Tales from the Vatican Vaults: 28 extraordinary stories by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Garry Kilworth, Mary Gentle, KJ Parker, Storm Constantine and many more

by David V. Barrett

Should that happen, please believe me that your powers of persuasion will avail you nothing. Consider, even the Emperor Rudolph, who might be thought sympathetic to your views, was unwilling to countenance your stories of meeting beings from another world. When you tried to distil some of these otherworldly wonders into the two books we wrote together, they had to be disguised as Magick to evade even the relaxed censorship here in Prague. And the disguise was so thorough that I am not sure anything but Magick remains.

  You claim further that what you are pleased to call your ‘embassy to the stars’ was supported by Cardinal Rebiba and approved by Pope Pius, but both men are dead, they can do nothing for you now. Unless they have left written records, which is doubtful, your claim cannot be backed up, certainly not to a degree that would satisfy the Inquisition. Indeed, politics change so rapidly in the Vatican that it is likely that even if they did leave a written record it would not be enough to save you now.

  Finally, put not your faith in your friends from the stars. They will not and cannot speak for you. By your own account, they have not themselves visited Earth for more than ten years, and I do not see how they will be able to help once you are locked within the Tower of Nona.

  My friend, I know that you have been offered the chance to teach your system of memory in Venice, and that is more than you have been able to do in Prague or Frankfurt or Wittenberg. I know that you get restless and must constantly move to new places. I know that you seek out new experiences, new knowledge, that you might offer to your friends from the stars. But think that such opportunities might not also be available in Denmark or Poland or other German states, where you would be safer than in Venice?

  Giordano, for the sake of our friendship, for the sake of all that extraordinary knowledge that you hold, please do not put yourself into the hands of the Inquisition.

  *

  16. Document inserted into the file at this point. It is unsigned and undated, but the handwriting matches that of the marginal notations on a number of other documents in the file.

  By my order, all documents relating to Giordano Bruno and his so-called ‘embassy to the stars’ have been withdrawn from circulation or destroyed.

  Records of the trial have been examined in detail. All documents relating to the embassy have been destroyed. Any references to the embassy have been removed and the trial records re-written as necessary.

  These remaining documents are to be locked in this file in perpetuity.

  *

  17. Testimony of Domenico Bellarmino, guard at the Tower of Nona, given 22 January 1600.

  It was my duty to take food to the prisoner Bruno. He was to be delivered that day to the secular authorities ready for execution, so this was the last meal he would receive here. We all knew of the words he spoke upon receiving his sentence: ‘Perhaps you deliver this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it.’ It was believed that this defiance betokened some plan for rescue or escape, so we took special precautions. I had two armed men accompany me and others were stationed at several points nearby.

  As I approached the cell I became aware of a light that seemed to emanate from it. Of course, there should have been no light. So I put the food down and the three of us approached the door cautiously. The light was quite pale, but it was distinctly visible around the door frame. The door was still locked. I remember that, and I am sure the other guards will testify to that effect. I took my key and unlocked it, and then the three of us burst in.

  The prisoner was still chained where he had been, but there was another person beside him. This person was tall but stooped, and white like an angel. I could see all this clearly, because the light seemed to come directly from the body of this angel.

  Even as we watched, the prisoner shook the chains from his wrists, then the two of them turned slightly towards us and in an instant had disappeared.

  I swear by my Lord Jesus Christ and my hope of salvation that this is the truth. I have never seen the white figure before or since, and there is no other way by which they could have entered or left the cell. It was a miracle, my lord.

  *

  18. Letter from Johannes Kepler to his mother, dated Prague, October 1610. The letter seems never to have been sent.

  I had the most extraordinary dream. I must assume it was a dream, though I was in my workshop and it was the middle of the day.

  I looked up from my desk and a tall white man stood before me. I had heard nobody enter, and indeed had thought the door locked (which it later proved to be), so I challenged the intruder. Who are you? What are you doing here? He did not answer, but instead he said, ‘Giordano Bruno is dead,’ though I could not swear that his lips moved.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, for this is the sort of conversation one has in dreams, is it not? ‘He was burned in Rome ten years ago.’

  ‘No,’ the man said. The voice, as I heard it, seemed to come from inside my head. It was very calming, I felt no sense of threat. ‘He died this morning aboard our ship. It was felt someone should be informed of his true death.’

  ‘And the auto-da-fé?’ I said.

  ‘Some other poor unfortunate, hooded and gagged so the deception would not be discovered. Giordano Bruno was our friend, our ambassador he called it, so we took him to our ship and tended the wounds from his torture. But his body could not long endure the strains of low gravity and today his system failed beyond repair.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ I said. I recall the words now perfectly, though they make no sense to me. But without answering, the figure vanished. And I was in my study, and somewhere far away I could hear a clock strike twelve.

  I thought then of all the things Bruno had told us, about the infinite stars and the many worlds and all the peoples who might be found upon them. Then I turned again to my calculations, for it had all been but a dream.

  Ω

  It might be said that if anyone from the sixteenth century were to make contact with aliens, it would be Giordano Bruno. Obviously it cannot, at this distance, be proved either way, but as historians we must say that the documentary evidence in this file would be more than sufficient to support any less controversial historical scenario. To dismiss this possibility out of hand, therefore, must be to rely on preconceptions rather than on the weight of evidence.

  1620

  The voyage of the Mayflower to what would become the United States of America is part of that nation’s mythology. The hazards the passengers and crew encountered at sea were nothing compared to those they faced after they landed, with a harsh winter and unrelenting sickness. Many died – but those who lived were among the first settlers in America, remembered with veneration today as the Pilgrim Fathers.

  But if this account is to be believed, that mythology, like most mythologies, is only part of the truth; the reality was very different. This was an age of religious division and duplicity. Were all the Brownist Dissenters and Puritans quite what they seemed? And were the misfortunes they encountered just misfortunes?

  This account, which has been rendered into modern English, is compiled from diary entries and from a package of letters, which have been interleaved in chronological order. They were found separately in the Vatican Vaults, but together they tell a very different version of the voyage of the Mayflower.

  The Hammer of Witches

  Mary Gentle

  22 July 1620, to his Grace the Bishop of Luçon, at Avignon – Sir: I sabotaged the Speedwell, sister ship to the Mayflower, on the journey across the English Channel to Southampton.

  It isn’t as successful as I’d hoped.

  You’ll recall that, in my identity of John Allerton, one of the heretic Protestant separatists at Leiden in Holland, I was in charge of buying a ship for their mission to colonise the New World. I purchased the 60-ton Speedwell because it was the nearest thing I could find to a wreck still afloat.

  Despite taking an iron pry-bar to the hull and easing open the planking, worsening the leaks, it still floats.

  We’ve limpe
d here, into Southampton Water. The master, Captain John Chappell, has ordered her patched up. We rendezvoused with the Mayflower, and the English branch of the sect (Anglicans and Brownists, mostly; amiable people). I’m cheered to find the seventy Merchant Adventurers investors have hired more clerks and labourers to go out and work the colony. Our so-called ‘Saints’ from Leiden have nicknamed the whole group ‘The Strangers’ though they have nothing in common apart from the name.

  Your agent who was to have sabotaged the Mayflower is missing. The ship’s master, Captain Jones, appears honest when he says he has never heard the man’s name.

  We have many enemies.

  The yard has patched up the Speedwell as much as they can. I can see where it can be speedily unpatched. I hope to write to your Grace from another English port soon. I’ll do all I can to make sure neither ship leaves the English Channel. However, if we do – what’s the Bishop’s Wizard worth if he can’t raise up a storm in the Atlantic Ocean?

  I confirm that, yes, the problem is not enthusiastic Brownists and Anglicans making a home in the New World. It’s who they carry among them – and how many.

  Until we’re away from shore, I’m keeping my abilities quiet. The separatists want to escape persecution, but they’ll burn witches just as readily as Bloody Mary and Elizabeth burned heretics (of different flavours).

  On a different subject. If possible, my lord, might you have a secretary write to that ignorant soldier Miles Standish that you have acting as my minder? I know we Gifted are not quite of God, and must be watched; but please, he needs reminding that his job is to see that I get my job done?

  I remain, as ever, your servant.

  JA

  [Usual cypher] [This is the only part of the text written in clear French.]

  *

  Diary entry dated 13 August 1620

  [Marked private cypher]

  My dearest Secret,

  I’m about the Bishop’s Godly business, so it’s far too dangerous to actually send letters to the nunnery. I write this diary under the pretence that it’s letters to you. I’ll do as before – when I get back, I’ll parcel it up and bring it, and you can read everything I’ve seen and done.

  For this mission I’ve taken over the identity of one John Allerton, a common seaman, but a powerful man among the Puritan churches, and an Elder of this group who are going to the New World. Or rather, aren’t.

  As to where we are – I thought I might need to raise a wind to delay sailing down the Channel. However, the Speedwell sprang another leak. We took refuge in Dartmouth, a little port in Devon.

  Sadly, we are now repaired, and are once more at sea.

  For some reason, I’ve often been tempted to ask one Moses Fletcher, another of our Elders, and master of the Saints on the Speedwell, what he would think of a weather-wizard in his company?

  He’d turn from my friend to my enemy in an instant, I’d guess. As if I’d become a totally different man.

  I don’t know if I ever told you – when I was a small boy (you would have been in your cradle), my father took me to see the crowning of King James of Scotland, then to be King James of England too. When it got to the point where the King was anointed, I asked, Dad,Why?

  The answer I got was Spraying holy oil on that man’s body changes it into a miraculous body, son, different from the rest of us. A King’s body. A divine body.

  Someone in the crowd took exception – some Puritan enthusiast – and shouted that it was Nonsense, rubbish and Papist superstition! All of us were thrown out by the musketeers and halberd-men.

  On the way home, I was still young enough to ask my dad if the King’s new body was a Gift, like my Gift of controlling the weather?

  That was the first time he ever hit me for what he thought was blasphemy.

  Today, sailing down the Channel (the Speedwell straining to keep up with the Mayflower) it begins to seem – on the face of it – that it’s the Puritan separatists who’ll rule the proposed colony. A man could look at us and say: the Strangers have little in common with each other. A humble-jumble of farmers, blacksmiths, butchers, boatmen, valets and ladies’ maids, who fancy the idea of owning their own land and bringing up their children the way they like. The Saints are bound tightly together by congregation, by their Elders, by their beliefs. They argue much, but they speak with one voice to others.

  Then again, as ever, things are not quite as they seem.

  You Fore-Saw it right.

  Of the hundred and fifty passengers on both ships, Puritans and everyone else, more than a hundred of them are Gifted. That’s what this ship carries to the New World. Not escaping Puritans, but escaping Gifted souls.

  I’m melancholy; I wish I had your company.

  And, yes, sometimes I wish I had your twin gifts of Fore-sight and Past-sight. But what’s happening on the Speedwell is far too close to ‘the moment of Things Happening’ (as you call it!) for you to see anything but obscurity and fog.

  Writing in this crowded underdeck by a taper’s inefficient light, kept close like animals in a stock pen, is a premonition of the Hell that awaits both of us. Forgive me. They have just called that we are passing Land’s End; I run with all these other fools to see it!

  *

  31 August, Plymouth Harbour, Devon; to his Grace the Bishop of Luçon at Avignon – Sir:

  I thought I might have to try harder at sabotage. Turns out the Speedwell’s crew were there with their own pry-bars, loosening the seams. The cowards were facing bad weather, thin crops, savage natives and disease in the New World, and they decided they wanted no part of it. Who can blame them? But why not do it before!

  Maybe it wasn’t a real threat to them until they were in the Atlantic rollers.

  We made two hundred miles out into the Atlantic before the Speedwell almost foundered. There were winds from the west strong enough in our faces that I hardly needed to give them a push; the weather was entirely ready to hamper us.

  Despite protests, we turned back.

  Before Standish writes you his side of the story, I confess we fought on the deck. He accused me of not doing my duty (trying to say, without other people understanding him, that I could have called up a greater gale before this time). I ran out of patience when I most needed it. They broke up the fight before the daggers could be used.

  We are now in the harbour of Plymouth, Devon, from where Drake’s forces set out to harry the Armada’s ships. (I believe the Spanish weather-wizards had very little skill.)

  They have a capable yard here. All agree the Speedwell couldn’t sail across a town duck pond. Stores are shifted to the Mayflower, some families decide to wait for the following year, and some men leave their families in England and say they will send for them when they’re settled. You’ll remember from my earlier reports that the Mayflower is a 180-ton Dutch fluyt, as they call them; built specifically for carrying cargo and, unlike most, with no ability to convert to a warship – hence its greater tonnage for a 100-foot ship. Its four decks carry an amazing amount of stores, families and livestock.

  What can be put off for one year can be put off for a decade.

  I keep pushing the justifiable opinion to the other Elders that August is far too late to set sail across the Atlantic, especially when they must build shelter and plant crops to harvest when they arrive.

  As I surmised, the Saints have the advantage of a unified opinion. The voice they speak with is not that of the separatists, rather, it is that of all the Gifted.

  But I believe it’s only their united, ordinary voice.

  I’ve now noted the connections between many of the Strangers hired by the Merchant Adventurers, and the English and Leiden Puritans. (See my attached report. Perhaps this is information your agent on the Mayflower discovered, before he vanished.)

  The truth is, Secret is right. I wouldn’t have her Gift. Hundreds of years in the future, she can See wonders – men walking on the silver globe in the sky – and terrors. She can guess at causes; at where thing
s may originate. And at the moment, the cause of terror begins this year, with the voyage of the Speedwell and the Mayflower. And a colony the world would be better off without.

  At least two-thirds of these people are wizards and witches, desiring to escape Europe.

  You said they might thrive in this colony, escaping the Witch-Burnings that have killed hundreds of thousands of the Gifted across Europe.

  I know why it had to be done.

  Now it seems it must be done in the New World, too.

  I shall soon find myself in the Atlantic again. I will put as much obstruction from wind and wave in the ship’s way as I can. All I can say, sir, is, remember we’re dealing with fanatics.

  I remain your very obedient servant,

  JA

  [Autumn cypher] [Again, these two words in clear French.]

  *

  Diary entry: 2 September 1620

  [Marked private cypher]

  Beloved Secret,

  I miss our talks together, even though most times the rules of your Order keep a barred grill between us when we speak. I’m using what you discovered with your Past-Sight in argument with that idiot Miles Standish. He may have a degree in military engineering from the University of Leiden. He’s still the cast-off son of an English lord with all the sense of entitlement the aristocracy have, and no respect for scholarship. Or for witches.

  He could, if he wanted, read in any Church library how the wizards and witches – I’d still rather call us the Gifted – fell under the Church’s control even before Constantine adopted Christianity. It’s no coincidence that all the pagan demi-gods and enchantresses and magi started disappearing about then. The First Council of Nicaea asserted priests could use us in the service of good.

  Miles Standish, that soldier who loves his cannon more than his wife Rose, who he’s dragged along with him, keeps hammering the table and demanding What use are you? The ability to spoil milk, help a wife conceive a son, put a fog in the path of an enemy army . . . Chance could do as much!