The Greenest Branch

by P K Adams

  Fortunately, his entire attention was fixed on the hawker, and those precious moments allowed me to gather my wits. Careful to avoid any abrupt moves, I pulled the hood deeper over my face, turned, and walked away at a measured pace until there were enough people between me and the prior. Then I broke into a run.

  Maybe this is a bad idea, I thought as I ran, a little panicky, weaving among the crowd until I realized I had veered into a side alley and become lost. I could have asked for directions, of course, but after the near-encounter with Helenger, I felt that all eyes were on me and dared not raise my hood. As long as it was still light, I would try to find the way on my own. To that end, I took the first turn to the left, hoping it might lead back to the square.

  But it was just another alley, narrow and cluttered with barrels, wooden crates full of vegetable peelings, and other refuse that filled the air with an unwholesome smell. I made two more turns, always coming to an alley with a tavern, a cobbler’s workshop, or a cheese shop, all empty now that everyone was at the market, but none of them looked familiar or took me any closer to the town gate. When I decided to retrace my steps, I swiftly realized that I had lost my way back even to that first alley, and tears of frustration welled in my eyes. I fought them and pushed the hood back because there was nobody around.

  I took a few aimless steps and heard subdued voices from around the nearest corner. A burst of female laugher rose suddenly above these murmurings but was quickly hushed by another—lower, more masculine. Relieved, I ran up the street toward what I expected to be a group of tradesmen—and tradeswomen, clearly—discussing the day’s business. I abruptly stopped at the sight of a young couple in tight embrace.

  The woman stood with her back against the wall of a shack, her companion pressing his chest against hers. His hand had found its way under her skirts and was caressing her leg. The woman’s demeanor belied what I imagined should have been a terrible discomfort or even peril of this arrangement because she was whispering in the man’s ear in cooing tones. While she was trying to arrest the hand’s progress up her thigh, her effort seemed rather half-hearted. This scene played out in front of me for only a few moments because the pair sensed my presence. They turned toward me without relaxing their embrace.

  I stared at them, unable to produce a voice to ask for directions. The man must have seen my confusion, for he asked in a hoarse voice full of impatience and urgency, “What do you want here, boy?”

  “I . . . I was looking for the town gate and became lost,” I finally managed.

  “Well, it’s not this way. You have to go back.” He pointed over my head with the hand he’d had to take off the girl’s leg, which seemed only to increase his annoyance. “See the church spire? Walk down that alley”—he pointed to a narrow street nearby—“then turn left and follow it until you reach the market. You’ll see the gate from there. Now run along,” he growled.

  The parish church spire! Of course. I turned and walked away with a sense of relief, but I could not get the picture of the couple out of my head. I had an idea, albeit a vague one, of what the two had been up to, but I was surprised at my own reaction. It was as if all my nerves, especially those around my throat and in my fingertips, had been plucked by an invisible hand and were vibrating like a string, exquisitely and painfully at the same time.

  To make matters worse, I inexplicably thought about Volmar, and, for one mortifying moment, I imagined him pressing like that against me. I reached for the hood and pulled it over my eyes as if I could shield myself from those images that way.

  Back in the square, I was about to cut diagonally across the market when I felt a tug at my sleeve. I turned, my eyes instinctively going to the sleeve first, then heat rose to my face as I lifted them to find Volmar. He was standing at the bowyer’s stall, weighing up a fine-looking weapon, too large for him even though he was nearly as tall as I was.

  “It is you!” he exclaimed with his usual roguish smile. “I thought I recognized you even with the hood up. Clever,” he acknowledged respectfully. “But—What’s wrong?” He frowned as he noticed my distress.

  “I saw Prior Helenger and he may have recognized me . . . I don’t know.” I was close to tears now. “Then I got lost in the back alleys, and there was a man and a woman, and he was pushing her against the wall . . .” I hardly knew what I was saying anymore, and I covered my mouth with my hand before I blurted out more. “I just want to go back.”

  Volmar returned the bow, took me by the elbow, and guided me toward the gate. “I should have guessed you would find a way to come here.” He laughed softly. “Let’s sit down somewhere.”

  We went out through the gate, so thronged nobody paid any attention to us, and walked along the town wall toward the forest. We sat at the edge of the woods and watched people and carts going in and out of Disibodenberg.

  “What were you doing at the fair?” I asked when I felt calmer again, though I still could not meet his eyes. “I thought the monks did not attend.”

  “They don’t, but Brother Philipp allowed the oblate boys to go down for a little while. We cannot buy anything, of course.”

  My head was clearer now, and I concluded that there was little chance Helenger had noticed me. “Did the prior come with you to chaperone?”

  “No.” Volmar shook his head. “But I hear he likes to task himself with ensuring that nothing inappropriate is sold at the market.”

  I thought about the amulets against evil spirits, some of which contained wisps of dried herbs in little glass chambers melted into their centers. As if reading my thoughts, Volmar added, “People were saying that some of the herb sellers had been kicked out.”

  We sat in silence for a while as the late sun broke through the clouds. On the opposite side of the sky, the pale moon had already risen. It sent my thoughts down a different track. “Do you think that stars can influence people’s health and the outcome of cures?”

  Volmar frowned thoughtfully, and I was fascinated—not for the first time—by the change that seemed to come over him whenever his usual cheeriness was replaced by a more contemplative mood, and his face assumed a softness that was almost feminine. His ability to so seamlessly shift from the spirited to the sublime never ceased to amaze me. “I don’t see how,” he said at length. “People pray to saints for deliverance from illness, and sometimes their prayers are answered, but stars? I cannot see how they can help or hinder anything.”

  “Medical books say otherwise.” I told him about the volume of excerpts from Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine I had read the previous winter, which the monk-translator had prefaced with a commentary on the link between the configuration of stars at a person’s birth and the therapies best suited for his illness. I had been struggling with it because I had no direct evidence—something I always preferred in the treatment of patients—for faraway bodies’ ability to exert such powers. And yet to me, the world was a whole, where every element, no matter how distant, was connected to every other element, all of them infused with the same vital energy of the creation. And since God had designed it all, who knew what mysteries were hidden beneath the layers inaccessible to our minds?

  “Does Brother Wigbert believe it?”

  “Hard to say. When I asked, he said he had not received training in reading astrological charts, but that many physicians swear by them, and that celestial influence over human affairs is well known. For example, the appearance of comets in the sky portends catastrophes like floods, wars, or royal deaths.”

  “Does it?”

  “That’s what he said.” I paused, thinking. I was often struck by the selectiveness of monastic medicine. Dioscorides dealt extensively with the healing properties of herbs, as did Medicinale Anglicum, suggesting that even in Christian England scholars used and studied them. And yet our infirmarian shied away from herbal cures, preferring surgery and bloodletting while others turned to the stars for help. It seemed that there w
as no unified approach to treatments; monastic physicians relied only on what they considered doctrinally safe and discarded what they deemed inconvenient or suspicious.

  The blue of the sky had lost its clear summer quality and assumed a more somber color tinged with streaks of purple over the horizon. In the west, the crescent of the moon had grown whiter. “Have you ever wondered what the stars are made of?” Volmar asked.

  I nodded.

  “Brother Rudeger says they are made up of divine matter.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Nobody has seen it since the heavens are unreachable.” Volmar’s parody of the pompous tone and self-importance of the schoolmaster made me burst out laughing. “But natural philosophers say it is more rarefied than terrestrial matter.”

  “I wonder why.”

  “Let’s see . . .” He racked his brain for the half-forgotten lesson. “Because the celestial region is immutable, unlike things on earth which are subject to corruption. But the sun, the moon, and the stars are always the same; they don’t change or age, and they move on the spheres with circular motion, which is perfect. It follows that they must consist of matter that is also perfect, and therefore divine.”

  I pondered this. Heavenly bodies did seem the same from day to day and year to year. “But why would God take the trouble to create a different substance for the heavens if He could use the same four elements He created for the earth?”

  Volmar lifted his shoulders. “Brother Rudeger would say it is not for us to question God’s design.”

  I pursed my lips. “But since nobody has seen this divine matter, there is no proof that it is different, is there? So it is at least possible that the moon is made of the same thing that is under our feet.”

  “It seems reasonable.” Vomar said. “Though imagine what would happen if the prior heard you say that.” He shot me that mischievous glance again.

  I smiled and looked up at the sky again. My imagination had long been fired up by its mysteries. What was it really like up there? How was it all organized? If the natural order on earth, for all its fragility and—as Brother Rudeger had put it—corruption, possessed such great beauty and such extraordinary regenerative powers, who knew what marvels hid in the heavens?

  I turned to Volmar. “You have access to the library through the school; did you see any drawings of the sky?”

  He shook his head. “Only anatomical charts.”

  “I have those. Brother Wigbert brought them for me to study.” I rose from the grass. It was getting late, although the activity on the high road continued unabated. “And yet the workings of the heavens are just as fascinating as those of the body.”

  14

  September 1119

  I had not been studying anatomy for long when I had to set the charts aside to attend to another illness. Adelheid’s condition, which I had at first attributed to the strain of Jutta’s bouts of fever, worsened in the autumn of 1119, leaving her alarmingly thin and with an ashen complexion. I replaced the valerian oil with infusions of fennel and lemon balm that I had witnessed restore strength to patients weakened by seasonal ailments. I also boiled nettle leaves and sweetened them with honey. But nothing worked. Her once vivacious spirit had faded into a ghost of itself.

  I had begun to suspect the real cause of Adelheid’s decline; I had seen it enough times in the infirmary. I was preparing myself for an honest talk with her when she called me to the dorter one day she was alone there. She stood facing away for a while, head bowed in prayer or meditation, then turned to me. “Sister—I can call you that, for soon you will be one of us,” she said softly, “I believe God is going to take me soon.”

  Though I was prepared for this, I felt a lump rising in my throat. “Why do you think that?”

  “I am in pain . . . have been for a while.” She swallowed. “I have a growth on my breast, and I think it is consuming my vital humors.”

  “Can I see it?” I was cautious after my experience with Jutta, but without a word Adelheid slid the robe off her right shoulder to reveal a breast, still youthfully firm, with a protuberance under the nipple the size of a hen’s egg.

  I dropped my gaze so she would not read the dismay in my eyes. I had seen this before. Growths like this appeared in various places, most commonly on breasts and around the neck, but also on people’s bottoms and other fleshy parts. While some had claimed to have had them for years, others wasted away and died soon after discovering these lumps. On rare occasions, if they were small enough, Brother Wigbert excised them with the knife he used for lancing boils, but there was nothing else—no powder, draft, or mixture—that would slow the disease down or reverse its course.

  I touched the growth. It was more solid that the normal flesh. I gently lifted Adelheid’s right arm and felt around the armpit, causing her to grimace with pain. More swellings there, also familiar. Yes, her presentiment was likely correct. My heart sank, for my attachment to her was deep. The vesper bell tore through the air with its metallic urgency, and it seemed particularly mournful just then.

  Gingerly, I lifted the sleeve of Adelheid’s robe to cover her and was struck by the serenity of her gaze when I finally met it. With a sense of relief, I realized that she was reconciled to her fate and accepted it. That was probably for the best. “I will make sure you are as comfortable as possible,” I said in a low voice, still not trusting myself to be able to control it.

  “Comfort is not in store for me.” There was no fear in her voice, only a hint of resignation. “My mother died of the same disease when I was a little child. She suffered greatly.”

  “There are infusions I can make for you that will alleviate the pain and help you sleep.” I tried to sound reassuring, but I was worried. The agony this disease often brought with it was fierce; if it lasted long enough, the poppy syrup, though effective at first in numbing the senses, would become increasingly useless in procuring relief.

  I spent the next several days frantically reviewing each of Brother Wigbert’s reference volumes, hoping to find a cure everyone else had missed. I consulted with him, and he brought Book XXVI of Pliny’s Naturalis Historia from the library, which classifies remedies according to specific diseases. Wigbert dismissed the herbal treatments because of Pliny’s suggestion that they should be applied while repeating invocations to Apollo, one of the ancients’ heathen gods. We also reviewed the sections of Galen and Hippocrates about growths, which Hippocrates referred to as carcinos, after a mythical Greek creature. But few of the suggested treatments were feasible; given the size of Adelheid’s lump, a surgery would kill her before the disease did. As for purgatives, which Galen strongly recommended, they seemed a bad idea for an already weak patient who was unable to swallow more than a few spoonfuls of broth.

  In the end, the poppy extract was our only recourse, and perhaps the only blessing was that Adelheid’s death, a month later, came in the depth of the dreamless sleep it induces.

  Jutta spent the first day of mourning prostrated on the chapel’s floor, but Juliana was unable to pray. She threw herself on the body of her companion, and after I managed to persuade her to let go, she lay on her pallet, turned to the wall, and remained that way for hours. She did not rise even when we washed the body and wrapped it in a shroud. But she did come to the chapel, drawn and hollow-eyed, during the overnight vigil and started to wail again, the tremulous circles of light from the candles by Adelheid’s head giving the scene an almost demonic quality.

  Juliana regained a measure of peace only after the body had been removed to the church on the night before the burial. After matins, Jutta announced that she would stay in the chapel for the rest of the night, and I tried not to think about how she was going to spend those solitary hours. Back in bed I was hoping for some sleep, for my exhaustion was great, when Juliana’s voice reached me from the shadows barely scattered by the single candle. “She was a recluse like myself, but she had abo
ut her something of the world without.” Juliana’s voice was low, but it seemed to ring out in the darkness. Despite my weariness, I turned toward her.

  “I left that world unwillingly,” she went on, haltingly at first, then with increasing forcefulness. “I did not have a calling for the monastic life. Like most young girls, I expected to be married and looked forward to it. But my misfortune started when I fell in love with a man well below my station, the son of our groom, a handsome fellow with such gentle blue eyes . . . I believe he loved me, too, for although many women in our household talked about him—not just the serving girls, but even my sisters noticed how fair he was—he only had eyes for me, and I was quite lost!” There was a shudder of emotion in Juliana’s voice, and she paused for a long moment.

  “I would invite him to walk with me in the garden, and sometimes we kissed. But then my father accepted a marriage proposal from a neighbor, a childless widower over thirty years older than me with an estate adjoining our lands.” She laughed bitterly. “With this dual obstacle between us, we did not stand a chance. When rumors began to spread of our affection, my parents moved quickly to try to conclude the marriage, but I found out their plans and swore I would rather become an anchoress than spend my life with an old man I did not love. Oh, the cries that followed, the threats, the implorations!”

  She laughed again, but this time there was a note of vengefulness in it that chilled me. “But I never relented, no! I asked to be taken to the convent of St. Disibod because Sister Jutta’s reputation was already spreading. At first, I enjoyed the isolation—it soothed my pain—and before I understood the true burden of the anchorite life, I had taken my vows.” In the silence that followed, her mystifying demeanor—the lack of the zeal that characterized the other anchoresses and aversion to the extremes of austerity—finally made sense to me. “But at least I had Adelheid,” she resumed before her voice faltered again. She broke into a lament, “Now she is gone and I am left alone, sealed alive in this tomb!” Her chest heaved with a series of desperate sobs.