident in which a man slips and falls from the side of a mountain or is bitten by an adder, or where a child is lost in the snow of winter and is found days later clutching his staff, his face blue and icy. It is a death of honor, and a man’s household is judged by how he faces his fate. It is at the heart of the Lore and its ritual and is behind the authority of wizardry. And this is why, although it is a calamity we dread and fear, northerners never complain against vendetta: it is as much part of us as the ground beneath us, as the cycle of the seasons. To speak against the vendetta is a blasphemy, like pitting your face against the will of God.
Vendetta has, like everything here, its stern courtesies, and its laws are intricate and anc
ient. As it is about honor, it is the concern of men: women might suffer its cruelties, but they are not permitted into its workings. At root, for all the complicated rulings around it, vendetta is brutally simple. It begins with the murder of a man (the murder of a woman is considered a crime against property, not against honor). After a murder there is forty days’ truce; then the man deemed responsible for the crime may be killed at any time. The murderer must pay in two ways: with the Blood Tax and with his life. His death must be at the hands of the victim’s nearest male relation. Once the killer is slain, however, the avenger must in turn pay for his crime, the second murder sparking the third, and so on.
During the forty-day truce, the killer must travel to the king and hand to him one hundred silver pieces. To fail to pay the Blood Tax brings undying shame upon his name and upon his family. The royal treasuries depend on vendetta. It will not surprise you that those of royal blood are exempt from vendetta: the laws that apply to peasants do not apply to them. As farmers tend their crops, so the king tends his populace, growing fat on the shedding of blood.
The penalties for those who do not pay are severe indeed: after he is killed by hanging, a dishonorable death, the defaulter’s hands and feet are cut off so that he will never find his way to heaven, and he is buried at a crossroads as if he were a suicide. If his family or nearest relations still fail to pay the tax, any property they own may be confiscated and their homes burned to the ground, and they are banished. Their shame is absolute and may never be gainsaid. So you can imagine the ruinous lengths to which people will go to pay the tax. I know of no one who has not done so, but I have heard many stories of those who have bankrupted themselves, or have even sold their daughters and sons into slavery, in order to raise the money.
The wizards do not partake in the Blood Tax, but as they administer the legalities of the vendetta, they stand to gain as much as those who do. It is the root of their absolute spiritual authority over the people of the Black Country. You know, I am sure, that each village has its wizard, and that the wizard’s word is law. Their judgment is final; each wizard carries the Book of Truth, which has more authority here than the Bible, and the wizards’ rulings are known among the people as the Law of the Book. The wizards live humbly, eschewing worldly wealth, and for the most part spend their time dealing with petty disagreements: whether one man has stolen another’s goats, for example, or whether a boundary is three feet nearer a river than another man claims. Such punishments as were visited on the unlucky Oti are rarely administered, but the dread of them underlies the obedience paid to the wizards. I am sure they have other duties, but they are unknown to anyone outside their order: they keep their ranks closed, and to reveal the secrets of their magic is punishable by death.
There is much I don’t know: what the bond is, for instance, between the wizards and the royal family. Then there is the constant war between the church and the wizards, both of which have strong claims on the royal house and fight jealously for its notice. The priests think the wizards are godless, and the wizards believe the priests are frauds imposed on the North by some fiat of the South. The latter assertion has enough truth to ensure that church attendance in the North is regarded as a matter of social appearances, while true God-fearing is reserved for the wizards. In the Plateau, Christian piety is, begging your pardon, secretly regarded as a sign of disloyalty, even though there wouldn’t be one soul in the Black Country who doesn’t believe in the wrath of God and the torments of hell and who doesn’t cross himself for fear of the Devil or call for the Last Rites when he is dying.
I will leave you to contemplate these contradictions yourself: some mock the northerners as heathens and pagans, but that seems as inaccurate to me as claiming that they are pious Christians. There are those who say that the king placates the wizards because there would be an insurrection if he did not, and I think there is a truth in that, but it doesn’t account for the whole. If nothing else, it demonstrates that human beings are complicated creatures and that even we stern northerners demonstrate an elasticity of being which might surprise the dogmas of city folk like yourself.
I don’t mean to say that wizards are evil, even if they are feared: to be stern is not to be unjust. But some wizards are dark in their power. The Wizard Ezra was one of those: a bitter rage seemed knitted in his very bones, and what in some was a harsh justice, was in him cruel and vicious. He was not above using his powers for private ends, although wizards are supposed only to deal in public law. It is well known that he cursed a girl of the village when he was a young man because she would not have him: he set a cold spell in her bones, so she was twisted and distorted with agony, and her beauty was destroyed. It is a byword here, when speaking of impossible things, that it is like asking mercy of a wizard, yet there is still a difference between those who are pitiless and those who revel in the pain they cause.
To my mind, the northerners are like cattle that run willingly into the pen where they will be slaughtered for the table of their lord. Worse, we will fight to the death for the right to fill the coffers of the king with our own blood and to kiss the feet of the wizards who spit on us. I know you southerners think the vendetta a strange and romantic thing, and that your poets speak of it as part of the harsh and tragic beauty of the North, but I see no romance in it. I see a savage transaction which keeps the poor in their place, the wizards in their power, and the kings in their comfort.
I should not say these things, even to a stranger. But I have watched and suffered, and this is what I believe.
The vendetta at Elbasa began undramatically enough. You might have seen the tinkers and the men who travel from one end of the Plateau to another, offering their wares and labor in return for a few coins or their keep. There are many such in the Black Country, men without a household or a village who have nothing to call their own except the skill of their hands or the strength of their shoulders. I know that in the South, these travelers are considered to be beneath contempt and treated as outcasts. It is not so here: they have the dignity of their names and their strong bodies, and even when a village cannot offer them work, honor demands that they are given a roof and a meal before they move on to the next village.
That year the autumn was long and warm. On a clear, moonless evening when the stars were so bright they threw shadows, a man known only as Surinam came to Elbasa, seeking work. He was a stranger to us: many itinerants like Surinam arrived through the harvest season, staying for a night or a week or a month before moving on elsewhere, but he wasn’t one of our regulars. We already had our full complement of workers and he was directed to my uncle’s house, where he was given a meal and the hayloft for the night. He left early the next day, as dawn was lightening the Plateau. Later that morning his body was found slumped on the road by a shepherd boy. He had been shot twice, first in the stomach and then through his right eye.
He was lying next to the border stone of the village, but we children, alerted before anyone else, didn’t think about what that meant. Most of us had seen corpses in our short lives, but few had seen a shot man, and this was an event. We stared with a fearful fascination at his deathly pale skin, at the dark, congealed pool of blood that seeped from beneath his body, at the pink mess that had erupted from his skull. Lina was pale with excitement: she bent down to peer at the body, her eyes bright, high spots of color on her cheekbones, holding Damek’s hand so tightly that her knuckles were white.
“He looks like a dead pig,” said one of the children.
“No, he don’t,” said another scornfully. “You cut a pig’s throat. You don’t make its head explode.” He mimed the man’s brains gushing out of his skull.
“He just looks dead,” said Damek. He alone seemed unimpressed, even disgusted. “That’s all. I don’t know why you’re all so beside yourselves. There’s nothing special about being dead. I wonder who shot him.”
Lina glanced at Damek reproachfully, as if he were spoiling one of her games, and he glared back at her with something lik
e contempt. Then he pulled back his hand from her grasp and stalked off by himself. Taken aback, Lina watched him leave and turned to me and shrugged. She picked up a stick and, despite my best attempts to stop her, poked the body, so it rolled stiffly. Its arm flopped back, and we all flinched, afraid for a moment that it was still alive.
It was probably fortunate that at this point some adults arrived, including my father, who boxed my ears and sent me home.
It was far from the end of it, of course. All the village children were agog: it was the most exciting thing that had happened that year, aside from Fatima’s two-headed chicken (which was later taken to be an omen of doom) and Kintur the Younger’s drowning when he fell off the bridge on his way home after a late drinking session. We were still considered too childish to be included in conversation; we were expected to be silent when adults spoke and to obey their orders without question. But we knew everything the adults said to one another: children were invisible and everywhere, like mice, and we all had sharp ears. We heard the talk as we polished dishes in the kitchen or worked in the fields and orchards, and that evening as we gathered after our household tasks were finished, we told one another what we heard.
At first it seemed to have nothing to do with us. Surinam was a stranger, after all. All that day, as the man’s body was brought to the town and washed and laid out for burial, the village hummed with disquiet. Who was Surinam? Where were his people? Was he in vendetta? Why else would anyone murder such a harmless-seeming, unimportant man? Or perhaps he was not as he seemed: some suggested he came from Skip, a nearby village toward which we harbored an ancient enmity, in which case evil goings-on were to be expected; others whispered that he was part of a gang of bandits and that he was the victim of one of their feuds. At this, everyone checked their houses and sheds, but nothing seemed to be stolen. It was, everyone agreed, a deep mystery, and the old women declared that we would all be murdered in our beds and locked their doors.