Margit Sandemo: The Ice People 35 - The Flute

“You!” he whispered to himself finally, pointing with his claw at one young man. “You are thinking about it. You want to do it and you are fanatical enough. But you don’t quite dare yet. Say it! Say it now!”

“I’ll do it!” said Gavrilo Princip.

“What will you do?”

“We have pistols, don’t we?”

“Gavrilo, you can’t! Not in the street like that!”

“Shut up,” Tengel thought, turning his gaze on the one who had just objected.

The man fell silent.

Another one jumped up. “I saw a pair of eyes flash up there, then they disappeared!”

Tengel shut his eyes tightly. Unluckily he had become too eager. And too careless!

“It’s probably that animal that stinks so badly,” muttered one of the youths. “Let’s light a fire.”

They fiddled with that for a moment.

Meanwhile Tengel’s thoughts were churning. Slowly and with great effort, but nevertheless efficiently. By the time they sat down again they had all fallen under the spell of his willpower.

“How do you plan to do it, Gavrilo?”

He explained it to them, his eagerness having grown under the influence of Tengel the Evil.

“You’re mad,” said one of the men when he had finished explaining. “You’ll never get away with it!”

“Of course I will. I’ll just melt into the crowd.”

Tengel chuckled quietly to himself. “Oh, is that what you think? Well, your fate means nothing to me. I just want you to create as much havoc as possible. A catastrophe! I’ll take command of that! Of the catastrophe. You are merely a tool.”

They were all in agreement down there by the nasty campfire. They had taken out their weapons and were talking about them, weighing them and taking aim. Gavrilo Princip was extremely excited and so eager that he could barely wait. The risk of his own death was no longer of any concern to him.

Tengel the Evil didn’t like the fire, he didn’t want to stay there any longer. He got up and stretched his arms towards the men with a commanding gesture. They subconsciously registered it, and he watched them cower as though in fear without knowing what had caused this sudden anxiety.

“May your actions have unfathomable consequences for the world,” Tengel ordered. “May they create such chaos that humans will destroy one another, and only the strongest and vilest survive to serve as my tools! For Tan-ghil will now return to his promised power: he will be with you to the end of time and beyond. His life and his power are eternal!”

He took off from the ground and flew in an upright position over the mountain until he was no longer visible to them.

Then he stopped. He squatted down in the strange sitting position that primitive people tend to use.

He felt empowered after having performed his first evil action. But his body and mind lagged behind and were unable to keep up with his will.

That confounded flute player who hadn’t completed the tune!

He was now going to focus his attention on that pathetic wretch, the lord of the castle in the marshy delta.

Tengel would force him to play the melody to its conclusion.

It probably wouldn’t be difficult to compel the man. But Tengel wasn’t sure how to tackle the situation. His brain was working so slowly, he felt completely exhausted after having had to use so much concentration just now.

First he would have to rest a little, and do some thinking.

He sank into a position with his head bent over his knees and his cape wrapped around him. Had anyone seen him now, they would have taken him for an ugly little greyish black stone or stump, covered in filthy brown and green mould.

Tengel the Evil suddenly froze.

Something was entering his brain ... something terrible, catastrophic!

No! It couldn’t be possible!

He could hear music so crisp and sharp and delicate that it made him tremble from head to toe, made him nauseous and sick and shake as though he had a fever.

No! No, no, no! Not now! Oh, spirits of the abyss, why did this have to happen?

He lifted his head. Sheer terror and a wild sense of fury radiated from his narrow eyes.

On the crest of the hill opposite he saw the contours of a distinguished figure dressed in a long, black monkish robe. He was holding a flute, barely the size of a penny whistle, to his mouth, and that was where the notes were coming from.

The Wanderer of the Darkness.

“No!” cried Tengel hoarsely. “Go back to your shadow world! You, the greatest traitor the world has ever seen! You had my confidence, I trusted you: you were to lull me into slumber with your flute playing, but you were also supposed to play the flute again to wake me!”

The Wanderer removed the flute from his lips. “It was stolen ...”

“I know!” Tengel howled in terror. “That confounded Jolin! But it was rediscovered in Eldafjord. And you were there. Don’t you know that I was there too – I know everything, everything! But you let it be destroyed by that bastard of my own blood!”

“One flute for slumber, one flute for reawakening,” said the Wanderer calmly. “It was your own choice.”

“I’m going to destroy you, you ...”

“You can’t,” the Wanderer interjected. “And you know it. You yourself gave me the status of eternal wanderer and ghost. To ensure that I could reawaken you one day.”

“And you betrayed me!”

The Wanderer had begun to play again. Tengel’s objections grew increasingly faint. He moaned helplessly as his body obeyed the crisp tones of the flute. Without protest, he followed when the Wanderer led him across mountains and valleys, past sleeping villages and back to the caves in Slovenia.

There Tengel the Evil was forced to re-inhabit his hidden cave, far away from the paths of tourists and researchers.

But by then he was so sluggish that he very willingly collapsed back into his lair of many centuries.

The Wanderer looked at him with a bitter smile and turned back to continue his unrelenting vigil.

Dressed in a uniform that strained about his increasing plumpness and a helmet decorated with waving plumes, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand sat in a motorcar for his triumphal procession through Sarajevo. His consort, dressed in white and also wearing a feathered hat, sat at his side.

He twirled his big, luxuriant moustache, and incessantly removed his white gloves and then put them back on.

The Archduke was nervous, though of course he did not show that to the waving crowds. Well, the crowds weren’t that big, perhaps. There were those who had turned up because they had no choice and others who came out of curiosity to see the royals and the splendour of their entourage. There was no real warmth in the feelings of this country’s population for the crowned heads of Austria-Hungary.

Franz Ferdinand knew that there was some risk of an assassination attempt. But he had not listened to the warnings of the Serbian envoy in Vienna. Whether it was his belief in his own popularity or immortality, or just a sense of duty that led him to make this journey, is hard to say. In any event, he and his wife had come to Sarajevo.

It was 28 June 1914.

The Archduke carried out an inspection of his troops that had been left behind in Bosnia, then he and his wife travelled by car to a reception at the city hall.

In the crowd on the street that day was Gavrilo Princip.

He, too, was nervous, but for different reasons. The revolver slipped in his hand because he was sweating. The royal couple were coming by car instead of a horse-drawn carriage, which made the situation much more difficult.

But it was too late to draw back now.

The procession was well under way. Now he expected ...

Yes!

His friends had done their duty: a bomb had exploded farther down the street. Someone shouted that an officer had been wounded. Now it was Gavrilo’s turn to take action.