People of the Book

by David Stacton

  The Snow King had always laid his moves in four dimensions, in a series of lines designed to hook onto any contingency. Besides, by his death, the game was so far advanced as to make most moves unavoidable. Oxenstierna followed his master’s operations down to the last catgut loop and gurney knot, if possible, for he had had a lifetime to learn to trust that skill. And there was a shortage of trained surgeons.

  Thus it was that after more tiresome negotiation than would have been needed to suborn the Pope, Grotius consented, grudgingly, to contemplate entering the Swedish service. His hesitations were predictable enough. Intellectuals come to greatness last. It is not a quality they have much use for, for greatness is seldom, if ever, intellectual; it is a matter of intelligence. It is rather like the distribution of function between women and men, before that was disturbed: intellectuals arrange facts, tidy them up, or cook them; great men hunt them down, shoot them dead as a doornail, and drag them home. Neither side thinks much of the other’s efforts, but there is this to be said for the great man: if nobody dragged it home, there would be nothing to cook, and no matter what women say, quite a lot of things in this world are both more nourishing, and taste better, raw.

  Grotius arrived at Frankfort am Main, where he allowed himself to be plied with the very best butter, a commodity, sweet or salt, for which his appetite, though decently expressed, seemed inexhaustible. He was vain, and vain in the worst and most intractable way: not of himself, but of his good name.

  “Come, come, my little man,” said Oxenstierna irritably, “it’s not as good as all that. What could be?” Grotius seemed not only to conjure with it, but complacently to expect to produce thereby a draught of loaves and fishes. But he said so privately, to relieve his feelings. Gustavus had left orders.

  What the devil was he to do with him?

  *

  Herr Grotius was a man so breathless after causes that he had never had time to look at any individual face. They were a blur to him. He gave to charity and was put out of countenance by beggars at his gate: they did not queue. He had married on principle (also for self-advancement). He had had children on principle. He had been the principal principled lawyer of his town. Ask him for the salt, and he passed it on principle. He had no use for anyone who had not principle, and recognized no principles but his own, on principle. Since he acted always in the commonweal, there was no way to get at him. It was all principle. And if his principles were high, so was his nose in the air. For though he realized he was but a man of common clay (humility is popular in these circles), he was also the sacred vessel of a shining principle (International Law). His efforts to apply it (screwing naval indemnities out of London) had been unsuccessful, but if anything this had hastened the March of Principle, as it usually does. Above all, he was Fair. It was understood that at the moment he was writing (in his lifetime he had been forced to move about a bit) a verse tragedy upon the Flight into Egypt. Later, he said, he hoped to send for his wife.

  He did not utter immortal truths himself. Instead he quoted (and misquoted) like a magician producing a white egg from beneath his armpit. There were a great many eggs. Sometimes they rolled down while he was shaking hands, which was sticky. If he must write of Maritime Law, you would think he would at least have spent an afternoon at the harbor. But no, that was not his way.

  The Great Chancellor liked to candle his own eggs. Instead he was reduced to saying, “In Sweden we have a saying that …” There was a precedent for everything, so it seemed. No matter how slight, it had a principle.

  “My servant,” said Grotius, slipping invisibly a black cap on his head, “has forgotten my shawl.” And that distasteful duty over with, everyone went into chambers.

  “Excellent Baccharach,” he said. This was his way of being worldly. What does the world want of me, he seemed to say, now, and looked at his agenda. He could have rubbed a swivet the wrong way.

  Oxenstierna marveled, and remembered that Grotius was famous for having himself smuggled out of the fortress of Loevestein disguised as a box of books. And by God, he was a box of books.

  Like many men who take the large view, he was pedantic in trifles, but he was world-famous, he would bolster the Swedish cause. Perhaps Oxenstierna could be forgiven a small sigh. The room was hot, there is a limit (thank God) to the amount of time we can devote to Philosophy, and besides, Aristotle was frequently wrong.

  “But the method, the method,” said Grotius, and his eyes lit up as though someone had put a candle in a jack-o’-lantern and he shone on from behind ragged teeth imperfectly cleansed. “Aristarchus among others of the Alexandrian school … Isidore of Seville … whereas among the Arabians and in particular Al Ghazzali … Pliny, his commentaries … Moses Maimonides … Leukippos … Laconas….”

  “Method be damned,” snapped Oxenstierna, a flight of stairs afterwards, and slammed his door.

  28

  In the middle of thick black woods, in a depression near a pond, there stood a timber mill. To the left of the timber mill was a chip burner, large, shaped like an alchemical retort.

  Though it was May, winter had been severe, spring had been slight and pale, these woods were private and deep, there was still a sufficiency of snow. It wasn’t white any more; it was choked with dead needles, pitted, pocked, and oozy at the crust.

  The sun did not descend; it fell. It was now black cold night. There was a stench in the air, resinous and sullen. Through the heavy wood, its boughs sprung low, the chip burner glowed, looking mighty like a maw. From time to time there were lurid darts of reflected light upon the snow, though no branch stirred.

  Halfway down one side of this ravine, three trees had been hacked off at the base and logged away. On one of these yellow stumps sat a young man in a doublet fantastically slashed, a steel mesh cuirass under it, his short hair decorated with a velvet hat ridiculously plumed. Only the yellow boots were the same. It was Mysendonck at twenty. The best place to hide a fresh corpse is on the battlefield, so you may take what you will. Behind him his new white horse was an attendant blur.

  He had been looking for men. Also, if war was to be his cover, he had to know where the war went. He did not feel at his ease, so what he wanted was a little kingdom. The question was, where?

  It was a safe place, this wood. Except for the log cutters, and they made sure to leave by dusk, everyone seemed afraid of it. He did not know why. It seemed to him like any other wood, scary by night, but not dangerous.

  Mysendonck was a permanent boy, someone who would always understand the where and why of tree houses. It came to him, in this godforsaken place, that there must be thousands, millions of places where no man had ever set foot, not just on the monstrous white places which surround maps, but in a neighbor’s field. It was as though (the moon had not yet risen, but it was a phosphorescent night) the tracks of every man who had ever crossed this glade, in whichever direction, in whatever age, had become visible. You could then see where they had not been. To be the explorer of foreign lands, you have only to stand there, tearing tigers apart with your bare hands, a year’s journey from nowhere. The natives call you Leader. You are safe.

  It was a lot better than damn and the Prophet Jeremiah.

  Behind him his horse snorted, shuddered, and reared up. Then he heard something crack on the far side of the glade.

  Two figures stood there in the dusk. They had not been standing there before. The wood was twenty feet behind them. They had left no footsteps. As he watched, one of them raised an arm and pointed with a stick. The horse screamed. Slowly, by perambulating the rim of the ravine, they advanced toward him, two ghosts out for an evening stroll. He turned his head to watch. They flickered in and out of shadow.

  It took them a quarter of an hour. Just as the moon was coming up, round, full, with bubbles in it, the color of champagne, they came out of the trees again and stopped before him.

  The man was lean and tall—not only tall, but towering. He seemed, however, frail (he was not; it was another of his decep
tions). He was mostly presence. He wore a fur-lined gown of some gray stuff that fell to his heels. On his head was the puffed velvet bonnet of some important personage, an elder of the church, a town councilor, a scholar. It too was mouse gray. One arm he had given to the woman with him. In his other hand he held a silver-knobbed cane, ebony, and tapered toward the tip.

  The woman was the most beautiful lady Mysendonck had ever seen, also tall for a woman, but not too tall, grave, lively, big-boned, firm and taut. She was wearing a massy gown made of some sort of golden fabric of no color, damasked with silver thread, that had a peach-bloom shimmer when she moved. She wore her hair in a chignon. Her skirt she held up delicately in her hands to assist walking. Neither of the two seemed really to be there.

  Mysendonck stood up and cocked his pistol. To this the tall man paid no attention whatsoever.

  “We have been a long time in that wood,” he said. “Good evening, sir.”

  Never before having been addressed as sir, Mysendonck lowered his pistol.

  “Tut, tut,” said the Magician. “I note you have three stumps and a fine horse. We will sit down, for we have a long journey ahead of us, all three.” With his cane he pointed to the middle stump. “You there, my dear.”

  The woman sat down. Before he sat down himself, the gray man stared at the horse. “A pity it did not come stolen with a sidesaddle,” he said. “My companion is named Selina. My child, you will have to balance as best you may.”

  “You can’t have my horse.”

  The Magician raised his cane, twisting the knob; the sheathing flew out like a spear and showed the rapier inside.

  “It is my wand. I never use it. However, it is well to know of what a magic wand consists. Hand me back the casing, please.”

  Mysendonck did so. The Magician fitted it back with a snap.

  “You see, you obey me. Most people do. I presume it arises from my manner.”

  Selina smiled.

  “I am a magician. A magician is a person who can do things other people cannot. He is observant. He can read minds as easily as a sneak thief peers in a window. He can also enter them, as easily as you would pick a lock. I do you the honor, you see, of knowing that you yourself would not pick a lock. You are too much the roaring boy for that. I would. By which you see, I have entered your mind and know my way about. I can also, if I wish, cut the cables of the will, and raise the dead when I have need of them. Which is often.”

  The young woman was breathing heavily. Her breasts rose and fell. The fur of her bodice brushed against Mysendonck once or twice.

  “So,” he said.

  “She is called Selina, but the name is really Selene, it means the moon. A chaste goddess,” said the Magician, and peered into Mysendonck’s face from his higher altitude hopefully, but without much hope. “Boy, are you afraid of me?”

  Though startled, Mysendonck couldn’t truthfully say he was. It seemed to him he had known these people for a long time. That he had always known them. It was a thought that had come into his mind.

  The Magician seemed relieved, as though he had just pulled a sword smooth from the stone. He got up, clasped his hands behind his back, and took a turn for a while. He looked at the moon.

  “In a sense we are camp followers, but in this wood we are who we are. It is a convenient wood. It has no paths. And if I wished, I could tell you why the people here do not like it. One has only to send the bogey out. But we have not much time, the moon is rising, we must go a long way.”

  “Go where?”

  “Young man, you should not hide your money in trees.”

  Mysendonck stood straight up. The Magician merely knocked the pistol aside with his cane.

  “Yes, I have taken it. It is your house rent. There is near here, though no one living knows how to find it, a house, a very old stone house. It was once an abbey. It is the Katzburg. I do not know why, for though I am a magician, I do not like cats. I do not,” he added bitterly, “like any animals. It is because I am not one. Sit down again. I will explain.”

  *

  Later, pacing through the wood with Mysendonck, a jaunty, slim-hipped figure, ahead of them to hold the horse, the Magician, walking beside Selina, the lines of whose gown he had arranged lovingly once she was up, whispered, “My dear, you must encourage him. He has spirit. He will not be easy to hold. But he is what we need.”

  Selina said nothing.

  “You will like that, won’t you?” said the Magician sadly and wistfully, and for a moment bent his head.

  Selina looked no happier. Mysendonck’s doublet and hose were not cloth but leather counterfeits, very tight, and rippled when he moved. He was the courtier as huntsman. Another one, she thought. A new example. It could not be helped. He resembled the Huntsman of Soest.

  The Magician peered at a clump of five dense conifers ahead of them. Of the five one was young, scarcely a seedling. Otherwise they looked like any other clump of trees.

  “To the left,” he said. “To the left.” It was abruptly cold. It was that hour in the morning when the soul ebbs, toward three or four, the hours of weakness when the current slackens, the hours of most death. Turning to the left, the party vanished, with only a faint jingle from that bridle Mysendonck had studded with silver and brass and hung with small bells. For in that wood he did as he wished, though not from now on. For now he was going to the center of it.

  After some hours, apparently unchanged, they reappeared. A mist had been rising for some time, deceptive and clammy, and with cold spots in it. Through it, dangerous as a hulk at sea, loomed the immense presence of a stranded building.

  It was their destination; it was the Katzburg.

  I.iii.8: Aristotle, in describing the requisites, which fit men for servitude, says, that “those men, whose powers are chiefly confined to the body, and whose principal excellence consists in affording bodily service, are naturally slaves, because it is their interest to be so.”

  PART II

  29

  THE BAKER OF FRANKFORT an der Oder was a kindly man, but had no imagination. He was kindly not by understanding or sympathy or compassion, but by nature, and pity was beyond him. He had no complaints of his new assistant, who took hold, seemed willing, and would make a fine baker someday. But he found the boy odd.

  “You have been to the docks again, you must not. It is wasteful,” he said. He found those trips incomprehensible, for everybody worships something, and the baker worshiped bread. To make bread is the highest duty of a useful man. Granted the privilege of making bread, why fret for other things? When he speckled the crusts of oblong sweet breads with leaves and petals of green citron and red citron, around a center of brandied cherries dyed scarlet with cochineal, it never occurred to him that these things came from far places, often by sea. He had never heard of the Spice Islands. When cinnamon and cloves cost a groschen more, he thought that was a matter of merchants turning a yet bigger profit, he did not realize it was also because a ship had gone down with all hands somewhere. Nor, as he showed Lars how to slice citron with a minimum of wastage, did he meditate upon the special heavy slowness of the knife as it moved through the jewel he was faceting, a soggy emerald. He was not sensuous. He did what was traditional, which was what he enjoyed.

  Part of his wife’s dowry had been the formula for a sirup made of the domes of scooped-out oranges and one lemon, simmered in honey, water, and some other things until it reduced. The domes were then chopped up, put back in the viscous melt, and the whole poured into costly tarts. The clean astringent whiff made your eyes water, but he never asked about Morocco or Spain. The Bay of Biscay, the Gulf of Storms, the Straits of Gibraltar, the Minch, the Mittelsee, the 9 Degree Passage, were names unknown to him. He had not looked at the monsters in the corners of old maps. He was unacquainted with the ribs and terrors of the whale, except at church on Sundays. He was a grinding man.

  Lars had tried once or twice to ship as a cabin boy, but could neither leave Hannale nor take her. Besides, he wore the dre
ss of an indentured apprentice, so no one would take him.

  The baker made his own conserves. In elderberry time, in blueberry time, when the red and black currants hung like salmon milt or prickly caviar from bending branches, and best of all, the lingonberries, vitreous and glossy—all these things came in three grades, the cultivated, the wild grown in plots, the wild found in the woods—Lars spent his Saturdays in the woods, picking them by the lug.

  Thus, while Oxenstierna was trying to deal with the insubordinations of Bernard of Saxe-Weimar (“An excellent commander,” wrote Richelieu, “but so much for himself that no one could make sure of him”—the war had reached that stage which all wars reach which are prolonged), Lars called for Hannale on Saturday mornings (Sunday was consecrated to God; one could do nothing then) and took her berrypicking.

  Hannale was now nine, the same child but crusted over with a scab of silence. You had only to see her smile to know she was affectionate by nature, but something had happened to her. It was not hard to see what. Life had happened to her.

  Frau Larsen had not meant to torture her children. But that tacit railing against their presence had had its effect. And then, they had lost their home and money. Hannale was given the education of a gentlewoman, while at the same time being given ample opportunity to learn, by slights and by a great strictness about her sewing, that she was not one. She was being prepared. Obviously she was too fine to marry a peasant (with that dowry who else would have her?), she was too feral and the wrong sect to be a nun (such a strange child, almost pretty); she must therefore be a spinster governess, or a companion reader. At the béguinage she had only one superior who, if puzzled by her, liked her. This was a lady, of very good family, true, who baked apples and did domestic things like that.