The Hand-Shoe

By Victor Barall

After a poem by Friedrich Schiller

They are all assembled, the great ones, the lords and ladies of the court, all overheating as they wait in the arena under the unrelenting, unforgiving sun, the ladies on the balcony, gently dabbing their upper lips and temples with perfumed handkerchiefs, the gentlemen, lower down, massed around the empty chair, roasting, and wiping their faces in one violent motion with the sleeves of their doublets, all of them waiting for the king, Francis One, to emerge from his private chamber beneath the grandstand and make his short journey to the portable throne that travels with him everywhere as he visits, one to the next, his suite of chateaux along the Loire, the throne as portable as they, the great ones of the court, traveling where he travels, privileged to be with him and required to be with him, an obligation they can neither deny nor deflect, but which is balanced by the many pleasures he lavishes upon them, including the spectacle that now awaits them if the king will ever leave his chamber and assume his throne.

Now there is a gradual dying away, a diminution by degrees of the small talk among the great ones as the rumor diffuses through the stadium that the sovereign has been seen stepping out of his chamber, or if not the sovereign, then at least the large white feather that invariably accompanies him on the days he dons, at a rakishly oft-kilter angle, his black velvet beret. And soon, as the faces all turn toward the runway that leads to the throne, the rumor is confirmed as fact, and the audience summoned to the exciting performance rises as one from the hard benches surrounding the throne and from the padded chairs up above cushioning the cosseted derrieres of the ladies perspiring beneath the beautiful wreaths adorning their heads like crowns.  They all rise, and to the extent they are capable, wedged as they are within the confines of the close-set rows of seating, they make their obeisances, not very low for the gentlemen, a little lower for the ladies.  Francis acknowledges them with a peremptory nod and takes his place on his throne, and for a few moments he sits there absently, as if—although he has summoned them at this very hour for this entertainment—he is suddenly remembering some grave affair of state about which, so eager for the entertainment himself, he had forgotten to sign a decree.  Or perhaps he is merely exercising his royal prerogative of making everyone wait a little longer.

Now at last his mind seems to have returned to the matter at hand and he looks across to the opposite side of the stadium, where there is no grandstand but a wall over which three tapestries at even intervals are draped, each tapestry decorated at intervals with the Salamander, the personal emblem of the king.  Slowly rises the king’s right hand and when it clears the white feather rising ever so slightly on the nearly imperceptible breeze, the king waves his index finger, and at a stately pace the central tapestry rises to reveal the bars of a wide cage, and in the darkness behind the bars some creature is moving.

There is a clanging, the sound of metal striking metal, and the bars move left and right to open up in the center a clearing through which the lion slowly, thoughtfully, silently steps onto the field of play.  He looks all around, and up above he sees them blush, he sees the spreading of pink over the cheeks of the fine women, and lower down, although the wall over which the men are seated is out of his reach, he sees the lips of the brave men tremble, and he opens his jaw and yawns, because he has seen it all before; because even in captivity he remains at the apex of the hierarchy of beings, and it is only natural that he should be receiving their homage.  He closes his maw and shakes his mane, but with that movement he can hear the rustle of the chain that his magnificent headdress conceals, and resignedly, gloomily he lowers his shoulders and after stretching his forelimbs and his hindlimbs, he makes one complete circumference of an infinitesimal circle only he can see and lays himself down.

The lords and the ladies turn their faces again to the king, because they cannot conceive that there will not be more, that they should have been made to appear here for so perfunctory a performance, even if, they must admit, they did, each for his or her own reasons, find it thrilling:  the lords, because the sight of the lion has brought back to them the tense moments immediately preceding the battles in which they have fought and by God’s grace survived, and the ladies, because not one of them has yet encountered a man possessing such a compelling combination of qualities as this beast has emanated so effortlessly.

Up once more goes the royal hand, and once more flexes the royal pointer, and another tapestry, by someone’s invisible manipulations, is slowly raised, revealing a fierce, battered wooden door studded with large, rusting rivets.  The door slowly opens out, and when its whiskers sense that there is room enough, the tiger, with a ferocious leap, enters the arena, and as his eyes land on the lion, he issues a titanic roar and beats the ground menacingly with his tail, left and right, left and right, sending up a cloud of dust that drifts in the direction of the resting emperor of the west.  And the tiger, the potentate of the east, stretching out his tongue, senses, inhaling the unfamiliar, unpleasant aromas, and remembers now, that he is not at home, among his own, who shiver at the scent of him, but that he is on the lion’s ground, and although he is the larger, more powerful of the two, he carefully, even timidly, treads around his counterpart, one wide circle, purring wrathfully but softly, and finally, grumbling, sets himself down to the lion’s side.

Their gazes once again are on him, and the king again seems to be elsewhere, as if he is contemplating an ambitious plan for the future he continually has had to put aside, but which keeps returning to pull at his sleeve, and now, a third time, the king’s hand rises and the finger with which he expresses his will twitches, and the final tapestry is drawn back by the same unseen hands, and a double-chambered prison cell spits out simultaneously the two leopards, who, so long confined and all their pent-up energy now uncoiled, fall upon the tiger with the same courage, the same warrior spirit that accompanies soldiers, who, about to fight for the first time and yearning for glory and urging each other on, even as each one hopes to outperform the others, and receiving the command to move, launch themselves madly at the stationary army opposing them.  They pounce together on the tiger, but he, unimpressed, unmoved by these lesser cats, calmly seizes them both in his enormous paws and prepares to dispatch them as if they were lapdogs.  The lion, however, will not allow it.  What he seeks at the moment is peace, which requires him to return to his feet, and he lets out a shout, and then all is quiet, and the three combatants, still hot and hell-bent on murder, circle each other warily, and then they lower themselves to ground, and the lion, too, resumes his former position, and all is again in repose on the infield.

If a king could be embarrassed, perhaps this would be an occasion for it.  Not that he should be embarrassed, because it ought to be enough that he has granted these, his most beholden subjects, the thrill of observing all of these exotic creatures all at the same time and without their having to leave France and confront them on their own playing fields, and indeed, in his great generosity, he has granted them the thrill of observing these hot-headed, war-mongering creatures engage in something truly rare, an act of diplomacy, an agreement to disagree.  And yet, certainly there are men and women of the court who may be excused for having anticipated something more—a little hand-to-hand combat, the shedding of a little blood—and if that meant that the king would need to obtain one or two live replacements from distant lands, then so be it; he would issue a command and it would be done.  Not that the men of the court would ever let themselves entertain the thought that the king could be embarrassed—they who themselves are so unflaggingly on patrol against succumbing to that uncomfortable state of mind—but the ladies?  Perhaps there might be one, or two, or a few?  But all of the rules of statecraft agree that although a monarch on rare occasions may lose his throne, he cannot, must not, be embarrassed, it is an impossibility, and accordingly, Francis is not embarrassed.

And just then, a new combatant, a lioness, enters the fray, not with a roar but a whisper, with a quiet scent that is well-known to the women of the court, who turn their heads to the one who wears it, and then they see, hanging on the breeze as she returns her uncovered hand to her lap, the scented glove of white lace that she has caused to fall; they see it slowly descend over the balcony’s edge, and then, carried on a gust of wind coming from the north, float like a rumor away from the grandstand, and now the lords below are beginning to become aware of it, too, and soon everyone but one is watching as the glove wafts down and settles on the unoccupied turf in the center of the king’s menagerie, squarely between the lion and the tiger. The two predators sniff the female scent; they inhale energetically and they lift their heads and their great pink tongues push out of their mouths and bathe their faces and they each growl at the other, as if they are reconsidering their pact of non-aggression, but then, as if responding to a command from a higher power, they abruptly resume their recumbent postures.

The king on his throne looks up at the lady who let sail the glove, and he is gratified by the gesture, which he understands as her resolving to come to his aid, and unnecessary as it was for her to do so, he thinks he will reward her for it, possibly with a large ruby or one of the smaller castles that he has grown bored with.  The knight Delorges, sitting with the other gentlemen of the court, has meanwhile been brooding over a recent military engagement in which he had fought bravely, but could not be where he should have been, and as a result, his young brother, whom he had sworn to himself to protect, is dead; and he is brooding, as well, over a match that the king has hinted would very much please him, and, indeed, Delorges himself has affectionate feelings for the lady, who is intelligent, witty, comely, and demure, but something thus far has seemed to have held him back, and as he is wondering what it is, the gentleman on his right, his friend, the knight Hubert, poking an elbow into his ribcage, has interrupted his reverie and is pointing at a spot of white on the field of play, and with a twist of his head, which Delorges mimics with his own head, indicates a lady on the balcony.

It is the lady Cunigonde who meets his gaze, and not with a modest lowering of the head, but with a bold, hard stare, and it occurs to Delorges, as he considers the faces of the other women on the balcony, that perhaps she offers that stare not only on her own behalf, but on behalf of them all–-not only the ladies who are patiently, or no longer so patiently, waiting for a man to know his mind, but also, the ladies who have grown so weary of always being under a husband’s thumb.  It is unthinkable what she has done, but now it is done, and no words need be spoken for Delorges to know what he must do; she has him in her power, she has forced the issue, brought the matter to a head, and if there is anyone so dim as to be incapable of understanding, now she spells it out out loud, so all can hear, and not mirthfully or facetiously, but mockingly and derisively:  “My dear knight, if your love for me is truly so hot as, every time we meet, you swear to me it is, then you will return to me my glove.”

And all those in attendance look to the One, the only one who possesses the power to countermand the challenge, and they look not to heaven, but to the throne, where the white feather on the king’s rakishly disported cap moves whimsically in the air, and all those in attendance may wait all day to see if the king will intervene, all of them but Delorges, who knows that to wait longer than a split-second, even if he were to wait only a split-second longer than a split-second, would be to accept disgrace, and he knows, in any event, that the king, who professes to value beyond estimation his great courage and martial prowess and his excellent judgment and counsel, will not today, for a fourth time, lift a finger.

Down goes Delorges from his seat above the wall, swiftly down to the runway and through the gate, and with strong, steady strides he enters the gruesome field and the gate closes behind him.  And with strong, steady strides he aims directly for the center, where the four felines patiently lie, and there is a hush that even they, who are always so ready to bellow or grumble or growl, decline to upset.  Are they in awe of him? Does he have them transfixed?  Boldly he proceeds, and when he reaches the monstrous middle, where between the tiger and the lion the white lace lies, he reaches in with one bold, deft finger and lifts it up.

With amazement and terror the noblemen and gentlewomen watch as Delorges crosses the field, and when he reaches the perimeter and the gate opens before him and closes behind him, the arena resounds with the stomping of boots on the floorboards down below, and up above, they are waving their perfumed handkerchiefs as Delorges, with slow, stately steps, mounts the flight of stairs to the balcony.

The customs, the mores, the manners, the rules of courtly life—Delorges has never given them the least thought, because, he now muses, now that he is impelled by events to consider them, because they are eternal.  To doubt them would be unthinkable, to question them would be like questioning the sun or the stars or the motion of the seas.  And if the lady for whom one has affectionate feelings and who returns them, and with whom one has a future, however nebulous and yet to be formalized it may at the moment be, drops her glove in one’s presence, whatever the circumstances and motives may be that have caused her to loose it in the midst of a conference of deadly animals, then one must, without her so much as having to make a request, retrieve the glove or die trying, and if one is fortunate enough to have picked up the glove without arousing the animals’ savagery, then one must, upon presenting it to the lady, make a bow, and graciously thank her for her kindness in offering him the opportunity to prove his devotion.  To do otherwise would be as much to disgrace oneself as it would be, not to endeavor to retrieve the glove at all.

All of these thoughts circle him as, to the continuing cheers and moans and whistles, he continues his stately, almost ceremonial ascent, each step closing the distance between him and the lady Cunigonde.  He is in no hurry to arrive, and neither the men below nor the crowd on the balcony above are growing impatient. They are all content to wait, as he, like a lion tracing the circumference of an ever-narrowing circle, approaches his destination.  He is almost there, near enough now to see the tender look, the love-look with which Cunigonde is waiting to welcome and receive him, a look that promises imminent pleasure and lifelong joy, and the hearts of the ladies closest to her, now their hearts are overflowing for their hero, and a blush is again spreading and taking possession of their lovely cheeks as they look forward to the kiss, and they move aside so that all may see it, as Delorges and Cunigonde complete their courtly ritual.

In his right hand he holds the hand-shoe, the delicate white glove, slightly soiled, a little dusty from its journey down to the field, and she holds out her hand to accept it, and she is about to offer him her thanks and receive his in return, and her lips are forming the first word she intends to speak, but he will hear none of it, because now he raises his hand and cries, “Your gratitude, lady, I do not want,” and he flings the glove in her face and turns away.

With heavy, determined strides that cause the wooden boards to tremble and bounce and creak, he climbs down onto the field, where the animals still lie, and they lift their heads for a moment, curious, and watch him yank open the gate and make his exit.

And now the king is making haste to leave the arena, and he is already thinking about which of his chateaux on the Loire he should visit next, about which one will provide the most comfort and relief during this particularly sweltering summer; and the lords and ladies are making haste to rise and make their bows to him, and soon, they know, they will have to make ready to follow him and his portable throne; and a hundred workmen out of sight are already beginning the work of breaking down the king’s colosseum and packing it up into the one thousand boxes that will travel with him to his next destination.  

All of them are making haste, all except the lady Cunigonde, who for some moments remains behind on the balcony, wearing a sort of smile, because, the grave insult notwithstanding, she is proud of what she has done.  And then she, too, is gone, and there are only the leopards, the tiger, and the lion, all enjoying their freedom, but knowing it will not last much longer, sensing in their limbs that soon I will reappear, along with my several apprentices, and our ropes and chains and long poles, and wearing our thick leather padding and our heavy metal gloves.

About the Author:

Victor Barall was born and raised in The Bronx, New York.  He resides in New York City. His stories have appeared in The Quarterly, The Greensboro Review, the anthology American Fiction, Beloit Fiction Journal, and Lettre International, in German translation.