The Sound of His Horn (9 page)

On the two long sides of the Hall the cornice on which the torch-bearers stood formed the top of an entablature supported by a row of pilasters, and between each pair of pilasters was a shallow alcove. Along the whole length of the room before these alcoves ran a broad bench or dais of stone, thickly covered with pelts of bison, bear and deer, while in the alcoves themselves, on top of similar skins, were spread robes of soft furs-fox, otter and marten. Between these two daises, though a broad space distant from each other, stood the great Hall table that would have seated a hundred people with ample elbow-room for all. The Gauleiter and his friends were no more than a dozen; with them were dining some dozen or fourteen of the Count's officers. All sat, well spaced out, towards the head of the table, and at the head itself, facing our window, in a huge carved wooden chair, sat Hans von Hackelnberg.

I had expected a striking figure. I had imagined him, I suppose, as a man with something of the distinction of the old Eastern European aristocracy in his face and manner. The only correspondence between my image of von Hackelnberg and the reality was the wildness I had imagined. But the man who sat there, dominating the table, dominating the whole vast hall, had a wildness in his looks far beyond anything I had ever known or fancied. He belonged neither to my century nor the Doctor's; he was remoter from the gross, loudmouthed Nazi politicians round him than they from me. Their brutality was the brutality of an urban, mechanised herd-civilisation, the sordid cruelty of a loud-speaker and tommy-gun tyranny. Hans von Hackelnberg belonged to an age when violence and cruelty were more personal, when right of rule resided in a man's own bodily strength; such individual ferocity as his belonged to the time of the aurochs, to the wild bulls of that dark and ancient German forest which the City had never subdued.

He was a bigger man than any you have seen: a giant who made the great throne he sat on and the mighty oaken board before him look like things of normal size, and made the rest of the company appear like children at table.

His auburn hair was cropped short, which made the power of his immense skull and bull-like brow seem the more monstrous. He wore long moustaches and a forked tawny beard that glinted in the torchlight as he turned his head sullenly from side to side and glowered on his guests. The upper half of his body was clad in a sleeveless green jerkin crossed by a gold-embroidered sword-belt; a massive gold chain was round his neck, and on his upper arm, circling the prodigious muscles, he wore a golden torque of the ancient Celtic design.

He was not eating; but from time to time he snatched up the drinking-horn in front of him, drained it and returned it to its rest again with a fiercely controlled force, as if his arm, once raised, could scarcely be restrained from sweeping down of its own accord to strike and destroy; and now and again he slashed a gobbet of meat from the haunch of beef before him and flung it to the hounds crouching beyond the table, with a violent gesture and a savage glare that plainly said he wished it were the Gauleiter's head he hurled. Occasionally he tilted back his head and stared into the roof-beams, or let his gaze travel slowly and grimly along the ranks of torch-bearers on the walls as though ensuring by the menace of his brow that none dare droop or budge from her station. I saw then that his eyes were tawny brown and the yellow torchlight touched them once or twice with a red glow, like a coal.

We were late in arriving and the feast was nearly over--or at least, the guests' appetite for roast meat was sated. They seemed to have been served with rude enormous lavishness from great joints of beef, mutton and pork as well as game, and there was a true mediaeval disorder of greasy trenchers, vast pewter and silver dishes and plates encumbering the board. Young foresters richly dressed in satins and brocades went round filling wooden stoups with beer, and the big cow-horns at each guest's place with wine.

They were a rowdy company, already three parts drunk; they sprawled and bawled and roared out songs, one group against another with more noise and if anything less grasp of words and tune than twice their number of English undergraduates on a Bump-Supper night. Nor did they quieten much when six tall young foresters, most magnificently clad in green and gold, mounted a low platform behind the Count's throne, and raising up their silver key-bugles, began to blow a succession of tunefully varied hunting-calls. The Count threw himself back in his chair and listened to their music with a gloomy frown, and while they played, a troop of serfs hurried in and quickly cleared the wide table of everything except the drinking vessels.

When all was cleared away the buglers paused for a few minutes, then resumed with a quick, merry tune--some hunting song that was half-familiar to me, a galloping, rousing music which now hushed the boozy roarings of the guests and set them jigging to its own time.

The two wide double doors at the end of the hall were suddenly flung open and the slaves came in again at a trot, each four of them now carrying an enormous bright metal dish fitted with a domed cover. They passed down each side of the table, sliding their burdens on to the black polished board in such a way that each guest soon had before him a monstrous receptacle that might have held a whole sheep or stag. A party of slaves then leapt on the table and arranged themselves one behind each dish, grasping the handle of the cover. The young boys meanwhile went round, placing ready to each guest's hand a hunting knife.

Count Hans von Hackelnberg rose slowly to his feet; his officers sprang up and stepped back from the table, while the guests, more or less steadily, followed their host's example and stood, leaning and swaying and looking wonderingly from the Count to the dishes in front of them. The bugles blew one ringing peal and were silent.

"Gentlemen!" cried the Count in a voice like the bellow of a bull, "I invite you to partake of the game you have shot!"

The serfs in unison heaved up the dish-covers and swung them high above their heads, and then filed swiftly away down the middle of the table.

Exposed on the dish then in front of each guest was the 'bird' he had bagged at the end of the morning's drive, plucked of her feathers now, all but her beaked mask, and trussed tightly, knees to chin, wrists to ankles. The forester officers deftly moved away the chairs behind the guests, and with a gesture or two indicated where the 'bird's' bonds might be slit with the knife; then discreetly nodded towards the convenient alcoves behind.

The guests seemed to be too astonished to take these suggestions in for a moment; then the Gauleiter, on the Count's right, having before him a fine bronzed creature with the vividly ornamented mask of a wild turkey-cock glowing against the pale spread of her own abundant blond hair, broke into loud guffaws and leaned forward to pinch his 'bird's' rounded thigh.

Some of the others cheered lustily and flourished their knives, but before any of them could cut the cords of his fowl, Hans von Hackelnberg had hammered on the table with the pommel of his hanger.

"Gentlemen!" he bellowed again, and complete silence and stillness followed on his command.

"Gentlemen!" said the Count, in a more human tone, though still speaking loudly enough for us to hear every word in our little chamber, and with such deliberation and force that I could follow practically all he said: "I hope you may enjoy the carving of your birds as much as you did the shooting of them. The game is yours; let each man satisfy his appetite in the way he likes best, and if anybody finds the meat not tender enough for his liking, my young men will take some of the tough skin off for him." He pointed to his chief forester, who, grinning, picked up a dog-whip and drew the lash slowly through his fingers. "But," roared the Count, suddenly violently imperious again, "before you fall to, I invite you to come with me and see some of this same appetising flesh in a different hide. Restrain your appetites, gentlemen, for ten minutes, and I will show you a spectacle of womanhood which, I warrant, will put a keener edge on them.
Bitte! Herr Gauleiter!"

He took the Gauleiter by the arm and marched him off to the main door of the hall, below the range of our view. The officers took the other guests in hand, and these, more bewildered by this sudden balking of their sport than they had been even by the unexpected offer of it, were shepherded in a puzzled and ineffectually enquiring flock from the hall, leaving their untasted delicacies to cool, as it were, on the plate under the eyes of the young forester-pages, who prepared to lounge out the interval which wine-cups in their hands on the skin-covered daises.

As the guests herded out of the hall the torch-bearers on the two long cornices turned left and right, and marched out through openings in the angles at the ends of their stone shelves, leaving only a third of their number still immobile on the end cornices to illuminate the hall.

The Doctor swore petulantly at finding the entertainment interrupted when it had scarcely begun. Then he plucked me urgently by the sleeve, whispering, "Let's go down and get a drink, at least, before they come back." And he promptly began to pull me along the narrow passage from our chamber.

I had no choice but to follow, but managed to enquire why we should not go and see the other spectacle. "No, no, no!" cried the Doctor with surprising vehemence. "I will not! For God's sake, let's get a drink!"

He tumbled down the spiral staircase, and I hard on his heels, but before we reached the outer air I had resolved to give him the slip. The yellow torches, formed into two regular lines, were moving with a steady pace through the dark some little distance from the hall; there was a considerable crowd of serfs and other indistinctly seen people standing about the end of the building, and as the Doctor scurried round to gain the main door, I had no difficulty in shaking off his hold on my sleeve and mingling with the silent crowd. I did not even hear him call after me as I shouldered my way through the serfs and hurried after the torches. I think he was too afraid of the darkness of the Schloss to stay out of the Hall by himself.

I caught the tail of the procession in a few minutes and attached myself to a knot of forester officers who were bringing up the rear. No one took any notice of me, though the light from the torches that flanked the party must have shown them my face and my plain costume. The silver-skinned girls, who looked as tall as grenadiers now that I was close beside them, marched with a deliberate ceremonial step, lifting their knees high at each pace, staring straight to their front and bearing their torches stiffly and steadily. The foresters conversed a little among themselves in low tones, but the guests, cooled by the night air, were strangely silent, and Count von Hackelnberg, still gripping the Gauleiter by the arm, stalked ahead, towering over everyone, and offering not a word of explanation.

We proceeded in this way for some hundreds of yards, until, judging by the tall hedges we had passed, I guessed that we had gone somewhere to one side of the game-park I had seen that morning. The two files of torch-bearers here began to wheel left and right, while the Count and the rest of us stopped and watched them until they had inclined again and formed a large oval ahead of us. Then the Count, with the first note of joviality I had heard from him, bade his guests be seated.

I edged forward and saw under the torchlight a broad bank of turf rimming the lip of a curious oval pit. The Count drew down the Gauleiter to sit beside him on the inner edge of the bank, and the rest of the company ranged themselves, with a little guidance by the foresters, to left and right. I moved quietly off to one end of the line and looked down. The girls now sloped their long torches forward so that the cressets overhung the pit and brightly illuminated it The sides were fifteen or twenty feet high, revetted with smooth white boards, and the floor of the pit was carpeted with closely cropped turf. At each end was an iron grille closing a subterranean passage, It was in miniature a Roman circus, though plain and rustic.

A horn suddenly blew with a high, wild blast that pierced and chilled me. I jerked my head involuntarily round, as everyone else did--as even the torch-bearers must have done, for a dipping wave of movement ran round the ring of cressets. Count von Hackelnberg had risen to his feet and had put his lips to a great, curling silver horn whose shining circle passed over his shoulder and round his body. He blew with all the power of his lungs, and the loud, clamouring urgency of his blast, so near, so wildly returned upon us by the close crowding woods, was well-nigh unbearable.

As it died I heard the rattle of one of the grilles opening. Out into the redly lit oval of turf came three young men, all clad from head to foot in suits of that strange armour I had seen in the keeper's room in the morning. I saw now it was not steel or other metal, but some material which, though obviously hard and tough, was flexible enough to allow them to move easily and lightly. The foremost two carried whips with long, heavy lashes of plaited leather, the third led two fallow does, two gentle, fat, dappled creatures, with silk ribbons round their necks.

They walked into the centre of the arena and stood there. The does trembled a little and pressed close to the keeper who held them by their ribbons; they turned their large ears apprehensively and lifted their heads with big, liquid, dark eyes that shone green for a second now and again as the torchlight filled them.

Von Hackelnberg blew another blast, short, high, peremptory, and before it had ceased I heard the response to it. That same savage caterwauling that I had heard in the morning, rising now to a shrill pitch of lust or hunger, came screaming nearer and nearer behind the second grille; there was the same horrible undertone of half-human babbling, but louder and more insistent now, the high, spiteful screeching which had so jangled the Doctor's nerves.

The grille was raised with a jerk and a clang, and there bounded into the pit some twenty large animals.

Cheetahs, I thought them for a second, springing forward with such eagerness they seemed to run upon their hind legs. But even before I clearly saw that they were not animals I heard great gusts of laughter from the Count and knew what he had intended by interrupting the lecherous pleasure of his flabby guests. The beautiful spotted coats shining sleek in the light below us were taut-stretched on the backs and full-rounded breasts of a troop of young women so matched in size and age and proportions that they must have been sought and selected with connoisseur's care among all the slave-breeding farms of the Greater Reich. They were strong and shapely, not fat, but in such perfect fullness of health and condition that the smooth curves of their limbs and bodies roused all the excitement that rare feminine beauty can, while the play of the muscles, flexing and flowing under the bright sun-tanned skin awoke in me something beyond admiration, an awe-no, ultimately a fear--of the power, the wild-beast power of sudden savage exertion, that those superficially lovely and womanly forms possessed. In repose they would have been models for a sculptor of ideal feminine beauty, but as they bounded into that arena, circling it with a fluid speed of movement almost too quick for the eye to follow, they were utterly unhuman: women transformed by a demonic skill in breeding and training into great, supple, swift and dangerous cats.