Authors: Steven Millhauser
A
CHANGE OF HEART.
The margrave was tortured on two separate occasions, on the second of which the bones of both arms and legs were broken, but he did not confess his crime, and at length he was carried unconscious down to the dungeon and flung onto a bed of straw. Some members of the court were surprised by the leniency of the punishment, for committing adultery with the wife of a prince was considered an act of treachery and was punishable by emasculation, followed by drawing and quartering, but others saw in the margrave’s fate a far worse punishment than death: a lingering lifetime of lying in darkness, sustained only by sufficient nourishment to keep one sensible
of one’s misery, while disease and madness gradually destroyed the body and the soul. The dwarf, who had advised death by beheading, a punishment reserved for rapists and sodomites, saw in the sentence a secret indecisiveness: the Prince did not entirely believe the confession of the Princess. Or, to put it more precisely, the Prince believed the confession of the Princess, but his belief had at its center a germ of doubt, which spread outward through his belief and infected it in every part with a suspicion of itself. The Princess, for her part, soon recovered from her fever, and resumed her former habits; only, there was a marked reserve about her, and sometimes she would break off in the middle of a sentence and grow silent, and seem to gaze inward. She no longer summoned the dwarf, and indeed appeared to avoid his company; but Scarbo well understood the necessity for his banishment, for had he not caused her to fall beneath her high estimate of herself? The Prince, uneasily reconciled with his wife, sensed in her an inner distance that he could not overcome; to his surprise, he discovered that he did not always wish to overcome it. To the extent that he believed her confession, he felt a cold revulsion that she had lain with the margrave, even at his own urging; to the extent that he disbelieved her confession, he blamed her for condemning the margrave to a dungeon death. Meanwhile the Princess withdrew deeper and deeper into her inner castle, where she brooded over the events that had estranged her from the Prince, and made her a stranger even to herself. And as the days passed, a change came over her. For she saw, with ever-increasing clearness, in the long nights when she no longer slept, that the Prince had wronged her, by sending her to the bed of the margrave; and she saw, with equal clearness, that she had horribly wronged the margrave, by her foul lies. Then in the dark the Princess vowed to set right the wrong she had done him. And she who had lain coldly in the bed of the margrave, brooding over the displeasure of the Prince, now looked at the Prince strangely, as at someone she had known
long ago; and lying coldly in the bed of the Prince, or lying alone in her private bedchamber high in her tower, she thought of the margrave, in the bowels of the earth, deep down.
W
IVES.
No burgher or artisan can manage the complex affairs of his household without the aid of his capable wife. The wives of our town are practical and industrious; on the way to market in the morning they walk purposefully, with powerful strides. It is true that our husbands, while admiring their wives, expect them to be obedient. A wife who disobeys her husband will be promptly chastised; if she provokes him by continued disobedience, he has the right to strike her with his fist. Once, when a young bride of high beauty and strong temperament argued with her patrician husband in the presence of dinner guests, he rose from the table and in full view of the company struck her in the face, breaking her nose and disfiguring her for life. A wife’s conduct is carefully regulated by law; it is illegal for a wife to permit a servant to place a brooch on her bosom, for no one may touch her on the breast except her husband. The wives of our town are strong, efficient, and never idle. They are fully able to manage a husband’s affairs if he should depart from town on business, or his trade if he should die. The wives make up the morning fires, shake out rugs and clothes, tend their gardens, direct their servants to prepare dinner. Only sometimes, resting by a window or pausing beside a well, a change comes over them. Then their eyes half close, a heaviness as of sleep seems to fall on their shoulders, and for a moment they are lost in dream, like children listening to stories by the chimney fire, before they return to their skins with a start.
A
MEETING.
One morning Scarbo received by messenger a summons from the Princess. He had not exchanged a single word
with her since her illness, and he appeared promptly at the bower, shutting the wicker gate behind him and entering the shady enclosure with a low bow. The Princess sat on one of the crimson silk couches and motioned for him to sit opposite. Scarbo was struck by something in her manner: she had about her a self-command, as if she were a tensely drawn bow, and she looked at him frankly, without hostility but without friendliness. As soon as he was seated she said that she wished to ask a difficult service of him. The request itself would put her at his mercy, and she had no illusions concerning his good will toward her; but since she no longer valued her life, save as a means to one end, she did not care whether he betrayed her. The dwarf, instantly alert to the danger of the interview, as well as to the possibility of increasing his power in the court, chose not to defend his good will, but remained warily silent, only lowering his eyes for a moment in order to display to the Princess his distress at the harshness and unfairness of her remark. The Princess spoke firmly and without hesitation. She said that because of her weak and evil nature, a nature abetted by dubious councillors in the service of one who no longer wished her well, she had wronged the margrave, who now lay suffering a horrible and unjust fate; and that she was determined to right her wrong, or die. In this quest she had decided, after long thought, to ask the help of the dwarf, knowing full well that by doing so she was placing herself in his power. And yet there was no one else she could turn to. He was intimate with the Prince, adept at hiding and spying, and, as she well knew, at insinuating himself into the confidence of those he served; moreover, it was he alone whom the Prince entrusted with the task of descending the legendary stairway with the prisoner’s daily ration of wretched food, which he placed in the hands of the keeper of the dungeon. The service she requested of the dwarf was this: to arrange for the margrave’s escape. In making her request, she understood perfectly that she was asking him to put his life at risk by betraying the Prince; and yet
she was bold enough to hope that the risk would be outweighed by the gratitude of the Princess, and the advantage of having her in his power. Here she paused and awaited his answer.
N
IGHTMARES.
Because of the stories we tell, our children believe that if they listen very carefully, in the dead of night, they will hear a faint scraping sound, coming from the bowels of the earth. It is the sound made by the prisoner as he secretly cuts his way with a pickax through the rock. For the most part our children listen for the sound of the prisoner with shining eyes and swiftly beating hearts. But sometimes they wake screaming in the night, weeping with fear, as the sounds get closer and closer. Then we rock them gently to sleep, telling them that our walls are thick, our moat deep, our towers high and equipped with powerful engines of war, our drop gates fitted with bronze spikes sharp as needles that, once fallen upon an enemy, will pierce his body through. Slowly our children close their eyes, while we, who have comforted them, lie wakeful in the night.
T
HE ANSWER.
To his surprise—and he did not like to be surprised—Scarbo realized at once that he would serve the Princess. The reason was not entirely clear to him, and would require close examination in the privacy of his chamber, but he saw that it was a complex reason consisting of three parts, which under different circumstances might have annulled one another, or at the very least led him to hesitate. The Princess, he clearly saw, considered him morally contemptible, and was appealing to what she assumed to be his cynical lust for power. In this she was quite correct, as far as she went; for indeed he was in part attracted by the vague but thrilling promise of having the Princess in his power, although what precisely she intended to imply by those words was probably unclear to her. She was
therefore correct, as far as she went; but she did not go far enough. For her very contempt prevented her from seeing the second part of his complex reason for agreeing to risk his life by serving her. Although Scarbo was ruthless, unscrupulous, and entirely cynical in moral matters, his cynicism did not prevent him from distinguishing modes of behavior one from the other; indeed he would argue that precisely his freedom from moral scruple made him acutely sensitive to the moral scruples of others. Because the Princess was moral by nature, the dwarf trusted her not to betray him; he could therefore count on her in a way he could no longer count on the Prince, whose moral nature had been corroded by jealousy. The third part of the reason was murkier than the other two, but could not be ignored. For the first time since her decline into weakness and confusion, Scarbo admired the Princess. He was helplessly drawn to power; and the Princess, in her proud bearing, in the intensity of her determination, in the absolute and, yes, ruthless quality of her conviction, was the very image of radiant power that he adored, in comparison to which the Prince, gnawed by secret doubt, seemed a weak and diminished being. Yes, Scarbo was drawn to the Princess, looked up to her, felt the full force of her power, in a sense yielded to her, and could deny her nothing, even as he felt the thrill of having her in his power. Such, then, were the three parts of the reason that led to his immediate inward assent. Aloud, the dwarf said to the Princess that there was much to be thought about, in a request that only honored him, and that he would deliver his answer the following day.
A
RTISTS.
Our tombstone effigies, the carved figures on our altarpieces, the faces of our patricians on medallions, the decorative reliefs and commemorative images in our churches, the stone figures on our fountains, the oil or tempera paintings that show an artisan in a leather cap, or the suffering face of Our Lord
on the cross, or St. Jerome bent over a book between a skull and a sleeping lion: all these receive high praise for their remarkably lifelike quality. So skillful are the painters in our workshops that they vie with one another to achieve unprecedented effects of minutely accurate detail, such as the individual hairs in the fur trim of a cloak, the weathered stone blocks of an archway, the shine on the wood of a lute or citole. The story is told how the dog of one of our painters, seeing a self-portrait of his master drying in the sun, ran up to it to lick his master’s face, and was startled by the taste of paint. But equally astonishing effects are regularly created by our master artisans. We have all watched our master wood-carvers cut from a small piece of pear wood or linden wood a little perfect cherry, on top of which sits a tiny fly; and our master goldsmiths, coppersmiths, silversmiths, and brass workers all delight us by creating tiny fruits and animals that amaze less by virtue of their smallness than by their precision of lifelike detail. Such mastery of the forms of life may suggest a disdain for the fanciful and fantastic, but this is by no means the case, for our painters and sculptors and master artisans also make dragons, devils, and fantastic creatures never seen before. Indeed it is precisely here, in the realm of the invisible and incredible, that our artists show their deepest devotion to the visible, for they render their monsters in such sharp detail that they come to seem no more fantastic than rats or horses. So strikingly lifelike is our art, so thoroughly has it replaced the older and stiffer forms, that it may seem as if ours is the final and imperishable end toward which the art of former ages has been striving. And yet, in the heart of the thoughtful admirer, a question may sometimes arise. For in such an art, where hardness and clarity are virtues, where the impossible itself is rendered with precision, is there not a risk that something has been lost? Is there not a risk that our art lacks mystery? With their clear eyes, so skilled at catching the look of a piece of velvet rubbed against the grain, with their clear eyes that cannot
not see, how can our artists portray fleeting sensations, intuitions, all things that are dim and shadowy and shifting? How can the grasping hand seize the ungraspable? And may it not sometimes seem that our art, in its bold conquest of the visible, is really a form of evasion, even of failure? On restless afternoons, when rain is about to fall but does not fall, when the heart thirsts, and is not satisfied, such are the thoughts that rise unbidden in those who stand apart and are watchful.
D
WARF IN THE TOWER.
Scarbo delivered his answer at the appointed time, and now daily he climbed the turning stairway that led to the private chamber at the top of the tower, where the Princess increasingly secluded herself from the cares of the castle to work her loom, brood over her fate, and await the news of the margrave in the dungeon. As the dwarf ascended the sun-streaked dark stairway he would rest from time to time at a wedge-shaped recess with an arrow loop, pulling himself up on the ledge and clasping his arms around his raised knees as he stared out at the river winding into the distance or the little city behind its meandering walls. In the long spaces between recesses the air darkened to blackness; sometimes in the dark he heard the rustle of tiny scurrying feet, or felt against his hair the sudden body of a bat. At the top of the stairway he came to a door, illuminated by an oil lamp resting on a corbel set into the wall. He knocked three times, with longish pauses between knocks—the agreed-on signal—and was admitted to a round room filled with sunlight and sky. The light entered through two pairs of tall lancet windows, with trefoil tracery at the top; each pair was set in a wide recess with stone window seats along the sides. On one stretch of wall between the two recesses was a wall painting that showed Tristan and Isolde lying side by side under a tree; from the branches peered the frowning face of King Mark, circled by leaves. The Princess led Scarbo to the pair of
window seats overlooking the walled town across the river, and there, sitting across from her and tucking one leg under him, the little man reported the progress of his plan. The crusty old keeper of the dungeon had at first seemed a stumbling block, but had soon revealed his weakness: a lust for glittering things. In return for a single one of the red and yellow and green jewels with which the Princess had filled the dwarf’s pockets—for she had insisted on supplying him with gems instead of buttons or glass—Scarbo had been able to secure the prisoner’s release from the heavy chains that had bound his arms and legs to the wall. In return for a second jewel, the dwarf had earned the privilege of visiting the prisoner alone. It was on the first of these occasions that he had provided the margrave with a long-handled iron shovel, which had proved easy to conceal in the pallet of straw, and which was used by the margrave to dig into the hard earthen floor. And here the tales do not say whether much time had passed, during which the margrave’s bones had healed, or whether the report of his crushed bones had been exaggerated. Impossible for the dwarf to say how long the prisoner would have to dig away at his tunnel, for the route of escape had to pass beneath the entire castle before beginning its immense, unthinkable ascent. The ground was hard, and filled with stones of many sizes. A straight tunnel was out of the question, since the presence of rocks required continual swerves; already the margrave had been forced to a complete stop in one direction and had had to strike out in another. The plan, such as it was, called for the margrave to proceed in the direction of the cliff, where a number of fissures in the rockface were known to lead to small cavelike passages; from the face of the cliff he could make his way undetected down to the river, where a skiff would be waiting—not to take him directly across, which would be far too dangerous, but to move him secretly along the rocky shore until he could cross over safely at a bend in the river concealed from the highest of the castle towers. Once in safety, he would
raise two mighty armies. One he would lead against the castle, for he had vowed to annihilate it from the face of the earth; the other, across the river, would march up to the walls of the town and demand entry. If refused, the second army would capture the town and use it to control the river, thereby both preventing supplies from reaching the castle by water, and threatening a second line of attack along the low riverbank upstream from the rocky cliff. For the margrave, in his fury, would let nothing stand in the way of his vengeance. Moreover, the town still paid homage to the Prince as supreme lord; and although the homage was well-nigh meaningless, since the Council had wrested from the Prince every conceivable power and was entirely autonomous, nevertheless the margrave, in his blind rage, viewed the town as an extension of the Prince and thereby worthy of destruction. The flaw in this grand plan was not simply the daily danger of discovery by the keeper, whose ferocious love of glitter would never permit him to ignore an attempted escape by a prisoner in his charge, but also the immense and uncertain depth of the dungeon, which was believed to lie far below the bed of the river. Scarbo had repeatedly tried to count the steps, but always he had broken off long before the end, when the number had passed into the thousands, for a strange hopelessness overcame him as he made the black descent, an utter erosion of belief in possibility; and in addition the steps themselves became blurred and broken after a while, so that it was impossible to distinguish one from another. If the idea of tunneling in a straight line had had to be abandoned in the short view, though not necessarily in the broad and general view, how much more tricky, indeed fantastic, seemed the idea of tunneling gradually upward to a point below the foundation of the castle but above the surface of the river. It would be far easier to thread a needle in the dark. At some point, moreover, the tunnel would come up against the solid rock of the cliff, at which moment a stonecutter’s pickax would have to replace the shovel. But the prisoner
was strong, and driven by a fierce thirst for vengeance; it was possible that in five years, in ten years, in twenty years, the plan might reach fruition. Then woe betide the margrave’s enemies, and anyone who tried to stand in his way; for, truth to tell, the margrave was much changed from the elegant, melancholy courtier he had been, and all his force was now concentrated into a fierce and single aim, culminating in a fiery vision of justice. Thus the dwarf, recounting the underground progress of the margrave to the Princess high in her sunny tower, while across from him she sat in silence, now staring at him intently, now turning her head slightly to gaze out the tall windows at a black raven in the blue sky, at the greenish blue riverbank far below, at the little stone town at the bottom of the wooded hillside.