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courtyard during the night and lay here and there, wrapped in cloaks and lying in piles of two and three. I hid behind the yews to avoid being seen, making my way to the front gate of the inner castle, and stepped onto the wooden bridge over the marsh. There the sun peeked through and lit the reeds with golden light, the herons moving on their long sticklike legs without a splash, searching for fish and frogs, and the insects went silent as I drew near. Finally I reached the outer battlements and then the road that led out of the marsh to a sloping grassy field. A copse of hawthorn partially hid the plain from view, but the tang of the mudand the reeds, the fertile smell of earth not yet planted, permeated everything.
    In front of this idyll the place of execution was prepared. Even before I saw them I could hear the screams of the gypsy women, each word an arrow thrown at the accused man in their mysterious sharp language. A great crowd had gathered to see the condemned man’s fate, and I hid among the skirts and trousers, scattering a flurry of pecking chickens as I made my way to the front of the crowd where the gypsy knelt on the ground, his hands tied behind him, the ties held by two of my father’s soldiers. He seemed large to my nine-year-old eyes but was probably of medium height, with a dark pockmarked complexion and a bushy mustache that drooped at the corners with snot and tears, for he was blubbering and begging for mercy, turning his head around wildly to catch the eye of someone who would take up his cause.
    Finally he addressed my father. Sir, he said, I am a guilty and sorry sinner. I have no right to ask, it’s true, but please, sir, spare my life. Surely nothing good will come of killing one poor gypsy today, and so many guests still in your house. Surely you would not want such bad luck coming to your house during the celebration for the birth of your daughter.
    My father would hear none of this. He said the condemned man had no right to speak of anyone’s daughter, having sold his own. It was worse than the crime of Judas, a man selling his own child to the invaders. “As to bad luck,” my father said, raising his great white head, “I would accept any on my house to be rid of the sight of you.”
    The condemned man slumped forward again, his chin against his chest in a faint. The soldiers held him by the rope that bound his wrists behind him, holding his weight at an unnatural angle, for his arms had been broken. He looked like nothing so much as the puppets my sister and I liked to play with in our rooms, sewed rags stuffed with straw and just as lifeless. My throat itched with unshed tears, but the sight of my father there and the stern tone of his voice when he addressed the man filled me with awe, so I hung back behind the skirts of the village women where no one would notice me.
    A little bit away from the crowd the soldiers had taken a horse, an old and scrawny brown mare with a swayback and each of its ribs showing, and tied it to the ground with tight ropes around its legs so that even though it struggled and thrashed, it could not rise. The noise of panic it gave was the sound I had mistaken, from a distance, for the voices of the gypsy women, who were instead silent and grave at the spectacle my father had prepared.
    One soldier stepped forward and slit the animal’s tawny belly from front to hindquarters. It gave a scream and tried to kick out its legs, but it could not move, could not do more than shudder and heave as its bowels and blood spilled out onto the ground.
    Quickly the soldiers stuffed the accused man inside the belly of the horse until only his head showed. Then one of the soldiers took a piece of cord and with a great curved needle and some rope began sewing up the horse’s belly once more. The gypsy cried and begged for his life, but the soldier kept sewing. The horse was still alive but no longer had the strength to fight. Its eyes rolled back in its head, showing the