Taming Devils (II)

*Disclaimer: This story is set in the world of Hailbringer: A Romanian Folktale and may contain spoilers for those who have not yet read the book

Read Part I

August 1459 (AD 6967), Moldavia

WHY DO YOU TORTURE that cat?’ the man asked.

These children were used to playing with the campfires, their faces and hands smeared with dirt and grime from handling the iron pots. It was clear as day they had been using the blazing sticks to torment the poor trapped animal.

Though the man didn’t raise his voice, his words carried across the distance with authority. The two boys barked at him in their tongue, but as soon as they noticed him approaching, their voices began to lower.

Undeterred, Daniil continued his stride towards them. Under God’s watchful eye, he thought, such cruelty was intolerable. He heard the animal’s desperate, angry cries long before he could see it, and upon reaching the place, he now understood why it was growling and hissing. The dark tomcat, caught in the gypsy wicker cage, bore burns and missing patches of fur all over.

‘Get away from it, you loafers!’ the monk commanded, waving his hand. ‘Get!’

Startled and seeing the man approaching, the boys dropped their burning sticks and fled, yelling in their own language. The monk could only grasp a few words, but he understood they were calling out to their mother. Seeing smoke rising from behind the nearest hill, he knew their camp couldn’t be far. With the boys gone, he knew he had to release the cat before they returned with reinforcements.

‘Don’t you dare scratch me,’ he muttered, retrieving a short knife from beneath his cloak and carefully unravelling the twine binding the wicker sticks together. His loyal pike would have been useful now, at least to keep the animal at bay if nothing else, but he had left it at the bottom of the hill with the horse.

The cat, oblivious to friend or foe, continued to growl from the farthest corner of the cage it could reach, its dark, dilated eyes fixed on the monk. Daniil shushed it as he worked to cut the ropes, keeping one eye on the animal.

‘I’m not harming you, for Christ’s sake!’ he grumbled under his breath, growing frustrated as freeing the animal took longer than expected, and longer than ideal.

The chatter carried by the wind reached his ears, the unpredictable gusts echoing through the valley. Winds were strange in this valley. Once again, he couldn’t see their source, much like he couldn’t see the tomcat before, yet he could hear both clearly. The wind was indeed fickle. He realised the boys had likely reached the camp and made their case, and their entire family was now probably prepared for a quarrel.

A gasp escaped his lips as he quickly withdrew his hand from the dismantling cage. With his eyes scouting the tall grass and his mind racing, the tomcat seized the opportunity to defy the man’s warnings and scratched him. The sudden sting of pain was followed almost immediately by a gradual light-headedness, mesmerised by the thin trickle of blood welling from the back of his hand.

Aware that the gypsy family was approaching, their shapes forming on the hill and their voices growing louder, he turned to the cat, ensnared by dizziness. Strangely, he noticed the animal had stopped hissing.

‘You there!’ the first words cut through his somewhat harmless delirium, a woman’s voice. Daniil raised his head and wiped the blood from his hand, observing the group of men and women surrounded by children, the original two among them.

‘Why are you harassing my children? I’ll teach you a lesson, I swear it on my mother’s grave!’

He believed she meant what she said, if only by looking at the older boys and a couple of old men who were already armed with pitchforks and truncheons. But he didn’t reply. Instead, he turned back to the cage and broke the final seal holding it in place. As soon as he did, three things happened almost simultaneously: the trap finally dismantled, the dark cat broke free, and the gypsy woman’s threats turned to horrifying laments.

‘What have you done?’ she wailed, turning to the men, and giving orders in her tongue, her pace quickening. As the whole scene held him in place, Daniil saw the boys and men running towards him, swearing and with faces twisted with unease. He also noticed the animal dropping into the grass and bolting desperately in the other direction, towards the nearby patches of woodland. Turning away from the cat, he braced himself to meet the charging group of men who left their matron behind, holding the knife in front of him.

His readiness turned to confusion when, instead of attacking him, the men and boys ran past him like the wind’s fury, beginning to chase the loose tomcat that he could no longer see.

‘What have you done, oh Virgin Mary and Saint Joseph, what have you done?’ the woman threw her hands and face to the sky.

‘Your offspring found it fit to torment a helpless beast,’ the monk replied, sensing already that he had interfered with things he was not supposed to. ‘So, I freed it!

‘Curses shall befall you, stupid man!’ she said, ignoring his explanation.

If curses were the woman’s choice, he had his own. The monks knew many, although only those who turned from God dared to use them. He pulled over his tunic the cross he had at his neck and let the hood slide off his grey hair. The woman saw it, and for the first time, she took a step back.

‘What of the priestly curses, woman; aren’t you afraid of them?’

But she no longer listened. Her face showed disappointment and hopelessness as her eyes noticed her men and boys returning from the woods empty-handed. They lost the cat. She fell to her knees and began praying in her language.

The group passed the monk as they quarrelled among themselves, and Daniil felt as if he were no longer their concern. The boys helped the crying woman stand up and began pulling her along, worried. She scolded them and, between sighs, ordered them to leave her behind.

‘I’ll follow you, don’t wait for me!’ she said. ‘Go gather your clobber; we’ll leave this damned hill at daybreak!’

The gypsies followed their Queen’s words without comment.

‘The Devil has already marked you, hasn’t he?’ she said after a moment of silence, as she wiped her tears, crossed herself, and spat in the grass.

Daniil had no clue how she could have known. He had indeed been marked years ago, and the Paralei following his tracks every night since he left Simca were a dreadful reminder of that old covenant.

‘How would you know?’ he asked sombrely, putting his knife away and walking slowly towards the woman. She measured him with her eyes as he approached, dark and grey strands of dishevelled hair coming out from under her kerchief as she pulled it out in despair. Her brown, inquisitive eyes fell on his left arm, then on his hand.

‘That scratch there!’ she said. ‘That’s the mark of this demon.’

Daniil’s jaw twitched.

‘The devil you’ve just released into the world.’

Her words were spoken as definitively as if they had been chiselled in stone.

‘I’ve seen demons, woman, and that creature wasn’t one.’

Though words such as these were uncommon among ordinary folk, the woman remained unimpressed, waving her hand wearily and sinking onto the grass, gasping for breath. Daniil did speak with conviction, but he couldn’t ignore the hint of gypsy witchcraft and spells in the woman’s visible despair and disappointment. It was an omen of something he was missing.

As she regained her breath, Daniil observed her closely. She was neither young nor overly thin, and the ascent up the hill seemed to have taken a toll on her. Her eyes, shaded by thick lashes, followed the quarrel of a pair of crows over an acorn nearby.

‘Not all demons are alike, priest. You should know that,’ she said, raising her finger as if imparting a lesson. ‘This was a devil’s-tomcat. A spiriduş, you see. Sarsailă, by its name.’

Daniil had perused old tomes in his youth, manuscripts left behind by long-dead abbots from the monasteries where he sought shelter during his travels. They contained stories of failed exorcisms, warnings, and ways to ward against all sorts of demons and archdemons. Yet, none of those texts mentioned creatures like the one he heard of now.

‘A half-demon at that,’ the woman continued, wiping sweat from her temples beneath her kerchief, then covering her face with her palms. ‘One with its legs walking both worlds, and it’s only I who’s at fault for bringing him into ours.’

‘A half-demon?’ Daniil furrowed his brow as he approached, intrigued.

He never thought much of the ways of her people to fight the evil chasing him. All his life, he had placed his faith in the hands of saints and the Almighty. Glancing over his shoulder, a habit he had acquired over many years, he looked to the mountains he had left behind on his journey and the forest lying at their feet. They were silent, but he knew the unholy beasts were lurking somewhere within, on his trail. The longer he lingered, the closer they would be to catching his scent.

‘Tell me about the cat’, he urged, sitting beside her. She initially ignored him, perhaps pondering where to start, Daniil believed. Then, with a swift motion, she grabbed a short stick from the grass and hurled it towards the crows, shooing them away.

‘Go croak somewhere else, damn you!’ she exclaimed, her expression now troubled as she turned to face the man.

‘You’ll find out soon enough on your own, I’m afraid. But maybe the sooner you know, the better,’ she continued. ‘We’re wicker workers, my people and I. Artisans. Freed from our service to the Church, we now wander, and our livelihoods depend on the whims of fate. There are only so many prayers one can offer in vain, and only so many baskets one can sell. And hunger is merciless, you see. It leads one astray…’

As she spoke, Daniil observed her intently, noticing how she rubbed her left, calloused palm with her right thumb.

‘I grew up hearing tales of the spiriduş. My grandmother was the witch of our family, she told us stories of them—how to birth them and bend them to your will. She warned us against meddling with their kind, too. But when your children are starving and your only shelter is the open sky, tales of an old witch no longer hold fear.’

She got quiet briefly, turning to the monk with a solemn expression.

‘You’re a man of letters, are you not? So, tell me: have you ever read of cats hatching from eggs in your books?’

The monk furrowed his brow, taken aback by her question.

‘I can’t say I have,’ he replied honestly.

The woman let out a heavy sigh. ‘Well,’ she began, her tone laden with sorrow, ‘that’s how this devilish tomcat came into the world.’ With a heavy heart, she continued her tale.

‘My grandmother used to say it had to be either an abandoned egg of a dark-feathered hen or a swallow. But I never thought it would come true. So, one day, I set aside a random egg as I boiled the others for dinner. I held it close to my breast, warming it with my touch, for nine days. During that time, I didn’t speak a word to anyone, nor did I utter a prayer. And on the ninth day, at the stroke of midnight—go figure! —the egg hatched…’

Her voice faltered, and she bit her lip, struggling to continue.

‘What a slink of a kitten!’ she let out, shivering. ‘’Twas no bigger than a chick, frail, furless, ugly, and covered in stinky blood. I could have just thrown it away to the birds and let it die, but I didn’t have the heart to do it. Instead, I washed it after everyone went to sleep, hid it in my best clay pot, and threw a pile of tatters over it. I fed it milk for weeks until it built itself up and could stand on its own legs, then freed it, thinking it would one day run away. Months passed, and I even began to forget about its unholy birth.’

The gypsy queen paused as she heaved a long sigh.

‘Boys are boys, they are hard around the edges. But my daughter…’ Her voice trembled. ‘My daughter loved playing with it and caring for it.’

Daniil noticed the grief in her voice, and now that he thought of it, he saw no girl running after the dark cat with the rest of the camp.

The woman’s voice quivered as she began to recount her sorrows, struggling to hold back tears.

‘I dreamt of it one night, but it didn’t feel like a dream. There was the camp, the hills, the mountains… and the tomcat. It was rubbing itself against my legs, begging to be petted. And I did. Then I heard a voice, calling out my name… It kept saying ‘Rahela, Rahela’. I looked around and saw no one. Just me and the cat. I turned to it, confused, and as soon as I looked into its fern-green eyes, the voice began telling me things. It told me its name. It said I was a good mother, that my children didn’t deserve to starve… And that it could help me. For a price.’

‘The blood of the innocent. The soul of my dearest.’

Daniil shook his head, trying to push away his own memories of that night in the abandoned cabin. The night he traded his own soul for mere trinkets.

‘You see, my daughter was so sick… Oh, Blessed Virgin Mary! She was only playing with that cat because she couldn’t wander outside with her brothers. In her good days, she was hot as a stove, and in her bad days, she was spewing blood. The smooth-tongued voice told me it wouldn’t be long until the boys fell ill too. And that it could help me save them and give us all we needed to prosper—if only I let my sick girl go with it. ‘So we can play together,’ it said. It told me she was nearly gone anyway, and I could save at least the boys and have no trouble feeding them for as long as I lived.’

The woman’s voice broke as she continued.

‘I said yes, didn’t I? I sacrificed my girl!’ she sobbed. ‘I said yes…’

She suddenly grabbed him by his sleeves and fell to her knees.

‘Forgive me, Oh God! Please, forgive me!’

The woman was deeply tormented, he was sure of it. Having your arm twisted to hand over something that isn’t rightfully yours must be unspeakably woeful. Surrendering the soul of someone you hold most dear so that others may live is a heart-wrenching sacrilege. He didn’t possess the power to forgive her; no one did. She had to find forgiveness within herself, an eternally vicious task. If he had been capable of this many years ago, perhaps he wouldn’t find himself now with hellhounds in his tail.

‘May the Lord absolve you of your sins woman’, were the only words of comfort he could utter.

He only just began noticing the sunset was close, and the closest shelter was Rahela’s camp. He couldn’t lie; he expected to at least be invited to spend the night in their tents, even if he was going to refuse, as he knew he had to resume his journey at once. However, the woman didn’t say a word. If anything, her gestures as she stood off the ground, beginning to gradually pull away, told him he was not welcomed.

‘I shall return to my children now, Father,’ she said, biting her lips.

Although it wasn’t hard to imagine the rest of the story, Daniil sensed there were things she kept to herself. The spiriduş was perhaps sent away, but creatures such as these, he believed, always find their way back. When they couldn’t get rid of it, the gypsies caged it and kept it away from the camp so children wouldn’t play with it, which obviously didn’t work either.

‘What aren’t you telling me?’ he demanded as his patience was running thin. ‘You said I was marked. That curses will follow me. You told me I will soon find it all out on my own. Yet all you did was confess to your sins and witchcraft.’

The queen hesitated and her eyes followed the red of the sky.

‘My grandmother,’ she finally said with a low voice, ‘she knew many things about these demons. But there was something she never found out, and for that, she warned us to never meddle with them. She never knew how to safely break the bond with them.’

Rahela sighed.

‘You see, I tried sending the spiriduş away in many ways. I tied it in a sack and travelled over many hills and abandoned it there… I dropped it in the fountains… I even broke its neck and left it hanging in the woods or buried it. But every time I returned home, Sarsailă was there. Purring, asking for affection during the day, and showing up in my dreams every night, reminding me of my lost daughter.’

She turned to him and covered her mouth, almost as if she was ashamed.

‘There was one way to part ways with the spiriduş, but my heart wouldn’t let me. Until God led you on this unfortunate path. And that way is passing it to someone else. You freed it and it now has your blood’s scent. The curse is now yours, priest. You are Sarsailă’s new master until the day you die.’

She then added:

‘Or until you give it to someone else you wish death upon.’

A caw echoed in the valley as evening enveloped the sky. One of the crows the woman had shooed away earlier darted through the air violently, and the monk caught it with the corner of his eye. Both him and the queen quickly scoured the gloomy hill in silence, searching for the other crow. A muffled growl rustled through the tall grass as the bird fluttered its broken wings, its cries becoming rare until they ceased altogether.

Around its neck, a short muzzle drained its life to the last drop, and a pair of glaring, fern-green eyes stared ominously straight into the Daniil’s gaze.

***