Coronets and Steel (6 page)

I was in a river valley of some kind. Squinting upward, I spotted the sun glaring through a whitish haze low over the horizon.

Morning. East, that way. Wait. What if it’s sunset? I could have slept through an entire day without knowing it.

But there was a look of morning to the dew glistening on the weeds and grasses around me, and to the butterflies and bees moving about their day’s business.

The agenda: one, finding some sort of civilization and getting the authorities to put me in touch with a U.S. Embassy; two, getting something to eat.

Seemed easy enough.

Then the grind of an engine and the crunch of gravel startled me. A vehicle! Should I—no, wait. I’d been kidnapped. It seemed unlikely that the Evil Alec and his bearded minion could be pursuing me—but then I would’ve thought it unlikely to go out for a drink and wake up on a train to God knows where.

I scrambled off the road and flung myself and my suitcase behind a shrub. Half a minute later an ancient, spectacularly rusted and decrepit pickup truck rattled by, with fifteen or twenty chattering guys squeezed bouncing and jouncing onto the back. It disappeared down the road, kicking up gravel and dust and spewing out enough diesel exhaust for five buses.

I coughed, waving at the blue cloud, my empty stomach lurching in protest. Those guys were probably workers on their way to the daily job—expected if it was morning. But I’d woken up on a train, when I should be buying my ticket to London.

“That does it. Never so much as mention Ariosto in public again,” I announced to the air. Somehow talking out loud to myself was comforting.

A town lay on the other side of the river valley—I made out a church spire and the golden-walled buildings so common in this region—but (being a Los Angeles native) I was certain I’d find what I wanted long before I had to walk that far.

I picked up my case and started hiking through the adjacent field so I wouldn’t have to worry about the road.

When I first left for Europe, I’d been proud of my careful packing. Thus far, my suitcase had been easy to roll from station to hotel, hotel to station.

As I trudged across the rough field, the suitcase’s weight seemed to increase by increments of ten pounds. Shifting it from hand to hand, I passed vista after vista of pretty scenery—rocks, fields, short tree-shaded cliffs, small flocks of sheep—and no houses or people.

The sun shone squarely on top of my head when I stumbled over a rock and sprawled heavily in the tall grass.

I groaned, rolling over and shading my eyes against the noon sun. Could have been an LA sky: bright blue except for blotchy clouds moving in grand unison—

Patchy clouds. At home, those usually preceded rain.

“Oh, great.” I added some speculation about the genealogy and probable postmortem fates of blue-eyed Alec and his Tyrolean friend.

That felt good, but didn’t do squat for fixing my situation. So I sat up. My head thrummed sharply, no longer from drugs and wine but from thirst and hunger. I scratched irritably at my legs and picked the worst of the stickers from the hems of my jeans. Then I got to my feet again, wincing as I tried to swallow. My tongue felt like a gym sock that had successfully evaded the laundry for the entire championship season.

Where?

A line of trees grew along the edge of the hill below me. Hadn’t I read in some book about finding streams near trees?

I opened my hands. On each palm a double line of new and angry blisters stung painfully. My suitcase felt like someone had inserted a dozen anvils into it.

The air was too warm and humid for me to take the clothes out and carry them, or wear them, so the last alternative was to hide the suitcase and come back for it. The sun was directly overhead so I was unsure of my direction, but to my right I noticed a cliff with an odd granite pattern topped by two distinctive scrub pines.

I fixed the landmark in my mind, pushed my suitcase under a bush with yellow flowers, oriented myself in relation to that cliff, and started off downslope at a much faster pace.

The trees grew alongside a stream trickling over mossy rocks. Stumbling toward it, I thought
typhoid, dysentery,
and my lips stayed resolutely closed as I dropped to my knees, put my hands down in the cold rush, and splashed my hot face, thinking with intense regret of that second Evian bottle left on the shelf back in the train compartment.

Two small birds chattered shrilly in protest, shot out of a low shrub, and zipped into the sky.

My gaze dropped back to the water longingly, my modern hygienic worries wavering until I noticed things floating along the top of the water. Nothing overtly nasty. Grass, leaves, pieces of bark, bits of sheep wool. With my luck, those sheep I’d seen back upstream used this water for a bathtub and a toilet as well as a drinking fountain. Ew.

Pick a direction, I thought, as my skull pounded rhythmically. Any direction. All roads lead to hell.

On the other side of the stream stretched a wide field, a circle of low farm buildings in the center. The fields surrounding the buildings had been plowed under and neat rows of crops grew. My giddiness grew, light shimmering over the bobbing backs of workers in the field.

They could have been medieval, or workers from the Thirty Years’ War, ears wary for the distant thunder of armies riding heedless across their fields. No matter whose side they were on, armies were always bad news for the farmers as well as their livestock and crops.

As I neared, the light coruscated like heat waves. Was that a tractor? No, a hay stack.

My isolation broke when the workers straightened up to stare. The men wore homemade work clothes; the women long, dull-colored dresses, their hair hidden under kerchiefs. I felt as if I’d fallen into a time machine and back a century.

I licked my dry lips before attempting a polite smile. A couple of younger men nudged each other and exchanged comments in a guttural tongue, then grinned at me. Two of the women, one young and one old, stared back at me, radiating stony disapproval.

I consciously straightened my backbone as I met the eyes of the oldest woman. Overhead, a flock of large brown birds squawked by. The woman’s brown, creased face did not change. I pointed to my mouth and croaked, “Water? Wasser? Eau?”

She flicked her eyes to the younger woman; as if they communicated by telepathy, the younger one nodded shortly to me and beckoned for me to follow.

“Do you speak German?” I asked in that tongue as we started across the fields.

Her tightly compressed lips didn’t move as she gave her head a shake. She seemed to be about my age. Her hair was bound under a kerchief, and she wore an old, coarse apron over her dark blouse and skirt. A crucifix lay on her breast, swinging with her long strides.

She did not look at me until we neared the low, ramshackle buildings. We walked into an unfenced barnyard, and there was a pump with its own roof.

On a shelf above the water pump sat a wooden bucket with a ladle in it. She lifted the bucket down. It was filled with water. She dipped the ladle and held it out to me.

It was warm and tasted slightly flat, with a seasoning of wood. I sucked it up greedily. When I handed the ladle back her face had changed, and she said something in a language I did not know. When I shrugged, she dipped the ladle and helped herself to a slug.

“Thanks,” I said, and repeated it in German.

“You are real,” she said in a Germanic-sounding dialect. But as she said it, a shaft of sun lanced down, and for an eye blink I could see right through her.

Thoroughly unsettled, I started on my way again; her footsteps faded as she strode back toward the fields.

Another hour or two along, the countryside began to roughen. Steeper inclines and larger rocks slowed me down, but there were more trees to shadow me intermittently from the white glare of the midday sun.

After toiling with increasing labor and decreasing speed, when I finally blundered onto a road, I stayed on it. The sky was hidden by clouds. I had long since lost sight of my suitcase-cliff, but I did try to memorize all the subsequent twists and turns of the road. I was too tired to care about cars, and I had had it with foraging through fields.

The road wound upward at an ever steeper incline until it narrowed as it entered a village perched on the side of a forested slope. Scenic as all get-out, but my feet were not appreciating the wild, Brontëian heights. The buildings were old, low, made of stone, with small windows and thick walls covered with a plaster painted that golden color so common in the south. They had to be centuries old—most were crumbling and mossy. The single street was cobbled only from about five hundred yards before the village started until the same distance past the last house.

The white glare had diminished somewhat, but the humidity remained. I squinted against the headache that blurred my vision. No signs evident, either on the street or on the houses. No people, either. My ankles, still sore from the impact of jumping off the train, jarred with every uneven step on those cobblestones. But I scarcely noticed. I was too creeped out by the sensation of being watched from behind those dark, blank windows.

In the last, low, old building, a swarm of flies circled lazily in an open door. I took a few steps toward it. Nothing was visible from outside. The thick air smelled of unrefrigerated meat. From within came sounds—the scratch of a wooden chair on a flagstone floor, the clank of something metallic being set on wood.

Someone was in there, looking out at me. And not in welcome, or wouldn’t they call something to me? Instinctive fear—a woman alone, no ID, no help in sight—prompted me to back away and continue on. Two more small houses, a sharp right turn—and I was out of the village. I paused for a fast scan: no street lights or electrical wires.

All right. Maybe I’d be better off finding a place that had upgraded their communications tech to at least the level of 1900.

I trekked about a mile along the road, which had narrowed to a single lane. A steep, tree-shadowed cliff rose sharply to my left, an equally sharp hillside slanted below toward an unseen stream tumbling away. Gradually I became aware of the rustle of leaves rising above the hissing roar of the unseen stream below. The high tree branches overhead tossed in a rising wind that I did not feel around me. The branches cast no shadow, and in the distance thunder muttered, dying away to a low rumble.

A bluish flicker gave me a nanosecond of warning before the skies opened on my head with a world-shaking thunderclap. I made an abrupt about-face and started marching back, opening my mouth to get at least some good out of the drenching downpour.

Maybe I was better off risking the village. Except . . . how far would I get with no money? Sorely regretting the magic talisman of cash, I won’t go so far as to say I felt naked, but you get the idea.

Well, I was rounding the sharp corner on the outskirts of the village when the raindrops ahead lit up in sparkling beams about four feet from the ground: car lights.

My discomforts had driven The Enemy out of my mind for the greater part of the day, and even now I couldn’t believe they would try to chase after me, much less be able to find me. Last night seemed a totally separate nightmare from this. Nevertheless I sprang between the last pair of cottages, pressing close to the wall as I sidled along its rough contour (I can still feel that crumbling plaster under my palms) until I reached the front corner. I peered around as the car stopped outside the butcher shop.

The driver flung open the door, got out, slammed the door shut, and strode around the front of the car toward the building. As he passed briefly in front of the car lights his profile was illuminated.

It was Alec.

He looked even more tired, and decidedly more disheveled, than he had the night before.

I gloated—
Ha! Ha!
—and then oops! I was standing next to a sheer wall, as exposed as a bug on glass. I scuttled to the back of the cottage and stood at the edge of a vegetable garden, peering back. Presently came the
thunk!
of a car door shutting. The engine roared to life, then the accelerating car shot down the lane, sending mud flying in all directions. Good riddance.

So now what?

Not onward, obviously. Or back. When he got far enough to realize even a marathon runner could not have covered that distance, what choice but to retrace?

I ran down the road until I was out of sight of the village. Then, facing the slope below, I drew in a long breath. “Here goes nothing.”

And I was so right.

Slipping and oozing down a mud-running mountainside is nothing I would have enjoyed even if I hadn’t been tired, hungry, lost, scared and semidrowned in a full-on thunderstorm. I bumped and slipped and rolled and fell, then climaxed my trip with an ignominious splat as one foot plunged into a hole (filled with slimy mud) and stuck. I fell face-down in the mud, my ankle wrenching excruciatingly.

For a long moment I lay there in the mud, cursing with Catullan fluency.

Good as it felt, it got me nowhere. So I sat up and faced into the rain, which at least washed some of the mud off my face, though my eyes stung and my teeth gritted from the load I’d already taken aboard. Then I checked my ankle. My years in dance had taught me a bit about leg and foot injuries. A light sprain was my guess. Not enough to be serious—as long as I kept from walking on it.

“Right,” I said to the thunder. “What now?”

I was sitting there, massaging my foot and debating what bright idea to try next, when twin glares emerged from the darkness below and to my left. A square, black car loomed out of the dark gray rain and crawled along slowly. From one of its windows a powerful beam flashed up and down along the slope I was on.

There was no way they weren’t going to find me.

Wincing against the headache, I forced myself to my feet. To hell with fate, destiny—or inevitability. The Murrays may go down in defeat, but they go down fighting, my father once said, and so I began inching my way back up the cliffside, as the sweep of the flashlight moved closer and closer and then lit up the area around my silhouette on the muddy incline.