Death and the Devil

“Are you thinking of running away again?”

“No.”

“You’ve nothing to fear, Fox-cub. Johann rattled his saber, and so did I. We each promised the other we’d make his life hell on earth if there wasn’t peace immediately.” Jaspar smiled smugly. “I had to cheat a bit. But only a bit.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That’s water under the bridge. Better nobody knows. I believe in knowledge, but too much can sometimes cause trouble.”

“What you found out about Urquhart didn’t. Quite the opposite.”

“It was your story, Fox-cub,” Jaspar explained. “I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I kept asking myself what could have made such an intelligent and cultured man as Urquhart into what he was. Suddenly I had the idea he must be like you, with a curse on him that lay somewhere in his past. I went back to St. Pantaleon to talk to Hieronymus again. Now I knew the murderer’s name. It was only a vague hope and not without its tragic aspect, forcing a dying man to rack his brains for me.”

“That’s why you were late?”

“Hieronymus couldn’t remember a man with long blond hair because at that time Urquhart didn’t have long blond hair. But the name rang a bell. At the end I knew what Urquhart really was.”

“And what was he?”

Jaspar gazed reflectively over the fields gilded by the setting sun. “He was a victim,” he said after a while.

“A victim?” Jacob mused. “And did you find the culprit?”

“War, Fox-cub. The thing that kills us at the moment when we kill. Urquhart was duke of Monadhliath in Scotland. His castle rises above Loch Ness. But he was not one of those clan chiefs who was a crude butcher. He had been to Paris and well taught there. Hieronymus described him as a man both noble and bold. Quick to take up his sword, but just as quick with words. A man who loved duels, but not slaughter. Among the nobles who led the Crusade, he was counted as one of the most honorable, although like so many he had succumbed to the mistaken belief that God’s seed can flourish in blood-soaked soil. Then Louis’s troops captured Damietta. And something happened he could not understand. Slaughter. Louis had hundreds of children herded together to demonstrate once and for all what he thought of the infidel. They were tortured and butchered, so that many of the men, even the toughest and cruelest among them, turned away in horror.”

Jaspar sighed.

“The mighty ignore condemnations of war with contempt, intellectuals with a shrug of the shoulders, because they say nothing new or original. But they will remain true as long as we continue to wage war. We will have dominion over the whole of creation in a way God never dreamed of. We will not be dwarves on the shoulders of giants, but a race of giants, each outgrowing the other much too quickly—but when it comes to the crunch, we’ll still smash one another’s skulls in as in the darkest of dark ages. When they slaughtered the children in Damietta, something changed inside Urquhart. War has more subtle methods of destroying people than just killing them. He fell into a fit of demented rage. And his heart began to freeze to ice. Eventually they were all afraid of him, even Louis. He sent a dozen of his best men to Urquhart’s tent. They crept in at night to kill him while he slept.”

“What happened?”

“Only one came out. Crawled out on his belly. His last words were that it wasn’t a man they’d found in the tent, but a beast, and that beast had been the Devil. The next morning Urquhart was gone. He had run away, just like you. From himself, from what could not be altered. And unlike you, who eventually managed to come to terms with it, Urquhart gave himself up to the dark side. The evil, that he believed he was fighting against, became his nature. Urquhart no longer recognized himself, otherwise he would have realized that one can always turn back.”

For a while Jacob said nothing. Then, “No,” he said, “I don’t think he could turn back.”

“But you did.”

“I had help.”

“Hmm.” Jaspar massaged the bridge of his nose. For a long time there was silence.

“What are you going to do now?” he eventually asked.

“Don’t know. Think. Play my whistle. Not run away, that’s for sure.”

“Very worthy. Now I’m not trying to talk you into anything you don’t want, but—well, as far as dyeing’s concerned, Goddert will have to call it a day, and Richmodis—well, I think I can say she quite likes you…”

“I more than quite like Richmodis.”

“Well, there you are!” Jaspar slapped the stone parapet. “What are we waiting for?”

“Jaspar.” Jacob shook his head and smiled for the first time. “You can run away by staying where you are. I need to be alone with myself for a while. It isn’t all over for me yet. What I mean is, saying Urquhart’s dead and the alliance dissolved is not the end of the story. I’m still the man who looked away too quickly. Once. Give me time.”

Jaspar looked at him for a long time. “Will you go away?”