Hold back your hand from the mill, you grinding girls; even if the cockcrow heralds the dawn, sleep on. For Demeter has imposed the labours of your hands on the nymphs, who leaping down upon the topmost part of the wheel, rotate its axle; with encircling cogs, it turns the hollow weight of the Nisyrian millstones. If we learn to feast toil-free on the fruits of the earth, we taste again the golden age.
Antipater of Thessalonica 20 BC/10 AD
The melodic trickle of the waterwheel along the western banks of the Rhine was ground out by the turning of the millstone, as it pummeled the autumn harvest of wheat into a fine flour. The hand-hewn granite storehouse cradled the eighteen-foot diameter wooden water wheel, as it harnessed the flowing water in its paddled arms, turning the oaken gears along the timbered shaft.
Amber lay hidden in the thick heather of the orchard meadows of apples, pears and cherries, with her basket, full of the last of the strawberries and blackberries for the season. She had collected the berries to preserve before winter set in, and now, with the new harvest of grain, there were enough stores to make pie crust as well as breads.
Daisy chains of delicate pale white flowers crested her thick dark mane, spilling all around her as she lay daydreaming of rising up through the trees and soaring with the ravens. The three ravens, to the villagers were known as unkindness, unholy and constables. She knew they watched over her, and their true nature was that of mind, thought and wisdom. She had laid out her scarlet robe in the clearing between the groves, where she sat picking the daisies and forming the chain that now adorned her head, her royal crown. They were the same color as the winter lace of her tunic, and she had fashioned a crown for herself of the delicate flowers before she fell back down onto her cape, reminiscing of her lineage.
Her true name was Ambroise, ‘The Immortal’. Her ancestors had lived in the Black Forest for over a thousand years, since the rein of King Darius the First. Darius the Great and the Immortals were her claim to nobility. Her own heritage, of the Persian Jewess, was a secret that only her brother shared. No one else in the local villages could know, or they would both be killed. The raids had been coming more frequently now, and they weren’t just after the winter stores. No. They wanted blood. Jewish blood. The raiders had grown from Vikings to Holy Crusaders, and now the Templars.
“Amber?” Cy, her brother had been splitting wood nearby, and planted his axe in the splitting log, calling for her to come help stack the wood.
“Coming.” Amber called back to him, as she hurriedly gathered up her robe and basket, and found her way back to their cottage near the mill.
“Over here.” He said as he chucked the last of the freshly split wood onto the hastily arranged pile. Each autumn, they stacked the wood in the ancient way, the way their father had shown them. Now, it was a ritual they performed together each year, in memorial.
Their parents had been killed three summers ago, in the first Crusader’s Raid. Her thoughts filled with bittersweet memories of her life before, as she walked out of the orchard and back toward their cottage. ‘Run!’ She could still hear her Papa as he said to her and her brother as the raiders approached. ‘Amber, come with me’ Cy said under his breath as he ran to her and grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the wood pile. ‘Hide!’ her father said in quiet desperation. ‘Run to the Holzhausen’, her father said as he saw the group of raiders cross the stone arched bridge that connected the eastern shore of the Rhine to the western shore, from Germany to France, just a few hundred yards downstream. The Crusader’s had already killed all of the villagers, eight hundred men, women and children, and were thirsty for more Jewish blood as they raced across the Rhine to find her parents.
The sound of Cy’s axe as he split the wood always reminded her of their screams. She could still hear them as the sound of the Crusader’s blades hacked down upon their parents from their mounts, splitting their flesh apart. She and Cy had stayed hidden inside the holzhausen behind the secret opening in the round wood pile for three hours. It felt like three days as they waited for the horsemen to ride away, back across the bridge into Germany. The holzhausen had kept them safe, inside of the secret room of stacked wood, five feet high and ten-foot a round, with an open center, hidden away inside and supporting the moss thatched roof by the center pole.
They stood outside of this year’s secret rooms they had built and said the prayers for their parents. Avenu Malkeinu, ‘Our Father. Our King’. Every Fall they would remember their parents in prayer, who had been killed just after the harvest festival, and after having completed their own holzhausen. The secret room was now a burial place, built around her parent’s graves. They built three this year. One for their parents, one for the root cellar and one, as a place to hide.
Stolen novel; please report.
They had been working since midday to finish stacking the winter’s wood supply. As they walked solemnly back to their cottage in the woods, the daylight turned to darkness in a subtle reminder of how quickly their lives had changed, from joy to tears, and from hope to despair. The villagers who had survived the last raid, had long since left and would never return. Amber and Cy had been on their own ever since that day of unkindness. Now, the only witness to testify to their existence, were the three ravens, who watched over the twins.
“Did you get the honey?”, Amber asked her brother as she prepared the crust for their cottage pie. They had learned to sustain themselves with the orchard’s harvest, garden vegetables and hunted deer and sometimes, elk. The beehives in the orchard provided them honey to sell at le marché with their harvest of apples, cherries and pears. The harvest market and festival began tomorrow, on the first day of the Autumnal Equinox, their sixteenth birthday. The goods they sold and traded would be the means to their survival through the harsh snowy winters. ‘Honey always brings a good price’, she thought to herself as she mashed the potatoes and covered the venison pie before placing it into the brick oven.
Returning to her preserve making, she reassured herself, thinking, ‘The only reason their orchards, mill and cottage weren’t taken by the raiders, was because those People's Crusaders were a nomadic band and killed and moved on’. Since they had burned the village, there was no one left to tell the story of their little farm hidden away in the Black Forest on the western bank of the Rhine. They would travel into the market from Worms by boat down river to Mainz, but always claimed to be from Baden-Baden, to remain hidden from prying eyes and would-be bandits, thieves and People's Crusaders.
Vermaysa as she called it in Hebrew, Worms in French, was one of the oldest cities in Northern Europe. Originally established in 14 BC as a Celtic City named Borbetomagus, it had evolved into Worms over the centuries from 420 AD to the present day, 1099 AD. Amber and Cy had survived the People’s Crusades instigated by Pope Urban the II. She was there in Auvergne, hiding in the shadows a she listened to his speech, in late November of 1095, at the Council of Clermont. Her heart shuddered under the blood lusting ‘call to arms’, as the crowd declared, ‘Deus Vuit’, ‘God Wills It’.
‘This is your Battle Cry!’ the overseeing Roman Pontiff announced to the unruly crowd as Pope Urban II finished the speech prepared for him by his closest ally, Robert the Monk. Amber knew it was the Pope’s desperate attempt to gain power. The power he so longed for ever since his speech in the spring had set him at odds with the Pope of Ravenna, Clement the III. His power struggle with Clement the III ended in the death of a thousand in one day, and tens of thousands in one summer. The Rhineland Massacre was the People’s Crusade, and had sent a collective shiver down the spine of the Chosen People.
Local Archbishop Ruthard’s had tried to protect the towns people behind the locked gates of the bishop’s palaces and courtyards. But they were quickly overwhelmed. After a week of sieges, the hoard was allowed passage by sympathetic and probably fearful guards, and the tens of thousands of Crusaders to entered and committed the slaughter they lusted after. In all, they had burned alive at the stake, beheaded, and mutilated thousands of men, women, and children in their murderous crusade. In Mainz, in Speyer, in Trier, and in Worms. Those they could not convert, or kill, had already taken their own lives in a defiant prelude to the future of European Jewry, even taking the lives of their own children.
Amber and Cy both knew Rachel’s daughters, Bella and Hannah. Rachel had taken their lives before taking her own, to spare them the rage and violations of the Crusaders. That was a few summers ago now. But the Crusader’s Army lived on in Emicho’s care, along with the infamous Peter the Hermit. She had never seen them. Although, she thought reflectively, she had heard last year in the market the locals talking; ‘the entire army was annihilated in Hungary, save one. Drogo of Nesle’. She knew him too. The thought of him sent more icy shivers of shock and fear through her body as she stood over the flaming heat of the brick oven. She only hoped he had not returned to France, and that their paths would not cross again, ever.