elf described were visible to her and, like her father, she knew how to make them perceptible to others around them. Every day, Maria would hold her close as they listened to the ermine, and the elf knew of nothing more precious than these two girls, their arms around each other, who, now and again, would run their delicate hands through her fur.
Bit by bit, Maria and Clara came to have a picture of the mists, and Tagore, Solon, and Gustavo tried to work out a way to take them there. But every attempt failed, one after the other.
“What do you feel?” Gustavo asked Maria while trying once again to lead her across the bridge, amid multiple doses of strong tea from the mists.
“Nothing,” she replied.
Gustavo turned to Clara.
“Can you tell Maria a story by playing something, the way you did during the battle in Burgundy?”
“You want me to give her an instruction manual, but it was really the power of a dream and a story that caused the sky to open,” she replied.
Gustavo paused thoughtfully for a moment, and Petrus chuckled.
“She’s your daughter, all right,” he said to Tagore.
He winked at Clara.
Petrus and Clara had known each other since her first days in Rome, and he and Maria had greeted one another warmly.
“He’s never completely sober or completely drunk,” Clara had said at the time.
And she’d given Petrus a wink that made him flop onto on his squirrel tail. Then the elf turned into the potbellied redhead that most humans found harmless and jovial. Who could have imagined that this clumsy little man was working day and night to organize what, in wartime, would be a civilian resistance so well structured and operational that its mystery would exasperate humans in the highest ranks of army and State? Petrus went back and forth across the red bridge, uniting his future companions at arms, including honest people of both sexes, some of whom, naturally, were winemakers. During the war years they had resisted, and very soon would launch the ultimate operation in support of the League. Alejandro had led the operations with a few of their leaders, ordinary people who had no military experience, but who knew how to say where, what, and how, before returning in silence to their factories or fields. They reminded him of Luis Álvarez, as he’d appeared to him in the vision in the cellar, walking with his comrades in arms through the baking summer heat, and Alejandro knew that that was another sort of resistance, at another time and in another place, but, like this one, it had lived on hawthorns and roses.
Ultimately, Petrus was not only a glutton and a drunk, but also had a temperament cut out for command. In the mists and in the land of humans he’d had to fight more than once, and his composure, his cool head—from inebriation, awkwardness transformed into strokes of genius—all were roundly hailed. With gratitude they watched him stumble, and they liked his amiability crossed with efficiency; although he fought without hatred, he gave no quarter, and that in itself is the model of fighters who win wars.
But now opportunities to fight were plentiful. The enemy had troops stationed in Ryoan, not yet an army, but there was nothing about the ever more frequent skirmishes to suggest the war would be a chivalrous one.
“They behave like orcs,” said Solon with disgust, after an enemy commando raid in the outskirts of Katsura, which set off the interelfin war, just before the first battle on the fields of Burgundy.
Aelius’s elves had killed irrationally and ruthlessly. Consequently, the defense of the provinces was reinforced, but hearts were heavy at having to reason like the adversary.
“There is no reason for such squeamishness,” Petrus protested. “The only purpose of a fight is victory, by any means and any scheme possible. The spirit of chivalry is incompatible with good strategy.”
“To what do we owe these exalted military reflections?” asked Solon.
“To the greatest war novel ever written on earth,” retorted Petrus.
“Might that be War and Peace?” suggested Solon.
He was not a great adept of human fiction, but Petrus suspected Solon had read at least as much as he had.
“Gone with the Wind,” he replied.
The next day, Solon convened a select elfin council to decide how Nanzen would make the main channels impassable to the enemy.
“What does Scarlett think of our plan?” he asked Petrus at the end of the session.
“That Atlanta was lost when the Yankees captured the channels of communication,” replied