An Elegant Solution(86)
“I don’t have my water buckets.”
“This fire won’t be put out with water, and I don’t want it out anyway. Have you heard of the Reciprocal Squares?”
“Yes . . . just recently. I’ve heard of the challenge from Paris.”
“Well, Brutus has a proof for the Reciprocal Squares.”
We’d just come to the Barefoot Square and I tripped on the first paving stone. “He has?”
“He has, and it’s stunner.”
“Is it his own proof?”
“Someone’s sent it to him, I think. I don’t think he’s come up with it himself.”
“Have you seen it?”
“I have and it’s written in his own hand. But it’s just that he copied it.”
“But is it valid?”
“That’s what I want you for. I want you to look at it. There’s some of it I can follow and some I can’t.”
“Why did your father show it to you?”
Daniel laughed. “He’s under torture. He’d die rather than allow that someone else solved it before him. And that’s worth it being valid just by itself.”
“Daniel!”
“He’s desperate to know if it’s valid, and he’s not sure himself! He just had to show it to me, and Nicolaus, and Gottlieb, too. It’s Mathematics, Leonhard! He wants so much to find a flaw in it he’ll even show it to us! Oh, it’s delicious, it is. And if there’s something to be found in that proof that Brutus can’t find, I’ll ask anyone. Anyone. And I’d give about anything.”
“It’s not worth that much.”
“I’d trade anything I had for it.” He wrinkled his nose, suddenly thinking. “Maybe that’s what Brutus has done. What do you think? What’s nefarious? He’s got a proof he’s always wanted, just out of air.”
“You make it sound like Faust,” I said, and Daniel pulled back.
“Don’t say that.” He said it vehemently.
“I won’t, then.”
“It’s not a joke.”
“I won’t say it again.”
He breathed deep. “You look at the proof, Leonhard. You see things we don’t, we all know that.”
“I . . . I won’t help you humiliate your father.”
“Oh, that’s the small part of it. The real part is whether it’s valid. That’s what we most want to know.”
“Well, then bring it to the Inn tonight.”
“I will.”
“And are you really all working together on it, Daniel? You and your father together?”
“It’s Mathematics, Leonhard. Of course we are.” We’d come to the Inn and I followed Daniel through the tunnel to the stables. “Where’s my black?” he asked Willi.
“Shoeing. Gustavus has him in the smithy.”
When the Olympic gods had been overthrown by the true Church, it was Gustavus who took Hephaestus’ forsaken anvil and hammer for his own. Only Gustavus could ever move those weights of iron, and the sparks they made were Zeus thrown lightnings.
The smith shop of the Boot and Thorn was in another far corner of that many-cornered building, near but beyond the stables. As with all the corners, there was fire. This flame was in a kiln-like oven, charcoal fed and white hot, the hottest fire in Basel.
We watched Gustavus form a horse’s shoe. No metal could withstand, between that continent of an anvil and that mighty hammer wielded as the earth wields mountains. It was a place to wonder about nefarious purposes. Gustavus in his black apron struck the shoe with his sledge, and I thought the sparks flew into it instead of out, to add fire to the horse’s speed.
The smithy was more a cave than a room. The walls were rock and the oven was in the rock, with a chimney bored straight up to the air above. There was water in a pit carved into the floor. When the shoe, still glowing, was dropped into that pool, the water was barely able to cool it. Water was always unwelcome by the fires that ruled that inn.
When Gustavus nailed the shoe on, the black horse suffered him gladly to do it.
“He’s ready, there?” Daniel asked.
“He’ll take you well, now,” Gustavus said.
“I’ll let him!”
The room was so dark compared with the white fire that everything in it was invisible.
Outside the inn, I was quick to find Lithicus on his scaffolding using the bright light of day to reach the shadow high and deep in the arch of the Coal Gate.
“What does he say?” he asked, indignant as sharp gravel and anxious, when I told him what Master Johann had said. “More lines? Show me the words.”
He didn’t climb down, so I put my foot on the first cross piece of the wood frame, then the second, to hand it up to him. He squinted in the poor light. “I know that line,” he said. “I’ve used it before. Most with University men.”