Shadow of the Lions by Christopher Swann
PROLOGUE
The two lions crouched on top of their pedestals, frozen in preparation to leap. One was snarling, its stone teeth menacing in the late-afternoon shadows, while the other stared out with disdain at the broad sweep of empty soybean fields that lay just across the state highway, a disdain made all the more pointed because the lion was missing its left eye.
The missing eye was their only major flaw. A myth of swift and terrible justice falling on those who harmed the lions had shielded them from further disfigurement over the years. Blackburne legend had it that the student who chiseled out the left eye as a class prank in 1947 died that same week, drowning in the Shenandoah Creek when his canoe tipped over. Since then, the lions had been revered by the students, and although time had worn away at these guardians of Blackburne’s front entrance, the lions remained fixed to the spot where they had sat for more than a century. The columns of Raleigh Hall, the freshman dorm, might be painted pink; a faculty member’s car might be placed inside the dining hall in the dead of night; the headmaster might open his office one morning to find every square inch filled with balloons. But the lions were left alone.
Jogging in place to keep from cooling down, I stared up at the lions, breath issuing from my open mouth like steam. It was half a mile back to the track, and the temperature was unusually cold for the middle of March. I didn’t want to cramp up. But I didn’t leave, either, just jogged in place and tried through sheer willpower to lower my heart rate and slow my breathing. Running from the track to the school gate and back was a typical warm-up, but I was alone. My teammates were running in the opposite direction, to the old closed bridge over the Shenandoah. I had asked Coach Meier if I could run to the gate, knowing he would say yes. I was a team captain and a senior—he had every reason to trust me. So when he nodded absently at me, I ran hard, sprinting away from the track and putting distance between myself and my team. Living at Blackburne, in close quarters with four hundred other boys in the Virginia countryside, could be claustrophobic. But that wasn’t why I had run away from the others, feet pounding the road even after I reached the broad belt of trees that surrounded Blackburne’s campus like a forest wall.
My father had told me the previous fall at the annual Blackburne–Manassas Prep game that in times of crisis, a man’s instinct is to do one of two things: retreat to a place of safety, or gather up his strength and hurl himself headlong into the fray. We had been talking about football—Blackburne was down ten points in the third quarter—and I had been all for the headlong hurling into the fray, in this case a grand and sweeping gesture, a trick play like a flea flicker. My father had shaken his head gently—he was always gentle when he disagreed with me—and said that we needed to stick to basics, trust our defense and our running game instead of trying to be something we weren’t. “Y’all keep throwing the ball and going nowhere, Matthias,” he said. “Play to your strengths. It may be boring, but it works.”
This had angered me, as my roommate was one of the wide receivers. Granted, he had uncharacteristically dropped one pass, but my father’s words had sounded treasonous. “Fritz is doing his best,” I told him sullenly. My irritation only deepened when Blackburne started running the ball and slowly but inexorably marched downfield, scored a touchdown with six minutes left, and then forced a turnover, running the ball back to win twenty-one to seventeen.
Looking from one lion to the other while I ran as if on an invisible treadmill, I did not know whether I was retreating to a place of safety to lick my wounds, or trying to gather myself together before heading back to school and facing what I had done.
The Blackburne School, like most boarding schools in America, has its own fiercely held traditions. Some are idiosyncratic, like the bonfire torches that freshmen—third formers in Blackburne parlance—must construct out of burlap, wire, and two-by-fours. Others are born out of a fundamental belief in certain core principles, a belief that borders on fervor. The honor code at Blackburne is rooted in such a belief. Its rules are stark as barbed wire against snow: you will not lie, or cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do. The punishment for being found guilty of violating the honor code is expulsion. And I had violated the code.
Running in place between the two lions, I didn’t hear Fritz coming down the drive. One moment, I was alone; the next, Fritz appeared from out of the trees that were beginning to soften with shade as the sun lowered to the horizon. He ran up, gasping, and stopped by the lion with the missing eye. “Ho, Matthias,” he said, and then bent at the waist, sucking in air through his mouth, hands at his hips.
“Ho, Fritz,” I said halfheartedly. It was our typical way of greeting each other, almost a call-and-response. Both of us had been teased about our Germanic first names when we started rooming together our fourth form year. The Huns, some of our classmates called us. At first we ignored the nickname, and then we gave in to it. Apart from being a rather mild joke at our expense, it was now an identifying label, another thread in the fabric of our class. Daryl Cooper was called Diamond, Jay Organ was Beef, and Fritz and I were the Huns. Such tags were a sign of acceptance, even approval, and they often had odd effects on those who bore them. One morning when the clock alarm went off and I was slow to hit the snooze button, Fritz looked over the rail of his upper bunk and stared blearily down at me. “Ho, Matthias,” he said. I looked up at him. “Ho, Fritz,” I said. And that was that. People outside of all-male boarding schools might snigger about the close relationships that develop between boys, imagining some sort of fervid buggery in the basements of the classroom buildings or the shower stalls of the dorms. While this wasn’t true, at least in my experience, students at Blackburne did establish intense, long-lasting friendships with one another, something that on a platonic level was most likely not experienced again until marriage. Fritz and I had that bond. We weren’t brothers; we were beyond that. He was perhaps the one person whose counsel and opinion I held higher than my own.
Facing Fritz at the lions, I realized with a soul-biting irony that I could tell him anything except what I had done, because aside from possibly being furious, he would also be ashamed for me, and I wouldn’t be able to bear it.
“You really ran here,” Fritz was saying. He was looking at me, waiting for a reply.