Heretic Dawn (4 page)

This was a good-looking fellow, about thirty years of age, black of hair and of skin like a Saracen, with fiery eyes and a proud mien, and well spoken, it appeared.

We threw him down on the ground in the great hall of Mespech, and my father, standing over him, hands on hips, said with his usual jolly and playful manner, “Your name, you rascal!”

“Captain Bouillac, Monsieur,” the fellow answered proudly, his black eyes emitting sparks.

“Captain!” replied Jean de Siorac. “Some sort of captain you are!”

“At your service, Monsieur.”

“You serve me ill, villain! I intend to hang you.”

“Monsieur!” answered Bouillac without dropping his proud manner. “May I not buy my freedom?”

“What?” spat my father. “Take stolen money from a blackguard?”

“How now? All money is good when given,” returned Bouillac. “What’s more, this money’s honest wages. I was paid for my services.”

“I think,” said Sauveterre, stepping forward into the hall with a furled brow and his usual limp, causing all our people to give way to his dark humours, “I think we should hang this blackguard straightaway.”

“But wait!” replied my father. “None among us was killed or wounded.”

“I still think we should hang the bastard.”

“But wait! Bouillac, where did you get this money?”

“I’ll be glad to tell you, Monsieur, if you accept my offer.”

“You’ll tell all once I put you on the rack!” answered Sauveterre, his eyes burning with anger.

“True enough,” said Bouillac without losing his haughty demeanour, “but torture takes time and you’re very pressed for time. As for me, since I’m destined for the noose in any case, I have an eternity to kill!”

At this flash of wit, which was not without its salt, aftertaste or piquancy, my father broke out laughing in admiration of the bravery of this rascal, and very interested in what he still might learn from him.

“Bouillac,” said he, “let’s talk frankly. How much will you offer us for your life?”

“One hundred écus.”

We all fell silent and looked at each other, so struck were we that a highwayman should have such a hoard. But at the sound of these coins, Sauveterre changed his expression and said, with a cutting tone, “Two hundred.”

“For shame, Monsieur!” said Bouillac. “Bargaining with a beggar!”

“A good Huguenot always bargains!” laughed my father.

“Two hundred,” repeated Sauveterre.

“Oh, Monsieur, you’re strangling me!”

“Perhaps you’d prefer another kind of strangling!”

“Agreed! Agreed!” confessed Bouillac with a huge sigh. “My neck will have it no other way.”

“We have a bargain!” crowed my father. “But now we have a battle against time!”

“Monsieur, while we were preparing to kill your swine and burn your mill, Captain Belves’s band was heading to le Breuil to massacre your sheep.”

“By the belly of St Vitus!” cried my father. “I thought so! How many are they?”

“Seven, with Belves.”

“I thank you, Bouillac. I’m going to head off this attack.”

Rushing from the room, my father ordered Miroul, Faujanet, Petremol and the two Siorac brothers to saddle up immediately and gallop to help Cabusse, who luckily wasn’t alone since he had the Herculean Jonas with him and possibly Alazaïs as well, if she’d been able to reach the sheepfold, which I calculated she would have since she was a crafty wench.

“Bouillac,” said my father on re-entering the hall, “who paid for and planned all this?”

“A brigand who robs and steals without ever leaving the comfort of his chateau or dirtying his hands.”

“Fontenac?”

Bouillac nodded but said not a word, and my father well understood the reason for his reticence, merely looking Bouillac in the eye.

“Monsieur,” said the highwayman, “am I free to go?”

“Certainly, once your ransom’s paid.”

“I’m off to get it,” said Bouillac, “as long as you’ll return my horse to me, and my pistols, sword and dagger, which are the tools of my trade and without which I’m unable to exercise my particular talents.”

“I’m afraid not,” said Sauveterre. “We’ll release you unarmed. If you want your tools, it’ll cost you another fifty écus.”

“Ah, Monsieur,” returned Bouillac, “you’re feeding me poisoned fruit!”

“Fifty écus… or nothing,” ventured my father.

“Nothing?” said Bouillac, frowning.

“Nothing, on condition that you formally bear witness against Fontenac before Ricou, the magistrate.”

Bouillac fell silent and thought about this for several minutes before finally giving in. But little did his testimony matter in the long run, for ’twas in vain that the Brethren brought his evidence to the parliament in Bordeaux, since the papist judges were so inflamed against the Huguenots that nothing ever came of our complaint.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Scarcely an hour after we captured Bouillac, Michel Siorac (who could now be distinguished from his brother by the deep scar on his left cheek from the battle in la Lendrevie) appeared in front of the chateau gate at Mespech on his frothy-mouthed gelding and shouted to Escorgol that they’d killed all the intruders at the le Breuil farm or put them to flight. My father and Sauveterre put their heads together and decided that, after having dispatched the wounded men, they’d pile the bodies on a cart and, in the dark of night, take the dead from the two bands and dump them on Fontenac’s drawbridge.

“Let him bury them,” snarled Sauveterre, “since he paid them!”

But before dispatching the funeral wagon to its intended destination, my father picked out one of the thinnest men killed at les Beunes for us to dissect before rigor mortis set in. Alazaïs carried the cadaver on her back up to the library of Mespech, where, having laid him out on the large table, she shamelessly undressed him without batting an eye. She made no more of a naked man than of a flea and put all her love in the Lord, directing her entire appetite to the Eternal.

Miroul started a roaring fire in the hearth and lit a large number of candles, and, still sweaty from combat, our helmets and cuirasses scarcely removed, my father set about the prosection. He had no compunction about this, even though it was a task which, at the school of medicine in Montpellier, no ordinary doctors would have stooped to, considering themselves too elevated for such work, according to some vainglorious belief that to touch a body would lower them to the level of the labourer, who is considered inferior by the learned physician. The sad consequence of this practice is that the prosector, normally a barber surgeon, ends up knowing a great deal more about the human anatomy than the doctor, since he has delved in with his hands (which no eye can replace) and discovered the physics of the relationships of the organs within the body.

And so it was, by the light of a candelabrum that Miroul held high above his head, that my father, in the silence of our exhausted household (Sauveterre himself having long since gone to bed, hunched, broken and dragging his lame leg behind him like an old crow), cut into the chest of this poor devil, who that very morning had been alive and sure of victory, while I sponged away his blood, to get a better view of his insides.

“This churl had a lot of blood,” I said. “It’s gushing like a cataract!”

“Hah!” agreed my father. “You’re right about that! It flows. And that’s the great mystery of life. Blood flows through our bodies. But
why? But how? What force makes it flow upwards when we’re standing? Notice that if blood flowed like the water through the les Beunes mill or the Dordogne or any of our earth’s rivers, our brains would naturally empty of blood and our heels fill up with it the minute we got up in the morning. But that’s not what happens. So blood must possess some mysterious property that moves and circulates it through the body. But what is this property?”

“Do we know what this property is, Father?”

“We don’t yet know completely, but perhaps we’re on our way to discovering it. Miroul, bring your candelabrum nearer. Look at his heart, Pierre. Do you see these little doors? Sylvius in Paris and Acquapendente in Padua have described them in great detail. They’re doors, no doubt about it, or sluices, which, opening and closing by turns, admit or refuse the flow of blood. Is the heart the motor we’re looking for? Servetus thought so, for he wrote about the ‘attraction’ the heart exerts on blood.”

“Servetus? Michael Servetus whom Calvin burned at the stake in Geneva?”

“He burned him for heresy, not because of his medical theories, both of which, to tell the truth, Servetus included in his book
Christianismi restitutio
, all the copies of which were set on fire and reduced, like their author, to ashes.”

“All of them, Father?” I gasped through the knot in my throat that practically stifled my voice as I remembered the atheist abbot, Cabassus, who was burnt alive on the public square in Montpellier along with his treatise,
Nego
.

“All but one,” replied my father. “All but one that luckily fell away from the pyre a little singed by the fire, but still intact.
†
I bought it
from a little Jewish bookseller in Geneva on one of my trips there. I still have it.”

And, laying his knife on the cadaver, my father went to look for Servetus’s treatise on the shelves in his library, and, his eyes shining with a strange light, he opened it to a page bookmarked by a ribbon. I’m not ashamed to say that I caught my breath, so possessed was I from head to heel by such a burning desire for learning that it made my heart nearly leap out of my chest.

“Here’s the magnum opus,” he said, his hands trembling feverishly. “My son, I abhor the theology that is set out in these pages, but I treasure the medical knowledge they hold, above all my other possessions, for Servetus has provided a luminous explanation of the function of our noblest organs. Listen, Pierre, open your ears to what I’m going to read to you, for this is the ultimate and unsurpassable
summum
‡
of the medical knowledge of our times.

“Oh, Father!” I exclaimed, trembling like a leaf in April. “Read it again, I beg you! What a sublime passage! I feel illuminated by its beauty!”

And so my father, his voice trembling, reread the passage that I’ve just written here in a pen as shaky as his voice was, for I was careful to memorize it word for word, to seal it for ever in the storehouse of my mind. It’s still there, entire, intact and untouched like the most glorious banner ever planted on the shores of a new land by this peaceful explorer of the human anatomy.

“How can it be, Father, that our minds are so suddenly illuminated by the striking clarity of this text? Why is it that we immediately believe it to be true?”

“Because it lines up perfectly,” my father replied joyfully, “with the reason God gave us to recognize evidence of the truth. You haven’t forgotten what was famously written about the heart by Aristotle—whom the papists have made an idol and whose every word is held sacred by them—that it is a hot organ, and since it risks overheating, the lungs are bellows that provide fresh air to keep it cool. What nonsense!” cried my father, holding high Servetus’s
Christianismi restitutio
. “Nonsense and totally obvious absurdities! Fallacies and tomfoolery! Idiocy masquerading as science! Isn’t it flagrantly evident that in the heat of summer, the lungs breathe in hot air, which couldn’t possibly cool the heart! Quite the contrary! And Michael Servetus has produced irrefutable evidence in the passage I just read. For what possible purpose could the lungs bring in air if not to nourish and purify the blood, and how would the blood leave the lungs if it weren’t
recalled
—note this word, please!—if it weren’t
recalled
by the heart?”

“Agreed!” I cried, feeling as though inebriated from drinking from this cup of knowledge. “It’s the truth, you can sense it; it is the marvellous truth, the secret of all palpitating life in one sentence! For there is no life without the blood that flows, winds and branches out throughout our body. But, Father, why did this brilliant mind have to perish in flames?”

“Oh, Pierre,” replied Jean de Siorac, his face suddenly full of sadness, “I cannot entirely fault Calvin; Michael Servetus in his crazy audacity had dared to deny this other irrefutable truth: the mystery of the Holy Trinity.”

I certainly did not wish to argue with my father, for fear of increasing his distress, but it did seem to me, in my heart of hearts, that these two kinds of evidence, the medical and the theological, were of very
different orders, the first being based on our observation of nature, and the second, I mean the Holy Trinity, being based on the authority of a sacred text, and therefore sacred but not intelligible to our human understanding, so that we had to swallow it without chewing it, our eyes closed tight; which meant that I for one swallowed it as I would an apothecary’s pill, without looking at it or tasting it, and without the divine illumination that I found in Servetus’s truth.

My father, having washed his hands in vinegar after his dissection, and finally feeling the fatigue of all the rushing around we’d done, suggested we take some refreshment before going to bed. I acquiesced with the greatest enthusiasm since, being in the bloom of my youth, my stomach was insatiable. Miroul lit our way to the great hall and served us up some victuals, then sat down with us to devour them. Which we did, at least for a few moments, in silence, our mouths watering and working our jaws like ravenous bulls in a pasture, very happy to be there, safe and sound, the wicked who’d tried to kill us now dead, and all of our goods intact—save for one oaken door.

’Sblood! How good it was to feel the solid walls of Mespech around us, its vast lake and its outer walls. And stretching out beyond our well-managed domain, which provided for all our worldly needs. For nothing was brought to our table that was not raised on our land: the ham from our pigs at les Beunes, the butter from our milch cows, our bread from the wheat of our fields and our red wine from our own vineyard—even the table was made of oak from one of our trees. I’d come upon it in the woods one evening after the wind had toppled it, lying there waiting to be sawed.