The House of War and Witness

by Mike Carey

  ‘Can if you like, sir, but it’ll do you no good. There’s no-one here can read.’

  ‘No-one?’ This was an out-of-the way place, Klaes thought, but still. ‘What do you children do for schooling, then?’

  The boy gave him a blank look. ‘What’s that?’

  Meister Weichorek was in favour of the idea, to Klaes’s considerable relief. He even suggested a place for Klaes to set up: while the church was being rebuilt, its surviving furniture had been moved to Laslow’s empty barn. The services were held there on Sundays, but for the rest of the week the pews and lectern might just as well be used for an impromptu schoolroom. Klaes would charge two groschen per pupil for a week’s teaching, and would move on to figuring once they knew their letters. The mayor would send away for slates and pencils at his own expense. He could not order the townspeople to send their children, of course, but many of the mothers would jump at the chance. And Dame Weichorek could be very persuasive.

  Klaes prepared for his first lessons two weeks before Christmas. Eight families were sending their children: eleven boys and three girls in all. He laid out the pews in a hollow square around the lectern and propped a large slate in front of it, feeling as nervous as when he’d taken his first command.

  He heard a step behind him and turned to see Bosilka Stefanu. He had not spoken to her since the night of his arrival, and could not imagine why she was here now, though from her stern expression it was not a friendly visit. He bowed to hide his discomfiture, and waited for her to state her purpose.

  ‘I want to join your class,’ she said without preamble.

  Klaes was completely taken aback. But she clearly required an answer. ‘You – you mean, to study with the children?’ he managed.

  ‘I mean to learn reading; to read better. Drozde left books in her trunk. I want to find out what they say.’

  ‘But …’ he stuttered, and was silent.

  ‘Dame Weichorek has approved it,’ the girl said defiantly. ‘I can come in the mornings and work longer in the afternoons. I already know my alphabet, and some words, and if it’s more trouble I’ll pay extra.’ She rummaged in her apron pocket as she spoke, and held out coins. Four cruitzers – that would be at least a week’s wages for her. When he still hesitated she added tartly, ‘Or don’t you teach girls?’

  ‘I do! Assuredly I do,’ he broke in at last. ‘But Miss Stefanu … these are children – the oldest is fourteen. Will you not feel out of place?’

  ‘I’m nineteen,’ she said. ‘If we’d had a teacher when I was younger I’d have gone to him, but there was none. And my father couldn’t read; nor could Anton. I’ve had to teach myself. Do you think I’m too old to learn more?’

  She met his gaze levelly, challenging him to disapprove. Klaes felt his face grow hot. ‘I’m sorry for doubting you, Miss Stefanu,’ he said. ‘I’ll teach you gladly.’ Her grey eyes were almost black in the room’s shadows. He pressed on without giving himself time to consider. ‘But I won’t take your money. Perhaps … Do you think you might come here as a helper, rather than a pupil? Assist me in running the class, I mean. As – as a friend. I think you could still learn all you’d need.’

  She hesitated. And Klaes had the sensation that he’d stepped over a cliff.

  ‘I could,’ she said. ‘That would work very well. And Lieutenant, my name is Bosilka.’

  By the new year they had twenty children. All of them could chant the alphabet and write their names, and Klaes had started the more advanced on reading passages from Drozde’s chapbooks and his own Old Testament, written painstakingly large on the big slate. At the end of each session Bosilka would teach them a song, or retell an old story with the children joining in at the exciting parts. And in February, when snow would otherwise have kept everyone indoors, they staged a puppet show.

  It was Bosilka’s idea. She had pestered Klaes for every detail he could remember of Drozde’s shows, and then she’d gone to find Private Taglitz, now doing odd jobs in the forge, to question him as well. They had agreed on a short performance for the first experiment: the stories of ‘Clever Gretel’ and ‘The Cobbler’s Son’, both favourites of the children, and to finish, a dramatisation of ‘The Moving of the Mala Panev’.

  Klaes had raised some objections to this. They couldn’t tell the full story, he pointed out: they would have to leave out important facts, even falsify. But Bosilka overruled them all.

  ‘We won’t lie,’ she promised him. ‘But this story is important to them, perhaps the most important of all. It tells them how their town has become what it is. It tells them who they are.’

  She worked night and day to make scenery: a series of cut-outs for the town, model barrels of gunpowder, a long skein of blue and green cloth for the river. She removed the fluttering eyelashes from Drozde’s model of the great gun and replaced them with menacing, reptilian eyes copied from the dragon. And she practised endlessly with the puppets: the overbearing colonel, Drozde, the soldiers and townspeople on their crosspieces, and the gangly officer who would stand in yet again for Klaes.

  This was Klaes’s greatest objection of all, though he’d been too embarrassed to voice it. His men’s lurid accounts of his exploits had gained some currency among the town’s drinkers, but the children had not yet connected the hero of their fathers’ stories with their well-mannered schoolteacher, and he had no wish for them to do so. But Bosilka had foreseen this problem too. ‘We’ll use your given name,’ she said.

  He did not like his Christian name. He had been teased about it too many times in the past: schoolmates and fellow soldiers informing him, as if he had never heard it before, that his parents had named him after the wrong animal. But the townspeople, and most of his men, had never heard it. So for the sake of the story the hero of Puppendorf, who blew up the dam and saved the town with a reed, would be Lieutenant Wolfgang.

  On the day of the show the barn was packed. Nearly a hundred children sat on the pews and on benches hurriedly made by Stefanu the week before, while their parents stood at the back. The press of bodies generated such heat that many had already opened their heavy coats before the performance started. Klaes stood to one side of the theatre booth, welcoming the arrivals and privately wondering what he had got himself into. He was no showman! But Bosilka raised the Drozde puppet and made her wave to him. Taglitz blew a fanfare on his trumpet, as raucous as it had ever been in the old days. And the crowd fell silent.

  Klaes took a deep breath. ‘Pay attention,’ he began.

  40

  And now, at last, she is with them.

  And now she has always been with them.

  And she is poured, for an endless moment, across the centuries, as oil is poured across a skillet. Her mind rushes to the furthest corners of things – the darkness before and the darkness after, the flash of light and life that counts as history, the endlessness of existence. She becomes a film, a thin slick of selfhood, spread far, far too thinly across cold, indifferent acres of casual cause and dread effect.

  But then she gathers herself in again. She does it, in part, because she knows it can be done. And in part she does it because she is a teller of stories, which is how the thing is achieved.

  And there are others coming and going around her, through her. They know her. They speak her name, and she speaks theirs. It is a benediction, flowing both ways.

  And she teaches them, the things she only knows because they told her. She tells them about time, and about stories, and her wisdom is passed among them like the bread of the sacrament.

  They come together in a complicated, fierce embrace. With each telling they become stronger – through endless repetition shore up their borderlands, defend their core. They build, through words, towers and ramparts of themselves. She helps them do it, leads the way, becomes the template and the map for every one of them.

  And is the first to realise that these walls, which were a refuge, have by degrees become a trap. Not the walls of the house (the house comes and goes; the houses com
e and go) but the walls of their telling. They have dropped their foundations so deep and reared their walls so high that there is no moving now. They have built their own prison.

  She shares her doubts with Gelbfisc and Ignacio, Ermel and Arinak. Most of all she confers with Anton and Magda, who are so close to her that they have almost become her.

  ‘We have always been here,’ Anton points out.

  ‘So if we were ever going to leave,’ Gelbfisc sighs, ‘we could not be here now.’

  ‘But what if there’s more than one always?’ Magda asks.

  And Drozde laughs and hugs her, heart against heart and thought against thought, because the little girl has set them free.

  Even the smallest part of eternity is still eternity.

  She gathers them, and tells them. We’ve done what there was to be done here. We’ve become so strong, in ourselves and in each other, nothing can extinguish us. We’re like a ball of string so knotted up it cannot ever, ever be untied.

  ‘We are the crown,’ Father Ignacio murmurs. ‘The crown of thorns.’

  ‘It may well be,’ Drozde allows. ‘So now, I say, it’s time to leave.’

  ‘We can’t,’ Thea protests. ‘We can’t leave Pokoj.’

  But Ermel at least is nodding. ‘Yes. I think we should.’

  And Arinak: ‘It’s where we died. Where all the generations of us lay our bodies down.’

  And Petra Veliky: ‘But did we mean to lay ourselves down, too? Or were we only taking off our flesh the way a runner takes off his coat and shirt – so that our souls could run the faster?’

  And the questions and the answers and the declamations run between them. The stories of their lives are all told again, sifted for wisdom, combed for sense. Drozde waits, and says nothing more. It is for all of them, now, and she has made her position clear. Repeating herself would serve no purpose.

  And one by one they come to it. And one by one they decide. And it grows in them like a seed, like a sense, so they’re like birds gathering on a sodden field in late October as the winter prepares to slam its lid in place over the sky.

  They have to fly before that happens, but like birds they wait and wait. It will come when it comes. And it feels close. It feels as though it might be any moment now, if there were any moments left.

  And there is.

  Just one.

  Also by Mike Carey, Linda Carey

  and Louise Carey from Gollancz:

  The City of Silk and Steel

  Copyright

  A Gollancz eBook

  Copyright © Mike Carey, Linda Carey and Louise Carey 2014

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Mike Carey, Linda Carey and Louise Carey to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

  Gollancz

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

  London, WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  This eBook first published in 2014 by Gollancz.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 0 575 13274 0

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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