The inn, as was customary, lies outside the town walls of the small city of Neuberg. A popular stopping point for weary travelers--and all travelers were weary--following the course of the Danube southwest toward Ulm a few miles away, or northwest to Stuttgart, Mannheim, and Frankfurt. Straw covers the floor. Small, opaque, leaded windows allow only a fraction of the day's already dying light into the room's murky interior.
With the Bavarian countryside already in the grip of what looks to be a fierce winter, the inn's central room overflows with a hundred, men, women, children, and animals, all gathered against the cold, seated around a dozen large trestle-tables performing every sort of function. Clothes are washed in buckets of water and hung along the stove to dry. Some perform their toilet in the same buckets, often partially disrobing to do so; others clean the bottoms of their boots of the mud and slime caked on them from the rutty road outside the inn's door. The smells of the room are powerful and earthy; body odor mingles with the aroma of food cooking; the reek of garlic is everywhere.
His entrance into the over-heated room brings stares from many. Even at this roadhouse, he is recognizably a stranger.
