Quietus

by Tristan Palmgren

  Joao asked, “You think God is punishing the Unity?”

  “Not their God. A god.”

  “That’s not anything I would have ever thought to hear you say.”

  “It’s worth considering. The Unity has explored about every option except what these people think about every day – that there’s a very large, supremely powerful force that disapproves of what the Unity is doing.”

  “These people are wrong,” Joao said. “They can fear God all they want, but it’s not going to give their immune systems the power to fight off the plague bacilli, or burn the rat fleas out of their clothes. They’d stop that nonsense at once if they knew.”

  The priest pointed at each of his audience in turn. Habidah waited until his attention had moved on before saying, “The onierophage feels like a disease, and acts a little like a disease, so we try to fight it like a disease. It’s only when we look deep down that we see it’s something inexplicable. Maybe it’s a mimic. A predator trying to seem like something else.”

  Joao said, “That doesn’t mean that it isn’t natural.”

  “It attacks only people with demiorganics. It bypasses every quarantine. Now we know that nobody who’s been outside the Unity for five years has been infected. It’s starting to sound like somebody’s making a clear distinction between who’s a part of the Unity and who’s not.”

  Kacienta asked, “If you’re right, what does that mean for us? All of this is so far above us that it almost doesn’t matter.”

  “It means that the amalgamates’ project is going to fail. The exiles are coming back to the Unity. No matter how deep the quarantine, they’re going to be infected just like everyone else.”

  Looking at their faces, she could tell she wasn’t going to persuade them. They were too accustomed to thinking of the onierophage as she had, as a temporal problem. She said, “It also means we need to get out of the Unity. Leaving might be the only way to save ourselves, if it’s not too late already.”

  They couldn’t speak for singing as the service progressed through the psalms and into the wine and the Host. Habidah and her colleagues had to step to the front. The congregants sidled clear of them. Joao curled his nose as he chewed the Host, but only with his back to the audience.

  “I’m with you on that last part, at least,” Kacienta said under her breath. “I don’t want to ever go back to the Unity.”

  Joao muttered, “The amalgamates wouldn’t let us go home after what we’ve seen.”

  Kacienta said, “I can’t send mail to my family. We’re exiles already. Might as well make it official, find a new home. We wouldn’t be the first.”

  Joao said, “The problem is that we can’t leave. We only have a microwidth communications gateway. Ways and Means controls every other way off this world.”

  Habidah admitted, “It’s all an academic argument right now.” But she was an academic. Hashing this stuff out early might as well have been in her department oath. “I brought you here because I needed to know that we’re together on this. If there’s any opportunity to leave, I’m going to take it. I’m counting on your help.”

  “And the people of this plane?” Kacienta asked. “Your friend, the monk?”

  “We can’t do anything for these people,” Habidah said, though part of her was already making plans for Niccoluccio.

  When the service ended, the first thing any of the locals did was to look back at the strangers. They were no longer welcome. Habidah led Joao and Kacienta out.

  She glanced at the sky. Her demiorganics tracked several satellites overhead. If the amalgamates had infiltrated her demiorganics, they’d heard everything anyway, but she’d done what she could. Her best hope was that they didn’t care enough.

  Niccoluccio’s voice interrupted the walk back: “Habidah, everything’s on fire.”

  Habidah stopped in mid stride. Niccoluccio’s voice sounded broken, strangely emotionless in transmission. His efforts to speak were constantly interrupted, cut off. “Help… need he… Right now.”

  “Say again?” Habidah subvocalized.

  “There’s a fire… the church is… I need to run.” Niccoluccio sounded like a man in shock. “Help us right now.”

  A bad chill spiked down Habidah’s back. “We’re on our way. Stay calm, and tell me what’s happening.”

  No answer.

  Habidah glanced back at Joao and Kacienta. Without waiting to explain, she broke into a run. Not until she was halfway back to the shuttle did she think to check to make sure they were following. For now, they were.

  26

  Niccoluccio knew, in theory, that riots had ravaged Florence. Every Florentine, educated or not, knew about the civil war between the Guelfs and the Ghibellines, which had ended with the city ostensibly allying with the papacy. They knew about the magnates, the wealthy young men who ran wild through the city. And everyone lived in fear of food riots each bad winter.

  But when he heard the yells outside the Church of San Lorenzo, at first he didn’t know what to make of it. He stared at his lone, foggy window. It wasn’t until he heard glass smashing – close – that he realized.

  He rushed into the church proper, his habit rustling at his heels. The stained glass behind the altar had burst. Red, violet, and blue shards glittered in the sunlight. The moment after he arrived, the doors cracked open. Three men burst in, a jeering crowd behind them.

  The handful of parishioners in the church were already rushing away from the doors. Frantic, Niccoluccio looked about for the head priest or any other clergyman, but he seemed to be alone. One of the women was weeping, trying to hide underneath her wimple.

  Niccoluccio stepped forward before he realized what he was doing. The church had an exit in the back, hidden in a hallway tucked in an alcove. He waved the parishioners toward it.

  The intruders were interested in looting, not chasing harmless men and women. They broke toward the altar. Niccoluccio got the seven men and women out unmolested.

  A handful of people had lined up to throw rocks in the alley behind the church. They must have been the ones who’d broken the stained glass. They watched Niccoluccio and the parishioners warily. When it became clear that they hadn’t come to counter-attack, the rioters picked up loose stones and hurled them into the church.

  Niccoluccio knew he shouldn’t have fled. It was his duty to protect the church’s treasures and shrines. In the flash of the moment, he hadn’t even considered that. He couldn’t think of himself as a part of the church. San Lorenzo was somebody else’s property, somebody else’s responsibility.

  At Sacro Cuore, it would have been different.

  The sounds of tumult and fury echoed over the roof. The worst of the crowd was on the street. The parishioners still looked to him for guidance. He took them down the alley, through puddles and waste runnels, around overturned barrels and an uncollected pest carcass.

  Once the shouting dwindled and the immediate danger ended, they fled in their own directions. Niccoluccio saw the last of them off. And then he turned back to the street.

  When he poked his head around the corner, he found the street empty but for a handful of men running past, all in the same direction. Peering that way, he could just see the crowd outside of the church. For as loud as they were, it was amazing that he hadn’t heard them inside. Maybe they’d gathered that much strength since he’d left.

  Niccoluccio gathered his courage and stepped into the path of one of the runners. The man slowed. His skin was pocked by some old disease, but otherwise he’d come through the pestilence strong and hale. Haste and fear glittered in his eyes.

  Niccoluccio asked, “In God’s name, what is happening here?”

  “Interdiction,” he breathed. “The fools have gone and got us interdicted.”

  Niccoluccio let him go. Everything had become clearer. Interdiction was the worst punishment a city could receive short of mass excommunication. It meant Pope Clement VI had decreed no services could be held in the Diocese of Florence. No sin
s could be confessed. No weddings officiated. No Last Rites administered. Whoever should die without either confession or rites would not be smiled upon by God.

  In one breath, Pope Clement had placed the city a hair’s width from damnation. It didn’t matter if the churches continued to perform their business. None of it would be sanctified in the eyes of God. No one would trust a marriage issued under an interdiction.

  This had certainly happened because the clergy of the cathedral chapter had, in concert with the civil authorities, unilaterally appointed Ambrogiuolo their own bishop. Not everyone had been in favor, but they’d been intimidated into silence. Now this was the dissenters’ chance to prove that they had been right all along.

  Pillars of smoke rose from the other corners of the city. Men clustered around a bonfire at the end of the next street. When Niccoluccio walked closer, he saw the fire had been fueled with chairs. A table burned as its centerpiece. The doors of the nearest home had been smashed. At least the rioters were civic-minded. They hadn’t set the actual house ablaze and risked the fire spreading.

  Niccoluccio should have gone to his brother’s home. At the last street crossing, he turned to the neighborhood in which Elisa lived.

  A loose formation of men passed, heading in the opposite direction. Half were dressed no differently than the rabble Niccoluccio had left behind, but the rest had the caps of the wall watch. The parish’s aged, knobby elbowed constable was among them. Niccoluccio knew he ought to have been relieved to see someone moving against the rioters, but mostly he didn’t care.

  Elisa lived near where she’d grown up, in a row of formerly up and coming merchants’ homes only blocks away from the Arno River. Each home was tastefully designed to hide the economy with which they had been built. Stone and brick had been painted white to resemble marble. They bore wide porticoes, but there was no servants’ housing.

  There was nobody left to be impressed. The quarantine boards over her neighbors’ doors hadn’t been removed even by squatters. Niccoluccio wouldn’t have been surprised to find pestilence corpses still in them, untouched.

  Elisa’s home was flanked by columns carved garishly in the shape of boars, birds, and game animals. Niccoluccio knocked gently. Elisa peered through the upper shutters before coming down. She stepped aside to allow him in.

  All the shutters were closed, shrouding the interior. There was a dusty shadow on the wall where a painting had recently hung. Niccoluccio shuddered to think that this was where she’d lived all those months.

  “Are you sure you want to be seen entering my home unescorted?” Elisa asked, bitterly.

  “As if there were anybody to see. I wanted to be sure you were all right.”

  “Nobody would come here to riot. Why would they? There’s nothing important left.”

  “You don’t have anyone here? No servants? No family?”

  “Our kitchen girl died of the pestilence. I couldn’t have hired another even if I had the money. But this is my home. I’m not afraid of it.”

  Niccoluccio hadn’t asked about her finances. He’d assumed, perhaps naively, that her husband had provided upkeep for after his death, or at the very least that her father-in-law would do the same.

  “I’m glad to find you safe,” he said, fumbling to find words. “I thought you would be panicking as much as I am.”

  “When my husband was alive, all he could talk about was obtaining his knighthood. It was so important to him. His knighthood would have made everything we’d suffered through worth it, he said. It would mean that no one could look down on him anymore. Our children would have their places secured.” She stopped outside an empty doorway and curled her nose. “All that fighting didn’t help him or them in the end.”

  Niccoluccio peered in the doorway. In the dark, he could just see a stack of five books, a pair of shoes too large for her. Elisa said, “You had the right idea, leaving Florence when you were young, learning about death and all other things precious to God. That’s all that matters after everything else passes.”

  Niccoluccio had said this before, but he’d never felt it so keenly. “I learned nothing in the monastery.”

  “You’re certainly a different person from who you used to be. And better than if you’d stayed here.”

  “All my brothers are dead. It was only a fluke that I survived.”

  “A fluke? I thought it was a miracle.”

  Niccoluccio blinked. He’d said the word before he realized what he meant. He nodded, slowly. “It can be both.”

  Elisa gave him a strange look. She led him through the buttery and into the pantry. Open and half-empty cupboards lined the walls. “I can’t have you in without at least offering something to eat. I’ve had to throw too much of it out already.”

  She poured the pair of them a glass of wine each, and bread with wafers in pewter dishware. “I wish I had richer food to offer you.”

  “This is far richer than I am accustomed to.” In Dioneo’s home, after the first day’s feast and the unfortunate digestive experience that had resulted, Niccoluccio had instructed the cook to furnish him with simple meals: breads with no butter, and milk. After a few bites, his pulse slowed. The fear that had burned since the riot dwindled.

  “You know, it’s strange how safe I feel with you,” Elisa said. “Any other man on Earth, I would have felt like you’d come only to assault me. But you were never like that. You or Pietro, even after all the things we did.”

  Niccoluccio shifted. “I feel like a beast, thinking about that.”

  “The beasts are the men conspiring to pit us against the papacy so soon after the pestilence.”

  Niccoluccio took another bite to keep from saying anything about his brother. Elisa rolled her bread back and forth. She hadn’t touched anything but her wine. She asked, “If this is the end of the world, why can’t it hurry and arrive? Why does God have to leave so many lingering?”

  “When the world ends, it will end in stages, none of which have come to pass.” He meant to be comforting when he said, “This is not the end of the world.”

  She asked, “Why must suicide be a mortal sin?”

  He knew what he was supposed to say. If she was a Christian, her life was pledged to God. It was not hers to give away. But, in many moments these past few days, he’d wondered the same. “I am no longer equipped to give spiritual advice.”

  Another odd look. “You, the Carthusian monk, not qualified? You’ve spent more years studying God than any priest in this city.”

  “I don’t know what I am anymore. I feel my spirit being ripped in many directions.” He’d been anxious about asking her a question, and he hadn’t realized what it was until now. “If you could go anywhere you want – if you could leave here, and never come back – would you?”

  “You always ask the strangest questions.”

  “It’s always sincerely meant. Do you think you could be happy anywhere else?”

  “It seems like being happy after all that’s happened would be a sin.”

  “There must be some end to the misery.”

  “Maybe it comes when we die and are forgotten,” Elisa said. “I know this is where my life is going to end. There’s nothing else for me. I also know that, wherever I go, I’ll never be free of what happened here.”

  The weight in his throat became a weight in his chest. He swallowed. He’d been near to asking her if she would accompany him when he left Florence, but he already had her answer. “Thank you for indulging me in my oddities.”

  When he stood, Elisa followed him to the door and stopped just beside it. “Do you think you could be happy?” she asked.

  “I don’t suppose so.”

  “I imagined as much. We’ve both lost so much.”

  There was so much he wanted to say, and nothing he could. He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. He had to force himself to leave.

  The fires still burned in every corner of the city. He passed no crowds on his short trip to his brother’s home. He breath
ed out when he found the neighborhood left untouched. A trio of magnates, the wealthy young barbarians, had formed a guard at the end of the street. Even the sight of Niccoluccio’s tonsure wouldn’t convince them to allow him to pass until he told them his name. It prompted the lead man to grin, and say, “The widow-taker.”

  As Niccoluccio passed, another said, “Some monk,” and spat on Niccoluccio’s shoes.

  They’d seen him with Elisa one too many times.

  Catella ran to the door when Niccoluccio knocked, but deflated when she saw it was just him. She told him Dioneo had gone running to the heart of the city. Niccoluccio hardly paused for breath before setting off.

  He found his brother in the shadow of the Palazzo Vecchio’s single ugly tower. He was in bitter conference with a semicircle of gray-haired parish constables. After waving the constables off, Dioneo stormed toward the Palazzo Vecchio’s doors. He gave no indication that he had seen Niccoluccio until he waved Niccoluccio after him.

  “There is no way to win with the rabble of Florence,” Dioneo complained, sitting behind his desk as if to shield himself. “Had we not appointed Ambrogiuolo, they would have rioted when the church raised rents and fees and called in its debts.”

  “You should feel lucky your home hasn’t been targeted. I thought you might feel better knowing that Catella and your children are safe.”

  “We’ve almost got the rabble under control. There’s no question about that. The city is ours, and it will remain ours. You’re going to help.”

  “What? How?”

  “You can start with the priests and monks. I thought the clergy would support us, but the lower orders of the hierarchy are almost as much in arms as the rioters.”

  Niccoluccio said, “They have more to lose from the interdiction than anybody. They’ll get just a fraction of the pittance they used to receive for services.”

  “You’d figured that, and you didn’t say so until now?”