People of the Book

by David Stacton

  We are in a cellar. Wagner, though a good boy, is a serious-minded mischiefmaker, and will never understand. The compact is signed. Fair Helen launches a thousand ships, from the topless towers of Ilium. Something bubbles in an alembic. It is better than Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. The Magician buys back his powers, and yet he stands condemned, and yet he dies in agony. He has seen too much.

  Behind them, Mysendonck sat on horseback, watching, not the stage—he had no use for flummery—but a face in the crowd, his own face, which he could not see, it would not turn to him.

  Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,

  And burnèd is Apollo’s laurel bow

  That sometime grew within this learned man.

  Someone reached up from behind and snatched Hannale from MacKensie’s shoulders, which had gone to sleep; it took him a moment to realize what had been done. There was a stir in the crowd as people passed, and Hannale screamed.

  No bad man likes to be bested, and it was their new game.

  The men hurried the child away, and MacKensie took after them with a yell, but had to fight against the crowd behind him. Lars followed. They came out of the press in time to see shadows scurrying ahead of them. MacKensie got there first, but soon fell. He had been easy to deal with; one had only to kill him.

  Mysendonck stood up in his stirrups and whistled.

  Running past the old man laid out, Lars chased the men to the edge of the woods. He had that morion in his hand, and catching up, began to bat the first face he saw. They had him down in no time, kicking him where they could.

  Mysendonck, who knew the men, if not by name, by nature, scattered them without effort. Lars, off balance because of the unaccustomed cuirass, had trouble getting up again. One of the men still had Hannale, but that was taken care of, and as the man fell and the child began to run, Mysendonck snatched her up into the air by an arm, and then returned.

  “I’ve got the child. Get up behind.”

  Lars found himself staring at a familiar stranger.

  “The old man,” he said.

  “To the devil with the old man. He’s dead. Get up. They know me. They’ll raise the whole camp.”

  Throwing the morion aside, Lars got up. They headed for the blue wagon to fetch Manglana away, for these bravos if they cannot get their revenge on the world one way, will get it another.

  III.iv.15: As the law of nations permits many things, in the manner above explained, which are not permitted by the law of nature, so it prohibits some things which the law of nature allows. Thus spies, if discovered and taken, are usually treated with the utmost severity. Yet there is no doubt, but the law of nations allows anyone to send spies, as Moses did to the land of promise, of whom Joshua was one.

  As for MacKensie, he was as good dead in one ditch as another, for

  II.i.4: It admits of some doubt, whether those who unintentionally obstruct our defense, or escape, which are necessary to our preservation, may be lawfully maimed or killed.

  So Lars, who had never before seen the face of someone who had been kind to him blindly staring back out of sudden death, had several things to think about. About Mysendonck he did not think. There are meetings in this world that lead to further meetings, it had all been taken care of in that hut; for to cast a true horoscope, you need only to know the hour and minute of any emotion’s birth, to know what follows after. It is a net.

  Sitting behind Mysendonck was to touch again upon his only humanity apart from Hannale.

  It itched a little.

  42

  “You were looking for me, you found me,” said Mysendonck shortly. If he had been looking for anybody himself, he would never say so.

  With her arm wrenched and her clothes torn, Hannale sat in front of Manglana (who had split her skirt the easier to ride), drowsing. They had been riding all night. Her only question had been to watch the flames before they entered the wood (Mysendonck’s men had set a few fires, to make a useful disorder behind them). Children accept rescue without surprise. Only its not coming would distress them. On she was jogged, half asleep.

  The woods were getting thinner, and dawn comes before it comes, to the peaks first; they had been moving steadily upward, in a companionable creak of saddle leather, for hours. The horses, as dilatory as they could get away with, now quickened, smelling the hay and no burdens of home. These trees were under a pall of silence, but had sudden whiffs of unexpected smells, a patch of cowslips, who knows what. The men began to wake up. Ahead of them pale light began to glow, and they came out at the foot of the meadow in time to see the last star fading.

  It was not exactly a meadow, but rather a long low rising bluff which steadily surmounted the trees, but which was boggy from some concealed spring. Today it was flocked with flowers, and no mist there, but only in the gorges to each side, level with the bluff, but halfway up the forests of the far ravines. It was a scene deep bitten by the clean acids of daybreak, without shadow, and exact. Two hundred yards away rose the bastions and outworks of the Katzburg, the terrace with its heavy, ruinated, clumsy Roman screen and entrance arch. Nothing more of the main blocks could be seen but serried roofs and the upper fifty feet of the tower.

  Mysendonck felt the satisfaction of showing what he had come to, to the only person who would have understood what he had come from, but said nothing. It was a building too large and too unexpected to be grasped, a barrage of columns, statues, turrets, architraves, and rusticated masonry, its windows blinded by having their glass put out. A single wisp of chiffon mist hovered over the meadow, as though tearing to be gone: it was rotted stuff.

  From the forest you could see what could not be seen from the Katzburg itself, that next to it stood, behind a stone wall, a tall Gothic ruined abbey church, the origin of all this pride, a tree soaring up out of the nave, broken tracery at the windows, a great door, monuments, and a graveyard at whose entrance there seemed always to be something waiting, as though it were still, if only by the dead, in use.

  The other horsemen fell behind. The worst of it was, usually when you come out to an open meadow, there is some sound, the inexorable purl of water, the diamond scratch of an unexpected bird, but here there was no sound at all. There was just waiting.

  *

  The Magician, who had not spent a night here alone before, but who was afraid of nothing on earth or under it or in heaven, nonetheless sometimes found himself listening. It was as though the building rebuilt itself in the night, and had its own plans. He had felt no need to explore. The Katzburg was the familiar he had come from, but on a bigger scale. Yet sometimes the immense weight of it came and stood beside his bed, in the darkness, snuffling like a beast of burden. So he read late and rose early.

  He was on the tower. Old men who cannot die like always to see another dawn. Besides, since he could sense anything that concerned him as it approached, he had been summoned there.

  What he saw when he came out on the platform was something so old it saddened him. He saw the dawn of the world over the lustrous blue-black forest, and next, color. Away from here were inhabited towns with which he had no business, Fulda, Vacham, Schelusingen, Königshofen, but here was only the great brooding silence of the Thüringerwald to the east. To the southeast, to the southwest, were Coburg, Lichtenfels, Hassfurt, Schweinfurt, and farther off, hamlets without name or nature; to the north, Reinhardsbrunn, and beyond that, Ratzeburg, Lübeck, Wismar, Glückstadt, Krempe, Stade, Schwerin, Travemünde, the places of home, never to be seen again. The world is a desert full of unprofitable sands which swallow water. We have nothing to look forward to but a handful of dates, given us by a hairy-handed stranger. For Esau was a great villain: Esau was sometimes kind.

  These are expensive thoughts, said the Magician. They vitiate the will. Remember you are nothing but a wicked old man, trying to cheat the ages, bending in the wind, and very difficult to blow over. You cannot die; you can only give hostages.

  Below him, there came first from the wood a woman on
a palfrey, holding in her lap a child; then two men on a white gelding; and after them a sorry lot of scavengers, come back to roost.

  “Ach so,” breathed the Magician, without surprise. “Die heilige flücht.” But why had Selina returned with a child?

  They had appeared out of stillness, sharp as a sudden warning. He started down the tower. He had mushrooms. He was a master of omelets. Something had for once gone wrong in his own right favor, and he sensed this. He felt young.

  *

  Looking up as they passed through the outer arch, Hannale saw above her two leopards, but said nothing.

  Otherwise she would have learned that they were not leopards. They were the two Landsknechte supporters of the Babelhausen arms, placed there by the Prioress Uta von Babelhausen, the grand reconstructress of this place, which she had extracted for a plaything from her family. During the Peasants’ Wars, a hundred years ago, she had been flung out naked into a ditch for her pains by gentlemen in wrapped leggings who had obeyed her until then, but now went rioting for food, smashing as they went, and firing the abbey church. Getting up out of the ditch, she had appeared among them, too indignant to reach for clothes, and told them to behave themselves. It was a fighting family; they did as they were told. One of them even handed her a cloak.

  But she had been the last prioress. Weeds and bushes uprooted the roads. The Katzburg was only a lost name now, and a haunted reputation.

  And young men, Landsknechte, who come from far places, are they not snow leopards after all? They melt into thin air, their beauty is their grace, and their grace a distant truth made savage. They have velvet paws, and steel talons to defend themselves.

  *

  To the left of the gate lay marble rooms turned into stables; to the right, offices, the state stairs; and above, state chambers which had never had a use, and smaller cribs for the domestics of this place. Manglana left them. Selina went through the outer court and the inner, back to the Magician.

  Mysendonck—who would have embraced Lars had he dared, or had he known how, who longed to touch what one cannot touch in a woman: a friend, a fellow conspirator—threw his arm along Lars’ shoulder, pretended ease, saw them settled, and went about his business. Nonetheless, it gives a glow, and puckering coarse lips in that sensitive lost face of his, he began to whistle.

  PART III

  43

  WITH THE WONDERFUL indifference of children, who take the marvelous as a matter of course, confirmed at last to see it, but sometimes swallow hard, Hannale, who now they were safe here (she was sure of that) wandered where she would, watched from the intersection of two corridors of closed doors, at the far end of one of them, before a mullioned window unglazed, the whirling toward her with an inconstant motion, now approaching, now withdrawing, of a go-devil of leaves. Tired and dry, they rose from the floor into an insubstantial crown of dead laurel which rattled, shook, and spun, faster, slower, some settling again to the floor, some rising again from it; they had the desiccated prick of oak; they had been here who knows how long.

  And they seemed, not the shape of something, but themselves nothing, which yet defined an energy that lay beyond identity, but which by stirring them up defined itself. Ghosts did not bother her.

  There was often such a stir in these abandoned corridors, in the early morning and late afternoon, when the Katzburg became caught in convections of rising air.

  The Magician as yet refused to receive them. They knew no more of him than that an old man and a young woman lived somewhere deeper in the building.

  Like an insubstantial crowd, the leaves whirled over her, down the corridors, and she would shut her eyes before the sandy grit until the warmth had passed her, and, delighted, step through these go-devils, again and again. They reached to her three-foot shoulder, but sometimes stretched above her head, like something on the top shelf of the pantry you cannot even on tiptoe filch down. She did not precisely like it here. But she had the feeling that something was over. We do not expect to find these tiny twisters inside buildings. They are presences from the deserts and man’s waste spaces. Usually they whirl across the flats and abandoned farmyards, into eternity, unseen, unstopped, while tumbleweed fumbles at broken fences, or goes gravely end over end through orchards long since gone to ruinous wrack. In man’s desert places, the pillar of his belief, insubstantial, warm, carrying spilth, arises and bloweth where it listeth. There is a god so terrible, he cannot be carved. He sits in the tugging bushes. He exacted Isaac, but changed his mind. He is the wayward god of I am. He burns green. Gratingly, softly, whirling the dust and the sand after him, he says, I am not. It is another one of his illusions.

  To Hannale it was a flurry game. It was the imaginary playmate capable of its own motion. At the intersection of these corridors, which were streets with their doors closed, she found again the imaginary friend.

  Delighted, entranced, without fear she followed. There came to her from somewhere in the stone an inexorable music, plaintive, gentle, difficult to bow, confounded in its own overtones, wayward, enticing. It had nothing to do with her. But just the same it summoned her. It had in it the freshet voice of Walther von der Vogelweide:

  In einem zwîvellîchen wân

  was ich geseen und gedâhte

  ich wolte von ir dienste gân,

  wan da ein trôst mich wider brâhte.

  Trôst mag e, rehte niht geheien ouwê des!

  E ist vil kûme ein kleine troestelîn,

  so kleine, swenne ich iu gesage, ir spottet mîn.

  Doch fröwet sich lützel iemen, er enwie wes …

  (I was sitting, and downcast,

  and thinking not to serve her more;

  and then a little comfort passed,

  so I forebore.

  You could not call it comfort quite,

  it scarcely paused as it went by.

  Scorn me, but no one knows delight

  who knows not why …)

  and of long-forgotten things which have still the power to cause our motions; most, perhaps, those of an unknown child. It was a sound evoked from the mere hushing of the strings of the beautiful instruments of past time, lovingly, lightly, in passing through a room, as one might look at a familiar portrait, a Babelhausen, a Natt och Dag (nobody now knows which one), an old woman, long dead, who lived long enough, even so, to bestow a benign smile when one was a small child, too young to see these bones were sticks. She is benign, for she has lived long enough to see the twelfth, the fourteenth generation of Babelhausen, of Natt och Dag—who cares what it looks like, so it be there? In the latest autumn there is always one more life. The birds, departing south, before they go see buds of blooms they will not see. Like a spinster standing with a basket in a neighbor’s garden, she saves seed. Old music tears the heart out; it is the one part of the past we can still hear. It brings back those voices who sang it first. Under her floppy gardening hat, the old woman smiles and drops her shears. The whole thing dissolves as soon as it hits the surface of salt life, but hangs its restless curtains in the air, a snowstorm at sea, of rare occurrence, seldom glimpsed, but for those reaons the more bewitching.

  Gangly, her body bigger than she felt, Hannale followed the loosely spun wool thread of sound through that building until it became a catgut blare, while the whirlwinds fell in behind her, and flowing, subsided.

  Ahead there was another one, starting up from the floor like an anxious dog with pricked ears, a long rising tawny mass of leaves that barked at her. She did not know it, but she was now in the old part of the schloss.

  The dog flew at her, hackles up, and then fled crackling through an open door. As she followed, it whirled through an old man sitting there, and collapsed around him, flumping. She had never before seen a man quite so old.

  He sat on a field chair, in the middle of nothing. Between his knees he had a tapering fiddle the color of pearwood, with a single string, over which he was bent, bowing, the index finger of his left hand just beneath the bow, with a diagnostic pressure upo
n the gut, shifting, pausing. Within the box were fifty sympathetic strings. It was a Trumscheit, a nun’s fiddle; it sounded like a blurred trumpet, mixed with the snaffle of a drum.

  Out of it, with several bounces of the bow, he drew a series of startled, astonished grunts. In a strip of pale sun from a naked window, hunched over it, he was crooning a second song:

  “Revecy venir du Printans

  l’amoureuz et belle saizon….”

  It complained a little. Respectfully she waited just inside the door.

  It was an instrument he had found somewhere in the schloss, re-strung and given back its voice, so like his own—a sweet, contentious growl, alternating to a deeper timbre, and there was a telltale crack across the sounding board.

  “Child, it is a long tune,” he said, “and this is not a vielle.”

  Hannale said nothing, while seventy-six contemplated nine and a half without discomfort—as why not, they both held different ends, but it was the same rope. He smiled.

  “How did you come here, child?”

  As we narrow down each toward our own sex, we lose our clutch on possibility. The glittering towers and pinnacles of the not yet formed recede into the mists which hang always over the wonderful city of sleep. We lose our way. The familiar unmarked paths now lead to nightmare alley, lined with the half-remembered tombs of forgotten dolls. Maturity is a Roman thing, full of self-indulgence and no joy, and eats hearts. It lacks the laughing Greek austerity. But Hannale had not quite come there yet. She thought the city of sleep as big as the world, which was still alive to her with that city’s lights.

  “I followed the go-devil. And then it vanished and you were here.”