The Tower of Fools

by Andrzej Sapkowski

  “I won’t try,” replied Horn, without lowering his gaze, “either to lie, or to answer. For your own good, actually. It may surprise you, but that is the truth.”

  “I’ll make you answer.” Reynevan took another step and drew a dagger. “I’ll make you, Horn. By force, if necessary.”

  The only sign that Horn had whistled were his pursed lips, for the sound was inaudible. But only to Reynevan, for a moment later, something struck him in the chest with tremendous force, slamming him onto the dirt floor. Pinned down by the weight, he opened his eyes to see Beelzebub’s full set of huge teeth bared in front of him. The mastiff’s saliva dripped down onto his face, the stench making him nauseous. A malevolent, throaty growl paralysed him with fear. Urban Horn appeared in his field of view, putting the charred paper into his jerkin.

  “You won’t make me do anything, my lad,” said Horn, straightening the chaperon on his head. “But listen to what I’ll tell you out of kindness. Beelzebub, stay.”

  Beelzebub stayed. Although it was clear he was itching to move.

  “Out of kindness do I advise you, Reinmar,” repeated Horn. “Flee. Vanish. Listen to the advice of Canon Beess. Because I wager my life that he gave you some advice, some guidance on how to get out of the quandary you find yourself in. Don’t disregard the counsel and instructions of people like Canon Beess, lad. Beelzebub, stay.

  “I am truly sorry about your brother. You have no idea how much. Farewell. And beware.”

  When Reynevan opened his eyes—which he had kept tightly shut before Beelzebub’s menacing muzzle—neither the dog nor Horn were in the barn.

  Reynevan crouched on his brother’s grave, huddled up and trembling with fear. He sprinkled all around himself a mixture of salt and hazel ash and repeated a charm in a trembling voice, believing less and less in its effectiveness with every repetition.

  Wirfe saltze, wirfe saltze

  Non timebis a timore nocturno

  Neither a plague, nor a guest from the darkness

  Nor a demon

  Wirfe saltze, wirfe saltze…

  Monsters seethed and murmured in the darkness.

  Aware of the risk and the time he was wasting, Reynevan had waited for his brother’s burial. Despite the efforts of his sister-in-law and her family, he would not be discouraged from keeping vigil over the corpse, and he took part in the exequies and funeral mass. He was there, with the sobbing Gryzelda, the parish priest and a small cortège when Peterlin was buried in the cemetery behind the small, old Wąwolnica church. Only then did he depart. Or rather—pretend to depart.

  When dusk fell, Reynevan hurried back to the cemetery. On the freshly dug grave, he arranged his magical instruments, which he had assembled with surprisingly little difficulty. The oldest part of the Wąwolnica cemetery adjoined a ravine hollowed out by a small river; the ground had subsided there, offering easy access to the ancient graves, so Reynevan’s magical arsenal even included a coffin nail and a skeleton’s finger.

  Nothing helped, however, not the finger bone, nor the monkshood, sage and chrysanthemum picked near the cemetery, nor the charm whispered over an ideogram furrowed in the soil with a crooked coffin nail. Peterlin’s soul, in spite of the assurances in the magic books, did not rise up over the grave in ethereal form. It didn’t speak. Or give a sign.

  If only I had my books here, thought Reynevan, resentful and disheartened by his repeated failures. If I had The Lesser Key of Solomon or the Necronomicon… A Venetian crystal… A little mandrake… If I had access to an alembic and could distil an elixir… If…

  It wasn’t to be. His grimoires, the crystal, the mandrake and the alembic were far away, in Oleśnica. In the Augustinian priory. Or—more likely—in the Inquisition’s possession.

  A storm was swiftly approaching beyond the horizon. The rumbling of thunder accompanying the flashes of lightning intensified. Then the wind dropped completely and the air became as lifeless and heavy as a shroud. It must have been close to midnight.

  And then it began.

  Another flash of lightning lit up the church. Reynevan saw in horror that the entire bell tower was teeming with spider-like creatures. In front of his very eyes, several stone crosses moved and slumped over, and in the distance, one of the graves visibly bulged. The crunching of coffin planks followed by a loud squelching resounded from the darkness over the ravine. And then came a howling.

  His hands were jumping as if he were feverish as he sprayed more salt around, and his lips barely let him mutter the formulae of the spell.

  Most of the movement was occurring in the ravine, in the oldest part of the cemetery covered in alders. Fortunately, Reynevan couldn’t see what was going on there; not even the lightning revealed anything more than vague shapes and contours in the gloom. But the sounds provided intense impressions—the throng rooting around among the ancient graves stamped, roared, wailed, whistled, cursed, snapped their jaws and gnashed their teeth.

  Wirfe saltze, wirfe saltze…

  A woman laughed shrilly and spasmodically. A baritone voice mockingly parodied the liturgy of the Mass, accompanied by wild cackling. Somebody was banging a drum.

  A skeleton emerged from the gloom. It pottered around a little, then sat down on a grave and stayed there, skull bent forward and resting in its bony hands. A moment later, a shaggy creature with huge feet sat down beside it and began to frantically scratch them, grunting and moaning. The pensive skeleton paid no attention.

  A death cap mushroom passed by on spidery legs, followed by something resembling a pelican, but with scales instead of feathers and a beak full of pointed fangs.

  An enormous frog hopped onto an adjacent grave.

  And Reynevan was aware of another presence, something utterly hidden in the darkness, invisible even in the flashes of lightning. But he knew it was staring at him, and closer examination revealed eyes shining like rotting wood. And long teeth.

  “Wirfe saltze.” He sprinkled the last of the salt in front of himself. “Wirfe saltze…”

  Suddenly, a bright, slow-moving spot caught his attention. He tracked it, waiting for another flash of lightning. When it came, he saw to his amazement a girl in a white shift, picking large, spreading nettles and laying them in a basket. The girl saw him, too. After a moment’s hesitation, she put the basket down. She paid no attention whatsoever to either the sorrowful skeleton or the shaggy creature still poking between his huge toes.

  “Pleasure?” she asked. “Or duty?”

  “Errr… duty…” he said, overcoming his fear and understanding what she meant. “My brother… my brother was killed. He’s buried here…”

  “Aha,” she said, brushing aside strands of hair from her forehead. “And as you see, I’m here picking nettles.”

  “To sew a blouse,” he said with a sigh a moment later. “For your brothers, magicked into swans?”

  She was silent for a long while.

  “You’re odd,” she finally said. “The nettles are for cloth, to be sure. For shirts. But not for my brothers. I don’t have any brothers. And if I had, I’d never let them wear these shirts.”

  She laughed throatily on seeing his expression.

  “Why are you even talking to him, Eliza?” said the toothy something, still mostly invisible in the darkness. “Why bother? The rain will come just before dawn and wash his salt away. Then his head will be bitten off.”

  “It’s not right,” said the sorrowful skeleton, not raising its skull. “It’s not right.”

  “Of course it isn’t,” the girl addressed as Eliza replied with a nod. “He’s Toledo. One of us. And few of us are left.”

  “Wanted to talk to a stiff,” declared a dwarf with buck teeth, appearing out of nowhere. He was as plump as a pumpkin, his bare belly shining beneath a short, frayed waistcoat.

  “Wanted to talk to a stiff,” he repeated. “With his brother, what’s buried here. Wanted answers to his questions. But he didn’t get any.”

  “Then it behoves us to help,” sa
id Eliza.

  “It does,” said the skeleton.

  “Sure,” croaked the frog.

  Lightning flashed; thunder boomed. A wind sprang up, whispered in the dried stalks, whipping and spinning clouds of dry leaves. Without hesitation, Eliza crossed the salt and shoved Reynevan hard in the chest. He fell over onto the grave, banging the back of his head on the cross. He saw stars, then everything went dark, then saw flashes again, but this time from the lightning. The earth beneath him trembled and whirled around. Two rings of shadowy, dancing shapes cavorted, spinning in opposite directions around Peterlin’s grave.

  “Barbelo, Hekate, Holda!”

  “Magna Mater!”

  “Eia!”

  The ground beneath him rocked and tipped so steeply that Reynevan had to spread out his arms to stop himself from sliding as his feet scrabbled vainly for purchase. But he didn’t fall. Sounds and singing filled his ears. Apparitions filled his eyes.

  “Veni, veni, venias,”

  ne me mori, ne me mori facias!

  Hyrca! Hyrce! Nazaza!

  Trillirivos! Trillirivos! Trillirivos!

  Adsumus, says Percival, kneeling before the Holy Grail. Adsumus, repeats Moses, stooped beneath the weight of the stone tablets brought down from Sinai. Adsumus, says Jesus, falling beneath the weight of the cross. Adsumus, repeat the knights gathered around the table with one voice. Adsumus! Adsumus! We are here, O Lord, gathered in Your name.

  An echo runs through the castle like booming thunder, like the sound of a distant battle, like the thudding of a battering ram against a castle gate. And slowly vanishes among the dark corridors.

  “Viator, the Wanderer, will come,” says a young girl with a vulpine face and dark circles under her eyes, adorned in a garland of verbena and clover. “Someone departs, someone comes. Apage! Flumen immundissimum, draco maleficus… Ask not after my name, it is secret. Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness. And who is to blame? The one who will tell the truth.

  “They shall be gathered together, as prisoners in the pit, and shall be shut up in the prison, and after many years shall they be punished. Beware the Wallcreeper, beware the bats, beware the demon that wasteth at noonday, and beware the one that walketh in darkness. Love, says Hans Mein Igel, love will save your life. Do you regret it?” asks the girl smelling of sweet flag and mint. “Do you regret it?” The girl is naked, yet innocent, nuditas virtualis. She is barely visible in the gloom, but so close Reynevan can sense her warmth.

  The sun, the serpent and the fish. The serpent, the fish and the sun set in a triangle. The Narrenturm falls, the turris fulgurata crumbles away, the tower is struck by lightning. The poor fool falls from it, tumbles down, towards destruction. I am that fool, a thought flashes through Reynevan’s head, a fool and a madman, I am the one falling, tumbling into the abyss.

  A burning man runs screaming across a thin cover of snow from a burning church.

  Reynevan shook his head to drive away the apparitions. And then, in the glare of another flash of lightning, he saw Peterlin.

  A spectre, motionless as a statue, suddenly glowing with an unnatural light. Reynevan saw that the light, like beams of sunlight through the cracks in a shed, was shining through numerous wounds—in his breast, his neck and his belly.

  “Oh, God, Peterlin…” he groaned. “How terribly they… They will pay for this, I swear! I will avenge you… I will avenge you, dear brother… I vow…”

  The spectre made a vigorous gesture. Clearly opposing, forbidding. Yes, it was Peterlin, for no one but their father gestured like that when he opposed or forbade something, when he reprimanded little Reynevan for japes or madcap ideas.

  “Peterlin… Dear brother…”

  The same gesture, even more vehement and emphatic. Leaving no room for doubt. The hand, pointing south.

  “Flee,” said the spectre in the voice of Eliza of the nettles. “Flee, little one. Far away. As far away as you can. Beyond the forests. Before the dungeon of the Narrenturm claims you. Flee, leaping across the mountains, bounding over the hills, saliens in montibus, transiliens colles.”

  The ground whirled furiously. And everything ended in darkness.

  The rain awoke him at dawn. He was lying on his brother’s grave on his back, motionless and numb, raindrops splashing on his face.

  “Permit me, young man,” said Otto Beess, canon of Saint John the Baptist’s and provost of the Wrocław Chapter. “Permit me to succinctly recapitulate what you’ve told me and what has made me stop believing my own ears. Thus, Konrad, Bishop of Wrocław, having the opportunity to tan the Sterczas’ hides, who genuinely hate him and whom he genuinely detests, does nothing. Having almost irrefutable proof that the Sterczas are embroiled in a family feud and murder, Bishop Konrad is taking no steps to deal with this matter. Is that right?”

  “Precisely so,” replied Gwibert Bancz, the Bishop of Wrocław’s secretary, a young seminarian with a pretty face, faultless skin and soft velvet eyes. “It has been decided. No measures against the Stercza family. No interrogations. Not even a reprimand. The bishop decreed it in the presence of His Excellency Bishop Suffragan Tylman. And in the presence of the knight to whom the investigation was entrusted. The one who rode to Wrocław this morning.”

  “The knight,” repeated the canon, staring at a painting portraying the martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, the only decoration on the chamber’s severe walls apart from some shelves holding candlesticks and a crucifix. “The knight who came to Wrocław this morning.”

  Gwibert Bancz swallowed. The situation was embarrassing and always had been. And there was nothing to suggest it would ever change.

  “Precisely.” Otto Beess drummed his fingers on the table, focusing all his attention on the saint being tortured by the Armenians. “Precisely. Who is that knight, my son? Name? Family? Arms?”

  The seminarian cleared his throat. “Neither name nor family were mentioned… He wore no coat of arms, was entirely attired in black. But I have seen him with the bishop before.”

  “So what did he look like? Must I drag it out of you?”

  “Youngish. Tall, slim… Black, shoulder-length hair. Long nose, almost a beak… Tandem a gaze that is almost… bird-like… Piercing… In summa, difficult to call him handsome… But manly—”

  Gwibert Bancz suddenly broke off. The canon didn’t turn his head, didn’t even stop drumming his fingers. He knew Bancz’s concealed erotic predilections, and that knowledge had allowed him to turn the young seminarian into his informer.

  “Go on.”

  “So, this unknown knight—who, incidentally, evinced neither humility, nor reticence of any kind in the bishop’s presence—reported on the investigation into the case of the murders of Lords Bart of Karczyn and Piotr of Bielawa. And it was such a report that His Excellency the bishop suffragan could not restrain himself at one point and began to laugh…”

  Otto Beess raised his eyebrows.

  “That knight said the Jews were to blame, since near the place of both crimes one could smell foetor judaicus, the typical stench of Jews… In order to remove that odour, Jews drink Christian blood, as is commonly known. Thus, the killings, the stranger continued—heedless of the fact that the Reverend Tylman was splitting his sides laughing—bore the marks of a ritual murder and the culprits should be sought in the local qahals, particularly in Brzeg, since the rabbi of Brzeg had just been seen in the vicinity of Strzelin, in the company, to boot, of the young Reinmar of Bielawa, who, as Your Excellency knows—”

  “I know. Go on.”

  “Hearing such a dictum, the Reverend Bishop Suffragan Tylman declared it all poppycock, saying that both had been murdered with swords. Added that the said Albrecht of Bart was a strongman and a born swordsman. And that no rabbi—not from Brzeg or anywhere else—could have overcome Lord Bart, even if they had chosen to fight with Talmuds. And began to laugh again.”

  “And the knight?”

  “He said that if the Jews hadn�
�t killed the noble gentlemen Bart and Piotr, then the Devil must have. So, in essence it’s all one.”

  “And what was Bishop Konrad’s response?”

  “His Eminence,” the seminarian cleared his throat, “glared at Reverend Bishop Tylman, evidently displeased by his merriment, and spoke at once, most sternly, seriously and officially, and ordered me to note it down—”

  “He discontinued the investigation,” interrupted the canon, very slowly pronouncing the words. “He simply discontinued the investigation.”

  “It is as if you had been there. And the Reverend Bishop Suffragan Tylman didn’t say a word, but his expression was strange. Bishop Konrad noticed that and said, angrily, that the argument was in his favour, that history would testify to it, and that it was ad maiorem Dei gloriam.”

  “He said that?”

  “Using those very words. For that reason, Reverend Father, don’t take this matter to the bishop. I guarantee it won’t change anything. Furthermore—”

  “Furthermore what?”

  “The stranger told the bishop that if he invoked anyone, submitted any petitions or demanded further investigation, he insisted on being informed about it.”

  “He insisted,” repeated Otto Beess. “And how did the bishop respond?”

  “He nodded.”

  “Well, well—Konrad, an Oleśnica Piast—nodded.”

  “He did, Reverend Father.”

  Once again, Otto Beess looked at the painting, at the torture of Bartholomew, from whom the Armenians were flaying long strips of skin using enormous pliers. Were one to believe the Golden Legend of Jacobus da Varagine, he thought, the sweet scent of roses hung over the place of his martyrdom. Like hell. Torture stinks. A stench hangs over all places of torment and torture, as it did over Golgotha. I swear there weren’t any roses there, either. There was, how aptly, foetor judaicus.

  “Please, my boy. Take it.”

  The seminarist, as usual, first reached for the pouch, then abruptly withdrew his hand as though the canon had offered him a scorpion.

  “Reverend Father…” he mumbled. “I don’t do it for… for a few paltry pennies… but because—”