Young Doctor Eszterhazy

Young Doctor Eszterhazy

Thou, eye-bitten, hag-ridden, elf-shotten, anse-rotten:

Under the wolf’s paw, under the eagle’s feather,

Under the eagle’s claw, ever mayest thou wither.

— Anglish Spell

I, eye-clear, hag-dear, elf-sustained, anse-unblamed:

Over the wolf’s paw, over the eagle’s feather,

Over the eagle’s claw, may I ever have good weather.

— Northish counter-spell from The book of the Troll-Hag (Trulldhaggibouger)

It was the year that the bears were so bad in Bosnia.

The year that the bears were so bad in Bosnia and Queen Victoria actually said, “We are not amused,” was a year very crucial in the affairs of Far-Northwestern Europe, as well as those of Scythia-Pannonia- Transbalkania.

The always-tremulous Union of Scandia and Froreland was once again in a state of perturbation, the Frore Nationalists now insisting upon a separate Bureau of Weights and Measures, and the Scands (entirely as a matter of principle, having nothing to do with the imposts on stockfish and goat-cheese) resisting this under the well-known motto, Where will it end? That Froreland and Scandia constituted “Two Gloriously Free Monarchies Conjoined by One Single and Magnanimous Monarch” was a truth as well-known as it was troublesome. The monarch at this time was Magnus IV and III, “Staunchly Lutheran and Ever-Victorious King of the Scands, Sorbs, Goths, Lapps, Lipps, and Frores; Protector of the Skraelings, Terror of Iceland and Ireland, and Benefactor of the Butter Business” — known more generally as Magni — the reaction of the King to this most recent and non-negotiable demand, was to put down his glog-glass and offer to “settle the matter once and for all” by shooting dice for Froreland with the Khan-Tsar of Tsartary — Finnmark and Carelia to be the counter-stakes. This sporting suggestion was met with a most ringing silence all round about the Arctic Circle.

Hence, the train of cars departing from the Finnmark Station in St. Brigidsgarth at a most unusual hour: the Conjoint Cabinet of the Two Kingdoms had met in secret session and decided to send the Terror of Iceland and Ireland, Benefactor of the Butter Business, on an immediate and unofficial tour for the benefit of his health . . . Magnus being notoriously a martyr to bronchitis, liver-complaint, and elf-shot . . . . The incognito title selected was that of Count Calmar; the Royal preference for Great-Duke Gotterdamurung being stiffly and decisively discouraged by Aide-de-Camp Baron Borg uk Borg.

As the journey was unofficial and had been almost unannounced (the Court Circular: The King has retired to the rural areas for a period of time), there was neither a military nor a civil sendoff: only two tiny groups; both on the wrong platform, with two banners: a new one, reading Swearing Eternal Fealty to the House of Olaus-Olaus- Astridson-Katzenelenbogen-Ulf-and-Olaus, Froreland Demands a Separate Bureau of Weights and Measures; and an old one, barely legible, representing the forlorn hope of A Fourteenth Full-Bishop For Faithful Froreland — this last was really getting very scuzzy and should have been replaced long ago — and would have, only it was “stained with the Blood of the Martyrs” — that is, of Adjutant-Bishop Gnump, always excessively prone to nosebleed. (He did indeed die, at the age of 87, during the royal absence, an advent marked by public mass recitations of the Shorter Catechism by all the as-yet-unconfirmed schoolchildren of the two kingdoms — even including the Unreconciled Zwinglians, by special dispensation of their Vicar-at-Large, who stipulated only that at the beginning of the famous and controversial Consubstantiation Clause they were to “pause perceptibly before continuing.”)

For the first two days of the journey, “Count Calmar” had done nothing but drink champagne and play boston with his Aide-de-Camp; the third day he spent in bed (not in berth: in bed: even kings incognito do not travel without maximum basic comfort). Fairly early on the fourth day, the train drew to a slow, steamy halt at a station in what appeared to be a largely industrial suburb of a moderately large city; Magnus peered and blinked. “Is this Antibes?” he inquired, dubiously.

“No, Sire,” said Baron Borg uk Borg. And cleared his throat.

“Not Antibes. ... Cannes?”

“No, Sire. Not Cannes.”

“Not Cannes. Oh! Nicel No . . . not Nice. .. .”

“Not Nice, Sire.”

Magnus considered this, slowly. Very, very slowly. Next he asked, “Then where?”

“Sire,” said Baron Borg uk Borg, who had been awaiting this moment, entirely without enthusiasm, for a long, long time; “Sire: Bella.”

“Oh,” said Magnus. “Bella.” He scraped his tongue against his front teeth. He examined the result. Then, with a sort of convulsion, he leapt to his carpet-slippered feet. “Where?” he cried.

“Sire. Bella.”

The silence was broken only by the tchoof-tchoof, tchoof-tchoof of a very small shunting locomotive, about the size of a very large samovar, in the adjacent marshalling yard. On the platform the assistant station- master was yawning, buttoning his tunic, and eating his breakfast bread-and-goosegrease. A much younger man in a much smarter uniform came walking up quite rapidly. Someone in a frock-coat and a red, blue, and black sash stood by, blinking tiredly.

“No palm trees,” muttered Magnus. Then, “For God’s sake, Borg, get me a glass of glog,” he said. “And tell me where the devil we are... for a moment I thought you said ‘Bella’!”

“ . . . Sire . . . . ”

The Conjoint Cabinet had decided that Scythia-Pannonia- Transbalkania was quite a good idea. “Perhaps,” suggested Royalforen- siccouncillor Gnomi Gnomisson; “Perhaps Magni can learn from a sovereign who rules three countries, how to manage, anyway, Jesus Christ, two.” All the other ministers muttered, “Hear, hear!” and pounded firmly on the green table. (The Special Minister for Frorish Affairs had actually muttered, “Froreland demands a separate Bureau of Weights and Measures,” but he pounded just as firmly as the rest.)

“May you be be-taken on an ice-floe by an impetuous polar bear!” cried Magnus; “At eight o’clock in the morning with a tongue like a stoker’s glove! I cannot meet an emperor!”

“ . . . Sire . . . . ”

“But why is he coming here incognito?” asked Ignats Louis (King- Emperor of Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania). “He has never come here cognito; why is he coming here incognito?”

The Minister of Ceremonial Affairs had not become Minister of Ceremonial Affairs for nothing. “Because he is a Lutheran, Sire, and it is Lent,” he said, as smoothly as though these facts had not just occurred to him. “Your Imperial Majesty could not officially receive a Lutheran during Lent.”

“No, he couldn’t, could he,” observed Ignats Louis, who sometimes had trouble with pronouns. “Poor old chap’s a Lutheran, isn’t...” he paused a moment, swept on. “Well, well, so be it and be it so. Lent. Pontifical High Divine Liturgy this morning again, eh. Tell the Right Reverend Mitred Protopresbyter to keep the sermon short.”

Then he put on his morning uniform saying slowly, “King of where?”

“But he is after all the King of Scandia and Froreland,” said the Scandian and Frorish Ambassador. Again.

“Not according to my Official Intimations,” said the Minister, slightly rustling the documents in his hand. “According to my official Intimations, he is, after all, a Count Calmar.”

“Quite so, Highness; quite so. But, actually, he is, after all, the King of Scandia and Froreland. ... You know....”

“When the King of Scandia and Froreland actually and really visits my country as such, he will actually and really be received as such. After all. Willingly. Gladly. When, however, he comes as Count Calmar, he can be received only as Count Calmar. That is what an incognito is all about, my dear Thorbringsson, you know,” said His Highness the Foreign Minister, in a lower and sympathetic and presumably less official tone of voice. “They should have thought of that in St. Brigidsgarth.”

“Of course they should have,” admitted the Ambassador; “however: they didn't. Meanwhile, Count Calmar is arriving in Bella, and — in, of course, the strictest confidence — I may tell you that Count Calmar is the King of Scandia and Froreland. Is he to be met at the station only by the Customs, the Immigration, and the Pest Control? I put the matter to you.”

The matter so put to him, the Minister of Foreign Affairs agreed that it would not do. The matter so put to the Minister of Ceremonial Affairs, he also agreed that it would not do.

“But, Holy Saint Ulfilas! Two merry-andrew monarchs, both arriving this same morning, and both incognito! For my sin, for my sin, for my own most grievous sin!”

Foreign Affairs paused in his departure, looked at Ceremonial Affairs with slightly raised eyebrows. “Really! Oh you poor chaps! Well, but who is the other?” For total reply Ceremonial Affairs performed an expansive gesture, intended presumably to outline a very large (and very female) figure. Foreign Affairs threw up his hands, rolled his eyes. “For your sin,” he said, dolefully, as he departed, “for your sin, for your own most in grievous sin!“

It was rather a quiet moment in the Stand-by Equerries’ Waiting Room. Some were slowly having breakfast off the buffet. Some sat reading the newspapers, either morning, or of the previous evening. Some sat sipping coffee. Some merely sat. The traditional loaf of large peasants’ bread (stale, traditionally) had not been thrown at a single noisy junior. Enter: a page. “Summons for two,” said he.

This was greeted with the equally traditional groan. Then someone asked, “What’s the task?”

The page (without referring to his paper): “Dowager Margravine of the Ister, one. Count Magnus —”

The Equerries (with a real groan): “Her Fatness! Ooohh!”

“Margrave of the Ister” was one of the lesser titles of the King- Emperor, but not only was his mother long deceased, she had never even been Margravine of the Ister. But all knew who had been... long before the late and sincerely lamented Queen-Empress (Ignats Louis was a widower)....

An inattentive Equerry: “Why are the scrambled eggs so tough? Cook! To the galleys!”

An attentive Equerry: “Oh Christ, it’s my turn. Will no one save me from this frightful fate?”

The Page: “Why ‘frightful’? You go meet the Public Train at the West Station, you bob and do the ‘Highborn and Noble Lady’ lay and all the rest of that cow-puckey, she bobs back, one of her witches comes forward with the charity-pyx, you drop something in, you fall back, some nobly- born nun takes over and takes them away; you come back and sign in and recover your donation from the Clerk of the Privy Purse, you sign out and collect your one-half gold-piece and you’ve got the rest of the day off and can go get bonked at Miss Betty’s —”

Cries of: “Boy! Presumptuous boy! To the galleys! Flog the boy!”

Another Equerry (holding out his hand): “Gimme Fat Emmy!” (Receives the paper summons and departs, accompanied by ribald hoots and howls.)

Yet Another Equerry: “I shall take the other task, Page. Give here.”

This was a young man with a fresh and open face on which sat a light beard and moustache, plus, to be frank, a few freckles. Unlike the majority of equerries, who had on the dun undress jackets which would be changed for dress whites before leaving for duty, he was already wearing his dress white jacket: and on it were pinned the ribbons of a few campaigns. A palace saying had it, “To face a cannonade requires a brave heart and a steady hand; and so does drinking morning coffee in a dress white jacket.” Another Equerry yet leaned over and looked at the official summons to duty. “Who in the Hell, now, is Count Magnus Olaus of Calmar? — besides being a noble of the Kingdoms of Scandia and Froreland? Hey, Engli?”

Engli said that they would see, wouldn’t they? His senior read on, “ ‘Arriving at the North Station,’ at the North! Like a consignment of rendered lard! ‘— with two companions of rank and three servitors.’ Hm, isn’t that the country the polar bears come from? Mind you don’t go back with them and freeze your boboes off.. . Bye Who’s got the morning Journal with the new roman in it?”

“I have, trade you for an Egyptian cig, I’m all out. Ta. Here you are. Funny chap, Engli, eh?”

“Funny, but nice. Oh, good: From the French, Translated. Mm.. ..”

The usual torpor regained rule over the Stand-by-Equerries’ Waiting Room.

Emma Katterina hoisted up her skirts . . . not very far . . . and bobbed a curtsey . . . not a very deep curtsey ... a station-master, even with a high silk hat, was, after all... a station-master. But he had bowed. So she had curtseyed. She repeated the motion, somewhat like all the tents of Kedar being pitched at once, when the Equerry bowed. And she repeated it a third time when the abbess of the Convent of the Purposefully Impover­ished Ladies of Noble Rank Being Now the Wee Sisters of the Sacred Crown and Humble Servants of the Very, Very Poor — repeated it considerably more deeply — curtseyed to her. A certain amount of attention was paid her arrival on the Public Train (the public paid rock-bottom rates for a racking, creeping journey, but the public trains ran once a day in each direction over every inch of track belonging to the Royal-and-Imperial Ironroads, and no reservations were ever necessary); but, though more than one person in the station either bowed or curtseyed, her presence in the capital was so well known as not to attract very much attention; and she did not attend further to such further attentions as she did get. She next embraced the Lady-Abbess and to her, and to her small suite, said, “Let us briskly walk. The Mamma is, truth to tell, rather chilled.”

By “The Mamma,” she meant herself.

To the station-master and the Equerry she gave a very thin smile and a very sly glance out of the corners of her tiny eyes, as if to reassure them how she valued their formalities; then she swept out. The station, with its smells of crowds and steam and smoke, like a somewhat smaller and somewhat cheaper version of the Baths of Caracalla done in wrought- iron and smoky glass, was now permitted to resume its usual, and commercial, functions. The 18th century had made a brief appearance. Now the 19th had taken over, once again.

Having seen their baggage into the hydraulic elevator at the Grand Hotel Windsor-Lido (the Scandian Count was merely incognito, not slumming), the Equerry next saw them into the hotel’s dining room. Magnus was feeling rather better. Borg uk Borg was stiff. Borg uk Borg was always stiff. And Kopperkupp, the private secretary, had spent so many years making himself inconspicuous that no one noticed he was there. “I assume that Count Calmar, on the vin du pays principle, is desirous of trying the national breakfast?” Count Calmar merely looked at him. He was rather young, rather tall, rather blond, and rather rough, in appearance. In reality, he was not really rough at all.

“What it is?” he asked. He spoke in English; he had indeed spent many years in the study of French; his marks, when reluctantly wrested from the Department of Educational and Ecclesiastical Affairs, proved to be a straight, undeviating, uninflected D. The Scandian Parliament, in an absolute fury, had deprived him of his traditional right to dispense the marriages of those under thirty who lacked parental consent; but the Frorish Parliament, on the principle that “French is a language spoken in brothels,” refused to do any such thing.

“What is it? Well, there are really two national breakfasts. The first one is dark bread spread with goose-grease. The other is boiled blood-sausage with boiled potatoes. Eh?”

“Nay.”

“Oh, but Count Calmar. The blood-sausage is so delightfully strong­smelling. The boiled potatoes are served cold and have such a delicately blueish tinge. As for the goose-grease —”

“Surely, Cornet Eszterhazy, you jest.”

“Well, Count Calmar, yes I do.”

Count Calmar guffawed. Then he groaned and put the palms of his hands over his eyes. Eszterhazy went on to say, “Seriously, I would recommend a new-laid egg, a cup of strong, clean coffee of the Mocha- Java blend . . . toasted light bread spread with pure sweet butter and Scottish marmalade... and... perhaps... with the coffee... a spoonful of white rum. Eh?”

Count Calmar said, “Aye.”

Baron Borg uk Borg after a moment said, “The Count Calmar is desirous of informing himself of the social and political principles where­by your own country, Cornet Eszterhazy, is enabled to encompass so successfully, how shall I term it, populations non-homogenous in nature. This question naturally concerns us in our own Two Kingdoms.”

This statement so perfectly summed up, perhaps exactly, the desires of Count Calmar, that he said nothing whatsoever.

Cornet Eszterhazy said, “Hmm.” After a while he added, “When we have finished breakfast, we might go for a ride. Or a walk.”

Count Calmar said, “Aye!”

Cornet Eszterhazy next observed that one of his new-found friends’ servants seemed rather odd .. . “For a servant, I mean. Nothing against his character, of course. He wears an odd sort of cap, and —”

“Ah, that is Ole,” said Calmar, with an indulgent chuckle.

“His name is not really ‘Ole,’ only we call him so. I don’t recall his real name,” Borg said. “The cap is part of his national costume. He is a

Skraeling, a man of some importance among his own people —”

“Sings songs,” Calmar said, looking around rather wistfully . . . perhaps trying to find the social and political principles of his host- nation; perhaps for more white rum.

Eszterhazy, having but slightly breakfasted with the Equerries, had joined in eating the same items suggested for his guests. And drinking. He felt benign. Felt.. . also .. . interested. “A ... a Skraeling?”

Borg and Calmar nodded. Something faintly flickered nearby. Eszterhazy believed that Kopperkupp had also nodded. “Yes,” Borg said. “A people of unknown provenance, anciently if not aboriginally established in the northern parts of both our kingdoms; from having intermarried with the Scands and Frores they have lost much of a distinctive physiognomy while yet retaining some elements of their old traditions. Traditionally they are entitled to be represented at court; hence Ole being with us, ahem.”

“He supplies the Sovereign with, at each meal, an egg of an Arctic tern,” said Calmar.

Eszterhazy politely raised his brows; Borg said, “Of course this is not possible except when the Sovereign bi-annually visits their territories. Elsewise it has been commuted to a duck’s egg.”

“I see. . . . What else does the man do, then?”

“He blacks the boots,” said Borg, somewhat curtly.

It was arranged that Borg and Calmar (and, presumably, Kopperkupp) would make a very brief call at their Embassy — “To be sure,” the Frorish Nationalists said, “we must have our own Embassies some day. But first we must have our own Bureau of Weights and Measures!” — that Borg and Kopperkupp would remain for whatever business need be. And that Calmar would then/there meet the Equerry-Cornet. And that they two would go off. Somewhere. Somewhere (it was discreetly understood) respectable.

The political education . . . perhaps re-education ... of “Count Calmar” need not begin that very day. Perhaps the very next.

As the Northern visitors wished first to make some slight adjustments to their dress — a change of dress-coats, perhaps, the ribbons of an order — Eszterhazy would wait below, and meet them in the grand lobby. He watched them as they departed; watched the waiter arriving with more coffee; watched as a tall, thin man in tweeds arose from a nearby table and trotted — there was no other word — trotted over to Eszterhazy’s table and snatched up one of the egg-cups and held it close to his eye. “Extraordinary,” he said. “Extraordinary.” Then, suddenly aware that his conduct might just possibly be considered other than entirely ordinary, he turned to Eszterhazy and begged his pardon. This was granted.

“Sir,” the man said. “I am Regius Professor of Natural History at the University of Oxbridge. Who would have expected to find this on a table of an hotel in the capital of Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania!”

“But why so, Professor?” asked Eszterhazy, slightly put-out, and slightly amused. “We do not live on locusts here. I myself, generally speaking, eat an egg a day. At least one egg.”

The Regius Professor of Natural History at the University of Oxbridge turned to him a face displaying the utmost astonishment. “But surely not the egg of an Arctic tern?” he asked.

Borg was not eager to relinquish Magnus, but was obliged to agree that the younger man did indeed require to stretch his legs and breathe fresh air after more than three days in a railroad carriage. Still, he did ask where ... “generally speaking” ... they planned on going. Eszterhazy acknowledged that this was a very fair question. He stroked his fair and as yet rather sparse moustache. “I had thought,” he said, “that we might commence with the Imperial Institute of Political and Social Economy.”

“Yes, yes!” — Borg.

“After a perhaps not over-tiring visit, hmm, next perhaps the Royal Ethnical and Ethical Museum. ...”

“Excellent!” — Borg.

“After that... well, although, alas, the Diet is not in session, still, a visit to the gallery will display the exquisite nicety with which the national and linguistic and political affiliations are delineated by means of a system of color-codes unique in Europe; the seats being upholstered — for example — in off-white for the Scythian Conservatives all the way through beige for the Hyperborean Monarchial Democrats —”

“Very good, very good!” — Borg.

“There was some rumpus once upon a time, with the Slovatchko Christian Socialists and the Pan-Imperial Unified Socialists each demanding red; however, this could not be granted, red being the traditional color of the Pannonian Ultra-Conservative Agrarians; and in the end, the Slovatchko Christian Socialists accepted puce and the P-I. U. Socialists, mauve. Perhaps this might interest Count Calmar?”

“Cornet, it cannot fail to do so.” — Borg. (Grimly)

Magnus, later, had fallen into a sullen silence, but by and by he began to look about with some interest at the passing scene and its presumably polyglot peoples. Just then the young Cornet lifted his light malacca walking-stick and gestured towards a stolid granite building across the street. “Imperial Institute of Political and Social Economy.” Magnus’s face fell at once, but his guide went on, brisky, “Well, so much for the Imperial Institute of Political and Social Economy; we have commenced with it. Now at the end of this alley, which leads towards the river, there is a place of public pleasure officially licensed under the name of The Pint of Port, the quantity which is sold there for three-tenths of a skilling... officially . . . actually the drink consists of the washings of expressed grape-hulls mixed with a small amount of low-grade potato- spirit, in consequence of which the place is commonly called The Pint of Piss. Its accommodations are rude, its ambience is coarse, its customers are very often totally depraved, and —”

“Take me there at once, do you hear?” said Count Calmar.

It was perhaps an hour and a half later that, as they strolled on through the Sunken Square (Ignats-Salvador had intended a palace but died just as the excavation was completed), a large old woman performed a full- formal curtsey of archaic manner as she came upon them; and Magnus, automatically, gave her a full-formal bow. He had taken a number of steps before he gave a start, started to turn around, caught his new friend’s amused eye, and asked, “Who was that?”

Down deep in a dungeon ... that is, down deep in what had long ago been a dungeon for the confinement of forgers of the petty currency (and served them right) but was now a cellar for the storage of merely moderately harsh wine — the sort which corner grocers fix up with sugar syrup and advertise as From Our Own Vineyard in the Country... a device which fools no one but indicates that the stuff is not too bad: the worst poison almost invariably being labeled as Imported From Oporto in the Land of the Portagews, DELICIOUS!... three men sat at a bench before a table spread with machinery. Presently, “The works is almost ready,” said one of the men. He wiped his brow with the sleeve of the denim jacket he wore.

“And then,” said another .. . pausing, as if he relished the words .. . “and then: Ka-BOOM!”

“Death to the tyrant!” cried a third. They returned to their employment.

After but a moment, one of them said, “One hears . . . One hears rumors . . . one hears rumors that the tyrant may already be dead —”

“Nonsense!”

“Lies, spread by the tyrant’s toadies!”

“The works! Let us get on with the works, and not dawdle over granny-talk!”

For a while they toiled on, jewelers’ loupes in their eyes, so cautiously weighing gunpowder, so carefully adjusting clock-work, so deftly fastening wires, turning tiny screws — “But why, if the tyrant is not dead, has he not been seen riding his Whitey horse as always? One hears that, for days now, he has not been —”

“Enough, babbler! The works!”

The room was large and dark; only where they worked was there light. Somewhere, neither near nor far, water dripped. Another man spoke. Diffidently. “It is of course essential that the tyrant be destroyed. But he is not trustworthy. Suppose that just at the time the works go off, just at the door of the Infants’ Infirmary in the Hospital for Children of Palace Servants, the tyrant is up in the throne room, trying on crowns — and not bringing sweets to the invalid infants?”

There was a murmur. There was a voice saying firmly, “ ‘Suppose?’ suppose. We shall suppose he will be there.”

Gaslight hissed.

Now in lower voice the same one resumed the same theme. “It is a terrible thought that the children would have died in vain. ...”

Once more the firm voice. “That would be the tyrant’s fault. If he had no servants they would have no children. It is the enemy who determines the conditions of the war.”

They all nodded, bowed their heads, worked on. There were no further interruptions.

In a room in a tower not more than a kilometer away, three other men glanced up from their map and looked out the window. One of them gestured with his pointer. “The vehicle in question will at the time appointed cross over the Italian Bridge disguised as a fruit-and-vegetable wagon. They expect to enter the Royal and Imperial Palace grounds without trouble via the back central passageway, and to stop just at the door of the Infants’ Infirmary in the Hospital for Children of Palace Servants. There several crates of produce will be unloaded in order to add an air of verisimilitude to the scene. Then, one by one, the men are going to leave the scene. The brakes and wheels will have already been tampered with so the vehicle cannot easily be moved. At three o’clock, as usual, the King-Emperor enters the Hospital to visit for fifteen minutes, said visit includes the Infirmary, and the infernal machine is to be set to go off at a quarter after three.” He gestured towards a clock.

The men were all in uniform; but it was a curious sort of uniform, entirely bare of any adornments whatsoever. One of the men asked, “How accurate is the report?”

“Our secret agent assures us that it is quite accurate.”

There was such silence as was not dispelled by the sounds of the great capital city below, muted by distance into one continual murmur, like that of some far-off and unbroken surf. Then someone said, “This is a terrible vision.”

Someone else slightly shrugged, said, “All the visions of the Jacobins are terrible. That is why they must all be destroyed, they and their visions together, whatever names they employ: democrats, socialists, republicans, reformers, anarchists, conservatives — as though the present system were worth conserving! It is re-action which alone may save us all. A reaction which will totally sweep away such diabolisms as representative government, religious toleration, and all the rest of it. Mud! Mud! Every change which has come about since 1789 has come up from the mud, and back down into the mud it must go.”

Someone cleared his throat. “You are quite sure then, companion, that it is not our duty to inform the August House?”

“Certainly not! The Jacobins must be destroyed and it is by exactly such an action on their part that shall come about a reaction, a revulsion which shall destroy them. All of them! They shall all die! Let the mobs arise and do this; then we shall destroy the mobs!”

The view from the tower window encompassed all the nearby Gothic Lowlands; one of those present said: “I see the Gothic Lowlands in flames ... then all Scythia . . . Pannonia, too: then Transbalkania —”

“Scholars say,” another murmured, “that it was the Gaetae of Dacia who were the ancestors of the modern Scythian Goths and thus neither the Visigoths nor Ostrogoths; but scholars also say the descent is from the Gauts of South Scandia... and do not scholars also connect the Getae of Ovid’s lines, Haec mihi Cimmerio bis tertio ducitur aestas Litore pellitos inter agenda Getas with those Geats which the Beowulf informs were centuries before encountered on the North and Baltic Seas? Scholars do“

“Damn all scholars! Let the scholars bum, too!”

A throat was cleared. “The Emperor is not a scholar ... what of the Emperor?”

The reply was brief. “The Emperor is a saint and has a place prepared for him in Heaven. Let the war go on.”

“But —”

“It is the enemy who determines the conditions of the war. Let the war go on.”

“Who was that?” asked Magnus.

The young Cornet-Equerry smiled. “That? That is Emma Katterina.” “Who?”

Emma Katterina. Her mother may have been “the barmaid of Brati­slava,” for that matter the mother of Don John of Austria had been “the laundress of Regensburg”: unlike Don John, whose father was Holy Roman Emperor, Emma Katterina’s father was merely a backwood noble in a barely united severalty of backwood thrones — again, however, and unlike Don John: she was of legitimate birth.

The Sunken Square, as Magnus quickly glanced, had the appearance of a valley of sorts down the middle of which rushed a river in spate, only breaking its flood to divide and roll round a black crag. Looked at more slowly, the river was revealed to be the usual throng and the rock to be moving against it as it parted: vast and unmistakable was the immense figure of Emma Katterina, Dowager Margravine of the Ister, Dowager Great Duchess of Dubrovnik, and Titular Queen of Carinthia... a.k.a. Tantushka, Mammushka, Fat Emmy, Her Fatness, and Great Katinka: from head to toe in fusty black slowly growing green for years, and accompanied by what was for her a train of state: “three witches and a priest,” as they were popularly described. She was also the widow of the half-brother of Ignats Louis, King-Emperor of Scythia-Pannonia- Transbalkania, as the Triune Monarchy was now called. Her parsimony was notorious; even now she was walking all the way across Bella in order to avoid the two copperka fares on the tram. Earlier, later, other sovereigns might negate this or that with some such phrase as It is not Our pleasure or La Reyne non veult; Emma Katterina accomplished it with the words, “Mamma wouldn’t let.” Metternich himself had shrugged his defeat by her, Francis Joseph would greet mention of her name by slowly rolling his head from side to side and uttering pained little moans. Bismarck —

Emma Katterina was not only immensely tall, immensely fat, immensely charitable (which was where her pensions mostly went); she was also immensely ignorant. She had certainly never heard of Darwin or Pasteur. It is doubtful if she could have placed Scandia, let alone Froreland, on a map; but, face to face with their Conjoint King, she had recognized his face at once. She had curtseyed. The effect was somewhat as though the Alps had curtseyed. Magnus bowed. Emma Katterina passed on by. Her moles bristled and her chins flowed. Then she crossed herself. Then she spat. Three times. A king was a king.

And a heretic was a heretic.

She knew her duty.

“Who was that?” asked Magnus again.

“Who was that?” someone else, far across the Sunken Square, asked his companion. “ ‘Tantushka’? Tell us something new. No: who was that she bobbed to? No. Fool. Does she bob to everyone? Find out who she bowed to”

“Why was The Mamma pleased to bob and spit just now back there a bit?” asked one of the “witches,” surtitled the Baroness Bix and Bix.

“The Mamma saw that that there youngling was a far-off king; The Mamma knows the faces of all the kings in Christendom,” nodding firmly as she strode along, said Emma Katterina; “and emperors, too, even Of Abyssinia, who is in Asia, and Of Brazil, which he is in Africa. Oh yes!”

“Oh yes!” echoed the second “witch,” surtitled the Countess Critz. “The Mamma she cuts them kings’s faces out of the penny papers and pastes them up in the excuse me.”

“And what far-off king the youngling was?” asked the third “witch,” surtitled the Highlady Grulzakk.

Emma Katterina shrugged. “The King of Koppenholm, somethinglike,” she said. “The Mamma spit, after-like, what because, because he’s a Calvinist: to burn,” and here she spat again . . . without malice. “Nicelooking boyling, yes.”

“In Koppenholm,” the Chaplain said, screwing up his scrannel jaws, and unscrewing them down again, “the people there, may the canker eat, are said to be, allegedly, Lutherans, some say.” The Chaplain may have been a bigot, but he was a tactful one.

“Lutherans are the worst kind of Calvinists,” said Emma Katterina, nothing fazed. “Doctor Calvin was a doctor, in Paris-France,” she explained to her suite. “And he turned heretic, for what because? Because for what he wouldn’t buy a bishop’s dispensation to marry his first cousin’s nephew’s niece. The Queen of Navarre, of blessed memory, she argues with him till she could see green worms with little red heads; but no and no and no! ‘For Heaven’s sake, Dr. Calvin,’ says she, ‘buy the bishop’s dispensation, what does it cost, a richman like you?’ But no and no and no\ ‘I’ll not have no dispensation,’ says he, ‘though the heavens may fall, and what’s more,’ says he, ‘I’ll not have no bishops, neither!’ ”

Gasps of horror and disgust greeted this revelation of total depravity. “So the Queen of Navarre, of blessed memory, who was minding the schloss while her brother was off a-fighting the King of Ireland, she condemns him of course to be burnt at the stake for Unitarianism without benefit of strangulation. So off he runs, with his codpiece a-flapping at ween his knees, not stopping till he gets to Gascony, where he changes his name to Doctor Luther, but the Elector a-sends him a packing. Nextwise he settles down in Switzerland, where their brains be all addled from the snows; Zwingling, he calls himself then. ‘Away with all bishops!’ says he. And there hasn’t been no bishops in Switzerland from that day to this, which is the reason them Switzers has to come down into France or Lichtenstein for to receive Confirmation. Come here incognito, it seems, this boy-chick, which it means, without no uniform, so that republicans and other anarchists won’t fling dirt in his face; what it means to be a king these days.

“Or a queen,” she added. And slowly shook her massive head.

Somewhere under its roof-slates the Grand Hotel Windsor-Lido maintained a dormitory and a row of cubicles for the housing of its employees and the servants of its guests; “Ole Skraelandi” did not bother to see where he was to be quartered according to the G.H. W.-L.; he knew his place and his place never varied: whether it was the turf beneath a reindeer-hide tent or the thick Belgian carpet of an elegant hotel, he slept across the threshold of his sovereign’s chamber. Somewhere far away amidst the moors and marshes of Skraeland, so void of landmarks to the outside eye, was a small hollow amidst a grove of dwarf willows. Here the child was born to whom the shaman gave the name of Eeiiuullaalaa. No one could have expected the pastor of the State Church, charged ex officio with the registration of births in his vast parish — he lived 100 kilometers from that willow-girt hollow — no one could have expected him to have spelled Eeiiuullaalaa correctly and so perhaps he hadn’t; the Skraelings, being largely illiterate, would not have known the difference. Largely is, however, not entirely. The shaman knew how to spell it and he had spelled it — once — in runes carved onto a piece of reindeer horn, which he had entrusted to the infant’s parents, strictly cautioning them not to show it about lest someone use it to work a spell upon the babe. The shaman had been the infant’s uncle or great-uncle, and in celebration of the event he had gotten drunk on Hoffman’s Drops (if “drunk” was quite the word to describe the effects of that antique but still potable and still potent mixture of brandy and ether, of which it was said that, “Three drops will paralyze a reindeer, four will kill a bull-elch, five would stun a polar-bear, six would bring a musk-ochs to its knees, and seven make the troll-hag smile”); so perhaps he had not spelled it correctly, either.

The boy did not grow tall, for the Skraeling are not a tall-growing people; but he grew, and, growing, learned deer-craft from his parents, and from his old uncle or great-uncle learned leech-craft and elf-craft and troll-craft; other things he learned, too, even the general names for which the Skraeling do not tell to others. And when a time came, and it did not come often, to select a shaman to go and live with the King and protect the King from harm (the incumbent shaman knowing he was now of an age to die), the young man suddenly and successively had visions and dreams of such a potent and indicative nature that every shaman in Skraeland agreed it was this one who must go. At the Court he took care of the sacred egg, of preparing charms for going under the threshold or under the bed, of beating the toom-toom if necessary and of blowing the eagle-whistle if necessary (these last two had not been necessary), and of chanting protective chants. And as indication of the trust the Court of the Scands and Frores had in the Skraels, they allowed him full charge of the care of the Sovereign’s boots, shoes, and slippers: a most important magic! Each night as he rubbed off the dust or scraped the dirt or mud from the royal footgear, and by observing where the King had been, was able to decide where the King should be: Bear him well, , bear him well, well, well, he would murmur, as he rubbed into the footgear of the King of Scandia and Froreland the tinted, scented grease they had provided him. Once, in the time of the previous king, John XII and XI, he, “Ole Frori,” as they called him casually at Court, had observed on the twice-royal buskins, traces of a marl which could have come only from the estate of a certain high-born (and beautiful) lady known (though not to John XII and XI) to be a double-agent in the pay of both the Russians and the Prussians. Such elf-craft he performed upon every single item which the King ever wore upon his feet that the King went not thither ever again. Nor knew why not.

It was all quite different from the prolonged twilights, the sky-capped plains of golden moss over which the antlered herds drifted like dark clouds, the night-welkin covered with the quivering mantle of the boreal witch-lights; but the ancestors had told him in dreams both dark and clear that he must serve the King: and serve he did, although scarcely the King knew that he was being served — and how he was being served, and how well, the King did not know at all.

And certainly the King did not know, as he idly sought his casual pleasure in this strange city, that the least of his servants sought the King, tirelessly shadowing him from street to street, concealment easy in this forest of buildings to one who had concealed himself in and on the unforested moors of Skraeland.

“But would republicans and other anarchists come here to Bella for to hurt the youngling king?” one of the “witches” asked.

“The Mamma wouldn’t let,” said Emma Katterina, firmly. Then — “That big dump there, is for us, not?”

“Royal and Imperial Bureau of Parks, Forests, and Lands, ah-hah,” said the Chaplain. Marble and granite and an entire range of mansarded turrets; they turned towards it.

The Mamma’s lips moved; she had no need of notebooks. “In Ritchli, eleven paddocks, grazing rights, commuted: cash. In Georgiou, firewood rights, gathering of, commuted: cash. In Apollograd, that’s in Hyper- borea, twelve fields for geese and goats, which they made a park of, ah how the Pappa, now in Paradise, enjoyed for breakfast the goose-grease therefrom: the fees therefor, commuted: cash. Three deer-parks in Pan- nonia and a Hunt-the-Hare there also, commuted: cash. All due this quarter fortnight past, uccage, soccage, copy-hold, frankpledge, assigned Turkish Tributes, mum-mum-, what? One hundred and thirty-five ducats, eleven skilling, thirteen pennies, one half-penny — plus interest — from the big dump, here.” She ignored the vast front steps and headed for a side door at street level.

Inside, one clerk-bookkeeper looking up through the glass half of his office door groaned, “Oh God, here she comes!”

“Her Fatness! What! Have you computed her interest? Do it at once!”

“Too late, too late — besides, she will do it herself anyway — Rise! All rise! Your Titular Majesty! Humbly welcoming, and kissing the hands and feet!”

The Titular Queen of Carinthia (Big Mamma, etc., etc.) paid no attention. To her suite she said, sinking with some relief into an immense and heavy chair kept there for just that purpose, “This quarter, the pensions from this big dump for the lepers are going, to pay for supplying loaves, they shouldn’t their bleeding gums to bruise upon the hard and stale — Writer!” this to the clerk-bookkeeper, “The abacus!” There were at that time in the secluded Hospital of Saint Lazarus, less than one hundred patients; most people in the Triune Monarchy (“. . . fourth- largest Empire in Europe . ..”) scarcely knew there were any, anymore: but the Titular Queen of Carinthia knew every one of them by name, and with each click of the abacus-beads, she baked for them a loaf of bread.

Not feudal dues alone had been commuted; galley-slavery in punish­ment for crime had been commuted: into forced labor at the Royal and Imperial Shipyards (a courtesy plural, there was only one). Indeed, the term “ships’ carpenter” had so much come to mean a convict, that genuine ships’ carpenters termed themselves “maritime woodworkers.” There was indeed talk, emanating no doubt from such sophisticated sources as Vienna, Berlin, Paris, and the American city of Philadelphiapennsylwania; talk that such forced labor was terribly old- fashioned, and that those convicted of offenses against society should be held in special institutions where they might learn to be penitent, and thus, to reform. But for the present, such advanced ideas had yet to penetrate into the legal system of Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania; and burglars and forgers and manslayers not hanged continued to haul and hew and saw and scrape and caulk and paint: and if they declined to do, they were flogged until they ceased to decline. Bruto Alarits had declined . . . for a while . . . but not for a very long while.

It had been two years since he had finished his sentence. For a while he had found employ as a maritime woodworker in a private yard, but his employers had been finicky, objecting to the disappearance of tools and nails, and that had been that. Bruto was by then rather too mature to enter an apprenticeship in the pickpocket line and so had alternated casual labor with casual theft — smash and grab, grab and run — the lot. He was clever enough not to be caught again, but... perhaps he was not so clever as he thought... not enough to be prosperous. Finally he had drifted into a sort of padroneship over lesser, weaker, more stupid thugs, enforcing a sort of organization and system, maintaining a sort of terror over those who did not appreciate the advantages of the system but perforce went along with it. Sometimes he strolled through factory and warehouse districts, accompanied often by his second-in-command, one Pishto-the- Avar, eye cocked for stealables. He would not himself steal; he would assign others. He would find a fence. He would exact commissions. Sometimes he would lounge around the streets.

Sometimes he lounged around the Sunken Square.

To call Pie-Petro’s place “a low dive” was to be not judgemental but exact. The place was not only low in a social sense, it was low in a topographical sense as well, having originally been built at the bottom of a ravine and the ravine largely filled in and another storey built onto the original building ... but the entrance remained where it had first been, and down the several pairs of stairs Bruto now walked in a thoughtful manner. Inside the dive it was dim — what else — and the sole gas-lamp emitted as much smell as light. Petro, sallow, squat, silent, had discovered a trick of business from which he had never seen any reason to depart: when you came into his joint, you had to buy a pie. You could also, if you wished, (and most wished) take your choice of bad beer, bad wine, bad brandy, bad vodka, bad rum — whiskey or gin was not available — the pie was not so bad — not so bad as the other items, anyway. Y ou had your choice of meat or fruit — though not what kind of meat or what kind of fruit. The pies were small and so, for that matter, were the drinks, but as most of Petro* s customers were apt to be greeted elsewhere with the words, “Outside, you,” few of them ever complained. Petro was believed to have done rather well, and to own the leaseholds on several tenement-courts.

In his usual comer a man in an extraordinarily-ripped frock coat was staring into a wine-cup as though engaged in divination. Bruto’s gesture brought wine pouring into the cup, and after the level had gone down again, Bruto spoke.

“Professor. A, like, question.”

“Question me,” the professor said, after a moment.

“On, like, etiquette.” A subject less likely to invite questions in Pie-Petro’s, it would have been hard to find. “Supposing there’s, like, a queen. And she bobs. Who’d she bob to? Huh?”

Slightly readjusting his tom coat, the professor said it would depend. “Could be to anybody. The Patriarch. The Emperor. Depends. A queen could curtsey even to a muck-raker, if he’d just saved her tiny grandson from tumbling off a dock....” The level of the wine went down again, a bit more was added to raise it, not much. “How deep does this queen bob?”

Bruto looked all around the low dive and there was that in his look which made all shun his glance. He then, and most solemnly, performed a curtsey before the professor’s bloodshot eyes.

“That deep, eh?”

“Yeah.”

“Only to a fellow-sovereign. Why —?”

A clumping of boots down the long steps; in came Pishto-the-Avar, drew Bruto slightly aside. “I shadowed’m, Boss. To the Windsor-Lido — ‘King’? There ain’t no kings there. There’s a couple counts there, though; they’re travellinon Scando-Frorish passports, whatever the Hell they are. Huh? Boss?”

But, prior to answering, Boss posed a further question of his own.

“Hey, Professor, what’s it mean if a king is travelling like a count, like?”

The professor gazed once again into his goblet; divined it was empty; was obliged to look up. His face ceased to be vacant, entirely; a look of faint thought came over it. “It means he is travelling incognito, incognito, literally unknown, you know....” His title derived from his having been for a while, long ago, a tutor to the junior page-boys at the Palace; he knew, then, presumably, whereof he spoke. “As, for instance, a sovereign wishes to visit a foreign country, but not in official state. Could be inconvenient both to him or her and to the host nation; therefore he or she employs what is termed a lesser title, as for example the late King of Illyria visited here as Count Hreb, and ” The professor’s voice, in its alcoholic monotone, had gotten lower and lower and slower and slower. It next ceased. Then with a look of, almost, terror, on his filthy face, the professor lurched to his trembly feet and took a tottering step towards the door. He was, to employ a polite term, distrained.

Afterwards, the professor having been made comatose with wine, a further conversation:

“Kidnap a king and hold him for ransom. Why, it’s never been done”

“Sure it has! Didn’t them French capture the old King of Scythia and hold him for ransom, back in them Bonaparte days?”

“Yeah... but the French had a army. We ain’t got the place, we ain’t got the —”

“We ain’t got the strennth.”

“We ain’t got the strennth. Fact. — Still...”

They gazed at each other, eyes gleaming; mouths open, silent.

“This could mean we swing.”

“Yeah . ..” Silence.

“This could mean buckets o’ ducats.”

“Yeah . ..”

Then —

“Only one man could do it. On-ly one”

“Yeah . .. uh, who’d ya mean?”

A hissed-in breath. “Who’d I mean? I mean the Boustremovitch. Who I mean.”

“The Boustremovitch! Yeah. . . . Yeah. Yeah!. . .

The two young men continued their stroll. Bella was certainly not Paris, but it was equally certainly larger than St. Brigidsgarth. And far more cosmopolitan. Here one saw men and women whose cut and style reminded one, at least, of Paris — or, at any rate, Brussels. And here were yeoman farmers in the boots and baggy britches of the Gothic Highlands, there a pair of Lowland Hussars in black shakoes, a group of drovers in the characteristic embroidered vests of Poposhki-Georgiou, Mountain Tsigane women in gaudy Bounces, River Tartars wearing caftans of many colors, barge-sailors with rings in dirty ears, Avars in low-crowned hats with narrow brims and embroidered bands .. .

“— and,” Count Calmar enquired, “besides your duties as equerry, of course, what do you do?”

The young cornet chuckled. “ ‘Do’? Why should I ‘do’ anything? Well, well, you must excuse my levity. My estates are not vast, but at least they are not entailed. I am such a younger son of such a younger son of a cadet branch that what lands came to me were not thought worth tying up; I may sell them if I wish, but there is no hurry. What would I do with the money? Wastrel it away in France? I think not. But... why... when I am not on duty for the Palace? Well, I hunt a little, I Fish a little; very few people of our class do fish here, but I picked it up in England. I have an uncle with an English wife and have spent many summers there; God save us from the winters!”

Magnus said, a touch of reproof, a touch of gloom, in his voice, “The winters of England are tropical in comparison to our Far-Northwestern winters. We have snow instead of rain. And so. And also —?”

Also Cornet Eszterhazy played cards and billiards. He had a horse— sometimes two. He visited the music halls and, and in season, the opera. Now and then he visited the ladies. No, there was no one lady. “I’m afraid it sounds like a rather useless life.”

Magnus said it sounded like a rather delightful life. “Everywhere I go at home some minister or chancellor is thrusting papers at me; och! God! Those eternal papers! And not just one set of them. Two! One for each kingdom. Oh why did my thrice-re moved grandfather marry my thrice-. removed grandmother! ‘To unite adjacent kingdoms,’ you will say. ‘And the House of Olaus-Olaus-Astridson with that of Katzenelenbogen-Ulf- and-Olaus.’ Well, the Houses are united. But the kingdoms, not. Always, from the Frores, some new demand. Always. Always. The Scands bother me quite enough, ‘Sire, you must not so often get drunk’ — why not? If I am sober for the ceremonies, what difference, the rest of the time? ‘Sire, you must put on a different uniform,’ ‘Sire, you must attend for this occasion, for that, you must get up,’ ‘Sire, you must not do that, Sire, you must do this, Sire, you cannot eat with people of a lower class, Sire’ — och! God! So stiff, the Scands! The Scands, so stuffy!” He stopped and shook his head so rapidly that his English-style cap almost fell off; he adjusted it so that it rested more securely on his long, blond hair.

“But the Frores! The Frores! Look: an easier way of collecting taxes: the Frores don’t want it. A better method of arranging the Army, the Navy: the Frores don’t want it. Such a simple method of satisfying the demands for free education: the Frores are not satisfied at all. Always dour, always scowly, always standoffish; the Borg uk Borg said a good word once: said, ‘The Frores always fight to drift upstream.’ Now, why, my dear new friend? Why?”

His dear new friend stroked a moustache like corn-silk — was thoughtful indeed.

“Why?”

“Well. . . Count Calmar ... it has been my experience that... no people, really, wants to be governed by another people, whether it is governed ill or governed well.”

Magnus muttered that the Frores really did not want to be governed at all. Then the mutter died away. Then he half-turned. “You spoke of visiting the ladies. Where... may one ask... as a visitor... are the ladies whom one may visit? Not one of those ‘nice, quiet places, like a boardinghouse for parsons’ widows. I have in my mind Turkish Gypsy girls with wild, black manes, and for a music there would be drums and concertinas and timbrels, and a wine as red as ox-blood.... Eh?”

The Slovatchkoes, third-most numerous (after the Goths and Avars) of the peoples of Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania, were divided in their opinion of the Brigand Boustremovitch. Some still admired their old image of him. Some no longer did so. Some had never admired him at all. Their patriotic painter, Karpustanko, had depicted him with large and lustrous eyes, a heroic stance, and vast curly mustachioes worthy of a bashi-bazouk, but time had taken toll. The large eyes were now less lustrous than bloodshot, the stance had declined into bowed legs and a dropped chest, and the mustachioes were limp and greyed. Furthermore, he who had once had his nest in a cave whence he preyed upon Turks and Tartars — and, incidentally, upon anyone else who passed by and had not purchased protection — now dwelt in a decayed once-palace in a nearslum section of Bella, and had done so ever since giving his parole and obtaining, with Imperial reluctancy, the Imperial pardon. Did he pass his days reading Boethius The Consolations of Philosophy? No he did not; he had never heard of Boethius, and, save for a faltering and seldom exercised acquaintance with the big red rubrics in the mass-book, the Brigand Boustremovitch could not read. The Secret Police (uniform: regulation sky-blue trousers, with a crimson tunic) spasmodically reminded the Ministry of Justice that “the reformed Brigand, Boustremovitch,” had a finger (seven or eight fingers) in criminal conspiracies of several sorts, kindly see attached document. The Ministry of Justice eventually invariably instructed the Secret Police to “continue its most valuable reports, Faithfully theirs, [squiggle].” Translation: “We would rather have him in Bella collecting an illegal tax on radish-wagons (for example), than back in the Glagolitic Alps mounting mounted irregulars. Again.” Gradually the Secret Police had grown bored. And so had the Brigand Boustremovitch. Often he had thought, wistfully, of breaking his parole and absquatulating for, say, Bulgaria, whence he would harry the Greeks. Or the Turks.

But the years like great black oxen trod the earth, and he had done nothing.

Ignats Louis —

Ignats Louis, groaning softly from a very recently returned pain to which he had long, at irregular intervals, been a martyr, stood studying an immense sheet of parchment on a table before him. Enter his Prime Minister.

“Your Royal and Imperial Majesty may perhaps wish to ride the Whitey horse this afternoon.”

“No he doesn’t perhaps either. Oh God, I am being punished for my sins!”

“But the people will expect it, your —”

“The people must bear the disappointment, oh Holy Souls in Purga—”

“But I have taken the liberty of having him saddled, Your —”

“Then take the liberty of riding him yourself. Oh. Oh. OH!”

“My consitutional advice —”

“Stuff your constitutional advice! I shan’t leave the premises — except of course to visit the dear little kiddies in the ’spital-house as usual —”

The First Minister still lingering and seeming about to press further, the Presence, bifurcated beard bristling with rage, addressed to him the following words, of perhaps dubious constitutional aspect: “Out you jumped-up burgomaster! You hangman morphadite and whoreson hostler: OUT!”

The First Minister, thinking enviously of Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Disraeli, bowed deeply and abjectly, and got OUT. Ignats Louis, with a groan and a whimper, returned his attention to the chart on the table. Gradually his moans ceased. Attention to his family tree never failed to soothe him. His finger fondly traced the Lineage in all its ramification, including those marked (morganatic), (illegitimate), (non compos mentis), and — none the less Royal, none the less Imperial — (insane). So.

Maurits Louis m Matilda Gertrude. So. Ignats Salvador m Amelia Carolina. Quite correct. So he had. Salvador Ignats. Theresa Matilda. Hmm. Well, he had not exactly married her, Salvador Ignats, but he certainly would have if he had not already had two living wives in the dungeons; a stickler for the canon law if there ever was one, Salvador Ignats.

All these monarchs had had their little idiosyncrasies, God bless them. Maurits Louis changed his uniform four or five times a day, but could never be persuaded to change his underwear at all; Ignats Salvador changed his underwear constantly and his trousers fairly often, but wore the same waistcoat and jacket months on end. Maximillian III Ignats considered it his constitutional duty to ride round Bella throwing largesse of, so he thought, gold coins to the throngs; actually his purse was kept purposefully filled with newly-minted extra-heavy copperka constantly coined for the purpose. Salvador Ignats spent most of his time in churches — eikons he could not learn to love — “Mamma, why are there so many ugly saints?” was his, perhaps, most well-known theological comment — but he had an absolute passion for the votive paintings which crammed the crumbling, smelly chapels of the Old Town. His favorite was said to be the so-called Pathetic Exemplum of Makushushka Daughter of the Master Chimneysweeper Brut sc hBeing Saved from a Sinking Rowboat by the Personal Intercession of the Archangel Angelo [the Prince-Archbishop of Bella, for roundly insisting that there was no Archangel Angelo, was forever after referred to by Salvador Ignats as “that freemason”] Limned in Minimally 37 Colors by the Master Limner-Painter Porushko, Believing without Cavil in the Faith which Was Given to the Saints. Lucky, lucky Porushko! When votive painting had been scarce, he had done cigar-box covers; now he was enabled by Royal and Imperial patronage to spend six years and six months depicting — of course in advance! — the deathbed of Salvador Ignats: with its many, many figures of men and of women and of angels. Did it not remind one of the Greco’s Burial of Count ?

Not very much.

Presently Ignats Louis rang a bell, the bell was answered by a Gentleman-in-Waiting, a middle-aged nobleman of many quarterings; “Listen, sonny,” said the Presence, “tell the Grand Almoner that today for my gifts to the sick kiddies besides the posies let’s have some chewy sweetmeats and some of the teeny-tiny toys, hey?”

“Certainly, Sire.”

“And, oh, sonny?”

“Yes, Sire?”

The Presence went deep in thought. “Say. Sonny. Where is it, a place called something like . . . ah . . . Frorela . . . maybe . . . ?”

The Gentleman-in-Waiting was at no loss for words. “I could go look it up in the Postal Gazette, Sire.”

The Presence, regarding this as something akin to brilliance, beamed. Nodded. The Gentleman-in-Waiting began to withdraw. Paused. “Sire. My humble obedience: Where?”

As it happened, the Brigand Boustremovitch had for some while been planning an action involving a recusant boss-fishmonger unwilling to pay his racket-assessments in full and on time. On hearing the proposal of Bruto and of Pishto-the-Avar, the Brigand immediately saw how neatly his planned action would fit, and, placing two fingers into his mouth, gave a brief whistle to summon his henchmen. The negligent fish-dealer could wait... or, likelier, be entirely forgotten, in view of what was now to be a great change of scene for Boustromovitch: with buckets of ducats he would never need to bother with kettles of fish again — he might even skip, or skip through, Bulgaria, and head thence into Turkey-in-Europe (or, for that matter, -in-Asia), turn his coat and swear fealty to the Sultan and purchase the rule of a sanjak, or a pashalik like Little Byzantia, the southernmost semi-province of the Empire. In his suddenly-quickened mind he saw himself the founder of a dynasty, a new khedive, a new Obrenovitch or Karageorgevitch. . . .

“Yes, Brigand,” the henchmen said. “Sure, Brigand! That’s the way we’ll do it, Brigand!”

“— and you, Vallackavo, go muck out the secret cell in the basement, and toss some clean straw into it —”

“Sorry, Brigand, the ceiling’s already fall in on the secret cell in the basement.”

“Then we’ll use the one up in the wall!”

No one had seen the Boustremovitch so excited since the time he had burned the Tartar’s toes; and when he shouted to them to Get Moving now!, they Got.

Count Magnus Calmar and Cornet Engelbert Eszterhazy absently observed a roughly-dressed fellow sitting in a doorway holding an empty bowl in his lap: propped against his body an equally-roughly-lettered sign bearing the initials of the words, Mute. Blind. Deaf. Mercy: equally absently dropped coins in it: continued their lighthearted conversation.

“You are sure that you would not rather go to Miss Betty’s?”

“I am quite sure.”

“Very well, then. I shall speak to my senior colleague, Lieutenant Knoebelhoffer, who is in the Equerries’ Room accounted rather knowl­edgeable on Gypsy dances and dancers; perhaps we may be able to arrange it for, say, later this evening — perhaps only tomorrow.”

“The sooner the better.”

“Agreed. Ah. By the way. Ahem. As we continue our educational walk,” they moved on, “you will observe to the left and across the street a rather smart new building which is the R.-I. Office of Commercial Statistics. Ahem.”

Magnus made a wry mouth. Then he gaped. Then he smiled a rather rusty smile. “Allow me to make a note of that... Baron Borg uk Borg will be pleased. Hm. I suppose they must have lots of statistics about stock­fish.” He gave a faint sigh. They both moved forward to allow a train of six ox-carts laden with sacks of wheat to pass on along to Umlaut’s Mills from the Great Grain Dock, where they had been unladen off barges.

Eszterhazy said, “You produce a great deal of stockfish, your countries, I mean; do you not?”

Magnus gave a heavy sigh, pressed his hand to his brow. “Och, God! Yes! We catch fish and we dry fish and we catch it and we dry it and... You see: Frore stockfish is cheaper, Scand stockfish is better, and so each country feels justified in demanding regulation against the other: quotas, imposts, duties — och, God! And of course neither one wishes to allow the demands of the other. We catch it and we dry it and we boil it and we eat it and we eat it and sometimes we eat it with hot mutton-fat and sometimes without and we have still more of it than we can eat and more of it than we can export.... And so, lacking the money to import wheat, often we ... the people, I mean... are sometimes obliged to go without bread —” And he sighed, yet again, heavily.

Eszterhazy gave a sympathetic nod; sympathetic, yet abstracted. The Count Calmar had perhaps told him more about stockfish than he wished to know. The last of the heavy-laden ox-wagons had finally gone by, leaving behind a golden trail of grain spilled from some torn sack, which, as no one bothered to gather it up, the sparrows of the city had now begun to feed upon. Struck by some sudden and inchoate thought, he addressed himself to a woman of the people passing by with her shopping basket — “Excuse me, Mother, but what does stockfish cost these days?”

“Too much!” she snapped. “— when we can git it, that is! Thank God that bread stays cheap.”

Magnus’s face had assumed once more that familiar vacant, almost rough stare. “My dear Engelbert, I want a drink,” he said. “How does one say in your language, ‘glog’? Or, for that matter: ‘shnops’?”

Engelbert Eszterhazy noted — and reported — that they were quite near his Club; they at that moment passing in front of the smart new building, he stepped forward and bowed politely to a man who had just descended the steps with a portfolio under his arm. “Pray forgive my impudence, my dear Herra Chiefstatisticscouncillor, but —”

The man, under the double influence of being addressed by a title a full two grades higher than his actual one, and by someone with an immensely upper-class accent, stretched himself to his full height, puffed his chest, and said, “Command me.”

“We were wondering ... at the Palace ...” The man’s eyes began to pop. “. . . if there were any known reason why the commerce and trade between Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania and Far Northwestern Europe is not greater than it is. Surely my dear Herra you will know, eh?”

The chief (merely) clerk was obliged to swallow. Twice. “The reason is, my dear ... my dear ...”

“The Cornet Engelbert Eszterhazy for to serve God, the Emperor, and my lord Chief Statisticscouncillor.” He handed his card.

“The reason is one of the economics of geography, a matter to which I, heh-hem, have paid especial attention. To ship, let us say —”

“Let us say .. . oh .. . grain . .. wheat.. . just for instance.”

To ship grain (for example, wheat) overland through Russia was to observe first-hand that it could be conveyed faster by a Vloxfellow with a wheelbarrow. Via water? Down the Ister to the Danube and thence to the Black Sea, into the Mediterranean, up the Atlantic — one sees the problem? Ideally, such a trade should pass by railroad via a direct northern route into Austria-Hungary, and thence — “Why not?” — Because, why not, there was no direct northern route. Such a route would needs pass through the demesnes of the Titular Majesty of Carinthia, and the Titular Majesty of Carinthia refused to allow it on the grounds that all steam engineers were Scotchmen, and all Scotchmen were heretics and had cut off the head of the piously Catholic Virgin Queen Victoria. Furthermore, the smoke of the locomotives would smutch her new-washed laundry....

There being, alas, no glog available at the Club, the two young men had a shnops instead. They had a second shnops. Instead. Eventually and once again they parted in the Grand Lobby of the Windsor-Lido: at any event “Engli” would report back as soon as he could. In an excellent mood, the Count Calmar entered his suite and was about to open the door of the parlor when he noted that, for one thing, it was already open, and, for another, that the room behind it was not unoccupied.

“He is already late,” said the dry, grim voice of the Baron Borg uk Borg; it was not even an angry or even an annoyed voice. It was only — as always — a disapproving voice. “I had planned to read him this very short minute I have written, it is only ten pages, on the present state of the Triune Monarchy. But he is already late.” The scratch of a pen indicated the presence of the industrious Kopperkupp.

Magnus knew he could not, simply could not, enter and sit still for a ten-page minute; he tiptoed out and, observing in the small private lobby a pair of neatly-furled umbrellas, took one and put it under his arm. He could have given no reason why, so perhaps the two glasses of shnops would have to serve as reason.

He had not gone very far, nor did he have any clear idea where he was going, when a rather roughly-dressed man separated himself from a knot of workingmen doing no particular work, and approached. That this fellow bore a very close likeness to the beggarman blind and mute and deaf to whom he had given alms not long ago did not occur to him; he did not remember having given alms. And the man came very close and said, “Hey, meester, pssst! You like see Turkish Gypsy dancing-girl?”

Later: “Fiii! Eeyoo! This stuff stinks,” said the “beggarman,” looking around.

“Otto of roses is one thing,” said Pishto-the-Avar. “And chloroform’s another.”

The Skraeling, when he hunts the walrus on the ice, attempts to convince the walrus that he, the Skraeling, is another walrus, pulling himself along on his elbows as he lies full-length stretched-out. To employ this same tactic in the streets of a large city requires some change of details, but the principle remained sufficiently the same so that Eeiiuullaalaa (a.k.a. “Ole Skraelandi,” “Ole Frori”) was not intercepted. He could not read what was painted on the side of the wagon into which his Sovereign had been swiftly thrust, but his nose told him it was strongly associated with fish ... and not stockfish, either ... it went off as rapidly as a fish-wagon could possibly go without arousing suspicion. He walked after it until it turned a comer; then he ran, loped, or trotted; to one who had chased reindeer, a fishwagon was nothing. When he got in sight of it again, he walked again; if it was not in sight he followed its trail of scent until it came in sight. Those who saw and noticed (not the same thing at all) perhaps docketed him as a quarter-cast Tartar in a slightly odd cap; but this was no reason for stopping him. And, in fact, no one did stop him.

He was not even thinking of the possibility that he might eventually become winded when he saw a gate open in a high wall, the wagon roll and rattle inside, the gate close. Nearby to where he stopped was a tree, a mulberry, a rather old and rather tall one. In Skraeland grew no mulberry trees, for in Skraeland grew few trees at all, but the Skrae shamans knew about trees nonetheless, and one of the things they said about them was, “Where there are no crags, eagles dwell in trees.” From within the walls wherein his unfortunate Ruler was now captive came, subdued by distance, some shrill whistles; these (the Brigand Boustremovitch was giving orders to his henchmen) — plus that just-remembered saying, reminded him of what he had to do. The toom-toom he had, as always, with him; but the toom-toom he had not now here with him: it was within its flat case, packed within his box at the hotel. But he had the other thing-of-power with him, and so now he thrust his hand into his bosom and he drew it out. It was wrapped in the skin of an entirely-black ermine tail, worn smooth and darkened by age; the thing-of-power had not been new when the first Court Shaman brought it with him first to Frorigarth and then to S’Brigidsgarth, and no one now remembered the name of the (pre-missionary, entirely pagan) shaman who fashioned it from the wing-bone of the large male eagle he had captured and — after a well-sung apology — killed. Ole chanted the Beginning Chant as the Beginning Chant was always sung.

Then he placed the whistle in his mouth, there as high in the old tree as it was prudent to climb, and began, in quick, sharp bursts, to blow it.

He did not know to whom he was whistling: to whom, in the realm below, his shrill cry for help was addressed; mainly he had in mind the spirits of the upper and the lower air. Partly — though not with much hope — he thought that perhaps there might be shamans here in this distant city or not very far from it... if not precisely fellow shamans then at least a one or two with some similar knowledge and who, recognizing the burden of his shrill cry, could come — somehow — to his aid. And besides: what else had he to do? And what else could he do?

Having left the Bureau of Parks, Forests, and Lands, Emma Katterina and her suite (popularly denominated as “three witches and a priest”) headed outward for the Office of the Privy Purse, there to collect yet another batch of “pensions”; some of them in her own right, and some of them as widow of the very long-late Margrave of the Ister, Ignats Louis’s elder half-brother. It had been a tangled Succession-to-the-Throne; and, rather than tangle it further still, the Royal and Imperial Family had preferred to pay. And pay. And pay. It did not, as such things were recokoned, pay much; but — who had known the woman would live so long? — if was still paying! The five eventually reached the Five Points, where the major routes through the city disembogued, were obliged to detour along the left side of the road because navvies laying gas-pipes had deeply trenched the east side. Emma Katterina had been waddling wearilessly along; suddenly she stopped, an odd expression on her face. The Baroness Bix and Bix, one of her Ladies in Waiting, asked, a trifle anxiously, “What, The Mamma?”

The Titular Queen of Carinthia was at no loss. “What, you can’t hear? What, your ears are stopped with wax and dirt and infidelity? The Satan is fifing!” And, in a sudden second of silence, it seemed to them that, lo! the Satan was fifing! Had they, the old woman and her chaplain and her three handmatrons, at that moment found themselves in some sort of suddenly constructed sound-trap, a ... as it were . . . nexus, where the high thin notes which came from the shaman’s eagle’s wing whistle were being driven down and along by currents of wind and air and flowed, however briefly, there and thither . . . and thither and there only? However briefly?

Without more to-do, Emma Katerina knelt on the road-bed and, taking out her rosary, began to pray. And so, without more to-do, her Chaplain and her Ladies knelt on the roadbed and, taking out their rosaries, began to pray. Six fish-wives who had been to the Great Market to replenish their wares, on seeing this, set down their baskets and, ceasing to cry, “Fresh! Fresh! A penny off a penny off!” knelt on the roadbed and, taking out their rosaries, began to pray. Seven superannuated housewives who had been on their way to the nearby Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius, knelt on the roadbed, took out their rosaries and began to pray. Eight coal-heavers coming along asked themselves what was going on here, and, reminding one another that it was Lent, knelt (rather rustily) upon the roadbed, and, after patting their pockets (“Got it here some where for sure — ah! Knew I’d got it!”), took out their rosaries and began to pray. The new-dug ditch was too broad to be leaped, and inside of three minutes the entire Five Points had become impassable. And while the constantly increasing throng knelt reciting endless rosaries (or, in the case of those of Other Denominations, the doxologies in Old High Hyperborean, Ancient Avar, Medieval Slovatchko, Reformed Romanou, and other liturgical languages of the polyglot Empire), the staff of SS. Cyril and Methodius ordered the churchbells to be rung — thus alerted, so did those of the not-quite-so- nearby Churches of St. Gleb, St. Boris, St. Vladimir, Holy Affliction, St. Nicholas of Myra, St. Peter in Chains, St. Catherine the Martyr, SS. Cosmo and Damian Healing the Sick Without Charge... the sounds of their bells spread like ripples. While all this was going on, steam-trams, horse-cars, omnibuses, wagons, private carriages, pedestrians, all piled up behind each other, clogging the streets as far as the Swing Bridge, and farther enough to prevent it from swinging, thus tying up the traffic on the Little Ister and even the Ister, and thus — also — preventing the Late Lunchtime Freight from passing across Stanislavs Street, thus tying up rail traffic as far away as Budapest and Belgrade. . . .

Three men in a fruit and vegetable wagon asked each other what was going on? They could fathom out no answer. Said one, “Well, whatever, we can’t get through here and we must be at the Palace Children’s Infirmary on time; turn at the right —” “Just as impassable! The devil!” “Keep on and turn at the next left —” “No use! What —?” “Whip up and head for Garlicstringer’s Gulley!” They lashed the horse. They pressed on. And on. But ever they seemed pressed farther and farther from the way they would go, and anxiously they scanned the faces of the church-tower clocks, and, with growing concern, compared their watches.

Three charcoal-burners had come down from the White Mountain to sing for money in the streets according to old-time custom, clad in shaggy goatskins: one with a timbrel, and one with a drum, and one with a rattle and a bell; the intention being to collect enough money to have a good old drunk at the end of Lent before heading back up-hill with what might be left — said, suddenly, one to the other, of a sudden looking up: “Say, brother, ain’t that a eagle?”

“A course that be a eagle, brother! That ain’t no magpie!”

“Makes a man feel at home . . . almost...”

“Say, we ain’t corned hear to watch birds, there’s a bunch a people up ahead, let’s give’m four or five verses of By the Limpid Forest Pool See the Chaste Gertruda Bathing Bare-ass

By and by the Police traced the bottle to the neck.

No one of course dared order Emma Katterina to arise, but attempts were made to order her Ladies and her Chaplain: “Up with you,

Madame. Up, Father, up! Get up, Lady — now!” Lips and fingers continued moving, eyes swung to the Royal Mistress. Her reply was brief. “The Mamma wouldn’t let,” said she.

The Countess Critz could not restrain a word of triumph to the baffled Police official; “Away, Antichrist!” she cried.

Hers was a very piercing voice.

The word spread to and through the superstitious and ever-turbulent South Ward that “Big Katinka was a-keeping Antichrist at bay,” whereat the locksmen in the Grand, the Royal, and the Little Canals downed levers as one, thus blocking canal traffic; with repercussions all the way to ’s Gravenhage and Rostov-on-Don; and the stokers in the R.- and I.- Central Steam Plant raked out the fires under their boilers and sounded the Great Alarm Whistle to blow off all the steam. Then they pissed on the embers to put them all quite out. And then they trooped along to join the throng.

“This bloody Gulley is bloody unpaved!” one of the men in the wagon cried. “Slow down, slow down, slow —”

“We haven’t the time,” said another, panting, “the clock in the Work is set and no one can break the seal without setting it off — oh God! Oh God!”

Still loyal to his faith in something which could not be proven, namely the nonexistence of Deity, another said, sweaty face gleaming, “There is no God.”

“Well, I bloody well believe that! Look, look! The next through street is packed and blocked! Oh God!”

“Oh God!”

Farther away. The sacristan of the Uniate Hyperboreans’ Procathedral, who had in recent years grown as cracked as his peal of bells, on hearing of the attempted approach of Antichrist, ran wildly up into his belfry and pealed them all. The Uniate Hyperboreans’ Procathedral lay in the East Ward, whither the confusion had yet in its full form to spread, and where in consequence the trams were still running. The tram- switchmen in the East Ward, however, by the rankest kind of nepotism, were Uniate Hyperboreans every-man-jack of them; no sooner had the tinny tintinnabulation of “their” bells rung out than, taking it for a sign, or at least a signal, they leapt from their hutches and threw their switches. Thirty-three trams were more than sufficient to block Gumbarr Street as it crossed the Avenue Anna Margerita; whereat, puzzled beyond patience as to what was going on, the Royal and Imperial Telegrapher on duty in the Gumbarr St. office tapped along an open wire the query — perhaps unfortunately couched in the form of a proverbial question — The Turks have entered Vienna? It was certainly unfortunate that, having given up spirituous beverage for Lent, his fingers suddenly trembled so that he could not at once add, Interrogation Point... for at once all the Receiving Telegraphers still on the wire ran to the doors of their offices and shouted at the tops of their lungs, “Turks have entered Vienna!“

The duty of Great Bell Ringer at the Old Tower of the Old Cathedral had traditionally been filled by the largest galley-slave on the Ister, it being assumed that only such labors could develop backs and arms to toll Great Gudzinkas, as the immense Bell (cast in Moscow during the reign of Anna and brought hither at vast expense) was called. Named after Algirdas Gudzinkas, the great Lithuanian metallurgist, engineer, and friend of Dr. Swedenborg, it had last been officially rung in celebration of a report that Bonaparte had been killed by an elephant whilst crossing the Alps (this report turned out to have been false). It had last been actually rung when Mazzimilian the Mad had — briefly — regained his sanity: an act so totally impermissible that Authority had ever since steadfastly denied that it had been rung at all.

It was long since there were galley-slaves. The current Great Bell Ringer was a convicted murderer on ticket-of-leave, one Gronka Grimka, called (and for very good reason) the Slovatchko Giant. He was sitting, as usual, scowling in his kennel and smoking the vile black tobacco known as Death-to-the-Vlox, when the Archbishop’s cook ran hysterically across the yard, waving her apron and ululating as she ran.

“Why are you sitting there, by-blow of a hobgoblin?” she howled. “Haven’t you heard? The Turks have entered Bella! Ring the Big Bell!“

Ordinarily Gronka Grimka would not have cared if the Turks had entered Heaven or Hell, let alone Bella, which he despised; but it was fixed tradition that “whosoever got to ring Great Gudzinkas would receive the Most Gracious Pardon, 17 1/2 pieces of gold, a barrel of the best good goose-grease, and a double-pension, too.” He rose to his feet rather like the rising of the Nile, and, first crossing himself and then spitting on his immense and horny palms, muttered his national imprecation of “Bugger the Bulgars,” and climbed up into the belfry without delay. The immense engine there moved slowly, but by no means silently. The sound of the turning of the huge iron wheels over which the cable-thick bell-ropes passed, presently rumbled through the air, causing all the servants still on their feet within a square mile to fall on their knees, under the impression that they were hearing “Satan’s chariots.” And soon the dull, clamorous boom-boom . . . boom-boom ... of Great Gudzinkas himself sounded throughout almost the whole city.

There was an ancient piece of ordnance, a veteran, in fact, of the French crossing of the Ister, situated on the Old High Rampart; it was of course by now purely ornamental, but Ignats Maurits had ordered it be kept charged. The order had never, somehow, been rescinded: informal motto of the R. & I. Artillery: “Follow an order even if it falls off a cliff.” Nevertheless, a certain common sense was employed in regard to the Old French Gun, to wit, “Under no circumstance is the Old French Gun to be fired except at the order of the direct superior officer, or the King- Emperor Himself if there present, or at the sounding of the Great Big Bell.” And at the sounding of the Great Big Bell, Cannonry-Corporal Moomkotch performed a neat about-face, bringing his knee up to his belt-level, and down again, stamp, produced a large wooden sulfur- match from his pocket, struck it on his boot-sole, and calmly touched it to the touch-hole of the Old French Gun. It went off with an immense boom! The ball whizzed high, dropped low, struck very near a certain large old mulberry tree, skimmed along the street like a giant bowling- ball, and buried itself in the wall of a mouldering old palace — to the pleasure of a wandering Swiss street photographer who, having set up his equipment, had just then taken a test shot.

“They have us in range!” cried the Brigand Boustremovitch.

“That’s what all the noise is about!” cried a henchman.

“Better beat it, Boss,” advised another.

“We will sell our lives dearly!” cried the one-time terror of the Glagolitic Alps.

In the secret cell in the upper wall, Magnus sat up on his straw.

“What was that?” he cried. He had an absolutely terrible taste in his mouth.

Cornet Eszterhazy, having retrieved his horse from the livery stable where he had left it, the better to assist the Count Calmar stretch his train-trip-rusted legs, cantered along towards the Palace, his mind pleasantly at ease as usual. Now and then something beckoned to the corner of his eye ... a quaint old shop, weather-worn sign, Bookbinder, Old Books for Sale, but who would wish to dismount and rummage among old books? Or a mountebank bound in chains from which, when sufficient small coins were produced, would emerge, straining and groaning, or some drunken wretch lying half in the road, or... He turned the horse and cantered back; what else had caught his eye he was not quite aware, but there was some pressing thought to go back and see... where had it been? He looked to right and left; presently — sure enough! Halfway up the next, half-empty block, he saw something lying in the road; thither he went to get it.

If it were not the very same English cap which Magnus had been wearing not long before, then it was its twin; and as not that many people in Bella would have had an English cap, very likely it was indeed the same: how came it there?

The drunken wretch in the gutter had pulled himself out of it and was now propped against a lamp-post; he addressed Eszterhazy.

“It fell out of a wagon, like, my lord —”

“When? What wagon? Who —”

“A fish-wagon. Come rattling along and knock me right over; help a poor veteran of the Wendish Wars, my lord; no friends at Headquarters and so hence no pension; to buy a nibble of bread, my lord?”

“A noggin of rum would be more like it —”

“Well, there’s that, my lord. There’s that. ‘Man liveth not by bread alone,’ as the Scripture tell us. Thank you, my lord! Thank you!”

The cornet bethought him a moment, trotting back to the broader street. The cap had fallen out of a wagon. Why had “Count Calmar,” or “Count Calmar’s” cap, been inside a wagon? A fish-wagon? On the spur of the moment, he turned and headed back to the Grand Hotel Windsor-Lido. And there in the grand lobby he saw the Baron Borg uk Borg, literally wringing his hands.

“Cornet! Cornet! There’s a report that His Maj — that Count Calmar — he was late, he was late, he did not in fact return — that he was seen being attacked and forced into a fish-wagon! A fish-wagon! The King of Scandia and Froreland! Not alone the possible danger to the poor young man, young and impetuous though he sometimes is — and heedless — it is only the Crown which keeps the Two Kingdoms together — it is nothing that I shall surely be forced to resign and that they will send me to be a petty postmaster at some Skrae trading-post on the Arctic Ocean —”

“Is this his cap?”

The courtier seized it, sniffed it, turned it partly inside out. “Essence of Lilac, his very hair-tonic; and look! Look! The label!”

GOUSTAW GOUSTAWSON HABERDASHER, S’BRIG.

“Then immediately we must notify your Minister and the Police.”

The Baron moved hand and face in a slight gesture of deep despair. “I have already despatched messengers to both, but — I don’t at all understand — they say there is some disturbance in the central section of the city and that the messengers may have some difficulty getting through to —”

The suave and practiced smile on the glossy face of the assistant manager vanished at Eszterhazy’s peremptory manner. “Yes, of course, Cornet, the Grand Hotel Windsor-Lido does have a private contract telegraph office, just next the cashier’s . . . but there seems to be some trouble on the line, and I am afraid that —”

A privy councillor walked by, curling his large moustache and conveying on his arm a handsome younger woman who, whoever she was, was certainly not the frow privy councillor; he raised his eyebrows in acknowledgement of the assistant manager’s sycophantic smile; again the smile vanished abruptly.

“This foreign milord, Baron Borg, is on an important mission; you will go with him and see that a constant attempt is made to get his telegrams through and you will remain with him until then or even longer if he asks you. We would hate to commandeer this place.” Thus spake Cornet Eszterhazy.

With a word or two and a salute, he left, walking rather rapidly to the alley where the horse waited for him. Yet, upset as he was, he could not but laugh a little as he recalled his own brash words.

We!

He quickly remounted his horse, and, looking up as he did so, he saw, flying rather low overhead, an eagle . . . and another eagle . . . and another .. . and another ... and another .. . and . ..

The Turkish Legate in Bella at that time was Selim Ghazi Effendi, commonly called “Grizzly Pasha,” who had been exiled from Paris for gross peculation and other high misdemeanors; and now spent his days and his nights stupefied with opium, which he smoked (mingled with Latakia and Makedonia and Otto de Rose) in his huge mother-of-pearl- inlaid hookah. Now, as the Great Big Bell boomed on, and he vaguely heard the sole sound which filled the sky, he looked from a dream which he saw very clearly in his charcoal brazier of the Blessed Houri dancing in Paradise ... a place which he was pleased but not surprised to observe very much resembled his former villa near Neuilly. He said, “Mmmuhhh?”

The Legation’s kawas appeared at his elbow. “Shadow of the Shadow of God,” the kawas said, “the giaours are saying that the Troops of the Faithful are at the portals of this stinking city.”

Grizzly Pasha said. “ Mmmuhhh ...”

By and by he gestured. “At once, Shadow of the Shadow of God,” the kawas said.

Presently the rather lop-sided coach which, once a year, the Legate was roused to ride to the Exchequer, where a token rent for Little Byzantia was paid over to him for transmittal to Constantinople — the rest being more crisply sent on via Coutt’s Bank — the coach, accompanied by five gaunt and elderly Kurd lancers (mounted upon five equally elderly and gaunt horses, and looking like a quincunx of quixotes); the coach rolled out of the grounds of the Legation and into the East Ward ...

Most of the telegraphers having left their keys to go home and protect their families, the police had resorted to the Army heliograph; this device (aided by telescope) now flashed the news that Turkish troops have been seen in the east ward; the sugar, butter, and flour dealers at once doubled their prices and prepared to barricade their premises.

It was in the mind of the Pasha merely to indicate that the building they were approaching was to be appropriated for the benefit of his younger brother; what he said, however, was “Mmm ...” and then, his tongue suddenly clearing somewhat, “That one —” The coach turned in the carriage-path, rolled up to the porte-cochere; stopped. The Pasha promptly dozed off. The Bulgarian Minister was playing backgammon with the wife of the Bulgarian First Secretary, when a startled servant informed him that the Turkish Legate had arrived.

“Bozhemoie, what does that impotent old paederast want here?” he asked. But under the porte-cochere he said, “Altesse, Altesse, mille fois bienvenu!”

“The keys, Giaour, ” said Grizzly Pasha. And paused.

“The keys, Your Highness? At once. Certainly. Which keys?”

Another pause. The Pasha had after all been in many cities; if he were not immediately sure which one he was in now, the doubt must be forgiven him.

Yet another pause. “The keys ... the keys to Belgrade, Giaour, ” said Grizzly Pasha. “Mmmuhh. . . .”

The Bulgarian Minister, who was a Bulgarian, was perplexed; the Bulgarian First Secretary, who was an Armenian, was not. In less than a minute he had returned with the largest keys available (they were those of the potting-shed, big and brass and bright), reposing on the red plush cushion which usually served for the repose of his wife’s pet poodle. “Avors, void, Altesse, les clefs a Belgrade, avec grande submission“ he said, offering them up. What, after all (his manner enquired) was Belgrade to him, or he to Belgrade?

Grizzly Pasha accepted and dropped them negligently in his lap, whence they slipped unnoticed to the carriage floor. Then he blinked. Then he said, “Three days looting for the troops.” Then he saw a plate, hastily prepared with bread and salt, also being thrust into his hands. “Oh, very well, then,” he conceded, in a disappointed tone. “We spare your lives, and your churches need not become mosques, either. But,” he licked his dry mouth with a dryer tongue, frowned; “Ah yes! A hundred thousand pieces of gold, a hundred pretty boys — fat, mind you, very, very fat! A glass of quince sorbet, and a dancing-girl (also fat). At once, getir!”

The sorbet, at least, was quickly brought. And then, to the tune of a music-box, the wife of the First Secretary (she had been born in Cairo, and was of a rather full figure) performed a beautiful belly-dance. Until the soi-disant Occupier of Bella fell suddenly asleep. And was wheeled back home in his carriage rather more rapidly than he had come. The Kurdish lancers were getting on in years, and badly wanted their yogurt.

“Bozhemoie!” said the Bulgarian Minister. “The things one has to put up with, here in Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania!”

His First Secretary shrugged. “Your Excellency may light a candle to his saint that he has been spared my first post, a place called St. Brigids- garth, where the sun does not shine from one year to another what with night and fog and mist and where one eats boiled stockfish with mutton-fat.”

His Excellency shuddered. “Where was that?”

The First Secretary thought for a moment. “It is in Froreland,” he said at last, “Isn't it?”

“Bozhemoie!” said His Excellency.

Then he said, “Where?”

And meanwhile? What of the “three witches”?

Very soon the Countess Bix and Bix began to feel that all prayers might be safely left to The Mamma and her Chaplain. Her own best guns were of another order, and consisted of a deck of worn and greasy old cards concealed inside the lining of her musty old muff of marten-skin. Squatting on the dung-smeared stone paving-blocks, she began to lay them out in the antique — the terribly, terribly antique pattern of the Abracadabra:

ABRACADABRA

ABRACADABR

ABRACADAB

ABRACADA

ABRACAD

ABRACA

ABRAC

ABRA

ABR

AB

A

(Perish like the word it meant ... or rather was supposed to mean; actually it should have been Abdacadabra, the ancient error of confusing the Resh with its near look-alike the Dalet had been committed by a scribe unskilled in Aramaic sometime in the days of Darius (or was it Tiberius?) and had never been corrected: Perish like the word it should have meant, but though blurred its power was, yet potent, as witness its still being used.)

Hers was no ordinary Adversary or Opponent — and, then, hers were no ordinary cards, for they bore (all of them) the BAPHOMET on their backs. What were they made of? Perhaps parchment. What was the parchment made of? Do not ask.

And of the second of the “three witches”? The Countess Critz?

The Countess Critz — as the drone of the growing throng increased — reached through a bottomless pocket in her skirt and rummaged till she found the pouch she wanted: not the one with the dried apple for sassy stepdaughters, no: the — First she spread out her moth-eaten woolen shawl, then she spread her worn old silk handkerchief. Next from the very small pouch came a smaller ball, the covering of it the scrotum-skin of an all-black bull-calf: the game she played resembled jacks but she used no jacks. Instead of jacks she cast out and gathered in, cast out and gathered in as the small ball bounced, cast out and gathered in the bright-white teeth of a hangman who had been hanged. And all the while she whined and she sing-songed and she chanted in the words of a language so old that (save for this sole incantation) it had quite died before the invention of any signs or letters which could write it.

And the third of the “three witches”? The Highlady Grulzakk had her own role to play; taking from a packet concealed in her rusty bosom she shook out into her dirty cracked palm a pair of rude dice carved from the ankle-bones of a wild white jackass, and began to play at dice with the Devil for the fate of Bella; not to give the Prince of Hell too much of a chance, she cast his dice with her left hand — but even so the fate of Bella was far too important to be left to a throw of dice, and therefore she used loaded dice. “Never give the Devil an even break” was her motto.

Thus, the Highlady Grulzakk.

Down the road from the Bulgarian Ministry and in a somewhat, but only somewhat, larger building: “Gin’ral Abercrombie,” asked the wife of the American Minister to the Triune Monarchy, “is they any ice for to make a nice cool glass o’ liminade?”

“Not a morsel, my little honey-bee; I have already checked, but for some reason unaccountable the iceman has not yet arrived,” said H. A.B. Abercrombie, formerly Sutler-General to the Army of the Missoula.

“Oh, I am jest drinched with presspiration!”

“Endure it, my dear dew-drop, for the sake of Our Great Republic; it is no hotter here than back in La Derriere, Del., and pays much better.” “I b’lieve I’ll take off my corset and put on my wrapper and go lie in the hammock you hung between thim funny old iron rengs sut in the walls down in that nice cool deep of cellar.”

“Do so, my dear, till the cool of the evening. How I wish I might join you and do likewise, but duty calls. ‘Toil,’ she says. ‘Toil on, toil on, toil —’ ” But Mrs. General had not tarried to hear.

“Safe for hours,” muttered the General. He glanced at himself in the tall pier-glass. More than one had commented on his resemblance to the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, a point which he felt obliged to concede, although his own figure was perhaps a trifle fuller. Next he rang for his butler. General Abercrombie had learned neither Gothic nor Avar, the principal tongues of the T riune Monarchy; and to foreigners wherever he found them, used the language he had learned in a previous diplomatic station (except to servants back home, to whom he might better have spoken in Gullah or Gaelic). “Boy,” he said, “washee whiskey glassee in office. Callee my horsee and buggy. And, ah, by the way ... Boy ... you know where findee Turkey Gypsy sing-song girly?”

There was at that time in Bella, pitching its canvas tents and touching up the paint on its wagons, in the Old Tartar Paddock, an entertainment entitled the Major James Elphonsus Dandy’s Great Texas and Wild West Show; it was really a rather small outfit, a generation or so ahead of its time, but it always managed to pay the bills. Jim Dandy himself, an old goat-looking man and a veteran of the Mexican and Civil Wars, had been giving licks here and there with his paint-brush when along came his partner, Tex Teeter, looking mighty thoughtful.

“Roan Horse has got the spirit up, Jim. Moanin and carryin on. I wanted you should know.” He squatted down on his hunkers.

“Drunk again, I spect.”

“Nooo. Not drunk a-tall. Keeps moaning that Yellow Hair is in bad trouble. Says he hears the death whistle. And like that.”

“Who in the Hell is Yellow Hair?”

“Well now Jim I don’t rightly know. But hain’t that what the Injuns call George Custer?”

Dandy snorted. “Know whut I call George Custer. His outfit was next to mine at Bull Run, he weren’t hardly used to war, twas whut you might call his first stand and he hardly stood it a-tall. Well. How come he sendin smoke signals to Roan Horse — if it be him?”

Teeter pushed to one side on his head the high-crowded derby which he like most cattlemen preferred to the broad Stetson with its ridiculous fiappy brim, though newspaper and magazine artists somehow preferred to depict the latter. “Oh it beats me Jim. But I say that the Horse has got the spirit up, an — Ho. Hey! Looky thar! In that buggy yander! Hain’t that that old jack-ass Hiram Abiff Abercrombie?”

Jim Dandy squinted and peered. “Why I do b’lieve tis. Might’s well give’m a hoot and a toot.” He moved into the vehicle whose paint he had been touching up. A moment later a blast of steam smote the air, followed at once by a rather rough but immediately recognizable bar of Rally Round the Flag. The buggy drew up till it was enveloped in its own dust, the driver stood up and, leaning forward, looked around; then waved his arm, sat down, and drove towards them. “But say, you ott not t’call him a old jack-ass; he is after all a high government official an a veteran of the Great Rebellion.”

Teeter snorted. “Great.. . Humbug. Spent the war in them Territories, sellin bad booze to the Injuns an the paroled Rebel prisoners supposed t’ward ’em off, of which I was one — bad pies, too! Oh Lordy them was bad pies — crusts soft as mush, and the dried apples hard as leather.” And together the two men recited the well-known verse:

I loathe, detest, abhor, despise,

Abominate dried apple pies. . . .

“Major Dandy,” said Abercrombie, getting out of his buggy. “Corporal Teeter.”

“How do,” said the major, offering his grizzled paw.

“Mm,” said the corporal. Not doing so.

“Oh come come now. Let us bury the bloody shirt and clasp hands across the something-or-other chasm; boys, my rye’s all gone — anything to drink?”

Jim Dandy said he supposed they could broach the barrel of bourbon. “Though mind you, sparingly. The treasury is mighty low, and if no customers show up we’ll have to cancel the evenin show.”

General Abercrombie said, “Some sort of religious rally has got downtown tied in knots. No idea why; I do not hold with superstitions they being largely spread by Irish Jesuits, no offense to any mackerel-snappers who might be present. As for the other matter, poot! Breach the barrel and pour its contents out with a lavish hand; the Government of the United States shall pay for it; I’ll put it down as entertainment of irregular cavalry.” He fluttered his eyebrows and he licked his lips.

After a moment, former-Corporal Teeter asked, only slightly grudgingly, “How’s the Mrs.?”

“Sweating. That woman could sweat in the middle of a blizzard.” He nodded thanks, raised his glass. “To the glorious American eagle, long may it scream.” They drank.

“Well, now, your Mrs. a fine woman. Though the union did seem to me a bit mysterious. You’n her, I mean. Different”

Abercrombie uttered a suspiration of content “Mystery? Not at all. She was a woman of a certain age who had never been married and I was an office-holder out of office. Her uncle is Senator Adelbert de la Der- riere, of Delaware, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, and a staunch Republican with his pockets full of patronage; there is no mystery; say, aren’t you going to give all hands a drink?”

Jim Dandy re-entered the cabin of his steam-calliope. Another blast of water music smote the air, followed by the music to the line, “There’s Whiskey in the Jar.” Figures seemed to arise out of the earth, holding cups, mugs, jam-glasses, and pannikins. “Make you all acquainted,” said Tex, as Major Jim poured. “Bloodgood Bixbee; Cockeyed Joe; Dead- wood Dick; Vermont Moses; Hebrew Moses; Shadrack Jackson, a former black buffalo soldier; Gettysburg Sims —”

“Gentlemen. Delighted.”

“Lance-Thrower, Big Prairie Dog, Minnetonka Three Wolves, Roan Horse, Crow-Killer —”

“Don’t stop pouring. My Redskinned friends. Delighted. In war, enemies. In peace, friends. But. Roan Horse. Why the paint?”

In a dolorous chant, Roan Horse announced that Yellow Hair was in trouble, that he (Roan Horse) saw many smokes and heard the deathwhis- tle and heard the eagle scream ... and that the sun either wouldn’t rise or wouldn’t set. He uttered a groan, and began to drink.

“What’s all this about, boys?”

Teeter grunted. Smacked his lips. Told him. “Pshaw,” said the United States Minister. “More superstition!”

“Well. Gen’ral, you think just as you like, but last time Roan Horse had the spirit up, was’t the last time — the first time — don’t matter; why he set around moaning Frog, Frog, complained he had pains in the small of his back something fierce; whut come to pass? Hardly a few days later we heard the French Emperor had a attack a thuh kidney colic something fierce and had surrendered his hull army to the Proosians, now didn’t we, Jim?”

“Well, that’s for true. We did. Say, who is this?”

“This” was a uniformed figure who came galloping up on a light- cavalry-type horse; quickly dismounting, he asked, “Sir. Are you not the American Minister?”

“I am, young sir. And you?”

The young sir said that he was Engelbert Eszterhazy, an Imperial Equerry; he seemed extremely agitated, maintaining his composure with some difficulty. “Ah, thank God, Your Excellency, I thought I recog­nized your vehicle — Sir! A terrible situation has arisen. The Count Calmar has evidently been kidnapped, and I am unable to get across the city or through the city in order to report it to any of our authorities; I don’t know what is happening, and I entreat your help as an emissary.” “Have a drink, Cornet.”

“No, no, I —”

“Cornet, an emissary of a friendly nation to the Court of your country, I direct you to have a drink!” A tin cup being put in his hand, young Cornet Eszterhazy drank. To be precise, he gulped. He shuddered. He staggered, put out an arm for balance. The cowboys laughed. Even the Indians smiled.

“This is not Tokay!” he gasped.

“Ho, ho. No, it is not Tokay, merely the same color; finish it before you tell me why you want my help. Go on now. Bottoms up!”

The Cornet perforce obeyed, but in some stiff sips rather than one main gulp. Breathing strongly, he wiped his mouth. “I want your help to rescue Count Calmar!”

General Abercrombie gestured that all drinking vessels be refilled. Next, that all drink again. Then he said, “Well, Cornet Um Ahh Um — Well, Cornet. I fear this does not come within the scope of my official duties, sorry as I am for the noble gentlemen, Count Who?”

The Cornet removed his pannikin from his mouth. “Your Excellency, but he is only the Count Calmar incognito! In actual fact, he is King Magnus of Scandia and Froreland!”

This was received with no reaction by the assembled rough riders, who continued to stroll to and from the bourbon barrel. But General Abercrombie, whose drinks were being brought to him, allowed a look of deep thought to steal over his face. “Well, this seems to put a different complexion on — A reigning monarch is no mere — ‘Scandia and Froreland,’ do you say? Yes. Yes? Why, the subjects of the King of Scandia and Froreland have in recent years been migrating very numerously to the United States. They are hard-working, hard-drinking, quick to become naturalized though very much attached to their old homeland; they vote dutifully in all elections and they are almost all of them attached to that same Grand Old Party which has saved the Union. Why —

” Something had occured to Major James Elphonsus Dandy. “Say. This here king. Hasn’t got yellow hair, has he?”

“Why yes. He has. Yes. He has.”

The major gave a satisfied jerk of the head. “Well. There yare. And, oh hey! Nother thing! Ain’t them two countries whut they call The Land of the Midnight Sun? Why sure! Just like old Roan Horse said, ‘The sun either won’t rise or won’t set,’ well! There y’are; git your carbines ready, men.”

Abercrombie leaned forward. “How do you know all this, my plumed, war-bonneted friend? And what else do you know about it?”

Roan Horse gave an enormous eructation. “Medicine Man send message. Not know what Medicine Man. He blow-em eagle whistle. Roan Horse hear.” The Indian’s eye-lids drooped. But between them his eyes still gleamed. “Umbrella tree,” he intoned. “Death. Umbrella tree. Yellow Hair. Many smokes. Eagle, eagle. Umbrella tree. ...”

Abercrombie asked Now what in the Hell they made of that. Eszterhazy, somewhat more quieted, said that there was something... something in a corner of his mind ... he could not quite . . .

Said Tex Teeter, pouring water (not much water) into his empty glass and swishing it around to collect the residual essence of whiskey: he said, slowly, “Now didn’t we see some purely odd-lookin kind a tree down in them Eye Talian provinces, whut was they called but um ber ella pines, which shorely they looked like. Now —”

Slowly Eszterhazy put down his own empty glass, not looking as to where it went. And slowly he straightened up again. His air of concentration was almost palpable. It was, certainly, contagious. “The so-called umbrella pine,” he said. “I have seen it in Italy, too. Is it here? In the Monarchy? In Bella? Yes. Yes! That is ... a few specimen trees, I have heard, introduced into his palace grounds by ... by whom? By whom?“ Again he was silent; scarcely, he seemed to be there. Then his head snapped up. His face was luminous. “Yes! The Duke of Dalmatia! In the palace the old King gave him when the Duke was in exile... before there was even an Empire —”

“Well, and who lives there now, my dear young sir?”

Eszterhazy’s face went first slack. Then it flooded with color. “It is now the lair of that dirty beast the Brigand Boustremovitch,” he said. His lips writhed up.

“Oh, sugar!” exclaimed the U.S. Minister. He was not noted for having knowledge of the local scene. But he had heard of the Brigand Boustremovitch. “Well, well. Well, they may fire me for this and I may be lucky to get the post of postmaster in Lump Dicky, Arkansas, but I say Let-tus risk it! A commissioned officer of a great and friendly nation whose capital city lies in temporary disarray asks us to assist in rescuance from durance vile the captured sovereign of another great and friendly, where the Hell is the place? — they won’t dare shoot me; I have diplomatic immunity;” (he also had the hiccups) “is there a bugle in the house, I’ll sound the charge; I used to, as a boy, play wind instruments in the band of The Great Doctor B.B. Jaspers’ Massive Medicine Pill Show; Dr. B.B. Jaspers’ Massive Medicine Pills are so skillfully compounded out of benign marsh and meadow grasses and healing woodland herbs as to be good for the de-bilitating diseases of men and beasts alike, one for a man and two for a milch cow, as wfell as female complaints of a familiar nature, where the Hell is this place?”

Eyes swung to the young cornet. He started to gesture.

“The President of the U-nited States to Ignats Louis, Great and Good Friend, we the People of said U-nited States send our Servant Hiram Abiff Abercrombie in whom there is no guile — Where?"

Cornet Eszterhazy made a gesture of despair. Said, “I have, oh my God, lost my bearings.”

“Well. Colonel, cain’t you git a native guide?”

Roan Horse rose to his feet and re-adjusted his blanket. White circles were painted around his eyes, his nose was yellow, and red&black stripes ran along his face. “No need-em native guide,” he said. “You see-em guide?” He pointed. “Follow,” he said, stalking for his mount. Every eye looked up.

Eszterhazy said, “Sweet tears of Christ.”

Up, up, and up, yet not so far up that they could not be clearly identified for what they were, from north, from east, frcrm south, from west, four columns of eagles flew in upon the capital in a cruciform pattern: and at some point farther on in the city they converged. And circled.

A shout went up from the men of the show; and, waving their carbines, they ran for their horses. General Abercrombie (in his buggy of course) could not keep up with them, but he made good time, and kept the U.S. and Confederate flags being waved up front well in sight.

“Thish year steam calliope,” Major Dandy explained to the watchman, “is made out of prime seasoned English oak and is as hard as iron, if not harder than some iron. It was tooken out of the Lady Washington steamboat, of which I was once Owner and Master, after she run aground off Garrett’s Point; whut toon shall I give’m?” The watchman made no reply; for one thing, the calliope having gotten into motion had started moving forward and lurched out of the Paddock by then. “C ’ that’s whut I’ll give ’em, haw haw haw!” The vehicle did not run smooth. But she ran staunch. And soon the war-whoops and Rebel yells of the horsemen were mingled with the hoarse, steamy notes of the music.

“Chief! Chief! This just come through by heliograph!”

“Give it here, montezuma the famous slayer of the maximillian EMPEROR HAS BEEN SEEN WITH A SQUAD OF IRREGULAR CAVALRY PLEASE flash instruction; they’ve all gone mad, I tell you — mad!”

„He must be told, I say!”

“I say, not yet!”

“He must be told!”

“Tell him yourself, then —”

“It is not my function!”

“Lower your voice, for God’s sake!”

Ignats Louis looked up in some mild annoyance from the interesting marginal gloss about Maurits Louis and the Lovely Mulatta, from which the (as it was called) Egyptian branch of the Morganatic branch of the Royal Family was descended; why were the officials always bothering him? Why couldn’t they make decisions for themselves? What was the use of a Constitution, otherwise? He glanced at the clock, clicked his tongue, and went out through the secret panel and down the secret steps to visit the dear sweet little kiddies in the Infirmary three courtyards away. Sometimes he had half a mind to abdicate and go fish for sardines off Corsica... or else Chatanooga in the Americas and hunt wisents with the Red Faced People.

“There, now we have a clear road, make haste! Make haste!”

The driver, sweating, said, “This is not a clear road, it is only a road through a merely crowded street — don’t you see the people?”

“Ride them down, then!”

“Ride the people down?”

“It would not be our fault but that of the enemy, for it is a definition that the enemy determines the conditions of the war!”

“I tell you, Boss, it’s witchcraft — witchcraft — witchcraft!”

“Don’t bray in my ear, you jackass!” The Brigand Boustremovitch spat three times and rapped thrice on the table. The mention of the mere possibility of witchcraft made him uneasy... of course he had already had a great deal to be uneasy about. There had been, for example, the thunder-storm. Peals of thunder and bolts of lightning and the day sky as dark as night; bad enough; but it was plain that all that was happening only overhead the old Dalmatian Palace — all roundabout as they looked, lo!, the land was bright and clear! And after that had come the hail-storm, hail-stones big as plums — but only on top of , the henchmen wailed.

And after that had come the rain of frogs. And after that. . .

“Who’d y’ think’s doin it all?” demanded the Boustremovich.

“Who else?” his henchman asked, jerking his head towards the upper secret cell. “You don’t think somebody that big is going to travel around without he’s got his private wizard, do ya?”

The Brigand struck the table with his huge fist. “I’ll cut his throat with my own hands,” he cried. “He’ll be dead when they get him after the ransom, but we won’t be here by then.” Yet still he did not move; and now suddenly the walls oozed a liquid red as blood and a most offensive foetor filled the room; from outside and overhead began a most discordant screaming. The Brigand unsheathed his long curved knife and, with fearful curses, ran out into the courtyard where the by now very old umbrella pines still grew and dropped their needles — and every time he turned towards his destination, the immense convocation of eagles ceased to soar and circle, and, swooping, darted, claws outstretched, screaming, for his eyes.. . .

Up in a tower in another part of the city were four men in uniforms without insignia of any sort. They stood at the windows and gazed out with telescopes. “The set time is very near,” said one of them, “and it is possible the clockwork in the infernal machine might go off early.”

“Is it possible that we will learn what in Hades is going on down there?”

A third said that he was also very curious, but they would simply have to wait. “Until we either see or hear the explosion. Or both.”

“Good God!” exclaimed the fourth. “Is it possible that the Emperor has for some or any reason left the Imperial Palace and that this is the reason for the commotion?”

There were gasps of dismay; then the first speaker said, “It is not possible, he is a creature of indestructible habit. However. I suggest that we coordinate our sightings. Let us each look out on a different direction and say what we see; agreed? Very well. North, what do you see?”

“Incredible congestion. A tangle of traffic. Nothing seems to be moving. Nothing at all.”

“Just so. South?”

“A vast throng of people, choking the streets. They are all on their knees. Can they all be praying?”

“Who knows? As I am East, I — No. No. That cannot be. My eyes are suffering from retinal strain. West, will you please make your report?”

“Yes. I see lines of halted tram-cars, lines of halted canal-and river- boats, lines of halted railroad trains. Well East, will you now report?”

After another silent moment, East said, in an oddly-stiff voice, “I see the old Dalmatian Palace, wherein lives the paroled and pardoned Brigand Boustremovitch. I see... I see… Well, I see American Redfaced Indians in full feathers and war-paint and I see American Farvestern covboyii in fringed buckskins and they are all on horseback and they are riding round and round the old Dalmatian Palace and firing upon it and now I see a figure strongly resembling the American Minister in the odd horse-drawn vehicle he drives and he is blowing a trumpet and now just now I see an absolutely incredible vehicle which appears to contain a church-organ yet is clearly propelled by steam like a railroad engine and yet as you all know there are no railroad tracks in that part of the city. What can it mean? What does it all mean?”

His companions did not tell him what it all meant. Silently, they had one by one joined him and were gazing through their own telescopes out the east window.

Major James Elphonsus Dandy was not riding around the walls of the old Dalmatian Palace, however. Not quite. For one thing, he had slowed down just a bit to get another piece of sheet-music ... something from Mazeppa would, he thought, be suitable.

Up in his secret cell, Magnus III and IV was on his feet. He was quite angry. In the larger sense, he had no idea where he was; in the narrower sense, he knew a cell when he saw one. He shouted and he heard shouts, but he also heard thunder and lightning and what sounded (he decided after a puzzled moment) like hail. And... did he hear... frogs? He gazed at the door. He tried the door. It was, unsurprisingly, locked. So he threw himself against it. Often. Although Magnus (“Count Calmar”) was young and rather strong; and although the door-frame had been already set somewhat askew by the shell of the Old French Gun; and although the door seemed to give a bit; still: it did not open. So he stood back and thought. But he could think of nothing. Nothing, that is, except that his being here was all the fault of the Frores; what did they want of him with their incessant demands? Who were they, anyway, that the benign and far more efficient methods of the Scands were not good enough for them? Who were they, in their poor and difficult little country with its tiny fields half-way up ragged, rugged mountains and their rocky and inhospitable coast forever split by craggy fiords and their misty forests and unnavigable rivers full of shoals and falls — who were they — to make demands? Well, whoever, he would teach them a lesson: he would sell them to the Swedes!

Magnus did not know, and neither did Jim Dandy, that when the Patriot-Poet Burli Grumbleson was so suddenly asked to put his great National Poem to music it had equally suddenly occurred to him that a certain piece from Mazeppa would suit it perfectly; hence: the immortal anthem, Froreland Forever, now, suddenly and amidst a welter of other strange and baffling sounds, soaring through the air via the medium of a steam calliope. Magnus may have heard a steam calliope before, he may not; his reaction was not to the medium but to the song. Instantly tears gushed from his eyes. “Froreland!” he cried. “My poor country, my native land, Froreland! Froreland!”

That other native, the Skraeling “Ole,” had also not been able to make his way back to the Grand Hotel Windsor-Lido by reason not of the congestion alone but because the Swing Bridge was blocked; he had been wandering hither and thither hoping to find a shallow place he might ford, when he heard an allarum of strange cries and the thudding of hooves. Neither he nor Roan Horse had ever seen each other before, needless to say; but there was an instant of recognition, a spark or perhaps even a flame passed between the shaman and the medicine-man. Roan Horse leaned from his saddle and reached out his arm, Eeiiuullaalaa jumped, seized, was lifted up, was sat down, and clutching his horse’s mane lightly, charged on with the others and added his Skraeling ulula- tion to their cries.

Round and round the old Dalmatian Palace they rode, and whenever a terrified face appeared over the parapet, they fired on it with whoops and yells. Major Dandy intended to turn his calliope so as to join the encircling pack, but the way thither had been rather rough and the tiller stuck ... and stuck... and so, with full force, the massy engine struck the wall right under King Magnus’ cell. The engine was not only massy, it was strong. It drew back, turned slowly and awkwardly, went farther back... and then rushed forward at full speed. It struck the gate and knocked it off its rusting hinges at just the moment when the cowboys and Indians came rounding the walls once again. And they poured into the fortress whose defenses had been breached.

Magnus heard and felt the concussion without knowing its cause; at once he attacked the door again: this time it gave way — he was free to go — — to go — where?

There was certain peril down below, he thought (incorrectly . .. but logically). And then he saw the umbrella he had impulsively taken from the lobby of his hotel suite, one of two. He didn’t know that he had clutched it tightly under his arm at the moment of his being assaulted; did not know that his captors, with coarse jests about brolly and bumbershoot, had heaved it into the cell with him; he might use it when the roof leaked, they sneered. “I shall climb to the parapet,” Magnus said, “and I shall jump, having first opened the umbrella, which shall slow my descent, as has been done from balloons with something like an umbrella, as I have seen in pictures;” he thought this very quickly, made his way to the parapet, and leaped up on it and stood there teetering and afraid to look down and tore off the tape keeping it furled — damned awkward clumsy umbrella, it hadn’t even a handle — and, flapping it madly to make it open, looked up and found that he was —

Frightful screams from inside the courtyard, the prisoners halfterrified of being scalped, and half-terrified of something worse: enter the Cornet Eszterhazy, veteran of two previous and rather longer campaigns; he drew his sword and announced that they were his and the Emperor’s prisoners: they at once surrendered, all of them. All of them, that is, except the Brigand Boustremovitch. He lay on his back, right where the keystone of the arch above the gate had in its falling caught him full upon the heart.

One of the prisoners was allowed to show where the barrels of wine were kept; and, as soon as they had finished tying up their captives, the captors began sampling the contents of the barrels. It was not bourbon, it was only the small local wine of the country and it would not travel far. But, then, of course, it was not being asked to.

After a rather wearing and roundabout route of travel, a certain group of foreigners had arrived in Bella earlier that day on one of the last trains to make it in. They had not, however, owing to unexpectedly unsettled conditions, been able to make it to their destination, namely in front of the Grand Hotel Windsor-Lido; they had not intended even to think of staying at the fashionable and expensive hotel. . . but they were absolutely determined to stay in front of it. Now, having been dismissed by the omnibus driver with a baffled shake of his hand and head at being unable to go anywhere that anyone wanted to go, they had — for lack of any notion of what to do — unfurled the banners they had brought with them, and simply commenced walking (being prudent, they had carefully noted the location and left one of their number in charge of the baggage). Scarcely had they marched a block or two when the sound of gunfire attracted their attention. And then they heard something which they could not believe they were hearing and next saw something which they could not believe they were seeing. It was at this point that Magnus, the sound of the anthem ringing in his ears, realized (a) that what he was waving was no umbrella but a very familiar flag; and (b) that down below, across the road, was a group of people looking up at him with open mouths and carrying two banners. One of the banners, a new one, read, Swearing Eternal Fealty to the House of Olaus-Olaus-Astridson-Katzenelenbogen-Ulf-and-Olaus, Froreland Demands a Separate Bureau of Weights and Measures. And the other, an old one barely legible, read, simply A Fourteenth Full-Bishop For Faithful Froreland.

The Street of Our Noble Ally the Grand Duke of Graustark (usually called Grau Street) was, for a miracle, only half- instead of entirely-filled; taking advantage of this, the driver half-rose from the wagon-seat and began to ply his whip — but the horse, instead of dashing onward at increased speed, came to an abrupt stop. An odd, gaunt, whiskery figure wearing a Norfolk jacket and jodhpur trousers, taking the animal by the head, cried, “Stop, stop! How dare you lash this poor old chap? I am Sebastian Allgoode-Freestinghaze, formerly of the Fifth Hyderabad Horse (Piggot’s Ponies), and now General Continental Agent for the RSPCA; I am obliged to remove the animal and lead him to our local contract livery stable and veterinary establishment, where he shall be able to receive the rest and medication so obviously requisite.” And whilst Col. Allgoode-Freestinghaze was saying all this, and saying it rather rapidly, as though well-accustomed to saying it, he was with even greater rapidity releasing the horse from the wagon. Having done so (and handed over to the dumb-struck trio on the wagon a card printed with his name and local address), he — and the horse — vanished around the corner.

It was too much for the driver. His nerves broke; and, leaping from the seat, he dashed madly away, screaming as he did so, “The Works! The Works!” At which almost every living soul on the Street of Our Noble Ally the grand Duke of Graustark (usually called Grau Street), screaming, “The Turks! The Turks!” fled precipitately; in a moment no one and no thing remained there except the wagon and the two other men. They had simultaneously decided to follow the example of their fellow conspirator and had, in fact, simultaneously leaped; there was one difficulty — the man on the left had leaped to the right and the man on the right had leaped to the left — the laws of physics being what they are, the two had collided: and it was while they were shouting and screaming and flailing at each other that the clock-works in the infernal machine made it go off.

“Bobbo! Bobbo!” cried the children in the Infirmary, clapping their hands, and using their Sovereign’s pet-name.

“Here’s the funny old pedlar with his itty-bitty wagon of nicknacks,” said His Royal and Imperial Majesty, wheeling it into the ward. “Who wants a posie? Posies cost one kiss. Mweh! Mweh! Who wants a little wooden cavalryman that moves its little wooden legs if you pull the little string? Costs one hand-shake. There you are, sir! Who wants some nice chewy Turkish Delight? Some nice chewy spice-drops, big as Bobbo’s thumb? Sweetmeats cost one hug. Oh! What a big squeeze! Whuh! Whuhl Who wants . . . ?”

The children were clustering around him when there was a shudder of the whole building, followed by a loud, flat noise. The children immediately looked up at him to see if they should cry. “Practising the big boom fireworks for Bobbo’s birthday, do you like big boom fireworks; do you like big sizzle-sparkle fireworks? Be good kiddies and say your prayers and take your medicine and sit on the potty-chair and make poo when nursey tells you, and you shall be allowed to come and watch the fireworks, see? How’s the little footsey? ‘Some better?’ Not all better? Well, let Bobbo bend over and kiss and it will soon all better because Bobbo is the Lord’s Anointed, see, and if Dr. Quaatsch doesn’t like it he can go . .. back to Vienna. This little piggy went to market. . ..”

They were all waiting for him when he got outside.

“What dreck-dribbling whoremongering sow-sucking son of a bitch was responsible for that punk-futtering explosion at this hour of the afternoon with no warning given to prepare the kids; I’ll geld him like an oxling!”

And then they told him Everything.

The men in the tower were still gazing through their telescopes when the clock in the corner began the brief musical notes which announced that it would next sound the quarter-hour. Only one of them bothered to turn and glance at it, then he turned away. Then — very, very swiftly — he turned back. “Is that the same clock that was always there?” he demanded, his voice gone high and weak. This time they all turned. The clock in the comer began to sound the quarter-hour. They all rushed for the door. They did not quite make it.

The two devices were well-timed, and the explosions had really sounded like one.

Everything, that is, which they knew about to tell him.

“We’ll see about this all, later,” said the King-Emperor, suddenly not so much angry as weary. “Immediately I must get down there and show myself to calm the people,” he said. “Bring the Whitey horse —”

Dr. Quaatsch stepped forward, cleared his throat. “As the Court Physician it is my duty to say that I cannot approve your Royal and Imperial Highness doing anything of the sort, and Your Royal and Imperial Highness very well knows why.”

The Emperor looked at him. “I have my duty, too,” he said.

The horse was (of course) white, the Emperor’s uniform was white, the ostrich feather in his cap was white, the Emperor had not yet begun to stoop and was still usually tall and straight, and as he now chose for the most part to ride standing in the stirrups he was visible for blocks. “Fun’s all over now,” he said (and said); “go home now, boys. Go home. Go home. Spread the word.”

Or: “Go home, wives. Go home, go home. It’s soon time to put the spuds on, if you’re not there the man will try to do it himself, scald the baby, and set the house on fire. Go home, ladies, go home — ”

At the Five Points: „...Amen... He doesn’t fife no more, upon which

I spit,” said Emma Katterina, starting to get up, her Chaplain scrambling to help her, the three Ladies-in-Waiting hustling to hide their apparatuses and, this done, to help brush off her skirts. Emma Katterina looked up, looked around. “What, you are still down there?” she asked of those of the multitude yet on their knees. “Up, up, it’s over, everything is now all right.” She raised her voice as she started walking: “To home or to church! Go! Go!” She shook her skirts as though shooing chickens. „ Go! „

“Boys [the Emperor], go home. Go —”

Voice from crowd: “But the Turks, Bobbo! What about the —”

“No more Turks! All gone! All gone!” — which was, historically, quite true, even if they had “all gone” a hundred-odd years earlier. “Go home ....”

Voice from crowd: “But what about that there Antichrist, Your Allness?”

Ignats Louis turned upon him in a well-simulated, well, perhaps it was not all simulated, fury. “I’ll give you ‘Antichrist, ’ you dumb son of a bitch; you leave that sort of thing to the Archbishop, the Patriarch, and the Holy Synod! Go home, I say! Go home!”

[“Ahh!” they said in the crowd. “That be a real Emperor, hear him cuss!”]

If the Frorish delegation was taken aback at seeing their Sovereign atop a palace wall, still, after all, they had come all the way to Bella to see him — however, they had not expected to see him waving the Frorish flag just a moment after they had been listening to the Frorish National Anthem. It was at this moment that he cupped his hands and called down to them, “I grant your demands!”

They did not cheer, being after all, Frores. After a moment one of them, The Patriotic Female Helga Helgasdochter, cupped her own hands and called back, “What, both of them?”

“Both of them!”

Silence. He pressed her so strongly that he might soon have done her a mischief, had she not foiled him by her ready acquiescence. . . .

Then: “The Scands will never approve!”

Magnus did not hesitate. “Then I shall abdicate... as King of Scandia, that is.” And, the implications of this slowly dawning on them, they slowly applauded. The Frores, it is well-known, are not a people given to sudden enthusiasms. The Scands, as a matter of fact, were indeed loath to approve — until their approval was made contingent to the subsequent Trade Treaty whereby the surplus stockfish of both Scandia and Froreland was sent to Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania in return for the Triune Monarchy’s surplus wheat; after which the price of breadstuffs went down in both Far-Northwestern Kingdoms (as it came to be known) grew abundant upon even the humblest table in the Triune Monarchy. But this was later. After. After, that is, young Cornet Eszter- hazy had persuaded Emma Katterina that all the Scotch steam engineers had gone on somewhere else. Baluchistan, maybe. Or Australia. And that the Royal and Imperial Ironroads could not only be obliged to pay a thousand ducats a month towards her charities, but would also build her a glassed-in drying shed for her laundry-drying, thus saying Make clear the way to a direct and swifter, cheaper rail route to the North.

Later.

After. After word had meanwhile gotten around of the role played by the staff of the Major James Elphonsus Dandy Great Texas and Wild West Show in the capture of the old Dalmatian Palace and the demise of the Brigand Boustremovitch, the show’s business boomed. And it kept on booming. Word, of course, had gotten distorted quite into folklore; but what of that? As for the brute Bruto and Pishto-the-Avar and the henchmen of the Boustremovitch, they all became (usually: again) “ships’ carpenters” in the dockyard/prison; it was hard work, but healthy, seeing the most of it was done in the open air. And perhaps it just might be that they were in some way less degraded as they hauled timber and heated tar and sawed and so on than if they had been confined instead in immense dungeons where they might or might not have tended to reform and to become penitent.

But this, too, was later.

By the time he had almost circumambulated the center of his city, Ignats Louis’s voice was worn to a croak. Observing, then, a sign Apothecary, over the open door of a shop, and the apothecary in his apron standing in the doorway and thinking perhaps to ask him for a glass of mineral water, the Emperor beckoned. The man came over and the Emperor leaned down; in the man’s ear he croaked, “My piles are killing mei”

“So I had assumed from Your Majesty’s stance, standing in the stirrups the whole way down the street; so here I take the liberty of offering Your Majesty a pillule of opium and a large glass of mineral water and brandy,” and he handed up first the one and then the other.

His Majesty took them, swallowed, swallowed, swallowed; then, with a grateful look, handed back both glass and saucer. In a voice considerably restored, he said, “You may add to your sign, By Appointment... and all the rest of it.” Then he rode on, mostly he gestured; but by now, mostly, they knew the meaning of the gestures.

Go home, boys. Go home.. .

Magnus, “Count Calmar,” went home, too. The wandering Swiss photographer had stuck to his place throughout all the excitement and had, thus, been able to take quite a good picture of Magnus as he stood on the wall waving the Frorish flag. It sold forever back home. Only the colors distinguished the two flags, they having the same pattern, and the colors did not show in the photograph: in Scandia they said it was the flag of Scandia and in Froreland they knew it was the flag of Froreland. As to details, no one bothered them with details. Their Conjoint King had helped plant a National Flag on the walls of the palace which . . . somehow ... he had helped be captured from a brigand: they had received a Hero in a time when it was often assumed that Heroism was dead: enough. The few republicans in the Two Kingdoms (mostly bankers, big brewers, and people like that) so to speak slunk back into their lairs, moodily drank their glog and shnops and ate their boiled stockfish with mutton-fat and bitterness. The King’s return was a good deal jollier than his departure. As usual not much attention was given in the capital(s) to “Ole Skraelandi,” but — later — on the golden-mossed moors of Skraeland itself the gifts of the many, many eagle feathers were gratefully received from the Court Shaman Eeiiuullaalaa in the name of the King. The King, of course, and most warmly, invited the young Cornet Eszterhazy to come and visit, and Eszterhazy — no long Cornet — did so. But that was later.

Much later.

Brief though immense the excitement had been; immense though brief. But he had had excitement before. This was different. It was a while, a long while in fitting together all that had happened. (Most people in Bella never did!) Even he had “pumped” the shaman and the medicine­man, via interpreters. Even he had gone over the great steam calliope again and again. (Could such vehicles be made to carry people, without rails?) Even he had examined the records of the police, both Public and Secret. Even . . .

It seemed to him that not alone a new world but a new universe had begun to open before his eyes, eyes from which the scales of ignorance had dropped. Gorgeous gates to which he had to find the keys. Knowledge! Knowledge! Science upon science — anthropology, ethnology, criminology, ornithology; history and law; medicine and mechanics; wisdom unsuspected and knowledge unknown. It was no longer possible to pass one’s days as a sort of upper servant, a glorified messenger; drinking, dicing, riding, hunting, whoring: these could never again suffice. Go thou and learn, somewhere he had heard the words, forgotten where, never mind where, that is what he had to do. First a course, courses, of private studies with tutors, then the university here, then universities elsewhere, then travel. And then again: study ... study ... study.

He would of course have to sell his landed estates to pay for it, but no prospect ever gave him more pleasure. These new estates were greater.

Unfortunate Sir Paunceforth! A rumor, writhing slowly and steadily as an eel bound for the Sargasso, made its way eventually down the Baltic and into the North Sea and thence to London, and so, eventually, to Windsor. Sir Paunceforth De Pueue (unfortunate Sir Paunceforth!) thought fit to mention it to the Widow.

“They say, you know, Ma’am, that there was a sort of conspiracy recently in Froreland, don’t you know, to depose their king and offer the throne to one of Your Majesty’s younger sons; haw!”

The Queen looked at him, saying nothing. Perhaps she did not care to hear of Monarchs being deposed; perhaps she was thinking how willingly she would have sent one of her sons to Froreland (had it been possible), though not necessarily a younger son; perhaps she did not like anyone to say haw! to her. She said nothing.

Sir Paunceforth tried to save the situation, tried very hard to get across the point that this was a funny story. “They say, Ma’am, that the main dish there is boiled stockfish with mut-ton fat! ... in Froreland . . .Haw!”

She looked at him with puffy, bloodshot, icy-blue little eyes. “We are not amused,” she said.

Unfortunate Sir Paunceforth!

Then the Queen said, “Where?”

But as to why the bears were so bad in Bosnia that year. ...

Further Contributions to the Natural History of Love

After a while one gets used to being a frog,

Even though eating flies is a bit off-putting at first.

One day a lovely young woman came along and kissed me.

For a moment, I thought I’d been changed to a handsome young prince, But then she said,

' “Can’t we be just friends?”

— Everett Lee Lady