The Master's Apprentice - Oliver Potzsch Page 0,174

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