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My father also supported the fact that the missing horses were slain
by the wolves or, more likely, by the gypsies themselves to produce the horrible death-cries of an animal in effort
to bring grim and morbid attention to our village and especially the forest.
It didn't take long for the foreigners to pour into the inns and hostels that the gypsies had built up to accommodate
the superstitious and the heavy-pursed old men of almost every nation. Of course, the way to the stones could only
be shown by them alone and for a certain fee, as were the symbols carved out of wood, that the old hags at the
camp used to sell the simpletons who were eager to witness those sorcerous lights that were said to hang over the
stones during nights when the moon did not shine: the lights would start to leak out of the stones and up into
the midst of glimmering stars above.
I had sneaked out of the house as a small pup often too many times for a test of courage and to defy my grandfathers
orders to steer clear of that shady place, where shadows used to grow too tall too sudden to belong to the oaks
themselves and where the gypsies supposedly lurked around, luring away children so they could make them disappear.
Sure, I knew those were ghost-stories told by my parents to keep me getting lost into the woods, but still the
overall feeling of unpleasantness filled my tummy and throat when I sat in the nearby bushes and stared at the
huge stones with anticipation.
Nothing ever happened but the occasional howl of the owl and the barking of a fox in the night. Dismissing the
false folklore from thereon on, I had inscribed inside my constitution a distrust against any man who would say
they dealt with all things occult, for if a man should ever acquire some degree and understanding of the forces
that lay beneath our definition of the simple word 'supernatural', then the visions and the poisonous ideas infiltrating
them would prevent their mouths from such careless declarations.
As far as I knew those men still visited the rocks, despite my father's reasoning to them that those tremendeous
bulks were carried there by the ice in elder times. There were some cabbalists, who laughed at the chance of such
an age even occurring, and there were still those, who took me and my family's talk as some sort of a peasant-lore,
by which we, for some paranoid reason only known to themselves, wished to keep the power of the stones to ourselves.
What this power was supposed to be, I did not care to learn for it was obvious to me that those sort of people
only saw what they cared wanted to see, heard what they wanted to hear and deducted what they wished to deduct.
With feelings of disappointment and dismay I regarded all occultists in my course as feeble-minded fools, who chased
the shadows of long-left ghosts and lifted up high their black candles in order to see the sun; to avoid seeing
the truth, that there are concepts that we, us humans, are never meant to comprehend, no matter the sum of teachings,
rites or sacrifices we may take part of.
If I had ever forgotten the measures and looks of the stones all I would have had to do was open the Chronikels
of the Eastern Slavic Wars by Hennrick of Livonia. An educated man, accompanying German soldiers wherever they
trod, he was the first author to mention my homeland by writing. With a rough four-meter in diameter and five meters
tall, they laid peacefully in the thick of the oaks, oaks that were supposed to have been there even before the
German crusaders set foot on the land and naming it after the Holy Virgin Mary, mother of their mundane god. But
even their hardened swords and merciless spirits were awestruck before the groves, covered under moss thicker than
the beards of the pagan lords that dwelt inside the green-lain territory.
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