Here on the Danube, a four-day journey from Kuisl’s home, neither the passengers nor the crew knew that Kuisl was the Schongau executioner. For the helmsman up front that was fortunate; if it had gotten around that a hangman had lent him a hand, he probably would have been expelled from his guild. In some regions, Kuisl had heard, just touching, or even being looked at by, an executioner could strip a man of his honor.
Kuisl climbed onto a barrel of pickled herring in the back of the cargo area and lit his pipe. Now, with the infamous Weltenburg Narrows behind them, the Danube widened again. The little town of Kelheim appeared on the left, and heavily loaded barges passed so close to the raft that Kuisl could almost reach out and touch their cargo. A fiddle could be heard on a vessel farther off, accompanied by the jangle of a tambourine. Behind that, a raft the size of a house plowed through the current at a leisurely pace. Loaded with lime, yew wood, and bricks, it lay so low in the water that small waves kept washing over the logs. In the middle of this slow-moving vessel, next to its tiny makeshift cabin, the captain rang a bell whenever smaller fishing boats drifted too close.
The hangman exhaled a few clouds of tobacco smoke into the almost cloudless summer sky, trying for a few minutes at least to forget the somber reason for his trip. Six days ago a letter from far-off Regensburg had arrived at his house in Schongau. Its contents troubled him more than he wanted his family to know. His younger sister, Lisbeth, who was married to the owner of a bathhouse and had been living in the distant Imperial City for years, had fallen seriously ill. It was a lump in her stomach, or so it was thought, accompanied by dreadful pain and a thick, black discharge. In the hastily scrawled lines of parchment his brother-in-law entreated him to come to Regensburg as soon as possible, since it was uncertain how long Lisbeth would survive. The Schongau hangman therefore emptied the medicine chest at home, packed his linen bag with opium gum, mountain arnica, and St. John’s Wort, and was on the next raft heading down the Danube. As executioner, he wasn’t allowed to leave town without prior approval of the city council, but Kuisl had simply ignored the prohibition. Just let Court Clerk Johann Lechner have him drawn and quartered when he got back! His sister’s fate was far more important to Kuisl. He didn’t trust the educated quacks, who would likely just bleed her until she was as white as a drowned corpse. If anyone could help his sister at all, it would have to be him and nobody else.
The Schongau executioner killed and healed. He was a master of both.
“Hey, big fellow! Would you like to join me for a drink?”
Jarred from his reveries, Kuisl looked ahead, where one of the raftsmen was raising his glass in a toast. The hangman shook his head and pulled his wide-brimmed hat down low over his forehead to protect himself from the blinding sun. His large hooked nose and, below that, the stem of his pipe were all that were visible under the brim. From beneath his hat he could observe both the travelers and the raftsmen among the crates in the middle of the raft, toasting their successful passage through the fearsome gorge with slugs of brandy. Like an annoying insect, a thought was troubling Kuisl. It would come and go, and the whirlpool at the Long Wall only briefly succeeded in displacing it.
Ever since his departure he had had the strange feeling he was being watched.
It wasn’t tied to any one thing in particular, but a combination of instinct and his many years of experience as a mercenary in the Great War had taught him to heed the little twitch between his shoulder blades. He didn’t know who was watching him or why, but the twitch persisted.
Kuisl looked around. Among the passengers he counted two Franciscan monks and a nun. In addition, there were traveling tradesmen, journeymen, and a handful of simple merchants-altogether around two dozen travelers, who along with the hangman had joined the convoy of five rafts. On the Danube it was possible to travel to Vienna in just one week, and within three weeks even as far as the Black Sea. In the evening, when the rafts moored together along the shore, everyone would meet around the fire, exchange a few words, and tell stories of previous travels and adventures-everyone but Kuisl. He didn’t know a soul and usually sat alone, which was fine by him, as he considered most people nothing more than gossiping simpletons. From where he sat, off to one side, the hangman observed the men and women each evening as they sat around the fire, laughing, drinking cheap wine, and nibbling on legs of mutton. And again and again, he thought he felt someone’s unwavering eyes upon him. Even now, under the bright noontime sun, he felt an itch or a tickle between his shoulder blades, as if a little bug were creeping across his back.
Kuisl, acting bored, dangled his feet from the wooden barrel. He filled his pipe again and looked out at the far shore, hoping to seem as if he were intently observing the horde of children standing there, waving at him.
Abruptly he wheeled around to face the stern of the vessel.
For a fraction of a second he did notice someone staring at him: the second helmsman, who operated the rudder in the stern. If Kuisl remembered correctly, the man had boarded in Schongau. The man was thickset and almost as tall as the hangman himself. From his blue Tyrolean jacket hung a hunting knife as long as a man’s forearm. His shoulders were broad, a hefty paunch bulged over his copper belt, and he wore his knee breeches stuffed into tall, coarse leather boots and a Tyrolean hat commonly worn by raftsmen. The most striking thing about him, however, was his face. The entire right-hand side was furrowed with little pockmarks and scars, likely the result of severe burns. Over one eye the man wore a black patch. A shiny pink scar extended from his forehead to his chin as if embossed on his face, and it seemed to twitch like a thick, iridescent worm.
For a moment Kuisl felt as though he weren’t looking at a face but an animated grotesque.
A hateful face.
When the moment passed, the helmsman bent down again over his oar. He sat with his back to the hangman as if their eyes had never met.
An image from Kuisl’s past flashed through his mind, but he couldn’t quite grasp it. The Danube flowed by lazily, taking the memory with it and leaving only a misty, vague presentiment.
Kuisl knew this man. He couldn’t say from where, but his instinct warned him. As a mercenary soldier in the Great War, the Schongau executioner had come to know all kinds of people-both cowards and heroes, some crooked and some upright, victims as well as murderers-and among them were many whom war had driven mad. One thing Kuisl could say with certainty: the man standing just a few steps from him, calmly guiding the tiller through the water-this man was dangerous. Dangerous and shrewd.
Deliberately, the hangman adjusted the larch-wood cudgel on his belt. All in all, there seemed no cause for concern. There were plenty of people who might say the same thing about him.
Kuisl got off the raft in the small town of Prufening, still a few miles short of Regensburg.
He grinned, shouldering his medicine bag and waving to the raftsmen, merchants, and craftsmen. If this scar-faced stranger was in fact on his trail, that man had a problem now. As helmsman, he could hardly leave the raft before it arrived in Regensburg. And, sure enough, the raftsman stared at him with his one healthy eye, as if he was contemplating abandoning the raft and setting off after Kuisl. But then, evidently, he thought better of it. With one last hateful look, so brief it went unnoticed by everyone else, he turned back to his work, wrapping the slick rope, thick as a man’s arm, around the posts in the jetty.
The raft remained moored there until a few more travelers boarded for the short trip to Regensburg. Then it cast off and began to glide slowly toward the Imperial City, whose tallest spires were now visible on the horizon.
Kuisl watched the raft drift away. Then, whistling a military march, he started down the narrow road leading north. Soon he’d left the little town behind and was surrounded on either side by fields of grain rippling in the wind. A stone marked the border where Kuisl left Bavarian territory and entered the lands belonging to the Free City of Regensburg. Until now he’d known the place only from stories. He knew that Regensburg was one of the greatest cities in the German Empire and was subject to no one but the kaiser himself. And he’d heard that the electoral princes, bishops, and dukes all convened there as a Reichstag to determine the empire’s fate.
When Kuisl’s gaze took in the towering spires and city walls in the distance, homesickness came over him. The Schongau hangman was not a man made for the wide world-the Sonnenbrau Tavern tucked behind the church, the green Lech River, and the deep Bavarian forests were good enough for him.
It was a hot August afternoon, and the fields shimmered gold in the sunlight. In the distance, black storm clouds were beginning to gather on the horizon. To his right, a gallows hill rose up from the fields; several corpses swayed gently in the breeze. Now-derelict trenches served as reminders that the Great War was not so far in the past. By now the hangman wasn’t alone on the road anymore; coaches and lone men on horseback rushed past him, as well as oxen slowly pulling farmers’ overladen carts. A broad stream of noisily babbling people, all on their way to Regensburg, had apparently come to a stop near the entrance to the high gate in the city’s western wall. Among the throng of poor farmers clad in wool and other coarse cloth, the pilgrims, the beggars, and the wagoners,
