Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [114]
It took only a few shouts before several hundred men lined up in neat rows on the shaking earth. I said, “They must hold onto each other around the waists, all together.”
The captain stared at me. Something flared in his eyes, anger mixed with sudden doubt. “These be soldiers, boy! They can’t fight like that! ”
“Not to fight. To leave Witchland. Or else they must stay here forever.”
He stared at me, and for a moment I thought he would not do it. But then he turned and gave the order. His dumbfounded men glanced at each other, scowled, muttered, glared at me—and one by one, each put his arms around the men closest to him, so that the neat rows became a vast, uncomfortable mass. “You too!” I said to the captain.
“No.”
I shrugged. “Then stay here.”
He swore and grabbed the man closest to him. I clutched at the captain, bit my tongue so hard that blood spurted into my mouth, and willed myself to cross over, with several hundred men fastened to me like weights, or leeches.
The sky shrieked and split open. Something roared out of the rent, something bright and terrible, just as the ground gave way beneath my feet. I was falling, I was being devoured by the bright monstrosity from the sky. . . .
And then I was in the grave, that in-between place of dirt in my mouth and worms in my eyes, of being imprisoned alive in my rotted body. . . . And this time, I could not get free. The weight of hundreds of men pulled at me, clawing and dragging. We would all stay here forever, trapped, neither dead nor alive. An eternity of the grave, with worms in my eyes and cold on my bones—
Oh, what had I done?
And still the earth held us, the barrier between the land of the living and the country of the Dead. The grave held my rotting flesh until death—the real thing—would have been welcome. I would just give up, surrender, let myself die—
No. I must save Maggie.
With a last tremendous effort of will, I concentrated upon reaching Maggie again. Cross over, cross over, cross over for Maggie—
I tumbled onto the grass beside the placid blue river.
Desperately I gasped for air, the soldiers heaving and moaning beside me. Sensation returned: my arms were flesh, not rotting bones; my eyes brought vision, not maggots; my tongue could move, unchoked by fetid dirt. The weight of men no longer dragged at me. Had there been, it seemed to me now, even one more of them, I could not have made that horrendous crossing. Never again!
When I could stand, I looked for Jee, who was not there. He had stayed hidden as I’d instructed. As soon as he recovered, the captain barked orders and soon the army was in battle formation, swords drawn, shield at the ready. He spared me one glance.
“Thank you, boy. Now go.”
A single look can change worlds. Before the captain’s gaze returned to his men, it had gone from gratitude to distaste to dislike. I had brought him out of Witchland, but that meant I was a witch, and witches were to be feared. To be hunted. To be burned. The contradiction was more than the captain wanted to navigate. He wanted me away, so that he would not have to sail those treacherous moral seas.
I faded back into the trees until my back was at the thicket where Jee lay hidden. The Blues began to march toward the river. From below me came a sound. It might have been Jee, breathing “Roger?” It might have been the rustle of a rabbit, or a fox. Or a rat.
All these soldiers would die a second time. Like Bat’s and Cecilia’s, their renewed lives were illusory, temporary. In a fortnight—I had finally worked out in my mind the passage of days—they would disappear, burned horribly out of existence like wood that becomes smoke, dissipating on the very air. You could not make smoke become the oak or maple or cherry wood it had once been. And yet if I had not done this monstrous thing, what would have become of these soldiers in the country of the Dead? They did not inhabit it as the rest of the Dead did, waiting in tranced calmness. Already they were restless, bored, desperate. What would they have become in ten years’ time, twenty