Skeletons (18 page)

"Go,"
Reesa
said softly. "I'll wait for you here."

I looked into her tear-filled eyes. "
Reesa
, I won't let you do these things. Our baby—"

'These things were meant to be. Go with Sasha.”

“
Reesa
—"

"Go."

I rose, and climbed the hill. When I reached Sasha, I turned to look down at
Reesa
, who had bowed her head and was weeping.

"Sit down with me," Sasha said.

"You cannot let her die like this," I said angrily, looking down at him. "If these fools want to kill themselves, let them, but she must come with us."

"Sit," Sasha said softly.

"No," I said. "I will not let this happen. You can live with your superstitions and legends if you want to, but not
Reesa
." I drew back away from him and brought out my knife. "I'm willing to fight you, Sasha. I'm willing to die here, if that must happen."

He rose and held out his hand. I stepped farther back and waved my knife at him.

"I mean what I said, Sasha."

The sadness in his eyes was overwhelming. "Listen to me, Peter.
Reesa
will go with you tomorrow. Only she cannot know it yet." He sat back down, patted the grass beside him. "Please, sit."

Keeping my blade out, I sat, but not close by. 'Talk."

A smile came to his lips. "You still haven't learned everything about invisibility, Peter. Isn't that right,
Tibor
?"

I turned quickly to see
Tibor
just behind me, ready, on command, to take my knife from me and pin me.

"Hello,"
Tibor
said. He walked past me, handed Sasha a dark bottle of wine.

"Is everything well down below?" Sasha asked.

"Yes,"
Tibor
replied. "We've had word from two advance scouts who say tomorrow will be our last free day. All of the others are being told to return."

"I see," Sasha said.

Tibor
left, patting me on the shoulder as he passed. "Sit beside me," Sasha said, holding the bottle out toward me.

I sheathed my knife and moved closer. The clouds had drawn away overhead, showing a sprinkling of stars. Sasha looked up at them for a moment.

`They are old friends," he said. As I watched him he let his gaze drift to the burial hill, visible in starlight to our left. I saw that many fresh holes had been dug, and that
Tibor
had mounted the hill, picking up a shovel to finish the work.

Sasha took the wine from me and drank deeply.

"You may consider this a child's story if you wish, Peter Sun. Every people has its own version. Ours was passed down by mouth for thousands of years, in a tongue no longer spoken. You heard it sung in our songs."

"Who are you people?" I asked.

He smiled. "Even we don't know. Some called us the Lost Tribe. We used to be called Gypsies, but that is not what we are. The Gypsies are our cousins, I suppose, but long ago we gave up the roads and made villages. When the various pogroms came over the various centuries, it was convenient to call us Gypsies. Enough of our tribe were hunted down and murdered so that we had to be called something."

"And that language, what is it?"

"I can't tell you that, either, Peter. But it is there, and it serves us. It makes us know that we are not Russian in our hearts after all. And made it easier to kill Russians when they tried to kill us back, which was almost always."

He drank wine, passed me the bottle.

"So here is my child's story. It is a simple one. About the beginning of the world, and then the end of the world, and the beginning again."

He waited for me to drink, then began.

"It seems that after making the world, God held it in His hand and looked at it, and all He saw were rocks, and water, and ice. It was a pretty place, but He wasn't happy with it yet, so He passed it through a cloud of perfume. And when He did that, something wonderful happened. The world came alive.

"It's said that the first man and woman that God set His eyes on were our own. He spoke to them in our language and blessed them, and told them to take care of the world. Then He told them that He had other worlds to make and must go away, but that if ever the world needed Him, they should call Him immediately to save them, which would prove that they believed in Him. He then set the world to spinning through space."

Sasha took the bottle, drank.

"So God went away, and forgot about the world, and forgot about His cloud of perfume. And the world spun through space, until such day that it passed back through the cloud of perfume again. Only this time the world became too much alive. What had been dead came back to life, making the world crowded and unbalanced.

"Our own people didn't call God right away, and when they finally did, and God saw what had happened, it was nearly too late, and God was angry. And so He promised to save the world, but at a terrible price."

Again Sasha drank wine, a deep draft.

He looked at me.

"'A man will come,' God said, 'from both the West and East. To you he will be called
Kral
Kishkin
. But he will not be one of you. And though the only daughter of your strongest father be with him, and flower his seed, this will not be the new flower of the world. But from
Kral
Kishkin
will come the new seed of the world.' He promised that if we did these things, he would once again favor us, but in the next world."

Sasha continued to look at me. 'That's it. A good fairy story, eh?"

I took the wine from him and drank. "That's all it is, a fairy story."

He shrugged. "Perhaps. There was a lot more in the texts, about when it would happen, how
Kral
Kishkin's
protection was our sacred duty, all that. I have to say, I didn't believe it myself, until all this happened. Our tribe had become almost secular. My third son, Igor, even went off to school in Leningrad, to become a scientist." His eyes darkened. "I'm sure he's dead now. We knew this was coming, Peter Sun, and we did nothing until it was too late. The prophecy has come true. And
Reesa
, who is the only daughter of our dead king, has been waiting for you her whole life." He leaned closer, in the near dark, and looked at me with his hard eyes. "But as to how my people handle themselves when this army of skeletons comes, you cannot change that. I only ask that when the time comes, when you see me and know me as a threat, you pledge to kill me."

I said nothing.

He put his hand on my arm and tightened his grip. “This is the way it will be,
Kral
Kishkin
. It is the only way that I can fulfill my sacred duty, and make sure that
Reesa
, and your baby, have a chance with you. But to do that, you must pledge to me."

I stared at him, mute.

"Tomorrow, before the first soldiers of the army come, I will twice kill the members of my tribe. Then I will kill myself.
Reesa
will go with you, up into the mountains, to fulfill the duty of your protection. When I tell her, she will not be able to refuse. She knows she is as capable of it as I am. More so, because she loves you."

He gripped me even harder. I could feel the tremble in his hand.

"And there is a chance for my tribe to continue, Peter Sun. One way or another, in this world or the next. If I send her with you, we have the chance in this world."

His grip relaxed. "But for you to save
Reesa
and your child, you must take an oath to kill me. Because after I kill myself, I will be one of them, and I will surely come after you. Do you understand?"

I looked at him. "Yes, I do."

"Do you make the oath?"

My eyes were steady, looking into his. "Yes.”

“Good!"

He suddenly laughed, and held his bottle up. He drank some down and then made me drink some down.

Then we sat together in the night and looked down the hill at the dying fire in the village square, and listened to the children singing.

The army of skeletons was closer than had been imagined. Apparently they had marched all night and were within sight distance in the next valley the next morning. The rumble of machinery close by could be heard. I was reminded of the progress of locusts, the tremble in the ground, nervous electricity in the air.

Sasha's village was in near chaos of preparation. But
Reesa
and I were their main concern. We were provided with the finest horse for Sasha's cart, which was loaded with as much food, supplies, and weapons as it could hold. Sasha pressed his own long knife into my hand.

"When the time comes," he said, "use this. My father gave it to me, his father to him. I would like to know that it will continue to be useful. I have offered it to
Tibor
, but it is his wish also that you have it. He would like to think of you as his brother, and I would like to think of you as my son."

"Thank you, Sasha."

When our actual leaving came, an eerie quiet descended on the village. I felt the weight of their hopes on our shoulders. There were twenty-two of them, in a village that had once held hundreds. They stood watching our cart pull away with hope so palpable it was nearly a physical sensation.

We had gone only a few meters when
Reesa
made me stop the cart and jumped down to run back to Sasha.

"Isn't there another way?" she cried. "Can't we all rush up into the mountains, hide in the woods? Wouldn't my father have wanted us to fight?"

Sasha held her until her crying subsided. Then he pushed her gently away from him. "We are fighting,
Reesa
. Go."

She ran back to me, crying, and climbed into the cart.

I bade our horse to go, and the cart went on, and
Reesa
did not look back again.

Sasha waved once to me, then turned and I saw him no more.

We climbed steadily for four hours into the mountain they called
Uz
-Cur. The Russians called it
Konzhakovski
Kamen
, a richly forested peak capped by a discrete snowy cap. We saw a few skeletal birds, and a single skeletal hawk that circled high overhead but never dropped. The sky became a deep blue.

When we rested, it was on a promontory that
Reesa
seemed to know well. It provided a beautiful view of the valleys spread beneath us, including her village. We could make out the tiny roofs of the huts, the cleared patch that was the village square.

Reesa
sat close by me. Though the day was warm, she drew a shawl tight around her and shivered. She looked somberly into the village below.

"He will have done it by now," she said.

"Look!" I cried.

There, off to the north, was a pall of smoke. There was a dull boom. The village below us erupted in a spurt of fire. There came another explosion, and another. I watched closely and saw one of the rockets, a tiny missile from this height, leave its launcher and arch over the trees to land almost directly in the center of the village. Squinting closely, I could see an array of armaments where the missile was launched. The valley near the village was swarming with tiny white figures, trucks, and tanks. The road, a thin pencil periodically visible through the trees, was clogged with armor. Letting the road lead my eyes north, I saw the blackened remains of two other villages, both smaller than
Reesa's
; the trees around them had been burned. The villages themselves appeared no more than craters carved out of the foot of the mountains.

Another missile found its target in the village, and now fire erupted and spread. We heard the thin hollow sounds of gunfire.

"Let's go on,"
Reesa
said, turning away.

The road curled us into a mountain plateau, away from the valleys below. Soon
Reesa
was herself again. She told me about her childhood, the places where she had played up here, and even higher on the mountain where she and her father had once trained a hawk. The sight of a high circling skeletal eagle brought a pall of sadness over her.

"It seems such a long time ago," she said.

Late in the day
Reesa
took sick, and I put the wagon into a cove of trees while she went off to vomit into the bushes. When I came to her, concerned, she pushed me away, and when I insisted on standing with her, she turned on me.

"You fool! It's only the baby!"

"I'm . . . sorry," I sputtered.

She retched once more, then stumbled out of the bushes and came to rest her head against me. "Don't ever be sorry," she said.

"Never," she said.

We climbed into the wagon, and again she put her head against me and closed her eyes.

I studied the sun and saw that we only had an hour or so of sunlight left. "Perhaps we should stay here tonight."

"We should go on,"
Reesa
said. But in a moment she was asleep against me, and my decision had been made.