Page 38 of The Devils

Reverses

‘God damn these goddamned boots!’ snarled Balthazar, hopping along on one so he could rip the other off and shake out some particle of grit, the discomfort it caused in outrageous disproportion to its infinitesimal dimensions. ‘They are less footwear than devices of torture !’

‘So speaks a man who’s never been tortured,’ murmured Baptiste, the seed head on the stalk of grass she gripped between her front teeth waving as she spoke.

‘And you have, I suppose?’

‘I have.’

Ordinarily, when she shared some aspect of her boundless experience, there was at least one elaborate anecdote attached. But on this occasion there was only silence, and Balthazar was forced, to his surprisingly intense discomfort, to imagine the circumstances for himself.

‘That is …’ Awful. I am so very sorry. The words teetered on his lips, but at the last moment he refused to give them voice. Was she not his jailer, after all? His bitter nemesis? Had he not sworn to exact a terrible revenge for her many slights? And here he was tricking himself into sympathy! It spoke extremely highly of his forgiving and empathetic nature, of course, but being dragged in opposite directions only made his anger flare up more brightly. ‘God damn this goddamned shirt!’ He scratched savagely at one armpit, then the other. ‘If there is one thing worse than one’s own lice, it is inheriting the lice of the deceased!’

‘You can’t always pick your travelling companions,’ murmured Baptiste around her grass, somewhat pointedly.

‘No doubt some among us thrive in squalor,’ he snapped, ‘but I am not a man made for sleeping in hedges, nor for defecating in ditches, nor for subsisting on squirrels!’

‘You don’t like squirrel? You should’ve said so.’

‘A thousand times I said so!’

‘Only a thousand? It felt like more. You still ate it, though.’

Balthazar gritted his teeth. Teeth in which shreds of squirrel might very well still be lodged. He had eaten it, after all, and should no doubt have been praising the great ingenuity with which she had trapped the stringy little creature. It had been fascinating to watch her about it: so utterly still, so perfectly intent, so formidably patient, biting ever so gently on her scarred lip, the drizzle leaving glittering dew in the curls about her face …

He shook himself. Knowing that without her he would very probably have starved, frozen, or fallen prey to bandits out here in this war-ravaged corner of Europe only made his resentment simmer all the hotter.

‘We should have reached the stones by now,’ he grumbled.

‘Feel free to plot your own course, we can see who gets there first.’

‘We should have gone left at that fork!’

‘Way too well travelled. It’d likely have taken us straight into an ambush. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a war going on.’

‘The several devastated villages, torched vineyards, and burned farmhouses, not to mention the large battlefield from the corpses of which we stole my lice-ridden clothes , did rather give the game away in that regard. Had we taken the last left we would have been there already!’

Baptiste removed the stalk of grass from between her teeth to speak more freely. ‘You need to stop clinging to the notion that there’s only one right path. You’ll waste half your time panicking you’re not on it, and the rest backtracking to find it. You know your problem?’

‘That I am enslaved by this bloody binding—’ he gave an acrid burp, and scratched angrily at the burned patch on his wrist ‘—and my life has become a succession of humiliating detours from a route I have no desire to take?’

‘None of that’d hurt so badly if you weren’t so rigid . You demand everything bend to your will and declare war on whatever doesn’t.’ She took a deep breath through her nose, and let it sigh contentedly away. ‘You should be like water. Take the shape of wherever you are and make the best of what floats past.’

She grinned over, gold tooth glinting, and for an instant Balthazar wondered whether the smile he had always taken as mockery could as easily be interpreted as a playful invitation. Whether it had been up to him, all along, which way he took it. And despite his lice and his hunger and his entirely reasonable hatred of the binding, he could not help grinning back. Did he catch a tantalising glimpse of a world in which … he could look on the bright side ? A world in which every reverse did not have to be a disaster, nor every offhand jibe a bitter score to settle. A world in which he could throw vanity and pedantry and suffocating self-regard to the wind and take wild chances. A world in which a man like him and a woman like—

‘What?’ she muttered, narrowing her eyes.

He opened his mouth to reply.

‘Stop right there!’

They sprang from the bushes and slipped from the trees, closing in on every side. Soldiers, with uncompromising expressions, with drawn bows, with levelled spears. Perhaps Balthazar might have noticed them, had he not been fantasising about being an entirely different person. Perhaps Baptiste might have noticed them, had she not been encouraging his doomed effort. But it was a little late for either of them to notice now. She considered the soldiers and – presumably seeing that neither fight nor flight offered a compelling chance of success – displayed a winning smile and slowly raised her hands.

Balthazar propped his own on his hips, and stared at the sky, and forced the words through gritted teeth.

‘God damn it!’

‘Sergeant …’

Balthazar pressed his face to the bars. He had been pressing it there for some time. He would likely end up with a permanent imprint of those bars across his visage. If he ever left the cage, that was.

‘Sergeant …?’ His voice wavered between needy croon and tetchy demand, and somehow ended up with an entirely unintended come-hitherish inflection. ‘Just a moment of your time?’

The lumpen jailer looked around. ‘Another?’

‘This is no more than an honest misunderstanding. We were simply passing through, on our way to the standing stones near Niksic—’

‘You’re druids?’

‘Druids? No. Druids? Ha! Do we look like druids?’

The man shrugged. ‘Being a druid’s not a question of outward trappings, but of mindset and beliefs.’

‘Well …’ That was a good deal more perceptive that Balthazar had been expecting. ‘You have a point there, but—’

‘Same as being a spy, in that respect.’

‘Spies? No. Spies? Us?’ Balthazar delivered a peal of slightly shrill laughter. ‘Do we look like spies?’

‘Not looking like a spy is exactly what a spy would look like,’ said the sergeant, identifying a weakness in the argument Balthazar had himself realised the moment the words left his mouth.

‘I spent some time as a spy, in fact,’ interjected Baptiste.

Balthazar turned to stare at her. She was lying on the bench at the back of the cell with one knee up and her hat over her face. ‘ Really? ’ he demanded. ‘ Now? ’

‘During that unpleasantness with the succession in Saxony a few years ago, but the lifestyle didn’t agree with me.’ She nudged her hat back to frown at the cobwebbed ceiling. ‘I mean, maintaining one decent identity is hard enough.’

Balthazar and the jailer looked at each other in silence for a moment, then the man shrugged. ‘Well, she’s not wrong.’

Perhaps fortunately, the door to the cellar was at that moment heaved open and a woman swept down the steps. She was very small, impeccably attired in a sapphire-blue dress with epaulettes and a gilded ornamental breastplate, her coils of golden hair gathered in a pearl-speckled net. A sort of generalissima attends her arch-enemy’s wedding mood.

‘Countess Jovanka!’ snapped their jailer, jumping from his chair to stand at stern attention, while Balthazar assumed his most sycophantic smile. Here, after all, was the kind of elevated personage with whom he was in his element!

The countess peered into the cage like a discerning diner finding a severed toe in their pudding. ‘And what have we here ?’

‘Spies, I daresay.’ An exceptionally tall, gaunt, and humourless cleric accompanied the countess, made to look even more tall, gaunt, and humourless by a headdress almost scraping the cellar’s ceiling that, along with the silver five-spoked wheel he wore, identified him as a senior priest of the Eastern Church.

‘Spies? No, no.’ It seemed Balthazar was cursed endlessly to repeat the same conversation with ever diminishing results. ‘Merely simple so-journers, on our way to the standing stones near Niksic—’

‘You don’t look like a druid,’ said the countess.

‘Druid? No, no, no.’ His chuckle died a slow death, alone. ‘Though … one might observe …’ Good grief, what was he saying? ‘… that being a druid is not a question of outward trappings, but of mindset and beliefs …’ Weeks of hunger, exhaustion, degradation, and the company of monsters appeared to have left him entirely incapable of cogent conversation. ‘… though I realise now that is … rather beside the point—’

‘Saviour protect us,’ murmured Baptiste with the heaviest of sighs.

‘I am as far from a druid as could be!’ declaimed Balthazar, hoping to finish strongly.

‘Then why the stones?’ The priest narrowed his eyes in a manner that reminded Balthazar more than was comfortable of the jurors at his trial. ‘Are you a magician?’

‘Magician?’ Balthazar bit the tip of his tongue. For months he had been wilfully miscategorised at every turn. Finally addressed as befitted his talents, he was obliged to deny it. ‘Ha! No. Magician? Anything but. My name is Balthazar Sham Ivam Draxi, a humble … person, and I feel there has been a simple misunderstanding—’

‘So you were invited to enter my domain?’ The countess’s painted lips made a round O of surprise. ‘I feel sure I would remember making out letters of transit with such a very long name.’

Balthazar cleared his throat. ‘Well, perhaps, I confess, not exactly invited—’

‘Not exactly ? Or just not ?’

‘Well, not invited —’

‘So whose misunderstanding was it?’

This, like most things over the half-year since his conviction, was not turning out quite how Balthazar had hoped. ‘I fear … we have somehow got off on the wrong foot—’

‘Perhaps you misunderstood which foot you’re on?’

‘It may well be, it may very well be!’ God, was he shuffling from one foot to the other? His chuckle had grown positively embarrassing. ‘I am really only here due to unavoidable circumstances involving an attack at sea, which itself was the result of an unforeseen diversion to Venice, a regrettable incident involving an illusionist’s house – a discipline more suited to cheap tricksters than genuine magicians—’

‘Though you’re not one?’

‘Me? No. Magician? Ha! Really, we should be halfway back from Troy already—’

‘Troy?’ asked the priest, his brow wrinkling in a manner that reminded Balthazar more than was comfortable of the judge at his trial. ‘What business have you in Troy?’

‘Well … er … oh … hmmm.’ Balthazar rubbed at his temples, where a quantity of sweat appeared to have developed. ‘Could we perhaps … start again –?’

‘So!’ Baptiste sauntered over to put him out of his misery. By then it was a mercy killing. ‘This is what passes for a countess these days?’ She peered down her nose, obliged to lift both hands, since they were chained together, to push up the brim of her hat with a forefinger. ‘They really will put a coronet on any old shit.’

Such fleeting relief as Balthazar had felt at her interruption was swept away in a surge of cold shock so intense that his intake of breath made an audible squeak somewhere in the upper reaches of his nose.

The countess stared in shock of her own, first at Baptiste, then at Balthazar. Her nostrils flared with fury. ‘Open this gate at once ,’ she breathed.

The key rattled in the lock and Baptiste swaggered out while Balthazar edged as far from her as the cell’s limited dimensions allowed, wondering if he could conceivably get away with saying they had never met. Countess Jovanka stepped forwards, the toes of her highly polished riding boots, and the toes of Baptiste’s filthy walking boots, almost touching.

‘Well, aren’t … you … a tall one,’ snarled the countess, glaring up, the top of her blonde head barely reaching Baptiste’s chin. ‘I may have to cut you down to size .’

‘You should do it quickly,’ said Baptiste. ‘Before I accidentally step on you.’

There was an exceedingly ugly pause, during which it appeared very likely that Balthazar had escaped being burned in the Holy City for a crime he most definitely had committed, only to be hanged in rural Serbia for a crime he had not even contemplated.

Then both women burst out laughing. The countess caught Baptiste’s face and pulled it down to kiss her on both cheeks. ‘Baptiste, you glorious shit .’ She grasped her manacles with one hand and beckoned the sergeant over with the other. ‘Get these bracelets off at once, Sergeant. You wear them with such dash, but they really don’t go with your ensemble at all . What the hell are you doing here?’

‘It’s a long and tragic story.’

The countess raised one brow. ‘Do you know any short stories?’

‘Wait …’ murmured Balthazar, edging back into the light. ‘What?’

‘This is Baptiste,’ the countess was explaining to her priest. ‘And this is Father Ignatios, Syncellus to the Archbishop Alypius of Dardania, a staunch supporter of my cause.’

‘And of all righteous causes,’ observed the priest, a pronouncement Balthazar did not doubt to be true, since righteousness tends to be self-defined.

‘We were both ladies-in-waiting to the Queen of Sicily,’ said Baptiste.

‘Queen of Sicily?’ muttered Balthazar.

‘She hasn’t told you her story about Havarazza?’ asked Countess Jovanka.

Each exchange left Balthazar more confused. ‘The painter?’

‘It was all long before I was a countess. But then there was the carriage accident, and then the fire, then my cousin Dragan was kicked by a horse, and my older brother took himself out of the running over that business with the nuns, and my younger started pissing blue and went completely mad, and before you know it everyone was kneeling to me and calling me Your Illustriousness so what was I to do?’

‘You seem to have risen to the challenge,’ said Baptiste. ‘Jewels suit you.’

‘Jewels suit everyone.’ The countess raised a considering brow at Balthazar. ‘And what the hell have you brought with you? As I recall you liked poor athletic men and rich ones of any description. This one seems … bookish and aloof.’

Balthazar would have liked to protest, but doubted he could fundamentally disagree, and in any case had a firm policy of not protesting to people who held the key to his manacles.

‘He’s a colleague, not a lover,’ said Baptiste, smirking as though the very suggestion was absurd.

‘Not a lover at all ,’ said Balthazar, making sure he smirked just as much while feeling, for some reason, deeply aggrieved.

The cellar was beneath a house packed with soldiers in blue livery, all competing to salute first as Countess Jovanka swept past. The house was on one side of a farmyard in which a team of butchers was slaughtering a penful of sheep, opposite a barn in which even more soldiers were stacking supplies. The farm proved to be at one corner of a sprawling camp pitched across several fields, swarming with more saluting soldiers, unhappy horses, smoking fires, stalled wagons, improvised forges, and more.

‘I’m only an occasional soldier,’ said Baptiste, wedging her hair back under her cap and brushing the wilting feather to attention, ‘but I get the impression you’re fighting a war.’

‘Not my first choice.’ The countess affectionately pinched the dirt-smudged cheek of a drummer-boy as she passed. ‘I despise marching music, but have been most outrageously provoked, and you know me, a provocation must be answered.’

‘Answered emphatically,’ murmured Balthazar, considering a large siege engine with carpenters crawling over its great arm, planing off the knots.

‘Bloody Count Radosav!’ spat the countess. ‘What a bore, what a bastard, what a menace to the public good, what a goat’s anus, eh, Ignatios?’

The priest inclined his head. ‘I am forced to deplore the language but with the substance I must regretfully concur.’

‘A tyrant to his underlings, a sycophant to his superiors, and to his equals the most arrogant, stubborn, contrarian … ugh, ugh!’ She mimed sticking fingers down her throat. ‘His demands, his disputes, my orchard, my wheatfield, my village. I swear if you gave him the world he’d want more. And now he’s gone to war with me! Or me with him, one or the other, the outrageous bastard! The man simply does not understand the word no or the word joke , though he did, it appears, understand the words arrogant shit because that last letter of mine did not improve his mood.’

She glared at Balthazar as though expecting a response. He cleared his throat. ‘A rebarbative oaf, beneath even the contempt of a noblewoman of your calibre. I will hope for your crushing victory.’

‘Huh.’ She considered him a moment longer, then strode on. ‘Your Draxi did not make much of a first impression, but I begin to warm to him. You’re heading for the standing stones?’

‘Indeed …’ Balthazar had to swallow yet another surge of nausea. ‘And time is something of a factor—’

‘You’re very close, in fact. I can show you the way.’ And the countess headed on between the tents towards a row of sharpened stakes at the edge of the camp. ‘Though you may face some … difficulties in reaching them.’

‘Believe me when I say we have overcome some considerable difficulties already,’ observed Balthazar, tiptoeing through the mud to stand beside her. ‘I do believe there is nothing … we cannot …’

‘Ah,’ said Baptiste.

The ground sloped away into a shallow valley, speckled with patches of sedge, scattered with sheep, or possibly goats, is there a difference? On the opposite slope a matching line of stakes had been planted. Tents were ranged beyond, with pennants fluttering overhead, smoke from cookfires drifting leisurely into the evening sky, steel glittering with the sunset. The camp of Count Radosav’s army, Balthazar presumed.

And there, in the no man’s land between the two sides, was the double ring of standing stones, small on the outside, large on the inside, a couple fallen over during the long centuries like missing teeth from a smile. Well within bowshot of two opposed armies numbering several thousand each, and in the perfect epicentre of what would, at some point on the coming day, very likely be a heaving battlefield.

Balthazar rubbed at the bridge of his nose and gave a long sigh.

‘God … damn it,’ he muttered.