The Anatomist's Dream

by Clio Gray

  ‘Have to get something,’ Philbert said, and the sleepy monk nodded, ‘back soon,’ and he nodded again.

  Philbert rounded the Abbey wall heading back towards the centre of the town, the dull glow of cooking fires flickering and smoking in front of the food stalls, the remains of ox-carcasses and sheep dripping into their embers, men and women sitting around them, drinking, talking, leaning against one other, discussing the day, just as Philbert had done half an hour since. He followed the lanes leading to town’s square, homing in on the splashing of the large public pump that lay at its centre and found the place awash with noise and young bloods chucking each other into the shallow pool that formed around it, spoiling the drinking water for the next morning. He’d reached his destination, could see what he’d come looking for swinging gently in the breeze, the untidy huddle inside inert and unmoving. The cage was just above a normal man’s head-height and it began to move violently from side to side as it was hit by a ­barrage of objects flung by the youths as they emerged dripping from the pump-pond: bottles and jars, squashed pumpkins and cabbages and whatever else they could lay hands on. Philbert could make out a face hidden amongst dirty rags, bruises and blood, as if he’d fallen into a mill-grist or been pounded by stones, his clothing wet and soiled, ringed with crusts of blood and pus. The bars of the cage were stuck with bits of rotten vegetables and even from where Philbert stood he could smell the filth and urine. The youths at the pump decided they’d had enough of taunting what couldn’t hit back – time to head off back to the tavern to warm themselves up. They flung their last missiles as they left, loose stones from the street, old fruit-pits from their pockets. They set the cage and its contents swinging; they swore and spat, threw horse manure from the streets in handfuls. ‘Filthy pig . . . Traitor . . . Murdering bastard!’ Never mind that they were probably all three themselves, or would be during the coming years of revolution.

  Philbert emerged from the shadows once the group had passed on, laughing and shoving one another, boasting about what they’d done. He moved beneath the cage, saw the close-up knot of flesh, skin pummelled, covered over in cuts like a crow run over by a cartwheel and left to die by the side of the road. The man had been woken from unconsciousness by the youths’ barrage and he unrolled slightly, clutching at his prison with grimy fingers.

  ‘No more, no more,’ he mumbled, his few teeth wobbling visibly in white gums. ‘I can tell you nothing. I know nothing.’ His words were choked, drowned by a deep up-welling of phlegm.

  Philbert stood beneath the cage as if beneath a crucifix, Christ’s sad head bleeding onto one shoulder, the rags of his misery clinging to the bones of his broken body. He took off his hat to take a closer look and, as he did so, the hands at the bars began a gentle tremor, the man choking out a cry, poking a finger through the bottom of the cage, stretching down towards the boy below. And Philbert recognised that finger, or the way it pointed, and he cocked his head to see the man’s battered face the better, rearranging the pieces here and there until they fit.

  ‘Is it Herr Federkiel?’ he whispered, shocked to see this man from the Westphal Club who’d described the shapes of potatoes and had wanted to measure Philbert’s head with his callipers.

  ‘Ah ah,’ groaned the prisoner, his voice thick with throat-rust, words scratching out as if with broken nails upon a crumbling wall. ‘It’s that boy,’ another awful rasp, ‘but how can it be? How can it be?’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Philbert murmured. ‘I’m so sorry . . .’

  The cage rattled alarmingly and Philbert moved away ­instinctively, fearing it would fall.

  ‘No, no, no,’ it was the dripping of an old tap as the man tried to speak again. ‘A moment, just a moment,’ like warped wood, ‘don’t go, oh please . . .’ A long, long sigh, wind down a draughty chimney, as he got himself together. ‘It’s . . . it’s . . .’

  ‘It’s Philbert,’ said the boy, tears squeezing from his eyes as he looked at the pathetic bundle suspended up above him in the night air.

  ‘Ah,’ gasped Federkiel. ‘Yes, yes, of course . . . so much I forget; my head is filled with scrambled eggs. All soft and steaming on hot buttered toast, just like Helge used to make.’ He stopped, swallowing a sob. He’d been beaten and interrogated, felt urine seeping down his leg, leaked brown liquid into the seat of his pants, made to lick up his own filth when he didn’t tell his interrogators what he couldn’t tell. His fine clothes had been ruined, his glasses lost, his precious measuring instruments stamped under uncaring feet. He’d seen his friend Schnurrhenker down on his knees, tired and bewildered, tears running silently down his face, holding up his shackled hands as the padlocks were undone and ripped from him so as not to waste them, the guns being raised, the shots in the woods outside Lengerrborn as dawn broke; the soldiers getting bored with kicking their weaker cargo into movement, watching the corpses rolling down the bank towards the river as Federkiel forced himself on, slipping in the splattered excrement of the soldiers’ horses, unable to understand how it had all happened; relieved when they finally got to the fort and were thrown into dungeons so at least they could rest. And then had come a second wave of prisoners, apparently escaped from one prison only to run directly towards another, yet another mystery Federkiel couldn’t understand, yet another sounding out of guns in the woods in the middle of the night; and then the dawn, and the calling out of his name – which had been the only piece of information he’d been able to give them throughout his long hours of torture about the Westphal and its apparent web of spies and rebels about which Federkiel knew absolutely nothing. And, for Federkiel, it all stopped here, halfway between heaven and earth, and somehow here was that boy again, the one with the head, a boy who was running across the square to the pump and bringing back a cannikin of water for Federkiel, which seemed the greatest kindness he’d ever known.

  ‘Ah,’ he felt a deep happiness as he drank that water down, as if that single draught could wipe away the misery his world had descended into, and he leant down against the bars and put his one good eye to them so that he could see Ullendorf’s wunderkind.

  ‘How excited we all were that night,’ he whispered, difficulty in every word he spoke, grinding out of him as flour from beneath a heavy quern, ‘to meet both you and Von Ebner – such a great man, and we were to meet him at last.’ He coughed, and there was blood in that cough and it splattered down in a fine mist upon Philbert’s hat as he held it in his arms. ‘Such a mind, such great ideas . . . me and Heinrich often talked after we’d been to the club, sitting at Helge’s table, eating Helge’s fine peach-dumplings, or the schnitzels she had left for us . . .’

  He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, wanting to hang on to the memory, keep it close, taste it, smell it. Then he shook himself, poking skinny fingers through the bars.

  ‘Will you do something for me?’ he asked, and he could just make out a movement down below him where the boy still stood.

  ‘Of course,’ Philbert whispered, unsure whether Federkiel had heard him, he’d gone so quiet, before starting up with what was obviously a great effort.

  ‘Give Helge a message for me. Tell her what I should have told her years ago . . .’

  Philbert’s throat was so tight he couldn’t speak, and anyway could not have brought himself to tell this broken man that Helge was missing, probably dead, just like her brother.

  ‘Tell her,’ Federkiel’s breath was fast and urgent, as if he’d thought of these words over and over again and now was the only time he was going to get to say them. ‘Tell her she is my nest of spheres, my prism of light, the heptagon of my days . . . can you remember that, Philbert?’

  ‘I can,’ he said. And he could. The moment the words were spoken he knew every one of them even if he had no idea what they meant. It was like a song that gets stuck in your head after the one and only time you’ve heard it. And then Federkiel closed his eyes and closed his lips, and Philbert stood there fo
r a few moments in case there was more.

  ‘I’ll tell her,’ he said, and lifted up his hand towards the cage but couldn’t quite reach those fingers clawed around the bars, untroubled that the very last words Federkiel might hear in his life were a lie. Sometimes lies were better than truth, Philbert knew it now if not before, and put his hat back on and returned to the Abbey, no one having realised he’d been gone.

  28

  A Great Deed Done

  Breakfast the following morning was a hurried affair. Brother Langer boiled up salt-fish and pickles, most of which he packed away for later. Kadia looked worn out, skin-thin, her dress tired and crumpled, her bluebell posy gone. She stroked Raspel for the last time and Philbert gave her a bunch of those Stars of Bethlehem, but Gruftgang had been quite right. Without the sun they were closed and tight and the gesture seemed meaningless, but she took them nonetheless. Fatzke gave Philbert a ring-dial and patted his shoulder, and Gruftgang gave him a quick hug before Brother Langer brought the goodbyes to a close by loading Kwert onto a donkey he’d borrowed from the Abbey, and they were off. Nobody mentioned miracles or angels or men in cages that morning, and everything was quiet and hushed, dawn a bare streak in the sky. They left by the midden gate, now abandoned, clopping their way across the poppy fields towards the bridge that marked the edge of the Abbey’s lands.

  Once a quarter mile from the dark shadow of the Abbey, Brother Langer tried to lift the mood by telling the tale of the bridge and how, before it had been built, the river used to ­sporadically overrun its banks, stranding fish, drowning crops, dragging fertile topsoil with it as it spooled away back into its banks. The Abbey had employed a French engineer to do the work.

  ‘A Frenchman! Imagine!’ Langer smiled, ‘everyone knew how much the Abbot hated the French, having fought against them way back when and never forgave them for it. Still, there it was, the man the Bishop sent was French and the Abbot had to swallow his pride and sit down and listen to the little man’s plans.’ Langer swept his arm across the landscape, the meadows of poppy and clover that seemed to stretch away forever. ‘But he knew his business, and look at it now.’

  And as they got closer they could see it was indeed unique. Langer was about to tell them more about the squat Frenchman, glasses perched upon his head, hand slapping at his blueprints, bare-backed monks toiling with their hoes and pickaxes, hacking out the artificial canal to act as storm-drain and ­irrigator but he stopped suddenly, held up a hand and looked behind him to see Brother Jaspis, habit flapping as he ran across the fields to catch them up, having to brace his hands on his knees once he’d got there so he could catch his breath. They were almost on the river by then, the bridge’s four arms ­spidering over it and its companion canal in the shape of an oblate X, two covered walkways converging from each side and meeting in the middle, crack willows leaning their orange branches down over the water, trailing their newborn leaves upon the surface like weed.

  ‘Soldiers!’ Jaspis gasped at last, ‘just left the Abbey. Coming this way.’ He managed to straighten himself, held his two hands to his lungs like armour.

  ‘Quick,’ commanded Brother Langer, taking hold of Kwert by the armpits and hauling him down from the donkey’s back while Philbert hurriedly unhooked Kwert’s walking sticks from the pack, Jaspis propelling them both up the wooden walkway of the nearest arm of the bridge until they reached the covered canopy at its centre. Once there, Jaspis gave the boy a leg-up into the eaves of the little portico where Philbert crouched, reaching out for Kwert as Langer shoved him after, Philbert having to clutch Kwert fast to keep him from falling, the skin sagging from Kwert’s face with the pain of cricking up his knees, clinging to the wooden arches, until they were roosted like a couple of badly balanced owls. Philbert looked down, saw small seats nooked into the octagonal chamber below, a tidy trapdoor that could be lifted to allow a rod to sneak down into the water that hurried and gurgled below between the starlings of the bridge. It should have been calm and peace, but Philbert could smell the fear and panic burning like vomit in his throat, saw Kwert’s hands shaking as they gripped the beams and put out one of his own and held it over Kwert’s. He could smell the dawn-wet dust being driven up by horses’ hooves as they ploughed their way across the fields from the Abbey. Only ­minutes later came the jangle of bridle rings, the snort of hard-run horses, the scuff of boots against short-haired flanks. Philbert squeezed his eye to a small knot-hole and saw the band of black-clad hussars, heavy and menacing as a thundercloud, charging through the poppy fields, red petals flying haphazardly as they came.

  ‘Now then,’ said the leading horseman, as he pushed himself up to stand in his stirrups and glower down on Langer and Jaspis, who were standing by the donkey, faces as calm and nonchalant as if they’d just stepped out of prayers. ‘What are you folks doing here so early? Looks like a conspiracy of nuns to me.’ He laughed at what he thought a great joke, pulling on his reins, forcing his horse to encircle the men and donkey with his stink and sweat. ‘We had a report there were a couple of escapees heading this way. Escapees from Lengerrborn no less.’ He spat the name Lengerrborn as if it had stung him and ­puckered his mouth in distaste.

  ‘A bad business,’ said Langer, keeping his large head down, ‘a bad business indeed.’ He committed himself no further, did not specify which bad business in particular he was alluding to.

  ‘They’ve had confessions from the revolutionaries captured in that Westphal Club,’ the soldier continued, pluffing his nose as if he were the horse and not the man, ‘that there was a plot to poison the Schupos there. Naturally the ringleaders have been caught and shot, but you know how vermin are. There’s always a few rats escape the trap.’ He spat again, looked at the two monks: one large, round and ugly, the other young and handsome and freshly tonsured. ‘No one passed this way?’

  ‘No one, sir, and we’ve been here a small time now,’ said Langer.

  ‘No one passing to admire your pretty pile of wood?’ The soldier nodded at the bridge, saw it fussy and overly ornate, completely unfitted for the passing over of troops. He liked flat wide bridges of buttressed beams that could fit a squadron riding side by side.

  ‘No one has passed here, Hauptmann,’ Langer’s voice was calm and steady. ‘I imagine it was only we two who were seen.’

  ‘Ah yes. Two brothers, out for a morning stroll,’ the soldier drawled, amused at his insinuations, ‘practising your little songs together, were you?’

  Langer coughed politely. ‘Fishing, sir. We are fishing. I am the Hermit from Öde Insel, visiting for my annual stipend. I’m returning to my island later this morning, and Brother Jaspis here was kind enough to offer me a little companionship before I left. We are abroad early so as to avoid the Market crowd. I’m sure you understand.’

  The soldier gobbed his spittle, seemed pleased at the pattern it made on the ground beside the ugly brother’s foot, looked hard at the river, at the bridge, at the track that snaked away from it through the sedge on the other side. He sat a moment, heels pressed into his horse’s flanks, then waved his arm at his fellows.

  ‘All right, clear out, lads. Back to the fort and breakfast,’ he twisted his reins tight in his hands, tugging the horse’s head into a hard fold, before giving them a last warning. ‘Keep your eyes skinned, brothers, and tell us who passes, or maybe we’ll skin your eyes for you, the better for you to see.’

  He scowled at them, liking his own jokes, the cage in the town one of his best; he’d always known himself to be a humorous man.

  They didn’t waste time and as soon as the soldiers were out of sight, Philbert was jumping down from the rafters, Langer and Jaspis carefully lowering Kwert and carrying him over to the other side of the bridge where they had already led the donkey. They all shook hands, Brother Langer insisting they take the donkey, onto which he gently lifted Kwert, which was as well; for Kwert could no more walk a few steps than a frog could fly.

 
‘Thank you,’ Philbert said as he took hold of the donkey’s halter and led Kwert away, waving one last time before turning his face towards the north and to Bremen, and the Maulwerf they hoped to find there.

  Philbert would have thanked Brother Langer all the more earnestly if he’d known what would happen next, but that little piece of drama he didn’t hear about for many, many months; no way of knowing that Brother Langer did not return directly to his island, instead heading from bridge to town, all day busy with his arrangements, going hither and thither, meeting strange people in taverns, talking to odd people on corners. He never saw Langer chatting to the old funambulist whom he’d known when he’d run away from the Abbey, nor heard him persuading the man to set up the rope for old-times’ sake. He would never see Brother Langer climbing the steps of the building from which the rope had been strung, nor the ill-fitting purple jerkin he’d borrowed to cover his cassock, make him look more like the showman he was pretending to be; nor did Philbert see Langer tottering out onto the hemp-line, pretending to dance, pretending to wobble in alarm and then falling, cutting the rope with his knife as he went, knocking hard into the cage Philbert had visited the night before, sending it plummeting to the ground. He didn’t see the people down below cry out in alarm and crowd around, nor that the cage was being kicked to one side, its door wrenched open by the tools a couple of ­members of the crowd had brought with them for the purpose; nor the many hands that had been waiting for just this moment to reach inside and grab the prisoner, hustling and hauling him away moments before the roaming soldiers arrived on horseback, clearing the crowds from the cobbles, the cage open and empty, Federkiel transported away, taken back to Brother Langer’s Isle by Jaspis; Brother Langer himself spirited away to the Abbey to set his twice-broken bones. They didn’t heal so well this time round, and Brother Langer would always feel the grumble of them at every turn. But back to his island he went and Jaspis went with him, for Langer could no longer manage on his own.