The Castle of Kings

by Oliver Pötzsch

  “Hey there, count’s whore,” he shouted. “Ready to hold your first audience in your wonderful throne room? Here comes the handsome prince. But don’t touch him or he’ll fall to pieces entirely.”

  There was laughter, and then two of the peasants let down a figure hanging lifeless as a puppet in a loop of rope. Blood dripped on Agnes.

  The man’s face was so badly beaten that it took her a moment to realize that it was Mathis. His clothing was torn, his head lolled forward. He looked like a hanged man.

  “You murderers!” Agnes yelled up to the two peasants. “What have you done to him?”

  “Never fear, he’s still alive. Jockel is keeping him for later.” Suddenly the moon-faced peasant raised his voice in a threatening tone that echoed through the walls. “But if his lordship your husband thinks he can storm Trifels, we’ll make short work of the pair of you. Then we’ll see what his whore and her fancy man are worth to the count.”

  He laughed and spat into the shaft. Then he let go of the rope, so that Mathis fell like a stone for the last few feet. He groaned softly as they put the slab back in place.

  “My God, Mathis! What have they done to you?” Agnes crawled toward him and cradled his head in her lap. Her eyes were well enough accustomed to the darkness now for her to see his face more clearly.

  Mathis’s lips were split, and his nose and mouth covered with congealed blood. Agnes cautiously felt his skull and his cheekbones, but apart from a large lump on the back of his head she could find no major cause for anxiety. The peasants had been rough with Mathis, but at least he would survive.

  Or he’ll survive these injuries, she thought in fear. But not what they’re going to do to us later. Unless we can find some way out . . .

  She reached for a bucket containing a little clouded, stinking water and washed Mathis’s face. He was quaking with pain and cold. With difficulty, he looked up at her.

  “I’m so sorry, Agnes,” he said hoarsely. “Why didn’t I listen to you? We never ought to have come back to Trifels.” Mathis coughed and spat out a broken tooth. “I . . . I love you. But now it’s too late.”

  “At least we are together,” said Agnes softly, stroking his hair, encrusted as it was with blood and dirt. “It probably had to be this way. It was Trifels, you see. It called to me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I dreamed of it again, Mathis. Of Trifels and Constanza. Just before the peasants found me. Your idea really did work.” Quietly, she told Mathis about her dream, about Constanza walled up in the castle, and the strange phrase that she could not get out of her head.

  “The place where enmity is no more,” she murmured at last. “I wonder what Constanza meant by that?”

  Mathis coughed again. “Never mind what it means, we’ll never find out now, or at least not in this life.”

  “You’re forgetting that my hated husband is at the gates of this castle,” Agnes pointed out. “He may not exactly love me ardently, but if we hold out here for a little while, then—”

  “Agnes, listen to me.” Mathis laboriously sat up. “My mother and my sister are up there. Jockel is threatening to execute them if I don’t tell him what your husband’s plans are. He thinks I know about a hidden tunnel of some kind. But I know no such thing. I am dreadfully sorry for getting us into this situation. Believe me, I don’t care about my own life, but I do care about the lives of my family.” He looked pleadingly at her with his swollen eyes. “You may curse me, Agnes, but if you know anything, maybe a second escape tunnel, a hidden crawl space, any kind of damned mouse hole, then tell me now, for the sake of my mother and my sister.”

  “By God, I wish I could help them, but I don’t know any other way out.” Agnes stared into the void. Once again, she felt close to fainting. “All I know is that Constanza was walled up alive somewhere in Trifels Castle.” She hesitated. “And, strange as it sounds, I feel that the place can’t be far from here.”

  Mathis laughed in desperation. “What a comfort. Imprisoned where your ancestress—”

  Suddenly he stopped short, thunderstruck. He straightened up until he could drag himself on his knees to the western wall of the dungeon, where he immediately began searching frantically in the straw.

  “What are you doing?” asked Agnes.

  “Looking for something. Something I found when I was in here before, but I quite forgot it later.” Without any more explanation, he went on feeling the floor and the wall. At last he stopped. “Ah, here it is!”

  Mathis had pushed the straw aside, and now he pointed to a spot on the wall. When he tapped it, the stone made a suspiciously hollow sound.

  “A stone was set into the wall here,” he excitedly explained. “And if I remember correctly, there was a Latin inscription on it.” He felt for it and finally nodded, satisfied. “Here it is.”

  With her heart beating unsteadily, Agnes got close to the wall and knelt in front of it. It was still dark in the dungeon, but Mathis gently took her hand and guided it until she could feel the words engraved on the stone. After passing her fingers over it a couple of times, Agnes thought she knew what it said.

  ALBERTUS FACIEBAT LEONES EXPULSOS ESSE . . .

  “Albertus caused the lions to be banished,” she murmured. “What in God’s name does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is that a stone was set into the wall of the dungeon here, and the space behind it presumably goes on farther.” Mathis knocked again at the stone block. His excitement obviously helped him to forget his pain for a while. “When you said just now that Constanza was buried alive somewhere near here, it came back to me. I wanted to blow the block out of place with gunpowder, don’t you remember? Why didn’t we think of it before? This is the dungeon of Trifels Castle. Way back in the past, Barbarossa’s son Henry kept his captives here. There may well be a passage leading from here to another chamber.”

  “Albertus faciebat leones expulsos esse,” said Agnes, repeating the words of the inscription quietly. She shrugged her shoulders. “That word faciebat often occurs on memorials, so that people will know who set them up. Maybe some stonemason was immortalizing himself here, or . . .” Agnes stopped in amazement. She felt herself begin to tingle all over with excitement.

  Can it really be true? Is it as simple as that? Or am I beginning to dream in broad daylight?

  “Of course.” she said. “It really does refer to Constanza. The lions, it’s the lions that stand for her.”

  “The lions?” Mathis asked, baffled.

  “Well, the lions are on the Hohenstaufen coat of arms. Do you see? It’s a riddle.” The words were tumbling out of Agnes now, as she went on interpreting the inscription. “The lions, meaning the Staufers, were banished to Trifels, with Constanza as their last legitimate descendant.”

  “But then who is Albertus?”

  Agnes smiled. “Albertus is the Latin form of Albrecht. And if I remember what Father Tristan told me correctly, Albrecht was the German king of the Habsburg family who ordered Constanza to be put to death. So Albrecht was making sure that the Hohenstaufen lion would be banished behind these walls for ever. Albertus faciebat leones expulsos esse . . .” She reverently stroked the block. “My ancestress’s grave is behind this stone,” she whispered. “I’m sure of it. We really have found the place.”

  Agnes closed her eyes, feeling a strange sense of peace come over her. All at once she was sure she had finally come to the end of her long journey. The fever that had been troubling her for two days was making her shiver, and once again a soft voice purred inside her head.

  The voice of Trifels.

  The circle is closing, Agnes. It all began here at Trifels Castle, and this is where it will all end. Even though it is not the end you would have wished for, is it?

  Agnes turned away, with a laugh of desperation. “How ironic. We really have found the entrance to Constanza’s grave, but we can’t reach her. We’ll never be able to move this stone.”

  “Not us, but maybe someon
e else will.” Mathis twisted his battered face into a grin, showing a wide gap between his teeth. “For instance, Jockel and his men.”

  Agnes looked at him, baffled. “Jockel? Why would he want to help us?”

  “Well, if we tell Jockel about our discovery, he’ll certainly want to know what’s just beyond this dungeon. He’ll begin digging. At least we’ll gain a little time that way.” Gingerly, Mathis leaned back against the slab. “And in our situation, time is very, very valuable.”

  About an hour later, Shepherd Jockel stood in the dungeon, thoughtfully feeling the edges of the stone slab. He had let himself down into the depths with three of his peasants, all of them carrying picks and shovels. A few lanterns cast light on the interior of the cell, so that the stone and its inscription were now clearly in view.

  “A walled-up escape tunnel, eh?” Jockel grinned at Mathis. “So you obviously did think of something after all. I knew you wouldn’t let your family down.”

  “Are my mother and my sister all right?” Mathis asked without responding to Jockel’s suggestion. He and Agnes had decided not to tell the peasants the true purpose of the tunnel. A noblewoman’s grave would be of far less interest to the rebels than the possibility of escaping Count Scharfeneck and his landsknechts at the last moment. By now, even a fanatic like Jockel would have realized that he could not hold the castle.

  “Your family are all right, at least so long as you’re not trying to fool us.” Jockel looked at him sharply. “Here, how did you know about this slab?”

  “I was imprisoned here once before, you know,” Mathis replied truthfully. “I couldn’t move the block out of place at the time, but now it’s different.” He indicated the three peasants standing expectantly in the background with their tools. “What are you waiting for?”

  Jockel signaled to the men, and they began loosening the masonry and plaster around the slab. It soon became clear that the heavy stone, about the thickness of a man’s arm, was set deep into the ground where it met the floor. Above it there was a small slit now walled up with bricks. When the peasants broke out the upper bricks, damp, musty air blew through into Mathis’s face.

  The crack that Father Domenicus mentioned, he thought. The crack through which Constanza could be heard moaning and singing until she died. The dean was right.

  “This is hard work, Jockel,” grumbled one of the peasants, tugging at the slab. It was the moon-faced man who had let Mathis down into the dungeon a few hours ago. “This thing won’t shift from the ground, not without a hell of a lot of digging.”

  “Then for God’s sake, dig,” Jockel hissed. “Or do you want the landsknechts cutting your throats a couple of hours from now?”

  “But you said other bands of peasants were coming to help us.”

  “So they are. But meanwhile it wouldn’t be a bad idea to . . . er, have another plan up our sleeve. It’s all to do with the trade of warfare. You wouldn’t understand that.”

  Muttering, the peasants went on with their work, while Jockel glanced suspiciously at Agnes. For some time now the castellan’s daughter had been leaning back against the opposite wall as she sat hunched on the floor, her eyes closed. Mathis was not sure whether it was because of the fever that had clearly been troubling Agnes for some time. Since they had been down in this dungeon, though, she had seemed to be in another world.

  “What’s the matter with her?” Jockel asked Mathis. “Is my lady the countess sick? Doesn’t she fancy the air down here?”

  “You can see yourself that she isn’t at all well,” Mathis replied. “She has a fever, and she’s in pain. I expect your stupid peasants were too rough with her.”

  Jockel gave a thin-lipped smile. “That’s nothing compared to the pain I’ll inflict on her if her husband really dares to storm Trifels. We sent a message to the landsknechts’ camp. The count knows his whore is here. And he knows what we’ll do to her if he lifts so much as a finger against us.”

  Mathis did not reply but looked solicitously at Agnes. Did her fainting fits and her absence of mind have anything to do with the fact that they were approaching the grave of her ancestress? Was such a thing possible?

  The next half hour passed in silence. The peasants dug, breathing heavily, driving their picks deep into the ground, until there was a hole over three feet deep beside the stone block. At last it could be shifted slightly.

  “Get it out,” Jockel ordered, rubbing his hands together, positively quaking with excitement. “Let’s see what’s behind it.”

  Puffing and panting, the peasants raised the heavy block and finally let it crash to the ground, where it broke into several pieces. A low-roofed passage came into view where it had stood. The musty smell was so strong now that the men covered their faces with their hands.

  “Aha, welcome to the gates of hell,” Jockel grinned. “The way this passage smells, no one’s used it for a long time. All the better.”

  Only a moment later, a muted clap of thunder shook the dungeon. The peasants cried out and looked fearfully up to where the noise had come from.

  “Holy Mother Mary—the devil!” Moonface screamed. “We’ve woken the devil!”

  “Don’t worry,” Jockel reassured them. “It’s only the guns of the besiegers. Sounds like the storming of the castle has begun.” He tried to smile and did not entirely succeed. “But Trifels Castle has held out against worse, right? So come on. We don’t have much time left.”

  But he looked anxiously up at the shaft, for screams and more firing could now be heard. It sounded like some of the landsknechts were already inside the lower bailey. The hunchback was about to start along the dark tunnel when a clear, loud voice stopped him in his tracks.

  “Get back, all of you. I will be the first to enter this passage.”

  Astonished, Mathis looked around at Agnes, who approached the entrance with new self-confidence. She seemed to have awoken from a long sleep.

  “If we must walk this way, I go first,” she said firmly. “I owe it to my forebears.”

  “Forebears? What nonsense are you talking?” Jockel looked at her, taken aback. “And how do you think you’re speaking to me anyway, woman?” He raised his hand to strike her. “I’ll teach you what it means to arouse the wrath of the peasants, you . . .” But he stopped, and smiled unpleasantly, “Well, I don’t know. Maybe it’s really better for our princess to go first. That passage looks damned old. It can’t hurt to have someone go ahead in case it falls in.” He seized Agnes by the chin and pulled her to him. “But don’t forget, countess, I’m right behind you. One false step, and this passage is your grave.”

  “Isn’t it my grave already?” Agnes replied quietly. Then she freed herself from him and disappeared into the darkness. Jockel and Mathis followed her, with the three peasants carrying lanterns after them.

  As Mathis, stooping, went along the low-roofed passage, he thought again of the self-confidence that Agnes had just shown. Almost as if someone else were speaking through her. What in the world, he wondered, was going on? Painfully, he hit his head on an overhanging rock and staggered on. The tunnel ran straight for about thirty feet then turned sharp right before finally widening out. Here, parts of the walls and roof were supported by rotting wooden props and joists, and a few rats scurried away between Mathis’s feet. Soon they stood at the entrance to another chamber; its extent could not be made out easily in the darkness. The thunder of the guns resounded from somewhere above them.

  “Get on with it, bring up those lanterns,” Jockel called to his men. “Or are you going to wait until the whole place falls in?”

  When the peasants had finally brought their lanterns to the front of the party, Mathis held his breath. This room was far larger than the dungeon, more of a great hall. Water dripped from the high ceiling, and Mathis guessed that they were underneath the well tower. The floor was weathered marble. But it was the walls that were truly extraordinary. All four of them bore the remnants of a huge fresco. Although the paintings were faded, Mathis could
tell that they depicted German kings and emperors. There were about two dozen of them, each with a crown on his head and dressed in richly decorated robes whose colors had flaked off long ago. Some held a sword, others a scepter, a Bible, or an imperial orb. The whole place was like a vast underground mausoleum.

  One of the rulers in particular caught Mathis’s eye. He was very tall, with a long, red beard, and his right hand held a mighty spear. The man’s name was written clearly above his flowing hair.

  Fridericus Barbarossa Imperator.

  “Emperor Redbeard and the Holy Lance,” Mathis whispered, staring at the portrait, fascinated. He shook his head in astonishment. “Who’d have thought? So the legend is true, or at least the kernel of it. Barbarossa really does sleep under Trifels Castle.”

  “Damn it, what’s all this?” That was Shepherd Jockel’s agitated voice. “Where have we ended up? This is no escape tunnel, it’s more like a crypt. Speak up, countess. Where have you brought us?”

  He made for Agnes, who was kneeling in front of one wall with several bleached bones directly before her. They bore a distant resemblance to the figure of a human being. Tiny scraps of fabric and matted hair still clung to them. Agnes picked the bones up and passed them through her fingers. She was so absorbed in her thoughts that she seemed not to hear the shouting of the peasant leader.

  “I want to know where we are,” Jockel demanded.

  He struck Agnes a blow that knocked her sideways, but she did not cry out. Instead, she slowly straightened up and looked Jockel so firmly in the face that he involuntarily flinched back. The cannon still rumbled overhead.

  “This is the grave of my ancestress Constanza, the daughter of Enzio, grandson of the great Emperor Frederick II,” Agnes said, pointing to the verdigris-tinged bones before her. She was like a woman in a trance, and her dreamy voice clearly terrified the three peasants in the background. “She was tortured and walled up alive here at Trifels. Kneel down and pray before her bones. We must give her a worthy burial.”