The opening was not wide enough for Winter, but he shoved the tin hat through to Freddie, who widened the hole until finally a groping hand emerged. Freddie seized it, heedless of Winter’s wound, and pulled with everything he had.
Winter slid out.
They collapsed, half-sunk in near-liquid mud, as though the earth were trying to finish what the pillbox had started. Freddie realized that he was whispering to himself without being aware of it, thought for a moment he was praying. Realized that he was just whisperingFucking hell,over and over. He wasn’t sure how long they lay there, just two dirty smudges, invisible. But the whistle of a falling shell rattled Freddie back to alertness. He raised his head. Grew properly aware, for the first time, of their surroundings.
It was night. Night and cold. It had been warmer in the pillbox. Now they lay out under torrents of almost frozen rain, and enough wind to riffle Freddie’s hair. A million craters stretched from one horizon to the other, full of water that reflected a sky glittering with shellfire. No landmarks but the ruined pillbox. Just holes and water, right to the flame-limned horizon. He couldn’t see any people,although he could hear grenades and small arms and trench mortars, the sound muffled by the wet air. There must be people. But they were hidden by the night and the rain and the lips of innumerable shell holes.
It was too wet, too dark, to tell their direction. They could as easily have been looking toward Germany as Canada. Could they wait until dawn?No,Freddie thought. They’d die. The rain was close cousin to snow, and already he was trying to catch it on his parched tongue. He’d be starting on the water in the shell holes soon, never mind the spent explosives and dead bodies. And Winter was wounded.
“Winter,” he whispered.
The German didn’t answer.
“Winter,” said Freddie again, seized with sudden terror. That Winter had died and left him alone. It was as though they were still in the pillbox, each the only thing in the other’s shrunken world. “Hans,” he said, loud and clumsy, catching the other man by his sodden shoulders, half-dragging him upright.
Winter raised his head just as a star shell went up and filled the darkness with cold light. Freddie realized with a shock that this was his first sight of the other man’s face. He saw close-cropped hair, matted and filthy. Helmet gone. Broad features, deep-set eyes, sunken with exhaustion. Generous mouth, stubbled jaw, hollow cheeks. All color bleached to bone by the white light overhead. Except for his eyes, dark as blood. It had been easier, somehow, to think of the German as only half-real: a bony shoulder, a voice in the dark.
Freddie wondered what Winter saw. Russet hair, he supposed, turned to black by filth and by night, face sprayed with freckles, his beard coming in bristly, nose a babyish snub that Freddie had despised, back when that kind of thing mattered.
The light went out, and Winter was just a dark shape again, a living presence beside him. “We can’t stay here,” said Freddie.
“I know.” Winter didn’t need to say anything else. They were both bareheaded, wet. Weakened by thirst and confinement. They’dcrawled out of their tomb. But they weren’t back in the land of the living. Not by a long chalk.
“Do you know which way is which?” It didn’t occur to Freddie that they might separate. The only thing worse than this place would be to face it alone. He’d fall into a shell hole and drown, and no one would ever know what had happened to him. The rain fell stinging into his eyes. His hands were still on Winter’s shoulders.
“No,” said Winter.
“We’ll have to chance a direction. We’ll die if we stay here.”
Their eyes met, just as another star shell faded, and in the dark Winter asked, “Am I your prisoner? Or are you mine, Iven?”
And wasn’t that just the bloody question? Freddie let him go. “Christ, each the other’s, I suppose. But I’ll follow, if you choose the direction.”
He couldn’t see Winter’s expression anymore, just the general shape of his features, the loom of him against the insane sky. But he could almost feel Winter’s surprise. Maybe Freddie didn’t need to see him, after all that time in the dark. Awkwardly, he added, “You saved my life.”
“Very well.” But still Winter hesitated. Freddie understood: It was a guess. Whichever way they went, there was danger. Stray bullets. Stray shells. Drowning, in that mud and oily water. Simply being shot on sight, by whichever side they ran into first.
“This way, then,” said Winter at length. “But do not speak, Iven, until we know where we are. I won’t either. If the wrong side hears German—or English—they’ll…”
“They’ll shoot first,” Freddie finished, and wiped half-frozen rain from his eyes. “Ask questions later.”
“Stay close,” said Winter, and started to walk.
THEGOTHIC,OUT OF HALIFAX
March 1918
The ponderousGothic,belching smoke, was drawn up at the quay with the gangplank down. Her convoy waited beyond the mouth of the harbor, gray smudges against the steely sea. They were to be convoyed to Liverpool first. Mary had business in London, before they went to Belgium. One heard that the system of convoys kept passenger liners safe from the U-boats, but Laura still had a horror of shipwrecks. Her palms sweated despite the cold as she went up the gangplank.
Two years after the comet, when theTitanicsank, all the fishermen of Halifax had gone out to the wreckage. They’d come back pale and hastily got drunk, as an endless stream of coffins came off their boats, to be buried with neither family nor ceremony. There had been so many dead that the undertaker had to invent a system of tying tags to toes to keep track of them all.
Charles Iven had been one of the men who’d gone out to the wreck. His drinking had got worse after that. Once, on a night he was very drunk, he’d even described it to his children.
“Just floating,” he’d said. “Hundreds of them, in the water. Staring up, staring down. Like dynamited fish. We hauled them up, andsome of them had their eyes pecked out by seabirds. Little children sometimes. There were so many. Thousands. Progress. Pah. What’s progress? Give people God’s power—to build ships like islands, or fly like birds, or set fire to the bowels of earth like the devil in his damned pit—it just writes their stupidity larger and larger until they drown the whole world. Our hands get bigger and our spirits shrink. Is it any wonder, really, that God’s done with us? That was the white horseman, Marie. That ship. Not your comet. Who cares about a comet? Pray, all of you.”
Laura mounted the gangplank, thinking she could face shellfire with equanimity if they could just get across the Atlantic.
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