During the symposium, the Æthelbert Document had been secured in a strongbox in the University Library’s restricted section. Sometime in the month since, the key was lost, and last week, the box itself disappeared. Thus, the letter Michael had received was not, to be honest, that much of a surprise.
* * *
It was the completion of a broad circle of years that the object which may have ended up becoming Michael’s personal Hindenburg was named for a Saxon king; he had been born in Saxony, in the city of Dresden. He liked to believe that his city was the center of the universe, although just about anyone who lived there and was over the age of thirty would admit that Dresden’s long gone golden age was early in the eighteenth century, when Saxony also ruled most of Poland. True, there were many treasures: treasures artistic and treasures architectural; but then again, the same could be said of Budapest, Prague, and half a dozen other cities in that region of Europe. Once, as a young man, he had hiked the length of the Elbe River to the Atlantic, and had come to the conclusion that there truly was no better place to extend his roots than in Dresden. But that was before Vienna. That was before Elena.
They had met and fallen in love when his family first relocated to Vienna, but his academic career had beckoned, and Michael was trundled off to Oxford. He exchanged letters with her for a time, but her replies eventually began to decrease to a mere trickle, then ceased altogether. When he had managed to return to Vienna, he found her married; not long after his return, she also became pregnant.
Michael saw the chance to reclaim the lost track of his life the night Elena’s daughter was born—that same evening, Elena’s husband vanished from Vienna, unaccountably, untraceably, gone. Some months later, Michael Langbein married Elena Strugatski.
The two moved briefly to Oxford, so Michael could finish his education, then returned one final time to Vienna, where he began teaching high school philosophy courses. When they had saved enough money, Michael and Elena moved into a three-hundred-year-old villa in the picturesque woods on the northern outskirts of Vienna. Nothing was ever seen of Elena’s first husband, although Michael suspected he may have communicated infrequently with his daughter via letters sent to her through her grandparents, who had accepted Michael only grudgingly.
Michael’s own parents, who had never condoned the marriage, died only a few years after the union, and for a few years, Michael, Elena, and Elena’s daughter, whom they named Meredith, lived a very rich life, all of which would’ve made an excellent story if it had ended there, which it didn’t. The richness began to tarnish one night before Meredith left for college at Oxford, on a scholarship her father had helped her to attain.
She had gone to visit her grandparents, to say her good-byes, but when she returned just minutes before midnight, the only goodbye she said that night was to Michael, and it was said with a cold, angry look in her eyes, and the fact that she had chosen not to speak to him—a covenant she had kept in all the years since. Even last year, when after a long, arduous struggle with pneumonia, Elena died, Meredith didn’t speak to him—the trip from Oxford took long enough that she missed the funeral. And although Michael later discovered that she had chosen to return to Vienna, and had in fact already begun her career as a photojournalist, she never once returned to the villa, or sought him out at the University. Several months after Elena’s passing, he cleared out the home he had so loved and returned to the city proper.
The apartment in the heart of Vienna just north of the University was a spectacular find, with not much less space than the villa, but for Michael, it was much larger, for there were fewer ghosts.
* * *
Traveling abroad had a great appeal for Michael, and the very real option of just dropping his trousers and showing the University the sunny side of his personality was greatly tempting. Leaving the University of Vienna meant no curriculums, no justification, no budgets; none of the necessary irritations that had a great deal to do with the business of teaching and practically nothing to do with teaching itself. It also would probably mean the end of his career as a respected academic, given that a wide swath of his credibility came from his University letterhead, and after the Æthelbert Document fiasco, employable only by a research lab in Denmark and the Greek State Department.
It was more than his reputation which kept him in Vienna, however—he believed that there were some places to which one’s heart belonged, and that those places formed bonds stronger than fear, stronger than love, stronger even than death. Other than Vienna, the only place where he had felt even a stirring of emotion that strongly was in Bayreuth, during his annual pilgrimage to the festival there.
There was also the issue of the acquisitions he had made during his time at the University—if the school’s officials were lax enough to allow a three-million-dollar document, in their possession less than a month, to vanish, then the rest of the collection had all the assurances of a hen in a fox house (although he suspected that the disappearance of the Æthelbert Document would likely coincide with the receipt of a substantial donation to the University by an unnamed British benefactor whose check bore a Royal seal). If nothing else, the range, scope, and unabashed quality of the books and documents Michael had amassed was enough to guarantee him a footnote in every research journal published for the next fifty years.
The United States knew of at least three preliminary copies of the Declaration of Independence, but only Michael Langbein had discovered the parchment, annotated by Thomas Jefferson, which outlined the well-known document, and appeared to have been written by a Dutchman living with Iroquois Indians in the sixteenth century. That was the transaction which convinced the University of Vienna to fund the department of Ancient Literature and Historical Studies—the sum paid by the United States to ‘reacquire’ the thin paper made from beaten tree bark was sufficiently large enough for the school to build the entire Central Library for Physics.
In the three years of Michael’s professorship, that had been the only divestment; everything else had remained in the library.
There was an early copy of the Magna Carta—presumably the only one which advocated the invasion of Egypt as a basic right of the English Barons. This was probably just an effort on the part of King John to placate the gentry and maintain his hold on the country, but it didn’t survive into the final version, which he had no intention of implementing anyway, which is why the Barons invited King Louis VII of France to boot John from the throne. Michael thought that if the version he’d found had been kept, then perhaps the entire sordid history of bad British cooking might have been avoided.
About eighteen months ago, he found a parchment written by a previously unknown student of the philosopher Parmenides, in which he proffered an early version of what would eventually be known to the world as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Since the viewpoint of this student, whose name was Thiassus, brought a heretofore unexpected layer of comprehension to Parmenides’ argument that reality must necessarily be changeless and uniform in contrast to the shifting diversity of the everyday world of appearances, the older man had him executed. Had Thiassus lived only a few years more until the rise of the atomists, the application of his methods of thinking to theirs could have accelerated the advent of Cosmology by two thousand years.
If those documents could be considered the main body of Michael’s collection, the item which was both the head and heart had to be the Uppsala Dance.
Named after a loosely connected and very significant document called the Uppsala Codex, the Uppsala Dance was the smallest, most expensive, and most studied item in all of Michael’s trove. A scrap of parchment not six inches across and eight inches long, the Dance—called so because it employed a form of poetry which had become popular in twelfth-century Iceland—consisted of six sets of four lines of minutely scumbled text, the content of which had been seen in only three other documents known to exist. The one Michael had the greatest access to was known as the Uppsala Codex. Written on parchment sometime during the f
irst few decades of the fourteenth century, the Codex was one of the more important manuscripts of Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, which was significant for two reasons: one, the Edda was considered to be the refining account of the mythologies of the Icelandic, Norse, and Germanic peoples; and two, it was the nearly-all-consuming passion of Michael Langbein.
The reason he had better access to the Codex as opposed to the other two existing documents was that he hadn’t actually tried to touch it before he had his academic credentials and a formal invitation. It was sheer luck that when he came across the Dance he recognized it as being in the same hand as the Codex; unfortunately, the amateur archaeologist (read: smuggler) who presented it to him for sale was educated, and knew as well as Michael just what it was he had.
It took less than a heartbeat for Michael to agree to the transaction, a few seconds more to sign the check, and several days, even with assistance from colleagues at the University of Reykjavik, to explain to the University of Vienna’s Administrative Director why he paid six point two million dollars for bad poetry on a tattered sheet of parchment the size of a Kleenex.
The significance was in the form as much as the content. A dance was a four-line improvisation using everyday words set to a loose rhythm, in which all metrical rules and disciplines were utterly disregarded. Sturluson hated dance poetry, and even went so far as to compose a section in the Edda which carefully specified the proper use of poetic forms, along with a warning that if those forms were set aside and fell into disuse, then much of the historical writings and the people’s understanding of their own mythologies would be lost.
The inclusion (or adaptation) of material from the Prose Edda in the Uppsala Dance could be interpreted only when it was discovered at what point it was written—if it was written at the same time as the Codex, then it would represent a significant shift in how Sturluson was actually perceived not far removed from his own time. If it was written before or after, then it could simply be dismissed as the efforts of another poetical wanna-be—except for the fact that the writing on both the Dance and the Codex were identical, and further, that chemical analysis revealed them to be written on identically-made and similarly-dated parchment.
Michael had fully expected, even with the astronomical cost, that the discovery of the Uppsala Dance would be the catalyst for permanently establishing his department at the University, but less than a week after he found it at the beginning of the school year, the University signed an employment contract with a mathematics prodigy who was not yet even old enough to drink, and as they had been looking for a reason to garner press attention for their new Central Library for Physics, the new professor became the glamour boy of the moment and Michael, with his seven-figure Kleenex, was quickly forgotten.
* * *
That was several months ago, and the overall conditions regarding his future had not brightened. Michael was committed to teaching through the end of the school year, and had hoped to get both Summer sessions as well, so he could better afford the trip to Bayreuth in August, but before he could take a step in any direction, he had to decide where he was going. Abroad, he could pursue his research freely, but he would lose the resources of an institution backing him, and although he had traveled often, he had never been without some sort of permanent place to return to. In Vienna, he was settled if not entirely happy, and he loved his work.
Michael sighed and slumped deeper into the chair. There were too many good reasons, too many motivations to want to stay to risk blowing a tenure position—and if he wanted to stay long enough to be considered for tenure at all, then he had better make certain there was a department in which to teach, and the best opportunity to make his case for that was at the meeting requested by the Rector. He picked up the letter and scanned it quickly for the scheduled time, then let out a loud groan. The meeting had been set for this afternoon—four hours ago.
The view from the battered old chair was his favorite—a sweeping panorama of the city and the Vienna hills, and over to the far right, a glimpse of the Danube. He crumpled up the letter from the University and flung it against the glass.
Eventually, he got tired of drumming his fingers and stewing in his own juices, and looked at the desk where the plum-colored invitation and orange ticket still lay. He decided.
Snatching up a jacket and the invitation, Michael opened the door and left before he could change his mind.
***
CHAPTER TWO
The Soloist
The note hung in the crisp, early-evening air, sweet and clear; it was a purity of sound which was unmatched by the cacophony of street sounds wafting into the open balcony doors. In the tasteful residential section in one of Vienna’s southern districts, those walking below who could hear it ringing into the approaching night may have wondered if it was some great applauded voice, preparing for a concert that was not advertised; or an undiscovered virtuoso, on the cusp of a wondrous career. Only a few had the capacity to discern the quality in the sound that marked it as a recording, not an actual voice; and fewer still would recognize that it was a recording more than ten years old.
Mikaal Gunnar-Galen shut off the turntable, then, thumbs twitching, switched it back on, and the clean, beautiful melodies again broke out into space.
* * *
In a city where musical virtuosity was practically encoded in the genes of its children, Mikaal Gunnar-Galen was a cultural phenomenon without precedent. Awarded a position in the renowned Vienna Boys Choir at the age of three, Galen dominated every performance in which he sang, and two things became quickly evident: the usual venues of performance, however notable, would not sufficiently showcase his talent; and his ego would not allow him to ever be a true ensemble performer.
As he grew older, concessions were made to his abilities, and many strictures of youth set aside so that he could more fully focus on developing his voice. Housing was a given, and a University education was practically delivered to his doorstep before he’d even taken steps to enroll. Essentially, the Viennese had decided that the same lightning-in-a-bottle which had created Mozart had struck again in the form of this young fair-haired prodigy, and they determined as a collective that if he could be used to forge a new identity for Austria as the undisputed cultural capital of Europe, then they would make the path to that goal as obstacle-free as possible.
The prodigy, however, while he had no objection to the Viennese handing him the world on a silver skewer, had other plans for his career goals.
Galen had rejected the offers of some of the traditional opera companies, all of which he considered to be stale and immovable in their adherence to tradition. Instead, he formed a company of his own, and promptly blazed a cultural trail across Europe with the skill of a Caruso and the moxy of the young Orson Welles. Much as Kenneth Branagh had taken his theater company and revolutionized Shakespeare, the Gunnar-Galen Opera Company presented the finest operas ever written in lavishly designed productions, to be performed in the venues of Emperors and Kings, and Galen performed all of the great roles—all, that is, save one.
By any standards, the tour was an astonishing success; by Galen’s standards, it was merely the warm-up act to what promised to be a career of unparalleled accomplishment. Recordings of his performances had made him wealthy, and he had the freedom to choose when, where, and how he performed. An unprecedented invitation was subsequently extended for Galen’s company to orchestrate, design, and perform one of the annual productions of Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the Wagner Festspielhaus in Bayreuth—an invitation which Galen accepted. Over recent years, the various productions of The Ring had run the gamut from innovative to scandalous, some equaling the choice once made by Welles to write a version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet to be performed entirely in modern dress. Nevertheless, any direction Mikaal Gunnar-Galen wished to take the performance would be welcomed with open arms and prideful smiles: the annual festival in Bayreuth was a symbol of national heritage and identity, and Galen was, at the moment (and to the
great chagrin of the Austrians), Germany’s most favored adoptive son.
The company had one final performance in Switzerland, after which the remainder of the year would be dedicated entirely to preparing for The Ring.
Due to a mistake in scheduling their performances in Brussels, the opera company had arrived early in Lucerne, and by Monday evening had made all of the necessary preparations for the first performance on Wednesday. Thus, there was a full day for the performers to relax and rehearse, or, if they so chose, to take in the sights. Having seen several of the sights clustered around the entrances of the performance hall, all long legs and smiles, straining to connect with one of the newly-arrived celebrities, Galen decided on the latter. After all, what is the point of being a celebrity-in-the-making if one cannot use one’s status, fame, and allure to do something to be properly ashamed of?
Her name was Ella, and she was the ideal image of the virginal young maiden—although a few minutes alone with her at her father’s stables convinced Galen that she was not virginal at all, and would do her level best to make him deliriously glad of the fact. He also thought it prudent not to inquire exactly how old she was.
She was fully as tall as he was, her breasts were large and shapely, and she smelled faintly of orange blossoms. She giggled as he moved against her, and crossed her legs over his back, clutching him tighter.
It was not the sort of situation where he would have suspected, feared, or even had the imagination to conceive that he was proceeding rapidly on a track that would mean the end of his career, nor would he foresee the form it would take.
In his mind’s eye, he could imagine that he had seen it, tines pointing upwards, sticking out of the hay, that he had twisted in midair, missing it by inches, that both he and the girl had laughed in relief at their good fortune. Perhaps, that would have happened if they’d fallen, or if they’d been in a hayloft, or if there’d even been any hay. As it was, the pitchfork was real enough, and in the end, that was all that mattered.
The Festival of Bones: Mythworld Book One Page 3