1635 The Papal Stakes (42 page)

“Oh,” said Antonio.

“And when he begins expanding his search from there, his men will eventually come across a small town, several days farther north, in which they will no doubt hear tales of a recent double-murder: a pair of strangers—mule-drivers—who were killed for no reason, and for which there are no suspects. That is the trail-blaze which we unavoidably left behind us, marking our path.”

Barberini turned to Ruy again. “That is why you tracked them for several days before dispatching them: to put that trail blaze closer to the Po. The next agents will now have a larger area to search, and will have to start farther away from us.”

“Yes.”

Barberini nodded. “Now I understand. I had wondered—” Barberini stopped, abashed.

Sharon’s voice was like slate, even in her own ears. “Wondered why we didn’t slit their throats here, Your Eminence? Well, now you know.”
But you’ll never know about the hushed argument over doing it at all—really the first dispute Ruy and I have ever had. He was right, damn it; we couldn’t give the assassins any more of our trail than we could help revealing. But I’m no good at staring at the ceiling, alone in my bed, wondering if he’ll live to come back to it. A man his age, playing hide-and-go-seek-and-destroy with assassins on the back roads of rural Italy. I knew I was not cut out to be a cop’s wife; how the hell did I think I’d be able to handle being married to—?

“My heart?”

The voice was Ruy’s: gentle, rich, shaping the words like a gift meant especially for her ears. And the doubt fled, and she knew why she would have married him all over again this very moment. “Yes, Ruy?”

“You seem distracted?”

“I was just thinking about how—how lucky we are. And how safe. Thanks to you.”

Ruy’s eyes widened a little bit; Sharon had not been reticent or oblique about her aversion to his plan. He smiled slowly, warmly at her.

“Lucky, yes,” agreed Barberini moodily, “but not lucky enough. Or safe enough. As you point out, Father Vitelleschi, these murderous rogues will most assuredly draw closer to us once again.”

“Which we anticipate,” said Ruy, rising to his feet so quickly and decisively that, in a man of less poise, it would have seemed that he had leaped to his feet. “And because we can anticipate where along the banks of the Po they will pick up their search, we have trailed some false lures on the roads and along the river.”

Six days later, Father Wadding was riding a little bit ahead of Larry Mazzare; as usual, sticking as close as he could to the pope and his nephew. Oddly, Vitelleschi had been spending more of his time drifting back to ride alongside Mazzare. He didn’t say anything; he just rode in a silence that, over the days, had become companionable.

As always, Father Wadding was riding a little bit ahead, sticking as close as he could to the pope and his nephew. Oddly, Vitelleschi had been spending more of his time drifting back to ride alongside Mazzare. He didn’t say anything; he just rode in a silence that, over the days, had become companionable.

But as they entered a small defile nestled in between the green peaks of the Vincentine PreAlps, with the sun rapidly heading towards its hiding place behind Monte Campomolon, Urban seemed to explain something to Wadding that surprised the Irishman. After a few moments, he slowed his nag so that it ultimately dropped back to put him alongside Vitelleschi. After several long, silent minutes, he cleared his throat. “Father Vitelleschi, if I understand the pope correctly, I have you to thank for ensuring that the Franciscans have maintained their control over St. Isidore’s, in Rome.”

Vitelleschi looked at him sharply. “Father Wadding, I regret to say that your gratitude seems to be misplaced. The decision regarding the legitimacy of Cardinal Ludovisi’s will was not in my purview.”

Mazzare dropped one eyebrow, raised the other. “Would someone care to fill me in on what’s being discussed?”

Wadding nodded. “Certainly, Your Eminence. St. Isidore’s benefactor, Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi, went to be with our eternal Father in 1632. He had long been a friend of the Franciscans, and had been created a Cardinal as Defender of Ireland. Given the signal successes of our Irish College, we rather presumed that he would leave a sustaining legacy for St. Isidore. He evidently did, but the will attributed to him transfers the control of the church and colleges to the Jesuits.”

“Am I to take it that this dispute has been in process for three years, now?” asked Mazzare.

“Just so,” affirmed Vitelleschi. “But the Franciscans, represented in the person of Father Wadding, vigorously contested the legitimacy of this part of the will—”

“Which we did in concert with Cardinal Ludovisi’s younger brother, I will point out,” Wadding was quick to add.

“It is as Father Wadding says,” Vitelleschi nodded as approving of the narrow, winding valley road ahead of them. “At any rate, it was the Sacred Roman Rota that had taken the matter under consideration, not me.”

“Yes, Father Vitelleschi, but you were the one who, just a few months after Galileo’s trial, encouraged the Jesuit fathers charged with defending the legitimacy of the will to reassess their case. To reassess it ‘in great detail.’ I believe those were your very words, were they not?”

Vitelleschi’s brow descended slightly. “Were we back in Rome, I would set aside some time to discover which of my colleagues have taken injudicious liberties in sharing the content of our private discussions.”

“So it’s true then: you delayed the process?” When Vitelleschi’s only response was an almost imperceptible shrug, Mazzare pressed further. “Why did you delay the proceedings?”

“Because of you.”

Mazzare blinked. “Me? How could that be? I have never even heard anything about—”

“Your Eminence, I do not mean ‘you’ in the sense of your very person, but in what you represent. Change. Up-time change. In the weeks following Galileo’s acquittal, His Holiness began contemplating how the arrival of up-time documents—most particularly those canonical texts you sent us before the trial, Cardinal Mazzare—would change the path of the Church. How your people’s perspectives on religious freedom would change what you called the Thirty Years’ War. He rightly anticipated that the Austrian branch of the Hapsburgs would begin to drift away from the Spanish, and that the shifting of those veritable mountains of Roman Catholic strength would send earthquakes throughout the Christian world.” Vitelleschi suffered what might have been another tic or a suppressed spasm of sardonic amusement. “He did not foresee, however, that the epicenter of the first shocks would originate in Rome itself. But in your case, Father Wadding, he wanted to change history for the better: in the up-time world, you were pushed out of St. Isidore’s earlier this year. He thought that was not only unfair, but unwise.”

“Unwise?” echoed Wadding.

“Unwise,” confirmed a new voice. Urban had let his own mount slow enough to be proximal to their own. “Father Wadding, you, along with the late Father MacCaghwell, are among the best Franciscan minds of our times. But more important, you are also a person of high integrity. I will need that integrity very much as we arrive at our refuge, for now I may think and deliberate with you.”

“I am honored, Your Holiness, but why do you specifically want a Franciscan as an interlocutor?”

“Oh, I do not want only a Franciscan, Father Wadding. I need a Jesuit, too.”

Vitelleschi looked at a distant bird; Mazzare could not tell if he was squinting or scowling.

“And I need a priest who has lived in a world where Mother Church has benefited from an additional three-and-a-half centuries of our Savior’s guiding wisdom and the Holy Spirit’s guiding grace.” Urban looked at Larry and smiled. “One might indeed claim that you possess a truly unique Charism, Cardinal Mazzare.”

Mazzare was silent for a long time. Yes, this is what he had felt coming. He had felt it back in Magdeburg as news of Borja’s violation of Rome began coming in over the radio, as the communications from the Holy See made it clear that it was not merely a political takeover, it was the imposition of a theological junta. Nothing less than an attempt to change both the pope and the direction of the Church by means of a
coup d’etat
.

And what had been the issue that had started this sequence of dominoes tumbling, that had allowed an army to be put at Borja’s disposal—and with so little control that, even if he had exceeded his mandate from Madrid, there was now no way to stop him?

The threat was as profound as it was uncomplicated: true, sweeping, politically-protected and -enforced religious tolerance. At this moment in history, this was the dagger at the neck of the Church. And for its reciprocal part, that Church was not merely confident in its identity as the one true faith, but convinced of its duty to impose God-ordained correctness upon the rest of the world by force of arms and
auto-da-fe
, if need be. Indeed, all too many of its princes were not merely ready, but eager, to resort to those brutal methods.

And standing squarely against such a doctrine and such actions was not only the general religious toleration that prevailed among the up-timers, but the specific, and deeply contradictory, canonical pronouncements found among the Church records that had come back in time with Larry Mazzare’s library,
ex cathedra
directives that had emerged from—

Mazzare turned back toward the pope. “This is about Vatican Two, isn’t it?”

Urban’s smile was slow, appreciative. “Ah, Lawrence, I knew you would see it. Which is only right”—Urban’s eyes almost twinkled—“since you were so troublesome as to bring up the whole matter in the first place.”

“Vatican Two?” Wadding shaped the words almost as though he were employing a memory trick. “That was the up-time convocation to begin the reintegration of all their Christian sects, supposedly presided over by Mother Church, was it not?”

“It was,” the pope answered.

“And in which general religious tolerance was made canonical doctrine,” added Vitelleschi.

“I was not aware the pontiff ever reiterated the exhortations of that council
ex cathedra
,” Wadding murmured.

“Ah, see? And this is why I needed you, Father Wadding. Why I needed all of you.” Urban sat very straight in his saddle. “For a variety of now-urgent reasons, we must decide upon the canonical status here—in
this
world—of the decrees and doctrines that proceeded from the Holy See in Cardinal Mazzare’s world.”

Wadding sputtered. “Your Holiness? At the very least, is not a different world a different world?”

Mazzare smiled at Wadding. “Are you suggesting that there is more than one God, with one Will?”

“Your Eminences!” Urban actually laughed. He made a palm’s-down gesture as if he was calming obstreperous children. “You shall have time enough to compare these opinions. Indeed, over the next few weeks, I will ask you to be their champions.”

Mazzare felt slightly disoriented. “Your Holiness?”

“Yes, of course. You, Cardinal Mazzare, can hardly be tasked to speak for any position other than the positive, in this matter. The Mother Church of your world, whose extremely tolerant practices you have made manifest here, has not only its best advocate in you, but I doubt you could bring yourself to earnestly argue that its canonical pronouncements should have no standing in
this
world.”

Mazzare simply said, “I fear you are correct, Your Holiness.”

Urban nodded. “And Father Wadding will be the
advocatus diaboli
.”

The Irishman looked stunned. “Your Holiness? Me?”

“Certainly. Who better?”

“Many would do far better than I. For instance, Father Vitelleschi’s familiarity with the theological conundrums of integrating the perspectives of the up-time Church far outstrip my humble—”

“Father Wadding, your humility, while genuine, is also quite misguided. You were the veritable spearhead—theological, rhetorical, and spiritual—in the final canonical determination of Mother Church’s doctrine regarding our Savior’s Virgin Birth. And I know you have maintained a lively interest in the theological documents and implications of the arrival of the up-timers.”

Wadding looked a bit pained. “Your Holiness, what you say is true. But I fear that what I have learned has not left me comfortable with their presence in our world, or congenial to what they call their Roman Catholic faith, so changed is it from our own.”

“Which is precisely why you are to argue against one of its great changes: the radical inter-faith tolerance that did not merely arise from Vatican Two, but was its very
raison’ d’être
.”

Wadding looked even more uncomfortable. “Might I point out, Your Holiness, that just thirty-five years ago, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for espousing the kind of radical toleration that the up-timers practice, and for claiming—as they also do—that many of His most wondrous miracles are in fact, merely laws of nature?”

“You most certainly may point that out, Father Wadding. Indeed, I expect you to do so. That will be part of your job, in the coming weeks. But it will also be important to remain mindful that the scientific assertions that brought such trouble to Galileo have now, in fact, been proven correct. And not just by the documents of the up-timers, but by our own observers, who now know what to look for, and how.” Urban folded his hands upon the front of his saddle, the reins held tightly beneath them. “Father, we have entered into a time when we must reconsider many matters in which we thought our knowledge was absolute. And this will, I suspect, take us down wholly unprecedented pathways of investigation and debate. Over which Father Vitelleschi will prevail as judge and arbiter.”

“Not you, Your Holiness?” Wadding sounded baffled.

“No, not me.”

“What role, then, do you intend to play in the proceedings?”

“I intend,” said Urban with a sly smile, “to watch, listen, and be edified.” Seeing the look of surprise, even dismay, upon the faces of the other clerics, Urban lifted a hand, striking a pose that painters often used in portraying Socratic scholars at work among their students. “Our Heavenly Father has, since the arrival of the up-timers, set us upon a fateful road that now forks in two opposite directions. And the respective choices are as terribly distinct, and as terribly portentous, as those that faced our Lord and Savior on the night he was betrayed and contended with his human frailties in the garden at Gethsemane.”