An Elegant Solution(11)

“Horses, Master.”

“I thought you would. I might want one for the month.”

“There’d be one.”

“Send Willi around with it. I’ll look it in the mouth.”

Gustavus’ dark darkened. “Willi’s gone with the coach to Freiburg, Master. I’ll send Fritz.”

“With the coach?” Now Daniel was curious. “What would Knipper want with him on the coach?”

“Willi drove it, Master. There was no Knipper.”

“He never came?” I asked. I was not afraid of Gustavus, either; not much.

“No.” No Master for me. I was in brown.

“Where’d he get to?” Nicolaus asked, and it was odd he’d spent the words.

“No place I know” was the answer. “I’ll send Fritz around with the horse, Master.”

“No need,” Daniel said. “I’m sure it’s fine. I’ll want it Monday. About noon.”

“Where are you riding?” I asked. Then, as a joke, “Russia?”

“Russia?” Daniel was authentically amused. “Not in an afternoon. It would be a fast horse for that.”

“Paris, then?” I asked, still with my joke, and that brought less amusement.

“Not Paris, either.” He turned. “That’s all,” he said to Gustavus, and that was all. Daniel was ready to leave, to return to the living streets, so I was pleased to return with him. We left the eternal dark for the simple black of earthly night, and I turned our conversation toward Italy. This was my interest. I’d always been so curious about the peninsula and all the world beyond Basel and I even coaxed a few words from Nicolaus on it. He knew the land well; before he took the Chair of Law in Bern, he’d been Chair of Mathematics in Padua, the same Chair Daniel now had. Even Gottlieb had held the Galileo Chair of Astronomy there years before. I wanted to go myself to Venice and Rome and Padua. Someday I’d Knipper south. We talked awhile before they left toward their home and beds, and I watched them leave. But I stayed in the Barefoot Square.



It has always been the poor whose feet were bare. Their Square was named for the church on it, and their church was plain and very large and worth more to them than shoes. It was built in old times by barefoot friars who knew poverty. I went in. It was lit by a few candles and they brightened more than all the fires in the Boot and Thorn.

The ceiling was higher inside than the roof outside, so far above the stones of the floor that the air inside the church was pulled thin by it. It was plain timber, not like the decorated toppings that crown wealthier churches. Two central walls hung from the ceiling a short distance, then split into peaked arches. Long pillars gripped the arches, held up by their tight hold. The pillars reached down to the stone floor and pulled upward on it, so the whole church was supported and lifted by its highest steeple. The floor grasped the crypt and the crypt was bedded in the rock and soil of the earth, which meant that Basel, and the whole planet, was held up by the church and the church by the heavens. If the chains to heaven were cut, the planet would plummet. The heavens would also be freed from the earth then, and would rebound away like a tree branch pulled down and released. But the chains were too, too strong. They would never break. I sometimes feared, though, that the church might break loose from its foundation and be wrenched into the sky. If it did, I hoped to be in it.

It was important of Basel that it was caught like this, held taut between earth and heaven like a knot between ropes. It was part of each but was not either. One day the city might be pulled fully to one side, and what a sundering that would be.

That night it did not. I sat some minutes on the back bench in a corner, a place where I listened and watched. That night in the Barefoot Church I saw winged Michael in holy flame, and slue-foot Lucifer in brimstone, the two of them in dispute, and between them a slab of cold stone. I knew it must be the body of Moses they were contending over, but I couldn’t see clearly.

Finally I went back out to the Square. The church was many centuries old, and built on centuries more of foundations. But the Boot and Thorn was very old, also. These two have faced each other across the Square, contending over it. So far neither had prevailed.



Sunday morning was fine and clear as glass. I rose early; I couldn’t help it. I walked in thought through Sabbath empty streets to the Munster square. Master Johann’s house was blank and not my destination. I was going to the Cathedral itself. Erasmus was buried in the left aisle and Oecolampadius in the center, but I wanted a different grave and passed by to the cloisters.

I knew just where to go. The shaded red stone columns divided the dim walk from the bright grass square. On the white plaster walls, carved stone epitaphs divided the shaded lives of remembered men from those bright living who remember. Soon I stood at a black oval surrounded by a garland wreath of marble, and capped by a globe and two shields.