Chapter 41 The Final Stage of Grief #2
Monika was there too, her second pregnancy clearly visible as she knelt by her cabbage patch.
Ella tottered around her with a trowel. Monika wore a sweater despite the heatwave, no doubt to hide fresh bruises on her arms. Her new beau was one of Santini’s soldiers.
I may have gotten over her fraternising with an enemy whose sole purpose in Vizzavona was to spy on Einar, but it was her ceaseless justification of his abuse that finally drove us apart.
She never learnt the truth about Albert’s death, and so she could not understand why her new choice of a lover was so impossible for me to tolerate.
She couldn’t have known that a part of my soul had been the ransom for the freedom she had so readily given up all anew.
I didn’t blame her, but neither could I help her anymore.
I saw Helga approach out of the corner of my eye with the cheerful bobbing of her pigtails, adorned with brightly pink ribbons.
She was undoubtedly on her way over to tell me about her most recent lover, probably a young man half her age.
So that she could then assure me that no matter how pleasant a night she had with him, it certainly couldn’t compare to the fun I had with my ‘hot damn heartthrob’ of a husband.
Then she would make an eerily convincing meowing noise, and I would laugh, not contradicting her.
Smiling, I started to air and freshen up the earth of my garden plot with a shovel just as she reached me.
“Well, hello there, darling,” she said in a distinctly American twang, only to follow it with an inquiry about my well-being that instantly revealed an accent that did not sound American at all.
Her speech was a mesmerising jumble of all the places she had lived during her colourful life, her country of birth untraceable in it, whatever it was.
I debated asking her where she was actually from on multiple occasions but was always deterred by a vague feeling that she would not care for being asked.
“Like a new epidemic, no?” She gestured towards Monika’s pregnant belly, echoing my previous thoughts.
I only grunted in reply as I squatted with my trowel, digging row after row of small holes to place the broccoli seeds in. I had never discussed my reproductive predicament with her, though I was sure that it was something of a public secret by then.
“Well, whoop-de-doo,” she chirped, laying her bejewelled hand with stubby fingers on my shoulder. “And just think where they all would be without you, hey? You made all this possible, doll.”
She departed with a pat on my back, startling young Mickey with a lewd, catcalling whistle as she passed him.
Laughter bubbled out of my mouth. Praise be to the universe for all the Helgas of the world.
By the late afternoon, I found myself at long last at the training range, going through a series of exercises to help me improve my strength, control, and purpose, the three pillars of archery.
A part of the training range was on a plain in front of the forest surrounding Vizzavona, but a decent part of it was in the woods, the burlap sack, human-shaped targets fastened to trees.
This section was incomparably more challenging, and it served much better to prepare us for what it would be like in the real world: shooting furies from odd angles, through a series of obstacles in the way.
Not that there was much real-world, field action these days anymore.
And except for weekly refresher sessions that I held in several locations across the mountains, I trained alone.
That afternoon I rushed between the targets, aiming at them from varying angles and distances and I went through a series of exercises: click and pull, pyramid ends, north-south-east-west and the blank bale.
As I often did, I lost track of time until a mild, Nordic voice interrupted my concentration.
“Behind you, trouble. Leave those poor burlap sacks alone and come give us a kiss.”
Startled, I fired an arrow too soon, and the target that I had been aiming at was spared for once.
“Einar!”
Dropping my bow as well as my quiver to the ground, I covered the few spaces between us in a heartbeat and lunged at him. He picked me up easily as I wrapped my hands above the vast bulk of his shoulders and my legs around his no less solid hips.
“I missed you too, my girl.” He kissed me, squeezing me tight.
“What’s new?” I asked as we walked hand-in-hand back to the cottage.
“Undo this first.” He evaded my question, already tugging at the bands that held my precarious, messy bun together. “I want to see your hair in full, it always looks so lovely in this light.”
I did as he asked me, more than a little proud of the flaming chestnut waves and curls that fell heavily down my back, reaching almost to my waist. Einar reverently wound his hand in the locks with a low rumble in his chest.
“Well then?” I nudged him.
“Oh, where do I start ...” he pondered with a sigh.
Well, that was certainly disconcerting, as Einar almost always knew how to start saying whatever it was he wanted to say.
“What news from Paoli?” I prompted him further, but careful not to anger him with anything that would even vaguely resemble nagging.
I threw my head back coquettishly as I looked up at him with my sweetest smile. I batted my long eyelashes at him.
He pulled me closer to himself, hand around my waist, kissing my brow. I made a point of knowing my weapons well. And more often than not, the bow wasn’t the most powerful one.
“The Innsbruck QZ was overrun two weeks ago. A new swarm. Estimated head count fifty thousand.” His breath tickled the crown of my head as he spoke.
I whistled. After the first one, we had to deal with five more swarms before Corsica became close to infection-free. But these were all baby swarms compared to the ones that haunted mainland Europe.
“Did they manage to tag it?” I asked, and Einar nodded.
That, at least, was good news. ‘Tagging’ a swarm meant shooting a few of its members with a small tracking device. Monitoring the swarms’ movements was about the only thing saving the continent from being completely overrun.
We shut the cottage door behind us and discarded our dirty shoes.
I set my bow and quiver back in their corner and peeled off my archery gloves.
With arms still interwoven around each other, we walked over to our kitchen with its pastel-green cupboards.
Einar sat at the table, looking oddly out of place when surrounded by the cute little furniture. He pulled me onto his lap.
“Spain’s still in terrible shape, no word of any established QZs there,” he carried on. “Switzerland, on the other hand, is working hard on reorganising its air force, if you can believe it.”
I could. Colder-climate countries fared best, especially if they were surrounded and as such protected by mountain ranges like Switzerland was.
Roamers tended to die fast of exposure and pneumonia there in wintertime as they lacked the brain power to dress appropriately for the weather.
Warm territories on the other hand ... Suffice to say that all those erstwhile Mediterranean vacation paradises had become sites of horror with little hope for them on the horizon.
“Gibraltar is socked in, apparently,” Einar held my hand as he said this in a grim tone of voice. “No longer possible to sail through safely.”
“No!”
I ran my hand through my hair, a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, my heart already picking up its flutter of panic.
“Unfortunately.”
We both sat silently for a while, digesting this, pondering the implications for our approaching voyage.
“Would you like some coffee?” I asked him, getting back up. “And an omelette perhaps?” I added, realising that it had slipped my mind earlier after all.
“Yes to both,” he replied, shifting on the chair, which creaked complainingly underneath his weight. “But it will be dinner soon, so make it a small portion.”
“I won’t,” I told him, fixing him with a pointed look. “I’m starving. Once again, I completely forgot to have anything to eat today.”
Einar shook his head disapprovingly and made a sound in his throat similar to the rumble a lion makes when readying for a roar.
“Didn’t I tell you that you mustn’t forget to take care of yourself when I’m not around?” he said so sternly that anyone who didn’t know him as well as I did wouldn’t have recognised the playful undertone.
“Oh, you may have told me.” I shrugged. “I suppose you just didn’t impress it upon me in a very convincing manner.”
Einar grumbled again, his cheeks flushed and an alluringly dangerous expression in his eyes.
“Be careful what you wish for, my girl ...”
“Or I might just get it?” I suggested innocently before walking over to our stove with a final look at him.
We passed the next twenty minutes in a markedly charged silence as I busied myself with cooking.
“Sailing all the way to Iceland isn’t an option anymore.” I revisited our previous topic of conversation as I set his plate and his mug in front of him on the walnut kitchen table.
“Thanks, darling.” He rose slightly to kiss me on the cheek before replying to my question, “No. Definitely not an option.”
He cut a large chunk of the omelette and closed his eyes, his expression the epitome of delight.
“So, so good,” he praised my culinary skills.
“Fresh eggs.” I shrugged the compliment off. “So, if we have to go, we will have to go across the mainland. And then sail from Holland or Denmark?”
“We will have to go,” Einar said quietly, putting down his knife and fork to take my hands in his.
I lost my appetite entirely in being braced in this fashion for more bad news.
“Santini wants to hold the election by the end of next year. And today he has already made certain ... insinuations. Hinting that I was becoming obsolete as there were practically no infected left. He also mentioned that he had seen painted posters of us the other day in some northern town.”
The table had a damaged edge where I sat.
“Posters?” I asked as I freed one of my hands from Einar’s and fiddled with the splintered wood.
“Yes. Hand-drawn. He showed me one. It was of two people that vaguely looked like us, the woman with a bow and the man with a knife and a sledgehammer. It said Andersens - the Saviours of Corsica.”
I hissed with a sharp intake of breath through my teeth as I inadvertently drove a thin splinter beneath my fingernail. Putting it to my mouth to staunch the blood, I finally left the poor table alone.
“I’m sure that made Santini very happy,” I remarked while nursing my wound.
“Oh, extremely,” Einar assured me sardonically, “as you can imagine.”
“Did it make him ... homicidally happy, do you think?”
He chewed and swallowed before replying. “Not yet, but he’s getting there. He’s giving us a chance to clear off. He knows me, he knows I will have stored a boat or two somewhere.”
“How about twenty-five boats?”
A small, sly smile flickered on Einar’s face, hair falling to his eyes in golden waves.
“Nope, I don’t imagine he knows that,” he replied dryly
“When do we leave?” I asked while cutting into my food.
Einar took a sip of his coffee before answering me.
“Now would be suicide. It can get cold any day, and once it does, most of the swarms will migrate back down to Spain and Italy and spread out all along the Mediterranean. Santini is reasonable enough to know he can’t expect me to set foot in there in wintertime.
Not when I have you with me. He’ll give me until spring arrives.
The swarms will have spread out again by then.
With luck, we’ll cross the continent in between them and then sail from wherever we can get to. ”
I drank the last sip of my coffee and set the cup on the top of my polished plate.
“Still hungry, love?” Einar asked me with a familiar, ferocious gleam in his eyes.
“Not for food. Do we really need to go to dinner?”
He shook his head, an anticipatory smile spreading on his face.
“We don’t. I’m sure they can do without me for one more night.
And I couldn’t last that long without getting my hands on you.
” He gazed at me in a feral sort of way, and I shivered happily under his glare.
“Unless you’re ready in fifteen minutes, I’ll have to throw you over my shoulder and carry you up by force, my girl. ”
“That won’t be necessary,” I assured him, “but it won’t be unwelcome either.”