The House of War and Witness

by Mike Carey

  Molebacher had no intention of letting her reach the stairs. Forgetting in the heat of the moment that they led nowhere, he launched himself headlong after her.

  Drozde covered half the distance, and a little more. She knew she wasn’t going to cover it all. With the open doorway looming ahead of her she dropped abruptly to her knees and bowed low to the ground, backside raised like a dog submitting to its master. In Katowice they called it the huscil pus, the goose-tail kiss, and it was considered a legitimate move even in a fair fight.

  Molebacher ran right into her, tripped over her, and fell full-length on the flags with a jarring impact. His skull, making contact with the stone, emitted a sound like a muffled gong. The manoeuvre hurt Drozde too, but she’d had her arse kicked many times and considered the bargain more than fair.

  She scrambled to her feet. Molebacher was twitching like a man in the grip of a nightmare. He seemed unable to rise. She turned and fled for the main door, but she lost her way in the dark and found herself groping at cold tiles fouled and furred with ancient grease. She didn’t even know, in her panicked urgency, whether she needed to go left or right.

  A clack of steel on stone sounded from behind her before she made that decision. She turned to see Molebacher striding towards her with the great cleaver, Gertrude, in his hand. A smear of blood hung like a skewed veil over his forehead, and his teeth were bared.

  Drozde groped in the pocket of her dress, found nothing there but an end of candle.

  Molebacher brought the cleaver down, and she jumped aside. He turned, quick as a cat and struck out again. This time the blade whickered past right in front of her face.

  In the corner of her pocket her fingers closed on something hard and familiar.

  Molebacher swung Gertrude a third time, and Drozde stood her ground as the steel sliced into her. She thrust with the tiny bradawl as if it were a sword. Its blade was barely two inches long, but Hanslo had kept it filed to a wicked point so that it would bite deep into dense heartwood. Now it bit deep into Molebacher.

  He staggered back, dropping the cleaver to clasp the wooden handle of the bradawl where it protruded from his chest. It was doubtful that she’d reached his heart: the sergeant’s body was well armoured with fat and muscle. But the shock and the sting of the wound made him reel.

  Drozde snatched up Gertrude and stepped forward, swinging wildly and without aim. Pain had stripped Molebacher of all his swagger and solidity, and he cowered and backed before her. Again and again, Gertrude’s razor edge dipped into his fat and sinew.

  Then he fell – exactly across the place where the kitchen ghost lay in its vague puddle of darkness. And his gesture as he vainly covered his head with his hand was the ghost’s gesture, which she had seen so often. Which meant, she realised as she hewed at him, that the kitchen ghost was Molebacher himself, present here before his death just as she was, and Magda was. But unlike them, kept in the dark and the cold and allowed to render down to this moment of pain and terror. If she had not been so intent on her labours, she might have wondered more at that. The sergeant was so very hard to kill!

  Drozde had never thought very much about what butchers did. Certainly she had never thought of them as heroes. But murdering Mole was an odyssey, and when she was done she was as weary as if she’d wandered ten years on the face of a hateful sea.

  35

  Too restless even to contemplate sleep, Colonel August sat long after midnight in his war room answering correspondence and bringing his journal up to date.

  ‘I feel now as if my coming here was providential,’ he wrote in the journal.

  If war is coming, it is these all too porous borderlands that will feel it first. And much of a war’s future course can be foretold in those initial engagements; the swing of the foeman’s steel, the volley of his guns, the extent to which the people of the margins recoil – and then respond!

  I have found, by meticulous probing, a weak point. And it is not weak by reason of fear or ignorance. It is wilfully weak, weak by its own wickedness. Narutsin is a place that has forgotten all vows of fealty and all ties of civilisation. In time of peace it could be chastised and reclaimed, but this is not a time of peace and there is no leisure for debate.

  An example must be made, and it must be so clear that none misunderstand.

  August set down his pen. He had more to say on this subject, and a pressing need to say it: he found himself troubled, still, at the implications of what he had decided. Posterity deserved a full explanation of his thought processes. How else would it forgive him? And without the sense of that forgiveness, trickling backwards through time from some unimaginable future of ease and plenty, how would he be strong enough now to do what must be done?

  But his eyes were tired and his mind was running on erratic courses. He could swear he had just heard, from the kitchen immediately below him, the clash of arms. As though Pokoj had become a battlefield! Or perhaps it was merely haunted by the ghosts of battles fought there in former times.

  On any other night he would have shrugged off the presentiment and laughed at himself. Tonight he found himself unable to do so. He needed to know that there was an innocent explanation for those sounds, so he took the lantern from his desk and went to see what was happening.

  The door of Molebacher’s kitchen was wide open, but the room seemed at first to be entirely empty. When the colonel ventured inside, however, he saw by the light of his lantern a figure standing by the butcher’s block. The light was not good – it was only firelight from red embers and the diffuse radiance of his lantern – but even with no more than a silhouette to go by August could see that it was not the sergeant himself but his doxy, the gypsy woman who performed the puppet shows.

  ‘You,’ he said. ‘Woman. Was Sergeant Molebacher here just now? I thought I heard a sound, from upstairs. An altercation.’

  The camp follower laughed – a strident, unlovely sound. ‘There was, sir, an exchange of words,’ she said. ‘For look, my dear Mole was killing a capon just now, to braise it with onions and marjoram for your lunch tomorrow. But when his steel took off the bird’s head, see how it painted me!’

  The woman gestured towards her face. August did not understand what she meant until, raising the lantern a little higher, he saw the streak of dark blood across her cheek and forehead. It was a startling and disgusting sight, and the colonel recoiled a little from it in spite of himself. ‘So he’s gone now,’ she went on, ‘to fetch a wet kerchief to wipe me with, for I’d be shamed to be seen out like this. And – he took his candle with him, which is why you find me here darkling, sir.’

  ‘Mole is a good man,’ August said inanely. He could think of nothing that was more to the purpose.

  ‘A very good man,’ the doxy agreed. ‘Bound for heaven, I’m sure, be it late or soon, for what does he lack of virtue?’ And she laughed again, somewhat louder. August wondered if she might not be a little crazed in her wits. He had never noticed it before, but there was something amiss in both her face and her voice. But her story explained the clang of steel he’d heard, and he saw besides that Molebacher had left one of his butcher knives – a large and fearsome one – lying on the block, which like the woman’s face was streaked and smeared with blood.

  ‘Well,’ the colonel said. ‘Commend me to him when he returns.’

  ‘I will, sir.’

  He was about to leave, but a happy thought struck him. ‘And have him broach one of those barrels of brandy,’ he said. ‘Let the men have two glasses each, those who are yet awake, to drink the archduchess’s health.’

  ‘I’ll tell him so, sir. Depend on it.’

  ‘Thank you.’ August nodded – the most he could bring himself to do by way of courtesy – and took his leave quickly.

  Drozde waited until he was gone, and then until the light of the lantern faded, before sinking to her knees.

  She had seen the colonel coming down the stairs as she was about to leave the kitchen, having already unbolted the door. The
re was no way she could get past him without being seen, and then she had realised with a thrill of horror that he was heading straight towards her.

  She might have fastened the bolt again, but would the colonel not wonder who was inside at such an hour? If he had business with Molebacher he would knock and stay until someone answered. She’d be trapped all over again.

  So she ducked back inside and ran across the room to the butcher’s block. The light from the fire would pick her out there, and if luck was with her the colonel would glance immediately in her direction – overlooking the hacked and mountainous corpse lying in its own blood off to his left.

  The whole while she had talked with him, Drozde had felt her own blood seeping from the rent Gertrude had opened in her side. She had not even dared yet to explore the depth and extent of it, but she knew from the lightness in her head and the weakness in her legs that it was no flesh wound.

  The blood ran down her legs and into her boots. A faint spattering sound told her that it had also soaked her shift and was dripping onto the flagstones in front of her feet. If August shifted his lantern and happened to see it she would have to kill him too, and she kept her hand close to the handle of the cleaver in case that should happen.

  At a certain point in the conversation, when he said that Molebacher was a good man, it occurred to her that she could kill him anyway. August’s death might at the very least mean a delay in the execution of his orders. But she could not be sure that she would be able to do it. In her present state, she could not even be sure of standing upright once she had let go her hold on the butcher’s block. So she held to her first course and waited him out.

  It was as hard, in its way, as the murder had been.

  Now, kneeling in a pool of her own blood, Drozde turned her attention belatedly to her injury. She needed to stop the bleeding, but the wound’s location made that very hard to do. She took one of the lengths of cloth she’d brought to deck out the theatre and bound it around her chest as tightly as she could, without much effect. Blood welled from under it and quickly drenched it through.

  She was starting to feel cold. She drew closer to the fire, but felt almost no warmth from it. It did, however, give her an idea. She took the cleaver, Gertrude, and laid it flat across the flames.

  Then when the steel was hot enough, and starting to glow red along its edge, she applied it to her wound.

  36

  Klaes loitered nervously in the pools of shadow beneath the ruined abbey’s crumbling walls, waiting for Drozde. Where on earth could the woman be? he wondered impatiently. The hour they’d agreed had come and gone, and a knot of Klaes’s men had gathered at the far end of the ruins. They were beginning to look at Klaes expectantly.

  It was not a bad turnout, he thought, surveying them all. Gulyas had come, with most of his friends, as had Toltz and Schneider. Most of his unit were there, but there were still a fair few faces missing from the crowd. He trusted that most of those who hadn’t turned up would keep the knowledge of the show to themselves for a while, but it was only a matter of time until the rumour spread throughout the camp, and not much time at that. They must act quickly, he knew, and Drozde was still nowhere to be seen.

  After what seemed like an age he saw her, hurrying towards him from the direction of the kitchen gardens. But something was badly wrong. She was staggering as she walked, and the bundle which she had slung over her back had bowed her almost to the ground. Klaes ran to help her with her burden, but Drozde waved him away and set it on the ground. As he drew nearer, he saw with a jolt of shock the blood that saturated her clothes and streaked her face.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked her. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Molebacher. And I’m well enough.’

  Klaes would have questioned her further, but the men were growing restless now, so he hurried to help Drozde set up. There would be time later, he hoped, to examine this fresh mystery, and to tend to her wounds.

  Drozde had mounted so many of these performances since she joined Colonel August’s company that the preparations had become instinctive behaviours, scarcely examined as she enacted them. She only realised this when she found herself down on one knee with the wooden uprights of her tent in her hands. She paused in what she was doing. Tonight would be different in every respect, and there was no point in pretending that it wasn’t. In fact, it was better to mark the difference from the start.

  Klaes, who was shaking out the canvas with a view to draping it over the wooden frame, was slow to understand that the agenda had changed. He stood waiting for Drozde to slot the uprights together.

  Instead she threw them down again, and indicated that he should do the same with the canvas. ‘I’ll do without a backstage tonight,’ she said.

  ‘But then what will make your proscenium arch stand up?’ Klaes objected.

  ‘I’ll do without that too. I just need my puppets.’

  Klaes stood aside to let her get at the pile of figures on the spread blanket. But he jumped forward again immediately as Drozde, in leaning over them, almost fell. His hands as he caught her scraped across her burned skin. The sudden pain shook her like a dog and she came close to fainting, but she still pushed back indignantly against Klaes’s grip. It was never a good thing to seem weak, even if you were dying. If people thought you were weak, they’d take liberties. ‘I’m fine,’ she told Klaes between gritted teeth.

  ‘Woman, you’re as pale as your shift.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be looking at my shift, Lieutenant.’ And anyway, it wasn’t true. There was so much blood on her, both her own and Molebacher’s, that she was dressed in crimson.

  She shrugged out of Klaes’s arms and rummaged among the puppets for her starting line-up. General Schrecklich, of course, and all the other soldiers she could lay her hands on. She had none in Prussian uniforms, unfortunately – but then, until she’d met the girl, Ermel, she’d not known what a Prussian uniform even looked like. Her little Austrian army would have to do.

  A few villagers, who would also double as Pokoj’s ghosts, a coquette to play the part of Agnese, and for herself … She reached into the pocket of her dress and brought out the puppet Anton had made. She tilted and dipped the crosspiece and the little figure bowed and danced.

  Somehow the touch of it made her feel stronger. When she stood, some of the dizziness had gone from her head and the stiffness from her side. The pain was as intense as before, but that was no bad thing: it would keep her awake and alert. She needed to be both.

  She turned to face her silent audience. They were watching these proceedings with troubled faces, their gaze flicking between her and their commander. She nodded to Klaes, indicating that she was ready to begin.

  ‘Pay attention,’ Klaes said. And he had sense enough to say no more, since he had no idea what was to follow.

  On an impulse, Drozde gave him the battered trumpet. She’d done enough to say, ‘this is different.’ Now she needed to remind them of why they gave her their coppers each month. Why she was one of them.

  Klaes took the instrument, and after only a moment’s hesitation blew the softest fanfare ever sounded. Nobody applauded or catcalled, but there was a shift in the way they stood or sat – an aura of attentiveness that spread like a wave from front to back of the huddled group.

  Drozde spread her arms. In her right hand she held three soldiers, their crosspieces hooked into a single control bar so that they could do little more than go forward in lockstep. They bobbed from right to left, rigidly erect. Marching. Held in her left hand, her own puppet walked along behind the soldiers, bottom thrust out and hips rolling to suggest a wanton’s ‘look at me’ gait. The faintest ripple of laughter went through the assembled men. It was a promising sign, even though this was going to be anything but a comedy. It meant she had them with her, at least at the outset.

  ‘What’s that great house?’ she had one of the soldiers say.

  ‘That’s Pokoj,’ another replied.

  And as they marched
on, the Drozde puppet detached herself from the column to come forward, facing the audience directly. Her back and her head tilted to suggest her staring, hushed and wide-eyed, at something vast that rose before her.

  ‘Pokoj,’ Drozde repeated. ‘I wonder what I’ll find there.’

  It was the damnedest thing, Klaes thought as he watched. How the gypsy could create a scene in your mind without even the benefit of a painted backdrop, a few trees made out of distressed green ribbons, or Private Taglitz’s flute.

  There was a level, still, on which he could not keep himself from despising her. A woman who had sold her body’s favours to one man after another without ever putting her affections into play. A hard and shameless whore who danced across the surface of the world, who shimmered like fool’s gold, who played for survival and would pitch any man into the mire when she needed to and never think about him after.

  But he had an inkling that night of what else she was, or might be, and of how small a part of her he apprehended.

  For he was sucked into the story as everyone else was, and lived its wonders. He went with Drozde into Pokoj. He met the ghosts, and heard their stories. He spoke with the Prussian soldier, and learned of the invasion that was to come. Sooner, or later? When would it be? Drozde asked the man-woman with trembling voice.

  ‘When the comet stands over the roof of the house and points to the Hunter’s hound.’

  And like every man there, Klaes found himself looking over his left shoulder. He quailed inwardly at the sight of that vivid red streak in the western sky, left behind like the scourings of the fallen sun and leering back at him now over Pokoj’s roofbeam.

  Drozde gave herself profligately to the performance. Whatever strength she had left, she spent it like a drunken lord at a gaming table, who throws gold coins in all directions as if to defy the fates and deny the very possibility that he could ever lose.