The Castle of Kings

  By now, the falcon had reached the requisite height of almost three hundred feet. He shot down like a bolt of lightning into the flock of crows, who fluttered apart, cawing loudly. But this time they all escaped him. The little predator caught himself up only a few yards above the ground and spiraled up to dive down once more. The flock surged like a black cloud.

  Agnes had been given the brown and white speckled falcon as a nestling by her father, and she had trained him without any help. It had taken her months of hard work. Parcival was her pride and joy, and even her usually morose father had to admit that she had done a good job with his training. Only last week the farmers of Annweiler had asked him, as castellan of Trifels, whether Agnes would fly her falcon over their fields to drive the crows away. This year there was a real plague of them. They ate the last of the seed corn in the ground and scared away the larks, chaffinches, and blackbirds that were often the only kind of meat the poor people tasted.

  Parcival had just come down on another crow. Caught up together, the two birds plummeted toward the field below, and Agnes ran over to protect her beloved falcon from potential attacks. Crows were crafty birds, and they would often combine in mobbing a predator to get rid of it. And indeed, the flock was coming menacingly close, and Agnes felt anger rise in her, just as though she was protecting her own child. She threw a few stones, and the birds turned away, cawing.

  Relieved, Agnes lured Parcival to her with the gnawed chicken leg again. She would leave the dead crow lying in the field to deter the rest of the flock. It was the seventh that the falcon had killed today.

  “Come along, little one. This will taste much better, I promise you.”

  Parcival stopped pecking the crow and flapped his wings in excitement. But just as the falcon was about to come down and perch on her glove, a mighty roll of thunder shook the valley. The bird turned and flew into the nearby wood.

  “Damn it, Parcival, stay here! What are you doing?”

  Apprehensively, Agnes looked up to see if a storm was about to break, but there were no black clouds in the sky, only gray cloud cover. Besides, it was only March, much too early for a summer storm. So what did that clap of thunder mean? Well, whatever it was, it had upset her falcon so much that Agnes was in danger of losing him forever.

  With the yapping Puck beside her, she ran to the little wood. As she did so, she looked around, trying to work out what could have made that noise. About half a mile of field and vegetable gardens, still with patches of snow lying on them, reached from here to the little town of Annweiler. Beyond, the castle mound rose in the soft afternoon light, surrounded by a broad belt of sloping vineyards and freshly plowed fields.

  Agnes thought. Could Ulrich Reichhart, master gunner at Trifels and usually drunk, have fired a shot from one of the three pieces of artillery that the castle still had left? But gunpowder was expensive, and moreover, the sound of the shot had come from the opposite direction.

  The way her falcon had flown.

  “Parcival! Parcival!”

  Her heart thudding, Agnes ran toward the outskirts of the forest, which were densely overgrown with hawthorn bushes. Only now did she think of something else that might have caused that thunderous crash. There had been persistent rumors lately of robbers in these parts. The Ramburg, one of the many hideouts of robber knights in the Wasgau area, lay only a few miles away. Could its commander, Hans von Wertingen, really have ventured to go marauding so close to her father’s castle? Thus far the impoverished nobleman had made only the roads unsafe, and even then usually under cover of darkness. But maybe he and his men had found that hunger now had the upper hand, and with it came the urge to rob and murder?

  On reaching the outskirts of the forest, Agnes cautiously stood still and looked back at the little town, with the castle mound towering behind it. It would certainly be more sensible to run up to the Trifels, to warn her father of the possibility of an attack. But then, presumably, she would never find her Parcival again. Even when trained, falcons were shy birds. The danger of his disappearing forever into the wilderness was great.

  Finally she pulled herself together and hurried on into the oak wood. Immediately dim light surrounded her; the dense branches, already putting out the first buds of the coming spring’s leaves and flowers, let hardly any sun filter through. In fall, the tanners of Annweiler came to this part of the forest for their tanning bark, but at this time of year the place seemed deserted. People out collecting firewood had searched the frozen ground a few weeks ago for wintry twigs and acorns, and now you might have thought that the forest had been swept clean. Agnes was glad to have Puck at least for company, even if the little dachshund was unlikely to be much help in the event of an attack. When the few branches and twigs that she trod on cracked, it sounded like bones breaking.

  She trudged farther and farther into the dark forest. There could be no question of moving fast; her way was often barred by ramparts of muddy earth and prickly hawthorn thickets. Once again, Agnes thought how lucky it was that she had put on her brown leather doublet to go hawking, not the long fustian dress that her father liked so much. The thorns would have torn that expensive garment to shreds by now. Burs and small twigs clung to Agnes’s fair and always untidy hair; thorns scratched her freckled face.

  “Parcival?” she called again, but the only response was the angry chirruping of several blackbirds. Although she usually loved the silence of the forest, it suddenly seemed to her oppressive, seeming to stifle her like a thick blanket.

  All at once she heard a familiar sound to her right. Agnes heaved a sigh of relief. It was clearly Parcival, trying to attract her attention. Young birds of prey that flew by daytime often gave that characteristic cry when they were begging for food. Sometimes the noise could be a real nuisance, but today it sounded as sweet to Agnes as the music of a lute. And now she also heard the little bell that hung from his foot to lead her to him.

  Agnes hurried in the direction from which the falcon’s cry and the sound of the bell had come, and a clearing in the forest opened up ahead of her. In the slanting sunlight that fell into the space, she saw an ivy-covered sandstone ruin that had probably once been a watchtower. Only now did she realize that she knew this place. There were many towers of this kind around the Trifels, since the district had once been the heart of the German Empire. Kings and emperors had built their castles here. Now only a few songs, and the remains of walls like this one, overgrown with moss, bore witness to the former glory of this tract of land. Agnes stood there as if caught in a dream, and a shudder ran through her. Swathes of mist drifted over the ruin, and there was a curious smell of something rotten in the air. She felt as if she were looking into the distant past. A time that seemed as familiar to her as her own, and yet was as dead as the stones all around.

  Once again she heard the falcon cry. Keeping in the cover of a broad tree trunk, Agnes searched the clearing and finally saw the bird on the branch of a stunted willow that had taken root in a crack in the ruined walls. She laughed with relief, and the magic moment was over.

  “So here you are, you—”

  Agnes stopped when she suddenly saw the figure of a man in the clearing. He had been hidden behind several large rocks, but now he came out of hiding, bending low. In his hands he held a kind of large tube, and now, with a groan, he put it down on a rock.

  Agnes clapped her hand to her mouth to keep herself from screaming. Was this one of the robber knights or footpads she had heard so much about? But then it struck her that the way the man moved was curiously familiar. When she looked more closely, she also recognized his well-worn leather jerkin, his sandy hair, and his finely shaped features.

  “My God, Mathis, how could you give me such a fright?” Shaking with fury, Agnes came out into the clearing, while Puck, yapping happily, jumped up at the young man and licked his hand.

  Mathis was just under a year older than Agnes. He was tall, but sinewy, with a broad back and well-developed muscles on his upper arms, the result of his
hard work at the anvil.

  “I might have known it was you behind that infernal noise,” Agnes said, shaking her head. But her anger was increasingly giving way to relief on finding that no robber had been lying in wait for her. In the end she couldn’t suppress a smile. “Anywhere there’s a smell of sulfur, the journeyman smith from Trifels won’t be far away, am I right?” She pointed to the tube, which was almost the size of a man, lying beside Mathis on the rocks. “I can see it’s not enough for you to drive your own father and mine to white-hot fury, you have to go scaring my falcon and all the creatures of the forest half to death. Shame on you.”

  Mathis grinned, raising his hands in a gesture of deprecation. “You think I ought to have fired it off up there in the castle? The Trifels may be a decrepit heap of stones, but that’s no reason to blow it sky-high.”

  “You mind what you’re saying, Mathis Wielenbach.”

  Agnes kept her voice low and cool, but Mathis was not to be intimidated. He was almost a head taller than she was, and her anger seemed to have no more effect on him than it would have on a wall.

  “My humble apologies, Your Excellency.” He made a deep bow. “I quite forgot I was speaking to the daughter of the venerable castellan. Is it permitted for me to approach you at all, young lady? Or aren’t you allowed to talk to such a dull-witted fool of a vassal as me?” Mathis pulled a face that made him look as if he were indeed simple-minded. But suddenly his expression darkened.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Agnes.

  Mathis took a deep breath before, at last, he replied quietly, “I was over in Queichhambach just now when they hanged three poachers. One of them was no older than me.” He shook his head angrily. “It’s going from bad to worse, Agnes. The people are eating husks and their seed corn, and when they’re so desperate that they hunt in the forest, they end up on the gallows. What does your father say to all that?”

  “My father didn’t make the laws, Mathis.”

  “No, he can go off hunting cheerfully himself while others have to hang for it.”

  “Good heavens above, Mathis!” Agnes looked at him, her eyes blazing. “You know very well that my father keeps not just one eye closed to poachers but both of them when he’s out and about in his forests. As for what happens in the jurisdiction of the mayor of Annweiler, there’s really nothing he can do about that. So leave my father out of this and don’t keep criticizing him all the time.”

  “All right, all right.” Mathis shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe I shouldn’t have such conversations with a castellan’s daughter.”

  “You shouldn’t have such conversations at all.”

  For a while neither of them said anything. Agnes folded her arms and stared truculently ahead of her. But soon her wrath evaporated; she had known Mathis too long to be genuinely angry with him for saying such things, even if she wasn’t going to let him run her father down. A few years ago the two of them had still been playing hide-and-seek in the castle cellars; not until last fall had their meetings become less frequent. Agnes had been looking after her falcon and spending the long winter evenings in the castle library, while Mathis spent more and more time with men who preached liberty and justice. He sometimes went too far, thought Agnes, although she herself had a great deal of sympathy for many of the peasants’ demands. However, it wasn’t for her or her father to change the conditions of their time; only very great lords could do that—princes, bishops, and, of course, the emperor.

  “What are you doing with that thing?” she finally asked, in a more conciliatory voice.

  “I’ve been trying out a new kind of gunpowder,” Mathis began solemnly, just as if there had never been any quarrel between them. “Seven instead of six parts of saltpeter, as well as five parts of sulfur, and some charcoal made from young hazel wood.” He reached for a little bag on the ground in front of him and let the dark gray substance trickle through his fingers. “And this time I’ve made the powder more granular. That way it will burn faster and be less inclined to clump together.”

  Agnes rolled her eyes. Firearms were Mathis’s great passion. She would never understand what he saw in those noisy iron tubes. “Someday you’ll blow yourself up along with the gunpowder,” she said reproachfully. “I just can’t think what’s so great about the racket they make and the stink they leave behind. It’s . . . it’s downright unchivalrous, that’s what I say.”

  Mathis smiled. “That’s what your father told you, am I right?”

  “So what if he did? Anyway, he wouldn’t like you stealing one of his arquebuses from the arsenal.” She pointed to the metal tube lying on the rock, still smoking slightly. “Because that’s where it came from, you might as well admit it.”

  Shrugging his shoulders, Mathis turned back to the gun and began filling it carefully with powder. He pushed the tiny grains to the very back of the chamber, and finally closed off the tube with a leaden ball the size of a walnut. There was a hook fitted to one side of the gun, which Mathis now jammed into a crevice between two rocks so that the recoil of the explosion wouldn’t make the arquebus fall to one side. Agnes had already seen her father’s men do something similar, except that they stuck the hook of the gun into the eyelets provided for it in the merlons of the castle battlements. These arquebuses were old-fashioned weapons, but more modern technology cost a great deal of money and was hardly known here at Trifels. Mathis made fun of such ignorance.

  “Old Ulrich never noticed me borrowing the gun,” the young smith muttered as he carefully tipped powder into the flash pan. “He was so drunk that I could simply fish the key to the arsenal out of his pocket. I hid it here the day before yesterday—I finally had the gunpowder ready today.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” Agnes shook her head incredulously. “That’s theft, Mathis. What do you think my father will do to you if he notices that the gun is missing?”

  “For heaven’s sake, he won’t notice unless you tell him. Anyway, what would your father do with this rusty old arquebus? Put the Turks to flight, maybe?” By now Mathis was ready. He took a match out of his pocket and fitted it into the place intended for it. “The castellan should be glad I’m putting my mind to such things. If we don’t soon have one or two new falconets standing on the castle mound, he might as well pelt any future attackers with rotten cabbages.”

  Agnes sighed. “You know as well as I do that there’s no money for such things. What’s more, I don’t know who’d attack us here. Not the Turks, anyway.”

  “Maybe not the Turks, but . . .”

  Mathis stopped when little Puck suddenly began growling. The dachshund bared his teeth and stared at the other side of the clearing, his coat bristling. As Agnes turned, she felt goose bumps cover her arms. She heard noises, and not pleasant ones. The snorting of horses, followed by the clink of weapons, and the low, deep voices of several men.

  Almost at once, four horsemen appeared beyond a hawthorn thicket. They wore shabby hose under stained leather jerkins. Hunting knives and crossbows the length of a man’s forearm hung at their horses’ sides. One of them, an unusually tall man, was also equipped with an old-fashioned breastplate and a round helmet, and a mighty broadsword hung from his belt. This giant had a large black mastiff, almost the size of a calf, on a long leash. The animal growled ferociously at the two young people.

  “Well, well, who have we here?” murmured the man in armor, while his dog, panting and with bulging eyes, strained at the leash. “Here we go looking for a great clap of thunder, and all we find is two little farts.”

  The other three men laughed, but the man in armor, who was obviously their leader, silenced them with a peremptory gesture. Distrustfully, he let his eyes wander over the clearing, and finally he turned to Agnes.

  “Are you two here alone?”

  Silently, Agnes nodded. There was no point in lying to the man. It was true that she had never seen him before, but she knew from his appearance that this must be the gigantic Hans von Wertingen. In times of peace, only knights m
ight carry two-handed weapons like his broadsword, even if they were now roaming the countryside to rob and murder. Moreover, Wertingen’s huge dog was notorious far beyond Annweiler. It was said that the animal was trained to attack human beings and had torn children to pieces. It was not for Agnes to say whether that was true, but in any case the animal was more than awe-inspiring.

  “Did the thunder deafen you, eh?” Hans von Wertingen growled. “Speak up. What are you doing here in these forests?”

  “We . . . we’re simple tanners from Annweiler, out looking for young oaks,” Agnes replied hesitantly, keeping her eyes on the ground. “We need fresh bark for our tanning pits. Forgive us if we disturbed your hunting, noble sirs.”

  Mathis looked at Agnes for a moment in surprise, and then imitated her. Clearly he, too, had realized what would happen if Hans von Wertingen knew who actually stood before him. As a nobleman’s daughter, Agnes was an ideal hostage—and holding hostages to ransom was a good way for robber knights to rid themselves of their financial difficulties.

  “Oh yes? And this tube?” Wertingen mockingly indicated the arquebus lying on the ground. “I suppose you use it for peeling bark off trees, do you?”

  “Found it here ourselves, noble sir,” Mathis replied, assuming a simple-minded expression. “It’s all old and rusty. We don’t know what it’s for neither.”

  “Ah, so you don’t know . . .” Hans von Wertingen examined the two of them suspiciously. When his glance fell on Agnes’s falconry gauntlet, a look of recognition suddenly dawned on his face. Agnes flinched and cursed herself for not taking the glove off earlier. It was too late now.

  “Of course,” the knight said, pointing to Agnes. “I know who you are. Blonde, dressed like a boy, freckles . . . You’re the crazy girl with the falcon, daughter of the castellan of the Trifels, aren’t you?” Grinning, he turned to his men. “A woman hunting with a falcon. Did you ever hear the like of it? Well, I think we’ll have cured you of that notion by the time your father pays the ransom we’ll demand. We’ll look after this little pigeon well, eh, men?”