Chapter 6 #6
Nobody seemed inclined to offer more than token opposition to this proposal, so the acting chairman gave the motion to the floor for further debate. At which point a man I didn’t recognise stood up and started to talk.
There was no point, he said, debating Cartimanduus or Odovacar or any of the old authorities, since they had now been superseded and were entirely irrelevant.
A new discovery meant that everything we had hitherto regarded as scripture was at best obsolete, at worst useless and positively pernicious.
Earlier that day, he went on, he had been handed a copy of the long-lost true gospels, which he had since read, and he was therefore in a position –
That’s as far as he managed to get before the shouting started.
I froze, naturally enough. I expected the speaker to be torn limb from limb, or at the very least bundled out of the room in a straitjacket.
But no, he carried on talking, though nobody could hear a word he was saying.
Some of the shouting was outrage and fury, but not all of it, and it suddenly occurred to me that I wasn’t the only one who’d heard about the true gospels.
Far from it. A lot of the people in the room seemed to know about them, and wanted to find out what they said.
I looked at Vitimer, who was on his feet shouting, but nobody seemed to be paying him any attention.
That was bad, whichever way you looked at it.
I felt sorry for him. Holy Mother Church has a long and selective memory, and Vitimer was going to be remembered for all eternity as the president of the council who couldn’t get people to shut up while he was talking.
It felt like the yelling went on for a very long time, but it can only have been a couple of minutes.
Then someone – I couldn’t see who; there were heads and shoulders in the way – grabbed one of the heavy candlesticks off the altar and started banging it on the stone floor.
That worked: everybody stopped roaring and howling, and there was a moment of dead silence, really rather spooky in its way.
Vitimer snatched the opportunity and announced that the session was adjourned until further notice, then started to walk quickly out of the chamber.
Not quickly enough. If he’d been able to get outside the door, his exit would automatically have closed the session, and nothing said or done after that would have had any sort of official standing, as a proceeding of the council.
If I’d been Vitimer, I’d have run, and the hell with the dignity of office.
As it was, he was still a couple of yards from the door when the baying and yelling started up again, and as far as I could tell it was coming exclusively from the faction who wanted to hear more about the true gospels.
Procedural footnote – just in case you aren’t as obsessively knowledgeable about the minutiae of ecclesiastical protocol as I am.
The existence of the true gospels had never been formally conceded; as far as Holy Mother Church was concerned, there was no such thing.
Naming them in a council session would at the very least confirm that they existed.
Whether they were scripture or anathema was another matter entirely, but ignoring them would no longer be an option.
Given their nature, there would inevitably have to be a debate, and by the look of it, that would split the Church as neatly and thoroughly as an axe splits straight-grain ash.
There’s a technical name for it: schism, meaning that the Indivisible Body has been divided, a state of affairs so unnatural and terrifying that Holy Mother Church has done everything she possibly could, for two thousand years, to stop it happening.
Among the things done and sacrifices made have been any number of martyrdoms and judicial executions, a dozen full-scale wars, the mass excommunication of the Blemmyan church and the reluctant decision to allow the fire-worshipping Sashan to enslave a million of our co-religionists in Olbia, because the Olbians refused to renounce the Donatist heresy.
So you’ll appreciate that schism is the worst thing that can possibly happen, and here it suddenly was, in the council chamber, on Vitimer’s watch; and all because I bought a box in a junk shop in a back street in Mavais.
Oops, I thought, or words to that effect.
Even at that late stage, Vitimer might just have saved the day if he’d carried on through the door and shut it firmly behind him.
After all, he’d declared the session adjourned.
I’m guessing he thought that would do the trick, in which case he was sadly misinformed about council procedure.
Even the president can’t just adjourn a session unilaterally.
He proposes an adjournment motion, which is always carried unanimously without a vote.
But he hadn’t done that. God only knows why, but he’d chosen the wrong form of words, so it was as though he’d never spoken at all.
Now, if he’d got out through the door it wouldn’t have mattered, since no council proceedings are valid unless the president is present.
But he didn’t. Instead, the silly fool turned and tried to make everybody shut up, thereby tacitly admitting that the session was still open.
Which meant that anything said (or screamed or yelled) in the chamber by a delegate would be on the record.
Which meant schism, sure as the Invincible Sun made little green apples, and left them lying about on a tree to tempt the stupid and the easily led.
I sat there while all this was going on, feeling like I was watching a stone from a siege catapult looping through the sky and heading straight at me.
Had there been anything I could have done, would I have done it?
Academic question. For a split second, I toyed with the idea of standing up and telling everybody that it was all my fault, I’d found the box and the books and brought them to Choris and negligently hidden them where any passing monster could find them – and then I asked myself what good that would do: answer, none.
If it had any effect at all, apart from finishing my career and probably landing me in jail or a remote priory in northern Permia, it’d only make things worse – a provenance (of sorts) for the book and the manuscripts, which might otherwise be dismissed as figments of somebody’s imagination.
So I kept my face shut and my arse on the bench and did nothing at all while the world as I’d known it began the process of coming to an end.
Someone I recognised – Philo of Lidarend, no less, abbot of the Golden Key and precentor of Brasch – was on his hind legs, pointing a skinny forefinger at Vitimer and howling that the true gospels must be acknowledged and their validity debated in open council.
He might as well have stuck Svangerd’s pet stiletto into Vitimer’s eye-socket; that would have been quicker, cleaner and far more humane.
Some people have no consideration for others.
Vitimer replied by shaking his head – clearly he’d got way beyond anything that could be fitted into words – and then someone I couldn’t see started calling for a vote, which suddenly transformed Philo’s demand into a formal motion of the council.
Vitimer shook his head again, but gestures don’t count.
All at once a forest of hands shot up, meaning that a vote was in progress whether the president liked it or not.
Lots of hands. I couldn’t see properly from where I was, but a moment later I heard the clerk sing out “Carried”, and I knew that we were all comprehensively and irrecoverably screwed. Schism. Oh boy.