The Castle of Kings

by Oliver Pötzsch

  “This is gunpowder, am I right? You’re the only one here who knows how to handle it. The only one who could have committed such a murder last night. And you have a strong motive. So go on, confess!”

  Mathis groaned quietly. He had completely forgotten the little bag.

  “Aha, he feels guilty!” cried Sperlin the apothecary. “See, he’s giving way. His crime has caught up with him.”

  Desperately, Mathis shook his head. He felt the noose tightening around his neck. “I may have been in possession of this powder, but I had no gun.” he protested. “And where would I have gotten one? What’s more, my companions can bear witness that—”

  “Your companions were so dead drunk that they couldn’t even have said whether there were stars in the sky last night,” the woolens weaver Peter Markschild interrupted. “We’ve locked them in the guardhouse for safekeeping. One of them, that man Reichhart, hit out wildly when he was arrested, and we had to make him see reason. Who knows, maybe he’s hand in glove with you. Isn’t he a master gunner himself?” Thrusting out his chest, the weaver turned to the gawpers and council members standing around. “As head of the town council, I am taking over authority in this town until the duke sends us a new mayor. If this young man won’t talk, then the executioner in Queichhambach and his red-hot pincers will teach him how. Do you all agree?”

  The men nodded, all but white-haired Nepomuk Kistler, who looked skeptical. “I still can’t believe that the boy really did such a thing,” he said. “From all we hear of him, he’s a right-minded young man. On the other hand . . .” He hesitated, and his lined face went a little paler. “If he didn’t do it, who did?”

  “The fellow will have an opportunity to prove himself innocent,” Markschild said in a placatory tone. “But first we must keep him in custody. Take him away.”

  “But none of this is true!” Mathis cried as two of the guards seized him and dragged him out into the alley. He looked around for help. One of those now standing beside the millstream was Diethelm Seebach, landlord of the Green Tree, looking at him with a shamefaced expression.

  “Diethelm!” cried Mathis. “You know me. I would never . . .”

  But Seebach turned away. His face disappeared in the noisy crowd, which now began throwing dirt, stones, and rotten vegetables at Mathis.

  “You brute,” Konrad Sperlin snapped at him. “You’ve killed like an animal, you will die like an animal.” He threw a handful of sheep dung, and Mathis only just avoided it. The next missile hit him in the middle of his face. Mathis thought about how he had been celebrating with many of these people only last night; a few months ago he had even been sitting with some of them while they all cursed the mayor to the devil. And now they were pelting Mathis with stones and spitting at him.

  As the guards dragged him on, Mathis glanced around once more, looking into all the angry faces of the shouting inhabitants of Annweiler. They belonged to tanners, joiners, shopkeepers, linen weavers, maidservants, grooms, and peasants—all of them simple folk for whose rights Mathis had always wished to fight. And now they wanted to see him dead.

  Then a stone hit his forehead, and he staggered on with blood running down his face.

  Agnes had spent all night sitting beside her father’s deathbed, holding his hand as his breath grew weaker and weaker. Father Tristan had joined them a couple of times, but when the monk saw that there was nothing more he could do, he had given the castellan of Trifels the rite of extreme unction and then left father and daughter together. By the end, Erfenstein’s body was as hard as a rock. He reminded Agnes of the stone knights on tombs, watching over the dead until the day of judgment.

  When the first rays of the sun came through the window and the birds began to sing, the castellan finally drew his last breath. Near the end only his eyes still moved in his rigid body, looking almost pleadingly at Agnes to the last. By then his voice had long since fallen silent. Just before the end, Philipp von Erfenstein had obviously wanted to say something else to her, but only stertorous, incomprehensible sounds had come out of his mouth.

  After the longest night of her life, Agnes closed her father’s eyelids and wept without a sound. Philipp von Erfenstein had been rough in his ways, but he had loved Agnes in his own fashion, even when he had probably wished for a different kind of daughter. A more feminine, charming young lady who did embroidery, sang, and chattered to other girls, instead of one who hunted crows with her falcon. Now her father had left her, and she was alone. The only friends she still had were Father Tristan and Mathis—though he apparently preferred to amuse himself with whores down in Annweiler.

  Minutes dragged on and felt like hours. At last Agnes pressed a final kiss on her dead father’s brow and decided to go in search of the monk. She had a great deal to discuss, and she had never needed his advice so much. She thought she now knew why her father had been doomed to die, but she had no idea what use that knowledge was to her. So she was far from being able to call the murderer to account. Furthermore, her knowledge was presumably more of a threat to her than a blessing.

  Agnes quietly closed the door and went over to the chapel in the old tower of the castle. Failing to find Father Tristan, however, she climbed the steep stairs to the library. Maybe he was there, going through the lists of the castellan’s few personal possessions, which would now belong to Agnes.

  She was relieved to hear the rustle of pages on the other side of the library door. Agnes turned the handle, but flinched back when she saw who was sitting in the chair behind the broad desk.

  It was Count Scharfeneck, reading several old parchment scrolls and books. He looked up with interest. Agnes immediately felt her heart turn to stone, and an invisible hand seemed to clutch her throat.

  Murderer . . .

  “Ah, how delightful to see your face,” said the count, smiling and pointing to the documents in front of him. He did not seem to feel at all like he had been caught doing something wrong. “I’ve been told that you like to read. You have a really interesting collection of old books.”

  “What are you doing here?” Agnes asked, her breath coming short.

  Friedrich von Löwenstein-Scharfeneck raised his hands in an apologetic gesture. “Forgive me for not saying so before, but while we were still in Ramberg, your father gave me permission to explore his library, and I thought it better not to disturb him.” He played with the golden chain that hung around his neck. “However, we can ask him now. How is he feeling?”

  “He’s dead,” Agnes said tonelessly. Her lips were narrowed, and she had to be careful not to let her voice break. “Philipp von Erfenstein, castellan of Trifels, died within this very hour. Was that what you wanted?”

  The count leaned back in silence, drumming his fingers on the desk. For a while neither of them said anything.

  “I am sorry your father is dead,” he said at last. “But forgive me if I do not burst into tears. He did not have to challenge Wertingen to single combat.”

  “It wasn’t the fight that killed him.”

  Scharfeneck’s head darted forward like the head of a snake. There was a menacing spark in his eyes. “Oh, so what did kill him, then?”

  “It was poison. Presumably monkshood. And you gave it to him. You!” Agnes had not intended to say those last few words, but when she saw the count sitting there looking so pleased with himself, they had suddenly burst out of her.

  Friedrich von Löwenstein-Scharfeneck looked at her for a long time. There was no sound but the crackling of the logs burning in the hearth. Finally he laughed quietly, with a sound like the sweet ringing of a bell. “I suppose that old monk told you so, did he? And you believe him.”

  “I know quite enough about herbs myself to be sure of it,” replied Agnes coolly. She remembered that Father Tristan had told her to keep quiet. And in no circumstances must suspicion fall on him. If it did, the count would surely find a way to get rid of her tutor.

  “Shivering, a racing heart, hesitant breathing, and progressive stiffening of th
e body,” she said, enumerating the symptoms. “That was not gangrene, it was cold-blooded murder.”

  With a violent movement, Friedrich von Löwenstein-Scharfeneck swept the books and scrolls of parchment off the desk, and rose from his chair, a threatening figure. In his close-fitting Spanish doublet with its high collar, with his thinning hair and pale face, he resembled an evil angel. It was as though an icy wind were suddenly blowing through the library.

  “I don’t mind what nonsense you talk within these four walls,” he hissed, “but if you were to tell the outside world that I had your father on my conscience, then I swear by God and all the saints—my family has a long arm, Lady Agnes, and you would wish you had never been born.”

  Agnes flinched back in shock. It was a fact that she had no concrete evidence against the count, and even if she had, to what court could she go with it? For some years now there had been the imperial supreme court in Nuremberg, set up by Emperor Maximilian for just such cases, but the trials there often went on for many years. And you needed money, a great deal of money, something that Agnes did not have.

  Neither evidence nor money, she thought. And he knows it.

  “Where is Father Tristan?” she asked suddenly, to change the subject.

  “That old fool?” Friedrich von Löwenstein-Scharfeneck sat down again, with a smile. All at once the cutting edge had left his voice. “I told him to go and tend some of my wounded landsknechts. A far-sighted decision, I now see. As a doddering old man, but with some knowledge of medicine, he’s more use to the living than the dead.”

  And you can snoop around here to your heart’s content, thought Agnes. As soon as the stag is dead, ravens come down on the carcass, croaking.

  “Before he died, my father told me about the . . . agreement between the two of you,” she said quietly.

  “Did he? Oh, I’m glad.” The count clapped his hands. “I would have liked to tell you myself, but I fear that recently you have been a little gruff with me.” Reaching inside his velvet doublet, he brought out a sealed paper. “To be on the safe side, your father confirmed it in writing just before his fight. What a fortunate circumstance, now that he is dead and, unfortunately, can say no more about our happiness, don’t you agree?”

  The count waved the paper in the air, eyes twinkling, and gave Agnes a smile that almost provoked her into striking him in the face. She took a deep breath to help herself calm down. Then she took a stool from beside the fire and sat down directly opposite her future bridegroom. She stared at him with hostility as, unmoved, he put the document back inside his doublet.

  “Why this marriage?” she asked at last. “My father is dead. You could simply turn me out of the castle and ask the duke to let you have Trifels. You have enough influence.”

  Friedrich von Löwenstein-Scharfeneck shrugged. “The duke is a fickle man. No one knows how he would make up his mind, and there are other powerful families for him to cultivate. So I asked his permission to request your hand in marriage. It was safer. In addition . . .” He leaned forward and, in a playful gesture, placed the fingertips of his hands together. “You may not believe me, Lady Agnes, but I am genuinely disposed to like you. I even think that we share more than you know. A passion for old stories, for dreaming, our love of these ancient walls . . .” He heaved a theatrical sigh. “In addition, I have a fancy for self-willed women. What am I to do?”

  Agnes made a face. “Then set your mind at rest,” she replied bitterly. “That’s the only kind of wife you’ll get.”

  “So I may hope?”

  Defiantly, Agnes folded her arms. Through all the hours that she had spent beside her father’s deathbed, holding his hand, she had been wrestling with herself. She owed the decision that she had finally made entirely to her uncertain future, and her father’s last wish.

  The house of Erfenstein will not die out, it will merge with a flourishing dynasty . . .

  She breathed deeply before forcing herself to answer. “Let’s not beat about the bush,” she said coolly. “You know as well as I do that I don’t have many options open to me. So very well, I agree to the marriage. But only on three conditions.” She raised a finger. “First, you will let me lead my life as I have always led it before. Second, Father Tristan and Mathis will stay at the castle as my friends. And third—don’t think that I am letting you into my bed. You would be unpleasantly surprised.”

  Friedrich von Löwenstein-Scharfeneck fiddled thoughtfully with the pointed end of his neatly trimmed black beard, while he inspected Agnes like something laid out for sale on a market stall. Once again, she noticed his thinning hair. Young as he was, he would probably have a bald patch within a few years. Apart from that, and despite his pallor, he was an attractive man—and above all, very prosperous. Agnes could not help thinking how many women would envy her this match.

  “The devil only knows why I let you speak to me like that,” Friedrich von Löwenstein-Scharfeneck finally replied. “But very well, you have my word. The old man and that young fool won’t bother me. And as for your last point, there are other beautiful women who will warm my bed.” He smiled suggestively. “What’s more, I am convinced that time heals all wounds.”

  “In your dreams, maybe. And now to the reason why you are so keen to possess Trifels Castle. May I?” Agnes rose abruptly to her feet and went over to one of the bookshelves. She took a large tome off it, and put it down on the desk in front of the count. “This is what you were looking for just now, isn’t it?”

  Surprised, Count Scharfeneck looked at the well-worn book in front of him. It was the Magna Historia de Castro Trifels, the book that Agnes herself had read in secret again and again during the last few months. Last time, Father Tristan had simply put it back on the shelf and then had obviously forgotten about it. But Agnes had always known where to find the volume.

  The count began turning the pages with trembling fingers. His eyes shone like a child’s. “The old chronicle of the castle,” he said. “On the finest vellum, illustrated, and with initial letters in gold leaf. I’ve heard a great deal about it, and now I actually have it in my hands. What a precious jewel. How did you . . . ?”

  “What you want is roughly in the middle of the book,” Agnes said. “The chapter about the time of the house of Hohenstaufen. I’m afraid that a few pages have been torn out, but it’s a different part that interests you anyway.” She looked out of the window, where the morning sun was shining brightly now, and quoted from memory the section about the Norman treasure.

  “The crown of all treasures,” Count Scharfeneck said reverently. “I have dreamed of it since I was a child.” He looked up and scrutinized Agnes with a smile. “You are a clever girl, Lady Agnes. I couldn’t wish for a better bride. How did you know that was why I wanted Trifels Castle?”

  “My father indicated as much. He said you were concerned with gold, a great deal of gold. And then there were . . . certain hints.” Agnes almost told the count about her conversation with Melchior, but at the last moment decided to keep the minstrel out of this. She turned back to Scharfeneck, shrugging her shoulders. “Your enthusiasm for Trifels and everything to do with it gave you away. Father Tristan claims that Emperor Frederick II had the treasure taken to Apulia later, but I can see that you don’t share his opinion. You suspect it’s still somewhere in this area, don’t you? Perhaps even here on the castle rock itself.”

  The count laughed softly. “Emperor Frederick II was a great teller of romantic tales when it came to his money. He would never have parted from such a huge fortune. I have sent messengers to Lucera in Apulia, to research that theory. It is said that Frederick stationed the Saracens whom he had pacified to guard the treasure there, but that was a lie told by the Staufers.” Quivering with excitement, he pointed to a picture on the page in front of him, showing several donkeys loaded up with chests. Armed warriors rode tall steeds and carried blood-red standards. “The treasure is still at Trifels. They hid it here,” he went on, with conviction. “There are ancient sources
proving it. Even as a little boy I dreamed of finding it. And a quarter of a year ago, we began the search at last.”

  Agnes wrinkled her brow. A quarter of a year ago?

  All at once, she remembered the men in the forest, the men she and Mathis had met just after they had found her falcon. Both of them had suspected Wertingen’s henchmen, but it had been the count with his landsknechts, searching for the treasure. Suddenly it all made sense.

  “So that’s why you bought Scharfenberg, isn’t it?” she asked quietly. “Not because you were intent on moving into your ancestors’ castle, but because you needed a base in these parts. You were digging here. Mathis and I saw lights in the woods. We were thinking about the old legend of Barbarossa, but it was you.”

  Scharfeneck shrugged. “The tale of Barbarossa certainly came in handy. It kept the superstitious peasantry away from us. All the same, I fear that something always gets out. There was a little . . .” Here he hesitated. “Well, let’s call it an incident. That was when I knew I must buy Scharfenberg Castle, if only to keep other curious and interfering folk away from me.” He smiled at her. “Unfortunately I had no prospect of acquiring Trifels at that time.”

  Repelled, Agnes turned her eyes away and once again looked through the window at the view of the lower bailey, the stables and sheds, the herb garden, the graveyard, and the well tower. Soon it would all belong to the count, and she would be nothing but a pretty ornament for him to wear. But what choice did she have?

  Suddenly her eye was caught by a detail outside. The tombstones in the castle graveyard. One of them still shone new and white in the morning sun, with only a few red poppies flowering on the mound of soil heaped over the grave itself. It was the tombstone of Martin von Heidelsheim, the former steward of Trifels. Two bedraggled crows perched on the murdered man’s grave.

  Agnes remembered the gruesome find of his body, and the way in which Heidelsheim had been killed. The expensive crossbow bolts, fletched with eagles’ feathers, had gone so far into the steward’s body that his murderer must have been standing directly in front of him. So Heidelsheim had known the man—either that, or he had assumed that he represented no danger.