Three Arched Bridge

37

FOR SEVERAL CONSECUTIVE DAYS carts loaded with barrels of pitch passed along the western highway. The ferryman poled them across the river, cursing the wagoners, the pitch, and the entire world.

They said that the pitch was urgently needed at the Vloré base. That is how it has always happened. As soon as tar begins to move fast along the highways, you know that blood will flow after it.

Meanwhile dire foreboding continually thickened around us, or, 1 would say, around everything that centered upon this cursed bridge. Now it was not merely the bards who went on casting their grim spell night and day at the Inn of the Two Roberts. No, this matter was now a topic of general conversation from morning to night; strangest of all, it became a most simple and natural thing to talk about a sacrifice, as if it were the weather or the crops. The idea of sacrifice, up to now a truth within a song, had emerged from its cocoon and suddenly crept up on us. Now it moved among us, alive and on equal terms with all the other concerns of the day.

On the roads, at home, and in taverns along the great highway, people talked of the reward the bridge and road builders would give to the family of the man who would allow himself to be sacrificed in the bridge piers. I could not accustom myself to this transition at all Things that had been savage and frightening until yesterday had suddenly become tame. Everybody talked about the sum of money the immured man’s family would receive, and people even said that, apart from the cash payment, they would receive for a long time to come a percentage of the profits from the bridge, like everyone else who had met its expenses. Other people gave even more astonishing explanations, They said that the compensation due to every member of the family had been worked out in the minutest detail, with every kind of eventuality borne in mind. Everything had been provided for, from the possibility of the victim being without relatives, an odd man out, as they say (which was difficult to believe), to the opposite case of a poor man who might have a wife, parents, and a dozen children. They had anticipated everything, from the possibility of an orphan (in which case, in the absence of heirs, the remaining portion of the reward would be spent on a chapel for his soul that would be built just next to the bridge piers) to the case of a needy man, who would be given a first and final chance of property to leave to his nearest and dearest, in just the same way as a meadow or a mill is left as a bequest, except that this property would be his death. They said that the planning had been so thorough that they had even provided for the sacrifice of rich men, in other words death for a whim, out of boredom with life, or simply for fame. In this case, if the immured victim did not care for the reward, the cash would be used to erect, besides the chapel, a statue or memorial, also next to the bridge piers,

They said that all these calculations had been put down on paper and fixed with a seal, so that anybody who was thinking of being immured could read them beforehand.

To me all this resembled a bizarre dream. This was something we had never heard of before, a kind of death with accounts, seals, and percentages, We were quite unused to it. Sometimes I could not take it in at all I called to mind the delegation and its talks with the count, and what the collector of legends and the bridge’s master-in-chief had said, and I tried to establish some connection between these things, but the more 1 brooded the more perplexed 1 became. This business of calculated sacrifice confused me completely.

Sometimes I told myself that perhaps these were the signs of the new order that the master-in-chief had told me about in that unforgettable conversation. That jumble of words had been full of contracts, accounts, currency exchange, and percentages, percentages, percentages on everything. Even on death.