Wolf on a String

by Benjamin Black

  “Stop, Caterina,” I begged her. “Please, stop!”

  Her only answer was to try to kick me, which she would have succeeded in doing had not her heavy skirts prevented it.

  My arms were aching; I knew I could not fend her off any longer—her strength was frightening. I took a quick sidestep and with a gasp flung her from me. She stumbled, and fell heavily against a small marble table, which toppled over, slowly at first and then much faster, and crashed to the floor, the edge of it shattering and throwing off splinters of white stone.

  I was wiping the sweat from my brow when to my astonishment I saw her come at me again, with another, smaller blade in her hand—where had she got it from, where had it been hidden?

  “Maiale!” she snarled again. “Pig! Fuck-pig!”

  I backed away from her. I was afraid she had lost her reason entirely, and for the first time it seemed that she might manage to kill me. The thought was at once appalling and somehow comical.

  I had misjudged the distance to the bed, and now I barged against the edge of it and I lost my balance and fell sprawling on my back onto the silk counterpane. I still wonder if it was that miscalculation that saved my life. Caterina stepped between my splayed knees and stood looking down at me, her nostrils flared and her brow glistening. She was pointing the blade of the little knife at me, though it was not so little that she could not have pierced my heart or punctured my throat with it. She muttered something in that new, guttural voice, some words in Italian I did not understand, and then, suddenly, she began to laugh.

  “I should cut off your cock,” she said, “it has crowed enough.” She tilted the knife until it was pointing at my crotch. “Maybe I will—what do you say, eh?”

  She laughed again and tossed the knife over her shoulder. Reaching down, she hauled up her skirts and knelt on the bed and planted herself astride my hips.

  “All right,” she whispered, “now do to me what you did to her.” She fumbled down between her legs, trying to unhook the front of my breeches.

  “Merda,” she muttered, “I can’t do it. Why do men truss themselves up like a Christmas goose?”

  I laid my head back on the bed and closed my eyes, taking long, slow breaths. My heart was pounding still, from all that violence, all that fright.

  “Caterina,” I said, “please.”

  “What’s the matter? You can’t do it now? You could do it to quella vacca inglese but not to me?”

  She put her arms on either side of me and, all sweetness, leaned down and kissed me on the lips.

  “Ah, my poor star,” she said, “you do not shine so brightly now.”

  The storm had passed. She sat back on my lap and surveyed me with one eyebrow lifted.

  “Tell me, what was she like?” she asked. “Did she suck your thing? They say Englishwomen love to do that. Tell me.”

  I reached up and set my hands on her hips.

  “Caterina, I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t forgive you, I never will—unless you do now to me what you did to her, only better.”

  She laughed yet again, making a fat little gurgling sound deep in her throat.

  We shed our clothes and lay down together, as so often.

  Our love-making was quickly done with, and afterwards we rested quietly in each other’s arms. She was gentle, almost distracted, all her wild fury spent. I cradled her in the crook of one arm, and she lifted a hand and played with the lovelock dangling by my cheek.

  “Would you really have spilled my blood?” I asked.

  She made a pouting shrug.

  “I may spill it yet.” She tugged hard on the lock of my hair. “You are a brute,” she said. “I let you out of my sight for a day and you mount the first woman to cross your path.”

  “She was lonely,” I said.

  “Oh, sob sob, I am so sad!”

  She pulled my hair again, drawing my face down to hers, and kissed me.

  “How did you know?” I asked.

  “Sir Kaspar, of course.”

  “Ah. So he was your spy, too.”

  “He used to be my lover.”

  I stared at her.

  “That old man?” I said.

  She laughed again.

  “He was not always old. And I was very young. My father tried to marry me to him. Then Rudi caught my eye, or I caught his.”

  I freed my arm from under her and sat up. By shrouding it all in a sort of mental fog, I had more or less come to terms with the thought of her and Rudolf together, but the image of her, in her youth, submitting to Sir Kaspar, that rickety old wreck, with his watery eyes and his bony knees, was intolerable—intolerable and, at the same time, almost, again, a thing to make one laugh.

  There were times, and this was one of them, when I seemed to be seeing this woman from a distance, as if she were a stranger, remote from me and unknowable, like that lewd Venus, with her monstrous child by her side, in the painting in the Nuncio’s dining room. By what madness had I let her lure me into her arms?

  “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  She was lying on her side, propped on an elbow, with a hand under her cheek. She never looked her age so much as when she lay like that, naked, with her breasts and her belly flopping sideways and her shiny, mottled shins crookedly crossed. And yet, despite the confusion of images tumbling through my mind—her doughy flesh, Rudolf’s wet little mouth, Sir Kaspar’s long and bony shanks—I only had to recall how, a few minutes past, she had lain under me in a transport of pleasure, and there would start up a new stirring in my lap.

  “Tell me,” I said, “will His Majesty show himself tomorrow?”

  “For his birthday?” She sniggered. “Of course he will! He loves birthdays, when they are his own. He has two every year, you know, the real one, and tomorrow’s official farce. There will be gifts: princes, legates, barbarian chiefs—all will bring him nice things for him to gloat over. This year he is promised a piece of Christ’s—what do you call this thing?”

  She reached into my lap and pinched the slack spout of my member.

  “The prepuce,” I said, wincing.

  “Yes, that—the Grand Vizier of somewhere or other is bringing it in a golden casket. Certo, the prospect of that will cure Rudi’s melancholy and lure him out of his lair, rubbing his fat little paws.”

  She rose from the bed and went to my table, where there was a gilded bowl filled with cherries. Bringing it back to the bed, she sat down cross-legged beside me.

  “You know that the Emperor’s brother is here?” I said.

  She began to eat the cherries.

  “Matthias the Mighty?”

  “He came a day early.”

  “He likes to surprise; he thinks of it as his battlefield strategy. Matthias—ha. You only have to see the Spanish cut of his beard to know what he is. And those eyes of his, the watchfulness behind the bluster. He is the kind who would spy on his sisters at their toilet.”

  She was gripping a cherry stone between her front teeth, and now she put a hand behind my head and drew my face to hers and kissed me. As she did so, she pressed the stone into my mouth, as once she had passed me the bone button she had torn from my jerkin, to seal our love pact. Then she let go of me, and laughed. I spat the stone in the direction of the fireplace; it fell onto the hearth.

  “And tomorrow will come his cousin Ferdinand,” she said, slipping another cherry into her mouth. “Young Turnip-Head himself. You must—come si dice?—cultivate him.”

  “I?”

  She nodded. Now it was her turn to spit the cherry stone; she had a better aim than I, and the stone plopped into the center of the fire with a tiny hiss.

  “Yes, Ferdinand is our man”—she threw her gaze upwards and made a rapid sign of the cross at her breast—“God help us.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “‘Our’ man? Who are ‘we’?”

  She turned her head and gave me a disbelieving look.

  “Do you really know so little, or do you only pretend?
Have you not talked to the Chamberlain? Has he not explained to you how things are?”

  “The Chamberlain tells me many things,” I said. “Some I believe, some I do not, some I don’t understand.”

  She sent another cherry stone on a long arc into the flames. All at once I had a clear and specific image of her as a little girl in a pink gown, sitting under a cherry tree in a sunny clime, eating fruit and spitting the stones into the dust. For all of us, even for her, there was once a time of innocence.

  “It is very simple,” she said. “Wenzel and Dr. Kroll and their men, they would like to see my poor Rudi forced from the throne and Matthias to be put there in his stead. We—the Chamberlain, I, and you, whether you choose to know it or not—want Rudolf the Mad to grow old and die, and Ferdinand to take his place.” She looked at me and shook her head, smiling ruefully. “You still don’t understand, do you. Matthias would allow the Protestants to thrive and thereby keep the peace—for a soldier, he does not much like fighting—while Ferdinand the Fierce will burn them all.”

  “And is that what ‘we’ wish for?”

  She thought for a moment, gazing upwards again and sucking on a cherry.

  “Yes,” she said, “that is what we want.” She looked at me and chuckled. “Think,” she said softly, tapping my forehead with a fingertip, “think what would become of us—of us—if Matthias were to gain the throne. Ah, mio caro, think of that.” She held the little bowl aloft, and her voice sank to a whisper. “No more cherries.”

  We were silent then. I was thinking, pondering what she had urged me to think about. At last I said:

  “Kroll’s daughter—why did she die?”

  “What?” she said absently. “I don’t understand.”

  “Nor do I.” I sighed. “Jeppe Schenckel, a little while ago, told me I knew nothing. Perhaps he is right. Sometimes it seems to me I don’t know anything at all.”

  She was watching me now. She had put the gilded bowl on the floor beside the bed.

  “Perhaps,” she said, “there are some matters it is better not to know about.”

  I took her chin in my fingers and turned her face sharply and made her look at me.

  “You know,” I said. “You could tell me.”

  And so she could—but would I want to hear?

  “Let go,” she said, “you’re hurting me.” I released her, and she rubbed her chin, pouting. “What things do I know?” She scowled. “That Kroll,” she said. “Che lenone.”

  “What?” I asked. “What does that mean?”

  “Pander,” she said. “Pimp! He pimped his daughter to my Rudi, to be a spy for Wenzel. I’m glad the bitch died.” She shivered. “I am cold,” she said. “Will you warm me?”

  She put her arms around my neck and rubbed herself slowly against me. I looked away.

  “Something,” I said, “or someone—I don’t know—attacked me in the corridor.”

  “Attacked you? When?”

  “Just now, as I was coming here.”

  “And were you hurt?” She leaned forward and gently licked the side of my neck. “Show me your wounds.”

  “It was some kind of—it seemed some kind of animal, but it was not. It was human, a human monster.”

  “Mmm,” she said, “you have a lovely taste, like salt.” Her mouth was at my ear; I felt her warm, cherry-scented breath. “Were you frightened?” she whispered.

  “Yes.”

  “It must have been an evil spirit,” she said, “flying through the castle, searching for blood.” She took the lobe of my ear between her teeth and bit into it softly. “A succubus,” she said, “is that how you say? A succubus, conjured by one of Rudi’s wizards.”

  She reached between my legs again, and leaned her head down and licked me there.

  “Mmm,” she murmured, “I can taste myself, on you. It is salty, too, like the sea.”

  She kissed my mouth. Her tongue was at once soft and grainy, a soft snail coated with sand.

  “Mio caro, maialetio Salato,” she said, pulling back and looking deep into my eyes. “Tell me again about the Englishwoman,” she whispered. “Tell me everything, spare me nothing.”

  25

  It had gone from my mind—is it any wonder, considering the hour I had just spent with Caterina Sardo?—that the Chamberlain had invited me to take supper with him, and now it was too late. Nevertheless, I rose from the bed and began to dress. Glancing towards the door, I saw something agleam on the floor there. I picked it up. It was scrap of paper, tightly folded. I opened it.

  Come to my house.

  Kroll

  I crushed the paper in my fist and hurried into my clothes. As I quitted the chamber, Caterina, still naked on the bed, grabbed at the back of my breeches and did her gurgling laugh.

  “Don’t leave me,” she cried. “Come back, dolce maialino mio.”

  She was still laughing as I stepped through the door. In the corridor I paused, glancing to the right and left, in fear that I might be set upon again by that mysterious and terrifying creature that had flung itself at me earlier. A servant had relit the two lamps that before had been extinguished, and I was glad not to have to step again into that awful patch of darkness.

  Outside, the night was searingly cold, and there were patches of frozen snow on the ground, but the sky was clear and the moon was high and small and flat as a coin. I walked down through Kleinseite. I had the sense, as I went along, of being close to some large and as yet undisclosed formulation; I was like the lookout on a ship at night, sailing steadily past the coast of a continent he could not see. The mind can know things it does not know it knows.

  I crossed the Stone Bridge. Down below, the dark river, on which the ice had thawed, tossed and jostled, showing flecks of foam here and there that were like the silvery manes of a pack of swiftly running horses. The Old Town Square was deserted, the moonlight glinting on its cobbles. I passed the spidery outline of the Týn Kirche and turned into a narrow street, a street I knew. A lantern glowed in the doorway of an alehouse, and I heard the sound of a fiddle within, and someone drunkenly singing. Passing under a balcony, I stopped and looked up. Here was where the whore that day had leaned out and called down to Jeppe the dwarf, and laughed at him, and spat.

  Jeppe Schenckel. He was one of the countries of that unseen continent, one of the things I didn’t know I knew.

  The Doctor’s house was in darkness. At the front door I crouched down and peered in at the keyhole. Far off at the end of the hallway there was a glow, vague and grainy, like a patch of yellowish mist. I was about to turn away when I heard a very faint creak. A breeze must have moved the door slightly, or perhaps, without realizing, I had leaned against it, but now I saw that it was unlocked and open a little way. I hesitated, then put a hand to it, and the door swung back heavily on its hinges. Again I hesitated, listening. I could hear nothing except, from back a little way along the street behind me, the muffled strains of the fiddle and the singer’s wobbly notes.

  I closed the door silently behind me—why had it been left unlocked, so late at night?—and walked softly down the hall, remembering that other time I had been here, invited in by Fricka the old housekeeper, and following the dwarf. There had been so many beginnings, of which that was only one. Was an end coming now? I could feel the slow heavy thudding of my heart.

  My ears caught something then, a far-off sound, so soft it was hardly a sound at all, coming to me from deep within the heart of the house, a sound as of someone quietly keening. I walked on, towards that patch of misty yellow radiance.

  Around a bend in the hallway another door stood halfway open, throwing a fan of light outwards across the floor. I stood again for a moment, listening. The keening sound was coming from inside the room: someone in there was weeping. I stepped forward, as in a dream when one crosses soundlessly over a threshold from world to world.

  It was the room Jeppe Schenckel had led me to that day, where I had waited all unknowing for the arrival of the Emperor. A fire was blazi
ng in the hearth, and in front of it was set an armchair, and there the Doctor was seated, just as I had seen him for the first time, the night at the castle, with Wenzel off in the shadows. He was reclining exactly as he had reclined then, his chin on his chest and one arm lolling down at the side of the chair.

  Fricka, the old servant, was squatting at his feet, her arms wrapped tightly round herself, rocking slowly back and forth and moaning softly. Hearing my step, she turned up to me a pinched gray grieving face.

  The front of the Doctor’s jerkin was soaked with a deep ruby stain. For a moment I thought he must have spilled a mug of wine on himself. Then I saw the knife wound in the side of his neck.

  At once I thought of the two of us in the cathedral, when we had walked there from Golden Lane, and Kroll had stood looking up at the crucifix above the high altar, speaking of blood and of sacrifice.

  I unfolded the paper I had found in my chamber and showed it to the old woman.

  “Is this the Doctor’s hand?” I asked. She shook her head. “Did you write it, then?” This time she did not bother to respond, but turned her face away.

  I have no memory of leaving the house. One moment I was in that room, seeing and not seeing the slaughtered man, and speaking to the old woman crouched on the floor. The next I was in the street, under a sky teeming with stars, hearing again that ragged music from the alehouse. The moon was higher, rounder, larger. I stood gazing at it, wondering how it could change its size. It is an illusion, I thought, caused by the air itself; the air must be a kind of lens, a great soft glassy lens. The notion pleased me.

  I became aware then of a commotion nearby, of voices raised and the clank of armor and the tramp of hurrying men.

  “There he is!” a voice called out. “There, see! Stop him! Stop, assassin!”

  I ran. I ran for a long time. A city is endless: street gives onto street, square onto square; there are houses, windows, doorways, all different and all alike. One might run forever. At first the soldiers followed me, but I outdistanced them; men-at-arms are not clad for fleetness.

  I came to the Church of St. Peter, and leaned into the shadow of the doorway, gasping, each breath a blast of fire in my throat.