Those Across the River by Christopher Buehlman Page A

contempt, for it was too hot and burned the ropes. I knew that sap was gathered by making slaves notch the trees on both sides and take from them until the trees died and could be burned to make tar.
    These two pines did not bear the marks of agriculture; they had been savaged. Just at the level of a grown man’s trouser pockets. No saw or axe had done this, but I was hard-pressed to say what had. I did not know if the gouges were intended to discourage further exploration, but looking at them gave me a curious feeling in my groin.
    I kept going.
    Soon after that I lost the trail and stumbled into a patch of nettles. They barbed the hell out of me, even through my pants, before I managed to peel myself free and continue on. I would have to stay more focused; I couldn’t afford to lose time if I intended to find the battlefield, which Lester said his daddy told him was a half mile north of the trail two or three miles past Magi Rock, “in some young birch and dogwoods where they mix up with pine.”
    I felt embarrassed about losing the trail. Martin Cranmer was right about my woodsmanship; I was a Chicago boy through and through, awkward and top-heavy in the woods. What’s more, it was no mean feat for me to even enter a forest after the Argonne. I had worked on that in Michigan, taking long walks alone in the woods near Ann Arbor, even if I had to get boozed up to do it; it wouldn’t have done for a grown man to spend the rest of his life getting the tremors every time he was surrounded by trees, afraid the next snapped twig would be followed by the bark of a machinegun nest opening up. By and by it had gotten better.
    I thought about Cranmer crouching in the trees near the burntdown house. Or was that a conceit on my part, imagining Martin had to crouch to avoid my notice? But then, Lester hadn’t seen him, either. Dora had not seemed to like Cranmer very much. Had she gotten an extra earful of gossip about him when she was in town?
    While I was musing on the war, Martin and Dora, I worked at removing a sticker that had gone deep into the heel of my hand. All I did was drive it deeper; I would have to dig for it later with whiskey and a pocketknife.
    When I looked up, I saw that I had lost the trail again.
    This time was worse because I had no idea how long it had been since I went astray. I turned around 180 degrees and marched with my eyes fixed on the forest floor, hoping I would recognize the trail again when I crossed it. A distressing amount of time passed before I noticed a recession and turned right, praying it would start to look path-like. It did.
    I stopped and crouched down on my heels for a moment to rest. I took a long, cool swig from my canteen, delighting in the taste of the iron. I thought back to my days in Glastonbury, England. Somerset County, where clotted cream on a scone was the culinary equivalent of a naked girl in a field of wildflowers.
    I had worked several weeks for the gardener at the Chalice Well. Less for the money than for an excuse to linger around that odd little town. The spigot in the well had been made in the shape of a lion’s head, and the water had been clean and cold and rusty, just like the water out of Magi Rock. There was a cat that used to nose my hand as I weeded or pruned, the cat the girl I was sleeping with called Bully because it bore the marks of so much fighting. My own wounds had still been fresh then, particularly those inside, but the waters of the well had helped to make me whole. I believe that. And I wasn’t the only one who thought there was something to the stories about that place. I met other veterans there, too; the Chalice Well called the walking wounded to it. I had been twenty then, and I had liked to imagine the waters of the spring below running over the bones of Arthur and Guinevere, bringing their strength to those who needed it. Twenty years old and through with God—whose ears I believed had numbed with too much prayer, or deafened from the