Refiner's Fire by Mark Helprin Read Free Book Online

Ikrtsk cadet could chase down a rabbit and, without the use of his hands, behead it with his teeth. Shmuel managed to reach an impenetrable swamp which, even so, he penetrated. He headed for the thickest muddiest bog and burrowed down into it like an anteater. His tracks quickly melted in the mud and thousands of red orchids obliterated his scent. He stayed for many days, not daring to move. From time to time he would see a flame-eyed cadet crisscrossing the forest, sniffing like a hound, crashing through the brush in great bounding arcs. They even tried to burn down the forest, but a rain came. After a few days they gave up and Shmuel made his way home. He never graduated, but then again neither did anyone else.
    â€œHis father wept and asked forgiveness. ‘What can I do, my son, to gain your blessing?’
    â€œShmuel thought for a while, remembering how helpless he had been standing there in his shorts. ‘Send me,’ he said, ‘to the Royal Danish Sabre Academy in Copenhagen.’ It was done.
    â€œHis father paid half his fortune for a very special curriculum. The instructors drove Shmuel day and night for five years. A team of physicians was in constant attendance supervising his exercise, making sure that he was brought to absolute limits but without damage to his system.
    â€œFrom six in the morning until ten thirty he had sabre practice with three great masters. From ten thirty until twelve he practiced gymnastics and weightlifting. From twelve to six the various masters engaged him in duels without cease. As he had his dinner a librarian read him the latest sabre magazines. After dinner he did gymnastics and went swimming, and then he had intensive fighting practice against an ever-growing number of experts. At the end of five years he spent fourteen hours a day with the sabres, sometimes fighting a dozen great masters at once. At twenty-four years of age he fought twenty-four great masters for twenty-four hours. He had become the greatest sabre fighter in the world.
    â€œHis regimen had caused him to grow to almost seven feet in height. He had 325 pounds of solid, lithe muscle, five pounds of regular muscle, and seventy pounds of other things such as brain, organs, etc. He could jump three times his height, run faster than a horse, and see better than an eagle.
    â€œOne bright June day he stood at the edge of the orchid-filled swamp near the military academy. He wore the finest black Danish armor, and his sword had been a present from the king. Across his chest were shining gold medals and red ribbons. Rays of light seemed to emanate from his face and eyes. With easy steps he ran ten miles through the swamp intending to fight all five hundred cadets and take on Lugo unarmed. But when he came out at the clearing where once the academy had stood he found only burnt remains—charred wooden beams enwrapped in clinging vines, and waving grasses on the windy floor where once he had fought. Losing many of their number, the peasants had come by the tens of thousands and thrown themselves against the academy, finally destroying it and its students. Shmuel was left in his shining black armor. He had become a jewel in fighting, but he found himself standing in a gentle field, his enemies gone, and soft things about which he did not know beckoning from all around him.”
6
    T HAT WAS what Katrina Perlé’s father told her. Being a little girl in a little bed late at night she believed him, and it gave her great courage in imagination. She loved her father very much, and since he was absent among the trees most of the time, this was a precious link to him. “Daddy,” she would say, “tell me about Grandfather Shmuel.”
    Even a great revolution did not obliterate the things in Russia which give exiles tremblings of the heart when they think back to a past over which the moon rode and into which violent winds poured with no check except the beleaguered sense of beauty that