‘Then there are the cards. They’re so strange. None of the animals look happy. As for the people…’ She turned to another plate in the book. Five miniature people danced and strutted across the page, though the closer Nick looked the less human they seemed. Some were as hairy as animals; on others, the skin seemed to hang off them like leaves. They blew horns, aimed arrows, swung cudgels. One strummed a lute, a fool oblivious to the mayhem around him.
‘This is the fifth suit, wild men. There’s something so unsettling about them.’ She gave a sad laugh. ‘Now you probably think I’m crazy.’
‘No.’ Nick touched her arm to reassure her and immediately wished he hadn’t. She shied away like a frightened bird, hugging her arms across her chest.
‘Sorry.’ He wished he hadn’t said that either. It made him sound guilty.
She got to her feet, smoothing her skirt behind her. Her face was almost lost behind her high collar. ‘I should go.’
Nick stood, keeping an awkward distance. ‘Be careful. I’m really grateful for your advice, but I might not be the guy you want to help right now.’
XVI
Basle, 1432-3
My father once said there is no change a man cannot get used to given a fortnight. Not in his soul, perhaps, but in his actions and routines, his choices and expectations. The first night of my journey with Aeneas, I slept on the floor of the inn and ate only bread. Midway through the second night, I crawled into the common bed and wrapped myself in a corner of a blanket. On the third night, I ate as much as any other man in the tavern, drank my fill and thought nothing of sleeping on straw rather than earth. Aeneas paid a barber to cut my hair and my beard, and that alone shaved ten years from my face. An hour’s scrubbing in a bathhouse removed another five.
‘Although,’ Aeneas told me, ‘you should certainly seek out the Holy Baths in Basle. They think nothing there of men and women bathing together quite promiscuously. The sights you see…’ He made an obscene gesture with his hand; I tried not to shudder. Some memories take more than a fortnight to heal.
By the time we reached Basle I was a new man. I had a new pair of boots, a new hat and a tunic that Aeneas had bought for three pennies from a French merchant. Even so, the city terrified me. It reminded me of Mainz: a rich town by the Rhine, a city of tall houses and high towers whose weathercocks and crosses sparkled like dew in the dawn sun. A ring of stout walls circled it, beyond which its tributary villages stretched almost unbroken in every direction.
The city was crammed to its rooftops with men there for the council, but Aeneas’ silver tongue soon found me lodgings in a monastery. He took me there, then excused himself – having been away for two months, he had much to learn and report to his masters. I lay on my pallet shivering, feeling abandoned in that strange city; I thought I must run down to the river and leap on the first barge that would carry me back to my hut in the forest. But the terror passed, I slept, and the next morning Aeneas bounded in, beaming with excitement.
‘A splendid opportunity,’ he enthused. ‘A countryman of yours, a most remarkable man. His secretary has just eloped with a girl from the bathhouse.’ He winked. ‘I told you they were promiscuous. But he is a prolific thinker: if he does not find a scribe to tap his words soon they will flood his mind until it bursts. I saw him this morning – no sooner had I mentioned your name than he told me to fetch you without a moment’s delay.’
One of Aeneas’ most appealing traits, then, was his utter lack of inhibition. He had as fine an instinct for politics as any man I ever knew, but he could praise others with unthinking generosity. I had no doubt that in his description I had become the greatest scribe since St Paul. I only feared that I could not possibly satisfy my prospective employer if he believed even half of what Aeneas said.
The man in question inhabited a small room on the upper level of a whitewashed courtyard at the house of the Augustinians. Aeneas did not wait for an answer to his knock, but pushed straight through. I followed more tentatively.
There was little in the room except a bed and a desk. The desk was the larger. Two candlesticks gave it the appearance of a sacred altar. Sheaves of paper covered every inch of its surface, weighted down with anything that came to hand: a penknife, a candle end, a Bible, even a brown apple core. There were three inkpots for red, black and blue ink, a selection of reed and goose-quill pens, a bull’s-eye glass for magnification and a half-drunk cup of wine with a dead fly in it. Stacks of books surrounded the desk like ramparts – more than I had ever seen in one room. And behind it, the lord of this paper kingdom, the man we had come to see.
He barely seemed to notice us, but stared at an icon of Christ that hung on a nail on the wall. His eyes were pale blue and pure as water. There was something ageless about him, though in the course of my employment I learned he was actually a few months younger than me. His head was shaved bare, revealing an angular skull whose bones seemed to press out against the skin. I remembered Aeneas’ joke about his mind bursting with words, and wondered if it might be true. Ink stained the white sleeves of his cassock, though his hands were surprisingly clean.
Aeneas did not wait. ‘This is Johann who I told you about. Johann, it is my honour to introduce Nicholas Cusanus.’
I gave a small bow and steeled myself for the inevitable questions about my past.
‘Can you write?’
‘He knows Latin better than Cicero,’ Aeneas insisted. ‘Do you know the first thing he said to me after he fished me out of the river? He said-’
‘Take a pen and write what I dictate.’ Nicholas pushed back his chair and stood. Barely looking, he picked up the cup and sipped it. I did not see whether he drank the fly. I took his chair, sharpened one of the pens with the knife and then made a clean cut in the point. My hands were shaking so much I almost sliced it in half.
Nicholas walked around the desk and stood with his back to me, still contemplating the icon.
‘Because God is perfect form, in which all differences are united and all contradictions are reconciled, it is impossible for a diversity of forms to exist in him.’
He waited while I wrote. There was something profound in his silence which hushed even Aeneas. The only sound in the room was the scratch of my pen. My cheeks pricked with sweat as I tried to remember how to form the words. I had barely picked up a pen in ten years. As for remembering what he had actually said, I felt as if I was stumbling blind. Absolute. The words hemmed me in like a fog.
The instant I put down my pen Nicholas spun around and picked up the paper.
‘Because God is perfectly form in which all differences are different and all contradictions united, it is impossible for him to exist.’ He threw the paper aside. ‘Do you know what my words mean?’
I shook my head. I felt hot: all I wanted was to be back in the river, feeling the cold current close over me.
‘It means that God is the unity of all things. Therefore there can be no diversity in God – and certainly no diversity when we write about God. Diversity leads to error, and error to sin.’ He turned to Aeneas. ‘I need a man who can record my words as if my tongue itself was writing on the page.’
Aeneas looked crestfallen. But he was not a man to abandon his enthusiasm so easily. ‘There are saints in heaven who would struggle to grasp your words. Johann is out of practice and overawed by your intellect. Let him try again.’
Nicholas turned back to face the icon. Without even waiting to see if I was ready, he began: