Three Arched Bridge

47

WHAT WAS THIS? They had gone, and an unendurable silence reigned everywhere, A horrible calm, Almost as if plague had struck,

No one crossed the bridge. Not even mad Gjelosh. Chill winds blew upon it, passing in and out of its arches. And then the winds dropped, and the bridge hung in air, a stranger, superfluous. Human travelers who should have headed for it avoided the place, turning aside, back, or away, looking for the ford, calling softly to the ferryman; they were ready to swim across the river or freeze in its rapids and drown rather than set foot on the bridge. Nobody wanted to walk over the dead.

And so the first week passed and the second began. The great mass of stone waited expectantly. The empty arches seemed about to eat you. The bowed spine above waited for someone to step on it, no matter who — vagrants, women, a barbarian horde, wedding guests, or an imperial army marching two, four, twenty-four, one hundred hours without rest.

But nobody set foot on it. Sometimes it made you want to cry out: Had so much sweat, so much effort, and even … blood been expended for this bridge, never to be used for anything?

Rain fell the second week. For days on end the bridge stood drenched and miserable.

Then the rain stopped, and again the weather was chill and gray. The third week began. A whining wind crawled over the wasteland. It was the end of Tuesday afternoon when they saw that a wolf had padded softly over the bridge, as in a fairy tale. People could not credit their own eyes (and there were those who were ready to believe that a herald had crossed, waving the standard of the Skuraj family, the only one that has a wolf in its center). The beast meanwhile vanished quickly into the distance, where the wind seemed to have stood still, and howled.

The days that followed were silent and empty. It was ashen weather everywhere, as if before the end of the world. One afternoon, old Ajkuna came up to the bridge. People thought that finally she would curse it, and they gathered to watch. She halted at the entrance to the bridge, below the right-hand approach arch, and laid her hand and then her ear to the masonry. She stood there a long while, then lifted her head from the palm of her hand and said:

“It is trembling.”

I remembered the man who had fallen in an epileptic fit. He had indeed passed on his convulsions to the bridge.

Many believed that the bridge would collapse of itself. Occasionally I brought out the card on which the designer had scribbled those mysterious figures, and I would study them abstractedly, as if trying to understand from them the bridge’s fear,

I would have wished that the designer could have seen this desolation.

But the bridge’s solitude, which seemed ready to last for centuries, came to an end suddenly one Sunday. The highway, the surrounding plain, and the sandbank echoed to a piercing creak. People ran in terror to see what was happening. On the ancient road, in a long black column like a crawling iron reptile, a convoy of carts was traveling. The carts approached the bridge. We all stood frozen on the bank, expecting to witness some catastrophe. The first cart quickened its speed and began to mount the incline. You could hear the iron wheels changing their tone as they struck the stone paving. Then the cart mounted the right-hand approach arch, and then on, on, over the first arch, over … the dead man. Then came the second and third carts, and then the others, all laden with blackened barrels. They squeaked frighteningly, especially when they rode over the immured victim, and it looked each time as if the arch would split, but nothing happened.

The tail of the convoy was still on the bridge when people realized what kind of caravan it was, what it carried, and where it was going. Its sole cargo was pitch, for the Orikum military base near Vloré.

We watched its progress for a long time, looking alternately at the tail of the convoy and at the bridge, which had suffered no harm at all.

Immediately after the crossing of this inauspicious tar train, as a guest at the Inn of the Two Roberts called it, news came that the death of Komneni had at last been announced at Vlore, and that his son-in-law, Balsha II, had deployed his troops over the entire principality, including Komneni’s half of Orikum. Our count, accompanied by his entourage, departed to attend the old prince’s burial He must have been still on the road when, like thunder after a lightning flash, more news came, worse than the first, to tell us that the Byzantine garrison had finally evacuated its half of the naval base, ceding it to the Turkish garrison.

We were on the brink of war,