position lest it tempt another into avarice and violence, and had slung his shoes around his neck so that his feet could be kept fresh by the air as he plodded along. He was happy; the weather was fine enough though chilly, the road good and empty; he was lost in thought and careless of the world—perhaps the state that gave rise to the couplet on forgetfulness in one of his surviving poems, for Olivier had an unprecedented ability to seize a passing moment and fix it in words, rendering the transient timeless.
As he rounded a corner obscured by a clump of trees, he came across an upturned wagon, a donkey lying on the ground and struggling to get up, and a man, not young, trying to loose it from its harness. He was cursing quietly; all around were the impedimenta of the traveling craftsman heading from village to market—his own stock, which turned out to be three pairs of beautifully made shoes, some uncut leather freshly tanned, and some baskets made by his family. The food grown by others in his village and surplus to their needs, and some small rolls of cloth, gray and ragged, for sale to whomever wished to buy such rough material.
Olivier stopped his horse and watched a moment, then leaped down and went to help. His assistance was needed, as the donkey was thrashing around and risking breaking one of its legs or snapping some vital part of the cart. The owner scarcely acknowledged him to begin with, but concentrated on the task of saving his livelihood, breathing a huge sigh of relief when, eventually, the beast was freed, rolled away, got up, and went carelessly off to the nearest patch of grass for a feed. Then he turned to Olivier and grunted his thanks.
He was, perhaps, twice Olivier’s age, strong but not big, with the precise movements of the craftsman and a gaze quite unlike anything Olivier had ever noted in one of his rank. It was open and inquiring, seeing and assessing Olivier in one glance, and yet he sensed something cautious and watchful as well.
He left it to his savior to speak first. “Come, let us turn your wagon the right way up. It seems undamaged, and it will not take long if both of us are at the job. Some of your goods are a little muddy, I’m afraid, but most seem fine.”
The man nodded, and they moved around the wagon, working out the easiest place to attack the problem. Then, under the craftsman’s direction and taking care not to get his clothes dirty, Olivier and he lifted, pushed, and pulled until at last the wagon balanced precariously on one wheel, then crashed down onto the ground the right way up. His new companion inspected it carefully, then sniffed with satisfaction.
“Thank you,” he said, speaking for the first time. “Grateful.”
As if to make up for his lack of words, and not wishing to seem churlish, he reached inside a large cloth bag that had fallen onto the ground and brought out a flask. This he unstoppered and offered to Olivier.
It was water, fortunately, for the day was young for wine, and Olivier drank gratefully. Not that he needed it; he had more than enough of his own, but it indicated his acknowledgment of the thanks. When he finished, he wiped his mouth on his sleeve and handed it back. “The water of the soul,” he said with a smile, unthinking, not even remembering where the phrase came from. It was simply the first thing that came into his head and he wanted to fill in the silence caused by the man’s taciturnity. Or maybe he wished to establish who he was, a person of some importance, of learning, not to be treated with familiarity even though they had just heaved over an old wagon together. Helping a traveler in trouble was one thing, a good Christian act that also broke some of the monotony of the journey. But that didn’t mean that he was encouraging presumption. Olivier was young enough and vain enough to want it known he was a man of mark.
If that was his aim, the result was quite other than the one he anticipated. The older man stared at him in surprise and suspicion, hesitated, then spoke himself. “Flows to the ocean of the divine.”
And now it was Olivier’s turn to stare, dumbstruck with astonishment. For the moment the man spoke, he remembered the source of the words. It was as well there was no one else nearby, for any casual observer would have been piqued by the sight. Two men, of clearly different ranks, standing close and eyeing each other warily. To the left a donkey, unattended, and all around the bric-a-brac of the market. All this in the middle of the countryside, several miles from the nearest habitation. It was a puzzle picture, which someone like Julia would have thought almost surrealist, the meaning there but hidden, needing an explanation that could only come from a particular vantage point. Not that she was ever tempted by such things; her aim was clarity, not games designed to obscure.
“Why did you say that?” Olivier asked. “How do you know that?”
The man now looked frightened, as though he had made a mistake and suddenly realized it. He mumbled something that Olivier didn’t catch and turned away, hurriedly throwing the rest of his goods on the back of the wagon and shouting at the donkey, dragging it away from its meal to hitch it up once more.
Olivier caught him by the arm. “Tell me at once,” he said. “Where did you hear that phrase? I mean you no harm.”
But he was not to be persuaded. “Nothing, nothing. It doesn’t matter,” he muttered, then, his task done, he got back up on the wagon once more and started to move off. Olivier ran alongside. “Stop,” he called out. “I order you to stop.”
It was no use. The man stared stolidly ahead, completely ignoring all of Olivier’s pleadings. And after he had run alongside, shouting some more, Olivier stood in the mud watching as the wagon lumbered down the road. He could have caught him easily; he had a horse, after all. He could have jumped on the wagon and wrestled the man to the ground, for although he was powerful and strong, Olivier was the younger by more than two decades.
He did neither of these things. There was something about the man’s sheer terror that made him stand there until the wagon had rolled over the next hill, giving the man time to get away, so that he wouldn’t be frightened anymore.
He waited an hour before continuing; his horse needed a rest in any case, and while it was munching the grass, continuing the meal that the donkey had so abruptly abandoned, he sat down under a tree and thought. It was wasted time, a frustrating and pointless exercise, for he knew before he started he could not work out how a cobbler could have quoted a luminous phrase written down by the Bishop of Vaison more than eight hundred years previously.
IT GNAWED AT HIM, this irritating confusion in his life. Olivier was used to a neat division between the world and the mind, between events and writing, between people and ideas. Unlike Julia, who sought consciously to bring all of these together through the fine movements of her hand, or Pisano, who did so without even being aware of it, much of the appeal of books for him was their dissociation from reality. His Cicero, his Horace, his Vergil, all of these were occult knowledge, whose existence and meaning was hidden from the world. His labors were contradictory; he wanted to recover such works, but to recover them for himself alone; he felt that at some level they would be tarnished if exposed to the generality, like silver when exposed to the air.
And yet there was this cobbler. . . . The problem exercised him all the way to his destination, which for that day was the town of Uzès, deep in French territory, but a duchy, whose overlord was of an independent frame of mind. Too lofty a business for someone like Olivier, however; he was not someone who dealt with dukes and kings. The seigneur, unaware of the poet’s visit as well, slept undisturbed in his fortress that night, and Olivier stayed in a small abbey in its shade, where the cardinal’s name ensured him hospitality, and he was surprised and delighted to discover that Althieux of Nîmes, passing through on his way to Tours, was also there, and ready to provide him with good company and conversation.
Althieux, the older man by some fifteen years, was not of Ceccani’s family; he belonged to the entourage of Cardinal de Deaux, Ceccani’s great opponent in the matter of Rome. The two friends had long since learned to negotiate the rocky shore on which one false word might cast all their hopes. Say, for example, that Olivier had let slip to Althieux that (as was the case at that particular moment) Ceccani was maneuvering with his usual skill to place his illegitimate son in the archbishopric of Dijon, a move that would have given an enemy of France access to the Duke of Burgundy—who was wobbling in the matter of England. If Althieux had spoken of this to his master, Olivier’s career would have been ruined. If he had not and it had emerged that he knew about it in advance, then Althieux’s own career would never recover.
Besides, Althieux was as devoted to his lord as Olivier was to Ceccani; both would have had to choose between friendship and obedience, creating a conundrum of irresolvable proportions. Better by far to avoid any such topics; to discuss matters of the mind alone, certain that both of those great princes were quite aware of the connection and smiled on it, as a discreet conduit for messages, should any such need to be sent from one side of the curia to the other.
All the more extraordinary, then, that Althieux should be so awkward, so strained in his company, he who was normally so easygoing. Olivier even asked him directly, but for some time was put off with a wave of the hand.
