“Your father can take care of them,” the hangman interrupted. “I’ve already told Lechner you’ll be traveling the next few weeks.”
“You did what?” Simon’s voice was loud enough now that even the priest up at the altar cleared his throat. “But…”
“Magdalena also didn’t think that was a good idea,” Kuisl sighed, lowering his voice again. “She still doesn’t trust letting you out of her sight, so I made her promise to go along with you to Altotting. You’ll go through Munich and pick up a few herbs for me, and some books. A fellow named Athanasius Kircher has written a new book about the plague and how to cure it…” The hangman’s face broke out in a broad grin. “If you don’t behave yourself in the next few days, I’ll think it over and perhaps come along, too.”
Simon could hardly believe his good fortune. He’d have a few weeks together with Magdalena, far from this place where she was the ostracized hangman’s daughter. Nobody would know her!
“Kuisl, how can I thank you…?” he whispered.
“Don’t thank me; thank the one up there,” he replied, pointing up at the Great God of Altenstadt. “He convinced me to do it. Now I’ve done him two favors.”
“Two favors?” Simon asked, baffled.
Jakob Kuisl drew on his cold pipe as if he were at home and not in the church. “The larch wood in his back was rotten,” he began. “The day before yesterday, the carpenter Balthasar Hemerle had to repair the Savior for Candlemas, and he couldn’t find a good piece of wood for it…old, solid wood that had already survived sixteen hundred years…”
Slowly, it dawned on Simon what he was talking about. “The True Cross of Christ in Steingaden…” he started to say.
The hangman knocked out his pipe on the pew. “I was able to save a small piece from the fire as a keepsake. It fit exactly into the back of the Savior.”
When Simon looked up at the Great God of Altenstadt, he thought he detected a smile cross the chiseled wood of Jesus’s face.
But, of course, that was just an illusion.
FB2 document info
Document ID: fbd-b614fe-4cd5-0b44-e580-b81d-1ee5-5d80ac
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 01.09.2012
Created using: calibre 0.8.66, Fiction Book Designer, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6.6 software
Document authors :
Oliver Potzsch
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The Dark Monk thd-2 Page 44