cheek against the place where his breastbone had raised two shallow curves.
The skin lay along the ground, a shadow reversed in a photo negative. Pavli stepped back from it. Matthi had told him what he had to do next.
Beneath the trees, he found the fallen branches he needed, one taller than himself, the other a little wider than his shoulders. With a strip torn from his shirt, he bound them into a crucifix. He used the jagged point of one of the branches to dig a hole in the frozen ground, deep enough to hold the cross up when he scraped a mound of dirt and pebbles around its base.
He hung his brother’s skin upon the cross. The forearms dangled from the ends of the horizontal branch, the motion of the night air spreading the empty hands in a gesture of benediction. The hollow legs twisted and caught against the rough bark below. Matthi’s face was held upright by the wood that could be seen behind the holes of mouth and eyes.
Pavli stood before the cross, his eyes raised to meet his brother’s gaze. He closed his own eyes and listened.
Everything… I promised I would tell you everything…
A raven passed beneath the moon. He felt its shadow upon his brow. Around him, in the forest’s silence, the small animals, the toads and winter-starved mice, crept out to watch.
His brother’s hand touched his, the silken fingers soft upon his still-mortal flesh. For a moment, one that didn’t end, as he kept himself unseeing, it was as if his brother had stepped down from the cross, freed himself of it, skin filled with a radiant flesh, bones of diamond light.
This is how… Matthi’s voice spoke stronger at his ear. These are the secrets…
He stepped closer, his brother’s arms folding softly around his shoulders. He didn’t know if it was his hand or his brother’s, that parted his shirt, bared his chest.
Here. Fingertips touched his unmarked ribs. And here. They traced unseen wounds upon his wrists.
Pavli stood half-naked in the forest’s cold and silence, listening to his brother’s voice. There would be things he must do, a great task; that would come. He stood and received his heritage, that which had been denied him, the faith of the Lazarenes.
He woke from a new dreaming. One in which he had never been before.
The birds of the night had shouted in triumph, far above the forest. He had heard them wheeling against the sky, their black wings blotting out the stars. Even before his brother had finished speaking to him, before he had felt the soft, empty hands clasp around his neck, drawing him toward his brother’s face, as though for the kiss of peace.
Pavli sat up from the ground, feeling its wetness beneath his palms. Grey morning light sifted through the trees. He shivered in his nakedness, the cold drawing ice through the centers of his bones, his jaw trembling uncontrollably. He looked to one side and saw someone else still sleeping, body sprawled across a mound of rotting-black leaves; farther away, under a thicket of close-knit twigs was another one.
He stood up, crystals of ice stinging his bare feet. With his arms tight around himself for warmth, he looked down at the nearest sleeper. It was one of the guards; he could recognize the SS uniform. Or what was left of it – the trousers and jacket had been slashed to ribbons. Blood had soaked through the ragged edges of cloth, spreading in a pool beneath the shoulders and the backs of the legs. The chest and abdomen was exposed, revealing the diagonal wound, pink coils of viscera loosened beneath the shattered ribcage. The stilled heart had been cut nearly in two, a red fist now spread open.
The other guard’s throat had been slashed, deep enough to show the hard knots of spine below the trachea. His eyes were still open, registering shock; Pavli looked down at him, remembering the same face, the same expression, from his dreaming. The guard had looked over his shoulder and had screamed, trying to raise his rifle, but it had been too late.
There were others scattered through the forest; Pavli could see them now, as the dawn spread more light. One sat with its back to a tree, hands mired in the blood collected in its lap. Another curled in fetal position around a useless rifle; its eyes were filled with wonder, as though it had seen a miracle in the moment of its death.
Pavli wondered if any of the guards had managed to escape. It didn’t seem likely to him; the forest’s silence told him that he and the smaller creatures were the only things left alive in it. He looked down at himself. His own chest and arms were smeared with blood, a red hieroglyphic roughened with dirt and broken twigs. He brushed away as much as he could, his fingertips dragging against the sticky markings.
The marks of his feet in the snow patches led him back to the cross he’d made. His brother Matthi’s skin was no longer draped upon it; that lay a few feet before it, the arms carefully outspread, the empty face gazing up at the clouded sky. Its chest and hands were daubed with red as well. The voice that spoke at Pavli’s ear had been a thing of the night, now silent in the first shadows of day.
Threads of blood spiraled around the upright branch of the cross. Impaled at the top was the head of Herr Doktor Ritter, the wooden end thrust up through the gaping throat. The eyes had been torn out, the sockets weeping red into the mouth dangling open. A few yards away was the rest of the corpse, lines across the ground showing where it had been dragged from elsewhere.
Bright metal glittered at the base of the cross. Pavli bent down and picked up an ornate knife; he recognized it as Ritter’s dagger, that he had kept on his desk at the asylum. Of all the things there, he had taken this, the ceremonial emblem of his membership in the SS. Pavli rubbed a finger along the words inscribed on the blade. Meine Ehre hei?t Treue. His fingertip came away marked with blood still wet.
He found his clothes and the black leather bag farther away. A streamlet of melted snow trickled nearby; he broke the ice covering it and washed himself, the cold tightening his flesh.
He debated throwing away Ritter’s dagger, but finally tucked it inside his shirt, snugged against the waistband of his trousers. Alone, and with far to go, he might have need of it. He knelt down with the bag beside his brother’s skin; he carefully folded the silken matter and placed it inside, then drew the strap through the buckle. There had been no possibility of his leaving this part of his brother behind, with the profane corpses lying among the trees.
Standing up, he held the bag close to his chest. In the distance, he could hear the faint noises of machinery, the rumbling of tanks and heavy artillery vehicles. He had no way of knowing to which army they might belong. If the battle began again, it would sweep over him like a fiery tide, crushing him beneath its treads. He would have to hurry, reach some kind of sanctuary before the earth split open once more.
His exhausted brain could think only of the way back to Berlin, the narrow roads by which the trucks had brought the Lazarenes to the asylum so long ago. If he could reach the city, there would be places he could hide, the curtains drawn over the windows of the bedroom he had shared with Matthi, the cellar of his uncle’s house, the alleys twisting around themselves, where he could elude any pursuers…
There was nowhere else to go.
Pavli wished his brother would speak to him again, tell him what to do, as Matthi had told him during the long dreaming night that had just ended. But he couldn’t wait for another night to come. The images of that dreaming – the shadows of ravens, the terrified faces of the guards before the blood was made to leap from their throats – tangled inside his skull. There had been another, whose face had been impossible to see beneath a darkened hood, a figure striding through the forest, implacable in the stalking of its prey. He tried to remember, but that was all, only that glimpse as he had fallen beneath the heavy sky.
His legs ached with the temptation to lie down, to curl next to the crucifix with the blind head staked above. To sleep, and wait, to let his dreaming unravel itself and become a memory he could grasp. But there was no time for that.
The bag of black leather, with its silken weight inside, dangled from his hand as he started walking toward home.
TWENTY-TWO
