This worked well for a number of weeks. Max seemed content to sit by the fire all day, eating every meal there as Claudia brought them to him, and only moved when it was time to take to the cabin’s only bed at night. He had no idea where his servants slept, since, at his insistence, they never retired at night until after he had, and always rose in the morning before he did. He never even stepped outside to use the outhouse — tucked almost invisibly back in the woods — but made his wastes in one of Claudia’s treasured porcelain bowls. After all, it was their job to clean up after him and dispose of his messes. The Schoeps settled into their new life without a complaint and Max seldom had to correct them.
“You two are eating too much,” he said one day, when the first snowfall of the year had begun to drift down from a dark sky.
“Excuse me, Mr. Piper?” Gerwulf said.
“We’re nearly finished with the first pig you’ve butchered,” Max said. “And there are only two pigs left, plus the cow. But once we kill that for its meat, we’ll no longer have its milk. If we keep eating at this rate, we’ll never have enough to last us through the winter. Now, as the master of this house, I can hardly be expected to do with less, but you and your wife aren’t eating as lowly servants should. You’re feasting every day as if this is your food, and not the bounty I’ve generously provided for you.
“But Mr. Piper —”
“Don’t try to plead with me. You’re both too fat anyway. Fat servants are an indictment against their lord. It shows others that he’s not truly in command of his own household — that he lets even the lowest minion get away with stealing from him. Eat less, or I might be tempted to cut by one the number of mouths I have to feed. The two of you are barely doing a single man’s work anyway. I’m too soft and indulge you too much.”
From that day on, Gerwulf and Claudia were only allowed a single meager bowl of porridge in the morning and another at night. For the afternoon meal Max allowed them a small serving of bread, cheese and meat. When Max reckoned later that this new plan would insure a surplus by winter’s end, he decided to increase his own portions, so as not to risk wasting any of it. Three times a day, every day, he tucked in with gusto, but remained rail thin.
The days accumulated along with the snow. Winter set in with grim intent.
Then one afternoon, when the snow had drifted high and the days had grown short, Max realized he hadn’t seen Gerwulf all day.
“Where is he?” Max asked of Claudia, who looked nervous and flighty, like a quivering young faun ready to bolt at any provocation.
“There are many chores to be done outside,” she said.
“Always, but he usually comes in three or four times a day to get warm. Has he suddenly discovered a reservoir of endurance and a sense of duty he never had before?”
“We’re low on firewood,” she said, “and I saw him earlier with the ax. Perhaps he’s wandered afar in search of the right trees to fell. This deep snow makes for slow going.”
That was a perfectly reasonable explanation, as Max had not the slightest idea what the true state of their wood supply was, seeing as how it was stored outside, under the same low shed that housed the animals in winter. But something seemed false in the way Claudia acted.
“You look nervous, Claudia, dear. What are you not telling me?”
“Nothing at all, sir. Only —”
“Yes?”
“Well, like you, I’m naturally nervous, because it has been some hours since Mr. Schoep’s been gone. Though he’s made his life as a woodcutter, he’s not as young or strong as he was. And there are fell creatures in the woods.”
“You’re offering up a number of good reasons why poor old Gerwulf might be tardy,” Max said. “But now I wonder if you might be providing too many.”
“Never, sir!”
“Just the same, your worry has now become mine. I think I’d best go out and see if some harm has befallen the man.”
“But, sir! You never go out!”
“And I shouldn’t have to. But like you, Claudia, dear old Gerwulf is under my care, and a good shepherd doesn’t neglect his flock. Besides, at least once before the season passes I should try out the new coat you’ve sewn for me over the past two months.”
After Claudia had finished cleaning and mending Max’s performance suit of bright colors, seeing how deft she was with a needle and thread, Max asked about the possibility of a coat to match. Claudia practically leapt at the idea, thinking that a warm coat might inspire him to once again venture outdoors, and doing that might inspire him to move down the road to oppress other homesteads. Claudia only had bits and pieces of cloth to work with, the scraps of a lifetime of sewing not only her own clothes, but finer dresses to sell at market each year. That suited Max’s tastes just fine. A coat of diverse colors and patterns would be a delight.
So Claudia made Max a pied coat of bright yellows and cheerful blue stripes, and silky vermilions, and a dozen shades of verdant. There were bold reds offset by somber browns and amber checkerboards. Fine needlework designs tied it all together in a festive theme. It was a coat like no other, and Max loved it.
Then, in order to further encourage Max to leave, she sewed him a warm liner for his coat that could be buttoned in or removed at need. In his younger days, Gerwulf had been a hunter, as well as a woodcutter. He’d provided Claudia with many a fur pelt from which to devise expensive winter coats for rich townsfolk. Claudia used the many leftover scraps of treated pelts to form the liner, sewing them together any which way. She didn’t worry about matching one type of fur to another, since Max reveled in the chaotic jumble of different shades and napes. Joined with the outer coat, it was a mantle that could keep a man warm on the coldest day.
Claudia made it all to encourage Max to leave, but now she acted as if that was the last thing she wished him to do.
“Don’t worry, old mother. I’ll bring Gerwulf back, sound and safe.”
Claudia couldn’t answer. Max put on his coat, with its fur liner, a pair of the couple’s old fur snow boots, which turned out to fit his feet just fine, and then buckled his sword belt outside the coat. After he left, walking resolutely through the drifts, she tried to keep from weeping, but ultimately failed.
Maybe Husband left in time and is too far ahead to be caught now, she thought. And maybe Max will give up and turn back around, which, considering his past inclinations, seemed entirely likely.
Outside of the cottage, Max was nearly stunned by the intensity of the cold. His first instinct was to turn around immediately and go back in. But then he saw the tracks Gerwulf had left from earlier in the morning. It had snowed all night and not since then, so there was only a single set of tracks leading away from the cottage and they were as clear as could be. When he’d left early this morning — long before Max had awakened — Gerwulf had made straight for the forest path and then down it. There was no indication that he’d wandered the yard at all first, as someone setting out to do the day’s chores might do. The tracks never diverted close to the trees lining either side of the forest path, as someone looking for wood to chop would need to do. It was instantly evident that Gerwulf was attempting to escape — no doubt off to seek armed men to bring back for a daring rescue of his tired old wife.
Max’s long dormant rage ignited and grew into a strong and steady fire all in a single moment. Max the deadly forest predator was suddenly alive again and spoiling for the hunt. Without pausing for any further consideration, he set out at a run, following in Gerwulf’s tracks.
Despite the snow’s impediment, he made good time. Small, fat Gerwulf didn’t have Max’s long and lanky strides, and he’d had to cut a new trail through the fresh snow, which had accumulated belly-high in the relatively cleared area of the forest pathway. Max only had to follow in the trail the fat old man had already cut deep for him. He ran and then rested and then ran again, surprised to discover that he was enjoying himself. In fact, he was having fun. Now that he’d adjusted to being outdoors for the first
time in months, he was perfectly warm in his long pied coat.
Max ran and ran, as the weary sun dropped closer and closer to the horizon.
Even in the dead of winter, the sun’s setting was gradual enough that Max was surprised when he realized it had actually turned dark. He’d chased Gerwulf for hours, but now it was time to turn back. He’d learned his lesson months ago that attempting to navigate the woods at night was a fool’s endeavor.
Then again, this was an odd sort of dark, for though the woods were black indeed, as was the sky overhead, the trail through the woods was still plain to see, draped as it was with a vast blanket of pure white snow. Even at night, the white snow stood out brightly, in stark contrast to the woods. He could continue on and still find his way back home without fear of losing his way.
And then, while Max was still dithering, trying to decide which way to go, he spotted a faint flicker of yellow light in the distance, like a single candle flame as seen from across a large hall.
“That’s a fire,” he said aloud.
So Max trudged onward. And in little time at all he came up on a humble campsite, pitched just off the side of the trail. Gerwulf was seated alone in the camp, close to the fire he’d built, but still shivering in his winter coat. He saw Max walk up on him, but made no attempt to flee, or grab for his ax, which was set into the same fallen log he was using for his seat.
“I thought you’d never try to follow me,” he said.
“I almost didn’t,” Max said. Frost Taker rose slithering from its sheath, thirsty and eager, hardly helped at all by Max’s guiding hand.
“Four more miles and I would’ve made it,” Gerwulf said. “But I got too tired to continue tonight.”
“Bad luck then,” Max said.
Frost Taker struck. Then it reared back and struck again, and again. It was all Max could do to hold onto it.
CLAUDIA DIDN’T LAST LONG after that night. She didn’t need to be told a thing when Max returned to the cottage, early in the following morning. His grim face told the story entire. She tried to carry on and keep working, hoping that her daughter would arrive some day, with a company of hard men, to put things right. But the life had simply drained out of her with Gerwulf’s loss. It was as if she had been stricken with the same thrusts of Frost Taker’s blade that had killed her husband. Within two weeks she passed away in the night, leaving Max entirely on his own once again.
Max deeply resented the betrayal.
“I protected them and cared for them,” he grumbled to the walls, “and they paid me back by abandoning me, just like Father and Mother did. And so did filthy Peter and all of the Peeps. They all ran off and left me in the woods to die like an animal.”
After Claudia died, after he’d dragged her body to the edge of the woods and left it there, food for whatever sort of thing that might happen to come along and take it, Max had to fend for himself. He wasn’t very good at it. He couldn’t figure out how to coax milk from the cow and finally decided just to butcher it for its meat. But the cow didn’t cooperate at all, finally running off down the snowy path, bleeding from a dozen minor cuts and lowing angry insults into the cold air. After killing four chickens, cutting them into useless jumbles of blood, gore and feathers, he finally managed to get one more or less intact onto a roasting spit. He did better with the pigs, having learned his lesson from the mess he made with the cow. He reached in and cut its throat first, before trying to cut or stab the animal anywhere else. Then he could chop at the dead pig all he liked, hacking off ragged chunks of meat as he needed them. But then, on the sixth day in a row that he trudged outside to cut his daily chunk of pork shoulder off the nearly frozen pig, he discovered that some beast had come in the night and dragged the remainder of its carcass away.
“That’s not fair!” Max shouted up to the indifferent sky. “There was so much left!”
As the early spring rains came to start washing the snow away, Max killed the last pig, and this time he cut every bit of meat he could get off it all at once, taking all day and half the night to complete the bloody work. Then he hauled all of the meat inside the cabin, where it would be safe from predators in the night. It took him several trips to tote every piece inside and he piled it on the table and counter and on the top of the sideboard, after he’d cleared all of Claudia’s fancy serving dishes off it. Within a month the cottage smelled like a charnel house, and Max was sick in his belly from rotted pork.
Aching and half delirious, he tossed the remainder of the rotting pig meat out off the front door, hurling each piece as far from the door as he could. Then he took to his bed and stayed there for eight days, writhing in a deep fever, until it finally broke and he felt well enough to get up.
The next day he trudged out to the animal shed again, empty now except for the chickens and a few remaining sticks of firewood. “Gerwulf lied about the firewood too,” Max said, perhaps talking to the chickens. Perhaps not. “There was plenty. Didn’t he realize that would be the first thing I’d check?” Max chose to ignore the fact that he hadn’t actually checked. Then, with nothing more to say about the wood, Max gathered the eggs which had accumulated over the past eight days and brought them back into the cottage, where he boiled them all in Claudia’s biggest copper pot. While the eggs boiled, he gathered up the remaining potatoes, carrots, onions, oats, sugar, salt, yellow cheese, and other sundries, and dumped them all into a single burlap sack. He didn’t take the flour, because he had no idea how to turn it into bread, or piecrusts, or any of the thousand other wonderful things traitorous old Claudia was able to do with it. When the eggs were boiled, he added those too to the sack. Then he filled the pockets of his coat with plenty of flint and tinder for starting fires, after which he was more or less ready to be on his way.
He donned his warm coat of diverse colors, to which a goodly amount of pig’s blood had recently been added, buckled on his sword belt, took up the sack of victuals. Then he stepped out the front door for the last time.
Patches of snow were still nestled into the crooks and crannies of the earth. The air was filled with the sounds of ten thousand trickles of water, melting off the remaining snow, running downhill, where it accumulated into the forest path, which acted as a makeshift drainage ditch, turning its ground into a soup of slick rocks and mud. “Better than struggling through the forest though,” Max said. Then, once again picking his direction at random, he set off down the wet path, leaving the ruined little cottage in the deep woods forever.
EARLY IN THE SPRING OF THE NEW YEAR, a dark and lovely young woman of the ancient craft walked down a wide forest road, in the company of a coal-black goat with high, twisty horns and eyes of red fire. She wore a dress of fine linen, dyed carnelian. Golden needlework in the pattern of leaves and twining thorn branches decorated its collar, sleeves and hem. A girdle of woven hemp enclosed her waist. From her belt dangled two daggers in bejeweled sheaths, one curved and the other straight. Also hanging from her belt was a small leather pouch of casting stones, with many an occult symbol inscribed on them. Her hair was long, black and silken. Her skin was pale and unblemished. Her lips were red. She chatted with the goat as they walked together. Her feet were bare against the road’s hard-packed dirt and embedded stones. The goat wore no leash or tether.
Max watched the girl and her goat from the concealment of the woods. He’d wandered through the forest for days, having been scared off the previous small path by the passage of a company of goblin foot soldiers. They’d come marching single file down the same narrow path he was on, no doubt on their way to expand the extent of their conquest into the smaller side roads and remote corners of the territory. Spotting them before they spotted him, Max had scrambled into the woods just in time to avoid their notice. Now, days later, he’d thrashed, cursed and stumbled his way to this much larger woodland avenue. He was about to step out onto it when he spied the girl and her companion goat walking towards him, approaching the place of his concealment.
What to do about her, he
wondered? The last of his boiled eggs had run out a week ago, closely followed by the remaining cheese, carrots and potatoes, leaving him only a few overripe onions to sate his hunger. The goat might make a fine meal, he thought. And the girl? What might I do with her? Intriguing ideas began to occur to him, while he hid in the underbrush. She was indeed a pretty one, he considered, and I’m now, by any honest measure, a man grown. It’s well past time I began to do things with pretty girls.
Max was in the process of screwing up his courage, preparing to step out into the road to block the girl’s progress, when a new development interrupted his plans. The heavy sounds of approaching horses rose from behind the girl, farther down the road.
Only a moment later, three riders appeared from around the bend. They were three knights of the gentry — that much was immediately obvious. They were dressed in armor of shining plate over chain mail, and wore bright surcoats over that, decorated with complex heraldic devices on their breasts. The warhorses they rode were huge and intimidating beasts, snorting and thundering.
The dark girl turned to watch them as they rode up to her. She seemed unconcerned, only mildly curious, and made no move to flee, or even step off the road. The riders reined up next to her. Their horses’ great hooves kicked up mud in their efforts to stop, spattering the girl’s white legs and the hem of her fine dress.
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