Strasbourg,

The Feast of Saint Denis

Dmitri,

This goes by Conrad the wool-merchant, who is honest and cannot read. Your last letter reached me whole with the seal intact. I have read it enough times that the creases in the vellum are going soft. But I do enjoy reading your words, even though you are sparing with them even on parchment. I am glad that I taught you to read and to write there at that table where we sat together, your hand under mine. I will not now pretend I regret arming you with this skill as it has proven useful.

I am still writing from the notary’s bench in the Münster. All autumn I have copied the same charter a dozen times already, which discusses tolls, the bishop’s men and the burghers who want to tax ships passing along the Rhine. Above me, the stonemasons sing as I work on copying the text.

You asked in your letter if I am well. And I am. I am as well as God allows me to be when half of me is four days’ ride south and owned by the count. I wake, I write my lines, I eat what Frau Hugelin sets in front of me. Sometimes I cannot tell what it is, but I’m too afraid to ask. Then I retire to sleep, in a bed that could be warmer if you were here. Between those things I think of you with an unending steadiness.

There is news, though you might know better than I. They say your count is buying his friends along the Rhine; that Basel inclines to him, and that the lesser lords are waiting to see which way the river will shift. Here, in the guildhall, the masters speak of nothing but this. They believe that Strasbourg answers to no lord, and they know that the seat of the Holy Roman Empire is an empty throne with no ruler. They know what a strong king would want from a city grown used to governing itself. They will not say the word. They say if there were ever a king again, and let the rest hang unanswered.

You belong to that count’s house now. I have never once held that against you, or how you swore your fealty to him; and I will not insult you by saying more about it than that. But be careful what you put to parchment for me, and by whose hand you send it. Conrad cannot read. Not every carrier is Conrad, and you are not a man who can afford to be known as literate.

Write to me about small things as well as important matters. Tell me what the Aare looks like with the seasons changing. Tell me whether the scar on your forearm aches in the cold dampness the way it did last autumn.

I remain, as I have been longer than either of us can properly account for, yours.

Elias

*****

Aargau,

The Eve of Saint Martin

Elias,

Conrad stood in the yard drinking ale and told us some story about your sister. He is a good liar, but I know you don’t have a sister. But this makes him the best for carrying the letter.

I read your letter by the stable lamp. Twice. I will tell you now what I do not say with others, because the page is the place I am permitted to speak plainly.

You wrote that you armed me. And you did. Before knowing you, I owned nothing I could not take back with one hand. Now I own the inside of letters. The count, who has counted everything I am and placed it in his inventory, has not counted on these pages. He does not know that these pages exist. This is the singular ground I hold that he has not already garrisoned.

You asked about small things. The scar does ache. It will ache until I die, and in any weather. Though I have stopped reporting it to anyone but you. The Aare runs low with the color of a blade. I broke a colt to wear a saddle this month without raising my voice. Horse grooms call it a trick. It is not. I learned young what it costs a body to be handled in fear, and I will not hand that cost forward to a horse.

Now the large thing. The count is gathering the Rhine to his hand. I dress his horse before light. I stand at his back when he rides out. I have watched men my whole life to know which way they will move before they move. A slave learns it early or a slave learns it hard. The count does not move like a man who intends to die as a count. Envoys come to Hapsburg Castle the way crows come to a turned field. Mainz. Trier. I will not write the rest. But you know them.

You wrote your masters will not speak to it. I will say it, since no man between here and your bench can hang me. They are right to be afraid. A dog that has taught itself to need no master is the first thing a master corrects. If the crown of the emperor comes to this house, freedom becomes a question put to your burghers with armed men in the room. I have been the armed man in the room. I know the answer to the question.

Here is the part I have no good word for. I do not know how to be owned by the man who will put that question forward; or, by my own choice, how to love the free man he will ask it to. I have turned it over in my mind over many times since the snow melted.

Yours unlike any other,

Dmitri

*****

Strasbourg,

The Feast of the Purification

Dmitri,

I have read your last letter so often that Frau Hugelin has begun to leave the lamp lit without being asked. She knows I enjoy reading your letters.

When I set your hand under mine at that table I thought I was giving you a safe thing – a way to read an order and sign a name without being cheated. I did not know what I would get back. The man who speaks four words in a room writes to me like a man laying out ground he means to hold. I have taught letters to merchants’ sons for nine years. None of them ever undid me with it. But you do. I mean that as the highest thing I have said to you.

And since I am writing of things while the lamp burns, you are gentle in these letters the way you were gentle with that colt. I have never mistaken your gentleness for the whole of you. I have not forgotten the rest of what you are. I keep my hand between ruled lines all day, but you are the one matter on which I have never wanted a gentle hand. A seal pressed gently leaves nothing in the wax. Set it hot when you come, and hard enough to take.

Now the large thing, and forgive me, because it is also strange. The cathedral chapter sent me a chest of failing charters to be recopied. The parchment is going, and the ink is lifting off in flakes. Grants of land, mostly, two hundred years old. Yesterday I came to one from the time of the Henry III, a grant of vineyard ground above the river, and at the foot of it, among the witnesses, the notary had set his own name and mark.

The notary’s name and mark were mine, Dmitri.

I made that exact mark, that exact turn on the tail of the E. I sat with the dead man’s parchment until the light went. You wrote that the past has followed you across more than one life. I have never been able to say a thing like that aloud. But I have copied charters for nine years, and the oldest of them sometimes read to me like letters I have already answered, and I am beginning to think you and I have done this before as a free man at a bench and a bound man at a lord’s back, loving each other across someone’s ambition, and that some part of me already knows the end and has already grieved it.

The city is not at peace, despite whatever the dyers’ children would tell you. The masters have sworn the guilds to a common watch. There is more grain brought in above and beyond what a quiet winter needs. When your count’s name reached us – and it has reached us – it is in every mouth on the Krämergasse. Burghers stand very straight and speak of the Empire’s old love for its free cities, and then go home and count their sons.

Come north on the first dry road. I am asking like I have not let myself ask before. Come north, my love.

Elias

*****

Aargau,

The Tuesday after Easter

Elias,

You wrote come north and gave it a line to itself. I have looked at those two words longer than a commander looks at a battlefield. You have never given me orders. I find I have wanted one from you for years. And now I have it.

But I cannot come. Not yet. I need you to see the whole field before you decide what means.

Since the snow broke, the count has been to Basel twice and down the Rhine to Cologne once. I have ridden behind him each time. The talk is no longer whether the princes will meet, but when, and where, and there is but one name. He does not boast. He does the largest things in the smallest voice, which is what you also do, and which is why I trust neither of you to tell me when you are afraid.

Hear the rest, how I would say it if my size did not speak first. A slave who leaves is a slave who runs, and a slave who runs is hunted. Hunted men leave a trail of that which they were running to. I am running towards you. I do not run. I hold position. I hold it on purpose close to the count, where a man can hear anything early and ride out fast if he must. A man cannot be loyal to one who owns him; he can only be obedient. I stay because the place at his stirrup is good ground. It is dry ground. I mean to be standing on it when the time is right to go north.

About what you wrote, of the dead Henry, and of your own hand. You said you have never been able to say such aloud. You did not have to. I have known you across enough of time to have watched you grieve, and stop in a doorway as though you had been struck. I stopped ever needing it explained. If you have loved me in some ledger I cannot read, then I have been better loved than free men ever know, and only a fool audits a gift such as this.

Tell me which gate your watch is heaviest on. Tell me Frau Hugelin is feeding you as well as always.

Dmitri

*****

Strasbourg,

The eve of Saint Michael

Dmitri,

This is short. The carrier is a Münster mason going only as far as Basel, and he leaves at first light.

It is all but done. The word in the guildhall is that the electors meet before All Souls, and that there is only one name –– that of your count. Soon I must stop writing the word count, as I find it bothers me.

Here is what I have decided, and do not spend your hard-bought words trying to move me. I will not leave Strasbourg. I have copied this city’s charters for nine years. I have set down its grants and its quarrels in a hand that may be older than the city’s stone. If the king sends men to ask Strasbourg whether it will kneel, I intend to be at my bench when they ask, because someone with a steady hand must write down how the city answers. In every account of myself I can reach, I have been the one who keeps the record. I will not run from the most important page of it.

But know this. Whatever the king does to the city, the city is stone and parchment and will outlast him as it has outlasted those who came before him. I am not stone though. When you ride north, come to the Münster. Ask for the notary. They all know me. I will be the one who looks up already knowing the sound of your steps.

Until then I am, as you have always known me, the one who loves you.

Elias.

*****

On the road,

two days south of Strasbourg,

in the first week of the new reign

Elias,

I write this on a board that lays across my knee. The hand is poor, I am sorry. You taught the hand, so you may complain to the teacher.

It is done. The princes met. There was one name as you said. Rudolf knelt as a count and rose as King of the Romans. I held his horse while it happened, as I have held it now for nine years.

I will not pretend the morning was nothing. While the crown went onto his head my mind had already broken and ridden north, calculating the distance from the saddle to your bed.

The king moves towards Alsace. Therefore, the king moves towards you. The very concern your masters lie awake over is now carrying me together with an army down the Rhine.

I will tell you the rest plainly. I do not yet know what the king means for Strasbourg. I have watched him, and listened to every word and the blank spaces between them. I think the fear of your city has ridden out well ahead of intent. He speaks of his free cities as a man speaks carefully of a strong horse – worth keeping sound, not breaking. I think. I do not promise. You will be at your bench to write down the truth of it, and I have made my peace with that, because I understood somewhere north of Basel that you and your city are the same stubborn document, and I did not fall in love with only half of it.

Three days. Maybe four, if the Breisach runs high.

I will come to the Münster in the evening, when the stonemasons have gone down off the scaffold. Do not arrange your face. Do not rehearse anything to say to me. I only want to hold you again. To feel your warmth. Your touch. Your kiss.

I have been gentle in every line I have sent you. Gentleness is the one thing I have ever chosen to give. It is lighter than a sword, but harder to wield. But you wrote to me that, a gentle seal in wax leaves nothing; that it must go down hot and hard enough to take. I have carried that line with me the whole length of the Rhine.

There is one wall I would lay siege to gladly, by my own choice and under no command. It is yours. It makes me a free man. Your gates open from the inside, and your hand is the one that throws the bolt. I am not riding north to be careful with you. Now know now that, I will lay siege to your wall.

The only order I have ever wanted to obey is the one you gave in your last letter. I am now obeying it. Have the lamp lit. I want to arrive and find you already looking up.

Yours truest love,

Dmitri