The moment of his career decision came, he explained while pouring the tea, when he learned that emergency room doctors were taught to consider incoming heart attack victims as already dead. It’s a method to cope: if the patient lives the doctor can believe that he has brought someone back but if the patient “remains” dead, the doctor knows that it wasn’t anything he did wrong.
“But only God has the power over life and death,” Father Shanahan said. “While a doctor can extend a man’s physical life, a priest might help him achieve life everlasting.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“It’s a job requirement.”
“Let me ask you a question. Is it possible to believe in souls without believing in God?”
“For some, perhaps.” Shanahan took a sip from his cup. “But not for me.”
Number 24 was finished. Number 23 was finished. Number 22 was finished. It was the last week of November, and Marianne Engel finally returned upstairs. She seemed to have reached the limits of how long a body could go without a proper meal or the comfort of a real bed.
I’m not much of a cook, but I forced a meal on her and made damn sure that it was thick with calories. Even though she was obviously done in, all the caffeine and nicotine left her in a state of manic exhaustion. She bounced on her seat, her eyes unfocused, and dropped her utensils often. When the meal was finished, she tried to stand but found herself physically unable. “Can you help?”
I put my stair-climbing practice to good use and did my best to steady her from behind, half pushing her up the steps. When we reached the washroom, I opened the faucets and she sat down heavily in the tub. There was no point in putting the plug into the drain until we rinsed away the top layer of filth, so I helped her scoop water over her body. When she was finally clean enough to be properly bathed, we filled the tub.
I sat beside the tub, working her skin. Large black bags had taken residence under her eyes. I washed the stone chips from the thick tangle of her hair, which now hung like vines that someone had forgotten to water. The worst change was simply the weight she had lost: certainly ten pounds, maybe twenty. It did not look good on her because it had come off too fast, in exactly the worst way. I vowed that I would make her start eating better, more. Daily.
The cleaning reinvigorated her enough that she could walk unaided to her bedroom. As soon as she was in the sheets I turned to leave, thinking she would drop immediately into sleep. She surprised me when she called me back.
“Mainz. The marketplace. Don’t you want to know who?”
XXV.
Until that moment, we weren’t even sure that he was still alive. You spoke his name as if trying to convince yourself that you were really seeing him again, after so many years.
“Brandeis.”
He had some new scars and a lot more gray in his hair, and he favored one leg that hadn’t been stiff when I first met him at Engelthal. But mostly he just looked weary. The young mercenaries continued to harass the vendor and Brandeis’ face betrayed a look that combined disgust with a complete lack of surprise.
You pulled me into the shadows behind a stall. Most of the soldiers were new and wouldn’t know you, but you could never be entirely safe, not with these men. You had concluded years before that the only reason your disappearance had never been investigated was that everyone, Brandeis included, believed your burns had killed you.
That you desperately wanted to speak with him goes without saying. You could not—you would not—let this opportunity pass, but the problem lay in how to approach Brandeis without being seen. When the young men started to push the shopkeep, you thought you might be able to sneak into the middle of the scrum. I was completely against the idea, although I knew that wouldn’t stop you. But just as you took a step forward, a new man entered the scene, and its entire nature changed. Immediately the young soldiers backed away from the vendor, as if they were too scared to do anything more without permission.
The first thing I noticed about this man was the cruel intelligence of his eyes. They seemed to shine with a lust for violence, as if he thought that chaos existed only so that he might take advantage of it.
“Who is that?” I asked.
You answered with an icy voice. “Kuonrat the Ambitious.”
The way the others deferred to him made clear that Kuonrat was now the leader of the troop. With only a few words and the tip of his sword at the shopkeep’s neck, a solution was brokered. The mercenaries took what they pleased, and the vendor was allowed to keep his life.
Kuonrat was the very last person before whom you could dare to reveal yourself, but I was bound by no such constraint. Before you could stop me, I stepped out of the shadows and headed towards the group. I knew that you couldn’t follow: showing yourself would have put me in greater danger than letting me proceed. I pulled my neckline open and headed directly for Brandeis.
It was a calculated risk. Kuonrat had never seen me and Brandeis was unlikely to recognize me, so many years later and not wearing my nun’s habit. I did my best imitation of a prostitute, making it perfectly clear that I was offering myself to Brandeis. It was really quite an act considering that, even though I wasn’t showing yet, I was carrying your child inside me. A few of the other soldiers hooted as I leaned forward to whisper into Brandeis’ ear—naming a price, they thought. I whispered two things: your name, and that I was the nun who’d cared for you at Engelthal.
Brandeis pulled back and his eyes narrowed upon my face as he sorted through his memories from the monastery. After he regained his composure, he informed the others that he would meet them later, and implied that an afternoon of fornication lay ahead. Even Kuonrat nodded his approval and said, “Perhaps when you’re finished with him, you can come back for the rest of us.”
The idea turned my stomach but I laughed a “maybe” as I dragged Brandeis away. It would have been too risky for you to reunite with him in public so I took him back to our home, where I knew you’d be waiting. Brandeis could hardly believe his eyes that you were still alive. “I thought—I was so sure—I went back to Engelthal once, but they told me nothing….”
I served our best ale and set about making a meal. I wanted to make a good impression, I wanted Brandeis to see how well I looked after you. You told him everything that had happened over the years, and he was amazed that you’d made such a life for yourself.
When it was his turn to speak, Brandeis told about how things had changed in the condotta. How they had become worse. Herwald had been mortally injured in battle and it was Kuonrat who brought down the final sword on the old man’s neck. This was no act of mercy; Kuonrat was staking his claim. When he challenged anyone who would dare oppose him for leadership, no one stepped forward.
Kuonrat took to admitting only the most bloodthirsty recruits. Their fighting instincts were sound, but the new soldiers were stupid and dishonorable. It was true that they killed more, but also they were killed more. They attacked with passion, not with intelligence, and Kuonrat goaded them like a master with a pack of wild dogs. Should they die, the countryside was ripe with an endless supply of boys looking to prove their manhood. It was a waste of Kuonrat’s time to worry about protecting a renewable resource. And besides, he knew from personal experience that those who remained in the troop for years sometimes developed a greed for power.
Despite his methods, there could be no arguing with Kuonrat’s results. The condotta had become known for its peculiar ruthlessness and its ability to defeat even much larger forces by sheer brutality. Success emboldened him and he’d started to question the entire practice of hiring out the troop. Why, he asked himself, should the nobility be in possession of the land if his condotta was the means by which the land was defended? Money was no longer enough. Kuonrat wanted more power. He was preparing to start taking territories for himself.
The years under Kuonrat had strengthened Brandeis’ desire to leave the condotta, but escaping had become even less conceivable. The rule remained that once
you were in the troop, you were in for life, but now there was something more. Kuonrat had never forgotten how Brandeis had stood up to him when you were injured on the battlefield; he was always looking for an excuse to exact retribution. If Brandeis were ever to bolt, Kuonrat would send the most talented trackers after him, men whose determination was matched only by their viciousness.
For all his despicable traits, Kuonrat was not stupid. He knew that he could not attack Brandeis without provocation, as the troop still included a number of old soldiers who respected Brandeis both as an archer and a man. And so, for the most part, Brandeis was left alone. But the unspoken threat was always there.
It was so strange to see you in the company of an old friend, one with whom you’d faced death on the battlefield many times. Brandeis had shared a part of your life that I could never understand. There was a strange closeness in the way you both tried to play at toughness but could not quite suppress the tenderness in your voices. I could tell that you missed the old days—not the battles but the camaraderie. It’s funny, the things one remembers; from that night, a single moment stands out in my memory. During the meal, Brandeis raised his hand in an almost imperceptible gesture, but you knew to pass him the water. It was an action that you must have repeated over a thousand campfire meals and it had not been forgotten in the years that you had been apart. Neither of you even seemed to notice.
At the end of the evening, a heavy silence fell. The two of you just stared at each other, maybe a full minute, until Brandeis said it aloud. “I cannot continue to live as I am living.”
“I will help in any way I can,” you said.
But no escape could occur that night. If Brandeis disappeared, the mercenaries would know to track down the “prostitute” with whom he’d last been seen. It was agreed that he would return to the condotta and play it out as if he’d had his pleasures with me. The troop would spend a few more days in the city and then head off for its next assignment. After a month had passed and the days in Mainz were a distant memory, only then would he make his escape.
If all went well, no one would be the wiser. Brandeis had no family in Mainz, no ties to the city whatsoever. Who would even remember his afternoon of sex a month previous? The plan was set.
At our door, the two of you stood in manly poses with your chests thrown out. He slapped your shoulder and you punched his arm. I hugged him and promised to pray for his safety. Brandeis said this was a good idea, and congratulated me once more on my pregnancy. When he took my hands in his, I could feel the scar tissue on his palms, and only then did I remember that he’d been burned while pulling the flaming arrow from your chest. As he headed out into the night, I was intensely aware of exactly how much we owed him.
The next month crawled by. We talked about Brandeis but never more than a few words at a time, almost as we had previously avoided speaking about our desire for a child, as if we were afraid to curse it. Five weeks. “Do you think…?” I asked. “He’ll get here when he gets here,” you answered.
Six weeks, no Brandeis. I couldn’t help but worry, and I was vomiting in the mornings because of my pregnancy. “He’ll get here when he gets here,” you kept saying. I went through wild swings of worrying about his safety—and ours, as well, after he arrived. You kept assuring me that everything would be fine, and I tried hard to believe you.
Seven weeks. I was at home working on a manuscript, sitting near the window, when a heavily cloaked figure came shuffling sideways through the street. I recognized the stiffness of the leg and immediately knew it was Brandeis even though his face was hidden. His robe was covered in the snow that’d been falling since early morning, and it was a good day to be entirely bundled up. No one would think twice about a man simply trying to remain warm. I let him in when no one was passing on the street.
He gulped down hot soup and explained how he’d been traveling for eight days, backtracking and circling, avoiding cities. Rather than buy food, he’d killed small animals so that there’d be no merchants to remember him. He was certain that he hadn’t been followed. Still, we didn’t send word to your worksite but let you come home at the regular time. It was important to make everything look as normal as possible.
The first few days would be the most dangerous. Kuonrat would have dispatched a group of his best trackers as soon as Brandeis was found to be missing. The two of you always kept an eye out the window, a crossbow never out of reach. Brandeis had brought two with him, his own and another that he’d stolen for you.
You took turns not sleeping, and Brandeis didn’t dare even to unpack his bag. You packed one for yourself and instructed me to do the same. All this was very upsetting, of course, more than I could have imagined. Should something go wrong—not that it would, of course—I was responsible not only for myself but for our unborn child. I said that I didn’t understand how it was possible that Brandeis might have been successfully tracked in so large a country. When I voiced this opinion, the two of you looked at each other and said nothing. Which said everything.
But nothing happened. Weeks passed, and no one came looking. You both started sleeping through the nights, though only after you strung a line of bells across the top of the door. Eventually you decided that it might be safe for Brandeis to venture outside the house. With his hood still pulled over his head, of course.
No lurking figures pounced out of the shadows, so after another week Brandeis began to accompany you to construction sites. Your recommendation was enough to find him some manual labor. He worked hard and took his lunches with you but otherwise kept to himself. Nobody asked too many questions; to your colleagues he was just another unskilled worker. Before long, we decided that he should get a room of his own because I was waking in the night with leg cramps. A little privacy would be good for everyone.
We had so many friends that finding lodgings was easy, just a few streets outside the Jewish area. I insisted on paying the deposit with money from my business and, this done, we finally decided to allow ourselves a proper celebration. Not that the two of you were fully convinced that his escape was a success, but you were willing to acknowledge that it seemed to be a success. It was a great feast, and you were so happy because you finally felt as though you’d repaid your debt to him.
I was healthy and beginning to outgrow my clothes, the pregnancy seemingly well on schedule. There was even a point during the meal that the baby kicked and you insisted that Brandeis place his hand on my belly. He was hesitant but when I assured him that it would please me if he did, he tentatively pressed his palm there. When he felt the movement, he jerked back his hand and looked at me in wide-eyed amazement.
“This is because of you,” you said to Brandeis. “This life is because you saved mine.”
With that, we lifted our cups to the fact that we had all escaped our previous lives into better ones.
But one should never divide the bear skin before the bear is killed. The very next day, while Brandeis was gathering the last of his possessions from our place, one of the Beguines came running to our door. I knew this couldn’t be a good sign, as I’d never seen one run before. She placed her hands on her knees and panted for a few moments before she was able to gasp out that a small group of men—“savages, by the looks of them”—had been asking around the marketplace for a man matching Brandeis’ description.
Apparently, Mainz was not as big as I’d thought. Despite all the care we’d put into keeping our visitor hidden, even the Beguines knew that he had been staying with us. To their credit, they recognized that giving out this information to strangers was inadvisable, but it was only a matter of time before someone spoke without considering the consequences. Brandeis asked a few questions about the “savages,” and the Beguine’s answers took away all doubt. These men were definitely trackers dispatched from the condotta. To this day, I have no idea how they managed to find him, but how doesn’t really matter. The only thing that mattered was that Mainz was no longer safe.
Brandeis offered to flee alo
ne, leaving a trail so obvious the trackers couldn’t help but be drawn away from us. “They’re only looking for me. You have a good life here, so don’t—”
You wouldn’t even allow him to finish his sentence. Your honor wouldn’t have it. You said that the trackers would find our place no matter what we did, and that when—not if, but when—they did, there was a good chance one of them would recognize you. What a coup that would be for them, dispatched to find one deserter but able to bring back two. It would earn great favor with Kuonrat, and the message would be clear: even a soldier who’d managed to escape for years and was presumed dead would eventually be hunted down.
You and Brandeis both argued that I should not come—because I was too far along in my pregnancy, because I would slow you down, because travel would endanger the child. I countered that the greatest danger of all was for me to remain in Mainz, where the trackers would find me and do whatever was necessary to extract information. Ultimately, I said, it didn’t matter what arguments were made. I would not be left behind, and if you wouldn’t take me, I’d follow anyway. Yes, I was pregnant, but I was still able to travel and I owed as much of my good fortune to Brandeis as you did. Finally, if you and I lost each other, where could we meet again? Our life in Mainz had been found out and we could not return. I argued that it was in fact because I was pregnant that I had to stay with you, rather than chance a permanent separation.
I took away all your options and I had the advantage that there was no time for arguments. So we gathered a few things, only the most valuable, and prepared to leave as soon as possible.
I packed the Inferno and Paolo’s prayer book, and when you weren’t looking I slipped the Morgengabe angel into my bag. You wouldn’t have allowed such dead weight, but it was too dear to me to leave behind. I also packed my nun’s habit, as I’d already learned that it could make a useful disguise. We took all the money we’d put away for the house that we’d never actually bought, and you and Brandeis went to buy three horses. I sold off my spices and books to whoever would buy them, although on such short notice I got almost nothing. Within a few hours of the Beguine’s arrival, we were heading out of Mainz. I had my bag, while the two of you took only your crossbows and the clothing on your backs. The life we’d spent years building was gone, just like that.