Popes and Phantoms

The Year 1493 ‘I die in Germany. Afterwards, I am enrolled in a conspiracy.’

‘You will sleep here, brother.’

Slovo stepped in. The first thing he noticed was the lack of a roof, the second the sound of the door locking behind him.

‘You will sleep here,’ came the voice of the Vehmic Knight from outside, ‘and wake to life anew.’

Admiral Slovo did not answer. He was here at the Holy Vehme’s pleasure and there was nothing to gain by vain protest.

The sea journey, a rarity for him nowadays, had revived old memories and forgotten tastes. All the way from Rome to … this place, where Germania merged into land disputed with the Turk, he had pondered the unnaturalness of his life, pushing a quill-pen, not a stiletto. The subtle and learned Vehmic courier (a friar in normal life) assigned to accompany him, and to subvert his every settled opinion, found little work left for him to do.

Everything had been arranged on Admiral Slovo’s behalf, as neat and quick as a thunderbolt. The notice of leave of absence, signed by a Bishop no less, had arrived on his Vatican desk just like any other piece of correspondence. That same afternoon, a clerk in his office, hitherto suspected of being nothing more than he seemed, confided to Slovo that a certain ship was sailing on the evening tide and that he must be on it. Admiral Slovo gladly surrendered to the equally pressing tide of events and let himself be borne along.

Now he found himself in an open-topped stone-built box observing the stars that shone down on him and the rest of the forsaken landscape. Even had he wished to escape, the constraining walls were too high and sheer to climb. The one and only door looked simple and sturdy enough to resist a siege. Slovo would be here just as long as the purpose of the Vehme required.

There was the very minor comfort of knowing that he was (technically) not alone. The brief night-time glimpse he’d been granted of the camp revealed at least two score similar cells. It was to be presumed that, for reasons of time-economy if no other, the Vehme initiated their recruits on a batch basis.

There were some minor furnishings in the cell but Slovo suspected there would be more than ample time to investigate them at his leisure. By forcing his mind to dwell on the writings of Euclid he caused himself to sleep.

In the morning, a hatch in the door opened and Slovo exchanged the cell’s chamber pot for bread and wine. It had rained during the night but he did not complain or in any way converse with the invisible owner of the proffering hand.

Sitting on the muddy ground, he meticulously nibbled his way through the half-loaf and then sipped slowly at the wine. He memorized each mouthful’s exact taste as solace in case there came a time of want – and so that he should know if and when his food was given that little narcotic or poisonous extra.

He had committed whole chapters of the Meditations and Epictetus’ Dissertations to memory, and so had the faculty to wile away some hours in ‘reading’. When this palled, as even the most sublime literature eventually must, he refreshed the body as he had the mind, with a period of vigorous exercise. The fierce glare of noon alerted him to the fact that the cell would never be more illuminated than now and it was thus an auspicious time to inspect fully the fixtures of his little world.

On the side opposite his chosen station there was a curious little table – perhaps an altar in intention – made of a stack of new-cut corn, levelled off below the head and made flat for a vase to rest on. This vase was also a direct gift of Nature, being made of cunningly woven green grass. In it stood a single stem and ear of bearded wheat.

Behind this on the wall were two images, paintings on wood, somewhat redolent of the icons Slovo had seen brought or pillaged from the schismatic Greeks and Rus. One was plainly of Zeus the Unconquered Sun – the second picture Slovo failed to recognize.

These items turned out to be the sum total of the diversions provided him and it took the calling to mind of his wife’s sexual repertoire for Slovo to lull his mind to sleep.

After twenty-three days, the food stopped arriving. By then the wheatsheaf altar had dried and drooped towards the ground to which it would eventually return. Admiral Slovo had had more than enough opportunity to observe its slow demise. Made cussed by boredom and the attentions of sun and rain, he deliberately refused to enter a decline. Others undergoing the same test failed to bear up so well. Several times he heard voices raised in protest from nearby cells. The Vehme clearly had some means of rapidly silencing these weaker brethren for each remonstration was abruptly aborted within seconds. Slovo took the hint and kept his own counsel.

After a further week of a water-only diet, the Admiral grew light-headed and reconciled. All rancour and rebellion flowed out of him, hitching a lift atop his departing reserves of strength. At the very end of the week, after a day without even water, just before dawn, the disembodied hand offered a change of clothes in the form of shining white raiment. Slovo was glad to accept for reasons of personal delicacy, if no other.

Almost directly, the door was sprung and the transformed Admiral Slovo stepped out to rejoin the world. After initial difficulties with distance focusing, he discovered himself in the company of a dozen similarly hesitant figures. There were men of European race, some negroes, even one woman with yellowish skin and curiously arranged eyes. Still attuned to the discipline of the previous lunar month, no one spoke, and each kept even their visual curiosity under control.

Slovo was impressed by the organization brought to the occasion: the troops of cavalry which appeared served both to herd the initiates on their way and to explain how the camp remained unmolested. The horsemen were silent and answered to no orders but those already in their heads. Even so, they drilled and rode in perfect order as though they had been together for long and eventful years; brothers all, who knew each other’s thoughts. Slovo wondered how this could be when they clearly came from each and every nation, race and army, retaining the dress and weapons appropriate to each. He could not conceive what force might cause Gendarme, Stradiot, Reiter and Spahi to act in such harmony.

Like bright-fleeced sheep the newly liberated prisoners of the Vehme were shepherded away by these grim and speechless horsemen.

They were left at the mouth of an underground temple. There was no prospect of flight – the Vehmic cavalry would straightaway have ridden them down. This being so, Admiral Slovo boldly led the way forward, endeavouring, in so far as his weakened state would permit, still to appear the master of his own fate. A wizened Turk of similar fortitude joined him at the front.

They descended the sloping, torch-lit passage for quite some time, expecting at any moment to emerge into the high drama of a vaulted cavern or subterranean hall. However, this did not occur. To pay the Vehme their due, what they had to teach, true or false, had nothing of the petty or fraudulent about it. It did not require the assistance of showmanship.

At a point where the passage levelled slightly, Admiral Slovo almost bumped into a woman standing in the half darkness beside one wall. He surprised himself by his failure to adopt a fighting stance or to reach for an eye or throat with reflex malicious intent. Obviously his period of enforced preparation and contemplation had had some effect after all. Instead, he bade her good-day.

She was very young and quite exceptionally beautiful; her voice was sweetness itself, without being cloying. All but the last was, of course, largely lost on the Admiral, although he could academically acknowledge perfection when he saw it; particularly when it was revealed in all its naked glory.

‘I beg your pardon,’ he said, apologizing for the near collision once his survey was complete.

She giggled, one tiny hand courteously shielding her mouth from sight. ‘That’s all right,’ she said, looking up at him provocatively. ‘Welcome to the New Eleusis. Pray drink at the well.’

Then she straightaway turned to the old Turk and addressed him in his own tongue, presumably stating the same message. It was obvious Slovo was meant to move along.

He obligingly did so, allowing the Vehmic girl to greet each of the initiates. A mere score of paces on, he discovered the well referred to and dived his face into the torrent that splashed into a cup carved from the rock of the passage wall. The draught he swallowed was bitter, but mineral-rich and highly refreshing. He waited for all the others to drink and eventually the callipygian girl came to the fore to lead on. ‘On’ proved to be into a maze and in its dreary convolutions the party soon became separated. Then Admiral Slovo died.

At first he thought he was back at the tunnel’s start, a flicking back of memory from future to past by no means uncommon to him. But then he noticed that this passage was radiantly lit and of infinite size, that his feet were no longer required to propel him forward and that the glorious light suffused his insubstantial body. The experience bore no relation to his previous trot down the tunnel to ‘New Eleusis’ and so Slovo was forced to more radical conclusions.

Looking down he saw the husk that had been Admiral Slovo, left behind, dead on the dusty floor. Meanwhile, the … force that from sheer habit he still called ‘himself’ was called on by something that caused the great light and which drew all created things home to itself. Keen to make the light’s acquaintance – or, wild notion, to re-meet his oldest friend – Slovo did not hold back. Surrendering like a whore offered a fortune, he barely noted the receding glimpse vouchsafed him of the maze in all its subtle and significant complexity. The supernatural, cut-away vision of the Vehmic mountain, with its wasp’s-nest of rooms and barracks, chapels and thousands of swarming devotees, no longer had the power to amaze. Not even the confirmation of the globate nature of the world as it dwindled away, or the premature discovery of the existence of America, Australasia or Antarctica, particularly exercised him.

Admiral Slovo was exclusively interested in the distant figures he discerned at the heart of the summoning light. He could not see but devoutly believed that the beckoning couple were his mother and father. For the first time since childhood he felt entirely at liberty to water his face with tears.

There were other things as well to enhance and complete such unaccustomed high emotion. Something that might have been called music, but containing waves of empathy and intimations of wisdom, accompanied him courtesy of an invisible choir. Figures from his past, people he’d sent on before him, flashed into brief life to assure him, without the slightest guile, that there were no hard feelings. Admiral Slovo started to appreciate the things that previously would have cannoned off the dryness he’d cultivated. Suddenly these topics seemed of endless import – if only he could grasp what the light was trying to say …

Like a three-year-old newly introduced to the subtleties of Stoicism, Admiral Slovo wasn’t ready for all that was being lavished on him; but he was growing by the second and very shortly he would understand all. And so forgive all.

And then someone forced a liquid down his rebelling throat and recalled him to life. Faster than man would travel until the invention of jets, Slovo shot back into his body and reoccupied the casing he had hoped to escape. In some inexpressible way, he didn’t seem to ‘fit’ it quite as well as before.

The naked Vehmic girl was astride his chest, hammering rhythmically on it with her fists until, after a lapse of seconds, he began to feel the blows. He also realized that his mouth was rinsed in something vile and he tried to spit it out. The girl smiled at him and ceased her efforts.

‘Welcome back,’ she said. ‘They almost all do that, you know – try to spew the life potion out. It won’t do you good, I made sure you swallowed a good dose.’ She arched over him and pressed one ear to his ribs. ‘No,’ she said triumphantly. ‘I’ve got it going properly again. You’re back for good.’ Then she skipped away.

Admiral Slovo didn’t know what to feel – the first wrenching wave of loss proved to be bearable due to his revived Stoic capabilities, and that was good news. Less happy was the realization that he was losing full recollection of his journey into light. Like a sandcastle in combat with the tide, he felt more and more of the precious insights being washed away each second, until he was left with nothing.

It took him an hour to get out of the maze, for its twists and spirals had been designed by a mind of even greater deviousness than his own. Twice on the way he encountered the bodies of initiates who had succumbed to the poison in the well. Perhaps the Vehmic maid had been unable to call them back from death, or maybe she’d merely failed to find them. To Slovo, such carelessness with their charges only emphasized the profundity of the role his employers had arranged for him.

As he emerged from the maze into the blinding light of central stage, he entered a high-ceilinged circular room thronged with people, once again a highly cosmopolitan crowd, dotted here and there with initiates more maze-adaptive than he.

A corpulent man in a turban offered the Admiral a drink. ‘Imbibe without reservation, brother,’ he said, in faultless Italian. ‘This liquid contains no untoward additives.’

Slovo politely tasted the wine. It was fit for a Prince and rushed straight to his head.

Enver Pasha – Turk and Vehmist – courteously allowed Slovo a moment to look around and collect himself. He noticed the Admiral’s attention was particularly taken by the great globe above, which illuminated the room. ‘To some we explain nothing,’ he said. ‘To you, we are safe in confiding that it is an effect of the heating of steam. A minor part of our knowledge, it serves to impress either way.’

‘I can see many uses for it in the outside world,’ said Slovo. ‘If you’ll excuse the play on words, I wonder why you chose to hide your light under a bushel?’

The Turk shrugged and smiled with a flash of gold. ‘There may come a time for its wider application,’ he agreed, ‘but by then it will be our time and we will have no need for concealment. In the interim, what we have, we keep.’

‘Ah … of course,’ said Slovo, as though this was a damning revelation. He’d wanted to coax this confession of pettiness from the Vehmist.

‘And that is the one lesson you must absorb today,’ the Turk went on. ‘From now on, you are we, and we are everything. Loyalty will come with the passing years but in the meanwhile let self-restraint, fear and respect serve the same ends.’

A steward offered them dainty refreshments, at which Slovo’s starved taste buds leapt into vibrant life. He wolfed down three of the pastry envelopes before he was able to control himself and say, ‘I recognize that man.’

The Vehmist turned and seemingly noticed the retreating serving-man for the first time.

‘Doubtless,’ he replied. ‘He is a Bishop and often in Rome.’

‘I hope,’ said Slovo, reserving several options by temporarily casting his glance to the garish mosaic floor, ‘that you do not expect me to wait on table like a lackey.’

Again Enver Pasha smiled. His voice had no kindness in it. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You are higher in our favours than he, more pregnant with … possibilities. However, if it were our wish that you should serve refreshments, that is what you would do.’

Slovo declined the implicit challenge by looking about. The party was becoming quite convivial and, as the Admiral’s allotted host, Enver Pasha did not wish his charge to be a conspicuous abstainer from his communal spirit. He stepped in to mend the conversational thread.

‘How was your near-death-experience, Admiral?’ he asked politely. ‘If you do not mind to speak of it, that is. Some people prefer not.’

‘It was very interesting, thank you,’ replied Slovo, both answering and rebuffing further enquiry. ‘I take it that it was all your doing.’

‘Oh, of course,’ said the Vehmist. ‘A mere matter of poison followed by an antidote, both in horse-doses. We find there’s no equal to it in shaking a person loose from their foundations and making them receptive to new ideas. Naturally there’s a wastage rate …’

‘But you reckon the exercise worthwhile, even so,’ Admiral Slovo completed the sentence for him, not wishing, for obscure reasons, to hear it from the Turk’s own lips.

Enver Pasha looked for hints of criticism in Slovo’s speech before replying, but could detect none. ‘Just so,’ he said. ‘I presume that you saw the Universal Light – that’s the commonest formulation for monotheists. I shouldn’t attach any great importance to it, nor to any visions of loved ones coming to greet you. It is merely the last gambit of the dying mind, coping with its terror by recalling the passage to birth and freeing itself of the burden of memory. At least, that’s what we presume.’

Enver Pasha suddenly noticed, by a stiffening of the Slovo spine, that he had caused offence. He knew then that something Slovo had seen on the brink of oblivion had touched his heart. ‘Still, it’s over now,’ he said hastily. ‘Make of it what you will.’

‘Thank you,’ replied Admiral Slovo, more than usually stony-faced, not actually offended at all but simply ashamed at the recollection of his tears in the tunnel of light. ‘So that’s all, I take it. No dark secrets? No blood-curdling oaths?’

‘No,’ confirmed Enver Pasha. ‘None at all. Some people will have them but in your case we don’t feel it necessary. You already have the required reverence for the antique world, you are too self-contained to be impressed by blood vows and threats. We tailor each initiation to the individual. After what you have undergone, the orthodoxies of the outer world will seem even less attractive to you than hitherto, I assure you. You have been made receptive to wider sympathies and that is sufficient for present needs.’

‘Though,’ queried Slovo, ‘you have told me nothing about yourselves. Surely I need to know what I am meant to be serving?’

Enver Pasha considered the point at some leisure. ‘There’s no need for it,’ he mused at last. ‘You’re not one of those we’ll drill and browbeat, because that would be counterproductive. In fact, you’re free to go. However, it’s your day, and I’m willing to humour you. Come with me.’

He waddled off through the throng and Admiral Slovo dutifully followed, taking the opportunity to snatch a further drink of wine and a handful of pastries en route. As they went, the Vehmist casually pointed people out, saying, ‘Do you get the picture? We’re anyone and everyone, a coalition, a family, an alliance of interests against the world.’

In this way they arrived at the wall of the great chamber, which was hung with tapestries depicting common themes from classical mythology. Clearly familiar to the point of contempt with the temple’s layout, the Vehmist brushed one section of covering aside to reveal a door. Slovo coined the suspicion that it was not the only such concealed entrance or exit and that this vault was perhaps only one in a series.

Enver Pasha unlocked the door with a rusty key and waved Slovo in. Once the door closed behind them the noise of the party ceased with alarming abruptness. ‘Well then,’ he said, indicating the object holding pride of place in the antechamber. ‘What do you think that is?’

‘It’s a large ball,’ Slovo said in due course, ‘with a cartography printed on its surface. I recognize the Middle Sea and Italia – but the curvature distorts reality and …’

Enver Pasha shook his head sadly and waved Slovo to silence. ‘Observe,’ he said testily, ‘and learn something from this Earth-Apple. Here,’ he pointed at a point on the globe, ‘in Cathay, we have propagated the ultra-conservative Confucian philosophy amongst the bureaucrats of the Ming dynasty court. Liu Daxia, who is one of ours – and, incidentally, the War Minister, has ordered the destruction of the vital navigational charts that permitted Chinese junks to contact Asia, Afrique and Indonesia. He explained to the Emperor that contact with foreign “barbarians” can only dilute and weaken the Chinese culture. Accordingly, the home of that culture will stagnate and decline, lost in a dream of self-sufficiency and past glories. Therefore, when the fleets of the West – those lands you presently call Christendom – one day reach out to the East, they won’t be barred from the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

‘Further, look here. This is Songhay, the Kingdom of Gao and Timbuktu, a centre for caravans and trade in gold. We caused Sonni ali Ber, its most alarmingly able Emperor, to be drowned in the River Niger only last year. He was returning from great conquests in the South but there will be no more victories for Songhay. The Portuguese are being … influenced into ambitions in North Afrique: Sonni ali Ber’s successors will rule a land-locked, isolated territory that will fall sooner or later – spears and arrows against gunpowder. We have decided against the prospering of Afrique.’

Having fought against the Southern ‘Horse Warriors’ at the behest of Khair Khaleel-el Din, while resident in Tripoli, Slovo’s indifference at this geo-political meddling knew no bounds. ‘Are you quite sure you really need me?’ was all he asked. ‘Things seem to be going smoothly already.’

Enver Pasha idly span the globe, trying to avoid sight of his Turkish homeland, knowing full well what the Vehme had in store for that. ‘Individually, no, of course not,’ he said. ‘Although some of our elders claim to discern strange destiny in you. However we do require numerous talented men, and women, our wonders to perform.’

‘And how will I recognize them?’

Enver Pasha caused the globe to cease its revolutions, something he occasionally wanted to do in reality. ‘You won’t,’ he said. ‘Not unless they wish you to. All I would say is that you may look for us amongst the high and wise.’

‘The two conditions are not often combined,’ said Slovo wryly.

‘Then perhaps,’ countered the Vehmist, ‘that will be their identification.’

‘There are one or two other things; may I?’

‘You might as well, Admiral. I doubt we’ll meet again.’

‘Well, primarily, what is it that you want?’

The Vehmist looked up at Slovo. ‘We are a coalition of ambitions, as I have told you,’ he said. ‘However, there has emerged a consensus in aims; we all of us hope for the restoration of older and better days, and ways.’

‘Elf-days, Imperial days, Pagan days?’ queried Slovo.

Enver Pasha smiled tightly but refused to be further drawn.

‘Well, are you sure it’s all worth it?’ said Slovo, trying another tack.

Enver Pasha had apparently never considered that point. ‘Possibly not, Admiral,’ he said eventually, ‘but the project has achieved a momentum of its own after such a time. And besides,’ he added cryptically, ‘we are guided by The Book …’

‘Which is not Holy Scripture or even the Qur’an, I take it?’

‘Nothing so prosaic, Admiral. This is our own book; we wrote it and we observe, with joy, its prophecies fulfilled page by page. Do not exercise your curiosity too much, however, I doubt you will ever do more than glimpse its cover.’

‘That good, eh?’

‘Beyond all attributes of praise, Slovo, it is the story of times from misty past to equally misty future. All the same, I don’t wish to send you forth entirely unappeased; you would only undertake private research and bring our investment in you to ruin. It has the summation of the ancient Delphic and Amun Oracles, the Eleusinian and Dodonan Mysteries and the Cumaean and Sibylline Books, I will tell you that much. Within living memory it has been added to by the blessed Gemistus Pletho – and since you’ve failed to ask – yes, it was he whose image decorated your initiate’s cell. It is possible for you to acquire some of his less radical, openly available, works and thereby see the merest ghost of our project. Consider that as your homework.’

It was pointless trying to conceal the awakening of interest at the mention of bookish learning and so Slovo did not bother to try. ‘I shall do so,’ he said. ‘What else must I do?’

‘Nothing and everything, Admiral, you are not one of our aimed missiles. We expect benefit from whatever field you may cultivate. Simply go out and live, Slovo. Make friends and influence people.’

With that the Vehmist indicated that their conversation was at an end. He gently guided Admiral Slovo back into the Great Chamber where the reception was still in full swing. A black-clad servant was awaiting them bearing the Admiral’s discarded clothes, now neatly laundered and folded. Slovo was not to know that they had also been cunningly loosened, if only by a stitch or two, and then expertly resewn. The Vehme would spare no effort, however painstaking, to ensure that their initiates departed home feeling that, in some indefinable way, they were not the same person as before.

Confident that all his other needs – transport, food and weaponry – would be equally met before he was dismissed, Admiral Slovo let himself be led from the Hall.

At the upward sloping exit, sister portal to that from the maze, stood two vast colossi from ancient times, marble effigies of Mars and Horus-Hadrian, one to each side. On a night of such abundant wonders, Slovo barely noticed them and walked through, burdened with thoughts of history-in-the-making.

He was alone in such carelessness, however. Even the other initiates now knew enough to study each departure through the living sentinels with intense interest. So, when yellow light flared in the eyes of neglected god and dead Emperor, and each stone titan groaned as though straining to track the Admiral’s path, it did not go unnoticed.

Throughout the great Council Chamber of the Holy and Ancient Vehme, though there was so much of great import to talk about, every conversation died.