Part 4

I swayed on my feet, staggered and fell. I fell head first into soft sand and heard a great thunder in my ear and a sound like whistling, like the whistle of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, in my chest. And when I got back up the awful spectre had vanished from the bench and so had the sword from the ground. But my cousin, the leper mother, was still standing next to me, wrapped in her black cloak. But I had knelt down, grasped the hem of her garment and shouted:

"Mother, it isn't so! Tell me it isn't so, mother!"

My cousin took one of her hands out of the folds of her cloak as if she wanted to pull my hands away, but she only covered her eyes with it and said with a deep sigh: "It is so! Who can fight against God's will?"

Then she pulled me up and laid her arm on my shoulder and turned round back in the direction of the town. I pulled myself away from her and pushed her back brutally and ran to the door of Saint John's Church sick bay. She ran after me, held me back and shouted over the wind:

"Come, my son. I won't let you and neither will he let you. Let it be. He has taken an oath on it. No-one must come near him from the land of the living. My heart bleeds like yours, my son. But he's right and we must act in accordance with his will."

I called out: "Michael! Michael!"

My only answer was the sound of the sharp, hissing wind through the dry grass. My old, grey-haired cousin had to support me, the strong young man, and lead me like a child back to the road leading to the town. My feet were like a weight of iron and my knees like broken reeds. My eyes beheld chaos.

Woe is me, what had become of the world? There loomed the hundred ramparts and battlements, gables and towers of the great dear town of Nuremberg and over there on the left the ruin of the citadel, which the brave knight Michael had also helped to conquer for our beloved community. Never had my eye other than with joy and hope rested thereon, whatever the way I chose to take to get there. Now there was nothing left of it. Had flames with a thousand red tongues suddenly licked the roofs, surrounded the towers and, as in a rush of wind born of an apocalypse, swallowed the town whole, my view of what was there could not have witnessed greater annihilation.

I was horrified by Nuremberg, how it looked, how it lay there darkly under the dark evening sky. Flames had already licked the citadel. There it lay, already blackened by torches, with burst roofs, broken towers, demolished walls! What did I care now if the town around it still stood upright?

Everything mocked and laughed at me. No green leaf, no flower, no ray of light had been left intact to comfort suffering humanity. It was laughable that we had gone out to rescue a crown for an empire that was no longer there. The Greek from Chios, my clever teacher, Theodoros Antoniades, had done the right thing. He had fled from his homeland before the last pillars and columns shattered and, in this bad moment, I derived comfort from one thing only and that was in the thought that I should do as he had and set off into the unknown devoid of property, homeland, wishes and hopes.

It degraded me that I did not think once then of Mechthild Grossin, but that too would come by and by.

We walked slowly and the Mater Leprosorum talked to me constantly, but I heard little in my state of dizziness. But the little I did hear was each time like a bolt of lightning on a thundery night. The leper mother told me how the poor man had spoken to her softly out of the blue before the sick bay of St John's Church.

In Ofen in Hungary leprosy fell on the German contingent that had gone there with the crown. Many soldiers in the detachment had died there, many others had simply stayed. Some had died on the way. Only Michael Groland had got back home, supporting himself on his knight's sword.

"Nobody knows him here in St John's hospice," said the cousin. "Even his own mother would not know him any more. I did not recognize him. You would not recognize him. God's hand has smitten him horribly. Your friend has descended into hell, misery has buried him alive. Today he has lost all the vanity of earthly desires. Tell me what we should do, my son! His will is to remain missing. Will you comply with it? Will you take upon yourself the burden of silence when it comes to Mechthild?"

Mechthilde! Mechthilde! That was the name that pushed me even deeper into the abyss and yet alone had the potential to redeem me. I began to remember her name again.

I asked my cousin a direct question. "You did not recognize him, cousin Cecilia, but you saw him. You are a mother to these lepers. You have the answer. Is there any hope of him recovering? Is there any hope that we can have him back again if we wait a year, two years, ten years?"

Cousin Stollhoferin lowered her head and thought about this for a long time. We stood on the bridge at the New Gate and those who guarded it had already uncovered their heads before the leper mother. My cousin bowed to me and said: "God's will be done and He is wholly good as He is wholly awesome. I will not mention the homecoming of her betrothed to Mechthild."

Then I remembered that night, that sleepless night, that followed this day of horrors and I weighed my strength to bear with discretion the fate of my two friends through years to come.

"He can bear it!" said my cousin as if she could read the innermost thoughts of my heart as from a slate. "He can bear it. He is a true knight. He has fought for the crown of life and will attain it."

I too was able to bear it.

The summer air is still full of the wails that are buzzing about in the churchyard of Saint Sebaldus. How this same air would tremble if that wild and fiery Franciscan there could speak as urgently as the drops of black ink now flowing from my quill pen down onto a white sheet of parchment. From leaving my room to go to the hospice of Saint John to coming back to it again my life had changed. Nothing was left of the person who had gone out only two hours before. Everything now seemed strange to me and when I lay there on my bed that night the darkness was like a tombstone in a crypt. I lay awake all night without being able to move. In the sick bay of Saint John my friend and brother also lay awake among the legion of the lost and waited, as did I, for a new day to dawn in abject misery.

And dawn broke, it was day and I could not understand how people went back to their daily work. It came as a shock to me that people in Banner Street did not stop and point to my house quite grief-stricken. I thought that even my worst enemy would have done as much.

I only understood that people were going about the hard business of earning a living when I saw my friend's poor betrothed, having stepped through the narrow door of her house into the garden, wander calmly amid the autumnal trees, over fallen branches through brown bushes. My teacher of Greek Theodoros came and saw at a glance that I was ill and asked after me most anxiously. He took leave of me shaking his head. Then a messenger came from Konrad Senior and Peter Junior with a document. It demanded legal support and advice from me because of a charitable foundation of these gentlemen for an enclosed order of nuns, and this was a good thing, for the act of doing this plunged me once more into the hurly-burly of a working day and did not leave me without anything to do as my grief would have wished. Other people whose futile needs and disputes I had to settle and decide according to the rule of law in Nuremberg, came and went and I was obliged to converse with them till evening and then night came round again. This was a very good thing, but it did not save me from the dread inspired by darkness.

On the second day after my meeting at the stone cross at the gate to Saint John's Church I eventually came to the attention of my fair female next door neighbour for the first time since then. I took it as good fortune that Master Theodoros Antoniades had already been there before me and had had misgivings about me being threatened by a serious illness. Mechthilde was most understanding towards me and I had to laugh even with a broken heart and I replied in a light tone that no bodily fragility oppressed me and no hidden torment of love and no mean rejection had made my cheeks pale so fast and furrowed my brow with such rapidity.

This was a time of change for me. These were days to make my bones rot and crumble and the blood run thicker in my veins. By night and by day I wandered through fields, gnashing my teeth as I did so in my struggles with a gruesome ghost. The shadow of the hooded leper never once left my side.

"If you force your way into his lostness, he will kill himself. He has sworn he will!" said my cousin Cecilia. "He is a true knight. He wants to bear his fate alone. His message to you through me is that you should be happy, my son. You should think that he fell in battle or died in Hungary. You should remember him amicably in the circle of your comrades and not grieve for him."

"And what about Mechthild?" I asked. And cousin Cecilia waved me aside and silently left me.

Friends and relations made more of me then than at other times of year, but the hardest obstacle I had to overcome was Mechthilde's tender loving care. November came and with it the first snow of winter. They danced and feasted a lot and made a big thing of it in Nuremberg and pulled me out of every hiding place and dragged me forcibly with threats to their junketings to rid me of my fancies and to make my viscous blood flow soundly and freely again. They had no idea what I saw in their banqueting halls nor of what I was not permitted to talk about. Michael Groland's sword, the sword of my friend and brother stood everywhere stuck in the ground before me, stood to ward off every joy and every pleasure. How could I reach out my own hand to the pretty, smiling girl who so friendlily offered me hers so that I could dance with her? The sword stood everywhere in my way, not just in the banqueting hall, but also in church, in lawyers' chambers, in my own quiet room. I could not get past it--it stood there on the defensive and all lust for life deserted me. There was no getting away from that sword that my dear friend had once so happily and bravely wielded.

The living corpse's bride to be was further transformed in her sweet trust in God's goodness during November and December of that ill-fated year. She too, in obedience to time-honoured custom, was not allowed to miss youthful festivals and dances. Even she, a happy prisoner of hope, who would have much preferred to stay behind in the peace and solitude of her little room, had had to socialize and so we were always bumping into each other and her fine trust and confidence made the frightful burden on my soul even heavier from one day to the next. When she suddenly broke away from me, it was like when a crossbow bolt is pulled from a wound in one's side and in the red flow of blood that then spurts out the rubble and corpse-strewn waste of the battlefield sinks around one, all is eclipsed and the whole world vanishes before one's eyes.

Just before Christmas Mechthild came home beaming in all the fullness of her happiness from the house of Sigmund Stromer where Barbara Stromerin had made ready a festivity. Mysteriously and out of breath one of the Grosse family maids summoned me that very same night to meet with her young mistress. With her finger to her lips, half way between laughter and tears, Mechthildis whispered to me that a great and precious piece of news had gone from ear to ear in Herr Stromer's house among the female guests. It was still a mystery, but still a truth for all that--the Holy Roman Empire's crown, the sword and the mantle of Charlemagne was coming back to Nuremberg; all the imperial treasures were returning to Nuremberg as of right. There was no doubt about it. The Emperor wanted it, the council knew about it and Barbara Stromerin had also known about it and because of the good knight Michael Groland the great and splendid mystery had circulated among the young women in the mayor's house, but without his knowledge.

"It's the return of summer, my friend!" cried Mechthild. "Blessed be the Emperor for returning the crown to our safekeeping. All my companions kissed me and we females were more pleased about it than the mayor and his aldermen. You be pleased about it too, dear friend, and shake off the grief that oppresses you and which I should like to redeem you from with my own heart's blood. Why do you not wish to be happy with your brother and myself now that the good old days will soon be with us again and twice the good fortune?"

The friends of Barbara Stromer really were the first ones in Nuremberg to know of the planned return of the imperial crown jewels, for they, the mayor and the Collegium Triumvirorum, the three most highly placed people in the town, had held the key to these treasures formerly and the key to the gate of the town and its banners.

Mechthild had brought the news home from the mayor's wife's get-together as a great mystery and made me swear not to divulge it, although it had spread from the party already throughout the town and was arousing the highest degree of jubilation in every heart.

There it was then! What I had borne alone in deference to my unhappy friend and the leper mother as long as I could keep it secret, had now to come out and there were no dams to throw up against it. The great honour that had fallen to my native town was the straw that broke the camel's back of our misfortune and on the same night on which Mechthild had returned in such bliss from Sigmund Stromer's house, I confided my fear and my suffering to Master Theodoros Antoniades. Of the hundreds of people that I knew and interacted with, he was the only one to whom I wanted to and could disclose all the misery in my soul.

The homeless Greek listened to me silently and with a deeply furrowed brow. Then he said this to me: "On the island of Chios, under the burning rubble of my home town, I left behind the corpses of my wife and my young sons and daughters. My homeland is perishing, has perished. The imperial eagle of the Eastern Roman Empire circles the old walls of great emperors with weary wings. There is no salvation for the great city of Constantinople. I carry a dead language among foreigners and when they are pleased with its beauty, the pain of loss I feel is that much greater. I carry my pain in silence, my son, and wait to see what God will do. The world is coming to an end not only for the ancient might and splendour of Byzantium. Who will care much for the time of its fall when it finally comes? The youngest of the young are prematurely old. Why should they care? Who still wants to defend himself against the inevitable Day of Judgement? I remember that day when the fair maid came to us and drove you two young men out to fight in that futile struggle. If you want me to, my son, I'll tell Mechthild what fate has had in store for her."

I led my Greek schoolmaster to my cousin Cecilia Stollhoferin, the leper mother, and the following morning all three of us went to see the betrothed of Michael Groland, opened up for her the Book of the Dead and pointed to the entry in letters of flame that determined her fate.

There comes to my ear a sound of trumpets and trombones which does not accompany the shouting coming from the churchyard of Saint Sebaldus. Hark to the bells once again, Saint Benedicta first and foremost! Yes, now the Preacher Johannes has said what he had to say. The people of Nuremberg process through the streets with psalms and litanies strewing ashes on their heads in the darkest corners of their houses and tomorrow they will resume their life of old. The noise of trumpets and trombones that imbues the story of my own life comes from the day after the Feast of Our Blessed Lady's Annunciation during Lent of the year 1424, for on this day the German imperial crown came back to Nuremberg.

Sigmund Stromer and Sebaldus Pfinzing had been sent by the town council to Ofen, to King Sigismund, and, in total confidentiality and secrecy the King of Rome had handed over to them the regalia. So secret was this transaction that no more than six people knew about it. And a week after Candlemas the great regalia were loaded by Nuremberg's twin envoys onto a waggon whose drivers thought they were carrying a load of the fish they call sturgeon. It was only when they were a mile from Nuremberg that the drivers learned just what an honour they had been found worthy of and, getting off their horses with fearful reverence, they humbled themselves in the dust and venerated the imperial regalia on their knees.

Bells and people singing! Woodwinds and trumpets! We all turned out when the approach of the envoys and the treasure they were bringing with them was rumoured. By the thousand and ten thousand--men and women, greybeards and children, we went to meet the crown. A greater day since records began has not been listed in the town's chronicles. Before all others though the heavy laden came as they did every year on the feast of the Arms of Christ, as long as the regalia were kept in the town's care, to lay their sorrows down in front of Our Lord's weapons and to pray for redemption. All sick people who could walk knelt with others at the roadside and all those who suffered from anguish of mind threw themselves down next to those who had only bodily ailments. There were no distinctions made between people. No class of people was allowed to take precedence over any other class. Before the crown, sceptre, sword and orb of the holy German race, before the holy iron of the lance that opened Christ's side, before the five thorns of his crown of thorns all were accounted equal, all brothers and sisters in this vale of tears we call the world. In the ranks of the young women went the saddest of them, Mechthilde, to the Church of the Holy Ghost, where, in the middle of the institution founded by her ancestor, Konrad Grossen, in the garden frequented by the lepers, the holy regalia had their dwelling formerly and where they were now to be housed again.

A hundred years before one slept there--a rich man, a poor man, a leper himself, Konrad, one of the Hainzen, there in the spot where today the imperial regalia of the German people rest safely. He was sleeping in his garden under a linden tree and there came to him in sleep a dream of a great treasure that lay in the ground owned by his forebears. And the place where the treasure was was also shown to him and the leper went there in his dream and followed a bright light leading him on. In order to mark the spot that had been indicated to him he grabbed a handful of leaves from the linden tree and put them where the treasure was buried. Then he woke up and remembered. When he wandered round the garden full of doubt and did not know if he should take things at face value, he found there the little heap of linden leaves and recovered with it a belief in the truth of his dream. His family came to visit him and listened to his wonderful story with astonishment. Then they started to help him dig up the ground. Konrad the leper made a promise to God that he would use anything he found in the service of the poor and sick, and behold: a great treasure really was excavated from the garden of the Hainzen of Pegnitz and Konrad kept to his vow. The hospice and the Church of the Holy Ghost were founded and built on the strength of the subterranean treasure, and now the imperial crown reposes in the place where the leper's hand and will pointed out to architect and stone masons the site they were about to build on. The man stricken with leprosy, as I have already mentioned elsewhere in this chronicle, was henceforth known as Konrad the Great and, by way of an eternal memorial to him, Emperor Ludwig the Bavarian gave him in his coat of arms the twenty-four linden leaves together with the hill to which he took them in his dream.

While Mechthild Grossin has made her way to the porch of the Holy Ghost Church to wait for the crown, I too have gone with my companions and others to the door of this church. Half a mile from the town we caught sight of the waggon and its escort.

The horses were indeed imposing in their harnesses and went with heads bowed as if they knew what they were pulling. And Sigismund Stromer and Sebaldus Pfinzing walked bareheaded on the right and the left of the waggon respectively. The armed escort rode in silence and it was quiet too in the crowd coming out of the town. The people's songs of praise fell silent and one could only still hear in the distance the bells ring out from all the towers of Nuremberg. Those who were on horseback got down and knelt at the roadside still holding on to the reins. Everyone knelt down and we watched as the waggon that was laden with so great a treasure and had come here all the way from Blindenburg in Hungary slowly moved towards us. And when it had gone past each of us got up off our knees once more, joined the procession and once again intoned songs of praise. In the town all the bells rang more and more brightly and joyfully and from its walls and towers too thousands rejoiced. Then we saw quite clearly how great a passion play old Nuremberg was playing host to within its noble walls. There was a throng from the gates of the town through all the streets and market places like a raging sea, but even where the throng was thickest that day no harsh words or blows were proffered. No knife or sword was loosened from its sheath. Each person felt a restraining hand on their heart and the wildest among them let themselves be pushed into corners and dead ends without complaint.

Thus we moved on with the crown through the streets to the square in front of the Church of the Holy Ghost. How I felt in that great swell of people pushing and shoving me willy nilly I cannot put into words. I was in a tearful and yet sweet state of ecstasy. My soul was trapped and earthbound and yet hovered high up over things of earth and there was in me a feeling of a splendid pardon I was torn away from. And then we arrived in the square in front of the Church of the Holy Ghost where with a legion of young women, councillors and clergy the town's most unfortunate inhabitants awaited the coming of the regalia.

No barrier had been erected. All the sick and suffering who wanted to go had been allowed to go. And there they all were--the unclean from Saint John's hospice, the homeless of Saint Martha's parish, the poor of every charitable foundation. They are all permitted to touch the casket of the living presence with their hands and to implore for help, for no sanctuary is held to be more gracious than this one that contains the crown of the German people and the trappings of Christ!

Tolle! Lege! The restraining hand that all of us felt on their hearts suddenly glowed in mine like fire then froze like ice. With outstretched arms the leper mother was making a way through the crowd for a hooded man and, on the steps of the church, I caught a brief glimpse of Master Theodoros near a pale female face. With beating heart I now set down what happened next.