Doctor Copernicus (7 page)

“It—?”

“—Or wherever, it’s no matter, so long as it is somewhere far off. And take your brother with you: I do not want him within an ass’s roar of my affairs. Well, man, what
are you grinning at?”

Italy!

*     *     *

O
n Easter Day in 1496 Canon Nicolas and his brother marched forth from Cracow’s Florian Gate in the company of a band of pilgrims. There were
holy men and sinners, monks, rogues, mountebanks and murderers, poor peasants and rich merchants, widows and virgins, mendicant knights, scholars, pardoners and preachers, the hale and the halt,
the blind, the deaf, the quick and the dying. Royal banners fluttered in the sunlight against an imperial blue sky, and the royal trumpeters blew a brassy blast, and from high upon the fortress
walls the citizens with cheers and a wild waving of caps and kerchiefs bade the wayfarers farewell, as down the dusty road into the plain they trudged. Southwards they were bound, over the Alps to
Rome, the Holy City.

“He could have got us a couple of nags,” Andreas grumbled, “damned skinflint, instead of leaving us to walk like common peasants.”

Nicolas would not have cared had Bishop Lucas forced them to crawl to Italy. He was, for the first time in his life, so it seemed to him, free. A post had been found for him at last at
Frauenburg; the Chapter at the Bishop’s direction had granted him immediate leave of absence, and he had departed without delay for Cracow. He found that city strangely altered, no longer the
forlorn gloomy terminus he had known during his university years, but a bustling waystation cheerful with travellers and loud with the uproar of foreign tongues. To be sure, the change was not in
the city but in him, the traveller, who noticed now what the student had ignored, yet he chose to see his new regard for this proud cold capital as a sign that he had at last grown up into himself
and his world, that he was at last renouncing the past and turning his face toward an intrepid manhood; it was all nonsense, of course, he knew it; but still, he was allowed for a few days at least
to feel mature, and worldly-wise, and significant.

His newfound self-esteem, however tentative it was and prone to collapse into self-mockery, infuriated Andreas. No undemanding canonry had been secured for him. Wherever he turned Bishop
Lucas’s black shadow fell upon him like a blight. He was not going to Italy—he was being sent. And he had not even been provided with a horse to lift him above the common throng.

“I am almost thirty, and still he treats me like a child. What have I ever done to deserve his contempt? What have I done?”

He glared at Nicolas, daring him to answer, and then turned his face away, grinding his teeth in rage and anguish. Nicolas was embarrassed, as always in the presence of another’s public
pain. He wanted to walk away very quickly, he even imagined himself fleeing with head down, muttering, waving his arms like one pursued by a plague of flies, but there was nowhere to go that would
be free of his brother’s anger and pain.

Andreas laughed.

“And you, brother,” he said softly, “feeding off me, eating me alive.”

Nicolas stared at him. “I do not understand you.”

“O get away, get away! You sicken me.”

And so, lashed together by thongs of hatred and frightful love, they set out for Italy.

*

They equipped themselves with two stout staffs, good heavy jackets lined with sheepskin against the Alpine cold, a tinderbox, a compass, four pounds of sailor’s biscuit
and a keg of salt pork. The gathering of these provisions afforded them a deep childish satisfaction. Andreas found in the Italian swordsmith’s near the cathedral an exquisitely tooled dagger
with a retracting blade that at the touch of a concealed lever sprang forward with an evil click. This ingenious weapon he kept in a sheath sewn for the purpose inside his bootleg. It made him feel
wonderfully dangerous. Bartholemew Gertner, Katharina’s husband, sold them a mule, and cheated them only a little on the deal, since they were family, after all. A taciturn and elderly beast,
this mule carried their baggage readily enough, but would not bear the indignity of a rider, as they quickly discovered.

Nicolas could have bought them a pair of horses. Before leaving Frauenburg he had drawn lavishly on his prebend. But he kept his riches secret, and sewed the gold into the lining of his cloak,
because he did not wish to embarrass his penniless brother, so he told himself.

Andreas gazed gloomily southwards. “Like common pig peasants!”

Forth from St Florian’s Gate they marched into the great plain, behind them the cheering and the brassy blare of trumpets, before them the long road.

*

The weather turned against them. Near Braclav a windstorm rose without warning out of the plain and came at them like a great dark animal, howling. The inns were terrible,
crawling with lice and rogues and poxed whores. At Graz they were fed a broth of tainted meat and suffered appalling fluxions; at Villach the bread was weevilled. A child died, fell down on the
road screaming, clenched in agony, while its mother stood by and bawled.

Their number shrank steadily day by day, for many who had left with them from Cracow had been, like the brothers, merely travellers seeking protection and companionship on their way to Silesia
or Hungary or South Germany, and by the time they reached the Carnic Alps they were no more than a dozen adults and some children, and even of that small band less than half were pilgrims. Old
Felix, the holy man, smote the ground with his staff and inveighed against those worldly ones in their midst who were exploiting God’s protection on this holy journey; it was their impiety
that had led them all to misfortune. He was a stooped emaciated ancient with a long white beard. On the women especially he fixed his burning eyes.

“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.”

*     *     *

A
t 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.