Black Spring by Alison Croggon

nothing seemed to be stolen. It was, everyone agreed, a deep mystery, and the old women declared that we would all be murdered in our beds and locked their doors.
    That evening, as the long summer twilight deepened over the plains, the Wizard Ezra was seen at the border stone, and the village’s curiosity was suddenly edged with fear. Old Yuri, who had seen him from a distance as he brought his goats in for the night, reported that the Wizard Ezra bent to the ground and sniffed the bloodstains and then smeared a little of the blood — or was it the earth of the death-site? — on his forehead. Others saw the wizard striding through the village toward his house, where he shut himself in. When Fatima knocked on his door on some pretext, only the mute opened it, and he made clear that his master was not to be disturbed. Ezra wasn’t seen for two days, although his mute was sent out to bring him raki and food, and for those two days the villagers went silent, as if they didn’t dare even to whisper their fears in case the Devil heard them and came running.
    We discussed the murder in the schoolroom the next day. Lina had heard of the Wizard Ezra’s visit to the site of Surinam’s murder. “What’s it got to do with him?” she said scornfully. “Wizards are always poking their noses in where they’re not wanted.”
    “You shouldn’t speak about the wizards like that!” I said, scandalized and a little admiring.
    “They don’t frighten me!” said Lina. “Just because you’re a quaking goose doesn’t mean that everyone else is.”
    There was a short silence, and then Damek, who had been scowling at his book, looked up. “If it’s vendetta, it is wizard’s business,” he said.
    “Well, I still don’t see what it has to do with Wizard Ezra,” said Lina. “It’s not our vendetta. Though wouldn’t it be exciting if it was?” She looked up, her eyes sparkling. “Nothing interesting ever happens here.”
    Nobody had mentioned that possibility out loud, but I suddenly understood why I had been hushed that morning when I had asked my mother about the murder and why people were looking sideways at each other, as if they were communicating in a secret code. Everyone was afraid that it might, after all, be our vendetta. I felt a clutch of foreboding in my middle, and for a moment almost felt as if I might be sick.
    “No, Miss Lina, a vendetta here would not be at all interesting,” said Mr. Herodias, who had been listening to the conversation with his mouth drawn into a thin, disapproving line. “And I would thank you to pay some attention to the irregular verbs on the page before you, if you would be so kind.”
    After that it was all Latin and Greek, and my oppression dissolved in the steady concentration the lesson demanded. Later, when the village children gathered after dinner to play in the long evening, we chatted in a desultory fashion about the dead man, but nobody had anything new to report. After Lina declared that it would be much better if the murder were part of a bandit war than a boring old vendetta, we decided to play a game of bandits instead. We were young and heedless, after all; although events made deep impressions on our minds, they were rapidly effaced, just as finger holes in a lump of rising dough will plump out and disappear.
    The Wizard Ezra emerged from his house the following day, but such was the expression on his face that no one dared to ask him any questions. He demanded a bag of provisions from the inn, then took his staff and his mute and strode off down the road that leads toward the mountains. He wasn’t seen for two weeks, and by then the anxiety of our elders had faded into the background of our little concerns, and we had mostly forgotten about the whole affair.

A child’s perceptions are partial and often mistaken, and there was much that happened in the following weeks that I didn’t fully understand until later. As I told you, I was very happy that summer: my