The Castle of Kings

by Oliver Pötzsch

  Shepherd Jockel rolled his eyes. “You’ll always find some little monk ready to give a poor peasant a crumb of bread,” he replied. “But they keep the meat for themselves. The good meat and the gold. They soothe you, they sing you to sleep, and after that . . .”

  “I’ve made my choice,” Ulrich Reichhart announced firmly. “I’m not killing any more monks. Let’s go and put those fires out instead, or we won’t have a roof left over our heads anymore.”

  Without another word, he turned and went out. Two or three other men followed him. The others went on whispering for a while, and finally they, too, left the church singly or in groups. In the end the only insurgents left were Mathis and Shepherd Jockel, while the Cistercians quietly began singing a hymn in front of the altar to the Virgin. Many of them were shivering and weeping, or had thrown themselves down on the cold flagstones of the church floor with their arms outspread, like living crosses.

  “I’ll never forgive you for this, Mathis, never,” Jockel hissed from the pulpit. With his hunched back, missing fingers, and piercing gaze, he made Mathis think of one of the gargoyles looking down on them both from the roof of the church. “Undermining me like that. I still have authority over you, and don’t you forget it.”

  Mathis shrugged. “I thought the whole point of our insurgency was to cast off the authorities,” he replied coolly. Then he turned and, with his head held high, he left the church by the great west door. Outside, buildings burned in the early morning air.

  But sensing the hostile glance of Jockel behind him, he guessed that he had made a powerful enemy.

  A good two hours later, Mathis was trudging through the last of the snowdrifts lying in the grounds of the monastery, helping to clear up. There were fires to be extinguished, doors to be nailed back in place, the injured to be tended, and dead men to be carried away.

  The peasants had laid all the bodies out neatly, side by side, near the graveyard. Rigid and pale, monks and monastery servants lay beside the insurgents, united in death. Under the watchful eyes of the bodyguards Jannsen and Paulus, the looted treasures were stacked up in a heap outside the church. Greedy eyes kept going to the many silver candlesticks, the chests and caskets, gilded crosses, and figures of saints. But Jockel had made it clear that any theft would be harshly punished. Mathis gave his own support to that threat. After all, the money was to be used to buy weapons, yes, but above all it would be spent for the common good. In that way, everyone would benefit.

  Jockel sat cross-legged beside the glittering pile, drawing up a list of the looted items in a well-worn notebook with a quill pen. He did not deign to give Mathis a glance when the younger man passed him. But some of the peasants clapped the young weaponsmith encouragingly on the shoulder, clearly glad that Mathis had managed to put an end to the bloodbath.

  The peasants had locked the surviving monks of Eusserthal in one of the cellars used for storage. They were to stay there as hostages until the monastery was ready to be defended against attack, and reinforcements from Dahn and Wilgartswiesen had arrived. Mathis labored under no illusions: they wouldn’t be able to hold out for a single day against a well-equipped army of landsknechts, even behind the high monastery walls. By attacking Eusserthal, the peasants of the Annweiler area had declared war on the bishop of Speyer, the duke of Zweibrücken, indeed the entire Palatinate. An answer would soon follow, and before then they must have gathered as many men as possible around them. That was their only chance.

  There was no going back now.

  Mathis decided to take another look at the monastery dormitorium, in search of a suitable place for a future arsenal that could be kept under lock and key. He turned right, crossed the chapter where, until yesterday evening, the monks had met for daily readings and sermons, and cast a brief glance at the refectorium. The peasants had done a great deal of damage to the monks’ dining room. Chairs and tables had been overturned, shards of broken plates and dishes lay all over the floor, and one of the insurgents had left a stinking pile of shit on the cushioned chair where the abbot used to sit enthroned. Wrinkling his nose, Mathis climbed the stairs to the floor above. There was less destruction here, as many of the peasants had never found their way to the upper floor. On the left there were several rooms, but one in particular interested Mathis, since it had a large lock on the door. That might be a good place to keep the firearms they would have in future. A notice on the door itself told him what the room was currently: SCRIPTORIUM.

  When Mathis tried the handle, he found that the door was already slightly ajar. It swung open, revealing a row of desks with an inkwell and a stack of parchment pages cut to size on each of them. A white-robed figure lay over the desk at the back, his head down on the top of it, his fingers convulsively clutching a quill pen. Looking more closely, Mathis saw blood dripping steadily, like thick ink, to the floor. A moment later, Mathis froze, rigid with shock.

  The lifeless man at the desk was Father Tristan.

  “Oh, my God!” Mathis ran to the old man and cautiously raised him. Father Tristan was still alive, but his breathing was stertorous and irregular. A deep wound gaped open on his neck, and the right side of his white habit was wet with blood.

  “Father!” Mathis cried. “I . . . I am so sorry. By all the saints, I didn’t want anything like this.”

  He had assumed that Father Tristan was still at Trifels Castle, and it almost broke his heart to find him here so badly injured. He had known the old monk since he was a little boy. Father Tristan had helped him when he was learning to read and had always had a kind word for him or some little snack for him to nibble. When Mathis had been closer to death than life at the age of nine, feverish and coughing, the old man had cured him after watching over him during long nights. Suddenly the whole of his short life seemed to Mathis pointless. All he had ever done was quarrel, fight, and make things that killed other people. How could he have abandoned himself to such madness?

  “Who did this?” he asked, although he knew that the answer was irrelevant. Some peasant, spurred on by his anger, had stabbed the old man like he might slaughter a pig. Mathis saw a large pool of blood in one corner of the scriptorium. Presumably the old monk had fled there before the spear or knife caught him. A red smear of blood formed a trail to the desk, on which a sheet of parchment lay, drenched with blood, but partly covered with writing. Had Father Tristan been trying to write a farewell letter?

  “Mathis, my dear Mathis . . .”

  Mathis gave a start at the sudden sound of the old man’s hoarse voice. Father Tristan had opened his eyes and was looking at him with a smile. His skin was pale, and as wrinkled as a dried apple, his face seemed to consist entirely of lines, and his aquiline nose stood out from it.

  “I knew that God would hear me,” he murmured. “You . . . you were sent here by heaven.”

  “Hell, more likely,” Mathis said sadly. He felt for Father Tristan’s heart. It beat weakly and unsteadily. “Father, I’m going to get help,” he went on. “We’ll move you down to the infirmary of the monastery, and then—”

  Father Tristan held Mathis’s hand so tightly that he stopped talking in alarm.

  “No time . . .” the monk gasped. “The letter . . . Agnes . . .”

  Confused, Mathis looked at him, and then at the sheet of parchment lying on the desk.

  “What about the letter?” he asked. But Father Tristan had already closed his eyes again, and only the faint rattle of his breathing was to be heard.

  “Curse it!” Cautiously, Mathis laid the injured monk down on the cold floor of the scriptorium and glanced at the desk. The letter had been written in a hurry and was stained with blood. Father Tristan had managed to complete only a few lines. Leaning over the letter, Mathis began to read it, murmuring to himself.

  Dear Agnes, when you read these lines I shall probably be with my God. Do not grieve; I am an old man, and have been granted more years than most others. What I feared has happened: the peasants have confused anger with justice and are storming
the monastery. I hope that in his boundless kindness, the Lord will allow one of the monastery servants to escape and bring you this letter.

  You have often asked me what your dreams mean, and I told you they were only figments of your imagination. I was lying. It is the ring that awakened something in you, something that had been hidden for a long time. I thought it best to tell you no more. But now I believe you have a right to learn about your past. There is an ancient monastery near Bingen, on the river Rhine. Its name is St. Goar. The canons there have guarded the knowledge of the empire for hundreds of years, and they also know that

  The letter ended abruptly, with one more stroke of the pen running right across the parchment. Mathis suspected that was when the peasants had stormed the scriptorium. He hastily hid the letter under his coat. He would think about it later. But for now he must make sure that Father Tristan survived, at least for the next few hours. Maybe there was still hope.

  Carefully, he lifted the old man’s astonishingly light body and put him over his shoulder as he might carry a small child. Then he staggered out into the corridor and went downstairs to the first floor.

  Tears were running down his face. He would tell the peasants they were from the smoke of fires not yet extinguished. They would believe him, because they considered him one of their leaders.

  But he could not lie to himself.

  Agnes saw the smoking fires from one of the hills crossed by the narrow track as it wound its way down into the valley. She might still be a good mile away from the monastery, but it was already easy to see the separate buildings. It looked like the whole of Eusserthal had fallen victim to the flames.

  It was now two days since she had found the scrap of parchment bearing the names of Johann and Constanza in the secret compartment in the library. Since then Agnes had been waiting for a chance to leave the castle in secret. On no account must Friedrich have any idea that she wanted to see her old father confessor. The count knew that Father Tristan suspected him of murdering Philipp von Erfenstein with poison, and he did not trust the old monk an inch. But today her husband was out in the forest around Trifels Castle and would be supervising several excavations there until evening. So it was a good opportunity. Late in the morning, dressed inconspicuously as a pilgrim, she had set out on the narrow donkey track through the woods and over the hills to the monastery, a walk of just under three hours.

  Holding her breath, Agnes stared at the large clearing, over which a pall of gray vapors hung. The fires in the monastery and the church had seemingly been put out already, but thin threads of smoke still rose, and red tongues of flame still licked at many of the sheds and surrounding buildings. Up here on the hill she caught the acrid smell of smoke. What in God’s name had happened down there? There had been no thunderstorm recently, and the fire had been too large to be the result of a minor accident in the bakehouse. Had the monastery come under attack? By whom?

  Dear God, don’t let anything have happened to Father Tristan, Agnes thought. Let all this be just a bad dream.

  She began to run, but after only a few steps she hesitated. If there really had been an attack down there, brigands could still be roaming nearby. On the other hand, she really must find out about Father Tristan.

  The steep, winding track turned to a broader one that could take a cart; it was set between high banks. The first of the monastery’s fields and meadows came into view. Agnes took a deep breath and then decided to make straight for the monastery itself.

  After only a few moments, she knew it had been the wrong decision.

  Mathis stared at the three figures approaching the forecourt of the monastery, unable to believe his eyes.

  But the girl between the two men who had been on guard really was Agnes. Mathis had just carried Father Tristan down to the infirmary, where one of the monastery’s terrified maidservants would tend him along with a few injured peasants. Mathis had felt for the strange letter under his coat several times, always thinking of Agnes—and now here she was, staggering toward the monastery gate with her hands tied and her forehead bleeding. She wore her old leather hose and a thin, torn shirt; her hair was dirty and untidy; and she was trembling all over. Nonetheless, Agnes still looked as lovely as he remembered her from their last meeting, just before the siege of Ramburg Castle.

  By now a whole group had gathered around the captive. The men laughed and cheered like the guards had shot a royal stag. One of them pulled Agnes’s hair, another tugged at her shirt so that it tore even more over the shoulder, exposing her breasts. Agnes covered them with her bound hands, ducking and turning while more and more hands reached out for her hair, her face, her bosom. In spite of her unfortunate situation, she still had the aura of pride that Mathis had always admired.

  “Stop that at once!” Mathis stormed toward the group, pulling a couple of the men aside, and pushing one of them away so hard that he fell on the seat of his hose, dazed. He hit another in the face.

  “What’s the big idea?” the man demanded, a hand to his split lip. Blood dripped on the ground. “You get to the back of the line if you want your share of the fun.”

  “You’re no better than animals,” Mathis swore at him. “Stinking, rutting animals.” The other men stepped aside, looking at him suspiciously.

  Agnes still had her bound hands raised, this time to protect her face. She slowly lowered them, and her eyes widened. Only now did she seem to realize who had come to her aid.

  “Mathis!” she cried, looking at him in horror. “You, here? But . . . but . . .”

  “I see those two know each other already.”

  It was the voice of Shepherd Jockel, who had heard the uproar and was now approaching the group. His eyes went slowly from Mathis to Agnes and back again. An expression of mock surprise came over Jockel’s face.

  “Why, of course, the daughter of the castellan at Trifels and her former weaponsmith. What a delightful reunion.” He looked distrustfully at Mathis. “I might almost think you had some special interest in the girl, from the way you were acting.”

  “I don’t like to see men behaving like animals, that’s all.” Mathis looked down awkwardly. None of the peasants knew how close Agnes really was to him. To them, he was only the former smith at Trifels Castle, and she his former mistress, now Countess von Löwenstein-Scharfeneck. His conduct must surprise the men, who would probably think him more likely to spit in her face.

  “No woman deserves to be treated like that,” he said brusquely.

  There was an unpleasant spark in Jockel’s eyes. Suddenly, in a feminine gesture, he put a finger to his lips.

  “Oh, Mathis! You, here? But . . . but . . .” he said, imitating Agnes in a shrill, piping voice. The men roared with laughter.

  “If I didn’t know that you’re my best man, and hate the nobility like the devil himself, I might think there was something between the two of you,” said Jockel at last. “Tell me, Mathis, is there? Come on, speak up! Have you been rolling in the hay with the pretty countess here?”

  “Nonsense,” Mathis replied, doing his best not to look either Jockel or Agnes in the eye. “We’re acquainted with each other, that’s all.”

  The men were perfectly quiet now, expectantly watching the quarrel between their two leaders.

  Finally Jockel gave an understanding nod. “If you say so. Then you won’t object if we lock up Her Excellency the countess now. The peasants’ council can decide this evening what we do with her.” He turned to the bystanders, speaking loudly, and pointing with visible disgust to Agnes. “Look at this woman, men. She may appear innocent now, but her husband is one of the greatest scoundrels in the Palatinate. His landsknechts have devastated our fields, his stewards squeeze the last kreuzer out of us peasants. And with that money he buys his wife the finest clothes while our children go in rags. Now she’ll bleed for what he’s done to us!”

  The peasants cheered. Greedy eyes wandered over Agnes in her torn shirt.

  “It’s not the countess who did you wrong,”
protested Mathis. “Don’t forget, it was the count. Let me—”

  “You won’t cheat us of our reward this time,” Jockel said to him in a dangerous whisper. “The monks can go free for all I care, they’re harmless old fellows. But not the countess. She is ours. God himself has brought her to us.”

  Mathis’s attempts to reply were drowned out by the shouting men. They roared, bellowed, bawled. Only when Agnes herself raised her voice did it become quieter. She had raised her head proudly, and no one but Mathis noticed the slight tremor spreading from her hands over her whole body. At that moment, Agnes did indeed look like a great lady born.

  “Where is Father Tristan?” she asked in a firm voice.

  Jockel scrutinized her with hate-filled eyes. “Who, castellan’s daughter?”

  “My father confessor. I came to visit him. If I am to die, I want to see him one last time, at least.” Agnes hesitated. “Or is he dead?”

  “How would I know? We slit the fat bellies of a few of those clerics. Could be that your father confessor was among them.” Shrugging his shoulders, Jockel looked around at the peasants. It was Mathis who finally replied.

  “Father Tristan is lying in the infirmary, gravely injured,” he said quietly, still not looking at Agnes. “His breathing is faint, but he is still alive.”

  Jockel laughed. “Then take her to him, and look sharp about it. Before it’s too late. For both of them,” he added after a pause, with a malicious smile. “We’ll decide what’s to be done with the woman this evening. The Wasgau needs a clear signal that our patience is at an end.” Casually, Jockel nodded to his two bodyguards. “Jannsen, Paulus, take her ladyship to the old fool. Mathis can show you where the infirmary is. If the priest’s still alive, he can hear her confession, whether in a shed or the latrine, I don’t mind.”

  “It’ll be better if I go too,” Ulrich Reichhart said, suddenly speaking up as he stepped out of the crowd. “I’ve known Mathis a long time. He fancies the woman, believe me. Devil only knows what he might be persuaded to do.”