The Dark Monk Read Free

hands froze into shapeless clumps, and he lost all sense of time. One thing was uppermost in this mind: He had to reach the church!
    Finally, his head bumped against a wall, and after a few seconds he realized he had reached the portal of the St. Lawrence Church. With his last bit of strength, he forced the frozen stumps that had once been his hands into the crack in the door and pulled it open. Once inside, he was no longer even able to crawl on all fours. His legs kept collapsing under the weight of his heavy body, and it was only by crawling on his belly that he could manage the final short distance. He could feel how his inner organs were failing, little by little.
    When the priest reached the slab over the crypt, he passed his hands briefly over the relief of the woman below him. He caressed the weathered figure like a lover and finally laid his cheek on her face. Paralysis was climbing up his body from his legs, but before it reached his hands, the priest scratched a circle with the jagged nail of his right index finger into the layer of frost atop the gravestone. Then the tension receded from the powerful body and he collapsed. Once more he tried to raise his head, but something was gripping him tightly.
    The last thing Andreas Koppmeyer felt was how his beard, his right ear, and the skin on his face slowly froze to the gravestone. Cold and silence enveloped him.

1
     
    S IMON FRONWIESER TRUDGED down Altenstadt Street through the snow, cursing his vocation. In weather like this, farmers, servants, carpenters, even whores and beggars stayed out of the goddamned cold and inside where it was warm. Only he, the Schongau medicus, was required to visit the sick!
    In spite of the heavy woolen coat he was wearing over his jacket and fur-lined leather gloves, he was miserably cold. Clumps of snow and ice had made their way under his collar and into his boots, melting there into a cold slush. When he looked down, he noticed a new hole at the tip of his left boot with his big, red, frozen toe peering out. Simon clenched his teeth. Why did his boots have to fail him now, of all times, in the dead of winter? He had already spent his savings on a pair of new petticoat breeches. But that was a necessity. He would rather a toe freeze off than do without the pleasure of the newest French fashion. It was important to observe the latest fashion, especially in a sleepy little Bavarian town like Schongau.
    Simon turned his attention once more to the road. It had been snowing until just a few moments ago, and now, in the late-morning hours, a biting cold hung over the fallow fields and forests around town. The crust of snow on the narrow path through the middle of the road collapsed under his feet with every step. Icicles hung down from the branches, and trees groaned under the weight of the snow. Here and there the branches broke with loud cracking sounds and released their loads of snow. Simon’s perfectly shaven Vandyke beard and black shoulder-length hair had by now frozen solid. He reached up and felt his eyebrows. Even they were caked with ice. Once again, he cursed loudly. It was the coldest damn day of the year and here he was having to trudge to Altenstadt on behalf of his father! And all that just because of a sick priest!
    Simon could well imagine what was ailing the fat priest. He had gorged himself again, as he did so often. And now he lay in bed with a bellyache, asking for linden blossom tea—as if his housekeeper Magda couldn’t make that for him! Probably old Koppmeyer had been out and about stuffing himself somewhere or had gotten involved with one of the whores in town, and now Magda had gone into a huff and Simon had to pay for it.
    Abraham Gedler, the sexton of St. Lawrence’s in Altenstadt, had shown up at the Fronwieser house early in the morning and pounded on the door. He had been strangely pale and uncommunicative and said only that the priest was sick and the doctor should come as fast as possible. Then,