Read The Ravens of Falkenau & Other Stories for Free Online Page B

  "What if the king served the country, rather than the country the king?" I said.
    "What, indeed?"   Trcka smiled.   "What if one could trade a bad king for a better?"
    "That is indeed treason," I said, but there was no heat in it.   The Emperor was elected from among the nobles.   Why not a good rather than a bad?   Emperors had been deposed before.
    "Perhaps the Emperor will see reason," Trcka said.   "After all, Wallenstein has an army, and he does not."
    "Perhaps he will," I said.   It would take an army to countermand the effects of Richelieu's gold.   A man could live in exile very comfortably for the rest of his life on a tenth of it, or spend his days in pampered splendor at the Luxembourg.   I stood and gave Trcka my hand.   "I will stand with you," I said.

    I returned to Falkenau on a late autumn day when the wind blew gusts around the towers, dead leaves chasing each other like goats on the mountains.   Cloaked and muffled, we got in ahead of the rain.   I was unsurprised to find my wife on the walls of Falkenau, looking north and west into the storm.   The freshening wind was laden with moisture, and her hair whipped in fine strands about her face like red gold against a sky of gray.
    "What misfortune have you brought today?" Izabela asked me.
    "Would that I could tell you," I said.   I put my hands upon the parapet and looked out at mountains and sky and all.   I had thought this might be mine, but a sword blade still stood between me and it, the treachery of kings.  
    And yet,   that orchard yonder might be replanted.   Apples would bear before too long, were there young trees transplanted from another.   Those fields had nothing wrong with them, merely the grain burned standing.   In the spring the stubble could be plowed under and the field would be as rich as ever.   Soon winter would come and water it all, cover everything beneath a pall of snow.   We would be short of supplies, but there was enough, I thought.   Barely enough.   And then spring would come with her healing cloak of green.
    If this were mine I should love it with all my heart.   I should know it, each stone and each tree, each bridge and each well, the shape of each far peak against the sky seen only as they are from Falkenau.   When I die, my bones should molder here, becoming one with this land, a bit of me passing into dirt and leaf and tree, a tie that could not be broken though centuries should pass.
    Izabela was looking at me sideways, a strange expression on her face.  
    "Politics, madam," I said.   No doubt it would please her to know that the Catholic Emperor was false to his own.   But the Protestant princes were no better.   They too were Richelieu's dupes.
    "Why did you ask for the minister?" I asked, and added at her blank look, "rather than a priest?"
    "Because I am Protestant," she said, as though that were obvious.  
    I shook my head.   There was a faint spatter of freckles on Izabela's nose courtesy of the summer sun that now faded from the sky.   "And that matters to you?"
    "Yes."   Izabela folded her hands on the stone, lifting her face to the wind.   The sky had darkened with the clouds and coming night.   "I believe that every man and every woman comes before God on his or her own merits with no interventions, no dispensations and no allowances, with no witness to speak for them save their own deeds.   And I believe that God speaks to each of us as He wills.   We do not need a priest to stand intermediary between us and God, for we are each a precious child of His own creation."
    "Born in sin to die in sin," I said.
    "And yet through our actions are we redeemed, and by our faith saved," Izabela said.   There was a curious smile on her face, as though her skin was but a vessel for something luminous.   "Mine is not the God of fires and pits, but the God who so loved the world that He gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believes in Him may not perish but have everlasting