‘By God, girl, you amuse me. We’ll see each other again, and then you’ll be kinder to me.’ He stretched out his hand as if to touch my hair. Christina screamed. I spat at his feet. His face grew hard. ‘Just you wait,’ he threatened. ‘Marta, eh? That’s what she called you, the little minx in the water?’
I was mute with fear as he turned and walked back up the embankment. Only when he had urged on his horses with a flick of his whip, and the clopping of hooves and the clattering of wheels had died away, did I breathe again and let the stone slip from my sweaty, sticky fingers. My knees buckled and I dropped onto the rough grey sand, shivering. Christina waded out of the water; she wrapped her arms around me and we held each other tight, until I was only shaking with cold and not fear anymore. She stroked my hair and whispered: ‘Marta, you’re so brave. I’d never have dared to threaten him with a silly little stone.’ I glanced down at the stone at my feet. It really did look silly and little.
‘Do you think we’ll see him again?’ she asked, while I struggled to my feet. I bit my lip in worry. He’d asked the way to the monastery to which all of us belonged – our izba, our land, the dress on my back, we ourselves. I chased away the thought.
‘Nonsense,’ I said, hoping I sounded surer than I felt. ‘We’ll never see that tub of lard again. Let’s hope he falls off his cart and breaks his neck.’
I tried to laugh but couldn’t. Christina didn’t look convinced either. Clouds covered the sun, veiling the daylight with the first blue of dusk. I was shivering in my damp dress, which was covered in dirt again. What a nuisance: I would have to wash it tomorrow, early in the morning before the feast. I brushed sand and pebbles off my shins. ‘Let’s go.’ Silently, we slipped into our old clothes and gathered up the still-damp washing to hang it over the flat oven at home to dry. It made the air in the hut even more humid and worsened my brother Fyodor’s cough.
‘Let’s not tell anyone, shall we?’ I said to Christina, hoping I could pretend to myself the encounter by the river had never happened. But in my heart I knew this wouldn’t be the end of it. Nothing in this world happens without a reason. That afternoon my life changed course, like the weathervane on the monastery roof spinning in the first blast of a sudden storm.
2
It rained the night before the fair. The monks didn’t make nemtsy like me attend their church on Sunday as the other souls did: I had been baptised Catholic, but to me faith was just mumbled prayers and a constant crossing of yourself with three fingers. On the day of our death, this – or so we hoped – was supposed to gain us entry to the freeborns’ Heaven.
Walking to the fairground by the monastery, our feet sank into the warm mud of the road, a soft sucking sound accompanying each step. We carried our sandals of wood and raffia in our hands so as not to ruin them. My younger sister Maggie, who was only four, could barely keep up with us, so I took her hand and slowed my steps to match her scuttle. The morning had been damp but this afternoon was sunny, the sky big and blue. At the village green, men were still levelling the ground for the evening’s dancing, and some women were stretching ropes between high birch trees for children to swing on. Others were standing around in groups in their long, bright dresses, laughing, talking, singing songs and clapping along. The fairground was already a lively hubbub as people from all over the province had come for the market.
A bear was tethered to a post outside the first tent I passed, his pelt dirty and dishevelled, and the teeth in his jaws as well as his claws filed down. Still, better he was kept away from the captive animals: their angry, unpredictable natures were merely slumbering, unconfined by their chains. In winter, the travelling merchants who kept them often froze to death by the roadside; the bears would rip their chains from the dead men’s hands when hunger drove them to the nearest houses and farms. So Maggie and I gave Master Bruin a wide berth as he uselessly whetted his claws on his post. Maggie glanced round quickly for her mother but Tanya was at a stall, looking at necklaces and bracelets. Putting her finger to her lips, the little girl curiously lifted the flap of a tent, its cloth mended and darned with colourful patches.
‘Maggie!’ I was about to tell her off, when she gasped and shrank back in dread. I took her place and peered inside: a gruesome creature with two heads, four arms and two legs was tied up in the middle of the tent. I suppressed a cry as one head turned to look at us, while the other hung helplessly to one side. Saliva dribbled from one slack mouth, while something like a smile spread across the other sad, slightly crooked face. A hand stirred; fingers reached out to me. I counted them: there were six! I stepped back. It was horrid, but I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Maggie squeezed in again beside me. At that moment a voice boomed behind us: ‘Aha, young ladies, so curious already about my Tent of Wonders?’
We were so startled, we almost tumbled right into the tent. Behind us, a man held on to a dwarf by a short chain wrapped around his neck. To his other side stood a girl in a dress of bright green and blue patches with a rope about her waist; her hair was wrapped in a torn fishing net. I had not seen make-up before and she looked frightful to me: her face seemed to have been pressed in lumpy flour, two garish red patches were painted on her cheeks, and she had outlined her eyes and eyebrows with a lump of coal.
The man bowed. ‘I am Master Lampert, bringing the wonders of the world right here to your sorry little village.’ I frowned: only we were allowed to badmouth the mir, not some random stranger! Master Lampert now kicked the dwarf in the side, whereupon he did a somersault and the bells and dull coins sewn on his jacket clinked cheerfully. ‘No one else has dwarves, mermaids and ghastly creatures like mine. Come to my show this evening, ladies!’
Ladies? Maggie and I giggled. No one had ever called us that. Master Lampert ignored our foolishness and carried on, ‘There’s a fun competition planned, throwing rotten fruit at my monster. Whoever hits it bang, smack in the face, wins.’ He pointed at the miserable being in the middle of the tent. Timidly, I glanced at it again. Both its heads were hanging once more, and its arms dangled uselessly. The ‘mermaid’ – whatever that was supposed to mean – smiled at me, revealing black gaps between her teeth. Dear God, I was glad when at that very moment an angry Tanya dragged Maggie and me out into the open.
‘What are you doing, loitering with the travelling folk? Are you one of them?’ she snapped at me. ‘Come, Christina and I are watching the fire-eater.’ In spite of the harshness of her tone, she pressed a few honey-roasted nuts into my hand. God knows how she’d smuggled the money for them past Father who’d surely feel we’d deprived him of a drink or a plug of chewing tobacco. This was a proper feast day and no mistake.
A troupe of musicians came down towards us along the muddy paths between tents and stalls, and the jolly noise of drums, flutes and bells mercifully swallowed Tanya’s scolding. I fed a couple of nuts to Maggie and followed Tanya and Christina to the stalls with the fire-eaters, jugglers and a magician in the midst of plucking a red ball from a farmer’s grubby ear. The crowd cheered and clapped furiously. Other men pressed forward, wanting to have balls conjured from their ears, too.
Christina pointed to the fire-eater. ‘Have you seen those muscles? He eats fire all right,’ she giggled. I sighed inwardly. If the monks didn’t find a husband for her from among the serfs in the village soon, we would be the ones leaving a little bundle on the edge of the forest.