“‘No god, no country, no master.’ I see.”
“Red propaganda, Capitán!” Serrano looked proud and relieved that he hadn’t just disturbed his capitán for two dirty peasants. Maybe these two even belonged to the resistance fighters against General Franco, who they had come to hunt in this accursed forest.
“It’s not propaganda!” the son protested.
“Shhh.”
The soldiers heard the threat in Vidal’s hissed warning, but the stupid young peacock was too eager to protect his father. Love kills in many ways.
“It’s just an old almanac, Capitán!”
No, the boy wouldn’t shut up.
“We are just farmers,” his father said, trying to draw Vidal’s gaze from his son.
“Go on.” Vidal liked it when they started pleading for their lives.
“I went up into the woods to hunt rabbits. For my daughters. They are both sick.”
Vidal sniffed at a bottle he drew out of the old man’s rucksack. Water. One had to do these things calmly to enjoy them.
Order. Even in these things.
“Rabbits . . . ,” he said. “Really?”
He knew the son would step into the trap. Oh yes, he knew how to do this. The generals shouldn’t have wasted his talents in this forest. He could have done great things.
“Capitán, respectfully,” the son said, “if my father says he was hunting rabbits, he was hunting rabbits.” He hid his pride under his lowered lids, but his lips betrayed him.
Calmly. That’s how it had to be done.
Vidal took the bottle of water and slammed it into the young peacock’s face. Then he drove the shattered glass into his eye. Again and again. Let the rage have its way or it will consume you. The glass cut and smashed, turning skin and flesh into bloody pulp.
The father screamed louder than the son, tears painting smears onto his dirty cheeks.
“You killed him! You killed him! Murderer!”
Vidal shot him in the chest. It was not much of a chest. The bullets found his heart easily. Two bullets through his dirty, ragged clothes and cardboard bones.
The son was still moving, his hands red with his own blood as he pressed them against the gaping wounds on his face. What a mess. Vidal shot him, too. Under the pale sickle of the moon.
The forest was watching as silently as his soldiers.
Vidal wiped his gloved hands clean on the rucksack, then upended it onto the ground. Papers. More papers. And two dead rabbits. He held them up. They were scrawny little things, mere bones and fur. Maybe a stew would have come out of them.
“Maybe next time you’ll learn to search these assholes properly,” he said to Serrano, “before you come knocking at my door.”
“Yes, Capitán.”
How stiffly they all stood there.
What? Vidal challenged them with his eyes. He had a temper. Yes. What were they thinking now, staring at the two dead men at their feet? That some of their fathers and brothers were peasants too? That they also loved their daughters and their sons? That one day he would do the same to them?
Maybe.
We are all wolves, he wanted to say to them. Learn from me.
The Sculptor’s Promise
Once upon a time, there was a young sculptor named Cintolo. He served a king in a realm so far underground that neither the sun’s beams nor the moonlight could find it. He filled the royal gardens with flowers sculpted from rubies and fountains sculpted from malachite. He carved busts of the king and queen that were so lifelike, everyone believed they could hear them breathe.
Their only daughter, the princess Moanna, loved to watch the sculptor work, but Cintolo never managed to sculpt her form. “I can’t sit still for that long, Cintolo,” she said. “There’s too much to do and too much to see.”
Then one day Moanna was gone. And Cintolo remembered how often she’d asked him about the sun and the moon and whether he knew what the trees, whose roots laced the ceiling of her bedroom, looked like above the ground.
The king and queen were so heartbroken that the Underground Kingdom echoed with their sighs, and their tears covered the sculptor’s flowers like dew. The Faun, who advised them on all affairs of beasts and the sacred things breathing underground, sent out his messengers—bats and fairies, rabbits and ravens—to bring Moanna back, but all those eyes were unable to find her.
The princess had been gone for 330 years when one night the Faun walked into Cintolo’s workshop, where the sculptor had fallen asleep amid his tools. He longed to comfort Their Majesties by chiseling Moanna’s countenance from a beautiful moonstone, but as hard as he tried, he couldn’t remember the princess’s face.
“I have a task for you, Cintolo,” said the Faun, “and you won’t be allowed to fail. I want numerous sculptures of the king and queen—as numerous as the uncurling fronds of ferns—to grow from the soil in the Upper Kingdom. Can you make them?”
Cintolo wasn’t sure, but no one dared to say no to the Faun, as he was known for his temper and his influence on the king. So Cintolo went to work. One year later, hundreds of stone columns grew out of the Upper Kingdom’s soil, wearing the sad faces of Moanna’s parents, carrying the Faun’s hope that the lost princess might one day walk past them and be reminded of who she was. But once again, many years passed and there was no news of Moanna. Hope died in the Underground Kingdom like a flower bereft of rain.
Cintolo grew old, but he couldn’t bear the thought that he might die before his skills had helped to bring his royal masters’ lost child back. So he asked for an audience with the Faun.
The Faun was feeding the swarm of fairies that served him, when the sculptor walked in. The Faun fed them with his tears to remind them of Moanna, as fairies tend to be quite forgetful creatures.
“Your Horned Highness,” the sculptor said, “may I offer my humble skills one more time to find our lost princess?”
“And how do you intend to do that?” the Faun asked as the fairies licked another tear from his clawed fingers.
“Please allow me not to answer your question,” Cintolo said. “I don’t know yet whether my hands will be able to create what I see in my mind. I hope, though, that despite my silence you will agree to sit for me so I may sculpt you.”
“Me?” The Faun was surprised by Cintolo’s request. But in the old man’s face he saw passion, patience, and the most valuable virtue of all in desperate times: hope. So he dismissed all other duties—of which the Faun had many—to sit patiently for the sculptor.
Cintolo didn’t use stone for this sculpture. He carved the Faun’s likeness from wood, for wood always remembers it was once a living tree, alive and breathing in both kingdoms, the one above and the one below.
It took Cintolo three days and three nights to finish the sculpture and, when he told the Faun to rise from his chair, so did his wooden image.
“Tell it to find her, Your Horned Highness,” the sculptor said. “I promise it will neither rest nor die before he does.”
The Faun smiled, for he noticed another rare quality in the old man’s face: faith. Faith in his art and in what it could do. And for the first time in many years the Faun dared to hope again.
But there are many roads in the Upper Kingdom and, although the sculptor’s creature walked through forests and deserts and crossed plains and mountains, it couldn’t find the lost princess and fulfill its creator’s promise. Cintolo was devastated, and when Death knocked at his workshop door, he didn’t send Her away, but followed Her, hoping to forget his failure in the land of oblivion.