The Invention of Fire. Bruce Holsinger

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ shook his head, unaffected by my confidence. ‘Those are rope burns, Master Gower, or so I believe, though inflicted after death, not before.’

      ‘How can you be sure?’

      From a pouch at his side Baker removed a brick-sized bundle bound tightly in brushed leather. Unwrapping the suede, he took out a book that he opened to reveal page upon page of intricate drawings of the human form. Arms, legs, fingers, heads, whole torsos, the private parts of man and woman alike, with no regard for decency or discretion. Brains, breasts, organs, a twisted testicle, the interior of a bisected anus. The frankness and detail of the drawings stunned me, as I had never before seen such intimate renderings of the corporeal man.

      Baker found the page he was looking for. Strode and I leaned in, rapt despite ourselves by the colourful intricacies of skin and gut.

      ‘The cheeks of a hanged man will go blue, you see.’ His finger traced delicately over the page, showing us the heads of four noosed corpses, the necks elongated and twisted at unlikely angles, eyes bulging, tongues and lips contorted into hideous grins, skin purpled into the shades of exotic birds. ‘I have seen this effect myself, many times. The blood rushes from the head, the veins burst, the aspect darkens. Leave them hanging long enough and they start to look like Ethiops, at least from the neck up. And there is more.’

      He squatted over the pit, gesturing for us to join him. In his right hand Baker bore a narrow stick, which he used to pry open the left eye of the nearest victim. ‘Do you see?’

      I looked at the man’s eyeball. ‘What is it I am to see?’ I said.

      ‘The iris is white,’ said Baker, reaching for the next man’s eyelid, this time with a tender finger. ‘As is this one. And this.’ He moved along the trench, pausing at each of the ring-necked victims to make sure we saw the whites of their eyes. ‘Yet the eyes of a hanged man go red with blood. See here.’ He fumbled with his book to show us another series of paintings a few pages on. Bulbous eyes spidered with red veins, like rivers and roads on a map of the world.

      I glanced at Strode, unsure what to think of this man’s boldness with the ways of death.

      ‘In Bologna the tradition is more – more practical than our own,’ said the physician, noting our unease. ‘They slice, they cut, they boil and prove and test. They observe and they experiment, and they admit when they are wrong. Such has it been for many years, good gentles, since the time of Barbarossa. It’s really quite something and if you are interested in this line of inquiry I recommend the Anatomia of Mondino de’ Liuzzi, a surgical master at Bologna some years ago who was an adept of the blade, a man thoroughly committed to dissection and—’

      ‘Not hanged, then,’ I said, less impressed by the man’s eloquence than convinced by the soundness of his evidence. ‘So how, in your learned view, were these men killed?’

      He smiled modestly, raised the second finger on his right hand, and reached for the chest of the nearest corpse. His fingertip found an indentation to the left of the victim’s heart, a mark I hadn’t noticed before. He gently pressed down, and soon his finger was buried up to the first knuckle.

      A hole. ‘Stabbed?’ guessed Strode, probing with a stick at a larger, more ragged wound on the second man’s chest.

      ‘Run through with a short sword, I’d wager,’ I said, walking down the row of corpses and pausing at each one. All had holes at various places on their bodies: some in the chest, others in the stomach or neck, some of them a bit sloughy but not unusually ragged, though one poor fellow was missing half his face. Fragments of wood were lodged above his lips, like the splinters of a broken board.

      ‘Not a blade, I think,’ said Baker, his voice hollow and low. ‘These wounds are quite peculiar. Only once before have I seen anything like them.’ He looked up at Strode. ‘With your permission, Master Strode?’

      Strode, after glancing back toward the church, gave him a swift nod. Baker moved to a position over the first corpse and flipped the man onto his front, exposing a narrow back thick with churchyard dirt. His apprentice handed him a skin of ale, which Baker used to wet a cloth pulled from his pocket. He washed the corpse’s back, smoothed his hand over the bare skin.

      ‘As I suspected,’ said Baker. ‘This one stayed inside,you see.’

      ‘What stayed inside?’ I said. ‘A bolt, perhaps, from a crossbow?’

      Baker returned the corpse to its original position and held out a hand to his apprentice, who gave him what looked like a filleting knife of the sort you might see deployed by lines of fishermen casting off the Southwark bankside. With a series of expert movements, Baker sliced across the flesh surrounding the hole, widening it until the blade had penetrated several inches into the man’s innards.

      Another raised hand. The apprentice took the knife and replaced it with a pair of tongs. Baker inserted them into the hole, widening the wound, harder work than it looked. An unpleasant suck of air, the clammy song of flesh giving way to the surgical tool, and my own guts heaved, but soon enough the tongs emerged clasping a spherical object about the diameter of a half noble. The apprentice took the tongs, then, at Baker’s direction, poured a short stream of ale over the ball. Baker put it between his front teeth and winced.

      ‘Not lead. Iron, dripped from a bloom into a mould. The Florentines have been casting iron balls like these for many years.’ He tossed the ball up to Strode, who caught it, inspected it for a moment, and handed it to me. I marvelled at the weight of the little thing: the size of a hazelnut, but as heavy as a lady’s girdle book. I had never seen anything quite like it, though I had a suspicion as to its nature and use. I handed it back to Baker.

      Strode was signalling for the gravedigger, who left the churchyard to summon a priest.

      ‘And the others?’ I asked Baker.

      ‘At least one was killed with an arrow, that one there.’ He gestured to the third body along the line. ‘Half the shaft’s still in his neck. As for the rest, I am fairly confident in my suspicions, though I would have to perform a similar inspection on all these corpses to be sure.’ He came to his full height and used more of the ale to cleanse his hands. ‘I assume that will not be possible, Master Strode?’

      Strode pushed out a wet lip. ‘Perhaps if the Bishop of London were abroad. Unfortunately Braybrooke’s lurking about Fulham, with no visitations in his immediate future.’

      ‘Very well,’ said Baker, and he watched with visible regret as a chantry priest arrived and started to mumble a cursory burial rite. The four of us made for the near chapel, keeping our voices low as Baker went over a few more observations gathered in the short window of time he had been at the grave. Some rat bites on the corpses but not many, and no great rot, suggesting the bodies had been in the sewer channel for no more than a day or two. I asked him about the wood splinters I had seen above the one man’s mouth.

      ‘Shield fragments, I would say,’ said Baker. ‘Carried there by the ball, and lodged in the skin around the point of penetration.’ We both knew, in that moment, what he was about to tell us, though neither of us could quite believe it. ‘These men have been shot, good masters, of that I am certain. Though not with an arrow, nor with a bolt.’

      The surgeon turned fully to us, his face sombre. ‘These men were killed with hand cannon. Handgonnes, fired with powder, and delivering small iron shot.’

      Handgonnes. A word new to me in that moment, though one that would shape and fill the weeks to come. I looked out СКАЧАТЬ