Q by Luther Blissett (most recommended books txt) 📖

had learned from a travelling salesman of almanacs and prophesies. One highly successful flier was the print showing the image of Martin Luther beating bishops and papists with a big stick. We thus decided that in the next fliers we would print images more than anything else: sovereigns forced to hoe the land, peasants in revolt beneath the protective eye of the Omnipotent one, and things of that kind.

That evening in Gr�nbach, we were invited into the shop of a certain Lambert, who worked as a blacksmith and mended tools. The furnace, which had recently gone out, spread its warmth through the room. We were offered bread spiced with cumin and coriander, and Elias, without attracting attention, persuaded even Ottilie, who hated the taste, to eat at least a little. Later, when we wrapped ourselves in our coarse blankets, he explained to us that only witches and wizards refuse to eat cumin, because it is said to cancel all of their power.

Lambert the smith threw down a challenge, in which we had to come up with songs involving contradictions, and proposed one of his own: I went out this morning just after dark, with my scythe to go hoeing, I went along the road and climbed up an oak tree, and I ate all the cherries, and the owner of the apple tree turned up and told me to pay for his grapes.

Others replied with one about wolves bleating, shells carrying snails and chicks turning into eggs. But the final prize went to Elias, with his ogre’s voice: I know a song of contradictions, I’ll sing it to you straight away: I explained the Gospel to the parish priest, who kept on talking in Latin, I told him: you’re going to have to pay for the wheat, and the part in excess belongs to the dispossessed. I went up to the palace on my own, my friend and I went to see the master, five of us told him the land was ours, ten of us explained it to him, twenty of us sent him running, fifty of us took the castle, a hundred of us burned it, a thousand of us crossed the river, ten thousand of us are marching to the last battle!

Thanks to this song, which quickly became an actual hymn, we immediately won the sympathy of the peasants of Gr�nbach. Elias prepared them for the final battle: proper training, each day at sunrise, teaching them the use of swords and knives, disarming the enemy, bringing him to the ground and leaving him in a right state, all with their bare hands. I had never used any kind of weapon before that, and I would have to admit that the peasants proved a good deal more skilful than I was.

And because country people aren’t keen on abstractions, after a few days we put our little troop to the test. There still wasn’t much fighting to be done, the parish priest fled as soon as they lifted their pitchforks over their heads, and it wasn’t hard to requisition the tithed grain to redistribute among the people of the surrounding villages.�

Some days later we organised a big party at Sneedorf, in the course of which the new parish priest of the community was elected, and for the first time in many years the religious authority was allowed to perform what they called the dance of the Cock, which had been forbidden until then because of certain very lascivious pirouettes that revealed the legs of the women. Before getting drunk as I had done several times, until my legs gave in, I danced with Dana, widow Frenner’s young daughter.

Over the days that followed the news of a parish priest being elected by his congregation reached the neighbouring community, who sent messengers to Gr�nbach to intervene on their behalf, now against the parish priest, now against the lord. Without hesitation, our comrades left their work and ran to where they were needed, until three uninterrupted days of snow made travel impossible.

Apart from the icy winds, a storm of another kind reached our village. Shortly before dawn we were awoken by the cries of peasants who had gone into the fields to check the effects of the frost.�

When we went out into the ploughed field, Frida was running madly around all over the place and Dana knelt weeping in the snow. Pfeiffer stopped the widow to find out what was happening, but in the state she was in, her speech became even more incomprehensible. Then I went over to Dana and, bending over her, asked her slowly, ‘What’s happening, sister? Say something.’

�� � � � � � Sobbing: ‘The landsknechts are back. They’ve killed my father, and taken my brothers away, and as to me and my mother, they… they….’ She couldn’t go on. Having emerged from nowhere, called away from who knows what war, hungry, cold and tired, a troop of mercenaries was advancing through the little village, hoping to carry off a bit of food, using threats of beatings, burnings and killings if they didn’t find any. Elias was the first to look for a solution.

� � � � � � ‘If I’m not mistaken, there are thirty men and twenty women here in the village. I’m sure there’s much more of them than that. We can’t beat them. I suggest we let them have the knight’s cattle: four cows ought to be enough for them.’

� � � � � Having said that he set off to warn the others. I walked behind him, while Pfeiffer stayed with the women.

� � � � � The peasants were used to defending their masters’ property�on pain of death, because the alternative would have meant spending whole years giving the master almost their entire share of the harvest, to repay the damage he had suffered. For that reason it wasn’t easy to convince them that this time, when the master came to claim his privileges, we would reply as he deserved us to. For the time being, isolated as we were, we could think only about saving our skins.

� � � � � � We met the mercenaries on the village street, up to our knees in snow and clutching all kinds of work-tools. There were at least a hundred of them, but we spotted straight away that they were exhausted with marching and cold. Many of them couldn’t stand upright because of their frozen feet, others were beginning to suffer from exposure. There were also a few women with them, probably prostitutes, in pitiful states.

‘We need food, a fire and some herbs for fever,’ said the captain, once we were within shouting distance.

‘You’ll get them,’ came the reply from Lambert the smith.

‘But,’ added Elias, who had grasped the meaning of the situation, ‘free all the men and women who don’t want to follow you.’

‘No one wants to leave my company!’ answered the captain, trying to sound convincing, but he hadn’t finished speaking before at least thirty, both women and men, stamping their way through the snow, came to hide behind us.

The captain didn’t move, his jaw set. Then he said again, ‘Come on, then, show us the food and firewood.’

We dispatched four rather well-fed cows to the cooks, who immediately began slaughtering and butchering them. Blood mixed with the melted snow.

That night Dana, almost paralysed with cold and fear, came looking for me in my straw bed, asking me to stay there and protect her because she feared that the soldiers would do again what she and her mother had been subjected to two years before.

She slipped underneath me before I could breathe, before I could collect my thoughts. She was thin, with angular elbows, long, straight legs, little breasts pointing up at me. I struggled to control my breathing, more intense by the minute, and stared into her big, dark eyes. She made herself smaller, her face pressed against my chest, one leg gently wrapped around my hips.

‘No one’s going to hurt you.’

I dissolved days, months of tension and desire inside her, gasping at every touch, every smooth caress. Dana’s quiet moans asked neither words nor promises. I bent over, my mouth sought her breast, first brushing, then pressing her nipple with my lips. I held her face and her hair, shorter than a shop-boy’s, between my hands, and I stayed inside her for a long time, longer than I can remember, until she went to sleep, still holding me in a tight embrace.

They left three days later, leaving the remains of the carcases beside the blackened holes in the snow, and those thirty desperate people who hadn’t been paid for months. The new arrivals proved useful: almost all of them were country people, but they knew how to wield weapons and draw up battle formations.

On the first Friday of very month there was a big craft fair in M�hlhausen, attracting people from the four corners of Thuringia, from Halle and Fulda, Allstedt and Sonderhausen. According to Pfeiffer, this was the day when we would have to try to get back into the city, hidden by the great mass of people passing through the gates. December was approaching. We started to make contact within M�hlhausen, among the miners of Count Mansfeld, among the inhabitants of Salza and Sangerhausen. On the first Friday in December the brewers’ city would be filled with a crowd looking for things other than new wicker baskets.