Tales from the Vatican Vaults: 28 extraordinary stories by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Garry Kilworth, Mary Gentle, KJ Parker, Storm Constantine and many more

by David V. Barrett

Most Gifts aren’t powerful, but they change the individual lives of people they help or harm.

  I’m sure Standish thinks my Gift is merely summoning up a wind, either behind us to fill our sails, or in front to hinder us. He doesn’t think that wind brings or takes rain – therefore, drought or plenty – and brings storms, tempests, lightning.

  He doesn’t think there may be other Gifts.

  I don’t doubt our beloved Bishop sent Standish as my minder simply because he and I will always grate against one another, and never fall into an alliance. Never mind. Bishop du Plessis uses our powers as he and the cardinals and the Pope see fit.

  Have you written again to Bishop du Plessis? Has he called at the nunnery? I keep watching the Devon hills around Plymouth, in case I should see a courier riding in. Your Fore-Sight showed us a future terrible beyond measure – I wake from the fire and light and heat almost every morning. Has what I’ve done so far made the slightest change?

  Bless you in your quiet Order. At least I can be out in the world, doing things. You have nothing but the round of Matins, Nones, Vespers and the rest, interrupted by the terrible sight of what Man can do to this world a few centuries in the future.

  One day I swear I’ll ride up and take you away from there.

  Put flowers on her grave from me, too.

  JA

  *

  The English ship Mayflower, at sea, 8 September 1620; a report by my hand to be saved for his Grace the Bishop of Luçon to read: his eyes only. If we pass a Spanish galleon sailing east, I will put a copy into their hands to carry it home – Sir:

  Is it your intention that everything I’m intended to do be endangered by Miles Standish?

  He openly calls me ‘the Bishop’s wizard’ – among people, Gifted or otherwise, who are willing to cross the Atlantic to get away from the Church!

  I can’t call him out to duel again, even on days when the deck is level enough, because he is your agent and I shouldn’t kill him! And because I don’t challenge him, I look like a coward, and the Gifted on board are starting to mistrust me.

  Was this your intention?

  Then again, perhaps you don’t have much choice in agents, and Captain Miles Standish is a loud-mouthed malcontent who can’t keep quiet when he’s been drinking.

  It would be a shame if a freak wave washed him off the deck.

  I must go pray and repent that thought.

  Your servant,

  JA

  [Winter cypher] [In French]

  *

  Diary entry dated 9 November, near the hook of Cape Cod, viewing the lost settlement of Plimouth [private cypher]

  My sweet cousin Secret,

  I won’t bother you with our voyage here – it was dreadful beyond telling, but boring to read. I made a copy of the reports I’ve written for the Bishop, and it’s enclosed here for you. To be short, terrible winds were against us, the voyage took much longer than expected, it’s now the start of November and we’ve just sighted land, and still they won’t turn back. Cape Cod is biting cold.

  I suppose, if I think about it, his Grace already knows – by asking you about the future – that the Mayflower didn’t go down with all hands, and likely has, in fact, arrived in these hellish icy seas.

  Some of the Strangers, as I’m now thinking of all non-Gifted here, do want to go home. There aren’t enough of them to carry the day against the Saints. (I include both Puritan Gifted and non-Puritan Gifted under this name.)

  We made one attempt to build a house; it’s been abandoned. It’s too cold and wet to build shelter. Expeditions have discovered buried corn, and graves of previous settlers, and a glimpse or two of the local inhabitants. The decision is to winter over on board the Mayflower itself, and to begin building the colony and planting in the spring.

  If not for what we know, I’d be here with the other witches and wizards, saving my own kind. Escaping the hunters back home; the implacable men, and the gossiping neighbours, who watch with gleeful terror as they comment that they never knew it took so much wood to build a pyre. Don’t witches have a right to save their own lives?

  A door has opened for them at the last minute. I know we must bar it shut.

  Fire now, or greater fire later on.

  Secret, Secret – you are sure, aren’t you?

  *

  20 November, New Plimouth Harbour, the Mayflower at anchor; to his Grace, Armand-Jean du Plessis, Bishop of Luçon, with the court of the Queen-Mother Marie de Medici in internal exile, 360 miles from Paris, at Avignon – Sir:

  I write to you at Avignon, your Grace, but it would surprise me if you were still there. Rumour in Leiden had it, last spring, that you’d reconcile King Louis and his royal mother before the autumn. Then back to Paris, and the King’s court. I imagine your Christmas will be different from ours, whether it’s in Paris or Avignon.

  Troubles continue here, you will perhaps be pleased to hear.

  We’re licensed to settle in Virginia. I called sufficient storms that we’ve been driven off course, to Cape Cod. We have no legal right to be on this piece of coast. And of course this made anyone with a loud mouth say that since we weren’t in Virginia, no one was in charge of us, and they’d do as they pleased!

  Organisation counts for a lot. I sometimes think the ancient Church only survived, in place of any of the other religions of the time (Mithraism, say), because it added the teachings of Christ to the organisation of the Roman Empire. But in this case we’re speaking of the Gifted among both Saints and Strangers, and they had a compact drawn up before you could say dread sovereign Lord King James.

  Apparently we’re to organise ourselves as a civic society, under the King’s distant rule, with every man having a voice to decide our laws. (Class is ignored, but still the women have no voice.) We all signed, that Standish at the front of the queue – he’s made captain of the militia – and I at the back.

  I can’t blame the Gifted. They’re desperate to escape burning, drowning, breaking on the wheel: all the other deaths prescribed [Unfinished; marked Winter cypher in an unsteady hand]

  *

  Diary entry, presumed late November or early December 1620, on board the Mayflower

  [Marked private cypher. With some errors]

  Dear my own Secret,

  Do you Fore-see when you’re asleep, as well as awake?

  My mind is hazy, as if nightmares are visible night and day, sleeping and waking. I can’t forget my Secret.

  I keep thinking of the day you told me.

  It was Standish, of course, who brought it to mind. Given how many of them we have with us, I began by sounding him out about the souls of witches and wizards.

  Well, that was stupid. In the Burning Times, there’s only one safe answer to give. Standish says They’re damned.

  ‘Suppose they’re Gifted witches and wizards, like the ones that signed the Mayflower Compact, and swore to put all their talents to work for the common good?’

  Miles Standish grudgingly agrees the Church can use the Devil’s power for Good. Then he looks at me the way he looks at the ship’s rats – Devil’s Lap-dogs, as he calls the vermin:

  ‘But then the he-witches and she-witches should all be killed after.’

  I had to walk away. He might be wearing steel back-and-breast-plate, but no man yet took a rapier through the eye and came out of it well.

  Since then I’ve sickened.

  There are nothing but memories in my mind’s eye, wiping out this desolate coast. You and I, in the herb garden of the nunnery, that one time; two Sisters chaperoning, and falling asleep over their knitting where they sat on stone benches. You and I walked with the scent of lavender.

  You held my hand and told me how the Burning Times started.

  Two or three hundred years ago is far enough that you can Past-see it, although a little fuzzy. You saw how the great killing started – started by the Church, because of one Gifted man.

  You couldn’t tell me his name.

  He wasn’t l
ike the other Gifted the Church used, and had used for nearly a millennium and a half. No feeble abilities like curing a sick sheep.

  Every man he worked for helped him, recommending him to their friends. Every business deal he made went his way. Every university passed him at the highest mark. Every aristocrat introduced him to the highest-ranking men and women in the royal courts of Europe.

  His Gift was to change any man’s mind in his favour.

  To compel them to think as he desired them to. And to like it.

  He made it to Cardinal before they caught him.

  . . . They knew it had been by luck alone.

  The moment the Gift of compulsion was seen in action, the then Pope – and every man on the seat of St Peter thereafter – was determined to eradicate witches and wizards from Europe. A frantic Secret Church Council was held, debating if there were more like him – if there’d been more in the past – how many there could be in the future – how they could detect them – what they could do to fight them?

  Within a year, the Burning started.

  Now it seems they have to bring it to the New World, too.

  I’m not an historian, but even I know that before then, the Church’s view of witchcraft was that it was a superstition, it didn’t exist, and anyone who thought it did had been deluded by the Devil. After so many centuries, a quick about-face had them warning that witches were everywhere, wizards too, and their favourite crime was infanticide as a sacrifice to Satan.

  In 1487 two Dominican monks wrote, and had published by the new printing press, the Malleus Maleficarum, The Hammer of (or Against) Witches. Everything you need to know to recognise, interrogate and condemn a witch or (more rarely) wizard. With the printed word spreading like the pox, the view that witchcraft didn’t exist found it hard to survive.

  The Church took the remaining young Gifted children into their custody, and used them if they could be trusted. If they were younger than seven.

  ‘All our bloodlines have died out,’ you said to me.

  I could only think of lavender, and your hot, damp hand. (I couldn’t have been more than twenty-two.)

  ‘Either killed, or kept in monasteries and nunneries and prevented from breeding until they died of old age. Hundreds of thousands of us, over the centuries. In Europe, now, I’m rare.’

  You took my other hand, before the Sisters woke.

  You said, ‘I do know that when the Inquisition is sure they’ve eradicated witches with our help, you and I will be killed too.’

  Apologies: I don’t have much of the good ink left; I shouldn’t make it run. But I thought I had no tears left either.

  My dear, oh my very dear. If I could pray, I’d just like you to live out your days, the way you want to, for as long as you want to.

  *

  25 December 1620, Mayflower at anchor; to his Grace the Bishop of Luçon, addendum:

  Excuse my insolence in the last report. We have disease on board. I was sickening with it as I wrote, delirious, and not in my right mind.

  I saw enough of this during the wars in the Low Countries. This is some mix of the Typhoid Fever, the Pneumonia, and something very like the Small Pox. People are dying so fast we can’t bury them. JA

  *

  Mid-January 1620 [new calendar, 1621], New Plimouth – Sir:

  We now have only seventeen crew capable of sailing the ship, including four officers and the master, Captain Christopher Jones. Deaths have slowed markedly, I’m pleased to report. However, of the colonists, there are but five and twenty adult men who have not fallen sick with this fever. Six women nurse the others, and their sisters and children among them.

  Some of my acquaintances from Leiden are among the dead. I take comfort in the friendship of Master Moses (or as he sometimes writes himself, Moyses) Fletcher. A man originally from England, now in his middle forties, he’s become the unofficial leader of the Gifted Saints. I think his Gift is to cure disease.

  I pray it is.

  He has a very compelling character.

  Master Standish lives. His wife Rose is among the dead.

  The Saints and Strangers are still determined to build their New Plimouth Town, so I suppose they’ll need Standish’s cannon and muskets. Some further interaction with the native people has turned them less friendly to us.

  Sir: Excuse me finishing here. I’m not over my own bout with the illness, and it’s a strain to write in cypher.

  Your obedient

  JA

  [Winter cypher] [This is also written in cypher, this time]

  *

  Diary entry, undated, possibly late January or early February [private cypher]

  My dear, my very dear,

  I’m a fool. I finally had my fight with Standish, and said much more than I ought.

  This has been the worst month for disease yet. It went through our ship, some fever not known by our doctors or any of those Gifted with healing. There are now only one hundred and seven of our colonists alive, of the hundred and fifty.

  Miles Standish is the Bishop’s man, too. He knows how many Gifted have died. I was stupid enough to say to him, ‘I wish not to do murder.’

  We had met hiding up on one of the two hills that overlooks the harbour. Cole’s Hill will be the graveyard, and the Town (if ever fully built), and this is the Fort. Standish had two pitch-leather bottles of spirits; I also. We spoke full of grief and guilt, both of us, stumbling drunk.

  ‘I did murder,’ Miles said. ‘Rose didn’t want to come, but I made her. We both obeyed the Church. What has it got us?’

  I ought to have told him the Will of God was often difficult to understand; that Rose is in a better place; that such a kind woman could never be damned.

  Some moment of empathy stopped me. He may be a decade my senior: grief made him sound bemused and young.

  ‘It’s for the best we obey the Bishop,’ I attempted to explain. ‘He knows the future. The broad sweep of it. As if we’re the river, and it’s the broad sea.’

  We wrangled over that one, me saying more and more, until I found myself trying to explain your secret. (I should have cut my tongue out.) I spelled out the Gift of Fore-Sight, and what it means.

  Miles Standish’s reaction?

  ‘It’s stupid to take the word of a daft gypsy witch imprisoned in a nunnery!’

  I had his throat in my hand, pushing him back against the trunk of a tree. I told him Secret is a dear, sweet, good, young woman, and my cousin; and far too good for him to insult—

  ‘Ah!’ he says, not caring I’m choking him. ‘I should a guessed. You’re in love with your cousin!’

  I let him go.

  ‘No.’ I couldn’t stop myself saying it: ‘I didn’t love Secret. I loved her twin sister, called Silence by their Puritan mother, born stone deaf.’

  Miles Standish’s emotions swung as a drunk man’s often do. He hugged my shoulders. If I hadn’t seen all the honest grief for Rose in his face, I would have knocked his arm away. Some painful tension released inside me.

  ‘She couldn’t learn to speak,’ I said.

  That didn’t matter to me.

  ‘But . . . As she grew into her twenties, men began to do her bidding, exactly as if they could hear her.’

  The world is full of cold, and the smell of sea. I could have grown old with her, listening to Silence.

  ‘Silence had the Compeller’s Gift. I begged her to do nothing to show she had a talent. In the end, she just wanted to communicate, and hear people, even if it was through compulsion and reading their thoughts. The Church was terrified. They burned her. Within a week of the day that she and I would have married.’

  Miles Standish proved himself an oaf again by sneering.

  ‘And the Church still trusts you?’

  ‘I understand what Gifts like that could be used for. Silence was as innocent of any malice or desire as a child. But I can imagine the barbarian Attila, or Emperor Charlemagne – or Pope Leo the Third – born with that power. We’d have the old ca
pricious, cruel pagan gods back. We are the model for them, after all.’ I found my leather bottle empty. ‘The Church has made us into a holokauston – a sacrifice where everything is burned up and destroyed – but it’s a sacrifice to protect against worse evil. The Church is just, not cruel.’

  Standish was unconscious. He wasn’t listening. I wondered if I was.

  I had to carry Standish back over my shoulder, and throw him down into the shallop boat to be rowed back to the Mayflower. He didn’t wake until two days later. The Bishop taught me the careful methods of interrogation, used when the subject doesn’t even know he’s being questioned, and I’m confident that Standish has nothing but a headache that could melt glass, and a vague memory that I have a dead fiancée to match his dead wife.

  *

  New Plimouth, 12 February 1620 [1621, new calendar], to his Grace the Bishop of Luçon, greetings – Sir:

  Another bad month for disease has killed four of us. Envoys from the locals have come and are friendly.

  JA.

  *

  Diary entry, 15 March 1620;New Plimouth [1621, new calendar] [marked private cypher]

  Secret –

  I must tell someone exactly what I’ve done, though I hate that it’s you I must burden.

  I’ve gone beyond my orders. I’ve approached the witches and wizards of New Plimouth. They’ve built shacks, and a palisade: the bare bones of a town. Perhaps another hard winter, or the locals, might wipe them out. But also perhaps not.

  I called Moses Fletcher aside. He now speaks for the Gifted that are left.

  ‘Go back to Europe,’ I said. ‘Take your family and belongings and make a run for it – it’s either flee to the Turks and Muslims in the south, Russia and Tartary in the east, or the New World – the only one without a religion that will sentence you to death. Yet! This New Plimouth won’t be allowed to survive the Burning Times.’

  Strangely, what he asked was, ‘Is your name truly John Allerton?’

  I could have said yes, and been close to the truth, but it wasn’t what he meant.

  ‘I’m not a simple seaman,’ I said. ‘And you can probably guess on whose behalf I joined the Saints at Leiden.’

  He rested his left hand on his rapier hilt.