by Mike Carey
Now Bosilka looked at him again, but with no trace of a smile. If anything, she seemed even more angry than before. ‘Any man who fronts me had better keep his cock well tucked away,’ she said coldly.
Klaes was not expecting such forthrightness. And he had not even registered his double entendre until the words were out. It occurred to him that the glances the girl had cast his way in the church might not have indicated complaisance but only curiosity.
‘They are your employer’s children,’ he said. From his suddenly exposed position, a banal statement of fact seemed like a redoubt.
But Bosilka was neither deflected nor appeased. ‘Soldiers are the likeliest ones to take away a girl’s honour,’ she said, with a sort of ferocity in her tone now. ‘Whether she consents or not. And yet they’re the likeliest ones to joke about it. Why is that? Does it make them feel better about themselves?’
Beleaguered, Klaes made one last half-hearted sortie. It was a matter of wonder to him how bad he was at this – at simple conversation! It looked so easy when someone like Dietmar did it. ‘None of my men would violate a helpless woman,’ he said. ‘The punishment for that is flogging or summary execution.’
Bosilka slowed for a moment, looking at him in astonished silence as if she was struggling to find words robust enough to carry the freight of her feeling. ‘What you just said didn’t even make any sense!’ she exclaimed at last. ‘If none of them ever do it, why do you have a penalty already set aside for it? Just in case? Don’t speak to me, Captain. Don’t walk with me.’
She tugged on the younger children’s hands and took them away at a quick march. The older children ran to keep up.
So did Klaes.
‘I apologise,’ he said when he was abreast of Bosilka again. He meant it. The girl’s cheeks were flushed, her eyes darting in every direction. There was no doubting the ferment of her emotions, and it filled him with dismay and self-disgust to think that he had been the cause of it. It was as though words were a sort of ordnance, and he had given forth a general volley without gauging range or wind. He was trying now to accomplish the impossible task of recalling a spent shot.
His own experience, of course, was not in artillery but in engineering. What he was most skilled at was undermining an enemy position. Or, as it turned out, his own.
At any rate Bosilka made no answer. She only shook her head and looked away again. But she didn’t bolt this time, so Klaes was able to go on talking. Unfortunately, he now had a wider audience. The children were all looking at him with wide eyes and slightly fearful expressions. ‘You’ll have to forgive me, Miss …?’
‘Stefanu.’
‘Miss Stefanu. Or might I call you Bosilka?’
‘You don’t need to call me anything.’
‘Army life abrades both a man’s manners and his language. He forgets, sometimes, what civil quotidian discourse means.’
‘I have no idea what it means. But if it’s what you’re doing to me, I’d like you to stop. Leave me alone, Captain.’
‘I’m only a lieutenant.’
She wrung her hands in exasperation. ‘Then leave me alone, Lieutenant!’
Others were looking now, including the burgomaster, whose expression was darkening into a scowl. Klaes didn’t fear the man. His authority was nugatory. But it would be galling to have him complain to the colonel, and to have the colonel apprised, therefore, of how bad a spy Klaes was turning out to be. Outfaced and outmanoeuvred, he had no option but to withdraw.
But he had one shot left, as it were, in his depleted armoury. He had observed Bosilka walking home, and knew the route she would take, along the village’s main (almost its only) street to its very end, and then down a narrower track between trees to the cottage half a mile away where she lived with her father, the village carpenter.
He waited for her by a stile which stood conveniently at the mid-point of her journey. He thought he could make it appear as though his being there was a coincidence. It was a place where a man might pause in his walking to scrape the mud from his boots or take a sip or two of schnapps from his flasquette. And an offer to help the girl over the stile would be an excellent and almost foolproof way of engaging her in conversation.
Bosilka’s irregular working hours meant that Klaes had no way of knowing when she would come. He took a pipe and tobacco from his sabretache and smoked while he waited, a thing he did very seldom. Then he tamped out the knockings on the heel of his boot and waited some more. Men’s voices and the rhythmic impacts of an axe floated through the trees at his back.
It was not yet evening, but the day was already beginning to wane. The light was leaking half-heartedly out of the sky, and the wind was getting an edge to it. That thought led Klaes back to the colonel’s entirely uncalled-for comment about his sabre. He cursed under his breath, shying away from the vulgar image.
It was true that he was a virgin. But he didn’t see this as a character flaw. A private or an officer without a commission had all-too-frequent opportunities to indulge his carnal appetites in tent brothels provided free of charge by a branch of the army’s quartermaster corps. Officers above the rank of sergeant were not expected to take part in these demeaning rituals, but if a man chose to have a girl visit him in his quarters he could be confident that a blind eye would be turned. Klaes had never felt tempted. Women were a slightly fearsome mystery to him, and he was waiting for an occasion when he could meet one, as it were, on his own terms. He was now older than his father had been when he was born, and the opportunity still hadn’t arisen.
He stood at last, reluctantly conceding that he was wasting his time. The girl had anticipated him and gone home another way. Or perhaps she had an assignation elsewhere. He already knew that she lacked the modesty and diffidence that became a young woman – or a woman of any age. He was now beginning to wonder if her chastity was not similarly wanting.
It was at this point, as he was poised on the brink of going, that he caught sight of Bosilka walking towards him along the path. She was no longer in her Sunday best, but had changed into a plain smock and shirt. Her light brown hair was bound up into a ferociously tight bun from which the wind had nonetheless contrived to release a few stray wisps.
She saw Klaes a moment after he saw her. Her face had already a solemn aspect, but at sight of him she positively grimaced. He thought she might actually turn back rather than meet him, but she kept up the same pace and only stopped when she came to the stile itself. She said not a word, but only looked at him expectantly – or perhaps suspiciously.
‘We’re met again, Panna Stefanu,’ Klaes observed.
‘Panna,’ the girl echoed. ‘Panna Stefanu. Is that meant to flatter me, Captain?’
Klaes shrugged, all innocence. ‘Is it flattery to use your own language?’
‘It might be, if you got it right. We don’t say Panna here. We say Slečna.’
Bohemian, or something like it, not Silesian. Why hadn’t he known that? Because this region had a hundred dialects, and wherever two of them met they melted together and made a third. Everyone made shift by using Meissner Deutsch as a lingua franca where it was needed, and that was close enough to Klaes’s own Schönbrunner that he needed no translator and could make himself understood without difficulty.
So he had made what seemed like a reasonable assumption and put his foot in the slop bucket yet again.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, gritting his teeth. ‘Slečna Stefanu.’
‘Why?’ Bosilka demanded.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Why are you sorry? It doesn’t matter. Stand out of my way, please. I’d like to get over the stile.’
‘Allow me to help you.’
He held out his hand, and she stepped back from it very quickly. ‘No.’
Klaes persisted. ‘I promise you, I mean you no insult. I know I offended you earlier, and you thought I was speaking lewdly to you, but I assure you I wasn’t. Let me help you, and walk with you until you reach your house.’
<
br /> ‘Why?’ Bosilka asked again. The same wary look was on her face.
Klaes groped for an answer. ‘For your own safety.’
‘And what should threaten me?’
It wasn’t always like this, Klaes decided. It couldn’t be. If all women challenged everything that all men said, without exception, then no conversation would ever have been finished in the history of the world. This was almost as bad as an argument with that horrendous trull, Drozde. And all discussions with her became arguments sooner or later. He would have slapped her with the flat of his sword more than once, except that it would have demeaned him more than it hurt her.
‘Wild beasts,’ he said to the girl. ‘Footpads. Anything.’
‘Wild beasts, footpads and anything.’ Bosilka smiled faintly. ‘You think you’re a long way from Vienna, don’t you, Captain?’
‘Oh yes. A very long way,’ Klaes said feelingly. Then he parsed his own words and apologised again. ‘Miss Stefanu, I know that this isn’t the edge of the world. All the same, a young woman walking alone –’
‘Not a hundred paces from her own house.’
‘– in the middle of a forest, where if anything untoward befell her, her cries might not be heard.’
‘Oh, and that sounds like a threat.’ The smile vanished at once. She folded her arms and glowered at him.
‘It was not a threat,’ Klaes said, exasperated now. ‘You take everything I say the wrong way.’
‘Do I?’
‘Yes, you do.’
‘Well, then there’s nothing to be done. We should both get about our business and stop wasting each other’s time.’
She made a move to pass him. On an impulse he reached out and caught her arm. As soon as he touched her, Bosilka screamed and pulled away from him so violently that she almost fell.
She stifled the scream almost at once, though she was still shaking and she struggled to speak, the words catching at first in her throat. ‘I don’t like to be touched. You shouldn’t have touched me.’
Klaes had no answer to that. It was true, of course, and he might have apologised again. But he felt certain that any apology would be an occasion for further misprisions, so he waited instead for Bosilka to recover herself, dropping his hands to his sides to signal that he would keep his distance.
‘I don’t like to be touched,’ she said again, with a movement that might have been either a shrug or a shudder.
‘I shouldn’t have touched you,’ Klaes offered earnestly. ‘It was disrespectful.’
Bosilka nodded. This was something, although perhaps not much – an acknowledgement of his words at their own face value. Thus encouraged, Klaes gestured to her to sit on the crosspiece of the stile. ‘Until your spirits are restored,’ he suggested. Then, noticing that the crosspiece was muddied, he took out his kerchief to wipe it off. It was something of a performance – ridiculous, really, given that the kerchief was silk and her gown rough homespun – but he carried it off tolerably well. And of course once it was done, it would have been very hard for her not to sit. Klaes stepped well aside to allow her to do it, tucking the ruined kerchief into his belt rather than putting it back in his pocket.
Bosilka arranged her skirts and sat.
‘Thank you, Captain,’ she said, her voice low and still a little tremulous.
‘Lieutenant,’ Klaes said. ‘Lieutenant Wolfgang Klaes.’
‘Thank you, Lieutenant Wolfgang Klaes.’
‘You are very welcome, Slečna Stefanu.’
‘Nobody ever calls me Slečna anything. It just sounds stupid.’
‘Not even the young men who court you?’
The girl looked at him hard, and he immediately wished the words unsaid. ‘I only meant …’ he began.
‘You meant a compliment, I know. If you don’t try to compliment me, we might get along a little better.’
Klaes bowed, accepting the point. That made her laugh. ‘You learned your manners at court,’ she said.
‘I’ve never been to court.’
‘No? But you lived in Vienna, surely.’
‘Most of my life. May I?’ He indicated the stump of a tree next to the stile, and then – since she made no objection – sat down. He made a rigmarole of this too, playing up to her view of him as a dandified Viennois. She didn’t laugh this time, but she did look amused by him. And he was content to be a fool if it caused her to feel comfortable in his company.
‘And now here I am.’ He indicated with both hands the woods around them, the valley, the village sitting just beyond the treeline.
‘At the edge of the world,’ Bosilka said. His own words from just before.
‘At the edge of the empire,’ Klaes amended. ‘Carrying the archduchess’s mandate into the rural fastnesses where its writ is most attenuated.’
‘What does fastnesses mean?’
‘Fortresses. Redoubts. Castles.’
‘Castles? In the forest?’
‘The castle is the forest,’ Klaes explained. ‘It’s a figure of speech. It means that this terrain is as hard to take and to hold as though it were fortified with walls and earthworks.’
Bosilka looked all around, her expression sceptical. ‘It doesn’t feel that way to us.’
‘No? Then it’s fortunate you have the bravest soldiers in the empire to protect you. The heroes of Banja Luka and Grocka.’ Determined to keep the tone light, Klaes inflated his voice with comical bombast but maintained a grave face. He did not mention the fact that at both Banja Luka and Grocka the imperial forces had been beaten to the wide.
‘To protect us?’ Bosilka said. ‘Is that what we’re meant to think? That you’re here for our sake?’
Klaes’s surprise was strong enough to throw him out of character. ‘Yes, of course,’ he said bluntly. ‘Why else?’
‘I don’t know. Because the archduchess thinks we need a watch kept on us, perhaps?’ The girl was staring at him with the same hard scrutiny as before. ‘You’re not the first soldiers we’ve had here, you know. They never seemed very much concerned with our protection. They only told us what to do, and what not to do, and threatened all sorts of things if we disobeyed. And laid a levy on the village for their provisioning. And beat Rupen Taelep for a brace of hare that weren’t even poached.’
‘Well,’ Klaes said. ‘I’m assuming these were Silesian militia? We’re not like that at all. Imperial troops, wherever they’re stationed, operate under the strictest of discipline. We harbour no pirates.’
‘Of course not.’
‘Nor no tyrants. Our authority is laid down in terms, and has its limits.’
‘Limits! My friend Agnese said they—’ She stopped mid-sentence and shook her head violently, as though she admonished herself for saying too much.
‘Said what?’
‘Nothing. It’s not important.’
‘Please,’ Klaes said. ‘If you have fears, I want to allay them. You may speak to me frankly, Slečna … Miss Stefanu. I’ll keep your counsel and work my utmost to answer your concerns.’
‘Thank you,’ Bosilka said heavily. She stood. ‘But I don’t have time to talk any more. I’ve chores to do at home.’
Damnation! He had had her talking freely and then somehow undone it all again by an incautious word. He wasn’t even sure what it was he’d said.
‘Then may we talk again?’ he asked her. ‘I’ve enjoyed this conversation very much.’
‘I’ve chores,’ Bosilka repeated. She set her foot on the stile and made to climb over. Unthinking, Klaes once again offered his hand. She ignored it, but in navigating around it she ascended the stile at an awkward angle, leaning away from him. He could see that she was unbalanced but didn’t dare touch her, and as she put her foot down on the further side she slipped and fell, crying out as she tumbled onto the hard ground.
With a muttered exclamation Klaes leaped over the stile. But once he was beside Bosilka again he was stymied by the requirement not to touch her. He hovered over her, arms half-extended, waiting fo
r her to accept his offered help. She seemed not to see the gesture, but struggled to right herself while keeping both hands clasped to the skirts of her dress to avoid a shaming display. She was flustered and angry but as far as he could see unhurt.
It seemed that this fiasco was already as bad as it could be. But there was comfortable room, still, for further complications.
Running footsteps made Klaes look round. Three men were approaching along the narrow path. All were in labourers’ clothes, loose shirts and trousers, buttonless waistcoats and flat sandals. One wore a straw hat whose edges were so ragged it looked as though it was returning to a wild state. Another, whose stature was huge and muscular, carried an axe.
‘Oh!’ Bosilka muttered as they approached – a strangled sound of desperate exasperation. She was on her feet now and brushing dust from her dress.
‘What is it?’ the big man called out to her. ‘Silkie, what’s he done to you?’
‘Nothing,’ Bosilka said. ‘Nothing, Kopesz. I’m very well, thank you. I only tripped and hurt myself, is all.’
‘Tripped?’ straw hat repeated. He gave Klaes a narrow-eyed glare. ‘Tripped and hurt yourself. Say true now, Silkie. You’ve nothing to fear with us here.’
‘I feared nothing before you came!’ Bosilka exclaimed. ‘I’m fine, truly. There’s nothing wrong with me.’
The three men slowed to a halt some few feet away, nonplussed. They’d thought themselves a rescue party and had now been told that they were no such thing. A change seemed to come over them as they considered this. It was an ugly change – a dawning of some deep and guarded emotion that stole over all three of them at slightly differing speeds.
‘Well then,’ the third man said, ‘what were you and the captain talking about, before you tripped and hurt yourself?’
‘I only said good afternoon to the lady,’ Klaes said, but none of the three were looking at him or seemed to hear him.
‘I wasn’t talking to him at all,’ Bosilka said. She looked genuinely appalled at the imputation. ‘I don’t want to talk to him. He was waiting here, and I was about to pass by him.’
‘Waiting,’ said straw hat, giving the word the same insinuating emphasis he’d supplied for tripped. ‘What were you waiting for, Captain? Have you got some business with our Silkie?’
