Oliver Potzsch - The Dark Monk

“You damn fools!” he cried out. “It’s me, the hangman! Stop at once!”

He leaned against the rock face, looking for cover. When he heard no further shots, he poked his head out carefully and saw a gruesome scene outside the cave.

A wave of anger came over him.

The Schongau men formed a half circle around a pile of dead bodies-young, old, men, women, and children. Blood flowed in streams over the white snow.

Several muskets were still directed at the entrance, and only gradually did the citizens lower their weapons. Hans Berchtholdt’s musket was still smoking. With a mixture of confusion and bloodlust, he stared at the hangman, who emerged from the cave now looking like the devil incarnate.

“I…I…” Berchtholdt stuttered.

“You dirty bastard, you almost killed me!” shouted Jakob Kuisl. Then he ran to the baker’s son and grabbed the barrel of the musket with his right hand. With a loud curse, he rammed the butt of the gun into Berchtholdt’s stomach so hard he sank to the ground, gasping.

“And what is this?” the hangman roared, pointing to the pile of corpses. “You were supposed to disarm and arrest them, not slaughter them!” For a moment, he was tempted to hit Berchtholdt over the head with his own musket, but Kuisl broke it over his knee instead and threw it as far as he could.

“They…they just started shooting.” Jakob Schreevogl stepped forward now. His face white, he was trembling and looking down sheepishly. “I couldn’t help myself.”

“How many?” Kuisl whispered.

Schreevogl just nodded. “We were able to capture a dozen, and the rest are dead, shot down like dogs.”

Berchtholdt stood up and spoke again, groaning. “You ought to be glad-that saves you work; you won’t have to string up so many.”

“It…was very simple,” Sebastian Semer added, a kind of fire burning in his eyes that the hangman knew all too well. “Just like hunting.”

Behind them, other voices joined in: “Why wait? Let’s string the rest of them up on the beech tree over there!”

Jakob Kuisl closed his eyes. His wounded left arm ached. Bloody scenes passed before his eyes, memories of days long gone.

Silence, only the cawing of the ravens strutting around on the bloody uniforms and pecking at the eyes of the dead women…a knotty tree full of twitching bodies that hang like plump apples on a tree…the men-my own men-looking at me, eyes wide with fear. I grab the next one, toss the noose around his neck, one after the other. One after the other…

The baker’s son seemed to notice Kuisl’s distress. “Since when has the hangman been afraid of death, huh?” he jeered, tottering about unsteadily. “All we did was make less work for you.”

Kuisl ignored him. “You’re just animals,” he whispered softly to himself. “Every one of you is worse than the hangman.”

He pushed the crowd aside and walked over to the trembling prisoners who were tied up, awaiting their fate. There were around a dozen of them, including four women. One of the women carried a screaming infant in a sling on her back. Two emaciated boys, around six and ten years of age, clung to their mother. Most of the men had fresh wounds, had been struck by a sword or grazed by a bullet, and many of the haggard faces were beaten black and blue.

One member of the anxious group stood out. He was almost as large as the hangman and wore a full beard, torn breeches, and a filthy leather cape collar. Blood seeped from a wound on his forehead, but despite his impoverished appearance, there was an aura of strength and pride about him. He looked at the hangman with an alert, steady gaze.

“You must be Hans Scheller,” Kuisl said.

The gang leader nodded. “And you’re nothing more than a filthy, murdering band of thugs,” he said.

Cries and angry shouts came from behind the hangman.

“Watch what you say, Scheller!” one of the workers shouted back. “Or we’ll rip your belly open right now and hang your guts up in the branches!”

“Nobody’s going to rip anyone’s belly out,” Kuisl said. His voice was calm, but there was something in it that caused the others to fall silent.

“We’ll take the marauders along with us back to Schongau now,” he continued, “and then the city council will take care of them. You all have done enough damage here already.” He turned aside with a disgusted expression. Snowflakes fell on the lifeless bodies piled up at the cave entrance like so many slaughtered animals.

The hangman shook his head. “Now let’s at least give them a decent burial.”

For the time being, he bound up his left arm with a dirty rag and used his right arm to move aside a few stones lying in a hollow near the cave.

“What’s the matter?” he growled. “Doesn’t anyone want to help me? After you nearly shot me to death, too?”

Silently, the Schongauers moved in to help him clear a space for the icy stone graves.

Jakob Kuisl’s left arm was so painful that he left the men to finish the bloody work on their own. With clenched teeth, he went back into the cave to look around.

The two robbers lay dead right where he’d left them, but the smoke was still so thick he couldn’t see farther than a few steps. He climbed over rubble, burning tree branches, and blackened logs until he reached the rear of the vault. Strewn about here were the robbers’ few belongings: tattered coats, stained copper plates, a few rusty weapons, even a roughly carved wooden doll.

Farther back still, directly along the sooty rock wall, the hangman came across a wooden box reinforced with iron bands. Its padlock took only five minutes of the hangman’s time. The lock snapped open, and Jakob Kuisl put his lock pick back in his bag, opening the trunk cautiously, well aware that some boxes like this were booby trapped-poisoned needles and pins could come shooting out. But nothing happened.

At the bottom of the trunk lay a few shining guilders; a silver pitcher; a corked, unopened bottle of brandy; furs; and a golden brooch that at one time must have belonged to the wife of a rich merchant. There wasn’t much there, but that didn’t surprise the hangman. The robbers had evidently bartered most of their treasure away or hidden it somewhere, which Kuisl doubted. He would certainly discover the truth in the tower dungeon. The hangman hoped that Hans Scheller would be reasonable and spare him having to tie hundredweight stones to his feet, as he had done with the highwayman Georg Brandner two years ago. Kuisl had had to break every bone in Brandner’s body before he finally told him where he had buried the stolen coins.

Underneath a lice-ridden fur coat and bearskin cap, the hangman finally came upon a laced-up leather bag. He opened it and couldn’t help laughing-it was exactly what he needed now. Evidently, either the robbers had at one time attacked a barber surgeon or one of them had held onto the surgical kit from his military service. In the bag, a needle, thread, and forceps were neatly arranged by size and still relatively free of rust.

Kuisl uncorked the bottle of brandy with his teeth and took a long swig. Then he rolled up his left shirtsleeve and felt for the wound. The bullet had passed through his coat, leather collar, and shirt and had lodged in his upper arm. Fortunately, the bone appeared uninjured, but Kuisl could feel that the bullet was still lodged in his flesh. He found a piece of leather in the bag, clenched it between his teeth, and groped for the bullet with the forceps.

The pain was so severe that he felt himself getting sick, so he sat down on the trunk to take a few deep breaths before continuing. Just when he thought he was going to faint, the forceps met a firm object. He carefully drew it out and viewed the small, bent piece of lead. After taking another drink, he poured the rest of the brandy over the wound. Once again, he was almost overcome with pain, but the hangman knew that most soldiers didn’t die from bullets themselves, but from the gangrene that followed a few days later. During the war, he learned that brandy could prevent gangrene. While most barber surgeons recommended cauterizing the wound or pouring hot oil into it, Kuisl preferred this method and had had good experience on some of his patients with it.