Vigil Read Free Page B

breath or the steady beat of my heart, but with my stomach grumbling in the stillness of the night.
    So those nights I went hungry.
    I walked in a kind of state of non-being, wandering, alone. I passed from happy to sad often in those first few days, but I did not know the meaning of lonely. In a way, I was fascinated. There was so much to learn and so many words in my head. The words in my head tumbled out and sometimes I spoke them aloud, just to hear them and taste them running over my tongue.
    ‘Whisper,’ I said. And, ‘rustle’, ‘earthen’, ‘flying’, to describe things I thought of as things, then I moved on to words to describe things I thought of as thoughts, such as ‘interesting’, ‘horrible’, ‘monotonous’. Sometimes I would speak words that described things I was doing, like ‘walking’, ‘breathing’, ‘speaking’.
    Mostly I walked and my hunger kept me awake all the time, whispering and complaining and grumbling and moaning.
    The ground began to slope steadily upwards. In the distance I could see mountains which seemed to cover the horizon, immense beyond my limited understanding, even though the view was broken into morsels I could take without going insane as I saw each glimpse through gaps in the trees. They were breathtaking, immense. I could hear a steady rumbling. It was the mountain’s hunger. It was the belly of the mountain, trying to eat the sky.
    One week passed. My hunger was like that of the mountain.
    That was when I found the path. Path: something people made, to go to one place from another.
    People, I remembered, tasted the best.
     
    *
     

 
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter Five
     
    Panaci
    Carpathian Mountains 
     
    It was a small village. There were only a handful of houses. People had banded together and made something solid and real. People need to be together. I needed to be with people. But I was not people. I was something else. I understood this as I watched them from the undergrowth. They bustled, busy in the day to day tasks that people had to do so that they could live. They tended crops, they spoke to each other in that strange harsh language that was so unlike my own, yet somehow familiar at times. The meaning floated before me, so close I could almost reach out and pluck it from the air like a falling leaf.
    I sat on my haunches in the bushes, a long way back from the people, just watching. They wore clothes spun from some dull cloth, with the occasional hint of colour in a sash or a headscarf. The adults went about their work, the children ran and played. A mother fed a child from a pendulous breast as she walked and I could smell the baby, hear its heart tripping within its chest. The beating heart of the mother was calm, the baby’s heart like a mouse in flight. I could hear the sucking sounds of the feeding baby, the slashing of hoes in the earth, the creak of the buildings in the wind, and underneath it all the heavy yawning of the mountains stretching from the earth.
    The pain became too much to bear after a short time. I shut my eyes against the sunlight. Part of me understood even then that this life was not for me. The hunger burned but it would wait until nightfall. That was when I came alive. I was just a pale shadow during the day. Night time was the only time a shadow felt truly at home.
    I curled up on myself and pulled a leafy plant over me and listened to the people, their growling language and their little footsteps on the hard packed earth. I waited and hungered, but night was a long time in coming. Part of me wanted to run out and feed, feed until my belly stood out and my jaws ached from chewing. The part of me that was slow to wake spoke softly to my hunger and bade it wait. Night was a time for feeding. When I could see and hear and run and the moon was shy.
    I did not sleep. I lay huddled like that child at his mother’s breast, cradled in my hunger, but I had no mother to feed me. I had been born full grown and had never known a