John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

“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 visions 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.

“Friends,” cried Rufus, “many thanks, and God go with you.”

They mounted up, but paused and muttered among themselves, grinning, and then dismounted again and raped the woman and two young boys. It took a long time for all those heaps of wriggling white flesh to be skewered, screaming, in the mud. Old Felix died as night fell, lying supine on the ground in the rain with his horny bare feet splayed, like a large wooden effigy, crying: Ah! Ah! Krack, waving a cheery farewell, had gone off with his friends. Andreas said:

“All that money, and not a word; you cunt.”

*

They would have perished surely, every one, had they not next day at dawn chanced upon a monastery perched on a rock high above a verdant valley. An old monk tending a vegetable garden outside the walls dropped his hoe and fled in terror at the sight of these walking dead who lifted up their frozen arms and mewled eerily. They could themselves hardly believe that they had survived. The night had been a kind of silvery icy death. They had spent it climbing blindly and in frantic haste, like possessed things, up the rocky slopes, watched by a huge impassive moon. Dawn had come in a flash of cold fire.

The monks of St Bernard received them kindly. One of the young boys died. Andreas, still brooding on that hidden trove of gold, would not speak to his brother. Nicolas passed his days out of doors, tramping the mountain paths in a monk’s cloak and cowl, telling himself stories, muttering Latin verse, imagining Italy, trying to purge himself of the memory of rain and screaming, of rags stiff with brown blood, of Krack’s smile. This country was unreal, this fiery icy Ultima Thule. He could not get his bearings here, everything was too big or too small, those impossible glittering mountains, the tiny blue flowers in the valley. Even the weather was strange, vast bluish brittle days of Alpine spring, fierce sun all light and little heat, transparent skies pierced by snowy peaks. The mountain goats clattered off with bells jangling at his approach, frightened by this staring alpenstocked dark parcel of pain and loathing. There was no forgetting. At night he was plagued by dreams whose sombre afterglow contaminated his waking hours, hung about him like a darkening of the air. He began to detect in everything signs of secret life, in flowers, mountain grasses, the very stones underfoot, all living, all somehow in agony. Thunderclouds flew low across the sky like roars of anguish on their way to being uttered elsewhere.

It was not the sufferings of the maimed and dead that pained him, but the very absence of that pain; he could not forget those terrible scenes, the blood and mud, the bundles of squirming flesh, but, remembering, he felt nothing, nothing, and this emptiness horrified him.

*

At Bologna, where they were to enrol at the university, the brothers parted company with the remnants of the pilgrimage. The representative at Rome of the Frauenburg Chapter, Canon Bernhard Schiller, had travelled north to meet them. He was a small grey cautious man.

“Well, gentlemen,” he snapped, “welcome to Italy. You are late arriving. I hope you had a pleasant journey, for certainly it was a leisurely one.”

They gazed at him. Andreas laughed. He said:

“We have no money.”

“What!” The Canon’s grey face turned greyer. In the end, however, he agreed to advance them a hundred ducats. “Understand, this is not my money, nor the Church’s either; it is your uncle’s. I have written to him today informing him of this transaction, and demanding an immediate refund.” He permitted himself a bleak smile. “I trust you have ready for him a satisfactory explanation of your poverty? And why, may I ask, are you got up in this monkish garb? Have you been gambling with clerics? A perilous pastime. Well, it is no business of mine. Good day.”

Andreas watched with bitter amusement as Nicolas carefully counted his share of the ducats.

“Better get it sewed up quick, brother.”

* * *

At twilight through hot crowded noxious streets he strode, speculating furiously on the true dimensions of the universe. Dark glossy heads and almond eyes turned to follow him with curiosity and amusement as he flew past. Bologna was a city of grotesques and madmen, yet he did not go unnoticed, with his long cloak and stark fanatic face. What did he care for their opinion, this noisy, stupid people! Italy had been a great disappointment; he hated it, the heat, the stale inescapable smell, the infantile uproar, the indolence, the corruption, the disorder. He had imagined a proud blue sunlit, serene land. Hawkers shrieked in his face, wheedling and bullying, thrusting at him their wine, their sweetmeats, their blinded singing birds. A fat buffoon with a head like a gobbet of raw meat, jiggling a string of stinking sausages, opened the wet red hole of his mouth and crowed: Bello, professore, bello, bello! A leprous beggar extended a fingerless hand and whined. He fled around a corner and was struck full tilt by a blinding blast of light. The setting sun sat on the city wall, flanked by a pair of robbers freshly hung that morning, black blots against the gold. Suddenly he yearned for those still pale pearly, limpid northern evenings full of silence and clouds. Vile vapours rose up from below. He had stepped in dogmerd.