Storm Wolf (27 page)

A few days passed quickly. The steady work in the mine and the hearty meals that Beatrycze and Sybilla both prepared helped Alexei regain the strength he had lost in his struggle with the man-wolf in Lithuania and his long walk into Silesia. On Saturday, the miners only worked a half-day shift and would have the next day, Sunday, free to spend with their families above ground. On Saturday afternoon, having come back up into the daylight, Zygmunt led Alexei to the paymaster’s office, where they joined the long line of men waiting to receive their wages for the week. Step by slow step, they approached the paymaster’s office. Alexei was surprised at the handful of small coins he received.

“I must repay you and your sisters something for your kindness and hospitality,” Alexei insisted as they walked away from the office with all the other soot-covered men. He held out a few of the coins to his friend.

“Nonsense!” cried Zygmunt. “We are happy to share what we have with you. Besides, you will need most of those coins for the tavern tonight!”

“Tavern?” Alexei asked.

“Yes!” Zygmunt laughed as he explained the weekly routine. “We work all week in the mine and get paid on Saturday. We give what we must to the women for household expenses—and the rest? The rest we take and make our way from tavern to tavern—there are three taverns in our village here—to drink and sing and celebrate the end of another week beneath the earth! The end of another week in which we have survived without the mineshafts collapsing onto our backs. Another week in which no one has died in the earth… and another week closer to the wedding of Sybilla and Benedikt!”

“Will drinking cause me to lose control of the wolf magic?” Alexei wondered as he washed off the soot and grime. “Maybe it would be best if I made an excuse that I am not feeling well and stayed here, at home, and did not go to the taverns with Zygmunt and Benedikt. When was the last time I was drunk?” He couldn’t remember. The loss of self-control that came with drinking frightened him. “I have so little control over the wolf magic as it is. What if the transformation comes over me while I am in a crowded tavern with these men?”

Alexei made his way back into the house, drying his hair with the towel that hung around his shoulders. He was surprised to find Benedikt and another man already sitting before the hearth, laughing with Beatrycze and Sybilla, who was sitting on Benedikt’s lap. Two other women he did not know were also in the room, helping Beatrycze with supper preparations.

“Alexei!” roared Benedikt, who had apparently already had a mug or two of beer from the pitcher on the table. “This is my best friend from home, in Bohemia, who came with me to Silesia to find work! This is Ctirad! Ctirad, this is Alexei! He has come to Silesia from Estonia and works on the same crew as Zygmunt and myself!”

Ctirad stood to greet Alexei and staggered, splashing the beer that was still in his mug onto the floor. He was a tall man, like Benedikt, but a ruddy man. His freshly washed dark-orange hair was slicked down across his head, and the rosy glow of his cheeks had been enhanced by the beer he had already drained from his mug. He reached out to Alexei and pulled him into an embrace, the mug striking Alexei between his shoulders.

“Ctirad is to be my best man at the wedding,” Benedikt told Alexei.

Ctirad released Alexei and fell back into the chair before the hearth.

“And that is my oldest friend.” Sybilla leaned away from Benedikt, whose arm was tightly wrapped around her waist. Sybilla laughed, gesturing to the one of the other young women working with Beatrycze.

Alexei gestured to Sybilla’s friend in greeting, and the young woman, a lovely dark-haired girl who could have been another sister in the family, smiled at him. “I am called Otylia.”

“She is to be my bride’s maid-of-honor,” Benedikt said, holding out his empty mug. Zygmunt, coming into the room from changing his clothing, picked up the pitcher from the table and refilled the mugs of both Bohemian men. He got himself a mug from the shelf and filled it as well.

“And our other friend,” continued Sybilla, gesturing, “is Renia! She is to be the other bride’s maid.”

Renia, a fairer girl, also smiled at Alexei. “I am happy to make your acquaintance,” she was able to say to him in German.

“As I am happy to make yours,” Alexei struggled to answer, bowing politely to the two women.

“Renia is the one I shall be escorting to the wedding feast,” Zygmunt added, “as I will be the groom’s man after Ctirad.”

Alexei nodded. “So it is to be a large wedding?”

“Large enough!” Benedikt insisted. “It has taken both Zygmunt—as Sybilla’s older brother and responsible for her after their father died—and me nearly a year to save enough to pay for it!”

“Finish dressing and come join us!” Zygmunt urged Alexei. “There is no reason to wait for the taverns to open before we start drinking!” The three miners laughed and the roomful of friends burst into a drinking song, beer splashing about as the smells of supper filled the room.

“I will! I will! Just give me a moment to finish dressing!” Alexei laughed. The happiness of the room was contagious, and his fears of losing control of the wolf magic melted as he hurried into the other room to finish changing. He hadn’t felt so much friendship and happiness in a room since that Christmas Eve dinner with Vakarė and her family. How long ago that felt! He hurried into the clothes that Zygmunt had lent him and rejoined the party in the parlor room.

The three women were all cooking or bustling about the table when Alexei stepped back into the parlor. Beatrycze handed him a mug of beer, and he pulled a chair from the table over to join the men at the hearth. He sang what words of the drinking songs he could with the men, the women joining in as they worked to finish preparing or setting out the supper. Jokes and laughter continued throughout the meal, and when everyone stood to go out to the tavern, there was no question in Alexei’s mind that he would join them.

“But, the women?” Alexei asked in surprise. “They are coming as well?”

The friends all laughed. Beatrycze took Alexei’s arm as Renia and Sybilla took Zygmunt and Benedikt’s arms and Otylia took Ctirad’s.

“Is that not how it is in Estonia?” she asked, smiling.

“No, it is not,” Alexei was forced to admit. “In Estonia, the men would go drinking while the women cleaned and washed up at home.”

“That is how it was in most of Silesia and Poland as well,” Beatrycze explained. “But here, in the mining villages, many of the old customs are changing quickly, and women can go to the taverns with their brothers or husbands or fiancées. Never alone. Always with a proper chaperone. And never for long. We go to join in the drinking and singing for a mug or two and then we go back home to wash and clean up the supper table while our men stay to drink and sing late into the night. Some things change, my new friend, but not all things!”

The friends set out through the door and down the muddy street towards the nearest tavern. The evening shadows were creeping across the street, and there were several small groups of men and women who were also singing and laughing and making their way towards the tavern, the men all friends who worked together in the mine.

The tide of Poles and Bohemians kept growing as it flowed through the dusk toward the tavern. Many of the small groups, like the one Alexei was part of, had evidently begun their Saturday night drinking before supper. Songs rang out in the air as men stumbled along, leaning against the women who walked beside them. Jokes and well-intentioned insults in languages that Alexei only half-understood flew between the groups. One exchange of insults came to blows as one man misunderstood or took seriously an insult another man had tossed off in jest; men began shouting and pulled the two combatants apart before either could really harm the other.

“Animals! You should learn to behave!” A shrill voice rang out across the road. “All of you! No better than the squealing rats that steal the grain in the tumble-down shacks you call barns!”

Alexei looked around to see who was calling out such insults. This mockery, unlike that offered by the miners to one another amid laughter, did not sound as if it were offered in good will. This mockery was cold-hearted and cruel.

“There!” Beatrycze saw him searching for the source of the shrill cries and pointed toward a large house slightly ahead of them on the other side of the road. “That is Pani—I mean, Frau—Berhta,” Beatrycze told him. “The old German matron Sybilla told you about.”

Alexei saw her standing on the front steps of the house.

She was an old woman, doubled over with a brightly patterned shawl draped around her hunchback, its long fringes swaying. Her long nose hooked down toward her chin, and her iron-gray hair was pulled back into a tight bun. She waved her cane crookedly towards the miners and women streaming past her house as she clutched the railing adorning the steps. Her black dress swirled about her ankles.

“Animals!” she cried again. “Every Saturday, coming past my home, your songs and fights disturbing my household from sunset until nearly sunrise! Such drunkards! You should consider how fortunate you are to work in the mine my son is responsible for and strive to better yourselves, to turn your back on such pitiful habits! How can you hope to escape this village for a better life when you insist on acting like… like such Poles and Bohemians! Dirty drunken peasants!”

“Does she stand out there every week as people go to the tavern?” Alexei wanted to know.

“Superstitious papists!” Frau Berhta spat the words at the people walking past. “Too ignorant to embrace the good Lutheran faith of the Germans!”

“Not every week,” Otylia, the dark-haired maid-of-honor walking alongside Ctirad, answered. “But often.”

“What does she hope to accomplish? Does she really think people will change because of her ranting at them?” Alexei shook his head in disbelief.

Renia, walking with Zygmunt, said, “She thinks everyone wants to be a German or a Lutheran but is afraid to admit it.”

“Go back inside and leave good people be!” Sybilla, walking with Benedikt, called out towards the old woman on the steps.

“Eh? Who said that? Which of you drunken animals told me—me! Frau Berhta!—to go back inside?” the old woman wanted to know.

The crowd continued to flow past her house, ignoring her now.

“If she knew Sybilla had said that, she would dismiss her even before the wedding,” Beatrycze whispered into Alexei’s ear as they neared the house.

“Old German busybody!” someone else called out. “Go away and let us enjoy the Saturday night!”

“You want to tell us proper Germans what to do but you are afraid to let me see your faces?” Frau Berhta called out. “Cowards!” She vigorously shook her cane at the people walking past.

A variety of voices shouted back strings of Polish words.

“Bah! Too cowardly to even answer an old woman properly,” she sneered.

A man shouted something that was neither German nor Polish. Bohemian, maybe?

Frau Berhta shook her cane at the miners passing by.

Something came sailing from across the road. A dried plum splatted against the railing, next to Fray Berhta’s gnarled hand.

“Animals! Drunks!” she taunted them. “Have you no care for a respectable old woman?”

More jeers in Polish rang out. A piece of fruit struck the door frame. Then another.

Alexei and Beatrycze were coming abreast of the house now. More angry words in Polish and Bohemian rang out, and the crowd seemed to pause.

“Do the people always react to her like this?” Alexei asked.

“No. They do not,” Beatrycze answered, worriedly looking behind them and across the road. “Usually people just walk by and ignore her. I do not understand why this evening is any different.”

Frau Berhta shouted something in German, but Alexei was listening to Beatrycze and did not catch what the old woman had taunted the villagers with.

A boot flew out of the crowd and struck the old woman on her shoulder, knocking the cane from her fist. Catcalls and hissing erupted from the crowd standing still in front of the house.

Frau Berhta turned and pulled herself back into the house. As she hobbled in through the door, Alexei saw her club foot turned in on itself. Another mud-covered boot flew across the road and smashed against the door as it slammed shut behind her.

“We should go.” Beatrycze sounded worried as she pulled Alexei away from the house and around the crowd that continued to stand and shout insults at the closed door. “We don’t need to be a part of any riot if that’s what happens. Rioters will certainly be fired on Monday. Or the menfolk related to any women identified as rioters.”

Beatrycze did not pause until they were safely inside the tavern. They quickly found Zygmunt with Renia and Ctirad with Otylia. But it was some time before they saw Sybilla and Benedikt come into the tavern, splattered with mud.

“Are you hurt? Were you caught in the riot?” Beatrycze wanted to know.

Sybilla tossed her head proudly. “Riot? That little incident? Bah! That was no riot—she only heard what she has needed to hear since she and her family came to Silesia, however many years ago it has been.”

“But I have never seen the taverngoers become so rowdy with Frau Berhta on her steps,” Benedikt admitted. “Everyone took up something, even if it was only clods of earth, to throw at her door!” He beamed proudly. “Even my Sybilla here! She took up two handfuls of dirt from the road to throw at the old woman’s door!”