As the harlot approached, Faust bowed deeply. The admiration he felt for her must have shown in his smile and eyes, for she stopped briefly to flirt. "You are dressed," she said, "as a scholar. Yet you bow like a courtier."
Faust met her eye steadily, resisting the urge to look lower and more lecherously. Her lips were wide and moist. Her eyes were blue and fearless, those of a woman who would do as she liked and apologize to none for it afterwards.
"It is your beauty makes me one, madame—briefly. Standing in your gaze I feel ensplendored, and the equal of any man." The merchant van t'Hoort frowned slightly, but was waved back by a flutter of her milk-white hand. "In a moment you will withdraw your radiance and then I shall fade back into the threadbare and humble scholar that I am without the enchantment of your presence."
"You have missed your calling, sir." Her eyes glittered with good humor. In the fading light, her complexion was exquisite and continued so into regions where she could never have suspected his eyes could follow. Her navel was as deep as a thumbprint pushed into fresh dough. The hair upon her cunt was downy and golden. "There's many a woman in court would sigh to know such a man has willfully denied her such honeyed lies."
She offered her arm to her escort, and with a swirl of invisible silks proceeded on her way. Faust stared after, watching her buttocks dimple merrily with every step.
(Bravely done! Had it not been for her companion, her good sense, her professional ethics, and the phase of the moon, I do affirm that come morning, we'd find her feeding you breakfast in bed.)
With mingled wonder and dismay, Faust said, "Are all women so easy, then? Can they all be won with a word, a smile, a bright scarf, or a handful of coins?"
(All human beings have their price, and quite often it is surprisingly small. The trick consists of knowing exactly what that price is, when they themselves do not.) They stopped now to admire a troop of boys improving their archery by shooting at a straw Saracen. Hard proud cries rose up every time an arrow struck its mark. (But let us extend our experiment. I shall continue to strip bare the good women of Nuremberg to your eye. You shall pick and choose among them; and I shall describe for you the consequences; in this way I guarantee you a companion tonight who is available, pliant, lusty, and pleasing to your every sense.)
"Do so!"
For the span of that enchanted evening, every woman Faust saw was revealed to his marveling vision, retaining jewelry, shoes, hats, and other ornamentation, but not a wisp of concealing cloth. The range of feminine possibility was spread before him. Mephistopheles played the part of solicitous merchant, pointing out the merits or hidden flaws of each, and exclaiming over their reasonable prices. Every woman, it seemed, was available to him. All of Nuremberg was his harem.
He strolled the island in an ecstasy.
Everywhere was beauty. Here a herd of tame deer scattered before the approach of a short and compact woman, all thighs, bust, and belly, who blushed happily at his glance and quickly looked away. (There's peasant blood in her) said Mephistopheles. (That sort can swing a hoe all day or plow a man all night, yet her husband gives her precious little opportunity to demonstrate her endurance. She's yours for a lie or three.)
Bowing, smiling, Faust progressed down the pathway. A handful-and-a-half of slim nymphs approached, chattering, hands swooping like birds, flesh luminous. A few were plain and several were not; yet their bodies each expressed beauty in its own way, some lush and some elegant, some spare and others extravagant. Two things they had in common: that their hair was cropped $hort, and that they wore no ornamentation but crucifixes that hung between their slight, plump, emphatic, subtle, and exuberant breasts. With a start, Faust realized that they were nuns. (Access is the problem here, yet I could point you out two or three who might be convinced to
leave a ladder leaning against the back of the convent wall.)
"They are brides of Christ!" Faust said, shocked.
(Oh, that won't bother them.)
The nuns passed with cheerful greetings and as they did Faust saw that one—slim-hipped and almost boyish of figure—had vivid red semicircles upon her breasts and belly and clustered upon the insides of her thighs. Briefly he was baffled. Then, all in an instant, the crescents resolved themselves into human bite-marks, such as only passion could have produced.
Faust blinked; Mephistopheles smiled and said nothing.
A pregnant woman walked by, made radiant as the moon by the grace of her belly; her flesh glowed with health. (Threaten to bankrupt her husband.) A slim girl, barely of age, with coltish legs and new-budded breasts. (Seduce her sister and she'll do the rest.) A councilor's red-haired wife, proud of bearing, with fat breasts and pubic hair like a dark flame. (Use force.)
"I am in a daze," Faust said. "How will I ever choose?" Already, darkness was seeping up from the ground. The Kais-erburg atop its rocky outcrop shone bright with reflected sunset; the stone buildings clustered below caught a dimmer light, which their orange-tiled roofs warmed and made into a single smearing brush-stroke of color; below them the trees were cool and shadowy green; an inn twinkled within their branches, one of several on the island. Lanterns had been hung from long poles in the tavern's forecourt, where wooden tables were scattered upon the grass. A boy went among them with a long candle-and-stick device, deftly lighting each.
Waiters with trays of food hurried in and out of the tavern. The festive crowd on the lawn moved in bright and languid swirls, laughing, raising up toasts, flitting from table to table. The women, nude, bright-eyed, were like woods-sylphs; the men, in slash-sleeved doublets and pants cut so as to display their best attributes, courteously danced attendance upon their ladies' grace. Several of the younger women had plaited flowers in their hair, and one of their swains, in response had, with two sticks and a kerchief, made for himself a pair of antlers. They danced, hand in hand in a ring, to music that drifted softly from a trio of lutists and horn-player seated on a bench by the tavern door. No fairy gathering could have been more delightful to the senses.
(Here comes the mayor's wife.)
A woman of enormous bulk and even greater dignity wallowed slowly up the path, escorted by her equally dignified but otherwise unnote worthy husband. Her legs were thick as tree trunks but suety-soft, bulging out into such buttocks as would have disgraced a hippopotamus. Her ample breasts draped themselves limply across a belly soft as a pudding, and so large that had it been a pudding, it would have fed multitudes. The nipples were brown as leather, and the mystery between her legs was hidden by bulging, sagging flesh. Everything was in motion, loose and jiggling. She favored Faust's appalled bow with the faintest of condescending nods, and passed grandly by. Glancing after her, he saw that she was heading straight for the mounded arrays of hams and fowls, sausages, roast boar, jugged hare, and peppered beef that were testing the tensile strength of the wooden tables.
(A lady who greatly favors meat) Mephistopheles said dryly. (I trust her husband has similar appetites.)
"You are unfair to that poor woman. Clothed, she would seem perfectly normal. I would pass her by without a second glance."
(Exactly my point) Mephistopheles said. (Human beings are far more grotesque than your dulled aesthetics give them credit for being.)
The light was draining from the sky as they crossed the Pegnitz once again, away from the pagan isle and back into the clean, narrow streets of the city. Reluctantly, the naiads and their retainers were leaving Faerie. Everywhere to be seen were promenaders making their slow ways home; Faust felt and shared their reluctance for the evening to end. Staring hungrily after the nymphs sifting slowly into obscurity, he said, "They are all so desirable that I cannot choose among them. I could be happy with any."
(Then follow me.) Mephistopheles turned down a wide dirt lane between the city armory and a small church. (I know of a woman who, I swear, fits your mood perfectly.)
Skeptically, happily, Faust followed.
He was halfway down the lane when a small door opened in the sid
e of the church and someone emerged.
Faust stopped in his tracks. The woman—if woman she was—stood briefly before him in the holy grace of her unadorned flesh, for Mephistopheles had not yet lifted his spell. Her breasts were small and perfect: no larger than two clenched fists, and tipped by the pinkest of nipples set off from her milky skin by the merest hint of apricot. The complex and inevitable swell of her belly drew his eye gently downward to where a soft and youthful down covered her most private of organs, like fine moss upon finer porcelain, before a chance movement of her hands hid it behind her prayer-book. Her knees and toes blushed a faintest rose.
She looked as innocent as Eve before the Fall.
All this in an instant. Then the young woman had passed him by. She gave him the briefest of glances as she passed, and there was in them not so much as a spark of lascivious
interest. He would have known if there had been.
"Who is she?"
(Oh, Faust, you don't want her.)
"I want her. Tell me her name." The woman disappeared around the corner. Her hair was pale brown with gold highlights, parted in the middle and chastely combed back, to be captured and bound by a small black ribbon, and then cascade free again in loose curls that did not quite reach her delicate waist.
(Direct your lust elsewhere. She is a pious and virginal girl, totally lacking in carnal experience. You cannot have her. It is an impossibility.)
(You said—)
(I said that everyone has her price. Sometimes, however, that price is too high. If you had the money and position, you could petition her father to marry her to you, and I guarantee you she would work as passionately to please her husband as would any other woman. But here you are a stranger, all but a pauper, and a man without friends or influence. She is young and inexperienced. Your slightest approach to her would send her scampering away like a deer affrighted in the wood. You could assault her in an alley, perhaps. But what you want, Faust—her, willingly, tonight—cannot be had. Yes, she could be seduced. But believe me, you lack the patience it would take.)
"I could be patience itself if—her name! You haven't told me her name."
(Margarete Rqinhardt.)
"Margarete! How that name transports me! I must win her."
(Faust, listen to me: There is a door not many streets from here, behind which a woman waits for her lover in perfect darkness. She does not know he's been delayed. Go there, knock once, and step boldly within. In an instant she'll slam the door shut, throw you down upon the floor, and rip open your trousers with her teeth. Then she'll crouch down over your body—for she has already shed all her clothing in anticipation of this moment—and impale herself upon you. She's a gorgeous creature and as pleasant a tumble as any you've had. When she realizes from the flavor of your mouth and the rough unfamiliarity of your caresses that you are a stranger, she will experience an instant of terror and confusion. But then her lust will be magnified by the very wantonness of the act, and she will redouble her lewd efforts. She will do things with you that she has never done before, even with her lover. And when you leave, she will whisper in your ear a time when next her husband will be away and the lamps all dark.)
"Are you done?"
(As ever, I am your slave. But to win this girl, who is hardly more lovely than a dozen others in Nuremberg, and totally lacking in the erotic experience a man of your age requires, would take you over a year. A year, Faust!—and not a year of flirtations, small favors, and stolen kisses, but a year wherein you must harshly discipline yourself to show her no favor, no special looks, no least sign of your ardor. A year, moreover, spent in such enterprises as you have stoutly refused to enter into. It's hopeless, my friend.)
Faust stared down the lane, marveling at how ordinary it seemed to the eye, how special to the heart. A trickle of water in the ditch alongside it caught the light and turned a palest silver. "Oh, intersecting lines of destiny!" he said aloud. "Oh, holiest of streets!" Then: "What was it you said? About how I can win her?"
Mephistopheles sighed. (Not with money.)
"No, of course not!"
(Yet it will take money to win her. The Reinhardts are not the wealthiest merchant-clan in the city. But they stand high in the second rank. To approach her in your penniless state would raise the suspicions of everyone involved. Including her.)
"I am certain such crass considerations wouldn't matter to Margarete. You said yourself that she was innocent."
(If a clumsy unfamiliarity with the arts of love is innocence rather than mere ignorance, why—)
"Shut up! I will not tolerate you speaking thus of an angel!"
(She is human. I can show you the contents of her chamber pot if you need proof.)
"Scoff as you will. Your denials and evasions only make me desire her the more."
(Do they?) Mephistopheles said casually.
Faust chewed his lip, thinking. Then, impatiently, he said, "You know what I want. Scan the future and advise me on how best to achieve my goal. But no more! You are to tell me of nothing that does not directly relate to my Margarete."
(Well, if you're determined, then the road to her bed begins at the tollhouse of her parents. If we hurry, you can catch them before they reach their door.)
Faust doffed his hat to the Reinhardts. They were a conventionally respectable couple, the man clad in modest velvet and his wife in, of course, nothing at all. She was a matronly woman, inclining toward the stout, with a hard jaw and a shrewd eye that yet had a glint of humor in it. Hers was a body pampered and well fed, so that it had grown lush, rounder here and pinker there, but everywhere smooth and firm. Faust felt an irrational urge to run his hands up and over every curve and rump of her, and thought, yes, here indeed was the mother of his Margarete. Hers was a beauty past its prime, but the remains of that beauty were there to be seen. An irritated thought directed at Mephistopheles restored her clothing; up and down the street, nymphs disappeared back into human guise; the enchantment dissolved from the evening; and Nuremberg was Nuremberg again.
"Good evening, Herr Reinhardt. Frau Reinhardt."
They returned him cautious nods, of the sort one offers to those whose station is unknown, and Reinhardt said, "Do I know you, sir?" with a coolness that suggested he did not. He was a sandy-haired man with a round and gullible face, which misleading appearance must surely have served him well in many negotiations.
"Sir, I am a stranger to you. Yet I have business to conduct in this city, and you are well known not just for your acumen in matters of commerce but for your probity as well."
"Not at all, not at all," the merchant said in a pleased, dismissive way. His wife actually smiled. "And you, sir? Your name?"
"I am, sir, your humble petitioner, Johannes Faust."
"The aerialist?"
"You have heard of me, then. That makes matters easier. My air-carriage is, indirectly, why I am here. My ascent, you see, so excited the mob that upon my return they destroyed the balloon and then, their savage lust unassuaged, attacked my house and burnt it to the ground. I was fortunate to escape with my life. All I had was lost." The lies came surprisingly easily; Faust was unhappily amazed to discover such a talent lying dormant within himself. "To my lasting shame, I had to leave debts behind me. I had greatly hoped for patronage, but..."
As they talked, all three continued to stroll, at a politely unhurried pace, toward the Reinhardts' house. For, though the moon was full and children were out playing in the streets, it was getting on time for all decent, moneyed folk to be safely abed. Had they not had the good fortune to live in a large city, their doors would have been bolted long ago.
"If I may say this without giving offense," Reinhardt said in a friendly but carefully formal manner, "you suffer from a common affliction of the imaginative. Your creation—brilliant! If you can yet find a sponsor for it, I would travel a far distance for the privilege of seeing such a thing. But of what practical use is it? Genius is not an easy ware to peddle. Had you turned your prodigious int
ellect to something lesser and yet more easily commodified..." He shrugged. "I am sorry to be so blunt with you, sir, but these words are kindly intended. I could not possibly bring myself to invest in your fly ing-de vice."
"Pray, don't misunderstand me! That was never my intention." Faust hesitated, then said, "I also invented something of more practical utility: the carriage leaf-spring."
"That was yours?" Reinhardt asked, while simultaneously, his wife exclaimed, "So you are Pfinzing's mysterious Wittenberg savant!" Her hand closed quietly about her husband's forearm and squeezed, a private signal which, a whispered word informed Faust, meant that he was to be alert for opportunities for profit.
"Herr Pfinzing has done extraordinarily well by that device," Reinhardt said. "Yet if you have come here to litigate for a share in his profits, I must hope that you obligated him
to a sound contract. Pfinzing is an honest man, but hard."
They had reached the Reinhardts' home now, and stood by its stoop.
"He is welcome to his profits," Faust said. "I have"—and only the devil could've detected the hesitation in his voice, or guessed what a distasteful chore to which he had just committed himself—"many more ideas of similarly practical utility."
A look passed quickly between the Reinhardts, and then the husband seized Faust's hands heartily. "Then come inside, good friend. If we are to talk business, let us talk seriously and in comfort. I'll put you up in our guest room."
They stepped within the house. Frau Reinhardt disappeared in search of candles. Standing in the moonlight with one hand on the door, ready to close it as soon as his wife returned, Reinhardt said, "Now—forgive my eagerness—but what exactly did you have in mind?"
"For one, an optical device which so manipulates light that distant objects can be seen clearly. I have used it myself to—"
"Yes, yes, but remember I asked you for practical devices. None of this dew and moonshine!"
Before Margarete, this dismissal of his greatest discoveries would have enraged Faust. Now he schooled himself to say, "Nothing could be more practical. The military potential, particularly for ships and port cities, should be self-evident. With its use, pirates can be evaded, cities and fortifications given hours more preparation against attack, and the deployment of enemy armies discerned from a distance." Nuremberg was a major foundry site; foundries meant armaments; Nuremberg was famous for its cannons throughout the civilized world.
Jack Faust - Michael Swanwick Page 8