A man was sitting on a fallen tree log near the fire, poking embers with a stick. The air was full of smoke, a smell of burnt wood, and the scent of… potatoes baking?
“Exactly…” The man said, then looked at me. “Want one?”
Judging by the looks of it he was in his late thirties, a bit dirty, his clothes had seen better days… a lot better… Shoulder-length unkempt hair, tangled as if he went for a long time without meeting a comb or a brush, rugged lazy beard, steel-grey eyes with green sparks.
“Come, sit down.” He slapped the log he was sitting on. “No truth in standing still, or what they say.”
“Ugh… I haven’t seen you around before… What’s your name?”
“Mine? Ha-ha, it’s so unimportant even I don’t know it… I’m just the traveller, you know.”
“The Traveller?”
He just nodded and response, then canted his head slightly at me.
“So, do you want some baked potatoes? It goes great with a show.”
“Show? What show?” I asked, sitting down alongside him.
***
...Four men were lying around the fire in the late evening. Military uniforms, weapons nearby. It was quiet, so the only thing one could hear was the crackling of the firewood. The air was still, so the blue-and-yellow flag on a short pole sticking from the ground near them was hanging down limply.
“So, Petrovich…” One of them said. “Tell me, why you are… Petrovich?”
“I am because that’s who I am. Want me to show you an ID? It’s all there.”
“No, I mean… Look, Vus is Vus because he’s old and wize and had a time to grow those things on his face… Same with Rudy – look at his head and you immediately get why he’s called Rudy… Me… well, that’s a long story.”
“One that you promised to tell one time, Bes” Said the one he’s called Vus. “Nights had been getting longer, you know… Just what you’d want for a long story.”
“One day… One night – I will, don’t worry” Bes answered in the voice of someone who really hoped that that day or night will never come. “Back to the point… Petrovich?”
“Ugh… Look, guys… Just imagine: you all went to war, standing tall, rifles in hands, ammo’s sticking out of every hole, grenades in teeth… Heroes as you are, true heroes, right?”
“...Can I just, don’t know, drag a crate of ammo instead of… every hole?”
“That wasn’t literal, Rudy” Petrovich frowned. “Point is: here you are, all battle-ready and warlike, but… How would you even fight without Petrovich? Every squad should have one. That’s an army regulation and is written in all books: “one Petrovich per squad”! No Petrovich, no ra-ta-ta-ta, right?” He gently stroked the stock of his machinegun. “This girl can sing, you know…”
“That she can…” Bes smiled. “That she sure can…”
***
"Stop trying to peel it, you lose the best part!" The Traveller's steel eyes looked irritated, green sparkles playing inside the irises judgingly.
"But it's burnt into the charcoal… it's dirty."
"Sometimes the dirty parts are exactly what is needed to make a story good. You should try it. Here." He picked a matchbox full of salt from the ground. "Try adding some salt."
"Salt?"
***
"Salt? Just the salt again!?" Vus was almost steaming with anger. "What do you think I can cook with just the salt?"
"Salt water I guess…" Rudy shook his head. "But if you add potatoes, beetroot, and those last bits of meat we still have… I'd say you can call it borscht."
"Borscht? How can you eat it if it doesn't have any taste!? Food without seasoning has no energy to it! It just fills your stomach and makes you want to lie down and sleep!"
"Calm down, Vus, we should thank the people who brought us that freezer and then that pork to put in it. You can’t go berate them for not giving you spice."
"I don't ask for any fancy spices! Say, do people here to the East…” He made a wide gesture at the direction that he thought of as being ‘East’ – mostly at a pole with a flag on it. “Do they don't know what pepper is here?”
“Oh, it is you westerners with your bogracz that’s so spicy it pops your eyes out…”
"They do know about the pepper here, Vus, stop shouting." Bes finally decided to enter the discussion.
"Bes, I just…"
"Rudy's right: it's a miracle we've got what we've got…"
"If you say so…"
"... I'll ask Taiga to grab you some pepper next time. We'll say it's medicinal. Anti-stress cure for Vus."
"Thank you, Bes… I guess I can cook you guys some plain borscht for now…"
***
"...Some cook he was." The Traveller smiled. "Everything should've been as hot and spicy as humanly possible."
"Um… hot… but tasty." I paused. "I'm talking about the potato. Crust really does add to the taste… even if it's dirty."
"Funny you say that… It's taken straight out of the fire, one could even say it was purified… by the flames…"
"Purified?"
"Oh, you know… high temperatures… disinfects, kills bacteria and the stuff. But leaves only ashen crust behind… acceptable trade-off I guess."
"..." I just shrugged. "Give me one more?"
***
Rudy lay down on his belly at the spotter’s position in a forward trench. He tried to spot anything through the thick milk-white wall of the mist, but it just wasn’t possible. He could see no further than several meters in every direction, before his gaze was completely the fog. And there was nothing he could do about it – no technology could make him see through such a dense mist and no technology could make it disappear. All he could potentially do was wait until it clears by itself.
“Well, if I can’t see them, they can’t see me either” He mumbled, rolled on his side. He pulled a pack of cigarettes and a matchbox from his pocket, grabbed one from the pack with his lips and tried to light it up.
The mist had played him here as well – with all the moisture in the air the match just scratched the soggy side of a box, refusing to ignite.
“Damn fog…” Then he added several more very descriptive words about the weather condition under his breath, spitting the – now dampened as well – cigarette back into the pack and putting it back into the pocket.
“Hello? I’m sorry… Do you speak English?”
Rudy slowly raised his eyes to meet one of the most unexpected sights in his life: the unfamiliar girl squatting atop the trench he was lying in.
“Do you speak English?” She repeated in a language he didn’t understand – well, truth be told, this one phrase sounded somewhat similar to something he was taught in school… what, about two years ago? She… She had asked him if he spoke English? Right? Why would she do that? Why anyone would do that? And who exactly is she? Who she could possibly be?
The girl, haven’t received any answer, looked at him curiously – and at this point, probably, already begun to notice his inner panic.
He grabbed his rifle – not that there was any point in that now, really… If she could appear out of the mist like that – he was as sure as dead if she wanted him so. Still, the points of “unknown girl”, “foreign” and “deal with it” had somehow connected in his mind. And of course from the “deal with it” point there was a short hop to the “commander should”.
He gathered all the knowledge he could from his memory…
“Come!” He grabbed the girl by the wrist. Harder than he should’ve, but he had to cover for his embarrassment somehow.
“Ah!” She gasped, sliding down into the trench – thankfully it was a shallow one. She added several more words in a language he couldn’t identify at all.
“Come… Come!” He repeated this, trying to drag her in the direction of the blindage. Then he remembered something. “Comm… Commander.”
“Commander? Your want to take me to your commanding officer?”
“Yes!” He nodded, even if in reality he didn’t understand a word from what she was saying. “Come! Commander! Yes?”
“Alright, I’ll follow you…” She said, visibly disappointed – probably by their inability to communicate, – but she finally let him lead her past the pole with a flag that was now completely soaked from the fog…
***
“Hey, don’t stop now! What has happened to her next? Where did she came from? Who was she?”
“Oh, so now when there’s a girl I suddenly got your attention, huh?” The Traveller chuckled.
“No… I mean, you had my attention before… but you can’t just throw her in randomly and then not tell me the whole story.”
“But what if I told you it’s not her story, this one? It’s not even a story about her…”
“Why even mentioning her then?”
“To connect this story to the one about her, perhaps. Or to pad out the narrative a little bit. Or to give that Rudy guy some spotlight. Or all of the above and neither of those. It’s hard to keep the plot straightforward when you’re trying to tell so many stories at once… It alway gets… tangled as a result.”
“Then should you be telling ‘so many stories’? I don’t quite understand what you mean, but shouldn’t the storyteller focus on the main elements, so that their audience would have an easier time with knowing what’s important and what’s not?”
“Implying that storyteller themself knows what’s important…”
“You want to tell me, you don’t? That’s lousy…”
“Oh, I know” The Traveller closed the eyes and shook his head. “They all are. I can’t just discard parts of it on a whim. But I do apologize for making it as spotty as it is and a bit convoluted as well.”
“Oh, come on, it’s just a story. Imagine a scissors and… cut.” I pantomimed scissors with my fingers.
“Just a story… Easy for you to say.”
“If it isn’t than what is it?”
“Oh, it is the story, alright. But… aren’t we all?”
“Aren’t we all what?”
“Stories? Aren’t we all just a stories… in the end? ‘Born, lived, died’ – a pre-built narrative structure, neatly packaged into flesh and bone. Some are short stories, with an inevitable sheckley-ish twist in the end; some live for long enough to become a full-blown novel – with pages upon pages of descriptions and unnecessary detail; some others… end before they even had a chance to begin. And at the same time we’re supporting characters, or even just a cameo, in someone else’s stories, as they are in ours…”
“Please, enough of this, I can hear ringing in my ears already…”
***
All he could hear right now was the ringing in his ears. His vision blurred, objects he saw went in and out of focus and then back in… Lifting his face from the ground was unexpectedly hard, but somehow Bes managed to do it. Well, he wouldn’t bother and just let the earth reclaim him, if not for the fact that something was moving near him… Something… Or someone… Truth be told, he not much heard the movement, as he simply felt it – felt it with his skin, with some cat-like sense.
Rudy
Rudy was crawling in the mud thrown around by the recent explosion and clearly was looking for something. He was digging the dirt with his bare hands, throwing it away by the handful – his lips were moving, almost soundless…
Oh, no, it’s just the damn ringing…
What’s he saying?
Did he lost something?
“Flag…”
“What?”
“Flag…”
“Wh… What?”
“The flag fell down…” Finally Rudy looked at him and Bes noticed that on his face dirt, blood and tears are all mixed together. “The flag… fell down… Can’t… have… has to be up… right?”
“Ru…” Bes tried to stretch a hand to him, but the limb didn’t heed his command. Rudy moved a bit to the side and begun digging the dirt again. “Rudy, don’t…”
“Aha! Found it!” His voice was brimming with sudden happiness. “Here, Bes, look, I’ve found it!”
He jumped up from the ground waving the dirtied blue-and-yellow piece of fabric in the air.
“Ru… Dow… Drop…”
pluck
...Like a pebble falling in the water.
...One by one.
pluck
pluck
...It’s just the pebbles are lead.
...It’s just the water is blood.
pluck-pluck-pluck
“...”
Rudy collapsed and fell into the mud – still with a happy smile on his face.
The crumpled cloth lay in the dirt near him, turning from blue and yellow into black and red with blood…
***
"Now that's… that's just silly…"
"Oh?" The Traveller raised an eyebrow.
"Silly and unrealistic. He was a soldier, right? Trained soldier. He should've get into the cover if he survived the explosion, not bother himself with the flag… it's either his life or a piece of cloth…"
"So that's where you draw the line…"
"What?"
"I mean, you've believed there were just the four of them there…"
"How would I know how many…"
"But sure you know exactly what to do if you're being shot at with the hi-explosive shells?"
"Isn't that just common sense? Basic survival instinct?"
"Isn't the war just the opposite of those words?"
"It isn't – it's just a test of who could survive better."
"Huh… Was that written in some book somewhere?"
"In a video on… anyway: I just don't believe…"
"Don't believe what? That a young idiot after being hit by the blast of a nearby explosion could not think rationally? That his brain rapidly went over everything he could do at that moment, picked the only thing he could reasonably accomplish – and dedicated all his resources to that singular task?"
"..."
"And anyway." The Traveller smiled. "It's just a story, right? Stories are supposed to be a bit unrealistic – or they wouldn't be so interesting."
"Oh, I get it…" I didn't, but it didn't matter. "And I can see where this is going. What was next?"
***
...It was a tank. Of course it was a tank.
A monstrous machine dragged itself over a dirt mound and after a second of balance dropped down and over the trench, squishing under its weight something that looked like a pile of mud and clothing – until Bes realised that from below the track a bent machinegun barrel was sticking out, along with a hand still holding on to it.
He groaned.
Buzzing and ringing in his ears had finally subsided to the point where he could hear himself groan – even over the roar of the tank’s engine. Still, something didn’t let him get a full breathe or to get up – or move around much for that matter.
He looked down – or, more exactly, forward, – at his feet, fearing to see the worst…
...It was the second worst.
Vus’ body lying over him weighed him down – willingly or not, old man covered Bes from the blast and shrapnel of an explosion, giving his life for Bes’. His light blue eyes were dead and stared right at Bes with… absolutely nothing. There was no “joy of duty well done”, no “reproach for the one still living”, not even a glimpse of “regret” or “sorrow”. These eyes were just a two light blue patches of nothingness.
...That was when Bes felt the scream coming from within him.
It was like a heap of diamond needles forced its way through his throat – and he barely opened the mouth fast enough, just in time to let it out, to not let it tear off his face from the inside. A scream. A howl as cold as the moon on a clear midwinter’s night and as merciless as the furthest of the stars. A shriek that can easily break glass and bone, bursting eardrums and popping out the eyes. A death wail that can be produced only by banshees and cats.
A black cat stands in front of the tank.
Two beasts came to face one another. One is a steel mammoth while other is but a mere cat, dwarfed by the size of the iron giant. Both of them had seen the better days but the cat has it much worse – the hair on its head, once jet-black and glossy is now tangled and torn in spots; one of its ears mangled, almost ripped off.
Yet the cat…
“What a good new toy!” The cat smiles and jumps forward with a laughter.
It flips and it rips, it prances and it pounces, and it claws its way through the fragile steel shell – oh so fragile! – and into the insides of the iron beast, aiming, reaching to get to those squishy juicy snacks that thought themselves so safe behind their armor. Cat’s claws scratch the metal, sending sparks flying, cat’s fangs are ready to take a bite…
Something crackles inside the iron shell of a warmachine. Something springs, then bends, and then snaps – and then meets the happy sparks left flying by the cat. Spark flashes, ignites and starts the flame.
In a moment it flies outwards and upwards – exploding, twisting, burning.
Raging flaming inferno reaches out and swallows them both – metal and flesh alike.
It burns and burns, hotter and hotter…
***
“...Aah! Hot! It’s hot!” I had bitten the potato in half, realising too late that while its outer surface had cooled enough, its innards still had a temperature of what felt like a class M star. So now I was stuck in the most embarrassing of situations: not able neither to swallow the hot stuff that burned my mouth, nor to spit it all out. So I just sat there, mouth wide open, rapidly inhaling-exhaling, trying to cool it down to acceptable levels.
The Traveller just stretched his legs and waited for when I would finally be able to close my mouth.
“Your face is dirty.” He said finally. “And funny. But mostly dirty.”
“Of course it is… Dirty I mean.” I sighed. “After all those charcoal you’ve fed me with.”
“Yeah, of course. But it was the last one, don’t worry. Last one is always the hottest for some reason… Like you’d expect it to be the one that had the most time to cool – and yet…”
I could just shrug at that. I’m not an expert in baked potatoes.
“Anyway…” He leaned to the side and pulled a bottle of water from behind the tree log. “Here, wash your hands… and the face of course. Get up, I’ll pour it for you.”
“So it was the last one, you say?” I asked after I was done with washing the ashes off.
“Yes.”
“So you won’t tell me what was next?”
“Why, I can: nothing. Next was nothing.”
“How come?”
“Just like that.” He took the bottle to his mouth and took several big gulps out of it. “It’s how it usually is: something happens, and then next comes nothing. That is all.”
“Hm… So, did it really happen?”
“Who knows… Maybe. Or maybe but not like that.”
“But you were the one who told the story… sure you have to know if it is real, and where it happened and when…?”
“Real… Where… When…” The Traveller got on his feet and stretched his back. “Look, it’s night already… quite late… Don’t you think all those questions are irrelevant in the darkness?”
“...?”
“When it’s dark, you can’t see what’s real. Can’t see where are you, or when are you either. But if you can’t see they can’t see you too, right? Hence: irrelevant.”
“...”
“It all could’ve had happened here, on this same spot. Or it may have happened hundreds of kilometers from here. A few months ago or several years into the future. Or it may have never happened in the first place.
“It’s just a story.
“It exists as it is with one singular goal.
“To be remembered.”
