PFLUGZEIT
This Mortal Coil
What is madness? Do you think that I am mad, one who would damn his own soul by practising the black arts? And to what end? For a few more decades of desperate decaying life? To become an outcast from the world of the living when it is precisely an unbearable desire to live that has driven one to study the proscribed rites of necromancy?
I shall tell you for what purpose I have done this. I have done it all for naught, for that is what I have now as I lay my soul bare before you: nothing. Nothing to show for two centuries of life, the lands that I once claimed as my own, the people who paid me fealty, all now forgotten.
And all I have now to look forward to is an ignominious end and an eternity spent in that twilight world of the realm of the dead, trapped between the worlds of eternal rest and glorious life, unable to exist in either, both tantalisingly, torturously out of reach. An eternity of torment. An eternity of damnation.
It has been said that the line between genius and insanity is a fine one and crossed all too easily. It has also been said that a madman sees things more clearly than any other, even more so than a man on his deathbed when suddenly his whole nefarious life is thrown into terrifying clarity for the first time in decades.
In times of insanity look to a madman for guidance. How true that saying is of this Chaos-riddled world in which we live, where nameless horrors forever wait in the darkness, ready to catch us, to trap us, and bring us to eternal ruin.
I believe that madness is an unshackling from the prescribed constraints put on us by the expectations of our culture, our race and most of all, ourselves. A madman does not care what others think of him. For what drives a person to madness is often the revelation that the world around them is not as safe and secure as they might like to believe, that it is a place populated by monsters that lurk just behind the thin veil of reality, that can rend a man’s soul apart as well as his body and destroy his mind.
You might ask whether I am mad?
If I deny it, would that be proof of my madness.
But then, if I were to say that I most certainly am mad, that admission itself would surely suggest that I possessed a sound and reasoning mind.
But I do not claim to be mad. As I have said, the only thing that brings a man a clear-mindedness that even approaches that possessed by the insane, is the knowledge that his own death is near. And I, for one, have accepted that truth, that inevitability.
Ironically, the lunatic does not believe himself to be mad for he sees the world with a clarity the rest of us could only hope for. He sees the world as it really is. For so often it is the realisation that there are horrors barely hidden beneath the surface of this world that drives men to madness. They have seen the world as it really is. And how can such a clear, unsullied view of the world be considered madness?
* * *
Mitterfruhl came and went that year in a haze of drizzle, dampening the spirits of the congregations of Taal and Ulric worshippers who thronged to the town to celebrate the spring equinox. And then Pflugzeit blew in, unseasonably cold but seasonably wet. The relentless overcast skies darkened the mood of everybody in the town, even though the Corpse Taker seemed to have decided to leave the populace alone for the time being. The rain was welcome, however, as it sluiced the slurry out of the streets that had collected in even greater quantities during the three days given over to the Mitterfruhl festival. But Dieter Heydrich had been virtually unaware of any of it.
Following his dire experience at the hands of the witch hunter Brother-Captain Krieger, Dieter had thrown himself into his studies even more than he had done before. He also spent even longer hours in the guild library and then continued with his note-taking late into the night in his garret room, spurning Erich’s offers of an evening’s relaxing entertainment away from his studies. It was as if he was determined to prove that any ability he might have was purely down to diligent labour and nothing more sinister than that. What did it matter that he was a son of a priest of Morr? He had been brought up in a gods-fearing household and he knew full well the difference between right and wrong. He was certainly no bodysnatcher or, Morr forbid, a necromancer!
But that did not change the fact that Dieter had acquired a sinister new nickname, given him by the other students, that of the daemon’s apprentice. Professor Theodrus had also taken pains to distance himself from Dieter. Although Theodrus had initially stood by his star pupil, incensed that Krieger should demonstrate such a flagrant disregard for the establishment of the physicians’ guild, which itself held great power and influence within the town, now that the matter was resolved, for the time being at least, the guild master had decided that to protect his interests he had needed to loosen the bonds between himself and his apprentice.
There had been long-held distrust between the Templar Order of Sigmar and the physicians’ guild. The templars held an almost psychotic hatred for magic users and spell casters—seeing the miracles their own warrior priests performed as exactly that, the divine intervention of the Heldenhammer himself—and considered the potion-brewing physicians as little better than conjurers or alchemists themselves.
So when Leopold offered him the opportunity to visit the Temple of Shallya, only a little further into the town from the guild, Dieter jumped at the chance to further his studies in another setting, no matter how brief that change might be. Here was a chance to prove that he was dedicated to the healing arts rather than a practitioner of the black arts, and at the same time practise his skills on live patients, rather than merely helping the licensed guild members prepare treatments that the qualified physicians would ultimately administer themselves, or simply cleaning up after them in their filthy laboratories.
The infirmary was a surprisingly large, open space that seemed to swallow up the echoes of the footsteps on the flags and absorb the muffled moans of the patients. It had been arranged inside a long hall, the cross-beamed roof the height of a two-storey building. Simple pallet beds lined the whitewashed walls, some separated from the others by wooden screens. The priestesses of Shallya glided between the beds in their dove grey and white gowns with a gold-embroidered heart over the left breast, each woman wearing a wimple that kept her hair hidden and out of the way.
The women ranged in age from young girls, barely out of adolescence, admitted to the temple as novices, to plump old dames, many of whom were widows who had come to the order late in life, after their duties to family were done, as a way of making the last years of their life mean something.
But they all had a calm demeanour about them and a ready smile for those poor souls in their care.
Standing before the two apprentices was Sister Marilda, a tall woman whose age Dieter found it hard to determine. Her face was handsome enough and she held herself with delicate poise and grace that also suggested that when challenged she could be as immovable as a rock in her expectations and attitudes. Dieter and Leopold had been sent to the temple with a letter of introduction from Doktor Kalt, and arrived as the sisters were processing out of matins.
“Good morning, gentlemen, and how may I help you this morning?” Sister Marilda asked. She patently knew they were from the guild and why they were there. Leopold had visited the infirmary-temple before with his master, Kalt. It was merely out of courtesy that she asked.
“Good morning, sister,” Leopold answered confidently, giving the priestess his most winning smile. Dieter stood behind him, trying not to draw attention to himself. “We have been sent here by Doktor Kalt, from the physicians’ guild.”
An apprentice could expect to visit the infirmary of the Temple of Shallya on a semi-regular basis, as part of his training, to help the priestesses tend to the sick. It also provided the medical students with an opportunity to try out new treatments on patients who, on the whole, had no family left to care what happened to them if something went wrong and they did not recover. So many of those in the care of the sisterhood of Shallya were in a state of terminal decline that they had nothing to lose in acting as guinea pigs for the apprentices to practise on, other than perhaps a few days or weeks of miserable life.
“Very good. You must thank Doktor Kalt when you return,” she said matter-of-factly.
“We have brought a new unguent, made from the flower of the meadowflax, for the treatment of open sores and ulcers and to see if there is any other way in which we can help.”
“And your help is much appreciated. There are certainly those who would be grateful for a salve to ease the pain of their afflictions. If you would come this way.”
Sister Marilda led the way across the infirmary, the two students following.
“But of course we must also continue to pray for the absolution of their souls,” Marilda said as she walked, “for you know, of course, that illness and disease are a physical manifestation of sin.”
“Yes, sister, of course,” Leopold agreed, then glancing back over his shoulder at his companion threw Dieter a theatrical wink.
They spent the next two hours cleaning and dressing the suppurating sores and raw flesh-eating ulcers of beggars, the elderly of the town cast upon the Shallyan temple to be ministered to in their final days and even an aging cleric from the temple of Bögenhafen’s patron—a thoroughly unpleasant, foul-mouthed and unappreciative curmudgeon who showed not one ounce of sanctity about his person.
The smell of infection as they worked was appalling, and Dieter was glad of the posy of strong-smelling herbs he carried now in his pocket. Between patients he held the posy close to his nose and inhaled deeply of its heady fragrance, so that it might at least in part mask the stench of putrefaction.
Throughout, Leopold talked to the patients about what he was doing, his manner jovial, and in turn listened to them unburden their hearts about the miseries that their lives had brought them. Dieter was secretly impressed by the way his friend conducted himself and wished he could be more like him. Leopold had obviously known what to expect from his previous visits, but it was more than just that. He had a manner about him more like that of a confessional priest than a doktor, from what Dieter had seen in his short time at the guild.
Sister Marilda approached Leopold and Dieter as they were washing their hands in the bowl the priestesses had provided for them, as the temple bell was chiming the hour of noon. Despite the stench of the work and the repulsive sores they had seen, Dieter could still feel hunger knotting inside his belly and was looking forward to sating his hunger at the Pestle and Mortar.
“Are you gentlemen finished?” Marilda asked demurely.
Leopold straightened from leaning over their last patient’s bed. “Yes, sister,” he said. “Is there something else we can do for you before we go?”
“Yes, there is,” Marilda replied. The image in Dieter’s mind of his next meal was devoured by stomach-gnawing hunger, “Just one more patient who might benefit from your salve. But I must warn you that he is a poor lunatic whose wits have left him.”
“Really?” Dieter suddenly found himself saying, morbidly curious. He had only ever encountered the wandering lunatics and drink and drug-addled vagabonds who could be found in every Imperial town or city, or wandering the highways and byways of the land, some in semi-feral packs. He had spent long hours studying ailments of the body over the past two months. Now here was an opportunity to study a sickness of the mind.
“Yes, his sins weigh heavy upon him,” Marilda said, lowering her eyes and shaking her head sadly.
“What is his name?” Leopold asked, surprised at his friend’s unaccustomed outburst, whilst at the same time being just as fascinated and excited by the prospect of meeting one of the mentally ill.
“His name is Anselm.”
“Anselm,” Leopold repeated. “Is that it? What is his family name?”
“Anselm is all he told us,” Sister Marilda explained. “It might well be all he knows. Come, he is this way.”
Within the harsh world in which the people of the Empire lived, the mentally ill were often forgotten; for the most part a misunderstood, untolerated and feared underclass. Very few places actually existed to make provision for their care. At best they were an embarrassment to their families, to be locked away from the world to save their relations embarrassment as much as for their own protection. At worst the insane were accused of being possessed by daemons and burnt as witches, or were, driven to join crazed Chaos cults in which they found some kind of acceptance. And every once in a while the mentally ill were taken to be divinely inspired messengers of the gods. Such was not the case with the poor wretch Anselm.
He was huddled on a pallet bed in a small cell with a sturdy iron-banded door. Dieter was immediately taken aback. Where the other patients they had attended to were old or at least prematurely aged by the hand life had dealt them, there was no mistaking that Anselm was still a young man, despite the sunken cheeks and hollow-eyed stare. His long hair, hanging in matted knots down as far as his shoulder blades, was prematurely white, making him look older than his years.
“Is it safe?” Dieter asked anxiously, seeing that Anselm was restrained within a harness-like jacket that kept his arms tied tight around his middle, secured with buckles behind so that he could not free himself.
“Oh yes,” assured Sister Marilda. “We had to restrain him to stop him harming himself.”
“Harming himself?” Leopold asked, looking at the bound man.
Dieter looked again too, the red-eyed stare of the madman looking sorrowfully back at him. But his eyes were drawn to infected areas of exposed flesh on the man’s legs, where circles of skin had been peeled away, revealing the raw flesh underneath.
“He did it to himself in his madness,” the priestess said, following Dieter’s gaze. “The sores are where he has pulled the skin away and picked at the scabs. Perhaps your salve might bring him some alleviation from the stinging soreness.”
Marilda turned to leave the cell and fixed both Leopold and Dieter with her suddenly stern gaze. “Pay no heed to anything he tells you,” she said in barely more than a whisper. “His mind is addled and his wits have left him. You would do well to remember that.” And with that she was gone.
Dieter stood looking at the lunatic Anselm, who stared back with an expression of pure terror in his eyes, not knowing quite how to approach this patient. But the ever-confident Leopold knew, of course. He spoke calmingly, and almost incessantly, as he approached the pallet bed, continually explaining to the wretch what he was doing and reassuring him. Dieter attempted to follow his friend’s example. Leopold truly had a way of putting people at their ease, madman and sane man alike.
Anselm shied away from the two of them at first, flinching as Leopold pulled up the torn leg of his britches to inspect the self-inflicted injuries. Then slowly but surely Leopold’s words seemed to have a calming effect on Anselm.
“A-are you from the g-g-guild?”
Hearing the thin, reedy voice so unexpectedly and for the first time made Dieter physically jump and his heart race. He took a step back from the lunatic’s cot, worried what other surprises he might have in store, readily believing that the wretch would attack them at any second, falling on them with gnashing teeth and clawing fingernails, having somehow freed himself of the jacket. But no such thing happened.
Leopold remained calmly where he was, crouched by the bed that he might treat the open sores.
“That’s right, the guild of physicians.”
Dieter looked at Leopold admiringly. He wished he had his friend’s confidence and charisma. But at least he had Leopold’s friendship.
“A-are you doktors? C-can you cure the sick?”
“Not doktors yet; apprentices. But we do try to help those who ail.”
“C-can you cure a man of a lost s-soul?”
Leopold and Dieter looked at one another uncomfortably. Dieter shivered, the skin on his arms prickling with gooseflesh. Was it just him or had the temperature in the damp cell dropped perceptibly?
“I-I was an apprentice, once.”
Dieter fixed the madman with his own inquisitive gaze. “At the physicians’ guild?” he asked.
“Y-yes. That’s right. At the g-guild. Until…” Anselm trailed off.
“Until what?” Dieter pressed.
“Until. N-no, I can’t say. M-mustn’t say.” Anselm drew his legs up, out of Leopold’s tending reach, and started to rock backwards and forwards on his cot. “No, mustn’t say. M-mustn’t say.”
“What is it?” Leopold asked. “What’s the matter?”
“No, can’t say. Mustn’t say. They’ll think you’re mad; mad, I tell you!” The lunatic was starting to babble.
Leopold looked at his friend sharply. “What have you done?” he said accusingly.
“I-I,” Dieter stammered in reply, wrong-footed by first the lunatic’s behaviour and now by his friend’s aggressive change of character, “I didn’t do anything.”
“Mad, I tell you. You can’t tell them. Not about the doktor, not about him, not about what you saw. Physician, heal thyself!”
Who was the madman talking to? To them? To himself? To someone else they couldn’t see, but whose presence Anselm could feel? He certainly wasn’t having trouble finding the words he wanted anymore.
“Which doktor?” Dieter persisted. “A doktor at the guild?”
“You can’t tell them about the doktor. Not about him. He’ll find out. He’ll know. He knows everything. He has your soul.”
Dieter felt the chill even more strongly now. “Which doktor are you talking about?”
“Stop this,” Leopold snapped.
“Which doktor, Anselm?” Hearing his name used for the first time, Anselm looked up, directly at Dieter, fear brimming in his eyes once more.
“Can’t you see what you’re doing to him?”
Suddenly the bound lunatic threw himself bodily at Dieter, landing on the cold stone floor in a heap at his feet, grazing his knees and making his interrogator take his own startled jump backwards.
“Cannot say, cannot say, cannot say. He knows everything, everything.”
And then the lunatic’s incoherent babbling devolved into unintelligible screams, the screams of a terrified man who had lost his soul.
Hearing the screams, the priestesses came running. The two apprentices were bustled out of the cell, the two priestesses who had taken their place slamming the cell door behind them. The door did not keep out the heartrending screams of the lunatic, however. They only stopped once the Shallyan nurses had been able to administer a sleeping draught distilled from the valerian herb.
The poor man’s screams had unsettled the rest of the infirmary as they echoed down the draughty stone corridors of the temple-hospice. The great hall was alive with the anxious murmuring of the other patients and the priestesses who tended them.
Leopold marched ahead of Dieter, his anger boiling off him, as they made their way to exit the Temple of Shallya. Then Sister Marilda was before them, like a suddenly materializing apparition in grey and white.
“Sister,” Leopold acknowledged, ever the well-mannered gentleman despite his current mood.
“Gentlemen,” Marilda said, her eyes cold, her lips unsmiling.
Dieter slunk after his companion but then paused and addressed the priestess for the first time. “How did the lunatic Anselm come to be here? What was it that caused him to lose his mind?”
“I told you not to listen to him,” the sister said sternly, her previously friendly demeanour gone. “Is it not enough that he is mad and in need of our prayers? I had thought you had come here to help those who suffered, not to make their suffering worse.”
Then there was nothing more to be said. Dieter would not get the answers he was looking for here.
But Dieter’s curiosity—that most dangerous of things—had been piqued. He was intrigued by the mysterious Anselm and was determined to find out more about him. After all, he had already experienced a darker side to the guild of physicians and wanted to know what could have made Anselm lose his mind so utterly. Perhaps part of him had to know that Anselm’s fate wouldn’t also be his. He would have to looks for answers elsewhere.
Dieter knocked three times on the door to the guild master’s study. For a moment he heard nothing. Was he doing the right thing, coming here, effectively challenging the professor, especially after what had happened? Perhaps the professor wasn’t there at all. Then he heard the single command: “Enter.”
Taking a deep breath Dieter opened the door and stepped into the room beyond, the memory of the last time he had been here still a livid scar in his mind.
Professor Theodrus looked up. “Oh, Heydrich, it’s you,” he said uncomfortably. “I had thought we had come to… er… an arrangement, after the… er… incident.”
“Yes, professor, we had and I-I’m sorry to trouble you,” Dieter looked down nervously at his feet. “B-but there was something I wanted to ask you.”
“What is it you want?”
Dieter clasped his hands tightly behind his back to stop them shaking. “I went to the Temple of Shallya today, to help the sisters in their work. I met a man there, a young man. His name was Anselm.”
A barely-noticeable tic passed across the left side of Theodrus’ face.
“Do you know him, or what caused him to lose his mind?”
“Anselm? Anselm? I don’t recall the name. I don’t know who you could mean,” Theodrus blustered, but his cheeks flushed as he did so.
“H-he said he was once a student of the physicians’ guild,” Dieter pressed on. “It could not have been that long ago. Should I ask one of the other senior members if they know of him?”
“Close the door,” Theodrus said irritably.
Dieter did as he was bid.
“I remember now. Two years ago there was a student here by the name of Anselm: Anselm Fleischer. He was an embarrassment to the guild. It is not something I like to talk about.”
Dieter considered his next words carefully. “He said a doktor had taken his soul.”
The apprentice now saw the colour visibly drain from the master’s face. “You cannot believe anything the wretch says, he has lost his mind.”
Dieter said nothing. The atmosphere in the guild master’s study was tense, the silence becoming unbearable. Dieter was about to excuse himself when Theodrus unexpectedly spoke again, releasing the tension in the room.
“He was a promising student but he abandoned his studies at the guild, without warning; without giving a reason. One day he simply did not turn up to help Doktor Fitzgarten and he stopped coming to lectures.” An almost wistful look had come to the professor’s eyes. “Some of the other students believed that he had become apprentice to a doktor with dangerously progressive ideas, a doktor not licensed by the guild, one practising clandestinely in the town. More than this they did not know.
“Then it was as if he had disappeared completely. Either he had left Bögenhafen or he was dead. Would that he had been.”
“What?”
“He was found months later by a barge captain and his son. He was roaming the Ostendamm, his clothes rags, his body filthy. All he would say, repeating it over and over, was, ‘Physician, heal thyself’.”
“They brought him to the guild. Once we were able to get any sense out of him it soon became apparent that his memory was like Wissenland chesse, full of holes. He could tell us that his name was Anselm but the name Fleischer meant nothing to him. He could not tell us how he came to be wandering the Ostendamm, nor did he know any of us at the guild, even though he knew he had studied there himself.”
Dieter realised that he was staring at Theodrus aghast.
“It truly is a tragic tale. Whatever had happened to him in the lost months had robbed him of his sanity. His wits had left him.”
“So you sent him to the Temple of Shallya.”
“He could not even clean up after himself anymore. The matter had become… difficult; the guild’s reputation might become tarnished. The guild makes an annual donation to the temple’s collection box for his keep.”
Dieter did not know what to say. Each question answered merely raised a dozen more. “It is a truly tragic tale,” was all he could manage.
“I don’t think you need mention this to any of the other apprentices, do you?”
“N-no, professor.”
“Very good. We have an understanding again then.”
“Yes.”
“Now, will there be anything else?”
“No, professor.”
This consultation was most definitely over.
It was on Aubentag, the seventeenth day of Pflugzeit, that the news reached Dieter that his father was dying.
On that day the sky was the grey of a burial shroud, with the threat of rain never fulfilling its promise. The message found him at the guild at noon, the messenger having been pointed in that direction by Frau Keeler. It was written in his sister’s hand and uncharacteristically brief. Things were dire indeed.
Conflicting emotions raged through Dieter as he bundled his notebooks into his scrip, along with several jars of herbs and treatments he had helped produce. Then he excused himself from Doktor Hirsch’s company. He knew that he had to return home to Hangenholz immediately. It was his duty. His dear sister Katarina needed him. His father was dying. He only hoped he would reach Hangenholz in time.
In the corridor outside Hirsch’s chamber Dieter collided with Leopold Hanser.
He had not seen Leopold since the incident at the Temple of Shallya. They had hardly spoken after leaving the temple. Leopold had seen a new side to his friend, that day, and it was not a side he had liked.
As a consequence Dieter had kept himself more and more to the lodging house in Dunst Strasse or the guild, preferring to move about the town by daylight and even then where the streets were busy and crowded. Dieter still felt vulnerable travelling alone, following his interrogation at the hands of Brother-Captain Krieger.
“I’m sorry,” Dieter said, picking up his dropped scrip.
Leopold saw the look in his friend’s eyes. “Dieter, what’s the matter?” he asked, genuine concern softening the words.
“It’s my father. He’s dying.”
Leopold gasped and looked crestfallen. “Then it is I who am sorry.”
Dieter returned briefly to his lodgings to collect a change of clothes and his travelling cloak, retrieve his full purse from its hiding place behind a loose brick in his garret room, and to leave a message for Erich with Frau Keeler. The large woman gave him a motherly smile and touched his arm. Dieter drew away sharply, uneasy with the physical contact—no one had touched him like that since his mother died, other than his sister—but he managed to return her smile weakly.
His scrip full, Dieter made his way to the Reisehauschen on the Bergstrasse, arriving just in time to buy passage on the last carriage of the day, leaving at two hours past noon, heading out on the Nuln road. He would have to change at the coaching stop of Vagenholt but he could still be in Hangenholz within three days, Morr willing.
Hangenholz didn’t look any different to how he had last seen it, other than then, almost three months earlier, it had still been in the grip of winter. Now the snow was gone from the fields, replaced by healthy stalks of oats and barley, and the iron-hard frosts had gone, leaving the packed earth of the road softer underfoot. But the steeple of the chapel still showed over the thatched roofs of the houses, the backdrop of the woods behind, and the mill with its slow-turning waterwheel by the bridge before the village. Beyond them all atop the blasted tor of Raven’s Crag was the ruined tower that watched over the village like some sinister sentinel.
Dieter paused as he approached the Highwayman’s Oak and looked up at the ancient, rusted cage creaking there from its thick knot of rope that was as black and mildewed as the gibbet cage was red and rusted, the lock and shackles corroded fast, never to be opened again.
And from inside the cage the grinning corpse face of Old Jack, Black Jack, smiled down at Dieter.
All the children of the village knew the mouldering skeleton. None were afraid of Jack for the skeleton was so unlike a living creature what was there to fear? A blackened, lichen-covered skeleton, slumped in its cage. He was like an old friend to them. It had been so long since the skeleton had been interred within the rusted cage that few in the village had ever known the corpse’s real name or why he had been left to die inside the sorrow cage of the gibbet. He had probably been just another highwayman—and given his title to the tree—captured and made to pay for his crimes in the harshest way possible as a warning to any other would-be bandits who would practise their wanton trade on the highways and byways of the Reikland.
But to the children of Hangenholz Old Jack had almost been seen as their protector, who guarded the cluster of peasant holdings from the predations of the wider world. There were always rumours of darker things that roamed abroad in the forests of the northern lands of the Empire and from the south came stories of degenerate green-skinned goblins and their ilk raiding out of the Grey Mountains. Yet Hangenholz seemed to have been spared any such troubles for as long as any could remember. And to the children’s minds, that had been thanks to Old Jack and his watch over the one road into the village, rather than the tireless work of the roadwardens in the employ of the notoriously stringent local lord.
There had been a gibbet there for many a year. The custom of carrying out hangings from the tall oaks in the woods dating from times long past—some said even harkening back to the practices of the pagan tribes people who had lived here before the time of Sigmar—had lent its name to the village. Without the hangings there would have been no village. Without the villains’ deaths there would have been no life for the people here.
It lent an austere, matter-of-fact quality to the people who lived in Hangenholz, who even in the enlightened age of Magnus the Pious following the repulsion of the great incursion from the north, still offered their prayers at the chapel of Morr, rather than at the overgrown way-shrine of Sigmar.
Rather than continue along the main trackway into the village, Dieter turned off the road onto a well-trodden footpath that cut across the fields of green barley. The shortcut was one he had often used as a child and he took it now, passing a crow-pecked turnip-headed scarecrow. He crossed the millstream via the footbridge downstream of the mill which carried the main road into the village to the square.
The priest’s house stood to the left of the chapel, the quiet, painstakingly tended graveyard of Morr’s field spreading out within the circle of a low dry stone wall to the north-west. It had always been a house in mourning but it was never more so than now. Dieter was half aware of villagers about their morning business muttering to each other conspiratorially as they caught sight of the prodigal returning home, but he had other things on his mind. His sister was standing at the door to the house, her eyes red and puffy, the wrung out rag of a handkerchief clenched in her hands.
Brother and sister embraced, and Katarina poured out her grief to Dieter. Then Dieter made his way directly to their father’s spartan room.
Albrecht Heydrich lay unconscious under the blankets of his bed looking for all the world like a corpse laid out in its burial shroud. A cold hand squeezed Dieter’s stomach whilst hot tears stung his eyes. Whatever else he might be feeling, this old man was his father and as the priest’s son he had a duty to the failing old man. But more than that Dieter was an apprentice physician now, a doktor in the making, and Albrecht Heydrich, priest of Morr, was his patient.
Dieter ministered at his father’s bedside for two days, forgoing food and rest. In all that time his father—his patient—did not regain consciousness, no matter what manner of herbal concoction or remedy the physician’s apprentice tried. It was on the third day that Albrecht Heydrich gave up his personal struggle with the god of death, and died.
For those three days Albrecht had been able to say nothing. Dieter simply said goodbye.
That night, Dieter laid his father’s body in the mortuary chapel himself, yet as he looked at the corpse lying there on the mortuary slab of the chapel it was not his father he saw, but his mother. He kept vigil himself, falling asleep on the cold stone floor before the chime of midnight, huddled in a black cowled robe that had been his father’s.
Engels Lothair arrived the next morning from Gabelbrucke to the news that the old priest had passed on into Morr’s realm himself at last. The news was not unexpected. He came to the mortuary chapel to find that his services were not required. Dieter had already prepared his father’s body for burial, washing it with herbs and anointing it with holy oils, knowing the ceremony as if he had trained as a priest of Morr himself, having seen his father carry it out a hundred times; it was as second nature to him. But then he had been surrounded by funerary rites and customs his whole life up to the age of eighteen. He was, as Engels Lothair said his father’s son.
All that remained was for Engels to bless the body before its interment in the cold ground of Morr’s field. Josef Wohlreich, Katarina’s elderly suitor, dug the grave.
Only Dieter and Katarina attended the brief funeral service, which was taken by Engels with the sexton Josef standing by. The threatening clouds gave up their rain at last, as if Morr himself mourned the passing of his servant, even if no one else in Hangenholz publicly did. Albrecht had been a black-hearted old curmudgeon after all, and Dieter would be the first to admit it.
The day of the funeral had been and gone, and Dieter had shed no more tears. Katarina, on the other hand, was devastated. Keeping house for her father, shunned by most of the villagers for being the priest’s flesh and blood, might not have been much of a life but it had been the only life she had known for so many years. And at this time of crippling grief she clung to it still.
But Dieter’s soul was troubled too. For what seemed like his whole life he had wanted to become a healer, that he might alleviate the suffering of others. It had become the sole purpose in his life. It was his reason for being and now he had failed to fulfil the vow he had sworn himself. And if he was a failure in his chosen profession, then his life meant nothing. Medicine was as much a vocation to him as service to Morr had been to his father.
Perhaps things might have been different if he had somehow reached Hangenholz sooner, if he had tried a different cure, if he had not lacked the necessary skills to revive his feather, if he had been a better physician. Despite all the hours of study, it had not been enough. Perhaps it was the old methods that had failed him. It was as if he had been as impotent to prevent his father’s death as he had been to do anything to save his mother all those years before, the very failure that had set him on the path to become a physician.
Perhaps it was the practice of medicine that needed to find another way. Perhaps the guild’s tried and tested methods were now out-dated and not progressive enough if he were to be able to ease people’s suffering and save them. But whatever the case, Dieter himself had been found wanting, and however he set about achieving it, if his life was to be of any consequence whatsoever, he had to train harder, put in longer hours, and become a better doktor. And to do that he had to learn as much as he possibly could, so that the same thing would not happen again. He had to return to Bögenhafen and, for the time being at least, the physicians’ guild.
Dieter’s suggestion that Katarina return with him was met with a furious refusal. Now sixteen, she acted as much the part of widow as that of grieving daughter. But then she was filled with remorse and kissed her brother and said that she would be thinking of him every day, looking forward to the day when he would return.
At that moment Dieter vowed, once again, that he would return to the village of his birth when he had finished his studies, and practise medicine there. No longer would their family name be synonymous with death in Hangenholz; he would make it a new association with life!
Dieter spent the subsequent week in Hangenholz putting their father’s affairs in order. But on the thirty-second of the month, the day before Dieter was due to return to Bögenhafen, he received a shock almost as momentous and life-changing as that of his father’s death, when the Notary Wilhelm Krupster knocked on the door of the Heydrich house.
It appeared that the life of a priest of Morr, being responsible for the offerings made to the temple of Morr, was not without its benefits. His father had been a frugal man; those of an unkind disposition might even have said miserly.
But their father’s frugality was now to prove of benefit to his orphaned offspring. Dieter found himself master of his father’s fortune, a not inconsiderable amount of money. So, having made sure that his sister was comfortably accommodated for, he set off for Bögenhafen the following morning, on the last day of Pflugzeit, considerably better off than he had been when he’d arrived in Hangenholz.
Now he was a man of means and life in decadent Bögenhafen had taught him that there was little that money could not buy, even with regards to knowledge. And it was a well-known tenet that with knowledge came power; the power to determine the course of one’s life rather than be tossed about on the fickle currents of fate. With money to his name, a man might remake his world.