The Ravens’ Banquet (21 page)

“I know not what else you offer, woman,” replied Hartmann. “But we take this bread and water with thanks. And we go.”

He gave me one last bitter stare. He could not fathom why I should remain behind. And thus, the last of my squadron turned and walked away, down the sloping forest floor and headed north.

As I stood, watching them grow further and further distant, disappearing into the trees, I felt empty and very much alone. I had forsaken my oath and all I had laboured for. And I did not know why. I hated myself even as I knew they hated me.

“Why have you stayed behind?” asked Rosemunde as she stood beside me. “You were the one who said you wished to join the army again.”

I turned to look upon her. A streak of black soot marked her forehead, her long hair loose, beset with tangles, and sprinkled with leaves. Yet her eyes shone sharp, and what lay behind was more than the simple mind of a peasant. There was Purpose there besides.

I answered her honestly.

“I don’t know why I’m staying.”

“Then you must remain until it is revealed to you,” she said softly, before turning away.

I looked on the others that stood with her. Strange creatures all, dirty and brown, dressed in rags. And they looked back at me, distrusting, a soldier in their midst. But why then did they want us to stay? Only Rosemunde showed neither fear nor favour.

I
PASSED NOT
too well that night, plagued by ill thoughts between fitful bouts of sleep, sleep filled with wretched phantasms. Christoph had stolen in after the moon was set, saying not a word to me but lying upon the bed of leaves. He was soon snoring, untroubled as a child. As light grew, and birds began to make their song, I grew drowsy, having fretted myself into exhaustion, and finally nodded off.

Christoph was shaking me to wakefulness.

“Come on, we must follow them,” he croaked at me, his voice rough with the early damp.

“What say you?” I protested. “Follow who? Rosemunde? Why?”

“Just get your arse off the ground and have a piss if you must. I don’t want to let them get too far ahead.”

Christoph yanked off the reeking blanket that covered me. I was cold and my shirt sodden. But I heeded him and drew on my doublet and buttoned up, fumbling about with my breeches and points.

“Fetch your cassock! Make haste!” he demanded.

We stooped and left the hovel. With Christoph leading ahead, we loped off in search of the women. Christoph’s back was hunched, and like some woodland demon he hopped from tree trunk to tree trunk, careful lest we be discovered. As I watched his sword slapping against his thigh, I only then realised that I, in my enforced haste, had forgotten mine. Christoph paused, kneeling behind an ancient oak, and I caught him up.

“In God’s name, what are we doing?” I hissed.

“Finding out what they don’t want us to know. You desire to discover their secret as much as I,
Rikard
.”

He had called me by my Christian name not many times afore.

“They are well-armed,” I said. “They could kill us for spying on them.”

“They could have killed us long ago if they had a mind to. Come on!”

And we were off again, crushing brambles and searching for the faint path that gave proof of earlier, and most regular, passage through the forest.

After a while, we stopped again as the sound of wood chopping came to our ears. We crept closer until the sisters were glimpsed, busy at their labours. Christoph’s head darted like a cat in the underbrush as he sought vantage through the greenery where we crouched. His breath was heavy as he listened and watched.

I saw all of them. They were hewing boughs of beech and piling them high. In a clearing was what looked like a great pyre. Large as a cart, and half as high as a man, the pyre was fashioned of wood, arrayed in a circle and covered with animal skins on top. From the center of the wood pile, smoke did issue forth, and at its base, one woman worked with a bellows to stoke the unseen flames at its heart.

“They told us the truth,” I whispered. “It’s a wood furnace. They
are
charcoalmakers as they did say.”

Christoph shook his head and growled from deep in his throat.

“Nay, I won’t buy that. There’s more here than meets the eye. There must be.”

He moved off anew and I tried to hold him back, my heart pounding with fear that we were about to be discovered. But rather than shake off my grip, he in turn grabbed my shoulder and dragged me with him, stumbling. The wood swirled about me as we ran forward, and Christoph was cursing as he went. Cursing at me, at the women, and at his own disbelief.

“Charcoal makers! By Christ, I’ll not be so easily fooled!”

And then the axes fell silent, and a cry went up. Christoph released his grip and drew his sword while I stood helplessly empty-handed, four paces behind him. On our left I spied two of the sisters closing, their crossbows raised. Facing us, the others came forward, Rosemunde at their head.

They were nearly upon us when Rosemunde raised her hand.

“Let them be! They are curious to know what we work here. So then, they shall see.”

Christoph tensed for a moment, but I saw him soften and, as bold as you like, he sheathed his sword with a flourish. I stepped forward hesitantly to join him.

A tall, blonde-haired and haggard woman spoke out to Rosemunde.

“No, it is not right. Oma has not given her word on it. They must not be shown.”

“Oma
does
know of this and has given her word to me, Maria,” replied Rosemunde. “These two are not going back to their army. Ask them.”

Maria fell silent and I plucked up my courage.

“We meant you no harm, Rosemunde. But things here are more than passing strange. Is it not reasonable to see what goes on in this place?”

Christoph glanced at me as I spoke, his lips curling in a furtive smile.

Rosemunde nodded. “It is so.”

I began to move forward towards the wood furnace, when Rosemunde suddenly held her arm out, bidding me to halt.

“And you,” she said, fingering Christoph, “Are you prepared to rest easy?”

“Aye,” said Christoph quietly. “I do believe I can do just that.”

Rosemunde nodded and we moved forward again. The women slowly returned to their labours and I began to understand, as I watched, just what they had fashioned in the clearing.

Christoph walked around the great fire mound, prodding it here and there. Rosemunde watched him as we two stood together.

“It’s for making charcoal isn’t it? I have seen the same at home in England,” I offered.

“It is for just that,” she replied looking at me and smiling.

“That poses more questions to my mind, than it does answer,” I said, sitting on the ground. My legs had grown weak from our pursuit and I was starving for some food.

“I don’t dispute that,
Auslander,”
she replied. “But you are in such a haste to find things out, like your comrade there.”

She too, sat upon the ground next to me.

“For me,” she continued, “it’s a great question as to how a foreigner like you came to be in this land and in this wood. Don’t you think that such a thing is just as strange to us?”

“I have come here to fight the Emperor,” I replied, “but as you can see, he has had a better time fighting me.”

Rosemunde laughed. It was a free laugh, no bravado or mockfulness. But quickly, she recovered herself and the hardness returned to her.

“Why can’t you believe that we labour here to earn our keep, burning this wood every day, making our charcoal and taking it to the town after a fortnight? Is that such a strange thing to see?”

“Not of itself,” I replied, “but here, alone, armed, no menfolk about, far from village or town, these things pose some good questions. It is, to my mind, not a natural existence.”

Smoke blew over our heads as we talked and Christoph finally settled down to join us, listening intently.

“We have had other lives, all of us here. Troubled, filled with pain… and loss,” she said, looking from me to Christoph. “Here, together, we have peace and we have the Oma to guide us. There is no other need.”

“And what of food?” asked Christoph. “By God, I could eat near upon anything I hunger so.”

Rosemunde stood up.

“You can have all you like, if you work for it first. There’s the woodpile.” And she pointed out a tangle of broken boughs and logs.

And so we set to work, cutting the firewood and stoking the furnace. Christoph swore under his breath as he heaved the logs. I was sure he didn’t believe all that had been said and in truth, nor did I. Much effort went on here, seemingly for very little profit. Rosemunde spoke to me from time to time as we worked, telling me of their hard times in the village they had left. She spoke of the mean-spirited burghers of Goslar, of the coming of Tilly’s men, of the rape of their friends, the theft of their possessions, and the impressment of their menfolk. All tales that rang of truth. Had I myself not sinned the very deeds she lamented so?

Toward the midday, we halted and ate bread and smoked meat, cut from a haunch. Christoph chewed his meal in silence, sitting off from the rest, and I worried that he was hatching some new stratagem that would lead to no good. I wished to know more of this small band, to tease more intelligence out of them without causing alarm.

“How long have you lived out here?” I asked Rosemunde. “And do you not go back to your village to live when the weather grows foul?”

She told me that they had worked in the forest since late the previous winter and that at first they travelled freely between village and forest to do their work. Yet after their men were taken, the Oma told them what they should do, and they followed her. Neighbours gossiped and grew ever more suspicious of these women who would not stay and obey their fathers or brothers.

As spring turned to summer, they found themselves persecuted for their belief in the old woman’s wisdom and for pursuing their labours in the wood, and so, only returned infrequently to drag in charcoal to sell and buy up what they could not obtain themselves. Oma was a Cunning Woman who could heal and tell portends, no more and no less, she told me. But others spoke ill of her. Their own children they left with aunts or uncles or husband’s family, until these too were denied them by their distrustful kin.

I said little as Rosemunde spun out her tale, not knowing what was true and what was not. Yet she spoke to me like one confessing a great burden, her voice sombre and laden with regret. And though I was moved by her words, I was not in whole convinced. The Oma I had seen, true enough, and the hag froze my blood. If I thought that the crone meant ill, it could well be believed that any townsman might also.

Mayhaps she needed me to believe her and her sad circumstance. But Rosemunde had yet to tell us why she wished our help, but that she
did
so, was most plain.

At length, she grew quiet, my manner betraying some lack of faith. The others had returned to their work by now, yet Rosemunde remained with me. Finally, she turned to me and spoke.

“There
is
more to my story,” she said quietly, fixing me with a gaze to test my resolve. And she paused, wavering whether to bare her soul to me. Christoph, sharp-eared as ever, had crept back to my side.

“Then tell us why you spared us. Tell us why Oma wishes for us to not leave you.”

She looked at me hard again and said, “I will tell thee true, but it is a truth that will bind you both to this place.”

“So be it,” said I.

“I trust you not, woman,” said Christoph in earnest, “but we cannot now go back as we came. Tell us what you will.”

“I will
show
you,” she said, nodding. And with a call to her sisters, all of us followed her deeper into the wood, and higher up the Kroeteberg.

At last, we reached a ledge crowned by a giant oak, half-dead. The hillock upon which this tree had stood for many years now had crumbled and fallen partly away, revealing a snarled tangle of ancient roots. And beneath this, one could glimpse the rock that lay exposed as the earth had washed away.

Rosemunde beckoned me and Christoph forward. We approached the hillock and looked upon an open wound in the forest floor. It was a crack as large as a man, lying underneath the tendrils of the oak. Black as pitch, the maw widened inside, smelling of damp and mouldy earth, like the grave.

“What import is this?” I asked Rosemunde.

Christoph bent down upon his knee and poked his head inside the cave.

Rosemunde said nothing but reached down to a pile of rocks and stones, the excavations of the hillock, and picked up something.

“Look upon this. What do you see?” she asked.

Christoph swore loudly as he scrambled back to his feet, his sweaty, lean face animated anew.

I looked at what she held up to me. It was a lump of stone, a lump that sparkled and shone, a speckled egg of rock. And silver danced within and about it, as bright as the trim on the King’s suit or a cathedral’s chalice.

“Never have I seen the metal in its natural state,” I stammered at her, unable to take my eyes from the lump. “Yet, by Christ, it must be pure silver.”

Rosemunde stooped down and ran her hand along the mouth of the hole in the earth.

“This is our good Fortune given over to us. It is a rich lode that lies beneath our feet. A vein that the Duke would take from us quick as you like if he knew of its existence.”

“Let us enter,” demanded Christoph, his greed working to a passion. “Let’s see the mine!”

Rosemunde stood up again, dusting her hands on her skirt.

“Would that any of us could,” she replied. “But it is two moons past since we last went down there. For some of the mine has fallen in and now is impassable.”

“Rip me, woman!” cursed Christoph. “We shall dig now. Dig like badgers if we must to open it again.”

“We have tried until our hands were bloodied, all in vain,” said Rosemunde. “The stones are most firmly settled in the hole and neither spade nor lever can move them.”

I got down on all fours and struggled to look into the entrance.

“There is something else we could hazard,” I said after a moment or two. “Something that could loosen these stones enough to pry them out. And I think I have a stratagem to make it so.”