The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart

by Jesse Bullington

  A sneak by nature as well as trade, Al-Gassur eventually overheard enough from the kitchen windows and the guards to ascertain the destination of the Grossbarts. The years of rotten food, alcoholism, and exposure had not dulled his wits but sharpened them, the mendicant well aware such an opportunity came to a man only once in his existence. Knowing his ruse could not last forever, he struggled to tame his forgetful tongue, scouring the streets in vain for another Arab to teach him what everyone assumed he knew.

  One sun-broiled Mediterranean morning several months after the arrival of the Grossbarts the twins found themselves again wandering the ill-kept gardens when they noticed Al-Gassur perched in the boughs of a lime tree. The fellow had shimmied out along a high branch that stretched over the top of the garden’s wall, and here he sat conversing, presumably, with someone on the other side of the wall. Cat-paw quiet, the Grossbarts crept underneath him to better eavesdrop but upon hearing the incomprehensible tongue of Italia they resolved with a glance how to handle the situation. Hegel dropped to a knee and Manfried sprang from his brother’s shoulder, seizing the Arab by his good leg and bringing them both crashing to the ground.

  Hearing hurried footsteps fleeing over cobblestones on the other side of the wall confirmed their suspicions as to the duplicitous nature of their servant, and Manfried held the stunned cripple while Hegel drew his knife.

  “Time you’s clean a spirit,” said Hegel, showing Al-Gassur his own terrified expression reflected on the blade.

  “Please! What?! No no no, let me explain!”

  “Explain away, traitor,” said Manfried, tightening his grip around the Arab’s pinned arms.

  “Traitor? Never!” Al-Gassur did not struggle, the panic leaving his face as he met his own reflection.

  “Own up and we’ll make it quick for you,” said Manfried. “You was tellin your heathenish relations bout our plans, wasn’t you?”

  “Givin’em time to ready for our arrival,” Hegel clucked. “And after all we done for you. Shameful.”

  “I would sooner cut the tongue from my own mouth and feed it to that Rodrigo before I would slander my benefactors!” Al-Gassur said. “I merely sought to find the reason, for your mutual benefits, as to why the two of you, and by extension myself, have been forbidden to leave the grounds these last weeks.”

  “Forbidden?” Hegel laughed. “We ain’t forbidden from nuthin!”

  “Bide, bide,” said Manfried, recalling the alcoholic distractions and bathy diversions placed before them whenever they had intended an outing over the previous month.

  “Bide what?” asked Hegel in their twinspeak. “He was talkin foreign!”

  “True enough,” Manfried replied in kind. “But sounded right Italia-talk to me, not that Arab gibberish. Implies he mightn’t be fibbin this once, least not completely. Hear’em out, and if I gives you the nod gut’em then.”

  “Fair’s fair,” Hegel said, reverting to the common language. “Tell us quick and true who you was talkin to, and spare no details if you want spared.”

  “And every other applicable item to boot,” said Manfried, “bout what you been doin since we showed up and put your mecky Infidel ass honest in this house.”

  “Yes! Please! At once! Honest and without hesitation!” Al-Gassur may have carried on like this for some time had Hegel not wiggled his knife at the Arab. “From the beginning then, and if I may presume to suppose you might be willing to sully your nobly forested mouths with a bottle that my own corroded lips have blemished, I would be elated to share my unworthy beverage as well as my tale.”

  “Huh?” said Hegel.

  “Ifing Master Manfried sees fit to release me, I would like to share my bottle of wine,” Al-Gassur clarified.

  “See, our company’s makin you more honest by the moment,” said Manfried, giving the man a final squeeze before letting him go.

  Finding the bottle unbroken in his bag, Al-Gassur fished it out and took a swig before offering it to the Brothers.

  “While the gutter has served as residence and employer for most of my time in Venezia, I have occasionally stooped to labor in more, as you say, honest ventures. An especially upstanding and chivalrous youth of noble standing spied me in a crowd and perceived I possessed all the graces required to be an ideal servant, and so I served in one of this fair city’s most highly houses.”

  Al-Gassur spoke a variety of truth, for the young man in question indeed found the Arab to possess certain graces-said graces being an appearance and demeanor assured to raise the rancor of the youth’s father. While Al-Gassur was never caught in the act of embezzling his master’s sugar and pepper, the lad had tragically been slain in a duel with an equally shallow coxcomb and that very afternoon Al-Gassur found himself discharged.

  “After I had done all I could for him, my original benefactor, and, dare I say, friend,” Al-Gassur continued, “I found cause to advance myself. We are aware, are we not, that any worthwhile city, like any worthwhile pudding, holds a thick layer of fat atop it?”

  Hegel nodded at this while Manfried futilely tried to think of a way of applying the analogy to graveyards that was not distasteful to his delicate sensibilities.

  “So I found employment with our mutual and dearly departed friend and confidant, Ennio, in this very house,” Al-Gassur said, omitting the detail that Ennio had hired him primarily to irritate his brother Rodrigo; a trend that, once established by his first master, served Al-Gassur all the days of his pragmatic life. “The barn is therefore familiar to me upon this, my second tenure in the House of Barousse. The matter of a missing cake from the kitchen’s windowsill undid my previous employment, despite the obvious, blatant, and irrefutable proof that the guards set me up. Nestore, God bless and keep him, has found work for me to perform down these days whenever I am not actively serving you.”

  Nestore, the cook’s husband and supplier of groceries, had taken to Al-Gassur at once, their mutual dislike of honest labor surpassed only by their affection for excessive drinking. Ennio and Nestore were the only ones who had stuck up for Al-Gassur when he was found munching the cake intended for Barousse’s board. The first night the Arab spent back in the barn Nestore and he had celebrated with the exquisite schnapps Al-Gassur had stolen from Hegel’s cask during the Grossbarts’ first, stormy discourse with Rodrigo before being admitted to the grounds. The schnapps was supplemented with Nestore’s cheese, sausage, and, of course, cake.

  “Fascinatin,” Manfried yawned. “Much as I’d love nuthin more than to hear your whole fuckin life told from when you crawled out your desert womb down to the present, with every time you copped a hot squat laid out in detail, time’s an essence where savin lives is concerned.”

  “Saving lives?” Al-Gassur blinked.

  “Yours,” said Hegel. “You get on with who you was talkin to just now or you get cut, you loquacious piece a shit.”

  “Naturally, of course, without pause! My advantageous placement in society allows me to catch the random rumor, the occasional whisper, and a nightsoilman I keep company with often gathers gossip along with the excrement he dumps in the canals. A consequence of our long-standing friendship is that he, on occasion, will pause underneath our esteemed host’s wall when he sees a rock balanced on the ledge, as he did today. I have known, as all with wits who dwell in this city do, that the doge harbors a strong disdain for Captain Barousse, although precisely why is all merely conjecture, and so I thought to enquire of him particular details, details which may explain why Barousse feels the need to keep his beloved Grossbarts safe behind these walls.”

  “Right,” said Manfried. “We’s finally fuckin gettin somewhere. You been consortin with shit-takers, which is fittin in light a your shitty nature. Could a said that in one word.”

  “Now brother,” said Hegel, “no call in runnin down nightsoilmen, we wouldn’t a gotten out a Bucharest without that sound fellow lettin us hide in his cart.”

  “Thanks for remindin me bout another one a your blessed schemes,” sai
d Manfried. “Buried alive in devil-dirt ain’t exactly the fondest memory I got, and might not a been the only way out that situation. Now stow the reminiscences long enough to see if we got to kill us an Arab.”

  As the Brothers had not switched to their private dialect, Al-Gassur wasted no time in relaying the rest of his information. “According to my friend, the most immediate defamation goes like this: a certain merchant of certain repute harbors certain wanted brigands who reputedly sacked a certain village to the north, the same village a certain mistress of a certain prominent official hails from. That both her parents burned to death in the ensuing fire is no less certain. Worse still, her only brother and several of his friends were found murdered in the river shortly after.”

  This tale the nightsoilman had told gelled with the doge’s emissary paying a visit to Barousse several days before, only to leave red-faced and cursing a short time later. Further confirmation came at once from the Grossbarts, who grinned at each other.

  “Called us certain brigands, did he?” said Manfried. “Tomorrow you’s puttin a stone out for your friend, then me and my brother can endeavor to impress on his certain ass the utility a usin proper language stead a slanderous terminology.”

  “Not his words, I assure you, but the words of the rumor!” said Al-Gassur. “He also says a new wrinkle has been revealed, namely that the, ah, accused brigands are in fact the leaders of a certain heretical sect calling themselves the Road Popes, and these blasphemous bandits have stolen much coin and spilled much blood which might have otherwise gone to Venezia, prior to this most recent and heinous and by no means proven crime of arson and murder.”

  The refutation of this rumor came to Al-Gassur in the form of a sound beating from the Brothers, who were more than happy to blame the messenger.

  “Your life’s spared for bein honest,” said Manfried as he boxed the wailing Arab’s ear. “That skin a yours’ a different matter, phrasin them lies like we’s them fuckin popes!”

  “Easy on,” said Hegel, jumping back rather than delivering the intended kick to the prostrate servant. “I just got me a touch a the chill.”

  “Someone’s raisin a ruckus out front,” said Manfried, his uncropped ear cocked to the side. “You’s square enough for masonry now, Arab, make sure you keep yourself that way.”

  A breathless Father Martyn argued through the gate with the guards until Rodrigo and the Grossbarts arrived simultaneously, admitting him and leading the nervous fellow inside moments before several of the doge’s guardsmen arrived. Barousse’s guards were equally surly to the pikemen, who left after issuing several oaths and proclamations for the neighbors’ benefit. To the observant Al-Gassur-who had slunk back to the barn to watch-trouble hovered over the Barousse household like the nightsoilman’s swarm of flies.

  “Heretics,” Martyn panted as he sat down at Barousse’s table.

  The captain, perpetually distracted of late, picked idly at a fish bone, but the Grossbarts took interest in Martyn’s return, his bruised face, and his vague proclamations regarding blasphemers of a yet-unnamed stripe.

  “You ain’t talkin bout us again,” Manfried informed him.

  “Or is you?” demanded Hegel.

  “What?” Martyn rubbed his swollen cheeks. “No, no, no. Lord no. I mean the Church.”

  “That’s better.” Hegel reclined in his chair.

  “Which church?” Only Rodrigo appeared dismayed by this.

  “The Church.” Martyn sipped more wine. “The only Church. The worm of corruption has been unearthed but I cannot exorcise it alone. How long? How long! Back to Formosus, certainly, but farther still I fear. Longer than my order has professed to battle heresy, certainly, certainly. Who remains untouched? Aquinas? Augustine?”

  “Those weren’t priests chasing you, they were guardsmen. Why?” Rodrigo pumped Martyn with all the subtlety of a burly child priming a spigot.

  “Hounds, nothing more!” The priest swigged at their mention. “I bore their scorn before, for the name of God and man, but no more! Roquetaillade was right, rotting in prison for speaking the truth! End Times are upon us!”

  “Calm yourself,” said Rodrigo.

  “Cease thy blathering!” said Martyn. “Nothing can be done for it! The Antichrist strides among us, gentlemen, he breathes and stalks and spreads ruin! Prophecy which they called heresy! They must have known, but feared martyring him lest he too rise. Saint Roquetaillade!”

  Seeing his brother’s confusion, Manfried clarified. “To get sainted you gotta die someways awful. Catch the wisdom?”

  “Evil clever.” Hegel nodded. “Didn’t reckon the clergy might be so underhanded-like.”

  “That’s just it,” said Martyn, unswallowed wine spilling from his mouth. “Always, always! I offered to bring you before them to validate my tale but they would have none of it! Accused me of harboring a demon, me! Meanwhile the Great Mortality has not returned over spring nor summer in any part of the continent! Any! We smote it from the Earth, and yet we are deemed wicked, we are deemed guilty of blasphemy! We who put our lot with the lowly and craven, we who suffer alongside serf and cow, through winters without turnips and summers without wheat!”

  Manfried scowled. “Seein how we’s not yet royalty, I’s a touch curious as to your choice a phrasin it we we we.”

  “They would not let me see him! I thought this Gomorrah ’s ill relations with our Mother Church would facilitate my immediate departure but alas, they are again close as brothers! I meant to stay only a night before journeying weeks, all to sit patiently for months seeking an audience in Avignon while hordes rally at our gates, that old Serpent never absent, our second fall!” Martyn babbled, then calmed, a rain-drunk creek of words. “I have not left the city since I left you, Grossbarts, seasons have passed and I have abided, imprisoned and tortured like the last Cathar to wither and die! That’s what they did to the surviving Albigensians, you know, not a quick death for them! They sent for an inquisitor to bring me to the Holy Office, I heard them! Escaped in time, through His Will! Delivered back to you despite pursuit! His Will!”

  “What’s he on bout?” Hegel asked his brother.

  “Parrently implicatin our good name in some fresh shit.” Manfried was on his feet. “What in Hell’s wrong with you?!”

  “Demonslayers, are you not? What worthier devil than the Archfiend, our nemesis! Of course I brought the title Grossbart into the field! Humble though you now seem, I know of your greatness, and would be remiss not to draw you into my company, lying as you do somewhere between laity and clergy. Even Saint Roquetaillade and Saint Roch quail before your sanctity! I have dreams, Grossbarts, and in them He has commanded me to do what is just! I thought that meant informing his so-called Holiness of the situation we endured, only to be undone! Not even exiled but imprisoned under his orders; his orders that the inquisitor pry the truth from my lips like some recalcitrant Judas!”

  “You’s mixin up tales, you drunken sod.” Manfried shook his head, abandoning his efforts to decipher the ravings.

  “Nah, keep talkin like that,” Hegel insisted. “Whatever he’s sayin sounds good to me. You’s always speakin on how corrupt them priests and abbots and all is, and here’s your proof!”

  “He was proof enough fore he went incomprehensible.” Manfried lowered his voice. “Seen how he looked at her.”

  “How he looked at who?” the captain unexpectedly joined the discourse.

  “I have weaknesses!” Martyn shouted, the indignity of being talked about as though he were absent intolerable after months of such treatment. “I have passed every test, though, every one! Oh Elise, poor poor Elise, I tried, I tried so hard but I was weak! But not a woman have I touched sinfully since I accepted my mantle so long ago! In this forgotten time it matters not, for all that should go have gone and all that remain until the End are those now twice-damned and twice-fallen! And still I abstain from temptation, still and forever!” He gulped a final gulp and pitched forward, moaning on the table.


  “Shit,” Rodrigo said after a brief silence.

  “Nuthin so sweet,” said Manfried.

  “So what’d he say?” asked Hegel.

  “You heard, same as us.” Manfried poured more wine.

  “Yeah, but what’s he mean?” Hegel pressed.

  “He means we’re in more trouble than just harboring the both of you,” Rodrigo sighed, “unless we turn him over.”

  “To who?” asked Hegel.

  “The Church, the doge’s guard, whoever. He’s wanted, same as the two of you.”

  “What’s this bout us beein wanted?” Manfried’s interest renewed at the prospect of an honest Arab.

  “Murder, arson, and some other crimes less polite. Don’t think we’ve asked you to stay within the grounds this past month for the pleasure of your company.” Rodrigo kept glancing at Barousse for support but the captain stared at the wall, his face vacant.

  “Wondered bout that.” Hegel took the bottle his brother offered. “But no mistake, had we more shoppin or carousin to do we would a been gone like a goose in winter and come back if and when we wanted. But the end’s what? We ain’t turnin’em over to them heretics.”

  “So that I’m not misunderstanding, by heretics you mean the Church?” Rodrigo spoke slowly.

  “Yeah, thems what think wearin fineries and havin precious baubles is intrinsic to their devotion. You know, heretics,” said Hegel.

  “We would all be burned if your feelings were known,” Rodrigo hissed.

  “Mind the lip, lad,” Manfried belched. “That priest is the best we’s seen in our time, and less he proves otherwise anyone callin him out on heresy is workin for Old Scratch themself.”

  “We’re dead!” Rodrigo jumped up, knocking Hegel’s feet off the table and spilling wine on the dozing Martyn. “Denying them you is difficult, but his presence will make it impossible! Even now they will be preparing an assault, and if not that, a siege! An inquisitor has been sent, and we hold the object of his summons! Dead and damned!”

  “Sit down,” Barousse said wearily. “Shouting like that soused church mouse’ll do nothing for any of us. You want to cut your ties and float on your own, I won’t stop you.”