“Let’s go,” he said.
“How did it turn out?” asked Count Hudenitz. “What was the outcome?”
“Later,” said the King.
Despite everything he was relieved when the army camp was finally behind them. The air was better. The sky was high and blue above them. Hills arched in the distance. Count Hudenitz asked him twice more what the results of the discussion had been and whether a return to Prague was to be expected, but when the answer never came, he gave up.
The King coughed. He asked himself whether it had been reality: that fat man with the fleshy hands, the horrible things he had said, the offer he had wanted to accept, with all his strength, and yet had had to decline. And why, why had he declined it? He no longer knew. The reasons, just a short while ago so compelling, had dissolved into mist. And he could even see this mist; bluish, it filled the air and blurred the hills.
He heard the fool telling stories from his life, yet all at once it seemed to him as if the fool were speaking inside him, as if he weren’t riding next to him, as if he were rather a feverish voice in his head, a part of himself he had never wanted to know. He closed his eyes.
The fool was talking about how he had run away with his sister: their father had been burned for witchcraft, their mother had moved to the Orient with a knight, to Jerusalem perhaps or to distant Persia, who could know.
“But she’s not your sister at all,” the King heard the cook saying.
He and his sister, said the fool, had at first wandered around with a bad balladeer, who had been good to them, and then with a traveling entertainer from whom he had learned everything he knew—an eminent jester, a good juggler, an actor who needn’t have feared comparison with anyone on the stage, but above all he had been a wicked man, so cruel that Nele had thought he was the devil. But then they came to understand that every traveling entertainer was a little bit devil and a little bit animal and a little bit harmless too, and as soon as they understood this, they no longer needed Pirmin, that was his name, and the next time he was especially nasty, Nele cooked him a mushroom dish that he did not soon forget, or rather, he forgot it immediately, that is, he died from it, two handfuls of chanterelles, one fly agaric, a piece of a black death cap, that was all you needed. The art consisted in using fly agaric and death cap, because although each of the two was deadly, individually they tasted bitter and attracted attention. Cooked together, their flavors merged into a fine, pleasant-tasting sweetness, arousing no suspicion.
“So you two killed him?” asked one of the soldiers.
Not he, said the fool. His sister had killed him. He himself couldn’t hurt a fly. He let out a ringing laugh. There had been no choice. The man had been so terrible that even in death they weren’t rid of him. For quite a while his ghost had trailed them, had snickered behind them at night in the forest, had appeared in their dreams and offered them one sort of bargain or another.
“What do you mean, bargain?”
The fool was silent, and when the King opened his eyes, he noticed that snowflakes were falling around them. He took a deep breath. The memory of the pestilential stench of the army camp was already dissolving. He licked his lips, thinking of Gustav Adolf, and had to cough again. Were they perhaps riding backward? The idea didn’t strike him as particularly odd, he just didn’t want to go back to that stinking camp, not among those soldiers again and to the Swedish king, who was only waiting to mock him. The meadows around them were now covered with a thin layer of white, and over the tree stumps—the advancing army had felled all the trees—mounds of snow were forming. He tilted his head back. The sky was flickering with flakes. He thought of his coronation, he thought of the five hundred singers and the eight-part chorale, he thought of Liz in the jeweled cloak.
Hours had passed, perhaps even days, when he found his way back into time—at least the terrain had once again changed. There was now so much snow that the horses could barely proceed. They lifted their hooves carefully and set them down slowly into the high mass of white. Cold wind lashed his face. When he looked around coughing, it struck him that the Dutch soldiers were no longer there. Only Count Hudenitz, the cook, and the fool were still riding alongside him.
“Where are the soldiers?” he asked, but the others took no notice of him. He repeated the question louder. Now Count Hudenitz looked at him uncomprehendingly, squinted, and turned his face back into the wind.
Must have run off, thought the King. “I have the army I deserve,” he said. Then, coughing, he added: “My court jester, my cook, and my chancellor of a court that no longer exists. My army of air, my last faithful!”
“At your command,” said the fool, who had apparently understood him despite the wind. “Now and forever. You’re ill, Majesty?”
The King realized almost with relief that it was true: hence the coughing, the dizziness, his weakness in the face of the Swede, the confusion. He was ill! It made so much sense that he had to laugh.
“Yes,” he cried joyfully. “I’m ill!”
As he bent forward to cough, he thought for some reason of his parents-in-law. He had known from the outset that they didn’t like him. But he had won them over, with his elegance and his chivalrous demeanor, with his German clarity, his inner strength.
And he thought of his eldest. The beautiful boy everyone had loved so much. If I don’t return, he had told him, the child, then you will return in my stead to the principality and to the high status of our family. Then the boat had capsized and he had drowned, and now he was with the Lord God.
Where I’ll soon be too, thought the King, touching his burning forehead. In eternal glory.
He turned his head sideways and adjusted the pillow. His breath felt hot. He pulled the blanket over his head. It was dirty and didn’t smell good. How many people had slept in this bed?
He kicked the blanket away and looked around. Apparently he was in a room at an inn. On the table stood a jug. On the floor lay straw. There was only one window, with thick glass; outside whirled snow. On a stool sat the cook.
“We must go on,” said the King.
“Too ill,” said the cook. “Your Majesty cannot, you are —”
“Balderdash,” said the King. “Nonsense, foolishness, piffle. Liz is waiting for me!”
He heard the cook reply, but before he could understand him, he must have fallen asleep again, for he found himself back in the cathedral, on the throne, facing the high altar, and he heard the choir and thought of the fairy tale about the spindle that his mother had once told him. Suddenly it seemed important, but his memory wouldn’t put it in the correct order: when you unwound thread from the spindle, a piece of life was unwound too, and the quicker you turned it, say, because you were in a hurry or because something was hurting you or because things were not the way you wanted, the quicker life went by too, and the man in the fairy tale had already come to the end of the thread, and everything was over and yet had hardly even begun. But what had happened in the middle the King could not remember, and so he opened his eyes and gave the command that they now had to go onward, onward to Holland, where his palace was and his wife was waiting with the court, attired in her silks and diadem, where the festivities never ended, where every day there were the theatrical productions she liked so much, performed by the best players from all over the world.
To his surprise he was on the horse again. Someone had wrapped a cloak around his shoulders, but he still felt the wind. The world seemed white—the sky, the ground, even the huts to the right and left of the road.
“Where’s Hudenitz?” he asked.
“The count is gone!” exclaimed the cook.
“We had to go on,” said the fool. “We had no more money. The innkeeper threw us out. King or not, he said, everyone has to pay!”