Excerpts from
The Midnight Soldier
By Ib Michael
1. Firestarter
Gómez is restless.
Gómez is always restless.
It is the wind. Whistling its banshee chorus around the tower at Koldinghus on the night of March 29th, in the year 1808.
The cold oozes from the walls of the guardroom; an anaemic, inadequate fire sputters in the hearth. With every gust of wind that howls down the flue, a cloud of acrid smoke billows out into the room to sting at eyes and throat.
Gómez coughs and swears in his mother tongue. The words crackle with sparks brought to life in warmer climes than these, aiya! A ring of dampness tightens around his chest and every joint complains. Head, knees and elbows ache. He is chilled to the bone. His pockmarked cheeks are ashen.
Never before has he experienced such bitter cold within four walls. The high-backed chairs are bare and stone-cold. A sea fog off the fjord has laid a greasy film over the tabletop and the place smells like a white-washed crypt.
A portrait of some king stares down at him from the wall, with the eyes of a fish and a powdered, pompadour wig. Outside, the darkness is grey and the night, starless.
He cups his hands around one of the guttering wicks and tries to blow some feeling back into his lifeless hands. He slaps them against his cheeks and they resound hollowly as he paces from one end of the guardroom to the other.
And all the while he is talking to himself, out loud. He is standing watch alone; he has curtailed his rounds to opening the door a fraction every now and again and sticking the muzzle of his gun out into the night - to be astonished time after time by the screech of the blast funnelling up the barrel.
When he opens the door candles keel over onto the oak boards of the table and he catches a momentary whiff of charred wood.
He sticks his head outside.
The freezing wind makes his eyes water and the skin over his cheekbones contract as it scythes through the night around him.
He pulls the door to and the storm is whittled down to a puddle on the stone floor. Then he returns to his pacing - in the opposite direction this time. His arms flail and lash at his body and the heels of his boots ring across the rough flagstones. He hunches up his shoulders. He snatches at the tablecloth and an earthenware bowl shatters on the floor. The sound of broken pottery is drowned by leftover porridge. He pulls the cloth around him, wrapping himself in a crocheted hem and beer stains. And a hell of a lot of good it does!
A tallow dip has burned down to the table surface and its wick founders in the pool of melted wax. Like a lightning flash the flame flares up once more before it is smothered - long enough to put a spark in his eye.
He tears a stool apart with his bare hands and throws it into the grate. In no time flames are roaring up the chimney. In the flickering light that they shed over the guardroom he could almost be smiling. He grunts and creeps closer to the fire. But his back feels cold as a shroud and discomfort creeps up into the back of his neck.
The cold has taken a consumptive hold on the very building itself, eating into the brickwork and the deep window recesses. It radiates, crosswise, from the iron bars of the windows, from the cracks in the putty, and slips whistling through a broken window pane. There is no escaping it.
The skin of his face is starting to crack in the glow from the blaze; stretching like parchment across his cheekbones. He turns away. Just at that moment a log bursts asunder and he draws his hand back sharply as an ember lights on the back of his hand. Damn and blast - this is no place for human beings!
Translated by Barbara Haveland
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