Don’t get the wrong idea, but yes, Traveler, I fell for him.
GENTLEMEN ERRANT (Iulus)
Much of the next month was spent in expeditions to gather up Father’s manuscript. I climbed the tops of trees, Mother slashed her way with a saber through beargrass and thistlesage, platoons of hired hands were sent six abreast across the fields, while Catspaw and Öscar tracked with a pair of Chetvorah. The brambles dripped with our bloody dew.
Some pages were found floating on the stagnant face of the Mze, others plastered on the gnarled boles of great oaks, still others nailed like theses on a nest of thorns. The black velvet curtain in the study had been stripped of its quotes, the neat piles of manuscript scattered, the chess piece paperweights overturned. The vortex had even turned pictures to the wall. Clothesline was strung throughout the den, and every available paperclip and safety pin had been recruited to dangle dry the smeared pages. About a third of the manuscript appeared to be lost. For the first time in history, dogs were barred from his tower suite, and Father was in a low mood.
After one of these expeditions, our disconsolate crew was seated on the front stairs when a shabby closed carriage appeared through the lime trees at the end of the drive, driven by a not-so-excellent specimen of Skopje in a wide-brimmed hat, transporting a man dressed in tête de nègre and accompanied by what appeared to be two equally black bear cubs. Thinking it was perhaps a rich gypsy with his road show, Father reached in his pocket for the smallest change, then squinted in disbelief as the Professor and his charges hove into view.
No words were exchanged as the Professor dismounted and the black balls of fluff bounded out and immediately began to tear at each other’s throats on the gravel, a fight beyond anything witnessed in our animal world. They couldn’t have been more than six months old, their teeth and claws hardly more than cartilage, yet strings of blood and spittle flew in the air, and from a brief glimpse of the set of the jaws, Father recognized a fight to the death among embryos was ensuing, and that no human hand, no matter how courageous, could separate them. The Professor himself seemed paralyzed. Mother mobilized me — luckily enough, the garden hose had been laid out that morning across the drive like a mamba, and the jet of cold water broke the dogs’ rage, shocking them into a civilized stupor and leaving them sprawled in the gravel at a third of their former size, the soaked black fur settled about their still-soft skeletons. With almond eyes they regarded the gashes in each other’s throats.
“Sisters?” Father asked cheerfully, and the Professor nodded curtly. “Chows?” Father inquired..
“Chow chows,” the Professor adumbrated..
“Yours?”
“The Prinzessin’s royal stock — a gift. The very finest. I couldn’t be prouder.”
Father refused to touch the dogs or try to ingratiate himself in any way. He instructed Öscar to isolate them and dress their wounds.
Both men were still inwardly seething from the Professor’s proffer made and refused at the Black Dog, and Father curtly waved his confrere inside, apparently not wishing to lose control in front of the family.
The Count’s visit before the storm had, as always, been brief and to the point. Count Zich was the proudest man in Cannonia, his ancestors clan chieftains and margraves when the Hohenzollerns were still goatherds. He was greatly respected throughout the country not for his wealth, station, or political power, but because he was a world-class pianist who only performed for his friends at parties, never in public. He had just come from one performance, apparently, his stiff dress shirt protruding from his lintwhite duster, smelling of rockrose, veal, and lavender water. His still-dark hair was slicked back, but his sidechops were as white as his starched shirtcuffs. His soft boots were of the same yellow leather as the fringed harness of his grays. And his malacca cane was topped with the ivory figure of a defecating mountain goat. The Count’s immense composure relaxed everyone. He always took his seat facing east, where his ancestors had been kings. Ainoha lay on the chaise lounge in pantaloons à la turk, her long clay pipe nested between her breasts. Father was bolt upright in his favorite chair, smoking a straight pipe but letting it droop sideways from his mouth, as if it were curved. And even the dogs, feigning sleep, had their ears cocked for what was to come.
It seemed that the Count’s vast network of spies, whose main brief was to keep his friends out of trouble, had alerted him to certain delinquencies in the tax rolls of Semper Vero, and while Zich had covered these with his own funds, he thought it best to personally urge a sober retrenchment upon his camarade. As an afterthought, he mentioned the fact that as Europe and Asia had broken the peace, funds for a general mobilization might require some two thousand million imperials. And then as a second afterthought, he opened the monogrammed leather briefcase which never left his side, revealing a gold telegraph key, a small ivory composing keyboard of one and a half octaves, as well as a piano roll, and with incredible nonchalance, his beautiful, beringed hands tapped out a precautionary message in C-minor to the army (Caparison the horses, lower all border toll gates) with a coded variant to the king at Umfallo. Then, swearing everyone to secrecy, he confided the latest coup of his intelligence service, the shocking information that the Americans were about to outlaw drinking! this ominous news producing general incredulity.
The Count was not surprised when his hosts expressed little anxiety about a potential conflict. Indeed, the attitude of everyone he had talked with, including his ministers, seemed to be one of inevitability, even enthusiasm. When he mentioned that the Russians might be drawn into an invasion, Ainoha said only, “Well, let them.”
As he took his leave, Count Zich asked Felix to use his influence with the gentry to prevent them from withdrawing funds from the savings banks. Should a war ultimatum be necessary, he would ask him to journey to Malaka and make his independent judgment available to King Peveny.
“This thing could be started by a bird’s chirp,” he confided. The grays fairly tore down the drive.
That evening, abed in Mother’s suite, Felix felt gaseous as lightning struck about his heart. But the thought of summoning Dr. Pür and being in his debt was too much to bear, and indeed, the small stroke he suffered seemed to calm him for the morning’s horrific discovery, when he found his white book wound tight about the blackened whale ribs of his estate.
After organizing our battalions of woe to run down his papers, Felix locked himself in the den for a month, admitting only Öscar with victuals, drink, ink, twine, and the daily quota of rescued manuscript. He leafed back through his Chronik and did the sums. Count Zich was quite right of course: there was not a liquid farthing to his name, and even after deducting advertising and meals, the training project, begun so innocuously with the advertisement in the Sunday Tagblatt a year ago, had through its cash drain forced him into general default. He asked himself what god, what madness had brought him to Cannonia, but did not have the strength to actually write this in the margins.
As one should know by now, blows of fate had the opposite effect upon Father as on most people. His mountains did not blow their tops, but rather fell ruined into themselves. His reaction was a sort of reverse hysteria, a chilling focus and self-control, the eerie calm of the sniper, and his abandoning of projects was most meticulous. He studied the Chronik for some days, arriving at a fair value for Semper Vero and all its dependencies, and detailing each asset, put the sheaf in the secret drawer holding the burnt-edged half-scraps of the Professor’s partially discarded lucubrations.