Tyll Read online

  The fat count used this sentence verbatim in his account. But because things became confused for him, he claimed there that it had been he himself who read the Ars magna, and indeed on their journey. He mentioned having tucked the work into his saddlebag, which, to be sure, clearly revealed, as the annotators later noted with mocking objectivity, that he had never held this gigantic book in his hands. The fat count, however, ingenuously described how he had studied Kircher’s memorable descriptions of light, lenses, and angels on various evenings in front of meager campfires, the subtle reflections of the great scholar appearing to him in the strangest contrast to their advance into the more and more ravaged land.

  At Altheim the wind became so biting that they had to put on their lined cloaks and pull their hoods down low over their foreheads. At Ranshofen the weather cleared again. In a vacant farmhouse they watched the sunset. No people far and wide. Only a goose that must have fled from someone stood ragged next to a well.

  The fat count stretched and yawned. The land was hilly, but there was not another tree to be seen; everything had been cut down. A distant rumble could be heard.

  “Oh my,” said the fat count, “not that too, a thunderstorm.”

  The dragoons laughed.

  The fat count recognized his mistake. He had already realized what it was, he said awkwardly, only compounding his embarrassment. He had spoken in jest.

  The goose stared at them with uncomprehending goose eyes. It opened and closed its bill. The dragoon Franz Kärrnbauer aimed his carbine and fired. And although the fat count would soon thereafter witness much more, he would not forget for the rest of his days what horror pierced him to the core when the head of the bird burst. Something about it was almost incomprehensible—how quickly it happened, how from one moment to the next a solid small head was transformed into a spray and into nothing and how the animal took another few waddles and then collapsed into a white mound, in a spreading pool of blood. As he rubbed his eyes and tried to breathe calmly so that he wouldn’t faint, he decided that he had to forget it at all costs. But of course he did not forget it, and when he recalled this journey half a century later while composing his life’s chronicle, it was the image of the bursting goose head that outshone everything else in clarity. In an utterly honest book he would have had to include it, but he couldn’t bring himself to do so and took it with him to the grave, and no one learned with what inexpressible disgust he had watched the dragoons dress the bird for dinner: cheerfully, they scraped off the feathers, cut and tore, took out the guts, and roasted the meat over the fire.

  That night the fat count slept badly. The wind howled through the empty window frames. He shivered with cold. The dragoon Kärrnbauer snored loudly. Another dragoon, named Stefan Purner, or perhaps it was Konrad Purner—the two of them were brothers, and the fat count mixed them up so often that they later merged into a single figure in the book—gave him a nudge, but he only snored louder.

  In the morning they rode on. The village of Markl was completely destroyed: walls full of holes, cracked beams, rubble in the road, a few old people begging for food next to the filthy well. The enemy had been here and had taken everything, and the little that they had been able to hide had been taken afterward by friendly troops, that is, the Elector’s soldiers, and no sooner had these soldiers withdrawn than what the villagers had managed to conceal even from them was in turn taken by more enemy forces.

  “Which enemies, then?” the fat count asked worriedly. “Swedes or Frenchmen?”

  It was all the same to them, they said. They were so hungry.

  The fat count hesitated for a moment. Then he gave the command to ride onward.

  It had been quite right not to leave them anything, said Karl von Doder. The travelers didn’t have enough provisions and had to carry out orders from the highest authority. You simply could not help everyone, only God had that power, and he would certainly look after these Christians in his infinite mercy.

  All the fields lay fallow; some were in ashes, from great fires. The hills cowered under a leaden sky. In the distance columns of smoke stood against the horizon.

  It would be best, said Karl von Doder, to head southward past Altötting, Polling, and Tüssling, far from the country road, in the open field. Whoever had not abandoned the villages by now was armed and mistrustful. A group of riders bearing down on a village could be shot from cover without further ado.

  “All right,” said the fat count, who didn’t understand why an Imperial Court Council secretary suddenly had such clear ideas about the conduct required in a war zone. “Agreed!”

  “If we’re lucky and don’t encounter any soldiers,” said Karl von Doder, “then we’ll make it to Andechs in two days.”

  The fat count nodded and tried to imagine someone seriously shooting at him, aiming over the iron sights. At him, Martin von Wolkenstein, who had never done anyone wrong, with a real bullet made of lead. He looked down at himself. His back hurt, his bottom was sore from the days in the saddle. He stroked his belly and imagined a bullet, he thought of the burst goose head, and he also thought of the metal magic about which Athanasius Kircher had written in his book on magnets: if you carried a magnetic stone of sufficient strength in your pocket, you could deflect the bullets and make a man invulnerable. The legendary scholar himself had tried it. Unfortunately, such strong magnets were very rare and expensive.

  When he attempted to reconstruct their journey half a century later, the course of time grew muddled in his mind. To disguise his uncertainty, a florid digression is found at this point, seventeen and a half pages long, about the camaraderie of the men, who go to meet danger in the knowledge that this very danger will either kill them or bind them in friendship for life. The passage became famous, irrespective of the fact that it was fabricated, for in truth none of the men had become his friend. One conversation or another with the Imperial Court Council secretary remained in his memory in fragments, but as for the dragoons, he hardly remembered their names, much less their faces. One of them had been wearing a broad-brimmed hat with a grayish red plume—this he remembered. Above all he saw loamy paths in front of him and felt, as if it had been yesterday, the patter of the rain on his hood. His cloak had been heavy with water. At the time it struck him that nothing had ever been so wet, that it could not get any wetter.

  Some time ago there had been forests here. But when he thought about it while riding, with aching back and sore bottom, he became aware that this knowledge meant nothing to him. The war didn’t seem to him like something manmade, but like wind and rain, like the sea, like the high cliffs of Sicily that he had seen as a child. This war was older than he was. It had at times grown and at times shrunk, it had crept here and there, had laid waste to the north, turned west, had extended one arm eastward and one southward, then heaved its full weight into the south, only to settle again for a while in the north. Naturally, the fat count knew people who still remembered the time before, chief among them his father, who, coughing and good-humored, awaited death in the family’s country seat, Rodenegg in Tyrol, as the fat count himself would await it almost sixty years later, coughing and writing, in the same place and at the same stone table. His father had once spoken with Albrecht von Wallenstein. The tall and dark man had complained about the damp weather in Vienna. His father had responded that one got used to it, to which Wallenstein had replied that he did not want to and would not get used to such foul weather—a statement that his father had been about to parry with an especially witty remark, but Wallenstein had already turned away brusquely. Scarcely a month went by in which his father did not find a reason to talk about it, just as he never forgot to mention that he had several years earlier also encountered the unfortunate Elector Friedrich, who shortly thereafter had accepted the Bohemian crown and provoked the great war, only to be chased off in disgrace after a single winter and finally to perish somewhere on the roadside, without so much as a grave.


  That night they found no shelter. They curled up on a bare field and wrapped themselves in their wet cloaks. The rain was too heavy for a fire. Never had the fat count felt so miserable. The wet cloak, which kept getting wetter, was now indescribably sodden, and his body was gradually sinking deeper into the soft loam. Could the mire simply swallow you? He tried to sit up but couldn’t; the loam seemed to hold him down.

  Eventually the rain stopped. Coughing, Franz Kärrnbauer piled a few sticks and struck the flints together, again and again, until finally sparks flew, and then he bustled around for another half an eternity and blew on the wood and murmured magic spells until little flames flickered in the darkness. Shivering, they held their hands in the warmth.

  The horses shied and whinnied. One of the dragoons stood up, the fat count couldn’t make out which, but he saw that he was leveling the carbine. The fire made their shadows dance.

  “Wolves,” whispered Karl von Doder.

  They stared into the night. Suddenly the fat count was filled with the conviction that all this must be a dream, indeed this was how he remembered it later, as a dream from which he had awoken in the bright morning, dry and well rested. It could not have happened like that, but instead of grappling with his memory, he inserted twelve pages of artfully nested sentences about his mother. Most of it was pure invention, for he merged his distant and coldhearted mother with the figure of his favorite governess, who had been gentler to him than any other person, except perhaps the thin and beautiful prostitute Aglaia. When his account after this long and fabricated recollection found its way back to the journey, they had already passed Haar, and behind him the dragoons were carrying on a conversation about magic spells that protected you from stray bullets.

  “Can’t do anything about a well-aimed one,” said Franz Kärrnbauer.

  “Unless you have a really strong spell,” said Konrad Purner. “One of the very secret ones. They can even do something about cannonballs, I’ve seen it myself, at Augsburg. A man next to me used one like that, I thought he was dead, but then he stood up again as if nothing had happened. I couldn’t quite hear the spell, alas.”

  “Yes, it can be done with a spell like that,” said Franz Kärrnbauer. “A really expensive one. But the simple spells that you buy at the market, they’re useless.”

  “I knew a fellow,” said Stefan Purner, “he fought for the Swedes, and he had an amulet; with it he survived first Magdeburg, then Lützen. Then he drank himself to death.”

  “But the amulet,” asked Franz Kärrnbauer. “Who got it, where is it?”

  “Yes, if I only knew.” Stefan Purner sighed. “If you had that, then everything would be different.”

  “Yes,” Franz Kärrnbauer said prayerfully. “If only you had that!”

  At Baierbronn they found the first dead man. He must have been lying there awhile already, for his clothes were covered with a layer of earth, and his hair seemed to have become intertwined with the blades of grass. He was lying facedown, his legs spread, with bare feet.

  “That’s normal,” said Konrad Purner. “No one leaves a corpse his boots. If you’re unlucky, you get killed just for the shoes.”

  The wind carried small, cold raindrops. All around them were tree stumps, hundreds of them; a whole forest had been cut down here. They passed through a village that had been burned down to its foundation walls, and there they saw a heap of corpses. The fat count averted his eyes and then looked after all. He saw blackened faces, a torso with only one arm, a hand clenched into a claw, two empty eye sockets over an open mouth, and something that looked like a sack but was the remains of a body. An acrid smell hung in the air.

  In the late afternoon they reached a village in which there were still people. Yes, Ulenspiegel was in the abbey, said an old woman, he was still alive. And when they encountered a feral-looking man and a small boy pulling a cart together shortly before sunset, they received the same information. “He’s in the abbey,” said the man, staring up at the fat count’s horse. “Keep heading west, past the lake, then you can’t miss it. Do you have food for me and my son, sirs?”

  The fat count reached into his saddlebag and gave him a sausage. It was his last, and he knew that it was a mistake, but he couldn’t help it, he felt so sorry for the child. In a daze, he asked why they were pulling the wagon.

  “It’s all we have.”

  “But it’s empty,” said the fat count.

  “But it’s all we have.”

  Again they slept in the open field; to be safe they didn’t light a fire. The fat count was freezing, but at least it wasn’t raining, and the ground was solid. Shortly after midnight they heard two shots nearby. They listened. In the first morning light Karl von Doder swore he had seen a wolf observing them from not too far away. Hastily they mounted their horses and rode onward.

  They encountered a woman. It was hard to tell whether she was old or whether life had just treated her badly, so furrowed was her face, so stooped her gait. Yes, in the abbey, he was still there. No sooner had she spoken of the famous jester than she had to smile. And so it always was, the fat count wrote fifty years later: word of him had reached whomsoever we met; at the mere mention of his name, they indicated the way to his abode; every soul remaining in this wasteland seemed to know his whereabouts.

  Toward midday soldiers approached them. First a group of pikemen: feral people with shaggy beards. Some had open wounds, others were dragging sacks full of booty. A smell of sweat, disease, and blood hung over them, and they gazed with small, hostile eyes. They were followed by covered wagons, on which their women and children were sitting. A few of the women were holding infants tight. We saw only the devastation of the bodies, the fat count wrote later, but whether friend or foe could not be discerned, for they carried no standard.

  After the pikemen came a good dozen horsemen.

  “Godspeed,” said a man who was apparently their leader. “Where are you bound?”

  “For the abbey,” said the fat count.

  “We’re just coming from there. Nothing to eat there.”

  “We’re not looking for food. We’re looking for Tyll Ulenspiegel.”

  “Yes, he’s there. We saw him, but we had to make off when the Kaiser’s men came.”

  The fat count turned pale.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you. I’m Hans Kloppmess from Hamburg. I was once one of the Kaiser’s men too. And maybe I’ll be one again, who knows? A soldier has a trade, no less than a carpenter or baker. The army is my guild. There in the wagon I have a wife and children. I have to feed them. At the moment the French aren’t paying anything, but when they do pay, then it will be more than you get from the Kaiser. In Westphalia the great lords are negotiating peace. When the war ends, all the men will get their outstanding pay, you can count on that, because without the pay we would refuse to go home, the lords are afraid of that. Nice horses you have there!”

  “Thank you,” said the fat count.

  “Could really use them,” said Hans Kloppmess.

  Worriedly the fat count turned to look at his dragoons.

  “Where are you coming from?” asked Hans Kloppmess.

  “Vienna,” the fat count said hoarsely.

  “I was almost in Vienna once,” said the horseman next to Hans Kloppmess.

  “What, really?” asked Hans Kloppmess. “You, in Vienna?”

  “Only almost. Didn’t make it there.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing happened, I didn’t make it to Vienna.”

  “Keep away from Starnberg,” said Hans Kloppmess. “It would be best to head south past Gauting, then toward Herrsching, then from there to the abbey. The road is still open to foot travelers. But hurry. Turenne and Wrangel have already crossed the Danube. Soon sparks will be flying.”

  “We’re no foot travelers,” said Karl von Dode
r.

  “Just wait and see.”

  No command was necessary, no consultation. All of them spurred their horses. The fat count bent down over the neck of the animal and held on tight, clinging to both reins and mane. He saw the earth spraying under the hooves, he heard shouts behind him, he heard the report of a shot, he resisted the temptation to look back.

  They rode and rode, and kept on riding and riding. His back ached unbearably, he had no strength left in his legs, and he didn’t dare turn his head. Alongside him rode Franz Kärrnbauer, in front of him rode Konrad Purner and Karl von Doder, behind him rode Stefan Purner.

  Finally they stopped. The horses were steaming with sweat. Everything went black before the fat count’s eyes. He slid out of the saddle. Franz Kärrnbauer supported him and helped him dismount. The soldiers hadn’t followed them. It had begun to snow. Whitish gray flakes drifted in the air. When he caught one of them on his finger, he recognized that it was ash.

  Karl von Doder patted his horse’s neck. “South past Gauting, he said, then toward Herrsching. The horses are thirsty, they need water.”

  They mounted again. Silently they rode through the falling ash. They no longer encountered anyone, and in the late afternoon they saw above them the tower of the abbey.

  Here Martin von Wolkenstein’s life’s chronicle makes a leap: he doesn’t say a word about the steep ascent beyond Herrsching, which cannot have been easy for the horses, nor is there anything about the half-destroyed abbey building and no description of the monks. This was due to his memory, of course, but it was probably due even more to the nervous impatience that came over him while writing. And so readers find him two turbid lines later already opposite the abbot, in the early morning hours of the next day.