Holzmenge: Book One: Corpus Juris Civilis

By Walter Max Poitzsch

The information about the book is not available as of this time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669827412

Walter Max Poitzsch

Walter spent most of his adult life living and working overseas (mostly in Africa) or teaching (from the secondary graduate school level). As a child his family traveled to Germany now and then to visit relatives. There he saw many restored castles and churches and heard many legends (and historical facts) about the history of Germany.

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Holzmenge:

Book One

Corpus Juris Civilis

Walter Max Poitzsch

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is drawn from a series of journals (The Personal Diaries of Valentin Fleischmann) donated by Professor Ernst Erlau (1927-1999), emeritus, School of Arts and Sciences, Department of Archaic Languages, Midwestern University. Special thanks to my colleagues in the Department of Demonology and Psychiatric Research, Jesuit College of Sienna, and the Department of Lithuanian Wiccan Studies and Antiquities, Prague College of Medicine. Also, warmest thanks to my editors at Marabou, Hornet & Lizard for their patience and support.

Copyright © 2022 by Walter Max Poitzsch.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Rev. date: 05/26/2022

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Contents

1166: Thüringia

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Holzmenge Book Two:

Schwester Katrei

May, 1308: Avignon, France

Chapter 2     August, 1307: Bohemia

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Holzmenge Book Three:

The Siege of Belgrade

Chapter 1     Anatolia, 1453

Chapter 2     Spring, 1456: Bohemia—the frontier of the Holy Roman Empire

Chapter 3     The Carpathian Mountains

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Holzmenge Book Four:

The Trial of Thomas Müntzer

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

ven in the grayest, most humorless hours, there was a hidden place, where dragonflies and hummingbirds hovered about the long-forgotten marble statue of a goddess. Once she had been worshipped by those that desired romantic intrigue and carnal adventure—but that interest now seemed unlikely, given the general misery of the times. Faith was fear. Retribution was the law of the presiding deity. Only the last gasp of hope before absolute despair awakened this most artfully designed effigy from the stupor into which she had been abandoned by the converted. Her last admirers had secreted her here, far from the stern eyes of the pious clergy.

She was carved from a single block of marble, smoothed by worshipful hands, once polished so that she emitted a comforting, strange warmth and a peculiar light. Now the handsome figure was covered with a green tint of dusty mold, and dried leaves whirled mysteriously around her on windless nights. Rats and bats, adders, hornets and termites flitted and slithered and tunneled around the statue, generation after generation, oblivious to the possibility that it might be anything greater than the work of a genius, driven to madness by the disappearance of the presence by which the artifact was inspired.

She had posed for him, night after night, and after delighting over the capture of her limbs, her bosom and shoulders and supple torso he had ended his labors with her face; he had perfectly recorded her features—the full lips, with their vague humor, her fine cheeks and her exquisite jaw. Finally—the day before he was to complete his masterpiece (the image of her dark eyes)—she had kissed him with a grave smile and in the morning, she was gone—just as the righteously angry missionaries stormed the gate of her temple. The sculptor had left the statue incomplete—the eyes blank, serene, and inconsistent with his memory of her—her last kiss, the night of her departure. The artist had hidden it from the missionaries, wept over it, and then hanged himself, adding to the foreboding mystery of the castellated ruins wherein it sat, abandoned and all but forgotten.

Only the gypsies knew of it, and in secrecy their presiding high priestess had left gifts for it during the eight decades of her residency, bowing and genuflecting before it and then departing rapidly. When the Roma conjurer found sympathy among her gentile neighbors, she whispered a spell to their children as they slept—the spell by which the statue might be brought to life, to bring support to the sufferer.

1166: Thüringia

THE KEEP OF Elsterberg was a fine symbol of the time: utility, sobriety and the omnipresent provider of harsh authority. It’s raised fists were two gaunt rectangular monoliths, seventy feet in height, and in breadth and depth half that. The towers and their connecting hall were built above the remains of a wooden fort, burned to the ground by the pious and humorless missionaries consigned by Charlemagne to stamp out the pagan adherents to a faith that worshipped trees and streams and had (reputedly) the ability to engage animals in conversation. This campaign progressed generation after generation, stymied only temporarily in places like the great fir forests of Lithuania and Finland—although eventually even there the druids were exhausted by their perpetual flight before the torches and cudgels borne by missionaries eager to melt golden and silver images of salmon and ravens into no less fanciful representations of the Virgin and her Child.

The influence of the pagan on the missionary was no less profound than the influence of the missionary on the pagan: the monks returned to their damp cells filled with a dread of kobolds, trolls and wurzelsepp as acute as the dread of the Christian hell that had replaced Valhalla in the imagination of the converts. Retribution proved more effective a moral than reward to these blonde savages.

Consequently, the fascination with Satan was—if anything—more acute than the love of sacrificial Lambs of God. It was no time at all before ceremonies in moon-flooded glens were voiced in chants of corrupted Latin—intended to conjure devils—rather than the tongue of the Old Norse, which had implored the spirits of the beech and oak to awaken. By stamping out one rival the hapless missionaries had replaced him with a far more dangerous successor. The antlers of the stag, the crown of carnal desire, were replaced with the pitiless horns of a bull. Curiosity about the devil was infinitely greater than adoration of the Virgin; artists employed far greater skill and effort in depiction of the demonic agencies—their expressive leers and snarls—than the placid, serene and slightly bored visage of the angelic and the sanctified. How mundane the dove: how mysterious and compelling the bat.

So enthusiastic were the Christians to carry out their instructions that they not only exterminated the druids and their consorts, but also sought to destroy any record—any artifact of their existence. History must have a beginning, and the beginning was the Book of Genesis. Let any ribald parishioner suggest that perhaps the lands between Scandinavia and the Danube were removed from the machinations of the Hebrews and the Philistines, and the grim friars of the local order were not remiss in their obligation to exercise corporal discipline in defense of the absolute authority of the bishops and the infallible accuracy of their Scriptures. No mummery was without a threatening moral, and no pantomime on a puppet stage was complete without a cloth-and-wooden devil crouching in the corner to bring the morally adventurous marionette to his (more often her) eternal reward. The inhabitants of the Holy Roman Empire were very much like these puppets themselves; the puppeteers were more and more often cowled, and ever less frequently elevated by a ceremony of dubbing. The friars and the cardinals grew more confident (and more sadistic) in the eagerness with which they jerked the strings by which their parishioners were manipulated.

Peonage replaced outright slavery. Through some act of bravery by a youth or some accident of birth that bestowed great beauty upon a maiden, a slave might rise in the society of the Norse; Christian serfs were consigned to hereditary debt, and there they would invariably remain. A handsome girl from among their ranks might provide an afternoon of bliss to a troubadour of higher social caliber—tearful assurances of unending devotion and eternal security: but once her pretty belly swelled, the poor waif was no better than a tavern anecdote to her callous lover—a wink exchanged with the Father Confessor—and soon her eyes would grow glassy and her skin harden, her hair would become knotty and stringy, and her proud carriage would retreat into the servile crouch of the other ragged slatterns that toiled bitterly in their lords’ fields of turnips and beets. Her bastard child could expect no dowry.

Love was an ideal and an inspiration to foppish poets and playwrights. To the uneducated masses it was something to be avoided, since of every two children born, one might expect to join his father at the plow on his seventh birthday, or fetch twigs from the fringe of the threatening forest for her mother’s kettle. Of every three births, one resulted in the death of the mother. Young girls were sold into servitude to toothless widowers whose hollow-eyed brood was often within a year or two of their stepmother’s maturity. To form emotional attachments was a foolish and dangerous trap; why broaden the pantheon of furies unleashed by the Crucifixion? Love God! To love anyone else was to place her or him on a status equal to the divine (or the demonic)—the presumption upon which the expulsion of Lucifer was predicated. (In her cell the goddess growled angrily at her dream, one slim arm over her eyes, the other hand clenching at her cobwebbed bedclothes. The tenets of monotheism—no less than the shackles of monogamy—were an effrontery to the abilities for which she was most notorious.)

Plagues came as frequently as floods or swarms of locusts. Graveyards flooded with stunning regularity, and corpses in varying states of decay were then dumped in unmarked trenches, from which the stench that permeated the sullen atmosphere was a clear acknowledgement of the Church’s grim predictions—a confirmation that centuries of maypoles and flowered crowns had been a presumption against which the hardships levied upon the serfs were only a shadowy preamble of what awaited them in the next sphere. Still; the Holy Fathers that most graphically elucidated these horrific images were the most revered: long lines of jostling Christians vied for a good spot in the audience of a gifted orator, and their horrified gasps were often accompanied by glances of gratified glee. Colorful names were contrived for the demons and angels that replaced the pagan demigods and demigoddesses; the devils and angels boxed and jousted and even seduced one another week after week, while the faithful moaned and wept with delighted terror. These anecdotes passed from village to village, and generation to generation, and this colorful apocrypha was soon solid doctrinal dogma: to challenge it was to bring upon oneself a range of punishments the least extreme of which involved excommunication. Seeing that they were already excommunicated, some fraternities of minstrels and mummers took advantage of the financial opportunity and soon St. Michael and Lucifer, Delilah and Jezebel could be admired in productions performed on wooden stages with surprisingly imaginative and elaborate sets. So did the secular subtly parasitize the religious.

Bringing the provinces into the fold also brought the proverbial flock leprosy and plague. These were cited among the bishops as evidence of the sinful nature of mankind. Repent! The ulcers and pneumatic cysts were but the prelude of what awaited the sinner in the afterlife; no tax was too harsh, no indulgence too extreme for the saved. Give thanks to God that He has released you from bondage and ignorance! Suggest otherwise and His messengers will exercise upon you the grim disciplines that men of their station command. Still, in spite of it all, the old faith survived to challenge the Church—along with Satanism (heresy was a rumor on the horizon). The missionaries—whether by design or accident—equated witchcraft with devil-worship, to the chagrin of the proponents of both.

A howl of desperation from one innocent soul echoed through the misery, awakening our one stubborn goddess. The prayer had been directed towards both the dove and the bat; now it was levied upon the raven. This goddess had no shortage of adventurous sensuality coupled with a dangerous sense of humor, and a few desperate gypsies remembered the ceremonies by which she was summoned. The Church had wrapped Her dubious cloak about Europe—only to find, to Her chagrin, that She had enveloped a tormenting flea within Her stole.

*

She awoke among the cushions of her chaise. Her quilt was the web of many spiders that had tormented her and teased her during her long slumber, when they had scampered over her marble body, vainly seeking an angle among her supple curves, to which they could have secured the guys of a snare; instead, they had undertaken the project with energy and ambition, only to abandon it frustrated and starving (not unlike certain missionaries in the world beyond her chambers, frustrated by the stubbornness and deviousness of their baptized flocks, who perpetuated ceremonies with maypoles and posies in secret.)

The goddess swept the cobwebs from her body with a grimace of disgust. The stale taste in her mouth compelled her to spit onto the littered flagstones of her chamber: the exertion produced a cascade of glittering dust from her hair. She moaned a little, licking her plump lips with an expression of distaste; she blew more dust from a flagon, connected to a small stool by more destitute, abandoned spider webs. She tentatively shook the bottle from side to side, her fine head cocked at a suspicious angle. A beatific look entered her dark eyes and she licked her full lips and white, even teeth, which she exercised by biting into the cork of the flask, and then twisting the bottle sharply. The cork popped out and she took a long drink, moaning as some of the liquid escaped from the corner of her mouth, snaked down her long throat and disappeared among her handsome curves with a delicious tickle.

What a dream I had, she muttered. Who is Constantine, and Justinian? What a lot of chatter; who is Charles Martel? What are Mohammedans and Kabbalah? Who disturbs me from my rest with her weeping entreaty? She stretched her long limbs, groaning, and then swayed to her feet. In the middle of the paving stones a bath was fixed; it was carpeted by lilies and infiltrated by flowered vines that grew from the dubious masonry. Birds of varying size and shape cocked their heads at her, and frogs hopped out of her way and plopped into the translucent flood. The goddess entered the cool bath, a sinuous shadow, and an instant later pulled herself out on the opposite extreme. Now her muscles were fully aroused, and, reflecting a flash of lightening visible through the broken rafters of her hall, her eyes were predatory and filled with eager curiosity.

So, old toad; now that you oppose one God instead of a legion, you think that you are beyond my reach! You think yourself so elevated, because you are now the favorite of the sculptors, rather than me? Hah! You are limestone; I am marble. You must hear as plainly as I do the desperation in the prayers that summon me, while those that pray to you do so out of deceit—knowing full well the interest you demand of them at the end of the contract! Greedy, starving rats devouring your acrid, poisoned cheese…How hungry I am…

Beyond the decrepit battlements the gypsies saw light flickering from the haunted castle’s portals—so long dormant and black, like the eye sockets of a skull, now lurid and eerie, like the eyes of the wolves reflected in the lights of their campfires. Lightening flickered in the moonlight; thunder rolled across a cloudless, starry sky and in the heavy shadows of the ancient forest the crickets enthusiastically strengthened their answer to a swelling, belching chant from the frogs. Beware! the goddess cried, shaking her fists. I hear the prayer! Yea, though you answer it first, my solution will always fulfill it! I am coming, sister! I am not forgotten, after all; how richly I will satisfy you for your memory of my liturgy! I shall restore passion and desire, and gild this bland, sour age...

Clergymen of every rank scrambled for rosaries and relics. Thunder rolled across the empire and those that sought to undermine it with bad morality were no less chagrined than the most honest and earnest son of the Church (who was awakened from his slumber in the haystack of a mill). He grunted dismissively at the lightening like a boar beholding a threatening wolf. The Christian absently scratched at an irritation beneath his weathered cloak, and, upon a second peal of lightening and a swelling tide of thunder that made the masonry of his refuge tremble, he growled: Witch…demon…do your worst. I will drown you in my baptismal font; I will scorch you with my zealotry! I will grind you to… his threat was drowned out by yet another celestial crescendo, but in the lightening that followed the big man was clearly visible, standing, his feet widely spaced, his chin thrust forward, his immense fists threatening the night sky. Devil! Witch! Beware: I have heard the prayers of the desperate; hold strong, child! Have faith! I am coming! I am Fulco!

*

Now for Elsterberg. Once the wooden fortress was set ablaze, and the druids safely hanged and beheaded, the good Christians put the local villagers to work in dismantling circles of great stone obelisks (at whose purpose the monks whispered colorful speculation while they decanted a muscular vintage of communion wine) and then reassigning them to the base of a water tower, built over a spring, on the crest of a knoll that overlooked a broad and ominous forest. The gigantic blocks were conveyed on sleds in winter, drawn by oxen whose steaming breath created a shower of frozen sparks in the bitter air. When their labors were done, they were slaughtered and devoured while their drivers lustily implored Jehovah to bless and sanctify His latest outpost. They consumed enough wine during the christening of the tower to resurrect a song from the olden times, one that explained (and excused) the sprigs of holly with which the communion was decorated. Thus, while the surviving oxen looked on aghast upon the carnage of the enslaved, the fortified well became the Keep of Elsterberg.

The Elsterberg keep had only a few windows, slits worked in among the blocks at strategic intervals that looked like nothing so much as disapproving eyes, glaring askance on the sins of the burghers that toiled in its grim shadow. The gargoyles set at the corners of the tower were crudely sculpted and left much to the imagination of the admirer: at one moment they might be a pike, the next a raven, then a wolf, or, in late afternoon, a savage boar. (In the chapel the religious statuary led to speculations equally colorful: the eyes of the infant Jesus, in late afternoon, caught a piercing shaft of pale light—which, far from conveying an image of serenity and piety, gave the Christ Child a hollow and sinister glare that made the hour a particularly popular time for confession.)

A generation later a clan of berserkers laid siege to the water tower. It was the intention of the berserkers’ prince to restore the kreis to the kinfolk of the deposed druids’ gods. After all, his ancestors had resisted the Romans; what were these Carolingians, in comparison to the showers of fire the Romans had rained down? Who was this Hebrew God that fancied himself beyond the reach of Thor and Jupiter?

However, as is wont to happen, the chieftain of the berserkers was tamed by a lady: a nun, a sister of fifteen summers that knelt in prayer—her bared shoulders thrown back defiantly, her bosom warmed and illuminated by the flames of combat—her eyes narrowed to turquoise slits from which exquisite tears drooled over her fine cheeks—her delicate hands clenching a wooden rosary that sported some semblance of the Crucified Christ dangled, precipitously, over a smoldering roof beam, her coif boldly cast into the mud while her unbound golden hair cascaded to the middle of her supple spine. So smitten with the fearless piety of the girl was the berserker that he forswore his filial appetites at once and converted, on the spot, to Roman Catholicism. Thus, the Church was preserved by a virgin—although not the Virgin that the Church would have preferred. Nevertheless, the devotion showed to the virgin in question was genuine—not the superficial devotion given to the other Virgin by converts of questionable sincerity. This devotional dichotomy was not lost on the more cynical (and shrewd) elements of the clergy and those opposed to the clergy, and Elsterberg’s wards thus gained a notoriety in Mainz and Rome that earned them scrutiny inconsistent with so insignificant an outpost of the Empire.

The architectural weakness that had allowed the maiden’s sortie was a gulley leading into the cellar of the tower, draining the wellspring—narrow, but of a diameter that might allow other eager and limber berserkers to eel their way into the cloaca of the tower. The new proprietors saw that this was corrected, and it was circulated that Elsterberg was now impregnable. Not long afterwards the erstwhile nun bore her amorous captor the first of a dozen children, while the gentleman himself was elevated to a bishopric. Such conveniences were not unknown in those rustic early years of the Empire. The fateful rosary became an icon, preserved in a wooden chest, undisturbed until it was forgotten by succeeding generations, the chest secreted, as it was, among a jumble of other historical detritus in an alcove of the dungeon. (The spring was bricked in the center of the tower’s gut; half-a-dozen iron-reinforced oaken doors—locked from the chamber of the well—obscured tunnels that coiled into the native rock below the keep. It was in one of these that the rosary of the first Baroness of Elsterberg was ensconced.) The new champion of the Christian empire now worked his sword and axe against his erstwhile allies, and, one by one, the pagans were brought into the stern fold of the Welfs.

Time went by, and by, and by, as it does, and a generation after the last person that might have had some personal connection to the youngest grandchild of the oldest man that had any racial knowledge of the berserker-turned-bishop and his nun-turned-baroness wife, the heir-contemporary of the Keep of Elsterberg (as the place had come to be known) excavated more blocks from the old pagan temples and, using the hard-packed snow as his road and the ox-drawn sleighs as his conveyance, he transported the huge bricks into a position on the knoll neighboring the Keep, and there he built a second tower identical to the first. He then constructed a bridge that connected the two towers, and on top of the bridge he erected a hall, with tall narrow windows that admitted meager light into a foyer wherein a visiting dignitary might admire trophies of the hunt: aurochs, bison, reindeer, stag, chamois, boar, wild sheep and goats and the huge brown bears and wolves that haunted the Empire in those romantic times. The foyer had several fire pits, and a few crude stoves and ovens.

On the whole, the two towers and their unifying element had a noble aspect, and the nobility of those that presided there was—with a few colorful exceptions—unquestioned by religious or secular authorities. Let the Welf and the Waiblingen squabble elsewhere; in this sanctum of chivalrous tradition even cats and dogs passed one another with a courteous acknowledgement of the whisker and tail. The violence of the place’s origin sufficed for a hundred generations beyond, anyway; for now, let us bow and give over the path: we may meet one another in circumstances where such petty trifles should not prevent us from baring our blades (or fangs) against a common antagonist!

The designer of the second tower (and the hall) was named (by his doting parents and his adoring wife) Uwe: Baron von Elsterberg. Among his retainers he was well-regarded, although several neighboring lords—upon remarking his raptorial nose and close-set eyes—called the Lord of Elsterberg Schnabel. The knight of Elsterberg gained this dubious nickname during a boar hunt; he was unaware of the cause of the snickering at the time. By the time he was made cognizant of it the unflattering title had been repeated so often that it had entered popular circulation—even among his peasants. Uwe von Elsterberg regretted the nickname, and his bride grew livid upon each occasion during which it was repeated in her presence.

The Baroness von Elsterberg herself was a nubile Frankish creature (twelve years younger than her husband) with hips too supple to tolerate the demands of child birth—a characteristic that overjoyed the Baron’s father (a lusty old boar-of-a-veteran) and inspired bitter remonstrations from the Baroness’s mother-in-law (an equine and jealous creature that profoundly resented the hungry approval with which her ursine and manly husband looked upon the Athenian appearance of his son’s little wife.) They had but a single child between them—that being Uwe—although more than one local maiden and youth of the peasantry bore a titillating resemblance to the Elder of Elsterberg. The notoriety of his romantic appetites added to the estimation in which this Champion of Christ was regarded among his peers. The opinions of this generation were to lead to great difficulties.

*

Why—my dear! Uwe cried out in dismay one morning in early May of the year 1166. His wife’s weeping broadened to a general expression of distress, manifested by roughly brushing his comforting hands from her convulsing shoulders. Whatever is the matter?

All is the matter, the maiden sobbed, disdaining the handkerchief Uwe proffered in preference to the sleeve of her green flaxen gown, which she dampened with the effluence of her limpid eyes and her fine nose. "I can bear no more of your mother’s insults! Each time she passes me, she remarks upon my skinniness, my boniness and my bloodlessness! She calls me ‘frog,’ and ‘eel,’ and suggests that I am somehow keeping her from a grandchild! How I pray, for a child; I first prayed for a child, that I might love it, and adore it, and nurse it; now I pray for a child, that it might still the mockery and the scolding of that harpy that is your mother!

"Oh, my dear; I know that I ought to love her as if she was my own dear mother (God rest her soul!) But I must confess to you (if you have not already guessed or been informed) that I hate her, and despise her…and…worse yet: I hate and despise this child that is denied me, for causing me all of this persecution! And your father! He pinches me and prods me like the dough of a gingerbread mannequin! I dread his coming, not in the least because his wretched wife looks upon me as the cause of his amours, not the victim…Oh, forgive me…and: further: I hate the neighbors, with all of their jovial and bawdy advice; I hate their leers, and their sneers…and I h-h-hate when they say Schnabel!..."

My dear! Uwe replaced his hands on her shoulders and again she jerked away. We must pray… he offered desperately.

Pray! she gasped wrathfully. Pray, Uwe? Oh, how I have prayed, she continued bitterly. I have prayed to God until my knees bled and my fingers grew numb while they wore my rosary to the texture of an icicle (and I felt as much warmth from it!) I have prayed to God, and I have prayed to…to…

In great dismay at his young wife’s misery and his helplessness to counter it, Uwe ordered his horse saddled and, alone, he rode into the trees surrounding his familial castle. Finally, he dismounted, and, leaving the horse to graze unbridled, and unencumbered by the saddle (which Uwe also removed) Uwe himself walked in the direction opposite the horse had taken, finally settling on a rock and peering into the rill below. All at once he heard a voice:

"Corpus Juris Civilis! How the cardinals gnashed their teeth—but how Barbarossa laughed when I dictated it to him! Ah!...trout, freshly grilled; wine, bloating the colon of a Billy goat; cheese, frosted with the mold of springtime; bread, baked in the ovens of buxom Saxon wenches (a good crisp slap on the bum, a chorus or two of song, a kiss, perhaps…how generous they become! All butt, bust and glorious gold hair!); above all, the good opinion of my emperor! Hah! Corpus Juris Civilis! How the fine and pious—hah! A spy! How now, my good fellow; why so glum, on so gay an occasion?"

Uwe regarded the speaker with wonder: the orator was barely three feet in height, but dressed with the elegance of a courtier. About his thick neck the creature proudly sported a gold chain, from which an imperial seal dangled. What gay occasion is that? the knight of Elsterberg asked warily.

Why—my exile, of course! the dwarf exulted.

Upon what pretext are you exiled? Uwe could not stay his curiosity.

"Corpus Juris Civilis," the dwarf sighed blissfully.

You reference this for the third time, Uwe said suspiciously. "What does it mean—Corpus Juris Civilis?"

You are a Waiblingen? the dwarf eyed Uwe.

I am, the knight rejoined.

In that case, it means that the Pope and his cronies are greatly reduced in the authority that they have taken to flaunting on every available occasion—and many occasions that ought not to have been available. It was suggested to me by a court physician—a Jew of Byzantium (splendid chess player!) that I remove myself from their confessional schedule ere they separate my head from my poor shoulders.

I don’t follow you, Uwe sat down on a log, which put him close to eye level with the dwarf.

I didn’t invite you to sit, the dwarf said with a complete absence of reproach. But now that you have, it seems only decent of me to invite you to my humble table. Now, sir: I represent the opinion that while for the moment the Pope may have Barbarossa’s ear, Barbarossa has the Empire’s sympathy—the Gaul no less than the Magyar. I stood on a stool next to him first at Frankfurt, and then at Pavia; he is feared and adored by all—while the Pope is more widely feared than our emperor, but adored, I can confidently confide, by no one.

You are the Emperor’s jester?

I was his scribe, the dwarf announced proudly. Among does, I am a dwarf—but next to a badger, I am a giant. Next to an asp, I am larger yet. Next to a hornet, I am of such profound dimension that I exceed the confines of geometry. Now, sir, I ask you: among these four—the doe, the badger, the asp and the hornet—which does an ordinary man fear least? The tall, shy, elegant one! And which does a reasonable man fear most? The noisiest, smallest and most virulent one!

Am I, too, well advised to fear you, Lord Advisor? Uwe chuckled a little.

I think not, the dwarf reflected. I am here to indulge a poor soul, smitten with sadness, whose plaintive entreaties compelled me to forswear my intention of seeking the audience of Byzantium. I hope that I am not too late to offer my services…in such circumstances I have often observed the desperate to rush madly into a contract without considering the legal minutiae …But you, sir! There is a great sadness in your face, lord. Come: repay me for this humble repast with your confidence.

An hour later the horse wandered back; the stallion brought his great nose down to investigate the dwarf, who with a motion almost too quick for the eye to follow flicked away some troubling gnats and flies. The horse rumbled his thanks and the dwarf responded with a desultory syllable. It seems to me, the dwarf reflected. "It seems to me that the problem may not rest with your wife at all—don’t