My Swordhand Is Singing Read Online Free PDF

priest had paid for only half his wood.
    Should he tell his father there were Gypsies in the village? He thought better of it. He could see his father’s look of indifference already, and besides, he felt something for them. If his father poured scorn on them the way he poured scorn on everything else, it would be one more thing to have happy dreams about that Peter would have lost. One more thing to push them apart.
    Like the box. It was one of Peter’s earliest memories, and it was a painful one. His father had a long wooden box that had always been with them, but Peter had never seen inside it. Wherever they had been, wherever they had lived, the box had always been there. Tomas always tucked it away out of sight under his mattress, and though Peter couldn’t remember, he knew Tomas must once have told him never to open it.
    As Peter had grown, so had his curiosity. One day it got the better of him. He’d been about to open the box when his father came into the room. Tomas thrashed Peter so hard that every night for weeks afterward he woke from the pain. But Tomas also did something worse.
    On the shelf by Peter’s bed sat the wooden goose Tomas had carved the day he gave his son his knife. Tomas snatched the carving from the shelf and threw it on the floor, then crushed it with his boot. Then he threw the pieces into the fire.
    To this day, Peter resented it. What could be so important that Tomas had to keep it from him? The box was like his life, as far as Peter could see—something he had no control over, something shut away, not to be talked about, full of secrets and riches he must not explore.
     
    Shutters barred every window as Peter walked out of Chust, but he could hear the sound of singing from every home he passed. Another form of protection, for everyone knew you should sing on St. Andrew’s Eve to keep evil away.
    Peter shrugged. It was the first night of the year, when evil was loosed on the world, and all the villagers had to protect themselves with were tar and singing.
    Above his head he suddenly heard the beat of wings and then the honking of geese. He looked up to see the birds streaming their way across the sky like a living arrowhead.
    “Very late,” Peter whispered to them. “Very late to be heading south.”
    But at least the geese could leave; late or not, they could take flight away from the cold heart of winter.
    For everyone else, it was a long journey indeed to the safety of spring.
     
    7
    Sheep and Wolves
    For the next few days Peter worked hard, chopping and delivering as much wood as he could before the snows really bit deep. On about half the days he managed to get his father to help him. The rest of the time Tomas sat by the stove in the hut, drinking his way through a small cask of slivovitz that he’d bought with the money Peter brought back from his last trip to Chust.
    Late one morning, as they were chopping logs from the lumber pile, Tomas dropped his axe. Not for the first time Peter noticed his father’s hands shaking. Tomas bent to pick the axe up from the snow but dropped it twice more before he began to swing it again.
    “Get on with your work, Peter,” he said gruffly, seeing his son staring at him.
    Peter didn’t move.
    “It’s cold out here, isn’t it?” Tomas said, pausing. “Can’t keep my damn hands still.”
    “Yes, Father,” Peter said. “The wind’s cruel today.”
    But later, back in the warmth of the hut, Tomas’s hands were still shaking.
     
    Peter and Sultan made a dozen trips around the village, their battered cart laden and creaking through the snow. Most people had good stores of seasoned logs already, but no one would refuse another delivery; you could never be sure how hard the winter might be. The difficult thing was getting people to pay for the wood straightaway, but nevertheless Peter came home most days with coins to put in the tin under the loose stone in the corner of the hut.
     
    One day, Peter came home with more than money.