stammered: “Imperial Majesty! To tell the truth is in the long run less
dangerous than to lie, and the Lord said to Moses: ‘Thou shalt not hold
with the great ones in that which is evil.’ Therefore I beseech that I
may forego further eating. For behold I am soon done with the game, and
my gracious lord--who is both like and unlike Your Imperial Majesty--has
in the last year turned me to drinking filtered marsh water.”
A twitching and trembling began in the czar’s right cheek near the eye.
“Yes, by Saint Andreas!” said he. “I am unlike my brother Charles, for
he hates women like a woman, and wine like a woman, and offers up his
people’s riches as a woman her husband’s, and abuses me like a woman;
but I respect him like a man. His health, Wooden Leg! Drink, drink!”
The czar sprang forward, seized me by the hair, and held the goblet to
my mouth, so that the Astrakan ale foamed over my chin and collar. As we
drank the prescribed health, two soldiers entered in brownish-yellow
uniforms with blue collars and discharged their pistols, so that the hot
room, which was already filled with tobacco clouds and onion smell, was
now also enveloped in powder smoke.
The czar sat down again at the table. Even in all that noise he wanted
to sit and think, but he never allowed anyone else to shirk the duty of
drinking and become serious like himself. He drew Feodosova afresh to
his knee. Poor, poor Feodosova! She sat there, a bit sunk together, with
arms hanging and mouth impotently half-open, as if she awaited cuff and
blow amid the caresses. Why had she not courage to pull the sword to her
from the table, press her wrist against the edge and save her honor,
before it was too late? Over and over she might have laughed at my
wooden leg and my disgrace, if with my life I could have preserved her
honor. Nor had I ever before been so near her and seen so clearly to
what a wondrous work she had been formed in the Heavenly Creator’s
hands. Poor, poor Feodosova, if you had but felt in your heart with
what a pure intent a friend regarded you in your humiliation and how he
prayed for your well-being!
Hour after hour the banquet continued. Those of the Boyars and dwarfs
who were most completely overcome already lay relaxed in the straw and
vomited or made water, but the czar himself always rose up and leaned
out through the window. “Drink, Wooden Leg, drink!” he commanded, and
hunted me around the room with the glass, making the Boyars hold me till
I had emptied every drop. The twitching in his face became ever more
uncanny, and when we were finally together at the table again, he moved
three brimful earthen bowls in front of me and said: “Now, Wooden Leg,
you shall propose a health to be drunk all round and teach us to
understand its meaning with your maxim.”
I raised myself again as well as I could.
“Your health, czar!” I shouted, “for you are assuredly born to command.”
“Why,” he asked, “should the soldiers present arms and salute me if any
other was worthier to command? Where is there anything more pitiful than
an incompetent ruler? The day I find my own son unworthy to inherit my
great, beloved realm, that day shall he die. Your first truth, Wooden
Leg, requires no bowl.”
The pistols cracked, and all drank but the czar.
Then I gathered the fragments of my understanding as a miser his coins,
for I believed that, if I could catch the czar in a gracious and mild
humour, I might perhaps save my Feodosova.
“Well, then, Imperial Majesty,” I continued, therefore, lifting one of
the bowls on high “this is Astrakan ale, brewed of mead and brandy with
pepper and tobacco. It burns much before it delights, and when it
delights it puts one to sleep.”
With that I threw the bowl to the ground so that it broke in a thousand
pieces. Then I lifted the next bowl.
“This is Hungarian wine. ‘Drink no more only water,’ writes the Apostle
Paul to Timothy, ‘but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and
because thou art so often sick.’ So speaks a holy one to weakly men and
stay-at-homes. But go out on the battle-field amid frost and wailing and
tell me: To how many of the groaning would this bowl of sweetish wine
give relief from pain and a softer death?”
Therewith I threw that bowl also to the ground so that it broke. Then I
lifted the third bowl.
“This is brandy. It is despised by the fortunate and the rich, because
they thirst not after refreshment as the desert for coolness, but would
only gibe at the pleasure it gives. But brandy assumes power in the very
moment it swims over the tongue, like a despot in the moment he steps
across a threshold, and the bleeding and dying draw comfort from a few
drops.”
“Right, right!” acclaimed the czar, and took the bowl and drank it, at
the same time that he handed me two gold-pieces, while the pistols
cracked. “You shall have a pass and a horse to go your way, and wherever
you come, you shall tell about Poltava.”
Then I knelt yet again in the straw and stammered: “Imperial Majesty--in
my pettiness and weakness--beside you sits a--a pure and good woman.”
“Haha!” screamed the dwarfs and Boyars and tottered to their feet.
“Haha! haha!”
The czar got up and carried Feodosova toward me.
“I understand. He who limps on a wooden leg may fall in love, too. Good.
I present her to you as she goes and stands, and you shall have a good
situation with me. I have promised every Swede who enters into my
service and is baptized in our faith that he shall become one of our
people.”
Feodosova stood like a sleep-walker and stretched her hands toward me.
What did it matter that she had laughed at me. I should soon have
forgotten that and she would soon not have seen my wooden leg, for I
should have cared for her and worked for her and prayed with her and
made her home bright and tranquil. I should have lifted her up to my
bosom as a child and asked her if an honest and faithful heart could not
make another heart throb. Mayhap she already bore the answer on her
tongue, for slowly she beamed up and became flushed, and her whole face
became transfigured. Far away in a corner house on Priest Street in
Stockholm a lonely old woman sat with her sermon-book and listened and
wondered whether a letter would not be left for her through the door,
whether no disabled man would step in with a greeting from the remote
wilderness, whether I never should come or whether I lay already dead
and buried. I had prayed for her every night. I had thought of her in
the tumult in the midst of stretchers and wailing wounded. But at that
moment I thought of her no longer; I saw and heard nothing else but
Feodosova. And yet I was angry and strove against something heavy which
weighed upon my heart and which I did not understand, but was only
slowly and gradually able to make out.
I bent to Feodosova to kiss her hand, but she whispered, “The czar’s
hand, the czar’s hand.”
Then I stretched myself toward the czar and kissed his hand.
“My faith,” I whispered equally softly, “and my royal lord I may not
desert.”
The czar’s cheek still twitched, and the dwarfs in their terror pulled
forth the Zaporogean from his nook to make the czar laugh at his
ridiculous figure. But then the czar’s arms began to move convulsively.
His face grew gray and he trembled in one of his dreaded fits. He went
toward the Zaporogean and struck him in the face with clenched fist so
that the blood streamed from his nose and mouth, and with such a hoarse
and altered voice that it could no longer be recognized he hissed: “I
have seen through you, liar, from the moment you came into the room. You
are a Zaporogean, a renegade, who have hidden yourself in Swedish
clothes.--To the wheel with him, to the wheel!”
All, even the drunken men, began to tremble and feel toward the doors,
and in his terror one of the Boyars whispered: “Bring forward the woman!
Shove her forward! As soon as he gets to see pretty faces and woman’s
limbs, he grows quiet.”
They seized her, her bodice was cut over the bosom, and, softly wailing,
she was supported forward step by step to the czar.
It grew black around me, and I staggered backward out of the room. I
remained standing on the street under the stars and I heard the clamor
grow muffled and the dwarfs began to sing.
Then I clenched my hands and remembered a promise on the field of
battle to pray for a poor sinner’s soul. But the more fervently I spoke
with my God, the further went my thoughts, and my invocation became a
prayer for a yet greater sinner who with his last faithful followers
wandered about on the desolate steppes.
* * * * *
The surgeon ceased with an anxious glance toward the coffin, and the
lady-in-waiting followed him forward to the catafalque.
“Amen!” said she, and the two again spread the covering over the
wax-pale Queen Dowager, Charles’ mother.
STORIES BY
PER HALLSTRÖM
THE FALCON
Renaud’s eyes took the color of the day: dim, lustreless and dark at
twilight; gleaming molten gold when the sunshine flitted across his hair
and outstretched neck, so that they sparkled with widening and
contracting flames as they looked out over the fields toward the blue
haze against the slanting red of the dawn, or toward the rustling of
hares in the thicket, of frightened birds and swaying branches.
Indolent and proud was his glance, the reflection of gilded steel on a
sheathed dagger, of the luck-piece on the brown bosom of a gipsy girl;
indolent and proud, too, the rhythmic motion of his naked feet, and the
line of his arms as he laid himself down at full-length in the passion
of the moment with his hands under his head and heard the horns
jubilating in the distance and the earth quivering with the thud of the
huntsmen.
But when it grew quiet--a quiet wonderfully intense, as if spread out in
a domed vault of restless waiting, with two black huddled specks that
rose in circles at the top--then Renaud raised his glance, as he leaned
on his elbow, his eyes wide and lips half-parted. And when the specks
came together and fell,--one subsiding in broken curves, the other
dropping always above it in a line straight as a spear,--and the blue
welkin rang again with voices, and the riders galloped forward to see
the falcon and the heron finish their fight, the boy ran up close. He
screamed with delight when the falcon, still trembling with ardor, was
lifted on his master’s glove, its wings drooped and its eyes blinded
under the hood.
He often followed along to Sir Enguerrand’s stable yard and saw the
falconers bathe the yellow feet of the hunting birds in metal bowls,
drying them carefully as if they were princes’ children each with its
crested cloth, and caressing their necks till they shut their naked
eyelids and dreamed against the shoulders of the attendants.
Renaud would have given ten years of his life or one of his ten fingers
to be allowed to hold them like that, the proud, silent creatures; but
they might not be touched by everybody, they were noble. They had each
its glove ornamented according to its rank, each its hood with
embroidered pattern, each its special food, and people talked to them in
a strange, archaic speech with elaborate etiquette. Renaud almost
blushed when he met their great eyes filled with languid repose,
especially before Sir Enguerrand’s white Iceland falcon, which had a
crimson hood, a gold and crimson glove, a jess with silver bells on its
foot, and a glance full of proud disdain and the yellow sunlight of
heroic story.
The young birds, which still quivered with rage over their captivity and
dreamed under the night of their hoods of hunting free and of lifting
their necks to scream, birds that were being tamed by hunger and
darkness,--them he might sometimes lift out of their cages. He might
show them the light and see them first totter with blinded eyes and
claws clasped about his wrist, then grow more calm, as their pupils
contracted, almost gentle indeed when he gave them a bit of warm, bloody
meat. But them he cared not for, them he soon wearied of, and he quickly
learned to perceive that none had the Iceland falcon’s breast-muscles of
steel, its long wide wings and quiescent strength. But it was the most
delightful thing possible to see how the young falcons were trained to
hunt according to the wise rules of King Modus, when they had reached
the time that their memory of freedom wore off and they sat, heavy and
blind, dozing on their perches.
The first thing was to accustom them again to fly, but with a cord on
the foot, till they had learned at the falconer’s cry to swoop down upon
the red cloth dummy fitted with a pair of large heron wings, which he
swung in the air on a string in oddly deliberate circles--that was fine
to see!--and to which he had tied the breast of a quail or a piece of
chicken. This the falcons afterwards devoured, the rage at their
confinement being dulled by thirst of blood. Soon they grew so
accustomed to this procedure that they never strained at their cord, no
gleam of wildness remained in their eyes; they at once looked about
calmly for the decoy and only rose according to rule, ascending in a
curve at the proper time to swoop down indolently and playfully in a
wide circle; and when the cord was taken off, they hardly seemed to
notice.
The time had now come to train them for hunting, each for its particular
quarry; the smaller for quail, partridge or sparrows, the larger for
hare or heron or kites, the ignoble kites which had the nature of crows
along with their powerful talons and beaks and which could never be
tamed to eat at a knightly board.
First they were given decoys like their quarry, with a piece of their
favorite food inside for them to search out; then disabled birds, which
they could strike their claws into at once and tear to pieces in
half-roused fury; and so on to prey that was harder to catch, until they
learned to enjoy the intoxication of the hunt. Their old wild instincts
awoke once more in full strength, but controlled and ennobled, so that
they calmly dropped their dying quarry after a short mad drink of blood
and ate only from their ornamented dishes, without greediness, as is
fitting for the birds of a knight.
Their eyes grew indolent and proud and took on the color of the day,
black when their hood was lifted off, brightening to molten gold when
they rose in the sunlight, burning with flakes of fire above the shriek
of their prey. They bent caressingly toward Renaud’s brown hand, but
none of them was like the Iceland falcon with the weary, kinglike
disdain in its glance, and he grew disgusted with them all, pressed
their beaks harshly shut when they tried to play, and threw them from
him carelessly, and mimicked the shriek of the kite so that they
trembled with disquietude and left the aviary with men’s curses behind
them and the wide brown plain before them.
Sir Enguerrand rode out hunting every day, nearly always wearing his
red, gold-embroidered glove, for only the bell-tinkling flight of the
Iceland falcon could awaken song within him and cause him to breathe the
sharp, volatile morning air with delight as if he drank living wine. One
day the falcon had struck a heron, bleeding, into a swamp behind a
thicket, where the huntsman found it and cracked its neck; but the
falcon itself was gone, either lured after a new quarry or recoiling
from the brown water or capriciously letting itself be lifted and
carried along by the wind. In vain they searched, in vain they called it
by the prettiest names, in vain they made the notes of the horn rebound
from every hill. Sir Enguerrand smote the mouth of the head falconer
bloody with his red glove and rode straight home across the tussocks of
the swamp with his lips shut more sharply and his eyelids sunk over the
listless pupils more gloomily than ever. The falcon they did not find.
But Renaud found it, its jess caught in a wild rose bush, awaiting death
by starvation with its grip fast on a branch, one wing drooping, the
other lifted defiantly, its narrow head stretched threateningly forward
with the eyes fixed and beak sharp--a splendid sight it was among the
blood-red berries. Renaud’s hand trembled with eagerness as he loosed
the jess from the thorns, as the bells tinkled around his fingers and
the ring with Sir Enguerrand’s crest, and he cried aloud with joy when
the sharp claws cut into his sinewy arm and he felt that it was his, the
falcon of broadest breast and longest wings and proudest eyes of burning
gold.
It was the more his in that he never would be able to show it to anyone,
for he knew that strict laws protected the sport of the nobles. In the
woods he would have to build a cage for it, early in the morning he
would steal thither before the bird had shaken off its chill, they
would go together across the open with searching looks directed at the
whitish heavens, they would grow fond of each other as they let the
sunlight rise and fall over their heads and the wind carry their silent
thoughts along, and the falcon would never miss its red glove or the
constraint of its pearl-sewn hood. He tied it again and ran down to the
pond, returning shortly with a duck which he had killed with a stone.
The falcon took it, and Renaud’s brain grew numb with intoxication, for
that was a sign that it did not despise him, that it was willing to be
his.
It became his; it bent its head forward, listening, with tranquil
wide-open eyes when the frosty branches cracked under his step in the
stillness of morning; it hopped lightly down from its cage and stretched
out toward his hand, beating its wings as for flight, but it did not
fly--that was only a reminder--and therewith they hurried out to the
softly glowing expanse of the moor.
Their eyes glanced searchingly toward the dark-red welkin. Black lay the
hills and thinning thickets, and the trees slept, their boughs heavy
with silent birds. But the heavens grew brighter, flaming with gold and
red and the lines of the plain turned to blue, and the owl sped close to
the ground, seeking its covert, and the day birds stretched their wings
and chirped softly because of the cold, and dark their flight cut
through the gleaming air. But Renaud and his falcon went quickly on, for
these were sparrows and thrushes, no prey fit for them. Down toward the
marshes sounded already the drawling cry of the herons and wide-circling
beat of their long wings, yonder was the quarry they sought. Then the
falcon was cast with breast already expanded and wings prepared to beat,
and Renaud saw it gilded by the sun as he stood with blinded eyes and
dizzy head while the bird crouched against the deep blue, and heard how
the clang of its bells mocked the shout of the herons.
They whirred like wheels in their terror; now they tended to shoot down
to the shore and hide their long necks and stupid frightened heads with
backward-pointing tufts under the dark wooded banks, now they tried in
wavering uncertainty to rise up in a spiral, thrusting in their broad
wings to attain higher than the enemy could follow, and they swerved
like reeds in the terror of their pale hearts.
But the falcon singled out at the start one of the strongest, one of
those that flew immediately aloft, because it loved to prove its
strength and to feel sharp, light air under its wings, and it rose as
fast and straight as if circling around a sunbeam. Soon it was
uppermost; smaller than a sparrow it looked, but something in the poise
of the wings, in the gathered strength of the body, made one divine the
sparkling savagery of its eye, its outspread talons. Of a sudden it
fell, heavy as steel, on the defenseless upturned neck of the quarry,
and they dropped like a single stone, hardly once eddying aside by a
wing’s breadth. Then Renaud ran and swam and waded so as to arrive
before the heron, which had been stunned by the stroke, could gather
itself together and in the wildness of its desperation make use of its
pointed bill. The falcon gave it the death blow sharply and swiftly,
turning its great eyes, already tranquil, on its master, for it did not
care to soil its feathers with blood, and waiting to have the warm heart
given to it.
Afterwards it did not fly any more that day; when Renaud cast it and ran
ahead with a shout, it only took a couple of wingstrokes and lighted
again on the lad’s shoulder close to his laughing face with proud
composure. It seemed to despise all play and Renaud soon made an end,
his expression taking on the far-gazing seriousness of the falcon. He
grew more fond of it than he had ever been of anything; it seemed to him
that it was his own soul, his longing, with its broad wings and its
glance confident of victory. But there was suffering in his love, the
dismal premonition of a misfortune. Sometimes he was afraid that the
bird would fly away from him in a fit of indifference; would vanish in
a mocking sound of bells, and that would be his death, such an empty
existence. Or it seemed to him that the falcon was honor, gleaming with
sunlight against the blue, which rested itself on his shoulder for new
exploits; and in the midst of his joy he was oppressed with his own
insignificance, so that he hardly dared to look at it. There was grief
at his heart that the bird would never share his delight, that its
glance would never melt warmly into his, and he fled to the realm of
dreams.
He laid himself down in the midst of the moor with the red heather under
his head, and the clouds glided past like human destiny, heavy and
light, gathered within a firm outline or scattered on high, with the
winds’ invisible hand ever at their shoulder, while the bushes bent
their rustling golden branches and Renaud told stories to the falcon.
King Arthur was come again, once more from out the British sea was
handed to him his sword Excalibur, blue as the chill nightly heavens;
his twelve knights lifted their heavy heads from the stone table and
shook off their sleep, the earth resounded with their tread. Gareth was
there, the prince’s son who put on the attire of a scullery boy and
turned Lynette’s ringing scorn into love. Renaud was there, too, was of
noble birth, his horse danced beneath him, and the falcon which now
slept with sunken head sat high on his hand and sought his glance with
eyes that gleamed with joy and the yellow sunlight of heroic story.
But the clouds glided past like human destiny, were driven dark, one
over another into a gigantic vault, from the apertures of which fell
sunbeams pale and sharp as spears, and the falcon dreamed dismal dreams
of impotent wrath and waked with a shriek.
Before long some roving lads chanced to see Sir Enguerrand’s falcon on
Renaud’s hand, and the knight’s men seized him and bore him to the
castle. His heart froze within him when they took away the falcon,
motionless and proud as ever, without a turn of its bended neck or a
look from its cold, calm eyes. They took it to its master, but he had
not a single caress for the missing favorite that had let itself be
touched by ignoble hands. Sir Enguerrand looked down at Renaud in
silence and more and more clearly in his thoughts took form the memory
of an old hunting law from the time when the nobleman’s foot pressed,
steel shod, on the neck of the common people, and his enjoyments
fluttered unassailable around his shoulders. And Sir Enguerrand’s
eyebrows contracted about the certainty that the old law had never been
repealed. The law commanded that he who stole a falcon with a knight’s
crest on its jess should pay twelve sols of silver or six ounces of
flesh from his ribs under the beak of a hungry bird of prey.
Sir Enguerrand knew of Renaud’s poverty and, looking at his naked brown
breast, extended his hand and touched it with an experimental, unfeeling
gesture. He then sent a message to the neighboring castle which reared
its pointed roof above the woods, and invited the seneschal and his two
daughters to be his guests three days later and see some falcons fly,
after they by their presence had heightened the solemnity of punishing a
thief--and they were to come before daybreak.
Renaud’s eyes had widened from the darkness of the prison; they were
black and motionless, and the gleaming pupils contracted but slowly to
mirror the thin-worn clouds and rising sun of the east. Behind Sir
Enguerrand was borne the Iceland falcon, its talons fiercely clasped in
the glove, with the hood over its wakeful and famished glances that had
not seen food for three days.