Heraclix and Pomp: A Novel of the Fabricated and the Fey

by Forrest Aguirre

  “Huzzah!” yelled the chorus.

  “And no one argues with a soldier . . .”

  “Huzzah!” again.

  “. . . but another soldier.”

  Grumbling assent bubbled up from the troops.

  “And so it happened . . .”

  “It was inevit-, inev-, unavoidable!” shouted one of the soldiers, more drunk than the rest. The veteran looked at the man with disgust, perturbed by the sot’s interruption.

  “And so it happened that one of Caspar’s victims, a man who, though not a soldier, had a soldier for a brother, convinced said sibling to talk giant Caspar into stealing a gift, a most precious gift, for his sweetheart, something from the General himself.”

  “Hoa!” one of the soldiers yelled.

  “A fair move!” shouted another.

  “A soldier’s a soldier!” a third.

  “Of course, it was a setup, and the framed simpleton was caught red-handed.”

  “Or, rather, made red-handed!” said the chorus.

  “Yes, made red-handed. For when the General learned of the theft, he had Caspar tortured by burning off the giant’s palm prints and fingerprints as a lesson to all that what is the General’s is the General’s.”

  “A good lesson,” the soldiers agreed, “well taught.”

  Heraclix folded his arms, hiding his palms underneath the fabric of his cowl.

  “He also had his feet and toes ironed, to show that a common foot-soldier dare not cross the General’s threshold without permission.”

  “Hear, hear!” the chorus heard.

  Heraclix looked down at his boot-clad feet. He thought he knew what he would see if he removed the footwear.

  “And then, with a full three whacks from the executioner’s axe, he was beheaded.”

  Pomp carefully studied the seams between Heraclix’s body and neck. She knelt carefully on his shoulder, shifting her weight to the outside, then flew out from under the cowl where she had been hidden.

  Heraclix started at the movement.

  “What? What is it?” one of the soldiers said.

  The most drunk of the bunch looked at Heraclix suspiciously.

  “Hey. Ain’t we supposed to be looking for someone big?”

  “Haw!” laughed the veteran, who walked over to the drunk and gave him a slap on the back so hard the man almost vomited. “This ain’t him. No way! Lookit him. He looks just like poor old Caspar. Could be his twin! Though a touch uglier.”

  “You know what this giant looked like?” Heraclix asked.

  “No, no.” The veteran had a far-off look in his eyes. “Caspar has been dead for a long, long time. Before my time, even. He’s a legend, old Caspar.”

  The men all solemnly nodded, lowering their eyes to show respect to Caspar’s memory.

  “But I thought you said—” Heraclix began.

  “Look here,” the veteran said, trying, unsuccessfully, to rest his arm over the giant’s back. “We’re supposed to take anyone who is ‘unusually large,’ as the orders go, in for questioning.”

  “But you . . . you’re like one of us, I’d say. What do you say, boys?”

  “Huzzah!” said all but the one who was still doubled over on the ground.

  “That’s right. One of us, like the ghost of old Caspar himself, heh?” he said.

  Heraclix forced a chuckle.

  “So you head on over to Hradčany, by the castle. There’s a bright blue flat there, stuck between a red butcher store and an orange flat. That’s where old Caspar lived, a long, long time ago. I’m sure his family still lives there.

  “Thank you,” Heraclix said.

  “No need! You’ve brought back some good memories, friend. And you needn’t worry about us ratting you out. We never saw you, did we, boys?”

  “Never!” most of them said.

  “Mmph!” said the drunk, shaking his head and vomiting into his own hands.

  “Well then, we’d best disappear,” Heraclix joked. He heard Pomp gasp in surprise.

  “We?” said the veteran, looking around Heraclix’s girth to see if anyone was hiding behind him.

  “Nothing. Ah, never mind,” Heraclix said, “Figure of speech.”

  He quickly headed off toward Prague Castle, leaving the soldiers behind. He walked mechanically through the streets, letting his body take him where it would. His thoughts were on his body, though he felt a strange separation of physical form and conscious thought. He recalled the brightly colored illustration contained in Mowler’s book and stopped momentarily.

  “Why have we stopped?” Pomp whispered.

  “Just thinking,” Heraclix said, reaching into his pouch to retrieve the book. He started walking again, slowly, while thumbing through to the illustration. “It’s a map,” he said.

  “A map?” Pomp asked.

  “Yes, a map of who I am, and who I was.”

  “This is good to have, right?”

  “I don’t know. I think I’m even more confused than before.”

  He closed the book, put it back in his pouch, and walked. His legs were taking him to their next destination, but his thoughts wandered off into regions unknown.

  CHAPTER 9

  Finding the blue house in Hradčany is like finding a specific grain in a teaspoon of salt. Blue, red, and orange houses are everywhere. Also yellow, white, lavender, and three shades of green. Windows and doors vary in shape, size, and quantity. The buildings are united by their proximity to each other, a chaining together of rain gutters like some strange airborne river, and, of course, by their utter lack of uniformity. No two neighborhoods look exactly alike, but all are part of the same organic whole, rows of homes growing out of cobblestone fields fed by rain gutter canals.

  Heraclix and Pomp wander for hours looking for the flat as described by the veteran soldier. Pomp scouts ahead, identifying blue building candidates and navigating Heraclix, who soon becomes lost in the twisting streets, through the neighborhood in the shadow of Saint Vitus Cathedral. The spire’s umbra has grown long, stretching toward the river like a dark dagger blade by the time they finally find the place.

  Pomp peeks in the windows.

  “No one home,” she says.

  Heraclix knocks, but there is no answer.

  Pomp flies up above the building where Heraclix can’t get in.

  There, there is a chimney, just big enough. She goes down, wriggling, punches a large spider who tries to bite her. The spider falls to the fireplace below. Still, she has to tear her way through the webs, down the flue and into the ash pit. The spider shakes, clenches in on itself like a fist, dies. Pomp looks around, up, down. Where is the spider’s ghost? Where did it go? Would it haunt her?

  Pomp backs out of the fireplace, turns around and scans the apartment. It is sparse: a desk, chair, bookshelf—papers strewn about, a silver thaler on a chain and a crucifix adorn the wall. Cobwebs are everywhere.

  The shimmer of the thaler catches Pomp’s attention. She lifts the chain from the wall peg. The man on the coin is different from the faces on Heraclix’s gold coins. Heraclix’s gold shows a woman with curly hair and a double chin. This coin shows a man wearing a laurel. His hair is just like Pomp’s—short, cut in a bob. She will keep this coin!

  Heraclix waited outside until his presence at the door began to draw people’s attention. A pair of women nudged each other and spoke in hushed tones. Their disapproval was clear on their faces. A group of young children chased each other until one of them spotted Heraclix, pointed at him, and ran away screaming. The others followed screaming, looking over their shoulders to see what it was that they were screaming about.

  An old man bumped into Heraclix and let out an almost inhuman growl. He looked up into the giant’s eyes and gave an evil glare.

  “Excuse me,” Heraclix said.

  The man pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes, then carefully backed away. After making some distance between them, the old man cast a hateful glare at the giant, then turned and ran away.
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br />   Heraclix walked away from the apartment. He’s gone to fetch the constable, Heraclix thought. Best to clear out and find a place to hide for a while.

  He turned and walked down the street toward the river. “This has been fruitless,” he said to himself. “I have no direction. I don’t even know where to begin. The more I learn about my . . . self,” he hesitated to use the word, “the less I know.”

  Heraclix entered the west doorway of Saint Vitus Cathedral and, sitting on a back pew in the nave, brought forth the papers that Pomp had acquired earlier, hoping to find some inspiration in them. The pews were empty, allowing Heraclix to meditate on the puzzles that plagued his thoughts. But as he began to read, he was surprised to see a silver thaler on a chain materialize, seemingly out of nowhere, and plop down on top of the papers.

  Pomp said. “I just find this.”

  “Just find? Where?” he said with a tone somewhere between amused and chiding.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know? Did you take it from the apartment?”

  Pomp became visible and visibly annoyed. “That man is dead. This is not his anymore. You say so!”

  Heraclix sighed, then held the coin up in the colored glow of a stained-glass window.

  “This coin looks old,” he said. He ran a finger over the obverse, studying the face of the noble stamped there. “Ferdinand III. This is an old coin, Pomp.” He flipped it to the reverse side, noting the coat of arms. “No date. This doesn’t get us any closer to finding Caspar.”

  He looked at the coin’s edge and was surprised to see tiny letters engraved there. He squinted to read them, turning the coin in the light to get a better angle on the worn lettering. “Josefov,” he said. “Probably the location of the original owner . . .” He stopped suddenly.

  “What?” Pomp asked.

  “Josefov! The ghetto!” He stood up and left just as a parishioner, alerted by Heraclix’s loud voice, came out of Saint Wenceslaus’s Chapel and walked toward the source of the disturbance. The door had closed behind Heraclix and Pomp by the time he was halfway down the pews.

  They went back to the bridge, Heraclix hoping that they wouldn’t run into any soldiers. Luck was on their side, and they crossed the river without incident. Desire drove Heraclix. He steered by instinct. He wasn’t quite sure how he was navigating his way from the Old Town to, then through, Josefov—he merely knew that he was. It felt natural to him, yet unnatural, like he knew exactly which course to take in order to reach his unknown destination, like he had taken this route a thousand times before, though he had never even been to the city, so far as he could recall. A degree of unease entered his gut, spread through his chest and crawled up his back. He skulked and stumbled through dozens of winding streets and alleyways, oblivious to his destination, yet confident that he knew the way there, his every motion an act of frisson-building faith.

  This sense of belonging, cast up against the knowledge of his very lack of knowledge, gave him pause. How can I know this place that I have never before seen? What part of me is so attuned to this area, and why? he thought. He felt nauseated when he dwelt on such questions: What part of my unseen past causes the city to ring such a familiar chord? Who, really, am I?

  The buildings leaned this way and that, with no particular dominant orientation, like God had played building blocks there as a child and never cleaned up his mess. The rooftops were steeper than the Alps, walls narrow and tall, but even more inaccessible. The lower windows were barred, the upper windows too high for potential burglars to reach except by way of the treacherous roofs. If one could see out the high windows, one would be rewarded with a view of yet another beige wall, which would be like no reward at all, save for those who enjoyed unending blandness. It was an open prison, a neighborhood-cum-jail. Eaves loomed, threatening to fall on the street below at the slightest disturbance. Still, Heraclix trusted that somehow he would reach and recognize his destination, though the thought did occur to him that he might prefer to be elsewhere when he finally found it.

  And then, he was there. And he knew he was there, somehow, wherever “there” was.

  “There” was a door off its hinges, a two-story beige flat with boarded-up windows snowing dust from between the splintered slats and a stairway on the side of the building that led nowhere. He softly pushed at the door, which teetered on one hinge for a moment, then slammed to the floor, blowing a wave of debris out in all directions. Dirt billowed out of the open doorway, causing Pomp to cough aloud in the cloud.

  “I thought you had a companion with you,” an old man’s voice said from within the gloom. “Now I am certain of it.”

  “Who are you?” Heraclix asked.

  “Peek-a-boo!” the voice in the darkness said. “I see you! But not your friend. Do show yourself, little one. Show yourself to this harmless codger.”

  From somewhere in the room, a spark erupted, followed by the light of a candle.

  Pomp entered first, followed closely by Heraclix. She showed herself to the old man, who sat on a rickety chair in the center of the main room. He wore only a pair of trousers. It was the old man Heraclix had bumped into outside of Caspar’s apartment in Hradčany. His bare chest and feet were more like a skeleton than a living man.

  “Fair enough. You’ve shown yourself. Now do come forward, my enormous friend.”

  Heraclix walked further in. After his eyes adjusted to the low light, he scanned the room, but there was little to scan: the man, the chair, the candle, and an extremely large mirror, which was cracked and positioned on the wall behind the chair. The reflection showed the trio and the chair, but it was difficult for Heraclix to see either his own or Pomp’s features. Their faces appeared like dark smudges in the mirror. As he turned his eyes away from the muddled reflection, the squalor of the place came into sharper focus. The peeling walls were spotted black with mold. There was blood on the mirror’s frame.

  “I had hoped you would come,” the old man said. “When I saw you outside Caspar’s apartment, I hoped that you would know to follow me. And now, here you are.”

  “What do you have to offer us?” Heraclix asked. “And how do we know we can trust you?”

  “You recall Caspar Melthazaar,” the old man said, ignoring Heraclix’s question, “the one whose coin you stole from the apartment?”

  Heraclix nodded.

  “I will tell you the truth about the man Caspar Melthazaar. I am old. My time in this world is nearly at an end, and I would tell my story before I die. It is a tale I think you will want to hear,” he said, pointing at Heraclix.

  Heraclix sat on the floor. “Well, go ahead, then, old man,” he said. “Tell your tale. We will listen.”

  The man laughed, “Ha, ha! It is well that you give ear, or what little ear you have left, to my story. I am an old man, very old. This tale comes from my childhood. It’s one of my earliest memories, though I suspect that my age is such that I have dragged my capacity to remember along with me. My earliest memories become later and later.”

  Pomp looked at the man with utter confusion.

  “Please get on with it,” Heraclix said.

  “This memory,” the old man continued, “is likely from the time I was about six. Yes, six and poor. Very poor. So poor I couldn’t even afford a mother or father. I lived with my dear old grandmother. I wasn’t the only one. There were a few of us cousins living together in that little flat. My parents, you see, weren’t the only ones who had died from the plague—there were others. In all, I think grandma lost seven or eight children or children-in-law in a short period. She buried her grief in loving and taking care of her children’s children.”

  “And one of these is Caspar,” Pomp said.

  “Caspar was absolutely her favorite. I think it was because he was so stupid that she took pity on him. She always did like him better.” He scowled as he spit the words out.

  He sat silent, brooding for a moment “Still, he was my cousin,” he sighed, “and we a
ll love our cousins, right?”

  Pomp couldn’t help smiling and clapping her hands. But she quickly realized that she must have looked ridiculous, so she stopped, embarrassed.

  “We were proud of him—Caspar the imperial soldier, a terror to Turk and Prussian alike. It was said that he once wrestled an enemy officer’s horse to the ground and crushed the unfortunate rider with his own steed. Oh, he was a brute in both body and mind,” the old man said with a hint of pride in his voice.

  “I knew he would never amount to much. So I wasn’t a bit surprised when I went to watch an execution only to see Caspar kneeling at the executioner’s block.”

  “Chop, chop, chop!” he said, his eyes growing wider and redder with each repetition of the word. One eye began to twitch. Pomp shrank back.

  Heraclix’s left hand tensed. He forcefully held it down on his thigh with the right hand. He looked away from the old man in an effort to calm himself. A strong sense of familiarity washed over him, as if he had been in this place before. The candlelight shimmered, and, in an instant, a vision opened up to Heraclix’s sight.

  The walls were clothed in color, the warm glow of a fireplace on a winter’s night shimmering about the room. It was more fully furnished, with another chair, a table, and an enormous bed. Beside the bed knelt a child with a surprised look on his face, a towheaded boy whose eyes were wide with shock. In his hands was a box full of coins. He looked up at Heraclix with apparent guilt.

  “What is happening here?” Heraclix-not-Heraclix asked the youth.

  “Nothing!” the child said in a quavering voice.

  “Something, I think.”

  “You don’t think. You are an idiot. I am smarter than you. I deserve this more than you.”

  “That is for grandmother.”

  “What? Why?”

  “She has taken care of us. She is good. She deserves better than what she has. Please put it back.”

  “No!”

  “Then, maybe you can take it to her?”

  “Yes,” the child said with a smile. “Yes, I’ll take it to her.” He looked at Heraclix-not-Heraclix, hardly believing his luck or, perhaps, his interlocutor’s stupidity. He shut the box and put it under one arm. The contents jingled loudly.