Blood of the Lamb (22 page)

the humblest of steps . . .

right foot then left, that leads the soul . . .

“The relic!” Thomas burst out.

The monk stopped and turned. “Father?”

“The relic,” Thomas repeated, stopping also. He brought his voice under control, which could not be said of his racing heart. “Santa Teresa. It’s here, isn’t it? I’d like very much to see the relic.”

Spencer George furrowed his brow. Livia Pietro gave Thomas a quizzical look, but Thomas kept his eyes on Father Battista.

A new interest softened the monk’s lined face. “I have to admit that’s a pleasant change,” he said. “The veneration of relics is out of fashion lately.” He gave Thomas a tentatively commiserating smile. Thomas returned it, though “lately” in this case was a relative term: the change dated from 1965, one of the results of the Second Vatican Council. That was before Thomas was born, so he’d come into a religious life that followed the Council’s precepts; but the elderly Father Battista had been a young man then, Thomas realized. He wondered if the monk had already taken his vows by the time the Council met. And whether, if young Giovanni Battista had known what changes were coming, he’d have entered holy orders all the same. And if he knew what Thomas knew now? About Thomas’s companions, about the Concordat’s corrupt bargain? How would he feel about his Holy Mother Church then?

“. . . quite a shame,” Father Battista was saying. Thomas forced his attention back to the monk. “Communion with the corporeal remains of a departed saint creates an atmosphere for prayer different from any other. It brings the worshipper into an intimate relationship with sanctity. It offers an immediacy that’s otherwise much more difficult to reach.”

Indeed,
Thomas thought.
I’ve heard that speech before.
Father Battista could spend a pleasant evening over cigars and brandy with Lorenzo, discussing the mistaken direction in which the Church was headed. They could talk about relics and the Latin Mass, the apostolic calling, nuns discarding their habits. Father Battista might not even care that all Lorenzo’s piety was a lie.

A lie with which Thomas would never have the opportunity to confront Lorenzo—not in human form, anyway—unless he found the Concordat.

“Yes,” he said to Father Battista, nodding as though in earnest agreement. “I’d like very much to see the relic.”

30

“What relic is your priest dragging us off to see?” Spencer whispered to Livia as the old monk led them down the side aisle.

“I have no idea. Or why.”

She watched Father Battista and Father Kelly walk side by side a few steps ahead, a young man and an old one, sharing the same piety, the same comprehension of the world. Father Kelly’s faith had been shaken by what he’d learned today, but Livia expected—she hoped—he’d recover his equilibrium. She’d meant what she told him: she did believe faith was a precious thing. Her own was more complex than his; she wasn’t sure at all that that was a good thing, but it was a truth there was no point in denying.

She’d been raised to believe in the same God Thomas Kelly did, though she’d never been as ardent as he. Since her Change, she’d pondered often the question of a deity and also of an afterlife. As she’d told Father Kelly, Noantri could die, though she had not been completely forthcoming with him on that subject: of the three ways death could come to a Noantri, she’d described only two. What she’d said about fire was true, though, and she’d been just half-joking when she’d reassured him that they’d all be devoured when the sun flared out. What then? On that large subject, she’d come to no conclusions. But she was sure of three things.

One was that she could think of no reason why a benevolent God, Thomas Kelly’s God, could not be credited with creating the microbe that Blessed the Noantri with their long, rich lives. Thomas Kelly saw the microbe, and the Noantri, as evil. The Unchanged always had, and through the millennia when the Noantri’s need for blood nourishment had made them an imminent threat, that view had been understandable. It wasn’t true any more than evil accounted for a cat killing a mouse; but you could see the mouse’s point. Which led Livia to her second article of faith: that the Concordat was an unqualified good.

The explanation Cardinal Cossa had given Thomas Kelly of how the Concordat came to be was no more the full story than Livia’s account of the death of a Noantri had been. It was true as far as it went and so was the history she’d added for him in Spencer’s study, but there was more she knew and hadn’t told him. And there was a secret at the heart of the Concordat’s story that she didn’t know. That Martin the Fifth had seen the advantages of ending the Church’s virulent and everlasting assault on the Noantri was true enough; but at the time of the Concordat, before Community, before the Law, the Noantri were a fragmented, furtive people. Calling a halt to the hunting, the persecution, was one thing, and would have permitted Martin to concentrate his strength on pressing matters of consolidating papal power. But to sign an agreement with her people, committing the Church to obligations in perpetuity? As a group, in 1431, the Noantri had commanded neither strength nor wealth enough to put in Martin’s service in exchange. Why had he done it? And why had the Church continued to abide by it through six centuries?

Possibly the answer to that last question was simple: peace was peace. Even early on, it might have been clear to Church fathers that once the Concordat was signed, the Noantri ceased being a danger. Thus the Church could turn its attention elsewhere.

As to the larger question, though, Livia had pondered it often, but had come to accept the fact that she did not, probably would never, have an answer. That knowledge was accorded to no Unchanged save the highest ranks of the Church, and to no Noantri outside the Conclave. Ultimately, though, it didn’t matter. Whatever had brought the Concordat into being was itself a Blessing.

But though most of the Unchanged didn’t know the Concordat existed at all, and the Noantri knew it only insofar as they were required to follow its provisions, the third thing Livia was sure of was that the life she and her people were able to lead because of the Concordat, the life she had come into when she’d Changed, the life so rich and full they had come to think of it as Blessed, was only possible if the agreement was faithfully kept by both parties.

Jonah refused to accept this truth, but he was wrong. And only if she found the lost copy of the Concordat and delivered it to the Conclave did he have any chance of living long enough to understand that.

31

Jorge Ocampo rose quietly from his knees. He waited a few moments and then passed between the pews to the left aisle of the church. The little group he’d slipped into the church to watch had been joined by an old monk and, after a false start in the other direction, was heading beyond the apse. He needed to keep them in view, but not to get too close. Right now the length of the church and the perfume of flowers and incense were keeping the
professoressa
from noticing him. If he were careful, if he were stealthy, that wouldn’t change. He hoped the group was planning to view a piece of art or inspect something in one of the side chapels and then leave. When they turned toward the door he’d slip back outside, and as soon as they came out he’d grab the notebook and race around the corner to his
motorino
. He’d bring Anna the notebook and she’d see he was, he truly was, the man for the job.

His only worry was that they were on their way to the church offices, or even worse, to the Carmelite cloister behind Santa Maria itself. How he’d follow them then, he wasn’t sure, but he’d find a way. This time, nothing was going to stop him from recovering that notebook for his Anna.

32

Thomas walked beside Father Battista, slowing his own pace to allow for the old man’s painfully arthritic steps. What he wanted to do was break into a run, but that would startle the women by the candles, and a young man praying in a rear pew. Not to mention the monk. It wasn’t likely that anyone, no matter how devout, had ever raced through Santa Maria della Scala to reach the church’s relic.

He’d heard Spencer George’s whisper to Livia Pietro. Neither of them had any idea what he was thinking and he didn’t enlighten them. Let their preternatural Noantri senses find them an answer. If he was right, he’d be free of them in any case, after this.

An upholstered wooden kneeler stood at a gap in the stone railing, blocking the entrance to a side chapel where a high marble altar rose. “The Reliquary Chapel is through there.” Father Battista pointed to the right, at an openwork gate in the chapel’s wall. “It’s visited rarely now, and we’re very few here. We keep it locked.”

“I appreciate your willingness to open it for me, Father,” Thomas said.

“Certainly.” The old monk made to roll the kneeler aside, but Thomas hurried forward to do it. At the gate to the Reliquary Chapel, under a pair of gold angels, Father Battista hoisted a jingling key ring, selected the proper key, and turned the heavy lock.

Thomas followed the monk into a small, high-ceilinged chapel where light glowed through stained glass windows to the left and right of the altar. John of the Cross and Saint Teresa. Paintings adorned the walls, but Thomas barely gave them a glance. Ahead, behind a low stone railing, was the reason he was here. On a marble altar, a flight of solemn gold angels supported a glass-doored case, perhaps eighteen inches high. Inside it, another glass-fronted box stood on golden lion’s legs. This was the reliquary itself.

Inside it rested the severed right foot of Saint Teresa.

Thomas’s heart beat faster. This must be it, what Damiani meant. Foot, trek, steps—it was all here. The two Noantri exchanged glances but Thomas ignored them. He became aware that the old monk was watching his face.

“Father, would you like to be alone to pray?”

Conscious that his relief and excitement had been mistaken for devotion, and conscious also that he was about to lie to a monk in a consecrated chapel in front of a saint’s relic, Thomas answered, “Yes, Father, thank you. I would.”

33

Father Giovanni Battista left the Reliquary Chapel, smiling at the sound of the gate behind him clicking shut. It had been a long time—years, he thought, though his clouded memory might be muddling things again, but in any case, a long time—since he’d seen that glow in a visitor’s eyes at the sight of the relic of Santa Teresa, that holy object with which he and his brothers were entrusted. He chided himself for his instinctive, mistaken dismissal of this trio. He’d assumed they were interested in Santa Maria della Scala only as art and as history. He’d supposed they’d come to see the icon, as visitors usually did. But three historians, on a project to study churches, what could he be expected to think? The young priests from America were usually the worst, too, taking pride in their own sophistication, their cynicism and worldly-wise ways. And Jesuits! Everything was reason and learning with the Jesuits. In his experience—and his experience was long; though his memory was often too foggy to detail that experience, the existence of the fog itself proved the years were there—Jesuits had no interest in mysticism, cared nothing for those rare, longed-for, and inexplicable ecstatic moments that had made Father Battista’s life worth living.