by Mike Carey
They were by turns terrified and astonished. Meister Weichorek’s first question was how Drozde could know about the Prussians’ attack. ‘You said you overheard what your colonel was planning, and that I can understand. But you never said about the other part. Presumably you weren’t able to eavesdrop on a Prussian cavalry column?’
‘Do you believe in witches?’ Drozde asked baldly. She saw no use in walking around this problem.
Dame Weichorek did, emphatically. Her great-aunt had been one, she said, and had been able to heal people’s ailments with a laying-on of hands. ‘I wish she were here now,’ Bosilka observed glumly, unable to take her eyes off Drozde’s damaged face.
‘Well, then,’ Drozde said. ‘I’m a witch too, and my skill isn’t healing but knowing. Now I know this, and I know something’s got to be done about it. The colonel’s only waiting to hear word from Wroclaw, and then he means to come here and make of Narutsin a great pile of kindling and broken stone. Now, to the Prussians, saving your presence, Narutsin is nothing. But it’s the enemy’s nothing, the archduchess’s nothing, and they won’t be chary of you. We must avert these harms or lessen them, and I know a way to do it.’
She explained her plan. The two women and the one man stared at her as if she was insane.
But then Bosilka laughed and clapped her hands.
‘Oh, if only it might work!’ she cried. ‘If something so wonderful and silly and … and clever could carry!’
‘But it’s a terrible risk,’ Weichorek muttered, scratching his chin. ‘If we packed up our things now and left the village, we might avoid all this and let them kill each other.’
‘Aye, but old women and children don’t march as fast as soldiers,’ Bosilka pointed out.
‘And then there’s Jakusch!’ Dame Weichorek exclaimed. ‘And Martek. And Piek. And Jan. They can’t even stand after that whipping.’
‘Mayhap we could hide them somewhere,’ the burgomaster said, but he said it without conviction.
‘And then to leave our livelihoods behind, Berthold! Everything we own. Everything we know. What kind of life would we have, if we ran away?’
‘So we stand.’ Weichorek nodded. ‘All right. And then what?’
‘Then the world moves around you,’ Drozde said, ‘and you watch as your enemies trip and go sprawling.’
They talked on well into the morning. There were many more questions, and much dissension and debate, but by the time Drozde rose to leave they had filled in most of the vexing details that would – that might – bring Drozde’s grand design to fruition. Banks of cloud were rolling in from the west as she left the Weichoreks’ house, their dark bulk covering the sun. When she was halfway across the yard, she heard someone calling her name and turned to see Bosilka running towards her. She held something out to Drozde in both hands, like a child.
‘My father found it when he was going through his things,’ Bosilka said. There was a tremor in her voice, but she gazed at Drozde levelly. ‘I think – It’s yours, surely. Meant for you, I mean. Meant for you to have.’
It was the puppet-Drozde. Her wooden limbs slack and dangling, she smiled up from Bosilka’s palms. Anton had seen something in that smile, Drozde thought, and it had been his ruin. It occurred to her with sudden and overwhelming force that even if her plan worked, and everyone in Narutsin was saved, he would still be dead, and her smile the cause of it. She knew, really, that that was nonsense. Molebacher had killed Hanslo, not her. But for the barest moment his death seemed to blot out everything that she had ever done, and all the things she had still to do.
She accepted the puppet from Bosilka with a nod of thanks, not trusting herself to speak. And she turned her thoughts back to the living, because the dead were beyond her help.
33
Strangely, though he was helpless and awaiting execution, the time did not hang so heavy on Klaes’s hands as it had when he was waiting in Meister Weichorek’s closet. In some ways, indeed, he felt that he had come to the end of time. The unrelieved darkness in the windowless room cut him adrift from the cycle of night and day so that he floated almost like a child in utero, and the hopelessness of his position gave him a curious kind of peace. With nothing to be done, there was nothing that could touch him. He was only sorry that he had done more harm than good here, and that the determination to put things right had come at the very moment when the ability to do anything, for good or ill, was taken from him.
He found himself recalling a conversation he’d had with his father not long before he left for the military school in Villach. The unbending old man had shaken his hand – God forbid they should ever share anything so warm as an embrace – but then had leaned in close to stare at him with an altogether unexpected intensity. ‘I will tell you, Wolfgang, the secret to success in the army.’
But you were never there, Klaes had thought but en-tirely failed to say. ‘The secret?’ he had said instead, non-committally.
‘It is the same as in all other endeavours. Do what you are told to do, but make sure always that what you have been told to do is known. Deference to authority shields you, but authority will always try to shield itself by sending its own guilt down the line to those who can’t refuse it. You must ensure that you are never in a position where another man’s blame becomes attached to you.’
And Klaes had thanked the old man gravely, while privately thinking that he would rather choose a responsible and morally upright superior than mould himself to the foibles of a corrupt one. Since he had no knowledge of hierarchical systems, he had naively assumed that this choice would lie within his power.
But here he was at length, the recipient of guilt that had come not down the line but up. It was true, of course, that Sergeant Molebacher could hardly have done what he had without the complaisance of the colonel, but in any event Klaes blamed himself far more than either of them for the situation in which he now languished. His father had been right on the substantive point. Klaes had trusted his fortunes to a set of formal and defined duties and relationships, and hidden his own conscience in the heel of his boot like a gold dollar too precious to be taken out except in the direst emergency.
Now that emergency had arrived, and when he tipped out his boot he had found it empty. He had been robbed in his sleep. Nothing remained to him but the clothes he stood up in and the reputation of a traitor.
Contemplating this, he sat with his back to the wall in the bare room and stared at the bare wall opposite, unaware of the passage of the hours or of the passage of thoughts across the cloudless sky of his numbed mind.
It was Private Toltz who delivered him back into time. The door was unlocked from outside and thrown open, and a man stepped in holding a trencher. Blinking against the light, Klaes was able to make out the private’s outline and infer the rest. ‘Breakfast, Lieutenant,’ Toltz said, with an approximation of good cheer. It must be morning then.
‘Thank you, Toltz,’ Klaes said as the trencher was set down before him. It bore a heel of bread, a slender slice of cheese and a pear. No water, though. ‘Could I be given something to drink?’
Toltz gave his forehead a ringing slap. ‘Empty!’ he ex-claimed. ‘Sorry, sir. I wasn’t thinking. I’ll get Schneider to bring you a pottle of beer and one of water, once I go back down.’
A soldier on duty at the door – one of Tusimov’s, still sporting bruises from the fight in the village – looked on with wary truculence, but he didn’t stop Toltz from kneeling to transfer the food from the trencher into Klaes’s open hands. ‘And is there anything else you’ll be needing, sir?’ he whispered. ‘I think the colonel’s looking to hang you and I don’t like it much. There’s not many like it, come to that.’
Klaes was almost too astonished at this show of support to be grateful. ‘Thank you, Toltz,’ he said. ‘I’m well enough, in truth. The beer will be very welcome. But … you could do me one favour, though it’s a great deal to ask.’
‘What’s that, sir?’
‘You could tell the
men that I didn’t do what I’m accused of. I found the barrels, but I didn’t try to sell them. I would have told the colonel, only Sergeant Molebacher told him first.’
‘Most of the men know Molebacher and his ways, sir, so that won’t come as a surprise. But I’ll tell them. I promise it.’
‘And tell them the villagers are innocent of any conspiracy,’ Klaes murmured urgently. ‘They were smuggling, that’s all. They have no thought to aid the Prussians.’
But this was a step too far for Toltz, who looked doubtful and perturbed. Klaes commanded a certain affection from the men of his command, he knew, but it was not unmixed with contempt. Certainly he was not respected for his judgement. ‘I don’t see as that can be true, sir,’ the private protested. ‘They’re all saying as how there were weapons down in that cellar, too – laid in against a bad day, as it were. And what else would farmers need muskets and rifles for? It’s not for killing crows.’
‘There were no muskets or rifles.’
‘Well, but the colonel’s said we’ve got to go up against them. He’s not going to send us up against nothing, is he? That doesn’t make any sense.’
‘The colonel is … he is mistaken. Or else he’s deceived.’
‘That’s enough whispering,’ the guard said from the doorway. ‘The lieutenant’s fed. Off with you now.’
‘He still needs a drink,’ Toltz said, but he stood and backed away from Klaes, clearly none too eager to share any further confidences.
‘He can drink my piss!’
‘Whip it out then,’ Toltz said equably. ‘He’s thirsty now.’
The guard opened his mouth to issue a rejoinder, but when one didn’t come he shut it again. ‘Thought not,’ Toltz said. ‘Too shy to let the other lads see what you’ve got, eh? Sorry, sir. Looks like it will have to be water.’
He walked out and the guard slammed the door to. Klaes could hear him flinging a stream of belated invective at Toltz as the private descended the stairs again.
Klaes’s thoughts and emotions were now in the greatest turmoil. It seemed impossible that Colonel August would contemplate what Toltz was suggesting – an actual attack on Narutsin, as though the village represented a military objective in its own right. But he had sounded so certain.
And Schneider, when he came, was no less so. A messenger had been sent to the general at the barracks outside Wroclaw. The messenger was Tusimov himself, under-lining the urgency of the message. Colonel August was only awaiting permission before the politically sensitive move of ordering his men to fire on a civilian population. Assuming that permission was given, and there was no reason to doubt that it would be, the villagers of Narutsin would be treated as hostile forces.
All Hell was going to be unleashed on them, in supposed retaliation for the slaughter of Captain Petos and his garrison. That imaginary massacre justified anything and everything.
Klaes’s earlier resignation vanished. A great deal of Klaes, already loosened by recent events, vanished with it. He felt exactly as Molebacher had described him a few hours earlier – as though he had been erased, reduced to an absence – and now was faced with the choice either of rebuilding himself or of surrendering to death.
He chose to build – and found that there was some compensation, at least, for the loss of his freedom, his commission, his reputation and his dignity. He had no obligations now, to any man. He could, and would, follow his conscience wherever it led him. Something had to be done to stop this madness in its tracks. So he had to escape, and then to take decisive action.
Unfortunately, the first half of this proposition was fraught with difficulty. There were two men at the door, and they were armed. Perhaps it would be possible to trick them into entering the room and then seize the key and lock them in. If he were to feign illness … But nobody would fall for a ruse so trite and transparent.
He could set fire to the room. That would serve two purposes, obliging the guards to come in and extinguish the blaze and at the same time filling the room with smoke so that Klaes’s planned ambush would be the less likely to be seen and countered. But unless the men responded quickly, he would burn alive or be overcome by the smoke. And they might just as easily run away as attempt to tackle the blaze themselves. It was too uncertain a prospect. And in any case, he discovered as he searched his pockets that his tinderbox had been taken away from him along with his sword.
If only there were a window for him to lower himself from. But there was no window, and of course no other door. He made a hundred circuits of the walls, his fingers trailing against the clammy plaster, but apart from the locked door through which he had entered it was unbroken.
When his thoughts had chased themselves around in circles for a very long time, he came back at last to his first, reckless plan. He would have to induce the guards to unlock the door, and then when it was open try his chances.
He hammered on the panels and called out, several times. He explained through the thickness of the door that he was faint and nauseous and needed physic. When that failed to elicit a response, he resorted to a great many variations on ‘Hey!’ and ‘Hoy!’ Nothing but silence answered him. He did not even know for sure that the guards were still there. Perhaps they had been stood down and had taken the key with them.
Klaes slumped at the base of the wall again and at length he fell into a fitful slumber.
In his dreams, someone called his name repeatedly. Sometimes the tone was accusing – an indictment that he couldn’t answer. Then again it was a plea, the desperate cry of someone lost and helpless begging for his aid. Back and forth it went, and Klaes moaned at each repetition as at a blow.
Until he woke.
‘Finally!’ Drozde exclaimed. He looked around, dazed, and couldn’t see her. The room was dark, of course. And yet it was not so dark as before. The air was suffused with a directionless golden glow, faint but pervasive. With the confusion of sleep still on him, Klaes wondered if perhaps the glow was Drozde. If the gypsy woman had died, and her soul had somehow …
‘Up here, you idiot!’
Klaes tilted his head back and stared. Directly above him, let into the ceiling of the room, there was a trapdoor. It had been opened from above and now hung down, low enough so that if he stood he might touch it with his outstretched hand.
Drozde’s head and shoulders were framed in the gap. She was holding a candle, the source of the seemingly magical radiance, and its light limned her face like a sketch in chalk and charcoal.
‘I’m at something of a disadvantage,’ Klaes told her dryly. ‘I’d like to invite you in, but I’m not sure how you’d get out again.’ He didn’t want her to know that he had thought her a supernatural being. It was too ridiculous, and he was sure he cut a ridiculous enough figure already.
‘Are you mad?’ Drozde hissed. ‘I’m not coming down there. I might let you up, though, if you promise to help me.’
‘To help you with what, exactly?’ Klaes got to his feet so that he could speak more softly. If there were still guards posted outside, he didn’t want his voice to reach their ears.
‘Something terrible is about to happen,’ Drozde said. ‘I want to get people out of the way of it.’
‘You mean the colonel attacking the village? It’s true then?’
‘That’s only a part of it. There’s more.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Later. Are you going to help?’
There were any number of grounds on which Klaes might have demurred – the fact that this woman was dictating terms to him; the fact that she was proposing he should mutiny against his commanding officer; the fact that if three hundred men with guns and limbers took it upon themselves to wipe out a few farmers and burn their houses down there wasn’t a great deal he and she could do to stop them. But he didn’t hesitate.
‘Yes.’
‘And you promise to do as you’re told, and not ask stupid questions that I don’t have time to answer?’
‘That’s insultingly phrased, but ye
s.’
‘And what about your men, Klaes? Will they do what you tell them to do?’
‘Some of them, I hope. Not all. And not if I ask them to mutiny. There’s nothing I could say that would induce them to betray their company and their country.’
‘No. But there might be something I can say, if you bring them to where I can speak to them.’
‘I doubt it,’ Klaes said. ‘And it won’t be easy for me right now to bring anybody anywhere. But if you have a plan I’ll hear you out.’
‘You’ll hear me out?’ Drozde’s echo of his tone was mocking.
‘Yes.’
‘That’s good of you. Hold out your hands.’
‘What?’
‘Your hands. Hold them out in front of you, as though you’re rocking a baby.’
Klaes did as he was told. A dark, moving mass dropped into his arms. He almost cried out before he realised that it was a coil of rope.
‘Try not to make too much noise,’ Drozde told him. ‘And when you get up here, put your feet on the beams. In between is just lath and plaster. You’ll go right through and we’ll have to start all over again.’
34
The vast roof space of Pokoj was like the upper level of a barn – but a barn at the end of March when the last bolts of hay have been fed to the starveling cattle below and the emptiness foretells either spring or ruin. Klaes wondered as he shuffled along behind Drozde which of the two things was presaged here.
He also began to consider with increasing seriousness Drozde’s claim to possess some sense or faculty lacking in the common run of humanity. In the near-dark of the roof space, where the candle cast more shadow than light, she walked with as much brisk confidence as if she were striding through a sunlit meadow.