by James Blish
Minorum.
Tuae devotionis litteras gratantes recepimus: sed at verba notarimus diligenter quae ad explanationem earum dilectus filius G. dictus Bonecor, Miles, viva voce nobis proposuit, tam fideliter quam prudenter.
Sane et medius nobis liqueat quid intendas, volumus, et tibi per Apostolica scripts praecipiendo mandamus, quatenus, non obstante praecepto praelati cujuscunque contrario, vel tui Ordinis constitution quacunque, opus illud, quod to dilecto filio Raymundo de Laonuno communicate rogarimus in minore officio constituti, scriptum de bona littera nobis mittere quam citissime poteris quae tibi videntur adhibenda remedia circa ilia, quae nuper occasione tanti discriminis intimasti: et hoc quarto secretius poteris facias indilate.
Datum Viterbii, x. Cal. Julii, anno II.
CLEMENT IV.
DEO GRATIAS. AMEN. AMEN. AMEN.
Oh, Deo gratias, amen! His day was come: Friar Bacon, the obscure, the rebellious, the exiled, the scorned and despised, had indeed become that Magister Roger of whom he had dreamed before he had ever left home: Magister Roger, whose works were writ for Popes!
He studied the miraculous document long and long, not only for the fiercely solemn delight with which it filled him, but also because he was determined, equally fiercely, that it should be put to the best possible use. It was enough like the first mandate – indeed, some of their phrases were identical –to contain many of the same traps. Clement had not only remembered the first mandate, as was clear but had come very close to repeating it. There was the same requirement that Roger’s writings be sent to him ‘in good letters’, which of course meant that copyists would be required; the same requirement that the work be sent regardless of any provisions to the contrary in the constitutions of the Order; the same corollary failure to include any instructions to the brothers for the mitigation of Roger’s menial duties; and above all, the same injunction that all this be done in secret. Furthermore, there was again no money – either Sir William Bonecor had failed to carry that part of the message, or he had not put the case strongly enough.
What, then, was he to do? On the face of it, a mandate from the spiritual emperor of all Christendom should be the most powerful of instruments; yet in point of fact, it seemed to leave him very much where he had been before. He could still proceed no further without making a thorough, indeed a drastic attempt to raise money; for this needed time, and the whole purpose of corrective discipline, no matter who was corrected, was to fill up time which might otherwise be used for thinking or some other mischief.
Roger sloshed his mop thoughtfully into a corner. It had not occurred to him until now, but under circumstances of this kind the injunction to secrecy would be impossible to fulfil, no matter how faithfully he himself obeyed it. The use of outside copyists would defeat it. If they did not pirate the work itself as it passed through their hands – the usual practice in a university town if the work in question appeared to be of some substance, likely sooner or later to be saleable to students – one or another of the scribes, sooner or later, would be sure to whisper to Roger’s superiors the word which would undo his triumph, branch and root. Then he would have no choice but to show the brothers his letter from the Pope, and secrecy of any sort would be at an end.
But there were, to be sure, different kinds and degrees of secrecy; and it might be possible, by forfeiting the lesser, to preserve the greater. The question was: since secrecy in toto was impossible, what aspect of it would be the greater in Clement’s eyes? To answer that, one would have to know why Guy had enjoined it in the first place, and not even a hint of such a reason appeared in either this or the earlier mandate. It would have to be a reason which would be as compelling to Pope Clement IV as it had been to the Cardinal-Bishop of Sabina, a reason which did not change and might indeed loom even larger with the donning of the Tiara.
One such which might have bulked large to a Cardinal, a reluctance to interfere with the internal discipline of the Orders, could hardly crouch so obstinately in the way of a Pope, on whose sufferance both Orders – both founded within the lifetimes of living men – depended for their existence. Yet young though they were, and corrupt though they were even in their youth, the Orders had proven their value to Christendom, and no Pope could now want to see them disrupted, let alone dissolved; so it might well be assumed that Clement, like his predecessors, would wish to avoid any move which might promote dissension between them – such as permitting an errant Franciscan to publish in despite of the direct prohibition of his Minister General; and publish, furthermore, an extensive work in the natural sciences which the Dominicans were forbidden to study at all.
In so far as Roger could determine, the reasoning was sound, but the conjecture upon which it ultimately stood was a shaky one indeed upon which to build in addition a course of action. Nevertheless, he had no better foundation; and its consequences were that, first, what Clement would most desire would be the concealment of the nature and content of the work, not only from the world, but from the Franciscans themselves; and, second, that in defence of this the larger secrecy, the smaller secret of the existence of the mandate might in middling-good conscience be sacrificed. Were the conjecture to be true, then it would follow that while the first mandate – from the Cardinal – might or might not specifically identify the work to be prepared as dealing with the natural sciences (as in fact, of course, it did), the second – from the Pope – would not; and this indeed was one of the major differences between these otherwise so similar documents. The logician in Roger shuddered at the prospect of launching into these unknowable seas aboard the keelless, sailless, rudderless fallacy of affirming the consequent; but the self whispered, What choice? And answered, None, none.
He sought Out the Father Superior, and showed him the letter. The consternation it produced was gratifying, but dangerous as well; to the demand that Roger surrender it for an examination in council and by the provincial minister, Roger refused on the grounds that it was addressed to him and was his property, which was inarguable except on the rarefied theological ground that as a Franciscan he had no property – an argument too tainted with Joachism to be usable here. After three days the provincial minister was called in, to see whether by the plea to the Pope on Roger’s part of which Clement’s letter plainly gave evidence, Roger had transgressed the fifth rubric of the Constitutions of Narbonne, which forbade any Franciscan to approach the Pontiff without many specific permissions; but the mandate, whose authenticity could hardly be doubted, was a white-hot iron to be thrust into the placid, indeed stagnant waters of a Parisian convent of no other account, and the charge was dismissed on the technicality that the text of Clement betrayed no intention on Roger’s part to pass over his, superiors to the Holy Father simply to prosecute a grievance, the main act the fifth rubric had been inscribed to prevent. In this much, Deo gratias, the discretion he had exercised in casting the plea had been paid back.
Suspicion, jealousy, envy, all these remained; to which was added even a certain savagery in the enforcement of his daily tasks; but the words and the signature of the Pope could in no wise be contraverted, nor could the brothers deny him time to go forth into the city to raise money for copyists – they being no better able than he had been to interpret otherwise Clement’s command to secrecy.
For the rest of their malice, he had a sufficient remedy, in his heart. He wrote to Eugene, without exposing the subject: It is the vice by which man loses himself, his neighbour, and God, which forces him to break peace with all, even with his dearest friends. He disparages everyone with insults, and assails everyone with injuries; he does not omit to expose himself to all perils, and is not afraid to blaspheme God.’
He had none to say to him, ‘Art aware, most Christian Roger, that thou art describing someone an enemy would say much favours thee?’ That man was dead.
Thus armed, he went forth into the city, which he had not seen since before Rome. By the river there was a ruin which he studied silently for a long time before his memories of both
towns combined to give him understanding of what had happened: the Parisians had clumsily piled a third course atop the aqueduct, and the whole long structure had come pouring down in a rain of ill-cut stones, leaving behind naught but a few arches and a parade of jagged stumps, like a burlesque of cypresses. There was a monument to ignorance that would stub toes and bark shins for centuries to come; but he had no time now to brood over it any further, let alone teach simple Roman engineering to the rough-dressed heads of Paris. His present errand was to Louis IX, King of France.
There was no one to tell him that this were madness, since he had broached it to no one but himself. It seemed to him to be a simple and sensible project: it was the best visible use to which one could put a letter from the curator princeps of the next world to a prince of this, and Louis was the best kind to read the message, as Henry III would doubtless have been the worst. Louis loved knowledge, and had been for a long time the patron of Vincent of Beauvais, a Dominican who had written in the domain of theology just such a work as Roger was now asked to write in the sciences; had in fact not only made Vincent his librarian, as Luca di Cosmati had been made the librarian of Piccolomini, Marquis of Modena, but had made him teacher and guide to his royal children.
The letter, indeed, did bring him to the king; but it also struck him dumb. Louis was remotely kind, as well as amused, but would know what business it was of the Pope’s that demanded so much money; and seeing from the letter that this could not be told, and from the shabbiness of the emissary, of whom he had never heard, that it could hardly be a matter of state, dismissed Roger with such a purse as he might give to any other mendicant and turned his mind to the next petitioner.
The purse was full of clipped trash, worth perhaps two pounds after the counterfeits were shaken out: a magnificent gift for a beggar, but a day wasted for Roger; he retreated at dusk to the convent, gloomily biting the ragged coins and spitting them out on to the cobbles.
It seemed reasonable, nay inevitable, that the response of any other high personage who did not know Roger would be the same, or perhaps much less gracious than that of the Saint-King had been. Such remaining quality as did know who Roger was, was in England, effectively beyond his reach for the indefinite future; and, of course, in Rome, which was no aid either. But wait: there was the Marquis of Modena.
But the more he considered the matter, the more reluctant he was to ask the grave scholar of Tivoli for money. Roger had not written to Piccolomini in a dozen years; and though there were assuredly many good and sufficient reasons for this, to break such a silence with a series of excuses directly followed by an appeal for funds would hardly sit well with the Roman aristocrat. Yet Roger was on the Pope’s business, and durst not let any field lie fallow that he knew might bear.
In the end, he wrote to Livia instead, explaining the circumstances frankly in so far as the mandate permitted him to do under his interpretation of it. Then he promptly forgot about this essay, for nothing was surer than that any response would be much delayed. If any money did indeed arrive from that source, it would not do so until he was in the concluding days of the work; and that would be just as well, for it would be then that the copyists’ bills would be falling due one after the other.
His next port of call was the laboratory of Peter the Peregrine.
‘Roger, you know well that I am cut off from my family as of old,’ the experimenter said when he was finished. ‘Yet you gave me money when you had it, and I’d not be such a poor Christian as to refuse you now. What to do? Well, here’s two pounds, as a beginning’– a most poor beginning, but I am a poor man.’
‘Believe me, Peter, I take it as gratefully as if it were riches; as from you it is. Could you, perhaps, suggest where else I might go? I have already tried the King.’
‘You have? Well, you were always bold. Belike I’d have gone to him myself, had I a mandate from the Pope in my scrip … but I doubt it. Now let’s see.… It would be easier, had we still the same circle of students as in the old days, to whom you gave your money; then we could simply pass a bowl around. Well, I can do that anyhow; I’ll tell those present that it’s a special assessment, and either they pay up or school’s out. But it’ll not produce so much as it would have did they know you and I could explain.’
‘Would it do any good, do you think,’ Roger suggested tentatively, ‘to explain it all the same, and tell them that I am the author of all those inflammatory books they’ve been reading?’
‘No, probably not,’ Peter said, frowning. ‘They’re an anticlerical lot; what care they for the Pope’s business, especially since I cannot say to them what precisely it is? Yet it might be as well to tell them that I am collecting the money for you. After all, they did lose four or five of your books, the young noodles; had those parchments belonged to the University library, the fines would have stings in them for fair; I’ll sting ’em too.’
‘I am more grateful to you than I can say, Peter.’
‘I have my reasons,’ Peter said, smiling. ‘Say me neither yea nor nay, but you prosecuting a business of the Pope’s must concern some work of knowledge, and you being who you are, it is bound to be knowledge in the natural sciences. I can think of nothing more worthy to be pressed upon a Pope; I have given my own life to them – what’s a few pounds?’
That interview cheered Roger for the remainder of the week; and at the outcome, he had six pounds, counting the two from the King. Yet there was no objective reason for cheerfulness – six pounds was almost as little use as no money at all; and he had exhausted his roster of noblemen, major and minor alike. Well then, merchants.
Here again, he knew of none but William Busshe, an Englishman; but that limitation was not without hope. It was true that the rebels had controlled the Cinque Ports –it was at Dover that they had met Guy de Foulques on his landing as mediator from the then Pope, and had torn the proposals he carried into a thousand bits and cast them into the sea – but they might not control them now, after Evesham; and in any event they had wanted the ports for the revenues, to help keep their armies in the field, and so would have had their own interest in the maintenance of shipping. What cost Roger more worry than this theory of strategy was winning from his superiors permission to make the long trip to Wissant; he won it at last not by an exercise of subtlety, but by flourishing the papal mandate at them like a bludgeon.
He had no hope of finding Bushe himself, for this was not the season for it, nor had he learned to know the family of Busshe’s hosts, during the three days that he had convalesced in their house, well enough to ask money of them. But he had with great care prepared a letter to William to be placed in their hands against the time when the Maudelayne should again be in port with its packs of fells. He knew the host at least well enough, he believed, to charge him most urgently with its cherishing, and most prompt delivery.
But Busshe was there. After some hesitation, and much whispering up and down stairs, the eldest daughter of his Flemish partner brought Roger to him, with her finger laid to her lips.
Busshe lay in that same great bed in which Roger had once recovered from his sea-sickness. His hands, that had hauled cordage in Channel storms, were crossed impotently in his lap, and beneath the linens lay the shadow of a torso as narrow and as lax as a length of tarred rope. His hair, totally white, was spread out on the bolster; and in all of him there was no colour, save for a bright-busked patch of red on each cheekbone, and the blue shadows under the closed eyes.
Below, there continued the muffled sounds of comings and goings: the host’s family, physicians, solicitors, agents, creditors, even sailors; Roger had seen, however, no ecclesiastics as yet. After a while, without opening his eyes, Busshe whispered:
‘The plate … the plate.…’
Roger understood very well; there had been just such a vigil of kites at his father’s last illness, and Robert, who had scattered it with brutal efficacy, had not then been too self-removed from his next-youngest brother to explain it. Roger bent and touched
Busshe’s hand gently with two fingers.
‘Dear friend,’ he said, and then was forced to swallow. ‘They cannot seize thy plate for thy debts. Thou’rt not at home.’
The dying man’s eyes opened at the touch, looking steadfastly at the ceiling. Nevertheless, he said:
‘’Tis Roger of Ilchester. Hast come to pray for William Busshe? I am thy debtor.’
There was no answer to be given; the question was as good as an indictment. The feathery voice said on:
‘I have many such. The horsemen … at Dover … took away my sarplers. Bare ‘scaped I with my ship.
‘Rest, William, I entreat thee.’
The hands stirred, fruitlessly. ‘Nay, no need. Well wis I. I be not long on live.… Thou’rt older too, Roger.’
‘Rest thee, in God’s name. How may I help thee?’
At that, William Busshe’s head turned on the bolster. His eyes glittered, but did not seem to see; it was the look of a limed bird. ‘Pray,’ he whispered; ‘pray. We will foredo them, thou and I, Roger. Ever scrupulously fair and honest was I with them; and now … they’re below dividing me, like … the cloak of … many colours. Seek in my chest, Roger.’
Roger looked about. ‘Good William, for what?’
‘The Maudelayne. The title’s there. Nay, first the key …’tis under this pillow.’
Gently, Roger extracted it, and opened the chest. In it there seemed to be nothing but a jumble of clothing.
‘The jerkin …’tis sewn flat into the right-hand corner. Thou art tonsured; say that I gave it thee to be shriven.’ He gasped, and his eyes closed.
Roger hastened to him. The sweat-beads on the white forehead were cold under his palm. But once more, Busshe’s lips moved.
‘Now … do I thank God … that one came to see me in mine extremity.… Roger … what dost do?’
Through his tears, Roger croaked forth the best half-truth of his life.
‘I am an adviser to the Pope.’