Contents
Cover
About the Author
Also by Lawrence Norfolk
Dedication
Title Page
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Lawrence Norfolk was born in London
in 1963.
This is his second novel.
ALSO BY LAWRENCE NORFOLK
Lemprière’s Dictionary
For Vineeta
All fishes eat. All fishes spawn.
Few fishes spawn where they eat.
Arne Lindroth
They expected more. He saw it in their faces, in the ebbing flush of excitement, the strain of mere exertion as Gundolf, Reinhard, Harald and the others dug their paddles into slack water and propelled the raft to shore. He ordered the giant and heathen into their own vessel and towed it off the stern where it dragged and rolled. The heathen seemed to have recovered well enough, lying back with one elbow propped insolently on the wales. The giant appeared inconsolable, staring down at his feet and muttering to himself. A boat, two vagabonds, and a barrel of seawater: not much of a catch to the innocent eye. He felt his own heart jerk and shudder at their prize.
Paddles plashed to either side of him and the rotting ropes below the deck’s planking chafed against the logs. Jörg’s eye wandered over the ruin of the church, down the cliff to its foot. There was Gerhardt, flanked by the remainder of the Brothers. They were drawn up along the waterline, still sentinels in grey, the island’s defenders. Only a little further now. He glanced back at the boat lolling in their wake and the men within it. The giant seemed quieted.
Ashore, Jörg directed Florian and Matthias to clean and clothe their guests. Gerhardt was speaking with his back to him. A group of Brothers was listening. The raft and boat were made fast and then he moved quickly to scale the slope. Gerhardt blocked his path.
‘I would have words with you, Father . . .’ But Gerhardt’s words were chains, weights, sapping loads. He was too close for distractions, for Gerhardt’s sour face and his pique at losing the captaincy of the raft, and he muttered, ‘Not now, not now,’ pushing past the man and hearing an answering mutter start up behind him as he strode up the side of the point. The prize needed to be better, and would be if he could only impel them to grasp it, to leap over their fears and reach it. They were close, but still too far. Brother HansJürgen was waiting for him in the cloister.
‘Take our guests to the beet loft,’ he told the monk. ‘Give them straw and a slop bucket. They may take their meals there. Bring the one calling himself Salvestro to me before Vespers.’
More monks appeared, then the paddlers, breathing heavily from their exertions and the steepness of the ascent, and last of all Brothers Florian and Matthias with the giant and his companion. HansJürgen followed as they were led to the well and watched as they stripped to have buckets of water poured over their heads. Naked, the giant looked if anything even bigger than before. His companion was rather puny. HansJürgen found it difficult to connect him with the islanders’ ill-defined fears. What had these vagabonds hoped for? What had they sought out there, beneath the sea’s opaque surface? He waited as they dried themselves and dressed, then led them through the cloister, past the dorter to a stone lean-to tacked on to the back of the kitchens.
The beet loft was wider than it was deep, and higher than it was wide, perhaps twice the height of a man. Lines of lathes on which the beets had once rested were set into the back wall, pointing out horizontally and rising in cobwebby shelves up the back wall. Three kinds of confusion – momentary, resigned, fundamental – peered through the door, for between it and the lathe-ends there was barely room to stand.
‘You will stay here,’ HansJürgen told the the two men. ‘You will be brought straw and food later. You may remove these sticks as you see fit.’
Sounds of hesitant, then determined, destruction followed him as he walked back through the cloister.
Once Bernardo had removed the last of the lathes the two men entered and sat down. The beet loft smelt of dry-rot and long-abandoned chicken coops. Gloom descended.
‘Nothing!’ Bernardo burst out after a minute’s silence. ‘How could there be nothing?’
Salvestro looked up absently. ‘Not nothing,’ he murmured to himself.
‘What then?’ demanded the other.
Salvestro did not reply. They could sell the rope, he calculated. The market at Stettin was held on a Saturday, or had been when last he heard. Today was Sunday. Ewald’s boat would have to be returned, and Bernardo’s other boot fetched from the drying-shed. Barns, woodsheds, caves, stables, scrapes, and bivouacs; in the forest beneath the boughs of the trees, the open sky. Now a beet loft. All the miles since Prato had fetched them up on a packed-earth floor with a view through the open door of a pile of sticks and a flat muddy field. Little enough. But down there, in the blackness and the disorder of his wits . . . Something. He had pulled back. He fingered the bump on the back of his head, which began once more to throb. Seated opposite him, Bernardo shifted on one buttock to release a long-withheld fart. Salvestro looked over at his companion, who prodded the ground aimlessly with his finger and would not look back.
‘There is a market quite near here. We’ll be able to sell the rope and there’s a good few suppers right there, that’s just for starters.’
Silence.
‘Listen, Bernardo. These monks didn’t fish us out just to throw us back in. They probably need a couple of fellows like us about the place. We can winter here as well as anywhere and in the spring . . .’
‘I don’t like it here,’ Bernardo said abruptly. ‘I didn’t like it when we arrived and I don’t like it now.’ He paused and thought. ‘It’s a shit hole.’
‘It may be a shit hole, Bernardo, but it’s a shit hole with a roof, with walls. . . .’
‘That fish shed was a shit hole too. I don’t care if you were born there or not. This island’s a shit hole and that dump we stopped in on the mainland before we got here, now that was a real shit hole. . . .’ And Salvestro listened with diminishing interest as Bernardo began listing the watering holes, villages, the scattering of wayside inns and camps which had served as the stations of their flight north, separating them into ‘shit holes’ and ‘real shit holes’, beginning with ‘that bog you led us into outside Prato’ where they had spent the first night of their journey spreadeagled on the quaking frangible surface, listening to the shouts of the Colonel’s men as they searched for them around the marsh’s periphery, not daring to move until dawn showed them safe passage, and following it with the remembrance of an ill-chosen hiding-place to which they had resorted with a whole village chasing after them (was it Ala? Serravalle? Somewhere before Trento, certainly before the mountains . . .) following Bernardo’s theft of a swan and which, inasmuch as it was a silo built eight feet high, might be termed ‘a hole’, and which, inasmuch as it was a manure silo . . . Well, Salvestro admitted privately, it fell fairly and squarely into the second of his companion’s categories. The swan had proved delicious, though the ‘shit’ in that particular ‘shit hole’ – being actually shit – had added its now faint but still unscrubbable stink to the others in his weeds: old sweat, cooking grease, tiny bits of food more easily rubbed in than wiped off, beer-splashes, milk. . . . Milk seemed so innocuous at first, he reflected, but then give it a couple of warm days and it smelt worse than puke. Funny stuff, milk. Most lately herring. Under them all the smell of the woman at Prato, soaking into him, her fish-cold flesh sucking the heat out of him. That smell. Prato. No sense in dwelling on that.
He cocked an ear once more to his companion whose rambling lament had gathered speed and now leaped a German mile north for every Italian one south, or vice versa, jumbling Cisalpine shepherds’ huts with Franconian hamlets, nameless clusters of hovels with the great marts of the Nordmark, redrawing the jagged line of their northward progress according to his own touchstones: Had they eaten? Had they been warm? Had they been chased? Hunger, cold, and dogs figured large in Bernardo’s imagination. For him, their journey had been little more than endless trudging through varying obstacles and discomforts. His companion had never really grasped that it had a purpose, a destination, and when they had finally stepped off the small boat which had ferried them across the Achter-wasser and he had said that they would stop here, they had arrived, Bernardo had become a child overwhelmed with gratitude and surprise, as though to stop merely was a gift too great to be longed for and its receipt an all-surpassing miracle. ‘Well, here we are. Here we are at last!’ he had exclaimed over and over as they tramped across the island to the north shore. ‘Now, tell me,’ he was beaming, standing there on the beach and drawing great breaths of the sea air, ‘where is the city?’
‘. . . and Nurnberg. Nürnberg! Another shit hole . . .’
Salvestro picked at his nose. It had been for his own good, for the both of them and to save their skins – there was no knowing how far a man like the Colonel might pursue them, and thus no knowing where exactly their progress had ceased to be a flight and become a journey – and Bernardo, the lummox, had wanted to stay. . . . But, had he – Salvestro – omitted a certain fact which, had it been known, might have severed the rope by which he had dragged Bernardo north? Emerging from the ravine which the Freiberg road took on its way to Dresden, he had pointed down the gentle slope of the valley and across the broad swathe of the river to the great walled city on the far bank, saying, ‘Once we reach the island, Vineta is as near as that.’ They were outside a little village called Plauen which, an old man who gave them water there assured them, had long ago lent its name to the much larger city they had passed through some days before and never got it back. He was furious on the subject. An hour later they had crossed the Elbe and were walking through crowded, narrow streets. ‘As near as that. . . .’ It was true, but was it the truth?
Bernardo had scanned the grey expanse before them, south-east to north-west where his eye alighted hopefully first on Greifswalder Oie, then behind it the heights of Göhren on Rügen, the headland of the neighbouring island just peaking out from behind that of Usedom’s own. Neither looked like the promised city of Salvestro’s tale, and the latter was pointing in the other direction, to where the sea lay unbroken before a truncated point of land on which some stone buildings huddled together all higgledy-piggledy. Not a city though, and beyond it only the sea . . .
‘Where is it?’
‘There.’
‘But I can’t see anything. Just water . . .’
There was a short silence. As near as that . . . Had he, on one crucial point, as it were, deceived his reluctant companion?
‘Underneath,’ said Salvestro.
Bernardo had begun complaining that night, clinging to his grievances like so much driftwood from the wreck. This latest lament was nothing new and would run its course now as it had before.
‘. . . then that raft, making me get on that thing. That G’litcz fellow, eh? A right pig in a poke till we sorted him out. Down that river . . .’
Two rivers, thought Salvestro. The Neisse, and then the broad flood he had been waiting for since, since he had fled this place all those years before and emerged from the forest and followed its banks upstream, south, away from the island and into other arms and all the years between. Island-obstructed and riven with false channels yet broad enough for all, they had found G’litcz in its tributary, run aground in midstream aboard a great raft of Bohemian oak trunks destined for the mart at Stettin, abandoned by his hirelings and squawking for help before the current should smash his vessel to ungovernable splinters. . . . They had shouted terms from the near bank, then Salvestro had swum out to take a line to shore, Bernardo had pulled him off, and they had continued on, the three of them poling downstream to the great confluence past Guben where their course joined the thick muddy flood of the Oder.
There G’litcz had claimed to have lost his satchel in the river, and with it his purse. He had been a short wiry man. How could he pay them? They had watched impassively as this story spilled out a league or so short of Stettin. Salvestro had pointed to the rope.
G’litcz’s rope. A piece of glass filched from a workshop backing onto the Schmiedegasse in Nürnberg. A barrel. A boat.
‘And then I thought you were dead!’ Bernardo burst out suddenly; a leap in the catalogue of his misfortunes which caught Salvestro by surprise and seemed to add new energy to the other’s accusations. ‘That was just typical, to leave me high and dry in a boat, on my own, after you promised this and swore by that and . . .’
While the promises he had made scattered like sinking cargoes into regions of dark and doubt, never to be recouped. Never to be lost either. The jolts of the surface, tidal surges, and heat-sapped convections add their slack echoes and seiches to the purposeless flux below: whorls, tilting water-fronts, skittish eddies peeling off the mass which drift and disperse their entrusted vessels. . . . Where? It’s unpredictable, to do with remote sea-motions, invisible storms, gales striking over the horizon. These are distant resolutions. A boy, bone-white, diving and washed away one night. A man diving in his fool’s coat of wood and rope, finding a boy’s promises down there, the water still thick with them. An inner skin had been waiting for him but its smooth invasion had been too cold, too final for him to gulp down. He gulped air instead. He spilled his stomach on the deck, telling his eager friend, ‘Nothing . . .’ Nothing? Something. His clothes steamed gently as his blood’s heat dried them. There was the rope to sell. There was the boat to be returned. . . . What else?
‘Straw,’ said a voice that was suddenly not Bernardo’s.
‘For bedding,’ said another.
‘Brother HansJürgen told us to bring straw for your bedding,’ said the third.
Peering in at the door were three monks, younger than the one who had conducted them here earlier, all three struggling somewhat under identical loads of straw. Salvestro jumped to his feet. ‘And very welcome too,’ he said quickly. ‘Right here,’ he indicated the floor.
Settled on their beds of straw, the two men watched the grey afternoon light drain west and disappear. Cooking smells reached them through the walls and, though Bernardo quickly resumed his complaints, his heart was no longer in it. ‘I never asked to come here in any case, we should have done like I said. You wouldn’t listen to me though, oh no. I told you what we should’ve done. We should have stayed with Groot,’ he finished up.
‘Groot is dead,’ Salvestro said then, and after that his companion was silent.
The same three monks reappeared a little later, two of them bearing large bowls filled with a kind of broth, the third a small oil-lamp. They watched by the flickering light as the two men ate hungrily and collected the bowls when they were finished. Salvestro looked up at the trio, who hovered there as though they had been charged with some task and were unsure how to go about it. A fourth, older face appeared behind them. It was the monk from that morning. Brother HansJürgen beckoned to Salvestro.
‘Father Jörg will see you now,’ he said.
Small ponds will freeze but not the sea, the winter being too mild. Such snow that fell by Michaelmas fell in heavy sopping flakes which melted at the first touch of sun. The winds blew weakly. It was a sodden winter.
They could be seen rounding the marshy precincts of the Schmollen-See, or paddling the sheltered waters of Krumminer Wiek, splashing ashore at Eigholz to tramp north as the sun dipped below the dark mass of the mainland. They came in twos and threes, muddying themselves in the marsh behind Stenschke’s place, threading their way through the bare and unfamiliar woods which thinned to beech scrub a little before the slope of the foreshore. They called on Ploetz once or twice, but he only shook his head as though to say he had worries enough already. Bruggeman’s were no business of his.
Ott, Ronsdorff, Riesenkampf, the Krumminer Wittmanns and the Buchenwald Wittmanns, Haase, Peter Gottfreund, others too, they all turned up on one evening or another, grunted a greeting to Mathilde and took their places around the hearth. She watched them clear their throats and spit in the flames, shifting their buttocks on the narrow benches. Their weather-scoured faces were bristly and red in the firelight. Heavy silences descended and enveloped them in an inhibiting pall. They were dour gatherings. Bruggeman could count himself lucky to have neighbours like them. He should have dealt with the matter himself.
She remembered the first sight of them. Two men had stood there, the giant behind, both silent until Ewald had appeared behind her and recognised the foremost. He had come back.
Her husband had offered them the herring shed. Later they had asked for food. And then a barrel. When the boat had disappeared she hoped without truly believing that this might be the final price of their forbearance and they were gone or drowned. When the monk’s knock came at their door, she had cowered, fearing it might be them. Then a voice she knew was not theirs sounded, asking who was within?
A monk stood there, a little older than her husband, tall, quite alone. ‘You are Bruggeman?’ She saw her husband nod. She hung back, catching only fragments of what passed between them: they are with us, at the monastery . . . our Prior too trusting, foolish even. . . . The monk moved his hands quickly and surely. They were working hands, calloused, with thick stubby fingers. She heard him say, ‘You are a good man, Bruggeman. You islanders are all good men. . . .’ The children lay very still but they were awake, only feigning sleep. Other children lay awake in other beds about the island. ‘You have just cause. Remember the Lion, Bruggeman. . . .’
The first of them came at dusk the next night. Their neighbours, though their relations were strained to something else now. Mathilde would pour them mugs of broth. She listened and nodded. When the fire burned low she sent her husband out to the woodpile, and his exit uncorked the bottle they had waited these hours to taste: Just a boy at the time . . . God alone knew what that bitch and her whelp had done to him. . . . They had shunned him for it, as boys that is, Ewald did it with the Savage. . . . But that was just teasing. Whatever it was that had gone on it was no laughing matter now. If it was down to Bruggeman it was down to them all; their own fathers should have finished the business.
Toeing the door open and peering over the faggots piled high in his arms, Ewald saw their faces turned to him, half-shadowed in the glow, and heard the familiar silence descend. He took his place on the low stool he reserved to himself and waited once more for the punctuation of grave assertions and grunts to shape the unspoken act before them: Isn’t that right? There’s no avoiding it, eh? Eh, Ewald? They would come to it easier with him out the way, but he was at its heart, somehow essential. The thing they were coming to could only be come to here, sitting around his, Ewald Bruggeman’s, hearth. The closer they came to it the more he nodded. He had nodded to the monk. It was Ewald that the Witch’s boy had led into the woods that night. Now the Witch’s boy was back. The monk had warned them. Now his warning had come true.
The bones of the Michaelmas goose were soup, foaming in the kettle over the fire. She had opened the door and there he was, and though her heart was in her mouth as she stammered that, no, Ewald was not at home, she had known too that there would be no further doubts that it must be done. Not here, she repeated. She slammed the door shut and waited, leaning with her back to it, listening as he left. She waited for her husband to return. She stirred and skimmed, hardly looking up as he entered, waiting for him to settle himself, holding herself in. He dipped a finger in the bowl before him.
‘He was here,’ she said.
‘Who?’
‘The Witch’s boy. The Savage.’
‘What of it?’ Face like a liar.
‘He is to return the boat. He means you to help beach her.’
He nodded and she saw that he was as frightened as herself. They had looked at each other in silence.
‘Get the others,’ Mathilde told her husband.
‘Right, I’m going,’ said Bernardo.
He watched the big man stomp off across the field, still limping. It had become a habit in the week it had taken Salvestro to muster his energies and walk the short miles across the island to retrieve his companion’s boot. Nothing had changed in the herring shed. The pond was much as it was before, though someone had pushed their derrick over. He swung back towards the shore. There was the smoke from Ewald’s chimney, there the chimney itself, then the hut as he cleared the trees and waded through the scrub, coming to the door at a run down the slope. He hesitated there. He had put it off for a week. He knocked.
Sixty yards away, Bernardo had reached a stand of beeches and was looking about him, seemingly confused.
Mathilde had faced him across the threshold. He was thrown suddenly. At a loss as to what to say, he mumbled something about the boat. It was not why he called; he had expected Ewald himself. He wanted to talk with the husband not his wife. Now he would have to return the boat, which the monks had dragged up the slope and beached against the east wall of the church. Kind enough, except that they had left it uncovered, it had filled with snow, the snow had melted to water, the water had frozen solid, and now it was filled with ice. He should have seen to it himself. He should have seen to Bernardo’s boot sooner too. He blamed the Prior for these misfortunes.
Sixty-seven yards away, Bernardo was manhandling beech trees, which were obstructive and larger than himself. The sky was a collection of dull greys, rain possible but unlikely. Bernardo swiped at low-hanging branches, ducked, and disappeared within them.
That first night, HansJürgen had climbed two short flights of steps broken by a corner which brought them to a passage running above the cloister’s north ambulatory. The monk’s sandals clacked ahead of his own near-soundless footfalls, the oil-lamp held before the monk’s chest throwing a great swathe of shadow which gathered him in and drew him along behind. They passed three doors set at regular intervals in the wall to their right; a fourth faced them at the end of the passage. A rod of light tapered itself between the lower edge and the threshold’s worn sill, flickering and fanning out over the flags’ tiny pits and slopes, dying in the passage’s outer dark. He could hear the sea very faintly; any of the rooms they had passed would overlook it. The monk had stopped. Salvestro thought to himself with sudden conviction, ‘I have been here before.’
At Prato, Groot had led him through the gates of the palazzo, across courtyards and through reception rooms echoing with their own emptiness, trumpeting abandonment. There are rooms behind such rooms, chambers dedicated to shyer purposes. Deniable rooms. The summons’ aura is perfumed with a fine blend of obligation and threat which will dissipate and adapt new shapes here: a private word, a dubious proposition, the privilege of a shared secret. Privy wares are set out amongst simple, hastily arranged furniture. A sergeant had asked them if they were the Colonel’s men? He was like no sergeant Salvestro had ever seen before, fine boned and well spoken, a silk and feathers sergeant. He sensed the half-veiled distaste at this pollution of the sanctum; authority’s resentment of its instruments. What was the task they had been designed to perform for this strange sergeant’s colonel? The ritual continues with grave nods, half-truths. He and Groot are being escorted out, anointed, spat out. Days later he is fleeing a slaughterhouse, he is lying in a marsh. Remembering . . . Authority’s resentment raised suddenly to fury and pursuing them over mountains and rivers. Stringing up Groot by the neck. Himself running north with an imbecile in tow. . . .
Bernardo. Where has he got to now? Having emerged on the far side of the stand, crossed a shallow bog and entered the woods proper, he was surrounded by beech trees, moving in a direction whose gist was south, but which also contained strong elements of south-east, east, and south-west. There were even hints of west, when the terrain became particularly vindictive. Distance? One hundred and seven yards.
‘Come,’ had sounded from within. HansJürgen pushed open the door. His summoner was bent over a table covered with papers, the monk from that morning, their leader. Simple furniture. His hand was raised and frozen in a beckoning gesture which seemed both to invite and stay his entry. He looked up at the two of them standing in the doorway. A room behind other rooms. What did he require?
One hundred and twenty-four yards south-south-east from where he sat, remembering, imagining, undirected bellows were erupting through the tangled branchwork, disturbing winter birdlife and small arboreal mammals, such as squirrels. Bernardo has encountered a thorn bush.
The giant had been unsettled and difficult in the days following their arrival. Discontent had centred about his boot, its absence, Salvestro’s reluctance to fetch it, but its roots were in their idleness. The monastery was a currentless place. They heard singing come from the chapter-house. They smelled cooking as it seeped through the wall. The monks themselves would congregate at odd hours in the cloister, walk about in twos and threes, talk together in tight, unwelcoming huddles. Their own meals arrived twice a day; an unvarying diet of black bread and broth (the morning) and black bread and broth and salted meat (the evening), delivered by the same youthful trio who had brought them food on the first night. Dried fish on the Friday. Bernardo had struck up a number of halting conversations with them, which invariably ended with his describing the food as ‘real rotgut stuff, thanks all the same’. The three novices seemed to find this funny.
Others shunned them completely, seeming to look through them as though they did not exist. There were alliances and private hatreds at work. He had walked down the slope to the shore one afternoon, then looked up at the gaping hole which had once been the nave of the church. He saw the clay beneath it was sodden. When summer came it would dry and crumble. A few blocks of stone showed above the water’s surface and bore witness to the earlier collapse. More would follow. He wondered if the monks were aware, or even cared about this fact. They never seemed to venture down here. He looked around him: the coast running north-west, grey sea, the coast running south-east. Further: the slope of the shore steepening as it neared him, the path down which he had walked, and then, at the top of the path, a monk. The monk was watching him and he felt suddenly that he should not be here, that he had been caught at something. He waved. The monk’s face appeared strange in some way, but at that instant he could not make it out. There was no answering wave. The figure turned abruptly and stalked off. The crumbling cliff. The collapsing church. The face, Salvestro realised belatedly, had been contorted with something close to rage. Even without the why or how, he knew then that here was the fault running through his new lodging. The sea lapped placidly at the foot of the cliff; it was this that splintered the monks into little cliques and factions. He scrambled his way up the slope, passed by Ewald’s ice-filled boat, and walked quickly across the cloister. He did not go back.
‘Thank you, Brother HansJürgen.’ The monk had withdrawn, closing the door behind him. There was a stool. ‘Sit.’ Salvestro sat. The Prior bent his head to the sheets of parchment. Salvestro saw squiggly black marks, curled corners, two wooden blocks placed to prevent the sheets from rolling closed. The man before him gathered his thoughts for a second then said, ‘You came back here to make mischief for Bruggeman, did you not? You used to be his friend.’
Bernardo’s boot was the Prior’s fault. The delay in fetching it. He had been preoccupied, mulling over such questions, anticipating others. There had been a second summons since that first one, and others would follow. He stood on the brittle crust of the present while the Prior’s interrogation pressed down on his head and the thin plate beneath his feet warped and shuddered. Beneath that was Then, and Then was dark and bottomless. He would sink in Then.
‘No,’ he had said.
‘Then why did you come back?’
The Prior’s table was strewn with quills, little earthenware pots, stoppered bottles, amulets whose meaning he could not divine. Above all, papers. He had prepared a speech for this occasion, for this inevitable question, a proud speech with flourishes and intrepid expressions. He had returned to uncover Vineta, a thing no other man had done. He was an adventurer, restless and impulsive. He needed an anchor to ground his spirit, a task. The undersea city was it. The Prior would then ask if he had found the peace he sought, if his spirit was quieted and harnessed. No! would be his answer (perhaps tearfully) and they would pray together side by side. He knew a prayer or two. He would revile his life, if necessary.
But he had barely embarked on this course when the Prior, eyeing him across the table, held up his hand as though his words were the screechings of two battling cats. ‘You are a liar. Out.’
He sat there rooted for a moment. ‘Out!’ He rose.
HansJürgen was standing in the passageway, as expressionless as before. As he turned from the door to face him, Salvestro saw two other monks carrying tapers and a bowl appear at the far end of the passage. They disappeared within the first of the doors they had passed earlier. The monk turned, and Salvestro understood that he was to follow. Wan candlelight shone through the doorway ahead. The monk stopped and stared.
‘What are you doing there? That is Brother Florian’s task! Who gave you permission . . . ?’
Salvestro looked over the outraged monk’s shoulder. He saw a cell furnished much as the Prior’s was, a little larger perhaps. The two monks were sitting on a low bed which rested against the far wall. Between them they supported a wizened, skeletal creature, a man dressed in a stained nightshirt and thick wool stockings whose head lolled back and whose mouth hung open. The skin was blotched and stretched tight over his bones. Even wedged between those of the monks, his arms and legs were limp. They were trying to spoon food into his mouth, but he would not, or could not, swallow and most of it was spilling onto the already filthy shirt. The only parts of him that moved of his own accord were his eyes. These rolled from side to side as though trying to catch sight of his tormentors.
‘Brother Florian is unfit to care for him,’ one of the monks replied shortly.
‘By whose authority!’ demanded HansJürgen again. ‘Gerhardt’s?’
But the monks ignored him, simply spooning food into their patient’s mouth. When he repeated, ‘Gerhardt? Is that it?’ the same monk looked up and said, ‘Since you take more pains with your ape than your Abbot, Brother HansJürgen, why do you not lead him back to his cage now? Or does our Prior plan to return him to one of his distant lands?’
HansJürgen had led him to his lodging in thunderous silence. He had lain down on the hard earth; Bernardo had filched most of his straw during his absence and now snored loudly on the other side of the beet loft. That day had begun with the two of them walking down the beach to Ewald’s boat, which seemed long, long ago. He had much to think about that night and the following days had given him more. He had had no time for boots but Bernardo’s complaints had eventually reached an unignorable pitch, culminating in the usual threat that ‘he had had enough and was off’. Without his boot this was impossible. With it, the compulsion was removed. A mind more vindictive than his own, Salvestro reflected, might have taken more pleasure in the conundrum.
He took none. He thought of the Prior. The second summons had come two days before the Quest for the Boot. Again he climbed the same steps and followed HansJürgen past the Abbot’s door – closed this time, the cell within unlit – and along the passage.
The second meeting went much as the first. He sat on the stool. The Prior fixed him with a stare and asked, by way of variation, ‘Tell me how you came to assume a false name?’
He had anticipated this. ‘Niklot’ was a common name, that was his curse. There were other ‘Niklot’s. One even resembled him somewhat. Unfortunately, he was a thief. From his lair deep in the forest, this outcast would snake out in the night to lift a chicken, a few eggs – once even a young pig – from the farms and manses thereabouts, leaving himself, the true Niklot, to take the blame. This impostor would trample corn, break fences, appear out of the greenery to frighten farmer’s daughters at their bathing, throw stones at their cattle. . . . There was no end to his devilment. No one could catch him either. He melted away like water into sand leaving a damp stain that the sun would dry in minutes. What was he, the true Niklot, to do? After much thought, and many unjust accusations (none proved), he had decided to change his name. Henceforth, he would be ‘Salvestro’.
He began this recitation with high hopes. He was establishing the fact of there being other ‘Niklot’s when the interruption came.
‘Enough!’ The Prior was glaring at him in exasperation. ‘More lies. Out!’
Walking back once more to the beet loft, following the dim pool of light cast by HansJürgen’s lamp across the cloister, a thought came to him. He considered it briefly. It was absurd. Once again, Bernardo had stolen his straw. Tomorrow, he would again not fetch Bernardo’s boot. He lay down, but could not get comfortable. The Prior vexed him. If he, Salvestro, did not know what the man wanted, how could he be expected to give it to him? An account of some sort, certainly. Something believable, consistent. It was hard to credit but it was almost as if – and here the thought jabbed him again – he wanted to hear the truth. And, harder still to believe, turning it over in his mind now, he, Salvestro, was almost tempted to accede, to in effect be frank, even candid, as it were, with reservations of course, but on the whole not, perhaps, or perhaps not . . . an extraordinary Thought then, this, which was, at least as a possibility, to, well, actually to tell the truth. The truth, yes. Could he? Might he . . . ? No.
The next day he considered the matter further. He wandered absent-mindedly into the cloister. A group of monks were standing by the door of the chapter-house. As he approached, one scooped a handful of water from the stoup there, ran up to him with a strange, tight face and threw it over him. The monk stared at him as though the water had been molten lead and he should fall to the ground and shrivel to a cinder. When he did not, the monk backed away fearfully. He turned about and resumed his deliberations. So long as he did this the Thought, by and large, left him alone.
It was back soon enough. Indeed, more insistently on the following day and Salvestro caught himself muttering angrily to himself, ‘No! Stupid!’ He found himself at the edge of the field. The Thought prodded him. The Prior seemed somehow to know when he was lying. In the Prior’s eyes, he was already a liar. He kept walking. Soon he was at the herring shed. The Thought, obviously, had been lying in wait for him. It swung out of the roof and knocked him to the ground. He struggled, but the Thought pinned him down. He wrestled, but it had him firm. He fought back, but at that it only pounded and pounded. . . .
Bernardo’s boot lay on the floor of the herring shed. He picked it up. The boot, then the boat. Thoughts of Ewald, the scene rolling round again. He called on the man, got his wife. The boat, then the boot. He walked back. Bernardo stalked off in a meaningless sulk, but Bernardo would always come back. He was happy enough, for the moment, to be alone.
The Thought circled him mistrustfully. He was resolved, yet the notion that he might actually follow this course of action shook him to the core. It went against the grain. He wavered. He had faith. He doubted. He believed. It was brilliant, irresistible, inspired. . . .
He envisaged a voice asking questions in tones that tell him they will not be repeated, a near-future voice having the Prior’s ring. Shivers underfoot; cracks snake forward and outpace him, split and peel the floor from its foundations, themselves already fallen away and sunk. Long-settled conflicts skinned this boggy earth in wood and stone, called it ‘Land. . . .’ Misplaced faith at best, and importunate. Soils and shy clays shrink away to leave hollows, cavities, brittle vaults which unmindful feet pound from above; the skin itself dries, grows paper-thin, stretched over nothing. The catastrophe waits while, as prelude, stones tumble away one night into a void that only daylight calls the sea. Vanity scrapes at the defining rind, and that which conceals itself in the very blandness of the cell, in the coming banality of such questions – Jörg’s questions – this is a version of ‘Then’. They will begin, he imagines, like this:
‘How did you come to be “Salvestro”?’
And he will answer, he imagines.
Like this.
Sunlight woke him on the shore of the Achter-wasser. He rose and walked forward into the woods. Standing and fallen trunks, dry and dying underbrush, leaf-drifts, scrub . . . The forest’s victors and defeated parted ranks to admit a damp and scrawny refugee. Hungry too: his teeth ground tuberous stems, tongue twitched and wettened, throat gulped, sap-heavy crowns burst against his palate. He pulped stringy roots, swallowed soapy juices, bolted acorns, wild garlic, a dead crow once, in experiment, and his excrement crawled with worms. He stole eggs from the farms thereabouts, a chicken, followed the banks of a great river, upstream, until the forest sucked him deeper and further in. Scabs and rashes bloomed on his arms and legs. He shod himself in calluses. Distance was a thickening of shadows, an opacity. By the island’s measure he was ten years old walking into this place; by the forest’s, a newborn baby.
For it scoured him, and he forgot himself within it, and his memories when they came at all would come at him like appetites. He ran, jumped, clung, hung. . . . Two holm oaks stood in a clearing opened by the deadening shade of the greater one’s canopy. The younger stood beside it gangling as a new foal. It shot up in a dash for the sunlight, crescive and skinny-limbed. How many seasons before its elder would starve it down? The needy suck of its roots, the pump of the supple trunk. . . . He swung, felt the bough he clung to half-bend, half-break, felt it yield, snap and drop him to the ground where he twisted and pulled, jumped again and gnawed at the fibrous splinters until it broke clean away at last. He thought of the years’ growth rippling up the trunk, along the boughs, fattening like a wave. . . . He saw a bear once. A shambling sack of fur crashed about in the undergrowth quite near him, searching for something. Deer clattered away, smelling him. Unseen creatures twitched and bolted. Sunlight prickled the dark canopy above and the wind when it blew was a terrible thrashing and scourging, a frightening violence from which he was immune. He cowered anyway, and fled the winters too, feeling the endless ache, the bone-freezing chill of each season a little less than the last – moving south, as he would later understand it. By chance the forest might give out, a sky yawn open, and he would be standing at the edge of grasslands, a moor, open ground. Huts appeared as little bricks with thin plumes of smoke disappearing into the abrupt blue. He would turn back, blend with the forest’s interior stillness, disappear again. He was incurious and uncatchable and invisible and unknown. . . . But he liked to watch fires.
‘What?’ (The Prior’s expression will be quizzical, one eyebrow raised, a little tilt of the head.)
Heart thumping against his ribs, mouth filled with spit, he liked to creep close, out of earshot but close, smell the carcass roasting over the glow, see the red flames flicker, watch the hunched figures shuffle about and nod to one another. They excited him, these wounds in the forest’s play of soft lights and shades and subtleties of dark. He liked to blind himself with the glow. The forest was briefly nothing then and would unclasp him, cut him loose to drift and blink the hot light out of his eyes. He liked to crawl about the camp, circle it inch by inch, slowly drawing spirals in the forest’s rustling growth. . . . He wanted always to get close, and closer, and closer still. That was how they caught him.
‘Who?’ (Put bluntly, a retraction of the earlier hint of curiosity. The Prior will not be curious. He will be business-like and matter of fact.)
‘Pull him out by the ears!’
‘Bark his shins!’
‘Box his ears!’
Perhaps these were the words which they shouted, which he heard as sudden noise and chaos and terror while they beat him. It was a whirl of light and huge faces looming in and out of view, of noise, above all noise. . . . They brandished themselves like clubs, knocking him about, colliding amongst themselves with great thuds. If he flattened himself against the earth, he could disappear in the shadows and they would forget him, walk away like the bear or clatter like the deer. Flatten himself. Disappear. Run, run to the sea. . . . They were huge booming men, strange-smelling and deafening. He clasped his head in his hands to shut them out but they were stubborn and forceful. They refused to vanish. One punched him on the ear. Another kicked him on the leg. He was rolled up in a resistant ball. They unrolled him. He was almost naked, he realised, and as tall as they. How had that happened? He wondered about this, amazed and somewhat hopeless.
There was a night of this, and then a dawn. There were great explosions of din and racket. Days fell out of the sky.
He remembered a sloping ridge of ground choked with grasses into which his feet sank spongily as they traversed and rose to the crest. It was sunny and he was being led along on a length of twine. Just that.
Another time, he was sleeping, near the fire for once, and dreamed that heavy sheets of material were being draped over his body, like animal skins, growing heavier and heavier. Mice burrowed beneath him and produced fantastic litters of young. Dozens upon dozens of squealing bodies.
Here was a different place, where the turf had been worn through to the damp black earth beneath and thus a path was etched between little hummocks and ant-hills. He lengthened his stride over the long thin puddles and added his own footprints to those already printed in the impressionable earth for he was marching along near the back that day. A meadow ran up to the very edge of the forest and the tree-trunks with the darkness beyond them appeared as a palisade forbidding entry or the bars of a monstrous cage roofed with green.
Another time they entered a village with fierce whoops and shouts. There was a long low interior in which the air had been breathed over and over until it smelt of the insides of men. One of them was scrabbling about on the floor where meat-bones, corn-husks, crusts, and bottles were scattered. Three others spoke together in low tones at the far end, falling silent as he came near. These men were different and strange, smelt different. They were not his men. There was a table running almost the length of the room. The scrabbler rose from beneath it and placed before him a large pile of scraps. He was suspicious. The other mimed eating and then, when this produced no response, plucked a bone from the pile and commenced to strip the remainder of its meat with his teeth. He understood then and fell on the pile like a wolf. The three men murmured to one another and from outside there was shrieking and a few shouts. Opposite him, his companion pointed to himself and made a sound like Aar-aar-Oood. They left there in the night, quietly, disturbing nothing. He liked that. He was the quietest of them all. The next morning though, the din began again.
For there was always noise. The air looped him in quick eruptions and outbreaks of clatter such as Nnunng and Tz-ztts and Lull-ooll. . . . Differing sounds startled him and made him nervous: louder and softer grunts, grunts ending in sharp claps and hissings. . . . He began to nod when these little thunderclaps passed near him, to duck almost, as though their chatter were a physical force, the rustling, or crashing, or slithery approach of a hundred different animals ten or twenty times a day. There were regular sounds which went back and forth between the wagging tongues, others that seemed to keen or stutter. Sharp yaps and little strings of yips. He twisted about, jumped and started at their barking, and after a time they even stopped laughing at these nervy antics so familiar and predictable had they become. And then, weeks after his ‘capture’, months even, perhaps – he was rolling a water bottle between his knees and one of the men was throwing little pebbles at him which were bouncing off his head – a sound came at him all suddenly, like SSoss-O!, which he had heard aimed at him before, and then two little gobbets of noise, like a half-grunt, Oer-tt, and then a groan, ooOower . . . Like that. And he felt the muscles in his cheeks and tongue ache, the muscles he used to manoeuvre mashed food into position before swallowing, and he felt his tongue do something like peel itself drily from the roof of his mouth, like skinning a very dry animal, and he opened his mouth and said, quite clearly, ‘Geddit y’self.’ Then a gulp.
‘Shit.’
Everyone stopped. An amazed hush swelled suddenly, an abrupt luxuriant silence which engulfed the odd creature he had spat at them, swallowed it whole, and his utterance wallowed and floundered about for footing. He blinked with the strain and said the same thing again. Their blank surprise trembled like a wall of deadening liquid behind which his tiny noise was unweighted and soundless. Then someone broke it with, ‘So Salvestro ain’t a deafmute,’ and everyone else started laughing. He looked about blankly. ‘Well, what else was we to call you?’ It was the same man, the one who had called to be passed the bottle which now lay forgotten on the ground in front of him. ‘Groot,’ he said, thumping himself on the chest. He was Groot. ‘Eh, Salvestro? Mister Geddit-Yourself-Shit, eh?’
SSoss-O! Oer-tt-oo Ower!
Salvestro. Water. He rolled the words in his mouth. Geddit ‘self. Groot. Groo-oo-oot. Behind him, the forest was a jumble of little rustlings and susurrations; unguessable, without meaning.
And these renaming vagabonds, who were they?
They were: Fante the Dagger and Umberto the Pike, Shiner, Horvart, Hurst (or ’Urst) who was imperturbable, Heinrich von Bool, dubbed Drool, for he had no tongue, and the Bandinelli Twins, who, though they were near-doubles of one another, had grown up in the same village and bore the names Aldo and Tebaldo, were unrelated. A certain ‘Corprochet’ titled himself the Admiral of the Adda; Pandulfo was ‘Il Dottore’, and alone of the company could read and write. He was composing an epical history in song of their exploits in the wars to the south. There was Criparacos the Greek, Low Simone, Sigismundo of the Fiery Eyes, and the Chevalier Gianbattista-Marcantonio di Castello-Molina di Fiemme. The one with the unnaturally smooth and garishly coloured face was Powder Jack. But most fearsome of them all was The Teeth.
Groot pointed them out and described them to him, advising him of their foibles and failings and explaining that these were not ordinary men but soldiers, tuned for combat, and unpredictable in their humours. ‘Always approach from the front,’ he warned, ‘and avoid shouting.’ For in the days and weeks since he had rediscovered his speech, Salvestro had taken to yelling nonsensical phrases at the top of his voice every few minutes or so to keep his new faculty in trim.
Their leader, known only as Il Capo, was a black-bearded, blue-eyed, jolly-faced gentleman of fifty years or more who was carried about in a wicker basket construction resembling in equal parts a very small boat and a large, but legless chair. Il Capo had no feet.