The Werewolf of Bamberg Read Free

about to leap, Michael Berchtholdt appeared alongside him like a ghost and dragged him back down the icy roof. Other boys followed and started beating Bartholomäus, who screamed desperately for his older brother.
    “Jakob, Jakob! Help me! They’re killing me!”
    Jakob saw the wide eyes of his brother staring back at him. He heard the blows raining down on Bartholomäus—six or maybe seven boys had jumped him. That would be too many—even for Jakob, who, with his strength, could perhaps have taken on three of them. Besides, if he jumped into the fray, there would be no one to warn Mother and little Lisl before even worse things happened. Suppose the unruly mob attacked their house down in the Tanners’ Quarter while he was fighting with the street urchins here? Perhaps they’d already set the house on fire. He couldn’t waste any time.
    But there was something else Jakob was reluctant to admit, even to himself—something that spun a fine, sticky web around him.
    The zeal Bartholomäus had shown the day before while piling the wood around the stake; his constant praise for their choleric father; his cool, dispassionate curiosity concerning the torture of the old shepherd . . . all of that had increased Jakob’s contempt for his brother. It was a palpable disgust that sometimes caused him to gag and even now left a bad taste in his mouth.
    At that moment it became painfully clear to Jakob that Bartholomäus was just like his father and the whole goddamned family of executioners. Jakob himself had never been one of them, and he wouldn’t be in the future, either, no matter how much he’d always longed for his father’s acceptance.
    Without being aware of it, Jakob had made up his mind.
    “Jakob, help me!” Bartholomäus wailed as the blows continued raining down on him. “Please don’t let me die!”
    For one last time, Jakob stared into his brother’s wide, terrified eyes. Then he turned away without saying a word and ran across the roofs of Schongau toward the eastern city wall, where the Tanners’ Quarter was located.
    Behind him he heard a high-pitched scream, like that of a dying animal.
    He ran faster, until he could no longer hear his brother’s cries.

1
    A FEW MILES FROM B AMBERG , O CTOBER 26, 1668 AD
M ORE THAN FORTY YEARS LATER
    D AMN IT! IF THOSE PEOPLE up front don’t start moving their asses, I’ll grab them by the scruff of the neck and whip them all the way to Bamberg myself.”
    With a strong curse on his lips, Jakob Kuisl rose from his seat in the oxcart and stared ahead angrily. An entire caravan of all kinds of carts and wagons blocked the narrow pass through the hills and, after a number of sharp turns, ended in a riverbed. The rain was pouring down, and the trees in the dark forest of firs all around were just barely visible. Water dripped from the low-lying branches, and the constant drumbeat of the rain mixed with the many other sounds down at the ford in the river. Pigs squealed, men shouted and cursed, and somewhere a horse whinnied. The muffled roar of the river and the rain overwhelmed most other sounds.
    Magdalena frowned as she looked at her father, who was spewing his anger like a volcano. More than six feet tall, he stood out above the carts like a church steeple above a nave.
    “Damn it all to hell. I—”
    “Can’t you see there’s something wrong up in front at the ford in the river?” interrupted Magdalena, who was sitting between sacks of grain. She yawned and stretched her back, which ached after she’d had to sit so long. The cold rain had drenched her woolen shawl, and she felt a chill. “Do you think we’re sitting here in this mess just for fun?”
    The Schongau executioner cleared his throat and spat with disgust into the swampy ground surrounding the wagon. “These damn Franks are capable of anything,” he growled, now somewhat more calmly. “I keep wondering what hole in the ground all these people come from. There’s more turmoil in this goddamned