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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 (#uc9988822-5db2-5c4c-b228-13b1180584f0)
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 (#ulink_924dbff3-8c41-5b24-81d5-300fa1fd4cf9)
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.
