Read The Bells for Free Online

as warm as the sun. He offered me a massive hand. “Come and be our king.”
    I cowered from the hand, dreading any touch but my mother’s. In any case, the smaller man quickly batted the larger’s hand away. “I said you should not touch him,” he muttered.
    “He’s just a boy,” the giant said, and he bent down and clutched both hands around my ribs, his thumbs pressing into my heart. His hands were warm and soft, yet every muscle in my body tightened. He held me up like a goatherd might inspect a kid. I was entirely naked, washed clean by the river. “What’s your name?”
    I did not answer. In fact, I could not answer—the villagers had only ever called me “that Froben boy” or “the idiot child.” I kept rigid and hoped that he would put me down so I could run away and find my mother. He shrugged. “Well, Moses is a fine enough name for boys swimming in rivers. Mine is Nicolai. The wolf here is Remus. We are monks.”
    I looked from the one man to the next, trying to extract a meaning from this term. Monks? I found nothing in common between the two except their tunics.
    “All right,” this Remus said, impatiently, his face screwed up as if against a noxious smell. “He is alive. Send him on his way.”
    “No!” the giant cried. “Are you so heartless?” He swung me down so I sat in the crux of his elbow and forced my cheek against the wet wool of his tunic until I itched from ear to hip. His heart thumped into my ear.
    “You’ve done your duty. You saved his life,” Remus said.
    Nicolai’s body recoiled in shock. “Remus, someone threw him in that river!”
    “You don’t know that. He could have fallen.”
    “Did you fall into the water?” the giant asked me. I did not answer—in fact, I did not even hear, for I was mesmerized by the beating of his heart, so much slower and deeper than my mother’s. The heart of a bull.
    “Come on,” Nicolai urged. “You can tell me. Who threw you in?”
    I closed my eyes. My heart was slowing, matching itself to the measured rhythm of the giant’s. My muscles loosened and, without willing it, I melted into his arms.
    “It doesn’t matter,” Remus said. “He’ll probably lie to us in any case. Watch your purse.”
    “Remus!”
    “You must leave him here.” Remus pointed at the grassy bank.
    “Here? Naked in the grass? How can you say that? What if those monks who found me on their doorstep had left me there? Where would you be now?”
    “I would be reading in my cell. In peace.”
    “Exactly. And instead you are seeing the world.”
    “I don’t want to see the world. I have told you that before. I want to go home. We are two months late.”
    “Another day won’t matter.”
    “Put him down.”
    Nicolai turned his back to Remus. He carried me several steps along the bank. I opened my eyes and looked up into his face. He peered down with the friendliest gaze I had ever seen. His breath was like a warm draft flitting up a cliff. “Remus is right,” he whispered to me. “He always is, and that’s why no one likes him. But I won’t just leave you here. Point me toward your home, and I’ll help you find your father.”
    I started so violently that Nicolai nearly dropped me. I looked around in a panic, worried I might see Karl Victor crouching in the grass.
    “My God,” Nicolai said. “That’s it! Isn’t it? It was your father! Remus,” Nicolai shouted, rushing back to the scowling, smaller monk. “His father threw him in!”
    “You don’t know that.”
    “He tried to kill his own son. That means this boy is an orphan. Just like me.”
    Remus covered his face with his hands. “Nicolai, you are not an orphan anymore—have not been for forty years. You are a monk. And monks cannot take in children.”
    Nicolai considered this. His beard bristled as he smiled. “He can become a novice.”
    “Staudach will not have him.”
    “I will speak with him.” Nicolai nodded confidently. “Make him understand what is at stake. His