Pavane (10 page)

had always valued more than slavish obedience to principles and a more or less sterile piety. Though there had been times, there had been times... Brother John broke in on his superior's thought stream. 'Reverend Father, could you... I mean have you any idea of the nature of the work?' 'None.' The Abbott was being somewhat less than frank; he turned over the papers on his desk, shuffled them into a heap and spread them out once more. 'I can tell you this much, it will involve a considerable journey. You'll be going to Dubris; when you arrive you'll put yourself at the disposal of Bishop Loudain. You can expect to be gone for some months, probably throughout the sittings of the... ah... Court of Spiritual Welfare, under Father Hieronymous. I can assure you the work will be of some... ah... importance, you'll be holding a direct commission from Rome.' He coughed again, looked embarrassed, fiddled with a stylus. 'You'll be performing a task of lasting value, Brother,' he said stiffly. 'A real service to the Church. Better than beer labels, when you've done and said all. Ehh...?' Brother John stayed silent. His mind, accustomed to jogging in its own grave channels, was for once working furiously. There was a lot to be said for the proposition; as Father Meredith had pointed out, it would mean a change of air; and a journey across England in springtime, always to John's mind the most attractive part of the year. And in any case it looked as if his freedom of choice was severely limited; if Master Albrecht, for his own purposes, wanted him out of the way for a time, it behoved him to go. There was professional pride too; his selection was a mark of honour, he knew that well enough. But... nothing decent, nothing good, would ever come out of the doings of the Court of Spiritual Welfare, Father Meredith knew that as well as anybody else. Because there had once been another name for the Court, a name that even in the Church-owned West had fallen into evil repute. The Inquisition...

John entered the great castle of Dubris by the Old Gate amid a noisy crowd of sightseers; mendicants, soldiers, townsfolk out for the day with picnic hampers and beer, the men swaggering in their Sunday best, the women with children hanging bawling round their skirts. Inside, the little monk paused involuntarily; the red-robed priest who was his guide waited impatiently, fidgeting with the heavy-bound books he carried, stepping from one foot to the other in the jostling of the mob. In front of John reared the second curtain; above it, sullen against the sky, was the huge donjon, daunting with its size and closeness. In the outer bailey, curving right as far as the great barbican of the Constable's Gate, an entire fairground had established itself. Steam plumed in the air; organs, Marenghis and Gaviolis, bellowed and clashed their endless tunes; automata conducted jerkily; bare golden nymphs swirled, horses and fabulous beasts glared from the rides. Performing dogs barked and howled, dark-skinned men spat gouts of fire; dancers and jugglers postured, sideshows promised all the erotica of the East. Nearby, on platforms improvised from trestles and beer crates, cudgel-players split their opponents' heads over boards already brown-daubed with blood, lithe boys in tight breeches of pale blue cloth lashed each other's legs raw with thin switches of hazel. Between the stalls ran children, girls and boys; there were priests, fortune-tellers, sailors with tarred pigtails sticking out jauntily from their necks, arm in arm with bosomy laughing women; the Papal Blue was much in evidence, and the scarlet robes of Inquisition officers scurrying on various errands. All was noise, colour, and confusion. From near the donjon smoke rose in a column, staining the sky; over the great place, beside the cobalt pennant of Pope John, flew the blood-red standard of the Court. The guide tugged at John's sleeve; he followed, bemused by the uproar. They headed for the inner barbican, the priest shoving and pushing to clear a way through the crowd. Against the bailey wall was an added attraction; a line of cages, open to the sky, housed the first batch of prisoners. Round them the crowd boiled and yelled. John, staring, saw a man lashing at his tormentors with a staff he had somehow wrested from one of them; his eyes were suffused, flecks of foam covered his beard. Further on an old woman railed, shaking scrawny fists; her head had been cut, it seemed by a stone, and blood striped her face and neck brightly. Next to her a pretty, long-haired girl defiantly suckled a baby. John turned aside frowning deeply, followed the flapping robes of the priest into the upper bailey. His duties had already been explained to him; he was to record, for the benefit of Rome, all stages in the procedure of the Court of Father Hieronymous, Witchfinder in General to Pope John. His task would begin with the Questioning of prisoners. The room set apart for the purpose was located beneath the donjon itself, and reached by a spiral stair. John passed through the Great Hall, its crosswall hung now with scarlet in preparation for the work to come. At the head of the recessed stairway a man in Papal Blue stood at ease, halberd grounded on the flags in front of him. He came to attention stiffly as John's guide passed. The priest descended the stairs stooping, sandals flopping on stone; John followed clutching sketchbooks and a satchel crammed with bottles and jars, inks and paints and brushes, pens, erasers, all the paraphernalia of an artist. The little monk was apprehensive already, trying to quiet his jangling nerves. The room in which he found himself was long and wide, devoid of windows except where to one side a line of grilles set close under the roof admitted livid fans of light. At the far end of the chamber an oil lamp burned; beneath it clustered a group of figures. John saw dark-dressed, burly men with the insigne of the Court, the hand wielding the hammer and the lightning flash, blazoned on their chests; a chaplain was mumbling over trays of instruments whose purpose he did not recognise. There were spiked rollers, oddly shaped irons, tourniquets of metal beads; other devices, ranged in rows, he identified with a cold shock. The little frames with their small cranked handles, toothed jaws; these were grésillons. Thumbscrews. Such things then really existed. Nearer at hand a species of rough table, fitted at each end with lever-operated wooden rollers, declared its use more plainly. The roof of the place was studded with pulleys, some with their ropes already reeved and dangling; a brazier burned redly, and near it were piled what looked to be huge lead weights. The priest at Brother John's elbow continued in a low voice the explanation on which he'd felt impelled to embark while crossing the town from their lodgings. 'We may take it then,' he said, 'that as the crimes of witchcraft and heresy, the raising of devils, receiving of incubi and succubi and like abominations, the trafficking with the Lord of Flies himself, are crimes of the spirit rather than the body, crimen excepta, they cannot be judged, and evidence may neither be given nor accepted under normal legal jurisdiction. The admission of spectral evidence and its acceptance as partial proof of guilt subject to confession during Questioning is therefore of vital importance to the functioning of our Court. Under this head too belongs our explanation of the use of torture and its justification; the death of the guilty one disrupts Satan's attack on the Plan of God, as revealed to Mother Church through His Vicar on Earth, our own Pope John; while dying penitent the heretic saved from greater relapse into the sin of subversion, to find eventually his place in the Divine Kingdom.' Brother John, his face screwed up as if in anticipation of pain, ventured a query. 'But are not your prisoners given the opportunity to confess? Were they to confess without the Questioning -' 'There can be no confession,' interrupted the other, 'without compulsion. As there can be no answering the challenges of spectral evidence, the use of which by definition invalidates the innocence of the accused.' He allowed his eyes to travel to one of the pulleys and its dangling rope. 'Confession,' he said, 'must be sincere. It must come from the heart. False confession, made to avoid the pain of Questioning, is useless to Church and God alike. Our aim is salvation; the salvation of the souls of these poor wretches in our charge, if necessary by the breaking of their bodies. Set against this, all else is straw in the wind.' The muttering of the priest at the far end of the chamber ceased abruptly. John's guide smiled thinly, without humour. 'Good,' he said. 'Your waiting is ended, Brother. They will start soon now.' 'What,' said Brother John, 'were they doing?' The other turned to him vaguely surprised. 'Doing?' he said. 'They were blessing the instruments of the Questioning, of course...' 'But,' said Brother John, rubbing his pate as was his custom when bewildered, 'what I don't seem to understand is the question of impregnation by the incubus. If as you say the incubus, the demon in its masculine form, is able physically to fertilise its victim, then the concept of diabolic delusion is invalidated. Creation by a minion of Satan is surely -' The priest turned on him quickly, eyes glittering. 'I would advise you,' he said, 'to understand very clearly. You are on dangerous ground here, more dangerous than you realise. The demon, being a sexless entity, is unable to create; as its Master is impotent in the face of God. But by receiving as succubus the seed of man, and transporting it invisibly through the air, the thing can be arranged; and is arranged, as you will see. I am not a heretic, Brother.' 'I see,' said John, white to the lips. 'You must forgive me, Brother Sebastian; we Adhelmians are technicians and mechanics, mere journeymen not noted in our lower orders at least for learning of such profundity...' There was a distant flourish of trumpets, muffled by the vastness of the walls.

Brother John left Dubris by a rutted track that wound through the scrubland to the north of the town. He sat his horse untidily, slumped forward in the saddle with his eyes on the ground. The dusty red gown, soiled now and frayed at the hem, flapped round his calves; he held the reins slackly so the animal meandered from side to side of the road, picking its own way. When it stopped, which was often, John made no attempt to urge it forward. He sat staring fixedly; once he lifted his head to gaze blankly at the horizon. His face had lost its colouring, acquiring instead a greyish sheen like the face of a corpse; fits of shivering shook him, as though he was suffering from a fever. He had lost a great deal of weight; his girdle, once tightly drawn, now hung loosely round his stomach. His satchel of equipment still swung from the pommel of the saddle but the sketchbooks were gone, were already if Brother Sebastian was to be believed on their way by special courier to Rome. Before parting, the Inquisitor had complimented John on his application and the fineness of his work, and attempted to cheer him by pointing out the immense setback the hearings had been to the cause of the Devil in Kent; but getting no answer had left him, not without a backward glance or two and a searching of the spirit. For he had become convinced during the weeks of their association that heresy burned somewhere in the heart of Brother John himself. There were times when he had almost felt tempted to bring the matter to the attention of Father Hieronymous, but who knew what repercussions might have resulted? The Adhelmians, in spite of what John himself had described as a certain lack of scholarship, were a valued and respected Order in the land, and the limner had after all held a commission from Rome. Brother Sebastian was a zealot, tireless in the prosecution of his Faith; but there are times when even the devout find it advisable to turn a blind eye... A farm cart passed rumbling, trailing a cloud of whitish dust. John's horse curveted; the priest chided gently, vacant-faced. Through the deep channels of his brain noises still echoed. A susurration, rising and falling like a shrill and hellish sea; the shrieks of the damned, and the dying, and the dead. And the sizzling of braziers, thud of whips splitting flesh; creaking of leather and wood, squeak and groan of sinews as machines tested to destruction the handiwork of God. John had seen it all; the white-hot pincers round the breasts, branding irons pushed smoking into mouths, calf-length boots topped up with boiling lead, the heated chairs, the spiked seats on which they bounced their victims then stacked the lead slabs on their thighs... The Territio, the Questions Preparatoire, Ordinaire, Extraordinaire; squassation and the strappado, the rack and the choking-pear; the Questioners stripped and sweating while the great mad Judge upstairs extracted from the foamings of epileptics the stuff of conviction after conviction... Pencil and brush recorded faithfully, flying at the paper with returning skill while Brother Sebastian stood and frowned, pulling at his lip and shaking his head. It seemed John's hands worked of their own, tearing the pages aside, grabbing for inks and washes while the drawings grew in depth and vividness. The brilliant side lighting; film of sweat on bodies that distended and heaved in ecstasies of pain; arms disjointed by the weights and pulleys, stomachs exploded by the rack, bright tree shapes of new blood running to the floor. It seemed the limner tried to force the stench, the squalor, even at last the noise down onto paper; Brother Sebastian, impressed in spite of himself, had finally dragged John away by force, but he couldn't stop him working. He drew a wizard in the outer bailey, pulled apart by four Suffolk punches; the doomed men and women sitting on their tar kegs waiting for the torch; the stark things that were left when the flames had died away.' Thou shall not suffer a witch to live,' Sebastian had said at his parting. 'Remember that, Brother. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live...' John's lips moved, repeating the words in silence. . Night overtook him a bare half dozen miles from Dubris. He dismounted in the dark, awkwardly, tethered the horse while he fetched water from a stream. In the stream he dropped the satchel of brushes and paints. He stood a long time staring, though in the blackness he couldn't see it float away. At his rate of travel it took many weeks to reach his home. Sometimes he took wrong turnings; sometimes people fed him, and then he blessed them and cried. Once a gang of footpads jumped him but the white mouth and staring eyes had them backing off in fear of one bewitched, or taken by the Plague. He finally entered Dorset miles off course at Blandford Forum. For a time he followed the westward meanderings of the Frome; beyond Durnovaria he turned north for Sherborne. Somebody recognised the crimson habit, put him on the road, filled his scrip with bread he never ate. In mid-July he reached his House; at the gates he gave the horse away to a ragged child. His Abbott, appalled, had him confined in the sickbay and took immediate steps to recover the animal, but it had vanished. John lay in a room bright with summer flowers, with fuchsias and. begonias and roses from the monastery grounds, watching the sun patches glide on the walls and the fleecy piling of clouds in the blue sky. He only spoke once, and then to Brother Joseph; leaning upright, eyes frightened and wild, gripping the boy's wrist. 'I enjoyed it, Brother,' he whispered. 'God and the Saints preserve me, / enjoyed my work ....'Joseph tried to calm him, but to no avail. A month passed before he rose and dressed himself. He had taken little food; he was thin now to the point of gauntness and his eyes were feverishly bright. He put himself to work on the litho presses; Master Albrecht chided, but he was ignored. John toiled all day, through the lunchtime break, through supper and the vesper bell. Night and the moon found him still working, inking the stone he could no longer see, swabbing, dropping the tympan, hauling the spokes of the wheel, lowering the bed, inking, dropping the tympan... Brother Joseph stayed with him a time, watching huddled in the shadows; then he too left, appalled by something he couldn't understand. It was early morning before John faltered in his penance. He stood slightly bowed, a dark shape outlined by a sheen of moonlight, listening, screwing his face as if trying to catch the echoes from some noise outside the range of human ears. Whimperings came from him; he staggered like a drunken man to the middle of the floor, dropped prone with arms outstretched. Over him a rooflight rattled in a sudden wind; he sat up, glared round straining for the sound, if it was a sound, he'd heard. It was then he suffered the first of the visions or hallucinations that were to haunt him for the rest of his days. Its onset was a quick thudding, like a drum rushing at night over a great tract of land. The room darkened, then glowed. John babbled, clawed at his face and tried to pray. There had been a country girl at Dubris, a pretty wench whose crime, monstrous and unnatural, had been the receiving of an incubus. Her they released, finally; but before they let her go they clipped the fingers from one small paw, and gave them to her in a cloth. Brother John saw her again, clear in the moonlight. She passed across the room, mewing and dissatisfied; and after her traipsed the host of horrors, the cut legs and arms, the severed heads, the bodies broken on the wheel, pierced and burned by the hot iron chairs. A bawling came from them and a howling, a lowing like the noise of the ghosts of cows, a dead-bird chittering, a crying, a wanting... John's face suffused; round him lights shone, the wheels of the presses seemed to spin like dark-spoked suns. He was assaulted by thunders and strange rattlings; his eyes rolled upward; disclosing the whites; he hammered at the floor with his fists, cried out and lay still. In the morning the Brothers, not finding him in his cell, searched the workshops. Then the whole monastery, then its grounds. But it was useless; Brother John had gone.