•
‘Obey!’ he commanded the wolfhound.
There were only the three of us in his private quarters in our capital’s last redoubt.
As far as the social divide was concerned he might just as well have rebuked us both.
He had named us both ‘Wolf’. ‘In this room,’ he told us grimly, ‘there can be no Trinity!’
(‘Nor a triumvirate,’ I thought. I understood his meaning readily enough. He despised the ineptitude of his field marshals whom he treated like waiters.)
This was his world now – the Boss, his Dog and the Valet – an enemy-infested world that had shrunk to a fortified underground room he was content to inhabit to be spared sight of the grey hopeless distance. Besides, his eyes were intolerant to sunlight.
He glanced at the clock, then spoke again: ‘Remind me once more, Wolf. At what hour did our great Warrior-King leave this world?’
‘Twenty minutes past two, my Master,’ I answered promptly. ‘1786. In the morning.’
(The Bakelite electric clock above the steel bulkhead door read twenty-past-two. Four hours would pass before dawn.) Evidently his challenge was yet another sly test of his memory-man. (‘Cicero kept a slave,’ he had bluntly told me on the day I was appointed. ‘A mnemonist to summon up the names of plotters against Rome. A nomenclator.’)
His love of our nation’s Great Warrior King was only matched by his love of the Roman Empire and its chronicler, Cicero.
I saw him stoop and whisper to the dog: ‘I rather fear, my dear Wolf, that when we have more citizens than soldiers it is time to take my leave.’ (It was evident the news had reached him of mass desertions at the front. As one of my duties, I was expected to keep a tally for the Action List of names marked down for elimination as conspirators, a running total in constant dispute. The Master loathed the patrician class, particularly those who’d retained their nobiliary particle.)
‘Take my leave.’ It was if a sudden chill had caused me to shiver. In his talk of the death of an emperor there was clearly a terrible meaning; an acceptance that saw him bow to his own imminent dissolution. I had a comforting sense that this moment was preordained, an unalterable scheme of events that would culminate in the defeat of his Great Cause.
For how else could it end when it was I, the Master’s valet, who had engineered his fall?
•
You might just wonder how a hexed chicken-bone can be introduced into the royally guarded sick bed of a vegetarian tyrant and Would-be Autocrat of All the World. I will tell you how.
My hair is saxon-flaxen. My eyes are blue. So it is true, of course, that from my infancy I have passed for a member of my Master’s tribe but, then, ever since the Middle Ages, so many of the Newly Converted – the Noviter Conversis – have assumed the mantle of their inquisitors, and adopted their speech; a language which – like the Master’s bull-bellowing-orations – is often merely a turgid and mystical aggregation of words promising nothing, to which his voice easily lends itself.
Such is the inviolable certainty of the Master’s race. Hence his diktat that the beliefs of our Outcast Elect must be reduced to the obscurity of a debased creed deserving of being wiped off the face of the earth.
Yet do our rulers imagine that, following
our distant ancestors’ enforced conversion, the secrets of the Elect were not restored
to us in our cradles even while the recusant Elders perished within their walled
Settlements of Exclusion? Let me confess:
the prepotent words of ancient and secret ordinances, conjurations and
maledictions, still echo in our blood from birth. For I, who had received the slave’s portion, had received a greater gift.
‘As fast as the throbbing progresses,’ the Master had grated, nursing his left hand, ‘as quickly my flesh withers.’ He had cut an abject figure. A pained smile, his face blueish-grey.
He could not have known that my people for centuries have regarded all sleep as a perilous state since the unguarded body is peculiarly open to attack by demon-magic.
That the Master’s vanity could be flattered by my demonic stratagems can be understood only when you consider that many ladies of the arts, particularly young movie starlets, pursued him with shamelessly seductive love letters often clipped to glossy publicity stills of their posing as come-hither ingénues in popular celluloid froth for the masses.
Naturally, I considered it my duty to intercept such importunities.
For it was one of these cris de cœur that lent credence to my subterfuge: ‘I love you, my Emperor, and want to be with you always in the joy of your divine-anointed future. My heart bursts with the ardency of my respect for you, etc.’ The letter with a single rose, its stem embellished with a red silk ribbon, I placed on the pillow of the Master’s bed.
A pullet’s bone had been concealed within the ribbon’s folds, a charm against evil men invested with our most powerful necromancy. I’d performed the prescribed forty-two repetitive adjurations over that hollow bone in which a louse, teased from the wolfhound’s bedding, had been imprisoned.
When the Master uncovered the rose and letter beneath his counterpane, his gaunt cheeks were seen to be singularly flushed in a patchy, unnatural way, yet the tributes remained untouched because that night the profound sleep of beseeched misfortune at once overtook him.
The next morning an early dispatch informed the Master of incalculable casualties on the Eastern Front as his armies retreated pursued by a massive counteroffensive.
•
Ours was once an enslaved people so the Ancients tell us and, from that morning, the ineffaceable suffering in my life – as another Androcles – intensified under the brute I served.
Whereas it is not exactly a case of putting one’s head into a lion’s mouth, it is too near for absolute peace of mind when at close quarters one is required to apply mortician’s greasepaint to the Master’s sunken cheeks to evince a counterfeit bloom.
It was the face not of an individual; it was the face of an entire nation, seen on postage stamps.
That face was now rigid. Sweat beaded his forehead and his limbs pulsed with a sharp acrid smell. A bestial stink.
Day and night, deep below on Sub-level Four, I was caged with this totem. On the increasingly rare occasions he ventured out in his armoured car to view the ruined city, the warning signs that reminded him The Enemy is Listening seemed only to prolong his caged paranoia.
Things come apart precipitately when they are held together by lies. So when they learned the Eastern Front was held by broken promises the ranks fell apart.
•
Not all occasions are equal for the efficacy of a curse. I chose carefully the hour when the stars favoured me to call down a curse on this loathsome man.
The Master’s voice had the charm of Satan; he’d oil his voice with a glass of clear honey, glycerin and water. My duty was to prepare the mixture he’d gargle before his speeches. In accordance with the cabbalistic rituals of our fabled mystics, before the glass was filled the seven signs of seven were written in honey on the inside of the glass while the given invocation was recited.
The next day, for the first time, his left arm began the violent twitching with which henceforth he would be afflicted, while the tremors in his hands were more pronounced, his lips quivered, and his left eyebrow was gripped by a persistent nervous tic.
Consider. Were not the tremors of his hands the mark of Cain, mankind’s First Murderer and likewise a vegetarian? Thereafter, in public, the Master would hold a pair of gloves, grasping his left hand to conceal the infirmity rendered by my sorcery.
Such was the ground I had prepared for the Master’s downfall. Nothing sharpens the mind like a condemned cell. That it was a conspiracy of one against the powers of evil and entirely dependent on my own acts and devices is an historical fact.
•
Behind me, from his desk, I heard an almost inappreciable indrawn breath, a sound I recognized as a cue preparatory to speech, as if something had just occurred to him.
So I turned at the door.
‘Don’t you know it’s unlucky to turn back?’ The Master was smiling with a sickening glazed look; the sort of cynical smile you see on the face of the dead.
‘Have you a revolver?’ The words were hardly audible.
Before I could answer he went on:
‘Take mine.’
He looked round him as a person looks round a room before starting on a long journey to remember all he leaves behind.
He fondled the muzzle of his dog. (His breath was fouler than Wolf’s when scavenging the old winter garden, now overrun with willow herb and nettles.)
‘His life will be nothing without me.’
I stretched out my hand and took the revolver, which was of an unfamiliar pattern. I made up my mind to shoot Wolf at once.
‘The quietus will seem from my own hand, you understand.’ The words were pronounced by a tyrant who issued orders that sent thousands to their deaths. Even in this extremity he was shooting from someone else’s shoulder; demanding I do his dirty work without compunction, as though I were simply another thuggish condottiere from his elite death squad.
He half rose in his chair to unlock a drawer. I saw his own service revolver reposed within. He withdrew a leather-bound cigarette case, which he opened and extended to me.
(I curbed a start of surprise. Famously, the Master neither took strong drink nor smoked.)
The cigarette case revealed a dozen glass ampoules packed in sawdust.
‘Take one.’ He lowered his voice.
Often – so very often – I wanted to cram glowing ashes into my mouth rather than answer with the expected rote assent: ‘Very good, my Master,’ or ‘As the Master pleases,’ regardless of the task he ordained.
I smartly placed the cyanide vial in my tunic breast pocket. I noticed the master was – unusually for this early hour – wearing service dress, yet such was his physical decline the uniform was now a poor fit. His trousers hung on him; in the first week of my appointment, I had been commended for introducing knife-edge sewn-in creases to spruce up his turnout.
On his left breast the Master wore his Medal for Valour, awarded for distinguished service when a corporal. Beneath the medal was pinned his gold Party badge, member Number One. It was whispered a misfortune had befallen the original owner of this coveted membership number, which had been reassigned to the Master. His rival for first place, we heard, had been ‘administratively exiled’ to a Detention Camp for Political Education.
As it was, I was haunted by my recollection of sewing that uniform with thread moistened by my own heathenish spittle, every stitch counted according to a numeromancy older than the Witch of Endor and her demon familiars.
And, yes, it’s true the Master did indeed shoot himself that morning but, if I am to be believed, he died by my own hand; the hand that threaded the fatal needle because, you see, the day was chosen. A Monday it was, remember, a day especially opportune for blood-letting.
The Master’s last words to me?
‘We are now willed to flourish from the ashes, free of our infantile servitude to the People’s legends from the Old Dispensation. The new man must fight for the New Order, Wolf.’
‘I give my word,’ I answered glibly, ‘as freely as my life is given,’ repeating the pledge that had bound me to this barbarian for seven long years (and in my mind I rehearsed again its curiously equivocal deniability).
(‘There has now risen a new authority as to who our Redeemer is,’ his Minister for Spiritual Reform had once explained to me. ‘This new authority is our Master.’)
The Master clasped and unclasped his hands without thought, a sure sign of his bodily pain. His eyes glittered with rheum. His teeth were resolutely clenched and he pressed his abdomen while feigning to adjust his waistband.
His inflammatory bowel complaint was first defined by a brilliant gastroenterologist, regrettably a remote lineal descendant of one of our recusant Elders, with whose name the discovery would be for ever linked. The Master refused to utter the physician’s name. He called his gastrointestinal affliction his Vulcanitis (even his own pathology he made the stuff of Olympian myths).
The Master was a delusional case. How desperate was his search for panaceas, to my mind, may be measured by his craven submission to the remedies of a crank dietician who, ever since our incarceration in the redoubt, had prescribed a treatment of crushed nettles in an infusion, fetched daily from a makeshift dispensary at Sub-level Two in one of the fortress’s surviving cellars.
It was to this dispensary that I now withdrew, the wolfhound close on my heels.
One of my tasks had been the supply of fresh nettles from the winter garden for steeping in a field water cask. I would pour the foul-smelling potion from its brass spigot into the Master’s carafe to be taken as a tincture.
The Master believed the decoction fired up his rhetoric. He was fond of repeating a folk saying well known in our language: ‘My words, like nettles, sting only those who are incautious.’
(He had touched my arm at our parting. ‘And when I give my word, I am in the habit of keeping it.’ A moment later a faint gunshot was heard confined by the door I had just closed behind me.)
I took Wolf by the leash and scrambled up the service access shaft that connected the dispensary to the surface where the entrance was concealed by a cunningly disguised trapdoor professing to be a commemorative slab dedicated to a long-lived empress whose baroque belvedere pavilion collapsed on the Ides of March on the same spot following the great hurricane of 1876.
(Even then, if truth be told, it was borne in on me that the meretricious convolutions of the Master’s overwrought speeches were no less baroque than his nation’s florid civic splendour now laid waste under the relentless carpet bombing dealt by his enemy’s superior firepower . . . and, indeed, that both floridities were now no more than so much scorched earth few could deny.)
Wolf surged ahead, teeth bared, bristling with unease, as we emerged hidden by a clump of nettles into a smoke-shrouded dawn. The last boom of our guns defending the city was like the slamming shut of a prison door on our freedom; we were besieged. A hail of returning shell and mortar fire caused us to draw back to seek refuge in the crater of a half-toppled obelisk that mocked the remains of the garden colonnade.
Ahead of us machine-guns stuttered and a breach in the outworks appeared, lit up by signal flares. I was assailed by the stench of machines and smoke and fell back oppressed, faint from intimations of my destiny, while headlong through the opening burst a host of messenger-angels – incorporeal, transcendent – clothed in the pure white samite raiment predicted by our prophets.
•
Comrade Wolf!’ was their first greeting. There were yells of wild laughter when Wolf slipped the leash and the platoon leader deftly caught him.
As they came near, I saw the invaders were cradling sub-machine guns half-concealed by their white capes; evidently their advance from the snowbound Eastern Front had been so rapid their winter service uniforms were all they had: fleece caps, belted sheepskin coats or white quilted jackets.
Broad faces. Cheekbones as though hacked out of ice. Nearly all were marked by some disfigurement, a record written on them of fatal combat where frostbite was no less cruel a foe.
Yet, astonishingly, they clapped me on the back and chorused, ‘Wolf! Wolf!’
It was thanks to the Party’s ultra-demagogic Minister of Information that Wolf was more renowned than Rin Tin Tin.
We were celebrities. So, of course, they – those guileless white-clad victors – delivered us as valued trophies to their own feared despot and for a gilded hour they were heroes.
•
‘I did not inherit my throne,’ my new master boasts with a slippery flippancy, ‘I was chosen.’
Again we have fallen on evil days. For now Wolf, too, has a new master.
Our new owner is, indeed, of a New Order. He is the Supreme Leader of the new World Order and rules half the hemisphere. Truly, my former Master had espoused the Great Cause to see his arch-enemy vanquished, yet this victorious peasant-faced Man of the People, at a stroke, has seized the ideological high ground.
Under his peasant heel, the Master’s fatherland has been damned a vassal state. And I? My fate is to be the Supreme Leader’s valet, installed in a new reptile house.
(Once, once, I had dreamt of a time when I’d be granted a great estate such as that bestowed by our Warrior-King in 1740 on his valet, the son of a peasant. Now my eyes have been opened. Am I to be ever cursed a Gibeonite, and never cease to be a slave?)
The Supreme Leader is a man, so far as I can see, of no particular distinction. From the way I see it, he fails to apprehend what is important and what is not. That will be his undoing.
His time will come.
He wears with relish my gold watch, the watch with a personal inscription the Master had presented to me. The defeated ruler’s favorite slave, too, becomes the trophy of a conqueror.
Now I live lower than dirt; below, in the basement area, under the arch of the steps that lead to the Supreme Leader’s grand front door. Of his mute slaves there is not one who does not fear their hell-bent ruler and quake at his tread.
Many times, on his approach, the monster bawls my name; stamps a tantrum at his door to bid his prized drudge: ‘Take off my boots!’
And there, on that doorstep, so near above my head, there at that boot scraper, under his tyrant heel he stamps out the dirt while I, his bootblack, suffer his taunts to bear all the cold earth, all the cold earth he rains down to mire my hair.
Ranting. Ever stomping to defile my hair.
I am Absalom, my golden hair caught in a thicket of my own trickery.
The Supreme Leader’s promises are ruinous. In time, he too will learn.
There shall be more conjurations. More maledictions.
Misfortune seldom comes alone to a house.
•
•
Keeping accounts does not necessarily mean one settles them.
© Catherine Isolde Eisner 2023
•
See also: A fervent proselytiser for the mystical recovery of a Greater Germany. Between life and death, January 14 1944. Poet Franz Lüdtke’s ‘Ostvisionen’ for Colonisation to the Baltic Coast.
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2018/02/between-life-and-death-january-14-1944.html
