But I still can’t move. Aramei’s gaze sears into mine, holding my body and my head solidly in place. Sweat begins to bead on my forehead and the more I try to look away, the more forcibly my head is held still.
Aramei reaches out both of her hands to me and my body leans toward her of its own accord.
“You see me…,” she says without moving her lips, “…Find me….” There is nothing but pain and desperation in those two words, which shakes my heart to its bitter core. Tears are streaming down my hot cheeks, my entire body shudders and trembles, but I still can’t look away from her.
As her hands get closer it feels as though time is slowing down.
Her fingers touch my face and it’s like being hurled off the top of a skyscraper. I feel like my body is falling a thousand miles per second. I try to scream out, but I can’t. My voice is locked inside my head along with any control over my own muscles. And when I see the ground hurtling upward at me, I try to prepare my mind to brace for the impact. But instead, once I’m at the bottom, my body stops abruptly and is then heaved violently out ahead, horizontally through some series of rapid-moving pictures…no…places. I see trees whipping by me. Darkness and then light and then darkness again. I catch glimpses of the recent past: Aramei standing near the waterfall in my dream, the vision of her lying next to me on the floor, Trajan making love to her, Eva and the servants bathing her. I see even further back in time: Sibyl’s face glaring in at Aramei from the shadows, the dangerous face of Nataša watching over Aramei. I see Viktor and the faces of people I have never met. Time moves faster now and it’s getting harder to see with much detail, but I always see the darkness and the light as the days fade into the past in and out of my mind like blips on a screen. I see the landscape turn white; vast, treacherous mountains covered by snow and then the landscape turns green again as the season changes.
Finally, just when I feel like my body has breathed its last breath and that death has come to take me, time stops abruptly and I’m looking in at a life once lived as if it had been my life.
As if it’s happening all over again….
Balkan Mountains – Eastern Serbia – Summer 1761
The valley stretches boundlessly in the distance, tucked deeply between a vast mountain range on all sides. At the foot of the mountain, scattered about the valley is a small village where hay-covered roofs and wooden structures dot the landscape. A small herd of sheep stand amid the ocean of grass just at the top of one hill, tranquil in the early morning sunlight which filters down through a layer of mist cascading across the landscape. Every now and then a baa echoes between the mountains and fades amid the sound of a waterfall.
It’s a village of poor farmers and sheep herders and fishermen, but a village untouched by the outside world. The only world that infiltrates this hidden valley is the dark world of the Black Beasts, a myth to some, but to others a danger they have feared for more than a thousand years.
Aramei, daughter of a farmer, walks behind her cottage carrying a basket filled with yesterday’s laundry, tucked underneath her arm and pressed against her hip. She wears a long russet-colored dress and a pair of worn leather sandals on her dainty feet. A piece of cloth holds her hair behind her, tied against her back.
She makes her way past the barn and slips into the forest behind it where the stream snakes in from the nearby pond. As she leans over the water, washing her father’s shirt, the sound of footsteps shuffling through the leaves behind her causes her to turn around. A tall and handsome man with a full moustache and long, braided dark hair smiles down at her. She has seen him before in her village, but knows he is no resident, nor any resident of any village within four days walk of here. His accent is odd, more like a mixture of her native Serbian and something more guttural like that of the Germans.
She had heard him speaking to a fisherman just yesterday.
But he seems harmless enough and she knows by the way he looks at her that he must have her in his sights. She is unmarried, after all, and it was but a matter of time before suitors began seeking her out. But why this strange foreigner? She thinks quietly as she stands to her feet, drying her hands on her apron. Her smile is soft and pretty and inviting, but not so much that she is giving in to his interests. Just enough to be polite and cordial. But it does make her uneasy that he followed her out here by the stream while she is alone. It gives her comfort that she can see the back of the large barn behind her house from this distance.
“Milord,” she greets him and half-curtsies with the coyness of a young girl.
The man, dressed in fine garb that reminds Aramei of something royal yet casual, like the noblemen from the north, bows his head gently and reaches out his hand to her. A thick silver ring with an engraving across the band adorns one finger. She notices that his hands are dirty, unbecoming of the rest of his appearance. Hesitantly, Aramei offers her hand to him and he takes it between his thumb and fingers, leans over and touches the top of it to his forehead.
“I am Viktor Vargasavic,” he says after raising his head again, but he keeps her hand gently clutched in his fingers. “Have I offended you with my curiosity?”
Gently, she lets her hand slip from his.
Even more bashful now because of his intimate introduction, Aramei turns and bends over to retrieve the basket from the ground, tucking it back against her side. She bows her head slightly. “No, Milord, but it is inappropriate to be here alone with you.”
Viktor smiles and bends one arm behind him across his lower back. He bows once more and holds it longer than the first time; a gesture of submission. “Forgive me,” he says and rises upright, “I mean no disrespect.”
Aramei blushes and lowers her eyes.
“Sissa! Sissa!” her older sister, Filipa, shouts as she runs toward them from the back of the barn. She’s waving one hand in the air above her, the other holding her dress at the legs to keep the ends from dragging the ground.
Aramei smiles at Viktor. “I must go,” she says. “Good day to you.”
Aramei meets Filipa halfway.
“Who is that man?” she says, eyeing Viktor from across the yard. She takes the basket from Aramei and carries it for her and fits her arm around Aramei’s back, clutching her shoulder.
“His name is Viktor,” Aramei whispers, “but that is all I know.”
Filipa looks at Aramei warily in a sideward glance, helping her farther across the yard and out of Viktor’s sights. “Did anyone see you?” Filipa asks sternly. “Sissa, he is not from here.” She stops near the east side of the barn, drops the basket and moves around in front of Aramei, grasping her shoulders in both hands, shaking her. “He feels dark. You must stay away from him. Do you understand?”
“Yes, I understand.”
Aramei has no intention of defying her sister’s orders. Viktor is handsome, but like Filipa said, he is an outsider and their father would never approve of their marriage. And Filipa, taking the place of their mother nine years ago after she caught the fever and died, Aramei would never consider disobeying her. Aramei is only nineteen, Filipa twenty-five, but Filipa has been as much of a caretaker as their mother was and Aramei often forgets that Filipa is her sister.
“You trouble me sometimes,” Filipa says, taking Aramei’s hand. “I cannot decide if you are fearless or just plain heedless.”
Aramei lowers her head shamefully. Filipa is right after all; Aramei has always gotten herself into trouble and in tight situations while growing up. Instead of running from a snake, she stopped to study one when she was five and it nearly bit her. Filipa pulled her away just as the snake went to strike. And when Aramei turned twelve, she went out alone to look for one of their sheep lost in the valley though it was known that wolves had likely claimed it. They could have claimed her, too, but Filipa found her and brought her back before the sun slipped behind the treacherous mountains. Aramei had always been very smart, having surpassed Filipa in learning to read and to sew and to cook—Aramei is still better at all of these things than her sister—but she has always been slow to judge when it came to recognizing danger when it stood in front of her. Curiosity and a heart bigger than her head, they were Aramei’s greatest weaknesses. Little did she know that they would also one day be the death of her.
“Come,” Filipa says and she leads Aramei back inside their cottage.
A storm blew through overnight, leaving the valley in a blanket of cool, misty air and rain-soaked earth. Aramei is up before the sun helping her father and Filipa find Vela, their skittish horse that had burst free from the stable spooked by the cracking thunder and lightning. For nearly an hour they searched for the horse, finally splitting up just as daylight creeps over the horizon, bathing the valley in warm light.
Aramei pulls her coat tight around her form and heads toward the North Hill, where the sheep often graze. When she makes it to the top of the grassy hill and looks down at the base of the other side, there Vela stands, alone and calm, drinking from a water hole.
“Oh, Vela,” she says many minutes later when she makes it down the hill to where the horse is. “Father will have your hide one day if you keep this up.” She pats the horse on its thick, muscled neck. A low whicker shudders through its body and its chestnut-colored tail swishes back and forth. Aramei goes to fix a loop of rope around its neck when the horse starts to appear agitated, its ears perking and a few whinnies rattle its chest.
“Okay, girl,” Aramei says, patting Vela’s neck once more. “What is it?”
Without warning, Vela rises up on her hind legs, knocking Aramei onto the rain-soaked grass and mud. The hooves come down hard against the earth as Aramei rolls through the mud to get out of the way.
“Vela! Where are you going?”
The horse whines and takes off back toward the village, the sounds of its hooves beating heavily against the ground.
Aramei pushes herself up and goes to dust herself off, but gives up when she realizes it will take more than that to wash these muddy clothes. She sighs heavily, thrusting her slim arms down against her sides. Feeling that the mud has taken a hold of her left foot, Aramei gently pulls her sandal from the mess and steps over onto a mound of grass. “That awful horse!” she says exasperated.
“They can be fickle creatures at times,” says a man’s voice.
Aramei turns around, startled, to see Viktor standing in the shade of a nearby small cluster of trees. She presses her hand to her chest as if that might help to calm her heartbeat.
She lowers her eyes and pretends to be straightening her dress and dusting more mud from the fabric, although it only makes her hands messier. She closes her dress robe tighter around her body, her gentle fingers clutching the fabric together at her chest.
“You are not from my village,” she says, but doesn’t make eye contact.
Viktor’s body moves closer, but he stops at a comfortable distance of five feet.
“No,” he says and she can hear the pursuit in his voice, which makes her slightly uneasy. “I am just a traveler of these lands. I set up camp east of here—could smell the fires and something like sweet bread cake.”