The Cabbage Girl
Chapter Six
Emlin didn’t stop running until she
was halfway back to the old warehouse.
Her mind was in a state of desperate panic, jumping to every worst case scenario – that the guards would catch her along the way; that they were following close on her heels just out of sight; that she’d get back to her hiding place only to find them there waiting for her over the corpses of Sir Gomly and Albrecht and the others.
So she ran until her lungs burned and her side ached so badly that she couldn’t run another step. Her chest heaved as she bellowed breaths in and out, her hand pushed against the painful stitch in her side. She wanted to collapse, but was certain that, at any moment, the guards would be upon her.
Even as she finally stopped running from exhaustion, she kept walking, trying to work the pain out while she continued to move forward.
She finally let herself actually stop once she had slid into the darkness of the sewer tunnels. She sat there in the shadows, weeping into a stagnant pool of water as the last light of day faded away into night.
After several minutes, she stood up, took a deep breath of the musty sewer air, and wiped her face with a part of her new cloak. Then she made her way back to her home.
Magus Altefalke looked up as she came in, pursing his lips and squinting at her.
“And where have you been?” he demanded.
“None of your business.”
“Heh! Probably selling us out to our enemies.”
“Leave her alone, magus,” demanded Albrecht. “She’s done alright by us. No reason for you to keep being such an...”
“Albrecht.” His master’s voice stopped the elder squire from finishing his sentence.
The pompous old magus harrumphed at the rebuke, and then went back to quizzing Ishild on sorcerous metaphysics.
“Have something to eat, child.” Sir Gomly ladled some cold stew into a small trencher of bread and put it on one of the old crates.
She sat down and stared at it. The food seemed alien to her, something that she knew, intellectually, that she needed to consume. But the thought of it revolted her.
“Sir Gomly?”
“Yes, Emlin?” he responded, pulling a small crust of bread from the loaf that he had torn her trencher from.
“I have to go with you when you leave.”
“But, child, if they catch us, they could…”
“They know about me,” she interrupted. “I found Etzel the Goat.” The knight looked at her, head cocked and brow furrowed in confusion. “The tavernkeeper at the Gurgling Goat. They…” she closed her eyes, trying to keep the tears from squeezing out. “They broke his leg and knocked out his teeth and cut off his ear, until he told them about me.” She started to sob.
Everyone sat in an uncomfortable silence, looking at each other and then back to the Cabbage Girl.
“He was a liar and a cheat,” she eventually continued, as Sir Gomly and Albrecht looked on. “But he fed me and didn’t rat on me when I robbed his customers and he even helped me sometimes…”
“Heh, sounds like the vile criminal deserved it,” interjected the magus.
“SHUT UP!” Emlin screamed. “SHUT UP! SHUT UP! You don’t know anything! He saved my life and I destroyed his, and you were the cause!” She grabbed the trencher of stew and threw it at the magus, catching him on the cheek.
Balduin and Korbinian giggled in the corner at the surprised look on the old sorcerer’s face, with a long smear of greasy stew from the side of his face down the front of his too-expensive velvet robe.
“I’ll turn you into a frog, you little wretch,” the magus fumed, as he began to lurch towards her.
“ENOUGH!” Sir Gomly jumped up, with Albrecht at his side. The two of them grappled the magus and threw him back from her. Ishild hid behind one of the crates that demarcated “her” portion of the hiding hole.
“That is enough, magus. Leave her be.” Sir Gomly turned to Emlin. “What do they know?”
“They know that I live in the sewers and one of the black-eyed man’s guards saw me running away with you that night. They know almost everyone I used to sell my cabbages to and made them all afraid of me. They even know that I’m a girl and not a boy.”
Sir Gomly sighed.
“Then we don’t know how close they are or how much time we have left. We need to pack up what supplies we have and go tonight – we cannot delay any longer. It is only blind, foolish fortune that Emlin managed to get this information to us without getting caught.” Gomly eyed her hard as he said this. “But now we know, and we do not have time to spare.”
* * * * * * *
It was only a few hours before everything was gathered and prepared. Each of the young boys, as well as Emlin, were given packs loaded with as much as they could carry. Albrecht and Sir Gomly also took a small pack each, but as light as they could manage, in case a fight was called for. The magus had a large satchel over his shoulder, in which he carried a couple of small books and his few remaining papers, as well as a small collection of strange bottles, jars, vials, and flasks. Other than that, though, he had nothing with which to really carry much at all. Neither did Ishild – nor had Albrecht and Emlin had an opportunity to buy more packs for them, as yet. Sir Gomly and Albrecht put as much as they could into Emlin’s old cabbage sacks and gave one to each of the pair.
Then they lit some small torches from the candle, and Emlin began to lead the way through the sewers towards the way out of Feiglingstadt. The added weight that many of them were carrying made for lots of stumbling and slipping on the wet, slime-covered stones. The Cabbage Girl was certain that, at any moment, they were going to be heard by someone or something whose attention they did not want, with all the splashing and clattering of rocks from awkward steps.
They cut across the old sewer causeway that was now little more than a ridge of slick stones just under the water’s surface and continued on their way.
Finally, they came to the fork in the passage that she knew so well. Emlin could hear something unfamiliar, but the bumbling of her companions made it impossible to make out. She hissed at them all to stop moving and be quiet.
When they finally did manage to become still, she could hear echoes of yelling, screams, and metal clanging in the distance down the right-hand passage.
“Left. Go left, hurry!” she said in a loud whisper.
As they continued on down the left passage, the youngest squire, Korbinian, spoke up.
“What were those sounds?”
Emlin responded:
“That was Gustaf the Cutter and his gang, probably being murdered by the city guards. Gustaf and his men are rapists and robbers and killers all, so maybe they deserve it. But they’re not being slaughtered for the things they’ve done. They’re being killed ‘cause of us.”
The grim pronouncement added haste to the whole party while silencing further discussion. And, while they still weren’t as quiet as she wanted them to be, they proceeded faster and with less hesitation at her directions.
A quarter of an hour after they went down the left fork, she instructed Albrecht and Sir Gomly to extinguish their torches.
“We’re gettin’ close to the way out. I don’t want some patrol a mile away to see us because you people can’t learn to walk in the dark without stumbling.” Once the fires were dropped into the stale waters and sputtered into smoke, she grabbed Albrecht’s hand. “Now, everyone take a hand and follow close. If I lose you, I’m not coming back for you.”
They linked up as instructed, and Emlin led them the remainder of the way through the dark sewers towards the old outlet.
It seemed like forever to her, trying to keep them all moving. Their clumsy inexperience in the dark made them all but useless. And every splash or clatter of a kicked stone resounded and echoed in her mind as though it were a knell of doom leading their hunters to them.
Finally, they reached the outlet. After the blinding ink-black of the sewers, the thin slice of moon, even half-covered as it was by clouds, seemed jarringly brilliant.
The Cabbage Girl gazed carefully across the open space between the outlet and the edge of the twisted old trees. That space had never seemed to loom so immense and barren before, but then, she told herself, she had never been actually running from the city guards before, either.
She slipped through the narrow gap in the grating and then realized that, while Ishild and the younger squires could almost certainly fit, the gap was certain to be too small a space for Albrecht, the knight, and the magus to pass. And while she’d happily leave the magus behind at the moment, she wasn’t terribly interested in abandoning the other two.
“Can you bend it?” she asked.
Albrecht and Sir Gomly pulled at it from different angles, but couldn’t get the grating to do more than flex a bit.
“We will need some kind of lever,” stated the knight.
“A lever?”
“Yes. If you can work loose one of the straighter, thicker branches or even one of the small saplings out there, we might be able to use it.”
She told them to stay out of sight and wait. Then she let herself down to the sandy, weed-covered waste below the outlet. Momentarily being free of the rest of her companions, she suddenly felt like the very spirit of sneakiness and silence. She darted across the open ground until she reached the ranks of blackened, mangled trees.
She started searching for long, solid branches, but all she could find were rotted limbs that crumbled or broke in half when she tried to lift them. Finally, she gave up looking for a branch on the ground and started pulling on the bigger, thicker saplings instead, seeing if she could find one to work free. After several minutes, she found one that seemed to be slightly loose in the ground and she began pulling it backwards and forwards and side to side, trying to wrench its roots out of the dirt.
Being stout is useful here, she thought. Just like it is when I try to pass as a boy. She suppressed a bit of a giggle, imagining dainty little Ishild trying to do the same thing, all while being afraid to touch something “dirty.”
Stop being silly, Emlin reprimanded herself. They’re waiting for you and it’s not that funny. Despite that, she still had something of a smile on her face when she finally pulled hard in one direction and the roots tore from the ground. She put the sapling over one shoulder and headed back to the outlet.
When she got back, she handed the small tree up to Balduin and Korbinian, who then took it back through the grate to the older men as the Cabbage Girl pulled herself back up and into the drainage opening.
By the time she was up there, Sir Gomly and Albrecht were wedging the sapling into one of the “squares” created by the crisscrossed bits of metal and, using the leverage and their combined mass, were slowly bending the iron. It was going to take more than just one or two applications of this strategy to create a large enough hole for the bigger men to fit. Moments turned into minutes and the minutes began to seem longer and longer, as the knight and his squire worked diligently.
But, unfortunately, they did not work quietly enough.
The Cabbage Girl was the first to notice the growing light in the tunnels behind the men. Magus Altefalke was too busy staring at the work that he wasn’t helping with rather than keeping any sort of guard.
Her eyes shot wide and she gasped out:
“Behind you!” in a loud whisper.
Gomly and Albrecht both looked back to see the threat. The magus took a moment to register what had just been said and his companions’ reactions. But when he did, he turned dead white and turned slowly around.
Emlin couldn’t see very well from her vantage, but she was pretty sure she could make out the flicker of fire somewhere past the magus’ head and shapes that looked like men.
Altefalke backed up against the grate, whimpering:
“Hurry!” he whispered.
“We are going as fast as we can,” said Gomly through gritted teeth as he and Albrecht returned to their work.
“You’re a magus, aren’t you?” the elder squire demanded. “Do some magic or something. Be useful for once!”
Emlin could hear the other men now. One of them shouted something to the effect of “Over there!”
“Go! Go! GO!” she yelled at Ishild and the younger squires. The boys let themselves down from the sewer outlet fast enough, dangling a bit by their arms and dropping the last foot or so to the sandy ground below. But Ishild just stood there, her face a mask of paralyzed terror.
“Move dammit!” Emlin grabbed Ishild and shook her. “You have to jump down and run!” Ishild only shook her head. “It’s not that far! Just GO!”
The Cabbage Girl used her weight and shoved Ishild off the lip of the outlet. She heard her cry out and land with a thump, but had no time to look before the noise from the sewer jerked her attention away.
There were at least a dozen men coming down the passage, slogging through the water with swords or maces in one hand and torches in the other.
The magus seemed to be fiddling with one of the small satchels at his belt, while Gomly and Albrecht had abandoned their grate-bending and drawn their own swords.
Emlin was certain that she was about to witness a slaughter.
Her mind was in a state of desperate panic, jumping to every worst case scenario – that the guards would catch her along the way; that they were following close on her heels just out of sight; that she’d get back to her hiding place only to find them there waiting for her over the corpses of Sir Gomly and Albrecht and the others.
So she ran until her lungs burned and her side ached so badly that she couldn’t run another step. Her chest heaved as she bellowed breaths in and out, her hand pushed against the painful stitch in her side. She wanted to collapse, but was certain that, at any moment, the guards would be upon her.
Even as she finally stopped running from exhaustion, she kept walking, trying to work the pain out while she continued to move forward.
She finally let herself actually stop once she had slid into the darkness of the sewer tunnels. She sat there in the shadows, weeping into a stagnant pool of water as the last light of day faded away into night.
After several minutes, she stood up, took a deep breath of the musty sewer air, and wiped her face with a part of her new cloak. Then she made her way back to her home.
Magus Altefalke looked up as she came in, pursing his lips and squinting at her.
“And where have you been?” he demanded.
“None of your business.”
“Heh! Probably selling us out to our enemies.”
“Leave her alone, magus,” demanded Albrecht. “She’s done alright by us. No reason for you to keep being such an...”
“Albrecht.” His master’s voice stopped the elder squire from finishing his sentence.
The pompous old magus harrumphed at the rebuke, and then went back to quizzing Ishild on sorcerous metaphysics.
“Have something to eat, child.” Sir Gomly ladled some cold stew into a small trencher of bread and put it on one of the old crates.
She sat down and stared at it. The food seemed alien to her, something that she knew, intellectually, that she needed to consume. But the thought of it revolted her.
“Sir Gomly?”
“Yes, Emlin?” he responded, pulling a small crust of bread from the loaf that he had torn her trencher from.
“I have to go with you when you leave.”
“But, child, if they catch us, they could…”
“They know about me,” she interrupted. “I found Etzel the Goat.” The knight looked at her, head cocked and brow furrowed in confusion. “The tavernkeeper at the Gurgling Goat. They…” she closed her eyes, trying to keep the tears from squeezing out. “They broke his leg and knocked out his teeth and cut off his ear, until he told them about me.” She started to sob.
Everyone sat in an uncomfortable silence, looking at each other and then back to the Cabbage Girl.
“He was a liar and a cheat,” she eventually continued, as Sir Gomly and Albrecht looked on. “But he fed me and didn’t rat on me when I robbed his customers and he even helped me sometimes…”
“Heh, sounds like the vile criminal deserved it,” interjected the magus.
“SHUT UP!” Emlin screamed. “SHUT UP! SHUT UP! You don’t know anything! He saved my life and I destroyed his, and you were the cause!” She grabbed the trencher of stew and threw it at the magus, catching him on the cheek.
Balduin and Korbinian giggled in the corner at the surprised look on the old sorcerer’s face, with a long smear of greasy stew from the side of his face down the front of his too-expensive velvet robe.
“I’ll turn you into a frog, you little wretch,” the magus fumed, as he began to lurch towards her.
“ENOUGH!” Sir Gomly jumped up, with Albrecht at his side. The two of them grappled the magus and threw him back from her. Ishild hid behind one of the crates that demarcated “her” portion of the hiding hole.
“That is enough, magus. Leave her be.” Sir Gomly turned to Emlin. “What do they know?”
“They know that I live in the sewers and one of the black-eyed man’s guards saw me running away with you that night. They know almost everyone I used to sell my cabbages to and made them all afraid of me. They even know that I’m a girl and not a boy.”
Sir Gomly sighed.
“Then we don’t know how close they are or how much time we have left. We need to pack up what supplies we have and go tonight – we cannot delay any longer. It is only blind, foolish fortune that Emlin managed to get this information to us without getting caught.” Gomly eyed her hard as he said this. “But now we know, and we do not have time to spare.”
* * * * * * *
It was only a few hours before everything was gathered and prepared. Each of the young boys, as well as Emlin, were given packs loaded with as much as they could carry. Albrecht and Sir Gomly also took a small pack each, but as light as they could manage, in case a fight was called for. The magus had a large satchel over his shoulder, in which he carried a couple of small books and his few remaining papers, as well as a small collection of strange bottles, jars, vials, and flasks. Other than that, though, he had nothing with which to really carry much at all. Neither did Ishild – nor had Albrecht and Emlin had an opportunity to buy more packs for them, as yet. Sir Gomly and Albrecht put as much as they could into Emlin’s old cabbage sacks and gave one to each of the pair.
Then they lit some small torches from the candle, and Emlin began to lead the way through the sewers towards the way out of Feiglingstadt. The added weight that many of them were carrying made for lots of stumbling and slipping on the wet, slime-covered stones. The Cabbage Girl was certain that, at any moment, they were going to be heard by someone or something whose attention they did not want, with all the splashing and clattering of rocks from awkward steps.
They cut across the old sewer causeway that was now little more than a ridge of slick stones just under the water’s surface and continued on their way.
Finally, they came to the fork in the passage that she knew so well. Emlin could hear something unfamiliar, but the bumbling of her companions made it impossible to make out. She hissed at them all to stop moving and be quiet.
When they finally did manage to become still, she could hear echoes of yelling, screams, and metal clanging in the distance down the right-hand passage.
“Left. Go left, hurry!” she said in a loud whisper.
As they continued on down the left passage, the youngest squire, Korbinian, spoke up.
“What were those sounds?”
Emlin responded:
“That was Gustaf the Cutter and his gang, probably being murdered by the city guards. Gustaf and his men are rapists and robbers and killers all, so maybe they deserve it. But they’re not being slaughtered for the things they’ve done. They’re being killed ‘cause of us.”
The grim pronouncement added haste to the whole party while silencing further discussion. And, while they still weren’t as quiet as she wanted them to be, they proceeded faster and with less hesitation at her directions.
A quarter of an hour after they went down the left fork, she instructed Albrecht and Sir Gomly to extinguish their torches.
“We’re gettin’ close to the way out. I don’t want some patrol a mile away to see us because you people can’t learn to walk in the dark without stumbling.” Once the fires were dropped into the stale waters and sputtered into smoke, she grabbed Albrecht’s hand. “Now, everyone take a hand and follow close. If I lose you, I’m not coming back for you.”
They linked up as instructed, and Emlin led them the remainder of the way through the dark sewers towards the old outlet.
It seemed like forever to her, trying to keep them all moving. Their clumsy inexperience in the dark made them all but useless. And every splash or clatter of a kicked stone resounded and echoed in her mind as though it were a knell of doom leading their hunters to them.
Finally, they reached the outlet. After the blinding ink-black of the sewers, the thin slice of moon, even half-covered as it was by clouds, seemed jarringly brilliant.
The Cabbage Girl gazed carefully across the open space between the outlet and the edge of the twisted old trees. That space had never seemed to loom so immense and barren before, but then, she told herself, she had never been actually running from the city guards before, either.
She slipped through the narrow gap in the grating and then realized that, while Ishild and the younger squires could almost certainly fit, the gap was certain to be too small a space for Albrecht, the knight, and the magus to pass. And while she’d happily leave the magus behind at the moment, she wasn’t terribly interested in abandoning the other two.
“Can you bend it?” she asked.
Albrecht and Sir Gomly pulled at it from different angles, but couldn’t get the grating to do more than flex a bit.
“We will need some kind of lever,” stated the knight.
“A lever?”
“Yes. If you can work loose one of the straighter, thicker branches or even one of the small saplings out there, we might be able to use it.”
She told them to stay out of sight and wait. Then she let herself down to the sandy, weed-covered waste below the outlet. Momentarily being free of the rest of her companions, she suddenly felt like the very spirit of sneakiness and silence. She darted across the open ground until she reached the ranks of blackened, mangled trees.
She started searching for long, solid branches, but all she could find were rotted limbs that crumbled or broke in half when she tried to lift them. Finally, she gave up looking for a branch on the ground and started pulling on the bigger, thicker saplings instead, seeing if she could find one to work free. After several minutes, she found one that seemed to be slightly loose in the ground and she began pulling it backwards and forwards and side to side, trying to wrench its roots out of the dirt.
Being stout is useful here, she thought. Just like it is when I try to pass as a boy. She suppressed a bit of a giggle, imagining dainty little Ishild trying to do the same thing, all while being afraid to touch something “dirty.”
Stop being silly, Emlin reprimanded herself. They’re waiting for you and it’s not that funny. Despite that, she still had something of a smile on her face when she finally pulled hard in one direction and the roots tore from the ground. She put the sapling over one shoulder and headed back to the outlet.
When she got back, she handed the small tree up to Balduin and Korbinian, who then took it back through the grate to the older men as the Cabbage Girl pulled herself back up and into the drainage opening.
By the time she was up there, Sir Gomly and Albrecht were wedging the sapling into one of the “squares” created by the crisscrossed bits of metal and, using the leverage and their combined mass, were slowly bending the iron. It was going to take more than just one or two applications of this strategy to create a large enough hole for the bigger men to fit. Moments turned into minutes and the minutes began to seem longer and longer, as the knight and his squire worked diligently.
But, unfortunately, they did not work quietly enough.
The Cabbage Girl was the first to notice the growing light in the tunnels behind the men. Magus Altefalke was too busy staring at the work that he wasn’t helping with rather than keeping any sort of guard.
Her eyes shot wide and she gasped out:
“Behind you!” in a loud whisper.
Gomly and Albrecht both looked back to see the threat. The magus took a moment to register what had just been said and his companions’ reactions. But when he did, he turned dead white and turned slowly around.
Emlin couldn’t see very well from her vantage, but she was pretty sure she could make out the flicker of fire somewhere past the magus’ head and shapes that looked like men.
Altefalke backed up against the grate, whimpering:
“Hurry!” he whispered.
“We are going as fast as we can,” said Gomly through gritted teeth as he and Albrecht returned to their work.
“You’re a magus, aren’t you?” the elder squire demanded. “Do some magic or something. Be useful for once!”
Emlin could hear the other men now. One of them shouted something to the effect of “Over there!”
“Go! Go! GO!” she yelled at Ishild and the younger squires. The boys let themselves down from the sewer outlet fast enough, dangling a bit by their arms and dropping the last foot or so to the sandy ground below. But Ishild just stood there, her face a mask of paralyzed terror.
“Move dammit!” Emlin grabbed Ishild and shook her. “You have to jump down and run!” Ishild only shook her head. “It’s not that far! Just GO!”
The Cabbage Girl used her weight and shoved Ishild off the lip of the outlet. She heard her cry out and land with a thump, but had no time to look before the noise from the sewer jerked her attention away.
There were at least a dozen men coming down the passage, slogging through the water with swords or maces in one hand and torches in the other.
The magus seemed to be fiddling with one of the small satchels at his belt, while Gomly and Albrecht had abandoned their grate-bending and drawn their own swords.
Emlin was certain that she was about to witness a slaughter.
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