From the square outside the Basilica of Saint-Sernin sounded the monotonous singsong of the pilgrims and the cries of vendors hawking candied figs and dates; the air smelled of roast mutton and freshly baked bread. Karl felt sick with hunger. Two days ago a kindly pilgrim woman had given him a boiled egg and a crust of black bread, and that had been the last time he had eaten. The only item of clothing he possessed was a filthy tunic that was ripped in so many places that he was practically half-naked. His arms and legs were scabby and thin as sticks; his face was overgrown by a beard and his cheeks sunken, making him look twenty years older.
But at least he knew who he was.
It hadn’t always been that way. Karl’s memories of the past were blurred, occasionally calling on him like capricious visitors. He had awoken in the austere room of a pauper’s hospital at Nantes nearly two years ago. Karl had no idea how he got there. He had known neither his name nor where he had come from, and not even the friendly Benedictine nuns had been able to help him. They had found him outside the gate, dumped like a sack of trash with broken limbs, bleeding fingers, and a high fever, more dead than alive. Very slowly he had regained his strength, and with time, fragments from his childhood and youth had come back to him, like tiny splinters of his previous life. Apparently he came from the German Empire, since he spoke German, and he believed that his name was Karl Wagner. He had probably studied medicine, because a wealth of Latin and Greek terms swirled around in his head. Clavicula, mandibula, os sacrum, Corpus Hippocraticum. He had no clue what had brought him to France nor what had happened to him there. He liked to draw, so he used charcoal on scraps of paper to capture the memories that sometime overcame him, even though he didn’t know what to make of the resulting images.
A man in a long cloak on a podium. A burning castle. The face of a young woman, wet with tears, her hand reaching out to him. The horned devil, grinning, handing him a goblet.
Karl instinctively touched the pendant that hung from his neck. The little angel was his lifeline whenever the terrible thoughts threatened to get the better of him. The pendant was a simple figurine whittled from alabaster, a token from the time before. He couldn’t say who had given it to him. His mother, perhaps? Despite the hunger consuming him, he would never sell his talisman; it was the only connection he had left to his old life, like a rope floating in the murky waters of his memory. The pendant felt as warm as if it were alive.
Once Karl had been nursed halfway back to health, the nuns had given him a plain tunic and a staff and wished him good luck in his future travels. They couldn’t accommodate him any longer—there were too many like him. Stranded souls, drifting through the country like ghosts and seeking shelter in hospitals and monasteries. For at least one night they would receive a roof over their heads and some watery soup before they returned to the road. Karl had been roaming ever since, but he had no idea where to. He had no compass and no memory; he simply drifted south because it was warmer there and people didn’t freeze to death in winter. Along the way he had learned French and some Occitan, the old language of the bards and the people in the south. He begged, and sometimes he managed to sell small pictures that he drew on scraps of paper or tree bark. He knew how to read and write, but his French wasn’t good enough to earn a living as a traveling clerk. To most people he was a foreigner and a fool. Only the girls liked him because he had beautiful eyes and a chiseled face, but Karl soon figured out that he wasn’t interested in girls. He wondered if his memory loss was God’s punishment for his secret longings.
France was a huge country, stretching all the way to the tall peaks of the Pyrenees and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. Thus Karl had traveled to Occitania and eventually arrived in Toulouse. The days crept by slowly, one after the other, all merging into one. He had become accustomed to his missing memory, and he had a hunch that the gaping hole in his recollections used to be filled with something unspeakably awful that his mind didn’t want to face.
A horned devil. A black goblet.
Again he could hear shouts and chanting from the square by the basilica, but this time there was also laughter and the clapping of hands. Karl listened. He guessed a troupe of jugglers and minstrels was performing, as he had occasionally seen in other places. The sight of jugglers had always made him strangely happy, though he had no idea why. He decided to abandon his shady spot outside the Dominican monastery and try his luck near the Basilica of Saint-Sernin. The church was one of the most significant pilgrims’ destinations in Christendom, accommodating the remains of various apostles. On the square would be many more beggars like
