EXCERPT 1
PROLOGUE
I
SCENE: The Castle at Bechlaren. A parapet.
1ST SENTINEL
Do they come?
2ND SENTINEL
Flecks appear across the mirrored ice.
1ST SENTINEL
Captain!
CAPTAIN OF THE GUARDS (Voice)
Ho! What stirs?
1ST SENTINEL
They grind the ice.
You may prepare the welcome.
2ND SENTINEL
Welcome! Ha!
I would not be a king, if such were my welcome.
1ST SENTINEL
They tell that she had sent a loving notice,
And her brothers come to be enclasped, warm-held,
In her fabulous, now-wealthy arms.
CAPTAIN
So the King,
Our Etzel, her second, and only second, husband,
Would will it. But she would overmaster him,
As ever, and he bows to her austerity.
2ND SENTINEL
It seeps like slime on a moat’s full flood,
The story how her Siegfried they destroyed,
And even now, it’s heard, beneath that ivory
Forbidding face, the worm is eating through,
And brotherhood, for her, means call to murder.
1ST SENTINEL
Had I a nest in any far-sprung tree,
I would not fly home to such dark-trembling arms,
Are not they kings all, of a thrice-kingly country?
CAPTAIN
Aye. Of dark-spreading, deep-loving country.
She sent her pleading messengers, twice-bent
Like love’s own arrows to their tender target,
With such imploring of her lonelihood,
Such night-ached story of her builded years,
Where still she sits with foreign mate, cold-throned,
And how her yearning probes for childhood’s brethren,
That stones thrice-buried would have melted through.
2ND SENTINEL
They know no fear, who hold such deed in their past?
CAPTAIN
Her persuasion is, and that of her messengers,
That love of kin, like a soft-swelling sea
Has swept her through with such deep tenderness,
All rancor, sorrow, bitter memory
Are washed forever in that endless tide.
1ST SENTINEL
She seems all formed of love. Our happy Etzel
Lives but to glow, and the eyes she lights us with
Do none but bless. One could quick forget
How importunate must be ambassadors
Who begged in vain, those tender months, her hand,
When like a pillar thrust through with void
He reigned alone, cold pow’r of empty earth,
For thus so dead was his bereaved, sore heart,
When, like her, he saw a first mate’s leaving.
CAPTAIN
Yet, strangely, after taciturn refusal,
Sudden as a miracle of sun
That parts implacable and swelling clouds,,
She beamed upon him, and in sweet agreement
Left a fruitful land, her majesty,
And all of home one woman then could claim,
To lift us here in flood of twin-smiling suns.
1ST SENTINEL
The flecks grow. Let us prepare for them.
CAPTAIN
Aye. It is a sorrowful business.
2ND SENTINEL
And not for hearts.
CAPTAIN
One must destroy that organ,
Or be at odds with the kingdom. Let us go down.
Drop bits of pity on the cold of earth
For them her granite chooses for the crushing.
(Exit)
(Curtain)
EXCERPT 2
(Visiting Knight Giselher meets the wife and daughter of the castle’s King/host. He has been talking philosophy with Hagan’s servant when they are interrupted. The Mother is troubled by visions of her previous warrior-husband.)
(Knocking on door)
GISELHER
What bruits long tale of love when hours are short?
RUDOLT
Talk runs the world in seconds. And hours are horrors,
Built to pile slow doom on a man’s soft head.
GISELHER
Approaches this doom loudly, or with a tapping?
RUDOLT
It grows, like nauseous mushrooms, in slow filth.
GISELHER
Then I hear not doom, but only impatient rancor;
A brutish rancor, that may be somewhat disposed
By a man’s sword.
(Approaches door, sword drawn)
RUDOLT
I would rise and assist you,
But neither a sleepy king nor a fool may lower
To common brawls. Do not disturb the king.
GISELHER
I shall rout these ten so softly, a mouse’s foot
Would not be shaken by air from the tremor. Ha,
Dark thieves, what think you by a tapping to steal,
When brassy thunder found deafness to your efforts?
(Opens door)
GOTELIND
Well, Soldier.
HILDBRYN
Mother, I cannot tell if we
Are welcome.
GISELHER
I can tell you no more surely. This was a sword
That hungered, and now its startled appetite
Must drowse, and close itself in colder steel,
When its wish had been for a moment’s warm repose
Through a thief’s blood, who would walk unholy night.
And yet it wavers somewhat, as if reluctant
To bed, when by some slow and rev’rent symbol
It might nod out inanimate surprise
To beauty. whom one would not find walking here,
Where the very stones rise up to smite a man.
GOTELIND
His sword betokened a soldier, but the tongue
Would speak for more.
HILDBRYN
A jewel might let drop
From a dark sky, or the hilt of a man’s sword,
And after its flashing, be swallowed up below
Unseen, but by some not forgotten.
*****
GISELHER
The earth grows cold. And chills of sudden fear
Like creepings from a giant shadow, unfelt,
Unseen, unheard, yet monstrous and enveloping,
Reach out to clutch me. In the presence of hope,
Fear ever stalks as a twinn’d deformity.
HILDBRYN
Fear not. Upon the earth the sky, the cloud
The wind, the grass the stars, and through the canyon’s
Pinnacles of all this buttressed world.
Floats triumph, through death and past, of a singing breath.
GOTELIND
He stands there. O, the gods save! Green,
Green of glow he is, green sockets for his eyes,
And webb’d and musty all the fallen spaces
Where a face had been. Nudung, leave, leave,
I pray you, for a more comfortable time,
And blast not the silk wings of our hour.
HILDBRYN
Mother, we must leave.
GISELHER
I shall go with you.
HILDBRYN
Where?
GISELHER
Where the primrose found its breath,
And the first glowworm its cool ‘candescent lantern;
Where nascent stars are born in virgin pools,
And the stuff of clouds is wove by an infant nymph.
HILDBRYN
I shall go there, then the tale of years is done,
But never find.
GISELHER
Find but in losing, ever seek,
And lose but in seeking what may never be found.
HILDBRYN
And if I would seek a one like you?
GISELHER
Seek swiftly,
When the turn of moon has wound but half his horn,
And this armor, if living, once more is placed on watch.
GOTELIND
Yet do not go, old grizzled, lovely soldier,
We are waiting, and I’ll still converse with thee,
Do you desire it; what story crowds those lips,
All pale of flesh and lost; what sad communing’s
Or warning tale do you stand with cost to bring?
HILDBRYN
I shall seek. And if my form is lost,
One dying breath the Scyther passed in swing
Shall swirl with a strange moan in these corners.
Mother, we go.
GOTELIND
What rusty, horrible clashing
Deforms the cleaving air, and now denotes
With echoes a terrible approach and crimson;
Then stalks a mad departing on our heads?
He is gone.
HILDBRYN
And are we.
GOTELIND
Wait again, Soldier.
(Exeunt)
GISELHER
May the greatest of all the gods forever strive
To keep my head unbowed, and tears from out these eyes!
(Falls to his knees and weeps)
(Curtain)
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