Excerpt: THE TINDER BOX by M. R. Carey

The soldier, home from the wars

1

But home, it transpires, isn’t as fixed a thing as you might expect it to be.

Mag returned from the wars, at any rate. He came back to Allesheim, the country where he was born; to the winding roads and wooded slopes of Schönwald, through which he had tramped every day as a younger man with his tinker’s box on his back. His boots had measured every mile of that land, until he would have sworn he could tell you where he stood just by the feel of the ground under his feet and the taste of the pine-scented air in his mouth.

Now, after four years on the battlefields of Ehrlich and Pozhka, nothing was familiar. Ditches had been dug across the roads or boulders rolled into their beds to hamper the movement of enemy troops if they should breach the border. Signposts had been uprooted and left lying at the roadside. Moss had grown over them.

And the people when Tresti passed them were surly, on their guard, unwilling to exchange more than a word or a nod. Which way is Kotchim? A thumb hooked over the left shoulder, which is not God’s highway but the Devil’s. Can a man find work in Kotchim? A shake of the head, a shrug. A man will find what’s there to be found.

So on he walked, and on, wondering as he went if he would ever arrive at a place that felt like an ending, an arrival, instead of just another pause for breath.

Magnus Tresti, aged forty-six. Just plain Mag, mostly, to friends and enemies alike. A Schönwalder with all the dubious qualities that word implies, quick of wit and unpolished in manner, slow to anger but violent when roused, stolid in the face of suffering not through courage but out of an unquestioned sense that suffering is the ordinary way of things. A veteran of Lord Ulich’s Stalwarts, known as the Deathless—ironically, because they died in their hundreds at the Shtevy pass and in their thousands at Ketowik. In war, Mag had come to understand, a heroic reputation is the half-brother to a death sentence.

It was at Ketowik that Mag took a musket ball in his left thigh. His squad, standing at less than half-strength, had been ordered to charge uphill against an enemy line braced with enough artillery to blast them all to pieces three times over. Some of them had decided not to, since the order was insane, but Mag had gone along with the majority and sprinted headlong into an abattoir. A musket ball wasn’t that bad an outcome, all things considered.

Still, what with the damage the ball itself did and the havoc that the army surgeon wrought in digging it out, Mag was left with a hitching limp. He could still walk but he couldn’t march. Staff Sergeant Escher took this vexatious matter to the captain, who cashiered Mag on the spot. A convoy might take the speed of the slowest ship, but a regiment has not that luxury.

There was a final parade where Mag along with around two hundred other wounded men were given their nunc dimittis. The king himself, his august majesty Frederick Korff-Heldenburg von Grün, was in attendance. He was a well-favoured man in early middle age, his noble bearing set off by the chestful of medals he wore on his uniform, which was that of the army’s supreme commander—essentially a general’s blazon but with a great deal more of scarlet and gold. Mag couldn’t help wondering where the king had come by those medals. He had never been within a mile of any battlefield. Perhaps he had them as gifts from his field marshals.

At the king’s side was a very tall gentleman with the almost transparent white hair of extreme age but the muscular and commanding physique of a man in his prime. This courtier or adviser to the king was most extraordinarily dressed. His vest, jacket and breeches were nothing out of the norm, though clearly very fine, but he was laden down with jewellery and adornments of every kind. He had rings on three fingers of his right hand, the stones—diamond, ruby and sapphire—indiscreetly large. Around his neck were a great many chains and pendants and lockets, so many that they clashed and clanked as he walked. And he had besides, which Mag had never seen in a man before, a number of rings in his left ear, of differently coloured metals arranged from light to dark in a kind of rainbow.

Mag nudged the trooper next to him. “Who’s yonder ironmonger?” he murmured. The man only glowered and shook his head. Better not to risk being put on a charge right then, things being what they were.

The king stood in front of the Deathless and congratulated what was left of them on the good fortune of their having survived. Their glory would live for ever, he told them, and that was the true meaning of their proud name. The flesh dies, but the story of its dying gets to be endlessly retold. And they themselves, the king exhorted them, should retell it as often as they could. They should declaim to anyone who asked them that they had fought in the king’s wars and acquitted themselves with honour. They should be proud, and happy. For was it not the greatest good any man could imagine to give his all for his country and his sovereign?

He paused for applause, but there was only silence from the ranks. They had just been through the several circles of Hell for their country and their sovereign. They had little breath left for cheering and still less spirit. After a moment the much-decorated courtier raised his hands and clapped them together. In the stillness the sound they made was a great boom like a cannon’s report. He repeated the action, twice, thrice, more times in a quickening rhythm until at last the assembled soldiery took it up. It was like magic. Even Mag found himself applauding, though he could not have said why. The stranger had conjured up a semblance of approval for the king’s words where there was none.

The occasion took a darker turn at once, however. What followed next was the punishment of those who in His Majesty’s august opinion hadn’t given enough, having refused to charge when the order was sent down. These also numbered around two hundred—for every acclaimed hero, a faithless coward. The cowards had been standing off to one side of the general muster all this time under guard, their heads bowed, each man hobbled with a chain so he couldn’t run. The king pronounced execration on them for dishonouring themselves, their families, their entire nation. Then he pronounced sentence. Every last man would be shot.

The executions were carried out in batches. Ten men at a time were hauled from the wretched throng and made to stand in a line. Twenty troopers with muskets stood facing them, and on the order of a grim-faced colonel they fired.

The judicial butchery went on for some considerable time. A single volley did not always suffice to kill every man. Some were only wounded. One or two had not been hit at all. The troopers had to reload and fire again until nothing moved or lived. Then the bodies were dragged away and a new cohort chivvied in to be slaughtered in their turn.

Mag had joined the army at a low ebb when all his other sources of income had dried up, and after his lover of many years had abandoned him. Long before this moment he had come to see the decision as the worst he had ever made. The cauldron of battle had been terrible. This was a different cauldron, and its heat was more than he could bear. He stood and wept silently as he saw half a company of hale young men butchered by their own comrades.

The king, by contrast, stood unmoved and watched with grim approbation, while his bejewelled adviser did not watch at all but stared at the distant hills as if bored by the whole spectacle. Men’s deaths must carry a different weight, Mag thought, when considered from such a great eminence.

Hatred was an indulgence far removed from Mag’s stolid temperament, but he decided on that day that he would allow himself to hate King Frederick. It was a pity, all things considered, that the king had chosen not to prosecute his wars in his own person. His being taken out of the world would leave none worse off and many a great deal happier. As for those retellings of glorious battles and great victories, Mag would hold himself aloof from them. He had nothing useful to say on that score.

With the killing finally done and the bodies hauled away for burial, a colonel of the regiment went down the ranks of the cashiered, saluting each man in turn for his sterling service and giving him five silver thalers by way of a pension. Mag took his coin in silence. Most of the others did too. The colonel tried to raise a second round of cheering for His Majesty’s bounty, but he did not have the commanding presence of the man with the necklaces and the rings. The cheer was the most ragged and forlorn thing Mag had ever heard.

Then the regiment moved on, leaving the pensioners to find their own way home by way of villages they and their comrades had swept through like a plague scant weeks before. To begin with the men walked together, but they soon realised how conspicuous this made them and broke apart by degrees into smaller and smaller groups. Mag was happy when he found himself at last alone. He had had his fill of being part of a muster. Men banded together were oftentimes worse than men alone, and these men were in the direst of exigences. He didn’t want to be drawn into some atrocity committed out of sheer desperation.

He kept to the hills and woods as he made his way back to the border, skirting wide around every settlement or habitation, every shepherd’s bothy and charcoal-burner’s hut. He tore off his insignia but he could do nothing about his greatcoat of Allesheim grey: spring had not yet come and the nights were too cold to go without it. The silver coins he separated out so they wouldn’t jingle, two in the greatcoat’s capacious pockets, one in each boot and the last tucked into the lining of his cap.

He ate almost nothing, because there were no nuts or berries to be found and he was a poor trapper. When he slept it was never for long, and that was not just because of the cold. His experiences in half a dozen bloody battles and their even bloodier aftermaths ensured that he woke up struggling with shadows, his breath stopped in his throat and his heart squeezed tight in an invisible fist.

Mag was relieved when he finally reached Allesheim soil, though it wasn’t soil in the usual sense but the thick alluvial sludge of the Ullescarp estuary. By day the mudflats would have been full of local peasant women with their skirts tucked up around their waists foraging for cockles, mussels and brown crabs. Mag crossed by night, and nobody saw him pass by except the man in the moon.

So now here he was once more in the land that had given him birth, feeling as though he might have left some vital part of himself behind in a corner of a foreign field, or perhaps in a mess tent, a latrine pit, a dusty road between two places whose names he couldn’t pronounce. His bad leg ached and his sodden boots squelched, brown water oozing out through the lace-holes with every step.

But at least his thalers were legal tender now. And he could venture into human spaces without being afraid that the sight of a grey coat would trigger a hue and cry. He found a road and stayed on it, hoping to see the smoke from a chimney up ahead and follow it into a village. A village would have an inn and an inn would have a fire, not to mention beer and a bed—although Mag would need to pay two coppers for a hot bath before he put himself between clean sheets.

He met but few people on the road, and this was where he began to see a tight-lipped caution in how they greeted him. Indeed most didn’t greet him at all, but would have walked on by if Mag hadn’t hailed them with his questions. By this time he had a rough sense of where he was, enough to be sure that Kotchim was the nearest village but not to find his way there without signs or directions. Signs were still lacking, and getting directions was like squeezing holy water out of a bishop’s mitre. He had remembered his countrymen as being friendly and outgoing in the main, especially those who lived away from towns and cities. Perhaps his four years in the army had left Mag with a fearsome bearing that invited wariness. Or perhaps the Allesheim he had come back to was not in all ways identical to the one he had left.

He found his way to Kotchim at last, but it proved a disappointment. The only inn was an establishment called the King’s Head, though the king would have been hard put to recognise himself in the crude likeness of him on the sign. The innkeeper, a woman with bare arms considerably more muscular than Mag’s own, would have charged him five groats for a night’s lodging. At that rate he would be penniless before the week was out. When he asked about any honest work that might be had, the good lady told him bluntly that such jobs as needed doing would be done by Kotchim men and Kotchim women. “Near at hand is near at heart,” she said.

“Aye, so it is,” Mag agreed. “Which is why all families are full of love and amity. And it’s clear that we have nothing but warm feelings for our neighbours in Ehrlich and Pozhka, which is why we go to visit them so often. I’ll take a stoup of the dark ale, lady, if it please you. And some bread and sausage.”

The innkeeper’s face closed like a fist. “You’ll get nothing from me,” she said. “Carry your treasonous talk off to where it’s welcome, and be hanged to you. We serve no ghosts here.”

Mag was puzzled by this last sally, but he saw which way the land lay and left without bandying any more words. Three miles further on he came to a coaching inn by the roadside and had his meat and ale there, though he was careful to keep his observations to himself. He risked a question though, asking the man who brought him his meal whether the inn—or any establishment thereabouts—would scruple to serve a ghost if one should wander in.

He was only trying to discover what the word might mean in this context, but in that regard he met with no success at all. The man blanched at first, and shook his head, but passed quickly from fearful to belligerent. “I don’t know what you’ve heard,” he blustered, “but we’re all loyal subjects of His Majesty here, may God and all His angels watch over him! If one of that rabble came through my door he’d get short shrift. Is there anything else you might be wanting?”

“Only some salt,” Mag said.

“To season the lies you’ve been swallowing,” the man grumbled, and took himself away. The salt was not produced, and Mag finished his meal in silence. He was aware of grim looks being aimed in his direction from all around, and once he had put down his trencher he didn’t linger.

These scenes were repeated often over the next few days. Not everyone Mag met was as cold as Kotchim’s innkeeper, but few were what he would have called warm. In some villages the local watch officers ordered him to move on as soon as he arrived lest they arrest him as a vagrant. In others the threatening looks of passing men made him misgive and he took himself away rather than risk some violent confrontation.

All in all it was not what a man wounded in his country’s service would have hoped for, but by and by he came to understand the why and wherefore of it. He saw it in the lean faces of the people, the barren fields, the spavined horses pulling half-empty carts. This was the fourth year of the war. The currents of normal life had been diverted into strange and unavailing channels. Want and scarcity were everywhere.

Rumours abounded too, and most especially rumours of ghosts. Across the country, it was said, brigands and ne’er-do-wells were committing outrages, stealing from decent folk, descending from nowhere to pillage and murder and then disappearing again as quick as a man’s breath on a cold day. To conceal their identities these looters and slaughterers wore white kerchiefs over their faces, giving them something of the aspect of wandering spirits—wherefore they were known as the Ghost Army.

Mag felt that he was getting only half this story. If the Ghost Army was only a nest of rogues and brigands, why should speaking out against the war be a sign of membership? Why did the pot-boy at that coaching inn, at the mere mention of the ghosts, assert his absolute loyalty to the king? There was more to be learned there, for a certainty.

Nonetheless, all this unease and mutual suspicion went a great way towards explaining Mag’s dilemma. He was not a man without resources. He had essayed a great many trades in his youth, some of them honest and some less so. Then he had served in the king’s army, in wartime and in a front-line regiment to boot, where he had added more skills to his blazon. He was willing to turn his hand to almost anything, but wherever he asked he found doors closed in his face and no heartier welcome than the hard stare and the cold shoulder. People were either afraid or angry, or not infrequently both.

His case was somewhat urgent. Even living as he was, sleeping under his coat in the forest at night and only eating when his hunger became too great to bear, he was burning through his meagre store of coins very quickly. When it was gone he would be destitute. He would starve.

2

One day, on the road between Odelni and Shteve, Mag chanced upon a corpse. It was lying by the side of the road, staring up at the sky through unseeing eyes. It could not have been lying there very long, for it had barely begun to stink and there were only a few fat flies perched on it. In life this had been a man of around Mag’s own age or a little older, with greying hair and a bulbous nose that had been broken once and healed crooked. He was dressed in a peasant’s shirt and breeches. There were three rents in the shirt where knives—or perhaps the same knife three times—had carved him. His feet were bare. Someone had killed him for his boots. Or it might be they had killed him for some other thing he carried and taken the boots as an afterthought.

Mag searched the man’s pockets and cursed when he found them empty. Of course it was unlikely the footpads who had waylaid and murdered this poor unfortunate would have left anything of any value about his person. In times like this “waste not, want not” was a universal creed.

The man’s face, now that Mag was leaning over him, bore an expression of tragic grief. His stare was a reproach to the heavens that had allowed this terrible thing to happen to him. By the same token it was a reproach to Mag, who was ashamed that his first impulse had been a mercenary one. He muttered an apology to the dead man’s spirit. Then he said a short prayer, the soldier’s “Father, on Thee I call”. For his own part he was not a man who found any comfort in religion. The idea of Heaven struck him as the kind of tale a child asks for at night to keep away the fear of the dark. But he believed in ghosts, and who knew where a ghost might look for solace?

He sat down beside the dead man, on a hummock of speargrass and dandelions. He took out his pipe and put it to his mouth. He had no tobacco, nor any means of lighting the pipe, but the familiar feel of the stem between his teeth was pleasant. “Well now, friend,” Mag said, “here we are together, you and I. And there’s not so very much to choose between your case and mine. If anything you have the better of me, for being dead already you’ve no more tribulations to fear. And your death when it came was quick, where mine is like to be more drawn out. But I don’t envy you or begrudge you. I’m not so mean-spirited. And I hope wherever you went from here you had an easy journey of it.”

Mag sat a while longer, pondering as the afternoon wore on. It felt wrong, now that he had had this conversation with the dead man, to leave him here by the roadside to be eaten piecemeal by foxes and wild dogs or to become a breeding ground for maggots. But what else could he do? He had no shovel with which to dig a grave, no flint or tinder to start a fire. Well then, he decided at last, I must make what shift I can.

He hauled the body off the road, some little way into the woods, and went about to find rocks and stones, which he piled up around the dead man and on top of him. The cairn was crude and shapeless but it might serve to deter wild animals from desecrating the body. When he was done he recited the soldier’s prayer again. You were meant to say it before going into battle so the words were only an imperfect fit here, but it would have to do.

Mag took his leave at last, feeling a strange dislocation or doubling of his senses—as though the dead man was watching his departing back, or as though he saw himself from behind as he walked away. He had let his imagination rest with that sad corpse, and it had made itself too comfortable there. Now it was as if he was divided between a living self and a dead one, and both were true or else neither. It wasn’t a happy feeling, and it weighed on him the heavier as the shadows lengthened and the daylight began its slow surrender.

There was a village up ahead. Mag had no great hopes of it but when the path forked to left and right he turned his steps towards the distant rooftops. He had had his fill of the forest’s vast, breathing silence and the dead man’s equivocal company.

3

It was hard to tell at first where the village’s inn was, for it had no sign and looked no different from an ordinary house, but Mag heard the sound of voices raised in song and he followed that. It brought him to a small low-ceilinged room, full of tobacco smoke and noise and the smell of sweat, where some dozen men with tankards in their fists bellowed bawdy catches while a dozen more told each other how the war might best be won.

Mag bought himself a jug of ale that was as thin as piss and a bowl of potato dumplings in gravy, acutely conscious of his diminishing store of coins. He sat in a corner of the room where he believed he was most likely to be ignored, but this was a small enough place that a stranger could not escape notice. In due course, and before he’d finished his meal, a red-faced man asked him what his business was in Rubik. “Only to rest from the road,” Mag said, “and perchance to look for work.”

The red-faced man was tall and broad-shouldered and what with that and his complexion Mag was inclined to be wary of him. He had a companion very much smaller and thinner, with a gaunt face and dark eyes and something of the manner of an animal that lived under stones best left unturned. The red-faced man’s name was Eckerhart, and the stone-dweller’s was Horst. Mag said he was pleased to make their acquaintance, and managed to keep his face straight as he said it.

“In sooth, though,” he asked the two men, “is there any farmer hereabouts in need of day labourers? Or a mason, or a carpenter? For if there is, I pledge you I’m a stout fellow of my hands and will do as much work as the next man, unless the next man were Hercules or Wide John.”

He smiled as he said this. Moreover he made the smile broader than he was wont and brandished it for longer. The danger in this company, he felt, would be to show himself too clever, wherefore he went as far as he could the other way. If these yokels thought he was a simpleton the worst that would befall was that they might try to beat him at trumps or seven high, which would bring them no joy.

“There’s no day-work to be had,” the red-faced man said. “If there were you’d find me and Horst here doing it, for all the other able-bodied men are gone to the wars.”

“And you two alone stayed back?” Mag asked, careful to put no weight on the words at all, no hint of judgement.

“I’ve a withered arm,” the stone-dweller said, showing it. “I’m no cripple, but I couldn’t fire a musket or carry a pike two-handed.”

“And I’m given to fits,” the red-faced man added, with something of boastfulness in his tone. “My eyes roll up into my head and I foam at the mouth like a dog. I’d be like to swallow my tongue if someone standing by didn’t shove a stick between my teeth to lock my jaws.”

“That must be a terrible sight,” said Mag, still in the same bland tone.

“Aye, it is.”

“And despite your infirmities you two good gentlemen go about to assist your neighbours when they need more hands than they can muster.”

“Aye, we’re good for it,” said the red-faced man belligerently.

“Good for all of it,” his friend confirmed. But then a look of idiot cunning came over his face and he tilted his head to one side. “I’m forgetting though,” he said. “There is such a one that wants work done. A great deal of work.”

“Is there?” the red-faced man demanded, seeming surprised at the news.

“Oh yes. Only her house is a good three miles out. Such a great way that she’s not counted in our number any more when the king calls a census.”

The red-faced man’s eyes widened a little as he caught the other’s drift. “Oh,” he said. “Aye, there’s that one.” He gave a snort of laughter, so badly suppressed that it turned into a prolonged and wheezing cough. When this paroxysm had subsided Mag asked politely who this goodwife might be.

“The widow Mirchella,” the man named Horst told him. “Her husband was the richest man between here and Pillen.”

“In his day,” Eckerhart added.

“In his day, aye. There’s not so much there any more. But still, Frau Mirchella—as a woman that lives alone—stands always in need of a man’s help to keep her house and grounds in good trim. You could do worse than go out there and sue to her.”

“You could do worse,” Eckerhart said. He lowered his head to his tankard, not to drink but to hide the grin that had spread like a rash across his face.

Mag got the general gist of all this without needing to understand the joke in its particulars. Either the widow Mirchella was chary of her safety and kept a bird-gun to deter casual visitors, or else she had run mad, or haply she was so tight-fisted her name was a watchword, or for any of a hundred reasons these two men thought his visiting her would result in amusement or upsets. He thanked them gravely for their advice, which he had no intention at all of following, and took his leave.

He had been heading more or less directly west ever since crossing the border, leaving Pozhka and all that had happened there as far behind him as he could. He saw no reason to change direction now, so he left Rubik by continuing on along the same road on which he’d entered, which was also the village’s only street.

Night was coming on, lit by a parsimonious sliver of a moon, and Mag was beginning to wish he had purchased a more substantial meal. A meagre bowl of dumplings had only been enough to remind him of how hungry he was. Now his stomach was griping and his legs felt weak. It was clear he wouldn’t be able to walk very much further.

Rounding a bend in the road, he suddenly came upon a house, standing behind an iron fence in its own grounds. It was a structure of considerable size, with gables to its roof and a portico with the kind of pillars that are no pillars at all but only plaster mouldings set to either side of the door; it was no mansion or palace but it seemed that it must be at the very least the house of some local justice or prosperous landlord. At second glance Mag noticed signs of sore neglect: gaps in the shingles, a cracked window, one of the chimney pots half-askew.

He remembered then the talk of the widow, and the hilarity that had arisen back at the inn at the mention of her. The man named Horst had said she lived three miles out so the distance was right. And his red-faced friend had said her house stood in need of repair, which was certainly the case here.

Mag considered. Bearing in mind the two men’s half-disguised mirth he doubted there was any succour to be found here. He saw no lights, so it was likely no one was home, or else that the whole household was already abed. But he was extremely weary and would need to stop for the night soon in any event. And then before too many days passed his money would be gone, at which point he would be in a perilous pass indeed. All in all he felt he had little to lose.

He went to the gate, whose black iron showed angry red where the rust had eaten through it. He saw no knocker or bell there, no way of hailing the house, but the gate itself stood ajar so he stepped inside and walked up the long drive to the door. It was a walk through tall weeds, spilling up between the paving stones like a dark tide. He wondered if he might be mistaken after all. Perhaps nobody lived in this place. If any did they must be almost as poor and desperate as himself.

Three stone steps led up to the house. The middle step had broken at some point and the pieces of it had been reassembled in place like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Mag decided not to trust his weight to it.

The door of the house was of polished oak, though the varnish had worn away in places and then the wood had bleached, giving it overall a piebald, unhealthy look. There was a knocker, made of the same wrought iron as the gate. Mag knocked, not too hard but with what he hoped would sound like the confidence of an honest man. Then he waited.

No sound came from inside the house. He could knock again, but if there was anyone within they could not have failed to hear him the first time. His gaze wandered to that cracked window, then back to the door. He could almost discern the outline of a face in the patterns of light and shade and the slight rucks and ripples where the veneer had warped away from the core wood. The round of the door knocker was the face’s wide-open eye, the other one being screwed shut.

He knocked again, with greater force. Hollow echoes of the sound reverberated around him, but died quickly as the silence of the nighted forest crowded in on all sides.

Well then. He had tried. The third time at anything was reputed to bring its own luck, three being the number of the Trinity, but Mag was fastidious about his superstitions and that was not one to which he gave credence. He turned away, about to leave, when a voice spoke right at his elbow.

“What do you want? Why are you disturbing a good Christian woman at this time of night?”

Mag spun in place again. The door had opened without a sound—a feat he would not have thought was possible given the state of its timber. A woman stood now in the doorway, framed against perfect blackness beyond. She was carrying a small lantern, which meant that her face was lit from below, the shadow of her upraised hand—the one that clasped the lantern—sending a splash of inky black across her cheek.

If this was the widow she was younger than Mag had expected, probably not yet forty years old. She was tall and slender, with thick and lustrous black hair imperfectly tucked into a white lace mob cap. She was not at all unhandsome of face, in Mag’s untutored opinion, but she carried herself with a cold, patrician air. Her lip was curled and the brow above her grey eyes creased, every line of her face expressing disapproval at his being there, at his having the temerity to rouse her up—from her bed, it seemed, for she was dressed in a long white nightgown.

“Are you struck dumb?” the lady demanded. Her voice was high and sharp. “I asked you what the matter was. If you’ve come here to rob me then as God is my witness you’ll wish you’d gone another way.”

“Pardon me, goodwife,” Mag said. He took off his hat and pressed it to his chest. “I’m no robber. I’m one that was a soldier, and took a hard wound in the king’s wars. Magnus Tresti is my name, and it’s a name with no blush or blemish to it. Now that I can’t fight for my country I’m looking to serve in some other way. I saw your house as I was passing by and wondered if perhaps you might have any work that needs doing. Cleaning, as it might be, or repairs.”

“You think my house is dirty, then,” the woman said. “Dirty and tumbledown.”

“By no means,” Mag protested. “Only…” He shrugged. “There are some chores a man can put his shoulder to more easily than a woman can. If the goodwife lives alone…”

“Who told you I live alone?”

“Nobody!” By Christ, Mag thought, talking to this woman was an uphill kind of business. “Only I saw the goodwife answering the door herself, rather than have a maid do it, and so I dared to assume…”

“Oh, you did, did you?” The woman’s nose, which was prominent and somewhat sharp, tilted up as she examined him then down again when she had seen enough. “Well, you should dare less and keep your assumptions to yourself.” There was a pause. The lantern guttered, making a tapestry of shadows run sidelong across her face. “Have you a place to sleep?” she demanded.

Mag shook his head. He saw no point in lying.

“Then you assumed—” the woman put a heavy emphasis on the word “—that I’d take you into my house in dead of night, trusting in your forbearance not to murder me in my bed or steal my silver. You say you’re a soldier, but for aught I know it might be the Ghost Army you did your soldiering in. Or you might be a footpad, or a prisoner escaped from the gaolhouse at Pillen.”

“I’m none of that, goodwife.” Mag stood on his dignity now because he could see that he was getting nothing out of this. “I never stole anything in my life, nor ever ate a crust I hadn’t earned. God give you good rest, I’ll not trouble you more.”

The woman tutted, waving his words aside as if they were so many vexatious flies. “So quick to take offence! I only said I wouldn’t let you into the house, not that I wouldn’t employ you.” She turned her head to the left, that sharp nose now becoming a pointer. “There’s a stable over there that’s no longer used. It may still smell somewhat of horses and horses’ doings, but it’s clean and dry and it will give you some shelter against the cold. You can sleep in there tonight, if you’ve a mind to, and tomorrow we’ll speak further. I don’t deny there are some chores hereabouts that I’ve put off too long, and perhaps you’re the man to take them in hand. Perhaps, I say, but I make no promises. We’ll speak on the morrow.”

Mag stammered out a thanks, but the woman was already turning away. She stepped back through the door and it closed behind her as silently as it had opened. He was alone.

He went where she had pointed. After a few steps he looked back over his shoulder. There was no light anywhere in the house, nor even a faint glow to show where that lantern might have gone.

He found the stable very much as the woman had described it, full of ancient stinks but mercifully free of actual filth. There was no lock or latch on the door, but he found a large stone in the overgrown garden which he pushed into place to hold it closed. He settled in a corner, drew his coat around him and made shift to sleep.