The War Hound and the World's Pain Read online

  “The world is still threatened,” I said to her, “but perhaps not by Lucifer.” I held her hand tightly.

  “Now we can go home to Bek,” I said.

  Sabrina and I were married in the old chapel in Bek. My father died soon after we returned and he was pleased that I was there, to maintain the estates as he would have wished. He said that I had “grown up” and he loved Sabrina, I think, as much as did I. She bore us two girls and a boy, all of whom lived and all of whom are now well. We continued with our studies and came to entertain many great men, who were impressed with Sabrina’s grasp of Natural Philosophy in particular, though I think they sometimes found my own speculations a trifle obscure.

  I was not to meet Lucifer again and perhaps I never shall.

  I continue to remain unclear, sometimes, as to whether my soul is my own. It is still possible that Lucifer lied to us, that God did not hear Him, that God did not speak to Him. Has Lucifer claimed the whole Earth as His domain in defiance of God? Or did God ever exist at all?

  These are not thoughts I express to anyone, of course, save now, when I believe myself to be dying. The world is unsafe for a man who utters such heresies. I see little evidence that Reason is triumphant or that it ever shall be triumphant. But if I have Faith, it is in the faint hope that mankind will save itself, that Lucifer did not, after all, lie.

  I have entered into Hell and know that I should not like to spend Eternity there. And I believe that I have been permitted a taste of Heaven.

  We came to be happy in Bek. We sought Harmony, but not at the expense of muscular thought and passionate argument, and I believe that we achieved it in a small measure. Harmony is hard-won, it seems.

  The War eventually subsided and did not touch us much. And as for the War which had threatened the supernatural Realms, we heard no more of it. The Plague never visited Bek. Without deliberately pursuing commerce we became well-to-do. Musicians and poets sought our patronage and returned it with the productions of their talents, so that we were consistently and most marvelously entertained.

  In the year 1648, through no particular effort of goodwill and chiefly on account of their weariness and growing poverty, both of money and of men, the adversaries in our War agreed a peace. For several years afterwards we were to receive men and women at our estates who had known nothing but War, who had been born into War and who had lived by War all their lives. We did not turn them away from Bek. Many of them continue to live amongst us, and because they have known so much of War, they are anxious to maintain a positive Peace.

  In 1678 my wife Sabrina died of natural causes and was buried in our family crypt, mourned by all. As for myself, I am alone at present. Our children are abroad; our son teaches Medicine and Natural Philosophy at the University of Prague, where he is greatly honoured; my elder daughter is in London as an ambassadress (there, I gather, her salon is famous and she enjoys the friendship of the Queen), and my younger daughter is married to a successful physician in Lübeck.

  To my subjective eye, the Pain of the World is a degree less terrible than it was some thirty years ago, when our Germany was left in ruins. If Lucifer did not lie to me, I pray to Him with all my heart and soul that He can lead mankind to Reason and Humanity and towards that Harmony which might, with great efforts, one day be ours.

  I pray, in short, that God exists, that Lucifer brings about His own Redemption and that mankind therefore shall in time be free of them both forever: for until Man makes his own justice according to his own experience, he will never know what true peace can be.

  With this, my testament, I consign my soul to Eternity, offering it neither to God nor to Lucifer but to Humanity, to use or to discard as it will. And I urgently beg any man or woman who reads this and who believes it to continue that which my wife and myself began:

  Do you the Devil’s work.

  And I suspect that you will see Heaven sooner than ever shall your Master.

  Signed by my own hand in

  this Year of Our Lord

  Sixteen Hundred and Eighty;

  BEK

  Table of Contents

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII