The Fifth Servant (35 page)

           
We also read the passage from the prophets where Joshua circumcises all the tribesmen of Israel with razor-sharp bits of flint stone (some of the men cringed involuntarily at those words), then a captain of the Lord’s army appears with a sword in his hand and tells Joshua how to defeat the people of Jericho, who had shut their gates against the children of Israel so that no one could go in or out.

           
And when the walls fell, the Israelites destroyed everything in the city—men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses—everything except for a harlot named Rakhav and her family, who had been kind enough to harbor our messengers.

           
It made me wonder if it was really such a great idea building walls around people, what ever the reason. Sure, it offered you short-term protection. But on the other hand, your enemies knew right where to find you, all crammed together like sheep in a pen.

           
Rabbi Loew finally lifted the silver pointer from the sacred scroll and laid it aside, then he gave his sermon in plain Yiddish.

           
Oddly enough, he didn’t say much about the current standoff with the Christians, beyond reminding us that no nation has the right to rule over another and that every nation has the right to be free. Instead, he suggested that certain members of the community bore some of the blame for our dismal situation, having sought a false sense of stability by siding with the wealthy burghers who were nothing but a pack of wolves who always wanted more and more of everything.

           
No wonder the shul was half-empty.

           
Then he drove the nail in deeper by railing against the leaders of the community for not attending to the needs of the poor.

           
“Rava said that the righteous could create a world, if they wanted to,” he declared, his words resounding off the cold stone walls. “But what do we find here in the
Yidnshtot
, where a handful of rich Jews own two-thirds of the property, while the rest of the community owns a little sliver of nothing? I have told you many times over the years that the only legitimate use of property is to provide us with our basic needs, and that any surplus wealth must be used to benefit the whole community. Doesn’t the Lord promise us that
there shall be no poor men among you
?”

           
Dvorim
.

           
He finished with the usual prayers for the health and well-being of Emperor Rudolf II and the rest of our Christian rulers. We had just started a Psalm—the one that goes
Vatabeyt eyni beshuroy, bakomim olay mereyim tishmanoh oznoy
(My eye has seen the downfall of my adversaries, and my ears have heard the torture of the evil ones who rise against me)—when a shopkeeper’s assistant came rushing in and announced that a royal carriage had just pulled up at the South Gate with orders to take Rabbi Loew up the hill to meet with Emperor Rudolf.

           
Rabbi Loew interrupted the Psalm amid hushed gasps and told me to get Rabbi Gans so that he could include this momentous event in his chronicles, then he directed the congregation back to the verses.

           
Rabbi Gans lived somewhere near the Pinkas Gate, but I couldn’t bring myself to cut through the cemetery again, so I had to run all the way around to the east, then south,
then
west on Pinkasgasse. Some straight-and-narrow types gave me a black look as I sped by, even though they should have known not to pass judgment without knowing the circumstances, since a man is permitted to run on Shabbes in order to perform a
mitsveh
.

           
If it is true that
an empty table holds no blessing
(
Zohar
), then surely Rabbi Gans was blessed many times over, because I found him finishing a large breakfast that easily fulfilled the obligation to celebrate Shabbes with three full meals in order to renew ourselves and all creation as well.

           
Rabbi Gans invited me to look around his study while he got ready. He had an impressive library of at least a hundred volumes, so of course I leafed through some of them while waiting for him to return. He had a copy of Rabbi Loew’s
D’rush No’eh b’Shabbes Hagodl
, A Fine Sermon for the Great Sabbath, published by Kohen of Prague three years ago, which had sealed the Maharal’s reputation as a troublemaker in these parts. In it, he was openly critical of the newly created office of Mayor of the
Yidnshtot
, and many other practices of the community government, denouncing corruption and ignorance wherever he saw it, which was pretty much everywhere. But I was surprised to find it shelved near a well-worn copy of dei Rossi’s
Meor Enayim
, a book that Rabbi Loew detested because the Mantuan author had claimed that the Jewish calendar, and therefore our whole system of telling time from the creation of the world, did not square with known mathematical principles.

           
Rabbi Gans may have hidden it well beneath his apparently placid exterior, but it was clear from even a glance at the titles on his shelves that he was bravely following our teacher Rabbi Isserles’s command to read what the great Christian scholars and other “idolaters” had to say on matters of science. His writing desk was littered with papers, and he appeared to be working on several manuscripts at once, on such topics as math, astronomy (this one was full of charts showing the phases of the moon and such), and what looked like a lengthy history of the Jews in Bohemia. This text opened with a citation of Moses’ command to “Remember the days of old” (
Dvorim
, again), and a courtly bow to “our lord
keyser
Rudolf, may his glory be exalted.”

           
Next to it lay a treatise on optical devices, and the first draft of his latest project—the chronicle of this week’s events. I was tempted to skim through it to see if my name appeared anywhere in the manuscript, but I didn’t want to disturb the collection of glass lenses arrayed on top of the pages, either as part of an optical experiment or merely as paperweights, I wasn’t sure which.

           
There were also several letters, including one from a kinsman named Joachim Gans, who apparently worked as a mining engineer in En gland without disclosing his Jewish identity, describing the results of an innovative method of manufacturing saltpeter, the main ingredient in blasting powder.

           
Rabbi Gans returned while I was trying to improve my knowledge of the mystifying ways of women by thumbing through his copy of the
Sheyn Froyenbikhl
, an instructional guide for women on manners, religion, and marital duties that was printed in Kraków when we were both students back in the old days.

           
“Are you ready?” I said.

           
“Is one ever ready to meet with one’s emperor?”

           
“I wouldn’t know. What’s he like in person, anyway? And please don’t give me any of that may-his-name-be-elevated stuff that you had to write in that book.”

           
Rabbi Gans smiled at me. “People will still be asking that question a hundred years from now.
Keyser
Rudolf is a hard man to know. He has much of the regal stiffness of his Spanish uncles, but he has always been a dedicated patron of the sciences. He has a long history of being subject to dark periods of melancholia, but after Prince William of Orange was killed by a Catholic zeal-ot’s bullet fired at point-blank range, he became even more reclusive, and began searching for magical elixirs of eternal youth and such. Perhaps he hopes that one of his Jewish alchemists or mineralogists will be able to find a cure for his melancholia, although that didn’t stop him from renewing the Jew badge edict. And he once approved the expulsion of a handful of Jews from a town in Moravia, but aside from a few such incidents that we will have the good taste not to bring up, he’s been as reliable a friend and protector as any of the Christian monarchs.”

           
“That’s not much of a standard to measure by, is it?”

           
“What else have we got to measure by?”

           
We stepped outside. The sky was shrouded by gray, as if the earth itself were in mourning, but thank God it had finally stopped raining.

           
Rabbi Gans studied the sky for a moment and said, “Did you know that the natural day is one degree longer than the normal rotation of the eighth sphere of the heavens?”

           
“Really? How much of a difference does that make?” I thought maybe he knew of a scientific way of negotiating for more time.

           
“About one-fifteenth of an hour.”

           
“You mean—four minutes?”

           
“It adds up significantly over the course of a year.”

           
And there I was thinking we had a chance.

           
If only we could literally
buy
the time we needed, I’d have laid down 100
gildn
for an extra ten hours. Hell, I’d have taken
five
hours at that rate.

           
We met up with Rabbi Loew at the sign of the Lion of Judah, and took the Narrow Lane toward the South Gate.

           
On the way, Rabbi Gans told me all about his latest book,
Tsemakh Dovid
(The Offspring of David, which sounded like a messianic title to me). It was already at the printing house, and,
keynehore,
it would be coming out any day now.

           
As we approached the gate, a group of traditionalists stood at our backs and carped at us for working on the Sabbath. I responded with the words of Rabbi Yokhanan ben Nuri, who says that anyone who goes forth on a mission such as ours is allowed 2,000 cubits in every direction, while Rabbi Loew simply stated that the Torah permits the wise men of each generation to create new laws. But the traditionalists had us outnumbered. Then, on the other side of the big gate, two rows of municipal guards stood before us in two straight lines, with a narrow, well-defended path between them leading from the small door in the gate to the open door of the royal carriage.

           
“You are Rabbi Loew?” said the footman, his nose crinkling as if his polished boots were unsuited to our muddy streets.

           
“I am,” the great Maharal replied.

           
“Then get in, Jews. The Kaiser has granted you an audience and you mustn’t keep him waiting.”

           
“I’m afraid that we’ll have to.”

           
You would have thought that—
kholile
—Rabbi Loew had cursed the name of God from the way the footman’s face jerked back in shock. God forbid.

           
The footman managed to cough up something that might have been a
What?

           
“It’s Shabbes,” the rabbi explained calmly. “We can’t ride in a carriage, or any other mode of transportation. We’ll have to walk.”

           
Two thousand cubits uphill.

           
And walking at the old man’s pace would take up a lot of time.

CHAPTER 20

           
IT HAD BEEN A LONG night, and he could tell that they weren’t going to get anything else out of the old woman for now.

           
The one called Freyde was hanging by her wrists, her blood coagulating in the gears of the great machine. The correctors should have taken greater care not to foul up the engine’s intricate workings, but even with black hoods obscuring their features, it was clear that they were getting tired. They just weren’t putting their backs into it anymore.

           
“Christ, it’s worse than pulling out poison ivy,” one of them muttered.

           
The
Uffzieher
was beautifully efficient for such a light form of questioning—all you had to do was secure weights to the criminal’s legs and yank the wretches up in the air, then drop them again. Repeat as necessary. Simple. But as long as God permitted the Devil to give his minions the strength to endure it, some of them even laughed as the instruments of persuasion were applied, knowing that the Evil One would protect them from any form of pain.

           
All except iron.

           
Oh, the legions of the faithful had made fantastic technological advances in the battle against evil. Led by the Germans, of course, they had conceived and executed glorious feats of engineering that could loosen the grip of the strongest demons on the souls of the possessed and wrestle the truth from the most recalcitrant sinners. The very word
engine
exhibited its divine origins in the Latin
ingenium
, meaning wisdom, skill, natural capacity, derived from
genium
and related to the Greek
genea
, birth, race, family, and akin to the Latin
gignere
, to beget. In other words, creation itself.