1636_The Vatican Sanction

by Eric Flint

  “Interior tube?”

  “Yes. What you’re seeing is an outer tube, sleeved over the inner one. The holes along here—filled with plaster—are arranged so they are located directly over matching holes in the interior tube.”

  Brenguier shook his head. “And so what does that achieve?”

  Gasquet had been careful to mentally rehearse this part ahead of time. “When the fuse ignites the mixture, it doesn’t explode, but it burns fast, and that increases the pressure enough to pop the plaster plugs out.”

  Brenguier nodded. “So the smoke disperses evenly along the length and sides of the bomb. That’s a nice trick. Could’ve used that three years ago in Lombardy.” Which was where Gasquet had met him. It had been an assassination that had gone smoothly until the getaway—when the far more primitive smoke bomb they had been given to cover their escape had jetted all its contents out one end and off to the side, rather than directly between them and the pursuing household troops. Gasquet and Brenquier had been the only two who escaped. “So that’s also what Peyre is going to throw to cover us before we run out through the grounds?”

  “No. When Peyre hears the first pipe bomb go off inside the palace, he starts a two minute hourglass running. When it runs out, he tosses his own pipe bomb, charges the gate with a pair of double-barreled snaphaunce pistols, and puts down any of the bog-hoppers who are still able to fight. As soon as we come running out from the kitchen store rooms into the wagon bay, he lights the smoke bomb and drops it behind us as we scatter.”

  “Scatter where?”

  Gasquet passed Brenquier a small, sealed wooden tube: a straw, really. “We’ve all been given one of these, which gives us directions to a place to hide. A one person hole, in most cases. Often enough, it’s just a smuggler’s false wall or what would pass for an oubliette. There are also directions to one of several hidden gathering points, once you get out of the city. Anyone who makes it there will find supplies, enough for a month if we’re still being hunted.”

  “But what if one of us is caught getting away from the palace, or trying to leave the city?”

  “Well, how could you tell them to find anyone else, since you don’t know what information is in the other tubes?”

  “No, but any of us can identify all the others and reveal that we’re gathering outside Basel to get our pay.”

  “Well, you know how good that pay is, so you also know that being identified is not a worry, because you won’t need to be seen ever again if you don’t want to. You will have free passage to a friendly nation and enough money to spend the next ten years living without a care, or for the rest of your life if you’re careful with your coin. And as for our meeting place—well, when you get there, you’ll see why having knowledge of it won’t do them any good.”

  Brenguier frowned and leaned back from the table. “It’s still a risky plan. A lot could go wrong. Some of us are sure to die.”

  Gasquet nodded. “Some surely will.” Thank St. Peter’s left nut that you didn’t say, All of us might die, because that’s not entirely unlikely either. “But those who survive will be rich men, maybe even pick up a meaningless title in Portugal or Mantua or the Basque country.”

  “Which might be another good way to get killed,” observed Donat Faur with a sour smile.

  Brenquier smiled back at him. “I don’t need a title. I just want the money.”

  Gasquet saw the first glimmers of false dawn seeping around the ill-fit door. He rose. “We sleep until nine, get ourselves in our gear by ten, run over the plan again until eleven, stroll out as an unprofessional mob, and make it to the palace at noon.”

  Brenquier nodded. “And that’s when we’re to meet the pope?”

  Gasquet shrugged and smiled. “Yes. And earn our pay.”

  Chapter 35

  Larry Mazzare looked out over the uniformly male, and mostly aged, faces stacked in ascending rows, on either side of the long audience chamber. And although the hall was stately and tasteful, and although he had come to know the great majority of the attendees, he would be happy to bid them farewell and have a two week break from the room before returning to it for the Consistory Council. He would be happier still had he never had to see it again.

  Not because the colloquium had been rancorous or frustrating. In truth, it hadn’t. Most of the cardinals had come with a pretty fair understanding of what they were in for: hard questions about how things would be different, which were often thinly veiled admonitions for past deeds and decisions. Not all of the red hats had been able to endure that with good grace: Dietrichstein had stormed out twice, returning the second time only because Urban made a personal appeal, with Vitelleschi standing behind him like the Grim Reaper.

  In their turn, the non-Catholic attendees managed to tolerate the occasional Roman reference to the “one true Church,” albeit with some very loud and distempered grumbling. Some of them were also active in chastening their own members, particularly those who seemed incapable of resisting the temptation to make “general” remarks about pride going before a fall and other poorly disguised suggestions that perhaps the papacy deserved what had happened to it.

  In truth, it was surprising that the now-concluded Besançon Colloquium had gone so well. Of course, that was partially because it really hadn’t tried to achieve very much other than establish a basis for discussion between persons who, a year ago, would never have tolerated being in the same room with each other, except in the furtherance of homicide. So in that regard, much had been accomplished. As Larry Mazzare had seen in no small number of domestic interventions (which shared no small number of similarities with the colloquium), the real breakthrough point was when people were just willing to stay in the room and listen to each other.

  But, just like an intervention, it had been emotionally and psychologically exhausting. At any given moment, the entire colloquium had always been ready to come off the rails and fly into a hundred sectarian pieces. And it had veered in that direction several times a day, often without warning. So Larry, Wadding, Urban, and increasingly von Spee, had had to be constantly watchful for the seeds of that kind of contention in order to defuse it before arguments got a chance to spin up into full blown crises. Which meant that they could never really relax, could never afford to take their eyes off the process.

  Von Spee concluded his review of the topics that had been touched upon and the tentative resolutions that were to be addressed at the next colloquium and sat. Urban, who was sitting directly to Larry’s right, rose. “I have been giving some thought to what history will say about what we accomplished here. Certainly the cynics will point out that we passed no resolutions, except to meet again, but that we did not even set a time or date. We will no doubt be criticized for being over-scrupulous in observing that old Roman axiom, ‘make haste slowly.’” There were a sprinkling of smiles among the faces.

  “However, in my contemplations, I also found myself going back to examine what other councils like this one accomplished. And in my readings I rediscovered a fact we all often overlook: that the last such council with vaguely similar ambitions—the Council of Basel—did an even worse job of coming to conclusions than we did. Because, since the Church of those years was almost as sharply divided as it is now, there is some debate as to whether it was ever formally closed.” Murmurs, some of surprise, others of doubt, most of stirred recollections, troubled the silence of the hall.

  Urban smiled. “It seems, therefore, that we may have actually set a new record for vigorously and swiftly achieving nothing to which we may put a name.” Some actual chuckles, now. “However, in all seriousness, I would like to think that we are not only carrying on what they started, but their purpose for doing so: to achieve a greater ecumenical spirit, and where and if possible, reunification.”

  Johann Gerhard rose; his voice was cautious. “Fine sentiments and words, and I hope we may all be guided by them. But I must ask this: after almost two centuries of increasingly bloody discord have added to those im
pediments, why would our present be more hopeful than that past?”

  Urban smiled. “Because that past did not also have a view to the future such as we have, such as came to us with Grantville.” He gestured toward Larry, who wished he was invisible at that moment. “We have examples and visions of a world that evolved from our own, in which our faiths—all of those here—gathered and broke bread together, officiated at weddings together, were even martyred together as they stood, time and again, against savage and godless regimes.”

  He bowed his head. “And sadly, that future often recalled the Church of these years in no different terms. As a savage regime, and, if not godless, then seduced away from divine grace by power and mammon, following only the forms rather than the spirit of our sacraments and creeds.”

  Larry felt as much as heard a ripple of uncomfortable movement among the cardinals with whom he sat. The majority had not shared Urban’s epiphanies, but they had come this far with him and, between their keen sense of political survival and whatever great or small conscience each possessed, they did not stir in rejection or revolt.

  Třanovský rose, his face unreadable. “These are powerful words, but they are just that: words. Words that convey a personal sentiment, but nothing substantial, nothing that we may take back to our lands, our churches, and say, ‘here is what is different now; here is a change upon which we may build our hope of some rapprochement and even, eventually, a possible partnership with Rome.’”

  Urban nodded. “That is true and well said. So let me give you more powerful words, words from a future pope that you may take back to your lands and your churches and so quicken that spark of hope.”

  Třanovský, still standing, waved a contentious hand. “I am forced to point out that it is you, yourself, who decreed that the ex cathedra remarks of these future popes cannot be binding upon the pontiffs of this world, that they spoke in the context of their times—times that shall now never come to pass.”

  Urban kept nodding. “Again, true. But I am not referring to canonical teaching, to explicit directions of a pope who is invoking his infallibility in matters of faith and morals. I am invoking the words of a pope as a man, as a leader of Mother Church, speaking his mind. I am relating to the apologies made by Pope John Paul II, the same pontiff who ensured that the ecumenical resolutions that arose from Vatican Two became canon law. And if you have read those resolutions, then you know that these apologies are simply the logical, the inescapable, outgrowth of those ecumenical and ethical directives.”

  The room was very quiet as Urban lifted a paper from the lectern before him. “On behalf of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope John Paul II apologized for Catholics’ involvement with the African slave trade, for the Church’s role in burning persons at the stake and the religious wars that followed the Protestant Reformation”—a startled rumble arose from those seats not occupied by cardinals—“for the injustices committed against women and the violation of their rights as human beings, for the denouncement and execution of Jan Hus in 1415 since, in John Paul II’s words, regardless of the theological convictions Hus defended, he ‘cannot be denied integrity in his personal life and commitment to the nation’s moral education.’ He further apologized for Catholic violations of the rights of ethnic groups and peoples, and for showing contempt for their cultures and religious traditions, and for the Crusader attack on Constantinople in 1204, whose Patriarch of Constantinople he visited in the year 2000 to express these sentiments: ‘It is tragic that the assailants, who had set out to secure free access for Christians to the Holy Land, turned against their own brothers in the faith. The fact that they were Latin Christians fills Catholics with deep regret. How can we fail to see here the mysterium iniquitatis at work in the human heart?’”

  Urban put down the sheet. The room was so silent that Larry wondered if everyone was holding their breath. From the looks on their faces, they might well be doing just that. “Could it be chance, that this last apology was made mere weeks before Grantville spun back through time to land in our world?” He looked imploringly at the Greek and Russian Orthodox contingent. “Could it be any hand but God’s own that sent such a message to us with such poignant timeliness, with such healing power, so that I might share it with you today?”

  Cardinal Pázmány rose into the persistent silence, clearing his throat. “Let us suppose that this future pope was right to make these apologies, no matter how strange some of them may sound to us today. Is it only the Roman Catholic Church which must make apologies? Most of the offenses Your Holiness invoked through this future pope’s words are not ours alone. Should we be the only ones to own such failings?” He looked meaningfully around the chamber.

  Urban shook his head. “When Christ rebuked an angry crowd by challenging ‘let he amongst you who is without sin cast the first stone,’ he reminded us that we all carry blame. But it is in the nature of free will that confession and repentance, whatever shape they may take in different churches, is ultimately a personal matter. My friend Peter, if we see our faults now, should we yet wait upon the actions of others to declare them? That might be a sound strategy among earthly states, but it subordinates actions of grace to those of politics. It is by just such fateful steps that the church, in its magnitude and worldliness, has forgotten that it must follow a different path, must aspire to different deeds and wisdom. Christ said rightly, ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.’

  “That is good advice for righteous captains and kings. But for us, His Own shepherds, it is not advice: it is a sacred truth and duty. It is for us to seek the path to grace, that others—including those captains and kings—may follow the path to Our Lord’s loving embrace. We cannot do so if we remain too concerned by the things which are properly Caesar’s, for that which a man owns can too easily come to own him, in turn.”

  Cardinal Wadding chuckled, did not stand. “Your Holiness, have you been reading Francis again?”

  Urban smiled at his friend. “With you ever at my side quoting him, I have little need to do so.” He became more somber. “But the lessons of Saint Francis of Assissi have been much on my mind of late. His is only one of our Church’s many voices which urged it toward what was realized in Vatican Two…and I hope, what we may have taken some small steps toward here in Besançon.”

  Joasaphus rose slowly, the gold in his vestments catching a beam of sunlight from the chamber’s high windows. “I have heard words of peace and reconciliation here, in this room, that I never expected to hear in my life. I nurture hope that they may effect change. But before I may let that hope fill me, and before I may raise a strong voice against those who will reject it, I must ask this: how do you see this change occurring? What steps must be taken?”

  Larry looked at Urban, who, he discovered, was already looking at him. “I think our first step is to take no step at all. Rather, we must make our way through the door of this new hope, this new ecumenical moment, on our knees.”

  Joasaphus, whose face had never once betrayed an emotion, might have smiled slightly. “That is well said.”

  “I wish it was I who had said it,” Urban admitted with a slightly theatrical sigh that summoned back a number of small smiles throughout the chamber. “But that also came to me from the future.” He put a meaningful hand on Larry’s shoulder as he continued. “I propose no specific resolutions because you, or certainly the rulers with whom you might share the proceedings of this colloquium, would rightly ask, ‘how can a renegade pope have the temerity to propose anything, when he is not even sure where his next meal is coming from?’” There were chuckles again.

  As Urban refolded his hands, Larry looked over at him: he sure knows how to work a crowd. Leads them to the brink of an almost incomprehensible maelstrom of papal admissions and apologies, and then hits them with a few self-deprecating remarks and grins and the room is smiling in relief and teetering on the verge of actual bonhomie. The right pope in the right place at the right time.
Quite literally, “thank you, Jesus!”

  Urban spent a quiet second bringing his hands higher, opened them slightly into an appeal. “What we can do, what we must do, is to resolve ourselves to be ready to embrace the change that is coming. But if we have been too long burdened with the cares and woes of this globe’s flock to trust in the possibility of a new future in which our faiths cleave closer, then here is a reason rooted in the very dirt and mud of this material world.”

  He paused and stared around at the faces for at least three seconds. “You may save lives. You may call for tolerance where there has been none knowing that, elsewhere, the rest of us are doing the same. You may insist upon fair treatment of all God’s children, no matter their origins, knowing that similar exhortations are arising, not merely as a matter of individual conscience, but as a collective resolve to make this the bridge by which we shall ultimately reach each other to join hands.”

  “And how shall we know that when we leave this place, we are not alone in taking such contentious, even dangerous stands?”

  Urban smiled again. “Because we will still be sharing these words. On a daily basis if you wish. Because the one thing you will all take with you, if you elect to, is a radio. This is a gift from Grantville and Gustavus Adolphus: a man of war who wishes to aid us in forging bonds of peace between all our faiths.”

  Urban’s voice became strained, rough. “How many fields have been littered by the bodies of the Lord’s own sons and daughters, blessed and cherished all, in His eyes? How many have been made homeless by those wars and now lie starving at the margins of fallow fields? And how many uncounted millions in the years and decades and centuries to come might feed the insatiable maw of this religious strife again and again and again—all of them chanting battle cries that it is their obligation to fight—and that the carnage is justified—because ‘God is on our side’?

  “What could be more practical, more effective, more essential than changing that, wherever and whenever we can? And here, today, the path through the door that leads from war and misery to peace and hope, stands open before us. Not merely as individuals, but as a collective, each of whom may communicate with and support the others on a daily basis, no matter how many miles separate us. You only need to choose to go through that door, but, as Cardinal Mazzare put it, you will need to do so on your knees, humble before both God and man.” He stared around the utterly still chamber. “A small price to pay, I should think, to not only save untold thousands of lives, but to come closer to the holy message and mind of our Heavenly Father as we do so.”