“Coachman? There’s no coachman,” the Prince said, mildly surprised. “Do you think you’re in Bella?”
Sure enough. One of the attendants vaulted onto the near horse—it had been saddled!— gave a gutteral growl—both horses sprang forward—the servant playing the role of tiger uttered a bloodcurdling squaw] (no bronze bells hereabouts!)—the Town of the Princely Fortress (etc.) flashed by. Eszterhazy murmured to himself a few words from his favorite guide-and- phrase-book, “Help! My postilion has been struck by lightning!’ ” Prince Roldrando turned a face twisted with astonishment and concern, his golden-brown eyes wide. “Too-badV’ he exclaimed. “Oh, why didn’t he wear a charm?’ Then, in an instant, the eyes vanished, the face split into a half-a-hundred wrinkles, the mouth exploded into laughter. “Ha-ha! Oh, you had me there! Postillion struck by lightning, he says! Oh, Oh, sweet little Saint Peter in Chains!" And he rolled about in such a manner as to give Eszterhazy the most extreme concern for his safety: Prince Roldrando, however, did not fall off the coach, and neither did he forget the phrase: from time to time during his friend’s visit— and, indeed, often at the oddest times—he would repeat it, the words usually varying in their order, until, at last, it passed into the common speech of the district as a sort of byword, as it might be, “May the black pox pass us over and may our postillions ne’er be struck by lightnings. ...”
The farmhouses of the Vlox countryside were painted in an absolutely Mediterannean profusion of colors—pink, yellow, brown with white trimmings, green with white trimmings, blue, lavendar with brown trimmings: and many, many other shades, tints, permutations, combinations—as though to make up in splendor what they lacked in straightness of line. Presently the houses began to thin out, and the real and still untamed Mud spread out on both sides and all about.
The road itself was lined with trees, but through the trees one could see nothing but an endless expanse of marsh: water, reeds, hummocks, water, blue sky, white clouds, canals, here and there a man in a flat-bottomed boat . . . and, everywhere, everywhere, sometimes floating on the surface of a pool, sometimes diving and bobbing for food, sometimes wheeling and screaming, sometimes conducting a parliamentary inquiry in a clump of trees: the birds .... more birds than Eszterhazy had ever seen in one place before, certainly more birds than he could identity .. . although, like a familiar motif recurrently introduced into some half-wild sort of symphony, there were often swans. Sometimes they sailed majestically upon the waters. And sometimes they squatted like pigs in the mudbanks.
Prince Von Vlox, who had fallen silent, suddenly sat up. Eszterhazy followed his host’s gaze.
Through a fortuitous gap in the trees, Castle Vlox could be seen, perhaps less than a kilometer away: and it seemed to float upon the surface of the waters as though designed for a pageant out of some insubstantial substance. It had, seemingly, everything a castle traditionally should have: walls, a gate, a drawbridge, a moat, towers.
“H ow often one thinks,” Eszterhazy said, musingly, “that a castle must be upon a high hill, a peak. That they often were, had nothing to do with any desire for scenery or prospects, vistas. It is clear that the marshes afforded every bit as much protection to this place as any mountain top. It has a moat, to be sure, but the Mud itself is one vast moat. ..."
Prince Roldrando gave a rich, deep chuckle. “Ferdy tried to besiege it once,” he said—he, probably the only living person who would even think of referring to that long-dead Holy Roman Emperor by a nickname— “a nice balls-up he made of it, trying to get his engines and his artillery through the Mud! So, after sitting and a-thinking about it a while, he sends word he’ll settle for a titular submission—say, the gaffer’s sceptre, and a silver bowl. Ha ha! Ah, the gaffer”—here he referred to none other than Sigismudo, Prince Von Vlox, 1520-1583—“the gaffer sends him a copper piss-pot and a gumph-stick, ho ho. . . .” In the 16th century and at this remove from the centers of soft living, a copper urinal was after all indeed a luxury of sorts: but a gumph-stick was a mere common appurtenance in every privy which hung out from a castle wall. What “Ferdy” had thought of it all need not trouble conjecture, but he had certainly never come back.
Eszterhazy gazed at the castle, slowly growing larger, appearing and vanishing as they came nearer and nearer. “It gives one a definite feeling of reassurance,” he said, “to know that tales like that are told of this old place. It is certainly neither Castle Dracula nor Castle Frankenstein—”
Roldrando nodded. “As for Vlad Drakulya, he was a Rumanian, need more be said? And the Franckensteins,” he said, indulgently, “one hears well of them, (hey are, after all, barons, is what llinj are. After all, anybody can be made a baron, but nobody can be made a prince; one is either born a prince or one is not, and the personal caprice of a monarch or a minister has nothing to do with it.” Eszterhazy was reminded ol the Great Duke of Wellington and his comment that what he liked about the Order of the Bath was that "there was no damned about ‘merit’ to it!” Such altitudes transcended snobbery. If one were, on one side, descended bom the Lusignan kings (one of whom quite casually married a mermaid), and, on the other side descended—somewhat farther back—from Charlemagne, the great-grandson of Big-footed Bertha, la reine pedauque—then one either automatically appropriated the Stationsmaster’s private pissoir or one merely “Stopped by the side of the road”—either one indifferently acceptable.
Prince Roldi took up a battered brass post-horn and blew a blast or two on it. Almost, one expected the draw-bridge to fall and men-at-arms to appear on the battlements. Actually, it was a signal to light the samovar. —The coach rattled over the bridge, and, making one half-turn around the court-yard, came to a stop. Several men half-rose, half-bowed, returned to their duties. Duties which, Eszterhazy noticed, consisted, respectively, of cleaning the latest model shotgun, and of sharpening the head of a boar- spear.
He really did not know if it was the latest model boar-spear.
They had the boar that night, with wild apple sauce; and with it a wine of the district, one which did not keep and so was never sent for sale: now, between sweet and sour, and slightly effervescent, it might have tempted angels.
Prince Roldi, gazing at the church-ransom of bees-wax candles all a glimmer, improved the vision by regarding it through his glass of wine. "Try it, Engli,” he urged. “Do the same. See if you can see the monkey in the glass.”
Eszterhazy complied. The flames winked, winked, wept, wept. Odd bits of things seemed to come into vision, then fall out of focus again. “The monkey?” he enquired, pleased, pleasantly tired, enjoying his dinner.
“ ‘Es. We had an old family doctor once. Said he could make monkeys. Long ago. The gaffer didn’t want him to make monkeys. Wanted him to make gold, I daresay. Atcful quarrel. Don’t know why the gaffer didn’t drop him in the sink. —Eh? The sink? Don’t you know what the—Ah, the, what do they call it, dunjeon. We call it the sink. He didn’t though. Chap rode away, swearing the sky sulfur-colored. Ever since then we always say, ‘Look through the wine into the flame and you’ll see the monkey old Theo made ’ ”
It was news indeed to Eszterhazy that Doctor Phillipus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, called Paracel- cus, had ever come this way. Sooner or later, he thought, must have a look in the library and the archives. Has ‘old Theo’ actually made him a homunculus here? One hardly knew. Still, the legend—however transmuted— the legend had persisted.