There was a woman in the story of Oswald and Drachenfels, Detlef was sure. A beautiful woman, of course. What had her name been? He was certain the crown prince was unmarried, so she must have passed out of the story soon after the death of the Great Enchanter. Perhaps she died. That was the fashion in melodrama, for the hero’s beloved to die. Heroes had to be free of such attachments if they were to continue their adventuring. During his own dashing hero phase, Detlef had lost count of the number of dying damsels he had vowed eternal love over, and the number of justified revenges he had later claimed.
The crown prince bit into the apple with perfect, even teeth, and chewed. Detlef was conscious that his own teeth were rather bad. He had even taken to wearing his moustaches unfashionably long to cover them up. But he was also conscious now of the hunger that had been with him for months. He knew the crown prince was looking him over, getting the measure of him, but he could only look, with a craving that amounted to lust, at the plain bowl of fruit. He swallowed the saliva that had filled his mouth, and forced himself to meet his visitor’s gaze.
What must he look like after these months of Mundsen Keep? He assumed that, even without Oswald to make him seem the male answer to the proverbial frump, he would break no hearts for the while. His stomach groaned as the crown prince threw his apple core into the fire. It hissed as it burned. Detlef would have exchanged a week’s bread and cheese for the fruitflesh that had remained on that core.
Evidently, his hunger was all too obvious to his visitor. “By all means, Mr. Sierck, help yourself…”
Crown Prince Oswald waved a gloved hand at the bowl. Pearl buttons at his wrist caught the light. He was, of course, dressed impeccably and in the latest style. Yet there was no showiness about his costume. He wore rich clothes with ease and wasn’t overwhelmed by them. There was, indeed, a princely simplicity about his outfit that would look all the better by comparison with the gaudy gorgeousness and over-ornamentation favoured by too many of the nobility.
Detlef touched an apple, relishing the feel of it, like a picky housewife in the marketplace testing for ripeness before making a purchase. He took it out of the bowl, and examined it. His stomach felt as if it had never been full. There were sharp pains. He bit into the fruit, and swallowed a mouthful down without tasting it. The apple was gone in three bites, core and all. He took a pear, and made a hasty meal of that too. Juice dribbled down his face. The crown prince watched with an eyebrow raised in amusement.
Oswald was still a young man, Detlef realized. And yet his famed exploit was some twenty-five years behind him. He must have been little more than a boy when he bested Drachenfels.
“I have read your works, Mr. Sierck. I have seen you perform. You are prodigiously talented.”
Detlef grunted his agreement through a mouthful of grapes. He spat the pips into his hand, and felt foolish that there was nowhere else to put them. He made a fist, intending to swallow them later. If Kosinski could eat mice, then Detlef Sierck wouldn’t baulk at grapestones.
“I was even granted access to the manuscript of your History of Sigmar. It is held, as you must know, by the elector of Middenland.”
“My greatest work? Did you like it?”
The crown prince smiled, almost slyly. “It was… ambitious. If impractical…”
“The manuscript would tell you little, highness. You should have seen the production. That would have convinced you. It would have been epoch-making.”
“No doubt.”
The two men looked closely at each other. Detlef stopped eating when there was no more fruit. The crown prince was in no hurry to disclose the purpose of his visit to Mundsen Keep. The fire burned. Detlef was aware of the pleasantness of simple warmth and space. An upholstered chair to sit on, and a table for his elbows. Before he came to the keep, he had insisted on mountains of embroidered pillows, maidservants waiting forever in attendance to gratify his needs, lavish meals served at any hour of the day or night to fuel his genius, and the finest musicians to play for him when he needed inspiration. His theatre in Middenheim had been more imposing, more monumental, than the Collegium Theologica. Never again would he demand such luxuries if he could but have a bed with a mattress, a fireplace and an axe to get wood, and a sufficiency of humble but honest fare for the table.
“The courts have found you responsible for quite a considerable sum of money. You have more creditors than a Tilean kingdom has illegitimate claimants to the throne.”
“Indeed, crown prince. That is why I am here. Through no fault of my own, I assure you. It is not my place to criticize an elector of the Empire, but your honoured colleague from Middenland has hardly acted in the spirit of fairness and decency over my situation. He undertook the responsibility for my production, and then had his lawyers find a way of breaking his contract with me…”
In fact, Detlef had been forced at knife-point to sign a statement absolving the elector of Middenland of any financial liability for The History of Sigmar. Later, the Konigsgarten Theatre had been burned to the ground by a rioting mob of tailors, carpenters, bit-part-players, musicians, ticket-holders, saddlers, bawds, merchants and inn-keepers. When faced with the choice between a pit of lime and a barrel of boiling tar, his trusted stage manager had denounced him. Everything he had had was seized by the elector’s bailiffs and thrown to the creditors. And Middenland himself had elected to make an official visit to some southern state with a decent climate and an official edict against stage plays not of a tediously religious nature. No amount of petitioning could recall the former patron of the arts to the aid of the greatest actor dramatist to put on a false nose since Jacopo Tarradasch himself. And since Detlef had always felt Tarradasch somewhat overrated, the calumny stung even more. He could conceive of no tragedy greater than that his art should be stifled. It was not for himself that he railed against the injustice of his life in prison, but for the world that was deprived of the fruits of his genius.
“Middenland is the beggar among electors,” said the crown prince. “He has no elephants from the east, no golden idols from Lustria. Set beside the riches of the emperor, his fortune would barely pay for a pot of ale and a side of beef. Your debts are nothing.”
Detlef was astonished.
“Seriously,” Oswald said, “Your debts can be taken care of.”
Detlef felt the tripwire coming. Here were the Great and the Good again, smiling and reassuring him that all would be taken care of, that his worries were thrown out with yesterday’s slops. He had learned from his dealings with patrons that the rich are a different species. Money was like the fabled warpstone; the more contact you had with the stuff, the less like a human being you became.
His presentiment troubled him again. He was supposed to have a touch of magic in him through some wrong-side-of-the-blanket great-grandfather. Once in a while, he had intuitions.
“You could walk out of Mundsen Keep this afternoon,” the crown prince said, “with crowns enough to set you up in fine style at any hostelry in Altdorf.”
“Highness, we are straightforward men, are we not? I would indeed relish the prospect of quitting my current accommodations. Furthermore, it would please me greatly to have the burden of my innocently-acquired debts lifted from me. And I have no doubt that your family has the wherewithal to accomplish such miracles. But, as you may know, I am from Nuln, a beneficiary of that city’s famed houses of learning. My father began life as a street vendor of vegetables and rose through his own efforts to great wealth. Throughout his life, he remembered the lore of his initial calling, and he taught me a lesson far greater than any the priests and professors were able to impart. ‘Detlef,’ he said once to me, ‘nobody ever gives anything away. There is always a price.’ And that lesson comes back to me now…”
Actually, Detlef’s father had always refused to talk about the days before he assembled the strong-arm gang who enabled him to corner the Nuln vegetable market by smashing the other traders’ stalls. He had been too much of a miserable bastard to
give his son any advice beyond “don’t go on the stage or I’ll cut you off without a penny!” Detlef had heard that his father died of apoplexy during a meeting with the Nuln tax collectors, at precisely the moment when it was suggested that his returns for the last thirty years would bear a close re-examination. His mother had decamped to the coastal city of Magritta in Estalia and taken up with a much younger man, a minstrel more noted for the contour of his tights than the sweetness of his voice. She hadn’t exactly encouraged his genius either.
“In short, highness, I would know now, before accepting your generous offer of aid, what is the price for your intervention in my case? What do you want of me?”
“You’re a shrewd fellow, Sierck. I want you to write and stage a play for me. Something less unwieldy than your History of Sigmar, but nevertheless a work of some standing. I want you to write and perform my own story, the story of my quest to Castle Drachenfels, and of the fall of the Great Enchanter.”
ACT TWO
I
It took a full week to negotiate the contract. During that time, Crown Prince Oswald arranged, much to Governor van Zandt’s cold fury, that Detlef have his collar struck and be transferred to more comfortable quarters within the keep. Unfortunately for the administration of the prison, the only quarters that even approximated Detlef’s idea of comfort were the governor’s own official chambers in the central tower. Van Zandt was booted out to seek refuge in a nearby hostelry and Detlef took over his offices for his own business. Although still technically a convicted debtor, he took the opportunity to rearrange his circumstances. Instead of a single dirty blanket, he had an Imperial size bed brought to the governor’s rooms; instead of Szaradat’s rough treatment, he was attended by a poor unfortunate girl in whose case he took an interest and whose gratitude was memorable and invigorating; and instead of the cheese, bread and water, he was served a selection of the finest meats, wines and puddings.
Even for a week, however, he could not tolerate the drab and tasteless furnishings van Zandt evidently chose to live with. It was hardly the governor’s fault that his parents had been a pair of pop-eyed uglies with little judgement when it came to commissioning portraits from cross-eyed mountebanks, but it seemed odd that he should compound the family shame by hanging over his desk an especially revolting daub of the van Zandts, senior, bathed in the golden light of some idiot’s palette. After a morning in the room with the thing, imagining the governor’s fish-faced mother frowning upon him with disapproval, Detlef personally threw the painting off the balcony and had it replaced with a magnificent oil of himself in the role of Guillaume the Conqueror in Tarradasch’s Barbenoire: The Bastard of Bretonnia. He had a generous impulse to leave it behind when he left, to cheer up the cold-hearted official’s surroundings with a daily reminder of the keep’s most notable past tenant, but then thought better of it. The oil, executed by the Konigsgarten Theatre’s art director, was too valued an item to leave for such a poor fellow to gaze dully upon while shuffling parchments and sanctioning the mindless brutality of his staff.
Normally, he would have entrusted the business of the contract to his valued associate, Thomas the Bargainer. But Thomas had been the first to turn on him, and stood at the head of the list of creditors, with his hand out for repayment. Therefore, Detlef took care of the tedious business himself. After all, Thomas had bargained him into his contract with the elector of Middenland. This time, he was certain, there would be no hidden clauses to catch him later.
The agreement was that Oswald pledged to underwrite the production of Detlef’s Drachenfels to the depths of his treasury, provided the dramatist himself lived modestly. Detlef hadn’t been sure about that particular condition, but then reasonably assumed that the crown prince’s idea of a modest living would probably shame a sybarite’s decadent dream of total luxury. As Detlef put it, between sips of van Zandt’s Estalian sherry, “all a man like me requires is food and drink, a warm bed with a stout roof over it, and the means to represent my genius to the public.”
Detlef also decided to share his good fortune with his erstwhile cellmates, and insisted that Oswald settle their debts too. In each case, the release could only be obtained if Detlef promised to vouch for their good character and provide them with employment. That was no problem: Kosinski and Manolo were brawny enough to shift heavy scenery, Justus’ previous occupation suggested he would make a fine character actor, Kerreth could cobble for the whole company, and Guglielmo would, his bankruptcy notwithstanding, make an admirable substitute for Thomas the Betrayer as business manager. Detlef even arranged, anonymously, for Szaradat’s release, confident that the turnkey’s base qualities would swiftly return him to prison. It would take years of suffering for him to regain, if he ever did, his unmerited position of privilege within the order of misery that was Mundsen Keep.
Meanwhile, Crown Prince Oswald had a ballroom in his palace reopened as a rehearsal hall. His mother had been fond of lavish parties, but since her death the position of the Empire’s premier hostess had fallen to the Countess Emmanuelle von Liebewitz of Nuln. The old grand prince, struck down by ill-health and grief, pottered about with toy soldiers, refighting all his great battles in his private rooms, but the business of the von Konigswalds was done exclusively now by his son. Oswald’s men were sent to seek out those remaining members of the Konigsgarten Theatre company who hadn’t turned traitor. More than a few actors, stage-hands and creative personnel who had sworn never again to be involved in a Detlef Sierck production were wooed back to the Prodigy of Konigsgarten by the von Konigswald name and the sudden settling of outstanding wages they had long ago written off as another loss in the notoriously hard life of the stage.
Word of Detlef’s return spread throughout Altdorf, and was even talked about in Nuln and Middenland. The elector of Middenheim took advantage of the sudden interest to have The History of Sigmar published along with a self-composed memoir blaming the dramatist for the disaster of the production that had never taken place. The book sold well, and thanks to his ownership of the manuscript, the elector was able to avoid paying a penny to Detlef. One of Gruenliebe’s balladeers composed a ditty about the foolishness of entrusting another major theatrical event to the architect of the Sigmar debacle. When the song came to the attention of Crown Prince Oswald, the balladeer found his license to jest summarily revoked, his merry face no longer welcome in even the lowest dives and a passage paid for him on a trading expedition to Araby and the South Lands.
Eventually, the contract was drawn up, and Detlef and the crown prince put their seals to it. The greatest dramatist of his generation strolled through the open gates of the debtors’ prison, dressed again in flamboyant finery, his grateful comrades a respectful twenty paces behind. It was the first good day of spring, and the streams of melting snow cleaned the streets around the depressing edifice of the keep. He looked back, and saw van Zandt fuming on one of his balconies. Two trusties were carrying a bent and muddy painting up the outside staircase of the tower. Van Zandt shook his fist in the air. Detlef swept the ground with his longfeathered cap and bowed low to the governor. Then, straightening, he gave a cheery wave to all the miserable souls peering out through the bars, and turned his back forever on Mundsen Keep.
II
“No!” screamed Lilli Nissen in her dressing room at the Premiere Theatre in Marienburg, as the fourth of the four priceless jewel-inset cut-glass goblets given her by the Grand Duke of Talabecland shattered into a million pieces against the wall. “No, no, no, no, no!”
The emissary from Altdorf quaked as the famed beauty’s cheeks burned red, and her haughty nostrils flared in unnatural fury. Her large, dark eyes shone like a cat’s. The minute lines about her mouth and eyes, totally unnoticeable when her face was in repose, formed deep and dangerous crevices in her carefully-applied paint.
It was entirely possible, Oswald’s man supposed, that her face would fall off completely. He wasn’t sure he wanted to see what lay beneath the surface that had so enchant
ed sculptors, painters, poets, statesmen and—it was rumoured—six out of fourteen electors.
“No, no, no, no, no, no.”
She looked at the seal on the letter again, the tragic and comic faces Detlef Sierck had taken for his emblem, and tore it off with lacquered fingernails like the claws of a carrion bird. She had gone into her rant without even scanning the substance of the message, simply at the mention of the name of the man from whom it came.
Lilli’s trembling dresser cringed in the corner, the bruises on her face eloquent testimony to the great beauty’s hidden ugliness. The dresser had a lopsided face, and one of her legs was shorter than the other, forcing her to hobble on a thick-soled boot. Given the choice, Oswald’s man would have at that moment chosen the dresser to warm his bed at the Hotel Marienburg this night, and left the actress who could inspire love in millions to her own devices.
“No, no, no, no.” The screaming was less shrill now, as Lilli digested the meat of Sierck’s proposal. Oswald’s man knew she would relent. Another starring role more or less meant nothing to the woman, but the name of Oswald von Konigswald must stand out on the page as if written in fire. He would be elector of Ostland soon, and Lilli had a collection to complete.
“No, no…”
The actress fell silent, her blood-red lips moving as she re-read the letter from Detlef Sierck. The dresser sighed, and came out of her corner. Without a complaint, she got painfully down on her knees and started picking up the pieces of the goblets, separating the worthless glass shards from the redeemable jewels.
Lilli looked up at Oswald’s messenger and flashed a smile he would remember every time he saw a pretty woman for the rest of his life. She put her fingers to her temples, and smoothed away the cracks. Again, she was perfect, the loveliest woman who ever lived. Her tongue flicked over one sharp eyetooth—the dramatist had cast her well as a vampire—and her hand went to the jewelled choker at her throat. Her fingers played with the rubies, and then went lower, parting her negligee, revealing a creamy expanse of unrouged skin.
[Genevieve 01] - Drachenfels Page 6