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  Something hits his head, there’s a spray of sparks, the boy’s knees give way. It takes him a moment to realize that Pirmin has thrown something. He touches his forehead. He leans forward—there lies the stone. Once again he is impressed how well Pirmin can aim.

  “You rats,” says Pirmin. “Bunglers. Do you think anyone wants to see this? Who wants to stare at playing children? Are you doing this for yourselves? Then go back to your parents, the ones who haven’t been incinerated. Or are you doing it for spectators? Then you have to be better. Better story, better acting, quicker, more power, more wit, more of everything! Then you have to have rehearsed it!”

  “His forehead!” Nele cries. “He’s bleeding!”

  “But not enough. He should bleed much more. Someone who can’t do his job should bleed all day.”

  “You swine!” Nele cries.

  Absently Pirmin picks up another stone.

  Nele ducks.

  “We’ll begin again,” the boy says.

  “I’ve had enough for today,” says Pirmin.

  “No,” says the boy. “No, no. One more time.”

  “I’ve had enough, let it be,” says Pirmin.

  So they sit down with him. The fire has burned down to a faint glow. A memory comes to the boy, which he doesn’t know whether he lived or dreamed: nocturnal noise from the thicket, buzzing and cracking and crunching coming from everywhere, and a large animal, the head of a donkey, its eyes open wide, a scream unlike any he has ever heard, and hot streaming blood. He shakes his head, pushes the memory away, reaches for Nele’s hand. Her fingers squeeze his.

  Pirmin chuckles. Once again the boy wonders whether this man can read his thoughts. It’s not so hard, Claus explained it to him, you only have to know the right spells.

  Actually Pirmin is not a bad fellow. Not entirely bad, in any case, not as thoroughly bad as it would seem at first glance. Sometimes there’s something soft about him, which could almost turn into mildness, if he didn’t have to lead the hard life of the traveling people. He is actually too old to still be moving from place to place, braving the rain and sleeping under trees, but somehow due to bad luck all opportunities for employment with room and board have passed him by, and now no more will arise. Either his knees will hurt so much in a few years that he won’t be able to roam anymore and will have to stay in the first village he comes to, with some farmer who has enough sympathy to take him on as a day laborer, for which, however, he will need a great deal of luck, for no one wants traveling people with them, it brings misfortune and bad weather and causes the neighbors to speak ill of them. Or Pirmin will have to beg, outside the wall of Nuremberg, Augsburg, or Munich, for beggars are not let into the cities. People throw food to the unfortunate, but it’s never enough for all of them, the stronger ones take it. Thus Pirmin will starve.

  Or it won’t even come to that. For example, because he stumbles somewhere along the way—damp roots are so treacherous, it’s hard to believe how slippery wet wood can be; or a stone on which he steps while climbing is not as stable as it seems. Then he will lie on the roadside with a broken leg, and anyone passing by will steer clear of the foul fellow in the muck, for what are they supposed to do, carry him? Give him warmth and nourishment, provide for him like a brother? Things like that occur in legends of the saints, not in real life.

  What, then, is the best thing that can happen to Pirmin? For his heart to stop. For a pang to shoot through his chest and his innards, during a show on the market square: he looks up at the balls, then an instant of the utmost torment, then it’s all over.

  He could bring it about himself. It wouldn’t be hard. Many traveling people do it—they know the mushrooms that guide you gently into sleep. Only, Pirmin confessed to them in a weak moment that he doesn’t have the courage. God opposed it with his severest commandment: he who kills himself may escape the adversity of this world, but he does so at the price of eternal torment in the next. And eternal—that doesn’t mean just a long time. It means that the longest time you can imagine, even if it were a thousand times as many years as it would take a bird to grind away the Brocken mountain with its beak, is merely the very tiniest fraction of the tiniest fraction of it. And even though it lasts so long, you don’t get used to the horror, to the loneliness, to the pain. That’s the system. So who can hold it against Pirmin that he is the way he is?

  And yet everything could have turned out differently. He has seen good times too. Once upon a time he had a future. In his heyday he made it to London, and whenever the strong beer makes him drunk, that is what he talks about. Then he tells them about the Thames, so wide in the glow of sunset, about the taverns and the bustle on the streets—the city was so huge that you could walk for days and not reach its end! And there were theaters on every corner. He didn’t understand the language, but the grace of the players and the truth in their faces moved him in a way that nothing later did.

  He was young in those days. He was one of the many traveling performers who crossed the Channel with the retinue of the young Electoral Prince. The Electoral Prince came to England to marry Princess Elizabeth, and since the English have a high regard for performers, he brought along all his country had to offer: ventriloquists, fire eaters, belchers, puppeteers, pugilists, hand walkers, hunchbacks, picturesque cripples, and indeed also him, Pirmin. On the third day of festivities, in the house of a certain Bacon, Pirmin threw his balls in front of all the great lords and ladies. The tables were bedecked with flowers. The host stood with a clever, wicked smile at the entrance to the hall.

  “I can still see them before my eyes,” Pirmin says. “The straitlaced Princess, the bridegroom who doesn’t know what’s hit him. We should hunt him down!”

  “What should we do?”

  “Hunt him down! It’s said that he moves from land to land and eats the Protestant nobility out of house and home. It’s said that he still acts as if he were king. It’s said that he drags his own little court along with him. But does he have a fool? Perhaps an old court jester is just the thing for a king without a country.”

  Pirmin has said this often. It’s another effect of all the beer: he repeats himself, and he doesn’t care. But now by the fire he is chewing on his last piece of dried meat while the children sit hungrily beside him listening to the forest noises. They hold hands and try to think of things that distract them from the hunger.

  With some practice it works very well. When you really know hunger, then you also know how to go about stifling it for a while. You must banish every image of edible things, you must clench your fists and pull yourself together and simply not permit it. Instead you can think about juggling, for it can be practiced in your head too—in this way you improve. Or you imagine yourself moving across the rope, wondrously high up, over peaks and clouds. The boy squints into the embers. Hunger makes you lighter. And as he gazes into the red glow, it seems to him as if he were seeing below him the bright vast day, as if the sun were blinding him.

  Nele puts her head on his shoulder. My brother, she thinks. He is now all she has left. She thinks about the home she will never see again, about her mother who was usually sad, about her father who hit her worse than Pirmin, and about her siblings and the hands. She thinks about the life that lay ahead of her: the Steger son, the work in the bakery. She doesn’t permit herself to think about the bread, of course—but now that she has thought about how she must not think about it, it has happened after all, and she sees the soft loaf of bread before her eyes, and she can smell it, and she feels it between her teeth.

  “Cut it out!” says the boy.

  And now she can’t help laughing and wonders how he knows what she was thinking. But it worked; the bread is gone.

  Pirmin has sunk forward. He is lying on the ground like a heavy sack, his back is rising and falling, and he is snoring like an animal.

  The fearful children look around.

 
It is cold.

  Soon the fire will be out.

  The Great Art of Light and Shadow

  At most times, Adam Olearius, the Gottorf court mathematician, curator of the ducal cabinet of curiosities and author of an account of a grueling mission to Russia and Persia, from which he had returned a few years earlier nearly unscathed, had a quick tongue, yet today in his nervousness he found speaking difficult. For before him, ringed by half a dozen secretaries in black cowls, deliberate, attentive, and bearing his incomprehensible wealth of learning like a light burden, stood none other than Father Athanasius Kircher, professor of the Collegium Romanum.

  Although it was their first meeting, they treated each other as if they had known each other for half their lives. This was customary among scholars. Olearius inquired what had brought his venerable colleague here, intentionally leaving unclear whether he meant the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation or Holstein or Gottorf Castle towering behind them.

  Kircher reflected for a while as if he had to retrieve the answer from the depths of his memory before he replied with a soft and somewhat too-high voice that he had left the Eternal City for the sake of various undertakings, the most important of which was to find a cure for the plague.

  “God help us,” said Olearius, “is it in Holstein again?”

  Kircher was silent.

  Olearius was disconcerted by how young the man standing opposite him was: it was hard to conceive that this head with the soft features had solved the mystery of magnetic force, the mystery of light, the mystery of music, and supposedly even the mystery of the writing of ancient Egypt. Olearius was aware of his own significance and was not known for his modesty. But in the presence of this man his voice threatened to fail.

  It went without saying that no religious enmity reigned between scholars. Almost twenty-five years ago, when the great war had begun, it would have been different, but things had changed. In Russia the Protestant Olearius had befriended French monks, and it was no secret that Kircher corresponded with many Calvinist scholars. Except that a short while ago, when Kircher mentioned in passing the death of the Swedish king at the Battle of Lützen and in this connection spoke of the grace of the good Lord, Olearius had to inwardly force himself not to reply that Gustav Adolf’s death had been a catastrophe in which any reasonable person had to recognize the hand of the devil.

  “You say that you want to cure the plague.” Olearius, still without an answer, cleared his throat. “And you say that you have come to Holstein for this purpose. So, then, has the plague come back to us?”

  Kircher let another moment pass and, as was apparently his wont, contemplated his fingertips before he replied that he naturally would not have come here to find a cure for the plague if the plague were raging in this region, for where it raged was precisely not where to find the means to hinder its spread. God’s goodness had so splendidly decreed that the searcher for a remedy, instead of exposing his life to the danger, should visit the very places to which the disease had not spread. For only there was that which countered it by the force of nature and the will of God to be found.

  They were sitting on the only stone bench of the castle park that had not been destroyed and dipping candy canes in diluted wine. Kircher’s six secretaries stood at a respectful distance and observed spellbound.

  It was not good wine, and Olearius knew that the park and the castle were not exactly impressive either. Marauders had felled the old trees, the lawn was covered with scorch marks, and the hedges were as damaged as the façade of the building, which was even missing part of its roof. Olearius was old enough to remember days when the castle had been a jewel of the north, the pride of the Jutish dukes. At the time he had still been a child and his father a simple craftsman, but the duke had recognized his talent and allowed him to become a student, and later he had sent him as an envoy to Russia and to distant, dazzling Persia, where he had seen camels and griffins and towers of jade and talking snakes. He would have liked to stay there, but he had sworn allegiance to the duke, and his wife too was waiting at home, or so he believed at least, for he hadn’t known that she had died in the interim. Thus he had returned to the cold Empire, to the war, and to the sad existence of a widower.

  Kircher pursed his lips, took another sip of wine, almost imperceptibly screwed up his face, wiped his lips with a red-stained little handkerchief, and went on to explain why he was here.

  “An experiment,” he said. “The new way of achieving certainty. One does tests. For example, one ignites a ball of sulfur, bitumen, and coal, and immediately one senses that the sight of the fire provokes anger. If one stays in the same room, one reels with rage. This is due to the fact that the ball reflects qualities of the red planet Mars. In a similar way one can use the watery qualities of Neptune to calm excited tempers or the confusing qualities of the treacherous moon to poison the mind. A sober man need only stay close to a moonlike magnet for a short time to get as drunk as if he had emptied a skin of wine.”

  “Magnets make you drunk?”

  “Read my book. In my new work there will be even more about it. It’s called Ars magna lucis et umbrae and answers the open questions.”

  “Which ones?”

  “All of them. As for the ball of sulfur: The experiment gave me the idea of having a decoction of sulfur and snail’s blood administered to a plague victim. For on the one hand the sulfur drives the Martian components of the disease out of him, while on the other hand the snail’s blood as a dracontological substitution sweetens that which sours the humors.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Kircher again contemplated his fingertips.

  “Snail’s blood is a substitute for dragon’s blood?” asked Olearius.

  “No,” Kircher said forbearingly, “dragon’s bile.”

  “And what brings you here now?”

  “The substitution has its limits. The plague victim in the experiment died despite the decoction, which clearly proves that real dragon’s blood would have cured him. Thus we need a dragon, and one of the last dragons of the north lives in Holstein.”

  Kircher looked at his hands. His breath formed little vapor clouds. Olearius shivered. Inside the castle it was no warmer, there were no trees left far and wide, and the duke used what little firewood there was for his bedroom.

  “Has it been sighted, then, the dragon?”

  “Of course not. A dragon that had been sighted would be a dragon that did not possess the most important quality of dragons—that of making itself undetectable. For this very reason one must treat all reports by people of having sighted dragons with extreme skepticism, for a dragon that let itself be sighted would be recognized a priori as a dragon that is no real dragon.”

  Olearius rubbed his forehead.

  “In this region, evidently, a dragon has never before been witnessed. Hence I am confident that there must be one here.”

  “But none have been witnessed in many other places too. So why here in particular?”

  “First of all, because the plague has withdrawn from this area. That is a strong sign. Secondly I used a pendulum.”

  “But that’s magic!”

  “Not if one uses a magnetic pendulum.” Kircher looked at Olearius with gleaming eyes. The slightly disparaging smile disappeared from his face as he leaned forward and asked with a simplicity that astounded Olearius: “Will you help me?”

  “Help you do what?”

  “Find the dragon.”

  Olearius pretended he had to think. Yet it wasn’t a difficult decision. He was no longer young, he had no children, and his wife was dead. He visited her grave every day, and it still happened that he would wake up and begin to weep, so much did he miss her and so heavily did the loneliness weigh on him. Nothing held him here. If, then, the most significant scholar in the world was inviting him on a shared adventure, there was not much to mull over. He drew a breath
to reply.

  But Kircher beat him to it. He rose and brushed dust off his cowl. “Very well, then we will set off tomorrow morning.”

  “I would like to bring my assistant along,” Olearius said, slightly annoyed. “Magister Fleming is knowledgeable and helpful.”

  “Yes, excellent,” said Kircher, evidently already thinking about something else. “Tomorrow morning, then, that’s good, we can manage that. Can you take me to the duke now?”

  “He is not receiving visitors at the moment.”

  “Don’t worry. When he learns who I am, he will consider himself fortunate.”

  * * *

  —

  Four coaches rumbled through the countryside. It was cold, morning haze rose pale from the meadows. The rearmost coach was filled from top to bottom with books that Kircher had acquired recently in Hamburg; in the next sat three secretaries copying manuscripts as well as they could in motion; in the next two secretaries were sleeping; and in the front coach Athanasius Kircher, Adam Olearius, and Magister Fleming, Olearius’s traveling companion of many years, were carrying on a conversation that a further secretary, quill and paper on his knees to take it down, was following attentively.

  “But what do we do if we find it?” asked Olearius.

  “The dragon?” asked Kircher.

  For a moment Olearius forgot his reverence and thought: I can’t stand him any longer. “Yes,” he then said. “The dragon.”

  Instead of answering, Kircher turned to Magister Fleming. “Do I understand correctly that you are a musician?”

  “I am a doctor. Above all, I write poems. And I studied music in Leipzig.”

  “Latin poems or French?”

  “German.”

  “German? Whatever for?”

  “What do we do if we find it?” Olearius repeated.

  “The dragon?” asked Kircher, and now Olearius would have liked nothing more than to slap his face.