“Imagine, in that case, my lord, the murder of a newborn who has but one nipple on his conscience!”
The king was still weeping. “My little Sigismund, my pretty babe! What to do?”
“Always do what is good, and think of your soul’s salvation.”
“And the salvation of Poland? Is that not more important than my own? Virtuous plunder! Noble massacres! I who detest guessing games! Explain! Interpret in God’s name!”
Zbigniew was making the gesture we are all familiar with, that of raising his shoulders while stretching out his two arms with upward palms, when a stunning thunderclap and an uncanny lightning bolt struck the castle as though from nowhere, for there was not a cloud to be seen in the darkening day. It was, obviously, a divine manifestation. The two men rushed to the royal chapel and fell on their knees before the altar. Thunder and lightning doubled in strength.
“Zbigniew!” suddenly exlaimed the king as he raised his head. “The thunder comes from the Tatras.... Something is looking for me from those mountains.... Mary Mother of God, pray for us.... Let us pray, Zbigniew....”
They did so. A terrible stroke of lightning ran through the chapel, followed by a yet louder clap of thunder. But after that, only a strange grumbling sound was heard. It seemed to say something to Casimir. “It is a message from the caves of the Tatras,” said the king. “I hear it.... I understand it.... Yes.... We must spare his life yet bury him....”
All of a sudden the heavenly growling ceased. The chapel became stiller than still.
Little by little, as time will have it, King Casimir grew old—old but yet vigorous (he still led the boarhunt), and, for the rest, remaining an excellent ruler, especially for the nobility. He still mourned his beloved Ludmila, and a groan escaped from his throat when he thought of the child he would have loved to hug. For he had borne no other. No lady of the court (nor none other) had gratified him with a baby—a bastard, to be sure, had such a child been born, yet unquestionably a prince. The only object of his paternal tenderness was his niece Estrella. As for the good Zbigniew, alas, he was no more. The king’s chief astrologer had fallen backward from a ladder in the royal library while trying to grasp, on a high shelf, the eloquent Nobilissimus liber de arte moriendi of Johannes Nide. He lost his balance, and his skull fatally struck the marble floor.
After his death (allow me, said Modrzewski, a short detour not devoid of intellectual interest), a loud quarrel divided his many admirers and his three or four enemies. Zbigniew had prophesied, in November, that he would die the following summer. He fell from his ladder on the ninth of June. His detractors concluded that he had misread the stars (“as usual,” they added under their breath), but his admirers argued, to begin with, that the distance between the ninth and the twenty-first of June was not worth mentioning, and furthermore, that the weather had been abnormally warm in early June. Be that as it may, the astrologer’s prediction had given his wife ample time to prepare, with suitable discretion, widow’s weeds that were judged in the best taste by the court.
I return to Sigismund. A false funeral had been held for the babe. He was kept carefully away in a pavilion not far from Cracow, and the rumor was spread that the child was, perhaps, the fruit of an illegitimate passion between a distant parent of the monarch (who was not named) and her butler. When this affair began to be forgotten (albeit this sort of forgetting is seldom complete, and the guilty make a mistake when they put their trust in it), Sigismund was carried to the foot of a forbidding cliff at the frontiers of the land, and chained to a cave. The gentleman charged with this mission was the baron Szymon Klotalski, lord of Zakopane. The few trusted men whom the baron employed had no reason to doubt the scandalous romance; the like happened so often!
So here is Sigismund, in his twenty-first year, dwelling in the land of wolves and bears, chained to his grotto. The chain was long enough to enable him to take the air, and even to walk about a little. At one end it was thrust deep into the stone wall of the cave, at the other it clasped the young man’s ankle. By means of a sinister key, it was changed once a month from one ankle to the other, but in order to do this, four soldiers were not one too many to compel the prince, for he struggled mightily during the minute or two it took to shackle him once more.
Indeed, the prince had grown into a colossus. Michelangelo would have admired, perhaps loved him. He exercised powerfully every morning. I mentioned bears, because they were abundant in the surrounding mountains. Well, I do believe that Sigismund could have wrestled down the biggest of them. At the same time, this giant was a cultivated man. Casimir had no intention of turning him into a savage. Klotalski had given him the Gospel to read (he knew it by heart by the age of eighteen), together with the most edifying saints’ lives, the best works of history (especially, of course, the glorious history of Poland, without, however, coming too near present times), collections of poetry and romantic tales of adventure, lives of great men, treatises of military and diplomatic strategy, and (needless to say) the finest texts that Athens and Rome have bequeathed to us.
The chain was a long one, as I said, and on sunny days Sigismund read his books, seated on a bench, his elbows resting on a long, rough pinewood table. Nearby a brook of the purest water ran over the stones. Father Radim, like Klotalski a man to be trusted, celebrated mass for him every Sunday, and took his confession twice a year. I said he was a man to be trusted, but he too knew nothing, or wanted to know nothing. He did not care whether Sigismund was the offspring of an illicit passion, or a princely baby-hostage seized from the Swedes. It was enough for him that here was a soul that needed to be groomed for paradise. Hence he had seen to it that on a tree trunk near the cave were nailed a great wooden crucifix, a splendid image of the Virgin, and the portraits of several saints whose regard is worth securing. As for Klotalski, he had caused to be nailed, on the next tree, a superb full-length portrait of the king—in full regalia—recently painted by the Venetian Tomaso Dolabella.
Clad in skins, kept in good health and well nourished, the young man’s body naturally began to feel other needs. To satisfy these, Klotalski, as soon as he became conscious that the boy had become a man, brought in a woman—the only woman, presumably, he would ever see in the flesh (many girls and ladies stared at him from the engravings of his books). Her name was Layla. She was a chubby Turkish slave, cheerful, not too young, not too fine looking, who undertook to play all the needed roles. She was mother, mistress, nurse, cook, barber, chambermaid, and, in Sigismund’s eyes, something of a sorceress. For, although the herbs, roots, leaves, flowers, and stalks that she gathered in the forest and mountain did wonders for his meals, his fevers, and his scratches, he couldn’t help being a little afraid of her. “Medea!” he would throw at her head when a bizarre flavor tickled his palate—though without hurting the poor woman’s feelings by explaining who that wicked creature had been. Also, it was obvious to him that she avoided Father Radim as if he (saintly man!) had been a sorcerer.
To be sure, she couldn’t have answered him, because she was mute. Oh no! It was not the Christians who had perpetrated this cruelty. I am sure it was not. It is simply not believable. Fortunately, being dumb didn’t prevent Layla from making herself understood. Together with her grimaces and her gestures, her hm, hm, hm translated quite effectively her wishes and her moods. “I’ll baptize her and marry her,” Sigismund often reflected, “as soon as I’ve shaken off this damnable chain.” Of course, he knew