The Castle of Kings
Page 17
“Appoint Mathis assistant gunner,” Agnes calmly repeated. “If you want to get Wertingen out of his castle, you’ll need firearms. Otherwise it won’t work, you said so yourself. And Ulrich isn’t going to be very much use.”
Agnes had thought hard about the best time to take her father by surprise with her idea. Several hours had passed since the count’s visit, and she had used them to make preparations. Philipp von Erfenstein seemed reasonably sober again, having done some work up by the well tower. The castellan had carried several new lengths of wood over from the courtyard himself, and had sent the men-at-arms, Gunther, Sebastian, and Eberhart, into the forest for more timber. So Agnes could be sure of speaking to her father alone for a while. However, when she saw his angry face now, she feared that she hadn’t thought her idea over well enough.
“You want me to make a boy who’s only just getting a beard my gunner?” Philipp von Erfenstein asked, bending to pick the axe up again. “A sly fox who stole one of my arquebuses, and who’s wanted as an insurgent by the mayor of Annweiler? Are you out of your mind?”
“Father, Mathis has been in that dungeon long enough. Is he to rot away down there?”
“It’s all the same to me.” Stoically, Philipp von Erfenstein chopped a length of timber to size with his axe. Finger-length splinters of wood flew in all directions.
Angrily, Agnes watched her father at work for a while. She finally decided to stake everything on a single card. “You said you were going to think what to do with Mathis.” The words burst out of her. “But you haven’t done anything. Anything at all except to brood over your worries and get drunk. So do something now, Father. Hand Mathis over to Gessler, banish him, even chop his hand off—anything, just don’t leave him wasting away in the keep.” She took a deep breath before she went on. “But I’ll tell you one thing: you’re making a great mistake. Mathis is the only person here who really understands anything about firearms. He can cast the guns you need for a siege, and he knows how to fire them, too. If you want to lose Trifels Castle, hand Mathis over to the mayor of Annweiler. But if you want to defeat Wertingen, let Mathis do what he can do best, forging firearms.”
Agnes had never spoken to her father in such a tone before. The old knight stood motionless for some time, his mouth open like the mouth of a stranded fish, the axe in his limp hand. All at once he raised the heavy tool, and Agnes feared that he might strike her down. But he simply brought it down on the handrail of the bridge, where it stuck fast.
Suddenly Philipp von Erfenstein began laughing heartily. His powerful chest rose and fell, tears of laughter ran down his cheeks.
“Damn it all!” he finally gasped. “My own daughter reading me a lecture. Just as my Katharina used to, God rest her soul. You womenfolk use tongues the way we men use our swords.” He wiped the tears from his face. “Only a woman could suggest something like that.” All at once he was serious again. “Even if I set Mathis free and let him cast the guns, where will I get the bronze for them, eh?” Erfenstein pointed to the ramshackle well tower, where one of the merlons was missing. “Have you forgotten that we don’t even have the money to carry out emergency repairs on this castle? It’s falling apart under us.”
“Melt the old weapons down,” replied Agnes coolly.
“What?” Her father looked at her, taken aback.
“Melt down the weapons in the armory,” she repeated. “I was discussing it with Ulrich just now. They’re old and rusty, good for nothing anymore. Melt them down and let Mathis forge new firearms. They cast a new bell over in Eusserthal monastery only last year. They still have furnaces for both melting and casting metal there. Father Tristan will ask the abbot to let us use them.”
Agnes sounded as matter-of-fact as she could. She had worked it all out in advance, taking both Ulrich and Father Tristan into her confidence. But she knew that her father could be as stubborn as an ox, particularly when he thought he was being driven into a corner.
“Oho, so that’s it.” The castellan crossed his muscular arms over his chest. “So you’ve talked it over with everyone except your own father. Who else knows about your crazy plan? Come on, tell me. Who else?”
Agnes sighed. “No one else, Father. But Ulrich also thinks that Mathis—”
“I couldn’t care less what that drunken sot thinks,” Erfenstein snapped. “I hate those stinking guns, anyway. Shooting a brave man from a hundred paces away—what kind of a chivalrous fight is that? In the old days, these things were settled with swords, man to man.”
He fell silent for a moment, and then nodded his head thoughtfully. “But you’re right. Much as I abhor them—without something like that to breach the walls we’ll never take Wertingen’s castle. What can we summon up on the Trifels?” Sighing, Erfenstein counted on his fingers. “A few dozen hackbuts, maybe, three rusty falconets, and a handful of mortars dating from your great-grandfather’s time.” He laughed bitterly. “Most of them are good as pots and pans for Hedwig’s kitchen at the best, but they’re probably too full of holes even for that.”
Smiling, Agnes took a step toward her father; she felt that the ice was slowly breaking. “There, you see,” she said gently. “Let Mathis melt down the whole lot. I promise he’ll forge you something to breach castle walls instead, a gun such as we’ve never seen here. And we’ll break into Wertingen’s castle with it. Mathis has assured me that it’s possible.”
The old knight frowned. “How would he know? He’s never made one. Yes, maybe he can mix gunpowder. But casting cannon like that is another trade. Particularly if it’s to be a really good one. You need years of training for that.”
“He’s read all about it, Father.”
Philipp von Erfenstein looked at her suspiciously. “Read about it? The lad can read?”
“I taught him. There are several books about firearms in the library here. He knows them all. And he kept thinking of new techniques and drawing guns in secret.” Agnes reached for her father’s hand as he stood there on the bridge, still undecided. “At least let him try,” she begged. “If he fails, you can always send him back to the dungeon or hand him over to the mayor of Annweiler. What do you have to lose?”
Erfenstein’s mind was visibly working. His glance went out over the countryside, over to the hills beyond which Wertingen’s castle stood. He tugged thoughtfully at his eye patch.
“Very well,” he growled at last. “I’ll give the boy a chance. If he can make a gun big enough for Ulrich to use in the fight, he can go free as far as I’m concerned. But on one condition.” He looked sternly at his daughter.
“Anything, Father, anything,” Agnes sighed in relief.
“If I catch you just once in the hay or anywhere else with that lad, if my men tell me the least little thing about you two turtle doves, I’ll send Mathis back to his cell and let him rot there. Is that clear?”
“But Father—”
“Quiet!” he interrupted her brusquely. “Do you think I can’t see what’s going on? I can see the two of you flirting. There must be an end to that. Mathis isn’t fit for you. Even if that fool Heidelsheim has made off, God alone knows why, keep away from Mathis, understand?”
Agnes flinched as if at the touch of a whip.
“Very well,” she finally murmured. “I’d do anything to get him out of there.”
“Right.” Her father walked over the swaying bridge, smiling, and toward the upper bailey. “Then let’s get the little bird out of his cage before he breaks his wings.”
Down in the valley, the old midwife Elsbeth Rechsteiner lay behind a bramble bush in the Annweiler woods, trying as hard as she could not to breathe too loud.
Not ten yards away, a man dismounted from his horse in the light of the setting sun. Behind him, half hidden in the shadow cast by the midwife’s little house, two more men, wild-looking characters, sat waiting on their own mounts.
As the stranger slowly turned and looked in her direction, Elsbeth put her hand over her mouth to keep herself from screaming. The man was clad in
expensive black fabric and wore a black cap, but the skin of his face under the cap was almost as black, and so was his throat, as were his hands with their long, fine fingers. Elsbeth had never seen such a man before. There were tales of dark-skinned people who lived far in the south, where there were also cannibals and two-headed lions. So the black man must come from very far away. He and his companions had certainly not come to pay her a harmless visit, or to buy some kind of herbal remedy for a cough or cold. The midwife shivered. What she had feared for so many years, what the Brotherhood had warned her against only two weeks ago, had actually happened.
The enemies had come back.
Elsbeth had been in her little garden in front of the house when she heard the hoof-beats and whinnying of horses. Her hut might be in the middle of the forest, and it was protected by a dense thicket of hawthorn and bramble bushes, but the road to Waldrohrbach was not far away, and there was a trodden footpath from the road to her house. Her visitors were usually simple folk—tanners, linen weavers, or peasants who couldn’t afford the expensive medicines sold by the apothecary in Annweiler. Certainly none of her patients had such a magnificent horse, and so a healthy distrust had made Elsbeth duck down behind the bushes.
That and a certain presentiment.
From the ground, the midwife stared at the stranger in the black cap. The other two horsemen had dismounted now and were letting their horses graze on the tiny cabbage leaves in Elsbeth’s small kitchen garden. A curved sword dangled from the dark-skinned man’s saddle, and the fluid movements with which he approached her hut betrayed a military training. For the last time, his eyes passed over the garden, and then he knocked on the crooked door of the little house.
“Hello. Is anybody there?” His loud voice, accustomed to giving orders, had a curious accent.
When no one opened the door, the man finally kicked it, cursing. The two rotten halves of it swung open with a creak, and the stranger entered the low-ceilinged cottage. The other two men followed him. Elsbeth couldn’t see what was going on inside, but she heard them walking around. Dishes and plates clattered, then her bed and her chest were pushed aside. The men were looking for something, and Elsbeth could already guess what it was. Someone must have told them where the ring could be found. But who? Only the members of the Brotherhood knew that she was the guardian of the ring. So was there a traitor among them? Or had the men already tortured the others and made them tell the secret? Elsbeth Rechsteiner made the sign of the cross and said a silent prayer of thanks that the ring was no longer in her keeping.
Dear Lord in Heaven, you have assuredly led me all this long way. Do not leave me now.
After a while, the men came out of the little house again. Elsbeth hoped they would mount their horses and ride away, but then the dark-skinned leader suddenly turned his head and looked up at the roof of the cottage. The midwife groaned quietly.
White smoke was curling out of the small, brick-built chimney.
No sensible person left a fire unattended for long, as Elsbeth knew, and so did the stranger. It must have been clear to him, at that moment, that she couldn’t be far away. Once again his gaze wandered over her recently sown garden with its trellises and beds, and finally he walked right across the raked black soil. He carelessly trod down the little seedlings and plants, until he was right beside the thicket of thorns. The man was now so close that Elsbeth could hear him breathing.
“Onde está a velha bruxa?” he hissed quietly through his teeth.
The midwife pressed herself far down into the moss, as if to merge with the forest, which was now lying in darkness. Not far away, she heard a couple of branches crack, and then the footsteps went away. When she dared to look up at last, she saw the man going back toward the hut. With a broken branch, he carefully brushed away the marks of his footsteps on the garden beds, and then he quietly said something to his two companions. Finally they all three led their horses back into the woods.
For some time, there was no sound but the twittering of the birds.
Elsbeth was about to heave a sigh of relief when the dark-skinned stranger suddenly came back without his horse. Once again he entered the hut, but this time he carefully closed the door behind him. Elsbeth felt a cold shudder run down her back.
He’s waiting for me to come back. And the other two are lurking in the forest.
Elsbeth waited for what seemed a small eternity, and then slowly straightened up. Her joints ached from lying in the moss so long, her back throbbed, but she made no sound. Like a deer scenting the air, she stood perfectly still for a moment behind the bushes. Then she cautiously turned and went on into the forest, step by step, doing all she could not to tread on a dry branch or twig. After endless minutes, she had finally reached the almost invisible trodden footpath that led, by a long way around, to the road. Only now was she far enough from her hut to venture to run. Gasping for breath, she hurried along the narrow path. She must get away from the black man waiting in her hut for her return, waiting to kill her. She must get away from his companions lying in ambush in the forest. Bending low, with her heart beating wildly, the old woman hobbled past green ferns and birch trees putting out new leaves, until at last she reached the open road.
A cart belonging to a peasant from Annweiler, drawn by two oxen, was coming toward her. She hailed it, and the kindly driver took her up and drove her toward Waldrohrbach, where a niece of hers lived. She would have to go into hiding there for the next few weeks, maybe even months. And she must warn the circle of initiates as soon as possible! There were important decisions for them all to make. The midwife knew one thing for certain: the men who had traveled so far to come here to the Wasgau were not going to give up in a hurry.
Once again, Elsbeth’s eyes went back to the apparently tranquil part of the forest where death still lay in wait for her.
It felt like his breath had touched her already.
✦ 6 ✦
Eusserthal Monastery, April, Anno Domini 1524
ON THE FIRST MORNING AFTER he was set free, Mathis inspected the armory in the Knights’ House with Ulrich Reichhart. It was better stocked than he had expected. The room contained more than a dozen arquebuses, stored in chests and troughs or wrapped in oily cloth; seven double hackbuts; and twenty small, old-fashioned handguns. With its three falconets, Trifels Castle also had several larger guns suitable for storming an enemy castle. There were two casks of gunpowder, a number of heavy stone cannonballs weighing two pounds each, and four bronze mortars, but three of them had so many holes that Mathis immediately decided to melt them down.
Meanwhile, Father Tristan was as good as his word, and he spoke to Abbot Weigand on behalf of Mathis. As a result, Mathis was able to use the two furnaces that stood not far from Eusserthal monastery, on the bank of a stream diverted from its original course. He, Ulrich, Gunther, and the other men-at-arms from Trifels carried out some improvements, brought along new bricks, and built a workshop for the rest of what had to be done in a shed near the monastery wall. Finally they began modeling a core for the mold from mud, linen, and hemp.
Now and then Erfenstein came over to Eusserthal from the castle and examined the progress of the work in silence. “All I see is dirt,” he growled. “How that’s ever to become a bronze gun is a mystery to me.”
“It’s basically the same as casting a bell,” Mathis tried to explain. Producing some crumpled sheets of parchment, he pointed to a few hastily executed sketches. “You cover the core with a layer of clay—it’s called the false bell—and then with a second layer on top of the first. You fire the whole thing in the furnace, then you carefully remove the outer layer and break the false bell.” Mathis carefully put the sheets of parchment away again, and wiped the dirt from his forehead. “Then, when you put the core and the outer layer together again, you have a hollow space between them; that’s the mold, and you fill it with molten bronze. I helped the master bell-founder last year, and so did some of the monks. So with God’s help it ought to work.”
Mathis waved that away. “I’m having no more to do with priests and monks anyway, never mind how long that man Luther preaches against the pope.”
In three weeks’ time, the mold for the gun was ready at last. Now it was time to cast the barrel.
With that in mind, Mathis had divided all the weapons in the armory into those that could still be used and those that could not. Old and damaged rifles and mortars went into the smelting furnace, along with several pounds of bronze and tin that Mathis had gained by melting down beakers, goblets, and broken or useless old tools. Ulrich and the other men-at-arms searched every nook and cranny of the castle for material to use. Even some of Hedwig’s old pots and pans had to be sacrificed, and so did the cracked bell in the castle chapel. Finally they had enough metal to be melted down.
“Damn it all, letting you out of that cell was the best decision the castellan ever made,” Ulrich Reichhart said. He stood on a ladder propped against the six-foot-high furnace in the shed, and tossed another tin beaker into the smoking opening. The monastery church, built of red sandstone and richly ornamented, was only a stone’s throw away, but Mathis, Ulrich, and the other men-at-arms were living in their own little world, full of smoke and poisonous vapors.
“We’ll show that bastard Wertingen,” swore Ulrich Reichhart, deep in thought as he looked at the bubbling, red-hot mass beneath him. The old master gunner had stopped drinking quite so heavily since they began work on the gun. It was as if he had been infected by Mathis’s own enthusiasm for the mighty weapon.
“We’ll shoot his castle from under his fat ass,” he cheerfully went on. “You wait and see, we won’t even need the landsknechts of that young count.” He laughed, and even Mathis couldn’t restrain a grin. But his smile faded suddenly when he thought of his father’s reproachful face. Why can’t he understand that times have changed? thought Mathis. Why must he be so angry with me all the time?