The Tower of Fools

by Andrzej Sapkowski

  “Oh! What a little rooster!”

  “Get up. I’ll give you a hiding.”

  Horn stood. Swift, nimble, like a lynx.

  “Take it easy,” he hissed. “Take is easy, m’Lord Bielawa the younger. Let’s keep calm. Anger mars beauty. You’ll lose your looks. And your popularity with married women now famous throughout Silesia.”

  Leaning back, Reynevan kicked Urban hard below the knee as he had seen Scharley do. Horn, astonished, dropped to his knees. But from that moment, Scharley’s tactics began to fail Reynevan. Horn avoided the punch meant to break his nose with a slight but quick movement and Reynevan’s fist only brushed his ear. Horn parried a wide and inaccurate left hook with his forearm, sprang nimbly up from his knees and jumped aside.

  “Well, well.” He grinned. “Who would have thought it? But since you want it so much, laddie… At your service.”

  “Horn.” Scharley, without turning around, took Tomasz Alpha’s bread knight with his bread queen. “We’re in prison, I know the custom, I won’t get involved. But I swear that whatever you do to him I’ll do to you twice over. Especially dislocations and fractures.”

  Things moved quickly. Horn jumped at Reynevan like a cat, smoothly, gracefully, sinuously. Reynevan dodged the first blow and punched, even finding the target, but only once; all his other blows were parried or blocked. Horn struck just twice, very quickly. Both blows were accurate. Reynevan flew back and sat down hard on the dirt floor.

  “Children,” said Tomasz Alpha, moving his king. “Just like children.”

  “Rook takes pawn,” said Scharley. “Checkmate.”

  Urban Horn stood over Reynevan, rubbing his cheek and ear.

  “I don’t want to return to this matter,” he said coldly. “Ever. But so you won’t think we fought for nothing, I’ll satisfy your curiosity somewhat and tell you a little. Something about your brother, Piotr. You want to know who killed him. Well, I don’t know who, but I do know what. It’s more than certain that your romance with Adèle of Stercza killed Piotr. Which was a pretext, an excellent pretext, that almost perfectly masked the real reasons. Don’t tell me that’s never occurred to you, since you know how to put two and two together.”

  Reynevan wiped the blood from under his nose. He didn’t answer. He licked his swelling lip.

  “Reinmar,” added Horn. “You look terrible. Sure you aren’t feverish?”

  Reynevan was cross for some time. With Horn—for obvious reasons. With Scharley—for not intervening and beating up Horn. With Koppirnig, for snoring, with Bonaventure for smelling, with Circulos, with Brother Tranquillus, with the Narrenturm and the whole world. With Adèle of Stercza, because she had behaved disgracefully towards him. With Katarzyna of Biberstein—because he had behaved hideously towards her.

  To make matters worse, he felt ill. He had a cold and the shivers, was sleeping badly and waking up both wet with sweat and frozen.

  He was tormented by dreams where he endlessly smelled Adèle’s scent, her powder, her rouge, her lipstick and her henna by turns with the scent of Katarzyna, her femininity, her girlish sweat and the mint and sweet flag in her hair. His fingers and hands remembered the touches that returned to him in his dreams. And endlessly compared them.

  He woke up covered in sweat. And while he was awake, he recalled his dreams and couldn’t stop comparing.

  His bad mood was made worse by Scharley and Horn, who since the fight had made friends and become chummy. The two old foxes often sat together at the sign of the omega for long conversations, obsessed with one topic, returning to it over and over. Even if they started somewhere else, they always came back to their prospects of getting out of clink.

  “Who knows,” said Scharley softly, pensively biting a chipped thumbnail. “Who knows, Horn. Perhaps we’ll be lucky… We have, as you can see, certain hopes… Somebody on the outside—”

  “Who is that?” Horn looked at him keenly. “If one may know?”

  “Know? What for? Do you know what strappado is? How long do you think you’d last when they pull you up by your—”

  “Very well, skip it. I was wondering if you’re pinning your hopes on Reinmar’s beloved, Adèle of Stercza. Who is, rumour has it, enjoying great popularity and influence among the Silesian Piasts.”

  “No,” countered Scharley, clearly amused by Reynevan’s furious expression. “It’s not her we’re pinning our hopes on. Our dear Reinmar is, indeed, popular with the fair sex, but there aren’t any benefits from that, of course, beyond very fleeting carnal pleasures.”

  “Yes, yes.” Horn appeared to have fallen into a reverie. “It’s not enough to be popular with the ladies, you have to be lucky with them, too. Have a way with them, if you’ll excuse the euphemism. Then one has the chance to have not only worries and love’s labour’s lost, but also some benefits. In a situation like ours, for example… Dammit, Reinmar, you really do look terrible.”

  “… Ecce enim veritatem dilexisti incerta et occulta sapientiae tuae manifestasti mihi. Asperges me hyssopo, et mundabor… Hey! I don’t want to come and thump one of you! Lavabis me… Oi! Don’t yawn there! Yes, yes, Koppirnig, I’m talking to you! And you, Bonaventure, why are you rubbing yourself against the wall like a pig? During prayers? A little dignity, please! And I’d like to know whose feet stink. Lavabis me et super nivem dealbabor. Auditui meo dabis gaudium… Saint Dymphna… What’s up with him again?”

  “He’s sick.”

  Reynevan’s back, which he was lying on, was painful. It surprised him to be recumbent, since he had only just been kneeling to pray. The floor was cold, the chill was radiating through the straw and he felt as though he were lying on ice. He was shaking with cold, trembling all over, and his teeth were chattering so much his jaw muscles hurt.

  “Fellows! Why, his body’s burning like Moloch’s furnace!”

  He wanted to protest. Couldn’t they see he was frozen, trembling from the cold? He wanted to ask them to cover him with something, but he couldn’t utter a single clearly articulated word through his chattering teeth.

  “Lie still. Don’t move.”

  Somebody next to him was wheezing, coughing violently. Circulos, it’s probably Circulos coughing like that, he thought, realising in sudden terror that even though the person coughing was only two steps away, all he could see of them was a vague blur. He blinked. It didn’t help. He felt somebody wiping his forehead and face.

  “Lie still,” said some mould on the wall in Scharley’s voice. “Lie still.”

  He was covered, but didn’t remember anybody covering him. But he had stopped shaking, and his teeth weren’t chattering.

  “You’re sick.”

  He wanted to say that he knew better—after all, he was a doctor, he’d studied medicine in Prague and could distinguish an illness from a passing chill and weakness. To his amazement, rather than intelligent speech, all that left his open mouth was a ghastly croaking. He was coughing violently, his throat sore and stinging. He strained and coughed again. And fainted from the effort.

  He was delirious. He started dreaming. About Adèle and Katarzyna. He had the scents of powder, rouge, mint, henna and sweet flag in his nostrils. His fingers and hands remembered the touch, the softness, the hardness, the smoothness. When he closed his eyes, he saw the modest, embarrassed nuditas virtualis—the small round breasts with nipples hard from desire. The slim waist, the narrow hips. Her flat stomach. The thighs shyly clenched together… Now he didn’t know which was which.

  He battled against the illness for two weeks, until All Saints’ Day. Later, when he recovered, he found out that the crisis and critical stage had occurred around Saints Simon and Jude’s Day, on the seventh day, as was standard. He also found out that Brother Tranquillus had supplied the herbal remedies and infusions that saved him, administered by Scharley and Horn who took turns to watch over him.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  In which our heroes are still—to use the words of the prophet Isaiah—sedentes in tenebris,
meaning in common parlance that they’re still locked up in the Narrenturm. Later, however, pressure is put on Reynevan using both arguments and instruments. And the Devil knows how it would have ended if it hadn’t been for some university friends.

  Nothing much changed in the two weeks that the illness erased from Reynevan’s biography. It had grown even colder, which couldn’t be called a phenomenon after All Souls’ Day. Herring had begun to prevail in the bill of fare, reminding the inmates that Advent was coming. In principle, canon law instructed that fasting begin only four Sundays before Christmas, but the very devout—and the canons of the Holy Sepulchre were among those—began earlier.

  Regarding other events, soon after Saint Ursula’s Day, Nicolaus Koppirnig had had such an acute and persistent attack of carbuncles that they’d had to be lanced in the hospital medicinarium. After the operation, the astronomer had spent several days in the infirmary. He had talked so compellingly about the comfort and provender there that the remaining inmates of the tower had decided to have some of it. The rags and straw from Koppirnig’s pallet had been divided up so that the other inmates might become infected. Indeed, soon after, the Institor and Bonaventure had come out in ulcers and pimples. But they weren’t a patch on Koppirnig’s carbuncles, and the canons of the Holy Sepulchre hadn’t considered them worthy of operating on or hospitalisation.

  Scharley, meanwhile, had managed to entice with scraps of food and tame a large rat which he’d named Martin in honour of the reigning Pope. The joke amused some of the Narrenturm’s inmates, while others were outraged at Scharley and Horn when they’d baptised the rat and quipped: Habemus papam.

  After Reynevan recovered his wits, little changed in the tower. Every evening they sat down and conversed, usually near Reynevan’s pallet, who was still too weak to get up and was being fed on chicken soup specially supplied by the canons of the Holy Sepulchre. Thus, Urban Horn fed Reynevan and Scharley fed Martin the rat. Bonaventure scratched his ulcers and Koppirnig, the Institor, the Camaldolite and Isaiah listened. Tomasz Alpha ranted. And the topics—inspired by the rat—were the popes, popery and the famous Prophecy of the Popes of Saint Malachy, Archbishop of Armagh.

  “You must admit,” said Tomasz Alpha, “that the prophecy is very accurate, so accurate its veracity cannot be called into question. Malachy must have had a revelation, God himself must have spoken to him, revealing the fate of Christianity, including the names of the popes, from his contemporary Celestyn II to Peter the Roman, the one whose papacy would allegedly end in the destruction of Rome, the papacy, and the entire Christian faith. And so far, Malachy’s prophecy has come true to the letter.”

  “Only when stretched,” Scharley said, shoving a scrap of bread under Martin’s whiskered snout. “You can put on tight boots using the same principle. You just can’t walk in them.”

  “You’re showing your ignorance. Malachy’s prophecy correctly describes all the popes convincingly. Just take the recent Schisms: why, the one whom the prophecy calls the ‘Cosmedine moon’ is the recently deceased Pedro de Luna, once cardinal deacon at Santa Maria’s in Cosmedine who called himself Benedict XIII. After him, in Malachy’s writings comes the cubus de mixtione, the ‘Cube of mixture’—and who’s that if not the Roman Boniface IX, Pietro Tomacelli, who had a chequered band in his arms?”

  “And the one called ‘Of a better star,’” interrupted Bonaventure, scratching an ulcer on his calf, “is of course Innocent VII, Cosimo de’ Migliorati, who has a comet in his coat of arms. Isn’t it?”

  “Indeed, it is! And the next pope, called by Malachy the ‘Mariner of the black bridge,’ is clearly Gregory XII, Angelo Corraro, a Venetian. And the ‘Lash of the Sun’? Why, it’s none other than the Cretan Peter Phillarges, Alexander V, made pope by the Council of Pisa, with the sun in his coat of arms. And the one called the ‘Stag of the Syren’ in Malachy’s prophecy—”

  “Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing. For shall waters break out—”

  “Quiet, Isaiah! For that stag is, is it not—”

  “Who the hell is it?” snapped Scharley. “I know, I know, you’ll shoehorn Baldassarre Cossa, John XXIII, in here, like a foot into a tight poulaine. Yet he isn’t a pope, but an antipope, who doesn’t suit the list at all, moreover, having nothing in common with a stag or a syren. In other words, Malachy was talking nonsense there. As in many other places of that celebrated prophecy.”

  “This is in poor taste, Master Scharley!” said Tomasz Alpha, growing annoyed. “You oughtn’t to treat prophecies like that! You should see what is indisputably true in it, and regard that as proof of the truth of the whole. The things you consider wrong can’t be declared falsehoods, instead one must humbly acknowledge that being but a trifling mortal, one comprehends not the word of God, for it is incomprehensible. But time will prove the truth!”

  “However much time passes, nothing can turn claptrap into the truth—”

  “Here, Scharley, you are wrong,” Urban Horn interrupted with a smile. “You seriously underestimate time.”

  “You are profane,” said Circulos, who was listening from his pallet. “You are ignoramuses. All of you. In truth, I listen and I hear: stultus stulta loquitur.”

  Tomasz Alpha gestured at him with his head and twisted a finger against his forehead. Horn snorted and Scharley waved a dismissive hand.

  The rat watched the incident with its wise, black eyes. Reynevan watched the rat. Koppirnig watched Reynevan.

  “And what,” Koppirnig suddenly asked, “do you say about the future of the papacy, Master Tomasz? What does Malachy say about that? Who will be the next pope, after Holy Father Martin?”

  “The Stag of the syren, probably,” sneered Scharley.

  “Then shall the lame man leap as an hart—”

  “I said be quiet, you nutcase! And I shall respond to you, Master Nicolaus: it will be the Catalonian. After the current Holy Father Martin, called the ‘Crown of the golden veil,’ Malachy mentions Barcelona.”

  “The ‘Schism of the Barcelonas,’” corrected Bonaventure, who was reassuring the weeping Isaiah. “And that would mean Gil Sanchez Munoz y Carbon, the next schismatic after Luna, calling himself Clement VIII. This part of the prophecy is by no means discussing Martin V’s successor.”

  “Oh, indeed?” Scharley showed exaggerated surprise. “By no means? What a relief.”

  “If only the Roman popes are taken into consideration,” Tomasz Alpha concluded, “the next one in Malachy’s writings is the ‘Celestian she-wolf.’”

  “I knew we’d get there in the end,” snorted Horn. “The Curia Romana has always been famous for its wolfish laws and customs, but a she-wolf on the Chair of Saint Peter? May God have mercy on us.”

  “And a female to boot,” said Scharley. “Again? Wasn’t one Joan enough? And it was said that all the candidates would be more closely examined to see if they had balls.”

  “They abandoned the examinations,” Horn winked at him, “Because too many were eliminated.”

  “Your jokes are inopportune,” frowned Tomasz Alpha, “and what’s more, smack of heresy.”

  “I swear,” the Institor added gloomily. “You blaspheme. Just like with that rat of yours—”

  “Enough, enough,” Koppirnig quietened him with a gesture. “Let us return to Malachy. Who’ll be the next pope, then?”

  “I checked and know,” Tomasz Alpha looked around proudly, “that only one cardinal may be considered. Gabriel Condulmer. At one time the Bishop of Sienna. And Sienna, please note, has a she-wolf in its arms. This Condulmer—mark well my and Malachy’s words—will be elected by the conclave after Pope Martin, may God give him a lengthy papacy.”

  “It doesn’t seem probable to me,” said Horn, shaking his head. “There are more likely candidates, more well known, who are pursuing more brilliant careers. Albert Branda Castiglione and Giordano Orsini, both members of the College. Or Juan de Cervantes, cardinal at San Pietro in Vincoli. Or for example, B
artolomeo Capra, Archbishop of Milan.”

  “The Camerlengo John of Palomar,” added Scharley. “Gilles Charlier, Dean of Cambrai. Cardinal Juan de Torquemada. And finally, John Stojković of Ragusa. In my view and if I’m to be frank, Condulmer, about whom I know nothing, has meagre chances—”

  “Malachy’s Prophecy,” Tomasz Alpha cut off the discussion, “is infallible.”

  “Which one can’t say about its interpreters,” replied Scharley.

  The rat sniffed Scharley’s bowl. Reynevan raised himself up with difficulty and leaned back against the wall.

  “Oh, gentlemen, gentlemen,” he said with effort, wiping sweat from his forehead and stifling a cough. “You’re locked in a tower, in a sombre prison. No one knows what tomorrow will bring. Perhaps they’ll take us away to be tortured and killed? And you’re arguing about a pope who won’t take office for six years…”

  “How do you know it’ll be six?” Tomasz Alpha choked.

  “I don’t. It just came to me.”

  On Saint Martin’s Eve, the tenth of November, by which time Reynevan was completely recovered, Isaiah and Normal were deemed healed and freed. They had previously been taken out several times to be examined. Whoever conducted the evaluations must have concluded that compulsive masturbation and communicating entirely by means of passages from the Book of Isaiah said nothing adverse about their mental health, for after all, the Pope had been known to quote the Book of Salvation and masturbation was a natural human act. Nicolaus Koppirnig had a different opinion about their releases.

  “They are preparing the terrain for the Inquisitor,” he pronounced gloomily. “They’re removing the nutcases and loonies so that the Inquisitor won’t have to waste time on them. They’re leaving the cream. Meaning us.”