Chapter 3
Otto
We shouldn’t have tossed that fucking farmhand down the well, Otto thinks as he walks to the barn. The thought is old by now, and no longer sends him into a fit of rage, though it does leave him feeling sour.
Poisoning a well with a corpse is all fine and proper unless you and your fellow soldiers need that well’s water. Any fool knows that.
Then again, they didn’t expect to be here long, now did they?
This was supposed to be a quick raid to secure food and drink, and it would have been, if that fucking farmhand hadn’t stabbed Karl in the belly with a shit-smeared pitchfork.
Now the farmhand is dead, his body corrupting the water, and Karl is dying slowly, his wounds corrupting his blood.
If it were up to Otto, they’d just put him out of his misery already.
You wouldn’t let a dog suffer like this, let alone a brother in arms. But it’s not up to him.
Wolf and Fergus the Irishman are deeply religious and would never stain their souls with the murder of a sick man, never mind that they have no problem stabbing, gutting, and maiming on the battlefield.
Gottfried is a Protestant mercenary and therefore doesn’t much care who he fights for as long as he gets to eat, but he, too, would rather not bloody his hands if it isn’t necessary.
And so, because Karl is too sick to move, and they can’t leave him behind because there’s no saying what the farmer’s family might do to him then, they are stuck here until Karl decides to hurry up and die already.
Otto enters the barn, inhales the smell of wood, hay, and manure, then grabs a stool and a pail, and sits down next to the goat.
They ate her kid last night, and if no one milks her, her udders will become infected.
In time, such an infection will kill her.
That would be a waste of good milk and good meat, neither of which are particularly abundant right now.
Otto scratches the goat between her horns, chuckles at the way she tosses her head and rolls her eyes at him. Goat eyes never fail to remind him of the coin slot in the collection box at church.
As he milks her, he finds himself growing calm.
Here, he doesn’t need to listen to the farmer’s daughter weeping.
The sound is incessant, like the droning of a hive but with just enough variation to make it impossible to tune out.
Last night, he smacked her in the mouth to get her to shut up.
His hand came away all bloody, the knuckles marred with the impression of her teeth, two of which have now blackened and will soon fall from her gums, but even that would not quiet her.
Otto prays that Gottfried won’t take this peasant girl back with him like he did the last one.
He doesn’t want to be confronted with her agony at the camp, though if Gottfried keeps treating her the way he has, she probably won’t last long; there’s only so much the body can take.
A good thing that other girl ran off, or she’d probably be dead by now.
You’re a lucky man, Otto Donatus Kreuzler, he tells himself, for unlike Gottfried and Wolf and Fergus, Otto has a wife.
She’s a real treasure: skilled, nurturing, and quiet by nature, even when he’s inside of her and makes her spend.
He can only tell he’s brought her to bliss by the way her brow creases, then smooths until it’s like a piece of alabaster.
Otto feels in his pocket for the delicate golden necklace with a small crucifix at the end.
He took it from the farmer’s wife. How she screamed when he ripped it from her throat!
His Frieda would never scream so. He imagines brushing away her dark braid, then clasping the chain around her slender neck.
She might shudder against the cool bite of the gold, the flesh of her throat rippling like a horse’s flank.
Once the shiver has passed, she will smile at him, grateful to wear such a jewel around her neck.
It’ll look much better adorning her queenly throat than the neck of that ugly farmer’s wife, who should have known better than to wear something so costly.
A smart man can grow rich from war. The world is full of precious things ready for the taking. Just this past year, Fergus the Irishman found a beautiful ivory statue of the Mother Mary, and Wolf a book of hours bound in deerskin and decorated with gold leaf.
By far the strangest thing they’ve found has to be Gottfried’s skull, though.
He found a Swede clutching it when the miserable wretch really should have been clutching what was left of his leg.
There could be no mistaking this skull for anything but a saint’s.
Yet looking at it had made Otto feel profoundly uneasy.
It was a strange thing, that skull, not yellow like the bone relics he has seen in churches before and has prayed to, but a chalky white.
And that hair… Don’t they say the devil’s hair is red?
Thank God it’s gone now, lost to a peasant in a game of dice.
The goat bleats suddenly and backs away, kicking over the pail of milk.
Otto curses, springs to his feet. He rights the pail, but most of the warm milk has been spilled already. He raises his hand to hit the goat. The animal doesn’t even cower. It stands frozen, panting, looking at something behind Otto with its coin-slot eyes.
Otto’s nape begins to tingle, and he knows that he’s no longer alone. He whips around, ready to give Wolf or Fergus or Gottfried a tongue-lashing, but it’s not one of his comrades he finds.
A man he doesn’t know is leaning against the wall. He’s tall and gaunt. His dark hair and eyes and clothes, sober but well cut and made of fine materials, make him look extraordinarily pale, the sort of color you’d expect to see only on a sick man who hasn’t been outside in months.
Or one recently dead.
Like a corpse resurrected by the devil himself to dance at a witch’s sabbath, Otto can’t help but think. The tingling at his nape spreads like the spilled milk, rapidly and relentlessly.
“Who are you?” Otto demands to know. He feels for his Katzbalger, realizes he has left the small sword inside the farm. No matter. He has killed men with his bare hands before and will do so again, if pressed.
The man looks up, smiles. It’s a hungry smile, all teeth. There’s something wrong with his face, though Otto can’t say what, exactly. He doesn’t like that. He rushes the man, grabs him by the throat, and pushes him hard against the wall. “I asked you a question,” he hisses.
The man’s smile never falters, which is decidedly unnerving. Otto has encountered men who have gone mad before. Some laugh without cause and with the abandon normally only found in children. There’s nothing childlike about this man’s grin, though.
His only answer to the fear that rises inside of him now and makes the sweat prickle under his armpits is to smother it with violence. He elbows the man hard in the face, causing his head to snap back and crack against the wall.
Blood as bright and thick as sealing wax slowly rolls out of his nose. The man touches his nose, then looks at his bloodied fingertips. Still he grins, as if his face is fixed in this position, like a death mask made of wax. “My turn.”
At last, Otto realizes what it is that has unsettled him about the man’s face. It’s not the chalky color of his skin nor his too-wide grin, but his eyes.
Like the goat’s, the pupils are horizontal slits.
Before he can let this sink in, the door to the barn flies open.
For a moment, Otto is too blinded by the sudden light to make out more than the shape of a person standing in the doorway.
He squints against the pain of his pupils contracting rapidly.
If this man with his goat’s eyes has brought an accomplice, and that accomplice has a pike, a halberd, a sword, any type of weapon, really, then Otto could be in serious trouble, but if he can alert the others, then he might…
His eyes adjust to the light, and he can finally make out the face of the man darkening the doorstep.
It’s the dead farmhand.
Otto has seen dead men before. Of course he has. He’s a mercenary, isn’t he? Though a Catholic in name, it is really at the altar of war that he worships, and has been worshipping for twenty years.
He is also intimately familiar with the workings of the human body.
How else can you torture a man for information without killing him, without having him lose consciousness, without his mind snapping?
There’s an art to it, one that Otto has mastered.
He can keep a man alive for days and reduce him to nothing more than a weeping sack of meat and shit ready to renounce his mother, his name, his God, anything to please make it stop.
And because he has seen so many dead men before, and because he knows the limits of what the human body can take before it buckles, he knows instantly that the farmhand is dead, very much so.
Yet somehow, he has crawled out of the well and is standing in front of Otto now on his shattered legs, dripping water polluted with rot everywhere. He lurches toward Otto. His movements are strange and jittery, like those of a wooden puppet being tugged to and fro by an inexperienced hand.
Though Otto’s brain has trouble making sense of what he sees, his body’s response to the sight is almost instantaneous. His hands turn stone-cold and his heart beats with such force, he can actually feel his eyeballs bulging.
But he hasn’t survived twenty years of war by freezing when an enemy approaches, and he doesn’t do so now. Lacking any other weapon, he grabs the pail that had contained goat’s milk and swings it against the farmhand’s head. It connects with a sickening crunch.