People of the Book

by David Stacton

  for John Mann Rucker

  “Ein Phantasiestück im Callotsmanier”

  Die Gerechten werden Weggeraft, vor dem Unglück;

  Und die richtig vor sich gewandelt haben kommen zum Frieden

  Und ruhen in ihren Kammern.

  — J. P. KRIEGER’S setting of Isaiah 57:1–2

  In order to see clearly, one must walk in the dark with both eyes shut.

  — ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS

  Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Part 2

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Part 3

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Part 4

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Copyright

  PART I

  1

  WHATEVER HE DID or wherever he was, the Great Chancellor had the art of sleeping well, but sometimes, and again wherever he was or whatever he did, for in private life he always did as he would, he took walks late at night, preferably in the garden if he was in a city, or in the countryside if he was on campaign, with no company but a horn lantern, and often not that, for he was not afraid of the dark. The Great Chancellor had never been afraid of anything and never would be. As for possible violence, his hearing was acute, he was a burly man, and nobody would dare. Like his late Master, he could, when necessary, stare whole peoples down. It often had been necessary, and he had never failed.

  He was indifferent to places. Except for the blue firs of the family estates at Föno, at Uppland, in Södermanland, all places were the same to him. And yet he did not like it here. It was too southerly.

  He was at Mainz, there were many refugees, and this being the first Sunday of February, 1635, the people had gone to church all day, to keep warm. Himself, he stamped and blew frost on the air like a pit pony, but needed no more than a fur cloak against even this cold. He was used to it.

  Though this was a holy war, or once had been, it was the policy of the Swedes to observe a religious tolerance, at least here. Therefore the Chancellor had not only made a state visit to his own church, but for political reasons, had had a report of what was said in the others.

  The report did not please him. The turmmusik did. It was the one thing in the Germanies he had grown fond of. When you entered a town, at dusk, at dawn, for weddings, feasts, funerals and holy days, or merely because some princeling liked it, trumpet volleys were let off from the towers, some so ancient no one any longer knew what they meant, some extempore. That sad, sweet, prideful blaring, firm, assured, but lost, now loud, now far away, deliberate, assertive, oddly diffident, made your scalp prickle; it was the ultimate unanswered question, as the quick green and rose sunsets heavily darkened down. These entries had in them the proud dignity of man in hell, they announced appearances and paced your walk. They suggested the staghorns, the magic bullet, and St. Hubertus devout in armour in the grove. They were wild in the right way. They were reminiscent of the blessing of the magic animals who speak on St. Martin’s Eve, having that night the gift of tongues. They were brass.

  So though he could not love these people—they were too quick, too slow, too roguish, too inconsequent, their rulers were homines otiosi, their Christ was a foreign god, they were not Swedish, or even Wendish, as the Baltic peoples, our first cousins, were—yet he would treat them with equity. He treated all men with equity; but perhaps a little more so because of the turmmusik.

  It was a matter of faith. The crucifix of the north is pain and writhing and what life means. It is not, as southerly, a rosy call to bed. In the south, death is an animal accident and pain a pleasure. In the north, it is a wrestling match with God, and pain a proof. Between Christ the town beauty and all of it play-acting, and Christ the Athlete, who must be caught and die, there is no understanding possible. We remain what we were before the Irish sent us colonizing saints. Our meaning is in what we are, not in what the thing is called. Just as the out-islanders, the Icelanders, those of Faeroe, of Groenland, of Main Land, who were our best stock, accepted Christianity only by legislation and agreement, as something of practical value, so do we, who stayed at home, have ethnic reservations about that faith we have found it expedient to accept. So it is with the turmmusik, for there were ancient gods in these woods, too. They are still there. We follow the old gods with new names. You will never understand men until you understand that, nor will you be able to do them any but a harmful good. It is essential to the well-being of the world that every nation’s turmmusik should survive, that no pride be humbled, and that no people be induced to give their old gods up, either voluntarily or involuntarily, for they cannot do it. If they do it, they die.

  Hence tolerance, for if one of them dies, we die a little, too, whether it be in the Indies or in my wife’s bed, by whom I had weak sons, it could not be helped, I was a strong man. They must fend for themselves. I can give them position and preferment. I cannot give them a character they do not have.

  And here is the report. Though devout to his own gods, Oxenstierna was not an orgiastic Christian. At home there were still enough things visible to enrich the Lutheran temperament with beliefs so deeply driven as to be the piles which held the Church above the waterline. In those white limed buildings which sat on the shore, backed by spruce and glittering with gypsum, clean, barren, and hard with character, another God was worshiped than was worshiped here. Peoples commune with what they are. That is what churches are for. There is a darkness in the soul has nothing to do with evil. There is a light on the sea which has the harsh, magnesium backlash of self-respect. The softer forms of salvation are not for us.

  If you have seen the landfall of Iceland in choppy weathers, or ridden home with your hair frozen and your face crusted with salt spray, you do not need the Virgin Mary. The Christmas lady with candles on her head and the solemn joys of the midsummer bonfires say more.

  In Oxenstierna’s own chapel, the pastor had taken as his text Revelations 6:2: “And I saw, and behold, a white horse, and he that sat thereon had a bow; and there was given unto him a crown: and he came forth conquering and to conquer.”

  This was a reference to the Snow King, melted away at Lützen this two and a half years ago, and was meant to encourage the troops, who had been losing ever since the battle of Nördlingen the previous September. If the Lion of the North had not been killed, he would now be a hearty, pink, and eager forty-one. He was missed.

  At the Catholic church, the text had b
een Psalm 37:38: “Mark the perfect man, and behold the upright; For the latter end of that man is Peace: As for the transgressors, they shall be destroyed together: The latter end of the wicked shall be cut off.” A reference to the Hapsburg cause, no doubt, and to a Swedish defeat. A further moral had been drawn from the nose of Isaiah 13:9: “Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, cruel, with wrath, and a fierce anger; to make the land a desolation and to destroy the sinners thereof out of it.” They were winning, so they exulted. The Chancellor did not distress himself about that. The war had long since lost whatever religious sheen it had had. It was now political. These cooings in the conventicle meant nothing.

  What bothered him was the Calvinists, a clamorous minority so eager to destroy anyone who did not agree with it, as not to be reasoned with. The Calvinists were always plotting. Their holy purpose was to pull the world down, on their own heads if need be. Their god was Loki.

  In his stark hate, the Calvinist preacher had belched hoarfrost over his shabby followers, in a freezing room, warmed them with a little hell-fire, and shouted out a few variations on Genesis 4:14: “And Cain said unto the Lord, my punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the ground; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer in the earth; and it shall come to pass that whosoever findeth me shall slay me.” Beware the rigors of the halbstarken. They alone are weak enough to murder Abel. They never forgive you for what they have done to you, and in their remorse they trample down whole towns.

  So a sermon of this sort was a serious matter. It did not do to feed discontent, which had little but itself these days to feed on. The armies had mutinied. “I must deplore the fact that every officer does as he pleases,” wrote General Banér. There was famine. Money was short. Allies could not be depended upon. Since the previous September the roads had been impassible for the citizens fleeing south. They had been locked up in refugee camps around Frankfort, but Frankfort was no refuge. Besides, there was no food. Of his own commanders, Bernard of Saxe-Weimar had been suborned by the French, so the news had it, and perhaps others as well. It is not one thing that happens at a time, but everything.

  To discuss these emergencies had taken up the afternoon and evening. There were others. The heiress to the throne was a minor; the Queen Regent a devout maniac who put black velvet over every window; the nobles in Stockholm were baying for autonomy. The Great Chancellor had discretionary powers and complete direction of the war, but to control the war, with nobody strong enough to hold tight rein on the government at home, except to drive him from it, was not easy. So he had much on his mind.

  I.i.4: RIGHT is a moral quality annexed to the person, justly entitling him to possess some particular privilege, or to perform some particular act…. This moral quality, when perfect, is called a FACULTY, when imperfect, an APTITUDE,

  thought Oxenstierna. It is from the Book. We are people of the Book. And he made a face. He had had to deal with the author of the Book recently.

  *

  There are various peoples of the book, for the book itself varies. We are proffered the Koran, the Bible, the Tao te Ching, the Analects, the Hidden under the Leaves. But the Snow King, he who took two and a half years to melt, took with him everywhere, so we are told, and certainly a copy was found in his tent after his death, The Rights of Peace and War by the Dutch legalist Huig de Groot, called Grotius. It is a work which endeavors to establish international behavior not by conscience, but by precedent, by means of ample quotations from the self-inflicted woes of Palestine and the pomps of Greece and Rome.

  It had led the Snow King to recommend Grotius to his successors. So Oxenstierna had been saddled with him. Indeed, he had only just managed to get rid of him. The Snow King was a master of the arts of war in practice, Grotius of contention in the abstract; no doubt the fascination had arisen from that. De Jure Belli Ac Pacis is a work of the carpenter’s plane: all definitions are smoothed down to the pith, and here are the shavings. It is a work of theory, fascinating to practical men in their leisure moments, of which they have not many, since they have no time to give the thing a name till it be done.

  And what was to be done?

  I.i.2: Cicero styles war a contention by force, but the practice has prevailed to indicate by that name, not an immediate action, but a state of affairs; so that war is the state of contending parties, considered as such.

  No doubt. No doubt. How well the man does put things. But can he deal with them? I fear not.

  *

  In Mainz the Great Chancellor occupied a schloss outside the city gates. It was an ungainly building whose stones bled damp of an evening. There was green mold on the back of most of the tapestries. Its rooms stank of too many calls upon his time. He had that kind of intelligence which overdrives and never becomes locked in the particular. He was better at strategy than tactics. He lost the move but won the game, eight moves over. His shortest reach was the knight’s gambit, but the knight is a tethered piece. It has to swivel. So rather than to bed, he went for a walk in the dark.

  He was a processional man, but hated pomp in private. A sentry was challenged a sleepy distance away. Apart from that he had the world for his own. He was unobserved. He felt himself. He snorted. He liked always to go from the smaller to the bigger room, from the world of houses to the world of nature. The night was cold enough to sear his nostrils, and he liked that, too. It revived him. The hairs in his nose became brittle. The night was so deep the trees looked blue.

  It was now some years since he had seen Föno, or Södermanland, or any of the farms and fields of home. He turned and looked north, over the knot garden and the ornamental statuary, a parterre that depressed him. The sky was a black velvet sieve, with light behind it and every hole moist and glittering as those of a colander when you hold it up. He took small faith from astrologers: so much for stars. But that lighter band along the northern horizon was the direction of Sweden. Yes, all places are the same to me, but only because they are not home.

  Far to the north, a week’s ride from Stockholm, lay the Kopparberg, at Falun, its harbor at this dirty time of year blocked with mounds of ice. In April, when the ice began to break up, the barges would come south to Lübeck and Hamburg, laden with copper ore, which in those towns would be exchanged for letters of credit. To the northeast lay the white and small still harbors of Estonia, of Livonia, strung as far down the coast as Riga and the Duchy of Kurland. The customs tolls of these, and the profits from the Kopparberg, paid for that part of the war the French would not. France could not be depended upon, as usual. French policy “is first to stir up the waters, the better to purloin a large portion of the fish.”

  Between the Duchy of Kurland and Denmark stretched Pomerania, what there was of Poland, North Germany, and the Hansa towns. Though Denmark controlled the entrance to it, the Baltic was now once more a Swedish sea. To keep it so, Sweden had entered this war, to protect the Protestant religion, to drive the Catholic troops of the Holy Roman Emperor out from the Wendish coast, and to have a town or two in Pomerania. It was now necessary to compel the French to continue subsidies, if the troops were to be paid back into trim. It was as simple as that. But that was not so simple.

  Oxenstierna went on staring north, and since there was a wind in the pine crowns, like the riders of the Apocalypse passing over, heard horses galloping on the shingle, and saw bleached driftwood heaved to against the rocks, licked his finger, held it up to the night breeze, sucked it, could have sworn he found it salt, and felt a freak hunger for dried salmon, which was hard come by here.

  There was a candle flickering in his bedroom. With an angry shrug, he trundled himself off to the woods, a large, but not a tall man of fifty-two, in sturdy health, wearing a fur-lined robe and soft yellow boots that sucked and flopped around his calves, but he did not notice, for he brooked no interference of any living thing, let alone the shrubbery. He had about him the smell of leather and the stench of horse. And since he
liked steam baths, he glowed pink and rosy.

  There was starlight enough on the snow to light his way, and the moon was rising. It was not good snow. It had a thin spider web of crust, through which his feet sank into a white ichor below. The more he went on, the worse his temper, and the worse his temper, the more he went on. Somewhere off to his left a sentry shouted again, lonely as a dog barking. He bruised his right foot on a concealed rock, cursed, and stumbled.

  “Goddam the Cardinal of France,” he said, who was probably at that moment turning in his sleep to curse him. In front of him was what looked like an eagle’s nest fallen complete from the tree, a wretched huddle of torn sticks and branches. Straightening up, he caught within it the glitter of white eyes.

  There is no known animal with white eyes. In the pine smell the Great Chancellor stood motionless and blinked.

  The glitter disappeared.

  Oxenstierna sucked in his breath and felt pleased. He had been put through so much of the other kind, that a mere physical danger appealed to him. It was some years since he had had the pleasure of striking anyone. Since he was standing in the middle of a large patch of snow, he could not throw himself to cover. He would have to bluff it out instead. He prepared to enjoy himself.

  “Come out of there.”

  Nothing stirred, but you can tell when people know they have been detected. The emotion ripples back. He had no weapons with him and in a giddy silence felt the need of none.

  “I said, come out of there.”