People of the Book

by David Stacton

  The more strongly they fought, the more they were admired, the more certain their crucifixion was. Their feet were not fastened, and when they were too long dying, sometimes the others, out of charity, hugged huge arms about their waists and bulky legs to weigh them down to death.

  It was voluptuous, and he was next. They had singled him out. He was a leader. He had struggled to the top of that heaving mound, wanting to be taken next, and then he died. It was like soaring.

  *

  When Mysendonck opened his eyes, he could see well. He lay on stone, among grass blades, staring at a ceiling with rents in it. There was no part of him that did not ache. He felt alive all over, from the sauna masochism of the athlete. Sinking his chin down into his neck, he saw, in a haze and then distinctly, a row of small glistered white crucifixes receding into infinity. It had been true. Christ is nothing but a crucifixed athlete. He won his game. He fought his way to the top of the heap, the better to be pulled down. He can die.

  It is better so than to kneel alone, bloody, abandoned, at dark, spitting teeth on the playing field. It is complete. Mysendonck rolled over on his stomach, with his arms against his chest, his knuckles clenched, and felt like a child waking up in a warm bed slowly on a cold morning. Perhaps another moment’s sleep or two.

  His head cleared. He saw this gutted chapel, with its cheap stations of the cross hanging on smoked walls, for what it was. But he had changed sides. He had had, like the saint, his ecstasy. From now on, until killed, he would be dangerous. For though he could not explain, the reason why he did things was now clear to him. Therefore he could do them freely, and to a purpose. He found this marvelous.

  He got up and repaired himself. His nose he left as it had been broken. Though it whistled when he breathed through it, was tender to the touch, and bled unexpectedly for days, it was his sign of grace: he had been chosen.

  Those toughs, when seen again, said nothing, but took it for granted he would hunt with them. He did. For a while he led them, and then he left them. It was not hard to find others, for he had been after dark on the playing fields, he knew where to look and whom to lead. He searched incessantly for the faces of those who would bring him down, and could find them nowhere. This had left him puzzled.

  *

  With a sensual stretch, he reached out his hands, grabbed two projections at the head of the bed, and writhed. He felt fine.

  “I wish the old man weren’t always watching. I like that picture.”

  “What picture?”

  “The one in the room we go through.”

  She had not noticed it. She was lying on her back, in a ditch, beside a dusty road, wondering how to get rid of him, but it seemed to her he was very likely that soldier coming down that road. Sometimes yes. Sometimes not. It had happened so often. And seeing Selina’s clothes waiting for her on the floor, she gave her explanation.

  “But we are spies. Nothing but spies.”

  “Who for?”

  “Not for, against. He is against both sides. We go from camp to camp, in a blue wagon. Always it must be blue. He will tell you soon.”

  “Nobody tells me anything.”

  “Then he will ask.” She shrugged. “It makes no difference to him. He is not like us. He is very kind. But … he is a man from somewhere else, and no one knows his name.” And as though someone had told her it was time to get up, she got out of bed and began to gather her clothes. Manglana disappeared.

  37

  They were at dinner. The Magician contemplated, without much attention, both of them.

  It can be done, particularly if you start in their childhood, but Selina had been malleable. You can shape any of mankind except for that tiny fraction of it born with its own identity, in any way you wish, for most men are nothing but similitudes, kept alive, if you could call it living, by imitation and the other forms of protective mimicry. You can make them docile, greedy, vicious, obedient, murderous, gentle, mannerly, outrageous, whatever you will. Above all, you can lay into them orders to incubate at different of their ages. This horrible set of delayed fuses is laid by most parents, involuntarily. The Magician had perceived how to do it deliberately, and with skill.

  But you could never be quite sure. When the color has rubbed off most, and their adolescence is over, there is nothing left but an empty shell, with a pinhole at each end to show where the egg was blown. Adolescents have an unconscious animal elegance which amounts to charm, but it is not their own, it is merely the body’s in its springtime. With some, fortunately also few, you cannot be sure because they are plural. With these, the self you have suppressed but could not be sure you had uprooted, in moments of stress may seize abruptly control. There was no telling when Manglana might appear, and only one way to force her back. She did not know, herself. The periodicity of this self was not lunar, but depended upon the random appearance of an imaginary resemblance, walking down a road.

  Also, there was this: Manglana never emerged in his presence. However, he could not keep watch all the time.

  Halfway down the table Mysendonck was speaking with Selina. From his end, the Magician idly cracked some walnuts and admired, where she belonged, presiding at his board, Christine Natt och Dag.

  Though the Magician changed often his ages and ran the length, in persona and appearance, of a varied, considerable, and extinct cousinage, there was never any question of who he was. He was the Magician, himself in yet another part.

  But Manglana, who had lost her own identity on a country road, was more subtle and had less nature (she would have been a good medium to permit the entrance of spirits). She had entered the room half an hour ago, magnificent as Selina. The Magician had said little, but emptying his mind, had let a note or two echo out, as though from sympathetic strings….

  As the firelight flickered over the scarred table, over the scavenged silver, once perhaps of religious use, he could see little changes taking place all over her body; her gestures changed, her voice, too, that oddly appealing double register, modulated to those of a woman she had never seen, a legend in his family.

  One of Mysendonck’s louts had been turned into a serving boy (the Magician did the cooking—it was necessary only to keep dishes warm, and a kitchen had been set up off the main hall). This was done partially so Mysendonck might be waited on, and so grow accustomed to a reinforced prestige; partially so the lout might grow accustomed to taking orders; and partially for the Magician’s convenience. This loon set down a china bowl containing a sort of syllabub, whose base was verjuice, sweet and steamy, and then retired.

  “Eighty,” willed the Magician, just to see if he could do it, and pressed out of himself the sharp gnawing pain of ancient brittle wrists, arthritic, weak, with sinews like gut, moving beneath ecchymotic spots on skin which was loose and had no flesh beneath it, only aching bone. It was so hard to bend the fingers now….

  *

  Mysendonck found himself, in a flare from the fire, staring into the hollow cheekbones of a very old, very erect, very distinguished old lady. She had scarcely a wrinkle. She smelled of sachet and time-worn sheets. Her shriveled neck was concealed tactfully behind a high collar. Only the eyes had the directed twinkle of the better-informed second childhood of old age, that has a sweetness in it real childhood did not have, the sweetness of directed knowledge.

  “It is silly,” said Christine Natt och Dag, “but my wrists hurt this evening, and they are heavy mugs. Would you pour?” She was haughty, amused, determined, inimical. And then a log fell in the grate. She turned her head to stare at it. The Magician withdrew his will and laid a hand across the still-vibrating strings. He had no desire to punish; he had wished only to instruct.

  “Well, it will save me bother,” said Selina.

  I can do everything with her I wish, thought the Magician, except the one thing I would wish. Or have I taught her too much? For an instant, he had a glimpse of Manglana, glowering up at him, floating just beneath the surface of a scummy water, but rising, rising.


  Weightless, and yet somehow weighted from beneath, like a drowned body, Manglana fell drifting back down into the depths of the well, smiling, for there is no way to kill those who neither live nor die.

  “Did you do that deliberately?” he asked.

  There was a pause. Mysendonck clomped the length of the table (had he nothing else to wear?) and set a mug down before him.

  “No,” said Selina. “It drifted across my mind. I didn’t expect it. It’s gone now.” And she gave him the look of a dutiful daughter, but one who has been through the family recipe books, and has found something she would like to try.

  *

  On the Island of Möen, above the glowing white scars which are the cliffs of Möen, Christine Natt och Dag had been formidable. It was no question of witchcraft, but people said she knew. What it was she knew, they did not say. They did not dare. She was an old woman, living in a cottage by the shore, but she was a Natt och Dag. The truth that they never sleep can be seen from their name.

  By the parish registers, she had been a worthy woman. She had given much to charity. Yet when she died (in 1572, the year of the great new star in Cassiopeia, at the age of ninety-three), it was as though an island of sleepwalkers had suddenly straightened up.

  And the Magician had read in a book of Peregrinations, quite by chance, that on the day of her death, but an hour afterwards, a natural of Möen, a foolish boy she had used to run chores for her, had locked himself into the church tower, climbed the belfry, and rung the bells until they could batter the door down, with such a clamorous fury of release and joy and sobbing gratitude, it was a mockery for twenty miles. Afterwards he had been good for nothing, who formerly had jogged to and from the village on her errands, chopped wood, tended the knot garden, met the boats. It was as though the mind that had inhabited that flabby, unhealthy, disproportionate body had withdrawn. (“… an idiot boy, employed by a respected gentlewoman, that day deceased, an heiress of this comty, who lived in what they call the manor house, a low building by the shore, but seemly, an och Dag of the family of och Dag….”) That new star which had heralded the birth of the Snow King had taken her away.

  For this ability to enter some minds comes from somewhere not human, and though it wanders from country to country, from mind to mind, like a coal glowing for a moment in the dark, impossible to predict where, is never out of the world for long. For an hour, in a provincial graveyard, it hovers about its last body. And then it is off. A baby kicks and screams somewhere, an ordinary baby, so who is to know? It has found a body again. For it does not pass from father to son, from mother to daughter. It chooses its habitation according to whim. Or so we would think.

  Yet the child is aware of something, and has special abilities difficult to define. It is hypersensitive not to thoughts, but to those roiling turmoils in the nether mind from which thoughts drift up like streamers. It does nothing and shows nothing, until it has maneuvered itself into a position to begin. It then uses its powers, but does not mention them. This is its margin of safety. And alas, it has no heirs. Great Gustavus left behind him a vivacious, spritely, spiritual cripple of an ostentatious, willful girl. Oxenstierna had been unfortunate in his sons. Incontinently it has wandered elsewhere. It always does.

  The Magician had been driven to attempt a desperate act, and had failed. For this reason Selina was the more precious to him, not as a success, but as his best experiment. And then he had come upon the Katzburg, which all men seek but few find. So really…. The quality is so rare, though persistent, that nobody believes it to exist. They call it something else, and speak of the enigma of so and so, or of genius. Well yes, it is a genius: we are inhabited. But it is not the same as genius. It has no interest in such things as what we call a genius devotes his life to. Socrates, being an ecstatic, had a female genius, but usually it is male or neuter. It plays with such religious toys as the arts are, but does not make them. Its object and material is men’s souls. It is a great gust in a human body. After it has passed, men cannot tell what it was that moved them so.

  For there is a great wind blowing, always, out there in the night, up there in the stars. We would let it in, did we but dare.

  The Magician sighed, glanced down at his shriveled body, picked up his mug, and remembered where he was.

  “A poker, boy. Bring me a poker.”

  Mysendonck started. He had had his glimpse of skull. But when these two were silent, they seemed to be talking to each other. It was a kind of pleading.

  The use to which I have tried to put it, thought the Magician, is somewhat different. My family was old. I had a weak body. I did not move often enough among men. I spent too much time, as a child, in old gardens and mossy graveyards. Whereas the Great King had never been ill a day in his life, until someone killed him. I misused my powers, afraid, I suppose, that someone would kill me before I was through. And yet it is our inevitable end, to be killed, unless we are like Christine, whom I have brought back, I have brought her back. And now alas I cannot die; it was always the misfortune of our family.

  It was not Christine he had wished to bring back, but something much more difficult, and dangerous, and rare, and wicked he had been at.

  Wicked? thought the Magician. There is no wicked. I must stop drifting about this table. I have not even told Selina what it is I am at. I have not let her know that I am still waiting. I have given up hope, but it is a habit, I wait.

  And picking up the poker, red-hot and glowing, he plunged it into the syllabub. There was a bubbling sizzle of singed verjuice, apple, sweating citron oil, cinnamon and ginger.

  “It needed that,” said the Magician, and handed the dripping dulled poker back to Mysendonck.

  Mysendonck put it by the fire and marveled at his first various woman. For who could guess, looking at this sexless thing, a great lady, daughter to a territorial magnate of some kind, in exile, that inside her was his avid mistress when she called him to her, an animal like the rest of us.

  Most would deny, in that case, the great lady to exist. But there was in Mysendonck something out of the Elder Edda; it was this which had made the Magician hesitate over him, before saying no and passing on. So he did not deny her to exist, but knew as well as a diplomat that animal and not may coexist, though they have nothing to do with each other. But he knew it backwards, for though it was Manglana who summoned him, it was Earl Haakon who went. This was his strandhugg. He saw always brawny legs, longboats, wet shingle, fires at night, on the shore, on the sea, swords in the sand, the rape of strong women, and a white riffle over the sides of the prow, from the black water rising, from the shore receding.

  “It is time,” said the Magician, “that we made exact plans.”

  38

  Hannale said, “Why do flies like dead people? I thought they just liked us.” She had been silent all day, all night, but a night’s sleep and the most forbidden questions become askable. “I thought they just liked the living.”

  “You’ve seen flies on dead things.”

  “But not on dead people. Don’t they know living people aren’t dead people?”

  “It’s because our sweat is sweet,” he said patiently.

  “Do dead people sweat?”

  “That’s where they lay their eggs. You’ve seen maggots.”

  “Like a stinging fly when it stings you?”

  “Perhaps,” said Lars, and sat down on a log. Dry rot had made it a comfortable seat. This conversation was childish and unlike her.

  “How much longer do we have to walk?”

  “I don’t know. Until we get to Blicksburg.”

  “Why do we have to get to Blicksburg?”

  “Because it’s too late to turn back,” said Lars, and ran a torn finger through his hair, which was filthy with wood dust and caked perspiration. They had been traveling barefoot, to save their shoes, and now he had a thorn in his foot and couldn’t dig it out.

  “I get tired sometimes. We’ve walked such a long time.”

  “Yes, we hav
e. You’re not going to cry, are you?”

  She sat demure beside him on the log, kicking her heels. “No. I don’t think so.”

  “I don’t want you to cry, not ever. You know that, don’t you?”

  She gave one of those impatient sighs nine-year-old girls give sometimes when grown-ups are being stupid, and nodded her head.

  “Uncle Stöss might help us get back to Wollin.”

  “I don’t care. I’m tired of walking.”

  “I care. See if you can get this thorn out.”

  Doing that seemed to make her feel better. Sitting on the log, they ate what they had been able to find, beg, take, or buy—some haws, some goat cheese, some stale bread, a handful of dried apples.

  “Do you remember Mysendonck the Pastor’s boy?” he asked, chewing a leathery white ring of apple.

  She didn’t, but said yes.

  “He might be here somewhere.” It was a hope he had been holding on to ever since the wood. Robber or not, he had no other hope. He didn’t even know which way Blicksburg was, anymore.

  But they ran across no trace of him.

  “Nice Lars,” she said. “Shall I tell you a secret?” And huddling up against him, she whispered in his ear, “When I grow up I’ll marry you.”

  “You can’t. You’re my sister.”

  “No I’m not.”

  “All right. Who are you then?”

  “Very grown up,” said Hannale scornfully, and holding him around the neck and tilting her head to look at him, she rocked back and forth, chanting: “I am a very great lady, and I live in a big castle with beds, and a kitchen, way above the sea, and I have two big white cats with black spots that come when I call them. And there is no wicked witch (my God, it was their mother), and you have a great big boat. And every night you come sailing back, and you sleep with the hawser of it fastened to your big toe.”