Shroud of Shadow (7 page)

“But what good is it?” Omelda finally asked. “I can learn this chant this way, but there are all the others . . .” She lifted her large hands, let them fall into her lap. One chant? There were thousands in the Church liturgy. An entire shelf of the abbey library was given over to chant books—the Antiphonary, the Graduale, the Hymnarius—and a dozen others. What was one chant among so many? And Omelda could not even see the use of the alterations upon which Natil had so insisted.

Natil took up a soft cloth, wiped the strings of her harp, wrapped the instrument. “It is a start,” she said. “I do not know where it will lead you.”

Omelda opened her mouth, but Natil looked at her with bright blue eyes an she shut it again.

“I did not know where I would be led when I came into life,” said the harper. “I did not know where I would be led when I looked up from my harp and saw you standing at the window. I do not know what next week might bring, or even . . .” A flash of pain and loss in those blue eyes. “. . . or even tomorrow. But you asked me to teach you my music, and so I am trying to do that.”

Chastened, feeling again a sense of transgression, Omelda rose silently and gathered the remainder of the food. Woman's work: cleaning up, plodding from one task to another. There was always something to do, whether in the Divine Office or in housekeeping.

“I'm sorry, Natil,” she said suddenly.

Natil looked up. “Sorry, beloved?”

“For complaining. I'm always complaining.” Omelda almost smiled: her sisters would be in chapter right about now, confessing to one another, asking God's forgiveness for personal faults and failings. Turn and twist and run as she would, she could not escape the life to which she had been committed. “Forgive me.”

Natil nodded as she rose. “I forgave you the moment you uttered the words, Omelda. Forgive yourself.”

Omelda stared, speechless. In chapter, faults would be confessed and punishments and disciplines meted out by Dame Agnes. But Natil—oh, what a difference was this!

Natil bowed. “It is a hard thing to forgive yourself deeply and sincerely, is it not? But it is an important thing to learn rightly.”

Omelda found her voice. “Only God can truly forgive. God and the priests.”

Natil straightened, fixed Omelda with her blue eyes for a moment, then bent and picked up her harp. “So say the priests, beloved.” But Omelda sensed that the harper—prophet or madwoman, she did not know—did not believe a word of what the priests said.

Darkness. Absolute darkness. The darkness of the grave. The darkness of the crypt. The darkness of death.

Siegfried of Madgeburg, Inquisitor of Furze, stood silently in the deepest corridor of the House of God. A soul newly flown from its body, he imagined, saw and felt this profundity of darkness. With full knowledge that, about it, but now forever beyond its grasp, the world of mundane concerns went on just as the world of Furze and poverty and wool cooperative plots went on outside the walls of the House of God, the individual soul, like the prisoner in the room ahead, like Siegfried himself, waited alone and in darkness.

And so Siegfried stood, silently meditating on the task ahead of him. But, as always, troubling thoughts arose. Fredrick, the prisoner, would see Siegfried and would know his fate, and the soul, waiting in darkness and silence, would eventually find itself confronted with its Supreme Judge. Siegfried, though . . .

Adoro te devote, latens deitas,
the Angelic Doctor had written. But Fra Thomas had been a mighty soldier of God, with more than enough faith to see beyond the simple appearances of bread and wine, defy the pronouncements of touch and taste and sight, and look straight into the heart of the divine mystery that the Sacrament concealed. Siegfried, however, found himself ever open to doubt and unfulfillment. The dead saw. Even the heretical prisoner saw. What did Siegfried of Madgeburg see?

Adoro te devote, latens deitas.
And Siegfried did indeed adore that hidden God. But always he hoped and wished that, after waiting in such darkness, he might someday open the metal door at the end of the passage and find there not a chamber full of torches and implements, men unwashed for a month, and the reek of urine squeezed out of panicked bladders; but rather a vision of divinity, a vision of God. No bread, no wine, no hidings and layers and tests of faith: just an honest acknowledgment of the Creator to His created, a pat on the shoulder perhaps, perhaps even a
Well done, Siegfried
.

Was death the only way to know, to see? Oh, there had been some petty heresy years ago—even Bernard Gui had not taken it seriously, and only a fool like Cranby would have pursued it—about seeing God face to face. Pernicious enough to be sure, but certainly nothing like the ravings of the Fraticelli and the Cathars and the Waldensians. Just a little isolated dream. They had insisted that they could see God. Any time they wanted.

To see God . . .

Siegfried bestirred himself and went down the corridor to a metal door that he had, in the course of twenty years, learned to find in the darkness as effortlessly as he could find his nose. He had been expected, and, beyond the door, the room fell silent save for breathing, the crackle and sputter of torches, the drip of something onto a dirt floor grown soggy with bodily fluids:
plat
.

Eyes turned to Siegfried.
Plat
. The notary assigned the arduous task of recording every question, every answer, every (
plat
) perversion of true faith, every scream—sat with his pen poised above his tablet.
Plat
. Fra Giovanni, Siegfried's assistant, was dragging the sleeve of his habit across his brow. It came away sopping: it was hot in the room.
Plat
. The men in charge of the instruments dropped their hands to their sides, waiting for orders.
Plat
.

“Well?” said Siegfried.

The men shuffled their feet. Giovanni shook his head. The notary made an entry.

Siegfried looked at the man in the center of the room, who, in truth, looked more like a strange insect, or a crustacean dredged up from the bottom of a lake. Here was a steel carapace about him to hold him fast. Here was a skeleton helmet of steel bars, with spines that thrust in so as to bring pressure upon his head. Here were iron boots and iron gloves to grip his feet and hands. And here also were two eyes that, from within the helmet and the spines, rolled whitely up at Siegfried, looking, seeing.

. . .
latens deitas
.

Giovanni bowed his head, chagrined, dejected. “Brother Siegfried, I've . . . I've sinned.”

Siegfried nodded understandingly.
Ecclesia abhorres a sanguine
, but in the heat of a battle for such a precious thing as a soul, excesses invariably happened. Long ago, though, Pope Urban had foreseen such frailty and had allowed for it: Inquisitors forgave one another regularly for having become
irregularis
.

Siegfried lifted his hand. “
Ego te absolvo, Giovanni
.”

Giovanni bowed.

Plat
.

Once again, Siegfried examined the prisoner. Fredrick's fingers—what was left of them—protruded from the ends of the metal gloves. Giovanni had perhaps seen to his fingernails himself. Or maybe to his feet: the screws that held the needles ready at the anklebones had been turned down all the way. Perhaps Giovanni had been guilty of that, too.

But Fredrick had only himself to blame for his torment. He had been given opportunity after opportunity to confess and recant these last three years, and he had stubbornly refused. And he had at last come to this.

“Fredrick, my son,” said Siegfried. “Are you ready to admit your errors?” He kept his voice patient, consoling. The duty of an Inquisitor was to win souls, and even at the extreme to which Fredrick had brought himself, souls were most readily won by kind words.

Silence.
Plat
.

Contumacious. Hardened and contumacious. When first ordered to appear before the tribunal, Fredrick had actually attempted to flee, but while he himself had been unsuccessful, his wife and children had, in fact, escaped to Hypprux.

Well, the woman and the whelps could go. Their heresy would be their downfall eventually, even in Hypprux; and by the powers granted the Inquisition to confiscate the possessions of heretics, Siegfried had Fredrick's lands and his house now, properties that were already, by revenue and sale, providing for more spies to report heresy, more tribunals to determine the truth of it, more Inquisitors to exterminate it at its roots. Fredrick, whether he confessed or not, whether he liked it or not, had done his part for Holy Church.

Plat
.

Fredrick's tongue, dragged forward out of his mouth by a pair of cast iron pincers, seared with a hot iron, and held in place with a spiked clamp, stirred, fluttered. A faint whine came from his throat.

Siegfried bent low to peer between the bars of the skeleton helmet. The white eyes followed him. Seeing.
Adoro te devote
. And when would Siegfried himself see? “Will you confess now, my son?” he said. “All you have to do is tell the truth.”

Plat
.

Fredrick did not even blink, but his tongue fluttered again.

“We know you are a heretic, Fredrick,” said Siegfried. “We know beyond any doubt. You would not have been accused had you not been a heretic. You would not have run away had you not been a heretic. You would not have been brought before the tribunal had you not been a heretic. You would not be here now if you had not made statements of belief contrary to the teachings of the Church. Do you realize the seriousness of your crime?”

Plat
.

Fredrick made no further movement, no further sound. His eyes, though, watched as Siegfried turned to the others present. “Leave me alone with him,” said the Inquisitor. “I will question him in private.”

The torturers, the notary, and Fra Giovanni all bowed. Siegfried often asked to be left alone with a prisoner. This was nothing unusual. Frequently, confessions followed such private interviews, and confessions were the entire reason for the Inquisition: the important thing was the salvation of the soul.

And so the other men filed out and the metal door swung to. Siegfried was alone with Fredrick, alone with the blistered and seared tongue, the fingers without nails, the feet with needles in the ankles, the broken thumbs and the mouth gag and the scourged and lacerated body fastened within the imprisoning armor and the steel bars.

Plat
.

Siegfried dragged a stool up beside Fredrick and sat down. He put his face close to the skeleton helmet, as close as he could without bumping into the handles of the screw spikes, but Fredrick was no longer looking at him.

Plat
.

Siegfried examined Fredrick for a long time. Silence.

Plat
.

“God must love you very much, Fredrick,” said Siegfried at last.

Fredrick did not move.

Plat
.

“Do you know how I know that He loves you?”

No reply.

Siegfried watched the eyes, waiting for a sign. A flicker. A glance. Something. But, no: nothing. Did he see? Was he seeing now?
Latens deitas
. Hidden God.
Hidden
!. Siegfried bent a little closer, until the handle of a screw spike rested against his cheekbone. “I know that he loves you, Fredrick,” he whispered, “because He has given you a chance.”

A flicker. Of the tongue or of the eyes, Siegfried could not be sure, so fleeting it was, but it was a flicker.

Plat
.

“You think that we hate you, do you not?”

Another flicker.

“Because we hurt you . . .”

Yes, there it was again. Fredrick was listening!

“But we hurt you because, like God, we love you. We love you greatly, Fredrick.”

The flickers abruptly stopped. Siegfried reached up, gave a sudden turn to the screw that bore down on the top of Fredrick's head.

A whimper, then . . . silence.

Plat
.

Siegfried rose, stood before the chained, bound, manacled man, leaned toward the helmet. Inches from his face, the blistered tongue was a skewered bit of red and white meat, oozing pus and lymph and blood, but flickering again, flickering.

Siegfried took a breath. “You think that these torments are excruciating, Fredrick, do you not? And yet, these are . . .” As always, he let the word hang on the edge of speech for a moment. “. . . nothing.”

Plat
.

“For if you die a heretic—and you surely are a heretic—you will suffer pains beyond anything you have ever known here or will ever know here.”

Plat
.

“The pains of hell, Fredrick.”

Plat
.

Siegfried spoke earnestly. This was not a bauble or a toy or a gold florin he was attempting to win, but an immortal soul. Fredrick's body was forfeit—his crimes were too great to be pardoned—but if the Inquisition could send him from the stake straight into the arms of God, then all the pain and suffering and entreaty and questioning would be proven worthwhile. “Think of it, Fredrick, my dear son. Hell is not for a moment, or for an hour, or for a day or a month or a year. It is . . . forever.”

Plat
.

Fredrick's eyes were closed, clenched as tightly as his hands would have been, Siegfried was sure, had they not been rendered a mass of pulp by the thumbscrews and the lever forceps. But Fredrick, contumacious and persistent heretic though he was, could not clench his ears. That was fitting: even the unrighteous could not block out the word of God.

“Forever,” Siegfried persisted. “Endless. Eternity. And as you burn and writhe and scream—yes, scream, Fredrick, for the Scriptures tell us that those who are in hell cry out continually—you will know that there is no escape from God's justice, and that you will burn and writhe and scream . . .” Another pause. “. . . forever.”

Plat
.