Free The Stone Carvers by Jane Urquhart Page A

says you should stay, and you promise him that you will, we will set you free.”
    Dieter heard the chain rattle somewhere in the darkness. Tilman had shifted his position. He had stopped whimpering, but his father could hear him breathing, quick and sharp, near his elbow.
    “You see,” he said to the boy, “we are all tied to a place.” He coughed into his hand. “We’re stuck to it. What if I were just to up and leave? What if I were just to wander off? Then who would keep the fields?”
    “There’s fields everywhere,” said Tilman quietly.
    “And everywhere,” said his father, “there’s a man keeping them.”
    The boy said nothing more. Somewhere in a nearby pasture filled with shadows and silver, a horse whinnied.
    “Will you stay, son?” his father asked. “Will you just stay home? Will you promise if the priest says so that you won’t go off again?”
    Tilman took the chain in his hands, then scrambled to his feet. He ran back and forth in an arc at the far end of the moonlit yard until the taut links cut across his father’s shins. “I won’t stay,” he called fiercely toward the house. “I want to go,” he screamed. “I want to go!”
    The next morning Tilman’s howling started at the same moment as the birds began to sing, at the first suggestion of light. His cries were taken up by dogs all over the county—a kind of relay of despair—so that sleepers ten and fifteen miles away were unknowingly disturbed by the boy’s anguish, their last dreams of the morning being those of confinement or attempted escape.
    His mother writhed in agony in the sheets, her hands against her ears. Klara, in her small white room, sat straight up in her bed, then ran across the hall, down the stairs, and out the front door, before she knew she was awake. She circled the house until she found Tilman thrashing in the yard at the end of his chain, flecks of foam at the corners of his mouth. His eyes were unfocused. He didn’t see her at all.
    “Stop it!” she screamed, flinging her body into his path, her fists pummelling flesh and the iron that encircled it. “You’re bad, you’re bad, you’re all gone wrong!”
    He stopped then and looked at Klara as if he’d never seen her before. She could see the harness rising and falling as he panted. He smelled of stale sweat.
    Whirling away from him she ran into the house and used the pump at the sink to fill a large pot, then back in the yard she tossed water at him as if to quench the fire she sensed was in his bones. “Stop it!” she yelled again, and in her confusion and sorrow she threw the empty pot against the house. “You’re bad,” she sobbed. “You never stop being bad.”
    Tilman stood still, panting and staring at his ten-year-old sister. “I’ve stopped,” he said, and then her name, “Klara.”
    Her feet were numb. The grass was crisp with frost and the morning cold caused her teeth to chatter.
    Upstairs, in the sudden silence, the exhausted parents tumbled again into a deep well of sleep.
    He repeated her name, Klara, as if he’d never said it before, as if she’d never heard it before.
    Every one of his ribs was bruised, the skin above them covered in plum-coloured blossoms. When he pulled up his shirt to show this to his sister, it was as if he were exposing his heart.
    She winced and turned away. The colour of the morning in these few moments had changed from grey to golden.
    Tilman pointed to the blacksmith’s shed. “A hammer,” he said. “Get me the hammer with the claw foot,” and then her name again, “Klara.”
    She loved her brother, loved his beautiful face, even when it was contorted by rage, by fear. She fetched the hammer, then looked at the squint of concentration around Tilman’s eyes as he pried from the door the large bent nails that held his chain. He twisted away from her, leaping down the lane that led to the road. She returned to her room and stood at the window watching her brother growing smaller and