Toymaker, The (9 page)

She had a small hole in her head, where the bone was pressed in. Just as big as the stone had been. There was nothing that could be done about it. Usually it didn’t matter. But sometimes it did. Then, without any warning, dancing lines of little pin colours would start to flicker before her eyes and she would find herself on the floor and not know how she’d got there. She would have wet herself or worse, and her skirt would be dirty and stink. Sometimes if there was no one around to help her, she’d bite through her tongue. So she had to wear the hat. It helped when she banged her head on the floor. She didn’t know she was doing it: she’d just find herself on the floor and know that it had happened again. Then she’d cry because it was going to be like that for the rest of her life, just because of that Burner boy and the stone.

So she had no love for filthy Burners and even less for their filthy children. She wondered, as she stood there, if they were the same ones, and that made her shudder. She’d have their eyes out if they were.

She bent down and picked up a stone, then thought better of throwing it. Instead, she held up her head and started to walk towards the hut where they’d taken Mathias – the stone, sharp-cornered
and heavy, in her hand. At least, now, she had something that she could use if she had to, and there was no knowing whether she might need it before long.

She stopped in the doorway. For a moment she couldn’t see a thing. Then her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom. It was dark and narrow inside the hut. Mathias had been laid on a rough, rug-covered bed – there was only one. There were pans and things she couldn’t make out hanging from the roof above her. There was a woman too, her face weather-tanned and lined. Koenig and the man had already begun to unbutton Mathias’s coat and pull his shirt over his head. He let out a moan and a hiss of breath as they sat him up to do it. The woman hushed him, then turned and said something to Katta in Burner. Katta shook her head, but then understood what the woman must have meant, and stepped to one side so that the light could come in.

With her fingertips, the woman carefully felt around the edges of the two knife wounds, trying to gauge how deep they were.

‘And his chest,’ Katta said. ‘He’s hurt his chest bad too.’

She felt suddenly uneasy, as though they might think that she had been responsible. ‘They dropped
him out of a window,’ she said. ‘He was holding his chest when I found him.’

She caught Koenig’s eye, and remembered that he’d already called her a liar once. ‘They did!’ she said.

But Koenig looked away. She didn’t know why she should be bothered about his opinion anyway. He was nothing but a thief.

The woman washed the blood away, then, making a pad from leaves, she spooned thick paste onto it from a clay pot and pressed it over the wounds. She took the shawl from her own shoulders and used it to bind the pad in place, tightly wrapping the thick cloth round and round Mathias’s chest. Then she made him drink something that smelled sweet and earthy, and his head lolled almost at once and he closed his eyes.

She said something to Katta and pointed at the bed. By signs Katta understood that she had to stay beside Mathias, so she sat down and watched. The woman reached up and pulled down two dead rabbits that were hanging from a hook in the rafters above her head. Then she set herself on a stool in the doorway and, pulling a sharp knife from her belt, began to skin them. Koenig and the man had
already gone outside. Through the doorway Katta could see them standing and talking. Koenig was doing most of the talking; the other man listened. Once or twice he nodded, then looked back at the hut, and Katta knew that they were talking about her. She leaned back into the dark so that she could still watch them and not be seen herself. Then she had the thought that the woman had set herself in the doorway as much to stop her from going out as to skin the rabbits. She looked down at Mathias: he was deep in a drugged sleep. But they hadn’t hurt him. For the moment he was safe. But she wasn’t so sure about herself. She slipped the stone into the pocket of her apron and held onto it tightly.

Koenig finished talking to the man, who went back across the clearing. Koenig came towards the hut. He said something to the woman in the doorway that Katta couldn’t understand, then leaned in and beckoned to Katta.

‘Why can’t they talk proper words like everyone else?’ she said as she got up.

‘I’d be careful what you say if I were you,’ said Koenig. ‘Some of them can.’

Katta looked quickly at the woman to see if she had understood what had been said. It’s one thing to
be rude about someone; it’s quite another thing for them to understand it, especially when they’re holding a knife. But the woman carried on skinning the rabbits and Katta guessed that she hadn’t understood anything. It made her bold again.

‘Then they should learn proper talk,’ she said.

She followed Koenig to where a small fire burned in the clearing. He held out his hands to warm them. Now she had the chance to look at him properly, she saw that he was younger than she had thought. It must have been the way the men in the wood obeyed him that had made him seem older. The big horse hadn’t been tethered. It was standing quietly nearby with its reins looped about its neck. Someone had piled some hay on the ground for it to eat.

‘Your horse will walk off,’ she said.

Koenig glanced over his shoulder. ‘What, Razor?’ he said.

The horse lifted its head and pricked up its ears at its name. Then, seeing it wasn’t needed, it bent down again to the hay.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Koenig.

The fire was warm. Katta could feel the heat of it on her face. Her skirt was still soaked from the river.
It began to steam as it dried. She realized how cold and hungry she was.

‘What do you want?’ she said.

‘I want you to tell me what it’s all about,’ he answered.

He said it as a simple statement of fact and that annoyed her.

‘Don’t have to tell you a thing,’ she said.

She had meant to sound defiant, but even to her own ears the words had only sounded petulant.

‘If you tell me,’ said Koenig, ‘then these people can look after you both until the boy’s better – believe me, they’re very good at it. If you don’t’ – he shrugged – ‘I just take you back where I found you.’

She saw straight away that she didn’t really have any choice. Even if she lied, what would she say? There wasn’t that much she could tell him anyway. But it was still something he wanted and that had to be worth keeping.

‘How do I know you won’t take us back anyway?’ she said.

‘You don’t. But you were right in the wood. He might be worth something. How much all depends on what you tell me, and what I find out. But if you don’t tell me anything, then he’s worth nothing at
all. Just the ride back to where I found you both. And I’m not sure that you really want that.’

Katta looked at the fire, and at the steam rising from the front of her skirt, but she wasn’t seeing it. In her mind’s eye she could still see the dwarf sitting on Mathias, pressing his thumbs into the boy’s eyes; see the moon-faced man with the silver-topped cane. No. She didn’t want to go back.

‘There’s not much to tell,’ she said.

‘Then there’s no point in not telling it,’ said Koenig.

It was hard to say what dark dreams were tumbling through Mathias’s head while he slept, but there were many of them. Sometimes he would call out, but Katta, who stood and watched him, couldn’t make sense of anything he said. He had grown hot and feverish and his words were confused. The Burner woman sat beside him, wiping his head with a cloth. She poured something onto it first, held it to his face and made him breathe it in. It smelled bitter as wormwood, and was as black as nightshade. Katta didn’t know whether he was being healed or poisoned, but there was little she could do anyway. She stood inside the door and watched. Once or twice, Burner children looked in to see the boy who had been knifed, but Katta stared at them with such hard, implacable hatred that they backed away and
didn’t come again.

She had told Koenig all that she had seen and done. He had listened to her without saying a word and she was not sure whether he believed her or not, but she didn’t care. Then he had got onto the big horse. He had spoken a few words in Burner to the woman before he left, and she had nodded. What he’d said Katta didn’t know, but she could guess. When she tried to stand outside the door of the hut, the Burner woman had called her back in. Hearing their voices, one of the men in the clearing had looked up from his work and stood watching until Katta had done what she was told. If she had had any thought of slipping away into the wood, that had been enough to show her that they wouldn’t let her.

Besides, there was the boy.

She had nothing to do but wait either for Koenig to come back or for Mathias to wake up. Waiting wasn’t something that she was very good at doing. At the inn she’d had to work all day; every single minute was filled. Now she had nothing to do but stand by the door and wonder what this was all about, and she would have to wait if she was going to find out.

As the day wore on, the sky slowly went the colour
of dull lead. Then it began to snow. Large, lazy flakes that feathered through the high branches of the trees and began to settle on the ground beneath. Thinly at first, but steadily more and more until the stacks of chopped wood grew fat with snow. Katta breathed in the air, it felt wet-cold and clean. Only the earthed mounds, hot on the inside, were not white – the flakes of snow vanished the very instant that they touched, as though they were sharp and had sliced straight through.

And Katta had nothing to do but stand, and watch, and wait.

The afternoon was just growing dark when suddenly Mathias sat up. The lamp had been lit in the hut. He stared with wide unseeing eyes into the shadows of the bracken roof above him. Katta hadn’t seen him stirring. For a while he watched her as she stood, arms folded, looking out of the door at the falling snow. He didn’t know who she was. Then she turned and saw him.

‘Am I dead?’ he asked in a whisper.

‘Not yet,’ she said.

The Burner woman heard the sound of their voices. She stopped what she was doing and, going to the bed, gently laid Mathias down again
unprotesting. He was asleep at once.

It was not until the middle of the next morning that he woke again, but this time the fever had broken. His eyes, though sunken, were bright and clear. The Burner woman had made some broth. Katta had eaten hers before Mathias woke. Now she sat beside him while he ate his and told him what had happened in the tunnel, about Koenig and how they had come to be where they were. He listened intently. She watched his grey face as she spoke, desperate to ask him the two questions she most wanted the answer to, but not sure how to choose
the moment. In the end the words just slipped out.

‘Why did they try to kill you? What were they looking for?’

Mathias glanced quickly at the Burner woman and back at Katta.

‘Don’t mind her,’ said Katta. ‘She only speaks in Burner.’

For a moment he didn’t say anything. He hadn’t yet decided whether to trust her. Then he remembered the dwarf and the tunnel and what she had already done.

‘I think they want a bit of paper,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what it’s about.’

He told her what he did know – how Gustav had had a secret. How he had found the paper sewn into the old man’s coat. How the man with the silver-topped cane had tried to find it. He looked at the Burner woman again, but she hadn’t looked up. She was busy in the corner of the hut.

‘It’s in my coat pocket,’ he said. ‘Or it was.’

Katta had used the coat as a blanket in the night. Now she picked it up from the floor where she’d slept and made a fuss of spreading it on the bed, tucking it in around Mathias, but as she did so, she put her hand deep down into one pocket and then
the other. She sat back down on the edge of the bed and carefully, so that the Burner woman couldn’t see, pressed something small and hard into Mathias’s hand.

‘This?’ she said.

He looked at it and nodded. ‘I wish I’d never found it,’ he said.

She took it from him and slipped it safely into her apron pocket with the stone. They might need that as well before long.

It snowed through the night, but it had stopped before Koenig returned the next morning. Katta watched him arrive. The big horse was steaming as though it had been ridden hard. There was snow on the shoulders of Koenig’s coat. He beat it off with his hat as he got down from the saddle. The Burner men were already working, but he didn’t stop to talk to them. He walked straight across the clearing towards the hut. When he came in, he saw that Mathias was awake.

Koenig looked cold and hungry. The Burner woman filled a bowl with hot broth and set it at the small table. She tore a loaf of bread in half and gave that to him as well. It wasn’t until the very last scrapings were gone that he pushed the bowl away and spoke.

‘Who is Doctor Leiter?’ he said.

Mathias looked at Katta. She gave the smallest shake of her head.