Free Breath (9781439132227) by Donna Jo Napoli Page B

Unless you want to count me—I smile at my joke, but it’s too stupid to say aloud. And my mouth is too full to speak anyway; the meat is delicious today, even without salt.
    Someone brought wine. Only lords and ladies drink wine on a daily basis, so it feels like a grand gesture to be drinking wine. I can’t have any, naturally. Großmutter says it slows the breathing even more than beer. But I’m part of the grand gesture just by being there. I drink from the brook, down on all fours. I feel cowlike. But I mustn’t think that way. Ican’t think about the cow waiting behind the bushes.
    There’s honey cake for dessert.
    Our familiars make noises at one another. Most of them are black hens, but there are dogs, too, and one bony black horse. They’re all closed up in wood cages, except the horse, who s tied to a tree. That’s so they won’t harm one another. Even Kuh is in a cage, though he’s too young to harm anything.
    The supreme head calls the meeting to order. People report on what’s happened since our last meeting. They take turns talking. The rats. The rats. The rats.
    The foreign man holds up a trap he’s designed. It’s two flat, round wood plates arranged one above the other with a spread hand’s width between them and little poles attaching one to the other at regular intervals around the perimeter. The top plate has a hole in the center the size of a fist. You drop a piece of meat through the hole. The rat noses along and jumps down inside to eat the meat. But he can’t fit between the poles. And he can’t climb back out the center hole because it’s greased so thickly. The man wants us all to charm the trap design for extra strength. He’s already made a dozen at home, and he plans to sell them in town on the morrow. We recite rhymes in unison:
    Slap the fat rat In the trap,
Slap the fat rat flat
Our tongues flap like slaps
.
    Then people take turns listing the ailments of the cattle. Everyone listens closely. This is what we’re here for. This is it:
    A cow gave birth early. The calf died
.
    That same thing happened in another herd as well. To three cows
.
    Body parts are drying up and turning black, dying right off the animal. Ears and tails fall to the ground
.
    Hooves are rotting away
.
    Calves bleat in misery as cow udders dry up
.
    After awhile, no one says anything more. We look at one another.
    Someone asks if anyone knows of sick sows yet. No one does. That’s good.
    But then someone talks about poultry. Combsand wattles are falling off. And the woman whose familiar is the mare says it spontaneously aborted a month ago. The foal was all black. Another reports on a sheep herd that’s sick. We fall silent.
    None of these reports is new to me or to anyone else. Hameln town and its surroundings have an illness. No one yet has been able to cure it. Not the farmers with their home remedies. Not the newfangled surgeons. Not the healers. So it’s our turn.
    And we’d better succeed, for there’s already been talk that the livestock have been put under an evil spell. Talk like that can turn deadly, even to a papist coven like ours. We know about witch trials. Ordinary trials start with a crime and go in search of a criminal. Witch trials go in reverse.
    But we don’t talk about that. There’s no point.
    We’re waiting for Pater Michael. He won’t take part in a coven feast, but he’ll come for the burial. While we wait, people finish off the last crumbs.
    The two altar boys guide Pater Michael through the forest. He’d get lost on his own, with those eyes. He carries a crucifix in front of him to ward off evil.
    The three of them walk into our midst, their black garb lost among ours. Ah. I remember thepiper in the woods thinking our coven wears black for the devil. But church clerics wear black too. I never made the connection before. It’s fitting that we all wear black.
    No one