I was admitted by Frau Schuster, who gave a mighty gulp of relief and took me immediately into her plump and comforting arms!
Chapter Eight
An unkept appointment. Further dreams. St Odhran’s solution to our promised embarrassment. News of our inflammable air. A Cretan nightmare. My bafflement. More horrid discoveries. A cowardly decision.
AS I ENTERED the taproom, I heard a great galloping noise on the stairs and then St Odhran, all thigh-booted military man with pistols in his pockets and powder at his belt, led our four young friends, also armed like Pickaroons, down to the main floor, giving orders as he went until he fetched up in comical surprise a nose-length from me: ‘Deuce! You’re rescued already!’ He was almost aggrieved.
‘Released,’ I said. ‘Herr Klosterheim’s madness is at once more elaborate and subtler than that of the Landgräfin’s nephew.’ I went to sit in the nook by the old iron stove. I was still shivering. ‘He’s been talking at me all night. You’ve had word from Montsorbier?’
‘God’s blood! I’d forgotten. He’ll be waiting.’
‘He is not. He never was.’
St Odhran’s long face clouded. ‘Montsorbier’s no coward. He must be dead or down with a fever at least.’ The four Radicals stood awkwardly at his back, as disappointed as my partner in their expectations of adventure. ‘Someone should be sent to his address.’ He frowned. ‘But as I recall he gave none.’
‘Doubtless he’ll find us.’ I accepted spiced wine from Frau Schuster’s hand. ‘Did the Baron himself escort you home?’
‘He sent two of the ruffians who originally captured us. But before I left he’d recovered his spirits a little. He let me know that tragedy would result if we continued to drain his inheritance from his aunt.’
‘He’d disobey Klosterheim? He’s bolder than I guessed.’
‘Or more stupid. He’s the kind who’ll take his master’s literal meaning but will count himself a cunning villain if he conceives a plot avoiding the exact letter of Klosterheim’s law. He’ll be shocked, too, if accused of it.’
‘He still plans to murder us, you think?’
‘He’ll try to arrange our deaths, more likely. Clumsily.’ St Odhran smiled, loosening his sword belt. ‘I’m more curious about Klosterheim. Why should he save us? Did he say? He seemed familiar with your name.’
‘My friend, he’s another who demands a passage on our aerial frigate. He, like the Landgräfin, believes the Mittelmarch exists!’
St Odhran sat himself down on a bench and began to untie his jabot. ‘Perhaps we should after all build the thing. We stand to make as large a fortune, at least, from selling berths aboard her!’
‘And follow one of your fanciful maps, too?’ I began to laugh louder than the joke deserved. ‘Where should we go, St Odhran? Into Klosterheim’s imagined worlds? Into the Mittelmarch to look for the Landgräfin’s husband? And what of our mysterious backer? Does the Prince wish to create an empire in the netherworld? And he who gives us the Hydrogen gas – where does he wish to fly – the land of Cockaigne?’ Breakfast was beginning to accumulate on the nearest table and at Frau Schuster’s urgent gesturing I rose to put my legs under the board.
Then I’d fainted on St Odhran before I knew it, swooning with what was probably no more than fatigue, yet dreaming of Klosterheim’s bleak presence, of a sword with a bird trapped in a glowing pommel, of a radiant cup. And I dreamed of the mistress of my heart. Libussa stroked my breast and breathed into my ear, making me helpless as a snake in a swami’s basket, and I woke in the familiar swamp of my own perspiration. Where was Montsorbier? Had the duel been fought and was I wounded? I could not tell where the dream and the actuality divided. Moonlight ran into the room as the clouds broke above Mirenburg’s delicate towers. I sat upright, pulling off my wet nightshirt, washing my body in the cold water which was silver in the china bowl, and I remembered that Klosterheim talked at me all night and Montsorbier failed to meet me for his satisfaction and sent no seconds to apologise. Some alchemist or natural philosopher had promised us Hydrogen gas for our aerial barque. All in one day. Yesterday? My instinct shouted ‘Conspiracy’ but my head reasoned ‘Coincidence’. When such conflict occurred I heeded neither but stayed on a middle course, if that were possible. Yet when I drew on shirt and breeches and went to visit St Odhran in his rooms, the Britisher also thought some conspiracy against us was afoot. His rooms were bright with lamps and candles, littered with diagrams and charts. Some of these were unfamiliar to me.
‘I suspect all our enemies conjoin to achieve our ruin,’ he said. ‘Though we planned to winter here, my friend, I think it would be wise if we met with an accident very soon.’
‘St Odhran,’ said I grimly, ‘you’ve mentioned no accident before.’
‘I keep so many possibilities in mind, dear friend, I cannot always express ’em in words. Our method of escape has been forming in my thoughts for the past few days. Shall I enlarge?’
‘I’d be grateful if you would, Sir.’
‘Then here’s what I foresee – we announce a further demonstration of our existing ship, using, if possible, the proffered gas. The balloon shall slip her tether – a frayed rope! We’ll shout for help! We’ll agitate the Gondola! We’ll make a great hullabaloo of despair – and the wind’ll do the rest. With Hydrogen to lift us we can go higher and faster than ever. We’ll be a hundred miles away in less than five hours. With the right wind we’ll be in Arabia before we need to land. With gold and our ship we’ll find dusky patronage amongst the Eastern Ottomans, the independent Sultans or even the Chinese, changing our names to whatever takes our fancy. Then, in a couple of years, we return to Europe with a good tale which serves to explain our absence and our wealth. None shall condemn us and only a few shall mourn!’
I was willing enough to accept escape on almost any terms at that juncture. Klosterheim had frightened me to my bones. But as for the gold, I said, how shall that be explained away?
‘Robbery,’ he said. ‘Those villains who kidnapped us will do. A plot against us. We’ll broadcast something of that in the next day or two. Other money’s banked in Germany, by the by. I’ll go to the Landgräfin this morning and tell her of her nephew’s bid to crush our venture and murder us. He’ll be suspected of any foul play. As for the French silk-weavers, their perfidy can be explained by Revolution. Meanwhile I’m writing to our mysterious bestower of inflammable air asking for enough of the gas to test the handling of our present craft, so that we may redesign our steering mechanism and enlarge the size of our gondola. We’ll know tomorrow if that’s granted. Then we’ll announce our intention of testing the gas. We’ll choose a time when the breeze is blowing its best. After that ’tis merely a question of deciding which Continent we wish to land upon!’ All this was given in English so that we should not be understood if overheard.
In the same language I said: ‘The balloon cannot be steered.’
‘True, but wind can be gauged and we can control our drift with simple sails. I’ll admit we’ll be somewhat at the wind’s mercy, but not completely helpless. There are no complexities in this, you’ll note. It shall be a simple plan, simply realised.’
I was beyond moral scruples at that stage. I wished only to be free of nightmares and nightmarish events, of a man who claimed to have lived for more than one hundred and fifty years and a female will-o’-the-wisp who haunted every hour of my days.
‘This gives you gold – and Bek, too, if you want it,’ said St Odhran.
Bek regained with a lie, I thought, could not be Bek at all. The consequences of habitual deception and lies, Goethe tells us, are the loss of self-trust, the loss of true love and the loss of the good will of one’s fellows. (But the balloon escape, though cowardly, might lift me from Libussa’s lure and allow me perspective, release from my madness.) Thus my panic easily conquered my conscience. My only concern was that we should not come down in some land where I was already outlawed! The image of our craft entangled upon a Kremlin onion gave me
an ironic pleasure which the reality would certainly lack. St Odhran reassured me. He was already, he said, anticipating our voyage – the adventures we should have in Arabia, India, China and some unknown islands in the South Seas.
‘You surely cannot steer so clear a course?’ said I.
‘No, indeed, but I can gauge the taste of a public which presently finds any sensation preferable to reality. The fictions with which we ease our daily burdens, you know. I’m planning how we’ll retail these adventures (which explain our absence). Our recruitment, for instance, to the wild Bedouin; our discovery of the Elephant’s Graveyard; our witnessing of the Dance of the Dead (in Cook’s Land); our capture and subsequent escape from the hands of white devil-worshippers in a hidden valley deep within the Saharan vastness. We shall never know poverty, von Bek, do you see?’ And St Odhran winked, disarming all my arguments. There is only one thing less resistible than a charming and subtle Rogue and that is his reminder to you that he knows better than anyone what his rhetoric is worth and does not for a moment deceive himself.
Later that evening I bundled up in a huge four-caped coachman’s coat, muffler and woollen gloves, and went down to the river to walk to the middle of the Mladota Bridge, the Bridge of Kings with all its great monarchs set in stone at intervals along both balustrades, to achieve the solitude I felt I required while I reviewed my thoughts and considered my experiences of the past thirty-six hours.
Klosterheim remained the most memorable. I wondered at his undoubted familiarity with my great ancestor. His insane tale of revenge and magic spoke of a poet’s imagination, for it turned all accepted Theology upside-down. Yet he was surely mad if he actually believed I could find the Holy Grail or possessed a magic sword or could wander at will into shadowy worlds which he described as a mirror to our own. He spoke of marvellous peoples and beasts reported by travellers down the centuries and entering the general consciousness through the medium of legend and fairy-tale. The more likely logic was that the lands of his description were no more than a reflection of his own profound need to believe the truth of simple, Romantic tales. In simple lands are found simple solutions to mankind’s ills. So what was Klosterheim but a poor lunatic in retreat from ambiguity and baffling subtlety? I shrugged as I looked down into the dark, fast water of the Rätt. I answered myself aloud:
‘He’s more than that.’
He was, I was certain, far more than a common madman in quest of common resolutions. Yet he could not, surely, be speaking in anything other than elaborate metaphor? I looked up at my surroundings. Mirenburg was a dreaming city now. Pale clouds, moonlit, appeared in her sky, like a malleable geography, as yet unfixed by a Creator’s command. Was all the Earth but agitated gas and molten stone before she was born? And was she founded all of a sudden by some galvanic thought which itself existed only for a split second? Did God truly build and populate a small planet for His own purposes; perhaps merely to relieve His boredom? Could God and Lucifer, as Klosterheim suggested, truly be locked in permanent debate as they attempted to decide the terms of their truce and eventual reunion?
I had no talent for abstract Theology. My chances of learning an answer to the last question were as good as my convincing Baron von Bresnvorts of the wisdom of buying shares in an Aerial Navigation Society or giving away his inheritance to the closest Almshouse.
I walked back towards the Right Bank. Looking down I saw the Wool Quay again, still silent and the snow now frozen on the flagstones, near as unblemished as when I went that morning to meet Montsorbier. Against the demands of all reason I had the growing conviction that indeed there were forces presently at work which were larger and more powerful than anything I had previously experienced. Logic continued to lead me towards the supposition that these forces could be, at least in part, supernatural.
It was time, I decided, to return to the inn for a glass or two of grog before retiring. I prayed I should sleep more soundly than of late, but I had little hope my prayers would be answered.
In bed that night my thoughts returned often to Klosterheim and his references to our mutual destiny, my family’s special gifts. I had always thought of us as a modest and respectable line of Saxon landowners, diverse in most interests, rarely in agreement on any subject but the most fundamental. It struck me that perhaps my Duchess of Crete had also seen me in the rôle of some Parsifal or other and had consequently saved me from my enemy. At this, she returned to me, as I crossed the border from waking to sleeping. I imagined that her lithe, pink body was soft against mine while she told me what my character was and how our destiny was shared. Had my own faith in my imagination become so weakened I could be prey to other, fanatical minds? Detecting the enervated condition of my spirit, did they seek to impose their own dreams upon mine, hoping that thus I would become what they desired me to be, some kind of questing hero?
I must, I thought, escape from all of it. The prospect of our flight grew more attractive to me by the moment. ‘I am von Bek,’ said I defiantly, lying naked on my bed and touching chest and head and thighs, those familiar contours and textures. Then: ‘But I must know. I must know, Libussa. I must know you… Why do I have it in my mind there’s a revelation to be discovered in your Greek blood? That somewhere within your name lies the secret, the foundation of all your other actions.’ I pant as if in the first blaze of a new passion. My whole body’s mobile, though I make every attempt to lie quiet. At night I cannot deceive or distract myself, I am enchanted still. The Minotaur rages in the Labyrinth, furious at Gods who made him neither Beast nor Man, and Daedalus flies free of this island while Icarus, elated in his first experiment, lifts himself too close to the Sun and is destroyed.
On Crete a blue sea sends white breakers upon a yellow beach. The rocks are worn to shards, resembling the ruins, almost as ancient, built upon them. A black sail on the horizon disappears. Now beautiful Theseus stands upon the shore, looking towards the City of the Bull. Time has not yet begun to be recorded. This is a scene painted in unclouded primaries. From somewhere a Bull’s voice rages, its thickened speech complaining and challenging as if it utters the poetry of distress.
Theseus brandishes a hard, polished club. There is a green cloak upon his wonderful shoulders, a helmet with a great crest of purple horsehair upon his perfect head; painted sandals upon his perfect legs. Yet he has the breasts of a woman and the genitals of a man. Hermaphrodite challenges the old, mad beast, the raging monster whose uncontrolled passions and appetites shall threaten his existence, our own future. He must be slain.
The youth-woman begins to stride with easy, athletic steps up the beach towards the City of the Beast, the City of the Labyrinth, in a time before History, when Man first came to value Reason over Sensibility and gave combat to the hairy halflings which ruled Him. The cloven hoofs dance upon the pavements of the maze, a great spiked club is beaten upon the earth, again and again. The Beast snorts and fumes in the darkness, its anger and its pride demanding sacrifice, the tasting of blood. Theseus pauses at the entrance, her chest rising and falling in conscious rhythms, half-willing, even now, to kneel worshipping before the enormous vitality of the mindless Bull.
Theseus grits his teeth and rubs the head of his club against his leg, letting his jealousy and his fears build themselves into bloodlust. The rich stink of the Minotaur is in his nostrils and he must call upon his own warlike skills and courage. She summons a spirit of determination few have ever needed. This Theseus, my Theseus, advances. The sword of his youth had a bird beating inside the crystal pommel. A hawk, flinging itself again and again in inaudible fury against its glassy prison.
In Byzantium the art of alchemy became European. Here lived Maria the Jewess and Zosimos the Egyptian, who sought to understand the bonds making mankind one with the universe; for surely each was mirrored in the other. Each was contained within the other? The alchemists reduced the elements to a single tincture into which all was concentrated; all matter, all human aspiration, all Time, all knowledge. A pill the size of a pea
brought the gift of transmutation (for it was one and therefore the same) and a means of perpetual restoration, both physical and mental. The great glass beakers, the stone retorts, the brass pans and tubes, the smoking elemental potions, had all led towards that end, the creation of a human being: Hermaphrodite, self-reproducing, possessing the sum of all knowledge and virtue; an harmonious and immortal creature neither master nor slave; both male and female; the being described in Genesis. This self-contained creature springs light-footed across the landscapes of my dreams and I see it from without; yet sometimes I myself am that creature, joyous in my power and freedom. In me is Eve and Adam combined. My mind is clear, my senses alert, as I breathe the new-minted air of an Earthly paradise.
Then Klosterheim is speaking and his voice is like a wind from Limbo, singing of death, cold ashes and a nostalgic ambition to reawaken those hopeless, envious legions of Hell, so that he might again command something, even though it be an army of wretches only capable of cruel destruction and the reduction of human aspiration. They quest for a reawakening of Sensibility, the likes of von Bresnvorts, yet it is true Sensibility which shall, by definition, forever be denied those who desire power over others more than they desire the delights of their own human sensuality.
Hermaphrodite sniffs the dangerous breeze. Should she fight or should he flee?
Again I was awakened in a midnight flood as my own juices sprang from every pore. I was godlike. I was afraid. Could so much truly be at stake? The very future of mankind? Until morning my Reason was locked in a struggle with what I must describe as my Instinct; but without resolution. I felt as if some version of the past and some potential tomorrow battled within me for my present loyalty. I feared to resort to the laudanum bottle at my bedside (placed there in all kindness by St Odhran) but at length I sipped a drop or two and fell back into dreams where my actions, I felt, at least had no effect upon my ordinary existence. I was awakened by my friend hammering upon a door I had inadvertently locked (perhaps during the course of my Cretan nightmare). He told me that he had heard our inflammable air was to be delivered that morning and he went to supervise its arrival at the Little Field. In my dazed condition I scarcely understood him. He was also, I gathered, off on some half-described business with the Landgräfin. I fell back into my stupor and it was midway through the morning before I found the strength to rise, perform my toilet, and enter the world of common reality below.
The City in the Autumn Stars Page 19