The Enterprise of Death (43 page)

“Oh my.”

“I know. Terrible. We’ll be destitute.”

“Oh my.”

“The thing is, I think I’ve also turned Oswald off putting in a word for me about that civic position.”

“Oh my.”

“So there’s nothing for it, really, but going back to the mercenary work.” Manuel examined his wife, trying to determine the rules and stakes of the game they were playing.

“This is the last time, Manuel,” she said, and he winced to see the sadness in her eyes. “And you need to know I lied to you and her earlier—I never told them where Awa went. I’ve thought it over and don’t want to be the clever, clever wife who knows the best way to help her husband is through clever, clever lies—if you go, it’s your choice, yours alone. Your things are in the studio.”

“Ah,” said Manuel, wondering for an instant if this confession changed matters in the slightest but knowing it did not. It had always been his choice. “After dinner then I’ll—”

“If you want to catch her you’ll have to leave immediately. I packed you a few meals.”

“But Lydie just took Hieronymus and Margaretha and won’t be back until later.”

“Yes.” Katharina was still looking him in the eyes, and he had to break her gaze.

“I’d have to leave without saying goodbye.”

“Yes.”

They sat in silence in the late afternoon warmth, and slowly Katharina stood and went to her husband. She held him for a time, then scratched his head and slapped him on the back. He stood, and she followed him to the studio. She had cleaned the room from top to bottom, so that no one would have known of the Dutch whirlwind that had blown through it earlier that day.
On his table was a pack laden with pine planks, charcoal, his stylus case, several pairs of clean trousers, shirts, blankets, cheese from their cousins’ goats, bread from his favorite baker, four sausages, three empty waterskins, and two bottles of schnapps. Beside the pack were his ostrich-plumed hat, his dagger, and the sword she had removed from the mantel.

Manuel was genuinely impressed that Monique had not tarried at the brothel but departed immediately upon concluding her business. He decided to try south, thinking if he were to write a play or a poem, something about witches and mercenaries and such, the obvious downward symbolism of the direction could not be passed up, and he arrived at her roadside campfire just after dark. She had told herself she would not smile but could not help herself, feeling like an idiot as she stowed the pistol she had brandished at the sound of hooves.

“You’re going the wrong way,” said Manuel, still on his horse. “Get your gear and mount up.”

“Well, I didn’t want ta get too far ahead lest ya lose the trail,” said Monique. “And how in fuck ya know where Awa is?”

“I don’t,” said Manuel. “But we’re not looking for Awa.”

“We’re not?”

“No.”

“Then who’re we lookin for?” said Monique.

“Ashton fucking Kahlert,” Manuel said triumphantly, but when Monique just blinked at him he sighed and pulled out the parchment he had received from Oswald after the flustered abbot had returned from checking his records. “The former Inquisitor who’s paying muscle to track down our little friend, printing posters and getting himself kicked out of the Church and such.”

“Ahhhh!” Monique’s crooked teeth shone in the firelight as she booted sand onto the blaze. “Ya got a beautiful brain inside that ugly head of yours.”

“Thank you, madam.”

“So where’s this cuntsmack gonna get ’is?”

“Well, the good news is Kahlert came from Salzburg, so the abbey at Bern had a few places to look for him. The bad news is that he hadn’t been through in years, so who knows how out of date the addresses are. But it’s a start.”

“That it is, that it is.” Monique mounted her horse. “Where’re the possibilities?”

“Well, one’s near Granada, which is the last place Oswald was sure Kahlert went before being excommunicated, but that’s almost ten years old. The other address is outside some shitty backwater in the Schwarzwald, a property he inherited from a dead superior of his.”

“Holy Roman, then,” said Monique. “Helluva lot closer, an’ bad as Imperials are, Spain’s full of evil cunts.”

Manuel wondered at this, for everyone he had ever met from Spain had been nothing short of lovely. They turned their horses and doubled back past Bern, the pretty red millwheel Manuel adored nothing but a black blur in the night, and together they began their hunt for an excommunicated witch hunter with the funds to send mercenaries all over Europe after Awa. For fuck’s sake.

The records Manuel had extorted from Oswald mentioned a house outside of Calw that Ashton Kahlert listed as his personal property, and with the last hard snows of winter behind them Manuel was confident they would gain the city by Lent. Not that he would be fasting this year—that was the first thing to go, although it might make getting decent food at the inns difficult. They were entering the land of Luther, though, so hope sprang eternal.

The slow, meandering river they had followed that morning now joined another just outside one of the dozy hamlets that popped up far less frequently than Manuel would have preferred. The Schwarzwald was every bit as black as its name, owls gliding just overhead in the middle of the afternoon; he had stowed his hat lest the birds mistake his bobbing toque for something edible. They crossed clearings and meadows as they wound up through the hills, but these breaks from the forest only made the artist more nervous, as if the entire surrounding wood were watching him venture out into the open, and always the road took them back under those brooding firs and the occasional elm, whose bare branches appeared almost reluctant to bud in so grim a forest.

“Wolfach,” Manuel told Monique as he returned to the table she had secured despite the throng of already piss-drunk locals.

“Never ’eard of it.” She took two of the four mugs he clung to as the sea of drunkards pushed and pulled around him.

“Nor I, but we’re close to Calw.” Manuel frowned, seeing she had the only stool.

“An’ will ’is Majesty be sharin a room with the lady?” Monique wiped ale foam from her mouth. “After a night or two beddin down under them evil trees I’m inclined ta take your pallet-minded ways ta heart.”

“What?” Manuel squinted, as if that might help him hear better over the hullabaloo.

“Did ya get us space in the common? I ain’t springin for a room less we ain’t got a choice.”

“No room,” said Manuel. “No rooms, and no room in the common. We’ll be camping out, though the keep says on nights like this folk are allowed to set up by the rivers once the party dies down.”

“Fuckin Fastnacht,” she spit, Manuel noting how much cooler her tone was now that they would not have a warm building to stumble inside after the festivities. He shrugged and drained his first beer. It was quality stuff, dark and stern as the woodland, and Manuel was thrilled they had found a decent town instead of spending the festival eve hunched around a fire in the loneliest fucking forest he had ever had the misfortune to ride through.

“I’m going to head down there after this, set up and get some sketching in.”

“I won’t join ya,” Monique belched. “Not til I get some fuckin meat in me. Unless they’re outta that, too, in which case I suppose I’ll eat my fuckin pony.”

“You want me to take her with me then, lest you lose control?”

“Huh?” A band had struck up somewhere in the packed tavern, a hurdy-gurdy moaning and a rumble-pot roaring.

“Do you want me to take your horse with me?!” Manuel
shouted in her face, and she nodded. He guzzled his second beer, overjoyed to escape her company for a spell. She was not bad, not really, but Christ could the loudmouth tax one’s patience—a sentiment shared by Monique, as far as the artist went.

Out in the streets the people of Wolfach, farmers and cowherds and miners, were already celebrating the eve of Ash Wednesday with the sun still high overhead, stalls set up and hay cast down to catch the influx of dung from all the hayseeds journeying into town for the festival. Manuel grinned, and wondered when the hell he had last taken the time to come out to one of these. Masks that might be doubles of the ones that had haunted his nightmares as a child leered all about him, witches and monsters everywhere, and he wondered if they would have a running of the Bright Ones. How had it gone … the Perchten, the Bright Ones, were lords of the beasts, and could be fair or foul. The young, pretty ones chased the old witches, and—

A shapely girl in a white robe bumped into him as he led the horses through the crowd, and as he began to apologize he noticed her mask, a bright red wooden hag face, a ram’s horn and a stag’s antler jutting off at wild angles. She shrieked and shook his arm, then capered away, one phantom amidst many. Manuel had stopped cold, staring after her, the horsetail pinned to her robe swishing behind her.

“Eat it,” Manuel’s great-aunt rasped, her voice sharp in his memory even down all the years. “You eat or she cut your belly open, stuff you fulla straw.”

Perchta was not just some creature of the wilds, Manuel remembered, the memories swirling like the crowd around him, she was a pagan deity, one of the old gods that still haunted these hills. The mad old woman was the exact opposite of Manuel’s overzealous Christian grandfather, and even as a child he could not tell which ancient minder was more terrifying. His great-aunt had a secret shrine to Perchta she hid from her pious siblings,
and she had made Manuel set out offerings, made him eat that disgusting fish gruel, which might have been tasty if she had not been the one making it, salted fish who knew how many years overripe mixed with moldering oats, while his mother was off doing whatever it was she did.

Manuel had always imagined his father’s side of the family would have treated him better, but the artist was a bastard, albeit one who knew the identity of his sire. It was not easy, being a bastard, but Manuel had managed the best he could, and the apothecary who could not formally acknowledge his son at least provided them coin enough that Manuel only had to stay with his demented relatives some of the time, instead of all of it. Manuel no longer tasted the phantom of the beer in his mouth, he tasted that wince-inducing, salty gruel of his great-aunt and smelled her almost sweet breath, and he moved faster, the dancing devils no longer quite so amusing.

From heretical altars on dirt floors to modest piety to rejecting the Church and fine city living in only a generation or two—impressive, thought Manuel as he kept along the river. He stabled the horses, then walked the length and breadth of Wolfach, plank and charcoal in hand like sword and shield.

Following a side street to the eastern wall, he paused by a gate looking up the cleared hillside bordering the town. Several late revelers were dashing down the cowtrail toward the artist, laughing and whooping, and seeing they were still some distance off he idly began sketching their approach. He would wipe the plank clean with a damp piece of bread later, but such exercises were good at keeping his speed up—rarely did even the perfect model keep the perfect pose for more than a few moments.

They were a curious bunch, the man in the lead dressed like a monk, which seemed a little strong even for an isolated town like Wolfach. At least he did not wear a mask, unlike the devils who chased him, their monstrous faces sliding about as they raced for
town. Then one of the bestial men hoisted a blunt-looking flail and easily as threshing wheat knocked the running monk’s legs out from under him. Manuel paused. Another man, all horns and fangs and animal skins, grabbed the monk’s beard as the poor fellow tried to gain his feet, and then the others were there, a man with a giant rooster mask seeming to give them orders.

Manuel ducked down, peering through the slats in the gate. As the chicken-headed man pulled his mask off to reveal a rather mundane mustachioed face, Manuel noticed two things. First, what he had taken to be the monk’s beard was clearly a crude gag made out of a pelt that was now jammed back into place, and second, the monk was none other than Doctor Paracelsus. The subdued physician was hoisted onto the shoulders of three of the five men, who trotted back up the trail into the forest as Chicken-Head put his mask into place and scanned the edge of the town. Manuel ducked lower, wondering just what the hell was going on, and when he next peeked through the slats the hillside was as empty as it had been on his arrival.