by Mike Carey
She took him all the way to the north end of the house. At first, seeing a bright light up ahead of them, Klaes thought that someone – perhaps Drozde herself – had lit a lantern there. He realised when he was closer that this was not the case. There was no roof at all to this end of the mansion: it had collapsed long before, leaving the house below open to the elements.
It was the light of the moon he saw. The realisation brought Klaes to a dead halt.
‘Night has fallen,’ he said. ‘A whole day has passed. A day, Drozde! Are we not—’
‘Tusimov’s not back yet,’ Drozde muttered, gesturing with down-thrust hands to tell him to speak more softly. ‘And no orders have been given to the men. I know that because they’re all still here. But time runs hard against us, yes, and though I’ve not been idle there’s a lot still to do. Too much, unless you help.’
‘I’ve said I will.’
‘You and your company.’
‘And that I can’t promise.’
She pointed to another trap, which must be the one through which she’d climbed up. There was no rope here. She indicated in dumb show that he should sit at the edge of the trap and slide himself down. He did so very slowly, fearful both of breaking his leg in falling and of making enough noise to bring the sentries down on the two of them.
But there was a solid surface not far below him. Klaes was able to lower himself onto it, duck down so that his head was clear of the trap, and then take stock of his surroundings. Drozde had stood a chair on top of a table, and though it creaked and moved under his weight it did not collapse. He descended to the floor, where the gypsy woman joined him.
He searched for some form of words to thank her for her rescue. It was no easy thing, since what she had helped him to do was – in effect – to desert, to void his oath to army, country and empire and place himself outside their collective aegis. Though he had already come to that decision, he had not come to the reality of it until now, and it tied his mind and tongue into a knot. But Drozde spoke first, saving him from his stammering attempts to say what could hardly be said.
‘I want you to collect your men somewhere away from the house,’ she told him. ‘I only need a handful for what has to be done, but any who stay here are likely to die, so bring them all. Let them all make their choice.’
‘What do you mean?’ Klaes demanded. ‘How will they die?’
‘You’ll find out when they do.’ Drozde’s tone was curt, her expression one of furious thought. ‘The ruins – where the abbey was. It’s easy to get to, but far enough from Pokoj that they won’t be seen. Bring them, Klaes.’
But he needed to know why. He had wanted to help the villagers, and now found himself enmeshed in a bigger plan whose edges he couldn’t see. ‘What should threaten the company?’ he demanded. ‘What do you know, Drozde, and how does it bear on the colonel’s plans? Tell me, or I’ll not assist you.’
Drozde thrust her face up close to his. ‘Yes,’ she said, her voice low and fierce. ‘You will. Or else you’ll have all their deaths on your conscience, Lieutenant, and your conscience doesn’t seem like it could take the strain. Do as you’re bloody well told. But do it carefully. I want only men who’ll take orders from you.’
‘That will depend on the orders,’ Klaes protested, but he felt the initiative slipping away from him. The truth was that he had no idea how to forestall August’s monstrous plan on his own. He had been planning – insofar as he had planned anything – to run or ride into Narutsin and raise the alarm. But what good would that do? The villagers would be more likely to give him a public hanging than an audience. And if they listened, and if they believed, what could they do? It was not to be imagined that they would consent to flee en masse from their homes and their livelihoods, or that they would get more than a league or two if they did.
Drozde was looking at him with exasperated impatience, as though she expected him to say more but had no high hopes of its usefulness. ‘I’ll need to tell them something,’ Klaes pointed out, more humbly. ‘To make them come, despite what they’ve been told about me and about the villagers.’
‘Don’t mention the villagers. Don’t say a word about Narutsin.’
‘But then …’
‘Tell them it’s a puppet show. A performance.’
Klaes gave a ragged laugh. Despair and wonder filled him. ‘A puppet show! They’re meant to absent themselves from their posts and their commanders to see you go through your usual antics!’
‘Tell them that it’s free, and that it will be the best one ever. Tell them …’ She hesitated, her mouth working as she tried out the words. ‘Tell them the colonel doesn’t want them to see it. That it’s been forbidden.’
‘What? Why would I tell them that? Then they certainly won’t come!’
‘I know my audience, Klaes. Tell them. And for good measure, tell them there’ll be brandy to drink.’
Klaes blinked, taken aback. ‘Will there?’
‘There will if you bring it. I want them reckless and defiant, prepared to take their lives in their hands, because that’s what I’ll be asking them to do.’
‘And you’d fuddle them with drink to make them—’
‘To save them. And everyone. This is going to be a night of blood in any case, but if some are washed away in it that we could have saved, then may the devil fuck the both of us.’
‘You’ve a foul tongue, woman,’ Klaes remonstrated, pained as always by the coarseness of Drozde’s spirit. And yet his own scruples had often amounted to no more than straining at gnats while gorging on camels. ‘I’ll do it,’ he said quickly, before she could answer him. ‘That is, I’ll do what I can. I’ve no idea how many will follow me, but those who will come I’ll bring.’
Drozde nodded tersely. ‘In half an hour,’ she said. ‘In the ruins. I need to collect my puppets and my theatre and make ready.’
‘I’ll probably need longer than that,’ Klaes said.
‘How long, then?’
‘An hour? The men will take some persuading, I’d imagine.’
‘All right. But no longer than that. Everything has to be finished long before morning.’
She turned from him and hurried away. Left alone, Klaes welcomed for a moment or two the mantle of silence and stillness that the house laid on him as he stood there. There was so much to do, and the outcomes were so uncertain, there was a comfort to be had in being lost in the penumbrous maze of the great house.
But he was not truly lost. Following the same route that Drozde had taken he found the stairs easily enough and descended back into the world.
It was safe to assume that in this atmosphere of intrigue and excitement there would be sentries on the doors of the house, so he climbed out through a ground floor window. It was easy enough after that to head for the encampment, though he skirted around the tents at a distance for some time before he heard a voice he recognised and homed in on that.
It was Gulyas, of his own command. The brawny Hungarian was sitting with two or three others close to the limits of the tent village, whittling with a pocket knife at the boiled bone of a sheep or goat. He made these strange trophies into pipes, carved with intricate scrimshaw designs, and sold them to unwary locals with stories about how he’d found them in the hills of Norway while he was on a wholly fictitious campaign there. The few coppers he made from these fraudulent transactions scarcely offset the long hours he put into the work. It seemed to Klaes that Gulyas regarded the successful lie as a part of the reward.
He was now faced with the problem of how to attract Gulyas’s attention. He would have preferred just to wait until the man walked off into the dark to relieve himself, but there was no time for that. Crouched down in the weeds and long grass near the curving wall that bounded the estate, he picked up a pine cone and threw it so that it landed close to Gulyas’s feet.
The big man stared at it, puzzled, as though its arrival was a profound mystery. Only after a long interval did he turn to look off into the dark. Kla
es waved and beckoned to him, but he wasn’t at all certain that he was visible.
Gulyas looked at the other men nearby, but they were busy warming themselves by the fire and none of them had seen the pine cone land. Then he looked back at Klaes, and Klaes gestured even more frantically.
Gulyas stood, muttered something that Klaes couldn’t hear, and walked away from the tents towards him. He stopped at ten paces’ distance, fists raised before him.
‘Who’s there?’ he demanded. ‘Is that you, Lidmila?’
‘No,’ Klaes said. ‘It’s Lieutenant Klaes.’
Gulyas uttered an oath and came a few steps closer. ‘Lieutenant?’ he blurted. ‘But … they locked you away. For treason, Mole said. Helping the enemy.’
‘Do you think I’m a traitor, Gulyas?’
There was a pause while the big man thought – something which always seemed to require more of a run-up for him than for most people. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t.’
‘Thank you!’ Klaes exclaimed fervently. ‘Thank you, Gulyas!’
‘I mean, well – your pardon, Lieutenant, but some of the men call you the little schoolmarm. It’s hard to imagine you breaking a rule. You’re almost the last man in the world I’d think that of!’
Klaes thanked Gulyas again, with feelings more mixed but still with gratitude predominating. Gulyas asked about the guns and barrels that had been found in the cellars of the house, and Klaes said he’d explain very soon how all of that had come to pass. But first he wanted Gulyas to spread the word about Drozde’s show – a most special and unique performance, without the colonel’s sanction or that of Tusimov, Pabst and Dietmar and therefore to be restricted to the soldiers in Klaes’s own command.
‘Tonight, in the ruins,’ he said, pointing. ‘Now, in fact. Go tell them, Gulyas. It will be the most outrageous and scandalous thing that Drozde has ever portrayed. Songs and stories that would have the officers and their wives in an uproar. And brandy to drink, and no money to pay. All free. You’ll never forgive yourself if you miss this.’
Gulyas seemed both enthusiastic and confused. It sounded like a good thing, but now? As late as it was, with the sun already set and most men settled down for the night? Private Melin had promised to bring over a jug of cider and one of—
‘Now! Yes! You can sit and drink any night, Gulyas, but this – this will only come once!’
It wasn’t easy, but finally by dint of much repetition and elaboration, Klaes was able to communicate some sense of excitement and urgency to the stolid private. Gulyas lumbered away at last to tell his comrades about the planned entertainment.
Klaes pondered the question of the brandy, but only briefly. It was clear there was no way he could lead a raid on the cellar, even if Sergeant Molebacher had been so foolish as to leave it unguarded. Drozde would have to do the best she could without that particular stage property.
After leaving Klaes, Drozde went directly to the main staircase of the house. She snuffed her candle before descending, fearful that a sentry might see its light from a distance and come to investigate. She took off her boots, too, to make less noise, but carried them with her in her hand. If she once put them down in the lightless maze of Pokoj it would be an epic endeavour to find them again.
She walked softly through the empty rooms to the heart of Molebacher’s empire, her heart in her mouth as she approached the open door of the kitchen. No lights were lit in the room beyond the doorway, despite the darkness outside, but that meant nothing. The embers of a cooking fire lit earlier in the day in the big hearth still glowed a dull red like rust: ample light for an ambush.
Despite the sense of urgency that plucked at her mind, Drozde waited on the threshold for what seemed like an age. No sound came to her ears, but she knew how quiet the sergeant could be in his dangerous moods, and she placed no trust in the silence. Only when her eyes adjusted to the dim radiance and confirmed that the room was empty did she finally step over the threshold, and even then she took the time to look behind the door and in every corner.
She closed and bolted the kitchen door, then lit her candle again by the fire. There was no help for it: she had no tinderbox with her, and she couldn’t do what she needed to do – finding and choosing her puppets and assembling the component parts of her theatre – in the dark.
Boots in one hand, candle in the other, she crossed to the cellar stairs on the opposite side of the room and listened again. Nothing stirred or breathed in the blackness of the stairwell. At her left elbow the sergeant’s stool, on which he had waited so patiently until Klaes came to deliver her, stood empty.
She tiptoed down the stairs, her guts twisting like snakes. Nothing frighted Drozde by day, but she found the thought of walking into a trap in the dark, underground, intensely uncongenial. She waited again at the foot of the stairs, straining her ears to hear a sound in the room beyond.
But she had no choice, in the end. She needed her puppets and her theatre, and she needed all the time she had. Finally she stepped inside, almost tripping on something heavy and angular lying on the floor. The room looked very different now from how she had left it. The cupboard she’d used as a barricade had been toppled and broken, lying almost in two vertical halves on the floor. Someone had thrown her trunk into a corner and that had taken damage too, its side staved in and its lid hanging askew. Some bolts of fabric that she used to decorate the front of the theatre had spilled onto the floor, red and orange and yellow like a nursery frieze of a bonfire. The further door that she and Klaes had opened had been closed again, and the loose timber piled up in front of it. It could still be opened, presumably, but it would take a deal of time and make a deal of noise.
Drozde closed the door behind her as quietly as she could. She paused again momentarily. Nothing seemed to be moving in the house, either close at hand or far away. She hoped fervently that Klaes had not miscarried. She hoped that she could evade or hold off her impending death long enough to finish this.
She hauled her trunk back into the centre of the room, knelt before it and rummaged through its contents. Normally she handled her puppets with obsessive care, both because she loved them and because their upkeep was essential to her livelihood, but now she was reckless, taking out puppets and props and drapes by double handfuls. Those she needed went into one pile, the rest into another. Then when she was done she heaped everything she’d chosen into a blanket and tied its ends to make a bundle.
She put her boots back on at this point, since the candle and the bundle would fill her two hands.
Back up the stairs she went, placing each foot with care to keep from raising echoes. And across the kitchen, past the remnants of the fire, skirting on her left the beached-whale bulk of Molebacher’s butcher’s block.
Which unfolded itself, as if its dead wood were rebelling against its hard usage, and reared before her, higher than her head.
Sergeant Molebacher had been kneeling behind the block, waiting for her to come. The dull light from the fire turned him into a creature of red clay like the golem the Jews of Praha made. He flexed his bare arms, then folded them across his chest.
‘Sit down,’ he told her.
Drozde swallowed hard, her mouth suddenly dry. Was this the time, she wondered, and was this the way of it? The way she was to die? Strangled by Molebacher because he felt his exclusive right to her body merited such a vigorous defence? The absurdity made her despair, but it also made her angry. She sorted the anger from the wretchedness and dread like a gleaner sorting grain from chaff.
‘I don’t have time to talk to you now, Molebacher,’ she said. ‘I’ll come back later, if you like. If you think there’s unfinished business between us. But I have things I must do first.’
‘Unfinished business?’ the sergeant mouthed the words as though their taste disgusted him. ‘Well I do think that, as it happens. But what’s between us is more than business, it seems to me, and I’m of a mind to settle it now.’
Drozde took a step back from him. She was
thinking about how far it was to the door, and whether she could win that race from a standing start. She was almost sure she could, but she’d have to get the bolt undone and the sergeant wouldn’t be more than a yard or two behind her.
‘I was going to burn your little dolls,’ Molebacher went on, ‘but I could see that wouldn’t be enough to put you in your place. So everything’s as you left it, more or less. I haven’t harmed a thing.’ He grinned down at her, daring her to contradict him.
‘Except for Hanslo,’ Drozde finished. She knew it was dangerous to name him, but she couldn’t forbear.
Molebacher nodded slowly. ‘Yes. And I’ll do the same again, to anyone else you take it into your head to fuck. Do you understand, Drozde?’
Drozde realised with a sudden shock that he still thought that she was his, that the memory of Hanslo’s death would wash from her mind as the rancid tallow had from her skin, leaving her as ready for him as she had been before. The murder had been no more to him than a just reproof, like depriving a child of its poppet when it screamed and howled. She realised, too, how easy it would be to let him think that he was right. She could lie to him, as she had lied so many times before.
‘I do understand,’ she said, bowing her head as though in contrition. ‘I can see that I’m much to blame, Molebacher.’
‘Good.’ Molebacher grunted. ‘That’s—’
‘I should have gutted you in your sleep last summer in barracks,’ she went on, meeting his gaze again. ‘I could have spared myself and the world your filthy weight and kept a good man alive.’
With a roar like a wounded bull, Sergeant Molebacher swung one huge fist in a punch that would have taken Drozde’s head from her shoulders. But on the word ‘weight’ she’d turned and run, heading for the cellar steps. She felt the wind of the blow, but nothing more.