The Poisoned Pilgrim_A Hangman's Daughter Tale

by Oliver Pötzsch

  “May bug fly, your father’s gone to die,

  your mother is in Pommer Land…”

  “What crazy songs your mother teaches you,” Kuisl cursed, but soon he was humming along softly, too. In the meantime, the constant swaying and singing had put little Paul to sleep in his sling.

  The path quickly became steeper, and as Kuisl made his way up the mountain, sweating and panting, he couldn’t help thinking about how many pilgrims had taken the same path to the Holy Mountain before him. At one time there had been over forty thousand present just for Pentecost, and now, for the Festival of the Three Hosts, huge crowds were also expected. The hangman could imagine that a warlock locked up in the monastery would be troubled by all this pious activity, and for that reason he also imagined they would try to set Nepomuk’s trial for the next day or so.

  Deciding to take a shortcut, Kuisl hastened his steps, abandoning the narrow serpentine path up the mountain, and climbed directly up the slope. Now and then he came upon old, weathered steps—moss-covered stones—amid the beeches, but mostly he had to struggle through knee-high thickets. Ahead he saw some boulders placed in a circle that looked almost like the foundation of a tower. The hangman threw back his sweaty head and tried to guess how far it might still be to the monastery.

  “Look, Grandpa, a witch. Are you going to burn her?” Peter pointed to an especially large boulder, at least forty feet high, in a clearing to the right. A gnarled linden tree was growing on top of it, so in the shadows of the surrounding forest it looked, in fact, like a stooped old woman.

  “Nonsense, lad,” Kuisl growled. “That’s no witch, that’s a—” Only then did he realize what the boy was actually pointing at. At the foot of the rock stood the entrance to a cave. There before a small fire sat an old, gray-haired, barefoot woman wearing a dirty, torn dress tied around her waist. She rose slowly with the help of a cane and hobbled painfully toward the hangman and his grandchildren. When she finally stood face to face with Kuisl, he looked into her milky white eyes and realized she was completely blind.

  “May the Lord bless you,” the woman murmured, extending her withered hand. “Is it you, Brother Johannes? Have you brought me a little beechnut porridge again?”

  “I… I’m only a pilgrim on the way to Andechs,” Kuisl replied hesitantly. “Tell me, old woman, is this the way to the monastery?”

  The old woman was visibly shocked, and it took a while for her to relax again.

  “A burden of great sin lies upon you,” she whispered. “Great sin! I can feel that. The devil’s rock has led you to me, hasn’t it?”

  “Devil’s rock?” Kuisl shook his head. “Woman, I have no time for your nonsense. I have two lads here who need their mother. So tell me… is this the way—”

  “This is the entrance to hell,” the woman hissed, pointing to the cave behind her. Her voice took on a hard tone now, and the whites of her eyes seemed to glow from the inside. “I am standing guard over it because Satan has come back to earth, but I have no power over him. He sings, he groans, he moans; I can hear him in the night when he forces his way through the bowels of the mountain with his Plague-infested body.” When she reached for Kuisl with her cadaverous hand, he took an instinctive step backward. “Beware, wanderer! I can sense you follow in the footsteps of Lucifer. Who are you? A mercenary overcome by misfortune? A murderer? How many men have you killed? Tell me, how many?”

  “I am the Schongau executioner,” Kuisl growled. He could feel the hair standing up on the back of his neck. “Ask the city council—they keep the books. Now let me through before I kill one more person.” The hangman brushed the old woman’s hand aside and hurried past her.

  Angrily the old woman pounded her crooked cane on the ground. “It is no accident that the Lord has sent you this way,” she shouted after him. “Hear the truth, hangman! Judgment is at hand. I can hear the demons digging. They are worming their way through the world, they are reaching out through moldy leaves with their long claws. Soon they will be here, very soon. Repent, hangman! Soon misfortune will strike you like a bolt of lightning.”

  The children were starting to cry, and Kuisl hastened up the steep path until the old woman’s voice was only a distant echo. His heart was pounding, and not just from exertion. The woman had touched something deep within him, something black, dark, in the very depths of his soul. It was as if all the dead men in the last decades, all those tortured, hanged, beheaded, or broken on the wheel had called out at the same time for revenge. He couldn’t help thinking of his dream the night before, the memories of the war that had flashed through his mind.

  How many men have you killed? Tell me, how many?

  For the first time in a long while Jakob Kuisl felt real fear.

  He shook himself and hurried along the path through the trees. Branches seemed to reach out to seize him, leaves brushed against his face, the children whined and wailed, and Peter kept pulling at his hair like an angry little gnome on his shoulders.

  Kuisl staggered forward, almost falling, but finally pushed one last green branch aside. Now he looked out on a sunny clearing of meadows and fields where ears of light brown barley waved in the wind. Beyond these, in the bright light of early afternoon, lay the monastery.

  The horror had vanished.

  Suddenly the hangman couldn’t help laughing out loud. Like a child, he’d let himself be scared by an old woman babbling about revenge and retribution. What in the world was wrong with him? Was he turning into an anxious child afraid of old wives’ tales? It was high time to hand the children over to Magdalena and concentrate on his real reason for being here.

  With renewed courage Kuisl hiked along the fields toward the monastery, but in secret he decided to pray and beg for forgiveness in the coming days.

  Not that he really believed in any of this, but it couldn’t hurt, either.

  Magdalena was awakened by the rattling cough of an old man on a simple wooden plank bed to her right. Gasping, the old man spat a green clump of phlegm onto the reeds on the floor.

  Disgusted, the hangman’s daughter turned away. Since the night before, she’d been laid out in a wing of the monastery—a horse stable no longer in use, which the abbot made available for the sick. Only a handful of patients were there in the early morning, but their numbers had increased dramatically in the last few hours. She estimated that over two dozen moaning, snoring, wailing pilgrims were housed now in the provisional hospital. Wrapped in thin woolen blankets, they lay shivering in flea-infested beds and on bales of straw on the ground. The damp old quarters stank of manure and human excrement, while outside they could hear pilgrims singing on their way to the monastery to pray for a good harvest, a healthy child, or simply a peaceful year without war, hunger, and pestilence.

  Carefully Magdalena tested the fragrant herbal dressing on her neck. The wound wasn’t deep—the strange projectile had only grazed her. Nevertheless, she had passed out briefly due to exhaustion and loss of blood. What troubled her even most was the fear of whoever was lying in wait for her the night before along the monastery wall.

  That unknown person… and the strange melody.

  Was it the same man who’d pushed her from the belfry the day before?

  “Well, are you back among the living?” Simon bent over her with a smile and handed her a bowl of steaming oatmeal. “My poppy-seed potion obviously worked well. It’s afternoon; with just a few interruptions, you’ve slept more than sixteen hours.”

  “I… I probably needed it,” Magdalena replied, still a bit drowsy. “But I’m damned hungry now.” She attacked the oatmeal with gusto. Not until she had wiped the last morsel away with her finger did she lean back, sighing.

  “That was good,” she murmured, “very good. Almost as good as the porridge my cousin makes, the scruffy knacker.” Suddenly her face turned serious. “I should be glad I’m still alive and can eat at all,” she added softly.

  Simon caressed her sweaty forehead. “I made you a compress with shepherd’s pu
rse, horsetail, and marigold,” he said, with concern in his voice. “The wound on your neck should heal well, but you were spouting all kinds of crazy things last night. What in the world happened to you?”

  Magdalena sighed. “If only I knew.” Then she told Simon about what she had seen during evening mass, the strange melody, about being ambushed and the shots that came from behind the wall.

  “It was the same song Brother Virgilius’s automaton was singing?” Simon looked at her skeptically. “Are you sure?”

  Magdalena shrugged. “In any case, it was a glockenspiel, and it came from somewhere inside the mountain… down below.” Suddenly a chill came over her again. “Do you think that automaton really killed its master and the apprentice and is now looking for other victims somewhere down there? Is it a… a golem?”

  “Nonsense,” Simon replied. “Those are nothing but horror stories. Only God can create life. But I do think these monks have something to do with it.”

  Magdalena grinned triumphantly. “Then do you believe now that the ugly Nepomuk is innocent? I said so right away.”

  “You mean Brother Johannes?” Simon handed Magdalena a pitcher of water, and she gulped it down eagerly. “If he really isn’t a sorcerer, he’ll be sitting just as before in the old cheese cellar,” he mused. “So he can’t be the one who shot at you last night. Perhaps it was just a hunter who thought you were a wild animal. It was, after all, pretty dark.”

  “Simon, don’t be silly. Do I look like a wild boar?” Magdalena shook her head and cringed, as the wound began to sting again. “That was no hunter; it was that stranger. Sometimes I believe you think I’m just a hysterical woman.”

  Simon smiled. “Oh, God, no, I’d never dare to think that. But it’s true that you sometimes… well… seem over-stressed.”

  “Good heavens, I’ve rarely felt as clear-headed as now,” Magdalena snapped. “But if you say one more time that I’m sick, I’ll probably really start feeling that way.”

  But Simon was already lost in thought again and seemed not to have heard. “The monks are indeed behaving very strangely,” he continued, haltingly. “All this talk in the monastery council about the blasphemous experiments Johannes and Virgilius were carrying out. What did the monks mean by that? And what was the abbot doing with the prior and one of the Wittelsbachs in the relics chamber so late at night? You said that Maurus Rambeck seemed very distracted during mass…”

  “Just like the young novitiate master,” Magdalena spoke up. “He looked like he’d been crying and got a poke in the ribs from the prior. And the fat cellarer was standing guard up on the balcony. If you ask me, they have a secret and are afraid someone will learn about it.”

  “But Count Wartenberg?” Simon frowned. “What in God’s name does that Wittelsbacher nobleman have to do with it?”

  “The cellarer said Wartenberg had the third key.”

  “The third key?” Simon shook his head, stood up, and stretched. “Things are getting more confusing just when I have my hands full here. This damned fever is like a plague.” He pointed to the door where two pilgrims were just carrying in another patient, a deathly pale farmer dressed in coarse linen, whose weak moans joined the chorus of the wailing and rattling of the other patients.

  “Basically this pilgrimage is one huge source of infection,” Simon grumbled. “For years, both my father and I have preached that what makes people sick is not vapors escaping from the ground, but that people infect one another. Thousands will come to Andechs in the next few days and carry this fever back with them to their cities and villages. It would be better for people to stay home and pray there.”

  “It’s too late for that now, Master Fronwieser. The best we can do is to care for the people, so they can return home healthy.”

  Simon turned around to see Jakob Schreevogl carrying in a child. He was weak, sweat was streaming down his forehead, and his eyes were closed.

  “The parents believed that a hundred rosaries and the donation of a candle would assure their child’s survival,” the alderman sputtered. “Fortunately I was able to convince them to leave the boy in your care, at least during noon mass. It’s a disgrace.” Carefully he placed the child down on a bale of straw in the corner of the low-ceilinged vault, then looked at Simon with a tired smile. “When I see sick children, I can’t help thinking of my little Clara and how you cured her back then, Fronwieser. I hope you can help this boy as well. Every child is a gift of God.” The young alderman reached for his belt and took out a purse of clinking coins. “Here, take this. I actually wanted to buy an arm’s-length bee’s-wax candle with the money and donate a new confessional booth, but I have the feeling the coins are better off invested here.”

  “Thank you,” Simon murmured, weighing the purse in his hands. There must have been thirty guilders in it. “I’ll ask the abbot for permission to buy medicine and clean bed linens with it.”

  Schreevogl waved him off. “Just decide for yourself. The abbot really has other concerns at the moment. Rumors of this horrible murder are going around, and some golem is said to be haunting the monastery. If Rambeck isn’t careful, his flock will be nothing but anxious sheep at the Festival of the Three Hosts.” He winked at Magdalena, who had sat up in bed now. “But if I know you, you both already know more about this than I do.”

  “If we learn anything about the murderer, you’ll be the first to know, we promise.” Magdalena stretched again and stood up. She was still wavering slightly but otherwise seemed to have recovered. “And now excuse us for a moment. I’d like to…” She stopped short as a shadow fell over her face. Something large was standing in the doorway, blocking the sunlight. It was a man in a black overcoat with broad shoulders, carrying a crude walking stick in his callused hands, his face concealed by a wide-brimmed hat. The giant bent down and placed two little boys gingerly on the ground. They ran toward Magdalena with shouts of joy.

  “Looks like Paul has finally learned to walk,” the hangman grumbled. “It’s about time. I thought he’d always be crawling through the house like a little worm.”

  “My God, Father!” Magdalena shouted, running toward her children, who embraced her warmly. She laughed out loud with relief. In all the excitement, she’d completely forgotten the letter she’d sent the day before. Now that her father and children were with her, she felt everything would turn out well.

  “Spare your mother, you rascals,” Kuisl scolded, raising his finger playfully. “You’ll crush her. It’s hard to believe that they were clinging to my coattails just a minute ago.”

  “Even the best grandfather can’t replace a mother.” Smiling, Simon came over to his father-in-law and held out his hand. As they shook, Simon could feel his bones cracking. He never ceased to be amazed at the strength of the Schongau executioner.

  “It’s great that you came so soon, Jakob,” Simon said through clenched teeth, “but we thought it might be without the children—”

  “Wouldn’t that suit you just fine,” Kuisl interrupted gruffly. “Leave the sick grandmother with two screaming youngsters and enjoy your vacation. Nothing doing—Magdalena can just take care of her own little rascals.”

  “Mother is sick?” Magdalena approached her father anxiously with her two children in her arms. “But why did you then—”

  “What am I to do? Abandon my friend?” Kuisl said crossly. “Anyway, I don’t think it’s anything serious, just a stupid cough like so many in Schongau have nowadays. I wanted to stay, but…” He stopped short, then continued gruffly. “Your mother is a tough woman. She practically threw me out of the house when she heard about Nepomuk.”

  “Nepomuk? Your friend?” Jakob Schreevogl, who had been standing quietly alongside them until then, gave the hangman a bewildered look. “I’m afraid I don’t understand. And just what are you doing in Andechs, Kuisl? Has the executioner come on a pilgrimage?”

  “Ah… I’m afraid that’s a long story, my dear councilor,” Magdalena interrupted. “I’ll tell you about it another ti
me, but for now we have a favor to ask.”

  “And what would that be?”

  Magdalena pointed at the coughing and wailing patients all around them. “Could you watch Simon’s patients for about an hour? The Kuisl family has a few things to discuss.”

  The patrician was dumbfounded. “Me? But I have no idea how—”

  “It’s very simple.” Magdalena handed Schreevogl a rag and a bucket of fresh water. “Wash the sweat from their brows, change the dressings now and then, and try to look serious and competent. Believe me, that’s all most doctors do.”

  She took her two children by the hand and left the stinking infirmary with Simon and the hangman as the astonished patrician gazed after her.

  Together the family climbed the steep lane up to the monastery church to find a quiet place to talk, but they soon found that wouldn’t be easy: The noon mass had just concluded, and crowds of attendees came streaming toward them. Magdalena noticed the number of pilgrims was significantly larger than the day before. There were still five days left before the Festival of the Three Hosts, but already the streets around the monastery were as crowded as at a church fair.

  The pilgrims seemed to come from everywhere. Magdalena heard many strange German dialects—of which she knew only Swabian and Frankish—and saw that many pilgrims from individual villages stayed together in tight groups. There were poorly dressed day laborers, solid middle-class workers, and fat patricians who stepped delicately over steaming piles of horse manure, looking disgusted and holding up their trousers. Often someone would start singing a hymn, and the others would join in.

  “Come sinners, come now, see the true son of God…”

  Simon and the hangman took the kids on their backs to make their way through the crowds more easily. The air smelled of incense, fried fish, and dust from the road, and somewhere a boy was crying for his mother. Still, all the singing and praying made Magdalena feel peaceful.