The Milkweed Triptych 01 - Bitter Seeds Read Free Page B

grandfather took it in a solid grip, pulled the boy’s arm straight, and sliced William’s palm with his pocketknife. William screamed and tried to pull away, but his grandfather didn’t release him until the blood trickled down William’s wrist to stain the cuff of his pullover. The old man nodded in satisfaction as the hot tickle pulsed along William’s hand and dripped to the earth.
    William scooted backwards, afraid of what his grandfather might do next. He wanted to go home, back to Mr. Malcolm and Mrs. Toomre, but he was lost and couldn’t see through his tears.
    His grandfather spoke again. But now he spoke a language that William couldn’t understand, more wails and gurgles than words. Inhuman noises from a human vessel.
    It lulled the boy into an uneasy stupor, like a fever dream. The fire’s warmth dried the tears on his face. A shadow fell across the glade; the world tipped sideways.
    And then the fire spoke.

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    2 February 1939
    Tarragona, Spain
    L ieutenant-Commander Raybould Marsh, formerly of His Majesty’s Royal Navy and currently of the Secret Intelligence Service, rode a flatbed truck through ruined olive groves while a civil war raged not many miles away. He secretly carried two fake passports, two train tickets to Lisbon, vouchers for berths on a steamer bound for Ireland, and one thousand pounds sterling. And he was bored.
    He’d been riding all morning. The truck passed yet another of the derelict farmhouses dotting the Catalonian landscape. Some had burned to the ground. Others stared back at him with empty windows for eyes, half-naked where the plaster had sloughed to the ground under erratic rows of bullet holes. Wind sighed through open doorways.
    Sometimes the farmers and their families had been buried in the very fields they tended, as evidenced by the mounds. And sometimesthey had been left to rot, as evidenced by the birds. Marsh envied the farmers their families, but not their ends.
    The land had fared no better than the farmers at the hands of armed factions. Artillery had pocked the fields and rained shrapnel upon centuries-old olive groves. In places, near the largest craters, the tang of cordite still wafted from broken earth.
    At one point, the truck had to swerve around the charred hulk of a Soviet-issue T-38 tank straddling the road. It looked like an inverted soup tureen on treads but was based, Marsh noted with pride and amusement, upon the Vickers. It was a common sight. Abandoned Republican matériel littered the countryside. Most of Spain had long since fallen to the Nationalists; now they mounted their final offensive, grinding north through Catalonia to strangle the final Republican strongholds.
    Officially, Britain had chosen to stay on the sidelines of the Spanish conflict. But the imminent victory of Franco’s Nationalists and their Fascist allies was raising eyebrows back home. Marsh’s section within the SIS, or MI6 as some people preferred to call it, was tasked with gathering information about Germany’s feverish rearmament over the past few years. So when a defector had contacted the British consulate claiming to have information about something new the Nazis were field-testing in Spain, Marsh got tapped for an “Iberian holiday,” as the old man put it.
    “Holiday,” Marsh repeated to himself. Stephenson had a wry sense of humor.
    The truck labored out of the valley into Tarragona, briefly passing through the shadow of a Roman aqueduct that straddled the foothills. A coastal plain spread out before Marsh as they topped the final rise. Orange and pomegranate groves, untended by virtue of winter and war, dotted the seaward slopes of the hills overlooking the city. At the right time of year, the groves might have perfumed the wind with their blossoms. Today the wind smelled of petrol, dust, and the distant sea.
    Below the groves sprawled the city: a jumble of bright stucco, wide plazas, and even the occasional gingko-lined avenue left behind by