Episode 59 · No One Laughed

He laid the boy down carefully at the edge of the black ground, his feet in the snow and his back toward the warmth. Then he stepped over the first veteran.

He grabbed the man with half an ear by his blanket and pulled.

The blanket came. The man did not. He rose onto one elbow and looked at him. The others woke and sat up around Leo, blocking his way back to the boy.

— Get out of here, boy, the man said, almost gently.

— Make room for him.

The first punch caught him in the mouth. He did not see it coming. He found himself on his knees in the warm earth, the taste of blood on his tongue. A kick caught him in the ribs and drove all the air out of him.

He curled up. A few more came, in his back, his shoulder, the back of his neck, with the laziness of men woken from sleep who want to get back to it.

Then they stopped.

Leo stayed curled up, his cheek pressed against the stone. It was warm. Not like an oven. Like a hand laid on your forehead.

— Enough, someone said. Leave him. He’s a child.

The veterans settled back down one by one. Leo lifted his face from the stone. He had ended up lying exactly between two of them, on a strip where no one was.

No one had driven him off.

He crawled back, took the miller’s son under the arms, pulled him onto the black earth and laid him down beside him, his back to the stone.

The veteran on the right shifted a few fingers’ width to the side without opening his eyes. Maybe in his sleep. Maybe not.

Toward daybreak the boy began to shake again. Leo almost cried for joy. Whoever shakes is still there.

Above him, the carved tree climbed toward a sky that was beginning to pale. From down there he could see that the cut branch had not been cut by time. It had been cut by a hand. Straight. Decisive. The way his father cut an apple branch so the tree would grow straight.

He put his fingers in the cut. The stone was warmer there than anywhere else. Nothing happened.

He sat with blood in his mouth until morning and understood that the war was not something waiting in the south after the ice melted. It was already here, with half an ear and a knife at its belt. And you did not win it. You paid for it.

At roll call, the sergeant saw his mouth and asked nothing.

— Leonatus, he called.

— Here.

No one laughed anymore.

❦

Krista drew until the pencil wore down to the wood.

Her phone was in a stranger’s pocket. What she had seen in the round room was not. She set the signs down in a spiral notebook, group by group, as they had stood on the walls, without knowing what any of them meant. Exact was the only thing she could still prove to herself.

Around three, her head went down on her arm.

She stood beneath a tree she had never seen and knew it was hers the way she knew her own handwriting. Gray outlines of plants stood around its roots. One had pale leaves, lit from inside along their veins, and it smelled faintly of wax.

A flat stone lay at its base. A name was cut into it.

Anselm.

No one stood beside the plant. Krista bent and touched a leaf.

— Leaf I —

For thirty-one years, Anselm had written what he was told. Every autumn, as the carts came in at the lower gate, he entered in the ledger what the stewards dictated.

That spring brought hunger. Brădet ate elm bark until May, and at the start of summer the miller climbed to the manor with the village tally. Forty notches. The lord asked for the autumn ledger. It said twenty-five, in Anselm’s hand.

The administrator stood beside the lord’s chair, his hands behind his back.

— His handwriting, he said. Anyone who knows it can tell.

Inside the belly of the first letter, where the loop closed, there was a stroke as thin as a hair. Anselm could see it from three paces away. No one else did. Pointing to it would only prove that he had known and written it anyway.

— It’s my handwriting, Anselm said.

They hanged him at the lower gate on a sunny morning. The last thing he thought of was the tiny line. That it would remain in the belly of the letter after him. That perhaps one day someone would look.

❦

Krista woke at four with her cheek on the notebook. The smell of wax was still in the room. There were no candles in her apartment.

Soles woke with the taste of iron in his mouth. His lip was whole. The taste remained, as after a dream in which you have bitten something.

Mina was asleep on his feet. Lucky lay in the bedroom doorway, watching him. When Soles sat up, his ribs reminded him of the day before. The tunnel. The warm stone. Tesa’s dry hands. The man who had stepped out of the wall the way you step out of water and said a single word.

Two.

He opened the nightstand drawer. The blade lay wrapped in its stiff leather, beside his phone charger and an old box of Mary’s buttons. He put his hand on it through the leather. It was cold. Only cold. And yet he thought of an apple branch cut straight, so the tree would grow the way it should.

He closed the drawer.

The phone vibrated. Maxim, sent just after five, from the room down the hall.

No one got past me. I know no one got past me. And yet someone did.

The spare room was empty. Soles followed the sound of a wrench into the yard. The hood was up. Maxim lay underneath on cardboard, only his legs showing.

— Came to see if I’ve hanged myself? came from under the truck.

— Came to see if you slept.

— I lay there. It’s almost the same.

Soles lowered himself onto a crate by the front wheel. His ribs let him sit only on the second try.

After a while Maxim came out on his back, pulling himself along with his heels. There was grease on his forehead and his eyes were red.

— I was there, he said. With the crowbar. With my back to the hole. I saw the road, the slope, the shed. I saw Varren’s cups on the footbridge and a sparrow that landed on them. And someone got past me.

— You didn’t see him because he couldn’t be seen.

— That’s worse, not better.

He rubbed his face with his palm and smeared the grease from his forehead down onto his cheek.

— After Kerr, I kept thinking I should have stayed closer. So this time I was there from the start. I watched the damn entrance. And it was still for nothing. If I’m no help even when I’m there, he said quietly, then what good am I?