My Swordhand Is Singing Read Free Page A

given him a clasp knife. Not a toy, but a well-made and useful tool.
    “Time you learnt to use one,” Tomas said.
     
     

     
     
    Peter had watched, entranced, as his father took an off-cut of a branch and quickly carved a small bird for him. A goose.
    “It’s a good one,” Tomas said. “Sharp.”
    “Yes, it’s a good one,” his little son had echoed, laughing, though it was not the knife he meant, but the slender little goose, the very image of the birds that he loved to gaze at as they flew overhead.
    Later, Tomas taught him to read, and that wasn’t the action of a drunkard, nor even a soldier, but once Tomas had belonged to a very different kind of family. Now the drink seemed to possess him, and it cost Peter a lot of effort chopping logs to buy a bottle of slivovitz or rakia.
     
    As they came within sight of the hut, Peter could see the birch smoke trailing up from the chimney, gently twisting into ghostly shapes in the dusk, drifting away and spreading like mist through the treetops.
    Peter smiled. The fire was still alight; the hut would be warm.
    The hut stood in a strange position. The river Chust, from which the village took its name, forked in two here, as it snaked through the woods. With deep banks, the river had spent ten thousand years eating its way gently down into the thick, soft, dark forest soil. Its verges were moss-laden blankets that dripped leaf mold into the slow brown water. But at a certain point in its ancient history, the river had met some solid rock hidden in the soil, and had split in two. It was at the head of this fork that the hut stood.

    Just over a year ago, in late autumn, Tomas and Peter had been traveling again when they’d heard there was a need for a woodcutter in Chust. They’d been moving from village to village, always heading as far from civilization as it seemed possible to go, and ever deeper into the vast forest. Tomas was pleased, and they took the job. There was a perfectly good, large hut on the edge of the village, but Tomas had insisted they build a new one of their own. Peter was used to such eccentricities, and he merely bent his back to the axe to cut the trees to make the planks for their new home.
    They laid a rough bridge of two halved tree trunks to cross to the middle of the fork, and began to build.
    Winter was coming on by the time they finished the hut, with a stable on one side and a toolshed on the other. Then Peter started to cut wood to earn their keep, but Tomas got his spade out.
    “What’s that for, Father?” Peter asked, but his father, as so often, replied only with actions.
    He surveyed the hut from the very tip of the river fork. Then he strode around the sides of the hut’s single storey, inspecting it from every angle.
    Peter leant on his axe and watched his father from across the river, where they had decided to make their timber yard.
    Tomas stood at a point twenty paces from the front of the hut, in the exact center between the two arms of the river. He swung his spade from his shoulder, thrust it into the spongy soil, and began to dig.
    Peter shook his head and went back to work. They had promised the kmetovi deliveries of chopped birch a week earlier, and they had already aroused suspicion by deciding to live outside the village. Father had tried to explain that it made more sense for them to live closer to their work, but that sort of logical explanation impressed no one in Chust.
    After an hour, Peter straightened his back and looked across to his father. Tomas had by now dug a deep but narrow pit. Peter sat down and pulled his knife from his pocket, the same knife he’d been given on his fifth birthday. From another pocket he pulled a piece of plum wood he’d been working on, and began to shave curls of wood from the back of the little sheep he was carving.
    Tomas was already up to his waist in the soil when Peter suddenly looked up to see his father’s eyes on him.
    “Get on with your work,” Tomas called. “I’ve