Then she pulled me up and laid her arm on my shoulder and turned round back in the direction of the town. I pulled myself away from her and pushed her back brutally and ran to the door of Saint John's Church sick bay. She ran after me, held me back and shouted over the wind:
"Come, my son. I won't let you and neither will he let you. Let it be. He has taken an oath on it. No-one must come near him from the land of the living. My heart bleeds like yours, my son. But he's right and we must act in accordance with his will."
I called out: "Michael! Michael!"
My only answer was the sound of the sharp, hissing wind through the dry grass. My old, grey-haired cousin had to support me, the strong young man, and lead me like a child back to the road leading to the town. My feet were like a weight of iron and my knees like broken reeds. My eyes beheld chaos.
Woe is me, what had become of the world? There loomed the hundred ramparts and battlements, gables and towers of the great dear town of Nuremberg and over there on the left the ruin of the citadel, which the brave knight Michael had also helped to conquer for our beloved community. Never had my eye other than with joy and hope rested thereon, whatever the way I chose to take to get there. Now there was nothing left of it. Had flames with a thousand red tongues suddenly licked the roofs, surrounded the towers and, as in a rush of wind born of an apocalypse, swallowed the town whole, my view of what was there could not have witnessed greater annihilation.
I was horrified by Nuremberg, how it looked, how it lay there darkly under the dark evening sky. Flames had already licked the citadel. There it lay, already blackened by torches, with burst roofs, broken towers, demolished walls! What did I care now if the town around it still stood upright?
Everything mocked and laughed at me. No green leaf, no flower, no ray of light had been left intact to comfort suffering humanity. It was laughable that we had gone out to rescue a crown for an empire that was no longer there. The Greek from Chios, my clever teacher, Theodoros Antoniades, had done the right thing. He had fled from his homeland before the last pillars and columns shattered and, in this bad moment, I derived comfort from one thing only and that was in the thought that I should do as he had and set off into the unknown devoid of property, homeland, wishes and hopes.
It degraded me that I did not think once then of Mechthild Grossin, but that too would come by and by.
We walked slowly and the Mater Leprosorum talked to me constantly, but I heard little in my state of dizziness. But the little I did hear was each time like a bolt of lightning on a thundery night. The leper mother told me how the poor man had spoken to her softly out of the blue before the sick bay of St John's Church.
In Ofen in Hungary leprosy fell on the German contingent that had gone there with the crown. Many soldiers in the detachment had died there, many others had simply stayed. Some had died on the way. Only Michael Groland had got back home, supporting himself on his knight's sword.