Like A Mountain, Waiting
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I was given a prophecy by the Oracle at Delphi, long before the birth of your Christ-child. She said I would be a soldier, and that I could not die until four things had happened. The first was finding "a mountain to the west." Do you have any idea how many mountains there are to the west of Delphi?
I do.
As the years and centuries passed, I searched, and fought, and searched again. Not knowing how I would know which mountain was the right mountain, but somehow certain I would know.
I exhausted Europe. The British Isles. Iceland, Greenland, eastern Canada. Down into America around the time she was born, and there I found...my mountain. I made it my home. I left only when I was called to battle, for my new country, for others. I survived, of course. Came back to wait for the next call. Wondered, too, as I fought, and lived, and waited...when the second, and third, and fourth would happen. Wondered, too, sometimes, when the millennia made a world's weight on shaking Atlas shoulders, if the right word was actually "if."
And then I met him. July 12, 1912. I was so very sure....
This is my story, and the story of my kin in the village-town, and in the homes and farms grain-scattered around my mountain, though not blood kin, for I never married. How could I? My story, told by the man whose life was intertwined so closely with mine for a time.
Nikolai
10,737 words of actual story text.
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Like A Mountain, Waiting - Eric Alan Westfall
A Hearty Round of (Cyber) Applause:
For A.L. and Audra, whose beta help caught those last (hopefully) little bits of goofs that I was so sure weren’t there, and whose advice helped as well;
For Lilia and Beck and Kaje, oh my...founding members of the Better Blurb Bureau, and
With extra special thanks for her patience with picky me, and of course for her extraordinary (as usual) artistry:
Cover design by
Enny Kraft (http://ennykraft.weebly.com/)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
A Hearty Round of Cyber-Applause To:
Like a Mountain, Waiting
Author’s Afterword
Author’s Bio
More Books by Eric Alan Westfall
January 11, 2000
Dear David,
I suppose I could write this on the laptop you sent, but somehow it didn’t seem right. Too impersonal. It will be slower this way, but perhaps the fact I’ve chosen to write this by hand will emphasize its importance to me, and I think its importance to you as well. You won’t get this until after I’m gone. Damn. I’m being coy. I’m too old for coy. Let’s try honesty. After I’m dead.
I’m not sure yet how soon to have this given to you. Or even whether you will be where it can be given. But I will gamble that this will eventually reach you, because there is no way I can give this to you now, much less talk to you about it.
This is about him. And how it all appeared to me.
I saw him the first time when I was twelve.
I touched him the first time when I was thirteen.
He went off to fight the Kaiser when I was fifteen. And that’s when I went up the mountain...and robbed him.
He came down off the mountain—his mountain, actually, or at least it was as far as we all were concerned—when I was twelve. It wasn’t the first time; it wasn’t the last. But it was never frequent. And he had been coming down off the mountain for a long time. A very long time.
Gran told me, not too long before she died...I was six, almost seven...about seeing him when he went off to fight one time. How beautiful he was in the moonlight. How she gathered her courage, offered him her words as a soft, silver-coated gift, a shy God keep you from harm,
as he passed by, pack on his back. How he’d stopped, tilted his head in a tiny bow toward where she stood at the clearing’s edge, wrapped in warm shadows and cool strands of light running down the side of her face, striping her gown. How he’d smiled, knowing she was where she shouldn’t have been, and gravely said, kindly said, And God keep you, my lady.
How it might have been that he said, The gods keep you, my lady,
though she was never sure. And then he was gone between one blink, one breath, and the next.
Others went to fight, too. Some came back, some didn’t. Gran’s much-older brother didn’t; nor her uncles. Her father did, but he was never the same after, she said. Granddad came back, too, though he wasn’t granddad then, just the boy-turned-man who wanted to be, and eventually was.
He came back to his mountain, too. After the others, long enough that Gran thought he might not come back at all. But he did. At night again, walking slowly with a limp, his clothes worn and ragged, the