Heraclix and Pomp: A Novel of the Fabricated and the Fey Page 5

  Heraclix hesitated.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I am not afraid. You should not be, either. Fate is fate, no?”

  Heraclix let her take the hand. That left hand. He felt a wave of nervousness rise up in him as he proffered it, then a calming influence as she touched it.

  It relaxed noticeably as she held the fingers back with her own hand, then traced the lines on the palm with the index finger of the other. Her face contorted, bushy eyebrows furrowed, as she examined the deep crevices that cut through the flesh like telltale caverns of destiny.

  “This lifeline,” she said with a touch of disbelief in her voice, “is impossibly long. It is intersected at a strange angle by a line I don’t often see, a life-changing event—possibly traumatic, possibly epiphanic and wonderful—that changed the course of this life. See how the line shifts away from its original path? This person was not the same after this. He was changed forever. Looking forward, up the lifeline, is another event or decision, still forthcoming. Details after this are difficult to read: the owner was cruel, a warrior or general, but with a gentle heart buried inside. He has touched lives, for good and evil, many lives. He was never married, had troubled, confusing relationships in and out of his family. He hated other children as a child, then loved them as an adult, though he never had any of his own. Again, these relationships seem confused and vague in their quality.

  “The past, then, seems clear, so far as backward divination goes. But the future is difficult to see.”

  She let the hand go.

  “Here, let me see your other hand,” she said.

  Then, taking the right hand, she stopped suddenly and gagged. After regaining her composure she said, “Your hand. There is nothing there. The fingerprints, the palm prints, they have all been burned off.”

  Heraclix looked at his right hand, which, truth be told, he had taken for granted up to that point. He had been so fixated on the significance of the left hand that he had neither looked at nor thought much about the right. The fingerprints had, indeed, been burned off, and any creases in the palms had been cauterized, melted together as if by a flat, hot iron.

  “I can learn nothing from this hand other than someone did not want it identified, did not want its past known—nor its future. Besides, reading the other has spent my gift. I have nothing more to offer this evening. Good night.”

  With this, she disappeared behind a curtain, leaving the pair in the parlor. Pomp, alarmed by Vadoma’s sudden exit, flew down from the lanterns and stood on the table. Heraclix sat ruminating on the old gypsy’s words.

  He held his hands up, comparing them to one another.

  “Here,” he held the left hand a little higher, “a life changed forever. And here,” he held up the right, “a life was meant to be forever forgotten.”

  He sighed deeply, then took out the papers he had earlier collected.

  “We don’t know where this Porchenskivik lived. Given the secretive nature of his letters, I don’t believe that he actually lived at Szalko. Besides, he claimed that his messenger was from the neighboring village of Bozsok.”

  He leaned back in his chair.

  “That settles it. We will travel to Bozsok soon,” Heraclix told Pomp, “as soon as we can slip out quietly, without drawing attention to ourselves. We must find this man Porchenskivik.”

  Pomp, uncharacteristically still and focused, stared into the crystal ball on the table, enthralled.

  Major Von Graeb brooded over a long wooden table. A map of Vienna’s streets was spread across its top. Each corner was held by a sergeant, with a few lower-rank non-commissioned officers between them.

  “We enter here,” Von Graeb said in grave tones, pointing to the map. Then, pointing to another spot, “this is where the graf will be as we flush them out.”

  One of the sergeants spoke up: “If I may be so bold, sir?”

  “Yes?” Von Graeb said.

  “You do not sound very excited about this, sir.”

  “No,” he admitted. “But we follow orders. We are loyal soldiers of the Holy Roman Empire, are we not?”

  The sergeant looked to his companions, realizing that he had crossed a line. “Yes, Major. We are loyal.”

  “Good. I don’t have to fully agree with orders to follow them. Neither do you. Now, move!”

  The room cleared with military precision.

  Though they marched in unison, three-dozen-plus-one strong, their boots made only a light tapping on the street. A pair of children, surprised by the sudden, almost silent appearance of a contingent of soldiers, scrambled out from the burned-out remnants of Mowler’s apartment and ran off into the fading night.

  “This is where the graf fought the devil,” one of the soldiers said to a companion.

  A sergeant responded in hushed tones, but with little restraint: “Silence, or I’ll cut your tongue out!”

  Silence was maintained all the way to the mouth of the gypsy quarter.

  Pomp screamed, alarming Heraclix and waking Vadoma, who came running through the curtains.

  “What was that about?” Heraclix asked, bewildered.

  Vadoma, her face showing mixed amusement and worry, said, “I think I know the problem.” She stood next to the table where Pomp sat staring into the crystal ball, transfixed.

  “Your little friend has seen something. What is it, fey one?” she tapped Pomp on the back.

  Pomp startled, going invisible, then flitting about the room, knocking into the little lanterns that hung from the ceiling.

  “Von Helmutter! He’s here!” Pomp yelled.

  “No, not yet, dear. But if you saw him here, he soon will be.”

  “He is here!”

  “He is not here yet.”

  “What? What is ‘yet?’” Pomp asked.

  Vadoma looked to Heraclix for help, but the golem merely shrugged.

  “Look around, little one,” Vadoma said. “Do you see Von Helmutter here?”

  “No. Is he invisible?”

  “No, dear, he is not invisible.”

  “Then he is not here,” Pomp’s voice relaxed considerably.

  “When is he coming, Pomp?” Vadoma asked, careful to speak gently, so as not to startle the fairy.

  “It is morning when he is here,” Pomp said.

  “Then we must hurry. They will look for you here, but they will not find you. When they do not find you, they will leave. They always do.”

  The sun had crested the city’s outer wall of buildings but had not yet penetrated down to the streets when Heraclix and Pomp, on the incomplete rooftops of the gypsy quarter, heard the clomp and clank of Von Helmutter’s men as they tried to weave through the wooden maze below. The length of the men’s bayoneted muskets made the going difficult, but they dare not leave their weapons behind. They were in the midst of enemy territory, according to what Vadoma had told Heraclix and Pomp the night before.

  The pair watched as the soldier’s torches bounced along, bungling their way through the outer rings of the quarter.

  “Torches,” Heraclix said.

  Pomp looked down over the edge of the rooftop.

  “Still dark down there.” She giggled, stretching her arms and wings out to soak up the rising sun, which was roughly parallel to their location, a good forty feet up.

  “But the sun will show through soon. They have light enough to see.” Heraclix said. “And why not lanterns . . . ?”

  He bolted upright.

  “Pomp! We’re endangering Vadoma and everyone here! We must leave at once!”

  Pomp saw the wisdom in this. She liked the old woman and didn’t want her to be hurt.

  “I will bring the soldiers with us!” she said, and flew off before Heraclix could finish saying “Pomp, no!”

  Pomp doesn’t think the soldiers need their torches. It’s morning time! She buzzes in, bites fingers, takes one torch, then another, douses them in a bucket of water.

  Soldiers shout, and so do the Romani. It’s very confusing, but Pomp i
s able to take away and squelch two more torches before the shooting starts. The soldiers don’t aim, they just shoot, and the Romani flee or fall. One, two, three of them collapse, two men and a boy-child. Another shot, a woman falls, her husband rushes at the soldiers, wielding a knife, but he is cut down by bayonets.

  Von Helmutter notes the confusion, smiles, orders “throw torches to flush them out!” and the air is full of a dozen smoking brands.

  Pomp can only put out a couple of them. The others set fire to the timbers, flames licking up the posts like dragon tongues.

  Screaming residents throw buckets of water at the flames, some succeed at quelling them, some do not. It is not enough to stop the fires from spreading, meeting, engulfing.

  Pomp pests a soldier just as a flaming section of building comes crashing down with a yell. A familiar yell.

  But buildings do not have voices, she thinks.

  Heraclix landed, quite awkwardly, on a large piece of roof that had become a piece of the floor. Great jets of smoke shot out from underneath, extinguishing some flames, fanning others.

  Heraclix rose, then rushed a group of soldiers, screaming “It’s me you want. Come and get me!”

  The soldiers agreed and complied.

  He barreled through them, knocking them aside, but gingerly, carefully, then continued past, away from the center of the Gypsy quarter.

  Their pursuit was a bungling mess. They were not swift among the building brambles. Heraclix intentionally took face-first stumbles and pratfalls to let them keep up with him. They took the bait and closed with him as he led them toward the outer edge of the quarter, away from the bulk of the Romani.

  He looked back frequently to make sure the soldiers kept him in their sights. Occasionally one of them fired a musket. Whether they missed him or the balls simply bounced off his body, Heraclix didn’t know or care. They were following him, and that was all that mattered . . .

  . . . until he turned around to see Von Helmutter, on his horse, silver dagger drawn, barring the path, waiting for Heraclix to come to him.

  Heraclix—who didn’t want to harm the soldiers but did want to draw them away—had no choice. He charged Von Helmutter.

  The graf smiled, steadying his horse.

  Another shot rang out behind Heraclix. In front of him, Von Helmutter’s horse screamed as a red flower blossomed in its front flank. The beast reared, throwing Von Helmutter just as Heraclix overran his position. Heraclix trampled the graf. The wounded horse kept bucking, preventing further pursuit. Heraclix waited a moment to allow time for the men to clear the horse, to draw them further out. But then he realized that Von Helmutter wasn’t the only one who was injured in the collision. A deep puncture in Heraclix’s upper thigh gushed silver. He looked at the wound, realized its severity, and hobbled toward and through the city gate as Von Helmutter sent pursuers after the giant.

  CHAPTER 5

  Pomp hears cries and the cracking of burning wood, but above all else she hears shouts, in Romani accents—angry shouts, but the anger is not directed at the soldiers. The people are angry at Vadoma and “the fugitives”!

  We cannot stay here, Pomp thinks. They hate us now!

  Pomp flies above the fray, looking for Heraclix. Through the smoke she espies the giant running from the city walls toward a deep, dark forest at the foothills of the mountains. The soldiers chase after him, but he is tearing a path through the trees and leaving branches behind him. Von Helmutter’s men cannot keep up with Heraclix. They shoot at him, but their bullets either miss or bounce off of him. After going into the woods only a few feet, the soldiers give up their pursuit and turn back.

  “Heraclix is free,” Pomp says as she watches the giant disappear into the woods where the imperial guards dare not follow without provisions.

  “And now, so is Pomp!”

  She flies off, directionless, heading for the portal that will lead her to her kin. She follows the contours of a hill that is not a hill, flying through a tear in the veil of the world, into a world that is not of men.

  This is familiar, this place. This is home. But she can’t help but feel that she has been away more than usual. However, she is not sure if this is true and is equally unsure about why she is not sure. Something is—what is the word?—different? Not different with here, but different with her. She dislikes the feeling and the realization. This is home, but she . . . is not. At least not completely.

  She spots one of her ten thousand sisters, Gloranda, the rainbow-haired one. Gloranda is leaning around the edge of a tree, peeking at something, with her back to Pomp.

  Pomp buzzes over and lays her head on Gloranda’s shoulder.

  Gloranda barely acknowledges Pomp, so focused is she on what she is watching.

  In the distance, plump Doribell and Ilsie, twins, are saddling a large bat.

  “He bucks!” Doribell says, giggling.

  “And squeaks!” Ilsie says.

  They jump on the bat’s back, nearly crushing it. The bat squeaks, the fairies giggle.

  “Hi, Gloranda!” Pomp says.

  “Shh!” says Gloranda. “I’m doing a trick.”

  “It is good to see you,” Pomp says.

  “You are here,” Gloranda says matter-of-factly.

  “I am here . . . now,” says Pomp. “There is another place where I am not here.”

  “That’s crazy talk,” says Gloranda. “You are here.”

  Pomp is silent, unable to explain what she means, how she has been elsewhere and has returned after an absence. The words “been” and “after” will not come to mind, and even if they do, Gloranda will not understand.

  “And the twins are there,” Gloranda continues. “And that bat is squeaky!”

  Gloranda darts off, flying low to the ground. Then she is under the bat’s shadow, flying up. She sees the strap holding the saddle to the bat and unbuckles it.

  The twins start falling off the saddle. They kick and grope, each one clawing at the bat, latching on to its sensitive face. Their weight is too much, and the bat’s neck snaps broken. It falls from the sky and hits the ground underneath Doribell’s and Ilsie’s combined crushing weight. Something pops and the bat is still.

  “I do my trick!” Gloranda shouts with glee.

  Pomp, from behind the tree, can’t help but giggle at the prank. And yet . . . and yet . . .

  What is “yet”?

  One, two, three, and four are now, but ten is yet. And yet—there it is again—it is more than just numbers. It is how things happen now . . . and yet. Her mind spins, and in the midst of the swirling nausea, she cannot help but think that she would never understand, except that she had almost become not yet . . . almost, what is the word? Dead?

  And there lays the bat. Not moving. Not breathing. Dead.

  “It’s broken,” says Ilsie. She is bored, Pomp sees. Ilsie joins hands with Doribell and Gloranda, and the fairies fly off, leaving the broken bat behind.

  Pomp is very, very confused. She walks over to the bat and tries petting it, but it does not respond.

  “Get up, bat,” she says. “Fly away!”

  She thinks she should be happy about Gloranda’s brilliant trick, but she is not happy at all.

  “Wake up!” she jostles the bat, lifting a wing only to have it drop back to the ground, limp.

  Her eyes are getting wet when she feels the hole open up inside her heart. She looks for the X on her chest, like Heraclix’s scar, but there is nothing there.

  “Why does it hurt without hurting?” she asks herself. “Why am I . . . sad?”

  She has seen sad before, in the human world. But now she is sad. It is a new feeling, and she does not like it. She does not like it so much that it makes her angry! Angry!

  “Sisters!” she screams. “You have made it . . . dead!”

  But no one responds to her shouting and crying. She is all alone.

  She is sad and angry and scared because this, this “dead” almost happens to her.

  The hole inside
her feels like it is growing. She has to do something, or it will swallow her up.

  “Think, Pomp, think!” she says, trying to bring a word into her mind, a word she hears Heraclix say when he is sad and empty. She thinks, walks around in circles around the dead bat, then thinks some more.

  “What is it, Pomp? What is it he does when he is sad and empty?”

  And then she remembers.

  She remembers.

  “Purpose!”

  Yes, “purpose” is the word Heraclix says before they go back to Mowler’s apartment to get the documents.

  As her mind catches hold of this, the hole inside her gets a little smaller.

  She realizes that she has changed. Things are different.

  Her life isn’t now about playing pranks all day every day. It isn’t about not caring. All this playing pranks and not caring isn’t fun any more. If she goes on like this, her life stays immortally, eternally . . . boring. Death is sad, but death makes life more worth living.

  Life is precious, she thinks as she looks down at the dead bat again. Bugs have begun to crawl over the bat, just like bugs had crawled all over Heraclix.

  But she won’t let Heraclix become like the bat. Pomp will not let Heraclix die. She will help him.

  Heraclix turned to face east, then west, then east again, standing atop the stone pillar above the tops of the trees. Bozsok, his desired destination, lay to the east. Vienna, burning, lay to the west. He was far enough away that he could not see the smoke, but he knew it was there, swirling around the soldiers and gypsies, carrying the screams and groans of the wounded and dying up into the vast, unheeding sky.

  Had he reason to feel sorrow up to this point? Of course he had. But there was something in the quality of sorrow suffered at the hands of another that was different than the sorrow that one brought on others, whether through one’s own stupidity and neglect or by intentional acts of hatred. The latter carried the sharpest stings of guilt, regret, self-berating, whereas the former was more easily dissociated from one’s self.