The Splendor Of Silence Read Free Page A

driftwood. Gulls soared and hummed above, wings aspread. Mike, seven at that time, trotted away along the edge of the water, clambering over the logs of wood, and Sam followed him as fast as he could. He had been distracted and overwhelmed by this fury of nature, and yet heedful, in some part of his head, that he had to keep an eye on his younger brother. Lightning forked along the thickly gray sky and Sam waited, listening for thunder. It came, booming and loud, setting the earth shaking.
    "Listen to that, Mike!" Sam had yelled, opening his arms wide to embrace the storm. "The skies are hungry. Listen!"
    He looked toward his left and did not see Mike anywhere. The clouds had completely covered the north entrance to the cove by now, dulled the light, brought night where day was, and Sam strained to find his brother.
    The tips of Sam's fingers began to freeze and he put his hands under his armpits.
    "Mike!" he shouted. "We should go in. Mama will worry."
    But nothing moved on the logs deposited haphazardly on the beach by previous tides, forming castles and goblins in the dying light. Sam clambered up a rock, zipped closed the front of his jacket, and searched around him. Where was Mike? He had been here, near the log pile they had named Buckingham Palace, and then here, near the Eiffel Tower, and there, and then where?
    "Mike, this is not funny. Come back now."
    Lightning crawled over the skies again, and Sam put his hands around his mouth. MIKE. MIKE. MIKE-Y. Until he was hoarse and panting. The sea roared in anger, crashing in huge sprays around him. His heart banged in his chest and a sudden chill ate away at his bones.
    "Mike," Sam whispered. "Where are you?"
    And then a cold hand touched his leg. Sam whirled around.
    "Ha!" Mike shouted, pushing a stick of bleached driftwood at him. "Got ya."
    Sam slithered down from the rock, scraping his ankles and shins, and grabbed the front of Mike's sweater. "Don't ever do that again. Never. Do you hear?"
    On the night train to Rudrakot, Sam remembered the dread that had ensnared him when he thought he had lost Mike, for what had seemed like an eternity, each moment as lucid today as it had been that day. And here, in another continent, another time, now when they were both grown men sent to India to engage in a mighty war, Mike was lost again, this time through no artifice of his own. And no amount of shouting would bring him back. Sam would not let himself think that he could not find Mike, and that was why he was on his way to the desert kingdom Rudrakot, to search for his brother again. To the place where he was first lost. To the beginning.
    An arrow of heat plunged downward from Sam's shoulder into his arm and he jerked back from the compartment window and fell heavily onto the bunk on his left side, crying out from the sudden pain. Whiteness filled his gaze, his ears roared, and Sam clutched at his shoulder.
    "Captain Hawthorne!"
    Sam gasped. "Yes, Mrs. Stanton." And then in a more resigned tone, he said, "I apologize, a sudden pain."
    "Your shoulder hurts?" she asked, her tone sleep softened from its daytime raucousness.
    "Yes," he replied, surprised. She was being solicitous? Why? He had been nothing but rude to her, well, barely civil anyway.
    "Well." She clicked her tongue. "It's the war. War hurts, Captain Hawthorne."
    Ah, Sam thought, righting himself on his bunk, there was never a truer statement, and it was astonishing that she of all people had considered it.
    Adelaide Stanton had a flowered cloth cap tied to her head, to keep her curls in perfect order overnight, yet little wisps of graying hair pulled out from under it. Her printed cotton nightgown was the most decorous Sam had seen; the tightly buttoned collar rode up her thin neck, the folds of cloth diffused tentlike over her body. He had been bestowed with the tiniest flash of skin around her ankles when she whipped her feet onto the bunk and settled her blanket over herself.
    "Would you mind shutting the