Winter's Tale

by Mark Helprin

  He was about to call Virginia over to view the little flashes on the horizon. They were unlike anything he had ever seen, except for the trail of the white horse. But when he turned he saw Virginia and Mrs. Gamely bent over Abby, who was lying on the floor, thumb in mouth, breathing heavily. “What’s the matter” he asked.

  “Abby’s got a terrible fever,” Mrs. Gamely answered. “She’s burning up.”

  “She must have caught a chill on the lake today,” Virginia said as she lifted the child and began to carry her to the children’s loft. Then she hesitated. “It’s too cold up there. We’ll have to make a bed for her here.”

  Hardesty put his hand on Abby’s forehead. He winced. “It came so suddenly,” he said.

  “She was building the corncobs just a minute ago,” Martin whimpered.

  “It’s all right, Martin. She’s going to get better,” Virginia said in a voice that was a little too shaky to be reassuring.

  After putting Abby to bed, they took her temperature. It was 104 degrees. “That’s not so high, for an infant,” Hardesty said. They moved about the bed, arranging things, in silence.

  “Where does the doctor live, Mrs. Gamely?” Hardesty asked.

  “Why don’t I prepare a poultice?” Mrs. Gamely asked back.

  “To hell with the poultice,” Hardesty said. “Where does the doctor live?”

  “In the house at the end of the lane between the inn and the lake.”

  Hardesty pulled on his boots, gloves, and parka, and was out the door in an instant. The insanely cold air hit him like a hammer and almost knocked him down. He ran toward the town, his way brightly lit by the seething stars.

  When he arrived he saw men running up the street, inland. They, too, were pulling on their parkas, and doors were slamming all over the village. But he hadn’t time to be curious, and went straight for the doctor’s house. The doctor’s wife appeared at the door in response to Hardesty’s agitated knocking (which she knew from experience to be that of the father of a sick child). “He’s not in now,” she reported. “He’ll be back in an hour or two. I’ll tell him to get right over there when he returns. Meanwhile, why don’t you go home and put a poultice on the little girl.”

  “Don’t talk to me about poultices,” Hardesty commanded. “Where’d he go?”

  The doctor’s wife cleared her throat. “He went with all the others to the Moobcots’ sheep barn, about two miles up the road.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know why. A lot of men carrying shotguns came to the door. The doctor grabbed his kit and ran out. He didn’t tell me what it was all about. He never gets . . .”

  Hardesty didn’t stay to listen. Instead, he ran along the snow-covered road that led to the high fields. He was in no condition to overtake the Coheeries men, who, when they closed on the stranded train, had seemed as fit as alpine troops. Alone on the open road, he found that the stars on all sides and above made him feel dizzy and out of control.

  A huge sheep barn was visible on a hillock in the fields. The door was open a crack, and bright light spilled out on the snow.

  Hardesty went in. The sheep were all packed together in a corner, the Coheeries men were in a tight semicircle facing the far wall, and the barn lights burned above their heads. Hardesty could see from the way that the butts of their guns were aligned in a fan-like arc that the barrels were trained in one general direction. Several men were arguing. One said, “These are different from him. They’re obviously not the same.”

  The other answered. “They came at the same time, and in the same way. I don’t like the way they look. I just don’t like it. They’re trying to appear harmless, but do you believe it?”

  “What do you want to do, Walter, kill them?” asked a voice from the far side. Hardesty tried to see over their shoulders.

  “Yes,” was the answer, followed by a buzz of disapproval.

  Hardesty stood on a bucket and looked over their heads. Sitting on a bunch of hay bales, tapping their feet, smiling, and chewing sprigs of straw, were fifty or sixty of the oddest-looking men he had ever seen.

  Their faces were either pinched and squashed, or as long and sharp as saws. Snub noses, overly bushy eyebrows, huge boxing-glove chins, and wickedly bowed legs were among their conspicuous features. But each and every one had in his eyes an emptiness that was terribly threatening, even if one could not say exactly why. They were dressed like vaudevillians, in derbies, and seemed to think nothing of it. They were further decked out in Edwardian three-piece suits, watch chains, and canes, all ratty and inelegant. They flashed the ingratiating smiles of those who do not have to conceal an evil and violent nature. But what proof was this of what assertion? And from where had they come?

  “They were just suddenly all over the place,” was the answer to the question that Hardesty had spoken aloud, “rummaging in people’s barns, trying to hitch up sleds, stealing horses. We caught about twenty of them that way. And then, when we thought we had them all, we ran into another fifty in a field near the mill. Who knows? Maybe there’s more out there.”

  “As long as we’ve got him,” someone said.

  “Who?” Hardesty asked.

  A dozen men pointed past the doorway of another room, to the doctor and several other men. The doctor’s kit was slung over his shoulder, and his shotgun was aimed at whatever he was observing. On his way over, Hardesty kicked a pile of something that jangled. “We took it all off these muskrats here,” he was told. He bent to examine the pile, and saw silver- and gold-plated pistols, including ones with pearl handles, a set or two of derringers small enough for a dollhouse, brass knuckles with projecting stilettos, spiked beaver tails, blackjacks, a miniature shotgun, and ivory-handled garrotes. There were no rifles though. No skis, snowshoes, or heavy clothing. Whoever they were, they were poorly equipped for the Lake of the Coheeries.

  Hardesty put his hand on the doctor’s shoulder and gently pushed him to the side so that he could see. When he did see, he shrank back, trying to catch his breath and stay upright.

  “Who in God’s name is that?” he asked, still off balance.

  “I could say, but I don’t want to,” the doctor replied.

  Hardesty then moved between the men with the guns and looked into the little room where they kept the prisoner, who was bigger than the runts in the derbies, but not all that big, and quite thin. He had a dreadful face, and his limbs twitched almost as much as his darting tongue—which seemed to have a life of its own, and was obviously beyond his control. His eyes, too, moved on their own, like angry rats trying to get out of a cage. Hardesty had the distinct impression that this man was a construct. Neither the eyes nor the bony fingers ceased moving for a second. Now and then, electricity seemed to spark from him, and, clearly, imprisoned within him was a destructive agony entirely inappropriate to the peace of the Coheeries.

  “Who is he?” Hardesty asked.

  “Ask him,” was the reply.

  “Me?” Hardesty said.

  The doctor looked at Hardesty askance. “Yes, you.”

  “Who are you?” Hardesty begged in a barely audible voice. Then he took hold of himself, stepped closer to the prisoner, and repeated the question with admirable firmness and authority.

  Pearly Soames bristled. His hot electric palsies filled the air as if he were a hundred rattlesnakes dangling from a chandelier. Hardesty suspected that this strange man and his companions were not actually captive but, rather, just resting in a warm barn to which the farmers had been courteous enough to bring them. This notion was fairly well confirmed by whatever it was that shook the barn walls when Pearly was displeased.

  But as far as Hardesty knew, this had nothing to do with Abby’s sickness, and he stole the doctor away from the Coheeries men, depriving them of the doctor’s learned opinions as they deliberated on what to do with the outlandish creatures that they had discovered in their fields and barns.

  THE NEXT night, under a sliver of silver moon, Hardesty drove the sleigh out
of Lake of the Coheeries Town at an astounding pace. He cracked the whip over the mare’s head until she devoured the road in front of her like a hungry dog. Though she was on fire with the race, it still wasn’t enough for him, and while he scanned the landscape in every direction, he shouted for her to pull even faster. An automatic shotgun lay by his side. Virginia held another on her lap. And Mrs. Gamely, inside a tentlike structure in the back seat with Martin and Abby, had her double-barreled twelve-gauge Ithaca right next to her.

  The odd gentlemen had been escorted from town onto the high road. Now the Marrattas and Mrs. Gamely had to pass through their ranks on the way out, because the doctor had said that he was unable to treat Abby. She was to be taken to a hospital without delay. Now they could no longer consider the luxury of being trapped in the safety and stillness of the Coheeries. Now they needed the city as much as they had needed before to get away from it, in fact much more. The doctor had been unwilling to educate them in the particulars of the disease. “That will come later,” he said. “You’ll want to know everything there is to know about it, and you will. It won’t make much difference.” They were stunned, and they didn’t believe him—what would a country doctor know?—but they left immediately.

  They had set out armed to the teeth, because they expected that the prisoners who had just been released would want the sleigh and the horse. There was only one road, and the snow was too deep for travel across the open terrain. Hardesty calculated that he would intercept the strange lot of men before the climb from the plain to the mountains. In that case, the sooner the better, since the horse would have more speed on the flat than in the hills. He drove her as hard as he did not only because they needed to get Abby out quickly, but because he wanted to be halfway through the brigands before they knew that he had overtaken them.

  The horse seemed to understand. But whether she did or not, she pulled them at a delirious pace, locomotive style, along the snow-packed road.

  When they had crossed most of the plain they came to a rise from which it was possible to look down the road that led into the mountains. Here they paused to search the steppes in front of them.

  Apart from the mare’s breathing and the gentle luffing of the sleigh blankets in the night breeze, there were no sounds. Though the temperature was less than zero, the breeze seemed balmy. Only after Hardesty and Virginia had looked carefully about them to make sure that no one was close by, did they again look up to see the faint bloomings of the night sky. Against the stars and ether, red plumes as squat and symmetrical as mushrooms, as graceful as parachutes, and as quick to fade as shooting stars, flowered and disappeared, floating downward. Every few seconds one of these would flare and vanish, though sometimes several would appear at one time or in rapid succession.

  “Parachutists,” Hardesty said. “And they keep on coming. Who knows, maybe it’s been that way all night. Maybe it’ll continue. And it’s not the Eighty-Second Airborne, either.”

  Then they looked downward, and as their eyes adjusted to the change in light, they saw that the plain was filled with scattered forms—gray individuals and dark formations struggling through the snow to converge on the road, where they made a ragged column that stretched for miles. These night soldiers moved silently and deliberately, without signals or lights. There was a thud in the snow nearby, and Hardesty and Virginia saw a doubled form unfold and run down the hill like a rat. It had been a man, clutching his hat to make sure that the breeze coming up the hillside did not roll it off his head.

  “Can we go around?” Virginia asked.

  “The horse would be chest deep. She could never pull the sleigh.”

  “Is there another road?”

  “You know better than I do that there isn’t,” Hardesty answered. “Undo the safety,” he said, readying his own gun, “and brace yourself with your feet. Mrs. Gamely?”

  “Yes, dear?” came the answer from the tentlike enclosure in the back of the sleigh.

  “How fast can you load that thing?”

  “Fast enough to keep a pie plate in the air. Before Virginia was born,” Mrs. Gamely said, “Theodore and I had to drive now and then to Bucklenburg in the hills. The wolves there were as big as ponies and as hungry as stecthaws. That’s where I learned.”

  “Are Abby and Martin sleeping?” Virginia asked.

  “Tucked away, sort of behind me,” Mrs. Gamely answered. “Jack is in the hatbox. So is Teddy.”

  “All right,” Hardesty said, “let’s get to the forest.” He snapped the reins and the mare moved forward, picking up speed as she went down the hill. Her hoofbeats were muffled in the snow, and the bells had been removed.

  As their runners hissed along the smooth road, they passed stragglers who hardly had time to get out of the way, but soon the sled began to break into formations of ten or fifteen men, scattering them against the snowbanks like mailsacks tossed from a train. Pistol shots were fired, alerting those ahead, who still were not aware of exactly what was coming at them from the dark. The horse began to thud against the ones who tried to stand their ground. This slowed her down. Muzzle flashes appeared from the front and the sides, the children awoke and began to scream, and dozens of the marchers were hanging on to the sled or trying to jump into it.

  Hardesty, Virginia, and Mrs. Gamely opened up with their shotguns, and the deafening noise was amplified by the shouting of the men on the road. The mass of the marchers seemed likely to stop them, and they soon slowed down to a trot. The horse was wounded. Her nostrils flared and her teeth showed. She was no Athansor, no war-horse, and as she bled, she cried out for him. Because she was bound by the traces of the sleigh, she could use only her forelegs, and only directly in front of her. This she did, knocking down her attackers and then pulling the knifelike runners over their limbs and bodies. But there were so many of them that eventually she found herself standing still.

  Though they reloaded very fast, Hardesty, Virginia, and Mrs. Gamely could not reload fast enough. “Don’t stop firing,” Hardesty called out as they were gradually overwhelmed by ranks of squat, insistent fighters who grunted and groaned, and held on to the sleigh with fleshy podlike hands. The more it seemed that the Marrattas were about to go under, the harder they fought. There were hundreds and hundreds of little men in a black knot around the sled.

  No one saw the white trail in the sky ahead, far brighter than when it had been a thin lashlike bend to the southeast. Now it appeared like a comet, dripping a million diamond embers that flared briefly and left the sky full of white smoke. It passed over them, a weaving shuttlecock, and then descended to the battle, lighting the white horse at the end of its blazing beam.

  First he froze the Short Tails in astonishment, and then he cleared a path through them for the sleigh. When he was rampant, his forelegs were a wheel of white knives, opening a bloody cut in the snow. When he kicked, the unfortunates who took the blow were propelled into the air like artillery shells. And when Athansor used his head and neck and teeth, he moved so fast that there seemed to be several of him.

  Then, a miracle of sharp and deadly grace, he began to move forward, wading through them, gaining speed, until he was fighting and running at the same time. The mare followed. Hardesty stopped firing and drove. They were galloping now, past the thinning ranks of the Short Tails. With the white horse a length and a half ahead, they broke into the clear and ran toward the mountains.

  He took them effortlessly to the top, from which they could see the Coheeries stretching away into the night. It seemed like a place that was too close to the stars to be cold, one of those tranquil high overlooks where there are no senses, but only the spirit. The white horse stretched his long neck down to the snow and then raised himself. He took a few turns around the sleigh and approached the mare. He was twice as big as she was. He bent his huge head and touched the side of her face. She backed a pace or two. Then he turned his attention to her wounds. He licked them, one by one; and, one by one, they were healed. Then he walked a few paces ahead, loo
ked up, and broke into his long strides.

  The next thing the Marrattas knew, they were alone, and a white band that had stretched across the sky was beginning to fade. They heard a faint whistling.

  Now it was almost morning, the moon was down, and the stars were tired. Hardesty flicked the reins, and the mare led them into the mountain forests.

  OLD ALDERMEN with beards on their jowls, monomaniacal ward captains, party officials, ex-mayors, and precinct hacks insisted as one that the preelection debates embrace a topic or two other than the holiness of winter and the theory of balance and grace. Skilled even in his thumbs at political maneuver, and used to telling audiences exactly what they wanted to hear, the Ermine Mayor finally forced Praeger to participate in a series of debates co-sponsored by The Sun and The Ghost, neither of which backed Praeger, since Craig Binky had deserted Praeger after Praeger had denounced him in public as (among many other things) “the slow dim-witted boob who runs The Ghost,” “our most beloved moron,” and “the jerk de résistance who floats around in a blimp that he calls a Binkopede.”

  Seasoned old rhinoceros that he was, the Ermine Mayor was sure that in the debates he would trample the clean-shaven young idealist, who was an assimilated patrician of sorts, and who had opened himself up to attack with the lunacy of all his talk about winter. At first it had been successful, but the voters were now hungry for the hard stuff, and the Ermine Mayor looked forward to his frontal assault on the newcomer, eager to crush him in the triple millstones of the mayor’s experience, age, and incumbency.

  The first debate had to be held in Central Park because Praeger refused to be on television. He hated it, and attacked it whenever he could. Since a substantial plank in Praeger’s platform called for the abolition of television, it was not surprising that the station owners threw their support to the Ermine Mayor and ran his political ads for free. They refused to cover Praeger at all, but Praeger would not allow television cameras to come anywhere near him anyway. He hit hard at what he called electronic slavery, and implored his listeners to reassert the primacy and sacredness of the printed page. It was the first time in half a century that anyone had attempted to be elected to public office without the use of captive electrons. In the debate only the Ermine Mayor was televised, and it appeared that he was debating a phantom. After ten minutes, Central Park began to fill with people who had abandoned their electronic hearthsides to see the first man in history with the courage to defy what had become the most powerful instrument of persuasion ever developed. Praeger had wisely insisted on the park. Though the evening was frigid, he eventually faced several million people and implored them to smash their televisions. For many, this was shocking and almost inconceivable. They stayed for hours in the cold, stomping from one foot to another, while vendors of hot drinks did a brisk trade among them.