[Revolutions 01] Doctor Copernicus Read online

  “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?”

  It was just the opening that the Bishop needed to reveal his plan, yet, because his too intense hatred of the Knights threw him off, or because he underestimated the King and his crawling Ambassador, for whatever reason, his judgment faltered, and he bungled it.

  “Is it not plain,” he snapped, “what I have in mind? Are not the Knights, supposedly at least, a crusading order? I say send, or lure, or force them, whatever, to your southern frontiers, that they may defend those territories against the Infidel.” There was a silence. He had been too precipitate, even the Canon saw it. He began to see it himself, and hastened to retrieve the situation. “They want to fight?” he cried, “—then let them fight, and if they are destroyed, why, the loss shall not be ours.” But he had succeeded only in making things worse, for now there arose before the horrified imaginations of the Poles the vision of a Turkish army flushed with victory, blooded as it were, swarming northwards over the mangled corpse of one of Europe’s finest military machines. Ah no, no. They avoided his fiercely searching eye; they seemed almost embarrassed. Of course they had known beforehand the nature of his scheme, but knowing was not the thing. The Canon watched his uncle covertly, and wondered, not without a certain malicious satisfaction, how it came that such an expert ritualist had stumbled so clumsily—for ritual was the thing.

  “A jolly fellow, Bishop, that fool of yours,” King Sigismund said. “Sing up, sirrah! And let us have more wine here. This Rhenish is damned good—the only good that’s ever come out of Germany, I say. Ha!”

  All dutifully laughed, save the Bishop, who sat and glared before him out of a purple trance of fury and chagrin. The Ambassador eyed him craftily, and smoothly said:

  “I think, my lord, that we must consider in greater detail this problem of the Knights. Your solution seems a little too—how should I say?—too simple. Destroy the Turk or be destroyed, these appear to be the only alternatives you foresee, but rather might not the Cross destroy Poland? Ah no, Bishop, I think: no.”

  Bishop Lucas seemed about to bite him, but instead, plucking at himself in his agitation, he turned abruptly to the King and made to speak, but was prevented by a steward who came running and whispered urgently in his ear. “Not now, man, not . . . what? . . . who?” He whirled on the Canon, the wattles of red fat at his throat wobbling. “You! you knew of this.”

  The Canon reared away in fright, shaking his head. “Of what, my lord, knew of what?”

  “The whoreson! Go to him, go, and tell him, tell him—” The table was agog. “—Tell him if he is not gone hence by dawn I’ll have his poxed carcase strung up at the castle gate!”

  Through passageways Canon Nicolas scurried, tripping on his robe in the darkness and moaning softly under his breath. Something from long ago, from childhood, ran in his head, over and over: The Turk impales his prisoners! The Turk impales his prisoners! In the flickering torchlight under the porch a dark figure waited, wrapt in a black cloak. The wind bellowed, whirled all away into the swirling tunnel of the tempest, Turks and Toad, sceptre and Cross, crusts, dust, old rags, a battered crown: all.

  “You!”

  “Yes, brother: I.”

  * * *

  Bishop Lucas’s decline began myste
riously that night of Andreas’s arrival at Heilsberg. It was not that he fell ill, or that his reason failed, but a kind of impalpable though devastating paralysis set in that was eventually to sap his steely will. The King of Poland, crapulous and monumentally irritated, would hear no more talk of the Knights, and left before morning with his henchmen, despite the weather. The Bishop stood puzzled and querulous, wracked by impotent rage and buffeted by black rain, watching his hopes for the security of Ermland depart with the royal party into storm and darkness. Of any other man it would have been said that he was growing old, that he had met his match in the King and his Ambassador, but these simple reasonings were not sufficient here. Perhaps for him also a dark something had lain in wait, whose vague form was suddenly made hideous flesh in Andreas’s coming.

  “Has that bitch’s bastard gone yet?”

  “No, my lord. My lord he is ill, you cannot send him away.”

  “Cannot? Cannot I now!” He was flushed and shaken, and bobbed about in his rage like a large inflated bladder. “Go find him, you, in whatever rathole he is skulking, and tell him, tell him—ach!”

  The Canon climbed the tower to his cell, where his brother sat on the edge of the bed with his cloak thrown over his shoulders, eating a sausage.

  “You have been speaking with the Bishop, I can see,” he said. “You are sweating.” He laughed, a faint thin dry scraping sound. Now in the candlelight his face was horrible and horribly fascinating, worse even than it had seemed at first sight in the ill-lit porch, a ghastly ultimate thing, a mud mask set with eyes and emitting a frightful familiar voice. He was almost entirely bald above a knotted suppurating forehead. His upper lip was all eaten away on one side, so that his mouth was set lop-sidedly in what was not a grin and yet not a snarl either. One of his ears was a mess of crumbled white meat, while the other was untouched, a pinkish shell that in its startling perfection appeared far more hideous than its ruined twin. The nose was pallid and swollen, unreal, dead already, as if there, at the ravaged nostrils, Death the Jester had marked the place where when his time came he would force an entry. With such damage, the absence of blood was an unfailing surprise. “I think, brother, our uncle loves me not.”

  The Canon nodded, unable to speak. He felt sundered, as if mind and body had come apart, the one writhing here in dazed helpless horror, the other bolt upright there on the floor, a thing of sticks and straw, nodding like a fairground dummy. A dome of turbulent darkness, held aloft only by the frail flame of the candle, pressed down upon the little room. He drew up a chair and very slowly sat. He told himself that this was not Andreas, could not be, was a phantom out of a dream. But it was Andreas, he knew it. What surprised him was that he was not surprised: had he known all along, without admitting it, the nature of his brother’s illness? Suddenly his sundered halves rushed together with a sickening smack, and he wrung his hands and cried:

  “Andreas, Andreas, how have you come so low!”

  His brother looked at him, amused and gratified by his distress, and lightly said:

  “I had suspected, you know, that you would not fail to notice some little change in me since last we met. Have I aged, do you think? Hmm?”

  “But what—what—?”

  But he knew, only too well. Andreas laughed again.

  “Why, it is the pox, brother, the Morbus Gallicus, or as your dear friend Fracastoro would have it in his famous verses, Syphilis, the beautiful boy struck down by the gods. A most troublesome complaint, I assure you.”

  “O Christ. Andreas.”

  Andreas frowned, if that was what to call this buckling of his maimed face.

  “I’ll have none of your pity, damn you,” he said, “your mealy-mouthed concern. I am brought low, am I? You cringing clown. Rather I should rot with the pox than be like you, dead from the neck down. I have lived! Can you understand what that means, you, death-in-life, Poor Pol, can you? When I am dead and in the ground I shall not have been brought so low as you are now, brother!”

  Into the globe of light in which they sat dim shapes were pressing, a crouched chair, the couch, a pile of books like clenched teeth, mute timid things, lifeless and yet seemingly alive, aching toward speech. The Canon looked about, unable to sustain the weight of his brother’s burning eyes, and wondered vaguely if these things among which he lived had somehow robbed him of some essential presence, of something vivid and absolutely vital, in order to imbue themselves with a little vicarious life. For certainly (Andreas was right!) he was in a way dead, cold, beyond touching. Even now it was not Andreas really that he pitied, but the pity itself. That seemed to mean something. Between the object and the emotion a third something, for him, must always mediate. Yes, that meant something. He did not know what. And then it all drifted away, those paradoxical fragments of almost-insight, and he was back in the charnel house.

  “Why do you hate me so?” he asked, not in anger, nor even sadness much, but wonderingly, with awe.

  Andreas did not answer. He fished up from under his cloak a soiled piece of cheese, looked at it doubtfully, and put it away. “Is there wine?” he growled. “Give it here.” And the ghost of the imperious headstrong bright beautiful creature he had once been appeared briefly in the furry yellow light, bowed haughtily, and was gone. He produced a length of hollow reed, and turning away with the fastidious stealth of a wounded animal, inserted one end of it between his lips and sucked up a mouthful of wine. “I suppose you think it only justice,” he mumbled, “that I have no longer a mouth with which to drink? You always disapproved of my drinking.” He wiped his lips carefully on his wrist. “Well, enough of this poking in the past—let us speak of present things. So you have sold yourself to Nuncle Luke, eh? For how much, I wonder. Another fat prebend? I hear he has given you a canonry at Breslau: rich pickings there, I daresay. Still, hardly enough to buy you whole, I should have thought. Or has he promised you Ermland, the bishopric? You’ll have to take Holy Orders for that. Well, say nothing, it’s no matter. You’ll rot here, as surely as I will, elsewhere. Perhaps I shall return to Rome. I have friends there, influence. You do not believe me, I see. But that is no matter either. What else can I tell you?—ah yes: I am a father.” Suddenly his eyes glittered, bright with spite. The Canon flinched. “Yes, the bitch that dosed me redeemed herself somewhat by dropping a son. Imagine that, brother: a son, a little Andreas! That burns your celibate soul, doesn’t it?”

  O yes, it burned him, burned him badly, worse than he would ever have suspected it could do. Andreas’s aim was uncanny: he felt as dry as a barren woman. He said:

  “Where is he now, your son?”

  Andreas took another sip of wine, and looked up, grinning in anguish. “Hard to say where he might be; in Purgatory, I expect, seeing that he was so grossly got. He could not live, not with such parents, no.” He sighed, and glanced about the darkling room abstractedly, then groped under his cloak again and brought up this time a raw carrot with the stalk still on. “I asked your fellow to filch me some food, and look what he brought, the dog.”

  “Max?” the Canon yelped, “was it Max? Did he see your . . . did he see you clearly? He will tell the Bishop how things are with you. Andreas.”

  But Andreas was not listening. He let fall the carrot from his fingers, and gazed at it where it lay on the floor as if it were all hope, all happiness lost. “Our lives, brother, are a little journey through God’s guts. We are soon shat. Those hills are not hills but heavenly piles, this earth a mess of consecrated cack, in which we sink at the end.” He grinned again. “Well, what do you say to that? Is it not a merry notion? The world as God’s belly: there is an image to confound your doctors of astronomy. Come, drink some wine. Why do I hate you? But I do not. I hate the world, and you, so to speak, are standing in the way. Come, do take some wine, we might as well be drunk. How the wind blows! Listen! Ah, brother, ah, I am in pain.”

  A bitter cold invaded the Canon’s veins. He had emerged on the far side of grief and horror into an icy plain. He said:
r />   “You cannot stay here, Andreas. Max will surely tell the Bishop how things are. He knows you are sick, but not how badly, how . . . how obviously. He will drive you out, he has threatened already to have you hanged. You must go now, tonight. I shall send Max with you to the town, he will find lodgings for you.” And in the same dry measured tone he added: “Forgive me.”

  Andreas had taken up his ebony cane and was leaning on it heavily, rocking back and forth where he sat. He was drunk.

  “But tell me what you think of the world, brother,” he mumbled. “Do you think it a worthy place? Are we incandescent angels inhabiting a heaven? Come now, say, what do you think of it?”

  The Canon grimaced and shook his head. “Nothing, I do not think. Will you go now, please?”

  “Christ!” Andreas cried, and lifted the stick as if to strike. The Canon did not stir, and they sat thus, with the weapon trembling above them. “Tell me, damn you! Tell me what you think!”

  “I think,” Canon Koppernigk said calmly, “that the world is absurd.”

  Andreas lowered the stick, and nodded, smiling, it was almost a smile, almost blissful. “That is what I wanted you to say. Now I shall go.”

  *

  He went. Max found a hole for him to hide in. The Bishop, believing, wishing to believe, that he had left the country, let it be known that he wanted to hear no more mention of him. But such rage and pain as Andreas’s could not easily be erased. His coming had contaminated the castle, and some malign part of his presence persisted, a desolation, a blackening of the air. The Canon visited him once. He lay in darkness in a shuttered garret and would not speak, pretending to be asleep. The crown of his skull, all that was visible of him above the soiled blanket, scaly with scurf and old scabs and stuck with patches of scant hair, was horrid and heart-rending. Downstairs the innkeeper leered with ghastly knowing. He wiped his hands on his apron before taking the coins the Canon offered.