“Where we were found?” asks Peter, not understanding.
“Our bodies, Peter. Scavengers found us together, preserved in mud on the banks of a river in China. You…were holding me in your arms.
“It was from those remains that Favorini rebuilt us.”
Peter’s eyes widen, recognition in them.
“Where?” he asks. “Where were we found exactly?”
“I can give you the coordinates, but it doesn’t matter. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Leizu began using shadow companies to propose the construction of a dam. It took nearly a hundred years, but she finally did it. The Three Gorges Dam flooded the whole countryside; millions of people were displaced.”
“Just tell me exactly where,” Peter insists.
“A short way from the dam. At the foot of a plateau on the western bank of the Yangtze River. They called it the dragon’s tooth. I have no memory of that life, but you and I were living at the same time as Huangdi. His empire would have been near where…where we—”
“Where we died,” Peter says, resting a hand on the glass of Hypatia’s coffin.
“What is it, Peter?” I ask.
“I know where to find Huangdi,” he says. “I remember.”
PART THREE
PRAVDA
(Truth / Justice)
The king stared at the figure in astonishment. It walked with rapid strides, moving its head up and down, so that anyone would have taken it for a live human being. The artificer touched its chin, and it began singing, perfectly in tune. He touched its hand, and it began posturing, keeping perfect time…
—LIEZI TEXT, FOURTH CENTURY BC
46
STALINGRAD, 1942
An old man, long dead by now, once asked me a question in the candlelit twilight. My son, he said. What is the first thing? And when I reached inside myself for the answer, I found an overwhelming instinct stamped into my mind. It translated into a simple word, as much a part of me as my hands or face.
Pravda.
I was a newborn with a mind as blank as a still pond, and the old man took me by the shoulders and led me. I followed without hesitation. He asked me to serve a tsar and told me I had a divine purpose. Like a child, I believed him. When my tsar was gone I served a king. Then I tried to serve a little girl. And when she left me, I chose to serve a long-dead ruler by protecting his anima.
For two hundred years, I have faithfully served. I am an instrument of truth, and I exist to create justice from injustice. I have done so through the first war between all men, and now I continue, deep into this second world war.
And all the while, it feels as though my true purpose has been hidden just beyond the next blasted crater, around the corner of another shattered building. Fighting through the agony of failing to fulfill my Word, I push onward like a broken machine, repeating the same motions of battle around the world, in the name of generals and kings and presidents.
The city of Stalingrad is a familiar kind of wasteland to me, a city of ghosts, under siege and mortar fire for months now. Only the scale of it is new. Millions dead instead of hundreds of thousands. A keen nostalgia haunts me as I fight house to house in this dying city, back within the ancient boundaries of my first country.
And falling into my old patterns, I have made an old mistake: sparking legend.
I hunt the German invaders during the night, running trench raids on their positions on the city outskirts. It was Russian women and children who dug these trenches as the German infantry made its way toward the city, never guessing the horror that would soon be unleashed. As homes burned, soldiers filtered in to take up residence. The last refuge of long-dead civilians now provides harbor to the enemy.
But in the night, something inhuman haunts the trenches of Stalingrad.
As the distant orb of the sun fades behind gray clouds, I don armor and a gas mask to protect my vessel from damage. Armed with a pair of trench knives, my hands wrapped in thick leather gloves and my fingers threaded through spiked knuckles, I set about my grisly work.
Sweeping through muddy culverts under the gleam of moonlight, I take no pity on the scared, wounded soldiers who I find cowering in their holes. The men and boys are freezing, far from home and underprepared. They’ve reached Stalingrad and set about gorging themselves to death on the flesh of my homeland.
Each morning I return to the Russian line, my sleeves glistening with frozen blood.
As I repair myself during the days of siege and bombardment, rumors spread among the Axis of my nighttime exploits—a jackbooted killer who leaves fortified trenches filled with corpses, each with a neat red smile beneath his chin. They fear the coming of the tall Soviet in the greatcoat, the one who leaves no survivors, who sees in the dark and makes no sound.
My error was an old one, and a legend soon took root. Not a man-eating tiger but an angel of vengeance. A living embodiment of justice, sent by an angry god.
The rumor catches up to me after midnight, as I am slogging through knee-deep water in a flooded trench.
A gray-green flare climbs into the sky, spitting and sparking, sending my shadow exploring the rugged contours of the German trench. This rut has been dug in what was once a neighborhood. The main house is a pile of bricks, the streets and trees shredded by mortars for a mile around. Only a backyard shed remains, a spot where this squad has been cooking their meals, storing cigarettes and scavenged tins of sardines.
At the bottom of the trench, in dirt conquered and reclaimed, lay the stiff gray bodies of Russians and green-uniformed Germans. The dead men are reduced to frozen angles of human figures, sharp geometries of smashed bricks and round, sloped helmets. It is a silent, fossilized hell, lit in stark relief by the flare.
I imagine it was the meager shed, leaning pathetically, that brought these Germans so deep into no-man’s-land. Around us are collapsed buildings and cratered holes in the dirt, all of it marbled with dirty ice. The invading soldiers have spread out now, their offensive stalled, and these boys grew isolated.
A distant gunshot barks, and then another.
Some detail is off, something wrong. The cigarettes and sardines. They are impossible to find this late in the fight. Someone has brought them in.
Bait.
This hole in the middle of no-man’s-land has the feel of a trap. Sardines and cigarettes to lure Germans to this vulnerable spot. And here they served their purpose as more bait. A furor of bullets cough into the night, Russian guns, urgent, firing closer to my position now.
I scan over the lip of the reinforced trench, toward the gunshots.
In my eyes, the dead expanse of no-man’s-land is alive with flickering traces of heat. Over the cool sucking mud and toothy barbed wire and skeletal fists of trees, I see the storm trooper coming. The figure runs in a hunch under the harsh light of another sputtering flare, coat flapping, chasing his own elongated shadow toward me.