The wine was excellent. Karl usually preferred beer to wine, especially when it came to red wine, but this was truly exceptional. Medium-bodied, with a pleasant aroma of cherries, with subtler nutty notes. After, the gasoline-like taste of moonshine for so long, it tasted like a miracle.
Drew claimed it was Chianti, but Karl wasn't sure; all the same he couldn't complain, the red liquor just seemed to improve with each cup.
He lounged back in his chair, tired, pleasantly sore, and happily tipsy. Brauer laughed from where he sat opposite the table.
"Got the flush!"
Karl lifted his head to look at his grinning teammate. He didn't bother looking at his cards. "Alright you win."
"Whaaat? You're folding that easily? You don't have anything you can bet? Surely you have a good rifle you can spare."
"Brauer, the only way you're walking out of here with one of my rifles is if it's shoved up your ass."
Brauer just laughed. "Alright, alright." He leaned heavily against the chair, making it creak. "You sure you don't want to rejoin the others?"
Karl shrugged. "Don't mind."
After their small victory in Siwa Drew had seen fit to break out some of the wine they'd stolen from the Italian outposts. Karl thought that it would be more appropriate to save it for when he stopped Vahlen's Project Seuche, but the taste of wine was pushing the thought into irrelevancy. It seemed to him that the gathering was more to celebrate Brauer's gallant rescue of Karl when he was pinned down by sniper fire. It was absolutely ridiculous really, straight out of a book - he'd just narrowly avoided being shot, and was pinned behind cover, tantalizingly close to his escape route. Then, out of nowhere, the gates burst open and out came a truck with Brauer on the turret, guns blazing. No subtlety in any of it.
"Hmm, we could play skat, if we had a third player." Karl considered.
"Skat?"
"Card game. I used to play it with mysister and bruder, als wir Kinder waren..." Karl reflected that he must truly be getting drunk, if he was slipping into German so easily. And his Berlin accent, usually vague, now sounded rather thick to his ears.
"Heh, you'll have to show me. Later. Right now, I'm drunk."
"Most people playing it in a Stammtisch are drunk too, and it never stops them."
"Bah, let's just join the others. Maybe they'll be sober enough to play."
"I doubt that."
Both men rose unsteadily to their feet, Brauer using his bed as support. They staggered out of the tent and Karl started to realize how drunk they were. Damn, how strong was that damned red?
Brauer looped an arm around Karl's shoulders, which Karl failed to shrug off until Brauer waved wildly to their comrades at the fire. "We're back!"
"'Bout damn time too! Where were you Karl, we missed you!" Murray called.
"Hmph, no you didn't." Karl replied, without vitriol.
"Yes, we did!" Drew was somewhat drunk himself though he seemed far more sober than the lot sprawled around him. "Will you drink with us?"
Karl sat down cross-legged in the sand. "Card games?" He asked, recalling Brauer's suggestion.
"Were any of us sober!" Drew laughed. "Nope we're playing a drinking game. When it's your turn, one of us guesses something about you. If we're right, you drink. If we're wrong, the guesser drinks. Want to play?"
It wasn't really a question, in a way. There were too many ways this game could go badly for him.
"Ich weiss nicht..I don't know." Karl corrected himself at the last second.
"I won't say anything embarrassing." Drew promised sincerely.
Bless you Drew; you wouldn't, but these sorry hides would. Karl thought.
Brauer clapped him on the back encouragingly. "I'll watch and decide if I want to go." Karl promised. He had no intention of going, but it would stave off the offer well enough.
The others seemed satisfied, and everyone turned their attention back to Markson, to Karl's relief.
Not to Markson's though. "Go on." He growled at Banes.
Banes leaned in with a devilish grin. "You were mistaken for a girl, repeatedly, as a child."
Markson gave him a glare that could cut steel and drank.
A low round of chuckles went through the circle. Markson fixed his eyes on Banes.
"Banes, you got into trouble with the law."
Banes briefly captured the look of a surprised rabbit under Markson's fox-green eyes but recovered quickly. "Well, it all turned out but…" He grinned. "I stole the landlord's dog. Oh yeah! Right out from under his daughter's nose. I'd planned to give it back for a kiss but her father entered the garden. I dropped the yappy thing, vaulted the fence and ran the whole way to the recruiting station. And that's how I got here." Banes leaned back and drank from his cup, smirking.
"Hardly honorable tactics." Murray scolded. "For what reason could you not get a kiss from the lass like a gent?"
"I've no idea!" Banes laughed.
Karl rolled his eyes. It hardly shocked him that the ringleader of the oasis initiation would do such a thing. The patheticness of the gesture reminded him of his brother's efforts to win the affections of Sofia, the girl three houses down on their street. Clear as day he could picture his brother with a desperate smile on his face and a handful of forget-me-nots.
"Patel!" The Liverpool native leaned in smiling.
They learned that Patel used to steal fish, that Drew had never kissed a girl, that Halliot had (in a bog, no less), and so on and so forth. Then it was Brauer's turn.
"You grew that awful mustache on a dare."
"Awful!" Brauer exclaimed, offended. "Are you in any position to say that my facial hair is awful Murray?"
"Answer then!"
"You're half-right. My brother grew this pitiful scrap of heath on his upper lip when he was fourteen, and he didn't like it when I told him how bad it looked. So he bet that I'd never have better luck growing hair." Brauer smirked and rubbed his mustache. "And look how wrong he was."
This got a chuckle from the crowd. Karl smiled. When Kirstein had grown the first hair on his upper lip (the very first, nearly invisible) he'd rushed down to the breakfast table still in his night clothes to show them, much to their mother's consternation. Karl, being ten, thought it was history in the making and begged Kirstein to show it to him, ignoring their mother's complaints of unbecoming behavior from two soon-to-be-men.
"Well, Fairburne? Are you joining in?"
Karl's head snapped up to see Murray looking at him. "I suppose so. Yeah."
"Alright." Murray leaned on his knees, fixing Karl in an intense stare. "You learned shooting by the time you were ten."
Karl smirked. "Drink up Murray. My father refused to teach me to shoot birds until I was thirteen. And I spent six years begging him to teach me."
The entire circle drank. "Six whole years eh? You've wanted to be a sniper for this long?"
"Not really. I don't think I ever pictured myself sitting here when I first held that old rifle out by the lake."
"Hah! Understatement of the decade, Karl!" Brauer laughed. "I don't think any of us saw this coming!"
Brauer raised his cup. "A toast then! To summer days, pretty girls and shitty booze!"