I. A House with a Roof
The house with the roof is a mean house: there is nothing to do in it.
Koshta Rotten Tooth discovered this by the seventh month. He slept through the first. In the second he repaired shutters that needed no repair. In the third he drank, thoroughly and with dignity, like a man who had earned the right. By the seventh, he was talking to the chickens.
The chickens were good. The chickens, at least, didn't ask where he fought.
The house stood in the lower Kutna, at Kosya, the second from the corner: two rooms, a cellar, a yard with an apple tree curve and - pride, the top, the crown of human life - its own distillation apparatus. A copper coil bought from the widow of the pharmacist for such money that the widow went to see if he had changed his mind for three days.
Every morning Koshta would pour four buckets of well, dark as diluted wine, and sank and drove three times, and each time he would pour the first and last into the ditch, because the widow of the apothecary explained to him that the first and last took all the crap with them, and by evening he would get one and a half cups of water through which the bottom was visible.
In the lab, the same four buckets would have made four times as many and ten times cleaner. But the lab was halfway down the street, and he was just a wealthy man.
He would drink them standing by the window as medicine.
He hated them.
- You see, he explained to the red hen, whom he called Marta though he would never admit it aloud, the whole trick is in the waiting. While you still want a thing, it is called a dream. Once you have it, it is called Tuesday.
Marta did not respond. Marta scratched at the dirt because she was cleverer than he was.
Vlasta came in November, in the rain.
He heard her before he saw her: she always knocked twice, briefly, as if she had been embarrassed beforehand. Opened. She stood on the threshold in a wet cloak, with a gun in her cover behind her, and the water flowed from her hat fields in reddish threads.
- You've gotten fat, she said.
- I am a wealthy man, Koshta said. - I'm supposed to.
- You're in the apron.
- It's a distillery apron. Craft.
- Koshta. She pulled her hat off and ran her hand through the short wet hair. - You have a spoon pocket in your apron.
They were sitting in the kitchen, and she was drinking his precious clear water, not realizing what she was drinking, and Koshta watched these one and a half mugs go into a person who absolutely doesn't care, and for some reason, for the first time in six months, was almost happy.
Then she told me why she came and the happiness was over.
- No, he said.
- I didn't even say the amount.
- Don't call me. I don't need money. I got a stake in a beer store, four leases, and I've invested in a salt truck, by the way.
- How's the salt?
Salt, Koshta said, is temporarily underwater.
Vlasta put on a mug.
- Eighty per person. Twenty ahead. Fifteen days of work.
Koshta opened its mouth and closed it.
Eighty silver in fifteen days was not a security charge. It was a price to pay for silence, for possible trouble and for what someone knew in advance: some people will not come back, and the price should be taken into account.
- Who are we taking?
- The Imperial negotiator. From Kutna to Sazawa.
Sazava is six days.
- Six in there. Three there. Six back.
- Why would he go to Sazawa?
Vlasta looked at him with the same look that one looks at a man who spent six months in the yard with chickens while the world was doing its own thing.
- For an oath, she said. Sazava decides whether to fall under the Empire or not. The council split exactly in half. The emperor sent a man to convince.
- And this man needs a security team of mercenaries. Empire is out of imperials?
- That's the thing. - She leaned forward. If he comes with an imperial escort, it is not a negotiation, but a siege with one soldier. He needs to enter the city in a way that looks like a guest visit, not like a forward detachment.
- So we were hired to look like we were.
- We were hired to look like we were, Vlasta agreed, and if anything went wrong, Empire would open her arms and say, ‘Well, mercenaries, what do you want?’
Koshta was silent for a long time.
The rain was knocking on the roof - on his own, bought, shingled roof - and there was something unbearable about that knock.
- Jiri in the case? - He asked.
Jiri has been in business since spring. He's not Jiri, he's Jiri Rzeznik, he's got two ribbons on his hat and he's telling the newcomers how to keep the line.
- Jesus.
- He respects you very much.
- That's scary, Koshta said.
He looked at a copper coil that stood like a good horse and produced one and a half mugs of Tuesday a day.
"Eighty," he said. - And I'm not going first.
II. The Gift
If you say one thing about Ondrzei Kubat, you'll say he was fat.
Jiri noted this immediately, in the yard, and immediately scolded himself for it, because he firmly decided to become a person who judges not by appearance. He has made a lot of decisions over the past six months. He now had two ribbons on his hat, his bullets, his mule and the reputation of a guy who didn't sit on a rock at the Bystrica crossing.
He never told anyone he didn’t sit down because he didn’t think of it.
The imperial negotiator was a man of fifty years old, with a belly, a perfectly shaved chin, and hands that never held anything heavier than a feather and a chicken leg. He went out into the courtyard, looked at eleven armed men, mules, boxes and puddles, and shone as if a garden had been given to him.
- Gentlemen! he said. - Madam. Excuse me. Ladies and gentlemen. How many of you are and how terrible you are. I'm thrilled.
No one answered. Mercenaries do not respond to the employer’s first phrase, which allows them to see what the employer says.
- My name is Ondrej Kubat, I am in the office of the First Emperor for the Acceding Cities, and as the title of office is longer than my patience, call me simply Kubat. He went down the steps, carefully bypassing the puddles. - I know what you think of me. You think: a fat official who will whine about drafts and demand hot.
He stopped in front of the Lord.
- You're absolutely right. I will. But I'm paying you eighty, so we'll get through it together sometime.
Koshta sniffed. Jiri noticed that he sniffed, and it was bad: Koshta sniffed only at those he liked, and Koshta sniffed at people better than anyone Jiri knew.
- Cargo? - Vlasta asked.
- Three chests of papers. One chest of my personal excesses, including nine bottles and a pillow I'm willing to fight for. And this.
He took out his chest from under his cloak.
The casket was small, in two palms, of dark wood, bounded in the corners, and on the lid lay an imperial seal - lead on a twisted cord. Jiri looked at him and felt his back get colder, because caskets of this size in this world do exactly one thing.
- Two measures, Kubat said hilariously. - Real ones. Preliquary, from the monastery in Zeliv, checked by three doctors College, with inventory and seals.
The court was silent.
“Jesus Christ,” said someone behind.
- He probably had nothing to do with it, Kubat said. - It's a gift. The Emperor gives Sazawa two measures as a sign of goodwill. Not for oaths, God forbid, no one buys the city so crudely. Just a gift. What the city will do to him is his business.
- What will he do with it? asked Jiri. He asked more than he intended and was afraid of his voice.
Kubat turned to him with the sincere pleasure of a man waiting for the right question.
- Do you know how many live babies were born in Sazawa last year?
- Nope.
- Eighty-one. With four thousand people. Eighty-one are alive, of which fifty-two lived to a year. He was just as funny and it made it worse. Two measures are, say, eight women who end their pregnancy with a child, not a funeral. Eight. From those whom their own council will choose.
He weighed the chest on his palm.
- That, he said, is the war. Everything else is noise.
We left at noon.
Eleven people: Vlasta, Koshta, Jiri, Matoush the accountant, the Prochazka brothers, Little Jan, Big Jan (who was a head shorter than Little Jan and never forgave him the joke), Kubat's clerk Stepan, the coachman Havel, and an old cook everyone called Granny. Nobody knew anything about her except that she cooked better than anyone and had once cut a marauder's throat with a kitchen knife in front of half the company without stopping stirring the pot.
The Jiri was driving third and thought about the box all first mile.
He thought about him for another six days.
III. The Road
It's a fair road. It shows who you are and doesn’t give you time to prepare.
Vlasta knew this for a long time and so she barely spoke on the road. She was watching.
Day one: Kubat whined about drafts as promised, and turned out to be a great storyteller. By evening, he knew the names of all eleven and one of the details of each, and the details were not the ones that people deliberately reported.
Second day: reached the Flooded Meadows, where the old riverbed of Sazawa had gone to the side and left behind eight miles of shallow muddy water standing in the former fields. Through it was a gutter - logs on stilts, laid thirty years ago and since then, brass by all who are not lazy.
The gati was driven by foot, by a goose, and the water was on the right and left, red, fixed, and in it stood the tops of flooded apple trees.
- There was Zdjar, Havel coacher said. - The village. There was a bell tower over there where the bush was.
- Where'd everyone go?
- Who's where? Half to Sazawa, half to Kutna. - He spit. Those who stayed became fishermen. Three years.
- And then?
- And then the fish ran out.
Day three: First ambush.
It was so bad that Vlasta then got angry for half a day, remembering. Four on the corner, all with smoothbore, none of them thought about going either side of the road. Matousz saw them two hundred steps through the smoke - they were warming up - and Vlasta spent exactly one bullet, and the Prohazki brothers made the rest with poles.
Three were released. One was left lying down.
The boys were fifteen years old, from Zdyar, and when the brothers shook their bags, there were: a pound and a half of boiled turnips, three snails, a children's shirt and a hammer.
- They were going to rob us with a hammer, Little Yang said.
- They were going to scare us with a hammer, Vlasta corrected. - They were going to rob after.
Kubat looked at it from the wagon, leaning up to his waist, with the expression of a man in the theater.
- Give them money, he said.
Vlasta turned around.
- What?
- Give them silver. Let's say two coins each. - He's been rummaging through his wallet. - And tell me what the Empire does.
- They just tried to kill us.
- They just tried and failed, and that, my dear, is a very different thing. Kubat tossed coins to Little Jan. In a year’s time, there will be an imperial post in Zdyar, that is, in what remains of it, and I want to be shown the way when the soldier asks for it.
He leaned back into the wagon.
- And of course, I want them to tell everyone how many of us are and how scary we are.
Vlasta looked after him and thought that in thirteen years of working, she had met many dangerous people, and almost all of them were dangerous because they didn’t think. This one was dangerous just the opposite.
She printed the letter tonight.
She wore it for four days and put it off, and on the fourth she realized that she was putting it off not out of delicacy but out of cowardice, and that made her angry.
The letter was from Lucia, her younger sister, from Hrudim. It was not Lucia who wrote—Lucia could not write—but with some kind of writing for two coins, and therefore the text came out solemn and dead like a tombstone:
Dear sister, I inform you that my child Marzhenka is sick for the third month with a throat disease, and the physician Mr. Ruzicka says that there is hope if she is given pure drink and meat, and if she does not, she will not survive by spring. Mother told me to bow.”
Vlasta read this four times.
Then she rolled up the letter, put it away by the sinus, sat down to the fire and cleaned the gun, which was clean.
Marzhenka was six. Vlasta saw her twice: once newborn, red and angry, and the second time last year, when she was running around the yard demanding that the “aunt with a gun” show how the gun was being shot and was offended that the gun could not be touched.
Clean drink and meat. Pan Ruzicka, it must be thought, was an honest man: he did not promise a miracle. He just listed what Lucia would never have.
Eighty silver in fifteen days bought, to be honest, four months of clear water and meat.
The disease lasted three months.
Vlasta sat there and did not count, and she counted, and again she did not meet, and at some point she looked up and saw that Koshta was looking at her from the other side of the fire.
- Bad news? he asked.
“No news,” Vlasta said.
Koshta nodded and didn’t ask again, and she was grateful for it, and at the same time she wanted to throw a pot at him.
IV. Zhdar
Flooded villages do not sink to the end. That's the point.
The zhdyar stood in the water for the fourth year. The gat passed directly through it, and therefore the road to Sazawa now went along the former main street: on the left the stove pipes stood out, on the right the top of the bell tower, and between them lay smooth red water, in which all this was reflected a second time, upside down and slightly darker.
Nine houses were left standing on the hill. There lived sixty men in them.
The ferry, a flat-rope, stretching from the hill to the dry shore, was held by an old man named Vanek with his two sons, and the ferry cost a cruiser per man and three per mule, and it was the whole economy of what was formerly a village of four hundred yards.
We arrived at dusk. Vanek looked at the eleven armed men, at the wagon, at the mules, and said that he would not carry them overnight because the rope was wet and because it was dark, and that one could spend the night in a communal house for two coins.
- Two coins? said Vlasta.
- For everyone, Vanek said. - With straw.
"We're taking it," said Kubat from the wagon. - And pay him four.
- Why four? asked Vlasta as the old man walked away.
- Because he asked for two, Kubat said, and he wanted four, but he was afraid we would just take four for the ferry. He'll think all night what kind of people we are, and that'll make him quieter.
The communal house was big, cold, with an earthen floor and a strut of fresh logs across — because the walls were moving apart. It smelled like fish, smoke and stagnant water. On the wall hung a cross, and under it, contrary to all order, a dry bouquet, a turtle comb and a children's shoe.
Grandma looked at it and was not cross in the way that they were baptized in Kutna.
- What is it? asked Jiri.
- They do. - She put the pot in. - Not graves. They have graves out there, underwater. So hang what's left.
There was a corn cereal dinner, and Kubat took out two bottles of his nine, and twenty locals filled up in the community house, because nine bottles of slivovitsa in the flooded village is the biggest event of any politics.
Jiri sat by the wall and listened.
Listening was hard. Not because they said the terrible, but because they said the usual: about the fact that this year the pike went worse than last; about the fact that Kristina Vanekova’s husband is drowned, and she now goes to Klechki; about the fact that the imperial in the year before last put a post two miles away, and this is bad, because fasting, but also good, because fasting takes fish for money.
And once, about the bell.
- At night, it rings, said someone on the other side of the table, in between, as they say about the weather.
- How does it ring? asked Little Jan.
- There. Water goes, tongue swings. Not every night. When the wind is from noon.
- And you didn't?
The man looked at him with genuine perplexity.
- What about?
Last night, Jiri heard.
It wasn't a "bom." It was lower and more remote, as if they had hit not the bell, but the water itself: a short heavy sound, then a long nothing, then again.
He lay on the straw and listened, and his hair moved, and he knew firmly that it was the language of the bell in the flooded bell tower, and that there was a simple explanation for it, and that the explanation did not help at all.
Koshta was nearby.
- Sleep, he said.
- I'm asleep.
- You lie with your eyes open and think of God.
- Not God.
“God,” said Koshta with his eyes closed. Everyone thinks of him when something rings in the dark. It's like itching: it's indecent, but that's it.
The bell struck again.
- Koshta.
- Well.
- Do you believe he's dead?
The old man was silent for a long time, and Jiri had already decided that he was asleep.
- I drink his blood every day, Koshta said. - With water, with beer, with soup. Everyone drinks. It's not about faith, man. The question is not “Did”; the question is “And what now.”
- So what now?
- Now, said Koshta, turning to the other side, "you're asleep now, because at four you're on your post, and the dead man doesn't care if you're sleeping or not."
It wasn't the bell that woke them.
They were awakened by Grandma, who at the third hour went out to the wind and returned not through the yard, but running, and said one word:
- Mules.
There were twelve. There were nine mules, and nine mules in a flooded village where the fish went worse than last year - that's not a temptation, but a simple arithmetic of winter.
They came over the water, fording, through the old gardens, because no one ever expects water, and they would probably have taken three or four away if Matoush, who was on duty, had not counted aloud.
He always counted out loud. He counted the pillars, the steps, the stars, the bells, and at the third o'clock in the morning he counted the silhouettes coming out of the water, and at the seventh he lost his way and started anew, and that saved him, because the man who says aloud in the dark, "one, two, three," sounds like the man who sees you.
They rushed. Matoush shot in the air.
Then there was what Koshta later called fair fight: that is, darkness, screaming, four lights, two of which lit, knee-deep water where no one expected it, and twenty people who basically grabbed each other by their clothes.
The Jiri jumped third and fell immediately because there was a barrel at the door.
He then honestly recorded it in his personal, unseen chronicle of exploits: "there was a barrel at the doorstep.".
As he was climbing, Vlasta passed by him - she walked, not ran - stood on a trampled, raised her gun and fired once. Someone sat in the water on the other side of the yard.
The grandmother came out of the door with a knife she used to cut beef, and returned to the house a minute later, and the knife was wet, and she immediately began to wash it in the pot, grumbled that now she would have to boil.
Big Yang broke one arm.
Little Jan missed his and then defended himself for three days.
It all ended as quickly as it started.
Two were lying. One is in the water, face down, and he was pulled out by the Vanekov sons, silently, without any expression, like pulling out a snag. The second was a boy of fourteen years old, to whom Big Jan broke his arm, and he sat on the ground, holding it, and tried very hard not to howl.
The rest went back into the water.
- My own? - Vlasta asked Vanek.
The old man stood with a lantern, and his face was as it is in people who are asked about what they hoped they would not ask.
- Zdyarskogo, he said. - From across the coast. Who live in boats.
- You know them.
“Pani, I baptized them,” said Vanek. I mean, I didn't, I baptized the pope, I kept it. That's the one I held. He pointed the torch at the boy with his hand. - Vashek. Leather son.
Nobody said anything.
- He came to steal mules, the old man added, after being silent. - Don't think about it, I'm not justifying it. He came to steal your mules, and you are right. He stopped talking because he couldn’t think of how to finish.
We were crossing this morning.
Kubat lost his pillow.
He went around the community house twice, looked under the straw, asked Vanek, asked Vanek’s sons, and eventually stood in the middle of the courtyard with the appearance of the man who had been taken from him.
- And now, he said, I have been to the yard for real.
He never thought of it again, and the Jiri waited three days to remember it, and he couldn’t decide whether it was a holdover or whether he really didn’t need the pillow.
The boy was bandaged by Grandma, grumbled that the bones of the young were fusing like a dog and that there was nothing to climb. Kubat came out of the community house, looked at it, at the water, at the two bodies that had already been carried away, and reached into his purse - and stopped.
He stood for three seconds, with his hand in his purse, and took his hand away.
Jiri saw it.
- You gave those three the day before yesterday, he said. He wasn't going to say anything, but he did. - Not with that.
- Nope.
- Why?
Kubat looked at him.
- Because the day before yesterday it was a gesture, he said. - And today would be food.
- I don't get it.
- I gave the three of them money to tell them how rich and weird Empire is. It works once on the road and costs six coins. - He zipped his wallet. If I give it, in a month every boat on this water will know what they pay for attacking the Imperial train. And then, young man, the next train will just be eaten here.
He went to the ferry.
- I feel sorry for the boy, he said without turning around. - I really feel sorry for the boy. Which is why I'm not giving him a cruiser.
The ferry was slow; the Vanekov sons were pulling the rope, and the water was stationary, reddish, and there was a bell tower in it.
Koshta looked at her until they passed.
- I'll tell you what, he told Jiri in a low voice. You think Kubat is a bastard.
- He's not a bastard?
- You bastard, agreed Koshta. - But he's a bastard who explains. I've seen four dozen employers in thirty years, and three have explained. The others just said “do it” and if you asked why, they stopped taking you.
- What does that change?
- Nothing, Koshta said. It’s just that when you have to choose who to die for one day, you’ll choose the one who explained. Everyone chooses. - He spit overboard. This is where the empires are based.
V. The Procession
Keepers of the Dead God is not in a hurry. This is the first thing you need to know about them, and usually the last thing you know.
Koshta saw them on the fifth day, by noon, two miles away: a gray strip across the road where the path entered the beech forest and narrowed between the two slopes. Perfect place to stand. It's a disgusting place to pass.
- How much? asked Vlasta.
Matoush lifted the pipe and began counting aloud, twice as he always does.
- Thirty... thirty-seven. Thirty-seven. Eight of them with guns. Open with guns, I say.
- Horugvie?
- Alone. Gray, no sign.
Kubat leaned out of the wagon, looked, quacked and climbed back for his cloak.
- Beautiful, he said. - That's just fine. Someone in Kutna speaks very quickly.
- Is that about the box? asked Jiri.
- It's just about the box, young man. Keepers believes that the blood of God cannot be given, sold, or owned. - Kubat is fastened. Their position, between us, is far more honest than mine.
- What are we gonna do?
- We'll talk.
- What if the conversation doesn't work?
Kubat looked at the power.
- Then you'll kill everyone, he said simply. But first we will talk, because killing a procession is six days on the road and twenty years in sermons.
Their eldest came forward alone, without a weapon, and stopped at a distance of voice.
He was a man of seventy years old, dry, gray, with a staff that was not a staff. Koshta, standing three steps behind the Kubat with his hand on a cleaver, noted that the old man is holding the stick wrong for walking and perfectly right for hitting the throat.
- I am brother Rzhegorzh, the old man said.
Ondrej Kubat, Office of the Accessing Cities.
- I know who you are. You have a casket of Jeliva in your cart.
- I have nine bottles of slivovitsa in my cart, and I'm happy to share it, but yes, there's a casket, too.
Rzhegorj didn't smile.
- In the sixty-sixth year, the imperial soldiers entered Zheliv, burned the prayer-house of the community of Blood and Judah, and carried out the reliquary with four measures. Two brothers were taken away and never returned. Your emperor kept a vessel in the treasury for four years.
- I know. I signed the inventory.
- Two measures out of four you're now taking to Sazawa as a gift.
- That's right.
- And two?
Kubat was silent enough to make it clear that he was not looking for an answer, but rather deciding whether to answer.
- Two left in the sixty-eighth, he said. - Pardubica. There was a fever of birth, sixteen women, nine of them survived. I have a report in the office, I can send it.
- Nine out of sixteen.
- Nine out of sixteen, agreed Kubat. I don’t like that number either, brother.
Rzhegorj stood and looked at him, and Koshta saw the old man working, not with facts, but with Kubat himself, tearing it apart like a castle is being dismantled.
- Give me the chest, he said at last. We'll take him back to Zheliv and seal him in a new reliquary. And then none of your men and none of mine will die in this forest today.
- I can't.
- Why?
- Because then eight children will not be born in Sazawa.
- In Sazawa, eight children will not be born without your blood, said Rzhegorzh, and in Zheliva they will not burn the second prayer hall.
And here, as Koshta later told, it became clear what this fat man in a good cloak earns eighty silver for his brother.
Kubat did not dispute.
He came closer to the old man than he should have come, so close that eight armed men in the procession had advanced, and he spoke quietly, not for all.
Koshta heard it because he was standing right behind his shoulder. He regretted it later.
"Brother Rzhegorzh," Kubat said. - There are thirty-seven of you. Twenty-nine of them are women, old men and two children you took, because a procession with children is not the same as a squad. You have been here for the third day, you have no carriage, and you eat what you took out of Zdyar, and I believe they brought you turnips.
He spoke without mockery. Absolutely flat.
- I have eleven mercenaries, four good-fight guns, and a woman who puts a bullet two hundred feet where she looks. If we start, in a quarter of an hour there will be about twenty of yours, six of mine, both of them lying here -- because kids always run the wrong way -- and you, because you're going first. You know that. You knew that before you came to me.
- I knew it.
- They came out anyway.
- Yeah.
- Why?
Rzhegorj was silent.
- I'll tell you why, Kubat said. Because you were hoping I would be scared of preaching. And it was a reasonable hope, brother, because I'm really very afraid of them.
He stepped back.
- So I'm proposing this. You're letting me through. I write to the office, and Jeliva is returned to the reliquary - empty, silver, with seals. From imperial hands, publicly, with an apology for the sixty-sixth year. The apology will not be signed by the emperor, of course, but by a general, but will be signed.
- Empty silver.
"Empty silver," nodded Kubat, "and a guilty plea." The second one is more expensive, and you know that better than I do, otherwise you wouldn't wear gray.
- And blood?
- And I will give the blood to the city that decides whether to live or not, and it will be drunk for a year by people whose names I will never know. - Kubat spread his hands. - That's the worst possible outcome, brother. Except for everyone else.
Long pause.
Then the old man turned away and went to his own, and an hour later the groom was free, and the procession was on the side of the road, and as the wagon passed by, all thirty-seven men were silent, and this silence was worse than any scream.
One of the children, a boy of nine, spit under the wheel.
Kubat leaned out and waved to him.
- A nice guy, he said, sitting down. He will grow up and kill people like me.
- Is that fun? asked Koshta.
- It comforts me, Kubat said. Mr. Koshta, if people like me didn’t want to cut, we would be doing something really scary. - He pulled out the bottle. - You want?
Koshta, to his surprise, became a snag.
VI. Water
If you say one thing about Radmila Veivodova, you'll tell her she could count.
She was forty-six years old, a water-seat officer in the Free City of Sazawa, and in her eleventh year was responsible for ensuring that four thousand people did not die of thirst in a world where water was too abundant.
Its farm consisted of two pumps; three sump tanks; six coal boxes; a distillation battery of eight boilers; twenty-two workers; and one copper coil forty-one elbow long, which last month began to leak in two places.
Four knew about the coil: she herself, her master, a foundryman and the city clerk who led the expense. She knew what would happen if the coil stood up, because she was the only one who saw the whole calculation.
That was the calculation.
The battery gave a day sixty liters of transparent. Eighteen of them were to the infirmary; twelve to the maternity hospital; ten to the house of care; eight to the council and the representation; twelve to the sale of eighteen kreuzers per bucket. The sale covered half of the coal; the city paid the other half with a water tax, which was paid by everyone, including those who did not see clear water in the eye.
Without a coil, zero.
No less. Zero, because there is no second coil in Sazawa, and distillation without it is just a fire under the cauldron.
Anyone who has copper and a drag board could pull a new one. Copper wasn't in Sazawa. Copper was in Kutna and in the imperial litein at Colin, and in Kutna she was asked three times for her, and from Colin she came by imperial invoices, and the invoices were signed by a man whose title was long.
That's the whole calculation.
Radmila Veivodova wore it in her head for three weeks without sharing it with anyone, and in those three weeks she aged more markedly than in the previous five years.
The council met in the upper chamber of the town hall, where it was cold because the city could no longer afford to sink the halls, which house eleven people.
Eleven votes. Five for the oath. Five against. She's the eleventh.
Everyone knew that. All three weeks everyone knew this, and that's why she was now being called by the name of people who had never said hello before.
- A free city is not freer because it has two bottles, said Milos Drzka, a captain of the city militia, a man of sixty with two real wars behind him and a very simple device inside. - We're holding a ford. We're holding the wall. My father held this wall in the thirty-ninth against the Pardubicks.
- In the thirty-ninth Pardubick came with four hundred and one gun, said Jaroslav Tlusty, the petty officer of the clothmen. The Emperor will come with two thousand and eight.
- Let him come. The wall is standing.
- The wall is standing, Tlusty agreed. The bread comes from Kutna, the salt comes from Colin, and we don’t make gunpowder at all.
- Then we'll do it.
- Milos. - The tlusty rubbed his eyes. - We don't have saltpetre pits.
- Then we'll dig.
So, three weeks.
Father Vavřinets, the abbot of the Second Victim, rose last, and everyone was silent, because behind him were not the votes in the council, but the fifteen thousand people who went to his church.
- I'll say one thing, he said. - A gift.
He was old, thin, with a good voice, and he could stand a pause.
The Emperor sends us two measures of God’s blood. Not bread. Not gunpowder. Not the copper I heard the sergeant needed.
Radmila raised her head.
- He sends us that which cannot be divided into four thousand people. Two measures are eight women. Eight of the six-and-a-half who will be expecting a baby this year. And the eight of us in this room will be chosen.
He looked around them.
- Do you understand what he's doing to us? He's not buying the city. It gives us the opportunity to fight forever. A month after we elect eight, there will be no one left in Sazawa who will forgive his dead granddaughter to the council. Then the emperor will come and be greeted as the deliverer.
The room was very quiet.
- That, Tlusty said slowly, is the smartest thing I've heard in three weeks.
- Thank you.
- And she doesn't change anything. Because if we refuse the gift, there will be no eight at all. It'll be zero.
Father Wavřinec sat down.
Radmila Veivodova looked at her hands lying on the table, large, red, with a charcoal border under her nails, and thought not of eight children, nor of a wall, nor of the freedom of the free city of Sazawa.
She was thinking about forty-one elbows of a copper tube.
And she thought that in two days the imperial negotiator would come, and that she was probably the only person in this city who had something to sell him.
VII. The Long Bargain
Ondrej Kubat always ate first.
Not out of greed. Method.
The person who eats looks vulnerable and busy, and it is awkward to talk to him harshly; the person who eats with apparent pleasure seems good-natured; and most importantly, while Kubat ate, he was silent, and while he was silent, the others spoke, and spoke more than they intended.
At the first dinner in Sazawa, he ate a lot.
The table was set in the town hall: eleven advisers, the abbot, the captain of the militia, the water sergeant and he. Pork, porridge, turnips, bread of two varieties, and wine diluted with water were served in such proportions that the wine dyed the water rather than vice versa.
- “It’s amazing,” said Kubat. - That's amazing. Mrs., what is this gravy?
- From the guts, Mr. Kubat.
- It can't be. No way! Stepan, write down: gravy, guttural, Sazava. - He got wet on his lips. In Colin, I was served game, and it was worse. You know why? Because they have a cook who is discharged from Prague and despises everyone in the room.
Laughter. A little, but real.
He worked four hours. He asked the clothman about the cloth and listened to the answer. He asked Captain Drzka where he had fought, and on hearing him, gave the exact date and the exact number of cannons, and did not specify how he knew. He found out which of the advisers had children and who did not, and, most importantly, which of the councilors who did not had children was married to a second marriage.
By dessert, he knew exactly what he wanted to know: that the five against the oath were divided into two convinced and three frightened.
He didn't talk to the convinced at all.
“Father Wavrzynets,” he said, as the baked apples were served. I heard you think about the gift. I got it. She's brilliant.
The abbot strained.
- You're flattering.
- Not at all. You got the mechanism right. Kubat put a spoon in his mouth. The only thing you made a mistake about was that you thought it was a plan. And that's the consequence.
- Difference?
- It's huge. A plan can be thwarted by refusing. The consequences will happen anyway. - He put down the spoon. Father, you already have women in town who get clear water from the town hall and women who don't. The list is Mrs. Veyvodov. You hate her for that?
Radmila looked up.
- No, said Wawrzynitz.
- Why not?
Pause.
- Because everyone knows there's not enough water.
- Exactly. - Kubat smiled. People tolerate injustice when it is explained by lack. They cannot tolerate injustices caused by choice. The difference between rebellion and submission is whether a decision seems to be a decision or a circumstance.
He looked around the table.
- I don’t recommend choosing eight. The board should set a rule and hang it on the door. Let's say the first eight who come in with a doctor's report of three lost pregnancies. Let the doctor be alone, let him be of strangers, and let him be hated.
Silence.
- You offer us," said the cloth-man of Tlusta slowly, "how is this? Make sure it's the doctor's fault.
- I suggest to you, said Kubat, that it is not the neighbor's fault.
He went back to the apple.
Radmila approached him later in the yard when he went out to “breathe,” but in fact, to stand where he would be approached.
- Copper, she said without foreword.
- Forty-one elbows, Kubat said. The coil flows in two places, closer to the head. The casting is old, Kutnogorsk, with an admixture, so the fistulas will go further along the entire length. You don't need repairs, you need a new one.
Radmila stood and was silent for ten seconds.
"Where from," she finally said.
- Mr. Petty Officer, you have twenty-two employees. One of them married in Colin a year ago. Kubat looked at her almost guilty. This is not espionage, this is arithmetic. We sent coal to Sazawa. Three years in a row, the same, and this year you took a third less. The battery is not working at full capacity. So, something with the boilers or the snake. Your boilers are cast iron, local, you would fix them yourself.
- And you came with that.
- I came with a chest. Copper is something I left for later. - He sighed. I really don't want to use it, Miss.
- Why?
- Because a gift makes me generous, and copper makes me a blackmailer, and I'm still twenty years away from working in this city.
Radmila looked at this fat man in a nice cape and knew that she liked him and that this was the most dangerous thing that had happened to her in eleven years of service.
- How much? she asked.
- The snake will come from Colin twelve days after the oath. Kubat said it mildly, as reported by the diagnosis. - Not after the vote. After the oath, signed and announced. I can’t do it before because I’m not the one who signed the bill.
- What if the board says no?
- Then I will leave, and in six months the distillation will be closed in Sazawa, and the infirmary will go to boiled, and in a year you will be born as much as now, and before a year you will live not fifty-two, but thirty. - He's quiet. - I'm not threatening, Madam. I'm just the first person you've told about the coil out loud, and I'm sorry that person was me.
Radmila went away.
In the middle of the courtyard, she turned around.
- You're disgusting, she said.
- Yes, agreed Kubat. - But I came.
VIII. What Captain Drzka Remembers
If you say one thing about Milos Drzku, you will say that he remembered the thirty-ninth year.
He remembered it better than last Tuesday, and that, if you look at it, was the main problem of the free city of Sazawa.
He was twenty-nine at the time. The Pardubice came in August, four hundred footmen, one and a half hundred horsemen, and one gun, which they had dragged for eight days and fired eleven times. The Sazava lasted nineteen days. On the nineteenth Pardubicki had withdrawn and left, and since then both bells rang in the city every year on the fifth of September, and the old men bought each other beer, and the boys fought in the square with wooden guns, depicting a siege.
Milos Drzka also bought beer and listened to bells.
And he was the only one who still lived, who knew why the Pardubice had left.
They didn't leave because the wall was standing. The wall was, frankly, bad: on the seventh day, the Fish Tower had a corner and it was laid with wool bags, and anyone who climbed the wall in those days knew that the city would not survive the second such corner.
They left because they ran out of water.
Not food. The waters around Sazawa were as many as you like - the river, the old women, the rain. There was not a drop of transparency, but four hundred people, three weeks drinking what flows - it turned out to be bloody diarrhea, eighty people in the bed and the commander, who on the twentieth day counts not assault stairs, but barrels.
Milos Drzka learned this twelve years later, in Colin, from a former Pardubic sergeant, over a beer, by accident.
He came home and didn't come out for three days.
Not because the victory was not a victory. He'd get used to it. Because before that conversation he had been explaining to everyone for thirty years, including his son, that cities were not taken with guns, but by the fact that inside the wall there were people who did not flee.
Turns out it was water.
It turned out that for nineteen days, while he stood at the Fish Tower with bags of wool and determination, the fate of the city was decided by barrels in a foreign camp, about which he knew nothing and could not influence in any way.
He didn't tell anyone about it. Not once. Thirty-one years.
On Thursday night, on the eve of the vote, he went to Radmila Veivodova's.
Not the town hall, home. She lived in the distillery, on the second floor above the boiler room, and it was always warm, and it always smelled of coal, and Milos Drzka went there for years, and in the city they said exactly what they say in the cities, and both of them long ago stopped explaining that everything was wrong - because it was really meaningless, and because "wrong" was not quite true.
She opened it, looked at it, and said,
- Don't ask.
- I'm not asking.
- Milos.
- I'll ask. - He sat down without taking off his coat. - How much copper do you need?
She sat across from me.
- Forty-one elbows. And the caster, because our length is not that long.
- What if in parts? Pieces. With rations.
- Pike's gonna give her a fistulas in six months.
- What if four times ten cubits, four coils, four small cubes instead of one big cube?
Radmila opened her mouth. I closed it.
- You've been thinking about it, she said.
- I, Madam, have been thinking for thirty-one years about how to survive without someone else. Drzka rubbed his face with his palm. - Will it?
- Four times less water will come out, she said slowly, and four times more coal will come out to the same exit. We don't have coal for the winter. Coal comes from Colin.
- So we'll burn wood.
The firewood around Sazawa, Radmila said, is two years away at current expense. I counted. I'm counting, Milos, it's my job.
He was silent.
- Do you understand what you're suggesting to me? she said. You're offering me a plan where the city lives free for two more years and then dies slowly and without help. And you call it independence.
- I call it a choice.
- That is the choice, Radmila said. I just see both ends of it, and you’re the one that’s prettier.
He's up.
He stopped at the door and said what he later realized was the real reason for coming.
- My son took the oath at sixty-eighth. In Colin. He is now at the Imperial Post Office, and he has a house and two live children. - He was looking at the door, not her. - Two, Madam. I have no one but him, and he has two.
- Milosz.
- I'm not saying the empire gave it. I'm saying it happened. - He took the brace. I will vote no anyway, because I have been telling people for thirty-one years that we will not lie down, and if I lie down now, it will turn out that I have lied my whole life not to them, but to myself.
- That's not the reason.
- That is the only reason, sir, the captain of the city police said. Everything else is arithmetic, and you are stronger in it.
He voted against it. He watched Radmila Veivodova raise her hand first, and, to his credit, he didn’t change his face.
That same night, he gathered his own. Twenty-two men came out of sixty-four, and that, to be honest, was a good thing: he was counting on fifteen.
They left at night, through the Fish Gate, and no one stopped them, because there was no one to stop them: the Imperial garrison arrived in Sazawa only six weeks later.
At the turn at the mill, Drzka turned around and looked at the city, standing black on black, with two lights on the tower.
He didn't say anything high. He said:
- He who takes little salt will not go back. Hold on.
And they went.
IX. At Night
If you say one thing about Jiri Rzeznik, you say he wanted to be someone.
He never put it so bluntly because it sounded pathetic. Inside, it sounded different: he wanted to be the man who did the right thing the moment it was decided.
He had been preparing for this moment for six months.
The moment happened Thursday, at three o'clock in the morning, and Jiri did it all wrong.
They were housed in a former shophouse against the wall: mercenaries in the common hall on the ground floor, Kubata and a scribe upstairs. The casket was in the Kubat room, in the chest, and the chest was chained to the bed riser, and this, as Koshta rightly observed, protected the bed mainly.
Two on duty, three hours.
At three o'clock in the morning, Jiri and Matoush were on duty.
Matoush went to the wind.
That's all. The whole story. Matoush the counter, who had the habit of counting everything twice and certainly out loud, went out into the yard for two minutes, because there was a living person, and living people walk to the wind.
Jiri heard a floorboard on top.
He returned to that moment many times and each time found himself completely at peace. He didn't shout. He took off his boots -- he took off his boots to keep quiet, and he was still proud of the detail -- and he walked up the stairs with a cleaver in his hand, and he walked into the Kubata room, and he saw the back of a man kneeling in front of the open chest.
There was no moon. The light came from a single candle on the floor.
Jiri said:
- Don't move.
The man didn't move.
Jiri took two steps and the man turned his head and it was Vlasta.
"Go away," she said.
The first thing he thought was she was here on orders. Two, she's here to check on security. The third, fourth and fifth were the same, and they all could not stand the simple circumstance: she had a casket in her hands, and the seal was cut off, and in the casket were two sealed vessels, and next to the floor were two of the same color, the same size, with wax seals.
Swappers.
She's been driving for six days.
“Vlasta,” Jiri said.
- Jiri, get out of the room.
- You're...
- Her voice was perfectly smooth. And you're going to turn around and go down the stairs, and Matoush will come back in a minute and you'll tell him it was quiet.
- I can't.
- You can.
- It's not ours!
- Nothing is ours, Vlasta said. - Nothing ever happened to us.
She's up. She was below him on his head and stood with a casket in his left hand, and the right was hanging loose, and Jiri suddenly realized with absolute clarity that if he took a step, she would kill him. Not because he wants to. Because she was better than him in all matters of murder, and because she had made the decision in Kutna six days earlier, and he was just beginning to make his decision.
- Who? - He asked.
- What?
- Who are you giving them to? You work for the Guardians? Pardubica?
And then she laughed. Quiet, scary, one breath.
- On Lucia, she said. - My sister. She has a daughter, she's six years old, she has a throat, and the doctor said she needs clean drink and meat. - She lifted the chest. - Here's fifteen years of pure drinking if you sell one.
- Jiri heard his own voice and didn't recognize it. - Sell one, leave one, I'll... I will say there were two who attacked.
- It won't work. Vlasta shook her head. - One seal on the chest. It's all or nothing.
- Then take it and go! Leave right now, I'll count to a hundred!
And here -- Jiri then realized this, years later, and it didn't bring him any relief -- that's where she almost agreed.
She was standing there looking at him, and something went in her face, and she opened her mouth to say something.
Then a voice from the stairs rang out, Koshta:
- No one's going anywhere.
He was standing in the door, barefoot, in his shirt, with a lantern, and he looked old.
- How long? asked Vlasta.
- With Kutna. Koshta put the lantern on the floor. - You packed your bag too carefully. You've never packed a bag neatly in thirteen years.
- Jesus.
- Yeah. - He rubbed his knee. - Give me the box, Vlasta.
- Nope.
- Give me the box, and we'll figure something else out.
- There's no other! She said it quietly, and it was more terrifying than screaming. Koshta, I've been putting off thirteen years. I have two hundred and forty coins in Kutna at the moneychanger's. Two hundred and forty! Do you know how much a measure costs? You know?
- I know.
- A house with land. Your house. Your apple tree, your snake, your damn chickens. - She was choking. And even this is not a measure, because measures are not sold, they do not happen on sale, they are given to such cities that eight foreign women will be able to take them.
"Eight," said Koshta.
- What?
- Eight women. You said eight other people's women. - He didn't move. Say it again and listen to yourself.
Silence.
The door slammed down: Matoush returned.
- I have a niece, Vlasta told the BBC.
- They have, too, Koshta said. Each of the eight has someone else.
- I don't care.
- I know, he said. - I wish I could.
He stepped forward and extended his hand.
And Vlasta gave the box away.
She gave it the way they give a child to a stranger for a minute: with both hands, neatly, and immediately turned away, and stood facing the wall, and Koshta stood with a casket, and Jiri stood with a cleaver, and no one knew what to do next, because all three were waiting for someone else to start screaming.
Nobody started.
- Take the swappers, Koshta said. - Put whatever you want in them. You tell me what you found in your bag in the morning, and we'll be looking all day for who put it. It'll take everyone till noon.
Vlasta did not turn around.
- Why? she asked.
- Because if you leave now, they'll find you in a week, and there's four thousand people and one road.
- That's not it. She finally turned and her face was wet and perfectly calm, as is the case with people who stopped holding. - Why are you stopping me? You. You took money in the spring to kill the old woman, and you didn't, and you took the money, and I know because I was driving her.
- I know you do.
- So why now?
Koshta was silent for a long time.
- Because I didn't steal from anyone back then, he said. - I cheated the bastard. It's cheap and it tastes good. And then you steal from a city that didn't do anything to you, and I, you stupid fool, I'll hate you for that in a year, and you'll hate me.
He raised the lantern.
- And then, he said in a very different tone, there's a simpler way.
X. The Oath
The Imperial oath is short.
The council of the Free City of Sazawa voted on Friday morning: six in favor, five against.
The eleventh voice was Radmila Veivodova, the water petty officer, and she raised her hand first, without waiting for the queue to watch the others lift.
At noon, a text was read in the square. It was three-quarters about trade and one-quarter about recruits, and the word "freedom" came up twice, both times in the affirmative.
Captain Milos Drzka refused the oath and left the city with twenty-two men that evening. Six months later he surfaced outside Khotsen, where the imperial patrol at Zajeci lost four men. From then on, Kubat's office kept a separate file on him under a very long title.
Father Wavřinets signed and delivered a sermon in which he never mentioned the emperor and seven times he gave patience.
The two-man suitcase was handed over to the city in front of witnesses.
The seal had not been opened by then: it had been cut by Kubat himself, the night before, in the presence of the abbot, the clothmaster and the sergeant, “for inspection, since the city must see what it buys, and I must not argue with the city about what it has not seen.”
Koshta, standing at the door, noted to himself that the imperial negotiator was able to open the imperial seal very quickly and very accurately, and that this was not the first time he had done it.
He also noted that Kubat had never looked at the power.
The rule was hung on the town hall door. It was exactly what Kubat had advised: eight seats, three confirmed lost pregnancies, a doctor's report, a filing date queue. The list was opened the same day. The doctor was not in town yet, and the first forty-plus records were made by the scribe Stepan of the Reich Chancellery, because the city clerk refused to sign.
It worked.
Koshta found Kubat on the wall, where he was standing alone, looking at the river, chewing something wrapped in a rag.
- Pan Kubat.
- Pan Koshta! - He was very happy. - Pie. You will? With squarks. They make baking monstrously here, but they make it with squarks.
Koshta took a piece.
They stood silent. Down at the bridge, the cart was unloaded; the seagulls, of which there were too many in the world, were shouting, and which had changed greatly.
- I have a question for you, Koshta said. - The coil.
Kubat has stopped chewing.
- Okay, he said.
- Don't worry, I'm not going to tell anyone. I'm interested in something else. Koshta was looking at the river. If the council voted against it, would you really not have sent copper?
Kubat thought long. Chewed, shook hands.
- I would, he said.
- They would.
- In a year. In a year and a half. When would it get really bad, and when would anyone in Sazawa already realize that the copper comes from Empire and that the town hall for a year could not get it. - He shrugged. - Mr. Koshta, I'm not a monster. I just know how to wait longer than the city.
- So you lied to her.
- Who?
- Chief of Staff. You made her understand that seven dead children depend on her hand.
- I didn't let her know. I listed the consequences of rejection. They were all true. Kubat shook the crumbs off his beautiful cloak. - I didn't say anything about the deadline. Silence is not a lie, it is a profession.
Koshta looked at him.
He was still curiously interested in having a drink with this man. That's the worst part.
- And now you're sleeping peacefully.
- I'm sick of sleeping, Kubat said. - But that's not why.
He turned to Koshta and for the first time in nine days looked like his real face.
- You know what keeps me awake, Mr. Koshta? Not a conscience. Arithmetic. For the fifth year I have been keeping these caskets in the cities, and before that I had been counting salt in the office for twelve years, and therefore I know what neither Father Vavřinets nor your lady sergeant know.
- What is it?
- There are fewer and fewer. Kubat was looking at the water. - Measure is not a harvest. It's not growing. Every one we drank was drunk. The office has an inventory of everything we can confirm: there were four hundred and twelve measures in the registers six hundred years ago, and now forty-four, and three of them, I am almost certain, are forgeries.
He folded the rag.
- We give away the latter and call it politics.
He's quiet.
- Speaking of handouts. I wrote to the office as I promised the old man. The reliquary of Zeliv will be returned before Christmas, the silver and the seal in order, the apology will be signed by General Hlava, who at sixty-six there and disposed. Kubat was a bit of a fun one. - They will. All of you, Mr. Koshta. To reject the reclaimed shrine is to have a very strong community and very little intelligence.
He was wrong.
The reliquary was brought to Zheliv in February, with the general's signature, with two officers and a drum. The community went to the gates in full strength, listened to an apology to the last word and did not accept silver.
Brother Rzhegorzh wrote a letter to the office for a page and a half. There were no threats or curses in it: it said that the vessel was made to keep, and that the empty vessel returned by those who had emptyed it was not a return, but a receipt, and that the community would not keep a receipt.
The silver was taken back and handed over to the warehouse of the office, where it is probably still standing.
Ondrej Kubat wrote a letter to himself. He kept it in his desk and, according to the scribe Stepan, read it from time to time, not angry, but with the attentive expression with which one examines one’s own loss.
Koshta went to look for Vlasta and found her at the gate: she was sitting on a rock and cleaning a gun that was clean.
He sat down next to her and silently put his purse on her lap.
She opened it. I saw it. I closed it.
- How much is it?
- Eighty of mine, Koshta said. Eighty of the Jiri — he himself, I didn't ask. Forty from Matoush: he counted twice and decided that half was enough. Twenty from the brothers, Little Jan gave ten and asked not to tell the Big. Grandma gave me five and said she didn't have any more, and that's a lie, she's got at least a hundred sewn up in her belt, but let's do it.
Vlasta sat with her purse on her lap.
- It’s two hundred and fifty-five, Koshta said. - Plus your two hundred and forty at the money changer. Almost five hundred.
- You can't buy a five-hundred.
- You can't buy measures. - He was looking right in front of him. - And the doctor from Kutna, the real one, with training, and a place in the infirmary, and clear water at eighteen per bucket for the whole winter, and meat - buy. She doesn't need a measure, Vlasta. Her throat needs treatment.
Long silence.
- And then, Koshta said, Kubat has a roadside card. Imperial. With her you will reach Hrudim in four days instead of nine, and at outposts you will not be checked the bag.
- Does Kubat know?!
“Kubat knew before I did,” Koshta said. He said you packed the bag too carefully.
Vlasta covered her face with her hands.
She sat there for a long time, and Koshta looked away, at the carts, at the seagulls, at the river of diluted wine, and thought that this is probably the thing that was worth climbing out of the house with the roof: not money, not eighty silver, not adventure, but the opportunity once every six months to do something that you do not have to keep silent about.
The thought was so unpleasantly like virtue that he immediately decided to get drunk.
Vlasta left at dawn.
She drove four days and came to Khrudim on the morning of the nineteenth, and Lucia met her at the gate, and everything became clear in her sister’s face before she opened her mouth.
Marzhenka died on the twelfth. That is, two days before Vlasta stood in a shophouse in Sazawa with someone else’s casket in her hands and decided who she was.
The letter lasted twelve days and was true when it was written.
Vlasta could not know that it was no longer a machine: there is no way to get information faster in this world than a person with paper.
Later, much later, when she became captain herself and was asked what her service had taught her, she answered the same thing and never explained:
- All the information is out of date. Always. Decide not to be ashamed, even if it has already happened.
She never told me that she had nearly stolen two measures of pure blood from a town she had done nothing to.
Koshta returned to Kutna in early December, entered his own house, hung a cleaver on a nail, descended to the cellar, poured four buckets of wells into a cube and melted it.
I got a cup and a half by tonight.
I had a drink standing by the window.
Marta was scratching beneath the apple tree because she was cleverer than he was.
“Look,” Koshta said through the glass, “I don’t think I cheated anyone this time.” No one at all.
The chicken didn't answer.
- So I think, Koshta said, that it must have been an accident.
Eleven days later, Jiri Rzeznik arrived, who now had three ribbons on his hat and sixteen men on hand, because Vlasta had left and the company needed someone who spoke confidently.
He had come to call Koshta back to work.
The work was in Sazawa: an imperial garrison, thirty-five men, winter maintenance, guarding a distillation battery and a copper coil of forty-two cubits, brought from Colin twelve days after the oath, as promised.
Forty a month.
If you say one thing about Koshta, you'll say he never died for free.
This story was a true story for thirty years, and ceased to be true in November at the gate of Sazawa, where he gave eighty silver for a foreign niece whom he had never seen.
He didn't tell anyone about it. He generally believed that the saying, if it was ever a lie, should be repeated more often, not less often, otherwise people will start asking questions.
He's got himself thirty-five.
Jiri then for six months could not understand why the man is undercutting the price of himself, and decided in the end that it was pride. The old man answered a direct question that he would have to work for forty.
All the way to Sazawa, he explained to Jiri that the salt was actually a great investment and just sank a little.
XI. Winter
Radmila Veivodova was the author of the book.
The book was a quarter-leaf, covered in calf leather, and from the first year of service everything was recorded: the arrival of coal, the consumption of coal, the daily output transparent, the roll-call distribution, breakdowns, repairs, the price of copper in Kutna and in Kolin.
On the thirty-first of December, she summed up the year and recorded the following.
The snake came from Colin on the twelfth day after the oath, as promised. Forty-two cubits instead of forty-one - the imperial foundryman rounded up in a big way, and it was the first pleasant surprise in eleven years.
Coal came on the nineteenth day, double the amount of last year, on the imperial invoice, with a twenty percent discount to the cities that joined.
The garrison came on the forty-third day, thirty-five men and a hired guard of a battery, which was hired separately and costing the city forty silver a month. The eldest of the mercenaries was very young, with three ribbons on his hat, and kept extremely straight, and there was an old man with him who on the first day went around the whole distillery, climbed into the boiler room, came out black and said that she had a craving in the wrong direction and that he saw such things in Kutna and knew how to fix it.
He was right.
The daily output of transparent rose from sixty liters to one hundred and four.
Eighteen to the infirmary. Twenty-six births. Twelve to the house of sanctuary. Eight councils and representation. Forty on sale, and the price of the bucket fell from eighteen kreuzers to eleven.
It was the best year of her entire service.
Radmila Veivodova wrote down these numbers in her smooth scribe handwriting, sprinkled sand, blew away the sand and sat above the page for a long time.
Then she turned over and on the back, where she usually took notes for memory, wrote down another.
The doctor's name was Dolejal. He was discharged from the Kutna, as advised by Kubat, and arrived in early December - young, in his thirties, wearing glasses, two suitcases of tools and with no idea where he was going.
The rule hung on the town hall door: eight seats, three confirmed lost pregnancies, a doctor's report, a queue for the filing date.
In the first four days he examined forty-six women, those forty-some whom Stepan had recorded on the day of his oath, and several more who had come later.
Twenty-one he took away at once: eleven had two losses, six had one each, four were not pregnant.
Of the remaining twenty-five, he selected eight.
He did it honestly. Radmila was present at the examinations — the board had her present so that no one could tell what a stranger had decided — and she saw him work: slowly, twice asking, writing down everything, down to what a woman would drink.
On the third day, he said to her:
- Pani, I want you to understand. I don't choose who it helps. I choose those who will not succeed without it. It's not the same thing.
- Difference?
- Measure increases the probability. She won't let her. - He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Of these eight, in my experience, five or six will be born. Maybe four.
- And no measure?
- Alone. Maybe two.
Radmila wrote it down because she wrote it down.
The woman who didn't pass was named Irma Klechkova, and she had two losses, not three.
She came to the town hall every day. She didn’t scream, complain, or try to bribe—she just came and stood at the board with a rule, read it as if she were waiting for something to change, and left.
She did it nineteen days in a row.
Radmila came out and spoke to her. She didn’t know why, or rather she knew she wanted to explain arithmetic. She was convinced that if you explained arithmetic to a person in full, honestly, with numbers, then a person would understand.
She explained for ten minutes. About a hundred and four liters. Eight seats. That if you let everyone with two losses, you'd need thirty-six seats and two measures.
Irma Klechkova listened very carefully.
Then she said,
- I understand all that, Miss.
- Then...
- I'm not here to argue. - She fixed her handkerchief. - I'm coming to see you.
And she left.
Radmila Veivodova stood on the steps of the town hall and thought that in eleven years of service she had never lost a dispute about numbers and that today it seems that the dispute was not about numbers.
Doctor Dolezal was expelled at the end of January.
Not the advice, the council was quite pleased. He was kicked out by four men at the gates of the infirmary in the evening, and one of them was the husband of a woman who was rejected a second time.
Jiri Rzeznik saw this from start to finish, because he was standing at the post twenty steps away, at the distillery, and under contract, the battery protection was not responsible for the infirmary.
He explained it to himself in three different ways and remembered all three verbatim.
One: there was no order.
Two: there were four of them, and he was one, and if he had intervened and been knocked down, an hour later there would have been not a four, but half a city at the gate.
The third, most honest, is that he recognized one of them. It was the driver of the Kubik with the Fish, from whom Jiri had been buying firewood all winter, and who had twice treated him to beer and once brought him to the barracks when he twisted his leg.
Dolejal was broken in his glasses, broke his finger on his left hand, and told that if he stayed, it would not be his finger the next time.
He left this morning.
Jiri walked him to the Fish Gate - that's what he did, and that was all he did.
- You are the one with the ribbons, the doctor said goodbye. He spoke without any expression, holding his hand. - The one that brought the casket.
- I was on guard.
- I'm not a scolder. - I was in the sled. I’m just wondering how they explained it to you. I was told in Kutna that I was going to do a useful thing according to a clear rule.
- You were explained correctly, Jiri said.
- Yes, the doctor agreed. - That's the problem, Mr. Rzeznik. I was told everything absolutely right.
The sleigh is gone.
Jiri Rzeznik, twenty-one, with three ribbons on his hat, sixteen people on hand and a half-year-old intention to one day be the man who did the right thing, returned to office and deserved a shift to the end.
The council sent a request to Kutna for a new doctor, and in the request Radmila wrote in her own hand the line: “indicating to the candidate that the position involves a known risk”.
She thought long enough whether to write. I wrote it. To deceive the next one would be meanness, and she had enough meanness.
It worked exactly as Kubat promised: the city didn't fight. Hated the doctor, then hated the rule, then hated Kutna, where the doctor came from. Neighbors and neighbors didn't fight.
Father Vavřinets preached at the end of January that charity is not measured in litres, and it was a very good sermon, and Radmila Veivodova listened to her standing in the back rows, and with every word she understood more and more clearly that mercy in her city is measured in litres, and that she was the only person who knew the exact figure.
Of the eight women, five gave birth.
One died in March with her baby, and at the funeral they said the measure was not real, or that it had been spoiled, or that someone on the council had changed.
Radmila didn't make excuses. To justify herself meant to explain that pure blood increased the probability, not annulled death, and to explain the probability to the people who had just been removed the coffin, she did not know how and did not think she had the right.
The second measure ended in April.
There was no ceremony. Just one day a new doctor, who had arrived in February, aged and very silent, poured the remainder into a measuring bottle, and it was enough for a third of the dose, and he wrote in a journal: "Remainder, third, to Svobodova's mother in labor; result unknown".
The empty chest was decided to keep in the town hall.
He's standing there.
The set was in April.
This was the quarter of the oath that was read in the square by the tongue-in-cheek between trade and the word “freedom”: forty people a year, between eighteen and thirty, with the contents of Empire and the right of the city to buy back one in five in money.
The lists were made by the town hall. The Town Hall is eleven people, of whom five voted against the oath and therefore now with special eagerness to prove that they were carrying it out honestly.
Radmila Veivodova had nothing to do with the set, but she rewrote the list to her book, because she wrote everything down.
Forty names. Against each, craft.
Two were hers.
Jan Peszek, eighteen, a pottery handyman, is the third year old, the only one of the young who could hear the difference when the thrust goes away. Vaclav Thunderstorm, twenty-three, stoker, healthy as a stove and stupid like her, but trouble-free.
She went to the town hall three times.
For the first time she was explained that the distillation is not included in the list of exempted fisheries, because the list was written in Kolin, and in Kolin about the Sazava distillation is not known.
The second time she was offered to buy one — by right every fifth, for one hundred and twenty silver from the city treasury.
She chose Pawn because he heard the pull.
The third time she came to ask for the Thunderstorm and was refused, and it was fair: the city bought off eight of forty, and for each bought out there were four families who proved that their son was more needed.
The storm left in May, in a column, along with thirty-one.
He wrote twice, with a different hand. The second letter was from under Khotsen, where the Imperial column searched for ford for four days and where, as he reported, fed well and boots gave new ones.
There were no more letters. In September, the list of losses on the Sazawa set for the summer came: four.
Radmila Veivodova rewrote him, too.
Thirty-first of December of the following year, Radmila Veivodova again summed up.
Living born in the free – now imperial – city of Sazawa: ninety-four. They lived to be sixty-one years old.
Against eighty-one and fifty-two in the sixty-ninth.
She looked at these numbers for a very long time, and then did what she hadn’t done for eleven years: she painted an increase on the sources, although there was, strictly speaking, nothing to write.
“There are five blood, one of them died in March.
Water, I don't know. One hundred and four liters against sixty. The infirmary took eighteen and asked for for forty.
Coal is on the waybill, with a discount; in previous years, this was not the case.
Salt from Kolin is a third cheaper than Kutnogorsk; this is the price of bread in winter.
The garrison was thirty-five men; the corn trains did not rob in winter for the first time since the sixty-first.
The set is forty, not all of them returned; four on the list for the summer. It doesn't add up, but it does.
How many of the sixty-one would have survived without all this, I do not know and never will know, for there is nothing to compare with: I have only one city.
She reread the book and was unhappy with it, because it was not the end result, but the list.
Then I dipped the pen again and wrote down one line under it, the only personal line in twelve years of keeping the book:
“It all turned out as I thought. Not a single day has been easier.”
Irma Klechkova came to the town hall in March.
She came with a paper from a new doctor, one who was old and silent, and it was written in the paper that Irma Klechkova, thirty-one, had a third lost pregnancy, a term of four months, December.
Three losses. The rule that was hanging on the door was that it passed.
The measure ended in April last year.
Radmila Veivodova explained this to her for the third time in her life, briefly, without numbers, because numbers had nothing to do with it.
Irma listened.
- Write it in, she said.
- Where?
- List.
- Mrs. Klechkova. - Radmila put her hands on the table. - The list is gone. There's nothing to distribute. If the Empire sends two more measures tomorrow, the list will be re-written, and you will be first, I promise you. But there's no list now.
- Then turn it on, said Irma Klechkova, and write me in first.
- Why?
The woman corrected the handkerchief with the same movement as she had corrected it for nineteen consecutive days at the board with the rule.
- To be recorded.
Radmila Veivodova took a new leaf, dipped her pen and wrote the first line.
Then she sprinkled sand, blew the sand away and went down to the boiler room, where something was again knocking in the wrong time.