The Singing Sword cc-2

by Jack Whyte

  We were riding among the paddocks, now; they seemed to stretch endlessly in every direction, packed with beautiful horseflesh. I reined my mount more tightly.

  "You intrigue me, Picus. Tell me more of this Pelagius. What did he say to you to upset you this much, so long afterwards?"

  He shook his head. "No, Uncle, he did not upset me — at least, not quite, not immediately. It took me a long time and a deal of thought to appreciate what it was that Pelagius said to me... Are you familiar with the name of Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo?"

  Again, I felt a sense of things of import crossing my horizons. I shook my head. "No, not at all. Tell me about him, too."

  "Well," he went on, with a barely discernible hesitation that was emphasized by its briefness, "Augustine is one of the most respected scholars of the Church. A very wise and learned man and a famed interpreter of the Word of God."

  "Oh! One of those. That sounds ominous. Go on."

  "Augustine, whom most men call a saintly man, has come into conflict with Pelagius — or, rather, it's the other way around. Pelagius has locked horns with Augustine."

  "So? What's the problem of the saintly Augustine?"

  "Pelagius thinks he is a hypocrite and a liar."

  I whistled to myself. "Has he told him so?"

  "He has told the entire world."

  "Why? For what reasons?" In spite of myself, in spite of the fact that I knew nothing of this Pelagius, I felt dismayed by this last statement of Picus's. "If, as you say, everyone thinks Augustine is a saintly man, your Pelagius runs a very real risk of being thought a madman, or a trouble-maker."

  We had almost completed a circuit of the camp by now, and I saw Picus's great standard come into view again in the distance. Picus was still talking very seriously. "Quite so," he said. "But it is bigger than that. Augustine is the champion of the theory of divine grace. He is a man of God. A bishop. But in his youth he was a notorious womanizer."

  "A womanizer? Really?" I found that intriguing, but not surprising. "Was he a priest at the time?"

  Picus shook his head. "No, I don't think so. Anyway, he has a prayer that has become notorious. He used to pray that God would send him the grace to find chastity ...but not yet!"

  I laughed, but Picus went right on over my laughter.

  "Augustine believes that man is incapable of finding or winning redemption without divine help. He believes that man is born damned, in mortal sin. Only baptism will wash away that sin, and only divine grace can enable man to stay away from sin thereafter. He believes that all of life is a temptation and that man should spend his life in prayer, abandoning himself to God's mercy in bestowing grace upon him."

  I nodded. "That, my young friend, is the view one tends to get from an ecclesia. That's what all the priests say. There's nothing new in what you've told me, except the saintly bishop's own example ... And you say Pelagius finds fault with this?" He nodded. "How?"

  "Totally. Pelagius believes that the entire concept of grace is a man-made device invented by the Church to keep all men in bondage."

  "Hah! Come on now, your friend Pelagius is beginning to sound like one of those old women who sees a rapist behind every bush. How can divine help keep men in bondage?"

  "It works by making men forget that they are made in the image of God Himself, and therefore able to determine between right and wrong."

  I saw the flaw immediately. "But that's not possible. Your man is mad! Men have known the difference between right and wrong since Eve ate the apple. The knowledge of good and evil. Men have always known the difference."

  "Exactly, Uncle. That's what Pelagius says." I felt myself frowning in confusion as Picus went on, "Pelagius argues that man, made in the image of God, knows the difference between good and evil, and has the ability to choose between them, and has always done so, even before the time of the Christ. Even barbarians have their moral laws, unwritten though they may be. Pelagius sees this divine grace as an instrument of men, designed to keep all other men in subjugation and reliant on the Church as the only intermediary between God and man. He sees Original Sin as an invention foisted upon men by other men to make all men guilty at birth, and therefore incapable of freedom of choice from the outset. If we are born guilty in sin before we begin to live, how can we live in freedom with free will?"

  I was holding my breath by this time, beginning to get an idea of the size of this disagreement.

  "Hold on, Picus," I said, holding up my hand to stem the flow of his words and his enthusiasm. "Too much good fodder will founder a bullock! You had better let me think about that for a minute, lad." We were approaching his tent. "Can you pour your old uncle a drink?"

  We dismounted and moved into the coolness of the tent, and he sent his steward to fetch a jug of wine. When we were seated comfortably he went back at it again, right where he'd finished off.

  "Do you see what I mean, Uncle, why I am so concerned with this question? The whole thing goes far beyond the premise of Original Sin and baptism. It digs far deeper. It comes down all the way to personal responsibility. Carried to its logical conclusion, the concept of divine grace destroys the basis of law. Who could punish a criminal, believing that the man only fell from righteousness because God did not provide him with the grace to resist temptation? That's reducing it to the absurd, but that is exactly what it all boils down to. If we accept the wholesome aspects of divine grace, we can paint a beautiful, piteous picture of poor mankind and his all-merciful and bountiful Deity. But if we are to accept that premise at all, we must accept all of it. And that means accepting the fact that law — human law — is folly and predestined to fail, because ultimately, in the absence of grace, the fault for crime can be laid right at God's door."

  I shook my head again, sucking nervously on my teeth, knowing that this entire discussion was beyond my scope. "Whoa," I pleaded, "you're getting pretty involved in your thinking there, lad. You're far beyond my grasp."

  "No, I'm not, Uncle."

  That earned him a snap. "For God's sake stop calling me Uncle. You make me feel like a toothless old man."

  "I'm sorry." He did not sound in the least penitent. "But it's not beyond your grasp at all. Pelagius believes, as the Scriptures tell us, that God made man in His own image. If man has the attributes of God, he says, then man must have free will. The majority of men know that society demands certain rules for the governance of property, sanity, decency and dignity. Those rules constitute the law. Pelagius maintains that a man — any man — born with the divine spark is free to choose between good and evil as defined by both Church and society. If he chooses to go against the law, be it divine or human, that choice is his own, and he has to be prepared to accept the responsibility for his choice in the eyes of God and in the eyes of his fellow men."

  He stopped talking, and a silence grew between us, broken only by the sound of a man singing nearby. I mulled over all that he had said. He had said a lot. But it made a lot of sense.

  "You say this man's a lawyer?" He nodded. "Do you believe him? Or do you believe Augustine and the Church?"

  He gnawed at his lower lip. "I believe Pelagius."

  I sucked a grape seed caught between my teeth. "It takes a lot of nerve to go against the Church. I'd never heard of this fellow Pelagius before this morning, but he makes sense to me, too. How far has this argument between them gone?"

  "A long way. It's the talk of Rome."

  "Sounds like it might become the talk of all the world. And you say this bishop is powerful?"

  "Extremely. He has powerful friends, great influence. Some say he should be Pope."

  "Sounds like your friend Pelagius is spitting into the wind. Will they reach an agreement? Some kind of compromise?"

  "How can they? They're like day and night."

  "Aye, and darkness is falling quickly, it would seem. Does Pelagius have any support within the Church? Or is everyone convinced he is possessed by evil spirits?"

  "He has support. In plenty. Many of the most
powerful espouse his cause."

  "How many? In terms of odds, I mean. Is there an even match?"

  "Perhaps. There could be. If we were dealing only in numbers."

  "What d'you mean?"

  "Uncle — I'm sorry — Publius, is that better?"

  "Much better."

  "So be it. The question here is one of basic policy. An army mutineer may have some right on his side in terms of the conditions that drove him to mutiny. But he has to die for his mutiny, no matter how laudable his cause might have been, no matter how understandable and sympathetic his motives. Mutiny cannot be condoned, no matter what the justification. To condone one instance of mutiny would be to invite, and to incite, the eventual and inevitable destruction of all the armies. So it is with Pelagius. He has to lose, or overthrow five hundred years of a Church established by the Christ Himself, with all its rules and methods. Pelagius knows this, Publius; he is not a stupid man. He is not challenging the Christ's Church but men's corruption of it, yet he knows he is too late to alter what others, stronger men than he, have been building for centuries, with a view to making it eternal. You see, Pelagius's doctrine, if you want to call it that, destroys the need for a Church just as surely as Augustine's doctrine destroys the need for the law. Pelagius is saying that every man carries the whole Church within his heart, and that he can commune directly with God by simply meditating! Augustine is saying that man is absolutely nothing without the Christian Church, which has as its symbol the Keys to the Kingdom of Heaven. The Church already speaks for God. Pelagius speaks for man. Therefore, Pelagius must be defeated in this struggle."

  "And when he is defeated? What will you do then?"

  Picus shrugged his enormous shoulders. "I will live my life by the rules he has evolved. I believe he is right, no matter what the evidence against him may be. I will stand before God as I have lived, and if I have been wrong, then at least I will have been wrong honestly, with good will. I will have lived my life according to the rules that I was taught in youth. I'm no great sinner."

  I smiled, sensing with great relief that this conversation was drawing to a close. "That I believe." I stood up and clapped him on the shoulder. "Now, enough of this talk of God and man. Let's take a walk together and enjoy this day that God has sent for us to enjoy, whatever way he wants us to believe."

  "Done!" He smiled at me, and I saw the boy I once knew in his flashing, bronze-faced grin.

  I pointed at the sword hanging by his side. "That looks familiar."

  He drew the blade from its bronzed sheath. "It should," he said. "It's never left my side since the day you gave it to me. I found a metalsmith in Iberia who seemed to know what he was about and had him make a gold sheath for me, for full-uniform parade occasions. But gold sheath or bronze, the sword stays with me at all times."

  He swung towards the doorway of the tent, but I stopped him, my hand on his arm. "A moment, Picus. You are obviously deeply concerned over this Pelagius thing. But tell me, why did you talk to me about it? I would have thought you'd get more intellectual response from your father."

  He grimaced. "It's not the sort of thing I want to argue with my father over yet. I'm afraid I was using you as a sounding board. I'm sorry if I bored you."

  "Bored me?" I laughed aloud. "Picus, I've seldom been so far from bored. I may have been out of my depth, but I wasn't bored for one second. Come on, let's get on our way. There is much that I haven't seen here, and I want to see it all before I leave for home."

  He looked at me with a smile.

  "Home? You mean the atmosphere of power here in Londinium does not enthrall you? You must run home to your provinces?"

  "Aye," I said, "to your Aunt Luceiia, and I care not who knows it or would laugh at me for it."

  "Uncle," Picus said, still smiling, "you will hear neither laughter nor criticism from me."

  BOOK THREE- Genesis

  XVII

  A man can know no finer sensation than arriving home after an arduous and extended absence. We made excellent time on the road back from Londinium, jubilant as we were with the news of Stilicho's commission and confident of the triumphal welcome that lay ahead of us at the end of our journey. On the last stage, we had a choice of pressing on and arriving at the villa in the middle of the night or stopping to sleep under the forest trees and arriving home with the new day. We chose the latter, rising with the skylarks while the sky itself was still dark and moving on as soon as the light began to penetrate the forest, so that we came in sight of the Colony home farm just as the sun rose fully over it, and for the first time in my adult life I experienced the pleasure of a real homecoming.

  High on the hill to the south-west, overlooking the villa and all the lands around, sat the still unfinished walls of our new fort, picked out clearly and burnished in the light of the new day. Gone was all sign of the forest that had burgeoned there for such a short time, and we felt good to know that never again would we feel a need to hide our achievements. Plautus, who had heard about the disguising of the hill and its fort, laid eyes on the site and promptly decided that we had gulled him. Now that he could see it for himself, he said, he refused to believe that we had ever been able to conceal it, and looking at the size of the hill and its crowning fort from this distance I could appreciate his scepticism. Caius and I merely smiled at each other and left him to believe what he would.

  Caius nodded to the north, where cloud banks were rolling in. "It looks as though we barely beat the weather on the road. It will be pleasant to rest by a glowing fire tonight while the rain falls outside on other people." I agreed with him and we galloped the rest of the way, suddenly wild with impatience to be home.

  Our welcome was chaotic and overwhelming. Luceiia wept openly with relief and love as she ran to meet me, uncaring who was watching. The feel of her body as she threw her arms around my neck and leaned into my embrace reminded me quite violently of the pleasures we had known after even brief separations in the young days of our marriage, and so total and insistently demanding was my own relief to see her again that, in spite of all the hubbub around us, I managed to spirit her away to our own room. There we tumbled each other hurriedly like a couple of spring colts, and yet thoroughly, too, like the well-accustomed partners we were. We rejoined the others later, hand in hand, flushed with our renewed knowledge of each other.

  Everyone in the Colony had assembled in the grounds of the villa, and rumours of our journey and our adventures were on everybody's tongue. Variations on the story abounded so riotously that eventually Caius was forced to call everyone to attention and make an impromptu speech, telling the news of our official recognition as a colony and of the designation of our military resources as "irregular troops." There would be a full meeting of the Council the following day, he said, to discuss thoroughly the differences our new commission would make to all aspects of our future.

  There was little work done on the Colony that day. It was a spontaneous holiday, and the midday meal developed into a major celebration that lasted well into the late afternoon, in spite of the rain that fell intermittently throughout the day. When darkness fell, the last, determined celebrants removed themselves indoors and lighted, it seemed, every lamp and candle in the Colony to accommodate their dancing, games and music. By the time Luceiia and I regained our bed, legitimately this time, we were both almost exhausted enough to fall asleep immediately, wrapped in each other's arms. Almost, but fortunately not quite exhausted enough.

  The Council meeting scheduled for the following day did not begin until the tenth hour of the morning and it lasted for five hours. It was not an arduous meeting, for the items to be discussed were all positive and beneficent and the spirit of the Council members was light-hearted, but Caius was looking tired by the time we adjourned. I walked with him to his day-room, where he stopped and ran his hands fondly over one of the codexes that lay on his work-table, where he had left it before we set off to Londinium with Seneca.

  "It is good to be home again, Publius," h
e said. "I think I will write for a while, before the light goes. My eyes are getting bad, you know. It hurts them now whenever I have to write by lamplight, and there was a time not long ago when I could write all night with only one lamp lit and never notice any strain at all."

  "That can't be good for anybody's eyes, Caius," I told him. "I think it is a good idea to do it by daylight, if you have the time and the opportunity. Although why anybody would want to write as much as you do mystifies me." He looked at me and smiled, but said nothing. "What do you write, anyway?" I asked. "I mean, you have spent hours and hours writing every day now for years and yet you never show anyone what you've written ... At least, I don't think you do. Do you?"

  His smile became wider. "No, Publius, as a matter of fact, no one has ever seen what I have written. No one has ever expressed any curiosity about it, except Luceiia. She knows what it is, although she has never read it. And she knows that when I die it will pass into her keeping."

  "Well, do you mind my asking what it is?"

  He smiled at me. "No, not at all, since it was you who inspired it."

  I stared at him in amazement. "Me? What did I do?"

  Caius laughed. "What, Publius? You do not even remember? You were irate with me for writing my military memoirs! Surely you recall that? You told me I should think of my own descendants and write for their guidance in future years." I vaguely remembered the occasion. "Anyway, that is what I have been writing ever since that day. It is a personal history of the growth of this Colony, set down for the entertainment, and perhaps the guidance, of those descendants of ours who might one day govern this place."

  "A history? How do you do that?"

  Caius shrugged his shoulders and grinned, in spite of his obvious tiredness. "Very simply," he said softly. "I have disciplined myself to set down, each day, the day's events."

  "So it is a chronicle? Like Luscar's log of the Invasion campaign?"

  "Mmm." The sound that came from his throat was high-pitched and suggested a negative. "Not quite, Publius, not quite ... More of a journal; less of a legal document. I add my own personal thoughts and observations. There are many of my opinions and thoughts mixed in with the events. As I said, it is a personal history, and sometimes almost embarrassingly egotistical."