The Anatomist's Dream (38 page)

It was the last thought in his head as his heart gave up the fight and ceased its beat, as did Alarico's and, in the few moments it took Philbert and Oort to get from the gallery down the stairs and into the hall, both men, though warm, were gone. The stench of spilled blood and burst guts was so appalling and overpowering it was all Philbert could do not to vomit, and he needed to go. There was nothing he could do for any of these people, that much was plain. He grasped at Oort's sleeve to get him on the move but the lad had stopped like a broken clock, too horror stricken by what he was seeing to turn away, barely taking in what was in front of him: a hall full of slaughtered men and women slumped around an enormous table scattered with the remnants of their half-eaten feast; people who'd been taken so completely by surprise they'd not even had the time to rise from their seats in protest or move their forks from their mouths, let alone fight off the disaster that had overtaken them.

Philbert had bigger worries on his mind as he started to run towards the service stairs that led to the kitchen shouting for Oort to follow, which he eventually did. The kitchen was deserted of people, if not of the food that had been left scattered randomly across every surface, but the moment Philbert flung open the door onto the cobblestones of the courtyard he went straight into another mess of bleeding bodies, though the vast proportion out here seemed at least alive enough to groan and swear, their women rushing around filling buckets from the pumps to wash out their wounds and bandage them up with whatever they could find.

Disaster was everywhere, no one understanding exactly what had happened, and certainly not why. Some things are simply too enormous to think about, and this was one of them. The uninjured concentrated on keeping the injured alive and breathing. They didn't speak. They didn't communicate the one with the other, they just got on with the task at hand. Philbert could hear from distant cries and shouts that the mercenaries had moved on from the castle to the Frost Fair, no one fit to lift a finger to help. This was the night of the wolf and the wolf had moved on, nothing they could do about it.

Not so Philbert, who took in the scene in the courtyard at a glance, and urged the folk there into action.

‘Get the drawbridge up!' he shouted, ‘and get the portcullis down if you can,' and it was a strange thing in that dark and bloody night, with the snow falling all around them, that the men and women held within the confines of the castle looked at the small boy in his large hat who was shouting out orders and did as they were commanded, indeed wondered why on earth they hadn't thought to do it already themselves. There was a flurry of folk, mostly women, who went at it with gusto, following the boy and his large friend who were running and skidding for the drawbridge and then were over and across its back.

‘Get it done now!' the boy shouted once he'd crossed, and the women went at the ropes, uncertain how to operate the pulleys but thanking the Lord that someone had had the sense to think of it, and soon enough up went the drawbridge and down went the portcullis, and away ran that boy from them into the white apparelled night.

39

Unwrapped and Undone

Rupert's Christmas Box of the Frost Fair had been destroyed long before Philbert got to it. While half the men who'd been waiting in the trees went into the castle – their mission to bring down the bourgeoisie, burgers and the pretender to the throne – the other half had orders to surround as much as they could of the Fair strung out across the frozen lake and clustered on its environs, to attack the moment the flag went up in flames. Their remit was simple: destroy the Fair and everyone in it, for somewhere at its heart lay the murderers of Lengerrborn and, as if that wasn't enough, its acting troupe had been promulgating rebellion of the worst kind with their little plays and attitudes, taking their message up and down the land, pitting themselves against the interests of the great and the good and fostering ideas of independence in the minds of every Schleswig-Holsteiner who'd visited their pernicious performances ever since the Fair had crossed the Elbe.

The men whose task it was to destroy the Fair had little ­political inclination. Certainly they despised the fat inhabitants of the castle their comrades had just stormed under the guise of late-arriving guests, setting to murder with great satisfaction. The Fair's folk held little fascination for these others, all of the ilk of men who got far more pleasure from upturning braziers than sitting happily beside them swapping tales, and within moments of the burning flag being hoisted – seen only because one of them carried a telescope and had been looking out for it – they were charging forward and throwing lighted brands onto makeshift shacks, laughing when the folk inside shrieked and ran, some of them burning far better than that wretched flag had ever done on the roof. They flattened anyone who got in their way, set as much of the camp to fire as would burn, took pot-shots at the people running away towards the dark edges of the forests, soon joined by their comrades from the castle, pumped up by the action, eager for more, made thirsty by murder and fight and all too soon breaking open beer kegs and stills once they were done, drinking until their knees began to give way beneath them, grabbing any women they could find by their hair and hauling them screaming over barrels while they fumbled to undo the buttons of their breeks. They threw small animals onto fires, barely bothering to cut their throats and bleed them dry. They stamped on possessions, denuded tents from their frames to provide a waterproof base for their antics, grabbed up paltry trinkets and stuffed them into pockets, ­garnered coins scattered in the snow from broken till-boxes, snatched up purses that lay abandoned open-eyed as they fell. All this was part and parcel of their pay.

Behind them the drawbridge had been raised, the wooden portcullis stuck at half-mast, its under-used cogs seizing for lack of oil, winch ropes frayed and tangled, but enough to keep the marauders out for the night, no way back into the castle even if they'd tried, and no more for Philbert and Oort once they'd crossed over. Oort's eyes were wide as moons in the blank set of his face as he crouched beside Philbert on the edge of the lake. It was obvious there could be no approaching, that there was nothing they could do but watch as sheds, shacks and booths went up in flames, listen to the screams and cries and the loud booming of the attackers' guns, see the dark sky lit up by ­explosions of gunpowder and the scatter of fires on which God knew what was burning.

Philbert closed his eyes, Oort shivering beside him, and there they stayed for an hour or more while the men held the Fair grounds fast and strong, drinking, singing and laughing until the snow began to fall without relent, at which point their leader, the man who'd been on the rooftop, called his men to order and took them away, led them stumbling off to regain their horses, filling their saddlebags with booty, throwing newly replenished wine-skins over their shoulders. By God, but they'd had a night of it, and away they went down the tracks filled to the brim with it, so that it would take some doing for any of them to melt back into the lives from which they'd come, returning a little richer, a lot crueller, more than ready to do it all again, if only someone would pay the price.

The moment they'd passed by the castle and gone off up the trail into the woods Philbert and Oort emerged from their hiding place. The fires the men had set were burning brightly, the greasy light and smoke twisting through the lazy swirl of snowflakes that had precipitated the men's departure and would continue falling until dawn. They moved slowly, throats tight with the awful devastation. One of the first things Philbert saw was Jimble burning on his back in a fire sustained by the leaking fat from his body, skin blackened with soot and charcoal, gouged out in places where the men had dug for food with their knives. A few yards away lay Jamble, his own fire out, but he was rammed belly-through by a stake to hold him to the ground. His body was still twitching and alive and Oort couldn't take it, went down on his knees beside the piglet, ripped out the stake and swiftly, quietly, snapped its neck, Oort keening and crying, unable to move further, anguish flowing through him like a river.

Philbert found Kwert beneath an overturned cart, curled into a ball, half-buried by the snow, skin so pale and cold Philbert assumed he must already be dead until he heard the small ­crepitation of Kwert's fast-failing lungs.

‘Oort!' Philbert shouted. ‘Oort! Come here and help!'

Oort didn't move until Philbert shouted out his name three times more but at last he came over. Philbert had disinterred Kwert from his snow-hole and Oort scooped him up, following Philbert's direction to take him inside the nearest tomb where at least they'd be out of the snow. Oort had always feared these dark, long-tunnelled cairns piled in rocky heaps all across this part of Schleswig-Holstein, but he was too distraught to recall it and went down on hands and knees and entered the neck of the tomb pulling Kwert in after him by his heels, Philbert at the other end keeping Kwert's head free of the rocky ground. In this way they stumbled the ten yards to the little cavern at the centre of the mound, a small clearing in which the ancients had left their dead. And, like most tombs, it still had room for one or two more.

Philbert made Kwert as comfortable as he could and then went back outside to bring in wood and hot cinders to hastily make up a fire. It soon warmed the confined space, the stones sucking in the heat, making it the perfect place to wait out the rest of the night, but not before Philbert and Oort made several more forays into the desecrated campground. It was eerie to be the only living things moving around out there, for they found no one else alive, no animals, no people. Plenty of bodies, many of whom they turned over to check for breath, but the night was so cold those who hadn't already bled out had frozen solid to the ice. The only encouraging sign was that there weren't nearly as many dead as there could have been, and it was obvious from the tracks that had not already been covered by the snow that a great many people must have made it into the dense, dark forests that surrounded the landward side of the lake. They dragged in more firewood and a couple of blankets they found in amongst the broken carts and could do no more, retreating to the tomb, the snow falling thick and fast and the wind rising up to whip it with the sand from the dunes into maelstroms and eddies all along the shore.

Once safely inside, they cosied themselves around the fire, Philbert laying Kwert's head on his lap, stroking his sparse hair, the grey stubble on his chin, feeling his pulse a feeble movement beneath his fingers. After almost an hour Kwert's lips began to move, Philbert bending down his head down to hear him.

‘The others,' he whispered.

‘It's alright, Kwert,' Philbert said, knowing full well that it wasn't, at least not for some. ‘They made it to the forest,' he said. ‘We'll find them in the morning.'

Kwert made a brief movement of his head. ‘Kroonk,' he whispered, and Philbert closed his eyes and breathed deeply. He didn't want to think about what might have happened to her and refused to do so now, forced that part of his mind to close down like a stone rolled over the mouth of a deep, dark hole.

‘Shall I read to you?' Philbert asked, and again there was a small nod of Kwert's head, and Philbert fumbled in his satchel for the little book of the
Philocalia
that had remained with him ever since they'd been on the hermit's island, Kwert being unable to carry even that extra little piece of baggage on top of the weight of his own bones. Philbert laid it on the ground beside the fire, flipping through the pages in an effort to find one with print bold enough to read. Some of the flyers from the Cloth Fair were still sandwiched between its pages after its soaking in the river, and Philbert lifted one up, smiling thinly as he recognised the words.

‘
Brought to you by Prunkvoll's Circus of Marvels
,' he said out loud. ‘
All the way from London
. Who would have believed it? A horse that can count . . .'

He turned the paper over and saw his own bad handwriting there, slowly deciphering the scrawls. ‘
You are my nest of spheres, my prism of light, the heptagon of my days . . .
' Words Philbert was supposed to deliver from a dying man's mouth to a woman who had almost certainly beaten him there. He stopped reading. The tragedy of it all struck him deeply, and not just this cryptic declaration of wasted love but the whole of it: the journey he'd taken from his home to the Fair, from the Fair to Ullendorf, from Ullendorf to the Westphal, from the Westphal to the prison, from the prison right to this tomb buried beneath the snow on the side of a frozen lake. If there'd ever been a point to it he didn't know what it was; nothing but a promise broken, a flag hoisted then brought down again and burned. He couldn't read another word. He closed the
Philocalia
, the three of them sitting in silence by the fire, waiting for the dawn.

40

New Dawn, New Day

Philbert was woken by Oort shaking him awake. He could hardly believe he'd slept at all but the moment he opened his eyes he knew something had changed.

‘It's the Fair!' Oort was saying excitedly. ‘I've just been out, and there's loads of them coming out of the forest!'

And so they were. Philbert emerged from the eye of the tunnel and stood up, shading his eyes from the glare of the snow and by God he could see them too, and Oort was pushing up beside him, waving his arms wildly about his head and shouting.

‘Over here! Over here!'

It seemed a miracle, that new day, that new dawn, that so many folk were emerging from the trees like hop-legged rooks, struggling through the night-fallen snow, tripping over the ­hummocks of the dead who had not been so lucky. Everywhere was white, from the camp grounds to the castle, from frozen lake to sea, giving them all a bizarre feeling of hope as it hid the worst of what had been done from their eyes, its new perfection marred only by several blackened circles of cinders and ash where the fires had fought on through the night before finally giving up a few hours earlier, when the snowfall had thinned and then desisted altogether.

Philbert ran out into the morning, calling and waving just as Oort was doing, looking desperately amongst the gaunt faces of the survivors until he found two that he knew: Lita and Lorenzini, and how they hugged each other and could hardly stop talking over each other until they'd clarified certain facts.

‘We didn't mean to leave Kwert,' Lita was saying.

‘We just couldn't find him,' Lorenzini chipped in.

‘He's fine, he's fine!' Philbert assured them. ‘We found him last night.'

‘Thank goodness!' Lita said. ‘How did you get out of the castle? What happened up there? We've no idea what's been going on . . .'

‘Kroonk?' Philbert asked, and there was that lump in his throat that seemed to stop him up from stem to stern.

‘She's fine,' Lorenzini laughed. ‘She came away with us! We've her tethered in the forest yonder until we knew what was what.'

‘And what is what?' broke in Maulwerf, panting into their circle. ‘What on earth has happened? Why hasn't the Prince called out his men?'

‘Because he has no men,' said Otto coming up beside them, large and red-faced as always, and looking very grim. ‘But I've just heard word from one of the castle farriers that there was a rumour yestermorning of a load of someone else's coming up from the south, all shod and geared, though not a proper ­soldier among them.'

Maulwerf shook his head. ‘I don't understand. Why would they want anything to do with us?'

‘Because of your bloody acting troupes, that's what,' said a woman no one recognised who was kicking viciously at the snow with her sodden boots, her eyes darting all about her as if expecting another attack at any moment. ‘You lot travel all over the place and come up here with your foreign ideas, and just look at what's gone on because of it. It's always us locals have to pay the price.'

‘And your name, Madam?' Maulwerf asked politely.

‘My name be bloody damned!' the woman retorted. ‘I came here last night with my husband from the steadings down the road just for a bit of fun, and just look what you've brought down on our heads. And my husband is out here somewhere, buried in the snow and now my children are going to starve, all because of you . . .'

The woman began to snivel, hid her head in her scarf and moved away, kicking at the humps in the snow as she went, hoping and fearing, all at the same time, that she was going to find her husband who hadn't made it to the trees the night the wolves had struck.

‘Were we really to blame?' asked Little Lita quietly, immediately enfolded by her husband's arms. Maulwerf shook his head but caught Philbert's eye as he did so
,
and Philbert knew then that Kwert had told him all about Lengerrborn and what had gone on there and afterwards.

‘We don't know,' Maulwerf said. ‘We just don't know.'

The Fair folk had been, for the most part, resurrected from the forest, but the woman who'd confronted them earlier had been right: the people on the ice took the brunt of the attack, the itinerant pedlars and local villagers who'd come out to hawk their wares. Maulwerf's Fair had been camped on the farther side of the lake and of those who hadn't been up at the castle most made it away before the attack reached them. All were sombre, and there was none of the usual chatter about campfires, breakfast and coffee; taking their place were the unpleasant smells of damp cinders, spoiled wood and wool, burned leather, burned flesh. People moved around quietly, scraping the snow away from their wretched belongings, righting carts, hammering wheels back into kilter. They discovered a few survivors who'd remained undisturbed, trapped beneath collapsed booths or hiding beneath prickly blankets, too cold to move of their own accord, and all were greeted with surprise and gratitude. Everyone who was able grabbed hammers and tools, whittling pegs and dowels, began the long task of putting back together what they could salvage from what had been almost destroyed. Others went around gathering clothing and covers, distributing them to those who had lost everything but the wet rags upon their backs. Children kicked excitedly through the dirt and dead embers, picking up anything that glinted, or seemed faintly edible. They stopped abruptly when they came across Huffelump half-cooked, spitted on a broken tent-pole, a great pile of guts frozen over and glazed by her side, eyes dull, haunches hacked away, hooves stiff. They said nothing, but as one they turned and walked away and stopped their scavenging, began helping the adults sort through the many heaps of charred canvas, erecting the best bits they could find onto branches Otto had caused to be brought out of the forest to give some shelter from the elements.

The snow had stopped, but the wind in the following days was bitter, coming at them from the east, going right through their clothes and into their bones. They sent messengers off to the castle but got short shrift the first day, the drawbridge remaining resolutely up, the castle keeping within its carapace, holding to itself the living and the dead. All who'd survived were staff members, set upon only because they'd got in the way of the real goal, which was the men and women banqueting in state in the Great Hall. And into that hall they ventured later on the day following the attack, dragging out the carcasses of the slaughtered, the great and the good, including Frau Fettleheim – which took some doing – alongside Alarico and his wife and the Atheling Rupert. They ripped the tapestries from the walls to be used at first as stretchers and later to fuel the burning of the dead whom they heaped up into a great pile in the courtyard on top of everything flammable they could find, setting the lot to flame and burn, an action they almost immediately regretted, for it left every surface of the castle, every piece of cloth in which they'd wrapped themselves, impregnated with the stench, and sent every last one of them into a frenzy of cleaning, trying to scrub away the stink of blood and slaughter and rotting food that seeped from every floorboard and every stone of the walls, until they could bear it no more and down came the drawbridge at dawn on the second morning, and out went the people who had erstwhile chosen to be trapped within. It was a long time before anyone thought to go up to the roof, and only because the boy with the big head turned up again the moment the bridge came down and suggested forcefully that they do so, finding the frozen bodies of the flagsmen, just as the boy had said they would.

It might be thought that once the drawbridge was down all those erstwhile servants and underlings from the castle would desert but they did not – not for loyalty to the dead Prince, rather because they had been born and bred into the castle just as much as Rupert had and it was the only home they knew. That another would come in Rupert's place was a given, though when and how and who they didn't know, only that it would happen, and here they would stay until it did.

That second morning, Philbert was cheered to hear the rhythmic clanging of Otto's hammer upon his anvil echoing through the dismal day. Maulwerf ordered the survivors well; although his velvet jacket was unbrushed and muddy, his little glasses scratched and smudged with ash, he directed people where they were needed most: fixing up the least damaged carts first, leaving the worst to be overhauled as and when or burned for warmth if they could not be mended. They had everything on site needed for such a task – abundant raw materials and fuel from the forest, farriers and blacksmiths, wood turners and carvers, seamstresses, leatherworkers and toolmakers. Many of the trap-pulling animals had broken in panic from their loose tethers at the first sign of attack and were soon gathered in and Maulwerf set his people the goal of being up and gone within the week. The surviving pedlars and itinerants salvaged what they could and left immediately along with the villagers, taking their dead with them. Everything else that could be salvaged from the ice camp was heaped into neat piles: blankets here, possessions there, the bodies taken to the edge of the ice to be burned. That the castle had already done this to the dead inside their walls was apparent from the horrid plume of dark, greasy smoke going up the previous afternoon, Philbert shuddering to see it go, knowing that somewhere amongst that rancid pyre must be Frau Fettleheim, Alarico and La Chucha Lanuga, and all of the Fair's Folk stopped for a few moments respectful silence, knowing it too.

Their own pile of bodies, including those hacked and melted and dragged off the ice, numbered thirty-one in total. Maulwerf ordered them to be divided into six separate heaps and covered over with wood from the forest under the auspices of Otto, who knew about charcoal kilns and how best to make them burn right back into earth and ash. Onto the last of these heaps went Kwert. He'd survived that first night, thanks to Oort and Philbert, and made it through the following day, but nothing could be done to warm him up again, no matter how hard Philbert tried, and Kwert soon slipped into a cold silence from which he would never awake. Philbert was there to oversee his passing, make sure he was dressed as he should have been – a ruddy coloured blanket that was as close as Philbert could find to the red robes he hadn't worn since Lengerrborn. Lita did her best washing him down but hadn't the stomach to shave his cold grey chin, more stubbled and grizzled than ever. She tied his jaw into place, his eyelids kept closed by a couple of coins Lorenzini fished out of the snow, and then Kwert was lifted tenderly and placed on the pyre and buried with his neighbours in the forest wood. Maulwerf asked if Philbert wanted to say a few words, but he could not. Anything he thought of caught like fish-bones in his throat, and instead he took hold of the lighted brand handed to him by Otto and laid it at the pyre's base, just as others were doing to the other pyres, waiting for Maulwerf, the Father of the Fair, to sound out the signal, which came in the form of him ringing a doleful bell over and over as the brands were set and the pyres were lit, and all the dead were burned into sky, snow and ice. Two nights and one day those fires were kept burning, more wood piled on as was needed, and afterwards the ashes and bone fragments were shovelled up and placed into sacks, dropped into holes bored into the ice of the frozen lake. A few people were never accounted for, found neither in camp grounds nor in the castle, nor out on the ice. It was surmised they must have made their way far deeper into the forest than the others had done, become separated, lost their way, never to return. One of these was Hannah, which grieved Philbert greatly, and he spent many hours looking for her in amongst the trees, but there were no traces nor tracks to follow, not after all the snow that had fallen, and it was an impossible task. By night the wolves howled along their hidden tracks, making people wince at the thought of what they were doing out there, and to whom, in the trees.

The only person found was Herr Himbeere. He'd managed to lock himself inside the wood-cellar below the castle kitchens on the night of the attack, discovered four days later, baying like a dog with mange, ranting about how he'd been reduced to chewing bark for sustenance and sucking water from the soil.