The Inquisitor''s Tale

  “I and a few others were chosen from Avignon, and other boys came from all over Christendom, to Rome, for our training. We learned the ways of investigation, of interview, how to listen, how to persuade, how to threaten. We learned how to be the eyes, ears, and nose of the papacy. And how, on occasion, to be the fist, too. We learned the ways, in short, of the Inquisition.”

  My eyesight is starting to clear. I see the children’s faces. Confusion, mostly. And pity. I think they are pitying me.

  They will not pity me soon.

  “The Inquisition is how the pope roots out heresy. Sniffs it out and finds it and pulls it up by the roots. For my first assignment, I was sent to Northern Italy, to prosecute a community of heretics. But during my investigations there, I met a young woman of that community. Inquisitors are supposed to be as chaste as monks. But”—Why am I telling them this? Stop, Étienne! Stop!—“I fell in love. Our love was discovered, first by the villagers I was prosecuting, and then by my superiors. I was brought back to Rome in shame, whipped like the runt I have always been, and told that another failure would result in my defrocking and expulsion from the ranks of the Holy Inquisitors.”

  The children are certainly pitying me now. My hand is gripping the knife so hard that my forearm aches.

  “I vowed to redeem myself, to regain the status that I had so recently achieved. The next assignment, whatever it was, would be my glory. I swore it. Then I could return to Arles as one of the greatest men in the church—for the greatest Inquisitors are as powerful as any cardinal in Christendom.

  “And then I received my next assignment. There was a village in the north of France where peasants were venerating a dog as a saint. A dog. My next assignment was a dog. How could I redeem myself with a dog? I tore at my hair and cursed my fate.”

  Jeanne pulls Gwenforte closer to her.

  “I traveled to the Oise and began collecting evidence. I spoke to peasants at markets and on the road. I talked to the local clergy. I discovered that the story of the dog was not as simple as I had assumed. There were children involved. You children.”

  They do look so much like children, with cheeks so round and soft. Gwenforte’s big black eyes stare at me.

  “And so I learned your story. And as I learned, something strange happened to me. I began to believe. The Church was wrong. The Holy Father was wrong. This is no cult, no heresy. I believe in you. You are saints.”

  I withdraw the knife from my cloak. The children start. Their eyes are now rimmed with fear. There is just moonlight now, in the mill, and the musty smell of rotted grain hangs in the air. The knife is aimed at them. I see William’s body quivering. Ready to leap. But I am closer to Jacob than William is to me.

  “What can I do?” I say. “Go back to Rome and declare that you are saints? What good would that do me? They will start an inquiry. Cardinals and bishops will descend upon you, shoving me to the back. What use will they have then for the Runt of Arles? And then they will leave, for the canonization process cannot begin until you are dead. Your dead body—your relics, your bones—must perform miracles. That is the new rule for saints. Did you know that? And who will care that I discovered you? No one.

  “But if you die . . . if you are martyred . . . then the process of canonizing you as saints can begin! If I am in possession of your bones, I can witness the miracles they perform—and surely, they will perform miracles! And then I can return, triumphant, your relics in my arms, and shepherd you through the canonization process myself! Three new saints! Maybe four, if they accept Gwenforte! All championed by Étienne! The Inquisitor of Arles!”

  I am standing up now. I don’t remember standing up. The knife is gripped in my hand, undulating in the moonlight. Gwenforte is growling low. Jacob is just an arm’s length away. I turn the knife around in my hand, so it is in stabbing position. The muscles in William’s legs are flexing. He is ready to strike.

  But I am fast. I bring the knife down, hard.

  Into the dirt. It stands there, in the earth, quivering with the force of my blow.

  “But I cannot do it,” I say. “Last night, as you slept, I could have slit your throats. It was my intention. As soon as you arrived in the yard of the inn, the plan leapt into my mind, fully formed. It was perfect. It was easy . . .”

  I let the words hang in the silence.

  Jeanne speaks. “But?”

  “It was wrong,” I reply. I feel hot tears welling in my eyes and then running down my cheeks. “It was wrong.” My shoulders are shaking. I draw the knife out of the ground. It makes the same scraping sound as a spade cutting the earth. The children recoil. I rise and go to the door of the mill and hurl the knife into the darkness. I fall to my knees. I am weeping.

  I feel Jeanne’s small hand on my back. I am humiliated. A child is comforting me. “I’m sorry,” I sob. “I’m sorry.”

  “Shhh,” she says. “We forgive you.”

  I press my fists into my eyes and weep.

  HAPTER 25

  The Second Part of the Inquisitor’s Tale

  The next morning is bright and beautiful. All night, I slept with Gwenforte curled beside me, and my sleep was deeper than any I had had since my disaster with the heretics in Italy. I am renewed. We walk briskly along the road. The smell of cows is thick, the wind is just barely warm, and the clouds are white trimmed with gold.

  The children seem to have truly and honestly forgiven me. In fact, they trust me now in a way that they did not before. They include me in their conversations and make jokes with me. My heart feels near bursting. There are some people in this world who have magic in them. Whose very presence makes you happier. Some of those people, it turns out, are children.

  After some hours of walking, Jacob says, “I read something interesting in the Talmud last night. After you had all fallen asleep.”

  “Wasn’t it too dark to read?” Jeanne asks.

  “I sat by the door, and the moon was full.”

  “What did you read?” says William.

  “I read a line that said, ‘You are like pomegranates split open. Even the emptiest among you are as full of good as a pomegranate is of seed.’”

  I choke on the thickness that rises in my throat. After my humiliation last night, and the forgiveness I received, I can only hope that is true.

  “And I read something else,” Jacob goes on. “There was this discussion of the story of Cain and Abel, from the Bible. After Cain kills his brother, God says, ‘The bloods of your brother call out to me.’ Not blood. Bloods. Weird, right? So the Talmud tries to explain it.”

  “I can explain it,” says William. “The scribe was drunk.”

  “William!” cries Jeanne. “The Bible is written by God!”

  “And copied by scribes,” the big boy replies. “Who get drunk. A lot. Trust me.”

  Jacob is laughing. “The rabbis have a different explanation. The Talmud says it’s ‘bloods’ because Cain didn’t only spill Abel’s blood. He spilled the blood of Abel and all the descendants he never had.”

  “Huh!”

  “And then it says something like, ‘Whoever destroys a single life destroys the whole world. And whoever saves a single life saves the whole world.’”

  There are sheep in the meadow beside the road. Gwenforte walks up to the low stone wall, and one sheep—a ram—doesn’t run away. They sniff each other’s noses. Her white fur beside the ram’s wool—two textures, two colors, both called white in our inadequate language.

  Jeanne is thinking about something. At last, she shares it. “William, you said that it takes a lifetime to make a book.”

  “That’s right.”

  “One book? A whole lifetime?”

  William nods. “A scribe might copy out a single book for years. An illuminator would then take it and work on it for longer still. Not to mention the tanner who made the parchment, and the bookbinder who sti
tched the book together, and the librarian who worked to get the book for the library and keep it safe from mold and thieves and clumsy monks with ink pots and dirty hands. And some books have authors, too, like Saint Augustine or Rabbi Yehuda. When you think about it, each book is a lot of lives. Dozens and dozens of them.”

  “Dozens and dozens of lives,” Jeanne says. “And each life a whole world.”

  “We saved five books,” says Jacob. “How many worlds is that?”

  William smiles. “I don’t know. A lot. A whole lot.”

  The sun is setting on the third day of our journey. We crest a hill, pockmarked with flashing puddles, and Gwenforte runs out ahead of us, to the top. Then she stops and stands as still as a greyhound in an illumination.

  We come up behind her—and all stop breathing at once.

  What lies before us is the most beautiful sight I have ever seen in my life.

  There is a bay, wide and flat, like a crescent moon laid on its side. The water seems no more than an inch deep in most places, straight across the wide bay, running in shallow currents, crested by delicate foam. The setting sun shimmers off this sheet of water—blue and periwinkle and pink and cobalt and gray and slate and yellow and tangerine—running away from the shifting currents of foam, deepening to black as a current of ripples hurries along the surface, and then eddying, and finally spreading out with a sigh. And rising up from these royal, liquid, silken bedsheets of a holy bay is a mountain, right in the middle. Perched on that mountain is a stone abbey, and perched on the abbey is a tower that points straight up toward the originator of the bay’s miraculous swirling colors—the sunset-streaked sky—and higher, to whatever is beyond.

  We stand, for a moment, and take in the beauty of Mont-Saint-Michel.

  And then Gwenforte bounds forward, down the hill, and the children go flying after her. Their leather shoes splash through the shining puddles on the road, the sacks of books bang against William’s broad back, and Jeanne shouts to the heavens. I run after, laughing and trying to keep up.

  The road angles down the steep hill and into a tiny town, the last outpost of civilization before the mount. But the children don’t stop. They run straight through, toward the bay beyond.

  And then, some hundred yards farther on, the road ends. Or rather, the bay begins. Gwenforte doesn’t seem to notice, and she goes splashing through the low surf, which is graying now, more lavender and cloud colored, as the sunset fades.

  “What happened to the road?” Jacob says, coming to a halt on the last yard of dry land. “It’s drowned.”

  Indeed it has. Where the road should be, the sea swirls, whorls of water twirling by. Gwenforte stands there, looking back at us, wet up to her haunches. We gaze past her, across the bay, at the great abbey on the mountain, surrounded by the sea. The only sound is the whirling waves.

  And then a voice breaks the stillness. “You won’t get across tonight.” It comes from behind us.

  A knight stands in the road, his shoulders rising and falling, his sword in its scabbard casting a serpentine shadow on the ground.

  I feel a rush of air as Jeanne sweeps past me. She pushes the knight in his stomach and shouts, “Marmeluc!”

  Gwenforte barks and barks and comes out of the bay and shakes water all over us. Then she throws her paws up on the knight until he laughs.

  “Why are you here?” William demands, dropping the sacks of books onto the road.

  “I’ve been waiting for you in that town there,” he says, pointing back at the few poor buildings.

  Jeanne steps back from the knight.

  Jacob says, “You’ve been waiting for us? You knew we’d come here?”

  “Half of France knows you’re coming here. And all of France’s knights.”

  “How?” says Jeanne.

  “A troubadour came to the royal court,” Marmeluc says. “He told them you were going to Mont-Saint-Michel. And that you had some Jewish books. In exchange for his information, he got to perform for the king.”

  Jacob knelt and put his head between his legs. I wondered if he was about to throw up.

  Jeanne said, “Chrétien?”

  “What?”

  “Was the troubadour’s name Chrétien?”

  “No. It was Nicolas something. Nicolas Lapin, I think.”

  Lapin—the Rabbit.

  “The other one,” William moans.

  “The king and the queen mother are coming here,” Marmeluc goes on. “With as many knights as they could muster. To get the books. And to get you.”

  The last town before Mont-Saint-Michel is barely a town at all. Its only inn is a single room, divided by a woolen blanket to separate where the innkeeper sleeps and where he keeps his one table and two benches.

  “I can make some soup for ye,” the old innkeeper says, as if it were the greatest hardship he’s ever faced. He’s bent, with a wild thicket of white hair that looks constantly buffeted by his own personal gale-force winds. His feet are wide splayed, and he swings his right arm more than his left as he walks, as if he were hauling a large and invisible sack of turnips. “The soup’ll take a long while,” he adds. “I have bread, too. It’s stale, though.”

  “They’ll have bread and soup, thank you, Clotho,” says Marmeluc.

  “And I imagine you’ll all want blankets for the night?” This sounds like an even greater imposition than the soup.

  “Yes, we will.”

  Clotho rolls his eyes and lugs his invisible turnips over to his side of the blanket.

  For a moment, there is a heavy silence. Gwenforte is scratching herself. The rest of us are thinking about the army that will soon descend upon these children.

  “When do you expect them?” William says.

  “They should be here by dawn.”

  “Then we have to leave now!” William says, standing up. “We must go to the abbey!”

  Clotho was hobbling by, gripping five dirty cups by their lips. “Ye won’t get across tonight,” he sneers. “I can promise ye that. The currents are aswirl right now.”

  “Tomorrow, though?” Marmeluc says. “The road will be clear tomorrow?”

  The innkeeper seems to take a grim satisfaction in being consulted. “Aye, tomorrow it’ll be clear. But don’t ye stray from the causeway. After a night like tonight, with devils’ pools and the cross-eyed currents, the sand will be hungry indeed.”

  Marmeluc nods at Clotho as if that statement made any sense.

  Clotho tosses some stale bread on the table. Jeanne says to him, “Have you lived here your whole life?”

  The innkeeper stops and eyes the little girl with something close to hatred. “Ay. Though I didn’t use to tend the inn. I took it over from Wulfram, when he died. Why?”

  Jeanne shrugs. Clotho glares at her. She smiles at him. He keeps glaring at her. She keeps smiling at him. “God’s wounds!” he swears, and pivots on his good leg to go tend the fire.

  A short time later, he lugs a great cauldron into the room and begins ladling soup into cracked earthenware bowls.

  “That didn’t take a long while,” Marmeluc murmurs.

  Clotho growls.

  “Will you eat with us?” Jeanne asks the innkeeper. We are all surprised at the question.

  Clotho is, too. After a moment of stunned silence, he mutters, “Keep to myself, I do.” And he drags himself back to the other side of the curtain.

  We all bend our heads over the bowls. The soup is thick with rue and sweetened with dried apples.

  “This is delicious!” Jeanne exclaims. She’s right. It is.

  We hear Hmph! from the other side of the blanket.

  Jacob has been spooning the stew slowly into his mouth and staring into the middle distance. Finally he says to Marmeluc, “You’re not going to turn us over to the king, are you?”

  The knight frowns. “You
saved my brother’s life. You three have performed miracles that I thought were the stuff of stories and sermons. I wouldn’t turn you in if an angel came out of the sky and told me to.”

  “You swear?” Jacob says.

  “My friend, I swear to you.”

  HAPTER 26

  The Third Part of the Inquisitor’s Tale

  We sleep on the damp dirt floor, wrapped in mildewed blankets so rough they could be used to scrape bark off logs. Well, let me be accurate. We lie on the damp dirt floor, wrapped in mildewed blankets so rough they could be used to scrape bark off logs. None of us sleep at all, knowing that an army, led by the king himself, will be here by sunrise.

  A few hours into the night, there is a strange sound. Like something rattling against the floor. It is coming, I think, from Jeanne’s direction. “Jeanne,” William whispers, raising himself on one elbow. “Jeanne, are you okay?”

  She does not respond. A few of us stir and try to see her in the dark. The rattling continues for a few moments, and then ceases.

  William settles down again.

  I lie on my back and wonder what that was.

  Some time before dawn, Gwenforte stands and begins to whine. Everyone sits up at once. We listen, but I can’t hear anything. Gwenforte barks.

  “Shut that dog up!” cries Clotho from the other side of the hanging blanket.

  On our side, we are all propped up on our arms in the darkness, totally still.

  “I hear it,” William whispers.

  “What?”

  “Shh!”

  After a moment, I hear it, too. We all do. I see the children’s faces transform. Marmeluc swears under his breath.

  Hoofbeats. Slow and steady. Many, many hoofbeats. They sound like war drums. Gwenforte barks again.