THE MARGRAVE. What of the margrave? The tales say little of the Prince’s friend, save that each night he lay faithfully on his side of the sword. It is true that in one version he becomes the Princess’s lover, and they are caught there, in the bed; but this is a version that few of us heed, for we recognize it to be less daring than the versions in which the Princess remains unsullied in the margrave’s bed. Let us say, then, that the margrave remains nightly on his side of the sword. What is he thinking? We may imagine that he is troubled by the visits of the Princess, who nightly creeps into his bed and lies beside him without a word. We do not disgrace him if we imagine that he desires the Princess, for he is a man like other men and the Princess is the fairest of all women; but even if we fail to take into account his own sense of honor, the margrave is bound to the Prince by the high law of friendship, and by the debt that every guest owes to his host: he would no more think of possessing the Prince’s wife than he would think of stealing a silver spoon. Or, to be more precise: he is forced, by the Princess’s offer of herself, to think continually of possessing her, and the thought so inflames and shames him that he must exercise all his vigilance to resist the nightly test, while at the same time he must make certain not to offend the Princess by an unseemly coldness. It is also possible that the margrave senses that the Princess has been sent by the Prince against her will, to test him; if so, the knowledge can only strengthen his resistance, while making him question why he has incurred the Prince’s suspicion. The margrave is troubled by the displeasure he senses in the Prince, and by the cooling of their warm friendship; he longs to return to the early days of his visit. It is time for him to return to his distant land, but he cannot make up his mind to leave the castle. Is he perhaps drawn to the nightly test, the nightly overcoming of his desire, by which act alone he can assert the power of his high nature? Or is he perhaps secretly drawn to the possibility of a great fall? Thus do we weave tales within tales, within our minds, when the tales themselves do not speak.
RATS. The rats in our town scuttle along the narrow lanes, crawl from the compost heaps before our houses, scamper freely in the grassy ditch between the double ring of walls. They feed on slops surreptitiously spilled in the streets despite our strict ordinances, on scraps from the dinner table, on carcasses brought for burial to the field beyond the gates. The ratcatcher drowns the rats in the river, and it is from the seed of these drowning rats that a darker breed of rat is said to grow. The dark rats swim across the river and burrow in the cliff hollows. Slowly they make their way up to the castle. They penetrate the towers of the outer and inner walls, scamper across the courtyards, invade the larder and the pantry, and gradually make their way down to the underground cells and tunnels. From there they begin their long descent, pushing their sleek bodies through hidden fissures, seeping into the stone like black water, until at last they come to the dungeon. The dungeon rats are long haired, half-blind, and smell of the river. They crouch in the black corners, rub against the damp walls, stumble against an outstretched foot. The prisoner can hear them cracking bits of stale bread, feeding on pools of urine. When he falls asleep the rats approach slowly, scurrying away only when he stirs. If the prisoner sleeps for more than a few minutes, he will feel the rats nibbling at his legs.
THE PRINCESS DECLINES. Scorned and distrusted by the Prince, eluded by the margrave, who no longer sought her company by day, thrown always into closer communion with the dwarf, the Princess began to mistrust herself, and to question her own mind. Always she lay awake at night, on her side of the margrave’s sword; and she spent her sunlight hours in a melancholy daze. Weary with sorrow, weak with night-wakefulness, she was yet ravaged with restlessness, and could scarcely sit still. Alone she walked in the green shadows of her garden, or wandered alone in the shady paths of the park; and though her gaze was fixed in an unseeing stare, often she would start, as if she had heard a voice at her ear. She ate little and grew thin, so that her chin looked bony and sharp; and in her wasting face her melancholy eyes grew large, and glowed with the dark light of sorrow. One morning she stumbled in her garden, and would have fallen had the dwarf not sprung from behind a privet hedge and helped to steady her; she felt a warmth on her neck and cheeks, and that afternoon she took to bed with a fever. In her fever-bed she had a vision or dream: she saw a girl at a well, holding a golden ball. The girl dropped the ball, which cracked in two, and from the ball a black raven flew forth and circled round her head, trying to peck out her eyes. And though the girl cried out, the bird put out her eyes; and from the drops of blood that fell to the ground, a thornbush grew. And when the wings of the raven brushed the thorns, instantly the bird died, and the girl’s sight was restored. Then the Princess woke from her fever-dream and asked the dwarf what it portended. The dwarf replied that the golden ball was her past happiness, and the margrave the raven, that had ended her happiness; and the thornbush was her sorrow, from whence would come her cure. For there was a cure, but it must come from her own despair. Thus did the dwarf tend the Princess in her sickbed, bringing her goblets of cool water, and telling her dwarf tales, as though she were a child; and always he watched her closely with his brown, melancholy, slightly moist, very intelligent eyes.
OTHER TALES. The tales of the Princess are part of a larger cycle of castle tales; other tales speak of the Prince’s daughter, the contest of archers, the Prince and the Red Knight. These are tales of the castle, but we have other tales as well: the tale of the Black Ship, the tale of the three skeletons under the alder tree, the tale of the raven, the dog, and the piece of gold. As children our heads are full of these tales, which we confuse with real things; as we grow older our minds turn to affairs of this world, and to the promise of the world hereafter. But the old tales of our childhood never leave us entirely; in later years we pass them on to our own children, without knowing why. Sometimes when we grow old the tales return to us so vividly that we become caught in their wonder, like little children, and forget the cares of the moment in a kind of drowsiness of dreaming; then we look up guiltily, as if we have done something of which we are ashamed.
OUTBURST. Day after day the Princess lay feverish in her sickbed, attended by the dwarf, who sat beside her on a high stool, held cool water to her lips, and fed her syrups prescribed by the court physician; and bending close to her ear, he urged her to confess to the Prince that the margrave had wronged him. Could she be certain, could she be absolutely certain, that the margrave, who after all possessed a fiery nature, had approached her only in friendship? Had she seen no sign of a more ardent feeling? Could she say, in all truthfulness, that relations between her and the margrave had been entirely innocent? When she looked deep into her heart—and he urged her to look deep, deep into her heart, deeper than ever into that unfathomable darkness where perhaps only a dwarf’s eyes could see clearly—when she thus looked into her innermost heart, could she say, in all conscience, that she did not desire the attentions of the margrave? Certainly he was a handsome man, well knit and hard muscled, and in all ways deserving of love, so that it must be difficult, for a woman, not to dream of being kissed by those lips, embraced by those graceful, powerful arms. Could she say, in all honesty, that she had not in some small way, if only by a smile or a look, encouraged in the Prince’s friend, who was also, as all the court knew, her intimate friend, some slight bending of his mind toward her, some barely perceptible swerve from the straight line of innocent friendship? And was not friendship itself, truly understood, a passion? Could she, when she looked into the darkness of her heart, deny that she had seen her friendship-passion take on a new and unexpected shape, there in the all-transforming and all-revealing dark? Far be it from him to suggest the slightest degree of deviation from the path of wifely duty—although, in such matters, precise lines were difficult, nay, impossible, to draw. And could she say, in all earnestness, that never once, in the margrave’s bedchamber, had the tip of his finger grazed her loosened hair, never once, in all those nights, had he looked on her o
therwise than in the purity of an unlikely child-friendship? For surely the ardent margrave had been tempted—to deny it would be to insult him, and indeed to insult the Princess herself, whom all women envied. But where there is temptation, there is the first motion toward a fall. Therefore to say that the margrave desired her was but to speak the truth; and for her to say to the Prince that the margrave had acted on his desire was no more than an extension of the truth, as heavy gold is beaten into airy foil. Thus did the dwarf whisper, as the Princess lay on her fever-bed, thus did he teach her to see in the dark; till looking into the darkness of her heart, the Princess saw disturbing shapes, and cried out in anguish. Then she bade the dwarf bring the Prince to her sickbed. And when the Prince appeared before her, the Princess cried out that the margrave had treacherously desired her, and whispered lewdly to her, and lain with her, and touched her lasciviously by day and by night; and for the sake of her lord, she confessed it. Then the Princess fell back, shuddering, and cried out that she was being stung by devils, so that she had to be restrained. Then the Prince summoned his guards, who seized the margrave in his chamber; and when he demanded to know what was charged against him, they would not answer him.
CRIMINALS. Our torture chamber and prison cells lie in the cellars beneath the town hall. Some say that a passageway leads down to a dungeon, which lies at the same depth as the dungeon of the castle on the other side of the river, but there is no evidence whatever for such a dungeon, which moreover would be entirely superfluous, since our prisons are used solely for detention during trial. It is impossible to know whether our legendary dungeon gave rise to the tale of the castle dungeon or whether the castle dungeon, in which we both do and do not believe, gave rise to ours. Our torturers are skilled craftsmen, and our laws are severe. Murderers, traitors, rapists, thieves, adulterers, sodomites, and wizards are taken in a cart to the executioner’s meadow beyond the walls and there hanged, beheaded, burned at the stake, drowned, or broken on the wheel by the public executioner in full view of citizens and nearby villagers who gather to witness the event and to eat sausages sold at butchers’ stalls. The peasants say that the seed of criminals buried in the graveyard gives birth to the race of dwarfs. The rigor of our laws, the skill of our torturers, and the threats of our preachers, who paint the torments of hell in lifelike detail worthy of our artists and engravers, are intended to frighten our townsfolk from committing criminal deeds and even from having criminal thoughts, and in this they are largely but not entirely successful. The depravity of human nature is a common explanation for this partial failure, but it is possible to wonder whether our criminals, who are tortured underground and executed outside our walls, are not secretly attracted to all that is beneath and outside the world enclosed by our walls—whether they do not, in some measure, represent a restlessness in the town, a desire for the unknown, a longing to exceed all that hems in and binds down, like the thick walls, the heavy gates, the well-made locks and door panels. It is perhaps for this reason that our laws are severe and our instruments of torture ingenious and well crafted: we fear our criminals because they reveal to us our desire for something we dare not imagine and cannot name.
A CHANGE OF HEART. The margrave was tortured on two separate occasions, on the second of which the bones of both arms and legs were broken, but he did not confess his crime, and at length he was carried unconscious down to the dungeon and flung onto a bed of straw. Some members of the court were surprised by the leniency of the punishment, for committing adultery with the wife of a prince was considered an act of treachery and was punishable by emasculation, followed by drawing and quartering, but others saw in the margrave’s fate a far worse punishment than death: a lingering lifetime of lying in darkness, sustained only by sufficient nourishment to keep one sensible of one’s misery, while disease and madness gradually destroyed the body and the soul. The dwarf, who had advised death by beheading, a punishment reserved for rapists and sodomites, saw in the sentence a secret indecisiveness: the Prince did not entirely believe the confession of the Princess. Or, to put it more precisely, the Prince believed the confession of the Princess, but his belief had at its center a germ of doubt, which spread outward through his belief and infected it in every part with a suspicion of itself. The Princess, for her part, soon recovered from her fever, and resumed her former habits; only, there was a marked reserve about her, and sometimes she would break off in the middle of a sentence and grow silent, and seem to gaze inward. She no longer summoned the dwarf, and indeed appeared to avoid his company; but Scarbo well understood the necessity for his banishment, for had he not caused her to fall beneath her high estimate of herself? The Prince, uneasily reconciled with his wife, sensed in her an inner distance that he could not overcome; to his surprise, he discovered that he did not always wish to overcome it. To the extent that he believed her confession, he felt a cold revulsion that she had lain with the margrave, even at his own urging; to the extent that he disbelieved her confession, he blamed her for condemning the margrave to a dungeon death. Meanwhile the Princess withdrew deeper and deeper into her inner castle, where she brooded over the events that had estranged her from the Prince, and made her a stranger even to herself. And as the days passed, a change came over her. For she saw, with ever-increasing clearness, in the long nights when she no longer slept, that the Prince had wronged her, by sending her to the bed of the margrave; and she saw, with equal clearness, that she had horribly wronged the margrave, by her foul lies. Then in the dark the Princess vowed to set right the wrong she had done him. And she who had lain coldly in the bed of the margrave, brooding over the displeasure of the Prince, now looked at the Prince strangely, as at someone she had known long ago; and lying coldly in the bed of the Prince, or lying alone in her private bedchamber high in her tower, she thought of the margrave, in the bowels of the earth, deep down.
WIVES. No burgher or artisan can manage the complex affairs of his household without the aid of his capable wife. The wives of our town are practical and industrious; on the way to market in the morning they walk purposefully, with powerful strides. It is true that our husbands, while admiring their wives, expect them to be obedient. A wife who disobeys her husband will be promptly chastised; if she provokes him by continued disobedience, he has the right to strike her with his fist. Once, when a young bride of high beauty and strong temperament argued with her patrician husband in the presence of dinner guests, he rose from the table and in full view of the company struck her in the face, breaking her nose and disfiguring her for life. A wife’s conduct is carefully regulated by law; it is illegal for a wife to permit a servant to place a brooch on her bosom, for no one may touch her on the breast except her husband. The wives of our town are strong, efficient, and never idle. They are fully able to manage a husband’s affairs if he should depart from town on business, or his trade if he should die. The wives make up the morning fires, shake out rugs and clothes, tend their gardens, direct their servants to prepare dinner. Only sometimes, resting by a window or pausing beside a well, a change comes over them. Then their eyes half close, a heaviness as of sleep seems to fall on their shoulders, and for a moment they are lost in dream, like children listening to stories by the chimney fire, before they return to their skins with a start.
A MEETING. One morning Scarbo received by messenger a summons from the Princess. He had not exchanged a single word with her since her illness, and he appeared promptly at the bower, shutting the wicker gate behind him and entering the shady enclosure with a low bow. The Princess sat on one of the crimson silk couches and motioned for him to sit opposite. Scarbo was struck by something in her manner: she had about her a self-command, as if she were a tensely drawn bow, and she looked at him frankly, without hostility but without friendliness. As soon as he was seated she said that she wished to ask a difficult service of him. The request itself would put her at his mercy, and she had no illusions concerning his good will toward her; but since she no longer valued her life, save as a means to one end, sh
e did not care whether he betrayed her. The dwarf, instantly alert to the danger of the interview, as well as to the possibility of increasing his power in the court, chose not to defend his good will, but remained warily silent, only lowering his eyes for a moment in order to display to the Princess his distress at the harshness and unfairness of her remark. The Princess spoke firmly and without hesitation. She said that because of her weak and evil nature, a nature abetted by dubious councillors in the service of one who no longer wished her well, she had wronged the margrave, who now lay suffering a horrible and unjust fate; and that she was determined to right her wrong, or die. In this quest she had decided, after long thought, to ask the help of the dwarf, knowing full well that by doing so she was placing herself in his power. And yet there was no one else she could turn to. He was intimate with the Prince, adept at hiding and spying, and, as she well knew, at insinuating himself into the confidence of those he served; moreover, it was he alone whom the Prince entrusted with the task of descending the legendary stairway with the prisoner’s daily ration of wretched food, which he placed in the hands of the keeper of the dungeon. The service she requested of the dwarf was this: to arrange for the margrave’s escape. In making her request, she understood perfectly that she was asking him to put his life at risk by betraying the Prince; and yet she was bold enough to hope that the risk would be outweighed by the gratitude of the Princess, and the advantage of having her in his power. Here she paused and awaited his answer.
NIGHTMARES. Because of the stories we tell, our children believe that if they listen very carefully, in the dead of night, they will hear a faint scraping sound, coming from the bowels of the earth. It is the sound made by the prisoner as he secretly cuts his way with a pickax through the rock. For the most part our children listen for the sound of the prisoner with shining eyes and swiftly beating hearts. But sometimes they wake screaming in the night, weeping with fear, as the sounds get closer and closer. Then we rock them gently to sleep, telling them that our walls are thick, our moat deep, our towers high and equipped with powerful engines of war, our drop gates fitted with bronze spikes sharp as needles that, once fallen upon an enemy, will pierce his body through. Slowly our children close their eyes, while we, who have comforted them, lie wakeful in the night.
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