The Enterprise of Death

by Jesse Bullington

  PRAISE FOR JESSE BULLINGTON

  “Darkly funny, profane, erudite, bawdy and wickedly original … an amazing new talent.”

  Jeff Vandermeer

  “An engrossing read.”

  Interzone

  “A novel of great humour, deep theology and gratuitous murder and quite unlike anything I’ve ever read before. I absolutely loved it … one of the books of the year for sure!”

  SFRevu.com

  “The wicked sense of amorality and humour will appeal to many who like their humour dark. Like its amazing cover, it is a satisfyingly clever, well-plotted book that never takes itself too seriously.”

  SFFWorld.com

  “This is one of the best I’ve read … utterly absorbing and as fine a tale as you’ll read this year.”

  Sci-Fi London

  “Bullington paints a world appropriately dark and sinister with a confidence that makes you wonder whether he knew someone who lived there.”

  Graemesfantasybookreview.com

  “Dark, brooding, atmospheric and compelling.”

  Booksmonthly.co.uk

  BY JESSE BULLINGTON

  The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart

  The Enterprise of Death

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 978-0-748-11880-9

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Jesse Bullington

  Extract from The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart by Jesse Bullington

  Copyright © 2009 by Jesse Bullington

  All rights reserved. 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.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk

  For

  All Those Who Go Before Us

  Contents

  Praise For Jesse Bullington

  By Jesse Bullington

  Copyright

  Prologue: The Worst Beginning Imaginable

  I: Death and the Artist

  II: The Coming of His Acolytes

  III: The Crucible of Madness

  IV: The Three Apprentices of the Necromancer

  V: The Final Test

  VI: The Soldier and Death

  VII: The Last Apprentice

  VIII: Awkward Adolescence

  IX: Medicines Bitter as Wormwood

  X: Cruel Youth

  XI: The Soldier and the Witch

  XII: Something Sweeter Than Unspoiled Wine

  XIII: The Counsel of Corpses

  XIV: The Long Walk to Golgatha

  XV: The Judgment of Milan

  XVI: Syphilis and the Magus

  XVII: The Hangman’s Sword

  XVIII: A Discharge, with Some Weeping

  XIX: The Smith’s Guns

  XX: Manuel’s Ladies

  XXI: Breakfast in Bern

  XXII: Dancing After Midnight

  XXIII: The Rise of the Hammer

  XXIV: The Whores, the Boors, and the Moor

  XXV: The Judgment of Paris

  XXVI: Necromancers and Other Scavengers

  XXVII: The High Cost of Living

  XXVIII: A Happy Reunion

  XXIX: A Fast Night in the Black Forest

  XXX: The Hammer Falls

  XXXI: A Slow Night in the Black Forest

  XXXII: The Convergence of Trails

  XXXIII: Bastards of the Schwarzwald

  XXXIV: Sharp Truths

  XXXV: A Tale for a Colder Night

  XXXVI: The Requiem of Bicocca

  XXXVII: Death and the Maiden

  XXXVIII: Eternity in the Tomb

  XXXIX: Et in Arcadia Ego

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Extras

  About the Author

  The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart

  I: The First Blasphemy

  II: Bastards at Large

  Prologue

  The Worst Beginning Imaginable

  Pity Boabdil. King of Granada, last Moor lord of the Iberian Peninsula, reduced to a suppliant outside his own city by a Spaniard sovereign, an exile from a home hard won. The truce signed by kings and Pope, all that remained was for Boabdil to bow before his victorious adversary and kiss the man’s ring. The victor was supposed to refuse the offer, thus preserving some shred of Boabdil’s already tattered honor, but this stipulation must have slipped the Christian’s mind as he extended his pudgy fingers to the Moor. There was nothing for it. King Ferdinand’s seal tasted salty as the strait Boabdil would soon cross, and the man’s onion-pale queen leered at the Moor as he rose.

  That dreadful Genoan sailor who hung around Isabella like a fly around a chamber pot stood a short distance off, and when they made eye contact Boabdil supposed the weather-beaten bastard was imagining his head on a pike. At the signing King Ferdinand had mentioned something about the explorer sailing for India the wrong way round and Boabdil had paid it no real mind until now, with the scheming seaman appraising the former ruler of Granada’s venerable pate. Boabdil hoped he drowned.

  The handover continued, a grand display of pageantry and pomp, with the humbled Boabdil bowing in all the proper places as the procession carrying aloft a weighty silver cross all but stuck out their tongues at the defeated Moors leaving the city. Of course the treaty had many articles detailing how the Moors who chose to stay in Granada or thereabouts would retain all their rights and be under no pressure to convert and be protected as they had before, and of course each and every article would be cast down and shattered before Boabdil’s mustaches gained even a few ashen strands. The Christians had given him a token patch of broken Spanish earth upon which to reestablish his noble person, but Boabdil held no illusions, and so south they departed to sail to a continent Boabdil had never known.

  When they came to a prominence upon the road where Boabdil could view the Alhambra of Granada one final time, history recalls the heavy sigh that escaped his lips, a sigh as weighty as if the whole country issued it. Indeed it might have—with the passing of Boabdil the tolerance and culture that the Moors had slowly cultivated over hundreds of years of conquest was likewise expelled, and within Boabdil’s lifetime the Jews and Moors who lived at peace with the Spanish Christians would be banished, murdered, or forcibly converted, the lanterns of illumination that mutual respect fosters traded for brands used to burn Qur’an and witch alike. Small wonder Boabdil might sigh, and smaller wonder still that this most famous of sighs was actually a ragged, choking sob.

  “Must you cry like a woman over that what you could not hold as a man?” his mother asked him, which, predictably, only made him weep the harder. She could be unfair, could Boabdil’s mother.

  Boabdil did not simply cry for his lost kingdom, he cried for his lost daughter. The son the Spaniards had kept ransom during the siege of Granada had been returned, but in his place Ferdinand, ever the son of a bitch, had claimed Boabdil’s daughter Aixa, and there was not a single thing the broken old ruler could do about it. A king should love his sons most, of course, but Boabdil was no longer king and so allowed his sorrow to run down his face in snotty dribbles.

  The viscous, golden grief dangling from Boabdil’s nose and lips as his belly shook with emotion made him look for all the world like a walrus chased off a honeycomb by a greedier bear, for Ferdinand’s piggy little eyes and boxy jaw lent him something of an ursine face. None presen
t had ever seen a walrus, however, and the only man who had encountered a bear was Boabdil’s second cousin, who had been severely mauled by the beast on a hunting expedition. The poor fellow had to be carried around in a lidded basket to keep those weak of stomach from fainting at the sight of the gnawed-up stumps where his legs used to be and the terrible scars crisscrossing his face. The result was that no one commented on the walrus-and-bear imagery, and Boabdil’s second cousin spent the rest of his life haunted by nightmares of the furry monster that had put him in his box. Pity Boabdil’s second cousin.

  Ferdinand, king of This, That, the Other, and now Granada, was very fond of sexual relations so long as they were not with his wife. It was Isabella’s eyes, eyes so widely spaced she looked more sardine than woman, and seafood gave him gout. That the portly Boabdil had sired such a gorgeous girl as Aixa pleased Ferdinand greatly, and almost quicker than he felt the pinch in his hose the lecherous ruler had her baptized, renamed after his wife—a coup to Ferdinand, but a choice that unsettled everyone else he told about it—and established as a mistress. Behaving in a beastly fashion to Moors was something of a hobby for Ferdinand, and so as Boabdil kissed his ring that fateful January day in 1492 the conquering king murmured in his fallen adversary’s ear that were Boabdil to send him a beauty who outshone Aixa then the Moor should have his daughter back, thereby ensuring Boabdil knew just what carnal fate awaited his beloved child.

  The time for pitying poor Boabdil has now passed. Upon emigrating to North Africa and settling in Fez, the still obscenely wealthy Moor did little but acquire pretty young girls in hopes of offering one to his old enemy. He thought his daughter peerless in beauty, however, and as the years passed and —whether or not he would admit it even to himself—his memory faded, he remembered his daughter as being yet prettier and prettier still, until a manifest goddess would have been hard-pressed to get an approving nod from the gloomy old walrus, and so none of the bought women ever made it further than his personal harem.

  At long last the would-be royal pimp came into possession of the Egyptian jewel of a local merchant’s harem, a girl who caused even Boabdil’s rheumy eyes to sparkle and widen. She was little older than the son Isabella-née-Aixa had by this time borne Ferdinand, but the former king of Granada saw the potential her beauty hinted at and so he wheedled and maneuvered and finally managed to get her sent straight toward Gibraltar, accompanied by a dozen slaves to tend to her and two dozen eunuchs to guard her and three dozen servants to carry the crates of incense and wine and dates and other presents he included to help persuade Ferdinand to release Aixa.

  Do not pity Boabdil, who committed vile sins in the name of fatherly love. When he heard that the ship carrying his nubile gift was sunk by Barbary pirates, he did not believe the herald and had him flayed, and the second one to bring him the same news he had burned alive, and the third he had quartered, and the fourth he had buried alive, but the fifth he believed, and was saddened. Having now lost two peerless beauties—which should not be possible in the first place, but pity the pedant who told Boabdil that—the former sultan finally gave up on freeing Aixa, and his sorrow was so pronounced that in his dotage he scarcely enjoyed his prodigious harem, or his sumptuous table, or his magnificent hunts, or his impressive stable, or his pleasure cruises.

  As for Omorose, the young Egyptian girl Boabdil had sent to exchange for Aixa, she did indeed fall victim to piracy and shipwreck on the crossing from Ceuta to Spain. Rather than surrendering to the notoriously ruthless corsairs, the ship’s captain had sunk his own vessel, Boabdil’s incense perfuming the waves as the less suicidal crewmen dumped out the chests to use as rafts. The pirates were able to fish out most of the servants and slaves and eunuchs and sailors to sell into bondage, but a few drowned along with the captain, who had tied himself to the mast to ensure a proud end. Only Omorose and her least favorite slave, Awa, escaped both pirates and sea by dint of a courageous eunuch named Halim, and after a terrifying night at sea with Omorose sitting in a myrrh-stinking box as the other two clung to the sides, all three washed up on the coast of Spain.

  Omorose was the oldest of the castaways and barely a woman herself, and her sheltered life had made her as skilled at taking charge of calamitous situations as it had at flying through the air. The two younger adolescents had weathered much harsher lives, thankfully, and Omorose deigned to heed their counsel when both Halim and Awa advised moving inland in search of fresh water. Instead of a stream or spring they found a gang of bandits, who wasted no time in tying their hands and feet. Omorose allowed her hands to be tied with a haughty dignity and poorly concealed relief at being discovered by someone, even if it was only a pack of mangy thieves. Halim took more umbrage at his mistress being thus detained and so had his nose broken before finding his own limbs bound, but Awa, who had fled bondage several times on her native continent only to find herself with a new master whenever she sought shelter, knew well when she was caught and obediently offered her wrists.

  Off they went toward Granada, where the chief of the bandits had a brother who spoke the heathen tongue of the Moors and could appraise the worth of the incomprehensible foreign prisoners accordingly. Away from the coast and over plain and mountain they went, into that highest Spanish range to avoid the known roads where servants of King Ferdinand might cheat an honest businessman and his partners of their fairly found booty. Up and up they went, along paths unfit for goats, until they were forced to take shelter from a thunderstorm in a narrow cave. None of the three Africans had ever known such chill as the wind whistling down into their damp shelter, their weather-ruined garments small protection, and there, in that cold, miserable cave, their nightmare began in earnest.

  I

  Death and the Artist

  The corpse gaped up at its killer, who squatted over it with a panel of pine steadied on the ruffled velvet covering his thigh, intently sketching the dead man’s startled, stupid expression with a nub of charcoal tied to a thin stick. It had taken no small effort to locate this particular body, the first man the artist could be sure he personally had killed in the battle. The youth had not died in a manner any would call brave or noble, instead fumbling with his intestines like a clumsy juggler as they fell out of his split belly, and he looked even worse with the grime and blood and filth and the reek of shit and sunbaked offal, but soon he would become a saint. Which saint exactly, the artist had yet to determine, but a saint to be sure; it was the least he could do.

  “You’re a sick bit of whore-crust, Manuel,” said a fellow mercenary as he cut the thumbs off the corpse nearest the one Manuel drew.

  “Say what you will, Werner,” said Manuel, scowling down at his handiwork and finding the representation no more pleasing than its model. “At least I don’t fuck them, you godless piece of shit.”

  “Somefinn’s in his arse,” a third man said with a laugh as he strode up behind them, and, giving Werner a wink, he trotted the last few feet and kicked Manuel in that very spot.

  Slipping forward from the blow, Manuel held his sketch aloft as though he had stepped into a creek that proved deeper than it looked. His exposed left knee fell directly onto his subject and he cursed as the fashionable slit he had cut in the fabric welcomed the warm push of rank meat, gutlining now lining his hose. He scrambled up and pursued his guffawing assailant Bernardo, and after settling matters with that jackass Manuel had to go so far as to draw his hand-and-a-half before Werner would surrender the thumbs he had nicked from the artist’s kill.

  By then the light was ruined, a crimson sunset outlining the Lombardy hillside Manuel trudged toward. The bald stone prominence rearing up into the bloody sky reminded him of a skull, with eye sockets and a nose formed from the command pavilions and the grove of mercenary tents at the base of the mount creating a jagged maw. But then he was an artist and so everything looked like a symbol for something else, and because he was also a soldier most of the symbols he saw made him think of death.

  “Manny, my little cowherd!” A
lbrecht von Stein did not stand to greet Manuel, reminding the artist at once why he despised the captain who sat across the obscenely heavy ebony table he insisted be brought from camp to camp with him. Von Stein was a large and hairy man whose blunt face would not have seemed amiss in some turnip field instead of wheedling at foreign courts, and his ogreish manners were little better than his looks. Were the bulk of Manuel’s fellow mercenaries not also Swiss who would testify to his military prowess upon returning to Bern, thereby aiding in his local ambitions, the artist would have sought out a less odious captain to serve under.

  Von Stein had followed the scent of bloody metal south just as surely as Manuel had, however, and the mercenaries of Bern had gravitated to von Stein’s service rather than working directly with the French or the various local—and therefore unstable —dukes and mayors. The Lombardy city-states were constantly pouring coin into the trough-coffers of the French and Imperial commanders providing the muscle for their squabbles when the foreigners were not fighting each other directly, and the old crown-eater did have a knack for tactics. Noticing the disheveled state of Manuel, von Stein pouted in the same fashion he had at a dinner several years before upon realizing the young artist he had just met was not actually gentry.

  “But you’ve spoiled your pretty little dress!”

  “I think a splash of color lends it something distinctive,” said Manuel as the flap of the tent fell behind him. “Papal paint and all that.”

  “Oh, that’s good, good.” Von Stein nodded. “Can’t have too many cute names for the wet red, and it’s distinctive to be sure. But do you know what the Emperor said about your little hose and silk and all? Your baubles and laces?”

  Manuel knew what the Emperor Maximilian, former employer and current adversary, had said because von Stein had already told him thrice on the campaign road—another hazard of knowing the commander personally before enlisting in the mercenary company. “No, what did he say?”