Inquisitor Dreams

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  The ecclesiastical arm still had power to judge guilt and assign some penalty, even without confession. All three boys had been sentenced to make the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, the last mile on their knees, as soon as they should either find sponsors to accompany them, or be old enough to go by themselves. In addition, Pedro Choved’s mother had disowned and turned him out by her own act. Don Felipe hoped that their souls, at least, might be saved.

  Blinking tears from his eyes, the Ordinary turned Castaña—his favorite little mule of the bishop’s stables—motioned to his attendants, and started back toward Daroca.

  Chapter 10

  The Dream of the Dragon

  He stood on the shore of a wide, dark water, its surface like glass reflecting the stars. No, not the stars; those ruddy reflections came from an opposite shore so far distant that its torches, if torches they were, looked no larger than the flames of candles. That distant shore was an island, or so he guessed by the way it appeared to lie across the wide path of moonlight on the glassy water.

  From the island, he heard faint music…hymn music, he might have said, but for its happiness, like a satyr’s hymn to Spring. Well, and why should a hymn not be happy? Had not the Lord Ihesu Himself eaten and made merry with sinners?

  From the shore behind him, Don Felipe heard…not a sound…but a silence, great and menacing, like the silence of an army massing. He looked around. He saw nothing, still heard nothing—save a single, muffled cough. Shivering, he turned back. Now he had to blink against the moon’s pathway, so brightly it shone after the dark into which he had just been staring.

  From downstream, the prow of a small boat entered the glittering ripples. As it drew fully into the moonpath, Felipe saw that a figure stood in its stern, upright and willowy, clad in flowing robes that shone dark against the moonlit water yet pale against the island lights. A lady alone in a little barge, like a fay from some romance of Arthur of Britain.

  Slowly, the barge drifted around to glide toward Don Felipe. Now the woman faced him, and he saw that she was Raymonde…Raymonde, come back to life. A faint nimbus trailed from her like cool smoke from a censer.

  The prow touched shore at his feet. Joy in meeting him seemed to overwhelm all other emotion in Raymonde’s eyes as she extended one fine-boned hand. “Great-great-grandson!”

  “Great-great-grandmother! Am I forgiven?”

  “For which of your sins?” She seemed amused.

  After a moment, he remembered. “Why, for your death!”

  “Many times great-grandson, that is rather for you to help forgive, than to be forgiven. Now, come.”

  Stepping unquestioningly into the boat, he accepted her hand. He would have kissed it, but she turned it, twining her fingers with his, then lowering her arm so that they stood with hands clasped like two innocent children.

  “Pay me no homage,” she reminded him gently. “To the good God alone is homage due.”

  “Do we not pay God homage in offering due honor to those whom He has set above us?”

  She smiled. “And in what way has God set me above you?”

  “In making you my ancestress, and in sending you back, in His great mercy and your own, despite my part in your death, to act as my guide.”

  “Did Virgil, though a condemned Pagan, become Dante’s superior in guiding him through Hell?”

  “In so far as God gave Virgil to Dante as guide and teacher, I would say yes, for the time that they were together, the Pagan poet held authority over the Catholic one. But you, my grandmother many times great, surely I see you in glory! Surely at the last you were saved through the flames, as I was lost through them; and you have come this time to show me glimpses of salvation and happiness.”

  Her smile grew sad. “The people of this island call it their New Eden; but Eden is not Heaven, and no expanse of water can stop enemies forever in the material creation.”

  Now they stood upon the island, even though, looking back, he could recollect neither crossing the water nor stepping from barge to shore. He regretted his lapse. Floating up the moon-laid path across the water, while engaged in edifying conversation with his glorified ancestress, ought to have given him a memory to cherish like the mustard seed of great price.

  “The New Eden?” he repeated. Almost at their feet, a man and a woman, both naked, were furiously coupling. Felipe could avert his eyes from them only by staring at Raymonde.

  “And they call themselves the Adamites,” she replied. “Each one as innocent of sin, in their own conception, as Adam and Eve before the Fall.”

  “But, without true Baptism, none of us can ever return to that lost innocence. Have these people been baptized?”

  “Great-grandson, where does true Baptism lie: on the head, or in the heart?” Averting her own eyes from the act of bestial innocence, she tugged at his hand to lead him on.

  Overgrown with trees and wild shrubs, the island bore little resemblance to Don Felipe’s imaginings of Eden. It did not lack a certain crude and unkempt beauty, for the torchlight made some trees and shrubs glow in ruddy outline against the dark sky, and elsewhere moonlight lay a heavy coating of silver on every leaf and stem it could touch. But where were the gardens, pastures, and flocks that should have fed these Adamites?

  “What do they eat?” he asked at last.

  “They go in groups to the mainland and gather what they need from the stores of their neighbors. Sometimes they knock down or tie up a neighbor who complains. The neighbors liken it to a fierce dragon devouring the countryside.”

  “Still, it is undeniably sinful.”

  “By both of our creeds—yours now and mine when I walked in the material world—this people’s entire Faith is deadly sin.”

  She brought him to the island’s heart: a village of bowers, thatched tents, and crudely wattled huts, bedecked everywhere with curling vines. In the grassy mud of its plaza sat a large circle of chanting people. More people danced and gyrated in and out of the circle, weaving back and forth in paces and patterns matched to the chant, dancers continuously changing places with chanters according to some order that Felipe could almost make out. Here and there someone, usually elderly, wore a flowing garment; but most of the people went naked to the skin. They were of all ages and both sexes, and in the center of the circle three pairs lay coupling to the half sacred, half profane rhythm of the song.

  “My God!” ejaculated the priest. “Can this be their idea of Eden?”

  “As it would have been, they suppose, for all of us if not for Adam’s Fall.”

  “Ah, happy Fall!” Yet even as he quoted the Easter liturgy, Don Felipe felt some part of himself throbbing in time with their chant, some impulse that made him ache to tear away his own garments and join these strangely innocent sinners. “How many of them are there?”

  “About three hundred now. All the survivors of Jan Žižka’s first inquisition on their sect.”

  “An inquisition on them, yes. Pity that it bore so little fruit. Yet this name—Jan Žižka—I seem to recollect, and not as that of one who bore any legitimate authority to head an inquisition.”

  “The captain of the Taborites, that group of Hussites who believe the others still too close to Rome.”

  “How deeply God has planted the impulse to purity in our breasts!” Don Felipe mused. “That it should still survive even among heretics, seeking to purify their own heresies.”

  “Their own?” his ancestress replied. “Or someone else’s?”

  Beneath their feet, the ground began to quake as with the thunder of an army’s heavy march. A fanfare of brassy horns rent the air. The Adamites seemed to pay it no attention.

  “Joshua at Jericho,” Raymonde remarked, sounding in that moment more like Rosemary.

  The Adamites had neither town wall nor tower to fall at the sound of the horns, but suddenly one of their bowers blossomed into flame, followed next instant by another on the opposite side of their grassy plaza. On every hand a great warcry smothered the sound of
chanting, though the lips of the Adamites continued to move even as they sprang to their feet and from somewhere produced weapons.

  “Come,” said Raymonde, tugging her descendant into the nearest hut. From outside, he had thought it small and miserable; but, blinking around at its interior, he found that it approached the palatial, with a baffling complexity of chambers opening one into another, furnished with fine things and poor ones mixed at haphazard, lined with cupboards containing books he longed to investigate. At first he supposed that the illumination enabling him to see all this glowed forth from the books. Then he saw that the cupboards—indeed, the very walls around them—were afire.

  Pulling back a Samarkand carpet, Raymonde stamped once on the earthen floor. A section of it dropped away beneath her foot, revealing a ladder. It looked steep, ill-balanced, and rickety, with several rungs broken or missing. Yet to remain above would be even more perilous, especially now that the walls were ablaze; so he followed her down.

  “The dwelling above us,” he asked as they descended. “How could it be so large?”

  “To hold the souls of those dwelling within.”

  “And contain so much treasure mingled with the dross?”

  “Love still abides, even in the heart of what others call heresy.”

  They reached the bottom. He found it slimy underfoot, yet Raymonde led the way through it without soiling her white hem. Roots, large and tiny, hung down everywhere from the tunnel’s crumbling ceiling. Small underground birds and moths—some of shining loveliness—flitted among them. Here and there in the muck at their feet gems shone gently, some of them large enough to form stepping stones. At length they came to another ladder. This one seemed more solid than the first, and he followed her up with relative ease.

  They emerged behind what remained of a smoldering bower. Its skeleton, mottled charcoal black, ashen white, and ember red, framed Don Felipe’s view of the battle. At least half the Adamites lay dead and dismembered. The rest—men, women, and children—fought on desperately, some with true weapons, others with stones, torches, and cooking implements.

  Brave they were, but Eden-naked against soldiers armored in boiled leather, chain, and even plate. Nor had the Adamites any cannon or musketry, while from one side Felipe saw a Hussite war machine—an armored wagon drawn by armored horses and filled with armored gunmen—advancing on the battle.

  “Alive,” he protested, “they might make restitution to those whom they have robbed.”

  “Do you not believe in spiritual restitution, great-grandson?”

  The war machine reached the plaza. Now it seemed to be a thing of whirling blades, before which limbs and heads flew, trailing arcs of blood. Satan’s own fountainworks it appeared to Don Felipe. He turned his face away.

  When he looked again, the war machine was gone. In its place lay a high, tumbled mound of naked corpses and fragments of flesh. Taborite soldiers, many of them bleeding but mostly whole, ringed the mound on three sides, leaving on the fourth a clear view for the priest and his guide, of whose presence they seemed unaware.

  A huge captain strode forward. Felipe knew him to be Jan Žižka himself, for the Hussite commander stood three times larger than his men, like some great saint or angel towering above ordinary souls in a painting.

  The giant turned his head toward the mound of death. One of his eyes had been drained away through an ancient scar, and the other was milky and sightless; but his face showed displeasure as stern as if he saw everything. “Have you all disobeyed my orders?” he thundered. “Have you not left me one alive?”

  The mound began to quiver, then to heave. Like ants, the Taborite soldiers clambered over it, hurling broken flesh away until they had cleared it all off into a wide circle of smaller heaps.

  Beneath that mound, one living pair, man and woman, had lain the entire time in each other’s arms, still coupling as though oblivious to the destruction of their little Eden around them.

  Dragging them apart, the soldiers looked expectantly to their commander. “Save me the man,” said Jan Žižka. “Woman’s tongues are quicker to deceive.”

  Immediately a soldier lopped off her head.

  After a short flight, it fell and rolled to Don Felipe’s feet. He stared at it in shock. All had happened so quickly that neither lover had yet recovered from the daze of finding themselves pulled roughly apart. The woman’s eyes blinked twice, her lips parted a little as if to speak, and then she closed her eyes as though with one last great effort of will, and lay frozen for the Final Judgment, bloody and yet strangely beautiful in death. One could have thought her another martyred saint.

  Her lover, having regained his worldly senses, sent up a piercing cry. Don Felipe thought it consisted of her name, wailed over and over. But he could not quite understand its syllables, and this increased his own grief.

  “Why, then, did Jan Žižka demand survivors,” he asked Raymonde, “if not in some small token of mercy?”

  The man’s screams turned from wails of grief into cries of pure animal pain.

  “For information only,” Raymonde replied in grief.

  Refusing to look again, Don Felipe protested, “What further need can there be for information after the entire sect has been condemned and executed?”

  “Perhaps to justify the act,” said Raymonde. “Although there are those who value information above all else, for its own empty sake. Even now, I call this one more trap of the material world.”

  He began to ask in which world they stood at that moment, and, asking, awoke baffled, supposing that his sleep had been dreamless.

  Chapter 11

  Voice in the Wilderness

  During Holy Week in the year of our Lord 1484, a voice began to cry in the wilderness north of Daroca: a ringing voice of middle pitch, coming from the throat of a man of middle height and sufficient leanness to suggest appropriate fasting. The dirt on his face, arms, and ragged garments made it difficult to be sure of his age. He carried himself very straight, and harangued at vehement length, at first to some few shepherds and passing muleteers but, as the weeks rolled on, to increasing audiences.

  Always he appeared within two or three hours’ walk of the town of Calatayud, coming and going with no announcement of where or when he would speak next. He seemed to appear in some place or other on every Catholic holy day and most Sundays, but on Christian working days he showed himself only rarely, and then always in either the morning or the evening twilight, and close to the town. He spoke against two things: the Holy War in Granada, and the new Inquisition that King Fernando and his Castilian queen were seeking to force into Aragon.

  Almost all the Aragonese opposed this new Inquisition, Old Christians as well as New, Catholics as well as Jews and Moslems—many Catholics, indeed, still more strongly than Jews and Moslems, for the baptized had far more than the merely circumcised to fear from either Inquisition.

  The Holy War was another matter. Most Christians considered it as pious as any Crusade of olden times, especially distant as it was on the far southern side of Spain. By his utterances against the Royal Inquisition, this new prophet could have belonged to any of Spain’s three religions; and the dirt upon his garments and person seemed more appropriate to a Christian than a Moslem holy man. But his harangues against the invasion of Granada, taken together with the times of his appearances, seemed to mark him as Mohammedan; and soon he came to be called El Santon—El Santon de Aragon, to distinguish him from that more famous santon who had for years gone about Granada prophesying doom to his fellow Islamites.

  “We, who are as good as you,” ran the pledge of the Cortes of Aragon to their monarch, “take an oath to you, who are no better than we, as prince and heir of our kingdom, on condition that you preserve our fueros and liberties; and if you do not, we do not.” Among these ancient liberties of which the Aragonese were so proud and jealous, freedom of speech stood high. El Santon de Aragon sometimes met with heckling and argument, for his auditors, many of whom were Christian and fav
ored the war, also had freedom of speech; but he went otherwise unmolested, growing in popularity as the Royal Inquisition waxed ever more and more menacing.

  The previous autumn, Fernando and Isabel had gotten yet another document from Pope Sixtus, this one a bull appointing Fray Tomás de Torquemada as Inquisitor General over Aragon and her neighboring kingdoms of Valencia and Catalonia. Not until the following spring did Aragon’s Cortes accept this fiery zealot of the king’s Inquisition, but when they did, Fray Tomás acted with all speed in appointing two creatures of his own—Fray Gaspar Juglar and Maestre Pedro Arbués—his new inquisitors for Zaragoza. Their haste became unseemly. As El Santon’s cries to the south of that great city rose in desperation, Fray Gaspar and Maestre Pedro held their first Act of Faith on Monday, the tenth day of May, 1484.

  On Thursday, the thirteenth day of May, a broadsheet appeared on the doors of every church and public building in Calatayud, more than two days’ journey on foot from Zaragoza:

  CONTREFUERO!

  Contrefuero! Send forth the cry to keep Liberty alive!

  They have fashioned a new weapon in their war on Holy Granada, a weapon to fill their coffers with plunder wrested from their own Jewish and Moorish subjects in kingdoms at peace, even as it sets every Christian against every Moor and every Jew. They have bought from their pope a new inquisition, one in which they themselves, king and queen, will name the inquisitors! No longer will it be the bishop of Rome who gives us men to keep the Catholic faith pure and well-washed with confiscations and penances: now it will be the king himself—this same king who gave us his bastard son, not yet grown to manhood, for archbishop of Zaragoza—who will name his own creatures and tools as inquisitors to burn us, plunder whatever wealth we possess, and leave our widows and orphans beggars in the streets! Is this what Christ Himself would have commanded?