CHAPTER ONE · THE GIRL ON THE WOLF ROAD
In the Schwarzwald, every path had a habit of its own.
One led to a mill where the flour was whiter than the miller’s conscience. Another wound towards the charcoal burners, who smelt of smoke, sweat, and that particular patience found only in men who spend their lives feeding fire. A third descended to the Wutach, where the water gnawed at stone with such persistence that it seemed determined to prove to the lords of Lupfen that true power did not always sit in a castle.
The wolf path was different. Everyone knew it. No one loved it.
Old women said it must not be used after the evening bell. Woodcutters, who were generally rough men and not inclined to fear anything that could be struck with an axe, avoided it so diligently that one might have mistaken them for lovers of long walks. Hunters laughed at these fears, though usually in a tavern, in daylight, with a mug in one hand and a wall safely behind their backs. In the forest they laughed less. They coughed, listened, and spoke kindly to their horses, which was not their custom at any other time.
Elsbeth Kräuterin was walking that very path.
A red woollen kerchief covered her dark hair, tied at the nape and pinned with a small brass clasp her mother had inherited from an aunt who had inherited it from someone no one now admitted remembering. The cloth was bright enough to be seen between the firs and plain enough to belong to a working household.
In Stühlingen the red cloth marked her as unmarried and old enough for every neighbour to have an opinion about why.
Elsbeth disliked the opinion almost as fiercely as she loved Grandmother Ursula, whom she was going to visit.
It was not that Elsbeth feared marriage. She feared very little, and in Stühlingen this was regarded as a defect in her upbringing. She simply disliked the world deciding in advance what she was. Today she was a maiden ready for marriage, tomorrow a wife, the next day a mother, then a widow, and finally an old woman trusted with herbs but not with a voice at the town assembly. A man, meanwhile, had time to become a son, apprentice, hunter, soldier, master, judge, drunkard, corpse, and, with favourable circumstances, a respected corpse.
Elsbeth considered this order suspiciously convenient for men. She carried a basket. Inside lay bread, a piece of smoked meat, a pot of honey, a bundle of dried wormwood, a linen shift for Ursula, and a small bottle of tincture that her mother had ordered her to deliver without smelling, tasting, or even looking at it too attentively.
Elsbeth had, naturally, already smelt it. The tincture had the odour of a churchwarden drowned after a poor confession.
The forest stood thick and damp, black at the roots and silver where mist clung to the fir branches. It was early morning, but the sun had not yet dared to enter beneath the trees. It hung somewhere above the hills, gilding the edge of the sky and pretending to be occupied. Many powerful men behaved in the same fashion: they shone from a distance while those below were left to deal with the darkness.
Elsbeth stopped. A branch cracked ahead. She did not scream. People who screamed at once in a forest seldom lived long enough to advise anyone else. Elsbeth slowly lowered the basket to the ground, slipped her right hand beneath her apron, and closed her fingers around the herb knife she carried there.
Nothing moved. The forest could display nothing so convincingly that there was usually something standing inside it.
Elsbeth crouched, picked up a fir needle from the path, and crushed it between finger and thumb. Then she studied the wet soil.
The print was fresh. Not boar. Not deer. Not dog. Wolf. A large one.
She straightened and breathed out through her nose.
“Grey, then,” she said softly.
The forest did not answer. It was not a pleasant silence. There was church silence, when people waited for prayer. There was dinner silence, when soup had finally been placed upon the table and everyone suddenly remembered good manners. And there was forest silence. It waited for nothing, forgave nothing, and promised no one anything.
Elsbeth lifted her basket.
“I am going to my grandmother,” she said. “If you have business with old Ursula, go and tell her yourself. If your business is with me, it must wait. I am occupied today.”
The mist between the trunks stirred. Elsbeth continued.
She had known this road since childhood. At first it followed a stream, then climbed towards an old beech whose divided trunk resembled the crooked legs of a drunken giant. Beyond the beech began the wolf’s part of the forest. Birds sang less frequently there, the moss darkened, and roots rose from the soil as though the earth were trying to hold on to them.
Grandmother Ursula lived beyond that stretch in a low house beneath the slope. The house was old but obstinate, much like Ursula herself. When people in Stühlingen said it ought to be pulled down, Ursula replied that the same could be said of half the town council. For some time afterwards the councillors remembered her with Christian irritation.
Ursula Kräuterin knew herbs, bones, childbirth, fevers, snakebites, men’s lies, and women’s silence. She treated the first five. She preferred not to meddle with the last two unless absolutely necessary.
