So I went forth Saturday night to meet with Daniel, setting my foot on the dark evening streets of Basel. As always the windows were shuttered. Just pins of light pricked out. There was little to fear with the Night Watch always close. I walked with one of them, he swinging his lantern and his jaw, and I listening for those moments to tales and tall tales of battle and adventure. In the Barefoot Square, the windows of the church were unshuttered and bright. The inn was lit with darker light. Through its weary door I left the overworld.
Enter the Boot and Thorn! Steifel und Stachel, Tavern primeval, vast beamed of ancient trees, smoked by the unquenchable flame, dark unyielding to light. Inside the door was a passage with no seen end, twisting into distance. Doors and stairs lived in it, and dragons. On its walls were pictures painted before there was light or color, and rails and moulds carved by gnomes. The air was soot and hay and mead. A gray cat with white eyes was named Charon and was Cerberus. I paid for my passage with a bow and crossed the hallway Styx.
On the right was a fissure, and through it the Common Room. A gaping, howling hearth lit the room, and oil lamps burned with more smoke than flame. Driven up through each table was an iron spike with a candle fixed on it. These were the best illumination in the room. As the evening would pass and each candle breathed its last, and the lamp glasses would blacken and strangle their glow, only the conflagration in the ruddy fireplace would enlighten.
The pillars that held the ceiling were not cut by human hands. They, and the ceiling they supported, were really a primordial forest of trunks and branches that grew themselves into that room with its soil floor. Shelves, eye-high, belt-high, high as good thoughts and high as foul plots ran the circuit of the walls. Tankards packed them. They were wood and clay, little gargoyles who watched in benign grotesquerie over the transacted business.
The tables were immovably heavy. They might have been filled or near empty and it would have appeared the same. The presence of men in the room was heard and sensed, not seen, and to enter the room was to be made part of it, to be made subterranean, to be lit by fire and breathe earthen air.
As I stood in the entrance, my vision was blunt but my ears were sharp, and I quickly knew where Daniel was. He would have preceded me, likely by hours. Only when I came close did I see that his brother Nicolaus was there, also.
A Master from Oxford, a Chair of Mathematics on a visit once to Master Johann, told me that in England there were coffee rooms for gentlemen in taverns, separate from the commons. Here was no division. Black and white mingled with brown. I wouldn’t know which I was meant for if I had to choose. The Room, like temptation, was common to all men. I hadn’t been noticed and I paused while Daniel spoke.
“There’s no word,” he was saying to his brother. “Not a breath of a whisper. I was sure there’d be a letter waiting.” He had a cup of dice in his hand and tossed them to the table. “Who else could have won the prize? There’s not a one who could have beat me.”
Nicolaus answered him, “It’s a hundred who could.”
“I’ll go to Paris myself and see. I’ll have them show me a better piece than what I sent them. I know I won the competition.”
“Then where’s the letter?”
“I’ll go to Paris and get it.” I could see his peeved frustration in the dark as well as I could hear it. He pulled the dice back into his cup. His words interested me, but the dice in his hand did more. The subject of Master Jacob’s Ars Conjectandi was Likelihood or Chance, what had more recently been named Probability. The Conjectandi presented the rolling of dice as a type of equation, but not one that gave a result. Instead the Mathematics gave possibilities of results. It was an odd prophecy, to say with certainty what might happen, but not what would happen. I had wondered at the role of Providence in guiding affairs: Did God know how the die would land?
“Daniel,” I said.
“Leonhard!” There was no chance to that. His greeting was certain and exactly as I’d known it would be. He pushed a bench toward me. “Still breathing? Not smothered by your hours in the Holy of Holies?”
“I’m breathing. It’s the air in here that would smother a man.”
“Then breathe it deep and listen to me.” Now, Daniel had his winning smile and friendly ways. All the ire he’d had a moment before was gone. “I’ve come back to Basel with a goal.” The hearth glare fell full on him. It made his grin fiery. “You have a part in it.”
“Tell me, then. I want to know what it is that I want nothing to do with,” I said.
“Your part’s easy enough. It’s about Uncle Jacob.”