by Ned Minkov
Chapter I
With his soul turned away from God,
And mind yielded to profane learning;
Federico Monticelli removed the black cowl covering his head. Underneath the thick woolen cloth there spread long tar-black hair. Against it, his pale complexion gave him a ghostly look. His dark eyes, sunken in their shadowy sockets, were fixed on the doorway of the old one-storey building before him. Dreadful chants accompanied by piercing screams echoed within the stone walls. But Monticelli's face showed no trace of fear of these disturbing noises. On the contrary, a smug smile formed under his prominent aquiline nose.
Federico Monticelli descended from a centuries-old family of servants devoted to the Throne of Saint Peter and its powerful Church. The patriarch of the Monticellis had been a bishop of the holy city of Antioch, after its reconquest by the Papal forces during the First Crusade in 1098. The last four of Federico's forefathers had been respected persecutors of the Holy Inqusition. And Federico had followed in their footsteps.
Tonight, he was engaged in his favourite professional duty: the hunt for heretics.
He turned towards the dozen soldiers lined behind him, waiting for his orders under cover of the night. They were heavily armed - some of them with fauchards, the rest with short swords. All wore steel breastplates over their tunics. Their faces, illuminated by their torches, revealed the same determination as their leader’s. Federico gave the soldiers a sign by nodding his head. Then he entered the building with half of them following him silently. The rest scattered around, surrounding the place on all sides.
Monticelli and his men advanced stealthily along a wide corridor, illuminating their way with the torches. At its end they came upon an opening leading to a room. As he reached the threshold, Federico made a sign to his companions to halt. Keeping his body pressed close against the wall by the edge of the door, he cautiously took a look inside.
The room was more spacious than he had imagined. Its walls matched their appearance on the outside – bare, gray masonry; the floor was tiled with irregularly shaped slabs of stone. Piles of hay lay stacked in heaps in the corners, suggesting the building was commonly used as a cattle-shed. But what Federico had come for was the scene taking place at the far end of the room.
A group of people were standing around a rectangular stone table resembling an altar. One of them, whose silhouette gave away the slender physique of a woman, stood above a motionless body lying on the table. She was dressed in a white robe, her head covered by a cowl in the same colour. Seven other figures were sitting in chairs arranged in a semi-circle around the woman, staring at her and at the body before her. They were wearing mantles like hers, only theirs were black. The whole place was gloomy, illuminated only by the four candles placed in each corner of the table. Their flickering flames cast light upon the improvised altar, so that they made the face of the body look as if it were wincing from time to time, creating the impression that it might still be alive.
The woman was holding what looked like a chalice and was slowly pouring its contents on the chest of the body, making slow circles with her hand. While performing these gestures, she sang drawlingly a song in an unfamiliar tongue, pitching her voice high to nearly screaming at times. As they watched the ritual, the people in the chairs kept chanting in a low-voiced chorus.
Federico was watching the scene quietly. He had spent months trying to find out where these heretics held their pagan gatherings. In the meantime, he had learnt a lot about this small society, whose leader was the woman in white. They worshipped ancient gods and, as rumor had it, carried out animal sacrifices before statues of those gods. Had they reached the point of making a human sacrifice tonight?
On Monticelli’s waving, the soldiers rushed into the room. Mayhem followed. Shouts echoed between the walls. The soldiers knocked some of the men down with the handles of their weapons and proceeded to tie their wrists. One tried to resist the arrest and was pierced through the chest with a sword. Another one escaped with the woman in white through another opening in the wall opposite to where the soldiers had come in. Federico, however, was not worried – his men lay in ambush outside, being ordered to kill any escapee on the spot.
When the commotion was over, the inquisitor walked into the room. Four men were standing with their caps removed, guarded by the soldiers. They were all young and were glancing around with desperate expressions on their faces. Monticelli stepped over the corpse of their slain comrade and stood astride another one lying on the ground, heavily wounded. Federico cast a glance at the terrified men and spoke with a cold, even voice:
‘You are all arrested on a charge of heresy.’ he announced. ‘My men will take you to a place where you will be allowed to repent and meet face to face with God’s justice.’
As if on his command, the soldiers pushed the four men back towards the door. As soon as they’d left, however, another soldier came in. He was one of those supposed to be guarding on the outside. He walked up to the inquisitor and spoke:
‘Signor Monticelli, we met the two who tried to escape arrest.’ he said. ‘We killed the man as he lunged at us with a knife. But the woman managed to escape, while we were dealing with him.’
Federico looked in the soldier’s eyes. His face twisted in a spiteful grimace. He was about to speak something, but then he suddenly turned around and approached the stone table. The body was still lying on its cold surface. It was completely naked except for a stripe of cloth girt around the loins. The inquisitor took the glove off his right hand. He ran his fingers across the pale skin and stared at the white powder sticking onto them. The whole body was covered with it. Federico thought it might not be dead, but lulled to sleep by some of the white-clad witch’s potions. He checked the man’s nostrils for breathing. There was none.
‘Pile up the hay and the chairs around this table and set fire to them,’ he ordered the soldier who was still waiting a word from his commander. Monticelli pointed to the wounded heretic on the floor:
‘Throw him onto the pile, too. He won’t make it through the night, anyway.’ Then he walked out where his black horse was waiting for him, held by the reins by his servant.
The soldier called a fellow of his to help him carry out the orders of the inquisitor. The two of them took hay from the corners of the room and piled it up by the stone table. Next they threw the chairs onto and around the haystack. The unconscious man, whom Monticelli had sentenced to death offhandedly, was placed flat on two of the chairs. They grabbed the candles from the table and threw them onto the hay. Then they hastened to leave the shed, before it filled with smoke, running out on the heels of the others.
The stone surface was heating up beyond bearing, when the eyelids of the powdered body opened. The dark eyes of the man glanced at the flames whose burning tongues his body had already tasted. Despite the painful tension in his lungs, for the heated air was no longer breathable, he managed to raise himself slowly up to a sitting position. His limbs were tingling, so he had to suffer until his blood regained its circulation. In a few seconds, as the flames grew too tall for him to be able to remain there any longer, he jumped off the table to his feet and ran through the curtain of black smoke. He headed not towards the opening through which the soldiers had left, but for the opposite one – the one through which they had come. He was aware that they might still be outside, so he had to find a spot away from the smoke, but one where he would nevertheless remain unnoticed. He reached the passage leading to the room he had just escaped from and where he could finally exhale. The air there was fresh, for it was the other opening that drew the smoke. Inhaling and exhaling, he mustered up all his strength, trying to figure out a way back to the city.
He was a student of Theology at the University of Bologna. He had just slipped the clutches of the Holy Inquisition by the skin of his teeth. Had he been caught, the fact that he was studying to be God’s servant, a clergyman, would have been sufficient reason for him to be tortured to death by this beast of a man �
� Federico Monticelli. The young man recalled the day he met the woman who, as he had heard from the soldier, had also managed to evade a certain death. He had no regrets about following her to this abandoned place, nor about participating in her barbaric rituals. He had fallen in love with the mysterious lady since the moment he had met her. Her name was Yandra and her ominous invocations not only did not dishearten the infatuated student, but, on the contrary, fuelled his attraction to and desire for her further.
He took a short cut across the fields back to the city. He needed to find some rag to drape his naked body in, not least because of the chill that made him shake like a leaf. He had to be back at his boarding house before daybreak; that is, before questions were raised about his absence.
The Director rose from his chair, taking the tea-pot with him. He refilled it with water and put it on a small portable hot-plate.
‘This right here I bought on my first day as Director, twenty-two years ago’, he said, as he turned the appliance on. ‘It takes half an hour just to boil some water on it. However, I’m not throwing it away. Besides, I see you’re cup is still full.’
I was so consumed following his words, as he related the story of Cossa’s first misdeed that I had forgotten about the tea he had offered me.
‘So, this man Balthasar is a heretic?’ I asked, as I took a sip of the beverage.
The professor returned to his seat.
‘Well, he gets himself involved in heresy, that’s for sure’, he said. ‘But it is only one of the sins he commits. The life he lives is in complete antagonism to the Christian dogmas, as you will see for yourself, as we move on.’
‘And is that why Pope John XXIII writes this sonnet about his life?’ I asked. ‘He stigmatized him and his deeds to teach people how not to live?’
‘Perhaps you could explain it that way-‘, the Director said and looked at me with same hint of mystery in both his eyes and words.
Then, he added.
‘Be patient, my boy. The story of Balthasar Cossa has just begun to unveil before you. I promise you that in the end, you will find this sonnet to be far more significant, than it seems to you now.’