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 ju
st 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.
Falling like a stone, I remember movies with people jumping over a cliff, moving their legs like they’re walking in the air. I always found that ridiculous and don’t try to imitate them, embarrassed to try. I don’t know why I should feel embarrassed in a dream, but that feeling follows me all the way down. The other feeling I have is not fear, but utter disappointment – I was expecting to fly.
I hit the water with a splash. It’s cold… I shiver. Cosmin makes the same splashing noise a second later. For no particular reason, I note that my body was two feet in the water by the time he hit. In dreams, gravity can vary. I have had some dreams in the past, taking place in strange worlds, where I could fly without wings. Going deep underwater, inside a cloud of gurgling, white bubbles, disappoints me even more – it would have been much easier to fly to the opposite shore. And dry. The cold creeps under my skin, and I don’t try to move. From diving training at a seaside resort, a long time ago, I remember that the water will push me up. My thoughts linger for a while, recollecting the warm tropical sea and the multi-colored fishes swimming through the reef. With a tinge of fear, I hope that the ‘push me up’ rule applies to this dream too. It takes a bit longer than I was expecting to reach the surface, and I fight for fresh air, panting, my mouth wide open. Cold air hisses like a snake through my throat. It was the backpack; I realize the cause of the delay. Quite realistic, this dream. When I can see again, my first reaction is to look for the savages. They appear on the cliff-edge a few seconds later, shouting unknown words that get lost in the wind, gesticulating with their spears and shooting more arrows at us; but we are now more than two hundred feet away from the place we fell, plus the difference in height between our positions. The water is faster than I thought, and we’re slaloming. To distract the archers, I realize. Somewhere to the side, more arrows hit the water with a short burp, before disappearing under the small waves. Their meteoric passage is short-lived, but I notice stone arrow-heads. Soon, the shore bends to the left, and we are out of the savages’ sight. I swim slowly, turning around to find Cosmin. He is some twenty feet away, floating face up, flowing calmly with the water.
“We have to get to the shore,” I say. He does not answer, his right hand just makes a small gesture of acknowledgement through the water. Glancing at the shore, I understand his indifference; there is no way to ‘get to the shore’ – for as far I can see, the shoreline is nothing more than a hundred-foot-tall wall of stone.
Drifting looks easy at first, an occasional movement, the water carrying you effortlessly but, after a few minutes, I start to feel tired. And cold. The backpack is heavy, but I think it may have a role to play in my dream – I rarely have simple dreams, and sometimes they flow like a quest that I have to solve. For no reason, an old dream, in which I carried a heavy lyre with me for several hours through a desert, comes back to me. At the end of a long passage, I had to sing to a sentry so I could enter the oasis he was guarding. Behind me, Cosmin is as calm as before, and that unnerves me. It’s my dream, and I should be the composed one. Still looking back at him, I hit a log, two foot in diameter, which is partly hidden in the water. A third of the log is visible, and I would have seen it, if I wasn’t looking back at Cosmin. I gasp from the pain in my ribs, and I curse my dream, the savages, the war and whatever else comes to mind. My left hand clings to the log, and at a snail's pace I climb up, until my belly is resting on the rough bark. It’s an old oak. Still immersed, my legs act as an anchor; the log is slowing down, and Cosmin is getting closer.
“Come,” I stretch my hand toward him, still irritated by his calmness. When his hand touches mine, I grab him. “You lazy man,” I growl, pulling him toward me and the log. My position is uncomfortable; I am overstretching, but slowly I pull him until his head hits the wood. “You deserved that.” I grin, though he can’t see my face; his head is somewhere under my right arm. I turn my head awkwardly, just to let him see the merriment on my lips. When my spine starts to complain, I stop turning, my eyes fixed on the arrow tip sticking out of Cosmin’s neck, right under his chin.
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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 Poenari 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
Mihail, 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, killed by Aron
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
Frankis Wanderers
Dochia, the Fourth Light of the Frankis Wanderers
Valera, the First Light
Livia, the Second Light at her death
Drusila, the Second Light after Livia’s death, the First Light after Valera’s death
Derena, the Second Light
Splendra, the Third Light, converted Serpentist and High Priestess of the Serpent in Frankis
Sybille, the Fifth Light
Olmia, the Eight Light
Chloe, the Ninth Light
Viler, Drusila�
�s nephew, and Chief of the Men Guard of the Frankis Wanderers. He was killed by Codrin in a duel.
Arenian Wanderers
Ada, the Second Light of the Arenian Wanderers, and the strongest Light of all the Wanderers
Litvonian Wanderers
Ingrid, the First Light of the Litvonian Wanderers
Salvina, the Fourth Light, converted Serpentist
Mared, the Fifth Light, converted Serpentist
The Circle
Cantemir, former Master Sage
Maud, the new Master Sage
Aurelian, Sage and Primus Itinerant, killed in Severin
Belugas, Sage and Primus Itinerant, hanged by Codrin
Verenius, Sage and Primus Itinerant
Octavian, Itinerant Sage
Dog, the best assassin of the Circle
Eric, the Chief of the Circle’s assassins
Petronius, Itinerant Sage
Hadrian, Itinerant Sage
Paul, novice Sage
Arad
Orban (the Beast), Grand Seigneur of Arad
Cantemir, Secretary of Arad and Master Sage of the Circle
Panait, the first Mester of the Merchants Guild in Arad
Delia, Panait’s wife
Doren, the Spatar of Arad (commander of the army)
Vasile, Jara’s agent in Arad
Leyona
Garland, the new Grand Seigneur of Leyona
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