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Krabat
Otfried Preussler
One of Neil Gaiman’s favourite scary stories for children.Set within a world of sorcery and wizardry, much like an 18th Century Harry Potter, Krabat tells the story of a 14-year-old beggar boy lured to a mysterious mill by a series of frightening dreams and apparitions.He becomes an apprentice to the master of the watermill where he joins the eleven other young journeymen who work there. Much to his surprise Krabat soon discovers that the mill is actually a school of black magic and he is expected to learn much more than just a normal miller’s trade.Krabat studies hard and becomes the master’s star pupil, but when he falls for a local village girl the depth of the masters evil and the darker secrets of the mill begin to reveal themselves. One by one his fellow classmates perish from mysterious, unexplained accidents and Krabat realises he must use all of the dark magic skills he has learned to secure his escape.Now a major motion picture starring David Kross (The Reader, War Horse).
KRABAT
OTFRIED PREUSSLER
TRANSLATED BY
ANTHEA BELL
CONTENTS
Cover (#u0a8b9b6a-3432-5deb-a569-a312f663fd6b)
Title Page (#uc2eda8bd-801a-5b88-8045-c694b4b34270)
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 (#uc9988822-5db2-5c4c-b228-13b1180584f0)
CHAPTER ONE The Mill (#uc9988822-5db2-5c4c-b228-13b1180584f0)
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 (#uc9988822-5db2-5c4c-b228-13b1180584f0)
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!
