Robert Masello - Blood and Ice

She brushed the mist from her hair with the back of one hand.

“You cannot bathe in blood every night,” she said, “and emerge the next morning unstained.”

Michael couldn't help but think of all the wars that had passed since her time, and all the soldiers who had struggled, with that same futility, to put the horrors behind them. Some things never changed.

Without looking at him, she abruptly said, “How long do you think I'm to be kept here?”

To dodge the question he said, “Where would you want to go?”

“Oh, that's simple enough. I want to go home, to Yorkshire. I know that no one in my family will be there, and that many, many things will have changed… but still, it can't all be gone, can it? The hills must still be there, and the trees and the streams. The old shops in the village will be gone, but new ones will have taken their place. The town square, the church, the train station, with its tearoom and the smell of hot scones and butter…”

Michael wondered, as she spoke, if any of it was left, if the hills hadn't been leveled for an apartment complex and the train station hadn't been shuttered for years.

“I just don't want to die in a place like this. I don't want to die in the ice.” Her head lowered, and her shoulders shivered at the thought.

Michael put out a hand and turned her gently toward him. “That won't happen,” he said. “I promise you.”

Tears were welling in her eyes. She looked up at him, desperate to believe.

“But how can you make such a promise?”

“I can,” he said, “and I will. I promise I won't leave here without you.”

“You're going?” she said, a note of alarm in her voice. “Where are you going?”

“Back home, to the United States.”

“When?”

He knew what she was afraid of-not just dying in the ice, but of succumbing to her need before she could see her old home again. Even now, he thought, she's probably resisting, with every ounce of her strength, a nearly irresistible urge.

“Soon,” he said, “soon,” and he gathered her into his arms. Beads of moisture still clung to her hair.

She came willingly, pressing her cheek against his chest. “You don't understand,” she said, softly, “and if you did, you would never make so rash a promise.”

But Michael knew that he would.

He was reminded of another promise he had made, on a mountainside in the Cascades. And just like that one, he meant to keep it, come hell or high water. “I won't leave you behind,” he swore.

December 26, 9:30 a.m.

Sinclair had made a studied assessment of his two jailers, trying to decide which one it would be wiser to move against.

While the fellow named Franklin was plainly the less intelligent of the two, he was also the more wary. Like a private in the army, he took his orders seriously and didn't like to think about them very much. He'd been told to stay clear of the prisoner, and he did. He even refused to engage in conversation, keeping his nose buried in one of those scandalous gazettes for the duration of each of his shifts.

The one named Lawson, on the other hand, was more intelligent, more sociable, and in general more curious. He was fascinated, Sinclair could see, by an unexpected visitor from another time and, despite the fact that he'd no doubt been given the same orders Franklin had, he thought nothing of defying them. When he came in to conduct his watch, Franklin couldn't leave fast enough, and Lawson positively settled in, stretching out his legs and leaning back against a crate for a nice long talk. Sinclair had noted that his boots looked very sturdy, with thick soles and heavy laces, and were in far better condition than his own riding boots, one of which had been torn by the sled dog.

Today, Lawson had brought with him a large book with many colored pictures in it. Sinclair could not see what it was, but he knew he would find out in good time. Lawson could not resist talking. After a few minutes, during which Sinclair silently waited him out, Lawson finally said, “Everything okay with you?”

Sinclair gave him a puzzled, but utterly benign, look.

“Oh, sorry. That just means: Is everything all right? You need me to call the doctor or anything?”

The doctor? Surely that would be the last request Sinclair would ever make. “No, no-not at all.” Sinclair gave him a forlorn smile. “It's the enforced idleness, that's all. Our friend Franklin provides little in the way of company.”

Why not flatter this fool?

“Oh, Franklin's a pretty good guy,” Lawson said. “He's just following orders.”

Sinclair chuckled. “If there's a swifter route to damnation than that, I'd like to know what it is.” He knew that such pronouncements only served to pique Lawson's interest. His fingers, he noted, drummed on the cover of the big book.

With a weary pro forma air, Sinclair asked about Eleanor and her welfare-no one ever told him anything of substance, but he asked, nonetheless-and received the usual vague reply; on this subject, even Lawson apparently knew enough to keep mum. But just what were they keeping from him? Sinclair wondered. Was she truly well? How could she be? How could she be satisfying the peculiar need that neither of them could ever confess to anyone? Sinclair did not know how much longer he could last himself. And he'd recently had the benefit of the slaughtered seal.

But Lawson eventually turned the topic, as Sinclair knew he would, to his own interests. His fascination with Sinclair's odyssey had become evident over their past few sessions together, and the purpose of that big book became clear, too. It was an atlas, and there were little colored pieces of paper attached to the edge of certain pages. It was to these pages that Lawson threw the book open in his lap.

“I've been trying to map out your journey,” he said, like some schoolboy swotting for an examination, “from Balaclava to Lisbon, and I think I've got most of it.”

The man was a born cartographer.

“But I got a little lost around Genoa. When you and Eleanor left, did you sail across the Ligurian Sea to Marseilles or take the overland route?”

Sinclair remembered every step of the journey quite well, even after all this time, but he pretended to be confused. In fact, they had traveled by coach-he recalled stopping at a public house in San Remo, not far from Genoa, where he had won a large sum at the game of telesina, a local variation on poker. Another player had accused him of cheating, and Sinclair had of course demanded satisfaction. The man had assumed he meant a duel, and though that was accomplished the same night-Sinclair ran him through with his cavalry saber-true satisfaction took a bit longer. When Sinclair had finished with him, he washed the blood from his face in a fragrant grove of lemon trees, before returning to Eleanor at the inn where they were staying.

“I'm not sure I recall the name of the town,” Sinclair said now, as if struggling, “but it was in Italy-it might have been San Remo. Can you find it there?”

He saw Lawson bend his head closer to the map and try to trace some route with his finger; he had one of those silly kerchiefs on his head, like some common seaman. It would only be a matter of time before Sinclair was able to persuade him to come closer and show him the map itself.

Then… he would shake off his chains and reclaim his stolen bride.

“Tomorrow,” Murphy repeated, leaning on the back of his desk chair. “The supply plane's coming tomorrow, at eight in the morning,” and he ran one hand nervously through his hair again. The other hand clutched a red marker, with which he had just circled the next day's date on the whiteboard mounted on the wall behind his desk. “And you're going back on it,” he said to Michael.