Breath (9781439132227) (4 page)

I've seen lots of animals from my perch: squirrels, of course, and hedgehogs, and I even saw a beaver. The lagoon near our farm has two dams, so I know beavers well. Großmutter and I make a beaver stew with sage and horseradish that leaves all of us so leaden with the fatty meat that we fall asleep in the common room. Yes, I know beavers well; but I had never seen one swimming in the river Weser before, and the sight surprised me so much I laughed.

Finally we come to the small fields, lying in short, parallel strips with irregular edges. These are tended by the farmers who've moved into Höxter town, just like the farmers around us have moved into Hameln town. I squint, hoping to see the lone farmstead I know still stands this side of town. But the gray rain foils me.

I can make out the Castle Corvey, though, down on the river's edge. Schwalenberg, inland between Hameln town and Höxter, has a castle too, and people talk of other castles being built all around Saxony. They're inhabited by counts who are
controlled by the emperor and, in turn, control the townsfolk. No one else can build a castle—no rich merchant, for example—it's not permitted. Castle Corvey is the only one I've ever seen, and only from the boat each month as I come for my lesson. The thick gray stones seem to form from the rain, but they look strong all the same. I wish Hameln had a strong castle.

Beyond the castle is the high town wall and the spires of the church inside it. Höxters church has two towers, though it's smaller than Hamelns main church. It was built in the year 800, more than 480 years ago. I love its oldness and its wood statues of the Virgin and of the popes. And I love the library where Pater Frederick teaches me.

I straighten up in my excitement, and the box of hens slides down my back. It crashes on the crate under me and breaks open. Hens squawk and flap around like idiots.

And I'm running after them, grabbing at their legs, slipping and sliding, and cutting my shins on the corners of crates. There's nothing in my pouch but a stone, nothing I can use to pay if anyone insists. Someone swats me hard on the back of the head and I go sprawling. But I manage not to lose my grip on the hen in each hand. I get to my feet.
Sweat breaks out all over me. It's a wonder I'm not curled on the deck in paroxysms of coughs. But they're laughing at me, the crew—snorting with laughter; they won't insist on the cargo fee. They're saying I lack sense, I'm a fool, I'm good for nothing, just like any other child.

By the time we dock, I've managed to get all four hens back in the box, which I'm holding shut by circling both arms around it. My hair is dripping and I remember Großmutter's warnings. I've been stupid not to take a new familiar, for now I have nothing to help me ward off the malady that already sends the slimmest tendrils to curl around my lungs.

Men wait with horses on the dock. They'll hitch them to the barge so the horses can pull it up on land for unloading. I leap past them and head straight for the gate that offers admission to the town. The rhododendron bushes are blooming like the maddened—they must love this rain, because I've never seen them this big and colored, this deep a purple. A lord's tasseled mantle is no more purple than these flowers. I pass through the gate and I'm on the main street, so wide that three tall men could lie head to foot across it. It goes straight to the market square, of course, and onward from there to the opposite gate
out of town. But I don't go as far as the market square. I cut left, onto the second side street.

This street is narrow and crooked. Rats run before me and disappear into a hole. A spasm of revulsion goes through me. I spit after them, to clean my mouth.

The town houses stand four or five stories high, with the upper ones jutting out beyond the lower ones, like in Hameln town. I've never been in a town house, but I wouldn't want to sleep on one of the lower stories, where no light can get in. And I couldn't bear hearing my neighbors all the time.

I wager Bertram couldn't either.

Father's right: Our farmstead is better. Bertram muttered something yesterday about moving to town without the rest of us if Father wouldn't agree. I'd hate that. We can't have the six of us go down to five—the family has shrunk too much already. Bertram has to find a way to convince Johannah to leave town life.

I knock on the fifth door on the right. It opens a crack and a lean, pale, bleary-eyed woman glares out at me. She's younger than most coven members—at least in Hameln's coven. After me the next youngest must be three times my age. “Hens,” I say, though she can hear the clucking.

Her face remains sullen, but she opens the door wide enough for me to squeeze through and set the box on the floor. The instant I put it down, a side falls off and the hens flap, then strut, through the dark room.

“Come back on your way out of town,” she says. “I've got something for you to bring back to Hameln.”

I leave quickly and return to the main street. The passing townsmen make me feel strange, with their earrings and chin piercings. Jewelry doesn't make sense on a farm, and the sight of it here reminds me that I don't belong. I can't imagine Bertram with earrings.

I run the rest of the way to the abbey. This is a double monastery, with a section for women. A young nun I've never met before greets me kindly and leads me to Pater Frederick.

Soon I'm reading aloud from the big parchment pages. They're made of cow skin sewn together down the middle. I like how the parchment is folded, how the hair sides face each other and the flesh sides face each other. I hold my hands clasped behind my back so I don't touch the pages by accident.

This is a thin book, but some are enormous.
Pater Frederick told me it can take hundreds of hides to make a single big book. This book came from the monastery at Würzburg, down south. Usually many scribes work separately on the different pages, then the parchment is bound together later, otherwise it would take too long to make a book. But only one scribe worked on this book. I can tell because the script has certain peculiarities that hold throughout, from page to page. The outer binding is two wood boards covered with leather and engraved with gold.

It's a new book. And it's different from others I've read. It's not Scripture or gospel or theology. Instead, it's poetry. A young poet named Boppe praises chivalry and the Virgin Mary and all female virtues. I turn the pages carefully, lifting the corner with wooden tongs. The poet talks of charity and generosity and decency. And he laments his own poverty.

I swivel around on my stool to face Pater Frederick. “Does he mean that? Is he really poor?”

Pater Frederick sits in a chair with his head leaning back against the wall and his hands clasped across his chest. “Probably,” he says, keeping his eyes on the ceiling. “Most people are.”

This is true. Almost everyone we know labors on
land that belongs to others. They don't own what they grow. They have to pay special taxes to the lord of the land. And they're not free to buy services elsewhere—they have to grind their grain at the landlord's mill.

Our family is different. We're freemen, living on our own land, subject only to the emperor. We pay military taxes—that's all. But we're still poor. Not as poor as serfs, but poorer than town merchants or burghers. “But how can a scholar as fine as this Boppe be poor? Look, they've even put his poems in a book.”

Pater Frederick gets slowly to his feet. “Maybe he won't stay poor, if he gets a benefactor. Anyway, what does it matter?”

Father hates it when our priest in Hameln town asks things like that. He says anyone who doesn't know what's wrong with poverty has too much to eat.

“The poor aren't treated the same under the law,” I say, mimicking a complaint of Father's.

“Under man's law. But master and servant are equals before God. Man is a moral being, endowed with reason.” Pater Frederick circles me slowly. “Man understands the principle of order, the principle that allows him to share in the government of the universe. Man has moral self-determination.”

Man: Father, my brothers, me. “What about women?”

“They have souls. They don't reason as well as we do, but they have souls.”

“What about children?”

“After age seven, children, also, have moral self-determination.”

“Is that why they can't be sold into slavery after that?”

Pater Frederick nods.

“But then, why aren't they set free as soon as they turn seven?”

Pater Frederick raises his brows. “Man's law again, with its inevitable flaws.” He closes the book and leaves it on its little table, but he's smiling. I can tell he's happy with my reasoning—this is what he most strives to teach me, logical, moral reasoning.

“Do you have sisters, Pater Frederick?”

“No.”

“I do. My sisters are slaves in Magdeburg. When I go there, I'm going to earn money and buy their freedom.”

Pater Frederick doesn't answer. He takes a box off a shelf and goes to the wide table near the wrindow. He lays out quills, a pot of soot, a bowl of vinegar, ink horns, a razor, a sponge, and a ruler.
Then he presses flat a large piece of rough parchment.

We each cut a quill to a sharp point. Then we mix the soot with vinegar to make a thick black ink. Pater Frederick draws a letter. I copy. He points out places for improvement. I copy five more times, using the ruler as a guide to try to form the letters in a straight line from side to side and of uniform height and width. Pater draws another letter. And so we go, till the parchment is full. He gives a critique of the whole work, with enough praise to make me happy. Then I sponge it clean and leave it to dry for use next month.

We go into the kitchen and eat pork on a bed of steamed watercress, and dark bread. At home I have lots of pork, for we raise both hogs and dairy cows. But I never tire of it. Who could? Pater washes his meal down with beer. He gives me cider. I don't bother to protest. Großmutter's rules don't extend to Höxter, but Pater won't ever give me beer anyway because he says it's clear that Großmutter is right—the fact that I am still living is proof of that.

When we finish, Pater hands me a slab of pork and a chunk of bread. “For your dinner,” he says, like always. The smell is luscious.

I roll them into my pant cuff, like I used to roll
Kröte. But I never brought Kröte with me to my lessons. Pater Frederick isn't like the priest in Hameln town; he has little sympathy with covens, even papist ones like ours. Whenever we talk about it, he says I'll have to give up the coven if I really want to become a cleric. I object, of course. I list the good things we do. But that's the end of the discussion, for he never presses. It isn't worth fighting about a future that doesn't exist. Even a Dominican priest, with all his scholarly ways, knows when to let an argument go.

That's why he didn't respond when I talked about buying back Eike and Hildegard.

We ate the midday meal later than normal because I arrived later than normal. So we have to hurry. We rush back to lessons now, this time history. Pater talks about the Crusades.

“Germany had no part in the First Crusade,” I offer, remembering Father's claims.

“That's true. Antioch, Edessa, Jerusalem—they were successfully conquered without us.”

“And the other Crusades were failures,” I say.

“But valuable nonetheless.”

“My father called them disasters.”

Pater Frederick runs his tongue along the sharp edges of his top front teeth. He does that whenever
I've said something stupid. “Come.” He leads me back to the kitchen pantry. He points as he talks. “Maize, rice, sugar, peppercorns, cinnamon.” He takes a cloth off a basket on the counter and points. “Lemons, oranges. We didn't know any of these goods before the Crusades.”

I'm still looking back at the shelves.

“What are you eyeing?” He lifts the sugar sack and holds it before me. “Dip your finger.”

I'm so thrilled I cough. Sugar costs more than we can afford. I don't think anyone in my family has ever tasted it. I put my finger in my mouth, then dig it into the sack. It comes out coated with tan granules that sparkle. I lick them off my finger as slowly as I can. They are different from honey. They are strangely odorless, yet bursting with sweetness.

Pater lifts the cinnamon sack and holds it before me.

I wet my finger in my mouth again.

He laughs. “No, no. This is just for smelling.”

I look. The sack is full of nothing but bits of brown stick. But, oh, the smell is pungent. I love it.

“You grate it and add it to sweets. Next time you come, I'll have a sugared cinnamon bun waiting for you.”

I swallow. What a long month it will be.

He takes down the peppercorn sack now and holds it under my nose.

I breathe deep, then step back, sneezing. The insides of my nose prickle.

He laughs again. “I'm sorry. I should have warned you.” He goes to put it back on the shelf.

“Wait, please.” I stay his arm and look in the bag. Small balls of red and purple and black give off that scent so strong I get dizzy and cough. Großmutter could make interesting brews with pepper. And what would Bertram do if I stuck a few balls beside his head as he slept? I can almost hear him sneezing and sneezing. I grin. “Peppercorns are wonderful.”

“Some say pepper is the real reason for the Crusades.”

“Is that true?”

He laughs again as he puts the bag away. “The next time you're in Hameln, go to the cloth merchants. See the damask and the baldachin silk from Baghdad. Look at the colors of the yarns—the dyes came to us from the Arab world. Look at the rugs. If you can get your grandmother to take you to the women's tables, smell the perfumes and cosmetics. All Arab goods.”

“So we fought the Crusades for pepper and perfume?”

“And the stars.” His eyes are bright. And now I'm pretty sure he's making fiin of me.