The Castle of Kings

  Agnes froze. If old Reichhart inspected the armory with the steward, Mathis’s theft was sure to be discovered. Feverishly, she tried to think of ways to divert her father’s mind from the idea, but he had already left. Instead, Martin von Heidelsheim was still staring fixedly at her. For a while there was no sound but the crackling of the logs on the hearth.

  “I’m glad the two of us have the chance of a moment alone,” said the steward after a while, in an ingratiating tone. “We ought to talk much more often, don’t you agree?”

  He came closer, with a playful smile, and sat down beside her on her father’s stool. She instinctively moved a little farther away. Heidelsheim smelled of overcooked onions and his musty study.

  “We . . . we’ve known each other so long,” he went on hesitantly, running his tongue over his thin lips. “I remember you as a little girl, always asking me for something sweet to eat. Do you recollect it?”

  Agnes nodded in silence. She had in fact gone to see Heidelsheim now and then in the past, knowing that he kept sticky-sweet quince cakes in his chest. On those occasions the steward had always patted her on the head, and sometimes on her little behind as well. Even then his body odor and insinuating ways had repelled her.

  Heidelsheim went on, his eyes twinkling. “Well, you’re older now, more mature, and your father has already dropped . . . er, hints to me quite often.”

  “What hints?” Agnes sat up very straight. “Explain yourself, Heidelsheim.” She felt her disgust increasing by the second. All the same, she tried to maintain her composure.

  Martin von Heidelsheim drew the stool a little closer to her, and laid his hand on her knee in a familiar manner. His fingers moved up to her lap like little spiders. “Remember, you’re sixteen, Agnes, you’ll soon be seventeen. Other girls of your age have married long ago. You should be looking around for a . . . suitable husband yourself. I have some ideas on the subject . . .” He grinned suggestively.

  Agnes leapt to her feet, all her fears about the armory and the stolen arquebus suddenly forgotten. Could it really be true that, behind her back, her father was planning to marry her off to Heidelsheim? She knew her father had been looking for a bridegroom for her for some time. So far she had put up with his efforts in silence, for one thing because she knew that she would not be able to refuse to marry for much longer. Her father was hoping for a worthy and above all prosperous successor to his fief, but he couldn’t possibly have meant Heidelsheim—or could he?

  “I think you are taking the wrong tone with me, sir,” she said. “Just because you could stroke my hair when I was a little girl, it doesn’t mean that I’m about to fall into your arms now.”

  Cool as Agnes appeared outwardly, her thoughts were racing. She still could hardly believe that Heidelsheim had just made her a proposal of marriage, perhaps even with her father’s consent. The whole situation was so absurd that she thought for a moment of simply storming out of the hall.

  The steward raised his hands apologetically. Obviously Agnes’s outburst had taken him by surprise. “You . . . don’t have to make up your mind right away,” he stammered. “Maybe in a month’s time, six months’ time if you like . . .”

  “You are dreaming, Heidelsheim. I shall never decide in your favor. A scribbling clerk like you is beneath my dignity.”

  Suddenly a sharp, almost threatening expression came into the steward’s face. His skin looked even more waxen than usual. “Be careful what you say, Agnes von Erfenstein.” he hissed. “I am not just anyone. I come from a highly regarded family in Worms. You may be the daughter of the lord of Trifels Castle, but that doesn’t mean you can treat me like . . . like dirt.” He had risen to his feet and was looking at her challengingly. “When will you high and mighty noble folk realize that your time is over? Just look at your fine father. Feudal lord over two dozen stupid peasants who can’t even pay him their rents.” He uttered a mocking laugh. “This castle is nothing but a heap of moss-grown stones, and all that’s left of Erfenstein is the old stories of feuds and tournaments long ago.” He took Agnes’s hand in his cold, clammy fingers. His tone of voice was suddenly low and familiar. “You must decide where you are going, Agnes, into the past or the future. In a few years’ time no fine young fellow will want an old maid like you. Other girls are betrothed far younger. People are already beginning to gossip, they think you are . . .” He smiled awkwardly. “Well, they think you’re a little strange. So what do you think?”

  Agnes tore herself away and looked at Heidelsheim, her eyes flashing with hostility. “How dare you speak to me like that? I am not your strumpet. I shall tell my father what you’ve just said, and then you’ll be sorry.”

  Heidelsheim dismissed that with a malicious smile. “Oh, indeed? Do you think your father will find a new steward to join him in this place? A castle falling into disrepair around him, a place that the duke wrote off long ago? I know Erfenstein is looking for a knight or a baron to marry you, but believe me, he can be glad I’m here and have taken a fancy to his penniless daughter.” A pleading expression suddenly came into his eyes. “Agnes, don’t you understand? I want only what’s best for you.”

  Heidelsheim approached her, his arms outspread, but Agnes brusquely turned away.

  “Find another woman for your bed, sir,” she said coolly. “You are as dry and tedious as your balance sheets.”

  She was about to hurry out of the hall when she suddenly felt Heidelsheim’s sticky hands on her throat. The steward was pulling her to him with all his might. Her dress tore with an ugly sound, her shift and the swell of her breasts coming into view above her bodice. Agnes struggled and shouted, but Heidelsheim clapped one hand over her mouth. He seemed to relish her resistance now. They fell to the floor together. The steward bent over Agnes, his lips passing over her breasts as his stinking breath rose to her nostrils.

  “Agnes,” he breathed. “You don’t understand. I . . . I love you. I’ve always loved you, ever since you were a little girl.”

  Petrified by fear, Agnes felt the steward’s right hand move slowly down to her private parts and stroke them mechanically. Stammered words came to her ears, but all she could really hear was the thudding of her heart. The penetrating stench of onions and the groping fingers between her legs almost made her faint. She felt Heidelsheim’s wet, rough tongue on her throat, like a slug. When he briefly shifted position to raise her dress farther, she managed to get away with a lightning-quick movement and ran for the steps down to the kitchen.

  “Agnes, wait! You must believe me. I . . . I’ll look after you. You’re making a grave mistake.”

  Martin von Heidelsheim jumped up to pursue her, but Agnes slammed the door in his face. She heard his yell of pain with satisfaction, and then ran down the stairs, past the fat cook, Hedwig, and the surprised servants, and out into the upper bailey. Blind with haste, she stumbled past the granary and a dilapidated shed, until at last she was standing on the foremost rocky peak of the Trifels—a narrow wedge pointing, like the bow of a mighty ship, to the nearby hills to the south. A cool evening wind blew through her hair, and the leaves of oak and beech trees rustled far below.

  Agnes looked around with a hunted expression, but Heidelsheim did not seem to have followed her. Her heart was beating wildly, a caustic flavor crept up her throat and made her retch. Briefly, Agnes closed her eyes to calm herself down, and then she tried to understand what had just happened. In shame, she was clutching her torn linen dress together over her breasts while a sense of cold spread through her limbs. Should she tell her father about the attempted rape? Heidelsheim would probably claim that he had accidentally fallen, bringing her down with him. She had just imagined the rest of it, he would say, a hysterical girl who was known to be prone to fantasies. She thought of what Martin von Heidelsheim had said to her.

  Do you think your father will find a new steward to join him in this place?

  Agnes swallowed and tried to hold back her tears. She kept thinking of Heidelsheim’s cold, nimble fingers, h
is wet tongue on her skin. Her father couldn’t possibly want her to marry such a monster. But presumably Heidelsheim was right in what he said. Philipp von Erfenstein should be glad to have a steward to look after this ruin at all. Although he had been installed as castellan by Emperor Maximilian, her father had shown not the slightest economic talent for running the place over the last two decades. He was very good at fighting, drinking, and telling stories of the old days, but Philipp von Erfenstein needed a sharp-witted steward like Heidelsheim, at least for the more prosaic tasks of administration. No doubt her father would appease him and maybe even lay the blame on her. Furthermore, hadn’t Heidelsheim said that her father had already thought of marrying her to him? She instinctively thought of the conspiratorial glance that he had exchanged with Heidelsheim. All the same, Agnes couldn’t think that Philipp von Erfenstein would really give his daughter in marriage to a stinking, dry-as-dust clerk. If she must marry, let her husband at least be a knight, or one of the lower ranks of the nobility, not the steward at Trifels Castle. In her dreams and sleepless nights she thought of only one man anyway, a certain man kissing, caressing, and making love to her.

  But he was both very near her and yet as far out of reach as the moon.

  Shivering, Agnes rubbed the goose bumps on her bare arms. The rags of the white dress with the close-fitting bodice that she had put on to please her father were fluttering in the wind. She sat down on a fallen beam and stared into the twilight. In the fading light of the sun that had just set, she could see a number of other castles enthroned on the surrounding hills like weathered stone giants. Neuscharfeneck, Meistersel, Ramburg, and next to that Scharfenburg Castle and the Anebos. They had all once been fortresses, protecting Trifels when kings and emperors still had their residence here. But that was long in the past.

  Now and then Agnes thought she heard droning and quaking deep within Trifels, as if the castle had briefly awoken from sleep. It sounded like someone quietly calling to her. At such moments she felt very much alone, for she knew that she was the only one who sensed that disturbance around her.

  As she sat huddled up on the rotting beam, looking out at night as it fell, another sound suddenly came to her ears. It was very quiet, but she recognized it at once. In sudden agitation Agnes got to her feet and let her gaze move over the surrounding fields and woods that now lay entirely in the darkness.

  It was the familiar cry of her falcon.

  Head bent like a dog driven into a corner, Mathis stood in the middle of the smithy while his father swung the bag of gunpowder back and forth before his eyes. The fire glowed faintly, and only a little dim light fell through the window, which was covered by thin leather stretched over it. It was enough light, however, for Hans Wielenbach to have seen what was in the bag.

  “How dare you bring this stuff into my house?” Wielenbach shouted. “A smith like you. Do you know what’ll happen if it catches fire? Do you?”

  Mathis ducked as his father swung back his arm to hit him. All the same, he couldn’t avoid the sturdy smith’s hand, which struck his cheek. Gritting his teeth, Mathis rubbed the place, which was already reddening. Then he straightened up again and stared defiantly at his father. The day when he would strike back was not far away.

  “Didn’t I forbid you to meddle with that devilish powder? Didn’t I say I wouldn’t have it here? Speak up!”

  “Leave him alone, Hans,” Mathis’s mother said mildly. She and little Marie stood to one side by the anvil, and she was rubbing her eyes, which were red with the smoke. They both wore gray smocks smudged with the ashes of the hearth. The famine of the last two winters had left the cheeks of Mathis’s eight-year-old sister pale and thin, though Agnes found a piece of meat now and then for Marie and her brother. Even so, the Wielenbachs were better off than many others in this neighborhood.

  “He won’t have meant any ill by it,” Martha Wielenbach went on soothingly. “Did you, Mathis? I expect you found the powder somewhere or other.”

  “He was playing about with it. We could all have been blown sky-high, and he knows it.”

  Shaking with fury, Hans Wielenbach was still holding up the bag of gunpowder. His face was careworn with work and grief, and the deep lines on it made him look far older than he really was.

  Mathis remained obstinately silent. In the confusion in the clearing, he had quickly hidden the little bag under his doublet so as not to lose it. It had taken him weeks to make the gunpowder, stealing out at night to scrape the walls of the shaft in the castle privy in order to get the saltpeter he wanted from the mud that contained urine. Then he had repeatedly mixed the powder with vinegar and dried it again, to get it into a granular form. Should he have left the result of all that hard work behind in the clearing? He had brought the bag home, only to run straight into his father’s arms.

  Hans Wielenbach swung his arm back again to strike a second blow. Little Marie whimpered and pressed close to her mother.

  “Don’t, Father!” she begged. “Don’t hit him.”

  This time Mathis had made up his mind not to flinch. The times when he had run away from his father in tears were long past.

  “Do you know what will happen to your mother and me if they find you with this powder?” His hand came down heavily on Mathis’s left cheek, but his son hardly moved. “They’ll hang us, that’s as sure as amen in church,” raged his father, and another blow landed in Mathis’s face. “Now, of all times, when everyone’s talking of rebellion and the peasants are demanding what they call justice in every village, my son has to go running around with a bag of gunpowder. You ungrateful . . .”

  His arm went back again, but this time Mathis caught his hand at the last moment and braced himself against it. Hans Wielenbach stood still in surprise, and beads of sweat ran down his broad forehead as Mathis forced his father’s arm aside, inch by inch, like a heavy tree branch. They faced each other head to head, both about the same height.

  “And yet . . . it’s true,” Mathis gasped, his face flushed with rage and effort. “The peasants are eating their own shoes while the clerics live high on the hog in their monasteries. Isn’t it only right for them to take what belongs to them? Take it by force if need be?”

  From one second to the next, all the life seemed to go out of his father; his strong hand slackened, and he stared blankly at Mathis. A severe coughing fit shook him. That cough had come more and more frequently in the last few years. Hard work at the forge demanded its tribute, particularly when he was agitated. He had already had to take to his bed a couple of times, unable to go on working.

  “Then . . . then it was really you shooting in the forest, wasn’t it?” the smith finally croaked. “Very likely with those rabble-rousing friends you always go around with.” He shook his head and took a step back. “My son a rioter, burning and murdering in these parts. Have you killed a man yet? Has it come to that?”

  “Curse it, it . . . that wasn’t it.” Mathis could have kicked himself for talking to his father about the peasants and the clergy. Why did the old man have to be so irascible? He was always egging him on to say things that Mathis would rather have left unsaid.

  “Stop it, for goodness’ sake, you two fighting cocks!”

  Martha Wielenbach came between the two of them and took her son in her arms. “You’re too hard on him, Hans. How is the boy to understand you if you do nothing but beat him? What’s more, you have good reason to be proud of him. He knows almost more than you about the work of a smith, and he’s only seventeen. And the bell-founder who was over at the monastery in Eusserthal last year praised Mathis for his skilled help in casting the bells, too.”

  “Well, so he may understand something about casting metal and making artillery and rifles,” said Wielenbach, who had by now calmed down a bit. He pushed his sparse red hair back from his forehead and cautiously felt the bag of powder with his large, callused hand. “And the lad can mix gunpowder like a damn alchemist. But can he forge a proper sword? No, he can’t.”

  “
Because pretty soon no one is going to need a sword anymore,” Mathis protested defiantly, pointing to the mud-stained bag of gunpowder. “This powder will change the world. Who will want knights, crossbows, and spears if he can blow a hole in the defenses of any castle with a hundred pounds of gunpowder?”

  “Don’t let his lordship the castellan hear you say that,” his mother warned, patting him on the shoulder. “Your father’s blows will be nothing to what you can expect then. No more knights?” She shook her head. “Such nonsense! There have always been knights. Princes, knights, peasants, and the clergy—the world is made up of all of them. And mind you, don’t let Agnes hear any of your inflammatory talk. What is she doing these days? I haven’t set eyes on her for ages.”

  “Yes, where’s Agnes?” cried little Marie. “I want to play dollies with Agnes again. She hasn’t been to see us for so long.”

  “We . . . were in the forest together today,” replied Mathis uncertainly. “With her falcon.” He had made up his mind not to mention their encounter with the robbers to his parents. The atmosphere at home was tense enough as things were.

  Martha Wielenbach smiled. “I’m glad to hear that. You and Agnes used to spend so much time together, but these last few months . . .”

  “They’re not children anymore, Martha,” her husband said. “It’s better for them to go their separate ways. Agnes is the daughter of the lord of Trifels Castle, and Mathis is only a journeyman smith. Where is that going to lead?”

  Mathis looked at his father, his eyes flashing. “Don’t we all have two arms, two legs, and a head to think with?” he replied defiantly, and suddenly his voice sounded like a preacher’s. “Doesn’t a human heart beat in every one of us? God has made us all equal, so why should she be better than us just because she is the daughter of the castellan of Trifels?”