The Ravens of Falkenau & Other Stories

by Jo Graham

  His eyes searched my face. “Mercenary captain. Who would have thought that you would even survive this long? Much less stand with lace at your throat and two hundred horsemen at your back?”

  “I’m hard to kill, My Lord.”

  “I know.” The angel almost smiled. “You stand there in black velvet, unbowed still. Perhaps there is some hope left in this bleeding continent. Have you never believed in anything?”

  I sat down at the table heavily. Trcka slumbered on in the chair beside me. “I believed in the Winter Queen,” I said. “But she was dross. She and her king fled, and left us to die on the mountain covering her retreat. So I fight no more for queens or thrones. I serve Wallenstein, who pays in gold. I care not for Emperor or Pope or kings.” I looked up at him.

  “You have come so far,” he said, his eyes searching my face, “from that bright girl alive with hope. So far from those days when even I was young. The world is older, now, and a new dark age upon us. This land is drowning in blood, and I do not see the end of it.”

  “You tell me what I know,” I said. “Now the kings of Sweden and France enter in, and there is no end to war.”

  “Yet you live,” he said, and took a breath. “I shall take some hope in that. That battered and changed, you endure. And perhaps you will find your way back from these caves. I cannot tell.”

  “My Lord,” I said, “What will be our fortunes in the field?”

  The angel gave a rueful smile. “I can tell you nothing you do not know. You will meet the King of Sweden in battle, and many brave men will die. You will win, or they will. And whoever prevails will fight again and again.”

  “Will I die, My Lord?” I asked.

  “No,” Michael said. “That would be too easy.”

  I had not spoken of these things to Trcka, nor would I. When I had awakened in the morning it seemed little more than a foul dream brought on by drink and atmosphere. And yet I was quite certain that I never wanted to do such things again. If something of the kind was the reason he had summoned me to Plzen I resolved to refuse even if it were grave disrespect.

  Our meal was served privately in an upper room, well seasoned fresh cutlets of pork and a dish of stewed apples, sweet Rhenish wine and a pastry thick with almond paste, and brandy to follow. It was very good.

  "Did it ever occur to you," Trcka asked at last, dabbing at the marzipan in his moustache, "that there are other ways to live?"

  "It occurs to me constantly," I said dryly. How not? Trcka should eat well if it were the last pig in Bohemia, and perhaps it was, so ruined was the countryside from fifteen years of war. I had not eaten thus in my childhood, when a sausage was dinner for us all, and a grand one at that with some cabbage. At Falkenau the winter would be harsh, but with care we might all see spring. If I were strict enough with the food now and let no man eat his fill, including myself.

  Trcka laughed as though I had made some great piece of wit. "I don't mean the food," he said, and his eyes were sober over his glass. "The ancients did not live thus. Pax Romana, Roman peace, enduring centuries from one end of the world to the other. They built roads and temples and towns, bridges that endure today! In Italy where are waterworks that still faithfully bring water from artesian springs into cities, fresh and pure as mountain air!"

  "What is all that to me?" I asked.

  "I thought you of all people had the imagination to think," Trcka said. "What might we do if this war were ended?"

  I shrugged. "I don't know." It made me angry for reasons I could not fathom and did not wish to.

  "Then what will happen if it does not?" he asked softly. "Surely you can see that."

  "There will be nothing left," I said, and I knew what I spoke of. I had seen the smoking ruins with no one left alive, the frightened people taking to the road looking for a safe place when there is none, their screams when cavalry cut through them, riding down children for sport. "There will be nothing," I said. Orchards ablaze, apple blossoms standing for a moment incongruous against the flames before the darkness took them, fields unplowed that would yield no harvest except skeletons, smoke rising to the sky from the pyre of the world.

  "No planting and no harvest," Trcka said.

  No glass blown in empty shops, a fine pulverized powder all that was left of a craftsman's life, book pages twisting on the wind, torn and worthless and ultimately empty….

  "No learning and no printing, no building and no crafting." Trcka put his hands together around his brandy. "We will make a wasteland. We already do."

  The words came unbidden in my mind, like words of a song I had heard in childhood. "Who will plant young olive trees? Who will plow fields that are fallow?"

  "You will," Trcka said, and his words fell like the bronze tolling of a bell in the silence.

  I looked at him, this ordinary man with his ordinary face. "I am a soldier," I said.

  He spread his hands. "Let me show you something," he said. He got up and went to the press, returned with papers that he spread before me. "You read well enough." He opened the first and smoothed it before me. "This was from a courier intercepted in the spring. The second was from one taken in September. I need not tell you their importance."

  I read them. I read them twice, turning the pages with careful hands.

  "This is a letter," I said, "from Cardinal Richelieu to the Emperor."

  "Just so," Trcka said. "From that Richelieu who rules France in all but name. To our Emperor."

  "He offers money," I said, reading it again. "A great deal of money. And by the second one it has been accepted, one Catholic monarch to another. Money and guns. Money and cannon." I looked up at Trcka, who bent over the table. "France is allied with the Swedes against us. They have already given them a great deal, otherwise they would have already withdrawn to their own country. Richelieu has been the prop of their army for the last four years."

  "And so?" Trcka asked.

  "And now he would secretly support us?" Wheels within wheels, a game I could parse too easily. Far too easily.

  "What does he gain by that?" Trcka asked quietly.

  "You know well what he does," I said. My mouth compressed into a thin line. "He pays us to fight one another. We dance like puppets on a string for his amusement. No, not for his amusement, but for the good of France. Sweden and Bohemia and Poland and all the states of the Empire tear one another apart like dogs in a fight, while France stands back unsullied, her wealth and her palaces intact. He goads us to attack one another, to destroy our universities and kill our farmers, and all it costs him is a bit of gold!"

  Trcka nodded.

  "We are played for fools," I said. My mind should not compass this, but it too easily did. "Richelieu has played us all for fools. We have spent a decade and more killing one another, Catholic and Protestant alike in the name of God, and it is nothing but Richelieu's game." I looked up at him. "Wallenstein knows?"

  "Wallenstein knows," Trcka said. "He gave me leave to speak to you."

  I blinked. I said the first thing that came to mind. "Why?"

  "Because he seeks a separate peace with the Swedes, and you are his man, not the Emperor's."

  I let out a long breath. "That is true," I said. Wallenstein was a soldier and a good one, and I had not met Ferdinand. He did not sully his hands with the likes of me.

  "Will you support him?"

  "Yes." I looked down at the paper again, proof of the greatest treason. Yes, we were but playthings for the great, but this… "What if the king served the country, rather than the country the king?" I said.

  "What, indeed?" Trcka smiled. "What if one could trade a bad king for a better?"

  "That is indeed treason," I said, but there was no heat in it. The Emperor was elected from among the nobles. Why not a good rather than a bad? Emperors had been deposed before.

  "Perhaps the Emperor will see reason," Trcka said. "After all, Wallenstein has an army, and he does not."

  "Perhaps he will," I said. It would take an army to countermand th
e effects of Richelieu's gold. A man could live in exile very comfortably for the rest of his life on a tenth of it, or spend his days in pampered splendor at the Luxembourg. I stood and gave Trcka my hand. "I will stand with you," I said.

  I returned to Falkenau on a late autumn day when the wind blew gusts around the towers, dead leaves chasing each other like goats on the mountains. Cloaked and muffled, we got in ahead of the rain. I was unsurprised to find my wife on the walls of Falkenau, looking north and west into the storm. The freshening wind was laden with moisture, and her hair whipped in fine strands about her face like red gold against a sky of gray.

  "What misfortune have you brought today?" Izabela asked me.

  "Would that I could tell you," I said. I put my hands upon the parapet and looked out at mountains and sky and all. I had thought this might be mine, but a sword blade still stood between me and it, the treachery of kings.

  And yet, that orchard yonder might be replanted. Apples would bear before too long, were there young trees transplanted from another. Those fields had nothing wrong with them, merely the grain burned standing. In the spring the stubble could be plowed under and the field would be as rich as ever. Soon winter would come and water it all, cover everything beneath a pall of snow. We would be short of supplies, but there was enough, I thought. Barely enough. And then spring would come with her healing cloak of green.

  If this were mine I should love it with all my heart. I should know it, each stone and each tree, each bridge and each well, the shape of each far peak against the sky seen only as they are from Falkenau. When I die, my bones should molder here, becoming one with this land, a bit of me passing into dirt and leaf and tree, a tie that could not be broken though centuries should pass.

  Izabela was looking at me sideways, a strange expression on her face.

  "Politics, madam," I said. No doubt it would please her to know that the Catholic Emperor was false to his own. But the Protestant princes were no better. They too were Richelieu's dupes.

  "Why did you ask for the minister?" I asked, and added at her blank look, "rather than a priest?"

  "Because I am Protestant," she said, as though that were obvious.

  I shook my head. There was a faint spatter of freckles on Izabela's nose courtesy of the summer sun that now faded from the sky. "And that matters to you?"

  "Yes." Izabela folded her hands on the stone, lifting her face to the wind. The sky had darkened with the clouds and coming night. "I believe that every man and every woman comes before God on his or her own merits with no interventions, no dispensations and no allowances, with no witness to speak for them save their own deeds. And I believe that God speaks to each of us as He wills. We do not need a priest to stand intermediary between us and God, for we are each a precious child of His own creation."

  "Born in sin to die in sin," I said.

  "And yet through our actions are we redeemed, and by our faith saved," Izabela said. There was a curious smile on her face, as though her skin was but a vessel for something luminous. "Mine is not the God of fires and pits, but the God who so loved the world that He gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believes in Him may not perish but have everlasting life." She turned her eyes to mine. "I did not understand that until I had sons of my own. To give your own child, to give your own sweet son… What love could be so strong that one would do so?"

  "I don't know," I said.

  Something in her face closed. "And you will take my sons from me when you wish. Do you think I do not know that you will kill them?"

  I opened my mouth and shut it again.

  "If you would have Falkenau pass to the heirs of your body, do you think I do not know what stands in your way?" Her mouth narrowed to a thin line. "They will not be the first boys killed by a murderous stepfather. So you will see that I will do whatever will save them."

  "I will do them no harm while you are cooperative," I managed.

  She snorted. "And when I have cooperated and you have got another son on me? Do you think I will believe that? Falkenau passes through the heirs of my body, not yours. If you would truly own it, then you know what you must do. And so do I."

  "I think that is unlikely," I said. I took a step closer, my side to her, looking into the eye of the north wind. "I will not live so long. What use in begetting a son when the time is already gone? I am not a young man, Izabela, and there are endless battles before me. Chances are I would not see it weaned. In the spring I will be gone to war."

  Unless there was peace. Unless Wallenstein traded for peace.

  She did not speak, only waited me out. Unless there was a change in the stars, something marked in the wind. Unless the world were transformed. And yet I did not think it would be. I thought there would be war. What use in planting fields that would be trampled before the harvest? What use in begetting children to be tiny corpses at the next turn of the tide?

  Whatever I did, it would not matter. And therein lay the crux of it.

  I glanced at her sideways, so young and so certain. "Do you never waver in your faith?"

  Her eyes slid from mine and she leaned upon her elbows against the wall. The first raindrops spattered around us in a gust of wind. "Sometimes," she said. "I waver." She lifted her face to the rain and did not look at me. "In the spring when my husband died and the armies came down upon us, I prayed to the Archangel Michael to send help not for me, but for my sons and for my people. And instead there was you."

  My throat closed and there was nothing I could say. Above, the banners flew in the wind, billowing around the skirts of her black dress as though we were two ravens who perched there, carrion eaters poised above the carnage of the world.

  Another spatter of rain, and I took her arm. "Come inside, Izabela," I said. "It is raining."

  I went down and found McDonald in the stableyard. "Walk with me," I said.

  He followed me through the hall and up the stair, down a winding passage that zigzagged between parts of the castle built in different centuries, to the lord's chamber. I closed the door behind us. He looked at me with a frown. "What's wrong?"

  I told him all, Richelieu and the rest, pacing the room like a caged beast, from door to windows that looked on mountains and river.

  When I was finished, McDonald sank into my chair beside the map table. "A fine mess," he said. Then he shrugged, eyes very blue. "But what's in it for us? Wallenstein's separate peace, I mean? If he makes peace with the Swedes and Protestants, what becomes of us?"

  For a moment I couldn't fathom what he was talking about.

  McDonald gestured around the fine room. "It's all well enough for you," he said. "You've got your share. You'll stay here and be Graf Falkenau married to a pretty wench and spend the rest of your life collecting taxes and siring fat children. But what about those boys downstairs? Most of them have never known any life except at arms. They've got no prospects and no crafts. If peace breaks out they've nothing to do except turn bandit. What about your men, Georg? Surely you're not so blinded by the Lady Izabela's spreading acres that you've forgotten about them?"

  I drew a deep breath. "You know as well as I that most of them will never have any more land than the grave they lie in. You and I — we're rare birds, Jamie. Old mercenaries. Most of them won't live five years, much less retire rich men."

  "But they might. And that's the siren, my friend. You heard her song and so did I. One more battle, one more march, and we'll get our own. Our ships will come in and we'll live on milk and honey. As long as you keep believing it you'll keep fighting." McDonald crossed his legs. "I'm not so much worried for me. I'd make a fine master at arms for Falkenau. But you can't keep them all on. What use is there for a company if peace breaks out?"

  "I never believed that," I said sharply. "I never believed there was anything for me except a grave."

  McDonald shrugged. "And yet here you are, Graf Falkenau. Mayhap you didn't believe it, but you did it all the same. You've a rare kind of stubbornness to you and a quicksilver wit behin
d those black Bavarian eyes. I said to myself, there's a man who's lucky, so I'll stand behind him. It's paid off so far. But you know as well as I that fear of you is the only thing that's keeping some of those lads from torching castle and village both." He shook his head. "You can't turn off an army of mercenaries, Georg."

  "Don't you think Wallenstein knows that?" I asked. "He's twenty years longer at this game than we, and the canniest man in the empire. If he's seeking terms he has a plan. Perhaps we'll turn this around and attack Richelieu, give him back a bit of what he's handed out." I paced over to the window again. "In which case you've got the company, my friend. I'll take myself out and you'll be captain. And the boys can do as they wish — sign on with you or muster out."

  "They'll sign on, most of them," McDonald said. He gave me a gap toothed smile. "You'll retire, and I'm for a field in the Elsass."

  "Unless you'd rather be master at arms for Falkenau," I said.

  He shook his head. "Not me. I'm a gambling man, Georg. One more throw of the dice to make me king!"

  A shiver ran down my spine, as though we had spoken of this before. Perhaps we had, only I did not remember it. "Sometimes it's better to leave the table when you're winning," I said. "To leave off grasping for the ring of fire and be content with what you have, rather than risk all and lose all."

  "Maybe so," he said, but when it came to that I thought he would not stay.

  Winter came, blowing in on the heels of the storm that had followed me, a hard freeze and a light snow, just enough to coat the cobblestones in the night and give a taste of what was to come. We had problems of fodder, and I sent McDonald around with Izabela's factor to see what they could buy up from outlying farms where our army had not yet been. McDonald didn't ask if he could just take it. After all, I was their overlord now, and stealing from my own peasants would be foolish. It would be stealing from myself.

  Advent came, and Christmastide. The cheer was perhaps the ghost of what it would have been in a normal year, but we were settling in to some kind of truce. Izabela's people did not hurry through the hall anymore without speaking, their eyes averted. There were fewer crude jests and more flirtation. I'd hang a man for rape, but a word here and there, a strong back to carry a heavy load of laundry upstairs, a word from a handsome fellow… Some would find their Christmas cheer.