ZITCHI - CHAPTER 24

Taligás has procured a long black coat with many pockets. He smiles his crooked smile, tucks it tight around himself. It is not new; it has mildew at the hem, but he likes it all the better for this. It comes to him with a history and the satisfaction of a job well done. He remembers her face... and promptly trips over the hem. No matter, he thinks, as he digs himself out of the dust. He will get a needlewoman onto shortening it tomorrow. In the meantime, he will be careful.

On the battlements, Erzebet paces. She will not admit to being wrong, but still, she thinks, it is a pity the Zitchi girl is dead. None of the others were as juicy, nor screamed so sweetly, before or since. Since Zitchi, she feels seven years creeping up on her with ease on each single morrow. Only this morning she detected a dowager's back in the mirror. It was slight, but it was there. And smashing the mirror and using the glass to slash her latest maid's visage has done little to suppress her disenchantment.




Thurzó knows everything there is to know about lunar eclipses. Of course, he says to himself as he heads to the river again. It is today. It is written. A partial one only. He looks up. But this is not quite as foreseen; the moon is as a bloodshot eye. He shivers.

Aliz is thinking deeply, but not so deeply she misses his arrival. She has squatted in her skirts with a knife and a bowl on the edge of the camp. She sees him, solemnly watches his approach, the wineskins on his shoulder. Does he feel the extraordinary weight of her gaze on him?

She has hidden herself behind a good tree. He comes up to the tree, looks around the trunk and down at her sitting in the long grass. "Hello, Aliz," he says. She grins up at him like an idiot, seems unable to move. "Come," he says, helps her to her feet. Together they walk down to the river and into the camp.

The food has turned the night salty and running with juice and with herbs, down their throats, overspilling onto their chins. The wine flows like a river of rubies. Overhead, the lunar circle widens degree by bloody degree like a woman widens when a child must be born. The stars come out. And it seems to Thurzó that the only thing left waiting to happen must be the arrival of a comet or a shooting star, but he knows that cannot be; it has not been foretold. She is sitting on the other side of the campfire, there beside the cymbalom. He cannot stop looking in the direction of the cymbalom. And it seems to her that he cannot stop looking at her, and yet she is unable to meet his gaze.

When the last of the food has been consumed and the bones thrown to the dogs and the last of the grease licked from fingers, there is still the music. The ghost of Old Man Nagy strikes up the cymbalom, or is it Raoul of the red rage? Another man takes the fiddle, and there is a deerskin drum to honour the spirits of all the fallen deer, including the one they have just eaten. There is a drunken pipe, but it does not last beyond the first song.

Up at the tree where Aliz sat earlier with her knife and her bowl, a man is crouching in a coat as good as invisible against the sky. But why? Nobody tells Taligás No, is why, but that is not the whole story. Everybody underestimates Taligás, is why, but that is not the whole story either. There is a precious particle of story which Taligás keeps locked inside his head, cherishes, nurtures, feeds, and above all, nobody but Taligás knows it is there.




And songs. Songs of travelling, songs of love. Songs of fire and of water. The cymbalom never stops, thinks Thurzó, as he watches Raoul's hands from across the circle. He wonders how he can keep moving his hands hour upon hour, how he can layer the notes that way, have three harmonies - at least - going at once when he only has two hands. He cannot know the answer to this, which is that Raoul is dancing a duet with Old Man Nagy, and also that the cymbalom itself has spirit, as all things do.

She is in you - she is in all of us.
She wants your body, she wants your mind.
And when she finds you, and when you let her out
Then she will get you, get you - you can't escape this time.

Aíya, Aíya, Aíya, Aíya.

She is a cold heart, she is a shadow,
She will betray you from deep inside,
And when you hear her calling you quietly
Then you will let her, let her - and you can never hide.

Aíya, Aíya, Aíya, Aíya.

She will take you - she knows you want her to.
She wants to wake you, make you the same.
You know you want her, you know you want her to
When you start sleeping, dreaming, and calling out her name:-

Aíya, Aíya, Aíya, Aíya,
Aíya, Aíya, Aíya, Aíya,
Aíya, Aíya, Aíya, Aíya.

The truth is, Raoul is bewitched, thinks Thurzó. Each time he gets to the chorus, sings the Aíyas, he does this strange thing with his voice which sends shivers up Thurzó's spine. It is as if his voice exists on two or three planes at once, vibrates between them, builds energy, the kind of energy you need before a scream, and yet the scream never comes, it exists as a promise only. Not a promise - a prophecy whose fulfillment is inevitable.

Aíya!

And yet - after the second verse Thurzó is singing the Aíyas too, and the final time it comes around he feels almost like he has a new religion. It cannot be the Bull's Blood - he is a big man who finds it difficult to sink enough to get drunk. It cannot be the company - he has spent time with the gypsies before. Or can it?

The signs and portents in the heavens? The eclipse is done now; it fizzled like an anticlimax years ago in the penultimate song. Thurzó realises the other musicians have gone to bed, most of the gypsies have gone to their caravans in fact. He does not see Aliz there, slumping half-asleep against the legs of the cymbalom. There is some mumbled chatter from the stragglers by the fireside, but it is winding down with the embers. He really should be getting back to Piest'ány.

At that moment, the skies brighten and Thurzó cranes his head upwards: a meteor storm, ah, but it cannot be! The sky has turned from midnight to purple, stripy and swirly like a painting as yet unpainted in the mind of a man not yet born, with balls of light and stars like fireworks. The Carpathian mountains are black jags against the sky, the distant town's rooftops and spires are silhouetted too.

Aíya!

And he really should be getting back to Piest'ány, but finds he cannot take his eyes away from the stars, or his heart away from the sensation of someone's hand reaching into his chest between his ribs and squeezing, squeezing, massaging him back to life even though, until this moment, he had not realised he was dead. The sensation is not unpleasant, he thinks. And then he does stop looking at the stars; he lowers his head and discovers his eyes are pointing like a compass at the source of his rebirth, the cymbalom. And he has no idea why but he finds himself getting to his feet as hurriedly as he can, taking three strides across the circle - jumping the fading fire as he does so. He arrives at the cymbalom and stretches out his hand -

Aíya!

- and finds it clasped in return by that wizard Raoul, who has laid down his hammers and now grasps Thurzó's hand in both of his. Raoul locks eyes with Thurzó, lifts his hands to his mouth and places a warm, soft kiss atop Thurzó's thumb.

"What do you think of the fireworks?" says Raoul.

Thurzó opens his mouth to speak but finds he has no words.

"I laid them on just for you," says Raoul.

"I have no doubt of it," says Thurzó.




Thurzó leaves for Piest'ány just before dawn, unseen. Unseen, that is, except by Aliz, who has spent a cold night's vigil under the cymbalom, her heart in bits. And she was very cold, for it is early in the year, and the waters of the Váh, bloated with ice, give off a frozen white cloak as they rush past.

What a shame for Aliz, that she did not possess a long black pocketed coat to keep her warm.