Tomorrow by Damian Dibben

Author:Damian Dibben
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Published: 2018-01-17T16:08:05+00:00

10

WAR

Vienna, January 1628

The day after my master made his confession to the village priest, we left our village in the Carpathian hills and went to Vienna. The journey was punishing. Not only were we in the bitterest stretch of winter, but we’d barely any money remaining and had to take what meagre transport we could find. My master was undaunted, though.

‘The start of a new year, my champion,’ he called over the January wind, as we huddled amidst crates on the back perch of a mail wagon. ‘What better time to begin again.’

Perhaps it was the weather, but I found Vienna gloomy in that age. There was a long wait at the town gates, as unfriendly guards cross-examined every new arrival. And inside, we found a place so resolutely built to defend itself, with layer after layer of bastions, walls and checkpoints, that civilized life seemed to have been pressed out of it entirely. I expected my master to whisper something amusing to me—‘What an uncongenial locale,’ or, ‘Where are the dances?’ he might usually say—but his mind was on other things. There was a hard glint in his eye and a straightness to his spine that were unfamiliar to me.

We went to the Hofburg palace, to the court of Ferdinand II—both house and household were as plain and unwelcoming as the city, a warren of bureaucrats—and in his single-minded state, my master was faster than ever to persuade the necessary people of their vital need to employ him.

But my master had more in mind than just working as a palace physician. As soon as we were given our quarters, he set about his project, his preparations—I would learn soon enough—for joining the war. I remembered his last vow to Frantz on Christmas Eve: I shall give up my former existence and start anew. I shall do my duty. To the battlefield I shall go.

The first task, and the most vital—as well as the reason we then spent a full three years at Hofburg, my master playing the role of royal doctor—was the distilling of the powdered jyhr into its liquid form. The tincture would become the central substance of all he would do in the decades that followed, but I had no idea how fiendishly complicated it was to create. The process could not be hurried; it took months and months and was unpredictable at best, and oftentimes dangerous.

Before the jyhr was even added, he had to manufacture a brew of other ingredients, a compendium of chemicals and minerals so diverse we had to go to nearly every pharmacist and apothecary in Vienna, as well as put in special orders for certain materials and wait weeks for them to be sent from some other part of the continent, until he had what he wanted. Back in our rooms, working late every night, he calibrated, mixed and reduced them on the hot plate of the furnace for long and precise periods. It was cooled and warmed and cooled again.

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