Chapter 7 #3
“Hard to know what to do for the best,” he went on.
“Should we be pragmatic and try and fudge some sort of compromise, or would it be better to lance the abscess straight away and let all the pus drain out before it poisons the lot of us? Honestly, I don’t know.
That’s the bitch of it, I just don’t know. Uncharted waters.”
I decided that I probably wouldn’t like him if I got to know him better, which I had no intention of doing. “Indeed,” I said, hoping he’d go away.
“You must be feeling it particularly deeply,” he went on, “since on one level at least it’s all your fault. Now I would maintain that you simply weren’t to know. You saw a pretty box in a junk shop, it wasn’t a great deal of money, so you bought it. I’d be lying, of course.”
That cold feeling again. “Who are you?” I said.
“Sadly,” he went on, “my advocacy of your position wouldn’t hold up to prolonged scrutiny.
You bought a pretty box. But your vows forbid you to own personal property, and by and large you abide by them.
Therefore you didn’t buy the box because you wanted to keep it.
So why did you buy the box? For its contents.
But you couldn’t read the contents. Why would a man buy a book he couldn’t read?
Because he knew what it was. Therefore you knew what the box contained, and you bought it and brought it to Choris Anthropou, where you were due to attend a general council.
True, your reason for attending was political assassination rather than theological sabotage, but I put it to you, it was in your mind to seek out someone at the council who’d be able to read the books.
It may not have turned out exactly as you planned, but I don’t think that really matters very much.
A crime is made up of two parts, the guilty act and the guilty intention.
It would be hard to argue that you didn’t perform the one and form the other.
” He laughed. “Do excuse me,” he said. “My speciality is canon law, I tend to think in opening addresses. Not a healthy trait, because you find yourself advocating a position rather than evaluating the facts. Call it an industrial injury, like a stonemason’s lumbago. ”
I really didn’t care for him one bit. “Who are you?” I repeated.
“The new man,” he said. “Very much everybody’s second choice for such a responsible job, including mine.
But since my distinguished predecessor was feckless enough to get himself killed at what could easily turn out to be one of the major pressure points in human history, there’s not an awful lot I can do about it.
Good idea, by the way. Very much along the right lines. ”
“What are you talking about?”
“Metallurgy,” he said. “They knew about that sort of thing under the empire. Eutropius of Carvasa was the first scientist to grasp the true composition of steel; he wrote about it in his Concerning the Physical World, which is now regrettably lost. He realised that steel is a mixture of iron and certain key impurities – charcoal dust, would you believe – and that’s what makes it possible to harden and temper it.
Ratbert the Younger went one step further and noted the growth of crystals in the suddenly quenched fabric, making the link between hardness and brittleness.
It’s best explained as being the opposite of water.
When water freezes it turns to ice. When steel is heated to cherry red and then quickly cooled, it too undergoes a sort of freezing action – I’m sorry,” he said, “I do tend to get carried away, and besides, I’m not sure you’re allowed to know any of that.
Please forget I spoke. Actually it’s all magic and nothing to do with science at all. ”
“All right,” I said. “Say for the sake of argument I believe you.”
“But you don’t.”
“Say I do. Why me?”
He looked at me. He had light brown eyes, short, curly black hair and a double chin like a pile of cushions; a handspan shorter than me, so slightly taller than average. He reminded me of a beetle, though I’m not sure why. “You think this is about you. That’s interesting.”
“Can we go somewhere and talk about this?”
“So you can try and intimidate me with physical violence without everybody seeing? No, I don’t think so.
Not that I blame you, it goes without saying.
It’s a perfectly natural reaction, when you feel as impotent as you do right now.
Everything is spiralling out of control, and there’s nothing at all you can do about it.
Believe me, I feel the same way. It’s thoroughly wretched, the whole thing. ”
Vitimer had arrived, and everybody got out of his way as he strode through the main door. One last try. “If you didn’t give the books to that idiot,” I said, “who did?”
“Ah,” he replied. “Long story. Would you excuse me? I do so want to get a seat at the front so I can hear every word – my ears aren’t as sharp as they used to be.”
I tried to grab his sleeve but he tugged it out of the way with a slight but perfectly timed twist of the wrist. Then someone shoved me from behind and the crowd of people trying to get into the hall closed round me, and I lost sight of him, and that was that.
The seats at the back were unusually popular, so I ended up in the middle somewhere, wedged in between a very large, very old man in a brown mendicant habit and a thin man in red from somewhere out east who smelled strongly of lavender and took notes on a small wooden tablet coated with beeswax, in which he made tiny wedge-shaped dents with the stub of a whittled reed.
Vitimer stood up, and everybody went quiet.
It was impossible, Vitimer said, to ignore what had happened at the previous session.
The existence of certain documents (I think everybody in the hall winced when he said that) was now a matter of record, and in his view it would be impossible for the work of the council to proceed until those documents had been discussed and debated and their validity and status put to a vote.
We should all remember that the authority of a general ecumenical council was supreme and absolute.
Once a decision had been reached, it would be final and binding on everyone present, on pain of instant and irrevocable excommunication.
Furthermore, it was not his intention to adjourn this session until such a decision had been reached and such a vote taken.
For his part, he felt it was his duty as president to abstain from expressing any opinion on the subject.
Only quiet, calm deliberation would serve to untangle this knot.
Therefore he urged us to listen carefully, speak thoughtfully and with our minds unclouded by emotion, judge wisely and vote responsibly.
Then he sat down; on his chair, presumably, since there wasn’t a fence available.
Immediately a man stood up, rocking slightly on his heels to regain his balance after such a precipitate movement.
I knew him from earlier sessions, though I hadn’t caught his name; he’d always been ultra-orthodox, the straight ticket, but everybody seemed to like him.
He’d now had a chance to read the true gospels, he said, and in his view they were exactly that: true and authoritative narratives, of greater authority than anything in orthodox scripture on account of their earlier date and unimpeachable provenance, which was contained in the text itself and therefore not reliant on any external source.
True, he had only read them in translation, and since he hadn’t yet had an opportunity to learn the original language they were written in, his views must be conditional on the accuracy of the translation being verified.
With that proviso, however, he had no hesitation in proposing a motion that the true gospels be officially incorporated into the canon of accepted scripture, and he felt sure –
What he felt sure about was drowned out in a roar of angry voices: the first wave, about half the delegates, angry with him; the second wave, the other half, angry with the first wave.
I looked at Vitimer, who’d obviously learned his lesson from yesterday and made no effort to restore order.
Quiet, calm deliberation had lasted roughly the time it takes to boil a kettle, and to be honest I was surprised it had made it that far.
A dozen men had jumped up when the yelling started.
Ten of them eventually sat down, leaving two on their feet glaring at each other: Taswald of Crasso, and a short, square old man I didn’t know.
Then someone grabbed Taswald’s arm and hauled him back down into his seat.
The square man then began to speak, and since he had the loudest voice I’ve ever heard in my life, eventually everyone shut up and let him.