you too bad a fright last night,’ said Tonda, turning to him.
‘Not too bad!’ said Krabat.
And when he saw the ‘ghosts’ by daylight, they were just young men like any others. All eleven spoke Wendish, and they were some years older than Krabat. When they looked at him it seemed to him there was pity in their eyes, which surprised him, but he thought no more about it.
What did puzzle him was the way the clothes he found at the end of his bed, though secondhand, fitted as if they had been made for him. He asked the others where they got their things – who had worn them before? But the moment his question was out, the miller’s men put down their spoons and gazed sadly at him.
‘Have I said something wrong?’ asked Krabat.
‘No, no,’ said Tonda. ‘Your clothes … they belonged to the man who was here before you.’
‘Why did he leave?’ asked Krabat. ‘Has he finished his apprenticeship?’
‘Yes,’ said Tonda. ‘Yes … he has finished his apprenticeship.’
At that moment the door flew open, and the Master came in. He was angry, and the miller’s men shrank back from him.
‘No idle chatter here!’ he shouted at them. His one eye fell on Krabat, and he added harshly, ‘It’s a mistake to ask too many questions. Repeat that!’
‘It’s a mistake to ask too many questions,’ Krabat stammered.
‘Get that into your head, then!’
And the Master left the servants’ hall, slamming the door behind him.
The men began to eat again, but suddenly Krabat felt he had had enough. He stared down at the table, bewildered. No one was taking any notice of him.
Or were they?
When he looked up, Tonda glanced across the table and nodded to him – very slightly, but the boy was glad of it. He could feel that it was good to have a friend in this mill.
After breakfast the miller’s men went to work. Krabat left the servants’ hall along with the others. The Master was standing in the hall of the house, and he beckoned to Krabat, saying, ‘Come with me!’
Krabat followed the miller out of doors. The sun was shining, it was a cold, still day, with hoarfrost on the trees.
The miller took him behind the mill, to a door at the back of the house, which he opened. They both entered the meal store, a low-ceilinged place with two tiny windows covered with flour dust. Flour covered the floor too, hung on the walls, lay thick on the oak beams of the ceiling.
‘Sweep it out!’ said the Master, pointing to a broom beside the door. He went away, leaving the boy alone.
Krabat set to work, but after wielding his broom a few times he was enveloped in a thick cloud of flour, like dust.
‘I’ll never do it this way,’ he thought. ‘Once I get to the other end of the room it will be as thick as ever back here! I’d better open a window.’
The windows were nailed up from outside, the door bolted. He might rattle it and bang on it as hard as he liked, it was no good. He was a prisoner here.
Krabat began to sweat. The flour stuck to his hair and eyelashes, it tickled his nose, it roughened his throat. It was like an endless nightmare – flour and more flour, great clouds of it, like mist, like flurrying snow.
Krabat was breathing with difficulty; he laid his forehead against a beam. He felt dizzy. Why not give up?
But what would the Master say if he just put down his broom now? Krabat did not want to get into the Master’s bad books, not least because of the good food at this mill. So he forced himself to go on, sweeping from one end of the room to the other without stopping, hour after hour.
Until at last, after half an eternity, someone came and opened the door. It was Tonda.
‘Come along!’ he cried. ‘It’s midday!’
The boy did not wait to be told twice. He staggered out into the fresh air, gasping for breath. The head journey man glanced inside the meal store.
‘Never mind, Krabat,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders. ‘No one does any better at the start!’
Muttering some words that Krabat did not catch, he traced something in the air with his hand. At that, the flour in the room rose up in the air, as if a strong wind were driving it out of every nook and cranny. A white, smoky plume swept out of the door and away over Krabat’s head, toward the wood.
The room was swept clean; not a grain of dust was left behind. The boy’s eyes widened in amazement.
‘How did you do that?’ he asked.
Tonda did not reply, but only said, ‘Let’s go in, Krabat; the soup will be getting cold.’
Krabat had a hard time from then on. The Master worked him unmercifully. It was, ‘Where are you, Krabat? There’s a couple of sacks of grain to be carried to the granary,’ and ‘Come here, Krabat! You’re to turn the grain over, right from the bottom, so it won’t start sprouting!’ or ‘That meal you sifted yesterday is full of husks! You’ll see to it after supper, and no bed for you before it’s clear of them!’
The mill in the fen of Kosel ground grain every day, weekdays and Sundays, from early in the morning until night began to fall. Only once a week, on Fridays, did the miller’s men stop work earlier, and they started two hours later than usual on Saturdays.
When Krabat was not busy carrying sacks or sifting meal, he had to chop wood, shovel snow, carry water to the kitchen, groom the horses, cart manure out of the cowshed – in short, there was always plenty for him to do, and when he lay down on his straw mattress at night, he felt as if every bone in his body was broken. His back was aching, the skin of his shoulders was chafed, and his arms and legs hurt so much he could hardly bear it.
Krabat marveled at his companions. They did not seem at all bothered by the heavy day’s work, none of them appeared tired or complained. They did not even sweat or get out of breath as they worked.
One morning Krabat was busy clearing snow from the way to the well. It had snowed all night without stopping, and the wind had drifted up the pathways. Krabat gritted his teeth, every time he dug his shovel in he felt a sharp pain in his back. Then Tonda came up to him, and looking around to make sure they were alone, he put a hand on Krabat’s shoulder.
‘Keep going, Krabat …’
Suddenly the boy felt as if new strength were flowing into him. The pain vanished, he seized his shovel, and would have gone on shoveling away with a will if Tonda had not taken his arm.
‘Don’t let the Master notice,’ he said. ‘Nor Lyshko, either!’
Krabat had not liked Lyshko much from the first,- he was a tall, lean fellow with a sharp nose and a squint, who seemed to be a snooper and an eavesdropper and a creeper around corners – you could never be sure you were safe from him.
‘All right,’ said Krabat, and he went on with his work, acting as though he were making very heavy weather of it. Quite soon, as if by chance, along came Lyshko.
‘Well, Krabat, how do you like the taste of your job?’
‘How do you think?’ grumbled the boy. ‘You try a nice mouthful of dirt, Lyshko – that’s about how much I like the taste of it!’
After this, Tonda took to meeting Krabat more often and placing a hand unobtrusively on his shoulder. Every time, the boy felt new strength coursing through him, and however hard his work might be, he found he could do it easily.
The Master and Lyshko knew nothing at all about it – nor did the other