The Devil's Pawn

by Oliver Pötzsch

  Greta laughed. “And all the while he was already upon the spire and all he had to do was wave. Or remember at Bamberg, when he used the laterna magica to make the prince-bishop and the collective delegates believe they were actually seeing the devil.”

  “The laterna magica.” Karl sighed. “It’s a crying shame it was destroyed back then. All those lovely images I painted.”

  “You could build another one yourself,” suggested Greta. “You spent years traveling the empire with the doctor and the laterna magica.”

  “And why would I do that?” asked Karl. “It was always Faust who thrilled the crowds. I was just the assistant. If the doctor is dead, then . . .”

  Greta gave him a questioning look. “What is it?”

  “Nothing. I . . . I just had an idea,” replied Karl. He frowned as he continued his line of thought.

  Faust isn’t dead.

  “Let me sleep on it,” he said after a while. He shook himself and gave Greta and Sebastian an affectionate look. “And what are you two going to do?”

  Greta shrugged. “I don’t know. I can’t go back to Santo Spirito.” She brushed Sebastian’s red hair from his forehead and squeezed him tight. “I am his mother, that’s all that matters for now. I will never leave my son alone again. Everything else will fall into place.”

  “Everything else will fall into place.” Karl nodded and gazed toward the city that stretched in all directions. To the southeast lay the snowcapped Alban Hills. The wide, brown ribbon of the Tiber flowed toward the sea. To the north, fields and meadows stretched as far as the eye could see. If he looked very carefully, he could make out the Via Aurelia, the old Roman road winding its way through the frosty, sugarcoated landscape.

  And out into the world.

  “This life still has much to offer,” said Karl. “Behind every hill a new story awaits.”

  He stood up and, alongside Greta holding little Sebastian by the hand, walked down the Palatine Hill and toward the bustling, noisy lanes in which every person every day tried in vain to rail against their fate.

  In the crystal-clear sky above circled two lonesome crows and a raven.

  Epilogue

  SOMEWHERE IN THE ELECTORATE OF SAXONY

  22 DECEMBER, AD 1523

  TWO YEARS LATER

  THE GIANT WORE A LONG AND SHAGGY BEARD THAT REACHED almost to the ground. He was clad in the stained robe of a monk, and his staff was as tall as a fir tree. The scoundrel’s head jutted above the crowns of the trees in the forest. A murmur went through the crowd in the hall, and some of the smaller children whined and clung to their mothers with their eyes pinched shut. But most of the spectators stared straight ahead as if spellbound by the sailcloth at the front, which billowed in the draft going through the room, making the giant on the fabric look alive.

  “The mighty Rübezahl,” intoned the voice of the man standing next to the canvas. “I once met him during my travels through the Giant Mountains. He who mocks Rübezahl or wishes him ill will be met with thunder, lightning, and hailstorms. He who comes as a friend may visit his garden, where the most mysterious herbs grow. One of the herbs has the power to make you fly!”

  The man beside the canvas raised his arms inside the wide sleeves of his black-and-blue coat. His face was hidden by a wide-brimmed, floppy hat. The image on the sailcloth changed, showing just that man flying through the clouds like a bird. The audience cried out with surprise.

  “I was arguing with Rübezahl over the question of which of us was the most powerful wizard in all the land,” the man next to the canvas continued. “When he tried to smite me with his cudgel the size of a tree, I swiftly ate some of those herbs and flew away through the clouds. Then—”

  “Pray, honorable Doctor Faustus, what . . . what’s it like, flying?” asked a portly older farmer’s wife in a trembling voice. “Isn’t it rather exhausting, flapping your arms like a bird the whole time?”

  The man with the floppy hat gave her a look of impatience through the eye glasses on his nose, something only scholars wore. “That is not necessary, dear. You hover all by yourself. But it isn’t particularly, well . . . pleasant.” He shook his head as if a memory had just come to him. “Not pleasant at all! But let me go on with my tale. Once I escaped from Rübezahl, I came to the land of the creatures with legs growing straight from their heads and of man-eating panthers.”

  The image changed again, and now it showed a big black cat ready to pounce. Some in the crowd screamed out with fear, others with excitement and awe. Three days ago, the famous Doctor Johann Georg Faustus had come to their small town, and since then no one spoke of anything else. The old folks told of the doctor’s manifold travels, pranks, and adventures; the doctor had visited the town many years earlier with his assistant. Now he had returned, and he looked like he hadn’t aged a day—on the contrary, he seemed to have grown younger. It must have been the healing herbs from the garden of Rübezahl, or perhaps the theriac that the doctor sold for three kreuzers a bottle. Doctor Faustus’s Original Theriac rejuvenated; helped with ailments of the eyes, constipation, limb pain; and even worked as a stain remover.

  The town had given Doctor Faustus the dance hall in the best tavern at the square, and the people pushed together in close rows. This was the third show that day, and the stream of adventures, anecdotes, and tales wasn’t slowing. A snowstorm rattled the closed shutters, the wind howling like an animal. These were the weeks of the shortest days and the darkest time of the year, and it was nearly Christmas. People needed thrilling stories as badly as medicine.

  “When the panther leaped toward me, I ducked at the last moment,” said Faust now, accompanying his tale with wild gestures and grimaces. “As he flew past me, I jumped upon him and rode the beast like a horse!”

  Greta was sitting in the first row and smiled. Karl always laid it on rather thickly. He elaborated on true stories, embellished a little here and there, spontaneously added some new monsters, and seasoned the concoction with a few scientific facts. During his presentations, his voice was always a little deeper and rougher than usual. People hung on his every word—he was a born storyteller. Even Greta was so entranced sometimes that she forgot to change the glass image in the laterna magica.

  Four-year-old Sebastian on her lap, she was sitting on one of the few chairs in the hall, right beside the wooden box that Karl had built two years ago. Since then they’d been traveling through the German lands and beyond. The laterna wasn’t as big as the one her father had constructed once upon a time, but they didn’t visit any castles and palaces, either. Their stages were smaller, performing at taverns and inns along the post roads. Karl sold Doctor Faustus’s Original Theriac and Greta sometimes juggled a little or balanced on rope above the market square. She was still a talented juggler, but by now she had become an even better healer, and so had Karl. Following their shows the two of them cared for the sick and injured, and especially for those who couldn’t afford to see a physician, and there were many of them.

  Their biggest attraction was still the laterna magica. In the beam of light streaming from inside the apparatus danced dust particles like tiny animals. Karl called the laterna his “story-weaving machine,” and he excelled at continually inventing new stories. Stories that helped to keep the one great tale alive.

  The tale of Doctor Johann Georg Faustus.

  “In Leipzig, I even flew upon a wine barrel when the tight innkeeper wouldn’t let me have it . . . wouldn’t let me . . . um . . .”

  Greta startled from her reveries when she noticed that Karl had stopped speaking. He was looking at her expectantly. Once again she had forgotten to change the image. Her hands in thin leather gloves, she pulled out the hot glass plate and carefully inserted a new one into the slit. The crate on the floor in front of her contained dozens more glass plates, all neatly sorted, many of them showing figures from German folklore. Others showed animals from faraway countries or comic sketches.

  When Doctor Faustus was shown flying through the ai
r astride a barrel, pursued by a visibly furious and very fat, sweaty innkeeper, the laughter was great. Greta and Karl always made sure that each show included not only scary stories but also funny, instructive, and uplifting ones. After all, there were many children among the spectators, and also pious elderly and sometimes even the town priest or other dignitaries. Little Sebastian followed every show with wide eyes, even though he knew most of the tales by heart. Greta hoped ardently that to Sebastian, the encounter with Tonio del Moravia two winters ago was nothing but another nebulous tale. A glass plate whose image was slowly fading.

  The cave beneath Palatine Hill.

  In the days that had followed, the idea had ripened. At first Greta had been skeptical when Karl told her of his plan.

  “We are going to keep the doctor alive,” he had told her back in Rome. “Faust is too great to die.”

  Greta wasn’t sure why Karl chose to take this path. He had always been more of a scientist and physician than a juggler. But then she had understood that this was Karl’s final proof of love. By becoming Faust, Karl was keeping his love for him alive. It was as if he had ingested the doctor like a sacred wafer. Maybe Karl’s never-ending affection had something to do with the letter he had found in an inside pocket of his coat several days after the incident at the cave. It was a letter the doctor must have written shortly before his death. Karl had never told Greta the contents of the letter, but it must have been warm words of comfort. Karl always carried the letter with him, like a treasure.

  The most amazing thing about Faust’s resurrection was that it had actually worked. During the first year they had avoided places that Faust and Karl had previously visited. But soon such precautions had no longer been necessary. No one ever pointed their finger at Karl and accused him of being a fraud. On the contrary: a few times people had told them about other traveling Fausts, whereupon Karl would declare with outrage that he was the only true Doctor Faustus and all the others impostors who ought to be put in the stocks. The most hair-raising tales were going around about the doctor, leaflets, drawings, and even a small book had been printed, and a bigger one was supposed to follow.

  Greta couldn’t help but smile.

  Faust is too great to die.

  Karl had been right—the legend was greater than the man. And she and Karl fed this legend with each new story and with each new glass image that Karl created with paint and brush, often working all through the night.

  For two years now they had been traveling thus, and most people probably assumed that Greta was the doctor’s wife. She didn’t do anything to discourage those assumptions. For a sodomite like Karl, who failed to resist temptation from time to time, it was good to have a woman and a child at his side. It protected him from suspicions. She, too, had enjoyed the occasional fling; her time as a sister of the order was well and truly finished. But she hadn’t found the right one. She only needed to look at Sebastian’s red shock of hair and the memories of John returned.

  Time heals all wounds, thought Greta. But ugly scars remain.

  “The olifant is a strange creature indeed,” said Karl, pointing at the flickering drawing of an elephant on the canvas. This was the scientific part of their show, which Karl loved the most. “It uses its trunk for drinking, but also as a weapon and as an arm to break off branches. The legendary caliph Al Rashid gifted one such olifant to the great emperor Charlemagne. In battle, the enemy would run screaming from this giant beast.”

  Karl had completed this image not long ago after he found the picture in an old book at a monastery. Meanwhile he had learned that Pope Leo also used to own one such elephant. Greta sometimes thought of the lunatic Medici pope who was killed by his own panthers during the attempt to summon the devil. Her father’s prediction had been right: the Vatican had swept the affair under the carpet. Officially, Leo had died very suddenly of a winter flu. His debts had been so extensive that, apparently, there hadn’t even been enough money to pay for the candles for his funeral.

  Leo’s successor, Pope Hadrian VI, a pious man who had wanted to lead the church back onto the path of virtue, had died just a year later. There had been rumors of poison. Now there was another pope from the powerful Medici family on the throne. The Lutherans could no longer be stopped, the church was divided, and in Italy the German emperor and the French king were still at loggerheads. War, envy, and intrigue.

  Basically, everything was the same as always.

  Sometimes Greta wondered what had become of the igró pir recipe that her father had wanted to give Tonio in exchange for her son. Evidently, they hadn’t gone through with the trade. Tonio would have sold the weapon to the highest bidder, or perhaps to all parties at once so that Europe would be reduced to ashes. But Greta increasingly gained the impression that mankind succeeded rather well at killing and tormenting one another without Tonio’s help.

  Tonio.

  A chill ran down her spine as Karl told the audience about his journey through the hot deserts of Africa. They had never heard anything of Tonio del Moravia again. And yet Greta knew that he was still there, somewhere out there. Whether he was dead or alive, he would live on in the tales, just like Faust. Some nights she would wake up screaming because she thought Tonio was leaning over her, feeling her and sniffing her. Ravens and crows frightened her since the events in Rome, and she chased those inquisitive birds away by throwing stones whenever she saw any. Her father’s legacy still slumbered inside her, as well as the eerie gift of foretelling death.

  She never wanted to use that gift again.

  It was too somber, a kind of devilish mark of Cain that reminded her how like her father she was.

  I am the daughter of Faust.

  Greta looked over to Karl, who was nodding at her. She inserted the final glass plate into the slit. It showed the image of a guardian angel who was standing behind a child with its arms spread. Karl had drawn it especially for Sebastian, and it was the boy’s favorite picture. Even now he whooped with joy and pointed his little finger at it. In the background of the image, flames were lapping out of the ground, and the devil writhed with anger because he failed to drag the child down to hell.

  The child was protected.

  “Good people of this town, may your guardian angel watch over you on your way home and shield you from the devil,” said Karl, concluding their final show for the day with a wink. “And don’t forget to drop your kreuzers into my hat. As you know, I am Doctor Faustus and I can conjure up demons and worse if I don’t get paid!”

  Greta hugged Sebastian tightly and gave him a kiss. Whatever might be lurking out there, she would never leave Sebastian again. Evil had no more power over her son or herself or Karl.

  They had banished evil into their stories.

  Or so Greta hoped.

  As the people dropped their coins in Karl’s hat and walked out into the cold winter’s night, murmuring and laughing, Greta placed the last glass plate into the crate and shut the lid. Enough for today.

  But tomorrow, the show would go on.

  Johann Georg Faustus would live forever.

  Afterword

  When I was still in the middle of writing the first book in my Faust saga, The Master’s Apprentice, and told a friend of mine that there was going to be a second part, he replied promptly: “Well, Goethe’s Faust II was quite the flop.”

  I truly hope it will be different with my sequel.

  But basically, my friend was right. While Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust Part I is perhaps the best-known German play, hardly anyone knows the second part. And to be honest, it isn’t easy to get to know because it is rarely performed onstage—not least because it is so darned long. In the year 2000, well-known theater director Peter Stein brought both Faust parts together onstage, and without breaks, it took fifteen hours to stage it! Hardly any theatergoers have that much time. Allegedly, the director himself said later: “When you see the third or fourth showing, you realize that it’s rubbish.”

  I wouldn’t go quite tha
t far, but it is true that Faust Part II seems a little, well . . . overambitious. Almost as if toward the end of his life, Goethe wanted to show the world one last time what he was made of. The story is brimming with mythological figures and innuendos, and at the same time it is practically impossible to summarize the storyline in a halfway decent manner. Movie producers would say, “Where the f . . . is the plot?” For a good and rather funny overview, I recommend Faust II to Go on YouTube, where the entire play is performed in less than twelve minutes by Playmobil figurines. Another option is reading this novel. It takes a little longer but is also quite entertaining.

  If you read the first volume, you will know that Doctor Faustus really existed. The Master’s Apprentice tells the story of how Faust became the restless, egocentric, and yet somehow lovable magician, astrologer, and quack. The second volume describes Faust’s (supposed) demise. My version doesn’t follow Goethe’s complicated plot (thank God!), but I still tried to accommodate some of his themes. You could say that Goethe is my very own master. And I’d say that isn’t the poorest choice for a writer.

  Unlike in the first, more personal part, this time the big politics of the time affect the lives of the protagonists. The 1519 election of the German king is easily on par with any current American presidential campaign. Just like in the US today, the candidates needed one thing more than anything else: money, and lots of it. The king of the Germans was elected by the seven German electors. The candidates were the grandson of the late emperor Maximilian, Charles, who had grown up in the Netherlands and Spain and knew the German Empire only from tales; and Maximilian’s old opponent, King Francis I of France. With the help of the Fuggers and nearly one million guilders, Charles indeed managed to bribe the German electors and decide the election of the German king in his favor. Nonetheless, it was a close race, and the German Empire almost got a French king. Who knows how our history would have developed then? In any case, Francis sulked following his defeat and retreated to the Loire Valley to work on his castles. In that regard he resembles the Bavarian fairy-tale king whose memory I honor in my historical thriller The Ludwig Conspiracy. If you’d like to learn more about the Hollywood-worthy wrestling of the two powerful rulers Charles and Francis, I recommend my novel The Castle of Kings.