Subconsciously Thibor sensed the seeping blood and knew, in the way all dreamers ‘know’, that it was only part of the dream. It would be a different matter when the sun had set and the seepage actually touched him, but for now he ignored it, returned to that time at the turn of the tenth century when he’d been merely human and had gone up into the Khorvaty on a mission of murder . . .
They had travelled as trappers, Thibor and his seven, as Wallachians who followed the Carpathian curve on a trek designed to get them deep into the northern forests by the onset of winter. In fact they had simply come from Kiev through Kolomyya and so to the mountains, but they’d taken all the paraphernalia of the trapper with them, to substantiate their story. It had taken them three weeks of steady riding to reach the place in the very lee of the sheer mountains, (a ‘village’, consisting of a handful of stone houses built into the hillside, half-a-dozen semi-permanent cabins, and a smattering of gypsy tents of cured skins with the fur inside) which the current incumbents called Moupho Aide Ferenc Yaborov, a mouthful they invariably shortened to Ferenc, which they made to sound like ‘Ferengi’. It meant ‘Place of the Old One’, or ‘of the Old Ferengi’, and the gypsies spoke of it in lowered tones and with a deal of respect.
There were maybe a hundred men there, some thirty women and as many children. Half of the men were trappers passing through, or prospective settlers uprooted by Pechenegi raids, on their way to find homes further north. Many of the latter group had their families with them. The remainder were either peasant inhabitants of Ferengi Yaborov, or gypsies come here to winter it out. They’d been coming since time immemorial, apparently, for ‘the old devil’ who was Boyar here was good to them and turned none away. Indeed, in times of hardship he’d even been known to supply his wandering occasional tenants with food from his own larder and wine from his cellars.
Thibor, asking about food and drink for himself and the others, was shown a house of timbers set in a stand of pines. It was an inn of sorts, with tiny rooms up in the rafters which could only be reached by rope ladders; the ladders were drawn up when the boarder wished to sleep. Down below there were wooden tables and stools, and at one end of the large room a bar stocked with small kegs of plum brandy and buckets of sweet ale. One wall was built half of stone, where burned a fire in the base of a huge chimney. On the fire was an iron pot of goulash giving out a heavy paprika reek. Onions dangled in bunches from nails in the wall close to the fire; likewise huge coarse-skinned sausages; black bread stood in loaves on the tables, baked in a stone oven to one side of the fire.
A man, his wife and one scruffy son ran the place; gypsies, Thibor guessed, who’d chosen to settle here. They could have done better, he thought, feeling cold in the shadows of the looming rocks, the mountains whose presence could be felt even indoors. It was a gloomy place this, frowning and foreboding.
The Wallach had told his men to speak to no one, but as they put away their gear, ate and drank, spoke in muffled tones to each other, he himself shared a jug of brandy with his host. ‘Who are you?’ that gnarled old man asked him.
‘Do you ask what I have been and where I have been?’ Thibor answered. ‘That’s easier to tell than who I am.’
‘Tell it then, if you feel like talking.’
Thibor smiled and sipped brandy. ‘I was a young boy under the Carpatii. My father was an Ungar who wandered into the borders of the southern steppe to farm – him and his brothers and kin and their families. I’ll be brief: came the Pechenegi, all was uprooted, our settlement destroyed. Since then I’ve wandered, fought the barbarian for payment and what little I could find on his body, done what I could where and whenever. Now I’ll be a trapper. I’ve seen the mountains, the steppe, the forests. Farming’s a hard life and blood-letting makes a man bitter. But in the towns and cities there’s money to be had from furs. You’ve roamed a bit yourself, I’ll vow?’