I ran my tongue over my lips, which had gone dry as paper.
“If,” I said, hesitantly, “if it is His Majesty’s wish, then of course I can not but stay.”
“Good!” Lang cried, with a fierce, false smile and giving his head a great upwards toss. “Good, good, good.”
Another silence followed. We remained as we were, in a kind of tableau, I seated and the Chamberlain leaning over me with a sort of devilish, exalted smile, his eyebrows arched. Could I really believe that the Emperor had expressed the wish that I should stay in Prague, on the strength merely of a wisp of a dream? And what of the murdered young woman, with whose death the Chamberlain seemed so little concerned?
I heard a sound then: it was distinctly the sound of a door opening and softly closing.
I twisted about on the chair and stared at the tapestry behind me. It was not, I realized, hanging against a wall, as I had thought, but was suspended from what seemed the middle of the ceiling. It was there to act as a curtain, separating off another part of the room and making a secret chamber of it, where someone, some third person, had been in hiding all this time, hiding and listening.
The Chamberlain, having heard the sound too, puffed out his cheeks and blew through comically flapping lips a long sigh of wearied relief. He was all at once a different man; he had stepped down from the stage.
“Well well, Herr Doktor,” he said, with a new expression now, one of glinting, spiteful disdain. “I hope you are gratified, to have gained so easily”—he gestured towards the tapestry—“the Emperor’s ear.”
5
And so, amid such drama, tumult, and outlandish pantomime, began my sojourn in the Capital of Magic. Sometimes I wonder if when I was there I was among human beings at all, or if what I took for men were only their simulacra, a host of speaking and breathing automata, conjured up at his command by Rudolf’s sorcerers, fantastically humanized versions of the manikins and marionettes that danced and twitched in darkened booths on every street corner at festivals and on market days, in that city of masks and make-believe. When I look back on those days, it seems to me I might have imagined it all. Yet how readily at the time I took for granted my great good fortune, saying to myself that fate had surely smiled on me. Had not the very thing I had aimed for in coming to Prague—the favor of the Emperor Rudolf and an entry into his court—had it not been granted to me, overnight, in the winking, as it might be, of His Majesty’s Chamberlain’s eye? True, this wonderful stroke of good fortune had come about not through any action on my own part, but solely by the chance of my name being what it was. But what is chance, I ask, and what do we know of how the heavens may direct our lives?
In Rudolf’s Prague I was to encounter all manner of signs and portents of impending wonders. The first and not the least of these, I considered, was the fact that I was to live in, of all places, Golden Lane.
Yes, Golden Lane! It was there, at the end of that baffling inquisition played out by Chamberlain Lang, that I found myself once more, in daylight this time, being conducted to a little house, one of a row, with two square windows on either side of a narrow front door. Here it was that at the Chamberlain’s direction I was to be lodged. A walk of but ten paces along the lane would bring me to the spot where the night before I had stumbled on the corpse of Magdalena Kroll. Was I to believe it was mere happenstance that had brought me back here, to the very place where all these remarkable happenings had their beginning, and that I shouldn’t take it for an omen, and a favorable one, at that?
But for all that my fortunes had been so magically reversed, I was bewildered still. My mind was a compass: on one side of the dial there was Felix Wenzel, on the other Chamberlain Lang, though the needle for all its fluttering would point in one direction only, towards the phantom presence hiding in its little closed-off chamber behind that deceptive tapestry, in front of which I had that momentous morning so innocently and all unknowingly sat.
Could it really be, I asked myself again, that His Majesty had dreamed of me, or of some prevision of me, as Lang assured me he had, and taken the dream for a portent of good fortune? It seemed too fanciful, even for one so famously fanciful as the Emperor Rudolf. But maybe it was true: after all, what spark of light from the celestial sphere might not have struck through a window chink and lit upon the royal brow and ignited there the notion of the imminent coming of a Christ-sent star? And who was to say that I, Christian Stern, was not indeed the starry messenger whom Rudolf had foreseen in his sleep? I have always considered the appearance of things to be no more than a gauzy veil behind which a truer reality is covertly and marvelously at work.
My house in Golden Lane was a house in name only, consisting as it did of a single, not very large, low-sized room, with a sleeping couch in one corner, two chairs, a tiled stove and a fireplace, and a table to work at. There was a cramped scullery off to one side, and an alcove with a hanging piece of unbleached canvas, behind which stood a wood-framed cackstool with a china pot set into the seat of it. The place was all frontage, since it was backed up against the ramparts of the castle. With the walls being whitewashed, or better say graywashed, and with those windows like eye sockets and the door for a mouth, I felt as if I had been set down inside a hollowed-out death’s-head.
But of course I did not mind any of this—what matter the conditions of my habitation?—for I was on fire with excitement and eager anticipation. Such things I would do here, of whatever sort they might be, such marvels I would achieve, in this bone-colored cell! For surely it was true—you see how quickly my doubts were quelled?—surely I was indeed the Emperor’s chosen one, the brightest star shining in the imperial firmament. So what if Rudolf was half-cracked and given to the wildest delusions? Let him be as mad as the man in the moon, for all I cared.
Prague! Yes, I was in Prague, and the Holy Roman Emperor himself had prophesied my coming.
The cat was another portent. One day I opened my door and he walked in, swiping his flank against my leg in a cursory caress. He was a big black tom with a malignant green gaze. He had a deep scar on his forehead, and the tip of his tail was missing. I could see by the look of him, as he nosed about the room in that fastidious way cats have, that he meant to stay. I called him Plato. He was a good mouser, but lazy. He liked nothing better than to see me at work and would crouch on the corner of my desk with his paws tucked in, purring like a soft engine, studying me intently as I labored over my books.
The chief agitation I was prey to, now that the first frights and fanfares were past, was a hardly governable impatience. Once already I had been within touching distance of the Emperor—twice, if I were to believe that it was the face of Rudolf himself, and not a fantastical vision of him, that I had seen looming over me as I lay in a drugged stupor in that prison cell. And I had no doubt at all that it was indeed Rudolf who had been listening behind the tapestry, as Philipp Lang had given me to understand at the end of his extravagant performance. The inevitable consequence of all this, I was certain, could be nothing other than an imminent, direct audience with His Imperial Majesty.
This expected encounter I rehearsed in my mind, over and over, throughout those first hours, there in my unexpectedly acquired quarters, that sudden place of shelter and calm, in Golden Lane. Yet when it came, that meeting face to face with the Emperor, the circumstances were such that I could not have anticipated.
I had paid the potboy to cart my things from the Blue Elephant, and since I was famished now, with nothing in my belly save the painfully persistent memory of that moldy lump of bread I had consumed in my jail cell in the dawn hours, I took out my purse and gave him another coin from my father the Bishop’s bounty and sent him back to the inn to fetch something hot for me to eat.
I paced and paced. How hard it is, to think calmly of kings!
Presently the boy returned, bringing a dish of mutton stew covered with a muslin cloth, along with a flask of wine. He also brought a message from the innkeeper, saying that since I had not paid for my room
, and since I had been the object and cause of a violent disturbance in the night that had led the other guests to complain, he would keep my horse in lieu of recompense. I was not much upset by this, for it would save me the cost of livery, and the poor brute was half-dead anyway.
For the boy’s final task before he left I had him light the stove, or attempt to light it, since it was no easy thing, the tinder being damp and the flint resistant. In the end, after two or three failed attempts, he succeeded in getting a halfhearted flame going, but he had no sooner departed, jingling my money in his pocket and mounted on that old forfeited jade of mine, than it sputtered out, leaving me to shiver in the cold again.
I sat down at the table to eat, taking a chair in front of one of the two low windows that gave onto the lane. The stew had cooled by now, and the meat, as I soon discovered, was rancid. I poured out a mug of the purple wine, and so fuddled and weary was I that the first few mouthfuls of the drink made me feel thoroughly light-headed.
The muslin napkin that the bowl had been covered with, a dainty thing, I took as a subtle token of remembrance from the innkeeper’s wife. Thinking of her and her come-hither eye, and of her unspoken offer which I had rashly spurned, I could not prevent myself from falling into a melancholy reverie.
Again there came to my mind, try as I would to fend it off, the image of the fat sentry, strung up on the gibbet like a boar’s carcass in a sack.
What did the fellow do, to merit summary execution? Was it only that he had seen the dead young woman in the snow—had the mere fact of having been a witness to her slaughtered state been enough to get him hanged? If so, there was no doubt I would have shared the gallows with him, had it not been for the Emperor’s prophetic dream.
That my neck had been saved by a nighttime fantasy was, I acknowledged, either miracle or madness, and most likely the latter. Whichever it was, I had no reason to think the royal dreamer might not come to his senses at any moment and hang me, too, if for no other reason than that of my being an impostor. The wine forced me to look at my circumstances without seeking to delude myself: pretend though I might, I knew, in the depths of my heart, that I was no Christ-sent star.
These gloomy ruminations, along with the bad mutton, robbed me of my appetite, and I pushed the dish of stew away uneaten. Globules of congealing fat floated on the surface of the tepid gravy, and by a tenuous association they brought back to me another memory, of Chamberlain Lang touching his fingertip to the sickly-smelling paste inside Magdalena Kroll’s gold medallion and making a little indentation there, a little smooth hollow, like a baby’s navel. Somehow the tiny gesture seemed to me another portent, a portent not of good fortune this time but, on the contrary, of some unforeseeable, dire eventuality.
At that moment I looked to the window and with a jolt saw there a man’s large, pale face looming in the glass, no more than an arm’s length away from me. He was regarding me with an intent and candid gaze. He had a queer expression, skeptical, it might be, or outright disdainful, although he was smiling, his pale lips pursed and twisted up at one side. He wore a conical black hat with a broad, circular brim.
I couldn’t understand how it was that we were at eye level, this fellow and I, since I was sitting down, and the window was low. Was he kneeling on the cobbles or crouching by the window ledge in some awkward fashion, in order to have a better view of me and what I was about?
In a flurry of indignation I jumped up and crossed quickly to the door. I stepped into the lane, thinking to challenge the brazen fellow and send him off about his business with a cuff and a kick.
He turned and greeted me quite calmly, with a show of courtly grace, sweeping off his elaborate black hat and making a low bow.
“Good day to you, sir,” he said.
He was a dwarf.
I returned his greeting uncertainly, looking him up and down. He bore my scrutiny in a tolerant and even prideful manner, with that same cold, twisted-up smile.
“I am sent by His Majesty,” he said.
“Oh,” I said. “I see.”
He was a singular creature indeed, and an unlikely imperial emissary. From crown to waist he looked a normal man—in fact, he was impressively burly, with broad shoulders and a fine stout chest—but below that he was all contorted and gnarled, with stunted legs, thick-thighed above and tapered below, like the nether parts of a mandrake root. He had a well-shaped head, and his shiny black hair was drawn smoothly back over his skull, like a helmet molded out of pitch. His eyes were as green as glass.
We stood regarding each other, I at the door and he still by the window. Flakes of snow fluttered about us, falling and rising like mayflies. The dwarf’s look had turned to one of cold amusement and faint but unconcealed contempt; it was as if it were not he but the world that was deformed.
“It is cold, sir, is it not?” he said pointedly.
“Forgive me,” I stammered hastily. “Please, step inside.”
“Why, thank you,” he said with sarcasm, and bowed again, holding his hat aside in one hand and making with the fingers of his other that elaborate twirling and tumbling gesture from chin to breast that courtiers do. The whole performance had about it, to my eye, a deliberate show of mockery.
He came forward, I stood aside, and he stepped past me. I would say he swaggered, except that his way of walking was so awkward, and so painful to behold, as he lurched and swayed, leaning heavily on an ebony cane with a gold knob for a handle.
His name, he announced, was Jeppe Schenckel.
Once we were inside, and I had shut the door on the swirling snow, he paused for a moment to look about, making no attempt to hide his curiosity. He seemed at once to take note of everything, or rather, I should say, of how little of everything there was, for the only indication that I was in residence was an untidy mound of my things, clothes and books and the like, where the potboy had deposited them unceremoniously on the low bed.
“I must say,” Jeppe Schenckel remarked with a sniff, “it is not much warmer in here than it was outside.”
I told him how the stove had been lit but then had gone out, and to my amazement he put down his hat and went at once to the hearth. He squatted and busied himself with flint and steel, and in a matter of moments he had the flames going again, vigorously this time.
Having been at first disconcerted by the fellow’s lordly manner, I watched him now in thorough bemusement as he squatted there at the stove on his haunches. I would not despise or mock a man for his deformities—after all, even the most comely of mortals is far short of godlike—but as I contemplated this malformed creature I could not but marvel at mankind’s inexhaustible variousness. The Gnostics held that the world was created by a demiurge, a sort of imp whose mischievous delight it is to twist men’s destinies out of true, and often I find myself thinking that they were right.
Satisfied that the tinder had taken, the dwarf laid a log of a limewood on the flames. He shut the door of the stove and, brushing motes of ash from his hands, came to the table and clambered onto a chair, cocking one stubby leg over the other. I said that I regretted having nothing to offer him—the stew by now had grown a cold gray skin all over its surface—and when I held up the flask he shook his head, saying with a prim frown that he did not drink wine and never had.
He sat there before me, displaying a marked daintiness of manner and elegance of gesture, despite his ill-shaped form. He was very pale, with skin of a waxen transparency, against which his eyebrows darkly gleamed. He was dressed in costly fashion, in a suit of black velvet, with silvery lace at wrists and throat. In the crepuscular light of the already dimmening afternoon, I felt myself at once drawn to and repelled by this finical and strangely self-assured, misshapen manling.
Could it really be that he had been sent by the Emperor? And if he had been, what was his mission? I longed to ask for enlightenment, but the calm collectedness with which he comported himself prevented me.
Snowflakes were crowding grayly against the windowpanes. I filled my
mug again from the flask, which to my vague surprise I noticed was almost empty. I was weary still after the turbulence of the night, and the wine was putting me half in a daze, and before I knew it I had launched again, with a thick tongue this time and much effortful blinking, upon the rambling story of myself and my origins and all my lofty achievements.
Why I was so ready to repeat it all I don’t know. Perhaps I wished to affirm something of myself against the puzzles and uncertainties I had been stumbling among since my arrival in the city; or, more likely, I was just nervous. The dwarf took it all in with quick little nods and a faintly jaded, faintly impatient smile, as if none of it were new to him. That was his way, as I would discover: it pleased him, in the intensity of his defiant vanity, to give the impression that no one could tell him anything he did not know already, that everything he heard was merely a confirmation of facts he had already in his possession, and which anyway he considered of little interest or value, to him, at least.
Afterwards, when I sobered up and came to myself again, I bitterly regretted having indulged in so much wine-tainted tattle and braggadocio. I had the feeling that I had parted with something I would have been well advised to safeguard and withhold—not merely the legend of my life so far, which was no great marvel, but, more importantly, some part of my essential self. And Jeppe Schenckel—perched there before me, sardonic and majestically at ease, with his big hands folded on the knob of his cane—had plucked it up deftly and stowed it away, neatly folded, in an inner recess of his elegant velvet jerkin.
“So,” he said now, “you are the new star over Prague.”
I was shocked by such a blunt and knowing reference to the Emperor’s dream of my coming. Perhaps the fellow had not been sent by Rudolf at all; perhaps he was an agent of Chamberlain Lang’s, or, worse, of Felix Wenzel’s, set to spy on me and report back to whichever of the two was his master? Or perhaps he was the agent of some other persons unknown, whom I had not encountered yet but who knew of me and were eager to know more. It seemed to me that I was in a hall of mirrors, turning this way and that and seeing myself from unexpected, unlooked-for, and alarming angles.
Wolf on a String Page 5
