My Swordhand Is Singing (18 page)

Sofia hung her head.

“Besides,” he went on, “who’d cut their stupid wood for them?”

He nodded toward the village.

Despite herself, Sofia laughed.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Wherever we need to. Wherever we hear of hostages that need to be freed. But first we are going to roll through the forest, and eventually we will find the meadows that lie beneath the mountains. They will be full of flowers and bees, and the rivers will be full of fish. We’ll stop there for a while and rest. We’ll sing, and make music.”

“It sounds wonderful,” said Peter.

“It is.”

“God bless you.”

“And you, Peter.”

She stepped forward, and finally closed the gap there had always been between them. She kissed him, and then they both heard laughter from the caravan.

She pulled away, blushing, and without another word, walked back to her future.

As she went, she sang, and Peter heard the final verse of the Miorita float into the air, where the shepherd marries a princess from the heavens.

He watched as she climbed aboard the cart and sat next to her uncle, and they disappeared into the trees.

Peter wandered back to the hut, but he found his eyes pricking and his head full of sorrow. Deciding he needed to be busy, he walked around to the toolshed, intending to sharpen the axes. There on the bench, as before, everything lay in neat and tidy rows, but suddenly he saw something he had missed before, a small rag, twisted into a ball. He picked it up and a tiny object inside the cloth fell into the sawdust at his feet.

He bent down and picked it up.

It was a carving, a small wooden carving.

Of a goose.

When his father had carved it, Peter didn’t know, but he knew it was for him. Tomas must have left it with the tools as he and Milosh and the others waited.

Peter knew what it meant.

His mind drifted back to the first day when he’d seen Sofia arrive in the square. Something had tugged at his heart that day, but he had not known what it was. Now, suddenly, he knew. It was right in front of him, in Sofia, in his hand, but until this moment he just hadn’t seen it.

It was their life, their nomadic life. He thought he was tired of traveling all his life, always on the move with his father. But now he saw that it was the only life he knew. It was the life he wanted. He looked again at the carving, identical to the one his father had made for him on his fifth birthday. He saw it not only as an apology but as a message, and knew that it was time to fly away again, like the geese.

And just like the shepherd in the song, he had a princess waiting for him.

Gently, he tucked the goose into his pocket.

“Sultan!” he cried, running to the stable, and Sultan came.

He flung himself onto the horse, and they hammered away over the bridge.

“Wait!” he called. “Wait! I’m coming with you!”

Author’s Note

Most people are familiar with the whys and wherefores of the vampire, but few realize how far a journey this nightmare figure has made. Today we can recognize a vampire in film or book by pointed canine teeth, a cape maybe, or an accompanying bat. The suave, sometimes overtly attractive vampire of modern myth is very far from the original revenants of the folklore where these creatures originated. In fact those first vampires are more like zombies with a bloodlust—either horrific bloated corpses returned from the earth, or beings indistinguishable from their former living selves (and what a dangerous thing that would be). Sometimes even the bloodlust is absent; one vampire’s preferred sustenance was noted to be milk! In many instances it is impossible to distinguish between the vampire and what we would know as the werewolf.

In writing this book I sought to capture the flavor of the early reports of vampirism, from the well-known case of the Shoemaker of Silesia in 1591 to the unnatural dealings of Peter Plogojowitz in 1725, via a myriad of less popular stories collected from various Eastern European countries: Pëtr Bogatyrëv’s studies of the Subcarpathian Rus and Alan Dundes’ unsurpassed anthropological collection
The Vampire: A Casebook
repaid their reading many times over. I also urge you, if interested, to read Paul Barber’s
Vampires, Burial, and Death,
which presents a well-argued theory using forensic pathology on the possible biochemical origin of many of the traits of the vampire.

To make a coherent story I had to pick and choose from among hundreds of stories, many of which flatly contradicted one another—for there are almost as many types of vampire as there are vampire stories. One example would be the vampires’ reaction to light: in some stories they may appear only at night, in others they are immune from any potentially destructive power of this force for good. Even giving vampires a name is not a simple thing; here are just a few of them:
krvoijac, vukodlak, wilkolak, varcolac, vurvolak, liderc nadaly, liougat, kulkutha, moroii, strigoii, murony, streghoi, vrykolakoi, upir, dschuma, velku dlaka, nachzehrer, zaloznye, nosferatu
—this last, quite familiar to us, is the vampire’s name in that most unholy of vampire lands, Transylvania, literally the Land Beyond the Forest. Transylvania is in fact a beautiful place, with mountains, pastures, and forest just as described in this book. And it is here that the stories of the Miorita, the Wedding of the Dead and the Shadow Queen would be familiar to local people, though again I have had to take certain liberties for the sake of the story. Nowadays we know all these fabulous stories of the undead to be myth, though it might be wise to remember that there are still some people who do not agree with this conclusion. Even in the first few years of this new century, stories have emerged from Romania of modern-day belief in vampires; in 2004 the relatives of a Romanian man were prosecuted for exhuming his corpse, burning his heart and drinking the ashes in water because they believed he had been visiting them in the night….

About the Author

Since
Floodland
won the Branford Boase Award for the best first children’s novel of 2000, Marcus Sedgwick’s books have been short-listed for many awards, including the
Guardian
Children’s Fiction Award, the Blue Peter Book Award, the Carnegie Medal, and the Edgar Allan Poe Award.

By day he works in children’s publishing, and by night he is the drummer in a rock band in Brighton. He lives in Sussex with his wife, Pippa, and has a daughter, Alice.

About
My Swordhand Is Singing
he says: “It was fascinating to discover the original folklore that gave birth to the vampire legend. No snowy graveyard is left unvisited, no corpse undisturbed, no spell unspoken, no date with destiny unmet. But it’s not all gloom; there are misery and horror, too.”

Published by Wendy Lamb Books
an imprint of Random House Children’s Books
a division of Random House, Inc.

New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Text and illustrations copyright © 2006 by Marcus Sedgwick

Originally published in Great Britain in 2006 by Orion Children’s Books

All rights reserved.

WENDY LAMB BOOKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

www.randomhouse.com/teens

Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at
www.randomhouse.com/teachers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sedgwick, Marcus.

My swordhand is singing / Marcus Sedgwick.—1st ed.

p. cm.

Summary: In the dangerous dark of winter in an Eastern European village during the early seventeenth century, Peter learns from a gypsy girl that the Shadow Queen is behind the recent murders and reanimations, and his father’s secret past may hold the key to stopping her.

eISBN: 978-0-375-89084-0

[1. Supernatural—Fiction. 2. Murder—Fiction. 3. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 4. Vampires—Fiction. 5. Romanies—Fiction. 6. Villages—Fiction. 7. Superstition—Fiction. 8. Europe, Eastern—History—17th century—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.S4484My 2007

[Fic}—dc22         2007007051

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