Popes and Phantoms

by John Whitbourn

  ‘You would soon tire of it if you’d been as close to the machinery as I have,’ warned Slovo. ‘The cogs slip and grind and they spit blood. People are the grist under the mill-wheels. What emerges, that cake you call history, is bound together with gore.’

  ‘It was always so,’ replied the Vehmist blithely. ‘But please do not think us so crude or superficial as to aim for mere visible events. True, we wish for Cromwell-the-catalyst to purge the Church and religious-houses from his native land but that is not the entirety of it. All the foretellings, the anti-Papal legislation, the dictated divorce, the martyrs and creation of another Protestant super-power are incidentals. Do you think we’d really stretch forth our hand to create the … “Church of England”?’

  ‘Possibly not,’ said Slovo to humour him. ‘There’s small pleasure in seeing an abortion get up and walk away.’

  ‘Just so, Admiral. As it happens, Cromwell, our little joint creation, will succeed beyond our wildest expectations. But even so, we have others in place to serve our desires. No, the crux of the matter is to destroy a way of life, a vital social support system for the poor and needy, as well as ideological centres of resistance to us. We want to knock a prop away, bring the edifice down, and let someone else build anew in its place. It’s in our mind to provide a mighty leg-up for the land-seizing classes, the secular and nationalist proto-bourgeoisie, you understand. In selling them the expansive monastery lands – as he shall – King Fatso VIII of England will sign the death warrant of his kind and there is also a certain beauty in seeing that social algebra start to work through.’

  ‘And with Luther it is just the same only writ large,’ said Admiral Slovo, assisting him.

  ‘Exactly,’ smiled the Vehmist. ‘And, as a by-product, all the chopping and changing and cynicism will discredit religion for the masses. The whole thing is so elegant.’

  ‘It was bound to come,’ said Slovo indifferently. ‘The rumblings of reformation were heard throughout even my life.’

  ‘Debatable, Admiral,’ countered the Vehmist. ‘It takes individuals, men acting under free-will to turn those “rumblings” into proper thunder and lightning. The Reformation needs its gardeners before it can flower. What you, and we, have caused to live will grow and change Europe – and thus the world. The playing out of that particular game occupies two full pages of The Book. Seeing it through is to be our major preoccupation for the next half-millennium!’

  ‘I did well out of it, I suppose,’ said Slovo wistfully. ‘Bracciolini’s17 personal, annotated copies of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things and Epictetus’s Encheiridion. Quite some finds!’

  ‘We had to send his heir floating under the Bridge of Sighs to acquire them,’ agreed the Vehmist. ‘He wouldn’t sell, you see.’

  ‘They certainly kept me diverted for upward of a month,’ said Slovo, indicating he thought the arrangement well worth it. ‘The outpourings of Lucretius were quite scandalizing however. Epicurianism is the antithesis of Stoicism!’

  ‘There will be room for both persuasions in our world, Admiral,’ said the Vehmist, in liberal mode. ‘And in so saying I’m reminded that it’s you we have to thank for there being such a world to look forward to … The prophecies focused and converged, all matters appeared to come to a point – and at its centre was you.’

  ‘Mere chance,’ said Slovo.

  ‘All predicted,’ the Vehmist objected. ‘Because of you, there was a Grand General Council meeting, one of only two ever convened – and that previous one was to note the conversion of the Emperor Constantine.18

  ‘This Council,’ asked Slovo, ‘it wouldn’t have been six summers ago, would it?’

  ‘That’s right,’ answered the Vehmist. ‘In the Damascus Casbah, away from prying monotheistic eyes.’

  ‘I thought I discerned a certain thinning in the ranks of high society,’ said the Admiral, pleased even at this stage in his life to have a wild supposition confirmed. ‘I had Vatican security look into it.’

  ‘I know – you scamp, you.’

  ‘But nothing came back to me.’

  ‘I should hope not, Admiral. It was the most vital of ventures, and far from lightly undertaken. Our wisest and best people, those who’d spent their life in analysis of The Book, couldn’t see beyond the crisis that was developing. We sensed either the ending or success of our plans. There were even suggestions that the day of the gods’ release was at hand.’

  ‘No,’ smiled Slovo. ‘Nothing so minor. They’re still tucked safely away. I looked in on them not so long ago.’

  Piqued by such blasphemous levity, the Vehmist spoke more coldly. ‘It turned out to be an even greater issue, if such there could be. It was the day, the one day, that you were born for. We – and the rest of creation – had to hold our breath and await your kind decision.’

  Admiral Slovo looked at the continuing, living world around him; his home and children, the birds and the sea, and he pondered the attractions of Apocalypse now. ‘I wonder,’ he thought aloud, ‘if I decided right?’

  The Year 1520

  ‘A LIGHT TO (AND FROM) THE GENTILES: In which I decide the fate of the Universe and become Lord of the Isle of Capri.’

  ‘The clockwork is being wound,’ said the flamboyant young dandy, smiling as he spoke. ‘Your presence is required.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ replied Admiral Slovo, shocked, even here in this wayside wineshop, at the invasion of his privacy. But the dandy had already gone – vanished most unnaturally into nothing.

  ‘Fires are being stoked high,’ added a dark, lascivious merchant from another nearby table. ‘Matters are near to the boil. Your presence is required.’

  ‘If you do not desist, I will stab you,’ answered the Admiral gently but firmly. After all, what point was there in his present vertiginous position if he could not socialize unaccosted? Slovo, sad to say, no longer had any leeway of patience for humans. In this case, none was needed, however, for the merchant was also … gone.

  ‘Desist from what?’ queried the Admiral’s companion, the Rabbi Megillah. He was unsettled by the intrusion of knife-talk – Rome’s ubiquitous, third-favourite topic. ‘To whom are you speaking?’

  The Admiral turned back to his flask and goblet, the merest ripple on his ocean of composure now smoothed. ‘To no one, I suspect,’ he replied. ‘Kindly overlook the matter.’

  His long years as ghetto-leader had trained Megillah not to distinguish between gentile request and gentile command.

  ‘… though, of course, we aspire to reunion with the Land in Messianic times,’ he continued, faultlessly from the break in the conversation, ‘where an even greater number of mitzvah – relating to the Temple and farming and so on – will be available for performance. This will further enhance the degree of sanctification and holiness amongst the children of Israel, which is the pre-requirement for the Messianic presence.’

  Admiral Slovo nodded his understanding. ‘Whereupon,’ he prompted, ‘you will presumably be the foretold “light to the gentile nations” and history (being merely the record of the deeds of the wicked) will equally presumably cease …’

  ‘Er … perhaps,’ answered Megillah, a trifle nervously and brisker than his normal style. ‘The issue impinges upon the eschatological beliefs of your own faith and could be construed as, er … contradictory at certain points. One likes to leave the subject unexpounded and rely on divinely ordained goodwill to permit co-existence in God’s good time.’

  Admiral Slovo was born half a millennium before such declarations could be taken at their face value and so construed it (only partly correctly, as it happened) to be a reference to the Inquisition.

  ‘Just so,’ he said, waving a calming, gauntleted hand over the theological difficulties of his friend. ‘Time will tell, I always say. Our dust will answer to one call or another, I’m sure.’

  ‘Indeed,’ agreed Megillah diffidently, obliged by the age to fear traps even from the friends of his comparative youth.

  ‘I
do so … enjoy our talks,’ said the Admiral slowly, surprised at his own use of such an emotional term. ‘They quite counter an equal number of hours spent attending to His Holiness’s Babylonian travails. One naturally suspects the survival of pockets of good faith and idealism, but it is refreshing nevertheless to actually encounter them. I recall that …’

  ‘Your presence is required.’

  ‘Can you see him? Is he real?’ Slovo asked Megillah calmly.

  When the Rabbi cautiously nodded his white-topped head, the Admiral turned to face the voice. ‘Yes, you’re real, enough,’ he said, prodding a Swiss guardsman in the chest. ‘So I will listen – but no more than that.’

  The guard had seen a great deal in a short life and certainly too much to worry about honour or insults. On duty, he could not be offended. ‘Your presence is required,’ he repeated evenly.

  ‘By His Holiness and now?’ Slovo helpfully expanded.

  The guardsman’s eyes glittered slightly in assent. ‘My message is delivered,’ he said. ‘Make or mar as you will.’ Three steps backward and he was gone as suddenly as he’d arrived.

  ‘You should go,’ advised Rabbi Megillah, as gently as he could. ‘We are doing nothing here—’

  ‘Precisely!’ said the Admiral, smiling tightly. ‘I am increasingly attached to nothing, whilst the calls to something grow dimmer by the day. And when that something is the murky labyrinth of His Apostolic Holiness’s world, the sentiment is infinitely multiplied.’

  Megillah recognized the mental state all too well, but naive friendship still caused him to shake his head and tut-tut.

  ‘I know, I know,’ said Admiral Slovo, levering himself up and dropping some coins on their table, ‘but what can he do to me? What can he take that I value? My disposition makes me a free man in a world of slaves. Disappearing messengers and Swiss escorts, both be damned; come and walk with me awhile. Tell me some more about your end of the Universe.’

  The two old men pottered off.

  At the end of the Via Sacra, on the point of leaving the old Roman Forum, they paused before the ancient Arch of Titus.

  ‘Everything is there,’ observed the Rabbi, ‘recorded in stone by Emperor Titus’s craftsmen. The spirit of rebellion, human strife, the loss of all that we held dear manifested in the structure of our Temple.’

  ‘But the triumph shown,’ interjected the Admiral, ‘is that of a dead Emperor of a dead Empire. Whereas you, the vanquished tribe, are still extant. Who then is the actual victor? There is that comfort to be drawn here.’

  Rabbit Megillah nodded. ‘I concede,’ he smiled, ‘there might, on reflection, be a multiplicity of lessons contained within this monument.’

  ‘They may have your Menorah,’ said Slovo, pointing to the scene of the sacred Temple candelabrum being borne aloft by exulting Romans, ‘but what good did it do them, eh?’

  The Rabbi was never given the opportunity to answer.

  The carved images and decorations of the Arch began to boil and writhe, rising in and out of the depth of the stone like tiny figures in a snake-pit.

  Slovo heard Rabbi Megillah gasp and thus knew that he was not alone in this between-world. However, since his companion was by profession and birth a natural victim, there was precious little comfort in that.

  Suddenly, from deep inside the Arch’s interior, a life-size head and torso burst forwards with enormous force. As the stone strained and bulged, a man’s face broke through into the open. He screamed and his eyes were full of horror.

  A second and third figure joined the first in similar manner, as if they’d been hurled against a permeable membrane. They struggled fiercely, striving to be fully free, howling horribly all the while, but could get no further.

  Then, in answer to a higher, inaudible command, the trio fell instantly silent and fixed their gaze upon Slovo and Megillah. A great quiet prevailed until even Admiral Slovo felt it oppressive. Eventually the first figure spoke.

  ‘I, Titus,’ it said, and then drew slightly back into the Arch.

  ‘I, Vespasian,’ said the second and likewise retreated.

  ‘I, Josephus,’ said the third; and the other two returned.

  ‘We burn!’ they shouted in unison. ‘We suffer! We suffer in Hell!’

  ‘For what I did!’ soloed the Emperor Titus.

  ‘For what I took!’ added his predecessor, Vespasian.

  ‘For what I wrote!’ said Josephus, the renegade and historian.

  ‘Help us! Save us! We burn!’ the chorus was renewed and with desperate gestures they indicated one particular part of the now mobile frieze surrounding them.

  Admiral Slovo tracked along the line of sight.

  ‘They are stretching for the Menorah,’ he observed to the awe-struck Megillah.

  ‘It is time!’ howled Titus, clearly in great pain.

  ‘Put it back!’ gasped Vespasian.

  ‘It is tiiiiiiiiiime!’ agreed Josephus and the others joined in his screech.

  The three, suddenly seized with renewed panic, struggled all the more vigorously but to no avail. Try as they might, they could not free more than head or hands, nor reach a finger’s width nearer the tiny engraved symbol of their desires. As before, they seemed to have heard some secret signal and it was not long in being enforced.

  From the Arch’s unguessable depths came claws and grapples which fastened on to the unfortunate three, tearing their flesh and drawing blood. Slowly but inexorably, though fighting with the strength of fear, they were drawn back until lost from sight. A final pitiful sob issued from one as the stone surface closed over his mouth and then all was quiet once more. The Arch was no longer alive.

  ‘Blah blah blah, blah-blah,’ said a nearby voice in due course, allowing Slovo to revive from his reverie and thus notice that he had returned to the world he knew.

  ‘Your presence is required,’ repeated the voice. ‘I’ll say that just once more and then: violence.’

  The Admiral recognized the tone, and the tracing of its owner gradually grew as a priority in his mind, thus compelling him to re-set his thoughts.

  ‘Master Droz?’ he said, turning to face the giant Swiss Captain. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Exasperated,’ replied the Swiss, ‘but implacable. Why will you not listen to me, honoured Admiral?’

  ‘I was deep in thought, Droz; pondering the course of the wise man in response to curious messages.’

  ‘Ah, well, I can settle that for you, Admiral. He responds to them promptly; particularly when I am the bearer. What’s up with that Jew?’

  ‘He is pondering likewise, I suspect.’

  ‘He could at least say hello. No good comes of all this thinking, you see. That is why God granted us instincts: to save us from slavery to fallible reason.’

  Admiral Slovo, who, if he cared for anything, cared for his Stoic beliefs, suppressed a shudder. ‘I propose a deal, Master Swiss,’ he said swiftly. ‘I will comply with your wishes in every single particular and, in return, you spare me your natural philosophy. How’s that?’

  ‘Done, Admiral – though you deprive me of my rebuke regarding your treatment of my sergeant-at-arms in the wineshop. This from you, Admiral – a man I call my friend!’

  They both laughed, the Swiss with a bellow, the Admiral with a dried-up bark of amusement, at the absurdity of the notion of friendship between such as they. Then Slovo allowed Numa Droz to lead the way, leaving Rabbi Megillah still rapt with shock before the silent Arch.

  ‘Don’t fret, Master Droz,’ said the Admiral, consolingly, ‘life is full of disappointments. However, on this day of portents, you may escort me to yet another.’

  ‘Admiral,’ said Leo X, Christ’s senior (recognized) representative on Earth, ‘you have kept us waiting!’

  Admiral Slovo parried this demand for an explanation by treating it as a statement of fact – thereby letting down the massed courtiers, priests and guards, who had been anticipating his discomfiture. They should have known of old that the Papal Investi
gator was poor sport in the tormenting stakes.

  ‘Everything comes to him who waits,’ said the Admiral politely, lazily selecting one of the more shop-worn phrases out of his vast collection of clichés.

  ‘Not poxing well fast enough, it doesn’t!’ roared the Pope. ‘Ach! Sit on this, you Caprisi … Admiral!’

  Slovo affected not to notice the Pope’s insulting thumb gesture, whilst registering that there was sadly little left of Giovanni Medici, ‘the Golden Florentine’, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent and youthful companion of Michelangelo. Life had turned him into Leo X, in whom appetite had prevailed over reason in Admiral Slovo’s stern judgement, and there was now a permanent sheen of grease on his chin to prove it.

  Leo looked ill and his short temper bubbled forth from deeper springs than the revenge of over-indulgence. The effect was so profound that the Admiral drew modestly from his drying well of human sympathy and actually felt sorry for his master.

  ‘If I had someone else with a brain whom I could call on,’ said the Pope, petulantly flinging a fig at his advisors, who shied from it as they would a cannonball, ‘someone with better hearing and more obedient legs, then rest assured I’d do so. However, I’m stuck with you, aren’t I, Ad-mir-al?’

  Slovo sensed that, even for him, this might not be the best time for a witty remark. There was more ill will than sunshine in the room as far as he was concerned. Any one of the career or just plain personal enemies gathered there would have been both swift and happy to implement any Papal decision to deal with him. Moreover, something so novel as to be interesting was afoot and he preferred not to miss it. So Admiral Slovo smiled and said nothing, and the Pope’s acid twinge passed like a cloud.

  Leo was uncharacteristically deep in thought and was obviously troubled. ‘I have a dream …’ he started – it was a standard opening recommended by the rhetorical schools of the day, a perennial favourite. ‘In fact, I get it all the time now,’ he continued in a less elevated rush. ‘At first I put it down to the cucumber brandy, but the same thing kept coming back, again and again. It’s burning me up, Slovo. I tell you, somehow, I don’t know how, but it’s been revealed to me I’m going to die, that I’m hellbound, if this thing isn’t solved!’