The Soldier of Transylvania

The Southern Carpathian peaks were drowned in a soup of sulfur and gray mountain fog. The battle was dying into a chaotic Romanian retreat, leaving the high mountain passes choked with the stench of abandoned war: rust, mud, and the start of rot.

I moved through the freshly abandoned trench, one hand on the damp timber wall, the other feeling ahead for tripwires the army might have left behind. The great war of the Gadjé was nothing more than a passing storm that left behind valuable scrap. And what men no longer needed, my family could use.

The stars gave just enough light to navigate by, but I didn’t need to see everything. I needed to see the shapes of things that might be useful. Canned goods, canvas still good, a tin mess kit, bent but whole. I stuffed each one into the pack slung across my back, my fingers working quickly. No wasted motion. Waste meant staying in the trench longer, and staying meant risk.

The walls were packed earth reinforced with timber that had already begun to surrender to the damp, the floor a slurry of mud and spent brass casings that clicked under my boots.

I crouched beside a discarded haversack and worked it open. Inside, a half-empty canteen and a spare shirt, wool, army-issue. I shoved it into my pack.

That was when the scream came.

A man, guttural, thin, and then abruptly cut off.

I dropped my pack, my churi already in my hand, the worn antler handle familiar against my palm. I didn’t think. Thinking came later. I moved down the trench line toward the sound, keeping close to the wall, the iron knife held low at my side. I slowed at the second turn, pressed my shoulder to the timber, and looked.

It was crouched over a soldier slumped against the trench wall. The creature had its back to me, but I could see its profile in the dimness: gray, naked, skeletal, with fraying hair. Its movements were twitchy, jerking animal shifts of something that hadn’t learned how to move, its teeth at the soldier’s neck.

I’d heard the stories from my grandmother when I was a child, sitting by the fire on winter nights. Dead things that wouldn’t stay dead.

The mullo.

I lunged.

The knife went low, aimed for the space between its ribs, but the creature sensed me and twisted. My blade caught the top of its ear instead. Cartilage parted with a wet pop. The creature shrieked and scrambled up the trench wall in a frenzy of limbs, raining dirt over us and disappearing into the dark above, its shredded ear leaving a dark spatter across the timber.

I stood with my knife raised, scanning the trench lip, the silence that followed pressing against my ears. I waited ten breaths. Twenty. Nothing came.

Only then did I lower the churi and crouch beside the soldier.

He was breathing. Shallow, but there. He was young. Dark hair, thick brows, thin with a sharp jaw, though his mouth was slack, his eyes fluttering. Grey Romanian army uniform, the fabric was dark with something that wasn’t mud near the collar.

I didn’t have time to think about what that meant. Not here in the open trench with the thing that had done it still out there in the dark.

Sheathing my knife, I got his arm over my shoulders. He was heavier than he looked, all muscle and dead weight. I braced my boots against the mud and hauled him upright. His head lolled against my shoulder. He smelled of sweat and gunpowder and the copper reek of fresh blood.

I managed to drag him down the trench, back the way I’d come. My pack was still there, but I left it.

The soldier’s boots scraped twin furrows through the mud. His breathing came in uneven hitches against my neck. Warm. Alive. For now.

The trench mouth opened onto the churned earth of no-man’s-land. The stars were brighter here, unobscured by the timber and earthworks. I adjusted his weight across my shoulders and started up the slope toward the tree line, toward the limestone face where I knew a cave waited, hidden in the shadows.

The cave mouth was a dark smile in the limestone face, half-hidden by a tangle of hawthorn. I dragged the soldier through it, his boots catching on the uneven rock, and laid him on the flat stretch of ground where the floor leveled out.

No time to check him yet. First, the door.

The cave was adequate. Tall enough to stand, the rock above us sweating a fine mist that collected in the cracks and plunked like a clock with no particular schedule to keep. Light came through hairline fractures in the limestone overhead. Not enough to see by, but enough to know when morning arrived. For now, we had darkness, and that feral thing was still out there in the trees with half an ear.

I took my knife and worked the heel of the handle into a crack beside the cave mouth. The iron nails I’d salvaged from a supply dump two weeks back went in next, driven in with three sharp raps of the knife handle. I set a second nail opposite it, then a third above the entrance, forming a rough triangle. They hate the metal, likely sensitive to magnets.

While I had left my pack, I pulled from my buznar a bundle of blackthorn twigs. Dry, brittle things I always carried to ward off those nasty creatures. I built a small fire just inside the entrance, careful to keep the flames low.

The soldier’s chest rose and fell in that same shallow rhythm. I crouched beside him and worked the collar of his jacket open. The fabric was stiff with half-dried blood. Beneath it, his shirt was worse, the cotton dark and clinging to the skin of his neck.

I peeled it back.

A bite, with two punctures about the width of my little finger. The skin around them had already begun to change, threaded with black veins that spread outward from the wound like cracks in ice. Not bruising. Something else. Something that moved as I watched, the black lines creeping millimeter by millimeter beneath his skin. My jaw tightened until the hinge ached.

I pulled the tin of salve from my buznar, wrapped in oilcloth to contain the smell. Garlic and sulfur, ground together into a paste thick enough to hold its shape. The cap came off and the smell brought tears, but I dipped two fingers into the paste and worked it directly into the punctures on his neck.

He didn’t flinch, but his breathing hitched, and I worked the paste into the wound until the black veins disappeared beneath the yellow-gray smear. My fingers came away tingling from the sulfur. I wiped them on my apron.

I needed to bandage his neck, or at least attempt to. Reaching under my heavy skirt, I hacked at my slip. I was already polluted. What more could I do?

I pressed the makeshift bandage into his neck, covering both the wound and the paste. My brother had taught me to bandage when I was twelve. For snakebites, he’d said. That was seven years ago. He hadn’t mentioned mullo. He hadn’t needed to. The treatment was the same: contain the venom.

Whether a body could fight this particular venom was a question I didn’t have an answer for.

This man must have had a name. I patted him down for something, anything that would tell me who he was. On a cord around his wrist I found the metal identity disc. 2nd Army, 6th Infantry. I set it beside me before unbuttoning his jacket and finding a silver Orthodox cross I had not noticed earlier resting against his sternum, the metal dark with tarnish except where his skin had polished it smooth.

In his breast pocket, a small cream-colored booklet, worn soft at the corners. His livret militar.

Toma Grigorescu. Bucharest. Twenty years old. Single. Romanian Orthodox. Unit designations, service dates, the mechanical record of a life reduced to lines on a page, but I closed the booklet and set it on top of the identity disc.

Toma.

He was handsome. He had the kind of face men only grew in cities. Under the grime of battle, his jaw was clean-angled, the cheekbones high and cut with shadow, brows heavy on his sunkissed skin. His hands, which I took into mine, had callouses, his fingers long enough to overlap on my wrist. His hair was slicked dark with blood and sweat, curling slightly where it met his forehead.

Outside, the mountains lay quiet. No wind, no sound of pursuit. Just the drip of water from the limestone ceiling. I reached under my skirt again and cut off another chunk. With the water on the walls, I wet the fabric and did what I could to clean his face. My heart quickened touching him, the stubble under my fingers, his breath warm on my wrist. I blushed as my hand traveled to his neck and what I could of his chest over his undershirt, my body pulsing under my skirt. Nineteen years and I’ve never felt anything like it. I forced myself not to go further before leaving him to rest.

I pulled my knees to my chest and set my knife across my thigh, the blade catching the firelight in a dull gleam.