And so he had been brought with his eyes closed to the royal tent, in the center of the camp, guarded by a dozen Swedes in full uniform, the king’s bodyguard, who stood here to fend off dissatisfied soldiers. The Swedish crown was always behind in its payments. Even if you won all the battles and took everything the defeated land offered, war was not a business that paid for itself.
“I bring a king,” said the cuirassier who had led them.
The guards laughed.
The King heard his own soldiers join in the laughter. “Count Hudenitz!” he said in his sharpest authoritative tone. “This insolent behavior must come to an end.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” the count muttered, and strangely enough it worked and the stupid swine went silent.
The King dismounted. He was dizzy. He bent forward and coughed for a while. One of the guards folded back the tent flap, and the King entered with his escorts.
That had been half an eternity ago. Two hours, perhaps three, they had been waiting, on low little benches without backrests, and the King no longer knew how he was supposed to go on overlooking the fact that he was being left sitting here; but he absolutely had to overlook it, because otherwise he would have had to stand up and leave, yet no one but this Swede could bring him back to Prague. Might it have had to do with the fact that the fellow had wanted to marry Liz? He had written dozens of letters, swearing his love countless times, again and again he had sent his portrait, but she hadn’t wanted him. That was probably the reason. This pettiness was his revenge.
Still, perhaps his need for retaliation would now be sated. Perhaps this was a good sign. Possibly the waiting meant that Gustav Adolf would help him. He rubbed his eyes. As always when he was agitated, his hands felt clammy, and in his stomach was a burning that no herbal tea could assuage. During the battle outside Prague it had been so strong that he had had to remove himself from the battlefield due to his attacks of colic; at home, surrounded by servants and courtiers, he had waited for the outcome, the worst hour of his life up to that point—except that everything that was to follow, every single hour, every moment, had been far worse.
He heard himself sigh. The wind above them rustled the tent. He heard men’s voices outside. Somewhere someone was screaming, either a wounded man or a man dying of the plague. In all camps there were plague victims. No one spoke of it, for no one wanted to think about it; there was nothing anyone could do.
“Tyll,” said the King.
“King?” said the fool.
“Do something.”
“Is time going by too slowly for your liking?”
The King was silent.
“Because he’s keeping you waiting so long, because he’s treating you like his renderer, like his barber, like his stool groom, that’s why you’re bored, and I’m supposed to offer you some entertainment, right?”
The King was silent.
“I’d be happy to.” The fool leaned forward. “Look me in the eyes.”
Hesitantly, the King looked at the fool. The pursed lips, the thin chin, the pied jerkin, the calfskin cap; once he had asked him why he wore this costume, whether he was perhaps trying to dress up as an animal, to which the fool had replied: “Oh no, as a person!”
Then he did as he was told and looked him in the eyes. He blinked. It was unpleasant, because he wasn’t accustomed to holding another person’s gaze. But anything was better than having to talk about the fact that the Swede was keeping him waiting, and he had asked the fool for entertainment, after all, and now he was also a little curious what he was up to. Suppressing the desire to close his eyes, he stared at the fool.
He thought of the white canvas. It hung in his throne room and had at first given him much pleasure. “Tell the visitors that stupid people don’t see the picture, tell them only the highborn see it, just say it, and you will witness a miracle!” It had been hilarious how the visitors had pretended, looking at the white picture discerningly and nodding. Of course they hadn’t claimed to actually see the picture, no one was so maladroit, and almost all of them were very well aware that there was nothing but a white canvas hanging there. But first of all they simply were not completely sure whether some magic wasn’t at work, and secondly they didn’t know whether Liz and he perhaps believed in it—and to be suspected by a king of stupidity or lowly origins was, in the end, just as bad as being stupid or of lowly origins.
Even Liz had said nothing. Even she, his wonderful, beautiful, but ultimately not always very clever wife, had looked at the picture and remained silent. Even she had not been sure, of course not, she was only a woman.
He had wanted to speak to her about it. Liz, he had wanted to say, stop this nonsense, don’t put on an act for me! But suddenly he hadn’t dared. Because if she believed in it, only a little bit, if she too thought a spell had been cast on the canvas, then what would she think of him?
And if she spoke of it to others? If she said something like: His Majesty, my husband, the King, he has seen no picture on the canvas, then how would he appear in their eyes? His status was fragile, he was a king without a country, he was an exile, he was utterly dependent on what people thought of him—what should he do if word went around that in his throne room hung a magic picture that only the highborn could see, but he couldn’t? Of course there was no picture there, it had been one of the fool’s jokes, but now that the canvas hung there, it had developed its own power, and the King had realized with horror that he could neither take it down nor say anything about it. Neither could he claim that he saw a painting where there was no painting, for there was no surer way to prove himself an idiot, nor could he declare that the canvas was white, for if the others believed that an enchanted picture hung there with the power to expose the lowly and stupid, then that was enough to disgrace him completely. He couldn’t even speak of it to his poor, sweet, dull-witted wife. It was maddening. The fool had done all this to him.
How long had the fool been staring at him now? He wondered what the fellow might be planning. Tyll’s eyes were completely blue. They were very bright, almost watery, they seemed to glow faintly of their own accord, and in the middle of the eyeball was a hole. Behind it was—well, what? Behind it was Tyll. Behind it was the soul of the fool, that which he was.
Again the King wanted to close his eyes, but he held the fool’s gaze. It became clear to him that what was happening on one side was happening on the other too: just as he was looking into the fool’s innermost depths, so the fool was now looking into him.
Completely incongruously he thought of the moment he had looked his wife in the eye for the first time, the evening after their marriage. How shy she had been, how fearful. She had held her hands in front of the bodice he had been about to unlace, but then she had looked up and he had seen her face in the candlelight, up close for the first time, and at that moment he had sensed what it’s like to truly be one with another person; but when he had spread his arms to pull her to him he had struck the carafe of rose water on the bedside table, and the tinkling of the shards had broken the spelclass="underline" The puddle on the ebony parquet floor, he could still see it before his eyes, and drifting on it, like little ships, the rose petals. There had been five petals. That he remembered clearly.
Then she had begun to weep. Apparently no one had explained to her what had to happen on a wedding night, and so he had let her be, because although a king had to be strong, he had above all always been gentle, and they had fallen asleep side by side like brother and sister.
In another bedroom, at home in Heidelberg, they had later discussed the great decision. Night after night, again and again, she had dithered and cautioned, in the age-old manner of women, and he had repeatedly explained to her that one didn’t receive an offer like this without the will of God and that one had to accept one’s fate. But the Kaiser, she had cried time and again, what about his wrath, no one rose up against the Kaiser, and he had patiently explained to her the argument his jurists had so persuasively presented to him: that the acceptance of the Bohemian crown would not be a breach of the imperial peace because Bohemia wasn’t part of the Empire.