“The Burgundian escaped from Ligota,” he stammered. “In secret… No one knows whither. Busy with the pursuit of Reynevan… they—we—allowed her to escape.”
“I wonder,” Ofka translated after a long, pregnant silence, “I wonder why this doesn’t surprise me at all. But since it is so, let it be. I won’t bother myself with the whore. Let Gelfrad deal with the matter on his return. He can handle it himself, whether or not he’s a cuckold. It’s nothing new in this family, actually. It must have happened to me, for it can’t be possible that such fools sprang from my own loins.”
Balbulus coughed, wheezed and choked for a while. But Ofka didn’t translate, so it couldn’t have been speech, just ordinary coughing. The old man finally took a breath, grimaced like a demon and struck his cane against the floor, then gurgled horribly. Ofka listened, sucking the end of her plait.
“But Nicolaus was the family’s hope,” she translated. “Was of my blood, the blood of the Sterczas, not the dregs of the Devil knows what mongrel couplings. So the killer will have to pay for Nicolaus’s spilled blood. With interest.”
Tammo banged his cane against the floor again. It fell from his shaking hand. The Lord of Sterzendorf coughed and sneezed, spraying saliva and snot around. Hrozwita of Baruth, Balbulus’s daughter and Ofka’s mother, who was standing alongside, wiped his chin, picked up the cane and pressed it into his hand.
“Hgrrrhhh! Grhhh… Bbb… bhrr… bhrrrllg…”
“Reinmar of Bielawa will pay me back for Nicolaus,” Ofka translated unemotionally. “He will pay, as God and all the saints are my witnesses. I will lock him up in a dungeon, in a cage, in a chest like the one the Duke of Głogów cast Henry the Fat into, so small he won’t even be able to scratch himself, with one hole for food and another directly opposite. And I’ll keep him like that for half a year. And only then go to work on him. And I’ll bring a torturer all the way from Magdeburg, because they have excellent men there, not like the ones here in Silesia, where the rascal expires on the second day. Oh, no, I’ll get hold of a master who’ll devote to Nicolaus’s killer a week. Or two.”
Apeczko Stercza swallowed.
“But to do that,” Ofka continued, “we must seize the adulterer. Which demands intelligence. Wits. Because the adulterer is no fool. A fool wouldn’t have graduated from Prague, or ingratiated himself with the Oleśnica friars, or have so ably seduced Gelfrad’s French wife. With a crafty one like that, it’s not enough to chase up and down the Wrocław road like an idiot, making a fool of oneself. Giving the affair renown that will serve the rake—and not us.”
Apeczko nodded. Ofka looked at him and sniffed and wiped her little snub nose.
“The adulterer,” she translated on, “has a brother, residing on an estate somewhere near Henryków. It’s quite likely he’ll seek shelter there. Perhaps he already has. Another Bielawa, before he died, was a priest at the Wrocław Collegiate, so it’s conceivable the rascal will want to hide with another rascal. I mean to say with His Excellency, the Most Reverend Bishop Konrad, that old soak and thief!”
Hrozwita of Baruth once again wiped the old man’s chin, which was covered in snot after his furious outburst.
“Furthermore, the rake has acquaintances among the monks of the Monastery of the Holy Ghost in Brzeg, in the hospice. Our sly boots may have headed there, to surprise and mislead Wolfher. Which isn’t too difficult, in any case. Finally, the most important thing. Listen carefully, Apecz. It’s certain that our adulterer will want to play the trouveur, pretend to be some sort of Lohengrin or Lancelot. He will want to contact the Frenchwoman. And we will most likely catch him there, in Ligota, like a dog with a bitch in heat.”
“Why in Ligota?” Apeczko dared to ask. “For she—”
“Has fled, I know. But he doesn’t.”
The old fart’s soul, thought Apeczko, is even more twisted than his body. But he’s as cunning as a fox. And, to give him his due, he knows a great deal. Knows everything.
“But to achieve what I have just ordered,” Ofka translated into comprehensible language, “you’re not much bloody use to me—you, my sons and nephews, blood, apparently, of my blood and bone of my bone. Therefore, you will hasten as quickly as you can to Niemodlin, and then to Ziębice. When you get there… Listen carefully, Apecz. You will find Kunz Aulock, called Kyrie-eleison. And others: Walter of Barby, Sybek of Kobylagłowa and Stork of Gorgowice. You will tell them that Tammo Stercza will pay a thousand Rhenish guilders for the capture of Reinmar of Bielawa alive. A thousand—remember.”
Apeczko swallowed at each name, for they were the names of the worst thugs and killers throughout Silesia, scoundrels with neither honour nor faith. Prepared to murder their own grandmothers for three skojeces, never mind the astonishing sum of a thousand guilders. My guilders, thought Apeczko crossly. Because that ought to be my inheritance when that damned cripple finally kicks the bucket.
“Do you understand, Apecz?”
“Yes, Father.”
“Then begone, off with you. Out of here, to horse, carry out my orders.”
First, thought Apeczko, I’ll head towards the kitchen, where I’ll eat my fill and drink enough for two, you stingy old bugger. And then we’ll see.
“Apecz.”
Apeczko Stercza turned around. And looked. But not at Balbulus’s contorted, flushed face, which seemed to him, for the first time here in Sterzendorf, to be unnatural, out of place. Apeczko looked into little Ofka’s huge, nut-brown eyes. At Hrozwita, standing behind his chair.
“Yes, Father?”
“Do not let us down.”
But perhaps it isn’t him at all? The thought flashed through his mind. Perhaps it’s a corpse sitting on this chair, a half-dead carcass with its brain utterly eaten up by paralysis? Perhaps… it’s them? Perhaps it’s the women—girls, maidens and matrons—who rule at Sterzendorf?
He quickly drove away the preposterous thought.
“I won’t, Father.”
Apeczko Stercza had no intention of hurrying to carry out Tammo’s orders. He walked briskly to the castle kitchen, murmuring angrily, where he demanded everything the said kitchen had to offer. Let the cripple lord it in his chamber upstairs; outside, executive power belonged to somebody else. Outside the chamber, Apeczko of Stercza was master, and he demonstrated it as soon as he entered the kitchen. A dog earned a kick and bolted, howling. A cat fled, deftly dodging the large wooden spoon thrown at it. The maids flinched as a cast-iron cauldron slammed down on the stone floor with a dreadful bang. The most sluggish maid was hit on the back of the neck and called a whorish clod. The serving boys learned all sorts of things about themselves and their parents, and several made the close acquaintance of their master’s fist, as hard and heavy as a lump of iron. A servant who needed to be told twice to bring wine from the master’s cellar received such a kick that he lurched forward onto hands and knees.
Soon after, Apeczko—Sir Apeczko—was sprawled on his chair, greedily chewing great mouthfuls of roast venison, fatty pork ribs, a huge ring of blood pudding, a hunk of dried Prague ham and several pigeons boiled in broth, accompanied by a whole loaf of bread as large as a Saracen’s buckler. Washed down, naturally, with the best Hungarian and Moldavian wines, which Balbulus kept for his own personal use. He tossed bones on the ground like a lord of the manor, spitting, belching and glowering at the fat housekeeper, just waiting for her to give him an excuse.