Read The Countess for Free Online Page A

whites. When the soldier was done, the man’s head lay between the horse’s rear legs as if the horse were birthing him, just as my sister’s dark head had poked out between my mother’s legs a few months before. It was the strangest sight I had ever seen—the soldiers standing around in their armor, watching a man sewed up inside a horse like a doll sewed up with its stuffing. A great bubble of laughter rose within me, a hard lump of awe and terror rising from my belly like a ball of unbaked bread that I had swallowed and would have to expel before it made me ill. Sputtering, the laugh escaped my lips. I clapped my hand over my mouth, but it was too late—I had been seen.
    The man looked into my face and begged me to get a knife and cut him free, said that he had done nothing wrong. “Please, pretty child,” he said in his strange, accented Hungarian, “please, I didn’t hurt my daughter, you must know, she was a little girl your age, I would never hurt her. Please set me free, pretty one. I will give youa great reward.” There was in his voice a malevolence that was new and strange to me, for terror ran underneath the kind words, and the look in his eyes was glittering and full of hate. What would he do to me, to the child of the man who condemned him, if I dared to set him free?
    My feet were rooted to the spot, my hands clenched inside my skirt. But then my father was there, bending to scoop me up and take me back inside, scolding me for rising so early from my bed and running away from my nurse, though he could not bring himself to punish me, his favorite. He marched me back through the fortress and up to my room, scolding the nurse too for letting me slip away so easily. Then he kissed me and bade me back to sleep, which was impossible, and then closed the door after him.
    I went to the window instead. Outside in the distance I could see the soldiers making their way back into the fortress, leaving the man behind to struggle and rot inside the belly of the dead horse. The other gypsies, the men who had accused him in their drunkenness, quickly packed their things and left Ecsed, ready to put the place and its sadness behind them. A few old gypsy women lingered long enough to curse and spit at the man for the sake of his vanished daughter, and then they, too, joined the rest of the gypsies in putting some distance between themselves and Ecsed village, and the estate of my mother and father, where bad luck was bound to linger.
    All day I remained in my room thinking of the man inside the belly of the horse, of his thirst and pain, the smell and the flies. I ate no supper and went to bed so early and with so little fuss that my nurse told my mother I must have been ill.
    Late that night I slipped out of the gate and went to the place where the man and the horse lay together, one dead and the other dying still. I found my way easily in the moonlight, following the gassy stench of entrails and old blood. The man was delirious and half mad, and at first he didn’t know anyone was there, his head waving back and forth with the sudden, jerky movements of thedemented and the dying. His skin was baked red and dry from a day in the sun, and his mustache was brittle with the tears and snot that had congealed there.
    My footsteps were loud in the dry grass, and he turned his head back and forth to look, but I was behind him, momentarily hidden. “Is someone there?” he called out, but from where he was sewed inside the horse he could not turn his head and see me. “A drink, please,” he begged. Nothing of the earlier menace remained in his voice; it was replaced with supplication, with pitiable chokes and sobs. “A sip of water is all I ask.”
    I stepped forward and showed myself to him in the moonlight. He roused himself and struggled. “I know you, child. You are the daughter of the lord of the house. Can you give me a little water? A sip for a dying man? I will ask nothing else, I promise, just a taste of cool