“Many thanks,” said the fat count, having hardly absorbed anything. Geography had never been his forte. In his father’s library there were several volumes of Matthäus Merian’s Topographia Germaniae; a few times he had leafed through them with a shudder. What was the point of memorizing all this? What was the point of visiting all these places when you could also just stay in the middle, in the center of the world, in Vienna?
“Go with God,” the abbot said to Ulenspiegel.
“Stay with God,” the fool replied from the horse. He had put his arms around Franz Kärrnbauer and looked so thin and weak that it was hard to imagine how he would keep himself on the horse.
“One day you stood outside our gates,” said the abbot. “We took you in, we didn’t ask your denomination. For more than a year you were here, now you’re leaving again.”
“Nice speech,” said Ulenspiegel.
The abbot made the sign of the cross. The entertainer moved to do the same, but apparently got muddled—his arms got tangled, his hands didn’t end up where they were supposed to go. The abbot turned away. The fat count had to suppress his laughter. Two monks opened the gate.
They didn’t get far. After a mere few hours they found themselves in a downpour such as the fat count had never before experienced. Hurriedly they dismounted and crouched under the horses. The rain poured, pelted, roared around them as if the sky were dissolving.
“But if it’s not Ulenspiegel?” whispered Karl von Doder.
Two things that could not be distinguished were the same thing, said the fat count. Either this man was Ulenspiegel, who had sought refuge in the Abbey of Andechs, or this was a man who had sought refuge in the abbey and called himself Ulenspiegel. God knew, but as long as he didn’t intervene, what was the difference?
At that moment they heard shots nearby. Hastily they mounted their horses, spurred them, and thundered across the open field. The fat count wheezed, his back ached. Raindrops struck his face. It seemed to him an eternity before the dragoons reined their horses.
With unsteady legs he dismounted and patted his horse’s neck. The animal pursed its lips and snorted. To their left was a small river; on the other side the slope rose toward a forest such as the fat count hadn’t seen since Melk.
“That must be Streitheim Forest,” said Karl von Doder.
“Then we’re too far north,” said Franz Kärrnbauer.
“There’s no way that’s Streitheim Forest,” said Stefan Purner.
“It most certainly is,” said Karl von Doder.
“Absolutely not,” said Stefan Purner.
Then they heard music. They held their breath and listened: trumpets and drums, a cheerful march that made you want to dance. The fat count noticed that his shoulders were moving up and down to the beat.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Konrad Purner.
“Not on the horses,” hissed Karl von Doder. “Into the forest!”
“Careful,” said the fat count, trying to at least keep up the pretense that he was the one giving orders here. “Ulenspiegel must be protected.”
“You poor idiots,” the scrawny man said softly. “You cattle. It is I who must protect you.”
The treetops soon closed over them. The fat count could see his horse’s reluctance, but he held the reins tight and patted its damp nostrils, and the animal complied. Before long the underbrush was so dense that the dragoons drew their sabers to clear a path.
They listened again. An indistinct murmur could be heard. Where was it coming from, what was it? Gradually the fat count realized that it was countless voices, an intermingling of singing and shouting and talking from many throats. He sensed his horse’s fear. He stroked its mane. The animal snorted.
Later he could no longer say how long they had walked like this, and so he claimed that it had been two hours. The voices behind us died away, he wrote, the loud silence of the forest enveloped us, birds shrieked, branches broke, and the wind whispered to us from the treetops.
“We have to head east,” said Karl von Doder, “toward Augsburg.”
“The abbot said the cities aren’t letting anyone in,” said the fat count.
“But we are envoys of the Kaiser,” said Karl von Doder.
It occurred to the fat count that he was carrying no paper that proved it: no identification, no charter, no document of any sort. He hadn’t requested papers, and apparently no one in the administration of the imperial palace had felt responsible for issuing such a thing.
“Where’s east?” asked Franz Kärrnbauer.
Stefan Purner pointed somewhere.
“That’s south,” said his brother.
“You really are half-wits,” Ulenspiegel said cheerfully. “You’re utterly incompetent nobodies! West is where we are, thus east is everywhere.”
Franz Kärrnbauer drew back his arm, but Ulenspiegel ducked with a speed of which no one would have thought him capable, and leaped behind a tree trunk. The dragoons followed him, yet Ulenspiegel glided like a shadow around the trunk and disappeared behind another and was no longer to be seen.
“You won’t get me,” they heard him say with a giggle, “I know the forest. I became a forest spirit when I was a small boy.”
“A forest spirit?” the fat count asked uneasily.
“A white forest spirit.” Ulenspiegel stepped out of the bushes with a laugh. “For the great devil.”
They took a rest. Their provisions were almost used up. The horses were nibbling on tree bark. They passed around the bottle of small beer, each of them taking a sip. When it arrived at the fat count, nothing was left.
Wearily they went on. The forest thinned. The trees stood at wider intervals. The underbrush was no longer impassable; the horses could walk without the path having to be cleared. It struck the fat count that no more birds could be heard: not a sparrow, not a blackbird, not a crow. They mounted and rode out of the forest.
“My God,” said Karl von Doder.
“Merciful Lord,” said Stefan Purner.
“Blessed Virgin,” said Franz Kärrnbauer.
When he later tried to depict what they had seen, the fat count discovered that he could not do it. It was beyond his abilities as a rational person: Even at a distance of half a century he found himself incapable of putting it into sentences that had any actual meaning. Naturally, he described the sight nonetheless. It was one of the most important moments of his life, and the fact that he had witnessed the final battle of the Thirty Years’ War defined from then on who he was and what people thought of him—the Lord Steward of the Household experienced firsthand the Battle of Zusmarshausen, it had been said ever since when he was introduced to someone. He fended this off with practiced modesty: “Let’s drop it, it’s not an easy story to tell.”
What sounded like a commonplace was the truth. It was not an easy story to tell. Not for him, at least. From the instant he rode out of the forest on the hill and looked across the river valley and saw the Kaiser’s army stretching to the horizon with its cannon emplacements, entrenched musketeers, and the pikemen standing in orderly groups of a hundred, whose pikes seemed to him a second forest, he felt as if he were experiencing something that did not belong in reality. The fact that so many people could come together in formation seemed so weighty that everything was thrown off balance. The fat count had to seize the mane of the horse to keep from sliding off.
Only then did it become clear to him that he had not only the imperial army before his eyes. To their right the slope fell away sharply. Below it was a wide road on which, silent and without music, so that only the hooves on the stone could be heard, the cavalry of the united crowns of France and Sweden was approaching: one rank behind the other, heading toward a single small bridge.
And at that moment it happened that this very bridge, which had just a second ago still stood there so solidly, dissolved into a small cloud. The fat count almost had to laugh at this magic trick. Bright smoke rose, the bridge was gone, and only now, when the smoke had already begun to drift away in the wind, did the bang reach them. How beautiful, the fat count thought and immediately felt ashamed and a moment later thought again, as if in defiance: No, that was beautiful.