Shadows of Falling Night (25 page)

“Only a bit—one of my grandmothers was German and she tried to teach me some when I was a kid. Oh, and I know the physics terminology, enough to help a conversation about that. Probably not much use here. There’s almost always somebody who can speak English in a German town, though, even a small one.”

The cold damp air was wonderfully enlivened with baking smells, rich with vanilla and buttery-nutty and gingery scents. It was long past lunchtime, and they’d just finished a long cold hike. Despite his general misery, that made part of him perk up.

“Okay, we need to get the kids warmed up and fed, and see if we can organize some transportation. We may be stuck here tonight from the look of the weather.”

He let himself shiver, no longer forcing the unpleasant feeling of being core chilled out of his mind by sheer willpower, surprised at how bad it was.

I may not be twenty-two anymore, but am I an old man already? Can a couple of eight-year-olds run me into the dirt?

The inn
was
blessedly warm and bright as they pushed through the door and stamped the snow off their shoes. The common room featured a lot of carved wood that reminded him of Swiss cuckoo clocks, a couple of murals of fairy tales with an unfortunate prevalence of wolves and white teeth, and pine logs crackling in a big fireplace with wrought-iron andirons and a tile surround. It was all presided over right now by a wrinkled crone in a shapeless black dress whose nose nearly met her chin. For a moment he remembered his joke about Hansel and Gretel, but her bright blue eyes looked at them with alert curiosity as she put down her knitting, and then widened in concern at the sight of the cold, snow-soggy children.

“
Ha woesch! Wo’ her?
”

They looked at her blankly; she clucked her tongue and continued into a flow of German, with a broad mooing accent that even he could tell wasn’t anything like the standard form of the language. It sounded rather like a compassionate and elderly Teutonic cow. Peter looked baffled, but Leon and Leila immediately started chattering back at her in German that was apparently fully fluent—and from the crone’s delighted smile, the same dialect she used. After a moment Leila turned to him:

“We told her that our car broke down,” she said.

“She says that we’re lucky it wasn’t any farther away from the village,” her brother added. “This is a lonely place, she says, and that they get snowed in a lot.”

“And she says that dinner will be ready soon if we want to eat—and there will be
Kniadel
,” Leila added eagerly.

“You mean
Knödel?
” Peter asked.

“
Ja, Kniadel
,” the old woman said helpfully, and broke into a new set
of moos, evidently asking things like
where is your car
and
what about luggage
and
do you know these kids are wet and freezing
?

A comedy of languages and dialects followed. Luckily some younger members of the family turned up who spoke reasonable English, albeit apparently somehow learned from Englishmen who spoke a thick and adenoidal version of their own, which was absolutely indescribable on a base of deeply rural Swabian. The grandchildren of the crone had a couple of children of their own around the twins’ age and size who could lend them some dry clothing. A message went off to ask around for someone with a four-wheel-drive vehicle to go fetch the luggage from the stranded car. Apparently with the weather this bad, there was no hope of getting the car itself fixed until after Christmas.

In the course of all that the ancient, her rather more than middle-aged son, and
his
son and daughter-in-law, took their coats, set them down in front of the fire to warm up and dry out, brought coffee and cream and plates of crescent-shaped biscuit/cookie things dusted with sugar and full of hazelnuts. Then they waded through a dinner of roast ham hocks done with mustard, horseradish and pickled chilies and accompanied by red cabbage, onion cakes and potato dumplings—which was what
Kniadel
turned out to be. Or
Knödel,
according to Peter. A bunch of locals trickled to in to have the same, mostly families, and mostly people who obviously knew each other from childhood; he supposed they were giving the housewives a rest before the big family dinners around Christmas.

“I suppose they’ll be stuffing their turkeys soon,” Eric said, and took a mouthful of the ham. “Dang, I expected German food to be sort of soggy and bland but this is pretty good.”

“It’s usually a goose, not a turkey, from what grandma used to say, her mother came from somewhere east of Munich, but yeah,” Peter said.
“German food is sort of heavy, but after walking a couple of miles in the snow you realize why it got that way.”

It was just the sort of thing you wanted in this weather, although Eric found himself tapering off long before he expected, giving it up and pushing away his half-full plate of the main course while the twins were already working their way through some cake full of cinnamon and nuts.

“
Liabr da Maga verrenkt, als em Wirt ebbes gschenkt,
” someone said disapprovingly as they took the remains of his dinner away; evidently that was a breach of manners here.

“I like it, this food,” Cheba said, polishing off hers with gusto. “I like this place, too. It’s different, but it’s more like a place where people live.”

“There’s even a ruined castle!” Peter chuckled.

“That too, there was an old ruined hacienda near where I was born, burned by the rebels in my great-grandfather’s time.”

Leon turned and relayed the remark about the castle to the old lady as she put a bowl of whipped cream down by the cake. Her benevolent-granny’s smile ran away from her face, and she said something guttural. Which was admittedly hard not to do in German, but it sounded more so than usual.

“She says that was the castle of the accursed von Trupps. And it’s under a curse, too!” Leila added with ghoulish enthusiasm. “And they were, like, tremendously wicked and stuff,
très mal
.”

“Like us Brézés,” Leon said helpfully, and the sister went on:

“Especially the last von Trupp, the mad baron. They say his master, the Devil, came for him in the form of a French magician in a black robe and stabbed him in the heart with a silver knife before he carried off his soul to Hell!”

One of the younger generation of the family that ran the inn started at the name, and then rolled his eyes at the repetition of the story.

“
Schmarrn! Heidezapf!
Superstition!” he said, in his odd hybrid accent. “In the days of the last Freiherr von Trupp there was plenty of bloody wickedness in the whole sodding country without bringing curses or any nonsense like that into the matter. The only truth in that story is that it
was
the French prisoners in the work camp there who burned down the
Schloss
. And killed the baron. They had good reason to do it, God knows; we were lucky they didn’t come after the village.”

Which started a ding-dong argument, involving granny (who would have been younger than the twins at the time) shaking her knotted finger in her grandson’s face, but didn’t make the table service any less efficient. Even his headache couldn’t keep Eric from smiling slightly: with some slight differences in looks—darker, and desiccated rail-thin as opposed to solid brick outhouse—she was his own great-grandmother to the life, from what he remembered as a small child. From his parents’ stories, the old biddy had ruled the whole family with a rod of iron until the day she died.

The
Gasthaus
had some rooms available, up under the roof and reached by a narrow twisting wooden stair that creaked beneath their shoes. Eric booked two of them, one for Cheba and the kids and another for him and Peter. The family of the old lady who liked stories about curses were obviously puzzled by the domestic arrangements of the strange Americans, the more so when they paid in cash from a thick roll of hundred-euro bills despite impeccable ID. The kids might just possibly have been Peter and Cheba’s from their looks, but the ages were wrong and then there were their odd linguistic accomplishments. And they would’ve heard Cheba and Eric swapping the occasional phrase in Spanish.

Fortunately they were too polite to pry. When they had the children settled, the adults had a brief conference.

“You don’t look so good, Eric,” Peter said.

Eric sighed and slumped back, rubbing his hands across his face. “Yeah, I’m not feeling so great either. Started getting a little off about the time the car gave up the ghost, but I couldn’t say anything then. Just had to bull through, there was no point in bitching. It’s getting worse, though.”

It was true; the headache had come on worse, his joints were aching, he felt hot shivery at the same time and he was beginning to regret dinner though he’d been hungry and justifiably so. It felt like the flu, but not quite. Cheba leaned forward and put her hand on his forehead—with two beds and two chairs the room was fairly crowded and half the space above was cut off by the slope of the roof. The calloused palm felt cool against the skin of his face.

She asked a few sharp questions in Spanish about how he felt, then made a sort of spitting noise of exasperation.

“
Paludismo,
” she said. “There is no doubt—I’ve seen it often enough before.”

“She means malaria,” Eric said, grimacing.

“
What!
” Peter blurted.

“I’ve had it,” Eric said. “Got careless about my preventive stuff while we were down south of Kabul where the national bird is the mosquito, the stuff they give you brings on these bitching headaches. Christ, though, I had it treated to a fare-thee-well and the doc said it wouldn’t recur…I suppose exertion and cold could have brought it on…”

“More
bad luck,
” Peter said.

Cheba looked frightened for the first time. “This is very bad,” she said. “Malaria can kill.”

Peter nodded. “Yes. We have to get him to a hospital.”

Both of them looked at the Minnesotan. After a moment he flushed a little. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “That’s what
they
want us to do.”

Eric grunted; he didn’t feel up to speaking much. With an effort, and pressing his hands to the sides of his head, he managed to say:

“Primaquine…I need primaquine and quinine. Better…try to get them without any records.”

Peter looked unhappy. “This is Germany. You can’t buy a sandwich without leaving a record in triplicate.”

“They might know, know that I’ve got malaria, or it might be just some general curse. Christ, just what I need, something that screws up my head.”

It was coming on strong now, and even more unpleasant than he remembered. They helped him over to the bed, got a basin in case dinner left, and then undressed him. It was all a blur shot through with pain, which the aspirin didn’t help much at all. He could feel the sweat running down his face and flanks, and someone wiping his face with a cold cloth. One of the worst parts was knowing that he’d soon be dreaming, and how well-stocked his subconscious was with some truly vile shit.

Vaguely, voices:
I must stay here and look after him; you will be better with the children.

“Where the hell am I?” Eric asked. Then after a moment: “Oh, yeah.”

What it
looked
like was the living room of Adrian Brézé’s house back near Santa Fe, the place where the were-eagle had attacked them. It felt absolutely realistic, down to the smell of piñon burning from the fireplace. The most dreamlike thing about it was that he felt completely healthy; that was an enormous relief and at the same time gave him a twinge at how bad it would feel when he went back. One of the many downsides of being really sick was that it seemed like it would last forever.

He turned, and Adrian and his wife Ellen were sitting together on the
couch. She flashed him a sympathetic smile, and Adrian gave a brisk nod.

“You are in my Memory Palace,” Adrian said courteously; that meant he was effectively in Adrian’s head. “And that is only possible because of the base-link.”

That had involved donating a syringe of his blood for Adrian to step out and drink in discreet privacy. Despite the clinical nature of the exchange, Eric still felt vaguely embarrassed by the memory. He overcame an obscure impulse to come to attention and say
Sir
, and sat down on one of the chairs facing them instead. Adrian selected one of the slim brown cigarettes from the case on the cast glass table and lit it.

“It is extraordinary how invisible you are,” the adept went on. “When I seek you with the eye of the Power, there is absolutely nothing. I can communicate with you, but you might as well be in China for all I can tell of your physical location; even the direction is obscure. It is the same with the others, even the children, and usually their direction is as plain as a compass heading. Where are you in fact?”

He filled them in on everything that had happened. When he had finished, there was a pause before Ellen filled it with a succinct:

“Shit.”

Adrian blew meditative smoke at the ceiling. “Precisely. This is quite bad. Worse than I had anticipated.”