The Aeschylus

1

He heard Heinrich's scream and paused with the ax in mid swing.

Ari pulled the girls closer. “Go on, Dominik, again!”

They rocked as the harpoon rope pulled taut, and the ax clanged into the ground, missing Dominik's foot by a hair's breadth. The nets holding the rowboat were half cut, but he was running out of time.

“Go again!” Ari said. “Keep going!”

His companion had taken hours to convince, but here he stood, urging Dominik on like a maniac. Down in the dark, it was easy to eschew danger, but here, with the smell of freedom so close, he was just as intoxicated as the rest of them. Looking at him, you would have never known he had any doubts.

“Try again!”

And then Dominik saw a shape. Through the spray of gloom and sea water, it took him a moment to recognize it as man. A man it was, fat and gray and dressed in the habiliments of the Gestapo.

Boris Seiler crept up the stern of the ship, pistol in hand. The ship rocked and swayed, but he kept pressing forward, eyes piercing the gloom. “You are trying to escape. You cannot escape. The penalty for attempting escape is death.”

Dominik could barely see, but he could swear the man was smiling. He knew Seiler had killed his driver on the bridge in Kiel, and his driver had just been a kid.

With a cry, he lunged, charging the Gestapo agent as fast as he could. He would be damned if anyone was going to die here because of him.

Seiler turned, a look of utter surprise on his face. He raised the gun, and in that instant, Dominik could see his own doom reflected in the black of the chamber. Then the departing vessel dropped lower into the water, and The Adalgisa rolled with it. Seiler hit the side rails, and the gun flew from his hand. A moment later, he tumbled onto his back, flailing as Dominik stepped over him. The would-be prisoner put one foot on the fat man's chest, ready to end him with a single downswing.

“Dominik!” Ari yelled.

He looked back and saw Ari was now face to face with the lieutenant. How Dietrich had managed to get up on them without being noticed was frightening. Before the man could do a thing, Ari grabbed him by the wrists.

Knowing he mustn't hesitate, Dominik raised the ax. With one quick sweep, he could cut Seiler's neck and send him into the sea.

“No!” the man yelled. “No! Don't cut me!”

The ax hesitated. Dominik told his hands to bring it down, but they weren't listening.

“I wasn't going to shoot!” Seiler said. “I only wanted to scare you!”

Dominik had heard a click in the moment before the pistol went overboard, and he wondered if Seiler really had tried to pull the trigger, chancing on a misfire. “We're getting off this boat,” he heard himself say. “Do you hear me?” Why was he talking at all? One cut, and they would be halfway to freedom.

“Kaminski, give me the ax!” Dietrich yelled.

He looked back and saw the lieutenant still locked in a melee with Ari, but he wasn't trying to hurt the man. It looked like he was just trying to push him off.

“We're capsizing!” the man shouted. It was nearly a shriek. “Give it to me! We have to cut the rope! Goddammit, give it to me!”

As if to prove his point, the ship rocked again, and somewhere far away, Dominik heard another scream. It was a man's scream, and it was cold as the waters below. He raised the ax again, but now he was looking towards Harald. Just beyond, he saw the silhouette of his two daughters. They were there in the shadows, watching his every move.

“For God's sake, Dominik, do it if you're going to do it!” Ari yelled.

“Let me cut him free!” Harald shouted. “Let me save the ship!” And then, as if trying to pacify him, “You've done nothing wrong. Just let me save him!”

Dominik imagined the ax coming down. He imagined Seiler putting his hand up to shield his face, the ax cutting through wrist and bone and skull at once. He imagined the spray of blood jetting from the man's head, his severed fingers dropping into the water like tiny fish.

He had but a single moment.

“Papa!” Zofia yelled.

He looked towards her, seeing that she had stepped into the light and was reaching out towards him. She was all of the way back behind Ari, but she was reaching, her tiny hand outstretched. His arms suddenly felt very, very heavy.

Looking into her eyes, he lowered the ax and tossed it to Harald.

2

The lieutenant pushed Ari away and caught the ax by the handle. He considered slamming the wood end into the little shit, but he didn't have time. Instead, he turned and ran up the starboard walk, his feet bending as the ship turned and rolled. Water slapped onto the deck, threatening to suck everyone on board to sea. A large wooden crate tipped over in front of him and smashed to pieces, spraying grain in all directions. Harald leapt over it, hearing Heinrich cry out again. A group of men were clustered around the captain, all trying to pull the rope away from the bollard. One was on the ground, his hands torn open from the effort. “Move!” Harald shouted. “Move, move!” He rushed up the small landing onto the foredeck and swept his hands to clear the crowd. As they parted, he could see the captain's head lolling. How he was conscious, Harald didn't know. His skin was dead white, his face drained. His arm was torn open from elbow to wrist, and it lay bent at a strange angle, bone jutting through skin. He remembered what his old friend had told him: “You have to hit the rope where it meets the wood, or it will bounce off.” It made sense, but it didn't give him much room for error. He wondered what Heinrich would have thought if he would have known his life might depend on that advice.

“Careful!” Karl yelled beside him. “God, don't hit him!”

Harald swung… and hit the rope. It was a good shot, half of the line unraveling in one go. Then, another lurch sent him stumbling back.

“She's tipping!” one of the men yelled.

Harald raised the ax and realized he could no longer swing; the angle of the bow was too steep. Frantically, he brought the ax down and began to give the rope little chops. Seconds passed, but by threads, it started to break.

Several more crates smashed onto the deck. The man clutching his hand was now visibly sliding on his stomach. He managed to grab one of the foredeck stairs before he slid over the deck, his eyes gaping and wide.

Harald hacked at the rope again, listening to the threads strain under the weight of the pull. Heinrich stopped screaming, and Harald was no longer sure if the man was alive or dead.

And then, it snapped.

One last chop and the rope pulled apart. The ship instantly rolled back in the other direction, men and cargo flying to port side.

Harald lost his balance and fell. “You're free!” he shouted. “You're free!”

Heinrich's body flopped across the deck and slid to the wall. It flipped over the railing and disappeared, sinking into the icy waters and out of sight.

“No,” Harald said, a scream rising in his throat. “No!”

Within moments, the ship was calm and quiet, all traces of the captain gone with the enemy ship.

3

The silence following Heinrich's death enveloped the ship like a shroud. The Adalgisa became a mechanical thing, drifting towards the island with ghosts at the helm. In the twelve hours it took to repair the damage, however, there were no more incidents.

For Dominik, the silence had nothing to do with the captain. His family returned to the pantry without protest, awaiting the retribution that would surely follow. The hours in the dark were maddening, for him more than any other. His plan had failed, and because of it, their lives were now suspect. For all of his bluster, he knew they were not as protected as he had made them believe. He had seen how The Reich treated its prisoners. They had sent Maggie away. Maybe they would take Zofia or Lucja now.

In the quiet, he wept.

They came to him then, his girls, and Ari too. They held each other for a time.

Zofia was the only one to speak. “It's all right, Papa,” she said. “We love you.”

She made him laugh, but he still wondered. He wondered what they would think if the lieutenant came back and snatched her. Would they be so forgiving then?

After some time, he slept, and his dreams were filled with despair. He pictured himself standing on the deck, ax in hand. Only instead of Seiler beneath him, it was Zofia. When the boat rocked, she fell over the edge, sinking into the waters below. It was a horrible vision, one that he couldn't shake: little Zofia, drowning.

When he woke some hours later, he found himself alone. The door to the pantry was open. “Ari?” he called. “Zofie?”

Panic washed over him as he scrambled to his feet. Still slumber-drunk, he stumbled into the hall and out into the main barracks. The room held only a few crewmen. They stared at him from their bunks and tables with Aryan eyes.

“Zofia?” Dominik yelled. “Lucja?” He looked around the room, praying he did not see them beneath the bunk — beneath the body — of a dirty ship worker.

A hand gripped his elbow, and he spun, the last vestiges of sleep clearing from his mind. He saw Sergeant Eichmann reclined on a hammock, his long hand outstretched. The man's other hand contained a book, a German translation of The Aeneid. It was difficult to see this, in a way; Dominik preferred to think of his captors as mindless.

“Where's my daughter?” he blurted. He realized how stupid that must have sounded since he was looking for both of his girls, but he let it stand.

By way of reply, Jan released his arm and pointed straight up. Above on the deck.

Dominik ran to the ladder. He was aware how tired he felt doing it. Being in prison for hours at a time saps you in a way he had never imagined. And that led to another thought: would he have let Seiler live had they only been on the ship a day instead of a month? Would he have been so compassionate, or perhaps, so drained of will? He shuddered. Best to bury such ideation before it buried him.

He reached the top deck. “Zofia?”

Then, he saw them there, all three of them, standing together at the rails. If they were being watched by Seiler or the lieutenant, they were nowhere close. Perhaps the failed escape attempt had made them arrogant. And why not? The thought of leaving the ship now brought only sadness and sickness.

The girls turned to look at him as he approached, and they smiled. They looked almost normal there, standing as a makeshift family. Dominik put his arms around them, letting himself comfort and be comforted.

When he released them, Ari pointed. “Look at that. We're here, Dom.”

When Dominik looked, his mouth fell open. The world in front of him did not look like it was of this world at all. The beach just beyond the ship was a sandy brown punctuated by puddles of iridescent blue, small pools of water made bright by the chunks of ice they held, by the sky they reflected. Beyond the beach, Dominik saw black earth which grew into even blacker hills. Beyond those, rocky crags that seemed to spring up from the ground as if pushed, violently, from the very core of the earth. The peeks of the highest number flowed so seamlessly into the clouds that it became impossible to discern where the snow dust ended and the atmospheric clouds began. A more religious man might have thought these peaks had been built by God as a path to heaven, but Dominik thought it more likely these antediluvian crags were forged by God's primitive ancestors, creating pathways to Valhalla or Mount Olympus instead.

The sight of the mountains and the black earth, the flawless beach, and the glowing water formed an image so incongruous with every expectation, that for a moment, he could do nothing but stare. If he was going to die a prisoner, he thought, there wasn't any place on earth more suited to the sacrifice. It took Lucja, a moment later, to bring him out of the trance.

“What?” he asked, realizing she had spoken.

She took his arm in one hand and pointed to the island with the other. He followed her signal, seeing a network of piers, decking, and ramshackle buildings ahead. Though his vision was poor, he saw shapes awaiting them on the docks.

“We're not alone.”