Conducted by Fra. Salimbene, a Thirteenth-Century Italian Franciscan. Englished from the Latin by ...
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he sins of Emperor Fridericus, King of Sicily, of Cyprus and Jerusalem, and of Germany, are so many in number and so prodigious in degree that in my weariness, and for want of time, I can enumerate but a few.
Once, for his idle amusement, he caused a vintner to be drowned in a cask of his own product, for he declared the wine in need of more full-bodied flavour - to which I say mine Emperor be as damned for the poor jape as for the murder.
Once, several of his enemies being captured in battle, he had them cut by a surgeon-barber, that the thews of their limbs be severed, and made slack and helpless thereby, and their hands and feet and bodies strung up, still living, like the puppets called marionettes. And great was the laughter of the assembled worthies to see those sorry men swinging about as in a children’s play, weeping and shouting to God, their limbs made to perform impious and abominable acts with each other, and with objects the merry Emperor and his friends tossed onto the stage.
Once, at luncheon, mine Emperor fed two men at table, of whom one he sent to sleep and the other to hunt; and that same evening he caused them to be disembowelled in his presence, to know which had the better digestion.
As for me, I cannot say I slept well nor digested a meal when in his patronage. More than once Rome branded him the Antichrist, and often enough I called him that also, in my cell at night - though for all his brutality, I must tell you he was no brute, but a comely, gallant man, a man of wit, conversant in seven languages and literate in nine, for which he was called stupor mundi or ‘wonder of the world’. A patron of the Arts and Sciences, sometimes his sins took a philosophical character, wherewith he endeavoured better to understand God’s Creation, even as he offended against it.
So it was that the Experiment came to be. Whether it would prove his greatest sin, or his saving, that is for Another to judge.
The notion must have visited him on a nightly carouse, for he came to me at Matins, very early, breaking into my dawn prayers with his ale-breath and hot eyes and the following instructions:
First, he desired me to gather a group of infants, hapless foundlings, some of whom he himself had, in some adventure or prodigality, made orphans.
Second, he bade me lock them in a cottage with a high-walled garden - and in this at least I felt no shame, for the children’s circumstances were much improved, with warm beds and meat and drink.
Third, I was to bring some foster-mothers and nurses for to suckle and bathe and care for the infants - but in no wise were they to speak with them. And here lay the critical thing, said the Emperor: his aim was to discover the Divine Language, being the tongue with which God addressed Adam and Eve, and which he argued must arise in those uninfluenced by the languages of man.
And so to my disgrace or glory I did as bid; and the children were gathered; and the nurses and foster-mothers suckled and bathed them; and the months passed; and one of the children sickened and died of a pox; and another fell from its cradle and broke a leg bone and perished of it; and they were interred in nameless graves, and I spoke over them words they never heard in life; and so passed a year.
In the second year one of the nurses was afflicted with a bloody flux and died of it, and I was obliged to replace her with another maid very imperfect for the task. Very soon this new maid could not forbear from muttering some blandishments to a girl under her care; and the Emperor, learning this, had the nurse killed and the girl cast out.
A year more passed; and two of the children grew twisted and died, so that I was given to reflect that language might be like those vital essences in foods which, if not taken in sufficient quantities, cause the bones to misshape, and the body to shrivel. However, later I wondered that if language be a food, then it is one with a poison in it, and must be consumed in moderation, for those most full of words are often twisted themselves, despite that the twisting may not be apparent to the eye.
A third year came and went; and late on Saint Zephyrinus’s Day a child spake. That it was a girl was no great surprise to me. Erelong another child made utterances, a younger boy, and then another, a girl also. And I caused to be built in their garden a screen like unto the blinds or hides wherewith hunters conceal themselves when stalking birds; and I sat me behind that screen, all unobserved; and after a goodly time of listening, I felt there was sense in their speech, that it was not a mere babble of idiots; but I could not decipher it or tell what language it was. It struck the ear strangely, being a curious, stuttering tongue, pretty, and musical as the speech of the Cathays - but I knew it was not that language. For if it be the speech native to Eden, as reason said it must be, then it must be native to the region of the Euphrates, and not the Far East, where Cathay lies.
I reported this to mine Emperor, but he was busy with an intrigue against Ludwig the Severe of Bavaria, and told me to leave him be. So I betook myself instead to my Abbot, and my Franciscan brothers, and begged them come to the cottage. With a will they came and sat they and listened to the speech, and all agreed that it be language, and not senseless blether. But as to what language it was, they could not agree.
Those who knew Hebrew affirmed that it was Greek; those who spake Greek declared it was Hebrew; those who spake both languages avowed it was Aramaic. And so a quarrel arose, and language of a profane sort was heard, and I daresay several of my brothers were obliged to confess the sin of anger the next day; but still the problem was not solved.
A week passing, the Emperor, discharged of other obligations, came to see this wonder. Sat he also behind the screen and listened. With time he stood, pale of the face, and quiet, and made known that even he, so wise of languages, was unable to unravel their speech.
So the Experiment went on, and the three children grew and their language with them. The other children in the cottage grew also, though not so hale. Never did they speak that language, nor any other, though one made the cluck-cluck noises of the chickens in the yard with such naturalness that the nurses joked he must be about to lay an egg, for which I scolded them, but was privately amused.
Still word spread, even beyond Christendom, even unto Arabia, and there came one day to the court of Fridericus a Levantine. And mine Emperor, who was then hoping for an alliance with a Governor in a city of Persia, was pleased to grant this scholar every largesse. But the Levantine desired only to see the children.
Came he to the cottage, where followed an exchange between us in which I formed the most favourable impression of that gracious and learned man, such that in the end I prayed Heaven that God in his Mercy might convert him to the True Faith, and save him from Perdition, to which he was surely bound. When I invited him to the screen, gently he did so, and listened he to the children for but a short while, after which he came away, thoughtful; and I asked him if he understood their words, and he said that he did.
I threw up my hands, crying out that Arabic be the language of God, but he bade me be still. For though he understood their speech, it was not Arabic, nor any language of the lands of Men.
Gazing at me, he gave me to know a great wonder. He told me the children were not speaking words, but the figures and formulations of the science that is called al-jabr, or algebra, devised of the Persian astrologer, mathematician and geographer Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī.
By his manner, and my own observations of the language, I knew he spoke truly, and I was lost then in silent amaze. But later, when I reflected on the thing, I thought I should not have been very much surprised, for had not Plato and Thales of Miletus declared long ago that mathematics be the Language of God?
So passed a week, in observation and fruitful discussion between the Levantine and I. Until one evening, Fridericus, having been unsuccessful in his alliance, and in bad humour with things Persian, had some of his troopers convey to the Levantine a choice between leaving forthwith, or staying at the cost of his eyes.
The Levantine took the former option, and we parted in full sorrow.
Erelong came the Emperor himself, visiting the cottage as a storm visits the land. To the clap and boom of his questions, I gave such replies as I was able, which wondrous news was greeted only with a rain of scorn and a gale of revilings. For what use was mathematics to such as he? It could not serve him as language did; it could not be used to make falsehoods or master other men.
He was minded to end the Experiment at once; but being otherwise occupied with a small war that was going poorly for him, he declared he would leave things as they stood until another purpose arose for the cottage; and so it was; and he passed over and blew away. Again for a while the weather was clement, and I was allowed to continue my observations alone. This I did in peace and delight, listening as the children spake the Divine Language; and danced and sang in it, for is not music a kind of beautiful counting?
With time, I learned the Language the more deeply, and loved the children for their jests and word-plays.
I was lost in the mazy joy found in the consideration of their simplest nursery rhymes.
I studied their drawings made in the soil of the ground, patterns in patterns of such secret intricacies they seemed to me more alive than the plants growing in the earth around them.
So passed a month, or a little less, and some important business then taking me abroad, I returned to the cottage after my absence on a chill Saint Stephens day, whereupon one of the nurses came to me very fretful and said the children had not eaten or made stool or passed water for more than a week.
And here follows a thing that I hesitate to say, for fear you should doubt my word; but I must tell you before God that I watched the children through that day, and the next, and the next day withal, and in truth they ate not, nor drank.
They ignored the food brought to them, though it was good to eat, and instead used their mouths to sing: a song most pure, consecratory, a harmony of subtle numbers. And though there was no visible change to the food, I saw it change nevertheless; and the children made the motions of eating in the air above their trenchers, slow and vague, as in a dream; and later, when they left the table, they did so with every appearance of satisfaction.
The maids retrieving the dishes, I inspected the bread and cheese and other stuffs, and sampled a little of it, and although the bread tasted as bread, and the cheese as cheese, it had lost all savour. It was food no longer, but something less. For with their singing, the children had drawn out some fluent essence, some vital principle, and nourished their bodies thereby.
In all the time following, being somewhat under six months, though those children never partook in meat or drink, they prospered very hale - not fat, but tall and hollow-boned, with chatoyant eyes of the most penetrating kind, such that even as I sat hidden behind the screen, often I felt the kindling touch of their gaze lighting the sins in my heart.
Then came a night, not four hours before the moment in which I set these words on the page, when the Emperor, his war finished, and wanting the cottage for a new mistress, came to me in my chapel at evensong and told me under God’s roof that he purposed to have the children killed as an inconvenience.
I stood before him and said he must not.
At which there was a silence. Then he said I must not say must not to him, and there was a little laugh in his voice, and I was afeared.
But still I stood there, and said before God he must not.
He said he would send me to God forthwith if I continued in my defiance.
But still I defied him.
He strode across the flagstones to me, and to my face, that I felt the spit on my cheeks, he cried that the children would be slain, and that the deed would be done by his own hand.
At this I shuddered, for I knew he would make the killing into sport for his amusement, and the children would die in the most abominable way.
May God forgive me, I gave him to know that I would go there directly and feed them some poison (for he did not know they did not eat), at which mine Emperor laughed, merrily this time, to think I should so imperil my soul, and he bade me do that thing. And I hied me to that cottage, where I blessed the maids and nurses - worthy, simple women all - and gave I them such gold as I had, and weeping they left, taking the two unspeaking children with them.
I betook me to the three children, my children, intending to open the doors that they might flee out into the world.
But when I stepped up, the screen was not there. The children were standing there in its stead, and they gazed at me very frankly, and the eldest girl favoured me with a smile, and by it I knew she knew the fate Fridericus intended for them, and she was untroubled by it.
Then she turned from me, and the three of them faced inwards, and sang they a number.
The number was like a lantern that shone a light which was no light; or a trumpet that blared a call that was no sound.
Like sudden clarity after a life of madness there opened a path that had been there unseen all along, and the children waved farewell, and turned they and skipped in a direction for which there is no name - away and away and away - leaving their smiles with me even as they made good their flight.
* * * *
Now sit I in the cottage, with God for company as I set down this - but hark! even now I hear a banging at the bolted doors! - and uncouth shouts, and I know the Emperor has come, and his men with him, to see what has become of me and the children.
I know I have but moments before they enter to kill me.
But alas! All I can leave for them to rend and tear are the pages of this account, which this unprofitable servant leaves in all humility and reverence for the pleasant reading of his Emperor.
And as the doors break, and with my history told, there remains one thing, and that is to speak that Holy Number, given me in my heart by my daughter; and the way will open anew, that I will rise and travel along it, to whereversoever she and her brother and sister have gone, gone forevermore.
So endeth this, my testament before God, Whose Number is One.
* * * *
Adam Browne lives in Melbourne with Julie Turner, also a writer, and their daughter Harriet. His stories have been published in Australia, Canada, USA and Poland. He also writes screenplays: Virus, directed by Stephen Amis, was produced in 2005, and The Adjustable Cosmos, directed by Adam Duncan, began production this year.