The Fortress Unbuilds Itself

• Chapter 1 The Final Knot at the Gallow-Tree
• Chapter 2 Black Ash and Shivering Skeletons
• Chapter 3 The Feast of Dry Bones
• Chapter 4 Mutiny in the Charnel Well
• Chapter 5 Blood on the Parapet Steps
• Chapter 6 The Winter of Hollow Cries
• Chapter 7 Unholy Rites in the Keep
• Chapter 8 Whispers Behind the Iron Grate
• Chapter 9 The Sentry Who Cut His Tongue
• Chapter 10 Mortar Mixed with Marrow
• Chapter 11 The Collapse of the East Bastion
• Chapter 12 Rations Turned to Bitter Dust
• Chapter 13 The Mason’s Severed Fingers
• Chapter 14 The Well Springs Black
• Chapter 15 Hauling Granite Up the Scree
• Chapter 16 A Scaffold Above the Chasm
• Chapter 17 The Quench of the Blacksmith’s Hammer
• Chapter 18 Trench-Rot and Summer Flies
• Chapter 19 Foundations Sunk in Bedrock
• Chapter 20 Carts of Iron and Gunpowder
• Chapter 21 The Clearing of the Devil’s Pines
• Chapter 22 Red Tents on the Ridge
• Chapter 23 The Surveyor’s Broken Glass
• Chapter 24 The Governor’s Seal and Decree
• Chapter 25 Untouched Snow on the Height
• Chapter 26 The First Driven Stake

The hemp rope had been greased with mutton fat to keep the frost from snapping the fibers, but it still smelled of stale tallow and cold sheep. It hung stiffly from the crossbeam of the gallows that stood in the center of the upper bailey. The wood of the scaffold was pine, notched by hand six months ago when men still possessed fingers sound enough to hold an adze, and it had turned the color of bruised lard under the persistent, iron-gray drizzle of the pass.

Commandant Nicholas Galt looked at the loop through eyes crusted with dried rheum. His coat, tailored seven years back in Munich from stiff green wool, had lost its brass buttons to barter and its hem to the rats. It was tied across his sunken ribs with strips of dried horsehide. He had neither boots nor stockings. His feet were wrapped in rags cut from a liturgical banner that had once depicted Saint Jude; the red silk face of the patron of lost causes was bound tight against his left sole, black with gangrene where his great toe had split open in the November freeze.

"You have the drop measured too short, Gunter," Galt said. His voice sounded like dry oats sliding down a chute. "I shall dangle and rattle. It is bad form for an officer to rattle before his pikemen."

Sergeant Gunter did not look up from the ladder. He was forty years old and had the teeth of an octogenarian, which was to say he had three on the left side of his jaw and none on the right. He pulled the noose down with two hands, his knuckles swollen to the thickness of walnuts by the damp. He gave the knot a vicious yank to test the bite of the bight.

"The drop is four feet, Nicholas," Gunter said. He did not say Excellency, nor Herr Commandant, nor even Captain. Titles required calories that neither of them had consumed since the feast of Saint Michael. "Four feet is enough to break a sheep's neck. Your neck isn't thicker than a wether’s. If it doesn't break, you won't rattle long. Your lungs are full of ditch-water anyway. I heard you barking all through matins."

"Matins," Galt murmured, his chin dropping toward his chest. "There was no priest to read matins."

"The crows were doing it on the breastwork," said Gunter. "They do it louder than Father Anselm ever did, and with better Latin."

Around the rim of the sunken square, sixteen men stood in the gray mud. They were what remained of three companies: the High German levies, the Bohemian wall-builders, and the nine musketeers from the Upper Palatinate who had marched through the southern gap with their hats cocked and their matchlocks oiled in the spring of the world. Now they wore grease-stiffened cowls pulled down to their cheekbones. They leaned upon halberds whose iron heads had rusted into deep, orange scallops. None of them carried powder; the horns at their belts were dry, rattling with dried peas or round river pebbles they chewed to keep the saliva moving in their mouths.

Behind them, the fortress loomed like an enormous tooth broken off in the jaw of the mountain. It was called Hohenstaufen by the clerks in the valley who had drafted the deeds on vellum, but the men had begun calling it the Bone-Mill before the masonry had even reached the height of a man’s shoulder. The walls were eleven paces thick at the base, constructed of cyclopean blocks of slate and black granite hauled out of the gorge by windlasses that had squealed like stuck pigs until the axle-trees snapped. The ramparts were finished, broad enough for three carts to pass abreast, but they ended abruptly in raw ragged teeth of stone against the clouds. There were no roofs on the storehouses. The great square keep sat open to the heavens like a dry cistern, its floor three feet deep in a slurry of old snow, human dung, and shavings from horse-carcasses.

The Provost stood beside the platform. He was a small man named Kappel who had once been a cooper’s clerk in Lindau. In his hand he held a square of foolscap, curled at the edges and gray with grease from his thumbs. He did not read from it, because the ink had run into blue smears during the great sleet of three weeks past, but he kept his thumb firmly planted over the red wax seal of the Duke’s commissioner.

"Nicholas Galt," Kappel said, reading the blank fog between his knuckles, "for the abandonment of the southern works; for the slaughter of the second draught-team without warrant; for the failure of the revetments at the third traverse; for the burial of Christian dead in the dry mortar of the cisterns without benefit of clergy; and for the eating of such things as are forbidden to the subjects of the Empire."

"The last one is unjust," Galt remarked to the gray sky. "We ate the salt-mules first. We ate the mule-collars after that. By the time we came to the leather from the cartridge-boxes, there was no law left north of the river."

"The Duke's law doesn't care about the mules," Kappel said without heat. He reached up and took Galt by the elbow. The wool of the Commandant’s sleeve was so stiff with lime-dust that it creased with a dry crackle like parchment. "Up you go, sir. The wind is coming off the needles, and if we wait until noon, the rope will be as hard as an ash spar. We’ll never get the eye over your chin."

Galt mounted the three steps. They had been built from the timber of the mortar-boxes, and the wood was crusted with hard gray lime that cut through the silk of Saint Jude into his flesh. He did not feel it particularly. His toes had been dead since the second week of the meat-rot, when the fog had rolled up from the lower pine forests and stayed in the moats like lard in a skillet.

From the platform, the whole design was visible. It was a masterpiece of modern Italian trace: five bastions like the points of a star, each mutually defending the curtain of the next, calculated to such an angle that no ball from a culverin could strike a wall without glancing into the scree below. It was an engine of stone intended to hold forty guns and six hundred men, commanding the only pass between the Catholic valleys and the heretic lakes. But there were no guns. There were only four iron swivels mounted on timber baulks near the gatehouse, their muzzles stuffed with rags to keep the rain from the chambers. The ditch was five fathoms deep, but half of it was filled with the rubble of the curtain that had slid into the gap when the subsoil turned to grease in October.

To the north, the peaks rose like iron saws into the belly of the cloud. They were nameless crags, though the teamsters had given them names of their own: the Devil’s Ribs, the Kettle, the Dry Maiden. Nothing grew upon them save the black lichen that looked like ink spat upon a flagstone.

"Gunter," Galt said as the sergeant dropped the hemp over his ears. "The knot should be under the ear, not behind the nape. If you put it behind, it only pulls the throat shut. It takes twenty minutes. You haven't got the wood to keep a watch-fire going twenty minutes."

"I know where the knot goes," Gunter growled. His breath was terrible; it smelled of the lichen they had boiled two nights ago with old harness-grease. "I was hanging camp-thieves before you had your ensign’s sash, Nicholas. Shut your teeth. If you bite your tongue off, you’ll spit blood down your ruff, and we have to give the linen back to the quartermaster."

"The ruff is gone," Galt said mildly. "The drummer traded it to the sutler's boy for three dried onions. You're thinking of the summer."

"Hold your head straight then," said Gunter.

Galt held his head straight. From this height, looking down through the gaping, windowless casemates of the West Bastion, he could see the lime-kilns. They were cold now. Great heaps of gray slaked dust lay around them like the droppings of giant beetles. When the wind rose, it caught the powder and carried it into the lungs of every living thing in the camp, so that men coughed white paste into their kerchiefs until their ribs cracked.

In the mud at the base of the gallows, a man named Hauer—who had once been an armorer’s striker and now possessed only an old buff jerkin held together by copper wire—shuffled his feet. He held an empty earthenware pipkin in one hand and a horn spoon in the other. He was not looking at the rope; he was looking at the small brass ring on Galt’s little finger.

"That's for the church," Galt told him.

"The church is full of horses," Hauer said. "The roof fell in on the nave when the rafters buckled. Father Anselm is buried under the north wall. He won't care about a ring."

"It belonged to my mother," Galt said. "In Ravensburg. She had sixteen spoons and a copper kettle."

"She’s dead then," Hauer said. "Ravensburg had the plague three winters back. My cousin was a teamster from the town. He said they dug the pits outside the water-gate because the churchyard was swollen like a pregnant sow."

"She is dead," Galt admitted. "The world seems remarkably full of ditches."

Sergeant Gunter stepped back from the timber. He had finished the knot. It was an honest piece of work, seven turns of the cord, thick and hard as an iron weight, resting just beneath the angle of the jaw where the pulse throbbed like a small, frantic toad.

"Do you want the cap?" Gunter asked.

"What cap?"

"The linen bag from the bread-sacks."

"It's dirty," Galt said.

"It's that or look at the mountain," said the sergeant. "The mountain isn't going to get any greener between now and noon."

"I'll look at the mountain," the Commandant said. "I've spent sixteen months looking at it through the embrasure in the gatehouse. It owes me that much."

Kappel cleared his throat. He had found a dry scrap of charcoal in his pocket and was attempting to write a figure on the back of his sodden foolscap. "The records must show the hour," he said. "The commissioner's court at Bregenz requires the day, the hour, and the disposition of the uniform. Nicholas, have you anything to say regarding the treasure-chest?"

Galt produced a dry, whistling sound from his gorge that might have been a laugh had there been any water in his meat.

"The chest is in the well," he said.

The sixteen men around the platform leaned forward simultaneously, their halberd staves clicking against their knee-bosses like dry canes in a garden.

"You said it was taken by the heretic scouts," Kappel said, his pencil pausing above the gray paper.

"I said many things," Galt replied. "I was an officer of the Emperor. It was my duty to lie to you when the bread gave out, and it was my duty to lie to you when the well-rope broke. The chest is sixty cubits down, under twelve wagon-loads of slate we dropped down the shaft to keep the water from souring. There is nothing in it but twelve brass groschen and four rolls of lint that have gone blue with mold. If you want it, Gunter can lower you by your heels. You always were light in the backside."

Gunter spat into the mud. "He's telling the truth about the slate. I helped throw it. We spent four days at it when the well turned black. My back hasn't straightened since."

"Then there is nothing," Kappel said. He made a small, vicious cross on the paper with the charcoal, which snapped between his fingers. He threw the stub into the mud. "The Duke is eighty thousand florins out of pocket on this ridge. Eighty thousand. You could have bought a barony in the Wetterau for that, with three vineyards and an apple-mill."

"The stone is good," Galt said, looking at the parapet. "The granite has no veins of spar. It will stand three hundred years."

"It won't stand three weeks," Gunter said, moving toward the trap-release—which was merely an oak lever that knocked away the spruce strut supporting the rear plank. "The frost is already in the lime. You can hear it at night. It sounds like mice ticking inside the walls. When the big thaw comes in May, the whole curtain will slide into the valley like a wet pancake."

"It will stand," Galt insisted. His eyes wandered to the south-east angle, where the flag-bastion stood forty cubits above the cliff. The masonry was smooth as a ledger-stone there; he had watched the Swiss masons rub it down with sand and lard until the joints were narrower than the prick of a pin. "The lines are correct. The Duke had the drawings from Verona. Count Paganetti himself drew the revetments with an ivory ruler."

"The Count went home in August," said Gunter. "He had four mules and two cases of malmsey. He didn't stay to watch the slate crack."

The Sergeant laid his hand upon the lever. He was a methodical man who had served through the Bohemian wars and seen four armies dissolve into the mud like salt in broth. He had no particular hatred for Galt; he had seen three commandants hanged before this, one for stealing the beef-barrels, one for selling three wagon-loads of match to the Saxons, and one simply because the company had not been paid in thirty months and someone had to go up the pole to satisfy the ledger in Vienna.

"Nicholas," Galt’s sergeant said, "are you ready?"

"My boots," Galt said, looking down at his feet. "Give the red silk to the drummer. He has a sister in Isny who makes ribbons for the lace-makers. She might get three kreutzers for the dye."

"The drummer died on Tuesday," said Hauer from below. "We put him in the ditch behind the smithy."

"Then keep them yourself, Gunter. You have a long walk down the valley."

"The snow is four feet deep in the gorge," Gunter said. "Nobody is walking down the valley."

He struck the spruce strut with the iron head of an entrenching tool.

The wood gave a wet, screaming groan. The plank dropped three inches, caught upon an uneven projection of the framework, shivered, and then fell away entirely into the muck below.

Galt dropped. The sheep-greased hemp snapped taut with the sound of a bowstring loosed in a cellar.

There was no crack. The Commandant’s neck was tough, tanned by thirty seasons of camp smoke and grease, and the drop had indeed been four inches too short. The knot slipped under his chin, wrenching his head backward so that his beard—thin, yellowish, and frosted with sleet—pointed directly at the iron clouds above the mountain.

His legs did not kick. The gangrened feet hung straight down, four inches above the mud, the silk of Saint Jude gleaming like a wet berry against the gray timber of the upright. His hands, which had not been tied behind him because there was no second length of cord to be spared from the mule-lines, rose slowly toward his throat. The fingers, crooked like iron hooks, clawed twice at the greased hemp, their nails black with the dry blood of the excavations.

Then his wrists dropped against his thighs.

The sixteen men watched him. The only sound in the square was the wind coming through the empty embrasures, making a low, hollow whistle like an empty bottle blown across by a drunkard. From the half-finished gatehouse, a strip of sodden felt that had been used to cover the master-mason's drawings flapped against the cedar posts: clap, clap, clap.

"He didn't rattle much," Hauer observed after two minutes had passed.

"I told you," Gunter said, leaning upon his lever. "His chest was dry. There wasn't enough spit in him to make a hiss."

Kappel folded the foolscap into four and tucked it into the lining of his beaver-skin cap, which was bald in patches where the rain had rotted the pelt. "The work is terminated," he said. "The Duke’s commission is satisfied. The site is abandoned."

"We need the rope," said Gunter.

"Leave him an hour," Kappel replied. "The law requires an hour on the tree before the shears. If we take him down before the glass runs, some clerk in Lindau will say he was rescued by his kindred and stop the company's back-pay."

"There is no back-pay," Gunter said.

"There is the account of it," said Kappel. "The account must have its margins."

The men stood for a while, their hands thrust deep into their armpits to borrow the meager heat of their bellies. The drizzle had changed its temper, hardening into small, round grains of rime that did not melt when they struck the stones, but gathered in the seams of the masonry and in the creases of Galt’s green coat like salt upon salt-pork.

Above them, the fortress sat upon its mountain, eleven thousand tons of hand-hewn granite, six thousand barrels of slaked lime, sixteen hundred oak baulks dragged from the lower valleys by dying oxen, and thirty-two miles of iron wire brought from the foundries of Graz.

The gallows stood precisely in the intersection of the two great diagonals drawn by Count Paganetti on his Italian vellum: the line from the North-East Redoubt to the Salient of the Hornwork, and the line from the Governor's Lodging to the Cistern Gate. It was the geographic center of the whole vast endeavor, the point from which every measurement had been laid off with the surveyor's iron chain and the brass quadrant.

The rope began to untwist slowly in the mountain air. Galt made a half-turn toward the west, his blind, milky eyes sweeping across the empty storehouses, then past the shattered lumber of the crane that leaned over the gorge like a broken fishing-rod, and finally toward the eastern horizon where, sixty miles away and six thousand feet below, the great rivers ran through the green empire of grass and wheat where men still ate bread that had not been ground from acorns.

Then the twist of the tallow-soaked hemp caught him, and he turned slowly back to face the empty stone.

Three nights before the tallow rope took the strain in the upper bailey, the fires had ceased to belong to the Duke. Fire on the mountain had formerly been an affair of ordnance receipts and timber requisitions, accounted for in duplicate by ledger-clerks who dipped their quills into inkhorns thawed over charcoal braziers. A corporal signing for eight bundles of split birch was expected to return four baskets of clean, sifted ash to the lye-vats behind the laundry. By the final Tuesday of November, however, the ledger-clerks were dead or huddled in the ditch, and the only fuel remaining on the ridge was that which had already been shaped by iron tools.

Commandant Nicholas Galt still had his boots on that evening, though the left counter had burst at the heel, allowing the frozen slush of the courtyard to pack itself tightly against his wool stockings. He sat upon an upturned butter-cask in the master-mason’s drafting office, warming his knuckles over an iron kettle that contained three burning wheelbarrows. The smoke was thick, sweet, and greasy, because the wheelbarrows had been constructed from seasoned ash saturated with lard from the axle-trees. It rose in heavy coils toward the unceiled rafters, coating the pine planks with a glossy, bitumen crust before finding its way through the empty window slits into the dark.

Beside him, Sergeant Gunter was methodically breaking the legs off a draftsman’s trestle table with an eight-pound sledge. The blows were dull and wet, cushioned by the dry rot that had crept into the wood during the autumn deluges. Every third stroke brought down a shower of fine, powdery wood-dust that sparkled like sugar as it drifted through the firelight.

"The oak doesn't burn," Gunter observed, pausing to spit into the tub. "The Swiss seasoned it in brine before they hauled it up from Bregenz. It only sweats and turns into black glass. We’d do better with the church benches."

"There are no benches in the church," Galt said without looking up from the kettle. His ears were tucked into the collar of his coat, which had three brass buttons remaining near the gorge. "The Bohemians burned the benches during the frost of Saint Jude. They burned the altar rails the night after, except for the post that had the carving of Saint Lawrence's gridiron. They thought it unlucky to put a painted saint into the embers."

"They weren't so tender about the reliquary," Gunter said, swinging the sledge again. The trestle leg gave way with a dry crackle like an old boot being torn in two. "They cracked that open with a pickax to see if there were silver pins in the hinges. Nothing inside but three sheep teeth and a strip of dried sheepskin with some clerk's scrawl on it."

"It was a fragment of the veil of Saint Walpurga," said the Commandant.

"It burned like birch-bark," said Gunter. "Smelled like sour milk, too. But it made about as much heat as an idle thought."

He tossed two jagged chunks of the trestle into the iron kettle. The flames sank beneath the weight of the seasoned timber, hissed a mouthful of white steam from a patch of surface lichen, and then caught with a sudden, vicious flare that illuminated the four corners of the room.

The office was crowded with the remnants of two companies whose barracks had lost their roofs to the great gales of mid-November. They sat shoulder to shoulder along the walls, their knees pulled up beneath their chins, wrapped in whatever textiles had survived the wear of the pickaxes and the slaking-pits. Some wore horse-rugs of gray felt, stiffened by dried horse-sweat until they stood upright on their own like sheet-copper. Others had wrapped themselves in the oiled canvasses that had once sheltered the powder-barrels, their heads protruding through roughly hacked slits, smelling powerfully of sulfur, beef-tallow, and the bitter vinegar used to sponge out the swivel-guns.

They were sixty-two men in all, though an accurate roll-call had not been returned to the valley since the first blizzard choked the lower gorges in October. When they moved, their joints made small, clicking sounds like dry twigs snapped beneath a heavy heel. Their faces were blackened not by sun, but by the relentless, day-and-night smudge of the trash-fires. Every man bore the same triangular mask of soot from the eyebrows to the lower lip, cut through only by the white, rheumy circles of their eyes and the raw red cracks where their lips had split down to the gums.

At the far end of the drafting table, Provost Kappel was attempting to salvage the ink in his pewter stand. He had wrapped the inkstand in a filthy piece of linen and held it directly over the embers of a broken shovel-handle. The liquid had frozen solid four nights ago, expanding until it split the pewter seam along the bottom, so that as it thawed, a thin, purple trickle leaked out onto his naked thumb.

"The muster cannot be closed without the designations," Kappel said. His voice was higher than it had been in the summer, pitched like the whistling of wind through a cracked flue. "If I write simply 'sixty-two survivors of the levy,' the paymaster at Lindau will dock the third-part for the non-effective men. He will say they died of the natural sickness, and for natural sickness the territory pays no burial-pence."

"Write that they were eaten by wolves," Gunter said, heaving another baulk of wood into the fire. "The Duke understands wolves. He keeps three packs of wolf-dogs in his park at Ravensburg. He pays four florins for an old bitch's scalp."

"There are no wolves on this peak," Kappel replied, not looking up as he smeared a blotted thumb across the margin of his paper. "Even the crows left three weeks ago when the teamsters buried the last mule under the hornwork. A wolf has four legs and some sense in his head. He stays down in the beechwoods where there are hares to be had for the running."

"The crows didn't leave," croaked a voice from the corner behind the door. It belonged to an old halberdier named Brandt, whose right ear was black and shriveled like a dried pear from the frost. "They only flew down to the second traverse where the scaffolding collapsed. There are seven teamsters under the spruce poles that we couldn't get the picks into before the ground turned to iron. The birds found a way in between the laths. You can hear them down there in the mornings, tapping on the timbers like cobblers at their lasts."

A brief silence fell over the room, filled only by the spit and pop of the burning ash-wood and the persistent, iron rattle of the sleet against the pig-skin that had been tacked over the northern window.

Outside, the mountain was entirely dark. The works had been laid out by the Italian engineers according to the most modern principles of the geometric school, with five bastions projecting like the points of a star, designed to eliminate every dead angle and provide mutually supporting curtains of fire. In the daylight, viewed from the peaks above, the fortress looked like a vast mathematical drawing laid out upon the granite in lines of chalk and charcoal. But in the winter nights, the geometry disappeared into a monstrous, formless labyrinth of half-finished masonry.

The ditches were half-excavated, their floors strewn with shattered boulders that had been blasted from the living bedrock with gunpowder, leaving jagged, razor-edged craters that filled with slush during the day and froze into slippery glass by midnight. Great ramps of earth, thrown up to mount the siege guns that had never arrived from the foundries, leaned against the raw stone faces like heaps of rotting refuse. Everywhere were the skeletons of machines: huge wooden treadwheels twenty feet high, their spokes cracked and their ropes trailing in the mud; cranes whose booms had snapped under the weight of five-ton lintels, left to rot where they fell; and hundreds upon hundreds of hand-barrows, their wicker sides broken in, piled in the corners of the works like drift-wood after an inundation.

A corporal named Werner, who had once been a charcoal-burner in the Black Forest, rose slowly from his place by the hearth. His knees popped twice with the sound of dry pine needles crushed underfoot. He walked to the window, pulled back an inch of the frozen pig-skin, and peered out into the gray swirl of the bailey.

"The sentry on the West Horn has sat down," Werner said.

Galt did not move his head. "Which sentry?"

"The boy from Isny. The weaver's lad who came up with the fourth recruitment. The one who had the yellow boots."

"His name was Hans," Gunter said, without pausing in his destruction of the drafting table. "His father owes six florins to the guild for his indenture. The boots aren't yellow anymore. He greased them with horse-fat three weeks back to keep the wet out, and the grease turned them the color of a wet toad."

"Tell him to stand up," Galt said.

"He won't stand up," said Werner, letting the pig-skin slap back against the spruce frame. "He’s sat down in the angle between the parapet and the scarp-wall. That's where the wind drops the drifts. If a man sits down there for five minutes, the rime gets into his neck-cloth, and by the tenth minute he thinks he’s lying in a feather-bed in an inn at Memmingen. I've seen it twenty times in the woods. They never get up again without two men to haul them by the armpits, and their shins are always as white and hard as salt-pork."

"Go and kick him, Gunter," the Commandant ordered. "A sentry who sleeps on the curtain is guilty of treason against the Emperor's peace. The Duke's instructions are explicit on the point. Article twelve: death by the cord without benefit of clergy."

Gunter let the sledge-hammer rest against his shins. His breath made small, brief jets of fog that smelled faintly of old bone-broth.

"You can hang him on Friday, Nicholas, if you have a mind to do it," the Sergeant said. "He won't run away between now and then. He’ll be as straight as an iron rail by morning, and we won't need to waste a man to hold his legs down while the provost reads the warrant."

"The service must be maintained," Galt insisted. His eyes were milky and fixed upon the red heart of the ash-wood embers. "If the service is not maintained, we are merely twenty-score vagabonds sitting on a heap of slate without a title to the land. The Emperor does not pay vagabonds."

"The Emperor hasn't paid us since the cherries were in blossom," Werner remarked from the wall. He did not say it with anger; he stated it with the flat, heavy indifference of a man who had long since ceased to believe that coin was something that could actually be passed from hand to hand. "The carters brought forty bags of rye in July, and thirty of them were full of weevils that smelled like old bed-straw. We ate the weevils and we ate the bags. There was more flour in the linen than there was in the grain."

The door to the office creaked inward on its iron pintles, which had never been greased and squealed with a piercing, pig-like shrillness that made every man in the room draw his shoulders toward his ears.

A soldier entered, carrying an armload of broken lathe-work from the carpenters' shed. He was so thin that his ribs could be counted through the rents in his doublet, each bone defined like the wicker ribs of a fish-trap. His beard was a matted tangle of brown wool crusted with grease and white crumbs of lime. Behind him came another man, dragging a long pine timber that had once served as a guide-rail for the mortar-trolleys.

"The teamsters' fire is out," the first soldier announced. He dropped his bundle of wood onto the floor with a clatter that sounded like the spilling of dry bones. "They burned the last of the wheel-spokes an hour before dark, and now they're huddled into the forge-pit like pigs in a sty. Two of them have the bloody-flux. You can hear them weeping from the gatehouse."

"Let them weep," Gunter said. "They had thirty guilders apiece in bounty-money when they marched out of Ravensburg. They had fat bellies and silver buckles on their hats. They called the pikemen dirt because we had nothing but five yards of ash-pole and an iron kettle between six men."

"They haven't got the buckles now," the soldier said, crouching by the kettle and extending two hands that were purple from the wrist to the fingernails. "They sold them to the sutler for three fingers of brand-wine and an onion that had gone soft in the middle. The sutler died three days later behind the lime-house. When we turned him over to see if he had any dry crusts in his pocket, he was as light as a wicker basket. The rats had had the belly out of him through his breeches."

Kappel blew upon his frozen inkstand. A tiny circle of wet, purplish black appeared around the tip of his quill. With infinite slowness, his hand shaking so violently that the letters looked like the tracks of a dying beetle across the vellum, he wrote: Item: One musketeer, Hans of Isny, deceased upon the breastwork through negligence of his watch.

"Cross out 'negligence,'" Galt said softly.

The Provost paused, his pen poised half an inch above the sheepskin. "The Duke’s auditor will demand the cause. If he died through the visitation of God, the company is charged three groschen for the registration of the demise in the bishop's book."

"Write that he died of the frost," Galt said. "The frost belongs to the Emperor. It is part of the terrain. The Duke cannot dock a man's arrears for the Emperor's weather."

Kappel made a small, wet scratch on the margin. "The Duke can dock a man for anything he pleases, Nicholas. He docked the master-mason four hundred florins because the bastion at the South Horn cracked when the lime was green. The mason said it was the subsoil that shifted, but the Duke's man said the stone should have known its business better than to sit upon grease."

"Where is the master-mason?" Werner asked from his corner.

"He went down the pass on Michaelmas," Gunter said, tossing another splinter into the fire. "He had a gray mule with two wicker panniers full of drawings, and an Italian boy to lead the beast by the nose. He told the Commandant he was going to Lindau to fetch four barrels of tallow and thirty bundles of Swedish iron for the portcullises."

"He didn't go to Lindau," said Brandt, his voice coming out of the shadows like the croaking of a raven in a hollow oak. "He didn't get five leagues past the lower gorge. The peasants at Saint Gall had their scythes on poles. They were waiting at the narrows where the track runs between the river and the limestone cliffs. They took the mule and they took the drawings. They used the vellum to patch the roofs of their goat-sheds, because the skins were thick and oiled against the rain."

"And the mason?" Werner asked.

"They threw him into the chasm," Brandt said with a dull, flat certainty. "The water there is thirty feet deep and runs like melted lead out of the snowfields. If you look down from the wooden bridge, you can see the big boulders at the bottom, round and white like skulls. He’s down there between two rocks, wedged under an alder trunk. He’ll stay there till the spring spates wash the valley out. His drawings won't help him much with the trout."

The kettle fire flared up once more, catching a pocket of old turpentine in the seasoned ash-wood. For a few seconds, the room was filled with a bright, yellow radiance that revealed every detail of their ruin: the great maps pinned to the timber walls, their corners curled and browned by soot; the piles of unread orders from the war-council at Innsbruck, tied with rotting hemp twine and gnawed at the margins by mice; the rows of halberds stacked against the chimney, their staves blackened by smoke and their tassels reduced to clusters of greasy threads.

Galt looked at his hands. They were resting upon his knees, perfectly still. The skin across the knuckles was stretched so tight that the yellow bone showed through the gray flesh like pebbles seen through thin ice. He could remember when those hands had held a silver compass, setting the points with an ivory-handled thumb-screw to lay off the bastions on Paganetti's plan. That had been in the spring, when the mountain was loud with the shouts of six hundred laborers, the creak of forty-two timber wagons, and the steady, rhythmic clink-clink-clink of eighty stone-cutters working the black granite in the scree-beds below the crag.

In those days, the mountain had seemed an adversary worthy of an officer of the Empire. It had been high, savage, and cold, but it was an enemy that could be subdued by the rules of trigonometry and the weight of Bohemian oak. Every bastion had been calculated to the third fraction of a pace; every curtain was thick enough to absorb the shock of three twelve-pound iron shot without splintering the backing-timber. The Duke had looked at the plans in his cabinet at Munich, ran his fat, ringed finger along the trace of the redoubts, and declared that this would be the bolt that locked the Germanies against the Swiss heretics forever.

Now the bolt sat upon its mountain, seven thousand cubits above the cattle-pastures, and its masters were sixty shivering skeletons who were burning the wheelbarrows to keep their toes from dropping into their boots.

"Gunter," Galt said.

"Aye, Nicholas."

"Is there any of the dried horse-flesh left in the salting-tub?"

"There is the head of the piebald mule," the Sergeant replied. "It’s been in the salt since the third week of October. The ears are gone, and somebody had the tongue out with a wood-chisel four nights ago, but the cheek-meat is still there if you can get a cleaver through the crust."

"Boil it," said the Commandant.

"With what?" Gunter asked, gesturing toward the iron kettle. "We've burned the tool-boxes. We've burned the wheelbarrows. There's nothing left in the shed except the windlass-frame, and that’s three-inch larch. It’d take two men four hours with a cross-cut saw to make kindling of it, and we haven't got two men who could pull a saw forty strokes without sitting down to spit their teeth out."

"Burn the drawing-boards," Galt said.

Provost Kappel looked up, his ink-stained thumb hovering over the sheepskin. "The boards are property of the Duke's surveyor. They are marked with the ducal brand at the corners. Three crossed anchors and the crown of Styria. To burn marked timber is a felony under the land-peace of 1598."

Galt reached out with his foot—the one where the boot was still whole—and kicked the nearest trestle leg into the fire. A shower of red sparks shot up toward the blackened rafters, dancing for a moment in the draft before vanishing into the cold soot of the flue.

"The Duke is in Munich," the Commandant said. "He is sitting in a room with three tiled stoves and a carpet from the Levant. He is drinking Rhenish wine out of a silver beaker with two handles, and his clerk is reading him the returns of the salt-tolls from the bridge at Donauwörth. He does not know what ash-wood smells like when it is mixed with grease from an old cartridge-box. He does not know what it is to have your toes rot while your ears are listening for the bread-wagons that were stopped six weeks ago by the river-thieves."

He leaned forward, his face coming within three inches of the low, red flames. The light caught the deep lines beside his mouth, filled with black soot until they looked like cuts made by a shoemaker's knife.

"Burn the boards, Kappel," he said, his voice dropping to a dry whisper that barely carried over the crackle of the wood. "Burn the anchors and burn the crown of Styria. We will have an hour's heat before the sleet comes through the roof, and the Duke may collect the ash from the chimney when he comes to take his fortress back."

The Provost hesitated for a moment. Then he reached down, took a flat board of clean white lime-wood—upon which was drawn the ground-plan of the great southern demi-lune, with all its traverses, banquettes, and communication-trenches indicated in vermilion ink—and snapped it across his knee. The wood was dry and brittle; it parted with a sound like a pistol-shot in a stone vault.

He laid the two pieces carefully across the dying embers.

For a few seconds, the white wood resisted the heat. The red lines of Count Paganetti's geometric marvel remained visible in the glow, the five-pointed stars and the concentric ditches standing out sharply against the pale grain of the timber. Then the edges began to curl, turning brown, then deep bronze, and finally an intense, velvety black. A thin tongue of blue flame sprang from the corner where the ducal seal was branded, crept along the line of the main counterscarp, devoured the flag-bastion in a sudden, crackling rush of sparks, and enveloped the entire design in a sheet of clear, hot fire.

The sixty men along the walls did not move. They watched the drawing burn with the dull, patient fascination of oxen standing before a flaming haystack. The heat reached their faces, warming the crusted grease on their cheeks, causing the frost in their beards to melt into tiny, glistening drops that ran down their lips like sweat.

"It makes a good blaze," Werner said from the door. "The lime-wood is sweeter than the ash. It doesn't bite the eyes so much."

"It's twenty florins' worth of seasoned timber," Kappel muttered, watching the ashes of the southern salient break into tiny red sparks that floated upward toward the flue. "The surveyor had it brought all the way from the Tyrol on the back of an ox. He said there wasn't a knot in six boards."

"He was right," said Gunter, leaning his back against the stone wall and closing his eyes. "It burns clean. It doesn't leave anything behind but the gray dust."

Outside, the rime continued to gather upon the stones of the unfinished works. It settled upon the ramparts where no sentry walked, drifted into the empty embrasures where no guns stood, and laid a thin, white shroud over the body of the boy from Isny, who sat in the angle of the West Horn with his yellow boots turned to the color of wet lead, his head resting against the frozen granite as though he were merely listening to the deep, grinding murmur of the mountain beneath the snow.