Black Spring Read Free

rain. I stared dully out of the carriage window, bored and cold, my spirits increasingly oppressed.
    We were passing yet another solitary walker when he glanced up incuriously at the carriage and briefly met my eyes. My breath stopped: although he was a young man, and of considerable beauty in the dark-browed fashion of those of the hinterland, he seemed a living corpse. His eyes were absolutely devoid of light, and his features pale and insensible as carven marble. The rain ran unchecked down his face, as if he really were a statue. My heart quickened as I noted the white band he wore around his right arm. This, then, was one of the Dead; my first sight of those who walked under the sigil of the vendetta. The band around his right arm indicated that he had killed a man but was still in his month of grace; after the month passed, the band would be worn on his left arm, and he could meet his death at any time in the daylight hours. Unless, that is, he took refuge in the odu, fated never to see the sun again.
    I looked back as his lone figure dwindled into the distance, struck to the heart by the man’s tragic beauty. He seemed indeed like an angel of death, walking through a landscape of the dead. For the first time I began really to understand my friend’s words about the Northern Plateau. But perversely the sight cheered me: perhaps, after all, I would find something to interest me in this godforsaken place.
    My carriage clattered into Elbasa’s tiny central square shortly before dusk that same day. A few vagrant sunbeams peeked through a low rent in the clouds and lent the square a little shabby warmth. While my coachman ventured off into the rain for directions to the house, I contemplated Elbasa gloomily out my carriage window. On one side of the square was a tavern, on the other what I presumed to be the house of the mayor. In the middle was an ancient and stunted lime tree, still bare of leaf, a forlorn version of its gay southern cousins, and underneath that a worn stone seat by a rank pond of blackish water choked with rotting leaves. A grimy shop and rows of shuttered houses completed the melancholy impression.
    After almost a week of constant travel, I was anxious to leave my carriage and settle into a comfortable house. I longed for a hot bath and then a glass of Madeira by a roaring fire before I fell gratefully into a comfortable bed. That I managed to get these things at the end of my journey was, I confess, a source of considerable astonishment.
    My friend’s report had not erred: the house I had leased for the spring months was indeed luxurious by the standards of the Northern Plateau. It was but a little way out of the village and set at a pleasing angle on a low rise, which was the closest they came to a hill in these parts. It could not escape the usual pines, which sheltered the house from the harsh winds that often swept down from the mountains. It was known as the Red House, because it did not have the ubiquitous slate roofing but cheery clay tiles, which someone must have imported at great trouble and expense from the South. As I peered curiously out my carriage, I saw the last of the day’s light touching its roof, making it appear almost luminous, and it seemed to me miraculous to see such a thing in this dour landscape of grays. I could also see a butter-yellow light streaming from the windows, and my heart lifted.
    Once inside, I met the couple who kept the house, a taciturn and courteous man named Zef and his wife, Anna. They were respectably dressed and mannered, locally bred but well trained, and although the house was not large — running perhaps to six or seven main rooms — it had about it an air of order and prosperity which was already a little alien to me, accustomed as I had become over the past few days to low-roofed inns with mattresses more notable for their livestock than their softness. Although it felt a little foolish in these polite surroundings, I carefully anointed the