Authors: Steven Millhauser
I
NVASION.
Should an enemy decide to attack us, he must first make his way across the dry moat, one hundred feet deep, that surrounds our outer wall. To do this he must begin by filling with earth, rubble, or bundles of logs that portion or portions of the moat he wishes to pass over. Next he must attempt the crossing itself, under cover of one or more wheeled wooden siege towers supplied with scaling ladders and containing archers, assault soldiers, and perhaps a copper-headed battering ram hung from leather thongs. But while the enemy is still engaged in the laborious task of filling up our moat, we ourselves are by no means idle. From behind our battlements we rain down a storm of flaming arrows and gunshot, while from our towers with their stores of catapult artillery we direct upon the enemy a ceaseless fire of deadly missiles. Should an enemy, against all odds, manage to advance to the outer wall, we are prepared to pour down on him, through openings between the corbels of our projecting parapets, rivers of molten lead and boiling oil, while we continue to shoot at men who are climbing highly exposed ladders that
rise against our twenty-foot wall; and since, by design, our towers project from the wall, we are able to direct a murderous fire at the enemy’s flank. Should he in all unlikelihood succeed in knocking down or scaling a portion of our outermost wall, he will find himself in a broad trench before a still higher wall, with its higher battlements and towers; and in this trench he will be subject to attack not only from the forty-foot wall looming before him, but from the uncaptured portions of the wall that is now behind him. So inconceivable is it that an enemy in the trench, however numerous, can survive slaughter, that our concern is directed rather at the sappers who, even as we triumph on the battlements, may be digging beneath our walls and towers in an effort to collapse them in one dramatic blow. Therefore we assign soldiers to listen carefully for the sound of underground digging, and we are prepared at any moment to countermine and take possession of an enemy tunnel. Should sappers succeed in toppling a tower or a portion of wall, we are prepared to erect behind it, swiftly, a second wall or palisade, from behind which we can fire upon the invaders as before. Although it is less conceivable that an enemy should penetrate our formidable defenses than that the nine crystalline spheres of the universe should cease to turn, sometimes we dream at night of enemy soldiers scaling our walls. In our dreams they are running through our streets, setting fire to our houses, raping our women and murdering our children, until we can smell the blood flowing among the paving stones, taste the smoke on our tongues, hear the shrieks of the mutilated and dying in a roar of falling and flaming walls and the mad laughter of the margrave as he strides like a giant through the ruins.
A
DISTURBING EPISODE.
It was about this time that the dwarf began to lust secretly after the Princess, who lived apart from the rest of the castle, and with whom he spent many hours
alone in her tower. Perhaps it would be more exact to say that a desire which had always lurked in the dark corners of his soul now first revealed itself to the dwarf, who had not dared to lust after the wife of his Prince when the Prince was his true master. Nightly in his chamber Scarbo imagined scenes of such melting and devouring bliss that he would sit up in bed with pounding temples and press his hands over his chest to still the violent beating of his heart. But when he climbed the stairs to the Princess’s tower, and saw her seated proudly and scornfully by the tall windows, he could not recognize in her a single trace of that wild and yielding Princess of the Night, and in his skin he felt an odd confusion, as if he had opened the wrong door and entered a room never seen before. Now, the dwarf was above all a courtier, and had drawn deep into his own nature the court’s conventions of love, which managed to combine delicacy of feeling, refinement of speech, longing for self-abasement, and relentless lust, all directed toward another man’s wife. Therefore his feelings for the Princess, although new to him, were at the same time quite familiar. But in addition to being a courtier, Scarbo was also a dwarf, and herein lay an important difference. As a dwarf he was threatened at every turn with ridicule, with secret laughter; although no one had dared to touch him since he had committed murder in defense of his honor, he was always aware of hostile and secretly mocking eyes. Once, in his early days at court, a lady-in-waiting had sat him on her lap and fondled him laughingly, placing his small hand on her half-bared breast and touching him on the thigh, calling him her little puppy, whispering that he should visit her at night. When he entered her bedchamber that night and groped his way to the curtained bed, she looked at him in surprise and suddenly burst out laughing, so that her naked breasts shook and tears of hilarity streamed along her cheeks. Scarbo drew his sword in order to cut off her breasts, hesitated, sheathed his sword, and left without a word. After that he never permitted
himself to be touched by anyone. His sudden desire for the Princess, which grew stronger each night, was therefore frustrated not only by the courtly convention of hopeless love-longing, but by fear—not simply the fear of ridicule, which in itself was intolerable, but the fear that the Princess would look at him in bewilderment, without understanding that she might exist as an object of desire for such a one as he. Secretive and cautious by temperament, Scarbo had trained himself over many years to murder any feeling that might interfere with his advancement at court. Should he not do so now? But the Princess had placed herself in his power. What could that mean except that she was his to do with as he liked? She was entirely dependent on him for the life of the margrave; she could not possibly refuse him the trivial favor of her body, which he longed for so violently that sometimes, as he walked along a corridor, tears of desire sprang into his eyes. But even though he held her in his power, as she herself had repeated more than once, so that he need only exercise that power by a simple act of will in order to take possession of her incomparable body, his pride demanded more—demanded, indeed, that she invite him to take his pleasure with her, that in no vague or uncertain terms she welcome him to her bed. And because he was tormented by ever-increasing desire, and because at the same time he was extremely cautious, Scarbo began to reveal his desire to the Princess, in her tower chamber: at first obliquely, through sly hints that might be taken up or ignored, and then more openly, though not directly. He spoke to her of love affairs at court, describing budding passions, unhappy marriages, and secret trysts, and soliciting her opinion concerning specific questions debated at court, such as whether a wife neglected by her husband had the right to take a lover, or whether a woman should prefer an ugly lover with a noble soul to a handsome lover with an ignoble soul. He contrived whenever possible to pay the Princess intimate compliments, praising the way a sleeve set off
the whiteness of her skin, alluding to her fingers and neck, and deploring the threadbare phrases of court poets, who settled for the same old expressions and therefore could not see the precise color, for example, of the Princess’s hair, which was not the color of beaten gold but rather of the field of wheat by the bend of the river in the light of early morning, or of a wall of pale stone darkened and made bright by the late afternoon sun. The Princess’s failure to acknowledge these compliments, which in one sense might have seemed discouraging, in another sense was almost heartening, for it could at least be said that his words had not awakened her active displeasure; and thus encouraged, the dwarf proceeded, as if by cunning, and yet quite helplessly, to more daring and intimate expressions. One day he spoke disparagingly of the fashion lately taken up by court ladies of binding their breasts with bandeaux, instead of leaving them free to assume their natural shape, as was still, he was pleased to observe, the custom of the Princess herself, who unlike certain of the ladies did not need to wrench into false and misleading forms those gifts of Nature which, as anyone with eyes could see, were of a beauty, indeed a perfection, that made one impatient with the shams of artifice and filled one with a longing to experience the naked truth of things—and as the little man continued to speak, shocked by his boldness, sickened by the sense of having gone too far, but unable to stop, he had the dreamlike sensation that he had entered a forbidden realm of freedom and transgression, for which at any moment he would be severely punished. Often he longed to reach out and touch the Princess. She sat across from him on her sunny stone bench, thoughtful, a little tired, with signs of a slight dishevelment; she had grown a trifle slack of late. The subtle laxity in her rigorous deportment, the startling wisp of hair escaping from beneath her headdress, the hint of indifference toward her own body, all this gave her a kind of softness or languor that caused his mouth to become dry, his stomach to tighten, his hands to tremble visibly—
but always at the last moment he held back, fearful of waking from his sensual dream. At last, sick with desire, he told the Princess that he often found himself awake at night, thinking of their conversations. He would, at such times, have been pleased to visit her, had he not feared to disturb her rest; and the Princess remaining silent, he added in a low voice, as if not wishing to hear himself speak, that he would like to visit her that very night, in order to discuss certain matters best left to the hours of darkness, unless of course she did not wish to be disturbed. At this the Princess turned her head and looked at him, with a gaze of immense weariness and disdain, and said that he was of course at liberty to visit her when and as he wished. Unsettled by the look of disdain, which he quickly thrust to the back of his mind, but thrilled by the words of assent, the dwarf could not sit still a moment more and abruptly took his leave. In his chamber he lay down on his small bed, made for him by the court carpenter in obedience to precise specifications he himself had furnished, and pressed both small hands against his thudding heart. A moment later he sprang up. He combed his beard in the glass, paced about, lay down on his bed, sprang up. He hadn’t expected her to agree so quickly, indeed the details of the scene were unclear in his mind, except for the troubling look that ought to have been accompanied by a refusal, but which perhaps could be explained as a last vestige of loyalty to the husband who had wronged her. She had accepted him, had she not? She hadn’t accepted him in the spirit he would have wished, but she had not refused him outright: far from it. In such thoughts he passed the afternoon and evening; and long after it had grown dark he waited in his chamber. At last he looked at himself in the glass, combed his beard with his fingers, slipped a dagger under his mantle, and closed his door softly behind him. The Princess’s bedchamber lay in the tower, directly beneath her high room, and as the dwarf climbed the familiar stairs he tried to recall the long history of his relation to the Princess, but
his mind produced only disconnected images: sunlight and leaf-shade trembling on the red silk of a couch, the face of King Mark peering out of the leaves, the body of a bat brushing against his hair. At the door of her bedchamber he paused, listening, then stood on his toes to place his hand on the iron ring that served as a doorknob. The heavy door, unbolted, gave way to his push. In the dark chamber, shuttered against the moon but lit with a single taper, the Princess lay propped on two pillows in her canopied bed, with the curtain open and the coverlet thrown back across her waist. She had removed her headdress, her wide-sleeved tunic, and her underrobe, but not her snow-white chemise threaded with gold. In the dim light of the taper she seemed a shimmer of snow and gold; and the tops of her breasts and her wheat-colored hair were white and gold. She looked at him coldly and said not a word. Scarbo closed the door behind him and began walking toward the bed, which soared above him; when he reached the side his head barely came up to the coverlet. At the bedfoot stood three steps leading up. Scarbo climbed the steps and began to walk along the coverlet toward the Princess. He was keenly aware of the ludicrous figure he cut as he marched along the trembling bed, and he felt almost grateful to her for not ridiculing him, for not requiring him to cut her throat. As he drew close he saw in her eyes a weariness so deep that it was deeper than disdain. When he reached the place where the coverlet had been turned back, he stopped beside the Princess and stood looking down at her. He saw with utter clarity that she did not and could not desire him, but that she would permit herself to endure his pleasure. He saw further that this permission was in part a desire to punish herself for the wrong she had done to the margrave, and in part a sign of her growing indifference to herself. He felt constrained, formal, and immensely melancholy. He understood that he was not going to tear the chemise from those longed-for breasts and plunge into a night of bliss that would change
his life forever. No, he would spare her the need to endure his undesired desire. For this she would be grateful, and her gratitude would increase his power over her. He understood suddenly that renouncing his dream of bliss would not be difficult for him, for he was skilled at renunciation—had he not spent a lifetime perfecting self-denial? Exhausted by his inrush of understanding, almost forgetful of the actual Princess lying at his feet, he understood one final thing: the Princess, who believed that she was acting solely to right a wrong, had not yet realized that she had fallen in love with the doomed and inaccessible margrave, who alone occupied her thoughts, and for whom she was willing to endure any indignity. Tired now, Scarbo sat down on the bed and crossed his little legs. He reached under his mantle and removed the dagger. “A gift for you, Milady,” he said, handing it to her hilt-first. “To protect yourself against unwelcome guests.” She took the dagger hesitantly; and as he began to speak of the margrave’s progress, he saw, in her weary and mistrustful eyes, a first faint shine of gratefulness.
C
ELLAR TALES.
Each of us has heard innumerable versions of the tales of the Princess. From this multiplicity of versions, varying from single details of wording to entire adventures composed of many episodes, each of us selects particular versions that eclipse or obscure the other versions, without eliminating them entirely. The versions selected by any one of us rarely replicate the versions chosen by others, but gradually, in the course of our town’s history, certain versions come to take precedence over other ones, which are relegated to a secondary status. It is here that an interesting development takes place. For these secondary versions, which have not been able to survive in the full light of day, continue to carry on a hidden life, and give rise to growths of a dubious and fantastic kind. Such offspring of rejected, inferior, but never-forgotten versions are
known as cellar tales, for they grow in the dark, unseen by anyone, mysterious as elves or potatoes. In one cycle of cellar tales, the Princess and the dwarf have a child, whose face is of a beauty unsurpassed, but whose body is hideously deformed. In another series of tales the margrave in his dungeon begins to change: a pair of black wings grows on his back, and one day he appears in the sky above the river as a black angel of death. Although the cellar tales are never admitted to the main cycle of castle tales, they nevertheless do not wither away, but multiply inexhaustibly, staining the other tales with their hidden colors, exerting a secret influence. Some say that a day will come when the daylight tales will weaken from lack of nourishment; then the cellar tales will rise from their dark places and take over the earth.