by Adam Gidwitz
On the other hand, can you imagine how Michelangelo and the children felt sharing a cart with a living, breathing king of France? They could not have been more nervous and awestruck if the Archangel Gabriel himself had descended to earth.
As the carts rumbled along, Paris began to grow around them. At first it was scattered villages, surrounded by the tendrils of the wood of Vincennes. Then the density became more like the town of Saint-Denis—tall wooden houses packed side by side. And still it grew.
The humanity multiplied. And multiplied. Like turning over a log in a wood and finding the underside teaming with life, and then realizing that the entire forest floor teems, too, and that this log, pulsing with creatures, is only one sliver of the great seething masses of life spreading out in every direction all around one’s feet—just so, as the royal oxcarts rolled on, each street of Paris appeared to the children like its own world, its own universe of life, teeming with more humans than they had ever seen. And then they would be reminded, by some skittering side alley or diagonally crossing lane, that this stretch of street was but an infinitesimally small slice of Paris, and that the city multiplied out and out and out. Trying to comprehend its enormity was like trying to imagine the enormity of God. The human mind is simply not up to the task.
There was every kind of person the children could imagine on the streets of Paris. There were wealthy tradesmen, wearing the emblems of their guilds on their finely woven, rain-soaked sleeves. There were peddlers, who were like the tradesmen but poorer, that carried their goods on their backs. One was selling broomsticks, and he shuffled over the muddy roads like a walking stack of kindling. There were lepers, moaning for alms. There were proud young knights, pushing past the wet rabble, their sheathed swords swinging like ship booms, occasionally smacking in the face the children who ran behind them, begging for bread. There were merchants, whose sons had set off on ships up the Seine to England or on horses down to Italy or even the Holy Land, their fathers left at home to pull the skin below their chins and worry loudly over their balance books—as they worried silently about their sons. There were students, students, and more students. One day, they would be the gray counselors of the world. But now they were just black-clad boys, some depressed, some drunk, shouting at one another across the lanes about philosophy and that butcher’s beautiful redheaded daughter.
They passed streets full of bakers, streets full of butchers, streets lined with the stalls of seamstresses, and another with the shops of tanners, and then another of furriers, and finally a street of only hatmakers—which the children had not even realized was a job.
A sudden thumping on the side of the cart made everyone turn their heads. A student, dressed in black, with freckles, black hair, and a chipped tooth, grinned at them all. “Sorry to bother you, friends. But there’s an event tonight you won’t want to miss down the university way. The English house debates the Flemish—a sic et non argument on whether God or free will is the cause of evil in the world. Just after vespers, at the Learned Scholar Tavern.” His smile widened. “We English’ll swab the floor with them. You’ll see.”
The student was about to start off, but Joinville’s round, refined voice called him back. “Student! Which side are the English arguing? God or free will?”
The student suddenly looked at a loss. “Well, you see, I’m not actually arguing, sir. So I don’t really know. But I’ll be there!” The student smacked the side of the cart, grinned at them with his chipped-tooth smile, and crossed the road, shouting, “Debate tonight! English to trounce the Flemish!”
“He’ll be there, all right.” Joinville laughed. “Soused to the gills.”
“Can we go?” William asked.
“You wouldn’t want to do that,” Joinville replied. “It’ll just turn into a fistfight before the night’s out. Always did in my day.”
William sat up straighter. “That sounds all right with me.”
Even the king laughed.
Just then, they passed one man shouting at two others. The shouting man was tall and blond and clad in a rich robe. His accent was somewhere between Italian and German, which likely meant he came from Lombardy. His face was red with fury, and he spat as he spoke.
“It was my account! Mine! How dare you undercut my price!”
He was shouting at two Jews. One was old, with a long beard, streaked with gray. The other was younger, and nearly as tall as the blond man. His beard was short cropped and handsome. He was holding the Lombard back and shouting, “You offer a usurious rate! Forty percent! Forty! My uncle offered thirty. Thirty is reasonable! Thirty is standard! But thirty is undercutting now?”
“Ah,“ sighed Joinville. “The disputes of the moneylenders. The Lombards only recently brought their usury to Paris, you see, where the money-lending trade has always been Jewish. The Lombards are not used to the competition. I don’t think they like it.”
“They moved here,” King Louis sniffed, “because I disallowed my Jews from lending with interest. And yet still they do it! Oh, my wicked, wicked Jews! Paris is packed with them. I look out my window and the bridges around the isle are thronging with Jews. A good Christian can barely pass. It’s an infestation. They say there are ten thousand in Paris alone. Ten thousand! How I hate them!”
Jacob stopped breathing. He should have known. He did know, but he had made himself forget it. He had begun to like King Louis—if it makes any sense to say you like the king. But he should have kept forefront in his mind that he was a Jew, and Louis was bound by law and religion to hate him and all his kind. Had he remembered that, maybe this moment, this inevitable moment, wouldn’t have been quite so shocking and painful. Jeanne glanced at Jacob, saw the thoughts that were passing behind his frozen, glassy eyes, and wished that they were anywhere, anywhere else.
The Lombard had raised a big, pale hand. The young Jew pushed his uncle back against a timber-framed wall. He would not raise his fist against the Lombard, for it would be a serious crime for a Jew to strike a Christian. The cart was past them now and slowly moving away. Jacob wondered whether striking a Jew was a crime at all.
“They are worse than peasants, the Jews are,” Louis went on. Jeanne started like she’d been slapped. Jacob saw her face and nearly laughed, jerked out of his misery by someone else’s. “Both are filthy,” Louis went on. “Both unruly. Both ignorant.” William gaped at the king. Jeanne was sitting right beside him—surely he hadn’t forgotten? “But the Jews lead the peasants away from Christ, and for this, they are worse.”
And then, there was the sound like an axe hitting a tree. Everyone in the cart turned. The Lombard had reached around the nephew and struck the elder Jew, knocking him to the ground. The nephew was crouching beside his uncle now, trying to protect him from further onslaughts—without risking his life by hitting the Lombard back.
It was all William could do not to leap from the cart and tackle the Lombard. He felt Michelangelo grab his sleeve to stop him. Jacob was gripping the side of the cart and his nails dug into the wet wood. The sound of the slap had woken Gwenforte, and she barked and barked at the Lombard, not sure what was going on but knowing she did not like it.
And then Louis was out of the cart. It was too fast for Joinville to prevent. He saw it happen, made a grab for the king to hold him back, and missed.
“God’s body!” he swore. Then he turned to the cart driver. “De Villiers!” he barked. “Go help the king!”
The driver was down in an instant, and the driver of the other cart, seeing what was happening, was running to the king, too, his sword drawn. The children watched as the king strode toward the Lombard and the Jews. “What is going on?” muttered William. The king had untied the cord at his throat. The gray cloak slid to the mud. Rain pelted his fine clothes.
“Stay your hand!” the king bellowed.
The Lombard spun.
“Kneel before the king!” the driver, de Villiers, barked.
The Lombard was so surprised and disoriented that he likely would have kneeled to a pig farmer. He fell to both knees in the muddy road.
The young Jew assumed a knee, too. His uncle tried to struggle out of the mud.
“For disturbing the king’s peace,” the king announced, “the fine is five silver livres. All three of you will pay this fine. Do you understand?”
The three moneylenders nodded, bowing their heads, their eyes averted.
“For assaulting one of the king’s Jews,” Louis went on, “the fine is fifteen livres.” The Lombard looked up at the furious king, and raindrops splashed off his freckled cheeks. He looked shocked. “Can you pay twenty livres?” the king demanded. “Or will you go to prison?”
“I can pay!” the Lombard said. “I can pay!”
“What is your name?”
“Johann Montefiore, of Lombardy!” the man said, groveling.
“Johann Montefiore, of Lombardy, if you do not report to the Hall of Justice tonight, you will be found and thrown into prison.”
“Yes, my king! Thank you, my lord!”
Louis stepped around the groveling Lombard. “And you!” he said, addressing the Jewish men, their cloaks covered in mud.
He pointed a finger in their faces. “You will report to the Hall of Justice as well, and you will render every livre of every usurious loan you’ve made to the chancellor. If you did not persist in your wicked usury and your incomprehensible refusal to acknowledge the Gospel of Christ, good Christians would not strike you in the streets! You have no one to blame but yourselves!”
With that, Louis marched back to the cart and climbed in. Joinville grabbed his elbow and his underarm and helped him up.
“Well,” sighed Joinville, once the king was aboard, “so much for going incognito.”
• • •
As they rumbled along the muddy roads of Paris, an uncomfortable silence settled on the group. Jacob’s feelings raged so hot and confusing that they stopped up his throat. But a thousand questions buzzed behind his eyes. Jeanne saw this, knew Jacob dared not speak, and knew just what he would ask if he dared to—for she had the same question.
“Your Majesty, why did you do that?” she said.
“Why did I do what?”
“Prevent that Lombard from beating those men. Why do that, if you hate Jews so much?”
The king looked genuinely surprised by the question. “We are not barbarians! Let them attack the Jews in the Rhineland, with their Peasants’ Crusades. Not here. The Jews are my children. Wayward, wicked children. But my children nonetheless. I hate them, but I will protect them.”
Jacob tried to keep his face under control, but his jaw was quivering, and his eyes were like cups of water. Brimming, but not spilling. Yet.
“Your Majesty,” Jeanne said, in her gentlest voice. “What about the town of Nogent-sur-Oise? It burned this week. A fire started by Christians in the Jewish quarter. People died.”
Michelangelo cleared his throat and said, “That is nothing to do with us. It is none of our business, Jeanne.”
But King Louis said, “I heard about that. It is a disgrace.” He looked as if he’d bitten into a rotten pear. “A stain on all of France. It makes me sick.”
Jacob stared at the king, his limp hair dripping with raindrops. How could he hate the Jews and yet feel sick when they were attacked? Louis hated peasants, too, apparently, and yet he had no problem sitting beside Jeanne—hoisting her in the air and dancing, even. Jacob tried to turn this over in his head, around and around, like the cartwheels beneath him. But after a while, he gave up. People were too strange to understand, he decided. They were like life. And also that cheese. Too many things at once.
The carts rumbled through the streets, and now they came into the quarter of the Jews. They shouted and gestured in their lanes like any Christian would in any other alley of the city. Save for a few more beards, they looked no different from any other Parisian. But the children realized that each one’s life depended on the king and his good will. A change in his disposition, and each one could be driven from their homes by fire or thrown by angry Lombards or rowdy knights into the river Seine. It was an existence that hung by a thread. Louis held the thread.
And the children, led by Michelangelo, were going to pluck it. They would try to save the entire written wisdom of the Jews of France. They might very well fail. Worse, though, in either failing or succeeding, they might anger the king—and thus cause him to let the thread go.
Jeanne, Jacob, and William were becoming aware of the consequences of the task they had undertaken.
And they were afraid.
The nun has stopped speaking.
“Is there more?” I say. “There is more, isn’t there?”
“There is, but I have run into a problem.”
“What? For God’s sake, tell us!”
She lifts her mug. It is empty.
“More ale!” the innkeeper cries. Ale is brought, and the nun goes on.
HAPTER 19
The Seventh Part of the Nun’s Tale
Suddenly, the sound of the horses’ hooves changed—from dull clopping on wet dirt to sharp ringing. The children sat up. Gwenforte began to whine. Jeanne and William looked over the edge of the cart. “What’s happening?” Jacob asked.
“Stones!” said Jeanne. “The ground is all stones! Like in a church!”
“It’s paved,” Joinville laughed. “Have you never seen paving stones before?”
They shook their heads. They had not.
And then the cart was inclining, and they were climbing up onto a bridge, clattering over it and then down onto the other side. Here, the road was paved, too. What power, what riches, the children wondered, could cover the entire earth with finely hewed stone?
Then they saw, lurking in the haze of the Paris rain, a monster. Like some giant crab, all spines and legs, but larger than a castle. A monstrous, mountainous, stone crustacean.
“Look!” Michelangelo di Bologna said to the children. “Notre Dame!”
Indeed it was. The greatest cathedral in the world, perched miraculously at the narrowest edge of an island in the middle of the river Seine. Perhaps it was not a crab, but a spider, and Paris was the spider’s web, each road a strand of silk leading back to the great stone beast at its center. Straight ahead of the cart, emerging from the gray mist, were walls as gray and imposing as Notre Dame herself. Fine spires poked up above them into the rain. The entire western half of the isle at the center of Paris was trapped inside those walls.
“Is that . . . ?” William asked.
“The palace,” Joinville replied.
“Welcome to my home,” said the king. “Well, one of them.”
The cart rattled on toward the palace’s gatehouse.
“Are we going . . . in?” Jeanne asked.
“You sound as if I’ve taken you prisoner!” the king said with a laugh. “I was hoping, my little miracle workers, that you would stay with me awhile. I would be honored.”
At this, even Michelangelo choked on his spittle. They were all too stunned to reply.
• • •
As the carts passed through the huge gatehouse, royal-blue-clad guards stepped to one side and moved to kneel to the king—until they saw who the king was riding with. One guard stopped mid-knee-bend and stared. Another dropped his spear and had to go diving after it as it clattered on the stones.
The king and Joinville exchanged small smiles.
They rumbled into a huge grassy courtyard. As they rolled to a stop, a dozen men streamed out of a nearby door and surrounded the cart. They wore red cloaks with rich blue lining and hoods that spilled over their shoulders and down their backs. Their faces were perfectly composed—but their eyes kept drifting to the children in the cart and then snapping off into the middle distance again as they recovered their di
scipline.
“These are my valets,” Louis explained, as the cloaked men took him by his forearms and lowered him gently to the grass. “They are the sons of the finest families in France and are more loyal than anyone in the kingdom.”
“Except for d’Avignon over there,” Joinville said. “He’s a real pain in the buttocks.”
D’Avignon smiled but did not reply.
The valets helped each of the children down to the grass, which was soft and wet under their feet. Michelangelo was the last to slide down from the cart, and he refused the valets’ help. “I’d crush you,” he said simply, easing his legs over the side one by one, and lifting his belly over the wood with his hands.
Jeanne had kneeled beside Gwenforte to prevent her from running off to explore the castle grounds. Or peeing in front of the king. That would be mortifying.
“Eric,” the king said to the youngest valet. “These are my honored guests. Find them a room and give them new clothes.” Eric looked at William and Michelangelo, and his eyes bulged. “Do your best,” the king said, laughing. Then, to the children, he said, “I’ll see you at dinner. You can meet my mother. She’ll be thrilled to make your acquaintance.”
The king led the way toward a great stone building. One of the valets ran out ahead of him, opened the door, and put his back against it, as if it might attack the king as he passed through. The king’s companions followed, and then the valets went after them. Once they were out of sight, Eric the valet turned to Jeanne.
“You can let her pee now,” he said.
So Jeanne let Gwenforte go. The greyhound shook herself indignantly, trotted out into the middle of the green lawn, and peed directly onto the royal grass.