The Burning Road Read online

  There was a brief silence. “And if it is not?” Karle said.

  “Then I shall call out like a bird of prey.” He nodded toward Kate. “And you shall take the hand of my daughter and fly off. She knows where she will find me again.” He smiled at the young woman and touched her cheek with fatherly affection. “All will be well, I am certain of it.” He stood and started for the clearing, but stopped before stepping out of the shadows.

  “But …” he said, his voice a bit hesitant. He reached into one pocket and took out a small sack, which he placed in Kate’s hand. Coins clinked against each other, and Kate put the sack into the pocket of her skirt with a small nod.

  Alejandro gazed at his daughter for a long moment, then turned back to Karle and said, “I make you this promise: If God sees fit to separate us, we will be rejoined. And when we are, she had better have no complaints.”

  In every place they’d hidden themselves in the years since England, it seemed they could not get away from windows. Often the first thing each would ask the other when observing a dwelling that appeared to be abandoned was Are there too many ways to see inside? The Jew physician and his adopted Christian daughter had become far more skillful than they’d wanted at shutting out the eyes of the world using parchment, or woven fabric, or sometimes planks of wood. He had taught her, comforted her, and chastised her in the thin light of torches and candles. Their craving for daylight was constant and sometimes nearly desperate, but their understanding of the darkness had thus become nearly perfect.

  But now it was he who wished to see inside, to spy upon his own home to see what might have transpired within during their morning’s absence. There was only one window through which he might do so, and that had been as carefully covered as all the rest they had encountered in their travels, so he could see nothing at all. Alejandro cursed his own proficiency and wished for once that he had made a poor job of doing something.

  He slunk between the trees and slipped into the stable, where he found his willful horse still in the stall, complacently nibbling at the pile of long grass that had been set in front of him the day before. A quick glance at the water trough told him that it was in need of refilling, but a trip to the stream with a bucket was out of the question until a safer moment. He greeted the huge stallion with a few gentle strokes on the nose. The horse snorted softly, as if he somehow knew better than to betray his master’s presence by whinnying. The physician whispered a few reassuring words to his mount and slipped back outside again.

  He stayed close to the wall and crept around the back of the cottage, keeping to the shaded side. When he reached the point where the side met the front wall, he crouched down and peered cautiously around the corner. There was no horse tethered outside, but in the soft dry dirt he saw the marks of hooves—too many to be from just one horse; he deduced that a riding party of some sort must have been here. But the dust had already settled, so they must have long since departed.

  We might have been here, he thought uncomfortably, but for burying the dead man. But have they left someone behind, someone waiting inside to surprise me? There were no footprints leading up to the door, but they might have been pardoned with a leafy branch just as his own had in leaving the forest. A chilling fear gripped at his belly, though there was no clear cause for it. The door looked just the same as it always did, and exactly as it had been when they left before dawn, but someone could easily have opened it and then closed it in the same position. Why did I not leave a stick, or a rock, or some other such device hidden on the door as I usually do, so I would know upon return whether it had been disturbed?

  He need not have questioned himself, for answer was maddeningly simple: because he was himself so disturbed by the sudden appearance of the Frenchman and his eyes for Kate that he had not thought clearly. He knew it was an expensive oversight, and he cursed himself.

  He sidled along the front wall and knocked tentatively on the wood planking of the door, then stood back, waiting for some sound from within. But he heard only the occasional moan of pain from the man who still lay tied to the table. Alejandro waited for a few moments, a brief bit of time that seemed eternal as he stood with his back pressed against the stonework, but no one appeared. So the physician boldly—foolishly, he thought—reached around the stones and into the recess. With one quick push, he shoved the heavy door open. It creaked slowly inward and finally came to a stop.

  He was all indecision. He half-expected to be greeted by some smirking knight, pleasured in anticipation of the fine ransom he would collect when he harvested the fugitives. And there might be a good price on the head of Karle, as well, even better perhaps than the one on his own. Add then the purse for the royal daughter, and it would be a fortunate fellow indeed who collected such a bounty.

  But, God be praised, no grinning captor awaited him. All that greeted him were the grunted supplications of the one-armed fellow, who despite his other misfortunes was lucky enough to yet breathe. He had soiled himself in the absence of caretakers who might have helped him relieve himself in a more dignified manner, and the bandages sealing his arm wound were soaked pink with ooze. Closed up as it had been, the small house stank of the man’s various exudations. But he was alive, and well enough to moan. This bodes well, Alejandro thought with some relief.

  He entered cautiously, looking first behind the door, and when he found no one lurking there to dismember him he closed the door again. He poked through the ashes of the hearth with the iron and found a glowing coal, with which he lit a candle. As his eyes adjusted to the dimness of the light, he took a quick look around. It looks undisturbed, he thought, but too undisturbed for my liking. The book he had been studying was still on the hearth near his pallet where he had set it the night before. He reached under the straw and poked around until his fingers found the hidden metal ring. With a great heave, he pulled upward, and raised the wood panel on which the pile of straw lay. He looked into the cellar below, and saw his treasured leather saddlebag still there. He reached down and picked it up by the handle, and was satisfied by its weight that the contents had not been removed. He dropped it with a thud and let the cover to the secret cellar fall shut again. He smiled with relief and thought that when they were resettled he would buy Kate all the shifts still left in France if she so desired.

  For now they would have to move on again. He had no doubt that those who pursued the rebel Guillaume Karle would be fierce and dogged in that pursuit. The man was, Alejandro thought, either incredibly brave or insanely foolish. He had led an attack against a castle sheltering royal women and children. It was an act that would not go unavenged.

  “But surely,” Alejandro had maintained on their trek out of the woods, “you must have realized that word would reach the knights, wherever they might be … ladies were in danger, and such a situation is never taken lightly, even by an enemy. Any knight worth his armor would have come to their aid, be he French or English or even Bohemian! Such is the obligation of knighthood.”

  “And how would a physician know of such things?” Karle had demanded.

  “I am a learned man” was all he had dared say, but he added the silent thought, a learned man promised knighthood by the king of England himself, along with the hand of the Princess Isabella’s companion.…

  The injured man pulled him back from his unrealized dreams with a cry of pain, and Alejandro turned his attention to the poor fellow on the table before him. The man was sweating, but a hand to the forehead did not reveal a true fever. He is sweating from the pain, Alejandro realized, not from fever. He ladled a small amount of water into the man’s mouth, then used his own sleeve to wipe away the rivulets that dribbled down the side of his face. “I am sorry I have nothing more to relieve you,” he said gently to the man.

  The anguished man finally managed to speak words. “I feel no pain in what remains,” he croaked, “but what was once there, and is no more, seems to be on fire. It is as if my arm burns in hell, but is still attached.”

  He h
ad heard this before from those who had lost limbs, that the phantom limb had taken on a life of its own, and now ruled the remaining body with its desperate need to be remembered. “We have laid it to rest. I am sorry that we had to take it, but had I left it attached your entire body would be on its way to eternity.”

  “If Navarre finds us,” the man panted fearfully, “he will happily take my other arm.” He tried to lift his head to look around. “And where is Karle? He must not be captured, or our cause is lost!”

  Alejandro wiped the man’s brow. “He waits in safety with my daughter not far away. When I have done with you, I will signal them to return. I can work more quickly without him standing over my shoulder. He is a distracting fellow.” His words seemed to put his suffering patient at ease, so he continued to speak as he tended to him. “But surely this Navarre will do you no harm now; it would be a grave sin not to show pity on one so maimed, especially after all our good work to save you. God would surely punish any man for such a transgression.”

  “God looks the other way when Navarre is at work.”

  “God never looks away, my friend. He sees all. Now God will look at your wound by making me reveal it.”

  He began to unwind the bandage on the stump. Would a life without arms be worse than death? Alejandro wondered with a shudder, and was silently grateful that he would probably never know.

  But in the silence he thought he heard the faint sound of hooves in the distance. He stopped what he was doing for a moment and listened. The sound seemed to disappear for a moment, but it returned again to become more distinct, closer-sounding. The patient looked toward the wood door of the cottage and began to mutter in fear. The poor man had soiled himself again, Alejandro realized, before he was even cleaned from the last time. He hastily rewound the same dressing, cursing his luck as he did so, for he had touched this dressing with his own hands, which were still fouled from the burial of the other man’s corpse.

  But that will not matter if these riders do not pass, he thought, his heart pounding. Perhaps they will not see this place at all, but will continue on, no wiser to its presence. He had chosen it for its concealment, and it had seemed somehow safer than the other choices; with so many dead in the wars and gone from the plague, there were hundreds of cottages empty and for the taking. But Karle had found them easily enough, and though he had tried to hide his path, some traces of it must have remained. A curse on all that walks, flies, swims, or slithers, he thought angrily. Why could I not have chosen better?

  He began to untie his whimpering patient, but the sound of riders approaching now seemed dangerously close. He drew a knife out of his boot and cut away the strips he had torn from Kate’s shift. The linen seemed to have turned to oak in his absence, and the knife unaccountably dull. With the patient still partly tied to the table, he rushed to the window. He ripped off the covering parchment, then cupped his hands around his mouth and called out like the hawk he would have loved to be at that moment. He grabbed the metal ring in the straw and yanked it upward—confirming his notion that there was room for two in the hiding space.

  It was not space that proved to be the mightier enemy, but time. The hooves were as loud as thunder, and he could hear the snorting of lathered horses. Would God agree, when his judgment came, that he had an obligation to save himself, if not for himself, then for Kate? For all those whose suffering he might ease in the time that remained to him?

  It was not a question he had time to pose to himself. He whispered desperately, “Forgive me, fellow, I am sorry to the depths of my soul … I beg you not to give us away. For my daughter’s sake. God be with you.” Then he slipped into the dirt cellar alongside his saddlebag and lay down. He let the plank fall over him, straw and all. And before his eyes were adjusted to the darkness, the approaching horses had come to rest outside the stone cottage. He heard the sound of the door opening, and of masculine voices speaking in French. His bladder seemed suddenly so full that it would burst, and he begged whichever God might be listening for the blessing of one more chance to empty it standing up.

  4

  Sitting on a chair next to the bed in Abraham Prives’s room at Jameson Memorial Hospital was a woman who anyone could easily see was the boy’s mother, if not by the resemblance then by the drawn look on her face. Janie raised her hand to tap on the open door, but held it back for a moment when she realized that Mrs. Prives was clutching her son’s hand and talking quietly to him, an event she thought ought not to be interrupted.

  He can probably hear everything, Janie mused sadly as she watched from a distance, although she wouldn’t know for sure unless she had the chance to test the boy’s hearing. Meanwhile, the mother would wait—for some sign that he heard her, for any indication that the boy she’d known was going to return. She was in excellent company, Janie knew, because somewhere in the world there was always a parent waiting for a child to come back from something.

  It was outside this very hospital that Janie had stood herself, years before, at a hastily erected fence, a chilling effect of martial law that neither she nor anyone who’d stood with her had ever experienced prior to the Outbreak of DR SAM that occasioned it. There had been no domestic wars or civil uprisings during her lifetime, but the fence itself seemed a foreign invader. The hated barrier had done its dirty job and had long since been removed, but the sight of it would always be indelibly planted in Janie’s memory. She and hundreds of others had begged and pleaded for passage through it, only to be held at bay by the ready guns of cops who were just as frightened as the people in the throng they were supposed to be containing. Many of the contained and the containers had kin inside that hospital—or friends, or associates who had suddenly fallen to the rogue bacteria. DR SAM had changed everything, everywhere, for just about everyone, and though conditions had eased and life had become more normal, it would never be entirely the same again.

  She stood outside the Prives child’s door and waited for the scene inside to change, rubbing her palm absentmindedly at the injection point as memories of those dark days resurfaced. Her senses betrayed her with psycho-trickery, making it all seem real again: the cold metal links, endlessly intertwined, the dank metallic smell they left on her fingers, the flashing lights of the ambulance caravans that threaded slowly down State Route 9 to the hospital, heading for the temporary crematorium, which had not yet been dismantled. On wet days, Janie sometimes thought she could smell the soot of the bodies that had been burned so the scourge that took them down would not be spread. But it had spread, and in some places, it still existed. It would never be corralled completely. Just suppressed.

  Among those bodies was that of her only child, who would not come back no matter how long Janie waited.

  She let a few more seconds pass and then knocked lightly. The mother turned in her direction.

  Janie said tentatively, “Mrs. Prives?”

  A hopeful nod.

  “I’m Jane Crowe, from the New Alchemy Foundation. We, uh—”

  Mrs. Prives, a slightly pear-shaped woman with graying hair and thick bifocals, stood very quickly and made a nervous gesture of smoothing her skirt. “Oh, yes,” came the thin voice.

  Janie remained at the door, not knowing what to do. Mrs. Prives motioned with her hand. “Please. Come in.”

  “I don’t want to interrupt anything—”

  A faint smile came over the woman’s face. “I’ve got kids. So I’m used to it.” She turned back toward her son. “Abe’s not—awake, I don’t think, so you’re probably not bothering him.”

  Janie returned the smile as she came to the bedside. “You never know. I hope I am bothering him. I also hope we’ll know soon whether I am or not.”

  Mrs. Prives glanced at her son, then back at Janie again. “That would certainly be a step forward. Do you have any new—I mean, is there anything more you can tell me?”

  Janie knew what she wanted to ask. It saddened her that people often felt so apologetic about requesting information. How had that retic
ence become so terribly widespread, so pathetically universal? She often felt it herself, and hated it, because the framework supporting that reluctance to ask questions could only be fear. “I’m trying to work it out so we can move him to the foundation’s patient care center. I’ll be frank with you, though, I’m running into some difficulties. There are some financial issues to be resolved yet.”

  Bitterness crept onto the mother’s face. “There always are.”

  “I know. I’m sorry, especially if I got your hopes up for no good reason. But if it’s any consolation, you’re not alone—we’re also trying to bring in another boy with a problem similar to Abraham’s—”

  Mrs. Prives interrupted her. “Similar how?”

  “The same kind of bone shattering.”

  “The people here told me it was very rare to have a break like that.”

  “Well, it is, we all think.”

  “You think?”

  Janie hesitated, wanting to phrase her answer with as much clarity and as little discouragement as possible. “There hasn’t really been a lot of ‘thinking’ done on it, that’s how unusual it is. I’m trying to get a permit now to do a system-wide search to see if there are other similar cases.”

  “Is it difficult to get one?”

  “Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your point of view, yes, it’s difficult. But not impossible. The foundation has a good success rate for getting database search permits.”

  “Is this other boy local?”

  “Boston.”

  “Oh. Not really, then.”

  Janie was quiet for a moment. “No, I suppose not.” And as she silently crossed her fingers that the permit application she’d already filed would be granted, she thought, In a case like this, the same hemisphere would almost seem local.

  She got so involved in making phone inquiries on Abraham’s behalf that she almost forgot her afternoon appointment. But eventually there came an undistracted moment during which Janie took a quick look at her planner, and there it was—a meeting she’d arranged a few days earlier, and almost forgotten.