Archive of Our Own ^beta

It was no elaborate plan that had started all of it. No strive for adventure, no need to see the world, no desire to come face-to-face with the Holy Inquisition, no curiosity to meet a living creature of the undead. In the beginning, there had been no­thing but a warm campfire out in the mountains, with a view on a sandstone formation they called the Great Gate, which looked like God had placed His table right there in between the two mountains. In the beginning, there had been an old geezer and his hut, down at the bottom of that rock gate, and the man's idea to build a tavern right where his hut stood, a long, arduous walk away from any civilisation. The pack only laughed at him for this. No one would travel all this far, they said, to where the road got so uneven and rocky that not even horses could tread it. It was a shit business idea.

Janosh didn't want to judge all that quickly. He'd have to try the food first, he said, before he could make a proper decision. So he had approached the old man with a warm smile, had pointed at the sausages he had hung up all around his stove, and had demanded “That one!” with the most confidence a man could muster. Then he had carried his purchase up to their camp in the nearby mountains, had sat down at the fire, looking out to the Great Gate, smiling happily to himself. Adder had walked over, had smiled too without knowing why, as he had taken a seat on the chest next to Janosh. Janosh had taken a bite. And so it had begun. Started by a matter of taste.

“Do piče!” The mouthful of hog meat described a majestic bow in the air that out-greated even the Great Gate, before it plunged down somewhere in the bushes nearby. “What this? Taste like he cook own wife in this. Together with clothes.”

Over at where they had left their horses, Hynek lifted his gaze and gave him a curious look. Žižka, who had taken care of polishing his sword, raised both his brows. Ranyek moved his attention away from his dice for the briefest moment, and that moment was enough for Bohuta to reach over and turn around the five ones that Ranyek had thrown.

Adder leaned over and reached out his hand for the sausage. “That bad, eh?”

“Is shame for cook.”

Adder wiggled the sausage around, shrugged his shoulders, took a bite. Then he gnawed around on it for a while, before he shrugged once more. “It's a piece of meat.”

“A piece of meat,” Janosh repeated. In Polish, to fully let his anger out, and because he could not believe Adder had really said that. “A piece of meat is a shame for a cook.”

“Well, he was no cook, was he?” Adder wielded the sausage as if it was a sword, pointing at the sky, and then over to the rocks and down to where the old man's hut blew pillars of smoke up into the air, surely, Janosh knew, smelling of rotten flesh and bile and of the old rags of his late wife. “Just some fool who thinks he could open up a tavern here, at the end of fucking Bohemia.”

“Should be end of world, would be best for everyone.” It was infuriating how lightly Adder took this. As if his senses hadn't just been assaulted the same way Janosh's had. As if this hadn't shaken his view of this God forsaken land to its core, or rather confirmed what he had already felt for a long time. As if he still had hope, as if this wasn't a much bigger catastrophe, one of unfathomable dimensions.

“He won't sell much up here. No one will get to eat it.”

“I have,” Janosh answered, and then he stood up and left to his tent. Standing in its darkness for a while, his hands sliding across the fabric of his kaftan ever so softly, in a way that soothed his mind, his heart, as he thought of his mother. Food is a gift from God, she said, and Janosh closed his eyes and took a deep breath. It wasn't Adder's fault that, to him, food was a bare necessity, an emotionfree thing one could enjoy for a few moments and then forget all about right after. It wasn't Adder's fault that he couldn't understand.

*

Just that same evening, Janosh had to learn that Adder could, in fact, understand, and he understood quite well. He proved it to him, when Žižka sent the two of them out on a mission, across the Saxon border. Scouting some nobleman's castle, a place called Rathen that had been built skilfully into the rocky under­ground, high up on a sandstone mountain. And scouting the cargo that entered and left it. To see whether all of the suppliers wore the colours of the Michelsbergers. It was no particularly exciting mission, nor an important one. Only a formality that some lord from Dresden had put them on, as he had got wary of the most recent numbers in his trade book not matching. Žiž­ka had already come to the conclusion that it was certainly just a shortage of labour and the attempt to varnish the results, and while there was some traffic of carriages and horses travelling up the steep mountain slope, there certainly wasn't a lot. And by far not enough to make the time spent crouched in the bu­shes by the road, with gnats and dangling spiders on their skin, worth it in any way.

Above them, the moon was hiding behind thick lines of clouds that crawled around painfully slowly, like grey worms that giants might ride on, but the branches of the trees hid most of the view from them. There were only stinging bushes and stinging insects and the stinging stench of some pile of horse­shit nearby, without any horse in sight.

Adder shifted his weight a bit to bring his body closer to Ja­nosh's. “You really did not like that sausage, eh?”

Somewhere above them, an owl cried out. Janosh lifted his gaze to the black branches and the grey worms, and saw his mother's face again. Down in the kitchen of the castle in Kesse­lökö. And he felt the heat of the fire on his face, chasing away even the cold that the Elbe river brought up to him, and mo­ther's hand on his cheek. “It's not about this sausage. Not only anyway.”

“It sure isn't, because you reacted just like that in Vodňany last month.”

Janosh sighed deeply. So Adder had noticed and remem­bered. Of course he had. He always did. “It's wherever we go, Komar, this disgrace to the art of cooking. We travel east, west, it does not matter. Every place sells sausages, and every time I am convinced it must finally be the worst one I ever tried, and yet.”

“And yet you keep getting disappointed.”

He sounded so sincere that Janosh turned his face to him. Regarded him curiously in the dim silver light. How widened his eyes were, how attentively they looked at him. And that little furrow between his brows had deepened in something that bordered on pity, and Janosh wanted to reach out a hand and caress his cheek and tell him that everything was alright, but it would have been a lie. “My mother used to make them,” he said instead, feeling a tear rise up in his eye. He had never spo­ken about this to anyone, just as he had only said little about his mother, but out here, next to the horseshit and the empty road, under the worm clouds and with Adder's leg brushing his, he felt safe enough. “She made them even when father told her not to. But she was unsatisfied with the cook, you see? Food is a gift from God, she said, and it should be treated as such.” His hand clenched into a fist. There was anger in him now, anger and frustration and loneliness, despite Adder being by his side. “But none of these yokels ever do. No, they're treating it like their morning shit. Like something that just has to get out. These fuckers do not even care.”

“But you care.”

“How should I not? Do I not owe myself a nicely cooked sausage every now and then?” He raised the palm of his hand to his right eye, wiped something away that shimmered like a net of molten diamonds on his skin. “Does she not deserve it?”

Adder squeezed his lips together and nodded. He under­stood. He always did. Janosh couldn't fathom why he ever doubted him. “And you have never found someone? A butcher, a cook, someone who made them how she has?”

“Out here in Bohemia? No, Bohemians are savages about their meat.”

“But in Hungary?”

“Perhaps, hey, but …” He shrugged his shoulders. “You know how it is.”

“Yes, kurwa. I know.”

They fell silent for a short while. The owl cried out again, the trees whistled. Somewhere in the far distance, carriage wheels rolled like thunder.

Adder's mouth turned into a crooked line as he pondered it. There was something hidden behind his wandering gaze that reminded Janosh of a child that had just come up with a plan to steal some wine off the elders' table. “And apart from Bohe­mia? Apart from Hungary?”

“What, Poland, Moravia, Silesia? We went there together, don't you remember? Did you ever hear me compliment any sausage in these lands?”

“One that wasn't mine, you mean?”

That made Janosh smile, and a tender heat lay down on his cheeks that didn't come from the kitchen's stove at Kesselökö. “Not a sausage I'd like to devour either, but certainly of a hea­venly taste.”

“Certainly.” Adder winked. “But that's not what I meant.”

“So what did you mean? I have not been anywhere else.”

“Then it might be time to change that.”

There it was again, that glint in his eyes that knew more than he wanted to reveal, the child's attention set firmly on the wine. The carriage wheels got closer. Janosh did not pay them any mind. “Here in Saxony?”

“In Saxony.” Adder grinned. “Or in Austria. Or Carinthia. Or Croatia. Or in all these other lands even further away that I am too much of an ox to remember.”

“You're not,” he said softly, because it was true, but Adder wouldn't hear it.

“Let us leave,” he said. “Let us travel the world and find it. The best sausage. One that comes close to what your mother made.”

“You are mad,” he whispered. “Žižka would never …”

Adder only laughed. “Let Žižka watch those carriages on his own, if he's so eager about them, eh? You said it yourself, you deserve something good, especially after Rab. And I deserve to see you happy. And besides,” he shrugged again, then he stood up, stretching his back, moaning as it released a crunching sound, and then he handed out a hand to Janosh, “we are sitting here since sunset now. I doubt anything interesting will hap­pen.”

Janosh shook his head, laughed in disbelief. You are mad, he wanted to repeat, oh how wonderfully mad you are. Adder's hand was hot and rough and it felt like a promise. Fuck Žižka. It's you and me, and nothing else.

They had just made their leave, when a carriage rolled down the way. Much quicker than any of the Michelsberger's carts had been going, and much more reckless too, almost toppling over at any turn and losing stones all along its way. The wago­ner didn't look like a Michelsberger vendor or a stonemason ei­ther, more like a pathetic image of a robber, and the symbol of Meissen was sewn into his black coat.

Janosh and Adder noticed none of that. They had already set out on a different adventure. One built around sausages, not stone, and around memories and a promise, and a cure against loneliness.