Chapter 12 #3
“Came to me in a vision, which is absolutely sort of true because she definitely did come to me, and she told me to send the head of the monster to Eichestamm and house it in a shrine, with a college of monks to pray for it, and in due course there’d be good luck and miracles, and it’d be a beacon and a lighthouse for the entire North.
And there you go,” I added. “Problem solved. Everyone’s a winner.
Eichestamm’s much too far away to interfere with your action, sorry, the flow of pilgrims to St Krimhild, and the abbot of Eichestamm will love you to bits and pieces once the money starts flooding in, which will be good since you need him on your side for the diocesan audit this autumn, and best of all, there’ll be a minimum of thirty monks at any given time to make sure the head doesn’t go anywhere.
You’ll be disposing of a horrible threat and getting a valuable ally in the process, not to mention bums on pews in Permia, which strengthens Holy Mother Church and the Kingdom on Earth generally.
And in twenty years’ time, the story will have changed out of all recognition, and nobody will know any different. What’s not to like?”
He looked at me. “Do you honestly and sincerely swear that you had a vision?”
“I swear by the Invincible Sun,” I said, “the True Faith and my hope of salvation. Will that do?”
He gave me a miserable look. “I suppose it’ll have to,” he said.
I hadn’t seen Svangerd since it happened.
She’d been in the Rose Chapel, while the goldsmiths were taking measurements and bickering with the clerk of the works about drilling holes in his plasterwork, praying for the soul of Mother Krimhild.
I had an idea (or the Blessed Saint came to me in a vision and told me; same difference) that I was the last person she’d want to see at that particular moment, so I left her alone.
I can be sensitive sometimes, and I didn’t want a broken nose to go with all my other aches and pains.
I think people had noticed the way Vitimer had taken to looking at me; in any event, I didn’t seem to be popular, so I took a packed lunch and my copy of Nicephorus into the Gardens of Sulpicius and found a shady corner of the arboretum, next to the compost heap.
I opened the book at random, the way I usually do, and read:
… Aspect of the Orovincian heresy was the insistence on actual bodily resurrection, rather than the sublime reconstitution of the soul in new and imperishable fabric.
To which the blessed Maroboduus objected that there would be many who died in the faith whose flesh would be unavailable or unsuitable for eternal habitation; for example, those who had been eaten by wild animals, or fish, or ants; those who perished in fire; those who passed away in extreme old age or as a result of wasting diseases or leprosy.
Was it conceivable, Maroboduus argued, that the Invincible Sun would countenance the streets of the Eternal City littered with the broken and deformed bodies of cripples, the one-legged hopping eternally on crutches, the blessed martyrs scorched and shrivelled by the flames of the fires in which they had so gloriously perished?
Or consider the monstrous forms of the Mesoge revenants, swollen and purple, lurching obscenely through the gates of the City of God, their sins finally washed away but their bodies still proclaiming the power of the Evil One, who by his servants and agents summoned them from the grave and compelled them to do his bidding.
Was there to be no rest for them, unwilling tools of the Armies of Night?
I closed the book, swallowed my last mouthful of honeycake, and went looking for someone to be nasty to.
“Me again,” I said.
He didn’t reply, mostly because, if he had, he’d have cut his own throat on the blade I was holding under his chin. It wasn’t a hog knife, because they don’t sell them in Choris and I hadn’t had time to get one made, but it was close enough for country dancing.
“This time,” I said, “I want the truth. Actually,” I added, “no, that’s not what I want. I want you to be all noble and say you’d rather die a martyr’s death, because then I can kill you and dump your body down the disused well out back of the kitchens. But the truth will do, at a pinch.”
I took my fingers out of his mouth and relaxed the pressure I’d been applying with the knife. “Very well,” he said. “It doesn’t matter now. The harm’s been done.”
I let him go, on the off-chance that he’d try and make a run for it, and I could kill him for that. But he didn’t. He turned and looked at me; more in sorrow than in anger, which I really hate. “Not here,” he said.
“Why not? It’s private.”
“I need to sit down.”
Fair enough. He was getting on in years. There was a little side-chapel not far away where nobody ever went. We sat down on a wooden bench in front of a diptych of the Resurrection. I put the knife away. I didn’t want to kill him any more. “Well?” I said.
He slumped forward, knees on elbows, head in cupped hands. “The worst part of it is,” he said, “I told a deliberate lie. Oh, I had clearance, from my superiors. But it’s been on my conscience, let me tell you. I’ve hardly slept.”
I stared at him. “Which lie would that be?” I asked.
He ignored me. “Our primary obligation is to the truth,” he went on, “the truth as we see it. To tell a deliberate lie undercuts everything we stand for and fight for. It goes against the very essence of the true gospels. From time to time, yes, we lie because it’s expedient,” he said bitterly, “but every time we do it, something irreplaceable is lost. You can understand that, I imagine, as a scholar.”
“This would be very interesting,” I said, “if I was interested, which I’m not. Tell me the truth. What’s going on?”
He sighed. “You need to know,” he said, “that the Loyal Opposition is no longer a united entity. For some time now there’s been a deep and far-reaching schism within the organisation.
For convenience we refer to the two parties as the orthodox and the provisional wings, though needless to say, that’s a gross simplification of a complex doctrinal—”
“I get you,” I said. “Two wings, like an angel. Which lot are you?”
“We don’t differ on objectives,” he went on.
“Both wings sincerely and passionately believe in the same cause, the same values, the same fundamental core beliefs. Where we part company is methodology. The orthodox maintain that the long-term plan should follow a certain specific course. The provisionals would prefer to adopt a different strategy. We respect each other, God knows we do; that’s the tragic thing about it.
Each wing knows that the other is entirely devoted to bringing about the same end we all yearn for.
But we’re divided, and the division would appear to be irreconcilable. ”
A tiny light flickered in the back of my mind. “So when you were rattling on at me about schism, it wasn’t Holy Mother Church you were talking about, it was—”
He nodded. “We had an opportunity to reunite the Loyal Opposition,” he said. “An opportunity now lost for ever. Thanks, in no small part, to you.”
He’d taken my breath away, temporarily. When I got it back, I said, “That plinking noise you can hear is my heart breaking. Now get on with it.”
There were, he told me, these two factions.
The original grounds for division were classified and technical and I couldn’t hope to understand them; suffice to say, there were two ways of playing the long game, both equally valid, and the orthodox supported one way and the provisionals supported the other.
The orthodox engineered the convening of a general ecumenical council, with a view to using it to bring about a complete and irreversible schism in Holy Mother Church.
To achieve this, they planned to use the last remaining copies of the true gospels (which were, in case I cared, an accurate and utterly reliable account of the Invincible Sun’s ministry on earth).
Needless to say, the provisionals were determined to prevent the schism, at any cost. The choice of who was to bring the gospels to the council devolved on a senior Loyal Opposition manager –
“Egil,” I said. “My friend Egil, back home.”
He nodded. “The list you saw on his desk was a schedule of possible candidates for the mission. Unfortunately, Egil isn’t the loyal orthodox he made himself out to be. We now know that he’d been secretly working for the provisionals for some time.”
Ouch. “So that means you’re—”
He nodded. “I represent the orthodox wing, naturally. Egil chose you because he knows you well. In particular, he knows that you’re an atheist, therefore not liable to be swayed by considerations of doctrine, faith or morality.
At least, that was the rationale he gave us, and it seemed perfectly reasonable, so we were happy to endorse his choice. ”
“But?”
He sighed. “As a spy for the provisional tendency, he had another reason for choosing you. He knew that we intended to use a Mesoge walker to dispose of the princess, who we saw as a major threat to our plan for schism. In fact, I seem to recall—”
“Why a walker?”
“The most formidable creature on earth,” he said (stupid question, implied).
“An unstoppable force that would do exactly what it was told. I seem to recall,” he went on, “that it was Brother Egil who suggested using that particular walker, though I’m not entirely sure.
In any event, acting for the provisionals, he made sure we chose you, because you were from the Mesoge, and the chosen walker’s son. ”
You get punch-drunk after a while. “Egil did that?”
“Yes. Clearly he believed that you would have some influence over the walker, though that proved not to be the case. He was a very treacherous man, but not as intelligent as he believed himself to be.”
“Past tense,” I noted.
“Yes. Egil died three days ago. A seizure of some sort.”