by Mike Carey
But she was losing. Though the soldiers thrilled at the strange story, it was not enough. For the first time in her life Drozde felt that she was like the men who had paid to use her in the past. Or perhaps she was their opposite. She had bought these men’s emotions, but not their action. She had filled them with the things she needed them to feel, but still they were weighted down with custom and obedience and a sense of how things should be. When the performance was over, they would go back to being men who followed a bugle and did what Colonel August told them to do.
But then, gradually and piecemeal, something changed.
Drozde felt it before she saw it. As when Klaes had sounded the fanfare, the men shifted to a new level of attentiveness. They had been absorbed in the puppets’ tale to the point where their breath was stilled. They still were, but now they were also looking past Drozde into the darkness, their eyes and mouths opening wider, their bodies half-rising involuntarily as though Lieutenant Klaes had called them to attention.
She should not look. Not in the middle of her story, with the hardest part still to come. She forced herself to continue – out of the past into the future. The soldiers in her left hand now, and General Schrecklich high-stepping onto the imagined stage from the right. ‘Step lively, you men. We’ve got to teach these treacherous peasants a lesson, what?’
The soldiers huzzahed and marched off towards Narutsin, which without a stage or a backdrop was as notional as Pokoj was. That didn’t trouble her. The audience always did most of the work in turning a few splashes of paint and a twist of lace into a location. She was more worried about the Prussians, but if anything the fact that they could not be seen or heard – that the soldiers fell to invisible enemies, their own volleys seemingly useless – added to the power of the final massacre.
When all of the soldiers were dead, she let the puppets fall one by one to the grass like leaves in autumn, and dusted off her hands.
The men said nothing. They did not applaud. They didn’t even move.
Finally Drozde risked a glance over her shoulder, and saw at once what it was that had subdued them. The ghosts of Pokoj had come to see the play. All those she’d seen before in the house she recognised at once. But there were newcomers too, and it took her a moment or two to realise who they were. Private Edek. Private Schottenberg. Private Fast. Private Renke. Private Standmeier. Sergeant Strumpfel. Lieutenants Pabst and Tusimov and Dietmar.
The ghosts of those who were about to die, in a battle they didn’t yet dream of.
Drozde wondered for a moment how they came to be there. Surely they hadn’t died in Pokoj’s grounds, and from all she knew they couldn’t wander far from the place where they had fallen. The place where they were yet to fall. Her question was answered when she saw among the ranks of the ghosts her own hard stare, her own face looking back at her out of the dark as though out of a mirror.
Ghost-Drozde had brought them. Had thrown her own intangible shoulder against the wheel where her living self pushed and heaved, and helped it turn.
‘That’s all of it,’ Drozde said, dismayed at the tremor in her voice. ‘And it’s all true. If you go against the village tomorrow, you’ll die. All of you. The Prussians will sweep over you like a wave, and there won’t be anything you can do about it. But if you help me, and do what your lieutenant tells you to do, there’s a way to come out of this alive. It means desertion, and if the army ever finds you again they’ll hang you for it. So this is goodbye to everything you were. Either you die tomorrow or you start again, like newborn babes. It’s up to you.’
A heavy silence met her words. The presence of those voiceless witnesses cowed the watching soldiery, so that even the bravest and the most contentious seemed lost for words.
‘Where can we go?’ Private Schneider protested at last. ‘We’re known, Drozde! We’d have to go a fair long way to be somewhere where our names didn’t follow us.’
Drozde nodded. ‘I’m not saying it’s going to be easy. But there is a way. A way of covering that distance in a single step – more or less. You can’t do it on your own, but I know some people who will help you. So long as you help them first.’
‘But why can’t we tell the colonel?’ someone else asked. ‘He’d know what to do.’
‘He wouldn’t believe you!’ Drozde exclaimed. ‘What you’re seeing, now, and what you’ve heard – that sways you. But I can’t raise the dead to speak to Colonel August. And he’ll never believe a word I say to him. He already locked Lieutenant Klaes in a cell for even daring to say Narutsin should be spared.’
She groped for words. Her wound was aching, her head both light and hot. She felt as though she were burning like a candle. Klaes stepped forward and rescued her at the point where she thought she must fall down, and lose this contest.
‘A show of hands,’ he said. ‘Who’s with us? Be honest. No-one will suffer for standing by his oath and his regiment. They’ll only die with the rest when their time comes. But those who stand with us will live to see this out. They won’t be soldiers any more, but they’ll live to be old and to have sons and to tell them how they fared at Pokoj when Pokoj fell.’
The first hand up was Private Toltz’s. The second was Schneider’s. After that it became harder to count. Finally all hands were raised. Some more reluctantly than others, to be sure, and Drozde suspected that some would default later and steal away when they were not observed. That was their choice. She only hoped that no word would reach August’s ears until they were well gone. After that he could do as he liked.
She sat down, with some difficulty, on the remains of one of the abbey’s walls. Klaes was issuing orders, quickly and efficiently, to small groups of men – choosing those he knew and trusted best. Things were happening, and for now they could happen without her.
A figure hovered beside her, and she tilted her head to find that she was staring into her own eyes. ‘I remember this,’ ghost-Drozde said. ‘It was almost the worst time. Almost the hardest thing to bear.’
‘What was the hardest?’ Drozde asked.
The dead eyes bored into hers, but no answer came. When he died, she thought. When I had to watch him die. That was the hardest thing. Her own death, when it came, would be nothing next to that.
The soldier standing guard duty at the stables, where Lieutenant Dietmar had deposited the barrels of powder for the guns, was Corporal Cunel. He was Austrian, but only just, since the small town where he had been born stood squarely on the border with Poland and had been ceded by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in a bloodless negotiation three years after his birth. As a result, he faced a certain amount of teasing from his comrades on the delicate matter of his nationality. He was mocked for other things too, including his monumental flatulence and his habit of stealing small trinkets from other men’s tents. He had few friends in the company and knew it.
So he did not think even for a moment that the half-dozen men bearing down on him out of the silent night were come there to lighten his vigil with drink or a wad of tobacco. He raised his rifle at once and told them to stand off.
Then he felt the tip of Klaes’s sword under his left ear, pressing against the fleshy dimple there in a disconcertingly intimate way. ‘Stand down, Corporal,’ Klaes ordered him. And Cunel stood down without a murmur.
Gagged and bound, he watched in amazement as the men levered open the stable door, which had been nailed shut in lieu of a reliable lock or bolt, and took away three large barrels of gunpowder. So the colonel had been right! Klaes was a traitor, in the pay of Prussia, and he’d suborned these other men. No doubt the powder was to blow up the loyal officers as they lay in their beds. But in that case why had they not killed Cunel himself? Were they hoping to convert him to the cause?
If so, it must be fairly low down on their agenda. They took four horses out of the stables, one at a time, whispering to them and gentling them as they led them away out of the gates and down the road. Then they took a cart, which they pushed by main strength out through t
he same gates. More men joined them there and towed the cart down the road. Clearly they didn’t mean to harness the horses until they were far enough away from Pokoj not to be heard or interrupted.
And finally, seemingly as an afterthought, two men lifted Cunel up and took him into the powder store, where they set him down with his back to a keg.
‘You won’t be here long,’ Klaes promised the terrified man. ‘They’ll be needing guns and powder both on the morrow, Cunel. Just you rest quiet here, and wait until they come.’
And as it fell out, Lieutenant Klaes was right. Tusimov came back with the dawn, bringing a letter from Wroclaw. As Magda had predicted, he rode a different horse. Thunderer had died under him a mile from the Oskander barracks, and a new mount – a grey gelding of sixteen hands – had been provided for his return.
He went directly to the colonel, who broke open the dispatch and read it at once.
It was terse and clear, amounting to no more than three words – though it might be argued that much meaning lay in the absence of any qualifiers or palliatives, the implied invitation to Colonel August to use his own discretion absolutely in the interpretation of said orders.
Take the village, the letter said. The details did not matter.
37
When the general muster sounded, the men of Colonel August’s command were slow to respond.
It was not that they were tired – although many of them were, having stayed up late hammering out in bare words the intricacies of their consciences. It was the nature of the orders they were about to receive, which had seeped through the company gradually and organically from Strumpfel and Bedvar. Once Tusimov was seen to depart at the gallop in the direction of Wroclaw, and once opinions began to be advanced on all sides about the nature of his mission, neither of the two had been able to hold his tongue for longer than it takes to fill a tankard.
Then they had seen Tusimov return, and bustle into the house with a great show of urgency and self-importance. So it was clear what answer he’d got at Oskander, and therefore what business they were now engaged in.
Not everyone was against it, by any means. Some of those in Tusimov’s company who’d already (as it were) seen active service in Narutsin were quite keen to go back there and wipe out the insult through the skilful application of an artillery bombardment and a slow advance with bayonets. And some who’d only heard about the fight now felt swollen up with a sense of vicarious injury and indignation, which feelings they would now be able to lance.
But by far the majority of the men were sombre in their manner. They were veterans of the Turkish campaign, and knew what fighting in a town or village was like even when the enemy were not civilians but merely lodged among them. They had had their share of bloodlettings, and now here they were again on the cusp of another. It made for sober reflection, even for those who were most skilled in the prosecution of such business.
But the colonel when he came out to them understood their mood and addressed it. He reminded them not just of the attack on Tusimov’s men but of events now uncovered which made that skirmish seem a trifle. A garrison of militiamen, he told them in solemn tones, had most likely been slaughtered under the roof where they now slept. Murdered by the smiling, welcoming locals they’d been sent to protect. That was the truth of Narutsin, he said. And by way of evidence he had the long-suffering Bedvar walk along the ranks holding aloft Nymand Petos’s paletot coat, now disinterred for a second time. The rust-brown spatters and the rents in its fabric had a mesmerising power. No one could doubt the violence of the militia captain’s end. And August invited them to imagine themselves in Petos’s place. Carrying out their duty, guarding a desolate border so that farmers and herders could sleep safely in their beds, only to have those same men tear them and mash them while they slept, no doubt with blunt spades and rusty sickles.
A murmur of discontent and rage went through the ranks. Petos’s coat was a poignant witness – as eloquent as Caesar’s cloak held up by Marcus Antonius.
Warming to his theme, August reminded the men that the foul corruption of Narutsin had even spread to infect one of his own officers – the villainous Lieutenant Klaes, who even now—
There was a pause. August scanned the rows of men in front of him more closely. ‘Are we missing Klaes’s unit?’ he demanded. ‘We seem to be almost eighty men down on the muster.’
It transpired that Lieutenant Dietmar had taken charge of bringing the men to parade rest, and had deputed two of his surly, moustachioed gunnery sergeants as sheepdogs, but they had failed to find more than a handful of Klaes’s men. These few, when questioned, emitted contradictory noises about another, earlier muster. Called by whom, exactly? They were not clear on that point. By an officer? Certainly. But they could not say for sure who that might have been. A comrade had said that he’d been told someone else had heard the order being given.
‘Ridiculous!’ August fulminated. ‘Utterly absurd! And where is Dietmar now?’
Enter Dietmar, furious and unhappy. If the colonel would give him leave—
‘Out with it, man!’ August snapped. ‘Where are they?’
Dietmar had not understood that he was being questioned. ‘I have no idea, sir,’ he proclaimed. ‘That’s not what I wish to report. The powder store, sir. It’s been broken into! We found Cunel trussed up in a corner, but we can’t get any sense out of him!’
The colonel went at once to the matter of moment. ‘How much was taken? Can we still mount a bombardment?’
‘Oh yes, sir. Of course, sir. We had forty barrels, and only three of them are gone. I’ll hang Cunel from a tree and beat the bottom of his feet with a split switch, but … but the attack’s not compromised, sir. Not at all!’
‘Then move the men out!’ August said in a grinding voice. He felt that more than enough time had been wasted on this – and that the effort he’d spent in building up the men’s belligerence and readiness was in danger of being undone.
‘Yes sir!’ Dietmar said, saluting smartly. ‘And the guns …?’
‘Will move with the vanguard, Dietmar. The guns are going to announce us.’
‘Even Mathilde?’ Dietmar wanted to be sure. This was, after all, a gun capable of punching a hole through foot-thick stonework, whereas Narutsin was primarily made out of clapboard and shingle.
‘Especially Mathilde.’
Dietmar relayed the orders, and the guns – already limbered, despite his private doubts – were drawn into position on the house’s driveway. Putting them in the van would slow the march, but the lieutenant felt that this might be an inauspicious time to make that observation.
As if to underscore his misgivings, two huge reports sounded – far away, but still loud and deep. An enemy bombardment? But there was no enemy, and nothing besides themselves that was worth bombarding. And after that double blast the morning air was still. Clearly it was the stolen gunpowder they were hearing, but it was much less apparent what it had been deployed against.
Dietmar gave the signal to Strumpfel, who barked the fall-in and the about-face, silencing the murmured speculations of the men. Then he called a single march. The double was impossible if they were not to outstrip the limbers and leave the guns behind.
The men marched out through the gates in moderately good order. Dietmar stayed with the guns after that, which meant that he rode at the head of the column. Colonel August and Lieutenant Pabst rode at the rear, while Tusimov marched along at the midpoint of the column. Alone among the officers he had elected not to ride, because the hard gallop to Wroclaw and back had left his back and lower limbs in such pain that it was hard for him to sit a saddle.
In any event, to make the march on foot was hardly a hardship. They would cover the three miles to the village in less than an hour, even keeping pace with the guns.
In fact, their journey was to be shorter than that and more full of incident. Only a mile out of Pokoj, they heard a third percussion from the north and west. For a moment it seemed to Dietmar that h
e might have been wrong – that this might after all be the report of an enemy gun. Nor was he alone in that thought. The men tensed and slowed, forgetting for a moment the order of march as they waited for a ball to explode near them. But no ball arrived.
If that was the stolen powder, Dietmar muttered to his sergeant, Jursitizky, then it was all used up now and they could rest easy. But what had it blown up?
They moved on warily. A few minutes later they rounded a corner and saw the Drench up ahead of them. Strewn across the road in jagged, broken shards were a few of the beams that had made up the bridge – now, clearly, all that was left of it. For a moment, the soldiers thought that this was what they had just heard. Dietmar, for one, knew that it wasn’t. The explosion had seemed to him to come from much further away, and even if he were mistaken in that there would still be some smoke and debris in the air if a barrel of gunpowder had been sent up in this spot so recently.
Curious, he rode up to the deep channel and reined in his horse at its very edge. The rest of the bridge lay in the channel of the Drench below him, broken and mangled. Each of its stanchions had been laboriously sawn through at either end, until finally it had lost enough support to fall into the channel and be broken.
Hours of work for many men. A waste of time, if the ones who’d done this were also those who’d stolen the gunpowder.
Then a sound from above and to his right made him turn and gasp in horror.
A second before he died, he realised what the gunpowder had been for.
Below Zielona Góra, perhaps seven hours before and in the dead of night, Klaes and his men had arrived to join the men and women of Narutsin at the stone breakwater that held in the Mala Panev at the easternmost point of her great meander. The villagers had been hammering at the stone with pickaxes throughout the day – ever since Drozde’s visit – and had made considerable inroads into it, but there was still much to be done.
