Blinking against the glare of sunlight, he gasped. The stake had been made into the fulcrum of a long lever, from one end of which the sacrilegious wretch dangled in chains, while executioners worked the other end to lower him nearer the flames and raise him again, prolonging his agony. His garments already burned away, the red-hot chains were scorching their patterns into his naked, blistering skin. Blackened, and cracked with stripes of blood, soon his nakedness would be invisible. The crowd laughed, jeered, hooted and mocked, relishing a poor sinner’s pain in the free assurance that all was for the greater glory of God. Yet—he saw with sudden shock—if they themselves were not sinners, they could not have enjoyed watching the sufferings of Satan himself.
“I die one of God’s martyrs!” Gardiner screamed. The crowd howled him to scorn, and the executioners dipped him again into the fiery bath, so that his words became animal shrieks.
Beside the pyre, the carpenter still labored at his craft, unnoticed by the crowd. His tears, where they fell upon his staves, looked bloody; and when he raised his hammer, Don Felipe saw that a great chunk had been torn out of his arm, leaving the upper bone bare and glistening for about the length and breadth of a Communion Host.
It seemed that Felipe was gripping Rosemary’s arm, rather than she his, for he felt his fingers squeezing as deeply as torture cords into flesh. Try as he would, he could not loosen them.
The lever broke. Like a man falling through thick water, the man-sized lump of bleeding charcoal toppled into the flames. The Carpenter plucked him out unburnt and clothed in white, put a palm branch into his hand, and set him on a platform, narrow across the front but stretching back out of sight, where a radiant multitude waved similar branches. El Santon was among them, and also…
“Raymonde!” Felipe exclaimed, pointing to one who stood embracing Gardiner. “There is my ancestress!”
Rosemary made a peculiar double grunt. “Uh-huh. So she’s your ‘ancestress’ all right, but I’m still waiting to be your ‘descendant.’ And, incidentally, hers.”
He looked in perplexity at the woman of the future. The whole scene had changed around them, save for the Carpenter working at His table; and, with the scene, Felipe’s own past…or, rather, he seemed to have a sort of double memory, glimpses of different lives, one of them filled with strange and impossible things.
“Valencia,” Rosemary told him. “July 26th, 1826.”
He saw the twisted columns of the Silk Exchange, the old church of Los Santos Juanes, and many structures such as part of him knew quite well but the other part not at all. No longer moblike, changed even more in temper than in costume, the crowd had grown sober and solemn; all watched quietly and many with half-hidden disapproval.
“Cayetano Ripoll, schoolmaster,” said a heavy voice, “for heresy and the teaching of heresy, you are sentenced to the flames.”
He nodded. Vague memories showed him that he had indeed committed these sins, though even now he felt no guilt for them.
Someone put a cord around his neck and began, from behind, to twist it tighter…tighter.
“Don’t worry,” Rosemary said. Inconsequentially, he thought. His throat completely constricted, he could no longer expel his last breath, and was drowning in the stale air trapped in his lungs…a long death it seemed, with the world moving very slowly beyond the tears that half veiled his sight.
The Carpenter picked his handiwork up at last and brought it forward. It was a barrel, large enough to serve as coffin for a grown man, and having its outside painted with large and bloody tears. “These are your flames,” the Carpenter said softly. “Behold the final fruit of this thing you have wrought in My Name.”
He raised the barrel and slipped it down over the dying man.
Rosemary said, “Technically, great-grandfather, your Inquisition isn’t responsible for Ripoll’s death. It’s already dead itself, and the bishops are acting on its behalf. But this is what it all comes down to.”
He heard no more. All was darkness.
Chapter 27
The Last Act of Faith
Don Felipe woke before the predawn dark, to look through his window and see a clear vista of stars, promising well for the feast day. Unable to sleep again, he thought he felt a rustle near his feet, and kicked at it, then propped himself up in his bed to sit huddled in blankets with his hands pressed together for warmth. He considered summoning Gubbio. A cup of steaming water would have been pleasant to hold beneath his nose, simultaneously warming his fingers and clearing his inhalations; but in pure forgetfulness he might sip, and an inquisitor’s failure to take Communion at early Mass on this day could be a source of scandal to any common folk who might hear of it, so he let his old servant snore on outside the door.
The bedding rustled again. Truly, he thought that he had been less troubled with vermin in the secret cells than here in his own bed in Daroca (where he had finally returned as senior of the tribunal’s two inquisitors). Strange how, as the years passed, he caught himself from time to time in curious nostalgia for those long days and longer nights of solitary confinement, with no other labor or responsibility than to worry about his trial and the state of his conscience.
He must check yet again with his few charges still under present investigation, to be sure that their cells remained free of rats. Completely free of mice was but an impossible dream anywhere in this sinful world.
This morning he remembered more than usual of his night’s dreaming. A barrel painted over with flames…and it had been the coffin for some poor wretch no more guilty than Saint Peter…and someone had said that to this the Holy Office must come at last…
At length the stars quietly began to disappear. Soon the procession would be assembled: the penitents for reconciliation, each with his or her new godparent to assist at the rebirth of spiritual life; the hapless unregenerates who must at last be pruned away and let fall to the secular arm…three of these today, and one of them poor El Santon—since his father’s death, the only Juan Delgado de Calamocha, who had fallen under scrutiny time and again until at last he exhausted all their efforts.
An unsigned pamphlet, traced to his press thanks to certain peculiarities of the typeface, had appeared making the claim that Holy Church had herself preserved the heresy of Arius—that Ihesu was merely a created demigod—by transferring it from God’s Son to His Mother, the most Blessed and Glorious Virgin Mary. Since this was seen as touching on the Immaculate Conception, which the Dominicans in the Council of Faith still opposed (and therefore, Don Felipe guessed, were privately somewhat less than outraged by the statement in question), that case had ended with the master printer sentenced to abjuration de levi.
Then, when the Lutheran heresy began spreading out plaguelike from northern lands, someone reported having heard Maestre Juan liken Holy Church to the Titan Saturn devouring his children lest one of them overthrow him and reign in his place. Since no such statement could be found in any printed work from his press, and there was but a single witness, it was quietly decided that the erstwhile El Santon de Aragon suffered from some species of lunacy, and it did not even come to his arrest.
Next he issued a pamphlet, this one boldly bearing the name of his shop—virtually a signature to the text itself—which included the argument that, even as “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” was to be interpreted as forbidding any person to demand more redress than essential for perfect balance, so the law of the tithe had been meant to prevent the Church from ever impoverishing her children by demanding more than a tenth from them. This time, with the evidence in print, he had been arrested and imprisoned awhile. But, since the pamphlet had been aimed primarily at the State, the passage going on to argue that no secular authority should ever demand more in taxation than the spiritual demanded in tithes; and since El Santon had already at least once been set down as insane, his case was suspended and himself quietly released through the back door.
At last, however, came the time when they could no longer either ignore or
release him but, for the spiritual welfare of the populace as a while, must excise his notorious heresies from their midst. As though further emboldened by each successive escape, he had begun proclaiming, both aloud and in print, that Ihesu had not suffered and died to ransom His people—for such a ransom, such a debt, could only be cancelled and forgiven, never paid—but that, rather, God had chosen to comprehend what His poor creatures suffered by enduring human agonies Himself, in His own Person, and thus, in that way, hallowing and sanctifying them.
From some fragment buried as deeply within the layers of his memory as any surviving record of his own imprisonment must be buried within the secret records of the Daroca tribunal, Don Felipe seemed to hear a soft voice saying, “I believed that this Lord of the Old Testament was hard and cruel because He had not yet learned compassion by passing through the Virgin’s womb, by tasting for Himself the full measure of human pain through enduring the torture of the cross.” Unable to find any episode, framework, or speaker for these words, he buried them once again and sadly agreed to Maestre Juan’s arrest.
Juan had succeeded in identifying the latest charge against him by including it in a list, running to four full pages, of more than a score of various propositions, some heretical and some of such sound orthodoxy as to lay the man still further under suspicion for doubting them.
“Juan, Juan,” Don Felipe had asked him in one interview, “how have these Lutherans led you so far astray?”
“Lutherans? My lord, do you think me a Lutheran? I am a good and loyal son of Holy Mother Church!”
“So you were baptized, and given almost enough instruction for a priest.” (Indeed, the inquisitor thought, the newly baptized printer had soon stored up more clerical knowledge than many a parish priest enjoyed.) “Is this the use to make of all your excellent learning?”
“Why has God given us minds at all, my lord, if not to ponder these things?”
“Why, to assist our wills in choosing the true Faith and cleaving to it.”
“But do you not see, my lord Don Felipe? Our God—the one and only True God—is so great, so vast! and we are so small, so infinitely small, so very limited. Each of us can grasp no more than a few infinitely tiny scraps of the Glory of God, and clothe those few poor scraps of vision each in his own pitiful words, and so fashion of them one more little door into Heaven—but all our doors lead at last into that same Glory of God!”
The inquisitor blinked, seeming to hear that same unidentified voice from deep in his forgotten past cry exultantly: “And upon the surface of this great Immensity of God we crawl, specks infinitely tiny, and we must use many religions and creeds if ever we would glimpse even the tiniest Atom of the Essence of God!” But this was heresy or, at the least, demonic temptation—for the demons, like the sirens, could speak in voices sweet as those of angels when it served their foul purpose. Shutting his mind to it, Don Felipe objected, “Surely you would not pretend that all these so-called ‘doors’—which are, in other words, so many heresies—are equally righteous and safe?”
“Equally safe? No, my lord, hardly equally safe! And their righteousness I do not pretend to judge. I say only, my lord, that each of us must enter by whatever door he finds best suited to his own size and shape, and may God have mercy on us all!”
“Juan, Juan!” The inquisitor shook his head mournfully. “Could you not at the very least exercise the great virtue of prudence? Keep these heretical temptations to yourself—privately seek out some good spiritual counsellor to help you resolve your doubts—but refrain from publishing them to the scandal of the whole Church and downfall of your fellow Catholic Christians?”
Lowering his gaze, Juan had slowly plucked off the spectacles which he, like his old master printer of Calatayud, now wore in his turn, wiped them on his sleeve, returned them to his face, and heaved a soft, deep sigh. Then, raising his head again, he said, “We must let these things out of our hearts, my lord, even if it should prove that they are weeds. Otherwise, they will choke us and stifle us.”
Juan, Juan, alas! my poor San Juan de Calamocha! Felipe’s heart had wept. You will force us at last to burn you! And with that thought had come the dim memory of another voice, too hard and grim to sound like that of a tempter, saying: “Don’t tell me that a lot of so-called martyrs didn’t goad their so-called persecutors into doing it.”
To Don Felipe’s comfort, however small, the one-time El Santon was spared formal torture in any degree. There was neither purpose nor need—out of his own mouth he had condemned himself—the Council of Faith did not so much as raise the question, simply condemning him, in varying measures of regret, to relaxation with the customary plea for mercy to the secular arm.
When Don Felipe’s junior inquisitor, Fray Estevan de la Clemencia de la Madre de Cristo, remarked, “This is what comes of giving common laymen too much instruction in the Faith,” Felipe determined to take upon himself the duty of informing Maestre Juan of the sentence at the customary hour, on the eve of its execution. It had only remained to hope and pray that the unfortunate man be reconciled and mercifully strangled before his pyre was lit.
Bits and pieces of last night’s visit rose again in Don Felipe’s memory, almost as clear as if he could step from his bed back into El Santon’s cell and lay his hand once more on the shoulder of the condemned printer.
“Must I die, then?”
“My poor friend, too often has Holy Mother Church held you safe from the secular arm, only to see her great mercy abused and betrayed.”
“Has pointed me out to the secular arm for burning—No! Let me recant!”
“Yes! Save your soul. Your body you can no longer save—but save your soul, which is by far the most important part, and your body will live again at the Final Judgment.”
“Don Felipe! Don Felipe! My only sin has been searching too desperately for God!”
“But what need for all this mad searching? Has not God Himself revealed all necessary truth through His Blessed Son, and has not Holy Church preserved and interpreted it for you, as for all of humankind?”
A little of the old defiance had flashed back into the condemned man’s face. “Are we babies, to accept our beliefs from our mothers’ lips, chewed to pap for us to swallow whole?”
“Yes, my friend, in the eyes of God we are all of us indeed babies and infants. But call His revealed truth, not ‘pap,’ but rather pure and wholesome milk from our mother’s breast. Poor man, poor man, your sin is not even limited to searching for God along paths which He Himself has forbidden. Why have you chosen to spew forth your poison in print, thus endangering other, simpler souls?”
“Children indeed, are we? Then let me go home, Don Inquisitor. I no longer wish to play these childish games!”
“Then repent this one more time. For the spiritual welfare of her other babes, Holy Church can no longer risk the false mercy of saving you from the secular arm. But spare your flesh the torture of the earthly fire and your soul the eternal torments of Hell. Be reconciled, and go to God’s judgment a clean and forgiven spirit, to sit in Heaven side by side with that Good Thief who received his blessing from Christ’s own lips.”
For a moment, Juan El Santon had seemed to waver. Alas, in the very teeth of despair his pride had visibly wrestled down his terror. “Say, rather, go a forsworn and cowardly spirit,” he had answered at last. “A soul more likely to be damned for betraying the God of its own conscience than blessed for groveling one more time—and to no earthly purpose!—before the God of hypocrisy and murder. No, this time I will not renounce my own poor thoughts and words!”
That was the moment when, unable to lay his hand on the wretched man’s head in blessing, Don Felipe had gripped his shoulder in simple human sympathy. What the two brothers, standing by in silence, might have made of the gesture, the old inquisitor hardly cared, even now. Let them question him about it—only let them question him, if at all, then at once—he had his answer ready. He had made one final attempt to reach the poor sinner, to tr
y whether a compassionate touch might succeed where words had failed.
But where and how, he berated himself, did my words fail? What argument of mine finally sealed the poor man’s doom? Lord, hold not against Your misguided Morisco-Lutheran child the failure of a bumbling old would-be spiritual adviser!
Was it truly too late for El Santon? Might he not yet repent in time? Might not that pair of brothers, one Dominican and one Franciscan, young though they were, have brought him sometime during the night to repentance and salvation? Or, if they too had failed, might not the elation of this day’s ceremonies strike a holy response from that sensitive soul, once—however tenuously—still ardently and eagerly Catholic? Or at least when his final hour approached, and he saw his fellow sufferers, both of whom had been successfully reconciled in their cells, being mercifully strangled at their stakes beside his?
The cathedral bell tolled four strokes, each one seeming to raise a tremor that was still vibrating as the next stroke began. Surely, Don Felipe mused, an overfine imagination must magnify the tones of the bell at this hour, else how had he—or anyone else in Daroca—slept through the tolling of the night’s earlier hours?
If the imagination of an inquisitor, who would spend this day in pomp and princely dignity on the scaffold of honor, were wrought up to such a pitch, what of the poor wretches…
The door opened and Gubbio came in, still stretching, his yawn visible in the light of his candle—a waxen one, as befitted a holy day. Opening his eyes wide enough to see his master sitting up in bed, he nodded comfortably and started laying out Don Felipe’s finest garments.
“Old friend,” the priest said suddenly, “tell me: the penitents…the reconciled and, perhaps even more, the condemned…is this not their day? The day of their rebirth, either in this world or in the next… Is it not they who most shine in the eyes of the people?”
Gubbio shrugged. “Maybe in the streets. And this evening in the burning-field, they’ll naturally have the attention all to themselves, even if they should happen to be strangled before the flames reach them. But in the square, my Don, that is where all eyes will rest on your Resplendence and the other great ones beside you.”
Inquisitor Dreams Page 29