People of the Book

by David Stacton

  There was a constant movement. Wagons came and went. Baggage trains arrived and departed. Tents went down or rippled up. It was worse than the woods. It was no place for Hannale, but MacKensie meant well, and Lars could not stir yet, he was too tired.

  Into the middle of the camp at dusk (they were on its periphery), came lumbering a large caravan, painted peacock blue, surrounded by horsemen carrying flares. It lurched to a halt in no particular spot, for no particular reason. Its mules were detached, its steps were let down, the horsemen put their flares in sockets to either side of its door. A blue tent covered with stars was raised nearby. A tall figure wearing a gray robe descended from the caravan and walked gravely to the tent.

  Later he could be seen moving among the campfires. The Magician had arrived for one of his infrequent visits to the world.

  “Ay, the blue wagon. I was wondering where those two were,” said MacKensie, and went on placidly to enumerate the advantages of a campaigner’s life, for most of us suffer the same death as the god we follow, and we’re always trying to find him more, for he might take them first. The old man had not done too badly, but his life was living him, not he it, a thing Lars refused to allow; and what was more, it was eating him up.

  “Lentils,” said MacKensie, and dished them up. So far they had stayed three days. “And a bit o’ ham. If you’re turning south, you’ll have to go through the wood. I don’t envy you that. It’s full of woodpeckers, and you know what that means. The natives are afeared on it, and I’m not sure I’m not afeared on it myself.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t know,” said MacKensie shortly, and returned to the Marquis of Hamilton’s Silesian campaigns of ’31. “Not that he wasn’t a maggoty-headed fool. But he was a bonny fool, despite his huffing ways. Not, mind ye, that I say anything for him.”

  The Magician strode by.

  Lars, who had been able to wash his shirt for the first time in weeks, had no swagger, but being clean again had improved him, just as swimming off the beach at home had always turned him otterine. He had gotten back his shimmer.

  MacKensie lived surrounded by bundles. From one of these, throwing wadded cloth away, he had a cuirass out, chased and gilded, and popping it over Lars like a nutcracker, fastened the straps. Formerly he had used it for dirty clothes.

  “’Twasn’t stealin’, the dead ha’ a verra pür sense o’ property,” he said. “There’s a morion, can I find it.” And with a rattling of metal bones, he pulled out a finished and fantasticated helmet, all sea bubbles and baroque scrolls, last worn as parade armor in a procession long vanished around the far corner of a dusty street. It weighed more than twenty pounds, the cuirass forty, the two pieces lifted together from some bloated corpse done with fighting.

  It took Lars back to that smoking winter in the hut. He could have cried aloud for Mysendonck, also to find himself enjoying thus being trapped, in a carapace that changed your natural growth and destroyed free will. It felt good, and yet only the unimaginative kill; it is a spiritual defeat. There are so many other ways to send men down, and besides, a moral refusal is innate, not ratiocinative, a matter of nerves and glands and empathy, a thing given at birth, inexplicable to Levelers, who at their birth, no matter how well intended, received nothing.

  But to please the old man, he strutted around, not knowing what to do, in a surrogate self two sizes too big for him, two sizes too small, and much too heavy. Hannale was pleased.

  “It isn’t you,” she said, and clapped her hands.

  This did not please him. Most men kill what is in them in order to escape to a farther room or to sulk alone in their lair. But Lars was not of the phoenix kind: he liked the room where he was born. Freedom to him was to be what he was. With free men, it is ever so. They busily seek no continual change. The turning of the leaf is what pleases them, and the soft green budding of the same leaf, the season after.

  MacKensie, a childless man who needed a son to dress, delighted with the general effect, handed him a pikestaff.

  “You’ll soon get the feel of it,” he said.

  Some officers went by, jostling among them some Swedish prisoners, one of whom, pushed too far, struggled back. He was a pink giant with uncertain eyes.

  “Daft,” said MacKensie, but looked worried. He knew the signs.

  The Swede grabbed a sword, and flailing in a circle, took one head off, produced more blood, and whirling on his toes, with the sword held straight out before him, began to yell after his kind.

  “Berserker,” said MacKensie. “It’s pride. Nothing but spirritual pride. You have to kill him. He won’t go down. Spirritual pride is an awesome thing.” But he grabbed back his pike and pushed Hannale down.

  Man’s first impulse is to run away. The Spaniards broke. His second is to gang up against a common danger, if it be not too great. Men began to run up from the tent rows, and formed a wide circle around the berserker, pikes inward.

  The Swede whirled in his circle, but more slowly. He did not seem to be an inhabited man any more. He had reverted to his principle. As the circle around him drew smaller, like a net drawn in, he roared and charged, driving himself on the pikes, until they stuck out through his back with a dirty glitter. Reaching over, he hacked away at anything he could still reach. Those who held the pikes abandoned them, but the pikes themselves propped him up while he went on hacking at the darkening air.

  It was necessary to dispatch him from the rear, which was soon done. But because of the pikes supporting him through his body, he could not fall. He sagged over them, and twitched, and then twitched no more. His fellow Swedes watched with that irritated silence we reserve always for that member of our company who has gotten drunk first.

  “Do ye ken Hector in the Iliad?” asked MacKensie, sighing. “‘Now again is my doom come upon me, nay, not without a struggle before I die.’ Spirritual pride is a fine and glittering thing.”

  “But he didn’t have a chance.”

  “Ay, that’s why. He hadn’t the need o’ one.”

  Lars stumbled because of the weight of the cuirass, and fumbled at the straps, but his fingers were numb.

  “It beats weepin’ and wailin’. They’re a fine people, only without the essential ingenuity; they’re too stubborn with theirselves. It’s the last thing they’ll give in to. With some self-indulgence, on the sly, mind ye, ye needn’t do that, most times. It’s their unnatural lust for the eating of fish, for the rest o’ the week as well.”

  In ten minutes, the prisoners had been marched on, and the small boys with tambourines who advertised the English Players were jumping over the corpse and striking stretched skin with cold fingers, while the metal disks rattled fixed around the rim. They had been too long at this life to pay much attention, and when they were twelve or thirteen, would graduate to women’s parts.

  As for the body, there were corpse gatherers who traveled with the army.

  Lars sat down. Children hoard their terror for the future, but at the time, count over their small collection of fears with their fingers in the dark, like shells and pebbles in their pockets. They do not forget these things, but they poke them down a small hole somewhere, into tomorrow. Hannale said nothing. What frightened her was the disappearance of her big warm brother into all that shiny steel. His face was hidden from her by the cheekpieces attached to the morion. And he creaked like a stranger.

  Lars had forgotten what he was wearing. He sat there trying to puzzle the world out. He knew that he was being driven. He stuck his heels in the every centimeter of the sucking sand and would not budge, and yet the ebb called him. He did not know how or where. Whistle and I’ll come for you, my lad: it is the burthen of the singing sands, north in the Hebrides, south on that coast where our colonists made their landfall, on the better, elbow side of the Sleeve. Something whips along the beach, pursuing. Our only way out is to dive in the wave.

  It is because we whistled.

  MacKensie contemplated his creation fondly. He was a man who needed someon
e to serve and follow. The impulse to follow a laird is as strong in some men as the need to be patted upon the head is in others. But one does not follow a laird to be patted on the head. One follows him because he is what one needs, he is the incarnation of what one worships.

  *

  On the second night in camp, the Magician vanished. He had his reasons. Few of us are sensitive or knowing enough to understand the world without personal suffering, for suffering exacerbates the nerves and sharpens the wits, but he could smell in the air the singed stench of incipient anarchy. His services would not be needed, and the Katzburg had reminded him of certain things long forgotten. Having found it, he did not want to lose it.

  Mysendonck could be his liaison; and his purpose, apart from finding him people and places to rob, had been the hope that Manglana, exposed to novelty among dark Spaniards, would pass on, and as she always did, in her compulsive search for the same event over and over again, leave Selina to him.

  Give her a week, and then bring her back. The Magician was tired. He sensed trouble. His tent went rippling down. He strolled back to that enormous ruin, through the woods, stooping from time to time to gather a brown fungus from a tree, leading his horse—they had horses now. Why was it so important to Mysendonck to break white horses?

  *

  “The boots are some sort of talisman, aren’t they?” said MacKensie.

  Lars thought that over and nodded. Then, because the old man was so friendly, he told him about Wollin, the horse, the hut, everything.

  “Taken from a dead man. It’s where we get most things,” said MacKensie. “The thing is, they seem to fit. This Mysendonck laddie now, would he wear the same kind?”

  “He did then.”

  “Then it’s hero worship. Ye had a crush on him. And why not? Hero worship is just love looking up, every man needs a hero, and it’s a stark wuruld. A child needs one all the mür. But here ye are, goin’ off to this uncle of yours, as pretty as you please. After a walk that long, even if ye marched, ye’d be tyrred. And ye don’t even know him.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I understand well enough. He’s a channel marker. Ding dong bell. I don’t say I don’t admirre ye. But ye shud ha gone t’other way, north. I was born by the sea myself. But I ne’er went near it. In Scuitland, we don’t.”

  And around him rose granite cliffs, bird droppings, sea gulls, and St. Columba’s, St. Iona’s chapel, half of it hanging out in space, no shingle to speak of two hundred feet down, but only the sea, heaving like water in a grave, the smell of kelp, and white froth over the edges of the cliff sometimes, blowing against you as you fought the wind. It cannot blow you over.

  “It’s dark and deep the sea. I was a hake-eatin’ child. But we looked the other way, toward the heath.”

  Hannale strayed toward the edge of the wood, where the spring was. Now Lars was growing up, she was aware of being sometimes ignored.

  “He’ll no get you back.”

  “There’s Hannale.”

  This seemed to MacKensie a full and sufficient explanation.

  Lars fumbled at his buckles.

  “Leave it,” said MacKensie. “It’s a gift.”

  Lars knew better than to say it was a gift he didn’t want. The old man of the sea was there to drag him down, into protean incertitude, and like most emotional people bottled in, an invincible slaveowner when it came to anyone he liked.

  “Have you heard of someone called Earl Haakon?”

  “He’s the chief night rider of these parts. I even caught a glimpse o’ him oncet. Not that I said so. There’s wurse things than stealin’.”

  “What’s he look like?”

  “I didna have time to see much. Black hair.” He didn’t mention the same boots, that it was the same person in another body. He knew it, but he didn’t want to give Lars up. “You think it might be your friend? If so, he’ll be a hard one to catch.”

  “He’s not my friend.”

  “Why not? You come from the same village, don’t you?” asked MacKensie, to whom friendship was the same as clannishness; it had nothing to do with amiability, like or dislike, and soft favors.

  *

  “There’s someone been asking about you,” said Manglana. “An old man and a boy.”

  Mysendonck was alert. “What kind of boy?”

  Manglana described him. “It was Earl Haakon they asked for. He had your accent. And the same kind of boots.”

  Mysendonck became as heavy, as impenetrable, as motionless as quarry water, and sat with his hands clenched in front of him, on the edge of the caravan bunk, for a long time.

  He, too, remembered a field at dusk, and a boy who had been the only one there to say good-bye to, so that he had not, after all, to ride off alone.

  He got up. He left the caravan. But he had to think it out, he had to circle, he had to reconnoiter. For most people change.

  *

  “Don’t go too far off,” said Lars.

  She had strayed out of sight, but she was not far. The spring was on the other side of a hummock, among a clump of trees. But like children, willful of their own authority, who will not answer their parents, she did not answer either. She would go back presently.

  It was a little dappled glade, and since she had always been forced to take her world in miniature, it was in miniature that she liked it best. Leaning over the crystal pool, no bigger than a tun, she watched the air bubbles rise from the sandy bottom, and was entranced. But pubescent girls learn to be as obliviously attentive as quail in season, who go on with what they are doing while they are being stalked, until almost, and sometimes, too late. Looking up, she saw three men with blue chins watching her. She did not run. She backed away.

  She did not have to be told why they were watching her. She had come to sense about herself that much already. One of them leaped down, hitting the water, going under it and staggering against an exposed tree root. She opened her mouth to scream for Lars, but no sound came.

  “Out.”

  Looking up to the far bank, she saw a man sitting motionless on a white horse. He sat as though he had been there for some time. It was the Huntsman of Soest. From the height he was on, he could look down toward the camp. The blue man made a lurch for her, and the other began to scramble down the bank.

  She thought at first the man on the horse was Lars. He had the same seat, and he was dressed like Lars, only in a leather shirt. Then she saw his hair was black as it blew across his forehead.

  “Out,” said the horseman again, raised his pistol, and fired.

  As MacKensie and Lars came running, the horseman vanished; and the two men splashed down the trickle of the stream as it left the spring.

  *

  “Did they touch you?” demanded Lars as she banged her head against his cuirass.

  “No.”

  “Why didn’t you call us?”

  “I thought you were there.”

  “What do you mean there?”

  “On a horse. Can’t we go away? I’m frightened here.”

  *

  As a reward—so are such things phrased: “It will shally the child’s mind”—MacKensie decided they should see the English Players, who spoke a low German enthusiastically, but it was mostly action.

  This was late of a broody afternoon, sultry and humid, with panic about. MacKensie refused to let Lars out of his carapace.

  “It makes you look like the quality, so we’ll get the closer to the trestles.” But that was not his real reason; the real reason was the wistful impositions of affection: why cannot they be like us? And he gave Lars a handsome loot pistol Lars did not know how to fire. It did not make much difference. As often as not, such pistols misfired whether you could use them or not.

  It was elaborately engraved with what looked to be a hunting scene, but was Acteon torn apart for the pleasure of it by hounds, in full view of an indifferent Diana, chaste Selene in a grove, chaste Selina. A powder horn, a silver scallop shell of quiet, he threw
in for good measure.

  Poor MacKensie, he wanted to give somebody things, and in Lars had found the person, unwilling but there. Happily he shouldered his way, bandylegged, into the play crowd, and got them the best places, for seats there were none.

  “Make way, make way,” he shouted, proud as a father whose son has come home after making a name for himself in foreign parts, and the whole village (MacKensie too), had thought him a fritterer and fribble.

  Hannale he bore on his shoulders, which delighted her, though she was too big at nine to be an easy burden, her legs dangled down below his waist. But it was like having the grandchild for the weekend, so far as he was concerned.

  There was a woman selling yallery-greeny apples which tasted of must and iodine. He bought three. In front of them was a wagon whose floor of frayed rough planks made a stage.

  The ’prentice boys played fife, recorder, snare, tambourine, and bagpipe, while the most limber of them, decorated with bells, did somersaults and hawked the play as the most splendiferous entertainment, very touching and true to life, the natural tragedy of the Black Man. When it comes to tragedy, the Green Man is never mentioned.

  MacKensie was entranced with the bagpipes. The Germans had them, but theirs did not sound the same. These called up the gray granite of empty hills and mist of a morning, or Arthur’s Seat at dusk. Then they wheezed awa’. The sky turned green. Flares were brought out and set in sockets before the wagon. And as he took his crunch of apple, the prologuer announced the True and Tragical Historie of Doctor Faustus.