The Fifth Servant (33 page)

           
I caught Rabbi Aaron looking at me with a hint of a smile, and I was so disturbed by runaway notions that I wanted to grab Schmerz by the shoulders and shake him.

           
I had come seeking answers that would help bring the truth to light, but I had forgotten that we also have a saying that if God wants to punish a man, He makes him wise.

           
I got out of there as fast as I could, my head filled with visions of the sky crashing down on us.

           
I ran through the streets to Rabbi Loew’s house to seek his counsel, splashing through puddles and skidding on the cobblestones, and saying the nighttime
Sh’ma
the whole way:

           
Master of the Universe, I hereby forgive anyone who angered or antagonized me, or who sinned against me, whether against my body, my property, my honor or against anything mine; whether accidentally, willfully, carelessly, or purposely; whether through speech, deed, thought, or notion; whether in this life or another. I forgive every Jew
.

           
I arrived wet, muddy, and exhausted, the words of the prayer still on my lips:

           
And may You illuminate my eyes lest I die in sleep.

CHAPTER 18

           
BISHOP S TEMPFEL FOLLOWED A PAIR of page boys to the bedchamber reserved for eminent guests. His retinue accompanied him inside the luxurious quarters, where a roaring fire cast its glow upon the four-poster bed bearing the coat of arms of Our Lady of Terezín. The bishop dismissed the pages and asked his aides to deliver their final report of the day.

           
Grünpickl placed a bound sheaf of page proofs on the table beside the bed, explaining that it was a compendium of evil doings across the continent penned by an Italian brother of the Order of Saint Ambrose. The bishop nodded. Another book to review for doctrinal errors and falsehoods before final approval for publication was given. Perfectly routine.

           
“What else?”

           
Grünpickl reported that there were still no clear indications linking witchcraft to that morning’s alleged bloodcrime offense, but the matter was still under investigation.

           
“The faithful are already calling on you to beatify the girl and set her on the path to sainthood,” said Popel.

           
Bishop Stempfel grunted. “It would be easier if she were a boy,” he said, as an attendant helped him doff his official robes and slip on a dressing gown that had been warming by the fire.

           
The final resting place of a martyred child-saint would bring thousands of visitors a year and much attention to the cause, but the biggest shrines belonged to the likes of Saints William of Norwich, Hugh of Lincoln, and Simon of Trent. All boys. But it was too late to change anything now.

           
The bishop climbed into the downy bed. The sheets were cold, like everything else this far north of Rome. He propped himself up on the pillows, but it was hard to find a comfortable position because of the inflammation in his posterior. He shivered as he pulled the covers up, then the attendant spread another coverlet on the bed and tucked it around the bishop’s mid-section.

           
Popel was still standing there.

           
“Was there something else?” the bishop asked.

           
“My lord, it has been our practice for many years for all the Brothers of Our Lady to gather in the great hall every Friday during Lent and castigate ourselves.”

           
“How very commendable of you.”

           
“Perhaps you would care to join us.”

           
“I appreciate the invitation, Brother Popel, but as you can see, I’m already suffering enough as it is.”

           
“Oh. Is your, um, condition still bothering you?”

           
“What do you think?” he said, eyeing the attendant, who quickly withdrew from the chamber. The itch got so bad that sometimes when he scratched it left spots of blood on his underclothes.

           
Popel was about to send for the doctor, but the bishop told Grünpickl to take care of it, and to make sure he brought back
two
doctors this time.

           
“But that’s not what you wanted to talk to me about,” said the bishop.

           
Popel acknowledged this with a crooked smile and launched into another one of his little tirades, this one about how Christian interest in dabbling in the Jewish Kabbalah was undermining the moral virtue of the nation, etc., and that such
excrementa
(as he called it) should be condemned and destroyed.

           
The bishop said, “It is our understanding that the Holy Office of the Inquisition has taken great pains to ensure that the Latin translations of the Kabbalistic works have been purged of all anti-Christian elements, so that one may read them and remain a good Christian.”

           
“True, but there is still much work to be done, my lord. This heretical book has just been brought to my attention, a book of ‘poetry’ by a certain Immanuel the Jew that contains passages of the vilest filth—”

           
“Can’t this wait till morning?”

           
Popel flipped through a stack of pages of crabbed handwriting, the results of several weeks’ labor by a team of learned professors who had been translating the offending text.

           
“Another banned book, Popel—?”

           
“My lord, I will tell you in all sincerity that if my own father had written this book, I would personally carry the torch to light the fire under him.”

           
Popel found the page he was looking for and read a passage aloud in which a young Jew boasts of having talked a nun into breaking her vows of chastity for him, and that her passion was so aroused that “the fire of lust burned in her like a river of sulfur.”

           
“I bet it sells very well at the Frankfurt Book Fair,” the bishop murmured.

           
“Beg pardon, my lord?”

           
“I said you’ll have to let me examine a copy before I make my determination.”

           
“Very good, my lord,” he said, piling the loose pages on top of the other book. “Of course, all the influential rabbis have condemned the book as usual, but that’s nothing but a clever ruse. This calls for
scharfe Barmherzigkeit
.” Rough mercy.

           
“I’ll look into it.”

           
“Excellent, my lord. Now, if you’ll excuse me, the brothers are waiting for me to join them.”

           
“By all means.”

           
Go whip yourself bloody
, he thought. Once the Lenten period of mourning was over, he’d have to talk with Popel about his misdirected zealotry. Dirty jokes about errant young men unleashing the passions of sexually frustrated nuns were as old as the seven hills, and hardly amounted to heresy, even if they did come from a randy Jewish bard.

           
The real problem of heresy came from turncoats like that Dominican monk Bruno, who dared to argue that there were no absolutes in space, only positions relative to other bodies. It might sound harmless, but taken to its logical conclusion, such an argument meant that there were no absolutes of any kind—no up or down, no right or wrong, and no God. The Venetian authorities would have to extradite him soon, and fortunately it wasn’t too late to save the young students who had read his book. But if any young women had been allowed to listen to his lies, the bishop had no doubt that their virtue would have been thoroughly destroyed. It’s a good thing women weren’t allowed in school.

           
He steepled his fingers and pressed them against his nostrils, and considered the other extreme—men like Popel, who saw the world
entirely
in terms of absolutes, when there were many subtle complexities to take into account. To such a man, the Cossacks would seem like natural allies. After all, they hated the Jews and the Turks equally as enemies of Christendom. But dig a little deeper and you found that the Cossacks hated the Catholics almost as much as they hated the Jews. They fought the Turks, but not for the right reasons. No, they were not our friends. And they were very good at destroying things. Of course, the Cossack hordes didn’t even have a country to call their own, but who’s to say what might come to pass in a hundred years time with a tribe of people so determined to assert their independence?

           
The bishop’s legs were finally warming up when the doctors came in and made him take the covers off again. His skin shriveled with cold as they poked and prodded him fore and aft. When they finally put away their instruments and let him cover himself back up again, he asked for their opinions.

           
The old man with the ring of white hair let the younger one speak first. His name was Lybrmon, and he had an unassuming and authoritative manner that the bishop found reassuring. Dr. Lybrmon wiped off his eyeglasses and spent a good long while stroking his trim gray beard before speaking.

           
“My lord, you have a fissure that will not heal on its own. We can supply you with ointments that will temporarily reduce the swelling and irritation, but a long-term cure would require stitching the wound up.”

           
The other doctor fixed his iron-gray eyes on his rival, and sliced the air with his bony arm as he denounced such procedures as dangerously similar to the forbidden practices of Jewish doctors, who, according to the latest research at the University of Vienna, were obligated by Jewish law to kill one-tenth of the Christian patients they treated.

           
The bishop was skeptical. Although Pope Gregory XIII had banned Jewish doctors from attending to Christian patients for all eternity, in all lands, even those undiscovered countries which did not yet know the light of Christ, it was widely known that every noble had a Jewish doctor hidden away somewhere, and surely somebody would have noticed if all the prominent noble families were being decimated by poisonous drugs. Even Emperor Rudolf II had an influential trio of converted Jews in his court as advisers, and the bishop had heard rumors about Rudolf’s personal physician, Tádeás Hájek, even though Hájek had fought on the Hungarian front as a military doctor and served as court doctor to the emperor’s father, Emperor Maximilian II.

           
“What do you recommend?” asked the bishop.

           
“Virgin amber, direct from the source, my lord. It’s the best thing for a toothache.”

           
“But I don’t have a toothache,” the bishop protested.

           
“You may not feel it, but the ache which manifests itself at one end often begins in the mouth.”

           
The bishop looked to Dr. Lybrmon, who quickly concurred with the elder doctor’s opinion.

           
“In that case, fetch forth the virgin amber.”

           
“As you wish, my lord. Although we might not be able to procure it until sometime tomorrow.”

           
“Fine, fine. Now go.”

           
The bishop dismissed the physicians, and settled back into bed. He shoved aside the papers Popel had left for him, and untied the ribbon around the bundle of page proofs he needed to examine. He skimmed the introduction, then flipped through the pages to get a general overview. By all appearances, it was a detailed, case-by-case catalog of the spread of witchcraft to every village, town, and region of every country in Europe, illustrated with a few dozen woodcuts depicting strangely compelling scenes of Satanic adoration. Men lined up to tread upon the cross and kiss the devil in that most hideous and shameful place. The Devil placed his mark upon their bodies, usually on the men’s eyelids, armpits, lips, and shoulders, and on the women’s breasts and privates, confirming what Gödelmann had noted in his new book,
Tractatus de magis
.

           
The book also furnished clear proof that devils can fornicate with women by preying upon their gullible nature and uncontrollable carnal lusts. It was clearly a work of immense importance.

           
He turned the pages over till he came to the chapter on soporific spells. A woodcut depicted a woman in bed, with her breasts showing and a passive smile on her face, as three well-dressed and deceptively comely young witches offered her a goblet containing a potion that had clearly drugged the woman into such a stupor that she was blissfully unaware—or possibly unconcerned—that her breasts were on display for all to see. He
had
to learn more about the uses and content of this potion, because, naturally, it might help make the accused more compliant during interrogations.