slit the soft white flesh on the inside of his forearm with his knife.
He clenched his fist and let the bright red blood run out and drip off his elbow. He aimed the drops so that they splashed richly on a patch of earth on the roadside.
‘Sir!’ Albrecht, his steward, shouted in alarm and tried to restrain him.
Eberhardt was enraged. ‘You swine!’ he bellowed, and angrily brushed the smaller man away. ‘Our blood cannot be separated from the soil that bore us! It will return! It will return again!’
He continued dripping blood, whilst he muttered through gritted teeth, ‘Blood and soil, blood and soil, we will become one again,’ like an incantation.
His hands held out, Albrecht wailed helplessly, ‘Sir, what are you doing?’ He screwed his eyes up and looked away.
‘I am a blood sacrifice for the German nation!’ Spittle flecked Eberhardt’s beard as he shouted through the pain. ‘I will become an oblation poured onto the soil. The soil that raised us, that has cradled us since our inception. Our father, our mother … our land!’
It was mid-morning, three days after the tragedy on the tower. Eberhardt was not sure what had happened to his grandmother. Her broken body had been discovered the next morning, cold and wet in the mud: did she jump or had he thrown her? He was unsure if he had experienced a dream or a spiritual visitation. Either way, his brush with the Deathstone had unsettled him. Why had it returned to him? What mission was it calling him to?
Albrecht had put it about in the village that his master’s grandmother had taken fright at the thunder and leaped to her death, and few had enquired further. He was a middle-aged, worrisome character who peered out suspiciously at the world from under a thatch of brown hair.
In contrast, his master was a big man in his forties, an old roué whose appetites had overrun his frame; his gut bulged out over his hose. He had a mane of silvery hair, with a heavy beard cut off square just under his chin. His eyes were rheumy and the skin of his face sagged like the canvas of an old tent.
Eberhardt was a Raubritter — a Robber Knight — although he preferred just to call himself a knight. He was from an ancient German family, but was really a bandit in charge of a cramped castle, a village and a few square miles of the Pfälzerwald.
The imminent Knights’ War against the Imperial Princes had revived some of his youthful passion.
He shouted at Albrecht, cowering in front of him, ‘The Pope and the Princes are ransacking the German people! The Emperor has banned our right of feud! The Knights won’t stand for it. The German people won’t stand for it!’
‘Yes, but—’
‘The good Dr Luther has raised the clarion call against the papists — Rome is leeching this country dry! We Knights will ride against the Princes. The time for sacrifice has come, Albrecht!’
They were two days’ ride from home in a shady spot in the forest, on the way south towards Landau, where the Knights were rallying. Eberhardt had spontaneously made his blood gesture on a break in their journey, having brooded on their mission as they rode along that morning.
‘Things can’t go on as they are.’
With this statement of fact he calmed down at last and stopped clenching his fist. He held his arm out to Albrecht.
‘Bind it up.’
Albrecht rummaged in the saddlebags of his horse for some spare cloth. He walked back over to Eberhardt and began binding his forearm. He was a simple man who focused on practical arrangements and left matters of national politics and religion to his lord. He was not even sure what Eberhardt meant by the concept of ‘the German people’. The Holy Roman Empire covered the area and was composed of hundreds of states run by Princes, and imperial free cities. Such ideas were beyond him.
The Knights had been able to hold their lands in this strange hotchpotch for centuries because they had the legal right from the Holy Roman Emperor to conduct armed feuds. This was supposed to allow the chivalrous art of war to be practised but was now just an excuse for murder and racketeering.
The new Emperor, Charles V, had tired of such anarchy and triggered the Knights’ War by banning their right of feud. The Knights had been declining for centuries and saw this as their last-ditch attempt to hold on to what little status they had left.
‘We’ll teach them a lesson,’ Eberhardt mused as he watched Albrecht tie off the white cloth.
‘There you go.’ His servant looked at his neat handiwork with satisfaction. Although he was used to his master’s outlandish manner, he was relieved that Eberhardt had calmed down.
He had known Eberhardt since he was a boy and he had always been a romantic. As a student at Heidelberg University he was an enthusiastic Renaissance man: a knight but a scholar as well, one who had joined the German intellectual revival that was shedding light into the Dark Ages. He was so inspired by the new thinkers that he’d begun writing his own magnum opus entitled The Quest for Glory, and had developed his own motto, Lumensfero!
However, these lofty ideas had been undermined when he was caught in bed with a professor’s wife. He had to flee, and travelled south where he fell in with a company of Landsknecht, German mercenaries, heading down to the Italian Wars, where he proved to be a brave soldier.
He journeyed on to Constantinople and fell in love with its exoticism. People of all creeds and cultures passed in front of him in a kaleidoscope of colours, languages and scents.
He felt preternaturally alive. His skin was taut; he could sense his body pushing against it, straining to take in all the new experiences. It was a wild, mad, beautiful time.
With sensations such as these it was no wonder that he had been writing like a fury. Every spare minute he had, he would sit and transcribe his adventures. He accumulated so many books that he had to bundle them up and send them back to Ludwig Fritzler, an old university friend working in the Heidelberg library.
When he thought back to those times, Eberhardt often wondered what had happened to Abba Athanasius, the Nubian mystic who led the Ishfaqi cult. He was such an odd mixture of religions. ‘Abba’ meant Father in Aramaic and ‘Athanasius’ meant immortal in Greek — both came from his background as a Coptic Christian priest. But he had then formed a cult that mixed elements of Islam and Christianity with animism, the worship of spirits. In this case the spirit was inside a large piece of black rock found in the heart of an extinct volcano in central Africa: the Deathstone.
The strange priest was the biggest human being that Eberhardt had ever seen, as forbidding and impenetrable as the Deathstone itself. With his bald head and black flowing robes he had a charisma as powerful and brooding as the volcano that the Stone came from.
He preached that the mountain was the new Mount Sinai and that it held the keys to the gates of death. The people there feared the Stone; those who had worked in mining it had all died of strange diseases.
Eberhardt was enthralled by the cult and took part enthusiastically in its ceremonies. In the Deathstone he was sure that he had discovered the nexus between life and death; an object that had true meaning.
The German had become a trusted follower of Abba Athanasius, with Latin their common language. His curiosity led him to ask the monk for the whereabouts of the holy mountain. Eventually he was given the task of organising an expedition to find the origins of the Stone.
He had set about planning avidly, obtaining directions from the monk and Arab traders that went into the area. Using rivers to mark out his route, he sketched a map along the Nile through the deserts of Egypt and Sudan and then southwest, cutting down right into the heart of the Dark Continent.
It was all planned out and he was getting ready to set off on his new odyssey when he received a letter from his mother. His father had died and he was summoned to return immediately to inherit his sestate before other greedy relatives tried to claim it.
It was a bitter blow; his