Martin holds the horse’s reins tightly. His knuckles are cracked, raw and bloody. The horse is chewing on the bit and jerking its head up and down. Froth drips onto Martin’s clammy hand. The horseman hangs in the saddle and groans.
Since the climb up the narrow path, the castle has been growing up out of the rock like a bony structure. The topmost battlements scratch at the clouds. Above them, rugged sky. The wind is sharp, as if it could cut metal, although it is summer. What would the winter be like? Martin hunches his shoulders. The horse is walking by itself. Its hooves know every bend of the path up the slope.
The castle is strange and cold. A rough block with narrow windows. Not particularly well fortified, but no one wants to be up here anyway. This is where all the bad things in the world come from, Martin thinks.
They arrive at the open gate. Martin leads the horse through the archway. The stones are slippery. The horse loses its footing; the horseman groans. Then they are in the courtyard, and immediately the obligatory misery begins – the houses, animals and people required to run a castle.
Everything is quite without splendour. Houses have gathered in the shadows of the castle walls like an infestation. An entire town has grown in the tightest of spaces.
Pigs grunt their way through puddles. Chickens stalk through the dirt. The first people approach, the curious ones who have spotted the child and the horseman. Martin does not need to explain anything and is not asked either. They know the horseman. They help him off the horse. Everyone suddenly helps him off the horse and carries him away so hastily that Martin struggles to keep up. It is his horseman. He has earned him.
A woman comes running, with children in tow; she claps her hands over her mouth. Astonished and happy, horrified and scared. Everything at once. It must be his wife. His children. They are hanging from her skirts so that she can barely move forwards. The half-dead, pain-wracked horseman is out of her reach. Martin picks up the youngest child and takes it in his arms, quite matter-of-factly, and follows the group that has formed around the woman and the injured man. He needs to stay close. Simply just stay close. The group moves between the narrow houses. Washing hangs out to dry above their heads.
But why does a horseman live in such a miserable hovel? It is barely large enough for everyone to fit in and place him on the bed. The curious people sweep pots off the stove and chairs to the ground with their backsides. The little ones are almost trampled. A cat jumps from neck to neck, hissing venomously.
Once the horseman has been set down on the bed, everyone backs away from him. Now the wife has the opportunity to approach him. She briefly places her hand on his cheek. It seems he has grown thin on his sickbed in the forest. Someone has sent for a doctor. The wife undoes the bandage and removes the leaves and the herb paste that Martin has spread on the wound. She seems surprised at the sight of the wound. Nods appreciatively.
‘Which herbs did you use?’ she asks the boy. The old knowledge. Martin jiggles the child on his narrow hip.
Then the doctor is there and makes room for himself. He has just eaten and is picking his teeth. First he smells the wound. His nose is red and enlarged; a drop hangs from it. Martin is worried that the drop might end up in the wound, and he knows that the doctor doesn’t care how well everything has healed until now, because in a moment he will dig around in the horseman’s flesh to look for the healing pus. Another myth, as Martin knows. The infection will break out anew and the horseman will inevitably die. The doctor might as well spew the remains of his lunch into the wound. But what is Martin supposed to say? No one would listen to him. Instead, he thinks of a distraction.
‘I found him in the forest,’ he says. ‘I believe it is a deep sword-thrust in his side.’ And he does not specify whether it was the enemy or the other horsemen.
‘My name is Martin,’ Martin says, and his voice goes up an octave because he sees that the doctor is already rolling up his sleeves, as if that would help in any way, when all the dirt is stuck under his fingernails, in the folds of his skin, just everywhere.
‘And I treated the wound.’ Panic makes Martin’s voice shake. ‘I didn’t let him die, but it took a long time to get him back on the horse so that I could bring him back here.’
He casts the wife a pleading look. She picks it up, understands and quickly wraps the bandage around the wound. The doctor looks indignant, but she manages to pacify him. Next door, the aunt, she has an amazing boil. Impressive and quite disgusting. Might he be interested? Oh yes, he would much rather take a look at that than a conventional sword wound. Something different. Up in the castle, there is only constipation and the princess’s cough.
‘Yes, yes,’ says the woman and pushes him out. ‘A boil as large as a lamb’s head.’
She also thanks the neighbours. She waves and nods until they have all left. Then she closes the low door. It is almost dark in here now. The woman takes the child from Martin’s hip.
‘We thought he wasn’t coming back,’ she said.
‘Is that why they penned us into this stable?’ the horseman asks, half sitting up in his bed.
The woman looks at her fingers. They once embroidered damask, held teacups and plucked the strings of a lute. Now all they do is scrub the floor and the pots, peel potatoes, day in, day out, wipe blobs of snot from her children’s noses and steal the hens’ eggs from their nests. And from now on they must care for the horseman, who will never get well again. Who will never recover from lying in the forest with his life seeping into the moss. Who finds himself unable to forget how the child staged that terror, a haunting without compare in this world.
Martin realises that the horseman cannot be thankful.
The horseman does not want to be a burden to his wife. He loves his children and wants to set them an example and be strong. Not groaning on his bed, with wounds that will torment him for the rest of his life, in a hut to which his family has been cast out, when before they lived in rooms in the castle. Every morning, he had walked over to the proud horses in the stables. A good life. And now…
Martin does not feel pity for the horseman. The price for his good life was the stolen children. How many might he have abducted?
‘He won’t stay,’ the horseman says.
‘He is staying,’ the woman says, and pulls Martin in close.
‘It’s worst at night,’ Martin whispers.
‘That’s always the way,’ she says.
‘I showed him the stars.’
‘Thank you for bringing him back to me.’
She knows it won’t be easy. But he is there. And that is better than if he weren’t.
‘You can stay with us. We will make up a bed for you,’ she says. ‘Next to the stove. You’ll be taken care of.’
Martin smiles. And later, when he curls up on his bed, he feels quite comfortable. He falls asleep to the sound of the other children’s breathing, and when, in the night, the horseman wakes his wife and half the town with his loud screams, Martin is sleeping peacefully for the first time in many nights and does not wake up. His slumber is so deep, his exhaustion so great.