Dragon´s Teeth by Margit Sandemo

Author:Margit Sandemo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jentas A/S
Published: 2019-10-25T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

Elena was a young girl who lived in a small mountain village called Planina, in the southernmost part of Austria-Hungary in the Habsburg Empire. She was skilful, good-looking and nice, but what did any of these things matter when she was the poorest person in the village? If you didn’t have a dowry, you didn’t get any suitors: that was the harsh reality where she lived. Though there were many young men who had their eyes on her, their parents would be down on them at once. Not Elena! You must marry a girl with money, you know that!

Since her grandmother had recently died, she was alone in the world. She owned two goats and a cat – which couldn’t make her rich, especially not the cat.

But there was one young man, Milan, who loved Elena above anything else in the world. He had told her so many, many times. He was a good man with a noble character. And he wasn’t particularly wealthy, so the match could have worked, had it not been for his father, who had flatly prohibited him from so much as looking at Elena. Because Milan did not have his own fortune, it was of immense importance that he should marry a wealthy woman.

Milan did not protest, for in this country people obeyed their parents. He just assumed that his father wasn’t going to live forever. It wasn’t that he actually wished for his father’s death, for he was very devout, but the fact was that the man was very, very old and frail. He just had to wait!

Elena lived some distance outside the village in a small clay hut, a house that looked as though it could collapse at any moment. But she was seldom at home. She tended her two goats up on the mountainside, for there were many predators in the surrounding area. She wore an attractive outfit of white, red and yellow, like all the other girls in the area, except that her dress was rather worn out and shabby but she did not have the money to weave a new one. She had long, dark-brown braids, her eyes were practically black but shone like stars and her colouring was vivid: her skin was golden-brown and she had rosy cheeks, red lips and white teeth.

The village of Planina suffered from a torment.

Perhaps it would be incorrect to call it a torment: fear is probably a better word. People preferred not to go out alone at night. They preferred not to go out at all. And if they had to they walked rapidly, with their eyes cast down while mumbling prayers and incessantly making the sign of the cross. For if they didn’t they might risk encountering the one they called the “Wanderer of the Darkness”.

One day while Elena was out minding her goats among the prickly shrubs on the karst slopes, Milan passed that way. He had not intended for this to happen, but now that it had happened he felt that he could talk to her with a clear conscience.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.