by Mike Carey
Not realising that he was already convinced, Drozde continued to hector him. ‘Isn’t there enough blood on your hands already? Are you so very determined to go looking for more?’
He tried to pacify her. ‘Madam. Drozde. Your argument is a strong one.’
‘Then listen to it, you idiot, and don’t seek to make this sorry situation even worse!’
‘I promise you, I won’t.’
She slowed in the middle of her tirade, the wind squarely gone from her sails. ‘You won’t?’
‘No. I’ll keep your … your friend’s confidence, and say nothing of what we found.’
He bowed formally to her, and took his leave. But as he approached the door of the room it was occluded by a familiar figure. It was Sergeant Molebacher, his hateful bulk filling the space.
Klaes drew his sword at once and advanced. There seemed to be no shaking the man, but he had been provoked beyond patience and he was determined to try what the flat of a sword would do.
‘Here, sir,’ Molebacher said. ‘And by’r’lady, I think he means to kill me!’
The sergeant stepped hastily aside, allowing a small troop of soldiers to walk by him into the room. August followed after, glaring at Klaes like a devil in a pantomime.
‘Colonel.’ Klaes acknowledged his commander with a smart salute.
‘Take his weapons,’ August said. ‘And bind his hands.’
So bizarre and inexplicable were these words to Klaes that for a moment he thought they were addressed to him – that he was being ordered to disarm and arrest the sergeant. Only for a moment, though. Then his sword was snatched from his grasp and strong hands seized his arms. He felt his wrists dragged together and a rough cord of some kind wrapped around them.
‘Colonel August!’ he protested. ‘What … what does this mean? Why are you doing this?’ He looked around, thinking that Drozde might intervene, but Drozde was nowhere to be seen. Apart from himself and the other soldiers, the ballroom was empty.
‘What does it mean?’ The colonel threw his words back at him with grim distaste. ‘It means you’re exposed for what you are, Lieutenant. I was deceived in you, but you were the worse deceived. Imagining that Sergeant Molebacher here would join you in such an enterprise!’
‘I’ve done nothing!’ Klaes protested. But the words sounded weak even to him, mined from within by the promise he’d just made to Drozde. He had conspired – in the interests of peace. But surely August could not have heard that. ‘I don’t understand you.’
The colonel strode up to him, visibly shaking with indignation. ‘What, nothing? So you didn’t find the body? Petos’s body? And then hide it again?’
‘I – I – yes.’ Klaes was too astonished to deny it. ‘Buried it again, yes. But not to hide it. I only wanted to wait until I had more information to present to you.’
‘Very good,’ August said, nodding in mock approval to Molebacher. The sergeant rolled his eyes. ‘More information, yes. Of course. And then when you found the barrels in the cellar, what was your reason for silence then? Was your investigation still not concluded?’
Klaes gasped aloud – which could only sound like an admission of guilt. It had been less than an hour before! Molebacher must have gone down the stairs as soon as they departed the kitchen, and found everything just as they’d left it. And then he must have gone directly to the colonel. But still, Klaes was uncertain what he was being accused of. ‘I would certainly have told you,’ he said. But the lieutenant was a fastidious man, and therefore hesitated before laying any further weight on top of such a blatant falsehood.
August shook his head in utter contempt. ‘You would have told me? But it was Molebacher you went to next – to ask for his help in selling on all that brandy, on behalf of those who left it there.’
‘No! Sir, I did not!’
‘To sell contraband,’ the colonel insisted, ‘and then to apply the profits to – say it, Mole. It sticks in my teeth.’
‘Weapons, sir.’ Molebacher delivered the word almost negligently. He had advanced into the room and was casting his gaze into its shadowed corners. Clearly he had expected Drozde to be here, too, and was surprised by her absence.
‘Weapons?’ Klaes’s tone hovered between horror and exasperation.
‘For Narutsin.’ Sergeant Molebacher spat on the floor.
‘For Narutsin.’ August looked to the soldiers who were holding Klaes, as though he were pleading a case in court and they were the jury. ‘I swear before God, Klaes, I never mistook you for a proper soldier, but it hurts me to find out you’re a traitor.’
‘But this is nonsense!’ Klaes yelled – and was silenced by a ringing slap from the colonel. August’s face was thrust belligerently into Klaes’s own. ‘Even if there were no evidence,’ he hissed. ‘If it were only your word against Mole’s, and no weight else on either side, a single word from him would outweigh all the simpering speeches you ever made. But we have the corpse. We have the brandy. And we have you, Klaes. We have you. For just so long as it takes to read out a charge and hang you by the neck. Take him away.’
These last words to the soldiers, who half-dragged and half-carried Klaes out of the room.
Looking wildly back over his shoulder, Klaes saw Sergeant Molebacher’s face – stern and solemn like the face of a preacher, but with a gleam in his eye that spoke louder than any words could have done. Shame me in front of my men? Beat me out of my own kitchen? Keep my doxy from me? Well I’ve the last laugh on you.
To all of these events, Drozde was a silent witness.
She could not help it.
As soon as Molebacher stood aside and August’s soldiers marched into the room, she felt a hand slip into hers. And then another, on the other side. And then more and more, laid on her arms, her shoulders, her sides and hips.
A gentle but insistent tugging from all these ghostly presences took her from her place and yet at the same time left her standing exactly where she was. A sort of curtain fell across her face, compounded of time and distance, tasting of dry dust at the back of the throat.
When Molebacher walked right in front of her and looked through her, she knew that she could not be seen. When he spat, his spittle hit the wooden tiles right at her feet.
The ghosts had saved her by drawing her a little way into their own place – which was this place, and yet was not this place at all.
She looked down at Magda, standing at her right hand, and nodded her thanks. The girl smiled and planted an immaterial kiss on her wrist, as though to reassure her in the face of this new calamity.
Then she looked to her left to thank the other ghost who was there. She expected to see Agnese, but it was not Agnese.
It was herself.
Drozde was looking into her own face.
The ghost-Drozde wore an urgent frown, and raised a finger to her pursed lips, advising silence. But Drozde could not have uttered a sound if she had tried.
In an instant, every riddle was solved and every question answered. Of course the ghosts of Pokoj knew her well. She had been here – and would be here – for all eternity.
She was going to die here and join them.
She let go of their hands and ran blindly, endlessly, through the terrible stillness.
31
Colonel August retired into his war room – the billiard room, of course, but its current function caused him to think of it as such – and took counsel. With himself alone, of course, because there was nobody besides himself whom he trusted with so momentous a problem as this.
He had kicked over an ant hill, and in the crumbling soil beneath it an abyss had opened. The people of Narutsin, who he had thought minor malefactors in need of a stern lesson, were in fact enemies of the empire on an entirely different order of magnitude. Something needed to be done, and it needed to be drastic.
Perhaps, in this, he was blinded by the intemperance of the violence already past, and sought to justify it by reference to this wider crisis only now uncovered – as thou
gh his conscience could wash itself clean of blood in a bigger bath of the stuff. And perhaps that disposed him to be more trusting than he might otherwise have been of Sergeant Molebacher’s account, which if questioned closely might not have seemed safe to bear the weight he was now placing on it. Or it might have been his old devil, the borderlands, come back to fleer at him again.
For whatever reason, he felt as though the whole world was pressing on his head, and the only way he might avoid being crushed to the ground was by issuing some decisive command that would relieve the pressure all at once. But the logic of these thought processes led him to a place that daunted his spirits.
The villagers of Narutsin had conspired with Prussians, initially in a financial escapade. Smuggling. A hanging offence, but normally one would only expect to hang those who were caught red-handed with smuggled goods in their possession.
Then they had committed murder. Of a militiaman (or more than that, for what might have been the fate of the dozen men in Petos’s command?). But still, this could be a matter of personal jealousies or resentments.
Then they had suborned one of his own officers.
There was a mental exercise the colonel’s old commander, General Polyer, had once recommended to him. Should you find yourself in doubt as to the legitimacy of a decision you intended to make, Polyer said, you performed a substitution: if x were not x, but y, how would this seem?
August tried this now. If the village of Narutsin were not a village at all but an enemy garrison, and they had done the things that had now been uncovered – only those things, nothing else – would he feel justified in launching an attack on them?
The answer was beyond argument. Of course he would.
The way seemed clear. And yet August hesitated. He saw himself, as it were at one remove, ordering a full-scale military action against a civilian population whom he had been sent here to protect. And the yawning gap between those two points of view gave him pause.
If he accepted that the village of Narutsin was in effect an enemy garrison, then he had to move against it. But how would it be seen by others far removed from this place and this moment of crisis? He did not wish to do this thing on his own authority, and then to be told – magisterially and arbitrarily – that he had exceeded his remit.
Or to put it another way, he was (on the whole) content, or at least, as it might be, prepared in good conscience, to carry out a massacre if it had already been blessed by those who otherwise might hold him to account for it.
So he called for his adjutant, Bedvar, and told him to bring him a new quill, and some sand for blotting. Ink and paper he already had. As Bedvar scurried to assemble this equipment, the colonel composed in his mind the letter he would send. It would be to the general, obviously, and it would lay out all the heads and particulars of what he had uncovered here. Some elements he would simplify – for example, that he had trusted Klaes and deputed him to investigate, only to discover later that he was himself compromised. The account was easier to understand if Sergeant Molebacher had been the investigator, keeping Klaes under close observation on August’s instructions and in the process uncovering the network of traitors and infiltrators at Narutsin.
Bedvar brought the quill, already cut and squared. August thanked him and sent him away to make a chicory-root infusion to be brought to him in the billiard room forthwith (he abhorred the Muslim drink, coffee, which had made such inroads into polite society in recent years). He sat down to write, the letter’s structure already mostly clear in his head.
All the same, it was a tasking and aggravating business to write it. August had thought the matter through and his conscience had given him a cautious nihil obstat. But it seemed there was some level below his conscience that still retained some reservations. At all events he was agitated, and kept spoiling this word or that with a wrong stroke of the pen. Terse though the missive was, it cost him a great deal of effort.
Another aggravation awaited him when he was finished. He had no sealing wax, and none was to be found on a quick search of his rooms. This was hardly a message that could travel open, but neither could he traipse up and down the house looking for a stick of wax like Diogenes with his lantern.
‘Here,’ he said, handing the letter and his seal ring to Bedvar. ‘Close this under my seal, Bedvar, and give it to Lieutenant Tusimov. He’s a good rider, I know, and speed is of the essence.’
‘But …’ the adjutant objected. ‘Colonel, Lieutenant Tusimov’s horse – Dancer – she had to be shot. On the day of the fight, she—’
‘Don’t trouble me with trifles, Bedvar, for God’s sake. Let him ride my Thunderer. Tell him the letter is to go to Oskander barracks. He’s to put it into General Sachener’s hands, or his man’s hands. And he must on no account relinquish it to anyone else along the way. You understand me?’
‘Yes sir.’ Bedvar saluted and withdrew.
But despite his incurious and essentially submissive nature, the adjutant would have been less than human if he hadn’t felt the temptation to glance at the letter’s contents – and the more so since the colonel hadn’t expressly forbidden him to do so. He’d only said that it was important to be quick. So provided Bedvar did not slacken his pace, it seemed to him to be acceptable to unfold the sheet and let his gaze wander over the words that were written on it.
At first he took in very little of the sense. He wasn’t the quickest of readers, and the colonel’s hand was ornate in the extreme, the curlicues sometimes extending to mask the letters above and below them. But some phrases stood out.
engaged in treasonous
vipers in the bosom of empire
extirpate this threat with the utmost
And by degrees, these islands of meaning joined to declare themselves an archipelago. At which point, Bedvar forgot about the need for haste and stopped on the stairs to read the message in its entirety, his lower jaw detaching itself by increments from its partner until he looked like a man submitting despite inner doubts to having a tooth pulled.
In a highly discomposed frame of mind, he completed his descent. At the bottom of the stairs he chanced upon Sergeant Strumpfel polishing his boots in the hall. When asked, Strumpfel was sure he knew where he could lay his hands on a stick of red sealing wax, whole or very nearly so. But that would not do for Bedvar, who had to unburden himself of the choice gossip that had fallen so unexpectedly into his lap.
‘But listen,’ Bedvar murmured, detaining Strumpfel with a hand on his shoulder. ‘Listen here, Strumpfel. It’s the colonel.’
‘The curtain?’ Strumpfel had served for many years in an artillery company, and consequently his hearing was greatly impaired.
‘Colonel August,’ Bedvar said, raising his voice.
‘Well what about him, Nicol? Has he found fault with you?’
‘No, it’s not that. You won’t guess it, Strumpfel. He’s going to attack the village. Knock it flat, he says. Because they’re a nest of vipers and they’ve got to be extirpated.’
Strumpfel raised his eyebrows. ‘I should have thought they were all but extirpated this morning. But then what’s the letter about?’
Bedvar looked at the letter as though he’d forgotten it was in his hand. ‘It’s for the general. General Sachener, at Oskander. Colonel August wants his permission to use the guns.’
‘What, even that big one? Mathilde?’
‘He just says the guns. Can you imagine? Those field pieces, on wooden houses? They’ll go down like a hand of cards.’ He laughed, but then checked himself. It would be a show, certainly, but it was an astonishing prospect to send an army, even a small one, cannons and muskets and drums and all, against a village street. ‘I’m not sure I see the sense of it,’ he finished in a minor key.
‘No, but presumably Colonel August has got his reasons,’ Strumpfel opined. ‘Otherwise he wouldn’t be doing it. You just do as you’re told, old man. Keep your shirt tucked in and your gear all trim. You know what else happened tonight, don’t you?’
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And the two men moved off towards the rear of the house, Strumpfel recounting as they went the ‘Lay of the Downfall of Lieutenant Klaes’ with suitable gestures and accompaniments.
Drozde waited until their footsteps had faded into silence before she came out from under the stairs.
‘I don’t like those men,’ Magda said, appearing from the shadows beside her. ‘They’re stupid. And the one with the big moustache has teeth that are all black and horrible.’
Drozde found no answer to this. She had sat down in the shadowy recess under the stairs to think about this matter of her death – which had solidified as she pondered it from an abstract notion to a solid thing. She was wondering whether it might be possible to continue avoiding it if she left right now and ran until she could run no more – until Pokoj was no longer even visible at her back.
In other words she was thinking, as Meister Gelbfisc had invited her to do the night before in the abbey ruins, about time and distance.
Now, in the light of what she’d just heard, she considered the same conundrum from a very different point of view. The march from Wroclaw had taken the column five days. But then they had walked at the pace of heavily laden men and even more heavily laden wagons. They had surely never gone more than fifteen miles in a day. The colonel’s horse could do fifteen miles in little more than an hour on a good road.
But there were no good roads before Lüben.
Tusimov would not leave until morning. But it was conceivable that he would make the entire journey to Wroclaw and back on the same day.
What could she do in a day? How could she stop this thing from happening, and still get clear herself so as not to become the phantom that had held her hand in the darkened ballroom?
The only thing she could think of was to murder Colonel August.
