How Firm a Foundation

by David Weber

  “What I didn’t tell you at that time was the way in which what I learned at Saint Zherneau’s changed my faith. I believe it broadened and deepened that faith, yet honesty compels me to say it might just as easily have destroyed my belief forever, had it been presented to me in even a slightly different fashion. And the second reason I sent you to Father Zhon and Father Ahbel was to give them the opportunity to meet you. To come to know you. To be brutally honest, to evaluate you … and how you might react to the same knowledge.”

  Wylsynn sat very still, eyes fixed on the archbishop’s face, and somewhere deep inside he felt a taut, singing tension. That tension rose, twisting higher and tighter, and his right hand wrapped its fingers around his pectoral scepter.

  “The reason for this meeting tonight is that the Brethren decided it would be best to share that same knowledge with you. Not the safest thing to do, perhaps, and not necessarily the wisest, but the best. The Brethren feel—as I do—that you deserve that knowledge, yet it’s also a two-edged sword. There are dangers in what we’re about to tell you, my son, and not just spiritual ones. There are dangers for us, for you, and for all the untold millions of God’s children living on this world or who may ever live upon it, and I fear it may bring you great pain. Yet I also believe it will ultimately bring you even greater joy, and in either case, I would never inflict it upon you if not for my deep belief that one of the reasons God sent you to Charis in the first place was to receive exactly this knowledge.”

  He paused, and Wylsynn drew a shaky breath. He looked around the other faces, saw the same solemnity in all of them, and a part of him wanted to stop the archbishop before he could utter another word. There was something terrifying about the stillness, about those expressions, and he realized he believed every word Staynair had already said. Yet behind his terror, beyond the fear, lay something else. Trust.

  “If your purpose was to impress me with the seriousness of whatever you’re about to tell me, Your Eminence, you’ve succeeded,” he said after a moment, and felt almost surprised his voice didn’t quiver around the edges.

  “Good,” Cayleb said, reclaiming the thread of the conversation, and Wylsynn’s eyes went to the emperor. “But before we get any further into this, there’s one other person who needs to be party to the discussion.”

  Wylsynn’s eyebrows rose, but before he could frame the question, even to himself, the door between Staynair’s spacious office and Ushyr’s much more humble adjoining cubicle opened and a tall, blue-eyed man in the cuirass and chain mail of the Imperial Guard stepped through it.

  The intendant’s eyes widened in shock and disbelief. Everyone in Tellesberg knew Merlin Athrawes had been sent to Zebediah and Corisande to protect Empress Sharleyan and Crown Princess Alahnah. At that moment, he was almost seven thousand miles from Tellesberg Palace as a wyvern might have flown. He couldn’t possibly be here!

  Yet he was.

  “Good afternoon, Father Paityr,” Merlin said in his deep voice, one hand stroking his fierce mustachios. “As I told you once in King Haarahld’s presence, I believe in God, I believe God has a plan for all men, everywhere, and I believe it’s the duty of every man and woman to stand and contend for Light against the Darkness. That was the truth, as you confirmed for yourself, but I’m afraid I wasn’t able to tell you all the truth then. Today I can.”

  * * *

  Paityr Wylsynn’s face was ashen, despite his deeply tanned complexion.

  Twilight had settled beyond the windows while Merlin, Cayleb, and Staynair took turns describing the Journal of Saint Zherneau. The blows to Wylsynn’s certainty had come hard and fast, and he knew now why Merlin was present. It was hard enough to believe the truth—even to accept that it might be the truth—with the seijin sitting there watching his face in the archbishop’s office when Wylsynn had known he was thousands of miles away.

  Of course, the fact he’s here doesn’t necessarily prove everything they’ve just told you is the truth, Paityr, does it? his Schuelerite training demanded. The Writ tells us there are such things as demons, and who but a demon could have made the journey Merlin claims to have made in this “recon skimmer” of his?

  Yet even as he asked himself that, he knew he didn’t believe for a moment that Merlin was a demon. In many ways, he wished he did. Things would have been so much simpler, and he would never have known his deep and abiding faith had been built entirely upon the most monstrous lie in human history, if only he’d been able to believe that. The priest in him, and the young seminarian he’d been even before he took his vows, cried out to turn away. To reject the lies of Shan-wei’s demon henchman before they completed the corruption of his soul—a corruption which must have begun well before this moment if he could accept even for an instant that Merlin wasn’t a demon.

  And he couldn’t reject them as lies. That was the problem. He couldn’t.

  And not just because of all those examples of “technology” Merlin’s just demonstrated, either, he thought starkly. All those doubts of yours, all those questions about how God could have permitted someone like Clyntahn to assume such power. They’re part of the reason you believe every single thing these people have just told you. But all the things they’ve said still don’t answer the questions! Unless the answer is simply so obvious you’re afraid to reach out and touch it. If it’s all truly a lie, if there truly are no Archangels and never were, then what if God Himself was never anything but a lie? That would explain His permitting Clyntahn to murder and kill and maim in His name, wouldn’t it? Because He wouldn’t be doing anything of the sort … since He never existed in the first place.

  “I’m sorry, Father,” Merlin said softly. “I’m sorry we’ve had to inflict this on you. It’s different for me. One thing my experience here on Safehold has taught me is that I’ll never truly be able to understand the shock involved in having all that absolute, documented certainty snatched out from under you.”

  “That’s … a very good way to describe it, actually, Seijin Merlin. Or should I call you Nimue Alban?”

  “The Archbishop and I have an ongoing argument about that,” Merlin said with an odd, almost whimsical smile. “To be honest, Father, I still haven’t decided exactly what I really am. On the other hand, I’ve also decided there’s no option but to continue on the assumption that I am Nimue Alban—or that she’s a part of me, at any rate—because the life or death of the human species depends on the completion of the mission she agreed to undertake.”

  “Because of these … Gbaba?” Wylsynn pronounced the unfamiliar word carefully.

  “That’s certainly the greatest, most pressing part of it,” Merlin agreed. “Sooner or later, humanity is going to encounter them again. If we do that without knowing what’s coming, it’s highly unlikely we’ll be fortunate enough to survive a second time. But there’s more to it than that, too. The society created here on Safehold is a straitjacket, at best. At worst, it’s the greatest intellectual and spiritual tyranny in history. We—all of us, Father Paityr, including this PICA sitting in front of you—have a responsibility, a duty, to break that tyranny. Even if there is no God, the moral responsibility remains. And if there is a God, as I believe there is, we have a responsibility to Him, as well.”

  Wylsynn stared at the PICA—the machine—and he felt a sudden almost irresistible need to laugh insanely. Merlin wasn’t even alive, and yet he was telling Wylsynn he believed in God? And what was Wylsynn supposed to believe in now?

  “I know what you’re thinking at this moment, Paityr,” Staynair said quietly.

  Wylsynn’s gray eyes snapped to him, wide with disbelief that anyone could truly know that, yet that incredulity faded as he gazed into the archbishop’s face.

  “Not the exact words you’re using to flagellate yourself, of course,” Staynair continued. “All of us find our own ways to do that. But I know the doubts, the sense of betrayal—of violation. All these years, you’ve deeply and sincerely believed in the Holy Writ, in The Testimonies, in Mother Churc
h, in the Archangels, and in God. You’ve believed, my son, and you’ve given your life to that belief. And now you’ve discovered it’s all a lie, all built on deliberate fabrications for the express purpose of preventing you from ever reaching out to the truth. It’s worse than being physically violated, because you’ve just discovered your very soul was raped by merely mortal men and women, pretending to be gods, who died centuries before your own birth.”

  He paused, and Wylsynn looked at him silently, unable to speak, and Staynair shook his head slowly.

  “I can’t and won’t try to dictate the ‘right way’ to deal with what you’re feeling at this moment,” the archbishop said quietly. “That would violate my own most deeply held beliefs. But I will ask you to think about this. The Church of God Awaiting wasn’t created by God. It was built by men and women … men and women who’d seen a more terrible tragedy than anything you and I could possibly imagine. Who’d been broken and damaged by that experience, and who were prepared to do anything—anything at all—to prevent it from happening again. I believe they were terribly, horribly mistaken in what they did, yet I’ve come to the conclusion over the years since I first discovered Saint Zherneau’s journal—and even more in the time since I’ve known Merlin, and gained access to Owl’s records of pre-Safeholdian history—that for all their unspeakable crimes, they weren’t really monsters. Oh, they did monstrous things in plenty, and understanding the why can’t excuse the what of their actions. I’m not trying to say it could, and I’m sure they did what they did for all the flawed, personal motives we could imagine, as well, including the hunger for power and the need to control. But that doesn’t change the truth of the fact that they genuinely believed the ultimate survival of the human race depended upon their actions.

  “Do I think that justifies what they did? No. Do I think it makes the final product of their lie any less monstrous? No. Am I prepared to close my eyes, turn away and allow that lie to continue unchallenged forever? A thousand times no. But neither do I think they acted out of pure evil and self-interest. And neither do I believe anything they might have done indicts God. Remember that they built their lie not out of whole cloth, but out of bits and pieces they took away from the writings and the beliefs—and the faith—of thousands of generations which had groped and felt their way towards God without benefit of the unbroken, unchallenged—and untrue—scripture and history which we possess. And so I come to my final rhetorical question. Do I believe the fact that men and women made unscrupulous by desperation and terror misused and abused religion and God Himself means God doesn’t exist? A million times no, my son.

  “I can no longer prove that to you by showing you the incontrovertible, inviolable word set down by the immortal Archangels. I can only ask you to reach inside yourself once more, to seek the wellsprings of faith and to look at all the wonders of the universe—and all the still greater wonders which are about to become available to you—and decide for yourself. Merlin and I had a discussion about this very subject the night he and I first told Cayleb the truth. I wasn’t aware then that I was following in the footsteps of another, far more ancient philosopher when I asked him what I could possibly lose by believing in God, but now I ask you the same question, Paityr. What do you lose by believing in a loving, compassionate God Who’s finally found a way to reach out to His children once more? Will it make you an evil man? Lead you into the same sort of actions that ensnared the real Langhorne and the real Bédard? Or will you continue to reach out in love to those about you? To do good, when the opportunity to do good comes to you? To reach the end of your life knowing you’ve truly labored to leave the world and all in it a better place than it might otherwise have been?

  “And if there is no God, if all there is beyond this life is a dreamless, eternal sleep—only nothingness—what will your faith have cost you then?” The archbishop smiled suddenly. “Do you expect to feel cheated or swindled when you realize there was no God waiting beyond that threshold? Only two things can lie on the other side of death, Paityr. It’s what Merlin or Owl might describe as ‘a binary solution set.’ There’s either nothingness, or some sort of continued existence, whether it leads us to what we think of now as God or not. And if it’s nothingness, then whether or not you were ‘cheated’ is meaningless. And if there is a continued existence which doesn’t contain that Whom I think of as God, then I’ll simply have to start over learning the truth again, won’t I?”

  Paityr gazed at him for several more seconds, then drew a deep breath.

  “I don’t know what to believe at this moment, Your Eminence,” he said finally. “I never imagined I could feel such turmoil as I’m feeling right now. Intellectually, I believe you when you say you’ve experienced the same things, and I can see you truly have found a way for your faith to survive those experiences. I envy that … I think. And the fact that I don’t know whether I truly envy your certainty or resent it as yet another manifestation of the lie sums up the heart of my confusion. I’ll need time, and a great deal of it, before I can put my spiritual house back in order and say ‘Yes, this is where I stand.’”

  “Of course you will,” Staynair said simply. “Surely you don’t think anyone else has ever simply taken this in stride and continued without missing a step!”

  “I don’t really know what I think right now, Your Eminence!” Wylsynn was astonished by the note of genuine humor in his own response.

  “Then you’re about where everyone is at this point, Father,” Merlin told him, and smiled with a bittersweet crookedness. “And believe me, I may not have had to grapple with the knowledge that I’d been lied to all my life, but waking up in Nimue’s Cave and realizing I’d been dead for the better part of a thousand years was just a little difficult to process.”

  “I can believe that,” Wylsynn said, yet even as he spoke his eyes had darkened, and his expression turned grim.

  “What is it, Paityr?” Staynair asked quickly but softly, and the intendant shook his head hard.

  “It’s just … ironic that Merlin should mention ‘a thousand years,’” he said. “You see, not everything about the Archangels and Mother Church was set forth in the Writ or The Testimonies after all, Your Eminence.”

  .III.

  A Recon Skimmer, Above Carter’s Ocean

  Merlin Athrawes leaned back in his flight couch, gazing up through the canopy at the distant moon. The waters of Carter’s Ocean stretched out far below him like an endless black mirror, touched with silver highlights. The stars were distant, glittering pinpricks overhead, but ahead of him lay a wall of cloud, the back edge of a massive weather front moving steadily eastward across Corisande.

  It all seemed incredibly peaceful, restful even. It wasn’t, of course. The winds along the leading edge of that front were less powerful than those which had battered Cayleb further north, but they were quite powerful enough. And they were going to catch up with Dawn Star in the next few hours. The galleon and her escorts were passing through Coris Strait, about to enter South Reach Sound southeast of Corisande before looping back westward through White Horse Reach to the Corisandian capital of Manchyr, and Merlin wondered if the bad weather was going to be his ally or his comeuppance. Getting on and off a sailing ship in the middle of the ocean without being detected was a nontrivial challenge, even for a PICA. As it was, he’d officially retreated to his cabin to “meditate,” and Sharleyan and the rest of her guard detail would see to it that he wasn’t disturbed. He’d even left a rope trailing helpfully from the galleon’s sternwalk so he could shinny back aboard, hopefully unnoticed. After so long, it had become almost a well-established routine.

  Except, of course, that if the weather’s as bad as it looks like being tonight, there’re going to be people keeping an anxious watch on little things like rigging and sails or rogue waves … any one of whom might just happen to notice the odd seijin climbing up a rope out of the ocean in the middle of the night.

  His lips twitched at the thought, yet he wasn’t really worried
about it. He’d be able to spot any lookout before the lookout could spot him, and a PICA could easily spend an hour or two submerged in the ship’s wake, clinging to a rope and waiting patiently until the coast was clear. Not only that, but he’d be back aboard several hours before local dawn, with plenty of darkness to help cover his return. In fact, that was the real reason for the timing of the conference with Father Paityr. They’d had to make sufficient allowance for Merlin’s transit, and he’d had to plan on both departing and returning under cover of night if he wanted to be certain he wasn’t observed.

  And that’s exactly what you’re going to be doing, he told himself. So why don’t you stop worrying about that and start worrying about what Father Paityr just told you, instead?

  His brief almost-smile disappeared, and he shook his head.

  I guess fair’s fair. You’ve cheerfully torn lots of other people’s worlds apart by telling the truth about Langhorne and Bédard. It’s about time somebody returned the compliment.

  He closed his eyes and his perfect PICA’s memory replayed the conversation in Maikel Staynair’s office.

  * * *

  “What do you mean ‘Not everything about the Archangels and Mother Church was set forth in the Writ or The Testimonies,’ my son?” Staynair asked, his eyes narrowing with concern as Paityr Wylsynn’s tone registered.

  “I mean there’s more than one reason my family’s always been so deeply involved in the affairs of Mother Church, Your Eminence.”

  Wylsynn’s face was tight, his voice harrowed with mingled bitterness, anger, and lingering shock at what he’d already been told. He looked around the others’ faces and drew a deep breath.

  “The tradition of my family’s always been that we were directly descended from the Archangel Schueler,” he said harshly. “All my life, that’s been a source of great joy to me—and of a pride I’ve struggled against as something unbecoming in any son of Mother Church. And, of course, it was also something Mother Church and the Inquisition would flatly have denied could have been possible. That’s one of the reasons my family was always so careful to keep the tradition secret. But we were also specifically charged to keep it so—according to the tradition—when certain knowledge was left in our possession.”