It must be their field they are crossing, their animals they walked among earlier, trying to find cover. There is something strangely familiar in this scene.
He could die here. It would be like coming home.
The man behind him grunts as one of the others in his unit stumble.
He turns and stares at the dirty face, seeing near-black eyes in Chinese-looking features, tattoos on the hands which are visible beyond his uniform sleeves. He looks at this other one, a brother of his, and he thinks to himself that his face is too unusual here.
They will know what he is. They will know him, and all of them will be caught.
He can’t kill them though...his own people. He won’t. Even beyond his uncle’s orders.
They push him and the others through the door of the house and yell at the occupants in French. He can’t understand French, but he reads the bulk of the meaning off their minds as they yell, waiting expectantly for an answer.
They want these people to keep them here, bound and guarded.
He relaxes a little, exhaling under his breath. They will get free. As soon as these soldiers are gone, he can push their captors. He can push the humans in his unit, too, convince them he is appealing to their captors' hearts, not manipulating their minds. Wreg might even help him. The others of his kind accept him because of who his uncle is, but the humans who fight alongside him don’t know what he is, either.
Usually they fight in separate units, the seers and the humans. He wonders why they deviated from that on this day, of all days...then decides it doesn’t matter. They will get out of this. He has to. There is only the easy way, and the hard way.
He is still thinking this when there is an answering call from upstairs, and a man comes down, disheveled, with brown hair and a large nose. The man, presumably the owner of the house, is thin but wiry, tall with eyes that are large in his face and that carry a surprisingly gentle light. Despite the lack of meat on his frame, his shoulders are broad, and he has a worker’s hands.
He barely looks at this human though, before the farmer is motioning them back out the front door, past the windows along the side of the house, and towards a green-painted cellar door, whose frame stands in solid earth. He follows along with Wreg and the others, stumbling first among the group down the wooden stairs, with the French bastard’s fist still in his back. He lets himself be shoved into a corner of a cellar filled with wooden shelves holding jams and jellies, even butter and cheese. Staring around at all of it, he feels his stomach cramp, wonders how much they can carry with them as they leave...
Then a light follows the farmer down the wooden steps, and a woman is with him.
He stares at her, stares at her face.
For a moment, he is transported somewhere else. Thoughts of how he will get away, how much food he can steal and how many he will have to kill, leave his mind...
He stares at her, and he cannot stop staring.
But he forgets another of their classmates is among them.
“Kuchta...” Stami breathes, from two bodies left of his. He stares at her, too, then his eyes find Nenzi’s, holding a kind of condensed hate. “You little fucking bastard...”
A French gun hits him in the head, silencing him before he can speak any further. Nenzi is relieved when he sees Stami hit, but his eyes cannot help but return to the woman’s face. This time, he finds her staring at him, too. Her eyes wide in her face, she looks him over, taking in the size of him with a kind of disbelief before returning her gaze to his face, and finally his eyes.
She looks at the French soldiers then, biting her lip.
They are staring at her, their eyes openly wary.
He is in their minds before the thought is fully formed. Within seconds, their expressions grow slightly blank, right before they look away, focusing back on the farmer.
“You will watch them,” their leader tells him. “Keep them here.”
“Oui,” the man replies, looking at the prisoners with a pained expression. He says in French, “We will lock them up in here...bolt the doors on top, and use a chain...”
The head of the French unit, the pigs that have taken them, nods, giving a last hard stare over the group of them. He does not pause on Nenzi’s face.
“Give us any trouble, and we’ll shoot you all dead,” he says then, in broken German. “We will line you up and shoot you, and say you fought back...”
“Or say nothing at all,” another adds darkly, his voice deeper than that of the first.
Nenzi doesn’t look up at their threats, afraid he won’t be able to keep his eyes off the woman. He holds Stami’s mind now, too, and forces him to forget what he’s seen, hoping it will work until the woman leaves the cellar and returns to the upstairs rooms.
In what feels like a long time, they all do leave. The cellar goes dark, and he is in there, with the others, breathing hard the smell of mold and butter.
“Who is she?” asks Wreg. He is the oldest of the seers there with him, and the one Nenzi had been looking at earlier, the one who is too obviously a foreigner.
Keeping his mind blank, Nenzi turns on him.
“Why did you not take them?” he hisses instead, his voice openly angry as he speaks in Prexci. “They had no seers! What chickenshit game are you playing at, Commandante!”
Wreg blinks at him in the dim light, his eyes shifting from curiosity to irritation. It is dark in the cellar, too dark for the humans, but not so for the seers' more sensitive eyes.
“Orders, runt,” he says. “Pretend you remember what that means. Then pretend you remember that you’re still under my command...and that I can have you beaten until you piss blood if you do not do as I say...”
“But to what purpose is this? We could be out there now...going after them...”
“They wanted us to scope out the area.”
“From a fucking cellar? Was that the request? And who made it?”
“Watch your tongue, you little prick, or you might get it cut off when we’re out of here.” The older seer’s voice hardens more, even as those black eyes meet his. “You wouldn’t dare speak to me that way, if your uncle was someone other than who he is. Maybe you should think about what kind of man that makes you, runt...”
“I’m not such a runt now,” he retorts back. “I’d caution you to remember that, too...”
The other laughs, looking up and down his body in disbelief. “You want to duel with me, little Nenz? I would gladly take that challenge...see if a good long trip to the hospital helps you to grow up a little. Or at the very least gives me a few weeks’ peace...”
“You’re on, you arrogant cocksucker. Any day...just give me the time and place...”
He is about to say more, when sound, and then light pull his eyes upwards, towards the trap door as it opens over them. He feels a sinking feeling in his gut, even before he sees her face glowing behind the lamplight.
“Ewald?” she whispers. She peers down through the hole in the ground, scanning faces to find his. “Ewald, is that really you down there?”
“No,” he says, glaring at Wreg when the other pings him insistently with his light. “Go away, woman. Go back to your farmer.”
“He is out with the soldiers now. They asked for him to come and help them with some of his equipment...to move things...bring them supplies...”
“You should not be telling us this,” he says angrily. “We are enemy soldiers, remember?”
She laughs, and the familiarity of it closes his throat.
“You are hardly in a position to do my husband harm,” she says.
“Go back to sleep, Frau...” he growls at her. He does not realize he is speaking German until then, or that she has been using the same.
Who is she? Wreg asks him in his head. How do you know her, runt?
He ignores the other seer, his attention focused on the woman in front of him. She looks so much the same it catches his breath, makes it hard for him to think clearly, much less pretend he does not know her.
Her face is slightly thinner, her cheekbones more prominent, but otherwise, it is the same face, and the same honey-colored eyes staring down at him, holding a kind of wonder as she looks at him, too.
He is still watching her warily when she pulls out a long kitchen knife.
“No...Kuchta...” he whispers fiercely as she approaches him. “Don’t! We can get away. It is all right...”
“So you do know me?” she smiles.
“Kuchta! This is serious! Leave me here...I don’t need your help...”
She gives him a puzzled smile, then bends down over and behind him, sliding the knife between his wrists and sawing at the heavy rope.
“Who says I am doing it for you?” she retorts, in the voice he remembers well. “Do you think I will miss my one and only opportunity to question the man who sent me away all those years ago? The boy who once said he was my friend?”
He glares up at her, gritting his teeth. “What will you tell your husband?”
“Absolutely nothing. There will be one less prisoner when they return. By then, they will likely be so drunk they will not notice.” At his raised eyebrow, she smiles, cutting through the last of the rope around his wrists. “...Their very first request was wine, Herr Gottschalk. And we are blessed with an abundance. I imagine my husband will be gone quite some time. He knows how to handle these swine...they pillage our stores regularly these days.”
When his hands come free, he rises to his feet, catching hold of her arms.
“Kuchta...go back upstairs.”
“Only if you will come with me.”
He stares at her, half out of his head with relief that she is alive, joy to see her, and fury at her for being so completely unreasonable.
“No. I won’t,” he says.
She folds her arms, looking up at him without changing expression. Despite her surprise in seeing him before, she seems undaunted by the differences in their sizes now.
“Then we will have to talk down here. Shall I start asking you questions now?”
“Kuchta...”
“You are a soldier now, Ewald? Why? What is this stupidity to you?” she says, staring up at him. She unfolds one arm, pointing at where Stami lies on the ground, his head bleeding. “What are you doing with that sack of shit, like he is your brother now?”
“It is complicated, Kuchta.”
“Complicated? That you pal around with your tormenters now? Explain to me just how complicated that is, Ewald...”
He looks at her, then at Stami’s face, and cannot help a curl in his lip.
“He won’t live out the war,” is all he says.
Stami starts to speak, but Wreg elbows him, hard, to keep him silent. He is staring between Nenzi and the woman, his black eyes wary. Nenzi takes this in, then turns back to the woman, feeling his jaw harden again.
“You have to go, Kuchta,” he says.
But she acts as if he hasn’t spoken.
“Shall I ask you the other question now?” she says pointedly. “The one about why you sent me away all those years ago? What the real reason was?”
He looks at Stami again, sees the death threat in the other’s eyes, and the way he stares at Kuchta in her dress. He won’t remember this though. He won’t remember any of it. Nenzi will make sure of that, no matter what he has to tell Wreg to convince him to go along.
“Ewald?” she says. “Are you coming? Or not?”
Seeing the stubborn look on her face, he thinks about pushing her. Then, on impulse, he doesn’t, grabbing her arm instead as he steers her towards the stairs.
“One hour,” he tells her. “We will talk. Then you will bring me back down here, and tie me up...”
Brother, what are you doing? Wreg asks him in his mind.
Piss off, he returns shortly. Getting laid...what the fuck do you think I’m doing? I’m sure you don’t mind, given that you’re sitting on the ground in your own shit, just like you wanted...
He closed off his mind before the other could answer, following her up the wooden stairs without looking back. But he feels a ripple of the other’s anger even through his shields, continues to feel him seething down in that dirt-floored room, even after Kuchta shut the double doors to the cellar and locked them with a thick chain.
“Why are you doing this, Kuchta?” he asks her, once they are inside the house.
They are upstairs and she is sitting on the bed, looking up at him with a half-smile on her face. He glares at her when the expression doesn’t change, looking around the small room in spite of himself, taking in the wood floors, the curtains on the windows.
“You are doing well for yourself,” he grunts finally. “Is he a good man, your husband?”
He turns to look at her, and she laughs, right before she gets to her feet. She envelops him in a hug before he understands what she intends, and he can only stand there, holding her back. After a moment, she separates herself from him, wiping her eyes. He sees her fingers holding tears and is frozen for a moment, unable to make himself speak.
He is still standing there, when she slaps him hard on the shoulder, just like she used to.
“You are enormous!” she laughs. “What the hell have you been eating?”
He smiles, he can’t help it. “Baby goats,” he says.
“Well stop it, you’re like a mountain.”
“I’m not so large.”
“You are! You are...” She holds her hand up, until it reaches the top of his head. “You are so tall, Ewald...how did you get so tall?”
“Nenzi,” he says, without thought. “My name is Nenzi now.”
“What kind of name is that?”
He hesitates, then shrugs, looking her directly in the eye.
“You know what kind,” he says.
She frowns at him a little, but it is a frown that is almost a smile. He realizes she is pleased with his words, if only because he told her the truth. He feels an odd rush of pride on her as she sits back on the bed, patting the mattress next to her with one hand.
“Sit! Talk to me! Tell me all about how you became this scary soldier...”
“No, Kuchta...” He shakes his head, feeling his frustration rise once more. “Put me back with the others! I did not send you here to get you shot by the fucking French...”
“They are my people now,” she says, indignant.
“Which is why you would be a traitor for helping me!” he returns angrily.
“Ewald...” Seeing his face, she smiles, amending, “...Nenzi. Come here. Please. I have not seen my friend in so long. Please, just let me talk to you. Please.”
Seeing the clear look in her eyes, the genuine affection in her light, he cannot refuse her. Sighing in frustration, as much at himself as at her, he walks over to her, and sits beside her.
“They cannot know how I know you...they do not know me, Kuchta.”
“The French soldiers? How would they?”
“No,” he says, shaking his head. “Not them. The ones with me. They know me differently...as someone else. Someone you would not like...”
She frowns at him, studying his eyes. “The foreigner down there...the big one, with the paint on his arms. He is like you, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“And he thinks you are someone else?”
He sighs, still drinking in her face in a kind of wonder. “Yes.”
“And why is that?” she says. Seeing him frown, she laughs, but there is a bitter edge to it. “I know...you cannot tell me. You have not changed at all, Ewald.” She clutches his hand impulsively, kissing his fingers. “And you are still with him, too...your uncle?”
He feels his jaw harden, right before he looks away. “Yes. You know I am.”
She hesitates a moment, then her voice grows more pointed.
“And you know of this being they talk about?” she says. “The one they call Syrimne? Syrimne d’Gaos? Is he with your uncle, too?”
He turns, staring at her. Feeling his heart pound in his chest, he can only look at her
for a moment, doubting his ears.
“Kuchta,” he says then. “I don’t know anything about that.”
She snorts. “Sure you don’t.” Shaking her head, she shoves at his shoulder again with her hand. “...Do you know, Ewald, you were always the most terrible liar? I’ve meant to tell you that for years, but I never had the heart to do it. You are positively the worst liar I know...”
“Kuchta...” he begins.
“Don’t. I know. You can’t talk about it.” She looks at him again, and he is shocked to see more of her tears. “Is he treating you better at least?”
He stares at her eyes, at a loss. “He treats me fine.”
“Sure he does,” she says, wiping her face. She gives a short laugh, but there is no humor in it. “By fine, I assume you mean he no longer beats you until you can’t walk...”
He reaches for her arms, tugging on them. “Stop, Kuchta. Stop. That is all over now. I’m not a child anymore...”
“No, but you are still his. I can see it on you. I can see it in your face.”
He frowns at this, but he doesn’t argue with her. He is trying to decide if he should push her, if he should just blank out her mind and free the others from the cellar, when she speaks up again, wiping her eyes with her fingers.
“Did you get married, Ewald? Like you said you would?”
He swallows, looking at her. Then he shakes his head.
“No,” he says.
“Why not?”
“She is not here,” he says. “My wife. She has not come yet.”
She laughs again at this, looking up at him. “What kind of wife is this?” she says. “An arranged marriage?”
He smiles at her attempt at humor, still worried at the grief he feels in her light, that seems to be emanating all around her.
“Something like that,” he says, shrugging a little.
“Something like that?” She tugs on his hair. “You need a haircut.”
He watches her distract herself with his hair, but he can feel the grief on her still.
“And you?” he says finally, smiling when she turns. “You are happy here? With your farmer?”
She smiles, and he is relieved that it is a real smile, one with warmth.
Allie's War Season Two Page 82
