The Poisoned Pilgrim_A Hangman's Daughter Tale

by Oliver Pötzsch

  As Simon entered the clinic, he was met by a dejected Jakob Schreevogl. The whole clinic stank of urine and garbage, Schreevogl’s jacket was smeared with sweat and dirt. The stress of the last few days was clearly visible in the face of the Schongau councilor.

  “We have another death to announce,” the patrician said softly.

  Simon’s heart skipped a beat. “Not Brother Laurentius, I hope?”

  Schreevogl shook his head. “It’s one of our Schongau masons, Andre Losch. God rest his soul.” He sighed deeply. “I still can’t believe it. Andre was such a bear of a man. Three days ago, he was carousing with the other master masons in the tavern and suddenly—”

  “Just a moment,” Simon interrupted. “In the tavern, you said?”

  Schreevogl nodded. “That’s right. All three were brought here with high fevers, along with the Twangler brothers, but Andre’s case was the worst.”

  Simon remembered now what had been bothering him during his conversation with the count. Leopold von Wartenberg mentioned his family had also dined in the monastery tavern.

  And only now did it occur to the medicus that other patients had been there as well—not just Losch, but little Martin and the Twangler brothers, too.

  Evidently many of the more well-to-do pilgrims had eaten there, and Simon could see now that the sickness seemed to especially affect those with means to eat there.

  He chewed his lower lip as he turned this over in his mind. Did the fever have some connection with the tavern? What could it be?

  Suddenly he had a terrible suspicion.

  “Master Schreevogl,” he said, turning to the councilor. “Could you do me a favor?”

  “And what would that be?”

  Quietly, so as not to waken the patients and start a panic, Simon told him.

  Schreevogl nodded, moved toward the door, then turned again to address the medicus. “If you’re really right,” he said softly, but with a dark undertone, “then at least one head will roll here, and this time it won’t be the poor apothecary’s.”

  Nepomuk Volkmar cowered in the pitch black of his cell, staring at his bloody fingers. Some were missing their nails, and the bloody stumps throbbed with a hellish pain.

  In theory, the apothecary was happy he was unable to see anything in the darkness—at least that relieved him of the torture of seeing his battered body. But new waves of pain kept coursing through him, and he knew that such agony would be his constant companion from then on.

  Master Hans had done a thorough job the day before. After he showed his victim the instruments of torture, as prescribed by law, he put Nepomuk in what they called the interrogation seat, a chair covered with spikes. His arms and legs were secured by iron clasps lined with spikes; even his feet were placed on a board of spikes. As the seated prisoner felt the spikes slowly cutting into his flesh, the pain followed quickly.

  After two hours of torture in the interrogation chair, Nepomuk still hadn’t confessed to any witchcraft, so Master Hans started pulling out the apothecary’s fingernails with a set of long tongs.

  It was then that Nepomuk’s screams were audible even in the square in front of the dungeon.

  But despite all the pain, the monk had remained strong, closing his eyes, praying, declaring his innocence, and thinking about the words of his friend Jakob Kuisl.

  No matter what happens, don’t confess. If you confess, it’s all over.

  How could anyone not confess, knowing this was only the beginning? That far worse torture would follow until he finally collapsed, wailing, and confessed to witchcraft? Nepomuk had watched some tortures at his father’s side—his father, the executioner of Reutling—and knew that victims yearned for death at some point. When they were finally dragged to the scaffold like animals to slaughter, there was often not much left of them but broken bones.

  Would he be able to keep silent after he, too, had been reduced to a whimpering bundle of flesh, yearning for his own death? How long would it take?

  Finally after hours of torture, he’d been dragged back to his cell. When the trapdoor slammed shut over him, he could only wait in the darkness for the next horror. Sleep was out of the question, so as the hours dragged by, Nepomuk tried to console himself with memories of better days. The melody of a fiddle; the rhythmic beat of drums before battle; the wild parties with the other mercenaries; the many practice battles with his only real friend, Jakob Kuisl; their conversations on long winter nights in burned-out barns or in the protection of storm-buffeted, half-ruined castles…

  “Where is your God, anyway?” Jakob asks as Nepomuk rubs the dirty rosary between his fingers. “Is he dead? I can’t see him; I can’t hear him.”

  “You can only believe in him,” Nepomuk answers.

  Jakob laughs softly, turning a sizzling rabbit on the spit as fat hisses and drips into the flames.

  “I believe in hard iron,” he says finally. “In laws, and in death.”

  “God is stronger than death, Jakob.”

  The son of the Schongau executioner watches his friend for a long time, then stomps off silently into the night.

  The next day they string up a half dozen outlaws together. As the bandits writhe about in the trees above, Jakob suddenly looks over to his friend as if still expecting an answer from him.

  Nepomuk remains silent.

  “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…”

  Sitting in his cell, mumbling softly, Nepomuk recited the eternal words of the rosary, hoping to rekindle an old faith that seemed to be slowly escaping through tiny cracks in the walls.

  “Blessed are thou amongst women, and blessed is…”

  A creak of the trapdoor above him caused Nepomuk’s heart to race. He knew they were coming to fetch him for another session. His tongue became as dry as a bone, and he suddenly felt himself start to shake.

  In fact it wasn’t long before the ladder was lowered down again. Since he was too weak to climb unassisted, one of the watchmen descended and tied a rope around his waist. Then the men overhead all pulled together, hauling him up like a fish wiggling on a hook.

  “Save your strength,” a familiar voice said. “You’ll need it.” It was Master Hans, standing next to the trapdoor above with his arms crossed, looking like a white-haired avenging angel. With bloodshot eyes, the Weilheim executioner examined his victim, then checked him all over for broken bones. Nepomuk knew that Master Hans, like so many other executioners, was also considered an excellent healer. It was his job to ensure the prisoner was fit for further torture.

  “Listen up,” Master Hans began, almost sounding compassionate as he probed Nepomuk like a piece of raw meat. “You know I make good money every day I torture you, so I should really be happy you held up so well yesterday. On the other hand…” He studied Nepomuk’s swollen, bloody fingers, as if checking over his own work once more. “On the other hand, it’s my duty to tell you that your denials are pointless. Believe me, you’ll confess eventually—any other outcome would damage my reputation. So don’t make it so hard on yourself.” He brought his lips right up to Nepomuk’s ear. “You said that you yourself come from a hangman’s family, so you must know all this better than I, dear cousin.”

  Laughing, the executioner gave Nepomuk a friendly pat on the shoulder. Then he closed the spiked iron clamp around the monk’s neck, and the guards pushed him through a hallway illuminated by torches.

  “Today, you’ll have a special guest,” Master Hans said as he led the contingent down the passageway with a lantern. “Count von Cäsana und Colle is tired of leading the questioning and would prefer to go hunting. So would I, if I had the time and money.” The Weilheim executioner shook his head scornfully. “The noble gentleman looked pale as a ghost yesterday when I pulled out your fingernails.” Softly he added, “This is nothing for such a spoiled man accustomed to white bread. He was that way the last time, too. The only blood the count can bear to look at is deer’s blood.”

  “Who’s coming in his place?” Nep
omuk gasped as the iron spikes dug into his neck. He had the quiet hope a more moderate jurist from Munich might be more interested in truth than in magic. The two witnesses were obsequious Weilheim aldermen who would do anything the count asked. Perhaps they could be swayed for the better by a scholar from the city.

  “You know him,” Master Hans responded after a while. “The count himself chose him for this job, to give him a chance to earn his stripes, so to speak.”

  In the meantime, they’d reached the entrance to the torture chamber. The executioner opened the door, and the bailiffs pulled Nepomuk into a dark room illuminated only by a crackling fire in an iron bowl. Just as in his cell before, the apothecary was overcome by uncontrollable shaking. His eyes wandered over the interrogation chair, still bloody from the day before, the rack, and the winch with which Master Hans would no doubt be hoisting him up until his tendons snapped like dry ropes.

  On the right side of the room was a wide table with an inkpot, some rolls of paper, and a heavy book on top. Three men sat behind the table, two of them the portly Weilheim aldermen whom Nepomuk had met the day before. The two chubby men, wrapped in expensive clothing, glared at him with a mixture of disgust, fear, and curiosity—almost as if they expected the sorcerer to fly away.

  The third man sat upright on the chair between them. When Nepomuk recognized him in the light of the crackling fire, he started shaking harder, fell to his knees, and folded his hands in prayer.

  “Please, Brother,” he pleaded. “You must believe me. This is all an—”

  “Don’t get any false hopes,” the third man interrupted. “I’m no longer your Brother, but your inquisitor. The Weilheim judge assigned me this unpleasant task in view of the need to soon fill a higher position. Our monastery urgently needs a new abbot.”

  The eyes of the Andechs prior flashed icily, like two marbles, as he turned and nodded to Master Hans. “Executioner,” Brother Jeremias said, “we wish to begin the interrogation. The sooner he confesses, the better.”

  14

  ANDECHS, THE EVENING OF SATURDAY, JUNE 19, 1666 AD

  SIMON SAT HUNCHED up on a rough-hewn chair at the bedside of Brother Laurentius, sadly observing the priest’s burned, disfigured body.

  The monk’s condition was unchanged. The many burns on his face, back, and legs were festering so that the bandages had to be changed frequently. The young monk’s face was covered; all that could be seen beneath the bandages were his nose and eyes. He groaned, and occasionally one of his fingers quivered, but otherwise there was no sign of life—he looked more like a mummy now than anything human.

  Simon bent over him compassionately and took his hand. Brother Laurentius seemed to feel the touch, and his breathing became more measured. Suddenly there was a sound from beneath the bandages—some mumbled, at first incomprehensible words.

  “Brother,” Simon said softly. “If you wish to tell me something…”

  “He’s… alive…” said a muffled voice from beneath the blankets. “Down in the catacombs… I’ve… I’ve… seen him.”

  “The puppet is alive?” Simon cringed. “But how is that possible? Who’s behind this, Laurentius? Say something, please. It’s very important.”

  “The… hosts. He… needs the hosts…” The Brother’s mumbling turned into an incomprehensible death rattle. Reaching up with his right hand, he grabbed Simon by the collar and pulled him down so that the medicus could smell his burnt flesh. Disgusted, Simon noticed a strong odor like that of a roasted pig.

  “Thunder and lightning! Thunder and Lightning! Stop him before the fire comes down from heaven. The fire!”

  With a final scream, the Brother doubled up, his grip around Simon’s neck loosening, and fell back on the bed, lifeless.

  “Brother Laurentius. Brother Laurentius!”

  Simon felt in vain for a pulse. Frantically he pulled a small, polished copper disk from his doctor’s bag and held it under Laurentius’s nose. When the disk finally misted up, the medicus leaned back, relieved. The Brother was breathing, even if very shallowly. No doubt he would soon pass away; Simon could only hope he would regain consciousness before that and say something. What in the world had Laurentius meant by those strange words?

  Thunder and lightning. Thunder and Lightning. Stop him before the fire comes down from heaven.

  The medicus took a deep breath and tried to calm down. Evidently Laurentius had seen the watchmaker’s automaton in the subterranean passageways of the former castle. His confused mumblings seemed to suggest this automaton or golem was still alive and that it had something to do with the three hosts. The medicus remembered that special magic numbers and incantations were required to summon a golem. Perhaps hosts, as well?

  Simon shook his head reluctantly. All that just couldn’t be true. Simon was an enlightened person of the new era, the time after the Great War. He believed in mechanics and empirical knowledge, not in magic formulas and golems. But what if science was wrong? What if there really was something like a physical, living devil? Had Virgilius perhaps created an automaton that could move according to the laws of mechanics, as well as think and… kill? Had the automaton killed its own creator?

  Then burned him and thrown him into a well? How could that be?

  Once more Simon checked Laurentius’s pulse, which had returned, though it was still weak. The monk had fallen into a death-like sleep; not even the tips of his fingers quivered beneath the bandages anymore.

  Other patients moaned from nearby beds, but Simon doubted they’d heard any of this strange talk. Nor had the pilgrims, still singing and praying outside the door. The medicus thought about Kuisl’s warning that the sorcerer, or perhaps one of his accomplices, could enter the clinic in the next few hours to kill the troublesome monk.

  If he waits just a bit longer, he can save himself the trouble, Simon thought. Laurentius doesn’t have long to live. It’s time to give him last rites.

  To take his mind off this, Simon reached for the Andechs chronicle, which he’d wrapped in a dirty towel and hidden under one of the beds. He leafed through the little book until he got to the place describing the old castle. Perhaps he could find some information here about the subterranean passageways depicted on the count’s map.

  Until now, Simon had read only that the castle had fallen due to “cowardly, vile treason.” Another chapter dealt in more detail with this. Evidently the Andechs-Meranier had been the leading family of nobles in Bavaria many hundreds of years ago, until suddenly the Wittelsbachs seized power.

  Simon immersed himself in the tiny, spidery flourishes that described how, at a wedding in Bamberg in the year 1208, the Wittelsbach Duke Otto had murdered the Staufer King Philipp, a son of the famous Emperor Barbarossa. Details of the murder were evidently never completely clear—only that Otto was declared an outlaw, arrested in Oberndorf near Kelheim, and beheaded on the spot.

  Simon started turning pages, then stopped short. In the investigation of King Philipp’s murder, it was not the Wittelsbachs who were charged with conspiracy, but the Andechs. All their property was confiscated and given to the Wittelsbachs, among them the Andechs castle that was stormed after many long battles, and razed. The chronicle described the conquest of the ancestral castle in dramatic detail.

  Lost in thought, the medicus was transported back into the past, to a world hundreds of years ago that came back to life in the pithy Latin text. As so often when he was reading, Simon became lost in the images conjured up in his mind. Suddenly he thought he could see the armor glinting in the sunlight, the cries of the attackers, and smell the blood and horse sweat in the air as the castle was stormed. Simon was sitting there, in his chair in the year 1666, but at the same time he was carried back more than four hundred years. His lips moved silently as his fingers followed the lines…

  The battlements rise over the mighty fortress high above the Kien Valley. Atop the parapets, the defenders run excitedly back and forth while below the Wittelsbach foot soldiers and knights gather in a cl
earing along the moat, preparing for the final assault. For weeks they have laid siege to their enemy’s castle, catapulting hundred-pound rocks at it and ramming the entrance again and again as fire, pitch, and sulfur rained down on them. Their sappers have dug passageways directly under the walls of the fortress. Many have died, and even more, tormented by fever and gangrene, writhe in pain in their tents, which look like red pustules in the cleared forest land.

  They yearn for the death of their enemy and know the day of vengeance is at hand.

  The traitor had cost them a lot of money, but he told them where the escape tunnel was; this was how the beleaguered defenders were able to smuggle fresh meat, flour, and wine into the castle—not enough to provide for the entire garrison, but enough to hold out for the last few months.

  That would all come to an end today.

  A small elite group of fighters set out through the tunnel into the castle. Silently they slashed the throats of the guards, leaving a trail of blood and gore beneath the castle and up into the courtyard. Now they can be heard screaming inside the castle, attacking the guards at the gate, shoving aside the three huge beams that bar the entrance, and finally opening the heavy door, leaving the way clear for the over three hundred warriors who have been waiting outside for just this moment.

  A cry of many voices arises, as loud as if the earth itself were opening up and calling for revenge.

  And then the killing begins.

  The men who stagger toward them from the castle courtyard with uplifted swords are also weakened by disease and hunger. Only a few dozen have held out, and they are cut down like dogs.

  “Death to all the Andechs!” the attackers cry, their eyes like those of wild animals. “Death, death, death!”

  Blood flows over the stone steps, and the men keep slipping and falling, but driven by their hatred and lust, they wander from room to room looking for women, wine, food, and treasure. They were promised treasures, but where are the damned treasures? The Wittelsbach duke told them there were more precious objects here than in the entire Holy Land. The gold they could keep; all the duke wanted for himself were the many relics.