Three Arched Bridge

34

IN THE FIRST WEEK OF MARCH the bridge was damaged again, This time the damage was mainly below the waterline and was extremely worrying. Large stone blocks had been dislodged from the piers of the main arch, and this, they said, would endanger the whole central portion of the bridge if repairs were not made at once.

Suspended by ropes above the icy water, the workmen attempted to fill the cavities. Besides being an exceptionally difficult task, this patchwork seemed in vain as long as the stones were put in place without mortar. However, if the repairs were postponed until summer, when the waters subsided and the use of mortar became possible, there was a danger that the waters would further erode the cavities.

As if bending over someone’s wounds, new faces that had come specially for this work swarmed all day over the damaged places. It was said that they were trying a new way of fixing stones with a mixture of wool, pitch and egg-white.

The new damage to the bridge caused, as expected, a fresh storm of evil premonitions. People came from all over to see with their own eyes the cursed bridge, which had brought down on itself the wrath of the naiads and water spirits. That the damage was invisible made it even more frightening.

Together with the curious travelers, a horde of bards came, some returning in disappointment from an unfinished war somewhere among the principalities of the north, and others appearing here for the first time. These latter took their places at the Inn of the Two Roberts, and every night sang old ballads in eerie voices.

They told me that one of these ballads was that of the three mason brothers and the young wife immured in the castle that was built by day and destroyed at night. I remembered the collector of tales and customs, but I do not know what it was that impelled me to set off for the Inn of the Two Roberts to listen to the ballad with my own ears.

It was chilly, but nevertheless I set off on foot. Perhaps because of the potholes and puddles on the highway, I could not banish from my mind the watery eyes of the vanished collector of tales.

As soon as I heard the ballad’s first verses, I recognized his hand in its composition. The ballad had been changed. It was not about three brothers building a castle wall, but about dozens of masons building a bridge. The bridge was built during the day and destroyed at night by the spirits of the water. It demanded a sacrifice. Let someone come who is willing to be sacrificed in the piers of the bridge, the bards sang. Let him be a sacrifice for the sake of the thousands and thousands of travelers who will cross that bridge winter and summer, in rain and storm, journeying toward their joy or to their misfortune, hordes of people down the centuries to come.

“Have you heard this new ballad that has appeared?” the innkeeper said to me, “The old one was better,”

I did not know what to say. The bard sang on in a spine-chilling voice:

O tremble, bridge of stone,

As I tremble in this tomb!

“Yesterday I heard them say that every bridge does in fact tremble a little, all the time,” the innkeeper went on.

I nodded. There flashed through my mind the thought that the collector of tales knew something about bridge building, perhaps as much as the master-in-chief.

I returned homeward in utter misery. From a distance the bridge stood blue in the falling dusk. Even if it were washed a thousand times in blood … the master-in-chief had said.

Clearly the ballad portended nothing but blood.

Along the entire road, I thought about the coming sacrifice. My head swam. Would he come to the bridge himself, like the youngest brother’s wife, or would he be caught in a trap? Who would it be? What reason would he have to die, or to be killed? The old ballad entangled itself in my head with the new one, like two trees unsuccessfully trying to graft themselves onto each other. What would happen the evening before in the house of the man to be sacrificed? And what would be his reason for setting out to die, on a moonless night, as the old song put it?

Nobody will come, I suddenly said almost aloud. That collector of tales was just mad. But deep in my heart I felt afraid that someone would come. He would come slowly^ with soft footsteps through the darkness^ and lay his head on the sacrificial block, Who are you who will come? I asked myself. And why will you come?