Doctor Copernicus

by John Banville

  He was shaken roughly, and heard himself, as from a great distance, groan. Maximilian, his manservant, gnawing an onion, scowled up at him, mumbling.

  “What? What do you say?” The servant only shrugged, and gestured toward the gate. A peasant’s cart with a broken axle straddled the drawbridge. In the half-light it had the look of a huge malign frog. “Go on, go on,” the Canon said. “There is room enough.”

  But they were forced to pass perilously close to the edge. He peered down at the glittering black water, and felt dizzy. How fast it runs! The carter was belabouring with a stick in mute fury the impassive mule standing trapped between the shafts. Max blessed the fellow gravely, and sniggered. From this hole in the gate-tower a sentry shambled sleepily forth.

  “State your business, strangers.”

  Max, the good German, waxed immediately indignant, to be addressed thus loutishly in the outlandish jabber of a native Prussian, a barbarian, beneath contempt. Imperiously he announced: “Doctor Copernicus!” and made to march on. The Prussian poked him perfunctorily in the belly with his blunt lance.

  “Nicolas Koppernigk,” the Canon said hastily, “liegeman to our Lord Bishop. Let us pass now, please, good fellow, and you shall have a penny.” Max looked up at him, and he perceived, not for the first time and yet with wonder still, the peculiar mixture of love and loathing his servant bore for him.

  In the deserted courtyard his horse’s hoofs rang frostily and clear upon the flagstones. The hounds began to bay. He lifted his throbbing eyes to the pillared arches of the galleries, to the lowering mass of the castle keep faintly slimed with starlight, and thought how like a prison the place appeared. Heilsberg was intended to be his home now; not even Prussia itself was that, any longer.

  “Max.”

  “Ja, ja” the servant growled, stamping off. “I know—the Bishop must not be disturbed. I know!”

  Then there were lights, and voices close by in the darkness, and a decrepit half-blind old woman came and led him inside, scolding him, not unkindly, as though he were an errant child. He had not been expected until the morrow. A fire of birchwood burned on the hearth in the great main hall, where a pallet had been laid for him. He was glad to be spared the stairs, for his limbs were liquid. The fever was mounting again, and he trembled violently. He lay down at once and pulled his cloak tight about him. Max and the old woman began to bicker. Max was jealous of her authority.

  “Master, she says your nuncle must be summoned, with you sick and arriving unexpected.”

  “No no,” the Canon groaned, “please, no.” And, in a whisper, with a graveyard laugh: “O keep him hence!”

  The old woman babbled on, but he closed his eyes and she went away at last, grumbling. Max squatted beside him and began to whistle softly through his teeth.

  “Max—Max I am ill.”

  “Aye. I seen it coming. And I warned you. Didn’t I say we should have stopped at Allenstein for the night? But you would none of it, and now you’re sicker than a dog.”

  “Yes yes, you were right.” Max was a good cure for self-pity. “You were quite right.” He could not sleep. Even his hair seemed to pulse with pain. The sickness was a keepsake of Italy; he smiled wryly at the thought. Long shadows pranced like crazed things upon the walls. A dog came to sniff at him, its snout fastidiously twitching, but Max growled, and the creature pricked up its ears and loped away. Canon Koppernigk gazed into the fire. The flames sang a little song whose melody was just beyond grasping. “Max?”

  “Aye.”

  Still there: a lean bundle of bones and sinew crouched in the firelight, staring narrowly at nothing. The hound returned and settled down unmolested beside them, licked its loins with relish, slept. The Canon touched the soiled coarse fur with his fingertips. Suddenly he was comforted by common things, the fire’s heat, this flea-bitten dog, Max’s bitter regard, and beyond these the campfire too, and the watchers about it, the peasant’s cart, the poor fastidious mule, even that rat on the steps: enduring things, brutish and bloody and warm, out of which, however dark and alien the shore, the essential self assembles a makeshift home.

  Later that night Bishop Lucas came and looked at him, and shook his great head gloomily. “A fine physician I have appointed!”

  *

  That title meant little. He was no true medic. He had not sufficient faith in the art of healing, nor in himself as a healer. At Padua they had taught him to cut up corpses very prettily, but that would have made him a better butcher than physician. Yet he had accepted the post without protest. On returning from Italy he had gone straight to Frauenburg, thinking to take up his duties as a canon of the Chapter; but he was not ready yet for that life, Italy was too much in his blood, and having secured with ease yet another, this time indefinite, leave of absence he had drifted to Torun. Katharina and her husband after protracted negotiations had bought from the Bishop the old house in St Anne’s Lane, and had moved there from Cracow. He should have known better than to go to them, of course. The company of his shrewish sister and her blustering mate irked him; they for their part made him less than welcome. He had engaged Max more as an ally than a servant, for he was a match indeed for that ill-tempered sullen household.

  Then word came from the Bishop: Canon Nicolas was summoned at once to Heilsberg as physician-in-residence at the castle, that he might thus, however inadequately, repay the expense of his years of Italian studies.

  He liked the job well enough. Medicine was a means of concealment, whereby he might come at his true concerns obliquely and by stealth: to unsuspecting eyes there was not much difference between a star table and an apothecary’s prescription, a geometrical calculation and a horoscope. But although he was free to work, he felt that he was trapped at Heilsberg, trapped and squirming, a grey old rat. He was thirty-three; his teeth were going. Once life had been an intense bright dream awaiting him elsewhere, beyond the disappointment of ordinary days, but now when he looked to that place once occupied by that gorgeous golden bowl of possibilities he saw only a blurred dark something with damaged limbs swimming toward him. It was not death, but something far less distinguished. It was, he supposed, failure. Each day it came a little nearer, and each day he made its coming a little easier, for was not his work—that is, his true work, his astronomy—a process of progressive failing? He moved forward doggedly, line by painful line, calculation by defective calculation, watching in mute suspended panic his blundering pen pollute and maim those concepts that, unexpressed, had throbbed with limpid purity and beauty. It was barbarism on a grand scale. Mathematical edifices of heart-rending frailty and delicacy were shattered at a stroke. He had thought that the working out of his theory would be nothing, mere hackwork: well, that was somewhat true, for there was hacking indeed, bloody butchery. He crouched at his desk by the light of a guttering candle, and suffered: it was a kind of slow internal bleeding. Only vaguely did he understand the nature of his plight. It was not that the theory itself was faulty, but somehow it was being contaminated in the working out. There seemed to be lacking some essential connection. The universe of dancing planets was out there, and he was here, and between the two spheres mere words and figures on paper could not mediate. Someone had once said something similar: who was that, or when? What matter! He dipped his pen in ink. He bled.

  And yet, paradoxically, he was happy, if that was the word. Despite the pain and the repeated disappointments, despite the emptiness of his grey life, there was not happiness anywhere in the world to compare with his rapturous grief.

  But there was more to his post at Heilsberg than tending to the Bishop’s boils and bowels and fallen arches: there was politics also. At sixty, and despite his numerous ailments, Bishop Lucas was more vigorous far than the nephew nearly half his age. A hard cold prince, a major man, he devoted the main part of his prodigious energies to the task of extricating Ermland from the monstrous web of European political intrigue. The Canon was not long at the castle before he discovered that, along with physician, secret
ary and general factotum, he was to be his uncle’s co-conspirator as well. He was appalled. Politics baffled him. The ceaseless warring of states and princes seemed to him insane. He wanted no part in that raucous public world, and yet, aghast, like one falling, he watched himself being drawn into the arena.

  He began to be noticed, at Prussian Diets, or on the autumn circuit of the Ermland cities, hanging back at the Bishop’s side. He cultivated anonymity, yet his pale unsmiling face and drab black cloak, his silence, his very diffidence, served only to surround him with an aura of significance. Toadies and leeches sought him out, hung on his heels, waylaid him in corridors, grinning their grins, baring their sharp little teeth, imagining that they had in him a sure channel to the Bishop’s favour. He took the petitions that they thrust at him on screwed-up bits of paper, and bent his ear intently to their whisperings, feeling a fool and a fraud. He could do nothing, he assured them, in a voice that even to him sounded entirely false, and realised with a sinking heart that he was making enemies across half of Europe. Pressures from all sides were brought to bear on him. His brother-in-law Bartholemew Gertner, that fervent patriot, stopped speaking to him after the Canon one day during his stay at Torun had refused to declare himself, by inclination if not strictly by birth, a true German. Suddenly he was being called upon to question his very nationality! and he discovered that he did not know what it was. Bishop Lucas, however, resolved that difficulty straightway. “You are not German, nephew, no, nor are you a Pole, nor even a Prussian. You are an Ermlander, simple. Remember it.”

  And so, meekly, he became what he was told to be. But it was only one more mask. Behind it he was that which no name nor nation could claim. He was Doctor Copernicus.

  *

  Bishop Lucas knew nothing of that separate existence—or if he did, for there was little that went on at the castle without his knowledge, he chose to ignore it. He had lofty plans for his nephew. These he never spoke of openly, however, believing seemingly that they were best left to become apparent of themselves in the fullness of time, of which there was ample, he knew, for he had yet to be convinced that one day he would, like lesser men, be compelled to die. He was torn between his innate obsession with secrecy on one hand, and on the other the paramount necessity of dinning into the Canon’s wilfully dull-witted skull, by main force if that would do it, the niceties of political intrigue. Diplomacy and public government were all right, any fool could conduct himself with skill and even elegance there, but the scheming and conniving by which the world was really run, these were a different matter, requiring intensive and expert coaching. But the trouble was that he did not entirely trust his nephew. The Canon sometimes had a look, hard to identify, but worrying. It was not simple stupidity, surely, that made his jaw hang thus, that misted over his rather ratty eyes with that peculiar greyish film?

  “—Your head is in the clouds, nephew. Come back to earth!” The Canon started, hastily covering up the papers he had been working on, and peered over his shoulder with a wan apprehensive smile. Bishop Lucas looked at him balefully. I’ll tell the dolt nothing; let him flounder! “I said: there is a guest expected. Are you going deaf?”

  “No, my lord, I heard you well enough. I shall be down presently. I have some… some letters to finish.”

  The Bishop had turned to go, but now he came back, glowering menacingly. A born bully, he was well aware that his power over others depended on his determination to let pass no challenge, however fainthearted. “Letters? What letters?” He was decked out all in purple, with purple gloves, and carried the mitre and staff tucked negligently under a fat arm. He was at once alarming and faintly comic. The Canon wondered uneasily why he had found it necessary personally to climb to this high room atop a windy tower merely to summon his nephew to dinner: it must be an important guest indeed. “Now, man—come!”

  They hurried down dark stairways and rank damp passages. A storm was bellowing about the castle like a demented bull. The great entrance doors stood wide open, and in the porch a muffled faceless crowd of clerics and petty officials huddled by flickering torchlight, muttering. The night outside was a huge black spinning cylinder of wind and rain. Faintly between gusts there came the noise of riders approaching and the shrill blast of a trumpet. A ripple of excitement passed through the porch. Hoofbeats clattered across the courtyard, and suddenly dark mounted figures loomed up in the swirling darkness. Then there were many voices at once, and one that rang above all others, saying:

  “Sennets and tuckets, by Christ!—and look here, a damned army awaiting us.”

  The Canon heard his uncle beside him moan faintly in anger and dismay, and then they were both confronted abruptly by a stone-grey face with staring eyes and a beard streaming rain.

  “Well Bishop, now that you have announced our coming to every German spy in Prussia, I suppose we can leave off this blasted disguise, eh?”

  “Your majesty, forgive me, I thought—”

  “Yes yes yes, enough.”

  There was a scuffling in the porch, and the Canon glanced behind him to see the welcoming party with difficulty sinking to its knees in homage. Some few fell over in the crush, clutching wildly, amid stifled hilarity. Bishop Lucas juggled with the mitre and staff and proffered awkwardly the episcopal ring to be kissed. His Majesty looked at it. The Bishop whirled on his nephew and snarled:

  “Bend your knee, churl, before the King of Poland!”

  *

  In the Hall of Knights above the nine great tables a thousand candles burned. First came hounds and torch-bearers and gaudy minstrels, and then the Bishop with his royal guest, followed by the Polish nobles, those hard-eyed horsemen, and at last the common household herd, pushing and squabbling and yelping for its dinner. A sort of silence fell as grace was offered. At the amen the Bishop sketched a hasty blessing on the air and ascended the dais to the mensa princeps, where he seated himself with the King on his right hand and the Canon on his left, and with heavy jowls sunk on his breast cast a cold eye upon the antics of the throng. He was still brooding on his humiliation in the porch. Jugglers and mountebanks pranced and leaped, spurred on by the shrieks of Toad the jester, a malignant stunted creature with a crazed fixed grin. Sandalled servants darted to and fro with fingerbowls and towels, and serving maids carried platters of smoking viands from the fire, where an uproar of cooks was toiling. A ragged cheer went up: one of the tumblers had fallen, and was being dragged away, writhing. Toad made a droll joke out of the fellow’s misfortune. Then an ancient rhymester with a white beard tottered forth and launched into an epic in praise of Ermland. He was pelted with crusts of bread. Come, Toad, a song!

  See how he flies up, O, pretty young thrush

  Heigh ho! sing willow Here’s a health to the bird in the bush

  Clamour and meat! Brute bliss! King Sigismund laughed loud and long, clawing at his tangled black beard.

  “You keep a merry table, Bishop!” he cried. His temper was greatly improved. He had cast off his sodden disguise of linsey cloak and jerkin (“Who would mistake us for a peasant anyway!”), and was dressed now in the rough splendour of cowhide and ermine. That Jagellon head, however, lacking its crown, was still a rough-hewn undistinguished thing. Only the manner, overbearing, cruel and slightly mad, proclaimed him royal. He had made the long hard journey from Cracow to Prussia in wintertime, disguised, because he, like the Bishop, was alarmed by the resurgence of the Teutonic Knights. “Aye, very merry.”

  But Bishop Lucas was in no mood for pleasantries, and he shrugged morosely and said nothing. He was worried indeed. The Knights, once rulers of all Prussia and now banished to the East, were again, with the encouragement of Germany, pushing westward against Royal Prussia, whose allegiance to the Jagellon throne, however unenthusiastic, afforded Poland a vital foothold on the Baltic coast. At the centre of this turbulent triangle stood little Ermland, sore pressed on every side, her precarious independence gravely threatened, by Poland no less than by the Knights. Something would have to be done. The
Bishop had a plan. But from the start, from that stormy arrival tonight, he had felt that things were going somehow awry. Sigismund played at being a boor, but he was no fool. He was crazed, perhaps, but cunningly so. His Ambassador was whispering in his ear. The Bishop’s brow darkened.

  “I am a plain man,” he growled, “a priest. I believe in plain speaking. And I say that the Knights are a far greater threat to Poland than to our small state.”

  The Ambassador left off whispering, and squirmed unhappily in his chair. The Bishop and he were old enemies. He was a sour little man with an absurd moustache and sallow high-boned cheeks: a Slav. His one secret concern was to protect his prospects of a coveted posting out of the backwoods of Ermland to Paris, city of his dreams (where within a year he was to be throttled by a berserk in a brothel).

  “Yes yes, Lord Bishop,” he ventured, “but is it not possible that we might treat with these unruly Knights in some way other than by open, and, I might add, dangerous, confrontation? I have great faith in diplomacy.” He simpered. “It is something I am not unskilled in.”

  Bishop Lucas bent on him a withering look. “Sir, you may know diplomacy, but you do not know the Cross. They are a vile rapacious horde, and cursed of God. Infestimmus hostis Ordinis Theutonici! The time is not long past when they held open season against our native Prussians, and slaughtered them for sport.”

  King Sigismund looked up, suddenly interested. “Did they?” His expression grew wistful, but then he recollected himself, and frowned. “Yes, well, for our part we see only one real threat, that is, the Turk, who is already at our southern border. What do you say of that vile horde, Bishop?”