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An Elegant Solution(119)

By:Paul Robertson


And at the end, after a Saturday afternoon unlike any I’d ever had, I paused and gathered my thoughts. “Master Johann, thank you for your nomination.”

“It was the committee’s nomination. Each of the members approved.”

“I don’t believe that I could be qualified.”

“You don’t believe that?”

I had to pause again. “I believe that I will become so. But Master Daniel and Master Staehelin both are, already.”

“The Chair is both for now and for the time to come.”

He gave me no exercises for the next week. When I came home, I could only tell my grandmother that we’d talked, and I wanted very much to study Mathematics for my whole life.





15

THE TREE, THRONE, AND CANDLE





After dinner I went to my room to rest. I lay on my bed some while, delaying my visit back to the Boot and Thorn. I nearly fell asleep, but finally I put my wig and hat back on my head and went out. It was dark night by then.



The Square was empty, as far as I could tell, it was so dark. There was only one light to be seen anywhere, if it could be called light. The windows of the Boot and Thorn seemed to pulse red. Somehow I didn’t see anything of the Barefoot Church.

As I came close to the Inn, I felt its heat. I stepped across the threshold and all outside vanished. I didn’t think I could have gone back out. The streets I’d left had been empty, but now the Common Room was full and bubbling. The smell was sharper, too, earthy and hot and damp. I couldn’t make out any one person at the tables, but every bench was full and nothing was still, every hand and shoulder and head were moving. The sound was like the smell, sudden and overwhelming and of too many parts to distinguish any one. Only the light was low and undersaturated. It was just the fire in the hearth. There were no candles and no lamps. It was just red, and orange, and throbbing. Chthonic Charon nodded to me and his eyes were red as the fire.

I stood in the doorway and then in the room, unseen. I might have been seeing what was invisible any other time, and I would be invisible to it. But there were crossings between two different worlds, and nephilim who straddled both. All along the walls the tankards and steins were jostling and striving against each other for space on their shelves. They shoved with their thin legs and arms, and I could hear them grunting. Their fat eyes, though, slowly fixed on me, one by one, and they went still. Then Old Gustavus saw them watching me, and they watched him come to me in the door. “Welcome, Master,” he said, and he seemed curious to find me in this dark half of the world.

“Gustavus. I said I’d return.”

“Come.”

He led me. I followed. Down that hall that twisted and amazed, ignoring the stairs and doors and side passages that grew from it, we stayed in the taproot, down and into. The heat and pressure increased, yet I shivered; and we finally came to a door framed in bedrock. There was no latch or lock. He pushed and it opened.

It was a cellar, a cave, a meat cooler, a larder, a pantry. Hooks held sides of cattle and shelves great barrels of ale, a close, crowded place, with walls not of stone but living rock, and floor and ceiling, also, and it wasn’t carved by human hand. Part of one wall was only a void and a bottomless roar. Anyone in Basel would have known it was the Birsig Flow that rushed by in that black hole, the stream buried in ancient times beneath the city, and this room was some eddy of its old course, worn into the rock by its constant force. I could have put my hand into its cold water. Beside the foodstuffs, there were other things stored here: a few very old wooden chests with locks on them, fitted into the rock as if it had grown around them.

The room was cool and mossy damp, yet even here there was fire. An oil lantern was mounted on a shelf and it danced and flickered in the whirling air that was no more still than the water that troubled it. In the center of the small open floor were three chairs, and Gustavus gestured to one, and I sat. He sat facing me. I’d advanced from commoner, to Master, and now to equal. “Yes, Master Leonhard,” he said, as respectful as always but now, not as a servant, “what do you want to say?”

“I’ve been nominated for the Chair of Physics.”

“I have heard so.”

Then we waited. I listened to the constrained waters. Finally I heard what he may have heard before, or had been waiting for, the sound of quick steps in the corridor outside. The door opened and the light dimmed before black capes and robes.

“What is he saying?” we were asked, and I answered.

“I’ve come to pay,” I said. “For use of Master Jacob’s papers.”

He was pleased. “What payment have you brought?”