A Princess of Roumania

by Paul Park

  The dog was out in front of them, and they followed her through the small trees. They climbed the slope, unable to talk, unable to do anything except keep some kind of rhythm with the stretcher as they stumbled forward into the driving snow; it was impossible. As time went on, Miranda found her elbows and fingers getting stiff and weak, found herself slipping and falling forward sometimes, while at the same time the stretcher of pine boughs was coming apart. Pieces were falling off of it, and now the bottom opened up, and Gregor Splaa fell into the snow. She sat down heavily beside him, and listened to the thump of her heartbeat. “This was a stupid idea,” she said.

  Andromeda had come back for them, and was sniffing at Splaa’s face. “We can’t stay here,” Miranda went on.

  “No.” Peter’s shoulders and wool cap were white.

  “Is he…?” he said, and paused while she bent down over Gregor Splaa. With the wind howling around her, and her ear an inch from his lips, she could still hear him whispering. “There’s a gun that you must get, and your aunt knows about it, which belonged to your father and his father. It’s a bone-handled revolver, and…”—on and on. She turned away.

  “He’s still alive,” she said.

  Peter stepped onto the discarded lattice and kicked it apart with his heavy boots. He kicked it away off the side of the path. Then he bent down and grabbed Splaa by his armpits and lifted him up. Made burly by his snow-covered coat, he looked like a man lifting a child. He took Splaa over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, then turned up the path again, where the yellow dog waited with her foreleg poised above the snow.

  And Miranda stumbled after him. Her sweatshirt was covered with snow, even though she’d tried to brush it off when she put on her coat again. Immediately she felt the snow begin to melt inside her coat. That frightened her, though she felt obscurely angry, too—frustrated by Peter’s new strength and competence, though the stretcher, she thought, had been a bust. She tried to console herself with that, because the rest—Peter going down and chasing the mammoth away, Peter carrying a grown man over his shoulder, for all the world as if he he’d beaten the Turks at Adrianopole—was scaring her. In her mind she caught a glimpse of his distorted face as he stood on the sandbar. After one day, and she was afraid she was going to lose him again. So instead she concentrated on Splaa’s head swinging back and forth upside down against the middle of Peter’s back. It bobbed as if his neck were made of rubber, and his eyes were closed. “He is dying now,” she thought. “Right now,” and as her mind formed those words she saw his mouth was hanging open and some object was coming out. If it hadn’t been for the cold, the snow, the numbness of her cheeks, she might have been horrified. But now she watched in frozen fascination as a creature revealed itself, a long and disgusting snake or slug, whose black, oiled body was too hot for the snow, which melted immediately as it fell on it. The creature was shaken out in increments, a little at a time as Splaa’s head bobbed and swung—first the long tail. But now it was obvious, as two legs pulled loose, that the beast was not a snake at all, but rather some kind of lizard. A fat, soft body was shaken out, then stunted forelegs which were scratching at the man’s lips as the lizard struggled to free its head out of Splaa’s mouth. Splaa no longer seemed a man or even a child, so much as a puppet or a doll.

  Frozen, out of breath, Miranda looked down at the tops of Peter’s boots, where the snow was going in. She didn’t see the lizard drop. When she raised her eyes, they stood on the ridge looking down, and there was no camp at the bottom of the bowl. An outcropping of rock was unfamiliar. They had lost their way. The storm had covered up their tracks.

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT, THOUGH, the weather was clear in Bucharest, where the elector sat again in his armchair in the Athenée Palace Hotel. During the day he had received a message from Hans Greuben. The baroness’s house was empty. There was a secret passageway under the street, it had turned out.

  The elector had eaten some crackers, drunk some soda water. Then he had prepared for Greuben a detailed package of instructions. Among other things he was to forward (by diplomatic courier to the steamship Carpathia, now docked at Bremerhaven) a letter for the German agent in New York, who was to make enquiries concerning the whereabouts of Miranda Popescu, etc., etc.

  There was also a letter to the director of the Institute for Mental Deviation in the Soseaua Kiseleff.

  Now he was looking for two women, the elector thought, a strange preoccupation for a grown man. Or rather, not the baroness so much as the jewel she had stolen. And not the girl so much as what she represented, a fantasy of failure.

  The elector’s hands trembled on the arms of his chair. And when he sank into his trance, he was again troubled by a dream of the white tyger. Again he was running through the woods, slipping in his patent-leather shoes. Again he fell into the mud, his fingers locked around a glowing jewel. Lying on his back, his suit spattered and ruined, he felt something new overtake him, a new conjuring that uttered from his body through the casement window into the night air.

  At that moment, from Codfish Bay to the Hudson River, almost a meter of new snow had fallen, and the tallest trees had been blown down. But that was not enough. That was just an utterance of the elector’s frustration. Again he was frustrated by the ghost of Aegypta Schenck, an old woman who had spread her gray cloak, it seemed to him, over the entire breadth of New England. For this reason he had been obliged to send a message to the German agent. And for this reason he was now obliged to fall back on unsubtle and unspecific means.

  For a moment in the darkness of America he had seen a flicker of light, and he struck at it. All of this was an offense to his conception of the scientific process, but that old bungler, that superstitious fraud Aegypta Schenck had made it necessary with her idiotic prayers and supplications—she was able to frustrate him from beyond the grave! She forced him to choose a weapon that did not require perfect aim. That night the inhabitants of the spirit world, hovering in the air above the great hotel, might have seen a small disturbance in the form of a colored flare, the tail of a penny rocket as it rose from the fifth-floor balcony. But even they would not have guessed at its cargo, a single microbe conjured from the mud, now speeding on its silent way.

  * * *

  IT WAS A SMALLPOX VIRUS, recently isolated by a Viennese professor. The elector was immune to it, having suffered in his youth. He sent it now into New England as a gift, and it arrived when the storm was at its worst. Peter and Miranda stood together in the snow after hours of wandering. They had long since abandoned the body of Gregor Splaa. Andromeda, the yellow dog—she had to think of her as Andromeda—was at her heels.

  “We need to find someplace to wait it out,” said Peter, his mouth close to Miranda’s ear.

  “Let’s keep going,” she said. They’d retraced their footprints many times, each time silted up with snow.

  “You’re no help,” she said to the yellow dog. Not for the first time she wondered if the beast could really understand her. Andromeda had not left them for a moment, and as far as Miranda could tell, she had not even attempted to find the camp.

  Now she got up and shook the snow out of her coat. For a moment she stood on three legs, her nose pointing into the wind. Now the afternoon was closing in, and it was getting dark. And yes, there did seem to be some kind of glimmer of light over there, against the side of the unfamiliar cliff, which now bulged over them.

  “Can you see that?” Miranda cried.

  “No.”

  Anyway, they would be better in the shelter of the cliff. There were some taller trees there and the wind was less. Her face felt scorched and burned, her hands numb. “Come on,” she said and then they staggered forward. And maybe it was just a trick of the light, because she no longer saw what she’d imagined, a bright place in the trees as they came over the rise. Her hair was stiff with ice. It wasn’t until half an hour later that she saw the fire burning up ahead.

  The sky was getting dark. And now in front of her she
could see a fire at the entrance to a cave, some shapes moving around it. “There they are,” she said, too relieved and exhausted to consider that the hunters’ camp had not been pitched below these looming rocks, among these trees.

  It was the wild men. The fire burned so brightly as they approached, Miranda almost found she didn’t care. She was not afraid. “They’re not my enemies,” she thought. She was being stupid and she knew it, but she couldn’t stop her thoughts. “In the boat they saw I was a prisoner. Maybe they were trying to rescue me.”

  There was an overhanging ledge, and then a deeper cave, and the fire burned among some boulders. Miranda cried out, and the wild men came to help her and Peter into the shelter of the rocks out of the wind. They brought rags of cloth to wipe their faces. “No one’s a cannibal,” Miranda thought. “I read it in a magazine—that’s nonsense.” She took off her mittens, then pushed her frozen hair out of her eyes. Andromeda had disappeared.

  “You,” someone said. The word was recognizable. And she recognized the man, also, though now he wore a bearskin shirt. He was a big man with yellow hair. Now he did not have his club with its quartz head. But he was angry. He came toward her, and she raised her hands.

  An old man now shuffled forward out of the mouth of the cave. He stepped between the big man and Miranda. Reaching out his hand, he pulled the ice-clumped sweatshirt from her wrist, revealing the golden bracelet of Miranda Brancoveanu.

  “Tyger,” he mumbled toothlessly. He had a shock of white hair, and his face was thin.

  But that was all it took. Later in the cave, Miranda found herself encouraged. The wild men brought food, roasted pieces of meat in wooden bowls, and a mush of pounded corn. They had built a small fire for her in a protected place. The cave was long and high, with a roof that disappeared into a blackened cleft. Somewhere there was open air, because the smoke flowed upward into the crack. Grimy snowflakes sifted down.

  The wild men left her and Peter more or less alone. They clustered around the larger fire at the cave’s mouth, ten yards or so away. Miranda sat in a litter of rocks the size of heads, cross-legged with her backpack in her lap.

  She put down her bowl of corn mush. Near her, rising up into the darkness, there was a flat rock wall. By the light of the fire she could see painted pictures on its surface.

  “What now?” Peter said.

  She shrugged.

  “I mean, what do we do now?”

  She rubbed her nose. “I guess we go to Albany. We’ve got a name, Ion Dreyfoos in the fish market. We’ve got some money now—that’s good. Maybe we can buy food from these people.”

  She stood up to examine the pictographs. Directly above her the roof was low and she had to stoop. But when she came to the wall, there she could straighten up. In the crackling firelight she could see the shapes of animals in black and ochre and red, painted on the uneven surface. Also human beings, simple and stylized, and she could see immediately there was a story to the pictures, though she couldn’t make it out in the uncertain light. “Look,” she said. She returned to the fire to select a burning stick.

  “No, don’t touch it,” said a voice, and she saw the old man hobbling toward her from the mouth of the cave. His back was bent from osteoporosis, and he carried a cane. It was a twisted stick, which he used to negotiate the uncertain ground, but now he raised it up and brandished it, striking the bulge of the roof. “Drop it now.”

  “Have you seen the dog?” she asked him.

  “Keep your dog away.”

  While everyone else she had met here, apart from Gregor Splaa, knew English, if at all, as a second or third language, these people were native speakers. They had no other tongue. And perhaps their way of talking had devolved here in the woods, or perhaps it always had been harsh and simple, and difficult to understand. The old man brandished his stick, but his face wasn’t angry. He seemed to smile out of a toothless mouth. His cheeks were fleshless, his eyes gleamed. And though he hadn’t wanted her to profane the wall of pictographs with her stick, he had no compunction against hammering at it with his own cane, pointing at the masses of figures.

  “There, look,” he said, and at the end of the stick she could see what now was unmistakable, the low beach and the city overwhelmed by waves as big as mountain ranges, and the people crushed and drowning. The land was split apart, and the sea entered in. Then on the surface of the waves, a few small boats.

  “What’s that place?” she asked, though she had guessed.

  The old man seemed angry now. He brandished his stick. “You were there,” he said. “Brancoveanu!” His blue eyes glittered. He made a few sounds more, and she realized he was singing or trying to sing, and realized also that she recognized the tune out of some movie or something, and the words:

  “And did those feet in ancient times,

  Walk upon England’s mountains green?

  And was the holy lamb of God…”

  The old man was dressed in sheepskins. “People of the lamb,” he said. “That is why we fight against the dog men.” In fact he cleared up a couple of things as he stumbled back through the cave, rapping on the painted wall. One of them was what had happened to Captain Raevsky, whom Miranda discovered just a few dozen yards in back of where she’d been sitting with Peter. His hands were tied together, and his ankles, too.

  He was wedged among some boulders in the dark. When he raised his head and saw her, an expression of hope and hopelessness moved over his face. His right eye was swelled up and was almost closed. His cheek was bruised.

  Seeing him, she felt a mixture of apprehension and relief. He didn’t speak to her. He stared at her for a minute or so, then looked down at his hands again, his face in shadow. There were shouts from the mouth of the cave, and the old man left her. Miranda returned to her little fire.

  “Raevsky is back there.”

  “Who?”

  And she found she had to describe to Peter who he was, the man who had attacked her on the ice, killed Blind Rodica, kidnapped her, all that. “What’s wrong with you?”

  Peter shrugged. “I’m not feeling well.” Miranda thought he looked a little pasty, wrapped in a blanket and his wool cap pulled down.

  Her description of Raevsky had allowed her to remember all the bad things he had done. Even so, it was hard for her to sit unconcerned beside the fire, now that she knew he was tied up behind her like an animal. It was hard for her to eat her food, drink her water. Peter wasn’t talking to her except in grunts or monosyllables, and Miranda found herself looking behind her all the time, trying to see some movement in the back of the cave, where Raevsky lay hidden in a dark recess.

  “Gregor Splaa was wrong about a lot of things,” she said. “He told me not to wear my bracelet, which was wrong.”

  “Sure, you’re a celebrity,” Peter said inconsequentially. “And Splaa was obviously a moron.” Miranda stared at him, trying to decipher his tone of voice, which was sarcastic, she now decided. He must have come down with a cold or something, because his nose was wet and red.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “I think I’m going to lie down.”

  All this trouble, she thought, was because of her. Thinking about Gregor Splaa’s inadequacies, she felt a stab of regret. She knew why he had challenged the mammoth with his torch—it was because of her. Apart from the money for the ivory, he’d been trying to show that he was not a coward.

  It was because of her that Raevsky was tied up behind her, that Rodica was gone. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “About what?”

  “I’m sorry I brought us here. I’m sorry about the storm.”

  “I think I’m going to lie down. If you think the weather is your fault, this princess thing is going to your head.”

  Then in a moment: “‘Oh, life is a wonderful cycle of song.’”

  She smiled. He had made a nest of blankets between the boulders. He drank some water from his bowl and lay down on the blankets. Miranda sat beside him, looking at the fire, think
ing about Raevsky, thinking also about Kempf and the others—where was Andromeda? How could Andromeda have left them? No, she hadn’t left, but she couldn’t have come into the cave. She’d led them to the cave, and then gone off to find some refuge from the storm. Miranda pictured a fallen tree with a bank of snow beneath it, a shelter she could excavate and lie in, and watch the light from the cave’s mouth.

  The wind whistled in the opening, a giant with a stone flute. The wind stirred the smoke, shredded the flames of her small fire.

  Andromeda—what had her aunt called her? Sasha Prochenko. And that was disconcerting, as it was worse than disconcerting now to see Peter’s big, hairy hand playing with the edge of his blanket, and to think that hand had once belonged to someone else, someone she’d known. But the name de Graz brought her nothing but a half memory of a figure up above her on the terrace, telling her to come up off the beach.

  Her hair was dry, finally, and she was warm. But every few minutes she looked over her shoulder to see if she could detect some movement from Captain Raevsky. When the white-haired old man clambered back from the cave’s mouth over the rocks, she asked about him.

  “He killed a man,” he said, looking carefully into her face. He squatted down and poked at the fire with his stick. His beard grew high over his cheeks, which were hollow and without meat.

  He must have meant the man who was wading across the stream. That death had been for her sake also, and Raevsky had rescued her.

  Now the old man produced from inside his rags a bowl of liquid and held it out. It was quite pleasant, a watery honey beer. “Thank you,” she said, and he smiled. His gums were pink. He was mumbling that song again. “And did those feet in ancient times…?”

  “‘Jerusalem.’ William Blake,” whispered Peter from where he lay.

  “Bring me my bow of burning gold,” mumbled the old man. “Bring me my arrows of desire.…” Then he broke off, interrupted himself. “Let me see it.”