John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

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 mysteriously 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.