Ascendant

by Florian Armas

  “They are coming,” Dan warns, watching the tactical com attached to his arm, and in sudden silence, we take up firing positions between the stones.

  The first projectile hits the ground just sixty feet in front of our position. Alerted by the whizzing sound, Andrei and I withdraw a few seconds before the explosion, our backs pressed to the old stone protecting us, its coldness passing slowly through our uniforms. It’s calming. We stare at each other and our nervous laughter fills the silence before the next explosion. We escaped. In the corner of my eye, I catch Cosmin squeezing the trigger of his rifle, which has a silencer, and I know that one enemy is down. One of many. Another explosion shatters the earth to the left of our hell-hole. It seems distant, and I am not bothered by it. Unexpectedly, a lone shard of shrapnel hisses through the air in front of us. With a muffled sound, it hits a stone covered with dried moss, on our right, and recoils, leaving behind multi-colored sparks. Andrei bends in pain and grunts loudly. I hear gurgling, and his head rolls. My mind registers its fall with an unwanted level of detail. It seems impossible, but Andrei’s head rolls down from his shoulders and falls into my lap. His body bends, then slips aside, away from me. In a few moments, the grass below changes from green to red, my camouflage trousers too. I can’t move; I can’t react in any way. I can still breathe. Logically, I realize that I am in a shock, not only because I am paralyzed, but because my mind has shed its self-preservation mechanism. Andrei’s eyes are serene, like he is resting, like he is still alive. I have the foolish hope that he will wink at me and smile, telling me that it’s all just a joke. All war is a bad joke.

  My breath comes out in spurts, one in and out each second, and I feel as if I’m breathing like a dog trying to cool itself down. My pulse goes up; I am hyperventilating; the oxygen in my blood is 100 percent, my pulse 187 heartbeats per minute, and the monitoring Lifeband around my head sends messages to my tactical com, warning me. It’s useless, my pulse still goes up. I feel an electric shock from the Lifeband, and I realize that I passed out for a while. The com shows me that I was unconscious for 5.7651 seconds. I don’t understand the need for so many decimals, and I blink rapidly. Andrei’s head is still sitting quietly in my lap, his blind eyes staring at me. Death is like sleeping. I look into his glassy eyes. All I can think now is to calculate the probability of that shrapnel hitting him and not me – a useless, yet somehow calming exercise, or at least numbing.

  “Our planes!” Dan shouts with sudden joy, pointing up at the sky. He taps frantically on his tactical console, and I assume he’s risking contacting our headquarters. “Nothing,” he growls. “They are jamming us.”

  Andrei’s head is still in my lap. I stare back with numb detachment at our front lines from where the planes were supposed to come; Dan is right. The moment I turn, a batch of missiles leave their places under the wings, and I follow them with the desperation of the dying man looking for his salvation: silvery fishes swarming the sky. Small at first, they grow with each second, approaching the hill, and spread out in a fan-like shape I saw in a medieval movie, some time ago, before the war. They look so beautiful in the sky. As I watch them, I’m still calculating the bloody probability that killed Andrei and not me.

  “Nooo!” Dan shouts.

  I don’t realize what’s happening until one of the missiles alters its course, coming straight toward us. “The probability,” I laugh like a mad man, embracing Andrei’s head. “The probability is so small...”

  Explosion. A red column of dust and hot air covers our hell-hill. My nostrils are burning.

  “I didn’t expect you,” an unfamiliar voice whispers in my mind.

  That’s the last thing I remember.

  My eyes open again to reflections of a dazzling sun shining from patches of snow on the high peaks, and to a sky deep and radiantly blue, in a place that is not the hell-hill. It’s not a hospital either. I am lying in the grass, in the middle of a meadow with coniferous trees here and there, surrounded by high mountains, similar to the ones around my grandparents’ village, yet unknown. It’s a calm spring landscape as lovely as a dream. There is no long tunnel and light at the end of my vision, no angels, no trumpets, yet it looks like the afterlife. I had the vague impression of some kind of tunnel. A hot and dark one. If this is death… I can’t complain, at least not right now. Flying high, a predatory bird reminds me of the hell I’ve escaped from and that bloody plane. Explosions still reverberate in my mind, and I have a brief impulse to check if I am wounded. My laughter fills the silent place; you no longer care about wounds when you are dead. Can I walk? Can I fly? The bird is calling to me, and I jump up easily, unable to avoid a surge of dark images of the many wounds I saw during the war – other people’s wounds. It was impossible to escape unwounded from that explosion. That much I know. And for sure, you can’t die if you are not badly wounded. When I half-turn, I see Dan. He is dead too, and he is definitely wounded. The lower half of his body is missing, from the navel down. Why is he like that? I stare at my lower parts, fearing that they might vanish in a blink. Everything is in the right place, even Andrei’s blood staining my trousers, small and almost dry rivulets running from thighs to ankles. Where is his head? Irritated by my own thought, I make no attempt to find it. With annoying pedantry, I observe more blood on my left leg. My fingers touch the canvas: the blood is still viscous, and I have to fight a sudden impulse to smell and taste it. To avoid my macabre urge, I check the tactical com. It’s dead. Who needs such things in the afterlife?

  “Vlad,” someone shouts, and I turn further. It is Cosmin, walking straight toward me. He is wounded too: a thin stream of blood runs down the left side of his face.

  That’s when I finally understand that I am dreaming, and I worry that, safe inside my dream, I have been badly wounded in real life. I shiver, and my teeth clack with a noise that sounds half comic. For a moment, I want to wake up. Why? Enjoy the dream. Or maybe I am too scared to return to a reality that might look like Dan. Or Andrei. Any moment I fear that his head will materialize in my dream, flying around me like the Cheshire Cat, all eyes and fangs. With unwanted precision, the memory of the explosion, which I am trying so hard to ignore, finds another way to resurface: the missile, whooshing as it falls on us, the blast, the hot dust in the air. Just a few seconds of a dark movie, repeated, over and over.

  It’s my dream, and I don’t care to share my knowledge with Cosmin, not even when he embraces me tightly.

  “We escaped,” he cries, his tears running down my face together with his blood.

  “Yes, we escaped.” I pat his back. At least, I escaped... There is no way to tell him that he may already be dead. Before the explosion, Cosmin was twenty paces in front of me, and Dan was a few paces in front of him. It makes sense, I glance at Dan’s half body. Where is Andrei’s head? I fight against my impulse to look for it.

  My dream has a strange clarity. Dan’s open belly is a grim lesson in anatomy, and his blood soils the grass. Closer to my eyes, Cosmin’s blood looks so real, and the spots on my pants too. Again I fight the urge to taste it. Disengaging, I glance around, still patting Cosmin’s shoulder. I can see many trees, and even see small branches and leaves. Rocks, a large river gleaming in the sun, delicate shrouds of cloud in the sky. The predatory bird is still flying above us, and my eyes follow it. My dream is strange not only in its content, but in the level of detail too. We have to bury Dan... I don’t know what significance that might have in a dream, but I feel the need to do it. With a sigh, I turn my eyes back to the landscape.

  “Don’t worry,” Cosmin tries to soothe me, his right arm still around my shoulders. “We will survive.”

  “Yes, we will survive,” I parrot his words, mechanically, with no intention of mocking him – a voice void of feeling.

  The burial is easy – we find a small crevasse in the ground with boulders around it. The hard part is carrying the corpse;, not because of its weight, after all it’s only half of the real Dan, but because we want to avoid losing some
more of him as we drag hid body along. Sobbing, Cosmin prays, then mumbles something that I can’t grasp about Dan’s energy going back to Mother Earth.

  In silence, we return to the place where I woke up and find our heavy backpacks, but no rifles. At least it’s a peaceful dream. I shrug.

  “What should we do now?” I ask Cosmin. It should be me driving my own dream, but I decide to take things easy and be lazy. Such a wonderful feeling to be in control of your laziness during a war. There will be enough things to worry about when I wake up. If I wake up…

  “We need to figure out where we are,” Cosmin says after a while. “And we need help.” He taps some commands on his tactical display. “It’s dead,” he mumbles, and I do the same with the same result. Even inside the dream, our tools have been jammed by the enemy. Silent, he looks around, then up at the sky, still blue, with some ragged tatters of clouds streaming far to the south. “I don’t like that,” he points to the predatory bird. “It reminds me of that plane.” He doesn’t need to say which plane. Neither do I. “This place is strange, like a different world. I feel it.”

  Any dream is strange. It takes me a bit of effort to stop a smile surfacing on my lips. Why upset him? Then I laugh at myself. Even in a dream, I don’t want to contradict his strange beliefs.

  “The energy vortex saved us,” he says, thoughtfully.

  “Of course. Let’s move. That direction.” I point down the meadow.

  “Good idea. To find people we need to climb down. I am sure there is no war here.”

  For the moment…

  We walk in silence, and from time to time, we glance up at the sky, quietly, in search of that bloody predatory bird. Its presence rakes my mind. Our paths seem strangely intertwined. It’s still there, and I try to imagine its aerial perception from that high place. Eagles’ eyes see things in two particular ways. The middle of the eye acts like a magnifying glass, looking for details, which means for prey. The outer side covers a larger area looking, of course, for prey too. I can’t be prey for an eagle, I think, annoyed. I’m too big. Yet, in a corner of my mind, associating it with that plane, I fear that in a dream, an eagle is able to hunt me, and I may end up looking like Dan.

  “I wonder where we are,” Cosmin says after a while, his voice now calm.

  In a dream.

  “How far we are from the front line? They may think we’re deserters if we don’t return quickly.”

  “What makes you think that we will return?” Deliberately, my question is ambiguous, letting him decide between ‘we can’t’ and ‘we don’t want to’. Can I trick my own dream? Unable to stop a sudden smile, I turn my head, pretending to be busy with the surroundings.

  “You know,” he says, worried, “even if we return, it will be hard to make them understand that we did not run away.”

  “Your vortex,” I say without turning, a bit more maliciously than I intended.

  “Vlad, do you really think I believe you when you agree with me on this subject? And if you don’t believe me, who will? The Court Martial?”

  I jerk my head back to him, just in time to catch his laughter, and I wonder if the real Cosmin is aware that I only pretend to believe his stories. “But do you agree with you?” I ask, curious and ashamed at the same time.

  “Yes, Vlad. There are many strange things in our world. Some of them are hidden, and some we are afraid to learn about. Portals exist. In the past we were able to use their power. Maybe some are still active today, but we have lost our knowledge of them. Maybe. I feel odd energy sometimes. I can’t explain why or how. I just feel it. It’s real. And on that hill, it was quite strong.”

  “Any vortex here?” I gesture around. “Do you feel anything?”

  “Nothing,” he says.

  My dream has outplayed me, and that has made everything more interesting. I don’t know how other people dream, but for me it’s like playing with a friend, waiting for a surprise that always comes. It makes sense, in the end; my dream counterpart is that part of my mind to which I don’t have conscious access. And my mind knows that I only pretend to believe Cosmin. Once, I discussed the mysteries of the mind with him, late on a cold early spring night, around the fire, vapors and words leaving our mouths like pagan mysteries. That night, he was the watcher of our platoon, and after a pause, he told me that I had a strong unconscious mind, touching Mother Earth – whatever that could mean.

  “Well,” I go back to the game again, “if we are far enough from the front line to prove that no normal transport could take us here in such short time…” l leave my phrase unfinished, to allow Cosmin enough space to surprise me again.

  “Do you really think a Court Martial will absolve us on such grounds?” Cosmin says jokingly, and for a moment I am tempted to tell him that we are in a dream. “Military judges are not famous for their logic.” He scratches his beard, like he’s trying to find a solution.“Run!” he growls.

  Sprinting after him, I turn my head in the direction he was looking, a moment earlier. Unconditional reaction is the product of camaraderie, trust and military conditioning. It has saved my life twice in the past. From the forest, on the left, a bunch of men bursts out, in the way that hunters chase their prey, spreading like the missiles from that bloody plane, trying to cut us off. They herd us down, toward the meadow’s end, and we have no choice but to obey their order. The predatory bird resurfaces in my mind like a frightening shadow. I have no time to check if it’s still in the sky. Maybe the eagle has metamorphosed into the savages hunting us. And savages they are, dressed in skins, hunting us with bows and spears.

  The long mound, ten to fifteen feet high, resembling a sand dune, slows us; then from its top, we scramble fast and slide down on the grass. For a while we are safe. Two arrows hiss over the mound, hitting the ground a few feet in front of us. They want to slow us down. I am slightly faster, and I hear Cosmin’s panting progress behind me. I adjust my pace until he catches me up. “Faster,” I breathe, and Cosmin nods, unable to speak. Feverishly, I calculate that the archers must be more than two hundred and fifty feet behind us. They are good, I think, knowing what I know about archery. The best archers a dream can provide, I laugh inside. Gasping for air, we sprint faster, and my backpack becomes a burden, yet I don’t think to throw it. Neither does Cosmin.

  We skid to a halt just before we fall over a cliff that has appeared abruptly in front of us. Braking hard, our boots stir the gravel, and distant clicks, of small rocks falling, echo below our feet: clack, clack, for a few seconds. A moment of respite; my breath comes dry, cold and gasping in my throat. A hundred feet below, a wide river flows, at great speed, between massive rocks. I glance back; the savages are coming at a speed that puzzles me – they could beat any sprinter in an Olympic final.

  “We have to jump,” I say casually. It’s just a dream. Cosmin is not convinced; for him everything is real, so I grab his hand.

  “There could be rocks under the water,” he says, hesitantly.

  “Could be… There are arrows behind us.” I point back to that certainty. “Now!” We jump together yet, in flight, our hands separate, each of us aloft with his fear. At first, arrows fly swiftly past us, whispering softly in intermittent cadences, leaving behind the mundane sensation of a surround sound theater.

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  Appendix

  Poenari

  Codrin, son of the slain King of Arenia and the legitimate King. After his father’s death, he finds sanctuary in the former kingdom of Frankis, sometimes using the name Tudor to conceal his real identity. Seigneur of Poenari in Frankis

  Mara, the Secretary of Poenari

  Vlaicu, Spatar of Poenari (commander of the army). Former Chief of the Guard of Severin before Severin fell to Aron

  Sava, Chief of the Guard of Poenari, former Chief of the Guard of Leyona

  Ban, Chief of the Archers of Poenari and Sava’s right hand. Former Chief of the Archers of Severin before Severin fell to Aron

  Bernart, custodian of Poe
nari before Codrin took the fortress

  Vlad, born in Litvonia, he followed Codrin to the former Frankis Kingdom. Chief Scout of Poenari

  Calin, former Secretary of Mehadia and Mara’s father

  Laurent, Knight of Faget, Garland’s brother

  Pintea, Vlad’s brother

  Julien, Sava’s son and captain

  Neira, Sava’s wife

  Nard, Aron’s second son, taken prisoner by Codrin after the conquest of Faget

  Siena, Bernart’s granddaughter

  Amelie, Bernart’s granddaughter

  Mihai, Mara’s son

  Severin

  Jara (Stejara), Signora of Severin, former Grand Signora of Midia. She lost her castle to Grand Seigneur Orban after her first husband, Malin, was slain in battle. She lost Severin to Aron when Mohor was killed

  Mohor, former Seigneur of Severin and Jara’s second husband

  Cernat, former Grand Seigneur of Midia and Jara’s father

  Saliné, Jara’s daughter

  Vio, Jara’s daughter

  Veres (Snail), Jara’s son

  Mark, Jara and Mohor’s son

  Aron (Big Mouth), Seigneur of Severin after killing Mohor, former Spatar of Severin (commander of the army)

  Bucur, Aron’ son, and new Candidate King of Frankis

  Karel, Spatar of Severin (commander of the army)

  Martin, guard

  Geo, guard

  Gria, servant of Aron used to keep Saliné under control

  Milene, servant in Jara’s house

  Dana, servant in Jara’s house and Milene’s sister

  Ferd, mercenary from Valer’s army

  Senal, Secretary of Severin

  Cleuny

  Calin, former Secretary of Mehadia

  Mara, Codrin’s Secretary and Calin’s daughter

  Frankis Wanderers

  Dochia, the Fourth Light of the Frankis Wanderers