Late in the night he leaves the old man and the sleeping boy to take a piss. Afterward, he wanders the castle in the dark, finding his way by starlit arrow slits and memory. It is a small castle made to seem larger than it is by its illogical design. It seems larger yet in the darkness, and our hero’s memory fails. He stumbles on an unseen stair and sits on cold stone to nurse a bruised shin. He wants to weep in self-pity, and he wants to laugh at the bathos of this moment, this life. He curses softly to the mice, and dozes for a moment with his head on his knee before the chill rouses him again. He climbs the stair, and realizes it is the stair to the tower. The floors are wooden here and there is a cold, complex, living smell of damp oak, bird shit, feathers, smoke. He crosses to a window, his muffled steps rousing sleeping birds above his head, and squeezes himself onto the windowsill. There are few streetlights in the town below, but there are windows bright yellow with lamplight or underwater-blue with TV light. There are lives below those sharp, starlit roofs. There is history out there in the cold, clean air. And there is the moon, a rising crescent that hangs in the night sky no higher than our hero’s window, as if it means to look at him eye to eye. A silver blade, a wink, a knowing smile, close enough to tempt his reach, far enough to let him fall if he tried.
Sitting above the town with no company but the moon and the sleeping birds, our hero feels alone, apart, and yet a part of all those lives, all that history taking place right now, here and everywhere, with every beat of every heart. The paradox of loneliness is a black gulf within him, a rift between the broken pieces of his heart. The moon casts his shadow into the room behind him, and there, in the moonlit dark, the shadow of his sister’s absence puts her arms around his neck and lays her cheek against his stubbled head, and he turns and leans his face against her breast, wraps his arms about her waist, and finally weeps.
When the stars fade and the frost-colored light of day begins to seep back into the world, the old man brings the knife, and the deed is swiftly done.
It is the jackdaws that wake him. They have drifted down from the rafters and stand about, peering at him with cocked heads, discussing in hoarse and thoughtful tones whether he is alive or dead. Dead, he tries to tell them, but his throat remembers the iron blade and closes tight on the word. What is this? he wonders. Is he still dying? But he remembers the knife, the sudden icy tear, the taste of blood, the drowning. Air slides into his lungs at the thought, tasting of dust and feathers. What is this? Is he alive? He sits, clumsy with cold, and the birds sidle off, muttering and unafraid. Their claws make a clock’s tock against the floor. Our hero’s shirt is stiff and evil with blood. What, then, is this running through his veins?
He is too bewildered to feel afraid.
At first he cannot see the changes, and he thinks that he has failed, though how he could have failed and yet be alive escapes him. The dissonance between possibility and impossibility is too intense, he is numb and not, perhaps, entirely sane. He stumbles down the stairs, the same spider-haunted stairs, while the daws leave by the windows. They laugh at him as they go, he has no doubt: birds have a black sense of humor. He blunders his way through the half-remembered halls, gets lost, laughs out of sheer uncomprehending terror. When he finds the entry hall, there is a fire burning on the vast hearth, a whole log alight, filling the fireplace with snapping and dancing flames, but he does not pause. The door is wide open, and the air is bright with morning light, although the sun is still below the roofs of the town.
There are bells ringing somewhere below, a shining tin-tanning of bronze, such a happy sound that our hero pulls off his blood-soaked shirt so as not to sully the good day. He walks bare-chested into the town, and no one stares or looks aside, although the streets are almost crowded. The people are not so happy as the bells; many seem as quietly, profoundly bewildered as our hero feels. He stops a woman about his own age, a woman with soft fair hair tousled across her face, and asks what has happened.
“What do you mean?” she says. “Everything has happened. Everything!”
“O God,” an older woman says beside them. “O God, do not abandon us. O God, preserve us.”
A man across the narrow street is cursing with a loud and frantic edge to his voice. He seems to be haranguing his car which is parked with two wheels up on the pavement, and which is no doubt out of gas after all these months of the embargo. Our hero supposes that the invading armies are near, perhaps at the fragile old walls of the town, and so, although there is something odd about the man’s defunct automobile, he continues on down the hill toward the river where he might be able to see what there is to see.
But there are other odd things, and gradually they begin to distract him from the shock of being alive. The streets are wider as they near the archaic boundary of the old wall, and the pavements here are lined with strange statues. Wrought-iron coaches with weighty and elaborate ornaments, brass lions with blunt, dog-like faces and curling manes, horses with legs like pistons and gilded springs. The people clustered around these peculiar artworks are predictably confused, but there are others in the streets who walk with shining eyes and buoyant steps, and some of these people, too, seem odd to our hero. Their clothing is too festive, their hair is strung with baubles, their faces are at once laughing and fierce. One bearded man catches our hero’s eye and bows. He sweeps off his jacket, blue velvet stiff with gold braid, and offers it to our hero with another bow. “My lord,” he says, and when our hero takes what is offered, the man spreads his arms with a wide flourish, as if to present to him everything: the people, the town, the world.
And then our hero sees, as if before he had been blind. The tired old houses propped up by silver-barked trees hung with jewel-faceted fruit. The banners lazily unfurling from lampposts that have moonstones in place of glass. The violets shivering above the clear, speaking stream that runs down the gutter, between the clawed feet of the transformed cars. It is the new world, the ancient world, the world that had faded to a golden dream on the losing face of his sister’s hoarded coin. It is the world he died for. He has come home.
It is still a four-day walk back to the new capital, and though it seems both illogical and unfair, our reborn hero’s feet still throb and sting with blisters in his worn-out army boots. He is warm enough in his old jeans and the blue velvet coat, despite the clouds that roll in from the east, but he walks with a deep internal chill that only deepens the closer he gets to home. He should have kept his ruined shirt to remind him that there is no such thing as a bloodless victory, a bloodless war. The invaders had penetrated too deeply to be shed with the nation’s old skin. Like embedded ticks engorged with suddenly poisoned blood, they—men and women of the East and the West, their weapons and machines—have suffered transformation along with the rest of them, and though harmed, they have not been rendered harmless. There are monsters in this new world. He sees one slain, a tank-dragon with bitter-green scales, a six-legged lizard with three heads and one mad Russian face, in the fields near where he had met the checkpoint guards and Martiana Vronskaya on his way north just a few days ago. Perhaps some of these confused and scrabbling warriors are those same young volunteers with their flak jackets and jeans. The jeans have not changed, nor the fearful determination, but the short spears with the shining blades are new. New, and as old as the world. Our hero leaves them to their bloody triumph on the flower-starred field, and like the veteran he is, continues on his painful way.
The new capital has changed more than the old, its modern buildings wrenched into something too much stranger than their origins. Our hero suspects this will never be an easy place to live, not even the old quarter where his sister lives. Here, 18th Century houses have melted like candlewax, or spiraled up into towers like narwhal tusks and antelope horns, crumbling moldings and baroque tiles bent and twisted out of true. Our hero cannot tell if this new architecture is better or worse than the old, uglier or more beautiful. He is only frustrated that the landmarks have changed, and that he cannot locate the house is that once he could find blind drunk and staggering. It seems bitterly unfair. He circles the half-familiar streets, until finally a doorway catches his eye, a pale door like a tooth or a pearl, with above it a wholly prosaic glass-and-iron transom in the shape of a fan. He knows that transom, and now that he is looking, he recognizes a brass-capped iron railing, a graffitoed slogan barely legible among the creeping blue flowers on the pavement at his feet. Tears of gratitude sparking hot and wet in his eyes, he turns the corner and walks to the second door.
His key still works, despite the rubies bursting like mushrooms from the crazed paint on the door. He enters the old-house quiet, breathes in the intimately remembered smell of dry wood and cabbage and sandalwood incense, climbs the crooked, creaking, fern-and-trumpet-vine stairs. He knocks on his sister’s door, and she opens it, and she is just the same.
The Rescue
She woke at the bottom of a well.
A squared-off well, strangely bright and lined with tiles, and with a painted door far overhead. Far, far overhead. She lay for a long time contemplating that door—it was so bright in the well she could see the flaws in the cream paint—until her other senses began to wake. She was lying as she must have fallen when they threw her in, with her head and shoulders on the floor and the rest of her body stretched up one wall . . . Gravity reasserted itself, spinning the well like a gimbal so that for an instant she was pressed like a squashed fly against the ceiling before it settled and she was lying on the floor. The floor of a room with tiled walls, and a window in the wall above her head, and a door a long way away. She went on looking at the door between her bare feet, blinking occasionally to mark the time. Gravity came and went. Finally she thought to test it, and raised her hand before her eyes.
Raised her hand . . .
Raised her hand, after a vast gulf of time, and left it floating in the air a while until she had encompassed what she saw. Not her hand (bony? small? chapped?) but a wool mitten strapped about the wrist and palm with dirty bandages. Was it cold? It began to seem to her that it was; that her bare feet were icy and the tiled floor beneath her was pressing a hard chill into her flesh through her clothes. While she was making these discoveries, her hand had drifted out of sight. She raised it again, with less lag time but more effort, and saw that the mitten was green.
She rubbed her face with it, and felt the fraying wool catch on new scabs, felt the sting of the scratches, and remembered clawing at her skin to release the insects tormenting her under the surface. Drugs, she thought. (Thought was slow. She went on lying there, looking at her hand, her toes, the door.) Drugs. Withdrawal from drugs: that was the bugs. Drugs: bugs: a rhyme. And this immense lethargy: that was drugs, too: a sedative. And this slow awakening: that was the sedative wearing off.
Now then. Here was a question. Where did the sedative come from?
The realization was like a second awakening: she was in a hospital room, bare of furniture and fixtures but unmistakable for its tiles and its sickly paint. Struggling with the weight of her limbs, she hauled herself up to sit against the wall, hugging her knees, trying to listen past the thudding of her heart and the ringing in her ears. Silence. That was wrong; that wasn’t the hospital she knew. The color of the paint on the door was wrong, too, cream instead of green. Everything was wrong—broken tiles—cold radiator—old mittens instead of restraints—
And she remembered being taken out of her cell by a male orderly. She remembered it vividly and all of a piece: his soft, stupid face; his hard hand on her arm; her arm bare under the sleeve of her scanty smock. She had been drugged no more than usual, had been left alone for several days, had almost recovered herself. Had known that the appearance of a male orderly in the women’s ward was a dreadful sign.
She couldn’t really remember the passage through the hospital, it was a pastiche of all her other trips through the halls, the unlocked and relocked doors, but she remembered being taken out into the courtyard. It was the kitchen yard, with the laundry steaming away on one side and the ambulances parked along the wall by the tradesman’s entrance. It had been cold. She had been surprised by the cold, having forgotten the seasons, and she wore nothing but her smock. The air was shocking on her shaved scalp, her bare feet and legs. Her attention had been caught by the clouds of steam from the laundry, the steam of her own breath, the billowing exhaust from the big olive-green car idling by the kitchen door.
They’re taking me away,
she thought without hope as the orderly handed her over to the two men in uniform. But the men in uniform, holding her by her arms, took her across the yard, past the laundry—through the wet clouds reeking of lye—and out a small door to the back of the hospital grounds, and then she knew for sure.
The wintry ground hurt her feet. Frozen grass gave way to frozen twigs and pebbles and leaves as they entered the bare-branched wood. She balked, and they hit her without waiting for a struggle. One hard punch on the back of her neck, and she could still feel the cruel ground scraping her feet as they dragged her to the ready-dug grave under the trees. They dropped her on her knees; she caught herself with her hands on the lip of the grave. There were roots protruding from the rough clay walls, black roots, brown clay. Her breath still steamed. There was a shot, two shots. A hard hand again on her arm, the hard ground again beneath her feet . . .
And a hospital room. And drugs. And bugs beneath her skin. Was this a rescue?
It was difficult—the gimbal that had spun the room was now inside her skull, spinning her brain—but she got herself onto her feet, and rather than dare the open floor she slid her shoulder against the wall, one corner and another, feeling the rough places in the tiles snag her sweater (sweater? over orderly’s pants?) until she achieved the door. It had a round handle. The mitten slid and slid. She knew it was locked. She tried both hands and the mechanism rattled and the door opened a crack. She pried it open with her mittened fingertips. A long hospital corridor stretched before her, very long, very empty, lit only by a window at the far end. It was silent, and cold, and she could hear the emptiness echoing throughout. An empty hospital.