Post by Aedh on Aug 8, 2009 0:02:31 GMT -5
Prologue: Illyria
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During the Napoleonic era, a minor nobleman named Svetozar Savić lived in the ancient town of Tjentište in the upper Drina valley in Bosnia. By day he loved to ride and potter about the sunny hedgerows of his ancestral lands, chatting with his peasants and free tenants, offering a word or two of advice, sometimes telling them of news had by letter from Venice, Marseilles, or Constantinople, called Tsargrad; and often passed his evenings studying the folkways of his countrymen or the learned books of the holy Orthodox Fathers. He devoted no time to his family because he had none.
This had not escaped the attention of other families. For years the wealthier parents had offered him their daughters in marriage, but for some reason known only to him, Svetozar seemed content to be the last of his house. As he approached middle age, his simple living turned almost toward the monastic, and people began to use his title, gospodar, with an appreciation of its medieval flavour. In a word, his bachelorhood was becoming as settled as any marriage he might have made.
And then at a certain point in the summer of 1815 it was realized that no one had seen him for several days. Word was passed, and after a matter of weeks and inquiries as far as Sarajevo and Uskub with no success, it began to look as though he had been done away with by enemies, although who those might be, none could imagine. By the time six months had passed, his estate had become a general concern, and the local government decided to initiate proceedings. Finally, one night, just as the kaimakam and his assessors were meeting in Svetozar's study, he himself appeared in the doorway with a woman. He briefly introduced her as his wife before throwing everybody out.
The new pair adopted a very private lifestyle. On his country rides, now infrequent, Svetozar graciously but firmly parried questions about her, saying only that she was from Thessaly and yet knew too little of the local language and manners to be socially presentable; but now and again they went out together in the wilder uplands, and talk about her soon circulated. Very beautiful, it was said: tall, black-eyed, raven-haired, broad-shouldered, and supple-limbed, regal of bearing; and whatever her antecedents, it was agreed, the gospodar had chosen a fine specimen. The inevitable soon occurred, and early in 1817 she gave birth to a son.
But instead of the crown to Svetozar Savić's fortune, this proved to be the start of trouble. Several nurses were hired for the child and one after another they quit, complaining of ill-treatment at the mistress' hands. After a time she began to go riding on her own, to frequent kafanas, and in short to behave in ways that gave rise to scandalous rumours.
Far from taking matters in hand, Svetozar added to his problems by seeing another woman himself, and so things went for several years; she moved to a separate house, coming and going there as she pleased, and eventually they stopped speaking to one another. Svetozar grew taciturn, his hair greying, confiding little even to his peasant servants, Miloš the bailiff and young Jovan Ilić the groom. His reputation did not suffer over-much. He continued in his scholarship, striking up correspondence with holy men in such places as Kiev and Mount Athos, and devoted himself greatly to the care of his affairs, which prospered thereby. He had many defenders, who claimed that his heartless foreign wife had taken advantage of him; but that was cold comfort.
Clearly, his son, Malibor Savić, inherited from his mother's side, rapidly growing into a brawny and cunning boy, but he unfortunately had also enough of his father's level-headedness to keep himself slightly above the ruination he caused. As he reached young manhood he became a figure of terror and allure to respectable women, and an object of fear to innkeepers and jealous husbands; at sixteen he stood well over six feet, was already a hard drinker and eater, swift runner, and would soon be strong enough--as it was said--to crush a silver dinar in his fist, or to seize a man in the street and hurl him up through a second-floor window.
It seemed that no one could influence him; no one, that is, but his mother. He stayed with her often enough to partake in many of the debaucheries told of her, and the only good thing held of them was that at least they did not carry their activities into politics. But everyone knew that sooner or later, the gospodar would have to do something about them.
The day of reckoning dawned in the autumn of 1838. Svetozar met his wife in the Tjentište bazaar, and they fell to quarrelling over a money matter. She threw a cup of hot coffee in his face, he slapped her, and both had knives drawn when the horrified bystanders pulled them apart. He went home, furious, and that night as his wife and son were leading an outrageous dance at the lowest sort of dive, an armed band of the gospodar's men broke into the place and physically subdued them; but not before the two had killed or injured several with their bare hands.
The very next day Svetozar Savić went before the leading men of Tjentište and declared himself an exile, to include all of his blood, and bound himself, his wife, and his son never to appear in the city again, by oath and by a substantial sum deposited with the local qadi. And on the third day after, four wagons led by Jovan Ilić left the town.
It became known that they trekked for a week to the north and east, down the Drina, then up the Tara river valley and over the Ljubišnja hills, coming at last to a lonely upland tract that had been the least of Svetozar's properties, called Vučedol--Valley of Wolves. Here on the borderland of the Zeta, the gospodar built a grim stone farmhouse and then turned his energies to carving usable farmland out of the pine- and cypress-studded waste.
For two years little news leaked out of the valley. From a servant who went to Vikoč or Brod on an errand one heard that clearing was proceeding apace, or that water was a problem; no more. Only in 1841 did the news reach Tjentište: Svetozar Savić was dead--killed, men said, by his vengeful kindred. Malibor Savić, his giant frame reduced to bone and sinew, appeared near the town like a spectre to hear his father's will read and it was discovered that old Svetozar had left all he owned to distant cousins in Bosnia, save for Vučedol; which he bequeathed to Jovan Ilić, whom he manumitted and declared to be "my only true and faithful heir."
Malibor Savić's reaction was a rage bordering on psychosis. Forcibly ejected from Tjentište, he collected a band of hatchet-men and stormed back to Vučedol swearing death on Jovan Ilić; but the ex-groom barricaded the big farmhouse against him and defended it in a battle that lasted five days and nights. Finally, thwarted in every direction, Malibor took to the woods.
It was an earthy and violent age in the Balkans, when the pig-farmer Black George was forging Serbian nationhood in blood and fire, and the Turks built tower of Slav skulls at Niš, still visible to this day. Each man lived by his wits and the strength of his arm; it was an age for which the gospodar Malibor Savić was born, in which he lived, and became a strange hero.
He wandered, renegade, as far as Macedonia and Carniola, sometimes leading guerrilla attacks against the authorities, now working as a blacksmith or wheelwright, or again taking on the crushing labour of a peasant. He is remembered in a few Bosnian and Montenegrin folk songs for his colourful exploits, superhuman endurance, and prodigious appetites: the Lay of Ismet Smailović speaks of him eating a whole roast pig, with stuffing; Juraj Strigović's Funeral describes him on foot fighting five mounted Turks, cutting one in half at the waist with a single sabre-blow. Tjentište alone remembers him as a thoroughly evil man, an extorter and predator upon his cousins, whom he never forgave; and the Ljubišnja uplands are silent.
Later in his forty-three-year life he displayed some symptoms of advanced syphilis. He took many women as 'wives,' and more than thirty illegitimate children are credited to him; but he acknowledged one son only, Nikola Savić, born perhaps in 1842-3; and who exactly was his mother will never be known. Some in the Celebiči area say that Malibor Savić fathered him upon his own mother, the 'Thessalian woman,' of whom we know little else; but this, of course, is impossible. Malibor did keep a locket portrait of her all his life; some time after his death it passed to the private collection of a Roman Catholic priest and is now on display at the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg. The chain has been lost, and as jewellery the setting is second-rate; it is bordered with worked gold beading, showing heavy wear, and a network of scratches on one side suggests an effaced inscription.
The portrait itself is another matter. It is actually a micro-mosaic of highest craftsmanship, probably of the Tucci school, circa 1830, showing a woman of about thirty years. Her straight, firm jaw-line and slanting cheekbones highlight full and sensuous lips; the deep-set eyes are nearly lost in the shadow of black brows, and the nose appears to be slightly arched, with flaring nostrils, the whole crowned by a tress of jet-black hair which lends the complexion a pale, velvety look. It is not a pretty face by the standards of the time, but strength and an incalculable will are written upon it, and seeing it one can instantly understand the legends that grew up about her; for her mien is that of a woman capable of anything.
Regardless of his parentage, however, the boy Nikola Savić found a home in his grandfather's farmstead, and a foster-parent in Jovan Ilić. He had Jovan Ilić's own children as playmates, and a peasant lad named Dabisav Uglesić became his best friend. Still, the rules of the house were strict, sober and God-fearing; and as the boy became aware of his legacy he developed rather too early a conscience and self-image which would ever after trouble him.
He saw his father occasionally. Malibor Savić, having acknowledged him, no doubt had some special feelings for him, and the two would sometimes meet near Šćepan Polje or Celebiči; but what passed between them we cannot tell. When young Nikola did speak of his father it was with respect and bitterness, for he held him both as an outlaw and an unbeliever, while yet hearing such of adventures as stir every boyish heart. Himself of moderate height, slender build, and brooding temperament, he was probably a disappointment to his huge, explosive elder--but again, we simply do not know.
Then in the fall of 1859 Malibor Savić reappeared in the area, and seemed likely to stay. He tried to ply a trade as a stonecutter, but his chronic drinking, hashish-use, and periodic mental blackouts--characteristic of syphilis--made him at best an erratic worker, and when in the spring he led a raid on a Turkish train the local people had had enough. Omer-latas Pasha had brought Ottoman troops into the area several years before, putting an end to the lawless days and enforcing Istanbul's tanzimat code with ferocity seldom seen even in that part of the world, burning, shooting, strangling, and hanging on every side, tenant and landlord alike; and the Bosnians did not want him back. Nikola made an appointment with his father, to which Jovan Ilić and two or three other men came, and it is certain that there they killed him.
It is said that even from an ambush it took a dozen bullets and many dagger-thrusts to bring Malibor Savić down. And it is also said that as he lay dying he raised his great bloody head, glaring at his son like a man possessed, and called down a terrible curse on his descendants and their servitors forever; and his body doubtless lies in an unmarked grave somewhere a few kilometres north of Celebiči, near the Vikoč crossroads.