The Horseman's Song

by Ben Pastor

  Walton could climb this mountain with his eyes closed. Here dwarf plants and insects became scarce; just ahead, a flat rock resembled an old man’s face. On the next toothed crag, the wind usually picked up. And Remedios’ house, invisible until he hiked over the rim of Mas del Aire … he’d seen a church like it in France during the war, run-down and with the cross askew on the roof.

  Seven months in Spain. Ascending steadily, Walton couldn’t strike a balance of the time he’d spent in Spain. He was becoming more and more convinced that no one can make a difference. His efforts and failures were like everyone else’s, a hopeless mix, and there was no rhyme or reason why one side won and the other was defeated. Even politics, which had meant so much to him for so long, was turning out to be an empty bottle you put either goodwill or stupidity into. “For God and for Country” was just one label on the swill, but there were others no less dumb.

  Having reached the crag where the wind picked up, Walton stopped to catch his breath. From the valley, not yet audible, infinitesimal against the wispy clouds, the airplane was approaching for its meaningless rounds, it, too, having become a part of the sierra. So small that an eagle could snatch it out of the sky.

  When he reached Mas del Aire, the melancholy of his last meeting with Remedios returned, and Walton was tempted to turn back. Only the thought that Bora might be with her kept him rooted where he was, suddenly transfixed. New to him, this urge too lay at the filthy bottom, a part of his foul curiosity to seek the scent and sight of his rival. He approached furtively, stalking across the windblown upland towards the house.

  High overhead, the small airplane went past, circling as though its only goal were to encompass as much sky as possible.

  The door to Remedios’ house was unlocked. Walton listened – no whispers, no sounds – before pushing it open. “Remedios?” What he would say to her, or she’d say to him, he didn’t care. “Remedios?” He tiptoed inside, meeting a silence deeper than his own. There were no sheets on the bed. The bare mattress took up a huge empty space in its metal frame. The pillows were gone. Walton ran his hand along the rail at the foot of the bed, looking around. “Remedios, where are you?” A veil of dust covered the mattress, the floor and the few furnishings. It was like a house that had once been lived in, but years had gone by and now the objects within were skeletons of things, ghosts of things that were alive long ago. Walton felt around the room, groping like a blind man.

  Often in Remedios’ house he’d felt time stand still, that she was real only during the hours he spent here and would cease existing once he left. But she had been real enough to the German, too. Again he listened, tensely, for sounds in the small room upstairs, or in the chapel.

  Come now. Remedios was simply in Castellar, or had gone to the sierra to gather plants. Somewhere real. Dust had blown in through the crack in the door, nothing more.

  Why then did he feel the dismay of a broken spell chasing him out of her house? He fled, and superstitiously left the door open behind him.

  Outside, the wind and sun belonged to the real world. Walton searched upstairs and in the chapel. Finally he started down the mountain, oblivious to the strained hum of the plane banking from the south. But from the change in pitch it was circling lazily, waiting to leave.

  Or was it? There was no laziness to the sound.

  Walton had just enough time to register the growl of a different, stronger engine before recognizing it. He turned around as the dive-bomber swooped down, screeching, first small and then huge and incredibly fast, cannons blazing from its crooked wings, landing gear extended like talons.

  Under its deafening shadow, rocks and dirt burst in parallel trails of whipped explosions, strafing him.

  “No!” Walton screamed the word, bolting with arms gathered to his head to protect it. He was in the open and there was no rock, no crevice, no shadow to beg for shelter. He ran and ran in wild zigzags while the bomber turned for a second pass, down the incline towards San Martín as if that would do him some good, fire and the unbearable din of death chasing him. Somewhere he fell or threw himself face down, hitting rock, dropping to a lower shelf where he scrambled at first, slipped and then lay still.

  Holding fire, the bomber flew overhead churning the air, braiding a roar like a tail behind its blackness, ugly, ugly, raven-like, deathlike, seeking the sky over the valley. Like crossbones, white X marks showed on the wings when it nosed up to the left, and the square cockpit shone wickedly in the sun. Walton scrabbled for a piece of rock to hide under, dragging himself on his belly, on his elbows, face low to keep from seeing the plane. He could hear it bank tightly and turn south again. Here it comes. Here it comes. A sharp, straining curve. Here it comes from behind. Walton started digging. He clawed at the pitiless rock to find himself a hiding place, whimpering for a trench or foxhole in the dirt where none existed, and then bloody fear bid him run. Here it comes! Walton heard himself shouting death-denying words, not at all demented but conscious, because he was never as conscious as when he was mortally afraid, and everything made sense and had relative value compared to the only thing that counted: life, life saved, maintained, chosen above all else. He sprang to his feet and cried out wordless sounds – not death, not death, life! – as he ran, clear-headed, with a stark, terrific will.

  What were they doing at the gun emplacement, why weren’t they doing the only thing they were expected to do, firing at airplanes? In the dazzle of haste, Walton made out the outline of a larger rock and fled to it, shouting.

  The plane soared, stalling like a black cross suspended, and then let go. As if a cord had been severed, it went into a nearly perpendicular dive, dropping, aiming for the gun emplacement at the edge of the mountain. Louder and louder it became, only at the last moment letting go of a single bomb.

  Whether the anti-aircraft gun even tried to fire back was immaterial. The emplacement exploded under the direct hit. Ammunition burst sky-high, metal flew from the blast; blinding yellow and red blossoms shot open with the speed of projectiles; rocks sheared other rocks, pulverizing them. Swollen by debris, smoke rose and curled up in a stormy comma as the skinny black shape with upturned wingtips climbed with a squeal of its engine and left.

  Walton lay stretched on his face, hugging pebbles to his chest. He’d torn his nails on the hard dirt. Jolts like electrical impulses running through a corpse shook his body, and he knew that uncontrollable trembling would follow. Tonight and the next night and the nights after he’d lie with his fists tight in a sweaty seizure-like rigidity. And though most of those who had known him at Soissons were dead, and his wounds justified his actions in Guadalajara, there was no hiding from Brissot this time.

  Under the rain of splintered minutiae and ashen dust, his body felt withered, empty, all links between muscles and bones melted away, tendons like glue; his jaw hung slackly and he had to make an effort to close his mouth. He was overcome by a tremendous, back-breaking fatigue just getting to his knees; crawling was too much, so he simply cowered with his side against the rock, knees drawn up.

  At camp, he’d say he’d fallen during the attack, fallen and got hurt. The small victory of managing to kneel and hold up his head filled him with a despairing sense of pride for not having lost his mind.

  NEAR THE HUERTA ENEBRALES DE VARGAS, TOWARDS CASTRALVO

  They’d come, barely speaking, to the place where the Rambla de Valdelobos, like all seasonal creeks, had dug a much wider bed than was necessary for most of the year.

  The distance was now almost two miles south of Teruel, and there were no farms, no houses in sight. Bora remembered coming down this dirt road on a day so blighted by heat that blood had started pouring from his nose and he’d had nothing but his sleeve to stanch it. Today it was not nearly as warm, and yet he perspired heavily under the uniform. Roig, he noticed, tended to slow down his mount so that Bora would unwittingly find himself in the lead. Twice already he’d caught himself pulling away from Roig and made himself stop until the other man caught up. />
  “Did you know the victim?” Without waiting for Bora to reply, Roig voiced his own conclusion. “Obviously you did, or else why would you be interested in the grisly details?”

  “I met him once.”

  “You met him once, and you’re this curious?”

  Bora faced a choice of answers, each one as good as the next, and gave none. He kept the reins gathered in his left fist and his right hand free. “I wasn’t quite expecting to have the patrol leader as my guide, but I appreciate it. The man was shot once, was he?”

  “Yes.”

  In the absence of landmarks, all looked flat and indistinguishable, a shadowless extension under the cloudy light. Bora recognized crossroads and turn-offs, however, and when they rode past the huerta of the Vargases, he felt a sting of remorse for having chased Soler from its safety. The walled space seemed easier to invade than the first time, even welcoming. The gate stood, still surmountable, as if to say Stop here. Don’t go, stop here. It’s your last opportunity. Take it.

  Fingering the reins, Roig ignored the huerta, his eyes fixed on the road ahead.

  Shortly the horses reached the dry ditch across the dirt road where Bora had held Soler at gunpoint and left him to return to Teruel. It was reasonable to assume that once alone, Soler would have wasted no time before crossing the road and trying to reach the huerta. The killer must have been too close for him even to have attempted it.

  Bora spoke up. “How far from here is it?”

  Roig contemplated him, as if he hadn’t really been listening and needed to reconstruct the meaning of Bora’s words. He indicated a blind curve ahead, where a rise of scruffy terrain flanked the road. “It’s there, down a slope. We’ll have to dismount to reach the site.” Unexpectedly, he turned to Bora with a crisp smile. “We could smell rotten flesh from here. One of the men was taken sick. Why do you ask how far it is?”

  “Because the ditch behind us is where I left him on the nineteenth.”

  Roig’s smile remained fixed on his face. The blind curve seemed chiselled against the clouds, among sparse patches of hard-leafed scrub. Bora meticulously searched inside himself for a sense of fear, but all he found was an increased sense of vigilance which was wholly physical and not altogether unpleasant; the sense of an internal void, the feeling of sand falling through a timer, remained remarkably small given the circumstances. But all that could change in an instant. Who says there aren’t soldiers beyond the bend, or a sharpshooter stationed on one of the heights? All the evidence I’ve gathered is in my bag. My diary, the ledger, the anarchist flag. The sketch I made of Remedios. It’ll be hard to explain to Nina how and why I came to this godforsaken place to get killed.

  Past the curve, the left shoulder of the slope narrowed to an eroded edge, to which Roig pointed. “Tell me, why all this interest in Soler?”

  Having reached the edge, Bora dismounted to look down into the hollow. His heartbeat had increased to a steady dull race filling his chest, not irregular, just fast and getting faster. He removed his riding gloves and slipped them into his belt. “It isn’t Soler that interests me.”

  Still saddled, Roig shifted his attention above and behind Bora, to the dry higher land. “Y qué le interesa à usted, realmente?”

  Bora was tempted to look at him over his shoulder but didn’t. “Cosas.”

  “Things? What things?”

  A cicada suddenly chirring on a dry stalk somewhere down the slope provided an opportune distraction. Bora envisioned the two or three seconds it would take his hand to reach and unlatch the holster on his left side. Pensively he stared at the scarified drop of land, sinking some twenty feet below into a trough-like depression. The stench of death was long gone. Still he couldn’t help wondering whether these rocks, these thirsty shrubs were intended from the beginning of time to become his place of death. Like Jover, he knew now – Remedios had said so – that there was an as yet unrevealed place where his life would be taken. Sooner, maybe, than even Remedios had said.

  Aware that Roig expected an answer, Bora made him wait. Then he said, “Horsemen interest me. Miraculous and otherwise.”

  Roig vaulted off the saddle. He, too, removed his gloves, but secured them to the space between the saddle and stirrup leather. “Why should you? What do you have in common with them?”

  Motionless at the edge of the slope, Bora stood a few feet away and slightly ahead of Roig, but at such an angle as to keep him in his field of vision. “Other than that I’m a horseman myself? Not much.” The crumbling rim under his feet had the colour of skinned flesh. His weeks on the sierra’s heights rendered the short escarpment laughable; Bora could easily reach the bottom in a few bounds, but would not do so before or without Roig. Was this the place? It’d be easy to kill someone here, push, and let the weight of death drag and roll the body down the slope. Easy, easy. “For one thing,” he added, “I’m armed.” (Remedios said seven.) “I know where I am, and in whose company.” (Could she have been wrong?) “Also, I left word of my destination.” (She could have been wrong.)

  Roig – Bora couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t just a misjudgement – had grown haggard under the shade of his visor cap, the shift in colour on his drawn face tantamount to a change in expression. His mouth, thin-lipped, monkish, became set and hard. Unquivering, drawn so it erased itself into a line, his mouth placed a seal of malice across that pockmarked pallor.

  The cicada stopped chirring. An astonished silence followed, and then distant thunder, a sound like hoofs pounding dirt far away. Rain would come soon. Time was dangerous, like a short blade. Roig’s voice came with dispassionate, surgical politeness. “I don’t believe you told anyone about your errand. In any case, having come thus far, you should take a closer look at what you came to see.”

  Bora turned his face, then his whole body towards Roig. Unexpectedly, he felt as sure of his destiny as on the day he had looked down from Mas del Aire and sought the greatness and vanity of the world, the finite arrogance of it. The trap gaped ahead of him. Why was knowing that he would be shot the moment he started down the slope more important than the fear of it, more important than avoiding it?

  There’s a sharpshooter waiting for his signal across the slope, Bora thought. He sees us and waits, finger on the small hook of the trigger.

  The thought exhilarated him, because he’d striven for lack of fear but now he was amazed that he’d even contemplated the possibility of fear. There was none. Pleasure and self-assurance in the risk he was taking with his soldering, yes. Trusting in risk at the potential cost of his life, absolutely. Fear, no. Holding Roig’s stare, he wondered if this was what Niceto called duende, man’s perfection in the face of and because of death. No other perfection is possible. The matter of his own end was surprisingly irrelevant, and Bora knew his face said as much to Mendez Roig.

  For the longest deadly moment Roig’s malicious mouth twisted in contempt, or bitter disappointment. His coolness discomposed, he turned away from the slope. With the motion, his shoulders lowered tiredly, as if a small piece had been taken from his haughty wholeness and the process were enough to affect him. Thunder edged the sky to the south.

  Roig reached for the saddle and mounted his horse. “Let’s go,” he said, and waited for Bora to do the same.

  On the way back they said nothing at all.

  A small patrol of road police – the Guardia Civil Caminera – eventually fell in with them at the Villaspesa crossroads. Their bays rounded the curve at a trot, making the sound of bones knocking on the rock-strewn path, and would have ridden past if cries of “Cho!” hadn’t curbed them in a pale commotion of dust.

  “Señor capitán, señor teniente.” The corporal leading them brought his hand to his boiled-leather headgear, part helmet, part peasant hat. “With permission, you shouldn’t travel without an escort. We’ve had reports of stray groups of marauders and Reds in the past weeks, and one never knows what may happen in the open country. Only a few days ago a civilian was killed up the road you come
from.”

  Roig said nothing, disdainfully checking his mount.

  “We thank you for the information,” Bora said.

  EL PALO DE LA VIRGEN

  Nothing was left of the gun emplacement. Gouged out of the sierra wall, the site had lost all resemblance to the nest of stone where the two men had smoked and slept and heaped refuse for the past eight weeks. Of them, there was no trace. Flies would eventually find tatters of flesh and bloody cloth, but right now it seemed like an empty gum socket after a molar has been pulled.

  Walton turned away from the wrecked mountain face, feeling physically ill. It was the second time he had tried to urinate, with no success, and his distended bladder was starting to hurt. Even taking a deep breath was difficult. Brissot wouldn’t need to notice the tremor; he’d know as soon as he saw him. He’d be lucky if he succeeded in avoiding Chernik, who’d been a reporter long enough to have seen his share of frightened faces.

  The rest of the men were unhurt. The horses and ammunition stored behind the house were safe. The worst damage to the camp was a boulder that had been dislodged by the explosion and fallen onto the roof. The sheet iron had caved in. Chernik pointed at it as Walton arrived. “Fell smack into the stairwell, Felipe. It’s a miracle no one was inside. Holy shit, you should have seen it dive! It was a German machine, all right. I wish I’d had my camera when it hit.”

  Walton could see from the doorstep that the interior had been demolished. He kept his hands in his pockets, elbows close to his sides. “The other plane was a pathfinder. This one knew exactly where to strike.”

  Chernik went inside, rummaged and came back with a rickety chair. “It’s like when the twister hit our hometown in ’21,” he said. “All we salvaged was a sofa, and my mother did the same thing I’m doing now: sat down. ‘Might as well be comfortable in the face of disaster,’ that’s the way she put it. Were you at Remedios’ when it happened?”