The Dream of Scipio

by Iain Pears

  Althieux grunted; then the shadow over the conversation passed.

  “You can, if you like, tell me why you are so sure this man is a heretic.”

  Althieux stretched, lazily, in front of the fire. “Something I heard. Have I ever told you of my earliest meeting with Pope Clement? My brush with greatness?”

  “You told me that you had encountered him once. But not the circumstances.”

  “Ah, the circumstances. Indeed. I must say that when he rose to his current position I had high hopes for a moment. Not everybody can claim to have assisted a pope in the days before he became so. And he remembered me, as well. But chose not to advance me any further. He considered I was quite well enough placed with Cardinal de Deaux, and needed no assistance from him. Besides, it may be that I brought back unpleasant memories, which he wished to shrug off once he exchanged the name of Pierre Roger for Clement the Sixth.”

  They lay on the floor together beside the fire, as it was cold in the evenings. There were no candles, no other light except for the logs sputtering in the large grate, and this gave off a fitful dancing light that made Althieux’s words seem the more resonant as he spoke.

  “It was when I was very young, and a novice at the house of Saint-Baudil near Nîmes. We had a new and dynamic young abbot, called Pierre Roger, known as a favorite of the king, an advisor to the powerful, a magnificent preacher, and as a man learned and effective in disputation. He turned out to be all of these; indeed, I have never met his equal before or since. He only stayed a short while; it was obvious he was destined for greater things, although we could scarcely guess how great they would be.

  “The lay courts often used to hand over cases, or at least ask for our advice, when there might be a religious complication, and the monastery had habitually gone along with this, not least because all concerned wished to avoid the return of the inquisitors, who were always looking for an opportunity to intervene. One day, such a case came up, and as the abbot’s secretary was ill, I was brought in to help and take notes for his personal record.

  “There were six of them, three men and three women, although (they hastened to assure us) only two were man and wife; the others had never had any sort of union. They came from a village nearby and had been accused of fraud. This turned out to be a falsity, a charge brought up by a jealous neighbor who wanted their land, but it became clear as the hearing progressed that there was much more to it than that. These people were heretics, and up until then had kept themselves well hidden. Only the false accusation brought them into the light of day. They would not swear, or take an oath, and when the abbot asked them why not, they told him.”

  “As simple as that?” Olivier asked.

  “As simple as that. They cannot lie. Anyway, they were quite unashamed of their beliefs and seemed to enjoy the chance to tell them to the court. I think they had accepted that their end was coming, but were completely unperturbed by it. They were asked why this was the case, and said that as their bodies were the prison in which they had been confined, the prospect of escape and return to their status as gods, alongside the Great God, could do nothing but please them. If they died well, then their next return to the material world would be the shorter.”

  “At which point,” Olivier commented dryly, “our future pope leaned over and set light to them.”

  “On the contrary; he found it all fascinating and questioned them closely for a long time, so much so that the others began to become impatient with him. Also he hates that sort of thing, and tried desperately to get them to say something, anything, which would allow him to recommend leniency. He is a legist and a theologian, well used (dare I say it) to spinning strong arguments from insubstantial threads. Had they said anything at all with even the breath of orthodoxy or repentence about it, he would have jumped on it and let them go. And the rest of the court would not have protested, for they had little stomach for the task either.

  “Nothing could be done. The more they said, the more everybody’s jaws hung open. I have never heard anyone, not even a Jew, contradict so many fundamental doctrines quite so quickly or quite so willingly. They claimed to be gods themselves, they denied the resurrection of the body, they claimed the world was evil and man a prison rather than something created in God’s own image. That God Himself, the god of the Bible, was but a meddling demon and had nothing to do with the true deity from which we all come. There was, of course, no mention of Our Lord, and they plainly believed in reincarnation. And, of course, no judgment, no hell—except for this world—no purgatory, no heaven.”

  Althieux smiled as he remembered. “And they were so serious, and so earnest; they spoke to us so intensely, as if they expected us to understand and even be converted by the sense of their words. On the other hand, they didn’t seem that surprised either by the verdict. The abbot even gave them a stern talking to; said one last time that all they had to do was say something orthodox and they would be saved. But they wouldn’t. Even then he would not give the order; he left the court to give them more time and went back to his monastery. But while he was there the local magistrates intervened. They all burned a couple of days later as thieves, for fear that the inquisitors would hear about it and come back. They didn’t want another massacre in their area. It put Clement into a fearful mood for a week; he was sure he could have talked them round eventually, he said. He had been looking forward to the next meeting.

  “It stayed with me; they turned to each other and smiled when they talked, so sweetly, and gave a warm embrace. Nothing ostentatious, you understand. Simple satisfaction and pleasure, quietly appreciated. You know, when I read the lives of the saints, sometimes I think they seem less graceful.”

  He paused, then shook himself and remembered that he had strayed far off his subject. “The point is, they referred to their soul as a river, flowing to the sea. Not individual, but coming from God and going back to God on death. That’s why I am sure your man today was the same.”

  “Extraordinary,” Olivier said. “But there is one problem.”

  “And what is that?”

  “The person who wrote the words that I quoted to this man was no heretic.”

  “No?”

  “No. He was a bishop and is still revered as a saint.”

  Althieux grinned. “Better not tell his parishioners, then. They’d be most disappointed.”

  “What is it? Is there something which concerns me?”

  “It is the plague. Your friend has brought it here.”

  Olivier’s blood turned cold, both for Althieux and for himself. No details or explanations were necessary. Everybody knew the moment they heard the words what it meant. Some of those in the hall began looking around them, as though they expected death to walk through the door at any moment; others left the table and began to pray on their knees; most, though, sat still, looking at their abbot, silently begging him to do something, send it away and save them.

  The abbot did nothing. He offered no words of consolation, provided no lead for the others to follow. Instead, he got up abruptly from the table and hurried out; Olivier thought he must be going to his friend to offer him the last rites—perhaps too late, but at least to do his job.

  He stopped being frightened, for some reason that he did not understand. He should have been; this he knew all too well. He had no more idea than anyone else what the sickness was, but was sure that the air was infected around the sick man. As he had spent the evening with him, his chances of succumbing himself seemed great. But he would not leave. He knew he would not. The idea never crossed his mind. The plague happened to others, not to him. He was not destined to die of it. Even the realization that others had this naïve opinion and died nonetheless did nothing to shake his confidence in his invulnerability. He kept on eating, watching the hall empty, the monks break up into little groups. Some walked out sobbing in the direction of their cells, the chapel, or the gardens, then he got up himself and went to Althieux’s room.

  His friend was dead, and when
he saw him Olivier realized for the first time why the world was so terrified of the plague. For what he saw was no longer a human being, just a mass of all-consuming sickness, his face wreathed in agony, his clothes stained dark with pus and sweat and vomit. He was lying on the floor, doubled over on himself, his fingertips bloody, the nails having come away from being dragged across the stone floor in agony.

  And there was the smell. Not that of death, which he had often come across before, nor of sickness, which he knew still better. None of these had any terrors for him, or for any of his time. It was the sour sweetness of the odor that shocked him, a tantalizing, seductive smell, almost, beckoning the passerby, wheedling and reassuring. The smell of the devil, in fact, clever, powerful, ruthless, and truly frightening.

  Olivier crossed himself and went outside into the morning sunlight to recover. He knelt on the ground and pushed his face close to it, to smell the fresh clean smell of the dew-soaked soil as it dried in the warmth.

  “You, brother, I need help,” he said as one of the monks hurried by. The man didn’t even pause. Olivier hailed another and another; they all ignored him. As he stood, he heard the sound of a horse, looked up and saw the abbot leaving through the main gate. Hurriedly, not looking back, urging the beast into a gallop the moment it was clear of the doors.

  The order and discipline of the monastery collapsed in minutes; three hundred years of contemplation and prayer and blind obedience wiped out by terror. Nor did it ever recover; three of the forty-five brothers survived, but they went elsewhere, and the building was abandoned for years before it was finally taken over by the duke and used as stabling. In the eighteenth century a fire in a pile of hay burned down most of it, and the depredations of builders removed much of the stone for new houses. What remained was incorporated, in 1882, into a school, a fine monument to the meritocratic ideals of Republicanism. The spot where Olivier stood in the sunlight, and where Althieux died, is now a favorite haunt of adolescent boys, who come here to smoke when their lessons are over for the morning. Wildflowers grow where Olivier buried his friend, tipping him into the grave he dug himself, saying a brief prayer in farewell, and promising to have a mass said for him when he could find a priest to say it. They are picked, every year, and the boys give them to their girlfriends of the moment.

  Even the market had few people in it as Olivier walked through, only a handful of traders remained in their places, still hoping that someone would come and buy to reward their efforts in coming. As Olivier looked around him he saw, quite plainly, his heretic of the previous day.

  The man noticed him as well. His eyes met Olivier’s.

  You know what I am, the glance said. What will you do?

  The faintest ghost of a smile crossed Olivier’s face. A half, even a quarter, of a wink. Then the meeting was broken. The man bent his head and saw to his pile of cloth. Olivier passed on his way, the bags bouncing against the side of his horse as he walked it toward the gate leading back to Avignon.

  Even though he was mindful of Althieux’s warning, and circuited so that he came into Avignon from the north, nonetheless the precautions were insufficient. As he stopped one night at a rough hostel for travelers on the far side of the Rhône, already back in Provençal territory, he heard two merchants talking.

  “Don’t know who they’re looking for, but they must want him badly.”

  “What’s this?” he said. “Trouble on the roads?”

  “Soldiers,” replied one of the men. “Don’t know whose they are, but they’re stopping everyone heading for Avignon. I’m told every way into the city has got blocks on it.”

  “Maybe they’re after brigands,” Olivier suggested.

  “No, there’s only a few of them. Enough to stop one man,” he said, looking at Olivier carefully, “but not much use for anything else.”

  He thought as he lay scratching on his flea-ridden straw pallet that night. If they were searching everybody, then they could not know what he looked like. It must be that they anticipated the letter giving him away. Therefore, the solution was simple.

  The next morning, after he’d had some bread and wine, he started off again, but instead of heading south to Avignon, he turned east inland and toward the hills that rose on the far side. Again, it added time onto his journey; in all, the detours took him a total of ten days, but as he did not want his throat cut, and as Ceccani would not have thanked him for losing the letter, he had no real choice. He headed straight for the chapel of Saint Sophia, thinking that by far the most sensible thing would be to consign it into his friend’s hands. Ceccani could then send some of his own bodyguards to bring the Italian, and the letter, into the city. His friend would like that; indeed, the prospect of being escorted into the town surrounded by an armed retinue in full regalia like some visiting potentate might well be the high point of his life, for he always had a grand sense of occasion.

  It began to rain the day before he arrived, and kept up a steady downpour for nearly thirty-six hours. He was soaked to the skin and shivering by the time he finally made it to the top of the hill, hoping desperately that he would soon see his friend, huddling over a fire in the makeshift encampment he had once proudly described. But Pisano was not there, of course; he rarely was when he was needed. The chapel was deserted; only the mess all around—the poles for the scaffolding, the scorched patches on the grass where he had built his fires at night, the splotches of bright red and blue on the earth where he had washed his brushes after his work—suggested that anyone had ever been there. It was bleak, and desolate, half finished and with the air of something that never would be finished. Olivier stood uncertainly, gazing out over the thick woodlands that surrounded the hill, listening to the rain pattering down on tens of thousands of leaves so that the whole of creation seemed to be drumming with the noise. In the distance he could just see the smoke rising from the chimneys of Vaison, which he had not visited for years. He shook the rain out of his eyes, then turned miserably to the chapel, which offered the only dryness within reach. Once inside, in the gloom, for the darkness of the sky meant little light came through the windows, he shivered; he knew a fever was coming and that if he didn’t get dry he would be in great danger. Even as the shivering grew worse and he had trouble standing, he still never considered the possibility that he, too, might have the plague. Instead he was as practical as he could be, knowing that he had little time before he would be too weak to stand. He took the warm blanket from his pack, his flask of water, took off his wet clothes, and, teeth chattering from the cold, wrapped himself up and huddled on the floor.

  He had no idea how long he slept, possibly a day or more, and half the time he did not know whether he was asleep or not. Rather, he kept passing in and out of dreams, sometimes thinking clearly, sometimes only aware that he could hardly think at all, and luxuriating in the strange thoughts that passed through his mind without his bidding. At some stage the rains stopped; he noticed the sudden silence, then the skies cleared for the chapel grew light once more, and a shaft of sunlight streamed in through the windows to illuminate Pisano’s unfinished work.

  Olivier lay there and looked; for as much as half a day he looked at what his friend had accomplished, sometimes aware he was looking at artifice, sometimes thinking he was looking at real events. He was entranced and knew that all of the Italian’s boasting, all his claim to be doing something the world had never seen before, were perfectly justified. He had created real people and endowed the story with life. Olivier saw how he used Isabelle de Fréjus to make his Magdalen, and wondered how anyone had ever considered that the blessed saint could have looked like anyone else. Even though it was unfinished, the panel of the saints arriving on dry land in their miraculous boat made him wonder at the glory of God who could protect such a frail craft on such violent seas. He even noticed that Pisano had given the blind man his face, and saw that Sophia was Rebecca. That darkness, with the radiance shining from her, the kindness of her gestures, the sometimes rough way she spoke, the
twist of her head and the fall of her hair. Who would not wish to see such a person? Who could not love her?

  He dozed again, and heard her words as she addressed the sinner who came to her. “You will see when you understand what love is,” and she passed her hand over his face—an imperious, commanding gesture, not something mannered as some fairground charlatan would do—and the sunlight streamed into his eyes and woke him with a start.

  The fever had gone, but still Olivier lay there, trembling in the memory of the dream, rather than from the illness. Eventually he got up, his bones creaking, his stomach protesting from hunger, his mouth dry and foul-tasting from the lack of water. His head hurt abominably, and he cried out in pain as he stood up, then knelt down again to stop the dizziness.

  And then he remembered why he was there. He checked his clothes to make sure they were wearable—they were still damp and clammy, but would dry swiftly enough once he got moving. He drank thirstily and forced himself to eat some of the bread, now green and moldy, that was in his pack. Then he reached in and took out the cardinal’s letter. After hesitating for a moment, he slipped his finger under the grand seal of the bishopric of Winchester and opened it up, still unsure whether he was doing the right thing or making the biggest mistake of his life. He began to read. He read it six times, concentrating as much as his weakened state allowed. When he was sure he had got it, he put it down and recited it to himself, finally picking it up once more and correcting his errors in recollection. In an hour he had it entire, not a word out of place, the message hidden in the one place soldiers could not pry.

  As for the letter itself, there were few enough places to put it; eventually he decided that the rough stone altar would have to do. He put his shoulder against it and heaved until it leaned over just far enough to create a gap at its base. He slipped the letter underneath and let it down, then sat down himself once more to steady his head.