by Iain Pears
Olivier took a deep breath, then turned and bowed in farewell. Gersonides nodded in return, then thought of something.
“That manuscript you brought me, by that bishop. It argues that understanding is more important than movement. That action is virtuous only if it reflects pure comprehension, and that virtue comes from the comprehension, not the action.”
Olivier frowned. “So?”
“Dear boy, I must tell you a secret.”
“What?”
“I do believe it is wrong.”
He looked out the window, hoping for distraction in the ordinary bustle and movement of the city, but there was virtually none. No people walking up and down going about their business, most of the shops shut. Only one car, its driver leaning against the bonnet smoking a cigarette. Where did he get that from? Julien thought. And he looked again, more carefully, and realized.
Friendship had its limits. Marcel had sent the police to watch him, make sure he didn’t try to leave and warn Bernard. He was to be, once more, an accessory to a murder. The realization snapped him awake; he could feel the surge of thought through his mind as he grasped what was going on. He had not gotten to the station on time, managed to achieve nothing to save Julia. But he could at least refuse to accept this as well.
He made his preparations quickly; changed his clothes, put on his stoutest shoes, ate what little food there was in his kitchen—some olives, a piece of hard, dry bread, a tomato, a small piece of cheese; they had all been there for a week or more and were scarcely edible. Drank a glass of wine that was close to being rancid, and wondered if he had ever had a meal that tasted quite so unpleasant.
Then he left the apartment, walked down the stairs and into the courtyard. There was a high stone wall that separated the house from the one behind; too high for him to climb. He went to the concierge and asked to borrow a chair.
“I am going to climb over the wall and go into the next street. There is a policeman outside. I want you to do something for me. If he asks, say that I went upstairs to go to sleep. Say I have not come down again and you have not seen me since. Will you do that?”
The concierge nodded, a little twinkle in her eye. Her husband, he knew, had spent years in jail for robbery before he had died; she herself had been in enough trouble with the police over the years for her nearly to have lost her position when one of the building’s occupants discovered it. Julien had argued for her to be left in peace. Had she ever done anything wrong? Then let her be. She knew of it, and was grateful.
“You’ll never make a good burglar, Monsieur Julien, if that’s what you’re thinking of doing. Best give it up before you get into trouble. Some people are just not made for it. My Robert, now, he was hopeless, so I know.”
He grinned at her. “I’ll bear it in mind. And I’d better go.”
“I’ve not seen you. Don’t worry. I wouldn’t talk to a policeman even if my life depended on it. Never have. Don’t hold with them.”
He nodded, and climbed the wall, making such a bad job of it that the last thing he heard as he fell heavily to the ground on the other side was a sarcastic cackle.
Then he started walking, passing through the gates of Avignon as the sun was beginning to set, doggedly pounding along the road as it grew dark. He reached Carpentras at about one in the morning and thought of stopping for a rest, lying down somewhere for a few hours’ sleep, but kept going; he had had enough sleep in his life and needed no more. Instead he headed north, and as dawn broke he passed close by the hill with the shrine of Saint Sophia at the top.
He was far too early to go to his house; Bernard was not due there until the afternoon. So he climbed the hill and took refuge in the place where Julia had been so happy. As he reached the top and saw the chapel nestling in its little copse of trees, he saw also the bits and pieces she had left behind the last time she had been there—a bundle of papers, an old tin can she used for washing her brushes, a scarf she wrapped around her head to keep the sun off. Julien picked it up and felt it, then put it to his face and smelled her for the last time. And her smell finally made him break down as he had not managed to do before at the train station, or with Marcel, or in his apartment. There he had still been in command of himself. Now he was no longer; he sank down onto the grass, his whole body shaking and his whole mind overflowing with grief.
It was only the heat as the sun rose higher in the sky, and the realization that time was passing, that eventually forced him to banish all such thoughts; but when he finally stood up he had accepted that she would not come back and he would never see her again.
He went into the chapel and looked at the pictures she had studied, and saw them through her eyes. He looked at the picture of the blind man and Sophia, her gesture so tender, his so responsive, and saw again how she had made it her own. She had lost herself in this old work, her personality dissolving into it, so that she had been set free. The immortality of the soul lies in its dissolution; this was the cryptic comment that so frustrated Olivier and which Julien had only ever grasped as evidence for the history of a particular school of thought. He had known all about its history, but Julia knew what it meant. He found the realization strangely reassuring; she, it seemed, had come to understand everything that Sophia had tried and failed to teach Manlius, and which he had never understood himself.
Did that make it any better? Did it lessen the horror of what she was enduring? Or of how he had contributed to it? Of course it did not; nothing ever could. She was on a train, in the hands of monsters, and while she journeyed to her death he sat here, looking at pictures. Julien had sunk into complete impotence, where he had nothing left he could do. Everything he had ever thought or learned, all his tastes and cultivation had gone, stripped away by this one fact: She was gone, and he could not prevent or change anything that was to happen.
Olivier had made a protest against great ideas for the sake of a small humanity, and had illuminated it with his own suffering. Julien could not even do that; his life was already over and with it any opportunity to accomplish something of worth. All he could do was signal that he understood, at least, how much in error he had been, and hope that someone might, in turn, understand him.
He closed the door of the chapel carefully, breathed in the warm air, so fresh after the slight dankness inside, and began walking down the hill.
They went some ten miles before they paused, and stopped by a stream to water the horses. It was then that the attackers struck. There were perhaps six of them, although as no one survived, the number remained conjecture. Felix himself was the last to die, his head severed from his body in such a way that it went rolling down the slight incline and came to rest in a patch of primroses growing on the riverbank.
But at least he died knowing who had killed him. The last thing he saw before his life was extinguished was the blade of the long-handled axe as it swung through the air, glinting brightly in the spring sunshine, and he recognized the man who had been hewing wood on Manlius’s estate the day before.
This was as it should be; no one mourned them, for by then they knew his true duplicity, and were the more won over by their bishop, their savior. For Manlius told them, with trembling voice, eyes filled with tears, how he had discovered the truth about his friend, how he had been in secret negotiation with Euric, planning to hand over the land to him in exchange for favors. This had been the true reason, he announced in a dull, resigned voice, why he had moved so fast to invite King Gundobad to move south, why he had abandoned the idea of going to the emperor for troops. There was no time if Felix’s treachery was to be countered.
The news came as a shock, but the impact was salutary. Gundobad was hailed as a savior and entered into his new patrimony without a sword being drawn in protest. And Manlius, his chief advisor, began teaching him about ruling, about the law, and about justice. About how to be a king, not merely a chieftain.
He was at his greatest in those years; he felt it was what he had been born to accomplish. The constant, i
ntricate details of administration, of justice, of reevaluating and reassigning tax revenues, the delicate discussions and persuasions needed to steer both rulers and ruled toward an understanding and even appreciation of each other. It was due to him that war never came between the Burgundians and Visigoths, that the destruction all had feared never happened. And the culmination of his achievement was the code of law, the Lex Gundobada as it was known to Julien, which encapsulated the triumph of Roman civilization over its tribal successors. The Roman people submitted to barbarian rule, but the barbarian rulers submitted to Roman law.
It took years of unremitting work before his labors were complete, and when he was satisfied, he went back to the great villa that had been almost desolate for so many years and opened up the doors and lived in peace once more. It was much changed; the huddling masses of laborers had been cleared away, but there had been no time and no money to restore the garden. Cracks had appeared in the fabric, holes in the pavements and mosaics, for despite his efforts the labor force had continued to evaporate, the towns to shrink. Cut off from much of its old places of trade, with travel ever more dififcult, society continued to wither, albeit at a slower, more gentle pace.
He was satisfied, nonetheless; he had achieved all he had aimed at, and more. And now he could rest. So he hoped, but no peace came to him. The hole in his soul grew bigger by the day, for he had lost Sophia, the woman who had guided him and taught him for all his adult life. He had wanted her praise, her thanks, or at least her understanding, and had gotten none of these, even when he finally finished his last work, the Dream, and sent it to her.
“That you will not have,” she said when she divined this part of the reason for his visit. She was sitting under a tree beneath which a servant had fixed up an awning of white cloth; there she sat on the ground, knees crossed and hands together.
“I never thought that I had managed to teach you so little,” she continued, with a sadness and a distance in her voice that he had never known before. Often in the past, she had been angry with him, furious at his obstinacy or his inability to understand. But that had been part of her love; this time she talked like an acquaintance, someone who cared nothing for him. The realization sent a chill through him.
“I admit it,” he said with a forced smile. “But what there is is all due to you.”
“Then let me be cursed for it,” she said quietly, “for if I am responsible for what you have done then I bear a heavy guilt. I taught you as much as I could and you used it to massacre your son, your friend, and the Jews. And you have become a saint. You are a saint, Manlius; the people say so already. When you are dead you will have your shrine and your prayers.”
“They are nothing to me if I do not have your good opinion, my lady.”
“And you do not have it. The moment you ordered the death of Syagrius you lost it forever. He did not betray you; he stayed in Vaison to ensure I came to no danger. He kept watch on me night and day, offered himself as a hostage until you came back. Your response was to kill him, without inquiry, so you could make a grand gesture before all the town. And to yourself, and to the shade of your father. You would not show weakness, would you, Lord Bishop? You would not expose yourself as your father did, and hesitate, and be merciful. He did, and died for it. His cause was lost. That was not a mistake you would make. You learned from him as you learned from me.”
“What he did—or what he failed to do—is the cause of our current distress,” Manlius said stiffly.
“Nonsense,” she replied harshly. “Do you think one man can make a difference? If he had lived another twenty years, would it have conjured up armies? Given the people of this region the will to fight? Made Rome able to defend itself? No. Your father’s quest was doomed from the start. He knew it, and he died as a man of honor, choosing not to do wrong, so that at least he would leave behind something noble. Would that you had his qualities. You have chosen instead to pile injustice on injustice, corpse on corpse. Felix knew nothing of what his cousin was doing, but your response was to kill him, and to kill his entire line, because you wanted to deliver a peaceful province to Gundobad. And because you needed to win the minds of the people, you slaughtered the Jews, who had done neither you nor anyone else any ill. On such things do you build your civilization, and you use me to justify it all.”
“I have brought peace to this land, and security,” he began.
“And what of your soul, when you use the cleverness of argument to cloak such acts? Do you think that the peace of a thousand cancels out the unjust death of one single person? It may be desirable, it may win you praise from those who have happily survived you and prospered from your deeds, but you have committed ignoble acts, and have been too proud to own them. I have waited patiently here, hoping that you would come to me, for if you understood, then some of your acts would be mitigated. But instead you send me this manuscript, proud, magisterial, and demonstrating only that you have understood nothing at all.”
“I returned to public life on your advice, madam,” he said stiffly.
“Yes; I advised it. I said if learning must die it should do so with a friend by its bedside. Not an assassin.”
She looked up at him, with tears in her eyes. “You were my last pupil, Manlius. And you have made what you have done into my legacy, as well as your own. You have taken what I had and corrupted it. Used what I taught you to kill and justify your killing. For that I will never forgive you. Please leave me alone now.”
She turned back to face the valley and closed her eyes in contemplation. Manlius waited for a moment, hoping she would begin talking to him once more, then turned and walked away. He never spoke to her again.
JULIEN HAD ONLY glimpses of what Olivier did in the last few hours before he was attacked. Olivier himself scarcely understood what he was doing; he did not proceed rationally, but rather went by instinct, almost in a dream. In many ways, he was behaving purely selfishly, in contrast to the idealism that motivated both Ceccani and Cardinal de Deaux in their different ways.
He left the palace and walked through the streets of Avignon until he saw a servant of the Comte de Fréjus, someone he had seen before. He walked up to him. “Say, my friend,” he said. “Would you do me a favor?”
The man turned and nodded in vague recognition.
“Would you run straight to your master and say you saw me? Say I am going to the house of the Italian painter Pisano. Tell him the news: that I said I know who murdered his wife, saw the culprit with my own eyes, and that I will inform the magistrates this afternoon. Make sure he understands. I know who murdered his wife.”
The man frowned in puzzlement.
“Do not ask me questions,” Olivier said urgently. “Just discharge this service, and I will be in your debt forever.”
And he turned and walked away. He went back to Pisano’s lodgings. He waited for four hours, during which time he wrote his last poems, the final four that came down to Julien, including the most puzzling of them all, the one that begins “Our lonely souls swim to the light . . .” a verse that only Julien ever properly understood, its strange imagery, and tone oscillating between the regretful and the joyous being too eccentric to be readily appreciated.
And then they came, as he knew they would. Olivier folded his papers and pushed them under the door of Pisano’s neighbor, with a note that he should take them to the pope. Then he knelt down to pray as he heard the footsteps coming softly up the stairs. He looked up and saw the Comte de Fréjus himself with three other men standing in the doorway.
“I have been expecting you,” he said quietly as they came in.
THE REST OF the story took place in public, although what it meant was swiftly obscured. Only Clement, perhaps, held all the strands. When de Fréjus fled, leaving Olivier bleeding on the floor all but dead, his hands smashed beyond use, his tongue cut off so that he could never tell his secret to anyone, the news traveled fast. The count was seen entering the building, seen leaving it two hours later covered in bl
ood; the screams as Olivier was tortured were heard for hundreds of yards around. No one dared intervene. It was then that the story began to circulate that the assault was revenge for Olivier’s murder of Isabelle de Fréjus; the tale protected the count’s reputation, for no one wanted the truth made public, but it did not fool Clement. A horse-man left the papal palace within the hour, heading for the Countess of Provence’s court; the comte’s seneschal was removed from Aigues-Mortes and the command taken over by her own cousin; extra soldiers were sent in. The English force materialized off the coast, waited three days, then sailed back to Bordeaux.
As a power, Ceccani was finished, his desire for the papacy to return to Rome dead. He even returned to his bishoprics, visiting each in turn and winning a reputation as a good shepherd of his flock, in contrast to the absentees of Avignon, who took their dues but gave precious little in exchange.
And three days after the attack, Olivier had his reward as he lay in a quiet room in the papal palace, attended by the pope’s own physician. For Clement was a thorough man; he not only blocked Ceccani’s plan for Aigues-Mortes, he moved to demolish the power base his cardinal had built himself as well. The great bull Cum Natura Humana, a thunderous declamation that echoed across the whole world, was issued. The Jews were innocent of any charges laid against them in the matter of the plague. They were the fathers of nations, as was now the pope himself. To injure them was to injure the pope, and all Christians as well. Clement took them under his personal protection. Anyone who harmed them in any way would be excommunicated and would have to answer to the pope himself. They were not to be attacked, nor to be forcibly converted, for obedience without faith was pointless. They were to be left alone.
And those people who attacked them, the men like Peter the flagellant and all his followers, were excommunicated, to be hunted down. And all those who helped them were to be excommunicated as well. They were to be chased from the society of men, spurned and shunned, thrown out of any town they approached, or arrested and kept imprisoned until they repented. Rather than using them to persecute the Jews, he turned the full force of papal power and authority on the persecutors. The results were not swift, but they were effective; the assaults on Jews spluttered out, bit by bit, the flagellants and those who came to the surface under the cloak of their piety were crushed.
