The remaining students at the university kept close together, like sheep in a harassed herd. Neither hide nor hair was seen of the headmaster, the servants ran away, the teachers failed to appear, and the youths, who had until recently considered themselves to be solid, respectable, learned men, turned out to be feckless boys. One day the walls of the Grand Auditorium resounded with the most sincere weeping. One of the Inquirers was sobbing on his rough bench like a small boy; he was just a village lad, for whom the first year of his studies had turned into a nightmare. The others averted their eyes, not wanting to look at the pale faces and quivering lips of their comrades, and then Fox suddenly grew savage, boiling up into a white-hot fury.
No one had ever heard such scathing speech from him before. He proffered a thimble to each and every one of them so that they could gather up their snot; he suggested that the wide skirts of their mothers might be very warm to hide under and called for a chamber pot to be brought into the hall in the event of sudden need. He strode up to the rostrum and rained insults down on his classmates: they were slack-mouthed, snot-nosed, scruffy little shits, receptacles for spit and piss, and limp-dicked mama’s boys. The weeping lad sobbed one last time then opened his mouth wide and blushed a deep red color, as if his cheeks had been brushed by a lady’s cosmetics.
The incident ended in a boozer. Fox appointed himself supply officer, broke into the university’s wine cellar, and uncorked many ancient bottles of wine. They drank right there in the lecture hall; they drank and sang and reminisced about the Old-Eyed Fly. Fox roared with laughter as if he were rabid then started a game: Everyone without exception must relate their first sexual experience, and those who did not have one would be obliged to make up for their neglect the very next day. Already drunk voices heckled each other, interweaving hysterical laughter with outbursts. Egert watched this carousal from the round window that adjoined the lecture hall to the library, and the discordant sounds of a song wafted to his ears. “Oh, oh, oh! Do not speak, my dear, don’t say a word! Oh, my soul is fire, but the door is squeaking: it hasn’t been oiled.”
He turned back to Toria and entertained her for a while with anecdotes about Fox’s previous pranks, some of which he had seen, some of which he had only heard of, and several of which he thought up while he was telling her the stories. Listening to his deliberately cheerful chatter, Toria at first smiled palely and then to please him she even burst out laughing, though with obvious effort.
After midnight the cries and shouts in the Grand Auditorium ceased and Toria fell asleep. Sitting next to her for a while then carefully smoothing back her hair, Egert departed below.
The students were sleeping side by side, some on the benches, some on the tables, and some simply on the chilly stone floor. Fox was nowhere to be found; Egert realized this from the very first glance, and for some unknown reason his heart shrank into his chest.
Gaetan was not in their room, and his worn cloak was not hanging from the iron hook. Egert stood on the university steps for a long time, peering out into the murky night. Windows gleamed faintly in the courthouse, the executed doll on its circular pedestal weaved in the rain, and the Tower of Lash soared overhead, mute, sealed like a crypt, indifferent to the city dying at its feet.
Fox did not return in the morning. The fog that had thickened in the night did not disperse with the sun, but instead it congealed like jelly; even the wind got stuck in its clinging, damp wisps. The door of the dean’s study remained firmly shut, and Toria began roaming the stacks of the library as if she were lost, muttering responses to her own thoughts as she compulsively rubbed a velvety-smooth rag over the spines, slipcovers, and gilded edges of the books.
Egert did not tell her where he was going. He did not want to worry her.
The chill dampness and his own terror caused him to tremble as, his teeth clenched, he stepped out onto the deserted square. There were no merchants; there were no shoppers: there was only the deaf, muffled silence, the gray silhouettes of the houses, and the merciful fog that covered the city like a shroud covers the face of the deceased.
Egert soon realized that he would not find Fox. He encountered dead bodies along his path. Egert averted his eyes, but just the same his gaze found first a woman’s hand, stretched out convulsively, clinging onto a jewel; then hair spread out over the cobblestones; then the rakish boot of a guard, wet from the sagging droplets of fog and therefore gleaming as if it had just been polished for a parade. The smell of smoke mixed with the scent of decay. Egert walked on, but then he stopped, flinching, scenting the familiar aroma of a bitterish perfume in the still, dead air.
The Tower of Lash, having accomplished its dreadful business, continued to smoke slightly. Egert approached it, strangely impassive; by the entrance to the Tower a completely gray man in a laborer’s coveralls was flailing his fists against the stone masonry.
“Open up! Open up! Open up!”
Several apathetic people were crouched nearby on the pavement. A pretty woman in a nightcap that had slipped off her hair was absentmindedly stroking a dead boy lying in her lap.
“Open up!” spat the gray man. His knuckles were completely devoid of skin from punching at the stone. Beads of blood dropped down onto the pavement. Nearby a broken pickax wallowed in the dirt.
“We must pray,” someone whispered. “We must pray. Oh, Spirit of Lash…”
The gray man in the overalls pounded at the sealed door with a renewed frenzy. “Open up! Ah! Scum! Undertakers! Open up! You can’t hide! Open up!”
Egert turned and stumbled away.
Fox would not be found. He had gone missing; he had disappeared somewhere in this pestilent cauldron; no one could help; nothing would make it better; and Egert would die as well. At this thought the animal fear raged in his soul, but with his heart and his mind he understood clearly that the most important thing left to him in his shortened life was Toria. Her final days must not be darkened with horror and grief. Egert would not allow himself the luxury of dying first: only once he had made sure that nothing could ever threaten Toria again would he close his own eyes.
Egert saw a collapsed boy on the pavement in front of him, and he was about to make his way around it, keeping it as far away as possible, when the man moved, and Egert heard the faint scratching of iron against stone. A sword rested in the hand of the dying man; Egert could see beads of moisture on the costly sheath, on the heavy monogrammed hilt, on the baldric decorated with semiprecious stones. Then he shifted his gaze to the face of the man lying in the pavement.
Karver said nothing. His chest was rising rapidly, trying to suck in the wet air; his lips were parched and his eyelids were swollen. One hand, clad in a thin glove, clawed at the stones of the pavement, while the other squeezed the handle of his sword as if the weapon could defend its master even from the Plague. Karver stared at Egert, unwilling to move his eyes away.
The plaintive whickering of a horse, muted by the fog, could be heard in the distance.
Karver gasped fitfully. His lips jerked and Egert heard, as quietly as the rustle of falling sand, “Egert…”
Egert said nothing because there was nothing to say.
“Egert … Kavarren … What is happening in Kavarren right now?”
Such a keen, imploring note slithered through Karver’s voice that Egert momentarily remembered that shy, thin-lipped boy who had been the friend of his childhood.
“This … this death … will it reach Kavarren?”
“Of course not,” Egert said with certainty. “It’s too far. And they will have set up a quarantine, and patrols.…”
Karver breathed deeply; it seemed he was relieved. He threw back his head and shaded his eyes with his hand. He whispered with a half smile, “Sand … Den, tracks … Cold … water … They laughed.…”
Egert was silent, taking these incoherent words for raving.
Karver did not tear his gaze away; it was an oddly vacant gaze that seeped out from under his heavy eyelids. “Sand … The Kava ri
ver … You remember?”
For a second Egert saw a sun-drenched bank, white on yellow like sponge cake covered with icing, green isles of grass, a group of boys, raising fountains of spray up to the heavens.…
“You always … threw sand in my eyes … remember?”
He tried as hard as he could to summon such a recollection, but there was only the wet, shiny pavement before his eyes. Could it have been so? Yes, it could. Karver had never complained; he had submissively washed all the sand from his inflamed eyes.
“I didn’t mean to,” Egert said for some reason.
“Yes, you did,” Karver objected quietly.
They were silent for a while. The fog did not wish to disperse, and smoke and decay and death approached from every side.
“Kavarren,” whispered Karver almost inaudibly.
“Nothing will happen to it,” Egert replied.
Searchingly gazing at Egert, Karver tried to raise himself up onto his elbow. “Are you sure?”
The smooth surface of the Kava river gleamed in Egert’s mind’s eye; sunlight flared up and died out on the water, where the quivering copper green of Kavarren’s roofs, turrets, and weathervanes was reflected.
Knowing that he lied, he smiled widely and tranquilly. “Of course I’m sure. Kavarren is safe.”
Karver sighed deeply and lowered himself back onto the pavement. His eyes closed halfway. “Thank … Heaven…”
No one would ever hear him say another word.
The fog dispersed, and the square appeared before Egert’s gaze. It looked like a field of battle. Here would be enough food for a thousand ravens, but there was not a single bird in the city; nothing disturbed the dead, as though the scavengers of the world were obeying a taboo.
However, that was not entirely true. Egert looked around; a boy ran from corpse to corpse with his back bent low. He was about eighteen years old, medium height, scrawny, with a canvas sack over his shoulder. Beggars gathered their alms in such sacks, and Egert guessed what the youngster was gathering in his. Stooping over a corpse, he dexterously fished out a purse or a snuffbox or whatever finery caught his eye from the dead person; rings were a bother: they did not wish to slip off the swollen fingers. The lad sniffed the air, keeping a wary eye on Egert, but he continued his business, scrubbing at dead hands with a piece of soap he had saved specially for this occasion.
Egert wanted to scream, but his fear proved stronger than his fury and disgust. Spitting on his soap, the looter skirted around Egert in a wide arc and then took to his heels at the sound of a shrill whistle.
Egert, struck dumb, watched as the lad fled. On the very edge of the square he was overtaken by two broad-shouldered figures, one in the white-and-red uniform of the guards, the other in a slovenly black smock. The lad screamed like a rabbit, tried to dart away, cowered in their arms, then thrust the sack away from himself as if trying to pay them off. Egert did not want to watch, but watch he did as the man in guard’s uniform beat the lad over the head with his sack. He heard the next words, painfully strained, carry throughout the entire square.
“No! I’m not! They don’t need it! They don’t need it! The dead don’t need—ah!”
Passing into an inarticulate shriek, the screaming died out. The scrawny body crumpled to the ground in the glow of the streetlamps with the canvas sack on its chest.
* * *
Fox returned late that evening. Egert, whose intuition that day had become as sharp as a spear, found him before anyone else.
Gaetan stood by the entrance, on the stone porch of the university; he stood embracing the wooden monkey by the shoulders. His tricornered hat, crumpled out of shape, slid down his forehead. He was, of course, blindly, staggeringly drunk. Egert, who experienced colossal relief at the sight of his friend, wanted to lead him in out of the cold and put him to bed. Hearing Egert’s footsteps behind him, Fox shivered and turned around. The light of the lantern in the doorway fell on his face. Gaetan was sober, as sober as the day of the exam, but his honey-colored eyes now seemed dark, almost black.
“Egert?”
Egert did not understand what had frightened his friend so. He took another step forward, extending his hand. “Let’s go.”
Gaetan recoiled. His gaze compelled Egert to come to a dead halt; not once in their long acquaintance had he seen in the eyes of his friend such a strange expression. What was it? Loathing? Scorn?
“Fox?” he muttered uneasily.
“Don’t come near me,” Fox replied desolately. “Don’t come near me, Egert. Don’t you come near me, I beg you. Go away. Go back.” He staggered, and Egert suddenly realized that the sober Gaetan could barely stand on his own two legs: he was being dragged to the ground. He was being dragged into the ground.
He understood now what that expression was that had frozen in Fox’s eyes. It was fear of approaching death and fear of carrying away with him another person, his friend, Egert.
“Gaetan!” groaned Egert through his teeth.
Fox hugged the monkey tighter. “Don’t … You know, Farri died yesterday. Do you remember Farri?”
“Gaetan…”
“Go back. I’ll just take a little … stroll. Maybe I’ll make my way to the One-Eyed Fly. If the innkeep is still alive, he’ll give me a drink. On credit.” Fox laughed, arduously stretched out his hand and, barely reaching it, patted the monkey on his shiny wooden bottom.
Egert stood on the steps and watched him walk away. Fox staggered as he walked, sometimes falling, just as he had so many times when returning from a night out; his cap with the silver fringe lay like a parting gift at the feet of the wooden monkey. The sightless sky, full of dark clouds, brooded over the city, and the Tower of Lash, mute, sealed shut, mantled in smoke, brooded over the square.
* * *
For a whole long day and night they thrashed about like two fish at the bottom of Toria’s reddish black incandescent ocean.
Coming to her senses, Toria felt echoes of shame: never in her life would she have imagined that within herself she carried this covetous, insatiable, inexhaustible beast, ready to tear off not just clothing, but skin. Panicking, she tried not to look at Egert, who was lying next to her; she did not dare touch his skin, not even with her breath, but the ardent beast quickened and upended all her notions of dignity and decency, and afflicted by passion, she responded to the similarly grasping, indefatigable passion of Egert.
Heaven, it can’t really be like this for everyone, can it? Toria thought, because then life was completely foreign, completely different than she had ever thought it was, because there seemed to be powers that controlled her, forces that overrode all her preconceptions, and she could finally understand dark, shadowy forces that had beguiled her mother. Mother? But why dark and shadowy? Why beguiling? This is happiness; this is joy. Egert! Egert, I could have died a remote old crone, never knowing the world of truth! But could I be wrong? What if this is not truth, but obsession, delirium, deceit!
Swallowing, her throat husky from groans, her cheeks stained with tears that she did not bother to wipe away, she relaxed, abated, melted into Egert’s embracing arms as if burrowing into a warm, secure den. Closing her eyes, she lazily sorted through the fragmentary images that rushed through her brain, and from time to time plucked from the stream one that seemed to contain unmistakable truths.
It was a truth that if had she become the wife of Dinar, she would never have known of any other love besides friendly, brotherly love. It was a truth that the loss of Dinar had blessed her. Heaven, this is monstrous, this is impossible. Dinar, forgive me! Toria began to weep silently, without tears, and in his sleep Egert embraced her more tightly. She dozed off, and she saw Dinar nearby, sitting on the couch opposite the bed as he usually had when he came to her room. Serene and earnest, he looked at Toria without reproach, but also without indulgence, as though desiring to say that he was done, that he would never come back, but don’t cry, he loves you so …
Then the vision of Dinar faded away, disap
peared in succession of others. Toria dreamed of her mother, frozen in a cold bank of snow, and of her father, forever weighed down by a sense of guilt. But where is the guilt of a woman, whose passions overwhelm her own identity, like a wave washing over the deck of a fragile ship? And if it was true that in her face she duplicated her mother, then did she not also inherit her passions?
However, right now it no longer mattered. Now they were all standing on the threshold of death, on the threshold beyond which Dinar had already stepped. She and Egert were a couple, even if they did not live to see their wedding, but her father was alone, alone in his study. If she feared, it was only for her father. Have I forsaken him for the sake of my own happiness? Could it be true that I have abandoned him? Could it be true?
Toria began to cry again. Egert kissed her glistening eyes and mumbled something tender; she could not make out a single word of what he said, and that was good: words were unnecessary.
Then she fell into a deep sleep and dreamed of a green mountain.
The mountain was covered with short, smooth grass. She hovered over it, occupying half the sky, and the second half was a deep blue. Toria recalled that the windows of their home were painted with this blue. The mountain was an emerald on blue. Toria inhaled, ascending even higher, and it was a good thing she did because there, on the summit of the mountain, stood her mother, wearing a dazzlingly white head scarf, laughing and stretching out her palms, which held a scarlet handful of strawberries, the first strawberries, and how long will it be until this winter is ended? There is still half a year until the next strawberries, there is still half a year, there is still time …
She awoke because Egert, groaning in his sleep, had firmly squeezed her shoulder.
* * *
They slept in the predawn hour; they both slept peacefully, deeply, without dreams, and therefore could not hear how, scraping softly, the door of the dean’s study opened, the door that had for many days been locked from the inside. In the recesses of the dark room the last flames of the candles were dying down, and the unbearably stuffy, smoky, thick air rushed to freedom. Books lay on the desk, on the floor, on all the shelves: laid bare, spread out, helpless as jellyfish driven to shore. The taxidermied rat shackled to its chain grinned evilly, the glass globe with the candle inside was covered with dust, but the steel wing spread out just as confidently and potently, and underneath it on the dean’s desk gleamed the faultless gold of the Amulet of the Prophet.