The Master's Apprentice - Oliver Potzsch Page 0,171

when he recognized the melody.

Growing in our garden are parsley and thyme; our Gretchen is the bride, she’s looking so fine . . .

It was the song he and Margarethe used to sing as children.

“Take your hands off her!” he screamed. He rushed at the guards and started wrestling with them.

“Don’t make it any worse!” shouted Jakob Kohlschreiber. He stepped in and grabbed Johann by the collar like a rabbit. “Or do you want to burn together with the witch? Is that what you want? Burn for this piece of trash?”

He kicked Margarethe, who whimpered and cowered on the ground. Rage swept over Johann like a dark wave. He felt angrier than ever before in his life—angrier even than the time he killed the French mercenary. Reason was blocked out, and an all-consuming hatred burned inside him. Suddenly he was holding his knife in his hand, although he had no idea how it got there. He raised his arm and stabbed wildly into the man in front of him. It felt good, and for a brief moment relief spread through his body, the sweet flavor of revenge trickling down his throat. Johann remembered Tonio’s words back when he’d gifted the knife to him.

I’m giving this to you . . . It cuts skin and sinews like butter.

Gasping for breath, Kohlschreiber collapsed in front of him, blood spurting from several wounds in his stomach.

“You . . . you bloody fool,” wheezed the vintner, writhing on the floor.

The guards froze with shock when they saw the seriously wounded man. They sensed that the young man with the knife wasn’t entirely in control of himself, that something dark had grasped hold of him. For a few moments, the only sound was Kohlschreiber’s groaning. Even Hans had taken a step back, but his eyes were flashing deviously.

“Congratulations, Faustus,” he spat. “You just dug your own grave.”

Johann stared at the bloodied knife in his hand with horror. He suddenly realized what he’d done. His eyes turned to Margarethe, who was holding her arms crossed in front of her chest, rocking back and forth and still humming the children’s tune.

Red wine, white wine, tomorrow morn you shall be mine . . .

“Margarethe, I . . . I’m so sorry,” he burst out. “I . . . I only wanted us to be happy.”

Still none of the other men stirred. They stared with fright at the knife in Johann’s hand. Kohlschreiber no longer made any sound, and a pool of blood grew around his plump body. Finally the guards raised their pikes again.

“Take him!” shouted Hans.

And Johann ran.

“Your grave!” rang out Hans’s triumphant voice, echoing through the cave. “Your grave!”

Johann ran outside, where night had fallen in the meantime. Saint John’s fires were burning on the hills all around, gleaming like eyes behind a dark mask.

“Your grave!” was the last thing Johann heard.

Then the forest swallowed him up.

Johann raced uphill for a long time, panicked like an animal in flight and unable to form a clear thought. It was just like the time he fled from Tonio del Moravia and his companions in the woods near Nördlingen. From one moment to the next he’d lost everything. But this time the shock went much deeper.

He had lost what he loved most.

Margarethe.

He noticed that he’d been running uphill only when the trees ended and he saw the sparkling lights of the Heidelberg watchtowers beneath him, with the castle above the city. He sensed he was looking back on a life he was leaving behind for good.

His life’s joy had stayed behind in the cave.

Johann tore at his hair, screamed and raved, cried and whined. Eventually he cowered in a hollow of damp, foul-smelling leaves and repeated the same words over and over.

“I . . . didn’t . . . want . . . this . . .”

And at the same time he knew that he alone was to blame. He had played with high stakes and lost everything. It had been his idea to win Margarethe over with the image of the archangel. He should have expected to be followed—he’d always suspected something. Every time he’d returned from the monastery or arrived at the cave, he thought he felt eyes on his back. Sobs racked his body once more.

Margarethe.

He should have stayed with her, defended her with his life. Instead he had run away and left her to the guards. Margarethe’s husband had already announced that he’d hand her over to the Inquisition. She wasn’t just a nun fooling