Salamander

by Thomas Wharton

  Prince Eugene crosses himself and dispatches the waiting messengers with his final orders to the marshals now scattered far and wide across the battle line. A few more moves on the chessboard, and this engagement, as well as the crusade he has led for the past three years into Ottoman territory, should be over, praise be to God. With the taking back of Belgrade from the Turk the centuries of warring back and forth over the same rivers, forests, and mountains will at long last cease. Today the clock stops.

  This was a war of time, Prince Eugene announces to his aides-de-camp. Our clocks against their musty lunar almanacs. You can’t run an efficient military engine by the phases of the moon.

  The aides-de-camp nod and murmur agreement. They have heard these phrases many times. Among them is a young man named Ludwig, the only son of Count Konstantin Ostrov, one of the Prince’s veteran commanders.

  Ludwig is seventeen. He has stayed all morning by the Prince’s side, held in reserve while the senior adjutants are chosen for the honour of relaying Papa’s orders. Ludwig has been fidgeting, barely reining in his desire to do something, anything, other than wait here with the Prince and his retinue on this distant knoll, which only a scattering of enemy cannonfire has reached all morning. When his turn at last arrives and the orders are signed, sealed, and tucked into the leather pouch at his side, he is off, galloping his sleek black mount down the hillside, over the trampled yellow grass, past the blood-spattered tents where doctors are sawing limbs off the shrieking wounded, between the slow columns of sullen reserve troops brought forward to fill the gaps in the dishevelled lines. He rides as if this is the whole world, the roar of the wind, the lunging flanks of the horse beneath him, the intoxication of his body’s youth and animal vigour. He surprises himself with the thought that this feeling surging up in him is an absolute joy.

  I am happy, he thinks, and laughs out loud.

  He remembers the letter that arrived in camp a month ago, informing him and his father of the death of the Countess, his mother, in childbirth. For the first time since that day the cold ashes in his heart have stirred to life.

  I have a sister, Ludwig reminds himself. Someday, when she is old enough to understand, I will tell her about this moment.

  He was sent to find his father, but it is his father who finds him. Led here by the captain who saw the boy fall, the Count at first does not recognize his son. Ludwig is stretched out on the grass, hat missing, his head propped against the wheel of a smouldering gun carriage. His hands are resting loosely, palms upward, in his lap. This is how beggars slump against walls. Ludwig’s head lolls to one side and his jaw hangs like an old man’s, as if in a single morning he has aged thirty years.

  The Count dismounts and kneels beside his son. Ludwig’s eyes are closed, his face chalk-white. He sighs like a gently roused sleeper about to awaken.

  The Count turns to the captain.

  What happened?

  The man sputters. He does not know. He saw the boy fall from his horse, he rushed over and carried him to the gun carriage. The Count searches his son’s uniform for traces of blood, gently opens the wings of his gold-embroidered coat. The white shirt beneath is spotless. At the Count’s touch, Ludwig opens his eyes.

  Let’s go home, Father, he says in the tone of a bored guest at a card party.

  He draws in a long, drowsy breath, as though about to yawn. His head falls softly sideways against the axle of the carriage. The Count moves closer and looks into Ludwig’s eyes.

  Peace to his soul, the captain says, doffing his hat.

  After a moment the Count draws his blood-crusted sabre and cuts the braided topknot, the Ostrov badge of warrior ancestry, from the head of his son. He rises shakily to his feet.

  What killed him? he asks the captain, who lifts his blackened hands helplessly and lets them drop. He just fell from his horse?

  Yes, Excellency. I saw him coming down the hill, then he slowed up and began searching this way and that, shading his eyes with his hand. Looking for you, I suppose. He was riding towards me when just like that he slid off the saddle and fell to the ground.

  When?

  I had scarcely rushed to his side and carried him here when I saw you riding by, Excellency.

  The Count tucks the topknot into his belt. He gazes over the trampled ground, as if he might find the past few moments lying among the other litter of war.

  Others are pausing now on their way back from the last expiring groans of the battle, to gawk, crane their necks, find out who has fallen here. There being a nobleman on hand, it must be somebody of importance. The Count glares around, his naked sabre held before him like an accusation, as if someone here knows the answer to this riddle and refuses to tell him. Young men do not just die.

  Two officers on horseback canter past, pausing in their conversation to take in the scene with impassive faces. A grenadier follows soon after, leading another whose eyes are hidden by a dirty bandage, his outstretched hands shakily patting the air before him. In the distance three infantrymen have upended a gunpowder cask and are already playing cards.

  The world will not stop.

  The Count tosses his sabre to the earth. Tomorrow perhaps, or the next day, the Prince’s army will breach the walls and take its vengeance for the deaths of comrades, family, ancestors. He will not be among them. He will honour his son’s dying request and return home. He will mourn his wife. See his infant daughter. And devote himself at last to his long-abandoned dream.

  The next morning he resigns his commission. Prince Eugene tearfully embraces his old comrade-in-arms.

  My dear Konstantin, what will you do?

  Puzzles, the Count says, placing his sword in the Prince’s hands. I will do puzzles.

  After his son’s death Count Ostrov retired to his ancestral castle, on a precipitous island of rock in the River Vah. This ancient stronghold had been built by his ancestors on the crumbling remains of a Roman fort in the same year that Constantinople fell to Mehmed the Conqueror and Gutenberg printed his first Bible.

  As a boy growing up in this castle, the Count had loved puzzles.

  Cryptograms, mathematical oddities, those new criss-cross word games known in his native land of Slovakia as krizovka, riddles and philosophical conundrums, optical illusions, and sleight-of-hand tricks: all beguiled him and, so the Count came to believe, each of these puzzles was related to the others by some hidden affinity, some universal pattern that he had not yet uncovered. Their solutions hinted at a vague shape, like the scattered place names on a mariner’s chart that trace the edge of an unmapped continent. The philosophers of the age were asking why or how God, perfect Being, had created an imperfect world, a world which at the same time the new science was comparing to an intricate machine of uncertain purpose. Perhaps the answer to such questions could be found in these seemingly innocent diversions of the intellect. Was not the mind itself, the Count conjectured, a composite engine of messy animal imperfection and clockwork order?

  Yet if there were a single solution to the infinite puzzlement of the world, the young Count Ostrov had been forced to abandon the search for it. In the tradition of his forefathers he had taken up the sabre and spent his life on horseback battling the encroaching Turks. At the time the thought did not occur to him that he might make some other choice. One of his ancestors, after all, was legendary for having decreed that when he died, his skin should be fashioned into a drum to call his descendants to arms. Another still led his men into battle after an exploding shell had blinded him.

  Now the Count indulged himself in puzzles as he had never been able to in his youth.

  He had trompe l’oeil doors and windows painted on walls. Filled rooms with unusual clocks and other marvellous trinkets and curiosities: refracting crystals and magic lanterns, miniature cranes and water wheels, ingenious traps for mice and other vermin. The few dinner guests who stopped at the castle over the years were required to solve riddles before they were allowed to eat.

  We are little airy Creatures<
br />
  All of different Voice and Features;

  One of us in Glass is set,

  One of us you’ll find in Jet.

  Another you may see in Tin,

  And the fourth a Box within.

  If the fifth you should pursue

  It can never fly from you.

  He hired servants who were what he called human riddles. Massive-jawed giants, dwarves, beings of indeterminate age or sex, boneless contortionists, and people with misshapen or extra limbs. Many of the menial tasks in and around the castle were, however, performed by ingenious mechanisms installed in the castle by inventors from all over Europe. Count Ostrov dreamed of a castle in which there would be no living servants at all, but despite many attempts he had not yet succeeded in having a machine fashioned that could prepare roasted larks just the way he liked them.

  Not long after the Peace of Passarowitz, the Count found his cherished seclusion threatened by another kind of invasion: that of the document men. The castle was besieged by government functionaries toting satchels bulging with documents, rolled-up maps under their arms, maps which they spread out on his huge oak desk to show him what the Imperial Survey Office and the Superintendency of Frontiers had jointly decided: the River Vah now formed the revised boundary between the Duchy of Transmoravian Bohemia and the Principality of Upper Hungary.

  Like a vast bloodstain the empire had changed shape once again. And once again, as so many times before, the land of Slovakia, like a slaughtered ox, had been sliced up the middle.

  In consequence, the document men told the Count, although your forests, fields, and vineyards are all situated in Bohemia, this castle stands precisely on the border with Hungary, and thus falls into two administrative districts.

  Which means? the Count growled, stroking his moustache.

  Which means that Your Excellency is now subject to the duties, excises, levies, and fiduciary responsibilities pertaining to both states.

  Which means, the Count said, stabbing a finger at the dotted line that bisected his homeland, every time a pheasant is killed and plucked at my back door, roasted in the kitchen, and carried out to me on the front terrace, another coin will be plucked from my purse.

  He argued that by their own logic, his castle did not in fact exist, as an entire castle, in either Bohemia or Hungary, and thus should be exempt from taxation altogether, and from any other meddling in his affairs, for that matter. The document men plunged into their law tomes and surfaced with an obscure ninety-year-old lex terrae stipulating that a fugitive could not be shot at by soldiers from either of two neighbouring nations as long as he stood precisely on the border. For if he be wounded in a leg that stands in one realm, the statute read, some of the blood he sheds will of necessity flow from that part of him residing in the other, the which transfer of vital humour clearly falls under the Unlawful Conveyance of Spirituous Liquors Act. Such a man, in other words, remained suspended in legal and political limbo for as long as he took not a single step in either direction. And so it appeared that by analogy the Count’s argument for autonomy was viable. Yet the document men insisted that an exemption of this kind could only take effect in the improbable circumstance that there were no separate, self-contained rooms in the Castle Ostrov.

  Just as the several parts of a man’s body blend together seamlessly, they reasoned, so your castle would have to be a space in which, for example, no one could say exactly where the gaming room ended and the chapel began.

  At that moment Count Ostrov had the great revelation of his life. Not only would he fill rooms with oddities and brain-teasers, he would transform the castle itself into a devious labyrinth, a riddle in three dimensions, a giant puzzle.

  Nineteen years were devoted to this grand design. In the world beyond the castle, peace gave way once again to war. The Turks retook Belgrade and were rumoured to be preparing for a march on Vienna, where the newly crowned empress Maria Theresa, young and inexperienced, was already under siege by Frederick of Prussia and his opportunistic allies. Armies tramped once again across Europe, cannonballs flew and villages burned, and during a brief lull in the conflagration the document men returned to inform the Count that the border had been renegotiated and moved, freeing him (at least until the next war) from the threat of dual taxation. He treated the document men to a sumptuous dinner for their trouble (complete with the obligatory riddles), dismissed them from his thoughts and went on with his project.

  Dry goods, cookware, clothing, furniture were gathered from their respective niches and redistributed throughout the castle. Ancient walls were knocked down and centuries-old doors taken off their hinges. Fixtures were unfixed, immovables became movables. There were windows set into floors and ceilings, inaccessible doors halfway up walls, winding passageways that circled back upon themselves or led to seemingly impassable barriers of stone that would slide away with the touch of an ingeniously concealed catch. Then came the tables, chairs, and beds mounted on rails in the floor, the mezzanines that lowered themselves into subterranean crypts, the revolving salons on platforms filled with halves of chairs, divans and settees whose other halves would be found along farflung galleries amid a clutter of incompatible household objects.

  The workings of the castle were made even more complex by the Count’s insistence that although the rooms merged, there would be no such intermingling when it came to social classes. Once every hour through the night, the Count’s bed, and that of his daughter, Irena, left their temporary chambers and roamed the castle on their iron rails, in the morning ending up where they began. Despite this nocturnal meandering, the Count saw to it that neither of them came near the areas reserved for the servants. For their part, the servants learned to remain as unobtrusive as possible when they went about their tasks. Their presence was a constant reminder to the Count that he had not yet succeeded in creating a castle capable of functioning on its own without constant human intervention. As they made their daily peregrinations, the servants would conceal themselves behind moving pieces of furniture, or take circuitous routes that kept them well away from where the Count and his infrequent guests were to be found. Eventually he hired a Venetian metallurgist who fashioned automatons to take over some of the castle’s more repetitive chores, and to these creations he gave the Slovak name for peasant labourers. There was a robotnik that polished silverware, a robotnik that folded bedsheets, a robotnik that woke the Count every morning by playing his favourite folk melodies on the violin.

  The intended result was that the castle seemed scarcely inhabited by human souls.

  But the crowning achievement of the Count’s great labour was undoubtedly the library. A Scottish inventor, at enormous expense, designed a system of hidden tracks, chains, and pulleys, driven by water and steam, to create a ceaseless migration of bookcases that without warning would sink into the walls or disappear behind sliding wooden panels. Others dropped through trapdoors in the ceiling or rose from concealed wells in the floors. The entire castle in effect became the library, and no private space was inviolable. A guest at the castle might be luxuriating in a perfumed bath, or lecherously pursuing a servant when, with a warble of unseen gears, a seemingly solid partition would slide back and a bookcase or a reading desk would trundle past, the Count himself often hobbling in its wake, consulting his watch, oblivious to anything but the timing and accuracy of the furniture’s progress.

  As volumes began to arrive in parcels, boxes, and crates, they were unpacked, inventoried, and given a first cursory examination by the Count’s daughter, Irena.

  When Count Ostrov first returned from Prince Eugene’s campaign, Irena was in the care of her nurses, and so she remained until the day the women came to him in terror to tell him that the child had fallen ill and was near death. He descended like a thundercloud on the nursery, scattered the women, and finally got to know his daughter.

  Never one to place trust in doctors, the Count installed Irena in his own bed, consulted the few medical treatises in his possession, and set
to work to cure the disease himself. He spent a sleepless week preparing herbal concoctions and force-feeding them to the child, who immediately threw most of them up all over the blankets. He had her shivering body swathed in reeking medicinal gauzes. She was steamed, plastered, and bled.

  Irena recovered, but the legacy of the illness, or the cure, was a weakened spine that left her unable to hold herself upright. Without the support of a pillow or someone’s arm she would collapse like a cloth doll. Eventually the Count had the girl fitted with a corset of steel bands, hammered into a poised, properly feminine shape by the castle blacksmith.

  It was also at this time that the Count realized Irena was old enough to read and write, and so might be of some use to him in his never-ending work. One morning he had her brought to his study.

  He handed her a small Bible.

  Read some of that.

  Yes, Father.

  She opened the book and then looked up.

  What shall I read?

  What you find there.

  He listened while she read from Deuteronomy, with quiet confidence, never once faltering. The secret things belong unto the Lord our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law…. He stopped her after a few minutes and gestured to the quill, inkhorn, and paper that sat on his desk.

  Now write it out.

  She set the Bible down, picked up the quill, dipped it in ink and began to write. After a moment he noticed that she was not looking at the book.

  You know the entire passage by heart.

  Yes, Father.

  You must have read it before.

  No.