The Inquisitor's Tale

by Adam Gidwitz

  • • •

  The doors to the great hall were thrown open, and a sextet of natural trumpets blared as the king walked out upon the dais. Once the trumpet fanfare faded away, a chorus of men began to sing, their voices blending like threads of silk on a loom.

  The retinue entered the hall after the king—first Blanche of Castile, followed by Queen Marguerite, King Louis’s wife, with their infant daughter in her arms. Next came the king’s companions and a few companions of Marguerite’s. Finally Michelangelo and the children, with William catching up with them just in time.

  “I shut her in the room,” William whispered. Jeanne nodded. She thought she was going to be ill. The hall was the grandest space she had ever been in—higher roofed than any church, wider than most fields, filled with hundreds of diners at scores of long tables. And these were not the rough wooden tables of Lord Bertulf’s hall—no, each table shimmered with silver. Above their heads, the double-barrel-vaulted ceiling was painted deep blue, with golden stars aping the real heavens just beyond.

  As Jeanne took all this in, her step faltered.

  “If you’re going to have a real fit,” William whispered in her ear, “that’ll work, too.”

  She made her way, half in a trance, to the high table, where she found, to her horror, that she was sitting directly opposite Blanche of Castile. Jacob was to her right, and William was next to Jacob. Joinville, Michelangelo, Robert de Sorbonne, and the king were seated around them. Jeanne felt like she was going to throw up all over the silk tablecloth.

  Servants began to bring forth food. Massive, elaborate dishes. An enormous boiled peacock, its head and tail feathers intact, was placed between Jeanne and Blanche. Now Jeanne was pretty sure she would throw up.

  “So, children,” Blanche of Castile began. “You are a strange and piebald crew!”

  The children didn’t know what to say to that, so they sat mutely and waited. Blanche’s face had the plumpness of adolescence, but in the flickering firelight of the great hall, wrinkles collected at her eyes and lips. Her youthful beauty was betrayed by the shadows.

  “And this is your brave leader, I take it? Michelangelo di Bologna, of Saint-Denis?”

  “At your service, madame.”

  “Are you?” Blanche replied, cocking her head. “I’ve heard such strange things about you, Brother Michelangelo. Red, fat, and wicked. Don’t they say that?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose—”

  “They got the fat part right, didn’t they?” Blanche laughed a high, arching laugh—like notes on a flute. Sweat began to sting the back of Jeanne’s neck. Joinville looked at the table. The king said, “Mother, please.”

  “Oh, it’s just a joke, my darling! No need to be so pious all the time! God knows I don’t blame the poor man for wobbling like venison jelly!” She laughed again. Michelangelo smiled graciously and wiped his forehead with his sleeve.

  “And you, my little peasant girl,” Blanche said to Jeanne. She had a way of claiming possession of everyone and everything: my darling, my child, my little peasant. Now Jeanne’s stomach had curled up like a caterpillar in the shadow of a bird. “I see we don’t like girl’s clothes, do we? Used to wearing breeches out in the fields?”

  “I-I suppose so . . . ,” Jeanne stammered.

  “That’s all right!” Blanche smiled. “You’re not very pretty, so dressing as a boy rather suits you!”

  “Mother!” Louis exclaimed.

  “The truth will set you free, my love,” she cooed. “And you—” She turned to William, pointing with the hand that wore the ovoid sapphire. William clenched his fists under the table. Striking the queen mother dead with his bare hands would not advance their cause. “Your father was supposed to be on Crusade, and instead he fell for a Saracen girl, hm?”

  William felt the veins in his head throb. Don’t kill her, he thought. Don’t kill her.

  “Then he shipped you off to a monastery, so his wife wouldn’t find out? You probably don’t see him much. How sad.” William suddenly didn’t know if he wanted to scream or to cry. Joinville put his face in his hands. Robert de Sorbonne smiled distantly, as if he were listening to an entirely different conversation.

  “And you,” Blanche said, turning to Jacob. Suddenly Jeanne’s worries about herself and her playacted fit evaporated. She realized that a much greater charade, with even more serious consequences, was being played by her Jewish friend. How had she forgotten that? How selfish had she been? William and Michelangelo seemed to realize it, too. William leaned forward over his untouched food. Michelangelo pretended to drink his wine, but his eyes bulged over the rim of his cup. “I was told by a little bird,” Blanche went on, “that your village burned down. What a tragedy. However did it happen?”

  Through lips as white and brittle as a swallow’s egg, Jacob said, “I suppose someone was careless with their cooking fire.”

  “Is that all?” Blanche murmured, raising her thin eyebrows. “Just like a peasant, to burn his own village from sheer stupidity!”

  “Mother . . .” Louis sighed.

  But at the same moment, Jacob said, “Better than burning books from sheer stupidity.”

  Michelangelo dropped his pewter cup onto his silver plate. The crash echoed through the hall. Nonetheless, no one at the table was looking at him. They were all staring at Jacob. Which, in one sense, was good, because Michelangelo’s mouth was still open, as if he’d expected his cup to be pouring wine into it, while in fact the wine ran over the tablecloth and into his lap.

  “What was that?” Blanche asked very quietly.

  “I said at least we don’t burn books out of sheer stupidity, like you do.” Jacob’s hands were trembling, but his voice was strong.

  The king sat up a little straighter in his wooden chair.

  “And what books would those be?” Blanche asked, innocent as a flower.

  “Jewish books. The work of centuries. The wisdom of the ages,” Jacob said.

  Blanche leaned in. “What a strange peasant you are. Not many peasant boys defending the Jews, are there?”

  “Listen,” the king cut in. He was clearly as uncomfortable as everyone else. “These books that we’re burning. They’re not wisdom.”

  “Yes,” said Blanche. “And I wonder who told you they were.” Her gaze moved to Michelangelo. His red eyes caught hers and dove for the table, where wine was still pouring into his lap.

  “They’re not Bibles,” Louis went on. “They’re Talmuds. New laws. Not God’s. They are misreadings of the Good Book, perpetrated by rabbis to lead the Jews away from God’s word.”

  “It’s for the Jews’ own good,” Blanche agreed.

  William could not contain himself any longer. His large rear end had been wriggling in his chair as he tried to keep his mouth shut, as if the energy of his lips needed to be transferred somewhere. But the butt-wiggling solution proved temporary and insufficient. “But think of the work alone!” William practically shouted. “One book can take a lifetime to compose, copy, illuminate, gloss, and annotate! A lifetime in each book. You’ll be confining dozens of lifetimes to the flames!”

  “Dozens?” said Blanche. “Who told you dozens?”

  “I—” William stammered. “I assumed it was at least—”

  “Thousands,” Blanche said proudly. “We’ve collected thousands of Jewish books from all over the kingdom. The abbots collected them for us, actually. They asked to ‘borrow’ them, for ‘copying’ purposes, from their local Jews. Lots of flattery was involved, I’m sure. The Jews are so proud. Probably a few threats, too, truth be told. But it’s all for the good of their souls!”

  “Sometimes we must harm in order to help,” the king agreed.

  “Yes, yes. They were counted at Saint-Denis, and they’ll be coming to Paris tomorrow for the burning!”

  “Tomorrow?” Michelangelo exclaimed.

&nb
sp; “Why, yes! Right on the old bridge, where the moneylenders are. Send the Jews quite a message, right, my sweet?” Blanche said to her son.

  The king nodded, his lank hair swaying beside his pale cheeks. “If it will save a single soul of my Jews, it will have been worthwhile.”

  Jacob stole a glance at Jeanne. Would she perform? Her head hung listlessly over her untouched food.

  “Tomorrow,” Michelangelo muttered. “Tomorrow.”

  “Shall I . . . ?” the nun says, looking at the avid faces of her audience.

  “Yes!” we all cry at once.

  So she continues.

  HAPTER 21

  The Ninth Part of the Nun’s Tale

  That night, Michelangelo lay in the large bed in their room and the children lay on their pallets all around him on the floor. William was using two. Gwenforte lay beside Jacob, curled between his ribs and his arm.

  “I’m sorry,” Jacob said to the darkness. The pallet beneath him creaked. “I’m sorry I mentioned the burning. I couldn’t help it.”

  No one could blame him. No one could forgive him.

  “I hate her,” he said. “I hate her.”

  “You and Gwenforte both,” William answered.

  “We all hate her,” said Jeanne. Her hands rested on her belly, and she gazed up at the ceiling. Candlelight from the cresset over the great bed threw the faintest flicker of brown light over the stones.

  “Why didn’t you have the fit, Jeanne?” Jacob asked. “Because I brought up the burning?”

  “She couldn’t very well have done it after, could she?” William said. “No one would have believed it.”

  Gwenforte whined and kicked Jacob in her sleep.

  “Try to close your eyes, children,” Michelangelo said. “Tomorrow, martyrdom may call.”

  A choking silence squeezed the room.

  Finally William said, “Oh, I’ll fall right to sleep now.”

  Jeanne and Jacob laughed.

  Except it sounded more like crying.

  • • •

  Jeanne had no idea what time it was when Michelangelo’s fat hand grabbed her shoulder and shook her awake. The candle in the cresset still burned dimly, but the lack of windows in the stone walls made it impossible to tell whether it was dawn or the middle of the night. She lay still and listened for a moment as Michelangelo moved to wake up the other children. There was no sound in the corridor. If it was morning, Jeanne guessed it was very early yet. Jacob sat on his pallet, rubbing his face with his hands. William snored on. Michelangelo grabbed a shoulder and shook him. He shook him again.

  “You have to get Gwenforte to do it,” Jeanne said. Jacob smiled wanly.

  Gwenforte was led—reluctantly, for she was still sleepy—from Jacob’s pallet up to William’s face. She dutifully began to lick him. William winced, tried to push her away, and then rolled over onto the floor.

  “Does your wickedness know no bounds?” he muttered.

  Jeanne smiled. But her stomach felt hollow and sour, and she couldn’t tell whether it was the early hour and her empty belly, or dread of the day to come.

  • • •

  Michelangelo opened the door to their chamber. Eric was lying on a pallet in the corridor. He raised his head sleepily.

  “We have an early morning rendezvous,” Michelangelo whispered. “You might show us out.”

  Eric led them through the darkened corridors—where every other torch had been extinguished and the tapestries looked woven from black silk—and back to the courtyard they’d come through. The Parisian sky was gray and low. The sun would not rise for a little while yet. Gwenforte ran out onto the grass and squatted. No one stopped her.

  They left the palace through a small door by the main gate—the guard nodded them through sleepily—and walked on the paving stones to the great square in front of Notre Dame. Her two towers seemed to touch the belly of the clouds. Her great rose window looked down like a dark and malevolent eye.

  “The street of the bakers is this way. We shall forage for breakfast,” Michelangelo said, his voice hushed in the quiet hour. It was strange to see the great city, home to the whole world, so asleep. A few beggars lay under the great tympanum of Notre Dame’s doorway. Along one side of the church, a priest clad in black stole from an alley and into a side door.

  “I wonder where he’s been,” William smirked. No one replied.

  The street of the bakers was just a short walk north of the Isle of the City. The streets were dirt again here on the north bank. This was the territory of merchants, of tradesmen, of butchers and tanners and brewsters. To the south of the isle, Paris was mostly farms and university buildings.

  The houses here had candles blazing in all their windows, and men and women and children hurried back and forth, up and down the street, bringing flour from the market stalls a few streets away, trading with a neighbor some salt for some yeast. Some windows were open and from them wafted the intoxicating smell of fresh bread. Michelangelo approached one of these and leaned his large elbow on the sill. A woman’s head appeared. One of her cheeks was pasty with flour.

  “Three loaves,” Michelangelo told her. “If you please. And if you have some scraps for our dog, she would thank you.”

  Three long, thin loaves of bread appeared on the sill, plus a misshapen lump of burned dough. Money was exchanged. Michelangelo gave one loaf to William, split another between Jeanne and Jacob, and threw the lump to Gwenforte. She began to attack it ferociously, gnawing on it with the side of her mouth, dancing around it as if it were an animal she had successfully brought down in a hunt. When she saw Michelangelo and the children begin to walk away down the street, she picked it up in her mouth and trotted proudly after them, carrying her kill high for all to see.

  Michelangelo led them down an alley of dim residences, much like Yehuda’s alley in Saint-Denis. It spilled directly out onto the Seine. They found a grassy patch and sat and ate their warm, fresh bread. The children tore at the hot firm crust with their teeth and dug out the soft, yeasty white center with dirty fingers.

  They watched the gray river wind between the tall banks. The palace loomed on the island in front of them. Seagulls turned on the damp and cool morning air. Jacob rubbed sleep from his eyes.

  “I want to save those books,” Jeanne said. Gwenforte sat between her legs. She stroked the greyhound’s coat, from the copper blaze on her nose all the way down to the middle of her back. Long, soothing strokes. Soothing for them both.

  “Yes,” said Michelangelo. “It is very admirable of you.”

  “But,” continued Jeanne, “I’m not sure I want to die for them.”

  Silence. The Seine churned below.

  “I see,” Michelangelo said at last.

  “No matter how much wisdom is in a book, is it right to trade your life for it?” Jeanne looked to William and then to Jacob. Both stared across the river. If she knew them at all by now, she knew that they, too, were doubting the trade of life, of lives, for books.

  Michelangelo, after a great space of cawing gulls, said, “I agree with you, Jeanne. A life is worth infinitely more than a book.”

  Jacob, still staring at the Isle of the City, said, “You told us to prepare for martyrdom.”

  “Sometimes,” said Michelangelo, “martyrdom takes you unaware, when you least expect it. I certainly do not plan for you children to die.”

  Through a jaw clenched like a fist, William said, “Well, that’s a relief.”

  Some time passed. The sky brightened. The sounds of the north bank grew behind them—clattering and shouting and children squealing at one another. Jeanne remembered when she might have done the same thing. Her childhood felt very long ago indeed.

  “The plan is simple,” Michelangelo said at last. “If this burning is like any other burning—of books or people—there will be a pyre at the center of th
e bridge. To the north of the pyre, the officials will stand. Also nobles and, perhaps, royals will be there. Behind them, there will be some spectators. Since many Jews live to the north of the isle, they’ll likely be on that side. I will stand with them or, if I am allowed, with the officials and the nobles. The entire south side of the bridge will be packed with the rest of the spectators. You children will stand there. Just before the burning begins, I will create a distraction. Jeanne, you will grab a book. Jacob, you will grab a book. William, you must keep your hands free. You will run south, away from the pyre and the palace and the officials. You will lose your pursuers in the university quarter and then find a way out of Paris. Once you are outside the city, go north.”

  “We’re only saving two books?” Jacob exclaimed.

  “Why can’t I take some?” William objected. “I could carry a lot more than two!”

  “You, my strong friend, will need your hands free to defend Jeanne and Jacob. There will be the king’s guards and men-at-arms. They will not like you taking the books. They may try to make you a martyr, whether you want it or no.”

  “There isn’t a better way to do this?” Jeanne objected. “To save more books? To stop the burning altogether?”

  “There was another plan last night. It failed, you will recall,” said Michelangelo. Jacob exhaled loudly. “But if you can think of something better, I will listen.”

  The children stared across the river. Like ripples on the water, half-formed plans rose and died in the currents of their thoughts. William considered fighting—but, as Michelangelo said, there would be guards and men-at-arms. Would William really kill them all?

  Jeanne thought of Joinville. Could he be enlisted to help? But what could he do? And besides, he seemed half in love with Louis. Surely he could not be trusted.

  Jacob dreamt of raising the Jews of Paris in a great rebellion, washing over the bridge in waves of righteous anger like the Maccabees washed over the Romans. But the Jews of today were not warriors—how could they be in their cramped alleyways, surrounded and outnumbered by Christian soldiers and Christian knights?