Tyll

Lord of the Air

I

He stretched the rope at knee height, from the linden to the old fir. He had to cut notches for it, which was easy to do in the fir, whereas the knife kept slipping off the linden, but in the end he did it. Now he tests the knots, slowly takes off his wooden shoes, climbs onto the rope, falls.

He climbs on again, spreads his arms out, and takes a step, but he can’t keep his balance and falls. He climbs back on, gives it another try, falls once again.

He tries and falls again.

It is not possible to walk on a rope. That is clear. Human feet aren’t made for it. Why attempt it at all?

But he keeps trying. He always starts at the linden. Every time he falls immediately. Hours pass. In the afternoon he successfully takes a step, just one, and by the time it grows dark, he hasn’t managed another. Yet for one moment the rope held him, and he stood on it as if on solid ground.

The next day it’s pouring rain. He stays indoors and helps his mother. “Hold the cloth taut, stop daydreaming, for Christ’s sake!” And the rain patters on the roof like hundreds of little fingers.

The next day it’s still raining. It’s icy cold, and the rope is clammy, making it impossible to take a step.

The next day, rain again. He climbs on and falls and climbs on again and falls, every time. For a while he lies on the ground, his arms spread, his hair so wet that it’s only a dark blot.

The next day is Sunday, and so he can’t get onto the rope until the afternoon, when the church service is finally over. In the evening he successfully takes three steps, and if the rope hadn’t been wet, it could have been four.

Gradually he comprehends how it can be done. His knees understand, his shoulders carry themselves differently. You have to yield to the swaying, have to soften your knees and hips, have to stay one step ahead of the fall. Heaviness reaches for you, but you’ve already moved on. Tightrope walking: running away from falling.

The following day it’s warmer. Jackdaws are cawing. Bugs and bees are buzzing, and the sun is dispelling the clouds. His breath rises in small puffs of mist into the air. The brightness of the morning carries voices; he hears his father shouting at a mill hand in the house. He sings to himself, the song of the Grim Reaper, they call him Death, his power’s from God on high—the melody is conducive to walking on the rope, but apparently he was too loud, for all at once Agneta, his mother, is standing next to him and asking why he isn’t working.

“I’ll be right there.”

“Water has to be fetched,” she says, “the stove cleaned.”

He spreads his arms out and climbs onto the rope, trying to disregard her bulging belly. Is there really a baby inside her, kicking and thrashing around and listening to them? The thought disturbs him. When God wants to make a person, why does he do it in another person? There’s something ugly in the fact that all beings emerge in obscurity: maggots in dough, flies in excrement, worms in the brown earth. Only very rarely, as his father explained to him, do children grow out of mandrakes and even more rarely infants out of rotten eggs.

“Shall I send Sepp?” she asks. “Do you want me to send Sepp?”

The boy falls off the rope, closes his eyes, spreads his arms out, climbs on again. The next time he looks, his mother is gone.

He hopes that she doesn’t make good on the threat, but after a while Sepp does come. Sepp watches him briefly, then he comes up to the rope and pushes him off: no light nudge, but a push, so hard that the boy falls flat on his face. In his anger he calls Sepp a disgusting ox’s arse who sleeps with his own sister.

That wasn’t wise. Because first of all he has no idea whether Sepp, who like all mill hands came from some unknown place and will move on to some unknown place, even has a sister; secondly, the fellow was only waiting for something like this. Before the boy can get up, Sepp has sat down on the back of his head.

He can’t breathe. Rocks are cutting into his face. He writhes, but it’s no help, because Sepp is twice his age and three times his weight and five times his strength. He pulls himself together so that he doesn’t use up too much air. His tongue tastes like blood. He inhales dirt, chokes, spits. There’s a humming and whistling in his ears, and the ground seems to be rising, sinking, and rising again.

Suddenly the weight is gone. He is rolled onto his back, soil in his mouth, his eyes sticky, a piercing pain in his head. The mill hand drags him to the mill: over gravel and soil, through grass, over even more soil, over sharp pebbles, past the trees, past the laughing female mill hand, the hay shed, the goat stable. Then he yanks him up, opens the door and shoves him in.

“Well, it’s about time,” says Agneta. “The stove isn’t going to clean itself.”

—

To go from the mill to the village you have to pass through a stretch of forest. At the point where the trees thin and you cross the village farmland—meadows and pastures and fields, a third of them lying fallow, two thirds cultivated and protected by wooden fences—you can already see the top of the church tower. Someone is always lying here in the dirt and mending the fences, which are constantly being broken but have to be maintained, otherwise the livestock will escape, or the forest animals will destroy the grain. Most of the fields belong to Peter Steger. Most of the animals too, which is easy to tell, for they have his brand on their necks.

First you pass Hanna Krell’s house. She sits—what else is she supposed to do?—on her doorstep and patches clothing; thus she earns her daily bread. Then you walk through the narrow gap between the Steger farm and Ludwig Stelling’s smithy, step onto the wooden footbridge that prevents you from sinking into the soft muck, go beyond Jakob Brantner’s cowshed on your right, and find yourself on the main street, which is the only street: Here lives Anselm Melker with wife and children, next door his brother-in-law Ludwig Koller, and in the next house Maria Leserin, whose husband died last year, because someone cursed him. Their daughter is seventeen and very beautiful, and she will marry Peter Steger’s oldest son. On the other side lives Martin Holtz, who bakes the bread, together with his wife and daughters, and next to him are the smaller houses of the Tamms, the Henrichs, and the Heinerling family, from whose windows you often hear quarrels. The Heinerlings are not good people; they have no honor. Besides the smith and the baker, they all have a little land outside, everyone has a few goats, but only Peter Steger, who’s rich, has cows.

Then you’re on the village square with the church, the old village linden, and the well. Next to the church is the priest’s house, next to the priest’s house the house where the steward lives, Paul Steger, Peter Steger’s cousin, who twice a year walks the fields and every third month brings the taxes to the lord.

On the far end of the village square is a fence. After you open the gate and cross the large field, which also belongs to Steger, you’re in the forest again, and if you’re not too afraid of the Cold Woman and keep going, in three hours you will be in the next village, which is not much bigger.

There, however, the boy has never been. He has never been elsewhere. And although several people who have been elsewhere before have told him that it’s exactly the same there as here, he can’t stop wondering where you would end up if you just kept going on and on, not merely to the next village, but farther and farther still.

—

At the head of the table the miller is speaking about the stars. His wife and his son and the mill hands are pretending to listen. There are groats. There were groats yesterday too, and there will be groats again tomorrow, boiled now in more and now in less water; there are groats every day, except on worse days when instead of groats there’s nothing. In the window a thick pane keeps the wind out. Under the stove, which doesn’t emit enough warmth, two cats are scuffling. In the corner of the room lies a goat, which should actually be over in the stable, but no one wants to throw it out, because they’re all tired, and its horns are sharp. Next to the door and around the window pentagrams are carved, to ward off evil spirits.

The miller is describing how, exactly ten thousand seven hundred and three years, five months, and nine days ago, the maelstrom in the heart of the world caught fire. And now the thing that is the world is spinning like a spindle and eternally giving birth to stars, for since time has no beginning it has no end either.

“No end,” he repeats and stops short, having realized that he said something unclear. “No end,” he says softly, “no end.”

Claus Ulenspiegel is from Mölln, up in the Lutheran north. A decade ago, even then no longer young, he arrived in this place, and because he wasn’t from here, he could only be a mill hand. The miller’s trade is not dishonorable like that of the renderer, who disposes of animal remains, or that of the night watchman or even the hangman, but it’s also no better than day labor and far worse than the trade of the craftsmen in their guilds or that of the farmers, who wouldn’t have offered someone like him so much as a handshake. But then the miller’s daughter married him, and soon the miller died, and now he is the miller himself. On the side he heals the farmers, who still won’t shake his hand, for what is not proper is not proper; but when they’re suffering, they come to his door.

No end. Claus can’t go on speaking, it preoccupies him too much. How could time cease? On the other hand…He rubs his head. It must have begun. For if it had never begun, how would we have reached this moment? He looks around. An infinite amount of time cannot be over. Therefore it simply must have begun. But before that? A before before time? It makes you dizzy. Just like in the mountains when you look into a ravine.

Once, he now says, he looked into one, in Switzerland. A herdsman had taken him along on the cattle drive up to the alpine pastures. The cows had worn large bells, and the name of the herdsman had been Ruedi. Claus pauses. Then he remembers what he actually wanted to say. So he looked into the ravine, and it was so deep that you couldn’t see the ground. He asked the herdsman, who by the way was named Ruedi—a strange name—well, he asked Ruedi: “How deep is it, then?” In a voice of the greatest weariness, Ruedi replied: “It has no bottom!”

Claus sighs. The spoons scrape in the silence. At first, he continues, he thought it wasn’t possible and the herdsman must be a liar. Then he wondered whether the gorge was perhaps the entrance to hell. But suddenly he realized that it didn’t matter at all: Even if this gorge happened to have a bottom, there was a bottomless gorge overhead, you only had to look up. With a heavy hand he scratches his head. A gorge, he murmurs, that just keeps going, farther and farther still, perpetually farther, in which, therefore, all the things in the world fit without filling even the tiniest fraction of its depth, a depth that nullifies everything…He eats a spoonful of groats. This makes you very queasy, he says, just as you also feel ill as soon as you realize that numbers never end! The fact that to every number you can add another, as if there were no God to stem such a tide. Always another! Counting without end, depth without bottom, time before time. Claus shakes his head. And if—

At this moment Sepp cries out. He presses his hands over his mouth. Everyone looks at him, baffled, but above all grateful for the interruption.

Sepp spits out a few brown pebbles that look exactly like the lumps of dough in the groats. It wasn’t easy to smuggle them into his bowl unnoticed. For something like that you have to wait for the right moment, and if necessary, you have to create a diversion yourself: That was why the boy a short while ago kicked Rosa, the female mill hand, in the shin, and when she cried out and told him that he was a stinking rat and he told her she was an ugly cow, and she in turn told him that he was filthier than filth, and his mother told both of them to hush, for God’s sake, or there wouldn’t be any food today, he quickly leaned forward and at the precise moment when everyone was looking at Agneta plopped the stones into Sepp’s bowl. The right moment is quickly missed, but if you’re attentive, you can sense it. Then a unicorn could run through the room without the others noticing.

Sepp feels around in his mouth with his finger, spits a tooth onto the table, lifts his head, and looks at the boy.

That’s not good. The boy was fairly certain that Sepp wouldn’t see through it, but apparently he’s not so stupid after all.

The boy jumps up and runs to the door. Unfortunately, Sepp is not only big but also fast, and he gets hold of him. The boy wants to break free, but he can’t. Sepp draws back his arm and punches him in the face. The blow absorbs all other noises.

He squints. Agneta has jumped up. Rosa is laughing; she likes it when there are beatings. Claus is sitting there with a furrowed brow, caught up in his thoughts. The other two mill hands are wide-eyed with curiosity. The boy hears nothing. The room is spinning. The ceiling is under him. Sepp has thrown him over his shoulder like a sack of flour. Then he carries him out, and the boy sees grass above him. Down below arches the sky, streaked with the evening strands of clouds. Now he hears something again: A high tone hangs trembling in the air.

Sepp holds him by the upper arms and stares into his face from up close. The boy can see the red in the mill hand’s beard. Where the tooth is missing it’s bleeding. He could punch the mill hand in the face with all his strength. Sepp would probably drop him, and if he could get to his feet again quickly enough, he could put some distance between them and reach the forest.

But what would be the point? They live in the same mill. If Sepp doesn’t catch him today, he’ll catch him tomorrow, and if not tomorrow, then the day after. It would be better to get it over with now, while everyone’s watching. Before the eyes of the others Sepp probably won’t kill him.

They’ve all come out of the house: Rosa is standing on tiptoe to be able to see better, she’s still laughing, and the two mill hands next to her are laughing too. Agneta is shouting something; the boy sees her opening her mouth wide and waving her hands, but he can’t hear her. Next to her Claus still looks as if he were thinking about something else.

Now the mill hand has lifted him high over his head. Afraid that Sepp will hurl him onto the hard ground, the boy raises his hands protectively over his forehead. But Sepp takes a step forward, then another and a third, and suddenly the boy’s heart begins to race. His blood throbbing in his ears, he begins to scream. He can’t hear his voice. He screams louder, but he still doesn’t hear it. He knows what Sepp is planning. Do the others know too? They could still intervene, but—not anymore. Sepp has done it. The boy is falling.

He’s still falling. Time seems to be slowing down, he can look around, he feels the plunge, the gliding through the air, and he can even think that the very thing is happening against which he has been warned all his life: Do not step into the stream in front of the wheel, never go in front of it, don’t go in front of the mill wheel, under no circumstances, never go, never, never, never go into the stream in front of the mill wheel! And now, after this has been thought, the plunge still isn’t over, and he’s still falling and falling and still falling, but just as he is forming another thought, namely, that possibly nothing at all will happen and the plunge will last forever, he hits the water with a slap and sinks, and again it takes a moment before the icy cold bites. His chest constricts. Everything goes black.

He feels a fish brush his cheek. He feels the current, feels it flowing faster and faster, feels the suction between his fingers. He knows that he has to hold on to something, but what? Everything is in motion, nothing solid anywhere. Then he feels a movement above him, and he can’t help thinking that he has imagined this all his life, with horror and curiosity, the question of what he should do if he ever really did fall into the stream in front of the mill wheel. Now everything is different, and he can’t do anything at all, and he knows that he will soon be dead, crushed, ground, mashed, but he does remember that he must not come to the surface, there’s no escape up there, up there is the wheel. He has to go down.

But where is that, down?

With all his strength, he makes swimming strokes. Dying is nothing, he understands that. It happens so quickly, it’s no big thing: take one false step, one leap, make one movement, and you’re no longer alive. A blade of grass snaps, a bug is stepped on, a flame goes out, a person dies—it’s nothing! His hands dig into the mud; he made it to the bottom.

And suddenly he knows that he won’t die today. Threads of long grass caressing him, dirt getting in his nose, he feels a cold grasp on the nape of his neck, hears a crunching sound, feels something on his back, then on his heels; he has passed under the mill wheel.

He pushes off from the bottom. As he rises, he briefly sees a pale face. The eyes large and empty, the mouth open, it glows faintly in the darkness of the water, probably the ghost of a child who was at some point less fortunate than he. He makes swimming strokes. Now he has reached the surface. He breathes in and spits mud and coughs and claws at the grass and crawls, gasping, onto the bank.

A dot is moving on thin little legs in front of his right eye. He squints. The dot comes closer. It tickles his eyebrow. He presses his hand against his face, and the dot disappears. Up above, roundly shimmering, hovers a cloud. Someone bends down over him. It’s Claus. He kneels, reaches out his hand and touches his chest, murmurs something that the boy doesn’t understand because the high tone is still hanging in the air and drowning out everything else. But as his father speaks, the tone grows softer and softer. Claus stands up. The tone has gone silent.

Now Agneta’s there too. And Rosa next to her. Every time someone reappears, it takes the boy a moment to recognize the face; something in his head slowed down and is not yet working again. His father is making circles with his hands. He feels his strength returning. He tries to speak, but all that comes out of his throat is croaking.

Agneta strokes his cheek. “Twice,” she says. “You’ve now been baptized twice.”

He doesn’t understand what she means. That’s probably due to the pain in his head, a pain so intense that it fills not only him but also the world itself—all visible things, the earth, the people around him, even the cloud up there, which is still as white as fresh snow.

“Well, come into the house,” says Claus. His voice sounds reproving, as if he had caught him doing something forbidden.

The boy sits up, leans forward, and vomits. Agneta kneels beside him and holds his head.

Then he sees his father draw his arm far back and slap Sepp’s face. Sepp’s upper body pitches forward. He holds his cheek and straightens up again, when the next blow hits him. And then a third, another big swing, the force almost hurling him to the ground. Claus rubs his sore hands together as Sepp staggers. It’s clear to the boy that he’s only pretending: it didn’t hurt him very much; he is substantially stronger than the miller. But even he knows that you have to be punished when you almost kill the child of your employer, just as the miller and everyone else know that they can’t just chase him off, for Claus needs three mill hands, fewer won’t do, and when one of them is missing, it can take weeks before a new wandering mill hand turns up—the farmhands don’t want to work in the mill, it’s too far away from the village, and the trade is not quite honorable, only the desperate are willing to do it.

“Come into the house,” Agneta now says too.

It’s almost dark. Everyone is in a hurry, because no one wants to be outside any longer. Everyone knows what roams the forests at night.

“Baptized twice,” Agneta says again.

He is about to ask her what she means when he realizes that she’s no longer with him. The stream is murmuring behind him. Some light leaks out through the thick curtain of the mill window. Claus must have already lit the tallow candle. Apparently no one took the trouble to drag him inside.

Freezing, the boy stands up. Survived. He survived. The mill wheel. He survived the mill wheel. He feels indescribably light. He takes a leap, but when he lands, his leg gives way, and he falls to his knees with a groan.

A whisper is coming from the forest. He holds his breath and listens. Now it’s a growl, now a hiss, then it stops for a moment, then it begins again. He feels that if only he listened closer, he would make out words. But that’s the last thing he wants. He hobbles hastily to the mill.

—

Weeks pass before his leg allows him to get back on the rope. On the very first day, one of the baker’s daughters appears and sits down in the grass. He knows her by sight; her father often comes to the mill, because ever since Hanna Krell cursed him after a quarrel he has been plagued by rheumatism. The pain won’t let him sleep, which is why he needs Claus’s protective magic.

The boy considers whether to chase her away. But first of all it wouldn’t be nice, and secondly he hasn’t forgotten that she won the stone-throwing contest at the last village festival. She must be very strong, whereas his whole body aches. So he tolerates her presence. Although he sees her only out of the corner of his eye, he notices that she has freckles on her arms and face and that in the sun her eyes are as blue as water.

“Your father,” she says, “told my father there’s no hell.”

“He did not.” He manages four whole steps before he falls.

“Did so.”

“Never,” he says firmly. “I swear.”

He’s fairly certain that she’s right. Although his father could also have said the opposite: we are in hell, forever, and will never get out. Or he could have said that we’re in heaven. He has heard his father say everything that can be said.

“Have you heard?” she asks. “Peter Steger slaughtered a calf at the old tree. The smith said so. It was the three of them. Peter Steger, the smith, and old Heinerling. They went to the willow at night and left the calf there, for the Cold Woman.”

“I was there once too,” he says.

She laughs. She doesn’t believe him, of course, and she’s right, of course, he wasn’t there; no one goes to the willow if he doesn’t have to.

“I swear!” he says. “Believe me, Nele!”

He climbs onto the rope again and stands there without holding on. He can do it now. To strengthen the oath he has sworn he places two fingers of his right hand on his heart. But then he takes the hand away again quickly, because he remembers that little Käthe Leser swore falsely to her parents last year, and two nights later she died. To escape the embarrassment, he pretends to lose his balance and lets himself fall flat on his face in the grass.

“Keep doing it,” she says calmly.

“What?” His face contorted with pain, he stands up.

“The rope. Being able to do something no one else can. That’s good.”

He shrugs. He can’t tell whether she’s mocking him.

“Have to go,” she says, jumps up, and runs off.

As he watches her leave, he rubs his sore shoulder. Then he climbs back onto the rope.

—

The next week they have to bring a cart of flour to the Reutter farm. Martin Reutter brought the grain three days ago, but he can’t fetch the flour because his drawbar broke. His farmhand Heiner came yesterday to let them know.

The situation is complicated. They can’t just send the farmhand with the flour, because he could abscond with it, never to be seen again; you cannot trust a farmhand an inch. But Claus can’t leave the mill, because there’s too much work, so Agneta has to go with Heiner, and because she shouldn’t be alone with him in the forest, since farmhands are capable of anything, the boy comes too.

They set off before sunrise after a night of heavy rain. Fog hangs between the tree trunks, the high branches seem to disappear in the still-dark sky, the meadows are waterlogged. The donkey takes dragging steps, it’s all the same to him. The boy has known him as long as he can remember. He has spent many hours sitting with him in the stable, listening to his soft snorting, stroking him and taking pleasure in the way the animal pressed his always damp muzzle against his cheek. Agneta holds the reins. The boy sits next to her on the box, his eyes half closed, and snuggles up to her. Behind them Heiner is lying on the sacks of flour; sometimes he grunts, and sometimes he laughs to himself; you couldn’t say whether he’s asleep or awake.

If they had taken the wide road, they could have been at their destination already this afternoon, but it passes too close to the clearing with the old willow. No unborn child may come close to the Cold Woman. Therefore, they have to take the detour by way of the narrow overgrown path that leads much deeper through the forest, past Maple Hill and the large Mouse Pond.

Agneta is talking about the time when she was not yet Ulenspiegel’s wife. One of baker Holtz’s two sons wanted to marry her. He threatened to join the soldiers if she didn’t take him. He would march east, to the Hungarian plains, to fight against the Turks. And she almost would have taken him—why not, she thought, in the end they’re all the same. But then Claus came to the village, a Catholic from the north, which was in itself strange enough, and when she married him, because she couldn’t resist him, young Holtz didn’t march east after all. He stayed and baked bread, and when two years later the plague spread through the village, he was the first to die, and when his father too died, his brother took over the bakery.

Agneta sighs and strokes the boy’s head. “You don’t know what he used to be like. Young and lithe and completely different from the others.”

It takes the boy a moment to understand whom she’s talking about.

“He knew everything. He could read. And he was beautiful too. He was strong, and he had bright eyes, and he could sing and dance better than anyone else.” She reflects for a while. “He was…awake!”

The boy nods. He would rather hear a fairy tale.

“He’s a good person,” says Agneta. “You must never forget that.”

The boy can’t help yawning.

“Only, his mind is never there. I didn’t understand it at the time. I didn’t know that such people existed. How should I have known, I who have never been anywhere but here, that he would never truly live among us? In the beginning his mind was elsewhere only now and then. Most of the time he was with me. He carried me in his arms. We laughed. His eyes were so bright. Only sometimes did he read his books or do his experiments, igniting something or mixing powders. Then he began spending more time with his books and less with me, and then even less, and now? Well, you see. Last month, when the mill wheel stopped. Only after three days did he repair it, because first he wanted to test something out in the meadow. He didn’t have time for the mill, the miller himself. And then he repaired the wheel poorly too, and the axle got stuck, and we had to get Anselm Melker’s help. But he didn’t care!”

“Can you tell me a fairy tale?”

Agneta nods. “A long time ago,” she begins. “When the stones were still young and there were no dukes and no one had to pay a tithe. A long time ago, when even in winter no snow fell…”

She hesitates, touches her belly, and shortens the reins. The path is now narrow and runs over broad roots. One false step by the donkey and the wagon could overturn.

“A long time ago,” she begins anew, “a girl found a golden apple. She wanted to share it with her mother, but then she cut her finger, and from a drop of her blood a tree grew. It bore more apples, though not golden ones, but shriveled ugly nasty apples. Whoever ate them died a hard death. For her mother was a witch. She guarded the golden apple like her most treasured possession, and she tore to pieces and devoured every knight who went up against her to free her daughter, laughing and asking: Is there no hero among you, then? But when winter finally came and covered everything with snow, the poor daughter had to clean and cook for her mother, day in, day out and without end.”

“Snow?”

Agneta falls silent.

“You said there was no snow in winter.”

Agneta remains silent.

“Sorry,” says the boy.

“The poor daughter had to clean and cook for her mother, day in, day out and without end, and this even though she was so beautiful that no one could look at her without falling in love.”

Agneta is silent again. Then she groans softly.

“What’s wrong?”

“And so the daughter ran away in the depth of winter, for she heard that far, far, far away, at the edge of the great sea, there lived a boy who was worthy of the golden apple. But first she had to flee, and this was hard, for her mother, the witch, was watchful.”

Agneta falls silent once again. The forest is now very dense; only high up between the treetops are there still flashes of light blue sky. Agneta pulls on the reins. The donkey stops. A squirrel jumps onto the path, looks at them with cold eyes. Then, as quickly as an illusion, it is gone. The farmhand behind them stops snoring and sits up.

“What’s wrong?” the boy asks again.

Agneta doesn’t reply. She’s suddenly deathly pale. And now the boy sees that her skirt is full of blood.

For a moment he is surprised that he didn’t notice such a big spot until now. Then he understands that just a moment ago the blood wasn’t there yet.

“It’s coming,” says Agneta. “I have to go back.”

The boy stares at her.

“Hot water,” she says, her voice cracking. “And Claus. I need hot water, and I need Claus too with his spells and herbs. And the midwife from the village, I need her too, Lise Köllerin.”

The boy stares at her. Heiner stares at her. The donkey stares ahead.

“Because I’ll die otherwise,” she says. “It has to happen. It can’t be helped. I can’t turn the wagon around here. Heiner will support me, we’ll walk, and you stay.”

“Why don’t we keep driving?”

“We won’t be at the Reutter farm until evening. To get back to the mill on foot will be faster.” Panting, she climbs down. The boy tries to reach for her arm, but she pushes him away. “Do you understand?”

“What?”

Agneta is struggling for air. “Someone has to stay with the flour. It’s worth as much as half the mill.”

“Alone in the forest?”

Agneta groans.

Heiner looks dully back and forth between them.

“I’m here with two idiots.” Agneta places both hands on the boy’s cheeks and looks him in the eyes so hard that he can see his reflection. Her breath whistles and rattles in her throat. “Do you understand?” she asks softly. “My heart, my little boy, do you understand? You wait here.”

The pounding in his chest is so loud that he thinks she must be able to hear it. He wants to tell her that she’s not thinking straight, that the pain has clouded her mind. She won’t make it on foot, it will take hours, she’s bleeding too heavily. But his throat is dried out; the words get stuck in it. Helplessly he watches her hobble away, leaning on Heiner. The farmhand is half supporting her, half dragging her. With each step she lets out a groan. For a short time he can still see them. Then he hears the groaning fading away, and then he is alone.

For a while he distracts himself by pulling on the donkey’s ears. Right and left and right, each time the animal makes a sad noise. Why is he so patient, why so good-natured, why doesn’t he bite? He looks him in the right eye. It sits in its socket like a glass ball, dark, watery, and empty. It doesn’t blink, it just twitches a little when he touches it with his finger. He wonders what it’s like to be this donkey. Imprisoned in a donkey soul, a donkey head on your shoulders, with donkey thoughts inside it—what does it feel like?

He holds his breath and listens. The wind: Noises within noises behind other noises, buzzing and rustling, squeaking, moaning and creaking. The whispering of the leaves over the whispering of voices, and again it seems to him as if he would only have to listen for a while, then he could understand. He begins to hum to himself, but his voice sounds foreign to him.

At this moment he notices that the flour sacks are knotted with a rope—a long one, which runs from one sack to the next. With relief he pulls out his knife and sets to work cutting notches into tree trunks.

As soon as he has fastened the rope at chest height between two trees, he feels better. He tests the firmness. Then he takes off his shoes, climbs on, and walks with outspread arms to the middle. There he stands, in front of the cart and donkey, over the loamy path. He loses his balance, jumps down, immediately climbs back up. A bee rises out of the bushes, descends again, and disappears in the greenery. Slowly the boy starts moving. He almost would have made it to the other end, but then he falls after all.

He stays on the ground for a while. What’s the point of standing up? He rolls onto his back. He feels as if time were coming to a halt. Something has changed: the wind is still whispering, and the leaves are still moving, and the donkey’s stomach is growling, but all this has nothing to do with time. Earlier was now, and now is now, and in the future, when everything is different and when there are different people and no one but God knows about him and Agneta and Claus and the mill anymore, then it will still be now.

The strip of sky over him has turned dark blue. Now it is clouding over with a velvety gray. Shadows climb down tree trunks, and all at once it’s evening down below. The light above ebbs to a trickle. And then it’s night.

He weeps. But because no one is there who could help, and because you can actually always weep for only a short while before you run out of strength and tears, he stops.

He is thirsty. Agneta and Heiner took the skin of beer with them. Heiner strapped it on; no one thought of leaving something here for him to drink. His lips are dry. There must be a stream nearby, but how is he supposed to find it?

The noises are different now than during the day: different animal sounds, a different wind, even the creaking of the branches is different. He listens. It must be safer up there. He sets about climbing a tree. But it’s hard when you can hardly see anything. Thin branches break, and the cracked bark cuts into his fingers. A shoe slips off his foot; he hears it bang into one branch and then another. Clasping the trunk, he shinnies up and makes it a little higher. Then he can’t go on.

For a while he hangs. He imagined that he could sleep on a wide limb, leaning against the trunk, but now he realizes that this is impossible. There’s nothing soft on a tree, and you have to cling to it constantly to keep from falling. A branch is pressing against his knee. At first he thinks that it can be endured, yet all at once it’s unbearable. Even the limb he’s sitting on hurts him. He finds himself thinking of the fairy tale about the evil witch and the beautiful daughter and the knight and the golden apple: will he ever find out how it ends?

He climbs back down. It’s difficult in the dark, but he is skillful and doesn’t slip off and reaches the ground. Only, he can no longer find his shoe. What a good thing that at least the donkey is there. The boy snuggles up to the soft, slightly stinking animal.

It occurs to him that his mother could come back. If she died on the way home, she could suddenly appear. She could brush past him, whisper something to him, show him her transformed face. The thought makes his blood run cold. Is it really possible to have just a second ago loved a person, but the next moment to die of fright when this person comes back? He thinks of little Gritt, who last year encountered her dead father while gathering mushrooms: he had no eyes and was hovering a hand’s breadth over the ground. And he thinks of the head that Grandmother saw many years ago in the boundary stone behind the Steger farm, lift your skirt, little girl, and there was no one hiding behind the stone, rather the stone all at once had eyes and lips, just lift it already and show what’s underneath! Grandmother told this story when he was little. Now she is long dead. Her body too must have decayed long ago, her eyes turning to stone and her hair to grass. He forbids himself to think of such things, but his effort fails, and there’s one thought above all that he can’t put out of his mind: better for Agneta to be dead, better imprisoned in the deepest eternal hell, than to suddenly step as a ghost out of the bushes.

The donkey gives a start. Wood cracks nearby. Something is approaching. His breeches fill up with warmth. A massive body brushes past and departs again. His breeches grow cold and heavy. The donkey growls; he felt it too. What was it? Now there’s a greenish gleam between the branches, bigger than a glowworm, yet less bright, and in his fear feverish images come into his head. He is hot, then cold. Then hot again. And despite everything he thinks: Agneta, alive or dead, must not find out that he wet himself, or else there will be blows. And when he sees her lying and whimpering under a bush that is at the same time the ribbon on which the earthly disk hangs from the moon, a remnant of his dissolving rational mind tells him that he must be falling asleep, exhausted by his fear and all the pounding of his heart, mercifully abandoned to his dwindling powers, on the cold ground and in the nocturnal noise of the forest, beside the softly snoring donkey. And so he doesn’t know that his mother is actually lying not far from him on the ground, whimpering and groaning, under a bush, which doesn’t look very different from the one in his dream, a juniper bush with majestically full berries. There she lies, in the darkness, there.

Agneta and the farmhand took the shortcut because she was too weak for the detour, and so they came too close to the Cold Woman’s clearing. Now Agneta is lying on the ground and has no more strength and barely any voice left to scream, and Heiner is sitting beside her, in his lap the newborn being.

The farmhand is considering whether to run away. What’s keeping him? This woman will die, and if he is nearby, people will say he is to blame. That’s how it always is. If something happens and a farmhand is nearby, then the farmhand is to blame.

He could disappear, never to be seen again. Nothing is keeping him on the Reutter farm. The food is not abundant, and the farmer is not good to him; he hits him as often as he hits his own sons. Why not leave mother and child here? The world is big, say the farmhands, new masters are easy to find, there are enough new farms, and something better than death can be found wherever you look.

He knows that it’s ill-advised to be in the forest at night, and he’s hungry and searingly thirsty, because somewhere along the way he lost the skin of beer. He closes his eyes. That helps. When you close your eyes, you are by yourself, no one else is there to hurt you, you are inside, you yourself are the only one there. He remembers meadows through which he ran when he was a child, he remembers fresh bread better than any he’s had in a long time, and a man who hit him with a stick, perhaps it was his father, he doesn’t know. And so he ran away from the man, and then he was elsewhere. Then he ran away again. Running away is a wonderful thing. There’s no danger you can’t escape when you have fast legs.

But this time he doesn’t run. He holds the baby, and he holds Agneta’s head too, and when she wants to stand up, he supports her and heaves her upward.

Nonetheless, Agneta would not have gotten to her feet if she hadn’t remembered the most powerful of all squares. Memorize it, Claus said, use it only in an emergency. You can write it down, only you must never say it aloud! And so she applied the last remainder of clarity in her head to scratching the letters into the ground. It began with Salom Arepo, but she couldn’t recall what came next—writing is triply difficult when you never learned how and it’s dark and you’re bleeding. But then she defied Claus’s instructions and cried hoarsely: “Salom Arepo, Salom Arepo!” And, since even fragments exert power, this was enough to bring back her memory, and she knew the rest too.

S A L O M

A R E P O

L E M E L

O P E R A

M O L A S

And this alone, she could feel it, drove back the evil forces, the bleeding abated, and, with pain as though from red-hot irons, the baby slid out of her body.

She would have liked so much to keep lying on the ground. But she knows that when you’ve lost a lot of blood, if you stay on the ground, you’ll be lying there forever.

“Give me the baby.”

He gives her the baby. It’s a girl.

She can’t see her, the night is so black that she might as well be blind, but when she holds the little being, she feels that she is still alive.

No one will know about you, she thinks. No one will remember, only I, your mother, and I won’t forget, because I must not forget. For everyone else will forget you.

She said the same thing to her other three who died at birth. And she really does still know everything there is to know about each of them: the smell, the weight, the shape—each time a little different—in her hands. They didn’t even have names.

Her knees give way. Heiner holds her. For a moment the temptation to simply lie down again is strong. But she has lost too much blood, the Cold Woman is not far, and the Little People might find her too. She hands Heiner the baby and wants to set off, but immediately she falls and lies on roots and sticks and senses how vast the night is. Why resist anyway? It would be so easy. Just let go. So easy.

Instead she opens her eyes. She feels the roots under her. She shivers with cold and grasps that she’s still alive.

Again she stands up. Apparently the bleeding has abated. Heiner holds out the baby to her. She takes her and realizes at once that there’s no life left in her, so she gives her back, because she needs both hands to hold on to a tree trunk. He lays the baby on the ground, but Agneta hisses at him, and he picks her back up. For of course they can’t leave her here: moss would grow over her, plants entwine her, bugs live in her limbs. Her spirit would never rest.

And at this moment it happens that a premonition of something wrong creeps up on Claus in the attic room of his mill. He quickly murmurs a prayer, sprinkles a pinch of crushed mandrake into the flame of his weak, smoky lamp. The bad omen is confirmed: instead of flaring up, the flame immediately goes out. A sharp stench fills the room.

In the darkness Claus writes a square of moderate strength on the wall:

M I L O N

I R A G O

L A M A L

O G A R I

N O L I M

Afterward, to be safe, he says aloud seven times: Nipson anomimata mi monan ospin. He knows that this is Greek. What it means, he doesn’t know, but it reads the same way forward as backward, and sentences of this sort have special power. Then he lies back down on the hard floorboards to continue his work.

Recently he has been observing the course of the moon every night. His sluggish progress is enough to drive him to despair. The moon always rises in a different place than it did the night before; its path never stays the same. And because apparently no one can explain this, Claus decided to clear up the matter himself.

“When there’s something no one knows,” Wolf Hüttner once said to him, “we have to find it out!”

Hüttner, the man who was his teacher, a chiromancer and necromancer of Konstanz, a night watchman by trade. Claus Ulenspiegel spent a winter in his employ, and not a day goes by that he doesn’t think of him with gratitude. Hüttner showed him the squares, spells, and potent herbs, and Claus hung on every word when Hüttner spoke to him of the Little People and the Big People and the Ancient Ones and the People of the Earthly Depths and the Spirits of the Air and the fact that you couldn’t trust the scholars, for they knew nothing, but they wouldn’t admit it, lest they fall out of favor with their princes, and when Claus moved on after the thaw, he had three books from Hüttner’s collection in his bag. At the time he had not yet known how to read, but a pastor in Augsburg whom he cured of rheumatism taught him, and when he moved on, he took with him three books from the pastor’s library too. All the books were heavy; a dozen of them filled the bag like lead. Soon it became clear to him that he either had to leave the books behind or else settle down somewhere, ideally in a hidden place away from the big roads, for books are expensive and not every owner had parted with his voluntarily, and by a stroke of ill fortune Hüttner himself could suddenly appear outside his door, put a curse on him, and demand back what belonged to him.

When he had amassed so many books that he actually couldn’t remain on the move, fate took its course. A miller’s daughter caught his fancy. She was pretty, and she was funny too, and strong, and a blind man could see that she liked him. To win her wasn’t hard. He was a good dancer, and he knew the right spells and herbs to bind a heart. On the whole he knew more than anyone else in the village. She found that appealing. At first her father had doubts, but none of the other mill hands seemed capable of taking over the mill, so he gave in. And for a while all was well.

Then he sensed her disappointment. First occasionally, then more often. And then all the time. She didn’t like his books, she didn’t like his need to solve the mysteries of the world, and besides, she wasn’t wrong, it’s a huge task, it doesn’t leave much strength for other things, especially not for the daily routine of the mill. Suddenly it seemed like a mistake to Claus too: What am I doing here, what do these clouds of flour have to do with me, or these dull farmers who always try to cheat you when they pay, or these slow-witted mill hands who never do what you instruct them to? On the other hand, he tells himself often, life simply leads you somewhere or other—if you weren’t here, you would be elsewhere, and everything would be just as strange. What really troubles him, however, is the question of whether a person will go to hell for stealing so many books.

But you must simply snatch knowledge wherever it can be found. People are not meant to languish in ignorance. And when you have no one to talk to, it’s not easy. So much preoccupies you, but no one wants to hear it, your thoughts about what the sky is and how stones come into being, and flies, and the teeming life everywhere, and in what language the angels speak with each other, and how the Lord God created himself and still must create himself, day after day, for if he didn’t do so, everything would cease from one moment to the next—who, if not God, should prevent the world from simply not existing?

Some books took Claus months, others years. Some he knows by heart and still doesn’t understand. And at least once a month he returns in perplexity to the thick Latin work he stole from the burning house of a priest in Trier. He wasn’t the one who started the fire, but he was nearby and smelled the smoke and seized the opportunity. Without him the book would have been reduced to ashes. He has a right to it. Yet he cannot read it.

It’s seven hundred sixty-six pages long, closely printed, and some pages contain pictures that seem to come from bad dreams: men with bird heads, a city with battlements and tall towers on a cloud from which rain is falling in thin lines, a horse with two heads in a forest clearing, an insect with long wings, a turtle climbing heavenward on a ray of sun. The first leaf, which must have once had the book’s title on it, is missing; someone also tore out the leaf with pages twenty-three and twenty-four and the one with pages five hundred nineteen and five hundred twenty. Claus has brought the book to the priest three times and asked for help, but each time the priest sent him away brusquely and declared that only educated people were entitled to concern themselves with Latin writings. At first Claus considered saddling him with a mild curse—rheumatism or an infestation of mice or spoiled milk—but then he realized that the poor village priest who drinks too much and is constantly repeating himself in his sermons in truth hardly understands Latin himself. Thus he has nearly reconciled himself to never being able to read this one book that possibly holds the key to everything. For who could teach him Latin here, in a godforsaken mill?

Nonetheless, in recent years he has found out a great deal. Essentially he now knows where things come from, how the world came into being, and why everything is the way it is: spirits, substances, souls, wood, water, sky, leather, grain, crickets. Hüttner would be proud of him. It won’t be long before he has filled in the final gaps. Then he himself will write a book containing all the answers, and then the scholars in their universities will marvel and feel ashamed and tear out their hair.

But it won’t be easy. His hands are big, and the thin quill is always breaking between his fingers. He will have to practice a lot before he will be able to fill a whole book with spidery signs in ink. But it has to happen, for he cannot forever retain in his memory everything he has found out. Even now it’s too much, it’s painful to him, often he feels dizzy from all the knowledge in his head.

Perhaps he will one day be able to teach his son something. He has noticed that the boy occasionally listens to him at meals, almost against his will and trying not to let anything show. He is thin and too weak, but he seems to be clever. Not long ago Claus caught him juggling three stones, very easily and effortlessly—sheer nonsense, but still a sign that the child is perhaps not as dull-witted as the others. Recently the boy asked him how many stars there actually are, and because only a short while ago Claus had counted, he was, not without pride, able to give him an answer. He hopes that the baby Agneta is carrying will be another boy—with some luck even one who is stronger so that he can help him better with the work, and whom he can then teach something too.

The floorboards are too hard. But if he were lying on a softer surface, he would fall asleep and wouldn’t be able to observe the moon. Painstakingly Claus made a grid out of thin threads in the slanted attic window. His fingers are thick and ponderous, and the wool spun by Agneta is recalcitrant. Yet in the end he succeeded in dividing the window into small and almost equal-sized squares.

And so he lies and stares. Time passes. He yawns. Tears come to his eyes. You must not fall asleep, he tells himself, no matter what, you must not fall asleep!

And finally the moon is there, silver and nearly round, with spots like those of dirty copper. It appeared in the lowest row, yet not in the first square as Claus would have expected, but in the second. But why? He squints. His eyes hurt. He fights sleep and dozes off and is awake again and dozes off again, but now he is awake and squints, and the moon is no longer in the second but in the third row from the bottom, in the second square from the left. How did that happen? Unfortunately, the squares are not equal-sized, because the wool frays, hence the knots turned out too thick—but why is the moon behaving like this? It is a wicked heavenly body, treacherous and deceitful; it’s no accident that in the cards its picture stands for decline and betrayal. To record when the moon is where, one must also know the time, but how, by all the devils, is one supposed to read the time if not from the position of the moon? It can drive you completely mad! On top of this, one of the threads has just come undone; Claus sits up and tries to tie it with intractable fingers. And no sooner has he finally succeeded than a cloud approaches. The light gleams faintly around its edges, but where exactly the moon is can no longer be said. He closes his weary eyes.

When Claus comes to, freezing, early in the morning, he has dreamed of flour. It’s unbelievable—this keeps happening to him. He used to have dreams full of light and noise. There was music in his dreams. Sometimes ghosts spoke with him. But that was a long time ago. Now he dreams of flour.

As he sits up in annoyance, it becomes clear to him that it wasn’t the flour dream that woke him, it was voices from outside. At this hour? Unsettled, he remembers the omen of the past night. He leans out the window and at the same moment the twilight gray of the forest opens and Agneta and Heiner hobble out.

They really made it, against all odds. At first the farmhand carried both of them, the living woman and the dead baby; then he couldn’t go on, and Agneta walked on her own, supported by him; then the baby was too heavy for him and too dangerous too, for one who died unbaptized attracts spirits, both those from above and those from the depths, and Agneta had to carry her herself. Thus they gropingly found their way.

Claus climbs down the ladder, stumbles over the snoring mill hands, kicks a goat aside, flings open the door, and runs out just in time to catch Agneta as she collapses. Carefully, he lays her down and gropes for her face. He feels her breath. He draws a pentagram on her forehead, with the point on top, of course, to bring about healing, and then he inhales deeply and says in a single breath: Christ was born in Bedlem, baptized in tho flem Jordan. Also tho flem astode, also astond thi blode. In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. He knows only roughly what this means, but the spell is ancient and he knows none stronger to stanch bleeding.

Now quicksilver would be good, but he has none left, so instead he makes the sign of quicksilver over her lower body—the cross with the eight that stands for Hermes, the great Mercury; the sign by itself doesn’t work as well as real quicksilver, but it’s better than nothing. Then he shouts at Heiner: “Go on, to the attic, fetch the orchis!” Heiner nods, staggers into the mill, and climbs up the ladder, gasping for breath. Only when he is up in the room, which smells of wood and old paper, and staring in confusion at the wool mesh in the window does it occur to him that he has no idea what an orchis is. And so he lies down on the floor, lays his head on the hay-stuffed pillow in which the miller has left an imprint, and falls asleep.

Day breaks. After Claus has carried his wife into the mill, the dew rises from the meadow, the sun comes up, the morning haze gives way to the noon light. The sun reaches its zenith and begins its path downward. Next to the mill there’s now a mound of earth freshly piled up: there lies the nameless baby who was not baptized and is therefore barred from the cemetery.

And Agneta doesn’t die. This surprises everyone. Perhaps it is due to her strength, perhaps to Claus’s spells, perhaps to the orchis, although it is not very strong, bryony or monkshood would have been better, but unfortunately he recently gave away the last of his supply to Maria Stelling, whose child was stillborn; there are rumors she helped make it happen, because she was pregnant not by her husband but by Anselm Melker, but this doesn’t interest Claus. Agneta, in any case, didn’t die, and only when she sits up and looks around wearily and calls a name at first softly, then more loudly, and finally earsplittingly, does everyone realize that in all the excitement they have forgotten the boy and the wagon with the donkey. And the expensive flour.

But the sun will go down soon. It’s too late to head out now. And so another night begins.

Early in the morning Claus sets off with Sepp and Heiner. They walk in silence. Claus is absorbed in his thoughts. Heiner never says a word anyway, and Sepp whistles softly to himself. Since they’re men and there are three of them, they don’t have to take a detour but can cut straight across the clearing with the old willow. The evil tree stands there black and huge, and its branches move in ways branches don’t usually move. The men make an effort not to look. When they are in the forest again, they heave a sigh.

Claus’s thoughts keep returning to the dead baby. Even though it was a girl, the loss is painful. It is indeed a good custom, he tells himself, not to love your own children too soon. Agneta has given birth so often, but only one of the babies survived, and even he is thin and frail, and they don’t know whether he has come through the two nights in the forest.

The love for your children—better to fight against it. You don’t get too close to a dog, after all; even if it looks friendly, it can snap at you. You always have to keep a distance between you and your children, they simply die too quickly. But with each year that passes, you get more used to such a being. You begin to trust, you allow yourself to be fond of them—and suddenly they’re gone.

Shortly before noon they discover footprints of the Little People. Out of caution they stop, but after a thorough examination Claus determines that they are leading southward, away from here. Besides, the Little People are not yet dangerous in spring. Only in autumn do they become restless and malevolent.

They find the place in the late afternoon. They almost would have passed it, because they veered off the path a little. The underbrush is thick; you hardly know where you’re going. But then Sepp noticed the sweetly sharp smell. They pushed branches aside, broke limbs, covered their noses with their hands. With each step the smell grew stronger. And there is the wagon, a cloud of flies swarming around it. The sacks have been torn open. The ground is white with flour. Something is lying behind the wagon. It looks like a heap of old skins. It takes them a moment to realize that it’s the remains of the donkey. Only the head is missing.

“It was probably a wolf,” says Sepp, flailing his arms to fend off the flies.

“That would look different,” says Claus.

“The Cold Woman?”

“She’s not interested in donkeys.” Claus bends down and gropes around. A smooth cut, no bite marks anywhere. No doubt, it was a knife.

They call for the boy. They listen. They call again. Sepp looks up and goes silent. Claus and Heiner keep calling. Sepp stands as if frozen.

Now Claus too looks up. Horror reaches for him and holds him and grips him even tighter until he thinks he might choke to death. Something is hovering above them, white from head to toe, and staring downward, and even though it’s growing dark, they can see the wide eyes, the bared teeth, the contorted face. And as they’re gaping upward, they hear a high sound. It sounds like a sob, but it’s not one. Whatever is above them there, it’s laughing.

“Come down,” calls Claus.

The boy, for it’s really him, giggles and doesn’t budge. He’s completely naked, completely white. He must have rolled around in the flour.

“Good Lord,” says Sepp. “Great merciful Lord!”

And while Claus is looking up, he sees something else that he just a moment ago didn’t see yet, because it’s too strange. What the boy is wearing on his head up there, while he is standing giggling and naked on a rope without falling down, is no hat.

“Blessed Virgin,” says Sepp. “Help us and don’t abandon us.”

Even Heiner crosses himself.

Claus draws his knife and, his hand trembling, carves a pentagram into a tree trunk: point on the right, the shape securely closed. To the right of it he engraves an alpha, to the left an omega. Then he holds his breath, counts slowly to seven, and murmurs an incantation—spirits of the upper world, spirits of the lower world, all saints, kind Virgin, stand by us in the name of the triune God. “Get him down,” he then says to Sepp. “Cut the rope!”

“Why me?”

“Because I say so.”

Sepp stares and doesn’t move. Flies land on his face, but he doesn’t wave them away.

“Then you,” Claus says to Heiner.

Heiner opens and closes his mouth. If he didn’t find it so hard to speak, he would now say that he has only just dragged a woman through the forest and saved her; completely on his own he found the way. He would say that everything has its limits, even the tolerance of the most forbearing. But since talking is not in his nature, he crosses his arms and looks stubbornly at the ground.

“Then you,” Claus says to Sepp. “Someone has to do it. And I have rheumatism. You climb now or you’ll regret it as long as you live.” He tries to remember the spell that compels the resistant to obey, but the words slip his mind.

Sepp utters terrible curses and begins to climb. He groans. The branches don’t give him a good foothold, and it takes all his strength not to look up at the white apparition.

“What is going on?” Claus calls up. “What has gotten into you?”

“The great, great devil,” the boy says cheerfully.

Sepp climbs back down. Hearing this reply was too much for him. Besides, it came back to him that he threw the boy into the stream, and if the boy remembers it and is angry at him, then now is not the moment to confront him. He reaches the ground and shakes his head.

“Then you!” Claus says to Heiner.

But he turns around without a word, walks away, and disappears in the thicket. For a while he can still be heard. Then no longer.

“Go back up,” Claus says to Sepp.

“No!”

“Mutus dedit,” Claus murmurs, now remembering the words of the spell after all, “mutus dedit nomen—”

“Makes no difference,” says Sepp. “I’m not doing it.”

There’s a crack in the underbrush, the sound of branches breaking. Heiner is back. It became clear to him that it would soon be night. He can’t be alone in the dark forest; he won’t be able to stand it again. Angrily he fends off flies, leans against a tree trunk, and hums to himself.

When Claus and Sepp turn away from him, they notice that the boy is standing next to them. Startled, they jump back. How did he get down so quickly? The boy takes off what he was wearing on his head: a piece of fur-covered scalp with two long donkey ears. His hair is encrusted with blood.

“For God’s sake,” says Claus. “For Mary’s and God’s and the Son’s sake.”

“It was a long time,” says the boy. “No one came. It was only a joke. And the voices! A big joke.”

“What voices?”

Claus looks around. Where is the rest of the donkey’s head? The eyes, the jaw with the teeth, the whole huge skull—where is all that?

The boy slowly kneels down. Then, laughing, he tips over sideways and stops moving.

They lift him up, wrap him in a blanket, and make off—away from the wagon, the flour, the blood. For a while they stumble through the darkness, until they feel safe enough to lay the child down. They don’t light a fire and they don’t talk to each other because they don’t want to attract anything. The boy giggles in his sleep. His skin is hot to the touch. Branches crack. The wind whispers. With his eyes closed Claus murmurs prayers and incantations. This helps a little, for they gradually feel better. As he prays, he tries to estimate how much this will cost him: the wagon is wrecked, the donkey dead, above all he will have to replace the flour. Where is he going to get the money?

In the early morning hours the boy’s fever subsides. When he wakes up, he asks in confusion why his hair is so sticky and why his body is white. Then he shrugs and doesn’t trouble himself further about it, and when they tell him that Agneta is alive, he is happy and laughs. They find a stream. He washes himself. The water is so cold that he trembles all over. Claus wraps him in the blanket again, and they set off. On the way home the boy tells the fairy tale he heard from Agneta. There’s a witch in it and a knight and a golden apple, and in the end everything turns out well, the princess marries the hero, the evil old woman is dead as a doornail.

Back in the mill, on his straw sack next to the stove that night, the boy sleeps so deeply that it is as if nothing could ever wake him again. He’s the only one who can sleep, for the dead baby returns: only a flicker in the darkness, along with a soft whimpering, more a draft than a voice. For a while she is in the partitioned area in the back where Claus and Agneta are lying, but when she can’t reach her parents’ bed because the pentagrams on the posts keep her away, she appears in the room where the boy and the mill hands have bedded down around the warm stove. She is blind and deaf and understands nothing and knocks over the milk bucket, whirls the freshly washed cloths off the shelf, and gets tangled in the curtain on the window before she disappears—into the limbo where the unbaptized freeze in the icy cold for a million years before the Lord forgives them.

—

A few days later Claus sends the boy to Ludwig Stelling, the smith, in the village. Claus needs a new hammer, which must not be expensive, however, because ever since he lost the load of flour, he is deep in debt to Martin Reutter.

On the way the boy picks up three stones. He throws the first up into the air, then the second, then he catches the first and throws it up again, then he throws the third, catches the second and throws it again, then he catches the third and throws it, then the first again—now all three are in the air. His hands make circular movements, and everything takes care of itself. The trick is not to think and not to look sharply at any of the stones. You have to pay close attention and at the same time pretend they aren’t there.

Thus he walks, the stones whirling around him, past Hanna Krell’s house and across Steger’s field. Outside the smithy he drops the stones into the mud and enters.

He places two coins on the anvil. He still has two in his pocket, but the smith doesn’t need to know that.

“Much too little,” says the smith.

The boy shrugs, takes the two coins, and turns to the door.

“Wait,” says the smith.

The boy stops.

“You do have to give more.”

The boy shakes his head.

“It doesn’t work like that,” says the smith. “If you want to buy something, you have to bargain.”

The boy walks to the door.

“Wait!”

The smith is gigantic, his naked belly is hairy, he has a cloth tied around his head, and his face is red and full of pores. Everyone in the village knows that he goes into the bushes at night with Ilse Melkerin, only Ilse’s husband doesn’t know, or maybe he knows and only pretends not to know, for what can anyone do against a smith. When the priest preaches on Sunday about immorality, he always looks at the smith and sometimes at Ilse too. But that doesn’t stop them.

“That’s too little,” the smith says.

But the boy knows that he has won. He wipes his forehead. The fire radiates scorching heat. Shadows dance on the wall. He puts his hand on his heart and swears: “This is all I was given, by the salvation of my soul!”

With an angry expression the smith gives him the hammer. The boy thanks him politely and walks slowly, so that the coins in his pocket don’t jingle, to the door.

He walks past Jakob Brantner’s cowshed and the Melker house and the Tamm house to the village square. Might Nele be there? And indeed, she is sitting there, in the drizzle, on the little wall of the well.

“You again,” he says.

“Then just go away,” she says.

“You go away.”

“I was here first.”

He sits down next to her. They both grin.

“The merchant was here,” she says. “He said the Kaiser is now having all the noblemen of Bohemia beheaded.”

“The King too?”

“The Winter King. Him too. That’s what they call him, because he was king for only a winter after the Bohemians gave him their crown. He was able to flee and will come back, at the head of a large army, because the English king is his wife’s father. He will reconquer Prague, and he will depose the Kaiser and become Kaiser himself.”

Hanna Krell comes with a bucket and busies herself at the edge of the well. The water is dirty, it’s undrinkable, but it’s needed for washing and for the livestock. When they were little, they drank milk, but for a few years now they have been old enough for small beer. Everyone in the village eats groats and drinks small beer. Even the rich Stegers. For Winter Kings and Kaisers there’s rose water and wine, but simple people drink milk and small beer, from their first day to their last.

“Prague,” says the boy.

“Yes,” says Nele. “Prague!”

The two of them think about Prague. Precisely because it’s a word, because they know nothing about it, it sounds as full of promise as a place in a fairy tale.

“How far is Prague?” asks the boy.

“Very far.”

He nods as if that were an answer. “And England?”

“Also very far.”

“It probably takes a year to journey there.”

“Longer.”

“Shall we go?”

Nele laughs.

“Why not?” he asks.

She doesn’t reply, and he knows that they have to be careful now. One wrong word can have consequences. Peter Steger’s youngest son gave Else Brantnerin a wooden pipe last year, and because she accepted the gift, the two of them are now engaged, even though they don’t like each other that much. The matter went all the way to the reeve in the district seat, who in turn passed it on to the diocese court, where it was decided that there was nothing to be done about it: a gift is a promise, and a promise is binding before God. To invite someone on a journey is not yet a gift, but it is almost a promise. The boy knows this, and he knows that Nele knows it too, and they both know that they have to change the subject.

“How is your father?” asks the boy. “The rheumatism better?”

She nods. “I don’t know what your father did. But it helped.”

“Spells and herbs.”

“Will you learn how to do that? Heal people, will you be able to do it too one day?”

“I’d rather go to England.”

Nele laughs.

He stands up. He has the vague hope that she will hold him back but she doesn’t budge.

“At the next solstice festival,” he says, “I will jump over the fire like the others.”

“Me too.”

“You’re a girl!”

“And this girl is about to smack you.”

He sets off without looking back. He knows that this is important, because if he turns around, she has won.

The hammer is heavy. The wooden footbridge ends at the Steger farm. The boy leaves the path and makes his way through tall grass. This is not entirely without danger, due to the Little People. He thinks of Sepp. Ever since the night in the forest the mill hand has been afraid of him and has kept a safe distance, which has been useful. If only he knew what happened in the forest. He knows that he shouldn’t think about it. Memory is a peculiar thing: it doesn’t simply come and go as it pleases; rather you can light it and extinguish it again like a pitchwood torch. The boy thinks of his mother, who can only just stand up again, and for a moment he thinks of the dead infant too, his sister, whose soul is now in the cold, because she was not baptized.

He stops and looks up. You would have to stretch the rope over the crowns, from one church tower to the next, from village to village. He spreads his arms out and imagines it. Then he sits down on a rock and watches the clouds parting. It has grown warm, and the air is filling with steam. He is sweating, puts the hammer down next to him. Suddenly he feels sleepy, and he’s hungry, but it’s still many hours until groats. And if you could fly? Flap your arms, leave the rope, rise higher, higher? He plucks a blade of grass and slides it between his lips. It tastes sweet, damp, and a little acrid. He lies down in the grass and closes his eyes so that the sunlight lies warm on his lids. The wetness of the grass penetrates his clothing clammily.

A shadow falls on him. The boy opens his eyes.

“Did I frighten you?”

The boy sits up, shakes his head. There are rarely strangers here. Sometimes the reeve comes from the district capital, and now and then come merchants. But he doesn’t know this stranger. He is young, just barely a man. He has a little goatee, and he is wearing a jerkin, breeches made of good gray material, and high boots. His eyes are bright and curious.

“Been imagining what it would be like if you could fly?”

The boy stares at the stranger.

“No,” says the stranger, “it wasn’t magic. Another person cannot read your thoughts. No one can do that. But when a child spreads his arms and stands on tiptoe and looks up, then he is thinking about flying. He does this because he cannot yet fully believe that he will never fly. That God doesn’t permit us to fly. The birds, yes, but not us.”

“Eventually we can all fly,” says the boy. “When we’re dead.”

“When you’re dead, you’re first of all dead. Then you lie in the grave until the Lord returns to judge us.”

“When will he return?”

“The priest hasn’t taught you that?”

The boy shrugs. The priest speaks often in church about these things, of course, the grave, the judgment, the dead, but he has a monotonous voice, and it’s also not rare for him to be drunk.

“At the end of time,” says the stranger. “Except that the dead cannot experience time, they’re dead, after all, so one can also say: immediately. As soon as you’re dead, the Day of Judgment dawns.”

“My father said the same thing.”

“Your father is a scholar?”

“My father is a miller.”

“Does he have opinions? Does he read?”

“He knows a lot,” says the boy. “He helps people.”

“Helps them?”

“When they’re ill.”

“Perhaps he can help me too.”

“Are you ill?”

The stranger sits down beside him on the ground. “What do you think, will it stay sunny, or will we have more rain?”

“How am I supposed to know?”

“You’re from here, aren’t you?”

“We’ll have more rain,” says the boy, because it rains most of the time. The weather is almost always bad. Which is why the harvest is so pitiful, which is why the mill doesn’t get enough grain, which is why everyone is hungry. Supposedly it used to be better. The older people remember long summers, but perhaps they’re also imagining it, who can know, they are old.

“My father thinks,” says the boy, “that angels ride on the rain clouds and look down at us.”

“Clouds are made of water,” says the stranger. “No one sits on them. The angels have bodies of light and need no conveyance. Nor do demons. They are made of air. That’s why the devil is known as the Lord of the Air.” He pauses as if to hearken to his own sentences, and gazes with an almost curious expression at his fingertips. “And yet,” he then says, “they are nothing but particles of God’s will.”

“Even the devils?”

“Naturally.”

“The devils are God’s will?”

“God’s will is greater than everything imaginable. It is so great that it is able to negate itself. An old riddle goes: can God make a stone so heavy that he can no longer lift it? It sounds like a paradox. Do you know what that is, a paradox?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

The boy nods.

“What is it?”

“You are a paradox, and your rogue of a pimp father is one too.”

The stranger is silent for a moment. Then the corners of his mouth stretch upward into a thin smile. “It’s actually not a paradox, for the correct answer is: naturally he can. But the stone that he can no longer lift he can then lift effortlessly. God is too encompassing to be one with himself. That’s why the Lord of the Air and his associates exist. That’s why everything that is not God exists. That’s why the world exists.”

The boy raises a hand in front of his face. The sun is now unobstructed by clouds. A blackbird flits past. Yes, of course, he thinks, you should fly like that, it would be even better than walking on the rope. But if you simply cannot fly, then walking on the rope is second best.

“I’d like to meet your father.”

The boy nods indifferently.

“You’d better hurry,” says the stranger. “It will be raining in an hour.”

The boy points to the sun questioningly.

“Do you see the small clouds back there?” asks the stranger. “And the elongated ones over us? The wind is massing together the ones back there, it’s coming from the east and bringing cold air, and the ones over us are catching it, and then everything cools even more, and the water grows heavy and falls to the earth. There are no angels sitting on the clouds, but it is nonetheless worthwhile to look at them, for they bring water and beauty. What’s your name?”

The boy tells him.

“Don’t forget your hammer, Tyll.” The stranger turns away and leaves.

—

Claus is in a gloomy mood this evening. The fact that he cannot solve the grain problem is weighing on his mind at the table.

It’s maddening. If you have a heap of grain in front of you and take away one grain, you still have a heap in front of you. Now take another. Is it still a heap? Of course. Now take another away. Is it still a heap? Yes, of course. Now take another away. Is it still a heap? Of course. And so on and so on. It is quite simple: merely by taking a single grain away, you never make a heap of grain into something that is not a heap of grain. Also, by putting on one grain, you never make something that is not a heap of grain into a heap.

And yet: if you remove grain after grain, the heap is at some point no longer a heap. At some point there will be just a few little grains left on the ground, which by no stretch of the imagination can be called a heap. And if you keep going, the moment will eventually come when you take the last one and there’s nothing left on the floor. Is one grain a heap? Certainly not. And nothing at all? No, nothing at all is not a heap. For nothing at all is nothing at all.

But which is the grain whose removal causes the heap to cease being a heap? When does it actually happen? Claus has played it through hundreds of times, piling up hundreds of grain heaps in his imagination, then mentally removing individual grains. But he has not found the decisive moment. It has ousted even the moon from his attention and he has no longer been thinking much about the dead baby either.

This afternoon he then tried it in reality. The most difficult part was hauling so much unground grain up to the attic room without losing some in the process, for the day after tomorrow Peter Steger is coming and picking up the flour. Claus had to shout and threaten the mill hands to make them be careful; he cannot afford any more debts. Agneta called him a furry horned animal, whereupon he told her not to meddle in things that are too difficult for women, whereupon she smacked him, whereupon he told her to watch herself, whereupon she slapped him so hard that he had to sit down for a while. This is how it often goes between them. In the beginning he sometimes hit Agneta back, but it never went well for him, he may be stronger, but she is usually angrier, and in every fight whoever is angrier wins, and so he long ago gave up hitting her, for as quickly as her anger comes, it fortunately evaporates just as quickly.

Then he began to work in his attic room. At first deliberate and scrupulous, examining the heap with each grain, but gradually sweating and morose and by late afternoon in sheer despair. On the right side of the room there was eventually a new heap and on the left side something that could perhaps still be called a heap, but perhaps not. And a little while later there was on the left only a handful of grains.

And where, then, was the dividing line? It’s enough to make you cry. He spoons his groats, sighs, and listens to the pelting rain. The groats taste bad as always, but for a while the sound of the rain soothes him. Then it occurs to him that it’s similar with rain: How many drops fewer would have to fall for it to no longer be rain? He groans. Sometimes it seems to him as if it were God’s goal in the way he made the world to confound a poor miller.

Agneta puts her hand on his arm and asks whether he’d like more groats.

He doesn’t want more, but he understands that she feels sorry for him and that it’s a peace offering because of the slaps. “Yes,” he says softly. “Thank you.”

Then there’s a thump at the door.

Claus crosses his fingers for protection. He murmurs a spell, makes signs in the air; only then does he call: “Who’s there, in the name of God?” Everyone knows never to say come in before whoever is outside has said his name. The evil spirits are powerful, but the vast majority of them cannot cross the threshold unless they are invited.

“Two wanderers,” calls a voice. “In Christ’s name, open the door.”

Claus stands up, goes to the door, and unbolts it.

A man enters. He is no longer young, but he looks strong. His hair and his beard are dripping wet. Rainwater forms pearls on the thick gray linen of his cloak. He is followed by a second, much younger man. This man looks around, and when he sees the boy, a smile passes over his face. It’s the stranger he encountered at noon.

“I am Dr. Oswald Tesimond of the Society of Jesus,” says the older man. “This is Dr. Kircher. We were invited.”

“Invited?” asks Agneta.

“Society of Jesus?” asks Claus.

“We are Jesuits.”

“Jesuits,” Claus repeats. “Real, true Jesuits?”

Agneta brings two stools to the table; the others move closer together.

Claus bows awkwardly. “I am Claus Ulenspiegel,” he says, “and this is my wife and this is my son and these are my mill hands. We rarely receive distinguished visitors. It’s an honor. There’s not much, but what we have is at your disposal. Here are the groats, there is the small beer, and there’s still some milk in the jug.” He clears his throat. “May I ask whether you are scholars?”

“I should say so,” replies Dr. Tesimond, taking a spoon gingerly. “I am a doctor of medicine and of theology, in addition a chemicus specializing in dracontology. Dr. Kircher concerns himself with occult signs, crystallography, and the nature of music.” He eats some groats, screws up his face, and puts down the spoon.

For a moment it is silent. Then Claus leans forward and says, “May I be permitted to ask a question?”

“With certainty,” says Dr. Tesimond. Something about the way he speaks is unusual: some words in his sentences are not where you would expect them, and he also emphasizes them differently; it sounds as if he had little stones in his mouth.

“What is dracontology?” asks Claus. Even in the weak light of the tallow candle the others can tell that his cheeks have turned red.

“The study of the nature of dragons.”

The mill hands raise their heads. Rosa’s mouth hangs open.

The boy feels hot. “Have you seen any?” he asks.

Dr. Tesimond furrows his brow as if an unpleasant noise had disturbed him.

Dr. Kircher looks at the boy and shakes his head.

“My apologies,” says Claus. “This is a simple house. My son doesn’t know how to behave and sometimes forgets that a child is to be quiet when adults are speaking. But the question did occur to me too. Have you seen any?”

“It is not the first time I’ve heard this amusing question,” says Dr. Tesimond. “Indeed every dracontologist is met with it regularly among the simple people. But dragons are rare. They are very…what’s the word again?”

“Shy,” says Dr. Kircher.

“German is not my native tongue,” says Dr. Tesimond. “I must apologize, sometimes I fall into the idiom of my beloved native land, which I will never see again in my life: England, the island of apples and of morning fog. Yes, dragons are inconceivably shy and capable of astounding feats of camouflage. You could search for a hundred years and yet never get close to a dragon. Just as you can spend a hundred years in immediate proximity to a dragon and never notice it. That is precisely why dracontology is necessary. For medical science cannot do without the healing power of their blood.”

Claus rubs his forehead. “Where do you get the blood, then?”

“We don’t have the blood, of course. Medicine is the art of…what’s the word?”

“Substitution,” says Dr. Kircher.

“Yes, indeed,” says Dr. Tesimond, “dragon blood is a substance of such power that you don’t need the stuff itself. It’s enough that the substance is in the world. In my beloved native land there are still two dragons, but no one has tracked them down in centuries.”

“Earthworm and grub,” says Dr. Kircher, “look like the dragon. Crushed into a fine substance their bodies can achieve astonishing things. Dragon blood has the power to make a person invulnerable, but as a substitute pulverized cinnabar can still cure skin diseases due to its resemblance. Cinnabar is itself hard to obtain, yet all herbs with surfaces that are scaly like dragons can in turn be substituted for cinnabar. The art of healing is substitution according to the principle of resemblance—crocus cures eye afflictions because it looks like an eye.”

“The better a dracontologist knows his trade,” says Dr. Tesimond, “the better he can make up for the absence of the dragon through substitution. The pinnacle of the art, however, lies in using not the body of the dragon, but its…what is it called?”

“Knowledge,” says Dr. Kircher.

“Its knowledge. As early a writer as Pliny the Elder reports that dragons know an herb by means of which they bring dead members of their species back to life. To find this herb would be the Holy Grail of our science.”

“But how do we know that dragons exist?” asks the boy.

Dr. Tesimond furrows his brow. Claus leans forward and slaps his son’s face.

“Because of the efficacy of the substitutes,” says Dr. Kircher. “How would such a puny insect as the grub have healing power if not by its resemblance to the dragon! Why can cinnabar heal, if not because it is dark red like dragon blood!”

“Another question,” says Claus. “While I am speaking with learned men…while I have the opportunity…”

“Go on,” says Dr. Tesimond.

“A heap of grains. If you always take away only one. It’s driving me mad.”

The mill hands laugh.

“A well-known problem,” says Dr. Tesimond. He makes an encouraging gesture in Dr. Kircher’s direction.

“Where one thing is, no other thing can be,” says Dr. Kircher, “but two words do not exclude each other. Between a thing that is a grain heap and a thing that is not a grain heap there is no sharp dividing line. The heap nature fades little by little, comparable to a cloud dispersing.”

“Yes,” Claus says as if to himself. “Yes. No, no. Because…No! You can’t make a table out of a fingernail of wood. Not one you could use. It’s not enough. It’s impossible. Nor out of two fingernails of wood. Not enough wood to make a table never becomes enough wood just because you add a tiny bit!”

The guests are silent. Everyone listens to the rain and the scratching of the spoons and the wind rattling the windows.

“A good question,” says Dr. Tesimond, looking encouragingly at Dr. Kircher.

“Things are what they are,” says Dr. Kircher, “but vagueness is embedded deep within our concepts. It is simply not always clear whether a thing is a mountain or not a mountain, a flower or not a flower, a shoe or not a shoe—or, indeed, a table or not a table. That is why, when God wants clarity, he speaks in numbers.”

“It’s unusual for a miller to take an interest in such questions,” says Dr. Tesimond. “Or in things like that.” He points to the pentagrams engraved over the doorframe.

“They keep away demons,” says Claus.

“And one just engraves them? That’s sufficient?”

“You need the right words.”

“Hold your tongue,” says Agneta.

“But it’s difficult with the words, isn’t it?” says Dr. Tesimond. “With the…” He looks questioningly at Dr. Kircher.

“Spells,” says Dr. Kircher.

“Exactly,” says Dr. Tesimond. “Isn’t it dangerous? They say that the same words that banish demons under certain conditions also lure them.”

“Those are different spells. I know them too. Don’t worry. I know the difference.”

“Be quiet,” says Agneta.

“And in what else, then, does a miller like you take an interest? What occupies his mind, what does he want to know? How else can one…help you?”

“Well, with the leaves,” says Claus.

“Hold your tongue!” says Agneta.

“A few months ago I found two leaves near the old oak on Jakob Brantner’s field. Actually it’s not Brantner’s field, it has always belonged to the Lesers, but in the inheritance dispute the prefect decided that it’s a Brantner field. No matter, the leaves, in any case, looked exactly alike.”

“It most certainly is Brantner’s field,” says Sepp, who was a hand on Brantner’s farm for a year. “The Lesers are liars, devil take them.”

“If there’s a liar here,” says Rosa, “then it’s Jakob Brantner. You need only see how he looks at the women in church.”

“But it really is his field,” says Sepp.

Claus pounds on the table. Everyone goes silent.

“The leaves. They looked alike, every vein, every crack. I dried them, I can show them to you. I even bought a magnifying glass from a merchant when he came through the village, to be able to view them better. The merchant doesn’t come often, his name is Hugo, he has only two fingers on his left hand, and when you ask him how he lost the others, he says: Miller, they’re only fingers!” Claus stops and thinks briefly, astounded at where the stream of his speech has carried him. “Well, when they were lying there in front of me, the two leaves, I suddenly wondered whether it doesn’t mean that they are actually one. If the difference consists only in the fact that the one leaf is on the left and the other on the right—well, all you need to do is make a hand movement.” He demonstrates it with such an awkward gesture that a spoon flies in one direction and a bowl in the other. “Imagine someone says now that the two leaves are one and the same—what can you reply? He would be right!” Claus thumps on the table, but all except Agneta, who is looking at him fixedly and beseechingly, are following with their eyes the rolling bowl, which goes around in a circle once, twice, and then comes to rest. “These two leaves, then,” Claus says into the silence. “If they are only in appearance two leaves and in truth one, doesn’t that mean that…all this here and there and elsewhere is only a web that God has woven so that we won’t penetrate his mysteries?”

“You must be silent now,” says Agneta.

“And speaking of mysteries,” says Claus, “I have a book that I can’t read.”

“No two leaves in all Creation are alike,” says Dr. Kircher. “Nor even two grains of sand. No two things between which God doesn’t distinguish.”

“The leaves are upstairs, I can show them to you! And I can show you the book too! And what you said about the grub is not true, honorable sir, crushed grub cannot heal, but causes back pain and cold joints.” Claus gives his son a sign. “Fetch the big book, the one without binding, the one with the pictures!”

The boy stands up and runs to the ladder that leads upstairs. He climbs with lightning speed, disappearing through the hatch.

“You have a good son,” says Dr. Kircher.

Claus nods distractedly.

“Be that as it may,” says Dr. Tesimond. “It’s late, and we must be in the village before nightfall. Are you coming, miller?”

Claus looks at him uncomprehendingly. The two guests stand up.

“You idiot,” says Agneta.

“Where?” asks Claus. “Why?”

“No reason to worry,” says Dr. Tesimond. “We just want to talk, at length and in peace. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it, miller? In peace. About everything that occupies your mind. Do we look like bad people?”

“But I can’t,” says Claus. “Steger is coming the day after tomorrow and wants his grain. It is not yet ground. I have it up in the room. Time is pressing.”

“These are good mill hands,” says Dr. Tesimond. “One can rely on them. The work will be done.”

“He who refuses to follow his friends,” says Dr. Kircher, “must be prepared to deal with people who are not his friends. We supped together, sat together in the mill. We can trust each other.”

“This Latin book,” says Dr. Tesimond. “I want to see it. If you have questions, we can answer them.”

Everyone is waiting for the boy, who is groping through the dark attic room above. It takes a while before he has found the right book next to the heap of grain. By the time he climbs back down, his father and the guests are standing in the doorway.

He hands the book to Claus, who strokes his head, then bends down and kisses him on the forehead. In the last light of day the boy sees the thin wrinkles chiseled into his father’s face. He sees the flicker in his restless eyes, which can always only briefly look at one thing, he sees the white hairs in the black beard.

And as Claus looks down at his son, it amazes him that so many of his children have died at birth but that of all his children this one survived. He didn’t take enough interest in the boy, he was simply too accustomed to all of them immediately disappearing again. But that will change, Claus thinks, I will teach him what I know, the spells, the squares, the herbs, and the course of the moon. Cheerfully he takes the book and steps out into the evening. The rain has stopped.

Agneta clasps him. They embrace for a long time. Claus wants to let go, but Agneta keeps holding him. The mill hands titter.

“You’ll be back soon,” says Dr. Tesimond.

“There you have it,” says Claus.

“You idiot,” says Agneta, weeping.

Suddenly all this is embarrassing to Claus—the mill, the sobbing wife, the scrawny son, his whole poor existence. Resolutely he pushes Agneta away from him. It pleases him that he will now have the chance to make common cause with the learned men, to whom he feels closer than to these mill people, who know nothing.

“Don’t worry,” he says to Dr. Tesimond. “I’ll find the way in the dark too.”

Claus sets off with long strides. The two men follow him. Agneta watches them until the twilight swallows them.

“Go inside,” she says to the boy.

“When is he coming back?”

She closes and bolts the door.

II

Dr. Kircher opens his eyes. Someone is in the room. He listens. No, there’s no one here except Dr. Tesimond, whose snoring he hears from the bed over there. He throws back the blanket, crosses himself, and gets up. The time has come. The day of the trial.

To crown it all he dreamed again of Egyptian signs. A clay-yellow wall, in it little men with dog heads, lions with wings, axes, swords, lances, wavy lines of all sorts. No one understands them. The knowledge of them has been lost, until a divinely gifted intellect will appear to decipher them again.

That will be he. One day.

His back hurts as it does every morning. The straw sack on which he has to sleep is thin, the floor icy cold. There’s only one bed in the priest’s house, and his master is sleeping in it; even the priest must lie on the floor in the next room. At least his master didn’t wake up last night. Often he screams in his sleep, and sometimes he pulls out the knife hidden under his pillow and thinks his life is in danger. When this happens, he has again been dreaming of the great conspiracy, in England, when he and a few brave people almost succeeded in blowing up the King. The attempt failed, but they didn’t give up: for days they searched for Princess Elizabeth in order to kidnap her and place her on the throne by force. It could have succeeded, and had it succeeded, the island would today again be in possession of the true faith. For weeks Dr. Tesimond lived in the forests, on roots and spring water. He was the only one to escape and make his way across the sea. Later he will be canonized, but at night one shouldn’t lie near him, for the knife is always under his pillow, and his dreams are swarming with Protestant oppressors.

Dr. Kircher throws his cloak over his shoulders and leaves the priest’s house. In a daze, he stands in the pale light of the early morning. On his right is the church, in front of him the main square with the well and the linden and the platform erected yesterday, next to it the houses of the Tamms, the Henrichs, and the Heinerlings. He now knows all the inhabitants of this village, he has interrogated them, he knows their secrets. Something is moving on the roof of the Henrich house. Instinctively he recoils, but it is probably only a cat. He murmurs a protective blessing and crosses himself three times, go away, evil spirit, desist, I stand under the protection of the Lord and the Virgin and all the saints. Then he sits down, leans against the wall of the priest’s house, and waits with chattering teeth for the sun.

He realizes that someone is sitting next to him. He must have approached soundlessly, sat down soundlessly. It’s Master Tilman.

“Good morning,” Dr. Kircher mutters and gives a start. That was a mistake; now Master Tilman might return the greeting.

To his horror it happens too. “Good morning!”

Dr. Kircher looks around in all directions. Fortunately there’s no one to be seen, the village is still asleep, no one is observing them.

“This cold,” says Master Tilman.

“Yes,” says Dr. Kircher, because he has to say something. “Bad.”

“And gets worse every year,” says Master Tilman.

They’re silent.

Dr. Kircher knows that it would be best not to reply, but the silence is oppressive, so he clears his throat and says: “The world is ending.”

Master Tilman spits on the ground. “And how much longer?”

“Probably about a hundred years,” says Dr. Kircher, still looking around uneasily. “Some think a bit sooner, while others believe that it will be around a hundred and twenty.”

He falls silent, feels a lump in his throat. This happens to him whenever he speaks of the apocalypse. He crosses himself. Master Tilman does the same.

The poor man, thinks Dr. Kircher. Actually, no hangman need fear the Last Judgment, since the condemned must forgive their executioners before death, but now and then there are stubborn ones who refuse, and occasionally it even happens that someone summons his hangman to the Valley of Josaphat. Everyone knows this curse: I summon you to the Valley of Josaphat. Whoever says that to the hangman accuses him of murder and denies him forgiveness. Has this ever happened to Master Tilman?

“You’re wondering whether I’m afraid of the Judgment.”

“No!”

“Whether anyone has summoned me to the Valley of Josaphat.”

“No!”

“Everyone wonders that. You know, I didn’t choose this. I am what I am because my father was what he was. And he was what he was because of his father. And my son will have to be what I am, for a hangman’s son becomes a hangman.” Master Tilman spits again. “My son is a gentle boy. I look at him, he is only eight and very kind, and killing doesn’t suit him. But he has no choice. It didn’t suit me either. And I learned how, and not badly at all.”

Dr. Kircher is now really worried. By no means may anyone see how he is chatting peacefully with the hangman here.

Whitish brightness spreads in the sky. On the walls of the houses the colors can now be distinguished. Even the platform is clearly visible over there in front of the linden. Nearby, only a blur in the dawn, stands the horse-drawn wagon of the balladeer who arrived two days ago. So it always happens: when there’s something to see, the traveling people gather.

“Thank God there’s no tavern in this hole,” says Master Tilman. “Because when there is one, I go there in the evening, but then I sit alone, and everyone peers over and whispers. And even though I know this beforehand, I still go to the tavern, for where else am I supposed to go? I can’t wait to get back to Eichstätt.”

“Do they treat you better there?”

“No, but there I’m at home. To be treated badly at home is better than to be treated badly elsewhere.” Master Tilman raises his arms and stretches with a yawn.

Dr. Kircher jerks sideways. The hangman’s hand is only a few inches away from his shoulder; there must not be any contact. Anyone touched by a hangman, even if only fleetingly, loses his honor. But of course you must not arouse his hostility either. If you anger him, he could grasp you intentionally and accept the punishment. Dr. Kircher curses himself for his own good nature—he never should have let himself be drawn into this conversation.

Now, to his relief, he hears from inside the house the dry cough of his master. Dr. Tesimond has awoken. With an apologetic gesture he stands up.

Master Tilman smiles wryly.

“God be with us on this great day,” says Dr. Kircher.

But the hangman doesn’t reply. Dr. Kircher goes quickly into the priest’s house to help his master get dressed.

—

With a measured step and clad in the red robe of the judge, Dr. Tesimond moves toward the platform. Up there stands a table with stacks of paper, weighed down with stones from the millstream, lest the wind carry away a sheet. The sun is approaching its zenith. The light falls shimmering through the crown of the linden. Everyone is here: in front all the members of the Steger family and the smith Stelling with his wife and the farmer Brantner with his family, behind them the baker Holtz with his wife and two daughters and Anselm Melker with his children and wife and sister-in-law and old mother and old mother-in-law and old father-in-law and aunt and next to them Maria Leserin with her beautiful daughter and behind them the Henrichs and the Heinerlings along with their hands and at the very back the mouselike round faces of the Tamms. Master Tilman stands apart, leaning on the trunk of the tree. He is wearing a brown cowl, his face is pale and swollen. Behind the tree the balladeer stands on his wagon, scribbling in a little book.

Light-footedly, Dr. Tesimond springs onto the platform and stands behind a chair. Despite his youth, Dr. Kircher has a less easy time of it; the platform is high and the robe hampers his climbing. When he is up there, Dr. Tesimond looks at him encouragingly, and Dr. Kircher knows that he is now supposed to speak, but as he looks around, he grows dizzy. The feeling of unreality is so great that he has to hold on to the edge of the table. It’s not the first time this has happened to him. It’s one of the things he must keep secret at all costs. He has only just received the minor orders, he is still far from a full Jesuit, and only men of the best health in body and mind may be members of the Society of Jesus.

Above all, however, no one must know how muddled time keeps becoming for him. Sometimes he finds himself in a strange place without knowing what has happened in the interim. Recently he forgot for a good hour that he is already grown up; he thought he was a child playing near his parents’ house in the grass, as if the fifteen years since then and the difficult studies in Paderborn were merely the fantasy of a boy wishing to finally be grown up. How fragile the world is. Almost every night he sees Egyptian signs, and increasingly the worry grows in him that he might one day no longer awake from one of these dreams, that he might be imprisoned forever in the colorful hell of a godless land of Pharaohs.

Hastily he rubs his eyes. Peter Steger and Ludwig Stelling, the assistant judges, have climbed up in black robes to join them, followed by Ludwig von Esch, the administrator and chairman of the local court district, who must deliver the verdict so that it has validity. Spots of sunlight dance on the grass and the well. Despite the brightness it’s so cold that your breath turns into little clouds of vapor. Linden crown, thinks Dr. Kircher. Linden crown, a word like that can get stuck in your head, but this must not happen now, he must not let himself be distracted, he must direct all his strength at the ceremony. Linden king, linden crone, linden crow. No! Not now, no confusion now, everyone is waiting! As the scribe he opens the trial, no one else can do it, it is his duty, he must fulfill it. To calm himself he looks into the faces of the spectators in front and in the middle, but no sooner has he grown calmer than his gaze meets that of the miller’s boy. He is standing at the very back, next to his mother. His eyes are narrow, cheeks hollow, lips a bit pursed as if he were whistling to himself.

Try to expunge him from your thoughts. You haven’t taken part in so many spiritual exercises for nothing. It’s the same with the mind as with the eyes: they see what lies in front of them, but you can determine where you direct them. He squints. Only a spot, he thinks, only colors, only a play of light. I don’t see a boy, I see light. I don’t see a face, I see colors. Only colors, light, and shadows.

And indeed, the boy is no longer of consequence. He simply must not look at him. Their gazes must not meet. As long as that doesn’t happen, everything is all right.

“Is the judge here?” he asks hoarsely.

“The judge is here,” replies Dr. Tesimond.

“The administrator here?”

“I’m here,” Ludwig von Esch says in an annoyed tone. Under normal circumstances he would be the one leading the trial, but these are not normal circumstances.

“The first assistant judge here?”

“Here,” says Peter Steger.

“The second?”

Silence. Peter Steger gives Ludwig Stelling a nudge. He looks around in surprise. Peter Steger gives another nudge.

“Yes, here,” says Ludwig Stelling.

“The tribunal is assembled,” says Dr. Kircher.

Inadvertently, he looks at Master Tilman. The hangman is leaning almost casually against the trunk of the linden, rubbing his beard and smiling, but at what? His heart pounding, he looks elsewhere. The impression must by no means be given that he has a mutual understanding with the executioner. So he looks at the balladeer. The day before yesterday he heard him singing. The lute was poorly tuned, the rhymes were rickety, and the outrageous events about which he sang were not so outrageous: a child murder by the Protestants in Magdeburg, a miserable song mocking the Elector Palatine in which bread was rhymed with bent and quivering with belligerents. With unease he thinks about the likelihood that in the ballad that the singer will sing about this trial he too will appear.

“The tribunal is assembled,” he hears himself saying once again. “Gathered to dispense justice and see justice done before the community, which is to maintain order and peace, from the beginning of the trial until the end, in the name of God.” He clears his throat. Then he calls: “Bring out the condemned!”

For a while it is so quiet that the wind can be heard, the bees, all the bleating and mooing and yapping of the animals. Then the door of the Brantner cowshed opens. It squeaks because it has just recently been reinforced with iron; the window shutters too have been boarded up. The cows, for whom there is now no more room inside, have been housed in the Steger shed, which caused a quarrel because Peter Steger wanted payment for it and Ludwig Brantner said it wasn’t his fault. In a village nothing is ever simple.

A pikeman steps outside, yawning, followed by the two accused, blinking, and behind them another two pikemen. They’re elderly warriors on the cusp of withdrawal from service. One of them limps, the other is missing his left hand. Nothing better was sent from Eichstätt.

And from the appearance of the accused, it can seem as if no more was necessary. With their shorn heads on which, as always when you cut off a person’s hair, all sorts of bumps and dents are visible, they look like the most harmless and weakest of people. Their hands are wrapped in thick bandages so that the crushed fingers cannot be seen, and bloody imprints stretch around their foreheads where Master Tilman applied the leather band. How easily, Dr. Kircher thinks, pity could overcome you, but you must not permit yourself to believe the appearance, for they are in league with the greatest power of the fallen world, and their lord is with them at every moment. That’s why it is so dangerous: during the trial, the devil can always intervene. At any time he can show his strength and free them. Only the courage and purity of the judges can prevent it. Again and again his superiors impressed this on him in the seminary: do not underestimate those who have made a pact with the devil! Never forget that your compassion is their weapon and that they have means at their disposal of which your mind has no inkling.

The spectators clear a path. The two accused are led to the platform: in front old Hanna Krell, behind her the miller. Both of them walk stooped. They appear abstracted. It remains unclear whether they know who they are or what is happening.

Don’t underestimate them, Dr. Kircher tells himself, that’s the important thing. Not to underestimate them.

The tribunal sits down: in the middle Dr. Tesimond, to his right Peter Steger, to his left Ludwig Stelling. And to Stelling’s left—at a slight distance because the court scribe, while responsible for the smooth course of the trial, is not himself part of the tribunal—is the chair for him.

“Hanna,” says Dr. Tesimond, raising a sheet of paper. “Here is your confession.”

She is silent. Her lips don’t move, her eyes seem extinguished. She looks like an empty shell, her face a mask that no one is wearing, her arms as if hung wrong at the joints. Better not to think about it, thinks Dr. Kircher, who at the same moment naturally cannot help thinking about what Master Tilman did to those arms to make them hang so wrong. Better not to imagine it. He rubs his eyes and imagines it.

“You are silent,” says Dr. Tesimond, “so we will read your words from the interrogation. They are written on this sheet of paper. You spoke them, Hanna. Now everyone shall hear them. Now everything shall come to light.” His words seem to echo as if they were spoken in a stone room and not outside under a linden, in whose linden crown the lingering wind—no! Not for the first time Dr. Kircher finds himself thinking about how fortunate he can consider himself and how favored by God he is that Dr. Tesimond chose him as his famulus. He himself did nothing, didn’t volunteer and didn’t thrust himself forward on the occasion when the legendary man came from Vienna to Paderborn, a guest of the superior, an admired traveler passing through, a witness to the true faith, who during an exercise in the church of the order suddenly stood up and approached him. I will question you, my boy, answer quickly. Don’t think about what I want to hear, you cannot guess it, just say what is correct. Whom does God love more—the angels who are without sin or the man who has sinned and repented? Answer more quickly. Are the angels of God’s substance and thus eternal or are they created as we are? Even more quickly. And sin, is it God’s creation, and if so, can he love it as he does all his creatures, and if not, how is it possible that the punishment of the sinner is without end, his pain without end, and his suffering in the fire without end? Speak quickly!

It went on like this for an hour. He heard himself giving answers, to ever-new questions, and when he didn’t know an answer, he made something up and sometimes even quotations and sources for it. Thomas Aquinas wrote over a hundred volumes, no one knows them all, and he had always been able to rely on his inventiveness. So he spoke and spoke as if someone else were talking through him, and gathered all his strength and didn’t permit his memory to withhold answers, sentences, or names from him, and he was even able to add and subtract and divide the numbers without paying attention to the beating of his heart or the dizziness in his head, and the whole time his brother in faith was looking him in the face with such intensity that to this day it sometimes seems to him as if the questioning were still going on and would go on forever, as if everything since then were a dream. Yet in the end Dr. Tesimond took a step back and said with his eyes closed and as if to himself: “I need you. My German is not good, you must help. I am traveling back to Vienna, holy duties call, you will come with me.”

And so they have now been on their way for a year. The journey to Vienna is long when there are so many urgent matters on the way; a man like Dr. Tesimond cannot simply move on when he discovers machinations. In Lippstadt they had to exorcise a demon. Then in Passau a dishonorable priest had to be chased away. They steered clear of Pilsen because the especially raging Protestants there might have arrested Jesuits passing through, and this detour brought them to a little village where the arrest, torture, and condemnation of an evil witch took them six months. Then they received tidings of a dracontological colloquium in Bayreuth. Naturally, they had to travel there to prevent Erhard von Felz, the doctor’s greatest rival, from spouting unchallenged nonsense. The debate between the two of them lasted seven weeks, four days, and three hours. Afterward he fervently hoped that they would now finally reach the imperial city, but when they spent the night at the Collegium Willibaldinum in Eichstätt, the Prince-Bishop summoned them to an audience: “My people are sleepy, Dr. Tesimond, the administrators don’t report enough offenses in the villages, there are more and more witches, no one does anything, I can hardly finance my own Jesuit seminary, because the cathedral canon is against it. Will you help me? I will appoint you ad hoc commissarius of witches, and I will grant you permission to administer capital supplicium to malefactors on the spot, if you will only help me. You will receive every authority.”

That was why Dr. Kircher hesitated for an entire afternoon when a conversation with a strange boy aroused in him the suspicion that they had once again crossed paths with a warlock. I don’t have to report it, he thought, I can keep silent, I can forget it, it was not at all necessary for me to talk to the boy, after all, it was a chance encounter. But the voice of conscience returned: Talk to your master. There is no such thing as chance, there is only God’s will. And as expected Dr. Tesimond immediately decided that the miller had to be paid a visit, and as expected everything that followed took its usual course. Now they have spent weeks already in this godforsaken village, and Vienna is more distant than ever.

He realizes that everyone is looking at him, only the accused are looking down at the ground. It happened again: he was absent. He can only hope that it didn’t last too long. Hastily he looks around and finds his bearings: In front of him lies Hanna Krell’s confession. He recognizes the handwriting, it is his own, he wrote it himself, and now he has to read it out. With unsteady fingers he reaches for it, but at the very moment his fingers touch the paper, a wind stirs. Dr. Kircher grasps the paper, fortunately quickly enough. It is firmly in his hand. It doesn’t bear thinking about what would have happened if it had flown away from him. Satan is powerful, the air his realm. It would suit him perfectly if the tribunal made a mockery of itself.

As he reads Hanna’s confession aloud, he thinks back helplessly to the interrogation. To the dark room in the back of the priest’s house, once the broom closet, now the interrogation room in which Master Tilman and Dr. Tesimond worked day after day on luring the truth out of the old woman. Dr. Tesimond has a kind soul and would have preferred to stay away from the harsh interrogation, but the Procedure for the Judgment of Capital Crimes of Kaiser Charles obliges a judge to be present at every torture he orders. And it also prescribes a confession. No trial may end without a confession; no sentence may be imposed if the defendants have not admitted anything. The actual trial takes place in the locked closet, but on the day of the tribunal, when the confession is publicly confirmed and the verdict delivered, all are present.

While Dr. Kircher is reading, cries of horror come from the crowd. People gasp, people whisper, people shake their heads, people bare their teeth in fury and disgust. His voice trembles as he hears himself speaking of nocturnal flights and exposed flesh, of traveling on the wind, of the great Sabbath of the night, of blood in the cauldrons and naked bodies, lo, they are rolling, the huge billy goat with never-flagging lust, he takes you from in front and takes you from behind, to songs sung in the language of Orcus. Dr. Kircher turns the page and comes to the curses: cold and hail on the fields, spoiling the crop of the pious, and hunger visited on the heads of the God-fearing and death and disease on the weak and pestilence on the children. Several times his voice almost fails, but he thinks of his sacred ministry and admonishes himself, and thank God he is prepared. None of these horrible things is new to him. He knows every word, has written it not only once but again and again, outside the closet, while the interrogation took place inside and Master Tilman brought to light everything that must be confessed in a witchcraft trial: And did you not fly too, Hanna? All witches fly. Do you mean to tell me that you of all people did not fly, will you deny it? And the Sabbath? Did you not kiss Satan, Hanna? If you speak, you will be forgiven, but if you keep silent, then look what Master Tilman has in his hand, he will use it.

“This has happened.” Dr. Kircher reads the last lines aloud. “In this way I, Hanna Krell, daughter of Leopoldina and Franz Krell, have renounced the Lord, betrayed the community of Christians, visited harm upon my fellow citizens and upon the holy church and my authorities too. In deep shame I confess and accept the just punishment, so help me God.”

He falls silent. A fly buzzes past his ear, flies in an arc, settles on his forehead. Should he drive it away or pretend he doesn’t notice it? What is more appropriate to the dignity of the tribunal, what is less ridiculous? He glances at his master inquisitively, but he doesn’t give him any sign.

Instead Dr. Tesimond leans forward, looks at Hanna Krell, and asks: “Is this your confession?”

She nods. Her chains rattle.

“You have to say it, Hanna!”

“That is my confession.”

“You have done all this?”

“I’ve done all that.”

“And who was the leader?”

She is silent.

“Hanna! Who was your leader? Who brought all of you to the Sabbath? Who taught you how to fly?”

She is silent.

“Hanna?”

She raises her hand and points to the miller.

“You have to say it, Hanna.”

“He did.”

“Louder!”

“It was he.”

Dr. Tesimond makes a hand movement. The guard pushes the miller forward. Now the main part of the trial begins. They came upon old Hanna only incidentally. A warlock almost always has followers. Nonetheless, it took a while before Ludwig Stelling’s wife admitted under threat of punishment that her rheumatism had been plaguing her only since she had quarreled with Hanna Krell, and again only after a week of interrogation did it also occur to Magda Steger and Maria Leserin that storms always came when Hanna was supposedly too ill to attend church. Hanna herself didn’t deny it long. As soon as Master Tilman showed her the instruments, she began to confess her crimes, and when he set to work in earnest, their full magnitude was very quickly revealed.

“Claus Ulenspiegel!” Dr. Tesimond holds three sheets of paper in the air. “Your confession!”

Dr. Kircher sees the sheets of paper in his master’s hand, and immediately his head hurts. He knows every sentence on them by heart. He rewrote it again and again, outside the locked door of the interrogation room through which you could hear everything.

“May I say something?” asks the miller.

Dr. Tesimond looks at him disapprovingly.

“Please,” says the miller. He rubs the red imprint of the leather band on his forehead. The chains rattle.

“What, then?” asks Dr. Tesimond.

This was how it went the whole time. Never before, Dr. Tesimond repeated often, had he encountered such a difficult case as this miller! And this is still so, despite all of Master Tilman’s efforts—despite blade and needle, despite salt and fire, despite leather loop, wet shoes, thumbscrew, and steel countess—all unclear. An executioner knows how to loosen tongues, but what does he do with someone who talks and talks and has absolutely no qualms about contradicting himself as if Aristotle had written nothing on logic? At first Dr. Tesimond took it for a perfidious ruse, but then he realized that the miller’s confusions always also contained fragments of truths—indeed, even astonishing insights.

“I’ve been thinking,” says Claus. “Now I understand. About my errors. I ask for forgiveness. I ask for mercy.”

“Did you do what this woman said? Lead the Witches’ Sabbath, did you do that?”

“I thought I was clever,” the miller says with downcast eyes. “I overestimated myself. Expected too much of my mind, my stupid intellect. I’m sorry. I ask for mercy.”

“And the black magic? The ruined fields? The cold, the rain—was that you?”

“I helped the sick according to the old way. There were some I couldn’t help. The old remedies are not so reliable. I always did my best. I was paid only if it helped, of course. I read the future of those who wanted to know it in water and bird flight. Peter Steger’s cousin, not Paul Steger, the other one, Karl, I told him not to climb the beech tree, not even to find treasures, don’t do it, I said, and the Steger cousin asked: A treasure in my beech tree? And I said: Don’t do it, Steger, and Karl said: If there’s a treasure there, I’m going up, and then he fell and smashed his head. And I can’t figure out, even though I think about it all the time, whether a prophecy that would not have come true if I hadn’t made it is actually a prophecy or something else.”

“Did you hear the witch’s confession? That she called you the leader of the Sabbath, did you hear that?”

“If there’s a treasure in the beech tree, then it’s still there.”

“Did you hear the witch?”

“And the two birch leaves I found.”

“Not again!”

“They looked like a single leaf.”

“Not the leaves again!”

Claus is sweating, he is breathing heavily. “The matter confused me so.” He reflects, shakes his head, scratches his shorn head, rattling his chains. “May I show you the leaves? They must still be in the mill, in the attic, where I pursued my foolish studies.” He turns around and points with a chain-rattling arm over the heads of the spectators. “My son can fetch them!”

“There are no more magic materials in the mill,” says Dr. Tesimond. “There’s a new miller there now, and he won’t have kept that junk.”

“And the books?” Claus asks softly.

Dr. Kircher is unsettled to see a fly land on the paper in his hands. Its little black legs follow the course of the letters. Is it possible that it’s trying to tell him something? But it’s moving so quickly that you can’t read what it’s writing, and he must not let himself be distracted once again.

“Where are my books?” asks Claus.

Dr. Tesimond gives his assistant a sign, and Dr. Kircher stands up and reads out the miller’s confession.

His thoughts turn again to the investigations. The mill hand Sepp readily told how often he found the miller in a deep sleep during the day. Without a witness to such states of unconsciousness, no one can be convicted of witchcraft, there are strict rules about that. The servants of Satan leave their bodies behind, and their spirits fly out to distant lands. Even shaking him, shouting at him, and kicking him wouldn’t have done any good, Sepp testified, and the priest too heavily incriminated the miller: I curse you, he cried as soon as anyone in the village angered him, I’ll burn you to death, I’ll cause you pain! He demanded obedience from the whole village, everyone feared his wrath. And the baker’s wife once saw the demons he invoked after dark on the Steger field: she spoke of throats, teeth, claws, and large genitals, slimy figures of midnight. Dr. Kircher could hardly bring himself to write it down. And then four, five, six villagers, and then another three and then another two, and more and more, described in detail how often he brought bad weather down upon their fields. Black magic is even more important than unconsciousness—if it is not witnessed, an accused can be condemned only of heresy but not of witchcraft. To ensure that there was no error, Dr. Kircher explained to the witnesses for days the gestures and words they must have noticed. Their minds work slowly, you have to repeat everything, the curses, the old spells, the Satanic invocations, before they remember. Indeed it turned out thereafter that they all heard the correct words and saw the correct gestures of invocation. Only the baker, who was also questioned, was suddenly no longer certain, but then Dr. Tesimond took him aside and asked him whether he really wanted to protect a warlock and whether his life was so pure that he had nothing to fear from a thorough investigation. Then the baker remembered after all that he saw everything the others saw, and then nothing more was needed to lead the miller to a confession in a severe interrogation.

“I sent the hail onto the fields,” Dr. Kircher reads aloud. “I carved my circles into the earth, summoned the powers below and the demons above and the Lord of the Air, brought ruin to the crops, ice onto the earth, death to the grain. In addition, I acquired a forbidden book, written in Latin…”

At this point he notices a stranger and goes silent. Where did he come from? Dr. Kircher didn’t see him approaching, but if the man had already been among the spectators before, with his broad-brimmed hat and the velvet collar and the silver cane, he would surely have caught Dr. Kircher’s eye! Yet there he stands, next to the balladeer’s wagon. What if he alone could see him? His heart begins to pound. If the man were here only for him and invisible to the others, what then?

But as the stranger now comes forward with slow strides, the people step aside to let him pass. Dr. Kircher heaves a sigh of relief. The man’s beard is cut short, his cloak is made of velvet, a feather bobs on his felt hat. With a solemn gesture he takes off the hat and bows.

“Greetings. Vaclav van Haag.”

Dr. Tesimond stands up and bows himself. “An honor,” he says. “A great pleasure!”

Dr. Kircher too stands up, bows, and sits back down. So it is not the devil, but the author of a well-known work on crystal formation in limestone caves—Dr. Kircher read it at some point and retained little in his memory. Questioningly he looks at the linden: The light wavers as if everything were an illusion. What is this expert on crystallization doing here?

“I’m writing a treatise on witchcraft,” says Dr. van Haag as he straightens up again. “Word has spread that you have apprehended a warlock in this village. I ask permission to defend him.”

A murmur goes through the spectators. Dr. Tesimond hesitates. “I’m certain,” he then says, “a man of your erudition has better things to do with his time.”

“Perhaps, but nonetheless I am here and ask you for this favor.”

“The Procedure for the Judgment of Capital Crimes prescribes no advocate for the condemned.”

“Nor does it forbid advocacy, however. Administrator, will you permit me—”

“Address the judge, dear colleague, not the administrator. He will announce the verdict, but I will judge.”

Dr. van Haag looks at the administrator, who is white with rage, but it’s true, he has no say here. Van Haag briefly tilts his head and speaks to Dr. Tesimond: “There are numerous precedents. Trials with advocates are becoming more and more common. Many a condemned man doesn’t speak as well for himself as he would certainly do if he could only speak well. For example, the forbidden book that was just mentioned. Wasn’t it said that it was written in Latin?”

“Correct.”

“Has the miller read it?”

“Well, for God’s sake, how could he have read it?”

Dr. van Haag smiles. He looks at Dr. Tesimond, then Dr. Kircher, then the miller, then Dr. Tesimond again.

“So what?” asks Dr. Tesimond.

“If the book is written in Latin!”

“Yes?”

“And if the miller doesn’t speak Latin.”

“Yes?”

Dr. van Haag spreads his arms and smiles again.

“Can I ask a question?” says the miller.

“A book that one is forbidden to possess, dear colleague, is a book that one is forbidden to possess, not a book that one is merely forbidden to read. The Holy Office speaks deliberately of having, not of knowing. Dr. Kircher?”

Dr. Kircher swallows, clears his throat, blinks. “A book is a possibility,” he says. “It is always prepared to speak. Even someone who does not understand its language can pass it on to others who can read it very well, so that it may do its wicked work on them. Or he could learn the language, and if there’s no one to teach it to him, he might find a way to teach it to himself. That’s not unheard of either. It can be achieved purely by examining the letters, by counting their frequency, by contemplating their pattern, for the human mind is powerful. In this way Saint Zagraphius learned Hebrew in the desert, merely out of the strong yearning to know God’s word in its primordial sound. And it’s reported that Taras of Byzantium comprehended Egyptian hieroglyphs solely by examining them for years. Unfortunately, he left us no key, and so we must undertake anew the task of deciphering them, but the problem will be solved, perhaps even soon. And lest we forget, there’s always the possibility that Satan, whose vassals understand all languages, endows one of his servants overnight with the ability to read the book. For these reasons the question of understanding is to be left to God and not his servants. To that God who will look into our souls on the Day of Judgment. The task of the human judges is to clear up the simple circumstances. And the simplest of them is this: if a book is forbidden, one is not permitted to have it.”

“Besides, it’s too late for a defense,” says Dr. Tesimond. “The trial is over. Only the verdict remains to be delivered. The accused confessed.”

“But evidently under torture?”

“Yes, of course,” cries Dr. Tesimond. “Why else should he have confessed? Without torture no one would ever confess anything!”

“Whereas under torture everyone confesses.”

“Thank God, yes!”

“Even an innocent man.”

“But he is not innocent. We have the testimony of the others. We have the book!”

“The testimony of the others who would have been subjected to torture if they had not testified?”

Dr. Tesimond is silent for a moment. “Dear colleague,” he says softly. “Naturally, someone who refuses to testify against a warlock must himself be investigated and charged. Where would we be if we did things differently?”

“Very well, another question: What does the unconsciousness of the warlocks actually mean? In the past it was said the unconscious ones had congress with the devil in their dreams. The devil has no power in God’s world, as even Institoris writes, therefore he must use sleep to instill in his allies the delusion he is giving them wild pleasure. Now, however, we condemn warlocks for the very acts we formerly declared illusions inspired by the devil, but we still indict them for the sleep and the delusional dreams. Well, is the evil deed real or imagined? It cannot be both. That doesn’t make sense, dear colleague!”

“It makes perfect sense, dear colleague!”

“Then explain it to me.”

“Dear colleague, I will not allow the trial to be debased by drivel and doubt.”

“May I ask a question?” the miller calls out.

“Me too,” says Peter Steger, smoothing his robe. “This is taking a long time, can we take a break? The cows’ udders are full, you can hear it yourselves.”

“Arrest him,” says Dr. Tesimond.

Dr. van Haag takes a step back. The guards stare at him.

“Take him away and bind him. It’s true that the Procedure for the Judgment of Capital Crimes permits the condemned an advocate, but nowhere does it say that it is decent to set oneself up as the advocate of a servant of the devil and to disrupt the trial with stupid questions. With all due respect to a learned colleague, I cannot tolerate that, and we will clear up in a rigorous interrogation what induces an esteemed man to conduct himself in this fashion.”

No one moves. Dr. van Haag looks at the guards; the guards look at Dr. Tesimond.

“Perhaps it is thirst for glory,” says Dr. Tesimond. “Perhaps something worse. Time will tell.”

Laughter goes through the crowd. Dr. van Haag takes another step back and puts his hand on the hilt of his sword. He really could have escaped, for the guards are neither fast nor brave, but now Master Tilman is standing beside him and shaking his head.

That’s all it takes. Master Tilman is very tall and very broad, and his face all at once looks different than it did just a moment ago. Dr. van Haag lets go of the sword. One of the guards grasps him by the wrist, takes the sword, and leads him to the shed with the iron-reinforced door.

“I protest!” says Dr. van Haag, as he goes along without resistance. “A man of rank must not be treated like this.”

“Permit me, dear colleague, to promise you that your rank will not be forgotten.”

While walking, Dr. van Haag turns around once more. He opens his mouth, but he seems suddenly to have no strength. He has been completely taken by surprise. Now the door is opening with a creak, and he disappears into the shed along with the guard. A short time passes. Then the guard comes back out, closes the door, and secures the two bolts.

Dr. Kircher’s heart is pounding. He feels dizzy with pride. It’s not the first time he has watched someone underestimate his master’s determination. You are not the sole survivor of the Gunpowder Plot for no reason; you do not become one of the most famous religious witnesses in the Society of Jesus just like that. Time and again there are people who don’t know whom they are dealing with. But without fail they find out.

“This is the great trial,” Dr. Tesimond says to Peter Steger. “This is not the time for milking cows. If your cattle’s udders are hurting, then they are hurting for God’s cause.”

“I understand,” says Peter Steger.

“Do you really understand?”

“Really. Yes, yes, I understand.”

“And you, miller. We have read out your confession. Now we want to hear it, loud and clear: Is it true? Did you do it? Do you repent?”

It grows quiet. Only the wind can be heard and the mooing of the cows. A cloud has drifted in front of the sun; to Dr. Kircher’s relief, the play of light in the crown of the tree has ceased. Now, however, the branches are rustling and whispering and hissing in the wind. It has grown cold. Probably it will soon rain again. Even the execution of this warlock won’t do any good against the bad weather, for there are too many evil people, all of whom together are to blame for the cold and the failed harvests and the scarcity of everything in these final years before the end of the world. But one does what one can. Even if one is fighting a losing battle. One holds out, defends the remaining positions and waits for the day when God will return in glory.

“Miller,” Dr. Tesimond repeats. “You must say it, before all the people here. Is it true? Did you do it?”

“May I ask a question?”

“No. You shall only answer. Is it true? Did you do it?”

The miller looks around like someone who doesn’t know exactly where he is. But this too is probably a feint. Dr. Kircher knows well that one mustn’t fall for it, for behind these apparently lost people the old adversary is hiding, ready to kill and to destroy wherever he can. If only the branches would quit making their noises. The rustling wind is suddenly even worse than the flickering light was. And if only the cows would be quiet!

Master Tilman steps beside the miller and puts his hand on his shoulder as if they were old friends. The miller looks at him. Since he’s shorter than the executioner, his gaze goes upward like that of a child. Master Tilman bends down and says something in his ear. The miller nods as if he understood. There’s an intimacy between the two of them that confuses Dr. Kircher. This is probably due to the fact that he is not paying attention and is looking in the wrong direction, directly into the eyes of the boy.

The boy has climbed onto the balladeer’s wagon. There he stands, elevated above everyone, on the edge of the wagon, and it’s strange that he doesn’t fall. How is he keeping his balance up there? Dr. Kircher can’t help smiling tensely. The boy doesn’t smile back. Involuntarily Dr. Kircher wonders whether the child too has been touched by Satan, yet in the interrogation there was no sign of it. The wife wept a great deal, the boy was withdrawn into himself, but both of them said everything that was necessary. All at once Dr. Kircher is no longer certain. Were they too careless? The feints of the Lord of the Air are manifold. What if the miller is not the worst warlock at all? Dr. Kircher feels a suspicion stirring in him.

“Did you do it?” Dr. Tesimond asks once again.

The executioner backs away. All listen attentively, stand on tiptoe, lift their heads. Even the wind subsides for a moment as Claus Ulenspiegel draws a breath to finally answer.

III

He didn’t know such good food existed. Never in his life has he encountered anything like it: first a hearty chicken soup with freshly baked wheat bread, then a leg of lamb, spiced with salt and even pepper, then the loin of a fat pig with sauce, finally sweet cherry cake, still warm from the oven, with a strong red wine rising like fog to his head. They must have brought a cook from somewhere. As Claus eats at his small table in the cowshed and feels his stomach filling up with warm, fine things, he thinks that a meal like this is ultimately even worth dying for.

He believed the hangman’s meal was only a figure of speech, never suspecting that a cook was actually called to prepare you food better than any you’d had in your whole life. With your arms chained together it’s hard to hold the meat, the iron chafes, your wrists are sore, but at the moment it doesn’t matter, so good does it taste. And on the whole his hands no longer hurt as much as a week ago. Master Tilman is also a master of healing; Claus has to admit without envy that the executioner knows herbs he has never heard of. Nonetheless, the feeling hasn’t returned to his crushed fingers, and so the meat keeps falling to the ground. He closes his eyes. He hears the chickens scratching in the coop next door, he hears the snoring of the man with the expensive clothing who wanted to be his advocate and is now lying chained up in the straw. As he chews the wonderful pork, he tries to conceive of the fact that he will never learn the outcome of this man’s trial.

For he will be dead by then. Nor will he learn what the weather will be like the day after tomorrow. He will be dead by then. Or whether it will rain again tomorrow night. But it doesn’t matter anyway, who cares about the rain.

Only it really is odd: Now you’re still sitting here and can rattle off all the numbers between one and a thousand, but the day after tomorrow you will be either an ethereal being or else a soul that returns to the world in a person or animal and hardly remembers the miller you still are—but when you are some weasel or a chicken or a sparrow on a branch and don’t even know that you were once a miller who concerned himself with the heavenly course of the moon, indeed, when you are hopping from branch to branch and thinking only about seeds and of course the buzzards you have to escape, what meaning does it actually still have that you were formerly a miller whom you have now completely forgotten?

He remembers that Master Tilman told him he could have more at any time. Just call, let me know, you can have as much as you want, because afterward there won’t be anything else.

So Claus tries it. He calls. He calls while chewing, for he still has meat on his plate, and there’s still cake too, but when you can have more, why wait until everything is gone and until the people outside might change their minds? He calls again, and the door really does open.

“Can I have more?”

“Of everything?”

“Of everything please.”

Master Tilman walks out silently, and Claus tucks into the cake. And while he is chewing up the warm, soft, sweet mass, it suddenly becomes clear to him that he has always been hungry: day and night, evening and morning. Only he no longer knew it was hunger—that feeling of dissatisfaction, the hollowness in everything, the never-abating weakness of the body, which makes the knees and the hands limp and confuses the head. It wasn’t necessary, it didn’t have to be like that, it was just hunger!

The door opens with a creak, and Master Tilman carries in a tray with bowls. Claus sighs with pleasure. Master Tilman, misunderstanding the sigh, sets down the tray and puts his hand on his shoulder.

“It will be all right,” he says.

“I know,” says Claus.

“It happens very quickly. I can do that. I promise you.”

“Thank you,” says Claus.

“Sometimes the condemned anger me. Then it doesn’t happen quickly. Believe me. But you haven’t angered me.”

Claus nods gratefully.

“These are better days. In the past you were all burned to death. That takes time, it’s not pleasant. But hanging is nothing. It happens quickly. You climb onto the scaffold and before you know it, you’re standing before the Creator. You’re incinerated afterward, but by then you’re dead, it doesn’t bother you at all, you’ll see.”

“Good,” says Claus.

The two of them look at each other. Master Tilman seems not to want to go. You might think he liked it in the shed.

“You’re not a bad fellow,” says Master Tilman.

“Thank you.”

“For a servant of the devil.”

Claus shrugs.

Master Tilman walks out and laboriously bolts the door.

Claus continues to eat. Again he tries to imagine it: the houses out there, the birds in the sky, the clouds, the brownish green ground with grass and fields and all the molehills in spring, for you’ll never get rid of the moles, not with any herb or spell, and the rain, of course—all this going on without him.

Only he can’t imagine it.

For whenever he pictures a world without Claus Ulenspiegel, his imagination smuggles back in the very Claus Ulenspiegel it is meant to remove—as an invisible man, an eye without a body, a ghost. But when he really thinks himself utterly away, then the world he would like to imagine without Claus Ulenspiegel vanishes with him. However often he tries it, it’s always the same thing. May he conclude from this that he is safe? For he cannot be gone at all, because the world ultimately must not vanish and because without him it would have to vanish?

The pork still tastes wonderful, but, he notices now, Master Tilman didn’t bring more cake, and because the cake was the best of all, Claus gives it a try and calls once again.

The executioner comes in.

“Can I have more cake?”

Master Tilman doesn’t reply and goes out. Claus chews the pork. Now that his hunger is sated, he realizes all the more how good it tastes, how fine and rich, how warm and salty, and a bit sweet too. He contemplates the wall of the shed. If you paint a square on it shortly before midnight and also draw two double circles with some blood on the ground and invoke three times the third of the secret names of the Almighty, then a door will appear, and you can slip away. The only problem would be the chains, for to cast them off you would need horsetail extract; and so he would have to flee in chains and find horsetail on the way, but Claus is tired, and his body hurts, and it’s also not the season for horsetail.

And it’s difficult to begin anew elsewhere. In the past it would have been possible, but now he is older and no longer has the strength to be a dishonorable traveling journeyman again, a despised day laborer on the outskirts of some village, a stranger shunned by everyone. You couldn’t even work as a healer, because that would attract attention.

No, it’s easier to be hanged. And if it should be that after death you can remember what was before, then this could advance your knowledge of the world further than any ten years of research and exploration. Perhaps afterward he will understand the principles behind the course of the moon, perhaps also grasp at which grain a heap ceases to be a heap, possibly even see what distinguishes two leaves between which there’s no difference but the fact that they are indeed two and not one. Perhaps it’s due to the wine and the warm comfort enveloping Claus for the first time in his life—whatever the reason, he no longer wants out. Let the wall stay where it is.

The door is unbolted. Master Tilman brings cake. “But that’s it now, I’m not coming again.” He pats Claus on the shoulder. He likes to do that, probably because he is forbidden ever to touch people outside. Then he yawns, walks out, and slams the door so loudly that the sleeping man wakes up.

He sits up, stretches, and looks around in all directions. “Where’s the old woman?”

“In a different shed,” says Claus. “Fortunately. She moans incessantly, it’s unbearable.”

“Give me wine!”

Claus looks at him in fright. He wants to reply that this is his wine, all his alone, that he has honestly earned it, for he must die for it. But then he feels sorry for the man, who doesn’t have it easy either, after all, and so he passes him the jug. The man grabs it and takes big gulps. Stop, Claus wants to cry, I won’t get any more! Yet he cannot bring himself to do it, for this is a man of rank; you don’t give someone like that commands. The wine runs down his chin and makes stains on his velvet collar, but it doesn’t seem to trouble him, so thirsty is he.

Finally he puts down the jug and says: “My God, that’s good wine!”

“Yes, yes,” says Claus, “very good.” He fervently hopes that the man doesn’t want the cake too.

“Now that no one can hear us, tell me the truth. Were you in league with the devil?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“How can someone not know that?”

Claus reflects. It’s obvious that he did something wrong in his stupid head, or else he wouldn’t be here. But he doesn’t really know what it was. He was interrogated for so long, again and again, in so much pain, he had to retell his story so many times, each time something else was missing, he always had to add something, another demon that had to be described, another conjuration, another dark book, another Sabbath, so that Master Tilman would let him be, and then he had to retell these new details too again and again, so that he no longer really knows what he had to make up and what actually happened in his short life, where there had not been much order anyhow: now he was here, now there, then somewhere else, and then he was suddenly in the flour dust, and his wife was dissatisfied, and the mill hands had no respect, and now he is in chains, and that was everything already. Just as the cake is about to be finished—three or four more bites, perhaps five, if he has only very little each time.

“I don’t know,” he says again.

“Damned misfortune,” the man says, looking at the cake.

In fright Claus takes all that’s left and swallows it without chewing. The cake filling his throat, he swallows as hard as he can: it’s gone. So that was it with food. Forever.

“Sir,” says Claus, to show that he knows what is proper. “What’s going to happen to you now?”

“Hard to predict. Once you’re in, it’s not easy to get out. They will bring me to the city, then they will interrogate me. I will have to confess something.” With a sigh, he gazes at his hands. He is obviously thinking of the executioner; everyone knows that he always starts with the fingers.

“Sir,” Claus says again. “If you imagine a heap of grain.”

“What?”

“You keep taking one away and putting it to the side.”

“What?”

“Always just one. When is it no longer a heap?”

“After twelve thousand grains.”

Claus rubs his forehead. His chains rattle. He feels the imprint of the leather band on his forehead. It was hellish agony, he still remembers every second he howled and begged, but Master Tilman loosened it only when he invented and described another Witches’ Sabbath. “Twelve thousand exactly?”

“Naturally,” says the man. “Do you think I can get a meal like that too? There must be something left. This is all a great injustice. I shouldn’t be here. I only wanted to defend you to write about it in my book. I finished the study of crystals. Now I wanted to take up law. But my situation has nothing to do with you. Perhaps you are in league with the devil, what do I know, perhaps you really are! Perhaps you’re not.” He is silent for a short time. Then he calls Master Tilman in an imperious tone.

This won’t go well, thinks Claus, who knows the executioner fairly well by now. He sighs. Now he would like to have some more wine to keep the sadness from returning, but he was clearly told there was no more.

The door is unbolted. Master Tilman looks in.

“Bring me some of this meat,” the man says without looking at him. “And wine. The jug is empty.”

“Will you be dead tomorrow too?” asks Master Tilman.

“This is a misunderstanding,” the man says hoarsely, acting as if he were speaking to Claus, for it’s better even to talk to a condemned warlock than to an executioner. “And it’s a nasty affront too, for which some people are going to pay.”

“If you will be alive tomorrow, you don’t get a hangman’s meal,” says Master Tilman. He puts his hand on Claus’s shoulder. “Listen,” he says softly. “When you’re standing under the gallows tomorrow—don’t forget that you have to forgive everyone.”

Claus nods.

“The judges,” says Master Tilman. “And you have to forgive me too.”

Claus closes his eyes. He still feels the wine—a warm, soft dizziness.

“Loud and clear,” says Master Tilman.

Claus sighs.

“It is proper,” says Master Tilman. “It is what’s done: the condemned forgives his hangman loud and clear so that everyone can hear. You know that?”

Claus can’t help thinking of his wife. Earlier Agneta was there and talked to him through the cracks between the wall boards. She was so sorry, she whispered. She had no choice but to say what they demanded of her. Could he forgive her?

Of course, he replied. He forgave everything. But he kept to himself that it was not quite clear to him what she was even talking about. There was nothing to be done about it; since his interrogations, his mind was no longer as reliable as it used to be.

Then she wept again and spoke of her hard life and also of the boy, who worried her, and she didn’t know what to do with him.

Claus was happy to hear about the boy, because he hadn’t thought about him for a long time, and at bottom he really was fond of him. But there was something odd about him, it was hard to explain, the boy seemed not to be made of the same stuff as other people.

“You have it easy,” she said. “You don’t have to trouble your head about anything anymore. But I can’t stay here in the village. They won’t let me. And I’ve never been anywhere else—what am I supposed to do?”

“Yes, certainly,” he replied, still thinking about the boy. “That’s true.”

“Maybe I could go to my family in Pfünz.”

“You have family in Pfünz?”

“The wife of my uncle’s nephew. Franz Melker’s cousin. You didn’t know my uncle; he died when I was a child. But before he died, he said he heard that she is now in Pfünz. Maybe it’s true. Where else am I supposed to go?”

“I don’t know.”

“But what about the boy? Maybe she’ll help me, if she remembers, who knows. If she’s still alive. But two hungry people at the same time? That’s too many.”

“Yes, that’s too many.”

“Maybe I can get the boy work as a day laborer. He’s small and not a good worker, but it might be possible. What else am I supposed to do? I’m not allowed to stay here.”

“No, you’re not allowed.”

“You stupid creature, you have it easy now. But just tell me, should I go looking for her? Maybe it wasn’t Pfünz at all. You always know everything, tell me, what do I do?”

Fortunately, at that moment the hangman’s meal came, and Agneta withdrew so that the executioner wouldn’t see her, for no one is permitted to talk to a condemned man. And then the wine and food were so good that the sobbing had completely passed from his mind.

“Miller!” Master Tilman shouts. “Are you listening to me?”

“Yes, yes.”

Master Tilman’s hand is lying heavily on his shoulder. “You have to say it loud tomorrow! That you forgive me! Do you hear? In front of everyone, did you hear? It’s what’s done!”

Claus wants to reply, but his mind keeps wandering, especially now that he finds himself thinking about the boy once again. Recently he saw him juggling. It was between two interrogations, in the empty time in which the world consists of nothing but throbbing pain—he looked through the cracks and saw his son passing by and making stones whirl above him as if they had no weight, as if it were happening of its own accord. Claus called his name to warn him. Someone who can do something like that must be careful; for that too you can be accused of witchcraft. But the boy didn’t hear him—perhaps also because Claus’s voice was too weak. That is now always the case, he can’t help it, it’s due to the interrogation.

“Listen,” says Master Tilman. “You will not summon me to the Valley of Josaphat!”

“The curse of a dying man is the most powerful,” says the man in the straw. “It clings to the soul, you can never get rid of it.”

“You won’t do that, miller, curse the executioner, you won’t do that to me, will you?”

“No,” says Claus. “I won’t.”

“You might think it doesn’t matter. You’re going to hang anyway, you think, but I’m the one who stands with you on the ladder, and I’m the one who puts on the noose, and I have to pull on your legs so that your neck breaks, or else it will take a long time!”

“That’s true,” says the man in the straw.

“You won’t summon me to the Valley of Josaphat? You won’t curse me, you’ll forgive the hangman, as is proper?”

“Yes, I will,” says Claus.

Master Tilman takes his hand off his shoulder and gives him a friendly pat. “I don’t care if you forgive the judges. That’s not my concern. You can handle that as you please.”

Suddenly Claus can’t help smiling. It must still be due to the wine, but it’s also because he realized that he can now finally try out the great Key of Solomon. There has never been an opportunity for it. He learned the many long sentences from old Hüttner. At the time it came easily to him. Probably he could still find them in his memory. They will see when he is standing on the ladder tomorrow and all at once the chains break as if they were made of paper. They will goggle when he spreads his arms and rises and hovers in the air above their stupid faces—above that idiotic Peter Steger and his even stupider wife and his relatives and children and grandparents, each one stupider than the next, above the Melkers and the Henrichs and the Holtzes and the Tamms and all the others. How they will goggle when he doesn’t fall but rises and keeps rising, how their mouths will hang open. For a brief time he sees them shrinking, then they are dots, and then the village itself is a spot in the middle of the dark green forest, and when he lifts his head he will see the white velvet of the clouds and their inhabitants, some with wings, some made of white fire, some with two or three heads, and there he is, the Prince of the Air, the King of the Spirits and Flames. Have mercy, my great devil, take me into your realm, set me free, and now Claus hears him reply: See my land. See how vast it is, and see how far below. Fly with me.

Claus laughs out loud. For a moment he sees mice swarming around his feet, some with the tails of snakes, others with the feelers of caterpillars, and it seems to him as if he felt their bites, but the pain is prickly and almost pleasant, and then he sees himself flying again, so light am I when my Lord permits it. All you have to do is remember the words. None may be wrong, none missing, or else the Key of Solomon will not unlock, or else it is in vain. If you find the words, however, everything will fall away from you, the heavy chains, the distress, the miller’s existence of cold and hunger.

“That’s due to the wine,” says Master Tilman.

“I won’t be imprisoned for long,” the man says without looking at him. “Tesimond will be sorry.”

“He said he’ll forgive me,” says Master Tilman. “He said he won’t curse me.”

“Don’t talk to me!”

“Say whether you heard it,” says Master Tilman. “Or I’ll hurt you. Did he say it?”

Both of them look at the miller. He has closed his eyes and leaned his head against the wall, and he won’t stop giggling.

“Yes,” says the man. “He said it.”

IV

Nele noticed at the very outset that he was not good. But only now, hearing Gottfried perform the song about the devilish miller in front of the crowd in the market town, does it become clear to her that they have stumbled on the worst balladeer of all.

He sings much too high, and sometimes he clears his throat in the middle of a line. When he speaks, his voice still sounds all right, yet when he sings, it cracks and squeaks. The voice by itself would not be bad if he could only carry a tune. Just as the poor singing would not be so bad if he could at least play the lute—Gottfried incessantly plays the wrong notes, and sometimes he forgets how the rest of the song goes. But even this would not be so unbearable if only his verses were better. They tell of the wicked miller and the village he had under his thumb, of his witcheries and tricks, yet although they are as rich in grisly stories and bloody details as people expect, they are jumbled and hard to understand, and the rhymes are so awkward that it must bother even a child.

Still, the people listen. Balladeers don’t come often, and people want to hear ballads about witch trials even when they’re terrible. But after four verses Nele can see that their expressions are changing, and by the time he has arrived at the twelfth and last, many have left. Now there’s an urgent need for something that will go over better. This much he must know, thinks Nele, this much he must be able to sense!

Gottfried starts the song from the beginning.

He notices the restlessness in the people’s faces, and in his desperation he sings louder, which makes his voice even shriller. Nele looks over at Tyll. He rolls his eyes. Then he spreads his arms in a resigned gesture. Light-footedly he leaps beside the singer and begins to dance on the wagon.

The improvement is immediate. Gottfried is singing as badly as before, but suddenly it no longer matters. Tyll is dancing as if he had been trained, he is dancing as if his body had no weight and as if there were no greater pleasure. He leaps and spins and leaps again as if he hadn’t just lost everything, and it’s so infectious that a few members of the audience and then another few and then more and more begin to dance too. Now coins are flying over. Nele gathers them up.

Gottfried sees it too, and in his relief he now manages better to keep the rhythm; Tyll is dancing with such abandon and such light determination that watching him Nele could almost forget that the song is about his father. Miller is rhymed with dealer, devil with shovel, fire with fear, and night with night, for this word is constantly repeated: dark night, black night, Witches’ Night. From the fifth verse on it’s about the trial: the stern and virtuous judges, God’s mercy, the punishment that in the end befalls every evildoer, despite all Satan’s maneuvers, under the eyes of his accusers, and the gallows on which the wicked miller must breathe his last, while the devil stands aghast. Tyll doesn’t stop dancing during all this, for they need the coins, they have to eat.

It still seems like a dream to her. That this village is not her village, that people live here whose faces she doesn’t know, and there are houses in which she has never been. Who could have foreseen that she would ever leave her home? It was not in store for her, and she half expects that in a moment she will wake up at home, next to the large oven, from which the bread’s warmth wafts. Girls don’t go to other places. They stay where they were born. So it has always been: you’re little, you help in the house; you get bigger, you help the female hands; you grow up and marry a Steger son, if you’re pretty, or else a relative of the smith or, if things go badly, a Heinerling. Then you have a child and another child and more children, most of whom die, and you continue to help the hands and in church sit somewhat farther toward the front, next to your husband and behind your mother-in-law, and then, when you’re forty and your bones ache and your teeth are gone, you sit in your mother-in-law’s old seat.

Because she didn’t want that, she went with Tyll.

How many days ago was it now? She couldn’t say; in the forest time is muddled. But she remembers well how Tyll stood before her, the evening after the trial, thin and somewhat lopsided, in the billowing grain of the Steger meadow.

“What’s going to happen to you now?” she asked.

“My mother says I have to become a day laborer. She says it will be hard because I’m too small and weak to be a good worker.”

“And that’s what you’ll do?”

“No, I’m going.”

“Where?”

“Far away.”

“When?”

“Now. One of the Jesuits, the younger one, was staring at me so.”

“But you can’t just go away!”

“Yes, I can.”

“And if they catch you? You’re alone, and they are many.”

“But I have two feet, and a judge with a robe or a guard with halberds, they also have only two. Each of them has the same number of feet as I do. No one has more. They can’t run faster together than we can.”

Suddenly she felt a wondrous excitement, and her throat seemed constricted, and her heart pounded. “Why do you say we?”

“Because you’re coming with me.”

“With you?”

“That’s why I was waiting.”

She knew that she must not think, or else she would lose her courage, or else she would stay here, as was in store for her; but he was right, you really could leave. The place where everyone thought you had to stay—in actuality nothing was keeping you there.

“Now go home,” he said, “and fetch as much bread as you can carry.”

“No!”

“You’re not coming with me?”

“Yes, I am coming with you, but I’m not going home first.”

“But the bread!”

“If I see my father and Mama and the oven and my sister, then I won’t leave anymore, then I’ll stay!”

“We need bread.”

She shook her head. And it’s true, she thinks now, while she collects coins on the market square of a strange village—if she had gone to the bakery again, she would have stayed and soon would have married the Steger son, the middle one, whose two front teeth are missing. There are only a few moments when two things are possible, one path as much as another. Only a few moments when you can decide.

“Without bread we can’t go,” he said. “We should also wait until morning. The forest at night, you don’t know what it’s like. You’ve never experienced it.”

“Are you afraid of the Cold Woman?”

Now she knew that she had won.

“I’m not afraid,” he said.

“Well, then let’s go!”

She will never forget that night for the rest of her life, never forget the giggling will-o’-the-wisps, the voices out of the blackness, never forget the animal noises or the sparkling face that appeared in front of her for a moment, only to vanish again before she was even certain that she had seen it at all. For the rest of her life she will think of the fear, her heart in her mouth, the blood pounding in her ears, and the whimpering murmur of the boy in front of her, who was talking either to himself or to the beings of the forest. When morning came, they found themselves trembling with cold at the edge of a loamy clearing. The dew was dripping from the trees. They were hungry.

“You really should have fetched bread.”

“I could bash you in the face.”

As they walked onward, in the clammy morning air, Tyll wept a little, and Nele felt like sobbing too. Her legs were heavy, the hunger was hardly bearable, and Tyll was right, without bread they would surely die. Yes, there were berries and roots, and even the grass should be edible, but that was not enough, it didn’t fill your stomach. In the summer it might do, but not in this cold.

And now they heard behind them the rumble and squeal of a carriage. They hid in the bushes until they saw that it was only the balladeer’s wagon. Tyll jumped out and stood in the middle of the road.

“Oh,” said the singer. “The miller’s son!”

“Take us with you?”

“Why?”

“Because we’ll die if you don’t, for one thing. But also because we’ll help you. Don’t you want company?”

“They’re probably already searching for you,” said the singer.

“Yet another reason. Or do you maybe want me to get caught?”

“Climb on.”

Gottfried explained the essentials to them: If you ride with a balladeer, you belong to the traveling people. No guild protects you, no authorities. If you’re in a city and there’s a fire, you have to slip away, for people will think you started it. If you’re in a village and something is stolen, slip away then too. If you’re ambushed by robbers, give them everything. Most of the time, however, they don’t take anything but demand a song—then sing for them, as well as you can, for robbers often dance better than the dullards in the villages. Always keep your ears open, so that you know where it’s market day, for when it’s not market day they won’t let you into the villages. At a market people come together, they want to dance, they want to hear songs, they part with their money easily.

“Is my father dead?”

“Yes, he is dead.”

“Did you see?”

“Of course I saw it, that’s why I was there. First he forgave the judges, as is proper, then the hangman, then he climbed onto the ladder, then the noose was put around his neck, and then he began to murmur, but I was standing too far back, I couldn’t understand him.”

“And then?”

“It went the way it goes.”

“So he is dead?”

“My boy, when someone is hanging from the gallows, what else is supposed to happen? Of course he’s dead! What do you think?”

“Did it go quickly?”

Gottfried was silent for a while before he answered: “Yes, very quickly.”

For some time they rode without speaking. The trees were no longer so dense; rays of light fell through the canopy of leaves. A fine haze rose from the grass of the clearings. The air was filled with insects and birds.

“How do you become a singer?” Nele finally asked.

“You train. I had a master. He taught me everything. You’ve heard of him, it’s Gerhard Vogtland.”

“No.”

“The one from Trier!”

The boy shrugged.

“The Great Litany of the Campaign of Duke Ernest Against the Treacherous Sultan.”

“What?”

“That’s his most famous song: The Great Litany of the Campaign of Duke Ernest Against the Treacherous Sultan. You really don’t know it? Shall I sing it?”

Nele nodded, and so they became acquainted for the first time with Gottfried’s paltry talent. “The Great Litany of the Campaign of Duke Ernest Against the Treacherous Sultan” had thirty-three verses, and although Gottfried could do little else, he did have an outstanding memory and had forgotten not a single one.

Thus they traveled for a long time. The singer sang, the horse grunted from time to time, and the wheels rumbled and squealed as if they were carrying on a conversation with each other. Nele saw out of the corner of her eye that tears were running down the boy’s face. He had turned his head away so that no one would notice.

When Gottfried was finished with his song, he started from the beginning. Next he sang them a ballad about the handsome Elector Friedrich and the Bohemian estates, next he sang about the evil dragon Kufer and the knight Robert, next about the wicked king in France and the great king in Spain, his enemy. Then he told stories from his life. His father was an executioner, so he was supposed to become an executioner too. But he ran away.

“Like us,” said Nele.

“Many people do it, more than you think! It is part of an upstanding life to stay put, but the land is full of people who didn’t stay put. They have no protection, but they are free. They don’t have to string anyone up. They don’t have to kill anyone.”

“Don’t have to marry the Steger son,” said Nele.

“Don’t have to be day laborers,” said the boy.

They heard how Gottfried had fared in earlier days with his master. Vogtland had often struck him and kicked him and once even bit him in the ear because he didn’t hit the right notes and could also hardly play the lute with his thick fingers. Poor idiot, Vogtland exclaimed, didn’t want to be a hangman, now you torture people ten times over with your music! But then Vogtland didn’t drive him away after all, and so he improved more and more, Gottfried said proudly, until he himself finally became a master. He discovered, however, that people want to hear about executions, everywhere, all the time. No one is indifferent to executions.

“I know all there is to know about executions. How to hold the sword, how to position the knot, how to stack a pyre, and the best place to apply the hot tongs—I know everything about that. Other singers might have smoother rhymes, but I can tell which hangman knows his trade and which doesn’t, and my ballads are the most accurate.”

When it grew dark, they lit a fire. Gottfried shared his provisions with them: dry flatbread, which Nele immediately recognized as having been made by her father. Her eyes briefly welled up with tears too, for at the sight of this bread with the cross pressed into the middle and the crumbling edges it became clear to her that she was in the same situation as the boy. He would never see his father again because he was dead, but she wouldn’t see hers either, because she couldn’t go back. Both of them were now orphans. But the moment passed. She stared into the fire and all at once felt as free as if she could fly.

The second night in the forest was not as bad as the first. They were now used to the sounds; besides, warmth emanated from the embers, and the singer had given them a blanket. As she was falling asleep, she noticed that Tyll was still awake next to her. He was so wakeful, so attentive, he was thinking so hard that she could feel it. She didn’t dare turn her head in his direction.

“Someone who carries fire,” he said softly.

She didn’t know whether he was talking to her. “Are you ill?”

He seemed to have a fever. She snuggled up to him. Waves of warmth radiated from him, which was pleasant and kept her from freezing so. Thus she fell asleep after a short time and dreamed of a battlefield and thousands of people marching over a hilly landscape, and then the cannons began to hammer. When she woke up, it was morning, and it was raining again.

The singer was sitting hunched under his blanket, a small writing calendar in one hand and the pencil in the other. He wrote in tiny signs, almost illegibly, for he had only this calendar, and paper was expensive.

“Versifying is the hardest,” he said. “Do you know a word that rhymes with rogue?”

But finally he did finish the song of the evil miller, and now they are in the market town, while Gottfried sings and Tyll dances to it, with such lightness and elegance that it surprises even Nele.

Other wagons are standing here too. On the opposite side of the square is the wagon of a cloth merchant, next to two scissors grinders, next to a fruit merchant, a kettle mender, another scissors grinder, a healer who is in possession of theriac, which can cure any illness, another fruit merchant, a spice merchant, another healer who unfortunately has no theriac and hence is left empty-handed, a fourth scissors grinder, and a barber. All these people are in the traveling trades. Anyone who robs or kills them is not prosecuted. That is the price of freedom.

At the edge of the square are another few dubious figures. These are the dishonest people, including musicians with fife, bagpipes, and fiddle. They stand far away, yet it seems to Nele as if they were grinning across at her and whispering jokes about Gottfried to each other. Next to them sits a storyteller. You can recognize him by the yellow hat and the blue jerkin and by the sign around his neck on which something is written in big letters that must mean “storyteller,” for only storytellers have signs—senseless though it is, since his audience consists of people who cannot read. You can recognize musicians by their instruments and merchants by their wares, but to recognize a storyteller all it takes is a sign. And then there’s also a man of small stature in the widely recognizable clothing of traveling entertainers: motley jerkin, puffed breeches, fur collar. With a thin smile he too looks across, something worse than mockery is in it, and when he notices that Nele is looking at him, he raises an eyebrow, shows his tongue in the corner of his mouth, and winks.

Gottfried has reached the twelfth verse for the second time, he concludes his ballad for the second time, considers for a moment, and then starts again from the beginning. Tyll gives Nele a sign. She stands up. She has danced before, of course—at the village festivals, when musicians came and the young people jumped over the fire, and often she also danced with the female hands, just like that, without music, during breaks from work. But she has never done it in front of an audience.

Yet as she spins first in one direction and then in the other, she realizes that it doesn’t make a difference. She only has to follow Tyll. Whenever the boy claps his hands, she claps too, when he raises his right foot, she raises her right foot, and the left when he raises the left, at first with a slight delay, but soon simultaneously, as if she knew beforehand what he was going to do, as if they were not two people but in dancing became one—and now all at once he pitches forward and dances on his hands, and she spins around him, again and again and again, so that the village square turns into a smear of colors. Dizziness rises in her, but she fights against it and keeps her gaze directed into empty space, it’s getting better already, and she can keep her balance without teetering while she spins.

For a moment she is confused when the music swells and the tones grow richer, but then she realizes that the musicians have joined in. Playing their instruments, they approach, and Gottfried, who cannot keep their rhythm, helplessly lowers the lute, so that now finally everything sounds right. The people applaud. Coins leap over the wood of the wagon. Tyll is again standing on his feet. Nele stops spinning, suppresses her dizziness, and watches as he knots a rope—where did he get it from so quickly?—to the wagon and then casts it from him so that it unwinds. Someone catches it, she can’t tell who it is because everything is still swaying, someone has fastened it, and now Tyll is standing on the rope and jumping forward and back and bowing, and more coins are flying, and Gottfried can hardly pick them up fast enough. Finally Tyll jumps down and takes her hand, the musicians play a fanfare, the two of them bow, and the people clap and howl. The fruit merchant throws them apples. She catches one and bites into it. She hasn’t eaten an apple in an eternity. Next to her Tyll catches one too and another and another and then another and juggles them. Again a cheer goes through the crowd.

When evening falls, they are sitting on the ground and listening to the storyteller. He is speaking of poor King Friedrich of Prague, whose reign lasted only a winter, before the Kaiser’s mighty army drove him out. Now the proud city has been laid low and will never recover. He speaks in long sentences in a liltingly beautiful melody, without moving his hands; with his voice alone he ensures that you won’t look elsewhere. All this is true, he says, even what has been made up is true. And Nele, without understanding what that’s supposed to mean, claps.

Gottfried scrawls in his calendar. He didn’t know, he mutters, that Friedrich was deposed again already; now he has to rewrite his song about him.

On Nele’s right the fiddler tunes his instrument with his eyes closed in concentration. Now we belong here, she thinks. Now we are among the traveling people.

Someone taps her on the shoulder. She wheels around.

Behind her crouches the traveling entertainer who winked at her earlier. He’s no longer so young, and his face is very red. Heinrich Tamm had such a red face shortly before he died. Even his eyes are shot through with red. But they are also sharp and alert and shrewd and unkind.

“You two,” he says softly.

Now the boy too turns around.

“Do you want to come with me?”

“Yes,” the boy says without hesitation.

Nele stares at him uncomprehendingly. Didn’t they want to travel with Gottfried, who is good to them, gives them food, led them out of the forest? Gottfried, who could really use the two of them?

“I can really use two people like you,” the entertainer says. “You could use someone like me. I’ll teach you everything.”

“But we’re with him.” Nele points to Gottfried, whose lips are moving as he writes in his little book. The pencil in his hand breaks. He curses softly, keeps scrawling.

“Then you won’t go far,” says the entertainer.

“We don’t know you,” says Nele.

“I am Pirmin,” says the entertainer. “Now you know me.”

“My name is Tyll. This is Nele.”

“I won’t ask again. If you’re not sure, never mind. Then I’ll be gone. Then you can go on with him.”

“We’re coming with you,” says the boy.

Pirmin extends his hand. Tyll grasps it. Pirmin chuckles, his lips twisting, his thick, moist tongue again becoming visible in the corner of his mouth. Nele is loath to travel with him.

Now he extends his hand to her.

She doesn’t move. Behind her the storyteller is speaking of the flight of the Winter King from the burning city—now he is a burden to Europe’s Protestant princes, roams the land with his silly court, still wears purple as if he were one of the great, but the children laugh at him, and the wise men shed tears because they see in him the frailty of all greatness.

Now Gottfried too has noticed it. With a furrowed brow he looks at the fool’s extended hand.

“Come on,” says the boy. “Shake his hand.”

But why should she do what Tyll says? Did she run away in order to obey him instead of her father? What does she owe him, why should he be in charge?

“What’s wrong?” asks Gottfried. “What’s going on here, what is this?”

Pirmin’s hand is still extended. His grin too is unchanging, as if her hesitation didn’t mean anything, as if he had long known what she will decide.

“Well, what’s this all about?” Gottfried asks again.

The hand is fleshy and soft. Nele doesn’t want to touch it. It’s true, of course, that Gottfried can’t do much. But he has been good to them. And she doesn’t like this fellow. There is something not right about him. On the other hand, it’s true, of course: Gottfried will not be able to teach them anything.

On the one hand, on the other hand. Pirmin winks as if he were reading her thoughts.

Tyll jerks his head impatiently. “Come on, Nele!”

She need only extend her arm.