by Mike Carey
Colonel August sat down, and indicated that Molebacher should sit too. But Molebacher had a very sure sense of how the colonel should be handled, and he didn’t take up the invitation at once.
He set down a basket on the table, with exaggerated reverence. ‘Saw these and thought of you, sir,’ he said, stepping back again. He clapped his hands together in a gesture he’d seen a Frenchman use once in a mess hall in the Low Countries. ‘Voilà! Bon appetit, Colonel, as they say in the Bourbon court.’
August unfolded the cloth cover from the basket and inspected the contents. A dozen slices of candied apple lay on a clean linen kerchief. The light from the low sun outside the window struck the lumps of sugar crusted onto the fruit and gave them a tempting lustre.
‘Thank you, Mole,’ August said. ‘Thank you very much indeed.’ His eyes were shining. Molebacher knew his commander – and his sweet tooth – very well.
‘I hear the French call their king the bonami, the well beloved,’ he said jovially. ‘Isn’t that so, Colonel? But love him or hate him, I doubt he dines on fruit as sweet as these are. A month in the syrup, they were. I was steeping them all through October. And they had your name on them, Colonel, right from the start. Strumpfel offered me three grosch for them, or an ounce of snuff, but I’d set them aside for you, and now I deliver them.’
‘Well, it was a kind thought,’ the colonel said. And Molebacher sat at last, having prepared the ground for what he had to say. But even now he went about it with indirection, trusting August to give him a suitable opening when the time came. The two men enjoyed a good understanding, based on the privations they’d undergone together, and it was not attenuated by the difference in rank. If anything it was strengthened, because befriending a man who was not even an officer made August feel that his humanity was of the transcendent kind that triumphs over social niceties. Though not at all sentimental himself, Molebacher encouraged and indulged the colonel’s sentimentality in this, both (as now) with gifts and with frequent reminders of how the two of them had been forged in the same furnace. He invented stories about occasions when Colonel August had shown him some peculiar favour, and recounted them loudly in the same way that a fisherman might throw out a stickleback in order to catch a pike.
‘So,’ he said now, ‘Lieutenant Klaes comes on, sir, does he not?’ Molebacher had heard the altercation between August and the lieutenant as he lingered outside the door, waiting for an appropriate moment to make his entrance. He was obliged to Klaes for drawing down the lightning, as it were. The colonel was never more expansive than when he had exercised his temper.
August grimaced. ‘Not as much as I’d hoped, Mole,’ he said. ‘To be honest, he hasn’t distinguished himself of late.’
‘No, sir? I’m sorry to hear it.’
‘I gave him a job to do, and it was simple enough. But not so simple as Klaes himself, it seems. He lets himself be led by the nose.’
‘Not a good quality in an officer, sir, certainly.’
‘And he treats these villagers with too much diffidence. Doesn’t close with them. Doesn’t make them feel him. I wanted him to turn them out with a stick, and he uses a feather.’
Quietly and neatly, as the colonel spoke, Sergeant Molebacher took a flask from the pocket of his jacket, unscrewed the lid (which turned itself into a cup) and poured out a generous measure of schnapps. He slid this across the table to August, raising the bottle in a salute.
‘Your health, sir.’
‘Yours. And devil take the bastard at the back!’
August emptied the cup in one, and Molebacher guzzled down a deep draught.
Thus encouraged, August told the sergeant the full story of Lieutenant Klaes’s researches, and Molebacher commiserated with his commander about the poor calibre of young officers these days. It was his place, though, to be both respectful and bluffly optimistic. ‘He only wants the sharp corners rubbing off of him, sir, and you’re the man to do it, I dare warrant. You’ll shape him, if he only listens to you.’
‘Perhaps, perhaps.’
Molebacher refilled the cup. ‘It is an issue, though, this business with the villagers. You must feel, sir, that recent events have proved you right. Give these people too much licence and they’ll always misuse it.’
‘Of course they will, Mole.’
‘I wonder, sir …’ Molebacher seemed to hesitate, but he was only waiting for permission.
‘Yes?’
‘There’s a matter that’s troubling me, sir. A matter of some delicacy – and as you know, I’m not really a delicate man.’
August laughed heartily. ‘You do yourself too little credit.’
‘No, sir. I’m a happy man with a knife and a frying pan in my two mitts. Or a gun, for that matter, for I’m no coward.’ He raised his hands, large and reddened, seamed with old wounds, and displayed them to their full effect. ‘But that’s just it. I think with these, sir, not with my head. So I was wondering if you could help me with a little advice.’
‘Tell me the facts of the matter, Mole.’
So Molebacher did.
25
The floggings were due to take place the next day, and everyone in the camp was tense, most with apprehension, but a few with excitement. Molebacher, Drozde knew, would be of the latter persuasion. She had seen him at floggings before. He took a kind of grim delight in the spectacle of it, engaging in macabre speculation over who would die, whose wounds would become infected, who was most likely to faint from the blows. Drozde hated it, and she would be damned if she was going to spend any time in his company tonight. She went out to the tents instead, in search of the other women. But Ottilie was with Frydek, and Libush (who had a dozen relationships to service to Drozde’s one) was nowhere to be seen.
There were campfires a-plenty, and Drozde would have been welcome at most of them, but where the company of the other women would have been restful that of the soldiers was likely to be boisterous and tiring. It might be enjoyable, but it was unlikely to distract her from the matters that were pressing on her mind, most of which related in one way or another to Pokoj’s invisible household of phantoms.
She needed to see them again, and to put her questions to them. Ermel’s story had finally convinced her of that. So she went back into the house, intending to go directly to the ballroom. She found Magda first, sitting in the love seat under the stairs, her ghost kitten curled up against her as she stroked the fur of its neck. The girl jumped up, and the kitten mewled in faint reproof as she tucked it under her arm.
‘Shall we go in, milady?’ Magda asked. She put on a haughty voice, holding out her crooked elbow to Drozde as though the two of them were old society ladies out for a stroll on the streets of Wroclaw.
Drozde fell in with the game, though it went against her mood more than a little. They walked on together, the woman putting on a gentlemanly swagger while the dead girl held up the train of an imaginary dress. ‘Tonight we talk on my terms, though,’ Drozde said, feeling the need to assert herself. ‘No stories until I say so. And I won’t say so until I’ve had some of my questions answered.’
‘All right,’ Magda said quickly. ‘I promise we’ll try. Unless it’s something … you know. Something we can’t talk about because we promised.’
‘As soon as we come to something you can’t talk about, I’m leaving,’ Drozde said grimly.
The ballroom was already full when they arrived, but the echoes raised by Drozde’s boots reverberated as loud and hollow as if she were the only one there. Ghost bodies did not muffle sound, and ghosts packed in together did not breathe or sniff or shuffle. Only when Drozde was right in the midst of them did they raise a murmur of welcome.
‘Well,’ Drozde said, ‘and good even to you too, all and some.’
‘Shall I be first?’ whispered a tall and stately man at her right shoulder.
‘No,’ Drozde said. ‘Not tonight. Tonight it’s my turn.’
Sighs and susurrations arose from all sides – expressions of w
onder and excitement. ‘Drozde’s story!’ the ghosts exclaimed. ‘Drozde will tell her story!’
‘Not Drozde’s story,’ she corrected them. ‘Drozde’s questions. Afterwards, if you’re still hungry for a story I’ll tell you one, but first there are things you have to tell me. Otherwise I’ll stop coming here and talking to you, and from what Magda said you wouldn’t want me to do that.’
Profound silence greeted her words, but the faces of the ghosts showed alarm and hurt. They took the threat seriously, and it didn’t leave them unmoved.
‘There are things we’re sworn not to say,’ Meister Gelbfisc pointed out. ‘But that’s not the worst of it. If the questions are about how we know you, and when we spoke to you before, then our answers will seem like nonsense to you.’
‘Those are my questions,’ Drozde said. ‘And I don’t see how the answers will be nonsense unless they’re lies.’
‘But if we try to tell the truth about things you’ve never known and never heard of, it will seem like lies. Most of what has happened to us since we died has been very different from what we knew in life. But the language we use is still the same. There is no tongue of the dead that we can learn, to speak about the doings of the dead. Perhaps there should be. But until there is, anything we say will be like …’ He paused, searching for a simile. ‘It will be like a boot many sizes too big for you, that you put your foot into and try to walk in anyway. And feel with each step both how foolish you must look as you walk and how hard it is to walk at all. And if someone asks you to dance …’ Gelbfisc shrugged eloquently. ‘Disaster.’
‘But I’m not asking you to dance!’ Drozde almost yelled. ‘I’m only asking you to explain something to me. Something that ought to be simple. You welcomed me into this place like a friend. Spoke as if you knew me. Used my given name as easily as if we’d all grown up in the same house.’
‘We did,’ Magda said. She was looking at the kitten again, head bent low over it, and the words were almost too low to catch.
‘And that,’ Drozde said, pointing to the child, ‘is what I need you to explain. How can you know me when I don’t know you? How can you tell me that I was here before when – my oath on holy Jesus – I’m certain that I never was?’
The ghosts’ response to Drozde’s words was curious and somewhat frightening. They multiplied. For a few moments as they murmured among themselves their numbers grew and grew, but without anyone either entering or leaving the room. It was as though each of the dead men and women was present many times in different parts of the room. Then they coalesced again, and Meister Gelbfisc turned – not to Drozde but to Magda – with a brisk smile.
‘We think she should hear about the torc,’ he said. ‘From first to last. And then you could perhaps show her …’
‘Yes!’ Magda set Amelie down so she could clap her hands. There was no sound when her palms met – and the kitten, once out of her grip, attenuated and dissolved into a ribbon of kitten-textured air. But when the girl bent again and touched it, it resumed its former shape and clambered daintily back into her arms.
Gelbfisc turned to Drozde, hands clasped formally over his chest. ‘This may further provoke you, madam,’ he said, ‘but I must take that risk. The best answer we can give to your questions must once again take the form of a story.’
Drozde uttered a bitter oath.
‘But it is not the story of any one of us,’ Gelbfisc assured her hastily. ‘And it’s not for ourselves or each other that we tell it. So we’ll tell it plain and spare, and then when the story is done we will show you something that may help you to understand how we live.’
‘And answer my question?’ Drozde demanded.
‘And in part, within the limits of a solemn promise we all of us made, answer your question.’
Drozde breathed hard. ‘Very well, then,’ she said. ‘But if I don’t like the answer, I won’t come back.’
A silence from all around, and then a shrug from Gelbfisc. ‘Even that,’ he said, ‘though it’s not phrased as a question, is hard for me to answer. The things we know are sometimes a burden – the things we can’t know, a bigger burden still. But that’s in the nature of what we are. Step forward, Petra Veliky.’
A ghost advanced out of the silent assembly to stand before Drozde. A woman, young and strong, with broad shoulders and an angular face. Her left cheek was pocked, the right one clear, but despite this asymmetry there was a certain beauty in her dark eyes and her full lips. She was no more than five and twenty, Drozde thought, possibly younger. She wore a peasant’s smock but a sword hung at her waist. Her clothes were like a man’s clothes, shirt of sack and leggings and boots of leather.
‘I am Petra Veliky,’ the woman said. ‘Of Praha.’
Petra Hiskil I was too, but my maiden name is the one I choose to go by. I lived a short but a blessed life, because I heard the word of Jan Hus and accepted it into my heart. If all of you could do the same, you would better bear the burdens you sometimes complain of.
Hus taught us that the lowest peasant who lived in virtue would be a great lord in Christ’s kingdom – and the lords would be lower than dogs, because they wallowed like pigs in wealth made by the labour of others. And the lowest of the low would be the priests and bishops, because they’d used the word of Christ only to make themselves rich when they should have used it to light the world.
But Hus died, burned by order of the pope because the pope hated the truths he spoke. And Žižka who was Hus’s shield and spear died too. Then we became Taborites and followed Kanis and Pelhrimov, who burned with a righteous fire. It was a strange time, with many madmen claiming to be prophets and many murderers wearing the robes of saints. The land was afire, the spires and the steeples awash with blood and the dogs dining daily on bishops and barons – but we, we alone, held to the pure word.
All things we shared, and nothing owned. We lived as Adam and Eve had lived in Eden, and as men and women will live again when Christ returns. Unless Hus was Christ, which some of us thought. Perhaps Christ comes to every generation, and is killed again and again until his time comes.
Three crusades the church sent against us, and every last one of them left their bones in the fields and forests of Boheme. We did not spare them, but left God to sift their souls for any grain of good. And there were, besides, counts and princelings who attacked us either because they were blind enough to see our freedoms as sin or because their priests told them so and they were too cowardly to think for themselves.
We always gave better than we got. Kanis had a teaching, which was for a hard word give a blow and for a blow give sword and fire. Our neighbours had to learn that we were holy and not to be touched. So we went against them often, and when we did, whether to punish them for raids against us or to strike first against those who were screwing up their courage to raid, we had a name for what we did: spanilé jízdy, the beautiful ride. Most times it would be a mass of us, but sometimes only a few. And once – only once – I rode alone.
It was against another teacher, Domazlic, who called himself Hussite and Adamite and Taborite and many things besides. He was none of those, but he was a great fighter and had hurt us numerous times when our foragers met his – for we did not farm but lived off what the land would give us, and that mainly meant stealing from the farms of others.
Domazlic, as I say, had done us harm, and Kanis had decided that he must be killed. But his camp was too well defended to fall to a raiding party, and we would lose a great many warriors in trying. So he said I should go into Domazlic’s camp – he called it a village but it was only shelters made of woven twigs in the middle of a wood – and pretend to be one of his followers. Then I should entice him to lie with me, and kill him while he slept.
I agreed to do this. I said we shared everything, and that meant our bodies too. Marriage as the church knew it was a sin, not a sacrament. So I thought nothing of using my sex to bring a man low. If anything I thought it made me more like our mother Eve, who when she persuaded
Adam to eat the apple surely used more than words.
And Domazlic was a man of strong and promiscuous desires, so the plan worked well. I walked into the camp without challenge, and walked into his bed not more than seven nights after.
When he was exhausted from enjoying me – and I nearly as spent as he! – he fell into a heavy sleep. I had not brought my knife into the tent, because he might have guessed my purpose, so I used his own sword to kill him, driving it downwards into his throat at an angle so that if he woke before he died he wouldn’t be able to cry out.
I wept afterwards. It was strange. I hadn’t known Domazlic, but his lovemaking had been sweet and fierce and I was sorry that he was dead. I wanted to remember him, so I took from around his neck a torc of gold that he wore. It was a beautiful thing. Probably it came from some great lady’s jewel chest, but the metal was thick and solid and it looked as well on a man.
I took it to remember him by, as I said, and it was all I took from the place. I slipped from his tent before the moon was down, and was gone. What his people thought when they found his body I know not and care not. I’d done my work as God willed it and despite the sadness I was mostly at peace.
But nothing went well for me after that – and particularly in my dealings with men I seemed dogged by misfortune. Every man I had an eye to went for some other woman, or used me and then left me, or worked me ill in some other wise. Much woe I had, until I met Prokop Hiskil and swore to him at an altar made of a sword crossed with a sickle, which was how we Hussite women were married.
But Prokop beat me near to death and left me in my blood when we’d been together only seven months. There was a baby inside me and he came premature because of the beating, so small and so sickly I was sure he’d die. I knew then that the torc I’d taken from Domazlic was cursed – which meant that Domazlic had had the powers of the devil and I’d been very right to kill him.
I prayed for guidance, and Hus himself came to me in a dream, with Jesus by his side. He told me to take the torc back to where it belonged and leave it there, and I’d be free of the evil.