Chapter 21
THE DIE IS CAST
Autumn was well underway, and although it was still sunny on most days, the air was crisp and cool, and the days started getting noticeably shorter. We were back in Ascu for a few days, enjoying a well-deserved break after having cleared the whole mountain region all the way to Vizzavona.
Vizzavona was a small town tucked neatly between forest-clad hills, separating the northern and southern mountain regions of Corsica.
It would be our next target and the first proper town to tackle.
But before going there, we had to wait for newly trained archers to join us from the colonies we had secured in the previous weeks, providing us with a much-needed respite in our own settlement.
Having agreed that only an hour-long training session per day was sufficient, I found myself swiftly sucked into the swirl of domestic chores. These ranged from cooking and cleaning to doing laundry and mending clothes. Which meant that I was likely the only person not enjoying that little holiday.
Compared with the inventive tasks of training new archers and with the excitement of being on the road, clearing, I could not help but resent these mundane occupations, necessary though they were.
I kept reminding myself that others, mostly men, were engaged in tasks less boring but even more unpleasant, such as hunting hares and mouflons, and the subsequent skinning and gutting of their prey, heavy repairs of the fence and the buildings, and digging of latrines.
However, these reminders didn’t help much either, because each time they made me realise how much I missed not only Einar’s company, but also the camaraderie I shared with most of my trainees.
I only saw Einar at night. The rest I only saw at meals.
I couldn’t wait to leave again, a sentiment which was only somewhat alleviated by having the chance to reconnect with Amit, Kevin, and especially with Monika, given our shared spectrum of drudgery.
One day, just after lunch, she and I sat by the crackling fire in the dining hall, enjoying a brief moment of respite.
This was the first time it was truly just the two of us since my return, and I was glad for the opportunity to speak to her privately.
She seemed off, pale, and tired. She had barely eaten anything during the meal, which I was glad for on the one hand, as I was allowed to polish off her ration of stew as well as mine, but on the other hand, it alarmed me to no little degree.
“So, how are you?” I asked her in a gentle tone of voice. “How are things with Albert?”
“Vell ... good,” she replied unconvincingly, not quite meeting my eye.
She shifted her weight, and the ancient couch creaked loudly in protest.
“Monika, what’s wrong, darling? You know you can tell me anything.”
I leaned closer to her, troubled by the dark shadows underneath her eyes and the fatigued lines that had no business being on her youthful forehead.
“I know. But I don’t know how tell you.” She paused as a couple of women on a lunch duty walked past us, their arms loaded with stacked dirty plates.
“I’m afraid to tell. For you it vill be hard to hear.”
My heart sped up, and I felt as if I had taken a plunge into a pool of icy water. Suddenly, I knew with absolute certainty what the matter was with her.
“You’re pregnant!” I gasped. “God, you as well?”
The initial shock had passed, and I began worrying that she expected a different reaction from me.
Joy and heartfelt congratulations. Perhaps an offer to organise a baby shower.
I made my best effort to whip my brain cells into submission to make them provide me with anything resembling a civilised response.
“Vho else is?” Monika asked, puzzled but unoffended.
The desolation in her expression allowed me to abandon my search for the correct words to express happiness I didn’t feel. Because plainly she wasn’t all that ecstatic about her new situation either.
“Oh, just this woman we met, never mind that.” I shrugged off in reply. “Uhm ... did you want this to happen?”
“No!” she assured me in an incredulously affronted tone of voice, as if wanting to ask how such a thing could even occur to me. “But I think Albert did. I tell him to be careful. But he often vasn’t and I couldn’t stop him ...”
“That bastard,” I hissed, “I could kill him.”
“I’m terrified,” she admitted, her eyes welling up. “I vas so scared to tell you. I vas scared I lose you as a friend.”
“Darling, of course not,” I assured her truthfully and pulled her into a hug just as three more people walked past, casting curious glances in our direction. “That’s one thing you don’t have to worry about.”
“Can ve go talk somewhere?” Monika suggested. “I need to do laundry. Ve can go to river.”
We collected our dirty clothes, two plastic tubs, and our ration of washing powder from the dusty utility room.
Then we headed to the nearby stream, hidden from sight by the same trees that used to hold the infected I eliminated when we first arrived.
The earth was covered by soft moss and rust-coloured ferns.
The stream bubbled peacefully through a bed of rocks, and we knelt by it on the soft, dry pine needles to prepare our washing.
Monika and I talked for a long time. She estimated she was about three months gone.
In a manner that had become almost instinctive over the years, the cogs and wheels of my tortured mind calculated that she must have gotten pregnant the very first month she got together with Albert.
Jealousy and shame flooded me in equal measures.
Only the genuine concern I felt for her enabled me to compose my face into a mask of compassionate neutrality.
Women in Monika’s family had a long history of complicated births, most requiring a caesarean to deliver safely.
Which made Monika’s prospects particularly dire.
“Vhen I realised, I knew I am dead,” she lamented, yet her eyes were dry and very wide, shining brightly with terror.
I beat Einar’s shirt on a rock to drain it of the last remains of water and filth, the slapping sound wet and satisfying. My fingers were numb with cold, their tips pasty, and the skin wrinkled and mushy.
“You don’t know that you’ll struggle.” I tried to console Monika, hoping that I managed to prevent my utter lack of conviction from creeping into my voice. “You’re so much younger than your mum or sisters were when they gave birth.”
She nodded reluctantly, my own scepticism reflected in her face.
“And besides, we still have six months. We might manage to clear our way to some hospital by then. And then there’s Doctor Martin and Doctor Rodriquez, not to mention Dave, Kevin, Josh, and Amit. When the time comes, you’ll have a huge medical team at your disposal.”
I deposited the shirt into a pile of more or less clean clothes and picked up another, mine this time, from the much larger dirty pile.
“Maybe I lose it.” Monika’s voice was no more than a whisper. “Maybe I lose it now vhen it’s still small. Oh god, please let me lose it.”
She turned pink with consternation, and her eyes swam with tears anew. I swallowed hard and, not looking at her, I plunged the shirt into the bitingly cold, soapy water in the tub, keeping my hands submerged for much longer than necessary.
“I’m so sorry, I know this is horrible to say. You must hate me. You vould be so glad to have a child born even if you risk dying, no?”
“When I was your age? No way.” I sighed heavily, blinking hard to dispel tears from forming in my own eyes. “And not even when Petr and I first started trying. But now, after everything? In a heartbeat.”
“Vell not me. I don’t vant to die. Oh, Renny, vhy is God burdening me vith this vhen it would have been the most great gift to you? Vhy? I know I must trust His plan, but I vish to understand.”
I wrung the shirt tightly, expelling water and dirt from it, my knuckles turning white with the effort.
“If there is a god,” I hissed through my clenched teeth, “then I think he hates us all.”
Monika had been wringing her own shirt in the soapy water, weakly and distractedly, but as I spoke, she stopped and looked in my direction.
She froze, turning pale, blood draining from her face instantly.
At first, I thought this was because of what I had said.
But if it were, she would have argued with me or deflected to a different topic, as she had done countless times in the past. Which made me realise two things.
Firstly, there was someone or something dangerous behind me.
And secondly, distracted as I was, I hadn’t brought my bow.
The back of my neck tingled as if exposed to a gush of freezing air, every muscle in my body tensing.
“Well, hello there, pretty darlings.” A leering, male voice drifted towards me. “Stand up slowly, both of you.”
We did, and I turned around in doing so.
There were two of them, two men in their late thirties with hair cropped short.
They wore bikers’ clothes, all leather. They had hunting rifles pointed in our direction.
I had never been held at gunpoint before and felt a ripple of dark excitement run through me.
The end of everything, so comforting and mysterious, a mere pull of a finger away.
My heart thrummed in my ears, and I had to fight off an unhinged desire to laugh.
“Woooow! You-are-A-beauty!” the slightly taller man drawled appreciatively as his eyes crawled over me.
Not quite knowing what compelled me to do so, I raised my eyebrows at him cockily, as if wanting to ask him to stop stating the obvious. In a disassociated manner, I noted that his English was accented. He was Dutch, perhaps, or somewhere from that region.
“And you’ll be mine! What a lucky man I am!”