The Master's Apprentice, page 46
part #1 of Faust Series
“Are you perhaps going to a bordello after all?” asked Karl, who was used to his master not telling him where he was going. “The Hamburg whores are famous. It might prove a pleasant distraction for you.”
Johann shrugged. “Indeed, I am frequenting a house that brings me pleasure—even if it isn’t the kind of pleasure you’re imagining. Oh, and by the way, when I return, you’ll have brewed two dozen bottles of theriac. Those seamen drink like fish. And remember the glass painting of the pirate. I want it done by tomorrow.” With those words, he left and headed into town.
Johann followed the stinking canals until he came to the city hall by the Trostbrücke Bridge. The city hall was a redbrick building multiple stories high, and he’d visited it several times in the last few days. A small side entrance led to a flight of stairs. A little man sat behind a desk on the second floor, nodding happily at Johann.
“Ah, the famous scholar Doctor Faustus,” he said and adjusted his monocle. “Yes, yes, always on the hunt for fresh knowledge. And everyone knows that studying the papers leads to a dry throat.”
Like every other day, Johann handed the man a bottle of theriac. “I haven’t even studied half of your books yet,” he grumbled. “If you continue to drink at this pace, I’ll soon be out of theriac for my shows.”
The bald, scrawny old man in his fur-lined coat and dirty beret grinned with a toothless mouth. “Well, a few drunken spectators less won’t hurt. What does it matter—when the door to the world of knowledge is wide open!”
He pulled a long key from his pocket and opened the door behind him. On the other side was a high-ceilinged room with bookshelves reaching from top to bottom. Ladders provided access to the books on the highest shelves. The boards were bending under the weight of the books and parchment scrolls, and the air smelled musty and leathery. To Johann the scent was like violets. The little man made a sweeping gesture. “This library is yours, venerable Doctor—at least until the bells strike six. Then my shift is over.” He closed the door behind Johann.
Johann looked around reverently. He still struggled to believe he was the only person in this room, just like the days before. That night near Wittenberge by the Elbe, when he’d seen the dark figure, he’d remembered something from fifteen years ago. Magister Archibaldus came from Hamburg, and on their journey to Venice he’d told Johann about a library. The Hamburg Ratsbibliothek was the only public library in the entire German empire. Usually such hoards of knowledge were in private ownership of universities or monasteries whose abbots would never grant entry to the alleged sorcerer and necromancer Doctor Johann Georg Faustus. Here, however, he was free to browse for as long as he liked. The Ratsbibliothek was bigger than the library at the monastery in Maulbronn that he used to visit with Father Antonius, and bigger than that of the creepy Signore Barbarese in Venice. The Hamburg library held many ecclesiastical works but also many secular ones—philosophical treatises as well as Greek dramas and scientific books. Johann had even found some notes by Leonardo da Vinci.
But what he was really after was works on astronomy that would help him with his calculations for the day of his birth. He’d been born on a day when Jupiter and the sun had stood in the same degree of the same zodiac. While that was a little unusual, it wasn’t anything extraordinary; many people were born beneath the same constellation because it occurred several times a year. So what was the secret of his birth?
So far he had found several writings by an astronomer named Heinrich von Langenstein, from Vienna, and also a book by Roger Bacon in which the well-known English Franciscan described the construction of a camera obscura for observation of the sun. But none of the books had told him why his date of birth was particularly blessed by the stars. Johann hadn’t found any more on Gilles de Rais, either, nor had he found the name Tonio del Moravia in any of the documents.
Johann slowly walked along the rows of books and studied the titles. After a few moments of deliberation, he chose a book he thought sounded promising. It was written by a certain Johannes Müller and, among other topics, discussed the question whether the sun was indeed rotating around the Earth, or whether perhaps the Earth was rotating around the sun. It was a fascinating thought, which Father Bernhard back in Knittlingen had told him about and which was increasingly discussed in scholarly circles these days. Johann carried the book to a desk and started to read. It was very interesting, but it didn’t help him in his quest. He was about to put it back on the shelf when he noticed another manuscript on the desk. It had been hidden under some loose pages of parchment, as if someone was in the middle of making a copy. Johann’s eyes scanned the title and author.
De Occulta Philosophia by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim.
Johann frowned. He had heard of this Agrippa. A clever man who’d apparently studied at the University of Cologne and about whose sharp mind Johann had encountered a few tales. They said he completed his baccalaureus at just fourteen years old, was fluent in eight languages, and despite his young age was already more learned than most doctors in the empire. These days he was lecturing in Cologne whenever he wasn’t traveling the country at the invitations of the rich and powerful. Agrippa hadn’t made a lot of friends among the clergy with his witty speeches.
Much to his surprise, Johann felt a twinge of jealousy. This Agrippa might actually see eye to eye with him. An equal in a world where true knowledge still struggled in the face of old-fashioned scholasticism and bigotry.
With growing curiosity Johann studied the pages of the manuscript, which had been written in a neat, very small hand. After a few lines he was so engrossed in the work that he forgot everything around him. It was like a miracle! This writ systematically combined all known areas of magic, from chiromancy and astrology to alchemy. Everything that Johann had been taught by Tonio and everything he’d taught himself thereafter was written right here in Latin. How had this Agrippa gained his immense knowledge? A man required decades to learn all this. Johann glanced over the pages and his heart beat faster. This was the best book he’d ever read! It was brilliantly written and blessed with an insight that elevated magic to the same level as faith and science. The astrological observations, too, went further than anything Johann had known until then. He leafed through the manuscript wildly and found to his horror that he was holding only about fifty measly pages.
The book finished before it had properly begun—and the author grandly promised a work of three volumes.
Where on earth?
Johann raced along the other desks and past the rows of shelves. Eventually he picked up the manuscript, opened the door, and waved the pages under the surprised librarian’s nose.
“Where is the rest?” he asked curtly.
“The rest of what?” The little man put on his monocle and studied the pages. Then his face lit up. “Oh, that! Interesting, isn’t it? A merchant on his way back from England dropped it off yesterday. Apparently Agrippa was in London at the behest of the emperor, and that’s where the merchant met him and bought these pages from him. I was going to copy them today. A highly—”
“Where is the rest?” repeated Johann.
The man sighed. “There is no rest. This is all the merchant brought me. He said Agrippa was still working on it.”
Johann closed his eyes for a moment. For the first time in a long while he had the feeling he wasn’t running in circles.
“I’m buying these pages,” he said. “How much?”
“They aren’t for sale. I’d have to make a copy—”
“I don’t have time for that.” Johann placed a gold ducat on the desk. It was the most valuable coin he owned. A fat Erfurt merchant had given it to him for a favorable nativity chart.
The librarian’s eyes widened. “You could buy two dozen books for that!”
“I only want this one manuscript. And now excuse me.”
Clutching the pages in his hand, Johann hurried outside and ran across the square and through the city gate toward the Elbe.
He was so lost in thought that he didn’t notice the figure that entered the Ratsbibliothek the moment he had left it.
At the end of his shift, the librarian had earned three gold ducats: one from that strange Doctor Faustus everyone was talking about, and two more from a man who wanted answers to a few questions and whom the librarian tried to forget as quickly as possible.
By the end of the day all the little man could say about the strange visitor was that his coat—his whole appearance, in fact—had been as black as the night.
Only his eyes seemed to have glowed eerily.
Down by the port, Karl Wagner sat at a wobbly table inside the wagon and painted the beard of a pirate. Not much light came in through the curtain behind the box seat, and the tallow candles smoked terribly, so that Karl was forced to lean closely over the glass plate. He was working with very fine brushes and had to consider each stroke carefully, since the paintings on the glass plates were so small. Karl thought about the famous Nuremberg painter Albrecht Dürer, who probably let his creativity run wild on canvases as tall as a man, while he himself was painting pirate beards the size of a fingernail.
Satan was lying at his feet and growled at every little movement. Karl was increasingly under the impression that the dog wasn’t guarding the wagon but him. If he tried to leave the wagon, Satan would probably tear him to pieces. Karl hated the mastiff, but he knew that his master loved her more than anything—and more than anyone. Just then Satan bared her teeth at him again, and Karl gave a strained smile.
“Lousy old mutt,” he said and kept smiling. “I guess you love me about as much as I love you. We must get along, though, whether we like it or not. So you better sit like a good dog or there won’t be any treats.”
He tossed the tip of a sausage to Satan, appeasing the dog for the moment.
Karl tiredly rubbed his eyes and stretched his back. Outside he could hear the sounds of the river: the shouts of the seamen, the ringing of ship bells, the mocking cries of the gulls that had flown inland from the ocean shores.
Karl painted inside the wagon to avoid curious gossips, and for that purpose he’d had a little table made in Wittenberge. He’d grown tired of getting hardly any work done because of all the questions people badgered him with. The pirate he was painting today was Klaus Störtebeker, a bloodthirsty villain who was executed a long time ago. Folks were still telling ghost stories about him. According to legend, after Störtebeker was decapitated he walked past eleven of his men before the hangman tripped him.
Karl sighed and continued his work. Starting tomorrow, the doctor had rented a hall in town where they were going to show the famous Störtebeker with the laterna magica. He hoped he’d manage to capture this accursed pirate on the glass plate by then. He’d spent half the afternoon brewing that stinking theriac. Part of the job was to get up early in the morning and head to Grasbrook Island to pick mint, wormwood, and wild fennel.
Once again doubts crept into Karl’s mind as to whether he had chosen the right path. Of course, Doctor Faustus had saved his life, and Karl owed him gratitude. And the man was famous—across the entire empire and beyond. But by now they’d been traveling together for almost a whole year, and the doctor was becoming more frightening by the day. Karl had found many strange books in one of the chests and begun to read them in his lonely hours, even though he didn’t fully understand them. The doctor had never told him what he used to do before he took up exploring the empire, but something told Karl that Faust had a dark past, as if he’d been cursed a long time ago. Was that the price he’d had to pay for wealth and fame?
Dabbing his brush very gently, Karl gave the pirate a dashing hat. Störtebeker’s gaze was both furious and mysterious at once—as mysterious as that of the doctor, who was on his way to becoming just as legendary as this buccaneer.
Doctor Faustus called himself a fraud, but Karl knew he was much more than that. Faust was the most learned man he’d ever met, blessed with a razor-sharp mind, and open to anything new. Karl worshipped the doctor—probably more than he cared to admit—but he was also afraid of him. Faust sometimes had horrendous fits of rage, and he could be arrogant and awfully sarcastic. And then there were the screams in the night.
The screams at night frightened Karl the most.
They frequently shared a room, and sometimes, when Karl stayed awake for longer than the doctor, he heard him mutter and groan in his sleep. He also cried and sighed in his dreams and repeated the same names over and over again: Margarethe, Martin, Tonio, Gilles de Rais.
The last name, especially, Faust said many times in his sleep.
On top of everything else, the doctor clearly suffered from paranoia, and it was only getting worse. During their trip north he’d often turned around to check the road behind them or stared at the birds in the sky. It was almost as if Faust feared that the birds were watching them. However, Karl had to admit that there had been a few strange occurrences lately. The black figure with the red eyes outside the Erfurt tavern window, for example. And twice more he thought he’d seen the same figure on their journey north, standing among the trees by the wayside. But he hadn’t said anything to the doctor for fear of adding to his paranoia.
Karl had learned more from Faust than he ever would have learned at a university. In Leipzig he was nothing but the son of an ambitious father whom he’d never have pleased. Karl had loved his mother very dearly, but she’d passed away years before. Now, on his adventures with the doctor, he was becoming a man. Still, he had made up his mind that he wouldn’t travel with the doctor forever. He felt that the heavy melancholy clinging to his master was rubbing off on him. He was going to stay with him for one more winter and then leave in the spring. He no longer cared about those stupid letters—his duty was done.
A movement by the curtain made Karl start from his thoughts. The brush jerked and the awe-inspiring sword he’d been working on turned into a long smudge. Karl swore. Now he’d have to start from the beginning. Below the table, Satan growled and pricked her ears.
“Who’s there?” asked Karl harshly. “The doctor is in town. Come back tomorrow.”
“Is there going to be another show tomorrow?” asked a high-pitched male voice. “I would so love to see the doctor one more time. And . . . and you, too.”
“Me?” Something in the voice piqued Karl’s interest. He threw Satan the bone that was supposed to go into the soup for dinner, stood up, and opened the curtain. A handsome boy of about sixteen or seventeen was standing beside the wagon. Karl had noticed him in the last few days—the chap hadn’t missed a show. Their eyes had met in a way Karl knew well.
They always knew each other by their eyes.
The youth smiled uncertainly. He was pale and had fine black hair. Judging by his clothes, he was a simple dockworker, although his delicate stature didn’t really fit the picture. His eyelashes were as long as a girl’s. Karl carefully looked around. It was quiet by the river at the moment. About a stone’s throw away, some day laborers were loading crates into a smaller boat that was probably headed for the Alster port, but none of them were looking in their direction. Karl hesitated, but not for long. The doctor wouldn’t be back before six—they had enough time.
“Come in,” he said and gestured behind himself, winking at the youth. “I want to show you something.”
“But . . . but the dog?” the boy asked anxiously and peered through the curtain, where Satan was chewing on the bone.
“It won’t hurt you. Not as long as I keep feeding it my dinner, anyhow. Come on in—you have nothing to fear.”
The boy did as he was asked. He climbed inside the wagon and looked at everything with curiosity: the dried herbs dangling from the ceiling, and the many crates and chests, some of which stood open, revealing their mysterious contents. When his gaze fell upon the glass plate on the table, he giggled like a girl.
“Oh, that must be Störtebeker. Am I right? You’ve captured him well!”
“Thank you.” Karl was also smiling now. “We’re going to show him with our laterna magica.”
“With your laterna what?” The youth’s eyes grew wide.
“Well, it’s an apparatus that allows us to make images appear against a wall,” explained Karl patronizingly. “And I paint the pictures. I’ve even drawn the pope and the emperor. I’m a painter,” he added unnecessarily. “Just like Leonardo da Vinci or Albrecht Dürer. Do you know Dürer?”
The youth shook his head.
“I copied his horsemen of the apocalypse,” said Karl. “Well, to be honest, I reinterpreted the work. I don’t think I’ve done too badly. Some even say it is better than the original.”
The young lad continued to stare at the glass plate. He reverently ran his finger along the edge of the miniature painting. “These must be very valuable.”
“What’s your name, boy?” asked Karl, trying to change the subject.
The youth took a bow. “Sebastian, sir.”
Karl laughed. “You don’t need to call me sir—I’m not much older than you. Sebastian is a beautiful name.” He winked at him. “And Saint Sebastian was a beautiful man. As handsome as you,” he added softly.
By now he felt certain that the boy was here for a particular reason. Karl couldn’t say whether it was the boy’s own desire or whether he was hoping for money, but at the end of the day it didn’t matter. Several times over the last few months he’d met with young men, and while Faust probably had his suspicions, Karl didn’t think he noticed anything. Mostly they’d been hasty encounters beneath bridges or in the bushes. There were boys like this one in every town—one only had to find them. They were all connected by their fear of discovery. Good, upright citizens had almost less sympathy for sodomites than they had for heretics, Jews, and well poisoners.
The dainty young man turned away and started to rummage through the chests. “Those are juggling balls, right?” He pulled out one red and one golden leather ball and tried to juggle them. The balls fell to the ground and he laughed.
