Free Refiner's Fire by Mark Helprin Page A

unpleasantness and for its associations. When Katrina opened her eyes she was shocked to see bodies lying around her, and she would not sleep again until she had seen some movement confirming that they were living men and women, and that therefore she herself was alive. But the sun had been of great help, as had been the views and the air. She was always partial to light and its various manifestations, messages, and tricks, and she could not help but share in the general good will and optimism. Her pregnancy was just beginning its seventh month.
    At first she had wished to do away with the child, but then, like the magnificent rarity of a warship backing up, she reversed herself entirely and saw it as a great gift, comforting, the beginning of something better. She did not care that despite her beauty, which increased every day in the sun and air so that her hair was the color of burnished gold and her face roseate and dark, no one wanted her. It seemed not to matter. Though she believed the child’s father to be dead, she was not alone.
    A full day passed, during most of which Avigdor was at the helm—a strange new passion for him, of great utility to Levy. That evening as the sea got a little rough and the clouds broke into driven archipelagos, Levy was making his final plan. They would harry the boilers all night and through the following day when they would some time hit the coast. He knew that the radars on Mt. Carmel and on the destroyers could track him at night, but that in darkness no action could be taken short of blasting them from the water—something which caused him to be sure that they entered territorial waters during daylight. Besides, a night landing would be difficult for his passengers, too many of whom were old and sick. Everyone knew his station and job. The weather was off just enough to set them properly on edge. Levy wore his pistol almost ceremoniously, for he could not imagine how it might help. As the clouds passed, they called to mind all the geography of the wide world as he had always known and loved it. That night the ship made fourteen knots—the swan song of the old boilers.
    It was a difficult night. The cabins and hold were silent and dark, but many in them were awake listening to the waves and the engines. Those who slept on deck looked up past the cables and shrouds and watched the smoke trail to stern past an array of mountain-flower stars. It was moist and uncomfortable. Even those who knew each other well did not speak. They just looked at the sky, toward the dark crashing and hissing which was the sea, and at themselves—rolled up in as many blankets as they could get, cold, sunburnt, thin, strong, and uniformly young even though they were of many ages and the young themselves were not youthful. This was something entirely different.
    They had their own warship and were determined to fight and die. Curiously, they were in no way frightened, and looked forward with great anticipation to the battle. The unlimited expanse of the sea, the air, the nights, the military order in which Levy worked them (sensible, precise, and rigorous), and the sun rising to illuminate those upward-reaching mountains in Crete, had enabled them to throw over for a time the camps, the wire, the railheads, the minor indignities, the boxcars, the death, and the darkness. They were alive on a ship in the sea and they would arise in strength as if from myth. Death was familiar; they had already crossed over those lines, something the young sailors who would oppose them could not even imagine. A ship of the living dead—breathing, animate, and warm—was going to be quite a surprise for those who were simply manipulators of steel, engineers and analysts who could not delight in dying.
12
    D AWN BROKE swift and hot. They were twelve miles from the Palestine coast and in the distance the Carmel Range appeared, a thin purple line dark in shadow. The immigrants imagined with a sense of mystery