The Willow King

by Meelis Friedenthal

  FRIDAY AFTERNOON

  HE COULD REMEMBER THE DARK, high walls, the moaning of hungry children, the muddy road. They had gone out through the Russian Gate, crossed a rotten bridge over a river edged with willow trees, and then taken a turning off the road. That part had been straightforward.

  He stood looking at the trees from which he had cut the bark a couple of days earlier. He remembered how the peasants had appeared as if from nowhere, and instinctively his hand reached for the hilt of his sword. But right now there was no one to be seen. The river looked safe and tranquil; the road seemed in a better state than he remembered—even the shabby houses across the river looked more inviting than before.

  “Now then,” he said. He went up to one of the trees, swiftly cut a few strips of bark to take with him and hurried onwards.

  There was a strange silence hanging over the dilapidated hovels which made up the outskirts of town. Occasionally someone would appear and cast a sidelong glance at Laurentius, and wide-eyed children stood and watched him from the doorways just as before, but this time he steeled himself not to show any concern. The buildings all seemed unfamiliar, so he carried on walking in no particular direction, occasionally peering beyond the houses to see if he could spot anything resembling the barn. But he could no longer remember which way he and the woman had gone. Peter had mentioned that the barn was situated somewhere in Aruküla, but since he was still unfamiliar with Dorpat geography he only had the vaguest idea where that might be. Wherever he looked there were just low houses and small outbuildings, nothing which tallied with his recollection of where they had been.

  Ever since the memory of the sick girl had come back to him as he sat in the coffee house, he could think of nothing else. Had his powder been of any use? Had there been enough? Had her mother managed to administer it properly? Maybe it was because he was sick himself that he was worried about the girl, that he could empathize with her. Maybe he sensed that if she got better, then he would too.

  Laurentius hurried onwards without bothering to think if he was going in the right direction.

  He had sat in the coffee shop talking with Peter and Jonas for a little longer before telling them that he needed to get some medicine and heading to the apothecary’s. The apothecary had seemed surprisingly well educated, and demonstrated some expertise in his field, speaking at length and quite eloquently about various treatments, and employing plenty of learned Latin terms. He took obvious pride in showing Laurentius a list of remedies which he had got printed at the Dorpat press. On hearing that Laurentius came from Leiden, he started telling him all about the situation in Dorpat, in particular about the climate, which he believed was particularly conducive to certain types of ailments, especially melancholia, and he had added that the nearby marshes also played their part. Laurentius even started to regret that he had been so wary of seeing an apothecary before letting blood. This one didn’t seem like a quack at all. It was only when he pulled a cunning expression and started to justify the local population’s fondness for the bottle that Laurentius realized that something was not quite right after all. A weakness for the tipple was known to be the second vocational malaise of apothecaries, after quackery. The apothecary had then all but forced Laurentius to take a small bottle of medicine made to his own personal recipe, at which Laurentius had hurriedly tried to explain that he only needed some ordinary fever medicine. He had tried to explain to the apothecary that one should take great care when preparing tinctures, since too much spirit could do more harm than good, making the sick soul even less receptive to treatment. But the apothecary would have none of it.

  “Pure drivel,” he had said. “It’s scientifically proven. The stronger the spirit, the more powerful the tincture. I’ve also got something with an adder preserved in it here. I use it myself; it’s a most effective remedy, in particular against curses. You rub it onto your neck like this, back and front.”

  Laurentius politely declined the adder tincture and bought a small bottle of ordinary spirit instead. To make a proper tincture he would need to distil the extract of the willow bark, but if he soaked the bark in spirit and used it carefully it should still help to restore the child’s fragile constitution. If he could teach her mother how to administer the medicine, then she should be able to manage the child’s treatment herself. Although given what the apothecary had said about the local people, there was always the danger that she would just drink it.

  The town outskirts came to an end; the road started winding uphill past a small pond, and then Laurentius recognized where he was. He could see the same narrow footpath which he had walked down yesterday evening. This was the spot where he had been startled by the vision of an elf king, hovering above the river. Now he just smiled at how superstitious he had been.

  He pushed on, struggling across the patchwork of muddy fields and occasionally passing the odd tree, until eventually he spotted a building which resembled the barn, standing alone, deserted on the hillside. There were no guards there; nor were any of the former inhabitants to be seen. The large double doors were wide open, and the space where dozens of people had been lying packed tightly side by side was now empty. There were some tattered bits of clothing strewn across the floor, but otherwise very little which would have suggested that people once lived here. Some wisps of straw, some square patches on the earth floor, but otherwise emptiness. Laurentius started to suspect that the city had finally decided to shut down the refuge and ordered the soldiers to send everyone packing. But then he noticed that at least one person was still there, hunched in the shadows to his right, peering at him hostilely.

  “Hello,” blurted Laurentius. “Where are the others?”

  The question was met by a shake of the head, from which Laurentius concluded that the hunched figure probably didn’t understand German. But he decided to try again.

  “The others, where?”

  The old woman continued to stare up at him, gesturing somewhere into the distance. Laurentius turned his gaze away.

  “Soldiers?” he asked.

  The old woman waved her hand towards the forest again, and when Laurentius looked he could indeed make out a vague, bluish object against the dark grey strip of forest which ran along the riverbank. It may have been a soldier, but it could just as well have been a tree stump or a large boulder.

  “Thank you,” Laurentius said.

  He hurried on with an anxious look on his face. A large number of people had evidently gone that way before him, since the grass had been trampled and the road churned into mud. Once he got closer to the bluish-grey form it turned out that it was indeed a soldier. Laurentius came to a standstill and stood there awkwardly. What should he say?

  “It certainly is raining hard,” he observed by way of a greeting.

  The soldier raised his hand in a friendly gesture, having evidently established from Laurentius’ dress and his sword that he wasn’t a peasant. “It’s pouring fit to wash the teeth out of your mouth!” the soldier replied.

  “Has the refuge over there been shut down, then?” Laurentius asked, trying to make his question sound like nothing more than passing curiosity.

  “Oh no,” the soldier seemed happy to inform him. “Most of them are here in this cave.”

  Only then did Laurentius notice that he was standing very close to the mouth of what looked like a man-made cave. Inside he could make out people’s backs and their hats, and there were children standing at the outer edge, pressed tightly against their parents to shelter from the pouring rain.

  “So what’s happening then?” Laurentius enquired.

  “Well, this morning we heard they were scrapping here overnight. It was a right muddled story; they mentioned some sort of willow or alder king. In any case, they battered one of the women with cudgels and dragged her into the caves. When we arrived for the morning watch she was already half-dead. Now they’re going to take her away on a stretcher; Pastor Mellinck is here as well,” the soldier explained.

  As the crow
d parted and two peasants carrying a stretcher stepped out from their midst, Laurentius felt a cold shudder run down him. The scene reminded him of watching the ragamuffin being lugged off after the tanner’s lad had knocked him dead. He didn’t need to ask who was lying there under the sodden cloth. The pastor was walking behind the stretcher, dressed in a broad black robe, talking to the soldier beside him in a serious tone of voice. The soldier was nodding, distractedly fumbling with the hilt of his sword as he went.

  “Have you found out who is guilty?” Laurentius asked, struggling to hold back a powerful wave of nausea. A rotten stench was wafting up from somewhere nearby.

  “How could we hope to now? They all claim to have seen nothing. There are plenty of incidents like that these days. The city gives the women tokens to exchange for food, then the lads come and take them off them. If the woman has any sense in her she gets away with her life, but if she puts up a fight, she’ll get a whack. That’s how things are round here, see,” the soldier explained, sounding like he knew what he was talking about. “We have all kinds of bother here, but we don’t have enough men to enforce the law.”

  The peasants huffed and puffed, cursing to themselves as they carried the stretcher past, and Laurentius stared down at the ground, trying not to look at it. He could see long, brownish grass, wet with rain, and the muddy path ahead. The men were walking briskly, and the load swayed slightly in time with their footsteps. They quickly came up alongside Laurentius, and started to descend the slope. Then one of them slipped on the wet grass and nearly fell over, and the other one staggered about as he tried to maintain his balance. The cloth which had been placed over the stretcher slipped to one side, and a bony leg clad in torn leather foot straps was left dangling over the edge at an odd angle.

  “Curses!” exclaimed one of the peasants.

  The soldier leapt towards them and grabbed hold of the stretcher. “Nearly went for a tumble there!” he announced jauntily as he placed the leg back onto the stretcher.

  The crowd started clamouring noisily. Someone started addressing them in an authoritative-sounding voice, while others mumbled angrily. Some of them were pointing their fingers in Laurentius’ direction.

  “What’s wrong with them?” he asked.

  By now the pastor and the soldier accompanying him had arrived alongside Laurentius. The pastor lifted his hand and lightly touched the brim of his hat, smiling broadly. He was around fifty years old, with a full beard, and his hair was cut short like a Pietist or English Roundhead. Laurentius cast his gaze downwards. “Good afternoon.”

  “Greetings. Jacob Mellinck, shepherd of souls. What brings you here?” the pastor asked cheerily. “Were you out having a walk?”

  “Laurentius Hylas—I matriculated just recently,” Laurentius announced in a sheepish-sounding voice. “I was indeed walking nearby; I’m acquainting myself with the locality. I gather that there are a lot of marshes here, and I have heard talk of healing springs as well. I understand there have even been balneological investigations conducted?”

  That had been one of the many pieces of local knowledge which the apothecary had shared with Laurentius. He had told him that one Professor Micrander (his personal acquaintance, no less) had conducted investigations into the healing properties of the waters near Dorpat.

  “Yes indeed,” the pastor replied. “I have even been involved in that myself—the springs here produce a slime which is very easily absorbed into the joints and can drive away serious illnesses. But there is less and less time available for research these days. You can see for yourself what I have to deal with on a daily basis—the ignorant masses.”

  Mellinck gestured towards the rowdy crowd of women and children. The children appeared to be trying to explain something to their mothers, worriedly shaking their heads. They were dirty and unruly, and the pastor’s description of them as ignorant seemed quite a charitable assessment.

  “What happened? What are they so worked up about?” Laurentius asked.

  “Just now? Well, look, the corpse started bleeding. They’re saying that the blood starts flowing when the corpse is carried past the murderer. But it’s just silly superstition, of course. The soldiers moved the woman into a different position—that’s why the bleeding started.”

  “Ah, really?” said Laurentius, unable to think of anything else to say. He could see bright-red blood trickling down the blades of grass, mixing with the rainwater, and viscous brown streaks had formed in the pools of water collecting in the men’s footprints.

  “Is she dead, then?” he asked the pastor.

  “Yes, she died before I arrived. It was an ugly scene, to be sure. At first I thought that it was because of those tokens—we have had a lot of trouble with those here; it would have been better if the city had found some other way of tackling the problem. But it seems that it was in fact the same old witchery story. They were talking about a king appearing from somewhere and giving the woman some powder, so that she could go and worship Satan. Normally they just come and complain to us about it, but in these troubled times they have started taking justice into their own hands.”

  Laurentius barely managed to nod. He should have known that this would happen. He felt tears welling up as the shame and remorse overpowered him. Maybe there was some truth in what they said about the corpse bleeding in the murderer’s proximity, even if the phenomenon had been found to have no scientific basis. In any case, he was the one who had given the child the medicine, so he could be seen to bear direct responsibility for her mother’s death. It had never occurred to him that people might think it was some sort of witch powder. But the way things were, only the slightest excuse was needed to accuse someone of occult activities. He shook his head despondently, unable to think of anything to say.

  “Yes, that’s a familiar story round these parts,” the pastor eventually said. “I am constantly trying to tell them witchery is just a figment of the imagination, that it is caused by melancholy, but just you try explaining anything in rational terms to this lot! They simply won’t listen. They’ll insist that they consort with Satan and fly through the sky on goats, and all manner of things. One old man once stubbornly assured me that he was a werewolf, and that he frequently visited hell to fetch grain. The court dismissed the case twice, but the crazy old man wouldn’t drop his story. It’s as if they’re troubled in the head or something,” Mellinck said, sounding as if he were seriously vexed by the situation.

  Laurentius smiled ruefully. It was clear that the pastor’s views on the subject came straight out of Johann Weyer’s work on the illusion of demons.

  “In my view De praestigiis daemonum provides a very balanced explanation,” Laurentius said, just to say something, anything at all, to hide his grief and despair. He had used that very book to try to understand his own condition better, to try to find a cure.

  “Oh, you’ve read it?” asked the pastor, livening up. “It’s a most sensible text. I have been referring to Weyer for some time to try to make clear that witchery is a sickness of the mind rather than something based in reality. But we still have all sorts of trouble with it. Since you are new in town I should warn you that folk are very superstitious here. They see spirits and demons wherever they look. They have listened to just enough of the teachings of Christ to use the Bible in their spells. Forselius and I even started running schools for the country folk, to try to tackle the terrible ignorance and superstition which prevails. It’s a great shame that Forselius met his demise like that. But fortunately new schools are being established all the time, and I believe that the situation is slowly starting to improve,” said Mellinck, gazing thoughtfully into the distance as he spoke.

  “That’s good to hear,” Laurentius agreed distractedly. “But that woman… did she have any kin?”

  He didn’t dare to ask directly about the sick girl, in case that aroused further suspicion. But nor could he just forget the matter.

  “Any kin?” the pastor asked, a note of surprise in his voice. “If she
had any kin, then she probably wouldn’t have got into this mess in the first place. It is the ones who have no one at all who have it the hardest. In these parts they send off their elder children to go to work for strangers as early as ten, and then when the hard times come they have no one left. There are plenty of orphans round here.”

  Laurentius was already familiar with that sad state of affairs. At one time he had even roamed around like those children himself. He had been sent away from home at the age of eight, and now he could remember nothing at all, not even his mother’s or father’s face. He had been forced to find work on the farms, to live among strangers, surviving on scant pickings, crying himself to sleep every night. All the time he had yearned to go home; once he had even tried to run away.

  “This one had a child too,” the pastor continued. “Most probably begot with some stranger in the village, and then both mother and daughter were sent packing. The wretched little thing is still there in the barn. She appears to be sick.”

  Laurentius and the pastor headed to the barn together and looked in through the door. The old woman peered at them suspiciously from the corner again, but when Mellinck addressed her she directed them to the back of the barn, where they found the girl sleeping under an old soldier’s cape.

  The pastor scratched his head thoughtfully. “I’ll take her into my household for now, until it’s clear what will happen next. That is if she survives, of course: no one can know that yet. But she will be sure to die if she is left here.”