standing here before you. Her father is the guardian of our pavilion, her mother is a remarkable woman, but according to all logic, Clara should never have been born, because unions between elves and humans have always been sterile. The other child, Maria, is waiting for us in Nanzen. She was born to the head of our Council and his elfin companion but, unlike us, and like Clara, her appearance is strictly human.”
“You look perfectly human to me,” said Jesús, surprised.
“Not in our mists,” said Petrus. “There, you will see how different we are from you. We only adopt a single appearance when we are here. Only Maria and Clara, despite their elfin blood, keep the same physiognomy in both worlds.”
“What do you look like when you are up there? Do you grow wings?” asked Jesús, obstinately situating mist and winged creatures in the sky.
“Nothing grows on us at all,” said Petrus, taken aback. “Simply, we are multiple.”
“Among elves, do you speak Spanish?” asked Jesús, ever pragmatic, now that he’d got going.
“Anyone who has stayed at the pavilion can speak every language on earth,” answered Petrus.
“What is the role of Maria and Clara?” Alejandro asked.
“Well, to save the world,” said Petrus.
“Is that all!” commented Jesús.
“The question,” continued Petrus, ignoring him, “is how. Six years of war and we were still blind—until, four days ago, when we obtained possession of a gray notebook dating from the sixteenth century. It belonged to an elf who also crossed over the bridge. He was an extremely talented painter, and we still have one of his paintings, which you will soon see. But the most astonishing thing—and, for us, the most interesting—is that he was the first elf who stayed in your world for good and chose to live a human life.”
Petrus scratched his head.
“It’s a long story, and I cannot begin to tell it now. Let’s just say that the notebook contains vital information, both for the outcome of the war, and for the future of our mists, and now we are in a position to determine our next move. Not the one that we would have dreamed of, to be honest—what we have learned forces us to make a radical decision. But we have come so far that we must risk everything or face certain death.”
“Who, in your mists, makes such decisions?” Alejandro asked. “Is it you?” he added, turning to Clara.
She laughed.
“Decisions are made by the Council of Mists.”
“Presided over by Maria’s father, if I got it right,” Jesús said. “So he is your king?”
“The head of the Council is at the service of the mists,” said Clara.
“Is your mist alive?” Jesús asked, still determined to understand.
“Come, we have to go now,” said Petrus. “Anything you don’t know yet, you will find out once you cross the bridge.”
“Cross the bridge?” echoed Jesús.
“We will try to cross with you,” continued Petrus, “and that is why Clara is here with us, for humans can only cross in her company.”
“I think there’s something you’ve failed to take into consideration,” said Jesús. “General de Yepes commands the first army. He cannot leave his post in the middle of an offensive to go off and sip tea in a celestial pavilion.”
There was a moment’s silence.
Then Petrus scratched his nose and said:
“Yet that is precisely the plan.”
And to Alejandro:
“It will not constitute desertion.”
He broke off. Alejandro was staring at him without seeing him, scrutinizing the darkness beyond. Petrus looked in the same direction.
“Ah, so there are the dead,” murmured the elf.
Alejandro found it hard to breathe.
Before him stood all his dead.
They appeared to him just as they had looked in days gone by, and had he not known that they were dead, Alejandro would have sworn on his honor that they were not ghosts. His family, Luis, Miguel, the men who’d fallen under his command, villagers he’d long forgotten: all of them had come through the gates of death to join the battalion of the living.
“Why?” he asked, out loud, and the congregation of the deceased vanished, with the exception of Miguel and Luis.
It was the same sensation as eighteen years earlier, when his family was being buried, and the funeral proceedings were enveloped in the torpor of a dream. He conversed with Luis and Miguel, back from the dead in the form of images they shared with him; he saw his tutor, thirty years younger, leading a group of men, marching through a baking hot day. The white-hot earth buzzed with insects, and the men moved forward,