“Let God have his temples and cathedrals,” Julot said passionately, “if they will give us libraries!”
The one called The Cat brought three bottles of red wine to the table, and when I placed a gold coin in his hand he stared at it. “A scholar with money! What have you done, robbed a priest?”
They brought slabs of roast beef to the table. Plates were almost unknown in Europe, and the meat was served on slices of bread. We drank wine, ate roast beef, and gestured with the meat bones as we talked. We argued, protested, debated. Their eyes were alive with excitement, and they vied with one another to have their questions answered, arguing furiously over the answers or probable answers.
Had I read Hippocrates? What of Lucretius? What did I think of On the Nature of Things?
“What of Avicenna? Who was he? Where did he come from? We have heard his name, nothing more.”
“One of the greatest minds of this or any age,” I said, “he has taken the whole field of knowledge for his province.” Their excitement was a tonic. They knew of John of Seville, of Averroes, and of al-Biruni, yet only by name, and even those were whispered about. As I talked, I kept an eye out for spies, for there were those who wanted no teaching that might weaken their power, and they were hard on any deemed as heretics. Being a pagan, I was theoretically free from persecution, for by Church law a pagan could not be prosecuted for heresy. At least, not at the time. However, I was skeptical about the interpretation of such a law, and strangers were forever vulnerable. Students crowded about the table, for despite their often rowdy ways, there was a genuine hunger to know what the world outside was thinking. They wished to know what had been thought in ancient Greece, in Rome, and Persia. There is no curtain knowledge cannot penetrate, although the process can be slowed.
Even as we talked, there were those in the monasteries who were moving cautiously into areas of knowledge hitherto forbidden. There were abbots and bishops who were overlooking the fact, but observing with interest.
It is a poor sort of man who is content to be spoon-fed knowledge that has been filtered through the canon of religious or political belief, and it is a poor sort of man who will permit others to dictate what he may or may not learn.
Those about me had tasted the wine of learning and liked the bite of it on the tongue. Their appetites had grown with tasting, and they were no longer content merely to wonder and question, they wanted answers. Civilization was born of curiosity, and can be kept alive in no other way.
Of Moslem poetry they knew nothing, so I recited for them from Firdausi, Hafiz, and el-Yezdi. As to Avicenna, I told them what I could: that he was born in Bokhara in 979 and died in 1037. By the time he was ten he knew the Koran from memory, had studied the Arab classics, and by the age of sixteen he had mastered the existing knowledge of mathematics, medicine, astronomy, philosophy, and had lectured on logic. Before his death he had written more than a hundred works, including the Canon on Medicine of more than a million words.
Suddenly, the door burst open, and in the door stood the hugest woman I had seen, but large as she was, there was still a shape to her. She was no taller than the average man present, but in girth she would have outdone any two of them, possibly any three.
Her plump cheeks were wide with smile, her large blue eyes truly beautiful. Around her, like pigeons fluttering around a barn, were half-a-dozen girls. “Where is this paragon of a man? Where is he?”
The group about the table parted, and standing, I bowed low. “No paragon, Claire, but who would be a paragon in company where you stand? How can the Good Lord have given you so much beauty when it meant depriving so many others?”
“A gallant speech!” She came down the room to our table. “Now there’s a man, girls!”
She took up our bottle and filled a glass. “They tell me you’ve a tongue for blasphemy. Is it true?”
“Blasphemy? Not unless it is blasphemy to seek the truth. No, I am no blasphemer, but something worse, I am an asker of questions.”
“And you are not a rascal?”
“In this company?” I glanced around in mock horror. “How could anyone as innocent as I be considered a rascal in such company as this? No, the teacher was talking nonsense, and I stated a contrary opinion, that is all.”
She seated herself, and the wenches gathered around, a comely lot and fit to start a man’s blood boiling had they been cleaner.
“They tell me,” I said, straight-faced, “that you, too, are a professor.”
“A professor? I? I have been called a lot of pretty things but never that. Perhaps a philosopher. Men come to me with their problems.”
“And who could solve them better?”
“I am Fat Claire, and I deny neither the name nor the title. Young man, Fat Claire is a name that is given respect!”
“How could I believe otherwise? I had scarcely met these gentlemen before they were assuring me of the high quality of your accomplishments.”
I called to the waiter. “Another bottle of wine. When I am out of funds, I shall leave.”
“Stay, we need your kind in Paris.”
“If you open a school,” Julot said, “I shall be the first to sit at your feet.” He turned to Fat Claire. “He is not all banter and wit. He has studied in Córdoba where they have more books than priests!”
“And studied more than books, I should say,” she replied wryly.
The girls gathered about with the students. “Stay with us, soldier, and we shall give you such entertainment as you will not find in Córdoba.”
“I have heard of your entertainment. My father was here long ago. He fought Vikings on the river below Paris.”
“Your father? And who might he have been?”
“Kerbouchard. It is an old name upon the sea.”
“The son of Kerbouchard.” Fat Claire’s look was appraising. “Yes, it could be, though no two men looked more and yet less alike. We know your father here, and bless him. He fought the Vikings well enough, fought them in the streets of Paris as well as on the river.
“I was a girl then, and the Vikings came up the river, and our town was empty of soldiers. They came with no warning, and had it not been for your father and his men, much good French blood would have run in the gutters that night. He followed them up the river and arrived behind them when they had begun their rampage. We were ready to flee to the island and burn our bridges as we used to do when he and his men took them at sword’s point.”
She put down her glass. “So you are the son of Kerbouchard? He was a strong man, and narrow in the hips.”
Julot leaned toward her. “Claire, I have a thought the teacher was ill-inclined to our soldier. He might start an inquiry. If so, we might have to flee quickly.”
She glanced at me. “Are you alone? Have you friends?”
“None here. I go to meet them now. I have my horses, and some gear.”
She did not ask where my friends were, for she had learned discretion in her own school. If the time came when I must escape, I preferred it to be by my own route. That man is a fool who would descend into a well on another man’s rope.
For one day I had done enough, and I was uneasy, for that teacher had seemed a narrow, vengeful man who would not have enjoyed my comments. It was a night’s ride to the fair, and if I did not start soon, they might be gone.
Peter Lombard, the student of Abelard, was no longer Bishop of Paris, and I had small hope such a straight-thinking man would succeed him. Had Peter Lombard still been bishop, I would have trusted my case to his hands, but I had no desire to lie in prison while they made up their minds about me or subjected me to torture. It had been my experience that the political or ecclesiastical mind is laggard in making decisions.
Whatever plans one has were best kept to oneself, for those with whom you share them might themselves share them with someone else, and he is a wise man who mentally keeps a hand on the door latch.
To die for what one believes is all very well for those so inclined, but it has always seemed to me the most vain of solutions. There is no cause worth dying for that is not better served by living.