by James Blish
Roger’s heart filled; he could feel his knuckles crackling under the robe. Since he could see nothing at all in the damp-ticking black passageway, he could not prevent himself from standing suddenly, also in his shivering shift, by the bedside of his father in the blocky fieldstone house outside Ilchester now abruptly gone, as his father was gone eleven years. Domine, Domine! Until that moment he had not loved his father. How little he had been able to anticipate even in his new rough boyhood, five years old and already master of the wide-nostrilled sweaty horses trembling with day-end exhaustion in their stalls, that Christopher Bacon’s rude remote justice would some day be replaced by the trade-swine arrogance of Robert Bacon, hardly eight years Roger’s senior!
And now Robert Grosseteste was dying, too, only a door away in the timeless darkness. Justice is Love, the self whispered suddenly. And he had no answer. The vision of his father’s death vanished as suddenly, leaving him empty in snow-covered Oxford, a black mark on a black ground inside a black box. If Robert Grosseteste died, where could Roger go then; what would he do; what would he think? Adam Marsh was well enough, but no man can have three fathers; besides, the gentle Adam lacked both the strength and the desire; he was a brother and would never be more –not a brother such as Robert Bacon, but a brother in love. As a father, he had no vocation.
Adam was with the lector now; had been with him a long time. In a while, perhaps, he would emerge and say: ‘It is over.’ There had been no assurance that the lector would be able to see Roger at all; it had been with a shock of guilty delight that Roger had heard that he even wanted to see Roger, but even of that there was no proof. It might only have been an idea of Adam’s; he might have been summoned only on a chance.
On the thought, the door opened a little, letting a wedge of smoky orange light into the corridor. That was all. There were no voices, no footsteps. A draught began to move gently past Roger’s face, seeking the smokehole of the lector’s fireplace and discovering to Roger that he was sweating under his cassock even in this black realm of liquid ice. The light wavered and lost some of its yellowness, as though a few tapers were nodding and blowing inside the room. Then a long-fingered hand, deeply chiselled on the back with shadows between the tendons, took the door by the latch and pulled it soundlessly to again. Perhaps it had been only a wind that had opened it to begin with.
But Roger knew the hand. He stood in the blackness and struggled with a jealousy only a little away from love. Never mind that Adam Marsh of Wearmouth had come to him the moment it appeared that the lector might die; he was only trying to prove to his student how high he stood in Robert’s esteem. Never mind that Adam had recognized the quick wit of the seventeen-year-old who sat under him in theology and had won him a place at Robert’s lectures to the Francisans; Roger could have done the same for himself. Never mind that Adam did seem to stand high in the esteem of the lector, and in the general esteem of the Order; he was only thirty-one years old and had become a Franciscan only last year. One Robert Bacon was enough; Domine, Domine!
But it was not true. Justice is Love.
The words drove the jealousy from him, though he fought sullenly to hold it. There was something about the self that hated emotion, and particularly the red emotions, the ones that fogged the eye, inside or out. Why should Grosseteste have called Roger at all? Roger and the lector had never even spoken, except once or twice in passing. Grosseteste had his own favourite students – Adam, obviously, and a frighteningly brilliant lecturer in his mid-twenties named John of Bandoun – and could hardly be aware of the deep, irrational awe he had inspired in some anonymous franklin’s son from Ilchester.
Justice is Love, the self said again in its sweet bodiless voice, and the fury was gone. Suddenly, he was only a man in a corridor in a hall in a town in a snowfall, his eyes as empty as embrasures, his head capped like a merlon in winter with coldness. For an instant he did not even know his own name; he stood as alone as a planet in the general dark.
It had been a long day, like all days: the bell in the night, calling him out of bed to church for matins and the lauds, the seven psalms of praise; the Divine Office at prime, six o’clock in the morning, still full darkness and the cold at its bitterest, seven psalms, the litany and the mass with freezing toes; midday mass and then the meal, roots and eggs and water, and the sleep of afternoon – but no sleep for Roger, because of the letter; then the bell again to sing nones at three o’clock; and studies, but again no studies for Roger, because Robert Grosseteste was sick and Adam beside him, and one of the Bolognese, too, especially dispensed to minister to an archdeacon thrice over; then supper, waste-bread, butter and beans, with a little ale (the letter had made him cautious of spending any money on wine, for the first time in his life; besides, it was written in Aelfric, ‘Wine is not a drink for children or foolish people, but for the old and wise’); then the bell, and compline.
And then the summons from Adam.
He lifted one hand under the robe to finger the bulge of the letter, like a man cautiously investigating a fresh wound. It was a dirty scrap of old vellum, grey with erasures; under its present burden could still be seen the shadows of minuscules which had been the previous writing. These were almost clear at the bottom of the letter and Roger had been able to work out a little of it: ‘… e ministr e omnib fidelib suis Francis e …’ – possibly a piece of some charter. But this game had run out quickly, and the faint remains of what the palimpsest had carried before it had been pumiced for the charter proved even duller: pieces of a crabbed hymn by some barely literate canon. There was no way to put off thinking about the message on top in new ink.
It was brief and disastrous enough. A villein whom Roger did not even remember had thought well enough of him to dictate it to Ilchester’s recorder, and had it sent to him by the most reliable means available to a man with neither purse nor freedom: a beggar. It said:
pis daye d Burh his Menne hap despiled
Franklin Bacon & putte alle in fleyht to
ferne Strondea Ihab aseyden for Mr
Roher ac hem schal cleym it Aske of pe
Franklin his serf Wulf at pe Oxen
Ad majorem gloriae
This, in, an oval-rubbed spot in the centre, surrounded by a haze of extinguished knowledge, or what passed for it. There was, unhappily, nothing in the least cryptic about the message. It meant that Roger’s home was gone and his money with it. Somehow the soldiers of the King’s justiciar, scouring the country for remaining pockets of baronial resistance, had happened into Ilchester, and had seen in the substantial heirs of Christopher Bacon, freeman landholder, some taint of sympathy with the partisans of the rebel barons, or some stronghold for the mercenaries who had infected the whole east of England, since the evacuation of the French in 1217. The rest had followed inevitably. No matter that Ilchester had always been an uneventful town, notable for nothing but its Wednesday market and its authorized fair every twenty-ninth of August; Hubert de Burgh stood accused of the failure of last year’s expedition to the west of France (regardless of the fact, or, as Adam Marsh had remarked sadly, perhaps because of the fact that the justiciar had advised King Henry most strongly against any such hunting party); he was out to prove that French sedition was still eating away at the body politick, even in a place as unlikely as Ilchester, and that the King’s justiciar was swift and terrible in hawking it. And so, farewell, suddenly, to the ancient yeoman house of Bacon, though it had yet to see partisan, baron, Frenchman or mercenary; the serfs would thieve away the harvest, and leave the family only exile and poverty. The reference to ‘ferne Strondea’ could only mean exile for Harold, Christopher’s brother; he was the last of authority in the family to remain in Ilchester; not even Hubert de Burgh could touch Robert Bacon in his factor’s fastness in London.
Very well; and so, good-bye as well to new copies of old books, to virgin parchment, to clean quills and fresh ink, to meat and to wine, to warm wool and pliant leather, to a new growth in wisdom under Oxford’s once mag
ister scholarum Robert Grosseteste, to a doctorate in theology, to becoming (Thou art addled in thy wits! the self cried in its sweet voice) the world’s wonder in moral philosophy. From now on, he would be poor. Robert Bacon would not help him, that was certain; Robert had been scathing, indeed flyting, of Roger’s scholiast bent and his penchant for the Latin language of the papal parasites, and of the money spent to support it – a scorn which had not been much tempered by the fact that Robert had twice been captured by the soldiers of Prince Louis’ invading army shortly after the thirteen-year-old Roger had entered Oxford, and had had to ransom himself. By now, Robert thought of Roger as a renegade from the family – and never mind that the still younger Eugene, now fifteen and at the new University of Toulouse, had shown the same scholar’s bent without being flyted for it; nor that now in. London Robert was farther away from the family than Roger and had even less of the grain on his tongue; still the indictment stuck.
As well it might, the self whispered in the darkness. Distresseth thou thyself, an thy people be dispersed? Justice is Love.
And it was true. He was more distressed by the loss of his money and his problematical fame than by the loss of his kin and seat, and more urgent to reclaim whatever effects the unknown Wulf had hidden for him than to succour his sisters, let alone the serfs. Perhaps there was even some money left; Christopher had always been careful to conceal caches of several scores of pounds at a time about the acres during the invasion against just such a catastrophe as this, and did not dream even on the day of his death that his sullen second-born son had found the records of those oubliettes and broken the cypher which told where all but two were buried. Roger had never touched but one, and that one of the two not mentioned in the cypher at all, but deducible by simple geometrical reasoning from the positions of the others; he had lifted a heavy stone and there it was, and he bad taken from it one pound, no more, as an honorarium to the power of his boy’s reasoning, watched only by three snotty-nosed yearling calves – all of whom had died not long after of the trough fever. It did not seem likely that either a serf or a pack of de Burgh’s mailed looters could have had the wit to uncover even the encyphered hideyholes, let alone Roger’s deposit-lighter-by-one pound; and at the worst, there was still the undiscovered, unrecorded burial, which, by evidence of its highest secrecy, might well be the richest of all – and a problem worthy of a subtle intellectual soul as much for its difficulty as for its treasure-trove.
And after that discovery, there were certain burials and other concealments that he had made – nothing that this Wulf could have known about, but as close to wealth as mark or pound might be in these times. There was, for instance, a flat glass that he had made from a broken wind-eye in the buttery, with a thin poured lead back in the centre of which he had dug out a peephole; through that chipped spot one might look in a dark room into a cat’s eye, reflecting a candle flame into the cat’s eye from the glass side – particularly into the eye of massive old Petronius, the black arbiter of the barn rats – and see deep in the lambent slitgated sphere a marvellous golden sparkle, overlaid with dusky red vessels. What might you see inside a man’s head with such a tool? He had tried it with the infant Beth, but there had been no light in her eyes that he could see, and besides, his mother had cut the experiment short with a within& In another pocket in the house he had hidden a small clump of nitre crystals which he had culled with reeking labour from the dungheap; he did not in the least know what they were good for, but anything so precisely formed had to be good for something, like the cylindrical bits of beryl which he had split from a prismatic rock, which laid on a page fattened the strokes and made even dirty minuscules easier to read. Every man has sisters; but how many men have such tools, and such mysteries?
Suddenly he realized that he was trembling. He let go of the letter and clasped his hands back together violently. If there is one thing in the world I will do, he told himself in the tear-freezing darkness …. No, if there is one thing in the world I will not do, Domine, dominus noster, I will not let go. I will not let go. Thou hast taken away mine house; so be it. But Thou shalt not take away from me what Thou hast given me, which is the lust to know Thy nature.
I shall never let go.
The wind made a sudden sucking sound somewhere in the convent and poured itself up the throat of a chimney with a low brief moan. The corridor lightened slightly, flickeringly. The time had come; Robert Grosseteste’s door was open. Adam Marsh was standing in the muddy, wavering light, one long hand crooked, one deep shadow laid along his narrow pointed nose.
‘Roger,’ he said softly. ‘Roger? Art still there? Ah, I see thee now. Come in most quietly, he is asleep, or so I think. But would talk with thee.’
Roger stirred, painfully; his bones were almost frozen. He cleared his throat, but his whisper was still harsh when it came forth:
‘Adam, if he is so ill—’
Certes he is ill, but would see thee all the same. He asked for thee, Roger. Come in quickly, this plaudering lets the chill in, too, and he needs warmth.’
Roger moved quickly then, fighting the stiffness, and Adam shut the door behind him with a miraculous soundlessness. If the room had been chilled during their brief exchange, Roger could not detect it; the air seemed almost hot to him, and the heat from the ardent coals in the fireplace beat against his cheeks and made his eyes tighten. Though there were two candles on a lectern against the wall to the left, and two more on an age-blackened, book-heaped table butting a wardrobe just to the right of the door, the room was quite dark all along its peripheries; the light and heat made an island in the centre, between the door and the hearth, where the low narrow bed was drawn up, parallel with the low stone mantel. The bed was deep in disordered robes and blankets.
The matter of the letter and his patrimony fled tracelessly from his mind the moment he saw the massive head of the lector upon the bolster, its bushy grey monk’s tonsure in a tangle under a blue woollen skullcap, the veined eyelids closed in deep-shadowed sockets, the skin of the face as tight and semi-transparent as parchment over the magnificent leonine cheekbones. Bending over Robert Grosseteste and listening with cat-still intentness to his breathing was a fierce-looking swarthy man in mouse-coloured breeches and a saffron tunic; the ear that was tipped down to the lector was bare, but from the other a gold earring lay along the cord of his neck. As Roger made an involuntary half-step forward, the swarthy man held up one palm with all the command of a lord.
‘Very well,’ the swarthy man said. ‘A will stay on live, an his stars permit it. But these are mischancy times. Give him of the electuary when a wakens:-
‘What is it he bath with him?’ Adam said with an equal intensity.
‘Not the consumption,’ the Jew said. ‘Beyond that I am as ignorant as any man. If there’s a crisis, call me no more; I have done what I could.’
‘And for that all thanks,’ Adam said, ‘and my purse. Would God might send thee His grace as well as His wisdom.’
The physician straightened, his eyes burning sombrely. ‘Keep thy purse,’ he said between startlingly white teeth. The purse struck the stone floor almost at Roger’s feet and burst, scattering coins among the rushes and the alder leaves spread to trap fleas. ‘Thou payest me ill enough already with thy blessing. I spit on thee.’
For a moment it seemed to Roger that he might actually do just that, but instead, he strode past them both with an odd, stoop-shouldered, loping gait and was gone. Adam stared after him; he seemed stunned.
‘What did I say?’ the Franciscan murmured.
‘What matter?’ Roger said in a hoarse whisper. He was having difficulty in keeping himself from tallying the spatter of coins in the rushes; he felt as though the parchment in his pocket had suddenly been set afire. ‘’Tis but a Jew.’
‘As were three of the nine worthies of the world,’ Adam said gently, ‘and among Christians there were eke but three, as among the paynims. Since Our Lord was a Jew as well, that giveth the Jews somewhat the advant
age.’
Roger shrugged convulsively. This was an ill time, it seemed to him, to be resurrecting the Nine Worthies.
‘Thou’dst talk nonsense on the day of wrath could it be mathematical nonsense, Master Marsh,’ he said edgily. The words, as they came out, appalled him; suddenly, it seemed as though he were giving voice to the self for the first time in all his guarded life – here in the presence of an undoubted elected saint, and of the angel of death. But it could hardly be unsaid. ‘Forgive me; Christ is as Christian a worthy as He was a Jew, it seemeth me. And meseemeth the Capito yonder as worthy a Christian as Godfrey of Bouillon, and leader of as worthy a crusade. I count ignorance as deadly as the paynim.’
Adams stared at Roger a little while as though he had seen the youngster for almost the first time. After a few moments, Roger was forced to drop his eyes, but that was no better, for that brought him back into encounter with the money on the floor.
‘A dangerous notion, and a bad piece of logic,’ Adam said at last in a strange voice. ‘Thou art an ill-tempered youngster, Roger. Nevertheless, thou remindest me that our matter here is with the lector, not disputation; which is a point which pierceth, be it never so poorly thrust. Let neither of us raise our voices again here.’
‘So be it,’ Roger muttered. There was a long and smothering silence, during which Roger began to hear the slightly ragged, slightly too rapid breathing of Robert Grosseteste, as though his lungs were being squeezed by a marching piper of the Scots to keep him harrowing the air. As time stretched out under Adam’s level eyes, the pace of the breathing increased; and then, with a start, the lector coughed rackingly and jerked his great head up.
‘That shall I do,’ he said in a thick, strangled voice. His head moved uncertainly and for a moment his eyes rested on Roger without seeming to see him. Adam stepped forward and Grosseteste’s head turned once more, but his eyes were still glazed; two hectic fever-spots began to burn on his cheeks, as though they had been rubbed with snow. Seeing the great head lolling thus frighteningly brought home to Roger as nothing else had done the precariousness of the lector’s future from moment to moment; he was, after all, My-seven years old and the uprightness of his life had not prevented it from being most active and taxing. He had been the chancellor of the University until 1229, when he had resigned the post to give the lectures to the Franciscans, and in the short course of Roger’s own lifetime he had been archdeacon of Chester, Northampton and Leicester, one after the other. No man in orders had ever been more attentive to the needs of his parishes; no member of the Faculty of Theology more assiduous of the needs of the whole University and all three thousand of its students; no scholar more careful to build the massive learning which alone justifies a master to lecture before the young. Were God to terminate his life in the next instant, no man could call it anything but long, full and rich in works – and the death had been laying an especial hand on the old.