The Last Fire: Part Two
Konrad rose in the dark, with the pre-dawn church bells. They clattered on as she crossed her room in a single step and threw open her wardrobe. She yanked off her dressing gown and grabbed the wash basin she’d filled the night before. A quick soapy wipe down, then a touch up with the razor had her ready.
Normally, she was dressed by the time the bells were finished and off to grab the first batch of bread and butter out of the kitchen, but today she dressed slowly, making sure every garter and seam was set right. Then she hunted her leather traveling pack from its shelf and laid it out.
She started with a fresh shaving kit bought at the market yesterday, then a comb and a bar of soap wrapped in waxed paper. A little tin of ash too, so she could both pretend to shave and have stubble, which would have brought some humor to her face if she hadn’t been doing it for sixteen years now. Then she rolled extra stockings and undergarments into neat little balls of silk and linen. She added a box of tinder and a flint for fires. Then a second box of tinder and extra flint to be sure. Then a whetstone and leather flask of oil for her sword and knives.
She followed with a flask of juniper-flavored jenever, brewed within Munich’s walls itself. Then, finally, a small jar of honey. The honey had cost her more than the rest combined. On campaigns in the past, she’d noticed the officers who flavored their water with honey had died of plague far less often than those who just drank from the rivers. Maybe it was a superstition, but Konrad hadn’t died of plague yet.
The last thing she did was unlock her little safe box and pull out the silver chain within. She wound it between her fingers and held it up so the locket swinging on it caught the light with its gold.
ICdS. For the name she’d abandoned at sixteen: Isabella Castries de la Sevilla. She wondered if her uncle had died yet, and therefore her older cousin had inherited the title Count of Castria. She had one memory of him as a boy with a mane of fluffy brown curls running naked from his wet nurse and the bath, cheeks red from boundless liveliness. She remembered him frozen in that moment, laughing with glee.
She tucked the necklace under her doublet collar. Then decided it wasn’t hidden enough, so she undid her breeches and tied it around her thigh right at the hem of her stockings, then smoothed her dressing gown and breeches over it.
She found the Duke in his chambers, dressing gown hanging out of his doublet as his trio of servants shirked over each other. His elderly butler-on his third generation of Berrig-simply stood at a canted angle from age and nodded to everything said by everyone.
“Konrad, you’re a career soldier,” Nicolaus said. He held up two capes. One with a massive blue lace collar and feathers, and one with a smaller, pink lace ruff but larger eagle feathers. “Which do you prefer?”
Konrad thought endless profanity while she tiptoed past him and dove into his vast outerwear wardrobe. She shifted through coats and cloaks until she found something that would do; a rugged brown cape with the family crest emblazoned faintly in the collar. She whipped it out and handed it to him.
“Why you can’t go to your wedding in such a barren garment,” one foppish servant cried.
“The common soldier wants to steal his master’s glory,” another said.
“Tetric!” Nicolaus snapped. The entire room fell silent as he rounded on the last servant to speak. “Konrad saved my life three days past and this is how you interpret the gesture? Shut your mouth and help me get this on.”
Nicolaus was pliant to learning, Konrad thought with satisfaction as he dressed in a reasonably functional outfit. Calling herself his bodyguard didn’t suffice for the task ahead. She looked him over in his silk and velvet finery, lined with exquisite lace. The traveling cloak, boots, and cap meant he’d pass for just a wealthy commoner at a distance. Oh no, she was about to be his wet nurse too, and his guide.
Maximilian was right, she thought. She had to be with God to do this.
She muttered prayers while they packed the saddle bags with salted provisions and dried vegetables, then readied the horses themselves. Her montante was too big to be worn while riding, so she tied it alongside the saddle. She kept her knives on her belt in case she needed to fight in a hurry.
Nicolaus was a natural administrator and businessman, but he’d been taught riding, fencing, and shooting so at least he could pull his own weight in the literal sense. Konrad would probably leave him to tend the horses while she set up camp nightly. They saddled up in the stables and rode at a slow walk towards the estate gate.
“Young master,” the butler’s voice cracked, and they pulled up their reigns.
The old man hobbled forth with an ornate wooden box. He held it up and his hands shook. “You forgot this; something you can only wield outside the city limits.”
Inside were two wheel lock pistols, and plenty of powder and shot for each. Konrad’s trigger finger ached as Nicolaus handed her one and took the other for himself. She inspected the wheel, the flash pan, the trigger, and then weighed it in her hands. Her arms shivered at the hefty weight. T’was power God had never given out. With one pull of her finger, any man’s decades of experience, warfare, and bravery mattered nought. She obliterated it all.
She hung it from a saddle strap, so she could have it in hand at a whiff of trouble.
The church bells were chiming breakfast when Munich’s gatehouse finally opened to them. Konrad tapped her horse with her heels and trotted ahead of Nicolaus. The suburbs loomed ahead, across the moat and cleared killing grounds and they trotted there.
At first, it was like they’d never left the city center. The buildings stretched out and people crammed every space. Going was slow for the many carts in their way. Once, a child nearly blundered into her horse and she had to yell at the little wench before she looked up. Her mouth fell open, then an older boy snatched her hand up and dragged her away.
The buildings ended and tents began. Endless fields of tents and uncovered refuse. Shit ran like a river with the mud, in the ditches alongside the road.
The lucky few had an overturned cart for solid, semi-waterproof shelter. The unlucky burned slowly in the distant sanitation pyres, always lit by the city guards. Their bodies became black smoke and ash that wafted to the heavens, but never made it. They blew aimlessly through the clear blue skies before settling back to earth and lost forever amidst the mud.
A few flakes of ash landed on Konrad’s shoulders, but she brushed them away in a hurry.
Fort Gerta’s walls marked the boundary. Prince Maximilian’s banners flapped atop its sloped earthen ramparts, and guards drank as they patrolled. A wooden sentry tower rose another forty feet above, and a lone man kept watch over the trees for the French in the green mountains beyond. The forest had been cleared for a sizeable distance beyond to provide clear fire for the fort’s cannon.
Nicolaus tipped his hat. One of the guards waved his own in reply. Then they were gone, and the stench of civilization faded behind them, replaced by the sweet rotting leaves of late spring.
Konrad gripped her new handgun with one hand as dark fingers of shade opened to receive her. The forest loomed, and whatever lay within loomed greater as the trees towered overhead. Darkness engulfed her, and she squinted all around. No French troops leapt out to seize her bridle and cut her throat, and she rode on across the paved roads.
“When should we stop for lunch?” Nicolaus said behind her. She heard the quaver in his voice and was comforted he knew enough to be afraid, too.
“Snack in the saddle if you want. We don’t stop till sundown, when we’ll get a distance off the road and make camp,” she said.
Nicolaus didn’t answer, which told her how disappointed he really was. She kept track of the steady clop of his horse’s hooves as she scanned the forest, past the dark shape of the occasional home. The recent exodus had left a trail of cast off detritus. Alongside the road, thick as fence posts, were the little crosses and heaps of freshly turned earth. Konrad read a few of the ages off them.
43, 88, 12, 7, 31, 2, 1, 11.
A bird fluttered past, breaking her concentration. She watched it go, then turned back to the trees.
“Why are you so urgently watching the trees? Do you think the dead will rise up and…” Nicolaus trailed off as the forest broke and sunlight streamed in.
Scheifert was a skeleton of stone foundations and blackened timbers, surrounded by deliberate scattered rubble. Last autumn, a French regiment had penetrated all the way to the edge of Munich. Bavarian and Imperial soldiers had ambushed them, and snapped them up.
A line of metal gibbets had been built around the village proper and the Frenchmen swung within them. They rustled, arms flapping as they reached out with skeletal fingers for someone to finally free their corpses of this endless torment. Their once-brilliant uniforms had faded into greys and blues that clung to their corpses, giving substance to bones and corruption now that their flesh was all gone.
A regiment was anywhere from one to two thousand men plus camp followers. Indeed, as she led them off the road and around the town she saw a few women locked up with their men, waiting for judgement day to finally break the bonds and flee into purgatory.
The horses suddenly shuddered unsteadily. Konrad looked down in alarm and saw the road stones had been ripped up by the Bavarians, and the dirt beneath ravaged by a full winter.
She saw a soiled blue dress, one skeletal arm reaching through the bars of the gibbet. Its fingers clung to the hand of the soldier in the next one over. Somehow locked together against the weathering of nature, time, and God’s favorite creatures in man.
Nicolaus let out something like a child’ pained gasp.
This was the world they lived in, in its purest form. Spain, France, Germany, the Swedes in the far north, it didn’t matter. Half the children died before their tenth birthday. The survivors grew up only to be picked up and thrown about by the whims of the world. Their creations didn’t matter, their love didn’t matter. They were all just ashes on the breeze in the end, and the winds were beyond their control.
Konrad remembered watching the Port of Cadiz shrink away when she was eight. She remembered her mother alone, holding her on the deck as sailors eyed them up and down, desiring them while fearing the bad luck of women on a ship. She’d taken a decade, after her mother had died, to finally figure out what had happened.
Her mother, never married, had had her out of wedlock. Instead of adopting her out, she’d arrogantly decided to seclude them and raise her herself.
She’d succeeded for eight years, until someone found out. Konrad never knew who, but that had been the end of hot, dry Spain.
They passed several more villages before the sun had set. Konrad kept them going until the darkness in the forest was nearly impenetrable.
She dismounted and led them a hundred paces off the road, until she splashed into a slow stream. “I’ll set up the tents. I would request you take care of the horses,” she said.
Nicolaus leapt off his steed and took his bridle. Then reached and took hers. Konrad saw a little light in his eyes as he led them away.
She got the tents up in minutes, then snuck off into the trees to relieve herself and do a quick wipe down. When she returned, Nicolaus had the horses tethered by the water and was piling branches between their tents.
“No fires, please,” she said. “It’s the seasons of warm nights and we have plenty of salted beef.”
He nodded and sat down.
The boy had received his first taste of war. It wasn’t even a real taste, Konrad thought. She stripped off her boots as she resigned herself to dragging him along, useful as a sack of silverware in the wilderness.
“Wait,” Nicolaus said.
She stopped halfway into sanctuary and crawled back out. “Your command, My Duke?”
“Is all of Germany so desolate?”
“Yes, my duke,” she said. “Some of it’s worse.”
“How can worse be done to it?” he said.
“Imagine if Munich itself was burned to the ground in the way Magdeburg was. Some places there are no cities left, just graves,” she said.
“My tutor’s words did not compare to seeing those bodies. Maybe that’s why this war keeps going; the people in charge just sit back and unaffected.” He bit down on a dried apple slice and chewed. Though it was a fairly mild spring night, he’d tucked his cloak around his body, only ruffling it to shove another apple slice into his mouth.
It was an idea that worked in a storybook. Nothing more than tales where villains were villains because they simply were. After all, since everybody in Germany thought they were fighting for God, it meant that none of them could be a villain. “Not at all, my duke,” she said.
“No?”
“I’ve seen plenty of kings and dukes on the battlefield, or looting cities. They know war as well as many common soldiers, and they love it,” she said.
“Like Landsknechts?”
“They are the worst evil of the land. They fight the emperor’s wars on his pay, but devour everything in their path including cities when they pass. They murder any traveler they come across and steal their bodies naked. Like the swarm of locusts in the Old Testament,” she said.
He nodded. Then crawled into his tent, taking his strip of beef with him.
At sunrise, they prepared in silence. Konrad waited until they were at the road, then pretended she’d forgotten something so she could run back and relieve herself.
Nicolaus regarded her in silence when she returned and clambered back on her horse.
They passed a few more villages. Some still had houses standing, but empty. Others were ashes wrapped in stone walls like a burial sheet.
“The French burned all this so quickly,” Nicolaus said as they passed the third ruined hamlet of the day. This one was the only one with a proper stone church, worthy of a house of God. Moss had grown all the way up the steeple, to the empty bell tower.
“Nay. Look at how high the moss has gone. This village was destroyed by the swedes when they invaded Bavaria in 1632, and never rebuilt,” she said.
“Then the swedes were destroyed in turn at Nordlingen,” Nicolaus said. “You said you were there for that.”
She smiled, at the memory of the haughty swedes retreating. “I was. Their king died and their army was turned back from Bavaria.”
“Only for a while though. Someone else came along and continued their work,” he said. “Only the French have their own motives for burning everything down.”
“You are beginning to understand the nature of war, my duke,” Konrad said.
Nicolaus rode up beside her. He looked slender and scared beneath his puffy clothes. “Tell me, do you think a marriage at Prague will do anything to end the war?”
No, Konrad thought. The war would end when everyone capable of fighting it was dead and rotting. They were getting very close to there. A few more battles, maybe another famine and there’d just be empty villages and empty cities left.
“I think it’s worth doing,” she said.
“You did not answer my question, Konrad,” Nicolaus said and reared up in his saddle.
“My duke, you hired me to guard your person, not to give my opinions on such matters,” she said.
“Now you have avoided the question. I am disheartened by your fear at the conclusion of this journey,” Nicolaus said.
Konrad kept her mouth shut, for her opinion would surely strike despair into the Duke far more than her current silence would.
That silence was broken by a distant shrieking, dead ahead.
Konrad sat up in her saddle and stared straight ahead. A vast swarm of birds lifted off from the trees far ahead. It rose like that tower of babel had. Except this tower swirled as it strode towards them across the trees.
“Get off the road, now” Konrad said and pointed.
“Is that…” Nicolaus didn’t have time to answer as she seized his bridle and yanked her own horse’s reins to the right at the same time. They jolted as the horses stumbled down the embankment.
“Just follow me,” she said and released him. She threw herself to the saddle and steered through the trees, low branches swiping her and her poor steed.
She heard a stream bubbling ahead and pulled up the reins sharply. The horse skidded to a stop with its front hooves digging ditches into the side of the little embarkment, black rocky water at the bottom.
Konrad leapt off. “Tie the horses up right on the bank, then dive into the brush.” She looked back. The road was faintly visible by the brighter light in its direction. This far into the trees, permanent twilight had left the ground bare with twisted roots and dirt. The dirt shook loose as the ground began to shake.
Konrad slid off her horse. She grabbed her handgun too and pulled the wheel back until it locked with a click.
She found a rise a little way from the stream and ducked behind, then looked back to make sure. The horses were attached to a tree rising diagonally from the embarkment, safely out of view of the road. The ground shook, and the horses snorted in fear. Nicolaus ran over and stood over her.
“What’s shaking the ground? Is some devil coming?” he said.
She leapt up and hauled him to the ground before he could react. His legs kicked out for a moment as some fearful instinct fired off inside that innocent head.
“Not some devil, many devils, now shush,” she growled in his ear. He went limp and nodded. She maintained her grasp just in case.
A few horses trotted down the roadway, silhouetted by the fading sunlight. Then came rank after rank of soldier, marching in perfect step. Little branches fell from the trees. Birds screeched and threw themselves to the air as their trees shook with the force.
She heard them singing. French was a beautiful language, so pretty it sounded musical even in the harsh throats of thousands of men. Konrad didn’t know French, but she soared with the beat just as well.
Bushes rustled ahead and a few figures emerged. Some were French. Some were unarmed peasants. Guides from the local villages, working for whatever motivation the French had produced. She pulled Nicolaus down further, so they could only watch through the gaps in the branches.
The scouts continued on in a straight line, casting halfhearted looks into the shadows as they went until they were out of view. The army kept marching.
Common soldier’s shoes were replaced by horses, then oxen and wagon wheels as the supply train brought up the rear. It was an entire regiment plus baggage.
Then it ended, and the ground kept shaking. Nicolaus leapt up.
“No, no,” Konrad said and pulled him back. Then the second regiment burst into the clearing. French voices continued a deeper, more melancholy song as they went.
“Do you think they’re putting Munich under siege?” Nicolaus said.
“Not immediately. They’d need weeks to dig all the siege trenches to actually encircle the city and build firing platforms for the cannon. Maximilian’s still got ten thousand soldiers camped outside the walls, and he’s not likely to sit on his ass and let them envelop him,” she said.
“But the French have far more than ten-thousand,” Nicolaus said.
“They have to spread out to surround the city,” she said. More scouts walked through. These passed a bottle of something between them.
The second regiment passed, and the marching faded to echoes and faint shaking. It left silence in its wake, all the little animals having fled a long ways away.
“Can we move?” Nicolaus said.
“No. There’s always a rear guard. We wait until sunset, and then slip away into the dark,” she said.
“Sorry about holding you,” he said. She only noticed his arms as he withdrew.
“No apology necessary, My duke,” she said.
Nightfall came and they crept back to the road. They hurried on, leading the horses to avoid accidents in the dark. It was only when the moon was low in the sky again that Konrad decided to stop.
Thank you for reading.
CONTINUE to part three.