The Waterfall, page 7
‘Will!’
It came from further away now, muffled by distance and perhaps by walls and buildings.
I started towards it at high pace, throwing the caution of the night down a well. ‘Jalid! I am coming for you!’ I hissed.
‘Will!’ And it was further away again, but this time accompanied by the sound of boots running on the earth and stones back towards the Old Church.
I gave chase, charging along the edge of the canal, past the great basilica of St Nicholas, quiet as the grave now that the monks had been driven to Rome. The wind whistling through its bell tower seemed to repeat their old names, their old psalter chants and liturgies.
And then I caught sight of my quarry for the first time. There was a great barge moored on the canal, with the navigators sitting on its roof carousing with flaming torches and a shoal of empty bottles in the water around it. He leapt through the yellow pool of light, showing me only the soles of his shoes. The navigators cheered at his escape.
I ran after, my lungs fit to burst. I could see the great church itself a hundred yards beyond, its coloured windows lit as if with a service, though what service would take place at the witching hour defied my knowledge.
Another shaft of light, this one from a tall merchant’s house, wherein the master must have been counting his guilders late.
Then my game bird was vaulting over the low railings surrounding the church’s boneyard and dashing between the headstones. I pursued him still, keeping pace, until of a sudden I realized I had lost sight of him. I turned this way and that, but to my anger all I could see were the stones of a thousand dead. I cursed and kicked one.
‘Will.’
It was spoken soft, as to a lover.
I turned my head. And there, in a patch of blue-and-gold light from the tall stained-glass windows of the Old Church, leaning upon a grave as if it were a Whitsun afternoon, he stood. And the face that greeted me was that of Kit Marlowe. A dead man up and walking.
‘Hello, Will,’ he said with the lightest crooked smile. ‘Are you surprised?’
And I will tell you that no, I was not. For there was a spirit who walked with Kit in all his days. And that spirit was the Devil himself.
The bell in the great church tower above us struck.
‘Did you die, Kit?’ I asked. For if he had told me then that he had never even been born, it would have been as simple to believe.
He laughed.
‘I see you read my message in chalk.’
‘I thought it was from Jalid.’ He glanced at the chiming bell, then met my gaze again. ‘Did you die? Someone told me he saw your body fall into the pit at the churchyard in Deptford.’
‘I am glad you came, Will. I was not at first, but now I am.’
I was not going to let my questions rest. ‘Were you thrown into a pauper’s grave?’
The bell struck for the sixth time, the seventh time, the eighth. He stared up at it, then his eyes slid down to mine. ‘Aye. I did. Aye, I was.’
It was an answer as strange as could be, yet the one I had expected. ‘And how stand you here?’
‘How stand I here… Yes, that is the mystery, is it not?’
I felt cool, not hot, as if we spoke of the latest play on the stage. ‘It is so.’
‘But you saw me before. As you sailed to Aemsterdam.’
‘It was you on the boat that passed mine.’
‘It was.’
‘You were laughing like a lunatic.’
‘Why would I not, after what I had come through?’ The wind whistled around us. For the twelfth time, the bell chimed. ‘Look at all the houses, Will.’ He gestured to the great merchant homes around the square – the greatest houses of the richest city in Europe. ‘Look at all the people in them. They walk and they talk as if they know their own lives. They know nothing. They know not one tenth of what is coming.’
‘And what is that?’ His riddles were becoming stale. Now I wanted answers.
‘When I left you that page in London to set you on the path, it was because I thought that death would be the end, and you would come to avenge me.’
‘What changed?’
‘Why, I did not realize the power that Leon has.’ He sat on a long mound of earth that marked the grave of a burgher long since departed.
‘Tell me what is coming against us,’ I demanded.
He looked to the tower, where the chimes of midnight had come and gone. ‘Words have limits. They can convey only the conceits of men. What is coming needs more.’
‘Tell me of the Catholics’ plot!’
‘The Catholics?’ He stared at me as if I were mad. ‘Fuck the Catholics! Come with me, and I will show you real power.’
* * *
We ran through the night, retracing our path along the canal, through the light thrown by the late carousers, to the lonely and hard-faced city wall.
‘Whitgift sent you to spy upon the Catholics, did he not?’ I asked, confusion wracking my brains.
‘He did.’
‘Did you betray him?’
‘Not with intention.’
‘Explain.’
‘I found something else. Something far greater.’
‘What?’
‘Beyond this door, all your questions will find their answers,’ Kit said, his breath quick and shallow.
My heart was beating hard in my chest and my ears. ‘Leon of Prague?’
‘He is there.’
‘He will tell me of the Two Houses?’
He hesitated. ‘If he believes you to be worthy of the knowledge. It is not for everyone.’ He could tell from my look that I felt some insult. ‘No, no, it is not a matter of raw cunning. Nor of subtlety of thought – your brain is as subtle as any man’s. It is… spirit. Some have the right animation, some have not.’
‘It is a question of moral being?’ I said, the affront returning.
‘No, nor that. You are a good man, Will.’ And he looked at me sidelong. ‘Perhaps even too good.’
‘Too—’ I started. But his hand reached out and grabbed my arm, and he put a finger to his lips. I harkened hard. There was the muffled sound of whispers, all coming from behind the iron door set into the wall.
We stepped close and put our ears to the metal. It was frosty. ‘It is always cold down there,’ Kit said, knowing my thoughts without my mouthing them.
The conspiracy of whispering seemed to grow. I made out a few words: ‘the tablets’, ‘reborn’, ‘Jerusalem’, ‘he comes!’ The last was uttered with a breath caught in the throat, as if the speaker had been grabbed.
Kit drew a dagger from his doublet. At that sign, I reached for my own, but he stayed my hand. ‘No, there may be danger, but it comes not now.’ And he used his knife only to tap thrice, then once, then thrice again on the metal, making it ring like the bell we had heard minutes earlier. Minutes that felt like hours. Oh, time can spread and shrink as it sees fit, and we must wear it.
‘Wie is daar?’ hissed a woman’s voice from the other side.
‘De Engelsman.’
More hissing on the other side, as if a coterie of snakes had turned sentry. I heard ‘De Engelsman’ repeated, as if the serpent was considering these syllables.
We waited. Kit looked less certain now, as if he had calculated ill. I glanced at the poniard in his hand.
Then a steel clang resounded like a cannon, signalling a heavy bolt drawn back. And another. A squeal as the door swung on hinges that had seen no oil for a century, if seemings were true. Before us stood a woman holding a beeswax candle that lit hair as white as a blizzard and lips red as cherries.
She stood in a stone passage that ran within the thickness of the walls, though the glow from the candle dimmed within a yard or two and left only blackness beyond. Still, I could see that the floor sloped downwards, as if angling into the ground. There was a smell of wet earth.
Whomsoever she had been speaking to was concealed within the gloom.
‘Madame Jaune,’ Kit said.
‘You return. We did not think you would.’ Her accent was from France. She turned her sight upon me.
‘Will is to be trusted.’
She stepped forward, her gaze drilling into my flesh and bones. ‘He is not for us. Take him hence.’
I knew not what I was being refused, and yet I knew I desired it. I was seeing fragments of the truth and wanted to see all.
‘Madame Jaune,’ I said, ‘I am a man of honour. All that I see I shall keep within my bosom.’
She snorted. ‘You shall?’ And she hissed, ‘If you were to gain entry and see what we have, you would scream it in every marketplace.’
‘I shall—’
‘Silence,’ she uttered. ‘I choose who may join us.’
‘No,’ declared Kit. ‘It is for Leon to choose. None other may do so.’
She tilted her head to peer at him. ‘You say so?’
‘I do.’
She paused in thought, then smiled sweetly as a girl. ‘Then you may plead before him.’
And she stood back to give us entry. The triumph I felt was undercut with trepidation.
Kit walked first into the passage, and I followed, a moment later hearing the woman slam the door closed, sealing us within the tomb. I could see far enough before me to walk and no more. ‘You must trust the path if you are to join us,’ she said, and I could hear the satire in her voice.
The candle illuminated walls of heavy grey stone blocks, their surfaces glistening with water that dripped down to soften the earth under our feet as I followed Kit.
The decline was steep, and every few paces there would be a step down, too, so that we seemed to be treading into the very bowels of Aemsterdam. After thirty yards, I thought we must have been well below the ground. The walls began to run with water, and the smell of the river began to take over. From time to time, I heard footsteps before us but never saw the walkers.
Another twenty paces and the passage took a sharp turn to the left. Then the floor and ceiling became stone, too, as if we were walking through a church nave, until before us there was the glow of more candles through a wooden doorway, whose lintel was carved with a motif of three circles, one within the other.
‘Are you certain?’ the woman asked me in a whisper.
I snorted in derision. I had had enough of her theatrics and strode through the doorway.
I found that we were in the cellar of a large house – no, an inn, because there were barrels stacked in a corner. It was all lit by rings of candles in glass bottles set around the edge of the room to make the room ripple like a dream. Another doorway was set into the opposite wall.
There were people there standing, talking quietly among themselves. Four or five dozen of them, I should say, and from their clothing they were drawn from every walk of the city: rich and poor, young and old. There was a child of twelve and a man of ancient years leaning on a wheeled frame of wood, all mixed without class or caste. At our entry, they stopped to stare at us.
‘Een vriend van de Engelsman,’ Madame Jaune informed them. One or two mumbled to their neighbours.
‘A friend of the Englishman?’ The voice was deep as the sea, and I looked hard to see whence it had come.
The people parted. In that dank cellar, I had found what I had sought, almost at the cost of my own life. For sitting quite still on a chair of brilliant ivory carved like the spires of a great cathedral church, behind an equally ornate ivory table, was a bear of a man. He was dressed in black furs, and a grey beard that flowed to his chest added to his ursine look so strongly that if he had roared and shown claws, I should have counted it natural.
‘Leon of Prague,’ I said.
He swept his gaze around the room, bringing everyone into his being. ‘I have that name. I have others.’ His tongue had the sound of a German to me.
‘By which should I address you?’
The corner of his mouth turned up a little, as if amusement had been sparked. ‘In my own country, they call me Rabbi Loew. In your language, Loew means “lion”. Hence Leon.’
‘I understand.’
‘You understand no more than a mouse.’ He pushed himself from his chair. ‘No more than a mouse.’ In common days, it would have seemed an insult, but I felt it only as a setting down of a fact.
‘My friend Kit told me I would see some acts of power here.’
‘Power?’ His back was to me as he walked through his acolytes. ‘Power is the beggar neighbour of thought.’ He said it as if sad that it had befallen him to instruct me. ‘It flows not from me. It flows from Ein Sof.’ I knew not that name but hazarded that we were speaking of God Almighty. And as he walked on, I noticed a face among the congregants that I had seen before: the maid who sold oranges at the Weighing House, the one who had wound out the thread that I had followed to this place. She had said her deceased father had attended the church; and she now looked worried, perhaps that I should prove a spy or unfriendly and the guilt would be upon her. ‘What brought you here?’
The answer sounded like the most absurd jest. ‘I came because I believed my friend was murdered. I know now that he was never dead.’
At that, he stopped and turned square to me. ‘Oh, but he was. He was dead. And buried, too.’
And I knew in my stomach that he spoke not in poetic fiction, but in plain language.
For a second, I reached for the right words, the right question. ‘But he stands behind me now.’
‘That, too, is true.’
‘Yet both cannot be the case. One must be false.’
Kit, moving to my side, spoke. ‘You must take my word for it, Will. I was dead, and yet here I am walking.’ And he did a slow little jig on the spot, both to prove and poke fun. ‘I told you there was more power here than have all the Catholics of Rome.’
At that, Leon of Prague knelt to the floor. And all around him followed. Only I remained standing. But they were not kneeling to me, for the man of Bohemia had seized an iron ring set in the floor. He lifted away a thin stone to reveal a small chamber below. Dark water rippled within.
I started forward, but he raised his hand to back me away and reached down into the hole. I saw the fur on his sleeves become wet. And when they lifted out, they held ten or twelve large black stone tablets, broken at the edges, as thin as writing slates. I made out that they were inscribed on both sides in an alphabet that I did not recognize. Leon stood, mirrored by all those around him, and carried the tablets to the ivory table, setting them down with all the reverence that the Jews afford their holy scrolls. He whispered a prayer to himself as he did.
‘Do you believe yourself a good man?’ he asked.
‘Does not everyone?’ I thought it a sharp answer.
‘Oh, but no. That is a common falsity. Many men know they are not of the righteous. Many delight in it.’
He was right, of course. I wrote for the stage so often of wicked personae that I had quite forgot such men walked outside theatres as well. ‘I believe myself good.’
‘Do you wish the best for men?’
My mind went to my children, as a father’s will. ‘And for women, too.’
There was the shadow of a smile.
He raised his hand to the woman, Madame Jaune, who went to the door behind him and spoke a few words to someone I could not see. She returned with a large plain leather satchel in her hand, and in her wake staggered two young men bearing a heavy burden. It was a bier, laden with the body of a man. I knew him not but saw by the weeping of the orange seller that this was her father whom she had said had died so recently.
He was lain down to the ground, his funeral processionaries retreating in deference. Leon went to the pit of water as the woman handed him the satchel. He unfastened it and took a glass vial from within, which he used to scoop some of the water from the well.
Then he went to the body of the man and poured the water across his flesh. This was repeated six more times. Finally, from the satchel he took a large package, wrapped in paper and twine, and opened it. Within was a large ball of deep grey clay, which I found quite the most unexpected sight.
Leon closed his eyes and muttered what I took to be a silent prayer of blessing. When they opened again, he took a large pat of the clay in his hands, working it soft and smearing it all over the man laid before him. It was a funereal rite that I had never seen before nor could recall from any Gospel, but it perhaps made sense to those who had studied the ancient Israelites. All the while, the other denizens of that room made not a sound. They could have halted breathing for all the noise they made.
After covering the body in a thin layer of the clay, Leon took a pen and a short slip of parchment from the bag. From where I stood, I saw him write a few letters of Hebrew – a language that I cannot read – on the paper. With another prayer, the note was pushed into the man’s mouth. Was it so that the dead man would have a prayer on his lips as he was judged by the Almighty? Next, Leon dipped his finger in the water and drew it through the clay on the man to form more Israelite letters, before reaching for the last time into the satchel to take out a vial of liquid of the lightest blue appearance. He unstoppered it, spread a little on his lips and then bent to the man before him. He touched his lips to the other’s and lifted away, pouring the rest of the bottle into the man’s mouth, wetting the paper with the writing upon it.
At that, everyone in the room muttered a low prayer, and Leon slowly returned to his ivory chair.
We waited in silence for him to speak.
‘Have you heard the parable of the Two Houses alike in dignity?’
At last, one of the mysteries I had not delved was being laid before me.
‘No.’
He gazed skyward, as if recalling a sight he had seen. ‘In old Israel, there was a house in a river valley. It had two sons. One day, the father of the house became ill and died, his wife having passed over some years before. When the sons looked in their father’s strongbox, they found it empty. The elder son, having reached the age of a man, set forth to create his own life. He swam across the river, for it was summer and the water was slow. On the other side of the valley, he built his own house. But his younger brother was incensed, saying, “Why have you left our parents’ home? It is not just.” The elder son replied in anger, “It was my calling. No more, no less.”
It came from further away now, muffled by distance and perhaps by walls and buildings.
I started towards it at high pace, throwing the caution of the night down a well. ‘Jalid! I am coming for you!’ I hissed.
‘Will!’ And it was further away again, but this time accompanied by the sound of boots running on the earth and stones back towards the Old Church.
I gave chase, charging along the edge of the canal, past the great basilica of St Nicholas, quiet as the grave now that the monks had been driven to Rome. The wind whistling through its bell tower seemed to repeat their old names, their old psalter chants and liturgies.
And then I caught sight of my quarry for the first time. There was a great barge moored on the canal, with the navigators sitting on its roof carousing with flaming torches and a shoal of empty bottles in the water around it. He leapt through the yellow pool of light, showing me only the soles of his shoes. The navigators cheered at his escape.
I ran after, my lungs fit to burst. I could see the great church itself a hundred yards beyond, its coloured windows lit as if with a service, though what service would take place at the witching hour defied my knowledge.
Another shaft of light, this one from a tall merchant’s house, wherein the master must have been counting his guilders late.
Then my game bird was vaulting over the low railings surrounding the church’s boneyard and dashing between the headstones. I pursued him still, keeping pace, until of a sudden I realized I had lost sight of him. I turned this way and that, but to my anger all I could see were the stones of a thousand dead. I cursed and kicked one.
‘Will.’
It was spoken soft, as to a lover.
I turned my head. And there, in a patch of blue-and-gold light from the tall stained-glass windows of the Old Church, leaning upon a grave as if it were a Whitsun afternoon, he stood. And the face that greeted me was that of Kit Marlowe. A dead man up and walking.
‘Hello, Will,’ he said with the lightest crooked smile. ‘Are you surprised?’
And I will tell you that no, I was not. For there was a spirit who walked with Kit in all his days. And that spirit was the Devil himself.
The bell in the great church tower above us struck.
‘Did you die, Kit?’ I asked. For if he had told me then that he had never even been born, it would have been as simple to believe.
He laughed.
‘I see you read my message in chalk.’
‘I thought it was from Jalid.’ He glanced at the chiming bell, then met my gaze again. ‘Did you die? Someone told me he saw your body fall into the pit at the churchyard in Deptford.’
‘I am glad you came, Will. I was not at first, but now I am.’
I was not going to let my questions rest. ‘Were you thrown into a pauper’s grave?’
The bell struck for the sixth time, the seventh time, the eighth. He stared up at it, then his eyes slid down to mine. ‘Aye. I did. Aye, I was.’
It was an answer as strange as could be, yet the one I had expected. ‘And how stand you here?’
‘How stand I here… Yes, that is the mystery, is it not?’
I felt cool, not hot, as if we spoke of the latest play on the stage. ‘It is so.’
‘But you saw me before. As you sailed to Aemsterdam.’
‘It was you on the boat that passed mine.’
‘It was.’
‘You were laughing like a lunatic.’
‘Why would I not, after what I had come through?’ The wind whistled around us. For the twelfth time, the bell chimed. ‘Look at all the houses, Will.’ He gestured to the great merchant homes around the square – the greatest houses of the richest city in Europe. ‘Look at all the people in them. They walk and they talk as if they know their own lives. They know nothing. They know not one tenth of what is coming.’
‘And what is that?’ His riddles were becoming stale. Now I wanted answers.
‘When I left you that page in London to set you on the path, it was because I thought that death would be the end, and you would come to avenge me.’
‘What changed?’
‘Why, I did not realize the power that Leon has.’ He sat on a long mound of earth that marked the grave of a burgher long since departed.
‘Tell me what is coming against us,’ I demanded.
He looked to the tower, where the chimes of midnight had come and gone. ‘Words have limits. They can convey only the conceits of men. What is coming needs more.’
‘Tell me of the Catholics’ plot!’
‘The Catholics?’ He stared at me as if I were mad. ‘Fuck the Catholics! Come with me, and I will show you real power.’
* * *
We ran through the night, retracing our path along the canal, through the light thrown by the late carousers, to the lonely and hard-faced city wall.
‘Whitgift sent you to spy upon the Catholics, did he not?’ I asked, confusion wracking my brains.
‘He did.’
‘Did you betray him?’
‘Not with intention.’
‘Explain.’
‘I found something else. Something far greater.’
‘What?’
‘Beyond this door, all your questions will find their answers,’ Kit said, his breath quick and shallow.
My heart was beating hard in my chest and my ears. ‘Leon of Prague?’
‘He is there.’
‘He will tell me of the Two Houses?’
He hesitated. ‘If he believes you to be worthy of the knowledge. It is not for everyone.’ He could tell from my look that I felt some insult. ‘No, no, it is not a matter of raw cunning. Nor of subtlety of thought – your brain is as subtle as any man’s. It is… spirit. Some have the right animation, some have not.’
‘It is a question of moral being?’ I said, the affront returning.
‘No, nor that. You are a good man, Will.’ And he looked at me sidelong. ‘Perhaps even too good.’
‘Too—’ I started. But his hand reached out and grabbed my arm, and he put a finger to his lips. I harkened hard. There was the muffled sound of whispers, all coming from behind the iron door set into the wall.
We stepped close and put our ears to the metal. It was frosty. ‘It is always cold down there,’ Kit said, knowing my thoughts without my mouthing them.
The conspiracy of whispering seemed to grow. I made out a few words: ‘the tablets’, ‘reborn’, ‘Jerusalem’, ‘he comes!’ The last was uttered with a breath caught in the throat, as if the speaker had been grabbed.
Kit drew a dagger from his doublet. At that sign, I reached for my own, but he stayed my hand. ‘No, there may be danger, but it comes not now.’ And he used his knife only to tap thrice, then once, then thrice again on the metal, making it ring like the bell we had heard minutes earlier. Minutes that felt like hours. Oh, time can spread and shrink as it sees fit, and we must wear it.
‘Wie is daar?’ hissed a woman’s voice from the other side.
‘De Engelsman.’
More hissing on the other side, as if a coterie of snakes had turned sentry. I heard ‘De Engelsman’ repeated, as if the serpent was considering these syllables.
We waited. Kit looked less certain now, as if he had calculated ill. I glanced at the poniard in his hand.
Then a steel clang resounded like a cannon, signalling a heavy bolt drawn back. And another. A squeal as the door swung on hinges that had seen no oil for a century, if seemings were true. Before us stood a woman holding a beeswax candle that lit hair as white as a blizzard and lips red as cherries.
She stood in a stone passage that ran within the thickness of the walls, though the glow from the candle dimmed within a yard or two and left only blackness beyond. Still, I could see that the floor sloped downwards, as if angling into the ground. There was a smell of wet earth.
Whomsoever she had been speaking to was concealed within the gloom.
‘Madame Jaune,’ Kit said.
‘You return. We did not think you would.’ Her accent was from France. She turned her sight upon me.
‘Will is to be trusted.’
She stepped forward, her gaze drilling into my flesh and bones. ‘He is not for us. Take him hence.’
I knew not what I was being refused, and yet I knew I desired it. I was seeing fragments of the truth and wanted to see all.
‘Madame Jaune,’ I said, ‘I am a man of honour. All that I see I shall keep within my bosom.’
She snorted. ‘You shall?’ And she hissed, ‘If you were to gain entry and see what we have, you would scream it in every marketplace.’
‘I shall—’
‘Silence,’ she uttered. ‘I choose who may join us.’
‘No,’ declared Kit. ‘It is for Leon to choose. None other may do so.’
She tilted her head to peer at him. ‘You say so?’
‘I do.’
She paused in thought, then smiled sweetly as a girl. ‘Then you may plead before him.’
And she stood back to give us entry. The triumph I felt was undercut with trepidation.
Kit walked first into the passage, and I followed, a moment later hearing the woman slam the door closed, sealing us within the tomb. I could see far enough before me to walk and no more. ‘You must trust the path if you are to join us,’ she said, and I could hear the satire in her voice.
The candle illuminated walls of heavy grey stone blocks, their surfaces glistening with water that dripped down to soften the earth under our feet as I followed Kit.
The decline was steep, and every few paces there would be a step down, too, so that we seemed to be treading into the very bowels of Aemsterdam. After thirty yards, I thought we must have been well below the ground. The walls began to run with water, and the smell of the river began to take over. From time to time, I heard footsteps before us but never saw the walkers.
Another twenty paces and the passage took a sharp turn to the left. Then the floor and ceiling became stone, too, as if we were walking through a church nave, until before us there was the glow of more candles through a wooden doorway, whose lintel was carved with a motif of three circles, one within the other.
‘Are you certain?’ the woman asked me in a whisper.
I snorted in derision. I had had enough of her theatrics and strode through the doorway.
I found that we were in the cellar of a large house – no, an inn, because there were barrels stacked in a corner. It was all lit by rings of candles in glass bottles set around the edge of the room to make the room ripple like a dream. Another doorway was set into the opposite wall.
There were people there standing, talking quietly among themselves. Four or five dozen of them, I should say, and from their clothing they were drawn from every walk of the city: rich and poor, young and old. There was a child of twelve and a man of ancient years leaning on a wheeled frame of wood, all mixed without class or caste. At our entry, they stopped to stare at us.
‘Een vriend van de Engelsman,’ Madame Jaune informed them. One or two mumbled to their neighbours.
‘A friend of the Englishman?’ The voice was deep as the sea, and I looked hard to see whence it had come.
The people parted. In that dank cellar, I had found what I had sought, almost at the cost of my own life. For sitting quite still on a chair of brilliant ivory carved like the spires of a great cathedral church, behind an equally ornate ivory table, was a bear of a man. He was dressed in black furs, and a grey beard that flowed to his chest added to his ursine look so strongly that if he had roared and shown claws, I should have counted it natural.
‘Leon of Prague,’ I said.
He swept his gaze around the room, bringing everyone into his being. ‘I have that name. I have others.’ His tongue had the sound of a German to me.
‘By which should I address you?’
The corner of his mouth turned up a little, as if amusement had been sparked. ‘In my own country, they call me Rabbi Loew. In your language, Loew means “lion”. Hence Leon.’
‘I understand.’
‘You understand no more than a mouse.’ He pushed himself from his chair. ‘No more than a mouse.’ In common days, it would have seemed an insult, but I felt it only as a setting down of a fact.
‘My friend Kit told me I would see some acts of power here.’
‘Power?’ His back was to me as he walked through his acolytes. ‘Power is the beggar neighbour of thought.’ He said it as if sad that it had befallen him to instruct me. ‘It flows not from me. It flows from Ein Sof.’ I knew not that name but hazarded that we were speaking of God Almighty. And as he walked on, I noticed a face among the congregants that I had seen before: the maid who sold oranges at the Weighing House, the one who had wound out the thread that I had followed to this place. She had said her deceased father had attended the church; and she now looked worried, perhaps that I should prove a spy or unfriendly and the guilt would be upon her. ‘What brought you here?’
The answer sounded like the most absurd jest. ‘I came because I believed my friend was murdered. I know now that he was never dead.’
At that, he stopped and turned square to me. ‘Oh, but he was. He was dead. And buried, too.’
And I knew in my stomach that he spoke not in poetic fiction, but in plain language.
For a second, I reached for the right words, the right question. ‘But he stands behind me now.’
‘That, too, is true.’
‘Yet both cannot be the case. One must be false.’
Kit, moving to my side, spoke. ‘You must take my word for it, Will. I was dead, and yet here I am walking.’ And he did a slow little jig on the spot, both to prove and poke fun. ‘I told you there was more power here than have all the Catholics of Rome.’
At that, Leon of Prague knelt to the floor. And all around him followed. Only I remained standing. But they were not kneeling to me, for the man of Bohemia had seized an iron ring set in the floor. He lifted away a thin stone to reveal a small chamber below. Dark water rippled within.
I started forward, but he raised his hand to back me away and reached down into the hole. I saw the fur on his sleeves become wet. And when they lifted out, they held ten or twelve large black stone tablets, broken at the edges, as thin as writing slates. I made out that they were inscribed on both sides in an alphabet that I did not recognize. Leon stood, mirrored by all those around him, and carried the tablets to the ivory table, setting them down with all the reverence that the Jews afford their holy scrolls. He whispered a prayer to himself as he did.
‘Do you believe yourself a good man?’ he asked.
‘Does not everyone?’ I thought it a sharp answer.
‘Oh, but no. That is a common falsity. Many men know they are not of the righteous. Many delight in it.’
He was right, of course. I wrote for the stage so often of wicked personae that I had quite forgot such men walked outside theatres as well. ‘I believe myself good.’
‘Do you wish the best for men?’
My mind went to my children, as a father’s will. ‘And for women, too.’
There was the shadow of a smile.
He raised his hand to the woman, Madame Jaune, who went to the door behind him and spoke a few words to someone I could not see. She returned with a large plain leather satchel in her hand, and in her wake staggered two young men bearing a heavy burden. It was a bier, laden with the body of a man. I knew him not but saw by the weeping of the orange seller that this was her father whom she had said had died so recently.
He was lain down to the ground, his funeral processionaries retreating in deference. Leon went to the pit of water as the woman handed him the satchel. He unfastened it and took a glass vial from within, which he used to scoop some of the water from the well.
Then he went to the body of the man and poured the water across his flesh. This was repeated six more times. Finally, from the satchel he took a large package, wrapped in paper and twine, and opened it. Within was a large ball of deep grey clay, which I found quite the most unexpected sight.
Leon closed his eyes and muttered what I took to be a silent prayer of blessing. When they opened again, he took a large pat of the clay in his hands, working it soft and smearing it all over the man laid before him. It was a funereal rite that I had never seen before nor could recall from any Gospel, but it perhaps made sense to those who had studied the ancient Israelites. All the while, the other denizens of that room made not a sound. They could have halted breathing for all the noise they made.
After covering the body in a thin layer of the clay, Leon took a pen and a short slip of parchment from the bag. From where I stood, I saw him write a few letters of Hebrew – a language that I cannot read – on the paper. With another prayer, the note was pushed into the man’s mouth. Was it so that the dead man would have a prayer on his lips as he was judged by the Almighty? Next, Leon dipped his finger in the water and drew it through the clay on the man to form more Israelite letters, before reaching for the last time into the satchel to take out a vial of liquid of the lightest blue appearance. He unstoppered it, spread a little on his lips and then bent to the man before him. He touched his lips to the other’s and lifted away, pouring the rest of the bottle into the man’s mouth, wetting the paper with the writing upon it.
At that, everyone in the room muttered a low prayer, and Leon slowly returned to his ivory chair.
We waited in silence for him to speak.
‘Have you heard the parable of the Two Houses alike in dignity?’
At last, one of the mysteries I had not delved was being laid before me.
‘No.’
He gazed skyward, as if recalling a sight he had seen. ‘In old Israel, there was a house in a river valley. It had two sons. One day, the father of the house became ill and died, his wife having passed over some years before. When the sons looked in their father’s strongbox, they found it empty. The elder son, having reached the age of a man, set forth to create his own life. He swam across the river, for it was summer and the water was slow. On the other side of the valley, he built his own house. But his younger brother was incensed, saying, “Why have you left our parents’ home? It is not just.” The elder son replied in anger, “It was my calling. No more, no less.”
