by Ben Hopkins
Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.
† † †
“Brother, wake up. Pssst! Wake up!”
Emmle’s voice.
Rettich rises from the corner where he has been lying, looks round with grey-filmed eyes in the gloom.
“I could hardly find you,” says Emmerich, “lying in this dark corner like a barn cat.”
“I was tired. I was awake all night,” mutters Rettich.
“Doing what? Playing dice with the murderers?”
“Thinking, Emmle.”
“Oh, that’s not good.”
“Watching the votive candle. Praying. Reflecting.”
“It’s getting worse. What are you, a monk? Sleep at night like a man with a good conscience. Or do you not have one?”
“I have my worries.”
Emmerich smiles, takes his elder brother’s hand. “Come, let’s move away from the merchant benches.” He means the townsmen and traders in the South Transept, sitting at their discussions and meetings. One of them is looking over at Emmerich with an even, hostile stare.
“He owes my master money,” whispers Emmerich, “and it’s me who reminds him every godgiven day.”
When he started working for Rosheimer, Emmle did the cleaning and on the Jewish sabbath he lit candles, made fires, carried water, did those things forbidden the Jews on their holy day. Then there was a new boy who carried out these tasks, and Emmerich was apprenticed in Mayenz, in the family’s trading business. Now he’s back in Hagenburg, runs errands in the city, collects debts, talks to the merchants in the marketplace and in the harbour. He is Rosheimer’s eyes and ears.
Seated in the far corner, they smile at each other. Always in the same city, yet in different worlds, never meeting.
“Tell me, big brother,” says Emmerich, “what troubles you?”
“I must get married, Emmle.”
“Is that troubling you?”
“It is a law that all Companions must be married men. I have one year to find a wife.”
Emmerich’s hands sweep around, indicating the busy city around them, the thousands of people. “Well, choose one.”
“How?”
“There were some village girls as liked you.”
Rettich shakes his head.
“But there is a fairer choice here in the city. Who has taken your fancy?”
Rettich shakes his head once more.
“Is there no-one you like?”
“No-one. Master Landolt has shown me his cousin, a baker’s daughter.”
“And?”
“If I want her, it can be arranged.”
“And how is she?”
“I know nothing about girls, Emmle.”
“Nothing?”
Silence in the vast Cathedral. Terce prayers must have passed whilst Rettich slept. The time for the midday meal is approaching, and the benches and chapels are nearly empty. An ancient, crooked man is bending, slowly and painfully, to kneel before the Virgin. Somewhere in the dome, a pigeon coos softly.
“I know a place. I can take you there,” whispers Emmerich.
“A place?”
“Where there are girls. Women. They can teach you.”
Rettich looks at his younger brother, his eyes widening. “This place, have you been there?”
Emmerich looks at the flagstones, saying nothing. Silence stretches out between the brothers. Rettich looks at Emmle, remembers the little boy, playing with the newborn lambs. Throwing pebbles at the geese, laughing at nothing.
Emmerich breaks the silence. “Is it Holo the Baker’s daughter, by the way?”
“It is.”
“You could do much worse than her.”
Over by the portal, the hawker has sat down to eat his last, unsold bread roll himself. As he chews, his eyes are closed, as if trying to sleep whilst he eats. Rettich tries to picture Ällin the Baker’s daughter, her cheerful, round face. Tries to picture her naked body, pressed against his . . .
“What did the Canon say?” asks Emmle, after a while.
Rettich looks up from his fruitless reverie, clears his throat. “He says that the Church Synod was clear on the matter. All who work for the Jews are in the ban of the Church. Your soul is in danger, Emmle.”
“Herr Rosheimer and I have a solution.”
“Which is?”
“We will set up a subsidiary trading and investing company, in my name. To start this company I will borrow money from Rosheimer, and follow his instructions, at least to begin with. And I will pay myself wages from this company’s profits. When profit comes in, whose money is that? Money has no owner, it’s always changing hands. It means I no longer work for the Jews.”
Rettich looks at his brother with troubled eyes. “Do you think God is a lawyer? When he judges your soul, do you think he looks at contracts?”
“Show me where in the Gospels it says that it is a sin to work for the Jews.”
“You know better than the Holy Fathers?”
Emmerich shrugs. “What I know is that for two marks a year I can buy a dispensation from the Church that will allow me to work with Jews, without sinning.”
“Then buy it.”
“Why pay good money to that pack of fraudsters?”
“You mean the Church?”
Emmerich shrugs.
“When was the last time you went to Mass, Emmerich?”
For a while, Emmerich says nothing. Then he turns to his elder brother. “Have you really never, with a girl . . . just kissed, maybe?” he asks, mischievously.
Rettich cannot help himself, and smiles. “Friede, in the village, one Johannisfest.”
“And?”
Rettich winces, laughs. “I ran away!”
“Oh, my brother . . . ” sighs Emmerich. “The baker’s daughter is used to carrying heavy baskets of loaves. She’ll hold you and won’t let go.”
† † †
Rettich presses his ear against the temporary wall of the Nave. It is made of wood, mud and straw, and is there to separate the quiet of the Cathedral from the noise of the Site. With his ear pressed against it, Rettich can hear, muffled and distant, the sound of his brothers chiselling stone. Looking up, he can see the temporary Nave roof above him, the height of a tall poplar tree . . .
In the four years Rettich has been working there, they have built two arches of the Nave. Now they are completing the arcades. Once they are ready, and strong, they will help support the weight of the Nave’s soaring walls . . . and once more they will build upwards and onwards towards the Western façade.
Achim, his friend and master, is sick. It is a year now since he was taken from the Burning Grounds, restrained by three men, frothing at the mouth like a dog with the rage. For some days, locked in a room in the Chapter House, he raved, screamed and attempted the sin of suicide, and then, exhausted, he sank into a dull Lethargy. And in this state of sullen darkness he was taken away to the monastery of Avenheim in the foothills of the Vogesen, where the Mad of good families are held in silence.
Rettich remembers. The last good times he and Master Achim spent together, crossing into Winzbach in Lothringen in search of the maker of the yellow glass. Forest paths, dappled sunlight, a night of rain in a parish church, wrapped in woollen blankets on straw. A hamlet of foundries and charcoal-burners by a churning, sand-bedded river, and an old man with rheum-ringed eyes, the maker of the glass.
The glass-maker remembered the yellow batch—he had been trying to make red, but had used the sand from higher up the river bed, and it had come out ochre. He laughs that now his mistake has brought him good fortune. Master Achim leaves silver in his palm, makes him promise to teach his grandsons the secret of the yellow glass so that, when the Western Rose is built, the colour of sunlight can flood the Bishop’s Ch
urch.
After his collapse, Achim lies in his bare cell in Avenheim Monastery, hardly moving, hardly eating, drinking, speaking. Rettich visits him on Sundays, chatters away into the dismal silence. His friend’s back is turned to him, lying on his pallet, facing the speechless, blank wall, immobile.
One Sunday Rettich brings with him the contents of Achim’s “escritoire,” his drawings, sketches and designs. Images of the statues of the Western Wall, paintings of stained glass windows for the Clerestory, the beauteous Rose.
“Master, I have brought your Work. I hoped . . . maybe . . . if you saw it. You would remember. Remember your calling. Remember your Voice.”
But when Achim speaks, he says that all of Creation is a decoy, a distraction from the Real World, which is hidden behind a curtain. He says that, because of him and his sins, the world has become a copy. Because of him, the whole world is a shadow.
If someone will kill him, he says, the world will be restored.
These are the kind of things that Achim has been saying in the cold cells and corridors of Avenheim. And there is now talk of abandoning his plans and designs for something more simple. For the Lord knows, these are maybe the designs of a madman . . . even a heretic.
Rettich looks at the windows of the Apse, the colours and figures that had moved him so much when first he came. Now that he has seen Achim’s work, he can see how lacking they are. To Bishops, Kings and Emperors, Achim prefers Prophets, Saints, Martyrs, the Ancestors of Christ. He prefers profiles, rapt figures, arms outstretched, bodies twisted, hips swaying, fabrics falling from coiling limbs, fluid shapes, a feeling of uplifting, spreading, rising . . . He favours floral patterns, leaves and petals, animals rampant, the world in rapturous essence. The first Leaf that was in God’s mind before it was copied into this world of forms . . . His vision, beautiful, strange, evocative, worshipful, must be retained. He must be saved from his own mind.
As the last notes of the Compline prayers subside into silence, Rettich prays. “Good Lord, protect your servant and my friend and Master, Achim von Esinbach, bring him serenity, heal his mind, Amen.”
These last days, he cannot think straight, he is tired, his mind is so full it is like a swollen stream in the thaw, running over its banks, spreading everywhere and running nowhere . . . his thoughts loop back into each other in exhaustion, finding no solutions.
And yet he feels a strange kind of elation, a closeness to God such as he has rarely felt before.
Rettich wishes Achim were here, so that he could touch him, hold his hand. A thought rises in his mind, unbidden. “If only I could marry Master Achim, I could take good care of him.”
Rettich blushes, shudders, drowns the thought back into the eddying waters whence it came. Then he smiles. What nonsense we think sometimes. What nonsense.
Compline has passed like a vision, a mirage, and the congregation is filing out into the autumnal darkness. The Warden snuffs the last candle in the choir, and, carrying a flickering lantern, walks quietly to the door.
The Cathedral falls silent.
In the vast darkness, only the one votive candle trembles. Rettich is alone in his part of the nave.
In the chapel, the murderer and criminals are sleeping. Over by the Southern wall, some travellers and beggars. It is almost as if he can hear their breathing.
The candle’s tiny flame flickers, the Eternal Light, dwarfed by the silence and darkness.
ANNO
1234
NINE CIRCLES
(ANNO 1234. EUGENIUS VON ZABERN IV)
I am not quite sure what, really, I was expecting. But not this. This bordello.
In my imagination I had seen Our Church’s splendour magnified, wide streets, grand basilicae, processions of the devout. Instead, I am presented with the stench of an open sewer, and crowds of lousy, stinking thieves.
Rome. The sun is like a hot iron on my back and shoulders. My black Flemish robes are too heavy for the climate—I will have to buy a new set of clothes; I may be here a while.
Magnus, our guide, turns and shows his apologetic face. Again. “It is not far,” he says, for the third time. Maybe I am to blame. To save a couple of shillings, I said we could walk from the Tiber to our lodgings near the Basilica of St. Peter. We make a pretty sight; a gaggle of pasty-faced Germans, sweating and trudging through the filth of the streets with a train of laden donkeys.
There are hordes of cutpurse children swarming around us. Tan faces, loud voices, starving eyes. They chatter and scream in their vulgar Italian, their hands make gestures, doubtless obscene. Our mercenary escort can hardly keep them from the pack animals and their precious cargo. I see one boy skirt past, cut one of the leather straps holding a sack with his little dagger. He runs off into the crowd, disappearing instantly. Then another boy, doing the same.
“Armund!” I shout at our brawny Englander who is meant to be guarding the animals, “the straps!”
“Huh?” he grunts back. I try in Latin, but it’s no use. I try and push through the crowd to get to him. Thanks to God, I had the foresight to hang my own purse round my neck, deep in my robes—no-one can get to it there.
Bang! The devils! Between them they have cut enough straps for the donkey’s burden to come crashing to the ground. Like ants over crumbs, the boys swarm onto our unravelled cargo.
Armund strikes out with the flat of his sword. His colleagues come running to back him up. One boy takes the edge of a blade on his wrist and screams. Spurts of blood.
“Quickly!” I shout. “Out of here! Now!”
† † †
The wintry weeks of Lent, in the episcopal castle in Haldenheim. The Bishop, wrapped in furs, rubs his watery eyes. And looking at him, diagonally propped on his bed and countless cushions, swollen and immobile, he seems like a prize boar laid low by the hunters’ spears; a once great and noble beast, brought down.
His two dogs lie beside him, shifting in their sleep. “I summoned you here, Eugenius, because I have a dropsy that the doctors cannot seem to cure.”
“My Lord, I am saddened to hear it.”
“Walking is becoming difficult. My legs are beginning to swell like gourds, barrels.”
“We can find new doctors.”
“I fear new doctors will only find new ways of torturing me.”
“We can send to Cologne, to Salerno, to Paris—”
“Who would leave Paris in midwinter to cure an ageing man?”
“I have an emergency fund, Your Grace. It is worth many hundred marks, it is quite sufficient to pay for a fancy doctor. And you are not old.”
“I feel old.” The Bishop’s ringed fingers reach out and caress his dog’s ears. “Keep the investment. Let us not throw the diocese’s money into my grave.” His Grace’s eyes flicker up at me, commanding and serious. I am instructed. “There is an Italian Prince who, I am told, lived with this form of dropsy for several years, and died the size of a cow.”
“That is encouraging.”
“Isn’t it? But I just wanted to make clear that my death seems not imminent. Nevertheless I would be remiss if I did not now turn my attention to my legacy. Eugenius, there are four major candidates to be my successor. Varenus. The Archdeacon has expressed an interest. As has the Dean.”
“The Dean is dreaming.”
“He is a Man of God. Let him dream.”
“The fourth?”
“Is you, Eugenius.”
“I have not declared myself a contender.”
“Nevertheless I will put forward your name as a candidate. If you have no objection.”
I say nothing and look to the floor. His Grace continues; “The Dean has no chance, all the Chapter know that he has no worldly understanding. Varenus; he always seeks consensus, which makes him popular, but weak. Archdeacon von Stahlem is well-liked, however, and may well be the Chapter’s favourite. Eugenius, your defe
ct, if I may say it, is that you have never courted popularity with your peers.”
“An understatement, Your Grace.”
“Begin now. You are not as antipathetic as you think you are. At times you even have charm.”
“What should I do? Bake cakes?”
“Use your emergency funds. Increase the refectory budget, have more meat pies served and sweets, and better wine.”
“Are my fellow Canons so simple-minded?”
“Most of them.”
“And for those Canons who are never in Hagenburg?”
“Send them gifts. They will know why.”
“Can not His Holiness appoint His own candidate?”
“Yes, but I don’t believe He will.”
The Bishop’s rheumy eyes cloud over, troubled. “Varenus . . . .” he says and sighs. “As young Canons, we made a deal to help each other. He would help me become Bishop, and I would help him become Dean. But, in the end, Vitztum was the highest office I could get for him. He never fulfilled his youthful promise. He will be very bitter if I give my support to your candidacy.”
“I can live with the Vitztum’s bitterness.”
“They said I appointed you too young. But you have been my greatest helper, Eugenius.”
He looks at me, and the whites of his eyes are veined with blood. “I need you to go to Rome.”
† † †
Our entry into our august lodgings is hardly decorous. We run red-faced and panicked through the heavy oak doors, pelted with filth by the baying Roman crowd. The doormen seem unsurprised by our precipitous entrance, however, and close the gates on the plebs romana as if it were a daily occurrence to rescue German ecclesiastics from a mob howling for blood.
“Welcome to Rome my Lords,” says the director of the establishment, bowing respectfully, as if nothing untoward had happened.