Cathedral

by Ben Hopkins

  He will say the Honour word now.

  “Where’s the Honour in that?”

  It is wearying to be right, on occasion. But the Count Schonachs of this world I have known since I was a boy, and as Treasurer, it is from my hands that their peace and co-operation are bought, twice annually.

  “Indeed.” I look the Count in the eye. “His Grace the Bishop determines the diplomatic policy of this diocese. His vassals, such as you, My Lord, have signed an undertaking not to take any action that may threaten the peace of these lands. You are free to do as you will, but not on the Bishop’s pension. If you no longer require the hundred marks a year, you are free. If you wish to receive the next instalment, His Grace awaits you, before the commencement of Lent, in Hagenburg, where you will kiss his hand in the public eye as a demonstration of your continued fealty.”

  Count Schonach mutters something. It sounds like “bloody extortioner,” but it is much of a muchness to me. From his reaction, I gather that, this time at least, we can expect him in Hagenburg before the week is out. Silver chalices do not grow on the Black Forest’s branches.

  But, despite my success, I am discomforted. There is doubtless something behind Schonach’s wavering loyalties; some attempted realignment of the balance of power—a balance which is only very precariously maintained in these fractious Alsatian lands.

  “Come in time for the Carnival, why don’t you,” I suggest civilly to the cantankerous Count. “You will feel better for a dance, a drink, and a change of perspective. These woods are so gloomy in winter, I find.”

  He looks as if he would like to throttle me, but offers me dinner instead. We have a whole evening of delightful conversation to look forward to.

  † † †

  What a knot of vipers they seem, the Lords of this Earth, from afar. Heinrich, who would depose his own Father. And Bishop Berthold, from the damp distance of Schonach castle, seems a despot Croesus, a golden spider sitting on a giant web, with all the lands in his dominion spread out beneath his black, unfeeling carapace.

  But come closer and see . . . the Bishop is just a man with watering eyes, colic and indigestion. Who looks on a farmer’s cart with envy, because there is a simple life in the sacks of corn and swinging children’s legs that will never be his.

  Nor mine neither. We are up well before dawn like monks, and out on our horses as soon as we can see our own noses in the gloom. Snow is falling, gently. If we are lucky we will make the monastery at St. Trudpert before sundown. The monastery is well provided and its refectory highly praised. If God is willing, let me at least get some good food in my belly before Lent begins.

  The snow falls heavier, and my horse is lamed a good distance from the nearest blacksmith. Devil take our luck, we will not make the monastery tonight. We will sleep in some other verminous village and eat stewed cabbage.

  It is worse, we must sleep in a barn. Like Our Lord Jesus Christ’s first night on this Earth, says my junior clerk, sentimentally. Well let us hope that Bethlehem is blessed by more clement climes than a damp hillside in the Black Forest. The manservants strew the straw, prepare the bedding, light a fire, heat the broth. The clerks sit and shiver, keeping a fearful eye on the dark outside, trembling with terror at the bark of a fox. They are Cathedral Schoolboys who only feel safe in cloisters, surrounded by their own Latin-speaking, nib-scratching kind. For them, Nature is full of threat and Evil.

  They know that I have learned the Book of Job by heart, and to distract themselves from the terrors of the dark, they question me about it. But I am weary and short-tempered, and have no patience for Latin biblical debates. I would rather listen to the knocks and hisses of the fire, and find in my mind a huge number that I can prove to myself to be divisible by seven.

  This is what calms me; the parade and infinity of numbers.

  We eat broth and hard bread. Outside the snow falls steadily, and we clerics fall silent. Two of the mercenaries, the Englander and the Danelander, have made friends, and are chatting quietly in some halfway language that they both seem to understand. Maybe it is the mother tongue of some island found in the northern seas between their two countries, inhabited by sea monsters and scaly beasts, who knows, but whatever it is, it sounds like the amorous grunting of toads. Strangely, it is conducive to sleep.

  Sinners that they are, they have stolen some plum aquavit from the Count’s cellar, and offer me a cup of it. God bless you, sirs. With its stolen sinful warmth in my belly I can lie down like an animal in the straw and hope to find sleep this freezing night.

  Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind,

  Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?

  Hast thou entered the treasuries of the snow?

  Hath the rain a father?

  Who hath begotten the drops of dew?

  Out of whose womb came the ice?

  Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?

  Who laid the corner stone thereof,

  when the morning stars sang together?

  † † †

  Whispering voices, sweet song awake me at dawn. A thrush is singing in the frosted branches, and my clerks are convinced it is a Devil trying to seduce them. They stop their ears against its liquid rush of song, the idiots. I pull out their fingers, and tell them to read the Book of Job and see thereby how proud the Lord is of his Creation. They should not offend God’s creatures by calling them Devils.

  They have referred to the bird, in their Cathedral School Latin, as a passer, which is “sparrow” in the vulgate. I also tell them they should have the respect to call the fowl of the air by their correct name, and this is a thrush, which in our Alsatian tongue is a “Trossle,” and in Latin a “turdus.” Genesis Two, and the Lord God formed every fowl of the air and brought them unto the man to see what he would call them, and whatsoever the man called every living creature, that was the name thereof. This sparks a discussion between the clerks (one is from the Aargau, one is from the Land of Oc) and the manservants (both Alsatian) about the name of the bird that is presently singing. No-one can agree on its name.

  Later, after hurried prayers and some more of last night’s soup, as we are loading the horses, I hear my clerks discuss Count Schonach’s black cats. There were two in the kitchen, apparently. The clerks think these were Schonach’s black magic familiars, keeping an eye upon us, and reporting back to their Dark Lord at midnight.

  They will be calmer when we reach the monastery. And they will dispense with this demonological nonsense by the time we leave the dark forest behind, and reach the wide Rhine plateau, where the shadows disperse.

  † † †

  O, Lands of Babel, where one singing bird has a hundred names. Today, on our short, snowbound trudge to St. Trudpert, we pass from Schonach’s lands to the Bishop’s, whence to the lands of the Dukes of Zähringen, and all are under the same white snow as God made them, without visible border or boundary.

  We reach the monastery at noon, and we are grateful for it. The Abbot is an ally of His Grace, pays his tithes promptly and to the penny, and keeps a good Christian establishment of calm and study in these snowy foothills. His cellar is good, his larder well plenished, and we will want for nothing.

  † † †

  We are back on the Rhine plain, God be praised, and heading for home. In Offenau we stop for food in the parsonage and hear from the priest’s maidservant (cum concubine, no doubt) that a local landowner of a hundred acres is on her deathbed.

  My clerks look at me in silent pleading. They had hoped to be in their own cells in Hagenburg tonight, even if it meant riding the last leagues in darkness. But Duty is Duty, the New Cathedral needs funding, and as soon as we have supped, we are riding off to the lady’s manor like vultures flying to the rumour of carrion.

  Yet it seems we arrive too late. A smooth Dominican is already there, holding her bony hand and l
ooking pleased with himself. Her heirs, two sons and two daughters, stand at the foot of the bed, looking distraught. In part, because their beloved mother is dying, and in greater part, because she has just bequeathed a good tranche of their inheritance to the Dominican, for the building of his monastery in Hagenburg, and for one hundred years less in Purgatory.

  It’s twenty marks I could have had for my Bottomless Hole, the New Cathedral. If the Dominican left the room, I could quietly make my counterbid, offer her eternal soul a Mass in one of the apse chapels once a year for the next hundred. But maybe that Preaching Vulture has already offered a Mass at his half-built monastery in Finckweiler? He eyes me charily, kneels to pray for the dying. I and my clerks gather round, we all recite together.

  My reverent half-closed eyes flicker over in the Dominican’s direction every minute or so. Surely, at some juncture, he will have to leave the room to urinate? Or is it now a contest between his bladder and her mortal frame? Which will hold out the longer?

  “My Lady,” I say, after a while. Why stand on decorum? “The Cathedral, Our Lady of Hagenburg, is to be rebuilt in the New Style to the Glory of God. It is conceived as the New Temple of New Jerusalem, it will have a roof of Gold, three Towers that pierce the heavens, twelve Portals, one for every disciple and one for every tribe of Israel, nine Altars, and will be one of the great wonders of Christendom. We are offering . . . ”

  I pause as a bilious secretion oozes out of her mouth, and one of her daughters reaches for the cloth and bowl of water, sending me a recriminatory glance.

  “ . . . for twenty marks, a mass to be said in a side chapel annually . . . ”

  The oozing has become a hacking coughing, and suddenly the children are all running to her side. The Preaching Brother, damn him, raises his eyebrow at me, and gently gestures towards the door. We go outside.

  Here the snow has not settled, and the plain stretches out in a motley of browns, greens and greys. “Brother Treasurer,” says the Dominican, “I have already changed her Will the once, and that took mortal effort. Before she redrafted in our favour, it was promised to the Abbey at Mohrmünster. But have you heard the rumours about that cursed place?”

  I lie and tell him that I have heard nothing. And so he whispers to me that he has heard direct witness of how the Abbot fornicates with the nuns (I am meant to be shocked, I think), how the Abbot believes himself some kind of God (this is more surprising, to be sure) and how he propagates heresies, such as that the Holy Ghost had sexual union with Mary (this, surely, if true, is the Abbot’s death sentence).

  I no longer need to dissemble alarm and outrage with this priggish, preaching fool. If there is truth in these claims, then action will have to be taken.

  We thank you for the information, Brother. You can keep your twenty marks from this bilious biddy, I am now hunting bigger game. Mohrmünster Abbey is within the lands of the Bishop of Metz, and is subject directly to the Pope himself. But if it is presently in the hands of heretics, then everything those heretics own, by ecclesiastical law, falls to the hands of the Holy Roman Church.

  And I know only too well, the Abbot and Abbess of Mohrmünster alone must be worth several, several hundred marks. And everything they own is now free for the taking.

  THE COUNTING HOUSE

  (ANNO 1231. MANFRED GERBER I)

  Mohrmünster Abbey. Dawn. He’s shitting himself. He doesn’t know it, but this is the day that will change his life. His hand trembles on the hilt of his sword. A dawn raid on a monastery protected by a troop of mercenaries. He’s been in the militia three years, but this is different from rolling drunks and chasing thieves. An ambush.

  Thick mist from the brook, frost-brittle branches, dim grey light. Snow underfoot, steam from the horses’ nostrils. From the nearby village, the dawn bell: once, twice, thrice.

  Treasurer von Zabern; aristocrat from a noble house going back countless generations, manager of the Bishop’s thousands of marks, and big joyless bastard hated by all, touches his silver cross. It’s big, must weigh eight ounces. Manfred calculates; he’s learned from his uncle in the Counting House: that’s about two hundred and forty silver pennies. Just hanging from that arsehole’s neck.

  Arsehole mutters something, waves his hands a few times. So he’s praying? What will God make of that one? What does God do with all the words lisped at Him? Lord bless this rapacious attack on one of your monasteries. Why is it the bastard Treasurer in charge today? And not the Armourer or one of the Bishop’s countless vassal knights?

  Arsehole waves his hand: signal to get ready. Manfred’s bowel loosens, but he gets it under control, pats his horse: a sorrel gelding. Present from his father, God bless him: the horse got Manfred a place in the raid; only mounted men can take part. During the week Manfred hires him out as a packhorse, and on Sundays he decks him out in fine harnessings and a saddle of Schlettstadt leather, and rides around in search of girls. But they never take him seriously. Girls like the noble boys, in their bright colours. Not some drab Rhine trader’s son, smelling of caulking tar.

  The Treasurer raises his hand, lets it fall. The signal to advance. Manfred’s stomach lurches, his heart pounds. Holy Mary, this is it. Spurs the gelding. Seventeen of them, mounted, armed, hit a canter towards the Mohrmünster gates. Treasure-Arsehole has briefed them: these are heretics and adulterers, unarmed monks and nuns, protected by a handful of lousy mercenaries. A mission for God and the Bishop. He gave them dispensations; blood-spilling here won’t count as a sin. And if you believe that, you can believe anything.

  But this is Metz’s territory, isn’t it? Not Hagenburg’s?

  Friedrich, Captain of the Militia, knocks at the Abbey gate. The troop fans out behind the Gatehouse, out of sight.

  Clunking sounds; the gate spyhole opening. The lay-brother idiot gatekeeper looks out, sees the cleric von Zabern, suspects nothing, opens up . . . Screams as he sees a sudden troop of sixteen horsemen bearing towards him. Bertle, Manfred’s closest friend and another Rhine Harbour merchant’s boy, thwacks the gatekeeper with the flat of his sword; “Shut your mouth.”

  They clatter into the main courtyard and rein in, look around in the surprising silence. Cretin gate-boy is on his knees, clutching his bruised skull. Where are the mercenaries?

  They’re hired by the Abbot to protect Mohrmünster’s lands and treasures from marauding bands. Marauding bands may have been common when Manfred was a boy, when the Bishop and the Staufens were squabbling over every fence and boundary post. But for some years now, Peace has ruined their business.

  And so, with no marauders around to test their mettle, the mercenaries have grown paunchy and lazy, and—it seems—they are still a-bed.

  Three of them now come stumbling out of the gatehouse, rubbing their eyes, pulling on their armour, waving swords and halberds, wondering what the devilfuck’s gone and happened. Seeing them like this, half dressed and half asleep, it’s already obvious that the fight’s over, but seven of the Hagenburg number are young noblemen, and they’ve not come all this way just to see three mercenary beer guts and a white flag.

  Young Statius von Fegersheim, eager to cover himself in chivalrous glory, charges straight at them, waves his dashing blade and nearly clean cuts off the first mercenary’s head. Seeing his bloody success, he utters a scream of horror, which he is quick to convert into a “hurrah” of knightly triumph, as he panic-scrambles his stallion to turn about and retreat . . .

  The other mercenaries flinch and look with pale discomfort at their companion’s near-severed head, now joined only by the spine and some bloody cordons to his twitching body. Then they fall silent and look at each other. A lake of blood slicks over the cobblestones. They turn to the Treasurer.

  “Ten shillings each and we’ll leave in peace,” says their leader, in an idiotic-sounding Swiss accent; just like the Hayseed Dunce character in the Feast of Fools plays. The Hagenburg troop crumple with laughter. Haysee
d Dunce reddens to the colour of cider apples. Von Zabern sheathes his sword, rests his gloved hands on the pommel. “Take three each and consider yourselves fortunate.”

  † † †

  The main part of the troop is sent to the Abbey to round up the monks from their dawn prayers. There might be some fighting, so the knights are needed. Manfred and Bertle get the “soft” detail: shake out the nuns at the nunnery.

  That’s just royal gold for them; it couldn’t be better. Here they are, haring around the herb-garden, kicking up slush from their geldings’ hooves, shouting, “To the main courtyard you heretic whores!” and other such niceties. The nuns run, screaming, pulling their black habits over their white gowns. Some men are running with them: monks, lay brothers and other boyfriends: so what Treasure-Fucker said is true; this is more of a brothel than a nunnery.

  Bertle has a long spear shaft, has some fun lifting the sisters’ skirts with it. They’re a fine-looking spread of whores—a better selection here than the worn-out sacks who work the zum thrunkenen Cahne.

  Beyond the herb garden, a paved pathway runs past the hospital and the leprosarium and into freedom. A group of three nuns and two half-dressed boys are trying their escape into the snowy fields . . . Manfred and Bertle canter up and chase them down.

  “Let us get away, what’s it to you?” says one of the men. Manfred taps him with the flat of his sword. “Let you get away, and we won’t get paid, that’s what it is to us.” With sword and spear and reeling horse, they sic them like sheep back into the monastery pen. A few blows to their arses send them running to the main Abbey square.

  Into the rooms, seeing if any are left in hiding. A long corridor, with the cells in rows on one side. These nuns, unmarriable daughters of fine families, live in luxury: silver plates, dried figs, spiced wine, perfumes, fine linen sheets. In the Abbess’ room, a stained glass Holy Virgin illumines an unmade bed of silk and Flemish linen. Golden candlesticks hold three-pound wax candles.