by Ben Hopkins
Being blind is not without its advantages. Primary amongst the long list of unexpected blessings, the substantial diminution of Society that I am expected to endure. Most of my fellow Canons seem happy to leave me alone in my quarters, sitting quietly with my disfigured face obscured by shadows that for me no longer have any significance. Sunlight I can feel on my skin, its warmth. But, for instance, candlelight means nothing to me. Here is a binary opposition that no longer has meaning: Light. Darkness. Both are reduced to an undifferentiated Meaninglessness. A Zero.
And in this beautiful Nought, I now live.
† † †
Hieronymus does visit me daily, but only to check that my needs are met, that my food and wine have been brought to me, my chamber pots emptied. And, upon my request, he reads to me. From the Holy Scriptures, but also often from the new writings that are emerging from the academies, from Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon. They have a sensibility that is pleasing to me, a wish to find concord between our God and the World in which he has seen fit to place us; namely a world that is made of Numbers and Facts and Laws which seem to be immutable. Maybe it is true that one day Our Lord will decree that the sun will rise in the West, but I doubt He will bother to do so. He will not disrupt the divine order of the world just to prove Brother Bacon wrong.
I would be untruthful were I to say that my Blinding was a blessing pure and simple. In fact it took me more than two long years to reach this state of Acceptance in which I repose today. The first weeks were plagued by physical discomfort, stabbing pains running from my eyes down my neck and along my arms, and by mental tortures far more difficult to bear. These, generally speaking, took the form of “if only I . . . ” and concerned me rearranging the sequence of events in such a way that I never was blinded and that all my Enemies were cruelly and viciously punished instead.
It took a long time to eschew these foolish thoughts and to dispose of them into the same trough into which I now throw all manner of former absurdities. Had it really been I, Eugenius von Zabern, who had seen “auguries” and superstitiously believed in signs? How could I, a man of intelligence, have believed that the Lord Our God so organised his world that a crow would fly thrice in circles around the calvary of St. Arbogast and that the sun would cast a crown of gold around my head in Arles Cathedral, just to inform me that I would one day be Bishop? Does not God have more significant concerns than to pluck the strings of the world to make auguries and signs for his humble servants?
I am ashamed that I ever even gave passing credence to such idiocy. But no longer. The darkness of the Zero in which I live is Total. It casts no shadows and half-lights, no uncertainty, no Roman chiaroscuro.
It, like Truth itself, is Absolute.
† † †
And so I have retired from the clamour and agitation of the City to the quiet of the hills, to Avenheim Monastery, where the restless souls of noble families are sometimes interned. Indeed, the Brother who helped install me in my austere cell muttered that this room had once belonged to Achim von Esinbach, adding, in a whisper, ‘the Suicide.’ In a certain way I am grateful for this coincidence, as I feel a sense of guilt about that young man’s death, for maybe, partway, my machinations contributed to his demise. And so his spirit is here in this room to remind me of my former Vanity, and of all the foolish Schemes that were its issue and offspring.
In the damp, lingering cold of the end of the Year, Hieronymus comes to me in my cell and informs me that I do, for once, have a Visitor.
“Well then, send him in.”
“My Lord, she is Female.”
This is intriguing. My Curiosity wishes immediately to be assuaged, yet I also wish to extend this state of anticipation for a little while longer. So I do not ask who it is, and instead request Hieronymus to guide me from the monks’ living quarters, where no women are admitted, to the Refectory, empty at this hour, where this unexpected meeting will take place.
Here Hieronymus helps me onto a stone bench, and I hear the woman’s voice. “Thank you for agreeing to meet with me, My Lord.”
It is Grete Gerber.
“Frau Gerber.” She doesn’t know that I have recognised her by voice alone. There is no need to tell her, it would only increase her already substantial vanity.
“Tell me what it is that I can do for you.”
† † †
Naturally, I am aware of the scandal of Schwanenstein. Our Bishop took the view that the Count of Schwanenstein, as a Canon of the Cathedral and the scion of one of the Chapter’s oldest families, should be left unmolested and offered up for trial by his fellow Canons, followed by contrite confession to His Grace himself, and repentance for his crimes: maybe a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Odile, or a month in a monastery on a lenten diet.
This is indeed how we Canons of the Cathedral have, in general, dealt with the misdemeanours of our fellows in the past, and it has always been judged sufficient. But on this occasion, in view of the Count’s numerous crimes of robbery, rape and murder, this “closing of the ranks” of the upper echelons of Hagenburg society has been met with ill-tempered dismay by the citizens of the city. Even the Bishop’s ministerial underlings, the judges, officers and officials of the City Families, increasingly alienated from their high-handed overlord, have demonstrated a sense of outrage.
And so Bishop von Stahlem, cowed and fearful of popular uprising, has exercised a form of benign indifference, and allowed the siege of Castle Schwanenstein to continue. His neutrality in the matter is doubtless a sensible policy. In any case, it was much of a muchness to me: after my Blinding, I had withdrawn from the Political World without the slightest pang of regret. But here, now, is Mistress Gerber, calling me back to the Whispering Chamber and the infernal labyrinth of intrigue. “If you could just talk to the Bishop, My Lord. I am sure, as the former Treasurer, your word must carry weight in matters financial.”
“You wish to ‘borrow’ half the Cathedral work force and take them to Schwanenstein? To build catapults?”
“Just for a couple of months.”
“I cannot see if you are blushing when you say such things.”
“Maybe a bit, My Lord. My brother tells me they are not so busy in winter.”
“True. As I recall, they spend the winter ‘working’ in the tavern whilst still drawing a salary on the Bishop’s shilling.”
“We will take them from the taverns and put them to work, My Lord.”
“You are doing this for the good of their souls, I see. And you want stone from the building site? From the quarries?”
“The rubble, My Lord. The unusable debris.”
“And what will the Bishop receive in return for his debris? For leasing you his Cathedral workforce to aid with the siege of Schwanenstein?”
“The Good Will of the City. I think he could do with it.”
“And cheap at the price! How about, assuming the siege is successful, the Schwanenstein estates?”
“This price is too high. But everything is negotiable, is it not?”
I have been happy to reside in darkness and allow the whispers to whisper unheard, to allow the cataracts of the world to rage in an unseen, unheeded distance, and concentrate on God, on Numbers, and on the new Thoughts that make their deep, considered way to me from the academies of Paris.
But now I feel myself drawn back to the world of Action. For some reason, maybe it is the memory of her attractive figure, the intemperate glow in her eyes, her shameless yet captivating disdain for the Noble Estate . . . but I like Grete Gerber. She makes me think of another world, entirely unknown to me, where the majority of people must live. A world now forever beyond my reach, where, after a day’s work, one would lie in a woman’s arms, and, falling asleep, forget the laws, concepts and numbers that rule all human life, and simply Dream and Be.
ANNO
1248
VANQUISHED
(ANNO
1248. RETTICH SCHÄFFER IX • YUDL BEN YITZHAK V • BARON VOLMAR VON KRONTHAL IV • GRETE GERBER III • EINOLF II •
EMMERICH SCHÄFFER I • COUNTESS ADELHEID VON SCHWANENSTEIN I)
Emmerich Schäffer
Dear Judah,
Once you receive this letter, I will be gone.
Please believe me. Everything I did was intended for the Best. I owe my good fortune to your Uncle, and that is something I will never forget. If, in my actions, I did anything wrong, I hope you will be able to forgive me. But I trust that, once you read this letter, you will understand that I intended only the good of Commerce in general, and that of our Company in particular.
In order to explain my actions, I must go back in time to before the siege of Schwanenstein. You will remember, from the many conversations between myself and your Uncle, the mention of one of our informants: a maidservant at the Castle named Elise Gottlieb. What you—and most people in Hagenburg—will not have known, is that this Elise has been, for some years, the concubine of the Baron of Kronthal . . .
Yudl Rosheimer
Despite the weeks of dark cloud and rain, Spring is coming. There are green buds on the courtyard linden tree, and the cats are screaming with their own, peculiar, aching form of Love. Yudl has found a Bride, a thirteen-year-old girl from the Kalonymus family of Speyer, the greatest rabbinical family on the Rhine: an honour for Hagenburg and the hushed and wondering talk of the beth midrash.
Yudl delays the wedding until the summer, citing the foul weather, the inauspicious constellations of the stars, but in truth waiting for Schwanenstein to fall, and for a solution to be found for his Mother.
His Mother, thirty-one summers old and still bright as the ruby in the Torah Crown. The tombstone has not yet been set on her husband’s grave, and already the tongues have begun to hiss. Aberle’s sister says that at Purim, when all were drunk and dancing, she saw Zipporah talking with the Strawhead Goy in Shokhet Alley, and she touched his arm, and laughed without covering her mouth. And Saul the cobbler said he saw her coming home after dark from the Christian part of town, smiling to herself like a girl. Rumours, whispers: the very whisperings that loosened and unravelled his Father’s seething mind.
She must go far away. Far away from the Strawhead Goy. Far away from the slanderers, who whet their tongues like swords.
The river is high, the current swift. The Rhine flatlands glide past the boat, fans of mud, flooded fields. Herons launch into the wide sapphire sky. Yudl dreams of his ancestors, misted in ancient time, warriors and generals, settlers of god-given lands. He sees Joshua returning from Egypt, laying waste to Jericho, blowing the shofar until the walls were breached by the Will of God.
He steps from the boat alongside his companions in trade; Emmerich Schäffer, Grete Gerber, Wikerus, Gaufried, the merchants who have funded the Schwanenstein campaign . . . He sees a field of mud, bedraggled tents, ropes stretched from tree to tree along the banks of the Rhine where steaming vestments dry in the newly emergent sun. He sees a host of soldiers, horses, teeming around piles of stones. And he sees four strange contraptions, tall-legged wooden animals like his Bestiary’s Giraffe, a long birch-tree neck twisting to the sky. From the end of the pole a leather sling hangs down, heavy with a charge of stone.
Baron von Kronthal sits high on his stallion, still and unmoving amongst the weaving currents of horses and men. At his orders, a clarion blows and silence falls.
Yudl closes his eyes, sways from side to side, and mutters the Words of the Holy Torah. Vengeance is mine, and recompense. See now that I, even I, am He. And there is no God with me. I kill and I make alive. I have wounded, and I heal. And there is none who can be delivered from my hand.
Baron Volmar von Kronthal
“Let it fly! Number One! Let it fly!”
This had better bloody work. Number One. The trigger is hammered free. The stone counterweight plunges to the ground, the timbers shudder, the long arm lurches into the air, wrenches its leather sling . . .
Goddamn! The sling catches in the mud, only judders up. The stone arcs, drops to the ground. Our soldiers scatter, running from its path.
Bloody engineers. If none of these damn things work . . . ?
“Number two!” I shout. “Let fly, let fly!”
Number Two. It’s our heaviest stone.
The counterweight plunges, the long arm wrenches, flies, the stone soars. The men cheer. It’s a sight to see.
But the stone’s too bloody heavy. It ploughs through the mud at the foot of the castle walls.
Getting better, but not good enough. I turn, catch Master Rettich’s eye, send him a look. He nods, shrugs, smiles. Him and the Count of Schonach, drunkards both, standing together, the Engineer sent by the Cathedral and the Veteran of the Siege of Damietta, adviser on engines of War.
“Number three! Let fly!”
Three. Our lightest stone! It overshoots! Flying over the walls like a swallow at dusk, plunging into the distance, into God Knows Where!
The men shout, wail, beat drums. We make stones fly like birds, we will vanquish stubborn Schwanenstein! “This is the one, boys! Number Four! Let fly!”
Four. A perfect hit, square and true. Thanks be to God! A sound of cracking, a plume of dust rises from Schwanenstein wall.
Rettich Schäffer
Rettich remembers the night of his Initiation, kneeling in the flawless darkness, praying for light.
The Minotaur is Weight. Weight that pulls at the Cathedral’s tendons, drags her down towards the groaning earth, Weight that the Mason must capture and defeat.
Now this Weight is once more in Rettich’s calloused hands, the drop of a hundredweight, the fling of a wooden arm, the throw of a quarry block. The Minotaur, in the service of War.
The Count of Schonach claps Rettich on the shoulders, laughing full-throated. “One square strike, Master Rettich, one square strike! We re-locate Trebuchets One and Two! And then we calibrate! And divvy up the stones!”
The quarry stones must be sorted. Not for their veining, their colour and shade, not for the gradual shifting hues of an arcade wall, not for Grace and not for God. But sorted for weight and size. The lighter stones for the further catapult, the heaviest for the trebuchet built close on a mound of earth and brick, shielded by wicker walls.
“Come, men! Listen!” shouts Rettich, and his workers and apprentices swarm, the Good Men of the Cathedral. Masons, stone-cutters, carpenters. Now Men of War.
Emmerich Schäffer
. . . we had been using the trebuchets for a week and the north wall of the Castle was beginning to fracture, when an event occurred that greatly unsettled the Baron von Kronthal’s confidence.
At dusk, on the battlements, Elise Gottlieb and her daughter Ysolt appeared. Both were naked. And both had nooses tied around their necks.
The next day the Baron summoned me and charged me with the task of negotiating a peace with the Count of Schwanenstein. Reluctantly, I agreed.
In the dark of night, I was sent with a lantern to the South wall. I called up, “Parley! I am sent by the Baron to the Count!” and, after a wait of some length, I was admitted by rope ladder into the Castle. I proceeded to my meeting with the Count, who received me in a private chamber. I had brought to him some plum aquavit from Ihringen, which he quaffed as if it were water, quickly becoming drunk. I outlined the Baron’s proposal; the Count would surrender and forfeit all the Schwanenstein and Illingen estates, his men would be arrested and tried and therefore either hanged or expelled from Alsace, Elise Gottlieb and her daughter were to be returned safe to the Baron’s hands, and in exchange the Count would be granted safe passage to his remaining estate in the Vogesen with a three knight and one dozen servant retinue.
Then I explained; should he not agree to these terms, all his estates would be forfeit, his castle would be destroyed and all found within
it, except women and children, killed.
“I accept,” said the Count, to my surprise. And, as maybe you understand, Yudl, to my acute displeasure. Had we spent a fortune in silver and months of work just to have the Count jaunt off to his Vogesen hunting lodge, unharmed? What guarantee that, from there, he would not recommence his banditry? And what weak and half-hearted warning would this be for those who in future might try and profit from piracy?
I asked, as I had been charged by the Baron, to take Elise with me as a token of the Count’s good faith and intention. Schwanenstein said, his speech slurred with schnapps, “Take her, but only if you bring us a new slut in exchange. The men need something to poke of an evening.” When I asked for further elucidation, he explained that since the beginning of the siege Elise had been used by the entire castle garrison as a whore.
I asked to see the woman and was led to a dungeon room where the Schwanenstein soldiers were queuing to take their turns to fornicate with her. I saw her only briefly, but my glimpse of the woman was enough to tell me that she was in a degenerate and forsaken state. Was this still the woman the Baron once loved?
Yudl. As I walked back through the castle grounds, I quickly considered all the factors. I had many courses of action open.
And in the end I chose the one I thought best for the City of Hagenburg. For Schäffer & Associates. For you. And for me.
Baron Volmar von Kronthal
I ask Schäffer, “Where is Elise? Did he not accept the proposal?”
Schäffer shakes his head, avoids my eyes. He looks pale. “My Lord. Try and forget Elise.”
“What, boy? Did he accept?”
“He did.”
“So where is Elise?”