“Heinrich!” barked Richard from the yard.
“Eh?”
“We’ve needs go. They’ve summoned all from Heribert’s column.”
The two soon stood in a long line of servants with their backs pressed against a cold wall. They faced their new foreman with dread and waited breathlessly as a broad-chested young man with an upturned nose and a well-fitted cloak strutted before them. “I am Falko of Wasserburg and I have news.” He smiled wickedly and tapped his thigh with a heavy stick. “Yer lords have assigned me as yer master. I’m to fetch you when one of ‘em needs you. In the meanwhile, you’ll ‘ave yer daily duties that I’ll set you to.” He gave them a hard look and raised his stick. “Keep in good order or you’ll be meetin’ m’friend here. Yer first duty is to get yourselves shorn and shaved.” He walked to Emil, the lad from Runkel. “Y’ve runny eyes.”
“Ja, sir master. And fever.”
“Humph.” He knocked the boy hard to the ground. “Get in yer bed and be ready on the morrow for fair day’s work. Now, the rest of you hear me. Yer lords won’t be warring against the Stedingers just yet; they’ve needs wait for more troops. Seems the Thurungians are late and the archbishop’s troops are in a fight with Otto’s men far to the east. The archbishop orders the count to hold fast until springtime.”
Astonished, Heinrich groaned and he squeezed his fists angrily. Springtime! he thought. Forty days, indeed!
Forty days became ninety and many more would come. The biting cold winds of late January had frozen the castle into a dismal stone cage. To the north, blinding snows sculpted the flat landscape into a blue-tipped desert of rippled white as far as shivering Heinrich could see. Each day the sky grayed with low clouds sagging southward from the nearby, ice-laden sea. Inside, the castle grounds were hazy with smoke trapped by heavy air within the high walls where peasants huddled around pitiful fires stoked with meager rations of firewood.
Within the halls of the nobles, great fires roared in ample hearths and drunken men indulged their vices in boredom. Soon after the Epiphany, the more refined and civil pleasures of reading, fencing, chess, or backgammon had given way to heavy drinking, dice, bloodletting swordplay, lasciviousness, and brawling.
Brother Blasius was aghast at the blasphemous indulgences and spent long, lonesome days and nights praying in the chapel or breaking bread with the three timid priests who served Oldenburg Castle with dubious devotion. Joined by four faithful, Christian knights who also found the wanton behavior of their comrades too disheartening to bear, he stared at each morning’s sky yearning for some harbinger of spring to offer hope in the winter’s desolation. From time to time he visited Heinrich and Richard in their respective bakery or stable. Yet he dared not linger for fear of what penalties Falko might exact from his good friends.
Richard was grateful for the hours he labored in the pungent stables. The many horses kept the buildings warm, and he found comfort in the gentle eyes of the beasts. It was the days he was sent with forage teams into the barren, frozen landscape that he dreaded. Wrapped in fur cloaks and heavy boots, he and others would lead sleighs into a far-off western forest where they rang their steel-head axes against the frozen trunks of tall spruce. By the pink-hued light of dusk, they then hurried their heavy loads back across deepening snows into the confines of the castle where they stood before their small fires with numb fingers and toes.
Richard’s crippled hand had adapted to the handle of an axe once again. Though awkward to the eye, the man had regained some measure of skill and quickly recalled the martial training of his youth. On Sabbaths he would race about the bailey feigning combat with his own shadow!
By March, the knights and other men-at-arms were nearly at their wits’ end. They had blatantly disregarded the forty days of Lent. Their months of self-indulged excess had predictably failed to satisfy, so they were irritable, explosive, and seething for blood. The servants, too, were despairing. Day after endless day of cold and gray, of aches and chills and monotony had left them miserable and short-tempered. A few had died from fights within their quarters. Six had frozen to death, having slept at the farthest reach of the fires. Four had been killed in the forest and another went missing. Samuel, the Jew from Limburg, had been found murdered during Advent though it was of little interest to any. Eighteen had perished with maladies such as bloody flux, cramp colic, congestive chill, and St. Vitus’s dance. Among the dead from fever was young Emil of Runkel.
The servants were not the only ones to suffer. Six footmen had died of putrid fever, one sergeant from milk leg, and Richard’s former master, Lord Simon, from an infected wound.