The Master's Apprentice - Oliver Potzsch Page 0,17

him over to the crumbling platform where the gallows rose into the night sky like a warning finger. When they came to the other side of the platform, Johann realized what they had planned for him.

Behind the execution site lay a huge anthill. It was almost up to Ludwig’s hips.

Johann screamed and squirmed, but the boys paid him no heed. The hill was a bustling scurry of tiny red insects busy carting pine needles and small twigs. Not far from it, half covered by dirt, lay a human skull and bones, presumably belonging to a hanged man. The wood ants had carefully cleaned the bones of any remaining sinews and flesh.

The lads pulled down Johann’s pants and whipped his naked buttocks with pine branches until blood ran down his legs. He raged and screamed with pain and anger at this humiliation—but no one heard him way up here, far from Knittlingen. The bottle of medicine he’d been clutching in his fingers fell to the ground, and Ludwig kicked it away like trash.

Then, still using a branch, he pummeled Johann like a madman. “You think you’re better than the rest of us, do you?” shouted Ludwig, panting. “Ha, how’s your learning helping you now, and all your smart comments? What’s the use of your heretic tricks now?”

Breathing heavily, Ludwig finally let go of the blood-smeared branch. Beads of sweat stood on his forehead.

“Now, in he goes!” he shouted. “This’ll be a lesson to the filthy bastard—he won’t roll around in the fields with my sister again.”

The third boy staggered toward them with half-closed eyes, his swollen face twisted into a grimace of hate. “One, two, three!” shouted Ludwig. “Enjoy your meal, you little beasts.”

The three boys hurled Johann right into the anthill.

The insects started to attack him instantly. They crawled over Johann’s naked, bleeding haunches, biting by the hundreds and spraying their acid, which burned like fire in his open sores. Johann screamed. The pain almost took his breath away. He tossed his body back and forth, yanked on his fetters, but the ants were everywhere—in his hair, his ears, his eyes, his mouth, on his skin. A murderous army of tiny soldiers, out to destroy him. There was no escape.

Laughing, the three boys turned to leave.

“Oh, and your medicine,” Ludwig said and turned one last time to Johann, who tossed and squirmed like a hare in a trap. Margarethe’s brother picked up the small corked bottle from the ground beside the anthill.

“If those white monks gave it to you, it’ll only be water and vinegar or whatever else they sell people,” Ludwig said. “Your father agrees. He won’t mind if we use it to feed the ants. I’m sure the little beasts will love it.”

He pulled the cork out of the bottle and slowly poured out its contents, creating a small puddle among the pine needles that soon seeped into the ground. Ludwig wrinkled his nose in disgust.

“Yuck! I told you, nothing but expensive hocus-pocus. Your mother should consider herself lucky she doesn’t have to drink this.” He signaled for his friends to follow him. “Come on, let’s go. If he really knows how to do magic, he can free himself.”

With one last smirk in Johann’s direction, the three went on their way, leaving the groaning and whimpering boy in the anthill. The insects’ bites felt like needles. Johann thought of the pale bones nearby and screamed loudly again as he tossed back and forth. After a while he managed to crawl a little way away from the hill and into a muddy, damp wallow, which had probably been used by wild boars the night before. The cool mud eased the worst of his pain. The ants gradually dispersed until there were just a few left on his scalp and in his pubic hair, searching for an invisible adversary.

Johann didn’t manage to undo his ties until it was fully dark. With his last remaining strength he limped through the night toward Knittlingen, bleeding and filthy.

When he reached home, his mother was dead.

2

THE FOLLOWING DAYS and weeks seemed like a never-ending nightmare to Johann.

He’d only seen his mother one last time before she’d been carried to her grave, looking almost unreal—like a small, dried-up doll. In the middle of summer, dead bodies decayed very fast, so the funeral took place the day after her death, at the cemetery of Saint Leonhard’s Church. Almost all the burghers of Knittlingen had come, as well as the day laborers, maidservants, and other workers. They