ALTDORF (The Forest Knights: Book 1) Read online

  A peace washed over him as he imagined living out the rest of his life as a ferryman on the shores of this lake, knowing he had served out his time as God’s soldier to the best of his ability. Perhaps this stage of his life was his reward for faithful service. A taste of Heaven here on Earth.

  “Why so quiet? What are you thinking about Thomi? You make me nervous when you get like that.”

  Thomas took a deep breath of the warm night air. He nudged Anid with his knees to pick up the pace. The stallion surged ahead.

  They were both eager for home.

  Chapter 7

  GISSLER HOVERED at the edge of the trees looking at the small hovel in the distance. An aged man struggled across the muddy courtyard carrying a bucket of slop, each jerky step causing a foul splash down his leg. Finally, with a Herculean effort he upended the bucket into a pigpen’s trough, and a half dozen dirty sows squealed with delight.

  The man was gaunt, a fact even the full grey beard and baggy russet clothes could not conceal. Gissler recognized the man as his brother only on some primal, spiritual level, for there was nothing left of the proud older boy he had looked up to as a child. Hugo was only five years older than Gissler, but the bent, misshapen figure shuffling about the pigpen looked to be in his sixties. Gissler could not remember even his father looking as old, or broken, as his brother did now.

  The Gisslers had been a family with stature. Being stewards of land for three generations had given them a position of respect within the community and the right to a share of the land’s crops and animals. His father always talked about the peasant class as those people. He knew the Gisslers did not have any blue blood, but in his heart he felt they were much closer to the noble class than that of peasants.

  He had been wrong. When King Albrecht rewarded a French count the estate, the Gisslers were unceremoniously forced to leave the land they had faithfully managed for more than fifty years. It must have been a devastating transition for his father to learn to rut in the mud as just another peasant, Gissler thought, and upon seeing the sorry living conditions of his elder brother, one that his father could not have survived.

  “You come to talk with my papa?”

  Gissler whirled at the sound of the voice to see a small girl no older than seven years old. Dirty bare feet stuck out the bottom of her grey, threadbare dress, which may have been pale blue at one time. She had a small mountain flower pinned in her hair and a few more clutched in one tiny hand. In the other she cupped a baby bird close to her chest.

  “He is just over there, if you want to talk to him,” she said pointing with her chin.

  “What is your name?” Gissler asked, surprised at the little girl’s fearlessness.

  “Sara,” she said.

  She had her father’s large brown eyes. They were the eyes Gissler remembered from his boyhood.

  “Actually, I came to see you,” Gissler said.

  Sara’s eyes narrowed. “Why do you want to see me? I am just a kid.”

  Gissler laughed and the sound made Sara smile.

  “A friend of your father’s asked me to give him something, but I am in a hurry. I was hoping you could give it to him for me. Would you do that?”

  Sara shrugged. “I guess so. But I have to put this bird back in his nest first. I saved him from a cat, you know.”

  “Fair enough. I will help you and then you help me. Agreed?”

  “You said you were in a hurry.”

  “I make time for worthy causes. And I can think of no purpose higher right now than returning your friend to his home.”

  With only a slight hesitation, she led Gissler to the bird’s tree and pointed out the nest. He asked about her family and learned her mother and brother died and she never had any grandparents. Only a papa.

  After the bird was tucked safely back in its nest, Gissler hung the coin purse that he had won at the tourney around Sara’s neck.

  “Take this to your father right away,” he said. “I think he may be waiting for it.”

  She promised she would and started walking back towards the cabin.

  Then she turned abruptly. She ran back and handed Gissler one of the little white flowers she still held in her hand.

  “Here. Take this. It will protect you from the bad elves.”

  Without a moment’s pause, she was off again running full speed towards the house.

  Hugo looked up in alarm at the sound of his daughter’s calls. She ran up to him and he listened to her words stumble over one another in an excited recounting of the man she had met in the forest. His eyes went wide when he opened the purse. He looked up and scanned the woods, searching for any sign of the man.

  A soft wind stirred the trees, but nothing more.

  Chapter 8

  THE FIRST HEAT of summer was upon them by the time Thomas and Pirmin finished work on the ferry. Thomas had his first customer the same day they completed rigging the sail; a goat herder moving his herd to new pasture. He paid with a bag of green apples, and the goats left their own payment all over the ferry deck. It took Thomas and Pirmin the rest of the day to scrub down the wooden planking.

  That was enough of the ferry business for Pirmin. He began hanging out more often at Sutter’s inn doing odd jobs for the family. Sutter would usually pay him with food and ale, which suited Pirmin just fine. But Thomas knew Pirmin would have done the work for nothing, so long as he could sit in the evenings drinking and talking with the inn’s patrons. It did not matter whether they were traveling merchants or the local regulars.

  Thomas had never seen another man like him. So huge and terrifying on one level, but if left in a room for an hour with total strangers, they would part as the closest friends, slapping each other on the back, and swearing to get together soon.

  Pirmin set up a bed in Sutter’s hayloft and Thomas saw him less and less. At first Thomas would go to the inn every other day, but lately his trips had grown less frequent. Unlike Pirmin, Thomas found little pleasure in the company of strangers. Where Pirmin saw the good in people, Thomas was deeply suspicious of almost everyone, and he found being in large groups of strangers exhausting. So he spent more time alone working on a cabin near his ferry, seeing one or two people a day, many of the locals as wary of the new ferryman as he was of them.

  Thomas stood on the wharf originally built by a ferryman long before the time of the one he had bought the barge from. He wrapped the ends of a rope, making a mental note that he should replace it the first chance he had enough coin, and stowed it on the bottom of the barge.

  His eye caught something moving up the road. Whoever was coming, was not moving fast. He continued with his inspection of every sheet and halyard on his ferry, and when he next looked down the road, the lone figure began to take shape.

  It was an old woman, hunched over by the years and rail thin. Her threadbare cloak flapped around her bones in the breeze like a flour sack snagged on scrub brush. Slung across her back, threatening to topple her with every step, was something heavy. Her eyes were fixed on Thomas as she stepped onto the dock and made her way to the side of the ferry. Thomas picked up another rope and began running the length through his hands.

  The old woman halted in front of Thomas and pushed back the hood of her cloak, letting much-needed light into eyes whitened with age. She kinked her neck up at an awkward angle to look at Thomas and stared at him, her eyes scrutinizing his face and coming to rest on the pale jagged line running down the left side. For all her physical ailments, her voice was surprisingly strong and clear.

  “You would be the one they call the ferryman. They said I could tell by the scar.”

  “Or the ferry,” Thomas said, nodding at the barge he stood on. “You looking to go to the other side old woman?”

  “Not yet,” she said, offended. “I have a few more years in me.”

  She continued to stare at the scar on Thomas’s face and did not say anything else. The silence was uncomfortable. Thomas leaned over and tucked away his coil of rope, then
stepped onto the wharf. When he faced the woman again he had his left side angled away.

  “Something I can do for you then, grandmother?”

  “Came to give you something,” she said.

  “Oh? And what might that be?”

  The woman reached to her shoulder and struggled briefly to duck her head under the shoulder strap. She held out the pack with both hands.

  “Take it,” she said. Her arms were starting to shake. “Take it! Cannot hold this thing all day.”

  He reached out, not because he wanted anything from her, but he thought she might fall over if he did not relieve her of the weight. He took the bag and helped the old woman sit on the edge of his barge. The bag was heavy; the woman was stronger than she looked to have carried it from who knew where. He peered inside cautiously.

  “It is a wheel of cheese. One of our better ones. Me and my daughter made it. Her son helped some, but mostly he is useless that one.”

  Within the pack, the cheese was carefully wrapped in a clean white cloth, which did little to keep the enticing aroma contained.

  “It smells delicious. But why give this to me if you have no need to cross?”

  She gave no indication that she had heard his question. “When my daughter was born, we did not have animals. Very few people in these parts did. Were grain farmers for years, then finally we came together as a community and got some pigs.” She paused and looked out over the water for a time.

  Thomas nodded and glanced helplessly around. The woman was old and had no one to talk to. But then again, neither did he.

  “Pigs are good, I suppose,” he said.

  The woman shook her head, the movement more a quiver. “We knew nothing about animals then. Not how cruel they could be, or how a sow will deny the runts of her litter her milk.”

  Thomas knew little of animals himself. To keep up their strength during campaigns, the fighting men of the Hospitallers were permitted to eat meat. But since the monks and priests of the order were forbidden to consume flesh, the Order did not raise its own animals, save for a few chickens and maybe the odd goat for milk. Any meat that ended up on the trenchers of the brother-sergeants was bought at market.

  The woman seemed to recognize his confusion, and explained.

  “You see, she has only got so much milk and if she let the little weak ones drink, the others, well, they might not get enough to grow up strong. Some of them might even die. Better to let the little ones starve than end up with a whole litter of runts.”

  She was not looking at Thomas now. Her white eyes were gazing out across the greenish blue waters again.

  “Me and my husband never cared much about that. We were just happy to have some animals. Life had been much harder before we got those pigs. But every time we had to pull dead piglets out of the pen, our daughter would cry and ask us why. Every time. It is God’s will, we would tell her. Every time.”

  “Children can get attached to farm animals,” Thomas said. He remembered Zora from all those years ago and how hard Pirmin had cried when his dog was killed. He cringed inwardly at the memory.

  The old woman had not seemed to hear him. She was lost in a different time.

  “Eventually, we got rid of those pigs, when we could afford to. Sold them and bought a cow, couple of goats.”

  “And now you make cheese. Fine cheese by the smell of it,” Thomas said.

  There was something about the woman that was beginning to grow on him. She was a survivor and he sensed an inner strength about her. She heard him this time and when she turned to look at him, he felt her eyes probing. She wanted something from him. Something she would never ask for.

  “Still, I cannot look at my daughter today and not see that poor little thing of yesteryear crying her eyes out. I wonder if she blames me. Sometimes I think I should have given those first pigs back. Kept to grain farming.”

  Her thin shoulders fell and she seemed to be trapped in her memories of the past. Finally, she spoke. “But the truth is, we would have all starved. We needed those pigs.”

  The old woman looked at Thomas, her jaw set firmly. She motioned for him to help her up. He did so and she put the hood of her cloak back up. Then, without another word, she turned and began to walk back the way she had come.

  “Are you sure you do not need me to help you go somewhere?” Thomas asked, puzzled by her sudden departure.

  Without stopping or even turning to look back, the old woman said, “You have done more than your bit. Enjoy the cheese ferryman.”

  Thomas shook his head. Crazy old woman.

  He picked up another rope and began working it through practiced hands, squeezing and pulling, testing for weaknesses. He watched the old woman until she eventually receded into the distance and disappeared amongst the green slopes.

  He heard the heavy breathing of the two men before he saw them. Unlike the hard-packed desert ground in Outremer, the grassy slopes in this country muffled the sounds of approaching footsteps. Thomas turned to see two men struggling down the hill toward him, one leaning heavily on the other for support.

  Even though one man was obviously injured, they moved quickly and were at Thomas’s ferry moments later. Thomas helped the one man lower his companion, a boy in his late teens, to the deck. When he took his hand away from the boy’s back it was covered in blood.

  “We were hunting in the woods and my friend fell off his horse,” the man said, speaking quickly. “I need to get him to the healer in the woods fast.”

  He was only a handful of years older than the injured teen, but he spoke with the commanding confidence of one much more senior. He was used to giving orders.

  “What happened to your horses?” Thomas asked.

  “Bolted when I got off to help him. Somewhere in the woods yonder,” the young man said without hesitation. But when he looked in the direction of the woods his eyes flicked over the landscape nervously, as though searching for something. Thomas got the impression he was not looking for his own horses.

  “We better stop that bleeding first, or your friend will not make it to the other side.”

  The man looked at Thomas and said, “You get this ferry moving and I will see to him. The sooner we get him to the healer the better. I have double your payment here, if that concerns you.” He patted the pouch at his belt, next to a short sword in a well-oiled leather scabbard. His eyes were hard, determined, but fear danced at their edges.

  A soft groan escaped from the boy on the deck and Thomas turned to see him squirm onto his side.

  “Get some pressure on his wound. I will cast off.”

  The wind was up and they were well out into the deep waters when a dozen horsemen rode into view. They sat atop a hill and watched the ferry make its way across the Great Lake. They were too far away for Thomas to make out the details of their crests, but the way they rode in formation told him they were soldiers. He shook his head as he pondered the ramifications of helping fugitives escape the local authorities. Well, he would worry about that later, he told himself. Right now a man was dying on his deck.

  He trimmed the sail and lashed the rudder in place, then went to where the man dabbed at the wound with a dirty rag attempting to staunch the steady flow of blood coming from the boy’s back. His ministrations were clumsy and reckless.

  Thomas grabbed the man by the wrist.

  “Give me that,” he said. “You do not know what you are doing.”

  The young man snarled and pulled his arm free. He dropped the rag and grabbed the handle of his sword.

  Thomas ignored him and ripped open the boy’s shirt to expose the wound. “You will not be needing to use that on me. But if you insist on cutting your own throat for almost killing this boy, I will not stop you.”

  “Watch your tongue ferryman. I saved his life.”

  “I have seen many things, but never a man who can pull a crossbow bolt out of the middle of his own back. Some unthinking fool pulled it out cutting open every blood vessel around and leaving a jagged
hole bigger than some men’s brains.”

  The young man clenched his teeth and glared at Thomas.

  “Careful. We are off the bank—out of reach of Landenberg’s men. I do not need you anymore to sail this raft.”

  Thomas pulled out his curved belt knife in one quick motion. The young man jumped to his feet, his hand starting to pull his own blade. Without paying the man even a sidelong glance, Thomas sliced a relatively clean piece of cloth off his own shirt and then pushed it hard against the boy’s wound.

  “Since you are up, reach in that saddle bag at your feet and hand me some of that clotting moss,” Thomas said.

  The man glowered, but he relaxed his grip on his sword and did as Thomas asked. Thomas pushed a handful of the moss into the wound and held it for a minute; until he was satisfied the bleeding had slowed. Then he had the man take over and keep pressure on while he went back to helm the ferry and bring her into shore.

  Once on shore he cut some clean bandages and produced a moldy piece of bread from his bag along with some more moss. He put them over the wound and wrapped it tightly with the bandages. The young man watched quietly.

  “You learn that in the Holy Lands?”

  Thomas looked up, his eyebrows knit together. “What makes you so sure you know anything about me?”

  The man laughed. “I know more about you Thomas Schwyzer than you know about yourself. I know you have returned to Schwyz after thirty years of fighting in the Holy Lands. These are my mountains. I have eyes and ears everywhere. If I did not, the Habsburgs would have hung me years ago.”

  “You are the outlaw Noll Melchthal.” The realization came fast. He was a favorite topic between Pirmin and Sutter at the inn, but Thomas had imagined him as a much older man. Apparently this Noll was a brigand wanted by the Habsburgs but was looked on fondly by many of the locals. They saw him as some kind of freedom fighter. The thought of turning him over to the Austrians for a reward crossed Thomas’s mind.