by Dan Davis
A hooded monk, old and drawn, hobbled over to us with his hands folded into his belly.
“This is our punishment. All must repent. Confess. And repent.”
“Yes, yes,” I said, trying to ignore him.
“Do you know of the tale of a wild man of Swabia? A man like a wolf. Some call him the Ancient One.”
The monk lurched away from me, muttering a prayer before seeming to lose his thoughts. “A ball of fire was seen above Vienna! Pestilential flame. The bishop exorcised it from the skies, praise God, and it fell to the ground. Praise God. A pillar of flame rises above Paris, from the depths of the city into the Heavens. Fire!” He stood as upright as he seemed able and raised his hands as he spoke.
“Stand back from him, sir,” Walter said, drawing me away. “He has the plague.”
I noticed then that the man’s hands were black and rotten. Someone nearby shouted for the guards. As he was dragged away, his hood fell down and a woman screamed at the ruin of his face.
“He was a leper,” I said to Walt. “Not a plague carrier.”
Walt shrugged. “Same thing, ain’t it?”
Heading further into the town, I kept an eye out for any man who might be likely to help me. A well-travelled man would be best, respectable in ordinary times but in dire need of silver and gold.
“Have you seen her?” a little girl with a pink face asked me in the marketplace. She was well dressed and the servant who was supposed to be taking care of the girl was instead arguing with a wine merchant about his prices. The child was perhaps ten years old and had spoken in good French, no doubt having heard me conversing with Walter.
“Have I seen who?” I asked the little girl.
She lowered her voice. “The Pest Jungfrau.”
“The Plague Maiden?” I said. “I never heard of her before. Who is she?”
The pale little girl was as delicate as a winter flower. Her big grey eyes filled her face. “A ghost. She flies across the land as a blue flame, spreading the plague. She flies from the mouths of the dying to look for her next hale body to fill with death. My mother died. My father will die, also. I think that I shall die soon.”
“Take heart, dear girl. You may yet—”
The servant woman whipped about, seized the child’s arm and dragged her away while giving me an evil glare.
“Poor child,” I said to Walt. “How potent is their fantasy. People are so impressionable, they can die of imagination itself.”
“Have you seen it, sir? The Plague Maiden?”
“For God’s sake, Walt.”
Stuttgart had taken the view that the pestilence was a punishment from God and that their only salvation could come from being free from sin. The town fathers had acted to shore up moral standards by forcing unmarried cohabiting couples to either marry or separate. Swearing, playing dice and working on the Sabbath became crimes punishable by the harshest fines and penalties. No bells were to be rung at funerals, no mourning clothes were to be worn and there were to be no more gatherings at the houses of the dead to honour the departed souls. New graveyards were dug and all the plague dead were taken there rather than to their family plots.
Men came to close the market even while we were negotiating our purchases and they turfed us out.
“It has been noted that deaths are more numerous about the marketplaces,” one of the kindlier officials explained in English. “And so we close the marketplaces. God be with you.”
“Please!” I said. “We are travelling south, seeking tales of a wolf man. Some call him the Ancient One.”
“By God,” the man said. “You are madmen.”
“Perhaps but have you heard of such a man?”
He shook his head, looking around to check that his fellows were not listening, and lowered his voice before speaking. “There is a wolf man in the Schwarzwald. Or many of them, perhaps. The tales are told to children to stop them going into the forest. It does not work.”
“In the Schwarzwald? The Black Forest? We have heard much talk of this place. Can you direct us to it?”
He scoffed. “It begins here,” he replied, pointing to the southwestern gate.
“Begins?” I said. “Where does it end?” I had a feeling I would not like the answer.
“I do not know. A hundred miles? Two weeks on horseback? The hills are large and many. The forest is dense and ancient. I must go now.”
“Thank you for your—”
He grabbed my shoulder. “Do not go into the Schwarzwald.” Before I could answer, he turned and strode away.
“What now, sir?” Walt asked.
“We go into the Black Forest.”
12. The Black Forest
An ancient fallen fir tree allowed us the space to look out across the wooded mountain ranges to the south. The track we had taken up the hill wound its way down the other side and disappeared amongst the deep green needles of the pines below us. On the other side of the narrow valley rose hill after hill, growing fainter until they were lost in a white mist and merged with the sky. Smoke drifted above the dense canopy here and there. Somewhere, perhaps miles distant, a single axe blade smacked steadily into a trunk, the sound echoing between the hills. I could make out a handful of shapes that might be houses.
“God help us,” Walt said. “We have no hope. None.”
“Nonsense, man. We must keep on to the next village. And then the next. Someone will know of the Ancient One.”
He mumbled under his breath as I led my horse on down the track but I heard him clearly enough. “I’ll be the bloody ancient one at this rate.”
After Stuttgart, we had asked in the marketplace of a very fine little town named Calw about the man that we sought and had been led by a leather worker to an old woodsman who sat drinking in a beer hall. Only after buying him a half-dozen mugs of ale did his tongue loosen. The leather worker, whose name was Conrad, explained to me in French what the old man was saying.
“He says this Ancient One, the man who is sometimes a wolf, lives deep in the forest. That all woodsmen know to leave his lands alone and to fell no trees there.”
“Ask him where, man. Where?”
“He says it would be very bad for you to go to this place.”
“Surely, that is my business. Tell him I wish to know. I will pay him for the knowledge. I shall pay you, also, if you get the truth out of him.”
“He says he swore to his father never to reveal this secret. He cannot do it for any money. He wishes us to leave now.”
Walt cleared his throat and leaned into my ear. “Could always beat it out of him, sir?”
I shook my head. We would need a translator willing to participate in a crime and if we were caught we would be strung up by the local lord and his bailiffs.
“If he knows of the Ancient One, others will also know. We will continue.”
Conrad agreed to act as our translator and guide, for a sizable sum, and so we went south and a little to the west, into the dark beneath the trees. Three days, we had picked our way into the northern Black Forest, before reaching that high ridge and looking out at the seemingly impenetrable mass of deep green.
Our guide, Conrad, had lost his parents and sister to the pestilence and his father’s business was almost entirely without custom. He claimed he was unafraid of the forest and that the people were perfectly reasonable folk. When it came to the stories of the Wolf Man, he said he had heard them from other children growing up but his parents had forbidden him to speak of such nonsense. It was all a little close to heathenry for good Christian people. But no one knew any details. Only the hunters, the charcoal makers, the woodsmen and swineherds knew the details and most of them would never speak of such things openly and never to outsiders.
“All I need is one man who knows,” I replied. “One man who knows on which mountain to search. Which valley to scour.”
On the fourth day, we came to Hausach, a small village nestled on the flat bottom of a steep-sided valley.
It seemed as
though everyone was dead.
The graveyard was lined with freshly-filled graves and a long trench had been dug as if ready to accept a host of bodies. Yet it was empty, and the sides had begun to crumble into the waterlogged hole.
“We should not enter this place,” Conrad said, in between muttered prayers.
“He ain’t wrong, sir,” Walt said, speaking softly. “Horses are nervy.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “We have walked through pestilential lands before and remain free from the sickness. Come, now.”
But nothing could convince our guide to continue on and Conrad took his payment and fled back to Calw as fast as his pony would carry him.
Walt climbed back into his saddle. “Well, I suppose we don’t need one who speaks the local tongue if everyone is dead.”
The next village was far smaller and seemed as though it had been abandoned for over a year.
“We need to find local people, Walter. They must be out there in the hills and under the trees but how can we find them?”
“Never many people in the woods in the best of days, is there, sir. If you want people, you find a town. To find a town, you follow the widest tracks.”
“That will take us away from the deep woods,” I argued. “And I know my grandfather is here. Somewhere. I can feel him.”
Walt frowned and looked at me strangely before shrugging. “Going forward sometimes means going backward. You said that to me years ago.”
“I very much doubt it. But we must find local people so let us go on.”
On the empty road to Freiburg, a rainstorm began late in the afternoon that was heavy enough to make travelling further almost impossible and we walked our horses into the trees to look for a dense copse or ideally a rocky cliff to shelter against until it passed. A track led to a very fine stopping place consisting of a short defile that was narrow enough for a few tree trunks to have been thrown across them to create a crude roof.
We slowed as we approached because someone was already there.
Loosening my cloak, I checked that my weapons were free to be drawn quickly and let my horse trail far behind me to make space. Walter began to draw his sword but I waved him back. Walking into a travellers’ camp with a drawn sword is as sure a way as any to start a fight.
“Good evening,” I called out in French, raising my voice over the cacophony of the ongoing deluge. “We are simple travellers, seeking shelter.”
Between the ten- or twelve-foot high rock outcrops on either side and beneath the roof was no more than a small family and a smoky little fire sputtering in the rain. A man stood with his son and behind them was the wife and a young girl. They were all soaked through and fearful.
“God be with you, good fellow. May we share your fire?” I asked as I approached, smiling. “We shall build it higher. We have food that we will share with you. We do not have the pestilence, as I am sure you can see. Lower your hood, Walt, show them your face.”
The wife hissed something but the man looked us over and nodded. Presumably my wealth was obvious enough to allay his initial fears. The son glared with open hostility but was dutiful enough to follow the lead of his father as they took their seats on the logs around the fire.
“My name is Richard and my servant is Walter. Where do you come from, sir?” I asked as we settled ourselves.
The wife glared at the husband and he hesitated but he knew that to not answer at all would be extremely rude.
“Basel.”
“Ah,” I said. “You are heading north?”
Again, he hesitated before answering. “East.” His French was heavily accented.
Walt busied himself splitting logs to one side and I left him to it.
“Is it bad in Basel?” I asked. He said nothing. “Of course, it is bad everywhere. Is the pestilence lesser in the East? We are heading southward but I do not know what our final destination will be as I am searching for a man, for a story of a man. Perhaps you have heard of a wildman who lives in the woods hereabouts? Some call him the Ancient One, or the Wolf Man. Have any other travellers mentioned such a man?”
The husband was confused and his wife scowled at his side. The son’s eyes were wide with anger which was clearly aimed at me. He saw me as a threat to the safety of his family, which I most certainly was.
“We have heard nothing like that,” the woman said, in rather good French, though there was something about it that made me look closer at her, and all of them.
The light was poor, her clothes were heavy and her hair was entirely covered. And she was drenched but she had a particular look to her. Pretty, in fact, and younger than her demeanour had suggested but her complexion was dark. It was a look that the husband had also, and of course the children were the same.
“What was your profession in Basel, sir?” I asked.
Both the wife and the son looked frightened and glanced at the husband, who clenched his jaw for a moment before looking down at his hands. His wife tutted and turned away. The son glared at his father with contempt, which he then turned on me.
“Are you Jews?” I asked but I already knew the answer. Walt stopped chopping wood and stared at them.
“We are travellers, heading east,” the husband said, not meeting my eye.
“You are travelling alone? Just the four of you? How do you mean to protect yourself against those who would do you harm?”
The boy jumped to his feet, eyes filled with emotion. The father pulled him down while his mother scolded him. The little girl continued to bury her face in her mother’s flank.
It was perhaps an unfair question to ask because clearly they had no protection and little hope of getting wherever it was they were going. Even in the best of times it would have been unlikely that a man such as he would have been able to long protect his woman on the wilder stretches of road. And at that time, when it appeared to be the end of the world and the civilising effects of the law was falling to pieces about us, they had no hope at all.
“Why do you not hire guards?” I asked him.
He scoffed and rolled his eyes, which was a strange response.
“Not all Jews are wealthy,” the woman said, glancing at her husband. I took this to be a barbed comment aimed at her husband’s failings but he nodded vigorously.
“We be very poor people, sir, and have nothing to offer anyone.”
Now he had raised my suspicions, for no Jew took pride in his poverty, as a good Christian might.
“Not all wealth comes in the form of coin and gold, sir,” I said, looking at his pretty young wife.
He looked horrified but she sat up straighter and held my gaze. The boy again stirred himself as if he was about to leap to his mother’s defence but she muttered some foreign words to him and he sullenly stayed where he was.
“Perhaps we could pay you, then,” the wife said, straightening the sides of her headdress and smoothing her clothing over her body. Even through the thick woollen layers, her womanly shape was quite apparent.
Despite myself, my ardour was raised. Without conscious thought, I entertained the idea of taking the woman to some sheltered spot close by to lay with her. It would have to be done against a tree or over some fallen trunk. She was offering herself in return for ongoing protection on the road, or even out of the hope that I would not murder her family that very night and take her anyway, before killing her, too. Rather rapidly, my ardour cooled.
The husband was looking down, while the woman looked at me steadily. She shook, ever so slightly. The strength of a woman, in what she is willing to suffer to protect her family, is the most powerfully-felt force in the world. Yet it is worthless without the physical and moral strength of a man to protect her. And her man was a weakling.
“I cannot travel with you eastwards,” I said, “as my task takes me elsewhere. If we had been headed in the same direction, I would have protected you without any form of payment.” The woman sagged, then, looking down. She took a deep breath. “But I would urge you to spend whateve
r coin you have to hire proper guards to escort you.”
“We did,” the wife said, glaring at me again. “They robbed us on the third day. They took all of our money, our jewellery. They even took my husband’s and my son’s weapons. Could you not escort us, good sir? Some of the way at least?”
“I can do no more than wish that God goes with you.”
They nodded, sadly.
Walt approached and began to build up the fire.
“Was it you?” he asked them. “Was it you what poisoned the wells?”
“Walter,” I chided him. “We are guests at their fire, are we not?”
He was surprised. “But they be Jews, sir. I mean no harm by asking but ain’t it a fair question? I just want to know, is all.”
“We poison nothing,” the man said. “Never. Nothing.”
I nodded. “It would not be the likes of these good folk, Walt. It would have been the elders and the priests of their tribe who did the poisoning. Besides, the learned physicians are certain that the pestilence is due to miasmas released from within the Earth, due to an alignment of the planets.”
“Our elders poisoned nothing,” the man said, sullenly. “We are innocent.”
Walt scoffed. “The Jews might be many things but they ain’t innocent, sir. We let you live in our towns, let you grow rich off our backs. You people are like fleas infesting our clothes, feasting on our blood. And this is how you repay us?”
Him and his boy stirred again but I knew they would do nothing. They were weaklings and soon they would be taken on the road and they would be murdered, for one reason or another.
“Leave them be, Walt,” I said. “You are right that their people are never to be trusted by good Christian folk but here before us is nothing but a poor family who need our charity.”
“Charity is for Christians, sir,” Walt said, with such certainty that I hesitated to correct him. Possibly he was right, for I was never much of a theologian. “What was your profession, sir? Were you a money lender?”
“I am a goldsmith,” he said, with pride.
“There you are, then, Sir Richard,” Walt said, immensely pleased with himself. “A bloody goldsmith. What more do you want, eh? I never understood none of it my whole life. What do you want to live in our towns for anyway, goldsmith? Living protected by our walls, protected by our soldiers, eating our bread what we grew with our own hands. And what do we get for it?” He held up a hand and counted off on his fingers. “You steal our babies for your blood magic, you poison our fountains and wells and kill us off for no reason, you creep about at night changing into animals, you pretend to be one of us when it suits you while at the same time you demand special treatment because you ain’t Christians, and… and…” he flailed around, desperate to find a fifth outrage so he could close his thumb also. “And usury. I cannot fathom why we allow them in our kingdoms at all, Sir Richard, can you? Of all the people of the world, the least trustworthy of all are—”
