People of the Book

by David Stacton

  It is all a foolish sort of dreaming.

  On a tower as high as the invisible winds, somewhere deep in the Thüringerwald (it was his secret where), the Magician stood upon a ruined platform and gazed north. Alone at this height (about eighty feet, but on top of the cliff), he did not bother with disguises. His hands gripped the stone coping, as though it had been the rail of a poop deck. The wind blew his thin hair back. His hair was the color of damp clay. At the moment he was somewhere else. Dietrich graf von und zu—never mind, it is lost now, it was too small so I threw it away—was having ten minutes with his native mildness. They made him sad.

  For not even the worst of us is entirely what life has made of us. There is always that part of us which time cannot touch. And yet we have lost it; we cannot touch it either. The voices of reason are filled with hate. The most mature of men is only a wistful boy. Hating hate, the Magician had turned it into something else, but wistfulness had made him cruel. He was marking time. One might as well cry out, mark twain. These are shallow waters.

  He could conjure. He could deceive. He could plot and plan and betray. He had several tricks to show the world. He had survived. He could point the locative finger. He was doing so now, as he faced north. But a magician? No. However, it helped to have Manglana afraid of him, and Selina loyal.

  With the protective layers shucked and put aside, you could see the shriveled kernels of a decent man. But that was something he did not wish seen. So it was not. Thus the tower. He could here be himself without listening always for some warning. It was a climb of 200 stairs; no one wants to see us as much as that.

  He was so lonely, in a way he wished he had never met that woman coming down a dusty road. But he could not do without her now. It could not be helped. She was afraid of him; that could not be helped either.

  Before him he could see the infinite blue-green undulations of the Thüringerwald. He hated it that he always faced north when he came up here. He had tried arbitrarily to look south, east, west. But, ex boreale lux, he always forgot. Like a steel needle magnetized in a bowl of water, he turned that way, and automatically adjusted the compass card. Our birthplace polarizes us forever.

  Nonetheless, at the Katzburg he felt himself.

  After their flight from Frankfort am Main, he and Selina had seemingly stumbled upon it by chance, at dusk, having been told by fugitives that this was haunted country. And there it had been, an enormous building, the ghost of itself, rising before them shrouded by fog. The first time he had seen those broken stairs, rising wide between twin pedestals into shredded mist, he had known himself at home. He had come to the ruin of his race, had expected no voice, no answer, and had found none. But it still had habitable rooms. Here was a thousand years, in staircases, corridors, rooms, loggias, cellars, bastions, landings, towers, oubliettes, and autumn leaves. There was space to breathe again.

  “We shall rule here,” he had told Selina.

  “Over whom?”

  “We will find him, he will find the others,” said the Magician. “It is a game we have played before.”

  And so they had.

  The Magician was a magician in this: he had learned how to turn other people’s hands against them, folding the dying fingers over into the palm. Mysendonck would do.

  The Katzburg had been keep, castle, stronghold, Residenz, and last, rich nunnery, its buildings faced in an ornate, massive, clumsy Renaissance style, but fallen into disuse. It stood on the higher edge of an uptilted sheet of rock, and truly it was immense. The tower rose over a keep and courtyard. Beyond the courtyard lay a block of buildings whose hollow square formed a second court. To the right of this, as you looked down, stood the roofless ruins of a large abbey church, gutted no doubt in some moment of sectarian malice. There was also a small chapel complete. Beyond the second block, some distance from it, lay a barrage of rooms which formed a screen on either side and over the main entrance. These had been tricked out on the approach side with columns, architraves, Christian saints, and Roman senators. It was a pompous outer work in the earliest mannered baroque. Beyond this a terrace, held in semicircular arms and with a paved way, led to that flight of giant stairs by means of which he and Selina had first come here. There was even a graveyard.

  Beyond that flood of stairs the tilted meadow led boggy down toward the woods, at whose edge there was, for the skeletons of pious ostentation were littered everywhere, a sort of triumphal gate, massive but fallen down and overgrown. The road must have led out through it, but seventy years of underbrush had obliterated the track.

  It had been the Magician’s notion that sometimes at night he and Selina should pace through the state rooms of the top floor of the outer wing (which was a story higher than the curtain building) bearing naked candles. If people believe a building to be haunted, they have a right to see the ghosts, and the woods were full of strangers. This evening rite helped to drive them away.

  Usually at this hour of the morning, the mists trailed off into nothingness along habitual trails, like cows going back to the barn. They did so now. Below him, Selina came in view, her motions made jerky by distance, hurrying with her customary placidity across the inner court.

  Mysendonck appeared in the outer. As the mist dissolved, he could be seen currying his horse. A thing which he does, thought the Magician wearily, as to the manner born.

  It is amusing, from a great height, to watch the inevitable occur. It makes one feel free of all that. How sad: we are all toys; we are devil dolls. She has timed him by the clock, and the devil of it is, it is my clock. She herself does not own one.

  Though he knew about these comedies, he had never before watched one. If the sight does not make you flinch, it brings a certain clinical serenity. To stand before the full moral shamelessness of the world is a horror as bracing as a March wind. One is not blown away; one exults.

  Or so he hoped. Selina’s illness had no cure but the homeopathy of old age, and by then surely he would not know her, he would not have to watch the death throes, it did not concern him. So he watched as calmly as from the front lines he had heard bullets passing over. They are only a form of punctuation: here a comma; here the parenthesis of a wound; here a colon (those who believe in fate live exactly balanced lives); here an exclamation point (a superficial graze, no more, equivalent to a scratch); here a full stop. Surely, somewhere, there must be a full stop? Or are we condemned to wander on, from rounded phrase to rounded phrase, clause after clause, independent, periodic, and no way of ending it ever? Some lives have no structure. They are nicht grammatikisch. They can only repeat.

  Below him Selina prepared to repeat—for the how manyeth time now?—but of course it was not exactly Selina. She must have Spanish blood; her sentences began with the ¿signo de interrogación? Her sole punctuation was the unanswered question. Unanswerable questions are invincible. In his steel mesh glove, the man who cannot die—you cannot kill him, he has outlived himself—catches the magic bullet, and as his fingers close over it, his palm smokes. You might as well try to kill the Golem. It is not a balanced structure.

  The Magician looked down at his fine wide hands. On one finger a heavy signet ring was cinctured, his safe-conduct, the only part of the past he had kept. He never took it off. He did not twist it. But sometimes, alone, he licked it for luck. Seeing Selina, he licked it now.

  *

  Selina was wearing, as always, the same heavy brocaded dress. Only its color varied; it was never twice the same. She was stalking something, like a cat. From the back of her chignon, her hair fell in tawny swatches. She paused, and then these began to flick about. She shrugged.

  The Magician knew what that shrug portended. It meant she had slid over the bar, invisible from the surface, between my lagoon and the little whitecaps toothed with sharks that lie out toward the barrier reef. Poor child, she will never find a passage out through there. Below him, like something in murano glass (“A glass ship tossed on a sea of terror/a tennis ball of error”), vitrified by the alchem
ist but still moving, Selina advanced to the outer courtyard. She does not know she is being watched. Stalking cats never do. It is the only thing they overlook.

  It was to watch a puppet. Out of compassion, the Magician would have cast her down her strings. But he did not dare.

  *

  Mysendonck had now been two weeks here. He had never before been allowed entry to such a building. That it was crumbled and broken and smashed, and full of the skittering and squeak of rats, he did not notice. Four years of war had led him to believe that such was the natural condition of buildings. The Katzburg seemed to go on forever, and then, when you least expected it, you came to a blank wall. A slug the color of tobacco and the size of a cigar sucked its way across a corridor, toward a dead leaf, leaving a glitter of slime. Through a broken mullion a tree thrust a branch into a room, a green arm with groping fingers. When you peered down the length of the halls half fallen, something at the end of them, beyond the last light, became a flutter and a whirl, invisible in dust. And then there were the lights at night.

  His men were afraid of them. He did not have a full complement yet, but such men as he had shared some rooms on the first floor of the outer block, behind the fake Roman screen. From these rooms there was a plain view of the lights moving back and forth, spasmodically, on the top floor of the main block, which shielded the castle behind from view.

  Selina and the Magician lived somewhere in the keep. The place was so big, it was impossible to tell without a search where. And every time you tried to explore, the Magician appeared, through a closed door, at the intersection of a corridor, above you, on a gallery. He said nothing. He did not seem to see you. But neither did you go on. There were peculiar noises. Once there had been an explosion, and smoke had come from a window high up, the color of wet wood-smoke, but it smelled worse. Then it had turned yellow and blown away, and a fire had gone out.

  Twice, when he had shot a deer, he was asked into the Great Hall, to dine with them. Sometimes he knew the Magician was watching him, as though looking in his face for something. Then he would give a grunt and pass on; disappointment seemed to make him affable. It was not the boy’s fault; Manglana chose always the wrong kind.

  “Selina is my daughter,” he said, glancing at her, and returned to his silence as to a book he had been reading, an absorbing book, but he did not like to dine alone. The glance was approval for those dresses in the style (but Mysendonck did not know that) of forty years before.

  The man must be sixty-five. Or was he older? Sometimes something older showed in his face. Most people, when they smile, evert their lips. His sucked in.

  Once, afterwards, Mysendonck had stopped Selina on the front terrace, where apparently she was not supposed to be. “You forget, I am his daughter,” she had said.

  Now he heard a rustle behind him. The horse stamped its left hind foot down twice.

  “You look like the bewitched bridegroom,” she said. “And if your horse kicks you, that’s what you’ll be.”

  She had a startling voice; it seemed always to come from deep within silence, a simultaneous double octave, two tones: the one curious, amused, self-indulgent, seductive, teasing; the other some sort of sadness that was an emotion but not human, a voice like a murmur across stone, a voice like moss. He dropped his wire brush.

  “You are ridiculous with that animal,” she said, staring at the dry golden dung on the cobbles under it. “Come.”

  He stooped to pick up the brush. “Did he send you?”

  “No, she did.” In her eyes, at the side, there appeared a small divided symmetrical highlight, the only indication that a stranger was walking in this body: it was not Selina.

  He had been going to touch her. He dropped his hand.

  “Silly boy,” said the stranger, and laughed. She had large, evenly aligned teeth, with small canines. “Silly, silly boy.” She drew slightly back. “Haakon, I have told you to come.”

  It was something the Magician had taught her years ago. You do not ask, you tell. If you tell correctly, you do not have to ask. But from being so long with him, there had come into her voice, not his inflections, but those of a woman of his family, a Natt och Dag, a descendant perhaps of Valdemar Atterdag, a bone-faced woman with a starched gorgeted neckpiece, someone dead now many years, stately, inexorable, frail. Then this person disappeared too and Selina stood there.

  *

  This metamorphosis had not escaped the Magician. “Almost,” he said to the winds on the tower, and winced.

  There was not one single surviving Natt och Dag of his branch. Like Death itself, the Natt och Dags are a dynasty, of incredible age and longevity, absolute power, and murderous arrogance. There have always been Natt och Dags. They are older than the Kings of Denmark, their perhaps once cousins, they are older than the earliest Swedish House, they are older than the Bohún.

  The last Natt och Dag of his line was Christine, who died during March of 1572, on the glowing cliffs of Möen, at the age of ninety-three. It was the Magician’s one whim, not to raise the dead but to impose them like a state seal upon a document, in this case upon a human document. And Mysendonck was not suitable. For Mysendonck he had another use. Therefore let her have him.

  The Magician was long sterile.

  “Selina,” he said, “that chaste goddess. Besides, she is my creature.”

  Below him both figures had disappeared.

  Earl Haakon, he thought. Earl Haakon. But it made an excellent name for a robber; that was all the original Haakon had been. It is all any of us has ever been.

  In Norway’s land was never known

  A braver earl than the brave Haakon.

  Nine kings to Odinn’s wide domain

  Were sent, by Haakon’s right hand slain …

  And by his left?

  “I must be nearby,” said the Magician, looking at the treetops. “I cannot help it.” And with one eye on a chirr of ravens, he turned, strode energetically toward the stairs, and disappeared himself.

  *

  There were two Selinas. That was why she had been able to send herself for him. And though the Magician had exorcized one of them with a name, the other was herself, a bad person.

  These are the rewards of the Katzburg. This is why people come to the Katzburg. This is why there is nobody there. Touch them and they vanish into smoke, into thin, acrid, dissolving smoke. One chokes on it. And then even the smoke vanishes.

  He smelled an odor like cedar, like cypress, like something smooth, like sandalwood. His hand was taken by a small, dry, real hand, disembodied in a heavy sleeve, cool, but the sleeve smelled old, old, yet the hand was young, and as it held his, grew warmer. His own felt as suddenly cold.

  “We climb,” said Selina. Dark did not bother her. She had been often in the dark. And the Magician had told her that very few of us live in one body, and it cannot be helped.

  “When you wake in the morning,” he said. “Lie there and remember. Remember who you are by day. And slowly, slowly it will come back. They are different worlds. You must remember each. You are a Natt och Dag.”

  She remembered. Since it was day, she sought the darker parts of the building. They climbed what seemed to be a deliberately blocked stair, crawled over masonry, reached the second flight, the third, the fourth, past closed and ornamented doors (each with a dry stoup, each with a cross), and came blinking into light again onto a stone platform, empty except for two balustrades with putti, surrounding two stairwells, one at each end. The first floor had low ceilings, but here the ceilings were eighteen feet. The walls were whitewashed, with dark paneling. The ceilings were coffered, though some of the lozenges had fallen. Brass chandeliers hung on chains, or had dropped and lay useless on their sides, verdigrised by damp, bent, broken, dulled.

  Selina glided across the stone and flung open two tall double doors. At once, beyond her, door stood open after door, leading to room after room.

  “These are the state rooms. Be careful where you step. Some of the flooring has g
one. This is where we walk at night with candles, to frighten fools away. But you must not tell anyone.”

  His heels echoed on the stone as he came toward her. And then wood gave under his foot. She sailed the length of the first gallery and paused to look back from the far doorway.

  “Why do you always wear those boots?”

  “For luck.”

  “Luck? Did you kill somebody to get them?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “But you have killed somebody?” It seemed to be important to her that he should have done so. And he had done so, many times. He said as much.

  “You are a very funny boy, I think. Come along. We have a long way to go.” She retreated before him, with a skitter, over dead mice, fremits, plaster, raped wood, broken glass, through room after room. “So have I,” she told him.

  At last, through an ultimate door, he saw a blank wall with some sort of painting on it, dark, white, and red. A set of wooden choir stalls stood under it. But when he reached the room it was empty. He could not see her.

  The painting was hung high. He caught a glimmer of wounds and blood, but could make out no more because of the varnish. The room was an abandoned sacristy, vestry, meeting hall, council chamber, what? The walls were lined with those tall brown choir stalls; except for a table built in under the painting, with two cabinets closed above, there was no interruption to the progression of those fixed chairs; and even when no one is there, chairs have always an air of being sat in by whoever was there last.

  The paneling was so dark that he had not noticed that two of the chairs had swung back, to show a passage. Inside it she took a candle out of a niche, and the little light that sprang up from it seemed loud.

  “It was a nunnery.” She led him to the middle of a room whose windows were small circles, high up and begrimed.