Darwinia (22 page)

“This guy was an American. Said he was recruited in Jeffersonville and that his people came into the hinterland bounty-hunting the Finch expedition. Said they were paid good money.”

“Did he say who paid ’em?”

“Not before he passed out, no. And I didn’t have a second chance to ask him. I had Finch to worry about, and you and Sullivan back at the well. Figured I’d sling the son of a bitch on a sledge and drag him along by daylight.” The frontiersman paused. “But he escaped.”

“Escaped?”

“I left him alone just long enough to harness the snakes. Well, not alone, precisely — Finch was with him, for all the difference that makes. When I got back, he was gone. Ran off.”

“You said he passed out. You said his legs were shot up.”

“He did, and his legs were bloody meat, a couple of bones obviously broken. Not the kind of wound you can fake. But when I came back he was gone. Left footprints. When I say he ran, I mean he
ran
. Ran like a jackrabbit, headed off into the ruins. I suppose I could have tracked him but there was too much else to do.”

“On the surface of it,” Guilford said carefully, “that’s impossible.”

“On the surface of it it’s bullshit, but all I know is what I see.”

“You say Finch was with him?”

Tom’s frown deepened, an angle of discontent in the frost-rimed cavern of his beard. “Finch was with him, but he hasn’t had a word to say on the subject.”

Guilford turned to the geologist. Every indignity the expedition had suffered since Gillvany’s death was written on Finch’s face, plus the special humiliation of a man who has lost command — who has lost lives for which he was nominally responsible. There was nothing pompous about Finch any longer, no dignity in his fixed stare, only defeat.

“Dr. Finch?”

The geologist looked at Guilford briefly. His attention flickered like a candle.

“Dr. Finch, did you see what happened to the man Tom talked to? The injured man?”

Finch turned his head away.

“Don’t bother,” Tom said. “He’s mute as a stick.”

“Dr. Finch, it might help us if we knew what happened. Help us get home safe, I mean.”

“It was a miracle,” Preston Finch said.

His voice was a sandpapered croak. The frontiersman gave him an astonished stare.

Guilford persisted gently. “Dr. Finch? What is it you saw, exactly?”

“His wounds healed. The flesh knitted itself together. The bones mended themselves. He stood up. He looked at me. He laughed.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s what I saw.”

“That’s a big help,” Tom Compton said.

The frontiersman sat watch. Guilford crawled into the lean-to with Finch. The botanist stank of stale sweat and snake hides and hopelessness, but Guilford didn’t smell much sweeter himself. Their human effluvia filled the narrow space, and their breath condensed to ice in the frigid air.

Something had stirred Finch to a fresh alertness. He stared past layered furs into the brutal night. “This isn’t the miracle I wanted,” he whispered. “Do you understand that, Mr. Law?”

Guilford was cold through and through. He found it hard to make himself concentrate. “I understand very little of this, Dr. Finch.”

“Isn’t that what you thought of me, you and Sullivan? Preston Finch, the fanatic, looking for evidence of divine intervention, like those people who claim to have found pieces of the Ark or the One True Cross?”

Finch sounded old as the night wind. “I’m sorry if you got that impression.”

“I’m not insulted. Maybe it’s true. Call it hubris. Sin of pride. I didn’t think things through. If nature and the divine are no longer separate then there might also be dark miracles. That awful city. The man whose bones unbroke themselves.”

And tunnels in the earth, and my twin in a tattered Army uniform, and demons straining at incarnation.
No: not that.
Let it all be illusion
, Guilford thought.
Fatigue and malnutrition and cold and fear.

Finch coughed into his hand, a wrenching sound. “It’s a new world,” he said.

No denying it. “We need to get some sleep, Dr. Finch.”

“Dark forces and light. They’re at our shoulders.” He shook his head sadly. “I never wanted that.”

“I know.”

A pause. “I’m sorry you lost your photographs, Mr. Law.”

“Thank you for saying so.”

He closed his eyes.

They traveled each day, a little distance, not far.

They followed game trails, rocky riverbeds, snowless patches beneath the mosque and sage-pine trees, places they wouldn’t leave obvious tracks. Periodically, the frontiersman left Guilford to supervise Finch while he went hunting with his Bowie knife. Often there was snake meat, and the moth-hawk roosts were a common last resort. But for many months there had been no vegetables save a few hard-scavenged roots or tough green mosque-tree spines boiled in water. Guilford’s teeth had loosened, and his vision was not as acute as it once had been. Finch, who had lost his glasses in the first attack, was nearly blind.

Days passed. Spring was not far off, by the calendar, but the skies remained dark, the wind cold and piercing. Guilford grew accustomed to the aching of his joints, the constant pain at every hinge in his body.

He wondered if the Bodensee had frozen. Whether he would see it again.

He kept his tattered journal inside his furs; it had never left his possession. The remaining blank pages were few, but he recorded occasional brief notes to Caroline.

He knew his strength was failing. His bad leg had begun to pain him daily, and as for Finch — he looked like something dragged out of an insect midden.

Temperatures rose for three days, followed by a cold spring rain. The season was welcome, the mud and wind were not. Even the fur snakes had grown moody and gaunt, foraging in the muck for last year’s ground cover. One of the animals had gone blind in one eye, a cataract that turned the pupil gauzy and pale.

Fresh storms came towering from the west. Tom Compton scouted out a rockfall that provided some natural shelter, a granite crawl space open on two sides. The floor was sand, littered with animal droppings. Guilford blocked up both entrances with sticks and furs and tethered the snakes outside to act as an alarm. But if the little cavern had once been occupied, its tenant showed no sign of returning.

A torrent of cold rain locked them into the sheltered space. Tom hollowed out a fire pit under the stones’ natural chimney. He had taken to humming ridiculous, sentimental old Mauve Decade tunes — “Golden Slippers,” “Marbl’d Halls,” and such. No lyrics, just raw basso melodies. The effect was less like song and more like an aboriginal chant, mournful and strange.

The rain storm rattled on, easing periodically but never stopping. Runnels of water coursed down the stone. Guilford scratched out a trench to conduct moisture to the lower opening of the cave. They began to ration their food.
Everyday we stay here
, Guilford thought,
we’re a little weaker; every day the Rhine is a little more distant.
He supposed there was some neat equation, some equivalency of pain and time, not working in their favor.

He dreamed less often of the Army picket, though the picket was still a regular fixture of his nights, concerned, imploring, and unwelcome. He dreamed of his father, whose doggedness and sense of order had conducted him to an early grave.

No judgment implied
, Guilford thought.
What brings a man to this desolate tag-end of the Earth, if not a ferocious single-mindedness?

Maybe the same single-mindedness would carry him back to Caroline and Lily.

You cannot die
, Sullivan had said. Perhaps not. He had been lucky. But he could certainly force his body beyond all tolerable limits.

He turned to face Tom, who sat with his spine against the cold rock, knees drawn. His hand groped periodically for the pipe he had lost months ago. “In the city,” Guilford said, “did you dream?”

The frontiersman’s response was glacial. “You don’t want to know.”

“Maybe I do.”

“Dreams are nothing. Dreams are shit.”

“Even so.”

“Dreamed one dream,” Tom said. “Dreamed I died in some field of mud. Dreamed I was a soldier.” He hesitated. “Dreamed I was my own ghost, if that makes any sense.”

Too much sense
, Guilford thought.

Well, not sense, exactly, but it implied… dear God,
what?

He shivered and turned away.

“We need food,” Tom said. “I’ll hunt tomorrow if the weather allows.” He gazed at Preston Finch, sleeping like a corpse, the skin of his face tattooed against his skull. “If I can’t hunt, we’ll have to slaughter one of the snakes.”

“We’d be cutting our own throat.”

“We can reach the Rhine with two snakes.”

For once, he didn’t sound confident.

Morning was clear but very cold. “Stoke the fire,” the frontiersman told Guilford. “Don’t let it go out. If I’m not back in three days, head north without me. Do what you can for Finch.”

Guilford watched him amble into the raw blue light of the day, his rifle slung on his shoulder, his motion cadenced, conserving his energy. The fur snakes turned their wide black eyes on him and mewed.

“I never wanted this,” Finch said.

The fire had burned low. Guilford crouched over it, feeding damp twigs into huddled flame. The moisture burned off quickly, more steam than smoke. “What’s that, Dr. Finch?”

Finch stood up, stepped cautiously out of the cave and into the frigid daylight, fragile as old paper. Guilford kept an eye on him. Last night he had been raving in his sleep.

But Finch only stood against a rock, loosened his fly, and urinated at length.

He hobbled back, still talking. “Never wanted this, Mr. Law. I wanted a sane world, d’you understand that?”

Finch was hard to understand in general, when he spoke at all. Two of his front teeth had loosened; he whistled like a kettle. Guilford nodded abstractedly as he fed the fire.

“Don’t patronize me.
Listen.
It made sense, Mr. Law, the Conversion of Europe, it made sense in the context of the Biblical Flood, Babel, the destruction of Sodom and Gommorah, and if it was not the act of a jealous but comprehensible God then it could only be chaos, horror.”

“Maybe it only looks that way because we’re ignorant,” Guilford said. “Maybe we’re like monkeys staring in a mirror. There’s a monkey
in
the mirror, but no monkey
behind
the mirror. Does that make it a miracle, Dr. Finch?”

“You didn’t see that man’s body give up its wounds.”

“Dr. Sullivan once said ‘miracle’ is a name we give our ignorance.”

“Only one of the names. There are others.”

“Oh?”

“Spirits. Demons.”

“Superstition,” Guilford said, though his hackles rose.

“Superstition,” Finch said tonelessly, “is what we call the miracles we don’t approve of.”

The plush lobby of the Empire Hotel was abandoned. The residents had gathered at the crown of the street to watch the shelling. Caroline passed by the red-velvet furniture and hurried up the stairs with Colin and Lily behind her.

Colin unlocked the door of his room. Lily was at the window instantly, craning to see the battle past the wall of a warehouse. Lily had been grateful to leave Mrs. de Koenig: she wanted to see what was happening, too.

“Fireworks,” Lily said solemnly.

“Not really, darling. This is something bad.”

“And
loud
,” Lily reported.

“Very loud.”
Are we safe here?
Caroline wondered. Was there somewhere else to go?

Artillery fire rattled the walls. American artillery, Caroline thought. What did that mean? It meant, she supposed, that she was an enemy national in a country at war. And that might be the least of her worries. The docks were ablaze, she saw as she pulled Lily away from the window — and the shipyards, the customs house, probably Jered’s warehouse full of munitions. The wind was gentle but persistent, and from the east, and something was already burning at the far end of Candlewick Street.

The Lieutenant cleared his throat. She turned and found him standing uncertainly in the frame of the open door.

“I should be with my regiment,” he said.

She hadn’t anticipated this. The prospect terrified her. “Colin, no — don’t leave us alone here.”

“Duty, Caroline—”

“Duty can go to hell. I won’t be left again. I won’t let Lily be left,
not now
. Lily needs someone she can depend on.”

And so do I
, she thought.
So do I, God knows.

Colin looked helpless and unhappy. “Caroline, for God’s sake, we’re at war!”

“And what are you going to do? Win the war all by yourself?”