People of the Book

by David Stacton

  It could be anyone. An assassin either shoots or he does not, and if he does, he generally misses. It is amazing how few men can kill for hire. Something swerves their aim. They need encouragement. He did not repeat himself. It should be sufficient to wait.

  Nor was he wrong. After two minutes’ pause, the front of the eagle’s nest came away like a root-cellar door and something emerged, carrying a musket by the muzzle, but only as someone would use a stick to hobble.

  “Drop it.”

  It was dropped. The Chancellor was reassured, but to his astonishment, when the soldier straightened up, it was not a soldier, it was a scrawny boy of fifteen, well built but filthy in a worn leather hunting suit. His eyes had a gray glitter. His skin was purple and goose-pimpled with cold. It looked more like the shuck of a boiled tongue than human flesh. He had a mop of tow-colored hair.

  “What’s your name, boy?”

  “Lars Larsen.”

  “You’re not Swedish.”

  “I don’t know.”

  He did not look like a peasant. He looked like a good man’s ghost. The Chancellor was curious.

  “Do you know where you are?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Hiding.”

  “Who from?”

  No answer. The boy slapped with his arms to keep warm. But though he looked scared, he did not seem frightened. There is a difference. He was concealing something.

  “There’s someone else in there. Bring them out.”

  The boy looked stubborn.

  “I am Oxenstierna. Bring them out.” They stared at each other. The Chancellor smiled. Apparently the name meant nothing. But his presence did. The boy smiled, too, as though it was something he had once done easily, put his fingers in his mouth, and whistled.

  The nest stirred, and out of it came this time a little girl too thin, but well taken care of. She had enormous eyes, gray too, but with glittering whites, so that was explained. On her head she had a fur toque several sizes too large for her and much too rich. Now where had that come from?

  “From a soldier,” said Lars. “He was dead. She needed a cap. She was cold.”

  “Where do you come from?”

  “Wollin.”

  “But that’s on the Baltic,” said Oxenstierna. It was one of the first places the Swedish armies had taken, five years ago.

  “There were some leopards in a cage,” said the girl. Her brother stared her silent.

  “Humph,” said Oxenstierna, who was always curious and sometimes kind, given he had time, and led them up to the house, leaving behind them nothing but footsteps in the snow. He was certain the boy had killed the soldier to get the cap. The girl’s name (he carried her; the boy was weak) was Hannale.

  At the house he took them to the kitchens, had them fed, and then got the boy’s story out of him. That is, he got as much of it as Lars was willing to tell.

  2

  II.xvii.18: Where a voluntary act gives rise to INVOLUNTARY consequences, those consequences, considered in a moral light, are to be deemed the fruits growing out of the exercise of a free will.

  On July 4, 1630, the Great King landed at Usedom both to take his future allies by surprise, who had not expected him to land there, and to drive the Imperial troops out of a territory he felt should be under his own control, for Sweden’s protection. He arrived across the shallow Pomeranian gulf, with twenty-eight warships, as many transports and thirteen thousand men. He was the Lion of the North, as well as the Snow King, a big man with a face like a blanched almond and tawny hair. This armada sailed up out of nowhere, at dusk, toward a coast in flames, for the Imperialists had fired it before retiring. The landing was made at Peenemünde. There was a wind blowing.

  The ruler of Pomerania was Bogislaw XIV, an elderly and childless man, the last surviving male member of his house. Resistance was useless. The ladies of the court waved to Gustavus from the balconies of Stettin. “Cousin,” said the Great King, “your fair defendants would not hold out three minutes against one company of my Dalecarnian infantry. And in any case, arma nostra are in urbe vestra: jure belli you are my property.”

  And this was true, for never had the Germanies seen such an army. The people did not know what to make of the Swedes, and as for the all but transparent Finns, and the short dark Laplanders with their furry ponies, fantastic hats, and oriental looks, it was a goblin war, it was no less. Also Swedes sometimes go berserk. There were never any berserkers in the Germanies. In the Germanies such acts were not considered part of heroic military conduct. So when they occurred they went by another name.

  The Imperial general had killed what cattle he could catch and fired the towns. To encourage his men, Gustavus gave them license to plunder Usedom. These places had until recently lived undisturbed. The Imperialists robbed everyone but fought few. Gustavus was more thorough.

  A few feet away from Usedom lay the island of Wollin, between the Stettiner Haff and the Baltic. Wollin the island is twenty miles long and two to twelve miles wide, an alluvial deposit of the Oder, superimposed upon a sandbar, flat and rich. Wollin the town, on an estuary, is any small Baltic fishing village, with rambling cottages whitewashed against sea damp, a sad little dock, a shingled shore, wet sand, and geraniums at the windows stout and sturdy against an offshore breeze.

  Here, in a series of long, low, black-beamed rooms, lived the widow Larsen with her two children, Hannale, then five, and Lars, who was nine. Captain Larsen had never had his likeness taken, so nobody could remember how he had looked. He was said to have been taciturn, tall, and blond-bearded. Frau Larsen was dark. Captain Larsen had disappeared overboard during a storm, five weeks after Hannale was born. Lars could remember him only as a presence and as an emotion, not as a man.

  The widow Larsen was a solidly built and handsome woman in her forties. But she was an outlander, and the town did not love her. Whether she was awkward, shy, or disdainful, the effect was the same. She seldom smiled, but could be gotten round if you took things up with her when she was baking. Baking put her in a good humor. Therefore the children came to associate generosity and favors with the tang and savor of yeast. So far did she allow herself to show emotion, no farther.

  It was agreed she took spotless care of the children, but … About Frau Larsen it was always agreed, but … She was an enigma. People who are puzzled by everything they cannot spell, and the less they can spell the more they are puzzled, found her frightening. So did the children. She was a woman who could not bear to touch anyone.

  She was prosperous from two pastures, a warehouse, and a half interest in a fishing smack. From time to time she underwrote small trade, from which she made good profits, though not so large as people liked to think.

  Captain Larsen, who had lived in the town for thirty years, was an outlander, too. He had come there at the age of eighteen, with half the price of a fishing boat and enough for a house besides. So the family had no kin in Wollin. There was supposed to be an uncle somewhere, inside the Germanies, a minister named Stöss. Very early on, nine years ago when she had first come here, Frau Larsen had inadvertently mentioned him.

  “Then he would be your brother?”

  No answer. There never was.

  *

  Coastal people do not thrive away from the smell and smack of the sea. They hear it always and they do not feel at ease without it. They lose their bearings overland. Hannale and Lars had no wish to go to the mainland. Lars wanted to skipper a boat, like his father. For Hannale the matter was simpler: she heard the waves in the shell of her ear at night, and that soothed her to sleep and made her feel in a familiar place when she awoke. Both children loved the familiar Kyrie eleison of the sea gulls, and the wild dry summer grasses, the pound of the sea at night on the far side of the island, the tarred pebbles that were never on the beach in the same place two tides running, the tide wrack and the tidal pools, the little dunes that shifted like dirty snow, the salt ice you could skate on in
winter until you came to the cairn of a pressure ridge, and the fish in spring, darting in layers just below the pier.

  In the summer Lars swam out to the sandbanks, and Hannale gathered what few there were of shells from the suck of the sea. There were the immaculate white sails that grew dimmer, smaller, and the creaking hulks that stood out from shore, carrying Nosferatu to Hamburg, or Lübeck, or wherever the undead go. There was the stench of sea boots, with white rime in the cracks across the toes, and of fish fins and fish heads, their dead eyes face up on the shingle like agates turning dull. And from out beyond the banks came the crack and boom of the real sea, the sound you get when you pop a sea onion, but longer and louder—at dusk, when there is not much light between sea and sky, at dawn, when there will be more; at least you can be sure of that. The skates slopped their dangerous tails over the edge of the fish cart, and for one whole hour Hannale watched a silver-sided smelt flopping and bounding its way down a wet gutter, with the athletic bound a twig makes when you snap it out between your thumb and forefinger. It was so alive to live, she never realized it died. It had such strength to go where it was going, like pewter, like silver, like lead, as it flipped in the deadly air. It was out of its element, but how is a child to know that? Nobody pities fish.

  Though she begged him to row her out to the real sea, so she could watch the sight of the boom, “No,” he said, it was dangerous, it was also a mile or more, they must wait until she was older.

  For the sea is a sort of dangerous, formless snake. It slithers and swells its hood and hisses and has a powerful muscular contraction in its tail. It can bolt you down. The world ocean and the world snake, they are the same. The sea can whip you like a blue jellyfish. It can kill. And yet in motionless green pools with sandy bottoms, among rocks rusty with seaweeds, how clear and still and slack and infinite it is. There is a world there. And one is not afraid of death when one comes across it at dawn, huddled against the wooden dividers which run down into the water, in the shape of a human vertebra polished and rubbed smooth, a cast feather, the white skeleton of a small bird. These things are then great treasures, as precious as chips of heavy green bottle glass. She picked them up and put them in her pinafore, and blinked out toward the source of light. She had never been on it, and besides, the sea was too big to be afraid of. And it was not here, it was out there.

  She had no other friends. She just had Lars.

  I.ii.l: Galen, in describing the use of different parts of the body, says, “that man is a creature formed for peace and war. His armour forms not an immediate part of his body; but he has hands fit for preparing and handling arms, and we see infants using them spontaneously without being taught to do so.”

  Whenever he thought of Wollin, and that was often, Lars remembered the sight of Pastor Mysendonck’s son breaking a horse that last spring. Young Mysendonck was fourteen, almost grown up, and to his father’s sorrow, not a gifted scholar but a throwback to the family’s peasant stock. He was big-muscled and had an eager, abashed face, but there was no Latinity in him. Herr Doktor Mysendonck, that well-known pedant, was only his own generation away from being a stableboy, but kept two horses. This was to be, if the boy could tame it, the third. He had paid for it by turning stableboy himself, an employment his father had opposed.

  Lars watched from a stile. Being nine, he was vastly too young to intrude, and besides, there was a crush between them, they both knew that. So they seldom spoke. Lars saw Mysendonck (so did Mysendonck) as an heraldic figure, like Earl Haakon:

  In Norway’s land was never known

  A braver earl than the brave Haakon.

  At sea, beneath the clear moon’s light

  No braver man e’er sought the fight.

  Nine kings to Odinn’s wide domain

  Were sent, by Haakon’s right hand slain.

  So well the raven-flocks were fed.

  So well the wolves were filled with dead.

  These were old ballads, but the second-best reason to break a white horse, the first-best being the doing of it. Physical things Mysendonck understood. He had ambitions.

  The field was spring damp, with the dew spat off the grass every time you moved. The long blades eddied around each other in the breeze, dappled with buttercups, Queen Anne’s lace, and ladybugs. There were butterflies and moths, pale yellow, dusty white.

  The pastor’s boy had grown up to pimples, but he knew horses. The horse itself was lithe, with a mane and tail that urine color old men’s hair gets who were once blond. It was a gay, silly mare, the best on the island, but willful. It was full of the soft powdered scent of springtime, what it means, to watch what the two of them were doing. It was something Lars would have liked to do.

  The horse reared over the boy, but was careful not to smash him. The boy reeled the horse in, as though working a kite to make it soar again, and hit her on the nose with a stick, but never too hard. Just hard enough. The mare would then draw out to the length of the cord and trot in a wide circle with her head down and her mane ruffled, absurd and coquettish. She frowned with her sides, as the muscles rippled under the hide. The effect was of layers and layers of molten white Murano glass. The form was there but it shifted, slower and slower, as the relationship between the two of them took form.

  This mutual ceremony continued until the moths hovered over the long grasses at dusk. The horse did not want to crush the boy, but neither did she want to give in. The boy did not want to crush the horse, but refused to be defeated. Each was enjoying the rite. Both were a little sad that the thing had to be done. Hence the gaiety, a physical gaiety that has nothing to do with the mind or the emotions. Lars could see that. It was the way he felt himself, when he was out of the house, when there was no Hannale to take care of, when he was free to act as he would.

  It is possible to dislike someone we admire, particularly if the admiration be involuntary. This evening charade made Lars dislike the Pastor’s boy the less. The Mysendoncks were Wendish. There was something wild about them, despite the Pastor’s cheese-rind piety. Young Mysendonck was not just a boy, he was also an animal. It was this which made Lars think the more of him.

  Nonetheless, we go through this world picking out the people who must die.

  I.i.12: As Porphyry well observes, some nations are so strange that no fair judgment of human nature can be formed from them, for it would be erroneous.

  Hannale’s memories of Wollin were of a different order. As yet her rage had no identity. She was too young, too taken up with living, to ask if she might live and hear the same old sea boom answer, a mile out, invisible, but “No.”

  Children are like vines. If they are to prosper, they must find a pole. Lars was the pole. Before we have thoughts, we have memories. She could not remember a time when he had not been there.

  Lars wanted to stand at high noon in the meadow, like the Pastor’s boy, or sail due north. He listened respectfully whenever anyone mentioned Novya Zemblya, and knew more by hearsay of the Lofoten Islands than did most men by having been there. He wanted to see the glacier calf across black water, watch the ship’s lamp sway from the roof of the cabin. He had made a cult of a dead father, who may or may not have loved him, and wished to put to sea to prove the truth of it.

  Hannale’s thoughts were of the morning and the evening, those hours proper to neglected children, because there are fewer people about then. In the shadows one can let’s pretend with invisible friends.

  In the mornings there was the ferment of baking from the kitchen, yesterday’s dough put in to encourage today’s to rise, and the warmth of the kitchen itself, with big female presences barging about in the gray light, and the heavier, darker, sneezing smell of cinnamon, mace, and cloves, honey for sweetness, chopped hazelnuts, and rarest of all, minced almonds for the paternoster cakes.

  In the evenings, Hannale liked to sit on the dock, while the shadows swept eastward and over her out to sea, in drowsy anticipation of the blond-bearded stranger who would step off the next boat that came abr
east of the landing stage, to pick her up in his arms and carry her to the house. That would be her father, dead almost as soon as she was born, but she knew how it would feel.

  She had her own explanation of the horizon. It was where people sailed in the night, who were gone the next day and you didn’t see them any more. If Lars would take her out to the sandbars, if they went through the surf with a dangerous wallop, they would find an island out there, from which strange boats came, and where they would all be sitting down to noonday dinner in an orchard, all the people who had left the town, with her father at the head of the table.

  She liked it best in the orchard behind their house, where the pink and white petals came down on your face, sticky with dew. She was young enough to believe in faerie. You could catch a glimpse of her sometimes, alone there, solemnly playing with the imaginary diamond people of the place; each leaf was jeweled.

  “Selina wouldn’t like it,” she would say. God knows where she got the name, but Selina was real enough. Lars approved. A sister can be a nuisance. He was glad she had someone to play with. Selina was the perfect immortal friend.

  Frau Larsen had not been told of her.

  Though disappointed when no one came, and therefore a little sad, Hannale went to the end of the dock almost every evening. For there is no end to the days of childhood: if it is not today, it will be tomorrow. The days are like a pack of cards, all the same size and shape, a few with pictures, but most with things one can’t read yet. They are never dealt in the same sequence twice. There are fifty-two in the pack, and a joker for leap year. If the patience does not come out at five, it will at six. She had no doubts that Captain Larsen would come. She was a child who did not talk so very much. She watched. He would come by sea.

  She was not encouraged to talk. Frau Larsen’s ability to spread silence as another woman would spread out laundry on a grassy bank to dry was remarkable. She moved in the center of a still world. When she spoke, it was fluent, you could tell she knew the ways of the world, though not recently. But she seldom chose to do so.