Doctor Mirabilis (40 page)

Roger was ready, for having run out of folk-tales, he had been for some weeks steadily working his way through the
Aeneid;
though puzzled, he proceeded as well as he was able. The preceding night had been unusually wretched, and his voice often
broke, but he managed to finish without other incident.

The boy’s voice said clearly: ‘See? What did I tell you!’ And then again there was the slow rumble of the adult voice. Now
it was all over, and Roger would have to go back into the silence; obviously the boy had told his father or some elder brother
of the delightful mystery of the talking wall,
and he would be forbidden to come again; no one of mature years in Ancona could fail to know what the March was.

The deep voice stopped. The boy said, all in a rush: ‘My father says you are a learned man and very kind and is there anything
you need T’

He seemed thoroughly delighted with himself. But how to answer the question? There was nothing that Roger did not need. After
a while, he said, slowly, ‘I thank your knightly father. What I most need is better food. But I fear me it will never pass
through that stone rat-hole.’

The boy reported this. Then he said, ‘My father says if you had a bit of money could you put it to any use?’

‘I do not know. I would have to try.’

Now there came the scrabbling sound of the boy’s hand, and then the pursed fingers were above him, like a closed anemone,
precariously pinching a coin. As Roger took it, the hand was hastily withdrawn, as though the flesh behind the voice were
still more than the boy could bear. Roger stood shakily on the stone block and looked at the chip of metal in the scant light.
As nearly as he could tell, it was a ducat, not much clipped.

‘God bless you both. I would my blessings were of some avail. I … can say naught else.’

A silence. The sea moaned.

‘My father says that Virgil is said to be a waste of time except in Latin. Can you teach me that?’

Roger put out a hand for support against the wet stone. ‘I can teach you better Latin in a week than any other master could
teach you in a year.’

‘He says I will be back tomorrow. O Roger, I wish I hadn’t. Now it will be more like school.’

‘Oh no. You will see. We will go right on telling stories’

On the next morning, Roger left his bowl on the stone seat, and instead held out into the corridor his open palm with the
ducat in it. Such was the gloom out there that Otto, seeing nothing but the hand, passed by with a snort; but at the end of
his rounds he was back again, peering more closely first at the outstretched palm, and then bending to glare
through the slit. Finally, he took the money. Roger left his hand where it was.

‘Where’d you get that?’ Otto growled. Though it was difficult for him, he was obviously trying to be as quiet as possible.
It was the first time he had spoken to a prisoner since Roger had come to the March – somewhere between four and six years.
Roger remained motionless, and said nothing.

‘Somebody’s talking to you through some hole, eh? I can seal that up in a hurry.’

Roger withdrew his hand. ‘They give me money every day,’ he said.

‘Much good it’ll do you.’ But Otto did not go away. Finally he said: ‘What do you want?’

‘Some fruit. A bit of fish. Even a little meat. Clean water.’

Otto laughed. ‘How about a stoup of wine, Your Lordship? Go back and rot.’

The next morning, there was nothing put into Roger’s bowl. Otto came to him after the rounds and said, deep in his throat:
‘Where is it? Hand it out.’

‘I have nothing yet.’

‘So you get nothing. Hand out the ducat.’

‘No.’

Otto went away. After three days, Roger had two coins to chink together in his cupped palms as Otto went by; and on the fourth
morning, his bowl held not only the usual mash, but also a decayed orange and the head of a herring. He gave back one ducat;
and after thinking the matter over for a short while, Otto silently took it.

The feast was more than Roger’s body could bear: he lost it all into the privy-hole. The next, however, he kept down; and
although there were other bad days, he began gradually to feel stronger. Having someone to talk to was almost more healing
than the food.

In this most curious of all schools the boy, whose name was Adrian, learned in fair weather his Latin and his Greek and his
logic, and even other subjects that could not ordinarily
be taught through a hole, such as the Elements of Euclid and descriptive astronomy. Roger saved his ducats as he was able,
and in turn learned the unspoken art of mutual blackmail, at which, though the advantage lay sometimes on this side and sometimes
on that, he found himself to be a better practitioner than Otto; for in the majority of their conflicts, Otto was faced with
the ultimate resource of the condemned man,
nee spe nee metu
- no hope can have no fear. Nor had the gaoler any real cause for complaint, for even the most that he gave for the money
would buy a score of times as much in the outside world where he moved free.

On one fine spring morning Roger was ready for the most bold of all his undertakings. Though he had been unable to win himself
new rags or new rushes, because Otto would not enter the cell for any amount of money, so that no betterment could be gained
that would not pass through the slit in the iron door, he felt well and cheerful; and he had hidden in the privy-hole - for
there was no other place to hide it -no less a sum than twenty-seven ducats, hoarded over three years. For this wealth he
meant to demand nothing smaller than the removal of the horses from the corridor. He did not think that Otto would try to
take it away from him, not after having been three years sole owner of the golden goose.

But Adrian did not come that morning; nor ever came again. While Roger waited in the alcove, the ducats in the privy were
given out one by one, for nothing but food; and the moment Roger began to try to conserve them, Otto sensed that there were
soon to be no more. For the last few he gave back nothing but the old slops from the horse-trough, and for the last one, he
gave nothing at all, but simply starved it out of Roger’s hands.

A fuzzy square of light on the ceiling, motionless. No, it was raining. A wailing in the night; someone was dying. A wrinkled
scum of ice over the privy. Blood in his mouth, and livid spots under his filth. Horses with rats’ heads. Rain. An incessant
hammering. The little lambs in spring. The structure of the eye. As I shall prove to Your Holiness by
many examples. Look in the mirror, Beth, just for a moment Would God allow? If you have no time to examine these difficulties,
Joannes is more capable than anyone. I gave him thirty pieces of silver. I have these smaller manuscripts,
aliqua capitula.
Here, Petronius, here, puss. Why don’t they stop that hammering? Virtue, therefore, clarifies the mind so that a man may
comprehend more easily not only moral but scientific truths. Is it today that He gives us the onion?
For san et haec olim meminisse juvablt.
Tonight we shall see Mars and Jupiter in trine. Sit here, Livia. Is that rain again? I will explain everything. Silence and
study. If I were not so cold, I could explain it all. Mother of God, sit here. I can explain it all.

One morning there was a commotion in the corridor after the horses were taken out, an angry shouting, and the flaring of torches.
It went on all day, and in the evening the horses were not brought back. When the noise resumed the next morning, he crawled
to the slit to watch.

The trough too had been removed. Otto was directing some three or four men with spades; they seemed to be attempting to clear
the corridor out, a truly Augean task. From this activity as much as from their talk, which Roger could hardly understand,
he deduced painfully that some important personage was coming, to see that the remnants of the schismatics were still properly
imprisoned.

This could be of no moment to him. None the less he watched; for any change, however trifling, in the routines of the March
helped to pass the iron days. The shovelling and cursing went on all week, and now that the horses were gone there was also
a change in the food - lumps of bread instead of congealed mash. At the end of the week, it might have been said that the
corridor was a little cleaner.

On Sunday morning - easily identifiable by its bells - the visitor came. Roger could not see him, but he heard the door open,
and then a strange voice:

‘Are these the spirituals, the disciples of Joachim?’

Its tone seemed angry, perhaps even incredulous. Otto’s
reply was in so unusually low a voice that Roger could not make it out.

‘Would that all of us and the whole Order were guilty of such a charge as this! Gaoler, release them,’

‘Release them? But Your Eminence, my most clear instructions from Your Eminence’s predecessor—’

‘He is no longer responsible for the Order. I am. Let them out, I say!’

One by one, the black doors were opened, protesting blindly for that they had not been stirred in more than a decade. Several
of them required the combined strengths of Otto and all his crew. At each cell, the ritual was the same:

‘I am Raymond de Gaufredi, Minister-General to the Franciscans. Who art thou, holy friar?’

‘I am called Angelo of Clareno, Your Eminence.’

‘Go thou with God, where thou willst Strike off his chains.’ And then there was the sound of a hammer.

But not after all at every cell, for there were several of those wretches who could neither reply nor come forth, but needed
to be led out, or in one instance, carried; and there were some doors which no longer needed to be opened. Roger watched and
listened with only the barest comprehension of what was happening, and that little not to be believed, until the slit that
fed him was jerked away from his face with a mighty squeal.

‘Who art thou, holy friar?’

‘I… am called Roger Bacon, Your Eminence.’

‘Go thou with God, where thou willst.’ At Roger’s feet, Otto knelt with the hammer.

‘Your Eminence… your pardon, if I… would you tell me… what year is this?”

The one thousand two hundred and ninetieth of Christ our Lord.’

The hammer fell, and thus he was answered. It had been thirteen years.

Blind as moles they blundered about in the even lemon glare of the sunlight, all those that survived, as confused and full
of wonder as men just expelled from a garden. For the serious business of convalescing, Raymond di Gaufredi gave them three
whole months, and they all went about it with the high seriousness of scholars; though there were some hurts no herbs nor
unguent nor hour could heal, especially in that fortress in whose dungeons they had so long groaned and heard no other voice.

For Roger, it was overwhelming. He could assimilate it only a little at a time, beginning with such small matters as he had
become accustomed to seeing at the boundaries of the universe: cracks in the wall, the taste of salt, the touch of water,
the shape of his shadow; and then, gradually, the sound of voices; and then, the movement of their sense.

While he was working at it, one came to visit him, from the village - not Adrian, but some merchant, of whom he had never
heard, and whom he had sent away. He was not ready for worldly converse yet; he had talked too long to himself. And he was
only confirmed in this when they told him -everyone was still ‘they’; he was not yet able to tell one face from another -
that the visitor had left him a purse. With horror, he sent it to di Gaufredi, without stopping even to look at it.

Gradually, too, and then voraciously, he won back the knack of reading, though it gave him blinding headaches; and through
this began once more to grant the world a population, with names and actions to which the minuscules testified. The written
words could not give him back his thirteen years, but they could in part give them back to the world, prove that it had had
a history even when he had not been watching. Through the words of the play, he was able to see the possibility of actors.

Among these he was at first more interested in the dead, as least likely to have changed; but even this was not always true.
While Roger Bacon, living, had gone down into his long defeat, the dead Simon de Montfort had clothed his memory in triumph.
Edward the King - who had in fact been wholly in control of England ever since Evesham, though he had not been crowned until
late in 1274 - had had the excellent good sense to adopt the parliamentary revolutions of his slain antagonist, and in addition,
to act at once to restrain the exactions of Rome - a victory for another corpse militant, Robert Grosseteste. These moves
won back Edward Longshanks both barons and rabble, as well as ample time for hunting and jousting, and the wresting of North
Wales from the hands of Llewellyn (although there were said to be some signs that that conquest was in danger of slipping
away).

As for the living, Jerome di Ascoli had become Pope Nicholas IV; and he had small reason to be pleased with the new English
King. Moreover, he had neither anticipated nor desired that his vacated office over the Franciscan Order would be filled by
Raymond de Gaufredi; for Raymond, though wholly free of any actionable taint of Joachism himself, could never believe that
there was any heresy in its doctrines nor any evil in its adherents. What Raymond had done in the March of Ancona would be
even less to the new Pope’s liking, yet Raymond was far from finished. He now proposed to send all those he had delivered,
when their health permitted it, as missionaries to Armenia.

This mission, Roger was permitted to decline - not only by virtue of his age, which was now seventy-six, but also because
upon examination it appeared that he had never been a missionary Joachite, and that the reasons for his punishment had been
much more complex than were those that had been applied to Angelo and his brothers in the March. There was still extant a
prohibition, obtained by Jerome from the then Pope by special letter, ruling that the dangerous doctrines of Roger Bacon be
totally suppressed. Without knowing or wishing to know what these dangerous
doctrines might be, Raymond nevertheless had no desire to turn them loose among the schismatic Armenians. It were more prudent
to let Roger go back to Oxford, where among the sophistications of a great University his mysterious teachings might not lack
for refutation.