The Pope's Assassin

by Tim Severin

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ I said. ‘We must be getting close to Beneventan territory. At the inn where we stopped last night he didn’t pay. He just showed his badge.’

  ‘No wonder the innkeeper had a sulky face.’

  The track began to climb and the olive trees gave way to a thick beech forest where the horses had to scrabble for purchase on the crumbly surface of the path that looped ever higher. Eventually, we came clear of the trees and found ourselves on a level hill crest where a lad watched over a few sheep grazing on the meagre upland pasture. Looking back the way we had come, I could see far below me the line of the road we had left. Beorthric was a few yards ahead of me and I heard him utter a slight groan of dismay. I rode up to join him. He was gazing ahead to where the track would take us. The end of the ridge rose to a peak and on it stood a cluster of buildings dominated by a bell tower.

  ‘Not another monastery,’ he growled.

  Our reception was efficient and wary. The porter in the monastery gatehouse made us wait while he sent an assistant to summon two men-at-arms dressed in the Beneventan livery. They took delivery of us from our escort and searched us for hidden weapons. They removed Beorthric’s scramseax and handed it to the porter for safe-keeping. They then brought us in through the monastery double doors and up a long flight of steps that led to a broad raised forecourt. It was clear that they had orders to make sure we were not seen by the monks, for we were hurried around the rear of a building which smelled like a bakery and, a few steps further on, we turned into the first doorway we came to.

  ‘Nice to know we had a place reserved for us,’ said Beorthric sarcastically as he let drop his saddlebags on the floor of the cell-like room into which we were shown. Behind us was the sound of the stout door being barred, shutting us in.

  I looked around. The room contained two cots, a three-legged stool, and a table with a bowl and an earthen water jug. Someone had left a loaf of bread and a large chunk of cheese beside the water jug.

  ‘No point in staying hungry,’ said Beorthric, reaching for the loaf and tearing it in half. He broke the cheese into two pieces and took a bite. ‘Sheep’s cheese and good too. You should try it.’

  A single small window, high up, allowed in light and air. Hearing a very faint whistling sound from beyond a curtain closing off a recess in one wall, I went across and drew it back. The alcove served as a privy, and there was a hole in the floor. The sound was the wind whistling past the aperture. Looking down the hole, I saw an open forty-foot drop to a near-vertical hillside. Coming back into the room, I placed the stool under the window and climbed up so that I could peer out. As I suspected, the monastery was perched on the edge of a steep scarp. Our room faced outward over the void and below us stretched an expanse of wooded hills and shadowed valleys as far as the eye could see.

  I went across to the door and listened. I could hear nothing. Nevertheless, I was worried that somehow our conversation might be overheard.

  ‘Stop fretting,’ Beorthric told me. He sounded relaxed and unworried. ‘They’ll come and fetch us when they’re ready.’

  ‘When do you think that will be?’

  He shrugged and ran his fingers through his hair which had grown back, long and blond, since the days with the Avars. ‘Probably after dark.’

  He stretched out on one of the cots, laid back his head, closed his eyes, and promptly fell asleep, leaving me to pace up and down the room, worrying.

  The silence was numbing. The outer wall of our room was four feet thick, and the solid interior walls not much less. They blocked out noise so that all I could hear were my footsteps on the floorboards, Beorthric’s breathing and the faint, hollow whistle of the wind next door. The dead, empty feeling reminded me of the derelict tombs we had ridden past on leaving Rome. With a shiver of fear I thought back to another monastery, the one in the foothills of the Alps. It was where I had my first encounter with Albinus, the Pope’s chamberlain. I wondered if I was about to see him again. If so, he was sure to recognize me. Then both Beorthric and I would not be allowed to live.

  My anxiety increased as the hours dragged by. I felt exposed and helpless, not knowing where we were or why we had not been taken to Benevento. Clearly, the Beneventans were not the only people who wanted to meet Beorthric, and it was impossible to guess who their allies might be. I found myself wishing that Paul had been more informative about Italian politics. The uncertainty weighed on my thoughts and I lost track of time. We were buried too deep within the monastery to hear the bell in the church tower marking the hours and calling the monks to service, or perhaps they did not require their belfry to measure out their day.

  It was long after the light from the little window had faded that I heard the sound of the door bolts being drawn back. Beorthric opened his eyes and sat up. Two men-at-arms in Beneventan livery entered. A third man stood in the corridor outside holding up a torch. They were not the same men who had escorted us before. Once again we were searched for hidden weapons, then taken from the room and out into the open air. We turned to our right and followed the line of the monastery’s perimeter wall, always keeping away from the more public areas. A sliver of moon showed the bulky outline of a large basilica on our right, its high roof black against the stars. Then a short flight of stone steps brought us to an upper level and the entrance to a small building that filled the space between the basilica and outer wall. The flickering light from the escort’s torch fell on small, narrow bricks like those used in the city walls of Rome. The building we were entering was very old.

  Our escort knocked on a closed door, and the moment it opened, we slipped inside before it was shut behind us. We were in some sort of a vestibule, not large, which smelled of mildew. It was badly lit by three or four torches in wall brackets. The floor was paved with large buff-coloured clay tiles so worn that their centres were slightly dished. Plain benches, dark with age, stood arranged against the walls, and pale patches in the plaster showed where pictures had once hung. I was fairly sure that we were in the antechamber to the monastery’s original chapel.

  Beorthric was remarkably self-possessed. Ignoring our escorts, he walked across to one of the benches and sat down, arms folded. I followed him. ‘I wonder how long we’ll be kept waiting,’ I said in an undertone, taking care to address him in Saxon. One of the guards promptly stepped up to me and snarled angrily, ‘Silence!’ – or something to that effect, for he spoke in the local dialect. Meekly, I settled back in my seat, careful not to make eye contact with him or his two comrades.

  We waited for perhaps half an hour and I caught snatches of argument from raised voices on the far side of the door that led deeper into the building. Eventually, that door opened and the same sour-faced man who had brought us from Rome looked out and beckoned to us to enter. Careful to walk a couple of steps behind Beorthric in the role of his assistant, I followed him into a spacious high-vaulted room. Most of it was in deep shadow though I could make out a line of window embrasures along each side. Directly ahead of us on the end wall was a fresco. It was a crucifixion scene in which a bearded man in an abbot’s dress and with a nimbus around his head knelt at the foot of the cross. Patches of the original paint had peeled away, the remaining colours were faded, and there were streaks across the picture where water had leaked from above. A name was written underneath the kneeling abbot, and though I strained my eyes to read what it was, the script was too blurred to be legible, and several letters were missing. To my mind there was no longer any doubt that we were in an abandoned oratory, disused now that the monks had built themselves a large basilica immediately adjacent.

  All original furniture had been removed and where an altar once stood, a group of four men sat at a table. My eye was drawn at once to the man directly facing us. Between forty and fifty years of age, his long dark hair hung loose to his shoulders, framing a bony, narrow face with an expression that managed to be both calculating and jaded at the same time. He was beautifully dressed in an over-gown of brocaded red and gold
silk trimmed with fur at the collar and cuffs, and held together at the throat with a gold brooch studded with precious stones. The candlelight from twin candelabra placed at each end of the table struck a deep red glow from the fat ruby he wore on a ring on the index finger of his right hand. Even before he spoke, it was clear that he was in charge of the meeting.

  ‘Your name is Beorthric?’ There was the slightest hint of a Beneventan accent in his slow, careful Frankish. I judged him to be a high official of the prince’s court rather than a member of the ruling family.

  ‘It is, my lord,’ Beorthric answered firmly.

  The official turned his gaze towards me where I stood a couple of paces behind the big Saxon. ‘And you are?’

  Beorthric replied for me. ‘My associate, my lord.’

  ‘What sort of an associate?’

  ‘He was with me when the khagan of the Avars enjoyed his final meal,’ Beorthric told him.

  The hint of a grim smile stretched the corners of the official’s mouth. ‘Tell me about it,’ he said.

  While Beorthric recounted the plot against Kaiam, I had a chance to study the other men seated at the table. Richly dressed, they all had that indefinable air of those who are accustomed to giving orders, not receiving them. Also I detected that there was some tension between them. The stout man with the meaty shoulders and the grizzled beard sitting on the left of the Beneventan official appeared to be his deputy. A sour-faced, stooped old man with hooded eyes and thin wisps of white hair scraped across his nearly bald scalp was unhappy with what was being considered. He was chewing on a fingernail and treating the company to a suspicious scowl. Facing him was a priest. Thin-faced and not particularly tall, the gaunt cheeks above the greying beard were covered with a network of broken veins. I put his age at fifty and he seemed to be uncomfortable, shifting in his seat. Instead of looking at the others, he studied a point in the empty air above their heads. He appeared to be having difficulty in understanding what Beorthric was saying.

  When Beorthric had finished giving his account of how Kaiam had been overthrown, it was the old man who spoke up. ‘How do you know he’s telling the truth?’ he rasped, taking his hand from his mouth and spitting out a morsel of fingernail. He put the question in Latin to the senior Beneventan, presuming, I supposed, that neither Beorthric nor I would understand him. His arrogance and the pallor of his skin, contrasting with the swarthy Beneventans, led me to believe that he was a nobleman who had come from Rome.

  ‘We agreed not to employ your gutter scum this time,’ answered the Beneventan evenly, confirming my guess. He too spoke in Latin.

  The old man was insistent. ‘And if this also goes wrong? What then?’

  ‘We’ll be even more ambitious next time.’

  The old man turned his scowl in my direction. His eyes were pale blue and a dark wart-like growth showed on his upper lip, at the corner of his mouth. ‘Get him out of here. One butcher is enough.’

  I had the good sense to keep my face blank, pretending not to understand, and also to look startled when the Beneventan manservant took me roughly by the arm and marched me out of the room and back into the antechamber.

  Under the hostile gaze of the guards I found myself a seat and tried to commit to memory what the men at the table had looked like. None of them had been tall enough to be the agent in Rome for the Greeks, and for that I was both disappointed and thankful – disappointed that I could not get a proper look at his face, and thankful that he had not been there to recognize me from the beating in Paderborn. The haughty old man at the meeting, I suspected, was from the aristocratic faction in Rome who wished to get rid of the upstart Pope Leo whom they regarded as an ill-bred commoner. The priest was an enigma. If he was the abbot of the monastery, or a very senior monk, he could have been at the meeting because he was the host for the visitors. On the other hand, he might be someone from the Lateran and actively engaged in the conspiracy against the Pope.

  Beorthric reappeared not long afterwards. In one hand he had a soft leather pouch dangling from its drawstring. Without a word, he jerked his head for me to follow him as he brushed past the guards and strode towards the outside door. Both of us remained silent while we were escorted back to our cell-like room, and locked in again for the night. Only when the noise of their footsteps had died away, did I dare to speak, and then only in a whisper.

  ‘What did you learn?’ I asked.

  ‘That they are serious about getting rid of Leo,’ he said. ‘They gave me a down payment of a hundred solidi’– he held up the pouch – ‘and promised four times as much again when he’s in his coffin.’

  ‘And how are you supposed to carry out the killing?’

  ‘On my own. They were most insistent that it has to be a solo attack, without accomplices.’

  ‘That’s because they employed a gang of city cut-throats last time and it was bungled.’

  ‘I told them that if the attack was to be successful, I had to be provided with detailed knowledge of my target’s movements and how well he is protected.’

  ‘What did they suggest?’

  ‘They had already picked a location where I can get close to the Pope when he’s unguarded.’

  ‘And where is this place?’

  ‘It goes by the name of the Forum of Nerva, and I presume it’s somewhere in the centre of the city. Naturally, I insisted that I had to scout it for myself.’

  ‘And what about the timing?’

  ‘They didn’t say. Only that I would be contacted when all the other arrangements were in place.’

  Beorthric hefted the pouch and I heard the chink of coins while I thought about what he had said. It appeared that the attack on Leo was part of a much wider plan.

  ‘What did you make of that bad-tempered, balding old fellow, the one with the wart on his lip?’ I asked.

  ‘He always spoke to the others in Latin, and I know only a couple of phrases but I think he was demanding that the Pope was dealt with by October at latest.’

  ‘And what was the response?’

  ‘The man with the ruby ring gave him an answer but I couldn’t understand what it was. I did notice that afterwards he looked to the old monk with the staff as if to check with him that he’d said the right thing.’

  ‘What old monk with a staff?’ I said, surprised. ‘I didn’t see anyone.’

  ‘He shuffled in through a side door not long after you had left. I’ve a feeling that he turned up to the meeting earlier than he was meant to, and I was not meant to have seen him. He stood in the shadows, listening.’

  ‘Shuffled?’

  ‘He had difficulty in walking. Either he was very old and his joints were stiff, or his eyesight was nearly gone. It was too dark for me to see much more.’

  I found myself wishing that I had been allowed to stay in the room to get a glimpse of this elderly priest. With a sudden lurch in my stomach I recalled Paul’s tale of the last time that armed violence had been used to place someone on St Peter’s Chair. The Duke of Nepi had successfully installed his own brother as Pope Constantine II and he had held the office until driven from the Lateran by an opposing faction. Though publicly humiliated and beaten up, Constantine had refused to admit any wrong doing, claiming that he was still the true Pope. Eventually, he had been sent away from Rome . . . to live in a monastery. Hurriedly, I did the calculation in my head. All this had taken place when Paul was a young official in the Lateran so it was certainly possible that Constantine was still alive. Now this new plot also involved someone from Nepi – Maurus. Like a thunderbolt it struck me that the shuffling old monk listening in to the conspiracy to remove Leo might well be Constantine himself, former and false Pope.

  Finally, I had something of solid value to report to Archbishop Arno, and the sooner I did so the better it would be.

  Chapter Sixteen

  BEORTHRIC AND I got back to Rome four days later. Our escort, another silent Beneventan retainer, left us off at a lodging house in the Trastevere quarter. Its loc
ation had been carefully chosen. The Trastevere was across the river from the main city, an out-of-the-way area frequented by bargemen and itinerant workers. The lodging house was small and discreet and we were told to remain there without drawing attention to ourselves until Beorthric received further instructions. Our rent was paid in advance.

  Naturally, as soon as I was sure that the house was not being watched, I slipped away to seek out Archbishop Arno. I was annoyed with myself that I had not worked out earlier that if the conspirators intended to dispose of Pope Leo, they had to have a successor ready to replace him. The day was blisteringly hot and when I got to the Lateran Palace shortly before noon it was to find that the half-dozen members of the Family of St Peter who were meant to be on guard had retreated into the shade of one of the porticoes. They were chatting amongst themselves and casually waved me through. Making my own way along the corridors I noted that many of the small writing rooms were empty and silent, the clerks and copyists finding an excuse to abandon their desks during the oppressive heat. Even the archbishop’s secretary looked half-asleep when I walked in on him and asked to see Arno on an urgent matter. The secretary was one of the scriniarii on loan from the regular Lateran bureaucracy, and there was a patronizing look on his face as he informed me smugly that I would have to wait, probably for weeks. The archbishop as well as the Pope and the senior members of the papal administration had all left Rome and dispersed to various summer retreats in the countryside. They would only return when the weather was cooler.

  That explained why the Family of St Peter were so slack.

  I badly needed to discuss the events at the monastery with someone who could help me understand them. The obvious candidate was my friend Paul, so I set out on the long walk across the city towards his villa. The sun-scorched streets were almost deserted and the glare reflecting off the broken paving stones was blinding so I stopped at a stall on my way past the Colosseum and bought a broad-brimmed straw hat from the rogue selling keepsakes and tokens to foreign visitors. Naturally, I had to pay four times what the hat would have cost elsewhere. Along my route most of the ancient public fountains had long since broken down, their basins cracked and filled with rubbish. One or two still ran feebly, trickling into stone troughs. I stopped to splash water over my face and, taking off my shoes, cooled my feet in the run-off. I refrained from drinking the water as it was lukewarm and scummy. By the time I reached Paul’s villa I was footsore and very, very thirsty.