The Narrator (32 page)

Makemin gathers us in a few buildings at one end of town, where the land rises. We can’t all fit inside one. I am present when the scouts report signs of the enemy moving back and forth on a spur of high land thrust out from the foothills and overlooking the town. Twice I hear the ping of bullets again, and now I see, in the fog, a blur here or there, that flits from rock to rock, or sways as light as a ghost swinging to and fro, guns banging far away ... Saskia wants to go after them—Makemin won’t hear of it in this fog. He takes my arm and tells me he is suspicious, he has intuitions, and doesn’t wait to see me nodding obediently. As the afternoon comes on, and there’s been some time with no shooting, the scouts go out again. Signs the soldiers have withdrawn—dusk is coming. We stay together in the houses until darkness falls, and leave our lamps unlit. We crane our ears into the silence, knowing the enemy is there in the dark and the fog, hidden in the rocks, high over us.

*

On patrol that night, again with the lieutenant. We fall in step with few words, following a street on the thin town’s thin edge. The houses loom larger than they are.

He’s looking away from me, at the windows we pass on his side.

“Any more riddles?” I ask.

“What?” he turns. “No,” he smiles faintly, looking away distracted.

I can go on walking these streets of fog for eternity. I look at the lieutenant, so when I hear the distant snap from above, when he stops and I hear him abruptly make that soft, sad “oh” as though he’d just blundered gently into something in the dark, I also see: his head dips, his face splits, his mandible swings wildly from his head on a strip of ligament, like a helmet’s loose chin strap, and blood cascades down his uniform to the ground. His feet take two little steps to the side, in the direction of the force, toward me, his body shudders and with it the jaw hanging by a scrap of left cheek, and now he makes and indescribable sound his eyes starting from their sockets, raising hands around a wound he dare not touch. Flinging out his arms he disappears into the house to his right.

I call and run after him—his shadow before me arms flailing, jaw swinging, the shape of the doorway as it runs feet loud on planks. A raw voice whoops out from the cavity, flying back to me from every wall in the dark as I’ve lost sight of him, the voice riots from everywhere as though the night were belching out its entrails.

A crash of water directs me and in a moment I am outside again, and there is agitation, a writhing black thing crosses the river away from me.

“Come back!” I stand on the bank. Where do I go?

Not even a streak in the water shows where he has been. I run in the dark, following the water’s edge; here a gravel mound spans the flow and I can ford across. My splashing legs make a great noise in the dark. I climb the opposite bank peering in all directions. The bank levels then swings up again. Moving from one boulder to another I gain height, hoping to find a good place to stop and look around. The slope is fractured ahead of me—a path. I head toward it.

I stop. These are the heights, where the enemy is. Dropping to a crouch I start dithering sideways below the level of the path, kicking down thick earth but not too noisily. This is a kind of spontaneous compromise between going on and going back—I think in confusion I will arc down toward the river, pausing along the flattened apex at intervals to search for the lieutenant. The path should be avoided, but it seems to draw me, and all the obstacles displaced to clear it now lie in my way. A rocky space like an ingrown wart comes up to me, and, still defying the path, I begin working my way down in among the rocks, holding on with hands and feet. It’s important to keep an eye on the path; it wants to trip me up, but it is the only landmark I have to gauge my height and position from here.

I look up to the path, and see barrel and gun, hand and half-hidden face ... the enemy uniform ... the eye at the sight.

The rain hides them from me. I have to walk with my head down. One goes ahead of me on my right, the other behind at my left, about six feet away. The one behind me took my gun and my pack. I don’t like the disembodied, light feeling that being disburdened gives me. I’m afraid, and there is no ballast of gear to hold. The path is satisfied, its personality is gone.

I don’t want to move my head, let the one behind me know I keep glancing about me, and at the one before me. A filled black uniform shiny with rain, a pale hand waving by the left hip. They are taking me toward the heights. Stuck in a vice I can only stare helplessly at my profuse and hasty thoughts none of them any good, they’re only making me crazy with the rain driving down on top of me. Will I panic? A sure way to die, how wise. How can such inane thoughts be possible now?

They conduct me between two large boulders as the path begins to curve around to the high place overlooking the one end of the town. I see a few tents bowed by the water, and the rags and ends of many others there; the camp is littered with trash. Enemy soldiers look up from their shooting places among the rocks, where most of them lie flat under grey sheets. Rain is gathering in a broad ribbon, widening to sheathe the end of the path before frothing over the edge and down the slope through a rough, fresh notch in the rim. The soil is crumbling as the water saws away at it. A bit of surprise keeps the fear from flashing too strongly over me as we come into camp—there are no more than a dozen or so of them. The rest have gone—I can see their tracks, the flat grooves the cartwheels left now bubbling with rain. These skirmishers remain to hold us down and convince us the enemy are massed on the heights, while the bulk of their number are already on their way and are now between Vscriathjadze and us.

Inside a spacious tent the rain has made into a drum, a man lies groaning on a cot. One of my guards talks to me and points at the man. He turns and puts my pack on table, sifting roughly through its contents. After a hasty inspection, he pulls out the sharper implements then shoves the pack into my hands and points to the wounded man. I don’t want to have to put up with his injuries or his weary suffering any more than they do; I set to work at once.

They must have no medical officer: they won’t kill me. But will they drag me away with them?

I finish, I do a good job. The guard who handed me my pack is gone. The one I presume to be the one to walk behind me sits now on a box by a lamp, elbows on knees, tired eyes on me. Pale-sallow, with a high square forehead tucked into the black visor, honey-brown hair, aristocratic looking nose. The first soldier returns and roots around in some boxes, festoons of water gushing from him. He’s removing bundles wrapped in rough fabric and tucking them under his arms. Suddenly he turns and crosses the tent in three strides, leaning sideways from the waist to peer down at the injured man, whose groans have subsided. He stares at my eyes sticking his finger into my face and speaks harshly to me, his voice so hoarse he can’t stop it breaking. He speaks Tauride, not Yeseg, but there is one word with a shock I know. It’s “narrator.”

The first soldier storms out with only a glance at his companion by the flap, who has not moved nor shifted her eyes from me. Naturally, they will have their own narrators. Soldiers come in and out for blankets or rain gear, as the water begins to fall hard again. They are not hostile, and pay me no more attention than seems necessary. Drawn anxious features stretched over their skulls is all I see. I’m a nuisance to them.

Relentless dripping, tapping on top of the tent.

Now I am compelled to rise and taken to another, half-collapsed tent, close to the rim. There is not much space in this tent, only enough for me to sit on the low stool that occupies it. The irregular flap has a view of the town below. The soldier walks away; I can see the others before me, huddled in among the rocks, scanning the town.

With nothing to do I have a harder time keeping the fear from gnawing—I’ve already begun to shiver, my uniform is plastered to my skin with sweat and icy rain. A wave of sharper cold blisters over me from behind ... out of the drumming of the rain comes a whispered roar, like the hooning sound of breath being blown into a bottle. It approaches the tent with steady deliberation—I can’t turn to look. It’s high up ... Nothing I could see anyway, without leaving the tent.

The roaring stops as something thuds on the canvas right above my head—two puckers where talons clutch the fabric.

I hear its respiration, regular, painful out of water, a protracted lowing, like a stricken animal moaning out its life in a deep cave. I look forward out the flap, my hands beginning to tremble on my knees. The presence soaks into my back. I can guess what it is—Wacagan have Predicanten.

The tent creaks. The thing lows just on top of me like a harbinger of doom.

The rain falls harder still. Though it is louder, it does not overwhelm that other sound ... As it eases again, my eye is drawn to a sprawling activity before me. The grey slopes to my right flap turbid with mud, I see the fumbling, cream-fringed edges of water tumbling over each other in layers as they grapple over rocks, down to the levels. Motion on lower ground now—the water climbs the walls of the houses in Cuttquisqui’s streets—all that landscape we explored and found swept clean of litter and this is why—the mounds of earth at the town’s edges were dykes, abandoned half-built.

The Predicate’s presence drops down out of it, enveloping me in a pillar of sway and suddenly every muscle in my body strains against itself, my jaw trembles and I am rigid. My spirit leaps against my frozen body—

They’ll be driven out into the open if the waters keep rising. Something drains out of me as I sit fixed in place watching.

The water goes higher. The streets are a grey slough.

Higher, higher—seething ashenness rushing in the doors. It climbs toward the windows.

Now I see them, dark spots emerging from the town, feet drag and slip and fall in the flow and now the careful enemy aims fires aiming and firing—some of those struggling shapes stop, weave, some fall; they are making for the mounds of displaced earth by the mine. Figures shapes move on the rooftops—with sick impotence I see them picked off, my eyes darting around and finding nothing, nothing, I can’t shout or fling a stone to jog their aiming arms. The breathing grip on me is driving its cold into my body harder and harder and I can only sit, my fingers crimping my knees—bodies of my friends bob and spin, rushing along fast enough now—or they fall wounded and struggling, and drown—and the horror of this thought is enough to wrench me an inch forward on my seat.

Above me I hear a studiously adjusted clench on the canvas. That breathing makes the canvas sputter as it rakes it with its grip—I will make that thing move drive it off strike it—I’ve seen mountain snow and I call that snow to mind as I drop my eyes to the fist-sized flat stone that weighs down one corner of the tent flap near my right foot—tears burst like acid from my eyes.

Still, white-clotted pelts of shaggy evergreens on the far side of a field of blue snow.

And then night, the flakes spin bright past my face and vanish in the gloom, fluffed and weightless in filmy air and a cold that polishes me.

My fingers have opened and my hand slides heavy as a millstone from my leg my arm drops to my side nearly numb.

Lighter than feathers, the snow flakes dance to the ground, weaving and looping with no breeze, no palpable influence, with only their own native frivolity. My hand stretches toward the stone with a feeling like the grating of rust on rust in my elbow in my shoulder. I am pulling madly against my lower back that is rigid as if I wore a corset, but I say I. am. in. the. snow. which scatters in high plumes with one half-hearted kick of my foot, which wafts back up from the ground like it’s not done playing.

The rock presses my palm and my fingers snap shut around it I swing straightening my legs and strike at the puckered canvas. The tent roof plunges violently, a hoarse indrawn moan erupts, breaking the breathing and that yawning roar takes its place again. The blow felt weak, useless. But perhaps it wasn’t.

My body snaps out of its confinement and in my tremor I lurch against the wall of the tent, bringing it down on top of me. I flounder there, pulling the canvas this way and that, struggling to free myself.