The trumpeter of Krakow

by Eric P. Kelly

“Well”—Joseph liked to see the blue eyes widen—“one night the Tartars will attack the city, or perhaps the Knights of the Cross. I shall see them coming from afar, in the midst of fire and smoke, and I shall hear war cries and their horses hoofs. And I shall be all alone in the tower that night, for neither my father nor any person will be here. And when I realize that it is an enemy, I must have a signal, since I myself may not leave the tower—a signal to some one in the town who will give the alarm. So I will play the Heynal, but I will not stop on the broken note. That note does not end the measure, you know. I will play on, two or three notes further.”

“Excellent,” she cried, and her cheeks were red with the excitement of it. “If I hear you play the Heynal without stopping at the broken note, I will run straight to Jan Kanty.”

“Now, come look at the city,” he broke off conversation on the subject. He was a little ashamed, for he had not expected Elzbietka to take his remarks quite so seriously. She had not taken the trumpet signal as the jest he intended, but had rejoiced at it as do most young people when they have a secret with some important person. And to her Joseph was a person of very great importance, not only because of his prowess with the trumpet and his progress in the collegium, but because, indeed, he possessed somehow more than ordinary seriousness for a boy of his age.

They peered through a little window. Off to the right ran the Street of St. Florian with the gate and church beyond: new towers were being constructed that very year in the walls that ran about the city and two of them near the Florian Gate were visible from the tower of the Church of Our Lady Mary. To each city guild was assigned one of these towers, to be kept in repair and to be manned in case of attack on the city. The joiners’ and the tailors’ guilds had watchtowers near this gate. Between these watchtowers and the church were many palaces with large enclosures in the center, open to the sun, where guards and soldiers were working or waiting or disporting themselves, breaking each other’s heads with quarterstaves or fencing, or shooting with arrows at pigeons tied to the tops of high poles.

Directly below them the market was still busy although it was late afternoon, for the peasants were ready to sell at small profit what remained of their stock and go home; under the arches of the Cloth Hall the crowds were still passing from booth to booth examining the laces and embroidery and fine silks that had come in from the east and south; beyond the Cloth Hall rose the tower of the Town House, or Ratusz, and in front of it two luckless wretches struggled in the pillory while a crowd of urchins pelted them with mud and decayed vegetables. To the left rose the peak of the Church of the Franciscans—they passed to the south window and there saw the twin towers of the old Church of St. Andrew, and far beyond it the great rock citadel, the Wawel, with its palace and cathedral glorious in the afternoon sun.

There were blue shadows already lengthening across the market when they descended from the tower and crossed the market square. Against the palaces that lined the open space there were more shadows, and moving like shadows within these shadows, promenaded black-gowned students and masters. They were moving definitely in one direction, and when once caught up in the crowd, Joseph and Elzbietka followed, unresisting, for they knew that some excitement was afoot in the students’ quarter.

The black figures grew constantly more and more numerous, until at length the two stopped and pushed right and left in an endeavor to reach a position of vantage in front of the dormitory in St. Ann’s Street. The dormitory was set back from the street, and in front was an open court, grassed over, in the center of which was a stone statue of Kazimir the Great, the founder of the university. Here upon the pedestal of this statue, leaning back upon the throne which bore Kazimir, stood a man in the gown of a Master of Arts speaking to the assembled students in the Latin language.

“I heard of him to-day,” Joseph told Elzbietka. “He is a celebrated Italian scholar who comes here to read the writings of the master poets and to recite some verses of his own. He talks of poets who bear such names as Dante and Petrarch, and he says that the day will come when a new learning will rule the world. He says that men have been in darkness too long, that the barbarism which fell upon the world after the downfall of Rome will be done away with only when men write in their native tongues and think for themselves.”

“And can you really understand him when he speaks?”