Coronets and Steel

by Sherwood Smith

A train? I was on a train?

  I’ve been roofied.

  Adrenalin burned from my aching brain to my feet. I threw off the light blanket covering me and sat up. My head throbbed as a sharp odor of stale wine drifted up from my clothes.

  I was still wearing my clothes, right down to my sandals.

  Okay, good news? I hadn’t been molested.

  Bad news? I was on a train in the middle of nowhere.

  I took in the tidy, impersonal compartment of a wagon-lit, trying to comprehend that I was awake. And here.

  Next to the bed someone had thoughtfully put a couple of bottles of Evian. I grabbed one and barely had the strength to twist off the top.

  I chugged the water and sat back, breathing gently, as the residual pain gradually began to diminish. After I finished the water I felt well enough to look around. I sustained another nasty shock when I spotted my suitcase lying on the suitcase rack.

  Memories surfaced murkily: laughing uncontrollably in the pensione lobby; being unable to stand on my own and thinking it terribly hilarious; the blaring voice echoing through the loudspeaker at the train station as I tried to walk across the wide, glaringly lit main hall with—

  I winced and shook my head despite the headache. My hairclip was loose, yanking on my scalp. I removed the clip and my hair rolled down and hit the bunk behind me with a soft plop. Massaging my scalp slowly, I thought back. I remembered stumbling and laughing, my arm up around a male shoulder as a strong hand gripped my waist . . . my own flat but enthusiastic soprano joining a pleasing light baritone in singing old Beatles tunes.

  Why?

  I glared at my suitcase. I never told Alec where I was staying, yet the green car had driven straight to my pensione, with me giggling drunkenly in the back of it. Rubbing my eyes, I tried to remember what the voices around me had said, and I remembered nothing. Nothing but those Beatles songs . . . and the vaguest, most ephemeral memory of a voice floating somewhere nearby as at last I stretched out and shut my eyes, “Sleep well, Aurelia. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  Right, I thought, planting my feet on the floor. Like hell we will.

  Ignoring the throbbing in my head, I pulled the suitcase onto the bed and unzipped it. There were my clothes, pretty much as I had left them. But my passport, my plane ticket for the return home, even the letters to Lisa and my folks that I’d begun on the train between Paris and Vienna, all were gone from the side pocket where I had kept them. I slapped my jeans pocket—my wallet was missing as well.

  I yanked the zipper shut, jammed my hair clip back over my coiled braid to anchor it, and stalked to the compartment door.

  I reached toward the handle to slam it open, then froze. Wait a minute. Whatever’s going on, no one knows I’m awake yet. This might be an advantage.

  There was a small window beyond my shoulder, with the shade modestly pulled down. I put my eye up to the crack between the shade and the window and peered out.

  In one direction I saw an empty train passageway with windows looking out onto swiftly passing hilly scenery. Not so in the other direction. Leaning against the window staring out was the gray-bearded man in the Tyrolean suit whom I had seen at least once in Vienna after our encounter on the Glorietta at Schönbrunn.

  A kidnapping, I thought. No, an honest-to-Regency-romance abduction . But why me? I was neither rich nor important.

  One thing was for sure, I wasn’t going to hang around long enough to find out why.

  Surely someone nosed in to check on me from time to time. They would in a mystery! I retreated to the bed and stretched out under the blanket again while I tried to plan my next step.

  What do I know? An English (?) guy who calls himself Alec, possibly teamed up with a short man who wears a Tyrolean suit, abducted me, and stuck me on a train—?

  Anything else: zip.

  Not much to go on.

  The lank-lank, thunk-thunk was gradually slowing. Not a minute later my door clicked and slid slowly open. My heart started thumping but I kept my breathing even and my eyes shut. Five or ten seconds that seemed like half an hour passed and then the door quietly slid shut again. Click.

  I sprang up. Grabbed my suitcase. This was an old train car, with windows that opened. I forced my shaking fingers to ease the window down.

  A quick glance over my shoulder showed the curtain trembling in the new current of air that rushed into the compartment. I stuck my head out again, the air buffeting my face. If I was going to jump, I had to do it before they pulled into whatever station was coming up.

  I leaned farther. Hilly pastureland and no people or houses in sight.

  The train is slowing. Has to be now.

  I levered my suitcase out, swung it, and dropped it as gently as I could, shoved a leg out, the other, then—carefully—my head, clinging to the upper part of the window with my fingers.

  Count to three. Hold my breath, tighten my guts. I braced my feet against the side of the train, and—one, two, three!—jumped.

  And hit with a thud that knocked my breath out. I tumbled like a rag doll, terrifyingly aware of the roaring clash of train wheels nearby. When I stopped rolling I lay gasping, grateful to be alive, until the last few cars passed. Then raised my head. My vision swam as the train thundered on down the track. No alarms sounded; no sudden braking sent up sparks.

  I wavered to my feet. One shoulder throbbed like a buffalo had stomped it, and a stone or something had gouged my rump during my roll down the embankment. I was amazed that I’d made it.

  I began a lead-footed lope back along the tracks to find my suitcase. It seemed a mile away, though it was probably only five hundred yards, if that, and it was surprisingly intact, aside from one of the wheels being bent.

  As I straightened up I caught sight of a patient group of cattle on a hillock on the other side of the tracks. The creatures stood motionless, watching me. When you only see cows on TV, you don’t notice that they are large. Cow attacks are not a big part of TV action sequences, but I was too shaky to take any chances. Doing a one-eighty, I struck out in the opposite direction. The cockeyed suitcase wheels promptly tried to roll in different directions, so I picked the thing up by its handle.

  I was in a river valley of some kind. Squinting upward, I spotted the sun glaring through a whitish haze low over the horizon.

  Morning. East, that way. Wait. What if it’s sunset? I could have slept through an entire day without knowing it.

  But there was a look of morning to the dew glistening on the weeds and grasses around me, and to the butterflies and bees moving about their day’s business.

  The agenda: one, finding some sort of civilization and getting the authorities to put me in touch with a U.S. Embassy; two, getting something to eat.

  Seemed easy enough.

  Then the grind of an engine and the crunch of gravel startled me. A vehicle! Should I—no, wait. I’d been kidnapped. It seemed unlikely that the Evil Alec and his bearded minion could be pursuing me—but then I would’ve thought it unlikely to go out for a drink and wake up on a train to God knows where.

  I scrambled off the road and flung myself and my suitcase behind a shrub. Half a minute later an ancient, spectacularly rusted and decrepit pickup truck rattled by, with fifteen or twenty chattering guys squeezed bouncing and jouncing onto the back. It disappeared down the road, kicking up gravel and dust and spewing out enough diesel exhaust for five buses.

  I coughed, waving at the blue cloud, my empty stomach lurching in protest. Those guys were probably workers on their way to the daily job—expected if it was morning. But I’d woken up on a train, when I should be buying my ticket to London.

  “That does it. Never so much as mention Ariosto in public again,” I announced to the air. Somehow talking out loud to myself was comforting.

  A town lay on the other side of the river valley—I made out a church spire and the golden-walled buildings so common in this region—but (being a Los Angeles native) I was certain I’d find what I wanted long before I had to
walk that far.

  I picked up my case and started hiking through the adjacent field so I wouldn’t have to worry about the road.

  When I first left for Europe, I’d been proud of my careful packing. Thus far, my suitcase had been easy to roll from station to hotel, hotel to station.

  As I trudged across the rough field, the suitcase’s weight seemed to increase by increments of ten pounds. Shifting it from hand to hand, I passed vista after vista of pretty scenery—rocks, fields, short tree-shaded cliffs, small flocks of sheep—and no houses or people.

  The sun shone squarely on top of my head when I stumbled over a rock and sprawled heavily in the tall grass.

  I groaned, rolling over and shading my eyes against the noon sun. Could have been an LA sky: bright blue except for blotchy clouds moving in grand unison—

  Patchy clouds. At home, those usually preceded rain.

  “Oh, great.” I added some speculation about the genealogy and probable postmortem fates of blue-eyed Alec and his Tyrolean friend.

  That felt good, but didn’t do squat for fixing my situation. So I sat up. My head thrummed sharply, no longer from drugs and wine but from thirst and hunger. I scratched irritably at my legs and picked the worst of the stickers from the hems of my jeans. Then I got to my feet again, wincing as I tried to swallow. My tongue felt like a gym sock that had successfully evaded the laundry for the entire championship season.

  I need water. And soon.

  Where?

  A line of trees grew along the edge of the hill below me. Hadn’t I read in some book about finding streams near trees?

  I opened my hands. On each palm a double line of new and angry blisters stung painfully. My suitcase felt like someone had inserted a dozen anvils into it.

  The air was too warm and humid for me to take the clothes out and carry them, or wear them, so the last alternative was to hide the suitcase and come back for it. The sun was directly overhead so I was unsure of my direction, but to my right I noticed a cliff with an odd granite pattern topped by two distinctive scrub pines.

  I fixed the landmark in my mind, pushed my suitcase under a bush with yellow flowers, oriented myself in relation to that cliff, and started off downslope at a much faster pace.

  The trees grew alongside a stream trickling over mossy rocks. Stumbling toward it, I thought typhoid, dysentery, and my lips stayed resolutely closed as I dropped to my knees, put my hands down in the cold rush, and splashed my hot face, thinking with intense regret of that second Evian bottle left on the shelf back in the train compartment.

  Two small birds chattered shrilly in protest, shot out of a low shrub, and zipped into the sky.

  My gaze dropped back to the water longingly, my modern hygienic worries wavering until I noticed things floating along the top of the water. Nothing overtly nasty. Grass, leaves, pieces of bark, bits of sheep wool. With my luck, those sheep I’d seen back upstream used this water for a bathtub and a toilet as well as a drinking fountain. Ew.

  Pick a direction, I thought, as my skull pounded rhythmically. Any direction. All roads lead to hell.

  On the other side of the stream stretched a wide field, a circle of low farm buildings in the center. The fields surrounding the buildings had been plowed under and neat rows of crops grew. My giddiness grew, light shimmering over the bobbing backs of workers in the field.

  They could have been medieval, or workers from the Thirty Years’ War, ears wary for the distant thunder of armies riding heedless across their fields. No matter whose side they were on, armies were always bad news for the farmers as well as their livestock and crops.

  As I neared, the light coruscated like heat waves. Was that a tractor? No, a hay stack.

  My isolation broke when the workers straightened up to stare. The men wore homemade work clothes; the women long, dull-colored dresses, their hair hidden under kerchiefs. I felt as if I’d fallen into a time machine and back a century.

  I licked my dry lips before attempting a polite smile. A couple of younger men nudged each other and exchanged comments in a guttural tongue, then grinned at me. Two of the women, one young and one old, stared back at me, radiating stony disapproval.

  I consciously straightened my backbone as I met the eyes of the oldest woman. Overhead, a flock of large brown birds squawked by. The woman’s brown, creased face did not change. I pointed to my mouth and croaked, “Water? Wasser? Eau?”

  She flicked her eyes to the younger woman; as if they communicated by telepathy, the younger one nodded shortly to me and beckoned for me to follow.

  “Do you speak German?” I asked in that tongue as we started across the fields.

  Her tightly compressed lips didn’t move as she gave her head a shake. She seemed to be about my age. Her hair was bound under a kerchief, and she wore an old, coarse apron over her dark blouse and skirt. A crucifix lay on her breast, swinging with her long strides.

  She did not look at me until we neared the low, ramshackle buildings. We walked into an unfenced barnyard, and there was a pump with its own roof.

  On a shelf above the water pump sat a wooden bucket with a ladle in it. She lifted the bucket down. It was filled with water. She dipped the ladle and held it out to me.

  It was warm and tasted slightly flat, with a seasoning of wood. I sucked it up greedily. When I handed the ladle back her face had changed, and she said something in a language I did not know. When I shrugged, she dipped the ladle and helped herself to a slug.

  “Thanks,” I said, and repeated it in German.

  “You are real,” she said in a Germanic-sounding dialect. But as she said it, a shaft of sun lanced down, and for an eye blink I could see right through her.

  Thoroughly unsettled, I started on my way again; her footsteps faded as she strode back toward the fields.

  Another hour or two along, the countryside began to roughen. Steeper inclines and larger rocks slowed me down, but there were more trees to shadow me intermittently from the white glare of the midday sun.

  After toiling with increasing labor and decreasing speed, when I finally blundered onto a road, I stayed on it. The sky was hidden by clouds. I had long since lost sight of my suitcase-cliff, but I did try to memorize all the subsequent twists and turns of the road. I was too tired to care about cars, and I had had it with foraging through fields.

  The road wound upward at an ever steeper incline until it narrowed as it entered a village perched on the side of a forested slope. Scenic as all get-out, but my feet were not appreciating the wild, Brontëian heights. The buildings were old, low, made of stone, with small windows and thick walls covered with a plaster painted that golden color so common in the south. They had to be centuries old—most were crumbling and mossy. The single street was cobbled only from about five hundred yards before the village started until the same distance past the last house.

  The white glare had diminished somewhat, but the humidity remained. I squinted against the headache that blurred my vision. No signs evident, either on the street or on the houses. No people, either. My ankles, still sore from the impact of jumping off the train, jarred with every uneven step on those cobblestones. But I scarcely noticed. I was too creeped out by the sensation of being watched from behind those dark, blank windows.

  In the last, low, old building, a swarm of flies circled lazily in an open door. I took a few steps toward it. Nothing was visible from outside. The thick air smelled of unrefrigerated meat. From within came sounds—the scratch of a wooden chair on a flagstone floor, the clank of something metallic being set on wood.

  Someone was in there, looking out at me. And not in welcome, or wouldn’t they call something to me? Instinctive fear—a woman alone, no ID, no help in sight—prompted me to back away and continue on. Two more small houses, a sharp right turn—and I was out of the village. I paused for a fast scan: no street lights or electrical wires.

  All right. Maybe I’d be better off finding a place that had upgraded their communications tech to at least the level of 1
900.

  I trekked about a mile along the road, which had narrowed to a single lane. A steep, tree-shadowed cliff rose sharply to my left, an equally sharp hillside slanted below toward an unseen stream tumbling away. Gradually I became aware of the rustle of leaves rising above the hissing roar of the unseen stream below. The high tree branches overhead tossed in a rising wind that I did not feel around me. The branches cast no shadow, and in the distance thunder muttered, dying away to a low rumble.

  A bluish flicker gave me a nanosecond of warning before the skies opened on my head with a world-shaking thunderclap. I made an abrupt about-face and started marching back, opening my mouth to get at least some good out of the drenching downpour.

  Maybe I was better off risking the village. Except . . . how far would I get with no money? Sorely regretting the magic talisman of cash, I won’t go so far as to say I felt naked, but you get the idea.

  Well, I was rounding the sharp corner on the outskirts of the village when the raindrops ahead lit up in sparkling beams about four feet from the ground: car lights.

  My discomforts had driven The Enemy out of my mind for the greater part of the day, and even now I couldn’t believe they would try to chase after me, much less be able to find me. Last night seemed a totally separate nightmare from this. Nevertheless I sprang between the last pair of cottages, pressing close to the wall as I sidled along its rough contour (I can still feel that crumbling plaster under my palms) until I reached the front corner. I peered around as the car stopped outside the butcher shop.

  The driver flung open the door, got out, slammed the door shut, and strode around the front of the car toward the building. As he passed briefly in front of the car lights his profile was illuminated.

  It was Alec.

  He looked even more tired, and decidedly more disheveled, than he had the night before.

  I gloated—Ha! Ha!—and then oops! I was standing next to a sheer wall, as exposed as a bug on glass. I scuttled to the back of the cottage and stood at the edge of a vegetable garden, peering back. Presently came the thunk! of a car door shutting. The engine roared to life, then the accelerating car shot down the lane, sending mud flying in all directions. Good riddance.