When the wind bites the sails and the wood slips steady through the water, free of the waves that pound the harbor—at that moment, I know we have begun our journey.

I note July 6 in the log, but that date says nothing. Twelve o’clock on the hour, with a cold east wind. Data only.

Not a gray sky, not the steel-colored sea surrounded by a persistent fog that should not remain at noon. Not the shouts of my sailors while they work the sails.

Facts scrawled in ink, without real meaning.

The crew consists of five men, two deck officers, the cook, and me.

Men from Russia, Vojvodina, Slovenia, Dalmatia, and Romania.

We leave the port of Varna, entering the Black Sea, on a route that will lead us from the East to cross the Aegean Sea, the Mediterranean, hugging the European coast before at last coming to port in England.

The route of ice and salt.

The gypsies, on their mounts, watched our movements and the actions of those who remained on land. Their dark hands gripped drawn weapons, at the ready, as if expecting that someone might attempt to stop us, prepared to repel any attack, willing to offer their blood in exchange for our safe departure.

An honor guard: excessive protection for a few boxes of clay and dirt.

What orders did they receive, precisely?

My second officer, Muresh, heard that the gypsies had arrived in Varna at noon yesterday, that they had stood at the entrance of the port, under the sun, for hours, indifferent to the slow passing of men and animals that brushed by them without ceasing.

Those men of the steppes, of the frozen horizon, hate the touch of strangers and - nevertheless - they remained there, waiting until nightfall to deliver their cargo.

Why?

The man who commanded them looked me in the eye a second before we set sail.

That I had touched one of his men was an affront. That he could not take revenge was a greater stigma still.

I had declared them slaves, servants.

And my blood had escaped them.

They looked upon me with infinite hatred, in which I could descry the free land they had lost, the lives without shadows they offered in exchange for something much more valuable than their pride, the one quality that has always sustained them in so many lands that were never theirs.

The chief Tzigane uncovered his neck with a slight gesture of defiance.

Mayhap he wished to convey that had his master not told them that those boxes must set sail, I should be dead for touching one of his men.

Or mayhap the message was another. Perchance he signaled that the taste of their skins was the right of another.

Not their own. Never their own.

Yet, until their master claimed that right, their flesh still belonged to them, completely.

As soon as we left the port, once the moorings were coiled and stowed, when it became clear that his mission was over, the Tzigane shouted something, a phrase.

His voice reached me weak, void of nuance. Mayhap a message, an explanation, an insult, a terrible truth.

“Denn die Todten reiten schnell!”

Then he spurred the horses, and he and his men galloped away.

The ominous words echoed in my heart:

“For the dead travel fast.”