Thoughts of chance were still on my mind. “He would still have had to win the draw, though, to get the Chair. It would still have only been one out of three?”
Mistress Dorothea had already cocked her head and given me a shrewd glance. “The fence is waiting. Mend it, Leonhard, before the dogs make the hole worse, and I’ll be grateful to you.”
It would be time soon to dress black and white, but first while I was in brown I ran to the Barefoot Square, and the Boot and Thorn. Daniel had said he’d be collecting his horse.
Day in the Common Room was like day in heavy forest. Light found its way to the tables and walls like rain in the forest would, only after touching many distant surfaces first. The fire was low, just smolderers, because it hadn’t yet died from the night past and it must return to life for the night coming. Daytime was the fire’s purgatory and a half life for night dwellers. Charon the cat slept with one eye.
I sat for a while with two men I knew, a stonecutter and a bookprinter, eating noon lunch in the twilight. They were arguing over which had the greatest permanence.
“What tears it?” the mason said. “What burns it?” He was an old man, and strong, with gray hair streaked dark and white, and the veins in his hands stood out. “Words written in stone, they never fade.”
“But what’s said with them?” the printer answered. “You cut one word while I press a thousand.” The printer was younger but his hair was white with thin black patches like marks, and his skin was brown and leathery.
“Which of those thousand last? Paper. Here, then gone.”
“I’ll print a thousand more when they are.”
“And my one still lasts. There’s a hundred men buried in the Munster yard, and all that’s remembered of them is what I chiseled.”
“There’s a thousand men whose graves are lost, but they’re remembered for their books that I’ve printed.
“If there was anything to remember about me,” I said, “I’d want it said with both.”
“There was a man,” the printer said, “dead more than a decade, but I printed his book and he was remembered again.”
“But I cut his epitaph and he was never forgotten.”
“I print the words he said.”
“I print the words said about him.”
“I publish his soul.”
“I chisel his life.”
“Lithicus,” I said to the stonecutter, “I know of that man. Was it my Master Johann’s brother Jacob?”
“That one, yes.”
“Did you know him?”
“I knew him.”
“And Lieber,” I said to the bookbinder, “I have that book, also. The Ars Conjectandi. Did you read any of it?”
“That Latin? I don’t know any of it.”
“You carve Latin,” I said to Lithicus. “Do you remember the words you cut?”
“I don’t know that Latin, either,” he said, and he and Lieber shook their heads together, that anyone would.
When Daniel did come in, I was still thinking of languages only spoken now by men in black robes. He sat and toyed with his cup of dice and I thought of the Latin his uncle had written about the arts of chance. And I told him what his mother had told me.
“Greek?” Daniel said. “He’d take the Greek Chair? He couldn’t crawl in that language.”
“I think he could crawl,” I said of Master Johann, “and walk and run.”
“But he wouldn’t sit. He’d never take a Chair of Greek. Leave Mathematics at Groningen for Greek at Basel? It’s not believable.”
“Your Grandfather Faulkner wanted his family close.”
“I remember that,” Daniel said warmly. “He was kind and a gentle old man. I’ll long remember that.”
“That’s what brought your father back to Basel.”
“Half a Chair, and half a family wouldn’t add to a whole.”
“His own father was here.”
“That’s a subtraction, not an addition.”
“Do you remember your Grandfather Nicolaus?”
“Not any. He died the year after we were back. Brutus had fled Basel to Holland to be away from him.”
“Why?”
“I was never told.”
“Will you tell your own children why you fled from your father in Basel?” I asked.
“No!” He laughed again. “Because they’ll have fled Basel themselves to be away from me.” As he said it, Gustavus came into the room and on his back was a log for the fire; a true log near the size of a man, four feet long and from low in the tree. “And Leonhard,” Daniel said, “I’ll tell you this from my own wisdom: When any of us flee from Basel, we only come back if we have a strong reason. I don’t believe Brutus only came back because Grandpoppa Faulkner wanted him to, and not for hope of a Chair in Greek, either.” With a thump that would have broken any other stone but not that hearth, Gustavus threw the wood onto the embers. “There was only one thing that would bring him to Basel, and that was the Chair of Mathematics.”