by Mike Carey
Molebacher picked up the carving and raised it in his hand to examine it more closely. The man who’d made this thing had spent time with Drozde and paid attention to her. He knew the shape of her body. More, he had caught her look. Her wildness. Not perfectly, but well enough for such a tiny thing. The quirk of the painted mouth, that air of teasing invitation.
He had fucked her.
The knowledge bit into Molebacher’s mind like a nail into a beam. He gasped aloud at the dismay that filled him, overwhelmed by its intensity. He stood for a moment on the balls of his feet, uncertain of his balance, the world moving under him.
And in that moment, when it seemed there was nothing in the world but him and that terrible, bodiless pain, he became aware that he wasn’t alone. Swivek had entered the room behind him and was looking at him open-mouthed.
Molebacher set the puppet down, but the damage was done. Swivek had seen him holding it, and had seen it unman him. His hand when he let go of the thing was shaking like the hand of a man in a fever. There was even a little moisture in his eyes, though he would have boiled them in their sockets sooner than shed it.
‘Where is the carpenter?’ he demanded, his voice hoarse. ‘Bring him in here.’
The carpenter was brought, Swivek and Rattenwend flanking him menacingly on either side.
‘Did you make this?’ Molebacher demanded, pointing at the puppet.
‘No.’ The man folded his arms categorically. ‘I did not.’
‘Who did, then?’
‘Hanslo, of course. All of these little nonsenses are his.’
Not the master, then, but the man. It made no difference really, but Molebacher felt that his humiliation was complete. Strangely, the feeling gave him strength. From the valley of the shadow, all roads lead upwards.
‘Find this Hanslo,’ he told the two privates in almost his own voice. ‘Make sure he stands with the others.’
Swivek and Rattenwend saluted and left. The carpenter remained, staring at Molebacher in bemusement. Clearly, whatever the sergeant’s voice might be doing, his face had not yet found an expression that approximated to that of a normal man.
The girl was watching him through the doorway. He wasn’t sure whether the look on her face was pity or hatred.
He wasn’t sure whether it mattered.
Lieutenant Klaes walked up and down the long row of men three times. His memory was really very good, and he was confident that he could have identified the street brawlers on the first pass. But the second and third allowed him to sift his mind for corroborating evidence – moments of time preserved in this or that mental compartment, yielding themselves now to his inspection. He wanted to be absolutely sure. To be less than sure would be to connive at injustice, either by sparing the guilty or by punishing men who had done nothing. Either outcome would be unacceptable.
When he was sure, he pointed.
‘You. And you. You, with the grey hair. And the young man there without a beard. Yes, and you. Step forward, all of you.’
The five men did as they were told, and the soldiers took possession of them.
Klaes hesitated. But if justice was partial it was nothing, or worse than nothing.
‘And you,’ he said, pointing to the mayor’s son, Jakusch. The boy’s face was comically crestfallen. He had been standing half-hidden between two taller men, and clearly thought he’d managed to avoid being seen. But out of all of them he was the one Klaes needed no prompting to remember. He had spent an entire evening staring at the boy across a table – and it had been a long evening.
Meister Weichorek watched the soldiers take his son with a face as impassive as if it had been carved out of stone. His wife, who was standing beside him, gripped his arm tightly. Seeing her stricken face, Klaes felt impelled to speak, but since he had no idea what punishment the colonel had in mind, he did not know what reassurances he could reasonably offer.
‘Any more, Lieutenant?’ Sergeant Molebacher asked, with a sarcastic inflection.
Klaes hadn’t even seen the sergeant return. The man could move quietly, for all his bulk.
‘No,’ he said. ‘No more. Just these six. Carry on, Sergeant.’
They walked out of the village as they’d entered it, with all eyes upon them. And all the way back to Pokoj Klaes thought about what he might have said to Dame Weichorek to still her disquiet about her son.
Something about military justice being swift, perhaps. It was unlikely that Colonel August meant to draw this out.
But reflecting on the kinds of justice that were swiftest filled Klaes’s mind with unpleasant intimations.
23
Drozde wandered restlessly through the house. She had slept badly last night, and woken before dawn, unable to put Ermel’s story from her mind. Even now it fretted at the edges of her consciousness. There was something about it that disquieted her. It was not just that it had left her head filled with visions of marching boots and bloodshed. It was its uncanny familiarity, the fact that the young soldier’s account of her childhood had been uncomfortably close, in many respects, to Drozde’s own. The fighting of which she spoke must surely have taken place a relatively short while ago, perhaps even in living memory, but if that were the case then why was no one in the camp aware of it?
Only the ghosts seemed to know that it had even happened, just as they had known Drozde’s name before they met her, and when she would fall asleep, and whether kittens would live or die. Their unaccountable, impossible knowledge disconcerted her more than anything else she had encountered in Pokoj. She was beginning to feel, too, that the things they knew where more than just a fascinating and unnerving mystery, that they were things that she too needed to know with some urgency.
The aftermath of the fight was not helping her sense of unease. Early that morning a rumour had spread through the camp that the colonel had ordered some of the townspeople to be arrested, and that they would be brought back to Pokoj today to be punished for their actions. The news had cast yesterday’s incident in a whole new light. Suddenly, the fight had been elevated from a mere scuffle to a serious criminal offence. Whether they thought this turn of events no more than justice or a gross over-reaction, no one was laughing any more.
Drozde’s wanderings had taken her to the far end of the house, an area the officers mostly avoided as the walls of the outer rooms were mildewed and damp. Good, she thought, and opened a door at random. Some time undisturbed might help her regain her equanimity.
The room had a faint whiff of damp but looked far less damaged than the others she’d seen, perhaps because three of the four walls were hidden behind bookshelves. They were not over-full but neatly stacked, in the manner of a household whose library is intended more for show than use. And clearly, Drozde thought, the house’s previous owners had not been over-fond of reading: they had taken almost every stick of furniture with them but left the books behind.
Not that she was going to complain. Drozde knew how to read: Vanek had taught her to keep his accounts when his eyes started failing, and she had helped him jot down new songs and ideas for the shows. At the bottom of her trunk she still kept his tattered chapbooks of old tales: Aschputtel, The Magic Donkey and the like. She was always happy to find new stories, and the books in this room looked as if no-one would ever miss them. She scanned the shelves. Those facing the door were given over to works of theology and moral instruction, in matched bindings that had once been gold-tooled. But round the corner on a bottom shelf was a row of much smaller, shabbier volumes: travel books, ballads and romances. She picked out a few interesting-looking ones. It would be good to have a book to read on the nights when Molebacher didn’t require her. She had no lamp, but there were fire pots; she’d read by firelight many times.
A sound behind her made her turn – no, not a sound, a vibration in the air, such as the ghosts made. ‘Magda?’ she called softly. But it was not the little girl. One of the other ghosts, barely visible, was standing at the far end of the room. Something about t
he figure seemed familiar to her, but it spun around as she turned to face it, and faded from sight, leaving only the sense of its presence.
With a start, she recalled the figure – or figures – that had withdrawn from the ballroom on some of the nights of storytelling. Why would any of the ghosts wish to avoid her? They respected and trusted her – they’d said so many times – and she couldn’t see what need ghosts would have to lie.
‘Hello?’ she said aloud. ‘You don’t need to hide; we’re friends, aren’t we?’
The ghost did not answer. Drozde started to speak again, and checked herself. Whoever it was, they had gone.
But her solitude was broken. She wrapped the books carefully in her shawl and left the room: she’d go and see to the puppets for a while.
She had expected to find Molebacher hard at work. Instead, Muntz and Standmeier were desultorily peeling potatoes while Hulyek smoked a quick pipe in the open doorway to the yard. Their relaxation told her at once that the quartermaster was away. He had gone to the town, Standmeier told her with careful politeness, to help Lieutenant Klaes with the arrests.
‘To help who?’
Standmeier laughed. ‘You’re not wrong, miss. I doubt the lieutenant could bring them in on his own. That’s why he took the sergeant along, no doubt.’
Drozde’s unease deepened. She’d thought Klaes had been given the job of talking to the townspeople, trying to win them over. Had the colonel decided to make enemies of them overnight, turning the friendly envoy into an arresting officer, with Molebacher as his enforcer? If any of the accused men showed any resistance Molebacher would break heads, and nothing the prissy little lieutenant could do would stop him. If August had wanted to provoke a further riot, she thought, he could not have sent two more likely taskmasters.
She suddenly felt the need for some more sensible company. She nodded to the orderlies and went outside to the women’s camp.
Libush and Sarai shared her dismay. They had heard about the arrests from Katerina Lehmann, whose husband had been one of the first to join the battle. She was full of indignation at the injuries he had suffered, but even by her account it seemed that he had struck the first blow.
‘By Katia’s tale, it was just name-calling at first,’ Sarai said. ‘Our men parading back and forth past their houses, and some silly lads tried to make fun of them. The lieutenant had no call to take them through the town at all.’
‘All of them brawling in the street like a pack of puppy dogs,’ said Libush gloomily. ‘It’s nobody’s fault. Or everyone’s. Why not just let it pass?’
‘I suppose,’ Sarai said. ‘Something needs to be done, doesn’t it? To restore order.’ But she didn’t sound convinced.
The prisoners were brought in at mid-day: six of them, ranging in age from a grey-haired man of over fifty to a youth still in his teens. Most of them still had visible bruises; all looked confused and sullen. Lieutenant Klaes, leading the procession, seemed nearly as miserable as his captives. His men, flanking them on both sides, were carefully stolid. Even Sergeant Molebacher, who brought up the rear, seemed less satisfied with his role than Drozde would have expected. She took care to stay out of the quartermaster’s line of sight. She was glad there had been no further violence, at least, but the sight of the six wretched men, escorted like criminals by those who had provoked the fight, filled her with anger.
Colonel August received the prisoners with massive dignity, and directed them to be taken to the north side of the house where one of the unoccupied rooms had been turned into a cell. They would be sentenced that same day, he said.
‘Sentenced!’ Libush muttered. ‘Was there a trial?’
The mood in the camp was ill-tempered and uneasy. Some of the men spoke of the arrests with vindictive satisfaction, viewing yesterday’s fight as an attack on the honour of the company. But the majority, including many who had been there, shared the women’s view.
‘It’s hitting a gnat with a sledgehammer,’ complained Fingerlos, one of Libush’s regular visitors. ‘What does the colonel think to gain by it? He’s just making more trouble down the line.’
‘There’ll be ill feeling from now till we leave,’ agreed Haas. ‘And I heard Strumpfel say it was our boys began it.’
The prisoners’ fate was known less than an hour after their arrival. Alis came to Libush’s tent supporting a tearful Ottilie, who had heard the news from sergeant Frydek: there would be a public flogging the next day.
August planned to make an example of his culprits. To this end he had sent a squad of men to extend the makeshift parade ground that had been cleared in the field to the west of the campsite, scything the tall weeds and clearing the molehills so that the whole town could be assembled to see the spectacle. And he had ordered the town’s carpenters to assist his own men in building three whipping frames.
The arrival of the giant wooden posts, on a gun carriage pulled by two horses and attended by twelve of Dietmar’s men, drew a smaller and more subdued crowd than the one that had met the guns a month before. Drozde refused to join it. But she could not stop herself, later on, from following the sound of hammering into the parade ground.
She felt the breath of Magda’s touch on her hand. She had never seen the child outside the house, but somehow her presence here did not surprise her. ‘This isn’t a good thing for you to see,’ she told her.
The little girl’s face was more sombre than she’d ever seen it. ‘I know what it is,’ she said. ‘And I know you have to come here. I just wish you wouldn’t, when it makes you so sad.’
‘My sadness has nothing to do with it,’ Drozde said, unable to keep the edge from her voice. ‘It’s a monstrous thing they’re doing, and a stupid one. And someone I know has let himself be involved with it.’
Magda nodded unhappily. ‘You have to tell him not to. I know that too. But don’t be too mean to them, Drozde. They don’t know what will happen.’
‘And you do, I suppose,’ Drozde retorted. But the little girl had gone.
She nearly ran into Klaes at the edge of the field. Four soldiers were already hoisting the first of the frames into position; a second was being hammered together. The lieutenant was watching with a stricken expression, as if he had not seen this sight a dozen times before – or as if it had only just struck him that the men to be pinioned on the vile things tomorrow would be there through his doing. Well might he feel guilty, the little weasel. But it was not Klaes who concerned her. She had someone else to see here, and for the life of her she did not know what she would say to him.
Anton was there with his master, a greying man who must be the girl Silkie’s father. She’d taken a sort of liking to the girl, which might have extended to the father if she had met him first in his workshop. Here and now, she wanted to box his ears, him and his man both. The two of them were planing the surfaces of the tops of the triangle to fit them into a smooth joint, with the same careful craftsmanship that she had seen in Hanslo’s work on a table leg.
She had already gone too close to them: both looked up. Without thinking she took Anton’s arm and pulled him away. The soldier hammering at the triangle’s foot ignored them both. Meister Stefanu began to protest, but something in her expression must have dissuaded him.
‘What are you doing?’ she demanded. ‘How can you let them use you like this!’
He tried to back away from her. He looked sheepish, but in no way guilty: he really did not understand. God preserve us from such innocence! she thought in despair.
‘I’m sorry you think less of me for it,’ he said. He really was, she could see. ‘It does grieve me to see my neighbours shamed like this – whipped like naughty schoolchildren. But Meister Weichorek says we’re to co-operate with the colonel’s orders. And, you know, they were brawling. I pulled Martek off one of your men myself. They would all have spent time in the stocks else, and the mayor doesn’t order that lightly.’
‘No more would he order this, if he knew! Anton, you think this is a beating like
a schoolmaster’s switch? Look at what you’re building! They tie a man to this so he can’t move. They flog him with a six-tailed whip till his back is bloody. Some die. Are you going to stand here tomorrow and see your neighbours tormented on an engine of your own making?’
She saw how the words hit him. ‘They’ll do that?’
‘Yes, Anton, they will. And you’re helping them!’
He shook his head. ‘No. That can’t be. It’s just a beating; we’ve all been beaten in our time. You can’t mean … It couldn’t really kill someone?’
‘The loss of blood. Or the wounds fester, afterwards.’ He was pale now. She’d said all she could. ‘They keep a surgeon on hand.’
Anton was silent for a long time. He glanced over at his master, who had stopped his own work and was watching them with misgiving.
‘I’ll tell him,’ he said. ‘Silkie would never forgive us. But I don’t know what we can do.’
‘There’s nothing you can do, not now.’
She hadn’t meant her voice to sound so cold. He was ashamed, not looking at her. She said, ‘You didn’t know.’
One of the soldiers hoisting the frame had seen them talking and pointed them out to his comrade. Another moment and someone would come over to order the men back to work, and shoo off the whore wasting time with them. She turned away. She heard Anton say, ‘We’ll do no more of it, Drozde,’ and wished she could go back and give him her hand on it – some touch, at least. But one of the soldiers at the frame was Rattenwend, one of Molebacher’s orderlies.
She stopped again at the field’s edge. Klaes was long gone; if he’d seen her with the carpenters he would certainly have felt it his duty to send her off himself. She saw Anton in anxious talk with his master. Neither had picked up his tools, and both of them looked over in her direction. Well, she could do no more. It wasn’t as if she’d achieved anything. They’d still build the hideous things without him, and use them; she couldn’t stop that. But it gave her a small satisfaction that Anton would not finish their work for them.
