K Jeter - The Kingdom of Shadows

The face was the last. A ghost floated above Marte, bound to her as though locked in an unending kiss. Pavli reached up and stroked his fingertips across her cheeks and brow, his thumbs moving along the angle of her jaw. The silken mask gave way. The ghost with her dreaming face rose higher now, faint luminous smoke caught against the low stonework of the tunnel.

He sank down upon the floor, feeling his own tiredness well up inside him. The administering of the sacrament to her, the angel that shared his blood and heritage, had taken what had been left of his strength. He could barely keep himself sitting upright as he watched the silken image slowly dissipate and vanish in the darkness overhead.

The sound of the woman’s breathing brought his gaze back down to her. Her breast rose higher now; he could see the force of her heartbeat, the pulse strong at the sides of her neck.

“I told you,” mumbled Pavli, his heavy eyelids lowering. “I told you… I could save her…”

His head snapped erect, startled, as he felt his arm seized. His eyes opened wider, and he found himself gazing into the angel’s awakened face. She raised herself from the bench, her fingers still tight above his elbow, and looked searching into his eyes.

“Who are you?” Her words rang sharp and clear.

He shook his head. “No one… it’s not important…”

She let go of him, looking down at herself now. In wonderment, she touched her naked flesh, glowing as though the life within had become fire.

“Why?” Bitterness rose in her voice as she turned her gaze to him again. “Why did you bring me back here?”

Von Behren had found for her a soldier’s winter coat, stripped of all its military emblems; the thick woolen fabric came down nearly to her ankles. Marte sat bundled up at the edge of the bench, sipping the cup of tea, lukewarm from an insulated flask, that her director had also managed to beg from a family clustered together in the shelter. She supposed they were all eager to help, having recognized her when she had been carried in, and having seen how close to death she must have looked then. A few of the braver ones had satisfied their curiosity by working their way through the crowded space, shoulders hunched against the battering noise of the bombardment in the streets above their heads, and peering around the tunnel’s angle at her. She could even hear them whispering of the miracle that had occurred, that she had somehow come back to the living.

The young man she had found kneeling beside where she lay – hardly more than a boy, but with an old man’s eyes in his starved-looking face – now sat on the shelter’s dirt floor, his hands clasped around his knees. She had seen him fall asleep from sheer exhaustion, his head nodding forward, but in a few minutes he had snapped back awake. He kept watching her as though she might disappear at any moment. His eyes of two colors, one blue and the other golden-brown – the sight of those, so like the eyes of the baby she had held in her arms so long ago, had stabbed her to the heart – had told her he was of the same blood as herself, that strange, inward-turned community that her father had abandoned. The fact that Pavli – he had told her his name at last – had taken the skin of death from her proved that he knew the ancient Lazarene secrets.

The memory of what he had done, the image, like a fading dream, of a ghostlike form with her face, floating above her…

She turned those things over in her thoughts and set them aside; they held no importance for her. If that dream had become real, it was no different – and no more real – than anything else. In this chamber in the earth, a tomb, sitting in darkness with all these others who believed themselves to be alive, she listened to the explosions and distant cries of the meaningless war overhead.

“You should have let me die.” She raised her head from the dented metal cup in her hands. “That was what I wanted.”

Pavli’s brow creased. “Why?”

She kept her voice low, to avoid von Behren hearing her. He had gone with a couple of the grips, to climb up the shelter’s stairs and see what was happening above, as though they might hold out the palms of their hands and find that it had stopped raining, the sun breaking through remnants of storm clouds. That had been during a few minutes reprieve in the bombardment; the ground-shaking explosions had started up again, and von Behren might already be around the concealing angle of the tunnel, come back to see if she were still all right. She didn’t need his fussing attention now.

“Why shouldn’t I want to die?” She let him gaze into the emptiness behind her own eyes. “I was dead already. And it was easier that way.” The brief smile faded from her lips. “They just thought I was alive. All of them… von Behren and Joseph… and David… they believed it because they wanted to. But they were lying to themselves, as much as they lied to me. I knew better, though. I knew all along… even before Joseph told me my little boy was lost…”

“No -” Pavli raised his head, eyes widening. “That’s not true. He’s not lost. He’s here, in Berlin.”

A wave of disgust moved through her; she could have reached out and slapped him, sent him sprawling across the dirt, stood over him and screamed in anger. “And now you’ll lie to me as well.” She shook her head. “About things of which you know nothing…”

“I do know.” His voice trembled with fervor. “ The prince is here . The raven told me. Your son isn’t lost, he’s alive, he’s here in the city – I know it.”

The other’s sudden passion confused her. “What do you mean…”

“Can’t you sense it? Can’t you hear him, feel him, close to you?” He was pleading with her. “That was what the dead skin kept you from knowing. But I took that away from you. Now you can tell for yourself.” He put his fingertips against the side of her face. “Close your eyes. Then you’ll know.”

She did as he instructed. Another darkness, even deeper, folded around her. She could still hear Pavli’s voice.

“It’s different when that skin has been taken away… from your eyes, your ears… all your senses. You were blind and deaf; you were wrapped in your own slow dying. But now you can see everything. Hear everything.” His voice became a whisper. “Everything… from the least to the most important. Listen…”

The sounds were no louder, the breathing and murmuring voices inside the shelter, the artillery shells and bursts of rifle fire up above. But now she felt herself moving among them, as though she were stepping between the rows of huddled people and out into the open. Each word, each noise, from the collapse of a building wall to the hissing of a cinder extinguished in a wet gutter, came sharp and clear to her.

And farther. She could imagine herself floating beneath a sky reddened by fire, as though she were the ghost that had been liberated from her flesh and risen through the dead earth. She could see the streets of Berlin laid out beneath her, the ranks of burning buildings pulling a stormwind of heated air through the open doorways and jagged windows. The flames silhouetted the tanks breaking through the outer ring of the city’s defenses, the soldiers moving from one block of flats or office building to the next. The smell of fire and explosives, the sudden stink of a German bullet ripping open a Russian’s intestine, the cry as his hands clasped his gut, blood streaming between his fingers… the smell of sweat acrid with fear and adrenaline and hastily swigged alcohol, bowels loosened by terror. And subtle traces, mixed in with the rest – Marte could hear a fourteen-year-old boy agreeing to the orders given him by his Volkssturm commander, to hold his position no matter how many of his enemy came rushing toward him; she could tell that the boy was lying, that as soon as the fool of a commander’s back was turned, the boy was going to throw away his antiquated, useless rifle and the two bullets he’d been issued, tear the Hitler Jugend insignia off his jacket, and run and hide in the deepest hole he could find until the battle was over. He didn’t care if it was right beneath the corpse of some deserter who had been hung from a lamppost days ago. Coward, read the signs around the necks of those corpses. I Was Afraid to Fight for My Country. Those things didn’t matter now. Everyone was afraid; the only thing to do was to find a way to survive until the shelling and the bullets stopped.