The House of War and Witness

by Mike Carey

  A divine irony: I have told you how during my stay in Pokoj I outfaced the threat of death with nothing but brazen rhetoric and parlour tricks. Yet it was in this very same abbey that I met with death again, and this time in a form which I could not avoid. It was much later in my life, and I was passing through Narutsin, a common enough occurrence on my commercial journeys, when on the sudden I became grievously ill. There being no hospital nearby, the monks took me in for the second time, to tend to me in what (it soon became clear) was my final illness.

  Ignacio had passed away long before; the father abbot presiding in Pokoj upon my arrival was none other than Tomas Lauzen, now risen in the church and much loved and respected. My second stay in the abbey was brief, and Tomas remained with me constantly, nursing me with simples and soothing balms just as I had once nursed him. He tried on several occasions during those last days to take my confession, uneasy at the thought that I might die with that old sin on my conscience, but I could not repent and therefore saw no point in confessing. Perhaps that is why I remained here after death – in this house that now stands where the abbey used to stand, instead of journeying on to God’s house.

  But God’s house stands everywhere. Who knows?

  There was a respectful silence after the ghost finished his story. His voice, which had been growing in animation throughout the telling, had swelled to fill the room and seemed to have woven his audience into a state of enchantment.

  Then as the applause broke out – soundless, because the hands of ghosts can’t disturb the air – he bowed deeply, pleased at the impression he’d made. Some of the dead now looked back over their shoulders at a gloomy shade who seemed somewhat less pleased. He was a tall, gaunt man in the robes of a monk.

  ‘I don’t think it was clever or honourable how you tricked me,’ this one muttered.

  ‘I wouldn’t have been able to trick you if God had taken your part,’ the Jew retorted.

  The other man – presumably the father abbot of Gelbfisc’s tale – seemed inclined to argue further, but the little girl stepped between them. ‘You know Drozde’s rules,’ she said sternly.

  ‘No arguments between us,’ the shade of an elderly woman took up. ‘No taking the teller to task for the facts of the tale. It’s not in the facts we live, but in the memories.’

  ‘Like birds in the branches of a tree.’

  ‘That any loud noise might scatter us.’

  The words came from all quarters, like the words of a liturgy. The abbot subsided at once. Several other phantoms had come between the two men, giving warning looks to both, but they had turned from each other and retreated from the confrontation. And by ones and by groups the other members of the strange assembly faded back into the shadows in the corners of the room, until all were gone saving only Magda and Drozde herself.

  ‘They get so carried away sometimes,’ the ghost girl said with childishly exaggerated annoyance.

  She laughed, made a face at Drozde, and then began to dance. The twists and turns of the dance were bizarre and extreme, and ended with the girl dropping to the floor, one leg stretched out in front of her and the other behind. She arched her back to look at Drozde with her face upside down.

  ‘You had to come,’ she said. ‘You had to let there be a telling. But I like it better when it’s just the two of us.’

  Once again Drozde had no answer to this. It was late and she was tired, and none of the ghosts had come close to giving her the explanations which she sought. The unreality of the last few hours had left her feeling frayed and irritable.

  ‘Good night, Magda,’ she said bluntly. ‘I’m going to bed.’

  The girl made a sour face. ‘Do you have to? All right, I know you do. But it’s so nice to see you like this!’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘You know. Like this’ She swept her hand up and down, gesturing emphatically to the whole of Drozde, from her head to her boots. ‘This is a special time, and it’s so short. Please come and talk to me again soon. Promise. Promise you will.’

  Drozde considered. She could avoid the ballroom entirely if she wanted to, but she was bound to run into Magda again, and she could already imagine the look of reproach and sadness on the girl’s face if she simply ignored her. Besides, it wasn’t as though she disliked the child. it was just that this whole situation was unfathomably strange.

  ‘Soon,’ she said, keeping her face neutral.

  The girl hugged her. Another first for Drozde, to be embraced by a spectre. The feeling was again like the passage of air across her body, but the girl smiled beatifically as she wrapped her arms around the woman’s waist. ‘I love you,’ she murmured.

  And was gone.

  9

  Klaes waited on Colonel August early the next morning, although he knew the report which he had to deliver would be found deeply unsatisfactory. He held to the principle that the more unpleasant a duty, the more important it was not to delay in performing it, and accordingly he rapped on the heavy wooden door of the colonel’s quarters at 8 a.m. sharp.

  His assiduity was to no end, however. A messenger had arrived at first light from Opole, where Henrik Dietmar, the fourth of the lieutenants under August’s command, had been assembling the detachment’s artillery. The big guns, and the final detachment that would bring the company to its full muster, were less than a day behind him. The messenger, a self-important artillery sergeant named Jursitizky, had much to relate on the subject of the guns and their possible deployment, and August remained closeted with him for most of the morning, pausing only to send out the adjutant with orders for Tusimov to set up a second camping-ground to the north of the house, and for Klaes to prepare another room upstairs for Dietmar and his new wife.

  The wives, Klaes remembered. They would all be here now. He had been at the mayor’s house when they arrived: the colonel’s lady and those of two of the other lieutenants. Of all three now, of course. He sighed inwardly. He already had to suffer a certain amount of ribbing on account of his youth – and also, from Tusimov at least, because of his father’s position as a small-town magistrate. The arrival of the wives would remind the other officers of another of their favourite reasons to mock him: the fact that he was the only one among them who was still single. And here he was, once again given the job of chamber-master for the married men.

  Heading for the main staircase to try to find another dry bedroom upstairs, he ran into a couple of privates squabbling in the hallway: Standmeier, he thought, and Fast, two of the quartermaster’s orderlies.

  ‘We have to bring an extra donkey!’ the older of the two was insisting. ‘He wants a hundred turnips and five sacks of oats. How else are we going to get that lot back here?’

  ‘How are we going to control three of those brutes without help? Toltz can come with us – or Janek; he’d go if we asked him.’

  ‘You going to charm him like you did Molebacher’s chopper? You’re a whore, Fast.’

  ‘Fuck off, Standmeier!’

  They stopped abruptly when they saw Klaes, and the older of the two saluted. The younger, slower off the mark, hung his head, red to the ears.

  ‘Private Fast, keep your voice to civilised levels. This is not a fish market,’ Klaes said to him. ‘And you,’ he snapped at the other man, his tone considerably sharper. ‘I don’t tolerate name-calling, nor baiting people for your own amusement. You’ve been given your orders: go and carry them out.’

  Klaes was pleased to see that Standmeier lost his swagger and even looked a little abashed. Both men saluted and marched smartly out of his sight. It was not really his place to reprimand them: they were not in his unit. But today of all days, exercising the authority of his rank went some way towards relieving Klaes’s feelings. He watched Privates Fast and Standmeier retreating in the direction of the stables, still arguing. If they were hoping to buy that many turnips – that much of anything – in the town, he wished them luck. The current quartermaster was efficient, Klaes would grant him that, but even so the man w
ould have his work cut out providing for all of them in a place like this. He fervently hoped they wouldn’t be here long.

  As he made his way somewhat cautiously upstairs (the treads were faced with marble, but he could feel the creaking of the wooden structure beneath) he heard women’s voices: the ladies were still up there. Most of the enlisted men never got to see them at all, and Klaes himself was not usually required to mix with them much; still, the atmosphere of a posting was subtly different when they were present. It wasn’t that they were demanding, exactly. Dame Osterhilis, the colonel’s wife, was well accustomed to the privations of military life, and she kept the other two in line. But there was always a certain awkwardness when they were around. Klaes himself was never quite sure how to address the ladies. He often thought Dame Osterhilis and Tusimov’s wife, Konstanze, looked down on him for some reason: his provincial accent, perhaps, or his Protestant origins.

  It was Dame Margarethe who met him in the upstairs corridor: Lieutenant Pabst’s wife, the youngest of the three, a thin, pale lady with freckles and a hesitant manner.

  ‘Oh, Lieutenant,’ she cried as soon as she saw him. ‘There is a bird in Konstanze ’s room. We cannot get rid of it. Would you be so kind?’

  It was a starling which must have got in through the roof somehow and was nesting above the beams. They had discovered it, apparently, when it flew into Dame Konstanze’s coiffure. She sat on the bed, grimacing and patting at her high-piled hair while Klaes chased the bird around the room and Margarethe watched from the corner with little cries of warning and encouragement. By the time he had wrestled open a window and shooed the starling through it (he would have to send someone up to deal with the nest later), Konstanze was asking if he could find her a looking glass. Klaes began obligingly to search through the closets and chests in the empty rooms, whereupon Dame Osterhilis appeared with a request for more blankets. Klaes had considerable respect for the colonel’s wife: he had never heard her complain in the face of discomfort or hunger, but she would not tolerate dirt. It appeared that some of the bedding she had been given had fungus growing on it.

  Klaes took on this new duty with good grace. Bowing low, and with heartfelt apologies, he took the offending blankets and escaped downstairs with them, promising to return in due course with better ones. The kitchen was empty except for Private Hulyek, Molebacher’s third orderly, who was sweeping the floor listlessly with a threadbare broom. The quartermaster had gone into the town to make some special purchases for the officers’ supper, the man said. Klaes gave the dirty blankets to Hulyek and ordered him to fetch some clean ones from the officers’ stores. Then he hurried back upstairs.

  He’d have to make over his own bedroom for Dietmar and his wife, he decided, and find a different billet for himself further down the corridor. He swept the floor and brought in another pallet, involuntarily checking his movements whenever he heard any of the ladies’ voices in the corridor outside. When he was finished he went back down for the clean blankets Hulyek had brought and was assailed by more female voices, chief among them the raucous laugh of the puppet girl, Drozde – there seemed no way of containing the woman! She was gossiping loudly with a group of camp followers, clustered around the well outside the kitchen. Klaes opened the door to issue a general reprimand, and recognised Dame Osterhilis’s maid, Carla, among the noisy group. His appearance broke up the party at once: the maid started upon hearing her name called and ran to him, curtsying nervously, while the others scurried about their business.

  ‘Take these to your mistress for me,’ Klaes told the girl, thrusting the blankets at her. He watched her go with the closest thing to satisfaction he had felt all day and, finally released, headed once again for the billiard room, which the colonel had designated as his headquarters.

  Jursitizky was leaving as he arrived, and he and Klaes met in the doorway. Looking past him into the big square room beyond, Klaes saw that the billiard table was scattered with papers, gloves, cups, even a punch ladle, set out to show the positions of town and river, the most likely points of approach of the Prussian army and the possible placement of the guns.

  ‘Let them come!’ August said to Jursitizky’s departing back, ushering Klaes in with an expansive gesture. ‘With a hundred pounds of cast iron at our backs, I don’t give much for their chances.’

  The colonel seemed to be in a genial mood. He insisted on sitting the lieutenant down while he heard his report, and listened attentively, nodding when Klaes mentioned the burgomaster’s near-total ignorance of national affairs as if this confirmed everything he had suspected. Klaes was as full and circumstantial as he could be. At the end of his recital the colonel looked at him with a raised eyebrow.

  ‘A very clear summary of the conversation,’ he said. ‘And now?’

  Klaes was confused. ‘Now, sir?’

  ‘By your account, Lieutenant, there is more to discover. The maidservant burst into tears, you say, and was dismissed from the room. And the mayor didn’t so much as ask how long we would be here, which is suspicious in itself. He used to be a butcher. He could have sought favour – and profit – by offering to provide us with meat. He could have tried to offload his neighbours’ clapped-out oxen on us. He did neither. Depend on it, the man is keeping his head down.’

  ‘I cannot imagine that any of them have suspect intentions, sir,’ Klaes ventured. ‘Their very ignorance, surely –’

  ‘– would not prevent them from trying to deceive us if they have something to hide,’ August interrupted him. ‘Go back to them, Klaes. I suggest you start with the girl; she seems the most likely to give something away. Sweet-talk her, man! Make love to her if you need to. She certainly won’t be a virgin.’ His lips twitched. ‘And your sabre will need to lose its edge somewhere.’

  Hot-faced, Klaes gave a stiff nod and got to his feet. ‘I’ll pursue the matter further, sir, as you instruct.’ He stalked out of the room, barely waiting to be dismissed. It was almost insubordination; he half-expected to be summoned back and rebuked. But it seemed nothing could dent August’s good humour today. As he carefully closed the door behind him, he could have sworn he heard the colonel laugh.

  Klaes was at least spared the need to go back into Narutsin immediately by the announcement only a few minutes later that the artillery party was approaching. The guns could be felt before they were seen or heard: the weight of the gun carriages and the drumming hooves of the horses pulling them made the ground shake.

  Their arrival was far more momentous than yesterday’s. August himself came out to see them: Lieutenant Dietmar galloping ahead, and in the lead cart, against all precedent, his young wife, cushioned and parasoled, attended by her maid and followed by a guard of ten men marching in step. Behind them came the guns. There were ten of the smaller cannons, six-pounders, and four impressive twelve-pounders, each with its own cart and an escort of a dozen men. And finally there was the monster, the thing that had caused the earth to shake.

  ‘This is Mathilde,’ Sergeant Jursitizky said with pride as the outsize cart rumbled to a halt. It had taken six horses to pull it. ‘She’s a twenty-four-pounder; you won’t find a bigger.’

  It was more like a siege engine, Klaes thought. He couldn’t imagine what use it would be here, out at the edge of the forest. But Dietmar wheeled his stallion and came up alongside the great cannon, patting its black iron barrel with affection. ‘She’ll see us right,’ he said. And August, standing to attention as the guns were arrayed in front of him, nodded in heartfelt approval.

  The great guns, it became immediately clear, required more attention than the ladies. Dietmar’s new wife, Dame Feronika, was handed over to Klaes to be taken to her quarters while everyone else, Dietmar included, clustered around the cannons. The young lady chattered to Klaes all the way to the house, mostly about the hardships of the journey and her concern for a silk robe that she feared had been damaged in transit. She had a high giggle and suspiciously golden hair. Klaes found himself comparing her unfavourably with the
maid at the Weichoreks’, who at least had something rational to say, even if she spoke out of turn. But that thought, recalling his new instructions, plunged him into gloom. Luckily Dame Osterhilis appeared to take charge of the new wife, who fell silent at the sight of her – in awe, Klaes supposed. He wished he could inspire anything similar.

  By the time he returned, the smaller guns had already been brought inside the house to a makeshift storeroom. The twelve-pounders were being housed in one of the stables, opposite the donkey stall, and Mathilde stood imposingly next door, a team of privates already hard at work building a shelter around her.

  ‘What are we meant to do with a gun that size?’ Klaes asked Lieutenant Pabst, who was supervising the building. He found Pabst a little more approachable than the other two; at least he didn’t routinely twit Klaes with his lack of experience. But the lieutenant could not give him an answer.

  ‘They do some damage, I can tell you that,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen twenty-four-pounders in action: a single ball from one of these could most likely level that old church in Narutsin.’

  ‘But as we’re not planning to level it, what use is the cannon?’ Klaes persisted.

  The older man shrugged. ‘Who knows? Never question the commanding officer, lad.’

  Klaes received an answer of sorts at supper that night. The colonel had instructed Molebacher to cook a special meal for the officers and their wives, and Molebacher had excelled himself: fennel and mushroom soup, veal with cream sauce and chestnuts. Even the wine was good, although not remotely comparable in quality to the brandy he had been served at the burgomaster’s house the previous day.

  ‘So, Dietmar,’ Tusimov said over the veal. ‘What’s the story with your new mistress?’

  Dietmar, whose temper was uncertain at the best of times, turned scarlet. His wife went pale. Tusimov addressed her before Dietmar could speak.

  ‘Don’t fear, madam! It’s just my rough tongue; the rapscallion loves you too well to stray! But for all that, he has another love. Big girl. Made of metal. Name of Mathilde?’