Doctor Mirabilis (39 page)

‘I believe it to be true,’ Roger said. ‘I writ His Holiness Clement IV, of glorious memory, that I so believed. Shall I deny
it to any other?’

‘Then we are done,’ Jerome said heavily. What matters the rest of this tally? Impudence to superiors; public attacks on eminent
Dominicans, leading to strife among the regulars; infractions of the discipline of the Order, such as publishing letters to
the Pope; provocation of dissension – all beside the point. Yet stay, these are also heavy charges. For the record, Friar
Bacon, do you deny them?’

Roger stood silent.

‘Shall it be said that you offered no defence? The Lord God seeth into thine heart, Roger. Testify, I beg thee.’

‘I do not deny these last,’ Roger said, wringing his hands, ‘They are true. I have been frail and contumacious indeed, and
ask your mercy; and the mercy of Jesus Christ our Lord. In His name I ask it.’

‘In His name thou shalt be given it, in every possible measure,’ Jerome said, holding out his hands across the table. ‘These
other charges are but internal matters of the Order, for which punishments are prescribed; for example, for publishing without
permission letters to the Pope, three days of bread and water, and the loss of the writing. But Roger, for the schismatic,
repentance is not enough; thou must recant, else thou are still lost. What thinkest thou, in this thine extremity, of the
doctrines of the Eternal Gospel?’

Roger said stonily: ‘Your Eminence, I believe what I have thought for twenty years. I believe them to be true.’

Jerome sank back in his chair. The lawyers were congratulating each other with their eyes; but the provincial minister said:

‘Your Eminence – on this matter of publishing to the Pope: The record will show, and I so testify, that I gave the learned
friar the necessary permission.’

Jerome looked at him for the first time. ‘Yes. I will deal with you later.’

‘But I submit, most humbly, to Your Eminence that these letters were commanded by the Holy Pope himself.’

‘It shall be so regarded; but what does that matter now? There is only one charge of substance here, and of this, the prisoner
is guilty. He has spoken, published and acted in support of a doctrine leading toward the division of our holy Order; in plain
controversion to many prohibitions thereof; and in the confessed knowledge that this was being furthered by his every word
and deed.’

The Minister-General stood up, resting his fingertips upon the table. His eyes were hooded and dark.

‘Friar Roger Bacon is remanded to the company of his fellow schismatics, in the March of Ancona, there to be kept in hobble-gyves,
with none to speak to him, for all the rest of his natural life; and on his deathbed, he shall be deprived of the sacraments
of holy Church, and buried in a common grave; and his writings are forbidden all men from this time forth.

‘This inquiry is now declared closed. Martin, have chains brought.’

Explicit tertia pars.

In the wall opposite the black iron door there was a curious niche or alcove, whose original function was wholly puzzling.
Two stone steps led into it, and within there was a single block of granite so placed that a man might sit there, sidewise;
but to what purpose was impossible to fathom. Overhead in this alcove was a breach in the wall which went to the outside,
but it was so high that, even standing on the block, Roger could barely touch it – nor could he have seen through it had it
been placed lower, for his fingers told him that it slanted downward from the inside; so that it could not have been placed
there for an archer’s convenience. By the rime of seepage around the sides of the cell, it was plain that a third of the chamber
was below the water line; so that the exit of that small rectangular hole, no bigger than the end of a book, could not be
more than four feet above the ground; perhaps less.

Each day, from that slanting, recondite embrasure, a beam Of dim yellow light made a blurred patch on the ceiling of the cell,
coming gradually into being long after dawn; it was brightest and had the sharpest edges at noon, and then faded again. Otherwise
it did not change; certainly it never moved.

But it was the only source of light that he had. Early and late in the day there was a little glow in the alcove from the
downslanting hole, but only when the sun was directly on the ground on which it looked, would it make that blurred rectangle
on the ceiling. On rainy days, there was no light at all, and the floor of the cell became an even sea of thick mud, through
which his hobble-chain dragged the decaying strips of old rushes, and his privy-hole filled to the brim. On such days he sat
on the stone block in the niche, huddled away from the dripping walls, and listened to the endless hollow sighing of the Adriatic;
that sea was, he knew, very
near, though he had not been permitted to observe just where in Ancona his prison was.

On bright days he tended his calendar, though after only a few months he no longer had any confidence in it; nor had he from
the beginning any belief that it was going anywhere but toward his death; it had simply been something to do. He made it by
lifting the centre link of his chain, which would reach about a foot up the wall from the dirt, and making a scratch with
it in the nitre. The early scratches, however, already were tending to fill with a stiff gluey stuff, vaguely blue-green when
the light was brightest, though they were almost surely not much more than a year old. By summer, they would be unreadable,
indeed obliterated.

Once a day, also, he took up his vigil by the slit in the iron door, ready to thrust out his bowl as soon as the hinges at
the end of the corridor screamed and the horses began to trample and snort expectantly. After the horses were fed, Otto would
dump into Roger’s bowl, as into everyone’s as long as it lasted, some of the gelid, mouldy mash from yesterday’s trough. On
holy days, if Otto was not too drunk, there was also a sprouted onion, often less than half soft. You withdrew the bowl quickly,
because Otto would knock it out of your hand if you appeared to him to be begging for more, and might not give it back to
you for days; and you ate quickly, so as to hold the bowl out again for water. Occasionally, for a joke, you got horse-piss;
but usually it was water.

During these transactions, Otto could often be heard swearing at the horses, especially when he was leading them in or out,
or when one of them trod on his foot; but he never spoke to a prisoner. That was forbidden. Nor did they talk to each other
any more; that had been difficult from the outset because the cells were so far apart, and there were many echoes; but also
it disturbed the horses, and betrayed the attempt to the gaoler. Now no one spoke, except those who were too sick or daft
to know that they were speaking, and none answered them. Occasionally, on the hottest days when the ground was almost dry,
there came the brief
musical rustle of a chain, and then another; that was their conversation.

Some sounds besides those of the sea came into Roger’s cell from outside. There was obviously a road not far away –close enough
to allow him to hear, now and then, the bray of a donkey, a clanking of pots, the bell and cry of a leper, or even indistinct
human voices, sometimes of children –and, daily, Otto hitching two of his animals to the wagon, to go buy in the market for
the brothers far above. To hearken to these, Roger came more and more to spend even fair days in the alcove, where, furthermore,
he now and again was vouchsafed a vagrant current of sweet air. But this was impossible to do in the winter; though there
was no part of the cell that was not cold then, the niche seared the skin even through the rags, and the wind made a prolonged
dismal fluting over the lip of the mysterious embrasure, as it did also during storms.

Then, too, there were the animals. Nothing could be done with the rats; sporadically, Otto tried to trap them, and in consequence
they were unapproachable. But Roger found that mice made pleasant companions. They were exceeding shy; yet by long patience
he trained several to-trust him, and one would even sit on his palm, grooming its fur like a cat but with much quicker strokes
– there was something almost bird-like in the movement. He had little to give them for a reward, but that little seemed to
be more than they were accustomed to. For some reason, it never occurred to him to give them names.

The cockroaches, like the rats, were invincibly self-centred and vicious, and horribly stupid, too; Roger learned to loathe
them. But he also learned to his astonishment that spiders, for all their cruelty, love music. There was one near the door
which would invariably let itself down on its cable if he whistled. It did not seem to be able to hear the voice, which was
fortunate; for the second time Roger tried it with a fragment of plainsong, several other prisoners took up the tune, the
horses panicked and kicked each other, and then there was no food for three days. In Roger’s nightmares, all
the fiends had horses’ heads.

And for more than a year – or was it two? – he tried to compose in his mind the
Summa salvation per scientiam;
not that there was any hope of committing it to writing, but only to see how it would go; and perhaps to memorize it then,
to have it in his soul for the Judgment. Thinking without parchment and quill was not so impossible as he had always before
supposed, and for a while he fancied that he was making a little progress; until he realized that for the want of authorities
to quote, he had been for months inventing them; one, a St. Robert of Lincoln, had even somehow in his mind acquired a life
history, although he knew well enough that there was no such saint.

Hunger impeded him as well, and cold; even the stench, though he was no longer more than intermittently conscious of that;
and the constant galling of the gyves; and the swollen bleeding gums of the scurvy; and then, the gradual, inexorable dementia of pellagra, until he sometimes could
not tell the imaginary vermin which gnawed him from the real. Now when he sat all day in the niche, he thought more and more
of less and less: over and over again, one sun-ripe day in the gardens at Tivoli would pass through his memory, and then again,
and again, like the cumbers of the unseen Adriatic; or he would dwell helplessly upon some line of Boethius, whom as a boy
he had so meanly despised … the little lambs, frisking their tails in spring … the little lambs.

One year as he sat, it seemed to him that he heard someone breathing. He made nothing of it, for he often heard such things;
they were only sent to torment him; often he had been promised even death and it had been snatched away. Yet the sound was
very loud, and ragged, and after a while began to turn into sobbing. It was the voice of a child; and real or unreal, Roger
was of a sudden distressed with God for the sorrows of His children.

He tried to speak, but could not; it had been too long. The second time, some words emerged, though in no voice he recognized
as human:

Demon, do not weep.

The sound choked off abruptly; and then there was the faint drumming of running footsteps; and that was all. Yet some days
later, Roger again heard the sound of breathing –now rapid, but somehow no longer sorrowful.

‘Who is there?’ he whispered.

The breathing quickened further, but there was no other reply. Perhaps it was an Italian demon, and did not understand good
Latin. He had a little Roman, remembered from – he did not know when; he tried that.

‘Who is there?’

‘Are you real?’ a child’s voice came back to him, tremulous, in that language. It came, like the sun, through the brick-shaped
hole. He had not expected so hard a question, and tried to think of an answer; and when he had given it up, the light was
gone and so was the voice.

Nevertheless it was back the next day. ‘Who are you in the hole?’ it said directly.

That was easier. ‘I am called Roger Bacon, the schismatic.’

‘Are you in prison?’

‘Yes … yes, I am.’

‘Everyone says the March is a prison. But the friars say it is only an old monastery. Were you a grave sinner?’

‘Very gave.…’

‘Then I shouldn’t talk to you.’

‘That is also true.’

‘How did it happen? Was it
very
grave?’

‘I do not know any longer how it happened. Why were you weeping, when I first heard you?’

‘Was I? I don’t remember. I sit here all the time, in this little niche in the wall, when I’m thinking. Maybe they’d punished
me. But it never spoke to me before. Can you see through that black place?’

‘No!’

‘Can you see my hand?’ There was a faint sound of scrabbling, very like a rat’s, and then the tips of four small fingers wove
like seaweed over Roger’s head.

‘Yes. I could even touch it.’

The fingers were snatched back. For a while there was silence. Then:

‘Do you know any stories?’ Far off, in Ancona, a bell began to toll. ‘O, I have to go. Will you be here tomorrow?’

There was a long hiatus, until Roger became sure that it had been only another hallucination. But finally the voice came back,
again demanding a story, and during their exchange, Roger learned that he was talking to a boy of six
ae
, the youngest son of an olive merchant. Roger told him the story of Thomas Aquinas’ encounter with the brazen head of Albertus
Magnus, but he did not much care for it; the story of how the mighty Gerbert rode the eagle was better received.

Each day, Roger ransacked his memory for legends; and in the meantime, he was gradually building up a picture of how they
sat together. It seemed evident that this twin alcove had originally been nothing but a priest’s hole, which meant that his
wall had once not been on the outside of the fortress; the structure must have been centuries old to have required such thick
inner walls.

There came a day when the boy came into earshot already babbling excitedly, of what, Roger could not tell; and then, there
was the slow, also indecipherable rumbling of an adult male voice. Then, came the usual gambit: ‘Here I am today, Roger. Tell
me another story.’