Quest of Hope: A Novel

by C. D. Baker

  For generations Christ’s faithful had endured alternating seasons of harshness and tolerance while they quietly suffered the added offense of watching their most holy places fall one by one into heathen hands. A small corner of the Holy Land still remained under Christian rule, and pilgrims continued to go in an unrelenting stream; they saw their lot as that of Christ’s and suffered in hopes of a final deliverance. Deliverance had surely been delayed, however. The black-and-white tents of the terrible Turks under Suleiman now dotted the plains and mountains of that land, and Christian pilgrims had become the targets of cruel torture and death. To these challenges the knights of Europe were still hoping to rise again in Holy Crusade.

  As he bounced through the valleys tightening around him, Heinrich began to wonder why these Syrians could peddle their spices and their silks unharmed, while Christian knights were dying on the bloody sands of Palestine. He stared at them as they knelt to pray and wondered if they were asking Allah to strike down the Christ. He knew Jerusalem had fallen to their kind less than twenty years before. He also knew that a remnant of Christian Palestine was hard-pressed on every side by a rising storm of infidels, perhaps kin to the ones he now served. Heinrich slowly became incensed. Look at ‘em! They strut about like clever peacocks in their foolish turbans and silk. They think our lands are theirs for the taking! The man began to bristle.

  Finally, in the early twilight of that same day Heinrich reined in his horses and dismounted the wagon. He snatched a loaf of stale bread and a flagon of ale from the caravan’s provisioner and walked away. He’d not serve them another step. Midst a volley of blasphemies and curses, the man spat and marched north toward a village he had seen from higher ground. He could hear a distant bell ringing compline and he quickened his step to find shelter before nightfall.

  Heinrich arrived in a small village set neatly against a starlit lake. In the silver moonlight he could see the silhouetted ring of mountains securing the modest hamlet at its center, cupping the village as if to shelter it from the evil world beyond. A stout, stone church squatted near the lake’s edge and he knocked on its heavy wooden door. A kindly priest named Father Wilfrid answered and welcomed the pilgrim inside to spend the night by a pleasant fire.

  It was a good night for Heinrich. The priest was cheerful and earnest, his bread soft and sweetened, and the fire bright and warm. Heinrich slept like a happy child and awakened to a charitable first-meal of porridge and cider. Father Wilfrid blessed him with a traveler’s prayer and an embrace. Heinrich looked about the warm surroundings and smiled. This one feels true, he thought. The priest begged him to delay his leaving for a few moments so that he might show him something in his workshop by the lake.

  Heinrich followed the eager man into a shed containing slabs of marble. “I collect these, my son. A man can only do so many baptisms, so many Holy Masses, so many burials before …”—he glanced about to be sure no other was listening—“before it gets a bit tiresome!”

  Heinrich chuckled.

  “So I carve the wisdom of others into rock for the ages to come. See, here.” Wilfrid pointed to several finished pieces. Most were inscribed in Latin but a few were in German. He translated them. “‘Open me this beautiful day and lead me into the house of God. Here at this place my soul shall be happy.’ This goes over a church door.”

  Heinrich liked it. “Where is such a church?”

  The priest shrugged. “I pray to find one!”

  Heinrich laughed again. He liked this fellow.

  “And here. ‘Starke und Hilfe in alle Not’”

  “Ah.” Heinrich nodded. “‘Strength and Help in all Need.’ Would that it be so.”

  The comment did not escape the priest’s notice. He paused, then showed Heinrich another. “‘Sei getran bis an den Tod,’ ‘Be true until you Die.’”

  Heinrich was silent. He looked about the shop and admired the priest’s eye for wisdom and for beauty. He nodded, then ducked through the doorway and stood by the lake’s crystal waters. “This village has a name, father?”

  “Ja, ‘tis called Zeil. Zell by the Lake.”

  Heinrich stared at the shimmering water and the snow-laced mountains that rose around it. His glance lightly followed the shoreline and over the knotty boughs of oak and maple, the delicate bared branches of white-trunked birch, and the yellowed wands of bending willow. He turned to the father. “How does one know what is true?”

  Father Wilfrid was not accustomed to such questions—his flock was more apt to ask how best to boil swan! But the young priest had a mind that was deep like the lake he loved, and clear like its waters. It was a matter he, too, had struggled with often. He answered slowly, but with conviction. “It is wise to know what it is, for it is the only thing worthy to serve.” He paused and tossed a few pebbles into his lake. “I believe, dear stranger, that truth is what remains when all else fails.”

  The priest of Zell gave Heinrich good directions to the Brenner Pass, and soon the pilgrim was hurrying through tight, twisting valleys squeezed between the steep-sloped mountains. Amazed, humbled, awestruck, and overwhelmed at every turn, the simple peasant of distant Weyer pressed on. He was pleased his journey took him through some simple hamlets where he could buy bread and cheese from cheerful, pink-faced villagers.

  Heinrich finally found his way through Innsbruck and followed the rising Sill valley until he arrived at the white cliffs of the Brenner Pass. Here he found himself suddenly crowded by many others urgently pressing toward their destinations. Merchantmen, legates, men-at-arms, and pilgrims from all parts of the Holy Empire met to face the toll keepers.

  Heinrich thought the toll a bit pricey for one man with only a rucksack and a satchel. But standing in the queue he heard something that was worth the half-shilling toll—he learned that a caravan of Syrians had just been slaughtered by a band of rogue knights returning from Palestine. Their bodies were found stripped and their wagons burned. The only evidence of the “crime” was a torn sash bearing the crest of a Norman lord.

  From Brenner, Heinrich hiked with a company of legates and couriers in a rapid descent into warmer environs. One fellow traveler was a longwinded messenger from Rome who was able to give the man some idea of where he might locate the church he was seeking. “Ah, si. Santa Maria in Domnica. Si, it is on the Caelian Hill. I know it well. It is a bit south of the Coliseum and not so very far to its west is the basilica of St. Giovanni and the pope’s palace in the Lateran. Si, my friend, I know it well. But how do you?”

  Heinrich grew more excited. His cheeks felt warm and his veins pumped. A miner in Hallein had told him many things of the ancient Romans. He knew something about the Coliseum and its horrors. Heinrich explained his need to present a letter to the superior of that particular church.

  The man loosened the fur collar of his shin-length tunic and laid his cloak over his arm. He removed a silk cap from his head and tossed a head full of long hair in the warm sun. “My matrona left me at the door of Santa Maria’s while I was yet a babe. This church … it serves the poor well. It stands where St. Lawrence once gave alms to the needy. Ah, good stranger. Wait until you see the mosaic! ‘Tis, ‘tis beyond words.” You see, the church’s art is Greek. It is a church made beautiful by rebels!” He swallowed a draught of red wine from a flagon slung from his shoulder. “Have you any interest in these things?”

  “Aye! Indeed I do. I’m rather fond of the work of rebels!” Heinrich’s eye beamed. “Please, we’ve days ahead; go on!”

  The traveler nodded. He was cheerful and had been well-schooled by a wealthy Lombardian family who had adopted him from the church when he was six. Now a man of middle age, he was fluent in Italian, Latin, German, English, and French. In the following days, he taught Heinrich much of the history of Rome and its influence on all of Christendom.

  Heinrich was intrigued. He had known no more than what legends were passed from the elders in Weyer, or what little news had come from passersby. Suddenly, he was beginning to realize that his life wa
s but one story told in a moment, yet an integral part of others gone before and more yet to come.

  The travelers descended quickly through the hardwoods of the Tyrol, past Balzano, Trento, and Verona. By mid-December Heinrich was striding through the warm, flat plain of the Po Valley. Here he marched past fallowed fields of rich soil made fertile by centuries of erosion from the Apennines and the Alps.

  In Bologna, Heinrich bade farewell to his fellow traveler and thanked the man profusely for the wealth of knowledge he had imparted. This effusive man had taught the simple baker that the world was an intricate tapestry. “It is textured,” he had said, “with Creation’s mountains and valleys, deserts, rivers, oceans, endless forests, and fertile fields. It is hued by colors born under the sun; it is sprinkled with the races of man and the creatures over which they are given dominion. As time turns, this great tapestry is revealed in greater dimension, while fingers of the unseen Weaver deftly add more wondrous threads to this Story of Stories.”

  The Apennines Mountains arc in a long, sweeping turn from Genoa’s Ligurian Alps in the northwest through the length of the Italian Peninsula. Somewhere in the stunted forests of these rounded hills Heinrich huddled beneath his cloak and waited patiently for the end of a heavy, pelting rainstorm. Indeed, he took the inconvenience in stride and soon found himself pressing southward around Firenze, through the olive orchards and birch forests of Umbria, by numerous villages of rose-hued stone, and beneath the uncomfortable watch of cliff-topped castles. At last he spotted what his informative friend had told him to seek: a Roman aqueduct! Stretched before him was a long, multi-arched, bridgelike structure that filled the gap between two rolling hills and disappeared from sight far in the distance. “Follow the aqueducts to Rome!” the man had said.

  Heinrich was nearly bursting with excitement as the roadway gradually clogged with more and more travelers. Merchants, farmers, carts laden with goods, impatient consorts, and companies of cavalry jostled and hurried along the now dusty road. Heinrich had been told to circuit the city and enter from the south—it would be a more advantageous route to the little church.

  The well-worn roadway was arrow-straight and flat, made of dark gray, almost black blocks of basalt. On either side were ancient ruins pilfered for their narrow, red-brown bricks or covered by creepers and vines. The blocks beneath his feet were about a man’s forearm square, rather rounded with age and often grooved by what Heinrich imagined were iron wheels from long-ago carts and chariots. To either side were gardens and ploughed fields, cypress trees and umbrella pines, chestnut tree and rhododendrons. A few modest farmhouses sheltered dark-eyed folk who seemed unimpressed by the steady flow of traffic passing them by.

  The man was eager but growing more nervous. He moved to the side of the road and took a brief respite. He watched the colorful pageant passing by, then stared wistfully ahead. He drew a deep breath and imagined Rome to be filled with the songs of angels and the aroma of heaven’s gardens. He closed his eye and pictured golden streets, jeweled portals, and silk banners. He could hear brass trumpets summoning the Virgin to bless penitent pilgrims such as he. He imagined the pope stepping lightly down the Holy Stairs, the Scala Santa, to receive the old Norseman’s pitiful necklace. He felt better.

  A voice interrupted Heinrich’s thoughts. “Saints Peter and Paul stepped there.”

  Heinrich opened his eye. “Eh?”

  It was a young Saxon lad who Heinrich judged as a novice by his robes.

  “Saint Paul stepped here, and Saint Peter, too.”

  Heinrich looked about. “Where?”

  “Here. On this road. This is the Appian Way, the road Rome’s legions traveled and the road the apostles walked.”

  Heinrich stared in disbelief.

  “’Tis true, pilgrim. Ahead are the holy catacombs … tombs of our brethren gone on before some thousand years ago. Then farther is the Porta Appia through Aurelian’s Wall. The wall is nearly a thousand years old itself!”

  Heinrich stared at his feet. He was about to tread where saints had actually walked. He lifted his foot toward the block of pavement and hesitated. When he set it down it was as if a surge of power entered his body. He muttered to himself, then bowed his head.

  It was dusk on Friday, the thirty-first of December, 1210, when a weary and dejected Heinrich finally stood at the door of Santa Maria in Domnica church. He paused and glanced over his shoulder at the ruin of an ancient aqueduct standing nearby. Beyond it, where the city sloped downward in the distant center of his view, he saw the gray walls of the infamous Coliseum.

  Rome had already disappointed him. From the moment he had passed through the deep gate of the massive, double-arched city wall he was sickened by the septic stench of stagnant sewers and the putrid odor of human waste. He had walked past run-down and abandoned villas on the broken cobbles of the Caelian Hill. Goats and sheep grazed between the columns of a once-mighty empire. Bricks lay in heaps aside collapsed homes, and weeds grew where lush gardens had once boasted blooms from all regions of the known world. The few green sprigs of Advent hanging here and there did little to add the cheer of Christmas to a place that had fallen so very far from glory.

  The City of Seven Hills was the heart of an empire that had once ruled the earth from the bogs of Britain to sunbaked Arabia. Its power and might had made Rome a city of glory in the center of a world forever changed. Yet great cities, like empires, always crumble under the weight of things greater than themselves, and by the time Heinrich arrived in Rome it had become a pitiful shadow of its former self. From its zenith of some one million inhabitants it had decayed into an overgrown, diseased, and gasping home to fewer than twenty thousand.

  Heinrich grimaced at the horrid odor curling within his nostrils. He longed for the clean air of the mountain spruce or the briny breezes of Stedingerland and the sea. He surveyed the faded tile rooftops of the dismal city and sighed. ’Tis a certain place to do penance. The sun was setting and the shadows were growing long. Heinrich gathered his courage and knocked on the door.

  None answered, so he knocked again, harder. At last a small window within the door opened and an eye peered out. “Si?”

  “G-guten Tag,” stuttered Heinrich. “I am a pilgrim come to do penance.”

  “Si? Avanti!” The window closed with a slam.

  Heinrich scratched his head and knocked again. Twice. The window opened and a few sharp words were hurled at the dumbfounded baker. The window slammed shut again.

  Heinrich sat on the dirt in front of the church and thought carefully. “Ach, dolt!” he muttered to himself. He reached into his satchel and dug for the relic and the letter from the Carthusians. When his fingers brushed against his mother’s medallion, however, he hesitated. Then, with a measure of resolve, he lifted it from its sanctuary and dangled it from his hand. It twirled in the cool evening breeze and he thought it a most beautiful thing. His mind flew to his hovel and to his mother. He grasped the medallion in his hand and wept.

  Whether it was the tears or gold none could know, but the church door suddenly creaked on its rusted hinges and opened slightly. A little man stepped from its recesses with a wary eye on the stranger. He had been watching the visitor all along. “German?”

  Heinrich was startled. “Ja!”

  “Humph.”

  “Pater?”

  “Si.”

  The priest stared at Heinrich for a long moment. He was a short, aging man with a close-cropped ring of white hair running from temple to temple. His complexion was olive; he was dark eyed, round faced, and slightly rotund. His eyebrows angled upward at the far side of each eye, giving him the appearance of perpetual anticipation. “And what to do for you?” His German language skills were weak, probably by choice. Romans had been annoyed with their shaggy German guests ever since Charlemagne and his heirs dared claim the name of “Holy Roman Emperor.”

  Heinrich handed the priest his letter of introduction and followed him to a dimly lit chamber attached to the church’s sanctuar
y. The priest lit several candles, read the letter with increasing interest, then turned to Heinrich. “The relic?” His tone had changed.

  Heinrich said nothing for a moment. He looked around the little room and wondered. With reluctance he extended his fist, then opened it to reveal the treasure lying in his calloused palm. The father knelt and crossed himself, then lifted the medallion reverently and laid it gently on an open Bible. He knelt again and murmured another prayer. Heinrich waited respectfully, then followed the little man down a dark hall and into a larger room where dozens of children prepared for sleep. Attending them were two more priests, a novice, and three nuns. Heinrich followed farther, past an infirmary filled with coughing, fevered children, and finally to a small cell with a single candle and one cot. The priest lit a stubby candle with his own. “Your room.”

  Heinrich stared.

  “I am Don Vincenzo. We speak in morning.” With that the little priest vanished and left Heinrich to his first night in the Eternal City.

  It was squeals of laughter that awakened Heinrich from an unhappy dream. He sat up with a start and stared about his dark, little cell. He quickly checked for his rucksack and satchel. All was in order, except for the unfamiliar noise.

  The man gathered his things and followed the happy sounds into the larger, straw-covered room he had passed through the night before. The children stopped playing and stared in terror as the one-eyed man with long red curls stepped toward them. Heinrich peered into each little face and smiled. Children! he thought. ‘Tis good to hear them laugh! A voice caught his attention. It was Father Vincenzo. “Come.”

  Heinrich obeyed and followed the priest through a maze of short hallways and rooms to a small office. He was seated in front of two other priests and one ancient woman dressed in a habit. Heinrich assumed she was a nun.