The Birsig, flooding from its tunnel, had filled the cellars of the Boot and Thorn and now was consuming the foundations.
The flames returned the attack, violently. Great pools of water were boiled out the windows. The fire had grown enormously and struck at the incoming flood. And it was of no use. The disquiet, unleashed Birsig was a fountain in the Common Room. All the floors above were being pulled down into it.
A mad rush issued from the tunnel as the panicked horses, and a panicked Willi and Fritz, escaped the stables. They fled out to the Square, and then into the streets. Fritz ran on but Willi reached the middle of the Square and turned in the rain to watch, as I was. There seemed to be no one else.
The windows went dark, one by one, each with a violent billow of steam. Then with a shaking I think the whole city must have felt, the fire of the Boot and Thorn was submerged, and quenched. All of the Birsig was flowing into the Common Room, opening a void to take the inn. The roof sank lower; the walls collapsed inward and the swelling water spewed from every open part.
Then it was gone, swallowed and extinguished, and there was only a wide, deep hole of water.
The rain decreased. There was a beginning of light in the west.
I was still in the door of the Barefoot Church, and there was a feeling, like a motion, though I couldn’t see movement. But the feeling was as if a weight had been cut from a spring, a heavy weight, and a very strong, slow spring; a slow up-and-down oscillation, like a wave. All of Basel was part of it. And the church rode peacefully on the motion.
The streets were rivers, all flowing into the Rhine, cleansing the city of its dry dust. The sky to the west had opened of clouds. I walked home through the lessening rain. Light shown from my grandmother’s front window.
She was in the front parlor with the curtains open. I sat beside her. She took my hand and held it, which she had never done.
“Daniel is going to Russia,” I said. “Nicolaus with him.”
I saw what she was watching, a rainbow.
“When will you go, Leonhard?”
“Next year.” The sunlight diffracted through the rain was bright as jewels. “I believe I’m finished with Basel.”
“What you did was very dangerous.”
“When I read Master Jacob’s papers,” I said, “I knew what had to be done. On his last day he repented of his disputes and his break with his brother. His last wisdom was that malice and dispute and betrayal were the greatest danger to a family, and by that to everything else. And he proposed a solution.”
“A Mathematic solution?”
“It is. A law of creation. That evil is defeated through sacrifice.”
“And all of this,” she said, of the storm, and of all the past, “was the defeat.”
“It was slow, and terrible, and grievous,” I said. “But the end is sure. It’s the greatest law of any.”
Paul Robertson is the acclaimed author of five novels including Dark in the City of Light and The Heir. He lives with his family in Blacksburg, Virginia.
Books by Paul Robertson
* * *
According to Their Deeds
Dark in the City of Light
An Elegant Solution
The Heir
Road to Nowhere
An Elegant Solution Page 38