Oh God, have mercy on her soul! Oh God . . .
“Nadia . . .” Father Michael could barely speak, so great was the pressure in his chest. His legs wobbled beneath him and suddenly they collapsed. He landed on his knees and lifted his one good arm to the girl. “Nadiaâ”
“I heard the song, Father.” She spoke quietly. Light sparkled through her eyes. A faint smile softened her features. The girl had lost her fear. Entirely!
Nadia hummed, faint, high-pitched, clear for all to hear.
“Hm hm hm hmhmm . . .”
The melody! Dear God, she had heard it too!
“Three!” Karadzic barked.
“I saw you there,” she said. And she winked.
Her eyes were wide open, an otherworldly blue penetrating his, when the gun bucked in the commander's thick, gnarled hand.
Boom!
Her head snapped back. She stood in the echoing silence for an endless moment, her chin pointed to sky, baring that tender pale neck. And then she crumpled to the ground like a sack of potatoes. A small one, wrapped in a pink dress.
Father Michael's mind began to explode. His own voice joined a hundred others in a long epitaph of distress. “Aaaaahhhhhh . . .” It screamed past his throat until the last whisper of breath had left his lungs. Then it began again, and Michael wanted desperately to die. He wanted absolutely nothing but to die.
Ivena's mouth lay wide open, but no sound came out. Only a breath of terror that seemed to strike Michael on his chest.
The priest's world began to spin and he lost his orientation. He fell forward, face first, swallowed by the horror of the moment. His head struck the concrete and his mind began to fade. Maybe he was in hell.
IVENA WAS reading through tears now. Wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand and sniffing and trying to keep the page clear enough to read. The sorrow felt like a deep healing balm as it washed through her chest in relentless waves.
It felt that way because she knew what was coming next and she could hardly wait to get there! Her fingers held a slight tremble as she turned these few pages. They were worn ragged on the corners. The book stated elsewhere that you could not find mountains without going through valleys. In all honesty she didn't know whether her Nadia's death was a mountain or a valley. It really depended on perspective.
And truly, the perspective was about to change.
JANJIC STARED, his eyes wide and stinging. All about him voices of torment screamed; pandemonium erupted on the courtyard floor. Father Michael lay face-down, his head not five inches from the girl's shiny white birthday shoes.
Karadzic reached out and snatched another child by the collar. The boy's mother wailed in protest, started forward, and then stopped when Karadzic shoved the gun toward her. “Shut up! Shut up! Everyone!” he thundered.
Janjic was running before his mind processed the order to run. Straight for the priest. Or perhaps straight for Karadzic, he didn't know which until the last possible second. The man had to be stopped.
How the commander managed to get his pistol around so quickly Janjic had no clue, but the black Luger whipped around and met him with a jarring blow to his cheek.
Pain shot over his skull. It felt like he'd run into a swinging bat. His head jerked back and his legs flew forward, throwing him from his feet. Janjic landed heavily on his back and rolled over, moaning. What was he doing? Stopping Karadzicâthat's what he was doing.
Janjic dragged himself from the commander, urged by a boot kick to his thigh. His mind swam. The world seemed to slow. Five feet away on the ground lay a girl who'd just given her life for her priest. For her God. For Christ's love. And Janjic had seen in her eyes a look of absolute certainty. He had seen her smile at the priest. He had seen the wink. A
wink
, for goodness sake! Something had changed with that wink. He was not sure what it meant, except that something had changed.
Dear God, she had hummed! She had
winked!
“Puzup, get him to his feet,” Karadzic ordered above the din.
Puzup stormed past Janjic and yanked the priest to his feet. Paul gaped at the scene, his expression impossible to interpret. Janjic pushed himself to his knees, ignoring the pain that throbbed through his skull. Blood dripped to the concrete from a wound behind his ear. He turned back to the commander and stood shakily. Ten feet separated them now.
The priest wavered on his feet, facing Karadzic. If the father had passed out from his fall, they had awakened him. The little boy the commander had hauled from the steps stood shaking and bawling. Karadzic pressed his pistol against the boy's ear.
“What do you say, Priest? What's this love of yours worth? Should I put another one of your children out of their misery?” Karadzic's eyes were rocks behind bushy brows, dull gray tombstones. He was grinning. “Or will you renounce your stupid faith?”
“Kill me,” Father Michael's voice quavered.
Janjic stopped trying to understand the madness that had gripped this priest and his flock of sheep. It was beyond the reaches of his mind. Yet it reached out to him with long fingers of desire.
“Take my life, sir. Please leave the boy.”
The smile vanished from commander's face. “Then renounce your faith, you blithering idiot! They are words! Just words! Say them. Say them!”
“They are words of Christ. He is my redeemer. He is my Savior. He is my Creator. How can I deny my own Creator? Please, sirâ”
“He is your redeemer? He is her redeemer too?” He motioned to the girl on the ground. “She is dead, you fool.”
The priest stood trembling for a few moments before responding. “She sees you now. She is laughing.”
Karadzic stared at Father Michael.
The women had stopped their cries and the children sat still, faces buried in their mothers' skirts.
“If you must have another death, let it be mine,” the priest said.
And then the rules of the game changed once more.
The girl's mother, Ivena, who had grown eerily calm, suddenly wrested herself free from Molosov but did not rush the commander again. Molosov grabbed one arm but let her stand on her own. “No,” she said softly, “let it be mine. Kill me in the boy's place.” She stood unflinching, like a stone statue.
Karadzic now stood with the pistol to the whimpering boy's ear, between a man and a woman each asking for death in the boy's place. He shifted on his feet, unsure how much power he truly held over this scene.
Another woman stepped forward, her face twisted in pity. “No. No, kill me instead. I will die for the boy. The priest has already suffered too much. And Ivena has lost her only child. I am childless. Take my life. I will join Nadia.”
“No, I will,” another said, taking two steps forward. “You are young, Kota. I am old. Please, this world holds no appeal to me. It would be good for me to pass on to be with our Lord.” The woman looked to be in her fifties.
Karadzic slashed the air with his pistol. “Silence! Perhaps I should kill
all
of you! I am killing here, not playing a game. You want me to kill you all?” Janjic had known the man long enough to recognize his faltering. But there was something else there as well. A glimmer of excitement that flashed through his gray eyes. Like a dog in heat.
“But it really should be me,” a voice said. Janjic looked to the steps where another girl stood facing them with her heels together. “Nadia was my best friend,” she said. “I should join her. Is there really music there, Father?”
The priest could not answer. He was weeping uncontrollably. Torn to shreds by this display of love.
The gun boomed and Janjic flinched.
Karadzic held the weapon above his head. He'd fired into the air. “Stop! Stop!” He shoved the boy sprawling to his seat. His thick lips glistened with spittle. The gun shook in his thick fingers, and above it all his eyes sparkled with rising excitement.
He stepped back and turned the pistol on Nadia's mother. She simply closed her eyes. Janjic understood her motivation to some degree: The woman's only child lay at her feet. She was stepping up to the bullet with a grief-ravaged mind.
He held his breath in anticipation of a shot.
Karadzic licked his wet lips and jerked the weapon to the younger woman who'd stepped forward. She too closed her eyes. But Karadzic did not shoot. He swiveled it to the older woman. Looking at them all now, Janjic thought that any one of the women might give their lives for the boy. It was a moment that could not be understood in the context of normal human experience. A great spiritual love had settled on them all. Karadzic was more than capable of killing; he was in fact eager for it. And yet the women stood square-shouldered now, daring him to pull the trigger.
Janjic swayed on weak legs, overcome by the display of self-sacrifice. The ravens cawed overhead and he glanced skyward, as much for a reprieve as in response to the bird's call. At first he thought the ravens had flown off; that a black cloud had drifted over the valley in their place. But then he saw the cloud ebb and flow and he knew it was a singular ring of birdsâa hundred or more, gliding overhead making their odd call. What was happening here? He lowered his eyes to the courtyard and blinked against the buzz that had overtaken the pounding in his skull.
For a long, silent minute Karadzic weighed his decision, his muscles strung to the snapping point, sweating profusely, breathing heavily.
The villagers did not move; they drilled him with steady stares. The priest seemed to float in and out of consciousness, swaying on his feet, opening and closing his eyes periodically. His face drifted through a range of expressionsâone moment his eyes open and his mouth sagged with grief, the next his eyes closed and his mouth opened in wonder. Janjic studied him, and his heart broke for the man. He wanted to take the gentle priest to a bed and dress his wounds. Bathe him in hot water and soothe his battered shoulder. His face would never be the same; the damage looked far too severe. He would probably be blind in his right eye, and eating would prove difficult for some time. Poor priest.
My poor, poor priest. I swear that I will care for you, my priest. I will come and serve . . .
What was this? What was he thinking? Janjic stopped himself. But it was true. He knew it then as much as he had known anything. He loved this man. He cherished this man. His heart felt sick over this man.
I will come and serve you, my priest.
A knot rose to Janjic's throat, suffocating him.
In you I have seen love, Priest. In you and your children and your women I have seen God. I will . . .
A chuckle interrupted his thoughts. The commander was chuckling. Looking around and chuckling. The sound engendered terror. The man was completely mad! He suddenly lowered his gun and studied the crowd, nodding slightly, tasting a new plan on his thick tongue.
“Haul this priest to the large cross,” he said. No one moved. Not even Molosov, who stood behind Ivena.
“Are you deaf, Molosov? Take him. Puzup, Paul, help Molosov.” He stared at the large stone cross facing the cemetery. “We will give them what they desire.”
FATHER MICHAEL remembered stumbling across the concrete, shoved from behind, tripping to his knees once and then being hauled up under his arms. He remembered the pain shooting through his shoulder and thinking someone had pulled his arm off. But it still swung ungainly by his side.
He remembered the cries of protest from the women. “Leave the Father! I beg you . . . He's a good man . . . Take one of us. We beg you!”
The world twisted topsy-turvy as they approached the cross. They left the girl lying on the concrete in pool of blood.
Nadia . . . Nadia, sweet child.
Ivena knelt by her daughter, weeping bitterly again, but a soldier jabbed her with his rifle, forcing her to follow the crowd to the cemetery.
The tall stone cross leaned against a white sky, gray and pitted. It had been erected one hundred years earlier. They called it stone, but the twelve-foot cross was actually cast of concrete, with etchings of rosebuds at the top and at the beams' intersection. Each end flared like a clover leaf, giving the instrument of death an incongruous sense of delicacy.
The pain on his right side reached to his bones. Some had been broken.
Oh, Father. Dear Father, give me strength
. The dove still sat on the roof peak and eyed them carefully. The spring bubbled without pause, oblivious of this treachery.
They reached the cross, and a sudden brutal pain shot through Michael's spine. His world faded.
When his mind crawled back into consciousness, a wailing greeted him. His head hung low, bowed from his shoulders, facing the dirt. His ribs stuck out like sticks beneath stretched skin. He was naked except for white boxer shorts, now stained in sweat and blood.
Michael blinked and struggled for orientation. He tried to lift his head, but pain sliced through his muscles. The women were singing, long mournful wails without tune. Mourning for whom?
For you. They're mourning you!
But why? It came back to him then. He had been marched to the cross. They had lashed him to the cross with a hemp rope around the midsection and shoulders, leaving his feet to dangle free.
He lifted his chin slowly and craned for a view, ignoring the shafts of pain down his right side. The commander stood to his left, the barrel of his pistol confronting Michael like a small black tunnel. The man looked at the women, most of whom had fallen to their knees, pleading with him.
A woman's words came to Michael. “He's our priest. He's a servant of God. You cannot kill him! You can not.” It was Ivena.
Oh, dear Ivena! Your heart is spun of gold!
The priest felt his body quiver as he slowly straightened his heavy head. He managed to lift it upright and let it flop backward. It struck the concrete cross with a dull thump.
The wailing ceased. They had heard. But now he stared up at the darkened sky. A white, overcast sky filled with black birds.
Goodness, there must be hundreds of birds flying around up there.
He tilted his head to his left and let it loll so that it rested on his good shoulder.