KRABAT

OTFRIED PREUSSLER

TRANSLATED BY

ANTHEA BELL

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

The First Year

CHAPTER ONE: The Mill

CHAPTER TWO: Eleven and One

CHAPTER THREE: No Bed of Roses

CHAPTER FOUR: A Dream of Escape

CHAPTER FIVE: The Man with the Plumed Hat

CHAPTER SIX: The Ravens’ Perch

CHAPTER SEVEN: The Sign of the Secret Brotherhood

CHAPTER EIGHT: Remember I Am the Master

CHAPTER NINE: The Ox Dealer from Kamenz

CHAPTER TEN: Military Music

CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Keepsake

CHAPTER TWELVE: No Pastor or Cross

The Second Year

CHAPTER ONE: The Custom of the Guild

CHAPTER TWO: A Mild Winter

CHAPTER THREE: Long Live Augustus!

CHAPTER FOUR: An Easter Candle

CHAPTER FIVE: The Tales of Big Hat

CHAPTER SIX: Horse Trading

CHAPTER SEVEN: Wine and Water

CHAPTER EIGHT: The Cockfight

CHAPTER NINE: The End of the Row

The Third Year

CHAPTER ONE: The King of the Moors

CHAPTER TWO: The Way You Fly with Wings

CHAPTER THREE: An Attempted Escape

CHAPTER FOUR: The Winter Wheat

CHAPTER FIVE: My Name is Krabat

CHAPTER SIX: Living in a Dream

CHAPTER SEVEN: Surprises

CHAPTER EIGHT: A Hard Task

CHAPTER NINE: The Sultan’s Eagle

CHAPTER TEN: A Ring of Hair

CHAPTER ELEVEN: An Offer

CHAPTER TWELVE: Between the Years

Copyright

About the Publisher

The First Year

CHAPTER ONE The Mill

It was between New Year’s Day and Twelfth Night, and Krabat, who was fourteen at the time, had joined forces with two other Wendish beggar boys. Although His Most Serene Highness, the Elector of Saxony, had passed a law forbidding vagabonds to beg in His Most Serene Highness’s lands (but luckily the justices and those in authority would often turn a blind eye), the boys were going from village to village in the country around Hoyerswerda, dressed as the Three Kings from the East. They wore straw crowns on top of their caps, and one of them, little Lobosch from Maukendorf, who was playing the part of the King of the Moors, blackened his face with soot every morning. He walked proudly at the head of the little procession, bearing the Star of Bethlehem, which Krabat had nailed to a stick.

Whenever they came to a farm, they would put Lobosch in the middle and sing, ‘Hosanna to the Son of David!’ Or rather, two of them would sing, while Krabat merely moved his lips silently, because his voice was breaking. The other two Kings sang all the louder to make up for it.

A good many farmers had killed a pig for the New Year, and they would give the Three Kings from the East plenty of sausages and bacon. At other houses they got apples, nuts and prunes, and sometimes gingerbread and lardy cake, aniseed balls and cinnamon cookies.

‘Here’s a good start to the year!’ said Lobosch at the end of the third day. ‘I could go on this way till next New Year’s Eve!’

Their Majesties, the other two Kings, nodded solemnly and sighed, ‘We wouldn’t mind that at all!’

They spent the next night in the hayloft of the smithy at Petershain, and it was there that Krabat dreamed his strange dream for the first time.

There were eleven ravens sitting on a perch, looking at him. He saw an empty place down at the end of the perch, on the left, and then he heard a voice. It was a hoarse voice, and it seemed to be coming out of thin air, from very far away, and it called him by his name, but he did not dare reply. ‘Krabat!’ called the voice a second time, and then a third time – ‘Krabat!’ Then it said, ‘Come to the mill at Schwarzkollm, and you will not regret it!’ At these words the ravens rose from their perch, croaking, ‘Obey the voice of the Master! Obey!’

With that, Krabat woke. ‘What a strange dream!’ he thought, turning over and dropping off to sleep again. The next day he and his companions walked on, and when he happened to think of the ravens, he laughed.

However, he dreamed the same dream again the next night. Once more the voice called him by his name, and once more the ravens croaked, ‘Obey!’ This set Krabat thinking, and the next morning he asked the farmer who had given them shelter for the night if he knew of a village called Schwarzkollm, or some such name.

The farmer remembered hearing that name. ‘Schwarzkollm …’ he said reflectively. ‘Oh, yes – it’s in the forest of Hoyerswerda, on the road to Leippe! There’s a village called Schwarzkollm there.’

The Three Kings spent the next night in a barn in Gross-Partwitz, and there, too, Krabat dreamed his dream of the ravens and the voice that seemed to be coming out of thin air. Everything happened just as before, and now he made up his mind to follow the voice. He crept out of the barn at daybreak, while his companions were still asleep. At the gate of the farmyard he met the servant girl going to the well. ‘Say good-bye to my two friends for me,’ he asked her. ‘I have to leave them now.’

At every village he came to, Krabat asked the way. The wind drove the falling snow into his face, and he kept having to stop and wipe his eyes. He got lost in the forest of Hoyerswerda, and it took him a good two hours to find the road to Leippe again. So it was that he did not reach his journey’s end until nearly evening.

Schwarzkollm was like any of the other moorland villages, with a long line of houses and barns on either side of the street, which was deep in snow. Plumes of smoke rose above the rooftops, and Krabat saw steaming middens and heard the lowing of cattle. There were children skating on the duck pond, shouting with glee.

Krabat looked around for a mill, but he could not see one. There was an old man carrying a bundle of sticks coming up the road, and Krabat asked him.

‘No, there’s no mill in this village,’ he was told.

‘Is there one nearby?’

‘Oh, if that’s the one you mean …’ The old man jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Back there in the fen of Kosel, by the Black Water, there’s a mill. But …’ And he broke off as though he had already said too much.

Krabat thanked him and turned in the direction the old man had pointed. He had gone only a few paces when he felt someone pluck him by the sleeve, and when he looked around, it was the old man with the bundle of sticks again.

‘What is it?’ Krabat asked.

Coming closer and looking cautiously around, the old man said, ‘I just wanted to warn you, boy! Keep away from the Kosel fen, keep away from the mill by the Black Water – it’s a queer place, that …’

Krabat hesitated for a moment, then he turned from the old man and went on his way, out of the village. Dusk was gathering, he had to take great care not to stray from the path, and he was shivering with cold. When he turned his head, he saw lights begin to flicker in the village he had left behind, here one, there another.

Might it not be wiser to turn back?

‘Oh, come!’ muttered Krabat, pulling up his collar. ‘I’m not a baby! It won’t hurt just to take a look at this mill!’

For some time Krabat groped his way blindly through the wood, until he came upon an open space. As he was emerging from the trees the clouds cleared away, the moon came through, and suddenly everything was flooded in cold moonlight.

Then he saw the mill.

It lay there before him, a hunched shape in the snow, dark and menacing, like some vicious, powerful animal lying in wait for its prey.

‘I don’t have to go there,’ thought Krabat, but then, telling himself he was a coward, he plucked up his courage and stepped forward out of the shadows of the wood. Striding boldly up to the mill, he found the door of the house closed, and knocked.

He knocked once, he knocked twice; there was no movement inside the house. No dog barked, no step creaked, no bundle of keys rattled – nothing.

Krabat knocked for the third time, so hard that it hurt his knuckles.

All was still quiet inside the mill. He tried the door handle, and the door opened. It was not even bolted. Krabat walked into the hall of the house.

It was silent as the grave, and pitch dark. But right at the end of the passage there was a faint gleam of light, just the glimmer of a glimmer.

‘There’s sure to be someone around, if there’s a light,’ said Krabat to himself.

Arms outstretched, he groped his way forward. As he came closer he saw that the light was coming through a chink in the door at the end of the passage. Suddenly full of curiosity, he crept up to the chink on tiptoe and peered through it.

He saw a room lit by the light of a single candle. The room was all black, and the candle red; it was stuck in a skull that lay on a table in the middle of the room. Behind the table sat a burly man in dark clothes. His face was very pale, white as a sheet, and he had a black patch over his left eye. A thick, leather-bound book lay chained to the table in front of him, and he was reading this book.

Suddenly he raised his head and gazed across the room, as if he had detected Krabat behind the chink in the door. His glance froze the boy to the marrow of his bones. Krabat’s eye, glued to the chink, began to itch, and then to stream, and his view of the room blurred.

Krabat rubbed his eye – then he felt a cold, icy hand placed on his shoulder from behind. The chill of it went right through his coat and his shirt. At the same time he heard a hoarse voice say, in the Wendish language, ‘So here you are!’

Krabat jumped; he knew that voice. When he turned around, he was facing the man with the patch over his eye.

How had he got there? One thing was certain, he had not come through the door …

The man, who was holding a candlestick in his hand, looked Krabat up and down in silence. Then, thrusting out his chin, he said, ‘I am the Master of this mill. You can be my apprentice if you like – I’m in need of one. Would you like that?’

Krabat heard himself reply, ‘Yes, I would.’ His voice sounded strange, as if it did not belong to him at all.

‘And what am I to teach you? How to grind grain, or the rest as well?’ inquired the master miller.

‘The rest as well,’ said Krabat.

The miller held out his left hand.

‘Done!’

At the very moment that they shook hands, a muffled thudding and rumbling sound started up somewhere in the house. It seemed to come from deep down. The floor quivered, the walls began to tremble, the beams and door-posts shook.

Krabat cried out and tried to run. All he wanted was to get away from this place! But the miller barred his way.

‘The mill!’ he cried, cupping his hands around his mouth. ‘The mill is grinding again!’

CHAPTER TWO Eleven and One

Signaling to Krabat to follow him, the Master silently showed the boy the way up the steep wooden stairs to the attic where the miller’s men slept. In the light of the candle Krabat could make out twelve low truckle beds with straw mattresses, six on one side of the room, six on the other, and beside each a locker and a pinewood stool. The blankets on the beds were tumbled, there were a couple of overturned stools in the gangway between them, and shirts and stockings were flung around the room. It looked as though the miller’s men had been summoned posthaste to work, straight from their beds.

One bed, however, was untouched, and the Master pointed to a bundle of clothes at its foot. ‘There are your things,’ he said. Then he turned and went out, taking the candle with him.

Krabat was left alone in the dark. Slowly, he began to undress. As he took off his cap, he felt the straw crown – why, it was only yesterday he had been one of the Three Kings! How long ago that seemed!

The attic, too, was echoing with the thud and clatter of the machinery of the mill, and it was lucky for the boy that he was worn out. No sooner did he lie down on his straw mattress than he fell asleep, and he slept like a log. He slept and slept, until suddenly he was awakened by a ray of light.

Krabat sat up, and froze with horror.

There were eleven white figures standing around his bed, looking down at him in the light of a stable lantern. Eleven white figures with white faces and white hands.

‘Who are you?’ asked the frightened boy.

‘We are what you will soon be,’ one of the apparitions replied.

‘We won’t hurt you,’ another of them added. ‘We are the miller’s men, we work here.’

‘There are eleven of you?’

‘And you make twelve! What’s your name?’ ‘Krabat. What’s yours?’

‘I am Tonda, the head journeyman. This is Michal, this is Merten, this is Juro …’

Tonda introduced them all by name, and then said, ‘That’s enough for now. Go back to sleep, Krabat. You’ll need all your strength in this mill.’

The miller’s men went to their truckle beds, the last one put out the light, they said good night and soon they were all snoring.

At breakfast the miller’s men assembled in the servants’ hall of the house, where the twelve of them sat around a long wooden table. There was good, thick oatmeal, one large dish to every four men. Krabat was so hungry that he fell on it ravenously. If dinner and supper were as good as breakfast, this mill was not a bad place at all!

Tonda, the head journeyman, was a handsome fellow with thick, iron-gray hair, though judging by his face he could hardly be thirty years old. There was something very grave about Tonda, or more precisely, about his eyes. Krabat trusted him from the first; his calm manner and the friendly way he treated the boy made Krabat take to him at once.

‘I hope we didn’t give you too bad a fright last night,’ said Tonda, turning to him.

‘Not too bad!’ said Krabat.

And when he saw the ‘ghosts’ by daylight, they were just young men like any others. All eleven spoke Wendish, and they were some years older than Krabat. When they looked at him it seemed to him there was pity in their eyes, which surprised him, but he thought no more about it.

What did puzzle him was the way the clothes he found at the end of his bed, though secondhand, fitted as if they had been made for him. He asked the others where they got their things – who had worn them before? But the moment his question was out, the miller’s men put down their spoons and gazed sadly at him.

‘Have I said something wrong?’ asked Krabat.

‘No, no,’ said Tonda. ‘Your clothes … they belonged to the man who was here before you.’

‘Why did he leave?’ asked Krabat. ‘Has he finished his apprenticeship?’

‘Yes,’ said Tonda. ‘Yes … he has finished his apprenticeship.’

At that moment the door flew open, and the Master came in. He was angry, and the miller’s men shrank back from him.

‘No idle chatter here!’ he shouted at them. His one eye fell on Krabat, and he added harshly, ‘It’s a mistake to ask too many questions. Repeat that!’

‘It’s a mistake to ask too many questions,’ Krabat stammered.

‘Get that into your head, then!’

And the Master left the servants’ hall, slamming the door behind him.

The men began to eat again, but suddenly Krabat felt he had had enough. He stared down at the table, bewildered. No one was taking any notice of him.

Or were they?

When he looked up, Tonda glanced across the table and nodded to him – very slightly, but the boy was glad of it. He could feel that it was good to have a friend in this mill.

After breakfast the miller’s men went to work. Krabat left the servants’ hall along with the others. The Master was standing in the hall of the house, and he beckoned to Krabat, saying, ‘Come with me!’

Krabat followed the miller out of doors. The sun was shining, it was a cold, still day, with hoarfrost on the trees.

The miller took him behind the mill, to a door at the back of the house, which he opened. They both entered the meal store, a low-ceilinged place with two tiny windows covered with flour dust. Flour covered the floor too, hung on the walls, lay thick on the oak beams of the ceiling.

‘Sweep it out!’ said the Master, pointing to a broom beside the door. He went away, leaving the boy alone.

Krabat set to work, but after wielding his broom a few times he was enveloped in a thick cloud of flour, like dust.

‘I’ll never do it this way,’ he thought. ‘Once I get to the other end of the room it will be as thick as ever back here! I’d better open a window.’

The windows were nailed up from outside, the door bolted. He might rattle it and bang on it as hard as he liked, it was no good. He was a prisoner here.

Krabat began to sweat. The flour stuck to his hair and eyelashes, it tickled his nose, it roughened his throat. It was like an endless nightmare – flour and more flour, great clouds of it, like mist, like flurrying snow.

Krabat was breathing with difficulty; he laid his forehead against a beam. He felt dizzy. Why not give up?

But what would the Master say if he just put down his broom now? Krabat did not want to get into the Master’s bad books, not least because of the good food at this mill. So he forced himself to go on, sweeping from one end of the room to the other without stopping, hour after hour.

Until at last, after half an eternity, someone came and opened the door. It was Tonda.

‘Come along!’ he cried. ‘It’s midday!’

The boy did not wait to be told twice. He staggered out into the fresh air, gasping for breath. The head journey man glanced inside the meal store.

‘Never mind, Krabat,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders. ‘No one does any better at the start!’

Muttering some words that Krabat did not catch, he traced something in the air with his hand. At that, the flour in the room rose up in the air, as if a strong wind were driving it out of every nook and cranny. A white, smoky plume swept out of the door and away over Krabat’s head, toward the wood.

The room was swept clean; not a grain of dust was left behind. The boy’s eyes widened in amazement.

‘How did you do that?’ he asked.

Tonda did not reply, but only said, ‘Let’s go in, Krabat; the soup will be getting cold.’

CHAPTER THREE No Bed of Roses

Krabat had a hard time from then on. The Master worked him unmercifully. It was, ‘Where are you, Krabat? There’s a couple of sacks of grain to be carried to the granary,’ and ‘Come here, Krabat! You’re to turn the grain over, right from the bottom, so it won’t start sprouting!’ or ‘That meal you sifted yesterday is full of husks! You’ll see to it after supper, and no bed for you before it’s clear of them!’

The mill in the fen of Kosel ground grain every day, weekdays and Sundays, from early in the morning until night began to fall. Only once a week, on Fridays, did the miller’s men stop work earlier, and they started two hours later than usual on Saturdays.

When Krabat was not busy carrying sacks or sifting meal, he had to chop wood, shovel snow, carry water to the kitchen, groom the horses, cart manure out of the cowshed – in short, there was always plenty for him to do, and when he lay down on his straw mattress at night, he felt as if every bone in his body was broken. His back was aching, the skin of his shoulders was chafed, and his arms and legs hurt so much he could hardly bear it.

Krabat marveled at his companions. They did not seem at all bothered by the heavy day’s work, none of them appeared tired or complained. They did not even sweat or get out of breath as they worked.

One morning Krabat was busy clearing snow from the way to the well. It had snowed all night without stopping, and the wind had drifted up the pathways. Krabat gritted his teeth, every time he dug his shovel in he felt a sharp pain in his back. Then Tonda came up to him, and looking around to make sure they were alone, he put a hand on Krabat’s shoulder.

‘Keep going, Krabat …’

Suddenly the boy felt as if new strength were flowing into him. The pain vanished, he seized his shovel, and would have gone on shoveling away with a will if Tonda had not taken his arm.

‘Don’t let the Master notice,’ he said. ‘Nor Lyshko, either!’

Krabat had not liked Lyshko much from the first,- he was a tall, lean fellow with a sharp nose and a squint, who seemed to be a snooper and an eavesdropper and a creeper around corners – you could never be sure you were safe from him.

‘All right,’ said Krabat, and he went on with his work, acting as though he were making very heavy weather of it. Quite soon, as if by chance, along came Lyshko.

‘Well, Krabat, how do you like the taste of your job?’

‘How do you think?’ grumbled the boy. ‘You try a nice mouthful of dirt, Lyshko – that’s about how much I like the taste of it!’

After this, Tonda took to meeting Krabat more often and placing a hand unobtrusively on his shoulder. Every time, the boy felt new strength coursing through him, and however hard his work might be, he found he could do it easily.

The Master and Lyshko knew nothing at all about it – nor did the other miller’s men, not the two cousins Michal and Merten, each as strong and good-natured as the other, nor pockmarked Andrush, who was a great joker, not Hanzo, who was nicknamed ‘The Bull’ because of his bull neck and his close-cropped hair, nor Petar, who passed his spare time whittling wooden spoons, nor the popular Stashko, who moved quick as a flash and was as clever as the little monkey Krabat remembered gaping at years before, at the fair in Koenigswartha. Kito, who always looked as if he had just swallowed a pound of nails, noticed nothing either, nor did the silent Kubo – nor, of course, did stupid Juro.

Juro was a brawny young man with short legs and a flat moon face sprinkled with freckles. He had been there longer than anyone but Tonda. He was not much use at the work of the mill, being, as Andrush used to say mockingly, ‘too stupid to keep bran and flour apart,’ and but for the fact that he had fool’s luck, he would certainly have fallen into the machinery and been caught between the millstones long ago, said Andrush.

Juro was quite used to such remarks, and put up with Andrush’s teasing patiently; he ducked without protest when Kito threatened to hit him for some trifle or other, and when, as often happened, the other journeymen played a practical joke on him, he took it with a grin, as much as to say, ‘Well, I know I’m stupid!’

The housework seemed to be all Juro was fit for, and since someone had to see to it, they were all perfectly happy to let Juro do it for them: cooking, and washing the dishes, baking bread and lighting fires, scrubbing the floor and scouring the steps, dusting, washing, ironing and everything else that had to be done about the house and the kitchen. He looked after the chickens, geese and pigs too.

It was a mystery to Krabat how Juro ever got all his jobs done. However, it seemed perfectly natural to the others, and on top of that, the Master treated Juro like dirt. Krabat thought it was a shame, and once, when he took a load of firewood into the kitchen and Juro, not for the first time, gave him the end of a sausage to put in his pocket, he told him exactly how he felt.

‘I just don’t see how you can put up with it!’ he said.

‘What, me?’ asked Juro in surprise.

‘Yes, you!’ said Krabat. ‘The Master treats you shamefully, and all the others laugh at you!’

‘Tonda doesn’t,’ Juro objected. ‘You don’t, either.’

‘What difference does that make?’ cried Krabat. ‘I know what I’d do if I were you. I’d stick up for myself, that’s what! I wouldn’t take it any more – I wouldn’t take it from Kito or Andrush or any of them!’

‘Hm,’ said Juro, scratching the back of his neck. ‘Maybe that’s what you’d do, Krabat – well, you could! But what if you were just a fool like me?’

‘Well, run away, then!’ cried the boy. ‘Run away from here! Find somewhere else where they’ll treat you better!’

‘Run away?’ And for a moment Juro did not look stupid at all, merely tired and sad. ‘Try it, Krabat! Try running away from here!’

‘I don’t have any reason to!’

‘No,’ muttered Juro, ‘no, of course you don’t – let’s hope you never do …’

He put a crust of bread in the boy’s other pocket, cut short his thanks, and pushed him out of the door, a silly grin on his face just as usual.

Krabat saved his bread and sausage until the end of the day. Soon after supper, while the miller’s men were sitting in the servants’ hall, Petar busy with his whittling and the rest passing the time by telling stories, the boy left them and climbed up to the attic, where he threw himself down on his straw mattress, yawning. He ate his bread and sausage then, and as he lay there enjoying his feast, his thoughts went back to Juro and their talk in the kitchen.

‘Run away?’ he thought. ‘Run away from what? It’s no bed of roses here, with so much hard work to do, and I’d be in a bad way without Tonda’s help. But the food’s good, there’s plenty of it, I have a roof over my head – and when I get up in the morning, I’m sure of a bed for the next night, warm and dry and reasonably soft, with no bugs or fleas in it. That’s more than I could ever have hoped for when I was a beggar boy!’

CHAPTER FOUR A Dream of Escape

Krabat had run away once in his life already, soon after the death of his parents, who had died of the smallpox the year before. The pastor had taken him in, ‘to stop the child running wild,’ said he, which was much to the credit of the good pastor and his wife, who had always wished for a boy of their own. But Krabat, who had spent all his life in a wretched hovel, the shepherd’s hut at Eutrich, found it hard to settle down in the pastor’s house and be good all day long, never shout or fight, wear a white shirt, wash his neck and comb his hair, not go barefoot, keep his hands clean and his fingernails scrubbed – and on top of all that he had to speak German the whole time instead of Wendish!

Krabat had tried as hard as he could. He tried for a whole week, and then another week, and after that he ran away from the pastor’s house and joined the beggar boys. He was not absolutely certain that he wanted to stay at the mill in the fen of Kosel for good, either.

‘All the same,’ he decided, licking his lips as he finished the last morsel, and half asleep already, ‘all the same, when I run away from here it’ll have to be summertime … no one’s getting me to leave before the wild flowers are out, and the wheat’s springing in the fields, and the fish in the millpond are biting …’

It is summer, the wild flowers are out in the meadows, the wheat is springing, the fish in the millpond are biting. Krabat has quarreled with his master; instead of carrying sacks of grain, he lay down in the grass in the shadow of the mill and fell asleep, and the Master caught him at it and hit him with his big stick.

‘I’ll teach you to be idle in broad daylight, young man!’ the miller shouted.

Was Krabat to put up with such treatment? In winter, with the icy wind howling over the moor, perhaps he’d have to take it. Aha – the Master was forgetting that it’s summer now!

Krabat has made up his mind. He won’t stay in this mill a day longer! He steals into the house, takes his coat and cap from the attic, and then slips away. No one sees him. The Master has gone back to his own room, the blinds are down over the windows because of the hot weather, the miller’s men are at work in the granary and tending the millstones, even Lyshko is too busy to bother about Krabat. Yet the boy still feels that someone is secretly watching him.

When he looks around, he does see a watcher on the woodshed roof, sitting there staring at him – a rough-haired black tom cat, a cat that doesn’t belong in the mill. It has only one eye.

Krabat bends to pick up a stone, throws it at the cat and shoos it off. Then he hurries toward the millpond, under cover of the willows. He catches sight of a fat carp in the water by the bank. It is goggling up at him with its one eye.

Feeling ill at ease, the boy picks up a stone and flings it at the carp, which dives away, plunging down into the green depths of the pond.

Now Krabat is following the Black Water to that place in the fen of Kosel that folks call the Waste Ground. He stops there for a few minutes, by Tonda’s grave, remembering vaguely how they had to bury their friend here one winter’s day.

He stands there thinking of the dead man … and suddenly, so unexpectedly that his heart misses a beat, he hears a hoarse croak. There is a large raven perched motionless on a stunted pine at the edge of the Waste Ground. It is looking at Krabat, and the boy sees with horror that it, too, has no left eye.

Now Krabat knows where he stands, and wasting no time, he begins to run, running away as fast as his feet will carry him, going upstream along the Black Water.

When he first stops to get his breath back, a viper comes wriggling through the heather, rears up, hissing, and looks at him – it has only one eye. The fox watching him from the undergrowth is one-eyed, too.

Krabat runs, stops for breath, runs on, stops again. Toward evening he comes to the far side of the fen. When he comes out into the open, so he hopes, he will be out of the Master’s reach. Quickly, he dips his hands in the water, splashes his forehead and temples. Then, tucking in his shirt, which had come adrift as he ran, he tightens his belt, takes the last few steps – and freezes with horror.

Instead of coming out on the open moor, as he expected, he finds himself in a clearing, and in the middle of this clearing, in the peaceful evening light, stands the mill. The Master is waiting for him at the door of the house.

‘Why, if it isn’t Krabat! There is mockery in his voice. ‘I was just about to send someone out to search for you!’

Krabat is furious. He cannot understand what went wrong. He runs away again, early in the morning this time, before daybreak, in the opposite direction, out of the wood, over fields and meadows, through villages and hamlets. He leaps over watercourses, he wades through a bog, he never stops to rest. He ignores ravens, vipers, foxes; he does not glance at fish or cat, chicken or drake. ‘They can have one eye or two, or be stone-blind for all I care!’ he thinks. ‘I won’t be led astray this time!’

All the same, at the end of the long day he is standing outside the mill in the fen of Kosel again. This time the miller’s men are there to welcome him back, Lyshko with malicious remarks, the others silently and with sympathy in their eyes. Krabat is near despair. He knows it would be best to give up, but he refuses to admit it. He tries again, a third time, that very night.

It is not difficult to slip away from the mill … now he will guide himself by the North Star! What does it matter if he stumbles and gets scratched and bruised in the dark? No one sees him, no one can cast any spell on him, and that is the main thing.

Not far away, an owl hoots, and then another bird flits past. Soon after that he spots an old eagle owl in the starlight; it is sitting on a branch, within his reach, and watching him – with its right eye. Its left eye is missing.

Krabat runs on, falling over roots, stumbling into a ditch. He is not much surprised, when day breaks, to find himself standing outside the mill for the third time.

All is still quiet indoors at this hour, but for the sound of Juro at work in the kitchen, busy making up the fire. Hearing him, Krabat goes in.

‘You were right, Juro. No one can run away from here. ’

Juro gives him something to drink. “You’d better go and wash, Krabat,‘ he says. He helps Krabat off with his wet, muddy, bloodstained shirt, fills a pitcher of water, and then seriously and without his usual foolish grin, he says, ‘You couldn’t do it on your own, Krabat… but perhaps it might be done by two. Suppose we both try another time?’

Krabat was awakened by the sound of the miller’s men coming upstairs to bed. He still had the taste of the sausage in his mouth, he could not have slept long, even though he had lived through two days and two nights in his dream.

The next morning he happened to be alone with Juro for a moment or two.

‘I dreamed of you, Juro,’ said Krabat. ‘You suggested something to me in my dream.’

‘I did?’ said Juro. ‘Well, it must have been nonsense, Krabat, and you’d better just forget about it!’

CHAPTER FIVE The Man with the Plumed Hat

The mill in the fen of Kosel had seven sets of millstones. Six sets were always in use, and the seventh never; they called those millstones the Dead Stones. They stood right at the back of the grinding room. At first Krabat thought part of the cogwheel must be broken, or the main shaft was stuck, or some other part of the machinery damaged, until one morning, as he was sweeping the place out, he found a little flour lying on the floor boards around the chute that led down to the meal bin under the Dead Stones. On closer inspection, he found traces of fresh flour in the meal bin, too, as if it had not been knocked out well enough after the work was done.

Had the Dead Stones been grinding grain last night? If so, it must have been done in secret, while everyone was asleep … or were they not all sleeping as soundly as Krabat himself last night?

He remembered that the miller’s men had turned up for breakfast looking pale and hollow-eyed that day, and many of them were yawning, which struck him as suspicious now. Impelled by curiosity, he climbed the wooden steps up to the bin floor, where the grain was tipped from its sacks into the funnel-shaped hopper, from which it ran over the feed shoe and so down between the millstones. As the men tipped it in, a few grains were bound to be spilled, only it was not grain of any kind lying there under the hopper, as Krabat expected. The things lying around the bin floor looked like pebbles at first sight, a second glance showed Krabat that they were teeth – teeth and splinters of bone.

Horrified, the boy opened his mouth to scream, but he could not utter a sound.

Suddenly Tonda was there, behind him. Krabat had not heard him coming. He took the boy’s hand.

‘What are you after up here, Krabat?’ he asked. ‘Come along down, before the Master catches you, and forget what you have seen here, do you hear me, Krabat? Forget it!’

Then he led Krabat down the steps, and no sooner did the boy feel the boards of the grinding-room floor under his feet than all he had seen that morning was wiped clean out of his mind.

During the second half of February, a severe frost set in. The miller’s men had to break the ice outside the sluice every morning. Overnight, while the wheel stood still, the water would freeze in the grooves of the paddles, forming thick crusts of ice, which had to be hacked away before the machinery could be started up.

Most dangerous of all was the ice that formed in the tailrace below the mill wheel. To keep it from damaging the wheel, two men had to climb down from time to time and hack it out, a job that none of them was particularly keen to do. Tonda made sure that no one shirked it, but when it was Krabat’s turn the head journeyman climbed down into the tailrace himself, saying it was no work for a boy who might hurt himself doing it.

The others made no objection, except for Kito, who grumbled as usual, and Lyshko, who said, ‘Anyone might hurt himself if he didn’t look out!’

Whether by chance or not, stupid Juro happened to be passing just then with a bucket full of pig swill in each hand. As he came past Lyshko he stumbled and splashed him with the pig swill from head to foot. Lyshko swore, and Juro, wringing his hands, assured him he could kick himself for being so clumsy.

‘Just think how you’ll smell for the next few days!’ said he. ‘And it’s all my fault … oh dear, Lyshko, don’t be cross with me, please don’t! I feel so sorry for the poor pigs, too!’

These days Krabat often went out felling trees in the wood, with Tonda and some of the others. As they set off in their sleigh, well wrapped up, hot oatmeal inside them, their fur caps crammed down on their foreheads, he felt so good in spite of the bitter cold that he envied no one in the world.

The trees they felled had their branches lopped on the spot, were stripped of their bark, cut to the right length, and stacked up loosely, with crossbars running between each layer to let the air in between the trunks, before they were taken to the mill next winter to be made into beams or sawn up for planks and boards.

So the weeks passed by, and nothing much changed in Krabat’s daily life. He noticed a good many things that made him stop to think. For a start, it was odd that no customers ever came to the mill. Were the local farmers avoiding it? Yet the millstones ground every day, and grain was always being poured into the hoppers – barley and oats and buckwheat.

Did the flour that was poured from the meal bins into sacks by day turn back into grain overnight? It seemed perfectly possible, Krabat thought.

At the end of the first week in March the weather changed. A west wind sprang up, driving gray clouds across the sky. ‘There’ll be snow,’ muttered Kito. ‘I can feel it in my bones!’ And it did snow a little, large, watery flakes, before the first raindrops came splashing down and the snow turned to a downpour.

‘I tell you what,’ said Andrush to Kito. ‘You’d better keep a tree frog to tell you what the weather will be – there’s no relying on your bones these days!’

It rained cats and dogs, the rain poured down in torrents, whipped along by the wind, melting snow and ice, and making the millstream rise alarmingly. The men had to go out in the rain to close the sluice and shore it up with props.

Would the sluice gate hold against the rising water?

‘If it goes on like this we’ll all be drowned along with the mill before three days are up!’ thought Krabat.

On the evening of the sixth day the rain stopped, there was a break in the blanket of clouds, and for a few moments the rays of the setting sun shone through the dark, dripping wood.

The next night Krabat had a frightening dream. Fire had broken out in the mill. The miller’s men jumped up from their straw mattresses and clattered downstairs, but Krabat himself lay on his bed like a log of wood, unable to move from the spot.

Flames were already crackling in the rafters, and the first sparks were showering down on his face, when he woke with a yell.

He rubbed his eyes and yawned, looking around him. All of a sudden he froze, unable to believe his eyes. Where were the miller’s men?

Their beds were empty, deserted; they seemed to have left in a hurry, since the blankets were hastily pushed back and the sheets crumpled. Here was a jacket on the floor, there a cap, a muffler, a belt – all clearly visible in the reflection of a red light flickering outside the gable window …

Was the mill really on fire?

Wide awake now, Krabat flung the window open. Leaning out, he saw a cart standing outside the mill. It was heavily laden, a canvas cover, dark with the rain, was stretched tightly over it, and a team of six horses, every one of them as black as coal, was harnessed to it. Someone was sitting on the box, his collar pulled up high, his hat well down over his forehead, and all his clothes were black as night, too. Only the feather he wore in his hat was bright red. It was wavering in the wind like a flame flickering, now blown upward, glowing bright, now drooping as if it would go out. It was bright enough to light up the whole front yard of the mill.

The miller’s men were hurrying back and forth between the house and the covered cart, unloading sacks, dragging them into the mill, running out again. They worked in complete silence and feverish haste. Not a shout nor a curse could be heard, only the panting of the men, and now and then a snap as the driver cracked his whip right above their heads, so that they could feel the wind of it. That spurred them on to redouble their efforts. Even the Master was hard at work, though he usually never did a hand’s turn in the mill, never lifted his little finger. But tonight he was working with the rest, competing with his men as if he were being paid for it.

Once he stopped work for a moment and vanished into the darkness, not for a rest, as Krabat suspected, but to run to the millstream, move away the props and open the sluice.

The water shot into the millrace, came rushing along and poured over into the tailrace, surging and slapping. With a creaking sound, the wheel began to turn, it was some time before it really got going, but then it went smoothly around. And now the millstones ought to start grinding, with a hollow groaning noise, but there was only one set of stones working, and that one set of stones worked with an unfamiliar sound. Krabat thought it seemed to come right from the back of the mill, a noisy clatter and thud, accompanied by an ugly squealing sound which soon turned to a howl that tormented the listener’s ears.

Krabat remembered the Dead Stones, and his flesh began to creep.

Meanwhile work was still going on down below. The covered cart was unloaded, and the miller’s men had a break – but not for long. The work went on again, though this time they were carrying the sacks back from the house to the cart. Whatever those sacks had contained, it was now ground and was being brought back.

Krabat meant to count the sacks, but he nodded off to sleep in the middle. At first cockcrow the rumble of cartwheels awakened him, and he was just in time to see the stranger drive away over the wet meadow, cracking his whip, going toward the wood – and strange to say, heavily laden as it was, the cart left no tracks behind it in the grass.

A moment later the sluice was closed and the mill wheel ran down. Krabat jumped back into bed and pulled the covers up over his head. The miller’s men came staggering upstairs, tired to death. They lay down on their beds in silence, only Kito muttering something about ‘these accursed nights of new moon’ and ‘a fiendish job.’

In the morning Krabat was so tired he could hardly get up. His head was throbbing, and he had a queasy feeling in his stomach. At breakfast he looked at the miller’s men, they were sleepy and bleary-eyed and surly as they ate their oatmeal. Even Andrush was disinclined to make jokes; he stared gloomily at his plate and did not say a word.

After breakfast Tonda took the boy aside.

‘Did you have a bad night?’

‘I – I’m not sure,’ said Krabat. ‘I didn’t have to work, I was just watching. But what about you? Why didn’t you wake me when the stranger came? I suppose you wanted to keep it secret from me – like all the other things that go on at this mill, and I’m not to know about them! But I’m not deaf or blind, you know, and I’m no fool, either, not by any means!’

‘No one said you were!’ protested Tonda.

‘But that’s the way you all act!’ cried Krabat. ‘You’re playing some kind of game with me! Why don’t you stop it?’

‘All in good time,’ said Tonda quietly. ‘You’ll learn all about this mill and its master soon enough. The day and the hour are nearer than you know. Be patient until then.’

CHAPTER SIX The Ravens’ Perch

Early on Good Friday evening there was a pale, bloated moon hanging in the sky above the fen of Kosel. The miller’s men were sitting together in the servants’ hall, while Krabat, worn out, was lying on his bed trying to get to sleep. They had had to work on Good Friday, too. He felt thankful it was evening at last, and he could get some rest …

All of a sudden he heard his name called, just as it was in the dream he had in the smithy at Petershain, only now he knew the hoarse voice that seemed to come out of thin air.

He sat up and listened, and the voice called again. ‘Krabat!’ Reaching for his clothes, he got dressed.

When he was ready, the Master called him for the third time.

Krabat made haste, groped his way to the attic door, and opened it. Light shone up from below. Down in the hall he heard voices, and the clatter of wooden clogs. Feeling uneasy, he hesitated, holding his breath – but then he pulled himself together and ran downstairs, three steps at a time.

The eleven journeymen were standing at the end of the hall. The door to the Black Room stood open, and the Master was sitting behind the table. Just as on the day of Krabat’s arrival, the thick, leather-bound book was lying in front of him, and there was the skull, too, with the red candle burning in it. The only difference was that the Master was not so pale in the face now.

‘Come closer, Krabat!’ he said.

The boy came forward, to the threshold of the Black Room. He did not feel tired now, nor did he notice his dizziness or the throbbing of his heart anymore.

The Master looked him over. Then, raising his left hand, he turned to the journeymen standing in the hall.

‘Up on your perch!’

Croaking and flapping their wings, eleven ravens flew past Krabat and through the door of the room. When he looked around, the miller’s men had disappeared. The ravens settled on a perch at the far end of the room, in the left corner, and sat there looking at him.

The Master rose, and his shadow fell on the boy.

‘You have been at this mill for a quarter of a year now, Krabat,’ said he. ‘Your trial period is over, and you are no longer an ordinary apprentice – from now on you will be my pupil.’

With these words he went up to Krabat and touched the boy’s left shoulder with his own left hand. A shiver ran through Krabat, he felt himself begin to shrink, his body became smaller and smaller, he grew raven’s feathers, a beak, and claws. There he crouched in the doorway, at the Master’s feet, not daring to look up.

The Master looked down at him for a while, then clapped his hands and cried, ‘Up on your perch!’ Krabat – the raven Krabat – obediently spread his wings and rose into the air. Flapping awkwardly, he crossed the room, flew around the table, brushing against the book and the skull, and then settled beside the other ravens, clinging tight to the perch.

‘You must know that you are in a Black School, Krabat,’ the Master told him. ‘You will not learn reading and writing and arithmetic here – you will learn the Art of Arts. The book chained to the table is the Book of Necromancy, which teaches how to conjure up spirits. As you see, it has black pages, and the words are white. It contains all the magic spells in the world. I alone may read them, because I am the Master here. But you – you, Krabat, and my other pupils – you are forbidden to read the Book, remember that! And no going behind my back, or it will be the worse for you! Do you understand that, Krabat?’

‘Yes, I understand,’ croaked the boy, surprised to find he could still speak at all – in a hoarse voice, to be sure, but quite clearly and easily.

Krabat had heard whispered tales of such Black Schools before. There were said to be several of them in Lusatia, but he had always supposed those were just old wives’ tales, such as women will tell while they sit and spin. Now he was a pupil in a Black School himself, though it appeared to be an ordinary mill! Yet it seemed that those who lived nearby, at least, said there was something strange about the place, or why did the people of the fen of Kosel keep away?

The boy had no time to pursue his thoughts, for the Master, sitting down at the table again, was beginning to read an extract from the Book of Necromancy. He read slowly, in a singsong voice, rocking stiffly back and forth from his hips as he did so.

‘This is the way to make a well run dry, so that it will give no water from one day to the next,’ he read out. ‘First get four pegs of birch wood, dried over the stove, each two and a half spans long, as broad as your thumb, and sharpened to a three-cornered point at one end. Next you must place your pegs of wood around the well by night, between twelve and one, driving each into the ground seven feet from the well, every one at a different point of the compass, beginning with midnight and ending with evening. Third and lastly, when you have done all this, saying no word, you must walk around the well three times and speak the words written here …’

Then the Master read out a magic spell, a sequence of incomprehensible words, fair-sounding, all of them, and yet there was a dark undertone, suggesting something evil, that lingered in the boy’s ears, even when the Master began again after a brief pause.

‘This is the way to make a well run dry …’

He read the passage from the Book and the magic spell three times in all, always in the same singsong voice, rocking back and forth from the waist. After the third time he closed the book. He waited in silence for a while, and then turned to the ravens.

‘Now I have taught you a new piece of the Secret Arts,’ said he, in his normal voice. ‘Let’s hear how much you remember of it. You there – begin!’

He pointed to one of the ravens, and told him to repeat the passage and the magic spell.

‘This is the way … to make a well run dry … so that … so that it will give no water from one day to the next …’

The miller picked on first one raven, then another, and questioned each one. He did not call any of the twelve by name, but Krabat could tell them apart by the way they spoke. Even when he was a raven, Tonda’s voice was calm and deliberate, Kito spoke with an unmistakably peevish tone, and Andrush was as quick with his beak as with his tongue, while Juro, when it was his turn to repeat the spell, had great difficulty and kept getting stuck; in short, there was not one of them whom Krabat could not identify.

‘This is the way to make a well run dry …’

Again and again they repeated the passage from the Book of Necromancy and the magic spell, some fluently, some hesitantly, a fifth time, a ninth, an eleventh.

‘Now you!’ The Master turned to Krabat.

The boy began to tremble. He stammered, ‘This is the way … is the way to make a … a well …’

Here he broke off, struck dumb. With the best will in the world, he could not remember how it went on. Would the Master punish him?

The Master did not seem at all angry.

‘You’d better pay more attention to the words than the voices another time, Krabat,’ he said. ‘Remember, no one is forced to learn in this school! If you master the passages I read you from the Book, it will be to your advantage; if not, it hurts no one but yourself!’

So saying, he finished the lesson. The door opened and the ravens flew out. Back in the hall, they returned to human form, Krabat, too, was changed back, he did not know how or by whom, and as he made his way up to the attic behind the miller’s men, he felt as though he had dreamed some strange, confusing dream.

CHAPTER SEVEN The Sign of the Secret Brotherhood

The next day, which was Easter Eve, the miller’s men did not have to work. Most of them seized their chance to go back to bed after breakfast. ‘You’d better go upstairs and get some sleep, too,’ Tonda told Krabat. ‘You’ll be needing it.’

‘Why?’

‘You’ll find out why. Go and lie down now, and try to sleep as long as you can.’

‘All right, I’m going!’ muttered Krabat. ‘Sorry I asked!’ Up in the attic, someone had hung a piece of cloth over the gable window, which was a good idea, it made it easier to get to sleep. Krabat settled down on his right side, his back to the window, his head buried in his arms. He lay there sleeping until Juro came to wake him.

‘Get up, Krabat – the food’s on the table.’

‘Why, is it midday already?’

Laughing, Juro pulled the cloth back from the window.

‘Midday! That’s a good one!’ said he. ‘The sun will soon be sinking out there, sleepyhead!’

The miller’s men had their dinner and supper rolled into one that day. It was a good, plentiful meal, almost a feast.

‘Eat all you can!’ Tonda told the men. ‘It will have to last you some time, as you know.’

After their meal, as night fell before the dawn of Easter Day, the Master came to the servants’ hall where they were sitting and sent out his men ‘to bring back the sign.’

They formed a circle around him, and he began to count them out, as children do playing tag or hide-and-seek. Reciting some words that had a strange, menacing sound, the Master counted first from right to left, then from left to right. The first time Stashko was counted out, and the second time it was Andrush. The two of them left the circle in silence and went away, while the Master began to count again. Next time it was Merten and Hanzo who had to go, and then Lyshko and Petar. Finally, only Krabat and Tonda were left.

For the last time the Master repeated the strange, ominous words, slowly and solemnly, then dismissed them both with a gesture and turned away.

Tonda signed to Krabat to follow him, and in silence they, too, left the mill and went out to the woodshed together.

‘Wait here a moment!’ Tonda fetched two blankets from the shed and gave one of them to Krabat. Then he set off along the path to Schwarzkollm, past the millpond and through the fen.

As they entered the wood the last of the daylight went. Krabat tried hard to keep close to Tonda, and it occurred to him that he had walked this way once before, though in the opposite direction and on his own, in wintertime. Could that really be little more than three months ago? It seemed incredible!

‘There’s Schwarzkollm,’ said Tonda after a while.

They saw the lights of the village shining between the tree trunks, but they themselves bore right, out onto the open moor. The path was dry and sandy here, and led past a few stunted trees, shrubs and bushes. The sky was high and wide, bright with starlight.

‘Where are we going?’ Krabat asked.

‘To Dead Man’s Cross,’ said the head journeyman.

A little later they caught sight of a fire burning on the moor, flickering at the bottom of a sandy hollow. Who could have lit it?

‘Not shepherds, for certain,’ said Krabat to himself, ‘not so early in the year. It must be gypsies, or a traveling tinker with his wares.’

Tonda had stopped. ‘They’re at Dead Man’s Cross before us – let’s go to Baumel’s End.’

He turned, without a word of explanation, and they had to make their way back to the wood by the same path. Then they turned right, along a footpath that led them past the village of Schwarzkollm and joined a road on the other side of it, leading to the outskirts of the wood opposite.

‘It’s not far,’ said Tonda.

By now the moon had risen, and was giving them light. They followed the road to the next bend, where a wooden cross as tall as a man stood in the shadow of the pines. It was plain and very weather-beaten, and it bore no inscription.

‘This is Baumel’s End,’ said Tonda. ‘Many years ago a man called Baumel lost his life here, while he was cutting wood, they say, though no one knows now exactly how it happened.’

‘What about us?’ asked Krabat. ‘Why are we here?’

‘We’re here because the Master says so,’ said Tonda. ‘All twelve of us have to spend the night before Easter out of doors, in couples, each couple at a spot where someone met with a violent death.’

‘And what do we do now?’ asked Krabat.

‘We light a fire,’ said Tonda. ‘Then we keep watch under this cross until dawn, and at the break of day we must mark each other with the sign.’

They kept the fire low purposely, so as not to arouse any attention over in Schwarzkollm. Each wrapped in his blanket, they sat and kept watch under the wooden cross. Now and then Tonda asked the boy if he was cold, or told him to put a few of the dry branches they had picked up in the wood on the fire. As time went by, he was increasingly silent. Krabat tried to get a conversation going himself.

‘Tonda.’

‘What is it?’

‘Is the Black School always like that? With the Master reading something from the Book and then saying, ’ “Let’s see how much you remember …”?’

‘Yes,’ said Tonda.

‘I don’t see how you can learn magic that way.’ ‘Well, you can,’ said Tonda.

‘Do you think I annoyed the Master because I wasn’t attending?’

‘No.’

‘I’ll do better in the future – I’ll make sure to notice everything! Do you think I’ll manage it?’ ‘Yes,’ said Tonda.

He did not seem to want to talk to Krabat very much. He sat there upright, his back against the cross, gazing into the distance, past the village, to the moonlit moor, and after this conversation he said nothing else at all. When Krabat spoke his name softly, he did not reply; a dead man could not have been quieter or gazed more fixedly into space.

As time went by, the boy began to feel there was something uncanny about the way Tonda was acting. He remembered hearing that some folk knew the art of ‘going out of themselves’, slipping out of the body like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, and leaving it behind, an empty shell, while their true selves went their own invisible way, on secret paths, to a secret goal. Had Tonda ‘gone out of himself’? Was it possible that while he sat here by the fire, he was really somewhere quite different?

‘I must keep awake,’ Krabat told himself.

He propped himself first on his right elbow, then on his left; he made sure the fire kept burning steadily, he occupied himself breaking up the branches into handy lengths and arranging them in neat little piles. And so the hours went by. The stars passed over the sky, the shadows of the trees and houses moved away under the moon, slowly changing their shape.

Quite suddenly, or so it seemed, Tonda came back to life. Leaning over to Krabat, he pointed to the countryside around them.

‘The bells – do you hear them?’

The church bells had been silent since Maundy Thursday, now, as Easter came in, they began to ring again, all over the country. Their peals floated across the fields to Schwarzkollm from the nearby village churches, muffled, only a faint noise, like the humming of a swarm of bees – yet the moor, the village, the fields and the meadows were filled with the sound to the farthest rim of the hills.

At almost the same moment as the distant bells rang out, a girl’s voice was raised in song in Schwarzkollm village. She was singing an old Easter hymn of rejoicing. Krabat knew the tune, he used to sing it in church himself as a child, but he felt as if he were hearing it for the first time.

Christ is risen!

Christ is risen!

Hallelujah, hallelujah!

Then a group of twelve or fifteen more girls joined in, singing the rest of the verse in chorus. The girl who led the choir began the next verse, and so they went on, first a solo, then all together, one hymn after another.

Krabat had heard it all before; on the morning of Easter Day at home the girls used to go up and down the village street singing, from midnight until dawn. They walked close together, side by side, in groups of three or four, and one of them, he knew, would lead the singing, the one with the purest and sweetest voice of all. She walked in the front row and sang the solo part.

The bells rang from afar, the girls sang, and Krabat, sitting by the fire under the wooden cross, held his breath. He listened and listened to the music coming from the village, as if spellbound.

Tonda put a branch on the fire.

‘I loved a girl once,’ said he. ‘Vorshula was her name. She has been lying in the graveyard of Seidewinkel six months now; it was little luck I brought her. Krabat, remember that none of us at the mill brings a girl luck! I don’t know why that is, and I don’t want to alarm you, but Krabat, if ever you love a girl, beware of showing it! Take care the Master doesn’t find out, or Lyshko, who’s always carrying tales to him.’

‘Why – did the Master and Lyshko have anything to do with the death of the girl you loved?’ asked Krabat.

‘I do not know,’ said Tonda. ‘All I know is that Vorshula would be alive today if I had kept her name to myself, but I only found that out too late. But you, Krabat – you know now, and you know in time! If ever you love a girl, don’t tell her name in the mill! Let nothing in the world get it out of you! Tell no one, do you hear, no one! Not awake, nor in your sleep, or it will bring bad luck to both of you!’

‘Never fear!’ said Krabat. ‘I’ve no time for girls, and I can’t see myself changing my mind about that!’

At daybreak the bells and the singing in the village fell silent. Tonda cut two splinters of wood from the cross with his knife. They put the splinters in the embers of their fire and charred the ends.

‘Do you know what a pentagram is?’ asked Tonda.

‘No,’ said Krabat.

‘Watch me, then.’

With the tip of his finger Tonda drew a figure in the sand, a five-pointed star formed of five straight lines, each intersecting two others so that the whole figure could be drawn in a single movement.

‘This is the sign,’ said Tonda. ‘Now draw it yourself.’

‘It can’t be difficult,’ said the boy. ‘First you did this … then this … then this …’

At his third attempt Krabat succeeded in drawing the pentagram in the sand correctly.

‘Good,’ said Tonda, putting one of the wooden splinters into his hand. ‘Now kneel by the fire, reach across the embers, and draw the sign on my forehead, and I’ll tell you what you have to say.’

Krabat did as the head journeyman told him, and as they drew the pentagram on each other’s foreheads, he repeated the words slowly:

I mark you, brother,

with wood from the cross.

I mark you

with the sign of

the Secret Brotherhood.

Then they gave each other the Easter kiss on the left cheek, raked sand over their fire, scattered the remaining firewood, and set off for home.

Tonda took the path through the fields again, skirting around the village. He was making for the wood, which was shrouded in morning mist, when they saw the outlines of shadowy figures appear before them in the half-light of dawn. The village girls were coming toward them, silently, in a long file, dark shawls around their heads and shoulders, and each with an earthen pitcher in her hand.

‘Come!’ said Tonda softly to Krabat. ‘They’ve been to draw the Easter water. We don’t want to frighten them.’

They drew back into the shadow of the nearest hedge and let the girls go by.

The Easter water, as Krabat knew, must be drawn from a spring before sunrise on Easter morning. It must be drawn in silence, and in silence it must be carried home, and if you washed in it you would have beauty and good luck for a whole year – or so the girls used to say.

Moreover, if you carried the Easter water home to the village without ever looking around, you might meet your future lover – so the girls said, but who knew what to think of that?

CHAPTER EIGHT Remember I Am the Master

The Master had fixed a yoke outside the open door of the house, both ends were nailed to the door frame at shoulder height. As the men came back they had to pass under it, one by one, saying, ‘I bow beneath the yoke of the Secret Brotherhood.’

The Master was waiting for them in the hall, and he gave each man a blow on the right cheek, with the words, ‘Remember you are my pupil!’ Then he struck them on the left cheek, adding, ‘Remember I am the Master!’ After that the men had to bow low to the miller three times, promising, ‘I will obey you in all things, Master, now and forever.’

Tonda and Krabat met with the same reception. The boy did not yet realize that he was now the Master’s property, delivered up to him utterly, body and soul, for life or death. He joined the other men, who were standing at the end of the passage, as if they were waiting for their breakfast. They all had the sign of the pentagram drawn on their foreheads, like Tonda and Krabat.

Petar and Lyshko were not back yet, but they soon appeared at the door, too, and after they had bowed under the yoke, taken their blows on the cheeks and made their promises, the mill began to go around.

‘To work!’ cried the Master to his men. ‘Off with you!’

At that the miller’s men threw off their coats. They ran to the grinding room, rolling up their sleeves as they went, dragged up sacks of grain and set to work, while the Master kept them hard at it, shouting and gesticulating impatiently.

‘And this is supposed to be Easter Sunday!’ thought Krabat. ‘Not a wink of sleep all night, no breakfast – and we have to work twice as hard as usual!’

Even Tonda ran out of breath at last and began to sweat. They were all sweating freely that morning; the perspiration dripped from their foreheads and temples, ran down their necks, poured down their backs so that their shirts were sticking to them.

‘How much longer is this going on?’ Krabat wondered.

Whenever he looked, he saw set, grim faces. They were all grunting and groaning, hot and damp with perspiration as they were. And the pentagrams on their foreheads were blurring, dissolving in their sweat, and gradually disappearing.

Then something quite unexpected happened. Krabat, shouldering a sack of wheat, was struggling up the steps to the bin floor. It took the very last of his strength and every scrap of will power he had. He was just about to stumble and collapse under his burden – when suddenly all his troubles were over. The pain in his legs was gone, his backache had disappeared, and his breathing came easily.

‘Tonda!’ he cried. ‘Look at this!’

He was up on the bin floor with one bound, then, tipping the sack off his shoulder, he grabbed it by both ends, and before emptying it into the hopper he brandished it in the air with shouts of triumph, as easily as if it were full of feathers instead of grain.

It was as if the miller’s men had been transformed by magic. They stretched their arms, laughed, and slapped their thighs. Even the sour-faced Kito was no exception.

Krabat was hurrying off to the granary to fetch the next sack, but the head journeyman cried, ‘Stop! That’ll do!’ They let the wheat run through the mill, and then Tonda stopped the machinery. ‘That’s it for today!’ said he.

With a final creak and clatter the mill wheel ran down, and they knocked the flour out of the meal bins.

‘And now to make merry, brothers!’ shouted Stashko.

All of a sudden there were big pitchers of wine, and Juro was bringing in dishes of Easter cakes, sweet and golden brown, fried in lard and filled with curds or plum jam.

‘Fall to, brothers! Eat them up, and don’t forget the wine!’

They ate and drank and made merry, and later Andrush began to sing, loud and boisterously. They washed down their cakes with red wine, and then formed a circle, linked arms, and stamped their feet in time to the song.

The miller, he sits

At the millhouse door,

Clackety, clickety,

Clack!

Spies as fine a young fellow,

As ever you saw,

Clackety, clickety,

As ever you saw!

Clackety, clickety,

Clack!

The miller’s men sang the ‘Clackety, clickety’ in chorus; then Hanzo started the next verse, and so they went on, singing in turn and dancing in a ring, first to the right, then to the left, into the middle and out again.

Krabat’s turn came last of all, since he was only the apprentice. He shut his eyes and sang the last verse of the song.

This fine young fellow,

No fool was he,

Clackety, clickety,

Clack!

He struck the miller,

Down on his knee,

Clackety, clickety,

Down on his knee!

Clackety, clickety,

Clack!

They stopped dancing and fell to drinking again. Kubo, who was usually so quiet, took the boy aside and patted him on the back.

‘You have a good voice, Krabat. You ought to be singing in a choir!’ said he.

‘Who, me?’ asked Krabat. It was only now Kubo mentioned it that he realized he could sing again – in a deeper voice than before, to be sure, but a voice that was firm and clear. The rasp in his throat that had been bothering him since the beginning of last winter was quite gone.

On Easter Monday the miller’s men went back to work as usual. Everything was back to normal – except that Krabat no longer had to toil so hard. He could easily do whatever the Master told him now. It seemed that the days when he dropped on to his bed half dead with exhaustion every evening were gone forever.

Krabat was heartily thankful for it, and he could guess how it had happened. When he and Tonda were next alone together, he asked his friend.

‘Yes, you’re right,’ said Tonda. ‘So long as we carry the sign of the pentagram on our foreheads we have to work like slaves – until the moment when the last of us has washed it away in the sweat of his brow. In return, our work will be easy all the year, as long as we do it between dawn and dusk.’

‘What about other times?’ asked Krabat. ‘After dark, I mean.’

‘Not then,’ said Tonda. ‘We have to manage as best we can after dark! But set your mind at rest, Krabat. For one thing, we don’t have to leave our beds to work so very often, and for another, well, it’s bearable when it happens!’

They never mentioned the night before Easter again, or Tonda’s grief for the girl he loved; they did not even allude to it. Yet Krabat thought he knew where Tonda had been while he sat by the fire like a dead man, staring into the distance. And whenever Krabat thought of Vorshula and her story, the singer of Schwarzkollm, the girl who led the choir, came into his mind – or rather her voice as he had heard it floating across the fields from the village at midnight. This seemed strange to him; he would have liked to forget that voice, yet he found it was impossible.

Once a week, on Fridays, the miller’s men assembled outside the Black Room after supper, turned themselves into ravens – Krabat soon learned the trick of it – and settled on their perch. Every Friday the Master read them a passage from the Book of Necromancy; he read it three times in all, and they had to repeat it after him, though the Master himself did not care what or how much of it they remembered.

Krabat was eager to memorize all the Master taught them: storm spells and charms to make hail, the casting of magic bullets and the way to use them, invisibility, the art of going out of one’s body, and many other things. While he was working by day, and before he fell asleep at night, he repeated the instructions and the words of the spells from the Book over and over again, so as to stamp them on his memory.

For by now Krabat had realized one thing: a man who knew the Art of Arts had power over other men, and to have power – as much as the Master had, if not more – struck him as a fine thing to aim for. It was to achieve that aim that he was studying and studying and studying.

One night in the second week after Easter the miller’s men were called from their beds. The Master was standing at the attic door with a light in his hand.

‘There’s work to be done!’ he cried. ‘The Goodman is coming – hurry up, make haste!’

In the rush Krabat could not find his shoes, so he followed the others out of the mill barefoot. There was a new moon; the night was so dark that the miller’s men could not see an inch in front of them. In the crush someone wearing wooden clogs trod on Krabat’s toes.

‘Hey!’ cried the boy. ‘Watch out, you clumsy oaf!’

A hand was put over his mouth. ‘Ssh!’ Tonda whispered.

Then Krabat realized that not one of the miller’s men had spoken a word since the Master woke them. And they did not utter a sound all the rest of that night, nor did Krabat himself.

He could guess what kind of work lay ahead, and soon enough the stranger with the flickering plume in his hat came rattling up in his cart. The men fell upon it, tore off the dark canvas cover, and began dragging sacks into the mill – to the Dead Stones at the far end of the grinding room.

Everything happened just as it had four weeks ago, when Krabat watched the others through the gable window, only this time the Master swung himself up by the stranger’s side on the box. Today it was he who cracked the whip, right above their heads, so that the men ducked as they felt it whistle past.

Krabat had almost forgotten what hard work it was to carry a full sack, and how soon you were out of breath.

‘Remember that you are my pupil!’

Those were the Master’s words, and the longer Krabat thought about them, the less he liked the sound of them.

The whip cracked, the men ran back and forth, the mill wheel went around and the house was filled with the clatter and squeal of the Dead Stones. What was in those sacks? Krabat glanced into the hopper, but he could not make much out in the dim light of the lantern swaying from the ceiling. Was he tipping clods of dirt, or pine cones, into the hopper, or maybe round stones encrusted with mud …?

The boy had no time to take a closer look; Lyshko came up with the next sack, panting, and elbowed Krabat aside.

Michal and Merten had taken up their positions by the meal bin; they refilled the empty sacks with whatever it was that had been ground, and tied them up. Again, everything happened just as before. At first cockcrow the cart was loaded up again, the cover pulled over it and fastened. The stranger reached for his whip, and off he went with his cart, so fast that the Master only just had time to jump down without breaking his neck.

‘Come with me!’ said Tonda to Krabat.

While the others went into the house, the two of them went up to the millrace to shut the sluice. They heard the mill wheel run down below them, and all was quiet, but for the rooster crowing and the hens clucking.

‘Does he often come?’ asked Krabat, jerking his head in the direction in which the cart had disappeared into the morning mist.

‘Every night of new moon,’ said Tonda.

‘Do you know who he is?’

‘Only the Master knows that. He calls him the Goodman – and he is afraid of him.’

They walked slowly back to the mill through the dewy meadows.

‘There’s one thing I don’t understand,’ said Krabat, before they entered the house. ‘Last time the stranger came the Master was working, too. Why not today?’

‘Last time he had to help us to make up the dozen,’ said the head journeyman. ‘But since Easter the numbers of the Black School have been made up, so now he can afford to spend the nights of new moon cracking the whip!’

CHAPTER NINE The Ox Dealer from Kamenz

Sometimes the Master sent his men out on errands, in pairs or in small groups, to give them a chance to use the arts they learned in the Black School. One morning Tonda went up to Krabat. ‘I have to go to the Wittichenau cattle market with Andrush today,’ he said. ‘The Master says you can go with us if you like.’

‘Good!’ said Krabat. ‘It’ll make a change from all this grinding of grain!’

They took a path through the wood that joined the road beside some houses near the Neudorf village pond. It was a fine, sunny July day. The jays were calling in the branches, they could hear the tapping of a woodpecker, swarms of honey bees and bumble bees filled the wild raspberry bushes with their buzzing.

Krabat noticed that Tonda and Andrush looked as merry as if they were off to the fair. It couldn’t be just the fine weather. Andrush, of course, was always a cheerful, good-tempered fellow, but it was unusual to hear Tonda whistling happily to himself. From time to time he cracked his ox whip.

‘Are you practicing to do that on the way home?’ said Krabat.

‘What do you mean, on the way home?’

‘I thought we were going to Wittichenau to buy an ox?’

‘On the contrary!’ said Tonda.

Just at that moment Krabat heard a loud ‘Moo!’ behind him, and when he turned around, there was a fine ox standing where Andrush had been a moment before. It had a smooth, reddish-brown coat, and it was looking at him in a friendly way.

‘Hey!’ said Krabat, rubbing his eyes.

Suddenly Tonda, too, was gone, and in his place there stood an old Wendish peasant, wearing felt shoes, linen trousers with cross-gartering from ankle to knee, and a smock belted with a cord. He had a greasy fur cap, its brim rubbed bare.

‘Hey!’ said Krabat again. Then someone tapped him on the shoulder and laughed. When he turned, there was Andrush back again.

‘Where did you go, Andrush? And where’s that ox – the one that was standing here just now?’

‘Moo!’ said Andrush in the ox’s voice.

‘What about Tonda?’

The peasant turned back into Tonda before Krabat’s very eyes.

‘So that’s it!’ said the boy.

‘Yes, that’s it,’ said Tonda. ‘Andrush is going to show his paces in the cattle market.’

‘You mean you’re going to sell him?’ ‘Those are the Master’s orders.’

‘But – but suppose Andrush gets sent to be slaughtered?’

‘No fear of that!’ Tonda assured him. ‘Once we sell Andrush as an ox, all we have to do is keep his halter. Then he can turn himself into any shape he likes, any time he likes.’

‘Suppose we lose the halter?’

‘You dare!’ cried Andrush. ‘If you did that I’d have to stay an ox all my life, eating hay and straw – just you get that into your heads, and don’t do any such thing!’

Tonda and Krabat created a great sensation in Wittichenau cattle market. Their ox was much admired. All the dealers came hurrying up and surrounded them, and a few of the townsfolk, and some farmers who had already disposed of their pigs and bullocks, joined the crowd. It wasn’t every day you saw such a fine, fat ox; they all felt they’d like to get their hands on it before anyone else could snap up such a splendid animal from under their noses.

‘How much?’

The cattle dealers showered Tonda with questions, shouting at the tops of their voices. Master Krause the butcher, from Hoyerswerda, offered fifteen guilders for Andrush, and lame Leuschner from Koenigsbruck went one better and offered sixteen.

Tonda merely shook his head. ‘Not good enough,’ said he.

‘Not good enough?’ said they. He must be crazy, they assured him. Did he take them for fools?

‘Fools or no,’ said Tonda, ‘I suppose you gentlemen must know that best yourselves!’

‘Very well, then,’ said Master Krause from Hoyer-swerda. ‘Eighteen!’

‘Eighteen! Why, I’d rather keep him myself!’ growled Tonda. He would not let Master Leuschner from Koenigs-bruck have him for nineteen guilders, either, or young Gustav Neubauer from Senftenberg for twenty.

‘The devil take you and your ox, then!’ cried Master Krause angrily, and Master Leuschner, tapping his forehead, said, ‘I’d be a fool to ruin myself. Twenty-two, and that’s my last word!’

The bargaining seemed to have reached a deadlock when a fat, shapeless man, puffing like a grampus at every step he took, pushed his way through the crowd. His frog face with its round, goggle eyes was shiny with sweat, he wore a green tailcoat with silver buttons, a showy watch chain over his red satin vest, and there was a fat purse at his belt for all the world to see.

Master Blaschke, the ox dealer from Kamenz, was one of the richest and probably the shrewdest of all the cattle dealers for miles around. Pushing Master Leuschner and young Gustav Neubauer aside, he shouted in his loud, blustering voice, ‘How in heaven’s name did such a thin fellow come by such a fat ox? I’ll take him for twenty-five!’

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