The Emperor of All Things - By Paul Witcover Page 0,100

known to look in from time to time,’ he confided to me in English with a wink and a grin as he tugged off his gloves.

My eyes had cleared, the dizziness lifted, and now I saw that there were a dozen or so men seated at tables in the inn’s common room, and an immensely fat, middle-aged woman who stood behind a long and unoccupied bar. All their eyes were fixed on me through a drifting bluish haze, but I sensed no animosity in their regard; thanks to Adolpheus, I had been accepted, accorded the provisional status of guest rather than intruder. I nodded a generalized hello, and the buzz of conversation resumed.

A medium-sized but rotund brown and white terrier, which I assumed was the same dog that had barked at my entrance, came waddling up like a sausage with legs, and Adolpheus chuckled and scratched behind the animal’s foxlike ears. ‘Hello, Hesta, old girl.’

The dog had but a single eye; the other, to judge by the scars surrounding the empty socket, had been lost in a fight. She wagged her stubby tail, basking in the attention, then gave my outstretched palm a sniff and allowed herself to be patted on the head before retreating, satisfied, to what was plainly her accustomed spot before the fire.

‘It’s she who truly owns the place,’ said Adolpheus, tucking his gloves into the pockets of his cloak. ‘The great Frederick himself couldn’t stop here if Hesta didn’t approve.’ He unfastened the cloak and shrugged it off, then handed it to me, indicating with his eyes a row of wooden pegs along one wall, above his reach, where other cloaks were hanging, dripping onto the wooden floor. ‘Would you mind?’

‘Not at all,’ I told him in my rough German. At his raised eyebrows, I added, ‘You see, I am as adept in your language as you are in mine.’

‘Then perhaps we can misunderstand each other equally,’ Adolpheus replied – in German – with a laugh. He had taken off his hat and tucked it beneath his arm, revealing a full head of hair the same reddish-brown as his beard.

I hung the cloak on an empty peg, then hung my own beside it. I shrugged out of my rucksack and stamped clinging snow and ice from my boots, toes tingling as they began to thaw. Meanwhile, the woman from behind the bar came forward to greet us. I tried not to stare, but I had seldom seen a woman – or man, for that matter – of such prodigious girth. Her bare arms were the size of hams; her neck and chin were lost in rolls of rosy pink flesh; the movement of her bosom beneath the tent of her blue and white smock, with its colourfully embroidered designs of mountain wildflowers, was positively oceanic. Seeing her across the room, I had assumed she was in her mid-to-late forties, perhaps somewhat older, but up close she appeared younger than that – or, no, not younger, but as if the range of her possible ages was wider than I had at first supposed, just as she herself appeared to widen as she approached, glowing with health and vigour. Her cheeks were like firm red apples, her eyes were blue as gentians, and thick brown braids, like wreaths of fresh-baked bread, curled about ears that were translucent, pink, and incongruously small, like souvenirs of a dainty girlhood otherwise unimaginable.

‘Well, and who’s your handsome friend, Dolph?’ she asked in German, appraising me with a frank and, or so it seemed, flirtatious stare. She was nearly my own height, but she must have outweighed me by two hundred pounds or more. She smelled like beer and bread. What would it be like, I found myself wondering, and not entirely without interest, to bed such an enormous woman?

Adolpheus introduced me as Michael Gray, a journeyman of the Worshipful Company. The woman’s name, I learned, was Inge Hubner.

‘A pleasure to meet you and enjoy such warm hospitality,’ I told her with a gallant bow. I spoke in German, and the rest of our conversation took place in that tongue; indeed, unless I mention otherwise, you should assume that all the conversations I report to you were conducted thus.

Inge laughed, her chins jiggling. ‘You’re a long way from home, Herr Gray. But I’ll bet I can guess what brings you to Märchen. You’ve come to try your luck with Wachter’s Folly, haven’t you?’

‘She means the clock,’ Adolpheus put in. ‘That’s what we call