They pause to wipe their brows and consider their work. “How does it look, Dreyling?” the foreman asks him.
Sigrud je Harkvaldsson pauses. He wishes they’d use the name he gave them—Bjorn—but they rarely do.
He kneels and lays his head sideways in the face cut, vaguely aware of the several tons of wood suspended directly above his skull. Then he squints, stands, waves to the left, and says, “Ten degrees east.”
“You sure, Dreyling?”
“Ten degrees east,” he says.
The other men glance at one another, smirking. Then they resume with this slight adjustment in the face cut.
Once the face cut is complete, they move to the opposite side of the tree and begin again with the two-man saw, slicing through the wood in agonizing strokes to grow close, but not too close, to the face cut.
When the man at the other end of the saw tires, Sigrud just waits, silently, for someone else to take up the other end. Then they resume sawing.
“I damnably do swear, Dreyling, are you an automaton?” says the foreman.
He says nothing as he saws.
“Were I to open up your chest, would I find naught but gears?”
He says nothing.
“I’ve had Dreylings on my teams before, and not a one of them could work a saw like you.”
Still nothing.
“Youth, perhaps,” the foreman muses. “To be as young as you, aye, that’s the ticket.”
Still Sigrud says nothing. Though this last statement troubles him deeply. For he is not a young man by any stretch of the imagination.
They pause periodically in their sawing, listening: listening for the deep, complaining cracks, like a shelf of ice collapsing. He is reminded of an argument, an old friend reluctantly coming round to your position: Perhaps you’re right, perhaps I should fall….Perhaps I should.
Then, finally, they hear it: a pop-pop-pop like massive harp strings snapping. The foreman screams, “She falls!” and they scatter away, tin helmets clapped to their heads.
The old, groaning giant tumbles over, branches snapping as it ploughs to the ground, sending up a great plume of soil. They creep back down to it as the dust settles. The pale circle of wood at the truncated end is bright and soft.
Sigrud looks at the stump for a moment—the only thing that will mark this tree’s decades of existence here—and notes its countless growth rings. How odd it is to think that such a colossus could be eradicated in a few hours by a handful of fools with axes and a saw.
“What are you staring at, Dreyling?” says the foreman. “Are you in love? Start buckling the damn thing, or I’ll scramble your brains even more than they already are!”
The other loggers chuckle as they straddle the fallen tree. He knows what they think of him: that he is slow, demented by some childhood accident. That must be, they whisper among themselves, why he never talks, never takes off his gloves, and why one of his eyes is never quite looking at anything, but rather just to the right; that must be why he never tires at the saw—surely his faculties must not register that he is fatigued. No normal person could silently withstand such punishment.
He does not mind their chatter. Better to think less of him than too much. Too much attention draws eyes.
He raises his ax, brings it down, and shears a branch off of the trunk. Thirteen years moving from little job to little job. He does not relish the idea of moving yet again, nor does he wish to alert any authorities to his presence. So he stays quiet.
He focuses on thinking the same question to himself, over and over again: Will she send for me today? Will today be the day she tells me to come alive again?
The logging crew bags their quota, so they’re all in high spirits come nightfall when they start the journey back to the logging camp, the campfires visible from halfway up the mountain. They make their way down through clear-cut forests, stark wastelands pockmarked with sullen stumps, their tool cart clinking and clanking over the bumps. They hurry as they grow near. Their logging range is not too far outside of Bulikov, so the sack wine is decent even if the food is abominable.
But as they near the camp, the air is not filled with the usual shouts and songs and raucous cries, celebrating the survival of another day stuck to the handle of an ax. The few loggers they see are clumped together like visitors at a funeral, sharing whispered words.
“What in all the hells is the matter tonight? Ahoy, Pavlik!” says the foreman, calling to a passing logger with a drooping mustache. “What’s the news? Another casualty?”
Pavlik shakes his head, his mustache swinging like the pendulum of a long-case clock. “No, not a casualty. Not a casualty here, at least.”
“What do you mean?”
“News came of an assassination in Ahanashtan. There’s talk of war. Again.”
The loggers glance at one another, unsure how seriously to take this.
“Pah,” says their foreman. He spits on the ground. “Another assassination….They say such things so gravely, as if the life of some diplomat were worth so much. But at the end of the day they’ll all back down again, just you wait.”
“Oh, I’d agree, if it were just some diplomat,” says Pavlik. “But it wasn’t. It was Komayd.”
A silence falls over the crew.
Then a low voice speaks: “Komayd? Komayd who…who did what?”
The logging crew parts to look at Sigrud, standing up straight by the cart. But they notice that his glance seems much brighter and clearer than they recall, and he stands straighter and taller than before—very tall, in fact, as if he’s unpacked three more inches from somewhere in his spine.
“What do you mean, Komayd who did what?” says Pavlik. “Who died, of course.”
Sigrud stares at the man. “Died? She was…She is dead?”
“Her and a bunch of other people. News came through the telegraphs just this morning. They blew her up along with half of a fancy hotel in downtown Ahanashtan, six days ago, lots of people ki—”
Sigrud steps closer to the man. “Then how are they sure? How are they sure she is dead? Do they really know?”
Pavlik hesitates as Sigrud nears, until the big Dreyling is looming over him like the firs they fell each day. “Well, uh…Well, they found the body, of course! Or what was left of it. They’re planning a big funeral and everything, it’s all over the papers!”
“Why Komayd?” says someone. “She was prime minister over ten damned years ago. Why kill someone out of office?”
“How should I know?” says Pavlik. “Maybe old grudges die hard. She pissed off nearly everyone when she was in office; they’re saying the list of suspects goes twice around the block.”
Sigrud slowly turns back to look at Pavlik. “So they do not know,” he says quietly, “who…did this to her?”
“If they know, they aren’t saying,” says Pavlik.
Sigrud falls silent, and the look of shock and horror on his face gives way to something different: grim resolution, perhaps, as if he’s just made a decision he’s been putting off for far too long.
“Enough of this,” says the foreman. “Dreyling, quit your damn foolery and help us unpack the cart.”
The other loggers scurry into action, but Sigrud remains still.