Tyll Page 19

  The king had a headache. He had difficulty breathing. He had not been prepared for the smell of the camp. He had known that cleanliness didn’t prevail when thousands upon thousands of soldiers along with their supply train were camping in one place, and he still remembered the smell of his own army, which he had commanded outside Prague before it disappeared, seeping away into the ground, dispersing like smoke, but that had been nothing like this—this was unimaginable. You smelled the camp even before it came into view, a whiff of sourness and acridity hovering over the depopulated landscape.

  “God, how it stinks,” the King had said.

  “Awful,” the fool had replied. “Absolutely awful. Winter King, it’s time you took a bath.”

  The cook and the four soldiers the Dutch States General had reluctantly given him for protection had laughed stupidly, and the King had considered for a moment whether he should put up with it, but that’s what fools were for, in the end, such conduct was proper when you were a king. The world treated you with respect, but this one person was permitted to say anything.

  “The King needs a bath,” said the cook.

  “He needs to wash his feet,” cried a soldier.

  The King looked at Count Hudenitz riding next to him, but since the count’s face remained impassive, he could pretend he hadn’t heard it.

  “And behind his ears,” said another soldier, and again everyone laughed except the count and the fool.

  The King didn’t know what he ought to do. It would have been appropriate to strike at the shameless fellow, but he didn’t feel well, for days he had had a cough, and what if the man struck back? The soldier was ultimately answerable to the States General, not to him. On the other hand, he certainly couldn’t let people insult him who were not his court jesters.

  Then they had seen the camp from a hilltop, and the King had forgotten his anger, and the soldiers had no longer thought to mock him. Like a white city wavering in the wind it had lain at their feet—a city with a gentle movement going through its houses, a back and forth, a gliding and undulating. Only at second glance did you realize that this city consisted of tents.

  The closer they came, the stronger the smell grew. It stung your eyes, it pierced your chest, and when you held a cloth over your face, it penetrated the fabric. The King squinted, he gagged. He tried to take shallow breaths, but in vain, there was no escape, he gagged more violently. He noticed that Count Hudenitz wasn’t doing any better, and the soldiers too were pressing their hands over their faces. The cook was deathly pale. Even the fool no longer had his usual impudent expression.

  The earth was churned up. The horses sank in, trudging as if through deep mire. Muck was heaped up dark brown on the roadside. The King tried to tell himself that it probably wasn’t what he suspected, but he knew it was precisely that: the excrement of a hundred thousand people.

  That wasn’t all it stank of. It also stank of wounds and sores, of sweat and of all diseases known to man. The King blinked. It seemed to him as if you could even see the smell, a poisonous yellow thickening of the air.

  “Where are you heading?”

  A dozen cuirassiers were blocking their way—tall, composed-looking men with helmets and breastplates, such as the King hadn’t seen since his days in Prague. He looked at Count Hudenitz. Count Hudenitz looked at the soldiers. The soldiers looked at the King. Someone had to speak, had to announce him.

  “His Bohemian Majesty and Serene Highness Elector and Count Palatine,” the King finally said himself. “On the way to your supreme commander.”

  “Where is His Bohemian Majesty?” asked one of the cuirassiers. He spoke Saxon dialect, and the King had to remind himself that only a small number of Swedes fought on the Swedish side—just as there were hardly any Danes in the Danish army and merely a few hundred Czechs had stood outside Prague during the battle.

  “Here,” said the King.

  The cuirassier gave him an amused look.

  “It’s me. His Majesty. That’s me.”

  The other cuirassiers grinned too.

  “What’s so funny?” asked the King. “We have a letter of safe conduct, an invitation from the King of Sweden. Bring me to him at once.”

  “All right, all right,” said the cuirassier.

  “I will tolerate no disrespect,” said the King.

  “Very well,” said the cuirassier. “Come along now, Majesty.”

  And then he had led them through the outskirts of the camp into the interior. As the stench, which had already been so pestilential that you might have thought it couldn’t grow any stronger, grew ever stronger, they passed the covered wagons of the supply train: drawbars jutted into the air, sick horses lay on the ground, children played in the filth, women nursed infants or washed clothes in tubs of brown water. These were the buyable soldiers’ brides, but they were also the wives with whom many a soldier traveled. A man who had a family brought them with him to war; where else should they have stayed?

  Here the King saw something horrible. He looked at it, didn’t realize at first what it was, it defied recognition, but when you looked at it longer, it took shape, and you understood. He quickly looked elsewhere. He heard Count Hudenitz groaning next to him.

  It was dead children. Probably none of them older than five, most of them not even a year old. They lay there heaped up and discolored, with blond, brown, and red hair, and when you looked closely, many pairs of eyes were open, forty or more, and the air was dark with flies. When they had passed, the King was tempted to turn around, because even though he didn’t want to see it, he did want to see it, but he resisted the temptation.

  Now they were in the interior of the camp, among the soldiers. Tents stood beside tents, men sat around fires, roasted meat, played cards, slept on the ground, drank. Everything would have been normal if you hadn’t seen so many sick men: sick men in the mud, sick men on sacks of straw, sick men on wagons—not merely wounded men, but men with sores, men with bumps on their faces, men with watering eyes and drooling mouths. Not a few lay there motionless and bent; you couldn’t have said whether they were dead or dying.

  The stench was now hardly bearable. The King and his escorts pressed their hands over their noses. They all tried not to breathe. Only when there was no other choice did they gasp for breath behind their palms. The King gagged again, he gathered all his strength, but he gagged even more violently, and then he had to vomit off his horse. Immediately Count Hudenitz and the cook and then even one of the Dutch soldiers had the same reaction.

  “Are you finished?” asked the cuirassier.

  “It’s Your Majesty,” said the fool.

  “Your Majesty,” said the cuirassier.

  “He’s finished,” said the fool.

  As they rode on, the King closed his eyes. This helped a little, for you actually smelled less when you didn’t see anything. Still, you smelled enough. He heard someone saying something, then he heard shouts, then he heard laughter from all sides, but it didn’t matter; let them make fun of him. All he wanted was not to have to endure this stench anymore.

  And so he had been brought with his eyes closed to the royal tent, in the center of the camp, guarded by a dozen Swedes in full uniform, the king’s bodyguard, who stood here to fend off dissatisfied soldiers. The Swedish crown was always behind in its payments. Even if you won all the battles and took everything the defeated land offered, war was not a business that paid for itself.

  “I bring a king,” said the cuirassier who had led them.

  The guards laughed.

  The King heard his own soldiers join in the laughter. “Count Hudenitz!” he said in his sharpest authoritative tone. “This insolent behavior must come to an end.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” the count muttered, and strangely enough it worked and the stupid swine went silent.

 
The King dismounted. He was dizzy. He bent forward and coughed for a while. One of the guards folded back the tent flap, and the King entered with his escorts.

  That had been half an eternity ago. Two hours, perhaps three, they had been waiting, on low little benches without backrests, and the King no longer knew how he was supposed to go on overlooking the fact that he was being left sitting here; but he absolutely had to overlook it, because otherwise he would have had to stand up and leave, yet no one but this Swede could bring him back to Prague. Might it have had to do with the fact that the fellow had wanted to marry Liz? He had written dozens of letters, swearing his love countless times, again and again he had sent his portrait, but she hadn’t wanted him. That was probably the reason. This pettiness was his revenge.

  Still, perhaps his need for retaliation would now be sated. Perhaps this was a good sign. Possibly the waiting meant that Gustav Adolf would help him. He rubbed his eyes. As always when he was agitated, his hands felt clammy, and in his stomach was a burning that no herbal tea could assuage. During the battle outside Prague it had been so strong that he had had to remove himself from the battlefield due to his attacks of colic; at home, surrounded by servants and courtiers, he had waited for the outcome, the worst hour of his life up to that point—except that everything that was to follow, every single hour, every moment, had been far worse.

  He heard himself sigh. The wind above them rustled the tent. He heard men’s voices outside. Somewhere someone was screaming, either a wounded man or a man dying of the plague. In all camps there were plague victims. No one spoke of it, for no one wanted to think about it; there was nothing anyone could do.

  “Tyll,” said the King.

  “King?” said the fool.

  “Do something.”

  “Is time going by too slowly for your liking?”

  The King was silent.

  “Because he’s keeping you waiting so long, because he’s treating you like his renderer, like his barber, like his stool groom, that’s why you’re bored, and I’m supposed to offer you some entertainment, right?”

  The King was silent.

  “I’d be happy to.” The fool leaned forward. “Look me in the eyes.”

  Hesitantly, the King looked at the fool. The pursed lips, the thin chin, the pied jerkin, the calfskin cap; once he had asked him why he wore this costume, whether he was perhaps trying to dress up as an animal, to which the fool had replied: “Oh no, as a person!”

  Then he did as he was told and looked him in the eyes. He blinked. It was unpleasant, because he wasn’t accustomed to holding another person’s gaze. But anything was better than having to talk about the fact that the Swede was keeping him waiting, and he had asked the fool for entertainment, after all, and now he was also a little curious what he was up to. Suppressing the desire to close his eyes, he stared at the fool.

  He thought of the white canvas. It hung in his throne room and had at first given him much pleasure. “Tell the visitors that stupid people don’t see the picture, tell them only the highborn see it, just say it, and you will witness a miracle!” It had been hilarious how the visitors had pretended, looking at the white picture discerningly and nodding. Of course they hadn’t claimed to actually see the picture, no one was so maladroit, and almost all of them were very well aware that there was nothing but a white canvas hanging there. But first of all they simply were not completely sure whether some magic wasn’t at work, and secondly they didn’t know whether Liz and he perhaps believed in it—and to be suspected by a king of stupidity or lowly origins was, in the end, just as bad as being stupid or of lowly origins.

  Even Liz had said nothing. Even she, his wonderful, beautiful, but ultimately not always very clever wife, had looked at the picture and remained silent. Even she had not been sure, of course not, she was only a woman.

  He had wanted to speak to her about it. Liz, he had wanted to say, stop this nonsense, don’t put on an act for me! But suddenly he hadn’t dared. Because if she believed in it, only a little bit, if she too thought a spell had been cast on the canvas, then what would she think of him?

  And if she spoke of it to others? If she said something like: His Majesty, my husband, the King, he has seen no picture on the canvas, then how would he appear in their eyes? His status was fragile, he was a king without a country, he was an exile, he was utterly dependent on what people thought of him—what should he do if word went around that in his throne room hung a magic picture that only the highborn could see, but he couldn’t? Of course there was no picture there, it had been one of the fool’s jokes, but now that the canvas hung there, it had developed its own power, and the King had realized with horror that he could neither take it down nor say anything about it. Neither could he claim that he saw a painting where there was no painting, for there was no surer way to prove himself an idiot, nor could he declare that the canvas was white, for if the others believed that an enchanted picture hung there with the power to expose the lowly and stupid, then that was enough to disgrace him completely. He couldn’t even speak of it to his poor, sweet, dull-witted wife. It was maddening. The fool had done all this to him.

  How long had the fool been staring at him now? He wondered what the fellow might be planning. Tyll’s eyes were completely blue. They were very bright, almost watery, they seemed to glow faintly of their own accord, and in the middle of the eyeball was a hole. Behind it was—well, what? Behind it was Tyll. Behind it was the soul of the fool, that which he was.

  Again the King wanted to close his eyes, but he held the fool’s gaze. It became clear to him that what was happening on one side was happening on the other too: just as he was looking into the fool’s innermost depths, so the fool was now looking into him.

  Completely incongruously he thought of the moment he had looked his wife in the eye for the first time, the evening after their marriage. How shy she had been, how fearful. She had held her hands in front of the bodice he had been about to unlace, but then she had looked up and he had seen her face in the candlelight, up close for the first time, and at that moment he had sensed what it’s like to truly be one with another person; but when he had spread his arms to pull her to him he had struck the carafe of rose water on the bedside table, and the tinkling of the shards had broken the spell: The puddle on the ebony parquet floor, he could still see it before his eyes, and drifting on it, like little ships, the rose petals. There had been five petals. That he remembered clearly.

  Then she had begun to weep. Apparently no one had explained to her what had to happen on a wedding night, and so he had let her be, because although a king had to be strong, he had above all always been gentle, and they had fallen asleep side by side like brother and sister.

  In another bedroom, at home in Heidelberg, they had later discussed the great decision. Night after night, again and again, she had dithered and cautioned, in the age-old manner of women, and he had repeatedly explained to her that one didn’t receive an offer like this without the will of God and that one had to accept one’s fate. But the Kaiser, she had cried time and again, what about his wrath, no one rose up against the Kaiser, and he had patiently explained to her the argument his jurists had so persuasively presented to him: that the acceptance of the Bohemian crown would not be a breach of the imperial peace because Bohemia wasn’t part of the Empire.

  And so he had finally persuaded her, as he had persuaded everyone else. He had made clear to her that Bohemia’s throne rightfully belonged to whomever the estates of Bohemia wanted as king, and therefore they had left Heidelberg and moved to Prague, and he would never forget the day of the coronation, the vast cathedral, the huge choir, and to this day it echoed within him: You are now a king, Fritz. You are one of the great.

  “Don’t close your eyes,” said the fool.

  “I’m not,” said the King.

  “Be quiet,” said the fool, and the King
wondered whether he could let that pass, never mind fool’s license, that went too far.

  “What’s going on with the donkey anyway?” he asked, to annoy the fool. “Can he do anything yet?”

  “He will soon speak like a preacher,” said the fool.

  “And what does he say?” asked the King. “What can he do now?”

  Two months ago he had spoken in the fool’s presence about the wondrous birds of the Orient that could form complete sentences so that you’d think people were talking to you. He had read about them in Athanasius Kircher’s book on God’s animal world and he had not been able to get the thought of talking birds out of his head ever since.

  But the fool had said that it was nothing to teach a bird to talk; all it took was a little skill to make any animal chatty. Animals were smarter than people, which was why they kept quiet: they were determined not to land themselves in trouble over trivialities. But as soon as you offered an animal good reasons for speaking, it broke its silence. He could prove this at any time in exchange for good food.