The Relic Master

by Christopher Buckley

  “What’s in the cart?”

  “A dying girl. Who’ll be dead if we don’t make haste.”

  The guards recoiled, suspecting plague.

  “She fell. We seek Paracelsus, the surgeon. Do you know him?”

  “Why should I?”

  Dismas dug into his purse and tossed the captain a gulden, enough to buy drinks for the whole guard.

  “Paracelsus. Name’s familiar . . .”

  Dismas dug another gulden from his purse and tossed it to him.

  “Street behind the college. Before you come to the armory.”

  “Bless you, my son.”

  Dismas spurred the horses. The Landsknechte charged ahead.

  When Dismas turned the cart down the street behind the college, he saw the Landsknechte dismounted, going door to door, accosting people on the street. Nutker had one man up against the wall and was shaking him, demanding to know where Paracelsus lurked.

  The surgery was through an alley that led into a courtyard. The alley was not wide enough to accommodate the cart, so they carried Magda on a stretcher improvised from blankets, Nutker going ahead of them bellowing, “Paracelsus! Paracelsus! Show yourself, Paracelsus!”

  A stout, florid-faced man of grave mien presented himself in the doorway, the image of affronted dignity. He had enough chins for three men. His cheeks matched his cherry-red cap. Here was Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, called Paracelsus.

  “What’s the meaning of this? Cease that noise or I’ll have out the guard!”

  Dismas spoke. “She’s dying, your honor. You knew her father. The apothecary at Schramberg. Her name is Magda.”

  Paracelsus bent and opened her eyelids.

  “Bring her in. Quickly, now.”

  They laid her on a table. Paracelsus ordered, “All of you, out.” He said to Dismas, “You, stay.”

  An assistant in a bloodstained apron appeared. He and Paracelsus spoke in Latin. Dismas knew enough to make out their talk.

  Paracelsus put his ear to her chest, then pressed two fingertips to the edge of her wrist. He seemed to be counting silently. He lifted her eyelids again, concentrating this time on one eye. He opened her mouth and peered in while the assistant held an apparatus that reflected and magnified candlelight. He looked into her nose and ears. He picked at some of the encrusted blood in her ear and put it to his tongue.

  “Gunpowder.”

  Dismas nodded.

  “Well? Must I drag it out of you? What happened?”

  “It was a bomb, your honor. It—”

  “When?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “When, yesterday?”

  “Morning.”

  Paracelsus fired questions: Had she been conscious at any point? Vomited? Had she raved in delirium? Convulsed? He probed her scalp with his fingertips. His fingers were fat as sausages, but moved with the nimbleness of a lutist’s. He conversed with the assistant. He said the word aemidus.

  “She’s bleeding, inside her head. The blood swells and presses on the brain. I must relieve the pressure.” He regarded Dismas’s monk habit. “I take it she is not your wife?”

  “No, your honor. We found her. In the forest.”

  Paracelsus grabbed Dismas’s sleeve, lifted it to his nose, sniffed.

  “Gunpowder. What’s your order, then?”

  Dismas saw this was a man to whom it was useless to lie.

  “Does it matter, your honor?”

  Paracelsus gave commands to the assistant, who disappeared into the next room. He took a small razor and shaved Magda’s scalp above the ear on the side opposite the eye he had concentrated on. He dabbed at the exposed flesh with a small sponge redolent of spirits.

  He told the assistant to hurry. He looked on his patient with a tenderness Dismas thought paternal.

  “She was a sweet little thing. Does Franz know?”

  “Dead. Whole family.”

  “Then we must save her. Sure, God wills it.”

  The assistant returned with a tray of instruments. The largest was a device with a small knob-handle of ivory. The shaft curved to a U, then continued straight, tapering to a fine silver point in the shape of a miniature broadhead arrow. Dismas recognized it as a trepan. He’d seen cruder versions in the army.

  “If you’re going to be sick, get out.”

  Dismas remained. The assistant put Magda’s head in a padded wooden vise, and Paracelsus commenced to drill into Magda’s skull. Dismas winced at the sound. A squirt of blood shot across the room. Paracelsus let the gushing subside. After some minutes, he lifted her eyelid. He grunted and held a bandage tightly against the hole he’d drilled.

  The assistant wiped Magda’s wounds with more of the pungent fluid and bandaged her head.

  “If she makes it through the night, she’ll live. Stay with her. If she revives, her pain will be great.”

  He reached for a small blue vial on a shelf.

  “Give her this. Two drops in water. No more than two drops. One drop more than two and she’ll stop breathing. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, your honor. Thank you. Bless you.”

  Paracelsus looked at Dismas. “Is that the blessing of a monk?”

  “No.”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Dismas.”

  “The Good Thief. Did you steal the getup you’re all wearing?”

  Paracelsus looked at the window into the courtyard. Pressed against it were the faces of Dürer and the Landsknechte.

  “Your fellow monks look like murderers and cutpurses. We’re not fools on this side of the Rhine, you know. What’s your game, then? Why is Franz’s daughter lying on my table, near death and reeking of gunpowder?”

  “If she dies, does it matter? If she lives, I’ll explain. You have my word.”

  Paracelsus scoffed. “How do you know I won’t call out the constable? They keep a busy executioner here. Suits me, as it keeps me well supplied with fresh bodies. Well, Good Thief? How do you know I won’t hand you all over?”

  “I don’t. My life is in your hands. As much as hers is.”

  Paracelsus stared. His countenance softened.

  “You’re a Swiss. You can always tell. Those others there—Germans. I’ll be back in the morning. Remember—no more than two drops. So now her life is in your hands, Good Thief.”

  22

  Paracelsus

  Magda opened her eyes early the next morning.

  The Landsknechte and Dürer had kept their vigil in the courtyard outside. When Dismas told them she would live, they dropped to their knees and prayed. Nutker blubbered. Dismas was astonished. Never had he seen a Landsknecht pray, or weep.

  She had no memory of what had happened in the meadow, but strangely, immediately recognized Paracelsus, even though she had not seen him in years. His gruffness of the day before was gone. He was all tenderness. She could stay here until she was recovered. Sisters from a nearby convent would attend her, day and night. He held her hand and kissed her forehead.

  • • •

  Dismas found lodging for himself and the others in an inn grandiosely named Edenhaus, in the southeast quarter of the city near the paper mill. The mill’s stink of rotten egg and sulfur made the air rather less than edenic, but its location near the St. Alban’s gate to the south would make for a hasty departure should need arise.

  Dismas made good on his promise to treat the lads to a night of pudendal merriment at the Purring Pussy. They invited Dismas and Dürer to accompany them, but they declined. Dismas was in no mood for bawds; for his part, Dürer was a faithful husband, and morbidly fearful of pox.

  “They’ll come back with a dose,” he said. “Mark my word. One night in Venus, the rest of your life on Mercury.”

  Paracelsus had devised a treatment for the pox consisting of minute doses of mercury. It had a slightly better effect than the reigning “cure”—guaiacum. Like the pox itself, guaiacum came from the New World, distilled from the hardwood tree Lignum vit
ae. The immensely profitable trade in guaiacum was a Fugger monopoly. Wherever you looked, there was Jacob Fugger—lending ducats to Albrecht to buy his cardinal’s hat; to Pope Leo, to cover expenses sacred and profane.

  Paracelsus scoffed at guaiacum, viewing it as no more than a self-dealing arrangement between Fugger and Rome. What’s more, he said so, and loudly, though such accusations could lead a man to a dungeon or the gallows. His majestic contempt for authority reminded Dismas of Luther. And come to think of it, they were both incendiaries as well. Luther had torched one of the papal bulls denouncing him. Paracelsus had set fire to a great pile of volumes of the great Arab doctor Avicenna and those by the Greek physician Galen, to show what he thought of them.

  • • •

  “So, do we continue on?” Dürer asked Dismas.

  “To Chambéry? What choice do I have? I don’t want to spend eternity in Hell.”

  “But Luther says—”

  “Nars. Luther has been declared a heretic. I won’t risk my immortal soul on his . . . theories. Go home. I release you.”

  “This was my fault.”

  “Yes, Nars, it was. And you’ll have to live with that. But you might as well live. You’ve a wife and your painting. Anyway, my life’s done. Albrecht’s penance was only a way to get me killed without starting a war with Frederick.”

  “What about the girl?”

  “She’ll make a good life here. Paracelsus treats her like his daughter.”

  Dürer said, “What if I could make a copy of it?”

  “Of the Shroud?” Dismas grunted. “Yes, we know you can do that.”

  “I’m trying to help.”

  “I can get myself killed without your help, thank you.”

  “If I could make a copy—an exact copy—maybe . . . we could switch them.”

  “Yes. Good. Knock on the Duke’s door. Tell him, ‘I am Dürer, the painter. I am here to make an exact copy of your shroud. Then we will switch it with the real one. May I have the keys, please? There are four, so I’ll need all of them.’ ”

  “Why do you mock me?”

  “Because you are mockable.”

  “It’s going to be displayed, isn’t it?”

  “On the castle wall. Can you make an exact copy from such a distance? Standing in the crowd? You must have the eyes of a hawk.”

  “Perhaps with a star glass . . .”

  Dismas chuckled. “Yes. Set your easel in the square, in the middle of the crowd, and stare through a star glass. Brilliant.”

  “You’re not very encouraging.”

  Dismas threw up his hands.

  “Very well. For the sake of encouragement—let’s imagine that you somehow make your exact copy. How then do you propose to switch it with the real one?”

  “Well, we won’t know until we get there. Will we?”

  Dismas looked at Dürer.

  “What are you telling me, Nars? That you’re coming with me to Chambéry?”

  “I don’t want to spend eternity in Hell, either.”

  “I thought you’d gone over to Luther.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Luther isn’t right. Anyway, I’m not going to spend the rest of my life being haunted by your fucking ghost. I’m doing it for me. Not you.”

  Dismas smiled. “Ah. Well, then, now I understand.”

  • • •

  It was almost dawn when the Landsknechte returned from their brothel, making a drunken clatter that woke the proprietress, an ill-tempered crone like all the rest of her kind.

  Dismas was already up, getting ready to go visit Magda.

  “How was Venus? Did you leave the girls limp?”

  Cunrat and Nutker were holding each other up, wobbling. Unks looked strangely sober and glum.

  “What’s the matter with him?”

  Cunrat, weaving on his feet, held up a rigid finger and curled it. “Pffft!”

  “Fuck you,” Unks said morosely.

  “Ah, don’t be so hard on yourself,” Cunrat said. “Hey, Nutker. Did you hear? I told him don’t be so hard on himself.”

  Their roar of laughter brought a remonstration from upstairs.

  Dismas saw that Unks’s fists were clenching.

  “Cunrat, Nutker,” Dismas scolded. “Don’t be unkind. It happens to everyone.”

  “Never to me,” Cunrat said.

  “Or to me,” Nutker said.

  God hates me, sure, Dismas thought. On top of everything, now he must keep peace among whoring Landsknechte because one of them could not perform.

  He put a hand on Unks’s shoulder to steer him away from the others.

  “Never before has this happened,” Unks moaned. “Never.”

  “Don’t worry, man. To me, it happens all the time. You’re tired, that’s all. Go to bed. Get some sleep. Tomorrow eat raw meat and drink springwater, then go back to the bawdy house and you will be a Minotaur.”

  Unks shook his head and said no, he was finished—forever—with whores. They could go to Hell, along with the rest of the world.

  • • •

  Dismas entertained Magda with the story, sitting on her bed in Paracelsus’s surgery.

  She was better, though her eyes were glassy. She said this was from the drops Paracelsus gave her for the pain. A tincture he called ladanum, a marvelous thing he had brought back from Arabia Deserta. From a gum that wept from a flower called Papaver. Paracelsus distilled it, adding this and that. It greatly helped with the pain, but made you feel warm and sleepy, “like in a dream.”

  Magda listened to the account of Unks’s disgrace at the bordello.

  “Ah. There is something for this,” she said. “My father used to make it for his customers. A tea, brewed from the bark of a tree from Africa. What’s it called? Yohimbe. Yes. Paracelsus knows it, sure.”

  Dismas smiled. What things Magda knew. She blushed, suddenly embarrassed.

  “Paracelsus does not believe you are a monk,” she said. “He asked me many questions. He likes you.” She whispered, “He thinks the others are murderers.”

  Dismas smiled. “Nars wouldn’t like to hear that. He’s a snob.”

  “Nars . . . ?”

  “Painter. With the hair like yours.”

  “Yes.” She nodded. “He is different from the novices. Well, we must do something for poor Unks. Give me some paper.”

  She wrote down the name of the African bark and instructions.

  “Give this to the apothecary in the Saint Andreas district.”

  Dismas took the paper from her. What a business.

  “What’s wrong?” Magda said.

  “Nothing. Well . . . no. A lot.”

  She took his hand. “What troubles you, Dismas?”

  “Better that you don’t know.”

  She looked so pretty with her head against the clean white pillow. Like one of the women in the painting by the Italian, what was his name—Botticelli?—that he had seen in the villa of one of his clients. He wanted to tell her everything. But, no. What purpose, involving her in his calamity?

  He smiled. “Rest. We’ll talk later.”

  She squeezed his hand. “You will come? Promise?”

  “Yes.” He stood, looked at the paper in his hand, and rolled his eyes in dismay.

  She smiled. “You must take care of your novices. But don’t let him take too much. It’s strong.”

  • • •

  Dismas went to the apothecary in the St. Andreas district and presented the paper, thoroughly embarrassed to be asking for such a thing. He emphasized to the apothecary that it was not for himself. For five gulden, a damnable price, he left with a small bottle of brown liquid.

  He presented it to Unks, telling him that it was from Magda and that he must not take more than three sips before setting off for the bordel. So of course Unks drank the entire vial.

  • • •

  The next morning, again just as dawn was breaking, the three Landsknechte returned to the Edenhaus, making a terrible ruckus. As before, Cunrat and N
utker were inebriated to the point of barely being able to stand.

  As for Unks, Dismas had never seen such a look of triumph. He walked with a peculiar gait, like someone who had just ridden a great distance on horseback. He held his hat over his groin. When he saw Dismas, he removed the hat with a courtier-like flourish.

  “Look!”

  “God in Heaven,” Dismas said. “Cover yourself, man!”

  “It won’t go down.”

  Dismas shrugged. “Well, it’s a better problem than before.”

  23

  The Dance of Death

  One afternoon some days later, Dismas and Dürer went to see a cloth merchant Dismas knew from his visits to Basel.

  The merchant rummaged amidst his catacomb of supplies and emerged sneezing with a roll of linen under his arm. Spread out, it measured fifteen by four feet. Dismas thought these dimensions roughly correct. The weave pattern, alternately inverted V’s, indicated that it came from Palestine or Judea—possibly Galilee, but probably not. The merchant guaranteed it was “at least” two centuries old. Dismas knew very well this was just an excuse for charging more.

  Dürer examined it minutely, rubbing it between his fingers, examining the threads with a magnifying glass. From his satchel he took a small box of paints and dabbed at a corner. He nodded approval.

  The haggling went on for an hour, Dismas and the merchant accusing each other of larceny and bad faith. The usual ritual of purchase. Dürer looked on with amusement, never before having seen the business side of his friend.

  Finally the sale was consummated for eighteen gulden. Dismas grumbled that this meant he could not afford meat for a month. The merchant pretended to believe him.

  When the coin and cloth had exchanged hands, the merchant smiled greasily and said, “Making a shroud, eh? I thought Dismas the Relic Master didn’t go in for that?”

  Mortifying, to be chid by such a person. Dismas knew that indignation would be misplaced. But at the practical level, no good could result from a chatty merchant bruiting it about the marketplace that Dismas the Relic Master had purchased material for a Jesus shroud.

  He could send Cunrat and the lads around to pay the fellow a visit. But no. Low as he may have fallen, Dismas was not one for thuggery and threats.