The Dark Monk

by Oliver Pötzsch

  Simon grinned. “I probably shouldn’t have helped myself to so many dumplings at the Epiphany feast. I fell through like a sack of potatoes.” He gestured to the plaques and the bones scattered around him. “With a little less luck I would be lying here along with the others.”

  Benedikta looked down at him. The floor of the crypt lay about thirty feet below the church. “We’ll need to get a beam for you to climb up on,” she said, looking around.

  Simon nodded. “Look over there on the right, by the altar. I think I saw some big boards there. But for heaven’s sake, be careful, or we’ll both be down here together.”

  Benedikta smiled at him. “Is that the worst thing that could happen?”

  She disappeared, and Simon could hear her cautiously walking across the rotting floor of the church. As the medicus waited for help, he examined the plaque closer. The Latin inscriptions gave the names of the deceased, and the stone reliefs showed knights in armor, standing, lying, and on horseback. One plaque even portrayed two knights on a horse. The physician stopped short.

  Two knights?

  Something bubbled up inside Simon, a fuzzy image, something that had lain dormant in his subconscious until that moment. Hectically, he fished the little guidebook by Wilhelm von Selling out of his jacket pocket and leafed through it. About halfway through the book, he found the solution.

  Two knights. One horse.

  “Benedikta! Benedikta!” he shouted, hoarse with excitement. “I think I’ve found something, the solution to the riddle—it’s here!”

  Benedikta’s face appeared again in the opening. “What?”

  “The Templars!” Simon shouted. “They must have been here. There’s a Templar’s grave plaque down here. The seal of the Grand Master always showed two knights on horseback. There’s an old illustration of it here in Selling’s book!”

  Simon waved the book around as Benedikta carefully lowered a beam.

  “For the Templars, riding horseback together was considered a sign of great confidence, a symbol that they shared everything, and for that reason, they put it on their seal. Now I can read the inscription.” He moved closer to the plaque and passed his finger over the raised letters along the edge of the plaque.

  “Sigillum Militum Christi,” he whispered. “Seal of the Warriors for Christ. It is, in fact, their seal.”

  In the meantime, Benedikta had slid down the beam and was standing alongside him.

  “Another grave plaque,” she groaned. “This is getting boring.”

  “There has to be something behind it.” Simon pulled out a stiletto that he occasionally used for minor surgical procedures and began to scratch away at the mortar along the edges of the plaque. Benedikta worked along with him for a good quarter hour until the plaque came loose and fell to the ground.

  There was nothing behind it.

  Only a bare wall on which someone had, in fact, chiseled a few lines into the rock. Unlike all the other inscriptions in the crypt, these sentences were in German, though in an archaic one. Simon quietly read them to himself.

  “This is what I discovered among men as the greatest wonder, that the earth did not exist, nor the sky above, nor trees, nor mountains, nor any other thing, and the sun did not burn, the moon did not shine, and the beautiful ocean did not sparkle.”

  “For heaven’s sake, what does that mean?” Benedikta whispered. “Another riddle from the Bible?”

  Simon nodded. “That’s what it looks like. But I’ve never heard this passage before. And there’s something else remarkable…”

  “What?” Benedikta looked at him questioningly.

  “Well, if it’s from the Bible, it actually should be in Latin. At that time, so far as I know, there was no German translation—at least nothing sanctioned by the church. But the inscription is in German.”

  Moving in for a better look, Benedikta pointed to a word in the second line.

  “The word tree is all in capital letters. But why?”

  Simon once more ran his index finger over the letters. “Perhaps this word is especially important,” he said. “Perhaps the treasure is buried under a tree.”

  Benedikta scoffed. “But which one? It’s a forest out there.”

  “It would have to be a very old tree, one that was standing here more than three hundred years ago. And there must be something special about it so you could recognize it again.” Simon hurried over to the charred beam and began to pull himself up. “Come, let’s have a look around. Perhaps we’re close to solving the riddle!”

  Benedikta sighed and climbed up after him.

  They searched all morning and half the afternoon for old trees, or unusual crippled trees, or oaks with something carved into the trunk, or beeches that stood apart, on hills. They looked for hidden signs and stone plaques on the ground; they searched in knotholes, in the crevices among roots, in old badger holes.

  And found nothing.

  After five hours of searching in vain, Simon sat down on a large snow-covered stone block that had fallen out of the wall, rubbing his ice-cold hands together. “This isn’t getting us anywhere,” he said, his breath turning to clouds of steam in the frigid air. “Even if the treasure, or whatever it is, lies hidden under a tree here, the ground is frozen and much too hard for us to dig.”

  Benedikta sat down beside him on the stone block, her face chafed from the dry cold. “Do you still believe there’s a gold treasure buried up here somewhere?”

  Trying to warm up, Simon stood and began pacing. “Perhaps it’s not money at all. It could be gold, jewelry, diamonds, something very small and valuable. But it could also all be rubbish, and I’m just getting carried away.”

  Angry, he tossed an egg-size stone down the hill. It knocked over a little mound of snow, setting off a small avalanche that came to rest among the trees below.

  “Let’s go home,” he said, turning to Benedikta. “You have to prepare for your brother’s funeral, and for the time being, I have had enough of these Templars.”

  Together, they tramped back through the snow into the valley. Neither noticed the three figures hiding behind a wall, staring after them with spiteful eyes.

  Brother Avenarius rubbed the thick bandage on the back of his head where the hangman had hit him with the club.

  “It doesn’t look like they found anything,” he said in his Swabian dialect. “Perhaps the young man is not as smart as he thinks he is. Sapientia certa in re incerta cernitur…True wisdom is found in an uncertain situation.”

  “He’s smarter than you, wiseass!” The man with the scarred face and the rasping voice fiddled with the curved dagger in his hand. “What have your erudite maxims done for us so far, eh? They’ve given us nothing but a dead priest and a heap of trouble!”

  “I had nothing to do with the priest!” the Swabian shouted angrily. “He didn’t have to be killed right away. It would have been enough to…well, silence him.”

  “Well, he’s silent now,” the scarred man replied. He threw his dagger and it lodged in a rotted stump, quivering.

  “Brother Nathanael is right,” replied the third, a monk dressed in black who gave off a strong scent of violets, even here outside. He was as gaunt and haggard as a dried-out, cracked log. He was the only one of the three monks who hid his face under his cowl. “The priest was too dangerous. Deus lo vult!”

  “Where’s all this leading?” the Swabian lamented. “First the priest, then the hangman…The Master didn’t send us out to do that!”

  “The Master’s words were more than clear.” The tall, haggard monk leaned in to Brother Avenarius now. While the perfume nauseated the fat Swabian, Avenarius would never dare to say anything about it. The haggard man was their leader, even though he seemed to act stranger with each passing week.

  “The Master has ordered us to bring the treasure back to where it belongs,” the man with the violet scent whispered. His mouth looked like a red spot in the depths of his black cowl. “Nothing else matters. In any case, the hangman escape
d. He’s alive. I saw him just yesterday with the others at Saint Michael’s Basilica.”

  “You what?” The monk with the scar jumped up, but the haggard one restrained him.

  “It’s fine. God obviously did not want the hangman to die. He needs him still as some small part in His great plan. We can assume that his daughter, the hangman’s girl, got away from us for the same reason. An astonishing woman…” He stopped as if he were reflecting. “Her name is Magdalena. It’s strange, I once knew someone by that name…”

  Suddenly, he clapped his hands. “Now let’s report to the Master.”

  The gaunt man jumped over the wall and beckoned the others to follow. Seeing a disappointed look in the face of his scarred colleague, he tried to cheer him up. “If they really find the treasure, their work is done, Nathanael. God won’t allow the heretics’ sacrilege to spread again. We destroyed them once and we shall succeed this time as well. Every memory of it must be destroyed. Your time will come.”

  The monk with the curved dagger nodded grimly; then the three set out like tracking dogs after a fresh scent.

  7

  JAKOB KUISL WALKED along the steep slope of the Ammer Gorge, looking down at the rushing river over two hundred feet below. Ice floes drifted along the surface, bumping into one another, piling up in bizarre formations that reminded the hangman of a crooked, worn-out flight of stairs. Below, darkness was already approaching, and before long the temperature would drop. Slowly, the sun dipped below the tree line, bathing the faces of the search party in the last rays of golden sunlight.

  “We need to stop for today,” Hans Berchtholdt mumbled behind him. “It’s like hunting for a needle in a haystack.”

  Almost from the very start of the hunt, the baker’s son had expressed doubts about the undertaking, and then the other patrician sons had followed suit. How would they ever find a band of robbers in the vast Schongau forest? Wasn’t this a job for soldiers and simple constables, anyway? Even if some of the young men had been keen on the idea at first—they hoped to finally have a chance to play real war games—the cold, strenuous march had robbed them of their last bit of enthusiasm. Now all they wanted was to go home.

  Jakob Kuisl kept a careful eye on the other bank of the river, hoping to spot any sign of suspicious movement. Highway banditry had always plagued the Bavarian forests, but since the Great War, it had become practically impossible to travel from city to city without an armed escort. Several times a year, Kuisl strung up a few thugs on Gallows Hill, some no older than fourteen, but it did no good. Hunger and desire trumped fear of the hangman. And this winter, the gangs of robbers were larger than they had been in many years. Their leader, Hans Scheller, had rallied almost two dozen of his cronies, among them former mercenaries, but also farmers whose fields, barns, and livestock had been destroyed in the war, as well as their women and children.

  “Hey, Kuisl, I’m talking to you! Let’s go home. You can keep looking by yourself.”

  Kuisl gave the baker’s son a scornful look. “We’ll check out one last hiding place; then you can go home to your warm feather bed. You do look completely frozen, or does the red nose come from the boozing?”

  Hans Berchtholdt turned even redder. “Don’t get smart with me, butcher!” he shouted, putting his hand on his sword. “I won’t let someone like you lecture me. It’s a disgrace that Lechner put you in charge!”

  “Watch your tongue, Berchtholdt!” said Jakob Schreevogl, who up to that point had been walking ahead silently with the hangman. “You heard yourself what the clerk said. Kuisl knows what he is doing better than any of us, and so he’s the leader.”

  “Berchtholdt is right, Schreevogl!” This time it was Sebastian Semer, son of the presiding burgomaster. In a tight-fitting doublet with copper buttons and an elegant round hat adorned with a rooster feather, he looked quite out of place here in the forest. In addition, the cold seemed to be getting the best of the young patrician in his thin leather boots. His voice trembled—whether from the cold or out of some unconscious anxiety about confronting the hangman, Jakob Kuisl couldn’t tell. “It’s unheard of that a butcher and executioner is ordering around honorable citizens,” Semer finally said. “I…I…shall complain to my father!”

  “Yes, yes, do that, and get started before nightfall.”

  Kuisl stomped ahead, hoping that the group would follow. He could feel his authority slipping away. He could count on the fingers of one hand the men who trusted him in this endeavor: Jakob Schreevogl; old Andre Wiedemann, whom he had known since the war; perhaps the blacksmith, Georg Kronauer; and a few workers. The rest followed him because the clerk ordered them to and because they feared the hangman.

  Kuisl sighed under his breath. Most people didn’t consider executioners honorable citizens because the job involved things that no one else wanted to do: torturing and hanging criminals, removing dead animals from town, sweeping up the streets, and preparing magic drinks and extracts. For the sons of the aldermen, the very idea that such a person should give them orders was an abomination. Kuisl could sense clearly that resistance was brewing.

  Under his breath, he cursed Lechner for having put him in this situation. Was it possible that Lechner just wanted to get rid of him? For far lesser reasons people had lynched hangmen. If the next hideout was empty like the rest, the hunt for robbers was over for him, too.

  When he stepped out from behind the next dense grove of pines, however, he knew at once that they were on the right track this time.

  From down below in the gorge, smoke rose toward them—just a thin column, but easy to see in the cold winter air. Kuisl grinned. He had been sure the scoundrels were hiding out somewhere around here. When he planned the hunt, he knew there was little point in just stumbling through the forest hoping to happen on individual bandits. The region around Schongau was a wilderness of forests, gorges, and steep hills. Around each town, only small areas were farmed, and beyond them the primeval forest took over, endless and profound.

  The hangman knew this area better than anyone else. In recent years, he had combed miles of the forest for healing and poisonous plants. He knew every major cave, every ruin, every hiding place. They had already been to three possible hideouts that day, and now, at the fourth, their luck seemed to have changed. From the beginning, Kuisl suspected he would find something here at Schleyer Falls.

  The smoke rose through a crevice in the rock near the steep slope. The hangman knew that, below, huge limestone formations had been hollowed out by water over a period of thousands of years, concealing an extensive network of caves with entrances behind the waterfalls. Here, at Schleyer Falls, the water flowed over green moss, down to the Ammer River in the summer; now, in the winter, icicles hung down like a white curtain in front of the entrances.

  Kuisl bent down to inhale the smoke, which smelled like roasted meat and burned fat. It was coming up through a natural chimney in the rock and had to be from a large campfire.

  “Hangman, what’s wrong? Why—”

  Kuisl motioned to the baker’s son to be silent, then pointed to the column of smoke and a small path about a hundred and fifty feet in front of them that led down into the gorge. He was about to move ahead when he caught sight of a few iron rungs that lead downward in the rock wall next to him.

  “Their escape route,” he whispered. “We have to split up. You take the main body of men down the path,” he said, addressing Jakob Schreevogl. “I’ll climb down the rungs with a smaller number of people, just to make sure they don’t slip away from us like rats through this escape hatch.”

  He reached into a sack he had been carrying over his shoulder, took out some torches, and distributed them to Andre Wiedemann and Georg Kronauer. “We’ll smoke them out from behind,” he said to the others. “You’ll be waiting by the entrance, and when they come out, capture as many as you can, but if anyone resists, kill him.”

  The old war veteran Andre Wiedemann grumbled his approval, while Hans Berchtholdt’s face turned as white as
a sheet. “Shouldn’t a few of us wait up here just in case someone slips by you?” he stammered. Like his friend, Sebastian Semer was suddenly no longer as outspoken as he had been moments before. An owl hooted somewhere, and he glanced anxiously in all directions.

  “Nonsense,” Kuisl said as he stuffed his two freshly oiled wheel lock pistols with powder, still chewing on his cold pipe. “We need every man down below. Now, off you go!”

  He nodded at Jakob Schreevogl once again, then put both pistols in his belt and, with the loaded musket slung over his shoulder, climbed down the rungs with Wiedemann; the blacksmith, Kronauer; and two other workers. For a moment, he wondered whether it might have been better to leave the two patrician boys up above. It was possible they would panic, do something rash, and blow the group’s cover. But when he thought of their shining sabers, dapper hats, and polished rifles, he couldn’t help but smile.

  They wanted to play soldier. Now they’d have a chance to see what it was really like.

  Magdalena felt as if she were flying. Standing at the very front of the raft, she watched water rush against the rough-hewn logs to her right and left. Now and then, the raft bumped into shattered ice floes or broken icicles that eddied and sank to the bottom of the Lech. They rushed past slopes on both sides that fell steeply down to the river from hilltops of snow-covered beeches. The raftsmen’s laughter and commands sounded like an unending song. Farther downriver, the Lech exited the narrow gorge and wound its way through a snow-covered landscape dotted with darker spots marking the locations of towns and small groves of trees.

  On the left, the little town of Landsberg appeared. Its formidable town walls and towers had been partially dismantled and taken away during the Great War. The hangman’s daughter had heard stories about how the little town had suffered much more than Schongau in the war. Many Landsberg girls, fearing they would be raped by marauding soldiers, jumped from watchtowers into the Lech and drowned. Magdalena remembered now that Benedikta, too, came from this town. These thoughts of the war and of her rival suddenly cast a pall over a trip that had been so pleasant up to then.