The Fifth Servant (38 page)

           
The others withdrew as he approached.

           
His lips drew back into a tight smile, making his shiny bald pate look like a giant Easter egg with a crack forming around its middle.

           
“Leave her to me, now,” he said.

CHAPTER 21

           
THE COPPER PFENNIG CAME SKIPPING over the cobblestones with a distinctive metallic
ping
and lodged in the mud that lay in our path. I looked up, tracing the path of the coin back to its point of origin, where a band of foot soldiers stood smirking at us.

           
It was one of those gray days when all the colors are dull and flat and people’s faces look as if they have no blood in them at all.

           
“Pick it up, Jews,” they said.

           
I resolved to keep marching straight ahead, keeping my eyes fixed on the King’s Way twenty yards onward, but when a little girl plucked the
fertl-pfennig
from the mud, wiped the dirt off it and offered it to us, Rabbi Loew acted as if the coin had dropped from the sky:

           
“Heaven is indeed generous, my friends,” he declared. “For who could imagine that this lowly farthing would provide the daily bread for at least a dozen little children? Praise be to God.”

           
At least the coin didn’t land in one of the steaming piles of offal that clogged the gutters near the Little Square. From the broad spatter marks on the paving stones, it looked like half of the
goyim
dumped their chamber pots right out the window.

           
We followed the royal carriage onto the King’s Way, which stretched for a hundred miles behind us to the east. The common folk cleared out of the road and stared open-mouthed, craning their necks to get a glimpse of the celebrated personage they assumed was inside the gilded carriage.

           
So most of the people paid us no mind as we quietly invaded their territory. The streets were unfamiliar to me, and I couldn’t help marveling at all the elaborate house signs, from the golden pikes near the South Gate to the white swans and silver harps near the stone bridge.

           
The entrance to the bridge was defended by a square tower with a pointed arch wide enough for two lanes of traffic. Above the archway ran a couple of rows of crested shields adorned with the usual eagles and lions, presided over by a trio of statues—a pair of kings with some saint perched between them, all cupping cross-topped orbs in their left hands and gilded scepters in their right.

           
Sentries stood under the arch collecting tolls and other taxes and fees. When they saw our Jew-badges, they decided that we had to be well-connected merchants, and tried to charge us a daler each to cross the bridge. They laughed when we tried to explain that we were three humble Jews on our way to see the
keyser
, until the royal footman intervened, peering down from his privileged perch and explaining to the sentries that the levy had to be waived in this instance.

           
The sentries had little choice but to agree, but they got back at us by holding up traffic in both directions and making us stand with our arms and legs apart so they could pat us down with unnecessary roughness and intimacy. Then, while the frustrated travelers cursed and
kvetched
in Czech and German, the guards pawed through the cloth bundle Rabbi Loew was carry ing. Then they made us remove our hats and shoes so they could “search” them for any weapons or substances that might harm the emperor’s person.

           
The bridge itself was nearly five hundred yards long. Covered wagons and nobles on horse back jostled for position alongside peasants carry ing baskets of dirty vegetables to market. Pilgrims crossed themselves as they passed a tall wooden crucifix set in its own special niche about one-third of the way across the span.

           
“Boy, that Jesus fellow sure gets around,” I muttered to the east wind.

           
Rabbi Gans shushed me, and nodded toward the severed heads that were fixed on pikes at various intervals along the bridge. He pointed out which were the common criminals and which were the rebellious subjects, whose grisly remains were left on display for years as an example to all.

           
A few hundred yards upstream, a long wall with crenellated teeth angled down the hill toward the river’s edge like the jawbone of some fallen giant. Rabbi Gans told me this was the Hunger Wall, which Emperor Charles IV built to help his subjects through a couple of lean years by paying them in food to build a wall that no one particularly needed. He also told me about how Charles’s son, Prince Václav, used to disguise himself as a poor journeyman to see if the workers were being cheated (they were), and how, after he put in a grueling day in the vineyards, he instituted a number of changes, shortening the workday for the agricultural laborers and giving them a longer meal break as well.

           
“If only more of the privileged would walk in another’s shoes, just for an hour,” he said, “or put on a badge and see what it’s like to be a Jew for a day, the world would be a better place.”

           
The gunpowder tower on the far side of the bridge was swaddled in billowing sheets of canvas. Dust flew as workers chiseled away at the squat structure, remaking it in the new style. A breeze off the river raised a white cloud of grit as we approached it. So I closed my eyes. When I opened them, a witch-like gargoyle with a hooked nose and sagging breasts was grimacing at me from a rainspout over the archway.

           
The castle hadn’t seemed quite so imposing from across the river, but as we got nearer, it appeared to grow tremendously, taking up an ever larger slice of the sky. I knew from Langweil’s model that it wasn’t simply a castle, it was a whole complex, including a four-hundred-year-old basilica, a cathedral, a convent, the queen’s summer house (although there was no queen at the moment), the old palace, as well as a new palace, which was still under construction. It seemed like half the city was still under construction.

           
The main language on this side of the river switched over to German, and all around me Catholic symbols proliferated on the churches.

           
IF ONE COULD DRAW an imaginary line in the air, straight from the South Gate to the main entrance hall of the castle, it probably
would
measure two thousand cubits. But we nearly doubled that figure by trudging up the winding streets of Little Town behind the carriage, sidestepping horse manure whenever we needed to, which was more often than I would have preferred, and by the time we reached the top of the Royal Road, my nose was dripping from the cold and my underclothes were soaked with sweat.

           
The wind picked up, cutting through my protective layers and conspiring with my own perspiration to chill me to the bone and compound my misery. It may have been late March on the Christian calendar, but up here it still felt like early February.

           
How could it be that the emperor’s castle was colder than my crowded little attic room? Maybe it was the stone walls, the castle’s location on a windy crag overlooking the city, and the sheer size of the rooms. The main hall of the old palace was big enough to hold a jousting contest with mounted knights in full armed regalia. Rabbi Gans told me that they did in fact hold jousts here until the 1570s, and that the huge entranceway on the far side of the hall had been purposely built with wide, flat steps so the knights could ride into the hall on horse back.

           
Next to the Riders’ Steps was the entrance to the Supreme Council chamber, whose four-columned portal, with twin columns on either side connected by a round arch over the doorway, looked exactly like the title pages of the Talmud and other rabbinic writings, which were themselves modeled on traditional descriptions of the main entrance of Solomon’s Temple. This resemblance to our ancient symbols of wisdom and justice gave me some hope.

           
A lackey dressed in the Italian style, with bright red velvet with gold accents, nodded curtly and told us, “The
Obersthofmeister
will be with you shortly.”

           
What the heck is an
Obersthofmeister? I wondered. Somebody big, I guessed.

           
We shuffled around, stamping our feet and trying to keep warm, while the lackey reminded us for the third time not to be put off by Kaiser Rudolf’s manner, which many of his subjects perceived as cold and distant. And all I could think of was that it must be pretty bad when
a German
thinks you’re cold.

           
Eventually
Obersthofmeister
Wilhelm von Stein Tafelfrung Gruber appeared wearing a tight-fitting black doublet with matching hose and a silver badge of office pinned over his left breast, and graciously led us from the old hall through a string of galleries whose regal placidity was being turned upside-down by new construction projects. He swept us past an open balcony that provided a splendid vista of the royal city, spreading toward the horizon in every direction, and filled with the roughly 60,000 Christian subjects who outnumbered the inhabitants of the ghetto by at least twenty to one. We passed through the
Wunderkammern
, whose cabinets contained such oddities as a unicorn’s horn, a set of rusty nails from Noah’s Ark (though the Torah makes no mention of iron nails), and, from the collection of Emperor Charles IV, a couple of drops of the Virgin Mary’s breast milk (clearly another miraculous occurrence), and some spines from the original crown of thorns. I was disappointed that they didn’t have the original wine-stained tablecloth from the Last Supper, although the King of Hungary is said to have possessed a piece of it.

           
The curator of Emperor Rudolf’s collection was an Italian Jew named Strada, who was too busy admiring himself in a full-length mirror to acknowledge us as we passed through the art gallery. Rabbi Gans told me that the emperor had sired at least three children by Strada’s daughter Katharina, though he had yet to legitimize them.

           
The largest paintings in the
Kunstkammer
were pastoral landscapes crowded with fleshy gods and goddesses bearing trumpets, shields, and plumed helmets, when they were wearing anything at all, but I thought the most interesting works were the small-scale portrait of the emperor as a bowl of fruit and some pen-and-ink drawings of costumes for some kind of celebratory parade, illustrating the diverse ways of dressing up a man as a demon or disguising a horse as a three-headed dragon.

           
That gave me an idea about how we could transform an ordinary-looking creature into a frightful one, but we had to keep moving, for the clock was already striking. This particular clock featured a Turkish soldier with an oversized head who shifted his eyes from side to side and raised his curved scimitar every time the little bells chimed.

           
Then an odd chattering came spilling out of an adjoining gallery. It sounded like a group of men were fighting in there, but the
Obersthofmeister
informed me that it was only a troupe of English comedians rehearsing a play.

           
“Does the
keyser
speak English, too?” I asked.

           
The
Obersthofmeister
replied, “His Majesty has mastered five languages, in addition to Czech, with some knowledge of English as well.”

           
Since English is a cousin to German, which is itself a sister to Yiddish, I was able to recognize some of the words, and I wasn’t terribly reassured by what I heard. One of the main actors appeared to be representing a Jew, complete with a false nose and beard, who was bragging about how he liked to go about poisoning wells, double-crossing friends, and filling the jails with Christians bankrupted by his usury, all of which has blessed him with “as much coyne as wull buye the towne.” I couldn’t say exactly what the last sentence meant, but it sure didn’t sound like a love letter to Christians. I wondered if the author had ever seen a Jew, since the English King Edward had exiled us from his lands more than three hundred years ago. Not that it would have made much of a difference, I suppose.

           
Still, I found myself hoping that Emperor Rudolf’s English wasn’t so very good after all.

           
I had expected the ostentatious displays of wealth that we had seen so far, but I was utterly amazed when we passed through a library containing
thousands
of books. It didn’t seem possible for one man to own so many books. And it brought me no comfort when I spotted several titles in English.

           
Rabbi Gans tried to comfort me by observing that such an intellectually curious sovereign simply
had
to be a friend of Israel because of our longstanding reputation as a nation of wisdom and reason, but I wasn’t convinced.

           
Finally, the
Obersthofmeister
led us into an antechamber, where a page boy drew back a curtain, and announced us, pronouncing the Maharal’s name in the Czech manner: “Rabbi Yehuda Liwa and his entourage.”