Musing on the degree of aceticism that could refer to the bottom of a deep pit, presumably hard, very probably damp or rocky or both, perhaps too narrow to lie down in at length, with no other amenity than bread and water, all for the length of an entire night, as “perfect comfort,” Don Felipe asked—he was hardly sure why—“Did you not even sleep, and suffer dreams?”
“None!” the canon said decisively.
* * * *
The canon would have traveled afoot from Narbonne to Bordeaux. Indeed, Don Felipe would scarcely have felt surprised to see him, for all his stubborn humility, try setting his foot upon the sea. When, on reaching port, the Spaniards and Italians turned their attention to finding mounts, the mendicant grumbled,
“You secular priests pride yourselves on taking no vow of poverty.”
Felipe responded, “Would you delay our mission?”
“I would have set out at once upon your arrival in Rome. Afoot, wherever there is land, as our Lord and His disciples traveled.”
“Not even with His miracles could He always impress every authority to do His will. We bear such orders as men may not receive willingly, even from his holiness. Would you have us appear to their eyes in less dignity than befits papal emissaries? Moreover, there are our men-at-arms to consider.”
“Does this mean you are in full agreement that that place of fraud and superstition must be closed?” the canon demanded eagerly.
“I shall neither agree nor disagree until after personally inspecting Saint Patrick’s Purgatory and judging for myself whether or no it is worthy of credence and pilgrimage.”
“You will agree! You will not—you cannot—fail to see their imposture for yourself! At least let me run afoot beside you.”
“And make us appear hard-hearted, as well as slowing our journey? Whereas,” Don Felipe added with a wink, “riding, you will save your breath for arguing with me.”
At last, still under protest, the canon was persuaded to ride a mule, as the one mount which none of the Evangelists described as sanctified by the touch of our Lord’s posterior. He breathed no word of protest against the horses chosen by Luis Albogado and the two Italian bodyguards, as befit their soldierly status; but he seemed to look askance at his clerical companion for perferring an ass, named by Matthew, Luke, and—arguably—Mark as the breed upon which Ihesu rode into Jerusalem, John alone remembering a donkey. Though the canon kept his glances veiled, Don Felipe renewed his resolution to make Confession to this man only in case of absolute and dire need.
* * * *
The prior of the small Benedictine house of Notre Dame de la Charité, where they passed two nights between Marmande and Bordeaux—the canon insisting on full observance of the Sabbath whenever possible—was an ardent scholar of all visions and accounts of the afterlife, those of Saint Patrick’s Purgatory included, and seized the chance to discuss it as eagerly as Don Felipe and at least two of their three men-at-arms (one Italian making no comment either way) seized the excuse to rest a day from travel.
“So,” the prior asked plaintively, “there were no demons at all?”
“None at all,” the canon returned with the merest hint of smugness, as if he enjoyed having the advantage of superior knowledge over a man of higher religious authority, but at the same time possessed enough grace of conscience to repent his enjoyment.
In his own disappointment over the lack of demons, the prior seemed to take no notice of his guest’s attitude. “And no fires?” he went on.
“As I understand our friend’s situation that night,” Don Felipe put in, “one or two small fires might have been welcome, whether fed by burning sinners or some less exotic fuel.”
Both men looked at him, the canon frowning very slightly. After a moment, the prior inclined his head deferentially and said, “Whether poor sinners actually fuel those flames with their own souls’ substance, has long caused me confusion. All in all, I think not, for damned souls must survive to burn forever, and souls in Purgatory must survive to pass on, in due course, into Heaven; and therefore it must be their sins alone which burn away, or, for Hell’s eternal fire, some other fuel, which ‘dies not, nor is ever quenched.’”
A little uneasy at his own levity, considering the perilous state of his soul, Don Felipe offered his goblet to be refilled with good French wine, poured by the young lay brother in attendance, and agreed that the prior’s argument was sound. He might have discharged his conscience to this courteous old Benedictine, but for his secular’s shyness of any Order; as inquisitor, he understood mistrust, even enmity, between Orders for what it was…but, as ordained mortal, he was not immune to feeling it himself.
Turning again to the canon, their host went on, “Yet not every visitor even to Saint Patrick’s Purgatory has been blessed with glimpses of what awaits our souls after death. Perhaps our good God had some reason for withholding them from you, to your own salvation?”
The canon emphatically shook his head. “For one whose desire was as ardent, prayers as fervent, and soul as carefully tended, our Lord could have had one reason only: to use me as His tool for unveiling this simony in all its fraudulent superstition.”
After suffering his companionship across the Mediterranean and much of France, Don Felipe had little doubt that the canon of Eymstadt was as sincere, pious, and clean of life as his words implied. Between this canon and himself, it was less a question of Order versus secular vows, than of personal humors as discordant as vinegar and burgundy.
* * * *
Midway between France and Donegal, when Don Felipe lay below deck cocooned in a hammock, he woke from a dream that a great storm raged around their ship and he was the prophet Jonah, to find that it was true—at least in so far as concerned the storm. The very sides of the vessel shook with each crack of lightning and crash of thunder, while waves dashed against the planking as though fierce to free their brother laplets of bilge water within, and Felipe’s own stomach, for all its emptiness of prudent fasting, groaned along with the general tumult, in no way soothed by the swinging and jerking of his hammock.
Return to sleep seemed impossible; yet as he lay listening to the din of sea, storm, and sailors shouting above him in their unfamiliar tongue, in his suffering he began to feel that the other part of his dream was true as well: that he was indeed Jonah, fleeing in his guilt from the wrath of an angry God—that he could even understand the sailors’ foreign speech, and they were already casting lots to learn what sinner among them had brought so much divine wrath down upon their voyage.
Confess, he thought. I must find my fellow traveler and make my Confession! For death seemed very near, if not from the storm itself, then from the distress in his own poor body…and yet, crippled as much by this same distress as by fear of those rough sailors above deck, he lay during swing after swing of the hammock, adding no movement of his own to its already violent motion, but beginning vaguely to fancy it a gallows on which he swung…when he heard voices almost in his ear:
“According to his own belief, great-granddaughter, he should confess.”
“Great-grandmother, that’s all crackerjack.”
Trying to sit up, Don Felipe tumbled from the hammock. At first, he had feared they were sailors come down to seize him. But no, the voices had been women’s—at least, one of them, the softer one—though already his alarmed mind was letting go of what, exactly, they had said.
Once knocked from his hammock, he groped his way to the hatch and climbed, hand over hand, ignoring sickness and bruises alike—everything but the old, festering ache in his conscience. The canon, he must find the canon of Eymstadt, it was time and past time to make his Confession.
Finally on deck, he found himself in a great, boisterous grayness like dawn, although, with the heaviness of the clouds, it might have been midday. Like Peter sinking into the water and calling on Christ Ihesu, Don Felipe began shouting for his companion, clinging in desperation to shroudline, railing, whatever seemed secure, never daring to relinquish one han
dhold until he had found another, straining his eyes against wind and rain in his efforts to locate the canon.
He spied him at last, huddled head to head with Luis Albogado. Luis! thought Felipe. He, too, is making his Confession—and to this foreign mendicant rather than to me. As is wise…does he guess as much, or was it merest proximity in need? Like my own need—had they tried to wake me before now, and failed?
But what sins could the faithful old familiar have on his soul, to need any great time confessing? Don Felipe looked about for the nearest way across to them, prepared to lurch toward a handhold just beyond his grasp…
When a sailor, as he supposed, walked past him and remarked, in clear if strangely accented Spanish, “Irish priest at the mast, great-grandfather. Your choice.”
Squinting forward, Felipe saw that there was indeed a man tied to the mast—so the storm was truly as desperate as it seemed to him—and this man was making the sign of absolution over a sailor. It was half the distance to the mast as to the canon.
As the sailor kissed his confessor’s hand and turned away, Don Felipe thrust himself forward. A wave swung the deck up to meet him—sprawling, he reached out and found himself clutching the Irish priest—who had told him this was an Irish priest?—by one ankle. After lingering long enough to put the end of a rope in the papal emissary’s hand and help him into a somewhat more secure and less undignified position, face to face with the native cleric, the sailor returned with freshly washed soul to his work of striving, with God’s will, to help save the ship.
Don Felipe had seen this Irish priest boarding at Dublin, but supposed him some petty tradesman. Small and lean, though with the smile of a well-fed uncle, he had settled among his ragged compatriots laughing and joking in their own language—Felipe remembered thinking that but for their strange tongue and their laughter, the mendicant canon of Eymstadt might have preferred their company to his own for its simplicity and poverty. No tradesman, then, but a priest? Obviously a secular, by his garb and the silvering red hair now rain-whipped across his face; obviously Christlike in his ability to eat and drink with sinners and as it appeared to share poverty with the poor; and obviously beloved and valued, to be tied already to this mast against the storm’s worst, while the papal emissary and his party were still left to their own devices.
“I beg pardon, brother,” Don Felipe began in Latin, half-shouting to be heard through the storm. “I did not know of your priesthood.”
Replying with a rush of words in his own language, the Irish priest ended by seizing Don Felipe’s hand and kissing it.
“You did not reveal your priesthood to us,” Felipe continued in Latin.
“…Holiness…I have…Latin, little,” the Irishman faltered, with bad case endings. “Little Latin. Latin, little.”
Beneath a prayer of relieved thanks to the merciful God, Don Felipe said in his slowest and most careful Latin, “I would make my Confession.”
His green eyes wide despite the rain, the Irish priest crossed himself hastily. “To me?”
“To you, my father.”
“Lamb of God who take away sin world’s have mercy us!” At least the Irish priest seemed to have enough Latin for some appropriate approximation of the liturgy.
So Don Felipe de Alhama de Granada y de Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Agapida, inquisitor of Daroca de Aragon, confessed at last, there on the deck of a small ship buffeted by the fury of the Irish Sea, burying the most mortal of all his sins amid a hurried litany of lesser and commoner offenses. There could hardly be even the pretense of whispering, here in the shriek of the gale, but he did somewhat drop his voice from time to time, including the time of the crucial words. In no way could the distant canon of Eymstadt have overheard, and no one else aboard was likely to have any better grasp of Latin than the little Irish priest, who seemed to understand the vital words of absolution and blessing in their meaning but not, by the way he uttered them, in their grammar and syntax.
Curiously, it appeared to Don Felipe that the storm began its abatement from the moment of his absolution.
* * * *
“Look with care,” Don Felipe instructed them. “This is that same, identical ‘Purgatory’ into which you caused my companion to be lowered?”
“It is,” Prior Terence Maguire replied, uneasily shifting his weight from foot to foot.
Don Felipe moved his gaze to the canon of Emystadt, who nodded sullenly and agreed, “It is. Never could I forget this place.”
During the last days of the journey, the canon’s gloom had seemed to deepen almost hour by hour, from the time he had glimpsed the papal emissary huddled in sacramental Confession with the Irish priest. “He was nearer,” Don Felipe had explained, “and I saw you already occupied in hearing our own people’s Confessions.” But no excuse would soothe the canon, who repeated that his papal holiness had meant them to act as each other’s chaplains, and apparently read in Felipe’s dereliction some portent of doom to his own purpose. This doom he must have come to fear more and more as Don Felipe refused to take monetary advantage of his status as papal representative, but smoothly and quietly paid every sum suggested by prior, bishop—or, more properly, acting episcopal vicar general, as Cathal Og MacManus proved to be—and the MacGrath who ruled as secular prince of this area. “But you seal their simony with papal approval!” the canon had cried, and kept shaking his head whenever the emissary tried to reassure him, “I merely put their custom upon trial.”
Now Don Felipe peered down the well, or pit. Meditatively, he dropped a pebble. It struck bottom quickly, and with a comforting dry sound.
“But, your Excellency,” Prior Terence whispered, bending as close to him as respect allowed, “this entrance is for paupers! It is but one of several entrances to our fine Purgatory of Saint Patrick, and your Excellency is surely no pauper—”
“It is this entrance I will use,” Don Felipe replied with tranquil authority. “Are not paupers as precious as princes in God’s eyes? But let all things be done in order,” he added aloud, for the canon’s benefit as much as the prior’s. “Tonight and tomorrow I will fast. Tomorrow evening I will make Confession—to this good priest whom his holiness has assigned me for chaplain on this pilgrimage—and take Communion from his hand and no other. Thus prepared, I will pass tomorrow night in this same pit.”
It might have been better to spend three or even four days in preparatory fasting, according to certain ancient precedents Don Felipe had found; but he mistrusted this Irish weather to hold dry for so long, and rain would certainly increase such natural discomfort as he expected to prove the Purgatory’s sole ordeal.
Chapter 16
The Dark Man of the Purgatory
He knew that he had fallen asleep only by his sense of awakening. Awakening in discomfort: he felt himself lying on a sharp-runged ladder, his limbs tightly bound, his head seeming to be on a strict level with his feet. He thought that, beneath the prickles of a woolen blanket, he was utterly naked.
Opening his eyes to a wash of ruddy light, he verified his conclusions on all points, in so far as he could do so with only his head free to move. By the absence of any restraint round head or neck, as well as the level plane of his body, he guessed that at least he need not fear the water torture.
The well seemed far deeper than he remembered, and far smoother, its polished sides soaring up and up in the glow of the unseen lamps, until his vision met a small crescent moon gleaming all but invisible near what must be the top.
He turned his head. His first impression was of demons so genially fantastic as to suggest grotesque interbreedings, not only with beasts, but even with such things as clocks and wheelbarrows. Eventually he determined that beneath the images lay three straight walls; he assumed that a fourth, behind him, squared the enclosure.
“Good evening,” a masculine voice to his left said pleasantly.
Don Felipe looked again. A dark man of uncertain age perched there on a high stool, holding a lute in his lap. Unless he had a
ppeared since the inquisitor’s first glance in that direction, Don Felipe must have mistaken him originally for one of the painted figures. True, they were grotesque and the dark man was not; yet his black hairline touched exaggeration in its retreat to either side from a central point that seemed to reach a third of the way down his pale forehead, and the lute shone richly polished and decorated against clothing so black as to mask its cut and style.
“Good evening,” Don Felipe replied in courtesy. “By what title and name shall I address you?”
“Why employ any?” His hands like ivory against the black of his attire, the man brushed a long chord from his lute, charging the air of the entire chamber. “What need have two entities alone to address each other by any label?” he went on. “Nomenclature is a convenience when three or more gather together. If you will, kindly glance up.”
Don Felipe did so. The tiny crescent had moved a minute distance to the left. As he watched, it moved back an equal distance to the right.
“As for titles,” the other added, “‘When I was a child, I thought as a child. Now that I am grown, I have put away the toys of a child.’”
“Do you suggest that blood, honor, chivalry, authority both spiritual and temporal—all things implicit in titles—are mere toys?”
“How much use did Jesus Himself have for titles?” the dark man replied, not only giving the Holy Name a curious pronunciation, but failing to incline his head on uttering it.
“So might a mere mortal argue,” the inquisitor replied, maintaining the tone and spirit of friendly debate, “who could claim neither title nor any other personal distinction of his own. Our Lord, being God, was and is and ever shall be so high above us that human tongue could never complete the litany of His titles and dignities. How, then, could He have demanded the respect that was His merit, and yet have time to finish His great and necessary work in our imperfect sphere? Yet the mortal who scorns all titles as toys, not only rebels against due authority, but sets himself by implication upon a level with God.”
Inquisitor Dreams Page 17