DWARF IN THE TOWER. Scarbo delivered his answer at the appointed time, and now daily he climbed the turning stairway that led to the private chamber at the top of the tower, where the Princess increasingly secluded herself from the cares of the castle to work her loom, brood over her fate, and await the news of the margrave in the dungeon. As the dwarf ascended the sun-streaked dark stairway he would rest from time to time at a wedge-shaped recess with an arrow loop, pulling himself up on the ledge and clasping his arms around his raised knees as he stared out at the river winding into the distance or the little city behind its meandering walls. In the long spaces between recesses the air darkened to blackness; sometimes in the dark he heard the rustle of tiny scurrying feet, or felt against his hair the sudden body of a bat. At the top of the stairway he came to a door, illuminated by an oil lamp resting on a corbel set into the wall. He knocked three times, with longish pauses between knocks — the agreed-on signal — and was admitted to a round room filled with sunlight and sky. The light entered through two pairs of tall lancet windows, with trefoil tracery at the top; each pair was set in a wide recess with stone window seats along the sides. On one stretch of wall between the two recesses was a wall painting that showed Tristan and Isolde lying side by side under a tree; from the branches peered the frowning face of King Mark, circled by leaves. The Princess led Scarbo to the pair of window seats overlooking the walled town across the river, and there, sitting across from her and tucking one leg under him, the little man reported the progress of his plan. The crusty old keeper of the dungeon had at first seemed a stumbling block, but had soon revealed his weakness: a lust for glittering things. In return for a single one of the red and yellow and green jewels with which the Princess had filled the dwarf’s pockets — for she had insisted on supplying him with gems instead of buttons or glass — Scarbo had been able to secure the prisoner’s release from the heavy chains that had bound his arms and legs to the wall. In return for a second jewel, the dwarf had earned the privilege of visiting the prisoner alone. It was on the first of these occasions that he had provided the margrave with a long-handled iron shovel, which had proved easy to conceal in the pallet of straw, and which was used by the margrave to dig into the hard earthen floor. And here the tales do not say whether much time had passed, during which the margrave’s bones had healed, or whether the report of his crushed bones had been exaggerated. Impossible for the dwarf to say how long the prisoner would have to dig away at his tunnel, for the route of escape had to pass beneath the entire castle before beginning its immense, unthinkable ascent. The ground was hard, and filled with stones of many sizes. A straight tunnel was out of the question, since the presence of rocks required continual swerves; already the margrave had been forced to a complete stop in one direction and had had to strike out in another. The plan, such as it was, called for the margrave to proceed in the direction of the cliff, where a number of fissures in the rockface were known to lead to small cavelike passages; from the face of the cliff he could make his way undetected down to the river, where a skiff would be waiting — not to take him directly across, which would be far too dangerous, but to move him secretly along the rocky shore until he could cross over safely at a bend in the river concealed from the highest of the castle towers. Once in safety, he would raise two mighty armies. One he would lead against the castle, for he had vowed to annihilate it from the face of the earth; the other, across the river, would march up to the walls of the town and demand entry. If refused, the second army would capture the town and use it to control the river, thereby both preventing supplies from reaching the castle by water, and threatening a second line of attack along the low riverbank upstream from the rocky cliff. For the margrave, in his fury, would let nothing stand in the way of his vengeance. Moreover, the town still paid homage to the Prince as supreme lord; and although the homage was well-nigh meaningless, since the Council had wrested from the Prince every conceivable power and was entirely autonomous, nevertheless the margrave, in his blind rage, viewed the town as an extension of the Prince and thereby worthy of destruction. The flaw in this grand plan was not simply the daily danger of discovery by the keeper, whose ferocious love of glitter would never permit him to ignore an attempted escape by a prisoner in his charge, but also the immense and uncertain depth of the dungeon, which was believed to lie far below the bed of the river. Scarbo had repeatedly tried to count the steps, but always he had broken off long before the end, when the number had passed into the thousands, for a strange hopelessness overcame him as he made the black descent, an utter erosion of belief in possibility; and in addition the steps themselves became blurred and broken after a while, so that it was impossible to distinguish one from another. If the idea of tunneling in a straight line had had to be abandoned in the short view, though not necessarily in the broad and general view, how much more tricky, indeed fantastic, seemed the idea of tunneling gradually upward to a point below the foundation of the castle but above the surface of the river. It would be far easier to thread a needle in the dark. At some point, moreover, the tunnel would come up against the solid rock of the cliff, at which moment a stonecutter’s pickax would have to replace the shovel. But the prisoner was strong, and driven by a fierce thirst for vengeance; it was possible that in five years, in ten years, in twenty years, the plan might reach fruition. Then woe betide the margrave’s enemies, and anyone who tried to stand in his way; for, truth to tell, the margrave was much changed from the elegant, melancholy courtier he had been, and all his force was now concentrated into a fierce and single aim, culminating in a fiery vision of justice. Thus the dwarf, recounting the underground progress of the margrave to the Princess high in her sunny tower, while across from him she sat in silence, now staring at him intently, now turning her head slightly to gaze out the tall windows at a black raven in the blue sky, at the greenish blue riverbank far below, at the little stone town at the bottom of the wooded hillside.
INVASION. Should an enemy decide to attack us, he must first make his way across the dry moat, one hundred feet deep, that surrounds our outer wall. To do this he must begin by filling with earth, rubble, or bundles of logs that portion or portions of the moat he wishes to pass over. Next he must attempt the crossing itself, under cover of one or more wheeled wooden siege towers supplied with scaling ladders and containing archers, assault soldiers, and perhaps a copper-headed battering ram hung from leather thongs. But while the enemy is still engaged in the laborious task of filling up our moat, we ourselves are by no means idle. From behind our battlements we rain down a storm of flaming arrows and gunshot, while from our towers with their stores of catapult artillery we direct upon the enemy a ceaseless fire of deadly missiles. Should an enemy, against all odds, manage to advance to the outer wall, we are prepared to pour down on him, through openings between the corbels of our projecting parapets, rivers of molten lead and boiling oil, while we continue to shoot at men who are climbing highly exposed ladders that rise against our twenty-foot wall; and since, by design, our towers project from the wall, we are able to direct a murderous fire at the enemy’s flank. Should he in all unlikelihood succeed in knocking down or scaling a portion of our outermost wall, he will find himself in a broad trench before a still higher wall, with its higher battlements and towers; and in this trench he will be subject to attack not only from the forty-foot wall looming before him, but from the uncaptured portions of the wall that is now behind him. So inconceivable is it that an enemy in the trench, however numerous, can survive slaughter, that our concern is directed rather at the sappers who, even as we triumph on the battlements, may be digging beneath our walls and towers in an effort to collapse them in one dramatic blow. Therefore we assign soldiers to listen carefully for the sound of underground digging, and we are prepared at any moment to countermine and take possession of an enemy tunnel. Should sappers succeed in toppling a tower or a portion of wall, we are prepared to erect behind it, swiftly, a second wall or palisade, from behind which we can fire upon the invaders as before. Although it is less conceivable that an enemy should penetrate our formidable defenses than that the nine crystalline spheres of the universe should cease to turn, sometimes we dream at night of enemy soldiers scaling our walls. In our dreams they are running through our streets, setting fire to our houses, raping our women and murdering our children, until we can smell the blood flowing among the paving stones, taste the smoke on our tongues, hear the shrieks of the mutilated and dying in a roar of falling and flaming walls and the mad laughter of the margrave as he strides like a giant through the ruins.