Now, more than ever, he hated humans. They were all rotten, always coming up with things like this to abuse each other--and he a custom-made instrument of torment. A government that wanted to break a people, beat them down until there was nothing left but timid and compliant husks, and he was pulled down, down, down into the snow and the emptiness and the cruel waste of an endless cycle. No escape for Solas the Shadow--nothing to do but finish what they had brought him here for.
As he rode around the children, he began to drink, stripping them of the last of their pitiful hope. Bitter as hemlock, sweet as song, it filled his hungry soul.
He didn’t remember the bright woman entering the circle, but suddenly there she was, arms spread in a gesture of protection and herding the smallest behind her. He noticed how the fringes of buckskin swayed on her outstretched arms, her chest unguarded against the threat. The soldiers cursed at her and made threatening gestures with their guns, but she ignored them; when she looked up, it was though she only saw Damien.
Her face was young and so impossibly alive. Chin up, back straight, she spoke softly in a language he didn’t understand, and opened her mind to him, just for a moment.
So, my shadow, you’ve finally come for me.
The touch of the Angel of Light on his psyche set him aflame, a blaze that sucked him in and threatened to crumble him into submission.
Zophiel? That’s you in there, isn’t it? Damien jumped at the connection too eagerly and the voice cooled, erecting a barrier and withdrawing, leaving only a faint whisper.
I will not beg for my life. I simply ask you: Let me live.
Stop. We are nearing the end, you and I. This has to happen.
Shoot me and the dream of a people dies.
With that, she opened the floodgates.
He could see everything. He saw the Prophet Wovoka teaching the dance, saw the dancers chanting and circling as the drumbeats shook them with the hope of a future. He saw their dreams of the land swept clean: endless green under blue skies, buffalo herds running in dark clouds, hooves thunder in the earth. He was there as this woman danced in her Ghost Shirt, believing that with a hope so strong, something must change. They had all felt it together and seen it in her voice and steps--a bulletproof hope that could banish the white invaders and bring back what had been lost.
Solas...
Zophiel, I...
It happened too quickly for him to react. A child, fed by a momentary gasp of bravery, made a break for it--and a startled soldier fired.
The truce was shattered. The children screamed and rifles cracked, and all was chaos once more. The woman still held his gaze, daring him, forcing him to make his choice as innocents fell around her.
“Shoot! Shoot, dammit!” Varnum howled, and Damien became aware of his finger on the trigger, squeezing...
The bullet struck her in the chest, tearing a small red hole in her pale shirt. She was dead before she hit the ground.
In his tent back at camp, Damien curled up with a bottle of whiskey and drank it dry. Even after all those years, the night after the final battle hadn’t grown easier. He had taken all they had to give, and now he was as empty as the bottle that he clutched to his aching chest.
It was over. He had won.
His one source of comfort gone, he wandered out into the snow and stared up at the tiny sliver of moon in the endless sky. He was free now; he had felt his connection to this place go to pieces when he had shot the dream dead, and he knew that somewhere, Zophiel soared, far away from this frozen little ditch. He thought of the way she had fallen so softly and quietly forward, and he threw the bottle down into the creek with all his might.
When the men of the 7th Cavalry woke, they would retain only a vague memory of one First Sergeant Damien Blackwell--just an impression of a tall, dark man synonymous with the defeat of the Lakota Sioux. For all they knew, he was one of their precious few casualties, a hero in a pine box on the 4:15 to Omaha.
A wind was blowing in the east, calling him. He could already feel himself beginning to change. Far away across the sea, the peasants were growing restless, and a bright young University student in Samara was reading Das Kapital.
Solas the Shadow saddled his horse and rode out of camp alone, with no one to see him go but the ravens that circled the silent battlefield at dawn.
**
The pain was horrible. Toivo tore himself from the memory, the dam broken, his past lives surging back to bowl him over with the immensity of his loss.
“Wait,” Demyan murmured. “I...”
Toivo recoiled from the man on the bed. “No,” he croaked. “They all...”
Demyan’s jaw tightened. “For what it’s worth,” he rasped, “I’m...sorry.”
There was nothing Toivo could say. He looked at the body of Solas, the Angel of Shadow, killer of hope, and wondered how long it would be before the inevitable happened and they were forced to kill each other. Perhaps hope would win out, and he would be the one to walk away, changing himself in a journey as one conflict became another.
Without a word, Toivo walked out of the bedroom and closed the door behind him.
He dropped onto the unyielding sofa of the living room and stared at the ceiling, trying to come to terms with the return of his memories--with where it all fit behind his current, painful reality.
He’d fought this, hadn’t he? He’d stayed away from incarnation for as long as he could, fighting the pull back down to earth and the human hearts begging for hope while the world caught fire in his absence. He’d fled Dresden, Nanking, Nagasaki, refusing to return, keeping distant from horrors even as he witnessed them. For seventy years the thought that was Zophiel had stayed aloft, above the smoke and death, his memories of his earthly existence fading with time until it was only a dull ache warning him of the pain of taking physical form. He could no longer bear to be that close to them; the way they suffered, the way they died.
The wall clock in the kitchen ticked out the minutes as the day wound down into evening. Toivo lay motionless on the couch, trapped by a sense of overwhelming fatalism. He thought back to the words of the angelic Station Chief--an old woman by an open hearth--and of the endless suffering that must have plagued his kind and their opposites throughout the ages.
As long as there is war, the light and shadow will fight. As long as humans call us and shape us, hope for us and fear us, we will fulfill their dreams and their nightmares.
The cycle was inevitable--an eternal polarity, a struggle that would play out as long as humans were human. He ran a hand weakly up the hair that had fallen in his eyes.
How long could this détente last? He thought of the prostrate man in the other room, and the offered gun he’d left in the State Security Building, and once again wondered what the hell he was doing.
Chapter 8
“Did he pass out?”
The voice was muffled by the sackcloth around his head, but Vesa could have sworn he’d heard it before. It was a boy’s voice--too high to be a grown man’s, but breaking low into a husky whisper.
“Nah, I think he’s just tired.” The man carrying him shifted him roughly to his other shoulder. “Tired of struggling, eh, you little git?”
The blood gathered in Vesa’s head as he hung upside down across his captor’s back, and he tried to bear in silence the hard shoulder that jabbed into his solar plexus with every step. When a low-hanging branch snapped back to catch him sharply across his spine, however, he couldn’t help but let out a yelp of pain.
“See? He’s awake,” said the man, and Vesa heard a few nasty laughs spring up in the air around him.
“Careful!” the higher voice hissed.
“Calm down--just having some fun.” There was more sniggering, and then the gang settled down, leaving Vesa to listen to the steady crunch of their boots through the snow.
He tried to get his bearings with the few unhindered senses he had left, seeking to take in every bit of information he could in case it proved helpful later.
They were in the woods now--he could tell at least that much. The periodic brush of twigs against his body, the distant birdsong, and the uneven ground along which his kidnappers walked all pointed to a retreat through the forest. He tried to count his captors’ footsteps and gauge their numbers, but was forced to give up with only a vague inference that they numbered more than three.
Vesa hadn’t been in a position to observe much during the whole ordeal. The masked men had thrown him, bound and gagged, into the trunk of their car, and driven roughly through city streets where every sharp turn slammed him against the confines of his oil-dank prison. They had stopped--there was a short burst of cold air and daylight through the cloth of his blindfold--and dragged him into a bigger space, where he was laid out on a metal floor and covered in dusty blankets that stank of smoke and grain. Whenever he had tried to move, the toe of a large boot dug at his ribs--sharp kicks that quickly convinced him to lie still and ponder the mess he was in.
At least he was still breathing; that was a good sign. If their aim had just been to kill him, he would be dead already--shot just like his bodyguard. It had been the man’s first day... Vesa flashed back to his glimpse of the bloody mess in the front seat of the car, and felt ill.
At least it wasn’t Mika, he thought, grimly trying to find something to soften the blow.
Vesa steered his thoughts back to the mystery of the young rebel’s voice. It was driving him mad, trying to place it with the blood throbbing thick in his ears, piecing it together from snatches of words he caught during the trek through the woods. There was something about it that surprised him--an uncomfortable jolt of familiarity. He began to wonder if it didn’t belong to a boy, but a woman amongst his captors.
It can’t be her. It just can’t.
Before he could dwell on the subject for too long, he heard the creak of a door and was jostled as they descended a flight of stairs. He heard a clamor of voices and a shout of triumph, and felt a sweaty, warm stillness in the air around him. As the man who carried him spun carelessly to greet someone, Vesa’s head struck something hard enough to send stars shooting through the darkness. He howled like an injured animal.
“What, you trying to kill him now?” the feminine rebel said. “Give him here.”
He was shifted into other arms, and his heart stung at the sympathetic touch. He felt fingers working around his neck, pulling the ties loose.
“What are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m taking the bag off.”
“Are you crazy? He’ll see our faces!”
“Then cover them. He’s no use if he asphyxiates.” Vesa thought that he could hear a slight quiver in the voice, like a hint of restrained emotion.
Please, please don’t be...
He drew a deep breath through his nose as the sack was pulled away.
There she was--Kai, the girl who had read to him, his friend--staring down at him, surrounded by a hostile crowd of men. She wore an expression of regret and shook her head, ever so slightly. He screamed through the rag between his lips.
He was instantly pulled away, passed from hand to hand and shoved unceremoniously into the space behind the wooden stairs--a storage cupboard for provisions hollowed out of the frozen ground. Someone blocked the opening with a board, leaving only a line of light bleeding around the edges like an eclipse.
As he lay face down, the knobby lumps of a sack of potatoes digging into his stomach and the damp, cold smell of soil leaching through the walls, claustrophobia set in. He squeezed his eyes shut.
He might as well have been buried alive, betrayed by the first girl he’d ever truly loved.
**
Kaija huddled on the edge of the narrow bunk, taut as a bowstring. She looked around for anything to draw her mind off the current situation, but the tiny room under the earth offered little in the way of diversions. The entire structure was made from rough-hewn logs, the papery birch bark peeling off and getting pale dust on her hands whenever she touched the walls. She tore a strip off the bed frame and began to shred it, fidgeting to distract herself from her guilt.
It was hopeless. The rest of the men in the bunker weren’t much better off; some were whittling or cleaning their guns, full of busy, nervous energy. Even Martin, who was usually so talkative, sat with his coat drawn tightly around him, quietly jabbing his finger into a hole in the straw pallet. The steady rasp of the leader, Klaus, sharpening his hunting knife against a whetstone cut through the silence, ratcheting up the tension in the air one grating stroke at a time.
Martin released a breathy whine that quickly built into a full-throated cry of desperation. Kaija looked up with the other men as Martin buried his head in his hands.
“Keep your voice down!” Klaus snapped.
“I can’t take any more of this,” Martin gasped through his fingers.
“I’m warning you, kid...”
“You’re all thinking the same thing, aren’t you?!” Martin cast his eyes around the bunker, his voice high with terror. “We’re screwed. Finished. Done for.”
Kaija felt a rumble of unease sweep through the room.
“After this, every soldier in Kalevia is going to be looking for us! It’s only a matter of time--”
In three swift steps, Klaus reached Martin’s bed. He grabbed the boy’s hair and yanked his head back, exposing the fish-belly white of his throat.
“I said, shut it.” The blade glittered under Martin’s Adam’s apple, pressed gently into the skin of his young neck. From where she was sitting, Kaija could see the pulse pounding in Martin’s jugular. A soft, vulnerable membrane was all that stood between the knife’s edge and the boy’s life.
“Now’s not the time to lose your nerve,” Klaus growled. “Got it?”
Despite the man’s grip on his hair, Martin managed the barest nod.
Klaus’ eyes were fixed on Martin, but he seemed to be addressing all of them. “Anyone else object to the way we’ve been operating?”
No one made a sound.
“Good.”
A sudden knock came at the hatch--a short, uneven series of rapid taps. All eyes snapped to the ceiling.
Although the signal was correct, no one seemed to trust their ears; predators no longer, they had become the hunted, hiding in their burrow from the perilous world above. Only Klaus relaxed. He released Martin, who collapsed backward into a trembling mess on his pallet.
“That’s just Taisto,” Klaus said with a shrug. “I sent him out for reconnaissance.”
Klaus climbed the stairs and struck out a rhythm in reply. At the answering knock, he threw open the scuttle hole; his lieutenant dropped through, shaking the snow from his head and shoulders. Taisto’s scar stood out against his wind-burned skin.
“Ah, finally!” he said, rubbing his hands vigorously against his cheeks. “There’s a real gale out there.”
“Snowing?”
“Plenty. Not a footprint to be seen.”
“And thank God for that! I thought you were a long time getting back.”
Klaus slapped him roughly on the back and smiled, the violence of a few minutes prior stored away for later use.
The room relaxed. Someone poured moonshine into chipped mugs, and they settled themselves around the sawhorse table, trying to forget the unpleasantness that had taken place. There was no backing out of this mission, and it was far from over.
“Now that we’re all here, let’s get down to business,” said Klaus. “I have here a copy of the demands we’ve sent to the Chairman’s office, complete with the public statement he’ll read on the air. The people of Kalevia have to know that the fight to free our nation has begun.”
Kaija half-listened as he read the letter aloud, her eyes drifting to the stairs. She hadn’t heard a sound from the crawlspace since they’d shut Vesa in there, and she was growing more anxious by the minute. She needed an excuse to check on him, but the bunker offered little in the way of privacy, and she was terrified of arousing the suspici
ons of her cohorts.
“Second, the finalized list of political prisoners for release.” Klaus slammed a typewritten page on the table, and the men pored over it with murmurs and nods of recognition.
“Hey, what about Nooa Jaakkola?” interrupted a youth with dark circles under his eyes. “They got him for distributing contraband last year. I heard he’s still alive.”
“He’s not particularly notable...”
“He’s my friend!”
“The Chairman’s not going to empty the gulags for us even if we do have his son. This is the list we need to start with.”
“What? I thought that if we told him to jump, he’d ask how high!”
“Drop it! Moving on...”
Seeing the rest of the partisans distracted, Kaija took a piece of bread from the table and ladled water into a ceramic mug from the pot of melted snow on the stove.
“I’m going to feed the prisoner,” she said, to no one in particular. Her brothers ignored her, still in the middle of their debate.
She pulled the board from the entrance to the crawlspace, and a band of light fell across Vesa’s body. The way he lay so still, with his face turned toward the wall, drove a spike of fear through her heart, but then he stirred, curling into a ball as though preparing himself for further abuse.
“Hey.”
He didn’t respond directly, but Kaija saw him cringe slightly at the sound of her voice. She ducked into the crawlspace and pulled the board back over the entrance, allowing them some privacy.
“Hey,” she said, quieter this time. “I brought you some food.” She rolled him toward her, over the sacks of oats and potatoes.
The gag still filled his mouth, but his eyes were eloquent in their bitter accusations. She tried to stroke his hair, to soothe him as she had done what seemed like an eternity ago, and he shrank from her touch.
Dusk in Kalevia Page 15