1
Prague
Year 1600
This story is about how a young man began to smile again.
It's up to you whether you want to believe it or not but I can reassure you by saying that it is true. This is how it has to have been and it has how it happened.
It is quite some time since I met Ludwig for the first time but everything has its beginning the night of 21 May 1600, near the Charles Bridge in Prague.
At midnight, the night was crystal clear according to the soldiers in the Alpine passes. But according to several who were still awake in Rome, Paris and London the sky shone red as a bloody wound. The red glow was something they had never seen before and they were quite sure that it had to do with what had happened in Rome.
But the night in Prague was absolutely pitch black, so black that you could not see your hands in front of you. The darkness hid what rode through the villages on the outskirts of the city, what it was and what it did.
A few hours later almost collapsed couriers Mario and Fabrizio against a customs house on the river in Prague. Between them stood a coffin they been commissioned to bring from Rome to Prague. It had become dawn, but the fog was so thick that the city was just a glimpse of the river.
Fabrizio and Mario sat in silence.
The only sound was their breathing.
They looked at the dark sky and the castle that lay along the slope above them. Although they did not actually let the eye wander over the castle and the sky.
Up there, they saw what they didn´t want to see. Over their eyes was a flicker of nightmare images of the beast in Rome and his bite, their fear of him, and their cries.
All the signs were there.
The August night moon was as black as the burnt pyre they had seen in Rome days before they fled from Rome. Bleak, it glimpsed surrounded by dark clouds. The night was cold and still. The city was deserted and silent. Above their heads, inside the gates of Prague Castle, over the crown of the St. Veits Cathedral flew a dozen ravens as an omen of the trumpets of Revelation.
All the signs were there.
Now they were going to die.
Fabrizio let go of the coffin and put his head against the ground. He looked at Mario and listened. The dew soaked through his shirt. The heart pounding. Weakly, he heard something, it was like a distant bang on the horizon.
He pressed his ear to the grass.
It rumbled beneath him. It sounded like an earthquake drilled toward them.
The handle on the coffin was shaking.
Fabrizio went to the corner of the customs house and looked up the hill where the Prague Castle was. A grass road with tire tracks snaked down from the castle to the customs house and went into the city and the bridge behind them. Darkness showed movements but they disappeared as quickly as they came. He could not trust his eyes.
The handle stopped shaking when Fabrizio put his hand over it. Fabrizio kept his eyes on the road. Cautiously they stepped onto the bridge and crept along the bridge.
With each step, they felt more secure, and fuller of life. It suddenly felt like they would make it, after all.
The Old town gate at the end of Charles Bridge shone as salvation itself.
But when they reached the halfway point, they turned around.
Out of the darkness welled horsemen like a dark tide. The men stood paralyzed. The hope ran out of them.
The horsemen rode down the slope from the castle and on the road to the customs house. In the men's eyes they looked like the horsemen of the Apocalypse, like those they had seen in paintings in Rome, draped with black hoods and arms raised with swords. Hoods hiding their faces, in front of their eyes hung a black cloth.
The men broke out of paralysis when the hooves hit the Charles Bridge first stone. The hooves pumped out adrenaline in the men, and they ran half exhausted and half storm towards the gate. Arriving at the gateway to the old town the horsemen shot an arrow at them but it bounced off the thigh of a Jesus statue. The men rushed through the gate to the old town.
They overturned stacked baskets and shouted as loud as they could so as many people as possible would wake up.
In the corner of a plaza a few blocks in from the gateway, they found a basement to hide in. They slammed the door. Put the coffin gently on the floor.
They held their breath and waited.
Sweat ran along the forehead of Fabrizio and Mario.
Nearby they heard the clatter of the horses against the cobbles.
The town was as quiet as before.
They saw a man open a window shutter and looked out cautiously but as soon as the riders approached, he closed it.
The dawn lit up the alley outside the basement. The Black Friars came closer. Fabrizio put his head against the door. A few steps away, he heard them.
Fabrizio and Mario took each other's hands and squeezed everything they could.
From the basement window, they saw the riders stop in the square. A knoll lying on a bench by the fountain pretended to sleep. The horsemen asked him if he had seen any men with a chest. He remained on the bench and shook his head. When the horsemen moved on Fabrizio and Mario fell down on the damp basement wall. They clasped hands and thanked God that they had escaped the Holy Inquisition.
A few days later handed Fabrizio and Mario coffin as agreed. A cab then took it to a farm outside Prague.
In seclusion the man did what was written in the instructions that were hidden in a compartment in the bottom of the coffin. After he was done, he sent the coffin ahead and hung himself from a beam in the ceiling wrapped by two red velvet ribbons.