People of the Book

by David Stacton

  He could follow most of this. “And then what?”

  “We live happily ever after, that’s all.” She looked up to where the pine crowns did not quite meet over their heads. “Sometimes it sounds like the sea at night here.”

  They went on. Except for a sea chart or two, Lars had never seen a map. Blicksburg was south, so he kept turning south, as often as possible. That was all he knew.

  The month was a warm August, but the fields were fallow. It had not been possible this year to plant crops. Sometimes, glancing skyward, he saw men motionless in trees, one with a red shirt, held there by broad leather belts against which they leaned into the wind. They did nothing, but they watched. From their waists dangled gear. They had been set there, because men will take refuge from danger even in what they fear most, if there be no other shelter near to hand.

  Though he did not know it, he was on the outskirts of the Katzburgerwald. These watchers made him nervous; and children, too, know many things without having to be told. For once, rather than lag, Hannale hurried ahead of him, with often glances over her shoulder, to force him to keep up.

  For an hour now, they had not heard a bird, they had not seen a squirrel. Once, and once only, they had found some dung in their way, pale, with straw in it, and smoking. But of the horse there had been no trace.

  39

  “Why should I, if I don’t want to?” demanded Mysendonck, hands on hips. He was cocky enough for two these days. This had not escaped the Magician’s attention, though, being merciful, notice he gave it none. He had great patience, and much sympathy with the lost. The outcome depended upon what Manglana did, and upon what Selina chose to do. He did not wish to break him. Unlike most men, he believed spirit of any kind, in anyone, is so rare as to be encouraged, not put down; without spirit, there is no hope, and the world is full enough of the broken, without adding another until necessary.

  Not that he liked Mysendonck, but the way the boy threw himself around, perhaps because he had nothing much to throw, seemed to him touching and cheerful. The poor and the ill-bred age faster than we do; they have nothing else, so for God’s sake let them have their youth. It is their one grace. Like foals and lambs, it has a doomed beauty of its own. It is not meant as an affront; it is just the youth of anything. If they are exceptional, save them. The rest will smash themselves. The exceptional evil is as much worth saving as the exceptional good. But Mysendonck, except for the stud glamour of his youth, was not exceptional.

  Here the Magician erred.

  “I will explain,” he said, who so far had explained nothing whatsoever.

  “I am not a spy, I am a leader,” said Mysendonck, who did not know why his back was up, but it was.

  “All men are spies, and leaders most of all, otherwise they would not be leaders long. One has to know the meaning of each grumble. Otherwise one is pulled down.”

  Mysendonck turned on him a face of exposed terror, in which every feature of Earl Haakon was visible. It was as though someone had sucked off his skin.

  The Magician was impossible to startle. But he took a step back. Wendish or Spanish? These black people are unpredictable. The Magician went about and shook the dead to wake them; he did not send them friends. He made great mischief impartially, to earn his living, and as a judge. He did not understand this. He found himself staring at the beautiful, androgynous and dreaming face of a young death.

  Earl Haakon disappeared. Mysendonck lowered his arms and opened his eyes. “Very well, old man. What do you want of me?”

  “Men help each other to their own self-interest.” The Magician was more than usually aware of the spirits of the dead watching. “It is to your advantage.” He wondered how much he should explain, for he had just seen that men can be dangerous in more than one way; they can also be a danger to themselves. Upheavals are the mechanism by which societies renew themselves, by throwing out the old trash to make room to let the new trash in. They are a milch for leaders. They do not want their former ones any more. But it is possible to pass hidden among them, exactly for that reason, a merit in disguise.

  “I was once an astronomer, in an amateur way. All my ways are amateur, for I have loved things. I have learned that men care nothing for knowledge, but they will pay anything to be told the future is not a lie, and that they are star-begotten. And yet, you common people of the night, what are you when the moon shall rise? They will pay to be told that, too. They will tell you anything, in return for certainty. And so, finding that out, I shouldered my bag of mischief and on I went. I am a Magician. I can give the future floors. And then I found my daughter.”

  “Selina is not your daughter.”

  “You have raped a coarse, unhappy girl, sensitive, kind, receptive. That concerns neither me nor her.” Restrained by the knowledge that impertinence, unlike insult, which is a judgment, arises only from ignorance, and so does not deserve to be punished, only to be put down, he explained a little. “I have given that wad of putty a name, a nature, a family, and a soul. I have taught it how to walk. Of necessity, then, she is my daughter. Your betters can be touched, but not by you. They are your betters, because there is something in them not even they can touch. What happens to our bodies does not concern us. Until you learn that, everything you try to touch will turn to smoke and ash.

  “Walnut, cedar, pine and thorn

  Were the trees when I was born,

  They are neither yours nor mine,

  Thorn, cedar, walnut, pine.

  The tree is cut. The wood is worn.

  Cedar, walnut, pine, and thorn.”

  The Magician, who had been tracing patterns in the dust with his stick, looked up. Somewhere in the forest there was the crash of a windfall. He scuffed the pattern out. He did not like it, but he had learned to accept it. He sighed.

  “There is a pitiable creature called Manglana, condemned to repeat into eternity an event which never occurred. She has done so an hundred times. She will do so an hundred again. She never sees the faces of those with whom she does this thing. She is a prostitute and a camp follower. In return, she is given money, jewels, troop movements, battle plans, the comings and goings of commanders. She is a lonely, wayward, helpless drudge. One day, in a burnt-over field, she met an old man, who asked her why she was crying, for he had often wept dry-eyed himself. He was a man who had caught the plague in both houses, and now stalked through the empty rooms. He had become the carrier of one disease, by almost dying of another. Because he had asked her why she cried, and because she had never before had anyone to protect, she nursed him until he was well. In return, he did certain things for her. They have been together ever since. As you have just seen, it is my endeavor to raise the dead, and to enter minds. I can do both, so take care. I can make things you have never seen and know not of, obey me.

  “Manglana does not even know who Selina is. Nor does Selina know who Manglana is. To Selina, you are nothing but a stable boy. There is nothing wrong with being a robber. Fine men as often as not have been born on the wrong side of the blanket. But that is all they are, until they have proved themselves to be something else. But that is all they are, unless they are something else. Robbers. Since my name has meant nothing, even to me, for many years, you are to address me as sir. You lose thereby no dignity you have. We could not lose the dignity we have, if we wanted to. It goes down with us, and we go down with it.”

  And he gave Mysendonck a hopeless look.

  “It is because the boats, my boy, are for the crew, not for the passengers. Passengers vanish tomorrow, but there will always be boats. You would not have clawed your way up to be captain, even of robbers, if you had not always known that. As for me, I am the Flying Dutchman. I am sad, but I am not unhappy, for I know my ship.”

  Mysendonck sensed something moving, pleading, restless, inexorable, and never still.

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  The Magician shrugged. “Ah well, it’s not like that.” He looked at Mysendonck and smiled. “It suits me here. But
we need supplies. A robber is not a common thief. He has a horse, he is a knight turned inside out, he has his equerries. Selina and I can get you information, tell when the pay wagons lumber in, what house is undefended, where the commissary is. It is to our mutual advantage. You in turn shall be our private army. And we shall need a blue wagon. It always has to be blue, I do not know why. It is her color.”

  To his amazement, Mysendonck, who had got his high spirits back, saluted, turned on his heel, and marched away. They had become conspirators.

  Well, you are a fine fellow, thought the Magician, clapping his big slender hands on his knees and standing up. But you are not the expected one. It is a shame.

  And for a moment (the mood was rare and seldom lasted long), he felt shabby.

  40

  Richelieu’s only purpose in the Germanies, apart from such territorial necessities as Alsace-Lorraine and the fortress of Philipsburg, was to destroy Hapsburg power by raising dissension. He scarcely needed to make the attempt. The dissension had raised itself. Nonetheless, perfumes are best used to cover up the stinks of cunning. La Gloire de France is a perfume.

  “If you do not obey me,” said a commander with only 32 quarterings to a junior lieutenant, palace hatched, with 64, “I shall report you to the King.”

  The lieutenant took off his glove and struck the almost commoner with it. “Report that to the King,” he said. The French, when it comes to battle, have taken Descartes for their commander, and are apt to say cogito, ergo sum, which though a noble statement, rallies no man to the last redoubt.

  On September 6, 1634, the Swedish armies had been defeated at Nördlingen by the Imperial forces. It was a disaster, and profited the French much, who, after it, could treat the Swedes as mercenaries, and no more. The French can never win, because they will seldom fight. The armies of few nations have been defeated more often, but no nation is more feared. And for this there are reasons.

  Oxenstierna had not come to like the Germans, but he had come to understand them, and to admire the same thing he was constrained to curse. There is a special kind of pigheadedness which, though it defeats us, is all that pulls us through, because of what it stands for. It stands for a blind phallic thrust and the stupidity to take God on His own terms and go down fighting. After all, we might win, and if we won, we would be gods ourselves. From defeat on those terms comes the certainty of our resurrection.

  This great thrust of the soul had the farthest lunge among the sea voyagers, but now we are doomed to make our voyages by land.

  I have read of volcanoes, but I have seen none. When the glacier has done with calving, the calf surfaces awash, and raises its weight to the natal height of sea treachery. It is God’s blue, white and green manta, which can kill, unlike the black manta of the tropic seas, not because of a sting in its tail but because of itself. It waits to be hit; that is the only way it can conquer.

  And Oxenstierna had been hard hit. For the second time in his life he did not sleep. Twelve thousand Swedes were dead at Nördlingen, and there were not that many of them. The Protestant German princelings flocked to the French ambassador. They did not flock to Oxenstierna. It was one of those swells in the course of any war; he had been caught in a running sea. On September 15 the Spanish forces took Göppingen, on the 16th, Heilbronn, on the 18th, Weiblingen, on the 20th, Württemberg. Nuremberg went. Frankfort went. Würzburg went.

  Only Augsburg, Blicksburg, and Mainz remained, Heidelberg, Strasbourg, and Hanau. So everything went Richelieu’s way. It was necessary to implore both aid and money.

  It is the great skill of the French. In a man’s world, they play a woman’s game. They gossip, intrigue, pay, and wait. In a man’s game, they would not last five minutes. But women, though they have the skill, have not the strength for politics. There comes a time when one must call the armies out, and not even Zenobia in her prime was a commander in the field.

  Richelieu had once led troops, but that had been nothing more than dressage. As commander in the field, Oxenstierna could therefore bargain for the cost of his men, if for nothing else, and hope for future opportunity to shift the terms back again his way.

  It was stalemate. One must clear the board and begin a different game.

  *

  This, to Lars and Hannale, meant only that, descending an abrupt rockfall into an empty road, they were suddenly swept on by hysterical peasants, as on the fore edge of a broom.

  They fled in carts. They dragged travois behind them. They were fleeing to that leader they had cheated and wanted none of, the Swede, the Protestant who would save them from the Catholic hordes. Lars and Hannale were carried forward by that crowd of the dishonest, the watchful, the waiting, the terrified, and crushed by the weight of people who had never had the courage to stand up, but now, erect and trembling, came begging to be plucked from their own burning.

  It was a human bore, raised by a volcanic explosion under sea, running everything before it, smashing it to bits, driving onward from its epicenter toward the nearest shore, or else, over the empty waters, rushing weaker and weaker toward its own subsidence.

  There is a great noise hovers over the fleeing, the voice of the omnivorous crowd, the noise of disturbed waters. Over them passes the angel Althabanazor, forefinger cast up, with a rush, the Hebrew deity of Death.

  Here and there rises the individual and therefore human shriek of a man shucked off the longboat and drowning. Otherwise it is the basic inhumanity of the human race that pours down that road, lemmings chattering into seas that were once causeways, driven by a migratory fear to geographical suicide, going overpopulous to their deaths, in the prudent pruning of a general immolation. When there are too many of us, that governor within the race declares a lemming war. If they have not the guts to take their own initiative, let them die. A few are lost that way, but not many, and nothing to the remainder saved. The stock is weeded out, therefore improved, and that is all that will save the race. It is involuntary, there is no other way, for most men lack will.

  Oxenstierna feared for the overturning of his coach, and decided, hell, a horse is faster. He was not the man to be cut down by such a thing; he had not forgotten how to ride a horse.

  Like a swarm of demented bees who have lost their queen—no branch will do—the mob swept on. Lars snatched Hannale out of it. It was that or be crushed to death. But the rush had swerved. They soon found out why.

  Below them, off the road, stretched for ten miles an Imperial camp. Pennants flapped. Tents stood striped. A bugle blew. A platoon rehearsed. There were campfires. Women hung out washing. It was like a carnival, set in the bottoms of autumn land. There was no way of telling which side it was on.

  They started down into it.

  41

  “Laddie, there’s nothing für it. Thee must go für a soldjer.”

  They had come up against a Scots mercenary who had taken them in because of the girl.

  “Ay, she’s a lassie.”

  The Scots somehow understand all in man that is more than man, and have little patience with anything else. That they cherish like a man planting a pine seedling in rocky heath. There is a sanity in an oaten loaf not to be found in black bread, and for this reason they are a mad people, harum-scarum but decorous, generous, but naturally of a saving disposition, kind but mercilessly shrewd. It has been enough to make a poor country stark but rich.

  “Sir,” said Lars, with that thank-you scrape no German ever quite forgets.

  “I’m a MacKensie. The exact name don’t matter,” said their veteran. As for what a covenanter was doing in Catholic troops, that was where the canniness came in. “Laddie, they pay wurse, but ye get mür, if ye got yür wits abawt ye.” This with a wink.

  “Killin’,” said MacKensie of Dumfries (to which he had no title, but the MacKensies of Dumfries weren’t there to say him nay), “is killin’. And mostly it’s lice and paychents and a lidtle audacitie befowr.”

  And having seen them fed, out of a stew badly burned, while the lig
hts of the field went out and the sentries began to echo over the camp like bad omens, he said, “Gie the child th’ rroeb,” and went to sleep.

  He was a genuine sandy, resourceful, susceptible to gentleness, bitter, tender, and blunt, but he didn’t want you to know it, and didn’t think much of the Germans, either. But Lars was blond, and seemed redeemable. To be blond is part of their past, part of the history of Main Land and of the Minch. And they seldom see one as white as this.

  MacKensie had been with the Swedes until the Great King died. But once they’re dead, unless they’re your own men, that’s that. The late King was the better man, but the Spaniards had perquisites. He was eager that Lars join the troop.

  Impossible to explain to a man of good will why you don’t share his feelings. You’re grateful, you admire him, but you don’t. He would never understand.

  “We were used to think it a holy warr,” said MacKensie. “But nae morr. So ye must learn to cheat them, laddie.” He was himself a middle-aged man as clean and innocent as Monday’s stoop. But he wanted Lars on his side. He could use a boy about the place. He wanted company.

  Indeed it was a lonely camp, and had a caravanserai and Asiatic feeling, the torches burning down the perspectives of the night, like cinnamon-colored cypress trees, for with their habitual indifference to felicity, the Spaniards had elected to bivouac in the soggy bottoms of a marshy plain.

  Three civilians to each enlisted man was minimal, seven to eight was nothing out of the way. Guttersnipes, kitchen orphans, stable boys, whores, respectable children, nurses, wives, valets, gun carriers, grooms, personal servants, cardsharpers, a company of players now and then, followed the soldiers from field to field. Since there was no commissary, a horde of tin merchants, sutlers, wine sellers, bakers, Jewish pedlars, and cooks followed after. There was no order. Anything could happen in the dark, and did. Since looting was permitted, there was also a swarm of pawnbrokers, moneylenders, smallclothes men, thieves, criminals, and members of the spirituality who received stolen goods. The nights were seldom still for long. It was a model of the world, with the roof taken off and the streets torn up. There were too many priests, most of them half starved. You could find a man there for any purpose.