The young priest could stand no more. Dangerous though it was even to hint at the exact nature of any accusation in the hearing of accused parties, lest in their eagerness they fall into the sin of bearing false witness against themselves, he guessed that this boy sincerely did not understand wherein lay the one crime for which the Inquisition could rightfully try him. Turning to Fra Guillaume, Don Felipe said carefully, “Perhaps we should turn our attention to the person actually found in possession of the book.”
“No!” Mehmoud half wailed, falling from his stool to kneel before them. “My lords, it was my fault—all mine! I gave it to her! She cannot even read yet—she only liked the pictures!”
To Don Felipe’s eyes—though he doubted young Mehmoud would notice it, head down and weeping as he was—Fra Guillaume’s whole being relaxed. Later, inquisitor might take Ordinary to task for his words; but not in front of the boy. Indeed, Felipe suspected, Fra Guillaume was secretly much relieved to have had the hint dropped, but not by himself. For now, he said only, “The sinner has made full confession at last. Some hours we will need for consultation as to his sentence and penance; but I think, with his Reverence the bishop’s blessing, we might finish this process tomorrow. Meanwhile,” he added to his lay brother, with a gentle nod toward the prisoner, “let him be returned to his cell, and see that he has broth, good bread, and I think, a little good wine.”
After the lay brother had led Mehmoud away, not unkindly, Fra Guillaume turned his gaze full on Don Felipe and said, “With all respect, my honored friend, do you understand what it was that you did just now?”
“With deepest regrets, good brother, I do. And I pray that God and our Lady may preserve me from ever falling into such error again.”
“Good. Then we need say no more on that subject.” Nodding, the old Dominican put his hands upon the table as if to push himself up to his feet.
“What of the other child?” Don Felipe asked. “Béatrix Cabaza, was it not?”
“I hardly think we need worry about her,” Fra Guillaume answered like a man who had already weighed the matter to a satisfactory conclusion in his own mind. “That her parents brought the book to its author’s father shows their concern for their daughter’s spiritual welfare. Moreover, by the boy’s own testimony, young Béatrix cannot yet read, and I think that the pictures alone could do her soul no injury. Without reading their names, she could not even know who King Herod and the others are meant to be.”
Unless, Don Felipe thought, Mehmoud had told her his story. Close on that thought came another: that the boy had not actually named Béatrix Cabaza; that he might have made more copies than one, and passed them around to more playfellows than one.
Nevertheless, if the Inquisition itself, in the person of its experienced servant, chose not to pursue the question of how many youthful disciples or even accomplices Mehmoud’s infant heresy might have gained in his town of Calamocha, who was a very young Ordinary to teach him his venerable business? Truth to tell, if Fra Guillaume preferred dozing in the sun with a spiritual book to rooting out possible juvenile heretics, so did Don Felipe.
They returned to Fra Guillaume’s study and settled Mehmoud’s penance over one or two glasses of sherry. Or, more accurately, the inquisitor imparted what he had already decided, and the Ordinary approved it: a reprimand and warning, to be administered privately tomorrow morning in the audience chamber; burning the book in the author’s sight—both churchmen regretted this necessity, but Fra Guillaume believed that, with the permission of the house’s owner, it could be accomplished on a brazier in the courtyard; and requiring the boy to abstain from all meat for a period of two months. Since Mehmoud was unbaptized, Fra Guillaume judged that such penances as prayers and pilgrimages could hardly be imposed. He had, however, an old manuscript volume of the Tractatus de purgatoria Sancti Patricii, which he would loan to Juan Maria Delgado de Calamocha on condition that Mehmoud make two illustrated copies, one to keep and one to return along with the parent volume.
“The Purgatory of Saint Patrick,” Don Felipe mused aloud, turning its pages. “I think I have heard somewhat of this place. In Ireland, is it not?”
Fra Guillaume nodded. “At the very edge of the world. Had our Lord seen fit to put it in some less outlandish place, with fewer wild natives and discomforts of the journey, it is a pilgrimage I might have wished one day to undertake for myself.”
Chapter 8
The Dream of the Death of Raymonde
He was Fra Hugon, a Dominican of older days, and he sat behind a shiny black table, polished to mirror finish, in a long black room, hidden away from sun and daylight, lit only by seven, or three, or nine beeswax tapers—he could not quite determine their number—in a silver candlestick.
On the other side of the table stood Raymonde, whiter than the candles. She, and they, and the silver in which they rested were the only white things in all that black chamber; the orange candle flames and Fra Hugon’s hands on the table the only spots of color. Though Dominican, his habit was entirely black.
They were alone, he and she. Some part of him was aware of the irregularity. Even when there was but one inquisitor, he should have other men present to validate the proceedings: scribe, advocate, consultor, Ordinary… Yet the larger part of him recognized the delicacy that had left him completely alone with her in this most sensitive of cases.
“You have claimed,” he began, “to be my progenitrix.”
She inclined her head. Part of it might have seemed grotesquely missing, so black was her hair. But a glowing aureole, much the same color and intensity as the candle flames, outlined it against her black surroundings.
“And the Pagan Rosemary—do you call her your descendant through me?”
Again Raymonde bowed her head in affirmation.
“Even knowing this to be impossible, sworn as I am to eternal celibacy?”
“Anna, Elizabeth, Sarah—had not each of them despaired of children? Had not Mary pledged herself to virginity?”
“Woman, do you not tremble to liken us to them?”
“We are what God has made us. What use to tremble before our Maker, Who knows each of us so well?”
“I am my ancestor, not you!”
“Great-great-grandson, we are both of us your ancestors.”
“Heretic!” cried Fra Hugon, rising to point one forefinger at her. To his annoyance, it trembled slightly. “Blasphemer and heretic! Albigensian—believer in Dualism and disbeliever in the actuality of Ihesu’s humanity, to the stake with you!”
Lifting her head, she looked him full in the face. “Yes,” she replied, still without raising her voice, “it is always our readiest answer, is it not?”
They stood at the stake, the two of them alone. It was cruciform, with a great mound of fagots heaped around its base. Ankle deep in splintery wood, he caught her nearest wrist and set out to clasp it into one of the shackles that swung from the crosspiece.
Neither resisting nor assisting, she went on quietly, “You call us ‘Cathar’ and ‘Albigensian’ as though you were naming unspeakable wickedness. We are many sects, with many beliefs, yet you make no distinction among them, as in a few years you will make no distinction among many other offshoots of Holy Church, but call them all ‘Lutheran,’ as if their creeds were identical. With fire and sword, you scrub us from the face of the Earth, and think you have cleansed it forever from the threat of our mere presence among you—as in a few more years, you will no longer be able to scrub away the ‘Lutherans,’ for your own sins will have made them far too many for even your fires.”
The rusted iron, not her wrist, gave him trouble; but at last he clamped it tight and reached, scrabbling, for her other wrist and the shackle on the far side of the crosspiece.
Her voice finally rose, sounding not of anger but of exultation. “And at last we are so many that it is impossible for any of us ever to destroy all those others who see the universe through different peepholes!”
He could not clamp the sec
ond iron. Giving up the attempt, he left her to dangle by one wrist, while he half tumbled down from the fagots and caught a blazing torch from the hand of someone who stood shadowy behind its light.
“For God is truly immense!” Raymonde sang from high atop her pyre. “Far too immense for any one creed ever to encompass! No, not though that one creed possessed all the souls in the world and all the ages of time!”
The wood was smeared thick with pitch and tallow. Fra Hugon thrust his torch deep in among the fagots, left it there, and stood back to watch the red flower blossom forth.
“And upon the Surface of this Great Immensity of God,” Raymonde cried in ecstasy and triumph, “we crawl, specks infinitely tiny, visible only to God and one another, and we must use many religions and creeds beyond counting if we would ever glimpse even the tiniest Atom of the Essence of God!”
Then the red flower blew around her. Her garment blazed up in livid brilliance. She shrieked. Peeling away in shards of glowing ash, the remains of clothing revealed her naked body, scorched and blackened beyond any touch of lecherousness, with widening red cracks like fresh wounds spurting more and more blood into the fire. Unquenched, the flames closed in again. A sound of hissing and stink of charred meat filled the air. Exhausted with pain, Raymonde fell limp against the stake, her arm stretched taut in the single wrist iron. In one shocked moment, he saw that she was not weeping: rather, her eyes were melting. The strained joint of her wrist gave way. She slumped into the red flower, her hand alone—little more than bones trailing strips of burning flesh—left balanced on the shackle, first finger pointing like a candle straight up to Heaven.
Aghast at what he had done, for he had never till now looked upon death at the stake, he turned to see who had handed him the torch. It was himself.
Chapter 9
The Holy Child of Daroca
In the year of grace 1483, on the afternoon of Easter Sunday, after a search of almost two days, little Estevan del Quivir was found at last, dead, in one of the small caves near Daroca.
He had been covered with half a sheet of torn linen, and below it he wore only one soiled strip bound round his waist and upper legs to cover his shame. His feet and the palms of both hands were crushed and broken as if nails had been pounded clumsily into them and yanked out again with desperate brutality. Deep rope burns circled each small wrist. The crown of his head showed lesser wounds, as if from thorns.
Many of those who spread the report spoke of the look of unutterable peace upon his face, the scent of otherworldly perfume that filled his cave, the golden aureole surrounding his slim young body. At six years of age, Estevan del Quivir instantly became the martyred Holy Child of Daroca.
To many of Old Christian blood it seemed obvious at once who had authored this martyrdom. Who were widely known, everywhere in Europe throughout these Christian centuries, to have used little Christian children in their sacrificial rites? thus joining themselves to the guilt of their fathers who had murdered God’s Holy Son. Did not their Passover fall at this same season? (It had in fact fallen two weeks earlier that year, but Old Christians paid little attention to the actual date, and New Christians said nothing to betray any knowledge of their former creed.)
And had not poor little Estevan often gone with one or both of his older brothers in their rash expeditions to the Jewish quarter of Daroca, especially to the shop of Nathaniel Ben Solomon, the silversmith?
Estevan had attended the long Good Friday service in the cathedral. Both his brothers, Juan and Luis, testified to that, as did their good friend Pedro Choved, and many others—more came forward hourly—who remembered seeing the lad already marked with his holy smile, if not yet with the clear golden aureole of sainthood. Being the best of Catholics, Don Martin del Quivir’s household made their fast complete on Good Friday, and retired silently and supperless to their bedchambers immediately on returning from church. Next morning, Estevan had been gone from the bed he shared with his older brothers.
Nothing—not the disappearance of King Fernando himself, which God forbid!—could have been permitted to stop the sacred ceremonies of the holiest triduum in the year. Processions, blessings, the great Easter Masses, all went on as usual; but many among the servants, relatives, and friends of Don Martin del Quivir’s family, even to the missing boy’s father and one of his brothers—the oldest boy, Juan—would have nonattendance to confess before their next Communion. Estevan’s mother, good Doña Sancha, knelt trembling and pale, one hand upon the shoulder of her son Luis, throughout all the Easter Masses, obviously throwing her entire strength into prayers for her missing boy.
The discovery of Estevan’s mangled body made it clear, to those good and pious Old Christians who knew so well the falsehood and wickedness of all creeds not their own, especially the Jewish, that Hebrew sorcerers, calling on Satan to keep the older boys fast asleep, must have spirited the child out of his bed in the dead of Good Friday night. This increased the city’s terrified outrage.
Gubbio brought the latest news to the bishop’s household as they sat at supper in the evening of Easter Sunday. “My reverend masters, a crowd is gathering at the gates of the Jewish quarter. They say that Doña Sancha has cast the silver brooch her sons bought for her from Nathaniel the Silversmith into the fire.”
Don Felipe found that he had started to his feet at his servant’s words.
The bishop looked ponderously from servant to master. “You, my son Felipe?” he asked, the calm of a lifetime’s experience in his voice. “Would you wish to put yourself in the way of the mob?”
For a moment, their eyes met. Trapped between self-preservation and old friendship, Don Felipe replied, “No, your Reverence, no more than Jeremiah wished to serve the Lord as prophet.” Pleased at the steadiness of his own voice, he added, “Nevertheless, Justice imposes certain demands on us.”
His Reverence nodded. “Then go. But remember, my son, that you speak for us, and that it is as grave a matter to be overhasty in judging innocence as in judging guilt.”
Don Felipe made his bow to the bishop, signaled his servant to follow, and took his departure, Gubbio at his heels. Not until they were in the street did the Italian produce a boiled egg and crack it.
“From the bishop’s table?” Don Felipe inquired with a glance.
“I saw plenty there,” Gubbio responded, “and a belly needs fuel in times like these.”
“Indeed. What else did you take for your own needs, out of the plenty that you saw there?”
“A hand-loaf and a fig or two.” Having eaten the egg in two bites, Gubbio reached again into his pocket. “What great difference, master, whether I take my share of the table scraps now, when I feel the need, or later? A fig for you?”
“Argued like a true philosopher,” Don Felipe observed dryly, pretending not to see Gubbio’s wink. “But is this a time for pleasantries? Has the alcalde been summoned?”
“How could he remain unaware of what is happening?”
“How can many things come to pass? Go and make sure that he has been summoned.”
Swallowing his mouthful of fig, Gubbio imitated his master’s bow to the bishop and turned in the direction of the alcalde’s house. To do him justice, he ran at his utmost speed, and he was fleet.
Somewhat restraining his own steps, as befit the dignity of bishop’s Ordinary, and to avoid arriving out of breath, Don Felipe hastened toward the Jewish quarter.
Although it was but twilight, torches already flowered above the heads of the crowd around the gates. Mere half-completed piles of masonry, doorless as yet, the great posts rose like pretended but nonexistent fortifications in some nightmare of invasion. With his grandparents’ tales pounding through his head—those great massacres they had heard of in their youth, fifty thousand killed in the terrible year of 1391 alone, when so many cities of Castile, Valencia, Catalonia, all those Christian kingdoms to Karnattah’s north, drenched in the misdirected piety of overzealous preachers—Don Felipe suddenly saw Daroca’s new gates a
s serving less for the isolation of her Hebrew inhabitants than for their protection, and regretted that the workers had been too long in finishing their task.
At any moment, the mob might burst over that intangible barrier and set to work with fire, steel, and stone. What mystery held them in check thus far? Ah—the good alguazil Manrique de Dios—Don Felipe glimpsed him now, standing wide-legged and watchful, holding his wand of office in one hand and his drawn sword in the other. So his Honor the alcalde had been notified, and Gubbio sent on a superfluous errand. But it needed only one single soul more zealous than the rest to step forward shouting about God’s honor and glory, and the entire mob would surge across the line to take holy vengeance for Estevan del Quivir and save their remaining children from similar fates.
Every instinct of self-preservation ordered Felipe de Alhama de Granada to hang back, avoid notice, slip away and denounce this thing from a safe distance. Yet he was ordained priest and bishop’s Ordinary. Who would be safe from a religiously motivated mob, if not he? Who else could hope to turn them back from their purpose, if not a man armed with ecclesiastical authority? Bitterly regretting that he had not Gubbio at his side to perform the office for him, Don Felipe cleared his throat and proclaimed his own “Make way!”
To his gratification, the alguazil caught sight of him and took over the cry, even as the outer fringe of the throng began to obey it. The Ordinary pushed through the crowd relatively unhindered, save by the stenches of fear and garlic.
Reaching the front, he spied a fair-sized stone waiting for the masons to fit it into the gatepost, and signified with a gesture that he wished it placed as his platform from which to address the crowd. Two or three men at the front understood his desire and hurried to obey, thus heartening him further. Stepping up onto the hewn stone, he spread his hands and cried,
“My people! In the voice of your bishop, I command you: Go to your homes—or to your churches—fall upon your knees, and pray! Do not mar the young saint’s entrance into Heaven with your own violence!”
Inquisitor Dreams Page 6