A Princess of Roumania

by Paul Park

  Aegypta Schenck”

  Miranda refolded the first letter, slipped it back into the envelope with its big wax seal. Andromeda could hear her small escaping breath. “You know, just somehow I was expecting something more. Especially the second one.”

  She read it again, folded it up. “Aegypta Schenck—what kind of name is that? ‘Mogosoaia’—are you kidding me?” Shivering, she wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, then turned around to look at the little stove.

  The dog, by contrast, was overheated. She lay on a bearskin, panting and yawning with her tongue out.

  There was movement at the entrance to the shelter, which was covered by a blanket. Peter Gross pushed through the hole, then stood up straight. “Talking to yourself?”

  Miranda shrugged, turned, smiled. “I guess.”

  Peter squatted down. He was dressed in a new woolen jacket. He reached out his left hand toward Andromeda, but stopped when he heard her small, throaty growl. “She doesn’t like you,” Miranda said. “She’s not going to hide it now.”

  “Well, sure.” He sat down against a pile of blankets midway between Andromeda and the cot. “Bad news?”

  Miranda shook her head. “Unbelievable.”

  Then in a moment, “You can read it if you want.”

  He stretched out his left hand for the envelope. “You know,” he said, “before all this I’d never even really heard of Roumania, except in that poem my Mom taught me. Now I wake up and it’s the most important country in the world.”

  “Is that what you’ve done—woken up?”

  Now he was reading the first letter. But he was talking to her, which made Andromeda think he was saying something he’d rehearsed. “I thought this was a dream because I didn’t feel anything at first. Now I think it was because I was afraid. My father used to say it’s why cowards are so dangerous. When I saw them put you in that boat, that felt really bad. And when I think about my father…” He raised his eyes from the letter to look at her. “So maybe I’ve come out of it a little bit.

  “That felt bad for me, too. When I saw you on that sandbar.”

  Her expression when she said this was a little odd, Andromeda thought. But then Miranda smiled. “I’ve been thinking about it, too. I’ve been thinking about it all day. You know when I was a kid, I used to love those books where the girl feels she doesn’t belong, and she’s having some kind of problems and she wakes up in a different country—just like this. And she fits into that place like a key into a lock, and everything that made no sense now suddenly makes sense. There are the good guys and the bad guys, the wise king and the shining prince. But I get the feeling we won’t find any of that here.”

  “There’s me,” Peter said. Andromeda pricked up her ears.

  Miranda smiled. With her left hand she drew her hair out of her face, perched it behind her ear.

  She said, “This isn’t that kind of story because it’s not a book—the book was before. And everything is different, but I’m not any different. I’m not smarter or prettier or stronger. I don’t feel I’ve come home. It doesn’t all make sense to me. It’s just another place, another bunch of adults and their problems. These women,” she said, indicating the letters in Peter’s hand, “—my mother and the woman from my dream—I’ve wanted to meet them my whole life. I’ve wondered about my mother my whole life—what kind of woman she is, whether I’d ever meet her. And now I have this photograph and this letter, and you know what? She’s a stranger.”

  “I think you’ve changed,” said Peter, but she interrupted him:

  “In books you always know the rules. Or at least that there were rules if you could learn them. That’s the difference between stories and real life, I thought. But maybe nothing real ever makes sense, ever feels like home. Understanding it won’t help. That’s what I mean.”

  She had shrugged the blanket from her shoulders. Now she sat forward on the cot. Maybe she also had rehearsed something to say. “When I was tied up in that boat, and I saw you disappear behind those trees, I thought at first I felt so sick because I was afraid. But I’ve been thinking about it lying here, and it’s because of you—we can’t risk losing each other. It’s because we’re the only people who know each other from before. When you say you feel bad about your father, I know what that means. And I know you’re the only person here who knows anything about me—this,” she said, indicating the letter in his hand, “it’s just a fantasy. I mean, what am I supposed to do about this? Go live in some palace on some throne?”

  “I gather you’re supposed to go home and help out. I gather they’re in some trouble over there.”

  “And what am I supposed to do about it?”

  “I don’t know. But it sounds as if your aunt has some ideas. She’s sort of been leading you step by step.”

  “You noticed that? But who is she? I have one memory of her, and then a face in a couple of dreams—it’s not like you. It’s not like Stanley or Andromeda or you. And it doesn’t mean we have to pretend our lives didn’t exist. We were starting to be friends before, and maybe that was the way the story was going to end up making sense. Maybe it’ll be harder now. But we can try.”

  He didn’t say anything, so she went on. “So I’m sorry about getting you into this mess. I know it’s my fault that you’re here. And I wanted to say I’m sorry because of how I treated you after school started and Andromeda came home. I know it sounds stupid, because it seems like a long time ago. Do you forgive me?”

  He shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”

  “We can’t lose each other anymore,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “So I have to ask you—are you coming with me?”

  Peter hesitated. “As opposed to what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It seems like everything’s been pushed back a couple of hundred years. Maybe you could go west with the gold rush. Or go to New York City and play the harmonica on the street. Or hang around here trying to get home. There’s got to be some way of getting home.”

  Peter shook his head. “I’ve always wanted to go to Europe. I was always jealous of kids who got to go.”

  Miranda smiled. “So it’s a deal? You’ll come with me, and then maybe I can do something to help. Whatever else, my aunt has got to have some powers. Magic powers, whatever—it sounds stupid to say. But there’s got to be some way to send us home.”

  Peter smiled, showed his crooked teeth. “I wasn’t about to leave you,” he said. And then Miranda put out her hand out for him. When he started to reach toward her with his left hand, she said, “No. The other one.”

  Which was enough for Andromeda. More than enough. In a moment she had nosed her way out through the slit in the shelter’s skin, out past the blanket and into the clear night. The snow was dry under her paws.

  The camp consisted of three round shelters and a central space of trampled snow. Coming south from the Hoosick River, she and Miranda had climbed mostly uphill for almost seven miles. They had left behind the great woods and the great trees, and climbed into an area of birches and aspens and thorn bushes. From time to time the trees gave out completely. The hunters’ camp was in one of these clearings, at the bottom of a shallow bowl surrounded by outcroppings of rocks. Above these on the south side there were some sheer rock walls, and a small stream dribbled under a layer of ice.

  In the middle of the circle burned a small, smoky bonfire, and the men sat around it on tree stumps and logs, drinking coffee in the dark cold. Splaa was there, and the three others whose winter camp this was—hard, sun-blackened men who looked as if they’d lived outside for years. They were frightened, apprehensive, and Splaa was trying to reassure them. They spoke English, though it wasn’t their first language. They wore wool-lined leather coats, leather pants, rubber boots. In those woods, with the help of traps and lines, retrievers and hounds, they hunted beavers, otters, foxes, and larger animals.

  As the yellow dog made a circle around the fire, another dog rose to growl at her. He was a yell
ow-eyed, brindled mastiff named Jack. “Good boy,” said his master, a thick, squat, bearded man. He caught hold of his collar.

  The thing that sucked about being a dog, the fly in the ointment, thought Andromeda, was other dogs. Some were dangerous and mean from the beginning. Others, friendly at first, turned nasty when you didn’t let them smell your butt.

  Among the seven dogs at the camp, Andromeda had imagined first a hierarchy of physical power with Jack at the top, and she thought he might be vicious because he felt threatened. She was a larger dog than all but two or three. But some of the nastiest were among the smallest, and Jack himself seemed to defer to one hound about half his size. So that wasn’t it. There was some more complicated arrangement that might involve breed, age, sex, family relationship, and temperament; whatever it was, it seemed to work pretty well. Harmony pretty much reigned. She herself was the only irritant. Though she’d been in several skirmishes and near-fights, and though she’d always managed to chase her attackers away, that never seemed to bring the others closer to accepting her. Yet it was clearly possible, even easy, she suspected, for a newcomer to gain acceptance. So that evening she dug a place in the snow and sat apart outside of the circle of firelight, watching the others. Certainly there was a language of gesture and smell. Certainly also there was another more conventional language, not of barking so much. Once she was sensitive to it, she was able to hear a whole vocabulary of grunts and moans. The dogs spoke to each other in short, terse conversations, rarely more than a few words. How was she to learn?

  And why did she care? What could these dim-witted brutes offer her, that she wasted time thinking about it? It was more interesting to listen to the hunters talk about the wendigo—the ghost Miranda saw the night before. It comes to you in the shape of someone you love. Then it leaves you heartbroken in the snow, and brings bad luck to everyone around you—which was such bullshit; she knew what Miranda had seen. Sasha Prochenko had come to her.

  Most interesting was to leave the firelight altogether. Near ten o’clock she got up, shook off the melted snow along her underside. That day there had been a wind, and the temperature had dropped. Drifts had formed. But now the wind was gone and the stars burned. And though part of her longed for the acceptance of the other dogs, for the contentment of sitting without thinking any thoughts, there was another part that came alive as soon as she had left the circle of firelight. Because of the warm temperatures of the last few days and then the sudden freeze, there was a layer of crusted snow that allowed her to move quickly. In many places the wind had blown it clean. In the clearings it gleamed like a clean white piece of paper.

  Away from the firelight her senses came alive, and her nose was no longer stuffed with the overpowering smells of camp: smoke, charred meat, and the urine of the seven dogs. As she left the clearing and moved away through the thin woods, she felt she was pushing through a net, each cord of which was the circle of urine marks that each dog had drawn around the fire. Her instinct was to stop often, restrained by the net, but she pushed through. On the far side she filled her lungs with cleaner air, which was nevertheless scented with a myriad small traces of animals and men. They seemed to draw glowing lines in front of her on the snow. There was the trail the men used, trampled with their boots, over the lip of the bowl and downhill toward a small pond.

  At the top of the rise she scratched among the exposed rocks and at the roots of some small bushes. Then she ran parallel to the man’s trail that seemed to glow beside her in the small trees. From time to time she was interrupted by the holes and scratches that animals had made across the snow, field mice and rabbits, foxes and raccoons—so many, she had never guessed how many—each with its distinctive shade of burning colors—lime green, pink, purple, and amber, which nevertheless started to fade the instant the animal had passed.

  These visual patterns did not replace her sense of smell. Instead they were the way her brain made meaning out of what was otherwise a chaos of small odors. Beside the fire, the stew of powerful, familiar scents made it possible to relax, possible to sleep. Out here in the night, her brain was kept alert and agitated not just by these impressions, but by the other senses that they overlaid. Her eyes were sharper than those of the girl she had been, seeing mixtures of movement that had been unknown to her before. Her ears, also, could hear new sounds. And since even for Miranda and Peter every sensation in this world seemed stronger, richer, clearer, then it was no wonder that the dog felt overburdened by delight.

  She danced down the hill and through the hummocks of the frozen swamp that filled the north end of the beaver pond. She danced onto the ice, blown clean by the wind. She was sliding and jumping there in a little circle when she heard a sound that made her stop.

  It was at the limit of her hearing, a howl that reached a quick high note, and then sank slowly down. Another voice interrupted, then another. Andromeda knew what she was listening to. It was a family of wolves, away and to the west, where she now saw the outline of a range of mountains, black against a darker black.

  At the same time she was aware of something else, a gleam of red on the west side of the pond. Moving stiffly, hesitantly now, distracted often by the sound of the wolves, she walked over to investigate. Another man had come to the pond in the last few hours, someone who was not one of the hunters and was not like them either. Some member, she now recognized, of the family of wild men who had attacked Miranda along the river.

  She saw the red line of the trail through the frozen grass. The color was still hot, but fading now. It was easy enough to follow and she took off, avoiding as before the heavy print of the boots that broke through the crust. Instead she followed alongside.

  At first she had been hindered by the sound of the wolves. Each time she heard it she had stopped and lowered her muzzle to the snow. The fur had bristled along the ridge of her back, and her ears and tail had sunk down. But after the first few miles the sound grew more sporadic, and besides, she no longer responded to it in the same way. Instead she bounded forward, her ears straining to hear, and this was partly because already she was used to the sound. Partly also because she had identified only two voices, and not an entire pack. And partly because another instinct was leading her now, a sensation of hunger that increased mile after mile.

  Of all her senses, the dullest by far was her sense of taste. Nothing tasted like anything as soon as it was in her mouth. So it was odd that hunger could possess her in this way and drive her forward.

  Surely the smartest thing would be to return to camp. Often the hunters would throw her bones. If Miranda was awake, then she would find her something. But Andromeda felt she must go forward, and the sound of the wolves now, when it came, seemed to promise a big supper.

  After the third mile there was something else, a smell she didn’t know. Dirt and meat, blood and hair, and she was aware of it for a long time before she burst out through a ring of broken trees into a wide, round clearing where the snow was trampled flat. In the middle was the source of the smell, a circle of snowy mounds.

  The dog stopped at the edge of the wood, one paw held poised above the snow.

  It was a family of mammoths, a bull and three cows in the middle of the field. They were arranged in a circle, their heads facing outward and some little ones between them. They were asleep or resting, their heavy bodies lying in the snow. From time to time one or another of the adults would raise its head and make a heavy, snuffling noise. Now as the dog watched, the bull raised his head to look at her, and he lifted his curved tusks above the snow.

  After a few minutes the dog moved into the woods again. She made a circle through the fringe of the trees, laying her line at intervals as she squatted to piss. So impressed was she by the power of the mammoths that she acted without thinking, without realizing that she was overmarking the line laid by another animal. This one she heard rather than saw, a low growl that made her tremble. Unable to move, she sank down with her ears low, her tail under her. Nor did she object when the wolf
came to smell her, smell her legs and stomach before lifting his own leg over a broken tree just inches from her nose.

  He was a beautiful creature. Nor, after he had smelled her all over, did he continue to notice her. He also was preoccupied with the mammoths, she imagined. He stood in the wreck of fallen trees, his nose held high. Then without glancing back at her, he retraced his steps. He had been coming along the man-trail from the west, and now she followed him, stiffly and shyly at first. But she found herself imitating his fast, straight-legged walk, and she followed him along the man-trail which was gleaming brighter now, and which led along the bottom of a wooded ridge.

  Mile after mile, and she could see the light through the trees. The bonfire at the hunters’ camp had been little and discreet. Here, it seemed, whole trees had been set alight. She followed the wolf through an open space of saplings and bushes until she had a better view.

  The fire had melted back the snow in a muddy circle. Wild men and women stood around it, warming not their hands but their whole bodies, for most of them were naked, or practically so. They had stripped down to their leather underpants, looking ridiculous, Andromeda decided. Once she had gone with her mother to see a production of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring at the New York City Ballet. It had featured a lot of nudity, and people with expensive haircuts pretending to be cavemen, accompanied by shrieks and crashes from the orchestra.

  Andromeda thought there was something self-conscious and unreal about these people, too, though mercifully there was no dancing. There was, however, a lot of body paint. Occasionally people staggered out of the circle away from the fire. They stood in the snow, their bodies steaming in the sudden cold.

  They had no dogs. And their eyes were so blinded by firelight, Andromeda imagined she could come to the edge of the circle without being seen. Behind her the wolf had continued on. He had not stopped.