* * * * * * * *
Life in The Tower was never the same after that final painting. Now, instead of working in the afternoons, Thaddaeus played with the children in the open spaces of the studio. He drew funny pictures to go with the stories he told, and he led them in silly games. Once, he brought up the kitchen dogs and they all played “Hunt the Snark” with an old meat bone and a slice of stale bread; the dogs began to bark frantically as Minn and Thaddaeus hid their quarry out of reach; Emmie screamed with delight and Edward sat up in bed, cheering the dogs on. Hearing the commotion, Bill and Grissle charged up the stairs to find out what calamity had befallen the prince and princess, only to be set upon by drooling dogs.
And, when he wasn’t playing games in the tower, Thaddaeus was out and about collecting firewood and people.
The frosty grey summer had been overtaken by an autumn so cold it bit down to the bone. At first, people who came to The Tower talked of little else, wondering if the coming winter could possibly be any colder. They talked of these things as they sat before roaring hearth fires in the Great Room. In fact, every room in The Tower boasted a fire night and day; Thaddaeus saw to that.
“Where does he get all this?” Tom said, gesturing toward a neat stack of lumber that had appeared in the woodshed. “Is he dismantling a house?”
This was exactly what Thaddaeus was doing. First he had found the deed to his boyhood home amongst a stack of old sketches, and realized it was in his name. Next he had gone to the house which was situated on a side street near The Tower. It stood three stories high, old and dark and decayed. His mother and father had died decades before, but he could not remember inheriting the house; he had not given attention to such details then.
I might have lived here these past years, he thought sadly; I’ve been asleep too long. Then he thought of little Emmie, Princess Minn and her pale brother, old Grissle, and Hyla who looked so pinched and worried these days. He thought of The Tower and the people coming in and out of the cold for food and drink; he thought of all these and he knew what to do. Returning to the inn, he went round to the woodshed, retrieved an axe and a saw, then went back to his abandoned house and began taking it apart, one room at a time. At first he didn’t need to break the walls apart; he just busted up the rotting furniture and carried it back to the inn. This took several weeks, but he had help from an unexpected quarter.
Going to the house very early one morning, intending to begin his work at dawn, he encountered a woman moaning and weeping in the road. She was one of the street folk, filthy and reeking and carrying a tiny baby. Thaddaeus approached her and asked why she wept.
“It’s my baby. She’s gonna die,” the woman shrieked. At the sound of her voice, a small crowd of street folk shuffled out of the shadows and stood near, watching.
Thaddaeus reached out his hand and touched the baby’s cheek; it was cold, but the infant was not yet dead.
“I’ve no food for myself, no milk for my baby,” the woman wailed. The crowd shuffled closer.
Thaddaeus pulled a thick slice of bread out of his pocket. “It’s all I have, but you’re welcome to it,” he said.
The woman drew back, but a man beside her took the bread and began to eat. “It’s good,” he growled, and passed it to the woman. She took a bite, then gobbled the rest.
“Come,” Thaddaeus said, “there’s more. Follow me.”
He led them to The Tower, through the front door and into the silent Great Room. There were no other guests at this early hour.
“Tom!” Thaddaeus called. “We’ve customers for breakfast!”
Tom and Grissle came running out of the kitchen and when they saw the small crowd, they brought out hot food and warm drinks. The street folk ate for a long time. At last Thaddaeus stood and, quitting the inn, made his way back to his old house. The men of the street followed, close at his heels.
At the door of the house, Thaddaeus said, “there’s no food here. What do you want?”
“To follow you,” they said.
“Then work with me,” he replied.
That is how Thaddaeus came to have help chopping and carrying, and it was the reason there were hearth fires in The Tower night and day.
That morning, when Hyla met the woman with the baby, something in her breast unclenched: perhaps it was the fear for her own child’s future. She took the woman and infant to a guest room, built a fire in the grate, brought hot water and helped them wash, then tucked them into bed. The woman sighed, and with her sigh came tears, and with her tears came the flow of mother’s milk. Her baby would not die so soon.
That same morning, Tom was thinking. Between the Great Room on the ground floor and the studio at the top of the stairs, there were three floors of guest rooms. For months now, the rooms had lain empty, ever since the farmers and merchants had stopped coming to market. We rarely have paying overnight guests anymore, Tom thought. And so it began: they gave the rooms to the street people who straggled in behind Thaddaeus.
The resident street folk took up work in the household. Hyla was grateful for their help, but cautious too. “Aren’t these people mostly criminals?” she said to Grissle as she watched one of the men come through the kitchen with a load of wood.
“Might be,” Grissle said.
“And I’ve heard some of them are unbalanced—you know—disturbed in their minds.”
“It’s been desperate times for the poor since the General came to power,” Grissle said.
“Yes, but I wonder: is it wise to let them stay here?” Hyla said.
“They’re just beggars,” Grissle said, “and so are we. We’re beggars showing others where to get bread.”
As the cold took hold of the land, so famine held the people in its death grip. In the city there were now only three places to get food: City Hall, The Tower, and a certain stall in the Market Square. Those who went to City Hall came under the Mayor’s power: his officials gave no food away without exacting a heavy price, whether in coin or services. Those who went to The Tower or the market stall must be willing to eat plain bread, but a surprising number of citizens would not touch it though it was offered free and without price. They said bread was passé: an archaic concoction without nutritional value, good only as fodder for coarse and common folk. Citizens who felt this way just had to make themselves content with either slavery or starvation.
Winter came but the biting cold could not keep Thaddaeus down. He came and went at all hours of the day and night. Except for the four or five hours in the afternoon he spent playing with the children in his studio, he might be anywhere. When he wasn’t gathering wood, he was walking the city streets, usually during the early hours of the morning when it was dark and very cold. Often, the street folk walked with him and led him into hidden byways where they found the dead and dying, the lost and forgotten: thieves, addicts, and vagabonds who had been passed over by the Mayor as unfit for life in the General’s rag-tag army. These folks had subsided into the city’s shadows, stealing and scavenging until famine and war exhausted the city of anything worth thieving. These lost ones would not take bread or any food Thaddaeus offered. He spent many a dark, cold hour comforting them as they died, and chanting his tuneless song as he buried their bodies in the garden of his childhood home.
This new job of grave digger never altered his bright inner visions or quelled his sense of that metrical pulse in the air, like the beating of a great heart, or of wings. They are close, he thought to himself, the day is near; I can feel it coming closer. “Beneath, above, behind, before, within, beside, to win, restore,” he would sing or chant as he chopped wood or walked through dark streets or dug graves. The street folk began to join him in his chanting.
One day, just a few weeks before MidWinter, the old white-haired scholar appeared at The Tower with a suitcase in one hand and a stack of books under his arm. It was late afternoon and Thaddaeus, who happened to be romping through the Great Room with the children, greeted his old acquaintance with delight. “We?
??ve got quite a crowd living here now, but you can share my rooms—if you don’t mind the children.”
The scholar accepted gladly, then stood looking at the paintings which covered the walls of the room. “My, my,” he said. “You have been busy since last we met.”
“The day is near,” Thaddaeus said, and ushered the scholar to the rooms at the top of the stairs.
The day after that, the entire army marched out of the city. Tom and Hyla went with Thaddaeus and the children to the top of the tower to watch. There had been rumours flying about over the past weeks that the enemy would invade the north coast, just two day’s march from the city, though the General, in one of his rare public appearances, assured the populace that this was not true. Still, no one who watched the marching that day could fail to notice that the soldiers were heading out the North Gate toward the coast.
With the soldiers gone, an unnatural stillness settled over the city. The inhabitants—those who hadn’t gone off with the army or died of starvation—kept to themselves and rarely came out of their houses. For the General’s scheme to boost the economy had one result: there was very little business left in either the Market Square or the halls of finance. The odd thing was that no one seemed to care. The general populace seemed stricken by a malaise of total indifference.
The only institution, besides City Hall and the Palace, bursting at the seams with fervent activity was the University. Ever since the Mayor had gotten friendly with the Provost, and granted an exemption from military service to all students, the University’s enrolment had tripled, and the Political Science department had swelled to unmanageable numbers. Funding was pulled from the departments of History, Literature, and Philosophy, and given to new Chairs and associate professors in all the major and minor branches of politics and the study of international relations. The other humanities departments evaporated overnight, but these departments had not been popular anyway. Their ancient professors, who liked to prattle on about things like ‘freedom of thought’ and ‘literary significance’ were shunted off to quiet research positions where they could totter about in the library and still appear for regular meals at the High Table. The Mayor, and most of the student body, wondered why these antiquated scholars and their superannuated ideas were tolerated at all, but the Provost maintained a nostalgic affection for his collection of college Methuselahs and refused to turn them out of doors.
Meanwhile, the winter days grew even colder and greyer as the world moved relentlessly toward that supreme feast day: MidWinter. Truth to tell, it was the only old feast day left in the year’s calendar. There had been others, but they were long forgotten. The only other high days observed throughout the country were Mayor’s Day and General’s Day: one celebrated in July, the other in August. Mayor’s Day often coincided with city elections which were held sporadically and were generally a surprise to the public. Compared to the carnivals and fireworks of these two festivals—revelries enforced by the General’s men in every region—MidWinter was a solemn affair whose origins were obscured in the deeps of time. The Government allowed, but did not encourage the observance of this old high day. The General was suspicious of its origins and its relevance to the modern state he was creating. Still, forbidding it outright might have caused unnecessary unrest and resistance.
Most people in the city observed MidWinter simply as a break from work or study and as an excuse to eat and drink more than usual. Those in and from the rural areas tended to attach certain customs to the day: on MidWinter’s Eve, farm animals were given an extra feed; children built miniature huts from sticks, filled them with clay animals, and set them around the hearth; women strung pinecones, dried fruit, and paper stars to festoon parlours and hallways. Often, families would cook a goose or a goat and invite friends in for a feast, though that custom had fallen away as harvests failed year after year. Yet, even at this leanest of MidWinters, there were those who refused to give in to the dreary grey that hung over the land. Grissle was one of these. Her MidWinter preparation list was as long as the General’s list of political enemies—possibly longer.
This particular year, she was aided and abetted by the white-haired scholar who understood more about this high day than anyone. Thaddaeus, the children, and The Tower’s resident street folk, threw themselves into Grissle’s plans and let nothing slip by. Each table in the Great Room held the traditional five-candle centerpiece set upon paper stars and wound round with evergreen boughs ‘borrowed’ from the University gardens. Stick huts and clay animals covered the hearth with the added touch of miniature trees supplied by the artful hands of Thaddaeus. Edward and Minn sat in their lair at the top of The Tower and produced miles of garland made from many things collected by Thaddaeus and the street folk: fir cones, feathers, tassels, buttons, beads, bits of coloured wool, paper spangles, broken jewellery, shards of glass, old corks: anything of worth they found in gutters, dust bins, and abandoned gardens or buildings. The Prince sat on his bed by the window and threaded the strange collection of oddments by the hour, his eyes bright and his cheeks flushed, while Minn either helped him, or sang and danced with little Emmie. Poor Edward was often reminded that he should rest—reminded in sharp tones of worry by Bill and Grissle. But then Thaddaeus would burst into the room with a fistful of bright beads or a rousing game, and all admonitions would be lost.
“Master Thaddaeus!” Grissle would scold.
“Now, now Grissle. Let the boy live,” he would say as he hoisted Edward onto his broad back, scooped Emmie into the crook of one arm, and made for the stairs with Minn at his heels.
“He’s ill!” Grissle would shout.
“Just a little fresh air,” Thaddaeus would call back, and off they’d go, romping down to the kitchen to chase the dogs or snatch bits of sweet biscuit dough from the distracted Hyla.
For Hyla had been given the complicated task of MidWinter baking. Grissle’s preparation list included the names of many unfamiliar confections, but fortunately the white-haired scholar came to Hyla’s aide. He seemed to have all the old recipes committed to memory, and with great delight, he donned an apron and worked by Hyla’s side, teaching her traditions she was sure even her great-grandmother had never known.
“Where did you learn all this?” she asked him one day as they mixed cake batters.
“It’s all in books written long ago,” he replied.
“Books?” Hyla exclaimed, startled by the thought.
“Yes. Ancient and forgotten books in the deepest vault of the University library.”
“But under the General’s regime . . . “ Hyla began.
“He overlooked one or two hoards of ancient lore when he tried to purge the colleges.”
“Does anyone else know of these books? Surely the Provost . . . .”
“Oh no. Not him. Our Provost does not like to know anything that might damage the blamelessness of his reputation,” chuckled the white-haired scholar. “But I often met Grissle rummaging about in those forgotten stacks. She liked to tell me she was cleaning.”
“That explains her lists,” Hyla said, looking thoughtfully at the scholar, “and it’s why you know all about MidWinter.”
“I wouldn’t go that far. I don’t know all about it. So many things about the old days are lost to us now. For instance: why the five-candle centerpiece? And why the tiny huts with clay animals?”
“Yes,” said Hyla. “What does it all mean?”
“Perhaps it signifies nothing in particular.”
“No,” Hyla said, hesitating. “There’s something at the back of it. Something important.”
“Yes,” said the scholar, resuming his measuring and sifting, “there is light. Light behind and before and beneath . . . “
“And above, and within and beside,” Hyla laughed, and they began to sing the old tune. It was the only clear thing rising out of the forgotten past, like a morning star in a dawn sky.