Celestial Chess Read online

  Gervaise came to my lodgings during this unprecedented siege of cold weather when the stars blazed and glistened at dusk like the eyes of demons. I was huddled before my small fire, my fingers too cold to hold the quill, my brain too cold to think of anything but its misery. Gervaise brought a letter of introduction from Eadmer, that fat abbot up in Yorkshire who thinks he’s such a brilliant scholar because Peter Abelard once patted his behind. Eadmer may have been good enough once, but his learning was suspect by now. Abelard had been dead for years and dialectic was no longer the celebrated cause it had been when he and his theories were the talk of Paris. No, wed been studying our Greek texts and our Arabic (I don’t think Eadmer could even read Arabic or that he’d ever heard of trigonometry). Of course, we were wiser than we’d been in Abelard’s day. We knew better than to antagonize the bishops or the rabble-rousers like Bernard of Clairvaux. That was the first thing I tried to impress upon Gervaise. I told him that his mind was indeed free: he could think whatever he wanted to think, and conclude whatever he liked, so long as he kept it to himself. No doubt Gervaise thought I was a dreadful hypocrite. But I’ve been a master here at Paris for twenty years and they’re not going to send me off to graze sheep in the provinces, I can tell you that.

  As soon as it was warm enough for the two of us to converse without our teeth chattering, I made an effort to find out what the boy really knew. His preparation was adequate—better than one might expect from a provincial education. Eadmer had given him his Latin and his Greek, his grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. I saw that we didn’t have to worry about basics, and Gervaise was immensely eager to learn something new. Old Eadmer had played the university up in his mind until the boy saw it as a kind of heaven where the angels themselves dispensed truths. Well, we did have things we could teach a young fellow like Gervaise. The question was: what would he go in for now that he had one of the great libraries and some of the greatest teachers in Europe at his disposal?

  I suggested law; you can’t go far in the Church these days without a thorough grounding in law, and of course that just happened to be my own field. But Gervaise hankered after poetry, theology, natural philosophy; it wasn’t enough for him to know how the world worked; he wanted to know why it worked that way, as well. I’ve seen minds like his before. They can learn law, but they don’t have the patience to make a career of it. They usually wind up as alchemists, astrologers, occult philosophers of one sort or another. I warned him against those fields. There’s no future in magic, I told him. An uneasy alliance with the Church at best, and it wouldn’t be long before all those pursuits were outlawed. If a scholar wants to amuse himself in his spare time by dissecting frogs or counting up the stars, that’s his privilege, but you can’t make a career of such twiddle. And don’t tell me anybody’s ever going to turn straw into gold or get silver out of mud, because I just don’t believe it.

  “Now, look at Becket,” I said to Gervaise. “Look at John of Salisbury. Your countrymen. At last you’ve got a decent king over there in England (and don’t forget Henry is more of a Frenchman than an Englishman), and it’s in a fair way to become a country fit for scholars once more. I know Thomas à Becket, as it happens. Studied law with him at Bologna. If you’re as bright as Eadmer says you are, I might be able to get you a place in Becket’s chancellery. But first you’ve got to learn your law.”

  “But where does the law come from?” Gervaise asked me. “Does it govern our actions, or does it proceed from them? Can the king legislate the lives of his subjects, or do the subjects determine the fate of kings? If laws are made by man, does he create them out of nothing or does he discover them in the world around him? Can a soul deny its own law? If the soul is immortal and the will is free . . .”

  And so forth and so on. The boy seemed absolutely driven to ask the most dangerous questions. A boy like that is going to wind up either a saint or a heretic; there’s no middle ground for his sort.

  Perhaps I should have washed my hands of Geoffrey Gervaise and let some other master worry about him. But there was something about those hungry, questioning eyes of his. I thought perhaps I could help him learn restraint in his studies, at least. Besides, I did owe Eadmer a favor or two from the old days. Ultimately it was settled; Gervaise studied law with me.

  He was diligent at his studies; I’d have had no patience with him otherwise. Oh, he might go for weeks without showing up for my lectures, and I would all but give up on him, assuming he’d found some other master to bedevil with his endless questions, or that he’d gone completely mad in the alehouse down by the river—but then he’d be back again, his brain reeling with everything he’d been reading in the interim, his tongue poisonous with questions.

  Of course, he had to be feeling his freedom after all those years in the monastery. He had to drink himself sick, to mount his whores, to write his verses—the students were all writing poetry then. I heard he was quite a chess player too, though I take no interest in the game myself. Apparently he made a bit of money by it. By the time he’d been here a year or two, he had quite a reputation in this town—as a poet, scholar, talker and reveler and wastrel and gambler. God knows what he’d been saying in the alehouses! A secretary of the bishop came to see me. Wanted the boy expelled as a “contamination” to the university. I stuck up for him. I risked my career in so doing. Much thanks I ever got for it from Gervaise.

  I remember one evening—this was in the spring of ’55 or ’56. I was coming back from a stroll along the Seine through that hell of taverns and bawdyhouses where the students live, when I chanced to pass an open doorway. I looked in and who should I see, standing up on a table to recite his latest poem, surrounded by drunkards and whores, dwarves and hunchbacks and crones, pimps and gamblers and vagabonds of every description, but my prize pupil (at the end of a week-long spree by the looks of him), Geoffrey Gervaise.

  I paused in the doorway, curious to hear one of those verses which had scandalized the bishop. Gervaise was very drunk. And the whore who was curled at his feet, gazing lovingly up at him, had probably been tutoring him in the ways of vice for several days. Still, I think it scarcely justified the lurid nature of the verse, or the brazen mocking manner in which Gervaise read it out to his audience of fools. I remember but a few lines. They were in Latin, of course. I won’t profane the language of law and theology by repeating them, but I’ll risk a translation in the vulgar tongue. The poem, after recounting the adventures of a roguish monk set loose in the city, ended thus:

  Beware the man who fears not hell,

  For in his words foul demons dwell,

  And ’neath the glare of that one’s wit,

  All withers, dies—and turns to shit!

  Gervaise was so humble and repentant when, a few days later, I upbraided him for his misconduct that it was impossible to remain angry with him. “It’s true,” he said mournfully, shedding real tears. “God must loathe me for my sins. I am not worthy of the priesthood and should not take orders. My life has been marked for evil and I am Satan’s pawn.”

  I quickly reminded the lad of Christ’s saving mercy, the love of God our Father, the constant intervention of the Virgin. No man is ever damned for his sins, I told him, but only for the denial of grace.

  Gervaise remained disconsolate and further questioning soon revealed to me the heretical origins of his despair. The Albigensians had come up to Paris not long before and their heathen doctrines had clouded many an unstable mind. The prelates were in an angry mood, and I was anxious to get Gervaise out of Paris before his scurrilous verses and wagging tongue got us both in trouble. Consequently, I arranged for him to present his Master’s disputation a good deal ahead of schedule. Send him back to England, that was my thought. Get him into Becket’s chancellery and let King Henry worry about him—he’s had plenty of practice at quarreling with Popes. Nobody is surprised at what those wild English do, anyway.

  I took a special interest in Gervaise’s preparations for the
disputation. I thought that, with a carefully chosen set of propositions, we might just survive the exercise out disaster. We settled on an innocuous thesis concerning the applicability of Aristotelian ethics to civil and religious law. It had been done before. “Remember,” I told him, “you’re a lawyer now, not a metaphysician. The clerks who come to hear you dispute won’t give two farts for your passionate quest for truth. Just present the issues, define the alternatives, and support your conclusions. It’s as simple as that.”

  But nothing was ever simple for Gervaise. Give him an idea and he’d worry it limp—tear it open and paw over its innards like one of those damned wolves. He began his lecture by quoting Honorius of Autun (a safe enough starting point): “Man’s exile is ignorance; his home is knowledge.” In exile, Gervaise observed, men are often captured and enslaved, while in their homeland they may be free men, and beneath their own roofs may reign supreme. Yet in what does human freedom consist? He then launched into an extended and preposterous analogy in which he compared the voyage of the soul to a game of chess. The object of the game, Gervaise informed his baffled audience, was to entrap the opponent’s king by limiting progressively the opponent’s freedom to move his pieces about the board. At the beginning of the game, each player enjoyed an infinite number of choices. But with each freely chosen move, each player decreased by one an option of his own and perhaps as many as several options for his opponent. Gervaise had worked out a mathematical formula to demonstrate the rapid diminution of free choice for both sides, so that as the end of the game drew near the players realized that their fates had been determined by the sum total of those choices already made.

  So it is, Gervaise contended, for all men. Only by foreseeing the ultimate consequence of all his decisions, and by foretelling the decisions of his opponent (what opponent? I wondered uneasily), can a man choose wisely and freely. Yet freedom adheres only to the act itself and not to one’s life as a whole. Gervaise even went so far as to portray Our Lord as a chess player, obliged by the logic of His glorious ministry to accept crucifixion as the inevitable consequence of all His previous decisions. “The law,” he concluded—and God help me if I knew what any of this had to do with Aristotle!—“is thus not the creation of kings or magistrates; it is not made by prelates or Popes, nor is it handed down to us from the stars. Each man’s a lawgiver unto himself, his own magistrate and, ultimately, his own executioner.”

  It was a most incredible performance. The audience was outraged at such nonsense. Gervaise was laughed from the hall and he—the madman!—fled amid the roar of derision with a sly smile on his lips, as if in thus sacrificing his ambitions he had somehow proven his points. So it is with truth-seekers. They are ready enough to burn at the stake, so long as they are allowed to carry the wood, build the fire and light it themselves.

  After this debacle, there was no hope of a degree. But as long as he was leaving France and would henceforth be the English prelates’ problem, the bishop was willing enough to confer holy orders upon Gervaise. He had already passed through minor orders at Wellesford, but was still reluctant to enter the priesthood—as well he might have been. I prevailed upon him, since I knew only benefit of clergy could save such a head as his from the block. Besides, I hoped the office would effect a change in him. I’ve seen many a rake and rebel settle down to embrace their duties once the consecrating hands have been laid on them.

  Within a month of the disputation, Gervaise was ordained. I escorted him to Calais and saw him safely put on board the boat, my letter to Becket tucked inside his garments. Well, Eadmer, I thought, as the boat set sail under a brisk east wind, what England has given us we are glad to pay back with interest. I noticed that the evening sky was full of small white and gold clouds, fleeing westward across the channel, as if a host of angels (or demons) meant to accompany Gervaise to his homeland.

  Things were frightfully dull in Paris for a year or two without the boy’s questions to provoke me. But eventually I learned once again not to expect too much of my students. Life is kind to a teacher, by and large, when he has only dullards to contend with.

  Dr. Dilbey sat up abruptly. He had thought of something—a brilliant alternative, a lucid refutation, an ultimate consequence. But no; he had simply remembered the tea which his wife had brought to the study some time ago. He poured a cup for me and a cup for himself, then sagged back into his deep armchair, relit his pipe and resumed his contemplation of the glowing coals.

  The March afternoon lay white and wet and silent outside the doctor’s study. Water dripped from eaves to brick walkway, lay in bright pools around the thorny stumps of the doctor’s rose garden. Half-moons of steam coated each pane of glass in the French doors. Though it was getting dark, Dr. Dilbey had not yet thought to turn on the lights. I took a sip of cold tea and waited for my eminent colleague to conclude his ruminations. The only man in the College who could take a genuine and informed interest in my work, Dr. Dilbey was much given to metaphysical speculation. Together we spun fine webs of reason across the universe, dangled suns and stars by the fragile thread of logic, harnessed whole galaxies to the service of our first principles—and then held our breath lest the whole delicate structure should come crashing down about our ears.

  Now, every proposition in religion and philosophy seemed equally frivolous to me, but these were afternoons to be cherished in their own way. We did not have such afternoons in America; we would not have known what to do with them, would have grown impatient, bored, anxious. We would have skipped altogether the most exquisite part of such discussions—the long silences, the profound pauses, the deep dreamy quietude of mute reflection, during which I gazed upon the silver teapot glinting firelight beside Dr. Dilbey’s chair. By half closing my eyes, I could enlarge that kernel of silver fire until it seemed a gigantic star burning in the utter darkness and emptiness of space—a God-star feeding the All, a gem blazing in the navel of the infinite. The good doctor and I stoked that blaze and kept it alive. We fed it words, concepts, theories—anything to nourish its flame—for what else was there, really, in the darkness outside this ring of enchanted brightness?

  “Geoffrey Gervaise,” Dr. Dilbey said, startling me from my reverie. He repeated the name solemnly, as if it were an incantation. “So you think, Fairchild, that you have identified the author of the Westchurch poem as Geoffrey Gervaise?’’

  I was sure of it, but I said only, ‘‘The evidence is persuasive, wouldn’t you say?”

  Dr. Dilbey held back his judgment of the evidence. “And this Gervaise, you say, was burned at the stake?’’

  “In 1175. I found an ancient letter in the British Museum. It’s addressed to Henry II and written by a deputy who was sent to Creypool Abbey to investigate a rumored execution for witchcraft. Apparently the local people took matters into their own hands before the king’s justice could be invoked. I’m sure that would ordinarily have angered Henry, but in this case the deputy writes as if he believes his lord will be relieved to learn that the matter is over and done with. One possible reason for Henry’s willingness to overlook that violation of due process was that Gervaise had been a protege of the recently murdered Becket.”

  ‘‘And were there other reasons, do you suppose?”

  “Gervaise had been a fugitive for nearly ten years. We know he left the court in 1165, after Becket was exiled to France. I think I have him spotted as a village priest in Wendlebury—which is fairly near Westchurch Hall, as it turns out—for a short time. Then he drops out of sight—no reference to him at all in any of the records I’ve searched. However, about 1168 we find reports of a ‘mad priest’ roaming England, from monastery to monastery, stirring the monks to religious fervor, reviling the nobles, sowing seeds of rebellion among the serfs . . . He is said to be a sorcerer in league with Satan, yet is also said to be a good and holy man who champions the oppressed and converts sinners. If this is our man, you can see why Henry was willing to overlook certain irregularities in his prosecution for witchcraft.”


  “Hmm. Yes. Henry always had his troubles with the Church. But I’ve always thought there were no witchcraft trials in England until the reign of King John.”

  “No doubt there were a good many impromptu executions which were never recorded,” I said. “This one is embedded in a sheaf of legal correspondence where it could easily be missed, and it’s a very guarded reference. Nonetheless, we do know there was considerable interest in sorcery in twelfth-century England. It’s frequently difficult to tell the necromancers from the men of science and their primitive experiments.”

  “Yes,” Dr. Dilbey said, “and of course it must be assumed that certain Druidic customs and rituals survived, especially among the country folk . . . But tell me, Fairchild, isn’t the twelfth century too early for this manuscript?”

  I briefly explained to Dr. Dilbey the basis on which I was prepared to challenge Throcknagle’s dating of the manuscript. I mentioned certain phonetic and syntactical survivals of Old English, the evidence of an early northern dialect, the many obscure references in the poem to twelfth-century personages and events. I could tell that Dr. Dilbey was impressed by the thoroughness of my research.