Chapter Text
Horatio disembarked in Lübeck on a rainy September afternoon, exhausted yet determined. He had spent the majority of his week’s voyage across the Baltic holed up in his quarters, which he had shared with an older man from the countryside.
He had never been one for the sea, usually feeling too sick to leave his bed and often too sick to sleep. He spent the time pouring over his schoolbooks, mumbling verb conjugations under his breath and annotating poems. Consequently, Horatio was nearly ten pounds lighter than normal and quite pallid.
His head throbbed as he drug his suitcases through the port. Its atmosphere did little to soothe his nerves. It was massive and sprawling but felt empty for its size. Small groups of travelers and merchants trailed about like ants, and many storefronts were boarded up. The further he got from the port, however, the more charmed Horatio became with Lübeck. Under his feet, cracked cobblestones meandered between magnificent brick buildings whose spires seemed to touch the clouds. Their narrow rayonnant style windows yawned upwards.
One brick building in particular compelled him: a small church with a simple sort of domed roof and a beautiful rose window above the entry. He saw through the open doors a small altar with two unlit candles and a lamp overhead. A notice was posted in German, something about sermons, but Horatio’s tired mind could not be bothered to think in its third language. As he crossed the threshold, he felt his right arm instinctively raise and he pressed a finger to his forehead. After a moment’s hesitation, his hand fell to his side again and he sat, head gently lowered.
The unassuming, quiet atmosphere was so peaceful that he remained in this position for nearly an hour, until the light of day had dimmed.
This sense of clarity did not leave him for the rest of his journey to Wittenberg, and in fact grew in strength as his carriage approached the great city four days later. The sky was a saturated, cloudless blue. Birds flew overhead and twisted between the tops of church towers. Horatio closed his eyes and listened to the sound of merchants barking in German, the tolling of the bells at each hour, and carts rattling past. Dozens of taverns spilled light and music into the street.
As the university drew closer, the streets became narrower and more crowded. Students rushed between enormous gothic buildings, carrying books and chattering in Latin.
It was dusk when Horatio arrived at his dormitory, a cramped sort of building that smelled heavily of dust. After providing his name and paperwork, he was led by a porter to a large room where he was handed a key, told to be in each night for a 10 pm curfew, and given a bundle of linens.
The room had four small beds, two desks, and a bookshelf. Two young men were already inside, talking animatedly in German. One, who looked Horatio’s age, was wearing coarse wool trousers and a white shirt with a wrinkled collar, his jacket having been tossed lazily onto the floor. The other, poised comfortably against the backboard of his bed, was dressed in a simple but sharply tailored charcoal doublet with matching trousers. He seemed slightly younger, perhaps 15 or 16. They stopped talking when Horatio entered, and the one in his shirt stood with his arm extended. When Horatio accepted the gesture, the young man squeezed his hand tightly.
“Lukas Bauer. And this here is Matthias.” The other man, apparently Matthias, nodded at Horatio. “You’re stuck with us for the year.”
“I’m sure I’ll enjoy being your captive,” Horatio said.
“Oh good, he’s got a sense of humor about him,” Lukas grinned. “And a funny accent too, I must say. Where are you from?”
Matthias scoffed at his friend. “A great first impression, Lukas, go and make fun of the man.”
“I’m Horatio of Denmark.” He gestured to the two empty beds. “Has the other man arrived yet?”
“No,” said Matthias. “I suspect he’s foreign as well. It could take him a while to arrive. After all, we’re neighbors, but I’m sure it was no short journey for you.”
Horatio nodded but didn't say any more. It had indeed been a long journey. Though the men seemed pleasant, Horatio was not terribly excited about continuing a conversation when he could be sleeping.
Lukas and Matthias respected his exhaustion and let him be. He fell into an effortlessly deep rest the moment his head hit the pillow.
***
Horatio learned that Lukas and Matthias had been neighbors and friends since childhood, much to his surprise. The two seemed so different that one could be forgiven for thinking that they would mix about as well as oil and water.
Matthias was not from a noble family, nor an exceedingly wealthy background, but he was proud and ambitious. He could not afford to adorn himself with jewelry nor fine fabrics but kept up with the latest fashions as best he could and was never seen unkempt. Lukas, in contrast, approached life as though it were nothing but a game. The two bickered constantly, as Horatio discovered when he awoke one morning to find Matthias screaming at Lukas for stealing his cloak the night before and returning it covered in beer stains.
As baffling as it was that the pair were friends in the first place, Horatio figured that they were so close with one another that no argument could damage the bond.
Their fourth roommate, a fidgety but cheerful Swiss man named Felix, arrived the Friday before classes began. His clothes seemed to always be a size too large for him, and he had a stubborn cowlick toward the back of his head of blond hair.
The foursome attended sermon together Sunday morning and afterwards sat around a long wooden table in the dining hall with large bowls of pottage. Horatio, Lukas, and Matthias listened as Felix passionately described the rolling fields of wildflowers outside his village and praised his noble father whom he seemed to miss dearly.
“I’m the first in my family to study abroad,” he said proudly. “Always had a knack for rhetoric. My father thinks I should go into law or governance, so he sent me here. What about you all?”
“Law as well I suppose,” Matthias said, lazily stirring at his pottage. “Anything but taking up a trade.”
Lukas frowned at his friend’s pretentious quip, and Horatio wondered if his family might be tradesmen. However, if Lukas was offended, he didn’t speak up.
“How about you, Horatio?” Felix smiled.
Horatio had indeed given the matter of his future a lot of thought. In his youth, he thought of setting aside his nobleman’s path to take up the cloth. To Horatio, the order of the metaphysical universe was somehow more comprehensible than the order of men and women.
As a boy, he had been quite inept at following the scripts of conversation, and though he had since learned to navigate social politics, he still quite detested doing so. Being a clergyman might allow him to escape the burdens of courtship and lineage, for which he had no interest.
Of course, he had not come to Wittenberg without greater ambition. The invisible hand of change loomed over Europe and had found itself clenched firmly on Horatio’s heart. Wittenberg, a beacon of the Reformation, heralded the values that Horatio himself most cherished: conscience, reason, and truth. The Christian world seemed so unsure of the proper order of things. Old traditions and new ideas mixed together such that up turned down and down turned up. Horatio hoped that this vigorous mixing of the pot may allow truths to surface.
“I want to be a theologian,” he told his new friends.