The Relic Master

by Christopher Buckley

  “And with you, Uncle.”

  Part Two

  18

  Cunrat, Nutker, Unks

  It was an unusual company of pilgrims that crossed the Elbe River headed south on the feast day of St. Joseph of Arimathea, Year of Our Lord 1519: five monks, consisting of a Swiss mercenary-turned-relic-dealer, three German mercenaries, and a melancholic Nuremberg painter.

  Dismas drove the horse cart, sitting in mute proximity to Dürer. The Landsknechte rode one in front, two behind. Their names were Cunrat, Nutker, and Unks. Dismas made no effort to converse with them. Like all their kind, they prided themselves on their flamboyant attire, similar to the papal Swiss guard. It pleased Dismas to discomfit them by making them don rough woolen monk habits. They chafed at this but, being under Dismas’s command, had no choice in the matter.

  Their retaliation, pyrrhic given the unseasonably warm weather, was to wear their own dandified outfits beneath their monk robes and cowls. This gave Dismas the added satisfaction of observing them itch and sweat.

  True to Landsknecht ethos, Cunrat and Nutker and Unks were haughty, arrogant, and brutish. Their humor was base and cruel, triggered by a flatulent horse or some remembered gruesome incident. They spoke aloud about Dismas in the third person in a coarse persiflage of sniggers, taunts, and derision.

  One day their theme of conversation was Dismas’s mutilated ears. They carried on a protracted dialogue trying to settle which type of goblin he most resembled. The next day their topic was bovine sodomy, a familiar trope among Landsknechte, who taunted Swiss Reiselaufers by calling them “cow buggerers.” So amusing.

  Dismas ignored this simian babble and prayed to St. Francis for patience. When he grew weary of prayer, he fell to calculating how many of them he could kill before being killed himself. He thought one, sure, possibly two, but not the third. They were superb fighters. Dismas shut his ears to their japery and tried to focus on the hopeless task before him.

  It was Dürer who rose to their bait, though Dismas suspected this was his way of attempting a peace offering.

  “Hey, you girls,” Dürer said, “don’t you have more intelligent conversation than idiot jokes about buggering cows?”

  Nutker laughed. “Cunrat, did you hear? Painter just called us girls?”

  “Well, if we’re girls, he should come back here and give us a good fucking.”

  “Hey, Painter,” said Unks, “come give this girl a kiss.”

  “Fuck yourselves,” Dürer said.

  Dismas groaned. Six hundred miles of this?

  St. Francis, gentlest of the saints, grant in thy benevolence—this once, only—that my companions should every one of them be smitten with plague. Or pox. Or, if it please you, struck by lightning.

  Dürer muttered companionably, “Well, this is marvelous.”

  “Do not speak to me.”

  “Look, Dis, I’m sorry if things—”

  “I said do not speak. Not one word more.”

  “It wasn’t my fault.”

  “Not your fault? How was it not your fault? You put Cranach’s signature on it. With your sperm.”

  “How was I to know they were going to put the thing in an oven?”

  “It wasn’t an oven. It was a fire, in the sacristy. Now shut your mouth. Or I’ll carve Cranach’s signature on you with this.” Dismas produced his dagger.

  Some hours later, Dürer tried again.

  “You’re not the only one who’s suffered, you know.”

  This was too much. Dismas reined the horses to a halt.

  “Did you just tell me you’re not the only one who’s suffered? Did you actually tell me that?”

  “I’d call this suffering. One moment I’m in my own house, in my own studio, and next I’m being abducted by thugs.”

  “That’s your definition of suffering, is it? Being interrupted at painting, in your studio? Care to hear mine?”

  “I’m not saying you, too, haven’t suffered.”

  “Out.”

  “What?”

  “Out. Get out of the cart.”

  “Gladly.”

  Dürer stepped down. “Good-bye to you and good luck.” He turned and started to walk off.

  “Oh, no. Not ‘good-bye.’ You’re coming with us, sure. You can walk to Chambéry. It’s only six hundred miles. The exercise will do you good. Then you’ll have some actual suffering to snivel about.”

  Dismas turned to the Landsknechte.

  “Painter will walk to Chambéry. If he tries to run away, shoot him. Aim for his head. You can’t miss. It is the largest part of him.”

  Off to a fine start.

  Some miles later Dismas found himself musing on the irony of ordering Landsknechte to threaten Dürer with the same weapons they had used against him and Markus at Cerignola.

  The horse cart had a concealed compartment. In it the Landsknechte had stashed a veritable armory—arquebuses, pikes, halberds, axes, swords, even a brace of handheld shooting weapons called pistalas, along with several kegs of the hated gunpowder. If this arsenal were to be discovered, it would belie their imposture as mendicant monks. To minimize the risk, they would avoid large towns, and make camp at night in woods, away from the road.

  • • •

  One night, a week into the journey as they sat by the fire under the stars, Dürer took out his sketchpad. He and Dismas had not exchanged a word since their altercation. Dürer’s feet were bare, warming by the fire.

  Dismas said, “What are you drawing, then?”

  “None of your damn business.”

  Dismas looked at the drawing on Dürer’s lap.

  “Your feet? Another self-portrait. That’ll fetch a fortune.”

  Without looking up, Dürer said, “What would you know about art? You’re a philistine Swiss. Did I say ‘philistine Swiss’? I repeat myself.”

  “Hey, Painter,” Unks said. “Why don’t you paint my cock?”

  Dismas had concluded from a week of listening to their inane banter that of the three Landsknechte, Unks was the most stupid. He was also the most physically imposing.

  “I don’t do miniatures,” Dürer said.

  Unks rose and stood over Dürer. He drew his sword and pointed the tip at Dürer’s chest.

  “Call this small?”

  Dürer flicked his forefinger against the blade, making a tingg.

  “It’s hard. I’ll give you that much.”

  Unks’s pride assuaged, he sat back down. Dürer continued to sketch his blistered feet, lambent in the firelight.

  Dismas watched as the drawing took shape. It was good, though he could not imagine who would buy a picture of blistered feet. In Dürer’s studio he’d seen a drawing of two hands clasped in prayer. Dürer made it into an engraving that sold many copies. But hands in prayer were one thing, blistered feet, another.

  “You could call it Pilgrim’s Feet,” Dismas said. “Maybe that will help you sell it.”

  He made a pillow with some folded burlap and laid his head on it.

  “Don’t forget to put Cranach’s signature,” he said sleepily. “With your man-jam.”

  Dürer said, “I thought it an apt medium for a Cranach signature. More fitting than honey or caramel. Or onion juice. Or vinegar.”

  “You’re Narcissus, sure. And we shall both die because of it.”

  Dürer stopped sketching. “Do you think we will die?”

  “Yes.”

  Dürer stared into the fire. He pulled a fresh sheet from his sketchbook. “Then I will make your portrait. At least there’ll be something left of you to remember.”

  “I don’t want to be remembered.”

  “Don’t be blithe. I’m offering immortality.”

  “You sound like Satan. What company I keep these days.”

  “Why do you think people pay me to make their portraits? To cover their walls? It’s fear of being forgotten. Everyone wants immortality.”

  “Vanity of vanities, sayeth the preacher. All is vanity. God knows you k
now about that.”

  “Listen to Dismas the theologian.”

  “I’m not a theologian. I’m going to be killed on this mission because of your vanity. But at least I’ll die doing my penance. One of Spalatin’s theologians says I won’t have to spend more than seven centuries in Purgatory. How many will you spend there, I wonder, for your part in this catastrophe? Or maybe it won’t be Purgatory for you. Someplace warmer, perhaps.”

  Dürer put down his sketchpad. “That was cruel, Dis.”

  “Did I hurt your feelings? Shame on me.”

  “You know I’m a melancholic. Why would you tell me I’m going to Hell?”

  “I didn’t say I want you to spend eternity in Hell. Though I admit that I have wished for just that many times these last months.”

  “Luther says that penance meted out by priests is bullshit,” Dürer said. “He says we don’t need priests for that. We can deal directly with God.”

  “Then you’d best start dealing directly soon.”

  “Why should priests—or cardinals—have the power to condemn us or absolve our sins? I’m with Luther. Salvation comes from faith. Faith alone.”

  “If you want to wager your immortal soul on it, go ahead. Myself, I’ll do my penance.”

  “So this is your revenge? To torment me for six hundred miles with visions of Hell?”

  “It wasn’t my plan,” Dismas said. “But it’s not a bad one. Good night.”

  19

  Count Lothar

  They skirted Karlsruhe and instead of taking the Rhine road, went southeast into the Black Forest. It was a more arduous way, but the main roads were full of imperial busybodies. Land without a ruler is unpredictable.

  The Emperor Maximilian had died. The throne of Charlemagne was vacant. The election to fill it approached. Spalatin had confided to Dismas that Frederick himself had declined the crown, having been urged to seek it by—of all people—Pope Leo. Another irony: Frederick had decided to cast his vote with Albrecht for Maximilian’s grandson King Charles of Spain. To provide a counterweight to the growing power of France. Pope Leo, too, wanted Charles as a check against King François.

  Dismas understood little of high politics. But perhaps it was to the good that Albrecht and Frederick and Pope Leo should ally themselves in this, despite their bitter differences over Luther.

  What would happen now to Luther? Charles of Spain was strenuously—fanatically, they said—Catholic, a champion of the Inquisition. And Frederick was not a healthy man. He’d declined the Holy Roman throne, Spalatin had told Dismas, because he felt his life ebbing. What would happen to Luther then? Such were the morbid thoughts that weighed on Dismas as they made their way along the rough and rutted paths of the Schwarzwald.

  His gloom became even more acute when, one night after they’d made camp on high ground in the forest, the moon came up, revealing in the south the snow-frosted peaks of the Alps.

  “What’s wrong with you tonight?” Dürer said, noticing Dismas staring so mournfully at the mountains. “Ah, sick for home.”

  “I’d be there now but for you.”

  “Can we not have one night without you moaning that I’ve ruined your life?”

  “Sorry. Thoughtless of me.”

  Cunrat, Nutker, and Unks stood watching them at a distance, around their own campfire. They’d been keeping an even more vigilant eye on Dismas since entering the forest, being close to the border with the cantons.

  Dürer said, “They think you’re going to bolt now that you can smell the snow. Snow. Swiss aphrodisiac. I’ll distract them for you so you can make a run for it. Hey there, Landsknechte. I heard a marmot squeak. Why don’t you go shoot it for our supper?”

  Nutker replied with an obscene gesture.

  Dürer sighed. “So, it’s to be another mouthwatering supper of salt beef and millet. It’s playing hell on my bowels. Haven’t had a decent crap in days. I’ve got a bolus inside me the size of a—”

  “Nars. I don’t want to hear about your bowels.”

  “That’s how I’m going to die on this death march. Of cemented intestines. What a glorious death.”

  “Shh.”

  “Don’t tell me to—”

  Dismas grabbed Dürer’s arm.

  “Quiet.”

  Through the trees appeared a flicker of torches. Then came the rumble of hooves. Voices.

  The Landsknechte were already on their feet, arming. At night they removed their arsenal from the cart to have it handy.

  Nutker and Unks lit the arquebus fuses. Cunrat sprinted toward a rock outcrop at the edge of the campfire, cranking his crossbow as he went.

  “Look smart,” Dismas said. “I’ll do the talking.”

  Five men on horseback, each with torch, stepped forward out of the trees. Dismas raised his hand in a greeting.

  “Peace to you.”

  The men took stock of the scene before them: two monks sitting by one fire, two other monks by a second fire, armed with arquebuses with lit fuses.

  The leader, a stout man with severe, unpleasant features, was expensively attired and mounted on a caparisoned horse. He spurred forward toward Dismas. His tone was arrogant, commanding.

  “Identify yourselves.”

  “Who asks?” Dismas said.

  “Lothar of Schramberg. These are my woods. I say again, identify yourselves.”

  “As you see, my lord, we are monks,” Dismas said.

  Lothar stared at Nutker and Unks.

  “Monks, bearing arms?”

  “The woods are dangerous, as his lordship knows, the woods being his.”

  “What I know, surely, is my woods are full of poachers who kill my game.”

  Dismas thought: So you are out here in the middle of the night in the forest hunting for poachers?

  “We have no ill designs on your woods, your worship. We wish only to pass through, in peace.”

  “I am Count Lothar. Godson to the new Emperor, Charles.”

  Dismas bowed. “We are honored. Has the election been decided, then?”

  “It will be, soon enough. Hand over your weapons.”

  This brought sniggering from Cunrat and Nutker.

  “Forgive them, my lord,” Dismas interjected. “We have been much accosted on our journey by footpads and highwaymen.”

  “That’s no excuse for insolence.”

  “I will deal with them. Might I ask your lordship, with respect, why you are abroad at such an hour? Sure, it cannot be for poachers.”

  “We hunt a witch.”

  “A witch. Ah, well, that is a grave business. Then sure, your lordship will agree best we keep our weapons. For protection.”

  Lothar scowled, trying to determine if this was impudence or fear.

  Dismas considered. A noble, witch-hunting, at this hour? Witch-fever in the southern part of the Empire ran high. Whenever there was an outbreak of plague, witches and Jews were in for it. Other times, witchery was a pretext for getting rid of a troublesome or inconvenient woman. Impotence was often ascribed to the evil influence of a witch.

  Dismas had a repugnance of witch-hunting. As a boy, he’d witnessed a terrible and prolonged burning of three girls. Their torment went on for hours. But witch-fear was everywhere. Even Luther, now making a career of not believing, professed it. Yet none of this explained why an overfed, name-dropping count was out prowling the forest at night instead of rogering his countess or servant girls in a warm bed at his schloss.

  “She’s a bad one,” Lothar said. “Greaser.”

  It was believed that witches smeared evil potions on things, to make spells.

  Dismas made a sign of the cross.

  “Pray, my lord, what did this creature infect with her satanic balm?”

  “My barn.”

  Nutker and Unks burst out laughing. Dismas himself also thought Lothar’s lament anticlimactic, but kept silent.

  Fuming with indignation, Lothar said, “I’ll have those two whipped for insolence.”

  “Pay the
m no heed, your lordship. They are novices. I will chastise them myself. Was your barn much harmed?”

  “All my livestock, dead.”

  “Villainy,” Dismas said, crossing himself again. “I shall pray to Saint Hubert for your success.”

  “Who?”

  “Saint Hubert, your worship. Patron saint of hunters.”

  “She also greased the door of the church.”

  “God have mercy on us,” Dismas said, crossing himself a third time. “And you seek this succubus hereabouts?”

  “She was to be burned, but escaped. Well, monk, have you seen a woman?”

  “No. But pray describe her, in case we encounter this fiend, that we may better gird our loins against her.”

  “She’s comely.”

  “In that case, she can grease this!” Nutker announced, rubbing his crotch expressively.

  “Pray keep quiet, Brother,” Dismas rebuked him. “Praise God, your worship, we have not encountered any women.”

  “Name’s Magda. Ginger hair. Lots of it. Curly, like that one’s, there.” Lothar pointed at Dürer.

  “Red hair.” Dismas crossed himself a fourth time. “Sure, a sign of the Cloven-Hoofed One.”

  “If you come across her, bring her to me at Schramberg. You’ll be well compensated.”

  “If I come across her,” Nutker said, “I will come in her!”

  He and Cunrat guffawed.

  This was too much for Count Lothar, who was accustomed, as most nobles, to obsequiousness in the lower orders.

  “Take care for your tongue, monk, or I’ll have it out!”

  “Come and take it.” Nutker stuck his tongue out at the Count and wiggled it obscenely.

  “Brother,” Dismas said through gritted teeth. “Respect for his lordship, if you please.”

  “Seize him!” Lothar ordered his men.

  Nutker and Unks took aim with their arquebuses, fuses sizzling. Lothar’s men remained in their saddles.

  Lothar angrily wheeled his horse and galloped away back into the woods, his men following.

  “Fools,” Dismas said to Nutker and Unks.

  “We don’t lick Habsburg arse, like you.”

  Cunrat emerged from behind the rock. He walked up to Nutker and cuffed him across the face with the back of his hand.