by Paul Park
The music was gone now but the statue still moved, still scattered beads of light that spread over the vault. Below, the surface of the pool glowed. No heat came from it, no sulfur smell, and the surface of the water was smooth and still. But Miranda could see movement in its depth.
This was the true, transforming water of Aphrodite. Like Insula Calia, this place was a point of contact between two worlds. If Miranda washed in this water, she would step out of the grotto’s mouth and find the world had changed.
This had been her aunt’s plan all along. Nicola Ceausescu was a conjurer, the Elector of Ratisbon was a conjurer. If she was going to struggle with them to make something better out of the world, then guns and horses would not be her weapons—not her father’s pistol and not broken-down old soldiers like Captain Dysart. Nor could she win by taking on the German army. But she would fight with her own weapons in the hidden world.
And it was true—she did have weapons there. Insula Calia had proved that—not just her aunt’s weapons, but her own. It was she who had destroyed the vampire, a chain of events that she remembered now.
After her book had been destroyed and she had come into this world, and after she’d been dragged through time into Roumania, and even after Insula Calia she had tried to convince herself that all those magical, unexplainable events were aberrations. It was how she’d managed to stumble forward—first things first. Step by step. The big picture was for morons, as her adoptive father had once said.
It was a strategy that had kept her safe and brought her to this place. Every morning she had tried to wake up fresh as if from a dream. The morning after she had seen her aunt in Insula Calia, she had tried to look forward and not back.
Now she imagined she had come to the end of that kind of journey. She was looking at the big picture now, that was for sure, moron or not. If sometimes on the way she had resisted and refused, it was because it was too threatening to find another reason for the world, another principle of experience that was not the same as Stanley’s careful strategy. In this cave, as in the salt cave, was the access to that principle.
Stiff and unsteady, she climbed from her perch next to the statue. She found she was peering over the edge of the stone basin into water that seemed impossibly deep.
Fascinated, frightened, she reached out her hand. Every action now was irreversible. Behind her were the tunnel and the grotto’s mouth leading out into the comfortable darkness.
And because it is hard not to look back, she paused now to reconsider. Were these her own weapons after all, and her own choices? Certainly during the moments she had already spent in this new world, when she remembered them later, she had not felt her choices were her own. At Insula Calia, fighting with the vampire and his men, she had not felt she could stop or go the other way. But it was as if some animal nature was driving her forward, something she couldn’t quite control.
And maybe instead of learning to control it, she had confused this sensation with another—one that made more sense to resent. For at these uncontrolled moments, in another way she had felt just like this clockwork mannequin, moving to a tune she had not written and scarcely recognized, a tune her aunt had sung over her cradle, or else paid a servant to sing, maybe, years before.
Now she examined her own feelings. For a long time it had been second nature to resist. But she’d always come to the brink eventually, and here she was.
Oh, but this seemed different and irrevocable. She could drown in this pool and never find herself again. Maybe it was all right to take a step away and reassure herself. There was no urgency tonight. And maybe this was not even the right moment. She knew the cave was here. She knew how the key worked. That was the important thing. These decisions could never be made lightly.
And so she turned away, stepped back toward the cave’s mouth, where there were people waiting under torchlight—familiar faces, though the small, misshapen women were all gone. But Captain Dysart was there, beckoning her into the night.
As always there was something ridiculous about him, his white hair and white moustache, though just in the time she’d known him he’d exchanged his ragged shirt for fashionable, expensive clothes. Her money had helped him with that—the light shone on his patent-leather boots. She didn’t look him in the face, didn’t look into his single eye, because she knew he was angry. “What, you must not go away like this. We have been searching and searching. You must understand it is so dangerous—”
He drew her out into the clearing by the grave. Miranda interrupted him. “Where are the women that were here? Where is Ludu Rat-tooth? Did you see her on the way?”
“Pah, that Gypsy! No, there is someone else I think that you must meet.”
Maybe a dozen men were in the clearing. They were dressed in policemen’s uniforms. The torches shone on silver buttons and high helmets. Their leader stood with his hands behind his back. He was a small man in black street clothes. He didn’t smile or acknowledge her. His gray hair was combed back from his forehead, and his moustache was luxuriant and black.
Confused, Miranda looked for Ludu Rat-tooth. Who were these men? She could feel the expression on her face begin to change. And when they saw her new expression they came forward, pretense abandoned.
She forced herself to smile. Smiling, she ducked away from Ernest Dysart. Arm outstretched, fingers splayed, she ran back into the tunnel with the men behind her, knowing if the golden mannequin had come to the end of her dance, then she was trapped. If the cave had changed back, she was trapped.
But there above her was the enormous painted tyger in the center of the vault, and there was the statue turning on its base—arm outstretched, fingers splayed—and there was the basin of blue water that Venus Aphrodite had touched, and Mary Magdalene had touched, and Miranda Brancoveanu had touched during the siege of Bucharest the night before she led her raid on Vulcan’s barbican. Good enough for them, good enough for her—Miranda put her hands into the pool and slopped the water on her arms and neck and face, and for good measure drank some.
The water in the pool was bitter, acrid, sulfurous, disgusting. And it had no immediate effect. She could hear the racket the police made in the tunnel, the echo of their voices. So maybe she was mistaken after all. “Help,” she thought, “Help me,” she thought, and this time she meant it.
16
A Derailment
AT FIRST LIGHT the Hephaestion came steaming to the town of Chiselet on the edge of the marsh, sixty kilometers southeast of Bucharest. Andromeda woke in the baggage car at the front of the train. She had in her belly a dissatisfied feeling, a queasiness that had nothing to do with the cramped, damp space, the smell of tar and oil and hot metal from the square hole in the floor. For several minutes she lay curled up on her clothes. Nor did she lift her heavy head from off her paws.
But with new eyes and the gray light from the hole, she could see details of the compartment hidden from her the night before. With her new ears she heard the same noises in a different way, softer, muted, and yet more complete. She lay listening to the scrape of the metal wheels, the shuddering rhythm of the ties, and yet she wasn’t bothered and deafened by them as before. It was as if her hearing was less sensitive but more acute, and in the space between the larger noises she could now perceive a range of others, the drip of the melting ice, the scurrying of some rodent, and Pieter de Graz’s breath as he swayed above her, his hand in the leather strap.
She stretched and yawned. And as soon as her mouth was open she could smell a number of new smells, wax, fish eggs, and fruit preserves, sawdust, grease, and gunpowder, urine, sweat, and straw.
There was a smell she couldn’t identify, and she raised her head. She lay curled up in a corner between two vibrating blocks of merchandise, strapped down and covered with tarpaulins. Beside her head a wooden crate was packed with cylindrical containers. Their rounded edges, their smooth, mirrored, metal skin seemed out of place. Carefully stenciled along its side were letters she couldn’t read.
; Above her de Graz said something, and she tried to understand his tone of voice.
It had been a long time since she’d been able to interpret the words of men. When she first woke on Christmas Hill when everything was new, then she’d understood. Especially she’d caught everything Miranda had said, perhaps because she knew her well. But steadily there’d been more guesswork and interpretation as her body changed and thickened, her hair grew coarse and dark along the spine, along the ears.
But even now she thought she didn’t miss much of importance. Pieter de Graz grunted above her. Already she missed Peter Gross, whose body had always given out a light and pleasing odor, even when he hadn’t washed for weeks. This new smell was rank and coarse. There was something apelike in the way he smelled, something apelike in the way he hung above her from the strap.
Andromeda yawned, stuck out her tongue. Then she settled her head between her forelegs.
She didn’t have long to wait. She listened to the shudder of the train. They were moving fast, the straight track a blur beneath them. She heard the whistle, a high, screaming sound, and then the scrape of metal as the brake came on. The wheels locked and the train slid forward. Andromeda started up, her claws uncertain on the metal floor.
De Graz already had his head out of the hole, and then half of his body. When he came up there was a different tone to the language of his grunting. Andromeda could see the ladder of the track that had led them to Roumania; at every instant the rungs were more distinct. The rhythm of the ties was slower, though the screaming of the brake hadn’t changed.
Pieter was hanging from the metal cage beneath the hole. Above him Andromeda watched the rungs of the ladder, thicker and darker all the time. She could see the stretches of cinder between them. She’d heard in Adrianopole that bandits sometimes stopped these trains. That’s why the engineers put the baggage car in front, she now remembered (“What an idiot!”), in case the train went over a mine.
De Graz was crouching in the metal slot, and she imagined for the first time he was waiting to drop down onto the track. If so, he would be ripped apart. And what about her? What was she supposed to do? What a jerk he was—the whistle was still screaming and the car lurched from side to side. But it was slower now, much slower, as she could tell from the rhythm and the solid ties.
De Graz climbed out of the hole again, picked up a hammer from behind one of the bins. There were some ventilation windows on the side of the car, fastened on the inside. He undid the steel clasps, pressed the windows open, a half dozen long, rectangular holes on top of each other, set into a louvered wooden frame. This he attacked with the hammer and a crazy fury that she recognized. He threw the entire weight and strength of his body into each blow. Andromeda could see the trees rushing past outside, more and more now as the frame gave way. De Graz pounded out a ragged hole maybe two feet square, and now he was scrambling through it with the hammer in his hand—what was she supposed to do? But no, she heard him clambering on the outside of the car, and then the blows of his hammer on the padlocked door, one, two, three, four, five, and then a crash, and the door slid open.
De Graz was nowhere to be seen. The train was still going about five miles an hour. She crawled to the open doorway and looked out. There was a path beside the track, and then a steep embankment, and then trees. But my God, to jump seemed crazy; she leaped forward, hit the ground, collapsed and crumpled with a pain in her foreleg. She kept her head pressed down beside the rail. She remembered a fall from her mountain bike outside her mother’s house on Syndicate Road.
She pressed herself into the dirt and listened to the cars trundle past, first the screaming engine and then the rest. One, two, three, four, five. And then the gray sky above her and some steaming rain and pebbles, and she raised her head to see the back of the train receding down the track. It seemed to go very slowly now, and other passengers were jumping from the rear platform onto the path, or rolling down the embankment on either side, still in their nightclothes.
Then there was an explosion that Andromeda couldn’t see except as a flash of light. But she heard the roar, felt the concussion. Ears down, teeth bared, she watched the train come off the rails. Slowly, at just a few miles an hour, the front car hit an obstacle and couldn’t proceed. But the back cars were still moving. One by one they collapsed onto each other and continued down the embankment on the right-hand side, away from her in a relentless grind of metal.
But the baggage car had blown up and had fallen to the left. As she watched, the steel skin of the compartment was ruptured and fire burst out of it, an immediate conflagration as the car broke apart. In front of it the track was broken over a trestle bridge, and there was a pile of stacked timbers. The whistle blew once and was silent.
Andromeda kept her head down. After a few minutes there was a silence that washed over everything, washed over Andromeda as she lay in the dirt.
In time she was aware of some new sounds, birds and squirrels chattering and buzzing in the trees. And then people whimpering and calling out like weak young pups, over on the other side of the embankment. The train lay sprawled and wheezing there. No one was with her on the track itself, and no one had the vantage point to see, as she did when she pulled herself upright and hobbled forward, the different views on either side of the embankment. On Andromeda’s left, men were coming out of the woods to stand around the broken baggage car, which was on fire. But after the first few explosions, everything was quiet there. The sun was coming out now from behind some clouds.
The engineer must have disconnected the car before it went over the mine. On the right-hand side of the embankment, the passengers gathered in dispirited little groups, men with their hands in the pockets of their dressing gowns. Andromeda caught the odor of a cigarette. Two cars stood almost upright down the slope, and two lay on their sides.
Andromeda saw Pieter de Graz pulling himself out of one of the fallen cars, walking upright underneath the line of windows, carrying a child in his arms. He jumped down and laid her on the ripped-up grass, bent over her as others stood around. Then he pulled himself onto the train again and disappeared into a window. A few minutes later he poked up again, dragging up a woman who was bleeding from both legs. He laid her on the side of the car, where she cried out. Men came to help her as de Graz lifted her down. He was the only moving part in that broken machine. Again he disappeared into the overturned train.
On the other side of the embankment, bandits were in the baggage car. And in the distance beyond the trestle bridge, some people were hurrying through the fields along a dirt track. There was a town not far away. The church had a double onion dome.
None of these three groups of people, separate and converging in a small space, was likely to have any use for Andromeda. A woman in her bathrobe shouted and pointed. A bandit raised his rifle. Favoring her left side, Andromeda jumped down the embankment into the long grass. Her paw wasn’t broken, she decided. But her feet and legs were bruised and she was bleeding from a gash along her ribs.
The wood was full of briars and dead trees. Andromeda lay down several times and licked her feet. As she left the railway line, the ground got soft and wet. Soon she was wading through water between hummocks of dried grass. Crows flapped from tree to tree.
During the night the train had crossed into Roumania. Curled up on the floor of the car, Andromeda had thought about the morning with anticipation and nostalgia. Prochenko was not sentimental about the beauty of his native land. It was Andromeda who longed to see the majestic rivers, the mountains, and the forests.
In Prochenko she’d felt as if she were discovering old parts of herself, relearning skills she’d always had. Her double memory had fused into a single impression of the past—high school and military school, California and New England, Roumania and Ukraine. Prochenko’s family was from Rymarivka across the border. His father was gone, his family was busted up, his mother drank too much.
But in her dog’s shape, each part of her humanity seemed muffled and
unreal. It was natural for her to leave de Graz and wander out into the swamp. She felt no loyalty to him. She felt no dogged loyalty to Miranda, even though she’d lain on the cold floor of the baggage car the previous night, listening to the throbbing engine and the shudder of the rails: find her, find her, you must find her.
But now she limped away. Her heart was full of feelings that had nothing to do with her hurt paws, or the swamp, or her arrival in Roumania. Nor did she care that she’d escaped death. None of that held any interest. She squatted to piss and then went on through the dead trees, her nose crowded with signs and smells that made a map in front of her. She followed the tiny paths, and came first to some wood lice in a rotten stump, which she scratched apart. Then there was the smell of otters but she didn’t see them.
Bees flew among the wildflowers. The sun came out again. She lay down on her stomach and licked at the pads of her feet. She must have hurt herself worse than she thought, because she was conscious of a smell of blood that interfered with other smells.
She spent the morning hunting for rodents and frogs. Then she lay licking her paws and the wound in her side. The ground was wet under her. When she heard men in the woods, she ran from them back toward the train track. Over the smell of her blood she caught a peculiar scent of someone else’s, mixed with gunpowder and grease and sweat—a trampled path through the undergrowth. Someone had pulled himself away from the wrecked train, maybe to escape the bandits. Someone had pulled himself into the small trees. There was a smell of feces now. There was a sound of shouting and pounding from the track.