by Mike Carey
Klaes sighed heavily. His patience was as worn as that ludicrous piece of headgear. ‘Everybody in this district seems incapable of reading imperial insignia,’ he said. ‘My rank is lieutenant, and I’d be obliged if you would make the effort to use it. As to my business with this lady, it is mine and not yours. I don’t, therefore, feel obliged to discuss it with you.’
The big man swished the axe through the air a few times with tight flicks of his muscular wrist. ‘What if we was to oblige you?’ he said.
Klaes was incredulous. ‘Oblige me?’ he demanded. ‘You’ll oblige me by giving me some room. I’ve nothing to discuss with you.’
‘No, you’ve not,’ straw hat said belligerently. ‘Nor with Silkie, neither. So that’s agreed, then. You can go your ways and not have discussions with anyone.’
Klaes considered. He had nothing to gain by disputing with these yokels, and a great deal to lose in terms of personal dignity. He turned his back on them deliberately, returning his attention to Bosilka. ‘I trust you took no harm, Miss Stefanu,’ he said.
Bosilka would not look at him, but kept her gaze on the ground. ‘I’m very well,’ she repeated. ‘Thank you, Lieutenant Klaes.’
‘Bugger off, Lieutenant Klaes,’ straw hat jeered.
‘Before we give you a haircut,’ the axe-wielder added.
‘I’ll take my leave of you, then,’ Klaes said to Bosilka. ‘And hope that you enjoy what’s left of this Sabbath day.’
Her face still averted, Bosilka nodded wordlessly.
‘Do you know what we do to soldier boys who cut too much of a swagger?’ straw hat demanded.
Enough was enough. Klaes turned to face the three men.
‘Speak politely to them, I imagine,’ he said, drawing his sabre, ‘and then swear at them behind their backs. That’s what your kind generally do. Now be off with you, before I flesh this steel in your backside.’
He stepped forward, swishing the sword briskly. He had half-expected the men to flee just at the sight of him – a soldier of the empire with his blood up and his weapon bared.
They did not flee but they did back away, at the same time spreading out so that it was harder for Klaes to keep them all in view at once. The big man was holding the axe en garde, as though he thought it might block a sabre thrust. The other two were casting about for sticks to use as clubs.
‘Oh, stop this!’ Bosilka wailed.
‘I’ll give you one last warning,’ Klaes told the three. ‘Leave this place now, and don’t look back. If you make this into a fight, I’ll have no other option but to treat you as enemies and show you the same quarter I’d show a Prussian.’
The men didn’t seem particularly awed by this threat. Straw hat bent and snatched up a branch. Klaes kept his sword up, judging distances. He wasn’t seriously intending to use lethal force on these louts – they were barely even armed. But a thrust to straw hat’s stomach, checked at the last minute, and a blow to the axeman’s arm with the flat of his sabre, just enough to make him drop his weapon, should teach them a valuable lesson.
‘Stop!’ Bosilka cried out again. She sounded close to hysteria, and Klaes wished he could reassure her. None of this was her fault, and he would make that clear when he reported the incident.
Straw hat was advancing, scuffling his feet through the mush of fallen leaves. Klaes tensed, drawing his weapon back across his body to prepare for a horizontal thrust.
He didn’t see what it was that hit him. He was not even really conscious of the blow. One moment he was facing his aggressors with – at the very least – a plan of attack and a determination to prosecute it. The next he was stretched full-length on the cold ground, blackness and light jangling inside his head like church bells without sound.
He tried to rise, but his limbs would not obey him. A formless moan rose in his throat. He had lost for the moment the thread that winds between past and future, so he had no idea where or even who he was. All he felt was a sense of spinning without moving, and a turbulent stirring in his stomach as though he was about to vomit.
‘He’s still alive,’ said a man’s voice.
‘Of course he’s still alive!’ A woman now, her tone loud and strident. ‘And you’ll leave him that way too, Kopesz Vilken!’
In recognising Bosilka’s voice, Klaes recovered the knowledge of his situation. He had to get up or he was lost. His arms moved feebly, without coordination, like the arms of a baby trying to essay its first crawl.
‘He’ll tell on us,’ said the man.
‘He doesn’t know anything. What would he tell?’
‘About Petos. About the cellar, and all that stuff.’
‘Kopesz, we didn’t speak about those things! Not a word!’
‘Well then. But what will he say about all this, now? He won’t like it, will he?’
‘You leave me to worry about that. Go. Go, go, go! You’ve done enough harm already. Now you’ll let me right it, or I’ll tell Meister Weichorek what you’ve done! I will! And then you can answer to him!’
The response to this was fervent in tone but low in volume – as though the men were remonstrating with each other or discussing possible strategies in the face of this apparently dire threat.
‘We’ll go then,’ one of the men grunted at last. ‘But you look to him, Silkie. And don’t you be seen around him again!’ After these contradictory instructions there was silence for a while, after which the male voices resumed at some further distance. They sounded truculent and defiant, but they were receding quickly.
Klaes returned to his unequal struggle against gravity. He still felt that it was incumbent on him to trounce these ruffians and beat them back into the village with the flat of his sword, the way a farmer drives geese with a paddle. But it seemed this project would have to wait.
As gradually as a cloud drifting by, he rolled over onto his back and sat up. When he touched the back of his head, with gingerly care, his fingers came away bloody. He might have stanched the wound with his kerchief, except that he had fouled it in wiping the stile clean for Bosilka – who was now, he saw, watching him from some distance away. Her face was white and her eyes wide.
‘I hit you on the head,’ she blurted. ‘And I’ll take whatever punishment it might be. But nobody else touched you! Only me.’ She scowled at him in what might have been defiance, but then her face crumpled and she burst into tears, backing away from him until she bumped into a tree. She sank back against the bark, her head in her hands, sobbing and shaking.
‘What did you hit me with?’ Klaes demanded. ‘Oh. This.’ There was a grey rock lying beside him on the grass. He picked it up and examined it. It had a round face and a flat face. The round face bore a dark smear of his blood.
He climbed to his feet. It wasn’t easy, but once he was there he began to feel a little more like himself. The promptings of nausea receded, and the throbbing pain in his head became somewhat more bearable.
Bosilka was still leaning against the tree, weeping.
‘Enough of that,’ Klaes said. And, when that elicited no reaction, ‘Miss Stefanu, stop. This is to no purpose.’
‘Oh – what’s – to become – of me?’ the girl moaned between her wrenching sobs. ‘M-my poor father – he – he can’t do – without me! He can’t!’
‘No, I dare say,’ Klaes said. ‘But he won’t have to. I understand what you did. I don’t like it, but I understand it. I’m not angry.’
Bosilka quieted, and after a moment or two raised her head to peer at him with one bloodshot eye. Her expression was at once calculating and hopeful, which made Klaes wonder if perhaps she had exaggerated the tears to enforce his pity.
‘I only w-wanted to stop you from killing them. Or them from killing you. You were all so angry with each other, and you wouldn’t listen when I said stop.’
Klaes tossed away the bloodied stone and once more explored the outline of his wound, wincing as he did so. ‘I promise I’ll listen to you next time,’ he said gloomily.
&nb
sp; Bosilka was watching him closely and anxiously. Real tears streaked her cheeks, for all that she might have coaxed them along.
‘Will you tell your commander about this?’ she asked in a child’s half-pleading voice.
‘That I was involved in an altercation with three farmers, and then had my brains knocked out by a girl?’ Klaes asked. ‘No, I believe I’ll keep that tale to myself.’
He went back to the stile and sat down to recover himself a little more before leaving. If he left now, he was sure that he would either stagger or fall over. It was important to him that he did not do either of those things.
Bosilka still watched him at first, but when he did not speak she bent her head, seemingly busied with some part of her attire. To spare her modesty Klaes looked away, which made his head start spinning again. He heard the rending of cloth, but kept his head averted.
‘Here,’ Bosilka said, from much closer than he expected. Her hand came into his line of sight, a ragged strip of cloth clutched between her fingers. She must have torn it from one of the many layers of her skirts.
Klaes hesitated, but only for a moment. He didn’t want to go back to Pokoj looking as though he’d just walked off a battlefield. He held the cloth to the back of his head, where there was now a sizeable lump. After a few moments a better idea occurred to him. He wadded the cloth up, opened up his flasquette and poured some brandy onto it. With this he began to swab at the wound. The smell of spirits would be less embarrassing than the sight of blood.
‘You won’t tell?’ Bosilka asked him again.
‘I’ve said that I won’t. I’m not a man to be foresworn.’
She laid her hand, for the briefest of moments, upon his sleeve. This surprised him, considering how badly she had reacted to being touched by him. ‘It would go hard with them,’ she said, ‘if you told. I know it. And I’m thankful for your silence.’
Klaes nodded. But this had little to do with gallantry or honour. Even if he had borne a grudge against the three yokels and wished to feed it, he would have died rather than let anyone know about this ridiculous affair.
‘My silence,’ he told Bosilka, ‘you can rely on.’
He considered offering once again to escort her to her father’s door, but it would have felt as absurd to him as it no doubt would to her. He gave her good day, climbed once more over the stile and went on his way. And as he walked, he considered the unexpected and indirect success of his stratagem.
Petos and the cellar, and all that stuff. The words of the peasant, Kopesz, spoken while Klaes lay apparently senseless on the forest floor.
These were his starting points. His enterprise was launched. And that more than made up for a buffet on the head.
15
Molebacher’s mood grew darker with the season. Over the next few days the big guns were the centre of attention, and Jursitizky and his men held drinking parties every night. The quartermaster was a welcome guest at these gatherings – he could, after all, contribute more than his share of the drink – but the artillerymen had a reputation for heroic over-indulgence, and made it a point of pride not to stop while there was a cask left unbroached. Molebacher began to look sour whenever the call went up for more wine.
Then, too, he seemed to find the guns themselves less enthralling as the days went on. He was used to being master of the feast himself, Drozde supposed. Perhaps he found it galling to be sidelined by lumps of machinery, or perhaps his temper had just turned with the wind, as it so often did. Whatever the reason, the effects were clear enough: the sergeant grew brooding and silent, and increasingly, when Drozde made her entry into the kitchen of a morning, there’d be nothing for her but an empty plate and a curt instruction to go and sniff out her own breakfast.
Drozde had seen him like this before: the seething irritability coming slowly to the boil until it spilled over, burning whoever had the misfortune to be close by at the time. She decided to clear off for a couple of days, just long enough to remind Molebacher of the need to keep up his end of the bargain. If he wasn’t inclined to feed her, then she saw no reason why she should grace his bed.
The camp was unusually quiet: there were no drills or manoeuvres on a Sunday, but even the routine turn-out and tent inspections seemed not to have happened. Drozde wondered if Sergeant Strumpfel was still snoring. On Sundays the men were usually left to themselves for a good part of the day, to worship or amuse themselves as they saw fit. Some were already playing dice next to their tents or straggling into the woods for a morning’s hunting. She found her friends finishing their bread, as dry and unappetising as her own. Ottilie, whose family were Protestants, was minded to go to church, and Libush offered to accompany her. She had no particular beliefs, she said, but she’d made a couple of acquaintances in the town and might meet them there. Drozde had no interest in church. The last time she’d entered one, as she recalled, they’d thrown her out for laughing. But she had no wish to stay in camp at the moment, and readily agreed to walk into the village with the other two.
‘You might ask Molebacher to make us some more bread,’ Libush reproached her as they made their way down the rutted lane. ‘It’s been hard as nails all this week.’
Her friends had a flattering belief in Drozde’s power over the quartermaster. ‘He really doesn’t listen to me,’ she told Libush.
‘He trusts you to go to the market for him!’
‘That’s just because he’s too lazy to go himself,’ Drozde said. She had cause to be grateful for Molebacher’s laziness: it was the only thing which kept his other vices in check and without it, she suspected, he would be loath to let her move about as freely as she did. ‘And it’s useful for the show,’ she added. ‘There’s a lot I can pick up at the market here.’
‘It’s certainly bigger than you’d think,’ Libush agreed. ‘I came up last week and the place was crowded. I wouldn’t have guessed there were that many people in the whole town.’
‘I don’t think there are. Most of them come from over the river.’
‘That can’t be so!’ Ottilie cut in. ‘That’s Prussia on the other side. They’re the enemy.’
The girl was perfectly serious. Drozde suppressed a smile. ‘The Narutsiners don’t see them like that,’ she said. ‘They’re just neighbours. Some of them have married people from across the river.’
‘But that’s treason,’ protested Ottilie. ‘Frydek says it’s betraying the empire to have any contact with the enemy, even to talk to them! How could they do that?’
Libush laughed. ‘Why wouldn’t they? I’ve tumbled with Prussians before now. They’re built like any other men.’
Ottilie was only eighteen, and had worked in a pie shop before she fell for the charms of Sergeant Frydek. She turned fiery red and looked at her feet. Libush was sorry; she was a soft-hearted woman and hadn’t meant to tease the girl. ‘They’re just poor villagers,’ she said. ‘I’m sure they’re not thinking any disloyalty; they just want to sell their milk and eggs. And it’s hard to have near neighbours and never speak to them.’
‘Tell me, Libush,’ Drozde cut in, seeing that Ottilie was still embarrassed, ‘did I see you with a tortoiseshell comb in your hair? You surely didn’t find that in the market here?’
They talked the rest of the way about combs and hairstyles, the immaculately piled curls of Dame Tusimov and how long it must take her each day to maintain them, and from there the various peculiarities of the officers’ ladies. The walk passed pleasantly, and Drozde was sorry to leave her companions when they reached the village. The church was already full. She saw them both seated at the back and withdrew hastily before the hymns could begin.
It seemed that the whole town was at church. The deserted square outside and the street beyond looked somehow narrower without the stalls and people of the market. Drozde wandered aimlessly until the drone of singing and sermonising at her back began to irritate her, then struck off into the woodland that bordered the road to the carpenter’s workshop. The trees had a bare, starvelin
g look, especially near the road where the branches had been stripped up to head height, she supposed for firewood. But there were still yellow leaves above her, and birdsong, and for now she relished the solitude. It was a while since she’d had much time to herself, she thought. Maybe, when spring came, she would take the puppets and her savings and make her way on her own again.
She was roused from her thoughts by the sound of an axe. Someone violating the Sabbath! she thought with a certain amusement, and found herself quickening her pace as she headed deeper into the wood towards the sound.
The woodcutter was working on a tree already felled, splitting it into logs. He was shirtless, a slender man, compact and well muscled. Drozde watched him with pleasure as she came towards him. He heard her approach and raised a hand in greeting without turning from his work. She was close enough by this time to recognise him: Anton Hanslo, the carpenter’s man.
He turned at last with a look of annoyance at the interruption, which changed to astonishment at the sight of Drozde.
‘The puppet mistress! What brings you here?’
Drozde greeted him cautiously, but he seemed genuinely pleased to see her, and in no way embarrassed by his half-dressed state. ‘I took some friends to church,’ she told him.
His smile widened. ‘You didn’t stay with them?
‘I’ve got out of the habit of going to church,’ she retorted. ‘As have you, it seems.’
‘Oh, I go most weeks,’ he said indifferently. ‘Old Stefanu likes me to be there, and Silkie will scold me for not showing my face today. But it’s likely to rain soon. I wanted to get some of this wood into the shed before it starts.’
She glanced up. What could be seen of the sky through the leaves was grey and heavy. ‘That’ll be quite a job, working on your own!’
‘It’s nothing,’ he said. He gestured to a handcart behind him. ‘It’s not far, once I have the cart loaded, and I’ve only a few more to cut now.’ He made to go back to his work, then stopped. ‘You could help me, if you’ve nothing better to do.’
