Jacob thought for a while. “Who would doubt the words of an archangel?” he said. “But I still don’t see what you’re getting at.”
“The truth. The archangel told the man the other would kill him. He didn’t say the other intended to kill him. But the first man took what he thought was the truth as the truth. Looked at in this light, it was his misinterpretation of the archangel’s prophecy, that is something that was not the truth, that led to it being fulfilled, that is the truth. If, on the other hand, he had ignored the warning, then nothing would have happened. But in that case the archangel would have lied, which, as you quite rightly point out, is de facto impossible. Leaving us with a dilemma. Do you follow me so far?”
“I—I’m trying. Yes, I think so.”
“Good,” said Jaspar. “So where is the truth in the story?”
Jacob thought. Hard. It was like a fairground inside his head. Stalls being opened, music blaring, peasants dancing across the floor with thunderous steps, bawling and shouting.
“So?” asked Jaspar.
“The archangel alone is in possession of the truth,” Jacob declared.
“Is he? Did he tell the truth, then?”
“Of course. What he said came true.”
“Only because the man didn’t understand the truth. But if he didn’t understand it, then the archangel may well have intended the truth, but he didn’t tell the truth.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Exactly. Every divine prophecy is clear, or are we to assume an archangel lacks the intellectual capacity to communicate with an ordinary mortal?”
“Perhaps the archangel intended the man to misunderstand?” Jacob proposed hesitantly.
“Possible. But then he would have told a deliberate lie to provoke the misunderstanding. Where does that leave the truth?”
“Just a minute,” Jacob exclaimed. The fairground inside his head was threatening to degenerate into complete pandemonium. “The truth is that the archangel told the truth. The man was hit over the head and killed.”
“But you’ve just said yourself he was killed because the archangel told a deliberate lie.”
Jacob slumped back down. “Oh, yes,” he admitted sheepishly.
“But an archangel always tells the truth, yes?”
“I—”
“So where is it, this truth?”
“Couldn’t we talk about something else?”
“No.”
“The truth is nowhere in your story, dammit.”
“Really?”
“I don’t know. Why are you telling me all this?”
Jaspar smiled. “Because you are like the man the archangel appeared to. You judge by appearances as well. You don’t think. It’s possible you might have told the truth, and everything happened as you said. But can you be sure?”
Jacob was silent for a long time. “Tell me where the truth is,” he begged.
“The truth? It’s simple. There was no archangel. The man imagined it. That solves our dilemma.”
Jacob stared at him, openmouthed. “A bloody clever conjuring trick.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it. Does that mean I dreamed it all, too?”
Jaspar shrugged his shoulders. “Who knows. You see how difficult it is to get at the truth. To see the truth, you must first doubt it. Put another way, in a desperate situation you have two alternatives. Headlong flight, as so far—”
“Or?”
“Or you use your head.” Jaspar stood up. “But do not forget,” he said, a severe expression on his face, “that I still have no proof that you’re really telling the truth.” Then a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “But I like you. At least I’m willing to try to find out. In the meantime you can stay here. Just think of yourself as my servant. And now you’d better get a few hours’ sleep. You look a little pale about the gills.”
Jacob let out a slow breath. “How did you mean that?”
“What?”
“That about using my head. What do you think I should do instead of running away?”
Jaspar spread his hands out. “Isn’t it obvious? Go on the attack.”
MEMENTO MORI
Matthias stood by the bier with Gerhard’s body, immersed in his memories.
He had gotten on well with the architect. Not that they had been quite what you would call friends. Matthias would not have sacrificed a friend. That would have been impossible anyway since, basically, he had no friends. But there was a characteristic he had shared with Gerhard, an exceptional clarity of mind combined with the ability to plan months and years ahead. Too few people saw time as something to be planned. The mystics even denied its very existence because an ever-rolling stream of time made possible what they condemned as heresy: progress, poison to the minds of the logicians with their Roscelin of Compiègne, Peter Abelard, Roger Bacon, Anselm, and the like. Most people saw time as a gift from God, to be consumed rather than exploited, parceled up into lauds and vespers, prime, terce, sext and none, matins and compline, rising, eating, working, eating, sleeping.
Time seen as the stage for human activity prompted the question of what a man could achieve in the course of his allotted span, if anything. The mystic’s concept of stasis was countered by the ideas of beginning and completion. But to complete something you had to live long enough, and did man ever live long enough to complete the things he began? A question that brought cries of “Heresy!” and “Criticizing God!” from traditionalists. It was the lot of man to suffer in silence, not to create. When the mystics talked of a crusade, they meant a crusade against the humanists as well. Christendom was more and more splitting up into enemy camps and Gerhard Morart, whose ambition had been to create something impossible to complete, had been pulled this way and that.
Matthias found the argument interesting, too. Did not he also, as he built up the Overstolz empire, place one stone upon another? It was not without reason that one of the mocking names for merchants was “sellers of time.” It also expressed an undercurrent of unease. They certainly never stood still.
The two men had often discussed the relationship between idea and execution, whether the concept of a new cathedral was incomplete without its physical realization and whether it was important to see your ideas carried through to completion. It was in this latter point that their views diverged. Matthias’s rational approach, which, as he well knew, came from a lack of imagination, led to a single-minded pursuit of immediate profit. Gerhard, on the other hand, saw reason simply as the best method of giving ideas that were clearly impracticable a basis of probability. In the final analysis, Gerhard had been a passionate visionary, inspired with the idea of creating something completely new, of introducing a revolutionary style into architecture that would fill the massive, earthbound buildings of his time, dominated by stone and shade, with pure light, soaring, slender, sublime—and above all, with no restriction on size. There was to be nothing castlelike about his vision of the heavenly city, the new Jerusalem, where God sat in state with His angels. Castles were the home of the Devil.
That was indeed something new. But however much they respected and admired him, some of his fellow citizens felt Gerhard’s enjoyment of the role of creator was all too plain to see. It was hardly surprising that the simple folk began to assume he had magic powers and rumors spread that he had called up Satan in the dead of night. There were many among the mendicant orders in particular who would have liked to see him tried for heresy and burned at the stake, together with Conrad von Hochstaden and Albertus Magnus. Had not Joachim of Fiore, whom the Franciscans held in high regard, prophesied the dawn of a new age for 1260, the age of a truly poor church? Was that colossal monument to human pride being built in Cologne an expression of that poverty? For many, Joachim’s prophecy represented the absolute truth, therefore the new cathedral, that most ambitious of enterprises, could only be the work of the Devil.