The Hidden World (A Princess of Roumania)

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The Hidden World (A Princess of Roumania) Page 20

by Paul Park


  You might search for it and find it in the hidden world, Miranda thought. Somewhere up ahead she might come down from Christmas Hill and find the streets spread out beyond the art museum. And if she made them or found them, what difference would it make? What would be the difference, if Rachel and Stanley were waiting for her in the big house on the green?

  But in Mogosoaia in the cave, when she had crawled into the secret world using the portal and the key her aunt had left for her, she’d found herself in Williamstown again. When she had fought the elector and killed him, she had found herself among the dark streets of her childhood. They were empty. The houses were open and abandoned. Nothing lived in them but bugs, and the orange cat, and the great coiling snake. Was that the limit of her creative power, here in the hidden world?

  No, but she had grown since then, hadn’t she? She had changed. But what if all her changing had the effect of taking her away, farther and farther into a new landscape she could not recognize. Now she was on a road into an unknown valley, a meandering path through green hills gnawed bare by goats or sheep.

  At first she had been startled by what her aunt had said, that in the hidden world the land could move with her, because of her, though not, maybe, in a way she could control. Was it so different in the real world? Stanley, her adoptive father, had once told her how a dozen people could stand in the same place, look out over the same scene, and there would be no point of similarity in what they saw, no common shape or color or pattern or significance. Maybe he exaggerated for effect, but it was certainly true that even the same person could perceive the same thing differently on different days, according to her mood. Today, here, now there was a stone wall, a ruined house, its roof open to the sky.

  She stopped beside it. Her boots kicked at the hard mud. A skein of paths led down from here, all leading in the same direction. This was her aunt’s road, she thought, and she could follow it down to the tasks her aunt had set for her. If Miranda were to reach someplace or find something of her own, would it be along here? Yes perhaps, because in one sense she had already departed from her aunt’s way, or else she’d laid her own way down on top of it.

  When she had first climbed down from Chistmas Hill into the world, she had expressed her resentment like a child, pushing the old woman’s hands away, rejecting her, refusing her comfort and her help. After Insula Calia that had changed, when Miranda had seen the ghost in the salt cave. And for some time she had needed guidance, asked for it, accepted it.

  But now the world had changed again. Miranda had crushed the snake that held the bird in its mouth. She had the power to make bargains. She was the white tyger of Roumania. The road she traveled led not only to Bocu’s death, but to Peter and to Berkshire County and the war’s end.

  She found herself walking in a light rain, dressed in woolen clothes that kept the moisture out. Homespun, she supposed. She had a kind of a hood that involved a lot of cloth around her neck—a cowl, she supposed. She’d always wondered what a cowl was.

  So—a belted woolen tunic without buttons, and wool pants underneath. Russet and sienna and oatmeal: Stanley had always made fun of those names in J. Crew or L.L.Bean catalogues. But they were the colors of the long-ago, at least in stories, or at least to her. Now there were boys on the barren hillsides. The goats had rope collars with little clappers made of wood.

  But like her aunt’s book, this place was bigger than she knew, as she realized when she came down through the terraced fields. She passed men and boys spreading slurry on the famished earth—a mixture of manure and water, which the mules pulled in leaky wagons. Not planting season yet, though they broke the dirt with wooden hoes. No one looked at her.

  So you made the world as you moved through it, although sometimes you’d never know, as when you were asleep. Even here, nothing felt under her control. But nothing surprised her either as she came into the village. It had stopped raining, but the sky was still heavy as she followed the muddy lanes downhill through rows of thatched stone cottages, mortared and faced in mud. There was sewage in the middle of the street, a little channel edged with stone. The wooden shutters were still closed in the afternoon and there was nobody around, until she came down to the well in the middle of the town. That’s where the people were, a crowd on the stone steps of the church below the wooden cross. They were building a gallows in an open space, Miranda saw without surprise. She guessed what it was for. There was even a priest in a rough cassock—umber, loden, ocher? He had a rope of beads around his waist and a demented expression on his ugly face, and he was poking a stick through the bars of a wooden cage. Miranda knew what was inside. She knew what these peasants were thinking of hanging or burning or breaking on the wheel.

  “What’s she done?” she murmured to the man beside her, a gap-toothed simpleton with a big nose.

  He answered in the antique Wallachian dialect that was current in these hills: “It’s a bad case. She is pregnant from the devil that lives near Chiselet.”

  Chiselet was the site of explosion, where General Antonescu had blown up the train. Peter had told her about that. Andromeda, too.

  “We have seen her on the mountain in the shape of a wolf,” continued the man. How likely was that? Miranda thought. Life-destroying superstitions flourished in these parts, no matter what she did. She was the white tyger of Roumania, and with a strength that seemed more normal and less counterfeit every moment she spent here, she pushed through the crowd. She ignored their grumbling, even took a stubborn pleasure in provoking it as she elbowed them aside, trod on their bare feet with her expensive leather boots—goatskin, calfskin, suede? She pulled the stick out of the priest’s hands, then stood against the cage with the people at her back. She listened to their anger, their uncertain muttering, while at the same time she stood with her hands against the bars, poles with the bark still on them, tied together with rough twine.

  Andromeda lay on her back, her knees drawn up. “Hey,” she said, “what took you?”

  Miranda drew from her sleeve a little steel blade, the kind of steel these country people never saw up in these hills with their wooden tools and their brittle, shoddy iron. The steel handle was twisted in a braid; she cut the rope apart and pulled the cage open. The noise at her back was loud and furious; yet even before she turned around she could hear a complaining, thwarted tone in it. The priest grabbed at her arm and she shook him off. How dare he touch her? She put the blade away. She didn’t need it. She stroked the wet bark of the cage, then turned and stripped the hood or cowl from her face. She stood bareheaded in front of them and listened to their shocked, defeated murmurs—“The white tyger, the white tyger.” There was no golden bracelet around her wrist. There was no tyger’s skin around her shoulders. She didn’t need any of that. But they recognized her, pulled away from her, and some of the superstitious ones collapsed onto their knees.

  “What have I always told you?” she said. “How many times before it splits your wooden skulls? And you,” she told the drooling priest, “you should be ashamed of yourself.”

  Later they stayed in an inn halfway down the valley on the way to Chiselet. Andromeda’s mood was better after a dinner in the private dining room and a bath—that is, a bucket of hot water in the outside privy. Then they lay on adjoining beds in Miranda’s room, drinking Georgian wine out of teacups. “Oh, it was terrible,” Andromeda said. “They chased me with dogs, hunted me down. I was much affronted, as they say in Victorian novels.”

  Miranda picked her nose. “Since when have you read a Victorian novel?”

  “Hey,” said Andromeda, fluttering her eyelashes. “This is your fantasy.”

  But it didn’t feel like a fantasy. The sagging bed, the rough coverlet, the low ceiling. The candle in its mirrored sconce. Andromeda’s curious face, her shining blue-gray eyes. In how much of every conversation, Miranda thought, are we really talking to ourselves?

  “Besides,” Andromeda said, “my father gave me Tess of the D’Urbervilles that summer we were in Turk
ey. You know how you read anything when you’re on vacation. I think he was trying to send a message about promiscuity.”

  “Yes, I can see it really took.”

  “Hey. I never pretended I wasn’t a slut.”

  Miranda considered this.

  “And when I say ‘slut,’” Andromeda went on, seeming to enjoy the word, “I’m talking technically. Not, you know, pejoratively.”

  Which was a line she must have gotten straight from her father along with the book. He was a philosophy professor in Berkeley, California. “Yeah, sure,” Miranda said, just as her friend broke into tears.

  * * *

  LIEUTENANT SASHA PROCHENKO, formerly of the Ninth Hussars, formerly aide-de-camp to General Schenck von Schenck, stood under the mosaic vault of the Gara de Nord in Bucharest, beside the big, four-sided clock and the newspaper kiosk. He had a copy of the Roumania Libera in his gloved hands, and he was reading a small story on page seven, the police news. A music-hall dancer had been murdered, her body abandoned in the Piata Enescu. Until the previous year she had been a student at the Sisters’ Academy in the Strada Julia. She must have been young—fourteen, perhaps.

  Touched in a way he didn’t understand, he rubbed a tear from his left eye, thinking of Elena Bibescu, who had deserved more than she’d received. The newspaper said nothing about how the girl had died. There was no mention of a single stab wound to the chest.

  * * *

  IN THE HALF-TIMBERED hotel on the way to Chiselet, Miranda rolled onto her friend’s bed to hug her, touch her face. “Oh, A.,” she said. “It’s what I loved about you. What I admired. You don’t just get to choose the parts you like.”

  The next day, she and Andromeda rode down the valley to the plain. Because she was the white tyger, she had claimed two piebald horses from the ostler, a mare and a gelding—she had taken the mare. Twice they had to cross the stream, the water leaping and crashing and gathering momentum for the marshlands, before it joined the great river down below.

  The second time, Miranda pulled up in the middle of the stream, where it had spread over egg-shaped rocks. The water was quiet around the horse’s hooves as it stopped to drink.

  “Wait,” Miranda said. “Doesn’t this look familiar? Doesn’t this look like that place where Hemlock Brook crosses Route Six?”

  Andromeda wouldn’t even turn her head. “You know, behind that restaurant?” Miranda went on, mentioning locations they had known in Berkshire County when they were girls. “What if we kept to this side of the stream? North of here—”

  Andromeda made a gesture of annoyance as she pulled her horse around. Miranda followed her across the ford, south along the path. Her friend was right as usual. It would have been stupid to try to ride cross-country through the woods. Anyway, they might have gotten lost. Or else—no, it was stupid. She must have been mistaken, Miranda thought, as the trees gave out and they came down onto the flat.

  And there it was all laid out for her. Out across the plain was the abandoned town of Chiselet, the embers still glowing from the fire, the smoky clouds bloodred above it. There was another fire burning over Staro Selo and the great bridge at Tutrakan. The smoke and flames were visible all day, at every turning of the road.

  On the river’s far bank the Turkish army waited to cross. They were building their great barges, each one round and heavy like a turtle’s back. They were bringing up their diabolic engines of war, dragging them along the road from Africa.

  The river folk had met them in the fens, Wallachian men-at-arms—free men and boys protecting their homes. Each one was worth fifty of the enemy. But the Turks pushed them backward step by bloody step, because of the force of their numbers and the power of their malice and the ingenuity of their machines. Degenerate, misbegotten, hideous, they marched under the shadow of the bridge. The air was full of smoke and fire, and their harsh and obscene screaming, which took the place of human speech.

  In Chiselet, Miranda thought, the real world and the hidden world might intersect. In the afternoon she and Andromeda reached the hamlet of Faurei above Lake Mostistea and the marsh. They stayed at the round castle by the lake. Miranda was in the courtyard; she was tending to the horses when the Chevalier de Graz came through the gate. He was maimed from the battle with the Turks, his armor split and riven—Pieter One-hand, as the soldiers called him, the most famous knight in all Roumania, and still young. Still handsome, too, as Miranda saw when they unlaced his helm: dark curly hair, cheeks as dark as any Gypsy’s, yet with a gray pallor underneath, because he’d lost so much blood. He lay back against the stones while his men stripped off his gauntlet, unbolted his breastplate, carried him up the outside staircase to his private room. He hadn’t seen her, hadn’t looked at her, hadn’t opened his eyes. She stood in the courtyard with the curry bristle in her hands.

  Later she saw the boys carrying the iron braziers, the bottled nostrums, the pots of leeches. Behind them the magi and the doctors climbed up the stairs—charlatans, all of them, of a particularly male kind, competitive in their bones, and jealous of the strength of other men. The aim of all their wisdom was to suck that strength away. She sent the castellan to put out their fires, chase them home, while at the same time she asked Andromeda how she should prepare herself, what clothes she should wear.

  “The fewer the better.” She shrugged. They were in Miranda’s upstairs room.

  “Don’t be smart with me. Please. I need your help.”

  “Hey, I’m trying. You asked my opinion.”

  “I don’t want to hear about it. You were with him for months, weren’t you? All those nights in North Africa and Byzantium—don’t tell me he never—”

  “Never what?”

  “Never—you know.”

  Andromeda laughed. “He’s not my type.” But there was something cold and melancholic in her face. “He’s your type, evidently. Come on. I’ll show you.”

  And so later, when everyone was asleep, Miranda climbed up to the top of the tower under the full moon. And the Danube coiled on the southern horizon, and the fire burned beyond it. Close at hand, the sky burned over Chiselet. Miranda wore a white robe like a tyger’s skin—striped with gray—and she paced the gallery for almost an hour, looking out over her country. Then she slipped down the outside stairs until she stood outside Pieter’s room. Men were in the antechamber, but they lay asleep. One stirred; she put her finger to her lips. Then she drew open the door and slipped inside.

  A candle guttered on the table. Pieter lay in bed, moaning in his sleep. The coverlet was stained from his leaking bandage. Miranda let the robe fall from her shoulders.

  * * *

  AND IN THE house in the Strada Cerbului, Peter Gross lay dreaming. Moonlight stretched through the open shutters.

  That night as usual he dreamed his chaotic dream of war. Voiceless and without images—heat, and color, and noise, and fear. Men retching in the mud. He lay on the lip of no-man’s-land while the fires burned around him.

  He dreamed without images, but only colors and sensations. The stink, the wet dirt in your mouth, and the concussive thunder. Crouching in a hole. Burning fire and the cold fog. Cowardice, shit, and cordite, and rotten meat. Tobacco smoke and brandy. No shapes or faces, no events. No beginning and no end.

  But then the noise of the bombardment eased and ceased, as if the Sabbath had finally come. Even in the dream his ears were ringing. And the darkness came, and the cool wind as the men stood down.

  And his dream changed, and he was dreaming of Miranda, who stood above him and let her robe fall.

  * * *

  MOONLIGHT TOUCHED THEM, made the room bright. Moonlight over Lake Mostistea in the valley of Chiselet. She lay beside him. He stirred, opened his eyes. “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey.”

  She reached down to touch his lips with her knuckles, his unshaven cheeks. It was all so easy. Nothing to have worried about, or to worry about now.

  “I’m thirsty,” he said.

  She poured some water
from a ewer on a bedside table, which she hadn’t noticed until that moment. Surely it had been there—every detail of the hidden world had a precision that made it seem more real than real. She sat up against the headboard, the sheet pulled up around her body. Surely in her own fantasy or dream she could reveal herself, show some square inches of flesh to him, expecially now when they had … been together like this, but no. What had her aunt Aegypta called this place? A landscape of the heart, something like that.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  And because she could not help herself, she reminded herself where her body actually lay, in a farmhouse in Stanesti-Jui upon the mountainside. Because she’d lost the tourmaline she was cut off from it. She wondered if she was lying asleep, and if all that had happened since Inspector Luckacz broke in with his men had taken—what? Seconds, hours, days? Was she sitting up with the bedclothes wrapped around her? Was she laughing, eating, talking? Was Andromeda still there, or had she left?

  But doubtless Peter was not there, was still in the trenches below Staro Selo, unless (was it possible?) her mother had gotten word to him. And maybe days had gone by, and maybe he had gotten leave to come up on the train, and maybe right now the two of them were playing out some version of this same scene, which is why it had seemed normal and unfraught—a word Andromeda had used to use in Berkshire County. No, it was impossible.

  He put the silver cup onto the table. With his poor, maimed, bandaged arm he reached up to kiss her, and she allowed herself to be kissed. A landscape of the heart, and every object in this room she had created from her own desire, and the Chevalier de Graz, and every word they spoke, and everything they did.

  So: a kiss. A little tongue, as Andromeda would have categorized it. And it was nice—why not? She felt the coarse sharp hair around his mouth prick at her lips in a way that was not unpleasant.

  In the hidden world, she told herself, you didn’t have to worry about doing the wrong thing. A little more tongue. And she suspected also, with a sudden suspicion that was stronger than knowledge, that the power and precision of her imagining had an effect on the real world as well, and that events there, still fluid and unformed, would seep into the mold she had created here. Not everyone could do this with her startled dreams and wants. Maybe she was the only one. This kiss was a premonition, she thought.

 

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