Beside him, the Grand Duke was rising to his feet as well. Waller glanced at him, and somehow the Grand Duke’s face seemed rapt upon Waller, as if ready to receive instruction from a master. Confidently, Waller stepped forward and picked up the volume of Alpinian law, raising it in his hand.
“My brothers, we have spoken much already about the special nature of the law in Alpinia—the law that was devised for you by God Himself. But I ask you: did God speak your law in human words? And did God mean to be bound by what words have been printed here?” At this, Waller opened a page and pointed at the Gothic block letters of German text. “Do you mean to tell me that God spoke this law in formal German? Why not in the dialect of Alpinia, as you speak?” At this, Waller turned to the endless bookshelves that ran around the room, containing countless volumes of exegesis and analysis. “And do you also mean to tell me that God was not aware that His simple law, so briefly and so beautifully stated, would still require so many thousands of pages of arguments and interpretations once it was put into practice? Do you mean to tell me that God Himself could be no more precise than this?”
Waller paused and looked around the hall, meeting the eyes of each one of the chief magistrates in turn. They fidgeted in their chairs and looked away, not in boredom but in discomfort. At last, Waller turned to look at the Grand Duke, who nodded encouragingly at him. Waller took another breath.
“Or did God in fact give you a deeper and holier law? A more permanent law? A law of love and compassion. Of flexibility. Of human reason—”
And so fell the words out of Waller’s mouth. He hardly needed to stop and think at all. The argument simply seemed inspired—and for half an hour more, until the sun dropped down to the very edge of the western hills, he allowed his words to paint a picture of the Law of Love and the Law of Sense that ought to have reigned in Alpinia.
By the time that night fell, there was not a dry eye among those of the chief magistrates—nor anyone else in the hall.
The Grand Duke in particular clasped Waller by the hands and stared down at him. For a long while, the Grand Duke said nothing, seemingly too overcome for speech. At last, he said merely: “You were magnificent, my son. Magnificent!”
Then the Grand Duke turned to the magistrates. They rose instantly at his command.
“Don’t delay any longer!” said the Grand Duke. “Render your verdict!”
At that, the chief magistrates picked up the volume of Alpinian law and quickly began turning its pages. One by one, they each pointed at passages in the book, and a low murmur hovered about them for several minutes as they seemed to weigh and discuss what they saw written there. Once they had reached the end of the volume, the senior-most of the chief magistrates looked up at the Grand Duke, shut the book lightly, sighed in visible regret, and shook his head.
The Grand Duke’s eyes flashed. “What!” he demanded. “That cannot be possible!”
He stepped forward himself, snatching up the volume and opening it, his eyes scanning the text inside. Again, a low murmur of discussion floated around the book as the chief magistrates pointed out to the Grand Duke what they had already observed among themselves.
Moments later, the book was closed again, and the Grand Duke stood as if thunderstruck. “We cannot believe it,” he said. “It is almost incredible! After such a performance as that! Such passion! Such inspiration! Our heart was moved—all of our hearts were moved!” The Grand Duke looked around, as if seeking agreement, and all in the hall nodded emphatically. Then the Grand Duke’s shoulders slumped as he reverently laid the book of law aside. “But it is true: not a word has been changed as a result! No, not even a single letter!”
To Waller, after that everything seemed to go black.
There was some commotion in the hall, of which he was scarcely aware. Then there were people around him, helping him to walk up a never-ending flight of stairs, then taking off his clothes and putting him to bed inside layer after layer of thick down blankets—impossible numbers of blankets, endless blankets.
And then all at once there were no people at all, and there continued to be none for a long time.
Later, as if far in the distance, there came a sound like the beginning of a gunshot—but somehow it had no end. Somehow it went on and on interminably, the echoes reverberating inside Waller’s body until he seemed to shiver in sympathy with the same roaring sound himself. It grew louder every moment, closer, more insistent, the pitch twisting and rising into an unearthly scream—
Blackness and loudness surrounding Waller like curtains of tidewater—
But now suddenly rushing out of him again, as all tides must do sooner or later. Leaving him brittle and cold, with a dull ache in each of his withered fingertips and a ringing in his ears.
No, not ringing—
Roaring, as if on a train rushing through a mountain tunnel—
Wailing, as if on a train approaching a trestle, the horn sounding in warning—
“You’re all right now,” said somebody very pleasantly.
A train! Good Heavens, so it was! And not the Alpinian local but a great barreling thing—the Munich express roaring past mountain towns at sixty miles an hour.
“We thought you were having a fit,” said the voice again. It was nobody who Waller recognized. Simply some other traveler. Some good Samaritan who had noticed his pale hands and the blank look on his face. An Englishman by the sound of his accent. “We were afraid you’d gone out for good!”
Memories were flooding back to Waller now. His hands clenched. Oh God, they were empty! Had he left it behind? Had he left it there? Waller jumped up in his seat and looked around the train car wildly.
“You’ve been ill!” protested the friendly voice. “Don’t excite yourself!”
But Waller was already forcing his way into the aisle of the train car. “I left it there,” he said, running toward the back of the train. “I left it there! What a fool I was!”
“What?” asked the friendly voice. “What did you leave?”
“The knife,” shouted Waller. Was the man an idiot? Did he not see? Did he not understand? “How could I have forgotten it? How could I have forgotten—?”
The broken knife! The gamekeeper’s knife!
He had brought it with him to the palace on purpose, but Frau Fenster had gone mad and had attacked the Grand Duke, and he had never had a chance to explain about the fingerprints.
Oh God! She was surely dead now. Shot, at dawn—just as her husband had been. And the same Grand Duke still presiding over the same damnable law!
“What knife?” asked the friendly voice again, receding now into the distance. “What were you going to do with a knife?”
And suddenly Waller was running through the tunnel again, or something like a tunnel, long miles of blackness and loudness, the gunshot sound ringing in his ears again. But then, all at once, he burst through the back of the train car and out into the Grand Duke’s dressing chamber.
He stood for a moment, trying to remember where he had just been. A train? On his way to Munich? No, that was absurd. Of course he had never left Alpinia. Of course, he had never left this room, since making his case to the Grand Duke. Wildly, he looked around, counting off the people he could see around him.
One: the Grand Duke, wearing his false mole and his silk dressing gown facing him! Good! Two: Frau Fenster, standing at his side, six round bullet holes in a tight circle on her breast! Even better!
Three: Waller himself, who now looked down into his own hand and observed that it clutched the knife. Magnificent!
Four: some man with a friendly voice, who never seemed to stop asking him what he was going to do with the knife.
Waller grinned back at him deliriously, unable to keep his voice from cracking with glee. “What am I going to do with this knife? Why, I’m going to do what I ought to have done the first time I had it in my hand.” Already, Frau Fenster’s hands were on the haft as well, and already the blade tore through the air in a ragged thrust.
“I’m going to push, and damn the consequences,” cried Waller to nobody in particular. “Yes, for the good of us all, this time I’m going to push—!”
© Copyright 2020 M. Bennardo
M Bennardo - [BCS297 S01] Page 3
