Jack Nicholls
The first week I was home, I woke every morning before the birds and reached for a musket that was no longer beside me. I had returned it to the armoury. The habit remained.
Scarlet found this amusing at the start. She said I had become so accustomed to orders that perhaps she ought to have a drum beaten before breakfast. I told her she would tire of commanding me soon enough. For a moment she laughed. Given a little time, things might be as they had been before I left. She said nothing. I knew that silence. Things had changed; that much was plain.
I had thought often of her laugh while marching. I had wanted nothing more than to be home. Yet now that I was, I no longer knew how to belong there. Guests spoke too loudly at supper, and at night the silence was worse than gunfire because I kept waiting for something to break it.
I had been under arms for three years. I came home with a sabre, a torn coat, and no notion of what a man was meant to do with himself after death.
Father’s workshop had changed little while I was gone, except for a leak above the bench. His cabinetmaking business employed six men and supplied the better houses around Darmstadt. Upstairs, a new pianoforte stood beside a glass cabinet of porcelain. The drawing-room clock disagreed with the one on the landing.
Scarlet had kept Father’s accounts during my absence. She did not intend to give them up merely because I had returned. Her mother had chosen places for a new shelf and, in time, a cradle. I pretended not to hear the second part.
On the third day, the baker’s boy asked whether I had killed a Frenchman. His mother slapped him before I could answer. I told him I had spent more time looking for dry socks than killing anybody, which disappointed him greatly. People remembered banners and generals. I remembered wet powder, lice, and men waking because somebody had dreamed aloud. Father wanted me at the ledgers. The town wanted stories. I could satisfy neither. So I repaired hinges, sharpened chisels and let Scarlet fill the silences.
The strange business began with Herr Brenner’s horse.
It was found before sunrise at the edge of the beechwood, still saddled, though Brenner himself was nowhere to be found. The horse had sweated itself white and would not be led beneath the trees. When anyone tried, it planted all four feet and rolled its eyes until the whites showed.
Brenner had served too. He had returned from Russia three years earlier and seldom spoke of what happened there. A search found no trace of him.
By noon half the town had gathered near Brenner’s yard, blaming deserters, wolves and witchcraft. The witchcraft came from Frau Eberhardt, our housekeeper, who had outlived three husbands and considered this sufficient experience to explain misfortunes. I suspected a simpler explanation.
‘He heard them,’ she said.
‘Heard whom?’ Scarlet asked.
‘The riders.’
Scarlet looked at me. I shook my head.
Eberhardt spat into the dust. ‘Laugh if you like. A man should not follow when the hunters call. Following is answer enough.’ The people of Hesse had a skill for making ordinary superstition sound like a death sentence.
That evening the sky clouded over.
It had been hot all day, the sort of heat that left the leaves hanging limp, but the cloud came from the north in one dark piece, broad as a range of hills. I noticed because the wind was coming steadily from the west and the cloud did not care.
Father was helping me carry warped boards out of the workshop. He employed men for such work, but liked to inspect their failures.
‘Quit staring,’ he said.
‘The wind is wrong.’
Then we heard the horn, a single note rolling over the fields. I set down the board. Father did not.
‘Inside,’ he said.
‘It’s only a hunting horn.’
He looked towards the tree line. ‘Not at this hour.’
He carried the board into the workshop without waiting for me.
A second note came after dark. By then every dog in the town was barking.
Matthias Heller found me before supper. We had served together; he still walked with a stiff leg. Voss had asked some veterans to meet at the ruined chapel. They meant to keep the riders from the houses.
‘How?’
‘Voss says there is an old way.’
‘The old ways did little for us in Russia.’
‘Will you come?’
I told him I had finished following men who claimed to know the way. He left without another word.
Later that night, I slept badly and woke near midnight with my hand around the sabre’s hilt.
The dogs had stopped. In their place there were hoofbeats. They came from above the roof.
I went outside before I had properly considered the wisdom of doing so. The street was empty. Shutters were closed. Over the houses the cloud had swallowed the stars, and within it came a dull running sound, hundreds of horses heard through thick walls.
A lantern moved between two warehouses. Matthias carried it. Two men followed him. One led a black goat. They were heading towards the wood.
I fetched my coat and went after them. I wanted to know what help I had refused.
There are habits from soldiering which a sensible man ought to lose. Following armed men into a dark wood is one of them.
The three kept to an old track. I followed far enough behind that their lantern appeared and disappeared between the trunks. The air grew colder as we climbed. At first I was grateful for it. Then I saw my breath.
The track ended at a clearing I remembered from childhood. Little remained of the old chapel but a broken wall and the crooked stone we had once dared one another to touch.
There were perhaps a dozen men, most of them faces I knew. Some still carried the marks of war: a missing hand, a stiff leg, a scar drawn white across the cheek. They stood inside a ring of smaller stones, around the old block covered in weather-worn runes.
At their centre stood Pastor Voss. That surprised me more than anything else. He had baptised half the town and buried the other half. He had also buried my brother. Yet there he stood without his collar, his grey hair loose about his shoulders, holding a staff dark with age.
‘You are late,’ he said to Matthias.
‘The cloud came quickly.’
‘It has waited longer than we have.’
I should have gone then. Instead I remained behind a fallen tree and watched.
Voss spoke quietly. I caught names: Donar, Frau Holle, Wodan. My grandmother had used them in stories Voss once told her to put away.
‘For twenty years,’ he said, ‘Christian kings have fed the earth with men. Frenchmen. Germans. Russians. Englishmen. They speak of peace because they are tired. The old ones are not tired.’
The horn was sounding already. Voss meant to turn the Hunt from the town. The goat, he said, would buy its passage through the wood, provided no man challenged the riders. He ordered the men to stay within the ring of stones.
Matthias brought the goat forward and cut its throat. The animal dropped hard onto the grass.
The horn answered. Every man in the clearing went still.
That was when the cloud descended. It did not fall as mist falls. It came between the trees in great black folds, so that the moon vanished and the clearing seemed roofed over. The smell was of wet leaves, horse sweat and something sweeter beneath it, like meat kept too long in summer.
From somewhere inside the cloud came dogs. Not barking at first. Panting. Close. One approached the stones and stopped. I saw no clear shape of it: a white muzzle, a back too high for any dog, eyes shining at the height of a man’s chest.
A voice replied from the cloud. ‘You have given enough.’
Voss smiled. I remember that clearly. He had mistaken danger for a response.
Riders passed above the clearing. I saw hooves where no road was. Some wore mail, others coats cut in fashions older than my grandfather. Some wore uniforms I had marched beside and fought against—blue, grey and white, torn as if straight from the field.
Among them rode Brenner. I recognised his fur collar, though he sat a horse I had never seen. He did not look down.
Matthias saw him too. He drew a pistol from his coat and fired.
The hounds leapt over the stones. Men who had come willingly ran for the trees, and the dogs went among them. Voss shouted for them to stand fast. A rider passed through him. When he fell, his hair had turned white.
Matthias stumbled towards my hiding place, a hound at his heels. I caught him by the coat and drew my sabre across the creature’s path. Its teeth closed upon empty air. Then it stopped, and the horn sounded once more.
The clearing emptied. Not of men. Of sound. Even those who were screaming made no noise. Matthias was pulled from my grasp. A moment later he rode among the Hunt, sitting straighter than I had ever seen him.
A horse stepped out of the cloud. It was grey and thin, steam rising from its hide. I counted four legs at first. Then it moved and I was no longer certain. Its saddle was empty.
Beside it sat a rider in a broad hat, one hand resting on a spear. The other held out the grey horse’s reins. He looked at my sabre.
I had followed the horn and drawn my sword before the Hunt. I needed no explanation for the horse.
I had carried that sabre through mud, rain and retreat, and even at home I could not quite leave it behind. I had hated the army often enough, but there had been a simplicity to it. When the column moved, you moved. When the order came, you obeyed. Even fear had somewhere to go. At home no one could tell me what came next.
I thought of Father’s workshop and the leak above his tools. I thought of Scarlet’s laugh, and how quickly it had faded when I spoke of things being as they were before. She had learnt to manage without me. I had yet to learn how to return.
Small things, perhaps. Enough.
I laid the blade in the grass.
For a moment nothing moved. Then the rider gathered the reins and turned his horse. The Hunt rose. Hounds, riders and horses passed upward through the branches, though not a twig stirred. The cloud followed them, drawing east across the paling sky.
By the time the birds began calling again, the clearing held only the dead, the old stone and my sabre in the grass. I left it there.
When I reached home, Scarlet was at the kitchen table with a lamp burning beside her. She looked at my clothes, then at my empty belt.
‘Where have you been?’
‘In the wood.’
‘I can see that.’
She stood and touched a cut above my eye, which I had not noticed until then.
‘Sit down.’
I did. She brought water and a clean cloth, and attended to the cut without asking further.
After a while she said, ‘The roof still leaks.’
‘I know.’
‘And you promised to mend it.’
‘I know.’
She looked at me again. ‘There are other things you promised.’
I had no answer ready. She set bread before me and took the chair opposite. I reached for her hand. She let me take it.
We said nothing more. This time the silence did not trouble me.
Jack Nicholls is an emerging writer from Sydney, New South Wales, whose love of storytelling grew out of an interest in books, film, and television. He studied Film and Screen Media alongside creative writing. His writing explores history, mythology and the supernatural, drawing inspiration from the stories and worlds that have captured his imagination.
