“Ah, now I understand,” she laughed. “You fell down here and Matthias cheered you up by feeding you prunes. It’s no wonder I didn’t hear a word from you-how could I, when your mouth was full of sweets?”
Peter snatched the sweet fruit from his mother’s hands and ate it hungrily. When Peter’s little brother started to cry, Matthias gave him a prune, too, and Paul at once put it in his mouth.
Together they walked along the slope past moss-covered rocks and beeches whose green foliage glimmered in the sun. After recovering from her fright, Magdalena felt almost born again. Now little Paul was riding on Matthias’s shoulders while Peter walked alongside holding his hand. The children seemed to really like the silent journeyman. Matthias pointed out birds in the forest, tossed leaves through the air so they came fluttering down like rain, and made funny faces that sent the children into fits of laughter. Magdalena couldn’t help but smile.
I hope Simon never hears about this, she thought. I can’t remember the last time he made the children laugh like this. He just doesn’t have enough time for them.
After a while, they came to a group of rocks that looked like the remains of a circular foundation. Behind these a kind of rocky spire rose up. Peter let go of the man’s hand, ran toward the rocks, and started to climb up. Once on top, he tiptoed around the edge… but then suddenly stopped, as if rooted to the spot.
“What’s the matter, Peter?” Magdalena asked. “Is something wrong?”
“Up there, Mama.” Peter pointed at another large rock that, in the distance, looked like the giant head of a troll. The child’s voice now sounded soft and anxious. “Look, Mama. There’s the witch again. I’m afraid of the witch.”
“What kind of witch?” With a pounding heart, Magdalena rushed over to the ring of stones, followed by Matthias and little Paul. Halfway around the circle she caught sight of an old woman in a tattered dress, stooped over as if carrying an enormous burden. When the white-haired woman turned to her, Magdalena could see from her empty, milky eyes that she was blind.
“The children,” the woman whispered, her voice sounding like the moaning of the wind. “The children are in great danger. Someone is trying to harm them-I can feel that.”
“What… what are you saying, woman?” asked Magdalena, moving closer to Matthias. “Who wants to harm my children?”
With angry grunts, the big, mute man strode over to the ring of stones and lifted Peter down from the rock. The boy, paralyzed by fear, couldn’t look away from the old woman in the tattered dress.
“Evil is everywhere!” the old woman wailed. “I’m guarding the entrance to hell, but evil long ago spread to our houses and homes, and I can no longer stop it. Beware, children. Beware!”
Blindly groping her way forward, the old woman staggered toward Matthias, Magdalena, and the children, reaching out toward Paul with her long, filthy fingernails. The knacker’s apprentice gave her a shove and she fell backward, landing in the wet leaves.
“Woe to you!” she screamed as if she’d completely lost her mind now. “Woe to you! Evil is reaching out: I can hear it rumbling in the bowels of the mountain, I hear its song every night-the end is near.”
Dazed, Magdalena took her children by the hand and walked backward, step by step, to the slope where they’d come down. “Listen, old woman,” the hangman’s daughter said, trying to calm her down. “We wish you no harm. I’m sorry if we’ve frightened you.”
Magdalena kept speaking in a soft, soothing voice as she continued to move away with the children. The woman was clearly insane, but crazy people often spoke curses that came true. That’s what older people had always told her, in any case; perhaps there was some truth to it.
The old woman was still wailing, but in the meantime her words had given way to an incomprehensible babble. She lay doubled up on the ground, and Magdalena only hoped Matthias hadn’t inadvertently injured her. Magdalena was about to walk back to the woman to see what was wrong when the knacker’s assistant took her by the shoulder and pulled her back with a growl. He gestured as if to say the woman was out of her mind and pointed back to the monastery. His gaze conveyed a clear warning-now void of any friendliness.
“Geout. Esser geout,” he stammered
“You’re right, Matthias,” Magdalena sighed. “We’d better turn around and get out before she does something to harm the children. There’s nothing more we can do to help here; she’s living in her own world.”
After a final anxious look, she turned and hurried back to the slope with Matthias and the children. She could hear the whining old woman for a while, but then only the stillness of the forest. The children were already beginning to laugh again, and in a few minutes, they seemed to have forgotten the strange encounter. In another quarter hour, they had struggled up the steep slope and now stood at the edge of the forest, looking out on the fragrant field of flowers.
Magdalena took a deep breath, feeling as if she’d awakened from a bad dream.
“Who in God’s name was that?” she asked Matthias, but the journeyman just shrugged and turned to point the way home.
The four hurried across the meadow toward the monastery wall, where new groups of pilgrims had been circling since early morning, praying loudly. In the midst of one such group, Magdalena spotted her father. This time he wasn’t wearing his monk’s robe, and he looked tired.
“Where in the devil have you been?” he growled, absent-mindedly patting his grandsons’ heads. “Simon and I have been worried.”
“I was in the forest with Matthias and the children,” she said, trying to reassure him. “You men were completely absorbed in your conversation.”
“Is that Graetz’s journeyman?” Kuisl took a careful look at the redheaded giant. “Well, then at least you weren’t unprotected. Nevertheless, I think it would be best for you not to go so far into the forest from now on.”
“Ah, I see. You want to lock me up, you and Simon?” asked Magdalena, regaining her self-confidence. “You can forget that,” she groused. “I’ll go where I want.”
For a moment she wondered whether to tell her father about the strange encounter with the mad old woman, but she decided to keep silent. In the present situation, it would just be grist for her father’s mill. Instead, she turned to him and whispered, “You’d better be careful Semer doesn’t see you out here, or he’ll get some dumb ideas.”
“Bah!” the hangman retorted. “I’m no more interested in Semer than I am in a used wad of tobacco.” He spat on the ground to emphasize his point. “Now for once, I want you to come where I want to go. Unlike you, stupid woman, we two men have been thinking.”
“Ah, and what came of that?”
“I’d rather discuss that with you in private, if possible, without the children present.” Once more the hangman looked Matthias up and down. “Do you think your strong bodyguard would be able to take the two kids down to the knacker’s house and keep an eye on them there?”
“Better than you and Simon together,” Magdalena snapped.
The children pouted, but when the knacker’s helper finally offered them two more plums, they followed willingly. After the children and Matthias disappeared around the corner, the hangman turned back to his daughter.
“Well?” she asked curiously. “What’s your plan?”
Grinning, the hangman unrolled the monk’s robe he’d been hiding under his cloak.
“Brother Jakobus and Saint Simon will pay another visit to the relics room,” he said with a sneer. “There’s something there I have to get a look at again. Do you think a weak woman like you can keep the priests off our backs for a while?”
“If you’re looking for a weak woman, you’ve come to the wrong place.”