Hannibal Rising

HANNIBAL THE GRIM (1365-1428) built Lecter Castle in five years, using for labor the soldiers he had captured at the Battle of Žalgiris. On the first day his pennant flew from the completed towers, he assembled the prisoners in the kitchen garden and, mounting his gallows to address them, he released the men to go home, just as he had promised. Many elected to stay in his service, owing to the quality of his provender.

Five hundred years later Hannibal Lecter, eight years old and eighth of the name, stood in the kitchen garden with his little sister Mischa and threw bread to the black swans on the black water of the moat. Mischa held on to Hannibal’s hand to steady herself and missed the moat entirely on several throws. Big carp stirred the lily pads and sent the dragonflies soaring.

Now the Alpha swan came out of the water, stumping toward the children on his short legs, hissing his challenge. The swan had known Hannibal all his life and still he came, his black wings shutting out part of the sky.

“Ohh, Anniba!” Mischa said and hid behind Hannibal’s leg.

Hannibal raised his arms to shoulder height as his father had taught him to do, his reach augmented with willow branches held in his hands. The swan stopped to consider Hannibal’s greater wingspan, and retired to the water to feed.

“We go through this every day,” Hannibal told the bird. But today was not every day and he wondered where the swans could flee.

Mischa in her excitement dropped her bread on the damp ground. When Hannibal stooped to help her, she was pleased to daub mud on his nose with her little star-shaped hand. He daubed a bit of mud on the end of her nose and they laughed at their reflections in the moat.

The children felt three hard thumps in the ground and the water shivered, blurring their faces. The sound of distant explosions rolled across the fields. Hannibal grabbed up his sister and ran for the castle.

The hunting wagon was in the courtyard, hitched to the great draft horse Cesar. Berndt in his hostler’s apron and the houseman, Lothar, loaded three small trunks into the wagon box. Cook brought out a lunch.

“Master Lecter, Madame wants you in her room,” Cook said.

Hannibal passed Mischa along to Nanny and ran up the hollowed steps.

Hannibal loved his mother’s room with its many scents, the faces carved in the woodwork, its painted ceiling—Madame Lecter was of the Sforza on one side and a Visconti on the other, and she had brought the room with her from Milan.

She was excited now and her bright maroon eyes reflected the light redly in sparks. Hannibal held the casket as his mother pressed the lips of a cherub in the molding and a hidden cabinet opened. She scooped her jewels into the casket, and some bundled letters; there was not room for them all.

Hannibal thought she looked like the cameo portrait of her grandmother that tumbled into the box.

Clouds painted on the ceiling. As a baby nursing he used to open his eyes and see his mother’s bosom blended with the clouds. The feel of the edges of her blouse against his face. The wet nurse too—her gold cross gleamed like sunlight between prodigious clouds and pressed against his cheek when she held him, she rubbing the mark of the cross on his skin to make it go away before Madame might see it
.

But his father was in the doorway now, carrying the ledgers.

“Simonetta, we need to go.”

The baby linens were packed in Mischa’s copper bathtub and Madame put the casket among them. She looked around the room, and took a small
painting of Venice from its tripod on the sideboard, considered a moment, and gave it to Hannibal.

“Take this to Cook. Take it by the frame.” She smiled at him. “Don’t smudge the back.”

Lothar carried the bathtub out to the wagon in the courtyard, where Mischa fretted, uneasy at the stir around her.

Hannibal held Mischa up to pat Cesar’s muzzle. She gave the horse’s nose a few squeezes as well to see if it would honk. Hannibal took grain in his hand and trailed it on the ground in the courtyard to make an “M.” The pigeons flocked to it, making an “M” in living birds on the ground. Hannibal traced the letter in Mischa’s palm—she was approaching three years old and he despaired of her ever learning to read. “‘M’ for Mischa!” he said. She ran among the birds laughing and they flew up around her, circling the towers, lighting in the belfry.

Cook, a big man in kitchen whites, came out carrying a lunch. The horse rolled an eye at Cook and followed his progress with a rotating ear—when Cesar was a colt, Cook had run him out of the vegetable garden on a number of occasions, yelling oaths and swatting his rump with a broom.

“I’ll stay and help you load the kitchen,” Mr. Jakov said to Cook.

“Go with the boy,” Cook said.

Count Lecter lifted Mischa into the wagon and Hannibal put his arms around her. Count Lecter cupped Hannibal’s face in his hand. Surprised by
the tingle in his father’s hand, Hannibal looked closely into Count Lecter’s face.

“Three planes bombed the rail yards. Colonel Timka says we have at least a week, if they reach here at all, and then the fighting will be along the main roads. We’ll be fine at the lodge.”

It was the second day of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s lightning sweep across Eastern Europe into Russia.

BERNDT WALKED AHEAD of the wagon on the forest path, careful of the horse’s face, hacking back the overgrown branches with a Swiss half-pike.

Mr. Jakov followed on a mare, his saddlebags full of books. He was unused to horseback and he hugged the horse’s neck to pass beneath the limbs. Sometimes where the trail was steep, he dismounted to push along with Lothar and Berndt and Count Lecter himself. Branches snapped back behind them to close the trail again.

Hannibal smelled greenery crushed by the wheels and Mischa’s warm hair beneath his chin as she rode on his lap. He watched the German bombers pass over high. Their vapor trails made a musical staff and Hannibal hummed to his sister the notes the black puffs of flak made in the sky. It was not a satisfying tune.

“No,” Mischa said. “Anniba sing
‘Das Mannlein’
!” And together they sang about the mysterious little man in the woods, Nanny joining in in the swaying wagon and Mr. Jakov singing from horseback, though he preferred not to sing in German.

Two hard hours brought them to a clearing beneath the canopy of the high forest.

The hunting lodge had evolved over three hundred years from a crude shelter into a comfortable forest retreat, half-timbered with a steep roof to shed the snow. There was a small barn containing two stalls and a bunkhouse and, behind the lodge, a Victorian privy with gingerbread carvings, its roof just visible over the screening hedge.

Still visible in the foundations of the lodge are the stones of an altar built in the Dark Ages, by a people who venerated the grass snake.

Now Hannibal watched a grass snake flee that ancient place as Lothar cut back some vines so Nanny could open windows.

Count Lecter ran his hands over the big horse while it drank a gallon and a half from the well bucket. “Cook will have the kitchen packed by the time you get back, Berndt. Cesar can rest in his own
stall overnight. You and Cook start back here at first light, no later. I want you well clear of the castle by morning.”

Vladis Grutas entered the courtyard of Lecter Castle with his most pleasant expression, scanning the windows as he came. He waved and called out “Hello!”

Grutas was a slight figure, dirty blond, in civilian clothes, with eyes so pale and blue they looked like discs of the empty sky. He called out “Hello in the house!” When there was no reply he went in the kitchen entrance and found cases of supplies packed on the kitchen floor. Quickly he put coffee and sugar in his pack. The cellar door was open. He looked down the long stairs and saw a light.

Violating another creature’s den is the oldest taboo. To certain warps, slipping in offers the freezing feeling of arousal, as it did now.

Grutas went down the staircase into the cool cave air of the castle’s vaulted dungeons. He peered through an arch and saw that the iron grate securing the wine room was open.

A rustling noise. Grutas could see labeled wine racks floor to ceiling filled with bottles and the cook’s big shadow moving around the room as he worked by the light of two lanterns. Square wrapped packages were on the tasting table in the center of the room and, with them, a single small painting in an ornate frame.