Many years had passed since the day the village of Hamelin lost its children. The bereft parents had more children to replace those who’d been led under the mountain by the piper in the multicolored jerkin, and those children became parents themselves. Hamelin grew from a village to a town, and prospered nicely, becoming the market center for all the surrounding villages. Farmers and craftspeople who brought their crops and wares to the main square on market days always remarked on the fact that although the streets and alleys of the town weren’t any cleaner than those of other towns, there were no rats scuttling around snapping up scraps of rotten meat and stale bread. When the visitors asked what had become of them, the townspeople generally shrugged and said something about a disease that had killed them all. But that answer didn’t completely satisfy the curious outsiders: everyone in Saxony remembered the death toll of the last outbreak of plague, which had been spread by fleas living in the coats of rats. If the disease had been plague, it would have decimated the human population along with that of the rodents. Yet Hamelin boasted more souls than any other town in the region.
The Hameliners weren’t deliberately trying to mislead the outsiders. Few of them had been alive when the Pied Piper had rid the town of rats and exacted a terrible revenge after he was cheated of his wage. Over the years, the story had become just that: a legend, a myth, a fairy-tale.
But there was a very old man named Axel Frank who claimed to have been one of the children piped away under the mountain. His left leg had been crippled by rickets, and he walked with a crutch. He hadn’t been able to keep up with the other children, but he managed to limp by himself to the open door at the base of the mountain. He got a good look at what lay on the other side, and he never stopped talking about it.
“It’s a town like ours, only bigger. The central square has a tall thorn fence, and the children are kept inside it. They have nothing but the clothes they wore when the Piper took them. There’s a long, low building with a thatched roof, a sort of stable, which must be where they sleep. As I watched, a richly-dressed man on horseback trotted up to the gate in the fence. The Piper opened the gate, and the man got off. He picked out a boy and looked him over like he was a colt or a calf – checked his teeth, felt his legs and arms, and made sure he had no open sores. When he was content, he opened his belt wallet and gave the Piper two gold coins and a silver one. The man bound the boy’s wrists with a length of rope and got back on his horse. The Piper helped him seat the boy in front of the saddle’s pommel. The boy tried to struggle, and the rider gave him a clout on the ear that made him cry. The Piper laughed, and the man spurred his horse and cantered away. The other boys started to cry, too, but the Piper tootled a little tune on his pipe that turned their weeping to laughter. I would have stayed longer to see what might befall next, but the Piper must have seen me spying, for he waved his hand, and the door closed.”
It was a strange, frightening story, but nobody believed it. People didn’t pay much attention to anything Axel said, for he was considered a daftie. Because of his crippled leg, he had never found a wife, and he lived in a tumbledown hut by the River Weser, with only a toothless old bloodhound named Otto for company. He and the dog wandered around town begging, and the goodwives usually gave him a few coppers. It was not out of the kindness of their hearts, but because he muttered continually under his breath, as if he were a warlock practicing his spells. They couldn’t completely understand what he was saying, but it was something about children and revenge. So the women gave him alms to keep him from cursing their little ones.
The men just wanted to get rid of him, because he was an embarrassment to their fine, upstanding community. In the evenings, after their work was done, they gathered at the Golden Angel Tavern to drink ale and talked about taking crowbars, picks, and shovels to his hut and tipping it into the river with him and his dog inside.
But the burghers of Hamelin never got around to drowning Axel and Otto. For on a bitterly cold Yuletide morning, the silence was shattered by the skirling of pipes. The tune they played was the same one the Pied Piper had used to lure the rats away. Startled from their beds, the townspeople opened their doors. Dancing two-by-two down the road that led to the mountain came a hundred and thirty stout, strong young men and women. They wore motley tunics colored red, green, and blue in triangular patterns, with yellow hosen. When they reached the central square, they stopped dancing, but they kept on playing. And the music was as irresistible to the Hameliners as it had been to the rats so many years before. Slowly at first, and then in a rush, men and women emerged from their houses without their children, dressed only in their night-clothes.
The young people formed a circle around them, and struck up a brisk jig. The burghers, their faces locked into horrified rictuses, began to dance like puppets on invisible strings, and the pipers led them toward the Weser. The river was in spate, with ice beginning to form on its banks. Axel, wakened by the eldritch music, stood in his doorway with Otto by his side, and watched as the pipers broke their circle and stood aside. One by one, the wretched townspeople jumped into the water and were swept away. After the last one disappeared, Otto bayed deeply, the way he did at the end of a hunt when the quarry had been killed. Axel patted his head. “That’s right, my good boy,” he said. “The two-legged rats are dead.”
The young men and women stopped playing and re-formed their pairs. Each couple headed for a different house. They poked up the fires in the hearths and started cooking porridge for the children’s breakfasts.
The children accepted their new parents without fussing. It was as if their old ones had only existed in the dreams of their deep sleep. The Yule Logs, cut from ash trees felled the previous winter, were brought indoors, and set to burning slowly in the hearths. Yule Morn was celebrated joyfully, with everyone dancing around the ancient holm-oak that stood at the edge of the Black Forest. Later, in the Town Hall, there was a feast for the whole populace, hosted by Axel Frank, who had been elected Lord Mayor of Hamelin by acclamation, because everything he had said about the town under the mountain had been true. As Lord Mayor, Axel’s duties were mostly ceremonial, for the new people of Hamelin governed themselves, making policy decisions by majority vote. Axel presided over the Harvest Celebration, the Yuletide Rites, the Spring Dances, and the Summer Music Festival, which always opened with someone skirling the Piper’s old tune. But it no longer had eldritch powers. It was just a little jig in a minor key which the children danced to.
The Pied Piper himself never reappeared. And among traveling tinkers, musicians, and craftsmen, Hamelin became known as a town where honest work was rewarded with prompt and generous payment. And to remind later generations of Hameliners that dishonesty had unpleasant consequences, a statue of the Pied Piper raising his pipe to his lips was erected on the square which had once been enclosed by the thorn fence. And there it stands today.
