Free Field of Mars by Stephen Miller Page B

‘Let’s drive for a while. This place is tiresome.’
    He settled himself in the rear seat, undid the boots and laid them on the floor, sat there in his stockinged feet as the big car gathered speed. There was no traffic to speak of, only an occasional cart. The road was too bumpy for him to read or do any work. He opened the windows and stared out at the torn fields. Every few kilometres they would see someone. A collection of huts in various states of collapse along the road. The soldiers had stripped everything, the fields had been harvested early and then abandoned. The landscape was bleak. At Novi Pazar they had to pause to cross a hastily built dyke where the road had been repaired.
    The car slowed for a crossroads further along and they stopped waiting for a ragtag parade of Rumanian infantry staggering along in the dust. They were the heroes of the war, having rushed down to attack Bulgaria from the rear, and now they controlled this entire region. They were victorious, but you would never know it; they were caked with dirt, some had lost their headgear, others wore bandages. The chauffeur sat there, the engine idling along while they waited. The soldiers looked up at them as they walked past, grumbling abuse and curses in their direction. They were led by an officer who rode a brindled nag and appeared to be falling asleep in the saddle. His men’s curses woke him up and he looked up and then saw their car there, marvelled at it for a moment, tried to peer through the darkened glass, then touched his hand to his cap in salute.
    The soldiers took only a quarter of an hour to file by. There was a gap where the fighters left off and the walking wounded began. They were escorted by a single mud-caked wagon drawn by four mules. From the back of the wagon Andrianov could see the bloody splints on the legs of men who couldn’t walk projecting over the lip of the tailboard.
    The chauffeur put the car in gear and they wove their way across the bumpy intersection between the groups, shifted up a gear and continued along the road to Bucharest.
    Only a few kilometres further there was what passed for an inn. Here there was no destruction. They slowed down to look at it; only a dilapidated house, stables, and a brace of privies set against the edge of the road, with a single acacia casting some shade in the courtyard. Mattei looked around at him and shrugged, Andrianov motioned in the mirror, and they pulled over.
    It had grown hot and he had taken off his jacket. Now he undid his cravat and opened his shirt. Across the road there was a burned-out building, some telegraph poles that had been uprooted and pushed down into the ditch. A tangled coil of wire.
    He was stiff from sitting in the hot car and he walked up the road to loosen his legs. In the distance he glimpsed a figure, someone working in the fields. As he got closer he saw it was a woman. She was bent over, grasping handfuls of straw and severing them cleanly with a short type of sickle, more of a knife. She was working her way along a row and then she would stop and hoe in the stubble. She had been doing this all day judging from the expanse of turned earth around her.
    The wind was warm and he could smell the rot of the soil. The sun had arced towards the west. Above him a single hawk wheeled in slow watchful circles.
    He walked closer until she saw him, then he stopped and gave a little nod, smiled. She straightened from her cutting. He could see now that she was possessed of that particular kind of peasant beauty that was so rare; a young woman with her husband gone to the war, a widow perhaps. Tall with strong legs and full breasts that pressed against the fabric of her simple blouse.
    The light was rosy and it brought out her colour. She was deeply bronzed from her labours in the fields, and her dark hair was streaked with amber highlights from the summer’s light. To gather her hair she had tied it back with a simple kerchief of lime-green