Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker(50)

“One the lord and one the lackey, it was ever thus,” said the farmer as he opened the door into the wind. “Keep yourselves warm, fellows.”

Dirk draped the cape over his arm, pinched an awl from a workbench, and climbed up to the loft again. He flung the cape at Felix’s head in something like anger, though he didn’t know why. “What are you making?” asked Felix, scrabbling out from behind the red cloth.

“A nutcracker.”

“For me?”

“You? No. For Nastaran.”

“Oh.” Felix replaced the rough brown blanket with his red wool cape, which Dirk now saw had a silk lining. He had rich tastes for a boy with a minister for a father. Very nice against the skin, no doubt.

He returned his eyes to his task. The figure was roughly cylindrical. Dirk blocked out volutes that would indicate arms held in martial strictness at the figure’s sides. The easiest sort of headpiece would be a Napoleonic conical piece, or a fez of some sort to indicate the mysterious East of Nastaran’s longing. A lancer helmet of some sort. Identity wasn’t important—indeed, Dirk wanted to avoid specificity. This could be the agent of a private brigade, coming to her rescue.

“Why a nutcracker, of all things?”

“To open the proverbial golden walnut, of course.”

“Ach. Of course. Stupid of me. I see how the jaw will pivot open by lifting the coat-tail. Clever. But look, when it’s in its resting position, the cavity where the jaw will descend is exposed. It’s an open box. No heart. The heart has fled.”

Dirk answered after a while in a lower voice. “Its heart is in its throat.”

“We’ll see about that.”

Dirk fashioned the tunic to tighten at the waist. He scored a diagonal across the chest to indicate a bandolier of sorts, or a sash for the display of medals. What campaigns might an army of one attempt? The rescue of a sorrowful woman, nothing more vital than that. Quickly the booted feet found themselves grounded on a disk that would help the creature stand at attention, should Dirk do the job well enough. The knife whacked and flicked. Dirk brushed the cuttings off the blanket. The iron stove clicked as it warmed. He kicked the blanket down to his naked feet, sitting up at attention as Felix began slowly to drowse in the heat and in the luxury of his silky cocoon.

By the time Dirk turned his attention to the nutcracker’s face, the wind had begun to howl about the barn as if in protest. Then it shrieked in a high-pitched note. Felix, who had rolled on his side to face away from Dirk, rolled back again. “That’s her, you know.”

“Her?” There was only one her in Dirk’s mind. Then he realized Felix meant the farmwife in labor. “Jesus’s mercy,” he muttered, putting down his knife just for a moment and gripping Felix’s hand. The oil lamp was guttering now. Dirk didn’t want to risk ruining the nutcracker in shallow light, so he set aside the creature, which could already stand on its base, and stuck the knife into a crack in the floorboards, blade down. The gnarled ironstone creature that formed the grasp was angled as if watching the travelers balefully. Dirk took a resting position beside Felix. He lowered the lamp but didn’t want to blow it out fully. Against the sound of screaming, which turned and returned in the wind, he felt defenseless and alone.

“It’s become warm up here,” murmured Felix. In response Dirk murmured a good night. He told his eye to close.

Some minutes later. “Are you quite cozy?” asked Felix in a low voice.

Dirk didn’t answer but willed his breathing to come more slowly. If he pretended to be asleep he would eventually learn to be asleep. He had no more talking in him today. He concentrated on the nutcracker in his mind, what it might do for Nastaran. It would only be a sign of Dirk’s adoration, of course, but she could keep it by her bed. If she worried about getting up and walking about in the night, looking for her childhood, the nutcracker would be there in Dirk’s stead, to guard her and protect her from terrors and affrights.

Dirk could never enter in her cloistered room with her, so the nutcracker would be his emissary.

He would borrow the paints in Nastaran’s attic studio and give his creature a bright red coat, and black boots, and a yellow brim to the military helmet, and perhaps epaulets if it wasn’t too late to work them into the shoulders.

And perhaps a feather from a thrush. He must make a small hole in the front of the cap to take a plume.

“Come here, the red cape is large enough for two,” whispered Felix.

Dirk had no way to consider what Felix was saying. For a moment he stopped breathing entirely. He’d have to answer Felix. And he couldn’t answer Felix in any way at all.

He must feign a deep, deep sleep. He released a breath through his nostrils as slowly, naturally, as he could. His eye-patch was toward Felix, his good eye squeezed shut on the far side.

“You are dreaming of her, of course,” whispered Felix. “I might have known.”

So Dirk’s carefully paced breathing compellingly implied sleep. Good. He trained his thoughts on the nutcracker. Perhaps it could have a sword.

“She is so beautiful, in her fluid pantaloons, her shawls.”

Why was Felix talking about Nastaran in the middle of the night in the warmth of a barn loft in the teeth of an early snowstorm?

“Her eyes so warm . . .”

Yes, but . . .

“. . . and her breasts, both of them so warm—so full.”