M Bennardo - [BCS297 S01]

by The Ordeal (html)

  The Ordeal

  By M. Bennardo

  For the tenth time in only twenty minutes, Waller trod heavily on his own toes to avoid crashing into the Grand Duke, who had halted abruptly in one of the one great halls of his palace. In this case, the sight that the Grand Duke now invited Waller to view appeared to be nothing more than a woman working a spinning wheel in intense concentration. And yet, the Grand Duke beamed and rubbed his hands together in evident satisfaction, as if he were about to show off some unheard-of wonder.

  “Herr Waller,” the Grand Duke said proudly, “as a new visitor to our land, we trust that you have not yet had any opportunity of observing any of our nation’s craftspeople spinning the fine thread for which they are so well-known, even in America.”

  Waller, who had indeed arrived only that day, indulged the Grand Duke by turning his attention to the woman at the wheel. Alpinia was a small country, not much larger in area that the city of Brooklyn, New York, and Waller supposed that he must expect its wonders to be equally modest. He regarded the woman at the spinning wheel politely for a few moments. She was small and slight, seemingly a little past middle-age, and was simply dressed in the national costume of the duchy. Waller had no special interest in yarn-making, so he offered a few complimentary phrases to the Grand Duke as he waited for the tour to continue.

  But the Grand Duke did not seem disposed to move on. “It perhaps does not look like much to you, Herr Waller, but thread-making takes a great deal of skill. Much of the challenge is in the spinning of the wheel, which she operates by foot with a treadle.”

  At this, the Grand Duke actually squatted on the floor next to the woman, which obliged Waller to do the same.

  “See how she presses the treadle regularly with her foot. The circle of the wheel must be absolutely perfect to keep the drive band turning at a constant rate. Too fast, and the spindle may break under the strain. Too slow, and the wool will snarl with knots instead of twisting cleanly into thread.”

  It was clear even to Waller from the behavior of the Grand Duke, and from the small crowd that stood in the hall observing the woman, that this was some extraordinary exhibition of craftsmanship. Dutifully, he observed in turn the woman’s beating foot, the whirring flight of the wheel, and the quick movements of her hands. “This splendid woman certainly must be one of your Royal Highness’s most skilled spinners.”

  For it did seem that the woman kept the wheel flying at a very great rate, one hand deftly feeding the spindle with perfectly twisted thread while the other continuously caught up handfuls of new wool from a bag on the floor, teasing the fibers out then pressing them into the twisting strand. The handfuls of wool seemingly melted effortlessly into yarn, and the yarn likewise collapsed down into the finest gauge of thread, as if by magic.

  The Grand Duke puffed his chest in evident delight, though his voice remained hushed and serious when he spoke. “Frau Fenster is the finest spinner in all of Alpinia.”

  “In that case, I offer my most genuine congratulations to her,” answered Waller. “But your Royal Highness may forgive me if I ask whether it is usual for her to ply her craft in the palace?”

  The Grand Duke’s eyes grew wide. “Good heavens! Forgive me, Herr Waller! As a visitor, of course you do not understand! Your father had always expressed an interest in seeing our Alpinian legal system at work—so different from the English common law with which you are familiar. This scene before you could in some ways be equated to what you would call a court of appeals. For Frau Fenster is here, in the palace, because she is at this moment undergoing a trial by ordeal.”

  Waller looked at the woman with new eyes. A trial by ordeal! This woman?

  But yes—now that he knew what to look for, he could detect an unmistakable recklessness in her movements. The trembling hand, straining against cramps! The swaying body, fighting to stay upright! It was as if the woman were a steam engine being run at the limits of its tolerances, the weak components rattling and protesting under the building pressure.

  And her face! Her jaw was firmly shut, her teeth grinding as she worked. And her eyes! Under her jumping eyebrows, did they not glow with a look of feverish desperation?

  But all of that was nothing to what Waller now saw when he examined her fingertips—where the swift flight of the fine thread had lacerated and abraded her skin so that blood welled to the surface, staining the thread a bright scarlet as it whipped through her hands and wound furiously around the spindle.

  “The ordeal set before Frau Fenster,” continued the Grand Duke, “is to spin and ply six hundred ells of fine gauge thread before the sun sets.”

  “But what on earth was her offense?” asked Waller.

  Waller was aware that his voice now carried an edge—but well might it! His father had told him of Alpinia’s trials by ordeal, but he had thought they must have certainly disappeared with so many other superstitious customs in so many other places at the dawning of the rational twentieth century. Finding himself now abruptly confronted with the reality of the practice, he could not help but be horrified by the scene. Forcing this woman to undergo an ordeal, with guilt or innocence depending on the outcome! It was a brutal test of the stamina of her body and mind, with no appeal to evidence or logic. Waller looked to the Grand Duke. Could he not see how her fingers bled? Could he not see the fear in her eyes lest she make a fatal mistake? The practice was barbaric!

  “But Frau Fenster is accused of nothing,” answered the Grand Duke serenely. “It would be too cruel for the accused to undergo the ordeal, in addition to their punishment. Rather it is this woman’s husband, Herr Fenster, who stands accused of poaching on royal game lands.

  “The facts of the matter are very simple, really. Herr and Frau Fenster live on the edge of the royal forest. He has a permit to cut shingles there, while his wife operates her spinning wheel inside their house. Sadly, the last accounting of the deer in the forest found several inexplicably missing, despite the mild winter. The gamekeeper testified that he had seen Herr Fenster carrying a rifle into the forest on occasion— As we have said, it is all very simple.”

  “But if it is so simple, then what is the point of the ordeal? Surely an investigation would quickly establish whether there was sufficient evidence to convict the man.”

  The Grand Duke frowned. “Your way is not ours. Indeed, while at school in America, we studied your system of law extensively. To our mind, it is... not satisfactory. Evidence can be falsified or be interpreted incorrectly, and even testimony is often not reliable. The sorts of investigations that you suggest all too often introduce more doubt than they resolve.” Here, the Grand Duke shifted his weight and cleared his throat, then smiled indulgently. “But on the other hand, the local magistrate did not consider that Herr Fenster’s case was so clear-cut that he should be convicted based solely on the gamekeeper’s observations. You may think it simple-minded or backward, but it is for that reason that we put our trust in God: the only true Witness and the only unerring Judge.”

  “Six hundred ells—is that very much?”

  “Oh yes, indeed,” answered the Grand Duke. “A skilled spinner would ordinarily produce between two hundred and three hundred ells of fine thread each day, depending upon the quality of the wool.”

  “Your Royal Highness asks for twice as much!” Waller was staggered. “Can there be any hope for this woman at all? Is such a task even possible?”

  The Grand Duke beamed. “That is precisely the point! As with every properly designed ordeal, her only real hope lies in the intervention of God.” For a moment, the Grand Duke’s attention shifted to Frau Fenster, and he regarded her pensively. “For we know that God is loving. And what truly loving God could endure the injustice of se
eing an innocent man executed? That is why we can be sure that if Herr Fenster is in fact innocent, God will grant to Frau Fenster the strength and resolve she needs to exceed her normal mortal abilities and complete even this otherwise impossible task.”

  Waller’s head reeled. For a moment he was speechless, but then his eye was caught by the golden flash of the setting sun through a window. “But your Royal Highness—allow me to observe that the day is almost over! If this woman began her spinning at sunrise, then she has been at her task for eight hours already. Surely it must be clear by now whether she will be successful or not.”

  At this, the Grand Duke consulted in the Alpinian dialect with a uniformed official in the crowd. After a moment, he turned back to Waller with an excited glow in his eyes. “It is a very close thing, but it seems that Frau Fenster may indeed complete the ordeal. If she continues without error at the same rate that she has been working all day, then God will have proved through her the innocence of her husband!”

  But as fate would have it, it was at just that moment when the woman’s foot suddenly faltered, missing the treadle of the spinning wheel altogether. Though she hastened to correct her error, it was too late. The spinning of the wheel slackened even as Waller watched in chilled horror—the length of thread that Frau Fenster had been twisting suddenly leaping into a terrible snarl, bulging with an accumulation of ugly knots.

  At once, Frau Fenster stopped her wheel and began unwinding the tangled length that was wrapped around the spindle. She worked quickly and silently, but her lacerated fingers slipped against the tiny knots. The snarled thread soon was slick with her blood.

  Meanwhile, the sun slipped lower, and the cold shadows in the hall grew longer.

  For one instant only, a look of pure agony was evident on Frau Fenster’s face and in her pose. Her hands clenched at her temples and a sobbing cry escaping from her lips. But just as quickly, her hands were back at the knots, fighting to untangle them.

  The Grand Duke tugged gently at Waller’s sleeve. “Come,” he said. “It is finished. There is no need for us to watch the end.”

  “But there is half an hour left in the day!” protested Waller. “She might yet recover.”

  The Grand Duke only shook his head. “Alas, no. The matter was too close. That mistake has sealed her husband’s fate.”

  “But surely your Royal Highness has the power to pardon the man!”

  “To what end? Nothing we can do here on Earth can erase the guilt of the man in the eyes of God. And if we shirk our godly duty, does God not have it in His power to choose another instrument?”

  And with that, they moved out of the hall and into another part of the palace. But though they no longer talked of the ordeal or the fate of the prisoner, the matter was not so easily dropped from Waller’s mind.

  Waller had not originally intended to visit Alpinia during his tour of Europe. Instead, like any young man fascinated by the culture and courtliness of the continent, his itinerary had been filled instead with the sights of Paris, Vienna, Budapest, Berlin, St Petersburg, and other such grand old metropolises.

  When his father had first suggested the idea of visiting Alpinia, young Waller had gone immediately to the study and pulled down the first volume of the encyclopedia from the bookcase. Opening the volume to the article on Alpinia, he had dutifully read the entire entry from start to finish. It had not taken very long.

  Afterward, he had come away with an impression of Alpinia as some sort of mountain-climbing, sheep-rearing, thread-spinning, church-going principality. Rustic and picturesque, indeed—! But what of it? Waller had already seen the American Rockies.

  But the elder Waller had a reputation as one of the finest jurists in New York, and before long he began to apply his persuasive skills to the problem of changing his son’s first impression.

  “In Paris or St Petersburg,” argued the elder Waller, “you will find yourself no more than an anonymous flyspeck. A nobody! Merely another foreign tourist stumbling through the Louvre, sounding out the French names in your guidebook, buffeted by the busy locals, an object of contempt and scorn.” Here, the old judge had grinned and placed a reassuring hand on his son’s knee. “But in Alpinia! With my letter of introduction, you will be the guest of the Grand Duke himself! He was educated in America, you know, and the two of us were great friends at university. Ah, Franz! It has been years! You must go—and you must find out for me what Alpinia is really like.”

  In the end, young Waller had reluctantly penciled in a detour into Alpinia between his visits to Geneva and Munich, while his father wrote a letter to his old friend, the Grand Duke. As Waller studied his new schedule, he reflected that this change would likely mean abbreviating his tour of Munich’s Marienplatz and famous royal avenues—but he supposed that every dutiful son must now and then indulge his father.

  The Grand Duke’s reply to the elder Waller’s letter, however, did not allow for merely a day or two in the duchy. Instead, Waller was soon to learn that the Grand Duke exerted a kind of iron persuasion of his own (quite different from his father’s way, but no less effective), and his letters made it clear that it was simply to be understood (as only an absolute monarch can make one understand) that Waller would arrive on the train from Geneva on such-and-such date and must not think of leaving on the Munich express until the grand banquet in honor of so-and-so dignitaries had concluded a week later.

  Returning rather doubtfully to the encyclopedia, Waller re-read the article on Alpinia with a slowly sinking heart. To his initial impression, he was able to add the fact that Alpinia’s population of six thousand souls was divided almost evenly between a single mostly modern town in the bowl of a beautiful Alpine valley and a scattering of a half-dozen little villages throughout the nearby mountains and forests. In addition, he learned that the traditional cuisine of the duchy consisted largely of mutton, leeks, turnips, wild mushrooms, hard dark breads, and soft sheep’s milk cheeses. The shops closed at three in the afternoon every day, and public houses closed at eight in the evening. The only exceptions were Wednesdays and Sundays, when the shops and public houses were closed all day, and the churches were open instead.

  Though Waller never allowed any complaint or protest to escape his lips, it would be fair to say that he had crossed the frontier from Switzerland into Alpinia in quite a gloomy mood. He expected to run out of English books to read before the week was half over, and supposed he would have to see about buying a new walking stick if he was to have any hope of amusing himself.

  But then, on his very first day in the capital, he had been witness to the trial by ordeal. And all at once, he no longer had any thought for novels or alpine exercise.

  Indeed, despite the downy comfort of the bed that the Grand Duke had provided him, Waller scarcely slept a wink that first night. Every time he closed his eyes, the image of Frau Fenster rose up in his mind—her hands darting quickly, her foot beating time on the treadle, and always the wheel ever spinning and spinning and spinning—

  (Perhaps it was still spinning yet, Waller’s sleep-deprived brain had mused more than once. Nonsense, he had quickly thought each time in reply. The ordeal ended at sundown!)

  During times of more intense wakefulness, he paged through the slim volume of Alpinian law that he had asked to borrow from the Grand Duke’s library. Though it was a very brief book, containing the entire law of the country in only one hundred pages, the sharp and heavy characters of the German type strained his eyes, just as the dense legal phrasing clouded his mind, and at last he was forced to put the book aside as utterly unreadable.

  Finally, dawn found Waller staring moodily out of the window at the palace grounds, wondering if it could really be true that somewhere in the labyrinthine courtyards below him there was actually a man about to be executed for a charge that (according to the legal customs of any modern nation) had not remotely been proved against him—

  But the sounding of a distant volley of shots just as the sun rose above the valley’s s
tony walls put any such doubts to rest.

  Waller’s mind was no easier later in the day when he boarded the Alpinian local train that connected the capital with the duchy’s hamlets. Sitting on the bench in the otherwise empty carriage, waiting for the train to depart, he considered how strange this place was that wrapped layers of apparent modernity around a core of beliefs that permitted such scenes of quiet barbarism to occur!

  The sense of unreality was only heightened when, a moment before the whistle blew, Frau Fenster mounted the stairs of Waller’s carriage and sat down facing him on the bench on the opposite side.

  No sooner had Frau Fenster sat down than the train began to puff slowly out of the station and under the rim of the valley wall. The carriage windows immediately revealed the kind of dramatic view common in Alpinia—vistas of sheer grey rock topped by endless expanses of shining white snow, with the faint blue lines that indicated ancient glaciers peeking out from under the newer snow. But Waller had no eyes for the scenery. Instead, he could only stare in gradually mounting horror at the woman on the other side of the carriage.

  Frau Fenster was neatly dressed, and her fingertips had been covered over with a profusion of bright white plasters. But her face was haggard and her expression was dazed, as if she had continued straight on with her task and had worked all through the night, neither stopping nor sleeping in the hours since Waller had seen her last.

  Then again—hadn’t she? After all, her husband had been executed that very morning! Was not grief a kind of work and ordeal of its own? And likewise self-reproach? And shame—?

  Indeed, it was with a start that Waller realized that it was more than likely that a long pinewood box had also been loaded into the train at the station, into the luggage car at the back, just before Frau Fenster had taken her seat—

  Neither did Frau Fenster look out the window during the slow hour-long train journey. In fact, she looked at very little, simply staring into the middle distance in front of her. Waller was sure that she saw neither the world outside the window, nor himself, nor even the interior of the carriage. Whatever it was that she looked at was entirely within her own mind.