People of the Book

by David Stacton

  Lars could understand that, and looking at the old man, felt sympathy, and a wish to help.

  The old man felt it, too. What an incredible sensation: it was like water frothing back again into a dry ditch, for someone has opened the weir. This time he had determined not to impose; this time he would evoke. And with male children, this is a harder task.

  But I cannot become a drowned sea captain, he thought. Or can I? After all, the whole lot of us made our voyages once, and Natt och Dags and Bjornesons took the land I lost. Why should I not walk back out of the sea myself? He was absurdly happy. When we have grown old we become tinder: it takes only a spark.

  Below them the forest lay black and motionless as water in a tarn, as water under the basalt canyons of a fjord. A little breeze rose up over it, with the low onhurrying twilight rush of an evening breeze across the water; all you can see is a low froth, as the ravel slaps quickened on its wetted stones. And then it is gone.

  “I was up on the tower,” said Lars, finding Mysendonck still awake.

  “Nobody ever goes up in the tower.”

  “He took me to watch the meteor shower. You can see for miles.”

  “I haven’t been there,” said Mysendonck, and using a knife, began to pare his nails.

  *

  To that cantus firmus material Oxenstierna had found in Man’s Myth, the Magician would have added nature and the stars, for he had not much use for Man’s Myth. Like Oxenstierna, like most men who have been out in the world and brought something back with them worth keeping, he was country bred. Cities decay. The world is littered with the dead bones of dead cities. Those ideologies by means of which men decorate the severed boar’s head of their terror to serve forth the feast, do not outlive them. The idealist is carted around the table with an apple in his mouth, to amuse cannibals. He had no beliefs of his own. Like Grotius, he was a casuist. But there is always somewhere some green thing beginning. And springth the wude nu. The Magician had cheered up, and now found his native pessimism as good as the New Comedy, a halcyon miracle of deep-sounding blue iris exfoliating in the snow.

  He went to the stables.

  “I want the boy and girl moved into the schloss,” he told Mysendonck. “They can be made more comfortable there.”

  Myendonck, who had had a horse’s hoof between his knees, straightened up and let it drop.

  “What do the boy and the girl want?” he asked. “Or haven’t you asked them?”

  The Magician did not care for this tone.

  “You can’t leave a girl of that age among the sort of men you have here.”

  “I don’t,” said Mysendonck curtly.

  The Magician cared for this tone even less.

  *

  Hannale had been turned over for the day to her admirer, the Magician, but found him out of sorts and less admirative than usual. With an amiable smile in which there was nothing amiable, he had retreated to the tower.

  With a whaleboned sigh, in which there was nothing very sad, Selina handed her an embroidery hoop.

  “We women must have our own employments, and it does no harm to be good at them,” said Selina, and bent over her stitching with a satisfied smile.

  Hannale fidgeted. Hannale didn’t like it. She didn’t see why Lars had to go off with Mysendonck all the time.

  *

  “Put these on,” said Mysendonck, rummaging in an armoire, and throwing over his shoulder buckskin hunting clothes which landed on the floor with a wet, soapy smack. Mysendonck’s luxuries were plain things well made and long worn; not a style but an innate manner, the luxe of the country. This was what had first caught the Magician’s eye, he needing at that time an animal. For ideas are jeweler’s work, designed as like as not to conceal the flaw in the stone, which is therefore apt to shatter under pressure, but the instinctual is sturdier and more reliable. For you can trust anyone, given you know his limitations, and there is something in healthy creatures which makes malice or treachery impossible to them. To say no one can be trusted is an attitude and so deluding. You have only to know how much and when and where, to trust people as much as you like. So Mysendonck had been chosen as a dogsbody.

  This was not Mysendonck’s notion. Good mastiffs as opposed to the broken kind follow mostly because they want to. And he didn’t. They obey, but that does not mean they do not have opinions. If phrased (they were not phrased), these mostly consisted of: The Magician shall not have him.

  Lars did not bend to pick the clothes up.

  “It’s rough country, put them on,” said Mysendonck, and made himself errands around the room, while Lars shucked his clothes and did so. It was another impersonation. There were now two Huntsmen of Soest.

  Mysendonck was so pleased with himself, he tousled Lars’ hair in passing. It was his own image, but innocent and golden, and not the son of Pastor Mysendonck.

  “Now you look the way you should,” he said, and led the way clattering down the stairs. At the foot of the stairs were two white horses saddled. What Mysendonck had in mind was twins. And when you foist these things on others, it is best to get moving at once, to avoid embarrassment. Besides, those who do not think are never easy without something to do, which as often as not does not satisfy them either. Riding, however, did.

  Looking down from the tower, the Magician saw what he took for Mysendonck and one of his bullies, off for the wood, but then, from the dandelion on top of one of them, recognized Lars. This show in force he knew instantly for what it was. It was Mysendonck’s challenge, and apart from that, never trust a man who says he doesn’t trust anybody; he’s being sentimental, and therefore doesn’t know what he is doing. That hardheadedness has always inside it a soft center.

  Not that the Magician ever had trusted him.

  *

  It was not entirely an aimless ride. To control his men, Mysendonck had to keep them busy, so he proposed to reconnoiter. He did not say so. If he wanted Lars on his side, he would have to go slowly and to keep still.

  He preferred to keep still. Talking, except as an art, and those arts fine in the jeweler’s sense of fine have no practical purpose whatsoever, is not among man’s more useful accomplishments. The real questions are not asked that way; the real answers are ineffable; rage is only a rhythm; affection cannot be said; it is a matter of lilt and tone. So if you know better than to listen, why speak? It is not needed. A glance is enough.

  Lars enjoyed himself. These light, underfed, skittish ponies were novel to him. A cart horse is like a big dog. You dig your fingers into its mane, and it just sighs. On these, where the underbrush was backlighted, he had the sensation of straddling if not a wave, at least the dolphin in it.

  Once or twice they came out above hamlets. Again they drew rein on a bluff, above a camp recently abandoned in disorder. As they passed a currant bush, Lars heard a bird sing out of it, like a sudden gush of water. It was the prophet bird.

  “I’ll race you,” said Mysendonck—they were on a gopher-pocked stony slope—“to that rock up there.”

  So they got back so late, they went to dinner at the schloss as they were.

  Even the wisest man is apt to overestimate the meaning of mere accidents. The Magician overestimated the meaning of this one. After this, there was much riding, and Lars began to stink of leather, no matter what he had on. The Magician did not like looking for Lars sometimes, and not finding him there.

  “Do you have to go again?” said Hannale, patient with the impatience of a woman, nine or not.

  Yes, Lars did.

  *

  And yet the Magician seemed to sense the boy was growing closer. Apart from that, Mysendonck had errands of his own.

  “You’d better not come with me this time,” he’d say, and give Lars an excluding, older look, not exactly full of respect, which Lars began to find maddening, as he was supposed to.

  One clear night late, when Lars was on the tower with the Magician, they saw far-off torches moving in and out of the trees, among the foliage. It was the
robbers coming back. At one point they appeared strung out in silhouette along a rocky razorback. Then they disappeared into blackness again.

  “In the place I come from,” said the Magician, “we have bonfires at the summer solstice. Very large ones. The peasants get drunk and do what they please. Of course we get drunk ourselves, but somehow we never do as we please. There is something in the setting, I suppose, which prevents our doing so. But when the peasants were liquored up, at two or three in the morning, they would climb the collapsed ridges which lie over toward the sea, and dance in wavering, stumbling, vomiting, catcalling single file, behind whichever one among them it was who was their leader that year, until his strength went out. For many years it was our cobbler, Albrecht. Albrecht by the Churchyard. We named them like that, you know, because there was no other way of telling them apart.

  “There was a broad stone terrace outside the Hall, with cannonballs on the balustrades. Big ones. And it was done to go out when we heard the shouting, to watch the fires die and to watch that drunken dance along the hill. And it seemed to me—I was then a child—that it was very like a picture we had in our parish church, of Death leading his dancers over the hills and down the crest, to music we could catch at in snatches as the wind blew it our way. They went piped along the hill in that manner, silhouetted against the green light of false dawn. Death led them off, and because they were drunk, they danced after him.”

  Below them the robbers enfiladed the meadow, Mysendonck leading them. By the light of a torch, his eyesockets seemed hollow. And perhaps aware of them there, he raised his right arm upward, saluting the tower.

  “Halloa,” he called, and disappeared under the arch, with his crocodile after him.

  Once more they were staring down at nothing.

  “I like you,” said the Magician. “And though I mean no harm, I have done much. It is dangerous to be liked by me.”

  Lars could not call that comforting, but the Magician was not aware of him. He gripped the coping of the battlement, as though he were gazing from perpendicular decks into the trough of Jonah’s last wave.

  “They say when a man is sick at sea, he will not die until landfall, but they also say, that unless he die, no wind will rise, the ship is becalmed, the rest must await death with him. And this they say not of gulfs, straits, or small enclosed waters, but of the center of the great ocean itself, which neither you nor I have ever seen, and where the doldrums are. What I have seen is the Flying Dutchman. Indeed, I know him well. We have been within hailing distance many times, in dirty weathers, I have seen his starboard lights go rocking by. Life is a voyage.”

  If this was designed to be either informative or reassuring, Lars found it neither. They descended the tower.

  *

  The robbers had done well enough this time out to get drunk for a week.

  “You would be safer here. Both you and the girl. You practically live here anyway. Safer and much more comfortable,” said the Magician. He was benign, but anxious.

  Lars hesitated.

  “I couldn’t leave Hannale,” he said finally, which made no sense.

  For Hannale substitute Mysendonck. The Magician tapped his fingers. It could not be called jealousy; the jealousy of old men has no name. Yet he who had given up whole worlds voluntarily was now afraid to lose the last one.

  Selina, too, had been evasive recently. He did not care for fear. It is a weakness. And there are some things best not gone into. Therefore it was time for discipline.

  *

  Manglana was having nightmares. The Magician had found still one more use for Christine Natt och Dag. He was sending out dreams.

  At night the psychic powers of the world diminish while it sleeps. An oppression lifts from the sensitive wakeful man, the interstellar static fades, he can think. But he can also, if he wishes, avail himself of his situation. On his tower, in the wind, the Magician looked down at the high-pitched slate roofs, blue in the moonlight, and as the mists began to rise toward him, entered the minds of those who concerned him, and left in each a gift.

  For the Magician, who had evoked imaginary children and made them flesh, could plant the dead in the foreheads of the living, and as often as not the graft took. He could also, if he made the effort, bring new bodies to the family tomb house, a small whitewashed building with an onion cupola, standing separate in black woods near his home, draw back the rusted bolts, and leave them there to wake.

  So it came into Manglana’s sleep, that her body was brass to be in, heavy, but light in weight and hollow, with rattling pellets of dry clay from the casting. Her joints were swollen knobs, her skin was flaccid and greasy to the touch. The veins, the arteries, the sinews, could be seen under it. Her hair was thin, and full of blue sparks, but without life or luster. She was lying there in state, and found it difficult to move. She lay on that lower level of the tomb where it is customary to place an effigy of the naked corpse complete to mortification. Peering out, she could see that she was surrounded by other effigies, each with its gisant. There was a movement above her. On the upper level, full length and kneeling in bronze, Selina sighed and rose from her prie-dieu, with a rattle and a rustle.

  “If you are to be one of us, it will first be necessary for us to kill you,” she said, stooping down. “We have often tried. It makes a disturbance, but this time it must be done properly.” And pulling out from beneath Manglana the brass pillow on which her head rested, she smiled compassionately and pressed it firmly down over Maglana’s face. It was studded in nails with the Magician’s arms. Manglana tried to struggle, but could not. Her body was now no more than a system of ropes and pulleys made of flesh, with the ropes frayed. She smelled brass at her nose. She descended into darkness. The pillow was removed. With a second sigh, Selina rustled back to her prie-dieu.

  A candle flared up. There was a shuffle of heavy feet, a susurration of spurs. All men who had ever trampled over her had come to view the remains. First the Spanish officer, then Mysendonck, then more Spanish officers, then Mysendonck, Mysendonck, Mysendonck, Mysendonck, Mysendonck, Mysendonck.

  “Leave. They will kill you,” said Manglana, and drew back dead lips. A little fetid air came out between them.

  “I have come to get you out of here,” said Earl Haakon. But he was so much younger than she that he seemed to dwindle away.

  She tried to breathe out again her warning.

  “But I want to die,” said Mysendonck.

  And then that tramping, that coldness, that banging far away of an iron door. She lay in a ditch. She was ten years old. The light went out.

  “They are gone,” said Christine Natt och Dag. “They are all gone. They always do. But I can offer you this.” And she held up the shapeless, boneless, dangling figure of an idiot. “I had good use of him. When we grow old, and our breasts drop, we can expect no more.”

  “Blub, blub, blub,” said the idiot, swinging eagerly toward her and stretching out sticky fingers. “Blub, blub, blub.”

  Manglana tried to make some sound, but could not, her mouth was stopped. Neither could she draw away. She was toothless.

  “Shush,” said Selina, kneeling above her, “we are trying to help you. That is why we have had to kill you. It is for your own good.”

  “They did not kill me,” said Christine Natt och Dag. “I died. He is a pleasant young man, but he does not exist, and at our age, we need this.” And she shook her idiot again.

  Somewhere a linchpin fell to the floor. Another tomb was opening.

  “I must go back,” said Christine. “But I never sleep. I have found it … not wise.”

  *

  Her father’s daughter, Selina had no dreams. She had only the life he gave her. She was mindless.

  *

  Mysendonck, thought the Magician, but did not go there. He had only a momentary impression of men struggling in a field, carrying among them one higher than the rest, but bloody, and a sensation of pleasure. It did not concern him. Nor did the child concern him; she
lay there, men came toward her, and then fell away. She screamed. That knobby boy, Lars, concerned him. For a moment he did not want to look.

  *

  Lars found himself running through an empty building, with a knife in his hand. Someone had startled him, so he had plunged the knife in, and now he was here, moving rapidly. He had a stitch in his side.

  He was on the upper floors of the Katzburg, trying to find a way down so he could escape. He came to the wellhead of a state stairway.

  The Magician appeared in the dust (why me? wondered the Magician), holding in one hand a flayed skin, dripping, with yellowed fat attached, the arms and hands flopping and dangling. As he twitched it, MacKensie’s face lolled around, a collapsed balloon.

  Lars turned and ran down the corridor toward a light at the far end, a nimbus with rays. When he got there, there was the Magician, holding the skin up.

  Again he ran. He flung open a door. Behind it, those marble busts stood on their stairs, spiraling downward, upward. The Magician rose among them, brandishing his skin, but this time the collapsed face had a shock of tow hair cascading across it.

  “Yes, it is your own,” said the Magician. “The thing in your hand is a flaying knife.” As he spoke, he stroked the hair fondly, and it cascaded from tow to blue to black. Lars slammed the door.

  At once the Magician appeared, this time at both ends of the corridor, and began to advance.

  *

  On his tower the Magician, shocked, said, “There is an alternative,” forgetting that we cannot transmit words and sentences, we can only reach in and evoke out of their darkness images, by reshaping what we find into what we wish them to experience, by giving a twist to what they fear, by mingling invisibly with what they love. As he spoke, the contact snapped. He found himself extruded.

  He is afraid of me. Why? The Magician felt stripped and disconsolate. Was it possible there was something about himself he did not know?

  The Magician was not so fond as one might think of these involuntary voyages made by night. They bring us no real power, and they contain much it would be better not to know.