Pope Joan (40 page)

“Thank you,” Joan said. “I will never forget your kindness.”

Arn said, “Remember, Joan. You are welcome here at any time. This is your home.”

Joan embraced him. “Teach the girl,” she said. “She is intelligent, and as hungry to learn as you were.”

She mounted the mule. The little family stood around her, looking sad. It was her constant fate, it seemed, to leave behind those she loved. This was the price for the strange life she had chosen, but she had gone into it with eyes open, and there was no profit in regret.

Joan kicked the mule into a trot. With a last wave over her shoulder, she turned her face toward the southern road—and Rome.

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Rome | 844

A
NASTASIUS put down his quill, stretching his fingers to rid them of cramp. With pride, he studied the page he had just written— the latest entry in his masterpiece, the
Liber pontificalis
, or Book of the Popes, a detailed record of the papacies of his time.

Lovingly Anastasius ran his hand over the clean white vellum that lay ahead. On these blank pages the accomplishments, the triumphs, the glory of his own papacy would one day be recorded.

How proud his father, Arsenius, would be then! Though Anastasius’s family had accumulated many titles and honors over the years, the ultimate prize of the papal throne had eluded them. Once it had seemed Arsenius might achieve it, but time and circumstance had conspired against him, and the opportunity had passed.

Now it was up to Anastasius. He must, he
would
vindicate his father’s faith in him by becoming Lord Pope and Bishop of Rome.

Not immediately, of course. Anastasius’s overarching ambition had not blinded him to the fact that his time had not yet come. He was only thirty-three, and his position as
primicerius
, though one of great power, was too secular a post from which to ascend to the Sacred Chair of St. Peter.

But his situation was soon to change. Pope Gregory lay on his deathbed. Once the formal period of mourning was over, there would be an election for a new Pope—an election whose outcome Arsenius had predetermined with a skillful blend of diplomacy, bribery, and threat. The next Pope would be Sergius, cardinal priest of the Church of St. Martin, weak and corruptible scion of a noble Roman family. Unlike Gregory, Sergius was a man who understood the way of the world; he would know how to express his gratitude to those who had helped him into office. Soon after Sergius’s election, Anastasius would be appointed Bishop of Castellum, a perfect position from which to ascend the papal throne after Sergius, in his turn, was gone.

It was a pretty picture, but for one detail—Gregory still lived. Like an aging vine, roots driven deep to suck sustenance from arid soil, the old man stubbornly clung to life. Prudent and contemplative in his personal life as in his papacy, Gregory was proceeding with infuriating slowness even in this final act of dying.

He had reigned for seventeen years, longer than any Pope since Leo III of blessed memory. A good man, modest, well intentioned, pious, Gregory was well loved by the Roman people. He had been a solicitous patron of the city’s teeming population of impoverished pilgrims, providing numerous shelters and houses of refuge, seeing that alms were distributed with a generous hand on all feast days and processions.

Anastasius regarded Gregory with a complicated mix of emotion, equal parts wonder and contempt: wonder at the genuineness of the man’s piety and faith, contempt for his simplicity and slow-wittedness, which left him constantly open to deceit and manipulation. Anastasius himself had often taken advantage of the Pope’s ingenuousness, never more successfully than on the Field of Lies, when he had arranged for the betrayal of Gregory’s peace negotiations with the Frankish Emperor Louis under his very nose. That little stratagem had paid handsomely; the benefactor, Louis’s son Lothar, had known how to render gratitude into coin, and Anastasius was now a wealthy man. Even more important, Anastasius had succeeded in winning Lothar’s trust and support. For a time, it was true, Anastasius had feared that his carefully cultivated alliance with the Frankish heir might come to naught—for Lothar’s defeat at Fontenoy had been admittedly disastrous. But Lothar had managed to come to terms with his rebellious brothers in the Treaty of Verdun, a remarkable piece of political legerdemain that permitted him to retain both his crown and his territories. Lothar was once again undisputed Emperor—a fact that should prove very valuable to Anastasius in the future.

The sound of bells jolted Anastasius from his reverie. The bells tolled once, twice, a third time. Anastasius slapped his thighs jubilantly. At last!

H
E HAD
already donned the robe of mourning when the expected knock came. A papal notary entered on silent feet. “The Apostolic One has been gathered to God,” he announced. “Your presence, Primicerius, is requested in the papal bedchamber.”

Side by side, without speaking, they threaded their way through the labyrinthine hallways of the Lateran Palace toward the papal quarters.

“He was a godly man.” The notary broke the silence. “A peacemaker, a saint.”

“A saint, indeed,” Anastasius responded. To himself he thought,
What better place for him, then, than in Heaven?

“When will come another?” The notary’s voice cracked.

Anastasius saw the man was crying. He was intrigued by the display of genuine emotion. He himself was far too artful, too aware of the effect everything he said and did had on others, to engage in
lacrimae rerum.
Nevertheless, the notary’s emotion reminded him that he should prepare his own show of grief. As they approached the papal bedchamber, he drew in his breath and held it, screwing up his face until he felt a sting behind his eyes. It was a trick he had, a way of bringing forth tears at will; he used it seldom, but always to good effect.

The bedchamber stood open to the gathering crowd of mourners. Inside Gregory lay on the great feather bed, eyes closed, arms, ritually crossed, clasped round a golden cross. The other
optimates
, or chief officers of the papal court, ringed the deathbed: Anastasius saw Arighis, the vicedominus; Compulus, the nomenclator; and Stephen, the vestiarius.

“The primicerius, Anastasius,” the secretary announced as Anastasius entered. The others looked up to see him plunged into grief, his features etched with pain, his cheeks streaked with tears.

J
OAN
raised her head, letting the rays of warm Roman sun spill onto her face. She was still unaccustomed to such pleasant, mild weather in Wintarmanoth—or January, as it was called in this southern part of the Empire, where Roman, not Frankish, customs prevailed.

Rome was not what she had imagined. She had envisioned a shining city, paved with gold and marble, its hundreds of basilicas rising toward Heaven in gleaming testimony to the existence of a true
Civitas Dei
, a City of God on earth. The reality proved far different. Sprawling, filthy, teeming, Rome’s narrow, broken streets seemed engendered in Hell rather than Heaven. Its ancient monuments—those that had not been converted to Christian churches—stood in ruin. Temples, amphitheaters, palaces, and baths had been stripped of their
gold and silver and left open to the elements. Vines snaked across their fallen column shafts; jasmine and acanthus sprouted from the crevices of their walls; pigs and goats and great-horned oxen grazed in their decaying porticoes. Statues of emperors lay strewn upon the ground; the empty sarcophagi of heroes were reemployed as wash-tubs, cisterns, or troughs for swine.

It was a city of ancient and seemingly irreconcilable contradictions: the wonder of the world, and a filthy, decaying backwash; a place of Christian pilgrimage, whose greatest art celebrated pagan gods; a center of books and learning, whose people wallowed in ignorance and superstition.

Despite these contradictions, perhaps because of them, Joan loved Rome. The seething tumult of its streets stirred her. In these teeming corridors the far corners of the world converged: Roman, Lombard, German, Byzantine, and Muslim jostling one another in an exciting mix of customs and tongues. Past and present, pagan and Christian were intertwined in a rich and diverting tapestry. The best and worst of all the world were gathered within these ancient walls. In Rome, Joan found the world of opportunity and adventure which she had sought all her life.

She spent most of her time in the Borgo, where the various
scholae
, or societies, of foreigners were clustered. Arriving over a year ago, she had naturally gone first to the Schola Francorum but found no admittance there, as the place was overbursting with Frankish pilgrims and immigrants. So she had gone on to the Schola Anglo-rum, where her father’s English ancestry, as well as her surname, Anglicus, had gained her a warm welcome.

The depth and breadth of her education soon earned her a reputation as a brilliant scholar. Theologians came from all over Rome to engage her in learned discourse; they went away awed by the breadth of her knowledge and her quick-witted skill in disputation. How dismayed they would have been, Joan thought with an inward smile, had they known they had been bested by a woman!

Her regular duties included assisting at daily mass in the small church close beside the schola. After the midday meal, and a short nap (for it was the custom in the south to sleep away the sweltering afternoon hours), she went to the infirmary, where she passed the rest of the day tending the sick. Her knowledge of the medical arts stood her in good stead, for the practice of medicine here was nowhere near
as advanced as in Frankland. The Romans knew little of the healing properties of herbs and plants, and nothing of the study of urine to diagnose and treat disease. Joan’s successes as a healer put her services much in demand.

It was an active, busy life, one that suited Joan perfectly. It offered all the opportunities of monastic life with none of the disadvantages. She could exercise the full measure of her intelligence without check or censure. She had access to the schola library, a small but fine collection of more than fifty volumes, and no one stood over her shoulder to question her if she chose to read Cicero or Suetonius rather than Augustine. She was free to come and go as she pleased, to think as she liked, to express her thoughts without fear of flogging and exposure. The time passed quickly, measured out contentedly in the fulfillment of each day’s work.

So things might have continued indefinitely had the newly elected Pope Sergius not fallen ill.

S
INCE
Septuagesima Sunday, the Pope had been beset by an assortment of vague but troubling symptoms: bad digestion, insomnia, heaviness and swelling of the limbs; shortly before Easter, he was stricken with a pain so intense as to be almost unendurable. Night after night, the entire palace was kept awake by his screaming.

The society of physicians sent a dozen of its best men to attend the stricken Pope. They tried a multitude of devices to effect a cure: they brought a fragment of the skull of St. Polycarp for Sergius to touch; they massaged his afflicted limbs with oil taken from a lamp that had burned all night on the tomb of St. Peter, a measure known to cure even the most desperate of afflictions; they bled him repeatedly and purged him with emetics so strong his whole body was racked with violent spasms. When even these powerful curatives failed, they tried to dispel the pain through counter-irritation, laying strips of burning flax across the veins of the legs.

Nothing availed. As the Pope’s condition worsened, the Roman people were gripped with alarm: if Sergius should die so soon after his predecessor, leaving the Throne of St. Peter vacant again, the Frankish Emperor, Lothar, might seize the opportunity to descend on the city and assert his imperial authority over them.

Sergius’s brother Benedict was also beset by worry—not out of any fraternal sentiment but because his brother’s demise represented
a threat to his own interests. Having persuaded Sergius to appoint him papal missus, Benedict had skillfully used that position to accrue the authority of the papal office for himself. The result was that, only five months into his papacy, Sergius ruled in name only; all real power in Rome was wielded by Benedict—to the considerable aggrandizement of his personal fortune.