Here and Now
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The wounded bodyguard, afraid to groan, was limping aside.
A stream of blood was staining his tracks.
“When a dog bites, its master should be punished,” said the margrave in a didactic tone. It seemed that except for him and Skwozhina there were no people remaining on the Earth. “You’ve mistaken, avenger. Here’s the pitchfork. Here I am, the master. Punish!”
“Stop it! Stop it, you foolish broad! My lord, she’s crazy! She’s...”
Not listening to the taverner’s screams, biting her lip and becoming alike the bull Hles when it would see something red, Skwozhina stroke. The clear eyes of her dead brother Stanek, the scoundrel of scoundrels, were looking at her back. The hot eyes of the margrave Siegfried, a man whose soldiers had done Skwozhina the long desired favour, were looking in her face. She was tearing away between these two glances. God bless you, kind lord! Stanek, wish you were dead! Well, dead you are ... what am I doing? Why am I doing this?!
...I’m doing.
She had time to lift the pitchfork for the third time, when the blade of a dolchmesser – a flat dagger with one-sided, knife-like sharpening – flashed under her chin.
“An assaulter cannot be a man or a woman,” said Siegfried von Maintz in a didactic tone, cleaning his blade over the skirt of the murdered woman. On the rough linen, dyed with onion peels and celandine, blood stains looked ordinary. “An assaulter cannot be your equal or not. He can be only an enemy – or dead. This is the main thing. Everything else is hypocrisy. Get ready, in an hour we set out for Osobloga.”
And added, narrowing his eyes: “Don’t burn down the tavern. I was pleased here.”
Later on, when the dust settled after the Maintz men went away, the taverner Jas let everybody out of the hideout. Little Karolinka didn’t cry. She sat near her mother’s body, rocking in her hand a piece from the “Triple Nornscoll”, singing “Hoy, clover of five leaves”. Having finished singing, she put the image near the deceased.
An unused, senseless pawn.
A carved soldier.
“What happened here?” asked Martzin Oblaz in a quivering voice.
It took some time until he got an answer.
The kitten that felt warm on the vagrant’s knees turned in its sleep in a funny way. Seized its muzzle with its paws, started purring louder. Peter stroked it absentmindedly. The touch of the soft fur was nice and somewhat unreal.
“I didn’t know,” said Peter. “I’ve...”
“You’ve,” muttered the taverner without anger. “You’ve, we’ve, torn a sleeve... That is, odd-even, you didn’t need to know about it. There’s nothing to know there. You’re alike – he and you, so I started pealing like an old bell...”
With the corner of his eye Peter Sliadek noticed the scanty smile of the mage in the corner who had been sitting still throughout the taverner’s story – and suddenly he understood with piercing clearness whom he was like with and who that stern staff-bearer was.
The door opened wide. A serving girl, about twelve years old, ran into tavern: sturdily– built, sunburnt. On her plain face strangely shone dark eyes, like two cherries. “Uncle Jas! Uncle Jas! The coach with mister Seingalt rode on. He’s ordered to tell he’ll wait near the graveyard, as usual! Let the rest go! He’s already so old, our Jacom, he’s sick from travel...”
“I’m going,” said the mage, getting up. “Jas, tell Jendrich and Lukerda to go after me. I have a presentiment: today, with the God’s help...” He halted, as if he doubted his own words or was afraid of jinx. “Let’s go, Karolinka. Let’s not keep Giacomo waiting.”
“Oh, let’s go, meister Martzin!..”
When the door shut, the lute under the table suddenly echoed with plaintive ringing. As if it had awakened. Or wanted to say something.
“You go,” said the taverner, trying not to look in Peter’s face. It happens when you’ve babbled too much, in a journey or in your cups, and you want to take leave of your accidental fellow traveller as fast as possible, to depart forever. “You go your way, lad. There’ll be no people here in the evening, whom will you sing for? Go to a crossroad, near Rahovez there’s the tavern of Zbych Proksha – on Saturdays it’s piled in! You’ll get your bag full of groshes! And I’ll give you some bread. Go, go, I have a lot of work to do...”
“Thank you,” said Peter.
Jas Misiur smiled wryly: “For the porridge? Or for my babbling?”
“For the porridge too.”
Soon, having left the tavern behind his back, Peter Sliadek slowed his path. I had to leave at once, he thought. I had to... To cheer himself, he started whistling his beloved ballade about the battle of Osobloga – but it didn’t do.
The song made his mouth sore.
He recollected how, a sixteen year old boy, he was standing in the Home Guard on the slope, with the spear he had been given. Miserable, trembling. Below, the cavalry of the margrave Siegfried was crossing the Wench ford. It was clear they wouldn’t hold the shore. The iron flood was ploughing through the river, the plumes of helms were swaying like white surf, and the shaft of his spear became disgustingly wet. Across the river, on a hill overgrown with willow thicket, surrounded by his bodyguards, the margrave himself was watching over the moving of his troops. While struggling with his fear, Peter didn’t understand at first what was going on. Nobody did. Where had the furious riders come from?! None other than the Devil himself must have brought them, because the nearest oak wood was combed thoroughly by the Maintz men beforehand. Seven horsemen, getting in wild galloping to Siegfried’s rear, showered the margrave with arrows at full speed. The bodyguards habitually covered their lord, moving their shields together, but one of them slipped, groaning from the pain in his leg, apparently recently wounded, – in the wall of shields there glimpsed an open space, and the last arrow shot by the horsemen’s leader stroke the neck of the margrave who had been late to put on his helm. Later on the prince Razimir would forgive the skilful marksman all his former sins, changing him from the chieftain Dry Storm into the frontier guard Jendrich Kionka, giving the brave man honour and a coat of arms; but then it didn’t matter, because one of the raiders, dismounted, was already fighting with the bodyguards, trying to make his way through, fight his way through to, reach wounded Siegfried, and the experienced warriors were retreating under the pressure, burning out like hay in fire. The fighter was wearing strange armour – it seemed he had gathered it part by part in the den of a looter or a fence. Because of the ridiculous bulky spaulders the assaulter would be nicknamed the Stooped Knight – but this would also happen only later. And then the cavalry halted at the ford, a terrible rainstorm with hail big as pigeon eggs whipped the usurpers – as if Byarn the Pensive himself, the good mage from Holne, came back from the dead, deciding to stand up for Opolie! The rain was washing out the oozy shore, and the horses stumbled, throwing their riders down. The cry: “Siegfried’s dead! Hit the foreigners!” rolled over Osobloga, and the prince Razimir ordered to sound the attack. Peter was running, choking on water and his own shouts, poking his spear into someone’s belly, shouting again, and came to himself only in the train, where it was hot, he was thirsty, and imps in his head were dancing fiery kozeryika.
His head would ache up to this day, foreboding autumn rains.
“Well, let it be so,” said Peter, barely understanding what he meant. “Let it be...”
At the roadside there was standing a coach. The moustached coachman sat there, bored, sipping from his flask from time to time. Still higher, to the left hand, where heather was fading under dark firs, a graveyard began. Near one of the crosses, around the grave there were sitting people. Peter recognized the company officer with his wife, the mage and young Karolinka. Also there was a very old man dressed in dark blue – the colours of the Opolie house. The old man was stooping heavily, leaning forward. All the people didn’t move, looking at a single point in front of them. Thus would sit players absorbed in a complicated game.
Peter could swear he knew what game was lying on the grave in front of the amazing five.
The “Triple Nornscoll”.
“ ‘I have a presentiment,’ said the mage, getting up. ‘Today, with the God’s help...’ ”
“I’ll write a song,” Peter Sliadek stopped. He was looking at the people occupied with the game, as if hoping they could hear him, digress, stop racking their tormented hearts with the dream of correcting – the most wonderful and the most deceitful dream in the world. “I give you my word, I’ll write a song. A real one. You won’t get angry if I sing it everywhere? I’m seldom allowed to visit castles...”
He threw his lute farther on his shoulder and moved along the Kichora road.
Whistling “Hoy, clover of five leaves.”