Wolf on a String
Page 2
At this the sentry laughed, and replied that someone in authority had been notified, for hadn’t I just told him, and wasn’t he someone in authority? It was apparent he considered this a rare turn of wit.
I sighed. My feet were almost entirely numb by now, and I could feel hardly anything of them from the ankles down. What, I asked myself, was that young woman to me, and why was I so concerned for her, who, after all, was no more than a corpse?
Now another guardsman arrived; I heard his boots crunching over the ice before he appeared out of the mist and the snowy darkness like a warrior’s fresh-made ghost emerging from the smoke of battle. He looked not much of a warrior, though, being thin-limbed, gangly, and gaunt. A rusty arquebus was slung over his shoulder. Come to relieve his fat counterpart, he bent on me an eye wholly indifferent as to who I might be and wiped his nose on a knuckle. The two exchanged some words, and the newcomer took up his place in the sentry box, putting down his firearm and offering his scrawny backside gratefully to the brazier and its glowing coals.
Once more I urged the fat sentry to come with me and view the corpse of the young woman and decide what was to be done.
“Leave her to the night watch,” he replied. “He’ll find her on his rounds.”
If he did not come with me now, I said, I would straightway fetch an officer of the guard and lay a complaint against him. This was mere bluff, of course, but I put so much authority in my tone that the fellow, after another hesitation, shrugged and snapped at me vexedly to lead on.
We made our way back down the lane. The sentry walked with a bow-legged waddle. He was so stunted that the top of his head, as round as a cabbage, hardly came much higher than my elbow.
The young woman’s corpse was as I had left it, and no one had been there in the meantime, for mine were still the only bootprints visible in the snow.
Beside me the fat fellow made a harsh noise at the back of his throat and shut one eye and sucked his teeth. He stepped forward and with a grunt squatted on his heels. Lifting up the medallion, he held it on his palm and examined it by the faint light of the stars. He gave a low whistle.
“Real gold, that is,” he said. “Feel the heft of it.”
What is it about gold, I wonder, that all men imagine themselves masters of the assayer’s art? The same is true of precious stones, yet any old chunk of carved glass can be passed off as a gem of rarest quality, as every jeweler, and every cutpurse, will tell you.
Suddenly the fellow let drop the medallion as if it had scorched his palm. He struggled to his feet and stumbled an unsteady step backwards in alarm.
“I know this one!” he muttered. “It’s Kroll’s daughter, his girl. Christ’s blood!”
He turned to me with a wild look, then peered all about in the darkness, as if he feared a skulk of murderers might be in hiding out there, ready to pounce.
“Kroll?” I asked. “Who or what is Kroll, pray?”
The sentry gave a desperate sort of laugh.
“You don’t know Dr. Kroll,” he said, “the Emperor’s sawbones and one of his chief wizards?” He laughed again, grimly. “I daresay you soon will, friend.”
And soon, indeed, I would.
2
Dawn was still a good way off when they came for me at my lodgings. It was a great shock and a greater fright, yet I found that in some deep part of myself I was not entirely surprised. I suspect there lurks in every one of us, since Adam ate the apple, the guilty expectation of just such a distant hammering on the door at dead of night, of curt voices in the hall and the tramp of heavy boots on the stair. No man in his heart believes himself entirely innocent.
Hearing the violent commotion now, I sprang up on my bed and cast about in a panic, but I had not even a blade to defend myself with. I wondered confusedly how they had known where to find me. In the night, after the fat sentry had identified the dead young woman for me, I had accompanied him back to the gate, where he had conferred in urgent mutterings with his companion-in-arms over the half door of the sentry box. That was the moment when I finally came to my senses—by now the effect of the schnapps had almost all worn off—and I stepped back cautiously and turned and made off into the night, leaving the two guards to their anxious colloquy.
At the Blue Elephant I had to wait outside in the cold for a long time, knocking at the door and peering anxiously up and down the street, before the innkeeper’s wife came down at last and let me in. She had risen from her bed and was in her nightclothes, her hair gathered under a dainty nightcap of white muslin. I had taken note of her already, when I first arrived. She was a pretty thing, with ruddy cheeks and shining black curls, though she looked to be somewhat on the mature side, to my young man’s eye.
Taking up a candlestick, she lit me to my room. When we got there she tarried in the doorway, giving me a brazen smile and the benefit of the view down the loose front of her shift. I caught her womanly fragrance and even fancied I could feel the warm glow of her skin. The candlelight softened her features and smoothed out the fine fans of wrinkles at the corners of her mouth and eyes. I’m sure I would have taken her up on her unspoken offer and drawn her with me into the room and into my bed, lice or no lice, had there not at that moment come back to me clearly, like an awful warning, the hazy glitter in the half-open, lifeless eyes of the young woman lying in the snow under the castle wall, with that other, terrible mouth below her chin bloodily agape.
The merchant next door had quietened by then—he might have succeeded in dying at last, for all I knew—yet still I hardly slept, and when I did, my sleep was plagued by dreams, presently to be proved prophetic, that were loud with shrieks and alarms and shot through with wild rushings in darkness from one patch of stark lamplight to another.
When I’d heard the soldiers downstairs, my first thought had been to leap out at the window and flee, but the room was on an upper floor; had I jumped I would have ended up broken and bleeding in the street below. Sluggish with fright, I was hardly halfway out of the bed before the door burst open and a squad of helmeted figures, sashed and booted, came crowding in. A mailed fist grasped me violently by the shoulder and hauled me to my feet.
Now I was pummeled and cursed, and shouted at with incomprehensible commands, and my clothes were flung at me and I was ordered to dress myself at once. I hopped on one leg about the floor pulling on my hose, and took a ringing blow to the side of the head for not being quick enough about it. Then I was hustled down the stairs amid a mingled fug of sweat and steel and the raw breath of rough men-at-arms.
As I was being led out at the front entrance I glanced back over my shoulder and saw the innkeeper’s wife, in her nightcap, peeping out fearfully from behind the taproom door. It was to be my last sight of her, but even now, all these years later, I recall her image often to my mind, with painful clarity, and experience yet again a fond and sad regret for that opportunity lost. Is not old age incorrigible?
Fortunately I had managed to snatch up my coat, for the still-dark sky was laden with sagging, big-bellied clouds, and a biting wind dashed flurries of snow into my face like half-frozen spit.
When the soldiers had first broken into the room, it had seemed to me that there must be a dozen men at least, but I saw now that they were no more than four. They clanked along, unrelenting and wordless, in a square formation, a sort of moving cage, with me inside it, stumbling and panting. They marched as one, in matched step, which made me feel all the more clumsy and helpless in their midst.
We passed through a gate, wider and loftier than the one where hours before I had come upon the sleeping sentry, then across a cobbled yard greasy with soft snow, to ascend three broad stone steps. Imprisoned by that box of armed men, I entered a bare hall with a roof immensely high and lit by rushlights in iron holders set halfway up the walls. How strange it is, the things that fear chooses to fasten on: those lights, flickering and smoking and making a sound like a conflagration raging afar, seemed to me the very image of bleak foreboding and fright.
Opposite the door was a fireplace with an open hearth tall enough for a man to stand up in. A single blazing log of beech wood was supported between two tall bronze andirons that were decorated with the molded figures of porpoises, Nereids, and writhing mermen. No torches burned here, and the only light in the room came from the fire.
The squad of soldiers withdrew, swinging the door shut behind them.
I stood before the table, as if it were the Judgment Seat, waiting for I knew not what. All that could be heard was the crackle of the flames in the hearth and the sound of my own labored breathing. I was glad of the fire’s glow, and had moved to approach it more closely when a voice spoke, making me start back—I had thought there was no one but myself in the room.
“Stern,” the voice snapped out. “That is what you call yourself, yes?”
I peered into the leaping shadows thrown by the firelight, searching for the source of the words that had been delivered with such sharpness and rude force.
In the gloom to the left of the hearth I made out a large, elderly man, who had been mostly hidden from me by the back of the richly upholstered, thronelike chair in which he was seated, facing the fire. He seemed to be asleep, from the slack way he was reclining, with his chin slumped on his chest and one arm hanging limply down by the side of the chair. As I saw, however, his eyes were open, the pupils reflecting the busy flames of the fire.
But he was not the man who had spoken. Another figure was standing off to the right of the hearth, far back, where the light of the fire hardly reached. I had the impression of a slight, lean frame, a small head, a sharply pointed beard above a silk ruff, its whiteness glowing eerily in the gloom. I recalled another ruff I had seen lately, though that one had been dark and stiff with blood.
“Yes,” I answered, and had to pause to clear my throat, “yes, that is my name.”
The man in the shadows gave a soft and for some reason disbelieving snort, and came forward, into the light.
His eyes seemed black in the fire’s glow and were set close together, like two tiny bright black beads. He had grayish hair, cut short and coming far down on his forehead in a narrow peak that found an echo in his sharply pointed beard. He was dressed in doublet and hose; his legs were curiously slender and delicate, more like a woman’s legs than a man’s. He was of middle years, and in aspect quick and keenly watchful. I did not at all care for the look of him, with his piercing eyes and widow’s peak and that satanic beard cut in the fashionable Spanish style.
“And you claim to have traveled here from Regensburg,” he said, his tone this time one of skeptical amusement.
“Yes,” I answered, “I set out from Regensburg a week ago and came to Prague last evening.”
“Regensburg,” the man repeated, with a soft, sarcastic laugh.
I was puzzled; from this fellow’s responses, it seemed I might have been claiming to have arrived here a moment past from Atlantis, or the fabled city of Ur.
“Regensburg is the city of my birth,” I said, speaking slowly and clearly, as to a child, “although I have been away from there for many years, first studying and then tutoring at the University of Würzburg.”
“Regensburg!” the man said again, with yet another snicker. “Würzburg!” He turned to the man seated in the chair. “How plausible he makes these westward places sound, eh, Doctor?”
I was by now thoroughly bewildered. Plainly the man in the ruff was convinced I was lying—but why would I lie about such simple matters as my name and birthplace? And besides, why was he questioning me in this truculent fashion? I had done no wrong, or none that I knew of. Surely it could not be a violation of the city ordinances to happen upon a corpse by accident? And yet, deep down, I had again that vague and guilty sense of unsurprise that I had felt when I first heard the noise of the soldiers’ boot heels on the stairway at the Blue Elephant.
I tried again.
“My name is Christian Stern,” I said, speaking even more slowly now, and with a heavier emphasis. “I came to Prague last evening, by way of Regensburg. Regensburg is where I was born and where I lived until I went away, at a young age, to study at the University of Würzburg, and it’s at Würzburg that I have been a scholar and a tutor for some years past.” I hesitated, and then added: “I shall not be long in Prague, for I am on my way to Dresden.”
This was not true, and I regretted it as soon as I had said it. I had no intention of traveling on to Dresden, or to anywhere else. Prague had been my yearned-for destination, and in Prague I meant to stop. Given this man’s suspicious and threatening manner, however, it had seemed wise to present myself as a passing stranger who would soon be safely gone from the city. Now I chided myself for this falsehood, for later, I ruefully thought, it would probably get me into further trouble. But what business was it of this officious fellow whether I stayed on in Prague or not? And what, further, had any of this to do with the dead girl in the snow?
“Step closer,” the man said brusquely, “where we can see you clearly.”
I walked around three sides of the table and stopped in front of the fireplace. The man considered me for a long moment in silence, inclining his small, neat head at a sharp tilt, like a blackbird stopping in mid-forage with one ear cocked.
“Do you know who I am?” the man asked.
“No, sir,” I said, “I do not.”
He drew his head upright, and lifted high his chin. “I am Felix Wenzel,” he said, “High Steward to His Majesty the Emperor Rudolf.”
Ah! I thought, and my heart made a skipping little beat. Felix Wenzel, as all the world knew, was one of the most clever, most cunning, and most feared of the Emperor’s advisers. I was as much impressed as alarmed. Felix Wenzel!
“I am honored to make your acquaintance, sir,” I said, with a stiff bow. Bowing, I am not ashamed to say, is a thing I have never got the hang of.
Wenzel smiled coldly and stroked the corners of his mouth with a finger and thumb, making a faint rasping sound in the grizzled stubble there. Still he regarded me with his bright, hard gaze.
“Tell us why you did the young woman to death,” he said.
The log in the hearth crackled and hissed, the light of its flames glinting on the naked breasts of a sea nymph leaning out from the base of one of the bronze andirons. For a moment I was so taken aback I could not speak; this was a notion it had not occurred to me even to consider, that I should be accused of the young woman’s murder.
I cleared my throat again.
“You are mistaken, sir,” I said. “I found her dead, where she lay. She had been so for some time, for her limbs were set and stiff.”
Wenzel nodded, though it was no more than a flick of impatience, as if he were dismissing an irrelevant and irritating detail.
“You are lying, of course,” he said.
Now the man seated in the chair before the fire, who had seemed to be lost in his own thoughts and not attending to us at all, suddenly spoke.
“Würzburg,” he said, in a low and weary-sounding growl, lifting his head and turning to glance up at me. “You come from Würzburg, you say?”
“That’s so, sir,” I replied. “Würzburg is where I have resided this ten year, and where I have my work, at the university.” I turned to Wenzel again. “If you doubt it, there are people there—colleagues, professors, men of learning—who will vouch for me.”
“Oh, certainly!” Wenzel exclaimed scornfully. “The wise men of Würzburg woul
d vouch for their grandmother’s goat!”
He turned away and walked off into his shadowed corner.
Ruefully now I recalled my father the Bishop’s letter of attestation—why had I not thought to take it with me when the soldiers were dragging me out of my room at the Blue Elephant? I could have produced it now and proved my identity. Forgetful fool that I was, I had left it under the stinking straw mattress, where, on arriving at the inn, I had tucked it for safety.
The man in the chair was looking up at me still. He had a large head with a high, domed forehead, a prominent nose, and a full beard. His eyes were slack-rimmed and inflamed.
“She was my daughter,” he said, so quietly that I barely caught the words. “The one you found.” He heaved a long, softly falling sigh. “Magdalena, she is called—was called. My daughter.”
I nodded. I had already guessed that this must be that Dr. Kroll whom the fat sentry had spoken of as the dead young woman’s father.
Now Wenzel addressed me again from the shadows.
“And the renegade, Madek,” he asked. “What do you know of him?”
Dr. Kroll, in his chair, gave a strange start, of surprise, it seemed, or even shock, at hearing that name. He stared at Wenzel, then turned back to the fire.
To Wenzel’s question I could offer no reply. I knew of no Madek, papist, renegade, or otherwise. Indeed, I could make nothing of any of this—the murdered woman, these high officials, this baffling, nightmarish interrogation. I felt like a man who, setting out on horseback at evening, had fallen asleep in the saddle, and now had woken to find himself on an unknown road, in deepest night, lost and confused.
Wenzel approached into the firelight again, pacing slowly with his eyes lowered and his hands clasped behind his back, setting one slim foot in front of the other with nice judgment and care, as if he were keeping to a line traced, straight but invisibly, along the floor. His slippers were made of soft calfskin, with silver threading and even a scrap of scarlet ribbon in the lace holes. A vain fellow, then, and not a little in love with himself. Note that well, I told myself: a man’s weaknesses are always useful to know and keep stored away.