Chapter 46 Morituri Te Salutant #2
My cry distracted the fury, rage further contorting his already distorted features.
And Einar managed to finally steady him, hold him long enough for me to shoot.
Except I couldn’t possibly think of shooting Petr, never.
Such a staggering deed could only be conquered by being split apart into smaller tasks that in themselves had nothing to do with killing someone I used to live with.
I reached back to my quiver for an arrow.
I nocked. The bow string cut into my fingers as I pulled it back.
I aimed at a target which happened to be the centre of a human’s back.
And then I jerked my fingers to the side.
Off the taut string. Only because the slight movement in itself had nothing to do with the much grander, sinister purpose of ending the life of a man whose name I used to wish to take for mine.
The arrow pierced Petr’s spine. He crumpled to the ground instantly, before I could fully comprehend the destination to which all those small, harmless, inconspicuous steps had led.
“Jesus,” Dave muttered, striding over, and he shot the twitching thing that used to be Petr in the forehead. “He certainly looks worse for wear.”
I couldn’t possibly look on. But the act I had just committed incited self-loathing in me so intense that I only allowed myself to avert my gaze to the only thing around that was even more terrifying, more world-crushing and universe-destroying than my ex-partner’s blood and brain matter spattered on the asphalt.
I made myself inspect Einar for injuries.
He was still standing, his chest heaving with pained rasps, his face pale beneath the various rivulets of blood.
He is alright, I thought at first, and my legs nearly collapsed under the sheer weight of my relief, a bit battered perhaps, but he is going to live.
Only then did my eyes fall on the dark bloom on Einar’s abdomen.
The handle of his large, hunting knife half protruded from it at a skewed angle.
White as a sheet and with the unthinking air of a child about to lodge a screwdriver into an electric socket, Einar pulled it out before gasping and going whiter still.
And yet, my overwrought mind refused to acknowledge what my eyes were plainly telling me.
That is no big issue, surely, it said stubbornly, we are going to a hospital after all.
With unhinged cruelty, I felt almost annoyed at Einar as he grasped the site of his injury and collapsed to the ground with a grimace of pain.
And with a horrifying, anguished cry I had never heard him make before.
I was almost angry at him for not complying with my distressed insistence that everything had to be alright.
I watched impassively as Dave put rubber gloves on and, with a significant risk to his own uninfected status, and despite Kevin’s vehement protests, he cut Einar out of the bloodied T-shirt.
I barely resisted the impulse to cover my ears as Dave poured two bottles of antiseptic solution over Einar’s body, making my husband, a giant among men, no less, elicit a high-pitched, undignified scream.
The last sound I would have ever imagined him making.
Dave then did his best to put pressure on the wound, wrapping gauze around Einar’s torso as the latter resisted with feebleness that was even more concerning than his pained cries.
It was only when Dave walked away from Einar to push the little purple Toyota out of the way that my disjointed thoughts connected into a semblance of sane order.
Einar lay crumpled on the ground, moaning and gasping with agony that I had so meanly begrudged him.
For accepting the fact that he could be mortally wounded was simply unthinkable.
Not Einar with his steadfast, unwavering strength of a pillar surviving through millennia.
When the realisation of what was happening arrived to me at last, I thought that the tunnel was caving in because I crashed into the ground under the impact of immense weight.
I reached Einar on my knees, half-choked with sobs of my own and no less anguished.
Dave and Kevin managed to hoist Einar into the back seat, even as he implored them not to.
The fact that they could make him do something he was set firmly against was in itself a shocking display of his fading strength that rattled me to my core.
So did his utterly tormented expression at the slightest movement, his eyes squeezed shut so tightly that a web of previously unseen lines appeared around them.
As we drove on, slowly, his head rested on my lap next to my immense belly, and he lamented the whole way, turning his head from side to side in a wordless protest, oblivious to my hand on his sweaty forehead.
I was barely aware of the time passing, engaged as I was in a desperate entreaty, not directed towards anyone in particular.
Let him live, let him live, please just let him live ...
I only became mindful of my surroundings as it suddenly got much lighter, and the solid walls of the tunnel turned once again into mere supporting pillars on both sides.
There were fewer and fewer obstacles in our way.
That was good because it hurt Einar terribly when Dave had to come to a stop to push wrecked vehicles out of our way.
It hurt him terribly to keep going, too, every little bump on the road making him groan with a desperation that hacked deep into my heart each time.
We finally came out at the other end of St Bernard, the shadowy Mount Mort rising behind us and a brilliantly green valley in front of us.
The sun had come out whilst we were inside, and the world looked bright.
How dared it?
Indifferent fields and meadows rolled by, overgrown with cheerful, blooming weeds, the foliage mocking me with its blossoms.
“We will make it to the hospital and then everything will be alright,” I kept muttering over and over, my eyes closed as I was unable to bear the sight of Einar’s suffering anymore. “Everything will be alright.”
“I heard you the first ten times, sweetheart,” said a voice below me so weak that it may well have been just a phantom echo of the voice I knew so well.
I looked down with a gasp. Einar’s glacial eyes, previously misty with frantic unawareness of all but pain, were gazing at me with startling clarity.
“H-Hey.”
“Hey, trouble.”
I almost could have laughed.
“Kev, stop here,” Einar said in a voice that yet carried traces of his commanding self.
Dave turned sharply, brown eyes boring into Einar’s arctic ones.
“Einar, mate ...” He wanted to protest, but Einar shook his head in a compact yet perceptible motion.
His blood was beginning to seep through the tight bandages that enveloped his torso, but when he saw me looking at the wound, no doubt with fright in my eyes, he covered the area with his palms with no more than a wince of pain.
“Stop the car,” he said again. His tone was its uncompromising self once more, and I had not known true fear until I heard his words. “Stop the car and help me out.”
Seeing Dave’s nod, as curt as it was resigned, Kevin drove off the main road and parked by a stately oak with a wide crown of budding emerald-green leaves. This time, Einar was almost silent as they dragged him, huffing, to lay him on the soft, spring grass underneath the ancient tree.
“Beautiful view,” he said with his head propped up, indicating the snow-capped mountains surrounding the valley from all sides. “Though not nearly as beautiful as you, my girl.”
Snivelling, I scoffed, shaking my head.
“Ever the flatterer,” I told him.
Dave offered Einar a jacket, but the latter refused, and we were left alone.
Dave and Kevin had retreated to the car to grant us privacy.
I knelt by my husband, placing my hands on his chest. He was chilly to the touch, but there were no goosebumps on his skin.
Impervious to cold as ever. I felt his heartbeat underneath my fingertips, its rhythm slow but still steady.
How long did we have until it wouldn’t be?
“Oh, Ren, love, please don’t. You know what it does to me to see you cry,” Einar begged me, his brow creased.
He raised his hand to wipe my tears with what seemed an immense effort. Then he laid it on my swollen belly, reassuringly solid, and my chest constricted painfully at his touch.
“I have to let you in on something,” Einar said lightly, but there was an edge to his voice, a hidden plea for me to comply. “Your birthday’s coming up, and I haven’t come up with a single idea for a gift for you.”
The fingers of his other hand pushed strands of hair from my forehead, slowly but reverently, as if he wanted to prolong and savour the touch, despite struggling to keep his arm lifted.
“I-I don’t need g-gifts.” Swallowing hard, I muted the sobs that threatened to claw at my throat. “I need you.”
His face was ghastly pale, full of new shadows and angles, but the warm smile reached his eyes nonetheless.
The valley around us was very still, as if holding its breath, and the crisply clean air was full of deceit with its promise of new life.
I knew then that I would forevermore despise the smell of spring.
“You’ve already given me something I thought possible only in books.
” I ran my own fingers along Einar’s face, tracing the sharp cheekbones, the strong jaw.
“A mutual obsession rather than a relationship. No one has ever matched the intensity of what I wanted, of what I carried inside. Until you came along.” I willed my voice to keep steady, to say that which could not be left unsaid.
“It was like breaking free after a lifetime of captivity. And it was only with you next to me, with you above and inside of me, that life has ever made sense. All the horror in this world, all the arbitrary suffering and meaningless boredom. To have you, to be with you, made all of it finally worth it.”
His eyes grew deeper and brighter, which scared me because I worried that it was a sign of his imminent departure.
But it was tears that changed them so. Einar had never before cried in front of me in open daylight.
Realising that, I could no longer hold off my own tears, letting them flow freely.
I pressed my hand to my chest in a futile attempt to hold together my shattering heart.
My stomach bulged underneath, and its small occupants moved languidly within, as if sensing my sorrow.
Take them instead, I thought savagely, take them! I don’t want them, not if this is the price I have to pay. Leave him to me in their stead, I argued a bargain that was too outrageous to ever say out loud. Let them die inside of me if it means that he will live.
I meant it and didn’t mean it at the same time. Now that they were finally in existence, I would rather have died a most gruesome death myself than lose my babies. Even just thinking such a horrifying thought made me superstitiously terrified of being punished for my unvoiced words.
And yet. I used to think that I was willing to do anything, give anything up, just to have them. Only to learn too late that there was, in fact, one sacrifice I had not been prepared to make.
“Don’t cry, my love,” Einar pleaded softly, but it was the direction my thoughts had taken that froze the sobs in my throat.
“I’m so sorry I got pregnant! So sorry I wanted to. None of this would have happened otherwise.”
“Don’t be. I’m not. Not even remotely. It wasn’t the Outbreak or the position it granted me.
You made me the man I was always meant to be.
And in turn, I gave you something you were always meant to have.
” He ran a finger down my cheek, wiping my face dry despite the fatal trembling of his fingers.
“Our story is complete. Everything is as it should be.”
Dark circles of mortal fatigue were emerging under his sunken eyes, and his lips barely moved when he spoke.
“And in all the reckoning that I could do now, looking back on all that I have done, the good against the bad against the inconsequential ... repenting my many crimes and rejoicing at my sparse achievements ... There is only the one scale with which I weigh my soul, the one Holy Judgement. You. My one salvation in a lifetime of solitude. It is only for you and no one else to say if a sinner like me, a man of vice and violence, was worthy of the heaven that I have found in you.”
His hands grasped mine, their grip only an echo of their evaporating power.
“Worthy of it?” I repeated it after him slowly with an exhale that was like the banishing of a part of me that I would never get back. “When you are gone, my memories of you will be the only heaven I’ll ever know again. In this life and beyond.”
He pulled me close to him then, laying me down along his body, my face next to his.
Our tears mingled together, and the blood from his wounded belly swiftly covered the swell of my own, warm and slick on my skin.
We stayed like so for an eternity that lasted shorter than a heartbeat.
Einar’s body resisted death with the same vehemence with which it had fought, loved, and lived.
And yet, words soon turned to a feeble whisper and then ran dry altogether.
I had no idea how much time had passed when I became aware that his chest no longer moved up and down against my breasts and that his arm lay limp and lifeless around my hip.
Still, I stayed next to him. Long past the moment when his heart had stopped beating in the palm of my hand.