by Clio Gray
‘Over here! Over here!’
It seemed a miracle, that new day, that new dawn, that so many folk were emerging from the trees like hop-legged rooks, struggling through the night-fallen snow, tripping over the hummocks of the dead who had not been so lucky. Everywhere was white, from the camp grounds to the castle, from frozen lake to sea, giving them all a bizarre feeling of hope as it hid the worst of what had been done from their eyes, its new perfection marred only by several blackened circles of cinders and ash where the fires had fought on through the night before finally giving up a few hours earlier, when the snowfall had thinned and then desisted altogether.
Philbert ran out into the morning, calling and waving just as Oort was doing, looking desperately amongst the gaunt faces of the survivors until he found two that he knew: Lita and Lorenzini, and how they hugged each other and could hardly stop talking over each other until they’d clarified certain facts.
‘We didn’t mean to leave Kwert,’ Lita was saying.
‘We just couldn’t find him,’ Lorenzini chipped in.
‘He’s fine, he’s fine!’ Philbert assured them. ‘We found him last night.’
‘Thank goodness!’ Lita said. ‘How did you get out of the castle? What happened up there? We’ve no idea what’s been going on . . .’
‘Kroonk?’ Philbert asked, and there was that lump in his throat that seemed to stop him up from stem to stern.
‘She’s fine,’ Lorenzini laughed. ‘She came away with us! We’ve her tethered in the forest yonder until we knew what was what.’
‘And what is what?’ broke in Maulwerf, panting into their circle. ‘What on earth has happened? Why hasn’t the Prince called out his men?’
‘Because he has no men,’ said Otto coming up beside them, large and red-faced as always, and looking very grim. ‘But I’ve just heard word from one of the castle farriers that there was a rumour yestermorning of a load of someone else’s coming up from the south, all shod and geared, though not a proper soldier among them.’
Maulwerf shook his head. ‘I don’t understand. Why would they want anything to do with us?’
‘Because of your bloody acting troupes, that’s what,’ said a woman no one recognised who was kicking viciously at the snow with her sodden boots, her eyes darting all about her as if expecting another attack at any moment. ‘You lot travel all over the place and come up here with your foreign ideas, and just look at what’s gone on because of it. It’s always us locals have to pay the price.’
‘And your name, Madam?’ Maulwerf asked politely.
‘My name be bloody damned!’ the woman retorted. ‘I came here last night with my husband from the steadings down the road just for a bit of fun, and just look what you’ve brought down on our heads. And my husband is out here somewhere, buried in the snow and now my children are going to starve, all because of you . . .’
The woman began to snivel, hid her head in her scarf and moved away, kicking at the humps in the snow as she went, hoping and fearing, all at the same time, that she was going to find her husband who hadn’t made it to the trees the night the wolves had struck.
‘Were we really to blame?’ asked Little Lita quietly, immediately enfolded by her husband’s arms. Maulwerf shook his head but caught Philbert’s eye as he did so, and Philbert knew then that Kwert had told him all about Lengerrborn and what had gone on there and afterwards.
‘We don’t know,’ Maulwerf said. ‘We just don’t know.’
The Fair folk had been, for the most part, resurrected from the forest, but the woman who’d confronted them earlier had been right: the people on the ice took the brunt of the attack, the itinerant pedlars and local villagers who’d come out to hawk their wares. Maulwerf’s Fair had been camped on the farther side of the lake and of those who hadn’t been up at the castle most made it away before the attack reached them. All were sombre, and there was none of the usual chatter about campfires, breakfast and coffee; taking their place were the unpleasant smells of damp cinders, spoiled wood and wool, burned leather, burned flesh. People moved around quietly, scraping the snow away from their wretched belongings, righting carts, hammering wheels back into kilter. They discovered a few survivors who’d remained undisturbed, trapped beneath collapsed booths or hiding beneath prickly blankets, too cold to move of their own accord, and all were greeted with surprise and gratitude. Everyone who was able grabbed hammers and tools, whittling pegs and dowels, began the long task of putting back together what they could salvage from what had been almost destroyed. Others went around gathering clothing and covers, distributing them to those who had lost everything but the wet rags upon their backs. Children kicked excitedly through the dirt and dead embers, picking up anything that glinted, or seemed faintly edible. They stopped abruptly when they came across Huffelump half-cooked, spitted on a broken tent-pole, a great pile of guts frozen over and glazed by her side, eyes dull, haunches hacked away, hooves stiff. They said nothing, but as one they turned and walked away and stopped their scavenging, began helping the adults sort through the many heaps of charred canvas, erecting the best bits they could find onto branches Otto had caused to be brought out of the forest to give some shelter from the elements.
The snow had stopped, but the wind in the following days was bitter, coming at them from the east, going right through their clothes and into their bones. They sent messengers off to the castle but got short shrift the first day, the drawbridge remaining resolutely up, the castle keeping within its carapace, holding to itself the living and the dead. All who’d survived were staff members, set upon only because they’d got in the way of the real goal, which was the men and women banqueting in state in the Great Hall. And into that hall they ventured later on the day following the attack, dragging out the carcasses of the slaughtered, the great and the good, including Frau Fettleheim – which took some doing – alongside Alarico and his wife and the Atheling Rupert. They ripped the tapestries from the walls to be used at first as stretchers and later to fuel the burning of the dead whom they heaped up into a great pile in the courtyard on top of everything flammable they could find, setting the lot to flame and burn, an action they almost immediately regretted, for it left every surface of the castle, every piece of cloth in which they’d wrapped themselves, impregnated with the stench, and sent every last one of them into a frenzy of cleaning, trying to scrub away the stink of blood and slaughter and rotting food that seeped from every floorboard and every stone of the walls, until they could bear it no more and down came the drawbridge at dawn on the second morning, and out went the people who had erstwhile chosen to be trapped within. It was a long time before anyone thought to go up to the roof, and only because the boy with the big head turned up again the moment the bridge came down and suggested forcefully that they do so, finding the frozen bodies of the flagsmen, just as the boy had said they would.
It might be thought that once the drawbridge was down all those erstwhile servants and underlings from the castle would desert but they did not – not for loyalty to the dead Prince, rather because they had been born and bred into the castle just as much as Rupert had and it was the only home they knew. That another would come in Rupert’s place was a given, though when and how and who they didn’t know, only that it would happen, and here they would stay until it did.
That second morning, Philbert was cheered to hear the rhythmic clanging of Otto’s hammer upon his anvil echoing through the dismal day. Maulwerf ordered the survivors well; although his velvet jacket was unbrushed and muddy, his little glasses scratched and smudged with ash, he directed people where they were needed most: fixing up the least damaged carts first, leaving the worst to be overhauled as and when or burned for warmth if they could not be mended. They had everything on site needed for such a task – abundant raw materials and fuel from the forest, farriers and blacksmiths, wood turners and carvers, seamstresses, leatherworkers and toolmakers. Many of the trap-pulling a
nimals had broken in panic from their loose tethers at the first sign of attack and were soon gathered in and Maulwerf set his people the goal of being up and gone within the week. The surviving pedlars and itinerants salvaged what they could and left immediately along with the villagers, taking their dead with them. Everything else that could be salvaged from the ice camp was heaped into neat piles: blankets here, possessions there, the bodies taken to the edge of the ice to be burned. That the castle had already done this to the dead inside their walls was apparent from the horrid plume of dark, greasy smoke going up the previous afternoon, Philbert shuddering to see it go, knowing that somewhere amongst that rancid pyre must be Frau Fettleheim, Alarico and La Chucha Lanuga, and all of the Fair’s Folk stopped for a few moments respectful silence, knowing it too.
Their own pile of bodies, including those hacked and melted and dragged off the ice, numbered thirty-one in total. Maulwerf ordered them to be divided into six separate heaps and covered over with wood from the forest under the auspices of Otto, who knew about charcoal kilns and how best to make them burn right back into earth and ash. Onto the last of these heaps went Kwert. He’d survived that first night, thanks to Oort and Philbert, and made it through the following day, but nothing could be done to warm him up again, no matter how hard Philbert tried, and Kwert soon slipped into a cold silence from which he would never awake. Philbert was there to oversee his passing, make sure he was dressed as he should have been – a ruddy coloured blanket that was as close as Philbert could find to the red robes he hadn’t worn since Lengerrborn. Lita did her best washing him down but hadn’t the stomach to shave his cold grey chin, more stubbled and grizzled than ever. She tied his jaw into place, his eyelids kept closed by a couple of coins Lorenzini fished out of the snow, and then Kwert was lifted tenderly and placed on the pyre and buried with his neighbours in the forest wood. Maulwerf asked if Philbert wanted to say a few words, but he could not. Anything he thought of caught like fish-bones in his throat, and instead he took hold of the lighted brand handed to him by Otto and laid it at the pyre’s base, just as others were doing to the other pyres, waiting for Maulwerf, the Father of the Fair, to sound out the signal, which came in the form of him ringing a doleful bell over and over as the brands were set and the pyres were lit, and all the dead were burned into sky, snow and ice. Two nights and one day those fires were kept burning, more wood piled on as was needed, and afterwards the ashes and bone fragments were shovelled up and placed into sacks, dropped into holes bored into the ice of the frozen lake. A few people were never accounted for, found neither in camp grounds nor in the castle, nor out on the ice. It was surmised they must have made their way far deeper into the forest than the others had done, become separated, lost their way, never to return. One of these was Hannah, which grieved Philbert greatly, and he spent many hours looking for her in amongst the trees, but there were no traces nor tracks to follow, not after all the snow that had fallen, and it was an impossible task. By night the wolves howled along their hidden tracks, making people wince at the thought of what they were doing out there, and to whom, in the trees.
The only person found was Herr Himbeere. He’d managed to lock himself inside the wood-cellar below the castle kitchens on the night of the attack, discovered four days later, baying like a dog with mange, ranting about how he’d been reduced to chewing bark for sustenance and sucking water from the soil.
‘Why do men do such things?’ he asked, returned to the world a mere mannequin of what he’d been, all skin and bone, pike tattoo crinkling across the dehydrated skin of his scalp. ‘Why do men do such things?’ was all he could say, a question to which there was no adequate answer, no matter how many times the survivors thought on it and talked on it in the coming days. The accusation bandied about by that nameless woman – that the Fair itself was to blame – was not a strong argument. The response to Harlekin’s little play on the opening day of the Frost Fair proved only that the majority of folk in attendance already believed vehemently that independence for Schleswig-Holstein was the way to go. The slaying of the two flagsmen on the roof of the castle gave no clues, only that someone somewhere disagreed with the Atheling Rupert’s boastful claims to various European crowns. Only Maulwerf and Philbert knew about Lengerrborn, but Maulwerf found it difficult to make a direct connection from what had happened there to what had happened here, from that action to this. The death of two Schupos surely couldn’t possibly be worth that much to anybody. But neither Maulwerf nor Philbert knew what had happened at the Cloth Fair after Philbert had left. They didn’t know about Brother Langer’s daring tripwire rescue of Federkiel, nor that this had been tied in with the Lengerrborn escape and that both incidents together gave the powerful of the region the creeping fear that their authority was losing its grip, as it had already done elsewhere, and this was not to be tolerated. Time to stop this revolution dead in its tracks.
41
Realisation
The news of what had happened at the castle and the Frost Fair began to move and grow, like a sheet of ice spreading from a riverbank in winter, until it crossed the entire extent of Schleswig-Holstein from the North Sea to the Baltic. By then Maulwerf and the rags of his Fair of Wonders had departed, heading back to Finzeln to wait the winter out, mend what could be mended, drinking too much wine in Herr Volstrecken’s cellar, mourning their dead.
Philbert, though, didn’t go with them. He gave Lita a letter for Corti telling him some of what had happened since Ullendorf broke into his head, and how it seemed to him that some of Corti’s music had seeped inside him, blowing through him like Corti’s breath through his reeds, making the world a little fuller, a little deeper, everything taking on a significance it had previously lacked. He also wrote about how Ullendorf had died, and how sorely he would be missed, ending by telling Corti of a carillon of cats he’d seen at the Cloth Fair and later at Magendie’s, that went by the name of a Felisophone – cats in cages, nails on sticks, sticks attached to buttons that the Felisophonist played to produce a weird chorus of wails and shrieks and hisses.
Everyone’s head seems to be like that, he wrote, or mine at least – a cat-filled cage waiting to be prodded and poked into action, a ramshackle orchestra from which I try to extract some kind of order, and maybe even a durable tune or two.
Philbert brushed Maulwerf’s velvet waistcoat for the last time and Maulwerf shook his hand and wished him well.
‘It has been a pleasure, sir,’ said Maulwerf solemnly, ‘and an education. And I know we’ll see you again soon. Great things, I was told,’ he added, tapping his stick against the wood of his cart as he geared up for leaving. ‘Great things, Philbert, and don’t you ever forget it.’
That great things, and not necessarily good ones, had already happened to Philbert and the Fair they neither of them mentioned, and if Maulwerf was relieved to see Kwert’s protégé leaving he kept it to himself. Lita cried, clutching at Lorenzini’s arm which doubled as prop and handkerchief, but did not attempt to dissuade Philbert from his course. They were the last people to whom Philbert said goodbye, handing over his letter for Corti as he did so, bowing low to them both.
‘Until May, then,’ Philbert said, for he’d promised he would do his utmost to meet up with them at the next Cloth Fair at Brother Langer’s Abbey. Philbert had no idea if he would make it there or not, but it didn’t seem a bad promise to make. He had Kwert’s knapsack slung about his neck, and in it was the Philocalia that held his mission like a nut within its shell. He would take those last words of Federkiel’s to Lengerrborn and to Helge, if she was still alive. He knew it wasn’t the smartest move, that someone might recognise him and turn him in even these many months later. He had the advantage of having Amt Gruftgang and the surviving Schupo, Ackersmann, on his side, for surely they would protect their miracle, if only to keep the church of their Lady St Lydia alive. So perhaps not so absurd a plan as it first appeared, besides which Philbert saw it not so much a plan as a duty,
and one he meant to carry out, one way or another. He was no longer the naïve, knuckleheaded yard of skin and bone as when he’d first joined the Fair. The intervening years had been kind as well as cruel; he’d outgrown himself, older on the inside than on the out, a person who knew his own mind and understood both his limitations and capabilities. He had on his large head the hat that La Chucha Lanuga had made for him with its squares of green silk and little mirrors, and had at his side his companion, Kroonk, and that was all Philbert needed.
He set off on foot down one of the snow-strewn paths meandering out from the castle grounds and the frozen river and into the surrounding forests, heading away from winter towards the west. He looked back only once, to see Lita and Lorenzini clasped together like the two halves of a walnut, Oort and Otto holding up their hammers in a farewell salute, Maulwerf sitting on the bridge of his cart with hand held high. Philbert gave a single wave before turning and disappearing into the forest, Kroonk waggling her red behind beside him: a boy with his monstrous head hidden within his monstrous hat, ready for anything the world had yet to throw at him.
For the first time in his life he was treading his path alone and was not afraid, indeed was happy for it. Life was his for the taking, and by God he meant to take as much of it as he could.
42
Would You Go Into the Abode of Goodness?
The narrow lane going up the hill was just as Philbert remembered, every pock and cobble exactly as he had laid out in his head. The great wrought iron gates were still extant, though rusted now to immobility, overgrown with traveller’s joy and errant honeysuckle. Philbert walked between them up the winding drive, the currant bushes on either side wild and leggy. Despite this general overview of decay he could see a dim light in one of the downstairs windows, and the wooden door was stout and strong, though no longer looked so huge as it had once done. The brass globe still hung from its dangling rope and he grasped it without hesitation and swung, the bell ringing deep inside the house. His mouth went dry when he heard a few steps in the hallway that lay beyond the door, his palms prickling, the hairs on the nape of his neck standing erect. The door opened and a girl stood before him, and Philbert blinked, saw the colour of her dress like cornflowers in bloom.
