The Stone War

by Madeleine E. Robins

  “John, you okay?” They hadn’t heard anyone open the roof door. Startled, Maia lost her balance and Tietjen put a hand out to brace her. He caught her wrist, and his fingers felt the warm, leathery flesh of the wing, the fineness of bone. He loosened his grip so he wouldn’t break her in two.

  “Jesus, Barbara, don’t sneak up that way, will you?” Behind McGrath, who stood just outside of the doorway, arms tense at her side, he saw Ketch. Hochman and Fratelone were behind her. “Maia’s an old friend,” he told them.

  “You talk to ’em, John. I’ll go talk to my friends.” Maia straightened her arms and dropped her wrists so that her wings were half furled. She looked back at the doorway again. “You sure got a lot of love around you, John. You take care of it.” She smiled at him, then smiled more broadly as she raised her arms so that the light breeze belled her wings. She took the few steps that brought her to the roof’s edge, then stepped off the roof in a shallow dive, banked, and was somehow above him again.

  “Take care, Mai,” he shouted up.

  Some were more ready to accept Tietjen’s explanation about Maia than others. Elena: the silent, frightened woman who had barely spoken a word to Tietjen or anyone but McGrath since her arrival, had become the children’s champion; the little girls, even DeeDee with the clawed hands, were her special charges. They played in the alleyway behind Elena’s makeshift kitchen, running errands, their laughter bubbling up behind the Store. Elena believed in Maia and in her friends. “Look at Dee,” she insisted to McGrath. “She’s a sweet girl. What happened changed her hands, not her soul. They should come to us; we are not going to turn them away.”

  Ketch, who had faced Tietjen down about DeeDee in the first place, was ready to believe there were others like her among the monsters. Oddly, Bobby Fratelone believed too.

  “I’d have thought you wouldn’t be able to forget what they did to you, Bobby,” Tietjen said.

  “The little girl didn’t do it, Boss. Hell, Kathy and Colleen and Karen are as changed as anyone; they can’t talk like normal no more. But I know they’re good kids. Besides,” he added, almost shyly. “You trust the flying lady, yeah?”

  Tietjen nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Well.” Bobby shrugged as if the question was settled.

  Tietjen was unnerved at how many people seemed willing to leave it at that: if he believed in Maia and her friends, that was good enough. Again he wondered if it was just wishful thinking on his part, if Maia was a Trojan horse, a way to breach his defenses. Again he worried about making the right decision.

  In the end he had to trust his instincts. Two days later, someone came to tell him that the “bat-lady” was circling the roof. Maia had a friend with her, waiting a block away, just beyond their sentries.

  “Can I bring him in?” she asked.

  “Fly him in?” Tietjen asked, momentarily confused.

  Maia laughed. “He’s way too solid for that; I’d never get him off the ground! I just meant, can you tell your people, the guards and that, to let him come? I’ll drop down low where he can see me; that’ll make him feel a little safer.”

  Tietjen reminded himself that he and the people of the Store were as much on parole as Maia and her visitor. “I’ll go out myself,” he told her.

  Bobby and Ketch didn’t want him to leave the shop, and insisted on going out with him. Barbara did too, brushing off Tietjen’s suggestions and Ketch’s that she stay behind, “just in case.” They stood just outside the doorway and watched as a short, stocky man walked carefully through the debris on the street, with Maia swooping back and forth just over his head. From a block away it was difficult to tell what about the man was changed: he wore a red shirt and dark red, oddly fitted pants, and moved with a peculiar, mincing gait. It was Barbara McGrath who first realized what she was seeing.

  “Good lord, a faun,” she breathed. The baggy pants were legs covered in coarse reddish fur. As the faun drew closer, Tietjen realized that he wore a breechcloth, and had tucked the red shirt into it. He looked back and forth between Tietjen and the people behind him, but always his eyes returned to Maia, hovering overhead, as if she were a touchstone.

  Maia made the introductions. “This is Mack. Mack, this is John and some of his friends.”

  Tietjen offered his hand and the faun shook it. His feet were small and delicately cloven, but he hadn’t the goat’s horns of a classical faun. Oh for God’s sake, Tietjen thought. Mack the faun? Barbara might have had the same thought, for when she stepped forward to shake Mack’s hand she was grinning broadly. Mack’s grin answered hers: his face was round and ruddy, his nose short, his eyes small and gray-blue. A good Irish face, Tietjen thought. Just what you’d expect from a creature from Greek mythology. Tietjen wanted everyone to come meet the faun; he couldn’t imagine anyone seeing a threat in Mack. But when Bobby stepped forward Mack shied back and stood as still as a wild animal scenting the air, and looked up for Maia. Tietjen realized that the Store was still on trial with Mack.

  “Ask Elena if she’ll come out,” he said to McGrath.

  Ketch shook her head. “She won’t come, John.”

  Tietjen insisted. “Tell Elena we need her. Ask her to bring the girls.”

  In a moment McGrath was back, with Elena following, and the little girls with her. Kathy Calvino now walked with a crutch, her sisters flanking her.

  “DeeDee, uhh—” Tietjen looked around helplessly until Barbara murmured their names—“Kathy, uh, Colleen, Karen, this is Mack.”

  DeeDee smiled up at the faun and clacked one claw at him, as a wave. “Hi, Mack.” The Calvino girls smiled and said something in their garbled language. All four children hung back slightly, but from shyness, not fear. At least, that was what Tietjen saw.

  “Hi, DeeDee and Kathy and Colleen and Karen,” Mack said. He sounded like someone who had spent a lot of time with children: friendly but not pushy. His voice was a musical tenor, his diction was precise but casual. Under it Tietjen thought he heard traces of the flat vowels of the Midwest.

  “It’s okay, girls. You can go inside again. Thanks, Elena.”

  Ketch, clearly impatient with the whole sequence, murmured, “What was that? You using those kids as some sort of litmus test to see if we can trust this guy?”

  “No,” Tietjen whispered back. “I’m using them to show him we can be trusted.”

  Mack watched as the girls followed Elena back into the building, obedient as ducklings. “They’ve taken good care of them,” he said to Maia, above him.

  “We try to take care of everyone who comes to us,” Barbara said quietly.

  Mack nodded. “Maia trusts you. Trusts him, anyway.” He jerked his head toward Tietjen. “And I trust Maia. Must say, though: you’re more my type.” He smiled at Barbara. Tietjen realized after a moment that he was flirting with her. Flirting with McGrath? he thought, astonished. It felt like sacrilege.

  But Barbara was clearly delighted and unimpressed. “Flattery will get you dinner. What else can you do?”

  Mack gave a howl of laughter, threw his arm around Barbara’s shoulders, and drew her toward the Store. “Where shall I begin?” he said. From the back their heads—his dark and her silvery curls—tilted together like cups for a toast.

  “Mack,” Maia called sharply. “What shall I tell the others?”

  He turned back to her. “That you left me here and came to bring the rest of them. That the coast is clear. That they’ll take us in. Quote from ‘Little Gidding,’ for heaven’s sake, but tell them to get their butts in gear; they should all be here before nightfall. When Gable figures out we’ve joined the enemy, he’s going to be pissed as shit. Now.” He returned his attention to Barbara. “Did I ever tell you about my childhood in the IRA?”

  She pulled back for a moment, assessing him. “For real?”

  “For sure,” Mack lied cheerfully. “Right before my stint in the Foreign Legion, but shortly after my service as an international espionage agent.”

  Barbara kept up withou
t missing a beat. “And you gave up all that glamour?”

  “What glamour? I hate martinis, can’t stand the desert, and—”

  “God, you’re an actor, aren’t you?” Barbara linked her arm with his.

  “You needn’t sound so dismayed. I was actually a rather decent actor.”

  Barbara shrugged. “But can you make a bomb?” she asked.

  Mack raised his eyes to Maia, still circling above them. “I’m in good hands, dear. Swoop off to the others, then come back to me. I’m off to dinner!” He turned back to McGrath, affecting a thick brogue. “Darling woman, can I make a bomb? Where’s me dinner? I build no bombs before I’m fed.”

  Speechless, Tietjen watched Mack and McGrath enter the Store.

  “He ain’t always like that,” Maia said, grinning. “Sometimes he’s worse.”

  “And the others? What are they like?”

  “He’s the only whatsit—faun? He’s the only one. And he’s got the biggest mouth on him. The others—shit, I oughta go after the others now. Couple of ’em move a little slow, and if they going to get here before dark—”

  Tietjen nodded. He watched as she took a few steps, extended her wings, and launched up. Like a bat, he thought. Like an angel.

  15

  THEY were as ready as they could be. The war parties were assembled, plans were made and remade and rehearsed, and weapons gathered. The night before their attack on the monsters’ stronghold Tietjen sat with his planning group long after they had run out of details to rehash. Finally Ketch had dragged him away, saying something about a good night’s sleep. When they reached Tietjen’s room she curled wordlessly on the bed, waiting for him to fold around her, and they fell asleep without saying a word.

  The raiding parties set out just before dawn, when the light was warming toward a turquoise still inky in corners and alleys. The Store’s army was armed with knives, axes, short staves made from spare wood or piping, chains, a pair of theatrical broadswords found in one of the fifth-floor apartments. The few guns they possessed had been distributed to Bobby’s best marksmen. Tietjen wasn’t one: he carried a machete, some rope, and a club Ketch had whittled from a two-by-four.

  One group, Ketch’s, had carts in tow, filled with sacks and cans of flammables: paint thinner, oil, anything they could find that would burn. Two cases of Chablis bottles filled with precious fuel siphoned out of old non-electric city buses, the bottles stuffed with rag wicks. Six boxes of old-fashioned kitchen matches, Barbara’s idea. And several dozen packages of “instant logs”—the sort of thing you put in a dummy fireplace and lit to provide the illusion of a real fire: doused with paint thinner or gas, the things became astonishingly volatile.

  Ketch and her group went straight down Fifth Avenue, planning to cross east at Forty-fifth and enter Grand Central from Vanderbilt Avenue. Tietjen and the others crept through the streets, across Madison and Park, where Bobby took another group south; then across Lexington to Third. Then Tietjen turned them south, moving as quietly as they could: too many people, only roughly trained as fighters. Two more small parties broke off at Tietjen’s direction, to accomplish preset tasks. The war council had stayed up for three nights trying to plan as much as possible, structure the attack in the same way that Tietjen once designed houses, laying the foundation, considering requirements, flow of movement, available material, cost.

  The faun, Mack, had drawn floor plans of Grand Central and the way Gable’s people were using it. To Tietjen’s relief, they seemed to be concentrated mostly in the main concourse and waiting rooms; Mack said the eastern face of the station was mostly in ruins, the hallways caved in and the stairs down to the lower concourse and platforms impassable. On the western side of the building there had been no collapse, the hallways were clean, but the tunnel of the defunct Times Square shuttle was flooded, and Mack said that while there was access to the lower concourse and platforms, most of Gable’s people avoided the tunnels. It wasn’t enough to go on, Tietjen thought, but they could wait forever for enough to go on.

  For weeks, every time Tietjen thought that his people’s will to fight the monsters might fade, something new had happened. In the last week, two of the monsters had got past a sentry to lob burning waste into the windows of the building next door to the Store—the fire had taken three hours to put out. A new group of survivors had appeared one night, bloodied and fearful, to tell their story: all of them tortured, and two of their group dead at the hands of Gable himself, before they escaped. Tietjen, Bobby, Ketch, and Barbara, convinced fighters all, had done their best to remind the others at the Store what they were fighting for. Soon there was little need to remind anyone.

  So now they were making their ways east and downtown in groups of ten or fifteen. Almost thirty people stayed behind, mostly kids, four of them over seventy, and a few like Elena and Sandy Hochman who could keep things going if Tietjen or Barbara didn’t make it back. They had to win. Tietjen walked on, following paths he had taken once on his night walks, everything the same and entirely different. Barbara walked a little way behind them.

  “We started this together,” she had told him. “I’m not splitting off now.” He had not argued with her.

  More than once they passed through eddies of the same despair Tietjen had met on the streets, the hopelessness so overwhelming he could feel it squeeze his heart, making the blood roar in his ears. The sensation was faint, but corrosive. Only the thought that he had to set the example kept him walking during those patches. That, and the sight of Barbara, when he looked behind him, walking easily, a rope coiled and worn like a bandoleer over her shoulder, her hair a silvery halo. She smiled when she saw him look at her, then her face relaxed into a look of concentration, a faint frown, her lips pursed and gray in the predawn light. Should I have made her stay with Elena and Sandy? We can’t lose Barbara.

  In the end he drew strength, as he always had, from the streetscape through which they moved, watching for the enemy hiding behind the ornamented security grilles that ringed most of the commercial buildings, but seeing, too, beloved details, architectural flourishes and signs of the old city’s life. He imagined the streets filled as they had been, with vehicles and with people in hurrying clusters. Remembered the smell, the heat, the sound of them. He was comforted.

  At Fifty-fourth Street he looked at his watch, stopped, and motioned everyone in the party into the shelter of a courtyard beyond a brass-tone security grille. If the other parties were on time, they were all stopping too, to take a few sips of water, eat the fruit or chocolate or cookie that Elena had packed for each of them. Tietjen thought suddenly of Chris, provisioned for a school trip just so, with cookies, fruit, chocolate. When he looked at Barbara he wondered if she was remembering packing such bags.

  “Okay,” he whispered. “Time to go. The others’ll be trying to get in to the terminal from Park and Vanderbilt while we’re on Forty-second, so we may not see them till we’re in. Everyone okay?”

  They nodded.

  “Okay. Good luck, okay?” He started to rise, but Barbara stopped him, took his hand and held it for a moment in both of hers. The gesture started a silent chain reaction of handclasps, shoulder-squeezing, hugs, among the others. Tietjen found himself embraced and kissed, hands clasped. He returned the embraces awkwardly, waiting for it to be over.

  “Let’s go,” Barbara said finally.

  Tietjen was first to the door of the gate, scanning the street. There could have been a dozen of Gable’s people hidden behind each of the grilles or façades of the nearest buildings, but it seemed clear, and seeming was all he had to go on. He waved to the others to follow him, and stepped out onto the street. Nothing happened. He released the breath he had been holding and started walking again.

  Within five minutes he knew something was wrong. He couldn’t tell what; there was no sense that they were being watched or followed. Wordlessly Tietjen motioned the others in closer.

  “What?” Barbara asked.

  “I don’t know,”
he muttered back. “Just listen for a minute.”

  The light was the thin overcast gray of just past sunrise, and half the street was still in shadow. The dozen of them waited, listening, straining for a sound.

  “There,” someone said, a stocky pale-haired woman in black shorts and a pullover who carried a bow and a quiver of arrows. “To the west.”

  Tietjen listened hard. In his mind he saw Bobby Fratelone, pinned under a block of stone or something, swiping one handed at an attacker who danced away from his blade and laughed. The others of Bobby’s party were fighting frantically as other attackers swarmed out from behind the grilles of a looming Art Deco building. There was no sound to the vision, but when he heard a real cry, distantly, he knew it had been made by the man he had seen take an arrow in the thigh.

  “Bobby’s in trouble,” he told Barbara.

  She didn’t ask how he knew. The sounds of a fight grew clearer, more cries, the sounds of breaking glass and impacts.

  They ran single file along Fiftieth Street, dodging around the wreckage of a three-car, two-bus pileup on Lexington. The sounds grew louder, the high-pitched hooting and shrieks Tietjen associated with Gable’s people bouncing off the windows. Where were they? Tietjen had glimpsed a building with shabby gilded sconces and an Art Deco portal, but which one was it, and where? On Park, where Bobby’s group had gone? What cross street? On a guess, Tietjen turned down Lexington, still at a trot, and went down two blocks before starting west to Park Avenue again. The cries were so loud now it sounded as if they were surrounded. A hundred feet from the corner Tietjen stopped and sent a stocky blond woman with a bow slung over her shoulder up to see what was happening. Her name was Allis; he had watched her target-shooting behind the Store last week.

  She was back in a moment. “They’re halfway down the block. It’s Bobby and them. Shit. There’s a whole mess of them—”

  “How many?” Barbara broke in.

  The woman stopped and thought carefully. “One … three … and six … then the ones on the other side of the street. I don’t know. Thirty, maybe?” They were outnumbered.