ALTDORF (The Forest Knights: Book 1) (18 page)

“There you are,” Thomas said stepping back.

Pirmin twisted a few times at the waist and raised each leg once. “Feels good. You still have the touch. Maybe I should have you dress me every day.”

“They will stay on for exactly half the match,” Thomas said.

The wrestlers were called into the circle and the match began.

It was an intense back and forth competition, but in the end, Gruber’s youth and experience won out over Pirmin’s strength. Both men were drenched in sweat and their breath came in labored gasps when Gruber finally won with a dramatic hip throw.

Pirmin pushed himself up off the ground and the two men embraced, after which Pirmin raised the victor’s hand into the air. The crowd screamed and the boy’s mother had tears in her eyes.

***

The meal that evening was both simple and decadent. Teams of oxen dragged the pieces of logs away from the town’s streets and stacked them to dry for a year after which they would be turned into firewood. Hundreds of brooms appeared and for the next hour festivalgoers of every age and sex took turns sweeping sawdust, wood chips and dirt from the cobble-stoned square. Chatting with friends as they worked, many sweeping with one hand and holding a cup of mead in the other.

Then a hundred trestle tables appeared in the center of the square. Lids were removed from huge vats of chamois stew that had been simmering since morning and a delicious aroma blanketed the square. There was a sudden, unannounced flurry of activity as people realized it was time to feast and they began to pile lengths of sausages and slabs of dried meats on tables, followed by freshly baked loaves of dark bread and huge wheels of cheese and pickled vegetables. As the sun began to set, a group of women lit torches and placed them around the perimeter.

Pirmin and Thomas sat on upright log ends and watched as Sutter and his wife tapped a fresh keg each of ale and mead. Sutter collected cups from the two men and filled them with mead. He raised his own mug to Thomas and Pirmin and toasted Pirmin on his day’s performance, and then scurried off to help his wife.

Thomas sipped the mead, detecting the tartness of plums within the honeyed alcohol. It was delicious and he was about to say so when Pirmin beat him to it.

“By God’s hand, Vreni! This is the finest mead I have set my tongue to. Sutter, how did an ornery scarecrow like you, win the heart of such an angel?”

Vreni rolled her eyes and waved away the compliment. Sutter, with an amazing display of accuracy, picked up a keg stopper and tossed it at Pirmin, hitting him dead center in the forehead. Thomas thought he caught the faintest trace of a smile in Sutter’s eyes as he turned away to fill someone else’s mug, but he may have been wrong.

Pirmin scoured the ground for a moment, looking for the projectile, probably intending to throw it back, but his mug distracted him and he took another sip. His eyes rolled heavenward and he smacked his lips.

“Ah, this is the life, eh Thomi? Tell me you are not glad I dragged you out of your shack today.”

Thomas took a satisfying pull off the mead. He knew the answer to Pirmin’s question but he would never admit it. “At least it looks like we will eat well tonight. I will give you that.”

“You should go into the innkeeping business. I have it on good authority the miserable sort can make a good living at it,” Pirmin said.

This got a grudging smile out of Thomas. “And what would you know about making a living at anything?”

They settled into the easy, mocking banter they had known since childhood, but Thomas could sense uneasiness in his friend. He was working around to asking Thomas something. A favor perhaps. Maybe Pirmin needed money, which would not be unlike him. Finally, his curiosity won out over his patience.

“Pirmin, if you need a loan I can help. The ferry has been crowded with passengers as of late, thanks in no small part to you.”

“Loan? No Thomi,” Pirmin said, shaking his head. “Sutter pays me more coin than I am worth, that I know. And more importantly, all the free food and drink I can stomach.”

“He must be a very rich man,” Thomas said. “Well, if it is not coin you are after, out with it then. Something is on your mind. I can see as much.”

Pirmin chuckled and squinted down at Thomas. “You always could get up inside my head.”

He quaffed his drink and looked out over the square at the hundreds of people milling about the tables filled with food. His eyes stopped scanning and rested on one table in particular. He nodded in that direction.

“That one,” he said.

Thomas followed his gaze. Noll Melchthal sat on top of a table, deep in conversation with two young men standing near one end. But Thomas only gave them a cursory glance, and found his eyes settling instead on Seraina, who sat amongst a group of children at the far end of the table. She was helping them carve lanterns out of giant beets, which the children would later parade through the nearby woods to chase away bad spirits.

“He has been talking a lot of sense lately. ‘Specially for one so young.”

“Who?”

“The Melchthal lad. You hearing me, Thomi?”

Thomas turned his head towards Pirmin and his eyes followed, eventually.

“He is a good talker all right,” Thomas said. “I will give him that. But Noll Melchthal is nothing more than a rabble-rouser. Men will die at his feet if they walk with him. Almost saw it happen last week.” He remembered the young boy with the crossbow bolt in his back. Shaking his head he raised his mug to his lips.

“I know. He told me.”

Thomas lowered his mug without drinking. “Just how much time have you and Noll been spending together?”

Pirmin’s face was shadowed in the low light of early evening, but Thomas saw a familiar glint in his eyes. “Ever been to Einsiedeln, Thomi?”

“The monastery? What cause do I have to go there?”

He did not know much about the large order of monks living near the Mythen mountains, only that they raised horses and were especially respected as breeders of war mounts for the German Empire. They did not deal in mules or oxen, so the locals never had much to say about them.

“Quite a place they have there. Must be a hundred monks. They built a town within their cathedral grounds. Got farriers, blacksmiths, sheep, some cows, and an awful lot of nice pasture land.”

“And you tell me this because you have decided to join their ranks, I suppose.”

“Not if the Lord Jesus himself begged me to. But, I think I will consider visiting them again sometime before our next feast day.”

Thomas followed his eyes and they stopped on a nearby table laden with roasted lamb shoulders, dried sausages, stacks of freshly baked trenchers, and a small keg of wine. He stared at Pirmin. The big man was grinning.

“Pirmin…what have you done?” Thomas was aghast.

“You know me. When I come to a feast I feel the need to contribute.”

“You stole from followers of Saint Benedict! They live in austerity—how could you do that?”

“Bah! Those monks are better off than Templars. They had mountains of foodstuffs in their cellars. They will hardly miss the morsels we took.”

Thomas’s eyes narrowed. There was more to this story, yet. “Who are
we
?”

“Well, you could say I asked Noll and his men to help me out on this one.” Pirmin shrugged. “There was a lot to carry.”

Thomas stood, sloshing half the contents of his mug onto the ground. “Are you touched? Raiding a monastery with a known outlaw could get you the noose. And if you avoid that, there is the small thing of blasphemy!”

Pirmin stared at the wet spot on the ground left by Thomas’s mead. “That was Sutter’s brew, not the monks’. Who are you to call me touched?”

“You have gone too far this time. Einsiedeln is under protection of the Habsburgs.”

“And that is exactly why we raided it,” Pirmin said. “How much do you know of the troubles Schwyz and the monks have been having?”

Thomas held his tongue and glowered at the big man sitting on his stump; he hardly needed to look down to be at eye level.

“They have been fighting over pasture land for years. Until ten months ago, when Habsburg soldiers started slaughtering any animal grazing within a day’s march of Einsiedeln that did not bear the monks’ brand.” He waved his hand toward the nearby tables heavy with meat. “More than a few of these haunches never belonged to those cursed monks in the first place.”

Pirmin had no love for monks, Thomas knew that. He suspected it was because monks always administered the beatings when they were children. And Pirmin, being the type of headstrong boy he was, received far more lashes than any other boy in the Acre hospice.

“Did you kill anyone?”

Pirmin’s eyes went wide. “Of course not. We redistributed some foodstuffs, as Noll likes to call it. Nothing more. We left them with their lives and valuables, I swear. Oh, except for a few kegs of ale and cider that, as we speak, are on their way to Noll’s camp for his men.”

“They will petition the Duke, and the Habsburgs will have no choice but to retaliate. You realize this?”

Pirmin’s grin widened. “Now Thomi, do not go all mother on me. It is a little meat, some wine, nothing more. Come—let us go fill that mug of yours.”

The celebrations carried on into the night and hours later Thomas found himself helping Sutter pile empty barrel kegs onto the back of a wagon. On the other side of the road, laughter erupted from a group of revelers, and when Thomas looked up he saw Pirmin amongst the crowd. He bent low, almost in half, so a woman could whisper in his ear. As she stood on her tiptoes and placed her slender fingers on Pirmin’s shoulder, Thomas realized it was Seraina.

He watched them for a moment, wondering what it was Pirmin was saying to make her smile and laugh so. He felt the scar on his face tighten as he forced a smile of his own. Pirmin was a force of nature when it came to women. Thomas had never known one to be immune to his charms. Why should Seraina be any different?

“Vreni made up a bed for you at the inn, if you want it,” Sutter said.

It took Thomas a moment before he understood what the innkeeper was talking about. “No, but tell her thank you. I need to go back home tonight,” Thomas said.

Sutter shrugged. “Suits me. It would just be another mouth eating my bread in the morning anyway.”

The two men finished loading the wagon and Sutter dropped the end board into place. Thomas turned to see Pirmin and Seraina walking towards him, her hand lost in the huge crook of his arm.

“Ah, Thomi! Good. You have not slunk off into the night as of yet.”

“As of yet,” Thomas said.

“Seraina is insisting on going back to her cabin tonight, and while I offered to escort her to the end of the world if need be, she refused. Wanted me to ask you to take her. Imagine that, ferryman.”

“Pirmin,” Seraina said and hit his arm with her open hand. “That is not what I said.”

“Oh I think it was.”

“I told you I had no need of an escort,” she said.

“And then you asked if Thomas was going back to the ferry tonight, and when I said ‘I am sure he is’—”

Seraina cut Pirmin off. “I merely thought, since we were both going in the same direction, some company would be nice,” She cast Thomas a sheepish, sidelong glance. “If you do not mind, that is.”

Thomas shook his head and said, “No, of course not.”

“I believe what he means to say is the thought of it horrifies him,” Pirmin said grinning from ear to ear.

Chapter 15

T
HOMAS SADDLED UP Anid and they rode out of Schwyz an hour past midnight. The stars hid beneath fast-moving clouds, but enough moonlight reflected through the billowing forms that they did not need a lantern.

Thomas could tell Seraina was an inexperienced rider, but once mounted behind him, she settled into Anid’s rhythm like she had been born a horse nomad of the desert steppes. Anid walked as though she was not even there.

But Thomas knew Seraina was there. Her hands rested lightly on his hips, and every so often when she leaned forward to say something, she would press against his back and he would feel the warmth of her breath on his neck.

For most of the trip they spoke of herbs and healing remedies. Quizzing each other on the different names of frequently used concoctions and compresses. They compared the medicine of the Greeks and Arabs to that of the druids, marveling at the similarities and laughed at some of history’s more ridiculous treatments.