It surprised the young boy to see how quickly the man died.
He’d only ever used his sharpened stick to stab at fish from the pool at the bottom of the valley. He’d always watched in wonder as skewered fish flapped and threw themselves about the river bank in their long drawn out dances of death. They would always fight for survival with every drop of their might until their life finally bled out of them. But this man, this Slovak gypsy, who’d pulled a knife and had laughed wickedly, had gone down and hadn’t moved from the moment he’d been struck. The stick stood protruding upwards from deep inside the man’s right eye, a fine rivulet of blood oozing from the socket.
The child crouched a little way away from the body, his fierce unblinking eyes on the corpse as if suspecting a trick. As if he expected the man to spring back to life and reach out at him, to choke the life out of him. The rat-faced man lay there, his back flat on the ground, his scowling, unmoving face turned upwards and to the side by the weight of the stick.
The boy could feel the blood beat in his ears. He was aware of the thumping in his chest and the ache in his clenched fist. His father had often told him of the Slovaks, bone-jawed and filthy, looting and stealing from the decent folk of the valleys and mountainsides of the southern Polish mountains, but he’d never seen one in the flesh. To him they’d been just stories, like those of ghosts and werewolves. Used by adults to keep him polite and quiet on a night. Now he felt guilt that he’d not believed his father, that he’d doubted monsters ever existed.
A strangled cry from away up the mountainside tore his eyes from the body. The cry came again from the ramshackle wooden house, teetering three hundred yards away on the rocky ridge above, this shriek even more desperate and shrill.
His mother.
An anger and a passion, the likes of which he’d never known in his twelve short years, coursed through him. He wrenched the stick from the man’s punctured eye and shot away up the mountainside, not even looking to see how he planted his shoes between the stones of the steep climb. His eyes remained fixed on the house and the wicked noises coming from within. There were men in the house. He could hear them now clearly – cruel laughter and shouts. He thought back to the dead gypsy at the river bank and imagined his house full of their type, pushing and taunting his mother, demanding food and money from her. There was only one aim in his mind. To act as his father would act, as any good shepherd would, to protect his own.
He leapt from the rocks of the river bank onto the dirt track, a short way from the front of the house. He landed and his left foot went from under him, skidding on the gravel. He went down, gashing his knee amongst the stones, skinning the knuckles of his hand holding the stick. The shutters of the house were closed against the morning sun but inside he could hear the angry growl of coarse voices and hard laughter, joined now and then by the pleading voice of his mother.
He whimpered and staggered to his feet; years of working atop the treacherous high ridge of the Tatras had taught him to ignore pain. He stumbled on towards the door, reaching out to the handle the very moment it was pulled open from inside. Instantly he knew it wasn’t his father framed in the doorway. The thin figure could only be one of them; his father always having to stoop his vast bulk beneath the lintel of the door. Without thinking, he closed his eyes and thrust his stick forwards with all the force he could summon from within. It snagged against something soft and then, moments later, continued its drive upwards, more slowly now, as if some force was pushing against the sharpened point. It reminded him of how he sometimes had to force his knife through chunks of mutton on his plate.
The stick slid five inches beyond the hang of the man’s shirt. He grunted and sank to his knees, his hands clutching weakly at the shaft. The handle of a knife glinted in his belt and instantly the child gathered it into his hand, leaping over the tumbling figure and through the open doorway.
A heavily bearded man stood to the right of him, the sneer on his hairy face foundering in surprise as the child leapt inside. Something lay curled in one corner of the room and he saw his mother, her clothing torn to shreds, on her hands and knees. A man, stripped beneath the waist, was forcing himself towards her.
At once his mother turned her head and cried out, pleading for the boy to be left alone. The hairy man spat something dark and reached forward to strike at him. Instinctively, the boy ducked and, finding himself between the man’s legs, drove the blade of the dagger upwards to the hilt with all his might. The man shrieked and staggered backwards against the wall, clutching at his butchered parts, blood pouring between his legs, out over the blade and his hands, onto the floor in a wild torrent.
The boy looked back at the man behind his mother. He’d now pushed himself away from her and had turned, his yellow-white thighs flecked with froth and blood, a monstrous looking member bobbing evilly between his legs. It confused and repulsed the child, how it wavered and hung like a weapon tilted towards him. The man shouted something in a language the boy didn’t understand and charged, kicking out with a mud-caked foot. The child was too quick for him and had turned and reached the far wall cupboard by the time the Slovak had regained his balance. As the boy passed the body curled in the corner, he recognised it instantly as his father, his face submerged in a pool of his own blood, wickedly slain with a knife in the back. A weight of grief and sickness crashed into him, almost dragging the child onto the floor.
The man shouted again. The boy tore open the cupboard drawing the revolver he knew his father always kept. The man’s eyes flashed and he ran forward, his tone more urgent, his hands raised.
The revolver blew itself out of child’s hands in the same instant that the man’s head blew backwards, sending him tumbling to the floor, the wooden floorboards showered in a vanilla and crimson spray of flesh and bone.
Finally silence flooded into the house and enveloped the room, the only sound now being the ringing of the boy’s ears from the gun. He wondered if he’d been deafened, until he heard his own voice call out.
“Mama!” he cried, racing to his mother, throwing himself into her side with a wide embrace.
He thought it strange how she didn’t wrap her arms around him, at least until he drenched his hands on the deep gash in her neck.
He never saw them arrive. He never heard their footsteps on the front porch of the house, their horrified cries when they first laid their eyes on the carnage in the room, capped their hands to their mouths in an attempt to hide their revulsion and mask the stench from the bodies. Trapped on the faint edge of unconsciousness between hunger and grief, the first time the boy was aware of the Fathers was when one of them knelt forward and gathered him from the half-naked woman, believing the child to be a victim amongst the dead.
They’d come to the valley as missionaries, to spread the word and message of their Catholic faith, to shepherd the desolate and the unguided towards the light. They’d never expected to find such horror as this.
The boy remembered how the Father had muttered about miracles the instant that he’d stirred and had his cheek cupped by the Father’s hand.
“What is your name, my child?” the Father asked, his eyes full of concern and sorrow.
“Tacit,” said the boy to the Priest, feeling very small under the heavy eyebrows of the missionary. He sniffed and brushed the hair weakly from his dead mother’s face. “Poldek Tacit.”