The Ravens of Falkenau & Other Stories (5 page)

I was not surprised that the first person I saw when I arrived was Count Trcka, striding across the courtyard to me before the groom had even taken my horse.
 
"Marianburg!"

"Count," I said, bowing very properly as one should.

"None of that," he said, and put his arm about my shoulders.
 
"You're a landed gentleman now.
 
Congratulations on your marriage!"

"Thank you," I said.
 
It had not quite occurred to me that I was now Graf Falkenau.
 
The castle and title were Izabela's inheritance, and unless they should pass to the sons of her first marriage….

"I hear she's a pretty thing."
 
Trcka winked at me.
 
He was a large man of my own age with carefully trimmed dark hair and beard and a mobile face that somehow rendered him Gallic in appearance, though he was Bohemian through and through.
 
In his scarlet pantaloons and broad sleeves he was not a sight one could miss.

"She is that," I said, and steered the conversation onto other courses before the subject of the marriage's consummation arose.
 
"What does the Generalissimo want with me?
 
To remonstrate about how long this took?"

Trcka waved it away.
 
"Nonsense.
 
He was busy all fall himself.
 
So were we all.
 
No, rather you are here at my wish."

I frowned.
 
I'd fought beside Trcka many times in the last decade, and might even call him friend, but the orders had come under Wallenstein's seal.
 
Still, Wallenstein was his brother in law, as they'd married landed sisters together, Wallenstein the elder and Trcka the younger.
 
"What do you need me for?" I asked.

"We'll talk of it later."
 
Adam Trcka clapped me on the shoulder and released me.
 
"My man will show you to comfortable quarters.
 
Dine with me and we'll discuss it all."

"Of course," I said a little stiffly.

He shook his head, smiling.
 
"Same old Marianburg.
 
Suspicious and without humor.
 
Cannot you believe in good fortune?"

"As much as any man," I said.

"A sober fellow," he said.
 
"We'll talk later."
 
And he left me with that.

I was not reassured.
 
After all, not everything he had suggested in the past had turned out well, case in point one particular evening before the Battle of Lutzen.

I would never have considered doing it at all if it weren’t for a large quantity of excellent Polish vodka. I do not believe in spirits, let alone believe that men may congress with them aided by candles and chalk.
 
Trcka believed differently, as did McDonald.

“Come, Georg,” McDonald said, reeling a little from the drink, “I’ve stood at your back often enough. Stand at mine, so that if demons attempt me it may be your swift knife!”

“There are no such things as demons,” I said testily.

“We aren’t summoning demons,” Trcka said. “That’s a dangerous business and I’ll have none of it. We’re summoning angels, that they may tell us the fates of our battles in the coming days. One angel in particular, the Archangel Michael, who watches over war.”

“Come, Georg,” McDonald said. “If you have nothing to fear, why do you hesitate?”

“I fear that in your drunk clumsiness you will set your hair afire or your beard or the table,” I said, but came with them to the upper room of the inn we had appropriated. Appropriated – pillaged rather, along with the good vodka and a quantity of
Rhenish
wine.

Trcka chalked the circles and walked them round, telling McDonald and me where to stand, setting candles on the tables, on the window sill. Most of what he said was gibberish to me. Perhaps it was Greek, or some more archaic tongue. I wouldn’t know. I am not a learned man.
 
I stood there where Trcka told me while he poured out wine, drew his sword and chanted out a great many words, walking round and round about inside his circle of chalk.
 

Perhaps I should have been afraid.
 
Most would be.
 
This was, after all, black magic proscribed by Church and Emperor alike.
 
It was death to begin this, or at least it would be so for those without wealth and rank to protect them.
 
If I feared anything it was this, not imaginary demons from some medieval bestiary, the imaginings of monks with nothing better to amuse themselves.

McDonald sat down on the floor.
 
“Are you all right, James?” I asked.

“Sleepy, so sleepy,” he said, leaning back against the wall.

“You’re dead drunk,” I said.

“
Mmmmm
,” he murmured.

I shrugged. He could sleep there against the wall and no harm would come to him. I spread his cloak over him.

When I looked up, Trcka had stopped pacing and mumbling. He slumped in a chair, his eyes closed, the chalk dangling from one hand, the sword from the other. I stepped over to him. He was snoring softly.

I was a bit unsteady on my feet myself. “Vodka,” I said. “Plays tricks on you.” This seemed terribly profound to me. “Sleep it off then. A quiet end to this charade.”
 
Nothing whatsoever had happened.

I went over and blew out the candle at the window sill. In the sudden burst of light as the flame was extinguished I saw the reflection of the fourth man. I would have thought it was one of our troopers, except for the shadow of folded wings behind him, cast high on the wall.

I turned.

He wore bloodstained velvet and a breastplate of good Spanish steel, light brown hair framing a tired young face, lined with care and weal. A blackened swept hilt rapier was at his side. His voice was very cool. “You should have a care, summoning your betters. It’s not polite.”

“My Lord,” I said, “I do not believe in you.”

Something moved in his eyes, some expression of regret. “Do you not?” he said, “Son of my heart? Can you have forgotten yourself so much?”

“I have forgotten nothing,” I said, and a great anger rose in me, the battle blindness I sometimes feel, pure and hot as fire. “Where were you when my step father beat me bloody again and again? Where were you when his fists blinded my mother and broke her jaw? When I killed him as he stood, when I was fifteen, and still she wept and said that she should turn me over to the Graf’s men for a murderer so that I should hang for killing him? Where were you when I fled from that place with nothing but my shirt and a bloody knife to make my way in this world?” I turned away from him. “I would that you were more than drunken imaginings so that I might put this blade through you.”

He stepped around the table, the feathers of his wings rippling softly. He stood very close, and there seemed little celestial about him, just a man of my own age, tired and sleepless. “Do you think I would not prevent such things if I could? I would that I could, that infinite power were mine. But if it were, I should use it no more wisely than you.”

“I do not care for celestial power,” I said. “What I want is money, a good sword and men to follow after me.”

“So that no one may harm you,” he said.

“Yes!” I spat it at him. “You have named it. There is no mercy in this fallen world, and I shall show none. Perhaps I am a beaten cur, hard bitten and hard biting. But if you had wished otherwise, you could have shown yourself twenty years ago!”

His eyes searched my face. “Mercenary captain. Who would have thought that you would even survive this long? Much less stand with lace at your throat and two hundred horsemen at your back?”

“I’m hard to kill, My Lord.”

“I know.” The angel almost smiled. “You stand there in black velvet, unbowed still. Perhaps there is some hope left in this bleeding continent. Have you never believed in anything?”

I sat down at the table heavily. Trcka slumbered on in the chair beside me. “I believed in the Winter Queen,” I said. “But she was dross. She and her king fled, and left us to die on the mountain covering her retreat. So I fight no more for queens or thrones. I serve Wallenstein, who pays in gold. I care not for Emperor or Pope or kings.” I looked up at him.

“You have come so far,” he said, his eyes searching my face, “from that bright girl alive with hope. So far from those days when even I was young. The world is older, now, and a new dark age upon us. This land is drowning in blood, and I do not see the end of it.”

“You tell me what I know,” I said. “Now the kings of Sweden and France enter in, and there is no end to war.”

“Yet you live,” he said, and took a breath. “I shall take some hope in that. That battered and changed, you endure. And perhaps you will find your way back from these caves. I cannot tell.”

“My Lord,” I said, “What will be our fortunes in the field?”

The angel gave a rueful smile. “I can tell you nothing you do not know. You will meet the King of Sweden in battle, and many brave men will die. You will win, or they will. And whoever prevails will fight again and again.”

“Will I die, My Lord?” I asked.

“No,” Michael said. “That would be too easy.”

I had not spoken of these things to Trcka, nor would I.
 
When I had awakened in the morning it seemed little more than a foul dream brought on by drink and atmosphere.
 
And yet I was quite certain that I never wanted to do such things again.
 
If something of the kind was the reason he had summoned me to Plzen I resolved to refuse even if it were grave disrespect.
 

Our meal was served privately in an upper room, well seasoned fresh cutlets of pork and a dish of stewed apples, sweet
Rhenish
wine and a pastry thick with almond paste, and brandy to follow.
 
It was very good.

"Did it ever occur to you," Trcka asked at last, dabbing at the marzipan in his moustache, "that there are other ways to live?"

"It occurs to me constantly," I said dryly.
 
How not?
 
Trcka should eat well if it were the last pig in Bohemia, and perhaps it was, so ruined was the countryside from fifteen years of war.
 
I had not eaten thus in my childhood, when a sausage was dinner for us all, and a grand one at that with some cabbage.
 
At Falkenau the winter would be harsh, but with care we might all see spring.
 
If I were strict enough with the food now and let no man eat his fill, including myself.

Trcka laughed as though I had made some great piece of wit.
 
"I don't mean the food," he said, and his eyes were sober over his glass.
 
"The ancients did not live thus.
 
Pax
Romana
, Roman peace, enduring centuries from one end of the world to the other.
 
They built roads and temples and towns, bridges that endure today!
 
In Italy where are waterworks that still faithfully bring water from artesian springs into cities, fresh and pure as mountain air!"

"What is all that to me?" I asked.

"I thought you of all people had the imagination to think," Trcka said.
 
"What might we do if this war were ended?"

I shrugged.
 
"I don't know."
 
It made me angry for reasons I could not fathom and did not wish to.

"Then what will happen if it does not?" he asked softly.
 
"Surely you can see that."

"There will be nothing left," I said, and I knew what I spoke of.
 
I had seen the smoking ruins with no one left alive, the frightened people taking to the road looking for a safe place when there is none, their screams when cavalry cut through them, riding down children for sport.
 
"There will be nothing," I said.
 
Orchards ablaze, apple blossoms standing for a moment incongruous against the flames before the darkness took them, fields unplowed that would yield no harvest except skeletons, smoke rising to the sky from the pyre of the world.
 

"No planting and no harvest," Trcka said.
 

No glass blown in empty shops, a fine pulverized powder all that was left of a craftsman's life, book pages twisting on the wind, torn and worthless and ultimately empty….

"No learning and no printing, no building and no crafting."
 
Trcka put his hands together around his brandy.
 
"We will make a wasteland.
 
We already do."

The words came unbidden in my mind, like words of a song I had heard in childhood.
 
"Who will plant young olive trees?
 
Who will plow fields that are fallow?"

"You will," Trcka said, and his words fell like the bronze tolling of a bell in the silence.

I looked at him, this ordinary man with his ordinary face.
 
"I am a soldier," I said.

He spread his hands.
 
"Let me show you something," he said.
 
He got up and went to the press, returned with papers that he spread before me.
 
"You read well enough."
 
He opened the first and smoothed it before me.
 
"This was from a courier intercepted in the spring.
 
The second was from one taken in September.
 
I need not tell you their importance."