Black Shirt (a short story)

I

A river flowed beneath the boots of two men dressed in black. Their legs dangled over the edge of a bridge, one of three visible breaks in the lamplit surface of the river.

“Merda! It’s cold.” said the first.

A grunt answered him.

“What’s this?”

“What’s what?” Sneered the second man. “Drink!”

The first man stared into the narrow mouth of the tin flask he’d been handed. The liquid within looked green under shifting light, fluorescent, though it was too dark to tell with certainty. Shades of war time rumours stiffened his heckles under his companion’s gaze. Talk of weapons programs, globe-altering bombs in testing phases. Early in the war he’d heard the word “Radioaktiv” leap off a German officer’s tongue. At the time he hadn’t taken the brag seriously. This had since changed.

Before he sipped, the fumes surged between his nose hairs and pulled water from his eyes. The sip itself was a mustard gas drop. The man doubled back over the bridge’s handrail to avoid a plunge into the Ljubljanica River. Laughter rained down on him as he landed hard on the flat of his back. Concrete knocked half the Sicilian out of him and he was left chasing shallow breaths.

Between high pitched wheezes his eyes fell on the fierce tail of a winged beast perched over him. It snarled and bore its talons. In his stunned state, the man’s recoil instincts were numbed. He froze. Ready to succumb to the fangs of this apex predator. In the face of such pure killing power shame poured through him. He swallowed down insufficient breaths. How many grand personal claims had he made in his lifetime? Elite, chosen, endowed by god, marching out of the shadow of Caesar’s lineage! How limp these assertions looked under the hunter gaze of this beast, purpose built for murder, designed to dismantle ego and body, perhaps not endowed by god himself, but certainly some entity of divine power. His wheezes evened out and his wince relaxed to a smooth skinned acceptance. All he could access now was relief. Devour me, release me from this false life I’ve led!

The laughter carried on. “Be quiet down there Rocco, don’t let the Partisans know you’ve met the green Faerae!”

Rocco didn’t laugh as his frantic blinks revealed the dragon’s steel body was fixed to the concrete handrail. He blinked some more and turned his head. His cap had left him and rolled into the centre of the bridge where his rank lay facedown in the dust. Burning liquorice and menthol seared everything between his tear ducts and his chest cavity yet the pain came from a threat located elsewhere. What if, in the next few moments, a commanding officer happened to visit the check-point he and his companion were currently supposed to be manning?

He wheezed and strained to sit up. His companion cackled. The model beast stared dumbly up the road towards the foot of the castle.

“Bruno, you’ll get us both shot one of these days.” Rocco righted his dusted off cap and leaned both arms on the edge of the bridge. “You know that?”

The second man grinned a Mussolini smile with jaw extended, eyes refusing to participate and took a swig. “We’re about to see the Roman Empire’s second act my friend.” He slung an arm around Rocco’s shoulder. “By nineteen forty eight Il Duce and the Germans will be wielding the world’s throne. I’d sooner be shot than miss a second of that.”

Rocco stared at his companion and half opened his mouth, then closed it and said nothing. If he addressed one of the holes in his companion’s quip, he’d have to take on every machine gun spatter in Bruno’s words. He shifted his gaze to the creature clutching the side of the bridge. It was mirrored three more times at each end of the river checkpoint. “What are the monsters all about anyway?” He asked.

“Monsters?” Bruno’s smile played subtly on his thick lips. His brow furrowed.

Rocco stood up straight and gripped a steel talon washed to teal by years of elemental exposure. “Monsters, Dragons. Whatever these people call them.”

“Oh Rocco, the green Faerae, she’s really done a number on you…”

Before Rocco could validate the physical features of the bridge any further, a heavy boom rained down from the hills. Both he and Bruno dropped into a crouch behind the bridge rails and unholstered their pistols. The boom carried the weight of a mature tree being felled. If not for the lack of shockwave, that word “Radioaktiv” would surely have revisited Rocco there on the bridge.

“Think that’s the Partisans?” asked Rocco.

Bruno pushed out his lips and shook his thick neck briskly. “No, those bandits only carry pitchforks and their Grandpa’s rabbiting rifles.”

“You wouldn’t talk about bandits in such low terms if you’d ever been to Palermo." Fired back Rocco, but Bruno wasn’t listening.

He repeated the head shake and shifted his tone up a register. “Though it could be a–” he stopped himself midsentence and moved his eyes to the winged silhouette on the bridge. “No.” He completed his set of three head shakes and holstered his pistol.

“Could be a what?”

Bruno shot eyes at him. He made a calculation that didn’t end in an answer.

“Could be a what, Bruno!”

“Quiet!” barked Bruno. “We’re guarding this bridge for a reason.”

“Pfff some noble reason,” muttered Rocco ingesting a second greedy swig of the green diesel and wiping off his burning lips. “You know if some foreign folk marched into my hometown, not even a dragon could keep me from hiding up in those hills with as many rifles as I could bundle in my arms.” His tone took on a cowboy pulp tale cadence. “I’d hide up there for weeks, months, waiting for my chance to take back my town.”

“Give me that.” Bruno’s jubilant mood was gone now as he snatched back the flask. He held it up in the air and shook it. “They banned this stuff for good reason, you know?”

Rocco’s gaze fixed on the tin under moonlight and could swear he saw an aura around the flask. Subtle but there. A pulsing, weaving outline. Aurora borealis lines blending with the town spires, winding and retreating. Visually gripping and musically persuasive in a manner that defied sense.

“This stuff makes a man braver than is good for him.” Bruno’s voice made it to Rocco’s ears, but not past his skull. He watched the flask shimmer, listened to its demands, wanted to challenge them, but found no convincing words.

“I had to trade a Luger from the great war and my Ninny’s Linguini recipe for this bottle.” Bruno carried on. “If I’d known it would land me in the company of a damned commie, I would have left it in the barracks tonight.”

The flask disappeared into Bruno’s pocket and with it Rocco’s trance. Bruno fixed his eyes on his light footed companion and the yet to be holstered pistol in his hand. “You want to know what these dragons are really doing on this bridge?”

Rocco’s eyes lit up. “So you admit they’re real?!”

Bruno ducked out of the line of the flailing firearm then his gaze darkened. “I really shouldn’t be admitting anything to you in your state. But Merda, it’s a cold night isn’t it? Come here so no one listens in.”

II

Bruno’s words were hushed. He cupped Rocco’s neck and pulled him into the warm line of alcohol drenched breath. Their jeep blocked half the bridge, their huddled forms blocked the other. He started with the legend of the dragons of Ljubljana bridge who were said to wag their tails whenever a virgin crossed the river.

Rocco made a quip about Bruno’s conspicuous lack of a sweet heart which frequently got brought up around the black shirt’s barracks, but found no laughter. Bruno moved on to Greek myth, Jason of the Argonauts, a hero who was said to have slain a dragon in these parts and inspired the Slovenian symbol. A legend that became attached to an entire cultural identity, a symbol of power, courage, protection but also a resistance to being tamed.

The man’s eyes widened as he dropped this final detail and here the two of them moved beyond the bridge check-point and its statue guardians, the river and the spires dotting the skyline, the castle and the hills, the war and its pageantry. Just he and Rocco and his hushed tones remained as he pointed out some strange details of this dragon story that didn’t align with the lore of conventional myth.

Viewed through blurred vision and a weightless head, Rocco saw a man in armour of a style he’d only witnessed in Roman paintings. This man carried a sword and the eyes of someone with burden dragging down every step he took.

Most myths of dragon slayings involve gold and a cave, metaphor and heroics. Bruno’s words merged with visuals, pulsing on absinthe waves breathing narration into the immersive images that bathed Rocco’s captive ear. Jason however, met his dragon in the marshy glades of swampland by no choice of his own. The armoured hero bore his blade not with the silent calm of a battle weathered warrior, but of a boy concerned about his mother’s potential scolding should he return home with muddied boots. He tiptoed the edge of the marsh, testing the depth of each step with low confidence. A boom rattled leaves and his nerves and sent the hero’s head reeling. No longer consumed by scolding, but fear of whether he’d ever return home at all. Cussing frequented his breath as he made slow progress through dense mud. Any sounds beyond the clearing spurred darting eyes and a raised blade. Finding a firm patch of ground, Jason climbed from the bog and caught his breath. When he resumed his journey, his route was as inefficient as ever. Often looping back, often followed by more cursing. At one point he climbed a great ancient tree that he’d passed by for the sixth time, this time seeking a vantage point. It should be noted that during this check he sought out the horizon rather than the horned tail of an earthwalking demon. It should also be noted that what he saw from up there did not provoke a stalking approach, but one of a burglar or an adulterer, a man in retreat. Most myths boast of a local hero venturing into the abyss and returning with spoils for their kin. Under the oppressive hissing of a hell lizard on the hunt, Jason fought to lose himself in the dense bush adorned by trees unfamiliar to him and landscape of a kind that his island upbringing ill prepared him for. His shoulders grew weary under the strain of a chambered blade. Battles in open air and a rested mind cannot prepare for the fatigue of flight across strange territory. A boom and roar dropped the hero to the ground. His armour conducted extreme heat and rippled burn blisters across his back and shoulders. The scent of burning pork permeated the air. If not for the irrationality of a fraying mind, Jason likely would have stayed there supine and either been passed by on account of his insignificance or devoured as a small snack to supplement whichever meal of greater worth the creature might come across that day.

Tales have since been written, editorialised and reworked to depict the vision Jason encountered when the great dragon eventually stalked down his scrambling figure and pinned him at the foot of a mud greased bank. His sandals fought urgently to climb the mossy face, but failed to find purchase and slid back down in a humiliating show of impotence even in the role of the coward.

The myths insist with a straight face that he met the monster’s roars with his own heroic screams. They say he impelled the beast to recognise his name, “This day, it’s your honour to meet Jason of the Argonauts. Will you accept the honour to die by his blade?” Though the address of self in third person aligns with the broad picture we’ve been given of Jason as a man so far, there are a greater number of reasons to question the truth of this part of the tale. Yes, conventional hero myths commonly demonstrate an uncommon willingness to face down forces few men would seek out, as we see here with Jason. But these feats of bravery typically align with a character of deep moral integrity. Even in its most flattering tellings, Jason’s myth demonstrates a flawed man destined to betray the woman who loved him leaving his children in the custody of this (equally flawed) person who would murder his innocent offspring out of sheer spite and force Jason to die alone in the guilt of knowing.

Nonetheless it’s told that he took in the hateful eyes of divine deathbringer and welcomed its hell fire breath. It’s told that as the beast flapped its wings with enough force to blow him off his feet, the formerly timid figure found it within himself to slide beneath the chassis of the dragon and plunge his blade between scales of volcano forged titanium. The wail that was released as the animal’s heart punctured is the matter for tales of its own. Yet the lion’s share of credit goes to Jason, who performed athletic wizardry comparable to his Olympic countrymen in escaping falling tonnes of mythic beast in time for local witnesses to watch him climb upon its writhing neck and strike a second killing blow and entrench his place in the lore of a land he was an alien in.

III

Bruno raised his eyes. “You know what I find strange about that story?”

“The golden fleece of the flying Ram?”

Bruno frowned at his drunken companion and shook his head. “What? No.”

“You know that’s what Jason’s quest was all about, don’t you? He had just killed a different dragon to retrieve a golden fleece belonging to a magic flying ram.”

The second man let the silence stretch as his companion’s head levelled with the bridge they stood upon and sobered some on the icy winter air. Eventually he shook his head and gestured to the steel statue nearest them. “It’s strange that the people adopted the symbol of the dragon rather than Jason. No?”

Rocco shrugged his shoulders, though offered no challenge.

“The story of St George always highlights the hero with the slain beast at his feet. You seen a single statue of Jason in this entire town?”

Before he could find an answer, a great boom knocked Rocco off his feet. Glass shattered into the jeep’s interior and the vehicle itself was tipped onto its side.

“It’s the damned Partisans!” shouted Bruno before firing off a full clip of bullets into the darkened wood.

Rocco clutched his pistol to his chest lying face up in the night. Head still blurred by the twisting lines of the absinthe stream. Shots pinged off the concrete bridge. He insisted he heard a dragon’s growl, but immediately he knew it wasn’t friendly to him. No. This growl was in resistance against being tamed. As he unloaded his own muzzle flares into the night, who here was the tamer? A crack dropped Bruno, followed by a lung heavy groan. Rocco crawled behind the body of the jeep and pushed the laboured breaths of his companion out of his mind. The puddle spilling its way across the bridge’s floor refused to be ignored however. Thick surface, a red so deep it was almost black. Organ blood. The terminal kind.

As shouts in local tongue (though foreign to Rocco) pierced the air within the bounds of the bridge, the lone guardian of this checkpoint gazed down at his own black attire. He breathed and resolved to channel the Jason of myths. Facing the odds of insurmountable force. Fighting to the last.

But as he stood up and raised his gun in a trembling grip, he saw the expressions of the men who’d slain his friend and realised his mistake. These men, these revolutionaries, they were dragons coming his way. In this case he was Jason. A crack released before his weapon was fully raised and Rocco fell to the bridge’s floor for the third time. He watched his cap fly across the ground and bath in dust once again. He watched a boot kick his pistol far out of his reach and felt cruel hands take his shoulders and force him against the chassis of the jeep.

Slavic tongue dressed him down in a manner that relied on tone to carry the load. Yet Rocco felt no fear. He watched a pistol rise to the line of his forehead, behind it, a fresh cheeked youth wearing conviction of a kind Rocco had only known in lip service form during his lifetime. While the rest of this young rebel’s posse marched into the occupied town of Ljubljana to take it back from its Italian invaders, Rocco barely noticed the muzzle pointed at his head. Instead his focus was on the wagging tails of two dragons at either end of the bridge.