The City in the Autumn Stars

by Michael Moorcock

  In truth, I was fitted to be nobody’s Lord; and my mother’s hopeful references to matrimony, though well meant, became offensive to my ears. Libussa remained my betrothed, in life or death, and in case the reader should conclude I fostered a morbid affectation within my breast, such as the heroines of the modern romances exhibit in the new breed of English novel and its progeny, I should make it plain I neither despaired nor was unusually subject to fits of Melancholy, wild frenzy or mysterious terrors. Libussa lived within me, as she lives now, and I was easy in that knowledge. Unlike the heroines of, say, The Castle of Wolfenbach or The Orphan of the Rhine, I, as Libussa, had scant capacity for languid terror and continued to be of an active disposition. What I most desired was the easy, unselfconscious, trusting comradeship of women, whose sensibilities often nowadays seemed so much closer to my own.

  Whatever worked that alchemy, whether it be the mixed tincture and blood of that terrible ritual, or simply my ordinary experiences as Libussa’s lover, there was no question that it had transformed me irredeemably. My interests remained the same (I had never had much taste for heroical warfare, hunting or the like) but they gradually broadened to include those which Society tells us belong to the Woman’s Sphere but which are not simply occupations; they suggest a certain way of observing the world. My energies were devoted increasingly to gardening, it is true, and to music.

  Perhaps this change in me is best explained by my mother’s references to my ‘affectionate and devoted nature’, my honest willingness, considered unusual in a man, to attend my poor brother when, in the last stages of his Consumption, he was permanently bedridden. Yet I continued to love late nights, talking of the most outrageous and unlikely subjects at extravagant length with my father’s friends or my youngest brother (soon summoned home in expectation of Ulrich’s demise). Also the frequent visits of Baron Karsovin, whose wife I found both charming and intelligent, though much in awe of her raconteur husband, were always anticipated with considerable pleasure. What greatly frustrated me was the segregation of the sexes, so that I was unable, much of the time, to choose the company I momentarily desired, and the deep-set assumptions expressed (as frequently by women as by men) on the matter of what did and what did not constitute either Man’s or Woman’s estate. Increasingly, after my brother’s death, I began to make trips abroad, to ease my boredom and restore my wits. The frequency of these trips at length began to distress my parents and I knew that I must resolve the matter sooner than I had planned.

  I arranged an interview in my father’s study. This lay upon the ground floor in the east wing of the house. It looked out upon the ornamental hedges and flower beds I myself had created only the previous year and which were pleasing to my father, who enjoyed beauty but always swore he had ‘no cleverness for making it’. My father welcomed the interview. I suppose he believed he was to learn what I had been doing on my trips abroad.

  At the agreed time he seated himself in his usual chair, patiently lighting his old churchwarden, looking out into the late Summer garden; it was a Monday afternoon in the year of 1797 (the second year of the Directory, following that in which Bonaparte became General of the Army in Italy and won victories at Lodi and Arcola). We discussed the news from France, as we often did, and he expressed some pleasure in his sense of things ‘settling down again’. I seized, as we say, the deer by the antlers. Hesitantly at first I explained why I felt I was unsuitable for the responsibilities of the next Graf von Bek and that I believed my younger brother Rickhardt was the better choice. Moreover he would be sure to provide Bek with an heir. My father frowned at this last and enquired delicately if there were any ‘difficulties’ in that area – perhaps a wound, he suggested – but I assured him that my life had been dissolute enough in France and America; my tendency at present was towards celibacy.

  I reassured him hurriedly that I was not ready to become a Jesuit. I believed thoroughly, I told him, in the old family tale concerning God’s commission to Lucifer, therefore I did not see much to be gained from a directly religious life. However, my tendency, I said, was to join some lay group dedicated to good works – some arm, I had thought, of the Moravians.

  After some discussion he gave me his blessing and there was a tear or two in his eyes which he wished me to ignore.

  ‘This running of land,’ he said a few moments later, as we walked together in the garden, ‘is a difficult business. It imposes duties upon one, and sometimes pointless disciplines. It imposes a rôle, too. I do not believe I was much cut out to be a patriarch, Manfred, yet here I am – a good, old typical Saxon Vaterstädter, indistinguishable, no doubt, from a hundred others. ’Tis my choice and I don’t much regret it. But I must let you know, my son, that I have sympathy with your decision. And Rickhardt, doubtless, will be only too happy to step into my shoes, since he never had hopes of that!’

  We walked out of the garden and across the meadows, towards the old, ruined Abbey which had stood there since the eighth century. There was little of it left and most of that was covered with vines. It lay amongst trees, on the other side of a rustic bridge.

  My father paused on the bridge, looking down into the slow, weed-strewn stream and the minnows darting just beneath the surface. ‘What constitutes a man’s duties and what are a woman’s is ordained by God, they say. Yet, if ’tis true God’s abandoned us (and our family motto says that’s so), then why should we not refuse His reasoning as He refuses us the comfort of Certainty?’

  As good parents will he had somehow found the crux of my problem without, for a second, guessing the superficial truth.

  ‘I am not sure I know, Father.’

  ‘It’s money, it seems,’ he said with a smile. ‘All a question of inheritance, and power, of course, since that comes with it – with Land.’ He looked about his fields. ‘You are certain you wish to give up this easy, comfortable power, my boy?’

  ‘Fervently,’ I said with a smile which set him to chuckling. We continued on across the bridge and into the shade of the old Abbey. Midges clustered there and my father blew smoke from his pipe to drive them away.

  ‘We enter an Age which values all this far more than I ever did,’ he said, ‘and at the same time conspires to destroy it. Was the world always full of so many paradoxes, Manfred?’

  ‘I think so,’ I told him. ‘Always.’

  ‘I believe you’re right, my boy.’

  St Odhran was due to visit us. He had written to say that not only had he failed to understand Miroslav’s design, he had spent half his fortune on a scheme to manufacture the gas called Vodorodium and met with complete lack of success in that direction. He had, however, met a wonderful English woman who showed intelligent and original interest in scientific enquiry, and he wished me to meet her. Her name was Lady Susan Vernon. In his letter he could not resist adding that he had certainly gone up a notch or two in Society since his early beginnings running ‘close to the gallows’ in the Scottish slums. I looked forward to their visit and arranged with my father that I would leave with them when they returned to Mirenburg.

  Lady Susan Vernon was everything St Odhran described and moreover she was a great beauty, with curly black hair and brilliant blue eyes, a wonderful match. We became excellent friends almost at once.

  St Odhran said he was tiring of Mirenburg, that all countries were backward now, even the new France, compared to England. ‘It’s a land of engineers, old friend,’ said he when, in stripes and flounces and tilted beaver, he brought the latest mode to Bek. ‘It may lack even a moderately good cuisine, or comfort, or decent weather. It is a land, in the main, of drunken brutes and condescending Philistines, of hypocrites and complacent know-nothings, but it has the raw materials of my trade. Moreover, of course, it is Susan’s home. Her family has met me. Her father’s something of an amateur experimenter. She’s a genius. I’m thought a suitable groom. And you must be my Best Man.’

  Doing my best to disguise any sudden sadness at his words, I accepted with what I hope was good grace
. Then I made a joke. ‘And what are those raw materials? I always thought them a pack of playing-cards and a brace of barkers!’ I would never let him forget our less respectable past. It always amused him. He was proud of it and had kept no secrets from his fiancée.

  ‘Odd’s blood, me dear,’ said he in that new limp manner of the English dandy, ‘but ye’d dem’ near have a sense of humour if ye wasn’t a German!’

  He continued in great enthusiasm about the experiments with steam, the new metals and the machines which would soon make England one vast manufactory. After Mirenburg, where he was arranging his affairs and transferring his funds, he would go first to Glasgow then join Susan Vernon in London. He meant to do great things, he said, but would have to begin in the North. And, he told me privately, if anyone recognised him for a Newgate-absentee, it would not present much of a problem for him now. ‘Lud, it’d cost me a hundred guineas! For the Prince himself would have to be sweetened!’

  I told him of my decision and what had happened to me. He thought the matter over, then nodded and embraced me. ‘She still inhabits you, then?’

  ‘Aye. ’Tis part of it.’ We stood upon Bek’s remaining battlements (all that was left of the old, dark Schloss) and looked out over lovely Autumn fields, where placid cattle cropped amongst the fallen, overgrown trees, beside the winding stream. There were oaks and lichen-covered elms, meadows of wild flowers. In the distance was the smoke of our village’s hearths, for we were feeling the first hint of Winter. It was almost sunset.

  He put a long arm about my shoulders. ‘Courage is never constant, dear friend. It comes and goes, according to circumstances. Like water in a well. And ’tis as hard to keep steady as mercury.’

  The morrow brought a very sober morning, the sun making only very few efforts to appear; yet I augured from it everything most favourable to my wishes. We were upon our way. St Odhran, Lady Susan and I boarded the diligence for Mirenburg, and all my bags were packed up on it. My mother kissed me farewell while my father hugged me with sudden strength. I told them I could be reached in care of Sergeant Schuster at The Martyred Priest. St Odhran lifted his hat to all and amiably said ‘Good day’ in English, to the delight of my youngest sister’s children who thought him fine amusement. Then we were off on the Prague Express, squawking tantivies and rattling harness, as the six-horse team galloped against the clock to ensure its record.

  After some time in Mirenburg, where I found my memories and dreams mingling too painfully for my taste, I accepted St Odhran’s request to return with him to Glasgow. In that pretty city he found himself part of a new élite. They were called by the press in England ‘Kettleheads’ and had a common interest in the uses of the improved steam-engines, some of which were already driving carriages at over five miles per hour! In St Odhran’s shadow, I became fairly famous in my own right, since I shared his enthusiasms and saw all that machinery as a means of ultimately liberating mankind from bestial toil. He planned to launch a new steam-powered Air-ship. In the meantime he invested in engines for the driving of ships and weaving-mills, and that type of machine proved so popular he could scarcely find sufficient follies on which to squander his profits. I, too, benefited from the enterprises and began to consider the possibility of founding a model village, a tiny universe, as it were, where at least a few of those new labouring men and women could find equality and tranquillity. St Odhran entertained hopes for a Steam Carriage Roadway which would carry several vehicles at a time, perhaps utilising the Canal towpaths.

  St Odhran, in Lady Susan’s laughing presence, confided that it was difficult for him to believe, after so many years a Swindler, that people possessed dreams which actually, by dint of experiment and careful investigation of Nature, could be made reality. He continued to speak as someone who had hit upon a perfect Fraud for which the Law could not reach him. ‘I’ve decided that I have not changed by a hair, neither have those people’s dreams changed – what has changed, I would guess, is Reality itself!’ They both laughed at this and I joined in, but I wondered if perhaps Libussa had achieved something, after all.

  Occasionally I wonder if both of us had been allowed to go only so far – to accomplish the Devil’s work. We had nothing but Lucifer’s word he did not control us. Yet it is also true that my failure of courage and her failure to banish the Beast would inevitably have conspired to ruin any large success for her alchemical schemes. Yet perhaps we both viewed matters too simply.

  Alchemy, in a few brief years, has become the material for low comedy: it is no longer feared for its occult powers, as it was in my day. The engineers like St Odhran are suddenly ascendant, when not long since the public had decided that those same men were the buffoons and crackpots. So there, too, it is possible to say Libussa failed. She threw her entire fate upon a single card. Her stake was not merely her own. She risked the fortunes and lives of dozens. And she lost. The Day of the Lion failed to dawn. Today is the Day of the Steam Engine. Perhaps she was after all a martyr: a martyr to changing times. But her death might also have been valuable in bringing those times about.

  I am still in London, though I have paid visits to Bek and to Mirenburg (where, by a mysterious personage, I exchanged letters with and send books to a certain Philarchus Grosses, whose little singular volume I still possess). I stay always at The Martyred Priest. Old Schuster still maintains a share in the hostelry run by his daughter. We talk for hours, the same stories in the main, about our days as Revolutionaries in America, the fate of France, the fortunes of young Krasny (who writes to Ulrica) after his considerable achievements with Bolivar in South America. Less frequently I delay my journey in Prague when I am on my way to Bek. I go in my carriage to a certain house near the Château-le-Blanc, where a group of old men meet to discuss the days of their former power and plan for a time when they will again startle the world. We discuss the old wisdoms, the arcane lore of alchemy, the Chemical Marriage, the Great Conjunction and so forth. I am honoured by them as their High Magister and enjoy considerable respect. If they are disappointed in me it is only because I refuse to support them in their dreams of a revival of what they term ‘the Golden Work’. There are some amongst them who would flatter me. They say I have scarcely aged at all, I am still the same Duke of Crete, last possessor of the pure Tauran blood, older than the human race itself; the same they knew a quarter-century since. And if I smile and make light of all that, it is not to mock them. These days it is wise to keep perspective. Unless we do so, can we ever hope to see true Harmony: a Cure for the World’s Pain?

  ‘That secret lies in the Grail,’ they tell me. ‘And the Grail is locked up in Hell. Lucifer has charge of it.’ Thus they explain their failures, the decline of their power. On that subject I would not display my scepticism.

  We all continue to grow rich in England on the profits of our former idealism. I have described to St Odhran my feelings of ambiguity on the matter but he tells me I have no need to agonise over the morality of it. The New Age will come, he tells me, but it will be a messy and sometimes painful birth, too complex for any single being to understand. ‘The danger will lie in attempting to simplify it,’ he says.

  On the insistence of Lady Susan, I began in the Summer of 1817 to set down this account of my story. She insisted that my experience should not go unrecorded. Thus I complied and the manuscript, as agreed, shall be put in her safe-keeping to do with as she pleases after my death (she being a few years younger than myself and in better health). Should she die, the manuscript is willed to her nearest female relative. Of my further adventures and discoveries, I have said nothing. They belong, I believe, to another account, which, if ever I am able, I shall also retail. It is my intention soon to return to Mirenburg, where I have bought a small house in Rosenstrasse. I believe I would rather live with what remains of my pain in a place which we once shared.

  I look forward to taking an open carriage and driving beside the Rätt during the month of October, when Mirenburg grows mild and sleepy. My coachman shall take me out
just before dawn, when the stars are still visible. Later I shall ask him to stop upon the Mladota Bridge. The air is always clear there, bearing the smell of wood-smoke, Autumn leaves and late Summer flowers. A few barges move slowly through the mist of the Rätt; early-risen boatmen call mutual greetings from a distance.

  Then there’s the sun! A golden Mirenburg dawn flooding into the pale blue of the sky, washing across the river, illuminating glittering domes and silver spires on either side, and the doves which nest nearby flutter up through the morning, a cloud of white enlivened by the light.

  When Mirenburg begins to come fully awake, opening cafés and shops, trundling produce through her streets, setting off to school, I shall begin the drive back to Rosenstrasse. Mirenburg is an extraordinary city, more peaceful and beautiful than most, but the people who live in her are no different; they conduct their lives and business pretty much as others do. It is a warm, old city, with a traditional tolerance of strangers.

  She is within me always, my Libussa. If her alchemy failed radically to change the world, it achieved permanent transformations elsewhere, through those she influenced. But I prefer to remember the earlier times, when it seemed our love must result in a more conventional marriage. I love to imagine she rides with me in the carriage, enjoying those simpler pleasures I now relish.

  We shall be happy, shall we not Libussa, in our decaying Autumn days?

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