Serpents and Stairways

Chapter IX - Part 1

Neither Michel's (un) inspiring speech, nor Narine's approval, had gained the two Chevaliers immediate trust of the poetry club: they had to eavesdrop and steal, set government facilities ablaze, destroying registries of conscripts-to-be, and finally rescue a fragile collective of striking glass factory workers out of jail (their hearts already shattered by the received death sentences.)

Although, (and Michel had noticed it quickly) the attendees of the poetry events weren't eager to trust each other in general. Or even respect each other. This lack wasn't as apparent as long as they were reading and reviewing poems: an occasional furrowed brow, and whispers during recitals—a few wet spots; survivable. But whenever the poets gathered with anything more practical than caesuras and alliterative verse on their minds, the meetings rapidly progressed into a sanatorium-worth of late consumption cases—its patients incessantly quarreling, and coughing up still-born ideas with fervor that drove blood up their throats.

"So," Pasha began, but caught himself sounding not significant enough.

Apparently, this meeting would proceed with usual pathogenesis.

"I mean... Welcome, my brave comrades! I wished to discuss with you... Well it's about time we did something for real, right? So that we don't just plan to do something, but we actually do. Lest we keep on being small, silent, shallow. Bribing mediocre officials, slowing military supply lines... All of this is so... Unnoticable. It is unnoticable, right?"

"He says, while listing things he's most proud of," Michel thought, and taking off his glasses, rubbed the irritated hastily shaved chin.

They had assembled before dawn. The abandoned market passage that Narine had chosen was cold, and to avoid freezing, they made a campfire right there—on the precious Mettlach ceramic tiles, used in Silen for factories and palaces alike. In any other city, it would've been already pried by children and employed in households, but here it remained untouched, covered with brown parchments of brown leaves, in which one could here and there spot brittle dried-up tiny bodies of pixies, indistinguishable from last-year's wind-snapped cracking twigs.

"Perhaps, unnoticable from the heights of your heroic epos, my young friend," said master Bolyai, "but it had helped a dozen families or so," As expected, his conciliatory tone only provoked Pasha further.

"But we could help hundreds!"

"Small steps."

"We can do more! Where's our referendum petition now? Gone! So we should be done acting peacefully!"

"It's not like we've always been peaceful."

"And acting small we should be done with, too! The Emperor doesn't care about these tiny losses. It's like stabbing artillery with needles."

Pasha kept on talking, the echoes carried his high-pitched voice, but Michel wasn't paying much attention—woke up too early, went to bed too late. He might've even dozed off, if not for Georg, who leaned over and asked quietly:

"What's that referendum that Pasha had mentioned? Do you happen to know?"

Michel shook his head in denial, shaking off sleep as well, even though in fact, he had already heard a rumor or two. "The Referendum" was what the poetry club had named a project of a peaceful reform which could, in theory, grant their land (a historical region in the document's ink) a sort of autonomy: to assemble the people, to ask the locals whether they'd love to split, to hold a vote for defining the republic's borders based on language... Yeah, right, as if that ever works. The documents were triumphantly presented to the local government, and never stood a chance of propagating any further than a fireplace of the reviewing officer.