From the Annals of Nail Company. Year 666 of the Fall, month three.
The scribe, aka Mikulash Stepanek, wrote for wanting.
Eighth day.
We're out. Twelve people, two mules, four boxes.
The captain didn't say where. The captain never says where until we're back for the day's crossing - he thinks that's how much less talk is being made in the taverns. He's right. He is almost always right, and that is his most unpleasant quality.
It started raining by noon. Normal.
Guska walked under him with his mouth open, caught and said it was communion. Guska is educated, served six months under the Second Victim as a psalmist until he was expelled from there for what he took. He won't say what he took. We don’t ask because there are few options and everyone is funny.
Grandpa told him to shut his mouth. He said, “The same thing flows from the roof as from under the cow, only higher.”
Guska was offended. Grandpa didn't notice. Grandpa hasn't noticed for ten years.
We slept under the mound. Wet. The fire didn't come out.
Day nine.
The captain gathered us and explained the task.
Let's go to Khotsen. Not on the Khotsen, but two hours south of it, to the water rise. There, on the old mine, there is a steam pump and a filter station with it: three sediment tanks, coal boxes, a distillation battery of six boilers. It was built, judging by the stigma, about forty years ago, and repaired last year, because last year Khotsen took four hundred people from flooded lowlands and began to drink twice as much.
The employer is Lipa's council. Lipa and Khotsen have argued for twelve years over three mills and a ford. The dispute has reached the stage where both sides find it cheaper to hire outsiders than explain it to their own people.
Task: burn the battery, open the box, disassemble the pump so that the repair took at least a season. No one should be touched as much as possible. Don't carry the banner. If they do, we're robbers, and Lipa hasn't heard of us.
The pin asked how many.
The captain gave me the amount. The sniper said that for such money you can carry a banner.
Everyone laughed except Grandpa.
Eleventh day.
Two days went by the edge of the Hare balds. This is the strip where, two hundred years ago, something fell down and since then, no normal tree has grown - only a low red shrub, all in cracks, as if it was burned from the inside.
Grandpa said don't drink here. We didn't drink, we had some with us.
The cube still scored in the flask from the stream, because his own is over and because the cube is the cube. We heard it half a day from the sound.
He was lying curled up, saying that his fingers had climbed into his stomach. Not "like fingers." Fingers. He counted them. He counted eleven and went astray, and began again, and so on for three hours.
The goat wanted to shoot him so he wouldn't suffer. Grandpa didn't. My grandfather said, “We’ll wait until morning, sometimes he lets go.”
Let go.
By dawn, Kubik was asleep, and by lunch he walked by himself, only with his hands he could not hold anything. He was fed with a spoon and he was a terrible curse. Two days later, that was it.
Grandpa said he was lucky.
I write it down because in a year we will forget it and decide that the water in the balds is not terrible. She's scary. Cube just got lucky.
Fourteenth day.
We're on the point. We watched it for a day and a half.
The station is in disrepair. Pipe, two brick buildings, a canopy over the boxes, a dump, a narrow gauge four hundred steps to the coal warehouse. The fence is symbolic - a pole on goats. There is no one to guard against; who in his right mind would go to break his own water in two hours from the city?
We are, for example.
Security: eight city, four in shifts. Young. One old man with them - judging by his habit, a sergeant from a real, retired. He's the only one who walks in circles, not sitting at the entrance.
There are nine workers and one engineer. The engineer is visible immediately: he is the only one without a beard and the only one who touches the machinery, not the shovels.
More women. We didn't expect that. By five o'clock, women with canons and carts and women again reached the station. Guska counted more than forty people in the evening.
Captain said it was a handout.
My grandfather said, “It’s crowded in the evening and empty at night.” So we're working in the third guard.
Guska said, "So they're drinking half the city."
The captain looked at him.
“Half the city is drinking from the river,” he said. - From here, the sick, pregnant and those who pay drink.
Guska fell silent.
The captain understands such things. He says them exactly once and never repeats them again, and that's the thing: He doesn't forbid you to think. He just puts out the details you don’t want to know and goes to check the posts.
Fifteenth day. Night.
Started at the third guard.
The pin and the Cube filmed two at the entrance quietly. One was very quiet, the other was as it happened; he managed to hit the wall with a pot, but no one woke up because there was always something knocking.
Me and Guska were put in boxes of boxes. Goat and Grandpa went to the battery.
We had good, lipo-like boxes: resin canvas, black gunpowder, cord in goose per. They are made only where there is a real workshop, and they stand like a good horse. The captain then reports for each unused box.
As they pulled the cord, I looked at the box.
It's simple, if you look at it. First, the water is in the sediments, and brown sits at the bottom. Then he goes through the sand. Then you have to burn it and change it, and that's the most expensive part. Then they drive it in cauldrons, and the steam is collected into a coil, and what flows down is transparent.
Of all the water that raises the pump, a transparent barrel comes out about a day. The rest just gets a little less cloudy.
I write this down because I used to think that cleaning is when you make the water clean. And that's when you put a very large amount of bad water into a very small amount of good water and a lot of bad water into a dump.
The engineer came out when we were leaving.
He was wearing his underpants and a lamp, and he didn't scream. He looked at the cord, at us, at the battery, and he said,
- Don't burn the boilers. Burn the pump.
The captain asked why he was doing that.
- I will collect the pump for you in a season, the engineer said. - Nobody's bringing me the battery. She was taken four months from Pardubice, in parts.
- I need a season, the captain said.
- Then take the shaft. The engineer placed the lamp on the ground, very carefully, as if it was the main business in his life. - A crankshaft. He's alone. There's no second in three days. Without it, the pump is a pile of iron, and you get your season and I get my battery. And then I'll be picking up the water by hand all summer, by the gate, and it'll be four times less, but it will be.
The captain thought, I guess, four heartbeats.
Then he said, Goat, take off the shaft.
Grandpa looked at the captain, but said nothing. My grandfather is silent when it comes to money.
We took the shaft off. We blew up the coal boxes because the coal had to be spoiled for the report anyway, and we set fire to the canopy because the smoke is visible from afar, and the smoke is half the job. We drowned two pumping rods and a pipe in the dump.
The battery was intact.
Val was taken with him. He weighs four poods plus, and we dragged him for two days on a mule, and then the mule limped and we dragged him ourselves.
The engineer stood and watched us leave. He probably had something to explain to the city.
Seventeenth day.
No loss. The sniper has a split eyebrow about his own butt, which he asked not to write about. I'm writing.
Two city men were killed, both at the entrance. Both are under twenty. One had a spoon wrapped in a cloth in his pocket, apparently to keep it from ringing. The spoon is good, tin. The goat wanted to take it, Grandpa didn't.
Grandpa said we have plenty of our own.
That's the only reason I know why Nail Company doesn't take spoons from dead people.
Twenty-first day.
Lipa paid. Totally silver by weight, without the usual bargaining. The captain told me not to be happy before the time.
He was right.
A day later, a councilman came and asked if we would take up a second job: escorting a train with water from Lipa to Khotsen. Lipa's selling. Four cruisers for a bucket of cloudy and eighteen for a transparent one.
Eighteen for the bucket.
The pin counted out loud, moved his lips, and counted to the point that in one train the Soviet would return everything that he paid us, and still remain.
The captain took the job.
Twenty-fourth day.
Come with the train. Six carts, barrels, guards with us twenty-two men, of whom twelve are ours.
The road is the same as the one we went there. Same baldness, same ford, same turn at the breakup. From the turn you can see the station: there is no canopy, the pipe is standing, and at the gate they put there, four walk in a circle. Manually. As the engineer promised.
The women came out to the cart. Lots. More than that night.
One stood for a long time near our cart and watched as the clergyman measured the transparent from a large barrel into a small one. She had a belly. Seven months, I think, but I don’t understand.
The orderly gave her a price. She stepped back and stood in another line, behind the murky.
Guska said:
- Hey, scribe. We did that, didn't we?
I said, we did what we paid for.
He said, I'm not talking about that.
I know what he's talking about.
I'm a company clerk, not a judge, and the Annals aren't being conducted to make anyone feel better. But I wrote it down because in ten years, one of our men will be telling us in a tavern how Nail Company famously took a water pump under the Khotsen and how the captain outsmarted the engineer. He'll tell you fun and everyone will laugh and it'll be the truth.
And then he forgets the woman who went into another queue.
Well, she was.
Twenty-sixth day.
The shaft was sold in Lipa to a blacksmith for eight coins. The blacksmith said he was going to switch to something useful.
Guska's gone. At night, without taking a share.
Grandpa said he'd be back. Grandpa said they all come back because you can only go where someone needs you, and we haven't left any of those places.
The captain said to cross him off the list.
I crossed it out.
There are eleven people in the company.
Rain.