Telling the Map

by Christopher Rowe

  “And he that curseth his father, or his mother, shall surely be put to death. Exodus 21:17.”

  “Michael!” she said, and he gave her a curt nod. He’d seen it, too. Then they were through the raceside crowd and back on the flat, open road, Maggie trying to use her body and her bike to communicate with her brother, to tell him to drop back from the pack so they could talk about the Amish and their message.

  Who can it have been from? We haven’t cursed our parents, have we? Could the Reenactors have spread word of the two of us being in the race? They had clearly been familiar with Brother Theodore. That seemed more likely than that whatever it was from Tennessee was trying to contact them through an Amish quilt.

  Michael was willfully ignoring her, though, going so far as to try to strike up a conversation with a woman riding at his other shoulder who swiftly proved to speak no English or Spanish. That or swiftly proved that she had no interest in speaking to Michael. For all that their team had forgiven him, there were still riders in the pack who brusquely maneuvered away from him when he came close, or threw him angry looks.

  It would be a long day, Maggie realized, and not just because they were riding almost 110 miles, wind at their backs but on false flats the whole route, steadily climbing a gradient invisible to the eye but taxing to the legs. At least there was one tiny little climb to look forward to, according to the race bible. When they reached the city of Bowling Green they would all experience the short, sharp shock of the hill the university there dominated, its old buildings spreading down the flanks of the only significant terrain feature for miles around.

  Only significant feature except for the Barren River, which shouldn’t prove nearly so much a challenge as the rivers of the day before, being a slack and lifeless thing, not only free of any influence of the Voluntary State, but also devoid of any life at all. No fish swam its dark waters.

  The day stretched out with a break establishing itself shortly after the troubling encounter with the Amish. This annoyed Maggie somewhat, because the three riders out front would soak up all the climbing points, pitifully few as they were, for the collegiate hill in Bowling Green. She looked down at the abbreviated cue sheet taped to her top tube, and hazarded a guess that the breakaway riders would be caught by the bunch roughly at the halfway point between the small city of Glasgow and the finishing line in the village of Edmonton. Maggie had visited both places on long rides out from the house above the Green River, though rarely. She and Michael tended to ride east on their training rides, into hillier terrain.

  Michael managed to keep himself apart from her in the pack for the next hour, and Maggie eventually gave up on the idea of talking to him during the race. She would corner him tonight at the race village. They had to determine what was going on, and no amount of ignoring the problem would make it go away. Not that Michael was really ignoring it. She knew him so well, knew that he was turning everything that had happened over and over in his mind, from the telephone landing on the road in front of them to the camerastat’s message to everything else. The problem was that he wouldn’t be trying to find an answer, he would be trying to find an escape.

  Maggie had always thought that Michael was more like their father than he realized.

  The radio crackled and Lydia’s voice came through. “We’re still in good shape for the general classification. But wouldn’t it be nice to win the climber’s jersey, too?”

  Maggie didn’t immediately make sense of her director’s question, but then Telly and Jordan launched themselves out of the pack, speeding ahead up the road and raising multilingual curses from the rest of the peloton.

  “What are they doing?” Maggie said to herself, but Nicholas heard her and laughed.

  “They’re chasing down the break,” he said. “So that you can get the climbing points in Bowling Green.”

  And then, surprising her and throwing tactics to the wind, the Dual Champion of Oklahoma and of the Cherokee Nation rode past her and went to help his teammates.

  The university at Bowling Green was the Commonwealth’s only remaining institution of higher learning, and in her rare daydreams about what her life would be like after cycling, Maggie had sometimes imagined herself a student there. But as she rode past the gasping riders from the earlier breakaway at the foot of the school’s hill, she took a precious second to glance around. A second was enough to see that she could never have thrived there.

  The university was the province of the Owls of the Bluegrass, scholar-savants like the race director who foreswore individuality in favor of heightened expertise in their dual missions of preserving knowledge of the past and combatting the designs of Athena Parthenus. The slopes of the hill were aswarm with Owls.

  One or two—students, Maggie imagined, though their helmets and robes made everyone in the teeming crowd more or less identical—attempted to run alongside her as she launched herself ahead of the thinned peloton and began flying up the hill. She left the runners and the racers alike behind. And climbed.

  A great disappointment of Maggie’s life was that she had never had—perhaps would never have—the opportunity to ride up one of the great passes of Europe, the finest and most challenging climbs in cycling. She had read about them, dreamed about them, ever since she discovered her talent for riding bicycles up steeply pitched pavement. Now, on this little climb that wouldn’t even be rated if there had been anything else like a hill on the day’s stage, she recited the beautiful names of those beautiful mountains across the sea, sotto voce, timed to her pedal strokes. “Alpe d’Huez, Col du Galibier, Col de Madeleine. Passo del Stelvio, Passo di Gavia, Colle de Finestre. Sierra de la Pandera, Pico de Veleta, Alto de L’Angliru.”

  The most difficult climbs in Kentucky were in the mountains to the east, but those were low, old mountains compared to the Alps and the Dolomites and the Pyrenees. Maggie knew she had the physical skills of a great climber, and believed she had the heart. But she had never truly been tested, and doing well in this race was an opportunity, an invitation to those legendary climbs abroad. She spun the pedals faster, still breathing easily. She was determined not only to do well, not only to excel, but to electrify.

  Maggie was so attuned to her own body that she knew another cyclist had latched onto her wheel not by seeing or hearing him, but by feeling the shadow he cast across her back. She spared a glance back and saw a grimacing Quebecois rider grinding a large gear. Down the slope, the rest of the pack was making their way up, apparently content to let this lone rider challenge her for the first-place points on offer at the top.

  She considered what to do. There was no time on this short climb to play games, to ease up and force the other racer to pass her so that she might herself gain the tactically superior position immediately behind the leader on the road.

  No time at all, she thought, as she noticed the barriers alongside the road, and the sign marking the one hundred meters to go mark.

  She clicked her gears up. She stood up on her pedals. And she rode away from her rival.

  Maggie smiled at the hooting, wordless cheers from the Owls of the Bluegrass gathered at the hillcrest. She forced herself to remember that this was not the stage finish, that she had many long miles to race before the day was done, but here was some glory. She spotted the team’s soigneur, Tammy, holding out a bottle at the roadside and grinning broadly.

  She expected the girl to shout encouragement or congratulations, but instead, Tammy said, “Look at the statue! Look what’s written on it!”

  Taking the bottle, Maggie looked over at the bronze image of a man in scholarly dress. She’d seen it before on her previous trips to Bowling Green, but had paid it little mind beyond noting that the figure depicted wore no owl helmet. This time, though, she read the words engraved in the limestone pediment. The Spirit Makes the Master.

  Maggie took a swig of water, settled herself onto the saddle, and began the descent. I suppose it does, she thought.

  The crossing of the Barren River was sedate, dead
waters stirred to a semblance of life by the simple expedients of watersheds and topography and gravity. Nothing of Kentucky or Tennessee either one lived there, so the race, regrouped after the shock of the climb, passed over it on an old poured concrete bridge at the edge of the city. Then it was into the rolling terrain of the Pennyroyal region, the kind of riding Maggie and Michael knew best, the route skirting the dangers of Mammoth Cave and staying south of the Green on a long east-bound approach to the finish in Edmonton.

  No more escapes went away, and this time the sprint finish was a picture-perfect thing of colorful lead-out trains jockeying for position and cranking the speed up higher and higher. Michael won by half a bike length.

  Chapter Nine

  “This race is too short for any more playing about. If we are to make a run for the general classification, it must be today.”

  It was the next morning, and Lydia was thumbing through the stage bible for the day’s long trek northward to the Kentucky River.

  Michael, stretched out on one of the couches and taking more than his share of room, pointed to the green jersey he now wore as leader of the race’s points competition. Then he nodded at Maggie, in the white jersey with red polka dots that marked her as the Queen of the Mountains, leader of the climbing competition. “We have two of the three jerseys. Shouldn’t we race to protect them?”

  David Bonheur rolled his eyes. “You think a stage win and that jersey wins you back into our good graces? Easy as that?”

  Michael pursed his lips as if in thought, and Maggie winced at the old sure signal that he was about to erupt in some tirade of sarcastic barbs.

  “It wasn’t easy,” said Nicholas, unexpectedly. “And he is back in our good graces, or at least in mine. Both of the twins road extraordinarily well yesterday, and we should be realistic about our chances. A stage win and two jerseys are nothing to sniff at, and Maggie has a real shot at the time trial tomorrow.”

  Lydia looked at her nephew thoughtfully, then said, “And so do you. As you do for the overall win. We have a legitimate chance of winning all three competitions, not to mention the time trial and perhaps the last day into Mayfield, which should suit the sprinters again.”

  Then almost everyone started talking at once, Michael grinning broadly in contrast to David’s scowl, the other riders babbling about their chances. Only Nicholas kept quiet, studying the map spread across the table. Only Maggie heard his question.

  “This river here, the Kentucky. It’s the worst of them?”

  Maggie looked at the spot on the map where Nicholas had rested his finger. The bright yellow line of the route map crossed the river in a place she’d heard of.

  “High Bridge,” she said, thinking. “High Bridge is held by the Shakers of Pleasant Hill.”

  By the time she had finished the sentence, the cross-talk had stopped and everyone heard her last few words.

  “Shakers?” asked Jordan. “Those are like the Amish? Except they”—and she made a wild flailing gesture with both hands—“dance? Right?”

  Maggie shook her head. “Not like the Amish at all. Well, they’re churched, but the Amish reject technology where the Shakers seek to make their communities as heavenly as possible, so they adopt—maybe I should say adapt—every advantage available to them. They’re masters of technology. Perfecters of it.”

  She realized everyone was looking at her, and she blushed.

  “At least that’s what my father taught me.”

  Lydia held up the race bible. “Your father apparently taught them as well. The Shakers, I mean. It says here that our crossing will be an easy one because the Shakers at this High Bridge . . . Well, it says ‘they are continuously praying and singing above the river.’ They now keep a twenty-mile stretch clear of Tennessee’s influence. We stay at their village tonight and caravan across in the morning for the start of the time trial in Lexington.”

  Nicholas looked from one twin to another. “I have heard of your mother’s great accomplishments all my life,” he said. “But your father’s exploits amaze me as well. He must be the greatest defender of your Commonwealth against Athena Parthenus.”

  Michael’s face had darkened, and he shook his head and shrugged, clearly uncomfortable with the unexpected turn of the conversation.

  Maggie shook her head, too, but replied. “He doesn’t want to defeat her,” she said. “He wants to redeem her.”

  There was a knock at the door and a muffled voice called, “Line them up!”

  It was time to race.

  For two days, they had ridden east, but now they turned north through the Pennyroyal region of Kentucky, aimed for the heart of the Commonwealth, the more gently rolling hills of the Bluegrass, where the Horselords reigned. These were roads the twins knew well.

  At Greensburg, in Green County, they crossed the Green River. It was a near the beginning of the race, and no riders had escaped up the road, so the peloton let the American team ride to the front so the twins could sing them across.

  Maggie won the day’s only climb, over a knob near the village of Gravel Switch. Michael took second in the sprint at the Civil War town of Perryville, gaining more points and solidifying his hold on the green jersey. And the race was all together as they approached the day’s finish on the palisades high above the Kentucky River.

  US 68 passed through the quiet town of Danville, given over completely to the Viewers at Home, and then reached northeast straight into Pleasant Hill, the holding of the Shakers. Even above the noise of a peloton winding up for a sprint finish, the racers heard the Shakers long before they saw them.

  They were singing:

  “Welcome here, welcome here,

  all be alive and be of good cheer.

  Welcome here, welcome here,

  all be alive and be of good cheer.”

  The race finished on a long straight stretch in front of the Shaker house of worship. This time his leadout was perfect, and Michael’s hands were in the air when he crossed the finish line in first.

  Deep in the peloton, shepherding Nicholas, Maggie threw up her on hands in victory when she saw that her twin had won again. But then she started and had to correct a drift off line when she saw something that Michael couldn’t have. On a large screen beside the road, showing the feeds that the Viewers at Home consumed, Michael’s victory was being repeated in slow motion. He was better than a bike’s length ahead of the Mexican rider who came second. And impossibly, standing in the road next to him, holding her hands up in supplication, was the wavering, transparent image of their mother.

  “Did you see that?” Maggie asked Nicholas as they coasted across the line.

  “Yes!” he answered. “Fantastic! He’s really found his sprint. We’ll keep the points jersey for sure, now!”

  “No, I meant . . .” She let her voice trail off. Nobody in the crowd of Shakers and people affiliated with the race seemed to be looking at the screen, which now showed an aerial shot of the village and the surrounding farmland. Nobody she could see wore an expression that indicated they’d seen something impossible or shocking. In fact, the only person not looking up the road at the excited scrum around Michael was the race director, who seemed to be looking directly at her. Though of course, behind the fixed features of his owl mask, it was impossible to tell whether he wore any expression at all.

  Maggie and Nicholas slowly picked their way toward the bus, frequently stopping when Shakers, race officials, riders from other teams, and others dashed in front of them. The finish of a stage was always a madhouse. As they neared their destination, they saw Michael climbing aboard the bus—he would be massaged first today.

  “I guess we have a little time to kill,” said Nicholas. “We should take a cool-down spin.”

  He was talking about riding even more, but now it would be at a slower pace, designed to slowly bring their muscles and cardiovascular systems down to a resting rate, with no bothersome camerastats following them. Usually such a ride was only necessary after a much more stren
uous effort than the two of them had made, sitting tucked in the peloton all day as they had been.

  “Back down the race route?” Maggie asked absentmindedly. She was trying to decide if she had imagined what she had seen on the screen.

  “No,” said Nicholas. “I saw a road leading down to a landing on the route map. I want to go down to the river.”

  The way he said it, the precise force with which he hit each word, almost as if he were sounding notes, made Maggie realize he was quoting an old hymn.

  “To pray?” she asked him, finishing the line.

  Nicholas smiled, but shook his head. “I’m not, what’s the word you use? Churched? I’m not a churched person. But this might be the only opportunity I have to stand right beside one of these invasive rivers instead of speed across one.”

  Maggie said, “It’s dangerous. They probably have it blocked off.”

  “If they won’t let us approach it, then it won’t be dangerous, now will it? And besides, I have you to protect me.”

  Which was true enough, but Maggie still worried over the ghostly image of her mother, which was, if anything, gaining clarity in her mind’s eye. What had she been trying to communicate, raising her hands to the heavens like that?

  Then she realized she had a reason to go to the river of her own.

  “Okay,” she told Nicholas. “But I probably will pray.”

  The road down to Shaker Landing was narrow and shaded and steep. It reminded Maggie of the Ginnie Hill, and the telephone call, which had come, she realized with a start, less than a week before. So much more time than that had seemed to pass. So many miles had passed.