Writ in Water, or The Gingerbread Man

WRIT IN WATER, or, The Gingerbread Man

By degrees (not learned ones, though) the curriculum vitae of Dr. Eszterbazy is becoming known. A set of Enquiries of. . . was published a decade ago; this is the fourth new tale that the author has vouchsafed us — of a world with some odd survivals, mundane and otherwise.

The spirit of the wood, the spirit of the water, and the spirit of the wheat-plant: they three be sib.

— old Slovatchko saying

The former Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Empire rode side by side with Madama D’Attila in her trim little chaise through Klejn Tinkeldorff, one of the less-fashionable suburbs of Bella. Bella was the capital of the Triune Monarchy of Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania. Who was the former Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Empire and who was Madama D’Attila? Madama D’Attila had at various times been the favorite of two European kings, one Turkish sultan, and three Latin American dictators; alas, the Sultan and one of the kings had gone ga-ga, the other king had been ignominiously deposed, and all three of the dictators had met ends too dreadful to be told in detail. Madama D’Attila presently lived very quietly under the aegis of the Triune Monarchy, now and then receiving the calling cards of the oldest (and youngest) members of the nobility. Once a day, bravely wearing a modest assortment of her best paste jewels, she bravely drove her one-horse chaise through the streets of her little suburb. His Royal and Imperial Majesty did not choose that she should come any closer.

“One never knows, you know,” said His Royal and Imperial Majesty.

The former Chief Eunuch, a martyr to the gout, had experienced increasing difficulty in the performance of his official duties; and, having taken a (platonic) fondness to Madama, had also (very quietly) taken his departure along with her own — and the privy purse of the ci-devant Sultan. “The mad do not need money,” he had observed as he bade farewell to his friend the Assistant Chief Eunuch. “By Allah, that is a true word!” replied the new C.E., raking in his own share of the ci-devant privy purse. So now the former Chief Eunuch sat upon the front seat (there was no back seat) with Madama D’Attila, and showed to the local burghers his immense pale swollen face with its pink eye-lids and rouged cheeks and rouged mouth and painted eyebrows and painted moustaches. The burghers calmly tipped their hats. “There goes the kings’ whore and the funny French gentleman,” they said. And tipped their hats again. Respectfully. (The ex-C.E. by the way was wearing a fuzzy brown suit and a fuzzy brown hat and fancied himself in the height of Western fashion; perhaps he was.)

A gentleman riding by on his horse just then raised his riding-crop in a polite salute. “Who is that? ” asked Madama.

“That is the famous Doctoor-Effendim,” said the ex-C.E. “His name is Eszter Ghazi.”

They stopped at Shueffer’s shop and bought marzipan. Then they drove home and really do not appear in this account again. Perhaps this is too bad. One might grow fond of them. But, as King-Emperor Ignats Louis observed, “One never knows.”

Dr. Eszterhazy did not stop at Shueffer’s shop and he did not buy marzipan.

Engelbert Eszterhazy, having already attained to three of the six learned degrees which he was eventually to have, was then engaged in preparing for the doctorate in music; he had spent a part of that morning in playing a series ofMozarabic masses (of his own arrangement) on the virginals (of his own design), to the great pleasure of the Papal Legate, one of the Examiners for that degree. Now he had come for a lesson with De Metz, in Composition. The great De Metz kept, in addition to his studio in Bella, a cottage in the suburb, regarding said cottage in the suburb as others might regard a chalet in the Alps or a villa on the Riviera. The lesson having been concluded, De Metz was observing as obiter dictum something on the nature of music and mathematic: “A single lifetime, sir, is not long enough to devote to the relation between music and mathematic . . . indeed, sir, one may begin by asking: relation? Music and mathematic? Is there a division? Song is number, sir, and number is song. What else is the Music of the Spheres but that song of all the morning stars singing together for joy?” Eszterhazy, assuming his instructor’s question to be rhetorical, forebore to answer it by more than a low, tactful hum, a sort of small, murmuring voice.

And while this mmmmm still sounded in the air, De Metz, still regarding his pupil with the same bird-bright gaze, in the same tone of voice asked, “Are you interested, Dr. Engelbert, in investment possibility?”

Engelbert could not have been much more surprised if the Emperor had asked him that.

“There is a man down the street who has invented an engine,” De Metz said, “and I thought it might have investment possibility. They say that engines do have. I myself, you know, well, it is not my field. But you, Dr. Engelbert —”

“Yes?” asked Engelbert, prepared to hear himself described as a sort of one-man Baring Brothers.

you have so many fields. . . .”

The street was lined with trees and shrubbery and gardens. It was not yet what the Indians call the cow-dust hour, but Dr. Eszterhazy knew that when it was, quite a number of many-colored kine would troop back from the common pasturage and, suburb or no suburb, each cow would turn aside and tread the almost invisible path between the street and her owner’s cowhouse. The ox knoweth his stall, and . . . But behind one of the houses the cow-house had been converted into a workroom; and though the lineaments of the once-spring-house next to it had been preserved, the cool water flowing from the hill behind no longer served to cool the pans of milk and keep them fresh while the cream rose. “Remind me, Engelbert, to tell you a very amusing story about the Gypsy and the mouse,” De Metz was saying; then De Metz said, “Ah, Engineer Brozz! Good later-afternoon. I have the honor

to present Dr. Eszterhazy.” Engineer Brozz was very tall. And very thin. And Eszterhazy had the fleeting impression that he had seen him before.

His appearance might not have led Eszterhazy to have thought, immediately, in terms of one who had invented an engine with investment possibility. Such a type did not precisely flourish in the Triune Monarchy (“fourth-largest empire in Europe”) ... as distinct from, say, the Nev- england Province of America, where, one understood, every Yankee kept next to his fireplace a device intended to provide either perpetual motion or a supply of wooden nutmegs. . . . Still, some years back, there had been Gumm. Gumm lived in the Scythian Highlands and was an engraver of religious woodcuts with brief texts, Gumm had been caught in flagrant delight, stripping the lead from the parson’s roof; and Gumm had said that he needed it because he needed a soft metal. For what? For a notion of his, that was his own word, the word invention seemed not to have been in his vocabulary; for a notion which would work a very great change in the production of religious engravings with brief texts: and what might this notion be — otherwise — called? Gumm, despite the seriousness of the case, wiggled in something like delight. “Movable type! ” said Gumm.

Unmoved by the simple splendor of his vision — a mere four hundred years after its time — they had charged him, not with Theft, but with Sacrilege, it having after all been the parson’s roof; and Gumm had been sentenced to recite The Ten Long Psalms three times a day for three years. Without remission.

Crime almost vanished from the Scythian Highlands.

Brozz began, perhaps inevitably, by saying that Natura vacuum abhorret (thus spake Aristotle — or would have, had Aristotle spoken Latin); then he said that Nature didn’t either Abhor a Vacuum ... or, perhaps, it was not quite clear, Nature used to abhor a vacuum but had been persuaded by scientific argument not to abhor one all that much. And he spoke about the Column of Mercury and the Column of Water and the Lift-Pump and about Galileo and Viviani and Toricelli and Pascal lather and Pascal son and Air Pressure and Hydrostatics and Hydraulics and Equilibrium and the Experiment in the River and the Sea of Air and von Guericke and the Magdeburg Hemispheres and the Total Force and the Weight of Water and Athanasius Kircher and —

— and he spoke about the three kinds of well-known wheels and the vertical turbine and the hydraulic ram and something called “the Pelton wheel” which was anyway still in the planning stage —

— and Eszterhazy felt himself sitting on a bench in the Great Lecture Hall and listening again to the famous old Professor Kugelius delivering his famous old lecture series On the Reconciliation of Aristotle and Plato, concluding that, when all was said and done, Aristotle and Plato could not really be reconciled. . . .

Was Engineer Brozz more or less dotty than Gumm? His voice was monotonous, but his voice was clear. His gestures may have been a bit jerky, but they were moderate gestures, and his words were those of someone speaking sanely on a sane subject — even if not quite persuasively. And the gestures directed attention to this feature and that of a model machine, small but functioning, which ... when all was said and done and span and spun ... wound a string which pulled a weight. And let it down. And pulled it up. And — After Brozz had said his say he was a moment silent. A flow of water was heard purling, somewhere very near. “Partly,” Brozz began again, “the machinery which you see is on such a small scale because the supply of running water is on such a small scale. Partly, it is because I lack capital to do anything on a larger scale.” De Metz again turned his bird-bright gaze upon Eszterhazy. Investment possibility, said the bird-bright gaze. “The ancient problem of the Archimedean Screw,” said Brozz, “before it was made practicable, I have so to speak turned inside-out. What was its fault, I have made into a strength. The rush of the water works the tuned harmonic turbine which then works the vacuum pump, and thence the compressed-air machine; the compressed-air machine is so clean;” but he began to repeat himself; and besides, his scientific principles seemed . . .

“ ‘Tuned harmonic turbine!’ ” exclaimed De Metz. “Music! Mathematic! Marvelous!”

“ Well, Engineer Brozz! This is most interesting. Have you a printed brochure?” Had he not seen the man?

Engineer Brozz looked at him as though he had asked if he had a piece of the moon. Next he said, No he had not. And then, as an obvious afterthought, he said, But he had a letter-press copy of his Statement. Letterpress ink was liberally laced with sugar to keep it from drying rapidly, the paper thus written was covered with another sheet, of different paper, and the press .. . well... pressed. The ink made, of course, a reverse, a mirror- image, on the second sheet: but the paper of the second sheet was so thin that the copy was read from the obverse, as though it had been right-side up. The alternative was to photograph the original, which was technically possible but so tedious that it was seldom done — or, simply, to copy the copy. With pen and ink. Ordinary ink. Brozz did agree to allow Eszterhazy to have the letter-press copy transcribed. But he did not seem at all pleased to have to do so. De Metz might feel bright about the investment possibility involved, but, although Brozz had indeed mentioned being hampered by a lack of capital, he did not seem at all concerned with ways of meeting the problem. Eszterhazy was quite sure that the engineer was not engaged in cozenage of any sort, not playing the innocent sitting unsuspecting on a fortune. And Eszterhazy was now quite sure that he had seen him before.

“Engineer Brozz has shown me some of the figures involved,” De Metz said now. “Some of the physical calculations. I am sure they might form the basis of an extraordinary composition . . . though not one, of course, likely to be familiar to those of purely conventional musical taste. Harmony!

Tune! Turbine!”

Somewhere the town-clock sounded. Even in Klejn TinkeldorfF, Time did not stand still. And as Dr. Eszterhazy did not care to dismiss the matter by saying something along the lines of, You are both too naif to be left at large for long, and as he could think of nothing else to say to Brozz which would be neither a lie nor an insincerity, he now said, “You asked me to remind you, cher maitre De Metz, to tell me a very amusing story about... a Gypsy and a —?”

At once the musician’s mask broke into a thousand lines of laughter. “Ah yes!” he cried. “Ah yes! I forget just when it happened. It happened around here, in this picturesque little hamlet. A certain family had a Gypsy working for it and he had his chores and one of them was to skim cream from the milk-pans in the spring-house and ladle it into the crock. You understand. And of course he was most very strictly forbidden to drink any of the cream himself. So. So one day he comes into the spring-house and what does he discover, he discovers that a mouse has gotten into the milk-pan! And drowned! What does he do?” Eszterhazy, smiling, lightly shook his head to indicate his inability to guess what does the Gypsy do; De Metz began to show what, by gesture and by mime. First the Gypsy showed puzzlement. Then surprise. Then — something must after all be done — resolution. De Metz, in the character of Yanosh, leaned over, picked up an invisible mouse by its invisible tail, began to throw it away, and then, bringing it level with his face, thrust out his tongue, and — slurp! slurp — and then threw it away.

“Oh ho ho! Ah ha ha! First he licked the cream offit! And then he threw it away! Oo hoo hoo!”

Eszterhazy chuckled. Engineer Brozz observed, “These Gypsies, they are all such children of nature.” A faint, very faint smile, creased his thin and rather weary-looking features. What [it asked], what are Gypsies, mice, and cream to one who lacked capital to prove the larger capacities of the tuned harmonic turbine and compressed-air pump, so potentially efficient in getting energy out of small mountain streams with very high heads of water?

One more call to make. Some of the houses were painted white, some chocolate-brown, some blue, pink, green. And in one of the white ones, with blue trim around the carved window-frames, dwelt the doctor’s grandmother’s first cousin, Christina Augusta, Tanta Tina. God knows what she might do, were he to ride past her house and not go in. Wait till the christening of his first-born child (he was not married) and then appear to utter murrains on everyone’s cattle, and blights on all their crops; perhaps. Tanta Tina belonged to an age gone by in more than mere generation; she dressed in the costume of her youth; she had few teeth; she had moles and a slight, white moustache. She and the Emperor Ignats Louis were god-sib. She called him “Loysheck.” He called her “Sissy.” She did not ever go to Court. And she did not know a word of French.

Well, that is not entirely correct. She knew three.

First she embraced him, then she blessed him, then she fondly stroked his beard. “My dearest little cousin-child,” she said, at length, “I shall bring you a cup of cafe au lait. And a piece of gingerbread.”

The coffee, in a sense, was already made. But not the cafe au lait. The beans had to come a long way, from Mocha and from Java (described by her as lying “in the lands of the Turks”), in order to be purchased under Tanta Tina’s eyes, roasted under Tanta Tina’s eyes, ground under Tanta Tina’s eyes, and then subjected to an almost alchemical process of. . . almost. . . distillation under Tanta Tina’s eyes. Tanta Tina next allowed the coffee to cool and then supervised its being decanted into wide-mouthed glass bottles which, each strictly rotated, remained three days each in the moist cool of the spring-house; the fluid was then poured off the dregs and set to heat in one pan while the milk was heating in another. A dash of cinnamon (fresh- ground), the contents of the two pots commingled at just the right moment: cool slightly, and drink. Who has never drunk cafe au lait made after the manner of Tanta Tina may indeed have drunk coffee and milk. But he or she has never drunk cafe au lait. And as for a mouse drowning in the cream of the milk with which Tanta Tina made the cafe au lait, no mouse would dare. As for the gingerbread —

“Ha, Tanta Tina, I am reminded of a capital story which I just heard today,” and he told it to her, complete with gesture and mime. The old woman laughed heartily; then she said, Ah the poor creature. And when he asked, Did she mean the Gypsy or the mouse?, she laughed heartily all over again, then wiped her eyes on her apron, made of hundred-year-old lace the like of which is never made more. And her little cousin-child lifted the gingerbread, sniffed it with zest, smiled ... what would they say, in fashionable circles, nibbling their petits-fours, if they were to see him about to bite into something as peasant-simple as a gingerbread-man? . . . well, he did not care; he need not care, any more than Tanta Tina; and he knew it and he knew they knew it, too. Then, as his tongue and teeth did their work, he was aware of his experiencing something quite different, quite, well, better, than he had expected. He felt his face change.

“It’s good, isn’t it, Little Engli?”

“But this is extraordinarily good! Is it some new recipe?” Even as he asked, he thought how unlikely it would be if this old woman were to try a new recipe.

She thought it unlikely, too. “Tchah! A new recipe? From the Old Avar Bakery?” Her tone revealed the all but impossibility of the Old Avar Bakery making anything from a new recipe. Assuming Charles XII, the Swedish “Lion of the North,” to have paused long enough in his impetuous ride through the old kingdoms of Scythia and Pannonia to have sampled something from the Avar Bakery; and assuming him to rise from the dead and, returning to sample the same item from the same bakery today, he of “that

Name at which the World grew pale” would find the item tasting exactly the same as it had tasted a century and a half before. The Swedish Lion had defeated Danes, Russians, Poles, Turks, sweeping almost insanely across the European continent —

“You can’t catch me, said the gingerbread-man,” Eszterhazy exclaimed, the line coming suddenly into his mind. But a sniper’s ball had caught the Lion, at last, in Norway, “on a mean Strand.”

“What is that you say, my child?”

He laughed, shortly. “Oh, just something from a children’s tale. I learned it long ago, from my English aunt —”

Ah, his English aunt. Meesis Emma. And how was Meesis Emma? He gave an account of the English Lady Emma Eszterhazy, and then his talk ebbed a moment into silence. He lifted up the remnants of the gingerbread, and, in the silence (. . . had an angel flown overhead? announcing, as the Moslems say, One God...?), he heard the old woman murmur, “There is a spirit in this man . . .” And it was his turn to ask, “What is that?”

She blinked, laughed lightly, brushed the matter away with her withered hand. “So my old nurse used to say. I don’t know what she meant. You say you like it, but you do not finish? So. A late lunch? An early dinner? Never mind. Let me wrap it up for you to take. The good Lord and Our Lady alone know what they give you to eat in Bella; is it quite wholesome? Yes? Not just foreign kickshaws, I hope?”

Almost back home, the odor of fresh-baked bread brought the matter to his mind again. Where was the — Ah. There. He dismounted, entered the corner bread-shop. Had they gingerbread? They had; he took it. Then he forgot it, until, later on, back home at 33 Turkling Street, the slightly unfamiliar weight in each of his pockets reminded him. Really, he mused, looking down, there was not much comparison. The gingerbread man from the antique Avar Bakery, broken though it was, was a sort of modest masterpiece. The outline was as crude as a child’s drawing. There was a currant for each eye, two for nostrils to indicate a nose, and a short row of them for teeth. The one from the neighborhood was elaborately confected with brightly-colored sugar icing in several hues. But it was soggy. And its taste was nothing. Let one of the servants remove it and give it to a child. Absent- mindedly he finished nibbling the broken bits from the Avar Bakery. It was good, it was good, it was very, very good. And as the taste filled his mouth, his mind filled with some vague thoughts not unconnected with it.

You can’t catch me, said the gingerbread-man.

There is a spirit in this man . . .

In came his servant with a small tray; on the tray an aperitif. “Ah, good. Ah. I shan’t want this piece of pastry.”

Would his Romanou valet lick the cream off a dead mouse before throwing it away? Possibly he might lick the cream off it even if someone else had thrown it away, unlicked.

Or even half-licked.

Ah, well.

Another day. Eszterhazy afoot. A woman called out, not especially to him, automatically, “ ’Llyri’ an’ th’ ’Talian ’Lliance . . . ’Llyri’ an’ th’ ’Talian ’Lliance . .. Press, Print, ’Zette... .” Elsewhere in the world, newspapers may have been hawked by newsboys — some of them, Dr. Eszterhazy had observed in his travels, rather well on into rather mature boyhood — in Bella the trade was largely in the hands of soldiers’ widows. True, pensions had ... eventually ... been instituted; true, pensions had ... eventually ... been increased . . . but when it had been hinted that the newswives might now tacitly retire and allow others to take this corner pitch and that: nothing like it! Wrapped in threadbare Army horse-blankets and with their late husbands’ medals pinned to their bosoms, they had marched — wailing — to the Ministry of War. Had the Minister hidden cravenly beneath his great mahogany desk? Had the Imperial Presence drawn his sword and stamped his foot and shouted that the newswidows must be allowed, etc.? Who could really say. The women still sat on their stools, still shortchanged their customers, still endured heat and cold, still chanted headlines they often did not understand, and still offered for sale papers which they themselves could often neither read nor wished to learn to read.

Half-automatically this one now held a Gazette out to Eszterhazy, half- automatically he gave her a coin and took the paper. He did not greatly desire it. He was not by any means a fanatical nationalist or imperialist, but he certainly preferred to see his own country’s flag flying over his own country rather than that of — say — Austria-Hungary, Russia, or Turkey. The news-vendor’s late husband may have died in battle or he may have been, whilst drunk, kicked to death by an angry mule. The price of a paper was a very small price.

Illyria and the Italian Alliance. Happy, happy Scythia-Pannonia- Transbalkania, to be fretted by small Illyria! All through the Dog Days and the Silly Season, not over-scrupulous editors would sell off an otherwise perhaps-unsalable edition by smearing a quarter of a page with, in large type, ILLYRIA AND THE ITALIAN ALLIANCE. There was somehow a feeling that Illyria ought not to have an alliance and that if Illyria nevertheless felt that it must have one, it bloody well ought to have one with Scythia- Pannonia-Transbalkania. And as Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania had never had an alliance with Italy, why should Illyria have one? The logic of this seemed irrefutable. At least in Bella. As for the King of Illyria, Kyryl II Mettodio, whose nose (admittedly rather long) had always been good for an affectionate jest in the Bellanese music halls, why, it was to be feared that His Adriatic Majesty’s veracity was now come to be questioned on the local musical stage; and that he was even occasionally nowadays being referred to there as King Pinocchio.

Tut-tut.

Eszterhazy gave the front page a glance which was reflexive rather than reflective and had half-folded it again; half he would throw it away, half he would tuck it under his arm for later; he took a half-step forward. He stopped. What. Why. Ah. There had been something on that damned page after all. Damn. Much better to have nothing but advertizements on the front page. For Sale, Fine Landau-Barouche. Otto Come Home All Is Forgiven. Philanthropic Gentleman Desires Make Loan to Young Woman in Good Health. — What had it been which had caught his eye ... aye, and stuck in like a piece of grit... ? Of course he could not say. Well... a sigh ... there was nothing for it; he sat down at a bench outside a rough tavern-cum-cookshop which catered to the needs of the coach-for-hire drivers. He was opening the paper when a not very clean apron stopped in front of him. Without looking up, Eszterhazy said, “The usual.” When he glanced up, the apron had gone. No waiter would sink pride and admit he did not remember a regular customer . .. which Eszterhazy was certainly not. Illyria and the — oh, blast and damn Illyria and the Italian Alliance!

The answer seemed to be, he was obliged finally to admit, that there were two somethings. And he would perhaps never be able to learn if he had noticed one before the other, perhaps the two had been read simultaneously; it did not matter. OUTRAGE AT THE SACRED GROVE was one. VERY IMPORTANT NEW INVENTION was the other. Someone, whilst putting an axe to a tree in the so-called Sacred Grove of the Olden-Time Goths at the headwaters of the Little River had had his head cloven by another axe. There was considerable unrest among the peasants. Huh. He had notes at home on the subject of the so-called Sacred Grove, etcetera, both from ancient and from modern writers. Hum. Well, he could cut this out and compare it and add it to the collection. As for the Very Important New Invention . . . :

The Gazette is able to inform its readers that a very important new invention has been perfected by a subject of the Triune Monarchy which will probably result in our country becoming a most prominent industrial consideration in the economy of Europe. Engineer H. V. Borits Brozz, a resident of the charming little suburb of Klejn Tinkeldorff, has perfected an engine which operates on water and air. The new engine does not require horse-power or steam. As neither wood nor coal is employed for fiiel. . .

Eszterhazy swore very silently. Every practitioner in stock trickery, every promoter of fake companies and worthless schemes, would be sure to get involved in this fine-tuned harmonic hobby-horse, mare’s nest, wild-goose chase, what-one-might-call-it. True — and fortunately — there were not many such in Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania. But that might leave a clearer field for those there were. At that moment the waiter, saying, “Two kopperkas, sir boss,” set something on the unclothed table. And Eszterhazy in a flash realized just how the Gazette had got hold of the story: De Metz was a friend of the musical critic of the Gazette and told it to him, and he in turn had passed it on to his editor. De Metz knew as much about engineering as Brozz did about music. The bee of Investment Possibility had entered his bonnet, and who could say how long it was going to buzz there? Perhaps forever. Certainly — in theory — the harmonic turbine had a potential. Certainly the compressed-air engine had a potential. In theory. So, in the time of Cardinal Richelieu, had the steam-boiler had a theoretical potential. It had since had two hundred years to develop from a toy suspected of sorcery into the immense engines which sped o’er Land and Ocean without rest. Even electricity had grown from a key on a kite in a rainstorm to something which now began, seemingly, to demonstrate a possible potential capable of perhaps rivaling steam.

What good is your new invention?

What good is a new-born baby?

But surely Engineer Brozz’s new model engine, for all its high-toned harmonic title, was now merely at the toy stage, doing nothing more than winding a cord which lifted and then lowered a very small weight. Would it have its century? If the idea got into the hands of scoundrel speculators might not the idea be driven from sight and thought, to lie buried in the Urn for its own several centuries? Well, perhaps that might be what it needed. Meanwhile there were after all and always many other new inventions.

What the waiter had set down was borsht. Cabbage-borsht.

Wasn’t bad. The usual. Ha!

But. . . where had he seen Brozz before?

The Scotch had not conquered the English nor had the English con­quered the Scotch in order for one sovereign to become King of England and King of Scotland and — eventually — King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain. What had brought it about was, firstly, the Scottish marriage of King Henry’s sister, and, secondly, the not-marriage of King Henry’s daughter: the Queen of Scots hath a bonny babe and I am but a barren stock. Neither had any wars at last united Scythia and Pannonia; the Pannonians at a certain point historical had no Crown-Prince? Well, neither had they any Salic Law: the then-Crown-Prince of Scythia was wedded to the then- Crown-Princess of Pannonia; both being tactful enough to die before their conjoint-grandchild, said grandchild became Sovereign of both Scythia and Pannonia — and what school-child anywhere did not know that the people of Scythia were (principally) Goths and that the people of Pannonia were (principally) Avars? What an occasion for the erasure of frontiers, the unification of armies, the abolition of customs and octrois! There were, however, also all those lesser, minor territories, of which the new Sovereign was

Prince of one and Duke of another ... in the Scythian Line of Descent. . . Grand Hetman here and Chief Boyar there ... in the Pannonian Line of Descent... and so on ... and so on. What to do about them, these not-quite- nations already becoming obsolete in an age where every political entity was felt to require a prime minister, a general staff, a set of postage stamps, a — What was done was perhaps cleverer than students of political science realized, for all these “Hegemonies,” as they were called, from Ritchli to Little Great Dombrovia to Hyperborea, and including Vlox-Majore and Vlox- Minore, were not absorbed by either Scythia or Pannonia, but were autonomously united to form Transbalkania.

The result, rather to the surprise of the gathering which assembled to form the (as it was popularly called forever) “the Big Union,” the result was an Empire . . .

And now the cheese of Poposhki, the smoked sturgeon of the Romanou, the brined-pork and the brawn of the Slovatchko Alps, appeared . . . un taxed!... on the market-stalls of Bella — Avar-Ister — Apolograd — and everywhere else in the fourth-largest empire in Europe. (The Turks were only fifth. Served them right.) Also the wheat of Scythia and the beef & mutton of the wide Pannonian plains. And, as Dr. Englebert Eszterhazy composed this paean in his own mind and looked at the ever-thronging streets of what, once a walled town, was now a world capital (yes, it was a small world), he considered the role which he himself would play. Which he had intended he should play and had designed (re-designed) his own life the better to play it. You can’t catch me, said —

Something light as a feather brushed Eszterhazy’s mind. He knew that, usually, he had only to wait a bit, emptying his mind of other things and that fairly soonly whatever the new thought was would silently enter and fill the space. He was mildly surprised that what came, soon enough, to fill the space, was the thought, newspaper cuttings. There was a plain, shallow box of some exotic wood on a shelf near his desk and in it he was accustomed to place any quick-cut items from periodicals which he had not immediately time to dispose of more thoroughly; he rose and looked. Sure enough. From the Gazette. VERY IMPORTANT NEW INVENTION was one. That would go under, hm, under, ha ha, Invention. In his scrapbooks. With a crossreference under Science. And under Commerce? He chuckled. “Investment possibility,” ha! And now for the other items so casually cut out a while ago, OUTRAGE AT THE SACRED GROVE. Someone, whilst putting an axe to a tree in the so-called Sacred Grove of the Olden-Time Goths at the headwaters of the Little River had had his head cloven by another axe. There was considerable unrest among the peasants. This one —

This one would require cross-references under History, Ethnology, National, Goths, Religion, Little River, and — what for its main classification? And did he really want to bother with all of it now? Ought he not now, now, in fact, to be in his music-room, doing work on the Mixo-Lydian Mode or the Later Italian Harpsichordists? Was music and mathematic really the same thing? How one thought led so easily, swiftly, to another! — and yet and still the feather brushed his mind; what, what? Why? Was there, then, more to it than merely boxing the newspaper cuttings? Evidently. So much as a sigh he allowed himself, then he went to looking up things in his books, not his scrapbooks, though perhaps he might find himself in them before he was finished.

The so-called Addendum to Procopius had been printed once, at Leipzig, perhaps fifty years ago; but the text was defective. Eszterhazy had tracked down the original, was able to satisfy himself that it had not been forged by the notorious Simonides — who knew more, probably, about Old Greek Paleography than the old Greek paleographers had known, and did such things as much for pleasure as for profit... if not more — and had it painstakingly photographed. It was a very late Byzantine MS, full of abbreviations, ligatures, and flourishes (and lacunae and, more simply, holes); and it had taken Eszterhazy a long time to establish exactly what was the text: then he had translated it himself. The Faculty of the University of Bella, to whom anything in the way of a Greek text even as late as the New Testament was of but moderate interest, had ignored his work. But he had received letters (one each from Caius College at Cambridge, St. Andrew’s in Scotland, and Kansas near Kickapoo in the American Province of Mid-vest) with such praise as more than made up for local neglect. So:

Another reason which justified Justinian’s waging war upon the Goths was their savage rites and customs, totally against religion and morality. For example, in the mountains of Eastern Scythia in a sacred grove by a sacred well or spring, the barbaric Goths are wont to select certain prisoners by lot and to let them loose and to pursue after them. The wretches unfortunate enough to be captured are not alone immolated [immolated, an interesting word, although of course all words were interesting; why not more simply say sacrificed ? Immolate . . . mol. . . mol. . . surely a cognate with the Magyar molnar, miller? and with what else? Meal? Mill? With a click of his tongue he reached for the dictionary, immolate : ah, here: im-mo-late, verb transitive, from Latin immolatus, past participle of immolare, in + mola, spelt grits; from the custom of sprinkling victims with sacrificial meal; akin to Latin molere to grind — see MILL. 1. to offer in sacrifice; especially to slay as a sacrificial victim. 2. KILL, DESTROY. .. . Hmm. Hmm. Interesting. Very interesting. Now back to the text.] immolated to the demons who dwelt in the place sacred to them, but portions of their flesh are cooked and eaten. Others say, eaten raw. It is true that some so-called Christians who should know better maintain that though such a cruel rite once pertained there, it had been abolished after the Gothic incursion, and that the Goths themselves

merely made effigies of meal and honey and it is these which they consume. Shame upon the so-called Christians who presume to speak well of the enemies of God and the Empire, they are probably Monophysites or Pelagians, may they be accursed and may they all be burnt alive.

Eszterhazy gave a snort of rueful amusement. The Addendum may not have been, probably was not, authentic. This of course did not mean that there had been no Goths, no Justinian, and so on; and certainly it did not mean that there had been “in the mountains of Eastern Scythia” no sacred grove, no sacred spring or well. In fact, it was rather sure that there had been. Very likely; more than one. Of each. Of most, reference to the precise site had been lost to both oral and written tradition, and of those sites of which this may not have been so, only one was still known as, and still regarded as, “the Sacred Grove.” It was near the headwaters of the Little River. One might have liked it better if the (so-called) Addendum —- probably never written by Procopius, that spiteful, scandal-loving lawyer — had made a definite reference to a river. One could not have everything. And anyway, the absence of such a reference was a sort of testimony to some sort of authenticity of the text: that the MS was of late Byzantine times did not mean it had been authored in late Byzantine times; had this been so, it likely would have mentioned a river, in order to add verisimilitude. No ... probably it was older than the Middle Ages, if not (perhaps) as old as Justinian and Procopius, and its author, whoever its author had been, merely repeated what others had said. And others had not been interested in providing geographical coordinates.

What then? about the Sacred Grove? Of the Sacred Grove?

Eszterhazy had been there, once, briefly. Though the oaks were indeed massy and ancient, of course they could hardly have been that ancient. He thought once of the lines of the English poet, Chaucer: a grove, stonding in a vale

This grove was indeed standing in a vale; it was deeply sunken into the vale. The spring was still there. The river was not the Little River, it was one of its tributaries. A Christian shrine, itself of great antiquity, was there; but the attempt to take the pagan quality away had hardly succeeded. Had not, certainly, entirely succeeded. On every bush and low tree round about, and on whatever low-enough branches of the higher trees, was tied a profusion, a multitude of bright-colored rags, strips of cloth. The people came and the people said their prayers by the proper shrine. And then the people went and made their wishes, and as they did this they tied a strip of bright cloth to a branch. It was a custom so old that it had passed out of anyone’s power to rationalize.

So no one tried.

The air was certainly one of more than merely immemorial antiquity. In the shade of the huge trees one felt intimations of things to which the rosary, the Pater Noster and Ave Maria, hardly seemed to apply. Of course the pilgrims, if so they might be called, hardly could have thought so. From time to time relics of the Bronze Age had been found there. Relics of the Stone Age had been found there, and Eszterhazy wondered if these flint knives, mostly now in fragments, had immolated any of the victims in the ancient and horrid rites which had certainly antedated the Goths, to say nothing of the Avars, who had later come to conquer . . . and had stayed . . . and still came and still stayed ... to pray. One did after all feel something there which one did after all not feel somewhere else. If there were not actually dryads in the oaks, not really naiads in the spring or pool or river, well, then of course, one could not really feel them. But for thousands of years, people had come and had emotional experiences there and had believed that there were dryads in the trees and naiads in the spring and pool and stream. And so perhaps it was that which one felt.

Because, to be sure, one felt something.

And as for the incident mentioned in the cutting from the Gazette newspaper? Well, there was a superstition that wood fallen from the trees in the Sacred Grove should not be taken from the Sacred Grove. Once a year, at least once a year, certainly on or very near Midsummer’s Night, great fires were made of all the wind-fall wood — otherwise the place might have become impenetrable. Heathen would not wish to take wood away, because it was sacred; Christians not, because it was, after all, sacred to heathen gods and spirits. It had long been good church doctrine; was it still (he wondered, as the gaslights hissed in the gasolier in his study) good church doctrine that the heathen gods had indeed existed and had been demons? And it was certainly contrary to some deeply-felt regional feeling, call it superstition, that no tree in the Sacred Grove should ever be felled —

— furthermore, it was, the entire area and for a league, say rather leagues, round about, the property of Prince Preez, who had very stern rules regarding the felling of any of his trees — the killing of any of his game — the taking of any of his fish —

But there is perhaps scarcely any rule which someone will not try to break, if it is to someone’s interest to break it. Oaken timber had a price, and it was inevitable that from time to time someone would try to earn that price. It was not clear from the paragraph in the Gazette which was considered the outrage, the attempted cutting-down of the tree or the successful cutting-down of the attemptor? Or just why there was considerable unrest among the peasants: though presumably in connection with the matter of the tree and the manslaughter.

Well, well, he would try to follow it up; meanwhile he carefully scissored the rough edges of the knife-cut newspaper items, neatly pasted them in their proper places in the scrapbooks, neatly made his cross-references. So much of this was in his head anyway that it wasn’t something it would do to

depend on a secretary for; and besides: he had no secretary. Though perhaps some day. Meanwhile, and quite apart from the intrinsic value of what he was doing, the storing-up of knowledge as a part of his life-plan, Dr. Eszterhazy found now (as always) that there was a simple and a rather restorative pleasure in doing such simple tasks as using the scissors and applying the paste. If this was — and it was — rather childlike, what of it? There was, after all, a child in everyone; better to minister to it in such harmless and helpful ways.

Just as he was closing the scrapbook there caught his eye the headline, VERY IMPORTANT new INVENTION. And, as before, he chuckled.

Fairly soon, however: there it was again.

Arriving for his regular session in Composition, Eszterhazy was met as usual by the housekeeper; and, as usual, she curtsied to him. Then, not as usual, she said, “Master has left word, sir, will you be pleased to go over and meet him at Engineer Brozz’s place, behind, in th’ old cow-house and spring-house as they’ve had the builders throw together and they calls it the lavatory.”

They were both there in the laboratory. Something had been added, Eszterhazy felt certain, but he was not yet aware what it was. As before, Brozz looked rather weary; as before, De Metz had his head cocked to one side. Greetings exchanged, De Metz, evidently acting as spokesman, said, “It was felt that perhaps the new invention did not sufficiently demonstrate the,” and here he paused a second, “prac-tic-al application of the invention. Of the tuned harmonic turbine and compressed-air pump. So. Doctor. Therefore —”

Brozz said, rather as one who speaks as it were weary of having spoken the same thing again and again, almost dreamily said, “It is so clean ... so clean ... no fire, no smoke, no ash — Ah. Yes. Instructor De Metz has been kind enough to make some practical suggestions, of the most helpful sort.” Sunlight diffused from the whitewashed walls, emphasizing here a ridge and there a whorl in the plaster covering the brick and stone. As though making some sort of effort, Brozz cleared his throat, lifting his head; muscles worked in his lean throat. “Instructor De Metz has assisted me to devise a small device which will —”

“But show him, show him, my dear Brozz!”

There was a flurry of apologetic sounds. Brozz moved levers. He turned wheels. The sound of water purling became the sound of water gurgling. Rushing. Brozz made one final movement and pulled a bar. By this time Eszterhazy had noticed the box, of wood and metal, which had not been there before: this was the something different, something new. And as the bar settled down into its altered position, there was a distinct click. And from the box, with sounds emulating those of the flute, the small drum, the mouth-organ, there came forth the very specific music of the Imperialusbk, the National Anthem of Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania: May Providence Protect Our Royal and Imperial Sovereign From Agues, Plagues, Jacobins, and Wends; And, Indeed, From All Other Afflictions Whatsoever. Commonly called, for purposes of brevity, the Imperialushk.

(Quite another name had originally followed Jacobins, also a name of a single syllable, but political considerations indicated that it would be more tactful to substitute the name of a people which did not have a standing army.)

As the last notes — those which would accompany the words, and even to the humblest grant him and/or her the slice of bread with goosegrease — died away, Eszterhazy was moved to clap his hands: of course no more appropriate after an Anthem than after a hymn. He said, and said quite sincerely, “Charming. Quite charming.” The matter of why it was better to have the music performed by water-powered vacuum pump “and/or” compressed air when music-boxes had done it perfectly well by clockwork . . . and clockwork, after all, operates even during a drought... was quite beside the point. Although ... to be sure ... a regular music-box might not have done the flute and mouth-organ quite as well.

At once De Metz asked, “And to whom else shall we show this?” He did not add, investment possibility. He did not need to.

Eszterhazy rubbed the end of his slightly-pointed nose. “Hm. Let me think. Ah. Have you considered Nuszboum’s Arcade?”

They had not considered Nuszboum’s Arcade. They considered it now. De Metz gave an entire sequence of his birdy-nods. Brozz said, “I have often enjoyed watching some of the machines and automata in the Arcade. I have no doubt that the principles of the tuned, harmonic, water-powered, turbine and compressed-air pump might be successfully applied to them, at any rate to some of them, and of course on a much larger scale.” It was clear that they liked the idea.

It was clear, very soon, that Nuszboum liked it, too. Nuszboum made an arrangement with the inventor, Nuszboum provided space for the invention next to his Test-the-Electricity Machine and just after his Slightly Naughty Magic Zooscope Lantern Peep (fat women in corsets). And in front of the Arcade, Nuszboum posted two masterpieces of posters appearing to be immense enlargements of the small item on the front page of the Gazette which had attracted Eszterhazy’s attention: IMPORTANT NEW INVENTION: actually, both posters had been painted by the famous Master Sign-Painter Adler. How many people saw them and how many had read them and how many people had been intrigued by them enough to go inside, no one could say. But somebody had gone inside. And somebody was not even interested in testing the Electrical Machine or peeping into the Zooscope Lantern ... which was just fme with those who were, tinsmiths and plasterers and other such subjects of the Triune Monarchy whose wives were just as fat but never wore corsets . . . and someone asked a question or so of Nuszboum and obtained an answer. And so, then —

“And how is our friend Engineer Brozz?” — one day.

“Quite well. He has gone away to set up his full-scale water engine.”

Eszterhazy was astonished. “He has? ”

“Oh yes. Someone is interested in investment possibility.” Eszterhazy asked just enough questions as to reassure himself that Someone was not a cheapjack or mounteback or floater of bogus shares; Someone was not. And further than that, Eszterhazy did not ask and De Metz did not offer and their conversation continued on into a very technical discussion of counterpoint and polyphony. And presently the season of the lessons with De Metz was over and the season for a holiday in the country was at hand, and whilst Eszterhazy was botanizing amidst the crags and high valleys and wildwoods of Little Byzantia, the matter of Engineer Brozz left his mind, and left it as completely (one might think) as though it had never been in it. When next he was in “Big Bella” the mock-newspaper posters were no longer up in front of Nuszboum’s Arcade and he had forgotten that they had ever been up. The matter occurred to him, vaguely, when he received the customary letter of felicitation from De Metz upon the award of the Doctorate in Music; but it was very vague indeed. On the vacation following, Eszterhazy went geologizing in the mountains behind Nimtsoran: and nothing there reminded him of Brozz, or of the vacuum-pump and the compressed-air engine. But on the vacation after that —

This time Eszterhazy took the Limited Express to Numbitszl, in the Avar Alps, from Numbitszl the mule-drawn diligence went to Gro, and at Gro he was met by a smart mountain wagon; its brightly-painted signs showed a figure with a halo who was mounted on something like a short-legged horse with a ruff of hair around its neck: this was Saint Mammas. Put a lion on Mammas! the heathen throng in the amphitheater had shouted, and this was done. Mammas had preached to the lion, Mammas had so to speak converted the lion, and Mammas had calmly ridden out of the arena mounted on the lion. — So at least the legend said, and if orthodox church historiographers and hagiographers said anything different, no one in the Avar Alps knew or cared. And it was at the piously-named (and well-appointed and well-run) Inn of St. Mammas that Eszterhazy was going to stay. For a full fortnight he might not even see a musical score or hear a musical instrument . . . except perhaps a peasant on the zither or the penny-whistle or the woodenhorn.

The road went around and around and up and up and up, the air was clean and clear, not alone different from the thicker air of the city of Bella but certainly far different from the air in the train. In theory the train-carriage’s windows were sealed, but the black soot seeped in anyway, and the air grew hot and stale, and if one opened the windows then the smoke from the engine rushed in, and in addition to grime on one’s face there was the inevitable cinder in one’s eye. Cinders. Eyes. But here all was clean. By the side of the narrow, winding road grew yellow wood-sorrel and the blue blossoms of the cornflower and the blue blue blooms of the chicory.

From the balcony of his two-and-one-half-room suite Eszterhazy could see a broken silver line: the Little River and its several falls, and — past that — the unbroken silver line of the broad ox-bow in its lower course. Eszterhazy’s Romanou valet had been given the fortnight off; and he himself was now being tended to by the inn’s servants, and tended to well enough; very well, he had to shave himself or submit to the unsophisticated ministrations of the village barber? Tut.

He rode the small rough horses of the mountains, he rode their rough large ponies, once or twice he rode their rusty-colored mules. And he walked. He walked and walked, sometimes botanizing, sometimes birdwatching, sometimes photographing. His face grew red, then brown; his nerves, calmer ... he had hardly realized that they had been otherwise. And then one night he said, more as a vocal expression of good spirits than an actual question, “Well, landlord, and what shall I do tomorrow?”

Barrel-bodied, immaculately-aproned, vastly-bearded and broadly- moustached, Karrolo the innkeeper answered, “Why, sir doctor sir, a party of the gentry be going cross the frontier a-morrow, and I do wonder if you be not wanting to go with’um.”

The frontier, there had been no “frontier,” even officially, since the Great Unification (“The Big Union”), but old manners of speech . . . and of thought, which gives utterance to speech, That which has no form of its own giving it to that which becomes formed. . . died hard. When (here in this remote area) they ever died at all. “Going from the Avar Land into Scythia, are they?” he asked, lazily stretching before the fire on which a red- hearted chestnut log burned. “Where there?”

The answer checked his lazy stretch. “Why, sir doctor sir, to the Sacred Grove.”

How could this be? The Sacred Grove was far away. It was. Was it not? A moment’s reflection showed him that, really, it was not. He had gone there before, from Bella: a longish trip. He had come here, from Avar-Ister — another longish trip. But from exactly here, St. Mammas’s Inn, to there, the Sacred Grove, was not really that far at all. Eszterhazy had not come to St. Mammas’s Inn in Pannonia directly from Bella in Scythia, because there was no direct railroad connection, and even sufficient connection via diligence — “stage coach,” they called it in Northamerica — was lacking. But rapidly he conjectured vision of a map, from here to there was but a small way indeed. He might easily go. Why should he not go? He could think of no reason why not. “Yes, Karrolo, I think it an excellent idea. Have them pack me some food . . . and a little brandy.”

Idly, he picked up the Avar-Ister newspaper, and turned to the classified notices. He made a mark in a margin.

The picnic went well enough. Karrolo would have felt his house disgraced if there had not been the usual seven sorts of sausages, seven kinds of cheese, and seven of pickled things and seven of pastry. In order to minister to the possibly more finicking tastes of the gentry, Hanni, his wife, who had worked a while in Avar-Ister (sometimes called “the Paris of the Balkans” by people who had spent more time in the Balkans than in Paris ... a lot more), had prepared sandwhishkas — thin slices of this and that between thin slices of bread. She had even made cucumber sandwhishkas, though her failure to peel the cucumbers occasioned mild merriment.

“Such a lot of gingerbread,” said one of the ladies.

“It is traditional,” explained one of the men.

There is a spirit in this man; whatever did that mean?

The air grew rather hot, but there in the shady grove it stayed cool. Now and then a breeze brought wafts of resin from the pines round about. “Look what I’ve got on my shoe,” a young girl whimpered. Her mother made an exclamation of disgust, said that there must be a dog around. One of the guests laughed.

“Not at all,” he said. “It is merely some old gingerbread. And the rain and dew have made it soggy. People come here all the time. And every time, they bring gingerbread.”

Eszterhazy said, “I don’t wonder, it is such good gingerbread. I only wonder that so much of it seems to be lying around, instead of having been all eaten up. Why is that?”

The same man said, “It is traditional.” And then, with a gesture, he said, “Look!”

Some distance away the employees of the Inn were also eating. While they watched, the blackbearded coachman took up his piece of gingerbread, broke off a piece, placed it on the ground, straightened up, began to eat the rest. “Why?” asked a lady. And, “Yes, why? Ask him why, do,” said the other ladies.

The same man raised his voice, called out, “Hoy, Coachie!” in his citified Avar. “Why do you put a piece of such good gingerbread on the ground to get mucked about? Are you feeding the stoats and the fieldmice?”

It took a while for “Coachie” to understand. Then, with an obvious intention to be respectful, he made an obvious attempt to answer. But he felt awkward; the words stuck in his throat; he made gestures; finally, in a voice too low to carry, he said a word or two in the rustic dialect to the woman serving as waitress. She nodded, walked back to the picnickers, curtseyed. “If it do please Your Honors, Ferri he say it be the custom.”

This would not do. Not altogether. A woman asked, Why was it the custom? Another demanded to be told. What did the custom mean? “Coachie,” not prepared to deal with the recondite matters, scratched his head, scratched his chin, had begun to scratch his armpits: stopped, under some dim apprehension that this was a gesture not socially accepted on all levels of society. All he had wanted to do, really, was drive his coach, tend his horses, eat his victuals, and leave a piece of his gingerbread in the grasses where bloomed the blue cornflower and where the blue chicory blossom blew. And while he thus floundered, the man who had first addressed him, perhaps from pity, perhaps from condescension, said, “Ah, the peasantry, they have their own lot of customs sure enough; for example, when the man comes in from his work, he —” His mouth continued to move but his voice had quite stopped; he grew very red in the face: Eszterhazy, whose own sympathy for the coachman had begun to be aroused, now transferred it to the nearer and more immediately necessitous.

“My legs are stiff from riding and then sitting,” said Eszterhazy, getting up awkwardly enough to lend credence to his remark. “A brisk walk is what they need; will you come along for a walk with me, my dear sir? — and point out things to me?”

The man scrambled to his feet, brushed his legs. “Love to,” he muttered, avoiding eyes. “Love, love to . . . love to. . . .”

When they were off by themselves, hot sun breathing down, the odor of grass replacing that of leaves and resin and sap, Eszterhazy said, “Well, now, you have aroused my curiosity —” He paused.

“Hanszlo Horvath. I know yours. Lord Professor Doctor Eszterhazy.”

“I am pleased to meet you, sir. And, oh, simply ‘Dr. Eszterhazy’ I have never been ‘Lord,’ my grandfather, yes; not I. And, really, never ‘Professor,’ either, though I have taught a class or two. Well, now, but what is it that the peasant man does when he comes in from his work?”

Horvath guffawed. “Well, then the woman pulls off his boots. And he breaks wind. And she says, ‘Be glad for good health.’ Ho ho ho!”

“Ha ha ha!”

“Huh huh huh! Well! So you see, sir. One could hardly tell that story in mixed company among the gentry.”

“No, no. Certainly not.” Among the gentry, no. And among the aristocracy? Certainly. Well, never mind. “What is that large building there? — down over there? I don’t remember it from my last visit, a few years ago.” Hanszlo Horvath said, which one? that one? (There was only one in sight.) Ah. That one. That was the new mill. The new mill? Yes. Some very clever chap from Bella, an engineer chap, had put it up. A faint bell rang in his companion’s head. “After all and why not?” declaimed Horvath, his voice ringing and echoing in the gorge down the sides of which they made their way on the old track, half-trail, half-stairs. “Why should all those things be found in Russia and Prussia, why shouldn’t we have them here, too?” He gestured. Following the movement, Eszterhazy saw a newly- painted sign. Great Tuned Harmonic Turbine and Compressed-Air Engine Industrial and Manufacturing Association, Stg. Sure enough. Stg. This was the latest attempt to get Scythia-Pannoina-Transbalkania into the ranks of modern commerce; Stg. was the equivalent of Inc., of Ltd., of Pty., and it stood for Stockholding.

“Sure enough. Well. Horvath, shall we go and have a look?”

“Might’s well,” said Horvath. “ ‘Be glad for good health!’ ha ha!”

The tuned harmonic etc. water-power plant was now established, and a factory with ample space had now been established, too. Ample . . . and empty, too. What was to be done with it? What use to be made of it? Brozz was with difficulty brought to bring his mind to bear upon this problem, and, indeed, could not easily recognize it as a problem at all. He would have been immensely content simply to watch his engines enginating all the day long, without other consideration. But it had all, after all, been brought into being by a Syndicate largely commercial in nature, and the commercial members of the Syndicate (or Association) had other ideas. They had after all raised what would in other parts of the world have been a lot of money; to the Triune Monarchy — where wealth still tended to be counted in terms of acres and arpents and horses and horned cattle — it was an immense amount of money. The resources of the European industrial world had been summoned to supply the machinery; and if most of it had come from England and Scotland (most of it had), some of it had come from Prussia (none of it from Russia), Belgium, Switzerland, and Sweden. So. Set up, was it. Excellent. What next. Brozz had no idea.

Brozz had no idea, but other Stockholders had, and they brought forward one Herra Gumprecht Ruprecht, a foreign thread-spinner. Herra Gum- precht Ruprecht was in search of cheap fibre, cheap labor, cheap space, and — the possibility suddenly occurring — cheap power. The heavy-smelling Upland wool was coarse, coarse, coarse; and . . . perhaps for that reason ... it was cheap, cheap, cheap. True that for every white strand in a typical clip of fleece of Upland wool there was a grey, a yellow, a brown, and several black strands: but this was all perfectly suited to Herra Gumprecht Ruprecht’s plan, which was to supply thread to weave druggets. And druggets, laid upon the floors — not the floors of palaces or villas (well, perhaps on the floors of the servants’ quarters of palaces or villas) — and trod upon by many muddy boots, required to be no color but black. Or blackish-brown. And the darker the wool, the less needed dark dye. Dye is money. Druggets often had a cotton woof; it was now proposed to use hemp. Perhaps hemp grew in Egypt.. . America . .. India ... it also grew in Scythia- Pannonia-Transbalkania. And cotton did not.

Brozz nodded civilly as Eszterhazy, accompanied by Horvath, appeared. The engineer was supervising the installation of some item and had just called, “A full meter clearance on all sides” to the work-crew. Now he said, as calmly (and as abstractedly) as though they were again (or still) in the suburbs of Bella, “You see very clean it all is.”

“I do see. Yes.”

“No fire. No smoke. No cinders. No ash.”

“None. True.” He didn’t add, And no reason why your absurd engine should work, either.... For if it did work, what then? Then it did. And that was that. Brozz was after all the engineer. Eszterhazy had after all not gone over the patents, the blue-prints, plans, specifications, calculations. What he had heard and seen in Bella hadn’t persuaded him that it ought all to work — at least not on any large and practical scale. Did it really? Well, well, they would see. Wouldn’t they? Now all he said was, “And the water is nice and clean, too.”

A very faint cloud came over the face of Engineer Brozz. “Sometimes there is sludge,” he said. Eszterhazy was about to ask about this when two gentlemen, investors, board members, appeared, and — seeing new faces — bore them away to the board room, produced cold beer, produced a neatly printed prospectus and an application for the purchase of shares. As he had left the engine-room Eszterhazy had heard Brozz say, yet again, “A full meter clearance on all sides.” And then he had heard Brozz catch his breath and he saw Brozz kick something. Heard Brozz say, “I won’t have this.” The doors closed. Rather odd.

But perhaps not.

There was nothing in the least odd about the way the investment possibility was urged, but something else was odd .. . definitely so . . . Eszterhazy could not at first have said why. Walls were rising for the new mill-pond, which should produce a very high head of water indeed. Eventually. It was Summer, the water was down, it was more easily diverted to allow the work to go on. What was odd, then? Something certainly was. He sought out Brozz, after they had left the board room. What was the projected height of the new wall?... of the new mill-pond? Ah, that high. That was more like a lake than a pond! Yes, one had to be assured of a good store and a good fall of water. A good high head of it. It would not of course all be contained by the wall, the dam. The natural features of the landscape would also serve to impound the water? Yes, of course, quite. The vale — beside a grove, stonding in a vale

“Excuse me, Engineer. But, ah... ah ... it seems to me that the new lake or pond or — that it would, if my hasty mental calculations are correct — that it would drown the Sacred Grove. Eh?”

Brozz gave him an abstracted look, turned away, called, “A full meter clearance on all sides;” turned back. “Excuse me, one must repeat things very often, else they may not be done. What did you ask? Flood the ... the what?”

“The Sacred Grove.”

The engineer’s eyes looked into his own. “What is the Sacred Grove?” Brozz asked.

Perhaps it was not so surprising that the man had never heard of the place; were there not many people who had and yet had never heard of a vacuum-pump or a compressed-air engine? Brozz had, to be sure, seen the site; he had seen every square meter round about; to him, however, it had been merely a natural declivity in which water might be impounded and made to fall from a considerable height. Its historical associations literally meant nothing to him, and neither did other possible uses for the water. It had seemed to Eszterhazy, and he could not refrain from mentioning the results of his quick calculations, that the water might more profitably be used to turn a dynamo and generate electricity. But this conveyed no more to Brozz than had the phrase the sacred grove; his mind for twenty years had been bent in one direction, and it could not now be bent into another. The huge brass and bronze engine parts, the immense segments of iron and steel moved incessantly; the fly-wheel, the walking-beam, the revolving-flying globes, the cogs and all the rest of the equipment. “And all so clean!” over and over again was Brozz’s exclamation. “No fire, no smoke, no ash, no cinders: only water and air! So clean! So clean!” (What was a little sludge?) See the great tuned turbine turn!

There was certainly a deal of merit in what he said. Eszterhazy had seen the Black Country of England and its continental equivalents; to compare it to Hell was a simile in a state of fatigue, but what other comparison was there? Pillars of cloud, black cloud, by day, and pillars of fire, red fire, by night. Soot falling down like snow, the earth riven open for coal. If indeed it were possible for the inevitable degree of industrialization which the country must experience to be based on water and air, well, so much the better. It would be too bad about the sacred grove or Sacred Grove; one could not have everything, of course. The changes along the Little River and its tributaries would be considerable.

Would, eventually, inevitably, be immense.

Must be immense.

And not there alone.

Eszterhazy realized this, and with something less than an absence of total discontent. But he reassured himself, as most would, that change was inevitable — and, in this instance, that change was at least to be minimized. The earth need not be wounded to yield coal, the forests need not be ravished to supply firewood. Only that the water, flowing anyway, would flow through channels. And, if no man ever bathed twice in the same river, the river having meanwhile flowed on; well, the same river would never turn any wheel twice. And, so, what of that?

Nothing.

Back at the Inn of St. Mammas, there on his desk was the Avar-Ister newspaper, folded, as he had left it, to the classified notices. And there, in the right hand margin, next to the pencil-mark he had made, was this:

Dr. Szilk will receive into his own home a very few gentlemen as

residential private patients. Secure care. Full board. Excellent attention. The Rose-colored House, 102 Great St. Gabriel Street near Pannonian Gate.

Why had he marked this ? There were always such notices in the newspapers; oh very well, there were always such advertizements : not always as discreetly worded as Dr. Szilk’s was. It was not clear if his “private patients” were shrieking mad or merely moody or nervous. But this was the key to something which had been locked a while in Dr. Eszterhazy’s mind. Dr. Szilk’s sanatorium in Avar-Ister — had he ever visited there? No. But he had visited others like it, in (for example) Dr. Rothenbueler’s, in Bella.

Among the particular ideas of Dr. Rothenbueler’s in Bella was that tight clothes were too unhealthy, dark clothes too depressing, bright clothes too exciting. And there, on a visit a few years ago ... a tall, thin man . . . loose light-grey jacket and loose tan trousers ... a mere glance. But now proving enough to identify. So. Engineer Brozz had once been treated for a crisis of nerves, eh? This might account for much. And it might account for ... currently . . . nothing. Nothing at all.

Nothing.

Eszterhazy was now a candidate for the degree of Doctor of Literature; at times he felt rather as Petrarch must have felt when, having gone all the way to — was it Ghent? — in order to copy a rare text of — was it Cicero? — he discovered that he could get no ink in Ghent. How could they have managed without ink in Ghent? Well, perhaps they had not needed ink just then: one did not copy texts of Cicero every day. Agreed. But — Ghent was a commercial center of no mean size; how had they kept their records? The answer might have been that they used tally-sticks. And not ledgers. It was certainly more easy to make tally-sticks than to make ink; however, one could not copy a rare text with a tally-stick.

Still. Was there not somewhere in Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania where the tally-stick was still in use? What had this to do with a degree of Doctor of Literature? Eszterhazy decided to adopt for his little motto, Often pause and turn aside. And, having paused and turned aside, he recollected that the tally- stick was still in use in the hills behind Gro. Gro. What... ? He consulted his scrapbooks. This, what: and in the Late Pre-Christian Era Gro prospered from the Slovatchko Pilgrimages, as the then-pagan Slovatchkoes passed through on their way to a sacred grove where they worshipped their Twin Gods: Chamibog the Dark and Byellibog the Bright. Ah, yes, that Sacred Grove again. Peasant unrest again. It was time to look into it again. It was time to consult Grekkor again; Grekkor was an ox-drover who had advanced to being a cattle-buyer, knew the region behind Gro, the Preez country, in and out. Grekkor was often in Bella, was he in Bella just now? He was. And that afternoon he came and brought Eszterhazy up to date on the dam.

The work on the dam was proceeding, but it could not be said that the work on the dam was proceeding in all respects smoothly. An official, or at any rate a semi-official, protest had come from the priest of the chapel in the grove — officially the Chapel of Sts. Ulfilas and Methodius. Was this ancient shrine, dedicated to the holy missionaries to the Goths and Slavs, was it to be drowned and flooded in order to enable (so the complaint went) the dung-locks of sheep to be spun more expeditiously . . . and more cheaply? But Prince Preez had perhaps been anticipating this, perhaps Prince Preez had already spoken words into ecclesiastical ears: at any rate directions were given that shrine and chapel be removed to higher ground: and, as these directions came from the Bishop, that took care of the objections of the priest. Further remonstrances, that the people were all accustomed from the most ancient times to affix certain bits of cloth to the trees in the grove when they made their petitions and said their prayers, and that they would no longer be able to do so if the trees were flooded and drowned — these remonstrances were met with pontifical censure of a sternness which had not been anticipated. Such customs were superstitious, such customs were heathen and pagan and perhaps even heretical, such customs were best abandoned, and the sooner they were abandoned the better. Penitence, prayer, and charity did not, could not, should not depend on such rites and rituals. The Bishop did not indeed say, Off with their heads!; bishops could hardly say such things nowadays; but there were things which bishops could say nowadays; and this Bishop said them: those who persisted in making agitations on the subject (this Bishop said) could hardly expect to apply for dispensations to marry their second cousins. And, as the people in those parts very often did apply for dispensations to marry their second cousins, in order to keep old-time properties within the family, resistance ceased.

Or, to employ another terminology, resistance went underground.

Dr. Eszterhazy listened. He asked, “And so the people —?”

“They won’t work on that dam. Goths, Avars, Slovatchkoes, none of them people will work on it. Brought up a team of navvies from The City,” Bella being understood, “and almost directly, they downed tools and made their own way back. I don’t know exactly where in Hyperborea they found the bunch of backwoodsmen they got working now —”

Eszterhazy’s face showed his surprise. “What? Oh, but surely the Hyperboreans are just as prone to superstition as —”

“Oh, more, far as that goes, sir. But they have different superstitions! ” Oh. Well. Hmm. Ifes. They had. An oak-grove by the river’s brim a simple oak-grove was to them. And nothing more. “So. And so the people in the mountains close around? Have they offered any violence? Any —”

“ ‘Offered,’ yes. But, well, the Stockholding folk, they’ve got the Rural Constabulary on guard. And then Prince Preez, he’s got his own men on guard, too. Mind you, no, they won’t do a lick of work themselves on this

dam. But they keep the others, the locals, from interfering. Prince Preez, he can’t call out the corvee no more, but ...”

Prince Preez. As far as living in the country, in his own country, was concerned, Prince Preez could hardly need spend a kopperka from one year to another. Food, wine, wood, even woolen and linen cloth, all were supplied by his own tenantry as part of rent. But Prince Preez did not care to spend all his time on his estates, in his house in Avar-Ister, his house in Bella. More and more often of recent years Prince Preez, glossy-red-faced Prince Preez, liked to travel to Vienna, to Florence, to Paris. To tarry on the Riviera. To turn a hand of cards. Throw a cup of dice. . . .

To live ... as it was called.

All this was increasingly costly (Prince Preez did not always win!) and Prince Preez could not pay the costs by giving the railroad a wild boar, however neatly gutted, or even a score of wild boar; his foreign hotels would not take homespun or hogsheads of sour crout or souse; he could not trade his own vineyards’ bullblood wine for champagne. He could not cover the stakes at the casino with cordwood, game, venison, or veal, or ever so many wagonloads of barley. All this required cash. Therefore Theobald Dieterich Gabriel Mario Maurits, eleventh Prince Preez, had given a 99-year lease to the new Company, wherefore the new Company had made him a Stockholder in the Stockholding and as soon as the Stockholding produced profits the prince would receive Dividends in the form of cash. Cash.

Until then? Until then, nothing.

Hence the huntsmen of Prince Preez and the herdsmen of Prince Preez and the housemen of Prince Preez, lots and lots of them, in their linen and leather livery of red and brown, with their boar-spears and their muskets and their shotguns and their whips and their dirks and their axes and their cudgels: and all on guard. Night and day. Day and night.

But scarcely had Eszterhazy assimilated this, gotten the picture of it formed in his mind, when — “And then there’s them gingerbread men, sir.”

“ ‘And then’ — what? There’s what? ”

So it was that Engelbert Kristoffr Klaudius Eszterhazy, with his baccalaureate, his licentiate, and his (by now) four doctorates, learned of the peculiar — and, rather, pitiful — form of protest to which the people of the mountain had been reduced. Grekkor thought perhaps they had used their children (their very small children) to smuggle these mute protests past the piquets and patrols . . . could there be a milder or a more moderate protest than these edible dolls which it was customary to enjoy in the Sacred Grove? — leaving, of course, a piece behind, uneaten, perhaps by way of quit-rent for the privilege — a more humble reminder? Hardly ... though ... even so . . . how even small children managed to get past the lines of guards, with their fires and their torches and their lamps and their lanterns, was a wonder. It was a great wonder.

Later on.

There had been an outbreak of the ailment commonly called “coals of fire,” or, in a fancier word, anthrax; and Eszterhazy, both as a qualified physician and as a member of the Higher Consultancy of the Royal and Imperial Hospital (commonly called “The Big Sickhouse”), had been discussing the outbreak with Doctor Umglotz, the Assistant Supervisor. Umglotz declared himself to be a “regular old-fashioned physician,” given to the traditional and the tried and true. None of your fads for Umglotz.

“Bleeding, blistering, cupping, purging,” he said. “If they don’t work, well, then nothing works.”

Eszterhazy nodded. “I see. Well, which have you tried for anthrax?” “Tried all of them.”

“I see. Well, which one works?”

“None of them works,” said Umglotz, with immense calm.

And he was quite right. None of them did work. Reading the write-ups on the afflicted, Eszterhazy observed something else. “All of the victims, Doctor, are employed at the Ister Woolen Works, it seems.”

“They are? Yes, yes. I see. They are. Well. No surprise. Where folk are working in that line — where you find wool and hair, you know, well, there you find anthrax. Dirty work. The beasts of the field, my good Eszterhazy, they do not employ the shower-bath," he employed the English term: the shower-bath was not greatly used in Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania; “but what would you? We cannot always wear cotton and linen. Every trade has its troubles, hatters go mad from the felting-mercury, vintners die from the acid gas in the great vats, trainmen are smashed in wrecks, and . . . and . . . and so it goes. Hazards of the chase, my good Eszterhazy, hazards of the chase. The dirts of the wool and hair get into the lungs. The sick, like the poor, are always with us, you know. Else what should we physician fellows do for our living; eh?” He shrugged and chuckled, then made to ring his bell. “Our good Royal and Imperial master sends us here regularly a pipe of excellent Rainwater madeira, and I am going to make you drink a glass of it before you go.”

His good Eszterhazy knew better than to suggest that even a glass of it be sent instead to one of the dying. “Willingly,” he said. Then his head jerked. “A sudden thought, Assistant Supervisor. When wool-working was what the English term ‘a cottage industry,’ when a single family raised sheep, sheared, carded, spun, wove, and all —”

Umglotz rang his bell, begged his good Eszterhazy’s pardon. “Yes, yes, quite. Go on, please.” Eszterhazy went on to say that in such a situation, if a family had the misfortune to encounter a tainted fleece, the outbreak of anthrax might be at least contained within that cottage and family. Whereas, when a tainted fleece was worked upon by an entire factory-full of people — “Yes, yes. Quite. I quite see your point. Well, what would you? People don’t want to stay in their cottage. They want to come to our beautiful,

exciting Big Bella. And who can blame them; not I. Ah, here it is! Let me fill your glass. Sercial is nice, Bual is nice, but as the Emperor is benevolent enough to send us Rainwater, I am loyal enough to maintain that Rainwater is the nicest madeira of all; drink up, my good Eszterhazy. Drink up!”

Having drunk up, and having declined a second glass, and acknowledging that being sent on one’s way with a glass of good wine was better than being kicked down a flight of stairs, Eszterhazy nevertheless left The Big Sick- house with a rather disturbing trend of thought still trending its way through his mind. Not even the beautiful, reflective Ister, of the sight of which anywhere on its course he never tired, was able to distract him. Excellent as Engineer Brozz’s intentions were to provide his native nation with a new (and clean) system of power and manufacture there seemed always some objection, and always some further objection, to arise. And it was of this, in general, and of this latest potential objection in particular, of which he thought and was thinking as he made his way over the beautiful Swedish Bridge, towards his home.

He was not thinking of what the Honorable Hiram Abiff Abercrombie, sometime United States Minister to the Triune Monarchy, termed The Remarkable Law of Coincidence as Exemplified by One-Legged Men Wearing Blue Baseball Caps. General Abercrombie (who had been drinking prune brandy purely, as he said, to “maintain the integrity of his intesrmeal tract”) explained that baseball was a game native to his own Great Republic, that the players wore caps of various colors, that such caps were sometimes worn by men not at the moment playing baseball, that you might go a hundred years without seeing a single one-legged man wearing a blue baseball cap, and that — tarnation! — one afternoon you’ll see three of them! And Abercrombie was moved to explain to his young friend Elmer Bert the full details of a great game of baseball played on the 4th of July in the year 1800 and 63, at Fort Fillmore, Missoula Territory, between the 15th Mounted Infantry and Indian Friendlies: but his young friend (without much difficulty) persuaded him to have another glass of prune brandy for his stomach’s sake. And for his other infirmities.

Yet something of this so-called Law seemed to be at work; for, on Eszterhazy’s having barely attained his chamber, there entered Kresht, the day porter, with a card on the flat palm of his hand. (Kresht, later succeeded by Lemkotch, had been provided with a tray for this purpose, but had persisted in using the tray as a way-stop for his glass of coffee, his glass of borsht, and his glass of tea with sliced citron and cherry preserve; until he had finally been excused the use of the tray for holding cards at all.) And the card, engraved in a crisp script, read Engineer Hildebert V. B. Brozz.

“Bring the gentleman up, Kresht.”

“Yurp, Lord Doctor.” And, having brought the gentleman up, Kresht brought himself down again, there to devote himself to his glass of rye- bread-beer, his glass of raspberry juice and hot water, and his glass of whatever else was his by kindness of the upper-kitchen woman with whom he had formed an entangling alliance. Kresht was later (not much later) succeeded by Lemkotch, who never drank anything at all. . . except whatever was in the flat black bottle which reposed in the pocket of his overcoat hanging Winter and Summer in the lower front hall closet: and for this Lemkotch required neither glass nor tray.

But as for Brozz —

Brozz did not look well.

“How are the tuned harmonic turbine, the vacuum-pump, and the compressed-air engine, Engineer?”

Engineer made a gesture. “I have not come to consult you about that. At least . . . not exactly. I have come to consult you as a doctor of medicine.” Again . . . was it that absurd “Law”?

“I am such, it is true, certainly. But it is certainly true that I became such chiefly to mark a milestone on the march to knowledge, not to practice and have patients. Have you consulted, for instance,” naming a well-known and “modern” physician, “Dr. Slawk?”

“I have.”

“And what did he say?”

“That my liver was out of order. And he offered me a black pill.” Brozz gazed at the beautifully-articulated skeleton in its cabinet, but its beautiful articulations did not seem to soothe him.

“Hmm. Well, but - Dr. Hrach?”

“Dr. Hrach, too.”

“And he -?”

“Said that my bowels were sluggish. And offered me a blue pill.”

There was one more suggestion to make, and Eszterhazy made it. “The Scottish surgeon is —”

“Dr. Maclllivery. Oh yes. Him, too. He said that the acid in green tea, when over-indulged in, affected the connective fibre of the nervous tissue. Have I over-indulged in the use of green tea? Sir, I have never indulged in green tea at all. And as for the witch —”

It followed. “Yes. ‘As for the witch’?”

Engineer Brozz took a slip of paper from a small leather pocket-case. “I wrote it down.” He read aloud. “ ‘ Water is thy greater fortune; and water, thy greater in fortune as well.’ Now, what does that mean, my good sir?” Eszterhazy began to say that it meant that she must have been a rather sophisticated witch; desisted. Surrendered. “Any pains in the small of the back? Any swellings of feet or ankles? Any difficulty in making —? No, eh. We may dismiss a kidney condition or the like. Hmm. Did the witch say anything else?” For sometimes the witch was only a dirty and mean old man or woman, yet sometimes the witch was something else; sometimes a good deal more.

“ ‘Say anything else’? Yes. ‘Cross my palm with silver, handsome Christian gentleman.’ ”

Eszterhazy sighed. “Well, well. Be kind enough to loosen your cuffs and collar, and to open your coat, waistcoat, and shirt. Yes. Just so. Say nothing until I tell you to.” The pulse was taken, the stethoscopic horn applied. At length Dr. Eszterhazy said, “There are some occasional, very minor, irregularities, but nothing very divergent from the norm. Pulse, heart, are both strong. Respiration normal. Do you sleep well? Can you eat? Does your vision waver? Any problem in hearing? — you never feel that others are mumbling? Your lungs seem sound.” He withdrew the thermometer from the armpit. “Normal. Your eyes are only slightly bloodshot. Well. I can tell you nothing more; what is it that you can tell me? ”

Brozz looked away from the skeleton, looked at the two immense terrestrial and celestial globes. Brozz muttered something very low. He let out his breath in a sudden gust. Jerked his head abruptly from side to side, twice. Then threw out his right hand in a bewildered gesture. “Listen, Doctor, I don’t know if you remember, or if you ever saw, perhaps you never saw, years ago there was a mountebank, sometimes he used to stand at the corner of the alley between the Big Wood Market and the Old Stillery, a very odd chap —”

Eszterhazy’s frown of concentration melted away. “Yes! A very odd chap!” His fingers now moved in a rather peculiar manner, wriggling, jerking, bobbing; and he made a crooning sound, a not-quite tune. The effect upon the engineer was not pleasant. His lips and eyelids seemed to snap back. He made a wavering, wordless sound in his throat. Then his widened eyes darted down past the physician’s moving fingers, down ... almost. . . to the carpet-covered floor. And next he uttered a shuddering sigh and for a while remained silent.

The mountebank, yes. He did not, literally, mount a bench. No matter. Who was he? Whence had he come? Whence had he come? Whither had he gone? Was he still alive? A slight and sallow man, almost dark his face was, and the skin around his eyes was dark indeed. In all weather he wore a short waistcoat exposing much not-very-clean shirt. His trick? Out of scraps of heavy colored paper a sort of doll or puppet had been made, and from any distance at all it seemed as though the man’s mesmeric gestures caused the one-dimensional doll to dance at his command. From right next to him (and only sometimes was he at the corner of the alley between the Big Wood Market and the Old Stillery; sometimes he stood by Sellzer’s Spelt Stores or Klungman’s Bristles For Brushes, or near the Old Little Uniate Chapel, or the Sailors’ Rest) from right next to him it was apparent that a single thread from his right hand kept the marionette up and that threads from each finger of his left hand made head, arms, and legs move and caper. And all the while the odd man keened his odd sub-song. He never indeed seemed to collect much money . . . but then his invested capital was minimal. And his rent was nothing at all. And now Eszterhazy shared the memory of him.

And patiently waited.

“You see,” Brozz said, by and by, “first I attended the old Bella Pantechni- cal School in Upper Hunyadi Street. Then I went to Scotland and worked with Watt and Grant, the great engineering firm in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and next my work was with British Looms Ltd. in Manchester and in Sheffield at Stanley Steel; and I may say: what there was to be learned about machinery, I learned it. I studied in London and in Brussels and Berlin. It was during those years I began to think about the tuned harmonic turbine and the vacuum-pump and the compressed-air engine. When they first began the advanced technical studies here at the Collegium, I returned and obtained the engineer degree.. ..

“My entire adult life, my professional and personal and philosophical res; well, though I was raised in the Calvinist Reformed Church, I am not very religious, my nature is purely pragmatic and rational, and absolutely I have not a trace of superstition in my nature. So ... when I say ... you will not assume that I ... do I not impress you as sane?”

“As perfectly sane.” Brozz may not have been as pragmatic as he thought; but he was certainly sane. Or seemed so. So far. Still...

“So when I say that I am —” He did not precisely pause or hesitate; only, his voice stopped.

Eszterhazy produced and profferred the (possibly) missing word, haunted —”

Brozz did not react other than to resume speaking. “I am haunted,” he said, in a dull, dead voice. His face was thinner than ever.

“You are haunted by paper puppets?”

The man’s face showed, fleetingly, first surprise; then, though quickly sur- pressed, annoyance. “No! What? ‘Paper puppets’? No, sir, what makes you think — Oh. I see, I understand. No, that" he moved his own fingers in the manner of the mountebank (if this were not too high a title to have given him, poor starveling wretch); “ that merely reminded. That —- reminded me of.. . the other. And... the other... reminded me of... that. But no. If I tell you that I am haunted by, oh, ghosts, revenants, vampires, werewolves — whatever — you... or anyone... might not believe. But even if you were scornful, it would be with a serious scorn. Yet...” He looked up, helplessly, as though, almost, his sense of horror was mixed with an equal sense of humiliation.

“At first, merely I saw them by one or two. Just lying around. I thought the workmen had been slipshod, careless. Then these things came more often, and more and more often. Soon one began to realize they were getting into the water supply, dissolving into a sludge, clogging . . . sometimes . . . clogging the machines. And also clogging them with stones, pebbles, fragments of splints. And then next I began to see them out of the corners of my eyes, moving ... moving... walking... and when I would, often, at night, lose my selfcontrol and chase after them....” His words ended in a soft sound half-sigh, half-groan.

Even softer: “Yes?”

“... they would run away ... and never ... I could never catch them . ..” His voice had sunk, now it rose. “Who will believe me? Who will ever respect me? They —”

“What are they?”

The engineer’s somewhat bloodshot eyes looked at him in a mixture of defiance and shame. “They? What are —? They are the gingerbread men.”

Everyone called it “the Old Avar Bakery.” But the place itself did not call itself so, the weathered sign had to be read at a certain time of day with the sun at a certain angle, and the sign read the famous OLD gingerbread bakery AT WHOLESALE AND RETAIL. It read so in Gothic and it read so in Avar. Everyone knew of it; and everyone knew of the Hospice for the Innocents, the orphanage run by the uncloistered nuns. Eszterhazy had brought a large box of the confections for, as he let it be known, to give to the Hospice, and paid cash: all matters disposing the shopman to answer questions. How did they make their excellent gingerbread men? In old cherry-wood molds. Where did the ingredients come from? “Well, sir, the eyes and mouths we make from them tiny raisins that grows in them Turkish islands where the Greeks do live, currants we call ’em, sir.” Yes. The isles of Greece and the cities thereof. Corinth. Currant. Yes. And the other ingredients? “Well, sir, the ginger and the m’lasses they comes from India, from the Indies, sir — Virginia and Jamaica and them-like other Indian places. And — and the what, sir? Ah, the flour? Well — no, not from the Bella Steam Mill, that grinding, well, we doesn’t care for it a-tall. ’Twon’t taste the same, you see. We use old fashioned style flour. Water-ground meal, we uses. Where it comes from? From the old mills way up the Little River. Sir. And mostly the honey, too.”

Rain had washed the soot off the carriage windows, but rain allowed very little to be seen as the train made its way, and that little was so wavering as to convey not much. As Eszterhazy pulled a window up and before he pulled it down again he looked upon a sodden landscape. Not far off the trains on the narrow-gauge branch-line seemed to move along like a procession of gondolas crossing the Venetian lagoon. It was after all his own private car and if he cared to keep the window open no one might gainsay him. He did not care: he had a boxful of things to read, and he did not want them rained upon. He would see the scenery later. Another time. When it stopped raining. If it ever did.

Rain in Scythia, rain in Pannonia, rain in Transbalkania — rain in Cisbalka- nia, for that matter. The rain was falling on the Acropolis and on the black mountain of Montenegro. All the Italian alliances in the world could not keep it from raining on Illyria, nor off the Hungarian shepherds in their shaggy capes. In the soggy delta of the Ister the Romanou gathered in their mucky huts, close around their smoky fires, ate smoked eels and thoughtfully wiped their fingers in their arm-pits. Here and there and everywhere the Tsiganes headed for drier ground and kept their keen black eyes open for drowned pigs; they had some very good recipes for drowned pig. In Klejn Tinkeldorff, Eszterhazy’s Tanta Tina clicked her tongue, and helped the housekeeper hang the washing in the kitchen. And, a few blocks away, Music Master De Metz sat composing motets. He did not know it was raining.

At the last train stop the diligence-driver helped the porter with Eszterhazy’s baggage. “I don’t know for sure will we be able to get Your Honor to the last stage, this here rain here be so heavy. They say as God be punishing this here district for that bloody new dam as will drown out the Sacred Grove, what a blasphemous thing to do.” He shook his head, scattering more rain, as he tight-hauled the rope on the tarpaulin cover for the baggage.

“Why, man,” said Eszterhazy, “this rain is falling not just here and not just on our country but all over Eastern Europe; they say it is the heaviest rain in many years.”

The driver looked at him doubtfully. “Not just here? Not just on — How does Your Honor know?”

Eszterhazy was not disposed to stand chatting while his clothes grew soaked. “Telegraphic reports,” he said. And got inside.

The driver, who had not a hope of keeping dry, looked at him through the window. “Ah. Telegraph. Oh’’ He had no more idea of how the telegraph worked than had a child, but he believed in it as surely as he believed in witchcraft. He pulled down the isinglass window, touched his hat, and mounted to the box. If the mica set into the leather flaps failed to keep out the wet, the passengers might lower the canvas curtains on the inside.

The driver proved right, as such drivers generally do: they had not been able to get Eszterhazy to the last stage, and so, leaving his baggage in charge of the manager of the post-station at the last stage but one, he had obtained a horse. It was still only afternoon, “though late, late was the hour,” yet the rain and mist and clouds so obscured visibility that he had ridden through many a night with less trouble. There came a time when he felt he might be better going on foot than on the back of a rain-blinded and nervous horse; and dismounted. He had intended to lead the beast, but the beast had other ideas; with a powerful jerk of neck and head it tore the leathers from his slippery hands and, with one last, loud neigh, made off. For a moment he was in fright for it; then, seeing it heading downhill, the way it had come, he thought the animal was likely to arrive safe enough (if wet enough) at its own stable. In a moment he had forgotten the horse and concentrated on keeping to the road.

He could scarcely see; he could hardly hear. It was no mere rainstorm which made the overwhelming sound now beating incessantly upon his ears, and which bothered him more than the wet. When he reached the new factory he would be out of the wet, into dry clothes; but would he be away from the noise? Soon enough he had an answer of sorts, though not the one he would

have hoped for. The road crested at the top of one of the hills, the road was going down, was turning to keep to the river, and —

Lines from an old Scottish poem, again courtesy of his aunt Lady Emma, supplied themselves: The river was great, and mickle wi’ spate.... Had they ever seen anything, though, like this, in Scotland? He had never before seen anything like it in Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania. Incredible sight. The water was a filthy hue of brown; God knows how many farms (in effect) were dissolved in it. To say that the river was swollen was to waste the word. The river had gone mad; the river was insane; the river rioted; and, grown vast and huge, the river seemed to throw challenge at the rainy heavens. There were no banks. There were no bridges. The sound of the waters drowned all other sound, almost it was drowning thought. Limbs of trees hurled and hurtled down that titanic millrace, were thrown high into the air, crashed back down in fume and spray but with no distinct... with, even no indistinct... noise of the fall. Timbers whirled around like straws; several times he saw the forms of cattle appear, whirl, bob, dive, vanish. They must have been long dead by then. And the unstable water made the stable earth tremble and shake.

How could the new dam stand up against all this? Could it? Well, probably. If they, there at the new factory below, so to speak, and alongside the dam, if they opened the sluices and allowed water to escape from the sides as well as over the top. /fthey opened the sluices? By now and in fact long before now, they of course must have.

He had heard much of all the men on guard roundabout this area by night and day, but he saw no one. He saw nothing, neither man nor beast. Animals looking to find refuge on higher ground by now would already have found it. .. found it, or been drowned. The water-birds?, where were they? Somewhere. Somewhere else. Not on the surface of the new-formed lake. He could not soon or easily become used to this new-formed lake. It was too unfamiliar, it was entirely unfamiliar, there was nothing he could recognize —

Stop.

Of course there was.

He recognized the vasty oak trees rising from amidst the waters and knew that he was looking at the Sacred Grove.

How long would and could the Grove’s trees survive, half-sunk beneath the waters as they were? He did not know. Bit by bit and very cautiously he advanced, but it was not easy; the road had become in part a stream-bed, and where not that, a mud-slick. And yet (he saw) he had been rather wrong, for there were living beings moving about; what were they? Children, very small children? No. Marmots, perhaps? Perhaps marmots, moving en masse in search of safety? Were there marmots here? Ground-squirrels, perhaps? And yet why did he keep thinking that they might be children, when plainly they could not and —

He saw them coming and increasing. He saw them coming on. He saw them coming, like an army of tiny brown pygmies, waving their stumpy ginger-red-brown arms. Their tiny black-marked mouths opening, wordlessly for all he could hear above the pouring rains and rushing waters. Had they something, each, in their small and fingerless hands? Were those mere meaningless motions, movements, gestures? Were they, seemingly, threatening? Stabbing? Against whom? Against what?

And as he watched, body wet and cold and numb, repeatedly dashing the rain from his forehead, again and again mopping his smarting eyes with his sodden sleeves, he saw the ranks ... Deucalion’s Flood? who had thrown the stones from which this race had sprung? or sown the dragon’s teeth? . . . saw the ranks waver, saw them tremble. Saw them melt, melting away. Ebb. Fade. Vanish. Gone.

Had he seen it? How could he have seen it? He could not have seen it, therefore he had not seen it. Not.

But how close it had seemed to come to him ... as close as ... as that tree. His eyes sank from the rain-soaked bark and bole of the ancient oak (surely of course not one of those there during the ancient days: but how far removed? perhaps grown of an acorn of an oak of an acorn from one of the pagan oaks: only three removes; what said Solomon? a three-fold cord is not easily broken), his eyes sank to the ground. He took a step forward, and another, through the quaggy mud and mire. A brown mass overlay the rain-flattened grass. Mud. Merely mud? Ginger-red-brown mud, where all other mud was black? Did it not look rather like melted meal and spice and —? And another flash, and on the ground something sparkled, sparkling here and sparkling there: mica, it was surely mica, small deposits of it lay all about here and there in this region. Mica. Was it? Heedless of the sheets of rain pelting his back, he bent, almost knelt, and picked something up. And another. And another. Incredulous, he felt something a moment later sting his spasmodically closing hand. He forced his fist to open. There among the muck and grass and blood he saw, by lightning flashes, tiny points of sharp flint. Sharpened flint. Flints. He turned and fled, tottering and slipping; he turned and fled.

Then he turned around again. Turned again, saw again, screamed again, fled again. Turned again. There in the gloom, half dark air and half dark water, he saw them again. Them: Again they surged forward, again their stone weapons threatened and glistened: again they seemed to melt. He now knew that, whatever they threatened, they did not threaten him. He waited and he waited and the lightnings flashed quite nearby and it was as though — had a signal been given? — had the electric surges animated something inanimate? that which is formless giving form to that which becomes formed? To some sort of primal slime, out of some sort of primal sludge? The them were larger now, ever so much larger, they were human-sized now, their weapons were larger, still they came on, as rough-shaped, still, as (indeed) the gingerbread-men for ages eaten in this grove, parts of them always left uneaten. An arm. A hand. Head. Leg. He followed, stumbling. Warning himself. Must watch himself. Watch yourself, man. Watch your step. Don’t fall or

slip. The river. The lake.

(Where, now, were the herdsmen, housemen, huntsmen of Prince Preez? And if they had been here, what might they do? Pursue? The words rang in Eszterhazy’s ears, You can’t catch me, said the gingerbread man!)

Once again the crude Them sank sodden and collapsed. Once more he waited, while the river and (he must suppose) the spillway of the dam roared and thundered. And once more he saw the Figures rise and take form out of the earth, wavering, become firm. Their faces no longer toy-like, doll-like, their faces giant-like. But they were now ruinous and eroded faces; their forms?

Male, female, sexless, androgynous, furious, faceless (now), huge and vast: and the rains came down and the water roared — the Figures leaped forward into the rain and mirk and were lost to sight. And then the almost allembracing noise for one horrible moment became utterly all-embracing indeed, something like a cataract in reverse heaved up in torrent, the fountains of the deep were truly broken, the saturated earth trembled and quaked; he sank upon his knees.

When he had recovered and was able to stand, though the rains had dwindled to drizzles, though still the waters rushed and foamed, they had ceased to roar and now they only loudly groaned and droned. Thick mud such as might have greeted the eyes of Noah lay all about the Sacred Grove, where ... long and long ago . . . the ancient Avars and Slovatchkoes and Goths, sometimes together and sometimes apart, had come to perform their heathen rituals, to honor God in the plural before ever they had ever learned to honor God in the singular . . . and, before, even, then, whatever ancient-most kiths and races had dwelt here then: proto-Pelasgians, perhaps, or ur-Hyperboreans and paleo-pagans whose very names were lost... but only mud lay round about the giant oak-trees now. The lake was gone. The pond below was gone. The millrace was gone. Save for a shattered stone groin, the dam was gone. The factory was entirely gone. Stripped of limbs and branches, trunks of trees lay here and there in heaps like giant jackstraws. It was far later and far downstream that, the sun shining as though there had never been rain, Eszterhazy encountered a broken (broken? shattered !) piece of machinery which he did not at first recognize. By and by he saw that it had belonged to one of the sluices. The sluices! Why had not the sluices been opened to relieve the enormous pressure of the waters inside the dam? He saw the answer to the question which not he alone had raised. The smashed joint or whatever it was had not been opened because it could not have been opened because, doubtless they had tried, but it was jammed shut. And with what, Dr. Eszterhazy now saw.

Aloud he repeated the words, once, long long ago (it seemed now) of Engineer Brozz: repeated them aloud: “ ‘Stone, pebbles, fragments of splints’ ” For there they were indeed, there (jammed, crammed) the stones, there the pebbles, and there the — “ ‘Fragments of splints’?” he cried. What had that meant? Nothing; it was gibberish; his ears had deceived themselves and him. Fragments of flints, was what the man had said. Fragments of flints. Had, simply, the encroaching waters simply opened up and washed down the remnants of some Stone Age encampment or workshop, or — No. He knew what he had seen.

He looked at the flints. Some of the fracture-lines were new, others as clearly not. What trove, troves, of Neolithic, perhaps even Paleolithic weaponry of chipped stone, flaked flint, had lain in the Scared Grove? as though ancient sacrificers and sacrificial victims had taken once and again, time and again, need never take again, an immense and ultimate revenge against the immolation of that gateway between Gods and men, the Sacred Grove.

Was that what had happened? What had happened? What had he seen? Well, he knew of course what he had seen. But what did it mean? Unbidden, words, entire lines, from the Addendum to Procopius, came to his mind as he stood there in the drying mud.

Another reason which justified Justinian’s waging war upon the Goths was their savage rites and customs, totally against religion and morality. For example, in the mountains of Eastern Scythia in a sacred grove by a sacred well or spring, the barbaric Goths are wont to select certain prisoners by lot and to let them loose and to pursue after them. The wretches unfortunate enough to be captured are not alone immolated to the demons who dwelt in the place sacred to them, but portions of their flesh are cooked and eaten. Others say, eaten raw. It is true that some so- called Christians who should know better maintain that though such a cruel rite once pertained there, it had been abolished after the Gothic incursion, and that the Goths themselves merely made effigies of meal and honey and it is these which they consume.

Effigies of meal and honey: mock-men, that is to say; proxies for the actual humans once actually sacrificed and eaten; the pagan Goths were barbarians, they were not savages. And ... but... effigies of meal and honey... though it was level daylight and no actual lightnings flashed, something like a stroke of lightning now certainly flashed enlightment upon him: it was not alone in ancient Gothic times that such “effigies of meal and honey” had been made and eaten, but they had been made and eaten ever since; were still being made and eaten right down to the present day, though no doubt the actual recipe had undergone change, changes. The Christian Church had tried to abolish, but had finally accepted this practice, for You can’t stop me, said the gingerbread man . . . !

What had lain slumbering in the groves and woods and waters for centuries, perhaps millennia? Had anything? Had not... something? Had it or had they been created out of a sort of spiritual effluvium? as the result of immemorial worship, and the rites thereof? or had worship (and its rites) resulted because Something was already there? Chamibog, for instance, the so-called Dark God of the ancient Slovatchkoes? or Byellibog, their so-called Bright one? But this was infinitely simplistic, and, perhaps, after all, nothing was there. “Nothingis there!”he cried aloud. And, “There is nothing!’’Echo answered, Nothing. . . . Nothing. . . .

But something else answered, as though out of the mist and rain and sunshine and spray: You can’t catch me, said the —

“There is a spirit in this man,” Tanta Tina’s old nurse had said.

It was very suddenly that he saw Engineer Brozz. The man was floating in a new-made backwater, floating on his back, so it seemed; but in fact only partly floating. In pan something held him up, held him fast; and this gave a slight illusion to the scene: if one had known nothing else one might have wondered why the man had chosen to float, fully clothed, slightly moving his arms and legs.

Much mud and earth and gravel and sand must indeed have flowed upon and lodged upon him, one saw it lying in deposits all around. But, caught as the back of his belt was by the broken point of a limb of a half-sunken tree, suspended from the muck and mirk at the bottom, all debris and detritus had been washed away by the flowing waters, and only some specks of mica glittered and glistened on him here and there. Eszterhazy remembered and spontaneously cried aloud the man’s own words:

“So clean! So clean! And all so clean!”

Though the flood was over, there was still an immense quantity of water which lay impounded by banks and shores and tangled masses of trees and other debris — “jams” or “rafts” this was termed in Northamerica; it had not been common enough in this country to take a name — and not far off this water formed a mere. Birds, attracted from far away, rested in flocks on the surface of the mere and flew off now and then, but always returned. Lines from a late Roman Latin poet, the buxom Good, repeated themselves endlessly. The waters of this mere now came up within a spit of the road and seemed to swell the landscape: buxom flood indeed! Where had these birds all come from? Some of them from the immeasurable willow-thickets of the Ister, some perhaps from lakes in the lower Balkans. Others? Perhaps some infecundation of the waters had created them by spontaneous generation, though this was hardly a modern concept. The mere would soon enough subside, it would all ebb, the scene return to normal; meanwhile one might forget death and terror and avalanches and boulders ripped and trundled; here was green grass, green trees, blue skies, birds of many colors, ripple and lap . . .

Buxom flood.

The waters reflected the sky and the sky was an incredible blue, bluer than cornflowers or the blossoms of the chicory (why were all images of it suddenly botanical?), and all nature lay spent, as though after some episode of great passion.

Buxom flood.

“The late deceased learned Engineer was of the Reformed, that is to say, the Calvinist, faith?”

“Yes, Minister.”

“Was there not perhaps some line or lines of Holy Scripture to which he was particularly attached? which I might mention in my brief address?”

No one had any reply; then an elderly man in old-fashioned clothing half- livery and half-uniform cleared his throat. “As an Under-sheriff, it’s my duty, your reverence, to examine the contents of the clothing of the late deceased. And I find this in his little leather budget as he have in his pocket, wrappit in a piece of oiled cloth. This piece paper, I mean. Ben’t it Scripture?”

The minister — he was young and had yet to learn he might not dawdle whilst the impetuous dead were waiting — took the slip of paper and solemnly read it aloud. “ ‘ Water is thy greater fortune; and water, thy greater infortune.’ Hem. This may be Apocrypha, I cannot say; it is certainly not Scripture as defined by the Reformed, or Calvinist, faith. Hem. I shall briefly speak on the versicle, Above the voice of many waters, mighty waters, breakers of the sea, mightier by far is the Lord on high. Briefly.”

But when he saw how many graves had been dug, and how many were waiting to get into them, he was very brief indeed.