The river Waysar flowered in a
gleaming arch through the lush green lowlands and nestled against a
graceful bend of its wide channel was the town of Hamlin. It was a
proud market town, with streets paved with clean scrubbed cobbles, a
cathedral to which some of the greatest glaziers and stone masons had
lent their hands, with a soaring spire full of great brazen bells,
and a wide plaza spread before its doors, large enough to hold all
the colorful booths of those who came from near and far to sell their
goods on market day. There was a fine harbor with deep berths for
the merchant ships from which a broad thoroughfare edged with trees
ran to the main market, lined with the impressive facades of fine
inns and eaters to accommodate the traders and there were countless
lesser artisans and solid townspeople thronging the streets, stopping
to purchase a bite from the various street vendors whose carts filled
the lanes with a delicious aroma, or pausing in their daily rounds to
rest beside one of the city's many fine statues and fountains...and
then there was the piper.
His name was Bernard and he was not a
piper by trade. That, much less important, was in leather working,
not something as specialized as a cobbler or a glover, just making
pouches, belts, and the like. Rather, his playing of the pipe organ
was what a casual observer might call a hobby, though this was far
from an accurate reflection of its magnitude. It was his vocation,
his obsession, the air he breathed. The first time he had played it,
he had thought he was going to die. The sheer force of the energy
that surged from it as it was played seemed like it was going to
shake him to bits. He had gone home with arms and fingers aching.
The next day, he could barely get dressed, being unable to raise his
arms above his head and it was even longer before he could eat
without pain, the knuckles screaming in protest if he attempted to
curl them around the handle of knife or spoon. Fortunately, he had
no pressing orders outstanding at the time for doing almost anything
in his workshop was virtually impossible. And the whole time he
could think of nothing but counting the days, no the seconds, until
he could get back to play it again. For the moment he had laid his
hands on the keys of the pipe organ and felt it's power throb through
him, it was as if he had come alive for the first time, as if his
whole life up to then had been only some vague twilit dream that had,
in that instant, burst into glorious blossom and golden sunlight.
The gray, nebulous sorrow that dogged his days, that nothing had ever
been able to banish long, had been blasted to shreds by the mighty
voice from those thundering pipes.
It was a strange twist of fate that he
had discovered it at all. One year, a few of the other minor
craftsmen from about the neighborhood had persuaded him to join them
in a collective rental of one of the stalls for the great spring
market, the festival following the snow melt, when people from all
over the countryside, released finally from the prison of winter,
streamed into Hamlin, eager to rejoice and thus to spend liberally.
Merchants of course, took full advantage of this and it was one of
the most lucrative markets of the year, thus space in the square was
much sought after and far beyond the means of all but the most
prestigious local artisans. Together, however, the five of them had
been able to manage and, while it was doubtful the profit they made
justified the expense, the weaver, who had conceived the plan in
first place, was more than convinced that their success would grow by
the year as word of their collective spread. Wiser heads thought
this unlikely but his high spirits were infectious and they all
retired to a tavern, along with the sexton of one of Hamlin's many
churches, who was a personal friend of the weaver.
All was jovial at first until the
cooper, who had taken the largest loss of the lot, became hostile to
the sexton and began to mock him for having a simple job that
required no real talent unlike those of tradesmen like themselves.
The sexton, already well into his cups, had taken up the gauntlet and
invited them to come to the church to see for themselves just what
his job demanded. Normally, any sensible tradesman would be heading
home after such a long day, not traipsing across town to blunder
about in an empty church. But the ale had been flowing freely and
all but one of them agreed to go. They were unimpressed at first
while the sexton dragged them here and there around the dull dusty
building showing them the hedges he had trimmed, the plaster he had
patched and the doors he had to make sure were locked, until, perhaps
as a last resort, he took them up to the pipe organ in the balcony
over the door and said his job also included playing it when the
service was lofty enough to call for it, then invited them to take a
turn to see how hard it really was.
The others had not taken it seriously,
tried a few haphazard chords, all uneven, but Bernard had been
transfixed and kept entreating the sexton to show him how to do more
until the others, especially the cooper, had become impatient and
demanded they go. But before they went Bernard managed to take the
sexton aside and make an arrangement to come back the following week
to learn more, and the other, delighted at what he then saw as an
easy source of additional income, was more than happy to oblige, if
not regularly than with sufficient frequency that Bernard was able to
make clear progress in his abilities. Over time, his fingers got
more used to the demands placed upon them. He would recover faster
after a practice session, though work the next day almost always
hurt. His knuckles swelled and thickened and leathery calluses
formed on his fingers, much more extensive than the few he had
developed from work, so parts of his hands now resembled the leather
he traded in. But, he never fully acclimated for, as his hands
became better able to bear the rigors of the playing, he simply
increased those rigors, striving ever to learn more complicated
pieces, to play for longer, to strike the keys in just the right way
to make the perfect ringing tone. And still it was not enough.
The sexton, as he had admitted the
first night, was only an occasional organ player and had received
little formal training so, while Bernard was certainly not his equal
in ability, he reached a point where he was no longer able to
increase his skills as the sexton knew not how to teach more than the
basics and was no longer providing him with challenges. After,
perhaps, a year of this frustration, he gathered his courage to assay
something more ambitious. After much searching, Bernard was able to
contact the organist of the Cathedral himself who agreed for what, to
a tradesman like Bernard, was a somewhat steep fee, to give him
lessons in playing the organ during his off hours. It was far from
pleasant at first as training under an actual professional organist
forced him to abruptly confront how wretchedly inadequate were his
skills, won with years of devotion and suffering of which he had been
so proud, coupled with long months of painful unlearning of poor
habits he had picked up from the sexton who knew no better.
Nevertheless, every week, he was able
to enter under the great vaulted ceiling, with the colored light from
the stained glass washing over him and, immerse himself, if only for
an hour, in the most sublime wonder. Even before he came into the
presence of the pipe organ, as he waited for the organist to arrive,
flexing and stretching his fingers to prepare them for the punishment
they were about to receive, he could feel the world falling away, all
its sorrows and bitterness and frustrations dwindling as his mind
became focused solely on the thing that was about to happen. As soon
as he laid his fingers on the keys, it was as if an electrical shock
went through him and he knew he touched something beyond the mortal
world. The resonance in the organ pulsed through his soul, lifting
it with the vastness of the sound, into the dark wood of the soaring
roof and beyond to heaven. Though he had tried hard to be devout all
his life, Bernard had never felt the inner call he believed was the
true mark of faith. But now, at last, he felt something. When he
played the organ he was in the presence of the divine, the music he
made was his devotion and his prayer and through it, the blazing
white, holy fire poured into him.
The cathedral was nearly an hour's
travel from Bernard's house but every week, he trudged there and back
gladly, in the icy winds of winter and summer's heavy heat, nibbling
at what food he was able to carry with him, heart pounding in
anticipation, or delirious with delight, wrapped in the euphoria that
always lingered after a lesson. Many was the time he stumbled on
uneven paving stones, missed the path he needed to follow and had to
retrace his steps, or narrowly escaped blundering into the path of an
on-coming wagon, for though his body was walking down the city
street, his soul was still seated in rapture before the pipe organ
and would not fully rejoin its fleshly shell until some hours had
passed.
And still he hungered for more,
chaffed with frustration at the slow speed at which he mastered the
ever more intricate patterns, learning to work on higher and higher
keyboards, or use each hand on a separate keyboard, gradually adding
in more complicated foot pedal work, but could not afford the cost of
more frequent lessons. As he went about his day, cutting out,
stitching, and stamping the leather, any time his hands were not
otherwise occupied, his fingers would be twitching, miming the key
patterns, his feet tapping out the rhythms. At last, after saving
his coin for a long time, he managed to purchase a very small,
second-hand harpsichord, just a box, without legs, the strings short
and mechanism simplistic. He got no joy from playing it, for it
lacked the all consuming might of the pipe organ. It was not even
adequate training as the keys were too light and did not require
enough finger strength to press. The keyboard was smaller and
everything was closer together so the demands of dexterity were much
less, to say nothing of the fact that there was only the single
keyboard. Still, it allowed him to maintain a base level of strength
and skill and to approximate some of the more challenging patterns so
he could make the most of his lessons on the actual organ.
And so the years passed, though
Bernard hardly marked their passing, noting only his, sometimes
erratic and painfully slow, increase in skill, and the shifts in the
seasonal round that could make the pilgrimage to the cathedral more
or less arduous. When he was not actually in his workshop, Bernard
was forever wandering the city in his half dream, humming the tunes
to whatever organ pieces he was currently working on, running over
the fingering in his mind as he did so, so that passers by could
sometimes see his hands twitch and flex oddly. They called him the
pied piper for this habit and for the strange mismatched clothing he
wore, often without fully realizing it for the lion's share of both
his thoughts and his money belonging exclusively to the organ. Some
said the name with malice and some with a sort of affection, but all
knew he was basically harmless and he became something of a local
character. Bernard did not care one way or another. He had eyes and
heart only for his beloved and, as long as he was left in peace to
pour out his passion, the world could do what it would.
The wealth of Hamlin was the great
trading ships, always sailing up the river and docking at the quays
to unload their goods for the market. Magnificent products from all
over the world could be seen going in steady procession to and from
the port, vibrant carpets covered in intricate patterns and twining
vines, great casks of wine in barrels of dark wood, spices of every
kind, scenting the air in a wide swath around them, finely worked
broaches and clasps in gold and silver, set with round stones, dully
gleaming. The people of Hamlin rejoiced in the bounty and showed
their pride in their fair city by commissioning a statue of the town
founder, astride a magnificent steed, cloak swirling about him, to be
placed in the square before the cathedral, in the midst of the
market. And every week, Bernard walked through that market, all the
riches of the world spread out on every side of him, a riot of colors
and a feast for the senses, thinking only to thread his way through
the close packed crowds as swiftly as possible, to reach the doors of
the cathedral and the dark, dusty loft below the great rose window,
where the pipe organ waited. And so all in the town were happy,
secure in the progression of their aims.
But the ships that brought the town's
wealth also brought rats, sheltering in their holds. When the ships
docked at the quays, they could be seen streaming from the hulls like
a black tide, tumbling down the wooden sides and bobbing in the
water. The harbor master paid gangs of boys to prowl the piers with
heavy cudgels and bludgeon the pests as the came ashore, but they
were never able to catch all of them. There was always a thriving
rat population, lurking in the alleys and scuttling about the edges
of the marketplace and it increased steadily year by year, as the
established residents bred and their numbers were swelled by new
beasts coming off the ships. From time to time, the town council
would organize purges, traps, poisons, or just more mobs of boys with
cudgels, to bring their numbers down but they were never able to
completely weed them out and, after a season or a year, the
population would surge again to even greater numbers than before the
purge. The rest of the time, the people did their best to ignore
this blight on their fair city, overlooking the thousand issues great
and small. From the chewed up dolls of the elite's daughters to the
far more menacing bites and food thieved, sometimes off the very
tables, of the less fortunate, all the townspeople simply lived with
the rats, as one would live with a drafty window or a leaky roof.
Until the day the rats brought plague.
It was the grandest ship yet that had
come to Hamlin, its vast hold packed to straining with silk and
spices. People danced in the streets at their supreme good fortune,
went in procession to the market place and feasted around great
bonfires, never dreaming that, before the moon had turned again, they
would curse themselves for their arrogant stupidity in reveling so
joyously when their doom already walked among them. For, as the
goods were carried ashore, the rats came too, as they always did.
These looked no different than any of the others that had come
before, but they carried, invisible inside them, the seeds of a
deadly sickness, that spread like fire, first through the native rat
population, and then through the human one.
First the harbor was closed and the
market suspended and there were strident objections from those most
directly affected, the sea captains, the dock owners, and the
merchants who managed the market, as well as on a lesser scale, those
who ran the inns and eating houses. But everyone felt stirrings of
dread for trade were the lifeblood of the city and if the city's
fortune was ruined by this action, as the whispered rumor ran through
the lanes that it would be, all the citizens of Hamlin would suffer,
no matter how tangentially connected to the market. But, with the
toll of bodies mounting every day, they dared not do otherwise. And
then, rapidly, one after another, the lesser trades began to shut
down or, at least, to operate in a convoluted fashion designed to
minimize exposure. One could still buy bread but it was no longer
possible to inspect the loaves directly before selecting one. The
baker would hang a red flag out his upstairs window when there was
bread for sale and customers would approach, carefully, and one at a
time, drop coins into a slot he had rigged up. The counter window
where he used to set out the loaves for inspection was rapidly
replaced by an enclosed box, divided down the middle over a revolving
platform. When sufficient payment had been received, he would open
his end of the box, place a loaf on the platform and rotate it so the
bread moved around the divider to the other side. Then he would
close the door and knock on the wall to let the customer know his
goods were in place. The person on the outside could then open the
outer door and take the bread. Other tradesmen, including Bernard
himself, were adopting similar measures.
Of course, there were incidents where
an honest citizen would pay the money, only to be shoved aside by
some wastrel who would then make off with the goods by force. But
this happened less often than might have been expected, especially
since the plague had also disrupted some of the church's charitable
activities, meaning there were yet more people in need, as attempting
to rob someone in this way would necessitate the very close, physical
contact, the whole system was designed to prevent and even those who
did not respect human laws, had no choice but to respect the natural
law of the plague and feared its spread as much as the rest of the
people. But there were still great shortages since everything now
moved with painful slowness as most craftsmen insisted on long pauses
between each step of the process. When the leather and thread were
delivered to Bernard house, via the revolving platform in reverse, he
let them stand in the inner section of the box for a day before
opening his door to remove them, in the hope that any plague seeds
they harbored might wither before coming in contact with him. The
tailor, the cobbler, and others like them followed similar
procedures.
Conversations could be conducted by
yelling through the box or through the door. Some enterprising
individuals had started installing special tubes in the wall of their
house to facilitate talk but, even in the best of circumstances, this
was a poor substitute for normal conversation. You could not see the
face of the person with whom you spoke and the words came distorted
and garbled through the barrier. A great deal of yelling and
repeating was necessary to convey even the simplest ideas and
remaining pressed against the wall at the correct height, which was
the only way anything at all could be heard, rapidly became
excruciatingly uncomfortable. Both parties had to stand as if the
one inside the house sat down, the one on the outside would have to
squat to be close enough. For all these reasons, conversations were
kept as short and utilitarian as possible. Still, such approaches
enabled the citizens of Hamlin to continue doing business, after a
fashion, and even exchange some bits and scraps of news. Bernard was
fortunate, in a way, that he had always been a bit of a loner so the
enforced isolation was less of a painful shock for him than it must
be for some of his neighbors who, he knew well, had been wont to go
to the tavern or hang about gossiping in the square most every night.
He had no idea how they could bear what was happening now. For him,
there was but one thing that mattered. As long as he could continue
to play the pipe organ the rest of the world could do as it willed.
“Are you not afraid?” the potter's
wife had called through the wall when she came to drop off her money
for a new purse and he had told her she would have to wait an extra
day because the event he most eagerly awaited was rapidly approaching
and he always took off at least half a day to accommodate his trip to
the cathedral for his time at the organ. Bernard turned his face
away, even though she could not see him and awkwardly parried the
questions. Yes, he was afraid. He was terrified. But nothing,
nothing, would keep him from his act of worship. He had to minimize
the danger of the plague in his mind, to summon his courage to show
his devotion. He had purchased for himself a small bottle of aqua
vitae to wipe on his hands whenever he touched something beyond the
walls of his home and, although he knew this was not adequate
protection, it was the best he could do. Many had taken to wearing
gloves whenever they went out but even the thinnest, most flexible
leather would impede his ability to play the organ so he would have
to settle for using the aqua vitae every time he paused in his
playing and simply pray it would be enough. But, by the time of his
next lesson, the doors of the cathedral were closed with a great
padlock and chain. It was unthinkable that such a thing should
happen, that the faithful should be denied the comforts of religion
when they needed them most. But it had. In the weeks that followed,
the great bells hung silent, along with the mighty organ itself and
the dust gathered thick under and around the pews.
Bernard became numb with shock. The
core of his life had been taken out from inside of him, leaving a
gaping black hole, howling in the torment of its emptiness. As long
as he could experience the joy of playing the organ, feel the power
surge up into him with the thrumming vibrations as he pressed the
keys, he felt he could do anything, that a part of that power resided
in him as well. For it he would have faced the plague head on.
Without it, he saw no point in taking the least risk. After learning
of the closing of the cathedral, Bernard sat for a long time in the
dark and cold of his house, for he was too distraught to build up the
fire, flexing and curling his fingers slowly and deliberately. He
rubbed one hand with the others, feeling the worn and thickened spots
he had built up over his years of playing the organ. In his mind, he
ran through the intricate fingering of the latest song he was
learning which involved rapid fingering on the uppermost keyboard,
for which he did not fully possess the dexterity yet, especially
while tensing the muscles needed to hold his arm up so high for an
extended period, that he had been working on for months and had only
barely been able to get right at his last lessons. Until he learned
of the disaster that had befallen, his heart had been galloping with
excitement that he might be able to build on this. He clutched his
hands over his head and lowered his forehead to the wall in agony.
Now all that would be lost. Who knew how long it would be before he
could touch a pipe organ again, sitting helpless as he watched all
the years and years of hard won strength and skill, earned through
uncounted hours of pain and dogged repetition, atrophy and crumble in
to dust.
Soon, he had reasons beyond his grief
and the general danger, to keep to his home. Some enterprising
physician had invented a paste of crushed herbs and minerals which
was found to keep the rats at a distance but it could only work by
being rubbed into human skin, needing the gentle, gradual warmth of
the body to release its properties. Bernard shook his head and could
take no comfort in this discovery, for he recognized some of the
ingredients, as well as its side effect of dying the skin a deep
purplish red, from a similar paste that had been proposed some years
back as a conditioner for leather. He had spoken to other leather
workers who had employed it with no ill effects, apart from the
temporary discoloration, but Bernard had been unable to make use of
it, for he suffered a violent reaction to some of the components,
which made his fingers, especially the knuckles become inflamed and
swollen until he could not fully bend them at all, or even move them
without great effort and pain. Worse, it caused similar swelling in
his throat, constricting the passage of his breath until he felt he
was reduced to frantic gasping, his brain convinced he was being
strangled. So, not only could he make no use of this new form of
protection, its use by others only made his plight worse as, while
repelling the rats did help lessen the risk of infection, the paste
was certainly not complete proof against the plague. Rather, it
instilled the other townspeople with false confidence, so that they
began to move about more freely and with less caution. A few of his
clients even made complaint that he was still using the tube and
revolving box. After all, the weaver and the joiner the next block
over, had gone back to having an open shop window where one could
peruse the goods before paying. Of course, shortly after that, the
weaver had to cease operating entirely, being laid up in bed with the
plague.
At this point, Bernard lost all track
of time. With nothing to look forward to, nothing to do beyond the
basic rudiments of filling his belly, one day was no different from
the next. The sun rose and set. He would receive supplies, both
personal necessities and raw materials for his craft, in through the
revolving door and send any completed merchandise out the same way.
He never saw another human face. As soon as the cathedral closed and
he had resolved not to go out, he had made an agreement with the
tailor's wife a few houses down, to bring him goods from the market
in return for a somewhat steep payment. Bernard did not hesitate.
What did it matter? With his beloved organ forbidden, what else did
he have to spend his money on anyway? Only rarely did he hear
another human voice. Most items passed back and forth through the
revolving window automatically by prearrangement. Only when a
customer wanted to order something special would he hear the garbled
words come through the tube in the wall. Used to silence stretching
for days, sometimes he would leap up startled, when he heard it and
then have to think for a moment to recall how to make his tongue form
words. He remembered not even what day of the week it was. Without
the sound of church bells to mark the passage of time, even the hour
of the day was now imprecise, able to be guessed at only by the
position of the sun in the sky. Ere long, all time had become
condensed into two basic categories, when there was light enough for
him to work without aid and when there was not, though, frequently,
even this ceased to matter, as he did not have a great deal of work
to do and spent much of his time sitting with his hands in his lap
staring blankly in front of him as clear memories of things like the
feel of wind on his face, the sight of the open sky or the sounds and
smells of the busy streets faded from his mind and he began to wonder
if such things had ever been real.
But worse was yet to come, for the
town council, just as they had closed the port, and the market, and
the cathedral itself, now issued an edict that for anyone to go
abroad, they must wear the rat repelling paste, a thing that was easy
to tell because of the way it discolored the skin. Now people were
forever demanding to see one another's hands or trying to peer under
hat brims, squinting in the darkness to catch the tell-tale tint,
despite the fact that separation would still have been a better
protection measure. Bernard felt his heart drop to the earth when he
heard the news and, for many hours after, sat, staring blankly at the
wall, a blackness before his eyes, seeing nothing, numb and without
feeling so great was the horror. Though he had always been a loner,
he had never been nor wished to be utterly solitary. Now, in one
stroke, the council had severed his fate from that of the rest of
humanity. Though he had no one with whom to share the experience in
words, even if lengthy conversation through the tube had been a
realistic possibility, he had drawn some comfort from the thought
that he and the other citizens of Hamlin were going through the
ordeal side by side, that the privations and close quarters, the
overwhelming loneliness, and the always present creeping fear were
the common lot of all even if the very necessity of keeping apart
meant one could never speak of these things. From now on, he would
experience these things radically differently and in unequal measure
from the people around him and he was completely and utterly alone.
The only comfort he could find in all of this was, with the cathedral
closed, he had no desire to leave, which made the cage somewhat less
oppressive, though cage it still was, and, with the false confidence
the use of the paste inspired, it looked likely that rash risk
takers, such as the weaver, would cause the disease to spread and,
thus, the cathedral to be locked, for far longer.
This last thought chilled Bernard's
heart in another way. Several weeks, more than a moon, perhaps two,
had passed since his sanctuary had been closed to him and he had
retreated into his house. It was difficult to track the passage of
time precisely, when one day bled into the next with no change to
mark their comings and goings, and no hope of change. But he knew
time was passing, and that it was becoming significant. In the past,
in the incredibly rare chance that he had to miss an opportunity to
play the organ, with illness, injury, or having to travel beyond the
city, like for significant family matters being the only things that
could cause him to do so and only in their most extreme forms, he
could feel the difference the next time he played. After only a week
or two, his fingers would start becoming stiff, he would become tired
more quickly, and his legs would cramp, being again unused to being
held always ready to push the pedals. He recalled one particularly
grim memory when he had traveled especially late in the year, to
attend the celebrations held by his cousin in the next town over to
mark the birth of his long awaited first child and Bernard had been
laid up with sickness while he was there. It was relatively early in
his pursuit of the pipe organ and within the last year he had finally
been able to achieve strong even chords on the top keyboard. But,
after the time away, he had utterly lost the ability and it had taken
six long months, burning with shame and frustration, for him to
slowly and painfully recover it. By this point, it was doubtless
gone again and worse would come if he did not do something. Since
the day he had found the church barred to him, Bernard had tried his
best to not think on the organ at all, to forget it and not torment
himself with what he could no longer have, praying desperately that
the plague would pass before lasting damage was done. But he knew
that, as the plague showed no sign of abating, rather the reverse,
now he could afford to wait no longer and must confront to full force
of his pain and loss.
Lighting a single candle, Bernard
pulled up a bench next to table on which rested his old harpsichord.
With a ragged breath, he threw back the lid, sending up a shower of
dust for he had not played the thing in many months. He pressed down
on a key and it gave like butter. How small and tinny the note
sounded, like a tiny pathetic cry, quickly lost and swallowed up even
in the limited space of his house, nothing at all like the great
voice of the organ that could shake the lofty rafters of the
cathedral. Hot rage surged up inside him and he wanted to crash his
fist into the old worn timbers of the harpsichord. It was nothing
short of sheer blasphemy to see this...this...weak,
whimpering...thing as having any relation at all to the majestic
organ. But, just in time, he stopped himself. The harpsichord was
all he had now. Wretched and inadequate as it was, this was the only
way he could try to retain even a sliver of his ability to play the
organ and so he must endure it. However much it galled him, through
his attentions to this impostor he would show his devotion to the
true divine vessel. And so Bernard played on, every key stroke
feeling like it was pressing down on his heart. It had only one
keyboard and no pedals depriving him of almost all the mental as well
as physical challenge he needed to maintain his skill, let alone to
provide him with the feeling of soaring euphoria he was starving for.
After forcing himself to continue to play for the better part of an
hour, Bernard allowed the lid to fall back into place and slumped
forward against the closed box. His heart and soul were exhausted
and wretched but only those. The burning and aching in his hands,
the stiff swelling in his fingers, that accompanied vigorous work at
the organ were entirely absent.
From then on, as the enforced solitude
of the plague lengthened, Bernard kept up a regular schedule of
practice. Every second or third day, he would sit before the
harpsichord and force himself to go through the most rigorous
exercises he could devise for the tiny, flimsy instrument. In short
order, he hated the thing with a bitter, smoldering hatred. Every
second he spent in its presence was salt rubbed into the wound of his
exile from the true object of his reverence, keeping the memory of
what he was denied ever fresh in the front of his mind. On the days
he had pledged himself to practice, he woke to a feeling of black
despair, the thought of what he had to do, pressing down on him like
a cloud of misery as soon as he was conscious. Often he would be so
overcome that he could restrain himself no longer and, losing all
ability to continue, he would slump down on the lid of the
harpsichord and sob uncontrollably for several minutes. Then, he
would force himself back up again, placing his hands again on the
hateful keys, and go on, tears continuing to trickle from his eyes
even as he played. Bernard would have given anything to be able to
stop playing the harpsichord. If he could no longer experience the
rapture of the pipe organ, he wanted only to forget it and cease
being tormented by what he could no longer have. It would have made
all other privations of the plague so much easier to bear. But only
by continuously and voluntarily subjecting himself to this torment
could he hope to preserve even the last tiny vestige of ability to
play.
After many moons had passed, though of
course he could not be sure how many for he could not see the moon
from any of the windows of his home, and the plague showed no sign of
abating, he could bear it no more. Through the word of mouth,
primarily via the sacristan of the cathedral, one of his regular
clients, he was able to get word to one of the church organists, now
out of work as all houses of worship were shut, who agreed, for some
small coin to come stand outside and yell instructions through the
tube in the wall. Although the organist was able to do little with
regards to actually improving his skills, giving the insurmountable
limitations of the harpsichord, he did achieve the primary purpose
for which Bernard had hired him, to provide externally enforced
practice exercises and time for doing them as the grief stricken
piper no longer possessed the mental ability to come up with these
himself or the force of will to make himself enact them. And, with
this one change, all continued on as before for many, indeterminate,
moons more.
Then the news came that he had known
would come and that he had been bracing himself in dread of ever
since the town council had endorsed that horrible paste. The number
of plague cases had fallen low enough that, spurred by the incessant
petitions of the merchants and craftsmen, they allowed the markets
and docks and other public facilities to re-open...including the
cathedral. But, of course, the edict that all must use the repellent
was still in force. Bernard screamed until his voice cracked,
falling away, dry like dust. Up and down he paced, hour after hour,
from one end of his small house to the other, viciously punching and
kicking the walls, like a wild beast savagely circling in a cage, for
now it was a cage indeed. The thing he wanted most was no longer
forbidden...except to him because of a freak accident of birth. He
thought wildly of making the attempt. Had he not said he would allow
nothing to keep him from that which he treasured, been willing to
face death at the hands of the plague for it? But this was
different. Steeling himself to voluntarily endure that horrible
suffocating feeling was one thing and something that he might have
been able to do, with much agony, if his calling had been something
that involved sitting quietly, like calligraphy, or even one of the
many branches of his own trade in leather working. But the energy
and effort it took to play the organ could not be sustained with the
limited air he would have, to say nothing of the swelling and numbing
of his fingers. It was impossible but still, a part of him felt that
his inability to overcome even these physical limitations made him
unworthy, like it was a sign the organ was not really his heart and
soul, the way he had always believed it was. And now, not only did
he have to sit in prison while others walked free, even to the place
where every fiber of his being ached to go, but, in doing so, they
were continuing to spread the plague, making the time he must stay so
imprisoned longer and longer.
The weeks and months dragged while
Bernard remained crushed in this despair. He knew not how much time
had passed but, from his vague awareness of the seasons outside he
knew it must be nearly a year that he had been shut within his house,
denied that which he longed for most, or even the sight of another
human face, when he began to hear bits and pieces of rumors trickle
in from people such as the potter's wife from three streets over who
had the running of her husband's store and was adept at ferreting out
all the latest news from her customers. She had heard through the
rumor mill that some apothecary was attempting to concoct a potion
that would prevent one from contracting the plague. Much better than
an external rat repellent, this would, if it worked, allow one to
resist the sickness from within, even if one were forced to go into
dangerous circumstances. It was just a vague rumor but,
nevertheless, when he heard it, Bernard felt faint. He had to put
his hand on the wall to steady himself and his heart hammered. He
lost all sense of anything beyond the wild hope surging inside him
until he heard the potter's wife make an impatient sound on the other
end of the tube. Swiftly and awkwardly, he completed the rest of
their transaction in a daze only half aware of what he was doing.
This was his chance at freedom. For
the first time, really since the wretched plague had begun, certainly
since the requirements about the paste had forced him to remain
trapped in his house while everyone else walked free, Bernard felt a
glimmer of hope. This could be a chance, at last, to even the score,
a protective measure he could use, to win himself the liberties
others already enjoyed. But how long, how long? Yes, the physician
was experimenting but there was no way to know when or even if, he
would discover the exact combination of substances to achieve the
desired effect. From then on, Bernard became a man obsessed. Every
day in his prison felt unbearable and it was more than he could do to
keep from grilling every client who came by for news on the progress
of the medicinal formula. Many were in ignorance and, those who were
not became heartily sick of his questioning but, in this way, he
slowly gleaned bits and scraps of news. There had been some dead
ends and false starts but, as the months crawled by, the alchemist,
rumor had it, inched with agonizing slowness towards his goal as
Bernard played always on the hateful harpsichord dreaming as he did
so now of a vial of bitter tincture he could swallow down to prove
his devotion and so be set free of this burden forever. And so it
went,
until, at last, he received the word he
had been so eagerly awaiting. The apothecary had perfected the
formula and the elixir was ready.
At first, people could not take the
potion fast enough. The apothecary was kept brewing day and night
and had to hire assistants to help him and still he had to turn
people away every day when his current batch ran out, despite the
fact that drinking the potion made most people become violently ill
for several days after. When his turn came, Bernard drained the
beaker of viscous yellow fluid gladly, ignoring it's sharp, bitter
taste, and managed to make it home before the effects came on him.
Through the next days of gut twisting nausea, pounding head, and
dazed, wandering mind, he clung always to a hazy, drifting image of
sun on a hillside, grass and flowers bending in the wind, the sweet
smell of fresh damp soil, and light glinting off the rippling surface
of the river Waysar, representing all of the vast world that he had
been barred from so long that he could scarce remember it now...all
but one thing. Turn his pain blurred mind's eye a slightly different
way and all this would shift and resolve anew to the great wheel of a
stained glass rose window and below it...below it....waited... He
hardly dared even think of it now but it was what he suffered for.
This pain was his show of devotion, his proof he was worthy. Once
the potion had run its course and his period of agony was over, he
would be redeemed...
...Only to learn, when rose from his
bed recovered, that the town council had decreed that the potion
would not count towards winning a person the right to move about
without restriction. The paste and the paste alone would continue to
be the sole key to freedom and the common people were for the most
part in agreement with this decision, or at least found it benign
enough that it was not worth their while to oppose it, though it
remained unclear to what extent the people were simply going with the
flow of the council's decision and to what extent the council had
made the decision because it knew that was what the people...or the
preeminent business owners of the town...wished. Regardless of whose
idea it had been, the decision, for Bernard, was anything but benign.
For him, it was all the difference between normal life and solitary
confinement in a dark hole, while, clearly, to the majority of the
people, the minor inconvenience of having to use the paste was not
worth bothering about. In addition to the privations of the
confinement itself, he was also crushed by the sense of shame at his
abnormality, his weakness that he simply could not tolerate what was
next to nothing for everyone else, so minor in fact that most could
not even truly conceive of his limitation, as well as his helpless
rage that, as one man, especially one who was not prestigious or
wealthy, his voice would never carry enough weight to count for
anything. Worst of all, since people were not required to, or even
rewarded for, swallowing the potion, their interest in doing so soon
waned and his desperate hope that enough would do so to make all
further need for protective measures unnecessary, soon withered into
bitter irony.
If it was not enough that he still
must be imprisoned while they all went free, the people showed not
the slightest concern for his plight or that of any like him.
Rather, they scorned and mocked those who did not use the paste,
regardless of their reason for doing so, or even treated them with
open hostility and anger. The term pale hands became an expression
of disgust leveled at those whose skin did not bear the stain of the
paste, the substance absorbed into his skin that would reduce him to
a gasping, nauseous, panicked wreck. Although she did not say it
directly to him, he heard the potter's wife use the expression
derisively to her husband, while he was attempting to order a new
leather roll for storing his tools. She may not have known that
Bernard could hear her or even that he was one of the ones to whom
she was referring but he was still filled with rage and despair at
the casual hatred leveled upon him from every quarter and felt a
great desire to deny her further business but lacked the courage to
do so. And everywhere were the hateful signs, crudely painted or
scratched into wood, or scrawled on scraps of rag nailed beside doors
proclaiming that entry was forbidden to all those who could not
display use of the rat repellent “regardless of whether they have
drunk the protective elixir or no.” While Bernard's level of
literacy was not much to speak of, next to nothing really, he soon
learned to recognize that particular string of letters, not
that it was difficult as it seemed, almost any direction he turn his
gaze, there it was again. Every shop and institution was now
displaying a banner proudly proclaiming his unwelcomeness and the
cathedral was no exception.
That he should be forbidden to
practice but for an hour isolated up in the choir balcony when, at
every service, the pews were packed with those who may not have had
even one dose of the potion galled Bernard's heart and soul like
bitter acid. He screamed wordlessly, as his finger nails dug into
the wood of the table. This agony was more than his present
suffering. It was now eternal. Once the plague ended, his hell
would not. Rather it would but grow worse and worse for he could not
re-enter a community that had so utterly refused to in any way
accommodate or even show compassion or understanding for his needs.
Concern for safety was one thing but it was impossible to now pretend
that this was any such thing for the safest thing would be to require
everyone to take the potion. If the town council, the cathedral, or
anyone else had demanded both, he would have forgiven them, for it
would have shown a true concern for safety and the high level of
protection would have sped the end of the plague. Instead, all
preventative measures had been thrown to the winds, except the one he
could not do and he was forced to watch them all go about their
lives, in essence as they had always done, as they continue to spread
the sickness through their faulty defenses, continuously and
indefinitely extending the time he had to remain in his prison and
giving no care for that whatsoever.
Some resisted swallowing the brew
because of additional pains it brought, but the main objection to
the elixir was that it was invisible. Unlike the stained skin, the
sight of which now revolted him, the potion left no mark on those who
drank it, making it impossible to tell if one were telling the truth
about having consumed it. People had come to associate the stained
skin of the paste with a reassuring feeling of safety and felt
vulnerable without the visual confirmation even when the invisible
protection was at least as strong, a fact confirmed when the potter's
wife told him in a superior tone that she would certainly not want
him in her shop...for her own safety you understand, nothing personal
of course, and had declined to respond when he acidly asked if she
kept away from all the customers who came in with stained hands for
fear that they had not taken the potion. This time he did refuse to
do further business with her in reality, not just in his mind. Yes,
there could have been some sort of registration system, like the one
use for the guilds but neither the council nor the businesses wanted
to take on the burden of investigating and verifying if someone was
really telling the truth about what they had or had not drunk. It
was so much more convenient just to look at their hands and so he was
to be sacrificed on the altar of expediency and false security.
Now, more than ever, anything beyond
his tiny, plague fenced world seemed like a dream. With horror,
Bernard realized he could no longer clearly remember what the sight
of sun and clouds in the sky looked like, the feeling of a rain drop
splatting against his skin. Had he ever actually walked down open
streets, looked up to see nothing above his head, or wandered through
the market place, people crowding close shoulder to shoulder without
fear, smelled the exotic imports and the hearty street food wafting
from the stalls, or heard the strolling musicians playing, seated at
the foot of the grand statue or on the lip of the fountain, a hat or
cloak spread before them to collect donations? Had he ever
acknowledged familiar greetings when those he knew passed him on the
street, or accept their invitation to join them at the ale house or
seated on the low wall by one of the many vendors? All this was now
hazy to him and came to seem more and more likely that he had simply
imagined it all. The plague was all. It had always been and it
would continue forever. All of creation was only his own tiny house.
Existence stopped at his front door. The goods that passed in and
out through the revolving platform were conjured by the divine force
that ruled the universe, as part of some magical pact of sustenance.
They came from nowhere and they went to nowhere, winking in and out
of existence as they entered and left his house, for there was
nowhere else for them to be when they were not under his roof.
But that again was another thing that
he was now convinced had been a dream, the communal act of worship.
Only inside his mind, had he ever stood within a church, surrounded
by fellow worshipers, smelled the thick sweet incense, and raised his
voice in songs of praise along with those of all the others around
him. It was a strange, recurring dream that seemed so real, but it
could not be for there were no such things as churches, his house
being the only building that existed, there were no other people
besides himself. He hated himself for conjuring up these beautiful,
ghostly flights of fancy, as ridiculous and unreal as the dream of
being a dragon slayer that he had harbored as a boy and had never
truly relinquished in his heart of hearts, making him discontent with
the prosaic, routine life of a craftsman. And then he had found the
one thing that had spoken to that deep longing, made him feel mighty
the way he had imagined...or had he? With a sick horror, Bernard
realized that, if there was no church, there was no organ and the
most important thing in his life had also not been real. Certainly,
there was no way to prove it for the calluses and swollen knuckles
that would have confirmed his past devotions had long since vanished,
if they had ever been there in the first place. At the very least,
he realized, in a flash of wrenching clarity, that he had completely
lost all memory of what it felt like to play the organ. He could not
call up the blessed wonder, even in his mind. Everything, everything
that mattered, that made him someone, that anchored him, however
tenuously to some form of reality, was fading as the, probably
imaginary, sun faded the colors of paint on a, probably imaginary,
wall.
Then he would sink to the floor
shaking, breaking out in a cold sweat at the helpless horror of it
all, as if he might suddenly see his own hands start to dissolve
before his eyes right then and there. Several minutes, an hour, a
day, the dread might last, but not longer, for the needs of the body
still had too great a hold on Bernard, despite his crumbling mind,
and hunger would drive him to eat. Food must be paid for, so he
would then need to turn to his work and, out of necessity to be able
to do these things, he would force his blind panic back into some
deep close sealed part of himself, where he could forget about it and
do what he must do, but where it still lurked waiting, always, until
the next time it burst free. And so the cycle of rage, misery,
scrabbling existential terror, and grim, plodding practicality went
on and on, eternal as the plague that had spawned it.
©Amanda RR Hamlin 2026
