Little Kingdoms

by Steven Millhauser

  THE PRINCE’S DOUBTS INCREASE. Now nightly the Prince drove his wife to the margrave’s chamber, and restlessly awaited her return; and every morning the Princess returned to say that the margrave had remained steadfast. The Prince, tormented by the growing certainty that he was being deceived, and exasperated by the hope born of her daily assurances, longed for proof of her faithlessness, in order to ease his heart of uncertainty. One night, sorrowing alone, he remembered suddenly a time before his life had taken a crooked turn. He and the Princess were walking in the park, in the avenue of acacias, and something he had said made her laugh aloud; and the sound of that laughter, and the sunlight pouring down through the acacia leaves onto the graveled path, and the Princess’s throat, half in sun and half in trembling shade, seemed as remote and irrecoverable as his own childhood. At that moment he saw with terrible clarity what he had done. He vowed to beg forgiveness on his knees and not to rise until he was permitted to return to his lost paradise. But even as he imagined the Princess laughing in the sun and shade of the acacia path, he saw her hand rise to her throat as she turned from the window, where a devil with a sharp beard and amethyst jewels on his mantle leaned motionless against the shadowed stone.

  SCARBO. Among the many devoted servants of the Prince was a dwarf, whose name was Scarbo. He was a proud little man, with stern features and a small pointed beard; he dressed in the latest fashion, was a master of court etiquette and of all questions concerning precedence, and was noted for his disdainful glance, his penetrating intelligence, and his unswerving devotion to the Prince. Once, after a courtier had humiliated the little man by picking him up and tossing him lightly in the air, while others had watched with smiles and laughter, Scarbo lay on his bed in silent fury for two nights and two days. On the third night he crept into the bedchamber of the offending courtier and plunged his little sharp sword into the sleeper’s throat. After that he cut off both of the dead man’s hands and laid them with interlocked fingers on the coverlet. The Prince forgave his dwarf, but sentenced him to a month in prison; some say he was confined in the dungeon itself, and absorbed its darkness into his soul. But if his proud and disdainful nature was immediately apparent, earning him an uneasy respect never far from ridicule, Scarbo’s most remarkable feature was his delicacy of feeling—for he possessed a highly developed and almost feminine sensitivity to the faintest motions of another person’s mood. This unusual development in the realm of feeling, born perhaps of an outsider’s habit of extreme watchfulness, increased his danger as an enemy and his value as a trusted servant and councillor. Combing his beard in his private chamber, handing the Prince a goblet of ruby wine, listening at night to the footsteps of the Princess moving past his door toward the margrave’s chamber, the dwarf knew that it was only a matter of time before the Prince would summon him.

  STORIES. Our town takes pride in the practical and useful arts. We are well known for our door panels and brass hinges, our stove tiles and weather vanes, our tomb effigies and stone crucifixes, whereas our literature rarely rises above the level of doggerel verses, carnival plays, and dull philosophical poems in monotonous meters and rigid rhymes. Our imagination is far better expressed in the famous work of our metal masters, above all in the brilliant productions of our church-bell casters, our bladesmiths, our makers of spice mills, astrolabes, and articulated figures for clocks. And yet it would be a mistake to think of us as entirely deficient in the art of the word. Although we are practical citizens, who keep our accounts strictly and go to bed early, we have all listened to tales in the nursery, tales that are never written down but may appear suddenly in distorted or fragmentary form in a song heard in a tavern or at a carnival play; and foremost among these stories of our childhood are tales of the castle. The same tales are told by minstrels in the courtyards of inns, and sung by peasants in the fields and villages of our territorial domain. In another form the tales show themselves in the early parts of our chronicles, where legend and fact are interwoven, and many episodes have been joined together by unknown hands and written down on sheets of parchment, which are bound in ivory and metal on wood, purchased by wealthy merchants, and read by their wives. Such stories, reaching far down into the deepest past of our town, attach themselves likewise to the castle of the present day, so that the actual dwellers in the castle come to seem nothing but passing actors asked to perform the changeless gestures of an eternal play. Thus it comes about that, although we are practical and commercial by nature, we too have our stories.

  THE SUMMONS. One morning after a night of shattering dreams the Prince summoned his dwarf to a private chamber and informed the little man that he desired a service of him. Scarbo bowed, noting once again the signs of change in his master and saying that he desired only to be of service to his Prince. With a show of impatience the Prince said that of late he had been preoccupied with pressing affairs, that he feared the Princess was too much alone, and that he desired his dwarf to spend more time in her company, attending to her needs, listening to her thoughts, and serving her in every way; and he further desired that he should report to the Prince each morning, concerning the state of her happiness. The dwarf understood instantly that he was being asked to spy on the Princess. His pride thrilled at the gravity of the mission, for the Prince was in effect conspiring with his dwarf against his own wife, but Scarbo recognized a danger: the Prince, while desiring evidence against the Princess, would not necessarily welcome the proof he sought, nor be grateful to his spy for easing his way into his wife’s confidence and ferreting out her secrets. It would not do to be overzealous in the performance of his duty. Wariness was all.

  ON VAGUENESS AND PRECISION. It is precisely because of our ignorance that we see across the river with such precision. We know the precise carvings on the capital of each stone pillar and the precise history of each soul: they are transparent to our understanding. On our side of the river, even the most familiar lanes bear surprises around well-known bends; we see only a certain distance into the hearts of our wives and friends, before darkness and uncertainty begin. Perhaps, after all, this is the lure of legend: not the dreamy twilight of the luxuriating fancy, in love with all that is misty and half-glimpsed, but the sharp clarity forbidden by our elusive lives.

  A WALK IN THE GARDEN. One sunny afternoon the Princess, who had been walking in the courtyard, dismissed her ladies-in-waiting at the garden gate and entered her garden alone. The walls were higher than her head; paths of checkered stone ran between beds of white, red, and yellow flowers; at one end stood a small orchard of pear, apple, quince, and plum trees. In the center of the garden, surrounded by a tall hedge with a wicker gate, stood the Princess’s bower, shaped like a pavilion and composed of trelliswork covered with vines. The Princess, in her azure tunic and her heart-shaped headdress, walked with bowed head among the fruit trees of the orchard, raising her eyes at the slightest noise and looking swiftly about. After a time she began to walk along the paths of checkered stone between the flower beds, passing two turf-covered benches, an octagon of white and red roses, and a white jasper three-tiered fountain with a column surmounted by a unicorn. At the central hedge she hesitated and seemed to listen; then she pushed open the gate and entered, bending low under a trellised arch. In the green shade of her bower sat two couches covered in crimson silk. Scarbo, seated in the corner of a couch, at once stood up and bowed. The Princess sat down stiffly on the couch opposite and stared as if harshly at the dwarf, who met her gaze and did not turn his eyes aside. “I cannot do what you propose,” she began, in a toneless voice. The dwarf, rigid with attention, listened patiently. He was well pleased with his progress.

  A LACK OF SOMETHING. Although ours is a flourishing town—and we flourish, according to some, precisely to the extent that the inhabitants of the castle have declined in power and serve a largely symbolic or representative function—we nevertheless feel a lack of something. Our metal artisans are admired far and wide, our sturdy houses with their steep gables and oak window frames fill th
e eye with delight, beyond the walls our fields and vineyards overflow with ripeness. Our church steeples rise proudly into the sky, and toll out the hours on great bells cast by masters. In fact, it is not too much to say that our lives pass in a harmony and tranquility that are the envy and admiration of the region. Nor is ours a dull tranquility, stifling all that is joyful or dark; for not only are we engaged in vigorous lives, but we are human beings like all human beings, we know the joys and sorrows that come to human hearts. And yet it remains true that, now and then, we feel a lack of something. We do not know what it is, this thing that we lack. We know only that on certain summer afternoons, when the too-blue sky stretches on and on, or in warm twilights when the blackbird cries from the hill, a restlessness comes over us, an inner dissatisfaction. Like children we grow suddenly angry for no reason, we want something. Then we turn to the castle, high on the other shore, and all at once we feel a savage quickening. With a kind of violence our hearts exult. For across the sun-sparkling river, there on the far shore, we feel a heightened sense of things, and we dare for a moment to cry out our forbidden desire: for exaltation, for devastation, for revelation.

  THE FOUR REASONS. Because of his high gifts in the realm of feeling, the dwarf understood something about the Prince that the Prince himself did not fully understand. The dwarf understood that the Prince, despite great wealth, a beautiful and virtuous wife, devoted friends, and a life that inspired the praise of all who knew him, bore within him a secret weakness: a desire for immense suffering. It was as if the experience of so much good fortune had created in the Prince a craving in the opposite direction. He had at last contrived to satisfy this desire by means of his wife, as though wishing to strike at the deepest source of his own happiness; and it was Scarbo’s role to confirm the Prince’s darkest suspicion and present him with the suffering he craved. The danger lay in the uncertainty of the Prince’s gratitude for such a service. Scarbo, radically set apart from the court and indeed from humankind by the accident of his diminutive stature, was a sharp observer of human nature; he understood that the Prince was furious at himself for being suspicious of his wife, and above all for inviting his dwarf to spy on her. The Princes sense that he had done something unclean might at any moment cause him to strike out violently at the instrument of his uncleanliness, namely, the dwarf. It was therefore essential that Scarbo not bear witness directly against the Princess, even though he crept nightly into the margrave’s chamber and listened through the closed bedcurtains in order to learn all he could about their lascivious trysts. To Scarbo’s surprise—to his bewilderment and anger—the margrave appeared to be innocent. This the dwarf attributed to a deep and still unfathomable design on the part of the margrave, whom he detested as the Prince’s former favorite. The Prince would surely have believed a report of lecherous foul play in the margrave’s tangled sheets, but Scarbo feared the force of the Princess’s denial, as well as the Prince’s rage at a witness of his wife’s degradation. There was also something else. Although the Prince desired to suffer, and although the means he had chosen was his wife’s infidelity, he also desired to be released from suffering, to return to the time of sunlight before the darkness of suspicion had entered his soul. The abandonment of this second desire, even though that abandonment alone could usher in the fulfillment of the first desire, was sure to be so painful that its agent would appear an enemy. The solution to all these problems and uncertainties had come to Scarbo one night after a week of relentless thought. It was brilliantly simple: the Princess herself must denounce the margrave. The Prince could then have the margrave tortured and killed in good conscience and enter into the life of suffering he craved, without having cause to turn against his dwarf. Now, Scarbo knew that the Princess was steadfast in virtue, and would die rather than yield her body to the margrave; his plan therefore was to persuade her to denounce the margrave untruthfully. For this he urged four reasons. The first was this, that such a denunciation would put an end to the torment of her nightly humiliation, which the Princess had confessed to the dwarf during the first of their bower meetings. The second was this, that the Prince longed for her to denounce the margrave, and that by so doing she would be satisfying the Prince’s wish. The third was this, that the margrave in fact desired the Princess, and refused to take advantage of her solely because he feared the Prince; the margrave was therefore a traitor, and deserved to be exposed. And the fourth was this, that to confess the margrave’s fall would be to reawaken the Prince’s desire for her, and put an end to her nightly banishment from his bed. The Princess had listened to the dwarf’s reasons in silence and had promised to give her answer in the bower. Her refusal, on that occasion, had been firm, but it could remain only as firm as her inner strength; and the dwarf knew that under the ravagement of her suffering, her inner strength was weakening.

  OF STORY AND HISTORY. For the most part we can only imagine the lives of those who live in the castle, lives that may in certain respects depart sharply from the particular shapes we invent as we brood across the river on midsummer afternoons. And yet it has been argued that these imaginary lives are true expressions of the world of the castle, that they constitute not legend, but history. They do so, it is said, not simply because here and there an invented episode set in the dim past may accidentally imitate an actual event, on the far side of the river; nor because our stories, however remote from literal truth, are images of eternal truths that lie buried beneath the shifting and ephemeral forms of the visible. No, our argument has a different origin. The argument goes that our tales are not unknown among the inhabitants of the castle, and in fact circulate freely among the courtiers, who admire the simplicity of our art or take up our stories and weave them into more refined forms, which we ourselves may sometimes hear recited by traveling minstrels in the courtyards of inns or in our market squares. But if our tales are known among the inhabitants of the castle, may it not come about that they begin to imitate the gestures that give them such pleasure, so that their lives gradually come to resemble the legendary lives we have imagined? To the extent that this is so, our dreams may be said to be our history.

  THE FACE IN THE POOL. Day after day the Princess suffered the Prince’s displeasure, night after night she lay stony cold beside the margrave; and in her sorrowing and distracted mind the voice of the dwarf grew louder, urging her to put an end to her unhappiness, and restore the pleasure of vanished days. One afternoon when the Princess was out walking in the park with two ladies-in-waiting, she came to a pool, shadowed by overhanging branches. Stooping over, she was startled to see, beneath the water, a wrinkled old woman who stared at her with grief-stricken eyes. Even as she drew in her breath sharply she knew that it was her own face, changed by sorrow. For a long time the Princess gazed at the face in the water before rising and returning to her chamber, where she dismissed her women and sat down at a table. There she took up her Venetian mirror, with its frame of carved ivory, and looked into eyes that seemed to be asking her a frightening question. After a time she reached for her jars of cosmetic powders and, mixing a small amount of saliva with several compounds, began to apply skin whiteners and rouge to her cheeks. Faster and faster she rubbed the unguents into her skin with her fingertips, before stopping abruptly to stare at her pink-and-white face. With a sudden motion she reached over to a small silver bell that sat on the table beside an openwork pomander containing a ball of musk, and shook it swiftly twice. A moment later Scarbo appeared, with a low bow. Holding up the mirror, the Princess gestured disdainfully toward her pink-and-white image in the glass. At once the dwarf stepped over, climbed onto a stool covered in green velvet, and picked up a cloth. With a headshake and a sigh of disapproval he began wiping the ointments from her face, while he held forth on the art of cosmetics. Had the Princess never been told that a base of white lead was to be avoided, since it was known to produce harmful effects on the skin? Surely she had seen the telltale red spots on the faces of women of the court—spots that had to be treated with ground
black mustard or snake-root. In place of white lead, might he suggest a mixture of wheat flour, egg white, powdered cuttlefish bone, sheep fat, and camphor? When Scarbo had finished cleaning the Princess’s face, he carefully selected half a dozen jars of powder from the table, holding each one up and studying it with a frown. In a copper bowl he prepared a whitish paste. Then, still standing on his stool, he leaned forward and began to apply the paste skillfully to the Princess’s cheeks with his small, jeweled fingers.