Greetings and Salutations (page 49)
from Rockcastle Rathen, Renaissance Castle Moritzburg, Kopenhagen by the Sea
The rockcastle Rathen stands high, impossibly, breath-snatchingly high, over the river Elbe. Leading to it is the bastion bridge, that bridge high in the sky. When you stand on it, the wind whips through your hair, and you cling to the stone ledges, as you inch your way forward. Especially if you have a one year old baby boy on your back.
Constantia of Cosel, carrying little Friedrich, August the Cold’s son, on her back, was walking back to the rockcastle Rathen. The boy was wrapped against the cold and against too much freedom atop the mountain, and his little booted feet were protruding from the damask carrier, and pounding a tattoo.
She did not feel safe at the King’s Rock eight kilometers away. She had come, over the last two hours, with her son on her back, down the mesa, across the river, and up to Rathen. Here she had spent part of her girlhood. Up here on the peaks that remind one of Hungshan and Huashan in Cathay, she knew the inhospitable and almost impenetrable heights and twists, rock caves and stone sanctuaries. Her fear was of the boy being taken away from her, and she had reasons to fear. So little round-cheeked protesting Friedrich, not making it easy for his mother, was up on top of the world, the rockcastle Rathen.
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A little less than fifty kilometers or three hours by cantering horse is Castle Moritzburg, where Cinderella’s prince awaits. She’s been gone for days, and he’s hunting and waiting for her. It’s not unusual for her to be gone for so long. She was a mysterious one, and the prince had plenty of lust for hunting. From the renaissance Castle Moritzburg he could see in the distance Pheasant Mansion. Pheasant Mansion is a funny Haus. He could see it plainly, glinting and so attractive in the sun. Its verdigris roof and cheerful pink walls beckoning. He was itching to take his luck with his cross-bow against the pheasants around it. But like a mirage, no matter how often he set off on the tree-lined allee, he never reached Pheasant Mansion.
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Pheasant Mansion was seated in imagination, on magic. One could see it from certain magnificent castles, looking out of a gilt window, a prince may catch a glimpse of its stupendous and imposing beauty. Cinderella’s prince could. The little meer-maid’s prince could, too.
Out on the Baltic Sea, where so much happens, the little meer-maid was sitting on a rock before Kopenhagen, where a castle’s broad marble steps ran down to the sea. She was only fifteen, too young to get married. But she didn’t know that. She was looking up at “her” Danish prince, who was already seventeen, and about to get married, to someone else. Isn’t that how it often goes?
The young son of a cobbler and a laundress, a boy who called himself HC Andersen, who lived beneath the tall steeples and over the cobblestones of Kopenhagen by the sea, saw the little meer-maid, and the swallow who was his friend told him her story.