“Get out of my way, or I’ll slit you open from your belly right up to your throat, espèce de pourriture! You piece of garbage!”
Simon thought at first that he had heard wrong, but it was, in fact, Benedikta who had spoken. Coolly, she eyed the leader of the gang of robbers in front of her, hands resting calmly on the pommel of her saddle, watching and waiting.
The robbers were just as astonished at her audacity. The head of the gang opened his mouth wide, but a moment passed before he could say anything. “You arrogant little bitch,” he grumbled finally. “You’ll be whimpering when I’m through with you. And then my comrades will get their turn, and this little peacock can sit there and watch.”
“For the last time, I’ll tell you to step aside.” Benedikta’s voice remained cool. Her horse snorted, and a cloud of steam emerged from its nostrils.
“That’s enough, you damned whore.” The robber chief reached out to seize the reins of her horse. “I’ll show you what-”
The shot resounded like the crack of a whip through the snowy forest. For a moment, the robber could only stand there, mouth open, looking at the hole in his chest. The bullet had shredded the coat, the jacket, and the flesh beneath it, and a thin jet of blood spurted out. With a gurgling sound in his throat, the dying man tipped backward.
Simon looked around frantically to see where the shot had come from, and only then did he notice the smoking pistol in Benedikta’s hand. She must have pulled it out from under her coat in a fraction of a second. And it was loaded!
In the next instant, a number of things happened simultaneously. Spurring her horse on, Benedikta sped down the road, Simon heard a shot and felt something cold whistle past his left cheek, the two robbers ran toward him swinging their cudgels and screaming, and Walli, terrified by the uproar, whinnied and rose up on her hind legs.
“Benedikta!” Simon shouted, struggling to stay in the saddle. “Wait for me!”
He managed to hold on as the horse bolted, branches lacerating his face, and he felt a heavy blow on his thigh where one of the robbers must have hit him with a cudgel. A sinewy, grimy hand reached for his horse’s reins, and instinctively, Simon pulled out his stiletto and plunged it into the hand. He heard screaming, the hand disappeared, and Walli galloped off.
Only now did the medicus dare to sit up a bit in the saddle and look around. The road had disappeared, and Walli was galloping, as if possessed, deeper and deeper into the forest. Pine branches struck Simon in the face. He struggled to turn around, hoping to at least see behind him, but he couldn’t find a road, not even a path, and it seemed as if Benedikta had vanished from the face of the earth! He was alone in the forest on a horse that seemed headed straight for hell. For a moment, he looked down and considered jumping, but when he saw the ground rushing past, he just clung tighter to his horse. Where was Benedikta? Again, he looked around frantically. The pine trees behind him seem to get thicker and thicker. He noticed that he had lost his expensive hat. It had cost two guilders! But then it occurred to him that, perhaps, in the future, he wouldn’t need a hat anyway because his head would be gone…
As he was about to turn around again, he heard a soft hiss; then something hit him in the side of the head.
The world turned black, and Simon could feel himself falling into the snow. It felt strangely warm, like a bed of feathers, he thought. Hands seemed to reach out for him, but then he was swallowed up in a dark, billowing cloud.
4
MAGDALENA STOMPED TOWARD the door to Strasser’s Tavern. She could still feel the effects of the strong mulled wine at the carpenter’s house, but she would need a lot more alcohol to forget seeing Simon and Benedikta together. How could he do something like that to her? A slut from the city! But perhaps she was being unfair to Benedikta; perhaps they had just happened to meet in the basilica and had been heading back to Schongau together and nothing more. But why, then, did Simon place his coat over her shoulders? And the way he laughed…
She opened the door to the tavern and was met by a warm, sticky mass of air. A fiddle was playing and someone was marking time to it with his foot. More than a dozen workmen had already gathered for lunch in the gloomy, low-ceilinged room lit by only a few torches. Some of the masons she had queried just the day before were among them. They looked at Magdalena suspiciously, then returned to their mugs of beer. A young fellow was sitting at a wobbly table in the middle of the room playing a fiddle while a few bystanders stood around clapping and dancing.
The hangman’s daughter smiled. The men had probably already had more to drink than they should have. Work slowed down in the wintertime, and the workers struggled to get by with part-time jobs, squandering their meager earnings on booze and waiting for the arrival of spring. When the merry group of men saw that a woman had entered the tavern, they raised their glasses to her and made a few smutty remarks.
“Girl, come over here! I’ll buy you a beer if I can have a look at your tender breasts!”
A short, stooped carpenter’s journeyman sidled over to her, bowed deeply, and tried to take her by the arm.
“Come dance, hangman’s girl. Make my back straight and my rod bigger with your black magic!”
Magdalena broke free from him, laughing. “I can’t do any magic when there’s nothing to charm. Bug off!”
She sat down at a table in an alcove off to the side. For a while, the men kept leering at her; then they started drinking again and swaying to the beat of the music. It was not customary for women to go to a tavern alone, but as a hangman’s daughter, Magdalena was no ordinary middle-class woman; she was dishonorable, an untouchable. More like a cross between a woman and a thing, she told herself angrily, before her thoughts turned back to Simon and Benedikta again. What was the medicus doing with someone like that? Benedikta, however, was a refined lady…
She had almost forgotten why she was here when suddenly the tavern keeper appeared in front of her holding a foaming mug of beer.
“This is from an anonymous admirer,” he said with a grin, setting the mug down hard on the table. “If I understand him right, he won’t just stop at this one round.”
For a moment, Magdalena considered turning down the beer. The alcohol she drank earlier was still pulsing through her veins, and her pride wouldn’t allow a stranger to treat her to a beer, anyway. But then thirst won out, and she reached across the table and sipped from the mug. It tasted delicious and fresh. She wiped the foam from her lips and turned to the tavern keeper.
“Hemerle told me that, on Sunday, there were three strangers here wearing black cowls. Is that right?”
The tavern keeper nodded. “They must have been monks from somewhere, but not ordinary ones. They arrived on handsome black horses, the kind you rarely see around here, and tied them up outside the tavern. I could see right away that they were rich, educated people.”
“Was there anything else special about them?” Magdalena asked.
Strasser knit his brow. “There was something strange. When I brought their beer, they suddenly all fell silent. But I heard a bit of their conversation anyway, and I think they were speaking in Latin the entire time.”