The Master's Apprentice, page 45
part #1 of Faust Series
“Why do you do it? I mean, you’re a highly educated man. In the last few months, I’ve heard you speak about Plato and Plutarch. You know about philosophy as well as mechanics. You know Archimedes’s formulas by heart as well as those of Pythagoras—even medicine isn’t unknown territory to you. You could be a widely respected doctor—rector, even—at any university. Instead—” Karl hesitated.
“Instead what?” asked Johann quietly, pouring himself another glass.
“Instead you travel the lands in a rickety wagon and fool people with those . . . those images, with magic potions, and false horoscopes. They call you a necromancer and a quack. Yes, you’re widely known, but you’re not respected.” Karl sighed. “To be honest, I think your name—and therewith mine—will soon be forgotten again. So tell me, why do you do this to yourself?”
Johann took a sip. He said nothing for a long while, staring into the goblet in front of him, the wine gleaming red as blood. He felt a strong urge to empty the goblet again and hurl it against the wall. But he restrained himself. Instead he leaned back and studied his assistant with amusement.
“Anyone else and I would have thrown the wine at your face for such insolence, but I think it is your right to receive an answer.” He leaned forward. “Do you know what I hope? I hope they lock me up one day. I long for that day, even though I know it will never arrive.”
“Lock you up?” Karl looked puzzled. “But why? I mean—”
Johann cut him off with a wave of his hand. “Not as a necromancer and sorcerer, silly, but as a fraudster. You know very well that everything we’re doing here is fraud. And the people know it, too, but they don’t want to see it.” He laughed softly. “They want to be spellbound; they want to believe that the devil really exists. Because only if the devil exists does God exist. And so they play along, buy our magic potions, and let themselves be frightened by our glass images. And as long as they do, people like you and me are free to do as we please. It’s our task in this world. We act the devil so God can exist.”
“Don’t you believe in God?” asked Karl with a frown.
Johann hesitated. “Let us imagine there was no God,” he said eventually. “Then there’d be nobody to put a stop to our evildoings. After all, our laws are all based on God. There’d be no rules and everything would be allowed. All writings, all thinking . . . a tempting thought. I myself have spent much time on that idea. Too much.” Johann stared into the distance for a while before going on. “Chaos would reign, because nothing would make sense any longer. We would be all alone in the universe without any solace, and without hope. That’s how I imagine hell. In my darkest hours I sometimes think we’re already in hell, only we haven’t noticed.”
“And if there is a hell, then there is a devil,” replied Wagner.
“Oh yes, he exists.” Johann took one last, long sip and stared into emptiness. “He exists. He just isn’t quite the way we imagine him.” He put down his goblet abruptly. “Enough of these gloomy, useless thoughts! It’s about time you improved your chess playing. So far it’s been rather sad.”
Johann reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the square board with the chess pieces. He had carved them himself, during long, sleepless nights, from horn and alabaster. He placed the board on the table and started to sort the pieces like he’d done a thousand times before.
But Karl wasn’t looking at the board. Instead he was gazing out the crown-glass window, where thick snowflakes had begun to tumble from the night sky.
“What is it?” asked Johann.
“Oh, nothing. Only . . .” Karl hesitated. “When we spoke of the devil before, I thought I saw someone standing outside the window. A man dressed in black. He seemed to be looking at us—watching us. And his eyes, they . . . they were burning like fire.”
“A man dressed in black? And now you think it was the devil?” Johann laughed. “My dear Karl, you’ve got a greater imagination than I gave you credit for. Most likely it was just a student who wanted to see the great Doctor Faustus up close. Or it was a black cat.” With a thin smile, Johann held up the two kings. “Which do you want to be? Black or white? These pieces right here are real, unlike some shadows outside the window.”
Johann didn’t let it show, but Karl’s comment had rattled him more than he cared to admit. Because he, too, had glimpsed a figure in the snow outside.
A man clad in black.
And now you think it was the devil.
Johann cast a furtive glance at the window again. There was a storm brewing outside, and the wind was howling like a lonesome child.
But there was nothing else—nothing but pitch-black night.
The sensation of being watched didn’t leave Johann. On the contrary, it was growing stronger by the week. When he walked over to his lectures at the university, he often spun around and looked behind himself. He started carrying his sword on him. Occasionally he thought he saw a particular pair of eyes among the students in the auditorium, and then he would falter in his lecture as he studied the rows of chairs. But all he saw were unfamiliar, guileless faces. He called himself a fool and decided it must be the dark winter’s days that made him so nervous and sullen. He had known the feeling of being watched for years—it clung to him like a foul smell. Sometimes the feeling disappeared for a few months and then it returned. But it had never been as strong as here in Erfurt.
And there was something else that bothered him: with his question at the tavern, Karl had touched a sore point.
Why do you do it?
Johann had given Karl a reply, but deep down he didn’t know why he was leading this life. Because he didn’t know anything else? Or because he was on the run from something—because he was waiting for something to happen? Johann didn’t know what that something might be. But the black figure outside the window had awakened something inside him. Something had begun to move. Which direction it would lead, he had no idea.
To improve his mood, he often took Satan on long walks along the river flats of the Gera, outside town. Karl sometimes accompanied him, and they’d discuss medicine. It turned out that the student had learned a fair amount in his time at Leipzig University. He was more intelligent than Johann had first thought, and he possessed a wit and quickness of mind that reminded Johann of Valentin.
“All they went on about in the lectures was Galen,” complained Karl. “As if nothing has changed in medicine since antiquity.”
“Has anything changed?” asked Johann with a smile. He was reminded of his conversations with Conrad Celtis back in Heidelberg. Back then, he’d also wanted to change the world, just like Karl did now.
“I saw the anatomical sketches of Mondino De’ Luzzi,” said Karl passionately. “I would love to be able to paint as accurately as he does. Not necessarily the inside of the human body, but still—his brushwork.”
“You paint pictures on glass for me, and that’s enough,” replied Johann gruffly. “For now, at least.” He gave the young man a hard look. “And stay away from the Erfurt students! I noticed the looks you were giving them last night. Death by fire is the punishment for sodomy—here in Erfurt, too.”
Karl looked abashed. “I know. It’s a sin. I pray every night.”
“Prayers won’t help you on the pyre. The only thing that’ll help you there is a pouch full of gunpowder around the neck to bring you a quick death.”
Johann whistled for Satan, who came running immediately. When Karl held out his hand to pat it, the animal growled at him.
“I’m afraid he doesn’t like me very much. I guess he’s jealous.”
“She,” said Johann, stroking Satan’s long back. “Satan is a she.”
Karl stared first at Johann and then at the dog. “A she? You’ve got to be joking!”
Johann shook his head. “Check for yourself—although I doubt she’ll let you.” He gave a shrug. “Unfortunately she doesn’t seem able to have pups. I always hoped she’d give me a litter, but now she’s too old.”
“A she!” Karl shook his head and laughed. “And why not? I always had a hunch that the devil is a woman.”
The weeks went by, and in March, when the snow melted on Erfurt’s rooftops, Johann decided it was time to head north.
The empire’s bigger roads had steadily improved in the last few years; forests had been felled, fords established, bridges built. The brothers Janetto and Francesco de Tasso—descendants of old Lombard nobility—had been instructed by the emperor to develop the German postal network. Between Schongau and Venice alone there were two dozen posthouses now, and messengers on horseback took only six days to get from the Netherlands to Innsbruck.
Post riders dashed past Johann and Wagner in rain, hail, or sunshine. Johann sometimes thought about his youth in Knittlingen and the mail station at the Lion Inn, where everything had started. He remembered how much he’d liked hanging around the Lion as a little boy. The grim-looking post riders, but especially the foreign dialects and tongues, and the strangely clad travelers with their wares from faraway countries had shown him that there was a world beyond the next hill. He had never returned to his hometown, and he didn’t know what had become of his stepfather and half brothers, just like he didn’t know who his real father was. But he didn’t want to know. All those things lay behind him now. He felt that his old life was like Pandora’s box: if he opened it, the memories would pour out like swarms of mosquitoes, including the memories of Margarethe, Valentin, Archibaldus, and young Martin . . .
Small, squirming bundles.
In his mind’s eye, Johann once again saw the dark figure outside the tavern window in Erfurt. It had been like a harbinger of the past. As if someone had knocked on the window and told him to pick up the scent again. But where? Karl had been closer to the truth than he knew. Johann walked in circles, like old Satan searching for a bone that didn’t exist.
Thus they passed through Jena, Halle in Saxony, and Magdeburg, from whence they followed the wide, lazy Elbe River downstream. There were towns Faust had visited before and others he was seeing for the first time, and everywhere they were received enthusiastically. But Faust barely saw his audience, as he was constantly on the lookout for a dark figure—a figure he thought he glimpsed more and more frequently now, behind the crown-glass window of an inn, in alcoves between buildings, in the fog on the fields. At nights he barred the door to his room and studied Albertus Magnus’s Speculum and other books on astronomy until the morning. In all the years, he still couldn’t see in the stars why Tonio had described him as a chosen one. His mother, too, had believed he was born under a lucky star. A traveling scholar, an astronomer from the West, had told her long ago.
Born on the day of the prophet.
What did that mean? And why had Tonio given him the black potion that night near Nördlingen? What had the master planned for him?
The world could lie at your feet—at our feet. You have the power to set the world on fire! Homo Deus est!
As the wagon rattled along the muddy towpaths by the river, Johann racked his brain. Where was this journey leading him? Was his path written in the stars—in the truest sense of the phrase? Was there something in the sky he couldn’t see? He’d studied countless books, searched the libraries of every university, but he hadn’t found a thing.
Then, one day in August, after so many lost years, three birds showed him the way.
Johann and Karl had passed Wittenberge, where, according to legend, Doctor Faustus had found treasure. The swampy, slightly brackish smell of the Elbe, which flowed toward the North Sea, wafted through the rooms of the plain inn with its crooked walls. As usual, Johann was lying awake in his bed. The nights were light up here in the summer, and he gazed at the few visible stars through the open window. After tossing and turning for a while longer, he got up and walked to the window. He was gazing at the sky, studying the glistening lights, when he realized that the day of his birth had come and gone for another year. The wheel of life kept turning.
At that moment he saw the raven and the two crows.
They were perched in an old oak tree directly opposite the inn and stared at him from small, mean-looking eyes. This time, Johann knew for certain that they were the same birds Tonio used to keep in the cage years ago. At least about the raven he felt certain.
His feathers were the same gray black, and a piece was missing from the bottom of his beak, as if he’d been in a fight. One of his claws was slightly twisted. Johann narrowed his eyes. Could it be possible? He’d heard that ravens could live very long—longer than men. But why should Tonio’s birds be here? So much time had passed. Why now, so many years later?
The raven opened its beak and cawed. It sounded almost human.
“Sheel . . . draay . . . ,” croaked the raven. “Sheel . . . draay . . .” He flapped his wings up and down and stared at Johann intently, as if trying to tell him something.
“Sheel . . . draay . . .”
With one last hoarse croak he spread his wings and flew off to the north. The crows followed.
Johann’s gaze followed them for a long time. He could hardly believe it, but he thought he knew what the raven had just said to him.
Sheel . . . draay . . . Gilles de Rais . . .
Once more he stared out into the night. The birds had gone. But now he thought he could see someone standing in the field.
A man dressed in black with glowing red eyes.
Gilles de Rais . . . the devil . . . Tonio del Moravia . . .
Johann rubbed his eyes. When he opened them again, there was nothing but a scarecrow with a tattered coat. But still he knew that evil had returned to his life. He’d tried to run away for fourteen years, but nowhere was safe for him.
Not until he figured out how everything was connected.
The raven and the obscure figure had reminded Johann that there was a dark spot in his life, as black as the soul of the devil. It didn’t matter whether he’d imagined everything or whether the birds had indeed been Tonio’s—he had to face up to his past, or he’d never find peace. He had to find out why Tonio had called him the chosen one and why he was allegedly born beneath a special star. Everything that had happened since his first encounter with Tonio—the horror in Schillingswald Forest, the eerie events in Venice, the gruesome death of Magister Archibaldus, the stories about Gilles de Rais—they all were stones of a large mosaic that he didn’t yet understand.
Johann knew deep down that the day of his birth must be the key to everything. He had to calculate his own nativity, and more accurately than any other horoscope he’d ever drawn up.
Filled with anger and a fierce determination, Johann slammed the shutters closed. Satan shot up from her sleep and looked at her master inquisitively. Johann stroked the dog and muttered some reassuring words.
And then he sat down to think.
By the time dawn broke, he knew what he had to do. Without really knowing why, he had traveled north, as if fate had led his way. And now the birds had shown him where to go next.
Hamburg.
The name of the city flashed through his mind, a tiny scrap of a memory about something Magister Archibaldus had told him many years ago. Yes—maybe he would find what he was looking for in Hamburg. There was one place he hadn’t told Karl Wagner about.
A place he should have visited a long time ago.
21
THE THOUGHT OF the raven and the mysterious figure in black didn’t let go of Johann during the following days and weeks as they made their way toward Hamburg. He couldn’t shake the feeling he was being watched. He often looked up at the sky or studied the trees by the wayside, where crows sat in the branches, watching him. He kept his sword and pistol within easy reach behind the box seat now, and sometimes he considered shooting at the crows. But there were too many.
“What’s the matter with you?” asked Karl. “It’s almost like you’re seeing robbers and vagabonds behind every corner.”
“More like ghosts of the past,” grumbled Johann.
The dark figure, at least, hadn’t returned, but crows always seemed to circle above him like birds of prey. A few times Johann thought he could see the raven among them.
Hamburg welcomed them with a ghastly stench. Summer had made a late comeback, and the trash and excrement in the streets reeked to the high heavens. The Hanseatic city was situated between the wide Elbe River and a tributary called Alster, which had been dammed to form a lake. Cadavers and garbage floated in the many canals crisscrossing the city. Like in all other cities of the empire, people dumped their muck directly into the gutter, where it mixed with rotten vegetables and the blood from the butchers and got washed into the city streams and canals. Rats scurried across dark corners and along alleyways; on the squares, market women and peddlers proffered their wares for sale right next to dunghills behind which people relieved themselves. Only down by the Elbe did the air seem a little better, and that was where Johann and Karl parked their wagon, set up a few benches, and welcomed the countless seamen to their shows.
Their spectators were mostly men with angular, weather-beaten faces. They hailed from England, Denmark, Sweden, and other countries that lay even farther away—somewhere to the north and east, beyond the horizon. Foreign-sounding scraps of conversation buzzed through the air, and much of what the eminent and wise Doctor Faustus said no one understood. But seafarers enjoyed jugglery and lighthearted magic tricks no matter where they came from. And they liked the taste of the strong theriac.
From Hamburg, the large sailboats, cogs, hulks, and caravels sailed down the Elbe to the North Sea and from there into the big world. There used to be even more ships arriving and departing from this port, but ever since a Portuguese man named Vasco da Gama had found the sea passage to India about ten years ago, many of the Augsburg and Nuremberg merchants had chosen different routes. Also, pirates occasionally frequented these shores. The heads of those captured were stuck on pikes next to the execution site on Grasbrook, an island in the Elbe.
The shows always took place in the morning, and every afternoon Johann left their camp by the river while Karl and Satan watched the wagon and prepared for the next show.
