by Ben Hopkins
The window above the draughtsman is oiled muslin, the light is dim. Alenard’s eyes water with squinting. “I will go,” says Achim, “and find a glazier.”
“The glazier is not the issue,” says Alenard. “We have no money to pay him.”
“Is the Treasurer not back from his journeys?”
Brother Alenard chuckles. “Not yet. And from that raven you won’t get a penny. We are his poison.”
Achim flicks his fingers. “In small doses, poison purges,” he says. “Let me go and be a purgative. Maybe he will sick up some silver.”
“You can try. Just mind that you don’t purge him from the other end.”
Achim smiles and looks to the floor. Rettich watches him from the corner where he is cleaning and oiling the tools. He looks at his Master’s soft face, clean-shaven and boyish, his roving hazel eyes, his fidgeting hands. From the twitching of his body it seems that von Esinbach is always discomforted, ill-at-ease, but whenever he speaks, he is mild and calm, whenever he looks at someone, the gaze is gentle and unguarded. He favours soft clothing of autumnal colours—russet, copper and brown. And he loses himself. His eyes veil over, his gaze wanders, closing off the world and drifting into distance.
And now his eyes land on Rettich, and it seems they do not see him. But when Rettich smiles, Achim returns to the world, and smiles back, in warm embarrassment, realising that he has been staring at the apprentice as if into a Void.
Alenard’s voice calls von Esinbach back to the world of work. “For the roof, we need slate. There’s no slate here. We need to source it from somewhere. And to underpin the spire, we need tall, strong timbers, with some bend in them, not too much. I’ve not seen timber like that in the forests near here.”
“No, nor I neither,” says Achim.
“I have,” says Rettich, speaking into the silence. All turn to look at the unbidden voice. “There’s a gully below my village. Three trees there are the highest I’ve ever seen.”
“Three won’t be enough, Rettich,” Alenard smiles benevolently.
“I can find more. And there’s some more growing. When will you need them? When will you build it?”
Work pauses. Tension of the Unanswerable Question in the air. Eyes turn to Alenard, who puts down his quill and holds up his innocent palms to the room. “Don’t gape my way!” he cries. “Go ask the Treasurer!” Rethinks, rephrases. “Go ask God!”
Still everyone is looking at him. He shrugs. “They are still building the Our Lady in Paris.”
“And when did they begin?”
“I don’t know. Sixty years ago.”
Silence. Rettich dries the tools with a rag. “Then there’s time to plant new trees for the steeple. And wait for them to grow.”
† † †
In the winter months, to save on fuel, Rettich will sleep in the Lodge itself. The nearby apprentices’ shack is now cold and empty, the other boys have taken leave and returned to distant hearths and homes. And so, as the short day closes, Rettich fetches his bowl of soup from the Refectory and hurries, clogs clattering over the sodden cobblestones, to the Lodge, the solitary makeshift building at the corner of the Cathedral construction site.
But on this night of sleet and rain he is not alone. Achim is seated at his drawing desk, staring into the darkness. On hearing Rettich’s steps, he turns, and his eyes are wide. “I am golden,” he says. “Golden, Rettich.”
“Master?”
“Tell me, where do ideas come from?”
Rettich is silent. Not because he wishes to be, but simply because he does not know what to say. He has heard the stories whispered amongst the Apprentices, of Achim’s madness. They say he has fits of black bile followed by ecstasies that make him rave, drink and spend money as if it were made of water. They say he has a scar on his back from where Satan extracted his soul in exchange for the revelation of the New Cathedral.
“When you make your little wood carvings, what are you thinking?”
“I don’t know, Master. I don’t know. It’s like my mind wanders off on a cloud and my hands do the thinking.”
“Yes!”
“The world goes into you through your eyes and ears, Master, and through your nose! The senses! But then it must all mix about like a soup inside you, all those sights and sounds and smells . . . and come out through your hands. That’s the way it’s always seemed to me.”
Rettich blushes. Burbling on about himself like a mountain brook in the presence of his Master. “And you, My Lord, where do your ideas come from?”
“Ah! If I knew that, Rettich . . . If only I knew! From God, I hope. From the angels.” And he waves his hands over the draughts and drawings hanging above the working tables. “For could a work like this ever come from the Devil?”
“No, my Lord.”
“Rettich, tonight . . . I don’t want to be alone. Will you stay with me? Will you drink with me? I have silver in my purse. A handful of pennies! I am made of gold!”
Rettich blushes once more, and looks to the floor.
† † †
The tavern that Achim takes them to is far from golden, merely the first that they passed on their way outside. Smoke-blackened beams and tablecloths whose hems glisten with the pork-fat wiped from hungry mouths. A cauldron of soup bubbling over the smouldering embers, baked clay pitchers of cheap, sweet Rhenish.
But for Achim it is the Earthly Paradise. His eyes shine with wine as he leans back in his chair by the fire. He seems to care nothing that he is the only nobleman present, surrounded by carters, porters and thieves. And yet Rettich is nervous, drinking deep to find Courage at the bottom of his cup.
And suddenly a man is standing in the centre of the room, dressed in a wide broad-brimmed hat and a leather cloak. In the beginning was the Light, says this Wanderer, and his accent is strange, an accent Rettich has never heard before, and there was nothing but the Light and nothing for the Light to know itself by, and so it created Darkness.
What strange words, and everyone feels it, the tavern becomes silent. The Wanderer, still in his long, patched coat, as if he had just now walked in from the rain and sleet, crouches, raises his arms, sweeps the air, spins.
And the Light circled the Darkness and the Darkness circled the Light, and they fell in Love with each other and created . . . Fire.
He waves his arms, and suddenly there is a small flame in his right hand and the audience gasps! . . . For Fire, look, my Friends, and he holds the flame aloft like in the Mass the priest holds aloft the Body of Our Lord, is a Child of both Darkness and Light.
Silence in the tavern. Inside, fire- and candlelight. Outside, gentle rain. A sodden coat, steaming by the hearth. Two beautiful young girls, watching the performance, bright-eyed, admiring. The Wanderer’s children?
The Wanderer speaks again, hushed. The Light in the Flame reaches upwards to the Home of Light above, and the Darkness sucks her down . . . down into the wood, the charcoal, into the Stuff of the World, into the Darkness.
His palm closes and the flame is no more. His pallid face, once lit by the magical light from his palm, now sinks in gloom.
He opens his palm again, and there is nothing. A vulnerable, human hand, shown open to all, held out, the sign of Peace. No trace of soot, no wound, no burning.
Fires burn in the Heaven, he says, holding out his arms, palms aloft, like a supplicant. The sun, the moon, the stars. And here on earth . . . he gestures to the tavern grate . . . fire gives us warmth, gives us bread, purifies the fruits of the earth to give us Iron, give us Silver, give us Gold.
My Lord, he says, holding out his palm to Achim, I and my two girls are fallen on ill times. We are weavers, wandering from place to place, looking for a position, looking for money to start our business anew. So please it God, touch my palm with your charity.
And the Wanderer’s two girls approach and kneel, and Achim
looks on them. And Rettich can see how his Master’s face begins to glow. For the older girl, of some fourteen summers, is of the kind of beauty that awakens Adoration in men.
Achim bends towards her. “What is your name, maid?”
“Odile, My Lord.”
He takes her hand in his. “Odile, will you marry me?”
“No, My Lord.”
There are tears in Achim’s eyes as he holds his hands up to his face. And pulls off his ring, set with a large amber stone. “But take this ring, Odile. And remember me. Remember me.”
And then Master Achim reaches into his coat and withdraws his purse. And into the beautiful girl’s outstretched, ivory hand, he places, one by one, thirteen silver pennies, a Devil’s shilling.
ANNO
1231
A KNOT OF VIPERS
(ANNO 1231. EUGENIUS VON ZABERN II)
And the Lord said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, From going to and fro in the earth and from walking up and down in it. And the Lord said unto Satan, hast thou considered my servant Job?
Hast thou considered my servant Eugenius von Zabern? He too, like Satan, goes to and fro in the mud and walks up and down in it as he marches from one pestilent village to another in January’s gloom. And all in the service of our Holy Mother Church and in the search for funds for the New Cathedral.
We are trailing through yet another mud-doused forest on our petulant mules and horses. At the front and back of our train, in case of trouble, ride our armed mercenaries, a motley of delinquents with colourfully painted noses, who, it must be said, are quite willing to fight or take prisoners when called upon. I am in the centre of the train, on my black palfrey, who carries me and our coin. Ahead of me the two asses, carrying our pots, rations and bedding, so that my constant vision, when struggling uphill as now, is of a donkey’s anus.
Behind me ride my two junior clerks and our two manservants who make fires, cook, deal with the kitchens and domestics in those places where we pass the night, and who delouse us in the morning sun, if there ever is any (we saw the last sunshine six days ago). We are toiling uphill to one of the castles of the Count of Schonach who has caused us the inconvenience of not being at home in his Black Forest valley residence. For some godforsaken reason, he has chosen to pass this, the darkest month, in his damp pile of stones on the overlooking hill.
Yesterday a rainstorm on the pass forced us to change our itinerary and seek shelter in the village of Blankenau. It is a poor mountain place producing hardy livestock, inedible cheese and a fine-flavoured honey from the pasture flowers. The tithes it pays us are negligible, but I remembered that last year they underpaid us by seven pounds of candle wax. If I am honest, I do somewhat enjoy putting the mortal fear of God into our parish priests by calling by, unannounced. It usually has the result that the missing seven pounds of wax are miraculously found. Usually in the priest’s sideboard. And if it’s not wax, it’s honey, or wine, or good Hagenburg silver.
In Blankenau the priest responded to my unexpected arrival with a panic that was out of all proportion to seven pounds of missing wax. It was as if I were Satan himself, come to claim his immortal soul. His eyes were wide, his Adam’s apple bounced. “I will stay with you tonight,” I declared. “We will join you and your congregation for Mass in the morning, and then be on our way.”
“Mass?” he stuttered, as if he had somehow forgotten that tomorrow was the Sabbath.
I was exhausted, retired early. My host seemed to stay up all night, with the susurrus of whispered voices rising from the lower floor at all hours. Next morning, in the dilapidated church, there was an eerie atmosphere. It was full, but everyone seemed ill-at-ease and strangely silent, and when I looked around, no-one met my eye.
When the priest raised the host and the altar boy rang the bell, I swear I could hear giggling in the congregation, and someone audibly farted.
We left immediately after Mass in hostile silence. The villagers, dressed mainly in black, scattered away like crows. As we set on our way, an old man spat across our path and covered his cataract-clouded eyes.
Looking back on it now, some hours later on this clammy Sunday, I cannot quite explain to myself the feelings of horror I felt in that cold and ramshackle church. The mass was conducted correctly, the congregants responded in muttered liturgy as they should. Yet somehow in the details it was wrong, as if seen through a mirror. All clear and true, yet reversed, back to front.
And it makes me think of the many rumours I have heard of late, of secret, heretical cults amongst the travelling weavers, of whole villages that have spat upon the cross and apostatised. Of a heretic Abbot in the wealthy convent of Mohrmünster, who claims that he has spoken in person with the Holy Spirit, and who fornicates with the Abbess and with all of her nuns.
One of our horses is sick, we slide in the mud as we struggle uphill. My juniors mutter that the old blind man has cursed us, that the Devil is on our backs. They startle and shiver when a boar grunts in the distance, say it sounds like a screaming purgatorial soul. “It is a boar,” I tell them gently, “you idiots.”
But the Lord is kind to His Servants, and the muddy ascent is over quicker than I had feared. In the castle courtyard, the servants treat us frostily but with decorum, bring us water, and the horses some hay. The Count von Schonach awaits me upstairs, he does not condescend to leave the warmth of his parlour to greet me. I take no offence. After all, he must receive a never-ending stream of visitors up here in the mists of January. He must be weary of Society.
I keep him waiting and gratefully feed my black palfrey a turnip for having borne me so laboriously. My party is admitted into the servants’ quarters for soup, but, at my orders, two armed men climb the castle stairs with me. What I have to discuss with the Count is delicate, and potentially fractious. They wait outside as I am invited into My Lord Schonach’s presence.
Fair-haired but balding and ruddy-skinned, he stands before his fireplace, wrapped in a heavy russet-brown cloak. After the greetings and salutations deemed necessary for Courtly Propriety, I am finally handed a chalice (silver-plated!) of warm, spiced wine and offered a seat by the fire. I am so chilled and damp I nearly forget to bless the cup and thank the Lord. But I remember as the chalice is at my lips, and—truly grateful—I silently give thanks to Our Father in Heaven, and drink deep, for the wine is good.
Now, refreshed, to the kernel of the matter. “We hear you prefer to pledge your loyalty to King Heinrich rather than to His Grace the Bishop?”
Schonach dissembles: shock, surprise.
“Is it true? Then you will not be wanting the pension of one hundred marks annual that His Grace pays you?”
Schonach spreads his hands, splutters protest, can’t find the words. I find them for him. “There is no truth to the rumours.”
“No. That is, yes. King Heinrich needs our support, does he not?”
“He is Our King. Support, what for, exactly?”
“Against the Emperor, who is in the ban of the church.”
“Support against his own father?”
“His own father, excommunicate.”
“Who has just won Jerusalem back for Christ.”
“Without striking a blow.”
“If he can win Jerusalem from the Infidel without shedding blood, is this not—?”
The Count interrupts, red in the face, “It’s not the ISSUE!”
Silence, as the Count regathers his Courtly Propriety which has momentarily gone astray. To discuss politics with anyone is usually a fruitless experience; everyone states their case ill-temperedly, everyone vociferously disagrees, and, at the end, everyone believes exactly what they believed at the beginning. And then, what’s more, to discuss the complexities of the ever-changing relations between the imperial Staufen family and the Popes with a provincial aristocrat, this is close to the definition of fruitless. I s
hould know, I come from a family of provincial aristocrats. Praise be to God, I escaped to the bosom of the Church, and the consolation of Numbers.
“And what is the issue, My Lord Schonach?”
“We must be rid of that red-haired heretic.”
“You mean Emperor Friedrich?”
“Who else?”
So, the rumours are true. Heinrich is canvassing support in the northern provinces to depose his own father as Emperor. He must have sent letters, messengers, ambassadors to these lonely Lords in their countless castle eyries around the German Lands. To sound them out, implore, cajole. And look at the result: the blotchy, choleric and moaning Graf von Schonach can’t wait to start a civil war.
“Tell me, My Lord Treasurer,” says Schonach, “if it came to it, which side would His Grace be on? For Heinrich? Or for Friedrich?”
I sigh, look at the Count, and it occurs to me that he is, simply, bored. He is bored out of his tiny, apoplectic mind. In this weather, he can’t even hunt. All he can do is sit in his Black Forest hole, throw bones at his dogs, and watch the rain spurt from the grimy gutters. How much more entertaining it would be to spend his Bishop’s pension on raising a troupe of mercenaries to go and split skulls and burn down buildings.
Pope Gregory, Emperor Friedrich, King Heinrich fighting like cats in a sack, whilst the Nobles watch on and place bets on who will win. And whilst the Lords of this World fight, unrest, heresy and misrule grow in the fertile darkness like mould on damp, warm rye.
What can I do? Panic? Run back to His Grace with my arms in the air, screaming that the gentry are plotting (again . . . )?
If My Lord Schonach can dissemble surprise, then I can dissemble disinterest. I yawn, take a luxurious gulp from the chalice. “Excellent wine, my Lord.”
“The spices are from Acre. I brought them back from the Crusade. From the proper Crusade, where we actually fought the Saracen, with arms. Didn’t just enact diplomacy and throw gold at the enemy to buy back Jerusalem. As if money were everything.”