“Kiss me, Little Faustusss.” She leaned over his throat and he saw her sharpened teeth. “I will kiss you like no woman has ever kissed you before. Like I used to kiss those sweet little things . . . so much fun, so much—”
Johann screamed as he lifted the pickaxe and swung it hard.
La Meffraye screeched like a bird as her face exploded into a cloud of blood, bone, and brains. For an instant Johann thought he could still see one single eye staring at him.
Then the witch tilted to the side and was finally silent.
Johann just lay there for a long while, listening to his own breathing and the chirping of the birds outside the chapel. The first slanted rays of sunshine fell through the windows. When he finally stood up with shaking knees, he avoided looking at La Meffraye’s face, as if he feared the lunatic grimace would still smirk at him. But he knew she was dead. And that there was no more smirk and no more face.
La Meffraye would haunt him only in his nightmares now.
Infinitely tired, feeling more dead than alive, he staggered across the chapel. Poitou, Prelati, Henriet, La Meffraye—he had vanquished them all. Now only Tonio and he were left.
The small silver globe rested by the wall, like a marble some children had left behind after playing. Johann picked it up and slipped it in his pocket.
With his last remaining strength, he pushed the grave slab back in place, put the pickaxe and the saw away, and sat down on the stone steps outside the chapel. With trembling fingers he opened the globe. The sun had risen by now, bathing the cemetery in warm light while the birds tried to outsing one another. The two halves were as easy to unscrew as if they’d only been waiting for Johann to take a look inside.
At the innermost core of the world.
Inside, folded into a tiny square, lay a flimsy piece of paper. Johann carefully drew it apart and found that it was nearly as long as his forearm, but very narrow. He had to read the scrawled black letters several times in order to decipher the mirror writing. Some words were smudged or simply a mystery to him, but gradually he began to comprehend. Despite the daylight he used his lantern, as his eyes were tired. But eventually he understood what Leonardo da Vinci had invented and what Tonio longed to possess. The last line on the paper sounded like an ominous prophecy.
Death and perdition will befall the world.
And in that moment Johann knew that the master could never get his hands on the tiny document—not for any price in the world.
Not even for the life of his daughter.
A shudder went through Johann’s body. He wanted to cry, but no tears came, only hoarse sobs. Too great was his grief.
Greta is lost.
Shaken by cramps, battered, bruised, and at the end of his rope, Johann Georg Faustus collapsed on the steps of the chapel—the most intelligent and the loneliest man in the world.
Act IV
The Whore of Rome
19
TOULOUSE, IN SOUTHERN FRANCE
18 JULY, AD 1521
TWO YEARS LATER
SOMETHING CLINKED IN THE BOWL, AND THE BEGGAR IN the dirty torn rags eagerly pulled the vessel closer, hoping to see a coin or at least a piece of stale bread. Karl’s mouth watered; he had hardly eaten in days. But when he reached inside, it was just a pebble. Children laughed, and quick little footsteps ran off. Before the beggar could throw the stone at the brats, they had vanished around the nearest corner.
“Dirty riffraff,” muttered Karl weakly. “Dirty little riffraff. May God punish you.”
The small pebble still in his hand, he leaned back into the shade of the house’s wall, where the sun wasn’t burning quite as mercilessly. He put the stone into his mouth and sucked on it, easing the worst of his hunger and thirst. A corpulent woad merchant clad entirely in blue strutted past Karl and cast a look of disgust. He kicked at the dented bowl, cussing vociferously in Occitan, apparently because Karl was in his way. Karl lowered his head demurely and made the sign of the cross so that the man wouldn’t set the guards on him. Flies buzzed around his head, but he no longer noticed them; they were his constant companions, just like the lice and fleas living in his long shaggy hair and beard.
Toulouse was one of the wealthiest cities in France, having grown prosperous through the trade of woad, a plant that flourished on the calciferous grounds southeast of the city, used to produce precious blue dye for fabric and clothing. Despite, or perhaps because of, its wealth, the city was full of beggars. They sat on the steps of Saint Étienne Cathedral, hobbled on their crutches across the multitude of market squares near the magnificent city hall, or sent their children pickpocketing in the crowds by the bridges across the Garonne River, which stank of urine and lye. The church preached the donating of alms—those who gave generously shortened their time in purgatory—but that wasn’t to say the poor couldn’t be treated like cattle.
From the square outside the Basilica of Saint-Sernin sounded the monotonous singsong of the pilgrims and the cries of vendors hawking candied figs and dates; the air smelled of roast mutton and freshly baked bread. Karl felt sick with hunger. Two days ago a kindly pilgrim woman had given him a boiled egg and a crust of black bread, and that had been the last time he had eaten. The only item of clothing he possessed was a filthy tunic that was ripped in so many places that he was practically half-naked. His arms and legs were scabby and thin as sticks; his face was overgrown by a beard and his cheeks sunken, making him look twenty years older.
But at least he knew who he was.
It hadn’t always been that way. Karl’s memories of the past were blurred, occasionally calling on him like capricious visitors. He had awoken in the austere room of a pauper’s hospital at Nantes nearly two years ago. Karl had no idea how he got there. He had known neither his name nor where he had come from, and not even the friendly Benedictine nuns had been able to help him. They had found him outside the gate, dumped like a sack of trash with broken limbs, bleeding fingers, and a high fever, more dead than alive. Very slowly he had regained his strength, and with time, fragments from his childhood and youth had come back to him, like tiny splinters of his previous life. Apparently he came from the German Empire, since he spoke German, and he believed that his name was Karl Wagner. He had probably studied medicine, because a wealth of Latin and Greek terms swirled around in his head. Clavicula, mandibula, os sacrum, Corpus Hippocraticum. He had no clue what had brought him to France nor what had happened to him there. He liked to draw, so he used charcoal on scraps of paper to capture the memories that sometime overcame him, even though he didn’t know what to make of the resulting images.
A man in a long cloak on a podium. A burning castle. The face of a young woman, wet with tears, her hand reaching out to him. The horned devil, grinning, handing him a goblet.
Karl instinctively touched the pendant that hung from his neck. The little angel was his lifeline whenever the terrible thoughts threatened to get the better of him. The pendant was a simple figurine whittled from alabaster, a token from the time before. He couldn’t say who had given it to him. His mother, perhaps? Despite the hunger consuming him, he would never sell his talisman; it was the only connection he had left to his old life, like a rope floating in the murky waters of his memory. The pendant felt as warm as if it were alive.
Once Karl had been nursed halfway back to health, the nuns had given him a plain tunic and a staff and wished him good luck in his future travels. They couldn’t accommodate him any longer—there were too many like him. Stranded souls, drifting through the country like ghosts and seeking shelter in hospitals and monasteries. For at least one night they would receive a roof over their heads and some watery soup before they returned to the road. Karl had been roaming ever since, but he had no idea where to. He had no compass and no memory; he simply drifted south because it was warmer there and people didn’t freeze to death in winter. Along the way he had learned French and some Occitan, the old language of the bards and the people in the south. He begged, and sometimes he managed to sel
l small pictures that he drew on scraps of paper or tree bark. He knew how to read and write, but his French wasn’t good enough to earn a living as a traveling clerk. To most people he was a foreigner and a fool. Only the girls liked him because he had beautiful eyes and a chiseled face, but Karl soon figured out that he wasn’t interested in girls. He wondered if his memory loss was God’s punishment for his secret longings.
France was a huge country, stretching all the way to the tall peaks of the Pyrenees and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. Thus Karl had traveled to Occitania and eventually arrived in Toulouse. The days crept by slowly, one after the other, all merging into one. He had become accustomed to his missing memory, and he had a hunch that the gaping hole in his recollections used to be filled with something unspeakably awful that his mind didn’t want to face.
A horned devil. A black goblet.
Again he could hear shouts and chanting from the square by the basilica, but this time there was also laughter and the clapping of hands. Karl listened. He guessed a troupe of jugglers and minstrels was performing, as he had occasionally seen in other places. The sight of jugglers had always made him strangely happy, though he had no idea why. He decided to abandon his shady spot outside the Dominican monastery and try his luck near the Basilica of Saint-Sernin. The church was one of the most significant pilgrims’ destinations in Christendom, accommodating the remains of various apostles. On the square would be many more beggars like him, but also more people who might toss him a scrap of food. People were more generous when they laughed and had a good time.
Karl picked up his rusty bowl and made his way over to the basilica. It was almost noon. Now, in July, the sun blazed so brightly that the brick buildings seemed to glow like red embers. Shimmering heat lay above the square outside the huge church, and Karl wiped the sweat from his eyes. A crowd of pilgrims and burghers had gathered around a shaky podium consisting of a few stacked-up crates. Standing on top of it was an older man in a stained black-and-blue coat who was just about to pull a cackling hen out of his hat. The man swayed, struggling to stay on his feet. Evidently, he’d had too much to drink. His long beard was as ragged as the fur of a mangy dog, his graying black hair matted. He seemed like one of those crazy itinerant preachers who liked to predict doom and gloom and were only tolerated by the church because they made their flock afraid of hell. The flapping animal slipped out of his grip and made a run for it, cheered on by the roaring laughter of the crowd.
“Hey, your supper, wizard!” shouted a man in the front row, the same woad merchant from before. “It’s flying away. What will you eat now? Or do you just drink? I’ll gladly give you a coin if you can conjure a jug of wine from your hat!”
The man on the podium slowly raised his face to look at the loudmouthed merchant.
Karl froze.
The man’s eyes made him dizzy. They were pitch black, sinister, and as deep as wells. Endless grief shimmered at their bottom, and something else that attracted Karl almost magically. Despite his drunken state, the ragged stranger exuded an almost tangible authority. Karl sensed that he knew the man from somewhere. But he had no idea where from or why.
Who are you, stranger?
“I think I will have fried egg,” the wizard said with a low, dragging voice. “The egg is the beginning and the end, isn’t it? The alpha and the omega.” Suddenly he fished an egg from his hat, then another and another. He juggled them, but it wasn’t long before one fell to the ground and burst. The two other eggs vanished magically.
“Ha, now you don’t even have eggs,” jeered the merchant in the bright-blue beret with a velvet ribbon, the sign of his guild. “Or are you going to lick it off the ground like a dog?”
“It’s true, I no longer have eggs,” replied the man on the podium, his voice very low and yet audible right across the square. “Because you stole them from me.”
“What are you talking about, you fool?” growled the merchant, looking around uncertainly. Some of the spectators started to mutter and whistle. “Do you want the city guards to put you in the stocks?”
Karl still stood as if frozen. He was thinking about the image from his memories he had drawn so many times. A man in a long cloak on a podium.
It was as if his drawings had suddenly come to life.
Like a large dark bird, the man jumped down from the crates, staggered but caught himself, then strode toward the merchant with slow steps. He swayed a little but didn’t fall.
“And what are you going to do now, you drunk quack?” asked the merchant, jutting out his chin defiantly. “You won’t get any hens or eggs from me—but I can give you a kick up the ass.”
“Are you sure?” asked the man when he came to a halt in front of the merchant. “No eggs? See for yourself.”
With astonishing speed the wizard slapped his flat hand onto the merchant’s beret. A yellow mess of egg flowed out from under his hat and down the dumfounded merchant’s forehead. The crowd cried out with surprise, and some people laughed.
“You . . . you are going to regret this,” exclaimed the merchant, shaking his fists. “Guards! Arrest this man!”
He leaped at the wizard, who, despite his state of intoxication, dodged him with surprising agility. Other citizens rushed to help, but the man in the black-and-blue coat was quicker. He feinted to the left and the right and soon escaped the agitated masses.
Karl followed him.
He knew that he mustn’t lose the stranger. He was the key to Karl’s old life. If only he had a moment to ponder where he might know the wizard from. But there was no time. And so Karl stuck to the man’s heels. The wizard sprinted across the square, tripping several times and catching himself on market stalls, sending them crashing to the ground. Vendors cried out indignantly, geese took off cackling, loaves of bread rolled into the filthy gutter. Karl lost the stranger for a moment, but then spotted him at the narrow entrance to a lane at the right-hand side of the square. The passage was behind one of the stalls, so that no one else had noticed the wizard there. Karl ran, fell on his knees, struggled back to his feet, and continued running. The lane wound its way past several brick buildings and grew increasingly narrow. Finally it ended in a small yard full of trash. Trying to catch his breath, Karl was walking past a stack of barrels when he tripped over a foot. The man in the black-and-blue coat towered above him, a rock in his raised fist. His eyes looked like those of a hunted animal.
“Damned bastard,” snarled the stranger. “Leave me alone! Why don’t you all leave me—”
“Faustus!” exclaimed Karl.
The name had just popped into his mind, and with the name memories rained down on him like a warm shower. Karl laughed and cried at the same time. The man in front of him was like a messenger from a distant era, an angel come to bring him back to life, waking him from the slumber that had lasted two whole years. The fact that this angel was an unkempt old codger who reeked of schnapps and wine didn’t bother him in the least.
“Lord in heaven, it is you. Doctor Johann Georg Faustus! Praise be to God!”
The wizard stepped back as if he’d been struck by a blow. He dropped the rock. Then, with an abrupt movement, he grabbed Karl by the collar and pulled him so close that Karl could smell his alcohol-infused breath.
“How do you know my name? Who told you my name? Who? Someone from the church? A French spy? Speak up, man!”
“No one,” gasped Karl. “I know your name because . . .” He faltered. “Because I . . . because I am your assistant. Don’t you recognize me? It’s me, your loyal Karl. Karl Wagner, the student from Leipzig.” He squeezed the talisman around his neck hard. “God Himself must have brought us back together. Finally I remember who I was—who I am. Praise be . . .”
Then he broke off, sobbing, overcome by a flood of tears, longing, and memories.
Karl Wagner had found his master again.
A short while later, two ragged men sat opposite each other in a tavern down by the river. One of the men still cried
soundlessly, and the other one was drinking himself into a stupor. Very little light got in through the spiderwebs covering the windows; the hazy outline of the Pyrenees stood on the horizon.
Through a cascade of tears Karl studied the doctor, whom he had recognized by his black eyes and the black-and-blue coat. Faust had aged in the last two years, appearing empty, drained. A long shaggy beard that reminded Karl of a rabbi’s covered his face, and Johann’s hair was matted. The red veins on his nose told Karl that the doctor was a slave to a very particular devil. A large jug of cheap wine stood between them. Instead of a lordly carriage and numerous crates and chests, Johann’s worldly possessions consisted of one old leather sack holding a few items for his magic tricks, and the coat, which he’d probably had made as a sign of his trade. The doctor’s hand shook as he lifted the cup to his mouth.
“What a strange coincidence that has brought us back together,” he murmured through his beard.
“Coincidence?” Karl shook his head. “I no longer believe in coincidences. This is a miracle—an act of providence.”
“Or an act of the devil.” Johann laughed dryly. “What happened to the ambitious young scientist who wants to explain everything with reason? Even heaven and hell, if he can?” He paused. “You haven’t seen what I have seen. And you don’t know what I know.”
“What about your illness?” asked Karl. “Your paralysis?” He studied the doctor with the eyes of a physician. “You no longer seem to be burdened by it. If it disappeared, it must have been a miracle. Or did you find a cure in the end?”
“Some . . . something like that.”
Karl swallowed and wiped his wet face with his sleeve. He didn’t have the impression that Johann was happy to see him. The shabby tavern they were sitting in, not far from the pilgrims’ hostel, served as the doctor’s accommodation in Toulouse. Evidently he still traveled the lands as a magician, even if he called himself by a different name now and was but a shadow of his former self. To help himself fill the gaps in his memory, Karl had spent the last two hours quizzing the doctor about details. Their journeys through the German Empire with Greta, then Faust’s mysterious disease, their escape to France, and their stay at Leonardo da Vinci’s. The answers had come haltingly, frequently interrupted by long gulps from the cup of wine that Johann kept refilling. The further Karl progressed in his recollection, the more close-lipped Faust became.
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