The House of War and Witness

by Mike Carey

  With the edge of his penknife, using the cover of another book as a rule, he carefully excised the page and began again. To be forgotten and ignored by those who came after him seemed to him a terrible thing, but to be remembered as an imbecile would be worse still.

  4

  Afternoon gave way to evening.

  Once more within the walls of Pokoj, Drozde sat on the table, her tired feet dangling, and watched Sergeant Molebacher build his kitchen. As she’d expected, he’d been pleased by the facilities and by the storeroom which would be his new quarters. Whether he was glad to see her too, and had forgiven her for disappearing that morning, she could not tell. His face was impassive as always, his only greeting a nod and an order to follow him inside. Drozde had taken care to give him her sweetest smile before going to check on her trunk: to her enormous relief, it was still where she had placed it, squarely on the bed of the largest cart, wedged between sacks of grain and extra bedding. After that her main concern had been to get the puppets safely out of the rain and into their new resting place, and she followed the quartermaster willingly, allowing him to make his own way to the kitchen. The orderlies lit the way for him with torches, and if there was any strange sound in the corridors it was drowned out by their excited voices, loud with good cheer at the prospect of a cooked meal and a night indoors.

  Drozde waited until Molebacher had set the men to work and departed for a closer inspection of the other rooms before vanishing downstairs with her trunk. Though she knew that it was of no interest to him, she was always careful to avoid drawing Molebacher’s attention to where she kept her theatre. He had a prodigious memory, both for details and for grudges, and Drozde was never entirely certain which impressions would sink through his mind without a trace, and which resurface to be used to his advantage when time and opportunity served. So she erred on the side of caution, reasoning that it never hurt to think ahead. She was prepared to stay with Molebacher for a goodly while, but if she ever had cause to rethink that position she wanted to leave him no opportunity to take hostages.

  In the basement she allowed herself a few minutes to check on the puppets’ condition. They had mostly survived the journey undamaged: there were some scuffs and cracked limbs, a little flaking of the paint, but nothing she couldn’t fix. The only real casualty was a coquette, which had somehow been trapped beneath the theatre. Her nose was broken and two long, deep scratches scored her face. She must have become wedged against a loose nail, Drozde reasoned, though she could not see one, either on the bottom of the trunk or protruding from the wooden framework of the theatre. The scarred coquette was a real blow, but she would have time to repair her later, and she shouldn’t stay down here any longer than she had to. Swallowing her dismay, she went upstairs to tend to her more troublesome charge.

  Molebacher had his advantages. As a sergeant – and a quartermaster sergeant, at that – he had a higher status than her previous lover, a mere private named Janut Frisch. Combined with his physical size and strength, this made Molebacher far better able to protect her on the occasions when she was unable to make shift for herself. That he was unprepossessing didn’t trouble Drozde overmuch. True, a big man working in a hot kitchen will tend to sweat a great deal, but Sergeant Molebacher was morbidly conscious of this fact and washed more often than most of the men Drozde had known. She approved of this. Rutting with a dirty man increased the risks both of disease and of pregnancy, since the atomies of nature would swarm on such a man, and nobody knew what they might quicken.

  Underneath a blanket, Molebacher was no worse than any of Drozde’s previous companions, and better than some. He only occasionally forced the issue on nights when she was not inclined, and she was gradually training him out of this habit by lying like a plank whenever he tried it, which usually made him lose interest. Granted he was rough and had no interest in pleasing her, but these were failings so common as to be almost expected, and Drozde took them in her stride.

  Private Frisch, by contrast, had been inclined to raise his hand to her, and had stuck fast to that religion through all her efforts to dissuade him. He beat her when he was in his cups, which was at least one night in two, and whenever he saw her talking to another man. When Drozde had raised the possibility of ending their relationship, he beat her again and assured her that she was his property until the day he died.

  So Drozde had applied her best efforts to hasten that day, the weapon of her choice being a puppet show.

  Frisch was a Pomeranian – the only one in the company, so far as Drozde knew. Bearing this in mind, she included in one of her Sunday night revues a comedic item about the propensity of Pomeranians to fuck livestock. Her marionette hero started with a goat, but being unable to satisfy the goat with his incredibly small manhood, he reduced his ambitions by gradual degrees until he finally found his soul-mate in an unfastidious mouse.

  Most of her audience loved this conceit and cheered the puppet on lustily. Frisch, on the other hand, took exception both to the content and the presentation. He tore the blanket behind the toy theatre down to get at Drozde and commenced to beat her with the butt of his musket.

  The rest of the audience wanted to see the end of the sketch, not to mention the still more obscene and scurrilous material with which Drozde usually concluded her performances. They hauled Frisch off her and gave him a drubbing from which he never fully recovered.

  It wasn’t intended to be so severe – each soldier landed no more than two or three kicks. But a man receiving the frustrated aggression of forty or fifty other men will not often come out of it intact. Frisch lost an eye and the use of his right arm, alongside a number of other injuries that were less easily classifiable. He was cashiered at the next town they came to and turned loose to fend for himself. He assumed that Drozde would come with him, and was astonished when she told him that she was staying with the company.

  Frisch bellowed threats at her and called her whore. Drozde shrugged. She reminded him that she’d given him the choice of letting her go of her own free will. If they’d stayed together, there was no doubt in her mind that one night he would have gone too far and left her either dead or crippled. She gave him just so much mercy and consideration as he would have given her.

  And she didn’t rob him, though she could have done so very easily, of the seven silver groschen that were his severance pay. She only took one of Frisch’s two tobacco pipes, made of white meerschaum turned rich orange from age and use, and a purse of Spanish tobacco, which she used to worm her way into Sergeant Molebacher’s favours.

  At the time she considered it the best bargain she’d ever made. She was puzzled, in fact, that a sweet billet like Molebacher had not been snatched up long before. The quartermaster’s doxy got a free pass to the quartermaster’s kitchen, after all. Bread and cheese and butter, eggs mashed with potatoes, beet soup, chicken and fried parsnips – and small beer, at the very least, with every meal. The food was good, and it was plentiful.

  And Molebacher himself didn’t seem so bad: in his good moods he could be convivial and open-handed, and even when angry was not one of those men who went from words to blows without marking the difference. Yet for all this, she had never seen him with another woman. It was said that Alis had dallied with him for a time, but that had been over a year before Drozde joined the company, and the other woman never spoke of it now. Drozde was aware of the rumours that circulated about the quartermaster’s dark moods, but she had never given them much credence. Molebacher traded on his image as a fierce and irascible taskmaster, and being a performer herself, she knew the importance of maintaining a reputation.

  It wasn’t long, though, before she realised that the rumours were true, though not in the ways she had expected. Molebacher’s viciousness manifested itself in small, stinging ways, more like the bites of flies than the heavy, inevitable impact of Frisch’s fists. He had a sense, sure and unerring, for what would hurt her. Once he had tripped on his way into the kitchen and Drozde had laughed at him. That ev
ening he made a double portion of stew and ate it all himself, slowly, while she watched.

  Though far less dangerous, these little cruelties exhausted and frustrated her more than the beatings had ever done. At least she had known where she was with Frisch: she had known when he was in a rage, when to hide from him, when a few well placed words would be enough to soothe him. More importantly, she had known how to escape him when she needed to. Molebacher was an altogether more uncertain quantity, and his small acts of spite, arbitrary and unpredictable, weighed on her in spite of herself.

  Living with him wasn’t easy. But still, Drozde felt, Molebacher’s advantages outweighed his drawbacks, considerable though they were. Until that changed, she was content to stay with him. Being a realist, however, she knew well enough that the yea or nay was unlikely to lie with her. Charles of Austria was dead; his daughter Maria Theresa ruled now, and in spite of her father’s best efforts during his life to cajole, bribe and browbeat the rest of Europe into allowing an archduchess to fill an archduke’s place, there were murmurs from Prussia that such an arrangement defied both law and decency. Everyone said war was coming – if not with Prussia then with Naples or Turkey or Russia or even England (although the English seemed an unlikely enemy, unless they found some way to sail their ships over the Beskid mountains).

  If war came, the company would move again, probably to fight on foreign soil. The wives would be sent home or to lodge at Oskander barracks outside Wroclaw. The camp followers could follow or not, as they saw fit, but armies on active manoeuvres moved quickly and moved far. If the women were separated from the company inside Prussia, they would have to sink or swim by themselves, unable even to speak without their burring Vilamovian or Sudöster German betraying their origins.

  In those circumstances Drozde would probably detach herself from the army and go back to civilian life, with all that that implied. She certainly wouldn’t miss Molebacher, though she would be sad to lose his kitchen. But she had never been sentimental in such matters: hold on to a man past his usefulness and you let yourself in for all sorts of inconveniences.

  The quartermaster was fully occupied when she returned, so she sat on the table, keeping her feet out of the way as three of his orderlies – she didn’t know where the other three were – cleaned the floors and surfaces of the enormous room. Under Molebacher’s cold eye they swept, then scrubbed with stiff brushes, then rinsed with washcloths dipped in water to which lye had been added. Finally they sluiced with pure water from the well outside. Drozde moved from one quarter of the room to another in order to stay out of their way as they worked. They stepped through the ragged ghost on the floor many times, without noticing. Sometimes their doing so coincided with its repeated gesture, so it looked as though it was flinching away from them. It was an unpleasant sight, and Drozde turned her eyes resolutely in another quarter.

  Molebacher, with the complacency of ownership, ignored her, but one pair of eyes followed her wherever she went. They belonged to Private Fast, one of the orderlies. He was clearly smitten with her. His glances at Drozde were sidelong and flirtatious. He was a well built lad, with pleasingly symmetrical features, and since Drozde would have been saddened to see that pretty, thoughtless face flattened against a wall, or against the sergeant’s fist, she turned her back on the private and snubbed him utterly.

  After the cleaning came the unpacking. The big tureens and bowls first, stacked up beside the fireplace on a monstrous frame like a gun limber that Molebacher had designed and built himself. Then the smaller cooking pans and baking racks, the pewter plates and tankards favoured by the officers and the wooden trenchers used by the enlisted men. No knives, apart from those used in preparing the food. If a man wanted to cut his meat and bread, he provided the knife himself. Most did.

  The amorous Fast took care to set down most of the loads he carried very close to Drozde, and although she gazed resolutely in the opposite direction, she was certain he was still making eyes at her. It was annoying. The only way of avoiding this coming to a violent head would be to absent herself, and she still hadn’t eaten.

  Panniers of dried herbs were brought in too, in considerable numbers, for Molebacher was a great proponent of the French and Italian styles of cooking, which used flavoured sauces to hide the imperfections of other ingredients. The trend had reached Silesia some time ago but was still a rarity in military cuisine. Drozde liked it and encouraged Molebacher’s wilder experiments.

  She got to her feet at last and headed for the door. ‘Perhaps you’d like an escort for your lady, Sergeant,’ the incautious private offered, ‘to see her safe back to the tents.’

  Molebacher sighed. ‘You stupid little fucker,’ he said. And to Drozde, ‘Bring me Gertrude.’

  Drozde was content to do so. If Molebacher had meant to chastise this stripling with actual violence, she doubted that he would have raised the issue now. The quartermaster had the bulk and solidity of a glacier, and his reactions could be similarly sluggish. People who didn’t know him well often made the mistake of thinking him phlegmatic. In fact he just put more thought into his score-settling than most men, and the longer the reckoning took in the coming, the worse it generally was. But Gertrude, a cleaver with a fourteen-inch blade, was for showing off, not for using. Drozde took it down from where it had just been hung, on a nail over the fireplace, and brought it to the sergeant like an offering, in both hands.

  Molebacher took it from Drozde and stropped it, ostentatiously, on his forearm. Private Fast blanched a little. His two colleagues stepped hastily away from him, not wanting to be too close to the monstrous thing if it should be swung in anger.

  ‘You see this?’ Molebacher asked the young man.

  ‘Yes,’ Fast offered in a slightly tremulous voice. His hands twitched. He was clearly wondering whether to draw his pocket knife, the only weapon he carried that would be remotely of use in this situation (his musket requiring a minimum of twenty seconds to load and fire).

  ‘Her name’s Gertrude. And she’d like a kiss.’

  A few seconds of silence followed as the implications of this sank in with all present.

  ‘What?’ the orderly asked.

  ‘She wants you to kiss her. But she’s not a whore. She’s only just met you, and she wouldn’t dream of letting you get your tongue on her sharp end. Just give her a little kiss on the flat, there. Like you kiss your mum.’

  Fast looked at Molebacher to see if he was joking. Molebacher clearly wasn’t. And the other two orderlies were studiously looking elsewhere. There was nothing else for it. Knowing that this would be the talk of the camp before nightfall, he puckered up and did his duty. For the rest of this posting he’d be known as the man who kissed the sergeant’s chopper.

  ‘Now bugger off,’ Molebacher told him, giving Gertrude back to Drozde. She hung the cleaver back up on its nail. When she turned around, all three of the privates had vanished.

  ‘Too many men in this camp who can’t see past their own swollen balls,’ Molebacher muttered.

  ‘Shall I cut you some bread and cheese?’ Drozde asked him. He took the hint and handed her one of the sacks that he had brought in himself. It contained three small loaves, a roundel of goat’s cheese and an earthenware tub of butter wrapped in muslin.

  Filling her belly for the first time that day, Drozde considered her man with a more complacent eye. Still, there was something wrong with him this evening. She was getting better at reading his moods, and something in the set of his shoulders or the way that he ate – turned slightly away from her – warned her that all was not well. He was probably still angry with her for running off earlier that day. She sat and ate without speaking for a while, working out how best to proceed. If she confronted him directly he would only brush it off, and resent her still more for challenging him. If she did nothing, he would continue to brood until he eventually found some way to make her suffer down the line, long after she had forgotten that she’d ever offended him. No, the best response, she decided
, was to try and placate him now, before he had too long to contemplate revenge.

  ‘I should have stayed in the back with you,’ she sighed, laying her hand on his. He shrugged off her touch, but she affected not to notice. ‘Well, I was punished for my thoughtlessness. The cart jolted my trunk, and my best coquette was ruined.’

  Molebacher turned to face her now, his expression unreadable. ‘Leave your pretty things lying around and they will get broken, Drozde,’ he said with something of satisfaction in his voice.

  Drozde couldn’t decide if this meant that he was prepared to let things lie or not, but she did not raise the issue again, and they finished their meal in silence.

  5

  Lieutenant Klaes was a man of punctilious habits, and made no distinction between large and small commitments. The colonel had told him he was expected at the mayor’s at seven of the clock, so at ten minutes before the hour he was trotting smartly towards Narutsin’s main square.

  He noticed as he rode that the suspicious glances and dark frowns which had greeted the detachment’s arrival earlier that day were more pronounced now that he returned alone. Men scowled behind their hands as he passed, and any children who ran out to stare were quickly pulled back into doorways. Klaes realised that to these people, who probably had no more than one horse between them, his entrance must look like a deliberately ostentatious display of power, and he began to regret his decision to ride into the village.

  The mayor’s house was scarcely any bigger than Narutsin’s other dwellings, although the walls were made of clay bricks clad with plaster rather than clapboards, and the shutters on the windows still had most of their paint. Someone had built a yard in front of the house, extending a little way out into the street and surrounded by a low drystone wall. There were gateposts, but no gates; in the absence of a stable, he tethered his horse to one of the posts, wishing the poor beast a quieter evening than he anticipated for himself. A dozen or so chickens scratched in the dirt, watched by a single beady-eyed rooster.