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The silence after Suchdol is, selfishly, the happiest time of Henry’s new life.
It begins in the morning. The Rattay riders depart the fortress while a buoyant southern wind ripples down the clover fields and through their golden standards, making the warhorses lighthearted and sanguine, their bloodthirst slaked for a while. The air is cool and smells of charred flour and stewed gooseberries in porridge. The poor courtyard is rubbled with the broken ribs of Sir Peter’s guest tower, littered with deadly wood chips and chalky dust and a dead mare besides.
But the sun is mild. But the Sasau wine Hanush brought them is only a little watered down and there is enough to fill every glass to the tippy-top. But the milk is fresh, and Henry finds a rind of old honey leftover in the bottom of a jelly jar, and he scrapes it onto a thin pancake and rolls it up and eats it and makes his fingers all sticky until lunch.
This morning, the hunger and dying is over—for a while—and the wind whisks the summer heat away with the pounding of shod hoofbeats on tall grass. The soldiers’ bodies have been cleared and the clouds are whipped goat butter and the sky is as blue as Henry imagines the Baltic Sea.
It is quiet, in a way. It is a way he cannot put words to. He can only breathe this silence into himself and understand it inside his bones.
Hanush and Radzig leave them there, in this silence. Lord Capon is instructed to assist the thoroughly frazzled Sir Peter in defense or reconstruction or whatever the hell he needs; Henry is instructed to assist Lord Capon. He bids farewell to his friends from Rattay and his almost-friends from the Devil’s Pack, and they settle into the business of picking up an army’s mess. Hans reassembles the village guard into a half-arsed patrol and Henry bullies Captain Frenzl until he sees a surgeon about his popped knee. They eat their fill of jerky and pretzels hauled here from home, only a little bit stale. They drag the dead mare out to the bailey to butcher and, with Peter’s permission, Hans kills a beautiful red buck in the glade behind Sigismund’s ghost camp, and the people will eat that, too.
Laboratores, bellatores. God’s intentions are lost in the sweat and relief and joy of work.
“Forget all of that now,” Hans tells him as they tie the deer’s forelegs together, crouching in rough feather grass that has gone to seed early, wet with evening dew. Henry brought it up as a joke—to cheekily ask, as he often does, and which State of Man are you in just now, sir—but Hans cuts eyes at him that look less like annoyance than shame.
He tells Henry, “The only thing you and I need to care about is time.”
Henry does his best to forget what he is. He pulls the knot tight and lifts the dead animal from its ankles, bearing half its weight, until they sling it upon the leggy buttermilk hunting mare Hans has taken for his own. Boudica stamps, still nervous in grief for her former master, and Henry hushes Mutt to pat her neck until she settles. Blood seeps from the buck’s wounds, where Hans’s first arrow sundered its lung and his second split the windpipe just under the jaw.
“You could ask him about it,” Henry goads, wicking his thumb at the limp animal as Boudica’s hip drops to accommodate the weight. “I bet he’d have a thing or two to say about whether that felt like warfare or good, honest labor.”
“Leave me alone, you Xanthippe. Are you taking the prey’s side now?”
“I dare not take any side. Whatever the hell you just called me. I saw how that turned out at Troskowitz. With a rotted apple busted all over your gob.”
“Cluck-cluck. Keep bawking, hen. You’ve had far worse busted on yours.”
“Oh, well! Far be it from me to school His Lordship on God’s law.”
Hans steps around Boudica and the dead buck, its tongue loose between its teeth, to stand where Henry is. And like so, he strips his gloves and drops them on the grass with all the decorum of brained fish, and he takes his squire’s face in his hands and beholds him with thoughtful tenderness. He finds the soft, killable spot nestled away beneath Henry’s jaw and digs his fingernails in.
“Look where you are, you blockhead,” he caws. There is a smear of deer blood on the collar of his fine green hunting shirt. “You indolent little Boheme. Two kings”—he gives him a kiss to seal his point, wetting his chapped bottom lip—“two Popes”—another on his top—“two fathers. There are no laws left in this country for God to care about.”
Hans leaves him one last kiss. His fingers crook deep into the flesh above the artery, making it sting, just a little.
Worry about you, he says, and me.
In Suchdol, they await the next phase of Hans Capon’s life—and so Henry’s life, too.
Something changes in him.
Godwin notices it first. He finds Henry one morning on the outer bailey wall walk, watching a fallish wind weave through the grass and the bachelor’s button flowers gather mist. Careful not to spill his mug of breakfast—hot pink wine simmered with apples—the cantankerous old priest ascends the gatehouse stair to join him.
“What’s the matter with you?” he asks, a good morning delivered with a smile that looks like a snarl. “Are you sick, lad?”
“What—do I look greenish?”
“No, worse. Introspective. You look like an old man contemplating your oldness.”
“Maybe I am an old man,” Henry says. “I feel as though.”
“You ought to knock it off, then. It’s against nature. And it will make the real old men want to kick you in the bags.”
Henry cannot decide if he ought to ask Godwin for wisdom or medicine or to take a confession, though he is not really sure what needs to be confessed. He will leave Suchdol soon, once Sir Christopher is recovered enough to escort home to their father. And he will not return to Uzhitz—for the young lord of Raborsch will inherit any day now—and Godwin will counsel his little brother for the rest of his time on God’s earth. Henry knows this, somehow, in the way he knows things about his life and the lives of the people he loves.
For a moment, he wonders if he should tell Godwin his future—if perhaps all the bloodiness of his life has awakened in him some magic. But Henry decides against it, for he is not certain if the magic is holy or hellish, or if it is even real, and it will be embarrassing if after all this fuss he is wrong.
“I don’t know. I feel strangely. Like I’ve lived a hundred lives,” he tries to explain, for Henry finds it easy to say any sort of thing to Godwin. But the words tumble around in his mouth like taffy, coming out in awkward shapes, not quite as he meant. “Like all of it has happened already and I’m here the second time for it. Like I’ve seen my own life before.”
Far uphill, between the castle and the white smoke rising over the village, a doe is leading her children out of the field and toward the trees. Old man thoughts: Henry wonders if Hans has shot her husband, or what deer have instead of husbands. This is the sort of bittersweet peace that crosses his mind these days, drifting in and out unbidden, like the river, bringing neither sadness nor triumph, not quite. It is as if his blood has thickened, slowing his guts and strengthening his stomach. He does indeed feel older, somehow, and haler—as if his heart has grown too large for its old skin and molted to new flesh.
The doe is startled by something they cannot see and crashes into the brush with her fawns. Behind them, in the sleepy bailey yard, a cat lobs a curse at a girl in a yellow dress, who shoos him away from the well to fill her bucket of water. Godwin does not say anything for a while, but stands there with his cup, as if he expects there will be more.
“You’re a young man, Henry,” he tells him, and before he leaves, gives him a sip of his warm wine. “One day, you’ll remember that again.”
There is a change in Hans, too.
Lord Capon is still as wildfire and red-blooded as ever, as ebullient and as mean, a creature made of shin-kicks and filthy jokes, who hits with a closed fist and who talks too loudly and unnerves the peasants with his jackal laugh. But Henry, who knows him best, can see the soul moving in different patterns behind his eyes; he is taking new form, in the way a stag grows used to the weight of his antlers, year after year, no matter how big they get.
He does not spend his freedom in public. He does not want to waste the time. He has lost his taste, at least for a while, for bathwater and the slit between a woman’s legs; he only bathes with Henry now; he lingers in bed too long, ignoring the sunlight that once spurred him into the woods; and when his cup is drunk empty, the young lord of Rattay does not guzzle down the pitcher. He goes in peace to home, to bed, to solace.
To Henry.
After the siege and everything from it, Hans will not stand to sleep apart from him. The bed is too small to stretch out beside one another, so he tucks himself atop Henry, boiling him with his too-hot limbs, sweating up the covers every night.
And Henry does not dream.
Every day, he comes alive like this: White daylight slices under the wooden shutters, and Hans lifts him into the waking world.
Blacksmith, he murmurs, their old and storied love word, one of his favorite things to say.
Henry wakes up stiff and sticky with discomfort and desire, trapped beneath his beloved’s weight. It is a word that when said by him can make Henry steam out his nose with anger or wilt helplessly with affection or go mad with want. His mind is half-soaked in the sugar-water of dreamless sleep and even so—
Go away, he tells him, even so.
But only because he does not mean it; only because he does not even care for any other name, not when he is barely awake and loved so well; only because Hans is happiest and most delightful when he is presented with a toothless challenge to scale and stamp into the dust.
Go away, go away, you earwig. Go to Hell, go to church, go to confession, go to Rome—
And if he does not wake fast enough, Hans will bite at the delicate skin of his ears and roll blacksmith into the back of his neck, into the fine baby hairs, and then he’ll bite at them too.
Go to sleep, Henry bids him, and leave me be.
But it is too late for that now; the sun is alive; Hans’s fingers slip through his hair, clammy with sweat from their sleep. He pesters him and blows at his neck and flicks at his cheek until Henry groggily shimmies over to lie side by side, pressed uncomfortably tight in the tiny bed, and kiss hotly for a while, until he is awake enough to be of service. Hans does not want to roughhouse with him or wrestle over who gets to be stallion, not now; his heart is not in it; he will be a menace and a spitfire later, under the craziness of nightfall. In the morning, he is simply the man who loves Henry, and who wants to be loved back, in every way a man can be loved.
My Birdie, Henry tells him, and kisses each of his eyebrows, smoothing the ridge of his cheeks with his thumbs. How now, my little bird?
He makes it easy to be alive.
It is easy to take Hans like this, like a woman, which is his favorite way to have him, on account of his legs hooked nicely around Henry’s waist and how much he may kiss him. They have done this so often, they have reshaped each other, a sword tang that burns its way inside the grip until the one piece only fits its pair. It makes him dizzy to think about. Hans whispers so nicely into his ear, imbuing their word with its secret potency, so that when said in public it raises no suspicion but hits Henry with the crippling force of my love.
Blacksmith, he says, once and again, to make sure Henry knows what he is really saying.
Henry tries to come up with something just as good to call him. My lad, he tries, but it isn’t the same. My nasty little dovehawk. My birdie.
But the closeness is too much to clap on new words, rotting through their patience. Joy and delight bubble over so keenly that Henry can't help it, and he must muffle his cries of Hans! Hans! Hans, oh God into the mattress as he spills himself out into him, as Hans overpowers him with the strength of his arms and bites beautifully into a mouthful of Henry's shoulder and slicks his belly with seed. And then it is just the cool summer air slipping in beneath the green-glass window, fresh and jubilant and clean, and the gentle sun warming Henry’s back. And they breathe together until daylight rises high enough to strike the blue in the undersides of Hans’s eyes, making him squint, and Henry shields him from it with a cupped hand.
Every day as this one. And when it's over, best of all: Hans is still his.
It will not last like this forever.
Henry knows he will love Hans Capon until he dies and then some, if God or the Devil allow you to love when you're dead; his life belongs only to his lord now, in every way one’s life can belong to a man. But he must share him, too, for Henry slots into the larger machine of demands and politic that comprises and entraps his beloved. It is enough for him, truly, though the nature of who he is and the parceled way he must love Henry causes Hans so much agitation and interrupted want, Henry fantasizes stupidly about robber baroning him off one day in the woods, never to be seen by the world again. It is an idiot’s little dream.
In Suchdol, for now, Hans only belongs to Henry. He has nowhere and no one else to be.
“You have an admirer,” Hans tells him lazily as they luncheon in the courtyard one day, fuzzy-tongued on the red wine he drinks with his chicken thighs.
Henry doesn’t believe him, of course. He swats his arm off the table and orders him to stop making jokes—to sober up and quit spouting stupidness—so Hans proves it. He jabs Henry’s elbow and points her out with his half-drunk cup, perversely bored, a cat too well-fed to be a threat.
It is the girl in the yellow dress. She is working outside the little cabin Sir Peter generously calls a bathhouse, kneeling in front of a wash basin, shaking out a basket of laundry into the lye. Her auburn hair is free and shades her round face nicely from the midday sun. Zuzana, or so Henry seems to think her name is, though it is a tiny memory that flits through the silt of his mind, muddied by bigger and uglier memories, and more beautiful ones too.
“Go on,” he scoffs, turning back to his meal of bread and bird meat before anyone sees him stare. “Sir Peter’s maid? That’s daft.”
“Indeed. A proper spring daisy. She seems to pop up everywhere I turn—so long as you’re there, that is.”
“Ah, bullshit. You’re imagining things.”
“Look there, sheep-fucker. The poor mouse follows you around like a lost pup, afraid you’ll turn about and hurl a shoe at her. Haven’t you noticed? Or are you too fixated on stroking your precious sword?”
“Looks more likely she’s banging grass stains out of Sir Christopher’s hose.”
Hans drops a greasy chicken bone on his plate, wiping his knuckles on his knee in want of a cloth. He props his big chin on his hand heels and roots his smarting elbows into the tabletop, watching her douse a shirt over and over again.
“It isn’t just today. She’s been under your feet at least since the siege. I suspect she hopes you’ll spot her out on accident one of these days and fall over smitten by Cupid’s arrow, spitting blood right into her arms.”
Henry would like to continue to deny it; he would like Hans to be wrong and an idiot, as he often is about women. But in the next moment, Maid Zuzana pauses in her laundry, dipped to her armpits in the washtub, and turns her chin to check the picnic table. Her eyes are wide and cow-black and searching—for Henry, aye, true enough—and when she finds the two men sitting there are already looking at her, they dart away in embarrassment, and she sloshes a tunic with new vigor.
Hans kicks him swiftly to the inside of his ankle, throwing his foot out from beneath the bench and spreading his legs uncomfortably wide, a bawdy I-told-you-so. Henry yanks it back in and feels his blush.
“She looked at you,” he insists, “not me.”
“I know when a woman lifts her tail in my direction. She could not give a fart in the wind. Would not, could not be fucked. That look was for you.”
Henry dares one last glimpse behind him. She’s very pretty, in the way of brown-haired girls who spend too much time in the sun, and he is reminded of their old games in Rattay—of sharing bathmaids and butcher’s daughters as a lark, and then, so there are no hard feelings, guzzling down a jug of the rathaus’s finest wine.
An offer, unserious, slips under his tongue. He knows in the way he knows his life now that the conclusion is foregone, that the tick of Hans’s heart has lowered in octave, and he will decline. Still, his fondness for that bygone era of their love-games pricks his ears and makes him ask, like wiggling a straw through the grass in front of a kitty’s paw.
“Shall I go and get her?” he proposes, lowly. “Bring her upstairs and we could read her a poem?”
She drops a heavy coat into the tub. A smile quirks one edge of Hans’s mouth, an echo of all the things that happened some yesterday that feels long ago, and Henry’s everyday reward for being, always, himself.
“No,” he says, certain, and closes his eyes for a moment in the sun, letting his lashes touch with a calmness and a mercy Henry has never seen on his sharp-toothed face before. “She’ll fall in love with you. Leave her little heart intact.”
So it is. Hans waits for the girl to look again, and when she does, he pays her a cruel kindness. In the shadow of the curtain wall, out of the guardsmen’s sight, he grabs a fistful of Henry’s short hair and kisses him kingfisher-quick, far too hard, so roughly that he cannot even choke in fear, and his eyes water so full he cannot for a heartbeat see anything.
Two drops plunk the table, right on his plate of chicken bones. Henry blinks the water away, fumbling his palm over his face, as if to hide a stain of something sweet he should not have eaten. Hans stands up to leave him for a while, and when he clears his eyes and remembers to look for the yellow girl, she is long gone.
Despite him, despite everything, he feels old arrowshot throb in his shoulder; he checks his mouth for fresh blood.
The day does not last indefinitely. Morning stretches into noon and dissolves to evening like early fireflies that dissipate over the orchards, getting stuck on the tart green August pears.
By evening, when work has grown tiresome but it is not yet the sanctity of night, they will skirt off into the overgrown copse east of the village lake, where no one comes except wooly bees and an abandoned cow. Here, they will eat bread and cheese and salted ham and yammer themselves out. When they have run out of gossip and gripes and grapes, Hans will hold Henry’s drowsy head on his lap and comb his hair with his fingers and tell him all sorts of embarrassing things as little songbirds shriek their goodnights in the birches and over the river.
Wake up, Henry.
No one has ever cared for anyone like I care for you.
God sent you to me. To fix me. So I would love you and it fixed me.
I’m going to build you a castle. The grandest fucking castle in Bohemia. Fuck that—the world. I will, too. I’ll build it for you and I’ll have you knighted, and you’ll have your own fucking holding. And then no one can say a damn thing about you.
Are you listening to me, blacksmith? Are you fucking sleeping? I'm talking to you. I said wake up, you blockhead. Wake up, my darling.
No one, do you hear me. No one has ever been like we are. Not in the whole world.
Don't you know you’re all I give a damn about? There isn’t a thing I wouldn't do if you asked me, you understand, not one fucking thing.
Hal, listen to me. Hal, I adore you.
Henry, I love you.
He talks to him as though Henry needs to be fed such words, and perhaps he does. Perhaps Hans is trying to fatten him up on love now, in summer, so he will survive the winter on smuggled looks and secret squeezes of his hand.
Henry tries to see into his future—to use his maybe-magic to prophesy what will become of them, to peer inside this silence and foresee if Hans should have an ugly wife or a son named Heinrich or even a daughter instead—but he can’t, somehow. He only knows in the way of a man who loves him that they will not be parted again.
And it will be enough.
Blacksmith, he calls him. What he says to Henry, always: You are the love of my life.
And there will be time.
He has heard this silence once before, but Henry has forgotten it. He left the memory and its magic behind with the lowest morning of his life.
Far away, on the Sasau River with all its blue and yellow wildflowers and all its silver fishes, there is a grassy cliffside just above Rattay, where the sun scrapes up the rocks every morning before it reaches the city. It is hardly noticeable, dwarfed by the taller, forested bluffs clamshelling the southern wall and hidden by the castle at hand. It rests just between the drawbridge and the flattened square of dirt where Captain Bernard tests his men.
It is on this cliff, in a ring of pathetic tents, that Henry once woke in the deep silence before dawn.
It was not so long ago, really. A handful of years, dense enough with pain and beauty to feel like decades—so perhaps he could remember it if he really tried. Or perhaps we are not meant to remember these strange mornings of our lives, anchored between two places, still enough to see into time. But if time is at all like water, as poets and sometimes priests say, then somewhere upriver, a shadow of Henry is still there.
The shadow comes to life in the cricketing, itchy dark. He has not slept at all. His fire, inexpertly made, has been snuffed by dew, and his bed of pine needles has poked him, and the other refugees who sleep here have already moved on to prepare for their begging. His stomach is moaning in agony, sick on raw apples and old beer and nothing else. He is cold and his teeth hurt and he has nothing to drink.
Still, he rises, for he must.
Yesterday was the most ragged his life has ever been. Yesterday, Peshek kicked him out of the mill—for they’d had a row over a debt and a distasteful task—and Henry, having no money and nowhere to sleep, became without home. Yesterday, he had come late to his drills, distracted by everything wrong with his life, and the captain had yelled at him, threatening his livelihood. Yesterday, he had been bullied to breaking by the young governor—who had called him names and embarrassed him so badly, blinded him so completely with petty rage that, for an instant, Henry forgot everything that had happened to him and who he was and the nothingness he stood to lose.
Today, there is no turning away from nothingness. He has no concept of what will happen to him. He is caught in the empty quiet of the place he once was and the place he will go next.
And for now, he is alone, more than is fathomable, more than seems possible.
It feels like no one in the whole world is miserable enough to be awake yet. Unable to restart the fire, Henry walks to the cliff edge in the clarity of his discomfort, shivering in his dirty gambeson, covered in spider bites, and he sits down with the taste of his own blood still in his mouth from the lordling’s punch.
He has no idea who he will be now.
He thinks for a moment he ought to cover his face and sob. Except it feels like crying would ruin this quiet, silky and new. The sun has not yet peeked over the edge of the world, but its glow turns the rock golden-bronze in the prettiest way, a promise or a threat. A sheep’s bell clangs somewhere in the distance. A grasshopper struggles through the wet clover next to his dirty shoe.
Henry does not sob. He sticks out a finger for the grasshopper and places it on the crook of his arm to let it rest. He looks over the bluffs and opens his mouth to the cool air and is freed, truly freed, by the certainty that this is as low as his life will ever go.
For if there was a yesterday—so a tomorrow, too.
He will hunt with Hans Capon in the morning, with the sun.
Now, he will take the time to listen for the hope that still lives inside him, and to let the silence do its work.
Tempora labuntur, tacitisque senescimus annis,
et fugiunt freno non remorante dies.
The times slip away, and we grow old with the silent years,
and the days flee unchecked by a rein.
Ovid's Fasti, VI, 771—772