People of the Book

by David Stacton

  He did not question this image. He did not ask where it came from. But it made him uneasy. When one came this way, unexpectedly, it meant that either he had seen something that had just happened somewhere, or that would happen soon. He never mentioned them, but often saw who was in a room before he entered it, and found the prevision useful. Axel had the ability, too, and also never mentioned it. But sometimes their eyes met. It was a form of knowledge; but this ability to stare into men’s minds as though through a sheet of badly poured glass was not always agreeable.

  He therefore perceived that this disappearance puzzled Axel in some way, that it concerned them in some way clear to neither of them, but only personally, so it didn’t matter; it was merely an inessential missing piece, turbulent, sad, but in no way weak. And then it went away.

  The missing piece was Selina. The road had been covered by an avalanche. There was nothing to be seen but a struggling blue hand. There was only an instant’s warning, the sound of a tumbril rattling across a wet street. The body was found after the spring thaw.

  By taking advantage of a fourteen-day truce they had themselves urged on Gustavus, the French were able to enter into a secret alliance with Maximilian of Bavaria, aimed ultimately against the Swedes. Yet the only advantage of playing both ends against the middle is to force the middle up and out. In April Gustavus invaded Bavaria.

  III.xxiv.4: Provided all injury and injustice are avoided, it is reckoned a lawful stratagem for anyone to avail himself of a parley in order to draw off the enemy’s attention from his military projects, and to promote his own. The device, by which Asdrubal extricated his army from the Ausetanian forests, was of this kind, and by the same means Scipio Africanus, the Elder, gained a perfect knowledge of Syphax’s camp. Both these circumstances are related by Livy.

  16

  Twelve Jesuits from Augsburg were detected in a plot to assassinate the King, and a Fleming was taken with a dagger near his bedchamber. Gustavus was unperturbed. “He thinks the ship cannot sink that carries him,” Sir Thomas Roe had said admiringly. That was because he had built the ship himself. “You take great pains to teach me to distrust God,” Gustavus told his advisers. “The Supreme Being would never make His work depend upon one breath or one person.” On April 24th he entered Augsburg, staying in the Függer town house, for he was never one to neglect a banker, and so far unbent, for he hated banquets, as to allow himself to be feasted, after which he danced with a pretty lady. “Swedish arms are irresistible,” said a burgher, and seemed so far to believe it as to offer his daughter in marriage to one of the King’s officers. The officer said, discreetly, that he preferred the army. This, in turn, pleased Gustavus.

  The Jesuits had done wrong to teach by example; one learns by example, but one cannot teach that way, one can teach, at least on the lower levels, only by rote. So to rote and the Rota they returned. They had already found the recent court amusement of Opera greatly to their purpose. It could present the emotion they wished to convey, by means of discipline and a little story. Nor were pageants to be ignored. They were among the first to discover that the pangs of learning may be assuaged by games, and that truth is irrelevant to the validity of any given system. It is necessary only to wear the right hat. One does not so much shape men’s minds as block them. Out they came steamed by the kettle, to the approved crease.

  It was therefore decided that the schoolchildren of Cham, an obedient bunch without an idea in their heads that had not been surgically implanted there as with tweezers, should have a war game in the village, to demonstrate which side in this great conflict between two faiths was sure to win (ours). Cham was Catholic. Pseudo-Tilly was the son of the burgomeister. The boy forced to enact Gustavus was chosen by lot. Pseudo-Tilly soon rounded up 150 boys of good family; Pseudo-Gustavus had to make do with thirty, all of them of mean appearance. The division of forces (it was a well-thought-of school) was about what it would have been without the politics.

  Unfortunately the boy chosen by lot happened to be the leader of a gang of boys, and leaders of whatever age or size are apt to be enterprising, no man ever having dug himself out of a dung heap except by the use of his own hands.

  Pseudo-Gustavus took himself off to a vacant lot, had trenches scooped out, and made good use of knolls. His name was Hans. The members of his gang owed their survival to their toughness. Pseudo-Tilly (his name was Dietrich) gathered his men inside the town gates—they owed their survival to the accomplishments of their fathers and forefathers—while the priests went up and down the line, adjusting garments and blessing the troops. Pseudo-Tilly was no slouch, but was hampered by his pseudonym, deference being by no means the same as obedience, and besides, it wasn’t a real war.

  A sufficient audience had been induced to occupy a hill, proud parents mostly, a few of the curious, and here and there a knowing leer.

  Pseudo-Gustavus blew his trumpet and invited the enemy to invade his lines. This the enemy did, five times, being urged on by the priests with exhortations, pursed lips, a flutter of the hands, eyes cast up to heaven, boredom, chagrin, and damn.

  Bloody noses are bloody noses, and a kick in the seat of the pants can frequently persuade the class prefect to fall down. Bawling their lungs out, the more adenoidal fled first, so giving their companions the courage of example, and five minutes later Pseudo-Gustavus, called Hans, was binding Pseudo-Tilly’s, called Dietrich’s, hands behind him tighter than was necessary (he couldn’t stand the little snot), and refusing to give up his weapons (wooden swords), marched Dietrich back to the burgomeister’s house and demanded a ransom. This, since he was not amused but did not want to be thought a fool, the burgomeister smilingly gave, clouted his son over the head as soon as the door was shut, and being in a foul mood, refused absolutely to untie him until after dinner. There was enough unrest among the lower orders already, without this.

  Hans was at the school only because of his exceptional abilities, for even the best schools feel constrained to take a few pupils on merit alone, otherwise how could standards be kept up? There descended a brief period of recrimination and gloom.

  “I’m very sorry, sir.”

  “You’re not sorry a bit.”

  A boy of twelve is not old enough to agree and say no. Neither are most grown-ups. So instead Hans chinked his ransom money.

  The only man to be amused was the man rebuking him, who, as it happened, did not like the burgomeister or little Dietrich either, and had once been a spunky child himself. Sometimes the laity takes faith too far.

  “Ah well,” he said. “How much did you get?” And decided to glide along to bless no more children, and to let Hans keep his bounty.

  “We have been made ridiculous, ridiculous,” said his superior, solemnly stalking his own shadow down the whitewashed wall, as though pacing off for a duel. He had no humor.

  “At least it was our own doing,” said Father Crespi, who had, and who believed that it was only what went wrong with best laid plans that made life endurable. At any rate, it made it entertaining.

  III.i.12: In the first place, many things may be said to madmen or children, the LITERAL MEANING of which may not be true, without incurring the guilt of wilful falsehood. A practice which seems to be allowed by the commonsense of all mankind. Quintilian, speaking of the age of puerility, says it is a period of life, when many useful truths may be taught in the dress of fiction.—Another reason given is, that as children and madmen possess no perfect power of judging, impositions of that kind can do no injury to their rights, in such respects.

  Gustavus, the real not the pseudo one, had proceeded to Ingolstadt, where he had a horse shot out from under him. As usual he had ventured too close to the enemy lines, whether from shortsightedness or because he preferred to, nobody knew, and like the Prophet, had insisted upon a white horse, which made him the easier to pick out.

  The cannonball, a fourteen-pounder well aimed, struck his mare full in the flank, so near the stirrup it ruffled his leg and pulled the saddle bla
nket out from under the saddle. His companion, Gassion, was knocked flat by the shock waves as the ball passed to plow the dirt ten feet beyond, where it set up a cloud of dust to muddy the air, like a manta settling to the sea bottom in some transparent apple-green lagoon.

  The horse tumbled over several times, in a flurry of blood and guts, and then rocked to a halt against a gun carriage, where it lay screaming until its eyes glazed. Gustavus rolled over three times and lay face down in the dirt. He was not surprised, only startled, and had been through this sort of thing often enough to be interested in a mouthful of dirt, abraded hands, and blood to taste. It felt, he decided, unreal, if only because it is a while before the pain starts; there is a terminal interlude of puzzled freedom. Everything stops there.

  “The King is dead,” somebody shouted.

  “Nonsense,” said Gustavus, who in time of personal trouble always took the impersonal view. “The King is not dead. He has had the wind knocked out of him, that’s all.”

  An equerry lifted him up and, still dazed, he added, “How was it possible for the enemy to hit me? I conceived myself out of danger.” And he drew a thick black line on the left side of that imaginary ledger which was his odds book. It would be of help someday, in the next race but one. For the race we are at present running, it is of no help whatsoever.

  He lifted the siege of Ingolstadt and marched on Munich instead. After he had gone, the citizens for want of something better stuffed his horse and placed it in the Dom, to be their trophy.

  17

  He had had his warning. But our end is as inevitable as our actions, the only question is when, and if we are wise we do not ask when, but quietly make our will and set our affairs in order and prepare. For this reason, Caesar did not allow the soothsayer to prevent his entry into the senate house. For our own death is not among our failures. Our only failure would be to change our course, and it was not thus the Vikings came to Vinland the second time. Death will be terrible anyway. It is only Philippi that hurts. So we continue the parade. The parade is like Caesar’s triumphs, and allows the Pontifex Maximus to have his way. It is the duty of the Pontifex Maximus to allow the augurs to repeat themselves, and let them hide their chagrin as best they may. He has no other.

  The Rhenish lands and Bavaria were the Roman parts of Germany and looked it. They had the unmistakable rosy glow of ancient brick, the equally unmistakable relaxed atmosphere of expansive order, something unlike the clenched fists and achtung of the northern Germanies. Bavaria was rich. That black soil steamed with wealth.

  Maximilian, a childless old man but the father of his country, maintained order by means of a gallows tree. He was not unique in this. Such gibbets were to be seen stuck up across the Germanies, so constantly inhabited that travelers used them as guideposts at dusk, just as navigators sometimes steer by the number of masts sticking out of the water above the banks of the North Sea, and yet dread death by drowning.

  The more people there are, the more of them it is necessary to hang, for one example seldom satisfies a multitude. So some of these spinneys of the dead stood on permanent stone platforms, as neatly joined as primitive altars. A hanging is a religious rite. It disposes of the scapegoat, the dangling man from the tarot deck, the dying god, and Golgotha in one. The crowd falls still. We do so need others to die for us; it is what makes life worthwhile.

  Gustavus rode curtly by. He did not approve of hanging. Fourteen bodies dangled like moles on a mole tree (the next gallows had twenty-six), some mummified, some decayed. They creaked. They had the smell of balsam of Peru. But they did not scare away crows and they did not save the crops. That is not their purpose. A mole tree is in actuality a propitiary offering to the god of terror in waste places. He haunts the white orchards around the cities. He has a long tail. He is why we build walls.

  “It is a fair country,” said Gustavus, “but not a country in which to go abroad at night”; and wondered why Maximilian should rather hang than fight. “Rise,” he had said recently to the burghers of Landshut, whom he had spared. “It is your duty to worship God, not me.”

  But though this was black Catholic country, it seemed to him that Maximilian, and the peasants here, too, worshiped some mighty strange gods, and had since Tacitus. Even their music, of which they were so proud, had the nasal wail and reedy shriek less of the battlefield than of the torture chamber. They were no jollier when they came back upstairs.

  In this month Tilly died, in agony both of mind and body, exhorting Maximilian to act the dissembler, and leaving a diamond ring to the Virgin of Oettingen. His death was a serious matter. In Gustavus’ regiments, there was a system of promotion by excellence, so that if a commander died, if all the commanders were to die, it did no great harm, for the men had been trained to their immediate advancement. In the Imperial armies, if a leader was wounded, the entire company lost its head and ran away. It would be necessary to recall Wallenstein.

  Maximilian had persuaded the French to endeavor to keep Gustavus out of his homelands. He was a misunderstood man, he said. He had no designs against the Swedes.

  “Sir, I am not a person to be amused and misled by mere sounds,” said Gustav Adolf to Etienne, the self-appointed ambassador, whose posture had the unction of a permanently insincere bow. “I intend to prove an expensive visitant.”

  Etienne spoke of Maximilian’s virtues.

  “Sir, no doubt the louse has its domestic virtues. They make it none the less a louse.”

  Etienne thought this going too far. The King thought it not to go far enough. The whole plot and counterplot came out, the French backing Maximilian to sap Gustavus, while backing Gustavus to sap Vienna, whose chief support Maximilian was. And Grotius, as usual, made an excellent headstone:

  III.xx.31: … the ancient Aetolians, who thought they had a right to deprive every plunderer of his spoils. A custom the force of which Polybius expresses in the following words, “when other powers, friends and allies of the Aetolians are at war with each other, the Aetolians may nevertheless serve in the armies of either side, destroying and spoiling their respective countries.”

  Such was French policy; it always had been, it always would be, and III.xxv.1 was equally informative:

  For good Faith, in the language of Cicero, is not only the principal hold by which all governments are bound together, but is the keystone by which the larger society of nations is united. Destroy this, says Aristotle, and you destroy the intercourse of mankind.

  And yet they are a people who pride themselves upon their conversational ability. It is nothing but the click of an abacus.

  “When thou actest for an unfortunate prince, like the Elector of Bavaria, behave thyself with humility,” Gustavus told Etienne. “The familiar freedoms of thy nation are sometimes overlooked, and sometimes despised; but in the present case, they are insupportable. Know I am offended and victorious.”

  He then entered Munich, and at the Residenz had the pleasure of seeing in situ those Flemish and Italian pictures so considerately described in Charles I’s shopping list. And admiring the muscular immensities of a particularly succulent and solicited Rubens, and remembering the frail stature of the most pusillanimous and parsimonious of his allies, he condescended, while contemplating the figure of Paris, to inquire of Vane what Buckingham was like, a whimsical chain of thought which, perhaps fortunately, impressed Vane as being no more than a non sequitur.

  In his boyish, even-tempered way (except when he lost it, and as he explained to his officers, if he could put up with their avarice, idiocy, and nose blowing, they could put up with an occasional eruption; every man has the right to one peccadillo), Gustav liked to saunter in the evenings, which in this mountain air were shadowy but crisp. Before the Residenz was a large paved apron, with, in the distance, an ornamental water. There had been a Te Deum that evening, with organs, and it had made him drowsy, the music being in the full polyphonic style considered aristocratic. The reason why it was considered more aristocratic than the monophonic was th
at it was harder to follow, so he had dozed. Now the night air revived him.

  “Damnit, sir, where have they put the tune? Only children and uneducated cats chase more than one butterfly at a time. Dum-tiddle-dee.”

  He was wearing loud enormous spurs, called jingling, made of cut brass, with a short curved neck, a hollow box filled with shot balls the size of field peas, and four rowels. They were a Swedish affectation.

  It seemed to him odd that the Munich arsenal had been worse than empty; there had been gun carriages, but no guns. The twelve apostles were missing (so Maximilian had named his greater cannon). Neither torture nor bribery had revealed their whereabouts.

  It was a starry night, but there must have been some mist in the upper air, for the stars looked soft. Its being May, there was spiked hawthorn about, ghostly pink, ghostly white. The flowers in then knots were an odoriferous blur. Gustavus rubbed his hands and went on walking, thirty paces left, thirty paces right, whirl, and down to-ward the canal, when his attention was attracted, for no particular reason, to the Coal Sack.

  It is the most informative object in the heavens, because of course it isn’t there. It is defined by the glitter around it. And the constellations are immutable precisely because the stars are never still. The Milky Way poured by like those more than a hundred towns the Swedes now held in Germany, from Konstanz back to the Baltic again. The question was, why?

  This had not occurred to him before. Sure of his destiny, he went from one thing to the next. It was like the box in the room. Once one has it, the world reorders itself accordingly. He let his motives form of their own accord, like cloud banks in the nether mind. They take the shape invisible currents give them, random but inevitable. And there are night riders up there. You can hear them on bad nights when the moon is yellow. One’s own shadow forms the glory on the Brocken. It is the size and sinister we will be next, if we go on walking. He went on striding up and down.