Gene Wolfe - The Land Across

“Not unless you want to,” I told her. “You can wait here on the boat.”

“Then you do not come….” Martya’s voice was so low I could scarcely hear her. “I will think he has fallen. Somewhere he lie with the broken legs. Perhaps he scream, or lie quiet with the strike of the head. I must come to help. I come, and we are seen no more.”

I said, “I don’t think it will be like that.”

“It will not. I will cut the rope and go fast away. You will see. No! You will not see, because I wait until you are out of sight.”

“Can you sail?”

“Yes! I am the fine sailor. I do not speak of this because I wish to sun myself.”

I dropped the sail. “In that case you’ll have an easy time of it. Only if you just let her drift, you’ll go anyplace the wind takes you, and you could spend tonight out here on the lake. If you try to sail but don’t know how, you’ll probably capsize and drown.”

She did not say a thing to that.

“An American boat would have life vests stowed somewhere. This one doesn’t. I looked.”

“I will not worry for you, and you have not to worry for me.”

“Good here,” I told her, and put the tiller over. Ten minutes later I had our little boat moored to a tree.

The edge of the wood was choked with brush. I pushed through it. As the hemlocks got bigger and the sunlight faded, the brush turned to ferns and moss. The wall of the castle (which I got to pretty soon) was damp gray stone so dark it looked black, big stones only roughly squared but fitted together so well that the placing of each, trying one stone then another, must have taken twenty or thirty men I do not know how many years of patient work. There were no windows, and no doors I could find. I walked along the wall, hoping to find some kind of gate.

A stretch of fallen wall fixed that. Whether it had been undermined by besiegers or just fallen because it was old, I had no way of telling. Whichever it was, the big stones had been laid low, and I climbed over them feeling like I ought to have had a sword and worn a knight-shirt of chain mail.

I thought I was going to see a courtyard, but there was none. Instead I saw empty rooms that had been open to the wind and weather for five or six hundred years. I got into one of the biggest and from it went into a bunch of others, each one darker than the last. In there, pretty well lost in the dark, a stair with high narrow steps went up to the next floor.

I went up and found another stair, one you could see only as a darker area on an uneven floor that was already plenty dark. This one went down, hundreds of worn, broken steps that got slippery with water if you went down far enough. That was enough for me.

“Martya was right,” I said out loud. “She’d hate this place.” Echoes were the only answer I got.

I had thought there was nobody on the island but me, but when I left I found a man in black sitting on one of the tumbled stones as if he were waiting for me. I spoke to him in German until I saw he did not understand it. He got up. I am tall, but he was a quite a bit taller than I am, NBA tall. When he talked it was in a language that was not like Martya’s, one I could not even recognize. Pretty soon he saw I did not understand, and so we talked with signs.

He came here to think, or it seemed to me that was what he said. Maybe he meant he was mourning. His black clothes would have been just right for a funeral. He knew the ruined castle well. He had been in every part of it and would show me around, although a lot was dangerous. (He pretended he was falling.)

The shadows had gotten long, and I was anxious to get away. I tried to say that I had to go, that somebody was waiting for me, but that I hoped to come back later to take pictures.

He said he would rather I not take his, and I promised I would not. I would only photograph the castle. That was what we said by signs, or at least I think it was.

The boat was still tied up where I had left it, which to tell you the truth did not surprise me a whole lot. I thanked Martya for not sailing away.

She sat up. “I could not find the knife. I looked and looked but you have take him with you. It was a bad place you went?”

“An old place,” I said, “and I doubt that it had running water.”

“When it rain.” She giggled. “What you think of me? I am red a lot?”

“You are, and if I were you, I’d go into the cabin and put on your clothes.”

“We go back? Go home?” She smiled.

“Yes, I think we’d better. We have six fish, but they won’t live long with a string through their gills.”

“First we go in here, where you tire me.”

I shook my head. “We’d have to lie on the floor. Try me tomorrow morning.”

“You mean!” She stuck her lip out.

“It’s all this German,” I said. “It has that effect on Americans. Now get ready to get mad, because I want to sail around the island before we go.”

“What is use of this? We must go into wind. Such a boat cannot do this.”

“We’ll never sail straight into it,” I told her. “Stay down off that roof and you’ll see. If I can buy a decent camera here without breaking the bank, I want to take pictures of Vlad’s castle. One I’ll certainly want will be a picture of the whole island taken from a boat, with the castle showing as plainly as I can get it through those damn trees.”

We made our circuit, during which I found two good angles from which to shoot the castle, and sailed away.

There is a lot more I could tell here, but it is pretty ordinary so I am going to skip it. After that I lived at Kleon’s for a couple of weeks. He did not like that or me. Martya did, maybe too much. Eight or ten times we waited until he was asleep and went out to the clubs to dance and drink and listen to lousy rock. There are only three clubs in Puraustays, and I never did decide which one was the worst. They were all cheap. They all watered the drinks, and all of them would push you around, or try to, if you complained. Days she showed me around the city or I searched the Willows, and three or four times we went to the beach.

Kleon kept getting worse if you know what I mean. I think a big part of it was that nobody came to see if I was still at his house. Then one evening Martya and I were talking and I was watching her peel vegetables for supper when someone began rattling the front door. I told her I would get it, and I did. I had just long enough to recognize Kleon and see he was drunk before he knocked me down.

For a moment or two I must have been dazed. When I realized what was going on he was kicking me, kicking as hard as he could but not always effectively. Somehow I managed to roll away from the kicks and get back on my feet.

For a few seconds we fought—or to cut the crap, I tried to fight Kleon while Kleon fought me. Then I was down again, and Martya was clinging to Kleon and begging. I could tell from her tone that it was begging, and I thought she was begging him not to kick me again. She may really have been begging him to forgive her and swearing I had forced her mornings, which was when we made love. That is a pretty good bet.

Whatever it was she said, it worked. They went off together to their bedroom. I limped out the open door and down the little path to the street with no ideas beyond putting as much distance as I could between Kleon and me.

The expression of the first woman I passed in the street told me I ought to get my bruised and bleeding face out of sight. At first I could think of no place where I could hide but the Willows. When it finally occurred to me that I could go to a hospital, I began asking where I could find one. Most of the people I stopped could speak no German—or anyhow pretended they could speak none. One lady gave me directions that left me completely lost.