Frantically, I looked around for Maria. She must be here somewhere! Or had she run on to the monastery in her panic? At last I found her, lying like the dead beside one of the basins. I stumbled a few more steps, and then I, too, sank to the ground. When I turned once to look back, the trees towered up in silence behind me, like a dark, high wall with evil raging beyond it.
There was no sign of von Strelitz.
“Who . . . who was that?” Maria gasped, as she lay there, still fighting for breath.
My mouth was full of a taste of iron; my rib cage hurt from the thrust of the sword. “An . . . old acquaintance,” I finally managed to say. “And you? Are you sure you have never seen the man before?”
“By God, no, never! How could I have known him?” She sat up and looked at me, distraught, her face smeared with dirt and blood running in a fine trickle from an injury to her forehead. “For heaven’s sake, Theodor!” she wailed. “What are you keeping from me?”
I shook my head and bent over her to wipe the blood away. “Nothing that has anything to do with you,” I said. “Believe me, it is better for you to know nothing about it.”
“But how am I to trust you in the future if you don’t trust me?”
“I’ve sworn an oath.”
“An . . . an oath?”
I closed her lips and went on cleaning her face and dress, in rough-and-ready fashion, with water from the basin of the fountain. When I had finished, I turned away and went in silence toward one of the many flower beds.
“What are you doing?” she cried. “Don’t leave me here alone.”
I began hastily picking a bunch of white lilies. When I had finished, I came back and knelt down in front of her. Reverently and with bowed head, like a paladin before his queen, I offered her the flowers.
“Dearest Maria,” I tentatively began. “The . . . the lily has been a symbol of purity and innocence since time immemorial. By the holy Virgin Mary and these flowers, I solemnly swear that none of the terrible recent events can destroy my love for you. I love you, Maria.”
With these last words I drew her down to me, the white lilies fell from her hand, and we sank into a sea of flowers in a close embrace. For the first time I kissed her on the mouth. She tasted of mud and blood, of sweat, and of the sweet fragrance of an apple cake that she had baked that morning. I had never in my life tasted anything so wonderful.
At that moment steps crunched over the gravel behind us. I sat up in alarm, fearing to see Carl von Strelitz standing on the path.
But it was not Strelitz; it was the king.
Ludwig did not seem to have slept at all. His face was even more waxen than I remembered it when I had seen him in the night. His eyes glowed with a cold rage that I had never seen in him before.
“How . . . how could you dare do this, Marot?” he said in a hoarse voice, as if someone were constricting his throat with a thin cord. “My friend . . . I trusted you.”
“Your Majesty . . .” I hesitantly replied, getting quickly to my feet as I brushed dust and dirt off my coat. “It is nothing that . . .”
“Get out of my sight before I put an end to you!” he shouted. His face swelled red as a turkey cock. He seemed to be inflating himself to twice his usual size, his whole stout body shaking like a mountain about to explode at any moment with the force of a power within it.
“I trusted you!” he roared. Picking up the lilies, he flung them in my face like someone throwing down a gauntlet. “I told you my idea, and this is how you repay me? Get out of here, both of you!”
At that moment, I was indeed afraid that the king might kill us both—strangle us with his fleshy paws, or drown us like a couple of kittens in the basin of the fountain. So I turned and ran with Maria toward the nearby castle.
Behind us, I heard Ludwig’s bestial roar. But as we moved farther away, I realized that it changed more and more into weeping—a pathetic whining, like the sound of a child whose favorite toy has been taken away.
It was to be many months before I saw the king again.
21
SHAKEN, STEVEN LUKAS PUT the diary down on the bench beside him.
The love story of Theodor and Maria affected him more than he had expected. Maybe his sudden sympathy for them also had something to do with Sara. Like Theodor Marot, Steven didn’t know what was happening to him. Angrily, the bookseller brushed that thought aside. When all this was over, and he could finally convince the police of his innocence, there would be time for Sara and him.
But first he must decipher the damn book.
The worst thing was that even after reading those last pages, he couldn’t say what the second keyword was. He could only hope that the guided tour of the castle that evening would get him farther.