The Willow King Read online

  Two men came in and, without saying a word, placed his chest by the door. One of them stretched out a hand towards Laurentius. Just as in Reval, Laurentius groped about in his purse for a while before finding a small coin. The porters nodded and left as silently as they had arrived. Probably Estonians, Laurentius thought to himself. He listened to their footsteps clumping down the wooden stairs, and then he turned and stretched out on the wooden bed boards again. Now he could sleep.

  He smiled to himself, anticipating the onset of oblivion.

  But the blissful sensation of lying down quickly passed as the hard base of the bed started digging into his shoulder and hip. The landlady had told him that he had to get hold of the straw for his bed himself, but he simply wasn’t capable of undertaking that task in the state he was in. The cold shivers were getting stronger and stronger.

  “Damn it...” Laurentius muttered.

  Straining to push himself upright, Laurentius stumbled over to his case. He had no bedclothes with him other than an empty mattress and a small feather pillow. During his journey he had normally slept under his travelling cape, and now he pulled it tighter around himself. The felted wool of the cape smelt of inn rooms and dampness, somehow reinforcing the feeling that he was in unfamiliar surroundings. His feather pillow was also damp, and smelt slightly musty.

  “I will try to get hold of some logs for the fire tomorrow,” Laurentius told himself. There were just a couple of dark lumps of coal in the hearth, and no logs to be seen at all.

  With some effort he lowered himself back onto the bed, and as he lay there various scraps of conversation from his journey started creeping back into his mind. Disconnected phrases, faces, scenes. But then these were replaced by an overwhelming fear that his sickness might take his life. Maybe when he had let the dampness seep into his body up near the barn he had tipped his health off balance for good. Now, shivering under his cape, he would gradually ebb away, and the vapour which he had breathed in and out would disappear into formless chaos.

  What had they been talking about in the carriage? Life?

  He stared at the cage sitting there on the table with its door twisted off. It had been Clodia’s cage. The stark, reproachful emptiness of the wire box made him feel awful. Nature abhors a vacuum, emptiness, lifelessness. Something new, something different would always appear in its place.

  “Natura abhorret vacuum,” he said to the cage. And to the rhythm of those words a fragment of verse he had once heard started coming back to him:

  If a snuffbox has been empty

  for one hundred years,

  then doubtless Old Nick

  will make his way there.

  The verse throbbed in his ears like the pulsing of blood through his veins, and despite its light-hearted tone it now seemed unambiguously sinister. But maybe it was not just Old Nick who would come? Emptiness meant not existing, the absence of reality. Only God was pure being, pure actuality, as Thomas Aquinas had said. The unmoved mover. He started praying in a barely audible whisper, hoping that the familiar rhythm and lucid sense of the prayer would drive away the phantasms which the sickness had stirred in his soul. Laurentius knew that the fever was necessary to restore his body’s inner balance. But when the body was already out of balance then the soul’s phantasms and other external influences could easily overpower it. That was why people saw visions when they were feverous, and that was why it was essential to protect the body and the soul from any kind of malign influences while ill. He remembered how the peasant folk in Holland had spoken about a willow or alder king, who came to steal the souls of sick people. People with weak souls, especially children, would often see him, dressed in a crown and dark cape. The tall shadowy form would stand there in a dark void under bare-branched trees and beckon the sick to come with him. Laurentius knew very well that this was real witchery, and not just the peasants’ imagination. His own soul had always been weak; the black bile had always ebbed and flowed inside him. But would nothingness remain in his cage, or would some other kind of reality take shape there?

  “Amen,” Laurentius whispered.

  Finishing his prayer, he curled up in bed and listened to the landlady bustling about and talking to someone on the ground floor. Laurentius could only catch mundane, insignificant fragments of sentences from the murmuring which reached him through the floorboards, and it seemed that the landlady was just exchanging some everyday news with someone. He listened more closely, trying to work out exactly what they were talking about, but to no avail. He knew he should ask for something hot to eat and for the fire to be lit, but he felt reluctant to—he didn’t want to bother anyone.

  “Tincture...” he whispered to himself. “Of course, tincture.”

  He pushed himself upright and took a small bottle from his chest. It contained well under half of the amount of mixture he needed to treat his fever, and he already regretted not having prepared more of it earlier. Some time ago he had written out a number of essential recipes from Dioscorides’ De materia medica and other manuals, and he had already tried most of them out on himself. He had hoped to find a cure for his ailments using Arabic inorganic chemistry and the findings of contemporary researchers. But up until now the tincture had proven the only truly effective means of relieving the pain and bringing down his fever. Although even the effect of that had grown weaker and weaker over time.

  He shook his head apprehensively.

  Every time Laurentius fell ill he experienced an overpowering sensation that he was inhabiting some sort of parallel reality, and that other people had only the most tenuous connection with it. They seemed distant and indistinct, as if he were sinking deeper and deeper into a well with a vertical ray of sunlight shining downwards, and the light had taken on a different quality. He would always worry that if he opened his mouth to ask something then people would look at him as if he were a foreigner who couldn’t speak their language and had started trying to explain something with strange sounds and gestures. Their expressions would convey sympathy and contempt at the same time. But no, he had to stop thinking like that.

  “Tincture,” he whispered. “That will help.”

  He measured out some of the brown liquid and took a swig. There was very little left now, and he couldn’t start preparing a new batch until tomorrow. He would just have to wait for the first bout of fever to do its work. In theory, a night of fever and sweating was supposed to show that the illness would soon pass, but if there was no sweating then it could last longer. Praying that he would make it through the night, Laurentius rolled up into a tight ball like a cat and tried hard to think of something other than his illness. It would have been better to worry about real problems, like the exam tomorrow and his studies. Not about some imagined spirits, the sticky dampness, his headache, the fever, a willow king and the nature of reality...

  “Ah!” Laurentius cried out.

  He jerked upright. He could feel a throbbing cramp in his right leg, and his side was hurting from lying on the hard wooden boards. He had an odd feeling in his stomach.

  He could hear snoring coming from somewhere very close by.

  Laurentius spun around in agitation, trying to see where the sound was coming from, but he could make out nothing in the darkness. Only then did he realize that night had fallen and that he had in fact been asleep for a few hours. The snoring probably belonged to one of the family members sleeping on the lower floor.

  Feeling slightly more at ease, Laurentius lowered himself back into bed and started massaging his leg. His muscles had distended from the heat of the fever, and the tension was causing his calves to cramp up, making it impossible to lie comfortably. Although the stiffness may just as well have come from his journey or the hard bed.

  He felt a shiver run through him as he became aware of the cold, damp air pouring in through the gaps in the window. He could just about make out the contours of low clouds through the small windowpanes. Raindrops were trickling down the uneven surface of the glass, and a small pool of wat
er had collected on the windowsill. As he lay there, listening to the house creaking and the water dripping from the eaves, he realized that he needed to go to the toilet. But then he recalled, to his dismay, that he hadn’t asked where it was, and he hadn’t yet managed to get hold of a chamber pot.

  “Satan and his wily ways,” Laurentius swore quietly to himself.

  Sometimes the latrine would be situated outside in the yard, sometimes it was inside the house.

  Laurentius groped about on top of the cupboard for the fire steel and tinder, but then he remembered that he didn’t even have a lamp. He hadn’t paid attention to what the landlady had said about that either.

  “Bother...” Laurentius muttered.

  Standing upright in the pitch blackness of the room, he decided that the best thing would be to try his luck outside. He was bound to wake up the family if he started looking for a latrine inside. He left his boots under the bed and set off barefoot, treading carefully. Coming downstairs and opening the back door, he found himself in a walled yard, the size of which he couldn’t determine in the darkness and rain. It was possible to make out the wavering outlines of a few objects through the wet haze, but they didn’t at first add up to any kind of whole. Just some dark curves and the rippling surface of the ground, which was covered in puddles. He shuddered and pulled his travelling cape tighter around himself.

  In the light shining from the doorway he gradually started to make out the roughly hewn wooden steps. A few paces away, against the backdrop of darkness, he could see the outline of a small shed, and then he picked up the bitter stench of ammonia emanating from it, familiar to him from every tanner’s workshop, guest house and outhouse he had ever been to. He remembered the conversation he had had with the tanner by the inn, and couldn’t help wondering, with a shudder, what had eventually happened to the old man and the tanner’s lad.

  Laurentius walked across the muddy ground to the shed, stepping on the cold, slippery stones which had evidently been put there for that purpose. Having got there, however, he decided it might be better not to go in after all. Who knew what his bare feet might encounter inside. Now that his eyes were used to the darkness he noticed the pretty, concentric circles which the drizzling rain was making in the puddles. His head was spinning from the fever.

  “Good evening,” he heard someone say.

  Laurentius felt a hot flush of surprise, and hurriedly pulled up his trousers. Glancing over his shoulder he saw a figure in a long, bright shirt, standing on the steps under the awning.

  “Good evening,” he said hesitantly in response, trying to put himself in order as inconspicuously as possible.

  “Are you the new lodger?” the figure asked.

  “That’s me,” Laurentius confirmed.

  “Have you come from afar?”

  Laurentius straightened his shirt and sheepishly tiptoed across the stones back to the shelter of the awning. When he stood facing the young woman he noticed that the pale skin of her face was glowing like an encaustic painting. Leaning against the wall, Laurentius tried to smile, but he realized straight away that it hadn’t turned out as he intended. It still felt as if his body were incandescent from fever, and that was making everything around him seem somehow unreal, as if it were shimmering like the hot air above an iron or brazier.

  “Yes, from afar,” Laurentius answered.

  “Have you got anything to eat?” the girl asked him.

  “To eat?” asked Laurentius, failing to understand the question.

  “Yes,” the girl confirmed.

  “No,” he said, realizing that he hadn’t eaten anything all day. “I’ve got nothing at all to eat.”

  “Would you like something?” she asked.

  The mud and cold water in the yard felt stinging cold against Laurentius’ bare feet, and the sensation was putting him vaguely on edge. As he tried hard to think about whether he should eat, he felt his right leg start to tighten with cramp again. He couldn’t bear standing there much longer. He stared at the girl’s bare toes on the wet planks.

  “Tomorrow. I will eat tomorrow,” Laurentius finally answered.

  He made a vague gesture with his hand and placed one foot on the steps. It was rude to slope off in the middle of a conversation like that, but he couldn’t be on his feet any longer. And he still had the feeling that he was dreaming. Maybe he really was still asleep?

  “Wait a moment—are you sure you’re all right?” the girl asked.

  “I have a fever,” Laurentius attempted to explain.

  The girl touched his forehead. “Look at me,” she instructed.

  “I can’t. Really, I can’t,” Laurentius said.

  “Look here,” she said insistently, and she forced him to move his head round to face her. Laurentius could see that her eyes were light yellow like Attica honey, as if there were a candle burning behind them. Like gold, which would restore his strength and drive off the melancholy. He breathed a sigh of relief.

  “You are sick; you must recuperate. Go and sleep,” the maiden said, and it sounded like a blessing, like a benediction.

  “Yes... I know. I have to sleep. Sleep,” Laurentius mumbled to himself as he started walking up the steps.

  The maiden smiled and waved to him as he left.

  NIGHT

  I FREEZE STILL FOR A MOMENT; my eyes are brimming with tears as I blink in the light of the burning brand, and the crowd is exultant.

  “Freak!”

  “Look now!”

  The court attendant shoves the flaming stake into my face. I can sense its scorching incandescence almost touching my brown skin, and the crackling dry heat singes my eyelashes and eyebrows.

  “Ah!” I cry out, and my whole body is gripped by panic. My head jerks to one side; one leg buckles backwards; my hands are trembling; my heart is pounding like a grain flail. I turn to try to flee into the darkness which beckons beyond the bright circles of torchlight, behind the crowd, somewhere far away from here.

  But the court attendant blocks me, grabs me by my hair, and forces me to look at the crowd through the yellow-red blaze of the flame. The gloved hand tugs and pulls at me until my spirit is subdued, limp and yielding. The surging, droning din of the crowd also begins to subside, like rain after a storm, still spattering for a while; some voices are still murmuring somewhere; the occasional cackle of laughter rings out. There are rows of people there, men and women, young and old, some of them still children just like me. They watch me, standing in the dim night light beside the scaffold. A ragged boy, a face like mud trampled under hoof. So this is the freak, the little whelp, the one who can see the witch’s mark.

  “Hideous!” one of the women cries out.

  “It’s little wonder...”

  “Shame on him!”

  Hands are raised, fingers pointing at me, at my grimy face and cracked lips. People are making rings in the air with their index fingers, warding off evil and driving away shame, so that no part of this witchery will befall them, so that nothing of me or what is happening on the scaffold will follow them home. All of these people are strangers to me, but all of them fear and despise me. I have pointed the finger, and that is why this woman has been convicted of being a witch.

  “Toad!” someone yells.

  I press my hands against my chest, fists clenched. There is nothing I can do; it is as if time has slowed down. The air is shimmering in the heat of the torches, and the scene looks like a reflection in a worn-out silver mirror. It radiates the heat of hell; people’s voices and faces become elongated; they lose all meaning; they become wretched shadows of their real selves. I cast my gaze downwards, away.

  The court attendant starts to read out the verdict in a booming voice: “When the executioner has mercifully concluded his work, so that the head is separated from the body, then the body shall be burned in fire. The court has reached this verdict on the basis of the divine law of Exodus 22: 18, Leviticus 20: 6 and Deuteronomy 18: 11, and the laws of the Swedish state. Insofar as this wit
ch has been identified by the seer boy; she bears the witch’s mark in her eyes and following incarceration has confessed her guilt.”

  The executioner strikes.

  I feel my head spinning, as if I were standing on a bridge, looking down at the fast-flowing river water below. A constant iridescence, sunlight reflecting off the rippling waters deep into the retina, blinding me. Now the shimmering heat takes the form of a sword held in the executioner’s hand, a glimmer of red blood trickling down its central groove. The tip of the sword is pointing at me, away from the woman, who has collapsed forward, hunched over the wooden block. The executioner’s fingers are tightly gripping the hilt of the sword, but the woman’s head has lolled backwards, the hacked-through veins of her neck still pulsing with blood. Her eyes are partly shielded by thick strands of dark hair stuck to her face, and blood is trickling through her lips, bubbling between her teeth as she breaths her final breaths. But she is not yet dead.

  “Ah...” I whisper.

  “That is the law. Be sure that you know it!” the court attendant cries out.

  I stand there; my eyes absorb the images, but my reason cannot comprehend them. They just slide under my hair and into my head, one by one, disconnected like dreams, shadows suspended in fog. Separate fragments, inexplicable parts, nothing which is clear or whole. But they scrape against me, working their way in, like death-watch beetles boring their meandering, senseless tunnels into a tree.

  Her eyes seek me out...

  The crowd has now overcome its initial shock and is growing ill-tempered and raucous. Some of the people in the back rows look like they are getting ready to leave, and they are discussing something among themselves in a half-whisper; a couple of the men are glowering in my direction.

  But I am staring wide-eyed at the execution platform; the light is scorching my face, shrivelling my corneas.

  For some reason I know that if I close my eyes everything will be hopelessly lost. They wanted me to show them the witch, so I showed them. Why did I do it? Maybe it was because I was hungry, so hungry...