by Chuck Dixon
“There is not enough danger in the streets, my son marches to battle to die on a German bayonet.” Mme. Villeneuve sat with a lace handkerchief to her cheek, eyes numb with shock.
“You don’t know that Jeannot went with them,” Caroline said with little conviction.
“I am not a fool!” the widow proclaimed and waved her visitor from the front drawing room. She wished to be alone to embrace her grief without interference.
“Can they succeed?” Caroline asked Claude as the big man gently shut the doors to the room, leaving his mistress to her sorrow.
“It is doubtful, Madame,” he said solemnly. “The defeat and capture of the city are inevitable. The generals have tried to convince the populace of this with little result.”
“You are a resolute people.”
“We are a romantic people, Madame. And when romance is held too dear, it becomes foolishness.”
“But if this counterattack will fail, then why have the generals agreed to lead it?”
“Perhaps because it is the only way to convince us that we have lost,” Claude said and held the door to the kitchen open for Caroline and her bundle to enter.
“Excuse me for saying so, Claude, but for so formidable a man, you are quite the philosopher,” Caroline said.
“I am French.” Claude shrugged. “What you call philosophy, I call seeing the world for what it is.”
Anatole was within the kitchen. But rather than preparing their lunch he was pulling on his winter coat while Inès, the plump downstairs maid, stood weeping into the sleeve of her blouse.
“And where are you off to?” Claude demanded. “I will fight!” Anatole declared. He jammed a hat upon his head and snatched a broad-bladed chopping knife from a block.
Claude stepped close to him and batted the knife from the smaller man’s hand with a flick of his fingers.
“You will not,” Claude said, and lifted the man from the floor by the front of his coat. A button went flying across the room from where Claude’s big hands took twin fistfuls of the heavy cloth.
“You are needed here, you pompous little Breton,” Claude said with no malice. “The Madame needs the comforts of her home and staff, and you will not desert her, only to be killed by some Bavarian whoreson.”
“Only a coward refuses the clarion call.” Anatole sniffed. He looked ridiculous suspended above the tiles, feet swinging and making belligerent challenges to the giant who held him.
“What good are you to anyone dead?” Claude set him down. “Now, back to your stove and make us breakfast.”
Anatole slipped from his coat with the help of an openly blubbering Inès; only now her tears ran down a face transformed by joy. The little chef glared at Claude, who took a seat on a stool. But the expression on the man’s face was a front that did little to mask the relief in his eyes. He had made his display of courage for all to see, and thus, his manhood was secure.
Late that evening, either due to a widow’s prayers or pure, stupid chance, Jeannot did return.
He came to the door well past midnight. Claude answered to a feeble patter from outside and drew the bolts open to admit the boy. Jeannot was covered in drying mud from his boots to his collar. His right hand was bandaged in dirty rags encrusted with black blood. He was drawn and exhausted. The young man looked as though he had aged a decade in a single day.
Claude ushered the boy into the dining room and sat him down before pouring a tumbler of brandy. Jeannot gulped the draught greedily. Claude ordered Inès to rush upstairs and alert Madame, who came down the steps with the help of Corrine and their Canadian guest. She was not so overcome with relief to prevent her from ordering Inès to sweep up the clumps of muck left on the floor by her son’s passage. The widow sat in a chair close by her son and took his bandaged hand in hers.
“We came out of the fog within steps of their defenses at Gennevilliers,” Jeannot said from his seat at the head of the table. His mother sat by him holding his wounded hand, leaving his other free to hold the tumbler of brandy. He spoke huskily, drily, with no trace of emotion. His eyes looked pained as they focused inwardly while he told his tale.
“That surprised the swine. It really did. We swept over them, mobs of men rushing together to batter a single Prussian to the ground. There were children who joined us at the end. And women. I saw a woman fatter than Inès laughing like an asylum inmate as she drove a butcher knife into the face of a screaming soldier years younger than I. There was no rifle fire at first. It was man to man with bayonet and club. The trenches were packed with writhing men.”
He took a long swallow of the brandy, and Claude poured a new portion that reached the brim of the glass.
“I joined an attack on a gun position, a big twelve-pounder. I think our mad idea was to turn the gun and use it ourselves. Though I doubt one of us knew how to load or fire the damned thing. We slipped and slid up an icy earthworks hand over hand, climbing over one another to be the first.
That was when the rifles sounded. The Germans recovered from their shock soon enough and trained their guns on us in ranks of three. It was like the old way, like Bonaparte’s time. They stood in files loading and firing in terrible succession.”
A single tear coursed through the dried filth on Jeannot’s face.
“We died then in numbers. Our zeal to fight was washed away in blood. I ran. We all ran. We stumbled over the bodies of our own. Anything to escape that deadly noise. Somehow they came around our left. Our right? I cannot know. They came quietly, with steel bared. They laughed as they caught us on the points of their blades. A big bastard with mustaches like a hairbrush came at me, and I grabbed his bayonet in my hand.”
Jeannot held up the bandaged hand with a simpering sound.
“It was foolish, but I believe it saved my life. I yanked the blade to one side and shot the man in the throat with Father’s pistol. I stole it from your room a few nights ago, Mama. The Prussian fell atop me. This blood is his.” Jeannot touched fingers to his coat where it was stained as black as ink.
“You need tell us no more,” his mother pleaded.
“I lay beneath him. I felt his last breaths on my face. I lay still and listened to the dying all around me. I did not move as the sortie en masse was slaughtered to a man. I heard women scream and children make sounds like...like... There is no sound like that this side of Hell. I remained under my German, feeling the warmth leave his body, covered with his blood, and acted as one dead. When the sun had gone down, I crawled from beneath him... Crawled...”
Jeannot turned and met his mother’s eyes. His face was white, his skin like wax. Only his eyes, rimmed scarlet, betrayed the life inside the boy. He collapsed then, sobbing on her breast while she patted his head and cooed comforting words the rest could not hear until he fell into a deep slumber there.
“I took the liberty of adding a tincture of laudanum to that last portion of brandy, Madame,” Claude said as he lifted the unconscious boy from the widow’s arms.
“That was quite thoughtful, Claude,” she said with a smile that might have been incongruous considering the tale of horror her son had told them. But her boy was alive, and no one saw anything out of place in her joy.
Claude walked to the foot of the steps, carrying the boy like a child.
“May I help?” Caroline asked.
“Do you know of medicine?” the big man replied.
“I have had training,” she said. Dwayne had shown her some combat medical procedures about treating wounds of all kinds. She was no expert but knew the rudiments. And, being from the twenty-first century, she knew more basics about fighting infection than anyone alive in 1871. Hell, one mouthwash commercial on TV was worth more than a university education in this day and age.
With the help of Corrine and Inès, they stripped the boy and washed him. He was bruised along the ribs, and Claude checked for breaks while Caroline cut away the caked cloth tied around Jeannot’s hand. The wound was deep across the palm of the hand, but none of the f
ingers were threatened, though she could see the white of bone through a gash at the base of the thumb. She cleaned the hand with hot soapy water. She picked tiny remnants of cloth left from his glove out of the sticky crevice of the wound with tweezers.
“What are the strongest spirits you have in the house, Claude?” she asked.
He left the room and returned with a dark bulbous bottle.
“Rum. From Antigua. No one could stand it but the master,” he said and pulled the cork with his teeth.
He held a bowl under Jeannot’s hand while Caroline poured a liberal splash over the wound. The boy winced audibly but did not awaken.
“It should be sewn closed,” she said.
“I will do it if one of the maids will fetch the sewing box and thread the needle for me.” Claude smiled gently and held up his scarred sausage fingers. The man was absolutely a boxer in his day.
“There is a sewing kit in my room,” Caroline directed Corrine. There were several unused needles in her case. They would be far more sterile than whatever was customary for use in this house.
The wound cleaned, closed, and wrapped in fresh muslin, Jeannot was laid in the bed in a laundered nightshirt. Claude would stay with him through the night. The crisis was over, for now.
Down in the dining room, Mme. Villeneuve accepted Caroline’s prognosis with gratitude. The widow was dozy, and confessed that she had helped herself to a cocktail of brandy and laudanum. Caroline helped her up the steps to her room. The maids worked together to see their mistress to bed as swiftly as they could manage.
And so Madame Villeneuve did not update her journal for a second night, thus sparing them from the dark man with the head of ivory hair for one more day.
37
Strangers With Candy
Bat Jaffe never realized how exhausting talking could be.
She stood atop the earthworks of the Roman fort and addressed the clumps of freed slaves milling about the ruined camp. Her voice was hoarse from trying to explain that they were all free to go. No one was listening. She wasn’t even sure most of them could understand her. They weren’t running away as instructed or as expected. They were just poking around through the wreckage, helping themselves to whatever they found there. Others located the cook tent and dragged out baskets of food that they then gorged on. Bat called out to them, but they ignored her. A few were wandering off over the rough ground in the general direction of wherever they thought home lay. But even those few didn’t appear to be in a particular hurry.
“Give it a rest for a minute,” Lee said and wet a bandana from his CamelBak. The big Ranger was carrying the banner of the Twenty-third.
“You taking that with us?”
“Bet your ass. This is gonna look great in my media room.”
“What media room?”
“The one we’re going to have,” he said and handed her the dripping cloth.
“That almost sounds like a proposal,” she said and accepted the damp cloth, which she held to the back of her neck.
“Way cooler than a stupid ring,” Lee said and waggled the banner. The polished horse atop it caught the sunlight.
“We have to get them moving, Lee,” Bat said, pointing her chin down at the men clumped below them.
“Remember, there’s only one here that we’re interested in,” he said. “Some of them ran off. Maybe he was one of them. It’s ‘Jesus, save yourself’ from here on. Our job is done here.”
“Or maybe he died on the march or in the quarry. Maybe we came here for nothing.”
“That’s always a possibility.”
“Then what?” she asked.
“Then the world we go back to is going to be a lot different than the one we left.” He shrugged.
“If we get back. Mission failure would mean that the future changed from this point on, right? No Taubers. No time machine. No way back.”
“I try not to think about things like that,” Lee said. “What if things are different? What will they be like? Rhetorically.”
“Rhetorically?”
“Okay, theologically,” Bat said. “If they’re different, it’s because Jesus’s life was interrupted and the events he lived through were never recorded. What does that prove?”
“Maybe you and Chaz will be singing from the same hymn book.”
“I don’t think so, stupid. Jews recognize Christ as a philosopher, just like Buddha or Plato. He lived and was influential to history. Subtracting him from the historical record would be a major shake-up to the status quo even if you don’t believe.”
“Like if there was no Elvis.”
“Exactly.”
“Maybe that should be our next mission,” Lee said. “Go back and save the King.”
“No one could save Elvis,” Bat said, shaking her head sadly.
Down in the camp, Jimbo had lashed some tent cloth to a pair of poles to make a stretcher for Boats.
The wound on the SEAL’s leg was turning ugly. It was swelling around where the shaft pierced the flesh. The skin already felt warm. The arrow needed to be pulled, and the puncture wound cleaned end to end. Only there was no way to know if that might tear a vessel, leaving Boats to bleed out. The shaft pierced him at an angle, where it could have struck any number of major vessels, including his femoral artery. They just weren’t equipped for that kind of eventuality, and the nearest surgery was a couple of millennia away. All he could do was stabilize Boats with antibiotics and try to keep the big guy from going into a fever. They’d all had dozens of prophylactic injections for whatever bugs they might run across. There was no way of knowing what brand of filth that arrow carried in with it. The sailor was a tough son of a bitch and could last a few days more. It would get sketchy after that.
Carrying the SEAL was a whole different set of problems. It was a four-man job, minimum. While Jimbo had all the respect in the world for the former IDF wonder woman on the team, she just didn’t have the size to keep up over the long haul under a load like that. Boats was well over two hundred pounds, and they had a rough days-long slog back to the coast with fifty pounds of gear each over bad country. It wouldn’t work even if Dwayne was along and they had four Rangers on the job. They needed guns walking point and drag. They couldn’t just be humping Boats like it was a marathon event through a city park.
Jimbo looked around him at the slaves they had freed. Instead of putting distance between them and their captors, they were hanging around like it was a tailgate party. Two guys were fighting over a crock of wine while others cheered them on. The rest were either sitting idly on the ground or walking around listlessly. They all had lice. Their skin crawled with the critters. Some of the men were wasted physically, painfully malnourished and covered in sores. They looked like they’d never walk another step. There were plenty of others who still looked healthy enough, and even a few who had some muscle on them. They were all of them little guys, but they all looked as tough as old timber.
There were younger and healthier ones here, too. They had to be the recent captives from Nazareth. Among them was the man they came to save. Jimbo searched their faces, not sure of what he was looking for. He had gone to a Catholic elementary school on the reservation. The nuns had told him all about Jesus, but none of them knew what he looked like. And no one here looked like the bearded rock star in his catechism books.
He walked up to a few seated on the ground chewing mouthfuls from a loaf of bread they were sharing.
“How about a hand, dude?” Jimbo said and kicked at the foot of the biggest one.
The man looked up at him sullenly and went back to chewing.
“We freed your ass, bro. How about doing a little work as a thank you?” Jimbo said and kicked the man’s foot again.
The man spat a wad of bread at Jimbo. The Pima reached down, grabbed a fistful of the man’s hair, and yanked him upright. Jimbo planted a fist square in the man’s face, sending him flying to lie unmoving in the dust.
“Up off your asses!” Jimbo roared.
/> The group understood the timeless language of aggression. They stood up as one and let Jimbo shove them into a line for an informal inspection. He picked the six stoutest examples, guys with good feet and sturdy calves and all their fingers. Years of quarry work had taken its share of digits off a lot of these guys. He pushed them from the line toward the stretcher. He gestured for them to pick the man up. Most looked at him blinking. One of them, a guy with a wild thatch of dirty blond hair and skin burnt bronze, seemed to get it and was speaking rapidly to the others. The guy was covered in layers of work muscle and reminded Jimbo of a California surfer who’d been left in the dryer too long.
The rest got the idea from the surfer and lifted Boats off the ground as a team. Jimbo waved them to gently lower the SEAL. He dug in a pouch for the hard candies he always carried out of habit after Afghanistan. He unwrapped one and popped it into his mouth, then handed a few to his stretcher team. They sniffed them, then put them in their own mouths to chew the candies with the cellophane still on. Grins all around as the sweet fruit flavor melted in their teeth.
The surfer grinned broadly. His front teeth, uppers and lowers, were gone. He met Jimbo’s eyes and tapped his chest with his fingertips. The dude was wearing a legionnaire skirt and sword girdle he’d looted off a Roman corpse. A gladius in a scabbard hung from the belt. Jimbo noticed the scars on his forearms. They were old and showed as pink lines against his mahogany skin. This guy had seen action as a soldier.
“Bris,” the surfer said. Or maybe it was “Brus.”
“Bruce?” Jimbo pointed, and the man hesitated before nodding with enthusiasm.
“Jim,” the Pima said, touching his own chest.
“Zim,” Bruce said, brows knitted.
“Close enough.” Jimbo nodded and held out a hand.
Bruce looked at it quizzically. Jimbo took the surfer’s right wrist and drew it forward to take the hand in his own. Bruce smiled and laughed and pumped the Indian’s hand with enthusiasm.
