Miroslav Penkov - Stork Mountain

“We’re going nowhere,” she said. “You don’t have to act so that the coward may seem less like a coward. That’s what you are, Orhan. A mouse-heart, like your father.”

At this, he slapped her, a backhand slap that sent her tumbling to the side. Her lip glistened in the light of the fire and hungrily she licked it. “Big man you are, taking a girl like she was a sheep for bribes. I bet that rifle of yours, I bet you don’t even know how to shoot it properly.”

Oh yeah? he said, and grabbed the Kalashnikov. Oh yeah, she said, and waited for him to spring up to his feet. I watched them, hypnotized — him on one side of the fire, her on the other, their faces bloody with flowing flame. “American,” she called, “wake up! Where is the bottle of rakia ?”

I pointed, not quite sure my finger was showing her the right direction. But all the same she found the bottle on the ground, and when she bent down to take it, she stumbled and fell. She dusted off her clothes, then picked up the bottle, in which some drink still remained.

“I’ll count ten paces,” she said. “One, two, ten. Then you shoot the bottle off my head. The real man you are. The brave.”

You think I won’t? he said. I think you can’t, she told him, and so he said, balance the bottle on your head and I will shoot it off, clean as a snowdrop. The safety of the rifle clicked, and while she was struggling to balance the bottle on her head, swaying this way and that, a deathly chill spread through my back and held me in its fist.

“The bottle is crooked,” she cried.

“Or are you afraid?”

Her laughter set my ears to buzzing. “Okay,” she yelped. “I’ll hold the bottle up. Like this. You shoot it off my hand.”

She held the rakia high, took tiny steps to counter her swaying; the soles of her shoes crunched against the sand and rock, the drink sloshed at the bottom of the bottle. Orhan jabbed the Kalashnikov against his shoulder and fixed his gaze through the sight.

“I bet you—” Elif began but didn’t finish. The rifle had expelled a single deafening bang that smashed the ruins, bounced back at us, then rolled off the cliffs and into the valley in waves of unfolding echo. The bottle was no longer in Elif’s hand. Her hand, however, was luckily still there. Spilled rakia glistened on her sweaty face and on the short locks of hair.

I called her, but she didn’t hear.

Anyone could be brave, she said, rubbing her eyes, when he was on the safe side of the barrel. Let’s see how he braved the death side. Oh, was that right? Orhan called. They’d come face-to-face now, and he shoved the Kalashnikov in her hands.

“I hold my canteen up and you shoot it. Five paces!”

“Ten,” she said.

“Make it fifteen!” He unlatched the canteen from his belt and held it up, like a conqueror toasting a victory. “American,” he barked, “she’s too drunk to count. Count fifteen paces for her.”

“American, don’t move!” she ordered. “I can. Alone.”

One, two, three. He held the canteen up while fifteen paces away through the night she stabbed the rifle against her shoulder. She swayed this way and that and I’m certain she would have shot him dead, if it weren’t for me stifling her in my embrace.

There was no Let me go! Get off of me! Instead, she closed her eyes serenely and pressed her cheek against my shoulder. A light burning breath fled her lips and we swayed together in the dark silence before her laugh. Next I looked, Orhan had snatched the Kalashnikov and locked the safety.

He too was laughing. “American, I owe you one.” From this day on, he said, he was forever bound to me. Whatever I asked of him, no matter how daring, he’d do it.

I swung to square him in the jaw, to drop him to the ground, to knock him out. Instead, I buried my nose in the dirt and they were laughing. The kind of hate I felt for him, for her, was new, unfelt before. And for a fleeting moment, I think I liked it.

“Hey now,” Elif was saying. “It’s all a joke. We do this every time.”

“For shame we do,” Orhan agreed, and took her in his arms. From my vantage point in the dirt, I watched her snuggle against his chest, the way she’d done with me, and couldn’t bear it. Back by the fire I curled up into a ball and prayed the heat of the flame would burn away my hate. I couldn’t reason this in so many words, but I knew it with my teeth and nails, and in my heels — for weeks my pining over Elif had inched me closer to an awful point of no return. But only tonight, among the sacrificial altars, the troughs for doctored wine, the walls of strongholds that were, for shame, no more, had I crossed this point and plunged myself, irrevocably, toward the bottom of the dried-up well.

When next I opened my eyes the fire had died and a thin red line bloodied the horizon. The rattle of the Kalashnikov shattered the air: Orhan — no, Elif — was shooting it into the dawn. Then in the valley below us, a louder rattle boomed. American, get up and try it!

I squeezed the trigger and the rifle wriggled, a biting snake in my arms. Rat-tat-tat. The echo answered, tat-tat-tat , a thousand clacking bills. We stood atop a ruined stronghold, and down below us in the valley a thousand white storks clacked their bills. A thousand wind turbines spun their propellers, in neat and endless rows.

“The storks speak with the gun,” Elif whispered in my ear, “as if the gun were one of them. Do it again,” she said. “Speak with the storks.”

Eastward, the sun was rising from the Black Sea. I pulled the trigger and spoke with the storks.

THE GODDESS LADA had reached as far north as she could and now her father, the god Perun, was reeling back her hair from his mountain. She knew his pull could not be stopped, but still she fought him. That day, while he was resting, she planted her heels deep into the soil to bid farewell the land she was departing. Darkness awaited inside her father’s cave, uneasy slumber at his electric feet. Farewell, my brothers, she told the stones of many sizes. Farewell, sweet, fragrant sisters. Thick, frosty moss tangled the stones; the flowers withered. And just when Lada was about to go, she saw through her tears a cloud on the horizon, a pall of black smoke creeping near, flashes of lightning boiling in its bowels. This was, she understood, a multitude of riders the like of which no Slavic god had seen before. And at their front, she saw a man whose head was shaven cleanly, a man who pointed a shiny saber as though at her. His madness took hold of Lada’s heart, like a worm in an apple. She tried to run and meet him, but how could she escape the shackles that weighed her down? She tugged, she chewed on the tresses, yet nothing helped. So then she wept in greater anguish still.

But suddenly the riders halted. The man who led them brought his horse her way. Thick rags of soot were falling from the sky now that the hooves no longer raised up dust and ash from pillage fires. In ashen rain the young man watched her, without a word.

“Are you a god?” she asked, and so he told her: at first he’d been a solitary rider, but then his lust to gallop on and on and pillage had sucked into its vortex a multitude of restless tribes. He was their leader now. Attila. But god? There was a single god — the great, vast sky whose life force was coursing through his veins.

She laughed. “When mortal men look me in the face they see a river.”

“I see a girl,” he said.

And so she begged him. “Take me with you. I want to ride free by your side.”

“So ride then.” He turned to leave, but didn’t move. She had expected this, of course.

That night the Huns camped by the river, their horde extending as far back as the human eye could stretch. The sky was merciful and opened up. Rain pounded down the cloud of ashes and blackened Lada’s hair. She knew her father would soon wake up and start his reeling.