Mulengro, page 1
mulengro
by Charles de Lint
from Tom Doherty Associates
Angel of Darkness
Dreams Underfoot
The Fair at EmainMacha
Forests of the Heart
From a Whisper to a Scream
Greenmantle
Into the Green
The Ivory and the Horn
Jack of Kinrowan
The Little Country
Memory and Dream
Moonheart
Moonlight and Vines
Mulengro
The Onion Girl
Someplace to Be Flying
Spirits in the Wires
Spiritwalk
Svaha
Tapping the Dream Tree
Trader
Yarrow
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Grateful acknowledgment is made to Robin Williamson for permission to use a portion of “The Road the Gypsies Go” from the albumA Glint at the Kindling, copyright © 1979 by Robin Williamson. For further information on Robin Williamson, write: Pig’s Whisker Music Press, P.O. Box 27522, Los Angeles, CA 90027; or Pig’s Whisker Music Press, BCM 4797, London WCIN 3XX, England.
Also thanks to Ewan MacColl for the use of the following:
“The Moving-On Song,” “Goodbye to the Thirty-Foot Trailer,” and “The Travelling People.” Words and music by Ewan MacColl, copyright © 1964, 1967 by Stormking Music Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
MULENGRO
Copyright © 1985 by Charles de Lint
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
Originally published in October 1985 by Ace Fantasy Books
An Orb Edition
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor.com
ISBN 0-312-87399-9
First Orb Edition: December 2003
Printed in the United States of America
0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
for
Charles R. Saunders
who got the ball rolling
Andrew J. Offutt
who pushed it
a little further
and for those folks
who bounced it back and forth
a few times:
Barry Blair
Roger Camm
John Charette
Larry Dickison
Ronald Grossey
Loay Hall
Richard Hall
Gordon Linzner
Contents
Foreword:
Part One: patteran
Part Two: mulengi dori
Part Three: czardas
Epilogue
Afterword
Glossary
Introduction
When Mulengro first appeared in 1985, readers picked it up expecting the usual de Lint novel. But sometimes the darkness calls, and I find myself approaching it, to try to understand it. The Otherworld contains as much darkness as it does ambiguity and light, and to ignore it entirely strikes me as only telling half the story.
While Mulengro has many of the elements that readers have come to expect in my work, it also contains graphic descriptions of violence and its aftereffects. It also portrays hope0, love, humor, loyalty, and personal growth. Almost twenty years have passed, and I remain proud of this story about modern Romany culture.
I can well understand that some people prefer not to read horror fiction, and in subsequent work where I explored the dark, I used the pseudonym Samuel M. Key. No secret was made of the fact that the pseudonym was mine, since it was merely a device to let readers know in advance that they could expect a darker story between the covers. As fate (or actually, my publisher) would have it, the Sam Key books are now being published under my own name, with Forewords similar to this. I suppose this indicates a measure of success in my career, and certainly I’ve received plenty of mail from people who enjoy these books as much as my others, but I still wanted to give a cautionary heads-up, in case this story might cause anyone discomfort.
“Far and near as fool’s fire,
they come glittering through the gloom.
Their tongues as strong and nimble,
as would bind the looms of luck. ...”
—from “The Road the Gypsies Go”
by Robin Williamson
“The boshom engro kils, he kils,
The tawnie juva gils, she gils,
A puro Romano gillie,
Now shoon the Romano gillie. “
—traditional Lowara Romany refrain
[The fellow with fiddle plays, he plays,
The little lassie sings, she sings
An ancient Gypsy ditty,
Now hear the Gypsy ditty]
Part One
patteran
With every light another color.
—Romany description of themselves
Wagon, tent, or trailer born,
last month, last year, in far-off days;
born here or a thousand miles away,
there’s always men nearby who’ll say:
You better get born in someplace else,
So move along, get along, move along, get along!
Go! Move! Shift!
—from “The Moving-On Song”
by Ewan MacColl
one
Janfri Yayal watched his house burn down without expression.
The two-story, wood-frame structure was beyond rescue. Flames leapt half its height into the night skies. Smoke erupted from windows and eaves, roiling upward like a ghost escaping the doomed flesh of its host body. A gasp came from the watching crowd as a section of roof collapsed in a shower of sparks. The firemen pulled back, all too aware of how ineffectual their efforts were at this point. Janfri’s only response was a nerve that twitched in his cheek.
The red light of the flames and the glare of the rotating beacons on the police cars and fire trucks flickered across his dark skin, highlighting the strong features set in their mask of indifference. He was oblivious to the growing crowd of thrill-seekers who jostled for position against the hastily-erected barricades that the police had set up. He watched the home he’d known for three years burning and remembered other fires. Not the cook and camp fires of his childhood, nor the pleasant crack and spit of seasoned wood burning in a stone hearth. Instead his mind thrust up memories of a man set afire and the crowd around him, jeering and laying wagers as to how long he would live. Of the wagons of his parents and grandparents and others of their kumpania burning in the night. Of the men who wore the four-armed symbol of the swastika and set countries alight with the same single-minded purpose with which they burned Gypsy wagons.
But there were no swastikas here. It was another symbol that had erased the expression from Janfri’s features. He had seen it on the wall of his home before the flames and smoke took it from his sight—a scrawl of black paint that was meaningless to the Gaje, the non-Gypsies, but that he understood with a bleak emptiness. It meant marhime. Ceremonially defiled. Unclean. It was a message from another Rom to him that there was no welcome among the Gypsies for a Rom who had become too Gaje. And yet, though he understood, he could not believe that one of his people could have done such a thing. Such a display of violence was not the way of the Rom. One who was marhime was not tolerated in the company of o phral, the true Rom. He was ostracized from every facet of Rom society, but he was not treated with violence. Or fire.
And yet. . . He had seen the symbol, the black paint with the excess liquid dripping from its lines like drops of blood; and who else but a Rom knew that he was one of their own? Who else but a Rom would know the secret patrin and defile the wall of his home with it?
“Jesus, John,” a voice said in hushed tones at his side. “You’ve lost everything.”
Janfri’s companion knew him as John Owczarek—one of Janfri’s Gaje names. Like all Gypsies, Janfri used and discarded names as a Gajo might a suit of clothes. Only the other Rom of his kumpania knew him as Janfri la Yayal—Janfri son of Yayal—and they were most likely to call him by his nickname, o Boshbaro, “the Big Fiddle,” for his skill on the instrument that was at this moment tucked under his arm, forgotten. To Rom who didn’t know him as well he was simply Boshengro, “the fellow who plays the fiddle.”
“I sure as hell hope you’ve got enough insurance to cover it,” Tom Shaw added. He glanced at Janfri’s face, puzzled by his friend’s lack of emotion. It had to be shock, he decided, because the stiff lack of response he saw in Janfri’s features simply didn’t jibe with the man Tom knew him to be. The John Owczarek that Tom knew was expansive in his moods, apt to gigantic joys and sorrows.
Tom stood a half head taller than his friend. He was a burly six-two, barrel-chested and meaty. Amongst the Gypsies, his size would label him as an im
“John . . .” he tried again, touching his friend’s arm. The wiry muscles were stiff under the light cloth of Janfri’s coat.
The Gypsy turned slowly to regard him. “Yekka buliasa nashti beshes pe done grastende,” he said softly. Forgetting himself, he spoke Romany. With one behind you cannot sit on two horses. He saw the puzzlement rise in Tom’s eyes, but made no attempt to explain. Let Tom think he spoke Hungarian. But the old saying rang all too true in his own mind. One was either Rom or Gajo. There was no in between.
“Listen, John,” Tom said. “If you want a place to stay . . . ?”
Janfri shook his head. His dark features were pained now. A fire smoldered in the depths of his eyes that were such a dark brown they were almost black.
“There is no John Owczarek,” he said. He turned and, before Tom could stop him, disappeared into the crowd.
For a long moment Tom stood in shock. The noise of the crowd seemed to grow louder. The roar of the flames and the pushing, jostling bodies around him combined to throw off his sense of the here and now. The night was abruptly surreal, filled with strangeness and menace. A chill traveled up his spine. He stared into the crowd, trying to see what had become of his friend.
“John!” he cried. “John!”
But the night had swallowed up the man he knew as John Owczarek as completely as though he had never existed.
two
The body lay at the back of the alley and, looking at it, Detective-Sergeant Patrick Briggs of the Ottawa Police Force bit down hard on the well-chewed stem of his unlit briar. He thought he might be sick. Under the bright glare of the police photographer’s lights, there was no avoiding the gruesome sight. The body lay in a sprawl. The head, half severed from the neck, was on its side, facing Briggs, its glazed eyes holding his gaze with a vacant stare. A gory trail of abruptly disjoined muscle, esophagus, trachea, spinal cord, jugular veins and carotid arteries trailed from below the jaw. It looked, Briggs thought, as though something had chewed right through the neck.
The body itself had sustained wounds as well. The right hand and forearm had been opened to the bone—defense wounds caused by the victim’s unsuccessful attempt to fend off his attacker. The flesh and muscle hung in ribbons from the arm. The left shoulder was no prettier. The cloth of the man’s jacket hung in tatters, matted with blood, and clung wetly to the corpse and the ground around it. Briggs looked away, hoping his stomach would settle down.
He was a veteran of twenty-four years on the Force—the last fifteen of them in General Assignment. To some extent he was inured to the inevitable results of violence that his work brought him into contact with—more so than a civilian confronted with the same situation might be. But at the same time, that familiarity, the sheer volume of man’s brutality against his fellow man that he was forced to be witness to, fueled an anger in him that sometimes frightened him with its intensity. This . . . thing lying in the alley had once been a man. Someone had worked real hard to make it look like he’d been torn apart by some kind of animal, but Briggs wasn’t buying it.
“Paddy?”
Briggs looked up at his partner’s call. Will Sandler was a tall, sharp-featured black man who went through life in a constant state of suppressed tension. It showed in the taut pull of the skin at his temples, around his eyes and the corners of his mouth, in the birdlike darting of his gaze. He contrasted sharply with the unimposing figure that Briggs cut—five-eight with a perpetual slouch that made him appear shorter, dark hair that was prematurely gray at the temples, sorrowful eyes. His suit was rumpled, tie loose, shoes scuffed. Will, on the other hand, always looked like he’d just left his tailor’s. But the two men made an effective pair, for their strengths augmented each other’s weak points. Briggs was a slow mover, a deliberate collector of details with little imagination, while Will’s mind moved in intuitive lunges. Since they’d been paired, their success on cases had reached a departmental high of sixty-seven percent.
Briggs removed his pipe and thrust it into the breast pocket of his suit coat, stem down, as he moved closer to his partner. “What do you think?” he asked.
“Well, it sure as hell wasn’t a mugging. There was over fifty bucks in his wallet.”
“Animal or man?” Briggs asked, wanting his own feelings confirmed.
Will shook his head. “A doberman might leave a mess like that . . . but I don’t know. We’re going to have to wait to see what Cooper comes up with once he’s done the autopsy. Thing is,” he nodded to the ground, “there’s enough dirt here to hold a track, but Alec didn’t come up with anything we could even pretend was an animal’s.” Alec MacDonald was with forensics and was standing at the mouth of the alley waiting for the body to be removed so that he could finish up. “I think we’ve got us a psycho on our hands. That, or a case of spontaneous mutilation.” Will glanced at his partner, but Briggs didn’t smile. “Bad juju, Paddy,” he added softly. “All the way.”
Briggs nodded and studied the body again.
“Hodgins wants to know if we’re finished with it,” Will said.
Briggs glanced to where Al Hodgins waited with the medics. A pale green body-bag lay on the stretcher. Briggs imagined them moving the body and the head coming loose, bouncing down the alleyway with a wet sound. . . . He grimaced.
“Stan got all the shots we need?” he asked.
Will nodded.
“What about that?” Briggs pointed to a symbol that had been scratched into the dirt near the victim’s head. It was a circular shape, cut with three slashing lines. Two of them were so close together that the topmost line ran into the one below it.
Will called the photographer over. “Did you get a shot of that, Stan?”
Stan Miller nodded. “A nice close-up,” he said. He was chewing on a pencil stub and talked around it rather than removing it.
“What the hell’s it supposed to mean?” Will muttered.
Briggs motioned to the medics that they could collect the body and watched his partner. He could see the cogs turning under Will’s short Afro, but his face mirrored the bewilderment Briggs knew was on his own. He and Will moved aside as the medics took the body away. All that remained now were the chalk outlines of where it had lain and the thickening pools of blood. It never failed to shock Briggs as to how much blood there was in one human being. There were only about ten pints in a full-grown man, but when you saw it all spilled out in some alleyway like this, it looked like about ten gallons.
“Hey! Is one of you Briggs?”
Both men turned to see a patrolman standing at the mouth of the alley.
“Yeah?”
“I’ve found you a witness.”
The man’s name was Ralph Cleary and he was a wino. He was in bad shape tonight, hands shaking like he had palsy, shuffling his feet, staring at the detectives with scared rheumy eyes. He wore a baggy suit that even the Sally Ann wouldn’t have accepted on a bet. It hung from his sloped shoulders and slender frame in loose, oversized folds. His face was flushed with alcohol poisoning, blue veins prominent.
“Where’d you find him?” Briggs asked the patrolman.
“Down the street in the park. He was sitting on a bench, just shaking and talking to himself. When I asked if he’d seen anything, he just started telling me that he ‘didn’t hurt no one.’ “
Briggs nodded. “Okay. Thanks. Stick around, would you? I want to talk to you after we’ve had a word with him.”
“He’s all yours,” the patrolman said, turning Cleary over to them with obvious relief.
Briggs led the frightened man to the unmarked car that he and Will had arrived in. He helped him into the back seat, then climbed in beside him. Will got into the front and leaned over the seat to look at them.
