They led me onward for what felt a long way, although it couldn’t have been: it wasn’t that far a distance from the synagogue to the city walls. But the last light from the sewer grate vanished behind me very quickly, and I felt blind and smothered and loud with my breath noisy in my own ears. But I kept counting ten, and if I still didn’t find a star, I felt over the wall until I did, or I took one step back and felt around there. Once I had to take two steps back, with nothing but blank wall under my hands, and then in fear take four steps forward before I found it at last. And then the stars ended and the wall fell away from under my hand as I stumbled over a ridge of dirt in the floor and fell, putting my hands down in sticky wet. I stood back up, wiping myself off on the cloak, and groped backwards in the dark until I found the corner of the turning with my fingers, and the wall of the earthen tunnel.
“There was a tower in the wall here, before the siege,” my grandfather had told me quietly, there in his small closed-in room. “The duke’s men broke it when they came in. And after, when the duke rebuilt the walls, he did not want the tower rebuilt. The foundations were solid. There was enough money for it. He chose not to. Why not?” My grandfather had spread his hands and shrugged a little, with his shoulders and his mouth. “A tower to guard the back of the city, why not? So after the walls were built again, and all the workmen had left, my brother Joshua and I went down into the sewers with rope, to search without getting lost. And we found the tunnel he had made.
“No one else knows. Only your great-uncle and me and your grandmother, and Amtal and the rabbi. Amtal keeps the grate clean. I pay him for it, I pay his rent. When he gets old, he will tell his son. We never use it: never for smuggling, never to avoid the toll. No one knows that we know. That is where they will have put him, this husband of yours, in that tower at the end of the tunnel.
“Now you must tell me, Miryem. You understand what this tunnel is. This tunnel is life. If their prisoner goes, even if you are not taken yourself, these great ones, the duke, the tsar, they will not shrug and say, ah well. They will ask how. They will look for footprints. Maybe they will block off the sewer passages. Or maybe they will follow them and find the grate. Maybe they will even come up out of it and see Amtal’s house there, and put a knife to the throat of his children, and Amtal will tell them who pays him to keep it clean.
“I say this expecting you to understand, these are not certainties. If they come here, even if Amtal has told them my name, there will be things I can do. I have a great deal of money, and I am useful to the duke. He will not hurry in a rage to destroy me, that is not the kind of man he is. And there is also the chance that they will not do any of these things. They may say, he is a magical creature, he has flown! He did not go through sewers. They may leave it all as it is.
“So I do not say, put my life, your grandmother’s life, on the scale. I say to you, here are the dangers. Some are more likely than others. Weigh them, put them all together, and you will know the cost. Then you must say, is this what you owe? Do you owe so much to this Staryk, who came and took you without your consent or ours, against the law? It is upon his head and not yours what has come of his acts. A robber who steals a knife and cuts himself cannot cry out against the woman who kept it sharp.”
He hadn’t waited for me to answer. He had only put his hand on my cheek, and then he had gone back out again. Now I stood there at the turning for a moment, with the dirt of the duke’s tunnel under my fingers, a road to safety that I might close forever to my own people just to save the Staryk’s. Or I might be caught myself, if there were guards down at the end, and do no one any good at all. I had already answered the question, but I would have to keep answering it with every step I took down that passage, and I wouldn’t be done until I came to the very end.
* * *
After Miryem climbed out of the cart, I took off my boots and put them there poking out under the cloak. I did not mind taking them off because it was warm, and I was sitting in a cart anyway. I was so glad to be leaving that terrible city. It was even worse than before. The streets were all crowded with people everywhere because now there was no snow and they wanted to be outside and they all wanted to talk at the same time and make noise. I lay down in the bottom of the cart next to the sacks that were pretending to be Miryem and I tried to pretend to be a sack myself, but I wasn’t a sack. I had to just lie there and cover my ears and wait until we were out. It took a long time until we came to that big city gate and Panov Mandelstam got down to pay the man at the gate some money, because that city was such a terrible place we had to pay to be let out.
But after that Sergey shook the reins and clucked to the horses just like a real driver and the horses started to walk fast, and we got away. For a little while all of us were safe. Sergey drove down the road until it turned so much that you could not see the gate when you sat up in the back of the cart and looked back. I tried when he stopped the horses and I could not see it, although I could still see smoke coming up from all the houses and all the people in there. Then Sergey gave Panov Mandelstam the reins and climbed down and looked up at me and Wanda and all of us and nodded goodbye. He was going to go around behind the wall of the city and hide and wait until Miryem came out, if she came out.
I did not like leaving Sergey behind. What if Miryem did not come out, what if the Staryk came out alone? He could kill Sergey. He could leave Sergey lying there on the ground all empty again. Or what if the tsar came out instead? That would be just as bad or maybe worse.
But Panov Mandelstam had wanted to go instead of Miryem, and then he had wanted to go with Miryem, and Miryem had said no and no to him. First she said no because the Staryk would not hurt her, and then she said no because one person alone would be more quiet if there was a guard, and then she said no because we could not trick the guards about two people missing, but all of those were not the real reasons. The real reason was that Panov Mandelstam was hurt. There were bruises all over him.
I knew because there were some purple marks that you could even see up his neck coming out of his shirt even though the Staryk had not hit him there. I knew how hard someone has to hit you so that you get bruises somewhere else. That is how hard the Staryk hit him, so I knew there were purple marks all under his clothing too, and even if I didn’t know that then I would still know he was hurt, because he limped and sometimes he put his hand on his side and breathed carefully for a little bit as if it hurt him, and he had fallen asleep twice during the day already.
Miryem did not say that, though, she said those other reasons, and finally Panov Mandelstam said, “I will wait for you outside the city then,” and Miryem also said no to that, but Panov Mandelstam was just shaking his head firmly, and he had let her say no before but he would not listen to no anymore, and he said that she did not even know where the house was.
That was when Sergey said to Panov Mandelstam, “I will wait for her. You cannot walk quickly. I can bring her to the house.” And Panov Mandelstam was still worried, but Sergey was bigger and stronger than him already, and also not hurt, and Miryem said, “He’s right, we’ll make better time,” so it was decided that Sergey was going to wait for Miryem and meanwhile the rest of us were going to keep going so that if anyone came to the house looking for us sooner than they came back, we would all be there keeping busy and we would say that Miryem and Sergey went away already to get the goats.
Miryem said, “But we will be back long before then,” as if it was all as certain, as if all she and Sergey had to do was just walk from the city to the house, but she did not really mean that. At first I thought that she was being foolish, because she could not know if she was going to come out. But she was not being foolish; she just did not mean it. I found out because we went upstairs to our room to pack the things and Miryem came up to us and said to Sergey, “Thank you. But don’t come to the city wall. When you get off the cart, just wait in the trees near the road. I’ll find you if I can.”