If you say one thing about Koshta, you'll say he never died for free.
He repeated this for twenty years, whenever someone offered him a job with a long list of reasons and a short list of money. He repeated it now, squatting by the side of the road, looking at the crossing that they were to pass before dark.
- You're saying it beautifully, Vlasta said, without raising her eyes from the gun lock. - Have you ever died at all?
- Three times. One time almost for real.
- How much did you get?
- Eight coins. Silver, by the way. Koshta spit into the grass and the grass was red like everything else here. - It was a good deal.
The bridge over Bystritsa has long been carried away, and instead people sketched stones, logs and what they managed to break out of the old mound. The water was thick and red like all water, and smelled of iron like all water. Koshta wasn't looking at water. He looked at the side where horses without men stood among the alder, and this meant exactly one thing in his experience.
- Ondra, he called.
- Well.
- How much is it?
- Four. Maybe six. Ondra lay in a weed with a trumpet in his hands and was happy because no one forced him to go first. - And one with a long one. Stutzer, or something.
- That's great. Koshta rose, straightening his knees one at a time because neither would straighten together. - That's just fine. Marta!
The midwife sat in the cart straight as a bayonet, clasping the leather kofar with both hands, and looked before her with the special hatred that people develop in themselves, forced to go with mercenaries for three days in a row.
- What.
- There are gentlemen ahead. Perhaps they are honest travelers who left their horses and went to pick flowers.
- Maybe not.
- Or maybe not, Koshta agreed. - In that case, they need you. Your drawer, actually.
- The tools are in the drawer.
- In the box are the tools, he repeated with feeling. And seven measures of glass, for each of which three people are cut in Kutna, and in Prague, they say, five, but there are always lies about prices.
Marta looked at him as if he had offered to sell her the baby. She was a little, gray-haired woman with the hands of a laundromat and the face of a man who couldn’t save someone every week.
- Do you realize what it is," she said quietly, "or do you just like the word "measure"?
- I like the word "payment," mistress. Everything else is your concern.
He turned away so she wouldn't see his face, because he had a sign on his face that he understood everything perfectly.
Seven measures of real blood. Not the diluted, not the tinted, not the stuff that monks pour out of a barrel to sing. Real. For the wife of Brzetislav Nezval, who held the upper city, three mines and enough men to hold it all, and who has not survived a single child in eleven years of marriage.
Four miscarriages. One boy who lived two days. And one daughter, who was whispered about in the city and who they say was hard to look at.
They pay for it. For this, they pay so that an old man with bad knees can buy a house with a roof, a cellar, a distillation cube and drink water for the rest of his days, in which the bottom will not be visible.
“Jiri,” Koshta said. - You're going first.
If you say one thing about Jiri, you say he agreed.
He was nineteen, had a new jacket bought on advance, and a firm belief that he was not like these. That he's not here for long. That he would return to Khrudim, marry Anezhka and tell about the crossing so that everyone would be silent.
He walked on the rocks, holding a gun across his chest, and the water beat him on his ankles, warm and heavy. He thought about not being afraid. He thought about it so carefully that he hardly noticed how he wet himself.
- Wait, said the alderman.
He stopped.
There were five. All in masks – not ceremonial, with valves and glass, but homemade, made of boiled leather, which are worn by those who have to walk a lot in the rain. The one with the long gun squatted and was calm like a man on a fishing trip.
- We're not from the city, Jiri said. - We're taking a doctor. A woman.
- We know who you're bringing.
- She's going to the mother in labor.
- And her too. The voice under the mask sounded tired and almost kind. - Listen, man. You're new. I can see it on my jacket. You're going to step three steps to the right and sit on a rock, and in half an hour you're going home, that's it. No one's gonna record you sitting down.
Jiri then thought many times what would have happened if he had sat down.
He did not sit down because Koshta was behind him, and Koshta once told him that it is not courage or cowardice that kills people, but procrastination. And because he was nineteen and his jacket was new.
He shot from the hip without aiming, and hit — not the shooter, but the horse, which screamed in a way that an animal should not scream, and fell into the alder, breaking everything around him.
He didn't have any order from there. It's still there: someone else's shoulder in the face. The taste of iron, your own or river, can not be understood. Ondra, who runs over the rocks and shouts something joyful. Vlasta, shooting from the knee, calmly and slowly, as if counting money. A man in a leather mask who sits in the water holding his own belly with both hands to keep it from spreading, and looks up at the Jiri from the bottom up, and Jiri suddenly realizes that the mask is too big for him. He would have asked someone to sit on a rock.
And Koshta. Koshta, who did not run anywhere, but stood in the middle of the crossing, with his legs wide, between the shooter and the wagon, and worked as a short cutter in the lazy, economical way that older people cut wood: not hard, but every time getting hit.
It was over before Jiri could decide how he felt.
Two strangers went to the alder. One sat in the water. Two people are still lying.
On their part is Ondra, whose junction bullet entered under the collarbone and came out with a spatula, and he was surprised by this circumstance aloud for another twenty minutes, and then stopped.
- Well, said Koshta, wiping his cleaver on his trouser. - Eight coins.
Marta worked on Ondra until he died, and remained silent until the evening. The fire was made late, wet, and it smoked more.
- You seriously think it's his people, she finally said.
- Koshta moved the coals. - Of course it is.
Vlasta raised her head.
- How's that? He hired us.
- He hired us to drive us. And he hired some to pick them up. Koshta spoke calmly as if it were the weather. Five measures will be taken by the guards, two measures will go into the hole at the crossing, and no one in the city will ask, because who counts after the fight. And you only have to pay the survivors.
- Then why did you protect him?
- I wasn't defending him, Koshta said. - I was defending the box. We were paid to bring it through, and we will. - He looked at Marta. - Now tell me, madam. You've held that case like a baby all the way here. Why?
The midwife was silent for a long time.
- Because I was opening it, she said.
In Kutna they were met with music.
Not because anyone loved mercenaries, but because Brzetislav Nezval was a man of imagination: he wanted the city to remember the day when the life of his heir was brought into the upper gate. Along the street stood people, and many wept, and the boys ran after the cart, and from the bell tower of the Second Victim was beaten so that laid ears.
Koshta was driving and thought that the house with the roof was not much. That you could ask for two houses.
They were led through the courtyard, then through the gallery, then into a room where it was too hot and too many carpets, and there was a woman on the bed who was no more than thirty and who looked fifty, and next to the bed stood Nezwal himself - large, beautiful, with the military straightness in the back that people who had never been to war develop.
- Mera, he said.
Marta put the case on the table and opened it. She took out a glass vessel sealed with wax, red liquid inside like everything else in this world.
And she said,
- It's a fake.
The room became very quiet. Even the bell outside seemed to trip.
- What, said Nezwal.
- All seven. She had a smooth, businesslike voice, like a man announcing that a bone had been broken in two places. - The seals are genuine, pre-reliquary, monastic work. They were not faked – they were simply opened and poured inside well water with a meerka and a fraction of pig blood. Careful. Expensive. Someone knew very well what the real measure looked like, and was sure that no one here knew it.
- You're lying.
I have been in this city for thirty years. She lifted the vessel to the light, and the light passed through, smoothly and muddy, as through any dirty water. - The real one keeps the lights out. It's like she's holding him.
- And that's all your proof?
-Nope. The light is only the beginning, and every barber will lie to you in the light alone. She put the vessel in and pushed it with her finger; the liquid splashed against the glass. - Weight's wrong. The precipitation is not the same: the real one does not give precipitation at all, and here the maroon is on the don. The smell's wrong. And the wax was poured on the seal: he lay on top of the old trail, not in it.
She wiped her finger on her apron.
- You would have seen it yourself if you had ever seen the real thing.
He didn't call me to look at the vessel.
Koshta, standing at the door, suddenly thought very clearly: he knows.
It was in his face. Not the astonishment of the deceived. Rather, the face of a man who had waited twenty years to be asked one day and was asked, and it turned out that the question did not sound as scary as he imagined.
- Five years ago," Marta said quietly, "you sold three measures to St. Prokop's Monastery. To the mines. Remember?
- Shut up.
- I told you then that you can't do that. That you won't find her again. You said you'd buy more.
A sound came from the bed. The woman woke up and looked at them, and it was clear from her eyes that she had heard everything and that there was no news for her, only that strangers now knew about it.
Nezwal turned to Koshta.
- Kill her, he said.
Koshta looked at the midwife. I looked at the woman in the bed. I looked at seven glass measures of tinted water that cost Ondra, two strangers, and one horse his life.
- How much? he asked.
Negval blinked.
- What?
- How much, Koshta patiently repeated, you pay for it.
If you say one thing about Koshta, you'll say he never died for free.
There was nothing in the story about killing for free, and he thought about it many times: that his whole life was based on a phrase in which half was missing.
He took the money. Of course he did; he was no fool, and Nezval paid double because frightened people always overpay. He led Marta out of the courtyard, put her in his own wagon, gave her a bag of provisions, gave Vlasta half his share, and ordered the midwife to take her to Chrudim without argument.
And then he came back and reported it was done, and Nezwal didn't even ask where.
Jiri waited for him at the gate. The guy had a face like he was going to say something about honor.
- Don't, Koshta said.
- I'm not a thing.
- You don't have to. The old man stopped, looked at the city, at the smoke, at the reddish puddles between the stones, at the woman who was peeling water through a rag at the public well, and at the bell tower, where still, by inertia, the ringing was in honor of the child who would not be born. Listen to me and I'll say it once. We didn't save her life.
- How is that? You're...
- We put it off. - Koshta rubbed his knee. Nezval will not search, because to seek is to tell why. But one day he'll drink too much, or someone in Hrudima will talk, or he'll just feel better without her. And then they send someone like us, and they'll take the money, because they want a house with a roof.
Jiri was silent.
- And the good news is, you know what? Koshta finally smiled, revealing the three teeth that made him so called. - We got paid in full. And for the delivery, and for her. For the second time in my life, I was paid twice for one job.
- And the first?
- I won’t tell you the first one, Koshta said. Otherwise you will think I am a good person.
They went down to the lower town, where there was cheap beer brewed on the same water as the river, and where no one asked where the silver came from.
The bell rang for another hour and a half.