The Drawing of the Dark

Page 11

Duffy grinned. 'Not a bit. I'm an old campaigner myself.'
Werner gave the Irishman a hard stare, then turned and walked away toward the stairs, his ostrich-plumed hat bobbing behind his neck on a string like a bird on a difficult perch.
When he had disappeared Anna shook her bead at Duffy. 'Why can't you ever be civil to him? You're only going to lose a good job.'
He sighed and reached for the dining room doorlatch. 'It's a terrible job, Anna. I felt more worthwhile cleaning stables when I was twelve.' He swung the door open and grinned back at her. 'As for Werner, he strikes me as the sort of person who ought to be annoyed. Hah. Poetry for God's sake.' He shook his head. 'Say, I think Piff left a package in the kitchen - food and stuff, could you look? I'm supposed to visit her father this morning and give it to him. And serve me a cup of the morning medicine in the dining room, hmm?'
She rolled her eyes and started for the kitchen. 'if the Turks weren't sure to kill us all before Christmas, Brian, I'd worry about you.'
In the sunlit dining room Duffy crossed to his habitual table and sat down. There were other patrons present, beering away the hours between breakfast and dinner, and Duffy looked around at them curiously. The half dozen at the largest table were mercenary soldiers from the troop of Swiss landsknechten that had arrived in town a week ago, hired, it had turned out, by Aurelianus; and in the corner behind them sat a tall black man in a conical red hat. Good God, a blackamoor, thought Duffy. What purpose can have brought him here?
Unprecedented numbers of people had been entering the city during the past weeks, and the Irishman had noticed that they tended to fall into three groups: most were either European soldiers of one sort and another, or the wagon-roving, small-time merchants that thrive on the economy of war; but there was a third type, odd, silent individuals, often evidently from the barbarous ends of the earth, who seemed content to look worried and stare intently at passersby. And the first and last groups, Duffy reflected, seemed to cluster thickest in the Zimmermann dining room.
'Ho there, steward!' bawled one of the landsknechten, a burly fellow with a gray-streaked beard. 'Trot out another round for us, hey?'
Duffy was leaning back now, staring at the friezes painted on the ceiling, but desisted when a wooden mug ricocheted off his shin.
'Wake up,' the mercenary shouted at him. 'Didn't you hear me call for beer?'
The Irishman smiled and got to his feet. He reached out sideways and, taking a firm grip on an iron candlecresset bolted to the wall, wrenched it right out of the wood with one powerful heave. Clumping heavily across to the mercenaries' table, he hefted the splinteredged piece of metal. 'Who was it asked for beer?' he inquired pleasantly.
The landsknecht stood up with a puzzled curse, dragging his dagger. 'You're hard on the furniture, steward,' he said.
'No problem,' Duffy assured him. 'I'll hang your skull• up there instead, and no one will notice the difference. Have to use a smaller candle, of course.'
The other man relaxed a little and cocked his head. 'My God.. .is it Brian Duffy?'
'Well...' Duffy stepped back, 'more or less. You know me?'
'Of course I do.' The man slapped his dagger back in the sheath and pulled his baggy, sleeve up past the elbow, revealing a wide scar knotted across his hairy forearm. 'You've got the other half of that scar on your shoulder.'
After a moment Duffy grinned and tossed the cresset clattering away. 'That's right. On the field of Villalar in 'twenty-one, when we kicked the stuffings out of the Communeros. And a four-pound ball shattered off a rock as we charged, and sprayed four or five of us with metal and stone.
'Damn right! But did that stop us?'
Duffy scratched his chin. 'Seems to me it did.'
'No! Slowed us down a trifle, perhaps.'
The Irishman proffered his hand as the other mercenaries relaxed and turned back to their beer. 'The name's Eilif, isn't it?'
'It is. Sit down, lad, tell me what troop you're with. Sorry I took you for a steward.'
'You weren't far from the mark, really,' Duffy admitted, dragging up a bench and straddling it. 'Ah, bless your heart, Anna,' he added as she arrived with mugs and a pitcher and the bundle for Epiphany's father. 'Actually I'm not with any troop. I'm the bouncer at this inn.
Eilif snorted as he poured foaming beer into two mugs. 'Christ, Duff, that's little better than being the man that sweeps off the doorstep in the morning. No, it won't do. Won't do! But fortunately you are in the right place at the right time.'
'Oh?' Duffy had been having his doubts.
'Well, certainly. I ask you: is Suleiman planning to come up the Danube straight toward where we're sitting, and bring along every mad-dog Turk from Constantinople? He is indeed! And will there be battles, forced marches, panics, exodi, sackings of towns? Unless I'm much mistaken! And who best reaps from such grim sowings?'
The Irishman grinned reminiscently. 'The mercenaries. The landsknechten.'
'Correct! Not the knights, locked up in their hundred pounds of plate armor oven, as noisy and unwieldy as a tinker's cart, and not the bishops and kings, who have a stake in the land and can't scamper off to a better position; and God knows it isn't the citizens, with their homes getting burned, their daughters raped and their very ribs sticking out from starvation. No, lad, it's us - the professionals, who fight for the highest bidder and know the situation firsthand and can look out for ourselves with no one's help.'
'Well, yes,' Duffy acknowledged. 'But I can remember times the landsknechten caught hell along with everyone else.'
'Oh yes. It's to be expected any time, and you always take your chances. But give me a war over peace any day. Things are clear in a war, people fall in line and don't argue or talk back. Women do what's expected of them without you having to go through all the preliminary miming they usually expect. Money becomes less important than -horseshoe nails, and everything is free. I say thank God for Luther, and King Francis, and Karlstadt, and Suleiman, and trouble-makers everywhere. Hell, when the big boys keep tossing the whole chessboard to the ground after every couple of moves, even a pawn can keep from being cornered if he's clever.'
A slow smile deepened the lines of Duffy's cheeks as he savored the memories Eilif's words woke in him: visions of mad, sweaty charges under smoke-streaked skies, of looking out over shattered battlements at the patterns of soldiers' campfires that provided the only pinpoints of light in the night of raped cities, of wild, torchlit revels in overthrown halls, and of refilling his cup from a spouting, axed brandy cask.
'Yes, Duff,' Eilif went on, 'you'll have to get in on it all. Now the Imperial troops are expected any day, but you're too dire an old wolf to march rank-and-file with that lot of sanctimonious youngsters.' The Irishman grinned at Eilif's typical mercenary's contempt for regular soldiers. 'Fortunately there are a dozen independent companies of landsknechten in town that would take you on this very minute, with the credentials you've piled up over the years; even one or two you've served with, probably. After all, lad, it's what you know best, and it's a seller's market right now.'
Before Duffy could reply, the street door swung open and a man in a long green robe swept into the room, the almond eyes in his high-cheekboned golden face darting about to scan the others present.
'What the hell is that?' demanded Eilif in an outraged tone of voice.
'Our mandarino,' Duffy told him. 'No morning here is complete without a visit from him.'
The Oriental looked anxiously across the room at Anna. 'Is there yet any word of Aurelianus?' he called.
The silent black man in the corner looked up, his eyes alight.
'No,' replied Anna patiently. 'But he is, as I've said, expected daily.'
'I think I know what it is, captain,' piped up one of Eilif's companions. 'I believe it's a snake waiting for the old wizard to smoke him.'
Amid the general hilarity that followed this, the robed man glanced scornfully at their table. 'The livestock certainly are noisy in Vienna.'
'What? Oh, livestock, is it?' roared the Swiss who'd spoken, suddenly enraged. He stood up so violently that the bench fell over behind him, spilling two of his companions onto the oak floorboards. 'Get out of here right now, monkey, or I'll make cattle feed out of you.'
The Oriental frowned, then his narrow lips curled up at the corners. 'Why, I think I'll stay.'
After a moment's pause Eilif threw two coins down on the table. 'Two Venetian ducats on our boy Bobo.'
'Covered,' said Duffy, producing two coins. The rest of the landsknechten began shouting and making bets of their own, and the Irishman kept track of the money.
Bobo kicked a few benches aside and cautiously circled the slender Oriental, who just revolved on a heel and watched impassively. Finally the Swiss leaped forward, lashing out at the other man's head with a heavy fist - but the robed man simply crouched under the rush and then instantly bounced up again with a whirl of arms that sent Bobo somersaulting through five feet of air into, and finally through, one of the leadpaned front windows. The abrupt percussive crash died away into the clink and rattle of individual pieces of glass on the cobblestones outside, and after a few moments Duffy could hear Bobo's gasping
groans wafting in with the cold breeze that now swept through the hole.
'If there is no one else interested in discussing the price of cattle feed,' said the victor politely, 'I think I'll leave you after all.' There were no takers, so he bowed and walked out of the room. Duffy gathered in the coins on the table top and began doling them out among himself and the two others who'd bet against Bobo.
There was a quick thumping down the stairs, and then the innkeeper's voice screeched, 'What the hell's going on? Duffy, why aren't you preventing this?'
'He's taking bets on it,' growled one of the losers.
'Oh, of course!' said Werner with an exaggerated nod. 'What else would a bouncer do? Listen to me, you old wreck: when Aurelianus gets back here - pray God it's soon! - you are going to be unemployed. Do you follow me?'
The Irishman pocketed his share and picked up Epiphany's bundle. 'I do.' After bowing to the company he crossed to the door and stepped outside. The air still had a bite of morning chill in it, but the sun was well up in the cloudless sky and steam was curling from the shingles of nearby roofs.
Bobo had got up on his hands and knees and was crawling toward the door. Duffy dropped several coins where he'd be sure to come across them, and then strode off, whistling.
Under the gaiety, the Irishman had been obscurely depressed all morning, as he always was when he intended to look in on Epiphany's invalid father. What is it, he asked himself now, that upsets me about the old artist? I guess it's mainly the smell of doom that clings to him. He's so clearly on the downward side of Fortune's wheel -studied under Castagno in his youth, was praised by Durer himself ten years. ago, and now he's a drunkard going blind, drawing on the walls of his tawdry Schottengasse room.
As Duffy turned down the Wallnerstrasse a couple of mongrels smelled the food in the cloth-wrapped package he was carrying, and pranced around him as he walked. The street became wider as it neared the northwest face of the city wall, and the Irishman made his way right down the middle of it, following the gutter, weaving around vegetable carts and knots of yelling children. Where is it, he thought, craning his neck; I'm always afraid I've passed it. Ah, right here. He shook his free arm menacingly. 'Off with you, dogs, this is where we part company.'
Edging his way out of the traffic flow and pushing open the creaking boarding house door, the Irishman stepped reluctantly out of the morning sunlight and into the stale-smelling dimness of the entryway. Maybe, he thought, what bothers me is the possibility that I'll be like this myself soon, living in a crummy hole and mumbling jumbled memories to people who aren't listening anyway.
He crossed the dusty entry, stepped through the stairway door - and froze.
In front of him, beyond a narrow beach, stretched away to the horizon a vast, listless lake or sea, reflecting with nearly no distortion the full moon that hung in the deep night sky.
Duffy's stunned mind scrabbled for an explanation like an atheist at the Second Coming. I was slugged from behind, he thought, and brought here (Where's here? There's no body of water this size within a hundred miles of Vienna) and I've been unconscious for hours. I just now came to, and I'm trying to get away.
He took two paces toward the lake and tripped painfully over the bottom steps of an old wooden stairway. Leaping to his feet, he stared around him bewilderedly at the close
walls and the stairs. He ran back through the entry hail to the street, stared hard at the front of the building, the crowded sunlit street and the blue sky, and then slowly walked back inside.
He winced when he stepped again into the stairwell, but the old, peeling walls remained solid, almost sneering at him in their mundanity. He clumped hurriedly up to the second floor and knocked on the door of Vogel's room. Then he knocked again.
A full minute after his third and loudest series of knocks, a chain rattled and the door swung inward, revealing the cluttered mess of blankets, books, bottles and paper-rolls that Duffy had always seen there.
'Who is it?' rasped the ancient, scruffy-bearded man who now poked his head around the edge of the door.
'It's Brian Duffy, Gustav. I've brought you food and ink.'
'Ah, good, good - Come in, son. Did you bring any...?' He did a pantomime of sucking at the neck of a bottle.