Song for a Gypsy (The Wolfboy Chronicles Book 1) Read online

  Mrs. Müller was now so upset she snorted at the girl.

  “Young lady. We wish to talk to your parents immediately,” she said, and looked back at the crowd of women with some satisfaction. If anyone could bring things back to order, it was her.

  “But I don’t have any parents,” the girl answered with another smile. “I’m an orphan.”

  A sound of shock went through the crowd. Who were these people? they all seemed to be thinking. Who was taking care of that child when she didn’t have any parents? She should at least be at an orphanage, where they would know how to take proper care of a situation like hers.

  “But, sweet little child, who is taking care of you then?” Mrs. Müller asked.

  “No one and everyone. We all take care of each other in our tribe.”

  Another wave of shock went through the crowd.

  “But certainly someone must be making the rules. You are, after all, only a child. Now, tell me, who is making the rules in your tribe? Who is in charge?”

  The young girl pointed at the Schneider’s house, where the door all of a sudden opened. Out came Mr. and Mrs. Schneider, along with their daughter and two very strange looking people. A man and a woman, as far as Mrs. Müller could tell. He was tall and dramatic in his appearance. She found his eyes wild and cruel and his right hand was constantly resting on the grip of a short curved dagger in his belt. On the top of his head he wore a red scarf around his black curly hair. His white shirt was open, so his black-haired chest with golden necklaces showed.

  Mrs. Müller put a hand on her chest.

  “My, oh my,” she said and caught her breath.

  The woman was small and just as dark as him. She wore a sparkling dress with thousands of colors and patterns in it. Her scarf was purple and she, too, wore golden earrings. She was holding the little girl’s hand while talking to the Schneiders.

  Mrs. Müller stretched her neck in order to better hear what was said when Mrs. Schneider kneeled in front of little Sara.

  “You be a good girl now,” she said. “This is your real mother and father, and they will take you back to your people now.”

  “But, Mom…”

  “Shh, now do as I tell you," she said with a thick voice. "These are your real parents. We have just been borrowing you. They love you and will take good care of you. It is the best for all of us. These are hard times for everybody, remember? With the three babies in the house, we have too many mouths to feed.”

  Now Mrs. Schneider was crying overtly.

  “You are so strong, Sara. You will be fine. It’s best for you to go back to who you really are. We will miss you, but maybe you will come back and visit one day?”

  Sara threw herself in Mrs. Schneider’s arms and hugged her for quite a while.

  “Now, go on,” Mrs. Schneider said through tears, and the strange woman and man started walking with Sara between them, both of them holding her hands.

  Sara looked back just before she entered the caravan with her new parents and waved at Mr. and Mrs. Schneider. She, too, had tears in her young eyes.

  Mrs. Müller and the other women from Reidenburgerstrasse had to move away from the street in order for the caravan wagons to leave with all their noisy and messy people and animals inside of them.

  Later on, the women would loudly agree that this day wasn’t one of the proudest in the history of Reidenburgerstrasse, but silently in their minds, they would all think the same thing.

  That it definitely was the most exciting.

  4

  THE ROMANI

  In the caravan, Sara was greeted by a lot of small curious faces. They all belonged to children of different ages and all were staring at her. For the first time in her life, she felt a little shy. She kept wondering why all those faces were looking at her.

  She sat down on a small chair, and the man and woman that had come to get her got on top of the wagon. She heard a sound like someone yelling and then they were moving.

  After they had driven for awhile, a little girl came to Sara inside the caravan. She looked at the other girls behind her before she had the courage to address Sara.

  “Is it true? Are you really her?” she asked.

  Sara had no answer to that.

  “Am I really who?”

  The little girl got shy and looked at the floor. An older girl took over.

  “Are you really the great Moeselman’s daughter?”

  “How should I know?”

  The girls in the caravan all looked at each other. Could it be that she didn’t even know who she was? they murmured.

  She didn’t, but soon her new parents would tell her. As they stopped for the night in a clearing in the forest, her mother and father approached her while she was sitting by the bonfire and eating her meat. (It had been a while since she last tasted real meat, so she was really enjoying it.)

  “You like your new home?” her father asked. He was the one named Moeselman, she now knew. That was his gypsy name. Her mother’s was Settela.

  Sara looked around to try and find the home he was talking about when he grabbed her chin and turned her head so she was looking at him.

  He smiled and put a fist to his heart.

  “This is home,” he said, while pounding the fist to his chest. “We don’t need walls to keep us from the world. We don’t need a yard and a picket fence. Home is where the heart is.”

  Sara ate some more of the meat, while staring at him.

  “Because you are gypsies?” she asked.

  “Romani,” Settela corrected her with a mild voice. “We don’t like to be called gypsies; we are Romani, and proud of it.”

  Sara looked at her.

  “What’s the difference?” she asked.

  Settela and Moeselman looked at each other and then they burst into huge laughter.

  “You are so right; in the end, it really doesn’t matter what we are called” Settela said. “But gypsy is a name the world has given us, and Romani is what we call ourselves. That is our origin. That is your origin, too.”

  Sara looked at her with great confusion.

  “But I thought I was German?”

  Moeselman grumbled, for he didn’t like the fact that his daughter had to grow up among the Germans while their leader was trying to eradicate the Romani people, but he had to admit that it was the best hiding place. Then Settela explained.

  “Yes, sweetheart, of course you would think so. But the thing is…during the war, being a Romani was really difficult. Some people tried to have us all killed. And a lot were killed. So we decided to hide you from those people and gave you to the Schneider family. But we always knew we would come and get you back one day.”

  “But you didn’t hide those other kids?”

  “They are not daughters of the great Moeselman. They are not going to be leader of the tribe one day. You are, since you are Moeselman’s first and only child. You are going to be the first woman to lead this tribe.”

  Sara ate greedily.

  “What does that mean?” she asked with her mouth full.

  Moeselman looked like he could burst with pride.

  “It means you are very special,” Settela said with a smile, while she put her arm around Sara.

  Sara got up and stood in front of them. Moeselman, who was not used to this kind of audacity in his presence, uttered a deep guttural sound.

  “What if I don’t want to?” Sara said.

  Moeselman got up from the ground too. He stood big and mighty in front of her, like he would do to anyone trying to defy him.

  “You will!” he said.

  Sara snorted. She didn’t like it when anyone tried to tell her what she was supposed to do or not. She never cared for what anyone thought of her, not her teachers, not her classmates, and she had never obeyed many of her parents’ rules. She was not about to change that now. No one told her what she should or shouldn’t do.

  “No, I won’t,” she said, and felt the dangerous feeling of anger rising from deep insid
e of her.

  “That is not your decision to make,” he said and looked at Settela. “Tell her she has to obey!”

  “Well, I’m not going to,” Sara said, and stomped her feet with her arms crossed in front of her chest.

  She had hardly finished the last word before everybody in the clearing got quiet. The music stopped and the people who were dancing froze in the middle of a movement.

  They all stared at Sara and her plate that was hanging in the air in front of her face.

  “Moeselman, look,” Settela said, and pointed at the plate.

  In that instant, Moeselman changed his expression and apparently forgot all about their fight. He smiled with great pride and ran towards Sara. He picked her up and held her high up in the air.

  “This is my daughter, Sara,” he roared to the rest of the tribe. “She truly is The Mighty One!”

  As he did, a wave of cheers and rejoicing went through the people. Music was playing again and women danced with fluttering skirts.

  As Sara soon would find out for herself, Gypsies, or Romanies, are an amazing and very unique people—the only group of people living in every corner of the earth without the benefits of power, money, armies, or ever fighting a war. Wherever you travel, to the plains of Hungary, the steppes of Siberia, the gates of Marrakesh, the highlands of Guatemala, or the frozen tundra of Alaska, everywhere, you'll find Romanies. They are always on the move and have an ever-abiding need for freedom and independence. Where did they come from, you might ask? Some believe they are the last survivors of Atlantis. Others suggest that their ancestors are the people of the biblical town of Babel. To the Romanies, it doesn’t matter. They readily learn the language of their host country, but no government and no monarch has been able to break the Romani spirit, not with gifts of land and seed and not with brutal persecution.

  Romanies have a deep and abiding respect for creation—for Mother Earth, and for life everywhere, in all its variety. Therefore, they gather only those leaves and flowers or only those portions of a root, bark, or fruit that is really needed. If every part of the plant is needed, they will leave some portion in the ground to ensure its new growth. And they will always make sure to thank the plant for the gift it has given and for its efforts to keep our planet alive.

  Furthermore, Romanies are at one with the spirits alive in every flame, tree, breeze, and stone. As they sit around a campfire, romance and hope of a golden future beckon to them. As they have for centuries, the elders tell the young of their age-old traditions and the spells that can bring love, health, wealth, and happiness. They are friends of moonlight and magic, superstition and prophesy, and they believe that if a spark flies from a campfire, they know a surprise is on its way.

  Sara and the tribe traveled for days, and as they did, Sara grew more and more fond of her new family and way of life. People were nice to her, and she finally got to see the world that she had been so eager to explore. She found rest for a while and the north wind seemed to be leaving her alone.

  The tribe traveled all over most of Europe, her parents told her, and performed at the marketplaces everywhere. They never stayed more than thirty days in the same place.

  Everybody in the tribe had something, a talent, an act that they would perform and thereby earn money to get by.

  Her dad, Moeselman, was a fire eater. He would place burning torches in his mouth to extinguish them, and sometimes he would even breathe fire like one of the dragons in Sara’s books. His performing name was Moeselman, the master of Hellfire. And he had everybody’s deepest respect (especially the children that stared at him with open mouths and eyes bigger than the wheels on their caravans) when he entered the stage and swallowed the burning fire.

  Her mom was a sorceress. That is what she would call herself. She could make potions and put spells on people (only good ones, though, those that would bring them prosperity and keep the evil spirits away) and she read their future in their hands or in her cards. (She was very good at reading Sara’s mind, too, but that was more a mother’s instinct than it was magic.)

  The most amazing thing to Sara was that her mother could heal people’s illnesses with herbs. Wherever they went, she cured hundreds of village people who were sick, and she never took any money for doing it (though it was often offered in gratitude) because tribal tradition said it would be most unlucky to do so.

  “Herbs, vegetables or fruit barks of every kind are the remedies, the salves which nature has sent to the Romani to heal the ills,” she would tell Sara. “It is for us to use them. To neglect nature’s cures is to turn away our greatest treasure.”

  Her grandmother—and Sara’s great grandmother—lived and traveled with them in the wagon. She used to be a sorceress, too, Sara was told. But not anymore. She had gotten too old, someone said (but no one knew how old she really was, not even herself.) She had lost the ability, the rumor had it. Sara didn’t talk much with her, since all the old lady spoke was Romani, the language of the Romani people.

  She was a small woman. She’d been born small and then she had four collapses of the spine in her back, and now she was so hunchbacked that no one had seen her face for years.

  Over the months, Sara got to know a lot of people who were very different from people where she’d come from. There was the extremely strong man who lifted weights, the tiny woman who trained and performed with the mighty elephants, the man with the dancing bear, the belly dancers, the illusionist who made things disappear and reappear in places you would never have expected, the snake charmer who used music to control his snakes, the bearded lady and the temptress in her tent, about whom it is said that no man can ever go in without being seduced.

  All of them were funny and happy people. All were making a living by using their talent that was given to them at birth.

  And then there was the Wolfboy. Sara was told to never go close to him. He lived in a cage that he only left when he was secured on a leash and only one man was crazy enough to hold him. That was Moeselman.

  “You stay as far away from that boy as you can,” he would say to her.

  Now, Moeselman wasn’t used to dealing with children, so he didn’t realize making such a demand would only make her even more curious.

  It was said the Wolfboy was a beast trapped in a boy’s body. That when the sun went down or if he smelled blood, he would turn into a vicious beast, a werewolf, and then no one was safe. That was why he had to stay in a cage.

  At the marketplace, Sara’s dad would take him out and show him off on the stage, making people shiver with fear of the beast inside of him that might show at the smell of human blood. The fear of something this innocent, a young boy no more than fourteen, who would all of a sudden turn in to your worst nightmare was spellbinding. That was always the highlight of their show, and the one act that made most people throw money at the stage. He was a regular moneymaker, and the tribe wouldn’t survive without him.

  At night, he would keep Sara awake. He would howl at the moon and groan all night. It sounded like he was crying, Sara thought, and one night it became too much for her and she left the caravan without anyone noticing and she went to see him.

  She sneaked across the site where the bonfire had been and then, as silently as possible, she neared the cage. But when she got there, she noticed that it was empty. And then she heard him. He was howling again, filling the forest with a mourning sound. But she couldn’t see him. An owl stared at her from a tree, and high in the sky behind it was a full moon. Sara felt her heart pounding in her chest as she walked backwards to the caravan and climbed into bed.

  That night, she didn’t sleep. She listened to the howling and wondered. In the morning, she stormed out of the caravan as soon as the sun had risen, just to find the boy back in his cage, sleeping like a baby, looking innocent as he lay there all curled up on the floor of the cage. All day, she kept an eye on him and his every move. From a distance, naturally. And several times her eyes caught his, looking all boyish and innocent, but he didn’t
fool her. She knew what he was up to.

  The next night, she tried again. When everybody in the caravan was sound asleep, she carefully opened the door and went outside. She went to the cage again, only to find it empty like the night before. And then there was the howling in the forest that gave her the chills. This time, she thought she also heard a sound from inside her parents’ caravan, so she hurried back. Since it was only Moeselman groaning in his sleep, she jumped back into her bed again, her heart beating like crazy.

  The third time she waited until later in the night. She walked so fast that she made more noise than was wise, but she didn’t care. She wanted to see the Wolfboy as he got back from doing what he did in the forest. She wanted to see him.

  And then she did.

  He ran out of the forest and towards the cage, a big wolf with no tail running on only two legs like a human. Sara froze and stood still without making a noise, but the wolf still sensed her. He stopped and looked straight at her. Her heart was threatening to jump out of her chest. His mouth was covered in blood from some animal he must have been eating. Or maybe it was from a human?

  What would he do next? Jump her?

  He walked closer to her and she could hear his heavy breath that sounded a bit like a horse. He stood in front of her, looking like he might jump at any moment and devour her in a second.

  And then she stared right into his eyes and saw something: the eyes of a boy. The very sad eyes of a boy not much older than her.

  “I swear, I will kill you if you touch her.”

  The voice came from behind her. It was Moeselman, and he was pointing a big rifle at the wolf.

  “Get back in your cage,” he said, while stepping closer to the wolf, still holding the rifle in its direction.

  The wolf didn’t move, but just stared at Sara.

  “Now!” he yelled.

  The eyes let go of Sara’s and the wolf obeyed. A few seconds later, he was back in the cage and locked in. Sara couldn’t help but stare at him as he spun around a few times in the cage and then lay down as she had seen dogs do.