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.
I have always wondered why it is that the living so fear
the dead. Why do people fear the soulless cadavers? What reason can there be?
Unless the dead have been given back some mocking semblance of life by a
necromancer’s conjurations, what can they do? What danger can they possibly
pose? How can they threaten a person of living, breathing flesh and blood?
And also, why do people fear body snatchers so? If they
believe that their eternal souls go on to a better place after they die, what
does it matter what happens to the rotting husk that was once their body? Why
should they care?
The dead should not be feared for there is much the living
can learn from them. It could be argued that if it were not for the resurrection
men then medical science’s understanding of the human body and its ailments
could not have advanced as far as it has. But then the same could be said of the
necromantic arts.
But is the truth of it that society’s fear of those who
despoil graves and desecrate charnel houses is born of their doubts regarding
their supposed faith? Is it because they secretly do not believe what they are
taught in temples and chapels throughout the principalities and provinces of the
Empire? Is their fear really born of the failing that they really believe that
there is nothing beyond this existence, except a horrific eternity in the grave,
and anything that would disturb that would merely make that hellish
non-existence infinitely worse?
The stagecoach rattled and rumbled through the encroaching
Sigmarzeit night, the lanterns swinging at the corners of its roof beside the
driver’s seat seeming to leave trails of flickering flame behind them in the
deepening darkness. The driver, Gustav Haltung, was hunched over the reins, his
travelling cloak wrapped tight about him, his wide-brimmed hat pulled down
tightly over his head. The seasons might be on the turn again, but the nights
still bore spring’s chill touch.
The coach sped along the rutted road between the shadows of
trees encroaching on the track. It passed a roadside milestone that, if it had
been light enough to see, the driver would have read in lichen-patterned carved
gothic letters that there were only two miles remaining to Bögenhafen.
Gustav lashed the panting pair of horses with the reins and a
shout of, “Yah!” The animals’ hooves drummed against the compacted surface of
the road, beating their own tattoo in counterpoint to the creaks and groans of
the carriage itself. They were on the home stretch and Gustav didn’t want
anything befalling them now that they were so close to their destination.
He was eager to reach the safety of the town as quickly as
possible. It didn’t do to be out after dark, if it could be helped, even in this
pocket of civilisation of the Reikland. If it hadn’t have been for the pale,
intense young man’s added incentive, he would have stopped at Vagenholt for the
night and finished the last leg of the journey to Bögenhafen the next morning.
Beneath the driver’s position, a glimmer of lantern light
escaped the inside of the carriage from between the thick, moth-eaten velvet
drapes drawn shut across its windows, barely even hinting at the discomfort the
customers of the Four Seasons Company might be suffering within.
The lantern hanging from the roof of the coach’s interior
swung crazily as the vehicle bounced along the road, throwing wild shadows
across the faces of the passengers.
Just as the last time he had travelled to Bögenhafen, Dieter
was not the only passenger on board the stagecoach, although this time it was he
who had paid the driver the tip to get them back to the town as quickly as
possible. He had tarried too long in Hangenholz; he would be getting behind with
his studies. Hence it was that rather than stop at the staging post hamlet, they
had kept on into the encroaching dark towards Bögenhafen.