The Devil's Pawn

by Oliver Pötzsch

  Johann could have told her about all the little ways in which she reminded him of himself—the looks, the gestures—or he could have shown her the heart-shaped birthmark they both carried on their right shoulders, or pointed out their shared tendency for melancholy. But then he remembered something else.

  “You foresaw my death,” he said. “Did you not? You foresaw my death in my hand.”

  Greta froze. “How do you know?”

  “Because it is an ability you inherited from me, Greta. I, too, can see a person’s death in their hand. It’s a terrible gift. I wasn’t yet eighteen when I felt it for the first time.”

  “Me . . . me too.” Greta sat down on the stool by the bed.

  “It’s like a throbbing, right? Then the lines begin to glow, and an awful premonition hits you like a blow.” Johann reached for her hand. “A long time ago I saw it in the hand of someone dear to me—Peter, a fiddle player and the leader of our troupe of jugglers. And I, too, didn’t dare tell him the truth—just like you didn’t want to tell me. Isn’t that so?”

  Greta nodded silently.

  “Do you believe me now? I am your father. And I would understand if you walked out that door right now and never wanted to see me again. But then I wouldn’t be able to set things right.”

  Greta looked up. “How do you think you can ever set things right?”

  “By telling you all, Greta. I promise you there won’t be any more secrets between us.” The words came gushing out. Johann knew that it would be better for them to go their separate ways. He was a danger to Greta—to everyone who traveled with him. But he couldn’t bring himself to send her away. He loved Greta more than anything else.

  “I must travel to France. I will explain the reason shortly,” he continued. “If you come with me, I will tell you everything. We have a long journey ahead of us, and we’ll have plenty of time to talk. About Tonio, too, and . . . and about your mother.”

  “About my mother?” Greta looked at him darkly and with crossed arms, clearly torn. But there was real interest in her eyes now, mixed with fear of the truth.

  “You better start right now,” she said eventually.

  Around the same time, Agrippa walked through the hallways of his house toward the dining room. His face was pale and sunken, as if he had aged by years in the last few days.

  And maybe I have, he thought. Everyone must pay their price.

  He didn’t know what the girl wanted from Johann. But it had cost him a great deal of energy to keep up appearances in front of his friend. He wasn’t fooling himself: the doctor was no idiot, and he was bound to draw his own conclusions.

  Agrippa corresponded with many great men in Europe—with the king of England, with the learned abbot and student of magic Johannes Trithemius up until his death, and nowadays even with Luther—but not with Leonardo da Vinci. It was a circumstance that had always vexed him a little, but the old master simply didn’t seem to care for Agrippa’s scholarly discourse. It was a pity, but there was nothing he could do about it.

  I hope he never finds out what I’ve done.

  Agrippa had told Johann precisely what the man with the red cap and the rooster’s feather had told him to say. During the night of Johann’s fit, someone had knocked on Agrippa’s door. An ice-cold breeze and the smell of sulfur had wafted into his house along with the man. He had promised that Agrippa would win the trial if he gave Johann this one piece of information.

  There is a man who complains of symptoms similar to yours. His name is Leonardo da Vinci.

  Agrippa knew neither whether this information was true nor what the man hoped to achieve by having it shared with Johann. And he didn’t want to know why Judge Leonard was found with a broken neck the following morning, or why his wide-open eyes had looked as if he had seen the devil himself. He knew only one thing: two nights ago, evil had come to his house. He had smelled its breath and had been enormously relieved when the man left again.

  All his theories had turned out to be correct. But this time the scholar couldn’t find any joy in the fact. At least he had won the trial. And his renown would grow—perhaps they would still speak of him in several hundred years as one of the most intelligent men of his time.

  We are more alike than you think, Johann Georg Faustus.

  He paused outside the door to the dining room, his hand resting on the doorknob. He raised the hand and sniffed at his fingers, as if he could still smell the sulfur. For hours after he’d shaken hands with the man, Agrippa’s hand had hurt as if it was burned.

  We have a pact, Heinrich Agrippa. Never forget.

  He truly liked the doctor. There was no one he could engage in more interesting conversations with. And together they had saved a woman accused of witchcraft from the pyre—the first lawyers to ever achieve such a thing. Well, with a little help. Agrippa winced as if a cold breeze had come over him. Suddenly the expression advocatus diaboli took on a whole new meaning.

  But despite their similarities, there was one decisive difference between him and the doctor. Johann had no family. And Agrippa’s family was sacred to him.

  The man with the rooster’s feather had made it very clear which child might next be found beneath a bridge with his throat ripped.

  Agrippa opened the door and smiled when he saw his wife and the small, only just four-year-old Paul sitting at the table. What good was all the wisdom, all the knowledge, in the world if there was no one to love and no one who loved you back?

  “Papa,” called the boy, holding out his arms.

  “Let us eat, Elsbeth,” Agrippa said softly and joined his family at the table. “I am starving.”

  He folded his hands in prayer and asked his son to say the daily psalm from the Old Testament. Despite his young age, the boy recited the lines with a clear, sometimes halting voice, and the great scholar Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim had tears in his eyes.

  Act II

  The River of Kings

  6

  GRETA LIVED THROUGH THE FOLLOWING DAYS AND WEEKS as if she’d been reborn. She came to view the last few years of her life in a different light. Her childhood, which had been nothing more than faint recollections overshadowed by blank nothingness, now seemed to her like a deep, shady valley waiting to be explored.

  She rode beside the man who for years used to be her teacher, friend, and protector. But he was also her father, and the man responsible for her mother’s death. He was so familiar to her, and yet she felt like she hardly knew him at all—perhaps less than ever.

  “So many wasted opportunities to tell me the truth,” she said to Johann one day as they rode side by side, Karl straggling behind. “Many times I saw in your eyes that you were keeping something from me. I thought it was to protect me from . . . from the terrible things that happened at Nuremberg.”

  “And that’s the truth,” Johann said. “You were just fourteen, Greta. You were deeply disturbed for weeks. Karl and I thought it better not to stir up your memories.”

  “I’m twenty years old now! How long were you planning to wait? I think you were just too gutless.”

  Greta tried hard to understand why he had kept the truth from her for so long. She thought he probably had meant to protect her, at least in the beginning. But she couldn’t forgive him the long silence entirely, not him and not Karl, who had known all along. And yet she traveled to France with them.

  She knew her reasons for that decision: she went because her father might die soon, and he was all the family she had, and because Karl was her only friend. And most of all because Johann was making good on his promise to tell her more about her mother, her childhood, Valentin, and also more about herself. Johann was a good storyteller who knew how to save part of the tale for the next day, and the next, and so on.

  Their journey led them west toward France, where Johann hoped to learn more about his disease and the curse. They were on their way to a man Greta had heard much about. Leonardo da Vinci was even more famous than her father. Karl had told
her about Leonardo’s paintings, which were celebrated throughout Europe. Most impressive of all was Leonardo’s reputation as an inventor. He was considered a genius, an expert in medicine and anatomy, and he had served at various courts. It was quite possible, then, that he knew something about Faust’s mysterious disease.

  The meltwater rushing down the mountains in March made the roads muddy and at times impassable, forcing them to take detours and sometimes travel along narrow game paths. Agrippa had organized fast horses for them and instructed them on the route to the Loire Valley. The city where Leonardo lived was called Amboise, and there was also a castle belonging to the king. They still needed to be careful of being followed, and so they traveled under false names and wore the plain pilgrims’ garb they’d used on their way to Metz. They avoided hostels and thus went without warm nights and the Lorraine region’s seductive-smelling food.

  Greta usually sat with Faust and Karl in forest clearings in the evenings, listening to her father’s tales while Karl turned the spit with a hare he had caught himself and stuffed with wild onion and herbs. There was so much she wanted to know, and Faust told her everything, even about the horrible events at Nuremberg, when Tonio del Moravia had used the fourteen-year-old Greta as bait to lure her father underground. Sometimes, as she stared into the crackling flames, images appeared before her mind’s eye, pale at first but growing clearer as Johann told her more.

  A high-ceilinged room like a church, chanting that rises and ebbs, a cross hanging upside down behind the altar, a girl tied down on the altar.

  Me.

  Since the encounter in Metz, Tonio had returned to Greta’s life. And even if she didn’t like to admit it, she wanted to learn more about the man with the black eyes as deep as ancient craters. Tonio had lodged himself like a thorn in Greta’s and her father’s lives, and she wouldn’t have a good night’s sleep again until that thorn was removed.

  And Greta heard everything about her mother, beautiful Margarethe.

  Her father had known Margarethe since childhood. But his ambition and unscrupulousness had been the ruin of them both. It was Johann’s fault that Margarethe had to burn at the stake at Worms after she gave birth to Greta in the bishop’s dungeons.

  “Your mother was the person I loved most in this world,” muttered Johann, staring into the flames as if he could still see Margarethe there. “Her laughter was the medicine that saved me, the only remedy that had the power to rouse me from my never-ending pondering. It was her laughter that protected me many times.” He looked up and smiled at Greta. “You are very much like her.”

  “And I’m like you, too,” said Greta. “Even though I find it hard to admit.”

  “Well, I’m not all bad, am I?”

  Her anger with her father and Karl gradually evaporated; she had known them for far too long. Only a very small, smoldering part remained. Some days, things were almost the way they used to be—but only almost.

  “This gift of foreseeing someone’s death in the palm of their hand—this gift I inherited from you,” said Greta hesitantly. “It is a curse nearly as great as the one torturing you now.”

  “But death doesn’t always have to follow. I’ve experienced that a few times—not often, to be honest, but occasionally I ran into the person again later on. They were marked by great suffering, but they lived.” Johann took her hand in his, struggling with the movement because of the paralysis growing in his left arm. “Perhaps it is the same with me. If only I can succeed in stopping this accursed illness.”

  Greta could feel his whole body shaking, as it often did in the evenings.

  “We ought to seek out Leonardo da Vinci as quickly as we can so we can learn more about your disease,” said Karl from his place by the fire, leafing through his notes.

  Karl had purchased a pair of those newfangled eye glasses in Metz. They were increasingly popular at monasteries and universities, and they gave him the air of a learned Adonis.

  Greta surmised that his love for the doctor had prevented Karl from telling her the truth. She had reproached him bitterly at the start of their trip, and now their relationship had cooled off noticeably. But Karl was still the only friend she had.

  “Although I still think Córdoba would have been better,” continued Karl. “There are excellent physicians there, and Leonardo da Vinci, as much as I admire him, is no physician. He’s an inventor and a painter.”

  “But he appears to have the same disease as me,” said Johann. “Agrippa said that Leonardo knows something about it. Maybe even something”—he paused for a moment—“something about the curse.”

  “So you still believe it is a curse?” asked Karl skeptically.

  “Oh yes, I do.”

  It wasn’t the first time Johann and Karl had had this conversation since their departure from Metz.

  Karl set down his quill. “I still struggle to believe what Agrippa told us. Tonio is the devil himself? Where is the proof? If he really is the devil, then why doesn’t he just take you right here and now?”

  “Even the devil must follow ancient rules,” said Johann quietly. “And Tonio aside, France offers us safety from the papal sleuths.”

  “What secret might you have learned from Tonio or Gilles de Rais?” said Greta, staring into the fire, where blue flames danced like will-o’-the-wisps. “It must be something very special for the pope to take an interest.”

  Karl nodded. “An interesting question indeed.”

  “Whatever it is—I don’t know the secret,” said Johann glumly. “But either way, I’d rather have as many miles as possible between us and Lahnstein and his men.”

  Greta jumped when a few branches cracked in the pitch-black forest behind them; something snorted. Little Satan, who was lying next to them chewing on a bone, pricked up his ears. He had heard it, too. Some larger animal was probably making its way through the woods, like a stag or a boar.

  Or something else, thought Greta, moving closer to the fire.

  Days and weeks went by. They rode through Nancy, the magnificent capital of the duchy of Lotharingia, an outpost of the German Empire. Then they came to the large, vibrant market town of Bar-sur-Aube in the county of Champagne, its lanes full of bleating lambs, goats, and calves. They had crossed the border into France without even noticing. For a while now, people had been speaking the soft, poetic language Greta knew from a few songs, so different from the harsh-sounding German. Communication was arduous at first, but Greta soon found that she had a knack for learning languages. She listened when her father negotiated their quarters or bought supplies in the small towns along their route, and soon she could lead halting conversations herself.

  Greta noticed that her father often gazed into the sky, growing visibly restless as soon as a swarm of birds circled above them. Ravens especially seemed to make him nervous. But when Greta asked him about it, he just waved it off.

  “An old habit,” he said. “I’ve never liked those beasts.”

  They swiftly trotted and cantered through the green lands of the duchy of Burgundy, the formerly large realm that used to stretch across half of Europe and which now belonged to France. If anyone asked, they were pilgrims on their way to the abbey in Fontevrault. The abbey was situated in the county of Anjou, not far from the Loire Valley, and was one of the biggest and best-known abbeys in France. It had been Johann’s idea to tell people that they were a deeply religious goldsmith family from Metz, the father with his son and younger daughter. The daughter would, so their story went, remain at the abbey as a nun to fulfill a family pledge.

  “The pilgrims’ clothes suit you,” said Karl with a wink, riding next to Greta. The two of them had become closer again. “Although I can’t really picture you as a nun. A life without juggling, music, and colors—how sad!”

  Greta snorted. She wore a plain brown woolen coat and a wide-brimmed hat typical for pilgrims. “Johann would love that, locking me up in a nunnery.” She hardly ever called him “Father”; she found it hard to say the word. �
�Ever since he told me that I’m his daughter, he is even more jealous.”

  “You can’t blame him.” Karl smirked. “You’re his greatest treasure.”

  “That is precisely how I feel. A treasure, not a person. A treasure that must be guarded. And I’ve got enough on my mind without a French love affair.”

  Greta kicked her heels into the horse’s sides and galloped off.

  At Gien, a pretty little town with colorful half-timbered houses and a newly erected castle, they finally reached the Loire River. They let their horses graze on the top of a hill and gazed down onto the glittering green ribbon below. Now, in spring, the river was even mightier than usual, its rippling current twirling branches, leaves, and logs. It was wider than most rivers Greta knew—almost as wide as the Rhine.

  “The Loire is the biggest river in France,” Johann said and raised his hand toward the south. “Its spring lies deep in the mountains, and its mouth beyond Nantes on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. Some say the Loire is the country’s main artery. In any case, it divides this vast kingdom into north and south, which might be one reason for the French kings’ preference for the Loire Valley. During the long war against the Englishmen, when Paris was in the hands of the enemy, they even ruled from here.” He grinned. “Even now, it is said, Francis I likes to spend more time at his beautiful castles along the Loire than in stinking old Paris. He is a passionate hunter.”

  “How do you know all that?” asked Greta.

  Johann shrugged. “I read a lot, including those new leaflets called newspapers. Granted, there’s much nonsense in them about earthquakes, falling stars, and the wrath of God. But also the odd interesting bit. At the moment it’s all about the election of the new German king, since Maximilian has passed away. The French want to stay informed because their king is part of the game.”

  He gazed down the wide river until it disappeared behind a bend. “There really is only one way to travel the Loire Valley.”