by Paul Park
You didn’t have to be a soldier, Peter thought, to see it was an easy place to defend. The bridge was narrow. It came down to a flat place among the pine trees and dead golden stubble, an open space below the cliff where once there’d been a house. Peter could see old foundations poking through the snow.
And was it true, he thought, that time sometimes grows quickly as a tumor? Pancreatic cancer was one of the fast ones. His mother had been sick for over a year.
Maybe that’s what happened when the book was destroyed—they’d come unstuck in time. And if he could just catch up, maybe there was still a place where his mother was alive—lung cancer, hers had been. When she was sick he’d read to her, trying to repay in one year all the nights he’d lain in bed with her beside him and the soft buzz of the TV downstairs. In those days she’d paid him a dollar for every page of poetry he’d memorized, regardless of quality: The Congo, Ulysses, Horatius at the Bridge. He had been drawn to long war epics. “‘Lars Porsena of Clusium,’” he quoted now, eyes wet, “‘By the nine gods he swore, that the great house of Tarquin would suffer wrong no more.’” Raevsky gave him a blank look.
The bridge ran straight across to the rocks on the other side. About fifty feet long, it was supported in the middle by an immense stone pillar that rose out of the stream. What was its purpose, a footbridge from nowhere to nowhere in the middle of the wilderness? What had Raevsky said about dynamite?
“‘In yon straight path a thousand may well be stopped by three,’” Peter quoted, eyes wet, tongue lumpy. “‘Now who will stand on either hand and keep the bridge with me?’”
Again the captain shook his head. They were standing on the south shore below the cliff. Above them the rock trail led to the camp. But there was another more roundabout way beside the river, through the pine trees and then up.
So Waile Bizunesh had discovered a kind of time machine, Peter guessed. She’d gone back and back. And the last time she’d been in her own country, she’d read about the white tyger. And a woman named Miranda, who had murdered a policeman—well, it was interesting. Hard to imagine, but interesting. A last resort—no one would try to cross the bridge tonight. And tomorrow they’d go on to Albany. They would look for Ion Dreyfoos in the fish market, as Blind Rodica had explained when they had first come to this country. And he would make them passports and bring them to Roumania over the ocean. That was the plan Blind Rodica had made on the first day and evening before she died. It seemed like months ago.
As darkness fell, they sent Fiona back with the others. They had brought supplies—cheese and sausage, canteens of water, and the long guns. There was a natural bastion at the bottom of the cliff where they could crouch behind the rocks and aim down on the bridge.
“Aunus from green Tifernum, lord of the hill of vines, and Seius, whose eight hundred slaves sicken in Ilva’s mines,” thought Peter. Names to conjure with. In several trips they had piled up blankets and bearskins, which they laid upon the rocks. In the last light Captain Raevsky showed him how to load the guns—the black powder cartridge, the lead bullet in its paper wad. They had five guns, and they set the copper priming caps and laid them out.
“No one will come,” Peter said. “If we light a fire, they’ll see the bridge cannot be crossed.” So they pulled down some dead pine boughs, which soon crackled up. It was a small fire just to show there was a guard. If a fight came, they’d put it out.
Peter sat with his back against the rock, looking up at the cliff’s head with the bridge behind him. Shadows jumped and postured on the rocks. Raevsky was smoking a cigar. It had Egyptian hieroglyphs on the band. He had gotten it from the girl up above.
Andromeda was across the bridge. She jumped onto the parapet and ran back and forth. The roar of the water had become familiar, and Peter scarcely heard it anymore.
“What if they come from the other side?” he asked.
“Girl shoot. We hear.” He pointed with his chin. “This side, Lieutenant Prochenko warns us. Bark.”
He gave a grumbling sort of guffaw, and Peter wondered if he’d ever heard him laugh before. And of course it was a little ridiculous, when you could relax and think about it. Peter smelled the tobacco smoke, the hot pine pitch. He took his hands from his gloves and held them to the fire. “What was he like, Sasha Prochenko?” he asked, and then listened as the handsome young guardsman took shape out of Raevsky’s words.
“Not so tall, but thin,” murmured the captain. “Small bones. Yellow hair. No beard. Cold eyes—blue. Rich clothes also—what you say? Expensive. Very sure. Women love, but no man trust. What you say—charming, fascinant? Some days, then you will see.”
“What do you mean?”
“Is conjure only for a little while. Heart of a man, it grows inside. Like a carcinom. Then he come back in the night time, you will see. Cry at moon in a man’s voice. Dog shape sometime and then man.”
Something to look forward to. “When I knew him he was a girl,” muttered Peter.
“Girl also grow inside. Cold eyes, maybe her, too. You will see.”
But Peter didn’t want to see. Gray eyes flecked with blue, he thought, as he remembered the girl he’d known. “What did you say about Transylvania? Before, I mean. Something about the Carpathian Mountains. Wasn’t that where Dracula was from?” Vampires—that’s what Peter knew about Roumania. That was the only thing, except for one stupid poem.
“I do not know this Dracula.”
In his mind Peter saw a young man with the girl’s face he remembered—not that Andromeda had ever been his friend. Not that she’d ever been nice to him, exactly. She’d been too proud and too stuck up. But in a moment he decided he’d be happy to see her, happy to see anybody who knew about the life he’d left behind. She’d be someone to talk to about home, about Miranda.
“I do not know this name,” Raevsky murmured. Then he smiled. Peter saw the gap in his back teeth.
“Howling at the moon,” Peter said, and he smiled, too. Sasha Prochenko, if it came to that—he and Sasha Prochenko would have things to talk about. Prochenko would have stories about Miranda, not the same Miranda but a different one, someone who had spent her childhood in Roumania and now returned to it. Someone different and new who had shot a policeman maybe, or might shoot one in five years—what bullshit that was! Waile Bizunesh had clearly lost her mind, alone here in this forest. Or she was just a little girl making up stories.…
But maybe as a last resort he would climb down into her tunnel or whatever it was. Sitting back against the rocks, Peter found it easy to imagine, even fun. The wild men wouldn’t come, he told himself. He would sit here by Raevsky with his hands out to the fire, and feel the food in his stomach. In a few hours they would go to bed. In the meantime it was pleasant here. And yes, there was something about this moment that seemed familiar, this kind of waiting. And yes, he’d liked the feel of the long guns, the smooth rubbed stocks with just a little old carving, the smell of powder and oiled steel. Raevsky had slipped them from their leather bags. Peter had asked him how to handle them. But he knew it all already, the taste of the cartridge in his teeth, the crunch of the rod inside the barrel, the satisfying weight, and not just because his Tennessee cousins had once taken him shooting for tin cans, to see if he could do anything with just the one hand.
Behind the cliff there was a section of orange sky, streaked with colors of the sunset. Peter found himself listening to Raevsky, who was cutting sausage into coins with his clasp knife. The old man was talking to himself, but in English so Peter could understand. In his sibilant, chaotic way he was telling stories of past wars, like someone in a restaurant remembering old meals—a habit of Peter’s father during car trips, and his mother had often laughed at him.
Raevsky rubbed his cracked lips. He was muttering names of places, Nova Zagora, Havsa, Adrianople, etc. What had happened in those places? Blood and more blood, yet here Peter was, munching sausage by the fire as the shadows played over the rocks.
As the captain talked, Peter
found himself thinking one more time about the tunnel to the future. “A little older,” he murmured, part of a longer phrase that was itself part of a godless prayer he’d used to say in front of the mirror back in Williamstown. “I would like to be a little older,” he murmured now, something he’d always felt in school, where gym class had been a nightmare, and every day was full of urgent things he couldn’t do. In the adult world, he’d imagined, hoped, his disability would disable him less.
Now, with two uneven hands, he grasped at some of the same hopes. Miranda had left him behind. In high school she’d been a couple of years younger, which had felt good to him. But as soon as they’d arrived here he had seen the change in her. Now he wanted to catch up.
But it was all bullshit, naturally. In the morning, he and Raevsky would continue on to Albany, where they would find Ion Dreyfoos.…
Raevsky was talking about someplace in Bulgaria where he’d fought the Turks. Peter wasn’t listening. Among the sheltering rocks he turned and looked out toward the bridge. He’d heard something, a shout, a whistling bark. And in the last light he could see Andromeda on the parapet, standing on three legs.
There was a light. There was another. Raevsky got up to stand beside him, and together they watched the torches through the trees. Men gathered on the opposite riverbank. Now Peter listened to another sound, a low and muffled drumbeat that seemed to come out of the crest of rocks above the torches.
“Is law not buy guns in Albany,” said Captain Raevsky. “Not for English. Still … arrows will have.” He threw his cigar into the fire.
There was a clump of torches at the far end of the bridge, where there were big steps and heavy stonework. Andromeda was gone. Raevsky picked up one of the long guns. “Shoot into the trees,” Peter said. “Above their heads.”
All the time the sun was setting, he’d been surprised by his own calmness. For minutes at a time he’d given no thought to the wild men. He knew that they’d been scared away the night before. Now here they were again, and he felt a sudden pressure in his bowels, though he had once more used the latrine before they’d climbed down from the camp. But even that wasn’t a sign of fear. Or if it was, then he was afraid of something inside himself, some greasy, knotted feeling that he couldn’t control.
The drum seemed to affect it. He felt a shudder in his stomach and then lower down. “Shoot into the trees,” he said again, his voice strange to him. Surely if the men heard gunshots, they would run. Last night a woman had chased them away.
From where they stood they had an unobstructed view of the near half of the bridge, which reached the shore below them about a hundred feet away. You couldn’t get a clear shot at the far end, though, because of the trees. The sound of the gun, the bullet rattling in the dry limbs would be enough, Peter thought.
Raevsky shrugged. He raised the gun and fired without aiming, the stock braced against his thigh.
Now the light was almost gone. But the sky retained a pearly luminescence, reflected in the hard crust of snow. Peter could see the horizontal line of the bridge, the perpendicular dead pines by the water’s edge. He could see the torchlight on the stream. Behind him, Raevsky was scattering the fire, which made the bridge easier to see. They wouldn’t need torchlight to pick the men off as they crossed.
But the lights hadn’t moved. The men were clustered at the far end of the bridge. Where was Andromeda? With the gunshot the drum stopped, and in the silence after the loud noise, Peter heard the running of the stream.
He stood up among the rocks, cupped his hands around his lips. “Hey!” he shouted. Raevsky was reloading. The best plan was to stay hidden, to pick the men off when they ventured past the midpoint of the bridge.
But Peter couldn’t tolerate the thought of that. The greasy knotted feeling was inside of him. He couldn’t stay still; he jumped down out of the rocks, then slid in a shower of pebbles to the flat clear snow between the cliff face and the bridge.
He heard Raevsky curse behind him, and felt a sudden urge to defecate. His feet punched through the snow. He felt a grinding, dirty engine in his body that could not be stopped, as if a car slipped into gear and lurched downhill. With part of his mind he thought maybe he could talk to the wild men, explain things. But at the same time he understood how he must look, running like a madman across the snow, clambering up the stone steps of the bridge, then running down the narrow way, his hands above his head, and he could hear his voice crying out. Most likely they would shoot him down.
But as he reached the middle of the bridge, he could see the faces of the men under the torches. There were some he recognized, the big man dressed in skins, a quartz-headed club in his hand, the light glinting on his yellow hair. Peter had seen him in the cave when he was sick. Andromeda was beside him now, the stone footbridge scarcely wide enough for them to run together. The parapets rose to his waist on either side. Peter was shouting at them, and maybe they thought he was still sick, but obviously they recognized him. They pulled back from the stone pillars and then scattered down the steps, down into the woods below the rocks.
“Was none who would be foremost to lead such dire attack,” Peter thought. “But those behind cried ‘Forward!’ And those before cried ‘Back!’”
Now he understood what he was doing. And it filled him with sick fear to realize how little his body was under his control. Here he was, Horatius at the bridge, inspired by stupid poems about people who’d never existed in this world or any world. Maybe that would not have been enough to make him budge out of the rocks where he’d been safe, except for this grim, erratic force that he could feel in his belly and his guts, and that had led him out into the open here between the stone balustrades. The force had a name, a Roumanian name that was like his. Pieter de Graz. He stood with his left hand splayed on one capstone, his big right hand clenched into a fist, and he had to admit it felt good to see the English savages break and run and stagger back, regroup under the rocks.
He counted over a dozen. None of them had bows. The light shone on their fierce, dirty faces, their long hair tied with feathers or bits of shell. “Stay away!” Peter shouted, and then, idiotically, “It’s all right. We’re fine.”
He meant they shouldn’t worry about the smallpox. But now he imagined how he must appear to them, the feverish embodiment of the disease. Three men came forward armed with stone-headed clubs. One climbed up the steps onto the bridge, a red-haired brute with white stripes painted on his forehead and his cheeks. Peter saw the whites of his eyes, the firelight flashing on his teeth, and took a step backward. Andromeda was behind him. She hadn’t gone past the middle of the bridge.
“Guts fer garters,” sneered the man, his accent wild and uncouth. Above him the drum had started to thud again. To its rhythm, the men took up a ragged tune. The words were mangled and mispronounced, but Peter knew the proper ones:
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy lamb of God
In England’s pleasant pastures seen?
He fell back step by step. Posturing and feinting, the red-haired man came forward. He had a wolf skin over his shoulders, and his chest was bare. He whirled his club above his head and then came on. But at the middle of the bridge, where Andromeda stayed, Peter heard a boom from behind him and the man fell. Peter didn’t know where he was hit, but the man groaned and cried out, his body wedged into the narrow way. Then snarling and with teeth bared, Andromeda flung herself over his head and leaped upon the man who was next in line, a black-haired man in a knitted cap, who dropped his torch and fell screaming. The dog was at his face, biting at his nose and lips. Two more shots passed overhead.
“At Pictus brave Horatius darted one fiery thrust,” Peter thought. “And the proud Umbrian’s gilded arms…” Goaded by the poem, Peter knelt to tug the club away from the red-haired man. So close, he could see the wound now and smell it. The man was shot in the body above the groin, and Peter smelled the stink of his r
uptured intestines. Blood came from his mouth.
But he wasn’t dead, and he grabbed hold of Peter’s ear. He wouldn’t let go of the club. Peter took the shaft in his left hand, but now he put his right hand under the man’s chin, his dark right hand that never failed in its strength. Both of them were muttering and shouting, but the red-haired man subsided and let go. His club came free.
Andromeda held the other men at bay. In that tight space there was no room for more than one to face her. Peter had never seen her like this, slavering and furious. One man brought his torch down to burn her. But she darted underneath the fire and ripped into his crotch.
Peter went to help her. The man in the wool cap was screaming with his face in his hands. But the red-haired man grabbed hold of Peter’s foot as he stepped over him. Peter turned to batter him with the club, and as he did he saw some other men behind him at Raevsky’s end of the bridge. He hadn’t heard any more gunshots.
And there were torches in the trees. Under the pearly sky, Peter could see Raevsky’s pirogue, which they’d abandoned upstream where they’d found the sick boy. It was drawn up among the pine trees. The wild men were on both sides of the river now. Maybe they were even at the camp.
Shouting for Andromeda, Peter shifted the club to his right hand. He let his right hand lead him back. Now there was nothing in his mind that was separate from the hand, the big hairy forearm that led him back along the bridge. And while the red-haired man had given him such trouble, these others gave way quickly. He wasn’t even aware of their faces as he pounded them with his club. One dropped his torch into the water. The other threw his crossbow down and ran. The dog was at his heels.
Still his right hand led him, the club upraised. Looking back, he could see men clustered at the middle of the bridge. He could see others in the trees beside the boat on the near shore. But there were none on the rocky cliff. At its base he found Raevsky.
Two guns were with him, flung down in the snow. The old man lay on his back. The ends of two short, heavy arrows protruded from his chest.