Post by Lorpius Prime on May 28, 2008 6:26:48 GMT -5
Jay blinked a few times to get the sleep out of his eyes before sliding his feet out of the bed. He worked his jaw a few times as he tried to figure out what had woken him. The little room on the third floor of the inn was still quite dark, except for the meager amount of moonlight which found its way through the single dusty window.
He didn’t feel particularly tired, so Jay got up and strode towards the window, stepping gingerly across the creaking wood floorboards. He rubbed the elbow of his last remaining shirt against the window, but there seemed to be just as much dust on the outside of the pane as inside.
Jay pushed his brow and nose up against the glass, but couldn’t see anything worthwhile outside, just the vague outlines of the street and buildings on the other side. It was quiet too; there wasn’t anything loud enough to wake…
“The cannons have stopped,” he said with mild astonishment. Earlier in the night he had thought that the noise of the shelling would prevent him from getting to sleep; now the silence had roused him. Jay shrugged at the irony.
Theodore had decided to hole up in the little inn when they learned the roads out of the city had been closed by the army. Theodore hadn’t seemed happy about the confinement and Jay himself had been more than a little worried; but after they saw a scared-looking checkpoint guard shoot an even more frightened citizen trying to flee past, they had opted to hunker down and wait. With the number of other people that had flooded into the streets of Munich’s eastern half, Jay thought they were probably lucky to get any lodging at all.
The floor protested noisily as Jay returned to the one dusty bed that he was splitting with Theodore.
“The cannons have stopped,” he said again, absently, as he climbed back onto the bed. The sheets had not wanted to come off the mattress and looked rather thin anyway, so the two had simply lain on top of them; mercifully, it had not been a cold night.
“Was sagen Sie?” Theodore murmured and stirred.
Jay bit his tongue; he had not intended to actually wake the other man. “Ah, the guns have stopped firing. Sorry, it woke me up, I had got used to the noise.”
Theodore sat up and shook his head, seeming flustered, “Was? Why?”
Jay blinked, “I don’t know… Nothing to shoot at?” He shrugged, his body was getting over the momentary wakefulness and Jay was ready to sleep again.
But Theodore got to his feet and hurried over to the window where he repeated the same ritual Jay had just a moment before. He had no more luck with the window; instead he pulled on its iron handles, muttering. It opened with a squeal of old wood and bad hinges and let fly a small cloud of dust, like an old man’s cough. Theodore stood on his toes and leaned forward to put his face outside, looking to his left, to the West.
Jay sniffed at the dust and the somewhat sulfurous smell carried in on a breeze. He wondered what Theodore was so anxious about. He didn’t have to wait long.
“I think we should leave,” the German said as he withdrew his head from the window and wiped the dust off his shirt where he’d leaned against the sill.
“You can’t be serious,” Jay said, leaning back on his elbows.
“Yes,” Theodore responded. He walked back towards the bed and picked up his boots. “We are in a quite perilous situation, and this change worries me. We should get out of the city at once.”
Jay sat up once more, “How? You saw the streets yesterday, the army’s got everyone barricaded in.”
“It is not the army I am concerned with.” He finished tying the laces on one of his boots. Jay groaned and leaned over the side of the bed to search for his own shoes.
“What are you ‘concerned with’, then?” Jay said with his head upside down as he felt around on the floor. “You can’t seriously think that… whatever it is on the other side of the river has actually gotten through all that mess on the bridges.” Jay remembered the jungle of sandbags, trenches, and field guns which sprung up on the river’s eastern shore by the time he and Theodore had made their way back through the crush of refugees after being denied exit.
“What else could have stopped the cannons?”
“Maybe everyone finally got tired?” Jay suggested as he latched onto his shoes and sat back up to slide his feet into them. “It is the middle of the bloody night, you know.”
Theodore finished with his other boot and walked over to the coat rack which stood in one corner of the room. “Mr. Blake, you have met our noble friend Karl. Did he seem the sort to use his nights for rest?” He threw Jay’s heavy coat to him.
Jay caught it with one hand and adjusted the straps on his braces before standing up to put it on. “I suppose not. But I only saw him once during the day, at his house.”
“I have been there. It is a shame, so much knowledge…” Theodore shook his head. “Come, let us go.” He pulled open the room’s door; it squeaked on hinges only slightly better oiled than the window’s.
Jay patted his bare head with a sigh and followed, buttoning up his long coat on the way. It was odd to think that it had been given to him by the person from whom they were now ostensibly fleeing. Jay pushed his doubts about Theodore’s version of events back out of his mind, however; at the moment, he had little choice but to trust the other man.
He followed Theodore into the narrow hallway outside the door. It was lit by a single lantern and a weathered green carpet ran the length. To the right, at the far end from their room was the door to the tiny washroom had taken a much needed bath the previous evening; although it had required forcing himself to ignore the crusty fixtures and basin as he scrubbed. At the other end of the hall was the staircase down which Theodore was descending. Jay went down after a moment of trying to decide whether he most distrusted the rotten-looking steps or the filthy-looking railing. He came to the conclusion that if the steps could hold Theodore they could handle his own weight, and Jay walked briskly down without touching the handrails.
At the bottom of two flights they emerged into the slightly nicer-looking bar area of the inn. The inn’s owner, whether out of a sense of kindness or profit, had allowed several people to stay inside the pub for the night, and most were now sleeping on chairs. The owner’s wife sat behind the bar, looking crossly at the people there, as if certain they would steal something if left unguarded. Theodore slid the key to their room across the bar to her, and she nodded curtly without speaking or taking her eyes off the others.
Jay opened the heavy front door and held it for Theodore; it was mercifully in far better condition than those upstairs and hardly made any noise at all as it swung inward. After passing through, Jay closed it as gently as he could.
The inn was close enough to the city’s center to have public gas lights on the street outside, but none of them were lit. Jay surmised that someone had probably thought it wise to shut off the gas for the time being. Still, it was light enough to see outside. There were no fires on this side of the river but the moon, although no longer full, was large and bright in the sky.
Once he had made sure the inn door was properly closed, Jay turned around to step down the pair of steps which led into the street. “Theodore, do you honestly think that—”
He stopped when the other man held up a hand over his shoulder and pointed with two fingers into the street. Jay looked around.
“All right, now that is rather eerie.”
They were not the only ones in the street. Jay would probably not have been surprised to find people sleeping in doorways or huddled up against the sides of buildings. He had seen quite a few of those on outskirts as they entered the city, and rather more had fled yesterday into the smaller Eastern half than could be comfortably accommodated. But the people in the street were not sleeping nor even sitting, they were standing in a small crowd, facing west.
Jay saw a handful turn to look at the two newcomers, and Theodore leaned in close to Jay to whisper, “I think you should not speak, Englishman.”
He caught the stress placed on the final word and the very serious look in Theodore’s eyes. Jay swallowed and nodded. Theodore turned back to watch the crowd of Germans muttering among themselves and stepped casually down into the street. Jay put his hands in his coat pockets and did the same, tilting his head down slightly so as to not look at anyone directly.
As best he could tell, the gathered people were simply watching the fires that were still visible as luminous spots behind the skyline to the west. He figured their quiet conversations were about the course of the progress of the battle which had split the city. Jay was not at all sure which side they supported.
The inn was on a short road called Milchstraße which was roughly halfway between Munich’s main rail line to the east and one of the large bridges which crossed over the river Isar to the west. So far as Jay could tell, it had nothing at all to do with milk. He saw a few hands pointing into the sky as he followed in Theodore’s wake through the crowd. When he followed the fingers, he could see an airship, a big one, hovering some ways off to the northwest. After a few minutes it sank below the tops of the buildings and Jay stopped looking over his shoulder to find that he had nearly lost Theodore in the crowd. He changed course and stepped quickly to catch up.
He fell in again behind his stocky comrade in a small triangular plaza where their oddly-named street bent northward. There were more people in the plaza, but they were grouped less densely in several small huddles. As they passed between two groups of murmuring Germans, a young man with a dirty face turned to them and raised a fist to his chest.
“Heute sind wir von der ausländischen Unterdrückung frei!” he exclaimed, and grinned from ear to dirt-smudged ear.
Theodore made a similar gesture and returned the other man’s comment with a sharp, “Endlich!” Jay gave what he hoped was a non-conspicuous nod of his head.
The man seemed to accept it, in any case, and he stepped back to allow Jay and Theodore to pass, nodding to each of them in turn with that alarmingly large smile plastered across his face. Jay wished Theodore would walk faster; he didn’t like the tone of the conversation which had just occurred and wanted to get away from this crowd as fast as possible.
To his great relief, no one else accosted them on their way out of the plaza. The crowd around it thinned out quickly as they continued northwest and Jay decided he could take the risk of leaning forward to whisper to Theodore.
“And what was that about?”
Theodore was apparently less confident than Jay and glanced sharply to either side before muttering a response.
“The people here are anticipating the end of the occupation. It excites them.”
Jay frowned, “So… what? Do they really think the army’s just going to fold? Or does the Baron actually have some sort of massive army of his own over there?” He nodded over his shoulder towards the river even though Theodore was facing the other direction. “Did he keep it in his basement?”
Theodore hung his head and sighed, “Mr. Blake, it is all around—“
He had been making a significant gesture towards the buildings around them when he was forced to stop. They had been walking out onto a slightly broader street which ran east-west when a tremendous horse came barreling down the street on their left. Jay grabbed Theodore by the shoulders and pulled him back. Although the shorter German would probably not have been trampled, the horse still passed very close and shrieked at the two men. Jay winced at the high-pitched and terrified sound; the horse had a saddle and bridle but no rider, its stirrups swung freely as it clattered by.
A second horse followed close behind. It also wanted for a rider, and Jay saw a carbine still in its holster strapped to the saddle. He stared as the two beasts flew down the road and into the dark distance.
“Well, that was unnerving,” Jay commented.
Theodore had stumbled slightly, but quickly regained his footing. “We must move quickly,” he announced.
Jay glanced down at the shorter man and shrugged. He followed Theodore for a few steps down the road, then stopped.
“Maybe we should have tried to stop them. The horses, I mean,” he added when Theodore looked over his shoulder at him. “We could have moved faster.”
“Do you ride?” the German looked skeptical.
Jay shrugged again and smiled somewhat lopsidedly, “Well, yes,” he admitted. “I’m no champion horseman, that is. My sister rode much more than me, but I can handle myself.”
Theodore shook his head, “I never would have guessed.” Then he waved his arm and resumed walking, “Come along, Mr. Blake. Those beasts would have trampled you if you had tried to stop them, and the soldiers around here would shoot you as a thief. We are not far from a rail station; we will try to follow the line out of the city.”
Jay nodded to Theodore’s back, the other man was almost certainly right. Even so, Jay felt a twinge of regret that he was proving to still be of no help at all, but was once more resigned to simply following and hoping that his companion knew what he was doing.
Book One, Chapter:
-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13-14-15-16-17-18-19-20-21-
-22-23-24-25-26-27-28-29-30-31-32-33-34-35-36-37-38-39-40-41-42-
-43-44-45-46-47-48-49-50-51-52-53-54-55-56-57-58-59-60-61-62-
Appendix: -A-B-C-
He didn’t feel particularly tired, so Jay got up and strode towards the window, stepping gingerly across the creaking wood floorboards. He rubbed the elbow of his last remaining shirt against the window, but there seemed to be just as much dust on the outside of the pane as inside.
Jay pushed his brow and nose up against the glass, but couldn’t see anything worthwhile outside, just the vague outlines of the street and buildings on the other side. It was quiet too; there wasn’t anything loud enough to wake…
“The cannons have stopped,” he said with mild astonishment. Earlier in the night he had thought that the noise of the shelling would prevent him from getting to sleep; now the silence had roused him. Jay shrugged at the irony.
Theodore had decided to hole up in the little inn when they learned the roads out of the city had been closed by the army. Theodore hadn’t seemed happy about the confinement and Jay himself had been more than a little worried; but after they saw a scared-looking checkpoint guard shoot an even more frightened citizen trying to flee past, they had opted to hunker down and wait. With the number of other people that had flooded into the streets of Munich’s eastern half, Jay thought they were probably lucky to get any lodging at all.
The floor protested noisily as Jay returned to the one dusty bed that he was splitting with Theodore.
“The cannons have stopped,” he said again, absently, as he climbed back onto the bed. The sheets had not wanted to come off the mattress and looked rather thin anyway, so the two had simply lain on top of them; mercifully, it had not been a cold night.
“Was sagen Sie?” Theodore murmured and stirred.
Jay bit his tongue; he had not intended to actually wake the other man. “Ah, the guns have stopped firing. Sorry, it woke me up, I had got used to the noise.”
Theodore sat up and shook his head, seeming flustered, “Was? Why?”
Jay blinked, “I don’t know… Nothing to shoot at?” He shrugged, his body was getting over the momentary wakefulness and Jay was ready to sleep again.
But Theodore got to his feet and hurried over to the window where he repeated the same ritual Jay had just a moment before. He had no more luck with the window; instead he pulled on its iron handles, muttering. It opened with a squeal of old wood and bad hinges and let fly a small cloud of dust, like an old man’s cough. Theodore stood on his toes and leaned forward to put his face outside, looking to his left, to the West.
Jay sniffed at the dust and the somewhat sulfurous smell carried in on a breeze. He wondered what Theodore was so anxious about. He didn’t have to wait long.
“I think we should leave,” the German said as he withdrew his head from the window and wiped the dust off his shirt where he’d leaned against the sill.
“You can’t be serious,” Jay said, leaning back on his elbows.
“Yes,” Theodore responded. He walked back towards the bed and picked up his boots. “We are in a quite perilous situation, and this change worries me. We should get out of the city at once.”
Jay sat up once more, “How? You saw the streets yesterday, the army’s got everyone barricaded in.”
“It is not the army I am concerned with.” He finished tying the laces on one of his boots. Jay groaned and leaned over the side of the bed to search for his own shoes.
“What are you ‘concerned with’, then?” Jay said with his head upside down as he felt around on the floor. “You can’t seriously think that… whatever it is on the other side of the river has actually gotten through all that mess on the bridges.” Jay remembered the jungle of sandbags, trenches, and field guns which sprung up on the river’s eastern shore by the time he and Theodore had made their way back through the crush of refugees after being denied exit.
“What else could have stopped the cannons?”
“Maybe everyone finally got tired?” Jay suggested as he latched onto his shoes and sat back up to slide his feet into them. “It is the middle of the bloody night, you know.”
Theodore finished with his other boot and walked over to the coat rack which stood in one corner of the room. “Mr. Blake, you have met our noble friend Karl. Did he seem the sort to use his nights for rest?” He threw Jay’s heavy coat to him.
Jay caught it with one hand and adjusted the straps on his braces before standing up to put it on. “I suppose not. But I only saw him once during the day, at his house.”
“I have been there. It is a shame, so much knowledge…” Theodore shook his head. “Come, let us go.” He pulled open the room’s door; it squeaked on hinges only slightly better oiled than the window’s.
Jay patted his bare head with a sigh and followed, buttoning up his long coat on the way. It was odd to think that it had been given to him by the person from whom they were now ostensibly fleeing. Jay pushed his doubts about Theodore’s version of events back out of his mind, however; at the moment, he had little choice but to trust the other man.
He followed Theodore into the narrow hallway outside the door. It was lit by a single lantern and a weathered green carpet ran the length. To the right, at the far end from their room was the door to the tiny washroom had taken a much needed bath the previous evening; although it had required forcing himself to ignore the crusty fixtures and basin as he scrubbed. At the other end of the hall was the staircase down which Theodore was descending. Jay went down after a moment of trying to decide whether he most distrusted the rotten-looking steps or the filthy-looking railing. He came to the conclusion that if the steps could hold Theodore they could handle his own weight, and Jay walked briskly down without touching the handrails.
At the bottom of two flights they emerged into the slightly nicer-looking bar area of the inn. The inn’s owner, whether out of a sense of kindness or profit, had allowed several people to stay inside the pub for the night, and most were now sleeping on chairs. The owner’s wife sat behind the bar, looking crossly at the people there, as if certain they would steal something if left unguarded. Theodore slid the key to their room across the bar to her, and she nodded curtly without speaking or taking her eyes off the others.
Jay opened the heavy front door and held it for Theodore; it was mercifully in far better condition than those upstairs and hardly made any noise at all as it swung inward. After passing through, Jay closed it as gently as he could.
The inn was close enough to the city’s center to have public gas lights on the street outside, but none of them were lit. Jay surmised that someone had probably thought it wise to shut off the gas for the time being. Still, it was light enough to see outside. There were no fires on this side of the river but the moon, although no longer full, was large and bright in the sky.
Once he had made sure the inn door was properly closed, Jay turned around to step down the pair of steps which led into the street. “Theodore, do you honestly think that—”
He stopped when the other man held up a hand over his shoulder and pointed with two fingers into the street. Jay looked around.
“All right, now that is rather eerie.”
They were not the only ones in the street. Jay would probably not have been surprised to find people sleeping in doorways or huddled up against the sides of buildings. He had seen quite a few of those on outskirts as they entered the city, and rather more had fled yesterday into the smaller Eastern half than could be comfortably accommodated. But the people in the street were not sleeping nor even sitting, they were standing in a small crowd, facing west.
Jay saw a handful turn to look at the two newcomers, and Theodore leaned in close to Jay to whisper, “I think you should not speak, Englishman.”
He caught the stress placed on the final word and the very serious look in Theodore’s eyes. Jay swallowed and nodded. Theodore turned back to watch the crowd of Germans muttering among themselves and stepped casually down into the street. Jay put his hands in his coat pockets and did the same, tilting his head down slightly so as to not look at anyone directly.
As best he could tell, the gathered people were simply watching the fires that were still visible as luminous spots behind the skyline to the west. He figured their quiet conversations were about the course of the progress of the battle which had split the city. Jay was not at all sure which side they supported.
The inn was on a short road called Milchstraße which was roughly halfway between Munich’s main rail line to the east and one of the large bridges which crossed over the river Isar to the west. So far as Jay could tell, it had nothing at all to do with milk. He saw a few hands pointing into the sky as he followed in Theodore’s wake through the crowd. When he followed the fingers, he could see an airship, a big one, hovering some ways off to the northwest. After a few minutes it sank below the tops of the buildings and Jay stopped looking over his shoulder to find that he had nearly lost Theodore in the crowd. He changed course and stepped quickly to catch up.
He fell in again behind his stocky comrade in a small triangular plaza where their oddly-named street bent northward. There were more people in the plaza, but they were grouped less densely in several small huddles. As they passed between two groups of murmuring Germans, a young man with a dirty face turned to them and raised a fist to his chest.
“Heute sind wir von der ausländischen Unterdrückung frei!” he exclaimed, and grinned from ear to dirt-smudged ear.
Theodore made a similar gesture and returned the other man’s comment with a sharp, “Endlich!” Jay gave what he hoped was a non-conspicuous nod of his head.
The man seemed to accept it, in any case, and he stepped back to allow Jay and Theodore to pass, nodding to each of them in turn with that alarmingly large smile plastered across his face. Jay wished Theodore would walk faster; he didn’t like the tone of the conversation which had just occurred and wanted to get away from this crowd as fast as possible.
To his great relief, no one else accosted them on their way out of the plaza. The crowd around it thinned out quickly as they continued northwest and Jay decided he could take the risk of leaning forward to whisper to Theodore.
“And what was that about?”
Theodore was apparently less confident than Jay and glanced sharply to either side before muttering a response.
“The people here are anticipating the end of the occupation. It excites them.”
Jay frowned, “So… what? Do they really think the army’s just going to fold? Or does the Baron actually have some sort of massive army of his own over there?” He nodded over his shoulder towards the river even though Theodore was facing the other direction. “Did he keep it in his basement?”
Theodore hung his head and sighed, “Mr. Blake, it is all around—“
He had been making a significant gesture towards the buildings around them when he was forced to stop. They had been walking out onto a slightly broader street which ran east-west when a tremendous horse came barreling down the street on their left. Jay grabbed Theodore by the shoulders and pulled him back. Although the shorter German would probably not have been trampled, the horse still passed very close and shrieked at the two men. Jay winced at the high-pitched and terrified sound; the horse had a saddle and bridle but no rider, its stirrups swung freely as it clattered by.
A second horse followed close behind. It also wanted for a rider, and Jay saw a carbine still in its holster strapped to the saddle. He stared as the two beasts flew down the road and into the dark distance.
“Well, that was unnerving,” Jay commented.
Theodore had stumbled slightly, but quickly regained his footing. “We must move quickly,” he announced.
Jay glanced down at the shorter man and shrugged. He followed Theodore for a few steps down the road, then stopped.
“Maybe we should have tried to stop them. The horses, I mean,” he added when Theodore looked over his shoulder at him. “We could have moved faster.”
“Do you ride?” the German looked skeptical.
Jay shrugged again and smiled somewhat lopsidedly, “Well, yes,” he admitted. “I’m no champion horseman, that is. My sister rode much more than me, but I can handle myself.”
Theodore shook his head, “I never would have guessed.” Then he waved his arm and resumed walking, “Come along, Mr. Blake. Those beasts would have trampled you if you had tried to stop them, and the soldiers around here would shoot you as a thief. We are not far from a rail station; we will try to follow the line out of the city.”
Jay nodded to Theodore’s back, the other man was almost certainly right. Even so, Jay felt a twinge of regret that he was proving to still be of no help at all, but was once more resigned to simply following and hoping that his companion knew what he was doing.
Book One, Chapter:
-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13-14-15-16-17-18-19-20-21-
-22-23-24-25-26-27-28-29-30-31-32-33-34-35-36-37-38-39-40-41-42-
-43-44-45-46-47-48-49-50-51-52-53-54-55-56-57-58-59-60-61-62-
Appendix: -A-B-C-