The Tower of Fools Read online

  “The complaint,” the parish priest said coldly, “is no subject for discussion. Let’s just say that he cured me.”

  “It’s not worth the worry of executing somebody like that,” added the burgermeister. “It’d be a shame to let such a lad perish in a family feud, just because his head was turned by a pair of beautiful… eyes. Let him serve folk. Let him treat folk, since he is skilled—”

  “Even by using a pentagram drawn on the floor?” snorted Hofrichter.

  “If it works,” said Father Gall gravely, “if it helps, if it eases the pain, why not? Such abilities are divine gifts; the Lord gives them according to His will and according to designs known only to Him. Spiritus fiat, ubi vult, it’s not for us to question His ways.”

  “Amen,” concluded the burgermeister.

  “In short,” Hofrichter kept pushing, “someone like Reynevan cannot be guilty? Is that it? Eh?”

  “He who is without guilt,” Father Gall replied inscrutably, “let him cast the first stone. And God will judge us all.”

  For a while, such a pregnant silence reigned that the rustle of moths’ wings striking the window could be heard. The long-drawn-out and melodious call of the town guard was audible from Saint John’s Street.

  “Wherefore, to summarise,” said the burgermeister, sitting up straight at the table so as to rest his belly against it, “the brothers Stercza are to blame for the disturbance in town. The brothers Stercza are to blame for the material damage and bodily injuries. The brothers Stercza are to blame for the grave injury to and—God forbid—the death of the Very Reverend Prior. They, and they alone. And what happened to Nicolaus of Stercza was a… mishap. Thus shall we present it to the duke on his return. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  “Consensus omnium.”

  “Concordi voce.”

  “But were Reynevan to appear anywhere,” Father Gall added a moment later, “I advise seizing him quietly and locking him up here, in our town-hall gaol. For his own safety. Until the matter blows over.”

  “It would be well to do so swiftly,” added Łukasz Friedmann, examining his rings one last time, “before Tammo of Stercza gets wind of the damnable business.”

  As he left the town hall and headed straight into the darkness of Saint John’s Street, the merchant Hofrichter glimpsed a movement on the tower’s moonlit wall, an indistinct, moving shape a little below the windows of the town trumpeter, but above the windows of the chamber where the meeting had just finished. He stared, shielding his eyes from the somewhat blinding light of the lantern carried by his servant. What the Devil? he thought and crossed himself. What’s creeping across the wall up there? An owl? A swift? A bat? Or perhaps…

  Jan Hofrichter shuddered, crossed himself again, pulled his marten-fur calpac down over his ears, wrapped his coat around him and set off briskly home.

  Thus he didn’t see a huge wallcreeper spread its wings, fly down from the parapet and noiselessly, like a nightly spectre, glide over the town’s rooftops.

  Apeczko of Stercza, Lord of Ledna, didn’t like visiting Sterzendorf Castle. There was one simple reason: Sterzendorf was the seat of Tammo of Stercza, the head and patriarch of the family—or, as some said, the family’s tyrant, despot and tormentor.

  The chamber was airless. And dark. Tammo of Stercza didn’t let anyone open the windows for fear of catching cold, or the shutters, because light dazzled the cripple’s eyes.

  Apeczko was hungry and covered in dust from his journey, but there was no time either to eat anything or to clean himself up. Old Stercza didn’t like to be kept waiting. Nor did he usually feed his guests. Particularly members of the family.

  So Apeczko was swallowing saliva to moisten his throat—he hadn’t been given anything to drink, naturally—and telling Tammo about the events in Oleśnica. He did so reluctantly, but he had no choice. Cripple or not, paralysed or not, Tammo was the family patriarch. A patriarch who didn’t tolerate defiance.

  The old man listened to the account, slumped on a chair in his familiar, bizarrely twisted position. Misshapen old fart, thought Apeczko. Bloody mangled old bugger.

  The cause of the condition of the Stercza family’s patriarch was neither fully understood nor common knowledge. One thing wasn’t in doubt—Tammo had suffered a stroke after a fit of rage. Some claimed that the old man had become furious on hearing that a personal enemy, the hated Konrad, Duke of Wrocław, had been anointed bishop and become the most powerful personage in Silesia. Others were certain the ill-fated outburst was the result of his mother-in-law, Anna of Pogarell, burning Tammo’s favourite dish—buckwheat kasha with fried pork rind. No one would ever know what really happened, but the outcome was evident and couldn’t be ignored. After the accident, Stercza could only move his left hand and foot—and clumsily at that. His right eyelid drooped permanently, glutinous tears oozed ceaselessly from his left, which he occasionally managed to lift, and saliva dribbled from the corner of his mouth, which was twisted in a ghastly grimace. The accident had also caused almost complete loss of speech, giving rise to the old man’s nickname: Balbulus. The Stammerer-Mumbler.

  The loss of the ability to speak hadn’t, however, resulted in what the entire family had hoped for—a loss of contact with the world. Oh, no. The Lord of Sterzendorf continued to hold the family in his grasp and terrorise everybody, and what he wanted to say, he said. For he always had to hand somebody who could understand and translate his gurgling, wheezing, gibbering and shouts into comprehensible speech. That person was usually a child, one of Balbulus’s countless grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

  This time, the interpreter was ten-year-old Ofka of Baruth, who was sitting at the old man’s feet and dressing a doll in colourful strips of rag.

  “Thus,” Apeczko finished his account, cleared his throat and moved on to his conclusion, “Wolfher asked me through an emissary to inform you that he will deal swiftly with the matter. That Reinmar of Bielawa will be seized on the Wrocław road and punished. But for the present, Wolfher’s hands are tied because the Duke of Oleśnica is journeying with his entire court and diverse eminent clergymen, so there is no way to pursue him. But Wolfher vows to seize Reynevan and claims he can be entrusted with the family’s honour.”

  Balbulus’s eyelid twitched and a dribble of saliva trickled from his mouth.

  “Bbbhh-bhh-bhh-bhubhu-bhhuaha-rrhhha-phhh-aaa-rrh!” reverberated through the chamber. “Bbb… hrrrh-urrrhh-bhuuh! Guggu-ggu…”

  “Wolfher is a bloody moron,” Ofka of Baruth translated in her high, melodious voice. “An idiot I wouldn’t even trust with a pail of puke. And the only thing he’s capable of seizing is his own prick.”

  “Father—”

  “Bbb… brrrh! Bhhrhuu-phr-rrrhhh!”

  “Silence,” translated Ofka without raising her head, busy with her doll. “Listen to what I say. To my orders.”

  Apeczko waited patiently for the wheezing and croaking to finish and then for the translation.

  “First of all, Apecz,” Tammo of Stercza ordered via the little girl’s mouth, “you will establish which of the women in Bierutów was charged with supervising the Burgundian. She obviously didn’t realise the true aim of those charitable visits to Oleśnica or alternatively was in league with the harlot. Give that woman thirty-five sound lashes with a birch on her naked arse. Here, in my chamber, in front of my eyes, that I might at least have a little diversion.”

  Apeczko of Stercza nodded. Balbulus coughed, wheezed and slobbered all over himself, then grimaced dreadfully and gaggled.

  “I order the Burgundian, meanwhile, to be taken from the Cistercian convent in Ligota, where I know she is in hiding,” translated Ofka, tidying her doll’s oakum hair with a small comb, “even if you have to storm it. Then imprison the trollop among monks favourably disposed towards us, for example—”

  Tammo abruptly stopped stammering and gobbling, his wheezing caught in his throat. Apeczko, pierced by the old man’s bloodshot eye, saw that he had noticed hi
s embarrassed expression. That he understood. That it was impossible to hide the truth any longer.

  “The Burgundian escaped from Ligota,” he stammered. “In secret… No one knows whither. Busy with the pursuit of Reynevan… they—we—allowed her to escape.”

  “I wonder,” Ofka translated after a long, pregnant silence, “I wonder why this doesn’t surprise me at all. But since it is so, let it be. I won’t bother myself with the whore. Let Gelfrad deal with the matter on his return. He can handle it himself, whether or not he’s a cuckold. It’s nothing new in this family, actually. It must have happened to me, for it can’t be possible that such fools sprang from my own loins.”

  Balbulus coughed, wheezed and choked for a while. But Ofka didn’t translate, so it couldn’t have been speech, just ordinary coughing. The old man finally took a breath, grimaced like a demon and struck his cane against the floor, then gurgled horribly. Ofka listened, sucking the end of her plait.

  “But Nicolaus was the family’s hope,” she translated. “Was of my blood, the blood of the Sterczas, not the dregs of the Devil knows what mongrel couplings. So the killer will have to pay for Nicolaus’s spilled blood. With interest.”

  Tammo banged his cane against the floor again. It fell from his shaking hand. The Lord of Sterzendorf coughed and sneezed, spraying saliva and snot around. Hrozwita of Baruth, Balbulus’s daughter and Ofka’s mother, who was standing alongside, wiped his chin, picked up the cane and pressed it into his hand.

  “Hgrrrhhh! Grhhh… Bbb… bhrr… bhrrrllg…”

  “Reinmar of Bielawa will pay me back for Nicolaus,” Ofka translated unemotionally. “He will pay, as God and all the saints are my witnesses. I will lock him up in a dungeon, in a cage, in a chest like the one the Duke of Głogów cast Henry the Fat into, so small he won’t even be able to scratch himself, with one hole for food and another directly opposite. And I’ll keep him like that for half a year. And only then go to work on him. And I’ll bring a torturer all the way from Magdeburg, because they have excellent men there, not like the ones here in Silesia, where the rascal expires on the second day. Oh, no, I’ll get hold of a master who’ll devote to Nicolaus’s killer a week. Or two.”

  Apeczko Stercza swallowed.

  “But to do that,” Ofka continued, “we must seize the adulterer. Which demands intelligence. Wits. Because the adulterer is no fool. A fool wouldn’t have graduated from Prague, or ingratiated himself with the Oleśnica friars, or have so ably seduced Gelfrad’s French wife. With a crafty one like that, it’s not enough to chase up and down the Wrocław road like an idiot, making a fool of oneself. Giving the affair renown that will serve the rake—and not us.”

  Apeczko nodded. Ofka looked at him and sniffed and wiped her little snub nose.

  “The adulterer,” she translated on, “has a brother, residing on an estate somewhere near Henryków. It’s quite likely he’ll seek shelter there. Perhaps he already has. Another Bielawa, before he died, was a priest at the Wrocław Collegiate, so it’s conceivable the rascal will want to hide with another rascal. I mean to say with His Excellency, the Most Reverend Bishop Konrad, that old soak and thief!”

  Hrozwita of Baruth once again wiped the old man’s chin, which was covered in snot after his furious outburst.

  “Furthermore, the rake has acquaintances among the monks of the Monastery of the Holy Ghost in Brzeg, in the hospice. Our sly boots may have headed there, to surprise and mislead Wolfher. Which isn’t too difficult, in any case. Finally, the most important thing. Listen carefully, Apecz. It’s certain that our adulterer will want to play the trouveur, pretend to be some sort of Lohengrin or Lancelot. He will want to contact the Frenchwoman. And we will most likely catch him there, in Ligota, like a dog with a bitch in heat.”

  “Why in Ligota?” Apeczko dared to ask. “For she—”

  “Has fled, I know. But he doesn’t.”

  The old fart’s soul, thought Apeczko, is even more twisted than his body. But he’s as cunning as a fox. And, to give him his due, he knows a great deal. Knows everything.

  “But to achieve what I have just ordered,” Ofka translated into comprehensible language, “you’re not much bloody use to me—you, my sons and nephews, blood, apparently, of my blood and bone of my bone. Therefore, you will hasten as quickly as you can to Niemodlin, and then to Ziębice. When you get there… Listen carefully, Apecz. You will find Kunz Aulock, called Kyrie-eleison. And others: Walter of Barby, Sybek of Kobylagłowa and Stork of Gorgowice. You will tell them that Tammo Stercza will pay a thousand Rhenish guilders for the capture of Reinmar of Bielawa alive. A thousand—remember.”

  Apeczko swallowed at each name, for they were the names of the worst thugs and killers throughout Silesia, scoundrels with neither honour nor faith. Prepared to murder their own grandmothers for three skojeces, never mind the astonishing sum of a thousand guilders. My guilders, thought Apeczko crossly. Because that ought to be my inheritance when that damned cripple finally kicks the bucket.

  “Do you understand, Apecz?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Then begone, off with you. Out of here, to horse, carry out my orders.”

  First, thought Apeczko, I’ll head towards the kitchen, where I’ll eat my fill and drink enough for two, you stingy old bugger. And then we’ll see.

  “Apecz.”

  Apeczko Stercza turned around. And looked. But not at Balbulus’s contorted, flushed face, which seemed to him, for the first time here in Sterzendorf, to be unnatural, out of place. Apeczko looked into little Ofka’s huge, nut-brown eyes. At Hrozwita, standing behind his chair.

  “Yes, Father?”

  “Do not let us down.”

  But perhaps it isn’t him at all? The thought flashed through his mind. Perhaps it’s a corpse sitting on this chair, a half-dead carcass with its brain utterly eaten up by paralysis? Perhaps… it’s them? Perhaps it’s the women—girls, maidens and matrons—who rule at Sterzendorf?

  He quickly drove away the preposterous thought.

  “I won’t, Father.”

  Apeczko Stercza had no intention of hurrying to carry out Tammo’s orders. He walked briskly to the castle kitchen, murmuring angrily, where he demanded everything the said kitchen had to offer. Let the cripple lord it in his chamber upstairs; outside, executive power belonged to somebody else. Outside the chamber, Apeczko of Stercza was master, and he demonstrated it as soon as he entered the kitchen. A dog earned a kick and bolted, howling. A cat fled, deftly dodging the large wooden spoon thrown at it. The maids flinched as a cast-iron cauldron slammed down on the stone floor with a dreadful bang. The most sluggish maid was hit on the back of the neck and called a whorish clod. The serving boys learned all sorts of things about themselves and their parents, and several made the close acquaintance of their master’s fist, as hard and heavy as a lump of iron. A servant who needed to be told twice to bring wine from the master’s cellar received such a kick that he lurched forward onto hands and knees.

  Soon after, Apeczko—Sir Apeczko—was sprawled on his chair, greedily chewing great mouthfuls of roast venison, fatty pork ribs, a huge ring of blood pudding, a hunk of dried Prague ham and several pigeons boiled in broth, accompanied by a whole loaf of bread as large as a Saracen’s buckler. Washed down, naturally, with the best Hungarian and Moldavian wines, which Balbulus kept for his own personal use. He tossed bones on the ground like a lord of the manor, spitting, belching and glowering at the fat housekeeper, just waiting for her to give him an excuse.

  The old bugger, the old fart, the paralytic orders me to call him “father” when he’s only my uncle, my father’s brother. But I must put up with it. For when he finally turns up his toes, I, the eldest Stercza, will at last become head of the family. The inheritance, of course, will have to be divided up, but I shall be head of the dynasty. Everybody knows it. Nothing will hinder me. Nothing will stop me…

  What might hinder me, thought Apeczko, swearing under his breath, is this furore with Reynevan and Gelfrad’
s wife. What may hinder me is a family feud making me fall foul of the Landfriede laws governing family feuds. Hiring thugs and killers may hinder me, as might the noisy pursuit, incarceration in a dungeon, ill-treatment and torture of a lad who’s kin of the Nostitzes, related to the Piasts and a vassal of Jan of Ziębice. And Konrad, Bishop of Wrocław—whose dislike of Balbulus is mutual—is just waiting for the first opportunity to give the Sterczas what for.

  Not good, not good, not good.

  And to blame for all of this, Apeczko suddenly decided, picking his teeth, is Reynevan, Reinmar of Bielawa. And he shall pay for it. But not in a way that would incite the whole of Silesia. He shall pay in an ordinary way, quietly, in the dark, with a knife in the ribs. When—as Balbulus guessed right—he appears in secret at the Cistercian sisters’ convent in Ligota, beneath his lover’s window. One thrust of a knife and he’ll land plop in the Cistercians’ carp pond. And hush! The carp won’t let on.

  On the other hand, one cannot utterly ignore Balbulus’s instructions, if only because the Mumbler usually checks whether his orders are executed by giving the same orders to not one, but several persons.

  What to do, by the Devil?

  Apeczko thrust a knife into the table with a thud and drained his beaker in one draught. He looked up and met the gaze of the fat housekeeper.

  “What are you staring at?” he growled.

  “The senior master has recently stocked up with some excellent Italian wine,” said the housekeeper calmly. “Shall I have it drawn, Your Grace?”

  “Indeed.” Apeczko smiled in spite of himself and felt the woman’s calm soothing him, too. “Indeed, please do, I shall taste what has been maturing in Italy. And please send a boy to the watchtower, have him bring me a half-decent horseman with his wits about him. Someone who’s capable of delivering a message.”