Realizing what is going to happen, Miriam’s sisters begin to bellow her name. “MIRIAM! MIRIAM!” A part of her is secretly glad that they do not know where she is hiding. She tells herself over and over that she cannot save them, she cannot prevail against fifty people. She lies amid the fleas and lice, feeling rats run over her from time to time, listening as her siblings bawl their pleas for help.

She has never been so needed. Again she remembers her father. He was a hero.

She begins to remove the straw, starts to sit up. But she freezes, the spectacle before her is so awful. Her youngest sister is naked. They lash her to the spit. Then she is laid across the flames.

A great sizzling starts, like parchment burning. She shrieks and shrieks, her urine steaming into the flames, her head shaking, her hair smoking and red with fire.

They damp the fire and slowly begin to turn the spit.

Her screams continue a long, long time. After an hour her voice breaks and all that issues are hisses.

Miriam’s other two sisters slump in a corner, tied as tightly together as two geese on market day.

It is night before all three are roasted.

Miriam has bitten her lips raw to keep from screaming. Her whole body buzzes with the pain of a thousand flea bites. Until late at night the room is filled with the sharp odor of cooking flesh and the gay shouts of the crowd. Of course they are gay, they have captured gold and been sated with her sisters, more meat than they have eaten in years. As dawn threatens, the villagers drink their foul black beer and have their couplings. Then they sleep.

Miriam bursts from her hiding place and runs. She lifts her brother’s body from the mud where it has been thrown and carries him into the forest, rushing as fast as possible through the trees, wild to escape this horrible place. Her heart aches for her lost sisters, but she dares not even approach their bones.

Soon she is in a dawn-filled glade. Flowers bob at her feet, the Carpathian massif rises in the clear sky. Before that majesty she shouts her grief. The sound is absorbed.

She is flooded with an agony of loneliness. Perhaps she should deliver herself to the villagers. But she cannot go back, cannot give herself to the flames. The beauty of life remains. Let the dead be their own heroes.

With her brother in her arms she sets out to cross the mountains, intending to seek a better land beyond.

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