The Werewolf of Bamberg Read Free Page B

scared them.”
    The children stared at their grandfather for a moment, baffled, then shouted at one another and went right on brawling. A moment later, Paul, the smaller one, triumphantly held up a handful of his brother’s hair. His older, far gentler brother Peter, almost a head taller, started crying and sought protection behind his father.
    “Maybe we should try the shrew’s fiddle, after all?” Simon asked hopefully.
    Magdalena glared at her husband. “Perhaps for a change you should stop reading so much and pay more attention to your sons. It’s no wonder they are always fighting. They’re boys, have you forgotten? They’re not made for sitting calmly on a wagon.”
    “Let’s just be happy we found someone to take us part of the way,” Simon replied. “I myself don’t especially want to go to Bamberg on foot. We surely have more than five miles to go, and we don’t have enough money to pay for a trip on the Regnitz River.”
    He stretched and sighed, then grabbed the two boys by the scruffs of their necks and climbed down from the wagon with them.
    “But, as almost always, you are right,” Simon mumbled. “This long wait can drive you crazy.” He nodded toward the dark forest on the other side of the narrow pass, where the branches and boughs of the pine trees formed a dense barrier. “I’ll take these two little devils for a walk over to the edge of the forest, where they can climb and run around a little. It looks like you’ll have to wait here a bit longer.”
    He gave the two boys a friendly slap, and they started whooping and running up the steep side of the pass. In no time the three had disappeared in the forest, while Magdalena remained behind with her father and bored-looking younger sister.
    “Simon is much too easy on the boys,” Jakob grumbled. “The little brats deserve a good spanking now and then. When I was a kid, children weren’t allowed to misbehave like that.”
    “How can you say that, when you’re always giving them candy and putting them up to all kinds of mischief?” Magdalena laughed and shook her head. “You’re the biggest kid of all. I can’t wait to hear what your brother is going to tell us about you and what a rascal you were as a child.”
    “Hah! What is there to tell? The blood, filth, and death, and all those beatings from my father, the old drunk. That’s about all I remember. One minute you’re pooping in your pants and sucking your thumb, and the next minute you get chewed up by the war.”
    The Schongau hangman stared into space, and Magdalena’s smile froze. As so often happened when she asked her father about his past, he became even more silent than usual. He hardly ever spoke about his brother, Bartholomäus, who was two years younger than he; it was only a few years ago that Magdalena had even learned she had an uncle who made his living as the executioner of Bamberg. The letter the Kuisl family had received more than two months ago consisted of just a few prosaic words and had come as a surprise to all of them. Bartholomäus’s wife had died some time ago, and now he was thinking about marrying again and, to celebrate this upcoming event, had invited all his relatives in Schongau.
    The only reason the Kuisls considered taking such a voyage—almost two hundred miles—was that Magdalena’s younger brother, Georg, had been apprenticed to his uncle in Bamberg over two years ago, and since then, neither Magdalena nor the rest of the family had seen him. This was particularly troubling to Jakob, though he never came out and said so, and it was the main reason he’d decided to go.
    Out of the corner of her eye, Magdalena looked at her father as he sat there drawing on his cold pipe. He was now in the autumn of his life. With his wet gray hair, bloodshot eyes, hooked nose, and scraggly beard, he exuded an aloofness that had only increased in recent years. Which did nothing to harm his reputation as the executioner of Schongau. On the contrary,