But it didn’t happen. There was no miracle. The body of the accused sank.
As the bubbles rose to the surface from the bottom of the river, fewer and fewer each moment, a snake appeared out of nowhere. As it swam across the water, its body formed beautiful arcs and it kept its head upright above the surface.
‘Look! Look!’ somebody shouted. ‘The evil spirit has swum out of her body!’
‘You mean it survived?’
‘The devil must have summoned it to himself. Now that it can’t live in her body any more, the witch is of no use to it. Such forces aren’t so easily destroyed. You can only destroy the body in which they sojourn. You can’t drown them; you have to burn them to death. An evil spirit is only destroyed by fire.’
After the little snake swam beneath the bridge and then, miraculously, never appeared on the other side, which the populace took to mean that the hornèd one had pulled it down to hell, a gentle white swan appeared on the river – a female swan, they decided, since it did not seem brawny or aggressive, the way only male swans, protective of their offspring, are known to be. She was swimming peacefully towards the bridge, but then she turned around beneath it, unlike the snake. After that, she started swimming back and forth on the water, occasionally looking at the people watching her, who were waiting to see what would happen.
‘If that’s her soul, it’s not very small.’
‘Well, her body wasn’t exactly tiny or delicate.’
‘What will happen now? Where will the swan go?’
‘She’ll probably fly into the sky.’
‘But look at her eyes! Why is she looking at us so strangely?’
‘What do you mean, strangely?’
‘As if her eyes were a little moist.’
‘Well, she’s swimming in water, and there’s lots of moisture in water.’
‘No, no. That look of hers … Doesn’t it seem like her eyes are accusing us?’
‘Accusing us of what? Does anyone really believe that we didn’t do the right thing? After all, the witch confessed!’
‘But who wouldn’t confess after such brutal torture! Maybe she only confessed to make the pain stop …’
‘ … and knew that God would see her heart and in the end separate the truth from the lies and take good care of her when she died …’
‘Well, even if that’s true and there is some sort of reproach in the swan’s eyes, there’s also mercy and forgiveness there. If in anything we did we were by chance mistaken, she – that is, her soul in the form of the swan – forgives us our mistake, for we acted in good faith, believing that what we did was just, honourable and good.’
‘So you think there could also be mercy and forgiveness in her eyes?’
‘Oh, yes, no doubt about it. Now her soul will swim off peacefully, up or down the river, to the other side, and if she herself is forgiven – since she’s not going to the other world completely sinless; nobody, except the littlest children, is without sin when they go to other side – then if we did make a mistake, God will forgive us, too.’
‘But we didn’t …’
‘Of course we didn’t, but still, just in case …’ This is what the populace was thinking as the swan spread her wide wings, toddled across the water on her red feet and, after a few yards, lifted herself off the surface and rose into the air; then, circling twice above the bridge, she flew into the distance, an ever smaller dot on the horizon until she completely vanished.
‘Vanished just like …’
‘ … like everything vanishes.’
If God had wanted to, he could have prevented her death – a few
isolated voices quietly speculated. But clearly, he had decided to snatch the poor woman from her torturers’ cruel hands and call her to himself, and then, years later, he would send that community of purportedly honest men and women a punishment they would be talking about for a long time. A punishment designed not to look like a punishment at first but like yet another opportunity for the populace, led by the secular and religious authorities, to go completely wild, and then afterwards they could celebrate their methods from the pulpit and boast of what had happened as a lesson to sinners far and wide. But perhaps the worst part of the punishment was that nobody ever fully agreed on what had actually happened during those cruel events. For the story, which was told in various versions, sounded completely unbelievable – almost as unbelievable as the atrocities that came centuries later would have sounded to people back then.
Suddenly, a Crack
The ancient trees passed by slowly by, to the syncopated rattle of the carriage, and with them the fading old world was also passing, a world regarded as dismal, shadowy, dark-sounding, with other onomatopoeic tones as well. But the world of the churches could in truth (and truth was in the crosshairs of the little churches), even during the day, no matter how blazing the sun, produce such an oily-black gloom that the ancient trees, even at night when the churches slept, were unable to thicken it in the dense mesh of their branches. Not for a very long time now. What had existed centuries ago in the places where the little churches were standing (for among these same long-lived trees there had been other temples) many people knew, but no one could say for sure. So stories circulated, cruel fables and fairy tales, woven by memory and the imagination in who knows what proportions.
Sunlight bounced off the amethyst that was set in a massive gold ring, which bit into the fleshy ring finger of a left hand. The hand opened the carriage curtain slightly, clenched and unclenched its swollen arthritic joints a few times, and rose to a mouth, which let out a harsh little cough through pursed lips.
‘Have you been in these parts before, Julian?’ the prince-bishop asks the young man sitting across from him.
‘It’s my first time here, sir,’ the travelling companion replies.
‘Do you think it beautiful?’
‘How can it not be? Nature is the work of the Creator and is beautiful everywhere,’ says Julian.
‘Well, nature is generous in some places but bleak and harsh in others; in some places it is soft and round but in others sharp and jagged. And here it is round, so it’s as if we’re sitting still, while hills and wonderful little valleys roll past. Don’t you agree, Julian?’
‘You are right, sir.’
‘But Julian, never let nature become aware of you. No matter how wonderfully beautiful it might be, it can bristle in an instant, fly into a rage, thrash the trees and shake the earth until in places it opens up and swallows innocent and guilty alike; it can move mountains, flood valleys …’
‘But if such be the will of God …’
‘Yes, of course. The will of God. But nature can rage even without God willing it. Some say nature can go mad entirely on its own and that there are those who can make it serve their most wicked intentions … Do you believe this?’ the prince-bishop asks.
‘That’s what people say …’
‘But you, Julian, you have an open mind – do you think it likely that a person can have so much power that he’s able to interject his sinister will into the laws of nature, to cause drought to appear and dry up what has been sown or make a cloud come whirling down to earth and flatten everything in its path?’
‘It’s said that there are people who can do such things, but not …’
‘But