Marina Dyachenko - The Scar

The incident ended in a boozer. Fox appointed himself supply officer, broke into the university’s wine cellar, and uncorked many ancient bottles of wine. They drank right there in the lecture hall; they drank and sang and reminisced about the Old-Eyed Fly. Fox roared with laughter as if he were rabid then started a game: Everyone without exception must relate their first sexual experience, and those who did not have one would be obliged to make up for their neglect the very next day. Already drunk voices heckled each other, interweaving hysterical laughter with outbursts. Egert watched this carousal from the round window that adjoined the lecture hall to the library, and the discordant sounds of a song wafted to his ears. “Oh, oh, oh! Do not speak, my dear, don’t say a word! Oh, my soul is fire, but the door is squeaking: it hasn’t been oiled.”

He turned back to Toria and entertained her for a while with anecdotes about Fox’s previous pranks, some of which he had seen, some of which he had only heard of, and several of which he thought up while he was telling her the stories. Listening to his deliberately cheerful chatter, Toria at first smiled palely and then to please him she even burst out laughing, though with obvious effort.

After midnight the cries and shouts in the Grand Auditorium ceased and Toria fell asleep. Sitting next to her for a while then carefully smoothing back her hair, Egert departed below.

The students were sleeping side by side, some on the benches, some on the tables, and some simply on the chilly stone floor. Fox was nowhere to be found; Egert realized this from the very first glance, and for some unknown reason his heart shrank into his chest.

Gaetan was not in their room, and his worn cloak was not hanging from the iron hook. Egert stood on the university steps for a long time, peering out into the murky night. Windows gleamed faintly in the courthouse, the executed doll on its circular pedestal weaved in the rain, and the Tower of Lash soared overhead, mute, sealed like a crypt, indifferent to the city dying at its feet.

Fox did not return in the morning. The fog that had thickened in the night did not disperse with the sun, but instead it congealed like jelly; even the wind got stuck in its clinging, damp wisps. The door of the dean’s study remained firmly shut, and Toria began roaming the stacks of the library as if she were lost, muttering responses to her own thoughts as she compulsively rubbed a velvety-smooth rag over the spines, slipcovers, and gilded edges of the books.

Egert did not tell her where he was going. He did not want to worry her.

The chill dampness and his own terror caused him to tremble as, his teeth clenched, he stepped out onto the deserted square. There were no merchants; there were no shoppers: there was only the deaf, muffled silence, the gray silhouettes of the houses, and the merciful fog that covered the city like a shroud covers the face of the deceased.

Egert soon realized that he would not find Fox. He encountered dead bodies along his path. Egert averted his eyes, but just the same his gaze found first a woman’s hand, stretched out convulsively, clinging onto a jewel; then hair spread out over the cobblestones; then the rakish boot of a guard, wet from the sagging droplets of fog and therefore gleaming as if it had just been polished for a parade. The smell of smoke mixed with the scent of decay. Egert walked on, but then he stopped, flinching, scenting the familiar aroma of a bitterish perfume in the still, dead air.

The Tower of Lash, having accomplished its dreadful business, continued to smoke slightly. Egert approached it, strangely impassive; by the entrance to the Tower a completely gray man in a laborer’s coveralls was flailing his fists against the stone masonry.

“Open up! Open up! Open up!”

Several apathetic people were crouched nearby on the pavement. A pretty woman in a nightcap that had slipped off her hair was absentmindedly stroking a dead boy lying in her lap.

“Open up!” spat the gray man. His knuckles were completely devoid of skin from punching at the stone. Beads of blood dropped down onto the pavement. Nearby a broken pickax wallowed in the dirt.

“We must pray,” someone whispered. “We must pray. Oh, Spirit of Lash…”

The gray man in the overalls pounded at the sealed door with a renewed frenzy. “Open up! Ah! Scum! Undertakers! Open up! You can’t hide! Open up!”

Egert turned and stumbled away.

Fox would not be found. He had gone missing; he had disappeared somewhere in this pestilent cauldron; no one could help; nothing would make it better; and Egert would die as well. At this thought the animal fear raged in his soul, but with his heart and his mind he understood clearly that the most important thing left to him in his shortened life was Toria. Her final days must not be darkened with horror and grief. Egert would not allow himself the luxury of dying first: only once he had made sure that nothing could ever threaten Toria again would he close his own eyes.

Egert saw a collapsed boy on the pavement in front of him, and he was about to make his way around it, keeping it as far away as possible, when the man moved, and Egert heard the faint scratching of iron against stone. A sword rested in the hand of the dying man; Egert could see beads of moisture on the costly sheath, on the heavy monogrammed hilt, on the baldric decorated with semiprecious stones. Then he shifted his gaze to the face of the man lying in the pavement.

Karver said nothing. His chest was rising rapidly, trying to suck in the wet air; his lips were parched and his eyelids were swollen. One hand, clad in a thin glove, clawed at the stones of the pavement, while the other squeezed the handle of his sword as if the weapon could defend its master even from the Plague. Karver stared at Egert, unwilling to move his eyes away.

The plaintive whickering of a horse, muted by the fog, could be heard in the distance.

Karver gasped fitfully. His lips jerked and Egert heard, as quietly as the rustle of falling sand, “Egert…”

Egert said nothing because there was nothing to say.

“Egert … Kavarren … What is happening in Kavarren right now?”

Such a keen, imploring note slithered through Karver’s voice that Egert momentarily remembered that shy, thin-lipped boy who had been the friend of his childhood.

“This … this death … will it reach Kavarren?”

“Of course not,” Egert said with certainty. “It’s too far. And they will have set up a quarantine, and patrols.…”

Karver breathed deeply; it seemed he was relieved. He threw back his head and shaded his eyes with his hand. He whispered with a half smile, “Sand … Den, tracks … Cold … water … They laughed.…”

Egert was silent, taking these incoherent words for raving.

Karver did not tear his gaze away; it was an oddly vacant gaze that seeped out from under his heavy eyelids. “Sand … The Kava river … You remember?”

For a second Egert saw a sun-drenched bank, white on yellow like sponge cake covered with icing, green isles of grass, a group of boys, raising fountains of spray up to the heavens.…

“You always … threw sand in my eyes … remember?”

He tried as hard as he could to summon such a recollection, but there was only the wet, shiny pavement before his eyes. Could it have been so? Yes, it could. Karver had never complained; he had submissively washed all the sand from his inflamed eyes.

“I didn’t mean to,” Egert said for some reason.

“Yes, you did,” Karver objected quietly.

They were silent for a while. The fog did not wish to disperse, and smoke and decay and death approached from every side.

“Kavarren,” whispered Karver almost inaudibly.

“Nothing will happen to it,” Egert replied.