Doctor Mirabilis (25 page)

‘Oh? Art aware, most Christian Adam, that thou art describing someone an enemy would say much favours thee?’

The peat-coke turned dull red and began to smoulder.

‘Nay, my lord, I was not. But I’ll abide it, and we shall shortly see. Roger returneth to Oxford as regent master in Aristotle,
to second the learned Richard Cornwall, this next year.’

‘Surprising, in view of what you say. By whose appointment?’

‘By whose …?’ Adam said, himself surprised. ‘Why, mine, of course.’

Explicit secunda pars.

And now, was it all over – or all but over? Strange it seemed to Roger, as he rode north with the post through Italy, toward
the cold green sea and home, that an interlude which had begun so greyly could have ended in such a burst of colour; strangest
of all, perhaps, that the beginning had seemed anything but grey, even in the midst of his illness.

In Rome the Franciscans had housed him, simply but comfortably, in a monastery in the Travestere, the arrowhead-shaped part
of the city on the other side of the Tiber. From the campanile of the monastery, he could see the ruins of the Circus Maximus,
if he cared to climb the tower. He often did, after his strength returned a little – not only to look at the Circus, but also
to marvel at the sky, which was of an intense cobalt such as he had never imagined could have existed. If from that side he
turned his back on Rome, he could see the hills of the Janiculum, thatched with the flat green domes of pines.

Below there was little to see but tenements, but it was simple enough to cross the Pons Aemilius – called by the unclassical
citizens the Ponte Rotto – into the rest of the city. He did some sightseeing, helped more or less by an exceedingly worn
copy of
Mirabilia urbis Romae
, a compilation lent him by the brothers; but he was bitterly disappointed to find that most of the ancient structures were
little more than heaps of rubble, some of them so dispersed that it was impossible to visualize their original plans even
with the help of the guide-book.

What was happening to the old monuments was painfully visible to him whenever he approached the bridge in the morning, where
he passed a house of some size which seemed to be made entirely of marble fragments from the pillars of history. An inscription
over the door said that the house belonged to Crescentius, son of Nikolaus, but there had
been no Crescentius in it for over fifty years; otherwise Roger might well have gone on inside and kicked him.

For the most part, however, he simply wandered, looking for nothing in particular, ready to be astonished at whatever the
next turn of the narrow, crooked streets might bring. Though modern Rome was far from being as populous as it had been during
its great age – the brothers guessed that it might contain thirty thousand people, most of whom lived huddled together about
the strongholds of the: barons – it was always busy; and the yellow brick with which it seemed everywhere to be faced contrasted
sharply with Roger’s memory of Paris, giving the Eternal City an oddly incongruous air of gaiety. If Paris had been music,
Roger thought, then Rome was light.

It was none the less somehow saddening to hear with his own ears that the language of the Romans was not Latin, though he
had known in advance that it was not.

One major surprise was the discovery of the bookshops of the Via Lata, in the very shadow of the arch of Claudius –not just
stalls, but full-fledged bookstores. The booksellers assured him that Rome had had bookstores even under the Republic, and
moreover, each man insisted that his store had in fact been in its present location since before the birth of Augustus. To
prove it, they offered to sell Roger original incunabula from such hands as Cleopatra’s, forehandedly penned by that queen
in a number of modern languages.

Such dubious wonders aside, however, the stocks of the stores did not prove to be nearly as various as those of the pedlars
of Paris. On reflection, Roger decided that this was only to have been expected, since Rome had not the good fortune to be
the home of a great university.

Nevertheless, he found enough of interest to lure him gradually back into the habit of study, and thence almost insensibly
out of the Roman sun, back toward that darkness from which had issued,

LUPU LURU VOPO VIR CAN UTRIET VOARCHADUMIA TRIPSARECOPSEM

Of these words there could be no doubt whatsoever, nor
had there been any when Roger had heard them uttered at the climax of his struggle with the death. He had seen them also;
or, perhaps, he had only seen them and not heard them at all, for he could not remember the timbre of the voice he knew had
spoken them. On the other side, he could ne more recall the size of the letters nor the hand they were written in, though
his memory for such things was nigh on perfect; yet at the same time he knew that none of the message had been in minuscule,
but rather throughout in Roman capitals like those he had seen only yesterday graven over the Forum.

Well, not all dreams are from God, just as Aristotle said, no matter what the nit-pickers of Paris made of the doctrine; and
if some are from demons or the self or one of the souls, should any man be astonished that they were sometimes hard to riddle?
What remained was what remained: here, that the spelling of these hard words in an unknown language was perfect, maugre the
ambiguity of the senses by which they had reached him in the dream.

Nay, not an unknown language entirely, for it was this that had given him his first key. VIR was a Latin word,
UTRIET
favoured a Latin word in despite of the fact that it was free of sense, LUPU was Latin but for one missing character – which
if supplied, however, would make
VIR
incorrect, or else
lupus
was, since both were grammatically uninflected. It was clear that the frightful meaningless pronouncement had to be an anagram,
not a language, but the parent language had to be Latin.

At first there had seemed to be no way to establish this with certainty. The resemblances could be artificial, or indeed provoked,
by some artificial breakage of the line which did not follow the real pauses between words at all. But the slippery certainties
of the dream allowed him to think that the spacings were not wholly without meaning. Almost beyond doubt, neither vat nor
lupus
were the words meant, but their separation into words that favoured Latin could not be an accident; there was Latin in it,
that much the separations clearly intended to convey.

Was there also Greek? The fragment ARCH in VOARCHADUMIA suggested it. In a message containing fifty characters – or fifty-seven,
if he were intended to count the breaks between the words – how likely was it that the four-letter form ARCH, almost diagnostic
of Greek, could occur even once? Roger did not know, and nothing in his mathematics suggested to him any way of finding out.
There were so many Greek words almost unchanged in Latin, for that matter, that there might well be no Greek to be deduced
from this single grouping, but instead further confirmation that the whole would be Latin when he had it in his hand.

Thus slowly, slowly, and without real awareness of the road, he began again to resume his night-time existence. No one at
the monastery took real heed of him or ever had, even as a novelty, for pilgrims were common enough at all seasons. As a visitor
he was not so closely bound to the regimen as were the brothers, and when he first failed to appear from his cell for the
better part of three clays – he was in fact asleep, utterly exhausted – it was assumed simply that he was in retreat. Thereafter
he rose famished, foraged briefly to break his fast, and then was back at the task, filled with solemn high excitement verging
once more on delirium, hard put to it not to begrudge it even his devotions. The friars, their just sleep warded by the mercy
of thick walls, neither saw his candle-flame nor heard him coughing in the black chill of midnight.

Yet for all his labours the riddle remained as unbreakable as an Etruscan inscription. Increasingly he was driven back out
into the day, in a grim canvas of the bookstores for anything that might help him, did it have to be Cleopatra her spurious
self. The booksellers took to greeting him with less and less eagerness or even patience, for by now they knew that they had
not what he asked for and were without hope of finding it; which in turn only increased Roger’s desperation. Forgetting to
eat, marching around and around the centre of the city in broken sandals, back and forth under the arch with its garret inscription
DE BIUTANIS, he at last heard one of the shopmen say,

‘Him? That’s the English ghost. They say he’s come to haunt Claudius for killing the Druids.’

Roger turned. For a moment he was blinded by the sunlight, for in the past few weeks his eyes had begun to hurt and water
constantly. After a few moments of blinking, however, he saw that he was being regarded steadily, and had the instant impression
that he too was being haunted.

The bookseller was leaning out of the wide window of his shop, which like them all had a wooden front set in a grooved travertine
sill. In the narrow doorway stood a layman whom Roger had seen often before, though he had not realized it until now: a thin
swarthy man in good cloth, perhaps a form of livery – though expensively cut, it was not otherwise ostentatious, and bore
no devices. On the instant of recognition, Roger knew that he had been being followed:

As their eyes met, the man stepped at once into the street and came toward him. Roger almost moved away, but something held
him – neither hope nor fear, but some fascination which was neither, and perhaps no more than hunger and weakness.

‘Most Christian friar,’ the man said, in excellent Latin. ‘I beg your blessing and indulgence. May I speak with your?’

‘Certes,’ Roger said. Then, in confusion: ‘Why have you been trailing me?’

‘Ah, you noticed! In truth, I didn’t set out to do so, not at first. Let me first name myself: Luca di Cosmati, secretary-in-chief
to Milord Lorenza Arnolfo Piccolomini, marquis of Modena and senator of Rome under the Emperor and Jesus Christ our Lord.
And you, clerkly sir?’

‘Roger Bacon, Franciscan and doctor of arts.’

Luca smiled. It was a thin smile, but not unpleasant. ‘A scholar, I knew it well! I said so myself! Your patience for an explanation.
It’s one of my duties to seek books for the marquis’ library, the most notable in Rome; and well you know, I observe, how
many rounds of the stores must be made on such an errand, and how barren they be by ordinary. Lately I was charged to find
a book of Seneca—’

‘Yes, Seneca! Have you seen any—’

‘Nay, alas. But there you have it. Wherever I went, there were you, seeking the same author, and often others whom the marquis
has, or would have if he could. An unusual circumstance, eminent doctor, for Rome is not these days a bookish town; my lord
is not its only bibliophile, but the rest are possessors only, not students, and buy any trash or forgery offered them.’

Roger found himself returning the smile. ‘A man may buy whatever he can pay for, but that kind of buying is hard on poor scholars.’

‘And on wealthy ones, books of all kinds being rarer than riches. And so, good sir, I took to following you, to make certain
I was right in taking you for a scholar; and when I was certain, I so reported you.’

A chill struck in the small of Roger’s back. The phrase was not a happy one. He made an abortive move of his hand toward his
sword, but he had given it up over a year ago, on the day he had taken orders.

‘Nay, be not alarmed, most Christian friar. Milord Modena welcomes scholars, whom he loves dearly. I am sent to beg you to
be his guest at dinner.’

Thus began Roger’s association with the Piccolomini family, and the belated dawn of his Roman years.

The family was large in estates, but startlingly small in number. The marquis’ villa at Tivoli, not far from the enormous
reaches of the Emperor Hadrian’s, had few but servants to walk its mosaic floors and silent gardens; the line was dying out.
That first dinner was attended only by Piccolomini himself, a stringy man of fifty with the long nose, lean face and sparse
hair of a Caesar off some worn silver coin; his daughter Olivia, a withdrawn, austerely beautiful woman, but taller than Roger
and far into her twenties; and Luca, the secretary-in-chief who had recruited Roger, who was treated by the marquis, who was
his patron, as a brother and confidant. It would have been an easy position to abuse, but Roger never saw Luca abuse it; in
fact, he seemed to cherish it.

After only a few hours of Piccolomini’s company, Roger could begin to see the sources of Luca’s loyalty and affection. The
marquis was the gentlest of men, but that was not all. Like Luca himself, he loved learning and beauty with a great and almost
exclusive intensity.

‘I am only officially a senator, you must understand,’ he told Roger. ‘Roman politics sicken me; I withdrew years ago. These
barons! They may be noble in the sight of God, but I hope He does not need my help to love them, or I shall be damned. What
think you, friar Bacon? Am I so obliged?’

‘The Scriptures seem to say so,’ Roger said thoughtfully. ‘But the translations are so corrupt that it is often hard to choose
between the Word and conscience.’

‘That would not be surprising after all these centuries,’ the marquis said. ‘But it might be difficult to prove. Is there
then much textual criticism afoot in Paris these days?’

‘Hardly any,’ Roger admitted. ‘The idea, such as it is, seems to be my own. I have been trying to learn some of the languages
needed: Arabic in particular, but I mean to go on to Hebrew and Chaldean if I can find teachers—’

‘Then you must of course use my library while you are here,’ Piccolomini said earnestly. ‘There must certainly be some works
in it which are to the purpose. I no longer recall everything I have, the shelves have become so crowded in recent years,
but Luca here can help you; he keeps the catalogue.’