He walked along beside her, silent.
“Can I stay here, Pier?”
His voice hardly freed itself from the jumble of voices and noises in the street: “There are no doors. No house left.”
His face was tired and angry; he did not look at her. They reached his tenement and climbed the stairs and came into the Panins’ flat.
“We could find something better than this,” she said with timidity. “Some privacy . . .”
The room was dusky, the window a square of void evening sky, without color. He sat down on the sofa. She put the new bulb in the socket, fixed the ball-fringed shade on it, switched it on and off again. Pier’s body as he sat awkwardly relaxed, stripped of all grace and of the substance that holds a man down heavy on the earth, was like a shadow among the shadows. She sat down on the floor beside him. After a while she took his hand. They sat in silence; and the silence between them was heavy, was present, it had a long past, and a future, it was like a long road walked at evening.
People came heavy-footed into the room, switching on the lamp, speaking, staring: an ugly, innocent-looking couple in their twenties, he lank, she pregnant. Mariya jumped up smoothing her braids. Pier got up. “The Panins, Mariya,” he said. “Martin, Anna, this is Mariya Korre. My wife.”
1965
The Lady of Moge
THEY MET ONCE when they were both nineteen, and again when they were twenty-three. That they met only once after that, and long after, was Andre’s fault. It was not the kind of fault one would have expected of him, seeing him at nineteen years old, a boy poised above his destiny like a hawk. One saw the eyes, the hawk-eyes, clear, unblinking, fierce. Only when they were closed in sleep did anyone ever see his face, beautiful and passive, the face of the hero. For heroes do not make history—that is the historians’ job—but, passive, let themselves be borne along, swept up to the crest of the tide of change, of chance, of war.
She was Isabella Oriana Mogeskar, daughter of the Counts of Helle and the Princes of Moge. She was a princess, and lived in a castle on a hill above the Molsen River. Young Andre Kalinskar was coming to seek her hand in marriage. The Kalinskar family coach rolled for half an hour through the domains of Moge, came through a walled town and up a steep fortified hill, passed under a gateway six feet thick, and stopped before the castle. The high wall was made splendid by an infinite tracery of red vines, for it was autumn; the chestnut trees of the forecourt were flawless gold. Over the golden trees, over the towers, stood the faint, clear, windy sky of late October. Andre looked about him with interest. He did not blink.
In the windowless ground-floor hall of the castle, among saddles and muskets and hunting, riding, fighting gear the two old companions-at-arms, Andre’s father and Prince Mogeskar, embraced. Upstairs where windows looked out to the river and the rooms were furnished with the comforts of peace, the Princess Isabella greeted them. Reddish-fair, with a long, calm, comely face and grey-blue eyes—Autumn as a young girl—she was tall, taller than Andre. When he straightened from his bow to her he straightened farther than usual, but the difference remained at least an inch.
They were eighteen at table that night, guests, dependents, and the Mogeskars: Isabella, her father, and her two brothers. George, a cheerful fifteen-year-old, talked hunting with Andre; the older brother and heir, Brant, glanced at him a couple of times, listened to him once, and then turned his fair head away, satisfied: his sister would not stoop to this Kalinskar fellow. Andre set his teeth, and, in order not to look at Brant, looked at his mother, who was talking with the Princess Isabella. He saw them both glance at him, as if they had been speaking of him. In his mother’s eyes he saw, as usual, pride and irony, in the girl’s—what? Not scorn; not approval. She simply saw him. She saw him clearly. It was exhilarating. He felt for the first time that esteem might be a motive quite as powerful as desire.
Late the next afternoon, leaving his father and his host to fight old battles, he went up to the roof of the castle and stood near the round tower to look out over the Molsen and the hills in the dying, windy, golden light. She came to him through the wind, across the stone. She spoke without greeting, as to a friend. “I’ve been wanting to talk with you.”
Her beauty, like the golden weather, cheered his heart, made him both bold and calm. “And I with you, princess!”
“I think you’re a generous man,” she said. There was a pleasant husky tone, almost guttural, in her light voice. He bowed a little, and compliments pranced through his mind, but something prompted him to say only, “Why?”
“It’s quite plain to see,” she replied, impatient. “May I speak to you as one man to another?”
“As one man—?”
“Dom Andre, when I first met you yesterday, I thought, ‘I have met a friend at last.’ Was I right?”
Did she plead, or challenge? He was moved. He said, “You were right.”
“Then may I ask you, my friend, not to try to marry me? I don’t intend to marry.”
There was a long silence.
“I shall do as you wish, princess.”
“And without arguing!” cried the girl, all at once alight, aflame. “Oh, I knew you were a friend! Please, Dom Andre, don’t feel sad or foolish. I refused the others without even thinking about it. With you, I had to think. You see, if I refuse to marry, my father will send me to the convent. So I can’t refuse to marry, I can only refuse each suitor. You see?” He did; though if she had given him time to think, he would have thought that she must in the end accept either marriage or the convent, being, after all, a girl. But she did not give him time to think. “So the suitors keep coming; and it’s like Princess Ranya, in the tale, you know, with her three questions, and all the young men’s heads stuck on poles around the palace. It is so cruel and wearisome. . . .” She sighed, and leaning on the parapet beside Andre looked out over the golden world, smiling, inexplicable, comradely.
“I wish you’d ask me the three questions,” he said, wistful.
“I have no questions. I have nothing to ask.”
“Nothing to ask that I could give you, to be sure.”
“Ah, you’ve already given me what I asked of you—not to ask me!”
He nodded. He would not seek her reasons; his rebuffed pride, and a sense of her vulnerability, forbade it. And so in her sweet perversity she gave them to him. “What I want, Dom Andre, is to be left alone. To live my life, my own life. At least till I’ve found out . . . The one thing I have questions to ask of, is myself. To live my own life, to find out my own way, am I too weak to do that? I was born in this castle, my people have been lords here for a long time, one gets used to it. Look at the walls, you can see why Moge has been attacked but never taken. Ah, one’s life could be so splendid, God knows what might happen! Isn’t it true, Dom Andre? One mustn’t choose too soon. If I marry I know what will happen, what I’ll do, what I’ll be. And I don’t want to know. I want nothing, except my freedom.”
“I think,” Andre said with a sense of discovery, “most women marry to get their freedom.”
“Then they want less than I do. There’s something inside me, in my heart, a brightness and a heaviness, how can I describe it? Something that exists and does not yet exist, which is mine to carry, and not mine to give up to any man.”
Did she speak, Andre wondered, of her virginity or of her destiny? She was very strange, but it was a princely and a touching strangeness. In all she said, however arrogant and naïve, she was most estimable; and though desire was forbidden, she had reached straight into him to his tenderness, the first woman who had ever done so. She stood there quite alone, within him, as she stood beside him and alone.
“Does your brother know your mind?”
“Brant? No. My father is gentle; Brant is not. When my father dies, Brant will force me to marry.”
“Then you have no one . . .”
“I have you,” she said smiling. “Which means that I have to send you away. But a friend is a friend, near or far.”
“Near or far, call to me if you need a friend, princess. I will come.” He spoke with a sudden dignity of passion, vowing to her, as a man when very young will vow himself entirely to the rarest and most imperilled thing he has beheld. She looked at him, shaken from her gentle, careless pride, and he took her hand, having earned the right. Beyond them the river ran red under the sunset. “I will,” she said. “I was never grateful to a man before, Dom Andre.”
He left her, full of exaltation; but when he got to his room he sat down, feeling suddenly very tired, and blinking often, as if on the point of tears.
That was their first meeting, in the wind and golden light on the top of the world, at nineteen. The Kalinskars went back home. Four years passed, in the second of which, 1640, began the civil struggle for succession known as the War of the Three Kings.
Like most petty noble families the Kalinskars sided with Duke Givan Sovenskar in his claim to the throne. Andre took arms in his troops; by 1643, when they were fighting town by town down through the Molsen Province to Krasnoy, Andre was a field-captain. To him, while Sovenskar pushed on to the capital to be crowned, was entrusted the siege of the last stronghold of the Loyalists east of the river, the town and castle of Moge. So on a June day Andre lay, chin on folded arms, on the rough grass of a hilltop, gazing across a valley at the slate roofs of the town, the walls rising from a surf of chestnut leaves, the round tower, the shining river beyond.
“Captain, where do you want the culverins placed?”
The old prince was dead, and Brant Mogeskar had been killed in March, in the east. Had King Gulhelm sent troops across the river to the defense of his defenders, his rival might not be riding now to Krasnoy to be crowned; but no help had come, and the Mogeskars were besieged now in their own castle. Surrender they would not. Andre’s lieutenant, who had arrived some days before him with the light troops, had requested a parley with George Mogeskar; but he had not even seen the prince. He had been received by the princess, he said, a handsome girl, but hard as iron. She had refused to parley: “Mogeskar does not bargain. If you lay siege we shall hold the castle. If you follow the Pretender we shall wait here for the King.”
Andre lay gazing at the tawny walls. “Well, Soten, the problem’s this: do we take the town first, or the castle?”
But that was not the problem at all. The problem was much crueller than that.
Lieutenant Soten sat down by him and puffed out his round cheeks. “Castle,” he said. “Lose weeks taking that town, and then still have the castle to breach.”
“Breach that—with the guns we’ve got? Once we’re in the town, they’ll accept terms in the castle.”
“Captain, that woman in there isn’t going to accept any terms.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve seen her!”
“So have I,” said Andre. “We’ll set the culverins there, at the south wall of the town. We’ll begin bombardment tomorrow at dawn. We were asked to take the fort as it stands. It’ll have to be at the cost of the town. They give us no choice.” He spoke grimly, but was in his heart elated. He would give her every chance: the chance to withdraw from the hopeless fight and the chance, also, to prove herself, to use the courage she had felt heavy and shining in her breast, like a sword lying secret in its sheath.
He had been a worthy suitor, a man of her own mettle, and had been rejected. Fair enough. She did not want a lover, but an enemy; and he would be a worthy, an estimable one. He wondered if she yet knew his name, if someone had said, “Field-captain Kalinskar is leading them,” and she had replied in her lordly, gentle, unheeding way, “Andre Kalinskar?”—frowning perhaps to learn that he had joined the Duke against the King, and yet not displeased, not sorry to have him as her foe.
They took the town, at the cost of three weeks and many lives. Later when Kalinskar was Marshal of the Royal Army he would say when drunk, “I can take any town. I took Moge.” The walls were ingeniously fortified, the castle arsenal seemed inexhaustible, and the defenders fought with terrible spirit and patience. They withstood shelling and assaults, put out fires barehanded, ate air, in the last extremity fought face to face, house after house, from the town gate up to the castle scarp; and when taken prisoner they said, “It’s her.”
He had not seen her yet. He had feared to see her in the thick of that carnage in the narrow, ruined streets. From them at evening he kept looking up to the battlements a hundred feet above, the smoking cannon-emplacements, the round tower tawny red in sunset, the untouched castle.
“Wonder how we could get a match into the powder-store,” said Lieutenant Soten, puffing his cheeks out cheerfully. His captain turned on him, his hawk-eyes red and swollen with smoke and weariness: “I’m taking Moge as it stands! Blow up the best fort in the country, would you, because you’re tired of fighting? By God I’ll teach you respect, Lieutenant!” Respect for what, or whom? Soten wondered, but held his tongue. As far as he was concerned, Kalinskar was the finest officer in the army, and he was quite content to follow him, into madness, or wherever. They were all mad with the fighting, with fatigue, with the glaring, grilling heat and dust of summer.
They bombarded and made assaults at all hours, to keep the defenders from rest. In the dark of early morning Andre was leading a troop up to a partial breach they had made by mining the outer wall, when a foray from the castle met them. They fought with swords there in the darkness under the wall. It was a confused and ineffectual scrap, and Andre was calling his men together to retreat when he became aware that he had dropped his sword. He groped for it. For some reason his hands would not grasp, but slid stupidly among clods and rocks. Something cold and grainy pressed against his face: the earth. He opened his eyes very wide, and saw darkness.
Two cows grazed in the inner courtyard, the last of the great herds of Moge. At five in the morning a cup of milk was brought to the princess in her room, as usual, and a little while later the captain of the fort came as usual to give her the night’s news. The news was the same as ever and Isabella paid little heed. She was calculating when King Gulhelm’s forces might arrive, if her messenger had got to him. It could not be sooner than ten days. Ten days was a long time. It was only three days now since the town had fallen, and that seemed quite remote, an event from last year, from history. However, they could hold out ten days, even two weeks, if they had to. Surely the King would send them help.
“They’ll send a messenger to ask about him,” Breye was saying.
“Him?” She turned her heavy look on the captain.
“The field-captain.”
“What field-captain?”
“I was telling you, princess. The foray took him prisoner this morning.”
“A prisoner? Bring him here at once!”
“He’s got a sabre-cut on the head, princess.”
“Can he speak? I’ll go to him. What’s his name?”
“Kalinskar.”
She followed Breye through gilt bedrooms where muskets were stacked on the beds, down a long parqueted corridor that crunched underfoot with crystal from the shattered candle-sconces, to the ballroom on the east side, now a hospital. Oaken bedsteads, pillared and canopied, their curtains open and awry, stood about on the sweep of floor like stray ships in a harbor after storm. The prisoner was asleep. She sat down by him and looked at his face, a dark face, serene, passive. Something within her grieved; not her will, which was resolute; but she was tired, mortally tired and grieved, as she sat looking at her enemy. He moved a little and opened his eyes. She recognised him then.
After a long time she said, “Dom Andre.”
He smiled a little, and said something inaudible.
“The surgeon says your wound is not serious. Have you been leading the siege?”
“Yes,” he said, quite clearly.
“From the start?”
“Yes.”
She looked up at the shuttered windows which let in only a dim hint of the hot July sunlight.
“You’re our
first prisoner. What news of the country?”
“Givan Sovenskar was crowned in Krasnoy on the first. Gulhelm is still in Aisnar.”
“You don’t bring good news, captain,” she said softly, with indifference. She glanced round the other beds down the great room, and motioned Breye to stand back. It irked her that they could not speak alone. But she found nothing to say.
“Are you alone here, princess?”
He had asked her a question like that the other time, up on the rooftop in the sunset.
“Brant is dead,” she answered.
“I know. But the younger brother . . . I hunted with him in the marshes, that time.”
“George is here now. He was at the defense of Kastre. A mortar blew up. It blinded him. Did you lead the siege at Kastre, too?”
“No. I fought there.”
She met his eyes, only for a moment.
“I’m sorry for this,” she said. “For George. For myself. For you, who swore to be my friend.”
“Are you? I’m not. I’ve done what I could. I’ve served your glory. You know that even my own soldiers sing songs about you, about the Lady of Moge, like an archangel on the castle walls. In Krasnoy they talk about you, they sing the songs. Now they can say that you took me prisoner, too. They talk of you with wonder. Your enemies rejoice in you. You’ve won your freedom. You have been yourself.” He spoke quickly, but when he stopped and shut his eyes a moment to rest, his face looked still again, youthful. Isabella sat for a minute saying nothing, then suddenly got up and went out of the room with the hurrying, awkward gait of a girl in distress, graceless in her heavy, powder-stained dress.
Ursula K. Le Guin Page 57