Wolf on a String Read online

  We had reached the other side of the bridge, and there we entered the Old Town. Once more I was filled with wonder at the handsome aspect of the buildings and the broad sweep of the many streets leading into that vast and noble central square. I stopped to gaze up at the bristling spires of the Týn church vanishing on high into the mist, while at my back the clock in the bell tower of the Old Town Hall began sounding the hour, the chimes rolling across the square like enormous slow bronze hoops.

  It was market day, and the place was thronged with townsfolk, and there was a medleyed clamor of merchants crying their wares and customers haggling, and animals lowing and the squeals and squeaks of a bagpipe band, while over all, in the tremulous air, there floated a transparent, dun-colored cloud composed of dung smoke and the breath of human beings and animals and the steam from their warm flesh. I thought, What a thing a great city is! and I shivered again a little, this time not from cold but in wonderment yet again at the fact of being where I was, here, in Prague, at the center not merely of the world, as the dwarf had sneeringly said, but of the universe itself, or so it seemed to me.

  When at length I left off gaping slack-jawed at the imposing and busy scenes around me, and looked to find what had become of the dwarf, I could see him nowhere.

  I was glad, at first, to think myself rid of him. Then I spied him wheeling into one of the little cobbled streets that meander away behind the Týn Kirche, an unmistakable black figure dragging itself along like a bat with a broken wing. I hesitated. Why should I not let the fellow go—what was he to me? But of course my interest had been too sharply piqued already, and the next moment I found myself elbowing my way through the crowd and hurrying down the narrow street where I had seen him disappear.

  I soon caught up with him, and was not surprised when he barely graced me with a glance. On he went, with me in his wake, telling myself what a fool I was to be trailing him obediently like this and yet unable to make myself fall back. Skitters of snow were dancing zigzag through the somber air, and the daylight was so dim by now that lamps were being lit already in the windows of the taverns.

  I overtook him again as we passed under the balcony of one of the houses, where a woman in a soiled petticoat leaned out and called down to him. He pretended not to hear her, and she gave a raucous laugh, and spat after him. How must it be to be him? I wondered. His broad pale face showed only blank indifference. I pictured him young, a little boy littler than all the rest. I saw him wheeled around by a ring of screaming children twice his size, like a bear cub baited by a pack of slavering hounds, with no way of escape, weeping tears of rage and shame and already plotting his revenge upon the world. Is it only hindsight that gives such a glare of significance to that first venture of mine down from the castle heights into the dark heart of the city, following blindly in the wake of this ill-favored creature? Or did I know, by some access of insight, by some grim premonition, how large this little man would loom in my life?

  Now he stopped again abruptly—he was a great one for stops and starts, for veerings and vanishings and sudden reappearings, like a conjurer’s monkey—and I stopped with him.

  We had come to the tall door of a fine broad high-built house. The windows were heavily barred, which gave to the place a sequestered, brooding air. The dwarf reached up and twitched a rope beside the door. Faintly from far within I heard the bell jangling.

  “What house is this?” I asked.

  I expected no reply, and got none.

  The snow was coming on heavily again. I confess I was eager be out of it and welcomed the prospect of shelter, no matter what starts or surprises might await me behind this high, black door. I had been in the city hardly one full day and already I had been apprehended and accused of murder, threatened with the rack, thrown into jail, then suddenly released and set up in a house of my own, without my even asking for it: what new thing now, however outlandish, could possibly surprise me?

  At length there was the sound from within of bolts being drawn, and the door was slowly pulled open on its protesting hinges. Peering out from the gloom of the hallway was a diminutive, aged creature of indeterminate gender. It had eyes like recently opened oysters, and it was bald save for a few strands of darkened silver hair drawn across a leathery skull. It spoke, though, with a woman’s voice, feathery and thin.

  “Ah, Master Schenckel,” she said to the dwarf, with a chuckle so soft it was hardly more than a succession of faint quick breaths. “Good day to Your Worship.”

  The dwarf offered no greeting in return, but pushed past the strange little creature and made his way into the hallway. He said not a word to me, either, nor gave me any indication of what I was to do, whether to follow him or draw back. It was only by the old woman’s not unkindly nod that I knew I was to enter also.

  I stepped over the threshold and bowed to the little woman, who, however shriveled and worn, was endowed, I could see, with a certain grace and even an air of authority. Inside the wide, ill-lit hallway the walls were hung with numerous large, time-blackened portraits of hardly distinguishable gentlemen and ladies in antique dress.

  “Come, sir,” the woman said in her whispery voice, inviting me onwards with an outstretched, clawlike hand. “Come along.”

  The dwarf was already at the far end of the hall, and now he dodged out of sight under a dim archway. I hurried to catch up with him, and the three of us proceeded in single file—Schenckel leading, with me after him, and the servant some way behind—through a series of chilly, anonymous rooms. We came at last to an equally anonymous doorway. The dwarf tapped lightly, glancing up at me sideways with that crookedly peculiar smile of his, at once amused and sour.

  We waited, but there was no response. Then the old servant came up, and she tapped too, more loudly than the dwarf had, and after a moment, still receiving no reply, she put her face close to the wood of the door and spoke some words, in the faintest murmur, as if she were reciting a magical invocation. This time a step sounded within, the door was opened, and the dwarf slipped quickly inside. Once again the old woman gave me an encouraging nod, and after a moment’s hesitation—what or who awaited me here?—I followed the dwarf’s example and stepped through the doorway.

  Directly opposite me, on the far side of the room, was a fire of logs blazing in the hearth, towards which Dr. Kroll was making his way. Whenever in later years I thought of that man, I always saw him with the glow of firelight playing on his mournful, ravaged features. The scene was so closely reminiscent of the one I had been thrust into that morning at the castle that I instinctively glanced off to the side, half expecting to see Felix Wenzel there too, standing in the shadows.

  The fireplace was flanked by a pair of arched windows with stained-glass panes that shed a feeble and somewhat lurid radiance into the room, creating a gloomily ecclesiastical effect.

  Kroll turned.

  “You’re welcome to my home, young man,” he said, with a grave nod. “Will you take some wine?”

  Jeppe Schenckel had made off into the gloomy reaches of the room, although I could sense his sharp little eyes fixed on me.

  The servant woman went to a table and poured the wine into a crystal goblet and brought it to me, bearing it in both hands, as if it were a chalice. More wine! As I took the glass from her, my fingers brushed against hers, and with a sort of shiver I felt the brittle, warm texture of her old woman’s skin and the twiglike frailty of the bones beneath it.

  I smiled my thanks, and she nodded, smiling too.

  How vivid everything suddenly seemed, vivid and almost painfully immediate—the heat of the fire, the wine’s strong, harsh savor, the dim light in the windows, the servant’s papery flesh. Indeed, it often seems to me that I was never so keenly alive, to myself and to the world, as I was in those earliest, turbulent days in Prague, city of flame and shadows.

  The serving woman withdrew, closing the door behind her soundlessly. I was sorry to see her go. To a motherless son, all women, no matter who or what they are, bring bac
k a formless recollection of maternal warmth.

  Jeppe Schenckel, off in his far corner of the room, had climbed onto a couch and was perched there, leaning back against a brocade cushion. Dr. Kroll had turned once more to the fire and was gazing pensively into the flames. I took another, deep draught of wine; as I did, I noticed a tremor in my hand, a tiny, rapid quaking. There was a general sense of some large, impending event: it was like the moment in a playhouse when the performance is about to begin, the audience all eagerness and the players waiting in the wings, ready to stride out upon the stage and set in motion the machinery of the drama.

  Perhaps, I thought, perhaps Chamberlain Lang would make another entrance, and launch into another theatrical performance.

  But it was not Lang who appeared. Instead, a door opened to the right of the fireplace, and a short, fat man in a rich robe trimmed with ermine stepped into the room.

  7

  I recognized him at once. Here was the face that had appeared above me in the prison cell, the face of the Emperor Rudolf—now at last I could be certain that the vision of him I’d seen had been no drug-induced dream.

  His Imperial Majesty was a good head shorter than I, a soft, somewhat flabby figure with notably small and shapely hands and delicate, dainty little feet. He had overall the air of an anxious voluptuary. His forehead was high, and he had a good strong nose, the effect of which was offset, however, by a weak, pinkly moist lower lip protruding under a flowing mustache of a dark auburn hue. His abundant beard could not hide the pendulous Hapsburg jaw; his eyes, above heavy, sagging lower lids, were large, dark blue, and keen of gaze, expressing equal hints of curiosity, suspicion, and, most unexpectedly, humor. Under his cape he wore a coat of thick, jet-black velvet braided with gold and silver thread, a ruff of stiffly pointed lace, and a high black felt hat adorned with a pale gray swan’s-down feather and studded around the brim with a variety of precious stones set in silver.

  I said just now that he had stepped into the room, but sidled would be a better word. Rudolf’s mode of forward motion had as much of retreat in it as advance, so that even as he came towards me he seemed at the same time to be shying away.

  I fell to one knee before him, bowing my head, and for a moment saw myself as a knight of old, swearing fealty to some legendary monarch in an old saga. Behind me I heard the dwarf snicker softly.

  “Your Majesty,” I began, “allow me to offer my humblest—”

  “Yes yes yes yes,” Rudolf said impatiently, “yes, good, perfect. But stand up, now, stand up.”

  I rose and faced him. I felt that my lower lip might be quivering, and quite likely it was, I being so nervous.

  He gazed up at me for a long moment, during which I did not dare even to blink. “Christian Stern,” he said. “That is truly your name, yes?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” I said. “Christian Stern, I am he.”

  He nodded, frowning a little, thinking.

  “We have been expecting you,” he said. “You know that?”

  “Indeed, sir, Chamberlain Lang said something of the sort.”

  “Oh, Chamberlain Lang!” he exclaimed, waggling his head in an almost comical fashion. “Chamberlain Lang says many things.” He stepped forward, and grasped me by the upper arms and made me lean down close to him. “We had a dream of you,” he whispered. “The star that would come from the west, the star sent by our Savior as a sign to us.”

  I heard myself swallow.

  “Come,” he said, drawing back from me and leading me aside, “come and talk to us about yourself and your alchemical studies, for as you will surely be aware we have a warm interest in the subject, yes indeed.”

  He had a hushed, hoarse manner of speaking, with much heaviness of breathing—I suspect he was afflicted with the dropsy, among numerous other ailments, which had aged him prematurely—so that everything he said seemed imparted in confidence and not meant to be overheard by the common ear.

  He was walking ahead of me into the dim corner where the couch was. When he spotted the dwarf perched at the end of it he gave a great loud laugh.

  “Ho there!” he called, peering. “Is that our stunted knave? Schenckel, you grow littler by the day: soon we shall be able to stow you in our codpiece. What do you say? Up, rogue!”

  The dwarf climbed down from the couch, one shoulder crookedly raised as if in expectation of a blow.

  “You say true, Majesty,” he replied in his soft, lisping way. “And should it be, your piece would be filled out well, for the first in a long time.”

  Rudolf laughed again and cuffed the little man on the side of his large head, then grasped a handful of the flesh under his jaw and tweaked it hard.

  “Animal!” he said merrily. “Apish abomination!” He turned to me. “This fellow, who is supposed to be our fool, plays us for a fool instead. Someday we shall have him hanged for his disdaining jests. Go, sir!” he shouted at the dwarf. “Go you, with Dr. Kroll, and leave us in peace alone with our bright new star.”

  Dr. Kroll, still by the fireplace, turned and made a low bow, and without a word stepped backwards respectfully to the door, which the dwarf, with that surprising agility of his, reached first and drew open. The two, one so tall and the other so short, exited together.

  “Now, Christian Stern,” Rudolf said, “sit down here by us.”

  And so it was that I found myself sequestered in close company with the ruler of the world, the Dominus Mundi, as the fire crackled and the winter’s day waned and outside the silent snow fell heavily.

  What did we speak of? Many things, but mainly matters magical, inevitably. I was required to give a detailed account of what subjects I had studied and what I knew and what work in the art of alchemy I had accomplished. I am afraid I pretended to be a more committed adept of this art than I really was: my true calling was natural philosophy, which, although it gives cognizance to certain mainfestations of the craft of magic, concerns itself with investigating the visible, graspable world in all its varied aspects and phenomena.

  Rudolf put numerous questions to me but could manage to show no more than a passing interest in my answers; after all, he had already heard me boasting about myself and my accomplishments, from his hiding place behind the scene of poor Actaeon’s slaughter, while I was undergoing Chamberlain Lang’s inquisition. And of course, like so many men in positions of great power, he was in general a less than good listener. When spoken to, he had a way of remaining quite motionless, gazing fixedly at the speaker’s lips, as if he were hanging on every word that was being said to him, whereas in fact, as I soon discovered, he was only waiting for the one who was addressing him to pause for breath, at which moment he would resume at once his own discourse at exactly the place where he had left off when the other had begun to speak. For Rudolf, to be spoken to was to be interrupted. He prized above all the sound of his own voice, and plainly much enjoyed hearing himself expound on his views of the world and its infinitely curious ways. And why would he not? He was Emperor, after all.

  At the time, in my youthful pride, and as a graduate of the respected seat of learning that was Würzburg, I was disdainful of all amateur scholars, yet despite myself I was surprised and impressed by the extent of Rudolf’s knowledge of a range of arcane subjects. Certainly he was acquainted intimately with a large number and variety of the ancient texts. In the course of that first conversation between us, if I may describe as conversation so one-sided an exchange, he spoke of how Plato in the Timaeus had conceived of the world as itself a living being, a doctrine which, as he—needlessly—reminded me, the new Platonists of the previous century, particularly those under the patronage of the great Florentine lord Lorenzo de’ Medici, had revived and developed. He mentioned a number of the central Hermetic texts, such as the Corpus Hermeticum and the Asclepius, and the works of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, for the latter of whom, as he approvingly noted, man was the measure of all things, the magnum miraculum. He spoke with enthusiasm also of the Cabala, the deep and
secret doctrine of the Jews, and even touched on the gematria, that ancient magical art based on the calculated attribution of numbers to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

  For Rudolf, as also, I should repeat, for me, the tangible world represented an infinitely intricate code by which the countless parts of creation were connected, all to one and one to all, in a living, harmonious continuum. The secret nature of the world was to be apprehended first and foremost through the portals of natural philosophy, in which alchemy and astrology played a part—not so great a part as His Majesty believed, I considered, although I did not say so.

  The old servant came to tend the fire, taking no notice of us, where we were seated side by side on the couch. In the doorway behind her an enormous deerhound appeared, a mighty beast that standing on its four legs would come up to the height of a tall man’s waist. It paused on the threshold for a moment, peering into the dimness of the room.

  “Ah, Schnorr,” the Emperor murmured, “dear old Schnorr.” The dog pricked up its ears and came padding forward, and lay down at the monarch’s feet with a rattle of bony limbs and a soft, contented sigh.

  “You are aware this is a house of mourning,” Rudolf said to me in a quiet voice, glancing in the direction of the servant where she knelt at the fireplace with her back turned towards us. “Old Fricka there, she nursed Dr. Kroll’s daughter when she was a babe.” Now like the dog he too heaved a sigh, and wiped his dampened eyes with his fingertips. “Poor Magdalena,” he said softly, “our darling Magda.”

  That the Emperor Rudolf was a reluctant monarch is a fact known to all, and he has been much criticized for it. There are some who contend he sacrificed the empire itself to his mania for magic and magicians, and left all Europe to flounder into this war without end that today is tearing whole nations asunder. Be that as it may—I am no historian, nor pretend to be—for my part I held him in the highest regard, although I did not blind myself to the undoubted flaws and fissures in his character. Yet a king who doubted his very right to rule with absolute power over his fellow creatures could not but win the admiration and respect of the ardent young man that I was then, and that indeed I still am, somehow, somewhere, deep down in the musty reaches of my by now so aged and decrepit self.