Sample Chapters
The Elbe Coffins
by Damian Rentoule
Chapter 1: Girl in the Box
The curious girl in the sawdust knew that if she waited long enough, a question would come. It always did.
Without looking up from the smooth wooden surface, her mother asked, ‘Why do we breathe out?’ The reply need not be hurried. The mother’s conversation, like her work, was never rushed. Another nail in the coffin lid sank as the daughter considered her response, but as usual, the girl was distracted by the body she knew was safely hidden beneath the lid.
The girl in the box was pretty. The villagers often said that the coffin maker made people look better in death than they did in life. There were those who said it was a type of magic. Dangerous words. ‘Nothing but a bit of soap,’ her mother would scoff, ‘and a little peace. Things most people see little of in life.’
The girl in the sawdust guessed that the occupant had been poor, perhaps a pauper. There was an important difference between poor people and paupers that she had noticed. A poor person works at some task, usually repetitive, like sewing, spinning, or tending a garden. Their hands are thin, but strong, and their fingers bear the marks of their work. This girl’s hands were not just thin. They were withered. They had scars but were not calloused in any specific way. Her age was difficult to tell, probably older than the shape of her body would suggest. The hardships she had faced were not from the tedious, backbreaking work of the poor, but from the all-consuming emptiness of the outcast. The poor shared their misery, at least. To be a pauper was to be utterly alone.
The saddest part of dying alone was that a person’s story died along with them. The story of one’s life was supposed to linger, fading slowly over time. The memory of a grandchild holds only faint images of their Oma or Opa. Their stories are told less often as memories soften. This is a fading loss, a blending of an old life into the new life that envelopes it over time. To die alone is a violent and abrupt halt to one’s memory. Something about this deeply disturbed the girl in the sawdust as she watched her mother working quietly on the pretty girl’s coffin.
The girl in the box had been found frozen behind the tavern, a dirty shawl pulled over her thin dress. Never enough to keep the cold out of a malnourished body. Her story did not fade. It disappeared. It froze and died along with her in the snow. The girl in the sawdust often asked her mother questions about the people in the coffins, a curiosity about them as people who once lived and breathed, laughed and loved under the sunshine, snow and rain. Her mother had taught her to respect the dead in this way. The girl often wondered, though, how her mother knew so much about each of them. Many, she had never even met before their deaths. One more mystery surrounding the woman she called ‘mother’.
A sudden silence interrupted the girl’s thoughts. Her mother had stopped hammering and was looking at her curiously, waiting for an answer to the earlier question, ‘Why do we breathe out?’
An answer slowly formed in the girl's mind as her mother waited patiently, nail poised, ready for the hammer blow that was to come. ‘Because we’ve breathed air in, it has to go out. It has to go somewhere. We’re born so we must die.’
A slight nod. ‘Yes, that’s a good start, It’s surely part of it.’
The hammer moved again. Another nail. Three strikes of the hammer; always three. The first one is soft; preparation. The second one is firm; stabilization. The third one is hard; final. Death was much like life. Everything seemed to come in threes. The daughter was haunted by that number. We are born, we live, we die. Always three.
Part of it. There was always more.
Her mother continued without looking up, ‘But does it have to go out?’ Another nail. Prepare, stabilize, and finish.
‘Where else would it go?’
‘It doesn’t have to go anywhere. It could stay inside. To breathe out is a choice of sorts. It wouldn’t be a choice if you hadn’t breathed in, but all the same, it doesn’t mean you have to. Not everything is tied to things that have already passed.’
A clue.
‘Some things are tied to what will come to be.’ The daughter thought out loud, getting closer. Fishing for another clue. Another nail. ‘So the girl in the box, did she die with breath inside her? Is that even possible?’
‘No,’ the mother had seen many deaths, some nastier than others, ‘there’s always the farewell breath so only the last one is without choice. You have to be conscious to hold your breath inside.’
The daughter was puzzled, a familiar emotion when talking to her mother when she worked, but from the clues, she would work the riddles out. Tied to things that will come to be? The next breath! ‘You breathe out to make room for the next one.’
‘Yes, clever girl. Most people think that everything happens because of what went before, but…’
‘...most people are fools!’ The daughter finished for her. She had heard that many times.
‘It’s all connected. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow. A piece of string goes through it all. All that happens is preparation for what must come. It’s not all about what caused it.’
‘The priest says that everything is caused by God.’ The daughter said this just to tease. She knew her mother’s feelings toward the lecherous priest.
‘Do you think that God cares what we do? If she did, that stinking priest would burst into flames.’
‘God isn’t a woman. Everyone knows that.’ Smiling, the daughter knew where this would lead.
‘Of course everyone knows, and…’
‘...everyone’s a fool,’ they finished together. The mother smiled, too, despite herself. Another nail. Prepare, stabilize, finish. Always three.
‘I fear you may be right, though.’ The mother added. ‘God, if anyone is actually up there, would have to be a man to mess all this up so badly.’
‘Heresy will get you burned alive if you’re not careful.’ The daughter warned her again, for the thousandth time.
‘Many careful people have been burned.’
The girl couldn’t argue with that. The Church had been busy.
‘Was this girl a pauper?’ The daughter asked. Curious to confirm her initial thoughts as the final nails were driven home to seal her in the little box forever, or at least until nature took its course. The coffin had already been sitting with a dozen others in the back room when the mother walked out of their cottage without a word into the icy rain, returning an hour later with the small, lifeless form in her arms. The daughter, as an apprentice, bathed and prepared the body, which was cold but still limp. She had not been gone for long.
‘At the end, yes, she had been a pauper. I don’t know what came before that. In her final days, she was an orphan, just like you were, with a mother who loved and protected her until her last breath. The night before last was just too cold for one without food in her belly. In the end, God didn’t look after her. Death did.’
Memories of her birth mother flooded the girl’s mind—the last weeks of cold, hunger, and fear, the elements merciless until the coffin maker arrived. As she played with the small white flowers that would always rest on the lid of a closed coffin, the girl pushed these thoughts from her mind.
The daughter wondered about the name of the girl in the box. She always did when a new body arrived. She knew it was forbidden, but couldn’t help herself.
‘I know I shouldn’t, but I wanted to ask you...The girl...’
Without warning, the hammer slammed into the table with enough force to send her backward, sprawling onto the floor. The daughter looked up into her mother’s eyes from her new seat. She saw the fierce emotion. Was it anger, or sorrow? The daughter also glimpsed the fear that was the cause of both of these emotions. The girl knew it was forbidden to ask. She had been about to break one of their rules. They had only three.
For as long as she could remember, the girl had been fascinated by the lines on the wood carved into the bottom of the coffins her mother made. When she started to learn to read, she gradually realized that the lines were letters and the words they formed were names. Her mother had noticed her crawling underneath the benches and introduced the first rule; never ask about the names. At first, it seemed like a strange request, even to her young ears.
The girl’s first inquiry about the names was met with a hard slap across the face. Also, the second, third, and possibly the fourth. It was hard for her to recall, since it had been so long since she had broken the rule. It seemed more serious now that she had grown, and although she did not know why, it had never seemed prudent to ask. The slaps had worked.
The name that the girl in the sawdust had traced with her fingers underneath the small coffin was Agnes, the pauper; plain in life, pretty in death. A coffin would eventually be made for every villager—rich and poor, beggars and masters alike. Even lecherous priests, which didn’t seem fair to her. It was only a matter of time. She didn’t know much about life, but she knew this. She also knew about taxes, but sometimes you could escape them. Never the box. In her village, there was always a coffin for you, and your name would be carefully carved into the bottom of the box. People do not look at the bottom of a coffin, but she learned when she was still a little girl that a finger could run along the edge of the base, where the feet would eventually come to rest, and the finger could trace the name. Every coffin her mother made had a name and she had traced the name, Agnes, with her finger two days before the girl had died.
The girl knew that this was long before anyone could have possibly known of the death of Agnes or even of the existence of the orphaned beggar girl in a nameless back alley. It was curious but the question, though, could not be asked. The first rule of the coffin maker.
Chapter 2: Mothers
The mother stood over her daughter, still holding the hammer, but softened features told the girl that her mother’s anger had abated. The girl regretted her carelessness. She knew better.
‘The rules are all we have. Remember your task. People are dying and in need of their boxes.’
‘Yes, Mother.’
The daughter didn’t need instructions. She knew what was required.
The path through the woods was dark, and the rain was cold, but it was not the elements that bothered her. As the coffin maker’s apprentice, she had come a long way and knew that her mother was proud of her progress, so the disappointment in her face burned deeply. This distraction was probably the reason she didn’t notice the man following her. If she had seen him earlier, perhaps everything would have been different. Perhaps not. Who is to know?
She did not notice his presence until it was too late. The shame of her question was all she could think of on the path through the woods that evening, and she had business to take care of that could not wait.
Her village, clinging to the banks of the Elbe, was small and you would think that the coffin business would be slow but conditions for the villagers weren’t suited to longevity. Her mother was busy making coffins seven days a week; small coffins, large coffins, and the ever present tiny ones that broke your heart, every time. The girl could hardly stand to look at the tiny ones, even though she had helped to prepare hundreds. People would travel for days to bring her the bodies. Her mother prepared the boxes. Sometimes, her mother had to travel to pick someone up who had no one to bring them. That was a sad death. It was the apprentice’s responsibility to start and finish the process. She prepared the wood for her mother, which meant felling trees and sawing timber. She bathed the bodies and placed them in their resting places. Even though the lid was not yet nailed shut, she considered what she did to be the end of the process for once at rest in their beautiful boxes, they cared nothing for what came next.
To fell a tree is taxing work. People in the village remarked that the labor was too hard for a girl. Her standard reply was that it was hard work, boy or girl. She found this way of thinking a bit strange as women broke their backs day in and day out on a range of chores. The coffin maker assisted the village midwife on occasion and from what the apprentice had witnessed, compared to the birth of a child, to fell a tree was a simple task. These ideas were heresy, of course. A number of people had reminded her of this, but it was so hard to keep the questions to herself. How else was she going to find out about the world?
Unfortunately, a girl felling a tree was not only considered heresy, it was legally considered boys’ work. It was a carpenter’s responsibility in this region and restricted to official members of the woodworking guild. Religion and commerce seemed to be common bedfellows, the coffin maker had often remarked. This restriction enforced by the woodworking guild meant that the girl should not have been in the woods. As being neither a boy nor related to a master in the guild she could be arrested. Defying the guild did not end well for anyone. Not even the general fear the people felt for the coffin maker would protect the apprentice if she openly defied the guilds. People tolerated a bit of heresy, but the guilds were business so unlike the Church they did not need to maintain a facade of mercy.
For this reason, the apprentice worked at night under cover of darkness and did it far from the village. People knew, of course. It was a small place. The wood for the coffins had to come from somewhere. The forests were vast and she selected trees from different areas each time. Her axes and saws, depending on what part of the process she was involved in, would be carried on her back in a pack her mother had given her as a gift on her first birthday with her. She was about seven years old at the time, although it was hard to be sure. They worked together for a few years but gradually, she grew strong enough to complete the task herself.
The apprentice did not know exactly when or where she was born. Her birthday was the day the coffin maker walked into the barn in which the girl’s mother had been hiding with the half-frozen child. The mother had only been dead for a day or so and the girl had not left her side. The arrow wound in the woman’s side had gone bad and the child had seen her mother slowly burn up with fever. She had lasted for two weeks as they made their way through the forests, scrounging what little food they could. The girl had some minor wounds but it would have been starvation and cold that slowly, relentlessly drained her young life. The girl’s birth mother had cried for most of her last days, not for herself, but for the fate of a little girl left alone in an unforgiving world. The knowledge that her daughter would only last another day or so both haunted and comforted the dying woman.
The coffin maker had walked into the barn and moved straight to the girl, took her by the hand and asked her if she could walk. The coffin maker had guessed her age to be around six winters. The recent malnutrition made it difficult to tell, not that it really mattered. The girl nodded and the coffin maker gently lifted the mother. Bread, cheese and a small pouch of ale were waiting by a fire outside. A warm coat was placed over her shoulders as she devoured the simple meal. The girl had nearly forgotten the warmth of a fire and the taste of unspoiled food. The coffin maker placed the mother in a small cart, just big enough for two bodies, one dead, one who would live. A heavy blanket was placed across the girl as well as her mother, even though the woman would never again be needing shelter from the cold. A delicate wreath of small white flowers had been placed in the frozen hands of her mother. The girl would never forget this small gesture of kindness, nor the respect shown to her dead mother by this strange, quiet lady.
Although there was a hollowness within her that would never fully heal, a space her mother had left when she drifted away on that snowy night, somehow, lying in that cart under the blanket with her mother, the girl knew she would be safe. The lady walked slowly beside the cart through the night until they reached her new home. The coffin maker was now her mother and the girl, her apprentice.
Her birth mother’s coffin was waiting for them when they returned. The mother’s name had already been engraved on the underside, but what was even more strange, the girl thought later when she had time to piece everything together, was that a coffin had also been prepared for her. It was on the shelf when she entered the workshop that first morning in the arms of the coffin maker, and it had never been moved. The girl could not read at the time, but had traced the small engraving of her own name on the underside of the small coffin kept in the back room. The words seemed to grow smaller every passing year. As her fingers grew, the name Else seemed to almost fade away.
Always practical, Else wondered what would happen when she eventually needed to use the box prepared for her all those years ago as she had clearly outgrown it. All boxes are eventually used, the second of the coffin maker’s rules. She thought that if she was burned at the stake, her charred remains would fit quite easily. Problem solved. The way the coffin maker spouted her heresy, this seemed a fairly logical outcome.
Ten years had passed since the coffin maker had found Else on the edge of death. She had treated Else as a daughter from that first day. The coffin maker knew the language of Else’s birth mother and used it with Else when no one else was around. In the presence of others, the language of the villagers was used. They never spoke about this, but Else knew. This was their third rule, but she explained that it was a new one and hopefully temporary. It had not always been necessary to hide the tongue of the Romani, but times had shifted and you needed to keep your wits about you. Of this, the coffin maker reminded Else regularly. When she told Else to never forget who she was, even if she was forced to hide her true identity, Else had replied that she didn’t really know who she was, anyway. The coffin maker had smiled and said it was because she was not a fool, like most people.
With her horse by her side, these thoughts kept Else company on her walk through the deepening darkness of the forest. She made her way to the tree on the edge of a small clearing that she had marked the day before, large enough for the timber she needed but not too large for her horse to handle. It had to be harnessed and dragged back through the forest. The tree was of modest size in a forest of giants so it would probably not be noticed by the lazy priests who owned this rich land as well as all of the people in the village.
With all of this land, Else wondered at the vows of poverty the priests are said to have taken when they joined the Church. She had asked the coffin maker once and she just laughed, but a little sadly, adding that they took that vow as seriously as their vows of chastity and obedience. At the time, Else was too young to know what chastity was all about but knew that she needed to be wary of the fat village priest. All the village girls knew that. To her, he was the Church and he was not a great ambassador.
Else knew that she was lucky that the coffin maker inspired fear and the villagers were superstitious. The priest had come to their cottage one day to arrange a coffin for one of the guild masters. The coffin maker caught him looking at Else in a way that she did not like. Not one little bit. The coffin maker walked up to him, so close that he was forced to back away, and when he hit the wall with nowhere to retreat, she raised a hammer to his face and said in a very quiet voice that if he went anywhere near the girl, his coffin would be the next one she made. The priest went pale and fled the house trembling. He never came back and since then he has crossed the street to avoid Else. Fear can be a useful tool.
This was another of the coffin maker’s mysteries. Anyone else of her station would have been arrested for threatening a priest. If you threaten a priest, you threaten the Church. People were killed for much less. Yet, she remained untouched. Else lived in constant fear of the soldiers coming for the heretical coffin maker as more and more people were taken away. It seemed that numbers caught for poaching and robbery had been in decline, despite many not having the means to feed their families. The soldiers were too busy with the heretics. This was an easier crime to arrest people for. You didn’t even need a victim. For reasons that she did not understand, it seemed that more and more arrests were needed so the disappearances continued.
Else had also heard rumors of a German Church that would keep coins from German speaking regions in their own hands instead of sending it away to the foreigners in Rome. This sort of talk was dangerous. The coffin maker took no interest and openly said that the German Church would be as bad as the Roman one, as long as it was run by power-hungry old men, which it surely would be. She, half jokingly, said on a number of occasions that if only there was a Women’s Church, she would sign up immediately. Obviously, making comments like this, the coffin maker was in danger or at least should have been. Else knew that her mother would protect her with her life, but sooner or later the superstitious fears of the villagers would not be enough to shield them. There was a darkness coming, Else thought, and it was already pretty dark.
Else sometimes wondered about her birth mother’s story, the woman who had given her life to keep Else safe, and wondered at the feelings she kept locked away. She knew her birth mother had loved her and that this had cost her her life. Else was warmed by the thought of this love but fought against feelings of guilt for having been the cause of her mother’s death, and if not the cause, then at least a contributor.
Else’s last memories were all clouded by fear, cold and hunger. Common companions. She remembered fragments, painfully clear fragments. They had been traveling for weeks. Their camp had been attacked in the night and even though Else and her mother didn’t know if anyone else had survived, the glimpses they had of the carnage on their way out convinced them that they needed to keep going. Nothing would be left of their old lives.
It wasn’t until the third day of their flight that Else noticed the wound where an arrow had pierced her mother’s side. She must have removed the arrowhead while Else had slept that first night and dressed it the best she could on the run. Her mother’s hand became unnaturally warm even as the wind bit cruelly at their exposed skin. The mother believed that the attackers were tracking them so they would not stop to rest.
Else remembered her people. They referred to themselves simply as Romani, having allegiance to no specific land. The local people referred to them as gypsies, travelers and not uncommonly, as thieves and devils. Their group was no stranger to violence and they could protect themselves when needed. Even as a child Else knew that. They all learned to fight, boys and girls alike, unlike in the villages where girls were prepared for a life of drudgery to support their masters. A Romani’s life was fundamentally different from that of a villager. There was no master for a Romani, but this also came with its dangers.
There had been stories of slave traders attacking Romani, looking for young girls for the markets in the south. This was relatively new. There were the usual small bands of bandits looking for some quick gold but they avoided the Romani who protected their camps fiercely. The memory of the Romani also discouraged trouble. Even if a raid was successful, their network was large and complex, their grudges long and unforgiving. Reprisals could come anytime, anyplace. It was a matter of honor. Raiders would be tracked, ambushed. Disappear if they strayed too far from camp. Provisions burned in the night. This could be months, or years later. A different country. The Romani reach was long. For this reason, they were often left alone but they were still vulnerable and forever cautious.
Before that final attack, Else had heard talk around the fires of larger bands of soldiers, organized and well-armed. Professional killers targeting Romani. The Romani were not protected by any laws. No longer welcome. These raiders were not looking to steal silver and ale, at least not as the main objective. They were being paid to slaughter the Romani, quietly. It was an expensive project and there were many rumors about who was funding the campaign and why, none comforting.
The mother and child fled the slaughter, and Else’s mother would not stop. She would keep Else safe. This is what really killed her, not the arrow. Her love for her daughter killed her in the end, at least in Else’s mind and she carried this burden.
As Else and her horse approached the tree, she attempted unsuccessfully to push all of these thoughts from her mind. There were only a few things she knew for sure about herself. She was Romani. She was probably about sixteen years old. She was the coffin maker’s apprentice. She would one day be the coffin maker. After that, she would be the protector. Always three. In the end, she would have her own box. That was enough.