Inquisitor Dreams

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  Felipe considered her again. She was indeed a beauty. His gaze traveled over her as appreciatively and calmly as if she had been a fine marble sculpture surviving from classical times. “She is everything you say. What of it?”

  “What of it?” The Italian looked slightly taken aback for a moment. Recovering, he went on, “But perhaps you think she is unavailable. I tell you, no. That lovely lady, that tempting delight, is one of my own sweet nymphs and, at the moment, our fruiterer having opted for her fellow nymph, she is free.”

  “By the way you call her ‘one of your own,’ implying slavery, I take it you are not approaching me to save her soul.”

  A laugh and a wink. “‘Saving her soul’! As good a way as any to speak of it. And popular, I have heard, with the old hermit monks of the desert.”

  The young priest replied quietly, “I will not hear you slander those holy saints.”

  “Saints, do you call those desert fathers? Well, perhaps, in their dotage, when they had no better use for their feeble strength.” Another wink. “Come, come, friend priest! Look around you. Your brothers of the cloth—both in Orders and merely ordained—your bishops, your cardinals, the Curia, the very popes themselves, one after the other…all of them understand that God has given our flesh certain needs, and that the best way to satisfy those same needs is not in a brothel. Now, look again at my lovely Isabella, there. No slave, she! Bred up gently as a lady, ready to be good as any wedded wife—better, indeed, than most wedded wives, for she will never turn shrew, nor give herself airs, nor beggar you with demands for scarves and jeweled trinkets. Priests’ women know their places! ‘A fruitful vine in the recesses of your home,’ as King David tells us. For three ducats only—no more than that—you will enjoy her company all the rest of this day and the whole long, joyous night until tomorrow morning. After that, if you and she should come to a more permanent understanding—as I am sure is more than likely—I ask a mere five ducats a month for myself. Or, if you should prefer a nice, quiet marriage—as I know many of your fellow priests do—deal with me in the place of her parents.”

  Felipe looked again at the lady, then back to her procurer. “Other men, alas! would no doubt find your offer a sore temptation. But my love and loyalty have been pledged already, to a lady as good and beautiful as she is unattainable. For her sake, I have made myself a spiritual Abelard.”

  The Italian stared at him. “What tale is this? If you wish to haggle over the trifling little price I ask—”

  “No tale, my friend.”

  “Then… Then why in God’s name did you not say so at once? You have made me waste my time!”

  “Let me speak for a moment as a priest,” Don Felipe replied, allowing a bit of unction to flow into his voice. “Your time was much better wasted in talking with me, than spent in successful pandering. God made both your soul and the lady’s for better things.”

  Still gaping at him, the Italian sat back, took another swallow of wine, and then started laughing, so suddenly that he snorted up a noseful and so violently that even the need to spew it out hardly interrupted his mirth. “So now, I suppose,” he said at last, still choking a little, “you will want us both to sit down and hear you preach at us concerning our sins?”

  “That sounds a profitable way of spending our evening.”

  “Profitable in heavenly coin only.” Chuckling again, the Italian pulled out a tattered handkerchief and began to wipe the wine as best he could from his face, hands, garments, and the table. “Well, it is my bad luck. Or the malice of the gods. Friend priest, that man is indeed a wealthy fruiterer of the city, but the blonde lady is his wife and the dark one, I believe, either his sister or hers. I know them only by having seen them and asked folk about them. They know me not in the slightest. You were the first on whom I tried this pleasant little scheme, and see what it has earned me!”

  “You would have taken my three ducats,” Don Felipe mused, “and then slipped away at once. You would have had to enjoy the ensuing jest in your imagination only. You could hardly have risked staying to watch it.”

  “I would have taken your money, pretended to arrange an assignation for the pair of you, then gone to their table, paid her some such little compliment as any lady may accept even from a complete stranger, nodded in your direction, and so out the door, leaving her none the wiser and you to cool your heels at your choice of Rome’s lovely fountains, or whatever trysting place you had named, from Vespers until…dawn, if your patience lasted so long.”

  “And suppose that I had insisted on meeting her here, at once?”

  “Why, in that case I would have taken your money, played out my little dumbshow, and slipped away as above stated, to enjoy the ensuing jest in my imagination only. And now, by your kind leave…” The Italian started to stand.

  The priest darted one arm forth to catch him by the sleeve. The state of this fellow’s handkerchief had not escaped his eye, nor the frayed and threadbare areas that pocked his faded garments, nor the fact that the fabric had never been of the best. “Stay a moment. Dine with me, at my expense. I may try to save your soul, but I will not report you, either to the secular authorities or the spiritual.”

  The fellow hesitated no more than a heartbeat or two before laughing again and reseating himself. “I see I did not choose my mark too badly, after all. Enough such failures, and I could become a fat man.”

  Not until near the end of their meal, when the Italian seemed sufficiently mellowed with food and wine that the priest judged him reasonably likely to speak truth in the matter, did Felipe ask his name and personal history.

  “Francesco di Gubbio. A scamp in my native town, a sometimes successful—and sometimes not—rogue here in Rome.”

  “By your leave, I shall call you Gubbio. Another San Francesco you are not. But have you considered, friend Gubbio, that your efforts might more often meet with success if they were directed in honest pursuits?”

  “For another bottle of wine and a plateful of fruit and cheese, I will consider whatever you like.”

  It was the only meal they were ever to eat as equals. Another bottle of wine and two plates of fruit later, Felipe had not only a benefice and a secretarial post with the bishop of Daroca awaiting him in Aragon, but his own personal manservant to accompany him there.

  Chapter 6

  The Dream of Hypatia

  He stood on something slippery as ice, in the midst of swirling black fog. Somewhere, a woman’s voice was calling: “Grandson! Great-grandson!”

  At length he discerned a brightening of the fog in the direction of her voice. Sliding his feet with extreme caution, he inched his way into the beam of light. Mist still clouded his vision, as though he swam through milk; but now, at least, he saw that the light had a source. He climbed toward that more than toward the voice, which he recognized and feared.

  “Great-grandson!” she called one last time.

  The fog fell away, and he found himself on the edge of a sort of raft of icy stuff, near the outer wall of some great building. The top of the wall was roughly even with his waist, but between his raft and the stonework was a deep chasm. His heretic ancestress waited at the edge of the stonework, extending her hand to him across the gulf.

  He drew back.

  “Will you drift?” she pleaded.

  “How anchor myself to heresy?”

  “Great-great-grandson! You are anchored in your priesthood, and your bishop has named you his Ordinary, to tie him with the Inquisition. Are you so loosely anchored in your own Faith that the mere touch of my hand might shake free your soul?”

  The chasm was widening. His choice was to accept her help or drift back into darkness. Reluctantly, he stretched forth his arm.

  She clasped it. There came a kind of soft, creeping shudder, and he stood beside her, his feet firm on the stone. Her touch was warm, human, and very gentle. Horrified in himself to find it so—should not a heretic’s touch burn the skin?—he pulled free of her and stepped back.

 
; “Beware,” she cried sadly.

  He saw that he had stepped too near the edge. One of his heels rested on empty air. Stepping forward again, though keeping his distance from her, he peered around.

  The place where they stood was like a piazza overlooking a great seacoast city. Sunlight danced in large bright flakes on the blue water, and salt breezes blew the commonplace stenches of any great city away inland. Distant roaring, as of mobs or the sea, reached his ears; but up here all seemed peaceful.

  On the other side of the piazza white smoke rose, swirling in the breeze, from a huge basin he guessed to be some roasting pit or giant incense burner. Indeed, the smell of incense teased his nostrils. Many people, most of them brown-robed monks, stood grouped about the basin. Several bent over their work at something that Don Felipe could not see. The rest chanted a strange chant, like none he had ever heard, but clearly meant for Christian rites.

  He walked forward for a closer look.

  One of the workers stood up, waving something above his head. It appeared to be a small white hand. He threw it into the basin. The smoke turned dark, and cheering interrupted the chant.

  Now Felipe saw one tall monk, cowl pushed back upon his shoulders, standing at a pulpit raised above the burning pit.

  “Bless you, my brothers!” this monk declaimed. “God blesses you, Christ and His great Mother Mary most holy bless you, for this holy work which you have done today in purifying our city of the Pagan philosopher and her baneful teaching!”

  In a few steps, Felipe covered the remaining distance and gazed down between the workers. He beheld a woman’s body, naked, bruised, and covered with blood. Once, he guessed, she had been beautiful, but she must have been stoned to death. One eye was gone, the other stared up blindly at nothing. Even as he watched in stunned silence, a monk hacked off her other hand and rose to throw it after the first, into the fire.

  Raymonde had come up at Felipe’s shoulder: he felt the brush of her inexplicable martyr’s palm.

  “Hypatia of Alexandria,” she murmured. “By both your creed and mine in life, great-grandson, a Pagan steeped in false doctrine; yet great Christian churchmen—though not including the bishop Cyril and his toadying monks—called her friend, respected her learning, and had hopes of her wisdom. She deserves to be remembered for more than the manner of her death.”

  Raymonde dropped her own martyr’s palm down upon Hypatia’s body. A monk pushed it unseeingly aside as he swung his axe into the dead woman’s elbow.

  Don Felipe turned away, sickened, but as quickly turned back. “Is this fit work for monks?” he shouted at them. “The woman is dead! You have murdered her! She was unbaptized—you had no right to judge her—and yet you murdered her! At least return her body for burial!”

  “And leave her soul to the good, merciful God,” Raymonde added, so softly that even Felipe heardly heard her.

  The rest of them paid the two no attention whatever. Instead, they listened enrapt to their preacher, who was going on:

  “Yet the greater part of your pious work remains to be done! The Pagans merely deny God—the Jews murdered Him on the Cross! Have we not suffered God’s murderers to live among us long enough?”

  “Who is that man?” Don Felipe demanded.

  “His name is Legion,” Raymonde answered mournfully. “Every age has many such.”

  Felipe could no longer see the corpse of Hypatia. They must have burned the last of it for incense in the burner which now sent up fragrant curls as it swung, golden and clanking, in the acolyte’s hands. The great church wherein they stood was a converted mosque, its Moorish architecture clear to Don Felipe’s eyes. Gone were sky and seacoast, and the crowd of listeners had greatly increased in number. Only the preacher in his pulpit remained the same.

  “Think of how those accursed Jews howled for Christ’s holy Blood!” he ranted on, lifting both his hands. “Let it be on our heads and our children’s, they themselves vowed in their shameless guilt! Is not God enraged with us for failing all these generations to root them out?”

  Don Felipe guessed, “That man is not…Fray Vincent Ferrer?”

  Raymonde shook her head. “It is the sixth day of June in the year of our Lord 1391, and we are in Seville, where this time the horror begins.”

  “Is this not why He struck our parents and grandparents down by the thousands forty years ago?” the preacher thundered, “In what man may call the Black Death, but I tell you solemnly was the holy wrath of God! Elsewhere in the world, did good Christians not take warning and drive them out then, purging the sickness with fire and sword? And we—why have we been lax? I tell you, if we purge not the vile Jews from our midst, God Himself will purge us with fire and plague to make men forget that of forty years ago!”

  “His name in this age and place,” Raymonde said, “is Ferran Martínez. But his words mean less than the way in which his hearers receive them.”

  The crowd of worshippers cheered. In that moment, Don Felipe watched them turn from congregation into mob.

  “Was not Ihesu Himself a Jew!” he screamed at them. “His holy Mother—was she not a pious Jewess? Saint Joseph—the blessed apostles—”

  “The king, the archbishop, the pope himself,” said Raymonde, “all have forbidden Ferran Martínez to say these things that he says. He, however, claims a higher obedience to God, and continues to say them. Great-grandson, can you stop the mob where your own pope has failed to stop their leader?”

  He turned on her. “They are ignorant, but you are heretic!”

  And, as he turned, the roar of the mob broke upon them, overwhelmed them, churned them under as the beast with a thousand heads and twice as many feet stormed over them and out of the church to the Jewish quarter…and there was blood, fire and blood, the screams of maidens, and limbs of children flung everywhere, and Felipe screamed and half awoke.

  But as he lay trembling, before all memory of the dream had faded, he dozed again. Now the great massacres of 1391 were over, and he stood in a place that he understood, though he had never seen it with his waking eyes, to be the huge new cathedral of Seville, begun in the year of grace 1402 and already, after not even a century, nearing completion. He heard a loud voice saying, “Fifty thousand killed, but hundreds of thousands baptized, to the glory of God!”

  “No!” answered the preacher in his pulpit, and if he was no longer either Ferran Martínez or the monk who had led them to martyr Hypatia, he might have been brother to both. He went on, “For these were no true conversions, and in their vile hearts and behind their filthy doors these so-called New Christians remain secret Jews, more to be despised and feared than their ancestors.”

  Don Felipe opened his mouth to argue before the preacher could rouse another mob, and in so trying to speak, woke himself, and remembered nothing of his dream save that it had concerned the great religious zeal of almost a century ago, which had inspired the new cathedral of Seville, the great efforts of Fray Vincent Ferrer, and other noble works.

  He also remembered, with a frown, that there had been mobs and massacres. But these had been akin to those of ancient times. The old Romans and Greeks had understood very well that mobs were mad beasts seizing upon any excuse for violence, and that the role of religion was only to quell them.

  Chapter 7

  San Juan de Calamocha

  “Here.” Fra Guillaume handed Don Felipe a small book, crudely bound between two separate pieces of boiled leather. “This gives us our present work.”

  Taking his seat in the old inquisitor’s tiny study closet (cushioned and comfortable, but barely large enough for two small chairs, a desk, and, in cold weather, a brazier), the young Ordinary opened the volume and found himself gazing at a picture, drawn clumsily but with obvious energy, of two humanlike figures and many bare trees against a darkly diapered sky. One figure, in russet cloak, had his back to the reader. The other was a monstrous, grinning creature like some misshapen ape, with oversized tusks from which poured lines of as bright a red, no doubt
, as the young artist had had at hand.

  Beneath this illustration were several lines of text, neither as straight nor as even as they might have been; and the wide margins were filled on all sides with scrolling vines and fanciful flowers.

  Every page was so illuminated, with illustrations of bloody vigor and demons or grotesque beasts frequently peering through the marginal vinework. Don Felipe read:

  Through the dark wood I wandered, lost and alone, when one came and grabbed me by the shoulder. He had a face of great ugliness, but his smile was pleasant, although his fangs dripped blood.

  “Who are you?” I cried in my fear.

  “I am Arazel,” he said. “I am one of the fallen angels, and you are a sinful man. Together, let us work our way back to heaven.”

  He led me to a great gate, on which was inscribed, “Abandon hope, everyone who enters here.” When I read this, I held back in fear, but he pulled me on, saying, “That means to abandon all hope of ever again enjoying your sins.”

  We entered, and came to a great, empty, black plain, full of nothing. “What is this place?” I cried, and he answered, “Once it was crowded with poor sinners and fallen angels, but they have all worked their way up to higher regions.”

  We went on, and came to a great black lake of burning pitch. Naked men were pushing hairy demons into the smoking pitch and holding them beneath the surface with big dung-forks.

  “What is this place?” I cried, and Arazel said, “The first duty of damned souls, whether angels or humans, is to hurt. Their second duty is to be hurt.”

  He handed me a dung-fork and said, “Here. You must push me in and hold me down for seven years.” I protested, “But why? You have never hurt me, and I have no wish to hurt you. Besides, it would add still more to the number of my sins.” He answered, “It will not add to the number of your sins, because punishing sinners is holy work. But we fallen angels belong to a higher order of creation than you mortal humans, and moreover we fell before your father Adam was made. Therefore those of us who still remain on this level are closer to heaven than those of you who are still here, and it is your duty to hurt me, and mine to suffer. Now lose no more time, for while we have talked, half a year has passed, and you must hold me down that much longer.”