by Peter McLean
“I like sport well enough,” I said. “I used to own a racehorse before the war, back in Ellinburg.”
“A racehorse?” she said, her lip curling with evident disdain. “How very . . . provincial.”
“Delightful,” Lan Yetrov said, in a tone that meant the exact opposite. “My dear Lady Ailsa, you must tell me sometime how in the world this happened.”
He laughed at that and turned away to continue his conversation elsewhere. I clenched my teeth but let Ailsa lead me back into the crowd.
“You mustn’t take it personally,” she whispered as she let a footman exchange her empty wineglass for a full one.
“How else am I to take it? These people know what I am, Ailsa.”
“No, they don’t,” she said. “They may think they do, but you are a respected priest and successful businessman and a high-ranking member of Ellinburg society, as my friends are very busy telling everyone. It will take time, that’s all. Do you honestly think someone like Jon Lan Barkov would be welcomed any more warmly by this company?”
I couldn’t say I had given that fool or his idiot painting any thought since we were in his house, but now that she raised the matter I supposed perhaps she had a point. The provinces were simply beneath the notice of these people. All the same, I thought he would fare better than me.
“At least he’s got a Lan in his name,” I muttered.
“That’s beside the point,” she said. “He has no real breeding and not quite enough money to make up for it, and no worthwhile pursuits whatsoever. You are a priest and a man of influence in business, and those things at least are respectable.”
“As pastimes, maybe,” I said. “How many of these here have worked a day in their lives, truly?”
“Don’t start,” Ailsa hissed at me. “Drink your wine and try to look amused.”
I didn’t feel amused, and I felt a lot less so when a bell rang and the steward announced that the entertainment was ready to begin, if the company would please make their way to the bear pit in the informal garden.
The bear pit was quite the construction, I had to allow. It was a walled circle some thirty feet across, surrounded by raised wooden tiers of seating for the spectators. Ailsa and I took our places with the other fools, the warm spring sun on our faces and the babble of excited conversation in our ears. Lan Yetrov and his wife were already seated in their private box.
The bear was a fearsome-looking thing. It was already in the pit, chained by one leg to a stake close to the far wall from where we sat. Bear baiting was a popular sport among all social classes, I knew that, but I found nothing to entertain me in seeing animals rip each other apart. I had seen enough of that in Abingon to last me a lifetime.
“The old bear looks tired,” the man beside me remarked.
I glanced at him and saw a young fellow with maybe twenty-five or so years to him. He was wearing a dark red coat of a military cut, and he had the customary bristling side whiskers of a cavalry officer. He looked to my mind as though he might be slightly less of a fool than most of his peers.
“Aye, well, wouldn’t you?” I replied.
The man chuckled.
“Most likely it has no teeth and its claws have been pulled,” he said. “I’ll bet on the dogs, I think.”
“I’ll take that bet,” I said, to goad him as much as anything else. “A tired old soldier is a soldier still, and those dogs will be nothing but arrogant pups.”
His eyes flashed at that, and I could tell he had taken my meaning.
“Oh, so it’s like that, is it?” He laughed. “Well, I’ll take your gold as happily as anyone else’s. I can have my man wash the Ellinburg off it later.”
I could have taken that as an insult, but I thought he meant it in the good-natured way of soldier’s talk, so I let it pass. I had to admit I hadn’t realized we’d be betting for gold and not silver, but it was done now and no backing down unless I wanted to look an utter fool.
“A crown on the bear, then,” I said. “My name is Father Tomas Piety, by the way.”
“Major Bakrylov, pleasure to meet you,” he said. “A crown it is.”
We shook on it, and I could feel the swordsman’s calluses on his palm. Perhaps he wasn’t such a pup, after all.
Lan Yetrov very much enjoyed bear baiting, Ailsa had told me, and bears were expensive and not easily come by so I doubted that he would pull their teeth and claws just to see them slaughtered by dogs, which were cheap and plentiful. I hoped I had the right of that.
The babble of conversation died away when Lan Yetrov rose to his feet in his box and waved a red silk pocket square in his hand like a fool.
“Bring in the dogs!” he shouted, and got a muted cheer from the assembled members of society.
A gate rumbled up and three dogs burst into the pit. They were big mastiffs, two black and one brown, and all of them solid and muscular. Each one was muzzled and had a handler behind it holding tight to a sturdy leash.
“The brown one will still be standing by the end,” the major said. “Look at the size of him!”
The bear chose that moment to rear up on its hind legs.
“Look at the size of the fucking bear,” I said, and he had no answer to that.
Then the dog handlers removed the muzzles from their charges, and loud barking echoed around the pit. The dogs strained at their tethers, eager to begin. Lan Yetrov let his ridiculous pocket square fall from his fingers, and the dog handlers let their beasts off the leash.
The big brown dog charged at once and leaped in an attempt to seize the bear by the throat, a savage growl coming from it as its jaws opened. The bear swung a massive paw and roared, and the dog spun away in a spray of blood to crash into the wall of the pit.
No, Lan Yetrov hadn’t had his prize bear’s claws pulled, or its teeth either. I hadn’t thought so. The bout was fierce and bloody, and the pit became a mess of clawing, howling, roaring fury. I’ll not record the details here for I found that the affair sickened me, but suffice it to say that I had been right to bet on the bear.
I relieved Major Bakrylov of a gold crown, and he just laughed as he handed it over.
“Well played, Piety, old chap,” he said, as though it were no amount of money at all. “That’s one for the tired old soldiers, eh? Abingon, I assume?”
“Aye,” I said, and we nodded to one another in comradeship.
I saw bets being settled all around the makeshift arena. Men came into the pit and dragged the dogs out with long billhooks, and that was done.
It seemed a brief enough entertainment to have brought so many people here, even those who might actually have found it entertaining.
I made to rise, but Ailsa put a hand on my arm.
“Be still,” she said. “The main event is about to start.”
That made me frown. I had thought the bear bait was the main event, but it seemed I had been wrong about that. Perhaps I had simply misunderstood some subtlety that a Dannsburg noble would have seen plainly.
Once the dog handlers were clear of the pit, another gate opened and a naked man was shoved into the open space. His body glistened with something that looked and smelled like an awful mixture of blood and fish and honey. He fell to his knees in front of Lan Yetrov, and I saw that he was pleading. Behind him the bear was growling and pulling at its chain, slobber visible at the sides of its mouth.
“Please, m’lord!” the kneeling man begged. “Please!”
“Some of you,” Lan Yetrov said, his voice carrying across the crowd, “may remember my former friend Salan Anishin. He owes me a great deal of money over a failed and foolish business venture, but rather than pay his debts like an honorable man he attempted to flee the city with his family. Of course, I had already posted a warrant with the Guard and he was arrested at the city gates and thrown into debtor’s prison to await the queen’s pleasure. However
, I took pity on him. I bought his debt, and therefore with it, of course, his life.”
I stared at the groveling man and at the bear. It took no degree of cleverness to see how this would end.
“I want to make it very clear,” our host announced, “what happens to those who cross the house of Lan Yetrov. Release the bear.”
A handler reached down over the wall of the pit with some implement on the end of a long pole, and a moment later the chain fell away from the bear’s leg. The beast was bleeding from its encounter with the dogs but now it seemed to become maddened as it caught the scent. It took a step toward the poor bastard in the pit with it, its nose twitching and ropes of slobber running from its jaws.
It snarled.
“Please!” Anishin screamed.
The bear roared and charged, and blood exploded up the walls of the pit. A gasp went up from the crowd, followed by vigorous applause.
Those were the times we lived in.
TWENTY-SIX
We were able to leave Lan Yetrov’s house shortly after that, for which I was grateful. He was a cunt, to my mind, and the sooner I got away from him the less chance there was of me telling him so in front of half of Dannsburg society. That wouldn’t have been wise, I knew, but it was tempting all the same.
“I know you didn’t care for the entertainment, Tomas,” Ailsa said to me in the carriage on the way back to her house, “but on the whole you did well. Major Bakrylov will remember you, certainly, if only because he’ll want to win his money back.”
“The fellow with the whiskers who I had the bet with?” I asked. I had already forgotten his name by then, but again I had to remind myself that Ailsa seemed to know each and every one of these people. “Aye, he seemed less of a shit than the rest of them, I’ll allow that.”
“He’s a good officer and a decorated war hero,” Ailsa said. “He was with the Queen’s Own Fifth, at Abingon. When their colonel fell in battle, he assumed command of the regiment and stormed the west gate with barely six hundred men.”
I remembered hearing of that, back in the war. He’d had barely six hundred men after he had taken the west gate, to be sure. When he gave the order to charge, he’d had over three thousand.
That was what made a war hero in Dannsburg, it seemed.
“Aye,” I said, and left it there.
Even if Ailsa had understood, I knew she wouldn’t have cared. She hadn’t been there, and no one who hadn’t been there could truly understand what Abingon had been like. How could they? There was nothing to compare it to, nothing at all. Aye, you might see violence in the streets, be it robberies or territory disputes between crews, or even the City Guard brutalizing the homeless, but there was nothing that could prepare you for something like Abingon.
It was Hell, pure and simple.
I remembered the roar of the cannon, the choking smoke and the unnatural darkness it brought with it. I saw flames leaping from fallen buildings, and bodies so tormented by the plague they barely looked human anymore. I saw the broken, burned, ruined people dragging themselves like living corpses through a sea of the dead, screaming as they came . . .
Ailsa’s hand gripped my arm so tightly it was almost painful, and she brought me back to myself before I tipped over the edge into the darkness.
“It’s all right, Tomas,” she said softly, and in that moment I could almost have believed she truly cared for me. “Breathe with me, deep and slow. Deep, and slow.”
I sagged back against the bench of the carriage and breathed with her, and it began to pass. I wondered if I would ever truly be free of the battle shock. Truth be told, I doubted it. To be free of it would be to forget, and I didn’t see how I could do that. That would feel like a betrayal, of myself and of all those I had fought beside. I wondered if it was like this for my brother, or if he felt something different when it came over him. What had he felt that night, that had moved him to tear a man’s throat out with his teeth and eat it?
“Breathe with me, Tomas,” Ailsa said again, her voice soothing as the carriage jolted over the cobbles. “Just breathe. Just . . . breathe . . .”
“Aye, I’m well,” I said at last. “I’m well, and I thank you.”
Ailsa understood battle shock, I had to allow. I wondered why that was and who she might have worked with during the war. It wasn’t impossible that she had been there, for all I knew. The Queen’s Men were knights, after all. Not the armored sort who fronted the charge of heavy cavalry, no, but knights nonetheless.
There was more than one sort of hero in a war, I knew that much.
* * *
* * *
We were left alone for the next few days, thank the Lady, with no further society engagements, and Ailsa took the time to arrange for a tutor for Billy. He was a thin, birdlike man called Fischer who we installed in a servant’s room on the top floor of the house. I tasked him with teaching the lad to read and write properly, if nothing else, and his figures as well if he could. Billy wasn’t happy about it, and I remembered I hadn’t much cared for schooling either, but then few lads do at that age.
On the morning of my sixth day in Dannsburg, Fat Luka came to me and said that a meeting with Grachyev had been arranged.
“You’ll sit down at the Bountiful Harvest tonight,” he told me over tea in the drawing room. “It’s an inn, a fancy one about half a mile from here. He owns it.”
“I wanted neutral territory,” I said.
“Well, there ain’t much of that,” Luka told me. “There’s only one crew doing business in Dannsburg, and Grachyev runs it.”
“What, in the whole fucking city?”
“Aye, boss, that seems to be the lay of things,” Luka said. “He’s a big man, is Grachyev.”
I remembered what Governor Hauer had told me the year before last, about the men the Skanians had sent to take over Ellinburg during the war. Men from country towns by and large, and a few billy-big-bollocks they’ve brought up from Dannsburg to stiffen them. I wondered if those billy-big-bollocks had been Grachyev’s men. That might be interesting, if it was so.
“I see,” I said. “So he owns Dannsburg, does he?”
“No, boss, he doesn’t,” Luka said. “I’ve done a lot of talking these last few days and I’ve greased a lot of palms, and I’ve had to be fucking careful about it too. The queen owns this city, make no mistake about that. Their City Guard ain’t like ours. They’re not for bribing, from what I hear, not over the big stuff anyway, and there’s no getting them to look the other way when they’ve got the bit between their teeth. There’s watchers everywhere and everyone seems to be informing on everyone else, and it all goes back to the crown through one channel or another. How Grachyev manages to do business at all is a mystery to me.”
“That’s very interesting, Fat Luka,” I said. “Right, tonight then. I’ll want you with me, of course. What have you and Leonov agreed about guards?”
“We agreed no weapons and no guards, but that’s horseshit and we all know it. Grachyev doesn’t know you and he owns the inn, so half the customers will probably be his men. I can’t see a way around it, in truth.”
“No, perhaps not,” I said. “Right, well, get Emil and Oliver and the other three over there this afternoon and have them wait for us. I’ll stand them dinner at the inn as long as they don’t drink too much. I need someone there, in case it all goes to the whores.”
“Aye, boss,” Luka said. “That’ll leave no one here, though.”
He was right, I knew. I had only brought five men with me from Ellinburg, not counting the steward or Luka himself. And Billy, of course. All the same, this might have been Ailsa’s house but I was Ailsa’s husband and her household guard seemed to respect that. I suspected that Brandt at least had been told the lay of things between Ailsa and me, or close enough anyway.
“Right, I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” I said. “Have one of the men
stay here just in case, but we’ll bring Billy the Boy with us. With you and me, I mean, not with the men.”
Luka frowned at that.
“How’s Grachyev going to take you bringing a lad barely old enough to shave to a sit-down? I don’t think we want to offend him, boss.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “Billy is my son now. I’m teaching him how business is done, that’s all. Grachyev will understand that.”
“Aye, well he might,” Luka allowed, “but he might not. Still, as you say, boss.”
I nodded and Luka went off to speak to the men, leaving me alone in the drawing room. I wondered what sort of man this Grachyev was. From what Luka had told me it seemed impossible that he was doing business in Dannsburg without paying off someone, but if it wasn’t the Guard, then who?
I passed the rest of the day wondering about that, and after a light supper that I didn’t really want I went out in my carriage with Luka and Billy the Boy. The Bountiful Harvest was barely half a mile from the house, as Luka had said, but arriving on foot would have made us look poor and I couldn’t have that. I understood well enough how that sort of game was played.
We were all unarmed, as per the agreement Luka had made with Leonov, but of course we had Billy with us so I wasn’t overly concerned on that score. Billy was more of a weapon than any sensible number of men with swords could hope to be. It pained me to think of the lad in those terms, but there it was.
The Bountiful Harvest was very respectable, as all the inns in this part of the city appeared to be, and the man on the door was courteous and unobtrusive but all the same I could tell he had the look about him. There was a cudgel at his belt like all doormen wore, but although his coat was well cut I thought I could see the shape of a sheathed dagger strapped to his forearm underneath it. He had old scars on his hands, too, and those looked like they had been hard earned. After a while you learn to spot the signs of a man who lives the life.