“Take the chair,” I suggested, “if you want to sit.”
“I do want to sit, but I want to look out the window while I do it.” She dragged the chair in that direction. She didn’t need help—Calyxa was a sturdy girl, evidently accustomed to performing such tasks on her own hook. She sat with her head turned, so that she could watch the window while we talked, putting her neck in profile. “This is awkward,” she said.
“You can sit on a box if you’d prefer it.”
“I mean the conversation.”
“Well, that’s because we hardly know each other … though I’ve thought of you often since Easter.”
“Have you? Why me?”
“What do you mean?”
“Of all the women in the choir, what set you onto me? Most of the soldiers I’ve met are more interested in whores than choristers.”
“To be honest, I can’t say. You seemed—exceptional.” I could hardly speak for blushing.
“How childish. But never mind.” She scanned the street again. “I don’t see them … though in this murkiness it’s hard to tell.…”
“Who are you expecting?”
“Some men who mean to harm me.”
“In that case I guarantee you every protection in my power! Who are these villains?”
“My brothers,” she said.
We talked for most of an hour more, alone in that airless chamber. What she told me—with a frankness I found admirable, if surprising—was that her parents had died when she was just three years old, and that she had been raised by her brothers, Job and Utty (Uther) Blake, who were bush runners.*
Calyxa was not of much use to them, as a female, and her brothers had never been patient or kind toward her. Her only relief from their autocracy was a four-year period when Job and Utty were sent to prison, and she was installed in a charitable Church School in Quebec City, where she learned to read and write. The school was not a paradise, but she had thrived on three regular meals a day and had enjoyed at least some access to the world of learning. Her innate curiosity and liveliness had been engaged, and she had fought bitterly against her return to the custody of her paroled siblings.
But the law was stern, and she was eventually given back to them. To her horror, they no longer considered her a useless encumbrance, but had worked out a scheme by which she could be sold to a Montreal brothel, or, failing that, bartered to some other guerilla band in exchange for considerations.
That did not suit her plans, and she resolved to escape before the transaction could be consummated. Fortunately her brothers still thought of her as a child, at least in her mental and spiritual faculties, and assumed they could bully her into submission. They were wrong. Calyxa had grown up considerably during the time they languished in prison. She was not just clever enough to outwit them, she was wise enough to disguise herself as meek, and lull her captors into equanimity, until an opportunity for escape presented itself. When Job and Utty left her alone in the wilderness cabin from which they ran their autumn trap lines—trusting in the isolation of the place, and a few stern threats, to keep her docile in their absence—she recognized an opportunity and took it.
She packed up what little food was available, along with a compass she had stolen from Utty, and set out for Montreal. She spoke reluctantly of that grueling, lonely journey, and would only say that she had arrived in the city exhausted and starving. A few nights spent on the streets convinced her she needed to support herself in better style, and that was when she took up singing—at first on sidewalks, for pennies, and then in establishments such as the Thirsty Boot. She had learned singing from the clerics at the residential school, and she had a natural aptitude for the work.
Since then she had got along all right, and had fallen in with better company than Job and Utty Blake. But her escape from her brothers would never be complete as long as they lived, for they were angry at the loss they had suffered. In their eyes she had stolen herself from them; and they meant to have her back, and to punish her for the crime of self-theft.
Calyxa was determined not to let that happen. During the winter months there was little to fear, for the Blake brothers wintered on land held by the Dutch Governor of the Saguenay Region, poaching and drinking and hiring themselves to the Mitteleuropans as spies. But in summer the brothers became more ambitious, and often came into Montreal with furs to trade or money to gamble away. For three years now Calyxa had spent the summer months dreading the chance that her brothers would discover her whereabouts. She relied on friends, who were sympathetic to her cause, to keep their eyes and ears open; and so far, though the brothers had twice come to the city, they hadn’t found her, or heard anything about her, and she always had sufficient warning to keep herself out of their view.
To night, however, Calyxa had received the worst possible news. Job and Utty were back in town, and they had picked up hints of her presence and were actively hunting her. In fact—so Evangelica had heard from a friend—the Blakes had learned that she frequented the Thirsty Boot, and they were hastening this way even now.
“You ought to go home, then,” I said, “and hide. I’ll escort you, if that’s what you need.”
“That would be exactly the wrong thing to do. Job and Utty—especially Job, he’s the smart one—probably formed a plan to watch the tavern rather than barge inside to make trouble. They’re hunters, Adam Hazzard, and they know how to stalk prey even when the prey has got wind of them. It’s true—I hope it’s true—they don’t know where I live. But if I leave now there’s every chance they’ll follow me, and break in when there are no witnesses present.”
“You live alone, then?”
“I do.”
“No male companion right at the moment?”
“No, but what does that matter?”
“Well, it increases the risk. What will you do, if you can’t go home?”
“All I can do is hide here. Evangelica will warn me if Job and Utty come inside. Even then I should be all right, unless my brothers search the building. That’s why I wanted you here with me—specifically, that’s why I wanted your pistol here with me.”
“Are your brothers armed?”
It wasn’t legal for citizens to go about armed within city limits, and the majority adhered to the rule. Her brothers weren’t among that majority, Calyxa explained. Both were experienced pistol-fighters, and unabashed about advertising the number of men they had killed. That brought home to me the severity of her crisis, and I advised her to check the street once more, to make sure the brothers hadn’t crept up on us unannounced.
Enough time passed, however, that we eventually began to let down our guard; and I was admiring her clockspring hair by lamplight, and beginning to feel brave again, when she stood up from her chair at the window and said, “Oh, Hell!”*
“They’re coming?”
She nodded. I hurried to the window, and caught a glimpse of two burly men, one in a patched wool coat and one in what looked like a sailor’s pea-jacket, as they strode across the torch-lit street to the entrance of the Thirsty Boot directly below us.
“Put out the light!” Calyxa said. “But before you do, unlatch the window.”
“Why, what for?”
“In case we need a quick escape.”
“There’s nothing outside but the street, and that’s two stories down,” I said.
“Consider it a last resort,” she said.
We huddled in the darkened room, anticipating disaster. The heat was oppressive. I could smell the approaching storm—a heavy, salty odor—and I wasn’t very fresh myself, though I had bathed that very morning. Perhaps Calyxa was equally conscious of her own scent—I was aware of it, but it wasn’t offensive to me—to me she smelled steamy and utterly distracting—but I won’t dwell on the matter.
Her brothers kept themselves downstairs for a great length of time, perhaps drinking and evaluating the tavern. But they were here for a purpose, and it was not to be indefinitely postponed. We heard footsteps on t
he stairs … it was Evangelica, the friendly waitress, come in stealth to warn us.
She knocked very faintly at the door of the room. “They’re coming up!” she whispered. “Arnaud and the bartender threatened them, but the Blakes showed their pistols and everyone is cowed. They mean to search all the rooms in the building—I have to go back! Be prepared.”
“Is your weapon loaded, Adam Hazzard?” Calyxa asked in a firm voice.
I took it out and made sure it was ready to fire.
“Give it to me, then,” she said.
“Give it to you!”
“I don’t want to burden you with the work of killing my brothers.”
“It’s not a burden—I only hope it doesn’t become a necessity.”
“Not a burden for you, but a positive pleasure for me.” (She was pretending to be bloodthirsty in order to spare my feelings, and my heart melted a little at her generosity.) “Give me the gun,” she said.
“I won’t.”
“Well, then, will you shoot them? Shoot them dead? Do you promise to shoot them?”
“At the first hint of a threat—”
“The hint has been given! Adam, they’re experienced murderers! You must shoot them, as soon as you see their shadows—and shoot to kill, not to wound—or we’re already lost!”
“They can’t be as ferocious as all that.”
“Dear God! Give me the gun, I beg you.”
“No—if there must be bloodshed, I want it on my conscience, not yours.”
“Conscience!” She pronounced the word as if it were a lament. “A quel genre d’idiot j’ai affaire?* Maybe the window is the better option, if you won’t hand over the pistol …”
“Surely we needn’t jump to our doom!”
“I’m not suggesting we jump! The only danger is that we might fall. Quickly, Adam, I hear them on the stairs … take off your shoes!”
I obeyed without question, because she seemed to have some plan in mind, though I was not pleased that it involved the window. “Why am I taking off my shoes, though?”
“Leather doesn’t grip like flesh. Holster your pistol, to keep your hands available. Now follow me.”
I followed her as closely as I could through the darkened room, though not without stubbing my toe on a barrel-rim. Then she threw open the hinged window, admitting a gust of rain and a lightning-flash. The storm, which had threatened all day, was upon us. The rattle of thunder was continuous, and the wind howled mercilessly. I watched with disbelief as Calyxa put her upper body through the open window and squirmed until she was standing outside of it, her toes clasping the narrow sill. Then she grabbed a gable on the roof above and hauled herself up.
At last her pleasant face appeared again, upside down in the high end of the window frame. “Hurry, Adam! Take my hand.”
It was embarrassing to be assisted by a girl at such a time, but it would have been more embarrassing to be trapped by a Blake brother and shot, or to tumble to my death; so I took her hand, and put my bare feet on the rain-drenched sill, and tried not to think of the hard surface of the street below, or of the lightning that forked about the sky and fingered the lightning-rods of the city’s countless steeples.
“Now grasp the rim of the roof and pull yourself up!”
I doubted I could do so—I was convinced I could not—but a few breaths later I was lying beside Calyxa on the half-pipe ceramic tiles that capped the Thirsty Boot. We were inclined at a reckless angle, and in danger of sliding into the void. Rainwater sluiced over us freely. But we were, for this fraction of a moment, more or less safe—if that word can be stretched to cover the situation.
I turned to speak to Calyxa—her face was only inches from mine—but she put a finger to her lips and hushed me. “Your pistol?”
I took it from where I had secured it. It was a Porter & Earle military revolver of modern design, and I was almost certain it wouldn’t be badly affected by the weather.
“Point it,” she said.
“At what?”
“Between your feet!” Where the roof ended, she meant: at the eaves-gutters, where we had just lofted ourselves up. I obliged her whim, steadying my right hand by bracing it with my left, and pressing the tiles with my feet to keep from falling. As warm as the day had been, the rain was plummeting down from some glacial height of the atmosphere, and I had to clench my teeth to keep from shivering. “Probably it won’t occur to them to look for us here,” said Calyxa. “But if they do, you must shoot the first person who attempts to cross the margin of the roof. In other words, if you see a head, put a hole in it. Now be quiet!”
I had no difficulty keeping quiet, and in any case it was a noisy night. The rain had the velocity of artillery fire, and it burst upon the roof with a similar impact. The roofs of these Montreal City buildings were irregular—they didn’t bear the stamp of the work of the Secular Ancients, which is an exacting symmetry; rather, they had been built over the dismantled remnants of older buildings, with haphazard attention to detail and no coherent plan. Water gushed down labyrinthine flues and runways, cascaded into bricked cisterns and holding tanks, and ran across the tiles in glistening washes. We might have been inside a flooding river, for all the noise we could contribute to it.
But Calyxa was listening intently for sounds from inside the room we had recently left, below us. She cupped her ear in that direction, and I tried to listen as well, though without success—or with too much success, for I imagined I heard innumerable thumps and rattles, any one of which might have signaled the approach of an angry Blake Brother. Suddenly Calyxa stiffened, and her eyes went wide. “Be ready, Adam!” she said.
I put all my attention on the eaves of the roof, though my heart was beating a military tempo. Rainwater in my eyes gave the scene a liquid inconstancy. I saw the tile-ends, and the edge of the eaves-gutter, and the high building across Guy Street, and a section of the street far below. There was a sound that might have been a window swinging wide and bouncing on its hinge-stops. Calyxa inhaled fearfully, and I reminded myself to continue breathing.
Seconds passed. Rain fell; thunder cracked; lightning crazed the tumbled clouds.
Then there was motion at the gutter by my feet. Two sets of knuckles, left and right, gripped the eaves-trough. That was the Horizon of the Roof, as I suddenly thought of it; and now a hairy Moon began to rise.
The lunar object was a Blake Brother, investigating what he must have deduced was his sister’s escape route. Perhaps the brothers’ opinion of Calyxa’s mental and physical capabilities had improved since her last encounter with them. I did not doubt that this was one of her brothers, for there was a family resemblance about the hair: the hair on this unwelcome Rising Moon curled like Calyxa’s, but it was unkempt, and washed only by the gusty rain, and so oily that it gave back the lightning-flashes in an inky blue reflection. The hair was followed by a forehead even more uncannily lunar in its scarped and pitted aspect; then rose a pair of eyes, yellow-rimmed and threaded with blood. Those eyes met mine and narrowed, as I imagine the eyes of a savage cat narrow when it spies its next meal a-hoof.
“Fire!” shouted Calyxa.
I don’t know that I could have brought myself to do as she asked—to fire on an apparently unarmed man, even a hostile one, when he was in a position of such vulnerability—except that her voice startled me, and caused my finger to compress the trigger of the pistol. The result was instantaneous. The pistol kicked in my hand. The sound of the concussion joined the rattle of thunder. There was a flash of red and white (of bone and blood, I supposed) where the head of the Blake Brother had been; then a rending screech, and terrible thumps as the injured man was pulled back inside the window, presumably by his outraged sibling.
I was too dazed to think of what to do next—this wasn’t much like shooting Dutch uniforms across an earthworks—but Calyxa had retained all her presence of mind. She grabbed my free hand and yanked on it. “Now run!” she said.
She set an example for me, scrabbling up the sl
ope of the roof, her bare feet sliding back an inch for every two they gained. I lurched after her. Eventually we achieved the peak of the roof, where a series of crude chimneys leaned into one another like arthritic pickets on a ridge top. I glanced back at the eaves-gutters, and I saw a hand waving a pistol and shooting it blindly. A bullet clipped a chimney-brick just adjacent to my head, and Calyxa tugged me forward, so that we slid down the opposite angle of the roof—to our doom, I expected; but this slope conjoined another one next to it, so that we found ourselves in a sort of clay-tile riverbed, through which we splashed a few yards more. Then Calyxa leapt across a narrow gap between two buildings, ignoring the empty air below her, and again I followed her example. There was no bravery in this—I felt every raindrop as if it were a shot between the shoulder-blades.
I will not record all the arduous climbs, giddy descents, perilous slides, and painful near-disasters that befell us as we fled across the darkened roofs of Montreal City that stormy night. After a time we slowed, and began to move more cautiously. It did not seem that we were being followed—understandably, perhaps, for I had killed or severely wounded one of the Blake Brothers, and the other might not be willing to leave his wounded sibling and chase us about the tiled slopes of the city, especially in weather so severe that funnel-clouds were seen spinning down the St. Lawrence River. It’s enough to say that we arrived at last at an iron fire-escape more than a mile from the Thirsty Boot in some direction that was incalculable to me, and that when I descended to street level my bare feet left bloody prints on the rusty ladder rungs. “Do you live near here?” I asked Calyxa hopefully, once I had gathered breath enough to speak.
The rain had drenched her—every part of her was slicked or drooped by it except her hair, which, amazingly, kept its all curly depth. Her mannish shirt clung to her body in a way that might have been indelicate if I had allowed my attention to linger on it. She had laced her shoelaces together and carried her shoes looped around her neck like clumsy pendants. She put them back on her feet, bending over to tie them. I had no such option—my own boots had been abandoned at the tavern.
Julian Comstock Page 19
