~Nuremburg, Bavaria~
Winter’s thin icy fingers nimbly plucked out the spark of life in Neureichburg. An eerie silence suffocated merriment and gaiety in the private halls of the Imperial House. Many more nights than usual the servants spent all day and night in the castle, instead of returning to their warm cottages in the valley below to rest. None had entered the Emperor’s office in a long while, all his correspondence was delivered to Herr von Richter, his secretary and advisor. Even Ilse von Wittelsbach, usually blooming with the bright radiance of a morning glory, walked with small hushed and rapid steps through the cold wet stone hallways. Unspoken fear held all the Imperial House of Wittelsbach captive.
The death pall remained over the castle even as the snows of winter began to melt away, and the new life of spring began to send new shoots skyward. Letters arrived everyday, bringing delayed news of the dead that lay frozen in the wastes of north Poland and Denmark. Even later came the news of the death of the stalwart defenders of the Holy City of Jerusalem, the Pandora’s Box within which so many of Christendom’s misfortunes and hopes sprung. Blood soaked the tundra of the north and the sands of the Levant indiscriminately.
Once the sound of young children brought what little joy could be found in the castle that housed the government of all the Empire. Little Frederick and Eva-Maria were yet young enough and inexperienced enough to watch the coming of spring with innocent wonderment. When March came though, Nora decided to return with the children to their home in Stuttgart, perhaps hoping for more familiar and peaceful climes. Their little footsteps still echoed against the stone steps and dusty tapestries. Too often the echo was sadder than the absence.
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Erich lay engulfed in the whiteness of sheets, pillows, blankets, and hot bricks wrapped in linen. Though they had been washed freshly that morning, by now in the late hours near midnight, they felt rank and stiff against the Kaiser’s gaunt flesh. The Emperor’s illness had wrenched his body from its once handsome strong form. His eye sockets were hollow and dark, his lips thinned and palest pink, his skull-like face was covered by ever thinning wisps of peppery hair. His hair had begun turning white at the tips ever since the negotiations on behalf of the Doge of Genoa, yet then it was still luxuriantly thick and mainly a deep brown. Now it fell out daily, leaving a crown of brown and white hair lying on the pillows around the Kaiser’s head, like nature’s mockery of his divinely appointed station. A dark lump had formed on his throat, making his breath short, in only the last month. The most noticeable change of all came in his eyes. Where once they were lucid liquid brown, intelligent and quick, now they were glazed and dry, leaving the Emperor staring forward, tacitly accepting the pain that had been his reality the last month.
The Imperial House had acquired many doctors and professionals throughout Erich’s reign, for placed the good of the state ahead of the good of his health far more often than was strictly healthy, spending long nights and early mornings hammering out fair agreements, ignoring any break or vacation to ensure the efficient administration of the Empire, and all the while attempting to live as a symbol of the virtuous prince and a model for all his subjects. He’d battled two bouts with illness so severe that they drew him away from the Diet and his office, but none so far had even approached the magnitude of the disease that now held him. To combat this they’d hired a specialist, a doctor renown for his study and treatment of strange and unusual ailments. He came from England, his name was Doctor von Wittgenstein, apparently he had been born in Wurtemburg.
A suspicious and secretive man, Doctor von Wittgenstein always wore a hooded cloak, and only arrived in the evenings. He slept in the city, and none ever saw him except when he came and went from the Neureichburg. To be honest, none knew from whence he came, nor his past, but his credentials were irrefutable, and at first at least, his ministrations seemed to be bringing the Kaiser onto the road to recovery. For this reason, the strange and mysterious Herr von Wittgenstein was afforded the family’s complete trust.
Erich felt the wurm eating away in his innards though. He knew that the demon Lucifer had planted its foul seed in him, as is the plight of all of Eve’s children. He knew that the wurm was growing and would consume his corporeal form, leaving his soul naked. The Count Palatine now Emperor of Humanity, knew in his heart, that soon he would be dead. The news of the Fall of Jerusalem only confirmed it. Though as a youth he had ignored the ramblings of his mad uncle Dirk von Hindeblum, a mystic and erudite, wise in the arcana of the ancients. He knew that the slaughter of Jerusalem, the site of Christ’s death and the site of his Second Coming, to the forces of Lucifer was a cosmic sign of the end of days, of the Armageddon.
The Lord will return to his Kingdom, and be beset immediately by infidel demons..our salvation..all of our salvation…
The horror of eternal damnation and the despair of both life and humanity spurred new strength in the Emperor. His aching body managed to straighten itself slightly. In the polished brass of the mirror that hang on his bedroom wall, Erich could see a shadow of himself garbed in flimsy white raiment, the image of the old mad king. His bones could all be seen, his skin was patchy and pale white. With weary, painful, slow movements, he walked along the wall, stumbling once, twice, three times, before falling onto the wooden kneeler that sat unassumingly beneath a gold leaf icon of the Madonna and Child and even above that a massive iron crucifix.
With childlike fright, Erich stared up into the compassionate loving eyes of a Christ tormented and twisted in bodily pain, yet at the same time saving his torturers. A shudder, a convulsion ran through the Emperor of Humanity, and his head fell into his arms, couched against the cushion on top the kneeler. Here His Most Serene and Pacific Majesty murmured his orison, hoping as all dying men do, that God would answer his small and feeble cry. The Emperor called out to his God.
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A velvet-gloved hand ran across Christoph von Wittelsbach’s face. The former Archbishop shuddered as the hand ran against the rough scars.
My own hand…the same hand by which this mark was given to me.. None saw Christoph, dressed now in a dark hooded cloak, shudder, for he rode alone in his carriage to the Neureichburg. He reflected on how lucky he was to travel to Stettin and Wien. There he had found his purpose and his method. With ducats lent by his ‘interested’ patrons, he’d managed to bribe his way into Imperial service, buying himself a reputation and all the trappings necessary to gain access to the Emperor. The sun was setting but none could tell for the dark clouds foretelling storms had covered the golden disk far earlier than dusk. It began to sleet.
The gloved hand now stroked a wooden box beside Christoph. The case contained many substances, both useful for good and for evil. It contained the muric acid with which Christoph had scarred his face beyond recognition of his former family. It also contained powdered rust, powdered aluminum, and a poisonous white powder, among many other reagents. Christoph’s thoughts however rested on a simple vial filled with a dark wine red elixir, a mixture of lettuce, gall from a castrated boar, briony, opium, henbane, and hemlock juice. This fairly common curative would soon serve a far more sinister purpose. Christoph grinned and shuddered at how near he was to his goal.
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In a voice that once commanded the entire Reichstag with comfort and ease, Erich murmured his soft prayer. That same voice had been reduced to a wheezing hacking mucus-ridden distortion of the oratorical talent it once possessed:
”Mein Gott…Mein Gott…in my error I have turned away from you…forgive me, oh Lord, for I have sinned. My last confession was…this is my last confession. Lord, the lure of power and glory was too great, and like a lusty youth I followed it. I thought I did so for the good of the Empire, of all Christendom…but greed is sinful, as is ambition. Too much blood was spent to acquire that power….”
The Emperor stares with sad recognition at his own hands, turning them over, for the moment simply remembering, and feeling in his heart the horrors of his life.
”But your angels have defeated my mean power Lord…your angel of death…your great deliverer, will return me to your judgement. Forgive me, Lord! Forgive me and forgive all the Empire….protect them, my people...preserve them, and give you’re your love…forgive the good faithful of Jerusalem whom I could not save…forgive all of us for letting your Holy City falter…forgive me Lord…forgive me…”
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When Christoph entered he saw a Erich kneeling completing his prayer. In a voice trained to stay starkly different from his own original, he croaked out a command,
”Yoooou shooould beee in bed, Yooour Maaajesssty.”
Grinning in a mixture of disgust and macabre pleasure behind the shadow of the hood, Christoph aided his former cousin into his bed. Erich seemed lighter, Christoph noticed, almost limply dead. He didn’t muse on it long but soon turned to his case, methodically extracting the elixir of hemlock. The last dose that would complete his revenge.
He uncorked the bottle, breathing in the pungent fumes.
Ah, death…so close and so seductive.. His eyes flit around the room, once, twice, searching for a goblet. Finally, they catch a glint of gold by the altar to Mary the Mother of God. A chalice, encrusted with gems and small icons of the Holy Family.
How appropriate.. Christoph mused, remembering how the Church in Rome had abandoned him after Erich’s cruel and unjust penalty. Swiftly he poured the entire contents of the vial into the chalice, mixing in some of the white powder from his medical box, just in case the ailing Kaiser proved stronger than he anticipated.
The Emperor turned in his bed. Christoph could feel his hated Erich’s eyes on his back, burning two painful holes, like two painful admonitions.
He knows…I can feel it, thought Christoph. He held the chalice close to him, turning on his heels, staring at the figure on the bed. He saw the Emperor’s back. Erich was staring the other way. The demon who had haunted his dreams mocked him.
”No, matter..he will soon join his children in hell,” whispered Christoph under his breath as he approached the bed.
”What, Herr Doctor?” came the Emperor’s tired thin voice.
”It is time for your medicine, Herr Kaiser,” came Christoph’s reply, almost in his own voice. For in his excitement he had forgotten his ruse.
Erich stirred, uncertain and confused by the voice he heard, but he had long sense despaired of making sense of the twisted world of his sickness. He had made his peace with God, now all he desired was the comforting embrace of cool oblivion.
”Too long on this earth…far too long,” he mumbled almost to himself.
Christoph almost snarled as the Emperor murmured,
He mocks me again! No! He cannot deny me anymore…nevermore… Grinning he placed the golden rim of the chalice against his hated enemies lips,
”Drink, Herr Emperor, drink your fill!”
As he noticed the chalice, a religious object, meant for sacred use, Erich balked, but the insisting thrust of the doctor’s hand poured the hot burning liquid into his mouth. He tried not to choke, and swallowed it, not without a little mess. Oh, it felt like molten iron running down his throat. It had never felt this painful, like it was stabbing at his soul. He convulsed a little, coughing, trying to get up. He felt the doctor’s firm hand on his chest, keeping him in place and pushing him into the bed. His mind began to drift, his vision clouded, he became dizzy and disoriented. Croaking through the hot burning in his throat, the Emperor spoke,
”Christoph, please forgive me...as I have you…forgive me!” Erich’s arm lurches upward, trying to grasp the doctor’s sleeve, but it feels tingly and distant. Soon that chasm of death spreads throughout his body, as his mind and soul detach from reality. The doctor’s face, clear now, morphs with his disowned cousin, then with his old friend Heinrich, and now it has become his father Rupert, dead now many years, and his mother in his youth, now his sisters, first Christine, then Ilse, then his dead brother Rupert, finally a cherubic faces of young Frederick and Eva-Maria fill his vision, laughing with innocent childlike joy. Even as he feels his face deadening, and life flowing like hot wine from his lips, he smiles easily and painlessly, laughing with the children of his dreams.
What…what?!? Thoughts race through Christoph’s mind as the Emperor’s face breaks into laughter. He lunges back, terrified, his eyes darting around the room, as he looks for escape.
He’s mocking me…the Satan…he’s mocking me…I’ve failed.. The bedposts begin to bend and creak, and the form of Christ nailed to the iron crucifix above the altar screams, filling the room with a howling so great that Christoph fears that the walls are caving in on him.
”NOOO!!!” he screams, wrenching the still howling crucifix from the wall, and turning to Erich’s still smiling but now dead form. He smashes the crucifix into the Emperor’s skull, once, twice, thrice…and so on. Deep pink jelly oozes and splatters off the cross as it mixes with bone and blood with each impact. After forty strokes, Christoph’s arm seizes up, cramping in pain. He collapse on the floor. The howling continues, agonizingly loud now. He can feel his eardrums bursting. Crawling quickly along the floor he reaches up for his medical case. The vial of muric acid falls first shattering on his hand, sending continuous pain as his skin burned away and blood boiled where the glass had imbedded itself. He reached up again, knocking over the bottle of white powder. Dabbing his hand in it, he reached down into his mouth, licking away the bitter poison. Then the convulsions came, then blackness, and finally death.
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Doctor von Richter, the Emperor’s confidant and secretary, entered the Diet for the first time in weeks. They had been hiding the Kaiser’s illness for over a month now, hoping to maintain the illusion of perfect health, or at least prevent the further degeneration of this civil war. What they had found that morning was too much.
The former representative of the Palatinate looked an entirely different man. Though still round and expressive, his face was solemn, even mournful. Not at all the jovial and good-natured ruddy smile that he usually wears. He walked slowly, his shoulders slumped a little. He made no eye contact, and stared only at the floor before him as he walked to the dais of the Singer’s Hall. He turned to face the entire Reichstag, and when he raised his head, it was apparent that he had been crying not too long ago.
”His Apostolic Majesty…The Kaiser…
He begins crying again, before blinking strongly and shaking his head.
”The Emperor is dead.”
