People of the Book

by David Stacton

  Waking up ten years older than she could be, in her bed, Manglana sweated and peered into the empty dark.

  They flee from me that sometime did me seek,

  With nakèd foot stalking within my chamber,

  Once have I seen them gentle, tame, and meek,

  That now are wild, and do not once remember

  That sometimes they have put themselves in danger

  To take bread at my hand; and now they range,

  Busily seeking in continual change….

  It was no dream; for I lay broad awaking:

  But all is turn’d now, through my gentleness,

  Into a bitter fashion of forsaking….

  “How like you this?”—what hath she now deservèd?

  “I won’t grow old, I won’t,” she said, and bit the pillow.

  *

  There is a modesty proper to each condition of man. The humility of a proud one is not the same thing, nor should it be, as the humility of a weak one. Men have their betters, but their inferiors are not among them. As for who does the choosing, there are mistakes, but on the whole men choose themselves, and have as much to do with their own advancement as chickens have in a roost at night, who in the natural course progress from pole to pole, a matter seen to by foxes, old age, death, the hatchet, a talent for crowding, and some skill at ruffing one’s own feathers.

  But when someone asks us in to shut us out, what are we to do?

  Looking Mysendonck hard in the eye, but with his own eyes too wide, Lars gripped his pommel and said, “I want to come, too.”

  The robbers had been night-riding the district, with layovers to get sober, for a month. They were now mounting in the archway leading out to the parterre.

  Though this was what he wanted, Mysendonck was troubled, felt compunction, looked down, mumbled, and said it wasn’t for the likes of him.

  But though it wasn’t what Lars wanted to do, it was what he had to do. Youth has its compulsions: a last dip to be taken on the last morning, otherwise we shall never be back to this beach for the summer again; a chasm that has to be jumped on this particular afternoon, for if we flunk it now we shall be cowards forever. It is a personal test nobody knows anything about; those are the worst ones. So he did not let go of the pommel, but shakily insisted upon coming.

  “Let him have Skog,” said Mysendonck, and as Lars swung up, watched his doppelgänger with the next thing to dread, a triumphant and self-destructive sorrow. These horses had been given Norse names. It was more of Earl Haakon again.

  Once they had started, the torches were doused, and there was no light until their eyes had adjusted to the stars, for neither was there a moon.

  There was a clatter over the flags of the parterre, and after that no sound but a snort, a wheeze, the saddles creaking, and the rustling of brittle grass. Lars had not chosen well this night to get his courage up; there was a frost. Mysendonck rode ahead and would have none of him.

  Lars, seeing the castle floating in its prompt mists as they turned a switchback, was glad to get away, but sorry he had come.

  He knew nothing of Mysendonck’s men, except that he did not like them. Now he rode surrounded by them. They breathed heavily, they cursed, and they stank. Had they been otherwise than they were, that would not have mattered. But they were what they were and nothing else. They lived in a fever. They did not like the idea of someone else unlike them among them. Mysendonck was as much of their betters as they could stand, and Mysendonck was no better than anyone else, for all men bleed if they are stuck. One by one they entered the wood. Each had with him on his pommel a long, curled, lovingly plaited whip.

  At the head of the column Mysendonck was chewing his cud and not liking the taste of it much. Though he wanted the two of them to be alike in everything, that did not mean that he wanted them to do the same things. What would life be, could we not save something out?

  He knew his men, and Lars was back there with them. Goddam them all. After a half hour’s brood in this manner, Mysendonck rode back down the line, and led Lars up to the head of the column where he belonged, and the men could make of that what they would. He did not speak. He was in a temper with the whole of creation just then, and had no energy left over.

  There was something wrong with the men. There always was, and there always would be. Relaxing, he glanced at Lars from time to time, but in profile it was a figure much like his own, it told him nothing. He smelled no fear. Lars was a fool.

  For three hours they circled through the woods in some pattern Lars could not follow, and then began to descend. Ahead of them the woods grew lighter, but not much lighter. Standing up in his stirrups, Mysendonck waved part of his men toward a gulley to their left, and waited until they had gone down into it. Then the other men moved up, precise as an unopposed maneuver.

  Below them a road from the gulley entered a small glade. An Imperial baggage train had camped out there. There was no guard. Improbably, by torchlight, its members were gathered watching players on a platform. It seemed to be the same play, the same players, Lars had seen months ago, before coming to the Katzburg.

  The woods here had a dusty smell. Mysendonck grunted.

  “You asked to come,” he said. “We ride around to the other end of the glade. And no noise.”

  When his remaining men were lined up again, he sent seven ahead, and a minute later, the other five.

  “Shoot the soldiers first. Shoot them,” he yelled. Life had left him with small affection for such. Lars stared at the other Mysendonck he didn’t know. Then Mysendonck spurred his horse after his second group, and Lars’ horse, having been trained for this work, followed.

  It was a matter of rounding the campers up and driving them to the forest road. The men galloped through the encampment, cracking their whips around hips and heads. It was a kind of polo. The later five men and Mysendonck galloped on the outskirts, shooting a soldier when they could. This was not difficult. The women in the camp ran screaming underfoot.

  “For God’s sake,” said Mysendonck, drawing rein next to Lars, “here’s a pistol. Use it.” And seeing a soldier with his arms raised, begging, he used his own. A woman rushed up out of darkness, with the face of a dead Hannale, and as soon collapsed. A young soldier dashed for the wood, but was cut down. He was no more than a boy, to judge by the way he ran.

  Though the last to scramble, the players were soon ahead of the women, and by screaming, shouting, shooting, and swift riding, it was possible, never mind the noises, in ten minutes to beat almost everyone up the road, as fast as bad food and not much of it and too much terror could send them.

  Mysendonck grinned. He got a glittering excitement out of this. A hubbub shrieking came from ahead of them. “They’ve reached the barrier. Now we’ll see something,” he said. And next there came the creaking plunge and heavy feathered smack of crashing trees, silence, and then musket shots and more screams.

  It is a Swedish form of ambush, taken up in the Germanies, called bräte, or if you use it more than once, brätar. It can only be done in thick woods. First a barrier is formed across a road. Then, as soldiers and refugees come up it, hemmed in by underbrush, trees half chopped through are felled over them. Down they crash with a whip of branches and cones more swiftly lethal than any man-made whip. Then the peasants close in with lances, and remove the life from the living with motions made familiar from their natural employment of pitching hay.

  There was no defense. Men do not take weapons to watch a play. From the pile of trees there was nothing but a low whimpering, as of a covey of quail in there, crouched before death in the bracken.

  Mysendonck sat arms akimbo, exhilarated, flushed, and smiling. “That should do,” he said, and began to draw off his men, though they didn’t seem to want to stop poking.

  There was a rustle of pine boughs, and from the center of the heap there rose, got its footing, and stood up, a lean figure improbably dressed in a long fur-trimmed robe and a tall peaked hat. He looked like the Magician; he
was in his Faustus robes. He removed his hat; it was as though a candle had removed its snuffer.

  “Exzellenz,” he said. “I am but a poor player, in the words of our poet, a poor strutting player, caught in a mousetrap. Perhaps you have seen us in The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, it is also called The Revenge of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark….”

  *

  Mysendonck burst out laughing, and stayed his men. Encouraged by this, there came up from around the player the supporting members of his company as though new-hatched, in what was left of their makeup and costumes, Walther, Fair Helen (a poor shivering white-skinned boy), Emperors, Kings, and several executioners disguised as devils. They stood at various heights on felled branches, emerging from the boughs a head, a bodice, a body. Some were bleeding. One had a broken dangling arm. One had a cap and bells, which shook when he shook.

  “You want your life, I suppose.”

  The Faustus looked apologetic, as though regretting the necessity, and held his pointed cap in his hand. “Yes, Exzellenz. It is something I have never been able to bring myself to part with, not even in moments of discouragement. You see, it was a holy trust, handed me by my father. ‘Boy,’ he said, ‘lose anything you like, but not your life. It is a keepsake handed down for generations in our family, and though nobody living knows the worth of it, still, it is our only heirloom. I wish that I could leave you more. But boy,’ he said …”

  “Not Exzellenz; Graf,” said Mysendonck. “Graf Haakon.”

  The Faustus bowed, but he was showing too much white of eye and calculating distances to the nearest shrub.

  “Your Excellency’s name is well known in these parts. Had I known to whom I was speaking, I would not …”

  “If you want it, take it,” said Mysendonck. “But you will have to run for it, first. Come out of there, all of you.”

  Slowly, and not trusting anybody, but when there’s nobody else to trust we have to trust who’s there, they came shakily out. Faustus was wearing a magistrate’s chain around his neck. Mysendonck leaned down and yanked it off. “Tinsel,” he said. “All right, run. If you can get into the wood”—he pointed to a place fifty feet back, where the underbrush was less thick—“whatever you save is yours. Off.”

  Dr. Faustus picked up his skirts and made a spindleshanked dash for it, with the rest of the Emperies and Powers and Fair Helen falsetto after him, while the robbers shot them up and fired at their heels, with a flick of the dusty surface of the road, not unlike the flick when a good flycast hits the water. It was a game.

  “You like it, don’t you?” Lars said to Mysendonck, after even the jingle-footed fool had scrambled away, with nothing worse than a flesh wound.

  Mysendonck spurred his horse, and when Lars caught up, said, “They look prettier dead. I’m used to it. They aren’t people. Nobody you kill is a person. He’s something else, otherwise you couldn’t do it.” He looked at Lars with the glitter still on him. “Nobody on the other side is a person. And when you’ve changed sides often enough, there just aren’t any people any more. I don’t know where they went to, but there just aren’t.”

  And punching Lars affectionately, as though he would rather linger, he went to lead his men down into what was left of the camp, some of it burning, to loot the baggage train.

  In the firelight the dead seemed to heave on the ground where they had fallen, as though in a ground swell.

  A fight started up. Mysendonck had kicked somebody down. Some of the robbers dropped their bags and closed in. The man who had been knocked down got his pistol out and cocked it.

  “Look out,” yelled Lars.

  Mysendonck had survived because he knew his own men, and was therefore always ready. He ducked, the pistol went off, and before he could get away, the man had had his guts slit out. Mysendonck let the body fall away from the knife. There was no other way to settle arguments, and this one was now settled.

  Infuriated, as Lars came up, he grabbed him down and smeared him with the blood, back and forth across his face. “I want you to be like me,” he shouted, and pushed him to the ground. “I want you to be like me.”

  Lars waited where he had fallen.

  Now there had been a quarrel between their leaders, the men felt better. They finished loading and made no more trouble.

  Mysendonck came up and knelt beside Lars. “Are you all right?” he asked. He began to wipe the blood off. Lars let him wipe it off.

  Mysendonck looked at the rag, threw it away, and sitting down, gave a sigh deep enough to be a sob. He sat with his head between his knees. Then he raised it.

  “How do you think your Magician eats?” he asked. “Those are grain bags. He spies out the troop movements. We get the loot and he keeps the supplies. Sometimes we catch a duck or a goose or a pig. We work for him, he works for us. How do you think anybody lives?”

  Lars felt his face, where some blood had clotted and granuled at the sides of his nose.

  “Are you all right?”

  Lars nodded.

  “Let me help you up.”

  “I can help myself up.”

  “I want to help you up,” said Mysendonck, hung on to him; exasperated, let him go; and watched him sadly until he was mounted.

  “You’d better ride with me,” he said shortly, but on the long ride back said nothing else, nor did Lars speak either.

  It was a lesson. The knife knows what it wants and so does the hand. Morals mean nothing, for the brain is far away from the hand, and the hand knows what it wants. Mysendonck had not noticed that putting his knife in Lars’ hand, he had forced him to slash the corpse. It had been soft and easy and it had felt right. So Lars had wanted to vomit.

  What good does it do to say no? It would be better to admit yes and then not do it. But that calls for an act of will, and we are tired, and besides, if it can only be done by not doing it, is it right? Where, then, is the world we believed in?

  Mysendonck’s hand was bigger than his, and stronger. The shirt of Nessus comes in many sizes and many cloths, and in rippling, sweat-soaked leather that smells of mold. And as soon as we rip it off, there it is waiting to be put on again, as already it was now, flowing around his body as he jogged along.

  It is a problem of life and death. How can I love my mortal enemy?

  And yet I do.

  *

  The Magician noted, and was pleased, that the two boys seemed to be avoiding each other these days. This made his existence placid, until he also noted that Lars seemed just as assiduously to be avoiding him. Those little suppers to which he had come to look forward had turned into monologues, for Selina seemed not to wish to speak, either.

  *

  Lars had taken to walks in the dark. Hannale saw too much, and this was not a problem he could discuss with her. Sometimes he shut his eyes, the better to be reassured by that roiling sense of true identity which has nothing to do with our body, face, or hands, beliefs or opinions, which is the thing that keeps us going.

  He would walk not in the Katzburg, but in the soggy night meadow, on the edge of the powdery woods, and now it was the beginning of December, in the snow. When he saw any human shadow ahead of him he turned aside.

  Close your eyes, and that spiritual yearning for the infinite which is man’s real desire, and all that satisfies him, like hunger after the fourth day, comes back.

  “Here,” says the Saga, “we came to a place where there was a lake of hammer shape and a hill; and we put up a marker, saying we were twenty-four days’ journey from the coast, being a party of thirty men and six women, having lost two men to the copper people in boats made of a tree they have here. At this place we built a long house and passed the winter, putting our trust in God, and in the spring journeyed back to our boats, and after a journey of thirty-six days, losing one boat and pausing to take Haakon Erlskinner and fifteen men from a rock in the ocean, where they had been shipwrecked, we reached Main Land, and after ten more days, Iceland. And we called this place where we had passed the
winter, Vinland, for in that land there were many vines, and many grapes. We thought it a good place to put a colony, but the next winter being hard, no boats put out to the Western Sea, nor in the year following, nor in the year after that. But in the fifth year boats went to Groenland, where a witchwoman much respected paid Leif and his party much honor, and sang, and gave us omens. But that year, the ice being early, and the season well advanced, we made no seafaring either, but returned to Torslund, whence we came.”

  And so the records of a new world vanish, and all things return to the sea.

  As happens in winter weather, the mists rose from the ravines thinner, and except when the wind blew, the weather was warmer.

  Increasingly he went to the ruined abbey. He had half forgotten Stöss. The Magician had asked him again to move. But though they scarcely spoke except when Lars went through his chambers to get to his own, Lars would leave neither the outer screen nor Mysendonck.

  Beside the churchyard wall, one evening in late snow, he saw a heavy shadow waiting for him. Old churchyards have such things, so, without hurry, he went to meet it. He had always gone to meet shadows.

  It was Mysendonck, another night walker these days. He eased himself from the wall and fell into step. Their instincts friendlier than they were, they went into the churchyard, among the tombs, into the nave, where the snow, melting and freezing, had formed a sort of halfhearted isinglass over the windows, but without images. The wind blew there like a chorus.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t go when he asked you to,” said Mysendonck.

  “I said not.”

  Mysendonck raised his clenched fists to his chin.

  Lars stopped and shut his eyes, but the roil meant nothing. “I don’t know how.”

  “You hate me.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  Mysendonck didn’t like that, either. “You can leave if you want to. Why don’t you? Go on to that uncle of yours, or up there, to the schloss. Just go. For God’s sake go. What help are you?”