He was getting very near—only a dozen feet or so—and his
eyes were locked on my face. The gunman would recognize me now on any street in any town. “And that’s all you are, I suppose: a decent man. Or, perhaps, a henchman.”
I laughed. “You already said I wasn’t much of a liar.”
The man lifted the rifle, and his index finger tightened on the trigger. “Yes. And soon you won’t be anything at all.” He fired.
THAT MARVELOUS GIRL
I
crouch in the darkness behind a boulder and watch in terror as our pursuer closes in on poor, wounded Thomas. I study the gunman’s face, hatchetlike and cruel, and my stomach turns.
Why can’t I remember that face?
The man lifts his cane-rifle and levels it at Thomas. “Yes, and soon you won’t be anything at all.”
Thomas is doomed …
Except for that marvelous girl.
FLIGHT BY SNOW
T
he slug ripped through my collar, grazed my neck, and punched a hole in my rucksack. It should have killed me, that shot … but the gunman’s horse had spooked. As I fell from the coach, I saw with strange clarity the muddy stone that had smacked the neck of the rearing horse. The gunman dropped his lantern in a vain attempt to catch himself, but he fell all the same, along with that plunging light. The gunman, the lantern, and I struck the earth simultaneously. The lamp went black.
I sat panting in the darkness as my foe shouted and cursed.
Then came a whispered voice some distance behind me. “Thomas! Come on!” It was Anna.
The gunman hushed, listening.
I held my breath and climbed to my feet.
“I can hear you,” he warned. A click told of another shell settling into the chamber.
Turning, I ran, arms outstretched. Ten paces carried me away from the gunman, but then the ground dropped out from under me, and I sprawled in a ditch. Breath burst from my lungs, and the noise was answered by the rifle’s report. The bullet struck a nearby rock and ricocheted into the night. I breathed more easily after that. It would take him a few moments to fit another shell, and by then, I’d be away in
the dark. I scrambled up the far bank and staggered on, even hazarding a call, “Anna? Anna, where are you?”
“Here,” came the reply, up and to the right.
I followed the sound, stumbling over loose stones to reach her. “That was a nice throw.”
“Father taught me to throw like a boy,” she whispered.
“Marvelous,” came Silence’s voice, nearby.
I blinked, trying to clear the afterimage of the lantern from my eyes. “What now?”
Anna sighed tightly. “We climb. There’s a path away to the left, rocky steps upward. I saw it before the lantern broke. If only there was a moon tonight.”
I craned to see a sky cluttered with stars. Arcturus hung within a U-shaped mountain pass overhead. “The moon is rising now in the east—beyond that ridgeline. The higher we climb, the sooner we’ll be in the light.”
Anna tapped a stick on the ground. “I’ll lead the way.” She headed up the slope, and her blue skirt showed gray in the starlight. She would be our beacon. I levered Silence up from the ground and braced him as we both found our balance.
We were in this now and no mistake—Silence and Anna and I hunted by a gunman. Surely he could hear our struggling steps. Surely he was following, wanting to get as close as possible before squeezing off his next shot.
WE CLIMBED, we crawled, we scrambled through stands of pine and then through a whole forest of them. For minutes at a time, we lost sight of the mountain pass above, and we had no way to know where our pursuer was below. I wished he would make a sound so we could know whether he was half a mile behind or half a yard.
We had just cleared the forest and staggered out onto a
snowy slope when Silence whispered breathlessly, “I have to rest.” He slumped to the ground and wheezed.
“Just a little farther,” I said. The snowy pass was a quarter mile above us, glowing white under the sickle-shaped moon. “We have to keep moving. The gunman—”
“There hasn’t been sight or sound of him for an hour,” Silence whispered. Then he called out in a clear voice, “Anna, dear—we’re taking a rest.”
Above us, Anna wailed, “It’s just a little farther!”
Silence reached to me. His hand was gray in the moonlight. “Thank you, Thomas. You and Anna—you could’ve left me in the river. You could’ve abandoned me miles ago. But you didn’t.”
I sat down beside him. Immediately, the snow began to melt into my trousers. “We’re simply doing the right thing.”
As the words trailed away, I heard a new sound—the furtive crackle of a stick beneath a gently laid boot. I clutched Silence’s arm and held my breath. The hush around us was intense. Another boot shifted in the darkness below. The gunman was stalking through the wood. He couldn’t be more than sixty feet back.
I rolled to my side and pushed against the ground, trying to get up, but my left arm rebelled. In the wan light of the moon, I saw dark drops fall from my neck and soak into the snow. Beside me, Silence struggled to his feet and began to climb the slope. Gritting my teeth, I shoved myself upward and followed.
“Anna!” I whispered. “Get moving!”
Ahead of us, she climbed, nearly invisible against the snow and pulling away rapidly.
The footsteps behind us grew loud and quick. The gunman knew we were on the move.
Silence and I strove upward side by side, like oxen yoked together.
The gunman gave an indistinct curse and fired.
The air around us shook, and a bullet screamed past our tucked heads. I looked toward Anna, fearing I would see her fall, but she climbed on soundlessly.
Another bullet roared out, this one grazing Silence’s splinted arm. He growled and went down.
“Get up!” I snarled, grabbing his collar and trying to hoist him. “Get up!”
Silence only stared at me, stunned.
The gunman clambered toward us. We’d never escape him now.
Except for the snow—tons of snow lay in fragile layers across the mountainside. The chemistry of the situation was perfect—a chain reaction waiting for the right catalyst.
While Silence lay clutching his arm, I turned and cut a path across the slope. I dug my feet in and dragged them, making as deep a trench as I could.
Above me, Anna stood in the pass, her eyes wide with terror.
Below me, the gunman planted his feet and raised his rifle.
Anna screamed, “Thomas!”
Her shout triggered the avalanche. I stood, amazed, as the shelf of snow below me broke free of the mountainside and began to slide. At first, it moved as one great raft, gray beneath the winking moon. As it picked up speed, though, the slope broke into huge slabs of snow and ice, and then into tumbling boulders and then a roaring cascade. I felt like a god hurling down vengeance on my adversary.
The gunman stood stunned, rifle firing uselessly into the white rush and eyes goggling. Then the avalanche engulfed
him. He was swallowed up, though I fancied to see his feet tumble in the churning stuff. There was no more sight of him as the avalanche slammed into the forest and plowed down trees.
He’s probably dead now, I thought, dead or as good as dead.
I was suddenly sitting, my legs too weak to hold me up. Exhaustion had done it to me: exhaustion and relief at having escaped … and guilt at having caused another man’s death.
Silence sidled up to me and collapsed likewise. He lay on his back and laughed at that sickle moon. “You did it, Thomas. Brilliant!”
“I suppose it was,” I replied as the last of the avalanche rumbled itself out a few miles below.
“Ingenuity and morality—a rare pairing.” Silence’s eyes were wide beneath the murk of the moon, and the smile he wore was genuine.
“Is everything all right?” Anna called down from the pass above.
“Everything except the gunman,” Silence replied. His voice was filled with relief that sounded almost like gloating.
“Dead?” Anna called out in a strangled voice.
“By all the laws of physics and metaphysics,” Silence replied grandly, “dead.”
A sick feeling rose in my throat, but I swallowed it. Anna, too, was silent for a time. Then she called out, “There’s a cave up here.”
“A what?” Silence asked.
“Shelter. A place to rest. Come on.”
THE SHEPHERD’S BARROW
A
s we enter the cave, Thomas digs a matchbox from his rucksack, strikes a match on the cave mouth, and uses it to ignite a pinch of wattle. A tiny flame illumines the shelter.
It is more than a cave—carved first by nature but later by humans. The floor is worn smooth by the feet of men and the hooves of sheep.
“This must be a shepherd’s barrow,” Anna says, “where they shelter when crossing from summer to winter pastures.”
The center of the cave boasts an ashy fire pit where a few charred logs remain. “Aha!” I gather straw from the ground and dump it into the pit. “Quickly, Thomas. We can’t waste matches.”
He brings the wattle forward, and in moments, he’s woken a neat little blaze, which casts a glow around the whole chamber.
“Much improved,” Anna says. She approaches the fire to warm herself. Meanwhile, I stalk about, surveying the area.
The flame illuminates straw pallets that lie on ledges of stone: apparent beds for shepherds. Away from the fire, rushes cover the floor, providing bedding and fodder for sheep. “Crude as they are,” I tell my young friends, “the accommodations seem heavenly to me. I could collapse and sleep a week.”
“You’re bleeding,” Anna says.
I grip my wounded arm, where a second bullet had ripped a shallow trough. The wound burns. “A trifle.”
“A trifle that needs tending.” Anna crouches down, takes hold of a lower hem of her skirt, and tears it. “It may be a little snow soaked, a little dirty … .”
“No more than I am, my dear,” I reply gently.
“We should get Thomas’s flask for this—for the infection. Thomas, how’s your flask holding out?”
He turns toward us, eyes looking haunted in the glow of the fire. “Enough for each of us.” He slides the rucksack from his back, fishes a flask from it, takes a draught, and then slaps a little whisky on the wound on his neck. Wincing from the pain, he hands the flask to Anna.
“You two are pretty shot up,” she observes as she dabs a few drops of whisky on my arm.
“Yes,” I reply through clenched teeth. The stinging is done in a moment. “The gunman was kind enough to spare you.”
Anna’s eyes flare, and her brows arch inward. She studies my face, seeking a hidden meaning in my words. She has a secret, this one, and she fears that I have stumbled on it. What secret, though? A moment later, her eyes go opaque, and tears gather in the corners.
“What is it?” I ask
Anna busies herself with the bandage. “It’s nothing … .”
I catch her hand. “Save some of the bandage for Thomas.”
“Of course. Thomas.” She rips the rest of the fabric free and ties off my bandage. Her eyes are flooded with tears.
Comforting her is not the province of an old man. I am that—yes. I know precious little else, but I do know that. “Thomas needs you, Anna. Go to him.”
She nods, rises, and crosses past the fire, where her ragged dress gleams like raiment. Reaching Thomas, she sits him
down on one of the straw mattresses and begins tending his neck wound.
“What now?” Thomas asks.
I reply, “Now, we sleep the sleep of the just—”
Anna laughs bleakly. “Or at least of the exhausted.”
“—and tomorrow, we hike back down the mountain into whatever village you two came from … .”
“Meiringen,” the two young people say together. Their eyes meet.
I look away. Let the young have their entanglements. What I need is time—time to sort out my head. “Yes, Meiringen. We’ll get the medical attention we need, and … and we’ll go our separate ways, as if none of this had ever happened.” The irony of those words strikes me. My whole life never happened. I’ve lived only these last hours, all of it at the verge of death.
Such thoughts should keep me awake, but the weary body has its own weight, and it drags me down. In moments, lying on a mean mat of shepherd’s straw, I plunge into sleep.
OF COURSE you haunt my dreams, Gunman. I see you entombed in snow like a cadaver in earth, ice packing your joints and turning skin to porcelain and turning meat to stone. But there is a heart still beating in you, and a will to kill. You are still alive, Gunman.
But that is not your name. That is only what you do, what you plan to do to me. What is your name?
Something that starts with
m
. Murdock? Mordred? Something with death in it—Morbid? Murder? Something with betrayal and hatred … . Your name is but a room away, and I can hear it like a faint sob through the wall: Morpheus? Monstrous?
You are not dead. You will not die—cannot. Your heart is
stoked with a preternatural flame, and it melts your stony muscles and your porcelain skin.
You are breaking free!
Frozen hands claw at the ice sheath around you. Frozen arms scull through the snow. They break open a space for breath. Time to climb out. Punching handholds, kicking footholds, you bull your way to the surface. Your head breaks through, and you cry out. Your hands pull you up. Slick and hot and furious, you are born out of the white slope and into the air. Snow-crusted eyes rise toward the starry sky. The stars show you this saddle pass where I lie asleep.
Oh, if only the avalanche had taken your memory as the river took mine—but no. You remember who you are. You remember who I am, and what you plan to do to me, don’t you, Gunman?
Maybe that is the best name for you, for even now you lift the rifle and smack the ice out of it and fill the chamber with another shell.
And then you toss your head back and laugh, a shriek that freezes the stars.