The Master's Apprentice - Oliver Potzsch Page 0,107

. but why are you acting like this?” he asked. “I honestly have no idea what to think. You’re so different at night from how you are during the day. Don’t you love me, Salome?”

She looked at him for a long time before replying in a quiet voice.

“I loved for the last time when I was fifteen years old. He was a boy from Armenia, handsome like you, smart, and always had a big smile on his face. When they dragged me and Mustafa onto the ship, he tried to block their way. They cut his throat and threw him into the water like a dead rat. I watched the sharks tear his beautiful body into pieces. That was the second-to-last time I cried. The last time was when they cut out Mustafa’s tongue.” Her lips were thin lines, her eyes as cold as ice.

“I won’t let them hurt me again. Ever! Now let go of me before I cut off your best piece. It would be a shame, no question, but I’d do it anyway.”

A small knife suddenly flashed in her hand, and Johann let go. She didn’t come to him for four nights. When she slipped underneath his blanket during the fifth night, they didn’t utter a word. The pain when her fingernails dug into his skin was sweet and made him howl like a wolf. Johann carried red streaks on his back for many days. And Emilio studied him with a quiet smile.

“She’s eating you up,” he mocked. “I warned you, Johann. She devours men.”

His hours with Archibaldus helped take his mind off Salome. The two men often rode in the back of the wagon on their trips between villages and towns. Archibaldus had organized a slab of slate and a piece of chalk for Johann, as well as an abacus to learn arithmetic. Of the seven liberal arts, Johann particularly enjoyed rhetoric. He and Archibaldus spent hours practicing the sequence of thesis and antithesis, whereby Archibaldus thoroughly enjoyed refuting Johann’s arguments.

“Socrates likened philosophers to midwives,” Archibaldus said with a smile when Johann found himself outwitted once more. “They are merely helping to deliver someone’s thoughts, but the initial spark has to come from within yourself.”

Johann groaned. “So much knowledge. It’s a crying shame that there isn’t a place where all that knowledge is stored and accessible to everyone, not just to a select few. Each monastery only hoards books for their own benefit, or you have to attend university and pay a pile of money.”

Archibaldus slowly shook his head. “Times are changing. There is a public library in my hometown of Hamburg now. It’s huge, and anyone can enter and browse through the books as they please.”

“I want to go there one day,” Johann replied. “And to Heidelberg, Prague, and Vienna—to all the great universities of the empire.”

Archibaldus was now drinking much less than he used to, going to bed only moderately drunk in the evenings. The lessons with Johann seemed to have rejuvenated him. He kept trying to find out more about Johann’s former teacher and master, but the young man gave almost nothing away about Tonio. On the one hand, because Johann hardly knew much about the man himself, and on the other, because he had the strange feeling that Tonio would be able to hear them if they talked about him—as if he came to life just by being spoken about. Or as if Tonio’s raven and crows were circling somewhere high above them, reporting to their master.

September came, then October. There were increasingly more rainy days now, and the mild, warm weather gave way to a dull grayness that seemed to win over the sun a little bit more every day. Storms rumbled along the coast, and sea fog crept into the land from the ocean. Still, it was much warmer than the October days Johann remembered from Knittlingen. Whenever they passed slopes planted in vines heavy with grapes, he wistfully thought about the harvests back home, about the German songs and the laughter of the pretty Knittlingen girls.

When October turned to November, they decided it was time to start heading for Venice. They had been in the mighty city-state for a while now. Venice’s properties stretched along the entire northeast shore of Italy and also included colonies on the shores of the Adriatic Sea and on large islands like Crete. But they hadn’t come near the city itself so far.

It had been Peter’s greatest wish to see the most glamorous city