“Papa?” Peter stood in front of him now, passing his little fingers over Simon’s sweaty brow. The medicus’s eyes were still wide open. “Papa, are you asleep?”
Little Paul had arrived now, as well. He crawled onto Simon’s chest and pressed his head tenderly against it. Simon always caressed him until he fell asleep, but now he lay beneath his son like a piece of dead meat. Paul began to cry.
“Don’t be sad, children,” said the hoarse voice from the other side of the corridor. “You have much to learn in your lives. Everyone must die, even your father. But at least come and have a good look at him, and remember him this way. I, too, had to watch over my dearest a long time before God finally took her away from me. This time, however, the trick is on God. Say goodbye, children; it’s time for you to go.”
The voice became louder as the stranger entered the room, approaching from the side so that Simon recognized his face only at the last moment.
The medicus tried to scream, and this time he was so terrified that, despite his paralysis, a brief, stifled squawk emerged.
The man standing above him did actually come from the underworld.
With a mixture of awe and horror Magdalena watched as her father, smeared with clay and lime, took out his cudgel and advanced menacingly toward Brother Eckhart.
“Where are the children?” he growled. “Speak up, you fat, black-robed rascal, before I send the whole bunch of you straight to hell.”
“What… what children?” Brother Eckhart was clearly confused. Until this point, he’d been firmly convinced a genuine golem was standing in front of him. Now this golem was posing curious questions, and in the thickest Bavarian accent. Magdalena could see clearly the monk’s mind working.
The wizened librarian had ascended the staircase and was now standing alongside Brother Jeremias, looking down incredulously at the scene below. Finally, he began to laugh hysterically.
“Damn, Eckhart,” he cried out. “That’s no golem; it’s the same man I caught snooping around Laurentius’s cell-that stubborn Schongau hangman, a man of flesh and blood. I was almost believing that nonsense about a golem myself.”
The Andechs prior seemed to have pulled himself together now, as well. He glanced nervously at the door, as if he were considering running away, but then he evidently made a decision. Reaching inside his robe, he suddenly pulled out a pistol.
“Stay where you are, hangman,” he shouted down into the keep. “We haven’t toiled away all these years to have everything ruined by a filthy country bumpkin. One step closer, and I’ll blow you away like a mad dog.”
The old librarian at Jeremias’s side seemed stunned for a moment by his colleague, but then a thin smile passed over his lips. “Well, well, Jeremias,” he purred, “I never thought you had it in you. Perhaps I’ve underestimated you all these years. Where does an impoverished monk get a hold of such a beautiful weapon?”
“That’s beside the point,” the prior snapped. “The important thing is that this girl and her father don’t give us away. So put down your cudgel, hangman.”
Until now, Kuisl had listened to the two Benedictines in silence. Now he lowered his weapon and stepped back. “A nice toy you have there, little monk,” he growled. “A genuine Flemish flintlock pistol, if I’m not mistaken. Must have cost a heap of money. Unfortunately, it fires only one shot, and there are two of us.”
“Brother Eckhart can take care of the girl all by himself,” the prior snarled, pointing at the fat cellarer still standing uncertainly on the floor of the keep. “He’s been looking forward to dealing with that girl so long, and we don’t want to disappoint him, do we?”
Until then, Magdalena had been standing behind one of the closed crates, observing the three Benedictines. Now she stepped forward angrily.
“Some fine monks you are,” she shouted up to the prior on the staircase. “Is this what our Savior understood by brotherly love? Rape and murder?”
“Silence, woman,” Father Benedict chimed in. “You don’t understand what’s going on.”
“I don’t understand?” Magdalena pointed at the crates around her. In the torchlight, she saw rusty crucifixes lying around on the tables, along with jawbones, colorful glass stones, and cheap tin chalices. “I’ll tell you what I understand. You’re making counterfeit relics here. I’ve no idea what you’re doing with them, but certainly you’re not putting the fake chalices in your own chapel.”
The librarian laughed again. “Didn’t I tell you, stupid hangman’s girl, that you really don’t understand?”
Magdalena looked at him incredulously. “Does that mean-”
“I’ll tell you what it means,” her father interrupted, swinging his cudgel. “The three of them are probably selling the genuine relics and putting the counterfeit ones in the holy chapel. Isn’t that right? You’re selling all the beautiful chalices, monstrances, and crucifixes, and the people in Andechs are praying to tin-plated counterfeits?”
Magdalena looked back again at the tables with the glass stones and rolls of fabric. To the right stood a brazier with a small bellows, and alongside them a few sparkling gold figurines.
“You’re… you’re melting down the chalices and crucifixes?” she cried out in horror. “You’re destroying the sacred treasures of Andechs Monastery and selling them as gold bars? Everything up there is nothing but cheap imitations?”
“Stupid brat.” The prior rolled his eyes in annoyance. “Of course not everything. Do you have any idea how many relics have been accumulating up there? Hundreds! Nobody notices when one or two relics are replaced by cheap imitations. The bones and cloth are returned. We change only the containers, so to speak, and the contents remain the same.”
He smiled broadly and continued pointing the pistol at Kuisl. The weapon seemed to lend him an enormous degree of self-confidence, and Magdalena could positively feel how the prior was enjoying this scene.
“Believe us, we didn’t plan it this way,” Jeremias continued almost apologetically. “During the Great War, hordes of mercenaries descended on us looking for our relics, and Benedikt and I had to hide them again and again. We hid the treasures deep down below the monastery. Then one day, we happened to find a walled-over section in the beer cellar. We broke through the wall and the passage led us here.”
“To the buried keep of Andechs Castle,” Magdalena murmured. “How many of these underground passageways do you think are still here?”
“We never looked any farther,” said the librarian, rubbing his tired little eyes. “It didn’t interest us. We were happy to find a good hiding place during the war.” His voice turned shrill and hatred gleamed in his eyes. “In any case, our own soldiers were worse than the enemy mercenaries. The elector always demanded money for his expensive military campaigns. Where do you think we got that? We melted down some of our relics and replaced them with cheap tin and glass stones. Nobody noticed a thing-on the contrary. The worse the war became, the more pilgrims came here, and they didn’t care what they were worshipping-tin or gold. The only thing they needed was faith.”
“And then after the war you simply carried on and pocketed the money yourselves,” the hangman snorted. “Greedy little monks. You’re all the same.” Warily he eyed the muzzle of the pistol, but Brother Jeremias didn’t let Kuisl out of his sight for a minute.
The old librarian smiled wanly. “I knew a stupid, dishonorable hangman would see it that way,” he finally replied. “But if you really want to know-no, we didn’t pocket the money ourselves. We used it to buy books, valuable knowledge that would otherwise be lost to history, and we’re saving it to make this monastery into something great someday. Soon we can begin with our new construction, isn’t that right, Brother Jeremias?”
The prior nodded. “The war taught us that faith doesn’t need money. What’s the point of all the bric-a-brac that just collects dust in the chests of the holy chapel? A few times each year, we display some of them from the bay window of the church and people are happy-they pray just as fervently even if these objects are just glass stones and cheap metal. And they will be even happier when the monastery is decked out in new splendor. Our actions are God’s work.”