famous Doctor Johann Georg Faustus. He was real!
Johann stifled a smile as he gazed at the gawking crowd from atop his wagon. Here in the Breisgau region, near the Alps, the audience was especially grateful. Maybe that was because they were so far away from the big cities—from Cologne, Frankfurt, Nuremberg, and Augsburg, where the world was changing more rapidly than ever before.
“We only have a few bottles of the miracle potion left,” declared Johann, making a sweeping gesture toward his wagon. “My loyal assistant, a widely traveled scholar from the University of Paris, will fetch them for you.”
Ducking out of the wagon came Karl Wagner, carrying a heavy crate full of corked bottles of theriac in his arms. Karl had perfected the recipe with a mix of juniper, gentian root, a pinch of henbane, and a lot of strong brandy. People loved the brew, just like they loved Karl’s painted canvases that hung down the sides of the wagon like flags. They showed fire-spitting dragons, monstrous creatures with long snouts, people with wolf heads, and a lion with the tail of a scorpion. Doctor Faustus had encountered all those creatures in the course of his travels, and there was a story to tell about each one. Karl was rightly proud of his artworks. They might not have been as perfect as those of Albrecht Dürer or the great Leonardo da Vinci, but they amazed people and transported them to another world. What more could an artist wish for?
While Karl handed out the bottles of theriac and pocketed the money, Johann invited individual spectators up onto the box seat, where he read their palms. Mostly he spoke in flowery words about happy events, like a good harvest or an impending marriage. He never foretold someone’s death—even if he saw it. And he never read his own future.
All that mattered was the present.
“Good day, Herr . . . Herr Doctor. Um, may I call you ‘Doctor’?” The voice of the fat farmer’s wife who’d just taken a seat beside him trembled with awe. The hand she held out to him was marked by hard work, wrinkled, and covered in lines and craters like a barren field. “My dear Hans died last year,” she said quietly. “All I’ve left is my daughter, Else. How are we going to fare in the coming years?”
“Hmm. Let me see.” Johann leaned over the hand and squinted. His eyesight wasn’t as good as it used to be, and the glass eye itched. It had been custom made by a Venetian craftsman and had cost him a fortune. With the false eye, his gaze appeared even more piercing and eerie. Thanks to Karl’s bandaging, Johann’s eye socket had healed well, as had his right hand, on which he wore a glove with an artificial finger. Following their escape from Nuremberg, Johann had remained in the grip of fever for three long weeks and only just managed to cheat death. Every now and then, a dull pressure reminded him of his little finger—the finger he’d lost in Nuremberg over a year ago.
The first sacrifice.
“I see a good summer and a rich harvest,” he muttered and tapped a spot on the woman’s palm. “Your Life line is as deep and wide as the Rhine.”
As he continued to study the hand of the worried farmer’s wife, his thoughts returned to Nuremberg. Tonio del Moravia had vanished from his life once more; Johann had never heard anything about him again. He still didn’t know what exactly had happened that night in the crypt below the Sebaldus Church. His memories were sketchy—probably because of the black potion as well as the fever.
Or because he didn’t want to remember what Tonio and his followers had tried to invoke in the underground hall and what role he had played in it.
Had Nuremberg patricians actually been involved in the madness? Had they really believed they could bring the devil to earth?
Or was the devil already among them?
“Your Head line is as straight as an arrow,” said Johann in a mysterious-sounding voice. “It shows that you pitch in on your late husband’s farm and that you know how to assert yourself.”
“It’s true!” The woman nodded. “You’re incredible!”
Johann smiled inwardly. These days he knew right from the beginning what people wanted to hear. He prattled on and on while his thoughts were miles away.
The horrific child murders had stopped following their departure from Nuremberg, or so travelers had told them. He’d felt relieved, even though he still
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