Doctor Mirabilis (21 page)

Yet these matters and the most secret of secrets of this kind had always hidden from the rank and file of philosophers, and
particularly so after men began to abuse science, turning to evil what God granted in full measure for the safety and advantage
of man; until he should strive that the wonderful and ineffable utility and splendour of experimental science may appear,
and the pathway to a
scientia universalis
be again opened.

And that by thee.

‘Stand forth!’ Roger shouted hoarsely. The goat leaped to her feet and was again thrown by the tether. Roger swallowed and
resumed his perch.

‘What art thou?’ he said quietly. ‘I demand thou answer, in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord.’

For a while there was no answer; and Roger noted that in the darkness beyond the candle flame there were strange amorphous
patches of colour, pulsing and elusive. Moreover, his giddiness was worse; was that still the sweet vitriol, or was he in
truth working too long, as Raymond—

I am the raven of Elias.

‘That is blasphemous and untrue. I charge thee, tell me who thou art!’

I am the man.

‘What man is this? Tell me thy signification, else I’ll exorcize thee straight!’

Thou art the man.

‘Speak on.’

Thou art the man, shalt bring back into the world the
scientia universalis.
Thou shalt make of it an edifice, unto the glory of thy Lord. All help I shall give thee, that thou requireth.

‘How?’

As food brought unto Elias in the desert. Thine edifice shall touch Heaven, and on its brow be written, Knowledge is power.

These cadences were putting him to sleep. Almost he failed to see the trap, that self-same trap into which the builders of
Babel had fallen.

Nay. Moral philosophy is the pinnacle, otherways nothing can touch Heaven.

‘How dost thou know?’ Roger whispered.

Forbye the light of knowledge the Church of God is governed; the commonwealth of the faithful is regulated; the conversion
of unbelievers is secured; and those who persist in their malice can be held in check by the excellence of knowledge, so that
they may be driven off from the borders of the Church in a better way than by the shedding of Christian blood.

‘And – this is the meaning of that saying, Knowledge is power?

All matters requiring the guidance of knowledge are reduced to these four heads, and no more,
the self sang sweetly. It was strange and horrifying to hear it discourse of these matters weighty and unusual in that same
remote, bodiless, tuneless whine, as though it sang only to amuse itself.

The pages of the
Secret of Secrets
wavered and blurred before him, and he closed the book. He could think of nothing else to ask; he was suspended in an ecstasy
of disbelief. In that emptiness, the self sang suddenly:

Time is.

‘Yes,’ Roger said, wonderingly. ‘It is the subject of motion. But I don’t—’

Time was,
sang the self.
Time was.
Behind the voiceless music, Roger seemed to hear an endless mirroring of echoes.

‘Is this the bread thou bring’st me, raven?’ he said sternly, though the words came forth more than a little slurred. ‘Well
know that time is single and linear, and giveth up one age belonging to all ages. This is a necessary conclusion, and doubted
by no one skilled in philosophy. Nor is it opposed to the sacred writers and principal doctors, but is in agreement with their
view. Why triest thou this axiom with me?’

Fool!

The moment hung. The point of the candle-flame bobbed up and down, like a fisherman’s float moored above ripples. When the
self spoke again, its distant soundless voice was as terrible as the strokes of a gong of brass.

Time is past!

The candle went out.

Whence from the darkness there rose rank upon rank of armed men with Saracen faces, and the faces of sheep, and the faces
of demons, too bright in their chains to look upon massed under the invisible sun, passing in their thousands as men who march
to the last great engagement; and with them thousands on horseback, and more on animals not yet seen in the world; and many
bearing strange engines; and at their head was Antichrist. Yet in a twinkling, all this terrible host shrank, so that each
man was no bigger than a grain of millet; and then even this emmet army was turned out of sight, as an image vanishes when
the glass is turned; and naught left behind but the whitecaps of some torrent, stretching to the far horizon, as if one looked
in vain across a strait for the coming invader. Things moved, like Leviathan, beneath these waters, but they were engines,
and there were men in them; and there were dragons in the air like the dragons of the Aethiopians, yet there were men in them;
and there were moles under the earth, and men rode them, all in mail, and with terrible countenances. And one wearing a cowl
came and stood upon the headlands above the wide waters, and held up such glasses and mirrors as were necessary to show forth
these things. And the mirrors turned, and there across the wide waters was the self-same army brought close again, yet now
every man was as great
as a giant across that distance, so that every link of the mail could be counted. And the mirrors moved, and the head of him
in the cowl appeared in the air above the army, greater than any of them, and burning as it were of brass in a furnace, yet
was not there; and many of those giants threw down their engines of war and fled; yet the host came on. And he made in the
air certain compositions, which a man might know only by smelling them, or not at all, but which were certainly fell, for
the ranks toppled in windrows; yet on came that inexhaustible host, and at their head was Antichrist. And he in the cowl held
out his hand over the wide waters, and in the palm of it were certain crystals like saltpetre from a dungheap; and he wrapped
the crystals in a scrap of parchment without any writing on it, and cast it into the wind, crying,

LUPU LURU VOPO VIR CAN UTRIET VOARCHADUMIA
TRIPSARECOPSEM

whereat all that army was seen to fall in a single flash of lightning, and with a roar of such sharp thunder that the cowl
flew from the skull of him that had cried out; and he fell dwindling away to nothing, like an ever-burning lamp cast into
the sea.

After that for a long time there was darkness and silence. It was not the nothingness of sleep, in which the consciousness
of time itself is obliterated, so that in an instant the night is gone that wakeful men could vouch for. Time passed, but
what events marked it in that sable silence could not be known, nor words spoken reach the ears, nor any touch penetrate.

Then he moaned, and heard, and confused light passed before his closed lids. In a while it was gone. In the new darkness he
almost awoke, drawing a breath only to discover that he could hardly breathe, and that he was soaked in sweat. Someone murmured
near him, and there was an answer; he understood neither. Now, however, he could fall into true sleep.

In the early morning the world crept back into his room,
grey and cautious as an old man. He turned his head exhaustedly. Raymond was lying in the straw beside his pallet, supine,
his mouth open, snoring softly. The man at the lectern had his head buried in his arms, but while Roger watched with detached
wonderment, he lifted heavy eyes and stared upward at the weak light coming in the window, as a man seeing somewhat unwelcome
but beyond his powers to undo. It was Peter the Peregrine, his profile so gaunt and hungry that he looked like a beggared
Simon de Montfort.

Then he was aloft, tottering toward the pallet on spider’s feet.

‘Roger! You’re awake? Shh, don’t speak, rest.’ He stirred Raymond with a toe; the boy only groaned. Peter nudged him harder.

‘Be quiet, Roger; you’re a sick man. Raymond, thou Spanish cow, get up and act the apothecary, in God’s name! Julian, light
the lamp and heat me some of that goat’s milk; he’s come around. Gloria! But let’s look lively.’

Perhaps it was still only Tuesday, and time now for the Arabic lesson? But why were Peter and Julian here … and where were
all those mailed glittering men? Then he remembered, seeing the cowl fly back from the skull in the instant of that enormous
noise, and fainted.

Nearly the whole college was there, bustling and anxious, when he opened his eyes again. Hands lifted his head gently; other
hands gave him something warm and sweet to drink; there was a cold wet cloth on his brow. Peter hovered over him like a man
on stilts.

He felt weak, but curiously tranquil, as though he had just accomplished some great work. There were now so many things that
he understood that it seemed to him that he had for the first time left his long childhood.

‘How do you feel, Roger?’ Peter said.

‘Content. God bless you all.’

‘You were very ill. We did our poor best, but in sooth there was little enough to do but pray.’

‘I had the death,’ Roger said tranquilly. ‘I recognize it
now. Perhaps it’s been pursuing me all this time; but now I’ve slipped away.’

Peter’s face grew more worried; Roger shook his head.

‘Nay, Peter, I’m not raving, only thinking back. I didn’t mean to speak in riddles.’

‘I
told
you you were working too hard,’ Raymond said, appearing next to Peter. ‘Will you heed me now?’

‘It’s true you ought to rest,’ Peter said, ‘if you can, Roger. Is there no place you could go – perhaps to visit relatives
in England, or in the mountains? Some place in the south would be the best of all, if that’s even barely possible.’

It was, of course, wholly possible; for now that he had decided, with an inspiration which had sprouted fantastically from
the very heart of his delirium, what was to become of him, the problem of the money had solved itself; and a trip to the south
would consume a substantial sum. It seemed so easy now that he knew, beyond all doubt, that he was to make of himself a scientist
instead of
a theologian; he had simply never thought of it in those terms before.

A rest in the sun … and leisure to read as much as he wished in the Vatican Library, greater even than the University’s. And
why not? The time had come to repudiate Paris in any event, it had given him all that it had for him, and were he to stay
on much longer he too would harden into the same mould as those tonsured donkeys he and Raymond had been flyting just before
the death had seized him in its fowl’s claw. Toulouse did not attract him either; the last letter from Eugene had reported
that the university there had restricted the teaching of the
libri naturales
for the first time in
its
history – a long step backward into the darkness. The rest of the Latins would soon follow; for the first act of Innocent
IV after his coronation (his first, that is, after his wild flight from the Emperor who had sponsored him) was to rescind
Gregory’s acts of absolution of the Paris masters who lectured on the books of nature. The fever was already festering in
Paris itself: the Dominicans had promptly forbidden all members of their order the study of medicine and natural philosophy,
Aristotelian or otherwise. The hand-writing
for Latin Christendom was on the wall; the darkness was coming back.

Yet it might not reach England, where Roger’s friends were in the ascendancy in court and church alike, and where independence
of the Pope would continue a long time after it had been snuffed out on the continent, despite Henry’s proclaimed vassallage
to Rome. Later, the continent might change again, for letters from Adam Marsh intimated that Guy de Foulques, the papal legate
whom Roger had met briefly at Westminster, might find himself in the apostolic succession – and Innocent, in revolting so
instantly against Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, had not laid the best foundation for a long pontificate.

Oxford, then, was the place; Oxford, by way of Rome.

Someone coughed lightly. ‘Shh, he’s asleep,’ Peter’s voice said, in a whisper so intense that it was almost savage.

Roger opened his eyes at once. ‘Nay, I was but thinking of what I should do; and have concluded, I must leave off work and
rest; wherefore I’ll go to the Holy City for a time –perhaps as long as a year.’

‘Gloria!’ Raymond crowed excitedly; and immediately his face turned sober. Roger wondered if he had suddenly thought of the
loss of his Arabic tutoring fees; but never mind, all that would be well shortly.

‘Most excellent wise,’ Peter said. ‘And now, we’ll let you rest; and come bid you farewell when you’re ready.’

‘No, Petrus Peregrinus, there’s one more favour I’ve to ask of you. Help me up.’

‘You’re mad,’ Peter said, horrified. ‘You must rest absolutely; though you know it not, a full week has passed while we watched
you, and the better part of another. You are not ready for any sort of venture, but must rest, and eat.’

‘A brief venture only – nor will I be dissuaded, gentle Peter. First someone must open my chest and take out my money; someone
strong in the thews, for there’s a lot of it, and much adulterated with base metals. Raymond, do so. There’s the chest,
lift the lid, and there you see the bag; set it out.’

The rest of the college gathered around curiously, except for Peter, who remained by the pallet, disapproving yet obviously
without enough foreknowledge to raise any objection he could think reasonable.

‘Now, Raymond: select what coins be most useful in Paris this year and count out five pounds all around, except to Peter –
which I charge you all, use either in learning, or in such charity as your dear souls showed me in my illness. As for you,
gentle Peter, well I know you’re not without resources, but that’s not the issue. You should be wealthy, too, but that’s not
within my power; I will you out of my little death fifty pounds, for your college and its master.’

The bag slumped open on top of the chest. Peter might have been about to protest, but if so, the sudden small flood of coins
out of the bag’s mouth paralysed him with astonishment. Roger was filled with glee; how much more joyful a thing it was to
spend money than to hide it! The coins chinked musically as Raymond, biting his lip and sweating, poured share after share
into the hands of the fellows of Peter’s college. Then he stood aside, and Peter approached the bag hesitantly. He looked
down at it for a long time without moving; without, it seemed, even blinking.