The Master's Apprentice, page 42
part #1 of Faust Series
The groaning stopped abruptly. There was a rustling noise, and a few moments later Valentin’s face appeared at the barred window. Johann saw that not only was his friend bleeding from his head, but one of his lips was split open and he was missing a few teeth. And his right eye was swollen shut. His other eye glowered angrily at Johann. There was no trace of warmth or friendship.
“What do you want?” he mumbled.
“Valentin, I . . . ,” Johann began desperately. “I . . . I’m so sorry! Please forgive me, I—”
“What is it that you’d like me to forgive? The fact that you lied to me—your only friend—the entire time? That you used the apparatus we built together for your low needs? That you used me just like you use all people? That I’m going to be tried as a sorcerer because of you?” Valentin’s good eye gleamed as cold and hard as a diamond. “To you, Faustus, people are nothing but scientific instruments. You use them and then you discard them. How could I be so stupid and not notice sooner? I should have listened to the others, but instead I followed you around like a dumb calf. And now the calf is being led to slaughter.”
Johann tried to shake the iron bars; his face was close to Valentin’s.
“Valentin . . . you . . . Don’t talk like that! I didn’t want any of this to happen, believe me! I’m your friend, I—”
Valentin’s blood-stained saliva struck his cheek.
“Did you not hear what I said? They’re taking me to the Inquisition at Worms! Not even Rector Gallus was able to do anything about it.” Valentin laughed hysterically. “They are going to inflict pain on me until I confess to invoking Satan with you. And then they’ll burn me alive—while you walk free!”
Johann said nothing. Then he asked the one question he needed to ask, even though he didn’t think Valentin would answer it.
“What about Margarethe?”
“Your little nun?” Valentin smiled for the first time, but it was a nasty, twisted smile. “Oh, she was lucky.”
Johann’s heart beat wildly and he felt wide awake. “Are you saying she . . . she won’t be taken to Worms?”
“No, she won’t. The worst is behind her. Only God is her judge now.”
Johann froze. He struggled to speak because each word was as heavy as a lead weight.
“God . . . is . . . her . . . judge? What . . . what do you mean?”
“Is it so hard to understand? She hanged herself, Faustus! Last night in her cell. I heard the guards cut her down and her dead body drop into the straw. I watched through my window as they carried her away. I guess they nailed her into a barrel and threw her in the river, like they do with all suicides.”
The world stopped turning. The universe stood still. The gray morning mist covered Johann’s face, but he shed no tears. He was incapable of moving, incapable of speaking.
Reality seemed like the fog wafting past him.
“She is dead, Faustus,” Valentin continued. “Did you hear me? And it’s your fault. Your greed, your arrogance, your lies killed her.” He tilted his head to one side and studied his former friend as if for the last time. “By the way, she confessed to being a witch. I heard it myself. She said the boogeyman would come and get her now. The boogeyman . . .” Valentin’s voice was just a whisper now. “Are you the boogeyman, Faustus?”
Suddenly the cart jerked forward. The gate was wide open and the cart rattled onto the bridge. Valentin’s face was becoming smaller and smaller.
“Are you the boogeyman, Faustus?” shouted Valentin. “Tell me, are you?”
“Shut up!” yelled Johann. “Shut the hell up!”
Finally he managed to move again. Beside himself with anger and grief, he ran after the wagon onto the bridge. He wanted to smash Valentin’s face, grind it like grain under a millstone, and punch it until the man’s lips stopped moving. He noticed that he still carried Tonio’s knife. He’d put it back in his pocket after he’d stabbed Jakob Kohlschreiber. Now he pulled it back out. He wanted to destroy Valentin, and himself, and the whole world.
“Are you the boogeyman, Faustus?” shouted Valentin once more.
“Shut your goddamned mouth!” Johann had reached the middle of the bridge, the river rushing down below. He was so blinded by rage that he didn’t notice the two guards following him. The cart stopped, and two guards with raised halberds approached him from the front as well.
“That’s him!” shouted one of them. Johann realized the man was one of the guards from the cave the night before. “The student of the devil who cast a spell on the nun and killed Kohlschreiber. I recognize him!”
The guards were closing in from two sides. Johann stood in the middle of the bridge, knife in hand, and heard Valentin laughing. It was a sad, desperate laugh—the laugh of the only true friend he’d ever had. Now Johann had lost everything. His friend and Margarethe. Everything worth living for.
Are you the boogeyman?
Johann climbed onto the bridge railing. He put the knife back in his pocket, lifted his hands toward the gray sky, and closed his eyes. The moment the guards reached out for him, he jumped.
Margarethe, I’m coming!
The waters of the Neckar swallowed him, but the Lord had no mercy. He made Johann rise to the surface and reach for a tree trunk, coughing and spluttering. Slowly Johann drifted toward the dark forests west of the Odenwald Mountains. The last sound he heard of Heidelberg was Valentin’s hysterical laughter.
Though he couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t Tonio del Moravia’s laughter. Or Signore Barbarese’s. Or Gilles de Rais’s, greeting him from the grave. They were all laughing at him.
Homo Deus est.
The pact was sealed.
Act V
The Awakening of the Beast
19
WARNHEIM, IN THE HEGAU OCTOBER 1510, THIRTEEN YEARS LATER
ON THE MARKET square, a man screamed as the pyre around him caught on fire.
He was tied to a stake with thick ropes, and the guards had stacked the logs knee high around him. The burning wood crackled and smoked while the condemned man begged for mercy—or, at the least, a quick death.
Most of the crowd watched the macabre show in silence, but there were a few who laughed, jeered, or sang dirty rhymes. Over a hundred people had gathered on the Warnheim market square, which was covered in muck and surrounded by crooked half-timbered houses and a decrepit little church. The majority of the spectators were peasants in plain tunics and drawstring shoes. The men came armed with pikes, pitchforks, and cudgels, but there were also women and children among the crowd. Awestruck, they all watched as the man on the pyre screamed. His clothes, skin, and hair were beginning to smolder, and the sweetish smell of fried meat spread across the square.
It reminded Johann of the meal he’d eaten at a tavern the night before—pork with beans and smoked ham.
Wearing his wide-brimmed hat low on his brow and a dirty coat around his shoulders, he was standing in one of the front rows, studying the flames. Blue, yellow, and red, they licked across the wood that had been doused with oil beforehand. The flames reached only to the man’s thighs so far, but Johann thought he could see the first blisters forming on the man’s face. He leaned forward with interest, his right hand resting on the top of the box-shaped hand-drawn cart he had lugged to the front of the crowd with much difficulty. The blisters were a fascinating phenomenon. He guessed that the heat rose up in waves against the body and increased in strength. Back at Heidelberg University, long ago, he’d read something similar in the writs of Archimedes. Or was it Pythagoras?
Meanwhile, the condemned man’s hair had completely caught on fire and his screams turned to inhuman screeching. Until a few moments ago he’d been a handsome lad with soft, almost feminine eyes and long lashes. Now there wasn’t much left of that. The burning figure increasingly disappeared behind the acrid black smoke that had now spread across the entire square.
The smoke . . .
With well-practiced movements, Johann removed the lid attached to the front of the box. Unfortunately it had taken too long for the smoke to become thick enough—pity, because otherwise he might have been able to save the life of the young man. But at least the dense smoke his charred body was producing served the second condemned man.
Johann’s eyes turned to the second pyre, where another young man stood tied to a stake. His eyes wide with horror, the youth had watched as the first pyre was lit and the fire consumed the man in a gruesome death.
“Holy mother of God!” he pleaded loudly. “Help me!”
An elderly Hegau peasant laughed and spat into the flames, where his saliva vaporized instantly. “Do you really think the Holy Virgin is going to help a sodomite?” he jeered. “No one can help you now, you pederast—not even God himself!”
Perhaps not God, thought Johann, but someone else can. The Antichrist . . .
The screams of the first victim had fallen silent by now, and through the dense smoke the onlookers could make out the remains of a blackened body twisted like a doll, the mouth open as if in a final scream. One of the farmers carried a torch to the second pyre.
“Go to hell, sodomite!” he roared, holding the torch to the oil-drenched logs. “And don’t forget to kiss the devil’s ass!”
At that moment, the devil himself appeared.
He had horns on his head, a goat’s foot, and a bushy tail, and his grin was as wide as a skull’s. The larger-than-life Satan danced in the smoke of the first fire as if he’d come directly from hell onto the Warnheim market square. Deafening cracks and thunderclaps seemed to prove that the gates of hell stood wide open, and the hellish stink of sulfur spread over the onlookers.
The spectators in the front rows were the first to see the flickering devil in the smoke. They screamed and moved backward, pushing back the people behind them. There were more powerful thunderclaps, and sparks rained down on the market square.
“The devil!” shouted Johann as he hurled another pouch of gunpowder into the flames. “The devil has come upon us! Run, honest folk of Warnheim, run!”
His cries and the gunpowder had the desired effect. Wailing fearfully, the crowd moved back; only a handful of daring young men stayed put, the pikes and forks trembling in their hands.
“Now, Satan,” whispered Johann.
He whistled on two fingers, and from the bottom of the cart sprang a large black mastiff. Through the haze of the smoke it looked like the hellhound Cerberus. Growling with its teeth bared, the calf-sized dog stalked toward the peasants, who turned and fled as fast as they could. Chaos broke out across the entire square; people cried, wailed, and ran; some were trampled and couldn’t get back up; others threw themselves onto the ground and prayed to God and all the saints. Everyone tried to seek shelter in the lanes around the square or in one of the houses.
Only Johann stayed where he was, calmly inspecting the devil grinning down at him. He hadn’t made a bad job of him, even if some strokes of the brush were a tad thick. The devil’s horns looked more like those of a cow than a goat, and the cloven foot was a little smudged.
A satanic cow, he thought. That’s all you can do. What a pathetic farce for a professor and doctor, forsooth!
He whistled Satan back before hurrying over to the second pyre, where the young man tied to the stake still trembled with horror. He was maybe eighteen or twenty years old. His smooth face was blackened by soot, and his trousers and shirt had begun to smolder in places, but other than that he seemed unharmed. Thankfully, only one side of the pile of logs had caught on fire so far.
But it wouldn’t be long before the whole pyre would go up in flames.
Johann drew his knife and started to cut the ropes binding the youth to the stake. They were made from several individual strands of hemp rope and soaked in water so they wouldn’t catch fire right away.
Shaking and wide eyed, the young man stared at his liberator, who was frantically sawing on the ropes.
“Are . . . are you the devil?” breathed the youth.
“No. But if we don’t hurry, you’ll meet him soon.”
A few moments later, Johann had severed the ropes. He kicked some of the burning logs aside, then he grabbed the young man by the arm and pulled him out of the burning pile. “Quickly now, before the lamp oil in the laterna is used up!”
“The . . . lamp oil? But—”
The fellow didn’t resist as Johann dragged him along. Smoke still hovered above the square, but it was growing weaker. The devil gradually dissolved into thin air.
Johann leaned over the box and pulled a few levers, and the devil disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived. A few more quick movements and the glass plate, tube, and laterna were safely stored inside the crate.
The young man gaped with amazement. “That . . . that’s sorcery.”
“No time for lengthy explanations. Here—put that on and help me pull the cart. Your questions will be answered later.”
Johann handed a dark, stained hooded coat to the young man, who quickly put it on. Now the two of them looked like simple peddlers trying to shield their faces from the smoke with their coats. They pushed and pulled the heavy cart across the market square, which was littered with weapons, scraps of clothing, and other hastily dropped bundles. The place was still deserted for now, but already the first curious onlookers peered around the corners and out the doors again.
“The devil has gone!” called out one of them, looking at the burning pyre. “And he’s taken the sodomite to hell with him!”
“That’s good,” he muttered through a thin smile. “Then they won’t come looking for us in this world.”
Together they dragged the cart through the narrow, dirty lanes away from the square; the large black dog followed them, growling at anyone coming toward them. No one gave them a second look.
Soon the two escapees reached the town gate, which stood wide open. Johann guessed that the watchmen had also rushed to the market square—unless the peasants and the rest of this accursed township had skewered them first. They pressed on without looking back. In a small wooded area not far from Warnheim, they came to a wagon like the ones used by jugglers. Strange-looking symbols, including pentagrams, were painted onto the canvas with red paint. A skinny horse tied to a tree grazed peacefully nearby. When it caught sight of the two men, it whinnied happily and pawed the ground.
The young man hadn’t spoken until then, but now he could no longer remain silent.
“What . . . what’s the meaning of this?” he began. “Why did you save me from those peasants? Who are you?”
“You’ll learn everything in due course,” said Johann. “Now help me hitch up the horse and load the laterna magica.”
The youth frowned. “The laterna . . . ?”
“For Christ’s sake, shut your mouth already, or else I’ll feed you to Satan for breakfast!”
The black mastiff growled and bared its teeth, and the young man rushed to help Johann lift the crate off the cart and store it inside the wagon. He caught a glimpse of more crates and chests, and bunches of dried herbs hanging from the ceiling. The inside of the wagon smelled intensely of brandy and resin.
“Hop on the front with me,” commanded Johann after he’d finished hitching the horse. “I’ll try to answer your questions along the way.”
They climbed on the box seat. “Move, old girl!” Johann cracked the reins, and the gray horse started to pull. Screeching and rattling, the wagon left the woods and the small town of Warnheim, where the people still searched for the gateway to hell.
Black columns of smoke rose up behind the walls.
“Now you can speak if you must,” said Johann after a while. “But don’t even think about thanking God for your life. He had nothing to do with your escape. If anyone did, then the devil.”
He could see from the corner of his eye that the young man had been trying to study him furtively for a while. In his eyes lurked both fear and boundless relief. Johann smiled and hoped the boy wouldn’t see it underneath the low brim of his hat.
He knew that he appeared creepy to most people. Although he was just in his early thirties, he seemed much older. His face was narrow, almost haggard, and his eyes gleamed black and mysterious. His raven-black hair reached down to his shoulders, and his hat was just as black. His pointed beard was carefully groomed and reinforced with beeswax. The cloak he wore under his old coat was made from black silk and speckled with blue spots, a pattern like stars in the night sky. With a certain amount of satisfaction Johann thought of an image he’d seen of himself not long ago. The beard and the cloak had been very faithfully reproduced. A juggler in Freiburg had sung a few mocking lines about him while holding up a series of painted canvases. Johann had considered hiring the fairground performer as a glass painter, but the man was quite old and didn’t seem to be the brightest. He certainly wouldn’t know how to play chess.
Johann took off the dirty overcoat and flicked the reins. “Get a move on, you old nag,” he grumbled. “Or I’ll turn you into a mouse and feed you to Satan. You wouldn’t be the first lazy horse to land in the dog’s belly.”
The young man beside him finally recognized him. His eyebrows shot up and he gasped with surprise.
“You . . . you’re the famous Doctor Faustus!” he called out. “The hat, the beard, the cloak—so you are real!”
“And why shouldn’t I be?” replied Johann with a shrug as he continued to urge the horse forward. He could never tell how long his tricks would remain undetected. For all they knew, a mob of angry Hegau peasants might be on their way already. The Hegau region wasn’t considered particularly safe for travelers—especially not those who led good, honest burghers on a merry chase using sulfur, gunpowder, and magic tricks.
“Well, there are so many rumors about you that it’s hard to tell what’s true and what’s made up.” The youth gave a chuckle. “Like the bet in Leipzig, for example.”
“What is that about?”
“You straddled a barrel of wine and flew it up the cellar stairs right into the taproom. The innkeeper was forced to give you the barrel, and you emptied it, with the students’ help.”
