Respectant

by Florian Armaselu

  “Pierre is the tall man who spoke, together with Sava, the short one, against the marriage. He is the Spatar of Tolosa. Both are my friends, and Sava is the Chief of the Guard in Arad. It’s a long story; he was the Chief of the Guard in Leyona and delivered the city to me, and then he followed me in Poenari.”

  “Verenius betrayed us in Severin, but he also helped me.”

  “The letter and the marking ribbons, I know. I still don’t know why he did it, but he is no friend to Maud, and he is in my council now. The ribbons helped us to follow you until Aron boarded that ship.”

  “I left two marked sticks in Petronius’s grave. I scratched Dog and Pirenes on them.”

  “That was a good idea, but we found only the one marked Dog. Some men from the Circle were there before us. Let’s forget about it. When I came here, the day before leaving Arad, I had a Vision about your wedding. Bloody Vision. I hated it, as I did not recognize the place, and had no idea where the wedding was. On the road to Tolosa, Pierre told me that there would be a wedding in Laurden, and he was invited. Tolosa is not far away, and I asked him to show me the land south of the city. We rode to a place from where I could use my Seer Farsight to search for you.” His voice wobbled a little, but Codrin didn’t tell her that he saw her kissing Eduin. Twice. “We arrived here this morning. I planned to take Laurden if I had to, but I hoped that it would not be necessary.”

  “Seer?” How much did he see? she wondered, and her mouth tightened in a worried line.

  Codrin pretended not to notice her reaction. “Yes, it seems that we will have a Fracture, and I was chosen by Dochia, the Last Empress, to be the Seer of the Realm. It took us two days to prepare my strategy to stop the wedding.”

  “You brought enough men,” Saliné nodded at the soldiers behind her, “but I am glad that everything was peaceful. Eduin is a kind man, and he saved my life.”

  “I will always be grateful to him for that, and I always pay my debts. There are two hundred more soldiers hidden in the forest, less than a mile from here.”

  Four days later, on the way back toward Arad, they arrived in Valeni, where Jara and Cernat were waiting, and they stayed there for a week. They arrived at noon, and by the evening, they were already husband and wife. Agatha was older, but her wit had not left her, and she insisted on marrying them under her famous statues. The priest complained at the beginning, but there was no way to bend the old iron lady to his will. There was also a strange feeling, when the couple stood in front of the side niche, where the two marble statues stared down at them: a huntress tensing her bow, and a swordsman. While everybody knew that Saliné and young Agatha looked alike, they also noticed a resemblance between the now mature Codrin and Agatha’s long dead husband, and no one saw the tough old woman hide her tears. She, who had never shed one for more than thirty years, since her husband was killed.

  Their last night in Valeni, Codrin and Saliné dreamed the same dream. The hordes of the Serpent God moved like a wave across the continent, leaving the land fractured behind them. The hordes vanished, and the land froze over, its features disappearing under a thick blanket of ice; now it was nothing more than a huge iceberg and, as they watched, it split into two great frozen blocks. Codrin and Saliné found themselves on opposite sides of the widening chasm. Struggling to keep their footing on the shuddering, moving ice, they stared, helpless, at each other as they drifted apart; it seemed only moments before they were both out of sight.

  Neither spoke of the dream; each kept it stored away, in a secret chamber of their mind. And nine months later, in Arad, they realized that their son, Cosmin, had been conceived in Valeni, in the room that Codrin had entered by climbing the wall, only two years earlier.

  Turn the page for an excerpt from

  The Shamans at the End of Time

  Chapter 1 – Vlad

  Technically, I’ve been a soldier from the day my conscription orders arrived seven months ago, on the day I graduated from university. The bright future in front of me is no longer bright. I am not a fighter. This is true. I never wanted to fight and, for all my training, I’m still not able to hit a moving target. The cold black rifle in my arm is a soldier’s best friend, but still a strange object to me. I am better with a bow, or a sword, but modern wars are not fought with antiques. While this is not my first mission, there’s been nothing like this before, and I wonder how my poor skills will cope when they attack us. Or my mind. Our enemies are of course moving targets. There is a strange irony in my being in the Special Forces. It’s not for my shooting skills. Having two black belts in martial art helps in close combat, though. Two years ago, I was the European champion at judo. This year I should have been the Olympic champion, everybody was expecting that, me included. It will not happen. Cosmin or Andrei can shoot a fly, at three hundred paces, with their rifles. I have to watch their backs, but who will watch mine?

  Morning comes slowly, an opening eyelid over a giant black eye morphing into dark blue. With the binoculars attached to the top of my helmet, I can see the enemy soldiers around the hill we occupy. My device can track five targets simultaneously – the most dangerous ones – and feed them directly into my goggles. There are only seven of us, not even a platoon. On my arm, the tactical display records the movement of our enemies on the map: red spots sliding slowly across the screen. They are still far away and, hopefully, unaware of our presence. Down in the valley, the morning mist is sneaking along the river. Perhaps so is our death. There must be some iron ore in the entrails of the surrounding hills; the lazily flowing water has a reddish hue. The cursed color forces me to look away.

  “When we get back, I will have someone Court Martialled,” Dan growls, the fingers of his left arm dancing gently in the air to control the movements of his binoculars, his right hand gripping the rifle tightly. He never lets AI control his binoculars.

  If we get back. As if he hears my thoughts, he turns toward me, and I struggle to avoid his stare.

  There was no need to say what everybody already knows: we are surrounded. Dan is our lieutenant, in charge of our lives as well as his. His frowning eyes betray some inner search for a miraculous escape plan. We trust him, but what is coming now is something that none of us have encountered before, not even him. We can’t even communicate with our base; our transmission would be intercepted instantly, and a missile would pay us a courtesy visit.

  My eyes move again from the enemy soldiers swarming on my screen to Dan’s face. Impassive, it reveals no feelings – as if his growl was just an illusion. He is a good lieutenant, or at least he has half a year more fighting experience than us, plus time at the military academy. I understand his apprehension. We are on this hilltop because the wrong coordinates were sent by a lazy soldier who did not take time to check the encrypted order he sent to us. Maybe he was dreaming of his girlfriend, or maybe his brother was killed in action. Or maybe it wasn’t anything like that, just plain negligence. One wrong digit in the coordinates Dan received sent us into this hell. I can’t say we were totally unlucky. Passing unobserved through the first enemy line during the night was a lucky shot, especially when we knew nothing about it. We even hummed a tune, walking through the forest to replace our comrades in an observation post that was supposed to be safe, at our edge of no-man’s land. Instead we found ourselves on this bloody hill.

  “This place is magical,” Cosmin whispers, a few paces in front of me. His left hand makes an ample gesture, to include the whole hilltop in that magical spot. The hill resembles a half-bald man’s head, thick hair on his nape, and a full beard. There is an old oak forest on the lower parts, some trees so large they could hide a car. The bald area is partly covered by old ruins that we had no idea about until today, no more than a few decayed stones arranged in a small circle between larger natural rocks. Propelled by some strange curiosity, we tried to find them on the maps, but there was nothing. “I can feel the energy surrounding us.” Fingers spread wide, his left hand is now rigid and stretched in front of him, trying
to feel what he calls the ‘energy’. The quiet excitement in his voice transfers into my mind too, I don’t know why.

  Cosmin is a math teacher. I’ve known him since childhood. The same quarter of the city, the same school, the same dreams. Almost. One year older, he finished university the year before me. His dream was already taking shape: for one year, he taught children the beauty of math. “Life is like a math equation,” he used to say. “It’s up to you to find the most beautiful solution.”

  What solution did our marvelous politicians find? The last economic crisis went on for almost two decades, and they decided that war was the best way to end it. At least no nukes have been used yet.

  What are my chances of getting out of here alive, returning home and fulfilling my own dream? My dream is to build planes, or even better, space planes ready to fly to Mars. Last year, I applied for several jobs, before graduating. By the time they answered, I was already in uniform. My parents informed them, and they promised to hire me when I got back from the front. With two permanent bases established on Mars and monthly shuttles to the Moon, there is a definite shortage of specialized engineers.

  Cosmin is not just a math teacher. Some years ago, he found, in his grandfather’s cellar, a box filled with strange books about spirituality and hidden mysteries from the past, and his life changed. He loves legends about energetic portals linking unknown places and time lines. I have heard them all. I don’t believe in such things, but Cosmin is a colorful storyteller, recounting lost civilizations that may never have existed and esoteric mysteries. No one can prove that Atlantis or Lemuria were real, but Cosmin is my friend. Why should I upset him? And he sees things that others cannot. I will believe that when I have proof, but I never contradict him. He takes my silent behavior as an endorsement of his peculiar beliefs.

  “The main vortex is right there,” Cosmin points at the stone resting my back and, involuntarily, I touch the stone. It’s cold.

  A cold vortex, I almost laugh, and bite my lip, unwilling to upset him. Convinced that there is nothing to see, I don’t turn around.

  “It goes a hundred feet into the sky. These ruins…” he continues, scratching his beard, his face thoughtful. “They must have been a temple a long time ago. What a pity to fight here.”

  What a pity to fight, period.

  “Shut up, Cosmin,” Toma growls. In normal circumstances, he would choose to ignore the story, and Toma is not the only feeling annoyed one right now.

  “Let him speak,” I say – better listening to Cosmin’s fairytales than thinking about a hundred ways to die. There are so many ways to vanish in a war. I had no idea about most of them in my previous life. There is more for the imagination in a real war than in a hundred movies. All morbid. “Your vortex must go underground too,” I tease Cosmin.

  “Yes,” he says quickly, unable to feel my friendly dig; it’s so easy to get him to talk about the hidden things that no one but he is able to see. “It’s like a hidden fire. Fire, walk with me,” he casts something resembling a spell from his old books, his eyes tense and searching.

  “Will this do it?” Andrei flicks his lighter and laughter fills the hill; the enemy is too far away to hear us.

  “I’m afraid that your vortex won’t help. What about a flying saucer? Can you summon one?” Dan jokes in his most serious tone, and that provokes more laughter. Even Toma joins in, a bit later, like an afterthought.

  “Only a flying can,” Cosmin replies, still laughing. “Make your choice. I have chicken or chicken.” Our usual meal for more than six months already. Swiftly, he opens the backpack, and tosses a can out. Then he does it again, and again, his repetitive movements resembling a peculiar metronome, counting the seconds of our lives.

  How I’d like to eat something cooked by Mother. My mind slips back to a past that has nothing to do with war and destruction and killing people like us. A past of love and happiness. A present of attrition and despair. Even the most regular meal with the family, a thing you used to ignore and take for granted, is now just a pleasant, distant dream you crave for.

  “They are coming,” Dan warns, watching the tactical com attached to his arm, and in sudden silence, we take up firing positions between the stones.

  The first projectile hits the ground just sixty feet in front of our position. Alerted by the whizzing sound, Andrei and I withdraw a few seconds before the explosion, our backs pressed to the old stone protecting us, its coldness passing slowly through our uniforms. It’s calming. We stare at each other and our nervous laughter fills the silence before the next explosion. We escaped. In the corner of my eye, I catch Cosmin squeezing the trigger of his rifle, which has a silencer, and I know that one enemy is down. One of many. Another explosion shatters the earth to the left of our hell-hole. It seems distant, and I am not bothered by it. Unexpectedly, a lone shard of shrapnel hisses through the air in front of us. With a muffled sound, it hits a stone covered with dried moss, on our right, and recoils, leaving behind multi-colored sparks. They resemble fireworks from a serene time long gone. Warm and delightful. Andrei bends in pain and grunts loudly. I hear gurgling, and his head rolls. My mind registers its fall with an unwanted level of detail. It seems impossible, but Andrei’s head rolls down from his shoulders and falls into my lap. His body bends, then slips aside, away from me. In a few moments, the grass below changes from green to red, my camouflage trousers too. I can’t move; I can’t react in any way. I can still breathe. Logically, I realize that I am in a shock, not only because I am paralyzed, but because my mind has shed its self-preservation mechanism. Andrei’s eyes are serene, like he is resting, like he is still alive. I have the foolish hope that he will wink at me and smile, telling me that it’s all just a joke. All war is a bad joke.

  My breath comes out in spurts, one in and out each second, and I feel as if I’m breathing like a dog trying to cool itself down. My pulse goes up; I am hyperventilating; the oxygen in my blood is 100 percent, my pulse 187 heartbeats per minute, and the monitoring Lifeband around my head sends messages to my tactical com, warning me. It’s useless, my pulse still goes up. I feel an electric shock from the Lifeband, and I realize that I passed out for a while. The com shows me that I was unconscious for 5.7651 seconds. I don’t understand the need for so many decimals, and I blink rapidly. Andrei’s head is still sitting quietly in my lap, his blind eyes staring at me. Death is like sleeping. I look into his glassy eyes. All I can think now is to calculate the probability of that shrapnel hitting him and not me – a useless, yet somehow calming exercise, or at least numbing.

  “Our planes!” Dan shouts with sudden joy, pointing up at the sky. He taps frantically on his tactical console, and I assume he’s risking contacting our headquarters. “Nothing,” he growls. “They are jamming us.”

  Andrei’s head is still in my lap. I stare back with numb detachment at our front lines from where the planes were supposed to come; Dan is right. The moment I turn, a batch of missiles leave their places under the wings, and I follow them with the desperation of the dying man looking for his salvation: silvery fishes swarming the sky. Small at first, they grow with each second, approaching the hill, and spread out in a fan-like shape I saw in a medieval movie, some time ago, before the war. They look so beautiful in the sky. As I watch them, I’m still calculating the bloody probability that killed Andrei and not me.

  “Nooo!” Dan shouts.

  I don’t realize what’s happening until one of the missiles alters its course, coming straight toward us. “The probability,” I laugh like a mad man, embracing Andrei’s head. “The probability is so small...”

  Explosion. A red column of dust and hot air covers our hell-hill. My nostrils are burning.

  “I didn’t expect you,” an unfamiliar voice whispers in my mind.

  That’s the last thing I remember.

  My eyes open again to reflections of a dazzling sun shining from patches of snow on the high peaks, and to a sky deep and radiantly blue, in a place that is not the hell-hill.
It’s not a hospital either. I am lying in the grass, in the middle of a meadow with coniferous trees here and there, surrounded by high mountains, similar to the ones around my grandparents’ village, yet unknown. It’s a calm spring landscape as lovely as a dream. There is no long tunnel and light at the end of my vision, no angels, no trumpets, yet it looks like the afterlife. I had the vague impression of some kind of tunnel. A hot and dark one. If this is death… I can’t complain, at least not right now. Flying high, a predatory bird reminds me of the hell I’ve escaped from and that bloody plane. Explosions still reverberate in my mind, and I have a brief impulse to check if I am wounded. My laughter fills the silent place; you no longer care about wounds when you are dead. Can I walk? Can I fly? The bird is calling to me, and I jump up easily, unable to avoid a surge of dark images of the many wounds I saw during the war – other people’s wounds. It was impossible to escape unwounded from that explosion. That much I know. And for sure, you can’t die if you are not badly wounded. When I half-turn, I see Dan. He is dead too, and he is definitely wounded. The lower half of his body is missing, from the navel down. Why is he like that? I stare at my lower parts, fearing that they might vanish in a blink. Everything is in the right place, even Andrei’s blood staining my trousers, small and almost dry rivulets running from thighs to ankles. Where is his head? Irritated by my own thought, I make no attempt to find it. With annoying pedantry, I observe more blood on my left leg. My fingers touch the canvas: the blood is still viscous, and I have to fight a sudden impulse to smell and taste it. To avoid my macabre urge, I check the tactical com. It’s dead. Who needs such things in the afterlife?

  “Vlad,” someone shouts, and I turn further. It is Cosmin, walking straight toward me. He is wounded too: a thin stream of blood runs down the left side of his face.

  That’s when I finally understand that I am dreaming, and I worry that, safe inside my dream, I have been badly wounded in real life. I shiver, and my teeth clack with a noise that sounds half comic. For a moment, I want to wake up. Why? Enjoy the dream. Or maybe I am too scared to return to a reality that might look like Dan. Or Andrei. Any moment I fear that his head will materialize in my dream, flying around me like the Cheshire Cat, all eyes and fangs. With unwanted precision, the memory of the explosion, which I am trying so hard to ignore, finds another way to resurface: the missile, whooshing as it falls on us, the blast, the hot dust in the air. Just a few seconds of a dark movie, repeated, over and over.