We’d been soldiers together. Recruited to fight in the crusades against Islam, us kurucs, farmers and workers of Hungary. What did we know about swords? (As the son of a blacksmith I’d held a lot more swords than most. Against a wooden post I was deadly.) For that matter, what did we care about Islam?
None of us wanted to go. But the nobles’ men circled on their horses, with threats and harassment. It was hardly like any of us could get out of it. Andrzej was whipped; my father’s hand was broken in trying to stop them. After Istvan refused the first time, his wife, Erzsébet, was taken and he never saw her again.
“No,” Istvan said. He sighed heavily and stared at the grass between his legs.
Out in the field the noble dismounted and approached a stallion, whose bridle was held by a kuruc.
“Shouldn’t have armor on,” Istvan said, “not to break it.”
The horse breakers were probably all dead, I thought.
The noble tried a running leap but the horse deftly sidestepped and the momentum of the man took him to the ground. Andrzej chuckled appreciatively at the folly and we all sat up a bit straighter, feeling a maddening hunger inside us.
“We make a bet,” Istvan said. “For your finger.” He pointed into the field.
“Whether he rides?” I said.
“No. He does not ride.”
“You bet that he cannot ride, and I’m to bet that he can?” I sighed and stared down at my wretched-looking fingers. This was certainly my own doing. In a moment of marvel at our weird condition earlier I’d bet Istvan a finger, and upon having won it, I pulled it off with a satisfying pop, to our mutual horror. I’d held it in my hand, wondering what one ought to do with such a prize. He asked for it back, and I agreed with relief. He spent some time pushing it here and there on his knuckle in an attempt to reattach it. “No, no, no,” he’d said with each attempt, as if going through a checklist of possible locations it might fit. He kept the thing in his pocket now.
The honorable thing to do was to take the same bet.
With misgivings, I held up my pinky. “We bet on this one. We’ll give him until the sun reaches there.” I pointed. “If I win, I ask a favor concerning…” I didn’t finish. He knew what I asked. He considered for a moment and then nodded. I had gone on about it at length, and they had seen me tortuously scrawl out the letter to Anelie in my crude writing, asking after their opinions on phrasing until they’d tired of me. “We have a bet?”
“No,” he said and stared at me.
I tried to understand his objection. Had he not just suggested the bet? “By no, you mean actually to say yes?”
He nodded and I could see it pained him. Out of old habit we looked down at our hands as if preparing to shake, but neither of us really cared to. It seemed a habit that belonged to the living.
The knight was patiently attended to by his servants. In the air, I got a whiff of them. Meat. And though we were far, I suspected I knew who he was. My father and I often took special requests from the lords. A hundred candelabra, three hundred hooks for the hanging of what I wasn’t sure, chains of a certain style. Armor, weapons, and devices of torture; dark, evil things we could hardly refuse to make, or we risked having them applied to us.
General György Dózsa would have enjoyed watching the knight lose against the stallion. He was appointed to lead us kurucs in our new crusade against the Ottomans, but when they armed us with so little, and with no provisions, and harassed our families and took our lands, and we began to starve before we’d even left, György’s temper flamed hot, and his temper was to be feared. He raged against the nobles, asking for their help, telling them they were sending us to our death. Finally, in a speech to his army I hope to never forget, he suggested that perhaps the enemy was not Islam, but here in front of us. For all who heard, it would have been hard to argue otherwise if a grain of sense he had in him. And so we warred against our own country, for the farmer and the kitchen maid, for the horse trainer and the stone mason. We rose up nearly a hundred thousand strong. Granted, we were inexperienced, but we were successful at first. Under György’s leadership we took half of Hungary back.
We rose up together, and now some of us had risen up again. I wondered if György was among us. Revenge would have mattered greatly to him. Honestly – and I tried to push the images from my mind – I’m not sure there would have been enough left of him after what they did to him: forcing him naked onto a smoldering throne, crowning him with a molten crown, in his hands a burning scepter. When his flesh was cooked, the nobles brought in a few soldiers they’d starved, to eat of him while he still lived or else be cut to pieces themselves.
I spent a moment with my own hunger. Out afield, the nobleman’s brain made a few more poor decisions. We were patient. We had all the time on Earth.
I whispered “Yes” in Istvan’s direction and then pretended to stare deep into the field, as if the word had materialized out there.
“No!” Istvan said, and slammed his fist into the ground.
“Yes,” I whispered again and Andrzej gave a chuckle, watching our friend glare. With my brother’s young children I had been a terrible tease, they who had held on to such tiny and powerful opinions. While they slept, I had told them, the grass became the bearded face of a giant, the huts warts upon his face. And he roamed about the land eating stars from the sky. The youngest had lapsed into a comatose stare and the oldest screamed an ecstatic “No!” with such persuasion that I had to reassure my sister-in-law. It was best, now, not to think of them, my niece and nephew, but it was difficult not to.
“I have to go. I have to see Anelie,” I said, feeling in my chest a terrible pull. I stood and started toward the village, but Andrzej ran after me and caught hold of my arm and held me in place. I tried to jerk away but he was strong. We stared at each other and I could see he felt sorry for me. He pointed out into the field, and I saw our prey there and remembered and hung my head.
We settled back into the grass to watch. The knight fell from the horse again in a loud clatter and for a moment did not move. After another try he gave up and let one of his peasants continue on with the work. Istvan and I immediately fell into debate about what that meant for our bet.
Our conversation got heated. Me arguing my defense: he had time yet! Istvan growling No, and reaching for my finger. Before long we looked up to see we’d been noticed.
The knight mounted his own steed and began to trot toward us in a wary fashion, his bow at ready.
Per our plan, Istvan and Andrzej hid, and I walked toward the forest, glancing backwards to see him coming on. He was shouting at me to stop. The smell of the living grew strong as he approached, and I was hungry for it.
When he was 20 yards away, I loped. I felt a punch to my rear that sent me sprawling forward into the grass. I turned to rise but had trouble, my movement constricted by the arrow embedded in my right buttock. I was shot! The knight’s horse reared over the top of me and through his visor I saw the look of horror on the man’s face. He drew his sword and dismounted and raised it over his head. I turned aside just as it came down and scrabbled toward him, and then Istvan and Andrzej were on him, pulling him to the ground. He began to scream in a way we later tried to imitate, as if it were the funniest of jokes. There was so little time between screams that he exhausted all the air in his lungs and the screams piled on top of each other in a hoarse syncopation. Meanwhile, his horse bolted and I concerned myself with the arrow.
It caused no feeling. It seems absurd to say that I miss pain. I experienced more than enough of it in my life, especially at the end. But still: what clearer sign of living is pain? Now there was an arrow in my rear and it was an impediment to sitting, nothing more. I couldn’t loose it from the flesh, so I borrowed the knight’s sword and sawed the shaft short and joined the others.
They had removed his armor and were having a go at him. I stared at his face. “Is it him?” I said. But I couldn’t get either of their attention. They all looked like torturers in
the end, and there had been many.
We were quiet for a while after Istvan removed the skull cap. The peasants, so recently from the wrong side of the war themselves, did not come looking for their noble, whom they’d surely seen fall.
After a long while, Andrzej looked up from the handful of brain meat in his hand. “Gnar,” he uttered. It was profoundly said. I nodded and Istvan agreed No. Surveying what we’d done, the fallen knight before us. His skull opened. In our hands this. “Look at who we are!” Andrzej meant, and “Look at what we’ve done! Our enemy here slain, dressed full for battle.” And but “Oh God, what have we done?” And “How is this so enjoyable?”
“Nar,” I replied in kind, and smiled. A grotesque sight, I’m sure.
But after a few more moments, an unbidden and lovely image of Anelie came into my mind again, how I’d seen her once with her head on her pillow, the soft arc of her naked shoulder, the childhood scar along her calf that made me love her so. And I saw myself through her eyes: ravaged and bent over and gnawing on a dead body, and the horror of her witnessing my state caused me to leap up and fall backward into the grass. I shoved my face down into the weeds there and moaned. She would be repulsed by me. She would loathe what I’d become. I would starve myself. I would do anything.
But after some moments of this show I felt a hand on each of my ankles, and my friends pulled me back. Andrezj motioned to the knight’s leg and showed me there was a bit of brain they’d saved, considerate friends. And I was so hungry.
* * *
When we’d finished, Istvan pointed at my finger.
“Sorry, my friend,” I said. “We did not give him a chance to settle our bet.”
“No,” Istvan said, and gestured for it.
I turned to Andrzej, who had reclined into the grass and had a peaceful, dazed look in his eyes. “Andrzej, you must settle this.”
He waved lazily at us, indicating he was above such petty wagers. But we were insistent and camped over him, waiting for his decision. Finally, with his great furry fist he indicated to us how the knight had ridden after all, albeit on his own horse.
I suddenly had a memory of this man, my friend Andrzej. In battle he bore a great double-sided axe. A poor pig farmer transformed into a giant who reigned over the field. A man who, when asked, always used to be ready with a line of wisdom, and many had sought him out for it. When the king’s troops finally got the better of us, he did not run like the others but stood against them like a boulder in a stream and fought.
“A good point!” I said. “The knight rode!”
“No. That’s not what – no!” Istvan kicked the fallen knight’s booted foot. After a while, he thoughtfully replaced his own worn shoes with the knight’s boots and it seemed like such a good idea that Andrzej and I followed suit. At the end of it, our appearance had improved, though that’s not saying much. The knight, it should be said, looked a bit poorly, naked and eaten of, his armor scattered about him like the shell of an egg.
Then we were back to a sort of beginning, though much livened-up. What to do with ourselves? There were the colts to watch. There was Anelie to think on. There was a hunger we knew would rise again within us. We lay in the grass and stared deep into the blue sky.
The thoughts that tinkered away in my brain seemed some weird residue of the living that had leaked from my friends. A leftover artifact. I feared it was only a matter of time before these thoughts were replaced by some single track of my own, a bit of repetition my brain could not jar itself away from.
I had to go see Anelie.
What haunted her, surely, were her dead. It seemed only moments ago that we had kissed, she and I, in the wake of the destruction of everything. When we were the last survivors of our kin, my brother long dead, both of our families done in by the war. I’d stood as a soldier in her house before the last battle, and she’d taken me into her bed and we had cried there and more. After, when I fought, when I was captured and cut, when I saw György die, inside of me a fountain gushed. What haunts the dead is the living.
“Come on,” I said suddenly.
We walked over the hill, wary as we went to keep from view, and then down into the valley where the village lay.
When we got near town, we detoured by the cemetery. My grave was there and there was something in me that felt a little fondness for it. It was a comfort. We followed Andrzej until he stopped at another grave and went to his knees in front of it. It was György Dózsa’s. It was undisturbed still, and so we knew he was taking the long rest. Andrzej made a hollow sob-like sound and then went quiet. I plucked a handful of grass and leaned it against the humble stone. Istvan said “No.” Our bodies had been thrown in the river – General Dózsa’s too – but the villagers recovered them and gave us proper burials.
Before he died, I remember the calm in Dózsa’s eyes. How he spoke in a voice that did not show the pain. He told his tormentors, with us there to witness, that each rebellion they crushed would rise again, and again, until the nobles were driven from the land. At the time it seemed a far-fetched thing to say.
We would do right by him, even if we ate them one by one.
* * *
We waited in the cemetery until dark. In the pocket of the noble’s cloak I found a gold piece. A pocket! What an odd invention. Made for those who have need of carrying things about. I took to flipping the coin and Istvan and Andrzej stood looking on in stony amazement, all of us eager to see which side would come up. Tails, heads, heads, heads, heads, tails. Who decided these things?
For Anelie I would be like an angel, vengeful and terrible. Except, I thought, looking down again at my awful hands, very much different. I wanted to see her.
In town we ambled from shadow to shadow. The village was reduced, what with so many martyrs having floated in its river. What could I buy with a gold coin? The only thing I wanted was Anelie’s happiness. Our happiness together.
We hovered about outside her hut. It was quiet, but there was a dim light within. Through the small windowpane my brother had installed before the poverty, I saw her sitting. She stared toward me, which gave me a start. She could not see me for the reflection on the glass.
From tucked inside my clothes, against my dead skin, I pulled the letter I’d written her. If Istvan delivered it, he would give weight to it, as she had known him living too. I could not bear to have her see me. I unfolded it and stared at the scrawl. She could not read, but she would find someone who could, and in that there was a complication too. My hands shook as I held it, and then I felt the weight of a hand on each of my shoulders.
No, Istvan said softly. Andrzej shook his head and squeezed my shoulder, and then held out his hand for the note.
I clutched it fiercely and pushed them back and we scuffled there. I would not hunger for her, I would not! We were all we had left, each other. But they finally got through to me. She did not have me. I was not myself. They were right. It was a fantasy.
To give the letter up was a terrible pain, like nothing I remembered at my tormentor’s hands, a scooping out from inside me, and for a moment I had trouble standing. Andrzej put the letter in his own pocket. They were right, wise friends. The living do not wish to hear from the dead, not like this.
Instead I stared at her through the window, and Andrzej and Istvan came to the glass and looked in too. Her head was free of its scarf, and her hair pooled on her shoulders. I could see the enchanting outline of her bosom under her linen smock. In her hand she held my nephew’s cap. I moaned softly, unable to keep the sound within me. Andrzej put his big paw on my shoulder, and we stayed like that, looking in, me murmuring, until she finally must have heard something and looked toward us with alarm.
I hastily leaned the gold coin against the window sill, and then we bolted, loping through the streets. I was only vaguely aware of the sound that seemed to be issuing from me.
When we got back to the cemetery I ferociously clawed my way back into my own grave, Istvan standing over me saying “No, no.”
I could hear them about up there for some time as I lay down there in the dark, the earth pressed in comfortingly against me.
I had always believed that what I feared most about death was that I would not hear how the story ended. How my kin fared. But in the end, perhaps it is not worth knowing these things. Perhaps the best tales are only half-told. I wished my tale had ended when I’d fibbed to my niece and nephew, myself eaten up by a grass-faced giant. Or when Anelie had pulled me into her bedroom, resting her lips against my neck, already wet with her tears.
But after a long while of sorting myself out, I hungered more and was a little bored and decided to come out. They were glad to see me, in the dim light before dawn. Istvan, with a surprising quickness, snatched my left wrist and held it up for inspection. My ring finger was missing! I stared at my hand with horror. The clawing scrabble down to my grave had been hard work, and I suspected it had become dislodged somehow. I kicked around in the dirt looking for it, but found nothing but worms.
“No,” Istvan said, and by that it was quite obvious what he meant: “Yes! Yes, we are brothers in arms! We are united! Yes!” He held his hand up next to mine, and I heard Andrzej’s low chuckle in the background.
“All right,” I said, but the words didn’t sound right in my mouth. “Come on.”
It would be dawn soon. We turned and headed back toward the castle. When the sun came up, the colts would run in the field again, and we wanted to be there to watch.
Art by GMB Chomichuk
Nine
by Kima Jones
* * *
1902
Phoenix, Arizona
FRIDAY
Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History Page 21
