City of Golden Shadow

  Clutching at straws, Jonas, he told himself. Clutching at feathers. He slid the shiny object back into his pocket. Dying men think of funny things—and that's what we all are here, aren't we? Dying men?

  He tried to smooth the thought away. Such ruminations would not slow his tired heart or ease his trembling muscles. He closed his eyes and began the slow search for the path that would take him back down to sleep. Somewhere on the other side of No Man's Land, the guns began to roar again.

  Come to us. . . .

  Paul woke up as a great crash split the sky. The sweat that covered his forehead and cheeks was sluiced away by a sweeping wash of rain. The sky lit up, the clouds suddenly white at the edges and burning behind. Another powerful roll of thunder followed. It was not the guns. It was not an attack at all, but only nature pointing out heavy-handed parallels.

  Paul sat up. Two yards away Finch lay like a dead man, his greatcoat pulled over his head and shoulders. A flare of lightning showed a row of sleeping forms beyond him.

  Come to us. . . . The dream-voice still echoed in his ears. He had felt her again—so close! An angel of mercy, come to whisper to him, come to summon him . . . where? To heaven? Was that what it was, an omen of his coming death?

  Paul put his hands over his ears as the thunder cracked again, but could not shut out the noise or ease the ache in his skull. He would die here. He had long been resigned to that miserable promise—it would be peace, anyway, a quiet rest. But now he suddenly knew that death would be no relief. Something worse waited for him beyond death's threshold, something far worse. It had something to do with the angel, although he could not believe any evil of her.

  A fit of shivering racked him. Something beyond death was hunting for him—he could almost see it! It had eyes and teeth and it would swallow him down into its belly where he would be torn and chewed forever.

  Terror climbed up out of the pit of his stomach and into his throat. As the lightning flashed again, he opened his mouth wide, then choked as water filled it. When he had spluttered it out again, he screamed helplessly, but his voice disappeared in the throbbing bellow of the storm. The night, the storm, the nameless terrors of dream and death, all closed in on him.

  "Think about getting out," a voice in another half-remembered dream had urged him. "About really getting out." He clutched at that memory as at something warm. In that collapsing moment it was his only coherent thought.

  Paul staggered to his feet and took a few steps down the trench, away from the rest of his platoon, then grabbed the rungs of the nearest ladder and climbed, as if to throw himself into enemy fire. But he was fleeing death, not running toward it. He hesitated at the top.

  Desertion. If his comrades caught him, they would shoot him. He had seen it happen, watched them execute a red-haired Geordie who had refused to go over on a raid. The boy hadn't been more than fifteen or sixteen, lied about his age when he volunteered, and he had apologized and cried steadily until the rifle squad's bullets punched into him, changing him in an instant from a human being to a leaking sack of meat.

  The wind howled and the rain flew horizontally before him as Paul pushed his head above the top of the trench. Let them shoot him, then—let either side shoot him if they could catch him. He was mad, mad as Lear. The storm had swept his senses away and he suddenly felt free.

  Getting out. . . .

  Paul stumbled off the top of the ladder and fell. The sky flared again. Great sagging coils of barbed wire stretched horizontally before him, running all along the front of the trenches, protecting the Tommies from German raids. Beyond that lay No Man's Land, and past that haunted place, as though a great mirror had been stretched across the Western Front, lay the dark twin of the British lines. Fritz had hung out his own wire, protecting the pits in which he crouched in his multiform sameness.

  Which way to go? Which of two nearly hopeless alternatives to choose? Forward across the wasteland on a night when the German sentries and snipers might be huddled behind their walls, or back across his own lines toward free France?

  The infantryman's inbred horror of the void between the armies almost ruled him, but the wind was wild and his blood seemed to respond to it, to urge a similar freedom from restraint. No one would expect him to go forward.

  He ran blindly through the rain, bent like an ape, until he was a few hundred yards from his platoon's entrenchment. As he crouched before the wire and took his cutters from his belt, he heard someone laughing quietly. He froze in terror before he realized that the person laughing had been him.

  The loose wire tore at his clothes as he pushed through, like the sentry brambles around a sleeping princess' castle. Paul flattened himself into the mud as another blaze of lightning turned the sky white. Thunder followed swiftly. The storm was coming closer. He crawled forward on knees and elbows, his bead full of noise.

  Stay in No Man's Land. Somewhere there will be a place to break out again. Somewhere, Stay between the lines.

  The world was all mud and wire. The war in the heavens was only a faint imitation of the horror men had learned to make.

  He couldn't find up. He'd lost it,

  Paul rubbed at his face, trying to clear the muck from his eyes, but there was always more. He was swimming in it. There was nothing solid to push against, no resistance to tell him here is the ground. He was drowning.

  He stopped struggling and lay with his hand cupped over his mouth to keep the mud out while he breathed. Somewhere far to his left a machine gun started up, its scratchy chatter a faint counterpoint to the wind and rumbling storm. He slowly tilted his head from side to side until the dizziness and confusion abated.

  Think. Think!

  He was somewhere in No Man's Land, trying to crawl south between the lines. The darkness striped by lightning and flares—that was the sky. The deeper darkness, giving light only from reflections in standing water, was the war-tortured earth.

  He, Private Paul Jonas, deserter, traitor, was clinging to that latter darkness like a flea on the back of a dying dog.

  He was on his belly. No surprise there. He had been on his belly forever, hadn't he?

  He dug in with his elbows and feet and pushed himself forward through the muck. The years' long bombardment had churned the mud of No Man's Land into a million peaks and troughs, an endless, frozen, shit-brown sea. He had been crawling through it for hours, awkward and mechanical as an injured beetle. Every cell in his body screamed for him to hurry, to get clear, to drag himself out of this no-place, this bleak and lifeless land, but there was no way he could move faster—to rise was to expose himself to eyes and guns on either side. He could only crawl, inch by miserable inch, groveling his way beneath shrapnel and storm.

  Something hard was under his fingers. A flash of lightning revealed the skeletal head of a horse pushing up from the mud, like something born of sowing the Hydra's teeth. He jerked back the hand that had rested on its snout, on the stony teeth exposed behind shriveled lips. Its eyes were long gone, the sockets full of mud. A crooked fence of boards protruded from the earth behind it, the remains of the ammunition limber it had drawn. Strange to think—almost impossible to think—that this hellish place had once been a country road, a quiet part of quiet France. A horse like this would have clopped by with wagon in tow, taking a farmer to market, delivering milk or mail to village houses. When things made sense. Things had made sense once. He couldn't quite remember such a time, but he could not let himself believe anything else. The world had been an ordered place. Now country roads, houses, cart-horses, all the things that once had separated civilization from encroaching darkness were being crushed together into a homogeneous primordial ooze.

  Houses, horses, people. The past, the dead. In the off-and-on glare of lightning he saw himself surrounded by the twisted corpses of soldiers—his fellow Tommies perhaps, or Germans: there was no way to tell. Nationality, dignity, breath, all had been ripped away. Like a Christmas pudding stuffed with shillings, the mud was salted with incomplete fractio
ns of life-bits of arms and legs, torsos with extremities cauterized by shellblast, boots with feet still in them, rags of uniform glued to shreds of skin. Other, more complete bodies lay among the pieces, bomb-broken and flung like dolls, first swallowed by the ocean of viscous soil and then exposed by the driving rain. Eyes stared blankly, mouths gaped; they were drowning, all drowning in muck. And everything everywhere, whether it had once lived or not, was the same horrible excremental color.

  It was the Slough of Despond. It was the ninth circle of hell. And if there was no salvation at the end of it, then the universe was a terrible, ill-constructed joke.

  Shivering and moaning, Paul crawled on, his back against the angry sky.

  A tremendous concussion knocked him down into the ooze. The ground lurched, engulfing him.

  As he swam back toward the air, he heard another whistling shriek and the earth heaved again. Two hundred yards away the impact sent up a huge gout of mud. Small things hissed past. Paul screamed as field guns drumrolled behind the German lines, painting an arc of fire across the horizon that threw the vast field of mud spikes into sharp relief. Another shell struck. Muck flew. Something dragged a burning claw across his back, tearing shirt and skin, and Paul's scream climbed toward the thunder and then stopped as his face dropped into the mud again.

  For a moment he was certain he was dying. His heart stuttered, beating so rapidly that it almost tripped over itself. He flexed his fingers, then moved his arm. It felt as though someone had opened him up and wiggled a knitting needle into his spine, but everything seemed to be working. He dragged himself forward half a yard, then froze as a shell crashed down behind him, blowing another great whirlpool of soil and body parts into the air. He could move. He was alive.

  He curled up in a puddle of water and clasped his hands to his head, trying to shut out the maddening roar of the guns, louder by far than the thunder had been. He lay as motionless as any of the corpses littering No Man's Land, his mind empty of all but terror, and waited for the bombardment to abate. The earth rocked. Red-hot shrapnel buzzed over his head. The eleven-inch shells from the German guns kept coming down in mindless, jackhammer repetition—he felt their heavy tread as they walked their way from one side of the British trenches to the other, leaving behind craters, splinters, and pulverized flesh.

  The excruciating noise would not stop.

  It was hopeless. The bombardment would never end. This was the crescendo, the finale, the moment when the war would finally set the skies themselves on fire and the clouds would fall sparking and blazing from the heavens like burning curtains.

  Get out or die. There was no cover here, nowhere to hide. Paul turned onto his stomach once more and began to slither forward as the earth bucked beneath him. Get out or die. Ahead, the ground sloped away to a lowland where once, years ago, before the shells had begun falling, a stream might have run. At the bottom lay a tongue of mist. Paul saw only a place to hide, a white murkiness that he could draw over him like a blanket. Hidden, he would sleep.

  Sleep.

  The single word rose in his battered mind like a flame in a dark room. Sleep. To lie down and shut out the noise, the fear, the unceasing misery.

  Sleep.

  He reached the top of the gentle slope, then tipped himself over and slithered downhill. All his senses were bent on the cool white fog lying at the bottom of the depression. As he crawled through the outlying layer of mist, the roar of the guns did seem to grow less, although the world still shuddered. He struggled forward until the fog closed above his head, shutting out the darts of red light crossing the sky. He was completely surrounded in cool whiteness. The hammering in his head quieted.

  He slowed. Something lay before him in the murk—more than one thing—dark, oblong shapes scattered along the slope. He dragged himself forward, eyes painfully wide and smarting with dirt, trying to see what they were.

  Coffins. Dozens of coffins were strewn along the hillside, some protruding from the sheared mud like ships breasting a wave. Many had spilled their occupants: pale winding sheets trailed down the shallow slope, as though the coffin owners too were fleeing the war.

  The guns still boomed, but they were strangely muted. Paul drew himself into a crouch, staring, and something like sanity began to come back. This was a graveyard. The ground had fallen away, revealing an old burial ground, its markers long since smashed to flinders. The dead had been spat out by an earth now surfeited with death.

  Paul pushed himself deeper into the fog. These corpses were now as homeless as those of his brothers above, a hundred tragic stories that would go unheard in the clamor of mass mortality. Here a mummified head sagged above the mud-spattered whiteness of a bridal dress, jaw dangling as though its owner called to the groom who had left her alone at Death's altar. Nearby, a small skeletal hand protruded from beneath the lid of a tiny coffin—Baby had learned to say bye-bye.

  Paul's sobbing laughter almost choked him.

  Death was everywhere, in uncountable variety. This was the Grim Reaper's wonderland, the dark one's private park. One sprawled skeleton wore the uniform of an earlier army, as though it crawled toward the muster bugle of the present conflict. A rotted winding sheet revealed two mummified children wrapped together, mouths round holes like hymn-singing angels on a sentimental card. Old and young, big and small, the civilian corpses had been cast forth in a macabre democracy to join the foreign strangers dying in throngs above, all to pass together into the blending mud.

  Paul struggled on through the foggy village of dead. The sounds of war grew more distant, which drove him ever forward. He would find a place where the conflict did not penetrate. Then he would sleep.

  A coffin at the edge of the ditch caught his eye. Dark hair trailed from it and wavered in the wind, like the fronds of some deep-sea plant. The lid was gone, and as he crawled nearer he could see the face of its female occupant nestled in the winding sheet, curiously undecayed. Something about her bloodless profile made him pause.

  He stared. Quivering, he approached the coffin, laying his hands on the muddy box so he could draw himself up to crouch above it. His hand pulled down the decaying muslin.

  It was her. Her. The angel of his dreams. Dead in a box, wrapped in a stained shroud and lost to him forever. His insides contracted—for a moment he thought he might fall into himself, shrink into nothingness like straw in a flame. Then she opened her eyes—black, black and empty—and her pale lips moved.

  "Come to us, Paul."

  He shrieked and leaped up, but caught his foot on the coffin handle and tumbled face-first back into the mud. He scrambled away, thrashing through the clinging muck like a wounded beast. She did not rise or follow, but her quiet, summoning voice trailed him through the fog until his own blackness swallowed him.

  He was in a strange place, stranger than any he had yet seen. It was . . . nothing. The truth of No Man's Land.

  Paul sat up, feeling curiously numb. His head still throbbed with the echoes of battle, but he was surrounded by silence, it wore a coating of mud inches thick, but the ground on which he lay was neither wet nor dry, neither hard nor soft. The fog through which he had crawled had thinned, but he could see nothing in any direction except pearl-white nothingness.

  He rose on trembling legs. Had he escaped? The dead angel, the village of coffins—had those been a shell-shocked dream?

  He took a step, then a dozen more. Everything remained as it was. He expected to see recognizable shapes appear through the mist at any moment—trees, rocks, houses—but the emptiness seemed to move with him.

  After what seemed an hour of fruitless walking he sat down and wept, weak tears of exhaustion and confusion. Was he dead? Was this purgatory? Or worse, for one could at least hope to work one's way out of purgatory, was this where one went after death, to stay?

  "Help me!" There was no trace of an echo—his voice went flatly out and did not return. "Help me, someone!" He sobbed again. "What have I done?"

  No answer came. Paul curled up
on the not-ground and pressed his face into his hands.

  Why had the dreams brought him to this place? The angel had seemed to care for him, but how could kindness lead to this? Unless every man's death was kind, but every man's afterlife was unremittingly bleak.

  Paul clung to the self-inflicted dark. He could not bear to see the mist any more. The angel's pale face appeared to his mind's eye, not cold and empty as it had been in the plundered graveyard, but the sweetly mournful visage that had haunted his dreams for so long.

  Was it all madness? Was he even here in this place at all, or was his body lying in the bottom of the muddy trench or beside the other failures in the morgue of a field hospital?

  Slowly, almost without his conscious attention, his hand stole across his muddy uniform blouse. As it reached his breast pocket, he suddenly knew what it—what he himself—sought. He stopped, terrified to move farther, for fear of what he might discover.

  But there is nothing else left.

  His hand dipped into the pocket and closed around it. When he opened his eyes, then brought it out into the dim light it shimmered, iridescent green.

  It was real.

  As Paul stared at the feather clutched in his fist, something else began to shimmer. Not far away—or what seemed, in this unfathomable place, not far away—the fog smoldered with a light like molten gold. He scrambled to his feet, fatigue and injuries almost forgotten.

  Something—a kind of doorway or hole—was forming in the mist. He could see nothing within its circumference but shifting amber light that moved like oil on water, yet he knew with a sudden, unshakable certainty that there was something on the other side. It led to somewhere else. He stepped toward the golden glow.

  "What's your hurry, Jonesie?"

  "Yes, you wouldn't run off without telling your mates, would you?"