It had not been as bad as Harun imagined.
Not quite.
Bertram had neither tied him to a tree and beaten him, nor had he made him eat fallen leaves and moss or thought up some other terrible punishment for the trials Harun had inflicted on him. In fact, after they had waved off Sir Christian and the knight had left, riding away into the forest on is tall mount, for the first time really looking like the knight he was supposed to be, the recluse had asked the scribe quite civilly to come in and even shared his meal with him, consisting of many, many things unsuitable for a pious nobleman.
Nevertheless, the following half-hour was pure torment. Harun could not remember ever having been punished so severely by piercing looks and twitching eyebrows, while sitting in a warm, comfortable room and being served tasty roasted meats and succulent ripe apples and pears. A fear of this solitary, serious man erupted suddenly in Harun’s heart. Not the fear of an enemy nor even that of a wild beast, but the fear one might feel standing before a vast mountain, which felt no wrath at you, yet could smite you down in an instant with a heavy bolder or a mass of white, deadly snow.
There were things under that black robe not for all to see.
Finally Bertram seemed to think his guest had had enough, and abandoned his silent penetration.
He lent back in his chair and shifted his eyebrows. Suddenly he seemed much more friendly, though no less intimidating.
“There is a specific reason why you are here, is there not?” he asked.
“There is a reason for everything,” said Harun, the man of logic.
“Yes. But in this case it must be an important one, ore you would have left long ago. I have not been exactly pleasant company.”
“That’s true enough. But I deserved it.”
“That’s true enough, too.”
“Am I forgiven?”
“Are you joking? After all, you have to bear the man each and every day, I only occasionally. Of course you are.”
“He’s not so bad always, you know.”
“When he’s five miles away from you, for example.”
“No, honestly, Bertram.”
“I am always honest. It is a congenital defect, I think. Do you want to hear what he confessed to me?”
“No!”
“There you have it. You have just as great a horror of the man as I have.”
“No, but you should not tell things to me he confesses to you, I know much about Christianity, but I know that much. Isn’t there a rule about it all being secret?”
“Yes there is. So what?”
“And isn’t there a rule about only priests being aloud to do it? You are no priest.”
“Should I have told him that and disappointed him? Even if I’d tried, I doubt whether he would have listened. He was very insistent about confessing each and every sin he could think of, and telling me how very sorry he was.”
Harun looked miserable. “And I’ve sent him to you. I’m really sorry.”
“Now you, too! That must be contagious. Don’t be. He didn’t recognize…” the recluse stopped.
“Recognize what?”
For a moment only, Bertram looked ill at ease. “Oh, nothing really. As I said, don’t let it bother you.”
“But he’ll come back.”
“Who cares? I’ll dodge him somehow. Holy men who live a life of solitary prayer in the forest have many calls on their time. Talking to God, fasting…” he bit from an apple and chewed energetically.
“Now back to you my friend, you and your reason for coming here. Am I right in thinking it has to do with your inquiries about this dead peasant?”
“Yes. Bertram, I…” Harun faltered, then it came out suddenly: “I don’t now what to do.”
“Take another apple,” his host suggested. “What’s the matter, exactly?”
“The murder cannot have been committed by anyone.”
“Why, that is a novel idea, certainly. And a very simplifying, from your point of view. You can forget about the whole business and return to your usual daily routine.”
“But I cannot do that! The murder must have been committed by somebody!”
“That, if my knowledge of Greek has not forsaken me, is what is called a paradox. An ancient principle of Greek philosophy. Just the right thing for you, I would have imagined.”
“It can be fifty philosophical principles for all I care! A man is dead, and admiring the difficulty and the theoretical interest of the circumstances surrounding his death is not getting me one inch closer to finding his killer!”
“And that is what is called practicality. A useful skill, though difficult to learn if one has not practiced it. Yet perhaps we two can help each other out. That is why you have come, if I am not mistaken.”
“You are not.”
“So why exactly is there no one who could have killed this man?”
Harun told him. Perhaps with a little less detail included about Wenzel and his discovery than one would expect, considering the guard’s part in the proceedings, but it was a truthful enough account as accounts go.
“Difficult,” Bertram granted when the scribe had finished. “You have not been able to find anyone with a motive for the deed? Anyone?”
“As I’ve told you, of the four people which could have done…”
“No, I’m not talking only about them. Is there someone other than these four people who could have a motive for murder?”
“What if there was? He could have nothing to do with it? I have proven that.”
“My dear friend, what you have proven is that you’ve landed yourself in a nice pickle because you’ve made and error somewhere and can’t figure out where exactly.”
“Do you mean to say there is somebody I’ve overlooked outside the circle of these four? Who?” Harun demanded.
“I did not say I knew where your error lay or what it was. I only observed that you must have made one.”
“Ha!”
“Which means in my humble opinion,” Bertram continued indifferently, “that you should be wary of relying absolutely on your own conclusions. Perhaps you should consider that you actually have to start all over again.”
Harun stared at the recluse as though he had declared the world to be cubic.
*~*~*~*~*
“'Start all over again'. It’s all very well for him to talk, sitting there in his snug little cottage with nothing to do but watch the sun sink and rise again. I cannot be wrong. I simply cannot be! I am a man of logic!”
Harun stopped, propping himself up on a tree stump to catch his breath again. These walks through the forest were annoyingly exhausting. If at least there were roads. But no, only mud and bramble as far as the eye could see. Which wasn’t very far, because of all these trees. Was he still going in the right direction?
He caught a glimpse of a distant gray tower through the rufous leaf-roof above him. Yes, there was the castle. The scribe sat of again.
Start all over again…
How could he start all over again? Just assume he had made an error somewhere and look for anyone with a motive for murder, whether equipped with a sword or not, living in the castle or outside it? One could just as well kick out logic through the window and assume Lukas was murdered by a passing devil on his way to hell. Anyway, there was no one with a motive to kill the peasant, neither inside the castle nor outside.
By now, Harun had almost reached the edge of the village. He wandered around it, always careful to stay in the shadows of the trees which he suddenly found not so annoying anymore. There were people on the little fields and between the houses. They had no logical reason to want to do something to him, but he preferred to stay well out of their way nevertheless. Perhaps they had an illogical one.
An idea came to the scribe. Perhaps that was what had taken place. Somebody had killed Lukas, not for any particular reason, but just because he just felt like doing it.
But than were did the murderer have the sword from? It all made no sense. No, it could not have been a quarrel or sudden rage. Apart from the matter of the sword, why should any two people come together at the well before the castle gates at this hour, if not because it was a designated meeting place? This was a premeditated crime. But then again, nobody had a motive.
Harun had reached the castle gates, which was opened at his knocking. The guards were considerably disappointed that he was still alive and apparently all in one peace. They pushed him around a bit but he was able to escape and retreat into his Scriptorium where he barred the door after him.
“Ruffians,” he muttered. “Appalling what the envy of a superior mind can make man do.”
He needed to compose himself. He sat down in his chair, and took out the Trial of Socrates. He opened it again randomly, hoping against hope that it would show an absolutely insignificant sentence which would not at all remind him of what he should be doing.
‘It is my task to reveal, as in this case, what is true, and, if doubtful, to inquire and reveal as untrue.’
No, not again. What he needed were not any reminders of what he had to do, but hints as to how to go about it. What good was Philosophy if it could not even manage that?
Angrily, he shut the book. As he did so, the peace of parchment he had used as a bookmark fell out and tumbled to the floor. He bent down to pick it up, and then froze, his eyes fixed on the little brown scrap.
He shut his eyes, breathed in deeply, opened them and stared again.
There they were. The same numbers, on the same peace of parchment. And he had used it as a bookmark. As a bookmark! And gone on looking for solutions in the Defence of Socrates. Practicality indeed.
112 Pounds on the old field behind the smithy, 109 Pounds on the old field up the hill, 104 Pounds and 111 Pounds on the two newest fields, only cleared last spring…
How could he have been so stupid! To have known about it all the time and yet failed to piece it together.
He saw once again the glinting of a sword, hanging from a belt of a man sitting in the main hall of Sevenport. The same man, the same sword, in Danzig, at the market, near the merchants selling and buying grain.
From his memory, Harun heard faraway voices calling out to him. Bertram saying, in a dark night in the woods:
“These new fields were rather more fertile than most of the older ones closer to the village of course and produced more crop, but that is so with all fields newly cleared by fire. The ash makes the ground fertile, you see.”
A bondsman, averting his eyes, telling Harun about the harvest:
“Not so good, nay. Not that much left.”
There was the motive. Simple and cold.
But this did not change anything, did it? The man still could not have committed the murder?
Yes, it did change something. It changed a lot. For the first time this offered a sound, comprehensible reason to murder, and whether or not it had actually led to a crime, Harun had something to work on again at last! He jumped up with unusual agility and hurried down the stairs, out of the castle and away over the fields, not caring for who or what got in his way.
The peasants stopped their work and gazed in amazement at the scribe stomping by. What was this creature doing out here? Did he not no they would beat him within an inch of his life if they got the chance, here, outside his lord’s protection? Obviously he did know, and he had went nevertheless…they turned their heads from right lo left, seeking reassurance in one another’s eyes, and finding none.
Harun looked so determined that nobody dared approach him, which was a good thing, because if anybody had approached him and shaken him out of his current state of mind he would probably have very quickly caught up on reality and stopped looking determined.
Nothing happened, as he passed the main fields, strode along the edge of the forest and came to the lonely-looking new fields. Lonely? More than that. Forsaken as they were, with only the one bondsman at work, picking up the few scattered corns left over from the gleaning, they looked dead. As well they might.
Harun, still not thinking of thinking, his mind fixed upon one purpose only, rapidly approached the solitary worker. It was a young man, and none to thick set a one. Hollow cheeks still showed that times for him had not always been as good as now, as bondsman of Sir Christian of Sevenport with his own piece of land to work. Bad enough to still care about leftovers, now that his life was far more secure. But his cheeks were also rosy, his face cheerful. This was a man happy in his world. Into which Harun the scribe broke like a thunderstorm.
“You!” The scribe strode right up to the young person and pointed a threatening, ink-stained finger at him. “You have paid a bribe to the murdered man, Lukas, to be granted this field.”
The peasant’s mouth dropped open.
“What the blazes…”
“It was the surplus corn gained here because of the clearing by fire. You have paid it as a bribe to Lukas, who had promised you to get theses fields for you somehow, and so has everyone who has been granted a newly cleared field here. Don’t try to deny it, I know all!”
“H- how?” was all the other one could get out of his mouth.
Harun thought about this.
“By my heathen powers of magic prophecy,” he declared, finally.
The young man’s eyes gleamed excitedly.
“Can I learn those, too?” he inquired. “Would be damn useful for playing cards and stuff.”
“No. They are abominable and for using them you will be cast into the flames of the fiery abyss below, where devils squeeze you with hot irons.”
“Shame. But you use them?”
“I’m a heathen. I’m abominable anyway, remember?”
The young man nodded. This made sense to him. If you had such a bad time coming in the afterlife, it couldn’t be wrong at least to win a little extra pelf as a recompense.
“So Lukas did demand a share of the harvest in exchange for getting you this field?”
“Aye. And a hefty one, at that. I hope he gets the hot irons, the bastard.”
“And you all hated him for it?”
“Red hot, big irons.”
“Thank you, that is clear enough.”
Harun looked the man in the eyes. There was hatred there, right enough, but how could he have got his hands on a sword? Or any other bondsman? No, the guilt lay somewhere else. And he knew where.
“So Lukas extorted a share of the harvest from all bondsmen.”
“Aye, as I said.”
Now came the crucial question. “Did it not occur to you to wonder how he got you your fields in exchange? Did you not realize that he could not have done so on his own?”
“Nay. Why?”
“Is a simple peasant and bondsman likely to have the power to distribute his lord’s lands at will? Is there not another person, a person which looks after the property of the lord, a person who would be in a far better position to extort a share of your harvest from you, if only a convenient go-between could be found?”
The peasant looked down, thinking. As it was an activity he had not much practice in, it took some time. But he knew about farming. And he knew where to look, when pointed in the right direction.
“Do… do you…” he began hesitantly, “do you mean like the steward?”
He looked up. Harun, however was already on his way, striding back towards the castle.
-----------------------------------------------------
We have a new suspect!! What do you think of him? Nice guy? ;)
By the way, I'd like to make an announcement, for those of my readers that haven't noticed yet: Now that 'Well Dead' is slowly coming to an end, I have started my new historical fiction 'The Robber Knight'. You can reach the story via the externel link, or on my profile. I'd love to hear all your views on my new story, if you have the time! :)
Cheers
Robert