“I’m here,” I whisper to her, our faces mere inches from one another. “I need to see what you see…please let in.”
Aramei’s hand comes up and slowly her fingers rest on my lips. I don’t freeze up this time, but I do remain quiet and still.
“Close your eyes,” she says so softly that it could lull me to sleep if I let it.
I close my eyes, feeling the smoothness of her fingertips on the edges of my lips.
And then the whirlwind of Time and Space takes me up again, hurling me through the ages and into the life of a young woman in Serbia.
Balkan Mountains – Eastern Serbia – Winter 1761
The wolves are bolder in the winter. They patrol the thickly snow-covered mountains like kings, scavenging the brave wildlife that dares to tread out in the open hunting for a scarce meal. But the wolves have also been hunted by humans for generations for fear they are the beasts eating their cattle. In some cases, this is true, but the real truth is that the locals fear that believing in the Black Beasts will make them real, so they blame it on a creature less frightening as if this will satisfy their hearts. The people of this small village and all of the villages that scatter the mountains go out early in the morning, trudge through the heavy snow wearing the furs of the wolves they killed the winter before and they hunt them down, year after year. But the cattle are never spared, no matter how many gray wolves are eradicated. And the horses and the sheep; they are being killed, too. Savagely. Sometimes there is nothing left, not even the bones, but most of the locals refuse to bring back the Old Myths, the stories their ancestors told of the Black Beasts that stand on two legs and are taller than any man.
Secretly, each of them believes the Old Myths. All of them grow up from children knowing that there are things in the vast Balkan Mountains far worse than anything man has ever known. They have feared the beasts for a thousand years, but superstition keeps them from admitting it openly.
On this frigid winter day, Aramei wakes to the sound of her sister’s scream piercing the outside air. Aramei jerks up and shakes the stun from her mind, rushing out of her tiny makeshift bedroom and out the front door of her cottage. Still in her nightgown and with bare feet, she stands in front of the rickety wooden door with the snow up to her ankles. In seconds, her feet are stinging from the cold. She rushes back inside and thrusts her feet down into her father’s boots and then yanks her father’s thick coat from the back of his chair, letting it swallow her small form.
Filipa screams out again and Aramei bursts back through the doorway and runs out into the snow, the oversized boots loose on her tiny feet.
“Father!” Filipa shrieks from somewhere behind the house. “Father! It’s Vela! The wolves got Vela!”
As Aramei comes around the corner of the house she spots a trail of dark red staining the bright white snow and coming from the stables. Her steps pick up, as much as the big boots and the weight of the snow swallowing her feet inside of them will allow.
“Where’s Vela?” Aramei shouts as she enters the barn.
Filipa sits crouched over the dead horse, a pool of thick warm blood pools on the ground where the horse’s lower half used to be. Steam rises from the blood and entrails in the bitter cold, making the sight that much more haunting.
“Oh, no, Vela…,” Aramei runs over, nearly tripping in the boots and she falls to her knees beside Filipa and the horse’s corpse. “Oh, girl,” she says, stroking the horse’s stiff snout; its eyes are glazed over, the tongue lolled out of its mouth. But Aramei can only be saddened by the sight and never sickened or afraid. She doesn’t even notice that her father’s coat is covered in the horse’s blood.
“Look at her!” Filipa rips out the words angrily, pointing to the back end of the horse. “There’s nothing left! What kind of wolf could do that?” Tears are streaming from Filipa’s eyes, but they are tears of anger.
Aramei, still gazing down into the horse’s black, lifeless eyes says, “Viktor told me about the black wolves deeper in the mountains. They are bigger than the gray wolves that father hunts every winter. I think only they could have done this.”
“Black wolves?” Filipa says, rising to her feet and gazing down at her sister. “Don’t you dare mention this to Father. You mean the Black Beasts! Who is this Viktor? Why have you been sneaking off with him this many months?” Filipa is growing angry, but more-so worried for Aramei. She crosses her arms over her chest and glares down at her disapprovingly.
Aramei stands and faces Filipa, her bloody hands resting helplessly at her sides. She had told Filipa that Viktor went back to his homeland last fall and this was true as far as she knew, but it didn’t stop Viktor from visiting Aramei at least once a month.
The last time he had come to her village was just days ago. He came to warn her about the ‘black wolves’.
“Please don’t tell Father,” Aramei says in a soft, pleading voice. “I will tell you everything if you give me your word you will keep it to yourself.”
Filipa’s green eyes widen with disbelief. Aramei has never kept secrets from her sister until this stranger, Viktor, came along and Aramei knows that it will be hard to finally tell Filipa the truth.
Just then, their father comes stumbling into the barn, still dressed in his long-pants and thick socks that he always sleeps in to keep warm. Aramei and Filipa move away from the corpse and stand side by side, huddled together to share their body heat. Their father looks at the horse first and then makes note of his coat and boots which Aramei is wearing. He shakes his heavily-bearded head at her, but doesn’t say anything about it.
He moves toward the horse, examining the amount of blood and damage.
“Must’ve been an entire pack,” he says and then his dark eyes wander around the rest of the barn to see that their cow and three goats have been left untouched. “Did you see it?”
“No, Father,” Filipa says.
He looks to Aramei and she shakes her head.
“Get inside,” he demands, pointing towards the cottage, “And Aramei, please make use of your own clothing.”
“Yes, Father.”
The sisters scurry out of the barn and back inside their warm cottage where a fireplace burns heavily in the front room. After putting her father’s coat and boots back where she took them, he comes in after her, dresses for the weather and heads out with six other men from the village, equipped with rifles and axes, to hunt the wolves.
Filipa watches her father from the window until his dark form contrasted against the snow disappears over the top of the hill leading deeper into the valley. She wastes no time and storms over to Aramei, grabbing her vigorously by the elbow.
“Who is Viktor to you?” she lashes out. “Have you given yourself to him?”
“No!” Aramei says, offended by her sister’s accusations. But then her face softens as she can’t hold an angry emotion for more than a few seconds at most. She reaches out takes Filipa’s hands. “He is just a man,” she says. “He has been wonderful company and has taught me things that I would never have learned here.”
Filipa moves back slowly so that Aramei’s hands fall away and she looks upon her warily. “Men do not befriend young women just to teach them things unless it is how to properly lie on your back when he needs to pleasure himself.” She sneers and then says, “What kind of things did he teach you?”
Aramei ignores Filipa’s cruel ridicule altogether. “I know how to live in the wild if I ever need to,” she says. “He taught me to trap small game and to hunt with a bow. What woman in this village do you know who has ever held a bow, much less become good at using one?” She points toward the wall to indicate the village women as a whole and adds, “Sweet bread. And laundry. And planting. And of course, child-bearing—as you so eloquently described it. That’s the most any woman from here will ever know, Filipa.”
Filipa snarls. “Why would you need to know how to use a bow?” she snaps. “And why would you ever need to know how to live in the wild? Do you plan to run away with this stranger and live in the wild with him?”
“Oh, Filipa. Sissa. I’m not a child anymore.” Aramei walks toward the window and peers out. “You have cared for me all of my life, even before Mother died, you were always there for me.” She turns around at the waist to see Filipa. “But you can’t be my mother forever.”
Filipa inhales a deep, aggravated breath and combs her hair away from her shoulders. But she avoids this particular subject and moves quickly onto the next.
“Tell me what this man told you,” she says in a calm, stern voice. “What is this about the black wolves in the mountains?”
Aramei’s petite shoulders rise and fall as she stands peering out at the vast blanket of white covering the landscape. She turns fully around to face Filipa, “Maybe the black wolves that Viktor spoke of and the Black Beasts of legend are one in the same; I do not know, but Viktor has told me that they are growing in numbers. And that they are different from the gray wolves we see on the mountains.”
Filipa tilts her head to one side, looking upon Aramei curiously. “Yes,” she says, “different as in more savage, but not because they are these…beasts. You would do better not to believe such things, too.”
Aramei snaps around, her arms still crossed with her delicate fingers peeking over the bend of the elbows. “Why, Filipa?” she says. Her voice is laced with discontent, which stuns Filipa momentarily. “Because they fear them?” She makes a slashing motion with her hand out in front of her. “When are you going to start thinking for yourself?”
Aramei turns her back on her sister, partially fed up with the prospect of being just like everybody else, but also it was hard for her to be so firm towards Filipa, to speak her mind for once.
“Are you saying you believe what this man tells you?” Filipa has lowered her tone and seems to be attempting to be more understanding towards Aramei. She moves behind her, placing her hands gently on her shoulders.
Aramei turns to face her. “Viktor did not tell me anything of the Black Beasts, Filipa…I believe in them on my own. I always have, since I was a little girl and I….”
Aramei looks away from Filipa’s engaged eyes, seeming afraid or ashamed for whatever she was about to say.
“What is it, Aramei? Tell me.”
Aramei raises her soft green eyes to Filipa once more, “…I do not believe that Mother died of the fever.”
Filipa’s chin draws back in a suspicious motion. “What are you saying?”
Aramei walks away, leaving Filipa standing by the window. She paces the room once and then stops, staring down at the clay vase their mother had made two years before she died. She remembers the vision of her face, staring up at her from the bed the day she told Aramei a dark secret. She remembers how her mother clutched Aramei’s dress tight in her hands as she leaned over her sweating body amid the soaked bed covers. Her skin was pale gray and sickly, her green eyes tired and fringed in red, inflamed by the infection coursing through her body.