10

The following day, since the weather was still mild, Drozde decided to put up her theatre and give a performance.

She’d already been asked a dozen times or more when the next show would be. It was a reasonable question. The company had just moved house in the middle of October, when it would normally have expected to be settling into winter quarters, and there was every expectation of fighting in the spring. Add to that the arrival of Lieutenant Dietmar, bringing with him not just the cannons but his new wife, and there was almost too much material to deal with. If Drozde didn’t perform all this, the news would grow stale, and her reputation for saying what was in everyone’s minds would be tarnished. Reputation was crucial. Of all the stories she told, the most important was the story that her stories were indispensable. Without that, she was just a grown woman who’d never put away her dolls.

The site she chose was the ruins of the old abbey, which stood in the grounds in front of the house and slightly to one side of it, close to a pear orchard that was so overgrown that the weeds were as high as the trees. For the most part, the ruins were now little more than the outlines of the abbey’s foundations. The nubs of stone that projected had been worn as smooth as glass. But one wall and part of another still stood, covered so thickly with ivy that they looked like some mad gardener had sculpted them out of the surrounding greenery. They made a natural windbreak, an effective backdrop and even a spotlight: through an arched window close to the ragged apex of the intact wall, pale sunlight spilled down onto the grass like the ghost of summer. That thought reminded Drozde of the other ghost, Gelbfisc, and the story he’d told her. This had been a place of power and influence once, only a few generations ago. Time buries everything, she thought, like an avalanche moving so slowly that you can’t even see it.

She fetched her trunk from the storeroom below the kitchen, put it down on the grass in the shadow of the wall and began to unpack it. The theatre itself had suffered a little damage in transit, despite the trunk having been wedged in securely at the bottom of Molebacher’s cart, so she addressed herself first of all to that—knocking in a few more nails to secure a loose board and re-attaching the curtain where it had come away from the iron hoops that held it. Then there were the damaged puppets to consider. Some of them would require no more than a new coat of paint, but for the others she would have to go into the village and see if there was a carpenter who could sell her some wood. Good solid beech, seasoned and cut into cylinders, would be ideal. Using green wood, which would warp as it dried, would only mean doing the same work twice.

For now Drozde set the three most damaged puppets aside. They were a soldier, a nobleman and the ruined coquette. She had plenty of soldiers to spare, and nobles didn’t figure in her sketches very often. The coquette had been her best one, though, and she’d been intending to use her for the new Dame Dietmar. The blonde hair was a good match, and the face—rendered grotesque now by its long scars—was one of the finest she’d ever painted.

She made do, turning a little girl doll into a coquette by changing her clothes and repainting her eyes and lips. It’s only what happens in real life, she reflected with a mixture of amusement and chagrin.

Private Taglitz wandered up while she was working. He stood over her for a while, watching in silence while Drozde pretended to be too absorbed in her preparations to notice him. “Will you need me?” he asked at last. She looked up, shielding her eyes from the sunlight shining over his shoulder.

“That depends,” she said.

“On what?”

“On whether you plan to stay sober this time.”

Taglitz squared his shoulders and thrust out his chin, aiming for a pugnacious look that his soft face couldn’t carry. Drozde noticed that his paletot overcoat, which he wore open despite the cold, had soup stains on it. The uniform was usually a good indicator with Taglitz—it went before the rest of him did. “A man’s got a right to a drink,” he pointed out.

“Yes, Tag, he has. He has a right to two drinks, or ten, or fifty. So long as he has them when he’s done with his work. If you can promise me you’ll be able to find the stops, you can pipe for me. Otherwise, I’ll get Drisch.”

“And sing to drums?” Taglitz was scornful.

“Drums can beat out a rhythm. I’d rather have no tune than the wrong tune.”

Taglitz seemed to have run out of arguments. He folded his arms across his gaunt chest, as though he meant to wait her out. Drozde turned back to the little girl puppet and resumed the task of primping her into a siren.

“All right,” Tag said to her back. “I won’t drink until after.”

“Then you shall have a grosch for your pains,” Drozde said, like a mother promising a treat to her child. “And a pottle of beer when you’re done.”

“A white grosch or a brown one?” Taglitz demanded warily.

She reached up and tapped one of the buttons on his greatcoat. “What are these made of?”

Taglitz was bewildered. “Pewter.”

“And your flute?”

“I don’t know. Kupfernickel, I suppose.”

“Right. There’s no silver about you, Tag. So don’t be pulling your hopes up higher than your socks. We’ll stick to brown groschen until you make colonel and I marry a duke.”

“All right. But small beer or real beer?”

“Real.”

“The light or the dunkel?”

“The dark.”

“And when you say a pottle . . .”

“A tankard, Taglitz! A thumb stein, with a handle and a lid to it! Bugger off and let me work!”

She shooed him away, and he was happy enough to go, all smiles now that he’d won his point. A grosch wasn’t much for an hour’s work, Drozde knew, but Tag loved to play for her. And it would hurt his pride, besides, if she let him go. Especially if she let him go for the loud and sneeringly confident Drisch, a Lusation from the northern Berglands who exaggerated his already thick accent in the hope of getting people to pick fights with him.

Drisch wasn’t a viable option in any case. He wasn’t the sort of man to do what he was told by a woman, and that was the sort of man Drozde needed as her accompanist. It mattered that he should have some sort of an ear for music, but it mattered a lot more that he should let the puppets be the centre of attention. The piper she’d had before she found Taglitz had played over her dialogue and killed some of the jokes. And he wouldn’t be told, so she’d had no choice but to send him packing.

She decided on four o’clock for the performance, and went round the camp announcing it. She took her time and allowed herself to get drawn into conversations, because this was an important part of her preparation. In gossiping about stories they’d heard, and in asking Drozde whether she was going to refer to this piece of scandal or that outrageous rumour, the soldiers and their doxies helped to shape the entertainment they were about to see.

Four o’clock was early, but Drozde was constrained by the sun, which would be down before five. She could play through twilight with the aid of torches, but in full dark too much nuance was lost.

After she’d told the soldiers, she went up to the house and passed the word along to the officers too. Not directly, of course—she couldn’t knock on the doors of the lieutenants, and she’d be even less welcome to speak to their wives. What she could do was to tell Carla, the colonel’s lady’s maid, and to extend her usual invitation. Most likely the lieutenants would come, with or without their ladies, and Drozde worked up her material based on that assumption. If they didn’t appear, she just had that little bit more latitude with the bawdy parts. August usually stayed away, although he surprised her every now and then by putting in an appearance. He would stand rather than sit, and he never cracked a smile. Possibly he thought that he was showing solidarity with the men under his command, but actually his solemn church face cast a pall over proceedings that she had to work hard to dispel.

After she’d finished her rounds she still had some time left before the performance was set to begin. She debated with herself whether she should walk into the village and try to find that carpenter. But the walk was a good three miles each way, and she couldn’t afford to be late. It was probably better to put it off until the next day.

So she visited Molebacher instead, and ate with him. He was cooking pottage for the officers, his two big cauldrons bubbling side by side in the fireplace. Hulyek and Fast were with him, chopping onions and yellow turnips, while Standmeier moved between the pots and stirred them, sweat pouring from his face. All three of them studiously avoided looking in her direction.

The meat in the pottage was beef, but for himself Molebacher­ had made a rabbit stew with carrots in a tin pannikin, tucking it in against the stones at the side of the fireplace to let it simmer slowly until it was done. He shared it with Drozde, and she listened to his complaints about the kitchen’s shortcomings. Too many draughts, too many doors, not enough surfaces for preparation, cracked flags on the floor and a ceiling that would certainly leak at the first rain. He didn’t need her to respond to this litany. Her role was to listen and shake her head while she ate her allotted portion of the stew.

“What about the lords and ladies?” she asked Molebacher when a suitable pause in his monologue presented itself. “Are they giving you a hard time?”

She was always cautious about asking Molebacher for gossip, especially about the officers and their wives. His reactions to such questioning were unpredictable: often he would simply say nothing, but he had been known to forget to save her a portion of dinner when she pressed him too hard. Today, however, he seemed to be in a loquacious mood.

“They’re fine,” Molebacher said, shrugging his big shoulders. Then he amended that blanket endorsement. “The colonel’s fine. The others . . .”

A pause. Drozde waited him out. If he had any specific stories to tell, they might find their way into the puppet show. Obviously she couldn’t say anything that actually criticised the officers, but she could dress up their foibles as satire and rely on their delight at being noticed outweighing their embarrassment at being named. Molebacher was usually the soul of discretion when it came to his betters—August permitted him a greater degree of familiarity than he allowed most of his lieutenants, and he wasn’t about to sacrifice that hard-won licence through incautious talk—but occasionally he let something slip.

He did so now. “The new one . . .” he said.

“What, Dietmar’s lady?”

“Yeah, her. She wants Lipisher torte.”

Drozde arched an eyebrow. “Cake in brandy?”

“With hazelnuts. And cream. Lots of cream. Well, I’m not going to go wandering around the woods gathering fucking nuts, am I? Dietmar says he’ll slip me a couple of cruitzers if I make her one. I’ll believe that when I see it. But if I don’t deliver and she goes whining to him about it, I’ll never hear the end of it.”

“I’m going into the village tomorrow,” Drozde offered. “I’ll see if I can find some hazelnuts there.”

Molebacher didn’t thank her. Thanks weren’t in his repertoire. But he nodded as though he was pleased that she’d seen her way through to this obvious solution.

“So,” Drozde said, still fishing. “Pottage. With beef. Any chance you’ll tell me where the beef came from?”

“Any chance you’ll keep your nose where it belongs?” Molebacher countered. But he grinned as he said it. He loved to tell tales of his own resourcefulness, and since a large part of his job was legally sanctioned piracy, he usually had plenty of stories to tell.

“Those fields we passed on our way here,” he said. “About ten miles back. With the big dairy herd. Did you notice Swivek and Rattenwend weren’t around yesterday? Yeah? Well I’d sent them back there, hadn’t I? They picked out seven or eight of the biggest cows and painted a letter M on their arses. Not in paint, obviously. I didn’t have any paint. It was blackjack gravy, from the barrel I made before we rolled out of Vostli. Then they went round to the farm and told the farmer they were looking for some stolen cattle belonging to Count von Molebacher and marked with his sign. Put the fear of God into the poor bastard. Serious business, stealing from the nobility. ‘All yours? Well let’s just take a little look, shall we? Oh dear oh dear.’ And of course the man’s swearing blind that it’s a mistake, he’s owned the cows for years, they’re practically members of the family. ‘All right then,’ says Swivek. ‘We’ll just take a couple, and show them to the count, and if he says they’re yours we’ll bring them right back.’ Of course, by then he thinks he’s going to lose all the bloody animals, so he’s very happy to settle for a couple, and off they go.”

Molebacher was laughing uproariously throughout this speech, hugely enjoying his own joke. Drozde smiled too, even though she didn’t really see how it was funny to rob a man of his livelihood.

“Got the turnips from the next farm along,” Molebacher added. “Nobody in sight, so just grabbed those and kept on walking. Plenty of meat to keep the brass and lace happy for a few days, and what’s left I can parcel up and sell off to the enlisted men. Fresh meat goes faster than anything.”

Armies lived off the land, Drozde knew. What else were they going to do? The alternative—keeping them supplied from some distant point where provisions would first be stored and then doled out—had been tried, and it didn’t work. It was both expensive and fragile. As soon as your enemy waltzed across your supply line, you were well and truly buggered. Better to help yourself to what was around you—so long as you didn’t care who you antagonised or ruined. But this was an Austrian company on Silesian soil. Colonel August had been ordered to tread lightly where possible, and he’d passed the same order on to Molebacher. This was Molebacher’s way of squaring the circle.

“I’m doing a performance,” Drozde told him now. “Tonight.”

Molebacher grunted but said nothing. Drozde wasn’t sure of his position on her shows. He never attended them and on the whole was inclined to dismiss her puppets, and indeed anything she did besides warming his bed, as profoundly unimportant. She suspected, however, that he enjoyed the social visibility she gave him, though he would never admit it. And he couldn’t argue with the money she was putting by from the shows, which was considerable.

Drozde gave the money to him for safekeeping, which was a tactical manoeuvre. There was nowhere in her tent or on her person where she could safely keep it. But she knew where he kept it—in a strongbox at the bottom of a sack of potatoes that he topped up daily so it was always full—and when she parted ways with the company it was going with her, not staying with him. The money represented the next stage of her grand plan. It would pay for the rent and the stock of a small shop in Ledziny or Imielin, or some other town in the far south that basked in the twin blessings of good climate and being a million leagues away from where she was born.

Drozde rose from the table, gave Molebacher a kiss on the cheek—for the benefit of the three privates he fended her off as though this was an unwanted irritation—and took her leave.

She still had an hour or so left. She used it to practise some of the sketches she had in mind and to work up a song to one of her favourite tunes—that of a hoary old ballad called “Bären Gässlin.” The original song was a grim screed about ghosts and vengeance, but its simple rhythms were very easy to compose to. Drozde had taught Taglitz to play it fast and light, and she used it regularly.

Soldiers began to wander over to the ruins in twos and threes as she worked. Most of them were content to sit and enjoy what was left of the sunlight, but some wanted to talk and Drozde (already in persona as the mistress of ceremonies) had to talk back. It was just chaff, flirtatious on their part and outrageously insulting on hers. They expected it and she had to deliver, even though she could have used a few minutes more to prepare.

When Taglitz came, she ran through the songs with him quickly and then, as the ruins filled with men and women, she retired into the tent-like space behind the theatre where the puppets were laid out ready. She watched through a worn patch in the fabric, judging her moment. Dietmar arrived (with wife) and then Pabst (without). Klaes came last of all, talking to the adjutant, Bedvar, and staying right at the back, where he could leave early if there was anything he disapproved of. There usually was.

When she judged by a quick count that two-thirds of the detachment was sitting on the grass in front of the theatre, she got the proceedings underway with a ragged fanfare that she played herself on an old, battered trumpet that probably had more tin than brass in it. The sound was awful, and she made no attempt to stay in tune, but the soldiers and the women greeted that raucous, untempered squawk with their usual cheers and applause.

Drozde started the show, as she did all her performances, with a short speech from General Schrecklich. The general’s puppet had a huge stomach, gin blossoms on his cheeks and so many medals on his uniform that they stood out further than his shoulders. “Pay attention, you men,” Schrecklich rumbled. “Entertainment’s an excellent thing. Takes your mind off other things. Like getting your heads blown off. All to the good, what, what? Watch the nice puppets. Give the puppet lady your pennies. And don’t think about the Prussians. We won’t be seeing any trouble from them. Sticklers for good manners, you know. They won’t shoot you if you don’t introduce yourself.”

The general said several more things in a similar vein, ostensibly trying to improve morale while dwelling in insensitive detail on the imminence of war. The soldiers, for whom this was no laughing matter, laughed until they pissed themselves.

The next item was broad slapstick—Molebacher’s liberation of the cows. Molebacher himself barely figured in the piece, whose heroes were Privates Swivek and Rattenwend. The farmer they swindled was belligerent and suspicious. He chased the soldiers away three times before they finally succeeded in tricking him out of his livestock. Finally they took the cows back to Molebacher, who ennobled them as Sir Swivek of the beef stew and Baron Rattenwend von Cowpat. The piece ended with the first song, a hymn of praise to beef sung by Molebacher and the two privates to a lilting skirl from Taglitz’s pipe. This was the song that Drozde hadn’t had enough time to work out, so it wasn’t very funny until, in a moment of pure inspiration, she had the cows join in, singing off-key. Tag played off-key too, as though there was a cow piper piping for the cow singers. That went down pretty well.

After that she enacted the piece she felt most confident about. The coquette came on along with a second puppet who played the role of her mother. “What ails you, Feronika?” the mother asked as her daughter languished prettily.

“I need . . . Lipisher torte !” the coquette sighed. “If any man should bring it to me, oh, what I should give to him! How my heart would swell with love and tender feeling for him! How pliant and willing I would be in his masculine arms!”

There was a yelp from the back of the audience. Drozde risked a quick glance through her peephole and saw the newly minted Dame Dietmar with her hands clasped to her mouth, eyes wide at the outrageous dialogue. But she was thrilled, not scandalised. She turned to her husband, shaking her head in wonder, and he chucked her under the chin as he kissed her. Look at this, his smile said. You married me, and now you’re famous.

Enter an officer puppet, much to the two ladies’ astonishment. Drozde put a swagger into the soldier’s movements as he introduced himself as Lieutenant Dietmar and swore himself into the coquette’s service like a knight of old. He would never return, he said, until he had found a Lipisher torte and brought it back to her.

“From Lipish?” the coquette hazarded. “It would take you no more than half an hour to ride there.”

No, the soldier said, not from Lipish. From the den of the ice dragon in the far north, who was known to keep a stash for his own use. Nothing would prevent the brave lieutenant from finding the dragon’s lair, slaying the beast and bringing back its hoard for the maiden’s delectation.

This was greeted ecstatically by the audience, as Drozde had known it would be. She kept the joke going through a series of comedic encounters, with the Dietmar puppet braving more and more absurd dangers to find and bring back the cream cake, and then in due course getting his reward—the love of the coquette, who married him with the ice dragon officiating. Drozde loved the dragon puppet, which had taken her three days to make, and lost no opportunity of bringing it into the show.

Another song, then—the “Bären Gässlin” one, with the coquette singing about the many reasons why she loved Lieutenant Dietmar, referring back to a great many of his exploits from former times, all well known to Drozde’s audience. She was careful to avoid any reference to Dietmar’s sexual conquests. They were a theme she’d visited often, but in front of Dietmar’s wife it would be perilous to cause him any real embarrassment. Instead, the jokes she retold in the song turned on drunken excesses or narrowly averted disasters.

The Dietmar piece was the longest in the show. Drozde went on to a series of short vignettes about the village people and the brief interactions that the company had had with them thus far. Most of these were harmless in the extreme, turning on the villagers’ mistrust of the soldiers and their ignorance of current affairs, but she’d saved (as she often did) a sting in the tail to end the performance.

The Schrecklich puppet, without his medals and standing in now for Colonel August, brooded silently in a dungeon-like room. A second officer entered, marching with such vigour and energy that his boot came up above his head with each step. He saluted his commanding officer, then bowed for good measure. When the colonel failed to notice him, he went out and came in again, saluting all the way.

“At ease, Klaes,” the colonel said. Drozde had to pause for a moment here, as this simple line caused such hilarity that it was a minute or more before she could make herself heard again. The rules were subtle here, but what it came down to was that Klaes was fair game because he was the youngest officer in the company, required to show good-natured tolerance rather than take offence when he was lampooned.

The colonel gave Klaes a secret mission—to spy on the villagers and see what secrets they were keeping. Klaes went on to do an appallingly bad job of this, spying on milkmaids while murders, thefts and wholesale debauchery went on all around him. The real Klaes had already left by this point, but Drozde couldn’t tell whether this was before the piece or in response to it. She wasn’t afraid either way. Klaes wasn’t a brute like Dietmar, and even if he were offended he wouldn’t stoop to act on his hurt feelings. It was sad, but it was so: the more pretensions a man had to good manners, the more liberties she could take with him. The vicious cleared a circle around themselves that she had better sense than to enter.

She wound the show down with a final song that was more sentimental and maudlin in nature. Then she came out from hiding and stood with her skirts hitched up to catch any coins the soldiers might give her as they filed out from her makeshift auditorium. Most gave a copper, or perhaps two. The women generally gave nothing, which wasn’t surprising. For them, as for Drozde, money was a matter of survival. Dietmar gave her a cruitzer and a condescending nod. From the smirk that tugged at his lips, she guessed that Dame Feronika had enjoyed The Quest for the Torte and the spotlight it put on her.

Once everyone had left, Drozde began to fold away the puppets. Taglitz knelt down to help her, but she shook her head and shooed him away. She had her own method of looping the strings so that they didn’t tangle in the box, and he’d never been able to learn it. To forestall any more well-meant but unneeded assistance, she paid him off.

Taglitz stared at the coins in the palm of his hand, counting them twice before he spoke. “There are five fenings here,” he said.

“Yes. So?”

“That doesn’t add up to a grosch. It adds up to a cruitzer and a fening over.”

“You had a good idea. Going off-key for the cows. So you get a little extra.”

“And I still get my beer?”

“And you still get your beer.”

“Fielen danken, Drozde.”

“You’re welcome. But don’t talk Schönbrunner, Tag. Not even bad Schönbrunner. Someone might mistake you for an officer, and then where would you be?”

Clouds had begun to scud in from the north as the sun retreated to the horizon. Tag cast a suspicious glance up at their black bulk. “Sleeping up in the house,” he sighed, “instead of in a tent with a fucking hole in it.”

Drozde hefted the first of her boxes onto her shoulder. If it was going to rain again, she had to get them inside quickly. “Everything has two sides to it, Tag. The secret to staying happy is turning things around so only the good side faces you.”

Taglitz didn’t look convinced. “Even getting soaking wet and chilled to the bone?”

“Even that. Isn’t Swivek in your tent?”

“Yes, he is. Why?”

“If he farts in the night, the hole will save you from suffocating.”

The first drops were starting to fall as she walked away.