Knowledge of Angels Read online

  ‘Yes, I am, Holiness, but . . .’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But Holiness, you have not seen her. She is – she is terrible. Everyone turns away, but I do not blame them. If I could stop thinking of her, I would. Holiness, when you see her, blackness . . . it is blackness in your heart. You are cast down, you cannot bear it. It is the worst thing you could ever know . . .’ He recovered himself a little, and said, ‘He said it would be blasphemy to baptize such a thing.’

  Severo paced up and down the garden for a while. Then he clapped his hands, and when a servant appeared he asked for Brother Rafal. Rafal came, wearing a simple monk’s habit, a young man, only a little older than Jaime.

  Severo said, ‘Rafal, this is my brother, Jaime.’ Jaime looked up in amazement. ‘I want you find him a cell for the night, and a suit of good clothes and stout shoes. In the morning you are to go with Jaime to the intramontana, and there you are to find a certain child, and bring it here. I will give you letters of authority and a purse. You are to be rapid and discreet. There may not be much time; the child seems to be dying, and the less attention we attract from the vulgarity the better. Do you accept this charge?’

  ‘Yes, Holiness.’

  ‘Good. Go with Rafal now, Jaime. I need to pray.’ When Jaime stood up, but stayed rooted to the spot, as if confused, he added, ‘You have done right, Jaime. You won’t regret it.’ Then, falling into Latin, a tongue very close to that of his island but different enough for him to suppose that Jaime would not understand him, he said to Rafal, ‘The boy is urgent to baptize the child you are seeking, but do not do so. He will not think to do it himself; he seems not to realize that is permitted. And I would first like to see what made the priest of Sant Jeronimo refuse his duty.’

  4

  Palinor had been incarcerated for months in the dungeons of the provincial citadel before a clerk in Ciudad, working doggedly through a pile of requests for warrants, liberties and placets, came upon an unusual one. He was a very junior clerk, still in the subdiaconate, and of lowly rank. He raised his head and said to Laurenx, his overseer, who worked alongside him at the long table covered with vellums, papers, inkwells and seals where he sat day after day, ‘What do we do with atheists?’

  ‘Put them to death, I think,’ said Laurenx, without looking up.

  ‘We have a protocol for that?’ the clerk said, appalled. ‘Do I have to . . .’

  ‘You’ve really got an atheist?’ Laurenx asked, putting down his pen. ‘What does he want to do?’

  ‘Travel to Ciudad,’ said the clerk, looking at the paper as though it were poisoned.

  ‘Well, don’t look so green,’ said Laurenx. ‘We don’t have to burn him ourselves. Just refer to higher authority. Take the paper to the Consistory Office.’

  ‘Yes,’ the clerk said, getting slowly and reluctantly off his stool. ‘But what will happen to the man, Laurenx?’

  ‘I’m sure we burn atheists,’ Laurenx said. ‘If they don’t recant, that is. I expect he gets a chance to recant. Just refer it upwards and forget about it, friend. It isn’t our responsibility.’

  The order from the Consistory Office baffled the prefect. ‘Transfer the alleged atheist at once, under escort, to Ciudad,’ it said. It did not say why. It was an unusual order, and the prefect could not discern from the paper surrounding the line in a crabbed official hand, whether the prisoner was to be sent under escort because he was, after all, a person of importance, or because he was a dangerous criminal. Naturally, it was to be hoped that it was because he was dangerously criminal; if he were really of importance, then the prefect might be in difficulties for having locked him up. It was in any case hard to decide whether the escort should be of a kind to honour or to disgrace the escorted. No guidance. The prefect looked all over both sides of the paper in case anyone had thought to scrawl him a note. Then he sent his servant to the dungeon tower at the lower end of the citadel to discover if the atheist was still alive. There were no arrangements for feeding prisoners; their families, or sometimes their parish priests, from charity, looked after them. The prefect was vexed with himself for not having considered that if the atheist’s story was true he had neither resource. And clearly it would be embarrassing if the man had died while in his keeping, whether he was wanted as a personage, or as a criminal.

  Palinor was alive. Months in the dark had cast a sickly pallor on his skin, and he was as filthy as prisoners usually were, but he was not starving; Lazaro’s mother, out of a blend of hope and charity, had fed him every day. The prefect stood just inside his windows and watched Palinor, released into the sunlit space within the citadel walls, where wild fig and cactus and rosemary grew in an impromptu garden, blink at the light and take uncertain steps along the path. The prefect decided that ‘at once’ could be thought to mean in three days’ time – a little space in which the man, if permitted exercise, would recover the ability to walk steadily. He watched with irritation as the ragged creature below him picked a sprig of rosemary, crushed it, and raising it delicately to his nostrils breathed its aroma like some effete aristocrat or silly girl. A ruse had occurred to him; if he escorted Palinor to Ciudad himself, he would surely be in the clear. Either as honouring or as securing the prisoner, he might be thought unduly diligent, but could not be seriously in the wrong, either way.

  On the third evening he summoned the prisoner and said, ‘You are sent for to Ciudad. We will ride there in the morning.’ He watched closely to see if any trace of guilt or alarm crossed the man’s face. Palinor said only, ‘Could you make arrangements for me to wash, in that case?’ Suppressing an impulse of rage at the man’s insolence, the prefect said that he could. Later he wondered why he found the man insolent, and realized that it was simply that the prisoner was not cowed. His unease increased.

  In the morning the horses were brought to the gatehouse tower. A bush of broom like a fanning fountain of yellow flower leaned over the road and carpeted the ground beneath the horses’ hooves with fallen petals. The prefect came last, and found his soldiers mounted and the prisoner, hands bound behind his back, seated on horseback, wearing a clean shirt and patched rustic trousers like a working man. He was clean again, his beard and hair glossed by the early light. He had a good seat, upright and steady in the saddle, so that the sight of his hands tied seemed ridiculous, and the prefect ordered them to be unbound. A shouted order, and the string of horses clattered away through the town.

  Good housewives were awake, early as it was, and sweeping their frontages. A farmer with a donkey-load of fresh greens for the market was setting up stall in the square. From the church tower a bell spoke the hour. Early as it was, Lazaro’s mother had got up to take her leave of Palinor, waving as he rode past in clothes that had belonged to her dead brother, and calling to him, ‘Don’t forget us in the great city!’

  Beyond the square the houses were poorer and the street dusty; then they were riding into open country. The road was lined with roughly piled stone walls, and it twisted about and climbed into wooded hills. The cool of the night lingered in the shade of the pines, and below the road, sparkling between the trees, was the sea. They could hear it, sighing and fidgeting against the shore below. Then the road rounded the headland, plunged inland and descended towards the heat of the plain. Palinor rode beside the prefect, looking around him.

  The plain was thickly carpeted with a deep pile of flourishing green wheat, spread out below the trees of thousands of orchards. Fig and almond trees were planted everywhere, with here and there a grove of oranges, a grove of apricots, or a vineyard. Once they passed a peasant ploughing with a donkey hitched to a hand-plough, cutting a furrow of startling blood-red earth. Hills of modest height but dramatic outline, with fretted and broken crests, rose in the distances, the grey rock overtopping the mantles of green-blue woodland which clothed them. On all the crests of the gentle undulations of the plain stood little towns; the golds and greys, ochres and terracottas of their stone and their roof tiles tinting them with the co
lours of the ground from which they rose. In each one the largest and the highest building was a venerable church. They trotted in a moving cloud of white dust raised from the road by the horses’ beating hooves, and soon were coated in dust themselves, so that they looked like millers.

  The road led from town to town – or perhaps they were only villages – into narrow streets, twisting through them into a central square, with the church on one side of it, and sometimes trees for shade, out into narrow streets again, and on towards the next little place. Twice they stopped to rest the horses and let them drink – there were basins in the village squares. The second time the prefect dismounted, and dipping the chained cup into the water basin, drank deeply. Then he filled the cup again and handed it up to Palinor. Gracefully, his prisoner leaned down from the saddle to bring his lips within the scope of the extended chain holding the cup. His horse jittered sideways, not liking the pull of the leaning rider, and Palinor soothed it, speaking foreign words to it and caressing its neck as though he owned it.

  As they rode further, a great range of mountains moved into sight in the west, some thirty miles distant, but even at so great a distance impressive. They were so sudden and so soaring that they looked as though they were painted on a curtain, hanging vertical at the margins of the plain. What seemed at first to be a band of bright cloud standing over them, revealed itself as the road edged nearer to them to be a region of sunlit snow. Much nearer the road an equally sudden height reared up abruptly from the plain, topped with a tower and bells.

  ‘Why is there a church so far from any town?’ Palinor asked the prefect.

  ‘That is Monte Mauro. It is a sanctuary. The famous hermit Learned Mauro lived and died there, long ago. Now there is a monastery. It is a place of pilgrimage.’

  ‘There are pilgrims?’

  ‘Every feast day. And there are many sanctuaries. This is an island of saints and hermits.’

  ‘What is the secular government here?’

  ‘We have none. Our cardinal is our prince.’

  ‘But you – you are not a cleric?’

  ‘I am in minor orders. I shall not rise beyond the rank of prefect. But there are four prefectures; I might one day get a richer one.’ Suddenly the prefect bit his lip, and fell silent. He realized that he was talking to the man like an equal. Yet there was a need to talk. The hardships of the long ride were shared; while they rode there was heat, dust, thirst in common, and that was all.

  By and by Palinor asked, ‘What are all these windmills for? They cannot be needed to grind wheat?’ They were approaching Ciudad, and little towers topped by a ring of sails like the petals of a sunflower were scattered everywhere, spinning in the evening air.

  ‘They raise water. By late summer the plain is parched. The Saracens taught the peasants how to do that, I believe.’

  ‘Can I stop long enough to look closely at one?’ Palinor asked.

  ‘If you wish. What do you want to see?’

  ‘How the drive is transmitted.’ The prefect did not answer; he did not understand. But he ordered a halt while Palinor inspected a windmill, and the cistern full of green water that its arrangements of buckets and chain had filled from the depths of the earth.

  ‘Isn’t the water brackish?’ Palinor asked, returning to the prefect’s side.

  ‘No; the wells are sweet and fresh.’

  ‘There is something to be said for the Saracens then.’

  ‘If you are a Saracen,’ said the prefect, ‘you have only to say so. There is a Saracen quarter in Ciudad. As long as you obeyed the curfew and kept within the city walls you would be at liberty. The Saracens can even worship – there is a permitted mosque – as long as they do not proselytize. There is some trade with Egypt; Saracens can come and go . . .’

  ‘But I am not a Saracen,’ said Palinor.

  ‘A pity,’ said the prefect. They crested a little rise in the undulating road, and Ciudad came into view, ringed by golden walls, with stout square bastions, a fine castle topping a hill within the walls, and beyond a great sweep of golden sand curving round a wide bay. A little forest of ships’ masts marked the port, and the long roof of a buttressed cathedral, prominently in view when the city was first seen from the road, dropped out of sight behind walls and buildings as they drew nearer.

  ‘What is to be done with me?’ asked Palinor, softly.

  At this first tiny sign of the abject mind of a prisoner, the prefect’s heart began to harden again. But he spoke truly when he said, ‘I don’t know. I advise you to dissemble.’

  ‘I thought God had proscribed lying,’ said Palinor.

  ‘But you do not believe in God, you say.’

  ‘You do,’ said Palinor. ‘And lying would demean me.’ They entered the city gates at a smart trot, and turned towards the cathedral.

  ‘I fell in,’ said Palinor, to the panel of the Consistory Court. He no longer laughed at it. His months in the citadel dungeon had given him time to realize his predicament and perceive the difficulty of reversing what he had thought of at first as temporary misfortune. The conversation was in Latin, in which he was fluent; the churchmen had conceded that to interrogate him in their own tongue, of which he knew only a few words, would be oppressive.

  ‘So, to recapitulate,’ said Fra Felip, who was in charge of the session, ‘you say that you did not intend to trade, to parley or to survey the island. You say that you had no intention of coming here at all. You vehemently deny being an agent sent to subvert the faith of true Christians . . .’

  ‘I had no plan for any dealings here of any kind,’ said Palinor, ‘because I had no intention of coming here at all. My arrival was an accident.’

  ‘You fell in.’

  ‘And then I swam ashore.’

  ‘You say you are a person of importance in your own country?’ The questioner was the oldest of the three men facing Palinor. He had thin features, withered like leaves in winter into a pattern of some beauty, which they might not have possessed in full flush. Behind the three men on the bench, behind the narrow table at which they sat, was a triple stained glass window narrating the mysteries of the faith in glowing colours suffused by transmitted daylight. Palinor’s face, though he did not know it, was blotched with a splash of carmine light cast by the wound in the side of Christ, portrayed in the central light, crucified.

  ‘I am a king.’

  ‘You claim to be the king of – where was it? – Aclar?’

  ‘Not the king; one of several.’

  ‘There can never be more than one king,’ said the third adjudicator, frowning.

  ‘I am a prince, then.’

  ‘You are the son of a king?’

  ‘No; I am a prince not by blood but by achievement. I am an architect and engineer. It is the gratitude of my people that has brought me the rank of prince.’

  The three men exchanged glances. ‘Tell us this, then,’ said Fra Felip, ‘how could a vessel fail to stop and rescue a person falling from it, if the person was of any importance?’

  ‘It was night,’ said Palinor. ‘A calm night of the brightest stars. We were setting course by them, but although I have often done that, I had never seen such brilliance. Perhaps it was because the moon was at her slightest crescent. I went up on deck to look again. I leaned over the stern of the vessel, and I exchanged a few words with the steersman. I noticed that he was a stripling, very young, and very sleepy, so I offered to take the tiller for an hour while he slept. He curled up on the deck at my feet, pillowed his head in his arms, and fell asleep at once, while I stood content, feeling through my hands how the waters pulled on the rudder and admiring the magnificence of the celestial night. The other vessels of the fleet . . .

  ‘There was a fleet?’

  ‘Seven vessels. We were on an errand of some importance. The other vessels were all ahead, being less laden. I felt something snag the rudder – a jar, and then a loss of movement in the tiller I was holding. Something had jammed it. Most foolishly, I swung myself over the r
ail and climbed down to see if I could free it. But whatever it was floated free of its own accord; the rudder swung suddenly, and plucked me from my foothold. I fell in. I think the boy on the deck above me did not wake; and you would be amazed, sirs, how fast a vessel that has seemed to be moving gently in light airs pulls away from a poor unfortunate in the water! And, of course, it was moving on the wrong degree, because the rudder was free.’

  ‘So you are saying that nobody would have known you had fallen in?’

  ‘They must have searched for me eventually; but how could they have found me in many miles of water, and in darkness? Retracing an uncertain course, not knowing the moment when I was lost?’

  ‘And so you swam, you say?’

  ‘The stars were bright, sirs. And I had some memory of an obscure island lying to the west of our intended course, some distance . . . I trod water for a while, considering my plight, and then began to swim. I swam westwards by the stars while they lasted, and then away from the rising sun. Then towards the land which rose in the distance before me. Before nightfall of the second night I reached a rock, far out, and almost submerged, but it allowed me rest. When the sun rose again I left the rock and swam ashore.’

  ‘You have no mark of rank. You wear common clothes,’ said Fra Aguilo.

  ‘When I fell in, I was wearing a quilted jacket embroidered in gold, and studded with pearls,’ said Palinor. ‘It soaked water at once, and dragged me down. I struggled out of it for my life. The full folds of my shirt and trousers likewise hindered me, and I abandoned them.’

  ‘You were not wearing jewels, or rings?’

  ‘I think I was wearing a ring. I do not know what became of it.’

  ‘This story is as full of holes as mouldy cheese,’ said the second inquisitor. ‘How do you expect us to believe that a man of rank would attempt to repair a rudder himself, with his bare hands?’