Inquisitor Dreams

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “Who is that blasphemer?” Felipe demanded of his guide.

  She answered gently, “Do you not recognize the first of all holy inquisitors?”

  Squinting, Felipe could only make out that the solitary man’s altar was heaped with as much anonymous fresh meat as was that of the multitude of priests.

  “Enough!” shouted the solitary man, pointing to the sun. It rested straight overhead; lack of shadows lent the glare a cast of emptiness. The multitude fell silent, staring from their altar to his. Each of their eyes resembled a pearl set with an onyx.

  The solitary man beckoned downslope, and several more men began toiling upward with waterskins and earthen jars. One by one, they emptied their vessels over the heaped altar. Gathering in great, glistering drops, the clear fluid oozed down from fiber to crimson fiber of the raw meat, stone to bloodstained stone, until it filled a trench dug deep around the altar.

  “Where have they found so much water,” Felipe marveled, “in the midst of a desperate drought?”

  “Cannot people always provide for their ceremonials?” Raymonde replied. “Though it may mean robbing themselves and their children of food, water, and even truth.”

  “Now!” cried the solitary man. “Choose, O my people, which you will serve—Lord or the Lord!”

  He threw wide his arms, gesturing toward both altars at once. For an instant, his open palm hovered almost directly above his own offering. Even as he jerked it back, fire sprang out upon the surface of the meat, scorching it until it writhed like something alive, shimmering down the stones, sheathing the whole erection in dancing flame. When it reached the trough, it rose in an eager crimson ring to circle altar, offering, and all.

  “Was it water,” said Felipe, “or was it oil?”

  “Beware, great-great-grandson,” Raymonde murmured. “One must always look upon these things with the eyes of Faith.”

  How he heard her words, Felipe was not sure, for a huge shout had risen from the mob as it surged up the left-hand hill to lay hold on the outermost priests, who offered no resistance.

  The next thing Felipe knew, he stood with his guide on one side of the nearly dry brook they had crossed earlier. On the other side, the defeated priests stood, weary and disheartened but meekly proud, waiting in a long, long line that stretched from horizon to horizon. No; it did not: far to the east, it ended abruptly.

  The trickle of water increased. The streambed began to fill, flowing red. Don Felipe looked again to the east. The end of the line was much nearer now—the solitary man of the consummated altar was progressing westward. Before him, the priests stood still. Behind him, they lay motionless across the streambed. He held a bloody sword in his right hand, and his garments dripped heavy with blood. One by one, he was cutting their throats.

  He reached those almost immediately facing Felipe and Raymonde. So far, none of the defeated priests had offered any protest; but now one, a beardless youth, perhaps an acolyte, raised face and voice to the heavens, crying, “O Lord, O Lord, why have You forsaken us?”

  The solitary man cut the youth down and moved on. At Felipe’s feet, the brown grasses grew lush and green as they greedily lapped the torrent of blood.

  “But what choice was this?” Felipe protested. “The Lord or the Lord?”

  “Heirs of the prophet-inquisitor will translate the one title and not the other,” she explained, “but ‘Baal’ means ‘Lord.’”

  “Then…have I been deceived? How is this possible?”

  “When I was in the flesh,” Raymonde said musingly, “I believed that this Lord of the Old Testament was hard and cruel because He had not yet learned compassion by passing through the Virgin’s womb, by tasting for Himself the full measure of human pain through enduring the torture of the cross.”

  Felipe stared at her in horror. “Can this be? My own ancestress a heretic?”

  With a sad smile, she brushed her martyr’s palm across his sleeve. “All flesh is weak and liable to error.”

  Catching his arm away as if it had been burned, he stared at her for one heartbeat, then turned and fled.

  The bloodsoaked dust sucked at his ankles, yet still he ran—though no one pursued—ran like a rabbit from the hounds. A line of pointy forest stretched between him and the distant horizon. If he could reach those firs, he might be safe…

  He had reached them. He stood beneath them, panting, leaning heavily against the rough bark of the nearest tree, feeling his heart thud within his chest, wondering vaguely why he had run. Did the nightmare arise from the slaughter of hundreds of pagan priests, or from the revelation of his ancestress as martyred heretic?

  Something fell on his shoulder. Raymonde’s hand? But this touch was firm, far from gentle. He whirled around, to behold a homely and hard-faced woman who stood tall as a man and wore trousers like a man. For a time he wondered if she were a man. Even for a man, she would have been tall; but her long nose, strong chin, and hollow cheeks would not have appeared unhandsome.

  “Call me Rosemary, grandfather,” she told him. “Now come on.” Gesturing for him to follow, she turned and started walking deeper into the woods.

  Still numb, repeating an Ave in his mind, he followed.

  The forest thickened, then thinned. Suddenly they stood at its edge, between two of the outermost trees, facing a field of herbs and gravel. Across the field, a stone church, seen from the back, blocked Felipe’s view of whatever lay beyond. The shadow of its spire and cross, falling backward over the slate roof, pointed to a row of pits. How large they were he could not quite judge, but that they were freshly dug he guessed by their sharp lines and the darkness of the clods heaped up between them.

  A strange machine appeared with a dull, roaring noise, sped fast as a running cat to the corner of the church, and lurched to a stop just short of the building. This machine looked like some strange and immense wagon, covered over with walls of dull-painted metal and resting on wheels that appeared to be encased in black cloth almost as stiff as wax. Yet it had moved with neither oxen, horses, nor any other creatures to pull it, but with only a little bump or proturberance at its front, windowed after the manner of certain watchtowers.

  “What thing is that?” Felipe asked, coughing at an acrid stench that might have been its breath.

  “We call it a truck.”

  Out of the church came men dressed in close-fitting black. Each bore strapped near his waist a small leather sheath curiously bulky in shape, and most of them also carried long, thin rods with paddle-like swellings at one end. All these men wore on one sleeve a band marked with a vivid gamma-cross.

  The back end of the truck opened into a pair of doors, spreading like the wings of a beetle, and people filed out…an endless procession of people, men and women, children, youths, and grown folk in the pride of their strength, babes in arms and elders hobbling upon canes, all clad in strange garments: the women in gowns of many colors and little fabric, barely covering their knees; the men mostly in trousers and doublets stark in cut and somber in hue. Several of the men wore their hair in locks much like those the laws of Felipe’s own time had come to prescribe for Israelites.

  A very few people came naked from the truck. The rest paused and stripped themselves to the skin, helping the very old and very young where necessary, dropping the garments into piles. Two men armbanded with gamma-crosses emerged from the windowed front of the truck and began gathering up the piles of discarded garments, loading them back into the truck. The naked people, shivering a little in the chill morning wind, filed to the edges of the pits.

  The black-clad men lifted their rods, each placing the paddle end against one shoulder and pointing the narrow end at the waiting line of naked people. Those who lacked long rods brought strange little handles out of their sheaths and pointed them instead. Small tongues of fire licked momentarily from the tips of the rods, a thunderous din enveloped all things, the first rows of naked people fell into the pits, and a faint veil of blue smoke started rising over the scene. The n
aked procession shuffled forward to fill the empty places beside the pits.

  “Guns?” cried Felipe. “Mother of God! They are hand-held cannon!”

  Again they spat quick fire. The next rows of victims fell.

  “But armies should use such weapons against one another,” the priest protested. “Why turn them on naked people?”

  “War isn’t chivalry, grandfather,” his guide answered. “It’s killing. Killing as much of the other side as possible, and demoralizing everyone who can’t be killed right away.” Watching the people fall dead into the pits, she added in a voice bereft of all passion, “And every last one of them with a story just as valid as yours or mine.”

  The small guns roared a third time, and more people fell, still twitching. Some of the black-garbed men sat down on the edges of the pits, aimed their tiny, hand-held cannon downward, and made them spit again and again.

  “But why do they not resist?” Felipe beseeched. “With so many, even unarmed and weaponless, they might rush their enemy!”

  “Or sit down and refuse to take their clothes off,” Rosemary added. “Make the soldiers work harder for every corpse.” She uttered the word “soldiers” as the worst of epithets. “I don’t know, great-grandfather. Why did the priests of Baal just stand there and wait? I don’t think I would’ve, but who knows?”

  The truck rolled away, its roar lost in that of the guns. Another truck passed it and stopped in its place beside the church, to disgorge another crowd of people for the pits, which must be very deep. One of the blackclad men paused to yawn and stretch, as if already tired and bored with his work.

  Felipe woke. Mercifully, the memories of his dream trickled away at once through the sieve that lies in the first turn of the body between sleep and waking.

  He remembered only that this coming day he would receive his priesthood.

  Chapter 5

  The Italian Procurer

  The step was taken. At the age of twenty-one, Felipe de Alhama de Karnattah—or Granada, as more northerly tongues pronounced the name—now bore within himself a soul wearing the indelible mark of a priest of God and Holy Mother Church. The young man had set his hand to the plow, and there was no longer time to turn back had he wanted to.

  After the momentous events of the days just past, he sat down to refresh himself a little in the wineshop of Giuliano Abruzzi. Had not our Lord Himself often eaten and drunk with sinners? Moreover, Giuliano’s was a quiet place, in which a man might eat and drink alone, resting and meditating on the peaks he had scaled and the path he found suddenly before him.

  His father, no doubt, would have preferred him to follow in the cloth trade that had proven so lucrative over the years. Still, the epistle over which Felipe had labored for weeks, and which he had not dispatched until almost too late for any messenger to return to him with a reply before the day of his ordination, had brought only parental congratulations and hopes that, when these troubled times for the kingdom of Karnattah were over, Don Felipe might revisit his family. His mother had even added the wish, in her own gentle hand, that her priestly son might in the due course of time officiate at the marriages of his dear sister and his younger brother.

  He guessed, now, that his father had already laid the money aside for his university education, that his love for Morayma had merely precipitated the moment of leavetaking. No doubt his parents had hoped for him not only to broaden his view both of letters and of the world, but to make influential connections in Italy. He wondered…if he had come home boasting of personal acquaintance with the greatest Italian merchants and bankers, prepared to follow his father in business, would he have found his way cleared to a mature courtship of his friend’s sister?

  Ah, but no! They had not even thought of waiting. They had married her only two years after his departure to one of her own religion. The young priest could never have been other to her than her loyal knight, worshiping her honor from afar.

  And yet, if he had been less violent in his protests seven years ago, if he had merely signified to his father a readiness to bow beneath the parental will in humble hopes for a future chance at the lady’s hand…

  Well, influential connections he had made, though perhaps not in the spheres his father had hoped. He remembered his last interview with Cardinal Borja, the pope’s vice chancellor, whom many called the most powerful man in the Curia.

  “His Holiness has heard good reports of you,” the cardinal had confided, “from certain of his own onetime fellow instructors at the university.”

  In trained humility, the young priest might have dismissed these words as kind flattery, had not his patron gone on to name two of his theology instructors. Both were conventual Franciscans, as was Pope Sixtus himself.

  They had tried to make a Franciscan out of young Felipe de Karnattah, even before they knew his intent to turn priest. Certain Dominicans as well, and at least one Augustinian, had tried to bag him for their respective Orders, so that he had already begun to glimpse the rivalries between and among all these venerable brotherhoods, with their endless squabbles as to processional precedence.

  “The benefice of Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Agapida, in Aragon, is open just at present,” Cardinal Borja had continued, running his long if chubby forefinger down a sheet of notes.

  “Your Eminence is very kind, but I had thought to stay here in Italy. Perhaps in some small parish near Assisi.”

  “A man of your talents?”

  “Well, then, if I were to seek a university post?”

  The vice chancellor had leaned forward, slowly shaking his handsome head with its prominent nose and delicately arched brows. “Listen to me, Don Felipe. The Church can show a proud and unruly face in Spain. I know. By birth, I am a Spaniard myself. We need men there whom we can trust. It is best when they, too, are Spanish, for our fellow Spaniards—yours and mine—all too often balk at having foreign clergy sent to shepherd them. My instinct tells me that God Himself has provided you to help us in the good work of solidifying our ties with Spain. Now: in addition to the benefice of Nuestra Señora, I believe that we can find you a good secretarial post with his Reverence the bishop of Daroca.”

  “I am of Karnattah,” Felipe pointed out. “In the kingdom of Aragon, I would be as foreign as any Italian priest.”

  Cardinal Borja sat back, folding his large white hands over his comfortable middle, and spoke with a companionable twinkle in his eye. “I came here to Italy a foreigner, and now I flatter myself that there are those who consider me an Italian among Italians. You have this advantage: you speak the same language they do in Aragon. Yours is a more southern form, true, but it is my observation that mere accents can be lost or, at least, overlaid.”

  The vice chancellor was a man of great personal charm and persuasive power. It had taken no more than that one interview, and the young priest found his entire life changed for him yet again.

  So now he sat in Giuliano Abruzzi’s wineshop, gazing into the goblet he turned between his hands while wondering whether, and how far, he was being used as a mere tool.

  Nevertheless, as long as the work was worthy, what business had the tool to complain of being a tool? Did a true loom turn upon the weaver, or a needle shed tears over its lot in life? Did the good hammer rebel against the carpenter, or the plow against the plowman? Did not a loyal knight in arms owe unquestioning loyalty to his liege lord here on this sinful earth? And should not the priest outshine the secular knight in obedience to the voice of God as it spoke to him through his spiritual lords? Was not the length of the Spanish peninsula distance enough to worship his lost Morayma from afar, without the additional safety of the sea between? True, the work of a bishop’s secretary might prove much different from that of a village pastor or a university instructor, but he would have the task of finding and approving a vicar for Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Agapida…

  “Hey, my lad!” a jovial voice cut into his meditations. “Do you read the future in that cup, like a witch telling fortunes in a bo
wl of water?”

  Felipe looked up. A tall and skinny Italian stood before him, perhaps a year or three older than himself, his once brightly-colored cap set to one side of a lean but lively face with thin lips and dark eyes.

  “I am an ordained priest,” Felipe answered stiffly, annoyed at this stranger’s having addressed him as “lad.”

  “Ah! But belonging to none of the holy brotherhoods, as your fine clothes tell me. Well, your priestliness might render you all the more eager to hear what I have to say.” Without waiting to be invited, the newcomer swung his frame into the empty chair at Don Felipe’s small table.

  Suddenly amused, the new priest told him, “Young man, you interest me strangely.”

  “Host me to a good cup of wine, and I promise to interest you still more.”

  Felipe counted out the coins, added something to the amount in honor of the generosity it behooved priests to show, and pushed the money across the table, more or less expecting the stranger to take it and never return.

  Instead, the Italian got his wine and settled himself more comfortably than before.

  “I am listening,” said Felipe.

  “Well, friend priest…” The Italian took a long drink, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and casually pointed at a table near the window. “Do you see that man with the pair of ladies?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you recognize them?”

  After a moment of study, Felipe shook his head. “No.”

  “Not even when I tell you that the man is a fruiterer of some prominence?”

  “I do not question your word,” Don Felipe replied with growing curiosity. “But I fail to perceive how any of them may concern me.”

  “The man, no, except in so far as he is one of my own satisfied customers. Nor, I fear, should the blonde lady, with whom he is so obviously smitten, concern you. But she who dares to flaunt her tresses in their natural raven black—ah! Is she not a morsel for the very gods?”