Jennifer R. Donohue
We didn’t know the gunsmith was a woman. It didn’t matter, not to me, but it was a surprise. She was tall, broad-shouldered, with unbelievably deft hands. She was not happy to see us when we arrived, road-weary and with haunted eyes from crossing the countryside while hiding from soldiers. But we’d heard this was the way to win the war, to come to the west to a little cottage with land up against the mountains, and get a magic gun from the smith there.
The world was burning, and it seemed like a magic gun was maybe one of the only things that would fix it.
Lew was the bold one of us, the first to steal boots off of a truck, or throw a rock through a windshield, and he stood forward, stood tall, and said “We heard you were the one to come to.”
“I don’t know who you’ve been talking to,” she said, looking us over. Lew. My brother Marek. Me just behind him. Artur the dog. She looked at me again, slouching in my boy’s clothes even though there was really no fooling anybody, and then sighed. “Come in.”
We shed our coats and hung them where she gestured. Marek gave me a brief, disapproving glance when I paused at the hearth and held my fingers out. They felt like wilted flower petals. “Really, Iga,” he muttered.
“We should have Lew get us gloves next, so we have fingers left to fight with,” I said, cutting and joking in equal amounts. What we wore was all we owned anymore.
We joined the resistance the day after the farm burned. Or, that’s how I liked to tell it. At first, we didn’t know what we would do, watching the smoke tower into the night sky, watching the sparks fly from the roof, into the hay, into the barn. We already slaughtered our pigs, thank God. I couldn’t have stood it, hearing them burn, unable to help. I zipped Artur in my coat while we hid, to keep him from barking at the soldiers, running to nip at their shiny booted heels. He was a puppy then; we’d already lost so much, and saving the puppy had to be enough. It felt like so long ago but was less than a year.
And then we walked, away from the armies, away from the smoke and gunfire. The nearby town might have been taken over already, there was no way for us to tell. Our neighbors were gone, killed or conscripted, we would never know. In the forest, Lew found us and brought us to the resistance that he knew. That was part of the problem; there was more than one resistance, and they didn’t all agree on the best way to do the job.
The smith fed us, ladling out soup from a huge pot on her stove. It was the kind of soup that never ended, you just added what you had to it and left it simmering. It was good, rich and warming, and when she caught me feeding a taste to Artur she frowned and found him a marrow bone that hadn’t yet gone into the pot.
“The one to come to for what?” the smith asked finally, after we’d filled our bellies and gotten our color back.
Lew coughed and looked away, his cheeks reddening, and Marek scowled at him. I was the one who found my voice. “Magical guns, for the resistance.”
She looked at me steadily, until I felt the hot flush in my cheeks, but I didn’t waver. We had come all this way, in the cold. We couldn’t lose our nerve now, it wasn’t as though all of the soldiers would just give up the war and go home on their own, and the rest of the world seemed to be taking their time as well. “Magical guns,” she said after a time, looking from me to each of the men. She was smiling slightly, though in derision or amusement, I couldn’t tell.
“Yes,” was all I could get out. But she didn’t laugh, and she didn’t yell. She studied the three of us, and gave a little sigh.
“You there,” she said to Lew, who gave her a sidelong look like an ashamed dog. “You are a thief and I will not make you a gun, magic or otherwise.” He nodded tightly. He must have considered that, on a fairytale quest such as this, he might be refused.
She turned to Marek, but his temper got the better of him and he shoved back from the table. If this had been a table of plenty, glasses and bowls would have sloshed; as it was, they only gently clinked together, empty. After the door slammed behind him, I became aware of the ticking clock in the room. The ticking clocks in the house; there were others that I couldn’t see.
“I’m sorry,” I said, scrambling to follow him. He wouldn’t go far, I hoped. He had more sense than that, I hoped. Artur trotted along with me. Lew said something as I left, closing the door more softly behind me, but I couldn’t make him out. Little explanation beyond ‘the war’ was needed, I thought; the war, the soldiers, the fires, the guns. And here we were for another gun.
“Go inside, you’ll freeze,” Marek said when he saw me. He went out in such a rush he didn’t have his coat, and I held it out to him.
“I came out here so you wouldn’t freeze.” He roughly shrugged into his coat, zipped it up to his neck. There was a place just under his jaw where his beard never grew. It looked like a knife wound to those who didn’t know he tripped in the toolshed when we were small.
“It was foolish, coming all this way. Of course she’ll turn us down.”
We stood in silence, shoulder to shoulder. Our breath came out in big cottony gusts and wreathed our heads, like when Papa and the neighbors used to smoke their pipes at the kitchen table. Mama wouldn’t let them do it anywhere else in the house, to save the furniture, and our bedding. I liked the smell of pipe tobacco. It smelled homey and comforting to me, like safety. You needed time to sit down and prepare a pipe to smoke, to take care of it when you were done. Nobody in our group of the resistance smoked a pipe. Most of them were out of cigarettes, even. It was another thing Lew was supposed to get, while we were on this mission.
“We don’t know she’ll turn all of us down. She turned Lew down.”
“And she’ll find me more worthy?” Marek asked bitterly. Artur gave a soft little whine, and I put my hand on his head, opened my mouth, and closed it again. I didn’t know everything my brother had done, before the war or up to now. Maybe he judged himself far more harshly than the smith would. And how would she know? Did making magic guns give you magic senses? I didn’t even know what magic was, what a magic gun would mean. It was a senseless hope, like praying, or reaching a border that war hadn’t touched.
“Let’s just go back inside,” I said after awhile. Long enough for Marek’s temper and the tip of my nose to have cooled. He didn’t say anything, but followed me.
Inside, Lew was smiling and the smith seemed about to. I wondered what they’d talked about. Thief or no, Lew was very charming. “Have some mead, to warm yourselves again,” the smith said.
“Thank you,” I said, when it seemed Marek would remain sulkily silent. “We’re grateful for your hospitality.” I wanted to ask again about the gun, but didn’t want to hear the final no, and instead cradled the fragile hope like an egg in my hands. Tomorrow. Tomorrow we would leave, or she would say yes. Artur settled in front of the hearth again with a happy groan.
“I make it myself,” she said, opening a cabinet and pulling down a bottle golden like sunshine, or like my mother’s amber necklace, kept sewn into the waist of my pants. “You may have seen the hives, when you came in.”
“We did! You have many hives,” Lew said, and I imagined him for a moment as a honey thief, reaching in like a bear, and smiled. The hives were big and square, shut up and cloth-wrapped. I thought beekeeping must be a hopeful endeavor, not knowing from one season until the next if the hive would survive, if the bees were sleeping or dead, if the queen was a good one. But what does make a good queen bee? I didn’t know; I’d only known pigs.
“I do. There used to be more people around to help me with them, and share in the results.” She poured us each a small glass, with gravity. There is a special mood in sharing mead with somebody on your home, a certain intent. Maybe it was magic in itself, even as such an everyday gesture.
“Na zdrowie!” I said, lifting my glass. Cheers.
“Sto lat,” said the smith. One hundred years. We all drank.
I wanted, again and again, to ask about the gun, but as the clocks ticked and the night deepened, we talked about smaller, quieter things. The dog. The bees. When the hives were opened, if they had survived, only the queens would be the same live bees as when the hives were closed. The workers only lived for six weeks, some of them living and dying entirely during the winter, and never knowing the smell of summertime, only knowing the pollen the other bees laid away, the honey, and keeping the queen warm. It made me think of the children who had been born after the war began; they did not know peace. I hoped they would know peace before they died.
When we settled to go to bed, the smith banked the fire and gave us blankets, and Lew and Marek gallantly let me take the sofa. Artur went back and forth between me and the men, then hopped up with me and curled into my belly under the blankets. I didn’t know how I would sleep, with the clocks, with our unanswered question, but I slipped away quickly, warm and with a full belly. Artur’s low warning growl woke me, when the smith reached down to wake me in the long dark hours of late night or early morning.
“What is it?” I asked and she shushed me.
“Please, come with me,” she said quietly, calmly. She’d been so calm all along, confident, even when three strangers were on her doorstep. Even with tanks rumbling like thunder in the distance, diesel clouds smearing the sky. What would happen to her, if they came here? To us?
I did what she asked, of course, reluctantly left the warm nest of blankets and shoved my feet into boots again, pulled my coat on again. Artur started to follow, and she paused. “Will he stay?”
“If I tell him to. Artur, go sleep with Marek.” He cocked his head at me in the dim light, and then paused over to settle with my brother.
Outside was very cold and very bright, the moon a lantern guiding our way towards the mountain that had loomed in the distance for the entire walk here. There was a border nearby, I remembered from the map, but into further Axis territories.
“You can’t see it from here, but there’s a large cross at the top of the mountain,” the smith said.
“That is Giewont, right?”
“Yes. The sleeping knight.” We walked longer, in the trees now, the cold ground crunching beneath our boots. We walked long enough that I thought surely there should be sign of dawn, a light in the east, the setting of the moon, but the night seemed completely still, a stopped clock. “What I am about to show you can’t be told to anybody. Not your brother, not that smiling young man, not your husband when you find one.”
“I won’t tell,” I said through stiff lips, numb from cold and sudden fear. She looked at me intently, and I noticed the laugh lines in the corners of her eyes. To have known so much laughter, and to be in the world we had now. “I promise.”
“If you break this promise, what I give you tonight will turn to ashes.”
“I won’t,” I said. She looked at me for three breaths more, and then nodded.
“Good.” She stepped off of the path, and not twenty steps through the trees, there was a sheer rock face.
“I don’t understand,” I said, and then the mountain opened. Not like a door, and not like a parting curtain, but a little bit like both of those things. She walked, and I followed. It was warmer inside the mountain, and I thought maybe it was just because we were out if the wind, but then we came to the room with the knights, and I slapped my hands over my mouth to keep from crying out in surprise and fright.
I don’t know how many of them were there, reclined on cushions, swords and suits of armor on the ground beside them, horses standing about, every last one of them breathing the sweet relaxed breaths of restful sleep. I stared at the knights, and stared at the blacksmith, as she went to one of them and picked up his sword and helmet, considered, took a gauntlet as well. The chain mail hanging from beneath the plate looked as finely wrought as my grandmother’s lace.
“Take this,” she said brusquely, handing me the sword. I had too many questions and not enough courage, and took it awkwardly into my arms, smelling the metal and oil and leather as I followed her back out if the cave again, away from the rocks and trees, back to her house on the edge of the village. The moon was still in the same place, and I wondered, if I drew the sword from its scabbard, if I’d be able to see my face in its blade. Such a childish, vain thought, to want to use a sword as a mirror, in a place like this, at a time like this. It was hard to know the right thoughts to have.
“What did we just do?” I asked, before she opened the door.
“Those knights have been sleeping in preparation to defend Poland. I don’t know why they haven’t woken up yet. Not now, and not the last time the Germans and Russians came. So. I’m tired of waiting. I will make you your gun.”
“Me?” I was too loud, I knew, my voice ringing in the still night air. “But I—”
“You came asking for a magical gun for the resistance. I am making it for you.” She smiled, sad, resolute. “Now go and sleep. We can talk more in the morning.”
In the morning, though, breakfast was laid on the table, and the clocks ticked, but the smith was shut away behind one of the doors in the house. How did one make a gun? With heat? With hammers?
“What happened?” Marek asked. He’d woken up with Artur, so knew I’d shifted in the night.
I drank some tea to give me the time to find my voice. “She’s making a gun.”
“For me?” His frown was an already gathering storm.
“For me,” I said so quietly that I thought he wouldn’t have heard and I’d have to repeat myself, and Lew laughed loudly.
“Iga, that’s amazing! You’re a far better shot than I am anyway. You’ll be Polish Annie Oakley.”
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“Nevermind his foolishness.” Marek waved a hand. “She’s making you a gun? She said so?”
“Yes, in middle of the night. We—” I brought myself up short. I was so close to ruining everything. It was always such a simple promise to keep, in the stories, always such a simple mistake. “We talked,” I finished.
“Will she make only one? Will she make one for me too?”
“She didn’t mention you, I’m sorry. I guess she would have woken you, if she was making two?” I expected him to storm out again, but instead, his frown cleared and he nodded.
“Then that’s how it is,” he said, and began to eat. Lew and I looked at each other across the table, and then we ate as well. Maybe Marek was relieved. He wasn’t the one responsible, but he could still be proud.
“I wonder how long it takes,” Lew said, stuffing more bread in his mouth.
“I hope it’s fast, so she has food left,” I said, elbowing him.
Lew shrugged. “She knows what she’s doing.”
The smith emerged from the workshop at supper. I waited, hesitated, waited through the afternoon, and then went through the pantry to prepare a meal. I wished we’d brought food to offer, meat so I could make golumpki, but there were eggs, and potatoes. Turnips. I hoped she wouldn’t be angry that I cooked, but she smiled tiredly and took her seat.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” Lew and Marek spent most of the time I was cooking outside, and were raw knuckled and their boots had brush tangled in the laces when they sat.
“We walked your fence line and repaired what we could,” Marek said. “There was some deadfall that we broke up for your woodpile.”
“It’s a good sign, when hands left idle find their own work,” the smith said.
“We’ve been too long idle,” Marek said, and he slowly smiled. “That one gets into too much trouble.” Lew grinned, shamefaced, but did not protest.
“Just like my little brother,” the smith said. We all laughed, just a little, but there was nobody else at this house, had not seemed to be for a long time. Her little brother was alive or dead, safe or not, and none of us was going to ask her.
We went on like that for a week and a day. I wondered when the resistance would think we were failed or dead or captured, but nobody else mentioned it, so I didn’t either. I spent a lot of time watching the pendulum on the clock in the kitchen, watching the gears grasp each other, counting the seconds like praying the rosary.
“My family made clocks,” she said one evening. “My father, and my grandmother, and her mother.”
“Is making guns very similar?” I asked, a little mystified.
“It came to me easily enough,” she said. She seemed so tired, more and more with each passing day. I wished there was a way I could help her in the workshop, but that was a door kept closed to all of us.
“I’m all thumbs when it comes to mechanics,” Lew announced cheerfully. “Marek is our man for that.”
“Is that so?”
“We had a truck that wouldn’t run, and a couple of our machine guns were all jammed up. Then Marek and Iga showed up and he put them to rights in just a few days. The truck took days, not the guns.”
“I cleaned and oiled parts, anybody could have,” Marek muttered. “Things like that need care.”
“Don’t let him fool you, he jury rigged a part for that truck from a different engine.”
“She doesn’t want to hear about the truck, Lew.” But Marek’s cheeks reddened just a little, and a smile glimmered in the corners of his mouth and eyes.
“There’s no harm in it,” the smith said. “I’ll have the gun done tomorrow. You can get back to your friends then.”
“Tomorrow?” I asked, putting my hands flat on the table. It was so nice here, even just waiting. With the war and everything just a dark cloud on the horizon, not a downpour we had to stand in. But of course we would leave. With a magic gun. My magic gun. My fingertips tingled just thinking about it.
“Yes.”
“Is there anything I should… know? Or do?”
“There isn’t any way to prepare, no,” she said, with a glance like pity as she got up to clear the table. I helped, stunned to silence. Tomorrow. It was what we came for, and even after going into the mountain, seeing the sleeping knights, it didn’t seem real. “You’ll be all right,” she said, quietly, when we reached the kitchen. Lew and Marek were talking again already, paying us no mind.
“I don’t see how,” I said, suddenly tearful. She paused a moment, and then set the dishes down and hugged me. I was so surprised by her embrace that I cried harder, forgetting to be polite and reserved. When was the last time anybody hugged me to comfort me? Before our mother died.
“We never do,” she murmured. I wondered who she was thinking of. Maybe just herself. It was hard to remember to think of yourself.
“Thank you,” I said, once I caught my breath, once the tears stopped coming. I meant more than just that moment, but the right words wouldn’t come. She nodded, though, seemed to understand me, and we finished cleaning up.
Later, I thought that surely I would have trouble sleeping. The anticipation would keep me awake until the dawn, listening to everybody’s breathing, and the occasional quiet crackle of the fire. But I fell asleep, and slept as soundly as when I was a child and both of our parents were still alive, and we had never known war. Had barely known a hard farm year. I woke in the golden morning, Marek’s hand gently closed on my shoulder.
“It’s time,” he said. I smelled the coffee, and thought Lew was uncharacteristically quiet.
“Thank you.” I straightened my clothes, combed out my hair. When we first cut it all off, I thought I would miss it. But I haven’t, not really. Artur wound around my feet as I walked to the table, which he hadn’t done since he was very small.
The smith sat there with her coffee, with breakfast laid out, and my stomach dropped. She saw my look, though, and smiled. “It’s best if you eat first,” she said. “You’ll likely have many hungry days before the war is done.”
“Thank you,” I said, though I thought it would be impossible to choke anything down. I managed some bread, some cheese. The eggs were gone, I felt bad about that. I didn’t know where she got her food. I wished again that we’d had anything to bring her. We weren’t even paying her for the gun, other than some dream of the war ending. Nobody had that in their pocket.
She got up and went to the workshop for a moment, and came out with a roll of fabric. I was expecting a wooden box like a treasure chest, I realized, or a holster, but why would she have either? The fabric had chickens printed on it; I had a skirt almost like it when I was a little girl. She set it in the table in front of me and it sounded like knocking on a door.
I sat for a moment, just looking at the chickens, listening to the clocks, the fire settle, Artur panting. It was like everybody else was holding their breath, like I was the only one in the room. Just me and the smith and this gun.
I reached out to unroll it, both hands, surprised at the heft, relieved. It felt like a responsibility. That, I’d expected.
I didn’t know it was going to be beautiful. Silvery with gold tracing, feathered etchings on the rotor, the grip dark-polished wood like a music box, the hammer and the trigger and trigger guard seeming like fanciful filigree, not tools of war. I could see my face in the barrel, pale as though I was bathed in moonlight.
Lew was talking—I felt his voice rather than heard it—and I looked up, feeling as though I was waking all over again. The smith looked only at me, as Lew thanked her, as Marek thanked her, and I looked only at her, the gun in my hands like a baby, like an axe, like every hope and hate in the whole world.
“Sto lat,” she said, and I thought of all those sleeping knights with their horses at hand, waiting under the mountain, waiting endlessly. Maybe this was how they would rise up and fight after all. One gun at a time.
“Sto lat,” I said, my voice echoing in my head, in the room. One hundred years.
“Now go,” she said. And we went.
It was the wrong time of day to travel as we were, ragtag and on foot, cutting across fallow fields, Artur ranging ahead and coming back. I carried the gun awkwardly inside my coat, touching the grips with my fingertips again and again. The men glanced at me, didn’t say anything. We were somehow alright, unnoticed, for many miles, but at nightfall we saw sudden headlights, heard the harsh voices as we approached the road. We froze like rabbits, turned to skulk back into the night.
“Stop! Come here!”
Lew ran, Marek grabbed my arm and ran, Artur was a streak in the dusk. There was more yelling behind us, car doors, and a single shot. I stumbled, shook Marek’s hand off my arm. I flapped open my coat, the gun coming into my hand like breathing, burning in my palm, and I turned as I drew, feeling like the whole world spun on me and my arm was pointing north on a compass or at twelve on a clock.
I thumbed the hammer back and the click was deafening, even with my brother yelling behind me, soldiers yelling in front of me, and my finger curled around the gleaming trigger and it seemed like I heard hoof beats as I fired the first blazing shot.
***
Jennifer R. Donohue is from the Jersey Shore and now lives in central New York with her husband and her Doberman, where she works at her local library and facilitates a writing workshop. She grew up with pierogies and her grandmother’s Polish lullabies. Inspiration for this story came from the legend of the sleeping knights, who would one day gallop out from under the mountain and fight for Poland once more. Her work has appeared in Escape Pod, Mythic Delirium, Truancy, and elsewhere. Her novella Run With the Hunted is available in paperback and on most digital platforms. She blogs at Authorized Musings, where she shares fiction and the tribulations of the writing life, and tweets @AuthorizedMusin