The Testament of Yves Gundron (21 page)

At last, that evening, I finished the plans for the brakes, full of private exultation. I nailed them like a proclamation to the barn door, though I was not sure what they heralded. One more step in the process my harness had begun, or its crowning glory altogether? I did not
regret my harness or any of the changes it had wrought, but my heart sang when it realized that perhaps this invention would be the end of all inventions, the one that would suffice for the rest of history.

I fell asleep that night holding fast to that clarity of mind.

Dawn brought my brother, who was in residence in a spot of sunshine against the side of the barn when I awoke. I had rolled out of bed to loose the animals, and was shocked to see him sitting there smiling, his eyes closed and his face tilted best to accept the first offering of the sun's warmth. When he was thus disposed, it was generally difficult to rouse him, but my curiosity was piqued by the parcel he'd brought with him, four feet by one in dimension, and wrapped in chamois like a sacred book. Therefore, despite that he was likely in communion with the Almighty, I stood at his feet and yelled, “Mandrik!”

He opened his eyes with a look of affront, as if I had slapped him in the face. “Christ, you could be more gentle.”

“You don't have to do your sitting right outside my barn, either. What's in the chamois?”

“I've been waiting for you to arise.”

“The dawn just broke.” Indeed, it still trailed wisps of pink and orange cloud across the horizon, though already the day was unusually hot. “How long have you been sitting there?”

He shrugged his shoulders and smiled sleepily.

“What's in the chamois?”

“I devised a smaller splint for Ruth's leg, and two crutches, that she might hobble out to the sunshine.”

“You think of her a great deal.”

“I should think you'd be pleased, brother, that she won't be abed all the day.”

“I like her,” I answered, “where I can watch her. Come have tea.”

“Adelaïda, I think, will like her better not underfoot.” He cracked his wrists, and followed me in. Adelaïda was boiling nettles for our tea and porridge for our breakfast, though Ruth was still sleeping and the child yet lay in her hammock.

“Good morning, all,” Mandrik commanded in a boisterous tone unlike him. The slumberers recoiled at the sound. “Sleep may yet beckon you, but we have important business.”

Ruth pulled the coverlet farther over her head.

“I've brought lighter implements to set your leg, and two crutches that you might hop about.”

From beneath the blanket she murmured, “Thank you.”

“Some of your countrymen are here, and you'd best come to meet them. They won't come calling like gentlemen, not like the Archduke. They talk faster and louder than jays at mating season, and go about everywhere with large, gray, whining devices that they claim record everything they hear or see, the world's most perfect scribes. They're not far. They've set up under a canvas tent at Heinrik Martin's.”

She startled fully awake, and pushed the covers from her face. “Excuse me, wait. Start over. Who's here?”

“Two men in search of your countrymen who fell. They say they don't know you.”

“Did you tell them you buried them? I told you to wait.”

“Rumor has it Stanislaus told them, and railed his displeasure against them—hard to imagine, but that's how the tale goes—and now they're ruffled up like fighting cocks.”

Something new to interrupt my timely ministration to my crops.

“Stanislaus, of course, told them that under no circumstances could they exhume what had been commended to the Lord. But when he starts up, they threaten their ‘government' will ‘intervene,' though they claim that's not their chiefest desire. And now the Archduke has sent his men to demand an audience.”

“Wage war?” I asked. It seemed impossible, that after all our placid history we should be besieged because two men fell from the sky.

“They did not mention war.”

Ruth scooted so far forward in the bed she nearly fell out. “Of course not. We wouldn't make war against some little island off Scotland.”

“Some little island?” I said, affronted.

Mandrik said, “They want the bodies back.”

“I don't blame them. I don't know what to do about this.” She exhaled through her nose, then pointed to his leg contraption, which, though fashioned of pine and willow, did not look especially kindly. It had more supports and straps than seemed strictly necessary, and the buckles were heavy and cruel. “Is that going to hurt?”

“I don't know. It's a new invention.”

My wife held a damp rag over Ruth's forehead as I and my brother, our eyes averted from her abbreviated undergarments, cut loose the old splint and bathed the leg, which had, curiously enough, sprouted hair. We bound the leg into the new bracing with minimal fuss from Ruth.

“Is it all right?” he asked her.

“My leg hurts.”

“But is the brace all right?”

She rolled her leg gently from side to side. The marvelous contraption gave off creaks like a harness as she moved. The wrinkles on her brow relaxed. “I think it's good. I think I can get around on it. But the only pants I have left are the stretchy black ones I was wearing when I got here.”

Mandrik said, “Something will have to suffice.”

“What do people do,” Adelaïda asked, “in families with no inventors?” From her tone it was unclear if she admired my brother's handiwork or wished he'd kept it in his own hut.

We fed my brother—who demanded to know of the brakes on the barn door, which, upon explanation, he called ingenious—and dressed the child for the journey toward town. Ruth wasn't so simple. Adelaïda's second, dark blue chemise proved too tight in the shoulders and scandalous in length; but it was no more scandalous than her trousers had been, and it was all we could do to cover her. I drew a stocking onto her one hale leg, thinking the while that I should not perform such ministrations and watching Adelaïda bristle as I performed them, and laced on her thick brown boot. I ran to Ydlbert's, explained him our troubles, and he hitched Thea and drove me back to the house. She hung her pretty black head and grumbled when she saw how much weight we were hoisting aboard. Though Hammadi she was not, she drew us without pause to Heinrik Martin's, where a hubbub was under way, centered on a large, singularly unfestive tent of mossy hue. Two men clad in those strange green zippery suits approached from thereout at a dizzying pace, before Ydlbert could coax Thea to stop.

“Are you Ruth Blum?” one called in an accent like her own-—broad, flat, and graceless. The other held a whining gray box on his shoulder, and looked through a dark protuberance over his eye. Both men peered into the cart. Martin's livestock were in a tizzy, and Stanislaus stood amid his parishioners with a pained look in his eyes.

“Yes, who are you?”

He with the box said, in a softer voice, “What's on your leg? Are you all right?”

“Lieutenant Commander Nolan Bradley of the United States Navy. The fellow with the camera is Lieutenant John Fiske. Are you hurt, ma'am?”

“Not badly, no,” she said. We struggled to lift her from the cart. “I broke my leg in an accident, but it seems to be healing okay.” She leaned heavily into her left crutch so that she could extend her right hand. Her unencumbered countryman extended his as if it were the most natural greeting in the world. “I'm pleased to meet you,” she said, “and I hope I can be of help.”

Fiske lifted the vision box from his eye, and the two men regarded one another. “Ms. Blum,” said Bradley, his hard voice full of portent, “would you mind stepping aside for a moment?”

She looked down at her contraption and said, “If we don't have to walk too far.” Bradley smiled curtly. Fiske placed his machine gingerly in the cart. Flanking her, they walked a few paces off. I tried to remain close enough to hear their talk, but they whispered, as all of us whispered to each other, gathering around to try to figure out what this new miracle meant.
³

When they returned, Fiske once again picked up his box, and trained it on our faces, then again on Ruth's beautiful splint.

“Ms. Blum,” Bradley continued, as if there had been no break in their conversation, “do you know where Boogaerts and Ulyanov are buried?”

“Not exactly. I broke my leg in the same accident that killed them. Their plane crashed in front of our horse. So no, I was in bed when they buried them. I presume they're in the graveyard. It's not big.”

“In the graveyard do they slumber,” said Stanislaus, “and there shall they remain.”

She kept leaning into one crutch or the other, smoothing her hair and running one palm across her mouth, as if terrified that they could see her. Bradley, who was a few inches taller, his bristling short hair the color of dried hay, took a long look at her ungainly attire. “And you say you're conducting anthropological research here, Ms. Blum?”

Even the animals, it seemed, hushed to hear her explanation; certainly the neighbors leaned closer in. “Yes. They'd had no intrusions from the modern world until I hiked in, in April.”

“What is she doing?” Jepho asked.

Mandrik said, “Not now.”

“And, if I may, I'll tell you bluntly,” she continued, talking to these strange, skinny men as if they were the most normal thing in the world, “that I'm concerned about what your presence here will mean for my work.”

Fiske, whose shoulder sagged slightly under the weight of his contraption, said gently, “We don't mean to interfere.”

“Rather,” Bradley added with more force, “the sooner we can amend the situation here, the sooner we'll get out. Father Stanislaus”—he nodded to the priest, who could not muster up a retort—“has denied our request for the return of our brothers' bodies. If you'll help us convince him otherwise, we'll be on our way.”

Strange though the gesture was upon her crutches, she shrugged her shoulders. “I'll do what I can. When does your backup arrive?”

Bradley stared at her.

“Surely the Navy didn't send a team of two to investigate the disappearance of one of its planes and two of its men?”

Bradley was as fair as she, and though his mouth remained stern, his
pale cheeks flushed. “As I mentioned, the nature of their mission—this is a matter of national security, Ms. Blum.”

She looked Fiske's machine in the eye. “Is it possible to put the camera away? I think that, until you brought it out, they'd never seen one.”

Fiske took the contraption down from his eye to regard her. “I'm sorry, ma'am, but it's regulations.”

“I understand.”

“And what are you doing,” he asked, incredulous, “in the field with no camera?”

She shook her head. “I didn't, I didn't think I should be the ambassador of technology. I'm writing everything down.”

“I never heard of such a thing.”

“The little worm sure does know how to make friendly,” said Wido Jungfrau. “Adelaïda better watch out.”

“Philistine,” Ydlbert whispered.

“We can help you with equipment, supplies—we can get you better medical attention,” Fiske offered.

“Thank you, but I don't need anything. I'm fine.”

The gray box stared at her leg for an uncomfortably long time. “Your leg is all right in that thing?”

She did not answer quickly. “This is the best they can do for it. I think it's all right.”

The box continued to point at her leg, and I saw how gruesome was my brother's fair contraption in its eye.

“We will, of course,” said Bradley, “bring these videotapes back for review.”

“Please don't make fun of how they're looking after me. The sooner we get this taken care of, the happier all of us will be.”

“Aye,” shouted Wido Jungfrau, “she's siding with the enemy already.”

“I am not, Wido, siding with anyone. I think it's in all of our best interests to see how we can work this out.”

“Over my dead body,” Stanislaus said quietly, “will they disturb the soul's rest.”

Jepho and Desvres drew him back into the crowd.

“And they'll do nothing,” said the nervous attaché, “without his Urbanity's say so.”

“Ma'am,” Fiske said, “we'll try to work this out as quickly as possible. I have a son in Tallahassee, and I'm anxious to see him.”

Tallahassee sounded some fair garden where no ill could befall a man—verdant and full of tumbling children.

“Perhaps,” said Bradley, “you'd like to come into the house a moment? If Mr. Martin wouldn't mind.”

Heinrik's eyes were so wide the whites shone all the way around his irises. “Whatever we can do for you, sirs, so long as you don't rain the wrath of God down upon us.”

Ruth said, “Thank you, Heinrik.” She worked her crutches without grace, and hopped toward the house. The two young men fell into step behind her, and my brother and I followed a few paces behind.

“Would it be possible to confer without your”—Bradley asked quietly, glancing round at us—“entourage?”

“My friends, Yves Gundron and Mandrik le Chouchou, are some of the most respected men in this village. They know much more about the Mandragorans than do I.”

Jungfrau muttered, “Aye, we worship our madmen here.”

The attaché stood before her and pushed back his voluminous coat. “As the Archduke's emissary, I feel it my duty—”

“Please,” Ruth said. “I promise I'll act in all of our best interests.”

Fiske let the box down from his squinting brown eye and looked at her—despite his Lieutenant Commander, I thought—with admiration. And so we left the attaché behind and went into Heinrik Martin's house, the tall strangers ducking beneath his low door. The man of the house ensconced himself in a corner with his gray-haired, freckle-faced wife; both wore slightly giddy expressions, as if they hadn't slept in days but had ceased to care, and Heinrik had, it seemed, been so much at playing with his whiskers that they hung twisted in two long spikes like a sage's. “Hullo, Martin,” I bade him.