The Master's Apprentice - Oliver Potzsch Page 0,188

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