“First you’ve got to catch us,” Jakob answered, panting for air.
Out of the corner of his eye he noticed a wagon loaded with barrels, standing in front of one of the houses. On a sudden impulse, he grabbed his brother by the hand, climbed on top of the barrels, and pulled himself up onto the low roof. Bartholomäus followed, gasping, and soon they both were standing atop the snow-covered ridge of the roof with a view over the entire town—all the way to the execution site. Jakob realized they weren’t safe yet. Howls, catcalls, and the sound of running feet announced that the others were hot on their trail. At that moment, Michael Berchtholdt’s grinning face appeared above the gutter of the roof.
“And now, you Kuisls?” he snarled. “Where do you think you’re going? Maybe fly away like the birds? Or will Bartl, this idiot, send for an eagle to carry you off?”
Jakob looked around desperately. Of all the rooftops, they’d picked the one farthest from the other buildings on the block. Jakob guessed it was at least three paces—nine feet—to the next house. He himself had a big, athletic build, and he could make it. But what about his younger brother? Bartholomäus was heavier, and besides, he looked worn out. Just the same, they at least had to try.
Without warning Bartholomäus, Jakob jumped. Vaguely he caught a glimpse of the small lane beneath him, covered with snow and garbage, and then he felt solid ground again. He’d made it to the next roof.
Relieved, he looked around at his brother, who was still standing hesitantly on the ridge of the roof. Just as Bartholomäus was about to leap, Michael Berchtholdt appeared alongside him like a ghost and dragged him back down the icy roof. Other boys followed and started beating Bartholomäus, who screamed desperately for his older brother.
“Jakob, Jakob! Help me! They’re killing me!”
Jakob saw the wide eyes of his brother staring back at him. He heard the blows raining down on Bartholomäus—six or maybe seven boys had jumped him. That would be too many—even for Jakob, who, with his strength, could perhaps have taken on three of them. Besides, if he jumped into the fray, there would be no one to warn Mother and little Lisl before even worse things happened. Suppose the unruly mob attacked their house down in the Tanners’ Quarter while he was fighting with the street urchins here? Perhaps they’d already set the house on fire. He couldn’t waste any time.
But there was something else Jakob was reluctant to admit, even to himself—something that spun a fine, sticky web around him.
The zeal Bartholomäus had shown the day before while piling the wood around the stake; his constant praise for their choleric father; his cool, dispassionate curiosity concerning the torture of the old shepherd . . . all of that had increased Jakob’s contempt for his brother. It was a palpable disgust that sometimes caused him to gag and even now left a bad taste in his mouth.
At that moment it became painfully clear to Jakob that Bartholomäus was just like his father and the whole goddamned family of executioners. Jakob himself had never been one of them, and he wouldn’t be in the future, either, no matter how much he’d always longed for his father’s acceptance.
Without being aware of it, Jakob had made up his mind.
“Jakob, help me!” Bartholomäus wailed as the blows continued raining down on him. “Please don’t let me die!”
For one last time, Jakob stared into his brother’s wide, terrified eyes. Then he turned away without saying a word and ran across the roofs of Schongau toward the eastern city wall, where the Tanners’ Quarter was located.
Behind him he heard a high-pitched scream, like that of a dying animal.
He ran faster, until he could no longer hear his brother’s cries.
1
A FEW MILES FROM BAMBERG, OCTOBER 26, 1668 AD
MORE THAN FORTY YEARS LATER
DAMN IT! IF THOSE PEOPLE up front don’t start moving their asses, I’ll grab them by the scruff of the neck and whip them all the way to Bamberg myself.”
With a strong curse on his lips, Jakob Kuisl rose from his seat in the oxcart and stared ahead angrily. An entire caravan of all kinds of carts and wagons blocked the narrow pass through the hills and, after a number of sharp turns, ended in a riverbed. The rain was pouring down, and the trees in the dark forest of firs all around were just barely visible. Water dripped from the low-lying branches, and the constant drumbeat of the rain mixed with the many other sounds down at the ford in the river. Pigs squealed, men shouted and cursed, and somewhere a horse whinnied. The muffled roar of the river and the rain overwhelmed most other sounds.
Magdalena frowned as she looked at her father, who was spewing his anger like a volcano. More than six feet tall, he stood out above the carts like a church steeple above a nave.
“Damn it all to hell. I—”
“Can’t you see there’s something wrong up in front at the ford in the river?” interrupted Magdalena, who was sitting between sacks of grain. She yawned and stretched her back, which ached after she’d had to sit so long. The cold rain had drenched her woolen shawl, and she felt a chill. “Do you think we’re sitting here in this mess just for fun?”
The Schongau executioner cleared his throat and spat with disgust into the swampy ground surrounding the wagon. “These damn Franks are capable of anything,” he growled, now somewhat more calmly. “I keep wondering what hole in the ground all these people come from. There’s more turmoil in this goddamned forest than at a proper execution. Where are we, anyway? Didn’t they say we’d get to Bamberg before sundown?”
“Well, this ford is the only place you can get across the river in such weather. And, as you see, we’re certainly not the only ones.”
Peeved, Magdalena turned around. The traffic both in front of and behind them was the worst she’d ever seen in their region, the quiet “Priests’ Corner” in the Alps. It had been three weeks since she and her family had left Schongau to pay a visit to her uncle Bartholomäus in Bamberg. Since their stop the day before in Forchheim, in Franconia, the muddy road had been getting busier and busier. Wandering journeymen traveled from town to town; stooped peddlers struggled under the weight of backpacks full of rudely carved wooden spoons, grinding stones, and cheap knickknacks; other riders on horseback, dressed in fancy clothing, hurried by silently in the rain. Most of the vehicles making their way through the forest along the crowded road were simple, canvas-covered two-wheeled carts without springs.
“Hey, what’s wrong there up front?” the Schongau executioner called out again, cupping his huge hands to form a mouthpiece. “Are you idiots sleeping up there?”
Now the wagon drivers in front and behind them began to grumble, too, and here and there someone cursed loudly. Magdalena noticed the worried, anxious glances on the faces of some of the men looking into the forest, which, despite the early-afternoon hour, was beginning to look threatening—as if behind the first few rows of trees night was already falling. A shiver passed reflexively up Magdalena’s spine.
“Probably a wagon got stuck in the mud of the river, that’s all. Or a few calves were spooked and didn’t want to go on,” she said, trying to comfort herself as she tugged on her father’s dirty linen shirt. “So you’d better sit down before you start an argument with someone.”
“It can’t be that hard to cross such a narrow part of the river,” Jakob replied, shaking his head. “These Franks are simply too stupid, that’s all there is to it. These stupid drunks would probably get stuck even in a dry riverbed.”
The hangman grumbled a little while longer, then finally sat down again and started puffing morosely on the long, cold stem of his pipe. Jakob had used up all his tobacco just as they were leaving Nuremberg, which didn’t do anything to improve his mood. The other members of the Kuisl clan were huddled together between the sacks of grain. Magdalena’s younger sister, fifteen-year-old Barbara, stared blankly into the steady downpour. Magdalena’s boys, Peter and Paul, were scuffling farther back in the wagon, in danger of falling backward into the swamp at any moment. As he did so often, t
he younger boy, Paul, had the upper hand; he was holding his five-year-old brother in a headlock, and Peter was gasping for air.
“Damn it, can’t you just once stop fighting?” scolded Simon, who was sitting up front on the coachbox alongside the wagon’s owner, a humpbacked old farmer. The long wait had clearly gotten on Magdalena’s husband’s nerves, as well. Until then, the Schongau medicus had been trying to read a book on medicine for midwives. Though the volume was bound in leather and wrapped in an oilcloth, rain kept dripping onto the pages. Now he put aside the tattered, drenched book and cast a severe glance at his two sons.
“You’ve been fooling around like that for hours. If you don’t stop right away, I’ll tell your grandfather and he’ll stretch your ears out on the rack. You know he can do that.”
“I could also put you both in a shrew’s fiddle,” Jakob chimed in ominously. “Then you’ll probably scratch each other’s eyes out and we’ll finally have some peace and quiet.”
“Stop this nonsense, you hooligans.” Magdalena pointed at the two boys, who finally now stopped fighting. “Just see the look in their eyes. I think you really scared them.”
The children stared at their grandfather for a moment, baffled, then shouted at one another and went right on brawling. A moment later, Paul, the smaller one, triumphantly held up a handful of his brother’s hair. His older, far gentler brother Peter, almost a head taller, started crying and sought protection behind his father.
“Maybe we should try the shrew’s fiddle, after all?” Simon asked hopefully.
Magdalena glared at her husband. “Perhaps for a change you should stop reading so much and pay more attention to your sons. It’s no wonder they are always fighting. They’re boys, have you forgotten? They’re not made for sitting calmly on a wagon.”
“Let’s just be happy we found someone to take us part of the way,” Simon replied. “I myself don’t especially want to go to Bamberg on foot. We surely have more than five miles to go, and we don’t have enough money to pay for a trip on the Regnitz River.”
He stretched and sighed, then grabbed the two boys by the scruffs of their necks and climbed down from the wagon with them.
“But, as almost always, you are right,” Simon mumbled. “This long wait can drive you crazy.” He nodded toward the dark forest on the other side of the narrow pass, where the branches and boughs of the pine trees formed a dense barrier. “I’ll take these two little devils for a walk over to the edge of the forest, where they can climb and run around a little. It looks like you’ll have to wait here a bit longer.”
He gave the two boys a friendly slap, and they started whooping and running up the steep side of the pass. In no time the three had disappeared in the forest, while Magdalena remained behind with her father and bored-looking younger sister.
“Simon is much too easy on the boys,” Jakob grumbled. “The little brats deserve a good spanking now and then. When I was a kid, children weren’t allowed to misbehave like that.”
“How can you say that, when you’re always giving them candy and putting them up to all kinds of mischief?” Magdalena laughed and shook her head. “You’re the biggest kid of all. I can’t wait to hear what your brother is going to tell us about you and what a rascal you were as a child.”
“Hah! What is there to tell? The blood, filth, and death, and all those beatings from my father, the old drunk. That’s about all I remember. One minute you’re pooping in your pants and sucking your thumb, and the next minute you get chewed up by the war.”
The Schongau hangman stared into space, and Magdalena’s smile froze. As so often happened when she asked her father about his past, he became even more silent than usual. He hardly ever spoke about his brother, Bartholomäus, who was two years younger than he; it was only a few years ago that Magdalena had even learned she had an uncle who made his living as the executioner of Bamberg. The letter the Kuisl family had received more than two months ago consisted of just a few prosaic words and had come as a surprise to all of them. Bartholomäus’s wife had died some time ago, and now he was thinking about marrying again and, to celebrate this upcoming event, had invited all his relatives in Schongau.
The only reason the Kuisls considered taking such a voyage—almost two hundred miles—was that Magdalena’s younger brother, Georg, had been apprenticed to his uncle in Bamberg over two years ago, and since then, neither Magdalena nor the rest of the family had seen him. This was particularly troubling to Jakob, though he never came out and said so, and it was the main reason he’d decided to go.
Out of the corner of her eye, Magdalena looked at her father as he sat there drawing on his cold pipe. He was now in the autumn of his life. With his wet gray hair, bloodshot eyes, hooked nose, and scraggly beard, he exuded an aloofness that had only increased in recent years. Which did nothing to harm his reputation as the executioner of Schongau. On the contrary, now more than ever, Jakob Kuisl was regarded as a perfect hangman: strong, quick, experienced, and blessed with an insight that was as sharp as the blade of his executioner’s sword.
And yet, he’s gotten old, Magdalena thought to herself, old and careworn, especially since the death of his wife. And he misses Georg, as I do. They’re alike in so many ways.
“Damn it, if those people up there in front don’t get their carts moving soon, there will be another accident.”
The wagon began to rock again when the hangman jumped down from the sacks of grain. The rat-faced old farmer, who had been sitting patiently on the coachbox until then, cast an anxious, sidelong glance at the huge, angry giant. He mouthed a silent Ave Maria, then turned to Magdalena.
“Good God, tell your father please to sit down,” he whispered. “If he keeps raving like that, he’ll scare the oxen.” The farmer gave a disparaging wave of his hand. “Maybe it would be better for you to continue to Bamberg on foot, since it’s not very far now.”
“Don’t worry, he’ll calm down. I know him. He’s basically a kind, peaceful man.” Magdalena lowered her voice and continued in a conspiratorial tone. “At least, until he runs out of tobacco. Is it possible you have a few leaves of it?”
The farmer frowned. “Do I look like someone who’d inhale that devilish smoke? The church has condemned it, and for good reason. The stuff comes straight from hell—at least it stinks like it does.” He crossed himself and scrutinized the Schongau executioner suspiciously.
With a sigh, Magdalena leaned back and bit her lip. In Forchheim, where she’d given the old man a few kreuzers to take them along, she’d prudently mentioned nothing of her father’s trade—and she had remained silent on other topics, as well. As the daughter of a hangman, she knew that if the pious old farmer had ever learned he was carrying a real live executioner and his family, he’d probably run for the nearest church and say a thousand rosaries.
The trip had taken the Kuisls on a large river ferry, first down the Lech to Augsburg and then on a smaller river to Nuremberg. Because they ran out of money there, they continued the journey on foot. But now they were only a few miles from Bamberg, so the delay was even more annoying.
“Shouldn’t we first check to see why the wagon train has stopped?” said Barbara from atop one of the grain sacks farther back. With a bored expression, the fifteen-year-old girl dangled her legs over the side of the wagon. “That would be better than sitting around here listening to Father cursing.” She made a face as she played with her hair, which was just as black as Magdalena’s. In fact, she bore a striking resemblance to her older sister. Barbara had the same bushy eyebrows and dark eyes that seemed to gaze out sardonically at the world around her. She had inherited both from her mother, Anna-Maria, who had died several years ago of the Plague.
Magdalena nodded. “You’re right. Why don’t we walk on ahead and see what’s happening down at the ford? Let the grumpy old guy sit here and grumble to himself,” she replied, winking at her father. “Perhaps we can even find a little tobacco for you.”
But Jakob had closed his eyes and
seemed to be listening to another, inner melody. His lips formed sounds that Magdalena couldn’t understand.
She suspected that it was, as usual, some long-forgotten war song.
Soon after Simon and his two sons had disappeared into the dense pine forest on the other side of the pass, the shouts of the wagon drivers became faint and muffled. The ground was strewn with damp, musty needles that swallowed up even the slightest sound. Somewhere nearby, a jay called out, but otherwise a silence prevailed that seemed almost surreal after the noisy wagon train. Even the patter of the rain in the dense forest of firs seemed strangely distant. The boys, too, seemed to notice the almost-solemn atmosphere. They had stopped quarreling and held their father’s hand tightly.
Simon smiled. There were often times when he wanted to beat the daylights out of the two little pests, but for now his heart was overwhelmed by an ocean of love.
“Tonight you’ll finally see your uncle Georg again,” he said cheerfully. “The one who always whittled swords for you from oak wood. Do you remember? Perhaps he’ll whittle some for you this time, as well.”
“Yes! Yes! An executioner’s sword,” little Paul cried. “I want an executioner’s sword so I can cut the chickens’ heads off, just like Stechlin did in the garden. May I, Father, please?”
“Don’t you dare!” Simon looked crossly at Paul. He couldn’t help thinking of the horrible bloodbath that Paul had inflicted a few months ago on the chickens belonging to Martha Stechlin, the Schongau midwife. What disturbed him more than anything else was the grin on the face of the child, who had obviously had a grand time slaughtering the animals, celebrating his first execution like a church mass.
“Is Uncle Georg now a hangman, too?” asked Peter, who was calmer and more thoughtful than his younger brother. Sometimes he seemed far older than his five years. Simon assumed that was due mainly to his tousled black hair and his serious, always attentive gaze whenever he spoke.