by Mike Carey
32
They took Klaes to the room where the villagers had been held. It was high up and towards the back of the house, but not at the very back. It had been chosen because it faced no outside wall, and therefore had no windows.
Sergeant Molebacher, shining in the colonel’s favour, presided over Klaes’s incarceration. But he made a great deal, first, of inspecting the walls and floor for soundness. ‘This is a desperate man,’ he told Private Standmeier. ‘If he were to get loose, it would be a bad day for all of us. You watch him close, Private. Watch him close and careful.’
‘I will, Sarge,’ Standmeier promised. ‘He’ll not get past us.’
Molebacher turned to Klaes and smirked. ‘Then I give you goodnight, Lieutenant,’ he said. ‘And trust your lodgings are to your satisfaction, sir, you being a man of delicate breeding.’
‘Sergeant,’ Klaes said. ‘This will rebound on you and it will destroy you. Whatever you think you’ve achieved, you’re a fool and your wretched lies will come to nothing.’
Molebacher only laughed, though his big hands balled into fists and his shoulders tensed. ‘Do you think so, sir? Well, I don’t have the benefit of your education, but it seems to me as it’s you that’s come to nothing. Not that that was so very long a journey from where you were, so to speak. The wonder wasn’t that you fell so hard, it was that you had anywhere to fall from. If you’ll take my advice, sir, then rather than getting on your high horse with me, you’ll look to yourself. Look to your soul, Lieutenant, and think on your mistake.’
‘My mistake?’ Klaes’s tone was mild – he wasn’t troubled by the sergeant’s barbs since he had come to broadly similar conclusions.
‘You got in my way,’ Molebacher said simply. ‘You made an enemy of me, sir – and whatever your rank and whatever your birth, that was a reckless thing to do.’
‘Yes,’ Klaes said. ‘I see that. But still, here we are, and we have to make the best of it.’
‘Not for very long,’ Molebacher said. And they left him in the dark.
There was an interim time, a hiatus. Drozde felt she could not move until the moon had gone down, the last of the cooking fires had been doused, the last of the soldiers had staggered off to sleep.
She had gone back to the camp to procure a bayonet, which was an easy enough thing to find and would probably be better suited to the task at hand than a pocket knife. Then she retired to her own tent to wait out the time until she judged it safe to proceed.
She did not sleep, but she did dream.
A procession of images moved past her waking eyes as she lay in her tent, on a mattress of damp ticking. Her sister Semilie first, sitting beside her in a summer meadow with a half-finished daisy chain in her busy hands. The memory was so vivid that Drozde could hear the words the two of them said to each other. ‘You won’t ever go away, will you, Darozh?’ ‘No, Sem, I’ll never go away.’ Because at five years old Semilie prattled every last word that was spoken to her back to her dada, and if dada knew what was in Drozde’s heart he’d break her legs. Better to speak that easy lie, and take the chance of breaking Sem’s little heart.
Her mother next. At a table, in a room without a candle, lit only by a waning fire. Working a spinning wheel while Drozde fed her flax. The old woman did no weaving any more. Arthritis had taken the strength and dexterity from her hands, which had once been so cunning they could make a zigzag pattern on a backstrap loom just by shifting her weight against the rope and forcing the shuttle back on its own base. But now spinning was all she could do. She sold the thread at market, wrapped on spindles made from branches Drozde cut and trimmed and sanded smooth. Other women wove it.
And finally the dead girl, Agnese, whose fate might so easily have been Drozde’s own. Her thoughtless, animated face as she talked about her dreams of this man or that man raising her up from poverty and giving her the things she had told herself she needed. That was life, in small – her own life, or anyone’s, not just Agnese’s. You spent it grubbing desperately for the physical things that would prolong it. For food mainly, and then if you were lucky enough to be fed, for shelter. And all the time in between you spent dreaming of places you couldn’t go, and things you could never have. You used it up trying to fit yourself into the spaces that would work, instead of unfolding yourself into the space that was yours and then seeing where that took you.
The space that was hers seemed very small now, and contracting quickly. But there was time, still, to set her shoulder against the crushing weight of these events and push. She had to believe that, or else lie here and let all that was left of her life become a whispered tale in a ruined house.
When the horn sounded for the change of watch she got up, put her dress on again over her shift, slid her sturdy, calloused feet into her boots and went to kill the colonel.
Most of the men were still awake, talking in their tents before sleep, but there was no singing. Only a murmur of conversations in which the individual words were lost, blending into a tonic note of unease and querulous question.
Nobody called out to her or seemed to notice her pass-ing, but Drozde pressed the steel of the bayonet flat against her thigh as she walked, her shoulders squared. She would look, she hoped, as though she were only holding her skirts down against the wind. The shadows would hide everything else.
The black bulk of the house rose before her, occluding half the sky. Its outline was clear: an area of solid darkness surrounded on all sides by an area where the dark was punctured by a milky scatter of stars.
A hundred feet from the front door Drozde slowed to a halt. She was looking up and to the left, at a patch of sky over the abbey ruins. Something red hung there. Brighter than most of the stars, and bigger, with a spreading tail. It did not move from its place, but looked as though it was frozen in the midst of violent, rushing progress. A shooting star that had paused for breath.
Drozde mouthed a word, naming what she saw. She had known the word before, and she knew in principle what it meant.
Comet.
There were all sorts of stories about them – mostly about how they portended some form of disaster, or spoke up about murder by hanging over the houses of the guilty. To Drozde, though she was no sceptic, the realm of stars seemed too far removed from the world they lit for any such conversation to be possible. But unless she was very much mistaken this was an omen of disaster that could not be denied.
She picked up her skirts and ran on into the house. She must have dropped the bayonet, but she had no memory of hearing it fall. Her half-formed plans had fallen along with it.
In the ballroom, her arrival prompted a condensation of ghosts. She walked through them heedless of their edges and boundaries, until she found the one she was looking for. Ermel. The woman who had passed herself off as a soldier to save the boys she loved from being parted.
‘Is it now?’ she demanded, without preamble. ‘Is it tonight?’
The woman seemed confused. She looked at the spirits around her, as though hoping for a cue, before turning back to Drozde with a shrug of apology. ‘Is what?’ she asked. ‘I’m sorry, Drozde. I don’t understand.’
‘You said you rode over the border on the night after the night the comet came,’ Drozde said, gesturing impatiently. ‘I see a comet in the sky tonight, but is it the same one? Is tomorrow the last day before the war begins? Is that the day you came, or – or will come, or keep on coming, or however this works for you? Is it now, Ermel, or is it some other time? Tell me!’
The woman stood with her arms at her sides and her lips half parted. Her face showed a great eagerness to answer Drozde’s question, but no words came. She only shook her head, to indicate that she could not help.
‘Will somebody answer me!’ Drozde cried. Her voice sounded indecently loud in the big, empty room; in the big, empty night.
‘It’s now,’ Magda said.
Drozde looked down at her in astonishment. She hadn’t imagined that Magda understood any of this, and certainly she
hadn’t intended to discuss such serious matters with a child. But the solemn, sorrowing look in the girl’s face gave her pause. ‘You know this?’ she demanded. ‘You know it to be true?’
‘Of course I do,’ Magda said indignantly. ‘This is how it always happens. I come here all the time, because of Amelie and because of you, and it’s never any different. You come with the soldiers, you meet Anton, you have your big fight with fatface and then you die. And it’s because of the war, so that’s how I remember there’s a war. Because of you dying in it.’
Drozde stared, wide-eyed.
‘It all happens tomorrow,’ Magda summed up. ‘The soldier who went off on the big white horse comes back on a different horse, and then it all happens.’
‘But what?’ Drozde demanded. ‘What happens then? Tell me everything, Magda!’
‘No.’ The voice that cut in was cold and stern. And although she’d never heard it – never really heard it, as she did then – she knew it with a terrible intimacy. She turned, although she wanted very much not to, and found herself staring into her own eyes.
‘She’s told you as much as she can,’ ghost-Drozde said. ‘And more than she was meant to. Go away, now, and do what you must.’
‘I …’ Living Drozde floundered for words, outraged at this brusque dismissal. ‘I don’t want you here. I don’t want to look at you. I need to talk to them.’
‘But they talk mostly to me,’ ghost-Drozde pointed out, taking in her spectral flock with a fling of her hand. ‘They only know you for a handful of days; I’m with them forever. The things that you were told are the things that I was told, and I was told too much.’
‘But what is too much?’ This was the father abbot, Ignacio. And though his tone was mild he stared at Drozde – at living Drozde – with a fixed intensity.
‘Good question,’ Drozde’s ghost acknowledged. ‘You know it’s too much when you find you can’t move from your place any more. Too much is the lantern that blinds the rabbit, so he stands in place and lets you bash his brains out. Or the candle flame the moth flies around until its wings burn.’
‘You’ve been around me too long,’ Ignacio said with a sigh. ‘You use my rhetoric now. She needed to be told the time was short.’
‘And now she knows,’ ghost-Drozde said. ‘So now she should bugger off and get working.’
‘Don’t fight,’ Magda pleaded desperately. ‘Please don’t fight. I can’t bear it. I love you both so much. This little bit where you’re alive is my favourite favourite out of everything, but it spoils it if you fight.’
She looked from each of the Drozdes to the other, holding that same expression of earnest pleading. After a few strained moments, the ghost-Drozde reached out to ruffle Magda’s hair – and some ruffling took place, although the palm of the woman’s hand slid past and through the crown of the girl’s head. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘And I’m done. Unlike you, Magda, I hate this time. I only come here because it needs such delicate managing. It exhausts me, and I’m always glad when it’s over.’
‘But when it’s over, you’re dead,’ the child mourned.
Drozde couldn’t help herself. She turned and fled.
A time followed – probably not a particularly long time – when she sat in the kitchen garden beside the dry well, rocking backwards and forwards, her arms folded around her body as though she was trying to hug herself close.
Then by degrees she came back into her right mind, and knew what had to be done. Or at least she had the rough idea of it. The hammer was about to fall. August’s soldiers would sweep over Narutsin, would level it to the ground. And the Prussians were coming too. From what Ermel had said, nothing would stand against them.
How to keep the village safe, when the whole world was bent to destroy it? The magician in Magda’s story had hidden something that was too big to hide simply by making his audience look the wrong way.
And all the other stories she’d been told … was there a single one of them that hadn’t been about lies and tricks and treacheries? Arinak tricking the demon. Gelbfisc tricking Father Ignacio. Thea tricking Eckert. Ermel tricking the recruiting sergeant. Petra Veliky tricking her way into the bed of the man she meant to kill.
To steal the moon was a rare thing if you could do it. To put it back in place again afterwards rarer still. But really, when you put on a performance, people mostly saw what you told them to see.
At last, when she had as much of it in her mind as her mind would hold, she rose up and went, out of the house and out of the gates. The roads were not safe at night, any fool knew that, but at least there were roads and she knew the direction. By starlight she walked the three miles to Narutsin, shuffling her feet like a baby’s feet to keep from falling.
Before dawn, even, she heard the hoofbeats behind her. She stepped off the path into the dark of the trees and watched Lieutenant Tusimov ride by. Only after he was gone did it occur to her that she might have set a trap for him on the road. Tripped him and broken his neck, and hidden the body in the trees. But the colonel’s horse would have wandered back to Pokoj, unless she killed that too, and another messenger would have been sent.
And it would not have served in any case. The war was about to break, the way a storm breaks. Tusimov’s death couldn’t hold off that greater calamity, or turn it from its course.
The three miles seemed more like thirty, but as the sun rose above the trees she came into the main street.
She waited there while the village woke. A man came out of his door into the street, saw her and went back inside. His wife came next, two children peering from behind her skirts. Then the door was closed again. Elsewhere curtains twitched. Shutters parted by a hair’s breadth and then closed again as though they were breathing.
It was a woman who came out to her, at last. A big woman, her fists swinging at her sides. Her face was like a piece of scraped hide and her shawl shifted as she strode like the sail of a yawl in a high wind. She stopped only when her face was right up against Drozde’s face, their eyes implacably locked.
‘This is no place for you, bitch,’ the woman said, in a voice of flint.
‘I came to talk to—’ Drozde began.
The woman swung her fist and Drozde went down. It was a solid punch, delivered to the side of her head. Lights danced behind her eyes, and insects whined in her ears.
Drozde could fight like a man when she had to. Had indeed fought against men, hand to hand, when no better options were available. What she had never done, before now, was to submit passively to a beating. Her instinct, when her head stopped ringing, was to get back up on her feet, thresh this hulking harridan back into her own front parlour and then hitch up her skirts and piss on her. But she collected herself slowly, carefully, and stood again. Her attacker was no longer alone. Others were coming in a slow trickle from the houses on both sides, lining up beside her.
‘I came—’
The second punch was delivered left-handed, so it didn’t hurt so much. It still knocked Drozde to the ground, but this time she was quicker to rise again.
‘I need to talk to the mayor,’ she said, her voice slurred because her lower lip was split and already starting to swell.
The woman flexed her right hand, which was presumably still hurting from the first punch. But the next blow came from beside Drozde, and she didn’t see who delivered it.
That one really hurt.
Drozde was able to sit up after a moment or two, but not at first to stand. While she was still trying, the small crowd that had been forming around her became a larger one. If they all took it into their heads to join in, she probably wouldn’t get out of this alive. But now there was a flurry from off to one side. The ranks of the crowd parted for a moment. Then hands were under her arms, lifting her. The woman who had hit her first had her right hand raised again, ready to take another turn, but she lowered it uncertainly.
‘This must stop,’ Dame Weichorek said. Bosilka Stefanu said nothing, but the two women stood to eith
er side of Drozde like a military escort, defying the crowd.
‘She’s a whore,’ the raw-faced woman said. ‘A soldier’s bedroll. I wouldn’t spit on ’un!’ Although having delivered that verdict she did spit, into the dirt at Drozde’s feet.
‘When my son was taken down bloody off that engine,’ Dame Weichorek said, ‘it was whores who tended him and washed his wounds. This whore included. You will not touch her again, Denina Luce. Not unless you want to fight with me, too.’
‘And with me,’ Bosilka said.
‘You!’ The woman sneered. ‘You’re not but a girl. A smack would blow you away!’
Bosilka held up her hand. She held a chisel with a wicked, narrow blade. ‘You’d have to land the smack, though,’ she pointed out mildly.
‘There’ll be no smacking, and no carving,’ Meister Weichorek said. He arrived in the middle of the throng, red in the face and huffing, still trying to tie up the string at the neck of his shirt. ‘Are we animals? Are we turned into animals? Stand away, and give her some room.’
‘We should send a message to those bastards,’ a man said, from the foremost row. ‘Send her back to them all cut, like a—’
Weichorek whipped his head round and stared into the man’s face, unblinking. Though he said nothing, his face was the face of a man whose next word, whose next action, could be anything. The crowd backed off a pace, and with averted gaze or hands clasped in front of them as though they were standing in church, variously signified their acceptance of the burgomaster’s authority.
Weichorek turned to Drozde. He was trembling with the effort of self-control. ‘I’m sorry, madam,’ he said, ‘that you were subjected to this. It shames us all. What can I – what can any of us – do for you?’
Drozde wiped her bloody mouth. ‘You can listen to me, Meister Burgomaster, if you don’t mind. I’ve got something to tell you that’s very important. Important to all of you.’
They walked to the burgomaster’s house, with the crowd first parting for them and then drifting along behind them. Dame Weichorek shut the door on them decisively, and then asked Bosilka to make a tisane while she brought cloths and cold water to bathe Drozde’s swollen face. Meister Weichorek himself stood solemnly by while these things were done. And once Bosilka had returned, Drozde told all three of them what she had to tell. It wasn’t easy, with her cut lip swollen and stinging and the taste of her own blood in her mouth, but she slogged on to the end.