“Let’s start at the Velvet Chapel this year,” Pivot suggested.
“I haven’t changed my mind; I still think that’s the nicest passage through the stations,” Dex agreed. He turned to Marco and the others. “It has been such a pleasure to travel with you; thank you for sharing the road with us. It’s been entertaining,” he said as he grinned over at Saul, “and interesting,” he put his arm around Marco’s shoulders.
“We’ll stay here for three days, and we always stay at the Gatehouse Inn just a block outside the gate. If any of the rest of you are staying, we’d enjoy your company at dinner time,” he told Saul, Mary, and Sophia.
“I know you’re ready to go on to Barcelon,” he said to Marco as he gave him an affectionate hug. “But you can wait until tomorrow to start that journey. You need to spend today inside the cathedral saying your prayers and visiting the stations and observing the rituals. You can spend the night in our room and we’ll buy you dinner tonight, won’t we father?” he asked Pivot, who nodded.
“Thank you,” Marco replied. He felt compelled to go inside the cathedral and pray. It was important to do, he knew. Thousands of people made the journey every year; dozens of miracles were reported in the building every year. Millions of prayers and hopes were lofted towards the cathedral, the relics, and the great church’s reputation for solving intractable problems. “I’ll stay with you for the night, if you’re sure you don’t mind,” he decided, and felt no compulsion within himself telling him to change his plans.
“Since you’re here for the first time, you ought to do it the traditional way,” Pivot told Marco.
“What is the traditional way?” Mary asked.
“We’ll lead you over,” Dex offered, and the six of them strolled through the crowd to the great entrance of the cathedral property, six doors wide, and receiving visitors through every portal. The group climbed up the broad steps and entered the building, then passed through the vestibule and came to the back of the narthex.
The light inside the cathedral was diffuse, scattered about from its origins, as it came streaming in from high above, through the many windows up there, some of them colored with stained glass, while others were transparent.
“Marco, and Saul, you go over to where that priest is standing,” Dex pointed to a small cluster of people on their left. “Mary and Sophia, you’re entitled to go with the special pilgrimage group for those who are in orders,” he pointed to a door on the right.
“Remember, we’ll meet you all at the Gatehouse Inn this evening,” Dex told his companions. He and Pivot went around shaking hands with the others, then walked straight up the center aisle of the nave.
“Be sure to pray for me,” Saul told his sister and mother, as the ladies prepared to go to their destination.
“We constantly do, Saul, we constantly do,” his mother said in a mournful tone, then she and his sister laughed, and made their departure.
“Even here at a holy place, no respect Marco! Let that be a lesson to you,” Saul said. “Let’s go start the process of cleansing our souls,” he suggested, and the two of them walked over to the priest.
“Welcome, welcome. You’re pilgrims here to pray through the stations of the cathedral, I presume?” the priest welcomed them.
He proceeded to give his group of a half dozen gathered pilgrims directions of where to go around the cathedral in a process that would lead them on a multi-hour progression toward the great altar that marked the resting place of St. James. “You should look for the stones that are marked with the violets, like this one,” he pointed at a keystone in the arch above his head, in which the petals and leaves of a blooming violet were clearly etched.
“Stop at each of the stones you see, and pray to the church, to the Holy Mother; if you’re praying for healing, follow the path of violets to the left, when you come to the Chapel of Candles. If you’re here to pray for indulgences, take the long route, straight ahead; if you’re praying for something else, follow the path to the right,” the priest instructed them.
“Go in peace, and may the Lord grant you what you seek,” the priest gave them his blessing, then departed, and the pilgrims found themselves ready to finally undertake the actual mechanics of the visit to the cathedral. A pair who Marco didn’t know dropped to their knees in front on the very stone that the priest had used as an example of the violet stone markers.
“I’ll see you at dinner,” Saul gave Marco a gentle squeeze on the shoulder, then walked down the side aisle of the church, searching for the next marked stone presumably.
Marco stood alone. He didn’t think he needed to pray at the stone the priest had pointed to; it was more like an example than a station. The area didn’t look like a chapel or place for prayer. He started walking along the left hand side of the long, large, beautiful nave of the cathedral.
He found the first violet-marked stone, not by seeing it directly, but by seeing three figures kneeling just inside one of the side chapels. Marco stepped inside the arched opening, into the dim interior of the recessed niche, where a statute gleamed with the color of gold as a pair of candles flickered in front of it. He knelt to begin his prayers.
What was he truly praying for, he asked himself. Was he praying for the restoration of his memories? Were there memories awaiting him that he might find he preferred not to hold? For the first time he was struck by the notion that he might be better off not knowing his past.
He checked himself. He didn’t seem to be a bad person; he hadn’t tried to lie or cheat or harm anyone. He didn’t think it was likely that he had a bad heart to worry about. Maybe there would be no harm in recovering his memories after all.
He began his prayers, imagining the wavering flames of the candles were lit just to raise his prayers up to the attention of the saint who was memorialized there. “Help me find the right way to Barcelon to Folence, and let me be pleased with what comes after,” he prayed, not able to formulate anything more meaningful to his situation. He followed with a ritualized prayer that sprang to his mind, one that he was sure was a standard prayer, as he realized he heard snatches of its words murmured by other penitents
He rose from his knees, and returned to the nave, then fell into the thin stream of other pilgrims walking along the route inside the cathedral. A few yards down was another collection of kneeling travelers, and Marco noted the stone next to the large stained glass window; the stone had the violet etched in place. Marco dropped to his knees and prayed again. He remained in place when the prayer was finished, and looked up at the stained glass window, an image of a saint standing by a doorway, holding his hand out and seeming to extinguish a fire that was frightening away others.
There was a curious doorway behind the saint, and a set of stairs through the door. Above the glass image of the door Marco noted three violet-etched stones set, as though the stairway portrayed in the window was an actual part of the pilgrimage experience.
He rose, and began to follow the path around a corner, to another chapel recess, and prayed, then continued on to three more stations of prayer, growing more relaxed and focused on his feeling of prayful supplication while time passed and he grew calm and contemplative as the words of the prayers rolled off his tongue more and more easily. He felt as though the pilgrimage experience was sedating, him, calming him into a semi-hypnotic state.
He reached the Chapel of Candles, the station in the prayer cycle that Dex had mentioned was where supplicants seeking different outcomes were to travel different ways. He wasn’t praying for indulgences, nor really for healing, so he chose not to go left or right afterwards, but instead went on the path straight ahead, the one on which he saw the fewest other pilgrims progressing.
Marco abruptly stopped his journey when he turned a corner as he walked further and further into the cathedral. Nearby there was a staircase, and above the doorway opening he saw three symbols of the violets. The staircase appeared to be the physical embodiment of the stairs he had seen portrayed in the stained glass w
indow that had been a station earlier in the prayer journey.
Marco looked around, and was surprised to see that the area in the cathedral around him was inexplicably deserted, despite the numbers of pilgrims in the holy building. His curiosity diverted his attention, and he walked over to the staircase. He was standing, he told himself, in the same location where the stained glass scene had shown a saint - a holy man - had stood, and he felt a shiver of excitement run through his soul.
Cautiously, he looked up the stairs. They began to curve immediately, and with only a moment's hesitation, he began to stealthily climb the stairs. He feared that he might be intruding on some part of the cathedral that was closed to tourists, but he felt a burning desire to know the staircase better, the steps that had been portrayed in the stained glass window.
At the top of the stairs there was a large, arched, clear glass window, allowing light to stream into the interior of the cathedral more directly than anyplace Marco had seen during his visit. The polished marble gleamed, and the dusty floor clearly indicated that no one else’s footsteps had crossed the space in quite a while. Marco looked left and right, then went to the right, into the dim interior away from the window.
He found another stone marker with the violets etched delicately into its surface, and he went down on his knees as he looked up at the large tapestry that hung on the wall. He stared at the tapestry, noting that it was a beautiful woman standing on a beach, with a mountain in the background behind her. She was holding a small cluster of violets in her hand as she smiled at the viewer. She was extraordinarily beautiful, with long blond hair, and the portrait displayed her with an innocent sensuality that seemed unusual for the church, he thought.
“Who are you, my striking icon?” he muttered as he stared up at her.
“I am the spirit of the Island of Ophiuchus,” the tapestry replied, and then the cloth began to change shape, bulging out where the woman’s figure stood, and Marco hurriedly scrambled backwards in panic across the marble floor, frightened by the supernatural occurrence that was unfolding before him.
“So you find me striking, do you?” the flesh body spoke to him as its bare feet touched the floor, just five feet away from where he sat sprawled all akimbo. He had a fleeting glimpse of a memory of himself, drawn from the past that he was no longer actively aware of, in which he sat in a similar position upon a paved plaza surface, looking up at a trio of women standing in a doorway.
“That’s kind of you, Marco, my young champion,” the woman said. She strode forward towards him, and then surprised him by bending and offering her hand to him to help him rise to his feet.
Marco reached up with his golden right hand, and as his fingers and her clasped one another, he felt a powerful surge of energy that coursed through his body as he felt himself lifted easily to his feet. The energy lasted only for the pair of seconds that the two hands touched, but it carried with it a vitality, and a knowledge of the vitality of everything around them, as well as a sense of how to heal and improve and preserve all the living entities that were within a wide area nearby.
“Who are you, my lady?” Marco asked again.
“As I said, I am the spirit of the island. You and I are old friends, it seems, doesn’t it?” she asked in a voice that had an earthiness and strength that Marco realized was the voice he had heard when he had been in caverns beneath a mountain, though he had no particular memories of a specific event. “I had to invite you here,” her arm swept around to indicate the empty space they alone occupied, “so that I could have this opportunity to talk to you.
“Why Mitment let you drink from Lethe I’ll never know, but I suppose it was the only option,” the spirit sighed. “That poor girl; I wish I could have handled that situation a little better.”
“Who?” Marco asked in confusion. “What do you mean?”
“You’ll understand in good time, Marco, don’t worry,” Ophiuchus answered. “For now, I simply needed a way to tell you that things are changing rapidly on the island. Despite my efforts to delay the inevitable, Iasco has fallen. Folence has gone to the isle to assume control and hold things together.
“So when you go to Barcelon, you will no longer go to the temple for Folence,” the spirit told him. “You will go down to your old haunts along the harbor, and you will call for your friend Kieweeooee to come fetch you and take you to the island. Once you’re there, you’ll have no trouble seeing Folence, and then we can discuss the next step to revive Iasco.”
“I don’t understand,” Marco said softly. “Why is all this happening to me?” he asked.
“It’s not happening to you Marco,” the spirit said softly. “It’s happening to the world. There is evil afoot. You just happen to play a prominent role in how we’re going to fight back.”
“We? We who?” Marco asked, no less enlightened.
“We, all of us,” Ophiuchus answered. She waved her hands in a circle in the air to encompass the cathedral around them. “The saints and the powers and the spirits of the old and the good, we are all joined together more strongly than ever before because we all fear what the evil side is plotting.
“Now, go and finish your prayers here, then resume your journey tomorrow and travel to Barcelon as quickly as you can. When you reach Folence on my isle, your memories will return, and we will plan for the next journey,” the spirit spoke. She stepped back from Marco, backing away from him as she smiled a warm and encouraging smile, returning to her place in the tapestry. “There will be one stop along the way, and I want you to collect something, something very rare from that place. You’ll know what to do when the time comes.”
“Can’t you tell me more? I’m not a child!” Marco protested. Despite the tranquility of the cathedral, and despite the overwhelming awe he felt at the power that the spirit radiated, he nonetheless felt as though he were being patronized, treated as a child from whom the truth was hidden.
“No Marco, you’re not a child, not after all you’ve been through – certainly not with all that yet lies before you,” her words made him shudder. “But you are under the geas of Lethe, and so we must wait to clear this up,” Ophiuchus told him, and then she somehow stepped back up into the tapestry, returning to the position she had stood in when he had first seen the woven fabric hanging on the wall.
“Your reward will come at the end, and your patience will be honored,” the woven image spoke to him, and then the sense of presence disappeared and he knew the tapestry was no longer possessed by the spirit.
Marco stood in stunned disbelief, wondering if he had somehow had a waking dream, or had otherwise imagined an impossible occurrence. He looked down as he tried to focus his scattered thoughts, and then his eyes widened and he gave a soft gasp, as he saw the prints of bare feet in the dust on the floor, prints that came from and returned to the tapestry.
“What are you doing here? How did you get here?” Marco jumped at the unexpected voice, and he whirled around to see a priest standing down the hall.
“I came up the stairs,” Marco swallowed as he spoke. “I must have taken a wrong turn on the pilgrimage prayer route.”
“What stairs?” the priest asked. “This area isn’t open to the pilgrims. You need to go on back down to where you belong.” The man wasn’t nasty in his tone, but he was firm. “Follow me,” he called, and Marco meekly walked over to where the man was, and followed him down a dark hallway to a broad set of stairs, and then descended under the priest’s watchful eyes.
He came back to the main floor of the cathedral, and saw a steady stream of pilgrims, some still holding bunches of wilting violets in their hands. He walked over to join the traffic, and quickly came to a niche in the wall, marked by the violets in stone, where pilgrims were praying. He knelt and joined the group, not sure that his quiet droning of the words of the prayers actually made sense as he tried to comprehend what he had experienced just minutes earlier.
After minutes of inconsequential activity, he rose to his feet and started walking, k
nowing that he no longer had the peace of mind to benefit from the pilgrimage.
“We’re almost there, aren’t we?” another pilgrim happened to speak to him as they came to the end of a hallway.
“What do you mean?” Marco asked as they turned a corner.
“We’re here at the final station, the tomb of St. James,” the other pilgrim replied. They looked at the new chamber they were entering, and Marco saw that a large, ornate altar was centered in the space, surrounded by a railing at which dozens of pilgrims were kneeling, praying for divine assistance in whatever problem had motivated them to travel so far to reach the tomb of the saint.
Marco joined the others, and found an opening at the rail, where he laid his still-held bundle of violets upon the rail, next to the many others that already laid by other pilgrims. He looked at the brilliantly gold-gilded statuary that covered the altar tomb, and then closed his eyes, and tried to focus on a final prayer.
“St. James,” he prayed silently, “help me to get to Barcelon, help me to meet the lady Folence, help me to understand what is happening around me and to me. I need your help,” he whispered urgently.
“You have our help and our support and our love in your labors, Marco,” a deep, masculine voice, one that connoted strength and steadiness, sounded in the recesses of his heart. “One of us is by your side at all times, closer than you realize, helping when you do not know. And you will see your guide when times grow most troubled.
“Your mission is vital, and more importantly, we know that you are a man with a good heart, one who will not fail us. Go in peace, and serve the Lord,” the voice paralyzed Marco with its power and vibrancy. He knelt at the altar, stock still, frozen by the impact of the voice of the saint speaking to him at the altar.
He suddenly felt a sense of suffocation, and realized that he had been holding his breath while he withstood the impact of the holy voice speaking to him. Marco sucked in a deep breath, then opened his eyes and looked around.
Scarlet From Gold (Book 3) Page 4
