Chapter Text
At the beginning of the New Year, the mill struck Krabat as cold and strange.
Juro was missing from every part of it, and Krabat felt hollowed out. He’d killed his friend, just as the Master once had, with Jirko. They’d stood on opposite sides and Krabat was absolutely sure that he’d had no choice. But now, after Juro was gone, he was ambivalent.
Juro had become a part of the mill. It was as if they’d done it an injury by taking him away.
Witko was making every possible effort, but he’d only had one year to learn and practice Juro’s many tasks. Without help, he would not manage. The Master and Hanzo lent him different journeymen, to do some of the kitchen or house-chores, the garden work, or take care of the poultry and swine. Stani, Lobosch, and Kubo did it gladly, but the Master made sure that the others did their share, too.
Lyschko and Krabat had to help the Master summon a new apprentice. He reached the mill on the evening before Epiphany.
Krabat had been there when Witko, Lobosch, and Stani arrived, and none of them had started their trial period in particularly good condition, but he’d never seen such a pitiful apprentice as Mischka.
Mischka was considerably older than Krabat had been when he arrived, maybe seventeen or eighteen. That already made him too old to be an apprentice. There was fear in his eyes as he pushed the door of the mill open. His clothes were shabby and torn, his shape was lean and drawn forward in a hunch, and he moved as if he were in pain and dreaded that it would soon be worse.
The Master offered Mischka an apprenticeship with his usual words, and Mischka shook his hand like every apprentice before him, as Lyschko and Krabat looked on.
With a thudding roar, the mill started to move, and it shook the house. Mischka was terrified.
The Master cupped his hands around his mouth like a funnel and cried, “The Mill! It grinds again!”
But this time, the Master didn’t immediately lead the newcomer to the attic to show him his bed and new belongings. “What’s wrong with you?” he shouted over the noise, gesturing at Mischka’s back to make his meaning clear. The apprentice still held himself hunched over.
Mischka flinched as if he’d been caught. “Nothing,” he said, so quietly that they practically had to lip-read to make out what he said despite the din from the machinery. He straightened his back, but couldn’t keep from wincing.
“Your jacket and shirt. Take them off!” The Master ordered him.
Mischka obeyed, with a face like he’d just been told to climb the stairs to the gallows. With stiff motions, he stripped off his tattered clothes. Under his shirt, he had stripes that must have come from a whip or a cane. They weren’t new, but his skin stretched taut between them as they healed, and some were red and swollen.
“What for?!” The Master demanded. He still had to shout, to make himself heard over the mill.
Mischka closed his eyes for a moment. “I was with the army …” He spoke louder now, but they could still barely understand him. “I tried to run away, but they caught me.”
He looked exhausted and spiritless, as he added, “and now I’ve deserted again. For a second offense, they’ll beat me to death – and admitting that, sir, I’ve lost my place here, haven’t I?”
The Master shook his head, and then said, “whoever you were makes no difference to me. No one will take you from here, I’ll make sure of that! But also, I’m no lord, so you can stuff that ‘sir’ and speak plainly!”
The Master disappeared into his room briefly and returned with a jar of salve in hand. “Lyschko, put this on his wounds!”
Lyschko smiled a little apologetically at Mischka, before walking behind him and rubbing the salve into his back. He went about his task more gently than Krabat had expected. Nevertheless, Mischka endured it with gritted teeth.
Krabat thought the salve smelled familiar. Then he realized that it must be Juro’s, which somehow the Master had acquired.
When the new apprentice was dressed again, as pleased as he was astonished at the speed of the healing, the Master ordered “Krabat, Lyschko, show him where he’ll sleep and the rest! And then get yourselves to the grinding room!”
It wasn’t as loud in the attic as it was closer to the grinding room, but there was still the rattling and rumbling. At least they didn’t have to shout to communicate – it was enough to speak loudly.
When they reached Juro’s bed, Lyschko said, “this is your bed.”
At the foot of the cot, neatly folded, were Juro’s clothes. Kubo had brought them upstairs the day after his death.
Krabat felt his throat go tight. “And here,” he added with some effort, “are your things.”
Then they left Mischka alone, and worked alongside the others in the mill.
.
The following evening, Stani was freed from his apprenticeship. He’d become a strapping young man, but Hanzo still made Petar and Andrusch stop when they got carried away with his free-milling.
“Enough!” cried the senior journeyman. “He’s supposed to be without fault or blemish, but that means keeping his bones in one piece!”
Staschko sprinkled flour over Stani’s head and then the newly-made mill journeyman had to drink to everyone’s health.
'If I count my own promotion, Stani is the fourth apprentice I’ve seen freemilled,' thought Krabat. 'I’ve been here for four years, and Lyschko for seven.'
Somehow, he felt like he’d arrived at the mill only yesterday and like he’d been here forever.
'Tonda, Michal, Merten, and Juro,' Krabat thought, with a heavy heart, as he watched the crowd of journeymen boisterously celebrating. 'Which of you will be next?'
.
This year, January was bitterly cold.
The only rooms that really got warm were the kitchen and the servants’ room. The Master’s room was heated by a small oven, but it was still so cold in there that the Master didn’t take off his coat and cloak. Now he always ate with the journeymen in the servants’ room and often sat there to warm himself up.
A little heat helped the guys out by rising from the house to the attic, but their roof was drafty and the wind whistled through. They stopped up the crevices as best they could with rushes and rags.
In the small room that Krabat and Lyschko shared, the water in the washbasin froze, and according to Lyschko, it was no better in the Master’s bedroom.
On Friday evenings when they had lessons in the black chamber, everyone brought their cloaks and winter hats or caps.
Aside from the mill work, once again they had wood to chop. Fortunately, this year it hadn’t snowed so much that they would have to shovel their way to the area of the forest where they logged. They put the felled trees on a horse-drawn sleigh and took them to the mill, and stored them in a woodshed, so that later they could be made into beams and boards.
One of their draft horses didn’t deal well with cold. The mare was already older and clearly in pain when she had to work. Kito and Andrusch joked that soon they would be eating Sauerbraten and horse sausage, which in addition to annoying Krabat (who quite liked the horses) earned them an unexpectedly sharp rebuke from Hanzo. The two brown work horses, named Janka and Lukasch, were already at the mill when he’d started his apprenticeship, and he felt a certain bond with them.
After every outing, Hanzo took care of the horses personally, rubbing them dry with straw and putting blankets over them. He even got over his misgivings and asked the Master for extra oats for the ailing Janka. The oat harvest had been bad that year, and they only had a little left in their stores, but nonetheless, the Master allowed Witko to soak half a bushel in a pot every evening, put it on the stove for a while, and finally cut a shriveled apple into it. After dinner, Hanzo would carry the steaming bucket to the stable and watch the mare eat.
“We’ll have to look for a new horse in spring,” said the Master to Krabat and Lyschko, one evening after Hanzo had set off for the stable again. “Janka won’t make it through another winter.”
“Can’t you heal her, Master? With the Art of Arts?” Asked Krabat.
The Master shook his head. “I could make her forget her pain, so that she doesn’t feel that she is sick. But that would only kill her sooner because she wouldn’t be as careful with her body. I can force her to work as if she were healthy, but again, that would also shorten her life. I can heal a wound, mend a broken bone … but against old age and death, there is no magic.”
“But, you yourself, Master,” Krabat started to say.
“Should Janka make a pact with the honorable Goodman, then?” Asked the miller, amused.
Lyschko laughed, and Krabat fell silent.
“I’d prolong her life if it were in my power, Krabat,” the Master added more seriously. “But you should know by now that a lot of spells only hold for a short while. And most of the ones that cause permanent changes are harmful in the long run, either to the one they’re cast on or to the person who cast them. The Dark Arts come at a high price, in more than one way.”
.
Mischka had a hard time at the mill. The apprenticeship was punishingly demanding, and he was hardly equal to it. He also didn’t have anyone who would take him under his wing and make him feel like he wasn’t completely on his own.
Juro’s death had sowed fear. The men who already had friends stuck by them all the harder and weren’t interested in letting anyone new join them. Witko, Stani, and Lobosch made up one group, and Andrusch, Staschko, and Kito formed another. Kubo and Petar had also grown closer. If Krabat and Lyschko were excluded anyway for being the Master’s successors, they at least had each other. Hanzo, who previously got along with Andrusch and his comrades in mischief, was wholly absorbed with his duties since Juro’s death, and held himself apart from the others. He was probably afraid of being next, if he didn’t acquit himself well enough as the senior journeyman, and he didn’t want to let anyone divert him from the straight and narrow.
On top of that, Juro’s death had undone a lot of what Krabat had accomplished with the other journeymen in the previous year, especially with Lobosch, Witko, and Stani.
“I don’t hold your bargain with the Master against you,” said Lobosch. “But Juro – I don’t know if I can ever forgive you for that.”
Stani would avoid Krabat whenever he got near him, and Witko was taciturn and didn't meet his eyes.
The three of them also avoided Lyschko, and there was fear in their eyes when they looked at him.
On the other hand, Kubo had remarked to Krabat, in passing, that “Juro’s time had to come some day. He made sure of that himself.” Petar’s attitude towards Krabat had not changed, either. In contrast, both of them were cautious around Lyschko, though not unfriendly.
Andrusch, Staschko, and Kito seemed to know that their intriguing with Juro was an open secret. Strangely, that spurred Andrusch to act even more insolently, even as it put a damper on the other two.
Hanzo was unusually reserved around Krabat and Lyschko. He still outranked them in the mill hierarchy, and he assigned them work just like all the others, even unpleasant work like mucking out the pigsty or turning the grain for hours, but he did it with deliberation. Krabat was impressed that the senior journeyman managed not to show favoritism, even though he was clearly afraid of them.
So none of the miller’s men were eager to stick their neck out for the newcomer. For the first several weeks, Mischka was practically on his own. Hanzo didn’t let the others bully him or play any particularly nasty practical jokes, but that was all.
On Mischka’s first day, no one helped him when he was supposed to “sweep out” a closed room. Hanzo fetched him at lunchtime and told him not to worry about it, because no one managed that when they started, and sent him to the kitchen to help Witko. The flour room stayed white from dust until he told Andrusch to deal with it, and Andrusch, looking delighted to be ordered to almost break a rule, sent the flour-cloud away in the direction of the forest.
Krabat had the impression that Lyschko was watching Mischka, much more closely than he’d watched Witko, Lobosch, or Stani. One day, as the apprentice was shoveling snow from the paths in the courtyard, Krabat walked by just as Lyschko said something and put his hand on Mischka’s shoulder. He knew instantly what was going on: Lyschko had given Mischka strength.
As they sat in their room in the evening, mending their clothes by candlelight, Krabat asked Lyschko about what he’d seen.
Lyschko hesitated before answering. “It’s only sensible to win over as many of the others as we can if we want to be the masters here one day – without their all coming for our backs with drawn knives,” he finally said. “Don’t you think?”
Krabat said no more, but he thought to himself that he’d stumbled on something important here, with Lyschko.
“Besides,” Lyschko surprised him by adding, long after Krabat thought the conversation was over, “I think Mischka’s one of the ones who’s going to try to get away. By any means.”
Krabat sat bolt upright, at that. “What are you talking about?”
“As I said. Mischka isn’t happy here. I don’t think it’s easy for him to make friends, and with the mood that’s been hanging over the mill, no one else is looking for a new one. Mischka will run the moment he finds out what’s really going on here. Sometime after Easter. Soon. And when he realizes there’s no getting out … I’m sure he’ll try another way.”
“Like Merten?” Asked Krabat.
“Mhm. Like Merten,” replied Lyschko.
They mended their clothes in silence for a while.
Then Krabat asked, “do you despise Merten for what he did?”
Lyschko shook his head. “I cared for him myself when he was sick, didn’t I? Just like any of you. No, I don’t despise him for it, and I didn’t even then.”
He was visibly struggling with himself. But then he spoke again. “When you were all ignoring me on Michal’s account, from Candlemas until Easter, I often thought about killing myself. You know, it’s not easy to be treated like you’re nothing for a quarter of a year.”
Krabat was silent, shocked by this admission. At the time, he’d thought Lyschko had gotten off lightly, but now he realized maybe beating him up would have been a less severe punishment.
“But you must know that Merten wasn’t the first to try and get nowhere with that,” continued Lyschko. “Shortly after I started my apprenticeship, Andrusch made an attempt. Andrusch wasn’t always the crude wag everyone knows now … he got to the mill two years before I did and it only sank in after his free milling that he would be stuck here for the rest of his life. When he asked the Master to let him go traveling, it was already too late. He could only have left in the three days after being made a journeyman.”
Lyschko threaded his needle anew, before he continued. “Andrusch struggled on for another year. But at the beginning of his third, he tried to run away twice, in a January that was just as cold as this one. Then he went into the water. He had to hack open the ice on the mill pond, first, to do it. The Master himself jumped in and pulled him out from under the ice. Tonda and Hanzo carried him into the servants’ room, undressed him, wrapped him in blankets and laid him down in front of the stove. 'So that he wouldn’t catch his death,' as people put it. For three days, he neither ate nor spoke, and refused to get up, although he could have. As the apprentice, I got the exciting task of emptying his chamber pot. When he left his bed, he was a different person. It’s like he’d become the Master’s court jester, though often there was a challenge or an insult hidden in his jokes. But the Master tolerated him with light mockery. You know the sort: ‘Andrusch doesn’t play with a full deck' – and after a while, he calmed down. Since then, he’s been our resident joker and the one directing things when there’s pranks to play or other craziness going on.”
Lyschko tugged at his jacket, looking for other places that needed to be repaired.
“But I still remember how he cried back then, in the servants’ room, as the Master loomed over him, soaking wet as Andrusch himself was, and said ‘there is no way out of here. Not for you, and not for any of the others. No one gets away from me!’ … after that, I didn’t have it in me to try anymore. Not even three years ago, when you were all treating me like I was contagious.”
.
After that conversation with Lyschko, Krabat paid more attention to Andrusch than before. And now he saw that behind a lot of his jokes and a lot of his transgressions, there was a certain amount of desperation. He thought about how Andrusch was always the loudest of them and the most tireless, at the Easter party, and how passionately he wished for the Master to go to hell. He also remembered many occasions when Andrusch had played tricks in front of the Miller, and even at his expense – like when he made the hole for the mill wheel too small with magic. Supposedly that was to tease Staschko, but all of them, including the Master, had had to hold its weight up, during.