She shuttled between windows. Dark deepened. Thin snow on untrafficked streets was slightly helpful to eyes and night glasses. The cannonade mounted.
Abruptly breath hissed between her teeth. She risked leaning out for a better view. Cold fell around her like a cloak.
“What is it?” Pyotr tried to whisper.
“Hush, I told you!” She strained to be sure. Black blots on the next street over from this, headed straight north... A hunter could interpret traces for a soldier. Those were perhaps a hundred men, afoot, therefore infantry, but they dragged several carte on which rested faintly sheening shapes that must be mortars ...
They passed. She lowered her glasses and groped through the apartment till she found Pyotr. He had sat down, maybe in his weariness he had fallen asleep, but he sprang to his feet when she touched him.
Tautness keened within her. “Germans bound for Kratoy Gully,” she said into his ear. “Got to be, on that route. If they wanted to go fight near the hill, they’d1 be headed westerly and I might never have seen them.”
“What ... do they intend?”
“I don’t know, but I can guess. It’s surely part of a general offensive against our sector. The cannon—and maybe armor, attacking from the side—those should hold our people’s attention. Meanwhile yonder detachment establishes itself in the ravine. It has the makings of a strongpoint. Our headquarters was in Tsaritsa Gorge, farther south, till the Germans took it, at heavy cost. If they take and hold the Kratoy, why, troops can scramble straight through it, or their engineers might throw a new bridge across.”
“Do you mean we could lose the whole city?”
“Oh, that alone won’t do it.” We have our orders, directly from Stalin. Here, at this place he renamed in his own honor, here we stand. We die if need be, but the enemy shall not pass one centimeter beyond us. “Every little thing counts, though. It would surely cost us hundreds of lives. This is what I came for. Now I go back and tell.”
She felt him shiver. “We go!”
A dead man’s hand clenched around her throat. She swallowed twice before she could say: “Not together. It’s too important. This whole district will be aswarm. I’ll have all I can do to get through alive, and I’m experienced. You must try by yourself. Wait here till—tomorrow night?—till it looks safer.”
Between her hands, he straightened. “No. My comrades are fighting. I ran away once. Not again.”
“What use will you be, with that wound of yours?”
“I can carry ammunition. Or—Katya, you might not make it. I might, by sheer luck, and let them know.” He laughed, or sobbed. “A tiny, tiny chance, but who can say for certain?”
“Oh, God. You idiot.”
“Every little thing counts, you said.”
Yes, each scrap thrown into the furnace, it does become part of the steel. “I mustn’t delay, Pyotr. Give me, well, half an hour till you start, so I can get clear. Count to, uh—”
“I know some old songs and about how long they take. I’ll sing them in my head. While I think of you, Katya.”
“Here.” She undid objects and tossed them on the sofa. “Food, water. You’ll need strength. No, I insist; I’m not injured. God keep you, lad, you—you Russian.”
“We’ll meet again. Won’t we1? Say we will!”
Instead, she cast her arms about him and laid her mouth on his. Just for a minute. Just for a memory.
She stepped back. He stood. His breath went like flaws of wind in the dark (springtime wind?) amidst the hammering of the guns. “Do be careful,” she said. Taking up her rifle, she felt her way to the door.
And down the stairs. And into the streets.
Tanks roared somewhere on her left. Would the Germans mount a night attack? Likelier a feint. But she was no strategist, merely a sharpshooter. Flashes etched skeletal buildings against a reddened sky. She felt the racket through her bootsoles. Hers was simply to deliver a message.
Or to survive? What had she to do with the cruel follies of mortals? Why was she here?
“Well, you see, Pyotr, dear, I am a Russian too.”
A park, a piece of openness between these jagged walls, glimmered white before her. A solitary tree was left, the rest were stumps and splinters around a crater. She skirted it, keeping to shadows. Likewise would she skirt the ravine, and be most cautious when she came to the railroad tracks that led to the Lazur. She must arrive with her word.
She doubted Pyotr would. Well, if not, he’d stop a bullet or two that might otherwise have gone into somebody more effective. If somehow he kept alive—Maria of the mercies, let him, help him!—of course they’d never see each other, or hear, or anything. Suppose two grams of dust are whirled together for a moment when a storm runs over the steppe. Will it bring them back?
Certainly never her to him. She would be changing identities again before long. Whenever the Four Horsemen rode across the world, they opened easy ways for doing that. She could not have stayed much more with the Cossacks anyhow.
But first—
The guns boomed louder. Given the news she bore, the Soviet artillery would take aim at Kratoy Gully. It would blast the Germans out of there before they could dig in. That would be that, while the war went on.
Work, you guns. Bring down the wrath of Dazhbog and Perun, of St. Yuri the dragonslayer and St. Alexander Nev-sky. Here we stand. The thing that bestrides all Europe shall come no farther than us. If we fight in the name of a monster, that makes no difference. And we don’t really. Once this Stalingrad was Tsaritsyn. It can become something else someday in the future. But good for now to think that we hold fast in the City of Steel.
We will endure, and prevail, and abide the day of our freedom.
XVIII. Judgment Day
1
At first it was as if half a century had never been. Snow-peaks gleamed against unutterable blue; in this clarity they seemed almost near enough to touch, though any of them might be fifty miles remote. A road that was little more than a track rose, fell, writhed through a darkness of deodars and gnarly wild fruit trees where langurs scampered. Then the forest opened onto pasture strewn with boulders, intensely green after the rains. Sheep and cattle grazed among stone threshing-floors. Tiny terraces carved from the valley walls bore maize, amaranth, buckwheat, barley, potatoes. A westering sun breathed a ghost of purple across the heights that looked into it, while across from them shadows lengthened, intricate over the wrinkles of the land. The air smelled of grass and glaciers.
As his mule brought him nearer the village, Wanderer began to see how much it had in fact changed. It had grown. Most of the new houses were not earth-roofed stone but timber, two or three stories high, with carved and painted galleries; it was curious to find something so tike Swiss chalets here on the knees of the Himalayas. Wires ran from a former dwelling which must house a generator, and the fuel tanks outside it also supplied a battered truck. A satellite receiver dish quite likely served more than a single communal television set. The folk were still Bhutias, essentially Tibetan stock, and men still generally wore the traditional long woolen coat, women the sleeved cloak; but he spied occasional sneakers or blue jeans, and he wondered how many people held by the mingled Buddhism, Hinduism, and animism that had been the faith of their fathers.
Herders and workers in the fields swarmed to meet him, soon joined by those who had been at home. Excitement capered and shouted. Any visit from outside was an event, and this newcomer was extraordinary. His two attendants were simply Gurkhas, familiar enough, guides to manage the animals and serve his needs, but he himself rode altogether strange, clad like a white man but broad of face and bronze of skin, his nose jutting yet his hair and eyes and cheekbones akin to theirs.
One woman, shriveled and toothless with age, made an abrupt sign against evil and scuttled from the crowd into a house. One man, equally old, drew a sharp breath before he bowed very low. They remembered his earlier call on them, Wanderer knew—when they were children and he just the same as today.
This seemed much as it had been. It remained the biggest, of stone and wood, an alien grace to its lines. Glass shone in the windows. Graveled paths twisted about the shrubs, dwarf trees, bamboo, and stones of a small, exquisite garden at the rear. The servants who emerged were of a new generation, but the man and woman who trod onto the verandah and waited were not.
Wanderer dismounted. Slowly, under awed stares and a hush, he walked to the steps and up. He bowed before the two, and they returned the gesture with equal gravity.
“Welcome,” said the man, and “Oh, boundlessly welcome!” the woman. He was Chinese, powerfully built, rather flat of countenance and without guile in it. She was Japanese, well-formed in a petite fashion, cat-alert beneath the schooled serenity. Both wore robes, simple though of the best material.
They had used Nepati, of which Wanderer had but a few words. “Thank you,” he replied in Mandarin Chinese. “I have returned as I promised.” He smiled. “This time I took the trouble to learn a language you understand.”
“Fifty years,” the woman breathed, using that tongue. “We could not be sure, we could only wait and wonder,”
“At last, at last,” the man said as shakily. He raised his voice in the tribal dialect. “I told them we will hold a feast of rejoicing tomorrow,” he explained. “Our servants will see to your men. Please come inside where we can be alone and honor you rightfully, sir—uh—”
“John Wanderer,” the American supplied.
“Why, that is what you called yourself before,” the woman said.
Wanderer shrugged. “What difference, after so long and in a foreign country? I like the name, take it again and again, and otherwise usually a version of it. Who are you being?”
“What does that matter any more?” It came as a bass cry from the man’s throat. “We are what we are, together for always.”
The room where they conferred was gracious, the furniture Chinese, a variety of objects on shelves. The pair had adventured widely before they raised up this home. That was in 1810, as nearly as Wanderer could figure from the calendar they employed. Subsequently they had absented themselves from time to time for years on end, gone to oversee the businesses that kept them prosperous, brought souvenirs back. Those included books; Tu Shan found his diversion mainly in handicrafts, but Asagao was quite a reader.
In the presence of their fellow immortal, they chose to recall those ancient names. It was as if they snatched for a handhold, now when once more their world was falling to pieces.
Nevertheless joy overrode uneasiness. “We hoped so, hoped you really were what you seemed to be,” Asagao said. “How we hoped. More than an end to loneliness. Others like us, why, that gives meaning to these lives of ours. Does it not?”
“I can’t say,” Wanderer replied. “Besides you, my friend and I know of only one who is certainly alive, and he refuses to associate himself with us. We may be mere freaks.” From the end table next his chair he lifted a cup and took a sip of the pungent local chong, followed by a mouthful of tea. They comforted.
“Surely we are on earth for a reason, however mysterious,” Asagao insisted. “At least, Tu Shan and I have tried to serve some purpose beyond surviving.”
“How did you find us, fifty years ago?” the man asked in his pragmatic way.
No real conversation had been possible then, when everything passed through an interpreter who had better not realize what meaning lay behind the words he rendered. Wanderer could just hint. Presently he thought these two had caught his intent and were doing likewise. They made it clear that they had no wish to depart, nor did they invite him to prolong his stay. Yet they were abundantly courteous, and when he risked his guide’s astonishment and suggested that he return in fifty years, their answer throbbed with eagerness. Today they all knew, past any doubt, what they were.
“I was always restless, never fond of cities, for I began as a wild plainsman,” Wanderer related. “After the first World War I set off around the world. My friend Hanno—he uses different identities, but between us he is Hanno—he had grown rich in America and gave me ample money, hoping I might come on the track of somebody like us. Nepal was not easy to reach or enter in those days, but I guessed that on that account it could harbor such persons. In Katmandu I caught rumors of a couple in the uplands who lived a kind of baronial existence among tribespeople whose benefactors and teachers they were. In spite of treating themselves well, they were considered holy. The story went that when they grew old they left on pilgrimage, and their son and his wife reappeared hi their place. Imagine how such a tale drew me.”
Asagao laughed. “Things were never so simple, of course,” she said. “Our people aren’t fools. They keep up the fiction about us because that is plainly what we want, but they know quite well that the same two come back to them. They don’t fear or envy us, their nature is to accept various lots in life. To them, yes, we are sacred and full of power, but we are also their friends. We sought long and far to find ourselves a home like this.”
“Besides,” Tu Shan grunted, “they don’t care to be overrun by worshippers, curiosity seekers, and the government and its tax collectors. At that, we have to deal with several visitors a year; more than that lately. Stories do get about. Only our distance from everything keeps them faint enough to protect us.”
Wanderer nodded. “I would probably have ignored them if I hadn’t been on the lookout. But nevertheless the modern world seems to be moving in.”
“We cannot forbear to bring what is good,” Asagao murmured. “Literacy, medicine, awareness, whatever lightens these hard lives without corrupting them too much.”
Wanderer Weakened. “It would have happened anyway, wouldn’t it? You are losing control, aren’t you?”
“I said we get more strangers all the time,” Tu Shan snapped. “And inspectors from the king. Such hardly ever sought us out before. Nor did they ask as many questions.”
“We know the country is changing, the whole world is in upheaval,” Asagao sighed. “Dear has this place been to us, but we understand that we must eventually disappear from it forever.”
“Or else become known for what you are,” Wanderer agreed low. “Do you wish that? If so, tell me. I’ll leave tomorrow, and in America change my name.” He left unspoken that he had not uttered any modern name of Hanno’s.
“We have thought of it,” Tu Shan admitted. “Sometimes in the past we made no pretense.” He paused. “But that was always among simple countryfolk, and we could always withdraw and hide again when danger threatened. I am not sure we can do that any longer.”
“You cannot, once you are found out. They will track you down if you try, for they have many means these days to hunt men. Afterward you will be slaves, no doubt well-housed and well-fed but never set free, animals for them to study.”
“Is it really that bad?”
“I fear it is,” Asagao said. To Wanderer: “We have spoken much about it, Tu Shan and I. The king of Nepal might treat us kindly, as his pet animals, but what if the Red Chinese or the Russians demand our persons?”
“At least keep your freedom,” Wanderer urged. “You can proclaim yourselves when the times look auspicious to you, but I do not think they are yet, and once you have done so, there will be no more choices.”
“Do you mean for us to go away with you?”
“I hope you will, or at any rate follow me soon. Hanno will provide for you—whatever you need that is in his power to get, and his power is great.”
“We could go,” she said slowly. “As I told you, we know how much people move about these days, and news leaps across thousands of miles. We have seen foreigners pass by and felt how they wondered about us. Even more do
we feel the growing presence of the government. So in the last few decades we have begun making ready, as we did over and over in the past. We have taken care to have no children throughout that time. Our last living ones are long since settled down—we always reared them elsewhere—and believe us dead. We never enlightened them about us.” She winced. “That would have hurt too much.”
“Then the children born to two immortals are themselves mortal?” Wanderer whispered. She nodded. He shook his head, in pain of his own. “Well, Hanno and I often speculated about that.”
“I hate to go,” Tu Shan said heavily.
“Go someday we must,” Asagao answered. “We knew that from the start. Now finally we can fly straight to shelter, companionship, help. The sooner the better.”
He shifted in his chair. “I still have things to do. Our villagers will miss us, and we will miss them.”
“Always have we lost to death all those we loved. Let us instead remember these as they are today, alive. Let their memory of us fade gently into a legend that nobody else believes.”
The windows were turning blue with dusk.
2
Corinne Macandal, Mama-lo of the Unity and known to it as the daughter of its founder Laurace, halted her pacing when Rosa Donau entered. For a space the two women stood as if in confrontation. Shades drawn, the Victorian room was murkily lighted; eyeballs shone brighter than its glass or silver. Silence weighted the air, somehow made heavier by an undertone of traffic on the street outside.
After a moment Rosa said unsurely, “I’m sorry to be this late. I was out for hours. Is this a bad time? Your message on my machine was that I should come right away, without calling back.”
“No, you did well,” Corinne told her.
“What’s the matter? You look all tensed up.”
“I am. Come.” The black woman led the white into the adjoining chamber, where nobody dared enter unbidden. She ignored the arcane objects that crowded it and went directly to the coffee table. Rosa turned as usual to face the altar and touched brow, lips, breast. She had spent too many centuries appealing to saints and appeasing demons to be certain that no real power dwelt in things called holy.
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