EARLY on Good Friday evening there was a pale, bloated moon hanging in the sky above the fen of Kosel. The miller’s men were sitting together in the servants’ hall, while Krabat, worn out, was lying on his bed trying to get to sleep. They had had to work on Good Friday too. He felt thankful it was evening at last, and he could get some rest . . .
All of a sudden he heard his name called, just as it was in the dream he had in the smithy at Petershain, only now he knew the hoarse voice that seemed to come out of thin air.
He sat up and listened, and the voice called again. “Krabat!” Reaching for his clothes, he got dressed.
When he was ready, the Master called him for the third time.
Krabat made haste, groped his way to the attic door and opened it. Light shone up from below. Down in the hall he heard voices, and the clatter of wooden clogs. Feeling uneasy, he hesitated, holding his breath—but then he pulled himself together and ran downstairs, three steps at a time.
The eleven journeymen were standing at the end of the hall. The door to the Black Room stood open, and the Master was sitting behind the table. Just as on the day of Krabat’s arrival, the thick, leather-bound book was lying in front of him, and there was the skull too, with the red candle burning in it. The only difference was that the Master was not so pale in the face now.
“Come closer, Krabat!” he said.
The boy came forward, to the threshold of the Black Room. He did not feel tired now, nor did he notice his dizziness or the throbbing of his heart anymore.
The Master looked him over. Then, raising his left hand, he turned to the journeymen standing in the hall.
“Up on your perch!”
Croaking and flapping their wings, eleven ravens flew past Krabat and through the door of the room. When he looked around, the miller’s men had disappeared. The ravens settled on a perch at the far end of the room, in the left corner, and sat there looking at him.
The Master rose, and his shadow fell on the boy.
“You have been at this mill for a quarter of a year now, Krabat,” said he. “Your trial period is over, and you are no longer an ordinary apprentice—from now on you will be my pupil.”
With these words he went up to Krabat and touched the boy’s left shoulder with his own left hand. A shiver ran through Krabat, he felt himself begin to shrink, his body became smaller and smaller, he grew raven’s feathers, a beak and claws. There he crouched in the doorway, at the Master’s feet, not daring to look up.
The Master looked down at him for a while, then clapped his hands and cried, “Up on your perch!” Krabat—the raven Krabat—obediently spread his wings and rose into the air. Flapping awkwardly, he crossed the room, flew around the table, brushing against the book and the skull, and then settled beside the other ravens, clinging tight to the perch.
“You must know that you are in a Black School, Krabat,” the Master told him. “You will not learn reading and writing and arithmetic here—you will learn the Art of Arts. The book chained to the table is the Book of Necromancy, which teaches how to conjure up spirits. As you see, it has black pages, and the words are white. It contains all the magic spells in the world. I alone may read them, because I am the Master here. But you—you, Krabat, and my other pupils—you are forbidden to read the Book, remember that! And no going behind my back, or it will be the worse for you! Do you understand that, Krabat?”
“Yes, I understand,” croaked the boy, surprised to find he could still speak at all—in a hoarse voice, to be sure, but quite clearly and easily.
Krabat had heard whispered tales of such Black Schools before. There were said to be several of them in Lusatia, but he had always supposed those were just old wives’ tales, such as women will tell while they sit and spin. Now he was a pupil in a Black School himself, though it appeared to be an ordinary mill! Yet it seemed that those who lived nearby, at least, said there was something strange about the place, or why did the people of the fen of Kosel keep away?
The boy had no time to pursue his thoughts, for the Master, sitting down at the table again, was beginning to read an extract from the Book of Necromancy. He read slowly, in a singsong voice, rocking stiffly back and forth from his hips as he did so.
“This is the way to make a well run dry, so that it will give no water from one day to the next,” he read out. “First get four pegs of birch wood, dried over the stove, each two and a half spans long, as broad as your thumb, and sharpened to a three-cornered point at one end. Next you must place your pegs of wood around the well by night, between twelve and one, driving each into the ground seven feet from the well, every one at a different point of the compass, beginning with midnight and ending with evening. Third and lastly, when you have done all this, saying no word, you must walk around the well three times and speak the words written here . . .”
Then the Master read out a magic spell, a sequence of incomprehensible words, fair-sounding, all of them, and yet there was a dark undertone, suggesting something evil, that lingered in the boy’s ears, even when the Master began again after a brief pause.
“This is the way to make a well run dry . . .”
He read the passage from the Book and the magic spell three times in all, always in the same singsong voice, rocking back and forth from the waist. After the third time he closed the book. He waited in silence for a while, and then turned to the ravens.
“Now I have taught you a new piece of the Secret Arts,” said he, in his normal voice. “Let’s hear how much you remember of it. You there—begin!”
He pointed to one of the ravens, and told him to repeat the passage and the magic spell.
“This is the way . . . to make a well run dry . . . so that . . . so that it will give no water from one day to the next . . .”
The miller picked on first one raven, then another, and questioned each one. He did not call any of the twelve by name, but Krabat could tell them apart by the way they spoke. Even when he was a raven, Tonda’s voice was calm and deliberate, Kito spoke with an unmistakably peevish tone and Andrush was as quick with his beak as with his tongue, while Juro, when it was his turn to repeat the spell, had great difficulty and kept getting stuck; in short, there was not one of them whom Krabat could not identify.
“This is the way to make a well run dry . . .”
Again and again they repeated the passage from the Book of Necromancy and the magic spell, some fluently, some hesitantly, a fifth time, a ninth, an eleventh.
“Now you!” The Master turned to Krabat.
The boy began to tremble. He stammered, “This is the way . . . is the way to make a . . . a well . . .”
Here he broke off, struck dumb. With the best will in the world, he could not remember how it went on. Would the Master punish him?
The Master did not seem at all angry.
“You’d better pay more attention to the words than the voices another time, Krabat,” he said. “Remember, no one is forced to learn in this school! If you master the passages I read you from the Book, it will be to your advantage; if not, it hurts no one but yourself!”
So saying, he finished the lesson. The door opened and the ravens flew out. Back in the hall, they returned to human form; Krabat too was changed back, he did not know how or by whom, and as he made his way up to the attic behind the miller’s men, he felt as though he had dreamed some strange, confusing dream.