by Paul Park
"Here is the place," said Rat-tooth.
She slipped out of the saddle. Taking hold of the horse's mouth, she turned aside under the trees, and Miranda followed her straight in under the beech trees on the left-hand side. Her whole body ached. She was grateful to be on the ground again, although her feet were hot, her leather boots uncomfortable. She stepped carefully over the fallen leaves, trying not to leave a mark.
In time they came to a clearing in the woods, and a small, round pool of water. There was high, soft grass, and some kind of ruined structure. "Queen Mary lived here for a day and a night," murmured the girl, as Miranda looked up at the darkening sky. "We should be safe."
Then immediately she would have started on her round of tasks with the horses and the camp, only Miranda held her arm. Miranda had been thinking long, gloomy thoughts. "Tell me," she said—Ludu Rat-tooth knew a lot. It was conceivable she might have heard, conceivable that in five years . . . "Tell me," Miranda said. "Have you ever heard the name de Graz, Pieter de Graz, or maybe Sasha Prochenko? Have you heard those names?" she asked. The girl shook her head, pulled her arm away.
BUT PETER LIFTED HIS HEAD as if he'd heard Miranda's question in the night air. In time and space he was much closer than she feared.
She would have been shocked to see him as he stood under the bridge. When she had left him his right hand had been thick and heavy on his boy's arm. Now his body matched it. He'd put on muscle and height, but less flesh than he needed. Even so he was a more handsome man than he'd ever been a boy. His brown hair, brown eyes, and crooked teeth were still the same. And she would have recognized many of his gestures and mannerisms.
Now he stood cursing in the dark, his lips twisted into a scowl. Photographs of the Chevalier de Graz, taken before his disappearance, would have shown this same expression. They would have shown him riding with his regiment or hunting bears in the Carpathians, or standing with his brothers and sisters and their dogs outside the Schloss de Graz in Satu Mares. They would have shown him with his parents, bluff, hard-drinking Roumanian aristocrats—whatever filter his character had passed through, it had not yet allowed any of those memories. Toward dawn, standing in the mud under the Kanuni bridge in Adrianopole, cursing after the lost dog, Peter Gross had no recollection of the place, even though the Chevalier de Graz had driven over the same road with Frederick Schenck von Schenck after the battle of Havsa on his way to meet the Turkish generals.
Part of this was an effort of will. He wouldn't give up his own mother and his father for a couple of battered sepia photographs. Peter's memory was much stronger, much more subtle than the chevalier's, and he had used it to protect his childhood, everything he was. Since he'd climbed out of the pit in Heliopolis, at free moments he'd gone back into the past, unearthing memories that were sometimes painful or touched with pain; it didn't matter. He had no desire to grow into something else.
And he associated de Graz with a dark part of his mind, an unreflective part that led him into violence and chaos. Raevsky had died, his spirit animal had scampered away. The man on the snowy bridge had grabbed hold of Peter's ear. Some memories he could not tolerate.
Certain skills had come back to him. He could speak Roumanian and French. A little Turkish might have come in handy, though. He pulled his boot out of the mud and strode down the slope under this other bridge. Beggars lived there in wooden packing crates and under oilcloth tarpaulins. This was the poorest section of the town, full of Bulgar refugees.
In the moneyless life he and Andromeda had led since they'd come out of the tiled well in Heliopolis, they'd passed months in neighborhoods like this, in Tunis, Alexandria, and Jerusalem. Though in his short life he had spent huge sums, the Chevalier de Graz had had no skill at generating cash. Neither did Peter Gross—his livelihood depended on the dog.
In the sophisticated cities of North Africa, he and Andromeda had been protected by people's ignorance, their lack of superstition. Even in Constantinople no one had glanced at the beast. But now finally they had reached the borders of Europe. These Bulgars, Hebrews, and Gypsies had a ruder knowledge. Sometimes as the dog passed, Peter had seen them make the sign of the evil eye.
Andromeda had been away for hours and he was worried. He'd been searching all afternoon. He stumbled down the embankment onto level ground, a wet stretch of cobblestones between the Tunca River and the pilings of the bridge. Overhead, the night traffic had almost ceased along the line of Byzantine stone arches, though occasionally a bullock cart still rumbled toward the city gates.
In the evening it rained. Along the black, quiet river, traffic had almost ceased. Under the bridge, though, a crowd of men had gathered. Some carried torches. The span closest to the water had been bricked up on the downstream side so that it formed a high-arched cave. Fifteen or twenty men stood in the entrance to that cave, swearing and shouting, and some laughed. Peter saw Andromeda's footprints in the wet mud.
He couldn't understand what the men were saying. But some of them had picked up stones. One of them held a pistol, an old, double flint-lock affair. He was a squat, evil-looking brute, dressed in a brown leather jacket (though it was a hot night), on which still hung some fragments of fur. Instinctively Peter selected him as the leader of this group and made his way toward him over the uneven ground. As he brought the gun down, Peter came behind him and seized hold of his wrist. One of the plates flashed and misfired.
Some Turkish might have been useful, though there was no time to talk. No time even to think what he was doing—Peter brought his right arm over the man's shoulder and pushed his forearm into the man's thick throat. At moments like this he gave himself into the hands of the Chevalier de Graz. He pulled the gun down as the man tried to stamp on his foot. Others had dropped their stones and come around now, a ragged, drunken, broken-toothed bunch of losers, Peter told himself. Some had their knives out, but Peter had the upper hand. They yelled at him; he didn't know what they were saying. He had their leader, though, and was hurting his windpipe as the man struggled and flailed. Then he found the second trigger, and his pistol fired.
There was a smell of smoke and powder. The shot resounded in the arch. Peter put his back against the wall and turned the man's body from side to side; he knew he'd won. The other men were worried now because the noise might draw down the janissaries from the guardhouse on the bridge. Some were already staggering away. The squat little man was struggling, and Peter used his body as a buckler, turning it from side to side as the others came closer with their knives. He was waiting for the sound of the policemen's whistle, and when it came, most of those who faced him turned and ran. He adjusted his arm so the little man could breathe, and then he threw him down completely on the muddy stones. Grimacing and roaring, he made a half-run toward the men who still remained in the entrance to the cave, then turned and ducked inside against the bricked-up wall, a distance of perhaps twenty feet.
The damned dog was in the cul-de-sac, crouching over a capon she had stolen, and she growled as Peter approached. In their journey from America she'd changed as he had, growing bigger and more fierce. Now she yawned, stretched her tongue out and then picked up the capon by it broken neck. Its viscera hung in the mud.
Again Peter heard the shrill whistle of the night janissaries. At the entrance to the cave the fat man lay groaning. But Andromeda wanted to play. She thrust her forelegs out, then bounded past him with the capon in her mouth. Peter was able to get a hand on the bird, whose head tore away. Then Andromeda was gone, disappearing out the open archway.
The bird was still warm, stolen from the henhouse of some citizen. Petertucked it into his coat. He slipped under the arch and into the small space between the piling and the embankment. It was partly blocked with rubble, but he managed to climb through without making any noise, and then he followed the riverbank into a thicket of small trees.
The police were at the bridge now, and he waited in the thicket to make sure they wouldn't follow him. Night came. While he waited, as was his custo
m, he ran over some poetry in his mind, then checked in with his father in the house on White Oak Road. Flexing the muscles of his memory, he recalled many things—small words of his mother and then something Miranda had said to him in high school when he was in ninth grade. It was in the corridor by Ms. McDonald's classroom. She hadn't really known him then. But he knew who she was.
This was a way of subduing the Chevalier de Graz, whom he had allowed to possess him in the fight. Now he shivered in his wet coat. When everything was still, he walked downstream for a couple of miles before turning in a circle to the road again. Two hours later he crossed the bridge without incident and reached his hotel before dawn.
It was a waystation for impoverished travelers called the Dardanelles. Far from, that body of water, it sagged on its foundations in a dirty, unpaved part of lawn. Peter and Andromeda's room was on the third story in the back, with a single, glassless window overlooking a bricked-up court. The floor was muddy and the plaster walls streaked with red where lodgers had crushed centipedes and other vermin. There was no furniture except a single, sagging bed, on which Andromeda lay sleeping when Peter came in.
It was dark in the room, except for the light that shone in from the court. Peter sat down on the bed and laid the capon on the floor, then fumbled for a bottle of water standing upright. He drew the cork out with his teeth and dropped it into his cupped palm. He was listening for a sound of movement from the bed. Soon it came.
There was the stub of a candle in a pool of hardened wax on the iron bed frame. When the water was finished, he broke the candle off and jammed it into the neck of the bottle, which he stood next to his boot. Pulling a box of phaetons from his pocket, he struck one of them and lit the wick, keeping the bottle low upon the ground. He did this out of a sense of modesty. He did not want to see Andromeda as she rose from the bed. He did not want to see her muscled body covered with a layer of fine hair. He didn't want to see her long, naked legs as she swung them off her side of the bed.
None of this, he thought, was intended to provoke him. She was oblivious. She showed no longer, for example, any trace of the way she had teased and flirted with him on Christmas Hill. So maybe he'd been wrong about that after all; he began to tear the feathers off the bird and drop them underfoot. Caught in a swirl of air, they scattered to the corner of the room or underneath the bed.
Peter was hungry. Without looking he could tell Andromeda was standing in the glow from the window, outside the light cast by the candle onto his boot and his hands and the bird and a circle of the floor. She was looking into the triangular fragment of a mirror, fixed to the wall beside the door. "So where the Christ have I been?" she said cheerfully. He knew from experience she would be touching streaks of blood and dirt, chuckling over her bruises. Her feet, especially, would be filthy and sore.
"You don't want to know."
He glanced up as he pulled the capon's breast feathers against the grain, and in the gathering dawn he saw her back as she shrugged off her linen shirt—she always dressed like a dandy, while he made do with rags. But it was true what she said. If she was to be let into card games and betting parlors, she had to look as if she had some money to lose.
She was rubbing her teeth, picking at them with her long fingernails.
Something dislodged, and she inspected the ball of her thumb. "Must have been a hard night," she said. "So what is it today?"
"A chicken."
"Ugh."
"I'll give it to the kitchen. Though I see you've had your breakfast."
"Yuck." She turned to face him, hands on her hips, and he looked down. One of the small feathers blew into the candle flame, emitting a singed smell. "So what's our plan today?" she said.
He shrugged. "Still the same. We need a hundred fifty piastres each for new papers and visas. Plus what we owe for the room."
Andromeda smelled her fingers. "I'm not paying for this."
The creature who was dressing now in front of him bore little resemblance to the girl he and Miranda had known. There was nothing female about her as she pulled on her silk shirt, except of course for the obvious things, which now he glanced at furtively. It wasn't that she was sexless now, but rather double-sexed, moving back and forth continually over a line—she'd always been flat-chested. She'd always been athletic and strong. That wasn't it.
He had to admit that there was nothing sexual in the way she teased him. If anything, those feelings came from him, and sometimes at night he had lain sleepless beside her, thinking about Miranda, about kissing her and touching her body—it was useless. Where was she?
And there were moments also, in a certain light, when he knew Andromeda had changed less than he had. Certainly she was still beautiful, and not just to him.When she stalked the streets in her long boots, men and women turned their heads.
"I'm off to the Ali Pasa Carsisi," she said—the covered bazaar in the Hurriyet Meydani. Which meant she'd spend the morning pickpocketing, a special skill. Pilfered merchants would forget their losses, abashed by her self-confidence. Surely she'd adapted to her triple nature—girl, dog, Roumanian staff officer—better than he'd adapted to his new right hand. Much about her made him jealous and disgusted him. When they slept in the big, sagging bed, here and in fleabags across North Africa, he was the one who kept all his clothes on, though he was a normal man.
"I think I'm sleeping in," he said, looking up finally into her delicate, strange face, in which her animal nature now seemed to predominate. Sphinxlike, she smiled, though her pale eyes were wide and innocent.
"I need a cup of coffee, I swear to God," she said, and licked her lips.
She was teasing him. Always she wasted money on luxuries—coffee and cigarettes, ice cream and liquor, while he counted every copper penny. Because she was the one who brought in money, it was impossible for him to complain except to himself. But if she would just bear down and concentrate, they could cross the border into Europe; into Roumania. The line was at Gobrovo in the mountains, a hundred miles north—not far away. Of course he still did not remember, but he had fought with Prince Frederick on the outskirts of this same city.
Sometimes it seemed as if she were happy with the life they had. She didn't seem in any hurry to return home. She spoke Turkish and Aegyptian. She could even write in hieroglyphs. It was her fault they had wasted all this time. Once in Alexandria he'd seen her win enough at dice to buy them passage all the way and pay for food as well. Then four hours later she had lost it all, except for a thousand dinars that she'd spent on a gold ring. She'd done it just to goad him, he was sure. She'd laughed and shrugged her shoulders, winked at him with every losing cast.
And maybe he'd have been able to get her moving, then and now, if he hadn't been so sick. He'd caught a fever in the dig at Heliopolis, caught a fever from her, he'd thought, and he remembered how hot she'd felt when he'd grabbed her in the dark, in Waile Bizunesh's archeological dig. "Chicken? I don't think so," she said now. "I think some almond gazelles' horns, or those pistachio bird's nests. Maybe a shot of grappa, or who knows? I know the sun's not up, but you've been out all night. Come and have a drink with me. I'll read you the newspapers."
She was dressed, as always, like a man—tight pants and riding boots, a loose, cream-colored shirt unbuttoned down the front to show a gold chain. In her right hand she carried a pair of leather gloves, which she knocked now against her left palm.
Her chin and chest glistened with the merest shadow of soft, yellow hair, which completed the illusion. She smiled at him, then shrugged as he bent stubbornly over the bird. She reached for her embroidered jacket, which she'd wear over her shoulder in the marketplace among the covered stalls. It had a secret panel in the lining.
Her smile never faded as they listened to the thump of footsteps coming toward them down the hall. Then there was a pounding on the door and a voice shouting in Turkish. In an instant Andromeda was at the window with her leg over the sill, then she was gone. He dropped the bird and rushed to follow her; she had sli
pped onto the roof of an adjoining shed and was now running over the tiles toward the outer wall, which gave onto an alley. Maybe the dog had managed to climb up that way, but Peter was afraid he'd fall, afraid the tin roof vould not support his weight. When the janissaries broke the door he was still in the room, and they arrested him.
De Witte
IT WAS CLOSE TO dawn. Near the west wall of the ruined hermitage, Miranda lay without sleeping. An hour before, the brightest stars had shown through a black mist. Now, though the mist was lighter, the stars had lost their brilliance, which was a relief, Miranda thought. Some of her clearest memories of home were of those nights in her backyard or in the field behind Garfield House, rolled up in a blanket while Stanley talked about the stars. Sometimes he had brought a small telescope, but most of all she enjoyed lying on her back to see the whole arc of the sky. During the various meteor showers, he and she had always gone out if it was clear. She knew all the constellations of the northern hemisphere. So in this place it was disconcerting to look up and recognize nothing.
She lay with her elbows wide, her fingers interlaced behind her head. She listened to the horses by the little pool. When they first arrived in the clearing, Ludu Rat-tooth had prevented them from drinking as much as they had wanted, had chased them away after a few swallows of water. But now they lay peaceably in the trampled grass, and sometimes Miranda could hear the sound of them snorting or shaking out their lips.
Ludu was asleep beside her. The hair had fallen away from her face. The previous day she'd seemed much older than her age, especially in the matter-of-fact, unsentimental way she had accepted catastrophe and loss. But now her toughness was like a mask that had fallen away, uncovering a softer and more childlike face. Her fist was at her mouth and she was sucking on her thumb. Under her upper lip on the left-hand side, Miranda could see the sharp end of her tooth.