by Mike Carey
Well, I had no idea where Domazlic had been buried, and his followers were no more. They’d disbanded as soon as they found him dead. But I knew where I’d killed him, and I believed I could find the place again.
So I put myself on the road, and I walked for many weeks – back to the valley of Glogau and the woodlands where the Domazlici had made their home. I arrived there in the middle of a windswept and blasted night, a night of storms, when only fools and cut-throats walk the roads – but then I was a cut-throat, of course, so that was meet. The Domazlici had built a shrine to their dead leader at the edge of the path, and it was still tended. I almost left the torc there, but it felt wrong to do that, as though I was making an offering to Domazlic, which I had no desire to do.
While I hesitated, wondering what I should do for the best, the moon came out of the clouds for a moment and I saw a place close by where the ground had been cleared for building. In fact, the building had begun. Coming closer, I saw foundations dug, stacks of cut stone, ropes and wood for scaffolding, all that was necessary for a job well underway. And from the shape of the foundations, which was a cross, I guessed that this was to be a church.
I buried the torc at the centre of the cross. If it did have the power of the devil in it, the devil would not like his new lodgings much and might have the courtesy to leave me alone in future.
But as I turned to leave, something came down out of the sky and hit me on the shoulder with terrible force. I fell, and it pinned me to the ground as a dog bears down a rat. It was a tree, toppled by the wind. I could not get out from under it and its great weight prevented me from drawing enough breath to fill my lungs.
Before the night was over I was dead. And saw the church built, and the abbey around the church, and the house rise where the abbey fell, and the wheel of time turn as God has decreed. For the Bible tells us that we will wait in our flesh until the Judgement comes, and this thin weave of nothingness I’ve become is in reality the very subtlest of flesh.
The girl was done with her tale. She stepped back, and Meister Gelbfisc acknowledged her efforts with a nod of thanks.
‘Rupit Zelzer,’ Gelbfisc said. ‘Will you speak next?’
‘I will,’ said a man at the back of the room. He came forward slowly, with many nervous glances to either side. ‘Though I wish to state for the record that I don’t believe in curses.’
‘Nor in anything else, neither!’ someone exclaimed, but whoever it was they were shushed and scolded with ‘Drozde!’ ‘Drozde’s rules!’ and the man was not heckled any further.
He was a strange fellow, Drozde thought. Tall and well built, as far as that went, but with a rheumy eye, a slouching shoulder and a lugubrious air. He wore a suit of indeterminate brown, and his hair where it remained was of the same colour. But the top of his head was bald, like a monk’s tonsure.
‘Yes,’ the man said defiantly, though the tremor in his voice undermined the words. ‘It’s true that I despise superstition. And it’s true that the faith I had in life I largely lost. So you could say, if you wanted to, that I believe in nothing. I prefer to say that I believe in man. In all men. And in one woman.’
He bowed to Drozde, the gesture awkward and uncertain. ‘Not this woman,’ he added, ‘though obviously I have the utmost respect, the utmost gratitude, the very … yes, a profound regard. But she is not my religion, and she never was. My religion was Simona Kaiser.’
‘You’re meant to be telling her about the torc!’ Magda admonished the man impatiently.
He gave her an austere and contemptuous look. ‘I know my brief,’ he said.
My name, as you have already heard, is Rupit Zelzer. I was born in Ostrawa. And my country, Czechoslovakia, was born in the same year I was, the year when the great war ended.
I grew up in what everyone assured me was a new world. The war that was gone – there would never be another like it. So what would the peace be like? Unimaginable! The rebirth of humanity, without need for religiosity or miracle.
My parents were members of a new political faction that valued equality and the rights of the common man, and I became one too. It was not that they indoctrinated me. It was just that I could see, with perfect clarity, what the future would be like and what my part in it must be. I saw the inevitability of progress towards the perfect worker state. I wanted to be one of its midwives.
But there was another war, even darker and more terrible. The world sickened, and that future died before it was even born. There was a monster at our borders, risen to power through disgrace and treachery, and he swallowed my country in two bites. His forces marched through the streets where I had played as a child, and his soldiers took the place of policemen on our corners.
We were captured without a fight because of the cowardice of our allies, but in my heart I was already preparing for yet another war, which would be a war of humanity against the dead weight of profit. And that thought sustained me through the years of darkness when the tyrants ruled us. They killed my parents, and my older brother – the defining tragedy of my life. They would have killed me too, for my political affiliation alone, but friends helped me to go to ground in Praha, and I lived there under false papers for the duration of the war.
When Berlin fell, the wheel turned and my faction came at last to power. Old scores were paid. Many of German and Hungarian descent were killed, and many more fled into exile. This may seem harsh, but you must remember that these were almost all people who had supported the monster’s regime without qualm or question when they were under his rule. They drew their ruin down upon themselves.
But if the peace brought us catharsis, it did not bring us stability. There were demagogues and fifth columnists in the national assembly who spoke out against the rule of this new, better order. They had to be purged. And then there were rabble-rousers who said that the purges were evidence that Czechoslovakia was not a democracy. It was a hard time. I wanted nothing but good for all my countrymen, but many of them resisted the gift. It was time – long past time – for social justice, but it seemed that social justice must be administered like medicine to those who would thrive by it, but like children feared its taste might be too bitter.
A hard time, yes, but for me it was when hard striving brought sweet success. I rose in the ranks of the new regime, becoming a member of a committee whose remit was the proper management of those assets left behind by our enemies as they fled, or confiscated by the state from dead ones.
As part of this work I came in the spring of my thirtieth year to the Mander glassworks in Glogau. Here. To this house in which we now stand. The Manders had left the country over a decade before and were rumoured to be living in Argentina. They had left the glassworks in the hands of a manager, a certain Vramt Kaiser, but he had just been arrested on charges of collaboration during the war. The state was de facto owner of the glassworks now, and did not want the asset to be wasted. I was to manage it, with the aid of my secretary Mikhal Tuss until a worker could be trained to take on that role.
The glassworks was not what I was expecting. It was already running on collectivised lines, the workers dividing all tasks between them and taking an equal share of the profits. Unfortunately, while I stoutly approved of this in principle, I was obliged to make the place run profitably in order to justify my presence, so I returned the glassworks to a more conventional form of organisation, placing all the workers on fixed salaries and rationalising the use of their time within defined hours instead of allowing them to come and go as they pleased (which seemed to be the system that was then in place).
Another surprise to me was that the workers were all women. I now know that Anatol Mander had arranged things in this way, seeing the glassworks as a means of allowing women widowed by war or accident some degree of autonomy. An unobjectionable goal, but since my brief was to expand production I immediately recruited a large number of men – war veterans, mostly, and desperate for any kind of work at all. Their ready availability emboldened me to lower the wage I�
��d only just set by three crowns a week.
At the same time I instituted a rule that there should be no talking on the workshop floor. The women were accustomed to sing while they worked, or on some days to tell each other folk tales. These bloodthirsty narratives always started in very much the same wise. ‘A man wandered into the woods, and lost his way …’ Then there would be a fairy or an ogre or a troll and everything would go extremely badly for the poor traveller.
The women were unhappy to lose their songs and their stories. They disapproved of my policies altogether, and some of them complained to me about them. Or rather they did not complain themselves, but deputed a spokeswoman to do so on their behalf. This was one Simona Kaiser, the daughter of the man who had been the manager before me.
And when I looked into her face, I was lost.
I’d never known love before. To be honest, I’d never even thought about it. It seemed something of a regressive idea, a myth to replace the older, failing myths of religion and douse the flames of revolution. Men and women pledging allegiance to each other and making each other the centre of their lives, when they ought to declare their kinship with the wider mass of humanity.
But now I knew that love was real – real enough to cripple me. Simona Kaiser’s beauty cut across my life like a shaft of sunlight across a drab landscape, making everything that was murky clear and resplendent.
Many would not have thought her beautiful. She was as big and well muscled as a shire horse. But her dark eyes blinded me, and her ruddy face superimposed itself on everything I saw. Even the smell of her sweat, which at the end of a shift was acute, caused my head to swim.
Yet it was difficult. Almost impossibly so. I was Simona’s superior, and obliged to keep her at a distance. Moreover, she hated me. She argued that all the changes I’d introduced were bad, and that I was ruining the factory. I tried hard to keep my patience and explain my thinking to her, the more so because of my tender feelings, but I could not make her understand the difference between the selfish striving for one’s own profit and the joy that was to be had in striving for the betterment of all.
‘The betterment of all!’ she scoffed. ‘I see our beloved leaders getting bettered. I don’t see it happening to anyone else!’
This was counter-revolutionary talk, and in theory I was obliged to report it. I didn’t do so. But neither did I allow myself to weaken on the core issue of the running of the glassworks. Everything I was doing was in the interests of improving production and making it a vital contributor to the new nation’s wealth and standing. If I succeeded, the benefits would flow to all.
But production did not improve. Alarmingly, although I had almost doubled the workforce I had not managed to increase output by even a small fraction. In the first quarter of the year it even fell back slightly. I felt that the secretary, Tuss, was watching me closely and very probably reporting back to my superiors on my achievements. He had no responsibilities at all, of course, and so could afford to be as censorious as he wanted.
I tried to enlist Simona as an ally, promoting her to forewoman and asking her to work with me to improve the glassworks. I was falling further and further behind on my targets, and was almost at my wits’ end searching for ways of reporting an increased profit. I could lower wages still further – the economy as a whole was so depressed, I didn’t see any likelihood of my workforce leaving en masse – but that would make her hate me even more, and might in any case have a demoralising effect that offset the immediate gain.
If only people could be made to work for love of their fellow man, as I did, then there would be no limit to human progress. But most people are inclined to follow selfish motives, and so they put chains on themselves without even knowing it.
Simona suggested a new furnace, capable of being raised to a higher temperature. I quailed at the thought of such an expense, but I did it to please her. I might have saved the money and spared the effort: she seemed to like me no better for it. Tuss, for his part, pursed his lips and shook his head when he saw the invoices. The cost of the furnace was equal to a whole month’s profit.
But in a sense that decision did change everything. It was just that the change was not one I could have foreseen. The workers who came to install the furnace began by taking up the floor in the blowing room and breaking into the existing foundations. Then they took away most of the material they had excavated, intending to return a few days later and set the furnace directly into the new and deeper foundations they intended to lay.
That night, wandering the glassworks alone and disconsolate, I found myself in the blowing room, staring at the deep pit that had been dug there. It seemed a fitting symbol for my emotions at the time. Most of the room was in darkness, but a bright, full moon laid a single bar of light down its left-hand side, and I saw there, picked out by the light, a small object of a different colour to the surrounding dirt – an object that seemed to pick up the light in a startling way.
I descended into the pit and dug out the small, bright thing. I found myself staring in astonishment at the golden torc you have already had described to you. It was still lying where it had been buried by Petra Veliky seven hundred years or so before.
I knew little about the buying and selling of gold, and still less how to assay its quality. But the solid weight of the torc, and the way its unspoiled brightness could be seen through the crust of dirt upon it, convinced me that it was pure and of enormous value. Probably more than enough to meet the cost of the furnace and allow me to show a profit on the quarter.
But I found myself thinking of another use to which it could be put, and once the idea had come to me I couldn’t push it away again. I hid the torc under a pile of boxes in a corner of the room, and the next day I approached Simona, with great trepidation, to ask her for a meeting.
‘You’re meeting me now,’ she pointed out, in a tone that was not encouraging.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Of course. I meant, though, outside of working hours.’
Simona stared at me as if I were speaking Greek. ‘What hours?’ she demanded. ‘What for? What do you mean?’
I meant that we should talk that night, I told her. And no, I was not trying to debauch or compromise her. It could still be here at the glassworks. All I wanted was a little privacy, to ask her something that was of a slightly delicate nature. And to make her – I stumbled over the word – a gift.
Simona agreed at last, but without enthusiasm. And having agreed she avoided me for the rest of the day, as though she had to fortify herself for the coming interview by fasting from my company.
The day seemed like a month to me. I had told Simona to return at ten in the evening, two hours after the glassworks closed its gates. It seemed a safe enough margin, but Tuss worked on until after nine, and finally I had to send him away by telling him I needed to lock the gates.
I retrieved the torc, took it to my office and waited impatiently there for Simona to return. At a quarter past ten I was still waiting. But finally I heard her footsteps – the only sound in the empty building – coming towards me along the main corridor. I surged to my feet and ran to meet her halfway.
When she saw me coming she stopped, and even backed away a little. I realised that I must look somewhat wild, and remembered that she still had no idea why I had asked her to come.
I began to explain, but it was as though my words fell over themselves as they left my mouth. I was reduced in moments to a stammering wreck.
But the one thing that came out clearly was that I cared for her. And I saw her surprise as she realised that; then her perplexity as she considered what it meant. Though she did not speak, her face softened. I think it had not occurred to her until then that I might have human feelings, still less that I might have them for her.
Encouraged, and daring to hope for a happy outcome, I held out the torc. After a moment’s hesitation, Simona took it from my hands. ‘What’s this?’ she demanded.
‘An antique,’ I said. ‘Of enormous value.
It’s for you. Well, for us.’
Simona blinked. ‘What?’
‘I thought that we could sell it. There are black market dealers in the taverns on Pohranicni who would give us a huge sum. Obviously we would have to break it down into smaller pieces and sell a little at a time. We could use the furnace here to melt it, and pour it into thimbles to make nuggets. You see?’
‘No,’ Simona said, bluntly. ‘I don’t see.’
I tried to put my plan into simpler words. ‘If we sell the gold, it will fetch enough money for us to live like kings. We could go to England or France or Spain and have a life together. A good life, in which you’d never have to work with your hands again.’
Simona had been staring at me all this time, and her expression had changed again into something I found very hard to read. ‘Isn’t working with your hands meant to be a good thing for a communist?’ she asked me.
‘It’s … Yes, of course!’ I stammered. ‘Of course it is. But here in the republic, with me a servant of the state and you a worker under me, it would be difficult for us to be together. With the money we got from selling this—’
She waved me silent. ‘You wish to escape from your life here?’ she said.
And though it was not that simple at all, I nodded.
Simona returned the nod. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Very well. I understand now. But you should try the necklace on first, Herr Manager. I think it would look good on you.’
She put one hand on my shoulder and spun me round, pushing me hard up against the wall of the corridor. For a woman, she was incredibly strong. With her other hand she slipped the torc around my neck and pulled it tight against my throat.
I struggled, but I was not strong enough to break Simona’s grip. Pushing with one hand on the back of my head, and pulling back with the other so that the torc bit hard into my windpipe, she succeeded in strangling me.
