“Can’t you show us something better?” he grumbled.
As it happens, Tyll rarely loses his temper, but when he does, then he is better at insulting than anyone, then he says something that someone like that will never forget. What was it that he said? The darkness really does muddle your memory. The stupid thing was that they were currently recruiting men for the defense of the Brno fortress.
“Just you wait. You will do your part, you will join the soldiers! You can choose a unit for yourself. Only make sure, everyone, that he doesn’t run away!”
Then he laughed, the town commandant, as if it had been a good joke, and to be fair, it wasn’t bad, for that’s the point of a siege, after all, that no one can run away; if you could run away from a siege, it wouldn’t be a siege.
“What do we do now?” Tyll hears Matthias ask.
“Find the pickax,” replies Korff. “It must be lying around here someplace. If not, I tell you, we can save ourselves the trouble. Then we’re done for.”
“Kurt had it,” says Tyll. “It must be under Kurt.”
He hears the two of them scraping and pushing and groping and cursing in the dark. He remains sitting—he doesn’t want to be in their way, and above all he doesn’t want them to remember that it wasn’t Kurt who had the pickax but he himself. He is not entirely certain, because you grow more and more muddleheaded here. You can still remember distant events clearly, but the closer something was to the bang a short while ago, the more soupy and runny it is in your mind. He is in fact fairly sure that he had the pickax but that, because it was heavy and kept dangling between his legs, it is now lying somewhere in the shaft. He doesn’t say a word about this, though. It’s better if the two of them think that the pickax is with Iron Kurt, for he has moved on; however angry they get, it doesn’t matter to him.
“Are you helping, bag of bones?” asks Matthias.
“Of course I’m helping,” says Tyll, without budging. “I’m searching and searching! I’m searching like mad, like a mole, can’t you hear?”
And because he is a good liar, this satisfies them. His aversion to moving is due to the air. It is suffocating, nothing is flowing in, nothing out, you could easily pass out and never wake up. In air like this it’s better not to move and to breathe only as much as absolutely necessary.
He shouldn’t have joined the miners. That was a mistake. The miners are deep down below, he had thought, and the bullets fly up above. The miners are protected by the earth, he had thought. The enemy has miners to blow up our walls, and we have miners to blow up the shafts the enemy digs under our walls. Miners dig, he had thought, while up above there’s hewing and stabbing. And if a miner pays attention, he had thought, and takes advantage of the moment, then he can also simply keep digging and dig himself a tunnel and pop up somewhere outside, he had thought, beyond the fortifications, and make off before anyone’s the wiser. And because Tyll had thought this, he told the officer holding him by the collar that he wanted to join the miners.
And the officer: “What?”
“The commandant said I can choose!”
And the officer: “Yes, but…really? The miners?”
“You heard me.”
Yes, that was stupid. Miners almost always die, but they didn’t tell him that until he was underground. For every five miners, four die; for every ten, eight die; for every twenty, sixteen; for every fifty, forty-seven; and for every hundred, all of them die.
At least Origenes got away. It was due to their quarrel, just last month, on the way to Brno.
“In the forest there are wolves,” the donkey said, “hungry wolves, don’t leave me here.”
“Don’t worry, the wolves are far away.”
“They’re so close I can smell them. You’re climbing a tree, but I’m standing down here, and what do I do when they come?”
“You do what I say!”
“But what if you say something stupid?”
“Even then. I’m the human. I should never have taught you to speak.”
“They shouldn’t have taught you to speak either, you almost never make any sense, and your juggling is not what it was. Soon you’ll be slipping off your rope. You can’t order me around!”
And then Tyll simply remained angrily in the tree and the donkey remained angrily down below. Tyll has slept so often in trees that it’s no longer hard for him—you need a thick branch and a rope to tie yourself up, and a good sense of balance, and as with everything else in life you need practice.
For half the night he heard the donkey cursing. Until the moon rose he grumbled and muttered, and Tyll did feel sorry for him, but it was late, and at night you cannot move on, what could you do. So Tyll just fell asleep, and when he woke up, the donkey was gone. No wolves had come, he would have noticed; apparently the donkey decided that he could make it on his own and didn’t need a ventriloquist.
And Origenes was right about the juggling. Here in Brno, in front of the cathedral, Tyll blundered and a ball fell to the ground. He pretended it had been intentional, made a face that made everyone laugh, but something like that is no joke, it can happen again, and if next time it really is the foot on the rope, what then?
Well, that’s one less thing to worry about. It doesn’t look like they’re going to get out of here.
“It doesn’t look like we’re going to get out of here,” says Matthias.
Yet it must have been Tyll, those were his thoughts that strayed into Matthias’s head in the darkness, but perhaps it was the other way around, who could tell. Now they also see little lights, buzzing like glowworms, which, however, are not really there either, Tyll knows that, for although he sees the lights, he also sees that it is still completely dark.
Matthias groans, and then Tyll hears a thud, as if someone had punched the wall. Then Matthias utters a wild curse—one that Tyll never heard before. Have to remember that, he thinks, but then he has immediately forgotten it nonetheless and wonders whether he only imagined it, but what was it anyway, what did he imagine? Suddenly he no longer knows.
“We’re not going to get out of here,” Matthias says again.
“Shut your stupid trap,” says Korff, “we’ll find the pickax, we’ll dig ourselves out, God will help.”
“Why should he?” asks Matthias.
“He didn’t help the lieutenant,” says Tyll.
“I’ll bash your heads in,” says Korff. “Then you definitely won’t get out.”
“What are you doing here, anyway?” asks Matthias. “You are Ulenspiegel, aren’t you?”
“They forced me. You think I’d volunteer? And what are you doing here?”
“I was forced, too. Stole bread, was put in chains, bim bam boom. But you? How did that happen? You’re famous, aren’t you? Why would they force someone like you?”
“Down here no one is famous,” says Korff.
“Who forced you, then?” Tyll asks Korff.
“No one forces me to do anything. Anyone who tries to force Korff, Korff kills. I was with the drummers under Christian von Halberstadt, then I went to the French as a musketeer, then to the Swedes, but when they didn’t pay, I went back to the French as an artilleryman. Then my battery was hit, you’ve never seen anything like it, direct hit with heated shot, all the powder blows up, fire like the end of the world, but Korff threw himself into the bushes and survived. Then I went over to the imperial forces, but they didn’t need cannoneers, and I didn’t want to be a pikeman anymore, so I came to Brno, and because I didn’t have any money left and no one gets paid as well as the miners, I mined. Been doing it for three weeks now. Most don’t survive that long. I was just with the Swedes, now I kill the Swedes, and you two dirtbags are lucky that you’ve been buried alive with Korff, because Korff is hard to kill.” He wants to say more, but now he is running out of air, and he coughs, and then he is quiet for a while. “You, bag of bones,” he finally says. “Have any money?”