WORKS IN PROGRESS: "The Equite's Son"

It took a lot longer to find an agent than to write a novel, pretty literally four times as long. I'm ever-grateful for Kimberley Cameron's representation and support, but, before I found her, I had time to build quite a backlog of writing. The first novel I wrote was one I'd been thinking about for decades, scribbling various notes over those years, and even taking a trip to look over the ground where I wanted to set it. It's the story of a young man whose parents wish him to take over the family farm. He would much prefer to go to the big city, maybe become a lawyer or get into politics, or perhaps wangle an officer's commission from his mother's cousin, a noted soldier whom he has never met. This all sounds kind of familiar, I suppose. It seems like something maybe set in Iowa in 1948 or something. In fact, that family farm is outside Ravenna, Italy and it's set in 56-54 BC. More than anything I've written, I look back over this one and feel I got exactly what I wanted. We're now starting the early process of trying to find a publisher. I'm trying not to get too excited, but I'd love to see this in print.

For those of you who are curious, I'll paste the first chapter below. Just for fun, I'll add a cover that a friend designed after reading an early draft. This is a working title, so feel free to comment below if you have an idea.

PART ONE 

Family Masks

"If I can guide you in the ways

Trod by the worthy folk of earlier days,

And, while you need direction, keep your name and life unstained,

I've attained my aim.” - Horace

"It is due to our own moral failures and not to any accident of chance that, while retaining the name, we have lost the reality of a republic.” - Cicero

Chapter One

The masks began to speak.

Lying on a dining couch in his parents’ villa, Marcus, sluggish with wine, blinked at the littered table before him. Flickering oil lamps lighted a shabby scene of dirty plates and overtipped cups.

He looked around the dim and shadowed room. Where had his friends gone?

“Ah, right,” he muttered woozily. They had left more than an hour ago. They’d be halfway back to Ravenna by now.

Marcus half-rose from the couch. The room began to spin alarmingly and he nearly fell onto the floor. Must tell the servants to clean up this room—order them to say nothing to his father about the mess he and his friends had made, the drunkenness.

Weighted with dinner and drink, he fell back onto the couch.

Later, he couldn't say how much time passed before he heard the first murmur of voices, barely piercing the curtain of his slumber. The voices seemed to come from the entry hall where the terra cotta masks of his ancestors hung.

A vision of the masks, hanging from their hooks, passed through his mind. He knew their faces as well as he knew his own, perhaps better. Over the last few years—he was nineteen now—his had changed rapidly. His features had lost their boyish roundness, the fair hair turned darker, the nose and jaw stronger.

His ancestors, though, were unchangeable—the stern faces of the grandfathers he had never known and the grandmothers but barely, the faces of their parents before them and theirs in turn, generations so deep into the past as to slip from memory into myth. Each mask bore the individual features of its subject, the vivid colors of flesh and hair and eyes so eerily real they had frightened him as a boy.

Whatever their differences, each mask shared the relentless strength of character and firmness of purpose that had first won and then maintained the family’s position in this most distant part of Italy. His mother's ancestors, the Julians, a storied Roman family, hung on one side. On the other side were his father's, the Scaevolas, Romans too, but long ago come north, almost beyond the writ of the Senate and the shield of the legionnaire, to found this estate in the Po Valley when barbarians still raided its rich plain.

Still wondering at the sound of the voices, Marcus, unable to keep his eyes open, curled up on the couch.

While he dozed, only half-asleep, the unhappy murmuring increased in strength, the voices drawing nearer. With a great effort he opened his eyes—and felt his heart stop in horror.

Before him, as if conjured by his thoughts, the masks of the ancestors were gliding above the atrium floor, winging toward him like angry ravens.

He shook his head, trying to clear the cobwebs that clouded his thoughts. But he could not banish the vision of the masks before him. Like unhappy spirits fleeing their tombs, they hovered in the air, floating in ragged ranks across the room.

With a shiver of horror, he realized the voices he heard came from their throatless mouths. Though unable to catch the sense of their words, Marcus heard them calling his name, their voices murderously angry.

He tried to rise and shout for the servants to send these masks back to their places. But neither his voice nor limbs obeyed his will.

As he struggled to cry out, the masks began to take on a macabre transformation. Beneath their shadowy features, living flesh started to materialize. Simulated colors took on the warm hues of life. Terra cotta mouths began to move, brows to furrow in anger.

Anger at what? Marcus searched his conscience for some heedless act of impiety that might have so offended the ancestors that they would leave their places in the shadow world and return to their earthly home to judge him.

Like swirling smoke congealing in place, the ghastly forms took shape, dressed in men's togas and matron's gowns, their owners shouting, some with upraised fists, all speaking in the veiled language of the dead.

The spirits crept closer, gathering around the couch on which Marcus lay. For the length of a deep breath, the encircling shades looked down on the young nobleman with their fathomless eyes. Then they knelt, took up his couch, slowly raised it onto their shoulders, and began to bear him away. As they did, the sense of their words grew clearer: betrayal. Betrayal of the genius, the guiding spirit, of his family and of its gods. Betrayal of a promise made long ago but left unfulfilled.

Baffled and frightened, Marcus could not fathom what family obligations could have passed over his parents and waited for him to keep. Yet the spirits insisted he had in some unknown way neglected his duties, betrayed his very Romanness, as if he were of another race, another people.

His mind disordered by terror, Marcus could not at first tell in what direction the spirits were taking him. Then he saw the entrance hall, its bare walls studded with the empty hooks from which the masks had wandered. Beyond it, the villa’s front door opened into the annihilating darkness.

Before him, just beyond the door, stood a formless shadow—Janus, the two-faced god of comings and goings, beginnings and endings. Beyond Janus, obscured by the darkness, appeared another figure. With a shock of horror, Marcus recognized his father, his face lined with anger and grief, reciting a funeral oration.

Marcus struggled to speak, to appeal to this stern man he knew so well and yet had never understood. He tried to cry out but could make no sound.

He saw it clearly now. The ancestors were carrying him out the door of his home, bearing him in the traditional manner of a corpse, feet first, so that his wandering spirit could not find its way back.

In the shadowy realm beyond the courtyard, Marcus caught a glimpse of another figure—no, two figures. A boar snuffled in the distance, as if waiting for him. And a woman, beautiful beyond words, with long black hair and lips red as plums.

With a final effort he struggled to call out, "No! Please! I will keep the promise. Only tell me what it is!" But he could produce nothing more than a strangled cry. 

Gasping for breath, Marcus sat bolt upright in his bed, the echo of his shout fading in the dark room, his heart pounding, sweat running down his face.

“Oh, Marcus! You’ll frighten me to death.” In the dim light he saw Pompeiia beside him in the bed, clutching the bedclothes to her neck. She put an arm around his shoulders and let the bedclothes drop. The aromas of her perfume and the warmth of her flesh eased his terror. “You’ve had a bad dream. Here, come closer.” She patted his head as if he were a child, unmanning him. “You’re all right now.”

Still possessed by his nightmare, he could not reply.

Pompeiia smiled. “I know how to make bad dreams go away.” She drew his hand to her breast.

Marcus fought to slow his breath, tell himself that it had only been a bad dream. But in his heart he knew that nothing was more real than a dream.

“Is it morning yet?” he asked.

“It’s almost dawn. But we have time.”

Marcus shook his head. “My father must have come back hours ago. You have to go.” Though his father might wink at his visits to a bordello in the city, such as virtually all young men indulged in, he would not be pleased with its employees coming to his house.

Marcus staggered out of bed and threw a tunic over his head.

She let out a huff of exasperation. “How will I get back? It’s miles to town.”

Marcus plucked some coins from his bedside table. “I’ll tell my slave to come up. He’ll take you out through the kitchens. Once you’re on the road someone will be happy to take you into Ravenna for this.”

He tossed the coins beside her on the bed, like tossing corn to a chicken. The young girl’s frowned at the insult. Then, recalling her need to please a good client , she manufactured an injured frown.

“I didn’t make you happy,” she said.

Marcus thought she might cry. “No, Pompeiia, don’t …” He gave her two more coins and kissed her on the forehead. “Don’t worry. I’ll tell Calpurnia that you're wonderful and that I’ll visit her place again when I’m in the city. I’ll ask for you particularly. I promise. But now you have to go.”

She tossed her head sulkily, then picked up the coins.

Marcus dashed downstairs, knowing he was late. His father would already be standing outside, angry, waiting for him.

Still haunted by the vision, he staggered out of the villa. He sensed it had been no mere dream, but a visitation, as real in spirit as it was shadowy in form—its effect terrifying, its purpose wholly obscure.

A small altar stood in the ancient oak grove beyond the villa, only a few paces from the marble tomb in which generations of Scaevola bones were interred. The carvings on the altar's sides had turned green with age and its base lay buried under layers of humus so thick that the pair of hooded figures observing rites at the altar needed to stoop slightly.

The two men turned as Marcus approached, pulling back the folds of their togas with which they covered their heads during religious ceremonies. His father's close-cropped graying hair, his lean, stern face appeared, as always, grave and purposeful as the masks hanging from the wall. Marcus half realized that the dread he felt whenever he passed through the entrance hall under the unblinking gaze of the ancestors reflected the unease he felt in his father’s presence.

Lately, the deep lines that creased his father's face, the sagging flesh under his eyes and the paleness under his tan had carried a message of mortality that Marcus tried not to think of. As much as his father's presence intimidated him, he could not imagine a world without him. For now, though, the anger in his father's blue eyes was proof enough of his vitality.

"You've interrupted the rites, Marcus. The gods no longer attend us. You come here late, dressed in a dirty tunic rather than a toga, your face unwashed.” His father turned away, but his anger drove him back. "It's not for my marriage we're enquiring of the gods, but yours—"

"Father—"

"Be quiet!” With this shout his father's shoulders sagged and he closed his eyes. When he opened them again the anger was gone. His voice was calm, almost relieved. "The auspices can't be read now. Go back inside. Put on clean clothes and go see your mother.” His father said to the priest. "I'll see that you're taken back to town."

The old priest bowed his head. "As you wish, Atticus Publius."

The two men turned their backs on Marcus and walked toward the villa, their breath steaming in the morning air.

Marcus walked over to the altar, puzzled that his father's anger about the interrupted rites had so quickly cooled.

A wisp of smoke rose from the smoldering grain in the center of the altar. Next to the grain lay the body of the sacrificed lamb. With a shiver of horror, Marcus saw that, though the sheep’s flesh was pink and fresh, its shrunken liver was black with disease.

These were the auspices for his marriage to Cornelia, the daughter of his father’s closest friend. By arriving late and unclean he had, to his father’s relief, negated the rites. The lamb and its ominous message meant nothing now.

His hands tucked under his arms against the cold, Marcus trotted back toward the house.

After falling ill in spring, his mother had been moved downstairs to a room behind the atrium. Here a warm flow of air under the floor, fed by fires near the villa's foundations, eased the chill that never left her now. The acrid smell of incense could not disguise the odor of illness that hung in the air.

Marcus looked in on her and thought she was asleep. But, sensing his presence, she opened her eyes. "Ah, Marcus. Come in. Sit with your mother." She nodded at a chair in a corner of the small room.

His mother, Julia, had never been a robust woman. She had nearly died in giving birth to him and never again been able to conceive. His father could have honorably divorced her for this, but his love for her kept him by her side as he saw her through her many illnesses. Throughout these trials, her spirit, her Juno, had always burned fiercely, in defiance of the weak vessel in which it dwelt.

She owed her marriage—and Marcus his existence—to this relentless determination. As a girl, she had needed every bit of it to bend the will of her own stern father, who had opposed her marriage to Atticus Publius Scaevola, who possessed bloodlines nearly as ancient and noble as her own, but lived a rusticated life in the Po Valley, a region barely civilized, only recently secured from Celtic tribes.

Over the years, Atticus had done little to strengthen his ties to the capital. Though an equite, only a step below senatorial rank, he chose to fulfill his obligations to Rome while spending as little time there as possible, and had never taken his son to the great city.

"You look well today, Mother."

Julia scoffed at his lie. "Oh, don't I though? But you don't. You have dark circles under your eyes.” A year earlier the comment would have cut Marcus to the core, but as illness melted away her frame, the imperious tone that had carried all the dignity of her proud family had softened. The flicker of a smile crossed her face. "I'm scolding you, aren't I?”

"I think Father hoped you would."

"I don't need your father's permission to tell you what I can see with my own eyes. As for your father, my … indisposition has been harder on him than on me. Be good to him."

"Be good to him? Why can’t he at least show me—?"

"Listen to me," she interrupted, "You're nineteen. It’s time you took on a man's responsibilities. Your father’s not young anymore. He needs you."

"Mother, I respect my father, but I don't love this as he does.” His vague gesture took in the villa, the estate and all they entailed. "It's time I saw something of the world. If I went to Rome—"

His mother fixed him with a look. "A son never sounds more childish than when he pretends to be wise. Let's speak of a future a little less distant. We’ve been invited to dinner in Ravenna with Sextus Flavius and his family tomorrow night. I think I will feel well enough. Don't make that face. It will be a chance for you to see your Cornelia."

"Mother, I know what she looks like. And 'my Cornelia?’  I—"

"Your father and I did not raise you to remain a child. Her father agreeing, you will marry her in the spring.”

“Don’t you think I’m a little young?”

“You’ll be twenty next year. She'll be sixteen, a perfect age for marriage.”

The sound of hobnailed shoes echoed in the hall. Marcus looked up and found his father standing in the doorway.

"I told him to come see you, not to take up your whole morning,” he said to Julia. Atticus Publius had changed into the tunic and boots he wore when going out to inspect his estate.

“Here, sit beside me on the bed," she said to him.

"You look well this morning, Julia."

She looked from her husband to her son and rolled her eyes. "Nothing makes me feel more feeble and drab than to have everyone telling me how well I look. Look at my hair. Thin and stringy and gone to gray." She tucked a curl more or less back into place. "And look at you.” She tugged at her husband's close-cropped hair. "While I try to hold onto what hair I have left, you've cut yours nearly to the scalp.” She turned to Marcus. "He used to be as fair as you, you know. And with the same blue eyes. I used to call him my little Gaul, my wicked Celt. I told him that's what came from living this far north, at the edge of the world. My family half-believed I’d married a barbarian."

Trying to maintain his dignity in front of his son, Atticus reddened and pulled back. Julia laughed and patted his hand. He ducked his head to hide his smile.

Marcus listened to their banter as if to a new language. He had never seen them talk this way, teasing each other, sharing a joke. In fact he had seldom seen his father smile.

As if reading his son’s thoughts, Atticus frowned. “Have your horse saddled. You’re coming with me into the fields.”

The light in his mother’s eyes faded, and he saw how pale she had become, fatigued by their brief conversation.

For Marcus, though, the image of his father’s smile and of his mother’s quiet laughter lingered as he walked out of the villa to fetch his horse. For the first time he understood that their relationship might contain something apart from their role as his parents. Sometimes you learn things just in time, he thought.

END CHAPTER

Work In Progress: "The Gangster, the Putain, and the Floating World"

Now in print as “To Live and Die in the Floating World”

First Chapter

It was nearly midnight and I was drunk and thinking of heading back to my dump at the Ecu d'Or when the Irishman Rory Gallagher came through the door of the smoky and flyblown bar on the backside of Montmartre. I thought later how different things might have been if he'd chosen another bar or I'd been sober.

I'd met Rory three months earlier in a little town on the Loire where we'd each stumbled into short-term jobs at a campground. We'd both passed the previous few months kicking around Europe pretending to find ourselves, even while I labored hard at not being found. In the way of such wanderers, we struck up a momentary friendship before parting bitterly over an Italian girl who decided to head up to Normandy with me instead of going with Gallagher to the south of France.

This checkered history flickered through my impaired mind as I saw him walk in, and I should have followed my first impulse, which was to keep my head down. Yet, under the influence of alcohol-induced bonhomie I raised my hand and gave him a welcoming kind of nod—the nod making my head swim after four beers on an empty stomach.

He cocked his head and squinted at me with one eye, trying to place me. When the eye popped open again, triggering a frown, I knew he'd made the connection. To my muddled surprise the frown morphed into a grin not unlike that of the Big Bad Wolf spying one of the Three Little Pigs in a dark alley, and he came over to my table.

“Kip Weston, you old sod. What're you doin' drinkin' alone?”

I looked around for the two Moroccans who'd been with me all evening, but found they had drifted away at some point in the evening.

“And where's the lovely Giulietta?” he asked.

I essayed a “who knows?” gesture and told him, “Heading for Brittany with some random Greek the last I saw her.”

My confession about losing her took some of the menace off his smile.

“How was the south of France?” I asked him.

“Dunno. Never got there.” He pulled out a chair and slumped into it. “I got some work in Burgundy for a couple of months to replenish my empty purse and didn't make it that far.”

“So, where you heading now?”

“Back to Dublin. I was promised a job startin' the end of September, and I've got to get back or lose it. How about yerself?”

I told him of my travels—with Giulietta and then without—and how I ended up here in one of the smarmier quarters of Paris, leaving out, as always, the important stuff.

“Where ya stayin'?”

“Been at the Ecu d'Or the last few weeks.”

“The Ecu? Migod, Weston, that's the sort of place where you wake up in the morning with stitches on your back and one of your kidneys missing.”

“I'm broke.”

“So, go home.”

“Don't want to go home.”

Even I caught the aggrieved tone of a spoiled child in my refusal.

“Ask your old man for some gelt. You told me he's swimmin' in the stuff. Has how many houses? And a yacht, as I recall.”

Having momentarily lost the power of speech, I laid my head on the table.

Gallagher blew out a breath. “And you were gettin' ready to take over the whole thing, yes? Graduated from some toffee-nosed school in finance or management or something.”

“No!” I shouted into the table top, the word ricocheting back at me hard enough to make my head bounce. “I told you about that.”

Ah, that's right. Comparative lit-ra-chur!” I'd forgotten the irritating edge to his laugh. “Yeah, just to rub the old man's nose in it, right? You graduate Magma Come Loudly or some such Greek. And now you're going to write a great novel about him and his kind, just to show you've got too much soul to take over the family business and make a real living.” He snorted. “Rich kids.”

In his mockery of my intentions I recognized words I'd often spoken after a couple of drinks. When thrown back at me, I cringed at their pretense. And whatever my whining confessions, I knew how much I'd left out, the parts I didn't tell anyone.

“All right. Enough about that, okay?”

“Sure thing, Kip. Meanwhile, why don't you just give the dad a call and get some money and take me out to dinner?”

“Someone stole my phone.”

He laughed so loud my brains wobbled.

“Aren't you the pathetic case?” he said and reached into his pocket. “Here, use mine. We'll call him right—”

“I don't want to call my father!”

I yanked myself up straight. The room oscillated alarmingly.

His hand still on his phone, he leaned back in his chair and eyed me for a long moment. “I almost admire you.”

“But not quite.”

“Not quite. Because you're a stubborn bugger and you don't know how to do yourself a favor.”

While I contemplated this profundity Gallagher ordered us both a beer and narrowed his eyes.

“So, Weston, my old friend, maybe you could use a job. You told me you did a lot of sailing. How about a job on a boat?”

Even while I was wondering why he would be willing to help me, I mean after the girl and all, I said, “A boat?”

“I knew that would wake you up.” Gallagher waved his hand like he was clearing away smoke, and when he didn't follow up on the boat thing I decided he'd been kidding.

We talked a little longer about where we'd been, what we'd done. We had another round, him moving on to whiskey as if, being an Irishman, he had to keep up a certain image. I'd almost forgotten about the boat when he asked again if I wanted work. He said he'd been working on a barge down in Burgundy, a peniche d'hotel he called it. “The Celeste. Owner's a Frenchwoman named Diane. She takes on a group of guests. Six of 'em, that's all, and treats them like royalty for a week for twenty-five thousand dollars. At the end of the week she packs 'em off and takes on another group. Crew of three, plus Diane. Easy work. Decent pay.”

“What did you do?”

“Drove a car that accompanied the boat. A London taxi, would you believe? I ran errands. Took the guests for excursions now and then. That kind of thing. Easy money, Weston. Easy money,” he said, hooking his thumbs into his belt and leaning back in his chair.

“So, why'd you leave?”

He gave me an if-only-you-knew smirk. “Like I say, I've got to get back to Dublin.” He took a look into the depths of his whiskey. “Anyway, my departure leaves her a crew member short. Most of the guests are Americans, so she wants people who speak English. If you've got a driver's license, the job's yours—if you get there first.”

He shrugged his indifference. It was up to me. His wicked smile should have made me think twice but, like I said, I'd had a few and was having a hard enough time thinking once.

I needed the money and was tired of this part of Paris, the only part I could afford. Summer, when everything was fun and everything seemed possible was nearly past, fall on the horizon and I felt like a grasshopper who should be thinking about turning into an ant.

So I said, “Sure. Why not?”

He bought me another beer to seal the deal, and knocked back a third whiskey. After a bit, he mentioned that he'd just come in from Dijon on the late train and the guys he hoped to stay with in Montmartre seemed to have moved on and could he maybe flop at my place?

“You willing to risk a kidney?”

“Sure,” he said, and we both laughed, though I didn't like the sound of his.

I woke in the morning feeling like my head had been taken off during the night and reattached without proper supervision. Gallagher, who had wrapped himself in the spare blanket and lay on the floor, sat up groaning and bleary-eyed. He rubbed his face and looked around, trying to figure out where he was. He looked surprised when he saw me. 

“What the hell are you doin'—?” Then it came back to him.

He rose from the floor, still in his clothes, and offered to buy me breakfast. We lurched down to a bistro at the bottom of the hill.

Neither of us had much to say. The hangover had caused my speech centers to flick on and off like a dying light bulb. For his part, Gallagher seemed preoccupied and did little but dip his croissant in his coffee and suck on it.

“Look, Kip, about that boat job. I'm thinkin' I shouldn't have mentioned it. Probably not something you'd care for. Sorry I brought it up.”

“I gotta make some money.”

“And anything's easier than calling your father,” he said with a snort. “I still don't get get why you don't want to at least ask him for—”

“Enough about my father, okay?” I said it more sharply than I meant to and I could see his face set hard against me. “Look. If I decide to follow up on this boat thing, should I tell the owner . . .”

“Diane.”

“. . . Diane, that you sent me?”

A smile came over his face that I should have read better. “Yeah, that's what you want to do.”

Overwhelmed with brotherly love, I said, “Rory, about the girl, I just wanted to say I'm—”

He waved a hand as he finished his coffee. “Forget about the girl. It's all good now.”

Out on the sidewalk we shook hands and said goodbye, Gallagher off to catch a train for London, me back to my fifth floor flop.

I hadn't got more than a few steps when he called, “Weston!”

“Yeah?”

“I almost forgot. Someone was looking for you. An American. In a gray suit. He came by the campground there in Beaugency, maybe a week or two after you took off with whatshername. He wanted to know where you— What's wrong?” 

“I'm fine. Why should anything be wrong? Nothing's wrong,” I tried to laugh but it came out as the sort of laugh they put you in a padded room for. “What about this guy?”

Gallagher smiled and squinted suspiciously at my attempt to play it cool. “He said he'd heard you were working there with me. Wanted to know where you'd gone.” He thrust his chin at me. “What's it all about?”

“No idea,” I lied.

 “He gave me his card.” He started to pull out his wallet. “You want it?”

“No!” I tried to collect myself. “So, what did you tell him?”

He cocked his head to one side, knowing I wouldn't give him a straight answer if he asked what was up with me. “If this guy's a stranger, what do you care?”

“I don't. It's just . . .”

Gallagher laughed and shook his head. “I told him you were headin' up to Normandy.” He shrugged, like it wasn't his fault he was still sore about the girl when this guy came by. “Then maybe Paris. That a problem?”

“No. You told him I was heading for Paris? Why should that be a problem?”

“If you don't know, I sure as hell don't.” He could see through me like a window and rewarded me with his most irritating smirk. “All right. So long, Weston.”

“So long, Gallagher.”

Still grinning, he headed down toward the Gare du Nord.

I ran back to my apartment, threw my stuff into a backpack and made the midday train to Dijon, looking over my shoulder the whole way. 

Work In Progress: "In Jerusalem's Fire."

Chapter One

By the time Lieutenant Chase told them to run, the loggers couldn't hear him over the howling of the wind.

They'd been felling a stand of spruce mixed with fir and hemlock on the crest of a ridge near Wessel Creek. The spruce grew thick here and the crew had been working the ridge for a week. Through the gaps they'd cut in the forest they could see the Pacific a few miles off, blue as lapis under the May sun.

After spending the first part of the day inspecting one of the loggers’ camps near the Siletz road, Lieutenant Austin Chase had come up to the logging operation late in the morning. He judged the men were in good spirits and working steadily. They knew their jobs better than he did, but it was his duty to keep an eye on things and make sure the work went well. So he limped around the site, leaning heavily on his cane, adding a word of encouragement here, asking a question there, mostly staying out of the way.

About midday a sudden gust of wind blew across the ridge, cold and hard, causing the trees to sway and the men to stop their work and look up. They were soldiers first, mostly draftees of the army hastily raised after America’s entry into the war. Whatever claims or misunderstandings or fates had put them in the forests of Oregon with axes and saws in their hands rather than in the trenches of France with rifles and bayonets, too few of them had enough experience in the woods to understand the message carried by the wind.

When the errant gust blew itself out, the men returned to their work, smiling and shaking their heads. None of them remarked on the strange silence that succeeded the wind, a stillness that lent an eerie clarity to every sound, from the thonk of an ax to the asthmatic pocketa-pocketa of the steam-driven donkey engine that hauled the felled trees up the slope. Nor did the men notice the birds gradually falling silent, no longer gliding through the trees but hopping from limb to limb in the rapidly thinning air.

Only Private Hakkonen continued to glance uneasily into the cloudless sky. When a corporal told him to get back to work Hakkonen shot him an agate-eyed frown and muttered something to himself before again taking up his end of the two-handled saw he'd been partnering with another soldier. But the stillness of the air ate at him and he soon stopped again. This time he walked away from the saw, ignoring the other soldier's puzzled look. When the corporal again told him to get back to work Hakkonen ignored him too and crossed the logged-over clearing to where Lieutenant Chase stood leaning on his cane.

“I think we oughta get out of here.”

Hakkonen never said “sir” and didn't give a damn about the hard looks most of the officers gave him for it. Chase, though, didn't seem to care. Maybe getting burned that bad changed you, Hakkonen thought. The scars down one side of his face and neck and God-knew-what-others hidden by his gloves and his uniform—that had to do something to a young guy.

His gloved hands resting on the neck of his cane, Chase cocked his head, turning the side less scarred toward Hakkonen. “Get out of here?” he asked. He didn't add “private” because he didn't give a damn about that kind of thing either, not anymore.

Hakkonen nodded toward the treetops. He was older than the other men, past thirty, his dark face creased from years of working outdoors.

“I don't know the Oregon woods,” Hakkonen said, “but if I was still logging up in Michigan I'd figure there was a bad blow coming.” The sharp whistle of the donkey engine cut through the air, warning men to scramble out of the way as it dragged a log up the slope. “I know you're new here and the ground seems dry, but it’s rained hard all spring and the ground's soft underneath.”

Chase looked into the sky, but knew he wasn't seeing what Hakkonen saw. He liked Hakkonen, blunt, square-headed, hard-working. He'd heard that before the war Hakkonen had been with the International Workers of the World—Wobblies, they were called—practically Communists. The civilians who supervised most of the logging in the are spoke his name with that peculiar contempt born of fear, and warned the Army he'd be trouble.

For some reason, maybe the fact that, in their way, they were both outsiders, the broad-shouldered Finn had, in Chase's case, suspended his habitual antagonism towards authority. When the Lieutenant first came to inspect the work site a couple of weeks earlier, Hakkonen had shown him how to tell if the men were being treated right and whether the civilian supervisors were doing what the Army needed them to do—cut spruce—and not felling the other timber the lumber bosses wanted for the open market. Most importantly, he impressed on Chase that logging was dangerous work, on most days more dangerous than soldiering, and taught him how to see which men knew what they were doing in the woods and which ones might get somebody killed.

Still, Chase shook his head. “I'm not in command here, Hakkonen, just inspecting the operation. It's up to the civilian supervisors to—”

“Well, they ain't here. And their loggers ain’t here neither. I don't know what got screwed up, but it’s just us soldiers today. You’re the only officer here right now. The men will listen to you.”

Chase nodded toward a short compact man with blond hair standing over near the donkey engine. “Sergeant McElroy—”

“—won't take a piss without some officer's by-your-leave.”

Again, Austin Chase looked into the sky, felt the stillness of the air. High above, a freshening west wind pushed a thin scrim of clouds across the sun.

He thought of other mornings like this, taking off from the dirt airstrip in France into the cool, quiet air, finding strong winds aloft that made him fight with the controls of his biplane as it danced across the sky like a butterfly.

He had promised himself not to think of that anymore.

“I don't know what you want me to do, Hakkonen. A little wind isn't going to hurt anyone.”

Hakkonen looked over his shoulder as if thinking he might go back to work. Instead, he stepped closer to Chase. He was a big man and looked down at the young lieutenant. “I know you ain't no woodsman, but you're always square with us. And I don't care what them bastards tell you. I'll work hard and honest, whether it's freezing or raining—even when there's snow coming down. But when it gets to blowin' hard it’s time to get out of—”

It came like the impatient “whoof” of a great bear, an exhalation of air followed by a deep groan as the wind rolled into the trees.

Again, the men stopped and looked up. This time none of them smiled.

Hakkonen heard it too and looked into the sky. When he turned back to Chase, the intensity in his face told the lieutenant everything he needed to know.

His eyes still on Hakkonen, Chase cupped his hands around his mouth. “Men, I want you to pick up your tools and head down the ridge to the plank road.”

The soldier-loggers turned their eyes from the sky and looked at him, but the moaning of the trees and the rush of the wind through the limbs drowned out his words.

A crack like a rifle-shot pierced the sighing of the wind and a thick limb fluttered down onto the forest floor, scattering the men below.

Chase froze, his eyes wide, gaping at the falling branch.

Hakkonen could see something had happened to Chase but didn't understand what it was. He shouted at the young officer, “We gotta get outta here, Lieutenant!”

Hakkonen's voice startled Chase back into the present. Fighting a headwind in his mind stronger than the one in the trees, he again brought his hands to his mouth.

Before he could speak, a deep boom rocked the air and the top of a tall hemlock snapped off and crashed to the ground like—Chase couldn’t run from the image—an airplane falling from the sky.

The men jumped away, looking to him for an order, unable to see that he was no longer really there.

Another limb fell—to Chase's mind, it too like the fluttering dive of a crippled fighter plane. From the crevice in his soul where they always lurked, flames danced to life. He imagined the smell of burning gasoline, felt the vise grip of panic in his chest. His breath came in strangled gulps as it had on that morning in France when he had struggled not to breathe the fire engulfing him.

Mustn’t let the men see me like this, he thought. He shut his eyes, choked down the fear, tried to breathe slowly, fought to control his damaged legs, which wanted to run.

Puzzled by the officer’s sudden inability to speak or even move, the Finn spun around and swung his arms toward the other men, waving them off the ridge and down toward the plank road. Some of them took a few steps, unready to follow the lead of an enlisted man like themselves, especially Hakkonen.

Ripping an act of will from deep in his gut, Austin Chase beat down the impulse to turn tail in front of the men and run. Leaning on his cane with one hand, he waved the men toward the road, shouting, “Go! On the double!”

Like the soldiers of a routed army throwing away their weapons, the men dropped their axes and saws and ran. The horse handler released his team from the log they were hauling and whipped them down the skid road. Above them, the tops of the towering trees reeled like drunks. Ominous cracking punctuated their groans.

Hakkonen shouted at Chase. “You better get going, Lieutenant. I don't think you can run so fast with . . . ” He nodded at Chase's cane.

“I'm not going to run,” Chase said between clenched teeth, more to himself than to Hakkonen.

Within moments the last of the men had dashed across the clearing and down the lee slope, their doughboy hats flying off in the wind. Leaning on his cane, Chase cast a last glance around and started to follow them.

At that moment two men scrambled into the clearing from where they had been working on the windward side of the ridge. Hakkonen waved them on, at the same time grabbing Chase by the arm, nearly yanking him off his feet to drag him toward the protection of the plank road.

With a crackling that started like the sound of a wood fire but quickly built into the thunder of a house tumbling down, the upper forty feet of a lone fir snapped off and toppled toward the ground.

One of the two men who had come up from below the ridge froze, staring at the treetop's gathering rush. His companion shouted at him to keep running, and showed him by example. But the first soldier, a thin, short fellow with his hat in his hand, appeared mesmerized. By the time he turned to run it was too late. With an earth-shaking “whump” the treetop hit the ground and the soldier disappeared under it.

Chase jerked his arm from Hakkonen’s grip, but as he tried to run toward the fallen soldier his cane slipped in the uneven soil and he fell headfirst onto the ground, dirt in his mouth.

“Dammit,” Hakkonen shouted over the wind, “you got to get outta here!”

Chase felt the Finn's hands under his shoulders, pulling him to his feet.

“No! Let go of me! We can't leave him here.”

“Half the damn tree fell on him. He's dead!”

Scrabbling for purchase with his cane, Chase rose and staggered across the open ground.

“Can't . . .  leave . . . him.” The sight of the crashing tree had put him back in the cockpit of his falling plane. He felt the rush of wind, the flames rising higher, his uniform starting to burn. “Save him! Save him!” he cried, knowing he was talking about something more than the fallen soldier.

Hakkonen shouted, “I'll check on him! You get down to the road!”

A deep tearing sound rumbled across the clearing as a hemlock tilted over, pulling up its roots as it went, falling slowly toward the treetop that had trapped the soldier. Even as Chase and Hakkonen braced for its impact, the hemlock's crash stopped as it caught in the branches of another tree.

Chase stumbled forward, fell again, cursing. He shook off Hakkonen's grip and again pulled himself up.

Hakkonen gave up trying to turn Chase around and instead dashed ahead of him across the clearing and began to pull at one of the branches covering the pinned soldier, ignoring the tilting, precariously caught tree overhead. Chase caught up and dropped to his knees beside Hakkonen, tugging at the same branch, to no effect.

Through the limbs of the fallen tree he could see the trapped soldier, just a kid—eighteen, maybe nineteen—his face dirty, his eyes closed. Pulling together, he and Hakkonen tried to lift the branch against the dead weight of the tree.

The trapped soldier moaned.

Chase shouted, “He's alive!”

Hakkonen pointed at the hemlock suspended above them. “Get out of here! That thing’s going to give way.” But they both knew neither of them was leaving.

The Finn scrambled to his feet, grabbed a discarded ax and attacked the branch halfway along its length.

Pulling hard on the limb, Chase glanced up at the tree hanging over them, then looked at Hakkonen.

The Finn shouted “Shut up!” at the unspoken order to hurry. Relentless as a piston, he swung the ax again and again, the half-conscious soldier crying out at each blow. Finally he called to Chase, “Now, give it a try!”

Calling on what strength he could draw from his damaged legs, Chase braced himself against the ground and pulled. The limb didn’t move.

Throwing down his ax, Hakkonen jumped in beside Chase, pulling and cursing.

Caught up in the incantatory power of the woodsman’s oaths, Chase started cursing too, shouting every vulgarity he knew. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Hakkonen bite his lip.

With the injured solider groaning under the limb, the wind howling over the ridgetop and an enormous tree threatening to fall on them, the big woodsman, hearing his officer swearing like a schoolboy, was struggling not to laugh.

Chase tried to force a frown but, like a bubble rising from his lungs, he laughed, cursed himself for laughing and laughed again.

Hakkonen gritted his teeth, trying to force himself to keep quiet, but couldn't hold back and snorted out loud, laughing through his nose.

Furious at themselves, the two men shouted an enormous “Hah!” that galvanized every fiber of muscle they possessed.

The branch cracked and broke.

Ignoring the wounded soldier's cries, Chase grabbed him by the shoulders, yanked him out from under the tree and struggled to throw the young man across his shoulders.

“Here, let me get him, Lieutenant. You can't—”

Chase shoved Hakkonen away and staggered to his feet. Bent nearly double under the soldier's weight, he lurched across the clearing.

Hakkonen grabbed the lieutenant's cane and tried to hand it to Chase.

“Screw the cane,” Chase muttered, stumbling forward.

After a few uneven steps, Chase's legs gave out and he fell to his knees. Hakkonen thrust a shoulder under the injured man and tried to take him from Chase's shoulders.

Chase elbowed him away. “I've got him,” he grunted, trying to rise to his feet. Though he would not give up the wounded soldier, he allowed Hakkonen's shoulder to slip under his own and lift him up.

With Chase carrying the young man across his shoulders and Hakkonen half-carrying Chase, they advanced like a broken insect, struggling to get out from under the shadow of the half-fallen tree. Neither of them looked up. There was nothing they could do about the danger of being crushed except to drop the kid and run, and that question had already been settled.

Wondering at every step if they were to be smashed beneath a falling hemlock, they reached the shelter of the trees on the far side of the clearing. Even then, Chase refused Hakkonen's pleas to give up the injured soldier. Together they scrambled down the lee slope, Chase by turns carrying, pushing and dragging the kid toward safety.

With a last tumble down the hillside, the three men slid to the edge of the plank road. A few of the waiting soldiers came up to meet them and Chase finally surrendered his burden to them.

Gasping for breath, their uniforms black with sweat, Chase and Hakkonen leaned back against the road cut. Above them, the trees rocked in the wind, but here the slope protected the men.

Resting against the cool dirt, struggling to catch his breath, Hakkonen turned toward the officer who had carried the injured man to safety on his own wounded legs.

Unable to speak, Chase flicked his hand toward Hakkonen, letting him know he should look at something else. Slowly, the terror that had proved a heavier burden than the injured soldier eased its grip and he blew out a long, free breath.

Hakkonen managed a smile. “Damned if you're not some lieutenant, Lieutenant.”

Chase tried to smile, but with the stimulant of danger receding, the shadow of melancholy from which he could not extricate himself, once more settled over him.

Work In Progress: Masks

Chapter One

The masks began to speak.

Lying on a dining couch in his parents’ villa, sluggish with wine, Marcus blinked at the littered table before him. Flickering oil lamps dimly lighted dirty plates and overtipped cups.

“Must have this all cleaned up before mother and father return,” he muttered.  It struck him that he was talking to himself. Where had his friends gone?

“Ah, right,” he said woozily to himself. They had left more than an hour ago. They’d be halfway back to Ravenna by now, the villa’s great hall empty but for himself.

Marcus half-rose from the couch and nearly fell over, the room spinning around. Must tell the servants to clean up this room—order them to say nothing to his father about the mess he and his friends had made, the drunkenness.

Weighted with dinner and drink, he fell back onto the couch.

How much time passed before he heard the first murmur of voices he could not say. Barely piercing the curtain of his slumber, the voices seemed to come from the entry hall where the terra-cotta masks of his ancestors hung.

A vision of the masks, hanging from their hooks, passed through his mind. He knew their faces as well as he knew his own, perhaps better. Over the last few years his had changed rapidly, losing its boyish roundness, the fair hair turned darker, the nose and jaw stronger.

His ancestors, though, were unchangeable, the stern faces of the grandfathers he had never known and the grandmothers but barely, the faces of their parents before them and theirs in turn, generations so deep into the past as to slip from memory into myth. Each mask bore the individual features of its subject—so eerily real, even to the fleshly colors painted by forgotten artisans, that they had frightened him as a boy.

Whatever their differences, each mask shared the relentless strength of character and firmness of purpose that had first won and then maintained the family’s position in this most distant part of Italy. His mother's ancestors, the Julians, a storied Roman family, hung on one side. On the other side were his father's, the Scaevolas, Romans too, but long ago come north, almost beyond the writ of the Senate and the shield of the legionnaire, to found their estate in the Po Valley when barbarians still roamed its plain.

Unable to keep his eyes open, Marcus fell into a doze on the couch.

The unhappy murmuring increased in strength, the voices drawing nearer. With a great effort he opened his eyes—and felt his heart stop in horror.

Before him, as if conjured by his thoughts, the masks of the ancestors were gliding above the atrium floor, winging toward him like a flock of angry ravens.

He shook his head, trying to clear the cobwebs that clouded his thoughts. But he could not banish the vision of the masks before him. Like unhappy spirits fleeing their tombs, they hovered in the air, floating in ragged ranks across the atrium.

With a shiver of horror, he realized the voices he heard came from their throatless mouths. Though he could not catch the sense of their words, Marcus heard them calling his name, their voices murderously angry.

He tried to rise, to shout for the servants, make them come and send these masks back to their places. But neither his voice nor limbs obeyed his will.

As he struggled to cry out, the masks underwent a macabre transformation. Beneath their shadowy features, living flesh began to materialize. Simulated colors took on the warm hues of life. Terra-cotta mouths began to move, brows to furrow in anger.

Anger at what? Marcus searched his conscience for some heedless act of impiety that might have so offended the ancestors that they would leave their places in the shadow world and return to their earthly home to judge him.

Like swirling smoke freezing in place, the ghastly forms took shape, dressed in men's togas and matron's gowns, their owners shouting, some with violent gestures and upraised fists, all speaking in the veiled language of the dead.

The spirits crept closer, gathering around the couch on which Marcus lay. For the length of a deep breath, the encircling shades looked down on the young nobleman with their fathomless eyes. Then they knelt, took up his couch, slowly raised it onto their shoulders, and began to bear him away across the atrium. The sense of their words became clearer to him: betrayal. Betrayal of the genius of his family and of its gods. Betrayal of a promise made long ago but left unfulfilled.

What family obligation, Marcus asked himself, should have passed over his parents and waited for him to keep? It made no sense. Yet the spirits insisted he had in some unknown way neglected his duties, betrayed his very Romanness as negligently as if he were of another race, another people.

His mind disordered by terror, Marcus could not at first see in what direction the spirits were taking him. Then he saw the entrance hall, its bare walls studded with the empty hooks from which the masks had wandered. Beyond it, the villa’s front door opened into the annihilating darkness.

Before him, just beyond the door, stood a formless shadow—Janus, the two-faced god of comings and goings, beginnings and endings. Behind Janus appeared another figure, his father, reciting a funeral oration, his face lined with anger and grief.

Marcus struggled to speak, to appeal to this stern man he knew so well and yet hardly at all. He tried to cry out, could make no sound.

He understood now, the ancestors were carrying him out the door of his home, bearing him in the traditional manner of a corpse, feet first, so that his wandering spirit could not find its way back.

In the shadowy realm beyond the courtyard, Marcus caught a glimpse of another figure—no, two figures. A boar snuffled in the distance, as if waiting for him. And a woman, beautiful beyond words, with long black hair and lips red as plums.

With a final effort he struggled to call out, "No! Please! I will keep the promise. Only tell me what it is." But he could produce nothing more than a strangled cry.

Marcus sat bolt upright in his bed, the echo of his shout fading in the dark room, his heart pounding, sweat running down his face.

“Marcus, you’ll frighten me to death.” In the dim light he saw Pompeiia beside him in the bed, clutching the bedclothes to her neck. She put an arm around his shoulders and let the bedclothes drop. The aromas of her perfume and the warmth of her flesh eased his terror. “You’ve had a bad dream. Here, come closer.” She patted his head as if he were a child, unmanning him. “You’re all right now.”

Still possessed by his nightmare, he could not reply.

Pompeiia smiled. “I know how to make bad dreams go away.” She drew his hand to her breast.

Marcus fought to slow his breath, tell himself that it had only been a bad dream. But in his heart he knew that nothing was more real than a dream.

“Is it morning yet?” he asked.

“It’s almost dawn. But we have time.”

Marcus shook his head. “My father must have come back hours ago. You have to go.” He staggered out of bed and threw a tunic over his head.

“But how will I get back? It’s miles to town.”

Marcus plucked some coins from a bedside table. “I’ll tell my slave to come up. He’ll take you out through the kitchens. Once you’re on the road someone will be happy to take you into Ravenna for this.”

He tossed the coins beside her on the bed, but the young girl’s mouth turned down.

“I didn’t make you happy,” she said.

Marcus thought she might cry. “No, Pompeiia, don’t …” He gave her two more coins and kissed her on the forehead. “Don’t worry. I’ll tell Calpurnia that you please me and that I’ll visit her place again when I’m in the city. I’ll ask for you particularly. I promise. But now you have to go.”

He dashed downstairs, knowing he was late. His father would already be outside, angry and waiting for him.

As he staggered out of the villa, he knew that the terrifying vision of his ancestors had been no mere dream, but a visitation, as real in spirit as it was shadowy in form—its purpose wholly obscure to him.

A small altar stood in the ancient oak grove beyond the villa, only a few paces from the marble tomb in which generations of Scaevola bones were interred. The carvings on the altar's sides had turned green with age and its base lay buried under layers of humus so thick that the two hooded observing rites at the altar needed to stoop slightly.

The two men turned as Marcus approached, pulling back the folds of their togas with which they covered their heads during religious ceremonies. His father's close-cropped graying hair, his lean, stern face always appeared to Marcus as grave and purposeful as the masks of the ancestors. He half realized that the unease he felt when passing the masks reflected the unease he felt in his father’s presence.

Lately, the deep lines that creased his father's face, the sagging flesh under his eyes and the paleness under his tan had carried a message of mortality that Marcus tried not to think of. For now, though, the anger in his father's blue eyes was proof enough of his vitality.

"You've interrupted the rites, Marcus. The gods no longer attend us. You come here late, dressed in a dirty tunic rather than a toga, your face unwashed.” He turned away from his son, but his anger drove him back. "It's not for my marriage we're enquiring of the gods, but yours—"

"Father—"

"Be quiet!” With this shout his father's shoulders sagged and he closed his eyes. When he opened them again the anger was gone. His voice was calm, almost relieved. "The auspices can't be read now. Go back inside. Put on clean clothes and go see your mother.” His father turned to the priest. "I'll see that you're taken back to town."

The old priest bowed his head. "As you wish, Atticus Publius."

The two men turned their backs on Marcus and walked toward the villa, their breath steaming in the morning air.

Marcus walked over to the altar, puzzled that his father's anger about the interrupted rites had so quickly cooled.

A wisp of smoke rose from the smoldering grain in the center of the altar. Next to the grain lay the body of the sacrificed lamb. Though the sheep’s flesh was pink and fresh, its shrunken liver was black with disease.

These were the auspices for his marriage to Cornelia, the daughter of his father’s closest friend. By arriving late and unclean he had, to his father’s relief, negated the rites. The lamb and its ominous message meant nothing now.