"No it isn't," I said, holding out my hand to check. "It's your imagination."
We climbed on in silence. It was dark and behind us the lights of Hameln were being doused. "Can you see the hut?" I called, bent under the weight of the power unit I carried.
"I think so," said Corin, and Adam grunted with annoyance.
"You either can or you can't," he snapped. "Let me see." He walked up to where Corin had stopped and was peering up the Koppelberg hill. "Is that a light?" said Corin.
"It's a star," I said, peering from under the pack I carried.
"It's a light," said Adam. "It's the hut. At last."
We plodded on, the soft soil beneath our feet making walking difficult. It was cold, too, and the clothes we wore, copies of late thirteenth century German raiments, were no protection against the night air.
Down the hill, off to the left, I could see the purple glow that was the videsonic probe. Malcolm was down there, working, obscured by the night, but peering deeper, deeper into the mysteries of the hill behind Hameln.
"We can move back further in ten minutes."
"Good," I said. This time, too, it would be a jump of only fifty years or so. The drain would be much less. Jumping back from the 21st had been difficult, and we had arrived in the early fourteenth century instead of the late thirteenth. Now I felt the excitement of anticipation building up within me as I thought of that final jump that would take us almost to the very day when the Piper had led the children through the streets of Hameln and to their doom. Now at last we would see for a fact that the legend was no legend...
If, that is, Christian had weaned the information from the man within the hut. Otherwise we would have to search the years until we found the day the Piper came to Hameln, to leave it a shaken town.
Adam must have seen the look in my eyes. "You still believe there was a Piper, don't you?"
I nodded. "We virtually found as much today."
Corin, about to knock on the door of the hut, turned on me.
"We didn't, you know. There wasn't a villager, remember, who knew to what we referred... not a single soul would admit to knowing about the Piper. All we found was that gap in the records."
Corin's sudden scepticism surprised me. All we found...? That gap in the records was enough for me! The Piper had come. Not in 1284 as Browning would have us think, but 14 years earlier, in 1270, the same year that the ruling hands of Hameln changed. A date in the early 70's had been implied in the manuscript that had caused us to come here from our own time, and as that date became more certain so my excitement grew. For centuries the first reference to the Pied Piper of Hameln, the Ratcatcher, had been in 16th century German literature, stating the date as 1284 and placing a very 16th century bias upon the story. But now we had an early 14th century reference to a colourful Piper who had enchanted the children away from the town.
And it occurred to me then that at this very moment in nearby Hanover that Saxon scholar was at work upon the very manuscript we would not discover until the spring of 2003.
Corin knocked on the door, and Christian answered it a moment later, motioning us inside.
"Leave the pack outside," he said to me. "There's hardly any room in here at all."
"Has the old man spoken at all?" I asked. Christian shook his head.
"He's spoken, but nothing I wanted to hear. I'm sure he's the cripple - his left leg's gammy. But he denies the Piper ever existed. I've given up."
"Defeatist," said Adam. We stood in one corner and looked around us. It was a very small hut, built cleverly from a minimum of timber and small, roughly chipped stone blocks. There was a small hearth with a very large pot upon the ashes of a recent fire. Wood-carvings littered the place, some of them animals, most of them people. Very crudely carved. In the opposite corner, sitting in a battered chair, staring at the ground, was a small man with trembling hands. He looked considerably older than I knew him to be.
"What's his name?"
"Hansel something," said Christian. "I forget. Very German."
I watched the old man as he seemed to recline, oblivious to all. "Is he the only cripple in or around Hameln?" I asked. "How do we know this is the right one?"
"There are other cripples," said Christian, nodding. "But I found out he came to live here when he was twelve... that would be about right if the villagers, or rather townspeople, had banished him as a bad omen after the Piper had taken the rest of the kids away."
"What sort of age range were the other cripples?" asked Corin.
Christian said, "Young to middle-aged. Hansel here is the oldest."
"Then the others are too young," I said. "Listen to what we've found." I glanced at Corin. Corin whispered: "Although there are several old people over sixty-five, and many under fifty-five, there are no people in Hameln between those two ages."
I felt my heart beating with excitement. It had to mean something: five to fifteen were the ages taken by the Piper. A ten year span!
"Hansel is sixty-two," said Christian. "And he came here, I found out, when he was twelve - he was an orphan. But his age would be right if the youngest age taken was about five, and was now, or would have been now, fifty five."
Adam snorted. "It still isn't proof positive. Nobody, Christian, nobody had ever heard of the Piper when we talked to them."
Christian looked puzzled. I said, "They might have forgotten." That didn't make sense and I knew it, so I added, "Or the memory hurts and they're trying to erase it."
Corin shook his head. "People don't do that sort of thing. It's reasonable that older people, the sixty five and older group, would like to forget the grief of that day, if it occurred, but the under fifty fives would have no real reason to forget the tragedy as they were too young to have known about it at the time."
"Which brings us back to Hansel," I said, pointing. "The only man to have lived through the trauma and the only man far enough from the rest of the town for us to work on him."
"And he pretends there was no Piper," said Christian.
"Then I suggest we believe him," said Adam coldly.
"Explain the records, then," I said, annoyed that he should be a continual dissenting note. "Where are the people who should fill that ten year gap? Why is the only contender a cripple who fits in with the legend perfectly?"
Adam shook his head. "The Child Crusades," he said.
Now I felt on safer ground. "Rubbish. The Children's Crusade occurred in 1212, decades ago..."
"That's the Crusade the textbooks write about, and I wasn't thinking so much of that one as of a second attempt to get children from Europe to the Palestine battle front. There is no reason it shouldn't have occurred and the records been lost - look how long it took us to find the Hanoverian manuscript."
I shook my head. "We asked the townspeople if at any time the children had gone on pilgrimages, or to war... they said no. The only time the youth ever suffered was in 1259. Just the male population, though."
"Yes, yes," said Adam impatiently. "But look, we know those people in Hameln were doing more lying than anything; they were scared of us, and they were falsifying and we can't really believe anything they said... or didn't say."
"Then they could have lied about there being no Piper," I concluded logically. Adam shrugged.
Corin said, "All I know is, there is a segment of the population missing that cannot be explained. I had the distinct impression when we talked with people in the marketplace that they were afraid of us and that they were hiding something. I'm sceptical about the Pied Piper as a living being, but I'm not in any doubt that there is something going on, or something has gone on these five decades past. There is something deeper than legend here. Don't you think, Adam?"
"Oh, I would agree with that," said Adam. "That's why I'm here." He glanced at me. "But there was no Pied Ratcatcher, I'll stake my life."
Christian said, "Talk to the old man before he falls asleep, or dies. He's a bit rambly and he's bad tempered, but I've got him thinking about the past and you might have some luck in getting him to tell all."
Corin nodded and we moved over to where old man Hans sat and reminisced. "When Malcolm comes up from the bottom of the hill we'll decide whether or not to go back fifty years."
I opened the shutters that looked out across the valley, and peered into the darkness. It was a magnificent night, the moon was high and almost full, and the dense clouds of early evening were dispersed, and now the stars shone through and winked down upon this land of the fourteenth century. Hameln glowed in the distance, tiny lights from tiny houses, lights that blinked on and off as late workers went about their business. The Weser sparkled in the moonlight as it wound away to the south, throwing out streams here and there, one of which we'd crossed as perhaps, fifty years in the past, the children of Hameln had crossed it, tiny feet dancing across the worn down planks of a bridge.
Behind me Corin, in his perfect thirteenth century German, probed and eased the answers from Hansel the cripple.
"Why did you move onto the hill, Hans?"
"They made me," came the reply, mumbled, hoarse, unwillingly given. Hans stared deftly at the floor, his whiskered face pale in the candlelight.
"Who made you, Hans?"
"Who are you?" Angry, obstinate. "Why are you bothering me with questions?"
"Who made you, Hans? Who made you move here?"
"The people," he said, slapping the arms of his chair. "The people made me."
"Why?"
Again the hands slapped the chair. "Crippled. Couldn't walk properly. They got rid of me."
"Why? Didn't they like cripples?"
"They thought... they thought I was evil. I saw things that happened... they thought I was evil..." he trailed off.
"Did you come to this hut before or after the Pied Piper came to Hameln?"
I saw Hans stiffen a fraction. "He asked me that," he said, looking swiftly at Christian, then away. "Don't know any Pied Piper."
"Are you sure, Hans? A piper dressed in different colours, whose music could make rats follow him, or children... a man who took the children of Hameln into the hill below this hut?"
"Don't know anything about that. Never heard of a coloured ratcatcher."
"And when the children were all gone, and only you were left, didn't the townspeople think you were possessed and banish you here?"
"No..."
"Did they think the Piper would come back and take more children if he realised he had lost you?"
"No..." Hans was becoming quite agitated. His head was turning this way, that way. His mouth was open, and I could see his eyes were clenched shut. "No Piper... no Piper... why do you keep asking me about the Piper... too long ago... bad things, bad things."
"What bad things, Hans? Things when you were twelve? What were they Hans?"
There was a knock at the door and Corin looked up and swore. The old man seemed to relax a little but I could see tears in the corners of his eyes. Adam went over and let Malcolm in. He was dirty with mud and he carried photographic prints. He looked at the old man. "That the cripple?"
Corin nodded and brought him up to date with what we had all found. Malcolm stared down at his plates.
"I don't know," he said. "There isn't much evidence for the Piper story in what you say... nobody knowing about him, or prepared to admit they know about him... but what about these?"
He passed the plates around. They were crumpled and not well prepared because Malcolm's equipment was limited.
What they showed was horrible. Malcolm explained. "I probed into the hill foot by foot. There was plenty of evidence for the top few feet having been dug up within the last century or so: possibly the townspeople trying to find where the cavern was. But there was only a very tiny cave, and very, very deep. It's mostly filled, too. About thirty feet into the hill I spotted it. This is the plate. As you can see it's crammed with dense material... at the edges you can clearly make them out."
"Skeletons," said Corin, shocked. "And small skeletons at that."
"Hundreds of them," said Macolm, looking through his other plates. "He must have taken them into the hill and killed them..."
"And left by another route?"
Malcolm shrugged. "There was just solid rock deeper in. No passageways that I could pick up. We'll have to go back and see. I'm sure there's more to the legend than just legend. Aren't you?" Again I nodded. Corin was looking thoughtful. He took the probe plate showing the massed bones of the children over to Hansel and knelt down beside the old man. "Look, Hans. Look. This is a picture of your friends of fifty years ago, all your chums, all your girlfriends. Their bones, Hans. They were taken into the mountain and killed by the Piper. These are their bones, and they're right below you, Hans, inside thirty feet of rock and dirt. Buried. Now will you tell me there was no Piper? Tell, Hans, tell me all. I must know - I must get even with the Piper for what he did to your friends..."
Hans was shaking his head, staring at the picture. He reached out for it and took it in trembling hands, staring down at the whiteness that was the skeletons, all heaped and intertangled in their earthy grave.
We waited silently, watching every motion of the old man's body. For a long while he stared at the picture and then, slowly, it slid from his fingers. Corin picked it up and was about to speak when, faintly, almost weeping, Hans began...
"He came at dawn. A Spring dawn, before any of the town was up... He played the pipe... he played the pipe as he stood in the town square where the market is... such a tune you have never heard before, a tune that seemed to talk to me as I lay in bed. I went to the window and looked out. The sun was not yet up but it was very bright, and I saw the Piper in the square, and he saw me, and he waved. He went on playing and I could feel my two feet dancing. I didn't dance very well because my left foot was crippled, but they didn't seem to mind. They jigged and jogged and that tune drifted through the morning air."
"By the time I was out in the street there were lots of children, older than me and younger than me, and they were all running round the Piper, holding hands and laughing and I went over and held hands and laughed too, and the tune played on and we all danced and laughed. The sun came up and the shutters opened with bangs and rattles and all the people in the town came out and watched the sight. Every child was there, from little Hanna who was just four years old, to the Bully - I forget his name. He was three years older than me and liked to push me around. But now he was dancing with the rest of us, as happy as you like."
"All the parents were out in the streets and smiling. I remember seeing them all talking and smiling, most of them still in their night clothes like we all were. The priest from my orphanage came over to me and put a coat round my shoulders, but I hadn't noticed the early morning chill, and I hardly noticed the coat. I was too happy. I'd never been so happy in all my life."
"Then the Piper undid the flaps of his coat, which was all patchwork in reds and greens and blues, and he gave one flap to one of the older girls, and the other to one of the youngest girls, and he got everybody to hold onto the one in front and form a snake, and then he danced away, playing his pipe and waving to the parents who, I expect, were delighted that he was taking us off their hands for a few hours. Round and round the square he went, up the streets as far as the Abbey, and back again to the square, with us following, hanging on in two long columns of boys and girls. We danced and whistled, those of us that could, and I was on the end because I kept falling over my feet, but when I was on the end it was easy to hold on to the boy in front and I danced round the square with them all."
"Soon I remember seeing no parents, no adults. They were all inside eating breakfast or doing the washing, and then the Piper led us down the streets of Hameln and into the country. And we all followed, still hanging on to keep the snakes intact. He led us up to the stream between Koppelberg and Hameln, and that was where I fell, because my snake waded through the water so the little kids could cross over the bridge, and when I came to the water's edge I was frightened of getting my bad foot wet. So I ran round and crossed the bridge but I was a long way behind and I couldn't run fast."
"The Piper took them to the hill, still playing away and dancing and jigging, and all the children, even me, dancing behind him, though I was too far behind to hang on to anybody."
"Then he stopped playing and turned round and called out that he was going to take us and show us a magic place in the hill, and we all shouted YES, and I ran after them, but they were running too, some running faster than the Piper himself, so that when he reached the hill, a few feet up its slope, he was surrounded by children. Then he shouted into the ground and told the children to stand back, and I couldn't quite see then, but they all started to shout and laugh and I could see the edges of a big cave open up."
"They all climbed in with the Piper helping them, and then he climbed in himself and helped the remaining few down into the magic place. I reached the edge of the hole and could see it was a tunnel but you had to jump in first and I didn't dare. I could hear the sound of voices echoing from deep in the hill and the occasional note of music from the Piper's flute. And then the hill just closed up - snap! And there was nothing left, no hole, no cave. Just me."
"And when the people came looking I remember I was crying and they thought I was wicked and sent me to live with an old man in this hut. And when he died I lived on my own and they never let me back into Hameln again, and not even the priest came to see me."
"And that's what happened and now... go away, leave me. I'm old and I want to forget. I had forgotten until you came pestering. So go away."
And we went away. We went outside and gathered our equipment. Corin said "That was convincing enough, wasn't it?"
I said, "But where did he take them? What was that hole in the ground? Was it magic?"
Adam snorted. "We'll know soon enough. I suppose we are going back?"
"To early Spring, 1270," said Corin. Adam grunted.
"You're not still sceptical, are you?" asked Christian. "You've just had an eyewitness account. What more do you want?"
Adam shrugged. The power pack was charged and the field set. We could jump back any time. Adam said "I dunno. That old man sounded to me... well, as if he were telling a story. Do you see what I mean? A story rather than a true account of something that happened to him. It didn't ring true."
I shook my head, but there were more exciting things at hand and I forgot Adam's disbelief. We travelled back in time by fifty years and we arrived on a Spring day in 1270, and in the distance Hameln sat in the valley of the Weser, waiting for us. The hut was still beside us but it was empty, though it was clearly being lived in. With no second thought we set off down the hill.
At the bottom of the hill, however, we realised that we had come too late. There was a patch of grassland already much dug, a clear sign that many people had been here and digging frantically, as if to reach down to where the children had been taken. By all the signs the digging had been performed over a month ago. Malcolm decided that it had been within the last six weeks. When our packs registered power enough for a six week jump we went back by that much again.
Corin's chronometer read late March. The wind was keen, but the sky was blue and the ground beneath our feet was firm and untouched. In the distance the brook gurgled merrily. We could not see Hameln because of the trees, and so we hid our equipment somewhere well away from where we stood and moved furtively, carefully into the streets of Hameln to see what we could see.
We were disappointed. Everything was normal, and after an hour or so we left the town and returned to our packs to sit and rest during the night. I don't know what we had really expected to see... a sign of the Piper, perhaps... but we had seen none. And there was plenty of evidence for children of all ages being still around - running through the streets and among the crowded market places.
We had seen rats, too. No Piper had yet been to entice the rodents of the town into the Weser. Where, in 1602, the Rattenfangerhaus would be built there was a small wooden house with brightly painted shutters. There were no ratcatchers in the Hameln of 1270. The place was ripe for plague.
Corin was uneasy. I asked him what was up and he shrugged. "Something about the way the adults were behaving," he said. "It was wrong. Or at least, it wasn't right... I don't know how to explain it. Didn't you notice?"
I confessed I hadn't noticed anything. Malcolm was nodding as he lay and watched the stars. "I know what you mean, Corin," he said. "They seemed dazed..."
"Yes, dazed. Wandering a little aimlessly..."
"Concentrating for ages on houses or people. I saw one old man staring at his stick as if he'd never seen it before."
"The children were all right," I observed. I had watched the children carefully. There had been nothing strange about them.
"Yes," said Corin. "The children were all right. And I expect it's just imagination. Probably fatigue. Let's get some sleep, eh? We have to be up at four."
We were up long before then. A rough hand shook me awake. It was very dark, the night sky speckled with stars and the gruesome silhouettes of trees surrounding me. I sat up and stared into the frightened face of Corin.
"Can you hear it?"
I listened. And listened again... there was a noise coming from Hameln. A noise that could only be described as the screaming of a whole town, the hysterical yelling of an entire population of men, women and children. We shook the others awake and they all listened to the sounds of confusion and terror drifting through the still night, across the Weser's brooks and streams, and through the trees.
"My God, what's happening over there?" Christian was on his feet, staring into the darkness.
"It sounds as if they're killing each other," said Corin.
"Go down to the brook," I said to Christian, "and have a look. We'll follow with the equipment." He was gone in a flash. We grabbed our cameras and inspected them carefully. There had to be no mistake about anything that we recorded in Hameln when the Piper came... or whatever. "What time is it?" I asked. Corin inspected the chronometer.
"Fifteen to midnight." The moon was just above the trees, now, staring at us, full faced and silver. As it was rising so the darkness was dispersing slightly.
"Have we got everything?" asked Corin eventually. I checked. Cameras, needle guns, smoke bombs, tape-recorders, sample bags. We were all carrying identical equipment. We wanted five identical records. I took Christian's pack and we raced down to the brook. He was standing on the bridge staring towards the distant town, whose nearer houses were illuminated in ghostly silhouette by the flames of a fire in the central square. I gave Christian his equipment and we ran across the fields until we were at the outskirts of the town. We all took different routes, then, down alleys and smaller streets until we came to the square where the fire had been lit.
It was horrifying. In their night clothes, many of them, and others in grotesque costumes, the adult population seemed possessed, running about the fire and laughing, shouting, waving their arms. Many of them were eating...
I heard Corin arrive beside me.
"They're eating round loaves! Why? Why eat bread when you're going crazy?"
Behind me Adam whispered, "I'll be right back."
To a huge pole that had been driven into the ground in the middle of the square, very close to the raging fire, were tied virtually all the children in the town. They sobbed and struggled, but they were tied with thin, strong twine and they could do no more than jerk against their bonds, and run and kick, and chase their parents as they celebrated some midnight glory that we could not imagine.
I could see Christian across the square snapping away at the scene before him. I turned on my recorder and began to take photographs myself, some stills and some short sequences of motion pictures. I was still taking close-up shots of the more hysterical adults when Christian arrived at my side, having skirted the square and remained unseen. "They're trying to conjure up some spirit or other..." he said.
"What?" hissed Corin. "A spirit? How do you know?"
"I saw them and heard them. There are three of the more important townsmen sitting near the fire making runes in the dust... and that's not all." He looked sick. "They're making them with blood. They've got three or four heads, I think they're children's heads."
"Christ," said Corin.
"The Devil?" I asked. "Are they calling up the Devil?"
"I don't know," said Corin. "Adam's the man who would know and he's off somewhere."
I was searching for the three townsmen that Christian had referred to. I spotted them eventually, squatting almost in the fire itself. One, in fact, was burning up one side. I could see his hair singeing, his shirt, which was all he wore, beginning to brown and crisp. He didn't seem to notice. The children moaned and screamed, and began to fight among themselves... I snapped and recorded, and Adam came back.
Before he could speak Corin urged him to go and see if he could make out the runes the three men were drawing.
"Okay - here, see what you make of that." He thrust something into Corin's hands, dropped his equipment and raced off across the square, veering and cavorting as the rest of the crowd were doing. I looked at the loaf Corin held, broke a bit and ate it.
"At a time like this he thinks of food," said Malcolm. "What's wrong with him?"
But I was watching Corin's face, and he was watching me, and we were coming to the same conclusion fast. I could see it in his eyes.
Adam raced back to us. "Christ," he screamed, "They're calling up the dead of the town for as far back as Hameln goes." His eyes searched all about; they were wide, frightened. "I don't know where they found out how to do it, but that's what they're doing!"
"The dead..." Malcolm was horrified. Even as he spoke I could feel the coldness of the air, I saw the fire douse a little and the skies seemed to cloud over so that no stars shone... but there were no clouds in the heavens. "They've gone crazy!"
"Not crazy..." I said.
"They've freaked out," said Corin. He held up the loaf. "How did they get it?"
"What, the bread?" asked Malcolm. "What's bread got to do with anything?"
"Ergot," said Adam quickly. "This bread has been made from rye wheat infected with a fungus - ergot! It contains a crude form of LSD - remember the drug our ancestors used to pop? It happened all over Europe during these centuries - whole populations came down sick after drinking wine made from this stuff, or," he tapped the loaf, "eating bread made from it. The whole of Hameln is on a trip. But ther's something wrong - look, they're not so much each undergoing a hallucinogenic experience as undergoing a mass freakout. I've never known that happen..."
"The children aren't affected," murmured Christian, "are you trying to tell me they ate no bread?"
"The children are being affected," said Adam slowly. "They're behaving like irritable animals - God knows what their senses are reporting. Somehow they're not sharing the mass experience of the adult population." He hesitated. "And perhaps the adults have alienated them for that very reason, tying them up like animals. While in their insane state they're doing something they would never dare do normally - they're calling up the dead. And look!"
Shadows.
They moved from the darkness of the streets, tenuous shadows, transparent and hideous. They came from behind us, and from in front of us, drifting through the night, foul manifestations of Hameln's dead past.
The town of Hameln went wild and the maniacal adult population began to dance with even greater hysteria, trying to touch the ghosts of the dead, dancing round them, and between them and even through them.
While, from the shadows, we five photographed and recorded, and trembled, and found it hard to believe that this was no hallucination we saw, but supernatural reality.
And then it happened. The melee of insane people closed about the children, seemingly under the orders of the ghostly nightmares that drifted all about and watched with their unblinking eyes. The children screamed and began to run as far as their bonds would let them (and I wondered what grotesque distortions of the human form their drug-affected senses were recording). I saw the flashing of metal, at first bright silver, but eventually dull red. Malcolm and Adam watched in silent horror, while Corin sobbed and sank to his knees and I just went on snapping away, perhaps as a reflex in an effort to conquer my rising gorge.
Within minutes the fire burned high again and the adult population of Hameln was roaring and screaming as it danced with the dead, oblivious to the slaughter that had just been committed. The square was thick with blood and severed limbs. I never saw the little crippled boy, Hans, but he must have been watching from a window somewhere as I heard a child's cry from a street to my right and it must have been Hans: that night he was the only child alive in Hameln, though at the moment he would probably rather have been dead.
"The Piper never came," said Corin as we sat at the edge of the town in the early hours of the morning, all of us trembling with reaction to the sight we had seen. "And he never will. The children died at the hands of their parents."
And as we sat, and the sky grew brighter and the world moved towards another day, so from deep in the town came the sounds of sobbing and despair. Christian left us for a while to go into the town and see what was going on. The dead spirits had dispersed, now, and the effects of the drug the people of Hameln had so unwittingly eaten had worn off. For the time being, at least.
"Very soon," said Adam, "they'll come this way dragging the bodies of their children and bury them in the Koppelberg hill, thirty feet deep where they'll never be found."
"And then they'll go home and cry," said Corin, "and in time they'll realise that they'll have to explain away the disappearance of a townsful of children."
I nodded. "So they'll invent the Pied Piper, the Ratcatcher who came and cleared the town of rats by enticing them into the Weser with his music. And when he wasn't paid he stole the children of the town instead, and they were never seen again."
Later Christian returned and sat down with us. We watched as a party of frightened men ran towards the Koppelberg to begin to dig. Already, said Christian, the story of the Piper was beginning to be put around; soon the whole legend would take shape.
A good legend, and a good story to cover for their crime. Only in forty years they would prefer to forget everything about the events of a spring day in 1270, and even their cover story would be denied.
Christian said "They'll banish Hansel to the hut on the hill and so frighten him that he will never dare to tell the truth if he's asked, only the fabrication."
Corin nodded. "And the legend will persist, bacause legends always do; this one because a man in Hanover will very soon, now, hear the story - and he will believe it is true because he will be told it is true. And it will be written down for posterity and for ever."