But of all the things I had learned, one bit of knowledge eluded me, though I had sought it without end. I had never learned the mystery of Sarafina. Who she really was, how she was related to us, why she had been ousted from our band. Nor what was the nature of the curse she was said to carry.
Not until the night when my life nearly ended—did end, for all practical purposes. It did end—and a new one began. It was late autumn, and the year was 1848.
I was a young man then. Hotheaded and reckless. My family was about to pack up and move on yet again. Not because we had grown tired of the place but because the locals accused us of stealing livestock, and we knew the law would be on us soon.
Before we left, I had decided I would extract a pound of flesh from our accusers. More than a pound, actually.
The moon was newly born that night; only a strand of silver gleamed in the sky as I crept into the farmer’s barnyard. And even that light was blotted out more and more often as long, clawlike fingers of blue-black clouds reached across its slender arch. I didn’t care what I stole that night, so long as I took something. It was retribution. It was repayment for the slander done to me and mine.
The first animal I came upon was a bearded billy goat. I remember it well … fawn and white, and shaggy. Horns curving back, away from its head. Hooves in sad need of trimming, like the too-long fingernails of an old man.
Slipping a rope around its neck, I led the goat away from the shed where it had been penned. Across the worn ground where, by day, the hens would peck and dig. Now they were roosting along the top rail of the fence and in the scraggly young saplings here and there. The goat came along easily, right up until I passed through the gate and started away from the barnyard. Then it stopped all of a sudden, planting its forefeet and bleating loud and long and plaintively. It was like a scream in the night.
I should have let the animal go. But pride in a young man is sometimes overblown, and in me it was combined with anger and fury and frustration.
So I kept tugging on the lead rope, dragging the animal through the lush green grasses, which were damp with night dew. It dragged its feet, tugging and thrashing its shaggy head from side to side, bawling like a lost calf.
The farmer never called out, never ordered me to stop or release the goat or anything else. I never even knew he’d stepped out of his house. That was how silently death came for me that night. One moment I was cussing at an ornery goat, turning and tugging, the rope over my shoulder and the goat behind me. And the next I was facedown on the ground, my ears ringing from the explosion of the gunshot that had come as if from nowhere.
I could not believe it had happened so easily, so suddenly. Without fanfare or drama. The farmer had simply pulled the trigger of his black powder rifle, sending an earsplitting roar through the night and a lead ball through my back.
Shock and pain screamed in me in the seconds after I hit the ground. I felt, for a moment, the fire of the ball’s path and the rush of the warm blood soaking my clothes. But then something far more frightening than pain came to me.
Numbness.
It began at my feet, as best I can recall. And I wasn’t aware of it as it happened but afterward, when I heard the farmer’s footfalls coming closer. I realized that I could not move, that I could not feel my feet. Within a second of that realization I felt the numbness spreading, creeping up my legs as steadily as a rising tide. My hips and pelvis, my belly. It rose further, and the pain that was like a fire in my back vanished. It simply vanished.
I felt nothing. I tried to move my arms, my legs, but I could not.
I gasped in shock when my body suddenly flipped, for I had not even felt the toe of the cruel farmer’s boot as he used it to roll me onto my back. But I saw the hate in his eyes as he stared down at me, his weathered face like the bark of an aging cherry tree, white whiskers long and unkempt.
“Thievin’ Gypsy scum,” he said. He spat on me, and then turned and walked away, taking his goat with him.
He hadn’t killed me.
The relief of that was soon overruled by the realization that he would have, had he not been certain I would die on my own within a few minutes. I could not feel the blood spreading beneath me, staining the grass. But I sensed it flowing from my body, felt myself weakening steadily from the loss of it. Felt myself … dying.
I heard his footsteps retreating. Heard the door of his ramshackle house banging closed. And then I heard nothing beyond the gentle wind of the night, whispering in the trees. Whispering my name.
“Oh, sweet Dante,” a voice said from very nearby. Not the wind. Not this time. “You’ve brought this upon yourself far more quickly than I would have liked.”
I moved my eyes, turned my head very slightly, but only that. For the most part, my eyes seemed to be the only part of me I was still able to command.
Sarafina stood beside me, silhouetted by the night, like some dark angel. Those black fingers of cloud stretched over the stars behind her. I tried to speak, but the words came so softly, I knew she could not hear them. Then she knelt and bent close to me, and with every ounce of strength in me, I managed to say, “Sarafina … I am dying.”
Her soft hand brushed my dark hair away from my forehead. “No, Dante. You know full well I shall not let that hap pen.”
“B-but …”
“Hush. It is almost time.” She glanced down at my body, and I wondered what she saw. “You’ve nearly bled to death. It will only be another moment.”
My eyes widened, and panic choked me. “Sarafina!” I rasped, fear giving my voice new strength, though it still emerged as little more than a harsh whisper. “Please!”
“Trust me, my darling. You will not die.”
“But …”
“You will not die,” she said again.
I lay there, fading, fading, darkness closing in around the edges of my vision. I realized dully that she looked no different to me than she had when I’d seen her last. No older. No different at all.
“There now. That’s better.”
My eyes opened, fell closed, opened again. My breaths came shallow and sparse, and I could feel my heartbeat. It pounded in my ears, ever slower … slower … slower….
“Listen to me, my special one,” she said, and her voice seemed to come from very far away, as if she spoke to me from the depths of a cave. “You have a choice to make, and it must be made now. There will be no time to deliberate. Do you wish to die? Here and now? Or live, though it will mean living in exile, as I do? Hated by the family, outcast and driven away.”
I felt weak. As if I were becoming a shadow. I didn’t understand her questions.
“Life or death, Dante? Speak your answer. If you delay, the choice will be gone. You will die. Tell me now. Which will it be? Life … or death?”
I strained to form the single word but never heard it emerge from my lips or felt them move at all. It was all I could do to think the word with the intention of speaking it aloud. Life.
“Good.”
She moved. My vision was fading, so that I could not see where she went, what she did. Then she pressed something warm and wet to my lips and whispered, “Drink, Dante. This is the elixir that will make you live. Drink.”
The warm, thick liquid touched my lips, and there was a quickening of my senses, followed at once by a shocking sensation of need. I closed my mouth around the font she offered and nursed at it like a suckling babe. Life seemed to awaken in me, along with a hunger such as I had never