They camped near our settlement. They had brought provisions in oxcarts. But before they had even launched their missionary activity, their Polish cook died on them. After preliminary talks — with both parties exchanging what they had — our cook (and hence priestess), Mestwina, offered to cook for the bishop and his retinue. Our contribution consisted of mangel-wurzels, Glumse, mutton, grits, mushrooms, honey, and fish.
Neither Fat Gret nor Amanda Woyke was the first to fold her bare fuzz-blond arms below her bosom and survey the table with a stern to benevolent look. In this same attitude my Mestwina watched Bishop Adalbert after serving up his dinner. She held her head slightly tilted, and her expression was one of expectancy. But Adalbert did not praise the dishes he liked; he ate as though tormented by disgust. He poked listlessly about, he chewed with distaste, as though every bite were at once a temptation and a harbinger of hell's torments. Not that he found fault with anything in particular or, confronted with Pomorshian cookery, missed his Bohemian cuisine; his disgust was universal. (You can't imagine, Ilsebill, what a repulsive sourpuss I was toward the end of the tenth century a.d. Because in principle I was this Adalbert of Prague, who gagged on his food and seemed to have been born without a palate.)
And yet Mestwina had fallen for the gaunt missionary. She, too, wanted to convert. When she looked over her folded
arms and saw him chewing, her face flushed, and the flush rose to the part in her hair. For she hoped that her heathen cookery might give him a foretaste, perhaps not of her conversion to Catholicism but at least of her love, for love him she did — with a love that ran hot and cold.
For Adalbert she baked bacon flatbread. For Adalbert she stirred honey into millet porridge. For him there was sheep's-milk cheese with smoked cod liver. For and against Adalbert she cooked (after singeing the bristles) a whole boned boar's head with roots and morels. Then Mestwina put the head in a bowl and covered it with its broth. In the January frost the broth soon hardened into jelly. (The bishop's mercenaries had speared the wild boar in the endless wooded hills of the interior.)
And toward noon, when the bishop wished to partake of a simple meal with the envoys of the king of Poland-Wladis-law was pressing for the conversion of the Prussians-Mest-wina, for and against Adalbert, overturned the bowl and dumped the boar's head on the table in such a way that though surrounded by jelly it could be seen for what it was. The famished envoys delivered it from the quivering jelly. But because Mestwina was looking on in her expectant attitude (over folded arms), Adalbert had to put a pious interpretation on their greediness: "One would think Satan in person had got into that jelly!" So the five of them vanquished Satan, and the bishop, as the standing Mestwina could see, had difficulty in displaying his usual disgust. The prelate Ludewig was encouraged to crack a joke or two about Satan's excellent flavor; but Adalbert did not laugh.
By then the zealous missionary had been with us for weeks. We Pomorshians were still heathen, though I, during my time as a shepherd, carved linden wood into handy little Blessed Virgins-who, to be sure, had three breasts under their drapery. (Take my word for it, Ilsebill; even as a missionary on the one hand and a shepherd on the other, I remained an artist.)
And once when Mestwina, who lived with us in the Wicker Bastion on Fisherman's Island in the middle of the Mottlava, was making fish soup for the bishop from five pop-
eyed codfish heads, her necklace of uncut amber tore just as she was taking the heads, which were about to disintegrate, out of the broth. As she bent over the steaming kettle, the waxed string came open and slid unaided over the rounded nape of her neck. Though Mestwina raised her hand quickly and tried to catch hold of the open string, nevertheless nine or seven pieces of amber, pierced (by me) with hot wire, slipped into the pot, where they dissolved in the foaming soup and gave the Christian Lenten fare the pagan strength which has resided in amber since the earliest times. Its effect so transformed, nay, revolutionized, the chaste Adalbert that no sooner had he spooned up the soup than he clutched my Mestwina like a madman and kept at it all that night (which had already begun to fall) and the following day. Time and time again the ascetic penetrated her flesh with his by now utterly unrepentant gimlet. Just as a Pomorshian might have done, but with more religious zeal and dialectical contradiction, he exhausted himself inside her, all the while mumbling his Church Latin, as though he had discovered a new way of pouring out the Holy Spirit. For we of the Wicker Bastion had not yet been baptized.
That brought dependence. From then on the bishop ordered Mestwina's amber-seasoned fish soup once a week. No wish could have been easier to satisfy. Never, even in the winter, was there any shortage of fish. Along with oatmeal, barley and manna porridge, root vegetables, and mutton, fish was the staple food of the Pomorshians. That was why we had recently taken to worshiping a certain fish along with the traditional earth goddess Awa. And Mestwina — as cook and priestess — sacrificed to the god Ryb, who was flat of body, flat of head, and crooked of mouth; in other words, he looked very much like the talking Flounder.
True, there was strife among the people of the Pomorshian coast when, flouting the women's will, the fishermen put through the cult of the flounder-headed god, but Mestwina amalgamated the new cult with traditional rites. She knew of legends to the effect that every spring the flounder god shared a bed made half of rushes and half of forest leaves with the three-breasted Awa. True, said Mestwina, they often quarreled, but Awa wouldn't mind if a small share in the
cult were devoted to her fish bedfellow. After all, he had been useful in his way, providing for full nets and calm seas; it was he who appeased the Vistula in time of flood, and he who had endowed amber with certain powers.
This was why the children of the Wicker Bastion carried sturgeon and codfish heads, the head of the silvery Vistula salmon, and the venerable gray head of the sheatfish on long branches cut from the willows that grew along the banks of the Radune, in a procession that followed the banks of the dikeless river mouths to the sea. And in the lead they carried crooked-mouthed, slant-eyed flounder heads. The idea was for the fish — the pike and the perch, the bass and the cod — to see the rivers and the Baltic Sea once again, and for the young god Ryb to be worshiped and appeased in his flounder form. (Even then the legend was going around that the Flounder — one had only to call him — would grant wishes and give advice, that he was especially devoted to fishermen and most remarkably intelligent.) "Flounder, O Flounder!" cried the children of the Wicker Bastion, festooned with old nets and rotting fish traps. And even after Mestwina's death, when they turned us into Christians, we continued to be good heathens. At Easter time — why not at Easter time? — after lashing ourselves with willow switches on the bank of the Radune, we showed the fish the rivers and the sea in a solemn procession, led by a priest with the cross and six choir boys with little bells. Incense was provided by ground amber, swung in bowls. Pomorshian prayers for a good catch were chanted. But also in evidence were the taut pigs' bladders that the girls tied on, three each, in memory of Awa. Only the litany was Catholic. For the dead eyes of the fish glittered unbaptized. Congealed eyes raised heavenward. Mouths ready to bite. Pectoral fins spread-eagled.