The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [136]
“Nor I, but we’re close to Calw.” Manuel frowned, seeing she had the only stool.
“An’ will ’is Majesty be sharin a room with the lady?” Monique wiped ale foam from her mouth. “After a night or two beddin down under them evil trees I’m inclined ta take your pallet-minded ways ta heart.”
“What?” Manuel squinted, as if that might help him hear better over the hullabaloo.
“Did ya get us space in the common? I ain’t springin for a room less we ain’t got a choice.”
“No room,” said Manuel. “No rooms, and no room in the common. We’ll be camping out, though the keep says on nights like this folk are allowed to set up by the rivers once the party dies down.”
“Fuckin Fastnacht,” she spit, Manuel noting how much cooler her tone was now that they would not have a warm building to stumble inside after the festivities. He shrugged and drained his first beer. It was quality stuff, dark and stern as the woodland, and Manuel was thrilled they had found a decent town instead of spending the festival eve hunched around a fire in the loneliest fucking forest he had ever had the misfortune to ride through.
“I’m going to head down there after this, set up and get some sketching in.”
“I won’t join ya,” Monique belched. “Not til I get some fuckin meat in me. Unless they’re outta that, too, in which case I suppose I’ll eat my fuckin pony.”
“You want me to take her with me then, lest you lose control?”
“Huh?” A band had struck up somewhere in the packed tavern, a hurdy-gurdy moaning and a rumble-pot roaring.
“Do you want me to take your horse with me?!” Manuel shouted in her face, and she nodded. He guzzled his second beer, overjoyed to escape her company for a spell. She was not bad, not really, but Christ could the loudmouth tax one’s patience—a sentiment shared by Monique, as far as the artist went.
Out in the streets the people of Wolfach, farmers and cowherds and miners, were already celebrating the eve of Ash Wednesday with the sun still high overhead, stalls set up and hay cast down to catch the influx of dung from all the hayseeds journeying into town for the festival. Manuel grinned, and wondered when the hell he had last taken the time to come out to one of these. Masks that might be doubles of the ones that had haunted his nightmares as a child leered all about him, witches and monsters everywhere, and he wondered if they would have a running of the Bright Ones. How had it gone … the Perchten, the Bright Ones, were lords of the beasts, and could be fair or foul. The young, pretty ones chased the old witches, and—
A shapely girl in a white robe bumped into him as he led the horses through the crowd, and as he began to apologize he noticed her mask, a bright red wooden hag face, a ram’s horn and a stag’s antler jutting off at wild angles. She shrieked and shook his arm, then capered away, one phantom amidst many. Manuel had stopped cold, staring after her, the horsetail pinned to her robe swishing behind her.
“Eat it,” Manuel’s great-aunt rasped, her voice sharp in his memory even down all the years. “You eat or she cut your belly open, stuff you fulla straw.”
Perchta was not just some creature of the wilds, Manuel remembered, the memories swirling like the crowd around him, she was a pagan deity, one of the old gods that still haunted these hills. The mad old woman was the exact opposite of Manuel’s overzealous Christian grandfather, and even as a child he could not tell which ancient minder was more terrifying. His great-aunt had a secret shrine to Perchta she hid from her pious siblings, and she had made Manuel set out offerings, made him eat that disgusting fish gruel, which might have been tasty if she had not been the one making it, salted fish who knew how many years overripe mixed with moldering oats, while his mother was off doing whatever it was she did.
Manuel had always imagined his father’s side of the family would have treated him better, but the artist was a bastard, albeit one who knew the identity of his