The Inquisitor''s Tale

  “So the dragon was just allergic to cheese?” I said.

  Jacob shrugged. “Something like that.”

  We climbed out of the tree, gingerly avoided the dragon-vomit, and made our way back to Marmeluc and Haye. “Look!” Marmeluc cried as we approached. “Look at him!” Marmeluc had taken off the moss and the leaves and washed his brother in cool water. The burns had healed, leaving faint, spidery scars across Haye’s skin. Haye was sleeping peacefully, his eyelids fluttering, his chest rising and falling. Marmeluc rose to his feet and took Jacob’s hand. “You cured him! Not a half a day’s passed, and he’s . . . he’s totally cured!”

  Jacob stared at Haye, as if he were a little surprised himself. Finally he said, “God cured him. God made the plants and gave them their magic. I just used them.”

  We all looked at Jacob in silence. After a moment, Marmeluc said, “Do you think God told you about the dragon, Jeanne?”

  Jeanne shrugged. “Maybe.”

  And then Sir Marmeluc did something very surprising indeed. He fell to one knee. He bowed his head and crossed himself. “Bless us,” he said.

  The other knights looked at one another. Then they looked to Haye, healed of the burns that should have killed him. Baldwin knelt next. “Bless us, please.” Georges and Robert did as Baldwin did, crossing themselves. I knelt, too. Finally even Fabian fell to one knee.

  “Bless us, Holy Ones,” we all said gruffly, earnestly. “Bless us.”

  Jeanne and Jacob stood in the midst of the kneeling knights. Utterly bewildered.

  Suddenly, I am more interested than I have been throughout this entire long, interesting evening. “You asked them to bless you?” I say. “Why would you do that?”

  “It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? Jacob healed a man who should have burned to death! Jeanne saw the future!”

  “And . . . ?”

  “Well, if that doesn’t make them saints, I don’t know what they are!”

  I lean back on my stool and cross my arms. “You think they’re saints. Touched by God, doing His work on earth through miracles that mere mortals are not capable of?”

  “What else could they be?”

  I nod. “What else, indeed? What else, indeed . . .”

  Gerald is looking at me. He is clearly uncomfortable. I can have that effect on people. When I want to.

  “Please,” I say very quietly. “Go on.”

  Gerald clears his throat, looks at me one more time, and then decides that he should do what I say.

  “That very night, we were attacked.”

  HAPTER 13

  The Third Part of the Chronicler’s Tale

  After the vanquishing of the dragon, there was a feast in the great hall. Jacob and Jeanne and all the knights and I were the guests of honor, and we sat with the lord and lady at the high table.

  Over dinner, Bertulf admitted that the children had earned their safe passage to Saint-Denis.

  “And we will not be turned over to Michelangelo di Bologna?” Jeanne confirmed.

  Bertulf looked at us for a while, as if considering. Then he nodded his bald, fat head. “I zvear it.”

  I swore, too. “I will personally escort you to the good Abbot Hubert, whose piety and wisdom is known even as far as Aberdeen. And the Red, Fat, Wicked Monk shall not touch a hair on your heads!” The children were very grateful.

  If only they had known.

  The hall was lit with dozens of torches, dancing and fluttering, casting strange shadows over the hundred feasters, either revealing their true nature or concealing it—one can never tell. A grandmother of a petty knight, an ugly woman with a crooked nose, seemed stately and beautiful in the torches’ strange light. A handsome man, a traveling preacher with a wide, white smile, seemed cruel and frightening in the same flickering glow.

  Servants appeared and brought rabbit pie, which was delicious. After, though, came out little rounds of cheese. Époisses. We all gagged and pushed it away from us as fast as we could. I was sure Georges was going to be sick, right up there on the dais.

  After the cheese was—mercifully—taken away, Lord Bertulf lifted himself to his feet.

  “Oyez!” he cried. “Hear ye!”

  The hall fell quiet.

  “I hope you have eaten vell?” he announced.

  The question was answered with a mix of halfhearted cheers and more than a few grumbles. Lord Bertulf was a miser. Only the tables in the front of the hall had gotten rabbit pie. The rest had just pie, with no rabbit inside—despite what the servers were calling it. Lord Bertulf smiled and put his hands on his enormous belly. If his guests had been satisfied, he would have known his cook had been too generous.

  “I vill now accept petitions and reqvests. If dere are any grievances, I shall hear dem.” A servant brought a long candle and set it beside Lord Bertulf and handed him a flame. “I shall light dis candle. Ven dere is no tallow left, the period for grievances shall end. Then, ve shall have song!” Some scattered cheers for that. But mostly there was a rush to form a long line by one of the wooden walls.

  And so began the most boring part of the evening, when landholders accused one another of moving boundary stones, peasants complained of their neighbors stealing their lambs, and knights demanded satisfaction of one another for imagined and exaggerated insults. The children put their arms on the table and their cheeks on their arms and watched the petitioners file by. I wondered if they were falling asleep.

  Lord Bertulf rarely let his tenants and vassals finish their claims before announcing his judgment. His wife whispered in his ear and twice forced him to change his verdict when she thought he was being too generous. Her bright eyes shone exactly as brightly, I guessed, as her money box.

  Then, as the tallow dwindled and the flame began to gutter in the wet wax of the candle, a hunchback approached the dais. Everyone quieted to see this lump of rags, shuffling forward, his weight leaning on a gnarled stick, his legs bent like bows and caked with mud.

  “Vat business do you have in my hall?” Bertulf bellowed. “I don’t give alms but on holy days! And never in my hall! Begone, you pile of vilth! Knights! Eject him!”

  Sir Fabian and his crew stood up. Baldwin jumped over the table and approached the beggar from behind.

  But before he could arrive, the hunchback spoke, his voice strange and high.

  “You have something that is not yours,” the hunchback intoned. “Return it, and I shall leave your august presence.”

  The people in the hall grew quiet, tense.

  “I have something dat belongs to you?” Lord Bertulf demanded. “How dare you imply zuch a ting!”

  Lady Galbert-Bertulf intervened. “Let him say what it is, my dear.” Her eyes were shining cold and hard. “What do you claim is not rightfully ours, beggar?”

  Suddenly, the hunchback seemed to erupt. He doubled in height, and from his back sprung a missile of fur and teeth. “JEANNE AND JACOB!” the former hunchback bellowed. And in the time it took for the faces of the lord and lady and all the knights to transform from suspicion to surprise, the boy called William had picked up his walking stick, spun, and smashed Baldwin in the face.

  The missile of fur and teeth—once the beggar’s hump—was Gwenforte, of course. She had bounded over the knights’ table and grabbed Robert by the collar of his shirt.

  “Knights!” Lord Bertulf screamed.

  “Mercy!” Lady Galbert-Bertulf cried.

  “Get him!” Sir Fabian bellowed.

  “Stop!” Jeanne and Jacob both shouted.

  But since everyone was hollering at the same time, no one heard anything, and Fabian, Haye, and Georges rushed at William, while Robert struggled with Gwenforte, Baldwin lay unconscious on the ground, and Marmeluc stared, stunned. William picked up a table—yes, an entire table, I saw it with my own eyes—and began swinging it over his head. Dirty plates a
nd goblets went crashing to the floor. So did Lord Bertulf, who fell flat on his face and tried to scramble to the back of the dais. Lady Galbert-Bertulf grabbed a knife in each hand, leapt up on her chair, and let loose a high, savage battle cry. There were concentric circles of madness radiating out into the hall. Knights and courtiers charging to the front, ladies and children either hiding below tables or standing on them to get a better view, a troupe of jongleurs (the now-superfluous entertainment for the evening) grabbing as many pewter serving plates as they could carry and running for the doors.

  But up at the front, Jeanne wasted no time. She stood up, planted her foot on her stool, leapt onto a table, and launched her entire body at William.

  The knights, their swords drawn, saw her and froze. William, his back to her, the table raised above his head, felt her before he saw her. She crashed into his back and wrapped her arms around his neck. William staggered, trying to spin and strike whatever was on his back with the table, when he heard Jeanne shouting directly in his ear. “Stop! They’re our friends! Stop!”

  William stopped. He looked at the knights, swords drawn, not moving.

  The more distant circles of the hall kept up their convulsions, but the central one had altogether frozen. Lord Bertulf (from the floor) and Lady Galbert-Bertulf (from atop the chair) and I (crouching behind the table, I must admit) and Jacob (standing behind the table) and the knights (stock-still) and even Gwenforte (standing above Robert, his collar in her mouth) all looked at William.

  “Say you’re sorry,” Jeanne told him.

  So William said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Put down the table.”

  William dropped the table. A leg broke, and the table lurched and toppled onto its side.

  Jeanne, still clinging to his back, said, “Turn around and kneel.” William did so, turning his smaller friend with him like a rucksack.

  “Lord Bertulf, Lady Galbert-Bertulf,” Jeanne intoned, “may I introduce our friend William. And also Gwenforte the greyhound.”

  To which there was absolutely nothing to say.

  • • •

  The next day, I accompanied the children and the knights—and Gwenforte the greyhound—on the day’s journey to Saint-Denis. William recounted to us how Gwenforte had tracked Jeanne and Jacob all the way to Bertulf’s hall—for which the dog got many pats on the back and scratches behind the ears. They told William of the farting dragon, and he laughed so loud the hills echoed. But after the story, I saw how he looked at them. Like he was worried that they had created some sort of bond that he could never break into. I could see it all over his face. And, if I had to guess, I’d say it was an old thought, formed over years of exclusion by the other oblates. I was an oblate once myself. I know how they are.

  The mind is like a muddy road. Two ruts run down its center, from all the carts that have passed that way. No matter how many carts try to roll alongside the ruts, to stay out of the mud, sooner or later, a turn here or a jolt there will send them down into the ruts for good. Just so is the mind. As hard as we try to keep our thoughts out of the old ways, the old patterns, the old ruts, any little jog or jerk will send them right back down into the mud. So it was, I imagined, with William.

  As we approached the town of Saint-Denis, the road widened, the traffic increased, and I saw Jacob becoming increasingly nervous.

  He said, “I’m not going to the abbey. I’ve got to find my parents. They’re probably worried to death about me.”

  For a moment, neither William nor Jeanne spoke. The road was very quiet.

  At last, William said, “Jacob, do you know that your parents escaped the fire?”

  Jacob’s face was tight. His nostrils flared. “They escaped,” he said. “They’ll be waiting for me at my cousin Yehuda’s. My mother said so.”

  William said, “Yehuda, the rabbi?”

  Jacob stopped. He passed his sleeve violently across his eyes as he turned to William. “You know him?”

  “You know him? Rabbi Yehuda is your cousin?” William asked.

  “My mom’s cousin. I’ve never met him, actually.”

  “Who’s Rabbi . . . You-hoo-doo?” Jeanne wanted to know.

  “Rabbi Yehuda. A famous heathen,” William said. “His arguments blind the eyes of good Christians with tricks of the Devil.”

  Jacob glared up at him. “You mean he’s a Jewish writer.”

  “Correct.”

  “He’s very famous.”

  “Notorious.”

  “Wise.” Jacob’s voice was rising.

  “Wicked.” So was William’s.

  Gwenforte started to growl at the boys.

  “Learned.” Jacob’s face was getting red.

  “In the ways of the Evil One!” William bellowed. Gwenforte barked at them.

  “His writing is beautiful!” Jacob bellowed back.

  William paused. “Yes, that’s true.”

  Jacob looked surprised. The big boy shrugged. Then he smiled. “Brother Jerome knows Hebrew. He’s translated it. Rabbi Yehuda writes more beautifully than any living author, I think.”

  Jacob gazed up at the giant oblate. “Well, you might be an idolater,” Jacob said at last. “But at least you have good taste.”

  And Jeanne laughed.

  Gwenforte stared between the two boys. She barked, as if to say, Now cut it out! Jacob bent down and started rubbing her head.

  Jeanne said to him, “Come with us. Let’s stay together. You come to the monastery. How long could that take? Then we can go together and find your parents.”

  Jacob rubbed Gwenforte’s head harder.

  “We’ll be there before supper,” William added.

  Finally Jacob murmured, “All right. I’ll come with you, and then you’ll come with me.”

  “Of course,” said Jeanne.

  “Of course,” agreed William.

  “Thank you.” Jacob nodded.

  Jeanne reached out and took her friend’s hand.

  I saw William notice it—and wince.

  And then Jeanne reached out and took William’s hand.

  The wince turned into a smile.

  Finally William reached out and took hold of one of Gwenforte’s ears. We all laughed. But the dog shook her head and gave William a look that said, Play with me or don’t, but leave my ears alone.

  We began to climb a gentle slope. I slowed my pace, so that I might say to the children, “Sir Fabian and his men will escort us as far as the gates of Saint-Denis. Beyond that, armed men may not go.” And then, very gravely, I said, “You must stay close to me. Michelangelo may be there. He is the prior of the abbey, after all.”

  “I don’t understand it,” said Jeanne. “Why would the good Abbot Hubert have wicked Michelangelo di Bologna as his prior?”

  “Don’t you know what they say? Keep your friends close—and your enemies closer. Hubert keeps a watchful eye on Michelangelo. Still, do not leave my side until we are in the presence of Abbot Hubert.”

  William said, “Thank you, Brother Gerald.”

  “And remember, Hubert is a serious man. More pious than anyone I have ever met. Do not joke with him or be flippant. Be straightforward. Be honest. So he will be with you. And there it is.”

  The children looked up—and there it stood. Saint-Denis. The first and most holy of the new wave of monumental churches. The building that all the great cathedrals—Notre Dame, Chartres, Rouen—are modeled after. The sun glinted off its black roof. Spreading out around it was the town of Saint-Denis, which was larger than any town the children had ever seen. It bustled and yelped and crackled and rumbled. For a moment, the children stood there and marveled. And then, they took off running down the hill. The knights and I had to jog after them, laughing all the way.

  We came into the town, among the two-story wooden buildings li
ning the narrow muddy lanes. Jeanne and Jacob kept commenting on how they had built one house on top of another. William had seen two-story buildings made of stone in his monastery. But two stories of wood and mud? That impressed him, too.

  Merchants and craftsmen leaned out of their windows or strolled by with their fat, pretty wives, clad in richly dyed wool.

  “Are these lords and ladies?” Jeanne whispered.

  “No,” I said. “Just burghers. They live in towns and give their goods and labor to anyone who will pay them.”

  “Where are their yards? Their farms? And do they work the fields dressed like that?”

  “They don’t have farms, and they don’t work the fields.”

  “Where do they get their food?”

  “They buy it.”

  “All of it?”

  “Yes.”

  “How rich do you have to be,” murmured Jeanne, “to be able to afford to buy all your food?”

  Jacob, meanwhile, was scouring the tiny alleys that ran between the tall wooden houses.

  William noticed. “Any Jews at all?”

  “They must be somewhere,” Jacob replied, his voice tight.

  And then, we were at the gates—and it was time to say good-bye to the knights.

  Marmeluc reached out his hand to Jacob, and they grasped wrists. It was sign of great respect. He did the same for William. Finally Jeanne approached Marmeluc and curtsied. He pulled her in for an embrace—which surprised us all.

  “Be careful, little one,” he said.

  Jeanne looked up at him. “Don’t worry. We’ll see each other again.”

  Marmeluc’s eyes went wide. “Did you have another vision?”

  She laughed. “No. I just have a feeling.”

  “Well, I won’t doubt you. Never again.”

  The children turned and bowed to the rest of the knights. Jeanne said, “Thank you for not killing us.” We all laughed.