The Master's Apprentice, page 9
part #1 of Faust Series
The pond!
He jumped off the boulder and ran toward the water.
“Wait!” called Margarethe after him. Her hair was full of bits of bark and moss from the cave, her face filled with anguish. All the feelings of happiness they’d shared a few moments before had vanished. “Where are you going? Don’t leave me alone!”
But Johann didn’t listen. He ran to the pond and jumped into the murky water, which didn’t feel nearly as warm as an hour or two ago. Martin couldn’t swim. The water wasn’t more than waist deep, but Johann knew that was enough for someone to drown in. Just the year before, the smith’s three-year-old son had drowned like a rat in the shallow city moat. His older sister had taken her eyes off him for only an instant.
“Martin! Martin!”
Panicked, Johann trudged through the pond, waving his arms back and forth in the water and hitting countless sticks with his feet on the slimy bottom. But he couldn’t see Martin anywhere. Margarethe arrived at the pond, panting.
“Do you think he might have gone home without us?” she asked.
“Never! He was much too frightened. You heard what he said about the boogeyman!”
Suddenly Johann remembered the drawing on the rock—a bearded man with horns like a billy goat.
Horns of the devil.
Fear gnawed at Johann’s stomach like a small animal.
“We have to search for him!” he shouted. “He . . . he must be somewhere in the woods!”
Again he rushed off without waiting for Margarethe. The entire clearing lay in the shade now; only the tip of the highest boulder still bore a patch of sunlight. The place Johann had found so peaceful earlier now seemed gloomy and menacing.
When Johann entered the forest, he realized how late it had become. Here, among the fir trees, night had already fallen. The trunks were black lines and the space in between was foggy gray twilight, and Johann could barely make out the ground. He stumbled and fell over roots and shrubs several times but got back to his feet and pressed on every time. He had promised to look after his little brother, and now Martin had disappeared. Swallowed up by this forest!
Or by something unspeakably evil.
“Johann! Johann! Wait for me!”
Margarethe’s voice rang out behind him, sounding scared and quite far away now. Johann stopped, gasping for breath. It was completely pointless! The forest was huge. He’d never find his brother this way.
“Martin!” he shouted into the twilight. “Martin, can you hear me? Where are you?”
But he received no reply.
Instead, he heard something else.
It was a soft whimpering, a plaintive moaning that seemed to come from the trees themselves, or the fog surrounding them. Johann froze.
“Martin?” he croaked. His voice almost failed him. “Martin, is . . . is that you?”
It was impossible to tell where the sound was coming from; it seemed to come from all directions at the same time. Johann knew it could be difficult to rely on one’s hearing for orientation in the forest. The Knittlingen prefect sometimes held hunts in Schillingswald Forest, and Johann had helped as a beater before. The beaters flushed small game out of their hiding places by swinging sticks and shouting, but they always stayed within sight of each other. They knew how quickly the woods could play tricks on you.
Johann held his breath and listened intently. He felt certain now. What he was hearing was the whimpering of a child.
“Martin!” he shouted into the darkness. “I can hear you! Where are you?”
Suddenly there was a piercing scream somewhere behind him. Johann thought it was Martin. But then he heard Margarethe’s voice. She sounded frightened.
“Oh my God, go away, go away!” Her voice became more and more shrill, and she sounded scared to death. Johann had never heard Margarethe scream like this before.
“Margarethe!” he called out. “What is it?”
“Away, away, away!” she screamed again, high pitched, almost like an animal. And the forest echoed Margarethe’s screams tenfold.
Away . . . away . . . away . . .
Johann spun around in panic. What was going on? Who or what else was in the forest with them?
“Margarethe?” he shouted again, and the trees seemed to swallow his calls. “Margarethe! Where are you?”
The screams had come from the clearing, he thought. Johann decided to look for her there. She was in danger! He picked up a solid branch and headed back. It seemed to be getting darker by the moment. Trees and background blended to a blackish gray. Johann kept running. Where was the damned clearing? There! He could see a spot that seemed a little lighter than the rest. Holding the cudgel tightly, Johann sped up and soon found the clearing.
But there was no sign of Margarethe or the mysterious attacker.
The screams and the whimpering had stopped. It was utterly still; even the birds had stopped singing, as if they waited for a signal.
“Margarethe!” shouted Johann. “Martin!” And he kept shouting, more and more desperate: “Margarethe, Martin! Margarethe, Martin!”
Ducks quacked by the pond and flapped their wings. Apart from that, Johann heard only his own voice as a jarring echo, as if an insane doppelgänger mocked him.
Margarethe . . . Martin . . . Margarethe . . . Martin . . . Margarethe . . . Martin . . .
The boulders were completely black now, like ink or blood seeping into the clearing.
Johann was gripped by an unspeakable fear.
He turned around and ran like never before in his life, racing along the stream. He stumbled and fell, got back to his feet, fell again, and kept running, out of breath, unable to form a single clear thought. All he heard were the thuds of his feet on the forest floor, the wind in the treetops above him, and the echo of his own voice inside him.
Margarethe . . . Martin . . . Margarethe . . . Martin . . . Margarethe . . . Martin . . .
Then suddenly there was more light and he staggered out into the fields. The lights of Knittlingen glowed warmly on the far side of the fields, and he could hear cheerful music coming from the fair.
Johann broke down crying.
He had made it out of the woods. But the only two people in the world he loved and whom he’d sworn to protect hadn’t. Something evil lurking in the depths of the forest had taken them.
4
JOHANN SAT AT the table in the perfect’s house and felt the eyes of the people in the room on him like daggers. They all glowered at him in silence, except Margarethe’s mother, who was crying softly in the background.
“So you ran away,” said Jörg Gerlach angrily, repeating what Johann had just told them in a trembling voice outside at the fair. “You left your little brother and Margarethe alone in the forest and ran away like a frightened rabbit. Not only did you disregard my order to stay inside the city walls, but you also acted cowardly! You . . . you . . .” Trembling with rage, he raised his hand to strike Johann, but the prefect stopped him.
“Leave it, Jörg,” he said. “It’s important that we find out what exactly happened.”
Unlike Johann’s father, the prefect was a level-headed man. Grief for his son had painted dark rings around his eyes. The news that now his daughter—his only remaining child—had gone missing had turned his face even more gray and wrinkled. He looked more dead than alive. Johann had found him and his own father at the fair and told them in brief, broken words what had happened. Jörg Gerlach had grabbed his son by the arm, and together with a handful of other men, including the priest and the bailiff, they’d gone to the prefect’s house to question Johann.
“You’re saying there was someone else in the forest with you?” asked the prefect.
Johann nodded uncertainly. “At least, I . . . I think so.”
“What do you mean, you think so?” snarled his father. “Speak plainly!”
“Margarethe kept shouting ‘Go away!’ and I heard a whimpering.”
“A whimpering? The boy’s out of his mind!” said the bailiff.
As the head of the city watch, the serious old man was in charge of the questioning. They were sitting around the table in the living room. No one touched the full jugs of wine in front of them.
“It could be robbers living in the woods,” the blacksmith suggested. “I heard them talking about a band of highwaymen in Tiefenbach waylaying carriages. Not even the imperial road is safe any longer!”
“Let us send out men with torches immediately!” said the prefect. “We have to find our children—now, before it’s too late!”
“And what about the boy?” asked the priest, studying Johann, who was shivering all over. “He still seems to be out of his senses.”
“Put him in the hole!” ordered Gerlach. “Maybe it’ll help him remember what really happened—it has worked for others. And it’s still a mild punishment for what he’s done.”
The bailiff hesitated at first but then nodded. “You’re right, Jörg. Perhaps he’ll come to his senses and then he can tell us the truth.”
They took Johann, who was unsteady on his feet, by the arms and walked him to the prefecture’s tower, which stood at the far end of the courtyard. The prison room was a dark, musty chamber with one tiny, barred window and a heavy, iron-studded door, which crashed shut behind him. Johann was alone. Soon he could hear the shouts of men outside and dogs barking—the search had begun. They would comb the forest the same way they did during a hunt, including the clearing Johann had described to them. He hoped and prayed they would find Margarethe and Martin. But deep down inside he felt that the two had gone forever, like the other children before them.
Johann’s knees buckled.
Racked by silent fits of crying, he sank onto the dirt floor. Until then, a shell of fear and shock had enclosed him. He’d replied to the men’s questions like a puppet, but now an icy wave of reality came crashing over him. He had sinned gravely, and prison really did seem like a mild punishment for his crimes. How could he have run away and left Margarethe and Martin behind? What had possessed him to do such a thing? No one had attacked him or pursued him. Everything that had seemed like the most wonderful thing in the world before—Margarethe’s kiss, touching her body all over, their whispers and moans—all that seemed dirty and bad to him now. Perhaps the church was right to condemn lust as the tool of the devil, because the two of them seemed to have called upon the devil, upon pure evil, with their doings.
He had been punished by God.
Johann desperately tried to figure out what had happened in the forest. Had there been outlaws about, like the blacksmith suspected? The whimpering could have come from Martin with someone holding a hand over his mouth. Margarethe fought back and shouted, “Go away,” so it would seem there was only one assailant, not several. He would have stood a chance against one man! He should have at least tried, instead of running like a chicken. The devil’s face etched into the rock, Margarethe’s screams, the twilight, the whimpering—everything had frightened him so much that he’d panicked.
The whimpering . . .
An old memory rose to the surface.
The wagon . . . The cage with the raven and the crows . . . The canvas billowing in the wind . . .
He’d heard a similar kind of whimpering before, eight years ago, when the magician was leaving town with his wagon. Could Tonio be behind all this? One misfortune after the other had occurred since the man had returned to Knittlingen. First he had made Johann wish for Ludwig’s death, whereupon it became reality. And now Martin and Margarethe had gone missing in Schillingswald Forest. Johann realized he hadn’t seen Tonio at the fair.
Because he was in the forest?
Of course Johann knew that children and youths were abducted from time to time. There were horror stories of hungry outcasts, of lunatics and wild men who caught little children and ate them. But Johann didn’t really believe that part. The poor souls were probably sold to the highest bidder and spent the rest of their days as mine workers below ground, as slaves in faraway countries, or as child harlots. But the suspects were always gangs of robbers—a single man with a child would be too conspicuous. Tonio’s presence in town and the terrible events could only be a stupid coincidence.
Johann huddled down in a corner of the prison chamber and thought about his life. Faustus, his mother had called him, the lucky one. The name had never seemed more wrong to him as in this dark hour. All his cleverness, his wit, his thirst for knowledge had led him not to the top, but into this abyss with no way out.
Time passed very slowly. Every now and then he could hear shouts and the barking of dogs in the distance. Half of Knittlingen was probably out in the forest, while he, the coward, the loser, was sitting in the hole.
When the first twilight broke through the dark of night, the shouts and barking suddenly became louder. The men were coming back. Soon afterward, heavy footsteps approached the door to his cell, then the bolt was pushed back and the door opened. The gray rectangle was filled by the bailiff, his coat ripped and muddy at the hem, his face damp with sweat and dew. But the man smiled as he lifted a lantern to illuminate Johann’s face.
“Good news, boy,” he said. “At least the prefect won’t bite off your head now. They found Margarethe.”
It would be a whole week before Johann was allowed to see Margarethe.
During that time, the people of Knittlingen—adults as well as children—acted as though he weren’t there. When he returned to the grape harvest in the vineyards, they avoided him. He worked by himself among the almost-bare vines, and when he carried his full basket to the carts, the farmers stared at him in silence and spat on the ground. As soon as he walked away, they whispered behind his back. Johann was too ashamed to go to Maulbronn. Surely Father Antonius would shake his head at a boy who first lost the medicine for his deathly ill mother and then failed to help his little brother and his friend.
Martin remained missing, and the hope of finding him alive dwindled with every passing day.
The fair came to an end, and the jugglers and merchants left Knittlingen. Tonio the magician must have departed earlier—his wagon hadn’t been parked outside the Lion for a while now. Hans Harschauber, the innkeeper and one of the few people who still talked to Johann, told him that the itinerant astrologer had indeed left town the morning of the first day of the fair.
Meanwhile, a group of men led by Jörg Gerlach and the prefect continued to search for Martin. They combed the forest with dogs almost as far as the Black Forest and past Bruchsal. They sent messengers to villages and towns near and far, but it was as if the earth had swallowed the boy. All that was found of Martin was a small, crudely carved wooden shoe lying near the clearing.
The worst were the evenings and nights at home. Neither his father nor his brothers, not even the maids, spoke with Johann. His bowl with soup or barley porridge was put in front of him in silence, and he wasn’t included in the mealtime prayers. For many hours Johann would lie in his chamber upstairs, staring at Martin’s empty bed beside him. What had happened to his little brother? Was he still alive? And if so, how was he doing? Was he sitting locked up in some stable or cage, crying, cursing his older brother who hadn’t protected him? Was he lying in chains in the belly of a ship traveling down the Rhine, in the hands of slave traders who treated him like livestock?
Johann also worried about Margarethe. He’d gathered from a few whispered remarks made by the servants that she hadn’t spoken since the incident in the woods. She merely lay in her bed in silence, getting spoon-fed, staring at the ceiling with wide eyes. She seemed to have been frightened out of her wits. Johann’s heart ached with concern for Margarethe. If only he could see her! But the house of the prefect—the entire prefecture, in fact—remained barred to him. Whenever he approached the entrance, two or three servants appeared and made it clear that he wasn’t welcome.
On the eighth day, the prefect visited the Gerlachs’ house and spoke with Johann’s father behind closed doors. Afterward, Gerlach addressed his son for the first time in a week.
“The prefect wants you to talk to Margarethe,” he said frostily. “He reckons you might get through to her, help her get better. And maybe she knows something about Martin. Although I doubt she’ll talk to the boy who abandoned her.”
Johann was filled with renewed hope. If he could bring Margarethe to speak again, all would end well! She’d describe the men who abducted Martin. They’d search for them across the whole Kraichgau, find them, and break them on the wheel or draw and quarter them. Martin would be brought home safely and Margarethe would love him again, just like she’d told him inside the cave.
He ran over to the prefecture, where the prefect awaited him in the courtyard. In the last few weeks, the once strong, tall man seemed to have aged by years. His hair had turned gray, and deep furrows lined his face.
“She’s in the back chamber,” he said to Johann, gesturing toward his house. “Try your best, boy. I’m just not sure what else to do. The devil knows what she saw in the forest. It seems to me the dear Lord has turned his back on our family.”
Johann walked past Margarethe’s father like a whipped dog, crossed the courtyard, and entered the house.
In the chamber, Margarethe lay still on her bed, her eyes wide open. Johann came closer, his heart thumping loudly. But she didn’t stir, even when he touched her cautiously. Her skin was as white as chalk, with blue veins showing underneath, and even now, in this sad moment, her beauty mesmerized Johann. He thought about their time together in the cave. That seemed like a lifetime ago. He had fantasized about becoming her husband then, and now she lay in front of him like a corpse.
“Margarethe,” he whispered and took her hand. “Can you hear me?”
