The Master's Apprentice - Oliver Potzsch Page 0,40

his captivity, laden with riches.

Johann was so wrapped up in his thoughts that he didn’t even notice the monastery disappearing behind the trees. He had walked past it without realizing—which meant he’d walked farther than ever before in his life. Until then, Maulbronn had been the end of his small world. Now he’d taken the first step into the unknown.

A new, much bigger world lay ahead of him.

The first few nights of his journey Johann spent in barns, freezing. His happy daydreams had burst with the first hailstorm. He’d also learned that no farmer needed a sixteen-year-old laborer this time of year. The harvest was in and the vines empty. The people of the Kraichgau were sitting at home in their warm kitchens, mending their baskets, fixing leaking tubs and broken crates, or looking after their wine in the cellar. If he was lucky, Johann received a stale chunk of bread when he knocked on doors; if he wasn’t, the farmer set his dogs on him.

The road seemed to wind endlessly through flat valleys filled with meadows and fields. Gentle slopes rose on both sides, covered with beech trees and oaks. Since ancient times the track connecting the eastern and the western ends of the German empire had run along here, between the Rhine flats and the lands east of the Neckar River. It was a lovely area during the summer, but now, in early November, autumn storms howled down from the mountains, and the rain whipped the last remaining leaves off the trees, leaving them bare and bending in the wind, like skeletons writhing in a dance of death.

Johann’s spirits dwindled by the day, and grief filled his whole heart. The silence that often surrounded him reminded him that he was alone in the world. He had no one. His mother was dead, and his father wasn’t his father but a nasty man who’d cast him out. He didn’t know his real father—probably some traveling juggler who had courted his mother. All he had left as the stranger’s son were the raven-black hair and the curse of being a bastard.

During his lonely nights, Johann sometimes pulled out the knife the magician had given him. He whittled small figures from rotten wood by the wayside and pretended they were his mother, Martin, or Margarethe. Often they’d turn out ugly or they broke, and he threw them away.

The handful of travelers going the other way, on horseback or with carts, were wrapped in heavy coats and wore their hoods pulled down low. They barely gave him as much as a nod in greeting, and soon the next rain shower swallowed them up. Johann’s clothes were saturated and no longer dried out. He shivered with cold, his shoes were wet, and the drenched coat pulled on him like chains. At night he was tortured by dreams of Margarethe and Martin standing above him with accusatory faces.

You frighten us, Johann! They called out and pointed their fingers at him. You are the devil! The devil!

Johann still didn’t know what had happened that evening in Schillingswald Forest and whom Margarethe had seen. It must have been bad enough for her to lose her mind. Had she seen who or what had taken Martin? Johann guessed he would never find out. All of that was behind him now, and before him unfurled the never-ending road.

Though he’d hoped to save his money for harder times, Johann was soon forced to spend some on food. Every night he counted his coins carefully. There were mainly stained kreuzers and tinged copper pennies, with only three silver pennies among them. His stepfather had remained a miser to the last. Johann rubbed the coins as if they were made of pure gold, stacked them up in little towers, and calculated. If he kept spending at this rate, he’d be out of money within a few weeks. He thought about selling the engraved knife, but he didn’t do it. Even though it had come from the magician, it seemed to be part of the world he had lost. Selling it seemed like selling a piece of himself. So he kept it and suffered from hunger.

Johann knew that if he carried on this way, sooner or later, he’d die on the side of the road like a stray dog. Unless he started earning money. If not by working as a laborer, then perhaps by doing something else.

And he had an idea just what he might do.

A wide river appeared in front of