THE SECOND half of October turned warm and sunny again, almost like summer. They used the fine days to bring home several cartloads of peat. Juro put the oxen between the shafts, Stashko and Krabat loaded up the cart with wooden planks and boards, and they took two handcarts along as well. Then Tonda joined them, and off they went.
The peat-cutting was on the far side of the fen, beyond the Black Water. Krabat had been working there with some of the others in the summer, at the hottest time of the year. Since he was inexperienced in the use of the narrow knife they used to cut peat, he had helped Michal and Merten cart the black, greasily gleaming squares of peat out of the hollow and stack them up.
Now the sun was shining, and the birch trees were mirrored in the puddles by the side of their path. The grass on the moorland hills was yellowed, the heather long since faded. A few red berries hung on the bushes, like drops of blood scattered here and there, and occasionally Krabat saw the silver gleam of a late spider’s web flung from twig to twig.
Krabat thought back to the old days, to his childhood in Eutrich, and the way they used to gather fallen wood and pine cones on October days like this. Sometimes there were still mushrooms to be found—would he find any today? It was warm enough . . .
When they reached the top of a rise, Juro stopped the oxen. “Here we are. You can unload,” he said.
They chose a narrow part of the Black Water, laid boards across and drove them firmly into the bank. Then they laid planks end to end to make themselves a path, and Stashko thrust stout sticks under them to keep them from sagging or giving way at boggy places. But it was further from their footbridge to the peat-cutting than they had estimated, and Juro offered to drive back and fetch the planks they still needed.
“No need for that!” said Stashko. He broke a twig from the nearest birch tree, and then paced out their track, striking the planks with the twig and reciting a magic spell. The planks began to grow longer, until they reached the peat-cutting.
Krabat was fascinated. “Why do we do any work at all?” he cried. “That’s what I ask myself, when everything we do with our own hands could be done by magic!”
“Yes, of course,” said Tonda. “But think how quickly you’d be bored with a life like that! We can’t do without work in the long run, not without going to the dogs.”
At the edge of the peat-cutting stood a wooden shack where the dry peat from the year before was stored. The miller’s men brought them back to their cart, wheeling them along the planks in the two handcarts, and Juro loaded them up. When the cart was full he climbed up on the box, cried, “Gee up!” and the oxen plodded off at their leisurely pace toward the mill.
While Tonda, Stashko and Krabat waited for Juro to come back, they spent the time bringing the peat cut that summer into the shed and stacking it up. There was no great hurry, and the boy had an idea. He asked the head journeyman and Stashko if they could do without him for a little.
“Where are you going?”
“To look for mushrooms. You only have to whistle and I’ll be back at once.”
“Well, if you think you’ll find any!”
Tonda and Stashko both said he could go. “I hope you have a long knife with you,” said Stashko.
“I don’t own one, or I’d certainly take it,” said Krabat.
“Here, I’ll lend you mine,” said the head journeyman. “Mind you don’t lose it!”
He showed him how to open the clasp knife by pressing a groove on the handle. The blade snapped out; it was dark, almost black, as if Tonda had held it over the wick of a burning candle.
“Your turn.” Tonda closed the knife again and handed it to the boy. “Let’s see if you have the trick of it.”
When Krabat snapped the knife open the blade was spotlessly clean and shining.
“What’s the matter?” Stashko asked the boy.
“N-nothing!” he said. But still he was puzzled.
“Off you go, then,” Tonda told him, “or those mushrooms of yours will get wind of you and run away!”
They spent four days working at the peat-cutting, and every day Krabat went in search of mushrooms. But all he found were a few very old ones, brown and tough.
“Never mind,” said Stashko. “You can’t really expect to find mushrooms so late in the year—not unless you give them a helping hand . . .”
He recited a magic spell and turned around seven times, arms outstretched—and immediately about seventy mushrooms sprouted from the peat-cutting, pushing their way up out of the ground like moles, one after another, all in a circle like a fairy ring; beautiful mushrooms of every kind, each as plump and fresh as the next.
“Oh, Stashko!” cried Krabat in amazement. “Do teach me that spell!”
He pulled out Tonda’s knife, ready to start picking the mushrooms, but before he could touch them, they shrank, and slipped back into the ground as if someone were pulling them by strings.
“Hey!” cried the boy. “Stop, stop!”
But the mushrooms were gone, and gone for good.
“Never mind,” said Stashko again. “Magic mushrooms like that taste bitter as gall, they’d only give you a stomach ache. I nearly did myself in that way last year!”
On the evening of the fourth day Stashko rode back with Juro and the last load of peat, while Tonda and Krabat returned to the mill on foot, choosing a short cut which led them across marshy ground. The first mists were rising from the peat bogs and the pools of water, and the boy was glad when they reached firmer land at last, not far from the Waste Ground.
They could walk side by side now. Usually the miller’s men avoided this place, for reasons that Krabat did not know. He remembered his dream of running away. There had been something about Tonda in it, he thought, something about burying the head journeyman, and a place out here.
But that was only a dream. There was Tonda alive and well beside him.
“I want to give you something, Krabat.” The head journeyman took his clasp knife out of his pocket. “It’s for a keepsake.”
“Are you going to leave us, Tonda?”
“Maybe,” said Tonda.
“But what about the Master? I don’t see him letting you go!”
“There are some things folks don’t see happening, yet happen they do!” said Tonda. “There’s nothing to be done about it.”
“Don’t talk like that!” cried Krabat. “Stay here—oh, do stay! I can’t imagine what it will be like at the mill without you!”
“And there are things in life folks can’t imagine, Krabat,” said the head journeyman, “but when they happen we have to manage as best we can.”
The Waste Ground was a square clearing, hardly bigger than a threshing floor, with stunted pines growing around it. The boy could make out a row of long, low mounds in the twilight, like graves in some deserted graveyard, untended and overgrown with heather, no cross or stone to mark them—whose graves could they be?
Tonda stopped.
“Take it,” he said, handing Krabat the knife, and the boy realized that he could not refuse.
“It has a special virtue,” said Tonda. “If you are ever in danger—real danger—then the blade will not shine when you open it.”
“Does it—does it turn black?” asked Krabat.
“Yes,” said Tonda, “black—as if you had held it over the wick of a burning candle.”