And I like a fool had to go and testify to the truth. The Flounder advised me to expose the fraud. "My son, it's your duty to speak out. I know how devoted you are to your Mestwina, but you will have to sacrifice her. For the first time you lazy, unconscious Pomorshians, who have never done anything to prove you existed, have really taken action; with a political murder you enter history, you set a classical
date — what eloquent ambiguity: he was killed on a Good Friday! — and already you're trying to wriggle back into a state of Stone Age innocence. You stand idly by while the glory goes to those barbarian bandits the Prussians. Too cowardly to confess like men. Go to them and say aloud: Yes, you Christian knights! It was one of us, Mestwina, our queen. He desired her, he lusted after her. She killed him to make our people conscious of their historic role. Make a saint of Adalbert, if you will, but we of Mestwina's tribe stand unbowed, like men. We don't want the cross. Our goddess is Awa. She is related to Demeter, Frigga, Cybele, Semele. Great figures, every one of them. Every one of them throve long before your cute little Mother of God. In short, we've got religion already!"
I spoke to the Bohemian prelate and the Polish knights as steadfastly as the Flounder had counseled, but without the provocative vocabulary. I can't remember asking Mestwina for her approval of my history-charged confession. She might have been generous enough to consent. But more probably she would have laughed at me, called me a fool, thrashed me when I talked back, and to get me out of the way sent me under guard to far-off beaches to look for amber.
Secretly I went to the Bohemian knights. They listened impassively but recorded only Mestwina's blasphemies against the crucified God and that part of my confession which showed her to be a still-active priestess of Awa. That fitted in with her drunkenness. And it fitted in with her habit of chewing fly agaric both raw and dried. After all, she had killed Adalbert, while drunk or on a muscarine trip.
The next day the Bohemian knights, presided over by the prelate Ludewig, condemned Mestwina to death by beheading. For us they ordered immediate forced baptism, but continued (undeterred by my confession) to maintain that Adalbert had been killed by the heathen Prussians. It would have been difficult if not impossible to canonize the bishop if he had been murdered by a woman, for according to the papal canonization bull, no one can become a martyr through the act of a woman. After all, the bishop's Bohemian retinue knew that Adalbert had tried several times to mortify his carnal lust inside Mestwina. The Polish knights whispered jokes about the pious Bohemian's penetrating technique of
conversion. If so much as a suggestion of Adalbert's pleasures on the bed of leaves had found its way into the canonization file, we can rest assured that there would have been one saint the fewer.
In his testimony before the Women's Tribunal, the Flounder justified his bad advice with neo-Scholastic eloquence. "It was quite in the spirit of the Hegelian dialectic, dear ladies. I, too, regret deeply that in those days women were denied the right to produce martyrs. I said to myself: From a subjective point of view a certain Mestwina may have bashed the bishop's head in with cast iron, but objectively, before the judgment seat of history, it had to be men, the heathen Prussians. And so, quite logically and only in apparent defiance of the facts, all the historical sources give the Prussians credit for making church history on this occasion."
It was supposed to have been done near Tolkmit. With a wooden oar, which later became a relic. Don't make me laugh.
What next, friend Flounder? It's all down in black and white: the rutting roar of false and authentic elk bulls, what the character with the boar's-tusk helmet did to me behind the gorse bush, how I sang to Christian knights. So am I exculpated? Is my guilt any lighter? And the rest of my shame? Intricately tied packages that want to be unknotted. Because after we were forcibly baptized as Christians, our sin only increased. And to Ilsebill I said, "With that Dorothea, who suffered from migraine in the High Gothic period as you do at present, I often knelt penitently on peas."
There she comes with blood on her dress. Which I don't want to remember. But I must.
The Second Month
How we became city dwellers
At the time when Mestwina, drunk but with unerring aim, struck down Bishop Adalbert, the region of the Vistula estuary was inhabited, apart from us old established Pomor-shians on the left bank and the Prussians who had settled on the right bank of the river, only by vestiges of peoples that had passed through: Gepidic Goths, who had been pretty well stirred together with us Pomorshians, and Saxons who had fled from the missionary zeal of the Franks. Slavic Poles trickled in from the south. And the Norse Varangians raided us whenever they felt like it. They built forts to ward off Prussian incursions but were unable to keep the Prussians from settling to the west of the river valley. The name of the Prussian chieftain was Jagel, a precursor form of the Lithuanian Jagello. And that is why, later on, when the city was founded, the hill came to be known as the Hagelsberg. As early as Mestwina's day the Varangians had disguised themselves as Pomorshian fishermen and murdered Jagel in
his robber baron's castle. But not until the Polish duke Boleslaw Chrobry threw the Prussians back to the right bank of the Vistula was Varangian replaced by Polish rule. For we became subjects soon after Mestwina slew Adalbert, whom the Polish duke had enlisted as a propagandist, and subjects we remained.
Boleslaw had the wonder-working corpse taken to Gniez-no, where it is held in honor to this day. Our territory was elevated to the status of province and named Pomerania— Pomarzanie in Old Polish — after us, because we lived by the sea. With friendly condescension, the pious Boleslaw called us Pomorshians "Kashubs." We were allowed to appoint our own governors, who, though they all harked back to Mest-wina's womb, soon learned masculine forms of authority by observing others. Their daughters and daughters' daughters continued to hand down mother right, but only in secret.
The first of our princes to become known by name was Sambor, who founded the Oliva Monastery and endowed it with privileges — exemptions from custom duties, the right to collect tithes. His son, Subislaw, was sickly and died young, whereupon his uncle, Mestwin I, became prince of Kashubian Pomerania. He barely had time to make his daughter, Dam-roka, an abbess, and with her at its head found the Convent of Zuckau, where just six hundred years later Amanda Woyke directed the farm hands' kitchen of the Royal Prussian State Farm, before the Danes invaded Pomerania and took possession of it for ten years, at the end of which Mestwin's son, Swantopolk, sent them home and appointed himself duke of Pomerania, which displeased the Polish duke Lesko. In truly masculine style the two dukes fought a battle to the death near Gniezno, which was won by Swantopolk and cost Lesko his life. But in the course of his unsuccessful warfare against the still-heathen Prussians, who would not yet recognize the Vistula as a borderline, the now independent Kashubian duke made the same mistake as the Poles: he, too, called the Teutonic Knights, who found themselves unemployed at the end of the Crusades, from Palestine to Kashubia. They came and made a clean sweep of everything Prussian. In the end they defeated Swantopolk several times and took his firstborn son, Mestwin II, prisoner. Set free, Mestwin allied himself with the dukes of Brandenburg against his brother and