by David Walton
Matthew clenched his fists. "You live in a house forged by quintessence. All the food you eat was created with quintessence." He gestured around the room. "Even the paper you use for your precious Bible translation is available in such quantity because of a quintessence-powered process, invented by people like me."
His father shrugged. "' When ye thought evil against me, God disposed it to good, that he might bring to pass, as it is this day, and save much people alive.'"
Matthew recognized the quote again, this time from Genesis 50. "Evil? You call feeding and protecting this colony evil?" This was why he avoided talking to his father. It made him furious. He felt like pulling all those scrolls down from their shelves and setting a match to them.
"No, son." His father shook his head sadly. "What you have accomplished is truly wonderful, and I praise God for it. The evil is in thinking you no longer need God."
"You're going to lose the governorship, if you're not careful," Matthew said. "Ferguson has been talking to almost everyone, listening to their grievances and blaming the shortages on you. He implies, though he never quite says, that if he were in charge, things wouldn't be so badly managed."
His father didn't blink. "I will not stoop to politics, Matthew. God has given me this role, but I would lay it down gladly if he wishes it."
"I'm not asking you to go door to door and curry favor," Matthew said, though he didn't think it would hurt any if he did exactly that. "I'm asking you to address the problem."
"I am addressing the problem. I preach repentance from the pulpit every Sunday."
"Ferguson calls you a manticore-lover. He preys on people's fears, tells them you're not on their side. He wants to expand the colony's land holdings and drive the manticores out."
"He's a fool."
"He's a fool people are listening to." Matthew searched for a way to reach his father. "'They are as sheep having no shepherd,'" he tried, a reference to Matthew 9:36.
"I am their shepherd," his father said, "and I am feeding their souls. If their bodies should lack in future months, that is no bad thing."
"So you won't call for rationing?"
"I will, if you wish it. But don't be fooled into believing that all you need is more time. What you need is prayer and repentance. You may discover why the salt in the soil is disappearing. You may even discover the mechanism by which it moves from the ocean water to the soil, but the truth will remain that it is God who commands it. 'Thou openest thine hand, and they are filled with good things. But if thou take away their breath, they die and return to their dust.'"
Psalm 104 again. "The rules have changed," Matthew said. "We don't need God to explain why things live anymore, or why they die."
"I know someone else who believed as much."
"Christopher Sinclair, you mean. And you know what? He was right." Matthew pointed his finger at his father's chest. "He was right about this island, and he was right about quintessence. He even brought Catherine back from the dead."
"Nearly at the cost of every life on the island, and ultimately at the cost of his own."
Matthew couldn't stand this conversation anymore. With each of his father's glib responses, hot blood rushed through him, making him want to hit his father or grab his throat and strangle him. His father just stood there, calm and untroubled, which made Matthew even angrier. He threw up his hands. "I can't talk to you," he said. He opened the door. "Sinclair died saving your life, you old fool." He slammed the door behind him.
Matthew stalked through the mansion, furious and, at the same time, deeply ashamed. He wished he could be like Sinclair and set himself completely against God, but he couldn't shake the sense that God really was there, watching him. There or not, however, he would let his father say the prayers. He wasn't going to stand back and wait for God to provide. As far as he was concerned, if there was a way to save this island, it was up to him to find it.
He walked out of the front door of the mansion into darkness. He looked up, expecting that another storm had covered over the sun, but no. Instead of clouds, he saw a rapidly moving stream of blackness, like a river in the sky. An immense whirring sound accompanied it. The river was composed of tiny grains, like pouring sand, and Matthew realized it was made of thousands and thousands of black beetles.
He started to run, ignoring the pain in his thigh. These were compass beetles, the same kind that Catherine's father, and later her mother, had used to navigate across the ocean to find Horizon in the first place. A huge colony of them lived in the beetlewood forest that surrounded the human settlement. The creatures had the unusual trait of knowing the direction to their home regardless of how far away from it they were, which made them immensely useful. Put one in a box and it would point toward home, even across a thousand miles of water.
But now, they were leaving their home behind, migrating en masse toward the interior of the island. What did it mean? Was there not enough food in the forest? Or were the leaves they ate no longer providing enough salt to keep them alive?
Matthew reached the invisible barrier around the settlement and ran through it into the forest. It didn't take him long to see what he had feared. Littering the earth around him were what looked like stones, rounded pieces of rock the size of a silver half crown. He picked one up. It was like a compass beetle, perfectly carved out of stone. It was solid, not a husk like molting cicadas might leave behind back in England. These beetles had petrified, and the others had fled before they met the same fate.
He looked up. High above him, the mossy branches of the trees bent with the weight of similar stone beetles. Hundreds of them.
Matthew had been sixteen—it seemed like an eternity ago—when the mysterious ship had sailed into London harbor filled with human statues and chests of sand. They knew now that the sailors had food made with quintessence in their flesh, and it had transformed back to salt and sand when they traveled too far from Horizon. To see these beetles, petrified like this, here on Horizon, was like reading a death sentence. If it could happen to the beetles, it could happen to them.
CHAPTER 3
RAMOS should have reported Antonia to the Inquisition. It was his duty as a priest and a Christian. The Inquisition was overwhelmed with reports of demon activity, however, since hundreds had been taken with fits in the night. Most of the afflicted were now mad, babbling nonsense and falling down repeatedly with the shaking fits. A rumor spread that the madness was contagious, and fear overcame reason. Several of the mad were dragged from their homes by mobs and stoned or thrown into the river.
Ramos kept Antonia hidden and tried to keep her madness secret. He stayed at home, feeding and caring for her himself. Her babbling was sometimes cheerful, sometimes despairing, and she often cried. Sometimes it even seemed to make a strange sort of sense, but never had any relation to the people or things around her. If he led her by the hand, she would walk along with him, though he had to lead her around obstacles. When she convulsed, he made sure she didn't knock into hard or sharp edges that could hurt her.
Pope Julius III declared the madness a judgment from God, directed at those who had harbored secret heresies in their hearts. The Inquisition started burning the mad, twenty or thirty at a time. The mass public trials drew thousands, both from the city and the surrounding area, to see the spectacle. Death always drew a crowd, but even more so the death of something the people feared.
As a Jesuit, Ramos had taken a holy oath to obey the Pope in all things. He had always taken comfort in the Church, where truth and falsehood were so clearly defined. As the founder of his order, Ignatius Loyola, had put it, "I will believe that the white that I see is black if the Church so defines it." But how could he believe that Antonia had harbored secret heresies? She was sweet and innocent, more so than many priests he knew. She had never heard the corruptions of holy doctrine taught by the Protestants, or seen the vile practices of the Musselman infidels. And even if she had . . . he loved her. How could he give her up to the fires?
On h
is own, a mere royal astronomer, Ramos had no political influence to bring to bear. If King Philip had been there, it might have been different. Philip was a devoutly religious man, devoted to the Church, but he was also practical and not given to superstition. He valued Ramos's intellect, especially on matters pertaining to the heavens. Ramos would never presume to think of the king as a friend, but Philip trusted him—a rare thing in a royal court—and he was fiercely protective of those few he could trust. The king, however, was still in England marrying Queen Mary, and was not due to return for months. Spain was in the hands of the Inquisition.
All the while, the hole in the sky grew. Ramos wasn't the only one to notice it. It sucked more of the surrounding stars into its maw, spinning out their light like thread from a spool, leaving them dim specters of their former brightness. Even those with no astronomical knowledge pointed and gawked and cowered in their homes. Many fled to the Church for protection, and the monasteries and convents doubled in size. Everyone could see that the sky was not the same as it had been. They began to refer to the hole in the sky simply by the Latin word for new. Nova.
Few people thought to consider any reason for the nova's appearance beyond the judgment of God. Events in the heavens occurred because God decreed them, just as things did on Earth. Ramos, however, wasn't satisfied with that. God might have been punishing the mad, but what if there was another cause? A cause that explained why some had been afflicted but not others? He was determined to find out.
Ramos left Antonia in Carmela's care and began interviewing the families of the afflicted and recording their answers. He made a map of the homes of the mad, hoping to find a geographical pattern. He studied his notes long into the night, barely admitting to himself the secret hope he harbored. If there was a pattern to the madness, then there might be a physical cause. And if there was a physical cause, there just might be a cure.
Word came from Madrid that the madness had struck there, too. When pilgrims arrived from France and the Netherlands, it became clear that the phenomenon was worldwide. Eventually, a pattern did emerge in Ramos's records, a simple strand that linked the thousands of people who had fallen to the madness. They had all been born between May 21 and May 25, the first five days of the constellation Gemini. The constellation in which the nova had appeared.
This provided no cure, of course, since he could not change Antonia's birthday. It did, however, suggest that it wasn't because of heresy that she was afflicted. It also suggested another possible catastrophe for the kingdom of Spain.
King Philip II had been born on May 21. No word had come from England. Was he marrying Queen Mary as planned? Or was he secretly raving in a palace room in London?
If the king was mad, then perhaps it was time for Ramos to take Antonia and flee the country. Spain had not been a unified nation for long. Even the suggestion that Philip might have lost his mind could spark a civil war, nobles vying with each other and with the Church for power, maybe even the division of Spain back into the independent kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, Navarre and Leon. It would mean bloody war and Spanish dead on a massive scale.
Not only that, but King Philip was the Church's greatest champion, the man whose strength held back the growth of Protestant heresy in Saxony and the Low Countries and the ever-fiercer armies of Musselman infidels to the south. If he had fallen to the madness, what would become of Christendom? The Netherlands would be overrun by Protestant rebels; Turkey and then Italy itself would fall to the Musselmen; perhaps even the Vatican would be overrun, its treasures plundered.
Ramos told no one of the pattern he had found, afraid of what the consequences might be. He stopped asking questions and stayed home with Antonia, quietly preparing to leave the country. He wasn't fast enough. Perhaps a neighbor, peering in a window, had seen Antonia in one of her fits, or maybe someone had marked his odd hours and behavior. In the middle of the night—as they always did, for maximum surprise and intimidation—the soldiers of the Inquisition came knocking.
Ramos was instantly alert. He threw off the blanket and went to rouse Antonia, but she was already awake. He helped her up and threw a cloak around her. There was no time to dress, no time to pack. He led her to the back door and opened it quietly, but the soldiers had anticipated him. Two of them pushed through, swords drawn. Antonia fell to the floor, her body convulsing. Ramos tried to go to her, but a soldier yanked his arms behind his back.
"Let me go to her!"
The other soldier slapped him, and he tasted blood. Two other soldiers came through from the front door, dragging Carmela with them. She was shouting at them, but when she saw Antonia on the floor, she started to cry.
"We'll go with you," Ramos said, trying for a reasonable tone. "Let me help her, and we'll go with you peaceably."
The biggest soldier, a scarred man with a broken nose, laughed. "You and your demon child will come with us whether you want to or not." He wrapped his thick fingers through Antonia's hair and yanked her to her feet. She made a high-pitched keening sound, confused and in pain. Carmela tried to intervene, but they knocked her to the floor, where she stayed, whimpering, as they dragged Ramos and Antonia out.
The soldiers threw them into a makeshift dungeon of brick and lime mortar, constructed in the Moorish style. Ramos wasn't even sure where in the city they were. The royal dungeons were in the Castillo de Mota, fifty leagues distant in the old city of Medina del Campo—too far away to bother bringing prisoners who would just be burned in a few days time. Ramos knew that neither his standing as a priest nor his royal connections would save him or Antonia from being convicted in a public mass trial. His home and possessions would already have been seized by the Church to pay for his incarceration and execution. At least they had not been brought to the Catedral and its torture chamber. He held Antonia and stroked her hair. She didn't know what was happening, but she was frightened nonetheless and moaned softly and clung to his arm.
The others in the dungeon were mad as well. They babbled, sang, or simply stared into the distance. They did not seem malnourished, which simply meant they had not been here for very long. The wheels of the Inquisition were turning quickly.
There was a little light coming through cracks in the ceiling and around the door. Ramos traced a circle in the dirt floor and added the lines of the ecliptic. This time, he used his own date and latitude of birth as a basis, because it was his own horoscope he wanted to calculate. He thought he could predict the rest of his short life without such a tool, but there was nothing else to do while he waited to die.
He didn't have his astrolabe or star almanac, but he had done this so many times he didn't need them. The nova lent a new variable to the figures, subtly changing them, twisting them in surprising directions. He moved to a new section of floor and pressed on, surprised at the complexity of the figures surrounding his own life. He almost gave them up as unsolvable, but finally the associations began to emerge.
They were nothing like what he expected. The nova was prominent, with links to madness and danger; no surprises there. But there were figures for treason and heresy, for the love of a woman, for crossing an ocean, and others so unfamiliar he could not understand them.
Ramos scuffed out the figures with his foot, feeling strangely encouraged. Perhaps he and Antonia would escape at the last moment, just as the boy Luis had done. Antonia. He drew another circle in the dust, suddenly afraid again. Just because he would escape didn't mean she would.
Before he could begin, however, the door to the prison burst open with a creak and a bang. The light from the lanterns brought in by the guards seemed unbearably bright, and Ramos covered his eyes. Antonia whimpered, and he wrapped his arms around her. Surely they weren't here to take her away from him already?
When his eyes adjusted, Ramos saw a military officer wearing half armor, an ornate morion helmet with red and white plumes, a red sash, and very white hose. He had a rapier in his belt and a grim expression on his face.
"Father Ramos de Tavera of the
University?" he demanded. By voice and bearing, he was an aristocrat, probably highly placed in the army. He seemed quite out of place in the filth and stench of this makeshift dungeon.
Gently, Ramos extricated himself from Antonia and stood to meet the stranger. "I am he."
The officer clapped his heels together and held out a rolled paper tied with ribbon and sealed with red wax. "A letter from His Majesty."
Ramos took it, dazed. "Then his Majesty is not mad?"
"Mad?" The officer looked appalled. "Of course he is not mad. He is married to the Queen of England. He sent me here to gather more ships and soldiers to sail to England and solidify their reign. I regret to inform you, however, that your brother Diego de Tavera died in the king's service."
Ramos's first thought was for Antonia, and he glanced back at her to see how she would react. Now both of her natural parents were dead, though in her mad state, he doubted she even understood the news. "How did he die?"
The officer told a fantastical story, of how Diego had traveled at the king's command to a far-off island in the Western sea, chasing improbable rumors of vast golden fortunes. It was bizarre. Diego was no explorer. He was a priest with political ambitions, a passion for the Church, and too much of a taste for power. He gravitated to thrones and cathedrals, not disease-ridden islands far from civilization. Ramos had never been close to his brother, but the news unsettled him. At least Diego would never see his daughter's madness.
Perhaps the king's letter would shed some light. It must be a letter of condolence, a rare display of generous emotion from a monarch to a member of his court. He tore it open and found that it was nothing of the kind.
To Father Ramos de Tavera, Universidad de Valladolid:
