Coming over to the bed, he folded the covers back and bent to help his master out into the day. As he yawned again, his breath flowed over Don Felipe like a draught of wine.
“Do you not, then, take Communion today, Gubbio?”
“Forgetful in your age, are you, my Don? Once a year is plenty for sinners like me, and thank God for His mercy in that, I say! It might be one thing for high churchmen like you to stand fasting at early Mass, but workers like me need something in the belly to help our poor flesh bear up beneath all that grace hitting our souls.”
“It was not so much forgetfulness, old friend, as hope that someday, perhaps today… But no, you are right. Frequent Communion touches too near presumption.” He almost added, “when indulged in by simple souls,” but his Italian had never been notable for simplicity. “No,” he finished aloud, “the safest customs are best, for body as well as soul.”
Gubbio winked.
* * * *
The day turned out cloudless, though not overly hot: perfect weather bespeaking the perfect grace of Heaven as it fell over the public Act of Faith. Surely the grace of Heaven fell. Surely the young priest Fray Benedeto drew it down through the holy ceremonies at the altar raised out of doors beneath God’s own blue vault, to flow outward from thence over them all—Don Felipe and his new junior inquisitor, along with the local dignitaries, hidalgos, and secular officers in their high places of honor, common folk come in throngs from town and countryside for many miles around, penitents and condemned standing in consecrated patience with their godparents at their sides.
Yes, they were the center of it all, these penitents. Surely it was upon them that God’s grace fell most strongly from the altar. Godparents and commoners, nobility and secular officials, churchmen and even representatives of the Holy Office could receive only the backwash, the overflow. It was these lambs, whether in sanbenito or other garment, for whose benefit the entire ceremony existed.
How else could they have stood there, so meekly and quietly, if not sustained even more than the rest of the assemblage by the vast outpouring of grace from Heaven? Those sentenced to live…yes, the mere desire to live on in the greatest comfort possible to them might in itself have been enough to hold them quiet and obedient. But the three condemned ones—what else save God’s grace could have kept them from raising riot? Don Felipe’s eyes located Maestre Juan, standing upright and still in his yellow sanbenito and miter painted over with flames and demons, his eyes closed and arms crossed on his deeply heaving chest. In his place, thought the inquisitor, had I no hope of Divine forgiveness and Heaven at last, I should kick and scream until dragged away. What had they to lose? Even if brutally beaten down…a well-hurled stone or expert jab of the pike might prove still swifter than merciful strangulation at the stake, so why not court death at the hands of soldiers or mob? What had the condemned, considering this world alone, to lose?
“Their dignity, perhaps,” said an almost mocking voice near Don Felipe.
Finding his eyes shut like those of El Santon, the inquisitor opened them to behold, perched at his feet, somewhat in the fashion of a jester, on the very edge of the scaffolding, the dark man of Saint Patrick’s Purgatory.
Felipe blinked. The sun continued to shine from a sky cloudless and benign as ever. The holy chant proceeded as smoothly, the entire assemblage watched in unbroken awe, not a single cough cut the sanctified silence…and not a single head appeared to have turned at the stranger’s voice. No one else except the senior inquisitor alone seemed to have noticed the impudent new presence.
“After all,” the dark man went on, “how much would violent resistance benefit them at this juncture?”
Yet they stand when they should, the inquisitor thought. They turn and move when so directed. Why not simply sit down and do nothing more of their own exertion?
“On the other hand, without hope, why not simply play along and spare themselves at least a few gratuitous kicks and fisticuffs?”
You are a demon of Hell! as I sensed so many years ago. Else why torment my holy meditations with doubts better befitting youth than age—better befitting poor El Santon than myself!
“Torment?” Unruffled, the dark man cocked one brow in the direction of the penitents and the condemned.
The inquisitor gazed at them again, marveling anew at the depth of their patience. What else could lend them such quiet dignity, save Divine Grace? Or… Juan’s words came back to him: “I no longer wish to play your games.” Had not the demon of the Purgatory echoed this in his “play along”?
My God! I have been blind! All these years, I have been blind!
“Don’t overreact,” said the dark man. “Your hypothesis stands as much chance of accuracy as does mine. My present status eschatologically speaking carries with it no particular claim to infallibility.”
“But we are children! We are truly all of us no more than tiny little children before God, playing out our silly little mystery plays to murderous endings! This is what the great Dumb Ox of God meant in laying down his great Summa Theologica as ‘all straw’! And I have been one of those who force other children to play their parts to the death, according to the rules of the childish bully!”
“Then leave,” said a woman’s voice beside him.
“What good would that do anybody?” said another woman’s voice at his other side.
Jerking his head from side to side, he saw them both: the one dark and delicate, somewhat smaller than himself, lovely as an angel and clad in flowing white, with the martyr’s palm in her hand; the other plain of face, larger than most grown men, and wearing simple tunic over trousers. Raymonde! Rosemary! As he felt their names, all the memories flooded back, to every drop of flame and gout of blood.
Raymonde went on, answering Rosemary’s question, “It would show them that one enlightened soul refuses to play any longer at being wicked. Great-grandson, you would turn yourself into a living symbol of God’s truth.”
“He’d probably turn himself into a temporarily living bonfire,” said Rosemary. “How much would that help those poor wretches down there today, and how long would anybody else remember the grand gesture?”
“That,” remarked the man of the Purgatory, “might depend on what historian, if any, set it down for posterity.”
Ignoring him, Don Felipe concentrated on the women. Never have I seen or remembered either of you outside my dreams. Am I again dreaming?
“No,” the dark man replied almost before the question was asked.
Felipe considered the scene around him. All seemed much as it had before any of the three appeared, save that beyond them it wavered and shimmered as though the very sunlight had a strong and rapid pulse. As yet, no one else seemed to have seen or heard any of his strange companions, not even the churchmen standing close on either side, whose positions the women had somehow usurped without displacing them. Nor did anyone else save the ghostly three show signs of having heard Felipe’s own words. For this, even in his agitation, the inquisitor felt profound relief.
Dying, then?
Rosemary snorted. “If you were, great-grandfather, I’d say go ahead and make a big production of walking away from it all.”
“I believe,” Raymonde told him, “that you are suffering a moment of Enlightenment. Accept it worthily.”
“When in doubt,” the dark man suggested, “compromise.”
Don Felipe pictured himself turning deliberately, walking past his fellow dignitaries without a glance, descending the steps, and proceeding, not to the table of refreshments beneath the scaffold of honor, but out of the square itself. Would the crowd part for him in awed silence? Or would it be required of him to push his way through?
Or suppose he were to collapse here and now, disrupting the Act of Faith with a feigned seizure? The disruption would be slight and soon over. He had seen it happen several times, although more often among the penitents and condemned than among the dignitaries.
And, in the end, Rosemary was right. It woul
d change nothing, not one thing, for the unhappy children under sentence. So, in the end, he did nothing.
* * * *
Nothing save visit the burning-field late that evening, after a light supper and an hour of troubled rest.
Never before had he come outside of town to that place where the secular arm carried out its executions. He knew of persons who considered themselves blessed for attending the burnings after missing the Act of Faith itself, and of many more who called themselves doubly blessed for attending both Act and burnings. But such piety had always lain beyond his personal comprehension. Even today, though he thought of defying the propriety befitting his office and forcing himself, in penance for his life’s work, to follow that part of the crowd which streamed from square to burning-field, he could not do it. The condemned had suffered at their stakes while he supped and rested in physical comfort far from the scene of their agony.
The stench of scorched human flesh still choked the air, but that of fear and bloodlust had largely dissipated along with the crowd. Charred remains clung to the stakes, barely visible but no longer recognizable, by the fading glow of the embers, as human bodies.
Which of the three had once housed the soul of San Juan de Calamocha? Had the earnest soul repented at last and earned strangulation before burning? Or had he followed his Ihesu in suffering the uttermost? The inquisitor decided not to ask.
His otherworldly companions, whether dreams or visions, had long departed; but this time the women remained in his wakeful memories. The burning-field seemed less grisly—in some way, less real—than the terrible sights of his lifelong dreams. And yet, in another way, it was worse: filled with great, and solemn, and forever unfillable emptiness. Juan El Santon was gone.
He was gone. Human power could never restore what it had so easily destroyed. They had forced him out of the game he no longer wished to play, and already Don Felipe ached for the man’s earthly presence, the curious gadfly innocence of his small, searching heresies.
Had good, hard-pressed Pope Alexander felt this way after yielding at last to the harsh necessity of burning Fra Girolamo?
But there should have been some other way! Surely nothing—nothing—could in God’s sight be worth this! Could I not—somehow—have argued my Council into voting him a harmless madman, this time for good and all—quietly releasing him and leaving him to chase his theological notions in peace, only confiscating and burning his pamphlets from time to time as need might demand?
Were not poor San Juan de Calamocha’s dreams and visions, if all could be said, far more wholesome than mine? Yes, even to that curious little Purgatorio of his youth…and he had gone so much farther, might have gone so much farther yet… And who is to say that his dreams were less involuntary than mine have ever been?
Or, ah, God! have I become another Fray Junípero, so hardened in my zeal for Thy Glory as to ignore the infinitely greater claims of Thy Mercy
“God help me,” the inquisitor murmured, safely beneath his breath. “I can follow my vocation no longer.”
Fortunately, the dark man’s compromise lay clear before him. Retirement to a life of prayer and meditation had always been an honorable choice, and one that no fellow churchman, not even another inquisitor, could question. Having failed to quit his life’s work dramatically, he did so quietly; and, as soon as making the decision, felt how appropriate was the official name for retirement upon half pay: “jubilation.”
Chapter 28
The Dream of Two Prophets
He stood in the porch of a great, white temple, looking down over a river, its banks marginated with buildings that seemed now to be of Italy, now of some outlandish village striving to establish itself in the heart of a strange, dense wilderness. Finding Rosemary on one hand and Raymonde on the other, both present with him at once, he guessed he was about to witness an intermingling of past and future events.
“Where are we?” he asked them.
“Milan,” said the one. “Easter Day, by the reckoning of Rome, in the year of our Lord 1300.”
“Nauvoo, overlooking the Mississippi,” said the other. “New World state of Illinois, June 1844.”
He blinked, trying to reconcile the images, and turned to the temple’s interior. It was at best half finished, but at an altar of purest marble, presiding over a congregation wherein people of old illuminations seemed to stand side by side with inhabitants of the unimaginable future, a priest in antique vestments was singing High Mass.
His ears told him, with a shock, that the priest was a woman.
“She is Mayfreda,” his ancestress told him, “pope of that Guilielma who was called the very Incarnation of the Holy Spirit.”
“Could be why they brought her here,” said Rosemary. “I think Mormon scripture makes a big deal of the Spirit, too.”
“The Gulielmites.” Don Felipe closed his eyes for a moment, trying to remember…had not one of his teachers in Rome mentioned this heresy? “Gulielma of Milan…but she died in…in…”
“In peace,” Raymonde said, sounding, for the first time since Don Felipe had met her, very slightly envious. “In 1282, in her bed, in peace, and even in the odor of sanctity. To her followers, she was another face of God.”
Rosemary grunted. “What if she was right?”
Don Felipe reacted unthinkingly, by making the Sign of the Cross at her.
“Oh, crackerjack!” snapped Rosemary. “I’m not possessed, I’m not a devil, and you can’t make me one by wishful thinking…great-great-grandfather. I’m just used to asking questions.”
“Like you, great-grandson, we were born of mortal flesh,” added Raymonde. “And even martyrdom brings only a simple palm. It does not bring the answer to every question.”
Popess Mayfreda began reading from a gold-bound book held by a female acolyte. “Listen!” Felipe exclaimed, holding up one hand. “The suppressed gospels of the Gulielmites?”
Rosemary shrugged. “I wouldn’t know ’em from the Silmarillion. You act eager enough to hear ’em, considering your people suppressed them.”
“I listen from old habit, because it was once my duty to understand heresy,” he answered, but before he could hear any great amount, there came a roll of thunder and the scene changed around them.
Now they stood within a chamber, not large, yet so plainly and sparingly furnished as to seem larger than it was. Floor, walls, and ceiling were of rough wood, and there were iron bars on every window. The thunder continued to roll, loudening and diminishing but never stopping.
The popess sat on a low, narrow cot, speaking earnestly with a tall and handsome man in early middle age.
“Interesting,” Rosemary observed. “As I recall, Joseph Smith had his brother with him.”
“And it was another woman, Andrea Saramita, who perished at the stake with Gulielma’s apostle pope,” said Raymonde.
Don Felipe went nearer, trying to overhear the man and woman; but the thunder rose again. He could make out neither Joseph Smith’s words nor Mayfreda’s, only those of his ancestress and pretended descendant.
“My point is,” Rosemary was saying, “if these Guilielmites had come along in the right time and place, maybe they could’ve done as well as the Mormons.”
“Are you saying that it was a true revelation?” Raymonde inquired.
“I don’t give a hang about revelations! Give almost any religion—no matter how righteous-mad it makes people at first—a generation or two, and it’ll become as respectable as any other religion.”
Don Felipe felt he could not, even now, permit such a statement to pass uncontested, but even as he turned around to challenge it, he understood that the long wave of sound was no longer thunder, but an angry mob. Hardly had he recognized this, when they broke into the chamber—tall, rough men with soot-smeared faces, brandishing long guns.
Those in front aimed their weapons at the prophet and popess. Sheets of flame exploded from the tips of the gunbarrels in a blinding roar, and Don Felipe woke.
; Only a flash of lightning and clap of thunder. Close…so close that when dawn came they would no doubt see at once where the bolt had fallen…but for now, he could place this latest dream alongside all those others in the secret archives of his mind, and fall asleep again listening to the storm as to a friend.
How if he were to spend some part of his jubilated years in writing them down? The Apocalypses of Don Felipe de Alhama de Karnattah…and where should he hide them? to rest safely concealed until well after his death, and come to light only when the world was safe for many doors to God.
Chapter 29
The Ransom
Midmorning, and the sun of mid-September, shining from an all but cloudless sky, filled Don Felipe’s garden with a glow more rich than if the place had been enclosed in stained glass. Contentedly drowsy in his cushioned chair, his back resting on a sun-warmed column, the jubilated inquisitor closed his eyes for a moment, opened them when his book slid off his lap to land with a thump in the bed of overgrown basil. He blinked a little in tranquil surprise at observing how much the shadows had shrunk during that momentary closure of his eyes; but were not such things to be expected in a man’s age?
Recovering the small volume, he sat turning it over and over in his hands. A duodecimo of approved devotions, totally above suspicion, but bland as porridge, both in content and manner of serving it up: uniform, mechanical letters, each formed by a pat of metal that might almost as well have been cast into gunshot; and all these lifeless little letters crowded together page after page with no grace of illumination either in pictures or margins, this particular volume having not even woodcut nor engraving, nothing save spaces for initials which had never been filled in.
Don Felipe’s parents had remembered the days before printed texts, when each word had to be copied anew in every volume. Then, books had been true books, every letter the personal touch of a human hand. Thoughts so transmitted, from one person directly to the next, had been as good as spoken. Felipe could still sense it when he picked up a hand-copied volume.
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