An Unfamiliar Winter

“You need to listen.” Elias whispered against the rotting timber of the doorway. Dmitri had placed him there to escape the pressing crowds in the street and the cold of the winter wind.

“Find a paper, a decree, a church bulletin… Anything with a date on it!” His breath plumed grey against the air.

Dmitri nodded as his eyes scanned the street with a predator-like focus.

“I see a place,” he said. “There’s ink and vellum… perhaps a scribe can be found there.”

“Go,” Elias said. “I’ll wait.”

“Stay back against the door, and pull your hood down over your head so that no one sees your collar. I will have the year when I come back for you.”

Elias melted back into the doorway, his dark robe camouflaging him against the stain of the wood. He watched as Dmitri disappeared down the alleyway, and the bustle of the crowd swallowed him.

Strasbourg in winter was wrung of every color Elias had ever known. The cold had trimmed the leaves from the trees, and the melting snow had turned the roads into a slick, dark mud. The only thing with any color was where the white snow lay untouched, and there was little of it left in the city. There was only the smell of woodsmoke and shit.

The buildings here leaned over the alley until the upper stories nearly touched one another. The cobblestones were concealed beneath at least three layers of mud. Cloaks in every shade from charcoal to bone moved past the alley’s mouth, all of them hooded, their owners keeping their heads down. Perhaps to stay warm. Perhaps to avoid stepping where the buckets of waste had been emptied. Or perhaps to avoid witnessing any number of crimes being committed.

The air was choked with soot from the fires, and turned the snow within the city’s walls to grey. There was nothing else. Just the monochrome of a city in winter trying to survive the cold, the food shortages, and each other, as if the whole world had been scrubbed with bleach until every hue of color was removed.

Elias counted his heartbeats and tried not to think about the iron collar at his throat. But as his hand unconsciously went up to adjust it, he was reminded of its presence. The collar was Dmitri’s idea. A man in chains drew less attention than a free man with no story to justify his presence. Property was invisible. He had practiced the posture for two days on the road from where they first arrived. But that was the only measure of time that Elias knew with certainty. He still needed to know the year.

But all of the practicing had not prepared him for what happened next. A rather large man moved as if using his weight to clear a path. He wore a heavy stained apron streaked with grease and blood. His gait bore the cockiness of someone who was overly confident in his abilities, and his face was scarred from too many fights. His eyes were dull and devoid of light; and they looked Elias up and down with a calm appraisal, like a man inspecting a horse.

“Well now,” he said. The words came out smelling of stale beer. “A stray dog without a leash.”

He stepped closer, leaning with one hand over Elias’ shoulder. Elias kept his head down and didn’t move.

“Are you lost?” The voice dropped a register. “Or did your master grow tired of you?”

A heavy hand landed on Elias’ jaw. The thumb pressed into his cheek hard enough to grind against the bone as if testing a piece of fruit for ripeness.

The man looked over his shoulder back to the street, then back to Elias, his grip tightening more.

“Stolen rags. A pretty mouth. Nobody’s looking," the man grinned.

Then the other hand that had been pressed against the door came down to land on Elias’ hip, giving it a squeeze.

Elias’ blood which had been as chilled as ice up until now, warmed, and turned hot. His hands, which stayed concealed inside the cloak curled into fists. He knew how to kill this man. He had done it before, in a different time, when the moment made it necessary. A thumb to the eye. A heel of the hand under the chin. Fatal.

But the cold iron of the collar pressed again against his throat, reminding him of the station he had assumed.

Then he looked up. He could not help it. The thumb on his cheekbone was an indignity he had not prepared for, and his eyes lifted before he could stop them, and for a single second they were not the eyes of a thrall.

They were the eyes of a man who had been a ruler.

The Butcher saw it. His grin slipped.

“Got a spirit, don’t you?” His grip tightened on Elias’ jaw until the bone creaked. The Butcher shoved him backward against the rotting timber, and Elias’ skull cracked against the wood. “Maybe you need to be reminded of your station. The watch don’t patrol the alleys at dusk. Nobody’d hear you scream… but me.”

He leaned his weight in. One leg forced its way between Elias’ thighs. His hand clumsily fumbled at his garment’s lacings.

“Stop!” The word carried down the alley. It was not shouted. It was lower than shouted, and somehow louder – loud enough and low enough to make the shutters rattle on the second story.

The man froze with his hand still in his lacings.

Dmitri stood at the intersection of the alley, his entire six-foot-six frame filling it broadly. The light of the winter sun as it set behind dark clouds caught the angles of Dmitri’s face. His expression had nothing in it to signal that there would be a negotiation.

The man read the situation entirely wrong. Where he should have seen a threat, he only saw a beggar.

“Piss off, mule,” he said. “Found him first. Find your own scrap.”

Dmitri did not answer.

The man had no time to scream. Dmitri grabbed him by the back of his leather apron and the belt of his trousers, lifting his entire body into the air, all two hundred pounds of it, as if it were a sack of grain, then slammed him into the frozen muck. The crack of the man’s skull on the cobbles was the dull sound of a walnut splitting. The air went out of him in a huff, and his eyes rolled white as his head lolled to the side.

A heavy iron-shod boot pinned his chest before he could make sense of what had happened.

Dmitri did not look down at him. His eyes were on Elias.

“To me.”

Elias pushed himself off the doorframe with heavy legs. He stepped over the man, careful of the slush, careful not to look at the man’s face, and stopped a pace behind Dmitri.

“I’m here.”

“Did he mark you.”

“Only my jaw.”

Dmitri’s gaze flickered down. Something moved in his face that was not in his voice. He pressed the boot down harder. Air escaped the man’s chest, making a sound like a kettle.

“You touch him again, I destroy you. Nod if you understand.”

The man nodded. The capillaries in his face had reddened to the color of brick. It was the first color Elias had seen in the city.

Dmitri lifted his boot.

The man rolled onto his hands and knees, then found his feet. He did not stand fully until he had put three yards behind himself. He cast one look back at Elias – a look that promised more, that promised the matter was only postponed – and then he was gone.

“He’ll talk,” Elias said.

“Not tonight. Tonight he’ll find a tavern and tell anyone who will listen that he was outnumbered.” Dmitri’s hand settled on the back of Elias’ neck, firm and trembling slightly. “We need a room.”

“And a year.”

“I have your year. Walk.”

The tavern was three streets deeper into the city. A boar with a slit throat hung over the door, the paint long since flaked to a silhouette of what had been there. Inside, the common room was a cavern of grey smoke and dim, grey light. Twenty three pairs of eyes turned to greet them, and the conversations were cut as they did.

Dmitri’s hand closed around the back of Elias’ neck.

It was not the guiding touch he had used in the alley. Instead, it was a firm grip, his fingers digging into the soft place at the base of the skull. He used it to steer Elias forward – not pushing, exactly, but making clear to anyone watching that the smaller man went where the larger one decided. Elias kept his head down, his collar catching the candlelight once. Once seen, twenty three pairs of eyes turned back around, and the conversations started up again at a different pitch. Elias was property. Boring property. Not worth caring about.

Dmitri walked him to the man at the barrels and slammed two silver coins onto the wood.

“Hot food, a room, and a door that locks.”

The innkeeper’s eyes went from the coins to Dmitri, to Elias, to the collar, and back to the coins.

“Top floor. Stairs at the back. Stew is in the pot.” He glanced at the collar again. “Keep him quiet. We don’t need the Watch coming to investigate noise.”

“He’ll be quiet.”

Dmitri steered him to a corner table and pressed him down onto the bench with a flat hand on the shoulder. The act had been harder than necessary, but hard enough to be witnessed. The stew was a disgusting looking gruel, devoid of color. The bread was as hard as bone. Elias kept his hood up and ate with his head bent. Dmitri ate without looking at him, like a man eating with his horse tied next to him.

When the bowls were empty Dmitri took Elias by the upper arm and walked him to the stairs. The grip was tight enough to bruise through the wool. The room watched them go, and then forgot them before they reached the second step.

The door opened onto a wooden box tucked under the eaves, low enough that Dmitri ducked to enter. The bed with its ropes supporting a flock mattress sagged in the middle. Above it hung a wooden cross with the image of the Savior, but the face was not discernable. A table propped on bricks sat against one wall. A casement looked out over the darkened sky outside. In the corner, a stone hearth was already laid with kindling. There was a flint on the mantel. On a hook by the door hung a copper basin.

Dmitri threw the latch. The bolt slid home with a thud. He turned to face Elias, but he did not move away from the door.

For a long moment he stood with his back to the door, and the tension in his shoulders let up enough that they dropped by a fraction. The grip he had used on Elias’ neck was gone from his hand as if it had never been there. He looked at Elias across the small room, and his face relaxed into the one Elias had always known.

“It’s only us now. Are you alright?”

“My jaw aches, but my pride aches more. And I’m cold.”

“Come here.”

Elias crossed the small room.

Dmitri opened his arms, and Elias stepped into them.

One foot in height and a hundred pounds of difference was reduced to nothing. Elias had to tilt his head back to find Dmitri’s face, and his arms reached around a chest he could not quite encircle. His cheek came to rest above a heart he could feel beating slow and steady through the wool. The grip Dmitri had used in the alley closed around him now in the opposite manner. It was careful, gentle, and rewarding.

“I’m sorry for the grip on the stairs.”

“I know.”

Dmitri’s thumb came up and brushed the bruise along Elias’ jaw. The gentleness of a hand that had, twenty minutes earlier, lifted two hundred pounds into the air.

“He thought he could have me.”

“He couldn’t. He never will. He touched you without understanding the consequences, and now he is somewhere telling a story about a giant in an alley.”

Dmitri’s hands loosened as he turned his head to the side of the room.

“Wait.” He stepped back and went to the hearth, striking the flint.

The kindling caught. A small flame, then a larger, then the slow roar of a real fire taking hold in dry oak. The hearth threw warmth into the room first, and then, as the flames climbed, threw light along the floorboards, up the rough plaster walls, and illuminated the underside of the low beams. But the room was still grey. The hearth could light the room, but the room was still Strasbourg.

As Dmitri turned away from the hearth, Elias slid his arms around his waist again, looking up this time. He tipped his head back, exposing his neck, and the iron collar that reflected the fire’s light.

“We made it,” Elias whispered.

Dmitri’s hand came to rest at the back of Elias’ head, cradling the curve of his skull with the same hand that had gripped him there not an hour earlier.

“Indeed. We made it.” Dmitri said with a smile. He reached for the key at his belt and raised it.

The iron collar opened with a small, dry click, and Dmitri lifted it away.

Almost immediately the room changed. Or rather, the room was the same, but Elias’ eyes were able to see the change. The hearth that had been grey was now golden hued. The plaster revealed a lovely shade of robin’s egg blue. The crucifix above the bed was now a deep walnut brown, and Elias could see now that the indiscernible face had been replaced, decades ago, with a small painted miniature. Even Dmitri’s hair, which in the alley had been a shade of white, was now the color of wheat at the end of summer. Elias had forgotten. Three days in Strasbourg, and he had forgotten what color the man he loved had on his head.

It had all been a costume. The collar and the greyness were coupled together like a complex costume.

Dmitri set the collar on the table without looking at it.

“Twelve sixty-two,” he said, quietly. “The scribe had a calendar.”

“Later,” Elias said.

“Later.”

Dmitri’s thumb brushed the pink skin at Elias’ throat once, and then his hands moved to the lacings of his tunic. He undressed himself first. The wool tunic came over his head, and the firelight found the long ridged scars along his ribs from a different country and a different war. The undershirt came after. He kept his eyes on Elias the whole time. What he was doing was an offering to a king. This is yours.

Then he reached for Elias and untied his wool tunic, lifting it over his head and tossing it on the floor. His trousers followed. Each piece of the grey city fell away in turn, until what remained was pink-hued skin.

Dmitri bent down towards him. His wheat-colored hair fell forward, and Elias reached up and put a hand against the side of his face, drawing him the rest of the way down. The kiss had been a long time coming, and even longer in arriving.

Dmitri lifted Elias, and Elias locked his legs around Dmitri’s waist. As Dmitri shifted his lover’s weight in his arms, he carried him to the bed, and laid him down there, falling over him, down, the kiss never dying. While outside the city went on being grey, the two men were creating every color the world had been hiding.