Episodul 58 · Warm Stone

That night, the garden was still above the forest. The tree had grown; the luminous plants had not multiplied.

Phenom looked up when Soles approached. His eyes followed Soles’s hand. Soles reached past the low leaves and touched his bare wrist.

Skin met skin. He snatched his fingers back.

Stand.

One word, rough and impatient. Soles had crouched without noticing. When he rose, Phenom watched his feet.

Leonatus stood beyond the narrow leaves, looking through him as before. Soles wanted to ask about the carved branch and the warm stone. The soldier did not turn.

Soles touched the narrow leaves. The next thing he knew was cold. He had not chosen a memory.

— I —

Winter caught them on the bank of a river with no name.

Maybe it had a name. Leo had not learned it. The sergeant with the sunburned face, whose face was now frostburned, had told them only that they would stay there until the ice melted, then move on south, where the war was that had not yet reached them. Until then, the war was the cold.

The camp spread over a slope beneath a bare hill, among ruins. No one knew whose they were. They were stones too large and too smooth for any hands in the region, set down without any sense: a wall that enclosed nothing, a step that climbed nowhere, a pillar lying on its side, one face polished like water. The men tied their horses to them and dried their foot wraps on them. No one looked at them longer than you look at a boulder.

Except for one.

It stood at the edge of the camp, sunk halfway into the side of the hill, like a door someone had buried and forgotten to dig out again. It was two men high and smooth as frozen water, and on it someone had carved a tree. The roots went down into the ground and were lost beneath the snow. The branches rose and spread at the top, out to the edges. Only one, on the left, stopped halfway, cut clean.

The stone was warm.

Leo had found that out in the second week, when snow settled everywhere except in a half circle in front of the tree. There the ground stayed black and soft. The veterans slept by it. Not all of them.

Seven or eight, the ones who had already been through other winters and other camps. They spread their blankets on the black ground, their backs against the stone, and slept like babies, while the rest of the camp shivered until daybreak and counted their toes in the morning.

— Whoever sleeps up against it, one of them had told him, a man with half an ear, one evening when Leo had stared too long, dreams of strangers’ deaths. You’re too young for strangers’ deaths. You’ve still got your own to make.

The men around the fire had laughed. Leo had laughed too, so as not to be the only one who didn’t.

The miller’s son had not laughed. He was coughing.

They had left together from the hill by the village, on the same morning, under the same flag. He was a year younger than Leo, though he had sworn at the recruitment table that he was older. The officer had seen his hands, white with flour, and signed without asking anything more. He was allowed to sign for anyone who could hold a spear.

His cough had started at the end of autumn. Now it did not stop. It came at night, from deep in his chest, with a wet sound, like a bellows with a hole in it. During the day he hid it.

At roll call he stood straight, his face white, his lips blue, and answered loudly to his name. At night he curled up next to Leo, under their two blankets laid one on top of the other, and shook so hard that Leo shook with him.

One night, after the frost had hardened the tent ropes, the miller’s son stopped shaking.

Leo woke because of the silence. He did not know what had woken him. Then he realized he could no longer hear the cough. He touched the boy’s cheek. The cheek was cold. Not cold like a man in the cold. Cold like a thing.

The boy opened his eyes when Leo shook him. He looked at him as if from the bottom of a well.

— I’m warm, he said.

Leo knew what that meant. He knew it from his grandfather, who had once found a shepherd in the snow and carried him to the village on his shoulders, and who had told the story at every table afterward: He said he was warm. When they say they’re warm, you have until morning. If you haven’t warmed them by then, you have nothing.

He got up. He lifted him too, blankets and all, and dragged him through the snow, between the tents, past the dead fires, to the edge of the camp, to the black half circle in front of the stone tree.

The veterans were asleep. Seven, in a row, their backs to the stone, under thick blankets. Between them there was not a hand’s width of room.

Leo stopped at the edge of the black ground. He could feel the warmth from there, on his face, like the mouth of an oven. The miller’s son hung from his arm, heavy, his head fallen on his chest.

— Make room, Leo said.

No one moved.

— Make room! he said louder. He’s sick.

The man with half an ear opened one eye. He weighed them both up. He closed the eye again.

— We’re all sick, he said. Go and sleep. Roll call in the morning.

— He’ll be dead by morning.

— Then he won’t need the room.

It was not a joke. The man had said something he knew and had said before, perhaps, to other boys, in other winters. He turned onto his side, facing the stone, and pulled the blanket over his good ear.

Leo stood there in the snow, with the boy hanging from his arm.

He knew what he should do. Go back to the tent. Rub the boy’s hands and feet until daybreak and pray, though he was not sure to whom. There were seven veterans. He was one, with a half-dead boy in his arms. The man with half an ear had hands like shovels and a knife at his belt, and Leo had seen what he had done with it to a mule driver who had once stolen his ration.

He was afraid.

He had not been afraid on the hill by the village, under the flag, with the smoke of their house rising straight from the chimney. He had not been afraid at camp, on the march, at the first roll call where the sergeant had called his name and no one laughed. Now he was. It was a cold fear that climbed up from the soles of his feet, and he did not know what to do with it.