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impertinences) wrote2020-10-31 03:12 pm
impertinences) wrote2020-10-31 03:12 pm
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I've had this sitting in my Drive for a few months now. I felt all inspired during the late summer, and then work sucked away my creativity. I did some editing and tried to wrap it up, but I'd completely forgotten where I intended to take this! Don't you just hate it when that happens? Seriously. Like how dare you, brain! Not being able to remember plans for months ago! C'mon!
I know it was supposed to delve more into Lene and Roman being AU good guys helping refugees and build to their relationship but ... nope. That's mentioned, but I felt like I needed another 8 pages to really explore everything that I was setting up. Lene doesn't even really clearly become the shepherd, which was the position she was supposed to take from Anders. Oh well!
PART ONE -
“You have played,
(I think)
And broke the toys you were fondest of,
And are a little tired now;
Tired of things that break, and -
Just tired.
So am I.”
e e cummings
All through the night, they hear the wheels of the train; the sound soothes them and makes them forget in some small, dazed way the enormity of what has happened. The Somme is falling further and further behind them. It is a river near a city that slips, now, into darkness, that’s filled with soot and ashes, where glass is never swept up, and fires burn in houses, and people disappear without a trace, and the shoes of those who struggled litter the streets.
On the train, Sunniva falls asleep using Palmer’s military jacket as a blanket while leaning against Roman’s arm. Her good leg, the whole one, is stretched out, her boot next to his boot. The other is bent at where her knee should be, but the prosthetic is doing the bending now, the buckles of leather and metal digging into her swollen and bruised skin. She’s tucked it as close as she can to the bench in their compartment like she can hide it. Even the jacket is bunched more on her left side, crumpled at the hip. She’s dreaming of her mother’s kitchen and the barley soup that so often boiled on the stove, but somewhere around midnight the dream shifts, and all she can see on the backs of her eyelids are lost limbs on muddy riverbanks. Riverbanks the color of bloodrust. Riverbanks that stink of gunmetal.
Roman keeps his head leaning against the cold glass window, even when she begins to twitch beside him. He can feel her breathing, slow and deep. Her hair still smells a little of antiseptic and the lemon soap most of the nurses had favored in the trenches, but he barely notices. He’s thinking about his rifle and his bullets and the terrible strain of following orders. The war had shown him who he was capable of becoming once he let himself go, and Roman’s soul feels dark with that knowledge. He is made of a cavernous landscape, of deep hollows, and someone once—some beautiful, doomed girl with shredded stockings and skeletal wrists—had sensed those fathomless depths inside of him because she’d had them within herself.
With his forehead pressed against the window, he tries to remember what her face looked like, but all he can think of is the dry, papery feel of her lips.
Palmer lights his third cigarette of the last half hour. He’s in the smoking compartment although most of the men on the train seem to smoke where they please. Their ashes follow behind them like the trails of ghosts. Everything is grey and sodden and worn. The train might be taking them away from the battlefields, but the landscape is all the same to him.
For once, he is not grinning.
For once, he does not join a game of cards when offered. He makes a joke about having already gambled everything but his life, and then he says something about still having friends in Berlin but that feels like a line more suited for the German Roman and nobody laughs. Palmer doesn’t mind that they don’t laugh. He keeps smoking, fingering the dog tags on the table in front of him, rubbing the metal necklace between his thumb and forefinger.
He should be thinking about Calder, the medic, who’s been shipped off to fight in England or Chason, the second class gunner he’d met on the Western front of France before the Battle of Loos. Instead, he’s thinking of Sunniva, of her lost leg, and how he’d left her with Roman in the compartment two corridors down. She’s been sullen since they received their orders to return home, but it’s not leaving the war that bothers her. She’s mourning the part of her that she’s lost, the physical more so than the internal. She has yet to show him her leg. She seems to have turned inward; she keeps to herself, even when the three of them are together, which they often are—her, him, and Roman.
Once, it had been only him and her. Once.
Roman doesn’t want Sunniva. Palmer knows this, knows how many nights Roman spent with his dying Parisian girl, knows the roads his hungry nihilism takes him down, but he knows too that just because Roman doesn’t want Sunniva doesn’t mean he never had her.
Palmer flicks the dog tags again. He drags on his cigarette and blows the smoke up above his head.
Sunniva doesn’t remember screaming, but she wakes to the sound of it anyway. Roman has her by the shoulder, steadying her, before she pulls away from him and shakes the dream from her weary head. It takes her a moment to remember where they are, to feel the train and its rumbling beneath her feet. The compartment seems the size of a coffin, their bodies and belongings whittled down to nothing more than bare necessity, yet there’s hardly room to breathe. Roman lets go of her shoulder and reaches for the paper bag on the table.
“I’m a butcher’s son from Munich, did you know that?” Roman asks. He takes a bottle of bourbon from the paper bag and pours a glass with his constantly steady hands. His eyes are red and his grin is mean.
Sunniva thinks of all the tents stretched throughout Europe they’ve sat inside. This is not so different from then. She clears her voice, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, collecting herself. She isn’t surprised that he doesn’t ask about the nightmare, the screaming. “No,” she says after a moment, “I don’t think so.”
“A butcher’s son who joined the military and gunned down children in Poland, then gunned down Germans in France.”
“Roman,” she says, her face barren now.
“If we lose the war, I guess that makes me a traitor, yes? Not a hero.” He grunts humorlessly and takes a drink. “I hope we win for my sake.”
“You saved many people. You intercepted communications. You broke codes.”
“That is very kind of you, but I saved myself.”
“We’ve all done that,” Sunniva says. She pulls the jacket off of her, fingers one dirty sleeve softly before folding it beside her. “Where’s Palmer?”
“Smoking. Still.”
“You know he knows, right?”
“He said something to you?”
“No, of course not, but I can tell. How he looks at you. At me.”
“He has always looked at you that way, liebchen.”
She gives a soft smile of acknowledgement. “Do you regret it?”
“Do you want me to regret it?” He has the habit of answering questions with questions; it was exhausting in Berlin, and it exhausts her still.
She breathes out a sigh and settles back into the hard bench corner. “I don’t know what I want,” she says, closing her eyes again.
“Yes, you do,” Roman tells her, finishing his bourbon, “but you are like me. We know, and we resist anyway.”
The train stops at a station. Before then, Palmer had returned and helped himself to a glass of Roman’s bourbon. He’d taken a seat by the German, propped his feet up on the table between the benches, and complained about being unable to sleep.
“Sleep is futile,” Roman had said, shouldering his bag before tossing Palmer his coat. “Nobody can bear the dreams.”
It’s Palmer that waits for Sunniva as she tightens a scarf around her throat and navigates the thin corridors. Roman goes ahead of them until they exit, and then they’re only part of a larger crowd, a weary mass identity of military fatigues and heartbreak.
“I’ll go find us a car,” Palmer says with his trademark determination. Sunniva and Roman watch him shoulder his way through a group of soldiers, half of them missing some extremity while others have their heads wrapped in bloody bandages or gauze sticking to burned skin.
Roman adjusts his bag and looks out, past the station, where the early morning landscape is still drenched in darkness. All he has with him he can carry in that one bag - a second uniform, half a supply of rations, two worn books (Nietzche and Rilke), a pair of women’s hosiery.
“I’m going back north,” he says without preamble just as Palmer slips from sight. “They are still fighting there.”
Sunniva cuts her eyes at him. She stands stiffly to his right, still not fully accustomed to the prosthetic, and fights the desire to cross her arms over her chest like a disapproving mother. After a stern silence, her eyes soften, and she glances back to where Palmer had been a moment earlier. “You can’t leave. I can’t travel with him alone.”
Roman grins. “It will be better without me. You will see.”
“Liar.”
“Go easy on him. And yourself.” He looks like, for a moment, he might try to press a kiss to her temple or smooth her hair back away from her face. Instead, he holds her gaze a second too long, lingering in the cold air, before he begins to walk away.
“Strauss!” she calls when he’s nearly lost in the rumble of the train and shuffling men.
He pauses, half-turns, a tall man with ashy, coffee-brown hair and a thatch of beard across his angled jaw, one eyebrow cocked beneath the station gaslights. She can barely make him out.
“Come find us after,” Sunniva shouts, arching up on her good foot, a hand cupping around one side of her mouth to help guide her words through the air.
She doesn’t know if he’s heard her before his back turns and he’s swallowed by the crowd.
Roman spends months walking. There’s still fighting in the north of France, so he takes his time; he’s cautious, staying off the main roads, lurking in the forests and hills by the day to travel mostly by night. The Germans may still occupy this part of the country, but the further north he goes, the less successful their occupation is. They’re already retreating, moving back to areas more easily protected. He sees a small group of men once, huddled together around a fire, sharing a roasted rabbit. He’s very aware of his rifle then and how he holds the upper ground, how easily it would be to slide into the thicket and aim. He lets them be instead; he doesn’t think he’s part of the war anymore, not in any official capacity. His hands are bloody enough.
The more he walks, the more he sheds his soldier’s persona. His hair grows long, the ends scraping against the tops of his shoulders, and his beard thickens, crawling to cover the lower half of his face. He keeps his winter coat, his rifle, and a bowie knife tucked into his boot. The books he’d brought with him are wrapped in a French woman’s ripped stockings and tucked into a canvas sack along with a single bittersweet chocolate bar, a tin of sardines, and a rapidly diminishing pack of cigarettes.
Eventually, he finds himself near the France and Switzerland border, where the mountains are the most beautiful and the people provincial. Here, there’s a light dusting of snow on the ground and a village of wary but friendly people. His French is accented but passable; they don’t ask questions, and when the local butcher offers him a job as an assistant, he takes it. There’s something familiar about the blood and the killing, the iron taste that gets stuck in his throat after, and at least animals are easier than men.
By his fourth week, he’s noticed how the butcher passes envelopes to a bicyclist twice a month on the main road heading northwest. He notices how certain families seem to keep to themselves, their storage supplies locked during odd hours, their curtains drawn most of the day. Sometimes, he sees certain children once or twice, buying apples at the market or playing hopscotch by the church, and never again. The village is full of transients, he realizes, but he does nothing until the Germans come.
There is a scattering sound of bullets in the distance and screams. Roman knows there are refugees in the forest, trying to live off the land, trying to salvage what they can while they wait for this war to end. He knows too how persistent the German army is, how one-minded.
“They will be here within an hour,” Roman tells the butcher, wiping his bloody hands with a cloth. They’re in the middle of quartering a deer, but the butcher doesn’t bother to clean his hands before taking out an envelope from inside a canister of soup bones.
“They come every few months. Raiding. This can’t be found.” The man holds out the envelope, but Roman doesn’t take it. He stares instead, frowning. “My old assistant helped. You will too now.”
“Helped?”
“Take these northwest. Up by the border, the Moray Farm, near the base of the mountain chain. Last real stop before nature takes over entirely. Ask for Knight when you get there. I already sent word that he should expect a new assistant weeks ago.”
“Why should I?” Roman asks.
The butcher weighs him with his eyes before pushing the envelope against Roman’s chest. “We let you stay. This is the price you owe.” His tone is matter-of-fact.
Reluctantly, Roman tucks the envelope inside the back of his pants, between his waistline and skin where the fall of his shirt hides the shape. He reaches for his coat then tightens the lacing on his boots. In the distance, there’s another shock of gunfire. “How will they know me?”
“They’re used to looking out for Germans.”
PART TWO -
“... this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart.”
e. e. cummings
At the Moray Farm, on the floor beside a roaring fire in her own simple cottage, Lene is trying to apply a poultice to Rebecca’s hot wrists, but the girl is trembling so much that the mixture will not stay in place. Lene can’t stop saying Rebecca’s name; she’s known the girl her entire life, since Rebecca was a baby, but now at thirteen, her hair is sweat-drenched and her eyes roll behind her eyelids as she kicks, writhes, buckles, and strains. Rebecca’s body is a prison of torture. Lene has to hold her by the shoulders finally. She lets out a hoarse whistling sound and pulls against Lene’s steady hands.
Anyone, Lene thinks, who describes dying as peaceful must never have witnessed it. Death is violent; death is a struggle. The body clings to life and will not easily let go, will not surrender its grip without a fight.
Anders is kneeling at the end of the pallet, holding on to one of Rebecca’s ankles, while outside the mother wails and presses fists into her own eyes. He watches his sister as she fumbles with another paste, another bandage, and his sad eyes say stop, leave her be, let her alone now. It’s too late for all that.
For her part, Rebecca is aware, vaguely, of how she convulses, of Lene’s voice, of Anders’ hands, but her mind is elsewhere. Some small part of her is panicking desperately, but she’s so tired, she wants only to close her eyes and be still.
Lene is whispering, Please keep fighting, please don’t leave, but all at once Rebecca stops shaking and a great soundlessness falls over the room. Her body is suddenly motionless, her gaze focused on something far above her. She takes a breath, draws it in, and lets it out. Then there is nothing more.
Lene sits back on her ankles and presses her fingers against her eyelids. She’s aware, suddenly, of the terrible stink within the room, of the smoke from the fire, of the mother’s unending wailing.
“How does this happen?” she asks, struggling to her feet while her brother reaches across to close Rebecca’s eyes.
“The fever. The infection spread. It happens.”
“She was just a child. Last week she was helping me break the new mare.”
Anders says nothing but draws a clean linen up to Rebecca’s shoulders. Her clothes are sick-stained and her skin dirty; he doesn’t want her mother to see this when he must bring her into the room, which needs to happen soon.
“You couldn’t have done anything,” he says after a moment, not unkindly.
“I’m tired of not doing anything though. The whole world is dying, and what am I doing? I have chickens and goats and an old cow, and it’s not enough. I want to accomplish something.” She wipes her hands on the front of her body, her eyes red and tearing but her face set. “It’s time. Let me help you.”
“No,” Anders says, coming to his own feet.
“Yes.”
Outside, Rebecca’s mother lets out another sob. Anders steels himself.
“We’ll talk about it later. For now …” He gestures to the girl’s body, and Lene dries her eyes before heading with him to the door.
For the last year, Anders has been responsible for leading a small group of rebels against the German army. They do what they can with calculated, planned attacks as the encroaching soldiers raid neighboring farms and villages; they build bombs from stolen supplies to ambush the roads, they foster refugees, they bring food to the others hiding in the forests. Six months ago, Anders aligned with the butcher in La Crue who would provide documents in need of forging - passports and travel aids and birth certificates - and then he would provide the children, most of them hardly older than ten, who needed those documents and safe passage through the mountains into the neutral, safe territory beyond.
It was and is exhausting work. His family has lived at Moray for centuries, so he knows the old paths better than most, but it’s at least two weeks of traveling by foot through snow and crags while trying to avoid being seen and shepherding war-weary children. He can only guide two during one trip, and he’s often away from the farm for weeks on end now as the resistance chases the slowly retreating Germans.
This is what he’s discussing with his sister after Rebecca’s death, after her mother has taken the body, and the sick pallet has been removed from in front of Lene’s hearth.
It’s what they’re discussing when the German arrives.
She does not like him, not immediately.
He says his name is Strauss, but nobody uses it—he prefers his surname. He’s tall and edgy and the shadows seem to cling to him no matter the time of day. His eyes are too steady for all the trauma he has supposedly witnessed, and she doesn’t know if this makes him strong or calloused or if there’s even a point in drawing such a distinction anymore. He comes with the documents from the butcher and a promise that he will help, that he can shepherd also, but the way he says it makes him seem unconcerned regardless of the outcome.
When Anders suggests that the newcomer stay the week in her cottage, Lene balks. She thinks he must be joking despite not having seen evidence of her brother’s sense of humor since before the war began.
Anders shrugs, running his hands over the backs of their main dairy cow in the field behind the turnip and cabbage garden. “Who better to keep an eye on him? To make sure he’s trustworthy? You have a good poker face and a better way of reading people.”
“Have Knight acclimate him. Knight’s the best.”
Her brother shakes his head, his mind already made up. “Let me know how he does.”
The second night he stays with her, stretched like a long, thin blade on top of a cot near the fire, she awakes to the sound of his nightmares.
Lene steps out from her bedroom, barefoot and cold, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders to ward off the anxiety she feels brimming inside of her. It makes her feel silly, really, because she knows that he’s asleep, and she knows that he’s dreaming, but the sounds he makes sound like sheep being slaughtered. He looks too much like a predator to create such bleating.
She can’t decide if she should wake him or not, so she hesitates at the threshold of the room. Her fingers cling to the blanket, her hands clutching it close to her chest. In the dim, fading firelight from the hearth, Roman looks sweat-drenched and troubled, his brow knotted in his sleep, his body twisting slightly from side to side. He hasn’t removed his boots, and his left food thuds against the side of the cot when it slips as he turns. The movement is enough to wake him, and Lene startles when she realizes that his eyes are open, the natural hazel a deeper brown at this hour but keen despite the fog of sleep he must be shaking away.
“You have bad dreams,” she says.
He clears the gravel from his throat but doesn’t sit up. “You do not?”
She doesn’t answer him before padding back to her room.
Two days turn into three, then three become four, and then the week has ended. She is not surprised when he stays another and another until an entire month has slipped by. She reports back to Anders when her brother returns from his mission, and she finds that she’s disappointed by her own lack of suspicion now that she’s had time to watch him. Roman is steady, except for when he’s dreaming, and even then he seems to contain whatever hurts are threatening to open inside of his wounded mind. He makes no apologies for the nightmares, and she doesn’t ask him to. Instead, she brews him lavender tea before he retires to his cot, and she keeps a satchel of dried anise beneath his pillow to ward off the dreams on the off chance that her grandmother had been right about such remedies.
She grows accustomed to his presence in the barn and out in the field. He keeps his hands busy, digging in rich dirt or shoveling back snow. He learns the land quicker than anyone else she’s ever known, and she doesn’t mind when he begins to assist with the shepherding. He still rendezvouses with the butcher for the documents in need of forging, but he makes these trips within a day’s time, leaving at sunrise and returning before nightfall.
Between the two of them grows an easy camaraderie.
When he grabs her hand one night as she passes him a steaming mug of tea, Lene realizes that she’s been waiting for this moment. His hands are calloused and long, and they’re holding her fingers above hers, the mug stalled between them because he has reached for her rather than the curved handle.
She breathes out slowly and looks at him. His eyes are more green tonight than brown, like moss or pine.
“I’m not like you,” she says, their fingers still touching. “My blood is not your blood.”
“I don’t care.”
Lene fights a smile. “One day you might have to.”
Roman shrugs. “One day we might be dead.”
He moves his hand slowly, his fingers drifting over hers, to grasp the mug of tea. He places it on the table, but before she can turn away he takes hold of her wrist and pulls her closer.
“No girl somewhere?” she asks, her free hand coming to rest tentatively against his right arm. She’s seen his canvas bag, the books he sometimes unwraps late at night to read by the fire.
He shakes his head almost imperceptibly. “If I did, I’d still be here.”
“I doubt that,” she says, but she lets him kiss her anyway.
I know it was supposed to delve more into Lene and Roman being AU good guys helping refugees and build to their relationship but ... nope. That's mentioned, but I felt like I needed another 8 pages to really explore everything that I was setting up. Lene doesn't even really clearly become the shepherd, which was the position she was supposed to take from Anders. Oh well!
PART ONE -
“You have played,
(I think)
And broke the toys you were fondest of,
And are a little tired now;
Tired of things that break, and -
Just tired.
So am I.”
e e cummings
All through the night, they hear the wheels of the train; the sound soothes them and makes them forget in some small, dazed way the enormity of what has happened. The Somme is falling further and further behind them. It is a river near a city that slips, now, into darkness, that’s filled with soot and ashes, where glass is never swept up, and fires burn in houses, and people disappear without a trace, and the shoes of those who struggled litter the streets.
On the train, Sunniva falls asleep using Palmer’s military jacket as a blanket while leaning against Roman’s arm. Her good leg, the whole one, is stretched out, her boot next to his boot. The other is bent at where her knee should be, but the prosthetic is doing the bending now, the buckles of leather and metal digging into her swollen and bruised skin. She’s tucked it as close as she can to the bench in their compartment like she can hide it. Even the jacket is bunched more on her left side, crumpled at the hip. She’s dreaming of her mother’s kitchen and the barley soup that so often boiled on the stove, but somewhere around midnight the dream shifts, and all she can see on the backs of her eyelids are lost limbs on muddy riverbanks. Riverbanks the color of bloodrust. Riverbanks that stink of gunmetal.
Roman keeps his head leaning against the cold glass window, even when she begins to twitch beside him. He can feel her breathing, slow and deep. Her hair still smells a little of antiseptic and the lemon soap most of the nurses had favored in the trenches, but he barely notices. He’s thinking about his rifle and his bullets and the terrible strain of following orders. The war had shown him who he was capable of becoming once he let himself go, and Roman’s soul feels dark with that knowledge. He is made of a cavernous landscape, of deep hollows, and someone once—some beautiful, doomed girl with shredded stockings and skeletal wrists—had sensed those fathomless depths inside of him because she’d had them within herself.
With his forehead pressed against the window, he tries to remember what her face looked like, but all he can think of is the dry, papery feel of her lips.
Palmer lights his third cigarette of the last half hour. He’s in the smoking compartment although most of the men on the train seem to smoke where they please. Their ashes follow behind them like the trails of ghosts. Everything is grey and sodden and worn. The train might be taking them away from the battlefields, but the landscape is all the same to him.
For once, he is not grinning.
For once, he does not join a game of cards when offered. He makes a joke about having already gambled everything but his life, and then he says something about still having friends in Berlin but that feels like a line more suited for the German Roman and nobody laughs. Palmer doesn’t mind that they don’t laugh. He keeps smoking, fingering the dog tags on the table in front of him, rubbing the metal necklace between his thumb and forefinger.
He should be thinking about Calder, the medic, who’s been shipped off to fight in England or Chason, the second class gunner he’d met on the Western front of France before the Battle of Loos. Instead, he’s thinking of Sunniva, of her lost leg, and how he’d left her with Roman in the compartment two corridors down. She’s been sullen since they received their orders to return home, but it’s not leaving the war that bothers her. She’s mourning the part of her that she’s lost, the physical more so than the internal. She has yet to show him her leg. She seems to have turned inward; she keeps to herself, even when the three of them are together, which they often are—her, him, and Roman.
Once, it had been only him and her. Once.
Roman doesn’t want Sunniva. Palmer knows this, knows how many nights Roman spent with his dying Parisian girl, knows the roads his hungry nihilism takes him down, but he knows too that just because Roman doesn’t want Sunniva doesn’t mean he never had her.
Palmer flicks the dog tags again. He drags on his cigarette and blows the smoke up above his head.
Sunniva doesn’t remember screaming, but she wakes to the sound of it anyway. Roman has her by the shoulder, steadying her, before she pulls away from him and shakes the dream from her weary head. It takes her a moment to remember where they are, to feel the train and its rumbling beneath her feet. The compartment seems the size of a coffin, their bodies and belongings whittled down to nothing more than bare necessity, yet there’s hardly room to breathe. Roman lets go of her shoulder and reaches for the paper bag on the table.
“I’m a butcher’s son from Munich, did you know that?” Roman asks. He takes a bottle of bourbon from the paper bag and pours a glass with his constantly steady hands. His eyes are red and his grin is mean.
Sunniva thinks of all the tents stretched throughout Europe they’ve sat inside. This is not so different from then. She clears her voice, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, collecting herself. She isn’t surprised that he doesn’t ask about the nightmare, the screaming. “No,” she says after a moment, “I don’t think so.”
“A butcher’s son who joined the military and gunned down children in Poland, then gunned down Germans in France.”
“Roman,” she says, her face barren now.
“If we lose the war, I guess that makes me a traitor, yes? Not a hero.” He grunts humorlessly and takes a drink. “I hope we win for my sake.”
“You saved many people. You intercepted communications. You broke codes.”
“That is very kind of you, but I saved myself.”
“We’ve all done that,” Sunniva says. She pulls the jacket off of her, fingers one dirty sleeve softly before folding it beside her. “Where’s Palmer?”
“Smoking. Still.”
“You know he knows, right?”
“He said something to you?”
“No, of course not, but I can tell. How he looks at you. At me.”
“He has always looked at you that way, liebchen.”
She gives a soft smile of acknowledgement. “Do you regret it?”
“Do you want me to regret it?” He has the habit of answering questions with questions; it was exhausting in Berlin, and it exhausts her still.
She breathes out a sigh and settles back into the hard bench corner. “I don’t know what I want,” she says, closing her eyes again.
“Yes, you do,” Roman tells her, finishing his bourbon, “but you are like me. We know, and we resist anyway.”
The train stops at a station. Before then, Palmer had returned and helped himself to a glass of Roman’s bourbon. He’d taken a seat by the German, propped his feet up on the table between the benches, and complained about being unable to sleep.
“Sleep is futile,” Roman had said, shouldering his bag before tossing Palmer his coat. “Nobody can bear the dreams.”
It’s Palmer that waits for Sunniva as she tightens a scarf around her throat and navigates the thin corridors. Roman goes ahead of them until they exit, and then they’re only part of a larger crowd, a weary mass identity of military fatigues and heartbreak.
“I’ll go find us a car,” Palmer says with his trademark determination. Sunniva and Roman watch him shoulder his way through a group of soldiers, half of them missing some extremity while others have their heads wrapped in bloody bandages or gauze sticking to burned skin.
Roman adjusts his bag and looks out, past the station, where the early morning landscape is still drenched in darkness. All he has with him he can carry in that one bag - a second uniform, half a supply of rations, two worn books (Nietzche and Rilke), a pair of women’s hosiery.
“I’m going back north,” he says without preamble just as Palmer slips from sight. “They are still fighting there.”
Sunniva cuts her eyes at him. She stands stiffly to his right, still not fully accustomed to the prosthetic, and fights the desire to cross her arms over her chest like a disapproving mother. After a stern silence, her eyes soften, and she glances back to where Palmer had been a moment earlier. “You can’t leave. I can’t travel with him alone.”
Roman grins. “It will be better without me. You will see.”
“Liar.”
“Go easy on him. And yourself.” He looks like, for a moment, he might try to press a kiss to her temple or smooth her hair back away from her face. Instead, he holds her gaze a second too long, lingering in the cold air, before he begins to walk away.
“Strauss!” she calls when he’s nearly lost in the rumble of the train and shuffling men.
He pauses, half-turns, a tall man with ashy, coffee-brown hair and a thatch of beard across his angled jaw, one eyebrow cocked beneath the station gaslights. She can barely make him out.
“Come find us after,” Sunniva shouts, arching up on her good foot, a hand cupping around one side of her mouth to help guide her words through the air.
She doesn’t know if he’s heard her before his back turns and he’s swallowed by the crowd.
Roman spends months walking. There’s still fighting in the north of France, so he takes his time; he’s cautious, staying off the main roads, lurking in the forests and hills by the day to travel mostly by night. The Germans may still occupy this part of the country, but the further north he goes, the less successful their occupation is. They’re already retreating, moving back to areas more easily protected. He sees a small group of men once, huddled together around a fire, sharing a roasted rabbit. He’s very aware of his rifle then and how he holds the upper ground, how easily it would be to slide into the thicket and aim. He lets them be instead; he doesn’t think he’s part of the war anymore, not in any official capacity. His hands are bloody enough.
The more he walks, the more he sheds his soldier’s persona. His hair grows long, the ends scraping against the tops of his shoulders, and his beard thickens, crawling to cover the lower half of his face. He keeps his winter coat, his rifle, and a bowie knife tucked into his boot. The books he’d brought with him are wrapped in a French woman’s ripped stockings and tucked into a canvas sack along with a single bittersweet chocolate bar, a tin of sardines, and a rapidly diminishing pack of cigarettes.
Eventually, he finds himself near the France and Switzerland border, where the mountains are the most beautiful and the people provincial. Here, there’s a light dusting of snow on the ground and a village of wary but friendly people. His French is accented but passable; they don’t ask questions, and when the local butcher offers him a job as an assistant, he takes it. There’s something familiar about the blood and the killing, the iron taste that gets stuck in his throat after, and at least animals are easier than men.
By his fourth week, he’s noticed how the butcher passes envelopes to a bicyclist twice a month on the main road heading northwest. He notices how certain families seem to keep to themselves, their storage supplies locked during odd hours, their curtains drawn most of the day. Sometimes, he sees certain children once or twice, buying apples at the market or playing hopscotch by the church, and never again. The village is full of transients, he realizes, but he does nothing until the Germans come.
There is a scattering sound of bullets in the distance and screams. Roman knows there are refugees in the forest, trying to live off the land, trying to salvage what they can while they wait for this war to end. He knows too how persistent the German army is, how one-minded.
“They will be here within an hour,” Roman tells the butcher, wiping his bloody hands with a cloth. They’re in the middle of quartering a deer, but the butcher doesn’t bother to clean his hands before taking out an envelope from inside a canister of soup bones.
“They come every few months. Raiding. This can’t be found.” The man holds out the envelope, but Roman doesn’t take it. He stares instead, frowning. “My old assistant helped. You will too now.”
“Helped?”
“Take these northwest. Up by the border, the Moray Farm, near the base of the mountain chain. Last real stop before nature takes over entirely. Ask for Knight when you get there. I already sent word that he should expect a new assistant weeks ago.”
“Why should I?” Roman asks.
The butcher weighs him with his eyes before pushing the envelope against Roman’s chest. “We let you stay. This is the price you owe.” His tone is matter-of-fact.
Reluctantly, Roman tucks the envelope inside the back of his pants, between his waistline and skin where the fall of his shirt hides the shape. He reaches for his coat then tightens the lacing on his boots. In the distance, there’s another shock of gunfire. “How will they know me?”
“They’re used to looking out for Germans.”
PART TWO -
“... this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart.”
e. e. cummings
At the Moray Farm, on the floor beside a roaring fire in her own simple cottage, Lene is trying to apply a poultice to Rebecca’s hot wrists, but the girl is trembling so much that the mixture will not stay in place. Lene can’t stop saying Rebecca’s name; she’s known the girl her entire life, since Rebecca was a baby, but now at thirteen, her hair is sweat-drenched and her eyes roll behind her eyelids as she kicks, writhes, buckles, and strains. Rebecca’s body is a prison of torture. Lene has to hold her by the shoulders finally. She lets out a hoarse whistling sound and pulls against Lene’s steady hands.
Anyone, Lene thinks, who describes dying as peaceful must never have witnessed it. Death is violent; death is a struggle. The body clings to life and will not easily let go, will not surrender its grip without a fight.
Anders is kneeling at the end of the pallet, holding on to one of Rebecca’s ankles, while outside the mother wails and presses fists into her own eyes. He watches his sister as she fumbles with another paste, another bandage, and his sad eyes say stop, leave her be, let her alone now. It’s too late for all that.
For her part, Rebecca is aware, vaguely, of how she convulses, of Lene’s voice, of Anders’ hands, but her mind is elsewhere. Some small part of her is panicking desperately, but she’s so tired, she wants only to close her eyes and be still.
Lene is whispering, Please keep fighting, please don’t leave, but all at once Rebecca stops shaking and a great soundlessness falls over the room. Her body is suddenly motionless, her gaze focused on something far above her. She takes a breath, draws it in, and lets it out. Then there is nothing more.
Lene sits back on her ankles and presses her fingers against her eyelids. She’s aware, suddenly, of the terrible stink within the room, of the smoke from the fire, of the mother’s unending wailing.
“How does this happen?” she asks, struggling to her feet while her brother reaches across to close Rebecca’s eyes.
“The fever. The infection spread. It happens.”
“She was just a child. Last week she was helping me break the new mare.”
Anders says nothing but draws a clean linen up to Rebecca’s shoulders. Her clothes are sick-stained and her skin dirty; he doesn’t want her mother to see this when he must bring her into the room, which needs to happen soon.
“You couldn’t have done anything,” he says after a moment, not unkindly.
“I’m tired of not doing anything though. The whole world is dying, and what am I doing? I have chickens and goats and an old cow, and it’s not enough. I want to accomplish something.” She wipes her hands on the front of her body, her eyes red and tearing but her face set. “It’s time. Let me help you.”
“No,” Anders says, coming to his own feet.
“Yes.”
Outside, Rebecca’s mother lets out another sob. Anders steels himself.
“We’ll talk about it later. For now …” He gestures to the girl’s body, and Lene dries her eyes before heading with him to the door.
For the last year, Anders has been responsible for leading a small group of rebels against the German army. They do what they can with calculated, planned attacks as the encroaching soldiers raid neighboring farms and villages; they build bombs from stolen supplies to ambush the roads, they foster refugees, they bring food to the others hiding in the forests. Six months ago, Anders aligned with the butcher in La Crue who would provide documents in need of forging - passports and travel aids and birth certificates - and then he would provide the children, most of them hardly older than ten, who needed those documents and safe passage through the mountains into the neutral, safe territory beyond.
It was and is exhausting work. His family has lived at Moray for centuries, so he knows the old paths better than most, but it’s at least two weeks of traveling by foot through snow and crags while trying to avoid being seen and shepherding war-weary children. He can only guide two during one trip, and he’s often away from the farm for weeks on end now as the resistance chases the slowly retreating Germans.
This is what he’s discussing with his sister after Rebecca’s death, after her mother has taken the body, and the sick pallet has been removed from in front of Lene’s hearth.
It’s what they’re discussing when the German arrives.
She does not like him, not immediately.
He says his name is Strauss, but nobody uses it—he prefers his surname. He’s tall and edgy and the shadows seem to cling to him no matter the time of day. His eyes are too steady for all the trauma he has supposedly witnessed, and she doesn’t know if this makes him strong or calloused or if there’s even a point in drawing such a distinction anymore. He comes with the documents from the butcher and a promise that he will help, that he can shepherd also, but the way he says it makes him seem unconcerned regardless of the outcome.
When Anders suggests that the newcomer stay the week in her cottage, Lene balks. She thinks he must be joking despite not having seen evidence of her brother’s sense of humor since before the war began.
Anders shrugs, running his hands over the backs of their main dairy cow in the field behind the turnip and cabbage garden. “Who better to keep an eye on him? To make sure he’s trustworthy? You have a good poker face and a better way of reading people.”
“Have Knight acclimate him. Knight’s the best.”
Her brother shakes his head, his mind already made up. “Let me know how he does.”
The second night he stays with her, stretched like a long, thin blade on top of a cot near the fire, she awakes to the sound of his nightmares.
Lene steps out from her bedroom, barefoot and cold, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders to ward off the anxiety she feels brimming inside of her. It makes her feel silly, really, because she knows that he’s asleep, and she knows that he’s dreaming, but the sounds he makes sound like sheep being slaughtered. He looks too much like a predator to create such bleating.
She can’t decide if she should wake him or not, so she hesitates at the threshold of the room. Her fingers cling to the blanket, her hands clutching it close to her chest. In the dim, fading firelight from the hearth, Roman looks sweat-drenched and troubled, his brow knotted in his sleep, his body twisting slightly from side to side. He hasn’t removed his boots, and his left food thuds against the side of the cot when it slips as he turns. The movement is enough to wake him, and Lene startles when she realizes that his eyes are open, the natural hazel a deeper brown at this hour but keen despite the fog of sleep he must be shaking away.
“You have bad dreams,” she says.
He clears the gravel from his throat but doesn’t sit up. “You do not?”
She doesn’t answer him before padding back to her room.
Two days turn into three, then three become four, and then the week has ended. She is not surprised when he stays another and another until an entire month has slipped by. She reports back to Anders when her brother returns from his mission, and she finds that she’s disappointed by her own lack of suspicion now that she’s had time to watch him. Roman is steady, except for when he’s dreaming, and even then he seems to contain whatever hurts are threatening to open inside of his wounded mind. He makes no apologies for the nightmares, and she doesn’t ask him to. Instead, she brews him lavender tea before he retires to his cot, and she keeps a satchel of dried anise beneath his pillow to ward off the dreams on the off chance that her grandmother had been right about such remedies.
She grows accustomed to his presence in the barn and out in the field. He keeps his hands busy, digging in rich dirt or shoveling back snow. He learns the land quicker than anyone else she’s ever known, and she doesn’t mind when he begins to assist with the shepherding. He still rendezvouses with the butcher for the documents in need of forging, but he makes these trips within a day’s time, leaving at sunrise and returning before nightfall.
Between the two of them grows an easy camaraderie.
When he grabs her hand one night as she passes him a steaming mug of tea, Lene realizes that she’s been waiting for this moment. His hands are calloused and long, and they’re holding her fingers above hers, the mug stalled between them because he has reached for her rather than the curved handle.
She breathes out slowly and looks at him. His eyes are more green tonight than brown, like moss or pine.
“I’m not like you,” she says, their fingers still touching. “My blood is not your blood.”
“I don’t care.”
Lene fights a smile. “One day you might have to.”
Roman shrugs. “One day we might be dead.”
He moves his hand slowly, his fingers drifting over hers, to grasp the mug of tea. He places it on the table, but before she can turn away he takes hold of her wrist and pulls her closer.
“No girl somewhere?” she asks, her free hand coming to rest tentatively against his right arm. She’s seen his canvas bag, the books he sometimes unwraps late at night to read by the fire.
He shakes his head almost imperceptibly. “If I did, I’d still be here.”
“I doubt that,” she says, but she lets him kiss her anyway.