The Boatmaker (35 page)

He picks up Crow's notebook, which is too big to burn. He will find a place to drop it in the river and let the brown tide of Vashad carry Crow's scratches—his calculations of loyalty and its opposite—to the sea.

He goes down the stairs between the ancestors of this house and out into a city sleeping off its blood sacrifice and burnt offerings.

On the wall around the Lippsted compound someone has written in red paint
Our sacred land
. Scattered around the large red letters are offensive names for Jews. Down in one corner of the wall the boatmaker sees
The Sons of Vashad
, written in yellow paint. It must be another organization, one whose name he hasn't heard before.

In the compound the ashes are smoking. The warren of workshops clustered around the townhouse is gone. The workshops were wood. They burned easily, leaving nothing but foundations, in some places not even those. The boatmaker can see clear across to the rear wall, ordinarily a ten-minute walk through a tangle of outbuildings.
On the ground, from one wall to the other, a layer of fine gray ash covers remnants of what would not burn: tools, glass, metal. The façade of the townhouse is still standing. Through openings where the windows were, the boatmaker can see the endless summer sky.

Careful to avoid the smoldering rubble, he picks his way through to where his storeroom was, feeling the heat through the soles of his boots. The storeroom is gone, only an outline of the foundation remaining. Where he left the secretary, he sees bits of burned canvas and a few gray outlines of the desk. He touches the gray with the toe of his boot and it dissolves into ash, lifted across the compound by the breeze.

The boatmaker wonders whether Eriksson saw his work before it burned. Probably not. There was the commotion around the race, and afterward the mob. The foreman could hardly have had time to go into the storeroom and examine the boatmaker's personal project. The boatmaker feels a deep disappointment, thinking of all the work that went into the secretary and the fact that Sven Eriksson will never see it to give it his blessing.

Then his disappointment lifts. What he made was good. He doesn't need anyone's approval to know that.

From outside the wall come voices, low and rough, of men recovering from the convulsion of the night
before. He walks through the gap in the wall where the gate stood. He looks both ways and sets out, boots on a street of the capital, where a thousand cords of wealth and power are braided into one.

CHAPTER 25

The city the boatmaker passes through as he leaves is mostly empty. But here and there groups of men roam the streets, some looking for stores to loot, others wandering, looking for leaders to tell them what to do next on this unsettled morning. Some of the men wear black armbands with a symbol the boatmaker hasn't seen before. Inside a white disc sits a crimson triangle. At each of its three corners is one of Vashad's blackbirds, dark and crude.

As the boatmaker leaves the Old Quarter he sees handbills marked with the triangle and blackbirds. These new handbills, in the old spiky type, are more overtly violent than the leaflets from The Brotherhood. They focus less on the king and more sharply on the Jews, calling for a final purification. They are signed
The Sons of Vashad
.

He gives the men on the street a wide berth and moves on. There are no police to be seen, and no soldiers, except those guarding the largest royal buildings. Outside the Mint stands a ring of royal guardsmen. They are wearing combat blue rather than dress scarlet, are heavily armed and look deeply uninterested in idle conversation. Leaving the city, he sees more groups of the Sons of Vashad in their red-triangle armbands. Some carry long, heavy sticks; he thinks he sees one with a pistol.

The boatmaker's journey to the place marked on Eriksson's map takes two days. The camp is deep in the woods. On reaching it, the first thing he sees is a man lounging at the base of a tree on the far side of a stream, shotgun cradled in his elbow, smoking.

As the stranger approaches, the sentry drops his cigarette in the stream and steadies his gun, its muzzle pointed at the boatmaker's knees. When he gives his name, the sentry tells him to wait. He disappears, returning a few minutes later trailing a taller figure, who also carries a shotgun. Eriksson has shed his canvas coat for a leather jacket and flat cap; he seems quite comfortable with the gun.

The foreman gestures the boatmaker across the stream. He picks his way across flat stones, the dinner suit wrapped in its torn sheet held over his head.

When the boatmaker has crossed the stream, the foreman leads him along a narrow path in the dark. To one side he sees men, barely visible in dark clothes, and tents pitched between the huge trunks of ancient trees. This forest, far from the city and part of a royal preserve, has never been logged. It smells prehistoric, ripe with birth and death. Up ahead, torches throw light on a clearing. At the center of the clearing is a platform made of unfinished pine boards, flanked by four large white tents, each with its flap down.

The foreman sends the sentry back to the stream. Torchlight illuminates many sets of muddy footprints on the boards, some made by a woman's boots.

“Did you have trouble on the way?”

“No, they left me alone.”

“That's good.”

“I stopped in the compound.”

“Gone?”

“Yes.”

“We got out just in time. A few more minutes and we would have been in the ashes ourselves, with no stories to tell our grandchildren.”

“The façade was the only thing standing.”

“The house can be rebuilt. The compound has been rebuilt before.”

“Everything else is gone.”

“Yes, the wood, the pieces in the workshops. We will make new ones. There is more wood in the world.”

“I suppose.”

“Believe me, there is. The House of Lippsted has been through this before. Fifty years ago was the last time. Even though I've never been through it myself, I have a sense of how things will go from here. Some from the compound have left. But those who have remained until now will stay with us. They are solid, like well-built furniture.” The taller man laughs, deep shadows painted on his face in the torchlight.

“By the way,” the foreman says, reaching in the pocket of his leather jacket and taking out his pipe. He lights the pipe gracefully around the shotgun. “I saw your piece in the storeroom before I went to the track. A Lippsted secretary. Very nice. Two generations ago that was one of the best-known pieces in the line. Not that we made many of them. They were famous because it's damned hard to make one without metal fastenings. You did a nice job.”

“Thank you.”

“Not easy to find, these days. They are considered old-fashioned. Where did you find one to learn from?”

“In the place I was before.”

The foreman smiles at the boatmaker's terseness. He inhales and lets his smoke rise toward the torches.

“Well, if you are not a master of the craft, you are not so far away from being one either. I am not sure whether what you made in the storeroom was really a Lippsted masterpiece. Perhaps a few too many touches of your own. I was skeptical, you know: an untrained man in the back of a storeroom. But what you made was good. Maybe a masterpiece, maybe not. But in its own fashion—very good.”

The boatmaker, pleased and embarrassed, looks at the splatter of bootprints. In the torchlight they are black against the pine boards.

“Who is so loud at this hour?” Rachel Lippsted's head emerges from one of the tents, curls framing her face, her eyes heavy with sleep. The foreman touches his cap and retreats into the darkness beyond the ancient treetrunks.

In the tent nothing needs to be said. When she saw him talking to Sven Eriksson, the questions in her letter were answered. He has things he wants to talk about, but they are difficult, requiring what for the boatmaker amount to extended conversations. He doesn't have the strength for that; he has eaten little on his journey.

He lays his bundle on the floor of her tent and joins her, head against her chest. The boatmaker knows little
about how a child grows inside its mother. As he leans against Rachel, he wonders whether he will hear two hearts instead of the one he knows. But it is just the single, familiar beat.

She gathers his head to her, feeling his body uncoil. Lying on the camp bed, the boatmaker feels as if he is still on the road, his legs never stopping, consulting the map engraved in his mind. The thoughts he could not afford while he was on the road flood in. He wonders whether the families in the lighted farmhouses he passed were gathered around their kitchen tables reading
The Brotherhood
, whether the Sons of Vashad have spread from the city to the countryside. He wonders what happened to Donelan's body. The foreman would never have left it in the stables at the track if he could help it, but his main thought must have been to get Jacob Lippsted and his sister out of the city before the mob reached the townhouse. And what of the horse who woke from his trance and ran like a brown demon? What of the pony who became a friend for a lump of sugar?

Rachel leans over him, watching the muscles of his face work as he lies exhausted between waking and sleeping. She sees his mouth move, thinks she can make out words, but when she leans in, her ear brushing his lips, the only word she can make out is
Vashad
.

She leaves her ear on his mouth for a moment, not listening, just feeling the warmth of his lips. He turns over and his body softens.

She eases off the narrow bed, finds a blanket and covers him without removing anything except his boots, blunt and muddy, which she puts under the bed.

She pulls up a camp chair and sits, watching him as he tosses and speaks snatches of conversation she does not understand, talking to people she does not know: a woman named Karin, his mother, someone with the comical name of Crow, a priest. He tosses under the blanket, mumbling, finally lying still as light begins to change the color of the canvas.

Early the next morning, her brother's dark head appears inside the flap, inquiring wordlessly whether she is decent. She looks at the bed, at her brother and raises a finger to her lips. The dark head disappears. Outside, low voices signal the beginning of the daily routine in this camp pitched in a royal forest near the border with Europe.

A little while later the boatmaker opens his eyes and sees the shadows of leaves on canvas. For a moment he thinks he is on Small Island, building his boat in the shed. Then everything that has happened returns and fills him with his own story.

He throws off the blanket, washes his face in a basin, sits in the camp chair to pull his boots on. All around him are her possessions: a steamer trunk set on end serving as an armoire, books in French and English, a silver mirror, comb and brush. He has never been in her bedroom before. Her possessions are things he cannot imagine anyone owning; her ways of being cared for are beyond his ken.

Outside on the platform four men of different heights stand in June sunshine. The foreman in his leather jacket, shotgun in the crook of his arm, towers over the others. Jacob Lippsted, in shirtsleeves, a vest, dark trousers and tall riding boots, is in the middle. Shorter are the rabbi and an even smaller man who looks much like him.

All four heads turn to the boatmaker. Conversation stops. Jacob Lippsted steps up to him, grasps him by the shoulder and shakes his hand. “So Eriksson's map served you right?”

“It was clear.”

“I'm glad you made it. My sister will be pleased.
Is pleased
, I should say. This is the rabbi's brother, by the way, Meyer Goldman. You'll be visiting him in due course.”

Jacob Lippsted seems in good spirits, in command here in the woods as he was in the compound, apparently untroubled by the destruction of his home.

“What can we get you? Breakfast? You must be hungry. No trouble on the way?”

“Not really. Mostly it was quiet—after.” He wants to talk about the Sons of Vashad but knows he must wait. “Breakfast would be good.”

“Eriksson, would you help our friend find a meal? And after that, a visit to Meyer's quarters. You'll find we're well equipped.”

Jacob Lippsted rubs his hands together, a man with a full program, eager to begin the day. Meyer Goldman gives the boatmaker a nod that is not entirely friendly.

Eriksson leads him into the woods, passing smaller tents hidden among the trees. Beyond the tents, the boatmaker sees a picket of armed men in leather coats.

They reach an open area with a cooking fire and men eating, weapons within easy reach. The boatmaker recognizes the men from the compound. They nod, finish their food, pick up their guns and head to the woods. The cook hands the boatmaker a metal plate, and he realizes how hungry he is. When he's cleared three plates and emptied two metal mugs of coffee, Sven Eriksson returns to lead him deeper into the woods. On their way they pass a new clearing in which men are cutting saplings and erecting a canopy of green branches under the larger canopy formed by a grove of old oaks.

“The horse?” he asks Eriksson.

“Safe in the country. Fannie, too.”

“Staedter?”

“Now, that man is a survivor if ever there was one. He slipped away after the race. Believe me, he'll be fine. Who knows? He may even be one of
them
. Never did like the man much, to tell you the truth. Got the job done, though, didn't he?”