Pictor's Metamorphoses (16 page)

That same king, with the assistance of all the princes who owed him fealty, created a fortification along the western frontier, and this, like all political constructs, had two dimensions: to wit, one part moral and the other mechanical. The moral component of the agreement between the king and his princes was a loyalty oath which bound the princes and their officials to dispatch themselves and their soldiers to the king's residence to aid him at the very first sign of distress. The mechanical component, which the king devised, consisted in an elaborate system of watchtowers, built along the western frontier. A guard would be posted day and night in each of the towers, which were furnished with huge drums. Now, should an enemy raid occur anywhere along the border, drumbeats would sound in the nearest tower, and from tower to tower the drum signal would fly with utmost speed throughout the land.

For a long time King Yu was occupied with this clever and meritorious project; he conferred with his princes, heard the reports of the master builders, arranged to have the sentries thoroughly trained. But he had a favorite wife by the name of Bau Si, a beautiful woman who knew how to exert more influence over the heart and mind of the king than is good for a ruler or his realm. Like her lord, Bau Si followed the construction works at the frontier with intense curiosity and interest, just as a lively, clever girl sometimes will look on with eager admiration at boys playing their games. In order to make the matter of the border defenses clear to her, one of the master builders made a fine model of painted and fired clay for Bau Si. There in miniature were the border and the system of towers, and in each of the dainty little clay towers stood an infinitely small clay guard, and a tiny bell hung in place of each drum. This charming toy gave the king's wife infinite pleasure; when she happened, now and then, to be in a bad mood, her maidservants would suggest they play “Barbarian Invasion.” Then they would set up all the little towers, pull on the strings of the miniature bells, and soon would grow thoroughly amused and exuberant.

It was a great day in the king's life when at last the construction was complete, the drums installed, and their attendants trained to perfection. And now, on a day previously deemed to be auspicious, the new border defenses were put to the test. Proud of his accomplishment, the king was greatly excited; his court officers stood ready to offer congratulations, but more than anyone, the lovely Bau Si was expectant and excited and could scarcely wait for all the preliminary ceremonies and invocations to be over.

At last, things reached the point where the game of towers and drumbeats, in which the king's wife had so often delighted, would be played out in real life. She could scarcely keep herself from intervening in the game and giving orders—so great was her excitement. With a serious look on his face, the king gave her a sign and she managed to control herself. The hour had come; now the game of “Barbarian Invasion” would be played with real, full-sized towers and drums and people, to see if everything would function properly. The king gave the signal, the head court official passed the order on to the captain of the cavalry; the captain rode to the first watchtower and gave the order to sound the drum. The drum boomed forcefully, and its solemn and gripping tone sounded in every ear. Bau Si had grown pale with excitement and began to tremble. Mightily the great war drum sang its harsh earthshaking song, a song full of warning and menace, full of the future, of war and misery, of fear and destruction. Everyone listened to it in awe. Now it began to fade, and the answer came from the next tower, distant and weak and rapidly dying away, until nothing more was heard, and after a while the solemn silence was broken, people began to talk again, to move about and amuse themselves.

In the meantime, the deep, menacing sound of the drum ran from the second tower to the third, to the tenth, and to the thirtieth tower, and as soon as they heard it, every soldier, under strict orders, armed and with his knapsack filled with provisions, immediately had to proceed to the rendezvous; every captain and colonel, without losing a moment's time, had to prepare to march and in all haste had to send certain orders, as previously determined, to the interior of the country. Everywhere within earshot of the sound of the drum, work and meals, games and sleep were interrupted and replaced by packing, saddling, assembling, marching and riding. As quickly as possible, and from all the neighboring districts, troops hurried on their way to the residence Fong.

In Fong, in the middle of the court, the intense emotion and suspense which, at the sounding of the terrible drum, had seized every heart had soon subsided. People strolled in the gardens of the residence, stimulated and chatting; the whole city had a holiday, and in less than three hours, large and small cavalcades approached from two sides, and from one hour to the next, new ones arrived. This went on all day and for the whole of the following two days, during which time the king, the officials, and the officers were seized by an ever-increasing enthusiasm. The king was piled high with honors and congratulations, the master builders were given a banquet, and the drummer from Tower I, who had been first to beat the drum, was garlanded, carried through the streets, and given presents by all the people.

Utterly enraptured, as if intoxicated, however, was Bau Si, the king's wife. More glorious than she could ever have imagined, her little game of towers and bells had become real. Enveloped in the broad, vast sound wave the drum produced, the command was magical, and it disappeared into the empty land. And alive, large as life, enormously its issue came streaming back out of the distance; out of the heart-gripping howl of that drum an army had grown, a well-equipped army of hundreds and thousands, who came in a steady stream, in a continuous hurrying motion; archers, light and heavy cavalry, lancers came riding and marching from the horizon, and with increasing turmoil they gradually filled all the space surrounding the city, where they were met and shown their posts, where they were greeted and shown hospitality, where they camped, pitched their tents, and lit their fires. Day and night it went on; like ghosts in a fairy tale, they emerged from the gray ground, distant, minute, veiled in small dust clouds, so that here at last, right before the eyes of the court and the enraptured Bau Si, they stood in formation, overwhelmingly real.

King Yu was well satisfied, and especially so with his enraptured favorite wife; like a flower she beamed with joy, and never before had she looked so beautiful to him. But all holidays must come to an end. Even this great holiday had to fade and yield to the everyday: no more miracles took place, no fairy-tale dreams came true. To idle and moody people, such disappointment is unbearable. A few weeks after the holiday. Bau Si had lost all her good humor. Once she had tasted the big game, the smaller game with the miniature clay towers and the tiny bells with their strings had become vapid. Oh, how intoxicating it had been! And now everything lay ready for a repetition of the rapturous game: there stood the towers and there hung the drums, the soldiers were at their posts and the drummers were in uniform, all waiting, all poised for the great command, and all this was dead and useless as long as no order came!

Bau Si lost her laughter, she lost her radiant disposition; and deprived of his most beloved playmate, of his evening consolation, the king grew sullen. He had to give her more and more extravagant gifts in order to bring a smile to her lips. Now would have been the time to acknowledge the situation and to sacrifice this tender affection on the altar of his duty. But Yu was weak. To see Bau Si laugh again seemed more important to him than anything else in the world.

So he yielded to her temptation—slowly and under protest, but he yielded. Bau Si brought him to the point where he became oblivious of his duty. Succumbing to her entreaties, repeated for the thousandth time, he fulfilled the single great wish of her heart: he acquiesced in giving the signal to the border guards, as if the enemy were in sight. Immediately the deep, agitating voice of the war drum sounded. But this time the king found it terrifying, and even Bau Si was frightened by the sound. But then the whole charming game was reenacted: at the edge of the world little clouds of dust suddenly appeared, the troops came riding and marching, for three whole days the generals bowed, the soldiers pitched their tents. Bau Si was blissful, her laugh was radiant. But these were difficult hours for King Yu. He had to confess that the enemy had not attacked, that everything was peaceful and calm. He tried his best to justify the false alarm, explaining it away as a salutary exercise. He was not contradicted, people bowed and accepted his excuses. But there was talk among the officers; they had been dealt a treacherous blow by the king, he had alarmed the whole border and set everything in motion, all those thousands of people, for the sole purpose of obliging his mistress. And the majority of the officers agreed that never again would they respond to such a command. In the meantime, the king took great pains to appease the disgruntled troops by seeing that they were entertained in a grand fashion. And so Bau Si had attained her goal.

But even before she had time to fall into another one of her bad moods and could again repeat the unscrupulous game, both Bau Si and the king got their punishment. Perhaps by chance, and perhaps because they had gotten wind of this story, one day the barbarians in the west came swarming over the frontier. Instantly the towers gave their signals, the deep drum sound cried its urgent warning and ran even to the farthest border. But this excellent toy, whose mechanism was so greatly to be admired, now appeared to be shattered—certainly the drums sounded, but this time they failed utterly to resound in the hearts of the soldiers and officers of the country. They did not follow the drum, and in vain the king and Bau Si looked out all around them; no dust clouds were rising, no small gray platoons came creeping, no one at all came to the aid of the king.

With what few troops he had on hand, the king hastened toward the barbarians. But these came in great numbers; they killed the king's troops, captured the residence Fong, destroyed the palace and the towers. King Yu lost his kingdom and his life, and things did not go otherwise for his favorite wife, Bau Si, of whose pernicious laugh the history books still tell us today.

Fong was destroyed, the game had been played in earnest. No more would the drums sound, King Yu was no more, and no more was the laughing Bau Si. Yu's successor, King Ping, found no alternative but to abandon Fong and remove his capital far to the east; to insure the future security of his dominion, he had to enter into alliances with the neighboring princes and buy them off by surrendering to them vast tracts of land.

Bird

A FAIRY TALE

B
IRD LIVED
, in times gone by, within the environs of Montagsdorf. His coloration was not especially bright, nor was his song distinctly beautiful, and he was neither large nor imposing; no, those who have seen him with their own eyes call him small, even puny. He was not a lovely bird, but he had in him some measure of the singular and the sublime, something which all animals and creatures have and which is not a function of genus or species. Neither hawk nor fowl, titmouse nor woodpecker nor finch—no others were like him; he was one of a kind. And people had known about him from time immemorial, from the beginnings of recorded time. And even if the only people who really knew him were those from the environs of Montagsdorf, neighbors far and wide had heard of him; and the inhabitants of Montagsdorf, like all people who have something special of their very own, were occasionally teased about him. “The people of Montagsdorf,” so it was said, “even have their own bird.” From Careno to Morbio and beyond, people knew of him and told stories about him. But as is so often the case, only in more recent times—to be precise, only since his disappearance—have people tried to obtain exact and reliable information about him. Many foreigners came to Montagsdorf to inquire about Bird, and many a native of Montagsdorf allowed himself to be interrogated over a glass of wine, until he finally confessed that he himself never had seen the bird. But if he had never seen Bird himself, then at least he still knew someone who had seen Bird one or more times, and who told stories about him. All this was now being investigated and recorded, and it was strange to see how much these various accounts disagreed with one another, concerning not only Bird's appearance, voice, and manner of flight, but also his habits and dealings with human beings.

In earlier times, sightings of Bird are said to have been more frequent, and whoever encountered Bird always felt joy; each time it was an event, a stroke of luck, a small adventure, just as for nature lovers it is a little event and a piece of luck when now and then they catch sight of a fox or a cuckoo and have a chance to observe it. For in that moment it seems that either the creature loses its fear of the frightful human race, or else the human himself is drawn back into a state of primitive innocence. There were those who did not think very highly of Bird, just as there are those who belittle the discovery of one of the first gentians, or an encounter with a wily old serpent; but there were others who loved him dearly, and for each of them it was a joy and a distinction to encounter him. Once in a great while one heard the opinion expressed that Bird may formerly have been dangerous or perhaps sinister: whoever looked at him would be upset for a time and would have many disturbing dreams at night and would feel uneasy and nostalgic at heart. Others denied this and maintained that there was no feeling more noble or exquisite than that which followed each encounter with Bird; for then one's heart felt as it did after Holy Communion, or as after hearing a lovely song; one thought of all that was beautiful and ideal, and deep inside resolved to become a different and a better human being.

A man by the name of Schalaster, a cousin of the well-known Sehuster who for many years was the mayor of Montagsdorf, was all his life deeply and especially preoccupied with Bird. Every year, so he tells us, he would encounter Bird on one or two or several occasions. For days after each encounter he would find himself in strange spirits; he was not exactly cheerful, but rather oddly moved and full of expectation and surmise. On such days his heart beat in a different way from the usual, it almost hurt a little; in any case, he could feel it in his breast, whereas otherwise he was scarcely aware that he had a heart. When he came to speak of it, Schalaster opined that it was no mere trifle to have this bird in the neighborhood; one ought to be proud of this
rara avis,
and one ought to think: a person to whom this enigmatic bird had revealed himself more often than to others had no doubt something special and exalted in him.