The Ballad of Aramei (7 page)

I swallow air and look up to meet Trajan’s gaze, who looks back at me with such solid calm and deafening silence that I want to drag my nails across the tabletop just to invoke some natural noise.

But I sit as still as a statue, until finally Trajan breaks that silence.

“You are right to think me cruel,” he says in a composed, yet compelling voice.

I don’t say anything.

“I would never deny that,” he goes on, “but our ways are different than yours. They always have been. Humans are weak and those like you who were human before gifted with this power will always be human. You will never understand our ways, nor will you ever know the true depth of our existence.”

“Why don’t you enlighten me, then?” I say, and I don’t sweeten the poison in my voice. Surely he knows that he’s seriously offended me and despite being who I am and him being who he is, I can’t sit here and let him completely turn me into his submissive little tool.

A small part of me hopes he doesn’t kill me though.

“It cannot be told,” he says simply.

I lick the dryness from my lips carefully and look over at Aramei sleeping. The quiet starts to fall across the room again and then I say gently, “But what about Aramei?” And when I’m not thrown onto the floor with Trajan’s massive hand around my throat, I continue:

“She’s only human. Do you think of
her
as weak?”

“Yes,” he says and his frankness stuns me, causing my head to snap around to face him again. “Aramei is weak because she is human, but that does not mean I cannot love her.”

Maybe he’s right in saying that humans are weak. I think I may have in a small way just proven his point by assuming he had been trying to anger and offend me all along when that wasn’t the case at all.

I lower my eyes away from him and gaze back at Aramei.

“Humans are unnecessarily violent,” he says, “and vile and treacherous and foolish.”

“And werewolves aren’t violent?” I say. “And I’m sorry, but there seems to be a lot of treachery among your kind, too.”

Trajan crosses one leg over the other and rests his right arm on the table. His eyes stray toward Aramei who still hasn’t moved since we got here even though we aren’t making any effort to lower our voices.

“Only small pockets of our kind are treacherous,” he says, still looking out ahead. “All races of life harbor treachery. Violence? No, Adria, violence is hatred and callousness and folly. We are none of those. What you consider violence in our case is merely honor and survival.”

I really could go on and on about this with him, delving into why they have death-match fights and things like that, but I think I’m walking enough of a thin line with my defiant questions already. And something deep down tells me that he will easily have a worthy justification for anything I throw at him.

I hope he’ll drop it, too.

Trajan stands from the table and pushes the chair back underneath it.

“But I did not bring you here for conversation,” he says walking toward the bed where Aramei lay sleeping. “At least not with me.”

“What am I supposed to…I mean how exactly am I supposed to communicate with her?”

Eva has been standing near the wall all this time, so quiet and still I forgot she was even in the room. With her hands folded gently in front of her she takes two steps forward and bows her head in Trajan’s view. He simply nods and she leaves the upstairs floor, the sound of her soft bare feet shuffling quietly down the wooden steps behind me.

I look back at Trajan as he sits down on the side of the bed next to Aramei with his back to me. I pause for a moment, thinking long and hard about my next move and then I rise to my feet. Slowly, I approach them and make my way around to the side so that I can see both of their faces. Trajan reaches out his hand and brushes the length of Aramei’s cheek with the backs of his fingers. She stirs, but remains sleeping.

Trajan doesn’t look at me when he says, “I do not know,” and his admission numbs me. He tilts his head gradually to face me now, “But I’m sure you will figure it out.” He leans across Aramei and touches his lips to her forehead.

I just stand here, flummoxed. I want to say: What the hell do you mean I’ll figure it out? But the actual words never escape my lips.

Trajan rises from the bed and absently I move to the side to let him walk past.

“I will leave you now,” he says, looking back once, “if you should need anything, Eva will assist you.”

“But….” I can’t get the question out.

And just like that, Trajan makes his way down the steps into the vast room below and leaves me standing here. I didn’t expect any bonding between he and I, or much in the way of conversation, but I really didn’t expect to be left on my own without an inkling as to how I’m supposed to go about this, either.

Chapter 5

IT’S NOT UNTIL I hear the front door shut after Trajan walks out, do I let myself snap out of the disbelief.

“He always leaves,” Eva says coming up the stairs.

My chin draws in slightly. “Wait…,” I say, putting up my hand, “did I just become Aramei’s new babysitter?”

A faint smile softens Eva’s face as she walks over to me. The long, see-through black gown she wears clings softly to her naked hourglass form; her dark auburn hair rests freely against her back like a wave of silk between her shoulder blades.

“I suppose you have, Milady.”

“Please don’t call me that.”

She stops in front of me.

“I mean…well, it’s just weird, y’know?”

Eva nods softly; her delicate hands are cradled just below her belly. “Very well. I will call you Adria.”

A failed attempt at a smile barely cracks my face. “Thanks.”

I let out a heavy breath and approach the bed, sitting down on the side of it where Trajan last sat. I reach out my hand and tuck my fingers under a long lock of Aramei’s light-colored hair. It feels so soft against my skin, the way I expected it to feel. I always did think of her as an angel and the way she lays here now, covered by a thin, white satin sheet and enveloped by her fluffy pillows so that her soft hair can lay feathered upon them, makes her appear even more angel-like.

I brush my fingertip across the bridge of her nose.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, Eva.” I never look away from Aramei.

Eva steps up behind me and I feel her hand rest on my shoulder.

“Wake her,” she says, “and then perhaps you will know.”

There’s more in her suggestion than what she is letting on. It feels like Eva already knows what I’m supposed to do, or what might happen.

I stare down at the sleeping angel for a moment, admiring her beauty and innocence, forgetting that the only emotion I should feel for her is sorrow.

“Aramei?” I say softly.

She doesn’t move and so I say it once more, raising my voice a notch. “Aramei, please wake up.” I comb my fingers through her hair and I can smell the lavender shampoo that it had been washed with recently.

Her eyes gently crack open, revealing a slither of iridescent green hiding underneath the delicate lids. She’s looking right at me, like she did before, on that night Isaac brought me here last and I felt her emotions within me. Her eyes open the rest of the way and she never seems to blink. I sit here frozen, my breath caught in my lungs. As always, I’m afraid I’ll scare her with any sudden movements. But at the same time, I’m mesmerized by her and what is slowly happening between us.

“Just let it happen,” I hear Eva’s voice whisper behind me and for some reason unknown to me, the advice puts me completely on edge.

Aramei’s eyes lock intensely on mine and suddenly I feel like I can’t breathe. My hands begin to shake irrepressibly. I can’t move my body. It’s as if I’m no longer the one in control of it.

“Don’t fight it….” Eva’s voice says though it sounds so far away that I want to turn to see if she’s even still standing in the room.

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.