The House of War and Witness by Carey Mike

Author:Carey, Mike [Carey, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2014-06-18T16:00:00+00:00

The soldier took off his cap and smoothed down his blond hair. Though a little wild and unkempt, it was – Drozde saw – very fine. Perhaps not fine enough to spin into gold, but she could see why a mother would say that. And yes, the smile was charming enough. Drozde wondered, now, how she could ever have thought the soldier a man. But then Ermel jammed the cap back down over her ears, and squared her jaw, and was a man again.

‘I gave them two years,’ she said. ‘What was I to do? They had only just found each other, and it would have broken my heart to sunder them. Perhaps they ran away together. Or perhaps the recruiters came again, two summers later, like reaper men out of season, and took one of my lovely boys with them to war and woe.

‘It is not my story – not that part of it – but I know which ending I prefer.’

There was a murmur of sympathy among the other ghosts as Ermel finished speaking.

‘Thank you for your story,’ Drozde said to her, and the others flowed around the soldier, offering their thanks with sorrowful faces, for the tale had been a sad one. Magda reached up to stroke the woman’s hair, and Ermel knelt down and removed her cap again so that the child could reach it. The sight of the two of them, Magda’s face rapturous even though her hand went through Ermel’s head as often as it made contact, touched Drozde in a way that surprised her.

But something about Ermel’s story had made her uneasy.

‘You said you were from Prussia,’ she asked the young soldier, ‘and that you fought in this place and triumphed. How can that be? The soldiers here are forever boasting that Silesia will never fall into Prussian hands. Your conquest must have been a long time ago if no one now remembers it.’

The young woman hesitated. She seemed suddenly constrained – wary even – and Drozde knew that she had come up again against that invisible barrier, the unspoken promise which bound the ghosts to silence. Ermel spread out her hands in a gesture of helplessness.

‘I’m sorry, Drozde. That’s one of the things we’re not supposed to talk about. But you know, even if I was allowed to tell it I couldn’t, not really. It’s hard to even think about time very much once you’re here.’

Drozde knew that she would in all probability get nothing more from Ermel, but still she persisted. ‘Can you try?’ she asked her.

Ermel frowned in concentration, staring beyond Drozde as if trying to sort her memories in her own mind. At length she said, ‘It was on the day after the comet, I know that. A star with a long tail, over in the northern sky. A beautiful thing, it was, and we only saw it that one night. Our captain said it was a sign of victory, but there were others feared it meant death. For

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