John the Pupil

by David Flusfeder

  The boy does not wish to drink. He moves his head from side to side to avoid the remedy. The liquid splashes on to his chin, his tunic, the hands of his mother who is squeezing his nose tight with one hand and pulling his jaws open with the other. People going about their work look at us as if we could have provided a better spectacle.

  The boy shrieks, vomits, is made to drink some more, and shrieks again. His mother spits three times, and leads him away. I gather up my utensils, the pot, the wine, the mixing stick.

  The lord Cavalcante de Cavalcanti came into the courtyard with his son. He was displeased. He said,

  Why do you beg when everything is provided? You are here as our guests. You do not need to beg. It is dishonouring, for all of us.

  I had no reply to make other than shame. Brother Andrew bowed, and returned the remainder of the wine to the store.

  Prince Guido said,

  They are typical friars and this is what friars do. Try to frighten our people with their stories and drink our wine and ask for money. I should have left them to the mercies of their enemies.

  I said,

  It is not like that.

  How then is it? said the great lord Cavalcante de Cavalcanti.

  I was sorry to have grieved them. His spirit is unruly, like his son’s, but it is tempered with wisdom and due care. He is a father to his people, a host to us, and I could see the picture that had been made, to our discredit.

  I said,

  We will be on our way. Thank you for all that you have given us.

  Our manners had failed to match their hospitality. But, I reflected, it was no bad thing, to be on our way. Our injuries were healing, our bellies were full. It was good to have been met with kindness, but we had a mission to fulfil and somewhere out there the second messenger was making his progress to Viterbo.

  The lord and his son were turning away from us; we were becoming vapour in their minds, vanishing from their memories, when the boy we had seen returned into the courtyard running ahead of his mother. His tunic was wetter than before, both were joyful. The mother bowed, she made her son kiss my hand. She talked of the Flood, she marvelled at the quantity of urine that her son had been able to expel. Again she bowed before me.

  We became solid again in the notice of the lord Cavalcante de Cavalcanti. He made the mother account for her behaviour. He asked her for a full description of what had been transacted between us and then he turned again to me, asking me to explain the means of my remedy, and the basis for it in my knowledge and experience.

  I told him something of my education, I praised my Master. I told Cavalcante de Cavalcanti that I was an unworthy vessel for the wisdom of the most learned man in Christendom. And the lord asked me if I accepted that I was under an obligation to him and his house and when I admitted that I was, he said that there would be no more talk of us leaving, and he said,

  You shall heal the sick of the castle. And you shall educate my son.

  I protested. I said that my time was not my own, that I was on a mission directed by my Master, but the lord is accustomed to getting his way, and he made me agree that our injuries are such that our progress would be impeded, and he promised satisfactory occupations for my companions, according to their capacities, and he made me consent that I would do as he asked while we gathered our full strength, and that I would proceed to do as he asked until our bodies were healed, or if my cures met with no effect, or until his son had grown weary of my instruction as he had of all his previous masters, and whichever of these should occur first then our covenant should end with no ill-feeling or bad-usage on either side.

  • • •

  Cavalcante de Cavalcanti promised us apt occupations. Mine are twofold: to instruct the prince, although I am not sure that my knowledge is being transmitted, and I do not have the means to enforce it with slaps and blows; and to minister to the sick of the castle. I have found a joy in healing people, and a joy too in satisfying a curiosity about the doings and failings of human hearts and bodies.

  A servant girl has been assigned to help me because otherwise the people are too many outside the room I work in. The room is built into a corner of the castle walls with a staircase leading up to it, a skylight, and a door set into the darker recesses. I keep my medicines in a cupboard by the door, where the heat does not reach. Knights from the castle, and their ladies, and serving girls and serving boys, and grooms from the stables, and old women, whose characters have been made indistinct by their great age, and men who work in the kitchen and men who work on the land, and milkmaids and ostlers and administrators all come to see me, filling the courtyard outside my door all the way to the well.

  Their rank determines their precedence. A stable boy, who has been waiting from nones to vespers, whose face is inflamed and pitted with the malady that afflicts him, who has nearly reached my room on several occasions, only to be thrust further away each time by the needs of a superior, is finally on the threshold again when his master, the great lord himself, thrusts past him and into my receiving room and shuts the door behind him.

  The lord has an energy that will not abate. The eagle flies and then rests, the horse sleeps in his stable, the lord Cavalcante is seldom still. He walks around my room, he picks up handfuls of chamomile and asks,

  What is this for? Which of my people needs this?

  And I am answering, telling him that I had decocted the herb in wine to administer to the troublesome spleen of his commander of guards and I would have gone on to describe the process whereby I had intended to mix it in honey to apply to the face of the stable boy, but Cavalcante de Cavalcanti is already on the move, the chamomile scattered behind him, a bowl of celery-leaved buttercup in wine now spilling over his hands, which are out of character with the rest of him, so pale and slender, fingers that should be picking at the strings of an instrument or pressed together in prayer, and then he is walking on again, to my pot of parsnip roots and wild orchid candied with honey and dates, and asking for its purpose and its intended recipient and I wonder if I should tell him that it is the daughter of the chamberlain who asked for this, heartsick with love for the son of her lord, and that she had asked me too for a stratagem to go along with it, like the commander of an army seeking help from a foreign general, she should give it to him how?, and she should give it to him when?, and how is she to make sure that after Guido ingests it hers is the first face that he will see? – but the father of the object of her idolatry is again on the move, and I consider that maybe the chamberlain’s daughter loves the son rather than his father because Cavalcante is so high above her, just as it is easier to love Jesus than it is to love God, because Jesus is human, half of him is human – until he sits finally, in the chair that my visitors use, and the girl who helps me is about to enter with a fresh pot of vinegar, but leaves again when she sees who is with me and I do not know if her consternation indicates that she suffers from a similar malady to the chamberlain’s daughter or to the other young women I have seen who have asked for something that should be forbidden but which I have been persuaded, after threats and blandishments and tears – it is tears that persuade me, I am always moved by tears – to give them, the mixture that takes many ingredients to combine, and time too to enable the combination, to stifle the life that grows inside them.

  Cavalcante sits in the chair, one of his legs over its side, his back twisted, his neck crooked, as if only with the bonds of discomfort might his unruly spirit be compelled to be still.

  The serving girl is like Aude, but not in any particularity.

  And Cavalcante says,

  How would you cure the ill that afflicts me?

  I answer that first I would require it to be named and then I could go to my store and find the elements of its remedy. I have grown confident in my powers, aided by a medicine of my own, my Master’s wisdom combined with that of Father Gabriel’s.

  And what is this? the lord says.

  He opens the strings that tie a small muslin bag, in which I hav
e stored the plant I found in the mountains, its seeds and black root and folded leaves, its white petals.

  I am honest with him. I can think of no reason not to be. I tell him that this is the plant I have discovered, whose powers I can only conjecture.

  He asks about the source of the power and he asks how the plant will operate on the human body, and I have to admit that I do not know. I do not tell him my secret hope, that this is the plant called moly, that Hermes gave to Odysseus to protect him from Circe’s magic, grown from blood, the elixir of healing, dangerous for mortal men to tear out from the soil, but not for the gods. Because that is something for my Master and the lesson I have already learned is that one man may not serve two Masters. So I quote from another part of Homer, telling Lord Cavalcante that I wonder if it is the drug that Helen, the daughter of Zeus, administered to enable men to forget their troubles.

  A drink of this, once mixed in with wine, would prevent any man from letting a tear fall on his cheek for one whole day, not even if his mother and his father died, or if, in his own presence, men armed with swords hacked down his brother or his son, as he looked on.

  The son, Guido, haughty, impetuous, perhaps the smaller mirror of his father, arrives to tell me that we are due for today’s lesson. And if he is the mirror of his father, he is also, although this might be self-flattery, the mirror of his unworthy instructor, because this is how I was with my own Master, impatient for his wisdom, his presence.

  My helper returns after her lord and the prince have gone. She puts the vinegar on a shelf with an act of ease that I choose not to question. She grinds down the rocket seeds, which indeed is the work I would have chosen for her but she is doing it without instruction, as if she has already heard my thoughts, and this could well be so, because I have heard hers, which plead with me not to ask her about her feelings towards her young lord.

  Guido is an avaricious learner, who drives his unworthy teacher to the limits of his knowledge. He asks me about the transmission of objects to the senses, and I tell him about the tremors that accompany sound and odour, and I describe the passage of light, its scintillation. I refer him to Ptolemy’s second book on Optics, to the third book by Alhazen, to Aristotle on perspective, and to the summit of this, the Opus Majus of Roger Bacon.

  We talk of the nature of light, the powers of vision that receive the universal species cast by the perceived objects. I tell him of the tremble of reception on the humours of the eyes, and I do not know if any of this has been transmitted, because Guido moves restlessly as I talk, and when the lesson is over, the teacher is more exhausted than his pupil.

  • • •

  Saint Christopher’s Day

  Before Christopher was baptised, he was called Reprobus, meaning outcast, but afterwards he was called Christophoros, the Christ-bearer. On account of his immense size and strength he was welcomed wherever he might choose to roam and at whichever court of power he might choose to ally himself with. Reprobus had found his way to the court of a king who had the largest army in Canaan. But when he saw the king look fearful and make the sign of the cross on his forehead when his jester made mention of the Devil, and the king admitted that he feared the Devil above all, Reprobus grieved at the limits of the king’s power and left the Canaanite court in search of the Devil to accept him as his master.

  In the desert, he came across a great host of soldiers, and at its head was one more fierce and more terrible than the rest. This was the Devil, whom Reprobus accepted as his lord and master. They marched along the highway until they came to a cross erected at a roadside. When the Devil saw it, he left the road and led his men over a wild and desolate tract before returning to the road. Reprobus made the Devil tell him why he was so frightened of the cross, and when he heard that there was a man named Christ who was nailed to a cross, and that whenever the Devil saw the sign of the cross, he was filled with terror and ran away, Reprobus who was becoming Christopher said, Well then, this Christ, whose sign you dread so much, is greater and more powerful than you. Therefore I am leaving you and going in search of the greater prince.

  My full strength is returning, and my store of medicines is becoming depleted, and I should go before I have too few treasures to return to my Master. The lord Cavalcante still will not confess the malady that ails him.

  Brother Bernard works in the forge, beating metal in the fire. He has a cloth belted at his waist that covers most of his lower body. His chest is bare. Sweat and smut and fire. He has learned to craft jewellery for the women of the castle, and sometime he will hide brooches or rings still warm beneath the folds of his cloak.

  Brother Andrew, who was the most injured of us, has no occupation. He swims in the river, he passes time on land with a serving girl of the kitchen, who tends his wounds.

  I have position here. People call me lord. As does my helper, who has hair as red as Tuscan earth and moves with a lightness that suggests she is at any time about to dance; but she does not dance, and I do not hold her, even though there is something in me that impels me to, and an answering feeling in her that requires me to.

  Cavalcante de Cavalcanti asks me if I am still so eager to leave his castle. I tell him it is an honourable and harmonious place. But yes, I tell him. I must leave.

  The head dictates to the body. Cavalcante de Cavalcanti, despite his appetites and turbulence, is a wise ruler.

  Stay until the feast, the lord tells me. This will be a night for pleasure, not like one of those interminable Ghibelline affairs with lengthy speeches and everyone trying to work out how soon they might be able to leave without causing too much offence.

  Cavalcante de Cavalcanti believes in pleasure. He says,

  We all desire the same things. I wish for what the lowliest peasant desires. Food in my belly, a warm place to sleep, beautiful objects to gaze upon, and a pretty girl on the end of my screw.

  Where does God come into this?

  Why nowhere of course.

  He is a follower of Epicurus and Lucretius. The body dies, nothing persists. The world he lives in is empty of spirit, no matter how harmonious its order. This, I am sure, is the malady that afflicts him. And one I do not have the remedy for.

  My pupil apologised for his father,

  My father likes to startle people. Particularly if he has a fondness for them. But sometime I think that he believes what he says.

  Later, when I was with my companions, I asked Brother Bernard how many gems he has stolen.

  He said that he had not counted, he said that he could not have stolen them; because if everything is free there can be no theft. This made me wonder where Cavalcante draws his income from. No trade goes on with other castles or towns. And yet, all here is in surfeit.

  I said,

  I think they are heretics.

  Brother Andrew replied,

  I think we are all heretics.

  Brother Andrew is the true Franciscan. If God is everywhere why then do we have to remove ourselves from Him? The true worship is in the fields and streams and on the body of another of his creatures. I will be true to Aude.

  I have already been here too long.

  Saint Anna’s Day

  Anna, of Bethlehem, is said to have had three husbands, Joachim, Cleophas and Salome. Joachim, a Galilean from the town of Nazareth, was her first husband. They were both righteous and walked without reproach in the commandments of the Lord. They divided all their goods, one part being reserved for the temple and its ministers, the second for transient strangers, and the third part for their own needs. They lived for twenty years without offspring and made a vow to the Lord that if He gave him a child, they would dedicate it in service to God. And she gave birth to one daughter, Mary, whom she gave in marriage to Joseph, and who brought forth Christ the Lord. Joachim died and Anna married Cleophas, Joseph’s brother, and of him she had another daughter, whom she likewise named Mary, and who was married to Alpheus. This Mary bore her husband four sons, namely, James the Less, Joseph the Just also called Barsa
bas, Simon, and Jude. After the death of her second husband, Anna took a third, namely, Salome, of whom she had another daughter, whom she also called Mary and whom she gave as wife to Zebedee. This Mary had two sons by her husband, namely, James the Greater and John the Evangelist.

  There were dining tables in the courtyard, dining tables in the great hall of the castle. Nearby villagers climbed the hill to the castle gates, where I stood with Guido and a pair of his men. Brothers Bernard and Andrew were elsewhere. I hardly ever see Brothers Bernard and Andrew. Guido and his men were guarding the passage in case any Ghibellines arrived uninvited to the feast.

  My pupil Guido’s mother died giving birth. This was fifteen years ago. His father has never remarried. Cavalcante de Cavalcanti is richer than he needs to be, and in this pagan Epicurean realm, he takes whichever woman he desires. I wonder how many of my pupil’s half-brothers and -sisters there are in the castle.

  It will not be dreary, Cavalcante promised. And it was not dreary. There was wine and roasted boar and roasted deer and lights hung inside different-coloured globes of glass that moved in the breeze and scattered blue and yellow and orange and green hues over the feasters. And there was smoke from the kitchen mixing in with the odour of roasted meat and the sweetness of the wine, and there were musicians from Brittany and dancers from Cadiz. In the hall there were discussions, held without rancour or discord. By the fountain there was song.

  I saw Brother Bernard with the singers, his mouth open in joy, a pot of wine in his hand, his cloak open at his chest that was still smeared with smut from the forge. Brother Andrew was with the dancers, two girls from Cadiz who were showing him how to make the steps and turn.

  All the Guelph lords of the region were here, with their chamberlains and retinues. And as well as all those manners of people, there are many more, whose intentions and trades I can only conjecture, and among them are emissaries from the Papal court, to whom I should announce myself and my mission, but from whom I have hid, despite the urgings of my companions, to whom I have been unable to give a reason why, because I cannot provide one to myself.