Haven: Book Seven of "The Liminality"

Chapter 4 - Prague

Urszula had never cared much for Prague. Not that it was such an awful city. It was a wonderful city. But it was a city and she had never been a city person. Even in the densest urban areas she always to gravitate towards the green spaces. It doesn't matter what they were. Weedy and vacant lots. Cemeteries. That was where she felt most comfortable. She was a country girl, after all.

Jan, though, just loved this place. A couple visits to a pub and he had already a coterie of new friends, some expat Poles among them, but not all. They were a cosmopolitan bunch, an Aussie and Korean among them, all sharing a common fanaticism for the game of football.

Jan had so much to catch up on after a year away in the land of the dead. The first item he bought with James' black and bottomless credit card was a widescreen TV and a cable plan. He didn't even bother with any furniture for their flat beyond a mattress at first. His priority was to catch up with all of the matches he had missed over the prior nine months. Not that Urszula minded. She didn't need furniture, really. As far as she was concerned, furniture was for guests. She was content to sit on counters or floors.

As time passed, their flat came to look rather normal by the standard of the living world. A cherrywood dining table with four matching chairs. A four poster bed with a mattress thicker and more plush than any she had ever rested her bones on. The wall décor, for which Jan was mostly responsible, tended to gravitated towards posters of players from his favorite teams: Juventus and Wisla Krakow.

Jan was positively thrilled to be alive again. He went to church every Sunday now to a special mass in Polish. Urszula even accompanied him some days, if only for amusement. She had to suppress giggles from time to time at some of the naivete in the sermons.

She didn't actually think he was a true believer. How could anyone believe in Scripture after all they had been through? Jan insisted that Lethe had opened in him and ability to read between the lines now, as if passages from the Bible were just code with embedded messages in the blank parts. Urszula did not share that skill. To her, it was all gibberish.

She humored his quirks and tolerated all the little things that made him happy even though few of his hobbies or interests overlapped with her own. She loved him. That was enough.

During the day she found plenty of time to be alone to satisfy her own requirements. Jan often stayed up late drinking and slept in well past noon. She would spend her mornings in the parks roaming the land between the paths. Keeping away from people for a few hours provided the fortitude to be with people when it came time to meet up with Jan and his new friends for lunch.

Jan's friends didn't know what to make of his girlfriend. Some assumed she was an artist, as that was their gauge of her temperament, even though she had never claimed to engage in anything particularly creative.

In truth, she was very creative. She created weapons. Clubs, shivs and mauls mostly, along with a crossbow and booby trap or two. The extra room in their flat was filled with devices she had from lengths of yew and cedar and studded with nails and tacks and fishing weights. They were each quite clever and beautiful in their own way. Even Jan thought so. Some could have passed for works of art. But all she cared about was function.

Today, she had gone looking for a family she had encountered a few weeks back. She ran across them from time to time in a new temporary encampment after they had been displaced by the park police yet again. At first, they had responded to her with fear, thinking she might report them. But Urszula had befriended them over time, via the children, a boy and a girl of six and eight years who would occasionally follow her on her wanderings and to whom she would ply with small gifts.