by Ben Hopkins
The grove surrounds them; a single chestnut and a cluster of silver-green firs, wind playing lightly in the needles and leaves. Dappled sunlight, a moving tapestry. Young, new grass. Meister Achim nods and turns to look at Rettich, who is perched absurdly on his donkey, his feet nearly touching the ground.
Rettich laughs. “Maybe I should get down before we enter the village.”
Our Lord arrived in Jerusalem upon an ass.
“And I in Lenzenbach on my own two feet.” He starts to dismount, but Achim protests. No no no, stay, my friend. He runs over to the grove of firs, and cuts a frond with his belt knife. No, you are the prodigal son, and we will fanfare your return as best we can.
In the village, the children run amongst the houses, calling out in silvery voices, “Rettich! Rettich’s come home! Rettich’s come home!” Their cries ring out amongst the rough brick threshing yards, the leaning rooves, the dark, open doorways, amongst the spring flowers.
The villagers gather in the muddy thoroughfare that snakes through their houses. Straw-haired Rettich, arriving, laughing, on a donkey. Behind him, a young Lord in a dark-green tunic, waving a fir frond as if the boy were Christ himself. A spectacle, as if from the Feast of Fools. They laugh and taunt, throw clumps of sheep dung at the Returning Son.
When Rettich’s sister Amaline comes to her doorway, the boy leaps from his donkey and runs to embrace her with joy. His sister, not seen since last Easter, and now heavy with child. And, beneath her white kerchief, her long flaxen hair all shorn away, like a sheep in May.
† † †
“Was he tall? A ginger beard?” asks Rettich.
Amaline nods. She smiles at Achim as she curtseys to offer him water, but Rettich can read her eyes, and her eyes show shame.
“Rettich?” asks Achim, hoping for enlightenment.
“In the Cathedral Square, on market day, there comes out of the crowds, coming up to me, a young gentleman, tall, ginger beard.”
“Yes?”
“He says to me, ‘Boy, where did you get hair like that?’ and I say, ‘On my head and on another place, saving your pardon,’ and he says, ‘Don’t play word games with me my friend, I’m asking where you and your hair are from?’ and I say, ‘Lenzenbach,’ and he says . . . ” Rettich pauses.
“What does he say, Rettich?”
“He says ‘You’ll have sisters, I should reckon,’ and I say, proudly, for I love my sisters like my own blood—”
“ . . . they are your own blood, Rettich . . . ”
“ . . . and that’s why I love them like my own blood, it’s true, and I say proudly, ‘I have three sisters, sir,’ and this gentleman, God damn his soul and God pardon me for saying so, he asks, ‘And have they blonde hair like yours?’ and I say, ‘Two of them has hair finer than the sun, but Grete she is dark for even in a human flock there must be black sheep,’ and he says, ‘I thank you, my boy’, or some such impertinence, for if he is my elder it can only be by one summer and I would say he was a spring lamb compared with me, and that was the conversation we held.”
Rettich drinks his water from his leather cup. His eyes sparkle, despite his irritation. The water of Home. He turns to Amaline.
“How much did he pay you, sister?”
Amaline’s eyes flicker over, uncertainly, to their Honoured Guest.
“There’s no shame before my Master Achim, sister.”
Amaline’s eyes are suddenly full of tears. “It will grow back!” She runs indoors to cry.
Rettich, regretful, shakes his head. His eyes meet his sister Grete’s. “Four shillings sixpence, each,” says Grete. “And it will grow back.” She pushes her own dark hair back behind her ears. “And the ginger beard, his name was Manfred. Thanks to him we won’t go hungry this winter.”
“You went hungry last winter?”
Mechthild pipes up now: “We ran out of flour well before Lent.”
Rettich looks at his eldest sister. Beneath her kerchief, her head is also shaved, and flaxen stubble is growing on her scalp. “Don’t your husbands take proper care of my girls?”
“You could send something from the City.”
“Only Grete is still my responsibility! I sent Emmle with a purse for her at Christmas!”
“Thank you, brother. It helped. For I am dark, and no-one wants to shear my hair like a sheep.” Grete laughs. Amaline appears in the shadow of the doorway, wiping her eyes, smiling through tears. “Ohh, I wish Emmle were here!” she says, and starts to weep again. “Imagine, all us five orphans, together again!”
Mechthild’s eyes are bright too, thinking of their absent brother. “How is the little fox?”
Rettich smiles, bringer of good news. “He’s in Mayenz! The Rosheimers sent him there to apprentice under their cousins, Rhine river merchants. He’s well, he’s learning to read and write, and sent me a fine little letter!”
Expiration of breath, happy surprise. Grete kicks at the ground, peevish. “You boys will leave us here to rot. Who here will teach us letters?”
Silence a moment. Sunlight, stealing out from under a cloud, makes a halo around Rettich’s golden head. Chickens pluck at old chaff amongst the stones, grumbling to themselves. The smell of peat smoke and drying dungheaps. Achim sits in the seat of honour; their only chair, Amaline’s husband’s oakwood stool.
Curiosity can wait no longer. “Brother,” asks Mechthild. “Why are you here?”
† † †
When Rettich arrives in the main room of the Lodge, he can see Master Achim at his tables, studying a series of coloured glass samples. Achim holds up a piece of pale lemon glass to the light, staring at it a long time, turning it slowly between index finger and thumb. He looks disappointed.
“Sir, you summoned me,” says Rettich, uncertain if he should speak.
Achim jumps at the sudden voice, and turns. “Rettich.”
A moment as the Master seems to come back to this world, and remember why the boy is there before him. “I summoned you.”
“Yes. I am here. What can I do for you, Master?”
“Show me your trees.”
“Master?”
“You said once that, near your village, there were very tall, straight trees.”
“There are a few, my Lord.”
“We will leave tomorrow.”
Rettich hesitates, caught like a deer in a forest clearing, uncertain of which way to turn.
“I thought you would be happy.”
“I am, sir! I’d like to dance on the moon.”
“But it is daytime.”
“Yes.”
“So the moon is not available.”
A shadow crosses Rettich’s mind. “I have no gifts for my family, sir. I promised I would return with gifts.”
“Then tomorrow, before we leave, we can buy some gifts.”
“I have no money, my Lord.”
“I said we can buy some gifts. I will be visiting them too, will I not? So, I can buy them on our behalf.”
“You, sir? Visit my family?”
“If you prefer I didn’t, you can hide me in a barn whilst you do the visiting.”
“No, you will visit them! It will be an honour, my Lord.”
“Good. After breakfast we will meet here and then go to the market. Can you ride a horse?”
Rettich wants to say “yes,” but in all conscience, cannot.
“A mule? . . . ”
Rettich looks sad. Does this mean he can’t come?
“A donkey?”
Now he’s smiling. And then, once again, he stops, and frowns. “Sir, I have no permission to leave! I must ask Master Giselbert.”
“Rettich, Rettich . . . What makes you think I haven’t already asked him?”
Rettich, his heart bounding with joy, bows and takes his leave. The Lodge door swings open to the
fresh, spring air. Rettich runs across the Cathedral Square, arms outstretched, like a swallow on the evening breeze.
† † †
Above them the tall trees tower. Straight, lofty in sunlight. Green-gold needled, sifting the wind.
“What do you call them?” asks Achim.
“Trees,” says Grete, who has come with them, despite brother Rettich’s protest. She giggles.
“Rettich?”
“She’s right, we call it a ‘tree.’” Rettich laughs.
Achim smiles, “It’s a good name for it.” His fingers feel the bark. They stand in the hill gully. The splash and gurgle of a brook, steep banks on either side. The sun is about to pass over the crest, leaving them in shadow. “We need to cut one down and season it. If it’s good, we need cuttings. Then we will plant a grove of them.”
“Here?”
“Nearer the Cathedral, Rettich. In the Bishop’s hunting forests.” Achim sighs. He looks at the crest of the trees, still bright in sunlight.
“Why sigh, my Lord?”
Achim shrugs, finds a smile. “Everything takes such time, work, effort. And money. If only we could just live in the mind . . . ”
Grete looks at Rettich. Her face says, “What?”
Achim pats the tree trunk. “But if we do this now, next year we will know if the timber is good. And, if so, we will plant a grove of them. And then they will grow. And then, after we are dead and buried, those who come after us who will build the towers and the steeples will be grateful for what we have done.”
Rettich looks at his Master’s face, sees that he is glum. “My lord, we will build this cathedral so fast that you will live to see it completed. I swear we will.”
Achim looks at Rettich, smiling, but his smile is wan.
† † †
One winter night, Rettich is alone in the Lodge. He sits obediently, waiting for the return of the Clerk, into whose hands he must give the Keys, and to no-one else. The night is cold, a deep frost, and the fire in the stove went out a while ago. He sits, wrapped in a blanket, shivers, and waits.
There is a knock on the door. It is Heinrich, the carpenters’ boy, and he is sniggering. “Clerky won’t be coming . . . ”
“What?”
Heinrich giggles like a child once more. He mimes drinking, drinking, drinking. “Spiced Christmas wine! At the zum Creutze. He won’t be getting up! Master says you must stay here the night, Rettichlein Rettichlein.”
“Then I’ll stay. Heinrich?”
“Yes.”
“For the Love of God, get me some firewood. Or I’ll die of cold.”
Later, with wood in the stove, he steals the sheepskins from the Clerk’s counting chair and lays them by the fire, folds the blanket, ready for bed . . .
Locks the door from inside.
A candle is burning over in the corner, by the chest where Master Achim keeps his drawings. Rettich goes to blow it out. The chest is not locked.
Temptation is too great. The candle stays lit. Rettich, his heart racing, opens the chest, pulls out a drawing.
Master Achim’s hand is so fine, so delicate. Rettich finds, standing before him, a Prophet. Who can it be? John the Baptist? He has long hair, a beard, bright staring eyes, a battered coat and cloak. He is holding his right hand aloft and in his hand a fire is burning, tongues of flame. His left hand is held open in peace, in openness.
Rettich pulls out another drawing, and another, and another, all of them traced in faint, almost invisible lines of the most delicate, greyest ink. And all of them display a young girl of incredible perfection. Her skin is the white of the page, her hair almost floating around her as she leans forward, her right hand outstretched. In her open palm, there is a heart.
A chill runs through Rettich. For he recognises the girl. Odile. The Girl to whom Master Achim had given the Devil’s shilling. The Wanderer’s daughter.
Another painting. Just one or two more and then he must stop. What if one of the Masters passes by, and seeing candlelight from the windows, comes to investigate?
The next parchment he pulls out is larger. A rose window. Painted in full colour. In the outer windows, petals and leaves and fronds of golden red and green and a sky of deepest, mountain gentian blue. Then a corolla of amber, shot through with rays of deepest gold, fading to the yellow of lemons, bright in sun. And in the centre, a circle of pure, bright, white light.
† † †
“Where are we going?”
“To the pass, Master. It’s not far.”
“Why are you taking me to the pass?”
“I want to show you something.”
Grete, incorrigible, trots along behind them in her clogs, deaf to any commands for her to go home. Late afternoon sunlight chequers the dirt path with shadows. Martins flutter above the swaying treetops. Above and ahead, the wood gives way to open grazing land.
They ride along in silence a while.
“Rettich,” says Achim tentatively, “do you have any experience with girls?”
Rettich answers quickly, “No.”
Grete laughs, then says, “I am a girl.”
“It’s true, Grete, you are a girl. Let me ask you instead. If someone were courting you, and he brought you a present, what would you like it to be?”
Rettich blushes. “Master, please, Grete is still young and under—”
Grete interrupts her brother, “But I already have an admirer. Hold your tongue, brother.”
“You? An admirer?”
“And what if it’s true?” says Grete, and turns to Achim. “Something pretty is of no use to me. Ribbons, dried flowers fa la la.”
“Something useful, then?” ventures Achim.
“Useful? Will you give a girl a hammer?”
“I see what you mean, Grete. Well then, advise me, poor lost man.”
“Something sweet in my mouth, Master. Sugar. Candied fruit. Honey cake.”
“Is that the way to your heart, Grete?”
“It may open the door a crack or two. You will need more to have it open wide.”
“And are all girls the same?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because it’s not you I’m courting, Grete Schäfferin.”
“More’s the pity, then I’d have two admirers.”
“And so I ask again. Candied fruit, sugar and spice. Will that always find a happy welcome in the female heart?”
“I reckon so. And who is your Belovèd, Master, may I ask?”
Achim blushes, smiles. “I cannot say. She is like an Angel, a Ghost. I have only seen her once. And I am searching for her, to see her again, here, there and everywhere . . . but I cannot find her.”
They continue on a while. Rettich looks censoriously at his youngest sister. She makes a face back at him. He wonders who her admirer can be, and prays that it is not Manfred the merchant, who came to their village to haggle prices for her sisters’ hair.
And then Rettich turns to watch his Master, who rides by his side, slightly ahead of him. Still thinking of the Wanderer’s daughter?
“We’re here.”
Rettich jumps from his donkey, feels his sore backside. Despite Grete’s protests, he puts her astride the poor beast’s back. “You wait outside, you witch,” he says.
A knoll rises above the pass, with a cross planted in its summit, placed there by the parson when the Bishop passed this way across his lands. Beneath the cross, at the top of the pass, a small chapel. Stumpy, tiny, in drab dun stone. It looks like a chicken squatting to lay an egg.
“You wanted to show me this?”
“Wait, my Lord. Come inside.”
Achim shrugs and dismounts as Rettich pushes the chapel door. They pass inside.
Dark, dank. An altar and a rough, naïve and charmless Virgin upon the wall above. Two bunks for pa
ssing travellers. A pitcher of water.
“Turn, my Lord,” says Rettich.
Achim turns. In the western wall, a window of yellow glass, a bright ochre eye in the dowdy stone.
“Master, I admitted to you earlier that I took a secret look at your drawings.”
“Yes?”
“I saw the Rose. The Rose Window.”
“You did?”
“Master, it is the most beautiful thing I have ever, ever seen.”
“Rettich . . . ”
“ . . . and I saw the yellows you used, dark golden. But I have never seen a glass that colour on your desk. So I thought of here, my Lord.”
“You did well, Rettich.”
“At sunset—”
Achim interrupts him, “Yes, Rettich, I can see. In a minute or two, it’s coming.”
“We are well come on the hour, Master.”
“We are indeed. Rettich, you are a marvel.”
Achim sits down on the damp pew, holds his head in his hands a second. “Rettich, do you know who made this glass?”
“I do not, my Lord. But I am sure we can find him.”
Achim sighs again. “So many pieces to find, to source, to fit together. The work that never ends.”
“Master?” asks Rettich, but no answer is forthcoming. Master Achim is silent because the sun is now suddenly shining directly into the chapel.
The window is alive with splendour. The ochre glass captures the setting rays, burnishing them with warm gold, the essence of Sunlight.
THE WHORES OF ROME
(ANNO 1231. MANFRED GERBER II)
He owes his Fortune to Abbess Hedwig and to the Whores of Rome. If the Abbess hadn’t been an ugly bald bitch, and if the horny Romans had less cream in their churns, then he’d still be at the docks lugging sacks and making deals for ha’penny profits.
Here’s how it happened: a ride on the wild horse of Fate.
Bertle and Manfred leave the Hayseed mercenaries by the outskirts of Pfalzburg on the Nanzig road; there’s a good Inn in Pfalzburg, and the Swiss cretins aren’t short of money. Unlike their captors, who—as yet unpaid by Holy Mother Church—spur their hungry horses and head back into the gathering dusk.