Little Kingdoms

The Princess, the Dwarf, and the Dungeon

THE DUNGEON. The dungeon is said to be located so far beneath the lowest subterranean chambers of the castle that a question naturally arises: is the dungeon part of the castle itself? Other underground chambers, such as the storage cellars, the torture chamber, and the prison cells used for detention during trial, are merely the lowest in an orderly progression of descending chambers, and maintain a clear and so to speak reasonable relation to the upper levels of the castle. But the dungeon lies so far beneath the others that it seems part of the dark world below, like the place under the mountain where ogres breed from the blood of murdered children.

THE CASTLE. The castle lies on a steep cliff on the far side of the river, three hundred feet above the water. In bright sunlight the castle seems to shine out from the darker rock of the cliff and to thrust its towers gaily into the blue sky, but when the air darkens with clouds the castle draws the darkness into itself and becomes nearly black against the stormy heavens. From our side of the river we can see the Princess’s tower, the battlements of the outer wall, including the vertical stone spikes on the merlons, and two arched gates of darker stone. Beneath the Princess’s tower lies her walled garden. We cannot see the garden walls or the garden itself, with its paths of checkered stone, its turf-covered benches, and its shady bower of trelliswork sheltering two couches covered in crimson silk. We cannot see the courtiers walking in the Court of the Three Fountains. We cannot see the Prince’s oriel overlooking the slate roof of the chapel, we cannot see the row of marble pillars three of which are said to come from the palace of Charlemagne at Ingelheim, we can only imagine the hall, the brewhouse, the bakehouse, the stables, the orchard, the park with its great alleys of shade trees, the dark forest stretching back and back and back.

TALES OF THE PRINCESS. There was once a beautiful Princess, whose skin was whiter than alabaster, whose hair was brighter than beaten gold, and whose virtue was celebrated throughout the land. One day she married a Prince, who was as handsome as she was beautiful; they loved each other entirely; and yet within a year their happiness turned to despair. Some held the Prince to blame, saying he was proud and jealous by nature, but others accused the Princess of a secret weakness. By this they meant nothing less than her virtue itself. For her virtue, which no one questioned, made her secure against the attentions of admirers, and prevented her from imagining even the possibility of unfaithfulness. Because of her deep love for the Prince and her knowledge of her own steadfastness, she failed to fortify herself with haughtiness, reserve, and a sense of formidable propriety. Instead, while acting always within the strict constraints of court etiquette, she was unaffected in manner, generous in spirit, and open to friendship with members of her husband’s intimate circle. Moreover, her love for the Prince led her to follow closely all matters at court, in order that she might understand all that concerned him and advise him sagely. It was therefore in no way unusual that she should take an interest in the stranger who arrived one night on a richly caparisoned horse, and who quickly won the friendship of the Prince by virtue of his nobility of bearing, his boldness of spirit, his thirst for knowledge, and his gift of ardent speech, but who nevertheless, saying only that he was a margrave, and that he came from a distant land, bore on his escutcheon the word Infelix: the Wretched One.

THE TWO STAIRWAYS. The stairways are circular and are composed of heavy blocks of stone that wind about a stone newel. Both stairways spiral to the right, in order to give the advantage to the defender, who with his right hand can wield his sword easily in the concavity of the round wall, while the attacker on the lower step is cramped by the newel’s outward curve. One stairway winds up past slitlike openings that give higher and higher glimpses of the little river, the little town with its double wall, the little mills along the riverbank, until at last it reaches the chamber of the Princess at the top of the tower. The other stairway begins in a subterranean corridor beneath the torture chamber and winds down and immeasurably down, in a darkness so thick that it feels palpable as cloth or stone. After a time the steps begin to crumble, sprouting black vegetation; gradually the outlines of the steps become blurred, as if the reason for steps has been forgotten. This stairway, which some imagine to narrow slowly until there is space only for the rats, descends to the dungeon.

THE WINDOW RECESS. The Prince, who was often closeted for long hours with his councillors in order to discuss a pressing matter of territorial jurisdiction, was grateful to the Princess for attending to his new friend. Accompanied by two ladies-in-waiting, the Princess walked with the margrave in the walled garden beneath her tower, or sat with him in a small receiving chamber attached to her private rooms in the great hall. The small chamber had a pair of tall lancet windows set in a wide recess with stone window seats along the sides. The many-paned windows looked down upon wooded hills and a distant twist of river. One day as the Princess stood at the window, looking out at the far river, while the margrave with his sharp brown beard and amethyst-studded mantle sat back against the angle formed by the stone seat and the windowed wall, the Princess was startled from her revery by the sound of suddenly advancing footsteps. She turned quickly, raising a hand to her throat, and saw the Prince standing in the arched doorway. “You startled me, my lord,” she said, as the margrave remained motionless in shadow. The dark stranger in the corner of the window seat, the startled, flushed wife, the stillness of the sky through the clear panes of glass, all this caused a suspicion to cross the Prince’s mind. He banished the thought instantly and advanced laughing toward the pair at the window.

THE RIVERSIDE. Directly to the west of the town, on the bank of the river between the copper mill and a grist mill, lies the broadest of our town meadows. To reach it we must first cross the dry moat on a bridge made of oak planks, which is let down every morning by chains from within the gate-opening in the outer wall, and is raised every night so that it fits back into the opening and seals the space shut. The meadow is supplied with shade trees, mostly lime and oak; a path runs along the river, and there are fountains carved with the heads of devils and monkeys. Here on holidays and summer Sundays the townsfolk play bowls, wrestle, dance, eat sausages, stroll along the river, or lie on the bank. Here wealthy merchants and their wives mingle with pork butchers, bricklayers, rope makers, laundresses, apprentice blacksmiths, journeyman carpet weavers, servants, day laborers. Here at any moment, throwing back our heads to laugh, or shifting our eyes slightly, we can see, through the sun-shot branches of the shade trees, the shimmering river, the sheer cliff, the high castle shining in the sun.

THOUGHTS IN SUN AND SHADE. As the Prince walked in the shady park, stepping through circles and lozenges of sunlight that made his dark velvet shoes, embroidered with gold quatrefoils, seem to glow, in his thoughts he kept seeing the Princess turn suddenly from the window with her hand on her throat and a flush on her cheek. The persistence of the image disturbed and shamed him. He felt that by seeing the image he was committing a great wrong against his wife, whose virtue he had never doubted, and against himself, who admired forthrightness and disdained all things secretive, sly, and hidden away. The Prince knew that if anyone had so much as hinted at unfaithfulness in the Princess, he would without hesitation have cut out the false accuser’s tongue; in the violence of the thought he recognized his inner disorder. He was proud of the frankness between him and the Princess, to whom he revealed his most intimate thoughts; in concealing this thought, of which he was ashamed, he seemed to himself to have fallen from a height. Walking alone along the avenue of the park, through lozenges of sunlight and stretches of shade, the Prince reproached himself bitterly for betraying his high idea of himself. It seemed to him suddenly that his brown-bearded friend with the amethyst-studded mantle was far worthier than he of his wife’s affection. Thus it came about that in the very act of self-reproach the Prince nourished his secret jealousy.

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THE TOWER. From dawn to dusk she sits in the tower. We catch glimpses of what appears to be her face in the tower window, but isn’t it likely that we are seeing only flashes of sunlight or shadows of passing birds on the high windowpanes? In all other ways she is invisible, for our solemn poets fix her in words of high, formal praise: her hair is more radiant than the sun, her breasts are whiter than swansdown or new-fallen snow. We saw her once, riding through the market square on a festival day, sitting on her white horse with black ostrich plumes, and we were shocked by the gleam of raven-black hair under the azure hood. But in the long days of midsummer, when the rooftops shimmer in the light of the sun as if they are about to dissolve, her raven hair is gradually replaced by the yellow hair of the poets, until the sight of her astride the white horse seems only a midday dream. High in her tower, from dawn to dark she paces in her grief, and who can say whether even her sorrow is her own?

LEGENDS OF THE RIVER. The river breeds its own stories, which we hear as children and never forget: the fisherman and the mermaid, the king in the hill, the maid of the rock. As adults we recall these legends fondly, even wistfully, for we no longer believe in them as we once did, but not every tale of the river passes into the realm of cherished, harmless things. Such is the tale of the escape of the prisoner: the splash, the waiting boat, the voyage, and there, already visible in the distance, the flames consuming the town and the castle, the blackness of the sky, the redness of the river.

INFELIX. The Princess, who had been startled by the Prince as she gazed out the window in the recess of her private chamber, gave the incident no further thought. Instead she continued to think of the margrave’s story, which he had revealed to her one day while they were walking in the garden, and about which she had been brooding when the Prince interrupted her revery. The margrave had told how his younger brother, secretly lusting after the margrave’s bride, had stolen the girl and locked her in a tower guarded by forty knights. Upon learning that the margrave was raising an army to free his bride, the brother sent him a jeweled casket; when the margrave opened the casket he saw the severed head of his bride. Half-crazed with grief and fury, the margrave led his knights against his brother, at last slaying him with his sword, cutting off his head, and razing the castle. But the margrave could not rest. Haunted by his dead bride, unable to bear his empty life, he fled from that accursed country, seeking adventure and death — death, which disdained him — and coming at last to the castle of the Prince. The Princess, pained by the margrave’s tale, did not try to console him; and now each day, when the Princess dismissed her ladies, the margrave spoke to her of his slain bride, whom he had loved ardently; for though he had vowed never to speak of her, yet speaking eased his heart a little.

THE TOWN. Our town lies on the lower slope of a hill that goes down to the river. The town extends from the bank of the river to a point partway up the hill where the slope becomes steeper and the vineyards begin. Above the vineyards is a thick wood, which lies within our territorial domain and harbors in its darkness a scattering of sandstone quarries, charcoal kilns, clearings yellow with rye, and ovens for manufacturing glass. Except for the grist mills, the sawmills, the copper mill, and the bathhouse, which stand on the bank of the river, our town is entirely enclosed by two meandering walls: an outer wall, which is twenty feet high and eight feet thick, with towers that rise ten feet higher than the battlements, and a vast inner wall, which is forty feet high and twelve feet thick, with towers that rise fifteen feet higher than the battlements. Between the two walls lies a broad trench covered with grass, where deer graze and where we hold crossbow matches and running contests. Should an enemy penetrate the defenses of the outer wall, he must face the defenses of the towering inner wall, while standing in the trench as at the bottom of a trap, where we rain upon him arrows and gunshot, rocks large enough to crush a horse, rivers of molten lead. Flush against the outer wall stands a dry moat, broad and very deep, which an enemy must cross in order to reach our outermost defenses. Although we have enjoyed peace for many years, guards patrol both walls ceaselessly. Inside the walls, steep-gabled houses with roofs of red tile line the winding stone-paved streets, carts rumble in the market square, fruit sellers cry from their stalls, from the shops of the ironworkers and the coppersmiths comes a continual din of hammers, servants hurry back and forth in the courtyards of the patricians’ houses, in the shade of the buttresses of the Church of St. Margaret a beggar watches a pig lie down in the sun.

THE PEAR TREE. The Princess was quick to sense a change in the Prince, who looked at her strangely, often seemed on the verge of saying something, and lay restlessly beside her at night. She waited for him to unburden himself, but when he continued to keep his mind in shadow, she determined to speak. One morning when she and the Prince were walking in the walled garden, where she had lately walked with the margrave, the Prince stopped beside a pear tree to pick a piece of fruit. With a melancholy smile he handed the yellow pear to his wife. The Princess took the pear and thanked him, but said that she would like to share it with her lord, reminding him that she was not only his wife, but his dearest friend, who asked no higher pleasure than to share his joys and sorrows, and to ease the burdens of his heart. The Prince, who wished only to conceal the ignoble secret of his suspicion, felt a motion of irritation toward his wife, who by her words had put him in the position of having to deceive her, and he replied coldly that he had picked the pear not for himself, but for her alone; and turning his face away he added that he had cause to believe that his new friend, who was also her friend, had dishonest intentions toward him. The Princess, though hurt by his cold refusal of the pear, was nonetheless pleased that he had unburdened himself at last. She replied that she knew not who had been trying to divide the Prince from his friend, but for her part, she could assure her lord that the margrave was as trustworthy as he was honest, and as loyal as he was trustworthy, and that he was entirely devoted to the Prince and to all that concerned him. The Prince, ashamed of his suspicion, convinced of his wife’s honor, yet hearing in her words a disturbing ardor, repeated sternly that he had cause to doubt the stranger, and wished to request of the Princess a small service. Though stung by his tone, the Princess put herself instantly at his disposal. Plucking a second pear roughly from the tree, the Prince asked the Princess to test the admirable devotion of his friend by offering to him what was most dear to the Prince in all the world. To put matters plainly, he desired the Princess to go to the margrave in his bedchamber that night, to lie down beside him, and to report the outcome to the Prince the next morning. In that way, and in that way alone, he hoped to be able to dispel the doubt that had arisen in his mind. The Princess, who all this while had been holding the first pear in her hand, looked at the Prince as if she had been struck in the face. The Prince watched the yellow pear fall from her long fingers and strike the ground, where it rolled over and revealed its split skin. Her look, like that of someone frightened in the dark, made the prince taste the full horror of his moral fall, even as it sharpened the sting of his suspicion.

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PATRICIANS. The patricians of our town are powerful men with broad shoulders, keen eyes, and a touch of disdain about the lips. In their steep-gabled houses with arcaded ground floors and three upper stories, furnished well but without ostentation, one sees handsome door panels, table centerpieces of chased silver, and heavy paintings of themselves and their wives: the patricians in their broad berets and their dark robes trimmed with fur, the wives in plain bodices with velvet-trimmed sleeves. From their paintings the patricians stare out fearless as princes. Indeed, in times of danger they leave their counting houses and their seats in the Council Chamber, put on sturdy armor forged by our master armorers, mount their proud horses, and lead well-armed citizens in maneuver and battle. The patricians are wealthier and more powerful than the nobles of the castle, against whom they have relentlessly asserted their rights as free citizens, thereby further weakening the always declining power of the Prince. And yet these keen-eyed merchants, in the pauses of their day, will raise their heads for a moment, as if lost in thought; or striding along the slope of an upper street, suddenly they will stare out between the walls of two houses at the river below, the sunny cliff, the high castle. Some of our patricians purchase for their wives cloaks modeled after the cloaks of court ladies, and hang on their walls ceremonial swords with jeweled hilts. We who are neither nobles nor patricians, we who are of the town but watchful, observe these manifestations without surprise.

THE KEEPER OF THE DUNGEON. The keeper of the dungeon, whom no one has ever seen, is said to dwell in a dark cave or cell beside the winding lower stair, twenty-two steps above the dungeon. The keeper is said to have thick, matted hair so stiff that it is brittle as straw, a flat nose, and a single tooth, shaped like the head of a crossbow arrow; he is so stooped that his face is pressed against his knees. In one hand he clutches, even when asleep, the heavy key to the dungeon, which over the years has impressed its shape in the flesh of his palm like a brand burned into the flesh of a criminal. His sole duty is to open the iron door of the dungeon and to push in the iron bowl of gruel and the iron cup of brackish water delivered from above. The keeper, whom some describe as an ogre, a one-eyed giant, or a three-headed beast, is said to have a single weakness: he is fond of small, bright objects, like glass beads, gold buttons, and pieces of colored foil bound between disks of clear glass, all of which he places in an iron box concealed behind a loose stone in the wall beside his bed of straw. It is by manipulating this weakness that the dwarf is able to work his will upon the keeper, who in all other respects is ruthless and inflexible.

THE MARGRAVE’S BEDCHAMBER. The Princess, who not only loved the Prince deeply but had been raised in the habit of unquestioning obedience to a husband’s slightest wish, did not for a moment think of disobeying him. Instead she thought only of persuading him to take back a request that had been born of some unpleasant rumor in the court, and could lead only to unhappiness for her, for his friend, and for himself. When the Prince proved adamant, the Princess lowered her eyes, rose naked from the bed, and sorrowfully, in the chill night air, drew on her long chemise ornamented with gold, her close-fitting underrobe, and her high-waisted tunic with wide sleeves, all the while hoping to be commanded to stop; and over her tight-bound hair she drew her thick-jeweled net of gold wire, so that not a single hair was visible. Then with a beseeching look at her lord, who would not meet her eyes, she betook herself to the margrave’s bedchamber, where by the trembling light of her candle she crept fearfully to the curtained bed, parted the curtains no more than a finger’s breadth, and looked in. The margrave lay fast asleep on his back with his head turned to one side. The Princess extinguished the candle and, offering up a silent prayer, slipped into the bed between the margrave and the curtain. Anxiously she lay awake, with wide-open eyes, starting whenever the margrave stirred in his sleep, yet hoping that he might not wake and find her there. But as she lay thinking of the change in the Prince, and his cold words beside the pear tree, her heart misgave her and she fell to weeping. The margrave, wakened by the noise, was startled to find a woman in his bed; and feeling sharp desire, he asked who it was that so honored him in his bedchamber, meanwhile reaching out his hand to touch her. But when he heard the voice of the Princess, he drew back his hand, which had grazed her shoulder, as if he had felt the blade of a sword. She said in a strained voice that she had come to offer him companionship in the night; she hoped she had not disturbed his sleep by her visit. Now the margrave loved the Prince, and revered the noble Princess above all women; and a sorrow came over him, even as he felt desire in the dark. He replied that he was more honored by her visit than by a gift of gold; and because he honored her above all women, he would remember this night until his dying day. Yet he thought it most fitting that she should return to the Prince, her lord and husband, and not trouble herself about one who longed only to serve the Prince and do her honor. The Princess was well pleased with this speech; but mindful of the Prince’s cruel command, that she test the margrave in the night, she said that she hoped he did not find her so foul that he would wish to banish her from his bed. The margrave replied that far from finding her foul, he found her of all women the most fair; and so far was he from wishing to banish her from his bed, that he would abandon the bed to her and lie down on the floor of his chamber, in order to keep watch over her rest. The Princess thanked him for his thoughtfulness, but said she could not dispossess him of his bed, and urged him to remain; whereupon the margrave graciously agreed, saying only that he revered her rest as much as he revered the Princess herself; and drawing forth the sharp sword that he kept always beside him, he placed it between them on the bed, pledging to protect her from all harm in the night. With that he wished her a good night, and drew himself down under the coverlet, and feigned sleep. The Princess, well pleased with his answer, tested him no more, but lay anxiously beside him until the first graying of the dark, when she returned to the Prince, who lay restlessly awaiting her. She reported all that had passed in the night, praising the delicacy of the margrave, who had not wished to injure her feelings even as he revealed his devotion to the Prince, and assuring her lord that his friend had been slandered by evil tongues. The Prince, although soothed by her account, was troubled that his wife had lain all night by the side of the margrave, even at the Prince’s own bidding; and whereas before this he had been haunted by the image of his wife in the window recess, now he was tormented by the image of his wife in the bed of the margrave, offering her breasts to his greedy fingers, rubbing her legs against him, and crying out in pleasure. For the Prince so desired his wife that he could not believe any man capable of resisting her, if she offered herself in the night. Wherefore he thought she was deceiving him in either of two ways: for either she had lain with the margrave and pleasured him in the dark, or else she had not gone to him as she had said. Therefore the Prince replied harshly that though the margrave had not betrayed him, yet he could not be certain whether it was from loyalty or sheer surprise, to find the wife of his friend beside him in the dark; and now that the Princess had shown a willingness to deceive her husband, it was necessary for her to pay a second visit to the margrave and test him in his full knowledge. To this the Princess replied coldly that she would do all that her lord demanded; only, she would sooner plunge a dagger into her heart than return to the bed of the margrave.

THE REFLECTION. During three days a year, at the height of summer, the position of the sun and the position of the cliff combine to permit the castle to be reflected in the river. It is said that by staring at the reflection one can see inside the castle, which reveals the precise disposition of its arched doorways, high halls, and secret chambers, the pattern of hidden stairways, the shadows cast by flagons and bunches of grapes on abandoned banquet tables, and there, high in the tower, the Princess pacing wearily, while far below, in the depths of the immaculate reflection, so deep that it is beneath the river itself, a shadow stirs in the corner of the dungeon.

TOWN AND CASTLE. Long ago, in the darkness of an uncertain and perhaps legendary past, a Prince dwelt within our walls, in a fortress where the merchants’ hall now stands. One day he decided to build a great castle on the cliff on the far side of the river. The decision of the Prince to move outside our walls has sometimes been interpreted as the desire of an ambitious lord to build an impregnable fortress in an unstable world, but a respected school of historians has argued that the change of residence occurred precisely when the power of the patricians was growing at the expense of the Prince, who after his move was expressly forbidden by the Council to build a fortified home within the town walls, although he continued to receive an increasingly ritual homage as lord of the town. A second school, while accepting the historical explanation, sees in the move a deeper stratagem. The Prince, so the argument goes, sensing the loss of his power, removed himself from the town and placed himself above it in order to exercise over our people the power of imagination and dream: remote but visible, no longer subject to patrician pressure, the Prince and his castle would enter into the deepest recesses of the people’s spirit and become ineradicable, immortal. A minor branch of this school accepts the dream explanation but attributes it to a different cause. They argue that our ancestors first settled on the far side of the river, in the shadow of the castle, and only gradually withdrew to our side, in order to be able to look across the river and dream continually of nobler, more passionate lives.

THE PRINCE’S DOUBTS INCREASE. Now nightly the Prince drove his wife to the margrave’s chamber, and restlessly awaited her return; and every morning the Princess returned to say that the margrave had remained steadfast. The Prince, tormented by the growing certainty that he was being deceived, and exasperated by the hope born of her daily assurances, longed for proof of her faithlessness, in order to ease his heart of uncertainty. One night, sorrowing alone, he remembered suddenly a time before his life had taken a crooked turn. He and the Princess were walking in the park, in the avenue of acacias, and something he had said made her laugh aloud; and the sound of that laughter, and the sunlight pouring down through the acacia leaves onto the graveled path, and the Princess’s throat, half in sun and half in trembling shade, seemed as remote and irrecoverable as his own childhood. At that moment he saw with terrible clarity what he had done. He vowed to beg forgiveness on his knees and not to rise until he was permitted to return to his lost paradise. But even as he imagined the Princess laughing in the sun and shade of the acacia path, he saw her hand rise to her throat as she turned from the window, where a devil with a sharp beard and amethyst jewels on his mantle leaned motionless against the shadowed stone.

SCARBO. Among the many devoted servants of the Prince was a dwarf, whose name was Scarbo. He was a proud little man, with stern features and a small pointed beard; he dressed in the latest fashion, was a master of court etiquette and of all questions concerning precedence, and was noted for his disdainful glance, his penetrating intelligence, and his unswerving devotion to the Prince. Once, after a courtier had humiliated the little man by picking him up and tossing him lightly in the air, while others had watched with smiles and laughter, Scarbo lay on his bed in silent fury for two nights and two days. On the third night he crept into the bedchamber of the offending courtier and plunged his little sharp sword into the sleeper’s throat. After that he cut off both of the dead man’s hands and laid them with interlocked fingers on the coverlet. The Prince forgave his dwarf, but sentenced him to a month in prison; some say he was confined in the dungeon itself, and absorbed its darkness into his soul. But if his proud and disdainful nature was immediately apparent, earning him an uneasy respect never far from ridicule, Scarbo’s most remarkable feature was his delicacy of feeling — for he possessed a highly developed and almost feminine sensitivity to the faintest motions of another person’s mood. This unusual development in the realm of feeling, born perhaps of an outsider’s habit of extreme watchfulness, increased his danger as an enemy and his value as a trusted servant and councillor. Combing his beard in his private chamber, handing the Prince a goblet of ruby wine, listening at night to the footsteps of the Princess moving past his door toward the margrave’s chamber, the dwarf knew that it was only a matter of time before the Prince would summon him.

STORIES. Our town takes pride in the practical and useful arts. We are well known for our door panels and brass hinges, our stove tiles and weather vanes, our tomb effigies and stone crucifixes, whereas our literature rarely rises above the level of doggerel verses, carnival plays, and dull philosophical poems in monotonous meters and rigid rhymes. Our imagination is far better expressed in the famous work of our metal masters, above all in the brilliant productions of our church-bell casters, our bladesmiths, our makers of spice mills, astrolabes, and articulated figures for clocks. And yet it would be a mistake to think of us as entirely deficient in the art of the word. Although we are practical citizens, who keep our accounts strictly and go to bed early, we have all listened to tales in the nursery, tales that are never written down but may appear suddenly in distorted or fragmentary form in a song heard in a tavern or at a carnival play; and foremost among these stories of our childhood are tales of the castle. The same tales are told by minstrels in the courtyards of inns, and sung by peasants in the fields and villages of our territorial domain. In another form the tales show themselves in the early parts of our chronicles, where legend and fact are interwoven, and many episodes have been joined together by unknown hands and written down on sheets of parchment, which are bound in ivory and metal on wood, purchased by wealthy merchants, and read by their wives. Such stories, reaching far down into the deepest past of our town, attach themselves likewise to the castle of the present day, so that the actual dwellers in the castle come to seem nothing but passing actors asked to perform the changeless gestures of an eternal play. Thus it comes about that, although we are practical and commercial by nature, we too have our stories.

THE SUMMONS. One morning after a night of shattering dreams the Prince summoned his dwarf to a private chamber and informed the little man that he desired a service of him. Scarbo bowed, noting once again the signs of change in his master and saying that he desired only to be of service to his Prince. With a show of impatience the Prince said that of late he had been preoccupied with pressing affairs, that he feared the Princess was too much alone, and that he desired his dwarf to spend more time in her company, attending to her needs, listening to her thoughts, and serving her in every way; and he further desired that he should report to the Prince each morning, concerning the state of her happiness. The dwarf understood instantly that he was being asked to spy on the Princess. His pride thrilled at the gravity of the mission, for the Prince was in effect conspiring with his dwarf against his own wife, but Scarbo recognized a danger: the Prince, while desiring evidence against the Princess, would not necessarily welcome the proof he sought, nor be grateful to his spy for easing his way into his wife’s confidence and ferreting out her secrets. It would not do to be overzealous in the performance of his duty. Wariness was all.

ON VAGUENESS AND PRECISION. It is precisely because of our ignorance that we see across the river with such precision. We know the precise carvings on the capital of each stone pillar and the precise history of each soul: they are transparent to our understanding. On our side of the river, even the most familiar lanes bear surprises around well-known bends; we see only a certain distance into the hearts of our wives and friends, before darkness and uncertainty begin. Perhaps, after all, this is the lure of legend: not the dreamy twilight of the luxuriating fancy, in love with all that is misty and half-glimpsed, but the sharp clarity forbidden by our elusive lives.

A WALK IN THE GARDEN. One sunny afternoon the Princess, who had been walking in the courtyard, dismissed her ladies-in-waiting at the garden gate and entered her garden alone. The walls were higher than her head; paths of checkered stone ran between beds of white, red, and yellow flowers; at one end stood a small orchard of pear, apple, quince, and plum trees. In the center of the garden, surrounded by a tall hedge with a wicker gate, stood the Princess’s bower, shaped like a pavilion and composed of trelliswork covered with vines. The Princess, in her azure tunic and her heart-shaped headdress, walked with bowed head among the fruit trees of the orchard, raising her eyes at the slightest noise and looking swiftly about. After a time she began to walk along the paths of checkered stone between the flower beds, passing two turf-covered benches, an octagon of white and red roses, and a white jasper three-tiered fountain with a column surmounted by a unicorn. At the central hedge she hesitated and seemed to listen; then she pushed open the gate and entered, bending low under a trellised arch. In the green shade of her bower sat two couches covered in crimson silk. Scarbo, seated in the corner of a couch, at once stood up and bowed. The Princess sat down stiffly on the couch opposite and stared as if harshly at the dwarf, who met her gaze and did not turn his eyes aside. “I cannot do what you propose,” she began, in a toneless voice. The dwarf, rigid with attention, listened patiently. He was well pleased with his progress.

A LACK OF SOMETHING. Although ours is a flourishing town — and we flourish, according to some, precisely to the extent that the inhabitants of the castle have declined in power and serve a largely symbolic or representative function — we nevertheless feel a lack of something. Our metal artisans are admired far and wide, our sturdy houses with their steep gables and oak window frames fill the eye with delight, beyond the walls our fields and vineyards overflow with ripeness. Our church steeples rise proudly into the sky, and toll out the hours on great bells cast by masters. In fact, it is not too much to say that our lives pass in a harmony and tranquility that are the envy and admiration of the region. Nor is ours a dull tranquility, stifling all that is joyful or dark; for not only are we engaged in vigorous lives, but we are human beings like all human beings, we know the joys and sorrows that come to human hearts. And yet it remains true that, now and then, we feel a lack of something. We do not know what it is, this thing that we lack. We know only that on certain summer afternoons, when the too-blue sky stretches on and on, or in warm twilights when the blackbird cries from the hill, a restlessness comes over us, an inner dissatisfaction. Like children we grow suddenly angry for no reason, we want something. Then we turn to the castle, high on the other shore, and all at once we feel a savage quickening. With a kind of violence our hearts exult. For across the sun-sparkling river, there on the far shore, we feel a heightened sense of things, and we dare for a moment to cry out our forbidden desire: for exaltation, for devastation, for revelation.

THE FOUR REASONS. Because of his high gifts in the realm of feeling, the dwarf understood something about the Prince that the Prince himself did not fully understand. The dwarf understood that the Prince, despite great wealth, a beautiful and virtuous wife, devoted friends, and a life that inspired the praise of all who knew him, bore within him a secret weakness: a desire for immense suffering. It was as if the experience of so much good fortune had created in the Prince a craving in the opposite direction. He had at last contrived to satisfy this desire by means of his wife, as though wishing to strike at the deepest source of his own happiness; and it was Scarbo’s role to confirm the Prince’s darkest suspicion and present him with the suffering he craved. The danger lay in the uncertainty of the Prince’s gratitude for such a service. Scarbo, radically set apart from the court and indeed from humankind by the accident of his diminutive stature, was a sharp observer of human nature; he understood that the Prince was furious at himself for being suspicious of his wife, and above all for inviting his dwarf to spy on her. The Princes sense that he had done something unclean might at any moment cause him to strike out violently at the instrument of his uncleanliness, namely, the dwarf. It was therefore essential that Scarbo not bear witness directly against the Princess, even though he crept nightly into the margrave’s chamber and listened through the closed bedcurtains in order to learn all he could about their lascivious trysts. To Scarbo’s surprise — to his bewilderment and anger — the margrave appeared to be innocent. This the dwarf attributed to a deep and still unfathomable design on the part of the margrave, whom he detested as the Prince’s former favorite. The Prince would surely have believed a report of lecherous foul play in the margrave’s tangled sheets, but Scarbo feared the force of the Princess’s denial, as well as the Prince’s rage at a witness of his wife’s degradation. There was also something else. Although the Prince desired to suffer, and although the means he had chosen was his wife’s infidelity, he also desired to be released from suffering, to return to the time of sunlight before the darkness of suspicion had entered his soul. The abandonment of this second desire, even though that abandonment alone could usher in the fulfillment of the first desire, was sure to be so painful that its agent would appear an enemy. The solution to all these problems and uncertainties had come to Scarbo one night after a week of relentless thought. It was brilliantly simple: the Princess herself must denounce the margrave. The Prince could then have the margrave tortured and killed in good conscience and enter into the life of suffering he craved, without having cause to turn against his dwarf. Now, Scarbo knew that the Princess was steadfast in virtue, and would die rather than yield her body to the margrave; his plan therefore was to persuade her to denounce the margrave untruthfully. For this he urged four reasons. The first was this, that such a denunciation would put an end to the torment of her nightly humiliation, which the Princess had confessed to the dwarf during the first of their bower meetings. The second was this, that the Prince longed for her to denounce the margrave, and that by so doing she would be satisfying the Prince’s wish. The third was this, that the margrave in fact desired the Princess, and refused to take advantage of her solely because he feared the Prince; the margrave was therefore a traitor, and deserved to be exposed. And the fourth was this, that to confess the margrave’s fall would be to reawaken the Prince’s desire for her, and put an end to her nightly banishment from his bed. The Princess had listened to the dwarf’s reasons in silence and had promised to give her answer in the bower. Her refusal, on that occasion, had been firm, but it could remain only as firm as her inner strength; and the dwarf knew that under the ravagement of her suffering, her inner strength was weakening.

OF STORY AND HISTORY. For the most part we can only imagine the lives of those who live in the castle, lives that may in certain respects depart sharply from the particular shapes we invent as we brood across the river on midsummer afternoons. And yet it has been argued that these imaginary lives are true expressions of the world of the castle, that they constitute not legend, but history. They do so, it is said, not simply because here and there an invented episode set in the dim past may accidentally imitate an actual event, on the far side of the river; nor because our stories, however remote from literal truth, are images of eternal truths that lie buried beneath the shifting and ephemeral forms of the visible. No, our argument has a different origin. The argument goes that our tales are not unknown among the inhabitants of the castle, and in fact circulate freely among the courtiers, who admire the simplicity of our art or take up our stories and weave them into more refined forms, which we ourselves may sometimes hear recited by traveling minstrels in the courtyards of inns or in our market squares. But if our tales are known among the inhabitants of the castle, may it not come about that they begin to imitate the gestures that give them such pleasure, so that their lives gradually come to resemble the legendary lives we have imagined? To the extent that this is so, our dreams may be said to be our history.

THE FACE IN THE POOL. Day after day the Princess suffered the Prince’s displeasure, night after night she lay stony cold beside the margrave; and in her sorrowing and distracted mind the voice of the dwarf grew louder, urging her to put an end to her unhappiness, and restore the pleasure of vanished days. One afternoon when the Princess was out walking in the park with two ladies-in-waiting, she came to a pool, shadowed by overhanging branches. Stooping over, she was startled to see, beneath the water, a wrinkled old woman who stared at her with grief-stricken eyes. Even as she drew in her breath sharply she knew that it was her own face, changed by sorrow. For a long time the Princess gazed at the face in the water before rising and returning to her chamber, where she dismissed her women and sat down at a table. There she took up her Venetian mirror, with its frame of carved ivory, and looked into eyes that seemed to be asking her a frightening question. After a time she reached for her jars of cosmetic powders and, mixing a small amount of saliva with several compounds, began to apply skin whiteners and rouge to her cheeks. Faster and faster she rubbed the unguents into her skin with her fingertips, before stopping abruptly to stare at her pink-and-white face. With a sudden motion she reached over to a small silver bell that sat on the table beside an openwork pomander containing a ball of musk, and shook it swiftly twice. A moment later Scarbo appeared, with a low bow. Holding up the mirror, the Princess gestured disdainfully toward her pink-and-white image in the glass. At once the dwarf stepped over, climbed onto a stool covered in green velvet, and picked up a cloth. With a headshake and a sigh of disapproval he began wiping the ointments from her face, while he held forth on the art of cosmetics. Had the Princess never been told that a base of white lead was to be avoided, since it was known to produce harmful effects on the skin? Surely she had seen the telltale red spots on the faces of women of the court — spots that had to be treated with ground black mustard or snake-root. In place of white lead, might he suggest a mixture of wheat flour, egg white, powdered cuttlefish bone, sheep fat, and camphor? When Scarbo had finished cleaning the Princess’s face, he carefully selected half a dozen jars of powder from the table, holding each one up and studying it with a frown. In a copper bowl he prepared a whitish paste. Then, still standing on his stool, he leaned forward and began to apply the paste skillfully to the Princess’s cheeks with his small, jeweled fingers.

THE MARGRAVE. What of the margrave? The tales say little of the Prince’s friend, save that each night he lay faithfully on his side of the sword. It is true that in one version he becomes the Princess’s lover, and they are caught there, in the bed; but this is a version that few of us heed, for we recognize it to be less daring than the versions in which the Princess remains unsullied in the margrave’s bed. Let us say, then, that the margrave remains nightly on his side of the sword. What is he thinking? We may imagine that he is troubled by the visits of the Princess, who nightly creeps into his bed and lies beside him without a word. We do not disgrace him if we imagine that he desires the Princess, for he is a man like other men and the Princess is the fairest of all women; but even if we fail to take into account his own sense of honor, the margrave is bound to the Prince by the high law of friendship, and by the debt that every guest owes to his host: he would no more think of possessing the Prince’s wife than he would think of stealing a silver spoon. Or, to be more precise: he is forced, by the Princess’s offer of herself, to think continually of possessing her, and the thought so inflames and shames him that he must exercise all his vigilance to resist the nightly test, while at the same time he must make certain not to offend the Princess by an unseemly coldness. It is also possible that the margrave senses that the Princess has been sent by the Prince against her will, to test him; if so, the knowledge can only strengthen his resistance, while making him question why he has incurred the Prince’s suspicion. The margrave is troubled by the displeasure he senses in the Prince, and by the cooling of their warm friendship; he longs to return to the early days of his visit. It is time for him to return to his distant land, but he cannot make up his mind to leave the castle. Is he perhaps drawn to the nightly test, the nightly overcoming of his desire, by which act alone he can assert the power of his high nature? Or is he perhaps secretly drawn to the possibility of a great fall? Thus do we weave tales within tales, within our minds, when the tales themselves do not speak.

RATS. The rats in our town scuttle along the narrow lanes, crawl from the compost heaps before our houses, scamper freely in the grassy ditch between the double ring of walls. They feed on slops surreptitiously spilled in the streets despite our strict ordinances, on scraps from the dinner table, on carcasses brought for burial to the field beyond the gates. The ratcatcher drowns the rats in the river, and it is from the seed of these drowning rats that a darker breed of rat is said to grow. The dark rats swim across the river and burrow in the cliff hollows. Slowly they make their way up to the castle. They penetrate the towers of the outer and inner walls, scamper across the courtyards, invade the larder and the pantry, and gradually make their way down to the underground cells and tunnels. From there they begin their long descent, pushing their sleek bodies through hidden fissures, seeping into the stone like black water, until at last they come to the dungeon. The dungeon rats are long haired, half-blind, and smell of the river. They crouch in the black corners, rub against the damp walls, stumble against an outstretched foot. The prisoner can hear them cracking bits of stale bread, feeding on pools of urine. When he falls asleep the rats approach slowly, scurrying away only when he stirs. If the prisoner sleeps for more than a few minutes, he will feel the rats nibbling at his legs.

THE PRINCESS DECLINES. Scorned and distrusted by the Prince, eluded by the margrave, who no longer sought her company by day, thrown always into closer communion with the dwarf, the Princess began to mistrust herself, and to question her own mind. Always she lay awake at night, on her side of the margrave’s sword; and she spent her sunlight hours in a melancholy daze. Weary with sorrow, weak with night-wakefulness, she was yet ravaged with restlessness, and could scarcely sit still. Alone she walked in the green shadows of her garden, or wandered alone in the shady paths of the park; and though her gaze was fixed in an unseeing stare, often she would start, as if she had heard a voice at her ear. She ate little and grew thin, so that her chin looked bony and sharp; and in her wasting face her melancholy eyes grew large, and glowed with the dark light of sorrow. One morning she stumbled in her garden, and would have fallen had the dwarf not sprung from behind a privet hedge and helped to steady her; she felt a warmth on her neck and cheeks, and that afternoon she took to bed with a fever. In her fever-bed she had a vision or dream: she saw a girl at a well, holding a golden ball. The girl dropped the ball, which cracked in two, and from the ball a black raven flew forth and circled round her head, trying to peck out her eyes. And though the girl cried out, the bird put out her eyes; and from the drops of blood that fell to the ground, a thornbush grew. And when the wings of the raven brushed the thorns, instantly the bird died, and the girl’s sight was restored. Then the Princess woke from her fever-dream and asked the dwarf what it portended. The dwarf replied that the golden ball was her past happiness, and the margrave the raven, that had ended her happiness; and the thornbush was her sorrow, from whence would come her cure. For there was a cure, but it must come from her own despair. Thus did the dwarf tend the Princess in her sickbed, bringing her goblets of cool water, and telling her dwarf tales, as though she were a child; and always he watched her closely with his brown, melancholy, slightly moist, very intelligent eyes.

OTHER TALES. The tales of the Princess are part of a larger cycle of castle tales; other tales speak of the Prince’s daughter, the contest of archers, the Prince and the Red Knight. These are tales of the castle, but we have other tales as well: the tale of the Black Ship, the tale of the three skeletons under the alder tree, the tale of the raven, the dog, and the piece of gold. As children our heads are full of these tales, which we confuse with real things; as we grow older our minds turn to affairs of this world, and to the promise of the world hereafter. But the old tales of our childhood never leave us entirely; in later years we pass them on to our own children, without knowing why. Sometimes when we grow old the tales return to us so vividly that we become caught in their wonder, like little children, and forget the cares of the moment in a kind of drowsiness of dreaming; then we look up guiltily, as if we have done something of which we are ashamed.

OUTBURST. Day after day the Princess lay feverish in her sickbed, attended by the dwarf, who sat beside her on a high stool, held cool water to her lips, and fed her syrups prescribed by the court physician; and bending close to her ear, he urged her to confess to the Prince that the margrave had wronged him. Could she be certain, could she be absolutely certain, that the margrave, who after all possessed a fiery nature, had approached her only in friendship? Had she seen no sign of a more ardent feeling? Could she say, in all truthfulness, that relations between her and the margrave had been entirely innocent? When she looked deep into her heart — and he urged her to look deep, deep into her heart, deeper than ever into that unfathomable darkness where perhaps only a dwarf’s eyes could see clearly — when she thus looked into her innermost heart, could she say, in all conscience, that she did not desire the attentions of the margrave? Certainly he was a handsome man, well knit and hard muscled, and in all ways deserving of love, so that it must be difficult, for a woman, not to dream of being kissed by those lips, embraced by those graceful, powerful arms. Could she say, in all honesty, that she had not in some small way, if only by a smile or a look, encouraged in the Prince’s friend, who was also, as all the court knew, her intimate friend, some slight bending of his mind toward her, some barely perceptible swerve from the straight line of innocent friendship? And was not friendship itself, truly understood, a passion? Could she, when she looked into the darkness of her heart, deny that she had seen her friendship-passion take on a new and unexpected shape, there in the all-transforming and all-revealing dark? Far be it from him to suggest the slightest degree of deviation from the path of wifely duty — although, in such matters, precise lines were difficult, nay, impossible, to draw. And could she say, in all earnestness, that never once, in the margrave’s bedchamber, had the tip of his finger grazed her loosened hair, never once, in all those nights, had he looked on her otherwise than in the purity of an unlikely child-friendship? For surely the ardent margrave had been tempted — to deny it would be to insult him, and indeed to insult the Princess herself, whom all women envied. But where there is temptation, there is the first motion toward a fall. Therefore to say that the margrave desired her was but to speak the truth; and for her to say to the Prince that the margrave had acted on his desire was no more than an extension of the truth, as heavy gold is beaten into airy foil. Thus did the dwarf whisper, as the Princess lay on her fever-bed, thus did he teach her to see in the dark; till looking into the darkness of her heart, the Princess saw disturbing shapes, and cried out in anguish. Then she bade the dwarf bring the Prince to her sickbed. And when the Prince appeared before her, the Princess cried out that the margrave had treacherously desired her, and whispered lewdly to her, and lain with her, and touched her lasciviously by day and by night; and for the sake of her lord, she confessed it. Then the Princess fell back, shuddering, and cried out that she was being stung by devils, so that she had to be restrained. Then the Prince summoned his guards, who seized the margrave in his chamber; and when he demanded to know what was charged against him, they would not answer him.

CRIMINALS. Our torture chamber and prison cells lie in the cellars beneath the town hall. Some say that a passageway leads down to a dungeon, which lies at the same depth as the dungeon of the castle on the other side of the river, but there is no evidence whatever for such a dungeon, which moreover would be entirely superfluous, since our prisons are used solely for detention during trial. It is impossible to know whether our legendary dungeon gave rise to the tale of the castle dungeon or whether the castle dungeon, in which we both do and do not believe, gave rise to ours. Our torturers are skilled craftsmen, and our laws are severe. Murderers, traitors, rapists, thieves, adulterers, sodomites, and wizards are taken in a cart to the executioner’s meadow beyond the walls and there hanged, beheaded, burned at the stake, drowned, or broken on the wheel by the public executioner in full view of citizens and nearby villagers who gather to witness the event and to eat sausages sold at butchers’ stalls. The peasants say that the seed of criminals buried in the graveyard gives birth to the race of dwarfs. The rigor of our laws, the skill of our torturers, and the threats of our preachers, who paint the torments of hell in lifelike detail worthy of our artists and engravers, are intended to frighten our townsfolk from committing criminal deeds and even from having criminal thoughts, and in this they are largely but not entirely successful. The depravity of human nature is a common explanation for this partial failure, but it is possible to wonder whether our criminals, who are tortured underground and executed outside our walls, are not secretly attracted to all that is beneath and outside the world enclosed by our walls — whether they do not, in some measure, represent a restlessness in the town, a desire for the unknown, a longing to exceed all that hems in and binds down, like the thick walls, the heavy gates, the well-made locks and door panels. It is perhaps for this reason that our laws are severe and our instruments of torture ingenious and well crafted: we fear our criminals because they reveal to us our desire for something we dare not imagine and cannot name.

A CHANGE OF HEART. The margrave was tortured on two separate occasions, on the second of which the bones of both arms and legs were broken, but he did not confess his crime, and at length he was carried unconscious down to the dungeon and flung onto a bed of straw. Some members of the court were surprised by the leniency of the punishment, for committing adultery with the wife of a prince was considered an act of treachery and was punishable by emasculation, followed by drawing and quartering, but others saw in the margrave’s fate a far worse punishment than death: a lingering lifetime of lying in darkness, sustained only by sufficient nourishment to keep one sensible of one’s misery, while disease and madness gradually destroyed the body and the soul. The dwarf, who had advised death by beheading, a punishment reserved for rapists and sodomites, saw in the sentence a secret indecisiveness: the Prince did not entirely believe the confession of the Princess. Or, to put it more precisely, the Prince believed the confession of the Princess, but his belief had at its center a germ of doubt, which spread outward through his belief and infected it in every part with a suspicion of itself. The Princess, for her part, soon recovered from her fever, and resumed her former habits; only, there was a marked reserve about her, and sometimes she would break off in the middle of a sentence and grow silent, and seem to gaze inward. She no longer summoned the dwarf, and indeed appeared to avoid his company; but Scarbo well understood the necessity for his banishment, for had he not caused her to fall beneath her high estimate of herself? The Prince, uneasily reconciled with his wife, sensed in her an inner distance that he could not overcome; to his surprise, he discovered that he did not always wish to overcome it. To the extent that he believed her confession, he felt a cold revulsion that she had lain with the margrave, even at his own urging; to the extent that he disbelieved her confession, he blamed her for condemning the margrave to a dungeon death. Meanwhile the Princess withdrew deeper and deeper into her inner castle, where she brooded over the events that had estranged her from the Prince, and made her a stranger even to herself. And as the days passed, a change came over her. For she saw, with ever-increasing clearness, in the long nights when she no longer slept, that the Prince had wronged her, by sending her to the bed of the margrave; and she saw, with equal clearness, that she had horribly wronged the margrave, by her foul lies. Then in the dark the Princess vowed to set right the wrong she had done him. And she who had lain coldly in the bed of the margrave, brooding over the displeasure of the Prince, now looked at the Prince strangely, as at someone she had known long ago; and lying coldly in the bed of the Prince, or lying alone in her private bedchamber high in her tower, she thought of the margrave, in the bowels of the earth, deep down.

WIVES. No burgher or artisan can manage the complex affairs of his household without the aid of his capable wife. The wives of our town are practical and industrious; on the way to market in the morning they walk purposefully, with powerful strides. It is true that our husbands, while admiring their wives, expect them to be obedient. A wife who disobeys her husband will be promptly chastised; if she provokes him by continued disobedience, he has the right to strike her with his fist. Once, when a young bride of high beauty and strong temperament argued with her patrician husband in the presence of dinner guests, he rose from the table and in full view of the company struck her in the face, breaking her nose and disfiguring her for life. A wife’s conduct is carefully regulated by law; it is illegal for a wife to permit a servant to place a brooch on her bosom, for no one may touch her on the breast except her husband. The wives of our town are strong, efficient, and never idle. They are fully able to manage a husband’s affairs if he should depart from town on business, or his trade if he should die. The wives make up the morning fires, shake out rugs and clothes, tend their gardens, direct their servants to prepare dinner. Only sometimes, resting by a window or pausing beside a well, a change comes over them. Then their eyes half close, a heaviness as of sleep seems to fall on their shoulders, and for a moment they are lost in dream, like children listening to stories by the chimney fire, before they return to their skins with a start.

A MEETING. One morning Scarbo received by messenger a summons from the Princess. He had not exchanged a single word with her since her illness, and he appeared promptly at the bower, shutting the wicker gate behind him and entering the shady enclosure with a low bow. The Princess sat on one of the crimson silk couches and motioned for him to sit opposite. Scarbo was struck by something in her manner: she had about her a self-command, as if she were a tensely drawn bow, and she looked at him frankly, without hostility but without friendliness. As soon as he was seated she said that she wished to ask a difficult service of him. The request itself would put her at his mercy, and she had no illusions concerning his good will toward her; but since she no longer valued her life, save as a means to one end, she did not care whether he betrayed her. The dwarf, instantly alert to the danger of the interview, as well as to the possibility of increasing his power in the court, chose not to defend his good will, but remained warily silent, only lowering his eyes for a moment in order to display to the Princess his distress at the harshness and unfairness of her remark. The Princess spoke firmly and without hesitation. She said that because of her weak and evil nature, a nature abetted by dubious councillors in the service of one who no longer wished her well, she had wronged the margrave, who now lay suffering a horrible and unjust fate; and that she was determined to right her wrong, or die. In this quest she had decided, after long thought, to ask the help of the dwarf, knowing full well that by doing so she was placing herself in his power. And yet there was no one else she could turn to. He was intimate with the Prince, adept at hiding and spying, and, as she well knew, at insinuating himself into the confidence of those he served; moreover, it was he alone whom the Prince entrusted with the task of descending the legendary stairway with the prisoner’s daily ration of wretched food, which he placed in the hands of the keeper of the dungeon. The service she requested of the dwarf was this: to arrange for the margrave’s escape. In making her request, she understood perfectly that she was asking him to put his life at risk by betraying the Prince; and yet she was bold enough to hope that the risk would be outweighed by the gratitude of the Princess, and the advantage of having her in his power. Here she paused and awaited his answer.

NIGHTMARES. Because of the stories we tell, our children believe that if they listen very carefully, in the dead of night, they will hear a faint scraping sound, coming from the bowels of the earth. It is the sound made by the prisoner as he secretly cuts his way with a pickax through the rock. For the most part our children listen for the sound of the prisoner with shining eyes and swiftly beating hearts. But sometimes they wake screaming in the night, weeping with fear, as the sounds get closer and closer. Then we rock them gently to sleep, telling them that our walls are thick, our moat deep, our towers high and equipped with powerful engines of war, our drop gates fitted with bronze spikes sharp as needles that, once fallen upon an enemy, will pierce his body through. Slowly our children close their eyes, while we, who have comforted them, lie wakeful in the night.

THE ANSWER. To his surprise — and he did not like to be surprised — Scarbo realized at once that he would serve the Princess. The reason was not entirely clear to him, and would require close examination in the privacy of his chamber, but he saw that it was a complex reason consisting of three parts, which under different circumstances might have annulled one another, or at the very least led him to hesitate. The Princess, he clearly saw, considered him morally contemptible, and was appealing to what she assumed to be his cynical lust for power. In this she was quite correct, as far as she went; for indeed he was in part attracted by the vague but thrilling promise of having the Princess in his power, although what precisely she intended to imply by those words was probably unclear to her. She was therefore correct, as far as she went; but she did not go far enough. For her very contempt prevented her from seeing the second part of his complex reason for agreeing to risk his life by serving her. Although Scarbo was ruthless, unscrupulous, and entirely cynical in moral matters, his cynicism did not prevent him from distinguishing modes of behavior one from the other; indeed he would argue that precisely his freedom from moral scruple made him acutely sensitive to the moral scruples of others. Because the Princess was moral by nature, the dwarf trusted her not to betray him; he could therefore count on her in a way he could no longer count on the Prince, whose moral nature had been corroded by jealousy. The third part of the reason was murkier than the other two, but could not be ignored. For the first time since her decline into weakness and confusion, Scarbo admired the Princess. He was helplessly drawn to power; and the Princess, in her proud bearing, in the intensity of her determination, in the absolute and, yes, ruthless quality of her conviction, was the very image of radiant power that he adored, in comparison to which the Prince, gnawed by secret doubt, seemed a weak and diminished being. Yes, Scarbo was drawn to the Princess, looked up to her, felt the full force of her power, in a sense yielded to her, and could deny her nothing, even as he felt the thrill of having her in his power. Such, then, were the three parts of the reason that led to his immediate inward assent. Aloud, the dwarf said to the Princess that there was much to be thought about, in a request that only honored him, and that he would deliver his answer the following day.

ARTISTS. Our tombstone effigies, the carved figures on our altarpieces, the faces of our patricians on medallions, the decorative reliefs and commemorative images in our churches, the stone figures on our fountains, the oil or tempera paintings that show an artisan in a leather cap, or the suffering face of Our Lord on the cross, or St. Jerome bent over a book between a skull and a sleeping lion: all these receive high praise for their remarkably lifelike quality. So skillful are the painters in our workshops that they vie with one another to achieve unprecedented effects of minutely accurate detail, such as the individual hairs in the fur trim of a cloak, the weathered stone blocks of an archway, the shine on the wood of a lute or citole. The story is told how the dog of one of our painters, seeing a self-portrait of his master drying in the sun, ran up to it to lick his master’s face, and was startled by the taste of paint. But equally astonishing effects are regularly created by our master artisans. We have all watched our master wood-carvers cut from a small piece of pear wood or linden wood a little perfect cherry, on top of which sits a tiny fly; and our master goldsmiths, coppersmiths, silversmiths, and brass workers all delight us by creating tiny fruits and animals that amaze less by virtue of their smallness than by their precision of lifelike detail. Such mastery of the forms of life may suggest a disdain for the fanciful and fantastic, but this is by no means the case, for our painters and sculptors and master artisans also make dragons, devils, and fantastic creatures never seen before. Indeed it is precisely here, in the realm of the invisible and incredible, that our artists show their deepest devotion to the visible, for they render their monsters in such sharp detail that they come to seem no more fantastic than rats or horses. So strikingly lifelike is our art, so thoroughly has it replaced the older and stiffer forms, that it may seem as if ours is the final and imperishable end toward which the art of former ages has been striving. And yet, in the heart of the thoughtful admirer, a question may sometimes arise. For in such an art, where hardness and clarity are virtues, where the impossible itself is rendered with precision, is there not a risk that something has been lost? Is there not a risk that our art lacks mystery? With their clear eyes, so skilled at catching the look of a piece of velvet rubbed against the grain, with their clear eyes that cannot not see, how can our artists portray fleeting sensations, intuitions, all things that are dim and shadowy and shifting? How can the grasping hand seize the ungraspable? And may it not sometimes seem that our art, in its bold conquest of the visible, is really a form of evasion, even of failure? On restless afternoons, when rain is about to fall but does not fall, when the heart thirsts, and is not satisfied, such are the thoughts that rise unbidden in those who stand apart and are watchful.

DWARF IN THE TOWER. Scarbo delivered his answer at the appointed time, and now daily he climbed the turning stairway that led to the private chamber at the top of the tower, where the Princess increasingly secluded herself from the cares of the castle to work her loom, brood over her fate, and await the news of the margrave in the dungeon. As the dwarf ascended the sun-streaked dark stairway he would rest from time to time at a wedge-shaped recess with an arrow loop, pulling himself up on the ledge and clasping his arms around his raised knees as he stared out at the river winding into the distance or the little city behind its meandering walls. In the long spaces between recesses the air darkened to blackness; sometimes in the dark he heard the rustle of tiny scurrying feet, or felt against his hair the sudden body of a bat. At the top of the stairway he came to a door, illuminated by an oil lamp resting on a corbel set into the wall. He knocked three times, with longish pauses between knocks — the agreed-on signal — and was admitted to a round room filled with sunlight and sky. The light entered through two pairs of tall lancet windows, with trefoil tracery at the top; each pair was set in a wide recess with stone window seats along the sides. On one stretch of wall between the two recesses was a wall painting that showed Tristan and Isolde lying side by side under a tree; from the branches peered the frowning face of King Mark, circled by leaves. The Princess led Scarbo to the pair of window seats overlooking the walled town across the river, and there, sitting across from her and tucking one leg under him, the little man reported the progress of his plan. The crusty old keeper of the dungeon had at first seemed a stumbling block, but had soon revealed his weakness: a lust for glittering things. In return for a single one of the red and yellow and green jewels with which the Princess had filled the dwarf’s pockets — for she had insisted on supplying him with gems instead of buttons or glass — Scarbo had been able to secure the prisoner’s release from the heavy chains that had bound his arms and legs to the wall. In return for a second jewel, the dwarf had earned the privilege of visiting the prisoner alone. It was on the first of these occasions that he had provided the margrave with a long-handled iron shovel, which had proved easy to conceal in the pallet of straw, and which was used by the margrave to dig into the hard earthen floor. And here the tales do not say whether much time had passed, during which the margrave’s bones had healed, or whether the report of his crushed bones had been exaggerated. Impossible for the dwarf to say how long the prisoner would have to dig away at his tunnel, for the route of escape had to pass beneath the entire castle before beginning its immense, unthinkable ascent. The ground was hard, and filled with stones of many sizes. A straight tunnel was out of the question, since the presence of rocks required continual swerves; already the margrave had been forced to a complete stop in one direction and had had to strike out in another. The plan, such as it was, called for the margrave to proceed in the direction of the cliff, where a number of fissures in the rockface were known to lead to small cavelike passages; from the face of the cliff he could make his way undetected down to the river, where a skiff would be waiting — not to take him directly across, which would be far too dangerous, but to move him secretly along the rocky shore until he could cross over safely at a bend in the river concealed from the highest of the castle towers. Once in safety, he would raise two mighty armies. One he would lead against the castle, for he had vowed to annihilate it from the face of the earth; the other, across the river, would march up to the walls of the town and demand entry. If refused, the second army would capture the town and use it to control the river, thereby both preventing supplies from reaching the castle by water, and threatening a second line of attack along the low riverbank upstream from the rocky cliff. For the margrave, in his fury, would let nothing stand in the way of his vengeance. Moreover, the town still paid homage to the Prince as supreme lord; and although the homage was well-nigh meaningless, since the Council had wrested from the Prince every conceivable power and was entirely autonomous, nevertheless the margrave, in his blind rage, viewed the town as an extension of the Prince and thereby worthy of destruction. The flaw in this grand plan was not simply the daily danger of discovery by the keeper, whose ferocious love of glitter would never permit him to ignore an attempted escape by a prisoner in his charge, but also the immense and uncertain depth of the dungeon, which was believed to lie far below the bed of the river. Scarbo had repeatedly tried to count the steps, but always he had broken off long before the end, when the number had passed into the thousands, for a strange hopelessness overcame him as he made the black descent, an utter erosion of belief in possibility; and in addition the steps themselves became blurred and broken after a while, so that it was impossible to distinguish one from another. If the idea of tunneling in a straight line had had to be abandoned in the short view, though not necessarily in the broad and general view, how much more tricky, indeed fantastic, seemed the idea of tunneling gradually upward to a point below the foundation of the castle but above the surface of the river. It would be far easier to thread a needle in the dark. At some point, moreover, the tunnel would come up against the solid rock of the cliff, at which moment a stonecutter’s pickax would have to replace the shovel. But the prisoner was strong, and driven by a fierce thirst for vengeance; it was possible that in five years, in ten years, in twenty years, the plan might reach fruition. Then woe betide the margrave’s enemies, and anyone who tried to stand in his way; for, truth to tell, the margrave was much changed from the elegant, melancholy courtier he had been, and all his force was now concentrated into a fierce and single aim, culminating in a fiery vision of justice. Thus the dwarf, recounting the underground progress of the margrave to the Princess high in her sunny tower, while across from him she sat in silence, now staring at him intently, now turning her head slightly to gaze out the tall windows at a black raven in the blue sky, at the greenish blue riverbank far below, at the little stone town at the bottom of the wooded hillside.

INVASION. Should an enemy decide to attack us, he must first make his way across the dry moat, one hundred feet deep, that surrounds our outer wall. To do this he must begin by filling with earth, rubble, or bundles of logs that portion or portions of the moat he wishes to pass over. Next he must attempt the crossing itself, under cover of one or more wheeled wooden siege towers supplied with scaling ladders and containing archers, assault soldiers, and perhaps a copper-headed battering ram hung from leather thongs. But while the enemy is still engaged in the laborious task of filling up our moat, we ourselves are by no means idle. From behind our battlements we rain down a storm of flaming arrows and gunshot, while from our towers with their stores of catapult artillery we direct upon the enemy a ceaseless fire of deadly missiles. Should an enemy, against all odds, manage to advance to the outer wall, we are prepared to pour down on him, through openings between the corbels of our projecting parapets, rivers of molten lead and boiling oil, while we continue to shoot at men who are climbing highly exposed ladders that rise against our twenty-foot wall; and since, by design, our towers project from the wall, we are able to direct a murderous fire at the enemy’s flank. Should he in all unlikelihood succeed in knocking down or scaling a portion of our outermost wall, he will find himself in a broad trench before a still higher wall, with its higher battlements and towers; and in this trench he will be subject to attack not only from the forty-foot wall looming before him, but from the uncaptured portions of the wall that is now behind him. So inconceivable is it that an enemy in the trench, however numerous, can survive slaughter, that our concern is directed rather at the sappers who, even as we triumph on the battlements, may be digging beneath our walls and towers in an effort to collapse them in one dramatic blow. Therefore we assign soldiers to listen carefully for the sound of underground digging, and we are prepared at any moment to countermine and take possession of an enemy tunnel. Should sappers succeed in toppling a tower or a portion of wall, we are prepared to erect behind it, swiftly, a second wall or palisade, from behind which we can fire upon the invaders as before. Although it is less conceivable that an enemy should penetrate our formidable defenses than that the nine crystalline spheres of the universe should cease to turn, sometimes we dream at night of enemy soldiers scaling our walls. In our dreams they are running through our streets, setting fire to our houses, raping our women and murdering our children, until we can smell the blood flowing among the paving stones, taste the smoke on our tongues, hear the shrieks of the mutilated and dying in a roar of falling and flaming walls and the mad laughter of the margrave as he strides like a giant through the ruins.

A DISTURBING EPISODE. It was about this time that the dwarf began to lust secretly after the Princess, who lived apart from the rest of the castle, and with whom he spent many hours alone in her tower. Perhaps it would be more exact to say that a desire which had always lurked in the dark corners of his soul now first revealed itself to the dwarf, who had not dared to lust after the wife of his Prince when the Prince was his true master. Nightly in his chamber Scarbo imagined scenes of such melting and devouring bliss that he would sit up in bed with pounding temples and press his hands over his chest to still the violent beating of his heart. But when he climbed the stairs to the Princess’s tower, and saw her seated proudly and scornfully by the tall windows, he could not recognize in her a single trace of that wild and yielding Princess of the Night, and in his skin he felt an odd confusion, as if he had opened the wrong door and entered a room never seen before. Now, the dwarf was above all a courtier, and had drawn deep into his own nature the court’s conventions of love, which managed to combine delicacy of feeling, refinement of speech, longing for self-abasement, and relentless lust, all directed toward another man’s wife. Therefore his feelings for the Princess, although new to him, were at the same time quite familiar. But in addition to being a courtier, Scarbo was also a dwarf, and herein lay an important difference. As a dwarf he was threatened at every turn with ridicule, with secret laughter; although no one had dared to touch him since he had committed murder in defense of his honor, he was always aware of hostile and secretly mocking eyes. Once, in his early days at court, a lady-in-waiting had sat him on her lap and fondled him laughingly, placing his small hand on her half-bared breast and touching him on the thigh, calling him her little puppy, whispering that he should visit her at night. When he entered her bedchamber that night and groped his way to the curtained bed, she looked at him in surprise and suddenly burst out laughing, so that her naked breasts shook and tears of hilarity streamed along her cheeks. Scarbo drew his sword in order to cut off her breasts, hesitated, sheathed his sword, and left without a word. After that he never permitted himself to be touched by anyone. His sudden desire for the Princess, which grew stronger each night, was therefore frustrated not only by the courtly convention of hopeless love-longing, but by fear — not simply the fear of ridicule, which in itself was intolerable, but the fear that the Princess would look at him in bewilderment, without understanding that she might exist as an object of desire for such a one as he. Secretive and cautious by temperament, Scarbo had trained himself over many years to murder any feeling that might interfere with his advancement at court. Should he not do so now? But the Princess had placed herself in his power. What could that mean except that she was his to do with as he liked? She was entirely dependent on him for the life of the margrave; she could not possibly refuse him the trivial favor of her body, which he longed for so violently that sometimes, as he walked along a corridor, tears of desire sprang into his eyes. But even though he held her in his power, as she herself had repeated more than once, so that he need only exercise that power by a simple act of will in order to take possession of her incomparable body, his pride demanded more — demanded, indeed, that she invite him to take his pleasure with her, that in no vague or uncertain terms she welcome him to her bed. And because he was tormented by ever-increasing desire, and because at the same time he was extremely cautious, Scarbo began to reveal his desire to the Princess, in her tower chamber: at first obliquely, through sly hints that might be taken up or ignored, and then more openly, though not directly. He spoke to her of love affairs at court, describing budding passions, unhappy marriages, and secret trysts, and soliciting her opinion concerning specific questions debated at court, such as whether a wife neglected by her husband had the right to take a lover, or whether a woman should prefer an ugly lover with a noble soul to a handsome lover with an ignoble soul. He contrived whenever possible to pay the Princess intimate compliments, praising the way a sleeve set off the whiteness of her skin, alluding to her fingers and neck, and deploring the threadbare phrases of court poets, who settled for the same old expressions and therefore could not see the precise color, for example, of the Princess’s hair, which was not the color of beaten gold but rather of the field of wheat by the bend of the river in the light of early morning, or of a wall of pale stone darkened and made bright by the late afternoon sun. The Princess’s failure to acknowledge these compliments, which in one sense might have seemed discouraging, in another sense was almost heartening, for it could at least be said that his words had not awakened her active displeasure; and thus encouraged, the dwarf proceeded, as if by cunning, and yet quite helplessly, to more daring and intimate expressions. One day he spoke disparagingly of the fashion lately taken up by court ladies of binding their breasts with bandeaux, instead of leaving them free to assume their natural shape, as was still, he was pleased to observe, the custom of the Princess herself, who unlike certain of the ladies did not need to wrench into false and misleading forms those gifts of Nature which, as anyone with eyes could see, were of a beauty, indeed a perfection, that made one impatient with the shams of artifice and filled one with a longing to experience the naked truth of things — and as the little man continued to speak, shocked by his boldness, sickened by the sense of having gone too far, but unable to stop, he had the dreamlike sensation that he had entered a forbidden realm of freedom and transgression, for which at any moment he would be severely punished. Often he longed to reach out and touch the Princess. She sat across from him on her sunny stone bench, thoughtful, a little tired, with signs of a slight dishevelment; she had grown a trifle slack of late. The subtle laxity in her rigorous deportment, the startling wisp of hair escaping from beneath her headdress, the hint of indifference toward her own body, all this gave her a kind of softness or languor that caused his mouth to become dry, his stomach to tighten, his hands to tremble visibly — but always at the last moment he held back, fearful of waking from his sensual dream. At last, sick with desire, he told the Princess that he often found himself awake at night, thinking of their conversations. He would, at such times, have been pleased to visit her, had he not feared to disturb her rest; and the Princess remaining silent, he added in a low voice, as if not wishing to hear himself speak, that he would like to visit her that very night, in order to discuss certain matters best left to the hours of darkness, unless of course she did not wish to be disturbed. At this the Princess turned her head and looked at him, with a gaze of immense weariness and disdain, and said that he was of course at liberty to visit her when and as he wished. Unsettled by the look of disdain, which he quickly thrust to the back of his mind, but thrilled by the words of assent, the dwarf could not sit still a moment more and abruptly took his leave. In his chamber he lay down on his small bed, made for him by the court carpenter in obedience to precise specifications he himself had furnished, and pressed both small hands against his thudding heart. A moment later he sprang up. He combed his beard in the glass, paced about, lay down on his bed, sprang up. He hadn’t expected her to agree so quickly, indeed the details of the scene were unclear in his mind, except for the troubling look that ought to have been accompanied by a refusal, but which perhaps could be explained as a last vestige of loyalty to the husband who had wronged her. She had accepted him, had she not? She hadn’t accepted him in the spirit he would have wished, but she had not refused him outright: far from it. In such thoughts he passed the afternoon and evening; and long after it had grown dark he waited in his chamber. At last he looked at himself in the glass, combed his beard with his fingers, slipped a dagger under his mantle, and closed his door softly behind him. The Princess’s bedchamber lay in the tower, directly beneath her high room, and as the dwarf climbed the familiar stairs he tried to recall the long history of his relation to the Princess, but his mind produced only disconnected images: sunlight and leaf-shade trembling on the red silk of a couch, the face of King Mark peering out of the leaves, the body of a bat brushing against his hair. At the door of her bedchamber he paused, listening, then stood on his toes to place his hand on the iron ring that served as a doorknob. The heavy door, unbolted, gave way to his push. In the dark chamber, shuttered against the moon but lit with a single taper, the Princess lay propped on two pillows in her canopied bed, with the curtain open and the coverlet thrown back across her waist. She had removed her headdress, her wide-sleeved tunic, and her underrobe, but not her snow-white chemise threaded with gold. In the dim light of the taper she seemed a shimmer of snow and gold; and the tops of her breasts and her wheat-colored hair were white and gold. She looked at him coldly and said not a word. Scarbo closed the door behind him and began walking toward the bed, which soared above him; when he reached the side his head barely came up to the coverlet. At the bedfoot stood three steps leading up. Scarbo climbed the steps and began to walk along the coverlet toward the Princess. He was keenly aware of the ludicrous figure he cut as he marched along the trembling bed, and he felt almost grateful to her for not ridiculing him, for not requiring him to cut her throat. As he drew close he saw in her eyes a weariness so deep that it was deeper than disdain. When he reached the place where the coverlet had been turned back, he stopped beside the Princess and stood looking down at her. He saw with utter clarity that she did not and could not desire him, but that she would permit herself to endure his pleasure. He saw further that this permission was in part a desire to punish herself for the wrong she had done to the margrave, and in part a sign of her growing indifference to herself. He felt constrained, formal, and immensely melancholy. He understood that he was not going to tear the chemise from those longed-for breasts and plunge into a night of bliss that would change his life forever. No, he would spare her the need to endure his undesired desire. For this she would be grateful, and her gratitude would increase his power over her. He understood suddenly that renouncing his dream of bliss would not be difficult for him, for he was skilled at renunciation — had he not spent a lifetime perfecting self-denial? Exhausted by his inrush of understanding, almost forgetful of the actual Princess lying at his feet, he understood one final thing: the Princess, who believed that she was acting solely to right a wrong, had not yet realized that she had fallen in love with the doomed and inaccessible margrave, who alone occupied her thoughts, and for whom she was willing to endure any indignity. Tired now, Scarbo sat down on the bed and crossed his little legs. He reached under his mantle and removed the dagger. “A gift for you, Milady,” he said, handing it to her hilt-first. “To protect yourself against unwelcome guests.” She took the dagger hesitantly; and as he began to speak of the margrave’s progress, he saw, in her weary and mistrustful eyes, a first faint shine of gratefulness.

CELLAR TALES. Each of us has heard innumerable versions of the tales of the Princess. From this multiplicity of versions, varying from single details of wording to entire adventures composed of many episodes, each of us selects particular versions that eclipse or obscure the other versions, without eliminating them entirely. The versions selected by any one of us rarely replicate the versions chosen by others, but gradually, in the course of our town’s history, certain versions come to take precedence over other ones, which are relegated to a secondary status. It is here that an interesting development takes place. For these secondary versions, which have not been able to survive in the full light of day, continue to carry on a hidden life, and give rise to growths of a dubious and fantastic kind. Such offspring of rejected, inferior, but never-forgotten versions are known as cellar tales, for they grow in the dark, unseen by anyone, mysterious as elves or potatoes. In one cycle of cellar tales, the Princess and the dwarf have a child, whose face is of a beauty unsurpassed, but whose body is hideously deformed. In another series of tales the margrave in his dungeon begins to change: a pair of black wings grows on his back, and one day he appears in the sky above the river as a black angel of death. Although the cellar tales are never admitted to the main cycle of castle tales, they nevertheless do not wither away, but multiply inexhaustibly, staining the other tales with their hidden colors, exerting a secret influence. Some say that a day will come when the daylight tales will weaken from lack of nourishment; then the cellar tales will rise from their dark places and take over the earth.

THE PRINCE. As the Princess withdrew to the solitude of her tower, the Prince retired to the privacy of his oriel chamber, with its great hearth, its hunting tapestries in which the yellows were woven with gold thread, and its many-paned window that overlooked the chapel roof. Here he kept his favorite falcon in a cage, his library of rhymed romances inked on parchment and bound in ivory covers mounted on wood, and a locked chest containing the horn of a unicorn. Alone on his window seat, the Prince brooded over the Princess, the margrave, and his own unhappy fate. Had his suspicions perhaps been ill founded? Had he acted unwisely in sending the Princess to the margrave’s bedchamber? Should he perhaps pardon the margrave and release himself from the worm of doubt that gnawed at his entrails? But such a step was impossible, for at the heart of his doubt was a still deeper doubt, a doubt that questioned his doubt. The Prince remembered reading of a cunning Moorish labyrinth in which a Christian knight had wandered for so many years that when he caught sight of himself in a puddle he saw the face of an old man, and it seemed to the Prince that he was that knight. Sometimes the castle, the margrave, the Princess, his own hand, seemed images in an evil dream. He no longer called for his dwarf, who alone might have been able to soothe him, for he sensed that the little man detected in him a secret weakness, an indecisiveness, a softening of the will to rule. Should he perhaps have the dwarf killed? In the late-afternoon shadows of his oriel chamber, the Prince half-closed his eyes and dreamed of another life: surely he would have been happier as a shepherd, tending his flock, playing his oaten pipes, leaning on an elbow beside a babbling brook.

DWARF DESCENDING. The tales say only that the dwarf passed back and forth between the Princess and the prisoner, but in the hillside vineyards beyond the upper gates, or along the well-laid paving stones of a winding lane, we imagine the details: the walls of damp stone, the crumbling edges of the steps, the sudden softness of a scuttling rat. Always, as he descended, Scarbo had the sensation that he knew the moment when the stairway passed beneath the surface of the river: the air became cooler, water trickled along the walls, the stone steps grew slick with moisture and erupted with soft black growths. Later, much later, the darkness changed, became blacker and more palpable: he had the sensation that he could feel it brushing against his face, as if he were passing through the wing of an enormous raven. It was at this point that the castle far above him began to waver in his mind, like vapor over a pool; somewhere a dream-Princess sat in a dream-tower; but for him there was only the long going down in darkness, as if he were a stone plunging into a well. Later still, he heard or thought he heard a faint tapping sound. This was the sound of the margrave’s pick, slowly cutting its way through rock. No longer did Scarbo expect to find the prisoner in the dungeon, but rather in one or another branch of a complex tunnel that veered off in many directions as the margrave evaded obstacles, gave way to discouragement, or followed sudden inspirations. So elaborate had the tunnel become, so crisscrossed with intersecting passageways, that it seemed less a tunnel than an ever-widening labyrinth; the dwarf no longer thought of it as a route of escape, but as a fantastic extension of the dungeon, a dungeon caught in the throes of delirium. Scarbo encouraged the margrave, brought him additional tools and measuring devices (a mason’s level, a measuring cord), helped estimate his progress, and discussed with him the most promising direction along which to proceed, but his secret plan was the precise opposite of the margrave’s: it was to confuse the path of escape, to delay it indefinitely, to prevent the prisoner from breaking free and throwing the world into chaos. But to confuse the path of escape was a difficult task, for Scarbo himself was unsure of the way out, and it was always possible that he would unwittingly direct the margrave toward the correct route. Therefore he contrived plans, made careful measurements, and brooded over sketches as passionately as the margrave himself, but solely with the intention of misleading him and thwarting his escape. For although Scarbo’s allegiance to the Princess was profound, it ceased at the point at which he could imagine a change of any kind in the world of the castle; and as he descended through the always darkening dark, it seemed to him that what he most desired was for the Princess to remain forever in her airy tower and for the margrave to dig forever toward an always elusive freedom, while he himself passed ceaselessly between them, in a darkness that never ended.

THE UNIVERSE. The universe, created out of nothing in an instant by a single act of God’s will, is finite and is composed of ten parts: the central globe of Earth and, surrounding it, nine concentric crystalline spheres, which increase in circumference as they increase in distance from the Earth. Each of the seven planets lies embedded in its own sphere; if we move outward from Earth, the first sphere is the sphere of the Moon, followed by the sphere of Mercury, the sphere of Venus, the sphere of the Sun, the sphere of Mars, the sphere of Jupiter, and the sphere of Saturn. The eighth sphere is the sphere of the fixed stars, which remain unchanging in relation to one another. The ninth or outermost sphere is the primum mobile, turning all the rest. Beyond the ninth sphere, which marks the boundary of the created universe, lies the coelum empyraeum, or empyrean heaven, which is the infinite abode of God. Some churchmen say that on the Last Day, when Christ, robed in glory, comes to judge the living and the risen dead, the entire universe will be consumed in fire; others argue that only that part of the universe will perish which lies beneath the sphere of the Moon; but all agree that a great fire will come, and Time will end, and generations will cease forever. Although we admire the architecture of the universe, which seems to have been created by one of our own master artisans, and although we fear its fiery destruction, we are rarely moved by its immense and intricate structure to the condition of wonder. Rather, our wonder is aroused by the tiny silver insects of our silversmiths, by the minuscule steel wheels of our watchmakers, by the maze of fine lines cut by the burin on a soft copper plate to represent the folds in a cloak, the petals of a dandelion, the eyes and nostrils of a hare or roebuck.

EDINGS. Just as we are familiar with many versions of the tales of the Princess, so are we familiar with a profusion of endings. Sometimes we no longer know whether we have heard an ending long ago, remembering it carelessly, with changes of our own, or whether we have dreamed it ourselves from hints in earlier episodes. Thus it is told how the margrave, suspicious of the dwarf, binds him in irons and climbs to the tower, where he lies down with the Princess and is tended by her for thirty nights and thirty days; on the thirty-first night they are discovered by a servant, and a great battle takes place, in which the Prince is slain. It is told how the Prince, longing for expiation, one day goes down to the margrave in the dungeon and insists on changing places with him, so that the margrave reigns in the castle while the Prince languishes in darkness. It is told how the margrave escapes from the dungeon after twenty-four years, and returns to defeat the Prince and marry the Princess, who in other versions dies in her tower after hearing a false report of the margraves death. Far from deploring the multiplicity of endings, we admire each for the virtues it possesses, and even imagine other endings that have never been told. For a story with a single ending seems to us a bare and diminished thing, like a tree with a single branch; and each ending seems to us an expression of something that is buried deep within the tale and can be brought to light in that way and no other. Nor does one ending prevent the existence of another, contradictory, ending, but rather encourages other endings, which aspire to be drawn out of the tale and take their place in our memory. Sometimes, to be sure, it happens that endings arise that do not seize us like dreams, and so they pass lightly by and are quickly forgotten. And it is true that among those that remain, however numerous and diverse, we recognize a secret kinship. For we understand that the endings are all differing instances of a single ending, in which injustice resolves in justice, and discord in concord. This is true even of the popular prophetic version, which changes suddenly to the future tense while the prisoner is digging through the rock. A day will come, says the tale, when the margrave will break free. A day will come when he will exact a terrible vengeance on all who have wronged him. A day will come … Thus we are able to imagine that long ago, in a past so distant that it blurs into legend, a great battle took place, in which the castle and the town were destroyed, while at the same time we imagine that now, at this very moment, the Princess is waiting in her tower, the dwarf is descending the lower stairway, the margrave is digging his way through the rock, the day is steadily approaching when he will burst forth to visit the world with fire and ruin.

A DAY WILL COME. A day will come when the margrave’s pick will suddenly break through the rock. Through cracks of stone he will see a burst of blue sky, brighter than fire. For a day and a night he will cover his eyes with his hands. On the morning of the second day he will widen the hole and peer down at the sun-bright river far below. Unseen by the castle watch he will lower himself on a rope to the river and swim to a waiting skiff. He will row downstream, hugging the cliff wall, for eighteen miles and disembark at the edge of a forest. In a hermit’s hut he will sleep for seven days and seven nights. After a long journey he will reach his domain and raise a mighty host, which will exact a terrible vengeance on all those who have wronged him or who attempt to stand in his way. One army will advance against the castle and one army will cross the river and advance against the town; and as both banks of the river burst into towers of fire, the margrave, grown gigantic with avenging fury, will stand astride the river with his face in the heavens and his arms raining destruction.

AN AFTERNOON STROLL. Far from the river, beyond the upper wall on the slope of the hill, lies the executioner’s meadow, where criminals are put to death and buried. Beyond the field, higher up the hillside, the vineyards begin. At the top of the vineyards runs a long path of beaten earth, which divides the vineyards from the forest above. Here one can walk undisturbed in the sun-broken shade of overhanging branches, passing an occasional vintner in a cart, or another wanderer from the town below. We recognize each other at once, we solitary ones who seek the heights above the town, and pass each other with a sense of fraternal sympathy not unmixed with irritation, for it is not society we seek on the upper path where the wood begins. From the path we can see a pleasing view of the town below, with its red tiled roofs, its church steeples, the twin towers of the guild hall, the merchants’ fountain in the market square, the garden of the Carthusian monastery, the courtyards of the patrician houses with their wooden galleries, the draw wells in the stone-paved streets. From the town rises a rich interweaving of sounds: the ringing of hammers in the blacksmiths’ street, the honking of geese hanging by their feet from the poulterers’ stalls, the clatter of cart wheels, the shouts of children, the bang of bells. They are the sounds of an industrious, prosperous, and peaceful town, prepared to defend itself against disturbance from within or without, honoring work and order above all, proud of its wealth, stern in its punishments, suspicious of extremes. The divisions of its day are well accounted for, with no room for idling or dreaming. But now and then, unbidden, a shadow passes across the mind of an artisan in his shop or a merchant in his counting house, and turning his head he looks up to see, across the river, the high castle shining in the sun. Then an image returns, perhaps from a tale heard in childhood, of a dark stairway, a princess with golden hair, a dungeon buried deep in the earth. Long ago these tales unfolded, long ago the prisoner escaped, the dwarf faded into darkness, the Princess closed her eyes. And yet even now we can sometimes see, in the high tower, a flash of yellow hair, we can sometimes hear, in the clear air, the sound of the prisoner cutting through rock. Ships pass on the river, bearing away copper bowls, armor plate, and toothed wheels for sawmills, bringing us spices, velvet, and silk, but under the river live trolls and mermaids. For these are the images that linger, of the river, of the castle, these are the town in dream. Then we smile to ourselves, we solitary ones, we who are of the town but bear toward it a certain reserve, for we see that the town reaches toward higher and lower places than those it honors. But the sun is halfway along the arc of the western sky, it’s time to go down to the town, which after all is our home, even ours. Grapes swell on our slopes, deer graze in the grassy trench between our walls, and in the winding streets, bordered by houses of whitewashed wood and clean stone, sunlight and shadow fall equally.