He was delirious. He started dreaming. About Adèle and Katarzyna. He had the scents of powder, rouge, mint, henna and sweet flag in his nostrils. His fingers and hands remembered the touch, the softness, the hardness, the smoothness. When he closed his eyes, he saw the modest, embarrassed nuditas virtualis—the small round breasts with nipples hard from desire. The slim waist, the narrow hips. Her flat stomach. The thighs shyly clenched together… Now he didn’t know which was which.

He battled against the illness for two weeks, until All Saints’ Day. Later, when he recovered, he found out that the crisis and critical stage had occurred around Saints Simon and Jude’s Day, on the seventh day, as was standard. He also found out that Brother Tranquillus had supplied the herbal remedies and infusions that saved him, administered by Scharley and Horn who took turns to watch over him.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

In which our heroes are still—to use the words of the prophet Isaiah—sedentes in tenebris, meaning in common parlance that they’re still locked up in the Narrenturm. Later, however, pressure is put on Reynevan using both arguments and instruments. And the Devil knows how it would have ended if it hadn’t been for some university friends.

Nothing much changed in the two weeks that the illness erased from Reynevan’s biography. It had grown even colder, which couldn’t be called a phenomenon after All Souls’ Day. Herring had begun to prevail in the bill of fare, reminding the inmates that Advent was coming. In principle, canon law instructed that fasting begin only four Sundays before Christmas, but the very devout—and the canons of the Holy Sepulchre were among those—began earlier.

Regarding other events, soon after Saint Ursula’s Day, Nicolaus Koppirnig had had such an acute and persistent attack of carbuncles that they’d had to be lanced in the hospital medicinarium. After the operation, the astronomer had spent several days in the infirmary. He had talked so compellingly about the comfort and provender there that the remaining inmates of the tower had decided to have some of it. The rags and straw from Koppirnig’s pallet had been divided up so that the other inmates might become infected. Indeed, soon after, the Institor and Bonaventure had come out in ulcers and pimples. But they weren’t a patch on Koppirnig’s carbuncles, and the canons of the Holy Sepulchre hadn’t considered them worthy of operating on or hospitalisation.

Scharley, meanwhile, had managed to entice with scraps of food and tame a large rat which he’d named Martin in honour of the reigning Pope. The joke amused some of the Narrenturm’s inmates, while others were outraged at Scharley and Horn when they’d baptised the rat and quipped: Habemus papam.