“Cast your gaze upward again,” the other suggested.
Obeying, Felipe noted that the crescent appeared larger.
“Teresa of Jesus, also,” the dark man mused, “complained of titles as so much needless baggage. Will complain, perhaps I ought to say.”
“What Doña Teresa is this?”
“A native of Avila, born a few years from where you are now. She purifies the Carmelites of Spain, and comes to be named a Doctor of the Church.”
“A female Doctor of the Church?” Don Felipe closed his eyes for a moment, the better to marvel at God’s work in His creation. “What a glorious society we are shaping, after all, in which the women will grow as theological as the men!”
“I wouldn’t be too quick to claim credit for the Great Teresa, were I in your place. Fortunately for her, she dies before your Inquisition plunges its fangs into her.”
Struck by sudden suspicion, Don Felipe began intoning the words of exorcism at the dark man.
Clearly recognizing the Latin formula, its target shook his head. “Those words,” he remarked, “are proof only against Satan and his creatures.”
“And are you not one of them?”
“Not so far as I am aware, although of course my present function might justify your surmise.”
“Yet you dare to suggest that the Holy Office prosecutes true sons and daughters of the Church.”
“Does it not?” The man in black sounded more amused than argumentative. “Are not your own theologians in process of charting the virtuous course for a good and true Catholic accidentally arrested by the Holy Office? Are they not determining that such a person may never, upon pain of sin, utter a false confession, not even to escape torture, nor to gain the mercy—available to any genuine heretic—of strangulation at the stake prior to consumption by the flames?”
Whatever this dark man might be, he seemed well informed. “Not all of us are so strict on this point,” Don Felipe explained. “In any case, the reward of such a soul will be great in Heaven.”
“In any case, the tide of posterity would quibble with your choice of the word ‘prosecute.’ ‘Persecute’ will come to be considered the more natural and appropriate term for your activities.”
“By enemies of Holy Church?”
“Oh, by Protestants and good Catholics alike. By the way, have you glanced up lately?”
Felipe again looked up. The crescent had grown definitely larger. Now it seemed the size of a melon, and its swing had apparently widened. “A type of pendulum, is it not?” he inquired.
“Precisely.”
“And these ‘Protestants’ you mention—who and what are they?”
“Ah! Pardon me. In another few decades, a rebel theologian of north central Europe will spearhead the largest and most enduring split in Christendom since that of the Eastern Orthodox. I believe that in your lifetime you will generally refer to these new believers in all their diverse subgroups as ‘Lutherans,’ after the abovementioned rebel theologian; they will come, however, to be called collectively ‘Protestants’—id est, protesters against the Church of Rome.”
Some vague, dim memory brushed Felipe’s awareness of someone murmuring plaintively, “We are many sects with many creeds, yet you make no distinction.” Unable to chase the memory down, he sighed, still watching the pendulum. “More heresy?”
“Heresies en masse, many of them as hotly at odds with one another as with Popery itself. Although how ‘heretical’ they are in the sight of God remains hidden from all but the angels.”
“And you?” Felipe went on, returning his gaze to his interlocutor. “Are you true angel, or fallen one?”
It was the turn of the man in black to sigh. “As human as yourself, although my dates fall some centuries after yours. The rules of chronology change considerably in eternity.”
Don Felipe felt his lips twist in a smile as he inquired, “Would you have me imagine you another descendant of mine?” (“Another”? What an odd question! He could not think why he had asked it.)
“As you please. It might as well be true as not. With half a millennium or so falling between, give or take a few hundred years any individual might turn out to lie somewhere or other in almost any other individual’s family lines. Again I must beg that you pay more than academic attention to the pendulum above you.”
This time Felipe saw that it was large as a scimitar, and close enough to make him turn his head in following its swing. He observed, “I lie in its path.”
“It is also as sharp as a scimitar,” said the dark man, apparently reading Felipe’s thought. At a chord from the lute, the curved blade stopped at the height of its swing, to hang poised in midair. “The irony,” the dark man went on in tones of wry amusement, “is that certain of my friends and well-wishers would have called me the one who ought to lie on that slab, rather than the one controlling the mechanism.”
“Am I not, then, dead already?”
“What great difference would it make? Do not Dante and long tradition both opine that the soul after death is lent a provisional body with which to experience any appropriate pleasures or pangs?” Brushing another chord, the dark man set the pendulum in motion once more. “I can, at least, offer you one choice. Shall I flick the blanket from you, or would you prefer to feel the blade shear through the cloth for a pass or two before touching the skin?”
Don Felipe shook his head. “No. What else is this but the fourth degree of torture prolonged? Never have I held that the pains of Purgatory were other than immediate and direct.”
“Why, man, what species of suffering is exclusion from the Beatific Vision, if not mental and emotional?” Pinching a fold of the blanket near Felipe’s chin, the young man—for now he seemed young, although at closer range silver could be seen in his hair—questioned the priest with his eyes.
Again Felipe shook his head.
The other released the blanket and stood back, remarking, “Moreover, can you rest assured that you are in Purgatory? Saint Patrick’s or anyone else’s?”
“Are we not?” Tears filling his eyes, Felipe tried to crane his head for another direct look into his executioner’s face, but the dark man had moved too far back. “Have I not, then, found absolution?”
“Oh, you have found absolution, in the strictly formal sense of the word. But have you found forgiveness?”
The blade, majestic in its unhurried immensity, grazed along the top of the blanket, fraying the threads. Felipe felt a moment of shame upon realizing that he had winced.
“Why?” he demanded. “Why this? Where are the fires, the smoking ground, the burning lake, the great wheel?”
“Would you truly prefer any such sensationalism as others have envisioned here to your present fine suspense?”
“I was…” Felipe paused, baffled. “…prepared for that, if for any vision at all.”
“Some minds might hypothesize,” the other told him, “that this is the meet and fitting punishment for your vocation. You see, the world will come to take it as a truism that you inquisitors, as a class, were inhuman monsters who delighted in creating exquisite and ingenious new tortures—such as this very device of the pendulum.”
“What?” Not even Fray Junípero had ever proposed any new tortures—difficult enough finding men to apply the old ones!
“Oh, yes. In time, the Holy Office will become a favorite bogy for romancers to employ as an excuse for scenes of sensational agony. I blush to own that I myself, although knowing something of the truth, rather preferred the lurid fantasy.”
“Will Holy Mother Church then grow so weak, her enemies so strong?”
“Why, certain respected Catholic scholars of unquestionable personal orthodoxy will be among the most enthusiastic promoters of your ‘ingenious torturers’ image. Is there not a loyal Catholic opposition even in your own time? Have not you yourself, in part and on occasion, subscribed to the sentiments of this same loyal opposition?”
The pendulum returned, fraying a few more t
hreads and, Felipe thought, his nipples. Catching back a gasp, he tried to see whether or not there was blood on the blade. When he unclenched his teeth, it was to protest: “Is this Divine Justice, to punish one of God’s servants for lies that future ages will tell concerning his work?”
“As to that,” the other replied, sounding for the first time embarrassed, “it may seem presumptuous, but I cannot help wondering whether the choice of this particular mechanism is less for your benefit than for mine. I suspect that the Purgatory in which you find yourself may in fact be my own.”
“Indeed? For what sin?” Even as he uttered the question, Don Felipe was not sure why. Mere custom, when he lay here at the farthest pole from his own state in life? Some blind wish to strike a counterblow?
“Man,” his tormentor answered in a voice gone harsh and stern, “who has appointed you my confessor?”
The blade crashed down, and there remained only dark silence.
Chapter 17
“A Matter of Faith”
Having availed himself of the opportunity to visit the great shrine of Santiago de Compostella, Don Felipe thought to pay a pastoral visit to the small parish of Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Agapida, which he had yet to see despite the monies it had been feeding into his purse, through his personally chosen vicar Don Osorio Fadrique, for two decades.
The canon of Eymstadt had taken his leave in Ireland, after kissing Don Felipe’s ring in respectful gratitude for pronouncing that the Purgatory of Saint Patrick should indeed be closed. (The dark man might have been demon—despite his protests to the contrary—or merely dream; in any case, the papal emissary had judged his own experience far too much at odds with every other vision he had ever learned of in connection with that place or any other holy site, either to reveal it or allow it to stand in the way of seeing the pit filled in and the pilgrimages stopped.)
The two Italian guards had accompanied him to Compostella for the genuine and undoubted pilgrimage. Then they, too, had kissed his ring before taking ship back to Rome, carrying with them both Don Felipe’s report to his holiness and a message to Felipe’s own bankers. In the latter he had double-enclosed his first epistle to Gamito.
Left with Luis Albogado as his only attendant, Felipe had considered returning to Aragon by way of the Bay of Biscay; but it was good to be on dry land again. They had met rough seas twice on the voyage from Ireland and, while neither of these storms had proven as menacing as that one between Dublin and Donegal, he had nowhere felt as endangered on land as on water. Shipboard might be the smoothest and easiest means of travel for some—though Felipe preferred the rolling of leather saddle to that of wooden deck—but they had met neither robbers nor rockfalls nor raging rivers in French or Irish lands, so what should threaten them here in Spanish? where they did not even need Latin to communicate, but Luis could speak as easily with tradesman or muleteer, as Don Felipe with bishop, abbot, or scholar. In each tribunal town, moreover, they would gather two or three sturdy local familiars to accompany them as far as the next tribunal, staying with them in monasteries and, once, a good and convenient inn along the way.
Shortly before turning off for Agapida, they rested in a Dominican house near the shadow of Borja castle, home of his own patron’s ancestors, which Don Felipe hoped to see either before or after visiting Nuestra Señora del Pilar.
“Will your Reverence join us for Matins and Lauds?” the prior asked him.
“For Lauds and early Mass, I will be honored to join you,” Felipe replied. “But travel is rigorous. Let me plead that fact as my excuse for begging to be allowed to read my Matins alone before bed, and slumber through yours.”
“As secular priest, your Reverence needs no excuse.” The prior smiled and summoned a brother to lead Don Felipe to his guest cell.
Luis Albogado and their two current companions had been bedded down, as usual, in the guesthouse for visiting laymen. Don Felipe had never felt difficulty in sleeping alone in one small room, with the door shut fast. This was to prove as well for him in years to come.
In the middle of the night he woke slowly, from a dreamless sleep, to the sound of loud, heavy knocks and a voice calling, between those knocks, “Felipe de Granada! Open!” And then, clear as the trumpet of Doomsday, the dread words: “It is a matter of Faith!”
But I am myself an inquisitor! he thought, and then: This is Fray Junípero’s doing—I have pushed him too far! And then: So this is what it is like for all those others.
End of Part I
Part II
The Last Act of Faith
Chapter 18
The Dream of the Trial
He stood in a forest of massive black trees, their trunks straight and stubby where the branches had been lopped off almost as far up as eye could see. By the blocking out of certain stars and parts of the full moon, he could tell that leafy boughs still remained at the woods’ very top.
When he looked again, the moon was crimson. Then it vanished completely. He walked in darkness…save that a faint glow limned the trees, which had become smooth as columns chiseled from stone centuries ago.
Far, far in the distance, he spied a patch of light. It seemed to surround a statue of Our Lady of the Pillar, with the body of San Pedro Arbués lying at her feet. He walked toward it. At first a column obscured it from time to time, forcing him to grope his way around; but eventually the columns formed a long, straight aisle to the lighted patch.
As he approached, he found it to be no statue. Rather, a white wall draped with the banner of the Inquisition. In front of the wall and beneath the banner a table, covered with white cloth, behind which sat two judges. Both in black and white robes that resembled, but were not, Dominican habits. Both women. Rosemary and Raymonde.
He attempted to hasten his steps. The ground clung to his feet like pitch. For what seemed a very long while, he came no closer. Then, suddenly, he stood directly at the table’s edge, facing them, his fingers splayed before him on the white cloth.
“Great-grandmother,” he greeted Raymonde.
“Your name?” said Rosemary.
For a moment, he could not remember it. At last he replied, “Felipe de Alhama de Karnattah.”
“Alhama de Granada,” Raymonde repeated, inscribing it on the cloth in gold letters.
“Age at time of arrest?” Rosemary went on.
“Forty-two.”
“Present age?”
“Fifty-one.”
Raymonde looked up from her writing. “How can you be sure?”
“I have kept careful count of the days. Day by day, every morning, another mark on the first leaf of paper I requested. It is nearly filled now. Soon I must request a second sheet for the purpose.”
“Have they never in nine years asked why that leaf was never returned?” Raymonde inquired.
“More than once, and each time I have produced it for examination. I have never made a secret of keeping my own calendar. It is permitted. Twice, indeed, my jailor has kindly corrected a small lapse on my part, due to illness.”
“Nine years,” Rosemary repeated. “Shameful! And you the inquisitor of Daroca. Why have you failed to bring your case until now?”
“I was but the younger inquisitor.”
Raymonde nodded. “The accused shows seemly modesty.”
“He shows laziness and incompetence,” Rosemary growled, looking straight at Don Felipe. “Well? Do you solemnly swear to tell us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and never reveal anything that happens here to anyone outside?”
“This is not the full and proper form of the oath, great-great-granddaughter,” Raymonde murmured.
“On your stack of Bibles or whatever! Sorry, great-great-grandmother, I don’t have much patience with crackerjack and red tape.”
“Before God and His Holy and Ever Blessed Virgin Mother,” Don Felipe said, “I do solemnly swear.”
“Good,” said Rosemary. “Where’s that fiscal?”
A dark-haired man whom Felipe
almost recognized appeared: at first merely a face floating among the shadows, his black robe detaching itself from the surrounding gloom only as he stepped forward. “Your Honors, I answer your summons fully prepared to publish the evidence.”
“The publication?” cried Don Felipe. “I protest! Is this not rather the time for the accusation?”
“You should have thought of that before you let nine years slip by,” Rosemary told him. “Now we’ve got to squeeze things together.”
The fiscal produced a book from his sleeve, laid it on the table, and let it fall open, seemingly at random. “Article One,” he declaimed, pointing a small glass wand at the top of the left-hand page. “During the year of our Lord 1497, the accused did express to one Gamito Ben Joseph, formerly of Alhama in Granada, more recently of various cities in Aragon, and currently resident in Rome, an unconverted and unregenerate Jew with whom the accused has long maintained an unholy friendship and was then most scandalously visiting in the pope’s own city, the sentiment and opinion that if God had indeed guided Admiral Colón to a hitherto unknown world beyond the ocean, it might be a new Promised Land divinely designated for the safe refuge of the unconverted children of Israel.”
To his confusion, Don Felipe saw that the volume was printed: all the charges against him set down in fine print on pages from a press. “That God guided Don Cristóbal Colón across the sea to those lands,” he stammered, “who could dare to doubt?”
Rosemary demanded, “Would you rather have seen the ‘New World’ Pagans converted to Judaism than Catholic Christianity? What do you call that, if not heresy?”
“Who are you to judge me of heresy?” he shot back, anger for a moment getting the better of good sense. “You who call yourself my descendant, do you not boast of being an unbaptized Pagan yourself?”
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