Doctor Copernicus

by John Banville

  “Paracelsus says,” he said, “that in the scale of things man occupies the centre, that he is the measure of all things, being the point of equilibrium between that which is great and that which is small.”

  Professor Brudzewski was staring at him.

  “Paracelsus? Who is this? He is mad, surely. God is the measure of all things, and only God can comprehend the world. What you seem to suggest, young man, with your principal thing, smacks of blasphemy therefore.”

  “Blablablasphemy?” Nicolas bleated. “Surely not. Did you yourself not say that in Ptolemy we find the solution to the mysteries of the universe?”

  “That was a manner of speaking, no more.”

  The door behind them opened and Andreas entered softly. Nicolas squirmed, drenched with sweat. The conspirators, without seeming to move, were yet bearing down upon him inexorably. He felt a dismayed sense of doom, like one who hears the ice shattering behind him as he careers with slow, mad inevitability out into the frozen lake.

  “But magister, you said—!”

  “Yes yes yes yes, quite—I know what I said.” The old man glared at the floor, and gave it a whack with his stick—take that, you! “Listen to me: you are confusing astronomy with philosophy, or rather that which is called philosophy today, by that Dutchman, and the Italians and their like. You are asking our science to perform tasks which it is incapable of performing. Astronomy does not describe the universe as it is, but only as we observe it. That theory is correct, therefore, which accounts for our observations. Ptolemy’s theory is perfectly, almost perfectly valid insofar as pure astronomy is concerned, because it saves the phenomena. This is all that is asked of it, and all that can be asked, in reason. It does not discern your principal thing, for that is not to be discerned, and the astronomer who claims otherwise will be hissed off the stage!”

  “Are we to be content then,” Nicolas cried, “are we to be content with mere abstractions? Columbus has proved that Ptolemy was mistaken as to the dimensions of the Earth; shall we ignore Columbus?”

  “An ignorant sailor, and a Spaniard. Pah!”

  “He has proved it, sir—!” He lifted a hand to his burning brow; calm, he must keep calm. The room seemed full of turbulence and uproar, but it was only the tumult within him dinning in his ears. Those three were still advancing steadily, and Andreas was at his back doing he did not wish to imagine what. The Professor swung himself on his stick in a furious circle around the table, so stooped now that it appeared he might soon, like some fabulous serpent, clamp his teeth upon his own nether regions and begin to devour himself in his rage. Nicolas, gobbling and clucking excitedly, pursued him at a hesitant hop.

  “Proof?” the old man snapped. “Proof? A ship sails a certain distance and returns, and the captain comes ashore and agitates the air briefly with words; you call this proof? By what immutable standards is this a refutation of Ptolemy? You are a nominalist, young man, and you do not even know it.”

  “I a nominalist—I? Do you not merely say the name of Ptolemy and imagine that all contrary arguments are thus refuted? No no, magister; I believe not in names, but in things. I believe that the physical world is amenable to physical investigation, and if astronomers will do no more than sit in their cells counting upon their fingers then they are shirking their responsibility!”

  The Professor halted. He was pale, and his head trembled alarmingly on its frail stalk of neck, yet he sounded more puzzled than enraged when he said:

  “Ptolemy’s theory saves the phenomena, I have said so already; what other responsibility should it have?”

  Tell him. Tell him.

  “Knowledge, magister, must become perception. The only acceptable theory is that one which explains the phenomena, which explains … which …” He stared at the Professor, who had begun to shake all over, while out of his pinched nostrils there came little puffs of an extraordinary harsh dry noise: he was laughing! Suddenly he turned, and pointed with his stick and asked:

  “What do you say, young fellow? Let us hear your views.”

  Andreas leaned at ease by the window with his arms folded and his face lifted up to the light. A handful of rain glistened on the glass, and a breeze in silence shook the blossoms of the cherry tree. The unutterable beauty of the world pierced Nicolas’s sinking heart. His brother pondered a moment, and then with the faintest of smiles said lightly:

  “I say, magister, that we must hold fast to sanity and Aristotle.”

  It meant nothing, of course, but it sounded well;  yes, it sounded well. Professor Brudzewski nodded his approval.

  “Ah yes,” he murmured. “Just so.” He turned again to Nicolas. “I think you have been too much influenced by our latterday upstarts, who imagine that they can unravel the intricacies of God’s all-good creation. You spoke of Regiomontanus: I studied under that great man, and I can assure you that he would have scorned these wild notions you have put forth today. You question Ptolemy? Mark this: to him who thinks that the ancients are not to be entirely trusted, the gates of our science are certainly closed. He will lie before those gates and spin the dreams of the deranged about the motion of the eighth sphere, and he will get what he deserves for believing that he can lend support to his own hallucinations by slandering the ancients. Therefore take this young man’s sound advice, and hold fast to sanity.”

  Nicolas in his dismay felt that he must be emitting a noise, a thin piercing shriek like that of chalk on slate. There was a distinct sensation of shock at the base of his spine, as if he had sat down suddenly without looking on the spot from whence a chair had been briskly removed. The three conspirators, crowding at his shoulder, regarded him with deep sadness. They were at once solicitous and sinister. The one with the warts kept his face turned away, unable to look full upon such folly. Andreas, laughing silently, said softly in his brother’s ear:

  “Bruder, du hast in der Scheisse getreppen.”

  And the fat conspirator giggled. Behind the screens in the hall the secret watcher waited. It was of course—of course!—the green girl. The Professor peered at her balefully, and turning to the brothers he sighed and said:

  “Gentlemen, you must forgive me my daughter. The wench is mad.”

  He shook his stick at her and she retreated, harlequinned by crisscross shadows, pursued by the conspirators scurrying on tiptoe, twit tering, to the stairs, where the little man in the plumed hat waited among other, vaguer enigmas. All bowed and turned, ascended slowly into the gloom, and vanished.

  Professor Brudzewski impatiently bade the brothers good day—but not before he had invited Andreas to attend his lectures. Grey rain was falling on Cracow.

  “What?—spend my mornings listening to that old cockerel droning on about the planets and all that? Not likely, brother; I have better things to do.”

  *

  Nicolas arrived in Torun at September’s end. The house in St Anne’s Lane received him silently, solicitously, like a fellow mourner. Old Anna and the other servants were gone now, and there was a new steward in charge, a surly fellow, one of the Bishop’s men. He followed Nicolas about the house with a watchful suspicious eye. The sunny autumn day outside was all light and distance, and above the roofs and spires a cloud, a ship in air, sailed gravely at the wind’s pace across a sky immensely high and blue. The leaves of the linden were turning.

  “Build a fire, will you. I am cold.”

  “Yes, master. His Grace your uncle gave me to understand that you would not be staying?”

  “No, I shall not be staying.”

  Uncle Lucas came that evening, in a black rage. He greeted Nicolas with a glare. The Frauenburg Precentor had been crass enough to die in an uneven-numbered month, when the privilege of filling Church appointments in the See of Ermland passed by Church law from the Bishop to the Pope.

  “So we may forget it, nephew: I am not loved at Rome. Ach!” He beat the air vainly with his fists. “Another week, that was all! However, we must be charitable. God rest his soul.” He fastened his
little black eyes on Nicolas. “Well, have you lost your tongue?”

  “My Lord—”

  “Pray, do not grovel! You took no degree at Cracow. Four years.”

  “It was you that summoned me away, my Lord. I had not completed my studies.”

  “Ah.” The Bishop paced about a moment, nodding rapidly, with his hands clasped behind his back. “Hmm. Yes.” He halted. “Let me give you some advice, nephew. Rid yourself of this rebellious streak, if you wish to remain in my favour. I will not have it! Do you understand?” Nicolas bowed his head meekly, and the Bishop grunted and turned away, disappointed it seemed with so easy a victory. He hoisted up his robe and thrust his backside to the fire. “Steward! Where is the whoreson? Which reminds me: I suppose your wastrel brother is also kicking his heels in Poland waiting for me to find him a soft post? What a family, dear God! It is from the father, of course. Bad blood there. And you, wretch, look at you, cowering like a kicked dog. You hate me, but you have not the courage to say it—yes, it’s true, I know. Well, you will be rid of me soon enough. There will be other posts at Frauenburg. Once I have secured you a prebend you will be off my hands, and my accounts, and after that I care not a whit what you do, I shall have fulfilled my responsibility. Take my advice and go to Italy.”

  “It—?”

  “—Or wherever, it’s no matter, so long as it is somewhere far off. And take your brother with you: I do not want him within an ass’s roar of my affairs. Well, man, what are you grinning at?”

  Italy!

  * * *

  On Easter Day in 1496 Canon Nicolas and his brother marched forth from Cracow’s Florian Gate in the company of a band of pilgrims. There were holy men and sinners, monks, rogues, mountebanks and murderers, poor peasants and rich merchants, widows and virgins, mendicant knights, scholars, pardoners and preachers, the hale and the halt, the blind, the deaf, the quick and the dying. Royal banners fluttered in the sunlight against an imperial blue sky, and the royal trumpeters blew a brassy blast, and from high upon the fortress walls the citizens with cheers and a wild waving of caps and kerchiefs bade the wayfarers farewell, as down the dusty road into the plain they trudged. Southwards they were bound, over the Alps to Rome, the Holy City.

  “He could have got us a couple of nags,” Andreas grumbled, “damned skinflint, instead of leaving us to walk like common peasants.”

  Nicolas would not have cared had Bishop Lucas forced them to crawl to Italy. He was, for the first time in his life, so it seemed to him, free. A post had been found for him at last at Frauenburg; the Chapter at the Bishop’s direction had granted him immediate leave of absence, and he had departed without delay for Cracow. He found that city strangely altered, no longer the forlorn gloomy terminus he had known during his university years, but a bustling waystation cheerful with travellers and loud with the uproar of foreign tongues. To be sure, the change was not in the city but in him, the traveller, who noticed now what the student had ignored, yet he chose to see his new regard for this proud cold capital as a sign that he had at last grown up into himself and his world, that he was at last renouncing the past and turning his face toward an intrepid manhood; it was all nonsense, of course, he knew it; but still, he was allowed for a few days at least to feel mature, and worldly-wise, and significant.

  His newfound self-esteem, however tentative it was and prone to collapse into self-mockery, infuriated Andreas. No undemanding canonry had been secured for him. Wherever he turned Bishop Lucas’s black shadow fell upon him like a blight. He was not going to Italy—he was being sent. And he had not even been provided with a horse to lift him above the common throng.

  “I am almost thirty, and still he treats me like a child. What have I ever done to deserve his contempt? What have I done?”

  He glared at Nicolas, daring him to answer, and then turned his face away, grinding his teeth in rage and anguish. Nicolas was embarrassed, as always in the presence of another’s public pain. He wanted to walk away very quickly, he even imagined himself fleeing with head down, muttering, waving his arms like one pursued by a plague of flies, but there was nowhere to go that would be free of his brother’s anger and pain.

  Andreas laughed.

  “And you, brother,” he said softly, “feeding off me, eating me alive.”

  Nicolas stared at him. “I do not understand you.”

  “O get away, get away! You sicken me.”

  And so, lashed together by thongs of hatred and frightful love, they set out for Italy.

  *

  They equipped themselves with two stout staffs, good heavy jackets lined with sheepskin against the Alpine cold, a tinderbox, a compass, four pounds of sailor’s biscuit and a keg of salt pork. The gathering of these provisions afforded them a deep childish satisfaction. Andreas found in the Italian swordsmith’s near the cathedral an exquisitely tooled dagger with a retracting blade that at the touch of a concealed lever sprang forward with an evil click. This ingenious weapon he kept in a sheath sewn for the purpose inside his bootleg. It made him feel wonderfully dangerous. Bartholemew Gertner, Katharina’s husband, sold them a mule, and cheated them only a little on the deal, since they were family, after all. A taciturn and elderly beast, this mule carried their baggage readily enough, but would not bear the indignity of a rider, as they quickly discovered.

  Nicolas could have bought them a pair of horses. Before leaving Frauenburg he had drawn lavishly on his prebend. But he kept his riches secret, and sewed the gold into the lining of his cloak, because he did not wish to embarrass his penniless brother, so he told himself. Andreas gazed gloomily southwards. “Like common pig peasants!” Forth from St Florian’s Gate they marched into the great plain, behind them the cheering and the brassy blare of trumpets, before them the long road.

  *

  The weather turned against them. Near Braclav a windstorm rose without warning out of the plain and came at them like a great dark animal, howling. The inns were terrible, crawling with lice and rogues and poxed whores. At Graz they were fed a broth of tainted meat and suffered appalling fluxions; at Villach the bread was weevilled. A child died, fell down on the road screaming, clenched in agony, while its mother stood by and bawled.

  Their number shrank steadily day by day, for many who had left with them from Cracow had been, like the brothers, merely travellers seeking protection and companionship on their way to Silesia or Hungary or South Germany, and by the time they reached the Carnic Alps they were no more than a dozen adults and some children, and even of that small band less than half were pilgrims. Old Felix, the holy man, smote the ground with his staff and inveighed against those worldly ones in their midst who were exploiting God’s protection on this holy journey; it was their impiety that had led them all to misfortune. He was a stooped emaciated ancient with a long white beard. On the women especially he fixed his burning eyes.

  “It is sin that has brought us to this pass!”

  Krack the murderer grinned.

  “Ah give it a rest, grandpa.”

  He was a jolly fellow, Krack, and useful too, for he knew well the ways of the road, and could truss and roast a pilfered chicken very prettily. He was convinced that they were all fugitives like him, using the pilgrimage as a handy camouflage for flight. Their dogged protests of innocence hurt his feelings: had he not regaled them readily enough with the details of his own moment of glory? “Bled like a pig he did, howling murder and God-a-mercy. He was tough, I tell you, the old bugger—slit from ear to ear and still clutching his few florins as if they was his ballocks I was tearing off. Jesus!”

  The men squabbled among themselves, and once there broke out a desperate fight with fists and cudgels in which a knife with a spring blade played no small part. There was trouble too with the womenfolk. A young girl, a crazed creature mortally diseased who lay at night with whatever man would have her, was set upon by the other women and beaten so severely that she died soon after. They left her for the wolves. Her ghost followed them, filling their nights with vis
ions of blood and ruin.

  And then one rainy evening as they were crossing a high plateau under a sulphurous lowering sky a band of horsemen wheeled down on them, yelling. They were unlovely ruffians, tattered and lean, deserters from some distant war. “Good holy Jesus poxed fucking Christ!” Krack muttered, gaping at them, and slapped his leg and laughed. They were old comrades of his, apparently. Their leader was a redheaded Saxon giant with an iron hook where his right hand had once been.

  “We are crusaders, see,” this Rufus roared, his carroty hair whipping in the yellow wind, “off to fight the infidel Turk. We need food and cash for the long journey before us. When you reach Rome you may tell the Pope you met with us: we’re his men, fighting his cause, and he’ll return with interest the donations you’re going to make to us. Right, lads?” His fellows laughed heartily. “Now then, let’s have you. Food I say, and whatever gold you’ve got, and anyone who tries to cheat us will have his tripes cut out.”

  Old Felix stepped forward.

  “We are but poor pilgrims, friend. If you take what little we have you must answer to God for our deaths, for certes we shall not leave these mountains alive.”

  Rufus grinned. “Offer up a prayer, dad, and Jesus might send manna from heaven.”

  The old man shakily lifted his staff to strike, but Rufus with a great laugh drew his sword and ran him through the guts, and he sank to his knees in a torrent of blood, bellowing most terribly. Rufus wiped his sword on his sleeve and looked about. “Any other arguments? No?”

  His men went among the travellers then like locusts, leaving them only their boots and a few rags to cover their backs. The brothers watched in silence their mule being driven off. Nicolas’s suspiciously weighty cloak was ripped asunder, and the hoard of coins spilled out. Andreas looked at him.