The Castle of Kings

by Oliver Pötzsch

  Agnes looked more closely at the text. The picture of the young man was on one of the last pages of the book, and the chapter to which it belonged had to do with the gradual deterioration of the castle, parallel to the decline of the house of Hohenstaufen.

  Just as Agnes was about to read on, she heard footsteps on the stairs. They were slow and measured, with the tapping of a stick in between them. Father Tristan was on his way to the library.

  Agnes thought for a moment, and then decided to put the book back and close the niche again. She was sure that the monk wouldn’t be happy that she had found the secret compartment. And if he knew, she ran the risk of his hiding the book somewhere else. Then she would never be able to look at it again.

  The door in the bookshelf was just clicking shut when Father Tristan entered the library. Agnes turned to him, an innocent expression on her face.

  “I was waiting for you, Father,” she said calmly. “For one thing to thank you for the funeral eulogy. It was beautiful, and very sensitive. It was really more than Heidelsheim deserved.”

  “Thank you,” said Father Tristan, smiling. “Although I don’t suppose that is the only reason you’re here.” For the fraction of a second, his eyes lingered on the secret door, but his face showed nothing.

  Agnes sighed and sat down on the bench by the stove. “As usual, you are right, Father. I wanted to be alone for a little while. Heidelsheim’s death touched me more than I would have expected. After all, he was murdered, and no one knows who killed him.”

  “Much in life remains inexplicable,” the old monk said. “Only God knows everything.”

  “Do you think my dreams are among the puzzles that will never be explained?” Agnes asked.

  Father Tristan smiled, and then sat down, with a groan, on the stool at the desk “I knew you wouldn’t give up so easily,” he murmured. “But I must disappoint you. Even I can’t interpret the meaning of your dreams.”

  “Here, the ring.” Agnes took the ring on its chain out from under her bodice “I saw it clearly in my dream. Couldn’t it have been here in Trifels Castle at that time? Like the young man I saw?”

  Father Tristan slowly nodded. “Maybe. But even so . . .” He struck the floor with his staff, and then shook his head fiercely, as though he had just come to a decision. “You are living here and now, Agnes, not three hundred years ago. So put the accursed thing away. It would have been better for you to throw it in Mathis’s furnace to be melted down with the rest of that stuff.” In a gentler voice, he went on, “I’ve been very glad to have your company visiting the sick. You have it in you to become a good healer, and you also show people that fine ladies and gentlemen don’t always have to be trampling the peasants’ freshly sown fields underfoot. You are doing good, Agnes. And now, in our own time. That’s worth more than all your dreams put together.”

  Sighing, Agnes tucked the ring into her bodice again. “And yet my dreams are a part of me. I can’t simply get rid of them.” She looked pleadingly at him. “At least tell me more about Barbarossa and the house of Hohenstaufen. They were such a powerful family. Why did they simply disappear?”

  “Those who have power make enemies,” Father Tristan replied thoughtfully. “In the end, the Staufer dynasty had too many. France, the pope, the German princes—they all distrusted the family. But in the end it was their own weakness that destroyed them. When such a mighty empire rests on the shoulders of a single man, a few blows of fate are enough to bring it down. And finally such misfortune struck the Staufers that you might have thought God himself was conspiring against them.”

  “What happened?” asked Agnes curiously.

  Father Tristan rolled his eyes and, groaning, went over to one of the bookshelves and took out a heavy volume. “You don’t give me any peace, do you?” he grumbled. “Right, listen to this.” He opened the leather-bound tome to one of its early pages and pointed to the picture of a strong man with a long red beard, holding a golden orb in his left hand. “This is Emperor Barbarossa, whose portrait is on your ring,” he began. “I’ve already told you about him: he was the first great member of the house of Hohenstaufen. Once a minor family from Swabia with the title of count, they had come a long way by dint of skill and cunning, and finally they produced a line of kings and emperors. When Barbarossa drowned on crusade to Jerusalem in 1190, he was succeeded by his son Henry VI.”

  “The emperor who brought the Norman treasure to Trifels,” Agnes put in.

  “Yes, that was Henry.” Father Tristan nodded and turned to the next page, showing a stern man with a crown seated on a throne. Several men knelt in front of him with their heads bowed. “Henry VI was a capable ruler, but also very cruel,” the monk continued. “Like his father before him, he had first to contend with the strongest opponents of the Staufers, the princely family of the Guelphs. Henry would stop at nothing to achieve his aims. He laid waste to half of Italy, took King Richard the Lionheart of England prisoner, and with Richard’s ransom he finally conquered Sicily, the country of his wife, Constance. When the Norman noblemen of Sicily rebelled against him, he imprisoned the conspirators at Trifels Castle and had them all blinded except the bishop of Salerno. He had a red-hot crown nailed to their leader’s head back in Sicily, and other conspirators were impaled or thrown into a vat of boiling pitch.” Father Tristan shrugged his shoulders. “Yes, you are right. Henry did bring a vast treasure home with him—but at what price.”

  Shivering, Agnes thought of the cellar in the keep where Mathis had been imprisoned. What terrible scenes might have been enacted down in that dungeon? She almost thought she could hear the screams of the Norman conspirators. It was as though Trifels Castle lived and breathed like a mighty animal.

  She shook herself and went on listening to the monk, who had just turned another page in the chronicle of the Staufer dynasty. It showed the picture of a knight bringing his raised sword down on the head of a man wearing a crown. A pool of red blood lay on the floor of a large hall.

  “Henry VI died of a fever in his early thirties,” Father Tristan said quietly. “Or maybe he was poisoned by his wife. Others claimed that God himself had punished Henry for his wicked deeds. No one knows for certain. Regardless, his son Frederick II was still too young to be crowned as the German king. So a majority of the electors chose Frederick’s uncle, Philip of Swabia, also of the house of Hohenstaufen, much to the displeasure of the Guelphs, who were gaining more and more influence at this time and were at odds with the Staufers for power. For several terrible years there were two kings in the realm, Otto the Guelph and Philip.” Father Tristan sighed. “Finally, King Philip was assassinated at the wedding of his daughter Beatrix, just before the pope could crown him Holy Roman Emperor. To this day, no one is sure whether or not the Guelphs were responsible for his murder.”

  Agnes felt that her head was buzzing with all these names. But she now knew that the young man in her dream had been a Guelph. What was he doing in a castle that had been the center of the Hohenstaufen realm? Had the Guelphs taken over Trifels at a later date?

  “You say that Frederick II, Barbarossa’s grandson, was still too young to ascend the throne,” she said. “But after his uncle Philip’s death, he was the rightful heir, wasn’t he?”

  Father Tristan nodded. “Yes, that is right. Frederick II came to the throne when he was sixteen. He put an end to confrontations with the Guelphs, who even let him have the imperial insignia—the crown, the imperial sword, and the scepter. He was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the pope in 1220 and is still regarded as the greatest ruler the empire has ever known.” The monk turned another page, and Agnes saw an emperor in a blue cloak seated on a throne. A speckled brown falcon sat on a perch beside him.

  “Oh, I know that picture,” she cried happily. “It’s in my book of falconry.”

  “Yes, the famous De arti venandi cum avibus.” The old monk smiled. “The Art of Hunting with Birds. Frederick II wrote that book himself, but he was a great scholar in many other fields as well. He
grew up in Sicily, where the Arab and Greek sciences were studied. Frederick spoke several languages fluently. He had many interests, and he managed to conquer Jerusalem without even fighting for it. So his contemporaries called him Stupor Mundi, the Wonder of the World. The pope, however, ended up regarding him as the Antichrist made flesh.”

  Father Tristan sighed again, looking thoughtfully at the picture of the tall man on the throne. An almost imperceptible smile played on his lips.

  “Frederick II died in 1250,” he went on at last. “His reign, which lasted nearly forty years, was the best that the German Empire ever knew. It welcomed strangers and was open to new ideas, yet it preserved its unity both at home and abroad. None of Frederick’s four sons managed to follow in his footsteps. The eldest, Henry VII, rebelled against his father and was deposed as the German king. In despair, he threw himself off his horse and broke his neck.” With a gloomy expression, Father Tristan went on, counting the sons off on his fingers. “The second son, Conrad, died of a fever while fighting in Italy. Manfred, the third son, fell in the famous battle of Benevento, trying to defend Sicily against Charles of Anjou, brother of the French king. Finally, Frederick’s favorite but illegitimate son, Enzio, was held prisoner in Bologna for over two decades; he died there alone and forsaken by all his friends.”

  “And was that the end of the Staufer dynasty?” asked Agnes.

  Father Tristan turned to the last page of the chronicle, where a black-clad executioner was shown in front of a large crowd of onlookers, cutting off the head of a young, fair-haired man with his sword. “Frederick’s second son, Conrad, had a son known as Conradin,” said the chaplain sadly. “Little Conrad. A good-looking boy. Everyone liked him, and he might perhaps have been able to take on his great inheritance. But Charles of Anjou captured Conradin and had his head cut off in Naples when he was only just sixteen. France had won.” With a bang, Father Tristan closed the book. “And that really was the end of the house of Hohenstaufen. Then there was a terrible time without any emperor. Fear, chaos, and lawlessness reigned in the German Empire. Not until a whole generation later did peace finally return, with the accession of King Rudolf von Habsburg.”

  Agnes frowned. Names of emperors and dynasties were swirling around in her mind like a swarm of buzzing bees, and her limbs were stiff from sitting on the bench beside the stove for so long. All the same, she concentrated on what Father Tristan had been saying. “Are those the same Habsburgs as the family of the present emperor?” she asked.

  “Yes, indeed, like his grandfather Emperor Maximilian before him, and Maximilian’s father, Emperor Frederick III. The Habsburgs have ruled the German Empire for a long time now, almost uninterruptedly.” The old monk rose with another groan and put the heavy book back on the shelf. “But people still look back to the Staufers nostalgically. They sing songs about them, they tell stories about their return. And in these times, when many simple folk are weighed down by the burden of poverty, and schism threatens the church, the legendary reputation of that family of rulers is particularly enticing.” He chuckled. “Even though their line died out almost three hundred years ago. Yet we could certainly do with such a capable ruler as Frederick II these days. All the injustice that we see getting worse from year to year . . . I don’t know where it will all lead.”

  All of a sudden, Agnes found her mind going instinctively to the books she had seen in the secret compartment. Works by Martin Luther, that critic of the church, had been among them. Why was Father Tristan keeping such books, and in secret too? Could he be on the side of the agitators himself?

  “Mathis thinks the church wants to gut poor people the way you’d pluck and draw a Christmas goose,” she cautiously ventured. “Priests selling indulgences travel around promising eternal life if you give the pope money for his palaces. The local peasants talk about Martin Luther more and more, too. Is that what you mean when you mention schism in the church and injustice?”

  It was some time before the priest replied. Only after a while did he say, in a soft voice, “The Church of Rome is old, ancient. We try to bear witness to the word of Jesus, but much has been forgotten, and much else may have been distorted in the course of time. Who knows the truth? However, the message itself has never changed: Jesus preached love, not hate. We must never forget that.”

  He went over to the window and looked out for a long time. Peasants were treading the castle acres with their plows, always following the same tracks. Twittering swallows flew to their nests under the castle rooftops, announcing the arrival of summer.

  “I can sense a storm coming,” said the old man at last. “I feel it in my bones, every one of them. It will blow away much that still stands like dry straw. May God protect us.”

  Suddenly a smile played around his almost toothless mouth. “But what am I saying, Agnes?” he said firmly. “The weather is much too fine for such sad thoughts.” He made for the door at last with his staff in his hand, his footsteps slow. “Let’s go to the forest together instead and gather bogbean and shepherd’s purse. Then we will visit one or other of our sick patients this afternoon. That is a more rewarding occupation than brooding and lamenting.”

  On the fifth day after Agnes and Mathis had quarreled, after she had thoughtlessly accused him of murder, she found him alone at last in the shabby little workshop beside his parents’ house, where he was finishing forging a few horseshoes. After work on the guns for the coming siege, Mathis was often occupied for many hours on other jobs in the castle smithy. It was weeks since his father had been able to stand at his forge. Mathis brought his hammer down powerfully on the red-hot iron. He didn’t seem to hear Agnes as she hesitantly approached him.

  “Mathis, I . . . I’m sorry,” she began quietly.

  Mathis stopped hammering for a moment, but he did not turn to her. “What for?” he asked stonily.

  “Well, for suspecting you of Heidelsheim’s murder. Will you forgive me?”

  Once again Mathis hammered away at the horseshoe, making a noise that almost drowned out his words. “If you can really imagine a thing like that, you don’t have to apologize for it. You obviously think I’m a murderer and a cutthroat. Why not? I’m only a coarse, uneducated smith.”

  “Oh, Mathis, do stop it!” She seized him by the shoulder so hard that he almost fell over backward. “I know I made a mistake, and I’ve said I’m sorry. That ought to be enough,” she went on angrily. “You weren’t exactly nice to me, either.”

  For the first time Mathis did look at her, grinning broadly. All at once his annoyance was gone. “I almost got the impression you thought I was jealous,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “You brute!” Agnes gave him another push, and this time he did end up sitting on the floor. “Just forget it, can’t you?” she hissed. “Why am I fighting my father over you when you’re not worth it?”

  Mathis raised his hands apologetically, but he was still smiling mockingly. “If your father sees us here, we’ll be in for it. Although I’m the one he’ll thrash soundly, not you. I’m obviously not the sort of company you ought to keep.” He stood up and wiped the oil and ashes off his hands on his leather apron. “Suppose we go over to Anebos, like we did so often in the past? We won’t be disturbed there, and you can lecture me in peace.” He glanced up at the sky, which was now red with the light of the setting sun. “It will soon be too dark to work, anyway.”

  Agnes smiled. “That’s the best idea you’ve had in a long time,” she replied in relief. And they set off along the path to the nearby wooded hill.

  As they walked along the narrow, trodden path, Agnes thought how often, as a child, she had been to Anebos with Mathis. In that picture in the chronicle of Trifels she had seen the little castle that used to stand there, but by now its ruins looked more like a natural rock in the form of a gigantic anvil, the shape to which it owed its name.

  When they reached the top of the slope, slightly out of breath, the sun had set behind th
e range of hills, and there was a sparkling starry sky overhead. The full moon, just rising, bathed the whole clearing in a pale, ghostly light. In the middle of the space, which was surrounded by tall beech trees, stood the tall pillar of rock, some thirty feet high, with other rocks scattered around it. In some places the outline of the foundation walls could still be seen, but otherwise nothing showed that a castle once used to stand here.

  Just below the rocky pillar was a cave hollowed out by rain and wind, where they had liked to hide as children. Once again they sat in it together, looking at the sky above, where little shooting stars fell to earth from time to time. Agnes nestled close to Mathis, smelling the smoke of the smithy fire in his hair.

  “How is your father?” she asked.

  Mathis took a deep breath. “He’s spitting blood more and more often,” he replied hesitantly. “Father Tristan did give him some dried lungwort again today, but he doesn’t think it will do much good. He says it comes from working such long hours at the forge. My mother is crying her eyes out.”

  “I tried to talk to you a couple of times recently,” Agnes said softly. “About my own father, too. I have a sinking feeling that he’s planning something again. But you were obviously too busy.”

  “You know I had to build a gun carriage,” Mathis replied a little roughly. “Don’t forget, your father can lock me up again any time if he isn’t satisfied with me. And you’ve been out and about with Father Tristan all the time yourself.”

  Agnes leaned her head against his shoulder, just as she used to when they were playing in the hay as children. “You’re right,” she said, sighing. “It’s the fever that’s going around. People need help, and now, of all times, Elsbeth Rechsteiner the midwife has gone missing. It’s as if she’d disappeared from the face of the earth. No one knows where she could be.”