People of the Book

by David Stacton

  At the bakeshop some soldiers stood about, having come to steal bread. They were teasing a small girl; it was harmless, but you could smell the sex in it. It was Hannale. Lars charged in, flailing his arms, and brought one of Gustavus’ best common foot down by the knees against a dough tray. But nothing had happened to her. The soldiers were still at the stage of egging each other on, assisted by the baker’s cooking schnapps.

  “A small berserker,” said the tallest of the soldiers with approval, put a strong arm around Lars’ neck and pinioned him with the other, lifted him off the ground, and let his legs kick. It was to Lars’ advantage that he was towheaded. The world loves a blond child, and will always give preference to it; they are children of the sun, and we worship the sun. The man was their leader. He was also muscular. Lars, though strong himself, could not squirm free.

  “Let go of my sister.” Lars had never been under restraint before. It crazed him. But the big man felt all right. There was nothing wrong with him. He was only another Mysendonck and liked to swagger. Fighting against him felt good. Since he could not get away, Lars cooled down.

  Hannale said nothing. She was one of those who take danger quietly.

  “Let her go. It’s a long war. She’ll be ripe soon enough,” said the leader. He could not have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three, with a shock of hair as blue-black as feathers. He looked shamefaced but amused. “Run along, boy,” he added, for they were now all merely standing there.

  Lars held out his hand to Hannale, and then decided to carry her. Behind them, as they left, they could hear the others laugh, like grown-ups at a joke you aren’t supposed to hear.

  “What were they going to do to me?” asked Hannale, who had been considering. She was only six; they had not told her.

  Lars made up some story, puzzled by a feeling he did not understand and did not like. He had lost control of himself, that was what it was. And he had enjoyed it; it had been like tearing off something that itched, as though what he did had nothing to with him. It had been like dressing up in the hut and having Mysendonck catch him. It was something never to be done again.

  For Lars had an instinct toward reason.

  Scared, but not of what he had seen, he took Hannale home. Though she said nothing, there was something desperate about the way she clung to him. And that night she would not sleep unless he held her. She did not like the strange noises from the street, she said.

  *

  Gustavus congratulated himself upon an easy engagement and order swiftly restored. This discipline of his, he felt—nor was he wrong—had an excellent effect upon civilian populations, and made them the more ready to sustain his troops than those of the enemy.

  III.xi.16: Sometimes, when very important advantages may attend striking a terror, by preventing the same crimes in future being committed, it may be proper to exercise the right of rigour to its full extent. But an obstinate resistance, which can be considered as nothing but the faithful discharge of a trust, can never come within the description of such delinquencies, as justify extreme rigour.

  III.vii.1: Nor is the commission of crime requisite to reduce them to [the condition of slavery], but the fate of all is alike, who are unfortunately taken within the territories of an enemy, upon the breaking out of war.

  So he freed Butler the Younger. He had acted with conscience; therefore his conscience was clear.

  11

  Magdeburg should have been relieved, less for strategic reasons than because it was a Protestant place which had, if unwillingly, put itself under the protection of the Snow King, and if he could not relieve it, his reputation would decline. But he could not relieve it while his natural allies, Brandenburg and Saxony, refused to support his supply lines and path of possible retreat. So he could not relieve Magdeburg, though he tried.

  The chief generals ranged against him were Pappenheim, Tilly, and Wallenstein, with, sometimes, Mansfeld. Mansfeld was the bastard son of minor nobility, fought for cash, and desired a small duchy with a title of its own. He never got it. Pappenheim was a loyal and competent commander, given to despair, who did not feel that Gustavus could be successfully opposed. Tilly was an elderly spider, carried about in a litter, blind, but the noblest and most dangerous of the Imperial professionals. However, since his armies could not be paid, and traveled in a horde of dependents, sutlers and prostitutes, his forces sapped themselves. The only man who could pay his troops was Wallenstein, who was at the moment out of power, but would be back. So Gustavus knew who his real adversary was. It was neither a general, an emperor, a polity, nor a faith. It was a dark gentleman seldom seen and never to be known, acting from motives no man living or dead has ever properly understood. Wallenstein trusted his astrologers and followed a heavy star. Sometimes you saw him at the end of a corridor, and his eyes glittered when the light caught them; that was all. He dressed in Spanish black. He was fond of furs.

  After taking Landsberg and finding himself in Silesia, where Wallenstein had recently been forced to abandon his ducal estates, Gustavus turned aside to see if he could judge the man from his burrow. Thus he came to the Duchy of Sagan, large and rich, but no country to be out at nights in. There is something wicked in Silesia, something dark. The mist lies on the ground too late of a morning, and rises too soon at dusk. In Silesia everyone lives with the dead. There are barrows there.

  Sagan stood on a knoll in a damp saucer of land at some distance from its village. It was half nightmare and half palace. Like all Wallenstein’s holdings—and he was Duke of Friedland, Sagan, Glogau and Mecklenburg, though not by birth—Sagan sat squat in the middle of a hush. It was not only that he could not abide noise; he was unhinged by it, being like the Arabs, who live on strong coffee and plot. The pines stood too close about the house. Their needles were burnished steel.

  Large men have no specific motives; they obey their own inevitability. Only little men act always in some cause. Nonetheless Wallenstein was a puzzle. It was customary to refer to him as the Black Man. You always felt the next thing he wanted was yours. He never took it. He bought it. No matter what you did to him, he could always raise the goods and money. Nobody knew how. He was much feared. For the most successful estate manager in Europe had winter dreams, whose icicles sparkled like empery. He was also its dark star; it had taken some time to learn of his existence, and nobody knew what he was made of.

  Gustavus thought he knew. He was a cinder man, an atheist, a Manichee. There were the ashes of burnt papers in the fireplaces to prove it.

  He was born a minor member of the petty Bohemian nobility. That, again, explained nothing. Wallenstein was an intelligence from somewhere else, maneuvering a body that had no self, not by character, which can be dealt with, but by will, which blows across the world like a wind from nowhere.

  Sagan was an odd building. What were these black and white marble floors, these receding columns, these floods of state stairs, long passages in the stonework, and deep shadowy loggias for? They were to a god unknown. In any room Wallenstein entered, you were aware of something worse that had just left. He had spent his life driving that thing to the next room farther on. He liked his own way. The storerooms, the granaries, the arsenal, the offices, they were all admirably run. He was a master of such things. But again, you were always conscious of something watching that was not there. Gustavus, who though reserved was spirited and warm, felt the chill in his wrists and was glad to get out of there. It was a crypt. At the top of its stairs, peering down from its loggias, was the restless shadow of enormous death, not a human death, but Wallenstein’s, a doppelgänger left to stand watch over his goods.

  12

  The Jews of Frankfort an der Oder, though startled by the proprietary nature of her scream in the street, were, being Yiddisher, not without a sense of humor, and so grateful to Frau Larsen, both publicly, with a word, and privately, in a secret and unusual way which, for the time being, they kept not only from others but from her. They would bury the old man properly. The questio
n was, how much burial did he deserve? They thought not much. His dealings had cut too fine. Next they waited upon her about her investments. They wished to be kind; perhaps they would rather have been generous. These foreigners then went away.

  It took her four months to replace everything, and it was replaced exactly, and after that never dusted, never added to, never diminished, and never moved. Stores were replaced to the last jar of pickles, never less, never more. The house became a museum of the way we live now. Whatever it was, it was not life.

  Frau Larsen, who in her time had turned her face to many walls, now seldom went out. She had been a solid woman. Now she shriveled down to the scale of a half-blind bird. She did not look at her portraits any more.

  In May came the news that Magdeburg had fallen. It shocked the world, though not Frankfort, which had fallen itself. It was an atrocity, a thing that happens always somewhere else, for when it happens to us it is not an atrocity, it has not that glamour.

  There had been a great wind. It cast the virgins down from the pinnacles of the Paradise Chapel, and General Falkenburg had been three times blown from his horse. Nor would the burghers aid to defend the city. “There is little wisdom here,” Falkenburg wrote Gustavus, “we live from day to day.” What else is wisdom, thought the Snow King angrily, but he could not send help in time. Falkenburg must hold out for two more months, he said.

  But Falkenburg couldn’t. He had run out of powder. Im Feste Burg was sung in the churches, but did not help. In the fugue of war there are too many voices. It is, besides, less fugue than mirror canon. The same people are on the opposite side, but moving gauche. And soon our left becomes our right.

  The person on the opposite side was Tilly. He was a professional; he had no other existence but that. He was also a bigot, a Catholic bigot. Death to him was a sort of Eucharist. He did not slaughter, he partook. This tiny elderly wisp of a creature, with a frostbitten nose and a wig, was aware of the immensity of his own great name, and wanted one last victory before his servants carried him off to die. The luxury of that dormitive would be as impersonal as pride. Like a nurse in a hospital, pride keeps us clean, not for our own sake but because we are in the assigned bed. Yet if we cannot die in that bed, why go to the bother of dying at all, why not be killed in a ditch?

  So Magdeburg was taken.

  The town was one-fourth Catholic, and the other citizens refused to fight for their beliefs. Unfortunately, if we do not have to fight for what we really believe, since we never mention it, the price to be paid for lip service is inexorable. No one having been willing to sell them stores, the garrison mutinied. Dietrich von Falkenburg had to shoot a few men to restore order, which left that many the less to defend the city. The 20th was a dusty day. Falkenburg was killed. He left this world feet first, and the city fell, the final assault having begun at seven in the morning.

  Tilly was not there. Being blind, he listened for the clatter of troops, signed death warrants in the dark, and could not see himself when he smiled. This in no way impeded his usefulness. Most of the world’s real work has always been done in the dark. What is done above ground is no more than a diversion to hold the attention of men of good will. Tilly listened when anything rustled. He was not a coward, but he was at a disadvantage, he was already an old man dying. When told his troops had gotten out of hand, he said, “Let the town bleed; it has not yet made sufficient atonement. Let the soldiers persist another hour, and then we will reconsider the matter.”

  There is a mutual agreement that the leaders of both sides are sacrosanct. In the abrogation of this agreement, assassination haunts us all, and the rules of war collapse. In that event, nothing remains possible but lost armies hacking their way nowhere across a general anarchy until they, too, go down. The Protestant Administrator of the place would have been ripped to shreds by Imperial troops, had not Pappenheim passed by and saved him. The massacre of Magdeburg had already begun.

  The best troops, Walloon veterans, behaved the least like men, but the Croatians were the more savage. The cannon on the walls had been turned around and were now being fired into the town. It was a religious orgy. It was, at any rate, an orgy with a religious excuse.

  In the street, a soldier held an infant by the legs, head downward, and another cut it in half with his sword. That was exhilarating. A young lady of quality was raped eight times and then transfixed to the ground with a pike rammed through her navel. That also was exhilarating. Catching infection from their betters, twenty fishermen’s daughters jumped into the Elbe. The garrison held out, and was allowed to capitulate, at the cost of the slaughter of its officers. It is a general rule that if we are to do as we wish, the intelligent must die first. That hatred all men feel for ability finally boils over. Out of that bloodbath, like a Roman soldier being baptized into the Cult of Mithra, a new leader will arise. Revolution has no other purpose than to elevate the new oligarchy.

  Soldiers, rioting up from the cellars, found that the city had caught fire, not in one but in many places. The heat was so great as to draw up here and there a series of small roaring fire domes, in which many stifled or were charred. These fires raged for three days, to the result that out of 40,000 people, 32,000 died; however, the incineration of so many prevented plague.

  Of the 8,000 who survived, four hundred had taken refuge in the Dom, behind barricaded doors. The cathedral, the church and convent of Our Lady, a few houses around it, and some eighty fishermen’s huts down by the river were the only buildings not to burn.

  The soldiers did not attack the cathedral, which had a Catholic look, whatever the rite practiced inside. Attached to the cathedral was the Paradise Chapel. It was a large airy double vault, having on three of its sides tall wide windows. The sills of these were twelve feet above the floor. Arranged around the sides of the room were stone stalls, and the chapel was incrusted with panels of elaborate late Gothic alabaster carving, to the English, German taste, surrounded by crockets, finials, and canopies, carved with leaf patterns halfway between acanthus and brussel sprouts, with heads, faces, and heraldic beasts glowering down from the bosses or peaking out of paranoic tracery.

  The Dom is large, with a stone floor always damp. It had been handed over to the Protestants. There was a curate attached to it by the name of Stöss, Epiphanius Stöss. He was heavy-boned and skinny, with a coarse, faintly sweaty hide, shortsighted, balding but with coarse black hair, and an intrusive, finely modeled nose; a born witch burner, by the glint in his eye, certainly an ecstatic whose only way to put people at their ease was to ask too many questions, none of them kind. People like this have dreams but no humanity. There is the devil to pay when a spoilt priest is still a priest.

  He was perhaps forty, and had a tendency to whine, seeing himself as the world’s victim, endlessly misunderstood. He had met enough people in his lifetime who clearly understood him, to convince him of the truth of this. These black people from Silesia have an almost Spanish desire to be martyred, but like the Spaniards, snap and snarl and insist that the world go into the arena first. Stöss saw himself as St. Stephen stoned, but an erotic St. Stephen, come to save the world because he had been a great sinner. He carried himself like a chalice, afraid to be spilt, and did not care for the jostle of human contact. In another world he would have made an excellent Jünker, except that he could not bear to be disciplined, even by himself. He lived in a state of permanent spiritual terror, not of the pit, not of the pendulum, but of accidie. He felt kept down. The ritual of blood obsessed him. He could paint a little.

  This gentleman, with his pockmarked face, his evasive kitten-blue eyes, and the white placket of the ministry under his chin, who attended the sick and dying as though he could not be bothered, it was beneath him, and who was inside a sad, weak, pathetic creature, starved for life, now found himself surrounded and impressed, a stranger wandering in the bivouac of a trapped platoon. He did not like this. He was one of those people who creep into the church like a man with a weak spine who cannot navigate with
out an iron harness. And where was protection now?

  The cathedral had an ambulatory, and stairs in the tower, a choir loft and the Paradise Chapel, otherwise there was no escaping from these four hundred people. They did not fill the nave. They made it seem emptier than ever. Every footstep had a stone echo. And since the building was now Lutheran, there was an insufficiency of ikons to distract prayers. Sobbing and moaning teased at the vaults; and there were no sanitary arrangements whatsoever. It was necessary to use a miseracordium and a bucket in the sacristy.

  Stöss was inveigled into going up on the leads, to help see the rafters did not catch, though there was no water with which to put flames out. The lead of the roof was warm. He froze on heights, and was humiliated to have to be prised away from his grip on the balustrades. Sixty feet below him an army of ants was eating itself up. The high wind blew all screams the same way, so that they hit your face a second after the heat did.

  Downstairs, and back inside, there was a crash sometimes against the barred doors. Rush-bottom seats for three hundred were scattered pellmell about the stone flags but nobody used them.

  It was easier to lie on the floor. Apart from stoop water, some sacramental wine and wafers, there was nothing to eat or drink, though some fool had had the sense to bangle smoked sausages up her arm, before picking up her skirts and making a run for it. Until the sausage was all eaten, she was much praised. The higher clergy went the rounds, with words of comfort and encouragement. Stöss couldn’t bring himself to do that. He was too honest. Such was his explanation.