Popes and Phantoms

The Year 1510 ‘THE FLOWERING OF THE REFORMATION & FATHER DROZ’S LITTLE OUTING: A symposium on faith, carnal lust and sausage. I guiltily sow weeds in the fields of Mother Church.’

‘So how goes it with the Roman Hebrews?’ asked Numa Droz. He was examining a crossbow quarrel, pondering ways to improve lethality but still sufficiently bored to show an unprecedented interest in others.

Admiral Slovo carelessly let the letter drop from his fingers, and the night breeze bore it off the Tower, and into the moonlit, Tuscan countryside below. ‘It goes badly,’ he replied languidly, ‘but that is nothing in the least novel. As head of the community, Megillah has been skinned for the Lion money.’

‘Serves him right,’ smiled Droz, showing his brown peg teeth. ‘What’s the Lion money then?’

‘The salary and expenses of the Custos Leonis who looks after the symbolic, but nevertheless live, lion traditionally held on the Capitoline Hill in Rome. Surely you must have seen it?’

‘No, Admiral, I haven’t. I don’t go to Rome to sight-see.’

But to be told who to kill, thought Slovo. ‘Quite. Well, on reflection, perhaps your omission is not so surprising. The lion is tame and gentle and easily intimidated by the brutality of the Roman crowd. It therefore rarely emerges from its cage. Even so, the related cost is said to be thirty silver florins per annum and in memory of the price paid to Judas for the betrayal of the Christ-person, such a sum is yearly extracted from the Roman Hebrews. Conjoined with all the other depredations they are prey to, it presents them with no small problem.’

‘Well then,’ said Droz, his conversational attention span reaching its limits, ‘they should kill it.’

‘The lion, you mean?’ queried Slovo, somewhat puzzled.

‘Why not?’ replied the Swiss mercenary, enviably untouched by doubt. ‘The lion, the custodian, whoever …’

‘So here we are again,’ said the Admiral, idly amused. ‘Your explanation and remedy for all ills: kill it.’

Numa Droz adopted his ‘honest peasant among sophisticates’ persona. ‘Well, it’s a maxim that always served me well,’ he sad stoutly.

Admiral Slovo would have been hard put to dispute the point. Captain of the Ostia Citadel at twenty-one, roving problem-remover for three Popes by the age of thirty, possessor of a smooth and unstressed family life, Numa Droz occupied the high ground in any such argument.

Silence, save for the sounds of perpetual war between owl and vole, fell as the duo on the tower resumed their vigil, peering out into the unlit night, grading shadows and evaluating the mutation of shades.

Admiral Slovo would have been content never to speak to mankind again, but Numa Droz, for all the bloodiness of his progress from the Alps to the Apennines, retained a degree of sociability. To his mind, speech and noise were useful indicators of life – lack of them usually meaning his job was done. The corollary of this, however, was that prolonged quiet made him uneasy. He worried that he too might have crossed the great divide without realizing (another of his range of tricks).

‘You’re very pally with Jews, aren’t you?’ he said eventually.

Slovo undermined his answer by hesitation. ‘… Yes – and why not?’

Numa Droz ignored the riposte. ‘We’ve got Jews in Canton Uri,’ he said. ‘Came from Heidelberg where the people gave ’em a hard time. It turned those left into a vicious bunch of daggermen: neutral, close-grained sort of folk as far as humanity goes; bad enemies. I really like them.’

‘Remind me never to introduce you to my acquaintance, Rabbi Megillah,’ mused Slovo.

‘There’s a saying about Hebrews in Uri, Admiral,’ continued Droz unabashed. ‘If anything’s really dangerous – you know, an iffy bridge or splintery seat – “it’s like a Jew with a knife”, we say. Now, is that high praise or what?’

‘Dangerous?’ queried the young lady emerging through the Tower’s trap door, catching the echo of conversation and repeating it with hot interest. ‘What’s so dangerous?’

‘Nothing that need engage your attention,’ growled Numa Droz, turning back to scan the outer darkness. Free as she was with her favours, the Lady Callypia de Marinetti would never sleep with a barbarian such as a Swiss. Knowing this, Droz was accordingly tormented with desire.

‘How are you, my lady?’ asked Slovo with great courtesy. ‘Can you not sleep?’

The beautiful young patrician unleashed a full volley of charm at the Admiral, and then remembered that in his case her powder was damp and useless. The charm was extinguished like a light.

‘I cannot sleep,’ she said, reverting to tartness, ‘because I am plagued by your Englishman following me: he even attempts to settle outside my door. I have come to complain.’

‘She’s plagued by something all right,’ said the soldier who now joined them on the roof. ‘Or maybe lack of something, hur hur!’

‘Then you still suspect there are matters afoot, Master Cromwell?’ asked Slovo gently.

‘Borr … she’s up to something tonight,’ said Thomas Cromwell. ‘There’s fires lit in there expecting quenching before cock crows, I reckon.’

To the fastidious Admiral, all speech bar his native Italian sounded like angry coughing but he recognized the control and cultivation overlying the soldier’s earthy peasant tones.

‘How dare …!’ exclaimed de Marinetti, for probably the fiftieth time that day. No one paid attention, for the act was wearing thin.

Cromwell dared because he was abroad and armed and fortified with the qualities expected of a Cockney Brewer’s son. ‘They may be all eyes and legs, these nobility,’ he continued, ‘but I know the spirit of the farmyard when I see it.’

‘Yes … yes, thank you,’ said Admiral Slovo, only his Stoicism preventing an impermissible show of embarrassment.

‘We go!’ hissed Numa Droz from the parapet’s edge, waving them all to silence with a compelling chop of his gauntleted hand. Cromwell permitted himself a thin-lipped smile of vindication.

For all his sympathy concerning the dictates of passion in others, the Admiral looked sternly on de Marinetti. She had only been in his charge for a mere month: what were young people coming to?

Seeing the game was up, Callypia shrugged her tiny shoulders, expressing the Pagan innocence of her time and class.

Carried clearly on the still air, they heard the gentle rasp of gravel upon glass further along the priory wall.

‘Love craves entry,’ whispered Numa Droz, ‘(if you see what I mean). And though the bed is empty, still he must have his night to remember.’

In an impressive blur, the Swiss rose, sighted and fired his crossbow. A howl like the end of the world livened the night.

‘Right in the parts!’ exulted Droz, addressing de Marinetti. ‘He’s a fine-looking youth – but not much use to you now, I fear.’

The lady, looking wiser than her sixteen summers should permit, was already descending the stairway. Bisected by the Tower floor, she turned back to reply. ‘If the ancient writers were studied,’ she said, firing another full broadside of allure in order to taunt, ‘in the place from which you spring, then you would know there are subtler refinements of joy than plain fornication. I go now to explore them. Sleep well, gentlemen – and you too, Swiss.’

Admiral Slovo (who knew precisely what she meant) and the soldiers who (even worse) could construct some guesses, were silenced. Prisoner though she was, de Marinetti retained the power to sow seeds that would blossom and grow, spreading their poison rest for seasons to come.

She then departed, mistress of the field.

Each wrapped in coils of unhealthy speculation, the three captors followed her down. The sobs and groans from the priory grounds continued a little longer before stopping abruptly and for ever.

What have I become, thought Admiral Slovo, remembering the child that he must once have been, that I find cruel things funny?

‘As one professional to another,’ said Thomas Cromwell, to Numa Droz the following morning, ‘I would advise against your present daydreams. Would you shoot so well with your eyes removed? Would there be point in such thoughts if your manly parts were torn out?’

Droz knew the advice was both timely and well meant. He tore his eyes from Madame de Marinetti’s retreating form for fear of the operation being performed literally.

‘It’s that bad, is it?’ he asked.

‘Or that good,’ nodded Cromwell. ‘Palatine gossip says her invention is so unique, her performance so mettlesome, that she makes monogamy a viable option. That holds obvious attractions for a Pope for, after all, he has a certain position to maintain. Alas, however, the lady’s energies are … exuberant and Pope Julius is a jealous man. He thinks a spell in this forsaken hole might cool his mistress’s passions – other than for him, that is.’

Numa Droz laughed: an unnatural and unpractised sound. ‘What? With all these novices and us here? Not to mention half the gentlemen of the region now wearing crossbow bolts in their codpieces.’

‘Leave the “us” out of it,’ said Cromwell, an edge of iron in his voice. ‘I saw what was done to the Scribbiacci brothers in Rome for essaying what you have in mind. Blood waterfalled freely from the scaffold and the hangman had to be paid extra. It was most educational and accordingly, for my part, I look at her as I would my mother.’

Numa Droz acknowledged the wisdom of this. ‘And, of course, the Admiral is her appointed custodian,’ he said. ‘Beware him, Englishman: he reads minds and is married to the stiletto.’

‘He has commendable self-control,’ concluded Cromwell. ‘And I intend to emulate him in this respect. You should do the same. It might,’ he went on, wrinkling his nose, ‘enable us to transcend the present overpowering stench.’

‘I know,’ agreed Droz. ‘Ghastly, isn’t it? I hate flowers.’

Admiral Slovo, who had listened in to all this, decided there was nothing of import brewing between his two mercenaries. There was, of course, a contingency plan for the disposal of either or both but, for the present, it could lie, chill but ready, in the ice-house of his subtle calculations. He walked on.

‘Must those two follow me everywhere?’ snarled de Marinetti. ‘Can’t I even walk in a garden without—’

‘Patience,’ said the Prioress, ‘is the open secret of happiness: lack of this quality is, I think, the seat of your troubles.’

‘The seat of her troubles,’ whispered Droz to Cromwell, ‘is her seat.’

Callypia glowered at the blameless grass but deferred to superior spirit when she heard it. Admiral Slovo was happy merely to observe the fray, holding his own decisive forces in reserve.

‘For instance.’ the Prioress continued gently, ‘it required patience to create this garden but, within a few decades, my restraint has borne a beautiful harvest. Look about you, child.’

For safety’s sake, de Marinetti glanced briefly up at the great coloured ramparts of flowers that bordered the narrow paths. Right up to where the walls of the garden met the sky, an anarchy of starbursts and tendrils was all that met her eye. ‘It is too much,’ she announced. ‘You have incited nature to excess.’

Admiral Slovo’s judgement was not so harsh. Although (also for safety’s sake) self-trained to aesthetic indifference, he quite liked the riotous garden. The unusual degree of concealment offered rendered it an assassin’s dream.

‘As you may already suspect,’ continued the serene old lady, ‘this garden is my pride and joy. It has blossomed and flourished in direct proportion to the joy and detachment I increasingly feel and, as such, may be a divinely permitted metaphor.’

‘But what if,’ Master Cromwell said confidently, ‘man is master of his own destiny? I heard it proposed in Antwerp that the Almighty set the universal mechanism in motion and then stepped back. Opinions vary, but perhaps he has withdrawn until the Day of Judgement – or even for ever. If so, we are alone: and these are just riotous blooms and no more. What then?’

The Prioress looked quizzically at the Admiral.

‘it is a foible of mine’ he said, ‘to permit liberality of speech in my servitors. It amuses me because of the occasional gem of perspective that, from time to time, emerges. However, if he is being offensive …’

‘No,’ said the Prioress in a kindly voice. ‘He may be English but his mind shows tolerable discernment.’

Cromwell frowned again and the observant Admiral saw the face of murder briefly surge up from its place of confinement.

‘Well,’ said Numa Droz, ‘if we’re all to be permitted to put our pike in, what I’d like to say is that this place would make a fine defensive point for the Priory. Hack them plant-things away, platform and crenellate the walls and you could hold this for days against pirates and free-companies.’

‘Or lovers of the inmates,’ said Cromwell, with cold anger.

The Prioress spoke up at once. ‘The blooms,’ she said, impelling Droz to silence, ‘will not be cut. I forbid it absolutely.’

The spirit in her voice caused the little party to wake anew. De Marinetti looked at the Prioress, perhaps scenting some weak point on which to play. Admiral Slovo was obliged to suppress a flicker of surprise. The soldiers, reflexes triggered by raised voices, were instantly on duty.

‘And that is my one permitted selfishness,’ she continued, by way of explanation. ‘Outside this garden I have surrendered my will to God but here; here is where I come to regroup. I trust you will appreciate the military metaphor there, gentlemen – and note it.’

They nodded.

‘Beauty hoarded,’ said de Marinetti, ‘is beauty wasted.’

‘Without restraint,’ countered the Prioress, ‘beauty is guzzled and debauched. The senses must be tamed and fed moderately – like a lion in a pleasure garden.’

The Admiral signalled his wholehearted agreement and cast his own mind cheerily back to when he himself was a mere slave of feeling: before tragedy and experience, before Marcus Aurelius and Stoicism.

Only Cromwell seemed to remain resentful of the Prioress prevailing, ‘I have heard it said that the Hebrew scriptures say that before the throne of judgement, every soul must one day account for every pleasure missed.’

‘Every legitimate pleasure,’ said the Prioress. ‘You really must quote accurately, mercenary.’

‘Whatever,’ replied Cromwell blithely. ‘Legitimacy varies from sect to sect.’

A gulf of years and sadness separated the Prioress from the dangerous energies of the Englishman and she could not find it in herself to blame him for his zest. Christ, she recalled, is in every man – but sometimes in heavy disguise. ‘I am pleased,’ she said, ‘to hear your familiarity with any scripture. Why, to think my previous impression was that the Almighty did not play an overlarge part in your life …’

‘Whilst not, of course,’ Cromwell replied, ‘denying God’ (and all the others nodded, observing the formalities of the age) ‘it is at least arguable to consider him remote. One can regard him as the foundation of proper social order but still not require the sight of his hand at work amongst men. I suspect we are effectively orphans and alone in the world – that being so, we must surely make our own way.’

The Prioress was merely amused and this only infuriated Cromwell the more.

‘If I did not know,’ she replied, ‘that my Redeemer liveth and will one day walk the Earth, life would be … insupportable. It would have no point.’

‘And why should it have?’ cried Cromwell, warming to his subject. ‘From our puny perspective, why should we perceive any meaning? I see no need for heaven or hell or meaning. It is a mighty universe we inhabit, Prioress, and more than enough to get on with, in fact.’

Admiral Slovo had long ago ceased to care, and the Prioress held her peace. Meanwhile, way above (or below) all this philosophy, Callypia de Marinetti winked at Numa Droz and shifted her endless legs. Ignoring visions of red-hot pincers and the executioner’s knife, and like all tiny creatures seizing at the fleeting moments life offered before the final dark, Droz winked back.

‘So they are all gone?’ asked Admiral Slovo calmly.

‘Every one, sir,’ replied the nervous novice. ‘And she has not risen at her customary time. We are all most concerned.’

De Marinetti placed a (possibly) consoling arm around the young nun’s shoulders and stroked her hand. ‘No one is holding you responsible, my lovely,’ she said. ‘Our suspicions are drifting elsewhere.’

‘Not I!’ protested Cromwell. ‘I am capable of many things—’

‘Of anything, surely,’ corrected Numa Droz, expressing his professional opinion.

‘—but not pettiness,’ Cromwell pressed on.

Admiral Slovo looked at the mercenary, pinning him with his grey eyes. A tense moment elapsed until, his mental trespass complete, Slovo was satisfied.

‘I believe you,’ he said. ‘However, given your continual debate with the Prioress these last two weeks, and your obvious ill-will upon being worsted, our initial surmise is surely forgivable.’

‘I would not harm the Prioress,’ Master Cromwell maintained stoutly, just the lightest sheen adorning his brow by virtue of Slovo’s scrutiny, ‘or any other old lady.’

‘Unless it was necessary or business,’ expanded Numa Droz again.

‘Naturally,’ conceded Cromwell.

‘Very well then,’ said Slovo. ‘The noose remains untenanted – for the time being. Let us go and examine the evidence first-hand.’

‘There may be no case to answer,’ commented Numa Droz reasonably. ‘Old ladies do sleep late sometimes. My great-grandmother …’

‘No,’ said the Admiral confidently. ‘This place is diminished: I can sense it. She has gone on.’

That was enough to decide things and the little party roused themselves from the breakfast table.

‘You stay here,’ said Slovo to the novice – and then noticed de Marinetti’s flare of predatory interest. ‘On second thoughts, come with us; you’ve had enough novelty for one day.’

The garden was bare, a green graveyard of beheaded stems.

‘What hours of patient work,’ marvelled Callypia, ‘to sever and collect every bloom. Surely this is either a labour of love or hate …’

‘Two closely related emotions,’ commented Slovo, permitting just a modicum of contempt on the final word. ‘And the Prioress’s bed-chamber is …?’ he enquired.

The novice indicated a solid-looking barrier at one end of the ravaged field.

‘Brute force, if you please,’ said Slovo to Numa Droz.

The great Swiss casually applied his metal-shod boot to the door, which splintered away from the violence offered it. With contrasting gentleness, he then disengaged the wounded lock. The door swung open.

Admiral Slovo walked in like Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror entering Constantinople. The others, more like the disciples at the Easter Tomb, followed nervously.

In this case the tomb was not empty. The Prioress, having left the world behind, sat peacefully composed in her bedside chair, surrounded by her transplanted earthly joys. Every surface bore bowls and vases packed with the cut flowers, even the bed and floor were thickly strewn with them so that the otherwise bare and sombre cell was today positively aglow with colour.

Whilst his charges and followers looked on in wonder, saving the image for their old age, Slovo made a search and discovered the unsealed letter propped up before a wash-bowl of roses.

‘I have heard my call,’ he read dispassionately to the assembled witnesses, ‘and dutifully answer, being nothing loath to leave. I know my redeemer liveth.’

Thomas Cromwell sighed.

‘She always had to have the last word,’ he said bitterly.

‘She may just have felt Time’s heavy hand upon her,’ said Cromwell, ‘and made a lucky guess.’

Admiral Slovo made his move and doomed, three turns on, Cromwell’s rook to inevitable death.

‘One does not bid farewell to one’s oldest friends, as the Prioress did, on the basis of a guess. Imagine the embarrassment of waking the next morning!’

‘Perhaps she took poison to avoid that shame,’ hazarded Cromwell, grimacing at the chessboard in his unwillingness to admit defeat.

‘No,’ said Slovo, looking around the cleared garden. ‘I have a passing familiarity with the poisoner’s art. The Prioress departed at the call of Nature alone.’

‘And she’s been seen again!’ piped the Lady de Marinetti. ‘This morning! One of the novices told me.’

‘I have also heard these stories,’ said Admiral Slovo. ‘If true, she seems to have retained a custodial interest in her former garden.’

Former was the correct word. Plagued by boredom and lust, Numa Droz had pressed the sturdier nuns into service, turning the garden into the citadel he had proposed earlier. Already, in one short week, the plants were gone, replaced by rough rubble ramparts.

‘The dead,’ Cromwell spat, ‘are gone and spent and do not return to trouble us. That is their great merit. It has to be so for the proper ordering of things.’

‘How so?’ queried Admiral Slovo with polite interest at his soldier’s venture into statecraft.

‘Well, consider,’ replied the Englishman, boldly convinced, ‘if every subject disposed of by a Prince, came back to mock his Lord’s decision; if every felon hung returned to flout the Law’s due sentence, what then? Why, Admiral, there would be metaphysical anarchy!’

Admiral Slovo decided he rather liked the sound of that situation and was thus in favour of the two-way grave.

‘Besides,’ Cromwell continued, ‘the one redeeming feature of the woman’s death was in the proof it must have supplied her. Failing to awake to life everlasting she would – if she could – have conceded the explosion of her life-long fancies. Alas, however, she could not – for she was dead and I am right.’

Then de Marinetti gasped and pointed. Admiral Slovo smiled and Cromwell rocketed to his feet, propelling the board and chessmen into the air.

The Prioress was gliding alongside one of the walls, tending and scenting flowers that only she could see. They saw her as through a grey, gauzy film, a figure who flicked in and out of view as she passed open doorways between her world and the real one. The presence of the Admiral and his party was not acknowledged. Eventually, she entered some section of the parallel region not visible to man and disappeared from sight like an extinguished candle-flame.

Callypia de Marinetti sighed deeply and smoothed her hands down her silken gown. ‘I never knew,’ she purred, ‘that fright could be so delicious.’

Thomas Cromwell was less sanguine. He stared after the vision, his face set with barely checked ferocity. ‘I take this as an insult,’ he said quietly.

‘The important thing about a haunting,’ said Admiral Slovo, ‘is to stand still.’

‘Eh?’ snarled Cromwell angrily, wrenching his eyes away from the Prioress’s spectre as she advanced, yet again, along the departed flowerbeds. ‘Still? What d’you mean?’

Slovo fastidiously ignored the lack of respect, putting it down to stress. Over the last two weeks, Cromwell had been positively persecuted by the ghost, both by its frequent appearances – sometimes at most inconvenient and private moments – and by the implications of its presence. He had got it into his head that everyone – even the giggly novices – was laughing at him.

‘I mean,’ explained the Admiral patiently, ‘that we are permitted these visions through portals of communication. As you will observe from the irregularity of our view, they are random and transient. One moment she can be seen, the next she has passed from sight – only to reappear elsewhere. The correlation of dimensions between here and … somewhere else is not precise or predictable. If one were to move about during a manifestation there would be the danger of involuntary penetration into other realms. At such moments, who knows what awful gateways gape a mere hand’s breadth away from us?’

But Thomas Cromwell had been pushed too far to heed wise words. The future Chancellor of England was consulting his subconscious, travelling back down the years and communing with his roots. He was hearing the savage advice of Pagan Saxon ancestors. Even King Ambition was powerless before the winds that blew from those times and regions.

His eyes narrowed and the hands that would one day draft the dissolution of the monasteries and priories of his native land, twitched and curled with fury. ‘Mebbe so,’ he said, to no one in particular, the careful Court-English he was capable of replaced with a thicker, swifter dialect, ‘but I reckon I’m being buggered about! And it’s like this; I be fed up with it!’

He drew the concealed, serrated dagger that Slovo had noted on their first meeting and charged at the intermittent image of the Prioress. Admiral Slovo was intrigued to note the Englishman was still soldier enough to downgrade his anger into serviceable ferocity – and just as interested to see his theory confirmed as Cromwell was swallowed up and vanished from sight.

In her first interaction with the world since leaving it, the Prioress slowly turned to face Admiral Slovo and howled in triumph. It was not a sound that could have been emulated in life, being too octave-ranging for mortal chords. Also, somewhere in the interval of time, her eyes had been turned into fire.

Whatever the provocation, the Admiral was determined to heed his own advice. He held on to the arms of his chair and remained still; where Thomas Cromwell had gone, he did not care to follow.

Accordingly, during the long afternoon that followed, Slovo was captive witness to the hunting and harrying of Cromwell through the Prioress’s new home. No one else entered the ravished garden, warned away by Slovo’s terse commands. Only Numa Droz hovered alertly by the entrance, patiently awaiting the call to rescue his contract-master. Time hung heavy and horrible during the gory process but, as it turned out, there were diversions …

Before the noise of the multi-voiced howl had died away, the Prioress had sped out of sight. A few yards away, another window opened and Slovo saw her hurtling, most unlike an old lady, down some endless corridor. At its end stood Thomas Cromwell.

The two collided in a chaos of flapping black habit and gaudy mercenary’s garb. Cromwell, bone-white but resolute, made a masterly up-and-under killing strike to the sternum region. It went up … and up … and through, meeting no resistance, Cromwell’s whole arm following the blade. He had a moment to stand stupefied, harmlessly transfixing the Prioress. Then she laughed and blinded his right eye with a talon.

Again the vision faded.

And so it went on. A few more times, Cromwell turned to fight, his dagger passing uselessly through the spectre, while he suffered yet more grievous injuries. Thereafter, he relied exclusively on flight.

The Prioress’s private heaven, hell or limbo, whatever it was, seemed full of indeterminate landscapes of white. Admiral Slovo caught glimpses of hills and plains as well as featureless interiors of the same dull hue. Sometimes, Cromwell appeared to have taken refuge within a building and would rest, heaving for breath and bright with blood, against a wall. But soon enough he would be scurrying on, driven by the sound of the Prioress’s keening call.

On other occasions, a great time seemed to have elapsed and he was seen labouring over low foothills or salt-white marshes, fleeing the razor-sharp claws ever close behind. The Prioress’s unearthly exultations echoed all over the drear scenes and seeped out of the portals to echo in her one-time garden. Cold winds also issued forth and streamed back the Admiral’s silver hair, carrying with them the sounds of the hunt and the scent of despair.

In one of the less dramatic interludes, Admiral Slovo found himself thinking of what an Ottoman Bashi-Bazouk once told him (under torture, naturally). In Paradise, he had said, everything forbidden on Earth: wine, boys, a nice portrait on one’s wall, all were permitted. Eternal indulgence was the reward for a life-time of restraint.

For himself, Admiral Slovo considered that total self-control should extend beyond the tomb – Stoicism being an absolute concept – but, for others, he could see the appeal of the idea. To the Prioress, for example, after three-score years and ten of peace and loving kindness, might not a spot of vengeance be most welcome? Surely, in her case, the larder of stockpiled aggression must be more than overflowing. In fact Slovo was slightly disappointed and his decision to distance himself from the world strengthened. If that was the way she acted once the leash was off, what real conviction had attended the virtuous life before? Actually it was rather shocking.

It ended – or the beginning ended – in early evening, by Admiral Slovo’s time. By poor Master Cromwell’s reckoning perhaps whole days or weeks had elapsed.

A series of irregular portals winked open and in a deserted town square, lit by the moon of Slovo’s world, the Admiral saw Cromwell cornered – and then averted his eyes as the Prioress skinned the screaming soldier alive.

When it was done, she draped herself in the red pelt and eagerly ran off to an eternity of new wickedness. Except in dreams, Admiral Slovo never saw her again.

The obscure tides governing the display shifted and snapped the windows shut, at which point Cromwell was spewed forth on to the ground before the Admiral’s feet, naked but otherwise untouched – and miraculously alive.

Less grateful than he might have been, Cromwell staggered to his feet and felt his chest and arms, half fearful that their solid attachment was illusory. ‘I am whole again!’ he gasped.

‘Well, almost,’ said Slovo gently. ‘Save that she has carved the Papal Cross-keys upon your arse.’

Cromwell nearly turned to look but, higher sensibilities such as dignity now returning, he restrained himself.

‘I suspect it may be permanent,’ added Slovo rather gratuitously.

Cromwell nodded, ‘I will be avenged, you know.’

Slovo smiled. ‘How so? The Prioress is beyond your reach in the most profound of ways.’

It was Cromwell’s turn to smile and there was a greater coldness in it than ever. Previously, his ambition had been undirected, but now it was mounted upon a mission and accordingly speeded and energized in a way that, he sensed, would last him out his days. ‘She has left hostages behind, Admiral,’ he said, waving his bare arm to encompass the entire priory, ‘things that she cared about: bricks and mortar, institutions and a culture, a whole way of life! With these tools I’ll pay her back, blow for blow, wound for wound, as she watches down, helpless to intervene. And since I’m an honest man, Slovo, after my own lights, I’ll repay her with proper interest, you mark my words!’

Admiral Slovo did as he was bid and noted the simplicity and innocence of a civilization younger than his own. He firmly believed that Cromwell would be as good as his vow. Slovo also felt that though the die of history was cast, the protesting squeak of those that history would crush should be heard.

Aloud he said, ‘But concerning the life to come and such; surely the Prioress was right, was she not?’

Cromwell looked at the Priory Tower, seeing demolition gangs and secular inheritors. ‘She was right,’ he agreed. ‘That only makes it worse.’[14]

‘He’s even forbidden us the solace of sausage!’ The monkish face was alight with indignation, squinting against the Roman sun. ‘Can you believe that?’

Reawakened by the rebarbative images this statement conjured up, Slovo forced himself to pay attention. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Since time immemorial, eminent Admiral,’ said the monk in a whiney tone, ‘each brother has been granted a daily pork-and-blood sausage of the type we Germans love. By partaking so intimately in the raw components of recently living things, we draw near to the divinely created cycle of existence. Von Staupitz has now forbidden us this ration!’

‘Give us this day our daily sausage, eh?’ grinned Numa Droz, as huge and unlikely in his clerical gown as a lion in a mitre.

The monk wasn’t sure whether the jest was in mockery or support but, too frightened of this monster of a ‘priest’ to do otherwise, accepted it as the latter. ‘That’s right!’ he said. ‘And that’s not the least of his savagery. He’s watering the wheat-beer as well.’

Father Droz’s eyes – as evil as a goat’s at the best of times – flared. ‘Now that’s not on!’ he said. ‘I reckon you ought to go back to Efurt and cut a blood eagle on the bastard!’

The monk was perturbed now, worried by the floodgates of ‘sympathy’ he’d opened. ‘Oh, I see … um, what’s that?’

‘A blood eagle?’ answered Droz. ‘The Vikings invented it – I’ve always admired their good old ways. First you put your man down, though it can be done on women too. Then you get ’em face to the ground and cut through the back till you see the ribs and can pull ’em up and through. It looks like they’ve got wings, d’you see? An eagle, get it? They can live on for hours sometimes.’

When the monk could manage no response, Droz took the open-mouthed silence for approval. ‘There you are then!’ he concluded. ‘Simple, isn’t it?’

‘What I suggest,’ interjected Slovo, forcing himself to try and regain control of events, ‘is that you go and indulge yourself. Here is a florin. Over there is a purveyor of processed dead animals. Go and consume blood sausage therein until funds are exhausted.’

‘Well, actually, Admiral,’ replied the monk, ‘I’m not all that hungry at the moment and—’

‘I insist,’ said Slovo, so that even Numa Droz had to fight the urge to leap forth to buy sausage. ‘And do not return until you are surfeit. Otherwise I shall think your complaints of ill-usage are as empty as your monastery larder.’

The monk looked into the Admiral’s eyes and saw a blasted landscape not at all to his liking. He was up and away like a greyhound.

‘So, Brother Martin,’ Slovo resumed to the remaining monk, ‘perhaps you will have the chance to speak now. What say you about all this?’

‘I think I’d best say nothing,’ returned the dumpy and intimidated German.

‘Sorry. That’s not permitted,’ replied Slovo, with great finality. ‘Whilst His Holiness deliberates on your Order’s complaints against their new Vicar General, we are deputed to entertain and enlighten you. We cannot entertain a silent man.’

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ said Droz, fixing the monk with his awful gaze. ‘Give us some of that tempestuous Teuton tomfoolery I’ve heard so much about – sausages, big women, Jew-baiting – anything that takes your fancy.’

‘This is my first visit to Rome,’ stumbled Brother Martin. ‘I am a little overwhelmed by it all and tired, yes, very tired. Perhaps I should rest and—’

‘No,’ said Slovo as decisive as before. ‘Tell us what you think of us Romans.’

The monk proved to have more backbone than first impressions suggested. His face directly hardened, his Latin acquired a harshness beyond that grafted on by a guttural mother-tongue. ‘You are loose-livers,’ he said. ‘I have never seen so many people seduced by the call of the flesh.’

Admiral Slovo leaned his chin on his hand. ‘Yes … that about sums us up.’

‘Present company excepted,’ added the monk – but only out of politeness, not fear.

‘I resent your prejudice, Brother,’ said Droz, smiling horribly, in a way which told Slovo that someone, somewhere, would suffer before the day was out. ‘But everyone’s entitled to their opinions, I suppose.’

Admiral Slovo called for another flask from the wine-shop owner and its speedy arrival smoothed over the awkward lull. He sampled its contents before asking, ‘So the new Augustinian General is giving your Order a hard time, is he?’

In fact Slovo knew full well that was so. Johann Von Staupitz – Thomist, Augustinian, member of the currently fashionable ‘Brethren of the Common Life’ and (more to the point) Vehmist – had been drafted in to do just that. Resentment boiled marginally below the violence point in the Order’s German houses as a result. Two eloquent (by the standards of their type) brothers had been deputized to take their grievances to Rome for restitution and it just so happened that Brother Martin Luther was one of them. It was he that the Vehmic talent spotters had adjudged ready for the influence of Rome and Admiral Slovo’s company.

‘I should say so,’ now replied Luther. ‘A monk’s life should be austere but nowhere do I find it justified that it should also be miserable. If it were not wrong to impute bad faith, I would say Von Staupitz was out to upset us for reasons of his own.’

Not knowing whether to be impressed by the monk’s perspicacity or shocked at the crudity of the Vehme, Slovo pushed the flask towards the monk. ‘I should have a drink,’ he said, oh-so reasonably. ‘You’ll enjoy your time with us more. Wine dulls those parts of man which discern pain and boredom. Conversely, it awakens the inner eye for joy.’

‘Life is crap, so drink and forget,’ added Father Droz, nudging the container even further forward till it threatened to topple into Luther’s lap.

Strangely, the monk seemed to appreciate these last words and he was thereby persuaded. Downing the wine in one mighty convulsion of the throat, he smacked his lips and drew a pudgy hand across them to mop up the residue.

Admiral Slovo was both encouraged and repelled. Not even the pirates he used to know consumed brain-stunning liquor with such indecent relish. Wine was, he realized, a powerful weapon against a man used to drinking in beer-quantities. The monk’s defences were now breached and open to the attack of new ideas and sensations.

‘Right then,’ Slovo said, gathering together his gloves and scrip, ‘since your colleague is off enjoying himself with death-by-a-thousand-sausages, we shall be away. What would you like to do?’

Luther looked about, symbolically taking in the mighty City, one-time home of Empire and now the hub of Faith. The first assault of alcohol was making it all seem full of infinite possibility. ‘I should like,’ he said, ‘to … go to church.’

Admiral Slovo saw propriety win a momentary victory during the monk’s hesitation. It didn’t matter. They’d planned for just such eventualities …

It had taken an inordinate amount of money and the calling-in of several favours to get Numa Droz to dress as a priest. Not only did he have a low opinion of the cloth, he was also much attached to his rainbow silks and flamboyant hats.

Admiral Slovo had won him over eventually but it’d been an uphill struggle. The Admiral did not number any six foot eight inch clerics among his acquaintance and so had to commission the necessary disguise as a special – and expensive – secret. But this had proved to be simplicity itself compared with coaching the mercenary to behave in a manner even distantly approaching that expected.

However, Droz was warming to the role and beginning to enjoy the pantomime. After Mass at the Church of the Repentant St Mary the Egyptian, he sat with Luther and the Admiral outside a nearby Neapolitan baker’s-cum-resthouse, enjoying a lunch of pizza[15] and watching the lively life of the adjacent Bordelletto.

‘I enjoyed that sermon,’ said Numa Droz. ‘It certainly stuck the knife in the Pelagian heresy!’

‘Is that why you kept shouting “Orthodox”?’ asked Luther.

‘Well, you can’t clap in church, can you?’ answered the Swiss, giving Slovo a who-is-this-yokel? look. ‘It reminded me of a talk I once gave to a load of captured Janissaries. My oath! Nigh on half of ’em renounced Islam on the spot!’

‘And the other half?’ asked Luther.

‘We stuck ’em on stakes, matey!’ Suddenly Droz recalled who and what he was currently meant to be. ‘I mean, that’s what they do to us – and anyway, they were all apostates!’

‘The Janissaries,’ explained Slovo to the monk, thinking a little interlude wouldn’t go amiss, ‘are recruited from a levy of Christian children imposed on the territories conquered by the Ottomans. They are raised as fanatical moslems and serve as the Sultan’s elite troops.’

‘I have heard of them,’ said Luther, ‘but would question whether the term “apostate” is appropriate. Full consent to salvation can only be given in adulthood.’

‘Can it?’ said Droz innocently. ‘If you say so.’

The monk looked a little shocked but let it pass. He was plainly more exercised by the proximity of the church in which they’d just worshipped to Rome’s throbbing red-light district. Admiral Slovo noted the direction of his burning gaze.

‘Is something troubling you?’ he asked.

‘I’m not sure,’ said the monk, creasing his brow. ‘Do you see what I see?’

Admiral Slovo and Numa Droz obligingly looked but saw nothing untoward.

Luther turned to them in some agitation, not all, Slovo suspected, of innocent origin.

‘I’ve just seen men openly consorting with women of easy virtue,’ gasped the monk. ‘Look! He’s negotiating with her! They should be whipped!’

‘Well,’ observed Droz amiably, ‘maybe they will be, though it costs a little extra, I understand.’

‘No, no, no!’ said the monk. ‘I refer to this open … traffic – and beside a church as well. To think that next door to a House of God wherein the sanctuary light shines before the Body of Christ, they are performing such enormities!’

‘It’s how you got here,’ said Slovo, disarmingly.

‘Are you saying my mother—’ roared Luther, rising to his feet.

‘My reference was to the mechanics of the procreative act, not your personal antecedents’ came the calm reply. ‘In a city where men of quality tend to marry late, you are somewhat intolerant of the demands of human nature.’

‘I am mortified to hear you speak like this,’ said Luther, shaking so much with indignation that he had to sit down again.

‘It so happens that I am singularly well qualified to do so,’ claimed Slovo.

‘Are you admitting that you—’ interrupted the monk, ‘with the taste of communion still in your mouth?’

‘No,’ said Slovo, annoyingly failing to join in with the mounting wave of emotion. ‘I am not admitting what you might think, though there would be little shame in it if I did. It just so happens that my tastes are more restrained.’

‘And specialized,’ added Numa Droz candidly.

‘What I was referring to,’ the Admiral continued, ‘was that one of my early occupations in His Holiness’s service was the supervising of the great Social Register. This involved enumerating all the whores plying their trade in Rome, but, being lazy, I gave up counting after nigh on seven thousand freely answered to that calling. All that, mark you, in a city of fifty to sixty thousand souls. Ultimately, for fear of scandalizing both His Holiness and posterity, my finished return included only the true professionals of fourteen hundred or so. Of that number,’ he went on, ‘nigh on five hundred were foreigners, especially imported. And since it was obvious that none of these “unfortunates” starved from lack of trade, it must be accepted that they were well patronized. That being so, if a sin is so universally practised, is it any longer sin?’

Before Luther could make the predictable point that murder and theft were pretty widespread too, but that didn’t make them all right, Admiral Slovo waved Numa Droz on to say his piece. The polished double-act caught the monk on the hop.

‘Anyway,’ said Droz in his priestly role, ‘I’ve got this theory. The purpose of the sexual act is breeding, right?’

‘Yes,’ Luther agreed cautiously. ‘Such is the Church’s teaching, based on natural law.’

‘So, a sexual act is a procreative act and, conversely, a procreative act is a sexual one. Well then,’ said Droz triumphantly, pleased at having remembered his lines all the way through, ‘by that formula, any act which excludes procreation isn’t sexual, is it? If you take precautions or venture some of the more daring stuff the ladies over there offer, there’s no chance of a baby, and thus no sexual business and thus no sin, geddit?’

‘Um …’ replied Luther, frowning monstrously. Slovo saw that he oh-so wanted to embrace this radical revision of developed natural law but stubborn honesty was bringing him back, time and again, to the flaws within it. Pretty soon, worrying away at the edges, he’d be able to drive a coach-and-four through one of the resulting gaps. The Admiral therefore prepared some propositions to meet the monk if and when he emerged. Slovo was determined that the weary hours spent coaching Droz to carry out his very first abstract argument should not go to waste.

Fortunately, at that exact moment, when all was in the balance, the powdered mushrooms that had been covertly introduced to Luther’s wine took effect. Slovo merely wished to make him more liberal and welcoming than hitherto, and it had been simplicity itself, for someone who’d spent two decades in the company of the Borgias, to doctor Luther’s drink. The monk’s attention had been seized by a passing Puttane with endless legs in gold hose; in a trice the deed was done – and the world thereby changed.

Luther looked at Slovo and Droz anew, a fresh vivacious light in his slit eyes. ‘I see what you mean,’ he said slowly. ‘Hadn’t ever thought of it that way before. So you could say it’s the intention that counts, not the deed, couldn’t you?’

‘Absolutely,’ replied the Admiral, not really listening any more, confident his job was done.

‘I mean,’ Luther sprinted on, ‘if ever a monk got to Heaven by monkery, it ought to be me. I’ve done my bit, ruined my knees in prayer and gone without beer and sausage for days on end to save my soul.’

‘And a lifetime without the flushed-pink diversions over there,’ smirked Droz. ‘No wonder you’re so worked up!’

‘You’re right, agreed the monk. ‘I reckon God should be more forgiving than man is, and men forgive almost anything. So, as long as you believe—’

‘The Just shall live by faith,’ mused Admiral Slovo, and – catching the monk’s chemically affected mind at just the right moment – inadvertently supplied the cornerstone of a whole new theology. Unknown to Slovo, the idea that would split Europe in two and put the Grim Reaper on to overtime had just been born.

‘Right!’ shouted Luther, standing up in his excitement. ‘Justification by faith alone – Ooo-wee!’ He punched the air and gyrated his bovine hips in a masterful, four centuries premature, impersonation of James Brown, ‘godfather of Soul’.

‘I feeeeeeeeeeel goooooooooooooooood!’ he sang, and the nearby ladies stared at him.

‘Over to you, I think,’ said Slovo to Droz. Things had gone terribly well – now for phase two of the plan.

‘I have some business to conduct elsewhere,’ Slovo explained to the dancing German. ‘However, Father Droz here will be with you for the rest of this little outing. He will take good care of you.’

‘S’right,’ rumbled the Swiss, pleased that things were now moving into his specialist sphere. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve brought a spare sword …’

Unwilling to actually witness the spiritual squalor of what Numa Droz called a good night out, Admiral Slovo went home and occupied himself with the sort of things he did when people weren’t watching. He was awaiting the inevitable.

It came at dawn in the form of a Burgundian Officer of the Watch. ‘Would the honoured Admiral be so good,’ he’d asked, puzzled but pleased to find Slovo dressed and waiting, ‘to attend the Castel Sant’Angelo and vouch for two malefactors who dare to claim acquaintance?’

Admiral Slovo followed on at his leisure, having advanced in the world beyond blind obedience to the summons of some mercenary. In the Palazzo del Senatore, he waited until the coast was clear and then gave the contents of his moneyscrip to an old beggar-lady who was crouching in a doorway. Then he hurried off before anyone spotted the shameful deed. It would not do for his painfully acquired image to be compromised by public knowledge of pointless kindness. One of his many enemies might conclude he was getting soft and make a move against him.

Even so, he’d felt impelled to make the gesture. Doubtless he would be richly rewarded, as usual, by the Vehme; land and money, and access to people and pleasure seemed to be theirs in infinite supply. There remained, though, some guilt about his compliance with their demands. Only a little, however …

Then, mentally braced against the tedium of active life, he entered the Sant’Angelo – and found Numa Droz and Martin Luther holding court.

The Watchmen, who were only hireling shepherds after all, were wary of Droz and had not attempted to disarm him. He was, Slovo straightaway realized, in that most unpredictable of phases where the waves of euphoria are set to crash against the cliffs of hangover. The Admiral accordingly kept communication to the minimum. The Swiss looked back red-eyed and noted the acknowledgement of a job well done. He felt pleased, but these things were tricky to judge.

Luther, by contrast, was making noise enough for three, reliving the night’s exploits under the amused eyes of the Watch. He plainly had no idea how to hang or handle a sword, was boastful drunk and didn’t know or care that he’d split his monk’s habit from neck to arse.

‘Hello, Admiral,’ he shouted, weaving about unsteadily. ‘What a time we’ve had!’

‘We finally caught up with them making a fighting retreat from the Bordelletto,’ said the Burgundian, smiling wryly. ‘There’s probably two dead and a lot more who’ll need patching, no one of any importance though. You obviously know them and your word’s good with me. What’s it to be, sir, the informal garrotte, a proper hanging or shall I let them go?’

Admiral Slovo paused for a few seconds before replying – just out of sadism really. Martin Luther sobered considerably in the interval.

‘The last option, I think,’ the Admiral said eventually.

‘If you’re sure,’ replied the Burgundian, signalling to his men to clear the way. ‘But if they’re either priest or monk, then I’m a Frenchman!’

‘No,’ admitted Slovo, to the man’s evident relief. ‘You’re not a Frenchman.’

Outside in the comparative cool of the morning, Luther started to come off the boil. Slovo had chosen the ‘Thousand Star’ mushroom because of the reportedly gentle and benign return to earth it gave. Never again would the monk feel as good or live so fully as he had done these last few hours, but the warm memory would linger on, like the fading perfume in a lost loved-one’s clothes. It would keep him going for a while – long enough for it to be too late to turn back.

‘Ah – Admiral,’ Luther rhapsodized as they walked along. ‘I don’t know what to say …’

‘Good,’ said Slovo, but to no avail.

‘I’ve had the best night of my miserable life, I have. Mind you, I’m scandalized that a priest of Rome should know what Father Droz knows!’

‘Please,’ said Admiral Slovo, raising his black-gloved hand, ‘no details, I beg of you.’

‘We had opportunity for thought as well, you know, amidst all the … doing,’ said Luther, pouting and offended. ‘It was strange, my perception of time seemed to go funny; the hours stretched on and on.’

‘They did when you started talking!’ complained Numa Droz, raising his eyes to Heaven.

‘Father Droz is like a soldier in many respects,’ the monk went on regardless. ‘He has their fatalistic attitudes, most unlike a normal priest.’

‘All I said,’ protested Droz, ‘was that if a pike-head’s got your name on it, it’s got your name on it and there’s nothing you can do.’

‘It’s just so in accord with my new insight,’ said Luther, ignoring him. ‘We live by faith alone. If you’re justified by faith you’re saved, if you’re not, you’re not – and there’s nothing you can do about it! See?’

When Luther added to himself, ‘I must think about this some more; it has such profound implications …’ then Slovo knew that the deed was done.

The monk would be given all the opportunity to think that he wanted. Johann Von Staupitz was under orders to cherish Luther upon his return and allow him free rein. The German Augustinian Order would have switched dramatically from over-severity to discreditable laxity when Brother Martin got back to Efurt. In order to disorientate, he who had been his sausage-stealing enemy would become his patron, friend and teacher.

‘The thing is,’ said Admiral to monk, transfixing Luther with cold eyes, ‘to think your own thoughts, become sure of them and then don’t budge. Nail your colours to the mast.’

‘Nail … to the mast!’ echoed Luther, fixing the advice in his befuddled brain.

Admiral Slovo was no prophet or seer, but perhaps long association with the Vehme had granted him gifts of insight. Whatever the cause, he saw ahead and felt impelled to add: ‘Well, nail them to something anyway.’[16]

‘What could we say, Admiral?’ asked the Welsh Vehmist. ‘Your name was cropping up at nigh on every Council meeting and the praise was getting wilder.’

Admiral Slovo was looking at the distant activity in and around his villa and thinking how marvellous it was at last to be free of care. ‘Was it actually all that much?’ he queried, albeit without great interest. ‘Didn’t you have myriad other agents burrowing away through the woodwork?’

‘None so gloriously favoured by success and omen,’ replied the Vehmist. ‘You were featuring in The Book with monotonous regularity, once we could see it, slipping with perfect fit into the predicted roles; those man-shaped spaces in history we’d allocated to be filled by one of our own. A Council member told me there’d not been such fulfilments of scripture since Attila appeared on the scene.’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Slovo, ‘that the comparison is altogether flattering.’

‘Everyone has different parts to play,’ explained the Welshman. ‘We don’t necessarily approve of everything that’s predicted, but what is written is written and some of it you just can’t get round. You, however, we could applaud. You were worth all the tolerance and patience expended on you.’

‘You think so?’ said the Admiral, tracking the movements of a tiny fishing smack on the glittering waters below. He was jealous of the fisherman’s short and ignorant life.

‘Undoubtedly,’ answered the Vehmist, wondering what was so absorbing about a stupid plank-and-rope boat when they were discussing the turning of the world. ‘After the event, we saw how needful it was for you to be there for the inspiration of Thomas Cromwell. It was awesome to see the fulfilment of Pletho’s words in so small a way – I mean – flowers and a branded bum! Fancy those insignificant things wreaking, by the gears and pulleys of position and power, such mighty violence on history!’

‘You would soon tire of it if you’d been as close to the machinery as I have,’ warned Slovo. ‘The cogs slip and grind and they spit blood. People are the grist under the mill-wheels. What emerges, that cake you call history, is bound together with gore.’

‘It was always so,’ replied the Vehmist blithely. ‘But please do not think us so crude or superficial as to aim for mere visible events. True, we wish for Cromwell-the-catalyst to purge the Church and religious-houses from his native land but that is not the entirety of it. All the foretellings, the anti-Papal legislation, the dictated divorce, the martyrs and creation of another Protestant super-power are incidentals. Do you think we’d really stretch forth our hand to create the … “Church of England”?’

‘Possibly not,’ said Slovo to humour him. ‘There’s small pleasure in seeing an abortion get up and walk away.’

‘Just so, Admiral. As it happens, Cromwell, our little joint creation, will succeed beyond our wildest expectations. But even so, we have others in place to serve our desires. No, the crux of the matter is to destroy a way of life, a vital social support system for the poor and needy, as well as ideological centres of resistance to us. We want to knock a prop away, bring the edifice down, and let someone else build anew in its place. It’s in our mind to provide a mighty leg-up for the land-seizing classes, the secular and nationalist proto-bourgeoisie, you understand. In selling them the expansive monastery lands – as he shall – King Fatso VIII of England will sign the death warrant of his kind and there is also a certain beauty in seeing that social algebra start to work through.’

‘And with Luther it is just the same only writ large,’ said Admiral Slovo, assisting him.

‘Exactly,’ smiled the Vehmist. ‘And, as a by-product, all the chopping and changing and cynicism will discredit religion for the masses. The whole thing is so elegant.’

‘It was bound to come,’ said Slovo indifferently. ‘The rumblings of reformation were heard throughout even my life.’

‘Debatable, Admiral,’ countered the Vehmist. ‘It takes individuals, men acting under free-will to turn those “rumblings” into proper thunder and lightning. The Reformation needs its gardeners before it can flower. What you, and we, have caused to live will grow and change Europe – and thus the world. The playing out of that particular game occupies two full pages of The Book. Seeing it through is to be our major preoccupation for the next half-millennium!’

‘I did well out of it, I suppose,’ said Slovo wistfully. ‘Bracciolini’s[17] personal, annotated copies of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things and Epictetus’s Encheiridion. Quite some finds!’

‘We had to send his heir floating under the Bridge of Sighs to acquire them,’ agreed the Vehmist. ‘He wouldn’t sell, you see.’

‘They certainly kept me diverted for upward of a month,’ said Slovo, indicating he thought the arrangement well worth it. ‘The outpourings of Lucretius were quite scandalizing however. Epicurianism is the antithesis of Stoicism!’

‘There will be room for both persuasions in our world, Admiral,’ said the Vehmist, in liberal mode. ‘And in so saying I’m reminded that it’s you we have to thank for there being such a world to look forward to … The prophecies focused and converged, all matters appeared to come to a point – and at its centre was you.’

‘Mere chance,’ said Slovo.

‘All predicted,’ the Vehmist objected. ‘Because of you, there was a Grand General Council meeting, one of only two ever convened – and that previous one was to note the conversion of the Emperor Constantine.[18]

‘This Council,’ asked Slovo, ‘it wouldn’t have been six summers ago, would it?’

‘That’s right,’ answered the Vehmist. ‘In the Damascus Casbah, away from prying monotheistic eyes.’

‘I thought I discerned a certain thinning in the ranks of high society,’ said the Admiral, pleased even at this stage in his life to have a wild supposition confirmed. ‘I had Vatican security look into it.’

‘I know – you scamp, you.’

‘But nothing came back to me.’

‘I should hope not, Admiral. It was the most vital of ventures, and far from lightly undertaken. Our wisest and best people, those who’d spent their life in analysis of The Book, couldn’t see beyond the crisis that was developing. We sensed either the ending or success of our plans. There were even suggestions that the day of the gods’ release was at hand.’

‘No,’ smiled Slovo. ‘Nothing so minor. They’re still tucked safely away. I looked in on them not so long ago.’

Piqued by such blasphemous levity, the Vehmist spoke more coldly. ‘It turned out to be an even greater issue, if such there could be. It was the day, the one day, that you were born for. We – and the rest of creation – had to hold our breath and await your kind decision.’

Admiral Slovo looked at the continuing, living world around him; his home and children, the birds and the sea, and he pondered the attractions of Apocalypse now. ‘I wonder,’ he thought aloud, ‘if I decided right?’