Otfried Preussler - Krabat

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.