The Idiot King

by Patty Jansen

  Upriver from that branch, the colour of the water became darker and clearer.

  “A branch of the river splits off and goes around the back of that hill,” Roald said. “The abbot got the workers to dig a new creek so that they could build a water mill there.”

  “So the cloudiness is run-off from mud?” Johanna asked. From where they were, upstream of the creek, the change in colour was very clear.

  “Is that mill working now?” Karl asked. It was the first thing he said in their presence, although he still seemed a little uncertain about how to relate to Roald. “Last time I saw it, they were still building it. They had some strange problems with it, I understand.”

  “The mill is working,” Roald said.

  The boat turned back downstream, and then drifted back to the jetty.

  Johanna caught the post, and Roald threw the rope over and pulled the boat in. A rickety wooden ladder showed that the monks were prepared for times of low water, but those stairs were not needed today.

  Johanna loosened the harness and the two bulls wandered off to graze.

  A gravel-paved path ran from the jetty to the low buildings of the order set on the hill. The belltower of the chapel that Roald had talked about overlooked the fields.

  The place looked completely peaceful, with rows of grapes with yellowing leaves and cows grazing in the paddock. A faint mist hung over the fields. From here, Florisheim looked pretty with the Baron’s castle and its fat, stubby tower protruding from the jumble of slate-covered roofs. From here, the quay looked barren and menacing, with the city wall and its iron gates at the back. While the city gate that Johanna passed on the way into town from the camp had always been open, these gates facing the river were always closed. Two ships lay there, low river freight vessels like the Lady Sara, but less pretty.

  The gated entrances to the cellars underneath the quay were also closed, and most of them were too far under water for any type of boat to enter.

  Behind her, Roald said, “Uh-oh.”

  Johanna’s heart jumped and she looked back at their side of the river, expecting to see someone coming down the path. But there was no one. Cows grazed. A group of geese came waddling down the hill.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Don’t like geese,” he said, nervously looking over his shoulder. “You know that I once got bitten by a goose?”

  Johanna laughed. “You’re afraid of geese?”

  “You’d be afraid, too, if you knew these geese. They are not nice.”

  Meanwhile, the geese waddled, honking down the path.

  “Let’s go this way.” Roald pulled her sleeve.

  He led them onto a side path between two fields of grapes. The path was narrow and muddy, and they had to walk single-file. The grapes grew in rows on trellises that reached above their heads, so that they couldn’t see what happened elsewhere. Johanna thought of the tunnel of interwoven trees on Duke Lothar’s land. The vines were heavy with fat, dew-covered red grapes. Roald picked a small bunch and shared them around. “The skins are touch, but just spit them out.”

  The grapes looked sweet, but they tasted sour. The skins were indeed quite inedible. Roald ate and spat, but she felt like she had to be more civilised about it, and wormed the skins into her hand before dropping them onto the ground.

  “Who would want fruit as sour as this?”

  “They’re for making wine,” Roald said, and went on to explain how wine was made. Apparently, it involved men stomping through grapes with their bare feet.

  Then they came over the crest of the hill where the vineyards stopped.

  Here there were orchards full of apples, that would soon need to be harvested, and stands of berries bleeding into pine forest.

  Johanna couldn’t help but think that some of these fruits should have been harvested in the past few days when the weather had been warm.

  A couple of horses grazed in a paddock.

  Roald whistled.

  One of the animals, a brown stallion, pricked up his ears, and turned his head in Roald’s direction.

  Roald ran to the fence and slapped his hand on the top bar. “Come here, Selmus! Come here, come here.”

  Silly. Of course his friends on the farm had been animals. Johanna should have known that.

  The horse clopped to the fence. Roald climbed on top so he could better reach the horse’s face. It nuzzled his face, whickering. Roald petted its head and scratched between the ears. If he could rule the animal kingdom, Roald would be the best king ever.

  “Shouldn’t we go?” Johanna looked over her shoulders, nervous that someone would come. The plan was to try to find Shepherd Carolus, without being discovered, and smuggle him out.

  “They feed the animals in the mornings,” Roald said. “No one comes here for most of the day while they’re all working.”

  “Aren’t they working in the fields?” Although by the neglected look of the vineyards, she should have known the answer. And neglecting the harvest seemed the most stupid thing to do ever. If the religious order sold wine and dried fruit, then what would they eat for the rest of the year if they didn’t get those grapes in?

  “You’ll see.”

  Roald jumped down from the fence. They continued down the hill. The horse followed them as far as it could. Most of the mist had cleared, but veils of it still hung in the valley, covering a little thicket of oak trees, where a small tower protruded from the canopy of leaves. Water pooled in a small lake in front of the trees. The surface was smooth as glass and reflected the trees and the chapel on the far bank. It was all so peaceful that Johanna couldn’t imagine that people who lived here did any ill.

  But when they came close to the chapel, it was as if the mist increased and the day grew darker. There were also . . . strange noises. Hammering, the grinding of millstones.

  “Is there a water mill here?”

  “I told you they diverted a part of the river to go through the fields so that they could have a mill here.”

  Yes, he had told her. It just seemed an unlikely place for a water mill, right next to the chapel, supposedly a place of prayer and solitude.

  On the other side of the chapel, trees had been cleared from an area that covered both banks of the creek. The water fell down a man-made drop, operating the watermill at good speed. The silence of the forest was broken by the steady slosh-slosh of the water in the scoops and the creaking and clanking of the mechanism. Whatever the mill operated was under the ground, connected by a large beam and two gear wheels and a second beam which went into a hole at least twenty paces across. Johanna couldn’t see over the edge, but sounds of clanking and rattling mill wheels rose from below.

  “Do they make paper here?” It was a strange place for that, with not even a roof overhead.

  “No. This is where they make iron.”

  Iron? Wasn’t that something people got . . . from the mountains?

  Johanna crept closer, but even when she could see the mechanisms and moving mill wheels in that hole in the ground, she still couldn’t see the bottom of the pit. The beam went deep into the ground, still turning, to whatever mechanism it operated down there. It squeaked.

  The pit appeared to be man-dug, with walls fortified with trunks of pine saplings. A ramp made from crude planks of wood zigzagged down into the pit. The air was moist here, and misty. It smelled of wet earth and reminded her in a disturbing, unpleasant way of the ice cellar.

  She could almost smell the faint rank scent of beginning decay.

  A monk in a grey habit came up a ramp wheeling a barrow full of what looked like black gravel. He went a short distance into the shelter of a roof on the other side of the pit and upended his load on top of a heap of similar material. Someone else was shovelling rocks from another pile into another machine that looked like grinding stones.

  There was a huge brick furnace at the back of the shed. Another set of beams and wheels went in that direction, coming from a second water mill, and moved a giant bellows up and
down that fanned the flames in the furnace. The entrance of the furnace was open and a monk was shovelling in scoops full of the black dirt.

  On the far end of the furnace, another monk lifted out a long pole with, on the end, a stone bowl with red glowing fluid inside. Another came to help and they poured it into a stone mould.

  Wait—she recognised these two. They weren’t proper monks. They were the two men she had sent downriver as scouts. She raised a hand to her mouth to stop herself shouting out. All that time the people in the camp had been waiting for them to return.

  Both men looked dirty. The hollow expressions on their faces spoke of days of hard work and little chance of escape.

  On the floor lay finished blocks of metal, sheets and strange shapes. Some monks were fashioning glowing shapes with hammers before they cooled down too much.

  In this open shed, Johanna recognised Shepherd Carolus, dressed in one of the grey gowns, stacking blocks of iron on top of each other. His arms had several raw wounds and bruises. His face was sweaty with the work.

  “There are three of our people here,” she said in a low voice to Karl, who had not met the Shepherd. She wasn’t afraid of being heard. The noise of the mill and the rushing water would down out their voices.

  “Are there people guarding this place?” Karl asked.

  “It’s easy to escape work,” Roald said. “Not so easy to stay away from punishment. The forests on all sides are full of dangerous things, and the monks will hunt you down and punish you.”

  Karl nodded.

  Shepherd Carolus now stood with his back to them, lifting another heavy piece on top of the pile.

  “What in heaven’s name do they need that much iron for?” Johanna asked. She knew about swords and various farming tools, but couldn’t think why anyone needed huge piece of iron, flat sheets, curved sheets, and chunky pieces with holes, presumably for handles, but the pieces looked like no tool she had ever seen.

  “It’s for making machines,” Roald said.

  “What kind?” He’d talked about these machines for a bit, and like many things Roald said, she had not taken him seriously. Did that mean that birds could indeed fly to the Moon?

  “The black rock is what makes the fire burn so hot. They find it in the ground in that hole over there. It’s extremely deep. There are tunnels down there and it’s very wet and dirty. When people come out they’re black all over. The iron rocks they get from a little way up the river where they’ve made another hole. They put those rocks on a barge and let it float down the river. Then they crush it and heat it up in the furnace and they can pour the iron.”

  A couple of monks were now lifting a platform full of hexagonal shapes that still glowed with heat. One of the monks only had one hand, which he used to lower the platform in the water with rope and pulleys. The water boiled and hissed, releasing a cloud of steam that hid the monks from view.

  Johanna pulled Roald back and Karl followed a little bit into the forest.

  “How are we going to get them out?” She looked from Roald to Karl and back again. “Maybe at night? Can you show us where they sleep?”

  Roald shook his head. “There are geese near the main buildings.”

  “Do we have to worry about geese?” Karl asked. “They’re only birds.”

  “They make a lot of noise,” Johanna said. Besides, if Roald didn’t want to do something, it was best not to do it.

  Karl gave her an incredulous look in an and-you-believe-that-we-should-be-afraid-of-geese? way.

  “What is the path they normally use to go back to the buildings?” Johanna asked. “The same one we’ve used?”

  “No, there is another path. I’ll show you.”

  The area behind the chapel was covered in thick forest. Roald led the group over various animal tracks that led through the tangle.

  The sound of the thumping mill wheels and falling water faded before becoming stronger again.

  They arrived at the top of another waterfall, this one not yet with a mill, although a hollowed-out area in the opposite bank showed that one was planned there. The water that tumbled over the edge into a deep pond was murky, as if someone had spilled milk in the creek upstream. A fine mist spread at the spot where the waterfall hit the pond’s surface, and swirls of fine silt formed cloudy shapes under the surface. This was where the river downstream obtained its muddy colour.

  It was as if the clouds consisted of tiny particles of silver that, when they swirled, reflected the light like schools of tiny fish. Johanna crouched and reached for the water, wanting to stir it up.

  “Don’t touch,” Karl said. “The water is bad. Don’t touch it and don’t drink it.”

  All right. She straightened.

  But then, a thought: what about the camp? It was downstream and people had been drinking this water for months.

  They had also behaved too passively for months. She had wondered what made them like this and now she knew why.

  “Magic,” Johanna said, softly. She stared at the pond, watching the swirling shapes under the surface. At times she swore she could see people or faces.

  Roald said, “When I was here, Alexandre fell in and the ghosts nearly killed him. That was why they said he went mad.”

  Johanna couldn’t stop looking at the water. It called out to her, making the magic in her blood sing.

  Someone has disturbed the magic lines. The meaning of that warning was now clear.

  The digging in the ground by the monks had done this. Magic bled out of the ground with the water that the monks used to cool their iron and rinse their rocks.

  “So, if we’re not going to get them from the dorm, then what do we do?” Karl said. He stood a bit back from the water, clamping his hands around himself, staring out over the mist. The bell tower of the main chapel protruded from above the buildings on top of the hill.

  “We wait until the workers start going home, and then we’ll try to get the Shepherd’s attention. He’s a strong man and I’m sure he can run. I presume they follow that path over there to the house.”

  Roald nodded. “Yes, they go that way, and then up the hill and between the vineyards to the back of the main building. There is a chicken pen there, and they have ducks. The geese don’t live near that part of the building. I think they don’t like the ducks. Oh, and there is also a donkey, but it’s not very friendly. You have to be careful, because it kicks.”

  “What time do they go back to the building?”

  “Usually when it goes dark.”

  That meant a long wait. It also meant that even after they freed the men, they might have to stay out here overnight because it might be too dark to cross the river.

  The thought of staying here overnight gave her the chills.

  ‎

  Chapter 18

  * * *

  THERE WAS NO COVER closer to the house, so they had to wait in the forest. Roald stretched out on the grass and was soon asleep, but Johanna felt uneasy. She spent a good while studying the shapes in the water. If she squinted, she could see them bleeding into the pool over the edge of the waterfall and re-forming once they were in the pond. She walked a little way back where she could see the cloudy water run out of the pit that the monks used to cool the iron. A stream of particularly milky water flowed out of a clay pipe that came from the deeper hole.

  At regular intervals, a monk would come up the ramp out of that hole with a wheelbarrow full of black stuff. As Roald had said, his face was black as soot, and this made his eyes look oddly bright. He would wheel his load to the furnace, tip it over and go back down.

  The water mill creaked, the huge bellows made a “whoomp” noise every time the air was pressed out into the furnace. Sometimes, fire would blow out of little air holes on the side.

  Shepherd Carolus was still stacking the iron shapes. A cart had arrived with two huge horses and he was loading the iron pieces onto the tray. Whenever he stopped for a rest, one of the overseers would yell. This was the only time that the horse
s would twitch or turn their heads. They were very huge, with long fetlocks and big, fat rumps. She wondered if Roald knew these horses, too.

  She counted at least fifteen men in the clearing and under the shelter, but there might be more in the hole where she couldn’t see them. Some of those men would be supervisors, like the one with the embroidered key on his robe, the Burovian prince, but others looked like workers or, more correctly, prisoners.

  The sun came through, its light weak through the mist, and then sank towards the horizon.

  They sat between the trees and ate. The bread they had brought was dry and hard to swallow.

  Karl looked really nervous, and when Johanna asked him why he was so jumpy, he only said that, “Strange things happen here at night.” He wouldn’t elaborate on what those things were, at which Roald started reciting a dissertation about ghosts and other things unnatural, written, he assured Johanna and Karl, by a priest of the Belaman Church. Strangely enough, it did nothing help Karl’s nerves.

  As dusk slid over the land, a few lights came on in the windows of the main building, but the whoomping of the bellows kept going and no one in the hole or in the shed with the furnace was preparing to stop work. Did these people go to sleep at all?

  The Moon rose over the horizon like a giant orange orb and spread an eerie pale glow over the fields. In it, and the rising mist, shapes swirled over the surface of the water.

  The thumping and creaking in the forest clearing continued unabated. A second cart approached over the main road from the main farm buildings.

  “They’re using Selmus,” Roald whispered next to Johanna while they watched the two horses pull the cart at leisurely pace towards the forest. The cart did not come back, nor did the one that was already there.

  “Do you know where they take those iron shapes?” Johanna asked.

  Roald said, “A place down the river that’s called Willow Bend. It’s the abbot’s summer residence. It’s quite close to Aroden.”