The Castle of Kings

by Oliver Pötzsch

  Until now, the count had thought nothing of the warnings of other noblemen. He knew what had happened at Eusserthal, and he had also heard of other castles being captured over the last few weeks. However, Scharfenberg Castle was well fortified after last year’s repairs, and Friedrich had far more men than most other feudal lords. But what use was that if the enemy could get into the castle along a secret passage?

  It was Agnes. Agnes told them where they could come in.

  Friedrich glanced down into the courtyard once again to get an impression of the situation. More arrows flew his way, but they bounced off the outer wall. A single man, a hunchback, stood on the steps up to the keep. The cripple was not fighting but watching the fray below him with an expression of satisfaction, like a general standing on a hill. He suddenly looked up at the window, and his face twisted in a grin.

  “There’s the count, men!” Shepherd Jockel shouted, pointing at Friedrich with his three-fingered hand. “Get him! We’ll hang him from the highest pinnacle of his castle and watch him kick.”

  Count Friedrich von Löwenstein-Scharfeneck ran to his desk and snatched up the most important of the documents. Obliged to run away from a pack of peasants—how had it come to this? He must at least save the papers about the Norman treasure. Everything else would probably go up in smoke. Fear and fury swept over Friedrich at the same time, while the blood rushed to his head.

  You’ll pay for this, Agnes. Oh, you’ll pay in full.

  The count cast one last look at the courtyard. Then, in sudden panic, he looked for a possible route of escape. But wherever Friedrich turned his eyes, he could not see one anywhere.

  Loud, heavy footsteps, like those of a large, angry animal, were hurrying up the steps to his chamber.

  Mathis swayed in his sleep. He didn’t know whether he was in a bed or on a horse. It was a steady up and down movement, accompanying him through his dreams. He was bathed in sweat. Yet he kept seeing Agnes with her hands stretched out to him, before she disappeared, screaming, drawn into a black whirlpool. The whirlpool was like a large ring, turning faster and faster. Mathis reached for her, but her hands slipped away from him, and she disappeared into the darkness.

  “Agnes! The ring—the ring!”

  Screaming, he opened his eyes and saw a termite-eaten wooden ceiling above him. A damp, moth-worried sheet covered his body like a shroud. Mathis threw it off, sat up, and realized that he had been lying in a bed. It stood in a low-ceilinged attic room with old, rotting rushes on the floor. The red globe of the sun setting in the west shone through the open window.

  Where am I? How long have I been asleep?

  He mopped cold sweat off his forehead, and memory slowly came back. Soon after they had set off from Albersweiler, he had fallen sick with fever, and they’d had to rest for a while. After that they had ridden for days, first along the Queich, then in the shallow valley of the Rhine, going upstream, because Melchior was convinced that the procurers would go south, toward the Danube and the Black Sea. They had asked in every tavern after a group of men with two women and a small, hairy monster, but no one could give them any information.

  Meanwhile, the wound in Mathis’s leg had become more and more inflamed. The healing herbs that Melchior had found in the Albersweiler tavern had failed to have the desired effect. Shaken by feverish fits, Mathis had ridden until he no longer knew if he was awake or dreaming. The swaying of the horse was his constant companion. The green landscape of willow, birches, and marshy water meadows blurred more and more indistinctly before his eyes into a thick mist that threatened to smother him. At some point he had simply fallen off the horse. From then on his memories consisted only of fragments in which Melchior spooned hot soup into him or changed his bandages.

  Agnes. We must go on in search of Agnes. Or has that minstrel left me behind?

  Mathis hastily stood up, but immediately felt dizzy. He staggered, and then fell full length on the wooden floorboards, knocking over a bowl of water that had been standing beside the bed. The crash of the breaking bowl echoed through the room.

  Next moment he heard hasty footsteps on the stairs outside, and the door was flung open. Melchior von Tanningen stood in the doorway with a bowl of steaming soup in his hands.

  “Who said you could get up?” asked the minstrel, wagging a mock-threatening finger at him. “You’re far too weak still. Look what you’ve done.”

  He picked up the broken pieces of the bowl, helped Mathis back into bed, and then handed him the soup. “Here, eat this. A good meat broth, it’ll help you to get your strength back.”

  Mathis pushed the bowl away. “We don’t have time for that. We must—”

  “What you must do is get better. A day more or less won’t make any difference.”

  “How long have I been lying here?” Mathis asked.

  “Three days.”

  “A whole three days?” Mathis sat up, horrified, but Melchior laid his hand on his shoulder.

  “You can be thankful you’re still alive. Another day on horseback and you’d have died of gangrene. I had to carry you the last few miles to this inn like a sack of flour.” The minstrel smiled reassuringly and put a spoonful of soup in Mathis’s mouth. “Anyway, we’re no worse off for the delay. If I’m right, and those louts are going on upstream in their boat, they’ll have to get it hauled along the towpath, or row it, or put up a sail. All that takes time. We’ll be faster with the horses.”

  “Suppose they’re going downstream?” asked Mathis.

  “I don’t think they are.” Melchior’s eyes twinkled. “I have good news, Master Wielenbach. While you were lying here sick, I’ve been down to the river harbor talking to some travelers coming from the south. They remember a group of men with a monkey and two talking birds. And they think there were two women with them. So my assumption was right.” Melchior dipped the spoon in the soup again, and ostentatiously blew on it to cool it. “Now, eat up. The sooner you’re on your feet again, the sooner we can set off and catch up with Agnes. How does that sound?”

  Sighing, Mathis gave in and ate his soup. It tasted surprisingly good, of meat, salt, and fat. Every spoonful seemed to give him new strength.

  “You spoke of a ring several times in your dreams,” Melchior said, watching Mathis eating. “Was that the ring that Agnes has with her? Do you know anything about it?”

  Mathis shrugged his shoulders. “Only what Agnes has probably told you, too. She found it one day tied to her falcon’s leg. The ring itself dates from the time of Barbarossa, and it’s a signet ring.”

  “Did she ever see it earlier?” Melchior persisted. “Maybe when she was a child?”

  “Not that I know of. Her dreams began when she had the ring with her, but that is all I know.”

  Feeling pleasantly well fed, Mathis spooned up the last of the soup. “How have you been paying for food and these beds?” he asked. “You didn’t sell your lute, did you? Not that I’d exactly burst into tears over that, but all the same . . .”

  The minstrel smiled. “No, I would never do that. But I’m afraid we’ll have to content ourselves with coats of much coarser cloth. The count’s garments brought in some money—the silver clasp on the cloak you were wearing was worth a small fortune in itself. What we have now should pay for the rest of our journey.”

  “And where will that take us?” Mathis’s face darkened. “Even if the men are going upstream, they could leave the river anywhere. We don’t even know if Agnes is still alive.”

  “She’s certainly alive. She’s too valuable to them that way. And the leader of those scoundrels gave us a clue, remember? They’re going to sell our fair maiden, as he put it, on the Black Sea, and what with the stuff they’re taking around with them, they’ll go there by water as far as possible.” The minstrel got up from the side of the bed. “I served a count in the Black Forest a few years ago. He was a drunken old sot, but he paid well and let me go around the local villages, so I know my way about those parts.”

  Melchior
picked up a rush from the floor and used it to draw some lines in the dust on the floor. “This is the Rhine,” he explained. “Farther east is the Danube, and eventually the Danube leads to the Black Sea. Those two great rivers are the largest in the German Empire. To reach the Danube from the Rhine, travelers often use a small river called the Kinzig, which flows, voilà . . .” The minstrel drew another line from the Danube to a certain place on the Rhine, “into the beautiful city of Strasbourg.”

  He made an elegant bow and threw the rush out of the window. “I’d wager my lute that the villains will stop off there with Agnes. If we make haste, we’ll get there in time to rescue her from those scoundrels. Wonderful material for a ballad. When I appear at the singers’ contest in the Wartburg this coming fall, the audience will love it, bien sûr.”

  Melchior von Tanningen raised his pleasing tenor voice and sang ardently:

  But in the forest, sad to say,

  The lady fair is stolen away

  On board a boat—who now can save

  Her beauty from a watery grave?

  Two warriors bold are on her track,

  Hoping to win the lady back.

  In Strasbourg town they come to battle . . .

  Here the minstrel hesitated, and shook his head. “No, nothing much rhymes with battle . . . cattle, rattle? They won’t do. I’m afraid I’ll have to polish up those lines a bit more, but we have a long journey ahead of us, so I’ll have plenty of time.”

  Groaning, Mathis lay back in the bed again, too tired and weak to protest.

  Agnes lay in the bottom of the boat, trying to breathe very quietly. Agathe was beside her, sobbing now and then in her sleep and tossing and turning restlessly from side to side. Agnes fervently hoped that her sobs would not awaken Samuel, snoring on one of the oarsmen’s benches as he leaned on the rail.

  It was now five days since she had stolen his knife, and so far something had always happened to keep her from using it. The men had not been sleeping soundly enough, or the place where they had stopped was not a favorable choice, or they were anchored too far from the bank. But here, not far from Strasbourg, she thought the right time for her to escape had come. The robbers had chained her and Agathe to the benches, as they did every night, to keep them from running away. A rusty padlock was attached to the chain around her right ankle, cutting off the blood supply. She had already practiced forcing the lock with Samuel’s stolen knife several times in secret.

  With the tip of the knife, she felt her way through the keyhole to the springs inside the padlock. She had to start again a couple of times, but at last there was a slight click, and the lock sprang open. Agnes managed to catch hold of the chain at the last minute, before it crashed to the bottom of the boat. She carefully placed it beside a coil of rope and rubbed her foot. Blood pulsed painfully through her ankle.

  Then she was free.

  Hesitating, Agnes looked at little Agathe, who was still crying in her sleep. It would be so easy just to let herself slip over the rail of the boat. A few strokes, and she could swim to the bank and safety. But she had made up her mind to take the girl with her. And besides that, she wanted to get hold of something first.

  The ring.

  Barnabas was keeping it in the seaman’s chest built into the bottom of the boat, near the bow. Agnes knew that she was endangering her escape, if not making it impossible, but she couldn’t go without Barbarossa’s ring. It was almost as if it were calling to her. Everything had begun with that ring, and everything would probably end with it as well.

  One way or another.

  Moving at snail’s pace, she straightened up and peered over the side of the boat. The moon was shining brightly above the Rhine, casting its pale light on the rooftops of the little town of Kehl that lay on the eastern side of the broad river. This was where they had anchored. A wide wooden bridge standing on piers led across the Rhine to Strasbourg. She could see a red glow of light in the city, and the tower of the famous minster pointed to the sky like a warning finger.

  Over the last few days, Barnabas had been constantly boasting of the high price he would ask the Turkish slave traders for Agnes. He planned to make for the Danube by way of the Black Forest, and then they could reach the Black Sea within two or three months. However, he had looked increasingly concerned the closer they came to Strasbourg, for there were more and more signs of war on both banks of the Rhine, the Palatinate side and the Alsatian side. As the boat went along, Agnes saw churches, abbeys, and castles burning almost every day, and often hamlets and peasant villages were also engulfed in flames. The baggage trains of troops of landsknechts were seen on the great trading routes on the banks of the river more and more often, strung out like long snakes winding their way over the water meadows, with drums and pipes playing as they marched toward the peasants. The few times the robbers stopped to come on land and stock up on their provisions, they heard horror stories of burned fields, mass rapes, murdered peasant children, and landsknechts drinking blood. Yet it did indeed seem that the peasants were on their way to victory. In a small town called Weinsberg in Swabia a genuine count—the son-in-law of Emperor Maximilian, no less—had been made to run the gauntlet. The great city of Stuttgart had been conquered already, and more districts were falling into the hands of the peasants all the time. Agnes kept thinking of Mathis, who had always told her that the time of rule by the nobility would soon be over. Was that reversal of fortune really imminent?

  She carefully took one step at a time, to avoid making the planks of the boat creak. Marek, Snuffler, and Barnabas slept beside the boat on the pier by the bank, wrapped in threadbare blankets. Agnes could see the procurer’s hairy chest as he snored like a dozen woodcutters at once. Only Samuel had been left in the boat as a guard, but his head had slumped forward, and a thin trickle of saliva ran from the corner of his mouth. He did not look like he represented any danger.

  Satan might, though.

  The monkey was crouching on one of the front oarsmen’s benches. In the dark, Agnes could not see whether his malicious little red eyes were open or closed. Presumably she wouldn’t find out until he began chattering angrily. But she had to take the risk.

  By now she had reached the monkey and was only a few steps away from the bow. She said a silent prayer, and then prowled past Satan like a cat.

  One of the planks creaked.

  Agnes stood as still as a pillar of salt, but the monkey had already heard her. Hissing quietly, it straightened up and tried to jump onto her shoulder, but the leash around its neck pulled it back. The steady scratch of its claws on the planks sounded as loud as thunder.

  Swiftly, she reached under her skirt and brought out a few nuts that she had been secretly collecting for the last few days. She put them in front of Satan’s nose, whereupon he first looked at her suspiciously, but then began nibbling with relish. Agnes heaved a sigh of relief. She would have at least a moment’s peace.

  She quickly went the rest of the way to the bow and slid back the bolt on the seaman’s chest. She had to search about, but at last, among a few discolored coins and all kinds of cheap trinkets, she found her ring. Picking it up, she was about to hurry back to Agathe and set her free when there was a deafening sound.

  It was a shrill horn signal.

  Agnes had to control herself to keep from bursting into tears. It had taken her so much trouble to open the lock, pacify the monkey, and go on to the bow of the boat undiscovered, and now the horn signal had wrecked it all.

  Barnabas and the others turned restlessly in their sleep, the parrots began to screech in their cage, and Samuel rubbed his eyes, muttering. The large quantity of brandy that he had consumed only a few hours earlier kept him from becoming fully alert yet. Agnes hesitated for a moment, and then put the ring back in the chest. If Barnabas found that it was missing before she made her escape, he would certainly suspect her before anyone else. The ring must wait.

  She closed the chest, hurried back, and lay down beside Agathe, who was just opening
her eyes. The padlock clicked shut again.

  “What—” Agathe began, surprised, but Agnes put her hand over the girl’s mouth.

  “Sh!”

  It was not a second too soon. Samuel was already making his way over the benches to them. He looked relieved to see both girls still lying at the bottom of the boat.

  “Thought you two pretty birds had flown,” he said. “What’s that damned racket?”

  Sure enough, more horns were blowing now, and they were joined by the clatter of horses’ hooves, the sound of drums, and of soldiers’ songs in the distance. Barnabas had risen to his feet on the pier, and now he stared at the bridge. A great troop of soldiers was crossing from Strasbourg and making for the town of Kehl. It stretched so far back that Agnes couldn’t see the end of it.

  “Curse it, what are those landsknechts doing in the middle of the night?” Barnabas growled angrily. “Can’t they let decent citizens get a good night’s rest?”

  By this time the first soldiers had reached the bridgehead, only a few feet away from where the boat was anchored. Barnabas raised his arm and hailed the nearest landsknecht.

  “Hey, what brings you here at this time of night?”

  The soldier had a drum buckled in front of his stomach and was beating out a dark, monotonous rhythm on it. He looked at Barnabas without interest.

  “Going north. The peasants are outside Speyer, and even the bishop there is shit-scared,” he finally replied. “Didn’t you hear of it? All Swabia, Franconia, and the Palatinate are in turmoil. Those stupid millet-eaters are a real plague. High time we tanned their hides.”

  Agnes pricked up her ears. If Speyer fell, Annweiler was not far away. Had the peasants already captured Trifels Castle?

  “To be sure, you’re doing God’s work.” Barnabas nodded earnestly, as he shifted from foot to foot. Agnes could almost see his mind busy at work. “Tell us, what’s it like in the Black Forest? Has the war reached there, too? We were planning to go along the Kinzig and then . . .”