The Master's Apprentice - Oliver Potzsch Page 0,84

peasant clothes.

As Johann walked past the city hall, he could hear cries of pain and the sound of splintering wood behind him. Someone blew a horn. He left the main street and turned onto a smaller lane, and the noise ebbed off.

He counted his winnings with trembling fingers. He’d managed to pick up nine Augsburg pennies—not a bad day’s work, even though he felt sorry for the jugglers. The red-haired fiddler had done nothing Johann himself hadn’t been doing a few months ago. Johann hoped the outraged people of Augsburg wouldn’t hurt the jugglers too badly and the guards wouldn’t lock them up.

With the coins in his hand, he prowled through the narrow lanes, wondering how much wine and roast chicken one could buy for a fistful of pennies in the wealthiest city on earth.

A few hours later, Johann came staggering out of a tavern in the hope of sobering up a little in the fresh air. He soon realized that wasn’t going to happen quickly.

To celebrate his winnings, he had decided on one of the better taverns near the cathedral. He struggled to remember what had happened after. At first the tavern keeper didn’t want to serve the gaunt young boy who clearly came from the country. But when Johann showed him his silver pennies, the man suddenly turned friendly and brought him roast venison with cranberry sauce, white bread baked from the finest flour, and a heavy deep-red wine that, according to the keeper, came from France. Wherever it came from, it was damned strong and just as expensive.

After the third jug of wine and a dessert made from egg yolk and honey, Johann was five pennies poorer. He gave two more to a busty, almost-toothless prostitute who disappeared quickly. In a generous mood fueled by alcohol, he gave the eighth penny to a homeless musician who was hanging around outside the tavern. Johann vaguely remembered that he’d performed card tricks at the tavern—hadn’t that tattered beggar played some music to his tricks on his old lute? Whatever the case, now his money was almost all gone, and all he had left was the one coin the wine merchant had given him.

Only just won, already gone, Johann thought in his drunken stupor.

He weaved along the dark lane without knowing where he was headed. He needed a cheap place to stay for the night, but one penny wouldn’t get him far in a city like Augsburg. Or should he just sleep out of doors? Chances were some scoundrel would slit his throat while he was asleep. Strangely, Johann wasn’t frightened by the thought. What reason was there for him to still be in this world? Everyone he’d ever loved was gone. Mother, Margarethe, his little brother. And his teacher, who had shown him the workings of the world, had turned out to be a profoundly evil man and a heretic. He thought about what Tonio had said to Poitou about him at the Golden Sun Inn.

If we go about this the right way, he will change the world . . .

What a joke! He must have heard wrong. He was a nothing, a nobody.

Grief and self-pity overwhelmed Johann. Tears streamed down his face, and he wanted to die. He felt awfully sick from all the wine and the sweet dessert. He braced himself against the wall of a house and took a deep breath, when suddenly someone slipped a sack over his head from behind.

“Hrmh—” was all he managed before everything turned black.

The attack had come as a complete surprise—he hadn’t heard anyone approach. Johann thrashed about widely, but the sack only grew tighter. A rope closed in around his neck, and Johann thought he was being throttled, but then someone lifted him up like a piece of furniture and tossed him over their shoulder. Johann cussed and screamed, and his abductor knocked Johann’s head against the wall so hard he thought his skull was going to burst.

Someone growled angrily, like a bear. Johann gathered it was a warning and kept quiet. He tried to figure out what the fellow wanted from him. Was he going to throw him into one of the canals running through the city and leave him to drown? But if he wanted to kill Johann, that would be unnecessary. The man carrying him was strong enough to squash him like a bug.

Johann was bounced through Augsburg like a sack of flour on the man’s shoulder. He smelled dust and musty grain but couldn’t see