WESTEROS AU XVI: TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY PRUSSIA

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."
Charles Dickens.

The Baratheon Saga

"Some are born great,
some achieve greatness,
and some have greatness thrust upon them."
William Shakespeare.

This AU is my Westerosi take on Victorian Realism fiction (Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy...).
Featuring:

• A narrator that may sound like Voltaire, Charles Dickens, or Lemony Snicket (Lemony narrator)
• Upstart Baratheons
• Courtier Lannisters
• The beast with a dozen backs
• Westerosi history transposed to the real world
• The turn of a century
• A couple of wars
• Allusions to Victorian fiction

Dedicated to Ser Uttam Paudel

BOOK THE FIRST

THREE BROTHERS, THREE DESTINIES

"And yet the past comes round again,

and new doth old fulfil."

John Greenleaf Whittier

I. In which the Baratheon family's origins are explained.

Dearest reader,
I warmly and heartily recommend you to stop for a while and think twice, or maybe even thrice (that means three times) before plunging into this complex and redoubtable rarity of a historical fiction. If you thought that the Baratheon Saga was some sappy happy literary fairytale, please seek another read. In this saga, there are neither dexterous heroes nor sinister villains, and there is not a mere handful of leading characters. There are simply families, groups of friends, factions, people like you and like me, confronting one another for various reasons, in this convoluted ensemble piece in which everyone matters. For the model that posed for this portrait of the last centuries' society is none other than Real Life. Of course there is room for romance here, and for friendship, and for redemption, and a partly happy ever after. Yet in Real Life, all does not end well, as whoever has a soul, or at least a shred of emotion, within their hearts (I am referring to the metaphorical heart, as well as literally to the limbic system) ought to know from experience. Thus, dearest reader, if you have got the brains, the heart, and the guts (ruby slippers are optional) that it takes to endure the harshest of all hardships, upon that I rely and begin...
This story could have started at any point in the history of the people involved. But, if it were told in medias res, the narrator would have to flash back into the past, thus obfuscating and/or confusing the reader. We should thus start from the beginning of it all: how the Baratheon brothers' parents first met and courted each other, or rather, how their ancestors came to the German lands.
The surname itself was proof of their foreign descent, and so was the colour of their hair, too dark for the Saxon half of western Europe (pitch black, in fact). Their eyes, however, were bright blue as cloudless days, betraying some distant Celtic or Viking blood in their veins. Back in the old country, before the Revolution, they were demigods (if you can call divinity having a château for an ancestral home, with rule over all of the surrounding shire, and got invited to Versailles every now and then).
Sadly enough, demigods are not completely gods, and all things must come to an end. Thus, when the French populace surprised the nobility (and the rest of the world) by releasing all the anger that the collective mind had repressed across the centuries, the last living members of House Barathéon, a fine young couple with their newborn only son Étienne, were obliged to leave Versailles for their château in the provinces... where they weren't safe either. Fleeing from an angry lynch mob (armed with pikes, pitchforks, spades, torches, and all the paraphernalia a good mob must possess), and from the new Republican Army (escaping from which was, actually, not as problem-free as you may imagine), having the ice-cold winter of that year as another enemy, they were finally able to cross into Prussia, where they were employed in a steel mill, on the coast of Swedish Pomerania (the region that once was known, in the Dark Ages, as Sturmland), founded and owned by the local steel barons and industrialists, the Swedish-French Estermonts (whose ancestors had, in the middle of that very eighteenth century, transferred their business to this more lucrative region), led by a well-to-do gentleman, who gladly took in and supported these ill-starred refugees for whom everything except their jewellery and the company of one another had been wrested from them by the nouveau régime.
The Baratheons (now done off with the accent on the E) resided in Sturmende, the local community presided by the steelworks, after having converted from freethought to Protestantism not to raise any suspicions (Freethought had been approved of by state authorities in the Protestant North during the Enlightenment, but the Revolution changed that kind of tolerance). Thus, they had to change their names as part of the conversion, Étienne being rebaptized Stefan Baratheon. It happened by chance that he took for a playmate, in spite of the relevant class difference, Fräulein Cassandra Estermont, a classmate of his, the only daughter and heiress of the dynasty. Back then, the numbers of soldiers and highwaymen on the roads had offed her parents' scheme of sending her to Miss Thorncroft's girls' boarding school in the UK, so she had to attend the local school with children of lesser rank, and also not to forget the condition of bourgeois that the then-generation of Estermonts did not want to rise above.
Now let's skip next decade. For, as the two children became playmates and classmates, the fortune of the steel barons was increased by the demand of steel by the British and Prussian armies during the Napoleonic Wars. The French then occupied the whole of Pomerania, and the district of Sturmende hosted a garrison led by a freshly-baked lieutenant. And thus, a born aristocrat demoted to steelworker was called up by the Prussian Army, exchanging letters with his wife and only child... then taken prisoner at Lützen in 1813, then captive in a fortress prison on an island somewhere in the French waters of the Mediterranean (while his spouse and child celebrated the Allies' victory at Leipzig under the steelworks owner Andreas Estermont's umbrella), until he returned home, after the Battle of Leipzig, weary and faint-hearted, until Blücher rallied the Prussian banners for what would be the last campaign in the feud against the French, driving Ormund Baratheon away from his loved ones once more. Long story short: the relationship of Stefan Baratheon with his father had become distant because of the wars, and it became even more distant when Réelle learned that her husband had fallen on a battlefield somewhere in Wallonia, shot and stabbed in several vital points, his chest shot and stabbed with many red wounds. And then, widowed and living for her only child, she was employed as the personal seamstress, governess, and chaperone of the steel-lords of the Estermont mansion, which brought her son and the only daughter of the industrialist even closer to one another than they had ever been before.
Then, that very year, came Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna. Peace had returned, the so-called Corsican Monster had been sent into exile, and all the rulers in Europe, including the Prussian one, shared the spoils of the decade-long war. It was then that, thanks to the Congress, Pomerania became Prussian. And, concerning our friends in Sturmende, both Stefan and Cassandra were no longer children, but neither adults. Aware that their childhood friendship had grown into attraction, yet conscious that, like Romeo and Juliet, they'd be hindered by relatives. One decade later, they decided to elope. (If you were expecting that their flight from Sturmende could have solved their issues, you are completely right.)
He promised he would take her to the ends of the Earth. At least, he took her as far as Leipzig, where Stefan attended university and Cassandra lived on needlework, being taught by her beau in the evenings after class (The universities of those days were completely unfair in not accepting female students). They lived in an apartment above a Gasthaus, typically Bohemian style. Four years later, they were married. And the next year, their eldest son was born and christened, in the Lutheran faith, after Robert Schumann, whom they had heard perform and seen compose, and were rather pleased with. Their little heir turned out to be a lively, sunny boy who found pleasure in anything.
The half-academic, half-artistic life the young family led had them move throughout the realm, in search of new opportunities and inspiration, during the next decade: Leipzig, Eisenach, Weimar, Kaiserslautern, Heidelberg, Koblenz, Erlangen, Jena, Potsdam, Küstrin, Königsberg, Leipzig again, Dresden, Weimar again, Küstrin again (at this point, Cassandra Baratheon was expectant for the second time), Eisenach again, Erfurt, Heidelberg once more, Erlangen once more, Kaiserslautern once more, Koblenz once more, Leipzig once more, Küstrin once more (all that during one year); in Küstrin, once next to the Polish border, the second son came to the world and was christened Stanislaus, after the last king of Poland (in the same Romantic spirit as before). Unlike his older brother, this child would be reserved and nearly never seen smiling or crying.
Then, Potsdam again, a letter, the steel baron on his deathbed, the young people and both their children hurrying to Sturmende, receiving Andreas's blessing, inherited the mansion and the steelworks, and settled down there for a while. In those days, the liberal revolutions and the equally revolutionary railway craze still kept demand for Prussian steel abroad, and the upstarts decided to enjoy their new status by purchasing whole armies of tin soldiers for the heir and spare, and gowns in fashionable mauve silk (like those worn by the female royals of those days) for Cassandra, giving their children their hands full of tutors, and keeping an army of servants. At the same time, more and more impoverished peasants turned to the steelworks as a new home and the promised land, and the whole community prospered. A bar of their steel even made its way to the great Exhibition in London 1851.
Here, the reader should be left to wonder about how the Baratheons, who were at first wealthy bluebloods in France, then impoverished and persecuted refugees in Swedish Pomerania, then steelworkers of a certain degree in their new Prussian home... and then, due to the impact of both these watermarks of the nineteenth century which are known as industrialism and Romanticism, wealthy upstarts, self-made by effort instead of born into privilege. Which will have consequences in the upcoming chapters of this epic tale.
Thus sped two decades. We should skip them as nothing relevant to our story happened: only figure out that Robert was a dashing young man about 18, Stanislaus was a shy lad in his early teens, and their mother was in labour for the third and last time in her life. The child, a boy for the third time, was christened Rainer, just because Frau Baratheon had read that name somewhere and fallen for it. A lovely little face framed in dark curls as black as the short summer night when he was born.
So far, they had had three boys in a row, just like in fairytales. An heir and two spares, coal-haired and blue-eyed all three. Which meant that Rainer would be the lucky child in spite of being the youngest. Robert was the heir and the hope of the steelworks, and Stanislaus... well, he simply was Stanislaus.


II. In which the Baratheon brothers are orphaned, plans are made for them, and they part ways. Robert makes friends and falls in love. And then, war breaks out.

Shortly after the birth of their third and youngest son (his mother's favourite, by the way), Herr and Frau Baratheon embarked in Stralsund for their anniversary trip, on a great voyage of exploration across the Arctic to find a Russian-garrison-free passage towards the Pacific Ocean, accepting an offer from the Crown to scout prospective colonies for the German Empire, having been promised landholdings there as reward, in one of those new modern steamers.
Their two eldest sons embraced them at the docks, at their departure. Little did Cassandra know that the kiss she had given little Rainer in his cradle would be the last one... and that neither would her spouse return alive.
Unfortunately for them, the Windstolz, before she reached her first natural port, was swallowed up by a wave after crashing against a completely unexpected iceberg. Not even the cat or the rats survived. The Baratheons, however, did not drown, but rather freeze to death and yield to hypothermia, leaving a Konzern and three orphans.
A fortnight later, a telegram reached Sturmende and a mourning period (tiresome for Robert, but tranquil for Stanislaus) ensued, followed by the fact that the eldest of our brothers inherited all the lands and fortune of the steel baron clan.
The associates of the Konzern found themselves on the case of what to do with both the spares. In theory and according to tradition since early modern states existed (and maybe earlier, since the Dark Ages themselves), the eldest son of an important family was always the heir, the second son was meant for the Army, and the youngest one for the Church. Yet the retainers knew that neither Stanislaus in blue nor Rainer in black would fit their careers, the former being too reserved and the latter too sunny. Thus, it was decreed that the middle Baratheon should pursue a Theology degree at Bonn University within five or six years, while the latter would attend the military academy at Lichterfelde as soon as he came of age. As for Robert, he had practically learned all that should be known about the steelworks, but he needed a little more social life.
And, the next year, that social life began, altogether with his superior studies, as he pursued that Fine Art degree at Leipzig by day... and made the Kommerz's tour of regular inns by night, often returning home with his best friend Edward Stark for a walking cane, unconscious and intoxicated, even sometimes reeling after having inhaled ether. For ether parties were in vogue in those days, and the Kommerz to which Robert Baratheon belonged, the same Kommerz which had once counted young Stefan Baratheon as its boldest and most charming member, hosted celebrations of this kind, which Robert never missed either.
A Kommerz was a brotherhood of popular university students, like our days' cliques, but also similar to the fellowships in Oxford and Cambridge. They had a great influence in Leipzig nightlife, and in that of other university towns in the Germanosphere as well.
(By the way, associates were running the factories of Sturmende in the young owner's absence. I felt like I had to say this, otherwise someone would say: "Who was in charge, then?")
A cheerful and popular born leader, dashing, bold to the point of being foolhardy, he put more weight on pleasure and on social life than in his studies, just like his father Stefan had done decades before. Fortunately, this lease of life was sponsored by one of his lecturers, a learned gentleman from the same region who had seen the worth in young Robert Baratheon and found him sympathetic: Richard Stark, a learned and open-minded provincial from the Baltic coast, and the widowed father of four lovely children, out of which the three boys were part of the same Kommerz to which Robert himself belonged: Brander was president, Edward was vice-president, and Benjamin was another member of the Kommerz. And Ilona... Ilona was no ordinary maiden, being a spirited and clever yet equally beautiful one. The lack of a university education for her was compensated with being brilliantly self-taught. And she was as hot-blooded and lively as the Baratheon heir himself.
Soon, Robert Baratheon, who had already mastered the Saxon accent, that barrier that typically leaves a Prussian newcomer confused in Leipzig, went to live with them as an honourary Stark.
And he got his duelling scars in a swordfight with Edward Stark, who also received his scars at the same time. The scars made both of them look dashing (as duelling scars are supposed to do on both officers and students). They also did Turnen, or German gymnastics, together, and they were part of a Turnverein as well, so both of them looked certainly dashing, like dark-haired gods incarnate. Yet, in spite of their appearance, they were actually young mortal men, with flaws that would shape the course of their lives. The lad from Sturmland was impulsive, maybe too generous, as bold as a young student could be, reckless to the point of challenging the higher powers. The Starks had to get him out of many a scrape, whether it were duels he had got into under the influence or any other kind of issue.
It was with the reserved Edward and the spirited Ilona that our POV character had the closest affinity: the former because opposites attract (Edward often had to help Robert with his studies, while the Baratheon took the Stark out to the Kneipen in the evening), the latter because he had never seen such a tomboyish or learned girl in his life. She looked like Snow White with raven hair, lilywhite skin, and eyes of blue... but a Snow White in breeches and a tight braid, able to quote Shakespeare by heart and fond of horse riding, yet still modest as a violet, was a total rarity. Indeed, this girl took after her mother, whose life had untimely been cut off by a riding accident the decade before.
In both her northern birthplace and in Leipzig, due to her boyish manners and quick wit, Ilona had had no suitors before the newcomer moved in. And soon, Robert was boasting at the dinner table and in the pubs, raising a tankard to his sweetheart every now and then, that Fräulein Ilona Stark was his bride and would soon be his wife (how proud of her independence she may be, which, in fact, she was). And so he did at ether parties as well, obviously.
She was pleased with him as well, as anyone well-acquainted with the Leipzig area in those days knew that they often went for a ride across the plains together and discussed each others' lives, or warmed themselves by the fireside in winter, with the sincere smiles of cheerful young people.
However, the happiness of spirited maidens and Fine Art students might as well be shattered by decisions taken up as far up in the social hierarchy as at the royal courts.
This story would have taken a completely different turn if the reigning King of Prussia, then William I, had not become interested in the Eastern French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, prosperous regions just separated from his own lands by the Rhine.
Otherwise, war should have not broken out.
Prussia had recently put less developed Austria to rout and driven another nail into the Habsburgs' coffin through the cunning use of train time tables. And France was next on the list of enemies.
So, for this chapter, we take our leave of the two older Stark boys and Robert in blue uniforms with boots, on the military train to Kehl, towards the war front. Ilona is also on board, and she looks innocently lovely in white only stained by her dark hair and the red crosses on her hat and sleeves.
All four of them have already packed their cases and cast aside their textbooks, as soon as they heard of the outbreak of war. All four of them real patriots, ready to fight for crown and country, hopeful as can be yet unaware of which catastrophes the future will unleash upon them.


III. In which our brave Prussian men encounter a posh officer of pure blue courtier blood, Ilona shows particular interest in a Frenchman and vice versa, the Prussian army conquers France, a heart is broken at Sedan, but a marriage into nobility is arranged.

We left the two older Stark boys and Robert in blue uniforms with boots, on the military train to Kehl, towards the war front. Ilona was also on board, and she looks innocently lovely in white only stained by her dark hair, her icy blue eyes, and the red crosses on her hat and sleeves.
All four of them real patriots, ready to fight for crown and country, hopeful as can be yet unaware of which catastrophes the future will unleash upon them.
Think that now ye are
In France, made dangerous with wasting war;
In Paris, where about each guarded gate,
Gathered in knots, the anxious people wait,
And press around each new-come man to learn
If Harfleur now the pagan wasters burn,
Or if the Rouen folk can keep their chain,
Or Pont de l’Arche unburnt still guards the Seine?
Or if 'tis true that Andelys succour wants?
That Vernon's folk are fleeing east to Mantes?
When will they come? or rather is it true
That a great band the Constable o’erthrew
Upon the marshes of the lower Seine?
Such questions did they ask, and, as fresh men
Came hurrying in, they asked them o’er again,
And from scared folk, or fools, or ignorant,
Still got new lies, or tidings very scant.
But let's move out of the capital and close in on the invading army, shall we? Now the Prussians have already taken Alsace and Lorraine, but their orders will take them as far as Versailles and Paris themselves. Suppose them in the Loire valley or somewhere else in the French heartland. Brander has been already killed in one of the first engagements that his hot-blooded youth led him to charge into (shot through the throat, for more information). So we will only see Edward and Robert by the campfire. If you look closely, they are now officers: look at their epaulettes! Ensigns, or second lieutenants, both of them!
There's another one in their circle, an even better-looking blond and green-eyed officer their age, but already one rank above them. He's got a posh and stuck-up attitude like those toffs at court... simply because he's one of them. Meet Count Jakob von Lännister, Lieutenant born in Potsdam and raised at Lichterfelde: he's the eldest son and heir to the general, Count Theibald von Lännister, who is leading their third of the army.
The young noble started fighting on the war front as an ensign (fresh out of the academy, already decked with epaulettes), as the commanding officer of those two dark-haired and Leipzig-accented noncoms on whom at first he looked down due to the difference between him and them in both rank and descent.
In spite of the resentment he feels towards these "petty bourgeois," it's inevitable what war can do to people of different social standing who barely know each other. Now, weeks later, they don't care anymore for being Prussian or Saxon, bluebloods or redbloods. And the young noble slowly learns to understand their at first unintelligible dialect. He shows the other officers letters from his twin sister Elisabeth, called Sissi, now attending a boarding school in the UK. The exchange between the fraternal twins is unusually passionate.
(There was also a third child, a misshapen wretch that caused the untimely demise of Countess Johanna von Lännister, the loveliest of the Queen's maids-of-honour, due to internal bleeding, as soon as he came to the world. Ashamed of having begotten such a misshapen child, Count Theibald, who officially stated that he had fathered a stillborn, had him sold to a passing-by freak-show, and he's now touring Europe as the popular "Kobold of the Harz").
As I had previously stated, Jakob von Lännister has got a twin sister Elisabeth, called Sissi, now attending a boarding school in the UK (Allenswood Academy, to be more precise), where she is learning more than one foreign language, dance, song, the harp, the piano, sketching and other arts... to prepare her for life in high society. The letter exchange between the fraternal twins is unusually passionate, like out of a Choderlos de Laclos epistolary novel. He shows Stark and Baratheon a beautiful daguerreotype, that he carries in a locket with a lock of golden hair for a memento: "Picture her hair as golden, and her eyes as green. Like me, but of the opposite gender. We are the two sides of the same mirror: one is glass and one is steel. Isn't she beautiful, elegant...?"
"Your sister can't hold a candle to our own Ilona!", Robert replies in a slurred baritone, already laced with fine French wine.
"She's a freaking mannish...", a sober von Lännister replies in his softer tenor voice.
"BUT I LOVE HER!"
The next day, a battle of nearly no importance (save for what will follow afterwards) is fought, and a young French colonel of horse with platinum braids and violet eyes is wounded in the left shoulder by a good Prussian bayonet (a Sturmende-forged one!) in the confrontation. This dashing enemy officer answers to the unusual and fine-sounding name of Edgar Targarien.
His shoulder wound is tended to by Ilona Stark, and at this point he starts to wonder whether it was a bayonet or a Cupid's arrow that has recently pierced his lilywhite skin, now slightly pale with blood loss. Little by little, the hussar wins her heart as she wins his. Since he writes poetry and composes, she listens to him entranced, running her fingers through his flowing fair locks, while beholding his perfect features.
Even Ilona, who only saw Baratheon as a friend, has started to blush, and to conversate in a muttering voice with the young Frenchman, to whose wounds she tends with all her care. She wonders why this oppression, tighter than any corset, has taken hold of her chest, and why his songs move her to tears... while he realizes that, as the wound in his shoulder is quickly healing, a deeper wound has pierced his heart through and through, racking his own heart with the pain of searing flames.
If such a scenario doesn't mean to the reader that Ilona and Edgar are ready to elope, the reader has obviously never read the great tragedies of Shakespeare, such as Othello or Romeo and Juliet.
The next day, a bed at the field hospital is empty, and Ilona has vanished as well. She has taken French leave (never better said!) of her countrymen and of her fiancé. The effect on Second Lieutenant Baratheon can't be more devastating than a sudden strike of lightning.
A vow is made, a vow that signifies that the young silver-haired hussar's days are numbered.
From that day on, Robert lives to hear news of his dear Ilona, which never come, be it by the fireside or the surgeon's lamp, whether fighting or resting, and, in retaliation, kill as many uniformed Frenchmen as he can. He equals Jakob von Lännister in rank, but the general's son has the right connections to get promoted to rittmeister (or cavalry captain, for those unfamiliar with the rank). Lännister is soon a commander, Baratheon a rittmeister. Soon, both are colonels, at their young age, and unable to rise any further.
(Nothing noteworthy except that their rivalry, a prelude to the feud that would come, actually happened before the Battle of Sedan).
Then, in early September that year, before Paris and Versailles, the great battle of Sedan took place, as some of us usually have read in history books. Like usual, a dark-haired officer rides forth at the head of the ranks, recognizing the platinum blond officer he last saw in the company of Ilona, the one whose bed was empty, the one who had taken her prisoner and violently deflowered her. (Robert Baratheon was so blinded... so intoxicated by rage and prejudice that he didn't see the enemy officer as the great composer and musician, fond of ruins and twilight, that he actually was).
In less than a second, Edgar Targarien fell to the ground, a four-foot rapier thrust through his light blue coat and his white linen shirt on the left side, before it passed in between two ribs, into the left lung, cutting off the life-important pulmonary artery, piercing his right shoulder blade, and the bloodstained steel tip emerged from his back. (The throbbing heart was not pierced, but it had already begun to fail in the wake of parting forever from a loved one).
With the steely taste of blood on his lips, he just had time to softly say the name of the only one he loved before drowning in his own blood:
"Ilona..." Then, he was pale and silent.
Were young Targarien's opponent less in love with the girl to whom both men had promised eternal love, after the war we would have found the hussar colonel alive, yet weak and weary, and shackled, within the walls of Küstrin Fortress (or Graudenz or Templin, or any other fortress prison in Prussia, but Küstrin was the one that held most of the French prisoners after Sedan), a defeated and broken prisoner of war pining for true love for an eternity, having lost all hope and become an apathetic ragdoll at the mercy of his French-hating captors.
However, his fall on the battlefield, his short life a flame quenched by the storm, was what Fate had decreed for the young hussar: to die quickly and violently, and never to find out about the loss of a beloved one or the defeat of his kin and nation. At least, he has fallen a true war hero for his country, "mort pour la France," as the French patriotically still say in our days, which for a Frenchman, and especially one of the aristocracy once chastised by the Revolution, has always been the most sought-after way to die. This young fellow has died like a true Romantic hero, like a legend of yore, and left the stage of our real-life drama as vehemently as he has entered. The leave-taking, however, will surely be sad, since he has cast an elongated shadow upon the lives of everyone he knew, and even upon this fine story.
Robert Baratheon pulled out his blade from the blood-drenched chest of his rival, looking rather pleased yet slightly stirred by the desperate look in the Frenchman's teary eyes.
We skip a few days and find him and his other rival, his posh frenemy Jakob, garrisoned at Versailles with the rest of the high officers. Having just left the Hospital of Versailles, the ward where the wounded officers lay, they have taken their leave of the surgeons and set off to explore the grand halls. The lavish baroque complex has always got something new to offer: in the light of thousands of candles on crystal chandeliers, halls completely hung with mirrors in gold and silver frames, halls completely hung with huge magnificent paintings of the great battles of France (until the Napoleonic Wars), halls hung with fine silk tapestries of risqué classical myths, fountains adorned with merfolk... and so on, even an indoor and an outdoor theatre, and a tennis court!
(Edward Stark is on leave, in the Pyrinees, in the late Targarien's château of Tour-de-Joie, where he thinks he will find Ilona. We'll see if he finds her, but let's return to the Baratheon-von Lännisters and the lavish Louis XIV interiors of the former royal court of France, since I had promised that that would be the scope of our chronicle).
There will soon be a coronation in the chapel, and our young officers are invited.
That evening, a king becomes a kaiser in a hall of mirrors, and history is made. Never before had Robert Baratheon entered a French Catholic church of this size before, and he is ecstatic. However, his blue eyes dart away from all the gold and marble and gilded plasterwork and candle-light and trompe-l'oeil, towards a dark-haired Virgin Mary. He whispers Ilona's name to himself, and restrains a few tears. Though he has earned renown, a promotion, a fortune in wealth, and a medal of the most renowned ones in Prussia by killing a high-ranking officer, the Baratheon's heart still bleeds and hurts. The sacked towns' miseries, marching armies passing before the commoners' eyes as curses were muttered in French, other maidens defiled by other soldiers and other officers --while he had been true to Ilona alone, as long as he hoped she was still alive--, the captives weak from blow and wound --cold steel, hot lead, and the far deeper wounds of a broken heart--; the Virgins of far villages having their faces broken off in a drunken rage, severed limbs, missing eyes, torn maidenheads, French and Prussian soldiers alike gutted like fish or their throats slit; the black eagle replacing the bloodstained tricolore on château towers as, in the thatched rooftops around, the leaping fire was rising higher to greet the noon-sun, when the glaive forbade all folk to help or save... long story short, all the shock of warfare has finally caught up with his conscience. Only Ilona had made warfare feel worthwhile, both their hearts throbbing in the glow of victory, and now all what battle has to offer is scattered to the winds at last.
That evening, seized with a burning thirst, he quaffs champagne, like the evening before, and like he'll do the next once. His thirst cannot be quenched with anything else than strong drink (which actually kindles the flames), and it's blazing like a bullet to his side. When love is gone from his life, temperance takes her leave as well. And once one link is broken, the whole chain will shatter.
Once recalled to Prussia, the day before returning home, a letter arrives to the von Lännisters: Sissi, after fulfilling her education, has finally returned from Allenswood to their mansion in Potsdam, and she's waiting impatiently for her father and brother to return.
When Jakob is reading the letter to Robert, to cheer him up in a more respectable manner (he was then on guard duty, and still pure enough to keep himself sober in that scenario, and stronger of character than Cassio in Othello)... and Count Theibald overhears the words of sorrow that the upstart has replied with, the old general, doing his blond whiskers right, suddenly has a flash of inspiration, a plan that will both secure the von Lännister fortune and introduce the name of Baratheon into high society.
If the reader wonders if Theibald von Lännister was planning to betroth his daughter to this... ehem... potentially addicted, heartbroken suitor, the dear reader is not wrong at all. (So-called "marriage à la mode", between decadent courtiers and upstart bourgeois, had become a more and more extended custom throughout Europe, in the wake of capitalism and industrialism. And this was back in the 1870s!)
He writes a letter to Sissi that he's found a husband for her, a military officer, and a dashing one as well. No reply arrives, except a letter with the short message "I do".
(As for Edward Stark, he's already buried Ilona in a cave near Tour-de-Joie. He found her, bereft of life, in a pool of blood. She said "Promise me..." before closing her eyes and ceasing to breathe. He doesn't dare to explain such a painful re-encounter to his fellow officers).
Jakob von Lännister congratulates his prospective brother-in-law and explains the betrothal to a doubtful Robert Baratheon, who has recently remembered the fair hair and green eyes of Sissi (and does not seem to think that such a lovely lady may turn his back on him), ready to console himself, after Ilona's disappearance and untimely death (of which her brother has finally told him), with a born and bred court lady of fair features.
The reader may be left to wonder what may come out of such a marriage.
A certain dreaded Corsican once said (referring to the opening of the officer class to commoners due to the Revolution) that every French private carries a marshal's bâton in his knapsack.
The Baratheon response to this outrageous claim said that every Prussian private with enough resolve carries a colonel's sword, a medal of honour, the golden wedding ring of a count's daughter, and one and a half million marks for dowry in his knapsack.
As I have stated before, the reader may be left to wonder what may come out of such a marriage. A match arranged at Versailles, made by the Prussian elite, yet perchance bereft of love. Arranged marriages rarely feature love between the husband and wife. Would this be one of the rare cases?
Then, peace returns to the land. But only the kind of peace meant by the absence of war, since conflicts tend to break out even during peacetime. And the Baratheons would find themselves as clashing centers of gravity.
Upon reaching their old birthplace during the victory celebrations, the steel baron discovered his youngest brother bedridden and fragile, and the middle brother informed Robert of his own betrothal with only childhood friend and fellow French refugee descendant Elise Florent, a girl of not that much attractiveness, but especially intelligent and teased at class, just like Stanislaus himself.
Wishing Stanislaus and Rainer good luck, and getting all dressed up in mess uniform, Robert Baratheon took his leave of Sturmende to get the blood-stained Blue Max (the most important medal in Prussia, bestowed by the Kaiser himself) on his left breast and to attend the wedding of the decade in Potsdam Cathedral, followed by a soirée until midnight in the Lännister mansion. Count Theibald von Lännister, who led his white-silken and lace-veiled girl to the altar, was still being sponsored by the Crown, and he drank to his new wealthy war hero of a son-in-law... though the latter drank actually more to the health of the former and his twin children, the emerald-eyed bride and that dashing golden blond lieutenant of royal guards who Jakob had become after the signature of the peace treaty. And to the Prussian military, to which toasts were constantly proposed... with all the honours (id est, with nine ringing cheers)! And to the greatness that Prussia had achieved after winning such an epic war, the officers' hearts throbbing in the glow of victory.
It was a shame that the vows specified "till death do us part", since Sissi would soon find out which kind of person she had tied the knot with.
If the wedding feast hadn't been washed down with champagne, this story may have taken a radically different direction.
That evening, the newlywed Baratheon shoved the bed-curtains aside, stumbling towards his golden-haired spouse, as he addressed her, his speech slurred, his mind too clouded for him to realize who the person beside him was:
"Ilona..."
Then, he held Elisabeth von Lännister in an iron grip, that not even the greatest escapist could set herself free from. And then, he gave such a thrust that her whole world turned from black to white in pain, as she screamed like a rabid banshee.
The next day, after a whole morning of rest and staying in bed, the newlyweds returned to provincial Sturmende, a born court lady shocked not only by the manners of her spouse, but also by the fact that she had to leave glittering society for a while. Actually, whenever invited to a main event, Robert and Sissi would make another entrance into Potsdam society... though, in their partners' respective worlds, both the upstart and the noblewoman would feel unable to fit in, and tensions would rise between them.
"He wedded a wife of the highest dower,
who lived for fashion, as he for power,"
or rather; their elders had wedded them to one another against their wishes, striking a loveless match till death did them part.
And thus, she would rather keep her maiden name than change her surname to that of her husband, which now sounded as vulgar to her as it could (despite being a French surname!). Born a von Lännister, she would live and die Elisabeth von Lännister.
(As for Edward Stark, whose absence after the end of the war may have startled you, he had met a lovely English volunteer nurse, Catherine Tully. They married in camp and, after the war, they went to live first in Kate's childhood home in Dorset, then to a farmhouse in the Swedish province of Värmland, the Starks' own ancestral birthplace. Don't worry about Ned and Kate: They will have more than one child, and they'll appear later on in this story).


IV. In which a deluge holds Sturmende in thrall and an unexpected deliverer arrives, becoming Stanislaus's right hand (!) and personal servant... and something happens to Rainer.

With the purpose of introducing new plot points and characters, the narrator needs to explain that, during the war against the French, there was a great storm in the area where the young Baratheons resided, effectively isolating the local community of Sturmende from the outside world. A downpour and surging rapids kept the place on an island on the Baltic coast, which was nearly impossible to reach. To make things worse, Rainer fell into a deep coma, which kept the servants watching him night and day, and Stanislaus was left in charge of more of the Konzern's affairs, with the clever Elise for his personal assistant.
In these dire straits, a lowly fugitive and his equally dark-haired moll sailed across the rapids in a little black steamer, the Schwarze Bertha, loaded with mushrooms of the red and white-spotted kind, to land in Sturmende and feed the beleaguered locals. The people of Sturmende were saved by such an unexpected criminal ex machina, who had sailed all the way from the Swedish coasts to sell his ware in Potsdam and Leipzig, but had been surprised by the storm as well, and thus, obliged to take a detour.
If the reader wonders whether Fate had let Davor's path of life cross with that of the Baratheons, I shall tell that Fate had actually decreed so. Davor, then surnamed Seewirth, was unusually dark-haired and copper-skinned, and, ever since he had been left on the doorstep of Rostock Orphanage, he had been employed by several crews as a cabin-boy, without having ever learned to read or write. When he came of age, he was introduced by one of such crews to the drug trade, a lucrative yet clandestine form of business in those days. Davor and Marie, an outcast circus performer whom he married to conceal her underage pregnancy, and their so far only child Matthias, had saved a lot of lives, but not without worsening Rainer's coma and making most of the adults fall ill.
Nevertheless, when the storm had subsided and the flood had receded, the Prussian National Guard arrived at Sturmende, inquiring for one Davor Seewirth, a notorious drug smuggler. The Jean Valjean of the North had, in the meantime, stolen the costly oil portrait of the master's parents (the only picture in colour among all those daguerreotypes) to sell it at the nearest celebrated pawnbroker's. In an unusually impulsive fit of selflessness, Stanislaus Baratheon informed the National Guards that they had suffered from a case of mistaken identity and been suspicious of his personal valet, Davor Kurzhand. He also informed the commanding officer that he had given Kurzhand the portrait for a present.
The officer fell for it all, hook, line, and sinker. The stern-faced Stanislaus had rarely been seen as sympathetic, but his words sounded honest and trustworthy.
The Seewirths had truly been "les misérables" before Stanislaus's act of kindness, which gave them a new surname and a new lease of life as Baratheon servants. To remind Davor of how his life had been saved from certain firing squad, Stanislaus took a little pruning hatchet and severed three of the former smuggler's five fingertips on the left, the three middle ones, sparing the thumb tip and the pinky tip alone, for he had seen that Davor was left-handed, and he also wanted to even the length of all five fingers. Hence, the surname Kurzhand was now imprinted on the father's body like a reminder of his redemption from a life of crime.
Then, Robert came home from the wars and went to Potsdam to marry. This has already been described in the previous chapter, which is convenient to skip back to for interested readers.
As he left for university to start his Theology studies, Stanislaus entrusted Elise to the care of this upstart family, also hoping that Fräulein Florent would introduce the uncouth Kurzhands to the wonders of high culture.
Upon which we leave Stanislaus Baratheon to his university studies, which will be resumed in the chapter after the next one... for the next chapter will turn our gaze back to Robert and his von Lännister in-laws, mostly to the said in-laws, and introduce a couple of new characters, who will be pulling a lot of strings in the upcoming chapters.


V. In which the Fouché and the Talleyrand of Sturmende are introduced, and, after realizing what kind of person she has married, Jakob and Sissi love each other much more than like brother and sister.

At the service of the von Lännisters as a royal court informer, there was a person whose life story, as well as his professionality in the intelligence trade, would put Joseph Fouché to shame.
He (not the original Fouché, but the other person we are speaking of) had been born and raised a long way east of Potsdam, in a Tatar camp which was attacked, when he was a young child, by Tatars of another clan. Not only did the enemy leave him orphaned and take him prisoner: to make him a less rebellious and more docile slave, this fellow was deprived of his virile attributes, without any prior anaesthesia. As the encampment of his masters was later on stormed by the Czar's Cossacks, the young eunuch (whose original name is too hard to spell to appear in this tale) was taken to their outpost home as a manservant, to tend to the garrison's vegetable plots. He was also taught to read and write in Cyrillic, to be able to do paperwork, which he carried out as well.
About two or three decades later, a man from Saint Petersburg visited the stanitsa. It was pretty clear that, in spite of his origin, this fellow was not one of the usual "toffs from the capital". This ostensibly incensed person, by the name of Vladimir Lenin, had visited the outpost to spread his ideas about class struggle and the proletariat (ideas too leftish for the Russian landowners and officer class to accept). He gave a vibrant speech, to which the young eunuch listened as if in a trance, and pretty soon he left the stanitsa to attend the Party founded by Lenin in St. Petersburg, before he was assigned to Prussia (the eunuch, not Lenin). At first he had joined the von Lännister faction at the royal court to destroy it from within, but then, the wedding of his master's daughter to a grand bourgeois as proud of his rank as can be had him relocated to Sturmende, where he had plans to introduce the Communist Manifesto in Karl Marx's own mother tongue.
This eunuch was plump as a butter ball, and bald as one as well: he regularly shaved all of his platinum blond hair off out of admiration for Comrade Lenin (though, due to lack of testosterone, he could never grow a goatee). He had worn a shapka over his naked head, and then a powdered wig as a valet at court, but the warmth of the Prussian summer made him take off such headdresses. He still wore the long robe of his nomadic ancestors, as a sign of identity and of having survived the pitfalls of imperialism. The people of both Potsdam society and Sturmende had grown accustomed to him, and to his plans of dealing out Manifestos to the common German, which had earned him the convenient nickname of Tovarish ("Comrade" in Russian), which, with the pass of time and the need of euphemism, was finally abriged into a simple Varish, and it is as Varish we shall refer to him from this moment onwards.
Not only was there a Fouché in the von Lännister faction, but also a Talleyrand as well. Peter Bälisch's life may sound as a Cinderella story to most of you readers: the upstart from the provinces (a schoolteacher's son) with sharp knowledge and wit like a rapier, who studied at several universities (Leipzig, Jena, Wittenberg: all of them in Saxon lands), had recently followed in the footsteps of Wallenstein by marrying the wealthy widow of a high-ranking officer, recently killed by a stroke (his wedding to Liese Arendt had given him a château in the Alps of conveniently neutral Switzerland, a sickly stepson ready to pass away at any second, and a golden ticket into high society), and he had also developed a more than slight resemblance to Wallenstein, being slender, dark-haired and goateed. He had also earned a nickname, this one because of his physique, and his nom de guerre was Kleinfinger. This gentleman of wealth and taste also made it to Sturmende, to replace the late treasurer of the Baratheon steelworks.
Needless to say that Varish and Kleinfinger, in between banters and philosophical conversations, developed a frenmity comparable to that between Joseph Fouché and Charles de Talleyrand (which should be of ostensibly no surprise).
They ostensibly admired and respected each other: the foreigner with a dangerous ideology, hated by some and dreaded by all... and the upstart with a talent for climbing up the social ladder and befriending powerful men and women. Both of them strangers in a strange land, cutting sharp figures against the gilded haze all around them.
During one of these conversations, they brought about the theme of their master, who, either in spite of or because of his outspoken and warm Fezziwig-like personality, had cut a figure in Potsdam society by making the beast with two backs with every courtesan he could find available. And that in a state of ethylic intoxication: the Green Fairy of absinthe had become one of his regular mistresses, second only to Lady Ether. With Lord Byron, he would say: "The best of life is but intoxication." Leaving poor Sissi on her own, betrayed and dejected... or not?
There was her own fraternal twin, her other half, her intellectual and physical equal, the only one allowed to share her pleasure. She had read in Romantic novels about maidens who made love to their own brothers, and she was to be no exception. Ever since she was left in the vast, lonely mansion during Jakob's military education, her childish fantasies had continued far into her sexual awakening. They had been apart for a decade, and absence had made their hearts grow fonder, since the lieutenant's heart had been throbbing for his sister as feverishly as hers had beat for him. Hadn't Lord Byron himself had a romance with his stepsister, after all? And what about King Arthur and Morgan le Fay? Both Jakob and Sissi liked the same kind of dark, Romantic tales, in which nothing was forbidden, and in which the Sixth Commandment (id est, the "Sexth Commandment") itself was anathema.
They could keep a dark secret as adults, couldn't they? The children they might have could pass off as Robert's, and get surnamed Baratheon, anyway. For Jakob was everything that Robert wasn't. Her brother was a born courtier. He was a professional officer. He was sober. He was clever, learned, intelligent, cultured. He was well-educated. He knew how to treat a lady. He shared her golden hair and green eyes. He was her reflection, her equal, her real better half. And she was his as well.
The moon was their witness, the mirror reflected their figures, making it four blond and svelte figures lying naked behind half-drawn bed-curtains, half-asleep in one another's arms, his lovely face quite hidden in her golden cascade of locks. They called out with elation at unison, caressing each other until a flash of both pleasure and pain surged through the veins of both. Now they were ablaze to the core, and lava coursed through their young veins. Upon having reached that state and thrust each other into each other's vitals, they had to part ways. Jakob took out his watch from the pocket of his officer's jacket as he put on his uniform in haste and disappeared into the late night, heading back to his quarters. Soon, Sissi thought, Robert would stagger into her bedchamber, the usual amount of liquor under his belt, and then, in a slurred baritone, call her Ilona. And so it all happened. That constantly intoxicated upstart was only her husband by proxy. "Feign with him, make love to the one you actually hold dear", became her rules of marital relations.
If you wonder, readers, why Elisabeth von Lännister never thought of leaving her husband when the laws of those days' Prussia gave her the chance, you have maybe forgotten that she was a court lady, a socialite, and a count's daughter, raised abiding by strict moral and religious norms which established a clear set of rules for the patriarchy and looked down upon divorce in the worst of all possible ways. For her, Romanticism, and its ideas of incest and adultery, were her way to escape from a now too harsh reality. She had never been interdicted to read Romantic fiction, after all! And, from reading about Arthur Pendragon and Morgan le Fay to partaking in a forbidden romance against nature like theirs, absence and misfortune had made it possible for their fantasy to become real.
This condemning of divorce and acceptance of adulterous incest may seem ironic to you, but that's how things were, and it cannot be changed.
So we leave them on the train to Sturmende, together with Jakob and even Theibald, for everyone in their faction (their Fouché and Talleyrand included) is invited to the wedding of Robert's brother Stanislaus and his friend Elise Florent, a marriage which will have more than relevant consequences.


VI. In which a vicar, before leaving for his new parish, celebrates his wedding, his sister-in-law is ruthlessly bedded, and a sexy soothsayer makes her first appearance.

Now it was celebration time in Sturmende, as when any wedding takes place in this world, though Stanislaus was more the reserved kind and wouldn't like a fuss of a feast... Like his wife, Elise, he'd rather stay indoors reading Schiller's Chronicles of the Thirty Years' War. In fact, during his now finally ended university years, he didn't belong to any Kommerz. The young Stanislaus Baratheon was a socially awkward student whose nightlife was spent in reading, alone and sober (though not lonely). He was a teetotaler as well. Which hadn't made him precisely popular among his classmates. And he was as interested in physical education as he was in having a social life. So far, he had only been to a single ether party during his youth, and that for not seeming uncourteous, but the drug took such a hold of his thoughts that he swore never to attend another one, and to never taste any intoxicant. At least, there was Sturmende, there was Elise, and there was the tying of their knot before becoming the vicar of Drachenstein and the vicar's wife of the same parish.
The soon-to-be clergyman, once an awkward student, had become a clean-shaven and slender young man, harsh and stern beyond his years, who would rather reply with his rapier wit than laugh or even smile. The black robe would fit Stanislaus Baratheon like a glove. His bride Elise was more outspoken, rather homely yet intellectual, a budding feminist: the only one who could share his life till death did them part.
Rainer had recently awakened from his coma, and Robert was returning from his first foray into society: they would be reunited once more, to part ways when their reunion came to an end.
Having posh guests like the von Lännisters would show the locals how their ruling clan had risen in status. The Baratheon clan had now got landholdings, connections into the royal court and high society... not only colonies across the oceans, a medal of heroism, and a steel mill second only to the Solingen Krupps'. Long story short: Power. Yet this is the Holy Grail of many people, and I can assure you that the Baratheons themselves would not enjoy it for a long time.
I would like to make a lengthy digression on lust for power, but that would distract the reader from the purpose of our story. Better watch our characters' lives unfold and let the events speak for themselves.
The Robert Baratheon who returned to his own birthplace to attend the wedding (or, to be more exact, the wedding feast) was a stranger to the people of Sturmende. It came as an unexpected surprise that the steelworks owner's physique had changed and was now defined by a couple of never heard of traits.
The first one was facial hair: indeed, to appear more stalwart, he now sported a walrus moustache conjoined with sideburns or whiskers, Francis Joseph style, and a massive black pear of raven hair on his chin. What a striking difference, not only to contrast with his younger self, but also with his clean-shaven younger brother Stanislaus.
The second trait that had made itself prevalent was his waistline. The young officer who had been hailed as the local war hero and received the acclaim of royalty itself was as dashing as only the hardships of military life and a nice corset could sculpture a young person, while the new one decade older Robert Baratheon, the socialite, displayed obviously what a more comfortable lifestyle, coupled with intemperance and self-indulgence, was most likely to do to a dashing young fellow. The weight of pleasure had been added to his own, and his girth had increased to the point that his hefty frame was nearly perfectly spherical. Due to this girth and to his temperament, he was now often compared to a powder keg. While Stanislaus was thin and hard and cold like an iron rod.
Long story short: the new Robert Baratheon was over ten years older, bearded, and overweight.
Which made it hard for the rest of Sturmende, including the bride and groom of our wedding feast, to recognize him. The steel-lord had previously telegraphed from Potsdam, saying that there would be a great grand extravagant outrageous wedding feast for his brother and said brother's best friend, and that he ensured the Konzern would pay for the celebrations. By day, our steel-lord still maintained his warm and cheerful, Fezziwig-like personality, convenient for a fellow of his middle age and hefty physique... but this impression was now a mere façade, underneath whose smiles and laughter he actually bled. Now his sole concern was, in the steelworks owner's own words, quaffing life at long draughts.
Now Count Theibald von Lännister, the seasoned general and courtier, was also (and would for decades be, until his death) the de facto owner of the whole Sturmland Konzern, his son-in-law being a constantly drunken and inept lush of a grown-up child. Here we can see a perfect example of something that was and is known as realpolitik. Like the case of Cardinal Richelieu for Louis XIII, to quote another example from real life.
Of course Stanislaus had in mind not to attend the wedding feast, which he had expected to be more of a normal supper and less of a display. The ideal wedding for him and Elise would be a straightforward and austere Lutheran wedding in the local church, followed by an average supper with less to no social interaction.
There was a carnival in the area, which didn't please the bridal couple, but would do wonders to the local children, including young Rainer, recently awakened from his coma. The young boy, dressed in a miniature officer's uniform, caught everyone's attention as he fought with a short wooden sword and quoted some lines from Schiller's Wallenstein.
There was more of an actor in him, but he would soon make a good officer. That's what the older people said about the youngest of the Baratheons. "Du Rainer, du Feiner," they often said with a look of praise in her eyes, eclipsing his older brother's star, no matter if the latter was the one celebrated.
The first impression that Stanislaus made upon the visiting courtiers was of a sarcastic and reserved fellow, who remarked coldly at every change he saw:
"Is that really you? I see that our surname of Baratheon has gained weight during these years..."
Upon hearing those words, Robert laughed as loudly as he could and vehemently patted Stanislaus on the back. The soon-to-be vicar turned away, ostensibly annoyed, without saying a word or even smiling. Then, he turned towards a stunning green-eyed blonde in a gorgeous scarlet gown.
"So you must be Sissi von Lännister... Don't you get suffocated in bed at night?"
In response, the blonde turned her eyes away from her husband and winked at her twin brother Jakob.
The wedding in the local parish church of Sturmende was like the bride and groom would have had it. A cool, austere Lutheran wedding within modest white walls, without much leaving the point of interest.
A black suit and a white gown without any ornaments (though the toffs from the capital had put on their holiday best, mess uniforms included).
"I do". "I do". And a kiss more like the one that friends would give each other.
Now the reader should be informed that Elise, the bride, had a two years younger sister by the name of Lena. Lena Florent, who was obviously present at the ceremony as a bridesmaid. For she plays a rather important role in the coda of this chapter.
Now it was so that, after the wedding feast, Robert Baratheon, who had indulged as much at the table as usual, stumbled towards Lena and invited her, his speech not yet slurred, to follow her home.
The young girl reminded him of that lovely lost Lenore whose name was Ilona Stark.
I forgot to inform you, dear readers, of a major detail about Sturmende, which here plays a more than relevant role: the Florents owned a local Kneipe and Gasthaus, which, like so many across Prussia, was called Zur Linde, the Linden Inn (There were two others in Sturmende, the Duke of Friedland [named after Wallenstein, who had allegedly spent the night there in 1630], uphill and the White Lady).
Now, after having crossed the threshold of the inn, and that of ethylic consumption, after having underpinned his girdle (to quote Chaucer for once) to the strumming of a passing-by spielmann's fiddle, Robert Baratheon brought the girl staggering upstairs in a bridal carry and both flung their clothes on the lilywhite bedsheets.
Pretty soon, both were caressing each other, out of themselves with elation, as he called her Ilona in that usual slurred speech and she was too ecstatic to defend her virginity.
So, long story short, she lost it.
Now Stanislaus had followed his older brother all the way to the Kneipe to ensure that he didn't do anything indecent to the fragile maiden. Frau Florent told him that they had gone upstairs.
Imagine the face of Stanislaus when he saw Lena and Robert in the same bed, embracing each other, both obviously intoxicated and having the orgasm of their lives.
Thus, the clergyman rushed down the stairs and out on the street, ready to return to the estate and make it to Drachenstein the next day.
At the mansion gates, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen seemed to have been waiting for him: with hair like spun copper, eyes full of sparks, and a scarlet gown the colour of poppies. A ruby locket hung on her ripe bosom, like a freshly-shed drop of blood.
"Are you by chance Stanislaus Baratheon?", she addressed him in a foreign, slightly Slavic, accent.
"I... I am...", he shyly replied. This lady may be less clever than Elise, but her charms had stolen his heart.
"I came here with the carnival and heard of you. From a young boy who said he was your little brother". So Rainer had seen this goddess and told her about Stanislaus...
"What do you...?"
"You appear to be in sore distress. I just have these feelings. For I am more than a simple fortune-teller. I am a real witch. I can do real magic. But I only use it on behalf of the distressed..." Her slightly sinister Slavic accent sounded like a real enchantment, her voice a sensual contralto, warm and soft as velvet.
"I... would be glad...", he overcame his shyness. The young man was a scientific soul, always questioning the truth, but his clerical education had managed to sow some seeds of faith in his heart of hearts.
"By the way... my name is Aleksandra".
It sounded like a magic word.
"You should know I am leaving this place tomorrow, in the company of my wife. We're leaving for Drachenstein, an island village in the Baltic. I shall be the vicar there..." He felt that the warmth she irradiated was searing his eyes and heating up the blood in her veins. What ever was making his iron will falter?
"And I will follow you". Her voice echoed through the leaves of the lindens and in the throbbing of his heart. The bride in white was now only a friend. The lady in red had taken his thoughts by storm.
The next day, as Stanislaus and Elise (with their true Kurzhand retainers in tow, obviously) got on the train and left for their new parish, a passionate Aleksandra convinced the troupe, which was headed for the Rhineland, to make a detour up north.
Towards Drachenstein.
But let's return to Sturmende and to little Rainer. For soon, his other brother and in-laws will have to take farewell of him at the station, for this lad to start the way of becoming a dashing military officer. Jakob von Lännister himself will follow him all the way to Lichterfelde.


VII. In which Rainer leaves for the boarding school where his military education is no bed of roses, but he makes a friend (actually, more than a friend) who is his equal and kindred spirit.

So Rainer Baratheon has been escorted by his cool brother-in-law to Lichterfelde. The great compound on the outskirts of Berlin, surrounded by wild heathlands and linden groves gilded by the craft of autumn, would also host the von Lännister heir, who had been assigned there as a military instructor to turn innocent lordlings into disciplined cadets, and then into Prussian Leutnants with vitals of steel.
During the train trip, he had told the child of his own upbringing in the same military academy, before the war on France. Our dear Rainer could not feel more impatient until the redoubtable tower of Lichterfelde, the so-called Kadettenturm, appeared from above the golden lindens.
The region itself was full of stately mansions. Some of them serving as summer houses for posh Berlinese and Potsdamers, some of them were their all-year estates. Linden avenues lined the streets of the district, and the leaves fell one after the other like disks of thin gold. Such an avenue greeted Rainer Baratheon when he left the modest railway station of Lichterfelde (notable for its square ochre clocktower). The young count stopped a tram coach, that took them along such an avenue, the aptly named Kadettenweg, out of the mansion district, and into a grove on its outskirts. The raven-haired child had fallen in love with the whole region. Living there made Sturmende look provincial and bleak in comparison.
Aside from Rainer and his von Lännister guide, there were another gentleman and another child, who carried a trunk the size of the Baratheon's, on the Strassenbahn coach. They had been on the train before, but they had not interacted with our leading characters back then. The former was auburn-haired and had a girth like that of Rainer's eldest brother, and a sharp goatee and curly moustache gave him the air of a second Gustavus Adolphus. The child, a honey-eyed little rarity with curly dark golden hair who was most likely to be the gentleman's own offspring, looked more like a fragile and sweet little girl, even though he wore trousers and a pair of knee-high boots. Rainer looked at the other child curiously as the young count listed the sights of Lichterfelde: the Karlsplatz, the neoclassical von Lännister summer residence, the bright red dome of the Johanneskirche (that, according to Rainer, looked like a cream pudding topped with half a huge strawberry)... When the stately halls had given way to golden woods, the long-expected tower reappeared.
The Kadettenturm or Cadet Tower, topped with a dome which was crowned by a royal crown and a winged victory, could be no other than the signifier of the Königliche Preussische Hauptkadettenanstalt zu Lichterfelde. It looked like a glittering and ornate Fabergé egg of oversized proportions. This was the cradle of officers. The factory of dreams for every Prussian lordling. Including the young Baratheon.
They travel by Strassenbahn from Lichterfelde Station all the way to the Anstalt, and, at the end of a great avenue where linden leaves are falling one after the other, after crossing a garden gate of black wrought iron, the redoubtable compound with walls of red stone comes to view, and both the children and their prospective teacher enter through the main door, below an arch right below the main tower, which was flanked by two smaller towers crowned with twin domes.
Little Rainer is obviously not the only one: the vast garden and the main entrance are nearly crowded with young boys of the upper echelons of Prussian society. For now, it's into their rooms and uniforms on before the first class. The young cadets receive sortings of which ones should share the same bedroom. Rainer looks at the sorting: Baratheon goes with Tyrell. "Tyrell", Rainer whispers. "What a lovely surname! Who can it be?"
It may be a trick of fate or a sign that their bonds will be even stronger than ties of blood. Looking around the corridor, he calls: "Tyrell? Tyrell? Lorenz Tyrell?". The golden-eyed boy from the train looked at Rainer and asked him: "Rainer Baratheon?"
For a few seconds, eyes of honey and eyes of blue transfixed each other, and both children recognized each other. This was the dawn of something more than a strong friendship.
Rainer and Lorenz walked together into their quarters. They had been told that the Königliche Preussische Hauptkadettenanstalt zu Lichterfelde had even got both a Catholic and a Protestant chapel, a well-equipped military hospital, stables with dozens of lovely ponies and geldings looking for the right rider, a well-assorted library, a Turnhalle (that is, a great hall for gymnastics and other physical activity), a vast gardens and a nice grove for outdoor physical activities, such as tennis and horse-riding... aside from the classrooms, the mess hall, and the quarters of cadets, instructors, and personnel.
"Surely, there will never be a tiresome day in here", Rainer Baratheon smiled.
"As long as you don't mind the pecking order", Tyrell replied. "I've heard that it's an institution here at Lichterfelde, most of the students are bluebloods, and there's something in you that proves you're of the gentry... and of foreign descent."
"My family owns a steel mill. And I'm not sure, but our surname is rather strange", Rainer replied, blushing until his cheeks looked like ripe strawberries.
"Well, my folks are landowners. And my mother is French, which makes my position in the pecking order one of the worst", Lorenz Tyrell had twinkles in his golden eyes, and he pulled a wisp of hair from his brows. "Guess we are not that different. It must have been more than chance that we share the same room. If we stick together, those courtiers' brats will think before they tease us".
"We're not so different... it's more than chance. Surely, we'll become friends!", the dark-haired boy chuckled, his blue eyes sparkling as well. Together, they made their way through a labyrinth of ostensibly endless corridors.
In their cozy bedroom, with a bunk bed facing the window, a shelf for books on the wall, an Art Nouveau wardrobe, and a table with a couple of chairs... both of them opened their trunks, full of books and school material, with training swords and several kinds of uniforms: winter, summer, and mess uniforms. The winter uniforms were soon on both children, who looked like miniature officers in their black boots and Prussian blue jackets. In spite of their youth, both of them cut a dashing figure in uniform already: the blue and white looked lovely both with the bright sky-coloured eyes of Rainer Baratheon and with the strawberry-blond locks of Lorenz Tyrell. Little swords, the size of daggers to an adult, hung from ornate scabbards by their legs, half-covered in black riding boots. Looking at each other and at themselves in the bedroom mirror, they praised each other's appearance. But the peal of the bells in the Cadet Tower soon awakened the young boys from their reverie: Lorenz first, followed by Rainer, returned to the corridor in haste, not to be late for the first class in their officers' training. They arrived five or four seconds before their first instructor, good old Freiherr Kurt von Pfennigrosen (a red-haired and goateed, scarred veteran of the French Wars, who wore a powdered wig to conceal his baldness), gave his first lesson on the nature of warfare, which, according to what he said, was a scourge of humankind slightly younger than the sin of Eve, when the older out of two prehistoric brothers let go of all his rage and jealousy in history's first display of violence. After such an impressive rant, he showed the students spearheads of flintstone, of green copper, of green bronze, of rusty iron, steel pikeheads from the Thirty Years' War, and bayonets used by the ranks of Frederick the Great.
At the end of the class, some haughty and cold-looking students cast piercing glares at Rainer and Lorenz. Both of them could hear their opponents call them "middling bourgeois", referring to the latter as a "French bastard" while croaking like frogs, and the hands went soon to the hilts of the swords. A violent fight, a lower-scale war of classes, could have broken out if Freiherr von Pfennigrosen had not intervened and fixed his stern gaze on courtiers' sons and commoners' alike.
The next class was Turnen, or German gymnastics, given at the Turnhalle by young Count Jakob von Lännister, who would also teach them fencing, tennis, and dance in later years. All of the students took off their Prussian blue cadet jackets. The training was hard and competition was fierce, since the Baratheon-Tyrell team wanted to show the courtier lads that they could be equally good, and thus, Rainer and Lorenz first got on the pommel horse and quickly vaulted over it, though the latter did it with his eyes shut and came down in a slump. They tried to overcome their vertigo at the parallel bars, which Rainer quickly mastered. Clutching the rings, the young Baratheon felt like he was swinging on a swing, different from the one in his birthplace garden in Sturmende, but still a good swing: such were his positive feelings. He encouraged Tyrell to swing on the rings, so that his blond locks fluttered like Rainer's own dark locks had done before. Lorenz was quicker than Rainer on the rings, though he was at first a little scared of falling and reluctantly let go, his little heart racing, landing with a thud on the soft floor. Both friends were now flushed with heat, drenched, thirsty and weary, yet pleased with their performance after all. Lännister said that he would be harder the next day, at which the cadets saluted and stood in attention.
After class, cleaning and cooling themselves in the shower, Rainer and Lorenz play-fought a little against each other, striking each other's soft chest and dripping locks with foam. The courtier boys from before appeared and laughed at our cadet friends, and what followed would soon become known as the First Battle of the Lichterfelde Showers, in which cool water and soft foam served as ammunition and the Baratheon-Tyrell alliance won by a landslide, driving the hard-hearted foe towards a general retreat, as Rainer and Lorenz would often say of this shower battle and of the five others that came thereafter.
That night, Rainer claimed the lower bed, but he had learned, during the physical education lesson, that the Tyrell lad was afraid of heights and generously offered him that privilege. Besides, the dark-haired cadet, now master of the higher bed, had a fine view of the woods and towers of Lichterfelde from the window.
The days passed on easily, learning, training, trying especially hard to do their Maths. There was another thing they had in common! At the end of the week, on Sunday evening, the cadets received letters from their relatives. There was no mail for Rainer, but one letter, from a place called Hohengarten in Lorraine, was adressed to his roommate. Lorenz read the letter aloud: the writing was elegant, and the message was conveyed in French. So he had to translate for his new friend. The heading, "Mon très cher frère", became "My dearest brother". The signature beneath read: "Ta petite soeur, Marguerite".
From the letter's contents, it appeared that Lorenz had two brothers, Karl and Wilhelm... or Charles and Guillaume (for French names were written in the letter). And a younger sister, Margarete... Marguerite, aside from the fact that he seemed to live, with his married parents and a good old grandmother, in an estate with an impressive garden. Rainer's guesses were confirmed by Lorenz... or Laurent, as he said that he rather wanted to be called at home. "Laurent Tyrell", rolling the Rs in French. "And you are... René Barathéon", Laurent said with the same French accent. And then, Rainer replied with a wistful smile and the suspicion that his surname could maybe be French (He did not know that this hypothesis was actually right).
"I'm, conveniently, le cadet... which also means 'the youngest son' or 'the youngest brother' in French. And the third sibling in birth order: there's Guillaume, Charles and me, and Marguerite is the youngest of us all, the loveliest girl I know so far. She does not attend any boarding school or have any tutors: Maman and Mamie, Mother and Gran, are responsible for her education. Guillaume is confined to a wheelchair since a riding accident, his left leg broken beyond repair, but he is extraordinarily clever: he gives lectures at Heidelberg University, and sometimes at the Sorbonne in Paris. Charles is an officer, and a brave one as well: he finished here this year already and now he's garrisoned in a distant fortress... in Graudenz, even though he has found himself a bride of our region's landed gentry, a beautiful redhead called Léonnette Fossovoie. And they do like each other! The wedding took place last summer, before Charles and I parted ways. I was supposed to become a priest myself, but my family is Catholic, and being such a priest would be so tiresome!... So I have had my way, and my wish to become an officer like Charles will soon come true!"
"What's the difference between a Catholic priest and a Protestant vicar? There shouldn't be such a difference. I believe it would be equally tedious!"
"So do I. Anyway, I am not that fond of religion. But you should visit our home someday! We call our estate Hautjardin, which is Hohengarten in French. It's lovely! We've got a huge greenhouse full of exotic plants, not to mention the rose garden, the hedge maze, the English grove, the orchards, the vineyards... and the Moselle River at the foot of the hill as a mirror for the estate. All four seasons have their charm there. For summer, I will return... but what about you?"
"I've talked to Count Jakob and found out that I'll stay here in Lichterfelde. In the mansions, not here at school. My eldest brother's in-laws have got a summer residence, and I will live there until we meet again. We have nice gardens, though not as vast or beautiful as yours at... Hohengarten? Hautjardin?"
"Say it the way it pleases you the most. I do not mind. Did you say your... eldest brother? And what about your parents?"
Rainer blushed and tried to restrain a few tears, unworthy of a military officer.
"I've got no memories of them... It was a shipwreck in the Pacific, when I was still a baby. So I grew up with two older brothers. I'm le cadet as well. Stanislaus, the middle one, has become a vicar, and now he's preaching in some place called Drachenstein. Hope they can make him smile or have fun there, for I have never seen him look pleased! Robert, the eldest, runs the steelworks in Sturmende. And he's always laughing. He must have done something important at Sedan, for everyone calls him a war hero and he always wears this medal on his chest... He's married to Count Jakob's sister, and it's in their summer mansion that I will spend my holidays. Anyway, we'll play croquet, we'll go to the races, maybe to a beach someday. But I will miss you terribly, and count down the days left until autumn returns."
"So will I. And Mamie and Papa and Maman and my brothers and Margot... that's short for Marguerite, like Gretchen in German... will be glad that I'm not alone at Lichterfelde. And that I have got the best of friends: my brave René Barathéon..." These words cheered him up. Perhaps the boy from Lorraine had had the childhood without much loneliness, and with adult caregivers, that Rainer wished he had had himself... but he was trying not to shed any tears upon saying these words, and he even blushed. It was clear that he felt sorry for having brought up the subject of the Baratheon family tragedy. And that he liked Rainer as well, ever since young Baratheon had spoken for him before their higher-class and German supremacist classmates.
"Rainer. Call me by my real name, but spare the French pronunciation of the surname. I love it myself. Besides, there's still a whole school year until summer do us part. And you could help me sharpen my French after class."
"Does this mean you will skip your French lessons on purpose, for me to...?"
"No. I will only consult you if I have any doubts about French classes. And before the exams."
"C'est redoutable!"
"C'est... what?"
"It's... worth admiration. There you have a new French expression you can use whenever you are excited."
After putting out the light, the two cadets snuggled themselves up in their beds and wished each other good night.
"Gute Nacht", you could hear Rainer wishing his new Lorrainian friend.
"Bonne nuit", Laurent cheerfully replied.
Such was their first day at Lichterfelde. The rest of their days were equally exciting, as they usually are to plucky young children. Autumn sped by and winter brought a dazzling Christmas tree to the great hall. Presents were unpacked by all of the cadets, for instance: a regiment of tin hussars for Lorenz Tyrell... a wooden nutcracker, crowned and dressed in Prussian blue, for Rainer Baratheon. That winter, snow forts soon rose in the courtyard, and every cadet was part of a garrison within white ice walls. Rainer was the leader of such a unit, with Lorenz for a right hand. They fought the same courtiers who always bullied them, and soon it came to light that both of them had more of the talents that make an officer than their blue-blooded enemies. Though the bluebloods fought back, and though snowballs hit both Rainer and Lorenz in vital points, the lads who were nicknamed "the Dark One" and "the French One" (the national enmity with the French still lingered after the war, as a prejudice of iron that followed young Tyrell like an elongated shadow, and it would soon resurface, but already was he teased, even more than Rainer, due to his descent; the bullies hopping and croaking and telling Laurent to "go eat frogs back in enemy country!") never stood defeated. To the children, this was real war. Little did they know that, when they came of age, reality would put them to the test by giving them a great war to fight. And break the bonds that were right now being forged.
The sun began to shine brightly once more, flowers peeped from beneath the coat of snow, and the lindens were in full bloom. Rainer was getting help from Laurent to polish his French, both of them studied history, trained, and played together. They had begun to study the Thirty Years' War, that soon became a part of their roleplay. Rainer Baratheon was Gustavus Adolphus, the brave King of Sweden, and his Lorrainian friend, now even abused due to his descent, was the great general Johan Banér. Rainer was always defending Laurent from being mistreated by the courtiers' sons, who were, in their eyes, Ferdinand II, Tilly, Wallenstein, and Pappenheim. Soon, Rainer and Laurent gave their bullies these roles as nicknames. The leader was Ferdinand II, the dark-haired one was Wallenstein. And Lichterfelde was the theatre of these children's wars, fought by cadets who could only read and dream about epic battles. Little did they know that their future just screamed of Breitenfelds, Lützens, Austerlitzes, real clashes, and even tragedy... And that their dreams of war would soon have one of them regretting his yearning for peace to end.
Summer tore them apart, as Rainer left for the von Lännister mansion (then to Kiel and the Danish islands, for some sailing) and Laurent for the family estate. Letters were frequently exchanged, leaves and flowers sent with the finely-written messages. And both of the young boys awaited, as impatient as every child, the day when autumn should reunite them: there were no other children Rainer's age he could play with during summer, while Laurent, in spite of seeing familiar faces and places once more, felt estranged and missed a classmate in particular.
And autumn, as always, did not delay a second. In September, both of them met again at the same gate.
Thus passed the years on the Lichterfelde campus, one by one, for Rainer Baratheon and Laurent Tyrell. Freiherr von Pfennigrosen, also known as "Old Kurt", turned out to be as clever as he was harsh, and, though he often lost his patience with these two lads, he gradually grew to like them and admire their progress. In due time, their shoulders broadened and their voices changed, and soon they were thirteen-year-olds riding on horseback, crossing rapiers and taught fencing as a subject. And, if they ever were paired as fencing partners, their iron wills clashed as violently as their steel. Neither wanted to give up. Within months, their arms grew accustomed to the swords. Since Rainer was a Baratheon, he would soon follow in his brother's footsteps as a swordsman and war hero. And he had sworn to never disappoint that legacy.
In those days, Otto von Lilienthal had already crashed his glider on a hill of the moors around Lichterfelde, while his brother Gustav still carried on with the family tradition of trying flying machines in the area. But let's get back to the Kadettenanstalt and to our young cadets!
Laurent was the perfect opponent for Rainer (or such was the opinion of the von Lännister heir, their instructor): impulsive and impatient as the Baratheon himself, yet slightly shorter and clearly quicker. From the first "En garde!" to the moment when either of them lowered guard on purpose to give the other the advantage and subsequently yielded, both sparring partners did always their best and were as determined as the musketeers in the exciting Dumas novels which Laurent had received, in original French, for Christmas and read aloud to Rainer every evening. Now they saw the courtiers' sons as the guards of Cardinal Richelieu, and both upstarts, Baratheon and Tyrell, were always heard proclaiming their favourite battle cry, "Tous pour un et un pour tous!", which they had adopted as their own.
They loved reading adventure novels by Walter Scott, and others which old Freiherr von Pfennigrosen had recommended, which covered the wars they had studied at class: the Thirty Years, Frederick the Great... Learning history that way was something that both of them loved, as their hearts were still yearning for change and adventures.
That year, they had put on a school play about the exploits of Gustavus Adolphus. Rainer, his dark hair concealed beneath a blond wig, played the lead role, while Laurent cross-dressed as Queen Eleanor and doubled as Banér. In the end, when the Golden King faded into the fog, shot by the enemy, his true general led the Swedes to defeat Wallenstein, and the widowed Queen wept beside the form of her beloved spouse, even the courtier parents of the classist lads were left speechless by the young upstart cadets' vivid performance. The play was hailed as a total success.
That summer, Laurent Tyrell went to Hohengarten or Hautjardin as usual, while Rainer went to the Isle of Wight, where the Baratheon-Lännisters now had got property. The next summer, and the rest of the summers during this stage of his life, he would spend in St. Andrews, or on the French Riviera, while Tyrell would frequent, according to tradition, his own estate birthplace.
Two or three years later, their skill as swordsmen and tennis players knew no equal, as their strength and speed increased. Both Rainer and Laurent had already developed tenor voices and started to grow little wisps of hair on their chests, though Rainer's dark wisps grew earlier and quicker than those of his half-French best friend. The uniforms, which once made them look cute as children, now made them look dashing as youths. It was then, when thoughts of love tend to fill the fiery, changing hearts of young people, that both of them discovered that they were not immune to that feeling. That autumn, when Rainer Baratheon returned to Lichterfelde from Biarritz and Laurent Tyrell from Cannes, they embraced in the station as friends. Throughout that year, they would embrace one another as more than friends.
Perchance it had started in the Turnhalle, when crossing swords and beholding each other's sparkling eyes above the flashing blades. Perchance it had started in the courtyard that winter, when the Lorrainian threw a white, soft snowball at his friend to cheer him up. Perchance it had started when they were riding on horseback, when the lindens where in bloom, and Rainer nearly fell off his steed, had not young Tyrell quickly reacted and helped him up on his saddle again. Perchance it had started in their bedroom in midwinter, as both youngsters were poring over Envers et contre tous by Amédée Achard: the novel Laurent had wished for and received under the star-decked fir tree. Perchance it had begun in the library, poring over their lessons, or at the tennis court, facing one another with rackets in hand.
Or perchance the flame of love began to glow in all four of these scenarios.
Rainer was now tall and broad-shouldered, twinkles in his sky blue eyes, a shade of black fuzz on his upper lip, a well-developed chest and shapely limbs due to his Baratheon heritage and devotion to exercise. The uniform fit him like it once had fit his brother. Yet, beneath that dashing blue jacket, he began to feel his heart throb nearly out of his chest every time Laurent touched him or looked at him. With his hair and eyes the colour of liquid gold or polished amber, and skin soft and fair as peaches and cream... with a flower-soft face and willowy limbs, and shoulders like those of a nymph, young Tyrell, shorter and more fragile than his roommate, seemed to have something that stirred Rainer deep inside his chest, setting his heart and lungs on fire. For a while, he grew pensive and did not dare to speak to the one who made him falter, to whom he had recently lost, time after time, during their fencing lessons. Or to read historical novels in French together. Rainer Baratheon, now more reserved, had lost his usual smile and self-confidence, and the sparkles in his eyes had become little flames. Soon, he was ablaze, seared by this unknown feeling, tossing feverishly on his bed, until, one evening, Laurent took him to the military hospital, sensing that his good friend may have fallen ill with a blazing fever, a cold sweat, and apathy so strange in a usually cheerful and lively cadet. And the dark-haired youth now even lost consciousness sometimes at class!
Strangely enough, the mercury reported 37 degrees Celsius: Rainer's system was in perfect health as it always had been, even though a revolution was taking place within him.
Still, the half-French cadet wondered how his friend might have changed so radically in so little time. Perchance it was, like in the old fairytale, a shard of magic mirror swallowed or breathed in, that had reached his young heart and frozen it cold and hard. Yet Rainer was neither cold nor hard. No. He was on fire, and he faltered, blushing and muttering instead of talking in his usual tone.
And then, as unexpectedly as it had happened to Rainer, Laurent had started to feel the same. Now he felt admiration towards his manlier friend, now concern and wonder at his startling change of heart... and now he wished to lose himself in those shimmering summer lakes that were the other's eyes, run his fingers through that raven hair, clasp that shapely waist, nestle leaning against that sculptured chest and listen to the steady heartbeat and equally steady breathing of such a dashing... Such a wistful wish! Was that more than a recurring daydream? Could that be possible? Had something more than friendship found a way into their changing young hearts? It had, of course.
Now they were invited into the grand mansions of Lichterfelde whenever there was a ball, a soirée, or any other society event. The cadets received, thus, an initiation into high society and a chance to show their dancing skills. Yet sometimes Rainer wished Laurent were a maiden, and vice versa. The brilliantly lighted ballrooms contained the flower of Prussian society: daughters of courtiers, industrialists, and landowners, dressed in their best and most colourful silks and satins, light glittering in their eyes as they expected a cavalier in Prussian blue with golden wings to sweep them off their feet. Yet neither the Lorrainian nor the Sturmländer felt a shadow of a thrill, as they smiled ironically and put on a face of courtesy when they invited the maidens to dance. Rather, they would seek each other and look at each other with each other's eyes.
By night, they slept no longer in separate beds. They had hitherto read books in the same bed, Laurent reading aloud to Rainer, or played with their soldiers. But they had slept each in his bed. That began to change. Now Rainer slept with Laurent, now Laurent with Rainer, both in their soft white shifts, embracing and tickling each other. And always did young Tyrell lay his little fair head to rest on young Baratheon, on his chest or on his solar plexus, listening to the soothing sounds that came from his recovering system, after a long day of training and studying, while Rainer, though exhausted, caressed and often, like a firing squad of passionate love, poured volleys of burning kisses upon that crown of golden locks and clasped or the supple waist of le petit Lorrain who nestled on his torso in exchange.
The year after, one stormy evening, both of them finally found the right words. At unison.
"Je t'aime", the half-French stripling quickly whispered, before he snuggled up himself beneath the sheets, wrapping himself in a soft cocoon.
"Und ich liebe dich!", Rainer Baratheon replied, blushing and honestly looking at him.
Then, he seized Laurent by the shoulders, still looking at him, and gave the blond youth a passionate kiss. On the lips. It lasted for five seconds, but it seemed that time had stopped for them... until their lips parted.
In response, Tyrell nearly lost consciousness. His heart skipped a beat, his lungs stopped, and he burst into tears not worthy of an officer, as he embraced his roommate, as strong as he could, pressing and burying a flustered face --now more peony-like than rose-like-- in the taller cadet's nightshirt, as if he would lose his greatest treasure in some way or another.
Completely absorbed in each other, intoxicated with the sweetly poisonous draught that is the gift of love, they sat in silence.
"You know... we were by no means the first ones. Remember what we have learned. Alexander the Great and Hephaestion...", Rainer explained, as he ran his fine fingers through cascades of dark gold.
"Or Gustavus Adolphus and Banér...", Laurent, who had now plunged into the clear lakes of a pair of Baratheon eyes, replied.
"Frederick the Great and Lieutenant von Katte... But what am I thinking of? Weren't all of those couples star-crossed?", Rainer tried to regain his reason.
"If that is the case, I hope we're not star-crossed at the end of the day", was the Lorrainian's honest reply. Little did both cadets know about their future. They were completely unaware that theirs would be a star-crossed romance as well. To them, as to young people in general, the present was all that they could think of.
"Bonne nuit."
"Bonne nuit."
As they put out the light and Rainer took his place in Laurent's bed, clasping the blond cadet in warm strong arms, pressing him even closer, they shared a second kiss, one that sent both ice and fire through their adolescent veins. This time, it was Laurent, burning with impatience and with passion, who had struck the Prussian's lips. And Rainer replied with peals of merry laughter and a second volley of kisses on that tender flushing lovely face, kissing peony-red features, curls drenched in perspiration... the blond cadet's starry eyes softly shutting, finally giving in to exhaustion, the crown of golden ringlets nestling right upon his roommate's throbbing heart.
Soon they had to conceal their secret by daylight, pretending to be best friends in everyone's eyes, the truth being revealed in the dark of the night, when they gave in, heart and soul and all the strength they had left, to the rush of elation brought upon them by their favourite intoxicant.
Thus went a few years by, and soon Cadets Baratheon and Tyrell were in their late teens, both still as dashing as ever, yet concerned because this was their last year at Lichterfelde and soon, as ensigns (before becoming lieutenants), they would surely be parted, to serve the Prussian Crown in different places. Laurent had written, on his Christmas wishlist, that he would serve in the Lorrainian Regiment garrisoned in Sierck, at the castle which once had been the residence of the Dukes of Lorraine... a short distance from the Tyrells' estate birthplace, located in the same Landkreis or district. Given the fact that they were wealthy (in spite of being half-French and of half-bourgeois descent), there would be no problem in convincing the Ministry of War (after all, the Tyrell clan's other military son Karl, or Charles, had been reassigned to Küstrin, right across the realm!).
When Rainer Baratheon had learned where his "best friend" wished to be stationed, he made the same wish. The same assignment, it could never have been more obvious! Besides, he would also put his now reached mastery of the French language to good use in Lorraine!
The seasons that year changed not as quickly as the others. Our cadets counted down the days in May and June. Until in the end, at their graduation, when they were finally presented with their assignment, both Rainer Baratheon and Lorenz Tyrell saw their wishes come true. Their duty would never part them.
Whether it was one of their surnames or both that made this miracle possible remains unclear, but what is true and a matter of fact was that two little boys had grown into young men (if not into striplings), from cadets into ensigns (their promotion to lieutenant would be decided by the officer class of the regiment), and both of them had discovered true love together, with the help of each other.
And that, during this decade, the old nineteenth century, so full of progress but also of conflict, had finally drifted away, to be replaced by a new age of which everyone held great expectations, in spite of the fact that it would be a darker and bloodier century than its now bygone predecessor. The twentieth century lay in its glass and steel cradle, so why would anyone know what it would bring, for better or worse?
Now you, dear reader, may have inquired more about Rainer's summer holidays with his relatives, and thus, about the main branch of the Baratheon clan. The ones from Sturmende, whose fate we have vaguely discussed in this chapter. In the following one, thus, we shall examine how Robert and Sissi, and everyone of importance to them, welcomed the twentieth century.


VIII. In which the old century comes to an end, the Konzern is blessed with three fair children, and the Starks drop by for a while.

As I have written in the chapter before, the twentieth century was dawning and everyone, from the Kaiser and Queen Victoria themselves to the ragged children in the orphanages, saw the sun of a new Golden Age rising before them. The lovers of pleasure, which have always been a majority among the upper and middle classes of this developed world, hoped in scenes of earthly enjoyment, for the overcoming of all wish for strife; the rule in store, the sovereignty of love, suppressing all desires but that for universal joy. All people would be happy alike, and a healing balsam would be poured into every wound! Then would all the old griefs be buried and forgotten, and the soothed minds of the contented trouble themselves no more with struggle. Oh for the dawning of that morn when the world should resound once more to the songs of rejoicing which gladdened the golden age! Then all should be equal and all happy. The cruel swords of war would be turned into ploughshares, and spears into reaping-hooks, and animate and inanimate Nature would join in one general song of joy.

There was heard the music of pleasure resorts and theatres. The world's best singers and players were all there. Theatres and places of music were going day and night.
The pleasure loving were constantly planning new pleasures. There was riotous joy and ceaseless feasting.
European society encouraged intermingling between classes, friendships on equal terms between men and women, more creativity, unconventional living arrangements, divorce, and a more open discussion of sexuality, paving the way for the flower children that would be born half a century later.
Confidently, they latched unto the idea that they would conquer and overcome strife. The superiority of Love would overcome all desires for conflict and everyone would work towards universal joy.

Surely, they would be able to make everyone happy and pour a healing tonic on every wound. Then all old sadnesses would be forgotten, and people's frustrated minds would be calmed, no longer troubled with struggles and difficult effort.

If only that day would come when everyone would be their own king or queen and their own realm, and the songs of rejoicing that gladdened the golden age could be heard all over the world! Isn't that what the prophets had said, and the poets had sung? Then everybody would be equal, and everyone would be happy.

But where could that hope come from? It would probably be in an unusually blessed part of the world, perhaps some beautiful, peaceful valley, among a community of simple, contented people in a perfect family who never experienced turmoil and lived in happy harmony with each other. Such a person could only come from this kind of blissful, peaceful background--the kind of person who would cause harsh weapons of war to be turned into tools for farming the land, and would cause plants, animals, and even rocks to join together in one general song of joy.

So those who took that view looked in peaceful valleys and quiet places where no disagreement ever happened. 

Long story short, those who lived for pleasure hoped that the new century would usher in earthly delights -- the truth was a far cry from their daydreams, and, though freedom from pain was the kind of healing they were looking for...

Little did they expect that was lay around the corner would be the most violent and bloody pile-up of armed conflicts and revolutions to shake the Western World since the Thirty Years' War. Nations and empires would collapse, systems would be questioned, many lives nipped in the bud on irrational grounds... And the creative arts would be one of the most battered among realms. But what would several generations of optimists, unaware of what the future had in store, know about the paramount list of bloodsheds that we now know as the twentieth century?
And, obviously, the Baratheons were among those who rang in the new century with the most cheer. And so were the von Lännisters. By the last midnight in 1899, Robert was already reeling from an excess of champagne, Sissi and Jakob were playing their games in the shade of a thuja maze, while Varish and Kleinfinger were eyeing the whole scene from the estate balcony and engaged in conversation about what the new century would bring. They brought up the Dreyfus affair and the French traitor's possible innocence, the Starks' appearance at the celebrations (Ned and Kate had been invited and were present at the soirée, together with their so far two children and Kate's slightly eccentric sister Lizzie Tully), the widowed Lizzie Tully's impressive fortune (by the way he spoke of her, it came as no surprise that Herr Bälisch was interested in this quirky and homely basket-case, and that he would pull a Wallenstein for the second time in his life), and the fact that the little heir to the Konzern, its so-far only child, remained awake and had been allowed to take a drink of champagne. In fact, when Sissi birthed a healthy male heir with golden wisps on his head, she held to herself the secret of who the child's real father was. The little boy, rosy and blond as a cherub, was christened in the Baratheons' own private chapel (for now the clan had got a private chapel) and given a lovely name which Sissi had heard as that of an operatic prince, as she attended a performance of one of Wagner's works: the Baratheon heir was christened Gottfried, which, coincidentally, means "God Peace". It could not be more optimistic, or reveal more of their expectations about the young hopeful. Or more ironic, as the pass of years would show both the whole Baratheon clan and the dear reader.
When little Gottfried's shut eyes finally opened, everyone saw that they were green as fresh mint. Bright green like his mother's. A true Baratheon, if the Laws of Mendel had been recalled, would have raven hair and sky-blue eyes. Yet the steel-kings of Sturmland cared little for genetics.
Now Gottfried was a child reared on pleasures instead of love, a golden bastard in a cradle of silks, a hope founded on dark secret love and the most forbidden sins, whose parents both detached themselves from his care, driven by more serious fun; a darling little rarity in whose chest a pure heart had been frozen into a cold and hard lump of ice, who had not had any friends, neither any pets since he had proved himself as an enemy to the animal kingdom by ripping off a dozen frogs' legs and wringing off a tabby kitten's head in a fit of rage. The nutcracker in the hussar suit, which he had received for Christmas, was also beheaded and quartered, and flowers were crushed and bleeding sap in his dainty little hands. This child of sin, already seen by his successive bruised nannies as the Antichrist, would be the next owner of the Baratheon Konzern, and woe to all Prussia if he ever inherited such a station!
Her own lord father having been too detached and putting affairs of state before his own children's welfare, and rather stern towards her and her twin when they misbehaved --the governess who had raised them being equally harsh--, Sissi tried to compensate such a friendless, detached childhood by granting her heir every wish he made. But such eager whims were rarely satisfied, and neither his spoiling mother nor any of his nannies had even chided him whenever he did something wrong. Saying Gottfried Baratheon-von Lännister was a pampered child was not enough. Even saying he was a brat --which no one said out loud-- was not enough.
About four years after Gottfried, another lovely golden-haired and green-eyed child saw the light of day at the von Lännister summer residence in Lichterfelde. She was given the name Elsa, after Gottfried's sister in the opera, and she appeared to be a sweeter and more normal child than her dreaded brother. Both children were obviously raised apart, in different bedrooms, and forbidden contact with each others, to spare Elschen, her dolls, her stuffed animals, flowering plants, nutcrackers, and storybooks, a world of pains and an untimely fate.
The Starks and the Baratheons met once more as good friends, and Robert nearly stifled Edward in his grasp. It hurt the steel-lord, in his heart of hearts, to see that his best friend had married for love and was pleased with his spouse and children, auburn Roy and copper-haired Sandra (Anna, the tomboyish youngest one, had been left behind), both of them as blue-eyed and good-looking as their darling mother.
Having drained a third cupful of heady Napoleon Cognac, a special keepsake from the spoils of war (which he had claimed as a young officer in France, decades ago), the host of the soirée, slapping his sides, laughed heartily and clasped his old friend once more.
"Remember? Our youth, France, Ilona? Wenzel, pour some more. (This was said out loud to a pre-adolescent boy of a von Lännister cadet branch, recently cupbearer or waiter at the Baratheons' service. After which Wenzel left once more.) Fine lad, isn't he, Ned? Wish Gottfried were just like this one... ah... France, Ilona. Those days when I had no need for this hot intoxicant. Those days when I quaffed from fresher springs... even picking up the dew from the grass and the flowers, drop by drop, where there was no rill or spring to quench our thirst... Those were the days... then it all went wrong. Ah, thank you, Wenzel."
"Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown..." Ned Stark replied as Robb drained his fourth cup at one fell swoop by his side.
"'Amlet?" the latter replied as he lay down the empty cup and wiped his lips. By now he was as intoxicated as usual.
"Henry the Fourth. But of course you have no time for reading or watching the classics..."
"Right. Got nuff ov a fuss already, Ned... a wife sho cold she might be dead... posh in-laws, running the mill... but when night fallsh, all that just fades awaay, whoosh! A drink, a girl, and to bed, and then... In my dreams, I shtill kill the Frensh by the shcore, every night; off with their 'eads, with their limbs, with their shcrewing organs, off withem all to left, to right... the battle-cry ish 'FOR PRUSSIA AN' ILONA!!' and the Frogs 'ear me roar but they can't run away..." Swinging an imaginary sword, Robert Baratheon stumbled forwards and was helped up by his friend back on his feet.
Shortly thereafter, he would be brought to bed right off, to face off the wicked enemy in his throbbing dreams.
Unlike their more fortunate acquaintances, the Starks stayed sober and restrained, and both parents and children were already resting in bed in the guest-room.
Let us go back to Varish and Kleinfinger once more. The latter has proposed to "Mad Aunt Lizzie" with his sweetest words of mock love during the soirée, and the doubtless answer has been yes. For she does actually love Peter Bälisch, and she would gladly be proud to share his surname and position.
The eunuch has seen through his frenemy's intentions: "Do you actually love her?"
Kleinfinger replies with no words and a Cheshire-Cat grin. And Varish replies:
"Well, speaking of betrothals, I lately overheard the Master and Herr Stark at their glasses, talking about Ilona and about joining their households. Hope our Gottfried sees the light when he takes a wife. Sandra Stark looks like a neat girl, even though she is a little innocent."
"That carrothead? You bet your life our young hopeful finds himself a new kitten! Or a new governess, for that manner."
"Well, she will stay here at our estate to learn society ways. Perhaps all our heir needs is some human company his own short age. They were born the same year, I mean, Elsa and Sandra. Gottfried is a little older than his sister, as you know."
"A nice girl. A too nice girl, it seems to me. Looks exactly like her mother, yet as a child. Lovely like no other little girl I ever have seen. Light of my life, fire of my loins... My sin, my heart, my soul: Sandra Stark!"
"Are you actually going to be after her?", Varish inquired, as Bälisch grew pale and turned his head towards the moon in the night sky.
"I have kissed her goodnight. In fact, who better than an upstart like me to teach an upstart like her the ropes of high society? I will be her instructor in good manners and courtesy."
"Mistress would prefer a lady for this duty. Rainer's old governess, Fräulein Mordäne, would gladly have Rainer again, for she has already had enough of the golden-haired monster. And now Mistress has instructed her to be Fräulein Stark's etiquette teacher instead. Needless to say Fräulein Mordäne is pleased with having a normal child in her care once more!"
"Fräulein Mordäne is a stick in the mud, a killjoy, or at least that's what I often heard Rainer say. Second to Stanislaus, yet nevertheless a stick in the mud."
"Speaking of the vicar, we've not heard a word of him", the eunuch said.
"Or from Elise. Mind that he has a flock to tend to and a God to serve. In fact, I almost became a vicar when I went to university. I have never believed in any gods."
"As you know, neither do I. Let's go to bed and carry on with our lives tomorrow."
And so they did.
The next day, Kate Stark kissed her daughter goodbye at the Sturmende station, Sandra Stark kissed her mother goodbye at the same station, and she returned to the Baratheon estate with her new governess, a stern and slender Fräulein Mordäne. The little debutante dried up her tears and then, forgetting about her dear mother, she began to daydream about herself as a fairytale princess, about silken gowns and sparkling jewelry, like she had often done at her estate birthplace in the Swedish backwoods. This was a more cultured, even more industrialised land, and soon she would even visit the capital or some fashionable resort. Now little Sandra had started to become impatient for her wish, a wish reared on reading countless fairytales and playing with her dolls, to finally come true. But would the fulfilment of her heart's desire ever bring Sandra Stark any satisfaction?
I leave this rhetorical question to you readers, but what matters is that she was given a guest-room and became part of the Baratheon-von Lännister household, where she would feel as out of place as Nancy Lammeter at Versailles. The first person who caught her eye was Herr Bälisch, who reminded her more than slightly of Wallenstein, and Fräulein Stark was stirred by the fact that, when he smiled, his eyes had an eerily mournful look. What would be the reason why?
At least, Gottfried appeared far nicer in the company of Sandra, taking the redhead out for walks through both streets and woods, and even along the coast during their summer holidays. And holding her hand, and smiling for her, holding her parasol and raising her colourful skirts and petticoats when Fräulein Stark ran the risk of soiling them. He appeared to be cheerful, free, and agreeable. Often, at teatime, he fed her frosted blackberries or strawberries in ether, now Fräulein Stark's favourite treat, and vice versa. Or the fiancés fed each other lemon teacakes, or liquor chocolates, or drank lemonade together. A daguerreotype of both fiancés under the Leipzig Linden (which had been planted in 1813 by old Andreas Estermont to commemorate the renowned victory) in bloom, which hung on the wall of the Baratheon-von Lännister marital bedroom in Sturmende, showed Gottfried in a miniature ensign's uniform, holding Sandra's parasol, both of them pleased with each other. Were that picture in colour, it would have been countless times more beautiful, rendering the bright colours of the heir's uniform and those of his fiancée's gown and bonnet, his golden locks, shining like his epaulettes, her golden locket, and her copper-red bun of hair. The linden in green and in full bloom, in springtime, and the smiles of both young people. Yet, had he worn his heart upon his sleeve, Sandra would have ceased to love him. However, soon the time would come when his true colours would see the light of day, and she would regret and even deny that she once had loved him at all.
As for Gottfried, he was homeschooled, being the heir to the Konzern, and his concerned mother, raised herself at Allenswood, having foreseen what a boarding school education for such a young hopeful could mean to Prussian society.
Now we have said "summer holidays" in this chapter, for which a convenient explanation, of something I had forgot you dear readers to explain, is needed. Elisabeth von Lännister had acquired a chair as headmistress of a boarding school, a charm school to be more precise, located in a lakeside castle in the Bavarian woods, and both her daughter and her ward studied the ways of high society within these walls. Count Theibald had arranged for a British-style society education, yet without losing the Germanic flair at the core, like the way he had reared his own daughter and favourite child at Allenswood, to be given to the new generation of Prussian debutantes. And Sissi, who had already known a charm school, was obviously an integral part of the project. Elsa and Sandra were even made roommates at Schulheim Schloss Lindenblum, for their friendship to introduce both of them into a realm, that of society, where standing alone as a maiden was playing Russian roulette without a loaded gun. And, though Sandra was more reserved and Elsa more outspoken, the Stark girl and the von Lännister one soon became as close as sisters. Their bedroom had a view of a clear blue lake, with the majestic Alps for a backdrop, and a meadow of yellow buttercups below: a really beautiful sight. Sometimes in the weekends, they were allowed to go on leave to the village nearby, walking through the narrow streets and drinking hot chocolate (or lemonade on ice, depending of the season) in the local café.
Every weekend, after her lessons of French, dancing, playing musical instruments, and other virtues of high society, the headmistress herself tutored her daughter and ward in the elegant yet treacherous ways of the socialite. Even though the lady's imposing presence in her office reminded Sandra Stark of Persephone on her golden throne, majestic and lovely yet cold, stern, and unhappy at heart:
"When thou unto the other side art come,
A palace shalt thou see of fiery gold,
And thou mayst pass into a glorious hall
Where many a wonder hangs upon the wall;
But far more wonderful than anything
The fair slim consort of the gloomy King,
Arrayed all royally shalt thou behold,
Who sitting on a carven throne of gold,
Whene’er thou enterest shall rise up to thee,
And bid thee welcome there most lovingly,
And pray thee on a royal bed to sit,
And share her feast; yet eat thou not of it,
But sitting on the ground eat bread alone,
Then do thy message kneeling by her throne;"
...
And there in that grey country, like a flame
Before one's eyes rose up the house of gold,
And so one came into the mighty hall,
And saw those wonders hanging on the wall,
That all with pomegranates was covered o’er
In memory of the meal on this sad shore,
Whereby fair Enna was bewept in vain,
And this became a kingdom and a chain.
   But on a throne, the Queen of all the dead
She sat therein with gold-embraced head,
In royal raiment, beautiful and pale;
In worship of her, who said, "Welcome here,
O messenger of Venus! thou art dear
To me thyself indeed, for of thy grace
And loveliness we know e’en in this place;
Rest thee then, fair one, on this royal bed
And with some dainty food shalt thou be fed;
Ho, ye who wait, bring in the tables now!"
   Therewith were brought things glorious of show
On cloths and tables royally beseen,
By damsels each one fairer than a queen,
The very latchets of whose shoes were worth
The royal crown of any queen on earth;
Yet all these dainty matters without flaw
Were strange of shape and of strange-blended hues,
[···] while with cold eyes
Regarding her ’twixt anger and surprise,
The queen sat silent for awhile, then spoke,

...

Alone within the hall, that changing light
From burning streams, and shadowy waves of night
Made strange and dread, till to one, standing there
The world began to seem no longer fair,
Life no more to be hoped for, but that place
The peaceful goal of all the hurrying race,

The house all must return to on some day."
Indeed, that was a sight to fill any young maiden in school uniform with awe and dread, that pale and slim, regally dressed lady with loving welcomes yet cold eyes, but those who knew her private life --her daughter and her ward-- knew she was far more Persephone-like, the dark cold depths beneath that coat of ice. Was Sissi, or Elisabeth as the young students called her, aware of that? Indeed, a kingdom and a chain indeed. And there were secrets not even her friends and relatives knew. Secrets of her own. Like the fact that she always kept a bottle of Moët et Chandon at hand, whether under the mirror of her pretty cabinet or in her headmistress's desk. Imagine that, the born and bred lady who despised her husband for being a lush, yet drowned her own sorrows in strong drink when no one was around...! This is called "hypocrisy" with a fancy word, and "calling the kettle black" in plain speech. It's considered one of the worst flaws, even a sin or a vice, that there can be; yet, as long as there are humans, there will always be free will, and thus, weakness and error.
In summer, Headmistress von Lännister took her object lessons in high society even further by showing them fashionable spas, operas (the Kalbeck version of Verdi's Othello had a great impact on Sandra Stark's mind), and preparing them for their debut in real-life society.
The absence of her twin brother made Elisabeth von Lännister's heart grow even fonder and fonder, and you readers may not be surprised by the fact that she impatiently counted the days until summer. Then, she would anxiously wait for a call on the phone, signalling that Jakob was on leave, and, once she had him by his side, the dashing officer would accompany his sister and daughter-niece, and the red-haired upstart, to the opera, to a spa, or wherever else they needed male company. To appear like a real family, they needed a male to fill the vacant slot, and Robert was nearly always drunk and obese, and flirting with younger maidens, so it would have been a disgrace to take him out of Sturmende after all. And let him run the steelworks and wait for the deer-hunts in autumn, as one waited, like for a ripening fruit to fall, for a coronary to put an end to his inglorious days.
Sometimes Kleinfinger would replace the now once more Colonel von Lännister as the male companion of the socialite and her girls, mostly to get close to Sandra Stark and hold her hands at the opera or the theatre, even though Sissi was at first indifferent to his ideas. There was tension in between these two, the upstart and the born court lady, and the reader of this tale should know that the former intended to play the latter like a fiddle, inspired even more by the Iago he had seen on stage in Verdi's redoubtable version, with a Kalbeck libretto, of Shakespeare's most heart-wrenching tragedy. It suffices to say that the steel-lord's wife was as aware of these strings pulled in the shade as Othello (and nearly everyone else) was of Iago's plots.
By the end of the decade, the Baratheon-von Lännisters had even purchased a Daimler-Benz horseless carriage, then in fashion as the choice toy of the Prussian elite, a custom one to fit the size of its owner, which Robert Baratheon gave the bittersweet-sounding name of Fräulein Ilona. And yes, he could fit into the driver's seat because the vehicle was custom. He didn't need a chauffeur just for the sheer excitement of driving the horseless carriage himself to show it off, especially in Sturmende, where one had never been seen before.
Like the original old Talleyrand once schemed and consorted with the King of Prussia behind Bonaparte's back, this new Prussian Talleyrand had, by means of finding the right means, married into the Stark-Baratheon-von Lännister circle. Lizzie Tully was now Frau Bälisch, and she appeared rather pleased with the bridegroom during the wedding (yet time will tell how long their marriage will last!). A Spanish proverb says that, when the devil grows old, he takes up a wife. Replace "the devil" in this proverb with either "Wallenstein", "Talleyrand", or "Kleinfinger", dear reader, and you will understand the expression. For, if Satan ever decided to get married, woe upon every single mortal!
In the meantime, Varish had even replaced the parish as the one in charge of the education of every orphan, foundling, and unwanted child in the Sturmende area, except one of them, Erich, the fruit of Lena Florent's drunken night. The orphanage he had founded with Baratheon and von Lännister support (ironically enough), given the merely vaguely leftish-sounding name of Das Rote Haus (which gave the immediate suggestion that it was named after its red brick walls), looked, through the eyes of the elite and middle class, like the average institution of its kind, but was actually a factory, or rather a hatchery, for revolutionaries. There, There, the Marseillaise and the Internationale were sung rather than common hymns and Lieder, and a little red Communist Manifesto replaced the usual Bible as the children's book of prayer (Varish had delightedly crammed "Herr Baratheon and Count von Lännister" in between "The Pope and the Czar" and "Metternich and Guizot" in his editions). And the usual fairytales were rewritten as propaganda, with obviously rightish villains and leftish heroes. To quote three examples:

• Red Riding Hood was now wearing her iconically-coloured headdress as sign of her ideology. Her Oma, or grandmother, had been laid off for being too elderly, without being given a pension. The Big Bad Wolf was Wolfgang, the owner of the cloth company in whose factories Oma had toiled, he was after RRH at the head of a detachment... and the huntsman was an anarchist leader who killed everyone associated with the Crown and the elite in this tale (obviously excluding RRH and her Oma).
• The Wicked Queen was a posh socialite of the worst sort, who played her puny husband like a fiddle. The Seven Dwarves had formed a trade union, all of them wore red hats and strove to kill the owner of the coal mines, who was obviously the Wicked Queen. Her stepdaughter Snow Red (note the change of name!) sided with the Dwarves, was drugged and taken hostage in exchange for their surrender. The Dwarves wound up killing the tyrant in the end.
• Gretchen and Kai (mark the heroine's name change!) now lived in an orphanage on the outskirts of Trier, Marx's own birthplace, and they received a leftish education pretty much like that of the story's child readers. The Snow Queen was a childless socialite who adopted Kai and had him raised at Lichterfelde for him to become an officer. The good witch of springtime was now the hostess and owner of an opium den, in which she nearly trapped Gretchen (remember the "opium of the people"?) in a vicious circle, from which she broke free by remembering the Manifesto. The band of robbers were anarchists, who recruited Gretchen into their ranks, and together, they stormed the Snow Queen's estate while her son, on leave, was visiting her. The story ended with the heroine crying over a dying lieutenant, who had cast off his coat and thrown it into the flames when a bullet seared his chest and he recognized his childhood friend in a now grown-up anarchist girl, making him realise what he had sacrificed and regret having become a traitor.
• The Little Match Girl survived that winter night with the aid of some friendly anarchists, who saved her life, recruited her, and lynched that stepfather who beat her. And then they burned the frigging match factory where the stepdad worked, and which was the cause of the whole desperate scenario, to the ground.

With such fairytales, it came as no surprise that Varish's wards were becoming more defiant and suspicious of authority than the wards of the Church or those of the State. Kleinfinger had married up, and Varish, with his new batch of revolutionaries, was not going to lag behind in their friendly rivalry. No Fouché has ever forgotten to catch up to his Talleyrand.
By the end of that decade, four years before the Great War, Elisabeth von Lännister was expecting a third child, who be named Isolde if it was another girl or Telramund if it was a boy. The surprise will be unveiled within a few chapters of this feuilleton, dear readers.
And Lena Florent had died in childbirth, her "orphan", who was actually a bastard, adopted by Robert Baratheon and raised together with Gottfried as a whipping boy. Erich was a clever and eager little boy, raven-haired and blue-eyed as any Baratheon, and his presence made the staff in the Baratheon mansion sure that there was another Rainer who could cheer them up and fill their lives with sunshine. The lad did not complain at all about his master's and stepbrother's abuse, getting beaten by Gottfried more than by the retainers when the heir's self-will led him into trouble.
Have I forgotten to explain the fate of anyone? Yes, I have! Rainer Baratheon and Laurent Tyrell, whom we last saw as young ensigns, about to board a train for Lorraine! Therefore, let us return to them and their lives, and their forbidden love, for Rainer (if the title of next chapter does not give you any clue) will soon encounter the Tyrells, the clan of his more than friend!


IX. In which Rainer leaves Lichterfelde for a lovelier region in the company of Lorenz, or Laurent as he prefers to be called, who is garrisoned in the same fortress. A visit to the Tyrell estate, and an introduction to the large and powerful Tyrell family, their history, and their customs. A blond girl, the commandant's daughter, who wants to be a soldier at heart. And a young ensign promoted to lieutenant.

Two chapters ago, we followed the progress of two young cadets. One blond, one dark. One short, one tall. One sweet, one cool. One Lorrainian, one Prussian. Laurent Tyrell and Rainer Baratheon. At first acquaintances, then friends, then close as brothers, then closer than brothers, and thus, constrained to conceal their dark secret love, which they discovered together. We saw them in the end, as young men, make a wish for their last Christmas at Lichterfelde, the same wish, that duty may not part them when they had received their assignments. And we celebrated their elation upon learning that they, as ensigns (real ensigns, like Jakob von Lännister had been during the first days of the French Wars: by-the-book, dashing, elegant...), would that summer depart for the Château des Ducs de Lorraine in Sierck, not far from Hautjardin (or Hohengarten), the Tyrell family estate. Together, obviously. That last summer morning, they looked back at the Hauptkadettenanstalt and its lindens in bloom with sorrowful expressions: this would be the last time they saw the campus both of them had called home for a whole stage of their lives. What lay ahead were even greater challenges. Yet Ensigns Baratheon and Tyrell lived in the present, with a tinge of the past.
Hand in hand, they entered Lichterfelde Station, where they had always met every September and parted in midsummer. This time would make history for both of them, now epauletted and plumed ensigns. Rainer could hardly wait to see and to experience by himself everything that Laurent had described ever since both of them were children. Now Margot would be all grown up, and the roses in bloom, and the whole Tyrell household would rush to the gate to welcome them as soon as they were on leave. Of course there would be new commanding officers (who knew what they would be like?), regulations to attend to... and Lorrainians in the military, like Laurent himself, spoke German to their regiments and French to their friends and families, which Rainer had already learned as a cadet.
"To think that we are all the same is impossible; our natures, our temperaments, are utterly unlike from one person to another. But this is what people will never see; they found all their opinions on a wrong basis. How can their deductions be just if their premisses are wrong? One law laid down by the majority, who happen to be of one disposition, is only binding on the minority legally, not morally." And, at the end of the day, the forbidden fruit was, as it still is and always will be, the one that tasted the sweetest...
What if the Tyrells or a commanding officer learned their secret? Would there be a separation? Reassignment to the colonies? Or even a court-martial, followed by a firing squad? Such romances had always been star-crossed, Laurent thought. This could even make a fine novel, Rainer thought. Two wealthy boys, both from the countryside, though from different provinces, meet as cadets at military school. A dark-haired orphan and a feminine blond who is afraid of heights. At first, they barely know each other, and they're both outcasts at the military academy. They're teased by courtiers' sons, oppressed by commanding officers, share the same bedroom, and soon become close as brothers. It turns out that both of them love literature, bright colours, the prospect of becoming officers... Soon, they are rarely seen anywhere on the campus without each other. Every summer, they part. And every autumn, they embrace at the railway station of Lichterfelde. Both boys grow up, and soon they begin to feel strange when they are near each other. It takes a while, but they discover it is love. True love, yet forbidden and star-crossed. Upon coming of age and receiving their ensign insignia, they are assigned to the birthplace of one of them. They're now the average ensigns: freshly baked, dashing, by the book, impatient to be made lieutenants. Minus the wooing of ladies. Which slightly betrays their common secret. One of them plans to woo and wed the other's sister, whom he only loves as a friend. Would the Government of Prussia, or that of any other European nation, accept to publish such a scandalous novel?
Rainer whispered these thoughts in Laurent's right ear. It tickled and made the blond officer chuckle. A novel like that? In the United Kingdom, the Lorrainian replied, nestling on the chest of his beloved, cradled in strong blue-sleeved arms. Or in France. As long as it was not published as a feuilleton in a newspaper. A finely-illustrated and unusual love story, which Bohemian artists, idle young socialites, and weary young officers would love to read.
"The title of the story?" Rainer asked.
"'Forbidden Fruit on Campus.' Or 'The One He Loved', or 'Rainer and the Lorrainian'."
"The last one sounds like an operetta or a sentimental novel. I'd pick it myself."
"The opening sentences would describe Lichterfelde Station at the start of the academic year. Lots of little boys running in haste with their caregivers to catch a Strassenbahn. Two of these get on the same coach."
And thus, both young officers, throughout the dawn-to-dusk journey across the German Empire, retold the story of their lives, taking it in turns: Laurent overcoming his fear of heights, Rainer learning French, the fencing, the horse-riding, the school play, learning about what they shared and what made them different from each other, coming of age, falling in love and keeping their mutual secret, which had been so far successfully concealed. The firing squads of burning kisses and the clamp of steel-strong arms, the softness of a rose-petal face and a crown of dark liquid gold. Their anxiety upon leaving the military academy, upon what might have been the end of their more-than-friendship, and the elation of knowing that it would take ages to part them.
What could the outside world matter to them now? Each was to the other the perfect fulfilment of a scarcely preconceived ideal; neither heaven nor hell nor highwater, not even all of Prussia, could offer more.
Completely absorbed in each other, intoxicated with the sweetly poisonous draught that is the gift of love, they sat in silence.
The sun had now set and the soft terraced hills of the Moselle could be seen from the windows, as the twilight turned the tranquil river into glowing blood-red light. Two young ensigns, one tall and dark, the other short and blond, watched the sunset as the sky darkened and Venus appeared, a lone white crystal on dark blue velvet. This was the first time Rainer Baratheon saw Lorraine, the loveliest region he would ever see, and that in the evening twilight. Everyone else had retired to the wagon-lits, Rainer and Laurent being the only two officers left on board. Laurent Tyrell, feeling already a little sleepy, had thrust his head on Rainer Baratheon's chest, like he had always done, listening to the taller officer's steady heartbeat and breathing, as the latter ran his thin and finely-gloved fingers, tips as hot as the exhausted Laurent's rosy face, through Tyrell's golden curls.
"Sierck!"
Thus, the conductor woke them from their reverie, startling Laurent and speeding Rainer's heart up. Both young officers got up and prepared to tread Lorrainian ground, new to Ensign Baratheon, welcoming to Ensign Tyrell. In the light of an evening crescent, they got on the platform of a quaint little village station, from which point of view the gothic church spire and the low towers of the stately, fortress-like castle, placed on three hills above the civilian community, rose like bayonets reaching to pierce the sky.
"This is Sierck... Lorraine..." Rainer Baratheon looked around in all directions, as curious as could be, his right hand held in the other ensign's left hand.
"There's a spa here in Sierck", Laurent explained. "The Dukes of Lorraine have held court here, and even their descendant, Marie Antoinette, stopped once here on her way from the Hofburg to Versailles."
Rainer looked back at the station, the tranquil river glittering in the moonlight and the soft hills beyond the railway tracks. Then, he turned his head forwards, along the main street of Sierck and towards the Château des Ducs, surrounded by three hills above the village the ensigns had to get through.
"The castle of the dukes, the Château des Ducs, stands on three hills: Stromberg, Stream Hill, to the north. Kirschberg, Cherry Hill, to the east. And Altenberg, Old Hill, to the southwest."
"Thanks for the information... but now I remember... didn't Condé, the Duke of Enghien, take this fortress in the 1640s for France?", Rainer suddenly recalled a history lesson.
"So I think... was it 1643?" They were running uphill, along the Grande Rue, the main street, to reach their assignment ere the fortress gates were locked for the night. A private soldier carried the trunks of both officers uphill in a luggage cart.
"Last one will have to black the other's boots!"
Soon, the street had given way to a path in a wooded park lit by countless fireflies, in which the croaking of some frogs and the hoot of an owl could be distinctly heard. Uphill went still their running for a while, until the second half of the park pathway turned out to be inside the castle walls. Soon, the two newest ensigns in the garrison were welcomed by the sentinels at the gates, and then, shown the way into the officers' quarters. Due to their rank, both Rainer and Laurent would have each one a bedroom all for himself, as well as an orderly, a private soldier for a valet. In the end, the officer on duty led them into adjacent bedrooms in the officers' residence. A young boy who doubtlessly was another Sierck Lorrainian, a blond and blue-eyed lad Laurent's age, was waiting for him in his bedchamber. The more Germanic-looking orderly in the corporal's uniform bowed before Laurent and saluted him, then introduced himself in German with a strong French accent:
"Ensign Lorenz Tyrell, I presume? My name is Olivier Olivier, and I have been assigned as your orderly."
The ensign felt a little uncomfortable, a tingling ran down his spine, but thoughts of Rainer summoned away all of those feelings that overwhelmed him as the orderly unpacked his trunk. Why was he feeling so awkward? Maybe because another young man, not Baratheon, was going to undress him and get to see him, no longer a child but a stripling, in the nude. There was a full-body mirror in each officer's bedroom, which would fill Laurent with even more embarrassment.
Switching over from French-language to German-language gear, Ensign Tyrell mustered up his courage to ask his new valet:
"Can I please... shut my eyes... as you undress me?"
"Why, Herr Ensign! And besides, it's too soon to think of that! Soon, at eight sharp, it will be supper time in the officers' mess hall."
Supper time. Which meant getting to sit next to Rainer and talk about their orderlies, while filling themselves with good Lorrainian cuisine. Anyway, who was this Olivier fellow? A commoner. A petit bourgeois or chicken farmer. Middle class. The average soldier. Far below the surnames of Baratheon and Tyrell in the social ladder. Too ordinary fare. That thought Lorenz, or Laurent, as he left and met Rainer in the corridor. And guess what they discussed on their way to the officers' mess hall?
"Got myself a nice orderly. A local boy called Olivier, eighteen summers like us. He looked rather decent. Hair of gold, eyes of blue, a French accent like most of us Lorrainians," Laurent explained in German. "Caviar to the general", he concluded.
"Caviar...?" Rainer looked puzzled.
"Oh, trifles, trifles. Just thinking of this sentence I heard somewhere... methinks it was either Maman or Mamie who said that once, 'caviar to the general', though any general can afford caviar."
"You should know my orderly", Rainer Baratheon replied. "Got myself a gentleman ranker. A dark-haired and dark-eyed stalwart thirty-something, who looks too fine and too clever to have always been a private. He had got a goatee and a little widow's peak. His surname, too... I think I heard it somewhere."
"A dashing fellow, who looked clever, with the air of a learned and blue-blooded...? What's his name?"
"Jean-Baptiste Fossovoie. He spoke very little to me, and he was serious. Not tiresome like Stanislaus, but rather serious in a positive sort of way."
"So there's old Jean, still alive, after all... Has he really reformed himself? Having lost all his pay at écarté... I doubted that he'd shoot himself, because there's much more to life for him than honour. To be honest, he never gave a hoot about honour..."
"Sounds like an interesting fellow, and hope we don't follow in his footsteps as rankers."
"Well, that's my brother-in-law, my sister-in-law Léonnette's good-for-nothing older brother Jean. Jean-Baptiste Fossovoie. He was once married to my younger aunt on my father's side, Jeanne. They married for love, even resorting to elopement. Yet their marriage was the shortest one I ever recall."
"Fine, you know each other. Though merely from one or two times you have met."
"Actually, three."
"There's the mess hall. Hope there's quiche, or something French. And something good to drink, and for dessert as well."
"Our wines are well-known, and so are the mirabelle plums that grow in this region. Half the orchards of Hautjardin are mirabelle. The 'gold of Lorraine', as they're called for a reason. The little plums are golden, delicate, smaller than the average plum, and sweeter than any other. The war on the Prussians may have overrun most of the vineyards of Lorraine, but our mirabelles are far hardier than the grapes."
"And what are these plums used for?"
"Pies, tartelettes, preserves, wine, liquor. Especially liquor. It's called quetsch, and it's an institution here in Lorraine. We Tyrells run the distillery that supplies this garrison. Ever since I was a child, I wished I could drink but a sip of that eau-de-vie. And now that I have come of age..."
"Well, I was less of a nice boy in that aspect", Rainer said as he chortled.
"Did you...?", Laurent looked fixedly into his blue eyes.
"When you've got no younger siblings or friends, and you're feeling lonely one evening, all you have to do is stay with the adults. And then, if your eldest brother offers you a sip or two, but no more than three, of the best French brandy the adults have got..."
"Is this the truth?"
"As true as the fact that it seared my throat and it made me feel light-headed and shed tears. Then, I decided not to have a strong drink more until I came of age."
"Which is nowadays."
They had entered the officers' mess hall, and soon they were feasting upon mushroom vol-au-vents, followed by creamy knepfle, a kind of fresh pasta, with croutons and crème fraîche (Laurent Tyrell's favourite dish), washed down with the good wine of Sierck Valley, and everything was crowned with a piece of mirabelle pie-style cake, or tarte aux mirabelles, with which each officer was served a drink of quetsch. As they were waiting for the dessert, Rainer remarked to Laurent that there was an officer of far higher rank, a broad-waisted and blond bear of a uniformed man in his fifties, sitting alone at a table distant from those of the others.
"That's the commandant", said another officer, a good-looking Lorrainian lieutenant with strawberry-blond hair. "Colonel and Freiherr Siegmund von Tarth, a Prussian of Swedish descent, from Rügen or Usedom or somewhere else along the Baltic coast. His daughter is also seated among us subalterns."
"How come?", Laurent inquired. "I can only see officers as far as I can see..."
The first draught of quetsch was already searing Rainer's throat as the tallest youngster at the table, a broad-shouldered person with steel-blue eyes, short light blond hair, and a smattering of freckles, thumped with a strong right fist on the table.
"Then, you two were fooled as well!", said person exclaimed in German in a contralto voice with a Prussian accent, as she put her glass of liquor to her lips before draining it at one fell swoop.
Ensigns Baratheon and Tyrell were puzzled, coughing into their handkerchiefs some quetsch that had gone down the wrong way.
"You have just met Brünnhilde von Tarth! Thought I was a chap? Well, all newcomers do. I grew up with no siblings, no mother, no friends, an army father, a different home every three years or so. I've been all over the empire, from Rügen to Küstrin all the way to these hills. Could have followed the family tradition, if there weren't a certain little hindrance that made it impossible for me to study at a military academy. Well, I've been to Lichterfelde. And to Magdeburg, yes, where Tilly and Pappenheim were. But not as one of the cadets, rather, as a teacher's homeschooled girl. I've read and trained all my childhood away. So I've got a bedchamber of my own, but no orderly. I have to dress and undress myself, unlike some high-and-mighty gentlemen who, like little boys, require the help of others. Yes, though I am not officially an officer, I am unofficially one. And I was born the same year as you two, Ensigns!"
"She drinks like a Cossack, and she's so tall, and more dashing than beautiful... What a strange girl, and what a ruse she pulled on us!" Laurent commented.
"Hope the day comes when women are allowed to serve the Kaiser by bearing arms," Rainer said, seeing his own lonely childhood reflected in that of Brünnhilde. She laughed, being already flushed with liquor. Rainer had himself another drink poured, and it went down as smoothly as the first one: a sweet and perfumed liquor, though just slightly sharp. As he felt the draught descend and gradually warm his system, Ensign Baratheon smacked his lips and looked around himself, at the other officers.
"You should try a café royal", the strawberry-blond lieutenant, whose surname was now known to the newcomers as Caron, replied. "A café au lait laced with this lovely nectar. You can have one for breakfast."
"So will I", Laurent Tyrell replied, draining his first glass of quetsch, of which he had rather sipped than quaffed, considering his own physique compared to those of the others.
The conversation soon developed far better than anyone at the table had expected, some of the officers already flushed with liquor. And one of those who were nearly bereft of reason (though, fortunately, not entirely) was Ensign Rainer Baratheon.
Now some people are endowed with the uncanny ability to make others, even strangers, feel pleased with them. Gustavus Adolphus and Napoleon Bonaparte could be found among the ranks of those possessing that mysterious ability known to the lay folk as charm, and Rainer Baratheon as well. The conversation in French and German that he carried out that night certified that he was no longer an outsider. It was the same "Du Rainer, du Feiner" look in their eyes that he knew from Sturmende. When he took his leave of the other officers at midnight, including Brünnhilde von Tarth, everyone warmly waved him goodbye with an honest smile, and he had replied in the same sincere and affectionate way. You can always count on ethanol as a prehistoric truth serum. Rainer's younger Lorrainian friend had pulled his sleeve eagerly ere the cheerful leave-takings took place:
"Rainer! We should get back to our rooms! We're officers now! Thank Our Lady we're not on duty..."
It was half-reeling, leaning on each other, that they returned to their adjacent bedrooms and said "bonne nuit" to each other, kissing for a short time ere their doors opened. Olivier had been waiting for Laurent for hours:
"Why, Herr Ensign! Or should I say 'Cinder-Ensign'? Supper must have been bland at the officers' for you to come this late! Oh, how I wish I were an officer, and I could wear a finer uniform, and have finer suppers..."
In response, his commanding officer just whistled the tune to the then well-known satirical German song by the title of "Ich war der Putzer vom Kaiser", "I was the Kaiser's Orderly", and then went on to sing the first verses, being half-drunk and a little too excited. I will not give you, dear readers, the whole song in German, lest I should trouble you with three eight-verse stanzas of harsh and convoluted pronunciation. Translated into Shakespeare's mother tongue, the first stanza of this renowned tune would have said something like the following:

"There in the ranks, I'd got good luck,

just for me there was no drilling.

Had to black boots, clean uniforms:

there was no chance of a killing!

I saw no guns, no enemies,

still I had early to rise-er...

Tra-la-la-la-la-la-lala-lala...

Orderly I was to the Kaiser!"

"Think of that, the Kaiser's orderly! But an ensign's valet is also a fine post, since you get spared all the drilling and all the killing and the sergeant at your heels...", Olivier replied, as he undressed Laurent, whose inhibitions were already clouded by the vapours of the quetsch, rendering him far less embarrassed of having his clothes taken off by a young man who wasn't Rainer Baratheon.
"Herr Ensign, should I wish you good night in French or German?", the orderly asked his officer, still in German, as he dressed said officer in his nightshirt.
"In German", Ensign Tyrell replied. For him, only his relatives and the one he loved could speak to him in French.
"Gute Nacht, Herr Ensign."
"Gute Nacht", Laurent said as he stumbled into bed.
And what were Rainer Baratheon and Jean Fossovoie doing in the bedroom across the wall? Look, the lights are already out, the officer is fast asleep, with his orderly watching by his side. Let's face the facts: Ensign Baratheon shared a flaw with one of his older brothers, though his case would be far less extreme than Robert's because no misfortune would crush his spirit. And Rainer was too intoxicated to pay attention to anything. He was mostly talking quickly and loudly about all the new friends he had made in mess hall, chanting some of the songs, praising the knepfle, the mirabelle cake, the liquor which had gone to his head and deprived him of half his reason... as the gentleman ranker undressed him, put his nightshirt on, and wished him gute Nacht.
At daybreak, both officers awoke with mild headaches, awakened by their orderlies and by the reveille call. After a warm café royal and some warm madeleines at the officers' quarters, there were duties to attend to, some of them (like paperwork or Rainer's first guard duty) more tiresome than others (such as leading their respective detachments in a recon drill), yet high spirits and passion can overcome even the most ominous-looking obstacles. Two goals were on Rainer's mind for him to redouble his efforts, in spite of the hot sun and the routine of peacetimee: a promotion to lieutenant and at least one day on leave to visit the Tyrells at their estate.
And in late August that year, when the woods had begun to change from green to the colours of fire, both ensigns were invited to the mirabelle harvest at Hautjardin, and thus, finally given leave from their duties for the weekend, for the Tyrells wished to learn to know Rainer since long ago. The château was so near their assignment that they could ride there on horseback, which Ensigns Baratheon and Tyrell quickly did that sunny day at dawn. The whole clan of the latter reunited that last weekend of summer, to celebrate the plum harvest: only then and for Christmas (but not during the past decade, since Laurent was away at Lichterfelde) could those living at the estate and those who had moved away gather and share their experiences.
"It's a Tyrell tradition. Including the shaking of the plum trees with a basket in hand. We Tyrells have to set a good example for our servants and the others in our care. I have done it every harvest since I was fourteen, ere I left for Lichterfelde."
"I haven't had many Baratheon traditions", Rainer sighed.
"Don't tell me..."
"As you know, I never had any friends my age, not even the servants' children. It was forbidden for them to come near me, lest their company should spoil my education. But I had full powers at our estate in Sturmende: If I wanted a person to be forgiven, rewarded, or punished, that person would know that it would be so. I could climb up any height, ride any horse, and eat what I liked whenever I liked, as long as it was not poisonous. So I had the run of the mansion and the surrounding gardens (as long as I could not get into trouble), where I caught butterflies and dragonflies, made fortresses from rubble to play with my soldiers and stormed them... picked wildflowers... the servants, and There was always something new to explore, though I often wondered why others rarely looked at me. But whenever they looked at me, there were such looks in their eyes, wordlessly saying  'Du Rainer, du Feiner...' I played alone, and I read alone as well. Often, when I had finished studying in the library, I stayed there to read stories and poetry until late."
"You must have loved reading... you must have loved literature since childhood", Ensign Tyrell remarked.
"It gave me wings. And, when I grew from fairytales into adventure novels, a restlessness grew within me, like a thirst which could not be quenched. The knowledge of new plants and animals, of new languages, of love and of hardship, of star-crossed love and of challenging hardship... and of many great people that lived in the past. Heroes and heroines. Many of them were orphans or loners whom I could relate to. There were more worlds beyond Sturmende... and I was burning to leave for one of them."
"And could you ever leave the estate, ever cross that cast-iron garden gate?"
"Not without my governess, and not beyond the station or the carnival grounds. Fräulein Mordäne was always watching over me, ensuring that I didn't stray too far and keeping me apart from other children." Rainer Baratheon sighed once more.
"It must have hurt", Laurent replied. "What did you feel upon leaving for Lichterfelde?"
"I could never have been more excited! For I would soon meet other boys my age, and then become an officer..."
"And once there?"
"I got to know the people above me. The likes of my eldest brother's in-laws, but those my own age. How they teased me! 'There goes the steel boy!' But, luckily, you were there."
Laurent Tyrell blushed and said nothing as his Prussian friend continued to explain:
"The little Lorrainian who was scared of heights..."
"But who nowadays is a young man who has conquered his fears", the third son of the Tyrells replied. "Which I could never have done without you."
"And you," Rainer replied, wiping the perspiration from his forehead, "you taught me to make a friend, and then to love, like only star-crossed lovers can feel for each other."
"Like only star-crossed lovers can..." Laurent whispered.
"There are vices that are bound to attract almost irresistibly anyone who loves beauty above everything. I have always sought for love: again and again I have been the victim of fits of passionate affection: time after time I have seemed to have found my ideal at last: the whole object of my life has been, times without number, to gain the love of some particular person. Several times my efforts were successful; each time I woke to find that the success I had obtained was worthless after all. As I grasped the prize, it lost all its attraction - I no longer cared for what I had once desired with my whole heart. In vain I endeavoured to drown the yearnings of my heart with the ordinary pleasures that usually attract the young. Ever since I came to Lichterfelde, I had been striving to cheat myself into the belief that peace had come at last - at last my yearning was satisfied: but all in vain. Unceasingly I have struggled with the old cravings for excitement, and, above all, the weary, incessant thirst for a perfect love. But now this thirst has been quenched at last. I love you have never loved anyone or anything before. And you had as little effort to win my affection as I had to win yours, offering heart and soul upon your sleeve right from the start. We are one another's by right... let the world judge us and that great war break out, if such intense rage should be a consequence of such feelings!"
They had been riding along the Moselle, westward, for a while. Now they were half-way from Hautjardin, and there was not a person in sight on either side of the glittering river. They rested for a while to give their steeds to drink and have, each officer, a sip of quetsch from his canteen, for the August sun beating down upon riders and steeds alike had given all four of them a thirst to quench. On their respective steeds, there were also a couple of small cases, containing spare shirts and their respective mess uniforms: the elegant ones meant for special occasions, and thus, the uniforms both ensigns would wear at the next day's fête.
It looked, with the golden woods, and the ripe hopyards, and the ripe vineyards and orchards, the Moselle like glitttering silver... like the best chance for a kiss, and thus, after having drunk to each other's health, Rainer Baratheon embraced Laurent Tyrell and, running his lithe fingers through the Lorrainian's sun-glittering golden hair, kissed him passionately, playing with the locks on that fair forehead drenched in perspiration and drinking up the last precious drops of liquor that remained on Ensign Tyrell's lips: the sweetest ones and the strongest ones he had ever tasted in his short life. Never had either of the officers felt more intoxicated than upon giving or receiving that shower of kisses. For a while, as one gave and the other received, their hearts stopped, and time stopped around them, and both had forgotten everything else. Could that lapse but be eternal! Their embrace had to come to an end, their lips to separate, and there was a mirabelle harvest to attend to.
"Now Margot must be all grown up", Rainer said, as they set off at the end of their rest. "Has she got any suitors outside the garrison? For we have heard the other officers of the regiment praise her beauty, her grace, or her cleverness..."
"Landowners' sons, impoverished courtiers, and officers from other regiments, garrisoned here in Lorraine and in other provinces. She's the best party in these lands!"
"Well, hope a petty ensign's suit goes not unnoticed... if that ensign's surname is Baratheon."
"Let me guess... you wish to woo her? Just to hide our secret, or for something more?"
"To conceal our secret, and also to fit in with your family. And I'd like to hear what she has to say in conversation, with that unusual cleverness of hers. For you said she has an answer for everything... I'd show her some of the poetry I have translated and written... Maybe we'll have no children, but at least she'll be a friend and an admirer to me. Wasn't Gustavus Adolphus married to Mary Eleanor and loved her as much as he loved Banér?"
"Did he love them equally? And did they love him equally? Whom did he spend most time in bed with? The queen who stayed at a certain distance from the front, or the general who shared his fights and his cart?", Laurent replied with an ironic smile.
"The hearts of both broke and bled at Lützen", Ensign Baratheon said. "Yet, though both of them shared the same passionate love... It was with Banér that Gustavus had slept that night, like at the Lech and like at Breitenfeld. And, besides, both were cheerful, fiery, fond of a good life... They were kindred spirits."
"Kindred spirits, just like us!" Tyrell recognized himself and remembered the plot of the play they had written and performed together at Lichterfelde. A story of warriors, where Queen Eleanor had but a supporting role. "We're lucky that these are times of peace, for I could never afford to lose you. Like Johan Banér after his liege lord's demise."
Neither one did know that a storm of fire and steel would gather at the end of the decade. And that their common story, like that of Gustavus Adolphus and his gallant Banér, would reach the same tragic ending.
However, readers, let's forget about this foreshadowing for a while and return to the times when we left Rainer Baratheon and Laurent Tyrell!
"I phoned home after breakfast, ere we left. And I have been given permission to bring you to the harvest. Everyone is waiting for both of us to come!", the latter said as he pulled the reins of his steed.
"They must have heard all about me, the Prussian whom their third son befriended and missed during summer", Rainer replied. "I must be an honourary Tyrell already."
"Not before they have met you in person, and I bet my life the whole Tyrell household will be pleased with you."
"Even Margot?", Ensign Baratheon asked.
"Even Margot. In fact, I have been burning to introduce you to Hautjardin and to my loved ones ever since the summer we first parted."
At this point in their conversation, the woods had given way to a great avenue of golden lindens, and at the end of which, an iron gate, a hedge maze, and a stately château in half-Renaissance, half-Baroque style, whose creamy walls and whose sharp turrets and spires gave it the air of an exceedingly oversized birthday cake covered in whipped cream, on top of the soft green hill.
"Voilà Hautjardin!", Laurent Tyrell said as both officers rode uphill through the great avenue, where the first leaves were already falling after one another. A young girl was running, in her light green satin skirt, through the garden gate as it opened. Could it be his little sister?
At this point in the story, we should give an account of the history of the Tyrell household, to give you readers an idea of what kind of people, their rank and their character, would welcome Ensign Rainer Baratheon.
And, to do that, we will have to flash back a few ages, all the way to the seventeenth century. To the stormy and gory yet glorious days of the Thirty Years' War itself.
In those days, Alain Tyrell, the second son of a then middling family of the region's landed gentry, volunteered in his early days to join the Catholic League on the fields of Saxony, and he served the Count of Tilly until the turning point of that campaign. Taken prisoner in the legendary and history-changing battle of Breitenfeld, he pleased the Swedish High Command easily, and was soon made cupbearer to Gustavus Adolphus himself. After the heroic death of his liege lord on the bloody battlefield of Lützen, he sided with the French, who had occupied his native land of Lorraine, and distinguished himself in the Low Countries, at Rocroi and in many other contested battles. In the end, when peace was finally signed at Westphalia, he found his parents and siblings dead and the estate, also called Hautjardin, overrun. And thus, Alain Tyrell turned his regard towards Versailles. As a skilful courtier and diplomat, serving both as Louis XIV's man in Vienna (where the Lorrainian ducal family lived in exile at the Austrian court) and the reigning Duke's in France, he was rewarded with a new Hautjardin, grander than the previous and baroque style, in the environs of Sierck, right in the border between both realms, and also marrying a maid-of-honour from the French court. Such were the origins of the Tyrells as a dynasty.
When the turn of the century into the eighteenth brought the French with their bayonets, tricorns, and lily-decked flags, a widowed Madame Liselotte Tyrell (whose eldest son was already in his teens) plied them with the good wines and plums of the land, plums that even supplied Versailles itself with liquor from the Tyrell clan's own distillery. This would by no means be the first time the Tyrells conquered a fierce invader without the use of cold steel or hot lead.
In the mid-eighteenth century, when Lorraine lost its independence and became French (though its last ruler had become Maria Theresa's kaiser-consort), an adolescent Marie Antoinette stopped at Hautjardin for a drink and a rest on her way from the Hofburg to Versailles.
At the close of the century, the new republican government marched on Hautjardin to claim the estate and take the family prisoner for their execution. While the then also widowed Madame Tyrell was imprisoned at the Château des Ducs in Sierck before she could be drowned in the Moselle (not all the victims of the Revolution were fortunate enough to have a rendezvous with Madame la Guillotine), her children, led by the young heir, managed to escape the prisoner cart and storm their estate, where the National Guards were celebrating their success and intoxicated to the point of losing reason, at twilight. Their mother was set free and warmly embraced them one year later.
That same year, the Prussian invasion did not manifest itself as violently in the region as in other parts of Lorraine. The only Prussians ever to frequent Hautjardin in those days were a young lieutenant, aged 23, and his unit of twenty. He returned to headquarters crippled, with both his legs infected, and a basketful of mirabelles, dying of blood poisoning a week later.
The rage of war would spare the region throughout the Napoleonic era, except for a greater host of Prussians, this time half a regiment, occupied the estate in 1814 for the most pleasant assignment in the officers' lives. Throughout the nineteenth century, in sunshine or rain, as regimes changed in France as quickly as seasons changed, as agricultural methods changed, and the railroad to Paris shortened the distance between the province and the capital, the Tyrell dynasty kept on growing strong like it had always done. And, in those days, the one who would be matriarch of the Tyrell clan, a born Pfalzic Prussian, was but a maiden with a resolve to rise above her station.
Helena von Rothwein was born and raised at a gentry estate on a terraced hill, surrounded by vineyards, on the outskirts of Saarburg, then in Prussia, and she was orphaned at an early age, left in the care of guardians and retainers, who raised her into the most clever maiden along the Moselle. The daughter of those late impoverished nobles, pretty and fragile as a doll in appearance yet a feminist and a virago at heart, had heard wonders about Luther Tyrell (a Catholic, named so because of his parents' Romantic spirit and disdain for authority), who had just inherited the fortune of his dynasty, and sought to attain his hand in marriage.
Thus, armed with nothing but her nutbrown locks, a pair of lace-making needles, and her rapier wit (an endless spring of stories, which anyone, no matter how powerful, would fall for), she crossed the border into France and proposed to the wealthy scion, giving her intelligence and the bounty of her Riesling vineyards as the reasons why to be chosen above any other party. Now a Tyrell maxim, dating all the way from the rise of the surname after the Thirty Years' War, was that every heir to the dynasty should wed a clever woman, a woman of wit. (Liselotte herself, the French court lady, had been the first one).
Needless to say that she had soon given up her religion to wed this Catholic Luther, and her Germanic maiden name to become Madame Hélène Tyrell. This grande dame was still the matriarch of the Tyrell dynasty in the early twentieth century, when we lay our scene, and, having reached her seventieth year, her auburn locks had completely changed into silver. But let us continue with our flashback to the mid-nineteenth century and her then still-existent marriage to Luther Tyrell!
Indeed, though there were many other good parties, both French and Prussian, both noble-born and common-born (mostly of wealthy peasant stock), the landowner could never have chosen a better wife, someone more sensible and down-to-earth, who would calm down her husband's frequent flights of fancy. Luther was kind and warm, yet detached from reality, and it frequently took Hélène's rapier wit and her sharp mind to put him on the right side. In spite of, or because of their differences, their relationship never lacked love, and it was always a constant series of ups, not interrupted by any downs. The fruit of such a nearly perfect marriage (for perfection does not exist) were three lovely children, auburn and amber-eyed, all of them grown into adults at the start of the twentieth century: Max -- the current figurehead of the Tyrell dynasty --, Jeanne -- divorced from Rainer's gentleman ranker of an orderly --, and Mine or Mina (Guillaumine or Wilhelmina), as happily married as can be, and that to another member of the Saarburg-based von Rothwein clan from which her mother had come.
Hélène Tyrell, in the days when her husband still lived, was one of those young ladies whose lifestyle, living with every comfort, leaves them practically nothing to do, and who thus devote themselves exclusively to the cultivation of their minds and to the care of their children, whom they give full powers to do anything they wish as long as it isn't dangerous. Reader, you may be tempted to think of Elisabeth von Lännister, who, with her even higher status, was also absorbed by the care of her children. Yet there is a significant difference that renders Madame Tyrell's case of more positive results for her and for her offspring: the fact that she was happy in marriage, and that she was far more intelligent. Thus, her children, and later on, her grandchildren, were raised with the same freedoms of action as Rainer Baratheon, which improved their character and their people skills.
The death of Luther Tyrell in a riding accident (he fell off an unruly stallion and into the waters of the Moselle, knocking his head on a rock below and finding a liquid grave) gave rise to a serious and cold mourning period that lasted for a year. From that day on, Hélène would play her husband's favourite tunes on the grand piano on the anniversary of his death, and always wear the widow's black instead of the bright colours of her youth. Losing her spouse, though it broke her heart, also have the dowager more time, more love, and more strength to share with her three children. Until, a decade later, the time came for three painful leave-takings, drying up tears at the Sierck station, one by one by one: Jeanne and Mina were both married off to fashionable Lorrainian gentlemen who also were officers (one of them would become a common soldier, as we have revealed), while Max, the eldest and the heir, would undergo superior education, more social life, and the courtship of a clever woman, a woman of wit, at Paris University.
The next decade, right before the war, having put on weight and grown a sharp goatee, he returned home from the capital, and not alone, but in the company of a beautifully modest young bourgeoise, of whom, after learning to know her, old Hélène accepted for a daughter-in-law. From her auburn bun and golden pince-nez to her blue petticoats and stockings, through her passion for translating the works of Shakespeare and Lord Byron, which she could quote by heart, Valérie Tourhaute fit the perfect definition of learned lady. Born and raised on the ground floor of a townhouse on the Left Bank of the Seine, orphaned in a carriage accident and reared by her great-uncle Gérard, a university lecturer who thoroughly homeschooled young Valérie to make up for the French educational system's shortcoming (like the author, both Gérard Tourhaute and his ward saw the interdiction for girls to enter university in those days as a shortcoming)... she, who had an answer for everything and never was without a book at hand, had helped the not that bright Lorrainian student who lived in their garret with his studies, feeding him well both physically and intellectually (though more intellectually than physically), and thus, he would never had made it through without her.
Even though the young gentlemen who frequented her with roses and chocolates were often praising Valérie's mind, for she truly shone with wit, she could see from the fire in their eyes that their actual intentions were of a more lustful or fortune-seeking condition. The Lorrainian, on the other hand, was her constant companion and the one she encouraged to ask more questions about high culture and the nature of feelings. Often, a maid would come to the young people in the morning with a tray of coffee and French pastry, knowing that she would find them in the library, dozing over philosophical writings such as those of Voltaire or René Descartes. In due time, Gérard Tourhaute, seeing how his ward was helping the young student so often and how much both of them had progressed both in and outside the classroom, showed no objection to the courtship and gave both of them his blessing.
There was also the fact that she was a feminist, and equality of gender was her religion, in the reign of Napoleon III, which would also influence the lives of her in-laws.
The Catholic wedding took place in Sierck three days after her arrival. Valérie never regretted leaving Paris for Lorraine, given that the Hautjardin library was well-stocked and assorted, and she got along surprisingly well with her mother-in-law, who was more interesting to her than her tiresome and now overweight husband. Likewise, Hélène felt that she had won a daughter, and one that may have been raised a Tyrell or better than that. Needless to say there is a distance between the left bank of the Rhine and the Left Bank of the Seine, but this distance barely matters when it comes to kindred spirits. In fact, the relationship and the great chemistry between the older Madame Tyrell and the younger can be compared to that between Czarina Elizabeth and her Prussian daughter-in-law Sophie (the would-be Catherine the Great). The customs and traditions of the Tyrells were soon known to Valérie, including the matriarch's performance of a few certain Liszt pieces every year on a certain summer evening.
When the war against the Prussians broke out, the younger Madame Tyrell was expecting her first child, and her husband was temporarily disabled by the fall of a broken branch during the year's plum harvest, right before the French military reached the estate for the draft. As a result, only the male servants of Hautjardin were obliged to dress in blue (and condemned to "die for France" as expendable cannon fodder, especially at Sedan), the male owner of the estate being spared such an unpleasant fate. Dear reader, what clever mothers and clever wives can do during wartime to spare their loved ones the call of duty knows no limits. Even bedridding their "loved one" and figurehead of their dynasty.
Shortly after the accident which left Max Tyrell at Hautjardin, the Prussian juggernaut marched through Alsace and Lorraine on its unstoppable march towards Paris. And chance led the disciplined and straightforward Germanic host through the Sierck area, where they found a grand estate completely wo-manned and staffed by lovely females (the bedridden and goateed gentleman with the broad waistline being the only exception), whose both leaders were one of them in her sixties, the other already expecting offspring. Hautjardin, now officially Hohengarten, was pardoned and free from flames during the whole campaign, as long as the detachment that occupied it was kept entertained with virgin maidservants, good old wine, and quetsch as strong and sweet as nectar itself. The traditional Tyrell recipe for dealing with occupying enemies during wartime was still infallible (diplomacy and feminine charms had always conquered the fierce conquerors). The next year, when peace finally returned and Lorraine had become a Prussian province, the next Tyrell heir was born and christened Wilhelm, or Guillaume, after the new kaiser of the land. Yet his mother tongue would always be French: this lad would always take after his mother, in both appearance (darker hair than his father's) and intellectual pursuits. The fateful riding accident that crushed his left leg (Tyrells falling off unruly horses had been a staple of the dynasty since the Thirty Years) never altered his career, and now he was a clever and sharp lecturer just like his mother's guardian: a Tourhaute in Tyrell attire. On the other hand, Karl or Charles, a lighter shade of auburn and more outspoken, took after his father, much to the female Tyrells' chagrin. The military profession fit him like a glove. The third child, another boy, was christened Lorenz or Laurent, for both "laurel" and "Lorraine," and supposed to become a Catholic priest, though we now know that his wishes and his destiny would take him in the opposite direction. The youngest child of that marriage was, as we know, a lovely girl who was named Margarete or Marguerite, both for the heroine in Goethe's Faust and for the flower in French called "marguerite," or "daisy" in Shakespeare's language. As pure and modest as her floral namesake, Margot had been homeschooled like her three older brothers, and with her three older brothers as they left the estate one by one; she was, having had the brightest artistic, literary, and social education, about to leave for Paris University --living with the Tourhautes as she pursued her degree-- as soon as she reached the upcoming age of eighteen. It had been Valérie's wish to raise her children herself, without the intervention of any tutors or boarding schools (except when it came to the military education of Charles and Laurent), since she believed that, raised by their own mother instead of by strangers, the children would attain free, open minds and stable emotions, and their inner worlds would be far less complicated like those of more decadent socialites. The von Lännisters would definitely need to learn their lesson from the more provincial, yet equally ostentatious and less corrupted, happily married Tyrells.
With these words, we close our three-century retrospective of the Tyrell clan and return to the mirabelle harvest of Hautjardin in our year of the early twentieth century, of the decade before the Great War that looms in the distance like storm clouds on the horizon of Lorraine. Like those distant storm clouds which nearly everyone sees as too far away to be a threat.
Where was I, reader? May you help me? Ah, there! Thank you, dear reader!
At this point in their conversation, the woods had given way to a great avenue of golden lindens, and at the end of the avenue, an iron gate, a hedge maze, and a stately château in half-Renaissance, half-Baroque style, whose creamy walls and whose sharp turrets and spires gave it the air of an exceedingly oversized birthday cake covered in whipped cream, on top of the soft green hill.
"Voilà Hautjardin!", Laurent Tyrell said as both officers rode uphill through the great avenue, where the first leaves were already falling after one another. A young girl was running, in her light green satin skirt, through the garden gate as it opened. Could it be his little sister?
That rhetorical question needs an answer, and now, reader, you can be reassured that the maiden spoken of was Marguerite Tyrell. We left her running down the estate avenue and coming closer, closer, closer to her brother and to his friend, whom she had been impatient to get to know for years.
"Laurent!", she shouted, throwing her arms around her brother's neck as Laurent got off his steed, nutbrown twin braids tied with mint-green ribbons fluttering in her wake. " And Ensign René Barathéon, I presume?", she reached out her right hand to the other officer with a sincere smile.
"It's Rainer", he replied with the same courtesy, bending over to kiss her delicate hand. "Mademoiselle Marguerite Tyrell, I presume?", he asked in French, before quoting Goethe, the words Faust had wooed her namesake with, in German to her:

"My fair damsel, could you please allow
me to give you my arm and guide you now?"

To his surprise, she chuckled slightly behind her green flowered fan and replied, also in German with a slight French accent:

"I'm neither damosel nor fair,
on my own I can get anywhere."

This maiden knew her Goethe, Rainer thought as she curtsied. Those honey or amber eyes, framed in curtains of dark braids, sparkled like evening stars, betraying her cleverness. A maiden with such eyes was sure to shine with wit, and to have an answer for everything. Her skin was white and fine as porcelain, her slightly rosy cheeks like pink roses on the snow. Soft lips the colour of strawberries curled upward in an innocent yet somewhat mysterious smile, like that of a female in a Renaissance painting. Her slender form, crowned with breasts small and ripe like mirabelle plums, was well-shaped and ostensibly flawless. No wonder that both her wit and her physique attracted so many eligible suitors. Trying to win her affections even further, Rainer gave Faust's reply in the play:

"Good Heavens, how this child is fair!
I've never seen a such one ere!
She is so virtuous, good, and kind,
ruby lips, rosy cheeks, bright mind...
I shall never forget this day!
When she threw lightning in my eyes,
my heart was branded in her guise.
How briefly did she thus reply:
then, I thought I would touch the sky!"

"So you've come to help at the harvest or to perform some drama with us?", she asked, with a tinge of irony, as she winked her left eye at the dark-haired officer. Rainer nodded in reply as he saluted: "Ensign Baratheon, reporting for duty!" "Well, Herr Ensign, the battle will be fierce these three days, so we expect no blunders from a hero like you!", Margot replied, leading her brother and her suitor through the iron gate and into the French garden, with its myth fountains and baroque hedge maze.
And Rainer let himself be led and shown the wonders of Hautjardin: the fountain of Narcissus, the fountain of Salmacis, the fountain of Galatea, the maze where generations of Tyrell children (ever since the seventeenth century, and including Laurent and Margot) had played hide and seek, the rose bower, full of roses of every colour and size, right before the entrance to the château proper, behind which the lovely great greenhouse, the wild English garden, and the mirabelle orchards could be seen. Across the Moselle on the other bank grew the Tyrell vineyards and hopyards, on the soft terraced hills across the river from the estate and gardens. Here and there, rococo bowers of various sizes could be seen: a little theatre, a jeu de paume (an indoor tennis court), gazebos for musicians...
"Indeed, the von Lännisters'... my in-laws' mansions in Potsdam and Lichterfelde look far harsher, far more artificial, and less living. Just like the von Lännisters themselves."
"Well, wait until you get inside and see our galleries," Laurent replied with that cheerful smile of his.
"I hope the pictures are worth admiring them," the dark-haired Prussian ensign said. They were now walking through the hedge maze, the Tyrell siblings guiding their guest the right way.
"There are depictions of classical myths, and also of battles of the past. What's more, along the corridor, there are portraits of all Tyrells that have ever lived here, ever since the Thirty Years' War."
"We Baratheons haven't really had that many ancestors. There's no hall of portraits in Sturmende." For a while, Rainer Baratheon thought of how few memories of his family's past were scattered around his birthplace. And how the Tyrells' residence, on the other hand, seemed to live and breathe a glorious past, resembling the princess's palace in "The Snow Queen", or the one where Sleeping Beauty lay on her bed in a tower of roses, awaiting the true kiss of love.
It seemed to the Prussian ensign as if he had entered one of those fairytales which he still loved with all his heart since childhood. So had it been since he entered Lorraine.
The three young people had now left the maze and were walking along the artificial lake that contained one of the three fountains. The bronze statues of a girl embracing a young man, who struggled to escape her grasp, both naked, stood in the middle of the waters.
"Do you see that maiden embracing that youth in the lake?", Margot wistfully asked Rainer. "Mon enseigne, as proof of your erudition, could you guess what these likenesses mean?"
The sculpture group reminded Rainer of a story he had read somewhere as a child. When and where he did not remember, neither the whole tale: with all the cares and the studies of any cadet, it lay buried deep inside him, like treasure hidden during wartime.
"Why, mon enseigne! That's Salmacis attacking Hermaphroditus!" Mademoiselle Tyrell chortled. The names, in a flash of lightning, brought the whole story to the young officer's consciousness: the treasure had come to light. Blushing a little in shame, yet confidently, he replied.
"I read it once... at the von Lännisters' during a summer holiday. In the Metamorphoses, I believe."
"Well," she replied. "It's one of Maman's favourite stories, and Mamie has also been seen to like it, as many other female Tyrells before us. In our gallery, we've got five or six pictures of the same story. Think of that, the girl proposing to the..." She chortled and looked at her brother, then at Rainer.
Now they were standing on the threshold of the château. The merry landowner, broad-waisted and auburn-goateed (with a matching moustache) and cheerful like Johan Banér, sprang towards them, his slender and bespectacled yet exceedingly beautiful lady wife by his side. Their children needn't introduce their special guest, yet still the introductions took place. Monsieur Tyrell, whom Rainer recognized from every summer and autumn at Lichterfelde station, shook hands so vehemently with the young officer that it hurt, while the younger Madame reached out her delicate hand more carefully. And obviously, both of them addressed Ensign Baratheon as "René."
"Since everyone around here uses my French name, I should get used to it", Rainer thought.
A short elderly lady, ostensibly in her seventies, stepped forth with a firm tread and without the need of a cane to walk. For her silver hair and countless wrinkles, she remained fresh as a spring rose, with the same youthful energy of Count Theibald von Lännister, or of the Count of Tilly, Rainer thought. Her gown and veil were black as midnight, which, combined with her regal mien and air of greatness, reminded the young officer of the many pictures of Queen Victoria and of Maria Theresa he had seen throughout his short life. "She might as well be royalty", he thought. "Here, they even call her a queen, Hélène la Reine des Épines." And he remembered how much had been spoken in the officers' quarters about the elder Madame Tyrell, her rapier wit, and the way she had withstood the Prussian invasion without coming to the slightest harm.
The old dowager led Rainer alone into the brilliantly lighted baroque entrance hall. She explained that she needed to have a talk with the officer, tête-à-tête. Right below a glittering chandelier, she thoroughly examined him from the plume of his shako to the spurs on his boots, before fixing her piercing hazel eyes on his sparkling blue eyes. Then, Hélène asked him a few relevant questions:
"René Barathéon?"
"Rainer, actually. But, since everyone around here uses my French name, feel free to call me whatever you like."
"How old are you? Eighteen?"
"I'll turn nineteen next month, when autumn comes."
"And your rank... you haven't risen very high in the ladder, have you, Rainer?"
"I'm still an ensign, madame", he said as he lowered his gaze on the pink marble pavement.
"Une enseigne! Alter Schwede! Saperlipopette!" The elder Madame Tyrell chuckled into her black handkerchief. Apparently, being an ensign at Hautjardin was too commonplace. Rainer thought of his possibilities for a while. Should he ask the dowager for her granddaughter's hand as soon as possible? It would be far better to ask her after the harvest, when he had already found a niche and proven himself worthy of the Tyrell clan.
"When I was young and the land was French, there were no ensigns around here", Hélène resumed her intervention.
Yes, and when her husband was alive, Rainer thought. Now she was surely going to talk about how many Prussian ensigns had visited the château during the last decades. But suddenly the Art Nouveau telephone on the wall of the entrance hall rang, and the old lady rushed forth and was soon talking on the phone. Someone important was coming soon, and the whole clan should prepare to receive that person. The Tyrell matriarch gave an order to a middle-aged maid with the keys to the estate on her waist, and the latter disappeared for a few seconds, to return pushing an ornate wheelchair. Then, accompanied by this servant and by Rainer, then also by the other Tyrells of Hautjardin, she led the whole clan back through the rose arbour and past the maze, to the iron-wrought garden gates, into whose lock the maid inserted the right key to open them as the latest stagecoach from Sierck stopped before the château.
The carriage door was opened from outside and out came a dashing young gentleman in his thirties, sharply dressed in a cream-coloured summer suit, carrying in his left hand a long cane crowned with a golden rose. His left leg was also shorter and more bent than the right. The coachman helped the passenger out of the coach and onto the wheelchair, as the maidservant, with the help of both ensigns, lowered and carried the middle-sized trunk that he had brought.
As soon as he was on the wheelchair, the newcomer was embraced by both Max and Valérie Tyrell, especially by the latter. Dark-haired and slender like his mother, with friendly blue eyes, he sported a fine moustache in the fashion of those days, and a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles like hers. Then, he shook hands with the old dowager, whom he called both Mamie and Oma, and embraced his dear little sister Margot, saying that she grew more lovely for each week.
"But Willi, we didn't expect you to come so early!", the old dowager said. "Such a foolish idea to hold a conference on baroque art and literature in summer! And Leipzig is right across the realm!"
"It was in Dresden, not Leipzig", the thirty-something coolly explained. "Anyway, though I found it as hard as always to get on and out of my wagon-lit bed, I had to make to our lands in time for the harvest. Tyrell tradition comes before scholarly research." Then, he looked at the crowd assembled at the garden gate, as the coachman now helped the stout maid bring the trunk into the château, and saw a new face among those of his well-known family. A young man in uniform, with raven locks and sapphire eyes.
"What is this? Can it really be Rainer Baratheon, of whom I have heard wonders? Your surname was on the lips of all of my fellow researchers..."
"It must be for my brother's sake, and not my own", the young officer replied as he sighed. Meanwhile, the coachman came back and got on the coach away, driving off.
The old dowager had disappeared: she was surely waiting for the hall phone to ring once more, for the now only missing grandson to arrive.
Margot pulled Rainer's scabbard as her eldest brother strolled by himself into the garden. "Guillaume is the most clever fellow in Lorraine. Like our Maman, he is rarely without a book at hand", she told him. "Though he can't walk by himself, he's always had a good heart: not only does he shine with wit. And he usually read to me aloud as a child. Drew constellations, for instance, and told me the myths around them. Like our zodiac signs. He told me that the maiden of Virgo was a princess... it's a sad story, but he also knows, like Andersen, how to tell a child sad stories the right way."
"No surprise he's gone to university, for, like his mother and in spite of his disability, your brother has an answer for everything. It pleases me to see that, in spite of being confined to a wheelchair, one can get this far in life." Rainer smiled and reached our his hand towards her. "Could you share with me the princess story, the way your brother told it? I'm already grown up, and I never heard that tale."
"I will try to make it short, but also precise. In the kingdom where she was born and lived, no one had tasted strong drink. Only water, milk, and juices. And everyone was happy and healthy. Only her crowned father had mead and wine to drink: some foreign dignitaries must have given the King such gifts. Yet he never abused their pleasure or lost his reason in the bottom of the cup."
"It must have been very good lands, a paradise on Earth!"
Mademoiselle Tyrell resumed her tale, now with a more mournful look in her eyes.
"One year, a lovely year of peace and good weather like today, the fruit harvest was exceptionally good, like this year. And thus, His Majesty decided to share the bounty of his cellars with the common people of the realm, to let them taste the closest to nectar. At first, the villagers were hesitant to drink, but one of them took a draught and felt pleased with it, so that all the others followed this bold fellow's example. Unused as they were to strong drink, it took effect by lightning, leaving them at the mercy of their passions. And, in response to a slight from their liege lord, who tried in vain to stop them from quaffing even more, they seized him, intoxicated as they were, wild with rage... they struck His Majesty dead, and earthed him in a deep ditch, like a trench, covered with autumn leaves."
Rainer grew pale and shuddered. Indeed, as a child, he had sometimes seen his eldest brother in such dreadful spirits, and then, he was advised by Fräulein Mordäne to stay in the nursery. And, knowing what one could do alone, what about a host of wasted Roberts, like in this tale? Ensign Baratheon thought of the princess. Would the intoxicated crowd storm the palace, like the smallfolk of France had done the century before? If so, what would happen to the princess? In a cold sweat, he asked Mademoiselle Tyrell to tell him what happened to the heroine of the tale.
"When the drunken ones came to, they took up the form of their liege lord from among the leaves in the trench. They sprayed him with water, cried his name, listened to the King's heart time after time. But only silence came. Dejected and regretful, they earthed him in the same place once more."
"And the princess?" Now Rainer's mood was lighter, yet he was still worried about her. "Was she crowned Queen? Did she punish those who had killed her father unaware?"
"She was playing in the gardens with her spaniel, when the puppy suddenly called her attention, and she followed her pet out into the fields and next to the trench all filled with leaves. And then, after sifting away a few leaves, she dropped blazing tears on her crowned father's lilywhite face, that was bleeding from his ears and nostrils. And she cradled his form and stroked his silver-spangled dark locks, bursting into tears and screams of despair, as the spaniel sat down by her side, looking sad as well."
"I assume her mother was deceased as well, like in other fairytales... Being an orphan myself, I understand her deep sorrow. Though I was just a baby when I first heard of my parents and that shipwreck, and I wouldn't understand it until years later." Ensign Baratheon restrained a teardrop unworthy of a military officer.
"Rainer, at least you were stronger than she was. She couldn't bear her grief. It was too much for her glass-like heart, that soon would shatter." Marguerite Tyrell put her hands around her own neck. "And thus, untying the sash she wore for a girdle around her waist, she placed it around her neck and pulled tighter and tighter, coughing and gasping as she choked, until... click!... her windpipe gave way."
The ensign gasped and his heart skipped a beat. The princess in the tale had strangled herself. At least, Margot was performing the strangulation like a real actress, the fatal and eerie click coming like the shock line in any good ghost story, by Poe or some other master in the genre.
"Then she was still, and her face and nails turned a bright shade of mauve as she ceased to breathe and her wildly throbbing heart finally became silent. In that state did the servants find their new liege lady, a dark blue or black collar marked on her skin. They placed the forms of both royals on flower-decked biers, and carried them home to court in state. The next day, a magnificent funeral was held, as an ambitious cadet branch of the dynasty usurped the vacant throne. Though the new ruler had taken the crown by force, he was good and righteous, and next week it appeared as if nothing sorrowful had ever happened. Of this the princess knew all, as she watched her realm from above, with feathered wings on her back and a wand like an ear of wheat in her left hand, her whole body now made of stars."
"That was a wonderful story, Sherezade!", Rainer clapped his finely gloved hands as he dried up the single teardrop he couldn't restrain. "I suppose you are a Virgo, for some reason or another."
"Indeed!" Margot smiled. "And thanks for the compliments! I could also have told you the other Virgo story, the one of Hades and Persephone... but let's face the facts: that other one's far more for children, and you surely know the tale, mon enseigne! And my birthday happens to be this weekend, precisely tomorrow, the day of the mirabelle harvest!"
"Then, this year we will celebrate twice!" There were sparkles in the young officer's blue eyes.
"This year's by no means the first one. Ever since my first birthday, there have been many years in which my birthday fell during the weekend. To celebrate both events at the same time when it happens is a..."
"...Tyrell tradition?" Rainer Baratheon finished her sentence and the whole family chuckled. "Anyway, that must have happened for not many years... How old are you? Fifteen?"
"I will turn sixteen tomorrow", Mademoiselle Tyrell replied with that sincere smile and those twinkles in her eyes.
"And I will turn nineteen next month..." he replied.
Presently, the old grandmother joined them at the gates once more, telling everyone that Charles and Léonnette were on their way.
"He must look smart in uniform", Rainer said. "If he is older than his brother and also an officer..."
"He's already a colonel, at twenty-five, and the very Kommandant of Küstrin", Margot said. Laurent blushed. His brother might as well have been his commanding officer! "I can't believe it... not that chubby Charles could reach such a fine rank!" Laurent and Guillaume chuckled, as their sister told Ensign Baratheon about the soon-coming Tyrell:
"Charles takes after his dad quite a bit. I've heard he's even grown a goatee, Gustavus Adolphus style, as well as that now the uniform fits him like a glove, like it fits you two. Tall as a grenadier and strong as oakwood. But when he was a little boy, he was fat as a keg. Plump as a boule de suif, just like our dad. We loved to crack jokes on his girth to annoy him, even though we've had a few arguments on those jokes. Still... we were children back then. And now he's sharply bearded, happily married, in charge of a whole fortress, and on his way to our estate!"
Another stagecoach from Sierck had stopped at the garden gates, and the gatekeeping maid opened them once more.
"Quand on parle des loups..." Max Tyrell said.
Out of the stagecoach stepped the best-looking young couple Rainer Baratheon had ever seen. The husband was a dashing army officer in his twenties, auburn-haired, honey-eyed, and broad-shouldered, with a girth now as slender as Rainer's own and a sharp moustache and goatee like his landowner father, or like any warlord of the Thirty Years' War. For a while, the young ensign thought of one of his novel heroes dressed in the blue epauletted uniform of his own days: dashing and bold as any swashbuckler officer of the seventeenth century. The wife, with bright strawberry blond locks flowing on either side of her bun, bright hazel eyes, and a fairy-like silhouette enhanced by her shining rose-pink satin gown, carried a matching parasol in her right hand. She looked to Rainer like the Renaissance Venus he had once seen on the wall of the von Lännister mansion in Lichterfelde, only that all dressed up (the Venus, a replica of Botticelli's most famous piece of art, was the first naked female Rainer had ever seen) and her hair arranged, like a proper lady but still with the charming air of a goddess of love. For a while, Ensign Baratheon thought that Gustavus Adolphus and Mary Eleanor themselves had come to Hautjardin.
Soon, Charles Tyrell and his Léonnette were embracing everyone else and being embraced in turn. The landowner, whose favourite child seemed to be Charles, boasted how proud of the unusually young colonel he was, and the landowner's wife praised her daughter-in-law's mind, for, though she was more inclined towards the artistic than the scientific realm, she shone with wit after all.
"Anyway... ours has been a long trip, from Küstrin to Sierck! Yet taking part in such a redoubtable plum harvest is sure worth the pain! Lorenz... Laurent, I see the uniform fits you thousands of times better than a black cassock! I was right, you weren't born to be a priest! And soon you will become a lieutenant, or something more!" He showed his younger brother his own larger, brighter epaulettes, and the insignia on his sleeves. Changing his language from French to German, he turned to Rainer. "And this must be the Prussian of whom I have heard so much about, eh, Baratheon? Like Baratheon Steel bayonets? To think I would meet a person with that surname, and also in the military! Such a shame he is not under my flag, in my regiment!"
Rainer nodded. "My eldest brother Robert owns and runs the factory, if not the whole Konzern. But I will soon become a lieutenant, or even more... even a colonel, with a whole garrison under my command. I suppose you have heard of me as a cadet." Now he admired this dashing officer, a colonel in his twenties, even more than he admired the disabled lecturer. What if he rose to the same rank as the Kommandant, happily married to a society lady as well? To think of his happiness with Margot for a wife and Laurent for an aide-de-camp...! (Dying childless was none of his, or Laurent's concern, both young officers aware that they were, after all, the spares to their respective family names).
"I heard you are fond of literature and theatre, Herr Ensign," Léonnette said with twinkles in her eyes. "Could you please show us some of your verses and play scenes, and those you have translated?"
And now those words made Rainer think that he had got an admirer as well, someone who appreciated his literary talent. He bowed before the young lady and kissed her delicate, glove-covered right hand.
"It would be my greatest pleasure, madame." Then, he turned towards Charles: "Do not doubt, mon colonel, do not fall prey to your concerns as Othello did. For, like Cassio, I am not interested in anything beyond chaste admiration and sharing of literary creations. In fact, when I first saw your regal mien, your bright eyes, and the dashing air about you, I thought of nought but Lützen's bloody battlefield, and of the fact that Gustavus Adolphus, now with the dark locks of a Lorrainian and dressed in the blue coat of our days' Imperial Prussia, is once more among the living... and, fortunately, not alone, but in the company of the flower of crowned ladies, the jewel of Hohenzollern, the fairest one e'er to wear a crown: his true and loving Mary Eleanor!"
The young lady blushed behind her fan, as the colonel listened attentively to the ensign's praise of her.
"Yet something is missing", Rainer cheerfully resumed his intervention. "A little Christina behind her mother's petticoats or in her father's arms, to crown their happiness ere the storm of war rages!"
"If we ever have a daughter, we now know which name she will be given in your honour, Ensign Baratheon", Léonnette and Charles said. "We will have a Christina, and it's a beautiful name as well!"
"You may feel free to call me Rainer, or René, or the versifying officer: whichever you like", the younger officer sincerely replied.
"Rainer... Anyway, if there are tableaux vivants tomorrow afternoon to celebrate Margot's birthday... and not any birthday but her sixteenth, her coming of age... we two would like a performance of that historical play that you had written and staged at military school", the colonel said.
"So Laurent, that little... told you about The Heroes of Lützen, eh? In my own opinion, for I adore tableaux, I say that it would be an excellent birthday entertainment for the soirée. The whole officer class and gentry of these lands is invited, I presume..." Ensign Baratheon's eyes lit up as he replied as sincerely as he could.
"So it was and so it is", Valérie remarked as she adjusted her pince-nez.
"Then, Caron and Cuy, and even Colonel von Tarth cum filia will visit the estate. The tableaux will be a great opportunity to show them more of the Tyrell spirit!"
And thus it was agreed that, in the afternoon of the next day, the distinguished guests would be entertained with a series of tableaux vivants starring the Tyrell family and Rainer Baratheon. The latter, together with his more than best friend Laurent, was already thinking of which scenes to perform: the landing of Othello, the landing of Gustavus Adolphus, his farewell to Mary Eleanor, his death, and the finding of his lifeless body at Lützen, Don Juan as a young lieutenant before Catherine the Great on her throne, the death of Vladimir Lensky, the execution of Louis XVI, and, lastly, Mary Eleanor with little Christina mourning for the embalmed form of Gustavus. In the short late afternoon through early evening time between the arrival of the young spouses and the supper, the following programme, interspersing the story of Gustavus Adolphus with the other ones, was quickly prepared in the well-assorted Tyrell library:

1. The landing of Gustavus Adolphus on the shores of Rügen.
2. The landing of Othello on the shores of Cyprus.
3. The last farewell of Mary Eleanor to Gustavus Adolphus.
4. Don Juan a young lieutenant before Catherine the Great.
5. The death of Gustavus Adolphus and Pappenheim.
6. The execution of Louis XVI.
7. The finding of Gustavus on the battlefield of Lützen at twilight.
8. The death of the poet Vladimir Lensky.
9. Mary Eleanor and Christina mourning for Gustavus Adolphus.

The two officers brainstormed which scenes from literature and history they would bring to the stage, cheerfully discussing their favourite stories and which ones their friends and family would prefer, until at last, the programme was settled. While his lover wrote lists of scenes and the possible cast of the tableaux, Ensign Baratheon sat cozily by the fireside, at evening twilight, sipping a glass of brandy, his left leg crossed over his right thigh, as he engaged in conversation with Laurent, who, contemplating Rainer's carefree, relaxed stance, was reminded of a modern, military version of Hugh the ranger, his favourite character in that Pre-Raphaelite tale:
Now long a lord and clad in rich attire,
In his fair hall he sat before the wine
Watching the evening sun’s yet burning fire,
Through the close branches of his pleasance shine,
In that mood when man thinks himself divine,
Remembering not whereto we all must come,
Not thinking aught but of his happy home.
“Yea,” saith the ranger, “that may well be wise,
But haste, for this eve am I well at ease,
Nor would be wearied with such folk as these.”
But for the ranger, left alone in peace,
He bade his folk bring in the minstrelsy;
And thinking of his life, and fair increase
Of all his goods, a happy man was he...
Indeed, all of those verses could apply to Ensign Baratheon, the fair-haired officer told him. "You are unwittingly staging a one-man tableau!" In response, the taller ensign nodded with a sincere smile, one that warmed both their hearts more than the liquor that was searing Rainer's throat.
Laurent knew of some old trunks in a Hautjardin tower that served as storage attic: treasure chests full of attire of his ancestors, wigs and plate armour included, which the Tyrell siblings had often amused themselves with. Rainer smiled and agreed that these would make the greatest costumes he had ever known.
During the supper, they would present the programme for the show as well as discuss the cast for each and every one of the tableaux.
And thus, that was what both young ensigns discussed with the rest of the Tyrell clan at the table that evening. The whole menu was a tribute to the mirabelle plums of Hautjardin: meat pies containing the ripe golden fruit, knepfle with béchamel and ripe mirabelles, vol-au-vents with mirabelle preserve filling, mirabelle macarons, and a pie-style cake full of "the gold of Lorraine", that, according to Rainer Baratheon, bested its counterpart in the officers' mess hall. The whole feast was washed down only with mirabelle wine and with quetsch, harvested, stored, and distilled within the estate. And this was merely the clan-only prelude to the sixteenth-birthday-and-plum-harvest banquet for all the society in the Moselle area of Lorraine. With a three-layer mirabelle pie, the size of a millstone or even larger. Wouldn't that be a perfect coda for the tableaux?
"We Tyrells serve only plum wine and quetsch during the mirabelle harvest", Laurent told his more than best friend, who was sitting by his side. "Only beer during the hop harvest. And only grape wine and brandy during the vintage. Both of these latter events will take place next month, in early autumn."
"Isn't this another of your family traditions?"
"A way of celebrating that we have got plenty for another day", the blond ensign replied with a smile.
"Then... what if there is no plenty?", the Prussian asked, shrugging his shoulders.
"There has always been enough plenty in Lorraine! French or Prussian, at the service of a Republic or of a Crown, how else do you think invading armies have been convinced to spare our lands? Think of Wallenstein..." Laurent was already finishing his share of delicious mirabelle pie.
"À propos..." Madame Valérie intervened, addressing her guest. "For being a Prussian, mon enseigne, your hair is too dark a shade. And your surname... 'Barathéon' sounds more French than anything else."
Rainer thought of those words as a draught of quetsch seared his throat. The Parisian-born lady cleared her throat and, adjusting her spectacles, resumed her address to him. "In fact, it reminds me of something I read as a young girl, in The Untold Story of the Revolution: The Royalists' Struggle. Feel free to peruse it in the château library, if you are curious. The last Barathéons... They were relatively young: he was in his twenties and she was but eighteen. Marquis Ormond de Barathéon and his lady, Marquise Réelle, née Targarien, said to be a bastard of Élisabeth Targarien and Louis XV. During the Terror, Marquis Ormond and Marquise Réelle had a son, who was christened Étienne, right before they fled Versailles. Then, with their newborn child in tow, they fled their château of Accalmie, on the English Channel, and were persecuted throughout the lands by state authorities. The last time all three Barathéons were seen, they sneaked past enemy lines, then crossed the Rhine on a raft and made it across the border into Prussia, finding sanctuary in the Hohenzollern army's campsite before crossing the war front."
Rainer listened attentively to the learned lady. Having never heard of his family history and now finding out that it may have been something out of a novel. Then, suddenly, as he tucked into his second piece of mirabelle cake, the ensign felt like a flash of light in his mind.
"My parents' names were Stefan and Cassandra... The character in that story, Stefan, was called Étienne in the French translation... There is only something I must be sure of before the puzzle fits...", Rainer thought as he laid aside his fork, before inquiring to the learned and clever Madame Valérie:
"Excuse me, madame... when in the year for you French is the feast of Saint Étienne?"
The whole company at the table looked at him. It was obvious that his own Protestant upbringing singled him out. Every Tyrell, living in Prussia or in Lorraine, agreed that it was on the second day of Christmas, the 26th of December. The very day the Baratheon brothers, as little boys, celebrated more Christmas after the two previous ones, to compensate for the loss of their parents and remember their memory.
"Then..." Rainer turned pale and downed his cup of quetsch at one fell swoop, coughing into his napkin some of the quetsch that had gone the wrong way down his throat. "Étienne de Barathéon was Stefan Baratheon... My father, whom I never knew, a fallen French aristocrat, of royal blood..." Now he was sure that his blue blood, even though diluted with that of a commoner, could secure him a niche in the Tyrell household and reinstate the once proud surname from the ashes of oblivion.
The cheerful landowner had rallied them to raise their glasses more than often to the health of every Tyrell and everything they could wish. Now, after a refill, the next toast was to the young guest, who was cheered upon and received much acclaim. It was then that the programme for the tableaux vivants was read aloud. The estate of Hautjardin had got a little gazebo-like cottage in the French garden, next to the Fountain of Galatea (Rainer had seen this construction and wondered what it might be), and it was a small indoor theatre dating back from the happy days of the Enlightenment. Surely, there was space enough to fit all the gentry and officers inside it to watch the show performed on stage. And thus, Ensign Baratheon also made the whole Tyrell clan sure of his plans for the cast and mise-en-scène of the tableaux.
Rainer himself would be dashing and confident as Gustavus Adolphus, Vladimir Lensky, Lieutenant Cassio and Don Juan, aside from the unfortunate Louis XVI.
Laurent would be Johan Banér, Eugene Onegin, the National Guard officer at the guillotine, a young Russian courtier, and Roderigo.
Margot would be seen as Queen Mary Eleanor, Lensky's bride Olga, a Russian court lady, a ragged and rumpled Marie Antoinette, and a wistful Emilia.
Charles would make a bold Pappenheim, a dashing Othello, a smug Potemkin, an elusive Zaretsky, and a menacing executioner. Little he cared for playing the villain in the two latter roles.
Léonnette was to be a Winged Victory in the Gustavus Adolphus play, a picture-perfect Desdemona, Onegin's French valet Guillot, a National Guard at the guillotine (crosscast in both roles), and the loveliest of the Czarina's maids-of-honour.
Both Tyrell parents would also appear on stage for a while: Max Tyrell as Iago, a Russian courtier, and a National Guard officer; Valérie as Catherine the Great herself. To much acclaim for both of them, since Rainer had not forgotten them at all, and seen which parts they could play on stage.
For the Death of Gustavus tableau, Wilhelm, responsible for the curtain and props, would appear as Wallenstein.
Lastly, Margot's porcelain doll Sophie would see the light of day once more, after years of imprisonment in a dark toy-box (due to lack of children to cast, since Rainer was not much interested in the servants' children), to shine like a star twice as a fatherless princess: as both Christina of Sweden and Marie Thérèse of France.
At the end of the supper, healths went round to the tableaux and to their authors, and then, after clinking and raising their glasses, everyone retired to their bedrooms. The elderly dowager wanted to show Rainer to a guest-room, but the dark-haired officer declined, saying that he would rather stay with Laurent in the latter's bedroom and practise for the tableaux together, winking to the blond ensign as he said those words. And thus, the Tyrells' third son accompanied his Prussian more-than-friend to his bedchamber, through marble floors and paintings of risqué classical myths, great battles of early modern history (from Breitenfeld to Sedan), and works of Turner featuring the steam clouds of ships and trains in the warm evening twilight.
During the route, Laurent showed Rainer the corridor as a hall of portraits of Tyrells, where allonge wigs gave way to powdered wigs, to ponytails or queues, to short hair. The fashion of nobility, both male and female, both military and civilian, from the Thirty Years' War to the Belle Époque, could be read as well as the history of the Tyrell household from its rise through two centuries of ostentation and hardship, of revolution, wartime, and precious days of peace. From Alain Tyrell in his allonge wig, cravat, and breastplate to a wheelchair-bound Guillaume in a smart black suit, reading a philosophy book by Kant, and a dashing Charles in lieutenant's mess uniform, with a fine shade of peach-fuzz on his upper lip (both must have been no older than our two young ensigns when portrayed). None of the pictures looked like a tiresome daguerreotype in black and white: all of them were portraits painted by hand, in colour, those destroyed in the war miraculously restored. The styles reached from Baroque through Art Nouveau and Impressionism, passing through all the artistic movements that came in between. For a while, both young officers stood admiring the portraits, Rainer wondering what may have become of those in his ancestral home of Accalmie, while also thinking of the black and white daguerreotypes of his childhood mansion in Sturmende. The Tyrell hall of portraits, on the other hand, was not divided by exile, and it breathed both colour and history, two things Rainer passionately loved.
"Today... I came here to harvest plums, meet your loved ones, and share a few days off with you. Not only did my wishes come true, but I found the past of my old family, and the promise of a new one, as well. Tonight, we will spend the night together. And tomorrow, we will have the time of our lives harvesting plums and acting in our tableaux!"
They were now in Laurent's bedroom, where a series of historical novels, that Rainer recognized as those they had read together in their shared room at Lichterfelde Academy, were lined in a fine bookcase. There was also a lovely neoclassical-style canopy bed and a matching wardrobe, aside from a desk-like table and a chair in the same style. Regiments of tin soldiers in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century uniforms, and those of the Napoleonic era (Prussians and French, but also a few redcoats), were ranged on a shelf above the bed.
Neither one of them completely intoxicated, both of them light-hearted and with sparkling eyes, they began to practise for the tableaux. For the Lensky one, the blond Lorrainian had to cradle his "best friend" in his arms, Rainer with shut eyes and clutching his chest. The Gustavus Adolphus tableau would have Banér shooting Pappenheim down as Gustavus lay dead on the battlefield, just like they had done on stage. The same routine from their childhood days. But the one with Onegin and Lensky... It made Ensign Tyrell tingle, feel unquiet. For a while, as he cradled his sweetheart for practice, Pushkin's words flashed through his mind:

The shining pistols are uncased, 

The mallet loud the ramrod strikes, 

Bullets are down the barrels pressed, 

For the first time the hammer clicks. 

Lo! poured in a thin gray cascade, 

The powder in the pan is laid, 

The sharp flint, screwed securely on, 

Is cocked once more. Uneasy grown, 

Guillot behind a pollard stood; 

Aside the foes their mantles threw, 

Zaretski paces thirty-two 

Measured with great exactitude. 

At each extreme one takes his stand, 

A loaded pistol in his hand.



"Advance!"—           Indifferent and sedate, 

The foes, as yet not taking aim, 

With measured step and even gait 

Athwart the snow four paces came— 

Four deadly paces do they span; 

Onegin slowly then began

To raise his pistol to his eye, 

Though he advanced unceasingly. 

And lo! five paces more they pass, 

And Lenski, closing his left eye,

 Took aim—but as immediately 

Onegin fired—Alas! alas! 

The poet's hour hath sounded—See! 

He drops his pistol silently.

He on his bosom gently placed
His hand, and fell. His clouded eye
Not agony, but death expressed.
So from the mountain lazily
The avalanche of snow first bends,
Then glittering in the sun descends.
The cold sweat bursting from his brow,
To the youth Eugene hurried now—
Gazed on him, called him. Useless care!
He was no more! The youthful bard
For evermore had disappeared.
The storm was hushed. The blossom fair
Was withered ere the morning light—
The altar flame was quenched in night.

Tranquil he lay, and strange to view
The peace which on his forehead beamed,
His breast was riddled through and through,
The blood gushed from the wound and steamed.
Ere this but one brief moment beat
That heart with inspiration sweet
And enmity and hope and love—
The blood boiled and the passions strove.
Now, as in a deserted house,
All dark and silent hath become;
The inmate is for ever dumb,
The windows whitened, shutters close—
Whither departed is the host?
God knows! The very trace is lost.

Well, if your pistol ball by chance
The comrade of your youth should strike,
Who by a haughty word or glance
Or any trifle else ye like
You o'er your wine insulted hath—
Or even overcome by wrath
Scornfully challenged you afield—
Tell me, of sentiments concealed
Which in your spirit dominates,
When motionless your gaze beneath
He lies, upon his forehead death,
And slowly life coagulates—
When deaf and silent he doth lie
Heedless of your despairing cry?

Eugene, his pistol yet in hand 

And with remorseful anguish filled, 

Gazing on Lenski's corpse did stand— 

Zaretski shouted: "Why, he's killed!"— 

Killed! at this dreadful exclamation 

Onegin went with trepidation 

And the attendants called in haste. 

Most carefully Zaretski placed 

Within his sledge the stiffened corpse, 

And hurried home his awful freight. 

Conscious of death approximate, 

Loud paws the earth each panting horse, 

His bit with foam besprinkled o'er, 

And homeward like an arrow tore.


My friends, the poet ye regret! 

When hope's delightful flower but bloomed 

In bud of promise incomplete, 

The manly toga scarce assumed, 

He perished. Where his troubled dreams, 

And where the admirable streams 

Of youthful impulse, reverie, 

Tender and elevated, free? 

And where tempestuous love's desires, 

The thirst of knowledge and of fame, 

Horror of sinfulness and shame, 

Imagination's sacred fires, 

Ye shadows of a life more high, 

Ye dreams of heavenly poesy?

Perchance to benefit mankind, 

Or but for fame he saw the light; 

His lyre, to silence now consigned, 

Resounding through all ages might 

Have echoed to eternity. 

With worldly honours, it may be, 

Fortune the poet had repaid. 

It may be that his martyred shade 

Carried a truth divine away; 

That, for the century designed, 

Had perished a creative mind, 

And past the threshold of decay, 

He ne'er shall hear Time's eulogy, 

The blessings of humanity.



But, howsoe'er his lot were cast, 

Alas! the youthful lover slain, 

Poetical enthusiast, 

A friendly hand thy life hath ta'en! 



There is a spot the village near 

Where dwelt the Muses' worshipper, 

Left-handed from the habitation

Where dwelled this child of inspiration,

Two pines have joined their tangled roots, 

A rivulet beneath them shoots 

Its waters to the neighbouring vale. 

There the tired ploughman loves to lie, 

The reaping girls approach and ply 

Within its wave the sounding pail, 

And by that shady rivulet 

A simple tombstone hath been set.

Let us proceed unto a rill,
Which in a hilly neighbourhood
Seeks, winding amid meadows still,
The river through the linden wood.
The nightingale there all night long,
Spring's paramour, pours forth her song
The fountain brawls, sweetbriars bloom,
And lo! where lies a marble tomb
And two old pines their branches spread—
"Vladimir Lenski lies beneath,
Who early died a gallant death,"
Thereon the passing traveller read:
"The date, his fleeting years how long—
Repose in peace, thou child of song."

My poor Vladimir, bitter tears 

Thee but a little space bewept, 

Faithless, alas! thy maid appears, 

Nor true unto her sorrow kept. 

Another could her heart engage, 

Another could her woe assuage 

By flattery and lover's art— 

An uhlan captivates her heart! 

An uhlan her soul dotes upon: 

Before the altar, lo! the pair, 

Mark ye with what a modest air

She bows her head beneath the crown;

Behold her downcast eyes which glow, 

Her lips where light smiles come and go!

My poor Vladimir! In the tomb, 

Passed into dull eternity, 

Was the sad poet filled with gloom, 

Hearing the fatal perfidy? 

Or, beyond Lethe lulled to rest, 

Hath the bard, by indifference blest, 

Callous to all on earth become— 

Is the world to him sealed and dumb? 

The same unmoved oblivion 

On us beyond the grave attends, 

The voice of lovers, foes, and friends, 

Dies suddenly: of heirs alone 

Remains on earth the unseemly rage, 

Whilst struggling for the heritage.

What if he ever, under the influence, challenged his beloved Rainer to a duel and took away his life? Officers like them, especially hot-blooded young officers, were far more likely to duel than civilians like Eugene and Vladimir in the poem. And, for some strange reason, Pushkin himself had shared Lensky's fate, shot down in a duel in the prime of his life. Had he foretold his own demise?
Or what if Laurent Tyrell himself was shot? How would Rainer cope with the loss of the one he loved above any other person, by his own heart and hand? The poem cast a long shadow over their lives.
"Touching a person who plays dead is something. Touching a truly dead person is different. One who plays dead is... Warm instead of cold, I guess. We will only be playing parts on stage", the dark-haired officer soothed the blond one. "Never worry if an offence is committed by one of us to the other. If one of us challenges the other to a duel, the other shall forgive said offence. Let us swear it with our blood." Rainer took off his left glove and drew his officer's sword, slashing the palm of his left hand and instructing Laurent to do the same, which the young Lorrainian, though slightly wincing, quickly did as well.
"If one of us challenges the other to a duel, the other shall forgive said offence. Let us swear it upon our blood", they swore at unison as they shook their slashed hands, sending their blood into each other's veins, like in the blood-oaths they knew from the Saxons and Vikings of yore.
"The wounds are shallow. They will heal overnight", Ensign Baratheon said as he cast off his other glove. "Anyway... No orderlies today... guess we will be each other's orderly! Laurent, take off my sword, and I will do the same to you!"
Soon, both swords were, still in their scabbards, flung on a chair, followed by their dark blue jackets, their lilywhite shirts, and, finally, Rainer's breeches. In the meantime, his Lorrainian sweetheart opened the wardrobe, inside which was an oval mirror, and took out two nightshirts, whose cuffs and collars were lined with delicate French lace. Ere he took off his own breeches, he tossed a shift over to the Prussian officer, who picked it in mid-air and put it on after a few seconds admiring the talent of the lacemaker who had decorated the otherwise dull, tiresome garment.
"I didn't know your shifts were so... Back in Sturmende, the shift I wore as a boy was rather drab, without any lace at all! Merci beaucoup, Laurent!"
The Lorrainian ensign nodded and looked at Rainer, who looked at it as well.
"Well, this shift looks as good on you as it looks on me! Though you stand one head taller, Rainer, and it barely reaches below your knees!" Laurent Tyrell, if it weren't for his short haircut and tenor voice, could as well have been mistaken for a maiden, with that golden hair in angelic curls, that rosy flower-like face, those delicate hands, those willowy limbs, and that frock-like shift lined with Alençon lace as supple as ice crystals, emphasizing the grace of every movement. While his Prussian sweetheart, taller, more muscular, and broad of shoulders, looked now more similar to a cross-dresser: the uniform fit him ten times better. Laurent chortled and whispered it in Ensign Baratheon's ear. And the latter chortled as well, tickling the young Lorrainian until Laurent told him to stop. Then, gently pushing the bed-curtains aside, Rainer made himself comfortable as Ensign Tyrell put out the kerosene lamp before taking his place by the Prussian's side and drawing the curtains once more. Now their cheerful laugh together had drowned the worries that had troubled them before.
"Bonne nuit."
The whole room was now in the dark, the moon but a thin crescent on black or dark blue velvet.
"Bonne nuit."
Soon they were asleep in one another's arms. Laurent Tyrell clung to Rainer Baratheon's torso like a climbing plant that grows up a strong tower, as the Prussian, warm and weary, stroked his sweetheart's golden hair, kissing that crown of ringlets of liquid gold over and over again.
That night, Laurent dreamt of a scene in the Fourth Story of The Snow Queen, where he was the princess and Rainer was the prince, the rest of the Tyrell clan and household being the royal courtiers and servants gathered in the throne room. Ensign Baratheon, on the other hand, dreamt of the French Revolution, and of the fugitive Ormond and Réelle Barathéon, a newborn Étienne in a bundle on her back, persecuted by the French National Guard and racing for the promised land across the Rhine.
Then, a tinkling bell rang and a ray of sunlight hit his eyelids, waking him up by reflex, though no reveille had entered his ears, used to the shrill fanfare call. The Tyrell boy was awake, nestled on top of him as usual, parting the bed-curtains and urging him to put the awe-inspiring blue mess uniform on:
"The plum harvest is today! And Margot's birthday, and the tableaux... This will doubtless be the best merrymaking I have ever been to in my short life!"
"And also, doubtless, the best merrymaking I have ever been to in my short life!", the Prussian ensign replied in his usual lively, lovely tone. The society soirées of his childhood had been cold, formal, stiff, even a little tiresome. Though he had acted a little and quoted from a few plays and poems to attract the attention of those straitlaced socialites, who would praise his skill, and his brother Robert would laugh and toss him into the air, explaining how lucky he was to have such a lovely li'l bro. Until the steelworks owner drank more than he could hold: then, Fräulein Mordäne always took him into the nursery, to be alone and sleep in bed. Rainer told this to his sweetheart as sincerely as he could. In response, Laurent winked as he opened both cases and took out the grand uniforms, casting his shift aside for an instant ere he put his breeches on. For an instant, Rainer was entranced upon seeing the young Lorrainian undressed, his golden hair and rosy cheeks kissed by the morning sun, his supple lilywhite form drenched in light. Then, as he buttoned his shirt, Ensign Tyrell urged his Prussian companion to put his own uniform on.
Neither of the shakos had been placed on the bed, since the Tyrells (except Valérie and her eldest son, the intellectuals of the clan) believed in the old French superstition that a headdress on a bed would bring misfortune, for physicians did always so to say that there was no more hope.
Within a quarter of an hour, shirts and jackets had been buttoned, breeches raised upwards, boots and spats placed on slender ankles, rapiers hung in their scabbards from belts... This was not the flamboyant and redoubtable mess uniform, which Laurent, with the help of Rainer, was now placing in the bedroom wardrobe, but their usual summer uniform, the one they would wear to the harvest. The young officers would change to their mess uniforms before the feast, and also resort to those old trunks full of outfits from ages past, which Laurent had taken out of that turret the afternoon before, for they would serve as costumes for the tableaux. It would be grand to see the whole Tyrell family revert to childhood and the pleasures of stage-play, pleasures that Rainer Baratheon, as a child, before leaving for Lichterfelde, had always enjoyed on his own. Looking at themselves in the mirror before they sauntered past the portraits and downstairs, both ensigns felt that the day could never have begun in a better way.
As both of them walked downstairs to break their fast in the dining room, they spoke of nought but the tableaux vivants. Madame Tyrell having arranged the table herself, she had helped the Tyrells' personal pâtissière in making madeleines according to the Tyrell family recipe. These gold nuggets of a sweet flavour and soft texture would also be served to the harvesters during the fruit-picking. During breakfast at Hautjardin, served with a warm cup of café royal for each member of the Tyrell clan, the little sponge cakes disappeared as easily as they were served. They tasted even better to Rainer than those he had eaten in the officers' mess hall: Laurent and Margot explained that it was because these contained the zest of lemons. The recipe of the cakes was also a Tyrell tradition, brought over from the ducal court of Lorraine in the eighteenth century. And the Prussian ensign, now less of a stranger, thought of the meaning of traditions as the warm laced coffee that he sipped seared his throat. "This evening, I'll tell her parents and the grande dame that I want Margot to be my wife," Rainer thought. If his lover became his brother-in-law, they would become even closer, and their relationship would be better concealed. Besides, the maiden was unusually clever and equally beautiful, as well as lively and kind: the best party in Lorraine, as her whole family said. That evening, after the tableaux and the birthday banquet, the proposal would take place. And Rainer hoped, as all young people blindly hope (without thinking of the negative outcome of the plan), that he would be given the prospective in-laws' blessing.
When the macarons (another courtly recipe changed and turned traditional by House Tyrell) and the madeleines were finished, and three coffeepots had been drained, coaches began to arrive at the garden gate, as all of the Tyrell clan gathered in the estate gardens to welcome those who would assist them in the harvest and in the merrymaking. A tall and strong officer in his fifties, in the company of a taller blond and freckled young person, landed among the first guests. Surprisingly, Colonel von Tarth and the septuagenarian "queen of thorns" acted coldly towards one another, yet Brünnhilde looked at Rainer with a look of estrangement and longing in her blue eyes, as, within her broad chest, her heart throbbed as wildly as if it would breach her sternum. "Du Rainer, du Feiner," she sighed. And the throbbing and the yearning look intensified gradually as Rainer introduced her to the members of the Tyrell clan. "This fellow in the wheelchair is Guillaume, a scholar. And that dashing officer is Charles, a colonel like your father, and the beautiful redhead is his wife Léonnette. As clever as she is beautiful." Though the girl in mess uniform was rather looking at the one who made all the introductions, from the shortly-cropped raven locks beneath his glittering shako to the shining spurs on his boot-heels. The sun of the August morning gave a glittering twinkle to every accessory of his uniform, like to those of the other officers, but Rainer Baratheon stood above them all, a picture of good looks and gallantry, the proof that the knights of the Dark Ages had evolved into the officers of the modern era. "Du Rainer, du Feiner!" their eyes said to him, and his heart swelled with praise and recognition.
Within an hour, most of the people of the shire had arrived, the volunteers and the harvesters of the orchards together with the officers of the garrison and the local gentry, everyone of importance in southern Lorraine, Hinz and Kunz, Greti and Pleti, Pierre, Paul, and Jacques with their wives and the eldest children of their marriages. Soon that part of the gardens was crowded, and servants handed over large wicker baskets and aberuncators --long poles to reach the highest-growing fruit-- to the Tyrells and to all the other harvesters alike, regardless of gender, age, and rank. Seeing that the colonel's daughter was still looking at him as if lost in a daydream, Rainer Baratheon handed over a basket and an aberuncator to her, and she blushed so much that her freckles vanished for a while, as he cheerfully explained with a wistful smile on his parted lips:
"Still you haven't shown me you are such a brave warrior. Why not prove your mettle today, when there are holdfasts to storm, and lay the spoils of war at my feet?"
Brünnhilde replied by standing at attention and saluting the tall, dark-haired ensign, wearing the basket on her head upside down on her head, after taking off her Pickelhaube, for a strange wicker helmet, shouldering the aberuncator for a pike or rifle. Rainer chortled, and so did Laurent by his side, as the younger sister of the latter handed each of them a basket for picking plums, holding herself a large tankard or ewer to serve the countless thirsty harvesters. The freckled maiden, blushing once more, looked down into the cobbled path where she was standing, as she took the basket from her head and subsequently, looking back at the dashing Prussian every now and then, disappeared into the throng of other officers in silver and blue who were taking part in the harvest, each one carrying a basket of his own. "Du Rainer, du Feiner," she whispered to herself as she breathed a low sigh. And she overheard the others talking about the fête of that day, and about the Mirabelle Queen who would be crowned that day. Which made Brünnhilde von Tarth clutch the handles of her basket as she thought that, raised as a boy and still mistaken for a young man, she would never in her life wear any crown. She would rather drink hard (and by that, readers, you shall know that she intended to drink more that she could handle, in spite of the hazard to her health and the fact that she had entered the ostentatious realm of high society).
In the meantime, the more feminine and cheerful Marguerite Tyrell, with a dashing ensign on each arm and a basket in each ensign's hand, having handed her tankard to Fräulein von Tarth, had already sauntered towards another part of the vast mirabelle orchards of Hautjardin, as the other youngsters of the Tyrell clan followed close by. In conversation, the three youngsters who led the entourage of the landowners spoke about everything they liked, from the Thirty Years' War to the tableaux that were going to be acted out that afternoon. From the windows on the first floor of the château, from the living room, the siblings' parents and grandmother, together with the colonel of the regiment and the other older officers, were overseeing the younger generation gathering the "gold of Lorraine" like the elders themselves had done decades ago, while taking part in conversations about mirabelle harvests and vintages gone by, military affairs, marriages of convenience and eligible suitors... Rainer, though the newcomer, had been appointed the leader of his band of gatherers, with Laurent for a second-in-command, and it was clear as crystal that Ensign Baratheon was destined to reach a high rank within the military hierarchy.
During that whole morning, the baskets gradually filled with fruit that was golden and sweet, little August suns that had drunk from their branch perches the summer star's heat and light; the branches where the mirabelle plums had been growing had been shaken to the last fruit, and the filled-to-the-brim baskets, fixed with shoulder straps, were returning to the estate gardens to be emptied into the wooden measures standing there (some of the plums to be crushed into juice for wine and quetsch, others to make preserves, others to be eaten fresh or in pastry); then the young harvesters returned uphill to the orchard to wipe the perspiration from their foreheads, quench their thirst, fill their baskets with golden fruit, and close the circle, then commence it anew... Suddenly, as distant church bells struck one, the sun was shining brighter than ever in the middle of the cloudless day sky to relentlessly beat down upon misting heads, and a maid in uniform rushed from the château to each and every band of weary, sunstruck plum-gatherers, informing them that everyone was gathering at the edge of the gardens, on the river bank, to picnic in the shade of the poplars and lindens, their non-existant tables set on the tall grass and everyone sitting at their post, as maids and children went round as cupbearers serving new plum wine (and plum juice for those who could not hold it) into each and every glass, all of them drained in eager haste. Hélène Tyrell and Siegmund von Tarth presided the midday feast, each one at one end of the tablecloths, with the clan of wealthy landowners sitting in the same arrangement they had placed themselves in at the table on previous occasions, "according to tradition" as Madame Tyrell the Elder had said. And healths went round and songs were sung, and the loveliest of girls, the dark-haired Margot, won the heart of every officer by singing, in her sweet soprano voice, the following song by Goethe with the melody Franz Schubert had composed for it (Once more, readers, I give you the lyrics in English, translated directly from the German for those who will not understand):

Saw a lad a rose in bloom, 
blooming on the heathland, 
young and fair, just like the morn.
He ran closer, seeing no thorn,
and beheld it, pleased lad.
Little scarlet heathland rose,
little wild and red rose!

Quoth the lad: "I'll now pick thee,

little wild and red rose!"

Quoth the rose: "I'll pierce your skin,

you'll remember, thus, your sin,

I will not regret woes!"

Little scarlet heathland rose,

little wild and red rose!

And the wild lad fiercely picked

little wild and red rose!

Red rose did herself defend,

young lad cried, to no good end,

in her, no regret rose!

Little scarlet heathland rose,
little wild and red rose!

At the end of the song, everyone at the improvised "tables" clapped their hands and gave a cheer for Marguerite Tyrell and to her sixteenth birthday, some of the boldest officers and courtiers, now filled with liquid courage, even whistling at her. She was sitting in between her older, more dignified sister-in-law and the dark-haired officer who had come to visit her. A golden-haired and cheerful Laurent Tyrell, in turn, was sitting on the other side of the dashing Rainer Baratheon, who won the hearts of not only his lover's sister and the tall blond girl in uniform, but of every single maiden at the table. (If only they all knew whom his heart really throbbed for!)

Speaking of Brünnhilde, she was sitting opposite the raven-haired and blue-eyed ensign, in between Lieutenant Caron and the colonel of the Tyrell children, yet she had only got eyes for the officer opposite her (who, in turn, was talking to the other ensign, the slender, blond and amber-eyed one whom he had never parted from), and for her glass of new mirabelle wine, which she emptied at one fell swoop and then had refilled, uttering a hearty laugh, every now and then, to distract herself from the feelings that now unexpectedly overwhelmed the strange maiden's heart. In the meantime, the sun was gradually sinking, until it began to set and Madame Hélène, in a lively tone unlikely for a grand lady in her seventies, rose followed by the rest of their clan and Ensign Baratheon, announcing that they were leaving for the little theatre in the estate gardens, where they would prepare the tableaux vivants (the costume trunk had been already placed backstage), and that everyone who wished to see the performance was welcome to attend it and enjoy themselves with the recreation of historical and fictional events, a surprise for all of the guests, that Hautjardin now had in store, while explaining where the stage could be found. And thus, taking their leave of the rest of the company, the Tyrells and Rainer headed for the little baroque theatre by the Fountain of Galatea. One hour of drinking and telling one another anecdote later, most of the distinguished officers and gentry, led by Colonel and Fräulein von Tarth, Lieutenants Caron and Cuy included, looked at their pocket watches and rose, as the church bells of Sierck pealed five times in a row, to take a cobbled path to a little construction similar to a baroque palace, with a relief of Muses and satyrs at the entrance, located on a cape of an artificial lake in which sculptures of a maiden cradling an unconscious young man, water surging like blood from a wound in the nape of his neck and from his parted lips of verdigrised bronze, could be seen. Only Colonel von Tarth had been inside the theatre of Hautjardin before, and he told the other distinguished guests how fond his memories were of that place and of the commedia dell' arte he had seen there four or five years before. A valet and a maid of the Tyrell household opened the ornate doors, whose ornate knobs were verdigrised roses with convoluted thorny stems and all, and the whole company, the awkward girl in silver and blue the most overawed one of the illustrious who had gathered there, crossed the threshold into the magical lands where the present becomes the past and fiction becomes reality, as the doors shut behind them and every guest helped him- or herself to a seat, the colonel and his only child, as well as the officers most in love with the beautiful birthday girl and her grandmother, eagerly claimed the front row, the tall Brünnhilde lowering her head and shoulders not to ruin any other spectator's experience of the scenes that would unfurl when the green and white curtains, thickly embroidered with gold and silver thread, would part to display the tableaux, the highlight of such a day of celebration. And soon, a quarter of an hour later, the embroidered curtains parted to reveal the first of the tableaux, which surprised the whole audience.

The first tableau displayed the landing of Gustavus Adolphus on Rügen. Rainer was there in a doublet with lace collar and cuffs, bending the knee as he placed the Swedish flag, blue with the golden cross, on the shore among the cliffs. Margot was a lovely Eleanor in scarlet petticoats, and Laurent, as Banér, looked as usually excited. The picture was a great success, everyone said, and Brünnhilde von Tarth clapped her hands, having only got eyes for Gustavus.
Then came the landing of Othello. Charles Tyrell had rumpled his hair and smeared his face with shoe-shine on purpose to fit the title role, while his lovely wife fit the part of Desdemona like a glove. As they embraced, Rainer made a dashing Lieutenant Cassio by dropping the hat he had worthrobn as Gustavus, and winking at Margot, who had exchanged the trappings of royalty for the frock of an army wife. And Monsieur Tyrell stood by as Iago, giving the best sneer a forty-something gentleman of his degree could muster to a frill-necked Roderigo, a shrugging Laurent, as they eyed the bold lieutenant. The audience was enthralled, and Brünnhilde threw the forget-me-nots she had picked by the Moselle riverside at Cassio's feet, though the little blue flowers were overlooked and even (what a shame!) trod on, even by Rainer himself.
In the next picture, Rainer and Margot reappeared as Gustavus Adolphus and Mary Eleanor in a cozy yet magnificent bedchamber, kissing each other passionately, as he gently dried up her endless tears. As most of the audience stood astonished, the colonel's only child noticed a teardrop trickling down the right side of her freckled face. And she could hardly breathed, yet she swallowed all of her pain and her doubts.
When the curtain parted the next time, the bedchamber of last scene had become a throne room, in which nearly the whole Tyrell family was standing in eighteenth-century clothes, except Valérie, née Tourhaute, who sat on the rococo throne in the middle of the hall, her ladies to the left of her, her gentleman courtiers to the right. Amidst all of the silk and frills and powdered wigs, a young lieutenant stood out like blood fallen on snow, locking eyes with the czarina: Rainer wore a scarlet coat with epaulettes, yellow breeches, white stockings, a finely-tied cravat, a short sword (shorter than the rapier he had worn as both Gustavus and Cassio) by his side, and a tricorn hat which he laid before Catherine II as he bent the knee. The czarina, who wore gold-rimmed spectacles, had sparkles in her eyes and smiled confidently, as if she and the lieutenant were really pleased with each other, as the courtiers looked on and whispered to one another. This was the crown jewel of the show, without any discrepance, and both the von Tarths clapped their hands as they shouted: "Merci! Spasiba!" The latter was one of the very few Russian words the colonel and his daughter knew.
In the following tableau, there was a battlefield instead of a throne room, a thick fog (actually stage smoke) covering the lea, and Rainer, once more Gustavus, lay on a stone on the grass, his eyes shut and his face strangely pale. The second child of the Tyrells entered on a cock-horse, with a breastplate, sword drawn and scabbard empty, an X-shaped scar on his brows, reeling off his steed. This Pappenheim was the most tragic and dramatic part for Charles Tyrell, winning the acclaim of the ladies in the audience, with the notable exception of Brünnhilde von Tarth. And thus, projectiles rained over the makeshift battlefield of Lützen, but, luckily, these projectiles were actually countless flowers and ribbons in various bright colours, as the Count of Pappenheim reeled and fell unconscious on the ground. In the background, Wilhelm Tyrell's shadowed silhouette could be seen through a curtain, expressing Wallenstein's scheming in the shade of his victims.
The next time the curtain parted, Rainer was alive again, yet dressed in rags and trapped in a guillotine in a public square, with Nôtre Dame in the background. Gasps arose across the audience. Shackled and flanked by two officers in French uniform, Marguerite Tyrell, dressed in rags and rumpled, pressed her golden-haired porcelain doll to her chest. Even as a fallen queen, the mademoiselle was still as lovely as always. And Siegmund von Tarth told his daughter that, for the first time in his life, he felt sorry for the fate of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Hélène, seated on the colonel's other side, nodded in approval.
So far, the tableaux vivants had been comme il faut, but the last ones were to be cathartic, and they would leave no one indifferent. Behind the drawn curtain, Laurent, shuddering and turning pale, downed a draught of quetsch for liquid courage. Rainer patted him on the shoulder as he reassured his more than friend:
"It's only a play, remember?" Ensign Baratheon wistfully winked an eye as he put on the lace collar he wore as Gustavus Adolphus. An encouraged Laurent, now fully dressed as Banér, with ink for soot on his face and gloves, smiled and nodded, as he sprinkled Rainer's cheeks and fingers with ink. Both of them laughed as they sauntered on stage, now changed into the battlefield at faint twilight, and Rainer laid himself down facing the stage floor. Laurent went backstage one more and returned with a small lantern. And then, the curtain parted for yet another time.
The time had come for the climax of the tableaux. And, as the curtains parted, everyone in the audience went silent. There lay Gustavus Adolphus on the twilit battlefield, his faithful general cradling him in his arms and burying his head in the Vasa's chest. A titian-haired winged victory, with flapping angelic wings, soared gracefully in and decked the locks of the fallen hero king with a laurel wreath, as a mournful dirge played in the background. Somewhere in the front row, Brünnhilde von Tarth dried up her tears.
Once more, the curtains shut, and the moment of truth would soon come at last. The scene that would be the most challenging, the death of Lensky, was the next tableau and the crown jewel of the show.
"Remember..." the Prussian officer told his Lorrainian more than best friend. "I'm only playing dead on stage. It's just a show."
His face strangely pale, Laurent swallowed hard and remembered Rainer's encouraging words in the bedchamber. Yes, it would only be a play, "Vladimir Lensky" would be warm and soft, his lungs heaving and his heart beating under the Werther-style dark blue overcoat and yellow waistcoat which Rainer was putting on, not before tucking a strawberry macaron in between... thus thought Laurent, as he buttoned up his cream waistcoat and black overcoat to look more like the St. Petersburg dandy he was to transform into. A wink of Rainer's left eye --the signal for firing the guns-- received and returned, and both young officers had become Eugene and Vladimir, respectively.
Though their insecurities lingered, the stripling steeled himself to give a brilliant performance as the curtain parted before the pièce de résistance.
They stood in a wintry taiga landscape, facing one another, pistol in hand, their seconds standing by in the shade of the pines --Charles in his most devious expression, which he had already used for Iago, and Léonnette in a powdered wig and livery--, the duelists doffing their coats, turning their backs, and counting those four steady strides before turning around to face one another and, after taking five wavering paces towards one another, firing their guns. Rainer winked his left eye, just like Lensky, and at that signal the pistols, two old flintlocks loaded with blanks, were fired at unison. As the report of the guns rang on stage, the young man in the Werther waistcoat reeled backwards, his left hand on his chest, squeezing the little strawberry macaron he kept hidden underneath to make the filling pour like blood on his canary-yellow waistcoat, as he fell backwards into the arms of his friend turned rival. The whole audience broke out into a gasp at unison.
Upon the stage, the blond young man was shaking his unconscious friend, placing hot fingertips on the dark-haired one's throat to feel the pulse as he checked its pace in a pocket watch, the expression on his face changing gradually from shock to despair and heartbreak, the seconds of the duel closing in and also gasping in dread. The Pietà scene took even those who did not know the story, whether they had heard of Eugene Onegin or not, by surprise.
"What's this?" At first, Brünnhilde von Tarth was the one taken the most aback, the scene being so realistic that she even took the strawberry preserves for blood from that heart pierced by a gunshot. A little reassurement from the Colonel that it was all a show, and his daughter sighed in relief as
the curtain fell once more.
"As you lay there cradled in my arms, I found it not that hard to pretend, but rather harsh... what if your heart and your ribcage were actually still, one day if a gunshot riddled your chest? What if you gave no reply and I felt not the pulse..." Laurent sincered himself, slightly pale, as Rainer, standing up, took out the macaron from his waistcoat and put it to his lips. "Though we have sworn the oath, we didn't share it with the other officers... with our fellow officers, did we?"
After swallowing the macaron and giving Lensky's "bloodstained" shirt and waistcoat to a servant for washing, a shirtless and ever so dashing Ensign Baratheon --no hole through his breastbone, a smile on his lips-- wrapped an arm around his lover's slender waist, and let le petit Lorrain lock lips with his own -even allowing a French kiss- for a while to taste the mushed-up macaron that hadn't been swallowed down, just like the owners of pet canaries let, in those days, their songbirds eat sugar from their mouths. The fair stripling felt reassured once more, but still the doubt would linger deep within his subconscious. Neither his dark lover's arms forming a strong clamp on his shoulders nor the sweet berry flavour of those lumps of macaron had done anything to dispel it.
The last tableau would require Gustavus laid in state, and a servant brought forth the scale-like plate armour as Léonnette had completed her transformation from French valet of a Russian master to queen dowager in mourning, all dressed in black, veiled, in corset and petticoats once more.

X. In which Stanislaus's daughter comes to this ironic world, and the lady in red sees the future in the flames (and in the Five of Swords).

In those days when our story took place, a certain Russian novelist said that all the happy families are alike, and that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own special way. While happy families like the Starks (who have just had a second daughter, a headstrong tomboy called Anna, back in Sweden) and the Tyrells (to whom you, dear readers, were introduced the chapter before) tend to be ordinary and tiresome (the Tyrells, with all their quirks, being however the exception), most readers would prefer to hear about unhappy families like the Baratheons of Sturmende, the von Lännisters, or the Baratheons of Drachenstein: the Reverend and his wife, who have already found themselves at home in their new parish. Puritanical as they are, neither Stanislaus nor Elise find their new life tiresome.
They carried themselves with backbones always so upright that their iron-hard, stubborn wills and their repressed rage, though they maintained an ostensible air of self-control, shone through.
According to the Revelation, at the end of times the Lake of Fire and its neverending torments will be the eternal assignment of murderers, idolaters, fornicators, and whoever loves and makes a lie (among other kinds of deviants). Which means that we will all be lake dwellers and left-hand guilties in the final afterlife; given the size of our egos, either Paradise will be deserted or Christian lore is but a ruse. Such, and strangely similar to mine, were the thoughts of the troubled clergyman. A parish of honest stonecutters and fisherfolk, a decent and faithful wife, a child about to come to light... and yet he was as hypocritical as the Pharisee who looked down with a piercing glare upon the taxman in the renowned parable. Still, Elise said nothing to him, believing that her husband, clever as he was, could figure out how to escape this elusive flaw, the besetting sin of many a powerful person through the ages, which even Luther himself had condemned in the Curia and started a world-changing Reformation for. Davor and Marie, however, advised Stanislaus to turn away from such thoughts... yet he still brooded, turning away from his friend and servant, and wishing rather to be alone. Some shard of the Mirror of Truth must have entered the Reverend's heart, making him only interested in what was dark and forbidden.
When he gave his sermons in the harsh little whitewashed chapel, he preached with fire and sword whenever it came to the dark side of reality: Satan, the lake of fire, the damned at the left hand of the Judge, and all the various sins and fruits of the flesh that a person ever could think of, especially self-will:
"Should your hand tempt you, cut it off! Should your eye tempt you, gouge it out! Whoever thinks of a sin has already committed a sin within their tainted hearts!" Thus he said, contradicting the dictates of both his heart and his reason.
But the most piercing rant Stanislaus Baratheon had to offer was the sermon which he gave a week before the one who would be his only child was born. Quoting the Ecclesiastes, he spoke of the average life as a pursuit of wind, that human lives were like flowers, that everything was vanity. He spoke of hearts full of thorns, of how the lusts of earthly things entering human hearts choked the Gospel within and made it forever unfruitful, like thorns suffocating the good seed that had fallen on the thorny patch. And, to put some clear examples, he mentioned his own shipwrecked parents, victims of their own overconfidence... his older brother Robert, the self-indulgent industrialist, whom he saw, hefty and reeking of drink, as Eglon of Moab... his younger brother Rainer, the self-indulgent officer, whom he saw, conceited and dashing, as Absalom... his self-indulgent courtier in-laws, the von Lännisters, whom he saw, hard-hearted, proud of their rank and gold, as Jezebel and all of her kin. And he said that, on the other hand, his own heart was like the soil of Drachenstein, hard and harsh, where no thorns would ever thrive. Like rock, like ice, like iron. Like an iron threshing flail that would purge the few patches of thorns which remained on those austere, modest islands. To thresh the thorns on the hearts of the intemperate, the covetous, those given to gambling, the "happy few" (in an ironic tone) that Drachenstein had to offer. Here, he held one of the highest ranks: a decent shepherd of a decent flock... which was not that decent at all. Indeed, unaware that his very heart and soul were being gradually poisoned, the preacher drew the attention of an entranced congregation, as intensely as Martin Luther himself during the Leipzig Debate. And comparing the middle Baratheon to Luther is no shortcoming, but rather the opposite.
Reverend Stanislaus Baratheon returned home at twilight, pale as the moon, still not devoid of rage and disappointment, when his faithful Davor sauntered out of the vicarage to embrace him and give him the breaking news:
"It's a girl, Master! It's a girl!"
Yet the clergyman coldly shook off his retainer. "Robert and Sissi have already got two children", he thought. "Now my Elise's child is alive and well... Elise!" He thought of the blood poisoning that could leave him a widower with both an infant and a flock to attend to... and, for a while, he came to his senses, asking for the well-being of his wife.
"Elise's alive and well, Master. Only mind that it was too hard for her. Doctor Christen says she can't have any more children."
So their girl would be an only child... Thankfully enough, they had nothing to inherit, lacking wealth to a certain degree without living in want and squalor. Entering, the vicar saw a mother and daughter lying in bed together, before Elise laid her precious treasure down on a modest basket cradle.
The newborn child's father stroked her downy head and looked at the tiny girl who lay there, sleeping in innocence, in peace. Would she ever be waylaid into eternal fire, be it by herself or others? What if she ever gave in to vanity, to strong drink, to love...? To any kind of self-will? And, with such worries in a heavy heart, he lay down to sleep, not answering to Elise's goodnight wish.
Next day in the morning, Stanislaus Baratheon baptised his own daughter in the Lutheran faith. The fragile little bud of life that lay in his hands, washed clean with holy water, was given the name of Irene, "Peace". Already had her parents seen what kind of person she would grow into: not impulsive and irascible like the usual Baratheon temperament, not a child of the night or a lover of pleasure. Every infant heart was to them, like to me, a blank slate, a book waiting to be filled. The plot of Irene's life was already being planned, like that of Gottfried's had been, but what a contrast between the golden-haired and green-eyed heir, bred upon gold and deceitful hopes, hopeful yet ruthless... and the vicar's lass, raven-haired and blue-eyed, reared in harsher circumstances and by more realistic caregivers, a true Baratheon. A pretend Baratheon and a true one, a golden boy spoiled by his mother and an iron girl disciplined by her mother. Would Irene be more fortunate than Gottfried?
Let us skip three or four years forward. Irene Baratheon, who, to her parents' relief, had just survived a painful and fiery infection of scarlet fever, was the loveliest child on the Drachenstein Islands, and, since everyone knew each other, both adults and children had learned to recognise her lovely raven braids, which framed large, clever eyes the light blue colour of the Baltic waters and of the skies above. The local children, little used even to the clergy's austere finery, saw her as a princess. Yet little Irene, like her parents, never smiled or laughed, and she had got no friends at all. She'd rather spend the days gathering amber and shells along the coast, or playing with her two modest wooden dolls, but especially with a clown ragdoll we will later, readers, dwell upon. A quiet child she was, one who always talked to herself, and one that would rather learn than play. Which concerned the Reverend and his wife more than usual: as children, they had been reserved, but not as much as their offspring. Their only source of joy was brooding and quiet, shut within herself. Irene had strange dreams, like visions, nightmares, and revelations no one believed except herself: would a little girl with such intense fancies be deluded or not?
For a clergyman and his spouse, in those days, having an only child and one completely shut within herself was a curse, something unworthy of their rank. And even a punishment for all the few sins both Stanislaus and Elise had committed and stubbornly denied (their backbones always so upright that their iron-hard, stubborn wills and their repressed rage, though they maintained an ostensible air of self-control, shone through).
No matter if Irene was bereft of self-will, which, in fact, she was, interacting very little (in fact, nearly never) with others around her, and without many comforts to attend to.
That year, in summer, letters come from the staff at Sturmende. Robert and Sissi have had another boy, one Telramund (where do these toffs get their names from?). Rainer is a lieutenant (what is rank to an officer?). Yet nothing happens on Drachenstein: the same limestone is cut, the same boats go out to fish and return at twilight, the same ferry leaves puffing for Stralsund and returns to the village port at the same hours, Elise and Irene are still their usual selves. Like Ecclesiastes and experience have taught Stanislaus Baratheon, "nothing new under the sun." However, that will soon change, and you readers shall find out if for better or worse.
For this summer, the circus has made it to Drachenstein, like every year. From the shadows, the red-haired lady in scarlet who reads the Tarot cards has looked at the clergyman and his wife, at the child they have had with her dolls, and at the faithful retainers. For these few years, Stanislaus was completely absorbed with his fire-and-brimstone preaching and with trying to make Irene open up, and he had completely forgotten Aleksandra. But this summer, everything will change as their paths cross for good. And Elise Baratheon herself will be the catalyst of the reunion.
For there is no love stronger than that between a mother and her daughter, a love from female heart to female heart, born from life and strengthened by the exchange of love between two warm hearts. It is a feeling more powerful than any other, than the love any male heart can hold, than the love of gods or nations. The bond between mother and daughter is stronger than steel and warmer than the sun, and lasts more than any other feeling ever to exist.
Elise Baratheon wished to heal her darling Irene, to free her only child from the vice-grip of what she saw as a curse that made it impossible for her daughter to act like any other little girl her age, but, ironically, she would wind up unleashing a maelström absolutely beyond control and without limits.



XI. In which, on a moonless night, some rather strange bullets are cast by hand.

"Two believers once went to the sanctuary to pray: one of them a Pharisee, the other a tax-collector. And the Pharisee stood upright, raising his hands to the heavens, and thus he prayed: 'O LORD, I thank you that I am not the like of all the others: extortioners, fornicators, unrighteous sinners, or even like this tax-collector who stands behind me, who leeches the empire's revenue for his own benefit. I fast twice every week, I have never tasted strong drink, I give tithes and alms of all that I get.' The tax-collector, who stood behind the Pharisee at a certain distance, was in tears, looking down on the pavement, for he would not lift his eyes to the heavens, and beat his chest in despair as he cried: 'O LORD, have mercy upon this miserable sinner!' And I tell you, the tax-collector went back home justified, and not the Pharisee. For everyone who exalt themselves will be humbled, but those who humble themselves will be exalted. Amen."
As he said this last word, within the narrow walls of the harsh whitewashed parish church of Drachenstein, Stanislaus Baratheon shut the heavy Luther Bible that lay open before him with a strength unexpected of his slender arms and shoulders, his blue eyes flashing, for a single instant, with a tinge of repressed rage. The congregation stood in awe, as if in a trance. The vicar skimmed the front row of seats: there was his wife with their daughter by her side, and next to Elise and Irene sat Davor with his Marie and their numerous brood of Kurzhands: Davor the Younger, Alrich, Matthias, Markus, Lukas, Stanislaus (named after the Reverend, of course), and Stefan (named after the Reverend's father). All of them boys, and the vicar knew their names in birth order by heart, for he had christened the five youngest, born on Drachenstein, in the Lutheran faith. And also that Davor captained a package boat to the Prussian mainland, a craft which sailed to Stralsund and back four days a week, or more or less (depending of the weather and the winds), while Marie served as a maid in the vicarage, where she cooked, cleaned, did the Baratheons' washing, and was long story short a jill of all trades.
It was the afternoon of the day at whose night Stanislaus had agreed to meet Aleksandra at the circle of stones.
During that month, he had breathed fire upon the residents of those islands like never before. And the tales of the sermons and hymns had seeped into his unquiet soul and bred dark daydreams, which in his clouded, metaphorically cataracted eyes were righteous: Stanislaus had been Ehud plunging his sword into Eglon's heft (and the obese despot wore a gentleman's suit), Joab thrusting his lance-head into Absalom's heart (and the conceited prince wore a lieutenant's uniform), Jehu shoving Jezebel out the palace window and down from the balcony (and the villainess had hair of gold and eyes of peridot). And after all three sinners pursued exterminating angels, tall beings with stern yet lovely faces, clad in armour of silver, riding steeds as black as Odin's Sleipnir, wielding in their right hands whips twined out of white lightning. Such sinister reveries haunted the vicar day and night, whispering that it was his calling to rid the world he lived in of unrighteousness.
And why? At heart, Stanislaus Baratheon was the minister of Peace on Drachenstein, lending the sanction of the religion of the meek to all of his flock; and, throughout his monotone life, whenever they had slapped him soundly on the right cheek, he had always willingly turned the left to the assailant du jour without even wincing. Now, a certain Romantic author once highlighted how incongruous a musket is on the altar at Christmas. Our Reverend kept a flintlock shotgun himself, and it had hitherto always hung on the wall at the head of the marital bed for protection of the Baratheon family from burglars or pirates that actually never came. Yet Stanislaus was, as these reveries became more and more vivid, convinced that he had to use this weapon as his threshing-flail: Aleksandra gradually kindled the resentment that seared his heart, pouring the vodka of her speech on the internal flames, whispering of righting wrongs and smiting the unrighteous in his left ear, as she straddled the sleeping clergyman and eagerly absorbed his life energy with her fiery kisses. It tasted like vodka and gunfire and freshly-shed blood; there was wrath in that man's life-force, righteous wrath laced with conviction: her personal catnip and the drug she needed to stay healthy and youthful. The lovers of pleasure, after all, are and were overrated, since their negative emotions are often overlooked by their conscience in favour of the positive. Stanislaus Baratheon, the critic, the cynic, was a completely different kettle of fish, detached from such an epicurean and hedonist mindset and, furthermore, holding the most negative opinion that can be held about its decrees. And yet he was ironically her favourite intoxicant, and she, as we shall see, became his favourite intoxicant as well.
In those days when Western European society was decadent and promiscuous, a discontented and resentful country preacher was right what Aleksandra needed to put her plan into fruition. Breathing herself into him, filling his lungs and his veins with righteous fire as she sapped his life-energy, she contrived to involve him in her sinister intrigue, kindling intense emotions within that indifferent heart of iron ore, upon which usually both sunshine and storms were poured out in vain, come hell or highwater?
Furthermore, she needed, for her recipe, a teardrop from his right eye (aside from one from her own left eye to match the set). A teardrop shed not for a teardrop's sake, by irritating the eye with spices or ashes, but one stirred by sincere, intense emotions. Luckily, the vicar had a wife and they had an only child... Indeed, Aleksandra would use the thought of the worst thing Stanislaus recalled having happened to Irene to get the ingredient she found the hardest to get, for which she had not lost any hopes.
The tear from her own left eye was something that she, not being a human herself, could produce anyway. Mercury, bismuth, brimstone, powdered charcoal: all of these chemicals were packed in little labelled flasks within her carpet bag. The lead and glass from stainglass windows, and the wax from church candles, she had obtained from the ruins of a Catalan nunnery desecrated by leftish students. The three bullets that had hit their marks had all of them struck human targets in vital points; one had been picked from a rapist's brain in a frosty back street of Saint Petersburg, the vodka-drunken bear of a man brought down by his intended victim, an adolescent Masha or Nastenka fresh out of the provinces, who concealed a pistol for self-defence under her overcoat. The second bullet was gathered from the quickly-stopped heart of the prioress who, leading a little band of peace-sworn and loving women, had tried in vain to appease the young leftists who stormed the same Catalan convent from which Aleksandra had gathered the church glass, lead, and wax. The third bullet she had harvested in France, in colourful autumn in those woodlands around the capital where idle Parisians still spend the weekends picnicking; it had struck one of two young French lieutenants, who were fighting a duel over some trifling slight both of them had forgotten (for both of them were flushed with drink when the offence had occurred), right in the solar plexus, at the end of the sternum, instantly severing both of the system's most important blood vessels. And the teardrop from her left eye was of course at hand... but the one from his right was all that remained to pop into the crucible. That midnight, in the light of a new moon which, displaying its dark side alone, blended perfectly with the darkness... she would coax it out, the ingredient which was needed to bind the bullets to the marksman's will and allow them to strike his intended targets no matter the distance or the consequences. The poignant image of little Irene tossing feverishly in her sickbed as a months-old... she had etched it perfectly into his mind's eye, the mind's left eye, which corresponds to the right eye of the face. At a certain point during the ritual, as she popped the three bullets into the crucible, she would coax it out with a quick trigger signal... The mise en scène would have to be perfect as she added ingredients to the crucible in the order that: brimstone, bismuth, and mercury; then charcoal, followed by the wax, lead, and glass from the desecrated church; then all three bullets which had severed so different and so valuable human lives; the tear coaxed out of his right eye and, finally, the one that would flow freely from her left.
For at last the night had come when the moon would be new, when the circle of stones of Drachenstein would blaze with the fire of the first and last Freikugeln cast within the twentieth century.
Picture yourselves the circle of stones, which we have previously described, on a moonless night when the autumn fog veils the large hewn monoliths in grey gauze. Not a star is seen in the night sky; owls hoot in the distance, and a fire crackles within the circle itself. In the middle of the circle, a red-haired lady stands, seemingly clad in blood, the glow of flames framing and accentuating the colour of her hair and lips, and making even her eyes look crimson as venous blood. The crucible is empty, glowing hot red, on the flames; the ingredients lay scattered in their little glass flasks around her. The little cauldron on the fire is framed in the middle of a pentacle, which Aleksandra has drawn with her athame. From the chapel tower peal the chimes at midnight, lending an even more ominous tone to the scene: Dong! Dong! Dong! Dong! Dong! Dong! Dong! Dong! Dong! Dong! Dong! Dong!
At the twelfth peal, a silhouette appears from the direction of the vicarage, slender and wearing a garment that may be a gown or a cassock. As that person grows near, it is revealed to be a man in a cassock, clean shaven, with hard, sharp features.
Upon entering the circle of stones, Stanislaus was shocked to see the lizards and the snakes popping up from the ground beneath the pentacle. The heat had startled the herptiles awake from their winter sleep. A barnyard owl, seizing the chance, swooped down and caught a collared grass snake in its talons before it flew away.
"I have been waiting for you, Stanislaus." Those words, that Slavic accent, the reptiles on the ground in mid-autumn, the crucible glowing as red as the hair and eyes of Aleksandra... it was all he needed to feel his own bosom swell with the same heat, and positive emotions awaken within just like those startled reptiles.
She had fallen into a trance and was chanting in some unknown, arcane language with an ominous voice. After a while in that state, she awoke, taking up the silver spoon. The lead from those Catalan church windows was scooped into the crucible, then bismuth and mercury. The mixture seethed unpredictably, and the vicar wondered at its reactions. Church wax, charcoal, and the three fatal bullets were added in turn. A wink of her left eye into his right eye, and Stanislaus saw an infant Irene tossing and wasting away on her sickbed. He had never cried a tear, whether a joyful or a painful one, since he got word of his parents' demise... until now. Scooping up the first teardrop from the corner of his right eye with the silver spoon, she then put it to her own left eye and shed a single tear laced and dyed with blood. The liquids mixed in the spoon, dying the vicar's own teardrop red, before they fell into the seething crucible.
"Probatum est!" she raised her voice to the clouds above.
With a sound of clashing steel, the flames flashed sickly green, like chlorine gas or plants grown for a lifetime in the shade, and rose up to try to rend the sky. The bubbles on the liquid within popped and even whistled. Aleksandra had fallen into a trance and was chanting in her arcane tongue once more. When she awakened, she cleared her throat and began to chant the incantation, while gesturing to Stanislaus to fetch the casting-pan, which had a six-petal flower pattern with a centre to cast seven bullets. A contralto voice with a Slavic accent rose to the green-lit, flaming skies (and, as usual, we translate the German verses):

"Stay by me throughout the night,
till the spell is done by light.
May this hot lead blessed be
seven times, nine times, then three,
for the bullets to be free!"

Stanislaus listened attentively. She had fallen into the trance again, but this time her eyes were completely white, and she chanted in his mother tongue. "By light..." So at sunrise all the Freikugeln would be ready. The flames waved back and forth, left and right, shifting ever-changing bright colours, turning the autumn skies into an artificial, yet perfect imitation of the Northern Lights. Little by little, the flames died down, turning blue and small as the liquid within the crucible ceased to seethe, now as calm as a looking-glass... a mirror as sickly green as chlorine or plants starved of sunlight. The Northern Lights had become ominous nimbus clouds looming right above their heads... Sometimes, white and blue flames would rise from the brew... At the same time as the fire died down and storm clouds gathered overhead, lightning flashed and she awoke once more. Scooping it up in another spoon, this one black and hard, she poured one spoonful of the hot liquid into each of the bullet moulds in the steel pan, which the vicar held for her, that usual stern fixed expression of his concealing awe, dread, excitement, and that tingling that sinister, foreboding events always cause in even the hardest of hearts.
Now it was time to free from their cold steel prison those projectiles that would bring so much harm to the Baratheon dynasty.
"Raz!" she called, holding up one index finger. "One," he thought. The ominous clouds clashed like confronting armies, and a flash of lightning turned the night into day for an instant, right before a thunderclap louder than any cannon made so far.
"Dva!" Aleksandra proclaimed. "Two," the Reverend whispered. Owls hooted, the underbrush in the woodland crackled, and the redhead herself appeared in an unearthly light, clasping the slender waist of Stanislaus Baratheon in her arms. His heart raced as the second Freikugel hardened.
"Tri!" the red lady held out her three middle fingers -those which Stanislaus had severed the tips of from his faithful Davor-. Lightning flashed right overhead once more. "Raz, dva, tri!" she chortled as she threw the three already hardened bullets at the vicar's feet. "Raz, dva, tri," Stanislaus said to himself as he picked the bullets up from the coarse grass one by one.
"Chetyre!" By now, he had grown accustomed and deduced that she was half-way across the count to seven. "Chetyre, chetyre, chetyre..." her voice echoed from the monoliths in a sinister tone. Figures like demons or goblins appeared in the woods, their catlike eyes glowing bright as the flames.
"Pyat!" "Pyat, pyat, pyat..." echoed the circle of stones as she let the fifth ball drop. All the owls on Drachenstein seemed to hoot a dirge, or rather a requiem, in chorus. Hoofbeats, fluttering wings, the catlike eyes closing in. Aleksandra laughing, clutching her belly with her right hand and clasping a tense Stanislaus with the left, to stop the fight-or-flight response that had begun to seize the Reverend.
"Shest!" No echo came this time, but instead thunder like the roll of cannon, and lightning like the flash of gunfire before the thundercrash. The storm was brewing --the air trembling, the nimbus clouds clashing like opposing armies. The silhouettes with the catlike eyes galloped forth into the circle of stones, their thestral horses sounding as shrill as fanfare calls... and their leader was a grey-bearded man with a patch over his left eye, riding an eight-legged thestral.
"Sem!" Her eyes were white once more as she freed the seventh and last Freikugel. The rain poured down, the thunderstorm raged, a cold northern gale swept across the circle of stones as she clung to the vicar's black cassock and he wrapped his left arm around her slender waist. The storm sounded no longer like battle, but like a song --a threnody, or, in more familiar terms, a dirge. Or rather a requiem. The lightning was blue and became one with the dying flames of the crucible, creating pillars of blue light, spiralling like snakes or Solomonic columns and at the same time fluttering like flags, between sky and earth. The monoliths themselves, which had stood tall for millennia, quivered as if they were ready to fall apart any moment, crushing vicar and temptress underneath their weight. Yet this scenario did not become reality as they clung to one another for life, for love, for the cause they were both sworn to. She kept the four last bullets within her cleavage, just like he kept the first three in a cassock pocket. His eyes were clouded, his head swam, he reeled, he fell in her warm, if not searing hot, slender arms...
When his eyelids parted, he awoke in the redhead's embrace, her fine fingers entwining upon his hard spinal column. The stars glittered in familiar patterns in the moonless, cloudless night sky, and the monoliths stood around them in those usual, steady stances in which they had endured for millennia. The empty, cold crucible lay at their feet, the flames having died out for good in the black charcoal.
So, had it all been a dream? She reached into her cleavage, and he reached into his pocket. Four bullets upon her bosom, and three in his care: the proof of the fact that it had been reality. In spite of the hours that had gone by --five peals could be heard from the church tower--, all seven Freikugeln were warm and seemed to throb like hearts.
"Do svidaniya," she wistfully said as she tossed him the Freikugeln she had kept in her cleavage and they returned hand in hand to the vicarage. It was crystal-clear that she had taken her leave of Odin, old One-Eye. For the rest of the night, as he lay in bed with Elise, he stayed awake for those few hours, thinking of all that had happened before producing a little purse and putting the throbbing bullets in it. He did not love his wife, but neither did he dare to leave her.
That night, he dreamt, his back turned to his spouse and his blue eyes wide open, of exterminating angels, tall beings with stern yet lovely faces, clad in armour of silver, riding steeds as black as Odin's Sleipnir, wielding in their right hands whips twined out of white lightning.
Now it was clear whom he preferred. As a lover, that is. As a lover who was also, in the obverse side of his life, devoted to wife, child, servants, flock; officiating at the baptismal font, the wedding altar, and the funeral pall alike and equally sternly. The reverse side was the family secret of the Baratheons of Drachenstein, within which a deeper, darker secret was known by the iron-hard vicar and the fire-haired governess.


XII. In which the arms race and the sex race are run in parallel, a big-game hunt ends in a rather unexpected way, Robert is wounded ostensibly by a stray bullet, and the von Lännisters expand their power in all directions.

BOOK THE SECOND

DAYS OF TRIAL

""In war, the strong make slaves of the weak."

Oscar Wilde

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
the ceremony of innocence is drowned;
the best lack all conviction, while the worst
are full of passionate intensity."
W. B. Yeats

XIII. In which an engagement is celebrated not far from Sierck, a secret is closely kept, Brünnhilde admires Rainer from afar, and a Habsburg Archduke has just fallen victim to terrorism. This chapter concludes with a call of duty and a frontline wedding.

In a certain shelf of the Akashic records, far beyond the limits of reality, stands a lone book of considerable size, its covers deep purple as the skin of the stifled, or like veins through which poisoned blood flows. Ever since the dawn of humankind, its yellowed leaves have, little by little, been filled with letters written in freshly-shed blood instead of ink. The names of places that have been the site of engagements and where communities have been overrun are written there, and so are the names of all the important people (brave or cowardly, clever or foolish, worthy or inept, male or female) who have led fellow humans of theirs in violent conflict against other humans, seeking to subdue the foe with propaganda and religion, to slaughter the foe with cold steel and hot lead. Still in this new millennium there is dark and gory history being written in what the Bard of Avon famously called the Purple Testament of Bleeding War. But nearly a century ago, its latest pages about conflict in Europe were completely blank for a decade that seemed to be the greatest one in the history of the West.
Yet tensions were bubbling underneath the peaceful surface (still waters have always run deep), and it would take a young university student with an extremist ideology to open the Purple Testament once more and begin to write one of the so far shortest, yet most violent and scarring chapters it had ever contained. In late June 1914, when Gavrilo, aged nineteen, pulled that trigger on Archduke Francis Ferdinand's horseless carriage as it crossed a certain bridge in downtown Sarajevo, the bullet quickly shot through the Habsburg's throat, passing through his blood vessels and trachea, and a spring of a scarlet liquid surged through both the gunshot wound and the parted lips, staining the Archduke's dark moustache and his unsullied white Austrian army uniform, falling into the waters of the Miljacka, staining the bridge railing, and opening the Purple Testament by the latest blank page, on which those drops of the precious royal blood fell to name the victim and the marksman, the site of the misdeed and the reason why, and the fact that surgeons were unable to save the mortally wounded Habsburg's precious life. After which, the drops of blood formed the words "WAR WAS BEGINNING IN THE BALKANS", which, seen from a historical perspective, were so far nothing new under the sun. Many empires had fought for control of the region, the conflict extending, so far, never beyond the reach of the Balkans. It seemed that the separatist dreams of independence that a hitherto invisible student cherished would be crushed, since they would surely bring both Austria and Russia down the path of war.
That conflict, which had so far been a tension below the surface of peace, just like a dormant volcano or a slowly advancing glacier, or both the devastating action of ice and fire together, was now completely impossible to avoid. And everything in the West and its former colonies would no longer be the same as before.
In one of his lesser known fairytales, Oscar Wilde quoth (and "quoth" is just an old-fashioned and more lyrical word for "said"): "In war, the strong make slaves of the weak." Which can be confirmed as one of the unwritten basic laws of warfare, which have never changed at all since prehistory and up to our own new millennium. Comparing the numbers of the military of the then by previous armed conflicts weakened Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire with those of the far larger and more militarized realm of Czarist Russia, the reader may put two and two together and realize who would be "the strong" and who "the weak" in the Balkan squabble of 1914.
But there are more unwritten perennial laws of warfare than only one. You have already known that "In war, the strong make slaves of the weak." But another everlasting law of warfare states that "one will never be stronger than more than one." And you, dear reader, though you may suck at Maths (like I do myself, this I must confess), it will not be hard at all, if you do the maths and add up the realm ruled by the other Kaiser, the greatest military power of those times, the Second Reich where all the characters in our epic chance to live, to its Habsburg ally, you will realize, reader, that the tables were turned on Czar Nicholas. There was no other choice than to bring the Slavic great power's own allies into the fray. Soon, Mother Russia would call for aid, and both Marianne and Britannia would answer their mutual friend's call of distress.
Thus, soon the whole of Central Europe would be once more, and for the umpteenth time in forever, turned to a battlefield.
So far, throughout the summer of 1914, the conflict was nothing but the average Balkan squabble between Austria and Russia. It appeared that it would never cross the limits of this particular kind of regional dispute, which had been a hot potato throughout the history of both empires.
However, we now know that this conflict developed into something far more ominous and violent than a mere Balkan squabble. Something unknown to those who lived outside the Balkans (and within them) in that summer of 1914.
Including those who lived in Lorraine, one of the most peaceful regions (and in a rare moment of peace in its convoluted history), in the summer of 1914, for we shall now return to the Tyrells and their ostentatious lives. For this, we shall leave overrun Serbia and Croatia for the Tyrell lands. Thus, we turn away from all those gunshots and screams of agony, to find ourselves transported to the Tyrells' estate. Do you, readers, hear the sound of dancing? A waltz is playing in there, where the sun has already set, Venus shines in the dark sky like a lone jewel, and the light of the halls still shines through countless windows. Un-deux-trois, un-deux-trois, un-deux-trois... Do you, readers, hear the sound of dancing? And now, from the fountain or the maze where you stand, pay attention! A beautiful girl comes out on the balcony with her lover. She looks lovely in that teal gown, her chestnut-coloured pompadour crowned with the bonniest bonnet ever seen on a Lorrainian maiden's head. He is tall and dashing, dark of hair and clean shaven, wearing a lieutenant's mess uniform, epaulettes and sword and all, that surely triples his graces. This soirée is held to celebrate their betrothal, it's their engagement ball (a historical event in Lorrainian society), and soon Mademoiselle Tyrell will be a Baratheon... No! Though her mother and grandmother have not done so, she'd rather keep her maiden surname.
The sound of dancing, a beautiful girl coming out on the balcony with her lover, who will soon be her spouse... What is the subject of their conversation?
"How wonderful the stars are," he says to her, "and how wonderful is the power of love!"
"I hope the cloth will be ready for my wedding dress in time," she answers. "I have ordered the satin from Paris this afternoon, and I will embroider it and sew it myself; so I will not be lazy."
"Margot, are you serious... You will make your own wedding gown?"
"As you hear it, René! And also make the white rose and lily wreath, and the matching bouquet, with my very own hands." Now, Margot Tyrell is wistfully leaning against the balcony railing. Her fiancé, standing behind her, chuckles. Lieutenant Baratheon was only accustomed to the von Lännisters' use of private dressmakers... and the Tyrells employ the local tailors and seamstresses, who sew both uniforms and civilian attire, for both officers and privates... So even Margot will make her own wedding gown, wreath, and bouquet? Thus he reasons: this is a clever girl, the cleverest one he ever has met, she will become a lieutenant's wife, and perchance the pay from the State won't suffice to support both of them. Not even after she has reached that degree at Paris University which she is planning to study in between the betrothal and the wedding.
A third person now comes out on the balcony. It's a blond young ensign, a good-looking one, looking at his sister and fiancé as he calls to them:
"Rainer! Margot! Midnight! The cotillion will now begin!" The church bells of Sierck peal distinctly in the distance.
And thus, all three enter the ballroom once more, where Louis XV chairs are arranged in a semicircle, and every girl and lady, from three generations of Tyrells to those who are but mere children, takes up a chair. The great hall blazes with light of chandeliers, reflecting on glittering bayonets and on officers' uniforms, and on their female company's jewelry.
A figure of tall, sturdy physique, not fit for the modest sky-blue dress she is wearing, but rather for an officer's uniform, steps out of the shadows and into the light. She has watched and eavesdropped behind the shut door, surveying the romantic couple on the balcony from behind a mint-green velvet curtain, keeping them still in sight, herself unseen... overhearing a comment about the lovely stars and the wonderful power of love as she restrained all the tears for her love's betrothal to another, envying the one who will hold Rainer's heart in hers: a beautiful girl, a born Tyrell, clever and of wealthier descent than the colonel's daughter. A bride worth such a bridegroom.
Thus, Brünnhilde von Tarth had not partaken in the revels except to watch Rainer Baratheon, who must have invited her for a reason. What if she became an old maid at the end of the day?... For she was still young and her heart was still full of fire.
Still there was a faint glimmer of hope in Brünnhilde's broken heart, and that was the cotillion. Primroses, forget-me-nots, larkspur, violets, pansies... If Rainer only gave her his little bouquet of wildflowers!
One by one, the young officers and the gentlemen picked a cotillion bouquet from the silver dish and presented it to one of their ladies. As the awkward girl had expected, Max Tyrell gave his to his Valérie, and Charles to his Léonnette. Other young officers, fellows like Caron or Cuy, flocked around other maidens on the chairs, Brünnhilde sitting still overlooked, a freak so tall that her gown scarcely reached below her knees, her flaxen hair cut short like a boy's, with a smattering of freckles now that the make-up had come off (she was a flapper a decade ahead of the trend, and you shall see how she changed during and after the war)... No surprise that even the freshly-baked ensigns shunned her. She could hear them chuckle behind her back. There was no fairy godmother to help her. And Rainer... "Du Rainer, du Feiner!" What if Rainer took up his bride to dance, as it has been intended?
To Brünnhilde's surprise, Rainer whispers something in French in Margot's ear. The only words the blonde can understand are "Excusez-moi." "Excuse me"...
And then, quite unexpectedly, the dashing lieutenant walks up to the overlooked, strange girl. His lively blue eyes meet her dreamy blue eyes, the colour of the forget-me-nots in the cotillion bouquet. Rainer Baratheon bends slightly before her, as Brünnhilde's cheeks flush so red that her freckles disappear. Into her finely gloved, though still rough and strong hand, he places his own, softer and less inured. She looks down into the flowers: her favourites, forget-me-nots! Is this a dream? Tonight, Brünnhilde has not drunk that much, and she is wide awake, her pierced heart hitting her sternum like trying to breach it as the lieutenant offers her his right arm and asks her, softly and confidently:
"Voulez-vous danser avec moi?"
As boldly as she can, mustering all the courage she can find, though her flaming blush still conceals her freckles, she replies: "Oui."
In the meantime, the Tyrell fiancée is taken out to dance, with a posy of daisies (to fit her name) by the youngest of her brothers. Margot and Laurent would have made a nice couple if no blood-ties bound them.
So Rainer takes Brünnhilde around the waist as he reassures the assembled Lorrainian gentry that he will dance the next waltz with his intended bride. The fair-haired girl doesn't care, as long as she's had but one dance with the one she loves and will never kiss. Perchance the essence of her love lies in that it is impossible to attain, unrequited, mere friendship from his side, yet blood-heating passion from hers. To look at the forbidden fruit from a distance and stay in her place by not even touching it.
At the end of the dance, the lieutenant looks at her wistfully as he bites his lower lip and blows her a kiss.
In between the cotillion and the next number, champagne is corked and served in the Bohemian cups, even to the children, and healths go round in this sparkling nectar to Rainer Baratheon and Marguerite Tyrell. And every costly glass is raised and most of them are drained, and, in the fiancé's system, reason now begins to yield to a quick and cheerful intoxication. Which appears to run in the family, as we have seen with other Baratheons. While Laurent merely drank a quarter of his cup, and so did Margot, the dashing young lieutenant, a second Cassio, drained his own to the dregs. Though it had already begun to warm his heart and reach his head, Rainer was but half or one-third intoxicated: he didn't reel when he took his bride out to waltz, but his thoughts had already been overcome by an excited elation he had felt before.
And Brünnhilde? The blond girl from Rügen had quaffed a good draught of liquid courage, and this time it was Laurent Tyrell who took her out to dance. Shorter and more fragile-looking, the ensign, though he lacked none of Rainer's graces, didn't attract her at all. Yet Laurent was as courteous as could be, not seeing beyond the ruddy blush and coy smile of the awkward maiden. In spite of her physique, she danced light as a sylph, her heavy heart lightened by the draught she had drunk. All had been joy around her ever since twilight fell, and at last, after midnight, she had given in to it. Would Brünnhilde von Tarth dream that night?
And what about Rainer? There he is, waltzing with his beautiful Tyrell bride, kissing her on the cheek while she plays with his raven hair, his strong uniformed arms clasped around her slender waist.
Every now and then, the strange girl looks at them, and her heart skips a beat, laughing and dancing with all the others, though deep inside she is still bleeding. "A lieutenant and a camp follower? Not even in fairytales!" Then, she steels herself and looks at Rainer, Laurent, Rainer, Old Madame Tyrell, Rainer. Then, all the officers follow the leader and take her out to dance: Cuy, Caron, Guillaume Tyrell... And she makes a promise to herself, to the lieutenant bridegroom that is not hers, and to the world around her:
"Though I never will marry Rainer Baratheon, I will protect his life, and even give mine in exchange!"
Little does Hilde know of the future that awaits both of them, and whether she will stay true to her commitment.
That engagement ball night, of whose consequences you will hear after this parenthesis, was the beginning of the end of the life of Rainer Baratheon. Yet little did he, and his friends and family, know that the dashing, charming lieutenant's days were numbered.
Some young people (and not so young ones) have always taken to write bucket lists, ie lists of things to do before kicking the bucket, but neither one of our officers was one of those. They lived in the present and the near future, and their concerns were rarely (as you have already read), very rarely, about the afterlife.



XIV. In which, in a convenient manner, the young heir to the Baratheon-von Lännister Konzern is disabled and spared the bloodshed of the Great War. And his birth father, after a string of victories (and a disagreement with the one above him on the ladders of the clan and of the military), has to relinquish his right hand. The adult Kurzhands are decimated to a man and the climate of Drachenstein changes for the worse.


XV. In which the advances in Prussian warfare introduced in this chapter spell D.O.O.M. for a certain dark-haired lieutenant, another of the Freikugeln is not fired in vain, and Brünnhilde von Tarth and Catherine Stark are obliged to flee the war front.


XVI. In which a mother and daughter are violently separated by a chlorine attack, Jakob von Lännister recovers from his wounds and returns home with Brünnhilde in tow, to encounter an unexpected circus troupe, a notorious pink frock, a rather unorthodox surgeon, and an amazing brown bear!! All black and brown and covered with hair!! (Also, Irene and Marie are reunited with Davor at last.)

BOOK THE THIRD

THE SHATTERED UNIVERSE

"If you can make one heap of all your winnings
  And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,  
And never breathe a word about your loss..."

Rudyard Kipling

"My soul, sit thou a patient looker-on;

judge not the play before the play is done:

Her plot has many changes: every day

speaks a new scene; the last act crowns the play."

Francis Quarles

XVII. In which we meet both Sandra Stark and the Tyrells again, Laurent is completely broken, Lorraine changes regime a couple of times, the Great War comes finally to an end, it is the twilight of the German Empire, a bride is prepared for the Baratheon scion, and said bride is informed of Gottfried's true colours. And which also concerns a locket and a seed.

XVIII. In which a new regime rises to power, the Only Party saves the Konzern from certain doom, the bride of Gottfried arrives at Lichterfelde with her entourage, some old friends pop up at the wedding, and a tottering mansion of cards finally crumbles.

XIX. In which we finally find out what became of Sandra Stark and Kleinfinger. And of Jakob, Brünnhilde, and some other people as well.