The Great Pagan Army

by Vaughn Heppner

  Lupus took a step nearer. “You bastard, we almost starved to death. Peter paid for your bread. We begged thereafter and endured spits, kicks and humiliation. And what did you do: slip away and buy yourself drinks!”

  “You thief!” shouted a glassy-eyed Enrico. “Give me back my coins.”

  Lupus’s eyes narrowed. He took another step nearer.

  Peter jumped in front of Enrico and fell onto his knees. “Don’t kill him, Lupus. I implore you. Don’t do it.”

  “Kill?” said Enrico, drunk puzzled.

  Lupus chuckled evilly. “You want your relic, I know,” he told Peter. “So I won’t kill him, but he has to pay. He’ll never lift a hand to help us. So…” Lupus began gathering the coins.

  “What are you doing?” shouted Enrico.

  Lupus made three equal piles. One of them he stuffed into a sack that he tied to his belt. The other he put back into the satchel. The last he left on the ground. “Those are yours,” he told Peter.

  “Thief!” hissed Enrico.

  Lupus met the sub-deacon’s gaze and scraped the edge of the knife against his cheek. “Call me that again and Peter or no and I’ll slit your throat.”

  The Roman coldly picked up his satchel. He looked around. There was nowhere to go. So he hunched by the fire and endured their presence in hateful silence.

  ***

  They exited the pass and headed for Pavia, the major city of Lombardy. Peter retuned his share of the coins to Enrico. The Roman spoke no thanks. He smirked instead, knowing that Peter desperately needed his help in the Eternal City.

  “I want his deniers, too,” said the sub-deacon.

  “Where did you get them? Judith told me you lost everything.”

  “She gave me the coins,” said Enrico. “She is a true child of the Church. I want your serf’s coins as well. Do you understand?”

  Peter did. No deniers meant that he could expect no help from the sub-deacon. Hatred rose in his heart. Peter nurtured it, played in his mind the myriad ways he could kill Enrico. Garrote him in his sleep. Bash his head with a rock. Stick him in the gut with Lupus’s knife. Horror filled him later. As a man thinks, so he becomes. Peter begged God for forgiveness, even tried to weep for his sins. He kept wondering what Judith had written in that Engelwin-stamped letter.

  Two days later near dusk, they reached the famed monastery of Pavia. Lupus used his knife’s pommel and hammered at a wooden gate. They shouted and Lupus hammered again. Then the gate creaked open as a monk with a raised lantern bid them enter.

  38.

  The abbot of Saint Pavia was the fattest man Peter had ever seen. The abbot breathed audibly as he spoke and his many chins quivered. Sweat glistened on a balding head and his hard little eyes lurked behind puffy flesh. The abbot talked to them at the refectory table even though it was long past supper. A fire blazed warmth and beer, bread and butter lay near at hand. Those hard little eyes flickered at the sub-deacon’s thirst, Lupus’s enormous appetite and Peter’s hesitation.

  “Did not the Lord Jesus Christ allow his disciples to pluck kernels of wheat on the Sabbath?” asked the abbot. “So I feed hungry, nay, starving men after the appointed hour.”

  Peter nodded and used his finger to spread butter.

  The abbot joined them in repast, and he enquired after their story. “All pilgrims have one,” he explained. “And you have the mark of pilgrims.”

  Lupus spoke as he ate. He talked about Northmen and Paris. Later Enrico slurred something about the Pope’s mission. When it was his turn, Peter only smiled sadly.

  “Come, come,” said the abbot. “All must speak. It is the price for the meal.”

  Peter wasn’t sure afterward what loosened his tongue, the beer, their safety or the inquisitive abbot with those hard little eyes. He spoke about his abbey, and in an edited version told of the Danish assault and his abbot’s penance. He spoke about Count Odo, Paris, and their harrowing trek here. He praised Lupus and spoke how God had seen fit to strand Enrico in Paris so he might help in this holy quest. Perhaps he quaffed too much beer on an insufficiently full stomach. He was sure he said too much—or maybe too little. Lupus grinned throughout the telling. The Lotharingian, Peter had come to understand, loved cleverness and seeing others shade the truth. Maybe it made Lupus feel better about his own slipperiness.

  Enrico paid little heed. The Roman watched the flames and poured beer down his gullet. He nodded now and again, but as his eyes reddened, his absorption with the fire became absolute.

  As he listened, the fat abbot tore his bread into thin slices. Then he took each slice and crumpled it bit by bit between his sausage-sized fingers. At last, with a sweep of his hand, he brushed the crumbs onto the floor. A small dog that slept between his feet jumped up with a yap and with its needle-like teeth wolfed down the bread.

  “Your story delights me,” said the abbot. “Naturally, not the sorrow it entails. The slaughter of innocents, the kidnapping of villagers, those are dreadful things. But this penance, tell me, brother, do you believe these saintly bones that await you in Rome will aid you?”

  “Most certainly,” Peter said.

  “Why?”

  “Power resides in a saint’s bones. They link us to him or her and help as we plead with Heaven.”

  The abbot clapped his fleshy hands. “You said that you were born in Ireland. You have traveled widely?”

  Peter nodded.

  “Do they believe in relics in your distant island?”

  “Yes, father.”

  “They pray to the saints in Ireland?”

  “Most assuredly,” Peter said. “The Christians of Ireland are true children of God.”

  The abbot breathed noisily as he smiled. “I’m sure you wonder at my questions. In our abbey is a learned brother, perhaps the most learned among us. Unfortunately, His learning has driven him mad, as they said of Saint Paul. Our monk has traveled to the East and spoken to heretics there, Iconoclasts. Have you heard of them?”

  “Bits and pieces,” Peter said.

  “The Iconoclasts were barbarians, near to heathens. Their heresy has warped the soul of our learned brother. For his own good, as the great Hincmar of Rheims once did to Gottschalk, I have locked my Christian brother in a cell that he might ponder the error of his folly.”

  Peter nodded. For hundreds of years Carolingians had put away dangerous people into locked abbey cells. In Charlemagne’s time, they had locked the rebel Duke of Bavaria in a monastery. First, they tonsured him. Sometimes such a man might have his eyes ruined, since a blind man couldn’t rule. Emperor Louis the Pious had ordered his rebel nephew, the King of Italy, blinded. The executioner had been a dolt. Instead of very lightly tapping the eye with a red-hot poker, and thereby clouding the cornea, he had touched the eye much too hard. The shock flew up the optic nerve and the lad had died in writhing agony. Afterwards, Louis had put Charlemagne’s bastards, his very own half-brothers, Drogo, Hugh and Thierry, into monasteries.

  “Iconoclast means ‘icon breaker,’ the damned heretics,” said the abbot. “They believed such icons and busts of saints were idols that the faithful worshiped. They spouted Scripture, namely, the second of the Ten Commandments. I quote: You shall not carve idols for yourselves in the shape of anything in the sky above or on the earth below or in the waters beneath the earth; you shall not bow down before them or worship them. For I, the Lord, your God, am a jealous God, inflicting punishments for their fathers’ wickedness on their children of those who hate me, down to the third and fourth generation; but bestowing mercy down to the thousandth generation, on the children of those who love me and keep my commandants. The Iconoclasts imply, if you can believe it, that our busts and bones of saints are idols. That we grovel before them as heathens once did to Baal or these Northern gods Thor and Odin.” The abbot slapped the table. “Do we sacrifice goats to the saints? No, we venerate them as children of God. We esteem them and ask them aid us as we beseech the Throne-room of the Lord Almighty.”

  “Yo
u should whip this heretic,” said Enrico, his face flushed a fiery red.

  The huge abbot shifted uncomfortably. “Nay, nay, I don’t like the whip. He was a good monk once and has a keen mind. I pray for his soul. Mercy and meekness are often better tools than whips and chains. I locked him away as much for his safety as to keep his words from the younger monks. Some of older monks… they, too, wish him whipped.”

  Enrico smirked as if he had won a debate, raised his collar and went back to staring at the flames.

  Soon thereafter, the abbot showed them to their cells, and the next morning they hurried along the road to Rome.

  ***

  Rome, the Eternal City of the Seven Hills, Peter breathed in wonder and amazement. He had never seen its like. The entire episode in Rome seemed like a dream, magnificent and evil, wonderful and treacherous. They first stayed in Enrico’s house near the church of the blessed Apostle Peter, called Saint Peter in Chains. They waited for several days. When Peter asked the sub-deacon about a relic, Enrico told him that his brother was away on business and he didn’t know when he would return. His brother owned many relics. Enrico urged Peter toward patience.

  “He’s never going to give you a relic,” Lupus said in their room. “He’s a liar, a swindler and a drunkard.”

  A few days later, Enrico found them boarding at a monastery outside the Aurelian walls. The sub-deacon assured Peter that as soon as his brother returned he would send them word. Enrico then bid them farewell and whistled merrily as he hurried away.

  “I should have slit his throat in the Alps,” Lupus whispered later.

  The Aurelian walls surrounded Rome. Emperor Aurelian of the old Roman Empire had built the walls in the third century A.D. Majestic ruins lay within the city and everywhere was strewn garbage. However, the people kept the old walls in excellent repair and seldom built outside them. The one great exception had been the Vatican Hill across the Tiber River. The plains around the hill were smelly marsh and the upper slopes of the hill slippery and steep. In olden times, part of the area had become a cemetery, while ancient Emperor Nero had taken another section and there constructed a vast pleasure garden. Holy tradition stated that in the garden’s Circus wicked men had crucified the Apostle Peter during the evil night of A.D. 64 when Nero had bidden that Christian martyrs be smeared with tar, lofted onto stakes and set ablaze. Brave disciples took down the apostle’s body (so stated tradition) and buried it in a shallow grave among the tombs near the Circus. By A.D. 160, a humble shrine stood at the spot. In the fourth century, the first basilica arose there.

  The basilica of Saint Peter was a garish sight. Builders had plundered old pagan temples and the very Circus where the apostle had perished to provide Saint Peter’s with building material. Ill-assorted bricks and blocks had been jammed together. The great columns towering in the murk of the interior were mismatched. The various bases and capitals hadn’t been set with their original column. Yet, as the years passed and as Christianity grew in popularity and power, the wealth expended upon Saint Peter’s became increasingly impressive. Seventh century builders hammered a thousand pounds of silver onto the great central door. Later, men tore off the silver and replaced it with heavy gold sheets.

  Saint Jerome had written against this. The marble walls shine, the roofs sparkle with gold, the altars with gems—but the true servants of God are without earthly splendor. In this, few listened to the great Jerome.

  The Aurelian walls protected the ancient city, but they didn’t encompass the Vatican Hill or the glittering wealth of the basilica of Saint Peter. For five hundred years that hadn’t mattered. Christians fought Christians and often the wars had proved bitter and bloody, but soldiers left the basilica’s silver, gold and gems alone because it was the holiest of the holy. That changed after the reign of Charlemagne and his son Louis the Pious. The Saracens invaded Sicily in 827, drenching the isle in blood until they made it theirs. Like locusts, they swarmed into southern Italy beginning in 843. Soon they learned of the basilica, of the plated sheets of gold, the treasures of gems and massive silver plate. In the dread year 846, a Saracen fleet had sailed out of Africa. Filled with the zeal of Islam, the reavers marched upon Rome. From upon the Aurelian walls that saved the city, the defenders wept as the Saracens plundered Saint Peter’s basilica. All the silver and gold plate, all the gems, went into the wagons waiting to cart them to the galleys. Worst of all, the Saracens broke open the Apostle Peter’s tomb and scattered his relics. It was monstrous sacrilege, and the people boiled out of the city and bitterly fought the invaders.

  Two years later, Pope Leo IV began work on a wall to guard Vatican Hill. Then in 849, the African and Sicilian Saracens sent a second, grander armada against Rome. The Roman and Latin counts gathered under Pope Leo, and all the Christian galley captains sailed for the port of Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber River. There was fought a great and glorious battle, and God aided Pope Leo by sending a tempest that drove most of the African fleet ashore. Soon captive Saracens labored by the hundreds on the Leonine Wall, as men soon named it. Up from the Tiber to the crest of the Vatican Hill and down again to join the river farther downstream, the forty-foot high wall guarded the holy basilica from future rapine.

  For days, Peter and Lupus wandered the vast city, sightseeing. An old solider from the wars guided them. The man lacked his left knee down and was blind in one eye. Tears leaked from that eye and trickled down his weathered cheek. The pittance Lupus paid him (using Enrico’s coin) produced a steady stream of legends, modern day information and the locations of the alleys they had best avoid.

  The marble, granite and travertine used so lavishly in these monuments and buildings awed Peter. Lupus pointed out the collapsed buildings, the garbage strewn everywhere and the stink. Their guide assured them that the smell was worse in summer.

  “This city is filled with rubbish,” Lupus said. “Everything is a relic.”

  Maybe the oddest thing was the ongoing destruction. Rampaging barbarians looting and sacking hadn’t torn down half the structures as the limekiln workers toiling across the centuries. Every day the workers carted marble chunks to the kilns and burned them down into lime, which they used for plaster. The travertine blocks (they formed the core of the various buildings) were broken up to make byres and hovels. It reminded Peter of the monks busy in the scriptorium he had visited. They had vast rolls of paper and monks busy erasing the old pagan stories. In their place, the monks wrote religious tracts and theological and devotional writings. The erasing was much cheaper than slaughtering sheep and curing their skins for parchment. Peter wondered how many old books had been lost that way, and soon shrugged. What did it matter? Everything would end in 1000, a little more than a hundred years left for this old world. The thought of time running down reminded him of Willelda and his sins.

  “I need a relic,” he said. “I need it now, not whenever Enrico’s brother returns.”

  Peter talked it over with Lupus; and after plying their guide with wine—Peter begged Saint Martin’s forgiveness—they wondered aloud where they could possibly find a saintly relic.

  The old soldier grinned as wine dribbled down his chin. “You want relics, eh? Every pilgrim does.” He smacked his nearly toothless gums. “I’ll tell thee what, for a few deniers I’ll show thee a road full of relics. Then ye can take your pick.”

  “A road full?” breathed Peter.

  Lupus frowned, eyeing the old soldier. “If this is a trick…”

  “Me?” said the soldier, “trick a ruffian like thee. I’m no fool.” He rubbed his wrinkled fingers. “Ye two are good lads. Ten deniers is all I ask.”

  Lupus bargained hard and dropped it down to two, which made the old soldier grumble. He told them to be ready the next morning and then he would show them.

  39.

  The old soldier took them three miles outside the city to the Via Lavicana and the cemeteries there. Along this ancient Roman road were buried many saintly relics. There were the graves of ten Roman legio
naries martyred under Emperor Gallienus in 260. The old soldier crutched along the rows until he pointed out a mass grave for two hundred and sixty martyrs. Emperor Diocletian had ordered the poor souls to dig sand on the Via Salaria. Later, dragged into the Roman arena, archers had shot the people to death with arrows. Their crime was that they had refused to surrender their Scriptures to the Roman authorities.

  Peter crossed himself as he mumbled prayers. The holiness and faith of these martyrs gave him goosebumps. Such brave and stubborn fools, as these—fools for God—would gain the martyr’s crown someday in Paradise. He looked away, filled with contempt for his lust. He recalled words from the Book of Ecclesiastes: It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of every man; the living should take this to heart. Sorrow is better than laughter, because a sad face is good for the heart. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of pleasure.

  Shame drove Peter to his knees. He wept before these tombstones. He touched them. His heart beat painfully in his breast.

  The old soldier beamed. Lupus scratched his side, picked his nose and soon shuffled his feet.

  After Peter had dried his tears, the old soldier limped to a small church, the north wall covered with vines. A robin perched on the topmost cross, whistling a sweet melody.

  With a dirty fingernail, the old soldier pointed at the building and spoke in a hush. “That is the church of the blessed martyr Tiburtius. His relics lie under the altar. In the church crypt below is a tomb where lie the bones of Saint Simplicius.”

  Peter shook his head.

  “Simplicius died during the hideous reign of Emperor Diocletian. The Emperor’s officer Lampadius tried to convince Simplicius to sacrifice to the gods. Then Lampadius died suddenly. His relatives blamed Simplicius for the death, as they he said practiced spells. To appease them the Emperor had Simplicius dragged into the arena, and on December 22, 303 he was beaten to death with leaden whips.”