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Days turned into weeks. The hours never had a chance of discernment. Werner never had a chance to make distinct passing time. To him, June never left and the ash never stopped raining on them. He only accepted autumn’s arrival when the leaves fell and buried Tassing’s dead. For what good they did, burying the rest of Tassing could have made no difference to him.
Were it not for the leaves, the longer nights would have missed him completely. Dusk and dawn lost meaning in the sleepless weeks after the… travesty. He begrudged the herbalist and sawbones for overshadowing his role, flaunting their lesser education at what is currently the peak of his career. His career… his hand and arm gave way and let his head hit the table. The moon, nestled behind the clouds, mocked him by depriving his crumpled state of its cool light. The hand forced to be functional grasped his glass with a white-knuckled grip.
With a groan, he pulled himself back into an upright position. A resounding crack reset him if just for a moment, all for naught when his last swig set him slouching anew. Right, the monastics. They grated his nerves, robbed his joints of cartilage… took something of a load off him. He sewed—stitched wounds, set bones back into place, administered tinctures and salves. He took the advice of an herbalist and a midwife, all knowledge he knew, all knowledge that fled at inopportune times. It sickened him. He sickened himself.
His hand reached for the bottle, nearly drained from the last 48 hours alone. He was smart enough to know why he drank; he resented Tassing and the lowest form of life the people represented. Was he not supposed to live better than this? What good was the Marienschrein pilgrimage if he were only to land in the same life and land in the same place? Tassing latched onto his wrist and suckled freely, threatened to leave him as dizzy as his drink. He wondered how many time he could continue to stand and walk at this rate.
His hand was stuck mid-air, afraid to touch the bottle. He had no energy to squint and see what he had left. He never bothered with a candle when he craved sleep; he fell for alcohol’s false warmth to cradle him. Otto’s murder and Maler’s misguided investigation added an extra glass to his routine. Sharing Martin’s revelation reduced half a glass. That damned Gertner peasant ushering in hell robbed him of drink and sleep alike. He who did not choke on their blood roamed the village, laying the dead to their permanent slumber. They donated their own blood, tears, and rest, their energy to the ones who could be pulled from the ashes.
His hand retracted, met its other on the empty glass. The ashes never ceased their fall, perfect for choking his corpse-like body. Only when the dead were buried did he turn to alcohol for rest. Frazzled nerves refused him even a moment of refuge, yet as the days—weeks? How could he know anymore—continued to pass, the act of sleep took splashes more before his body acknowledged why he shut his eyes. False torpor pushed him to arise in the morning, more exhausted than the previous night. He hated his flesh, reeking of hatred and booze fumes. He still reeked of Tassing’s burned pride. How long before he collapsed and turned to ash with all those lost in the rubble?
They never did find Maler in the ash. Johan, Anton, even the apprentice left behind remnants to be collected. They all turned him stony; a doctor had no choice but to shut off his mind and treat them like any other cadaver. Their families had or will have had closure, even if the apprentice went fairly unnoticed among the more intact. As time grew more available, his mind devoured itself over a man for whom he cared not at all. If any books survived, they vanished with the artist’s corpse. He never saw the silhouette dance in the flames, and his going unaccounted haunted him the most. Nary a bone fragment stuck out through sifting.
He bemoaned himself for this quiet obsession. Sharp tongues, acts of ignoring, even an unnecessarily grisly recounting of the crime scene, and for what? Martin was still alive with his unmarred skin at the cost of the Landhaus wife, but who was dead but the one man who did not spew and reciprocate their resentment? The one man who stepped foot in Tassing and accomplished a dream? The one man who actually gave him a shred of worth beyond his credentials.
Werner was better than this. Both men had been better than this, hadn’t they? Had he served just about anywhere but this fossilized hamlet, he would have proved himself long before a catastrophe proper. Among the elite, he could have studied and recorded nobility, monarchs! Here, he was merely one more battlefield sawbones, sewing wounds and cutting losses before infection. He could have been his own Maler, only alive and happy.
He stared at the open bottle again. He drank to sleep, to get through the day, to forget. He never forgot what mattered, only the steps he took from patient to patient. He remembered his patients, forced to live with them. He remembered Pfeiffer receiving his crutch and Pffeiferyn giving up the ghost. He remembered Jorg’s socket being sewn over and Peter’s impalement.
He remembered Maler’s—no, Andreas’ hollowed stare. He exuded dread with every step, wealth dull on his weary body. What little smile he showed lost what he assumed the villagers called charm. Burdened with success, a concept around which neither a buzzed nor sober mind could grasp. It could have been his; it should have been his. He would have worn success with his born pride, carried the medical world into breakthroughs beyond their greatest hopes! …Right? Andreas dulled his sense of color and light with melancholy, but he himself could have transformed his bitterness.
He had no idea how to wear a compliment.
He had no idea how to vanquish this loss from his being.
He had no idea just how much his life would have changed had he landed anywhere else.
Would courts give him much more meaning? He would have been baptized by fire, yes, much less in a literal fashion. A drunken mind rationalized his eventual slot into a king’s assembly, his blue veins. Simply put, he understood the politics and intrigues for which he was born. A village had none of the machinations, none of the stakes that challenged him. His free hand shook, furled in new contemplation for the bottle. He barely survived a revolt, yet here he was, still climbing when his world quite literally burned around him.
Maler lost ambition and threw himself into a hopeless case in a hopeless hovel, but what survived of him? Tassing was never his to claim and his flaunted wealth before the peasants cemented this truth. Still, his ashes scattered with the pages he failed to save across them all. He failed to save anything of meaning, failed to give his own life meaning.
Still, he spared kind words for a man whose bile tainted his every thought and spoken word.
He spared kind words for him.
It took the sound of shattered glass to break his spiraling trance. He failed to feel his own hand throw the glass from which he drank with any level of force, let alone one to send a glass to the wall. Hands buried a scruffy face and dragged his skin in a forced reveal of his room. The moon still hid behind the clouds and the sun refused to come over the horizon. Not splintering his foot or tearing his fabric gave him a reason to crawl out of bed in the morning, maybe more than the currently healing. Pathetic.
He had not let himself reach a point where he drank straight from the bottle. Dignity engrained himself too deeply, he told himself. He medicated, but never overdosed, and headaches were little more than a vicious side effect. Most tinctures came at a cost regardless of efficacy. He had no strength or will to find a new glass and continue his course. Acid and bile intermingled and tickled his throat, a sign he should stop anyway. Another drink and he would have been forced to dwell on his failures longer.
He pulled himself from the table at last and dragged himself to his bed. Better than most in town but quality was forfeit when he found no comfort or prestige. He held his head, unready for the day’s arrival. No matter how much he meditated on the world, on himself, on what was lost, he was still here. Tassing gripped his heart and made him sick, but he was here. One day, just one day, he would learn to accept this truth. Andreas never accepted his, but he was not him. He was forced to live in his ruinous wake, smother and grow in his ashes alongside Tassing.
Werner could not burn or drown. Sleep was just as questionable, even if the torpid state into which he fell stated otherwise.