Читать книгу Five-minute Mysteries 2 - Ken Weber - Страница 10
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A Safe Shelter?
The man lying on his stomach at the top of the ridge was named Tyl. In his village he had been known as Tyl the Miller, but his mill was gone now. So was his entire village. The Burgundians had burned it weeks before, just as they had razed every other village in their path as they marched through Flanders to the sea.
Tyl raised himself just enough to get a better look at the ruined building in the distance. He’d been watching it for hours, and his muscles protested the move. The Burgundians had been through here, too, he could see. What had once been a mill just like his was now part of a long, charred slash on the landscape. The mill was not completely destroyed, however, and that’s what made it worth the long watch. It just might provide shelter for a while. Provided there were no Burgundians there – or worse, one of the roving gangs of bandits that followed in their wake. Even another wanderer like Tyl could be dangerous if he were bigger and stronger.
Tyl moved to his left, keeping behind the sparse brush that grew along the ridge. The new angle gave him a better view of the flock of pigeons that had made their home in the mill, and allowed him to look inside through a missing wall. The other walls still stood strongly enough to hold up the damaged roof, where the pigeons strutted so importantly. It was a wind-powered mill like most in Flanders and, while the vanes had been torn down, the tower was intact. There was enough of the building left, Tyl could see, to keep out wind and rain. The only problem: was anybody else there?
He sighed deeply and lowered his body to the ground again. He was weak, desperately weak, but his wife and their one surviving child hidden behind him in the trunk of a hollow tree were even worse off. Tyl was in his prime, if it could be called that, and had withstood the effects of starvation better than they.
The year was 1384, but Tyl didn’t know that. It wouldn’t have mattered to him if he had. For generations that year would be known throughout Flanders simply as “the time the Burgundians came.” The previous year had been an even scarier marker. It was known as “the time with no summer” for, following a beautiful, promising spring, the rains had come and never left. The whole of Flanders, low-lying and flat to begin with, had turned into a sea of soggy mud. Creeks and canals had overflowed, crops had rotted in the fields, and people soon knew that famine was inevitable. By late fall they had begun to cast a reluctant, hungry eye at their animals. By mid-winter all the animals were gone. There was no hay or grain to feed them.
Tyl’s village starved, but had done a bit better than most at first because one of the old women had convinced everyone early on to capture and breed the rats that seemed to multiply in times like these.
But when spring came, so did the Burgundians, determined to wreak bloody vengeance for having been kicked out of Flanders some decades before. The only good part was that they, too, and even the bandits, were having trouble finding food. Only yesterday, just in time to hide, Tyl’s keen-eyed wife had spotted a troop on its way back to Burgundy, tired and bedraggled, the horses’ ribs showing clearly through their skin.
A low roll of thunder brought Tyl back to the present, reminding him that even a ruined shelter would be better than a hollow tree for what was soon to come. He raised himself once more to look at the mill. Nothing had changed. On his hands and knees he backed away from the brush to collect his family. He looked at the sky. Although they needed to move carefully and keep to the trees alongside the stream, he calculated they would still have time to get to the mill before the storm hit.
?
Tyl has decided there is no one in the mill. What has led him to this conclusion?
