The Master's Apprentice - Oliver Potzsch Page 0,209

that some of them fall down onto the Earth. Sometimes people find remains of strange rocks. Apparently a shooting star fell to the ground somewhere in the Alsace years ago. The emperor himself owns pieces of it—so they say. As for the others . . .” He gave a shrug. “Perhaps they simply burn out.”

“Couldn’t it be possible that they return? Like the stars and constellations that travel across the sky?”

“The scholars say that shooting stars—like comets—are merely evaporations in the sky, like gases that sometimes come out of the ground and start to burn. Agrippa doesn’t agree, but—” Suddenly Johann broke off. Karl’s questions had set off something inside him; thoughts that had hitherto been as unyielding as rocks suddenly began to flow like a river.

That they return . . .

“I must check something,” he said curtly. He rushed down the stairs to the bookshelf in the bottom chamber. He pulled out the books with Tonio’s notes and feverishly leafed through them. Suddenly all the numbers and formulas that had posed such a riddle to him were beginning to make sense. Johann closed his eyes and pictured the starry winter sky he’d just seen from the rooftop. He tried to visualize a grid against it. When he opened his eyes again and studied the numbers, it became obvious. The numbers and letters were coordinates. They described positions, but apparently not of stars. Dates and times were written down, and even today’s date was among them. The positions on the paper changed much faster than would be the case with stars. And finally Johann realized what Tonio’s coded records were about. He sat down as the weight of the realization sank in.

They described the paths of comets.

Johann spent the next few hours bent over the books in deep concentration, completely unaware of anything else around him, while Little Satan played and frolicked at his feet. Karl had gone to bed.

Johann went through the numbers row by row. What Tonio had done here was incredible! Comets were considered messengers of ill omens, warnings of wars or epidemics, or signs of good fortune. But it was impossible to predict when they would come. Tonio, however, had written down countless paths of comets spanning decades. Most of them couldn’t be seen with the naked eye, but it was Tonio’s theory that they returned, just like the moon and stars, which also had their regular paths. But the time spans between each visit were so great that no one had ever noticed. Some comets came every seventy years, others every ten, thirty, or forty. Johann wondered whether the star of Bethlehem from the day of Jesus Christ’s birth also returned in a certain rhythm.

With great excitement, Johann leafed back through the tattered pages to the beginning. The first entries were dated so far back that they couldn’t be from Tonio—unless they were based on more-recent calculations. They went back centuries—back to the conquest of England by the Normans; back to the times of the Romans, when Vesuvius broke out in Italy and swallowed a whole city. And indeed, the star of Bethlehem was also recorded and even marked with red. Tonio had written the word Messiah above it. Johann couldn’t remember ever seeing any records like the ones he was looking at. He took notes, compared entries to books on astronomy, and finally, when dawn was already breaking, he came across the one entry he’d been looking for all along. The secret of his day of birth.

There had been a comet in the heavens on the day he was born. And Tonio had given it a name.

Larua.

Johann shuddered. Larua was an Old Latin word for an evil spirit. A comet that brought evil. When Johann followed the rows of numbers with trembling fingers, he found that Larua returned in regular intervals, namely every sixteen years and eleven months—every seventeen years, roughly speaking.

Every seventeen years.

Johann counted. If he was born in April 1478, the comet must have next appeared in late March of 1495. A shiver ran down his spine. That was precisely when he’d been at Nördlingen and Tonio had given him the black potion. He remembered Tonio telling Poitou that they couldn’t wait any longer because the stars were favorable. Johann continued to count with a thumping heart. He wrote down the date and stared at it.

End of February 1512.

That was in two months! Was that the explanation for the feeling of being watched all the time? The tense expectation that something was