The Master's Apprentice - Oliver Potzsch Page 0,27

mouth filled with sour bile.

This is the taste of revenge, he thought. Not sweet, but sour.

Johann sank to his knees and spat out thick green mucus while the lamenting of Ludwig’s mother rose and fell like a never-ending chorale. When he had no more left to vomit, Johann looked down at himself, his lips trembling.

His fingers, pants, and shirt were red with grape mash, but it could also have been blood.

Ludwig’s blood.

3

JOHANN HARDLY SAW Margarethe in the following days. The prefect’s family was busy with the funeral preparations. It pained Johann to see how much effort was put into Ludwig’s last journey. Johann’s mother had deserved as much.

They washed Ludwig and dressed him in his best shirt. His casket wasn’t a rough-and-ready box but crafted from heavy beechwood, and the funeral feast took place at the house of the prefect, with ham, sausages, and fragrant loaves of wheat bread. Ludwig had been the family’s only son; all the other children except Margarethe had died in infancy. He was supposed to be the heir, and now there was only Margarethe. Johann’s father told him and his brothers about the large crowd of mourners and rambled on about Ludwig—what a great fellow he’d been, strong as an ox, hardworking, and loyal to his father, just like his own eldest sons.

“Oh Lord, protect us from misfortune!” he prayed and threw his arms around Karl and Lothar. “I don’t know how I’d carry on without you two.”

Johann knew: if he should die before his father, the man wouldn’t shed a tear for him.

Johann gave the Lion Inn a wide berth during those days. He couldn’t stop thinking about how Tonio had encouraged him to say the death wish out loud. At night he tossed and turned for hours while rats scurried across the floorboards. He thought about how he’d shaken Tonio’s hand after he’d voiced his desire for revenge, almost as if they’d sealed a pact. Johann had longed for Ludwig’s death and then it had arrived. If this was indeed a pact, then what would he have to pay? Or had he unwittingly given something already? He hadn’t gone near the knife under the floorboard again since, as if it were cursed.

But then Johann called himself a fool. Tonio might be an astrologer, a juggler, and a creepy magician, but surely he couldn’t kill anyone just by wishing them dead. It was nothing but an unfortunate coincidence. A sad coincidence, nothing more.

Johann had heard from workers at the prefecture that the mounting holding the tree trunk above the press basket had indeed been rotten. Still, an uneasy feeling remained, along with a fear that Johann didn’t understand. During one of his sleepless nights, he remembered some of the protective signs his mother had once taught him. He wrote them on a scrap of parchment, put the parchment inside a small leather satchel, and pushed it into a knothole in the threshold to his and Martin’s room. People had shielded themselves from evil for centuries this way, and Johann immediately felt a little better—although he had an inkling that those words and symbols were just make-believe.

To take his mind off his fears and gloomy thoughts, he worked even harder in the vineyards, where the harvest was slowly drawing to a close. He carried almost two dozen loads each day, filled to the brim with the best grapes. But his father wouldn’t change his mind. His decision stood firm: Johann wasn’t allowed to return to Latin School.

His father hadn’t visited his mother’s grave in days. In fact, he seemed to be looking for a new, younger wife already. Only Johann and little Martin walked to the cemetery every day, bringing a fresh bunch of flowers. Summer blooms had turned to autumn flowers, and now that it was almost November, some days the only blossoms they could find came from the monk’s pepper in the Maulbronn monastery garden. Johann knew his mother had particularly liked this inconspicuous plant.

All of Knittlingen was excited about the Saints Simon and Jude Fair. When the day finally arrived, Johann stood by the upper city gate like he’d done so many times over the years, watching the merchants and jugglers parade into town. But unlike in the past, he wasn’t feeling excited. He and little Martin drifted with the crowd, snacking on something here and watching the jugglers for a while there, but the magic of the past had gone. And Johann heard people talk about the missing children. The number