Ghastly shepherding accomplished, the piper at last lifts the flute from his lips. Satisfied that he has done the deed as mercifully as possible, he stares at the site of the rat waterfall, seeing them still, in phosphene tracers as he pinches closed his lids. What's the point, he wonders, the purpose of wisdom's chill deliverance? He smiles grimly and turns back to town, already knowing the furtive, grubby little coda of accounting awaiting him there.
Per expectation, no grateful town lines up to douse him in ticker tape back inside Hamelin's circumvallation. He is met under the eastern gate by an ensemble of dazed gazes and several of those questions that resent having to be answered. "What the hell you put in that music? Packs a kick, don't it?" "Say, yer not from around these parts, are ya?" And instantly, without an interval for decent shame, the community reneges. "You see that? Those varmints plumb up and spontaneously offed themselves. Just like they knew what they had coming."
The piper shakes his head sadly, having anticipated this expedience. No sooner does the well water stop festering with floating carcasses, the wattle holes cease breeding disease, the stored grain quit transubstantiating into hard little feces, no sooner is the town snatched from the incisors of hell, once again spared what is known locally as the Youngest Day, than folks habituate to believing that destiny meant all along to lift the curse of damnation before it became a real hassle.
The scope of salvation is too great for gratitude. By the time its savior reaches the packhouse district, Hamelin has revamped the eyewitness histories. The town is now, has always been, and ever shall be no less than steadily, appropriately blessed.
The thought flits idly through him: he should go into another line of work, one that makes more allotment for the moral caliber of his trading partners. Say, highwayman or molten lead wholesaler. But he puts aside the consolations of philosophy and heads to his doomed date with the town exchequer.
"We want you to know how deeply the council appreciates what you have done for the citizens of this town as well as the environs as a whole. The necessary paperwork on your disbursement will take a while to process. In the meantime, we'd like to present you with this token of Hamelin's sincerest recognition…"
The piper takes a room, mit Frühstück, above the Meat Hall. Once a week, during the open grievance hour, he petitions the council for his back pay. Each week they beg him to be patient; one needs to understand that all the town funds are not in ready assets. For a sum as enormous as the one they must pay the piper, certain long-term indemnities have to be called in. No business on earth can pay out 90 percent of its net worth overnight. Why, that would be liquidating to the point of evaporation.
After a spell of outrageous deference, the piper comes to the officers with a vague ultimatum. The exchequer, paranoid that the man might jeopardize Hamelin's standing with the infant Hansa, assures him that they will have the amount ready, in full, by the beginning of the next fiscal quarter. But come the appointed date, there is yet another unforeseeable delay. The piper stands at the back of the town council chamber and lowers his head. "I see," he says politely. "No, really. I fully understand." He takes his leave of the Rathaus, certain he has done everything in his power to act in good faith.
The next Sunday, when most of the town's adults are still in church, the piper settles his Gastzimmer bill and packs his satchel. Then, for the last time in this locale, in this lifetime, he takes up his post in the Marktplatz — a monklike figure in motley, legs together, pipe to his lips — and begins to concertize. The very first air from under the mouthpiece, waves of compression and release, maps a country, a republic of staggering rightness. For those only recently banished from the place, the music loosens a visceral, recollected purpose. Children out knee-deep, wet in spring's games, stumbling by gradual intervals and small mother-may-I steps, suddenly luck onto the one universal chord, up close, tangent to everything.
His long, self-spinning line is sleet against a windowsill, the seduction of tree-branch rustics interrogating the pane, luring one out of doors. Implied interior harmonies are fraught with hunger, parched. Old friends whom you yet remember — everything about them except their names — stand rhyming in the dark, haunting the half-timbered alleyways. They gather under the overhangs, too late at night, refusing to come in when called for bed. The sound is birdsong, batsong, angel, extinct pterosaur. It is the shush of an envelope slit open, the pulse from breath half a pillow distant. Brass bands in the gazebo, martial melancholy airs, high sopranos up in the choir loft, a scream of pain from the next hospital bed, stubborn harmonicas on both sides of a violence-stilled front, a beast trapped under a bushel, the tick of the second hand, the abiding shouts of an emptying city heard from miles off, the overtone series of night silence.
The flute does the work of a light dawn dew, revealing that every square foot of the familiar, commerce-stunted world is, in fact, covered in florid web. The tune's contour traces no less than that rapture that recourseless minors are told to wait for in all bedtime tales. And at its first teasing ear-stroke, everyone who is yet ill-advisedly a child spills out the front door, cocks a curious head, then breaks out laughing in recognition. Oh! This old guy. What took you so long?
The cadre of adults, however, are universally frozen in place. Churchgoing, field-mowing, crockery-stowing, they hear nothing, least of all their young skipping clandestinely away to see who else in this world can possibly know the melody that has been plaguing their heads since — when? — last night, the life before, twenty-four centuries at my door. Every battered, conscripted day laborer, the devil nightly Wed out of him, every manhandled mug under the magical cutoff age, takes to this melody like a new soul to the amniotic bath.
The youngest of them follow it more clearly than they as yet follow speech. A tiny blond girl with bruises down the length of each tube-worm thigh begins to sing a descant. Another, perhaps twelve, her flesh harder, her father-inflicted running sores more secret and circumspect, starts to twirl a tempo. She sets off others, mad bodies spinning reckless Ptolemaic epicycles through a market that fills with children aligning to the sound like filings to lodestone's invisible rose.
The whole carnival consolidates in a subslice of time, in the moment between one frozen adult's footstep and the next. Children march into the square banging and blowing and beating on makeshift drums and fifes of their own devising. In those where music has been stillborn, strangled blue in the bloody birthing sheets, the cord of melody twisted around the infant neck, song now frantically rough-houses free in the open. Rhythms race the way little dead sibs do, making up for lost time on their one released night of the year.
Solo flute sparks a tremendous tagalong chorus counted out in rope skipping, beam swinging, seesawing, clacker clapping, acrobating: all the manic, oscillating metronomes of native idiom. Voices from all corners — calls and responses in the highest registers — take up the tune, improvise lyrics, lay down an obbligato above the piper's air:
How many miles must we go?
Hush, baby; play on. No one knows.
Will we make it there by candlelight?
Maybe one day; never tonight.
A boy who celebrated his seventh birthday underground, in salt passages no wider than his emaciated body, reverts to a game of fighting tops with a boy who last year had to kill his crazed father with a backhand bottle gash. Girl slaves kneel down to jackstones or rummy bones. Others gavotte about with tiny babies on their hips, real mothers playing with last year's dolls. A half-Mongol mongrel tribe ride imaginary hobbyhorses, battle on piggyback, cross stick weapons, everywhere singing. Some dress up in tablecloths and shawls. Others tug rope or tag or hide. The market erupts in celebration of every child's pastime yet devised, and several still waiting their invention. Each one is a step in a vast, improvised, composite dance.