‘Come back for her in a week,’ said Sor Agnete. ‘We will have clothes and shoes ready to go with her.’
It took Rafal three days. And of course he couldn’t find everybody. He missed Jaime, for Jaime was on the road from Sant Clara. He brought Galceran, and Salvat, and Juan’s younger brother – Juan ran away and hid somewhere rather than be hauled in front of a cardinal. And Old Luis was dead. One or two others presented themselves whose account was vague; Rafal thought they were eager to share the journey, riding good horses, and gaining importance in the eyes of their cronies, not to speak of eating well, for he would, of course, have to sustain them from the cardinal’s bounty for three days at least – the journey each way and the time in Ciudad. Rafal’s nerves were drawn taut as tentered linen; he could not stand their cheerful conversation, and he rode a little ahead. But they sobered up as Ciudad came in sight and the prospect of the cardinal loomed nearer.
The cardinal spoke to them gravely. He told them that matters of vast importance hung on the answers they might make to him. He asked them to remember the capture of the wolf-child and what they had then done and said. Had they mentioned God to her?
He amazed them. They stood, nonplussed, glancing uneasily at each other, Galceran, it seemed, almost laughing, for he spluttered and covered his face with his great beefy hand.
‘Did we what, Holiness?’ he asked recovering himself.
‘Do you think you might have mentioned God to her?’
‘We didn’t exactly talk to her, Holiness,’ the man said. ‘She wasn’t friendly.’
‘Could you have talked about God amongst yourselves in such a way that she might have overheard you?’
They looked at the floor. They shuffled their feet. Galceran answered, and his voice had taken on the unmistakable tones of a man talking to a child. ‘We, er, don’t talk about God much, Holiness. Not much at all. Can’t remember when he last came up, in fact. Can you, Salvat?’
Salvat coloured and shook his head.
‘When you found her, you didn’t ask her where she came from? Or tell her to thank God for her rescue, or wonder aloud if she had been baptized?’
‘It was like overpowering a wild beast, Holiness, not like meeting a sweet little child. She drew blood; we were covered in wounds and scratches,’ said Galceran.
‘We might have cursed her,’ observed Salvat. ‘We might have sworn at her, Holiness. Is that the sort of thing you mean?’
‘You might have used curses that name God?’ he asked.
They seemed relieved, pleased almost, to understand him at last. ‘We might have done that,’ said Galceran. ‘I expect we did, Holiness. I’m almost sure of it.’
‘Yes,’ said Salvat. ‘Old Luis knew a blasphemy or two. He was always taking names in vain, and she bit him deep and hard, I remember. I bet he cursed her.’
Severo returned to his cell. It was a desolating thought that the child might have learned of God through curses – poor outcast soul! Not that he believed it. Whatever it was that could be learned from being the object of cursing, it was not, surely, the existence of an ever-loving creator. But he could tell Fra Murta that a creature who had been cursed in God’s name had heard of God. He had his little troop of witnesses. The experiment was void, and he would do battle with Fra Murta again on freshly chosen ground.
He was too late. Lying on his desk was a fresh pile of papers, and on top of the pile was another document penned in the careful hand of Petro Llop. ‘Audit resumed,’ he read.
‘Location: prisoner’s cell. Prisoner unable to walk or stand.
INQ. ‘You must repeat within one day a confession made under torture, or it is invalid.’
PRISONER [groans]. ‘Of course it is invalid. I will not repeat it.’
INQ. ‘If it is not true, why did you make it?’
PRISONER. ‘You know why! But if you only knew how eagerly your cardinal, and his friend Beneditx, have been seeking my free consent to their religion! And all is lost now; you have lost the game for them. For if I say now that I believe in God, how will anyone know whether what I say is sincere or said through fear?’
INQ. ‘I cannot answer for others. I have no difficulty in believing what you say. Repeat your confession.’
PRISONER [groans]. ‘What if I will not?’
INQ. ‘We shall resume the mancuerda.’
PRISONER. ‘You’ll be sorry for this! The captains of Aclar are not usually savages, but they would be so outraged and revolted by this, if ever they found out what you have done to me, that they would have scream for scream and tear for tear.’
INQ. ‘You’d be surprised how often we are threatened with ridiculous revenges.’
PRISONER. ‘God rot you in hell!’
INQ. ‘Who is to rot me? We have you, I think! Now, God be praised! We have you.’
To the truth of the above, I Petro Llop etc. etc., put my hand . . .’
36
‘I cannot save you once you have confessed,’ said Severo. He was standing beside Palinor’s pallet. ‘I thought I could make something of the fact that the child had been cursed. It isn’t watertight, of course; she couldn’t at first have understood a word of human speech, but Fra Murta doesn’t know that, and I have witnesses to the cursing . . .’
‘I don’t understand a word you say,’ said Palinor, speaking painfully. ‘One of us is demented, and I suppose it is more likely to be me.’
Brought up short, Severo remembered that from beginning to end Palinor himself had not known about the snow-child.
‘Don’t try to save me now,’ Palinor went on. ‘I don’t want years of crawling like a spider. Only . . . I am hideously afraid of the fire. Is there a better way than that?’
‘I can make sure you will be dead before the flame reaches you,’ said Severo. ‘Is there anything else I can do for you?’
‘When they fished me from the sea,’ said Palinor, ‘I did not at first realize what had happened; I thought I was still myself, and I promised to reward them; I promised them gold and rubies. Such a debt ought to be paid; will you see to it for me? Don’t forget.’
‘No; it shall be done,’ said Severo. ‘Are you sure there is nothing else?’
‘This isn’t ancient Athens,’ said Palinor. ‘You can’t sacrifice a cock, but would you offer a prayer for me?’
‘You cannot think it makes any difference! But I will do penance for you and pray for you every day of my life remaining.’
‘It makes a difference to you, if not to me,’ said Palinor. The ghost of a smile hovered on his gaunt and pain-racked face. ‘Don’t spare yourself the penance!’ Then, as Severo, openly weeping, rose to go, he said, ‘Ah, friend, I should have swum the other way for your sake, as well as for my own!’
Outside the prison a few bystanders were lurking, drawn by a ghoulish curiosity. Among them Severo recognized Palinor’s servants. The boy looked at him with passionate reproach, and the girl with unbridled hatred. He gave them his heavy purse, but it did not lighten his tormented conscience.
On his way through the cathedral cloisters, Rafal accosted him.
‘I cannot serve you any longer, Holiness,’ the man said. ‘I am leaving. I no longer believe in God.’
Severo looked hard and long at the familiar, unobserved, modest features of his chaplain. He saw that Rafal was trembling – was he trying to elect the path to the fire? Severo did not answer him, he merely clapped his hands. Two servants and a clerk in minor orders came running to his command.
‘Bind this man hand and foot; gag his mouth,’ said Severo, wearily. ‘Take him at once to the quays and cast him into whichever ship is the next to slip hawsers and set sail, wherever it may be bound. Pay for his passage; I don’t mean him to be enslaved.’ To Rafal he said, ‘To return will be the death of you.’ To the astonished clerk, he said, ‘Come with me. You are now my chaplain, and we have jobs to do.’ Then he walked on.
When Beneditx returned to the Galilea, he declined to occupy his old cell. There were d
arker, remoter caves, deeper and higher on the cliff-face across which the monastery straggled and towered. He sat in darkness, silently. At last his confessor, an old colleague, rather a stupid man, Beneditx had thought when he was teaching him, ordered him on pain of sin to return to a cell with a window and resume the treatise on angels. Just as Beneditx now found it hard to eat – food was like ashes in his mouth – so he found it hard to think; thoughts were like cold ashes in his mind. Of course he still believed in angels – how else could the movement of javelins after they left the hand of the thrower, the movement of water, the unfurling of leaves be explained? In a world full of mysteries, and in which one should never explain with more entities what could be explained with fewer, there was no alternative to angels. What Beneditx no longer believed in was the beneficent purpose with which he had always relied on angels to operate; now he feared they might have malign purposes, or none.
The monks and priests at the Galilea were full of concern for Beneditx. Though they did not know what had happened to him, they knew the dark night of the soul when they saw it. It was a country some few of them had suffered in and struggled home from. They tried to cheer him by taking every opportunity to praise him, to mention his achievements, admire his scholarship. They meant well, but they made it worse. Beneditx was humiliated. His faith turned out to be less efficient, less sufficient, than that of the stupidest peasant woman. It was not enough without the help of reason. It did not reach down to the point to which he had fallen.
He could kneel, and he could wind words through his mind: ‘Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord; Lord, hear my prayer. Let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication . . .’ On the far side of space and time, his God could not hear him. Beneditx had failed to save Palinor, whose probable fate haunted him at night, after the last bell, the last hour of prayer in the Galilea, when all fell silent and the lamps were all extinguished. He had deserved to fail; he could not even save himself.
He opened the book at the marker he had put in it to hold his place, many months ago, when he had closed it and gone with Severo’s messenger to Ciudad. It was a volume of St Thomas – De Veritate. ‘Should morning knowledge in angels be distinguished from evening knowledge in angels? It seems not,’ he read. ‘There are shadows in the morning and evening. In the angelic intellect, however, there are no shadows, for as Dionysus says, angels are very bright mirrors . . .’
Beneditx left the pages unturned, set down his quill, and gazed out of his high window. The vale of the Galilea in all its beauty spread out before him, and he could watch the day move across it in a changing panorama of light and shade from dawn to dusk. Once he had seen the world drawn very fine and thin, transfused with the presence of God, a bright immanence giving all things solidity and meaning. God did not merely exist, but was present in every atom of his creation, so that every sight and sound was a sacrament, the flight of the smallest bird was a blessing. Now the world had come to seem a brutal and purposeless chaos, wholly contingent, not a noble building but a tumble of stones.
Where was comfort to be found? Once it had flowed unfailingly in the exquisite liturgy performed in the Galilea, where the voices of the boys of the oblate school soared so that he used to think the vault must be full of angels, hovering, hushed and envious. The liturgy was like a garden now, where he used to walk as of right, a son of the house, and which now he was cast out from, so that every beauty increased his sense of pain and loss.
Once there had been consolation in Scripture. Beneditx used to open the psalter at random, finding always comfort and joy abounding. Now he opened and read: ‘In the morning thou shalt say, “Would God it were even,” and at even thou shalt say “Would God it were morning.”’
How high he had once aspired! He had desired the knowledge of angels, in whom there was no difference between morning knowledge and evening knowledge – in whom knowledge of the world as it was created in the mind of God, and knowledge of the world as in reality it was were one vision, one knowledge, one seamless whole – like an angel he had sought a knowledge without shadows, holding up to the creation a very bright mirror. And now the mirror of his soul was so fouled and darkened that neither morning nor evening could be distinguished from the black onrush of night.
37
Severo was keeping vigil, lying face down before the altar, praying. He was consumed with bitter remorse, for Palinor and for Beneditx, who had both asked him to be set free and then been shipwrecked because he had refused them. In the darkest hour he rose and went to the great Bible that lay always on a golden lectern before the high altar. He opened it, at random. But there was no such thing as accident – the hands of angels, so he had believed, directed the fall of the page. The volume opened at Isaiah, chapter seven. ‘Ask thee a sign of the Lord thy God,’ he read. ‘Ask it in the depth or in the height above. But Ahaz said, “I will not ask, neither will I tempt the Lord.” ’ Severo did not need a footnote, nor to turn a page, for his mind to jump to the words in the Gospel of Matthew: ‘Jesus said, “It is written also, thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” ’ And at last he understood what he had done. He had thought to use the snow-child to entrap his God.
Trembling, he returned to his prostrate position before the altar. He could not pray for what he desired now, for what he longed for was that he might not believe in God; that he might walk out from the darkness into a clear morning, in which the sky was empty and things had no meaning but simply were; in which one might be able to hate suffering without trying to believe that it could be just or could be corrected later. His God refused his unformulated prayer, but weighed him down with presence all night long and would not go away.
Palinor lay awake. This was not only because he was in pain, but because it seemed improvident to spend any of his last moments asleep when an eternity of unawareness lay ahead, and these were the last moments of consciousness before morning. Not one he could look forward to. He did not know what means Severo would take to kill him before the fire, but he didn’t expect it to be pleasant. For a while he let his thoughts wander amidst memories of his wife and son. He wished he had not sent Joffre with messages to talk to sea-captains who might in some distant harbour encounter a ship from home. This far-fetched attempt to save himself had not worked, and he thought his wife would sleep easier at night, his son grieve for him less mordantly if they never knew what had become of him. Well, after all, there was little likelihood they would ever know. He remembered a phrase in St Augustine, which had been his only available reading for so long, about the City of God, which he took to be located in the next world: ‘There our being will have no death, our knowledge no error, our love no mishap.’ In that world, if he had understood the saint correctly, suffering would be transfused with moral meaning and converted into joy. In the last hour before dawn he longed to believe this, and he even attempted a prayer, attempted in his mind to knock on the doors of the great silent universe, and shout, ‘Is there anyone there?’ Nothing answered him, and as the light of morning slowly flooded his cell, he wondered ruefully why it is those who believe most passionately in a merciful deity who are themselves most murderous and cruel.
When Josefa embraced her, Amara stiffened and clenched her teeth. She permitted herself to be held and kissed, however. Jaime stood waiting, carrying her bundle. The nuns were nearly all standing in the gatehouse to see their fosterling go; all but Sor Blancha, who was sitting by the abbess’s bedside, reading to her from the Book of Revelation. The abbess had been ill for so long that the book was nearly at an end.
‘I, Jesus, have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star . . .’
‘It has been dark here for too long,’ said the abbess. ‘Even so, come, Lord Jesus . . .’ Sor Blancha started up in alarm.
It was not safe to make so large a pyre in the city streets, and so the burning was to be held at a crossroads, some miles outside Ciudad,
on the plains. The people came from far and wide to see the heretic burn; nobody could remember anyone being burned alive in living memory, although one or two who had fled had been burned in effigy some time back. The workshops were empty, the markets suspended, and the labourers given ‘Sunday grace’ to flock out to see it.
Severo’s clerk had bribed the executioner with a king’s ransom to garrote Palinor before lighting the fire, but the inquisitor watched him so closely that he did not dare to. Even so, Palinor did not die the death that Fra Murta had purposed for him, for at the cost of the whole of the gold that Severo had given her, Dolca had procured in a back street in the Jewish quarter a little brick of dark brown sticky substance which emitted when ignited an instantly lethal, invisible fume, and when Palinor was already stripped naked and bound to the stake, she climbed wailing upon the pyre and kissing his feet, thrust it among the faggots below his heels.
38
Jaime took Amara first to Sant Jeronimo. He stood her in the midst of the little square in front of the church, and as people came and went, he told them about her. ‘This is the new snow-keeper, friends. Her name is Amara, and she will belong to my mother’s household from now on.’ Various of his neighbours stopped to talk and to look at the strange young woman, standing so stiffly and looking askance at everyone. Those who had seen her as the wolf-child seemed not to recognize her now, and Jaime saw no reason to tell her true story and every reason not to. It was simpler to give her out as a servant, brought to look after the snow-pits, and a parishioner like any other.
‘She doesn’t look one straight in the eye,’ said Galceran. ‘Is she a bit simple, Jaime?’
‘Only timid,’ said Jaime. ‘She’s had a troubled childhood.’
‘Haven’t we all?’ said Galceran. ‘Well, it doesn’t matter in a snow-keeper anyway.’
Knowledge of Angels Page 24