LITMIR.BIZ

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stared at her in horror. “Can this be? My own ancestress a heretic?”

      With a sad smile, she brushed her martyr’s palm across his sleeve. “All flesh is weak and liable to error.”

      Catching his arm away as if it had been burned, he stared at her for one heartbeat, then turned and fled.

      The bloodsoaked dust sucked at his ankles, yet still he ran—though no one pursued—ran like a rabbit from the hounds. A line of pointy forest stretched between him and the distant horizon. If he could reach those firs, he might be safe…

      He had reached them. He stood beneath them, panting, leaning heavily against the rough bark of the nearest tree, feeling his heart thud within his chest, wondering vaguely why he had run. Did the nightmare arise from the slaughter of hundreds of pagan priests, or from the revelation of his ancestress as martyred heretic?

      Something fell on his shoulder. Raymonde’s hand? But this touch was firm, far from gentle. He whirled around, to behold a homely and hard-faced woman who stood tall as a man and wore trousers like a man. For a time he wondered if she were a man. Even for a man, she would have been tall; but her long nose, strong chin, and hollow cheeks would not have appeared unhandsome.

      “Call me Rosemary, grandfather,” she told him. “Now come on.” Gesturing for him to follow, she turned and started walking deeper into the woods.

      Still numb, repeating an Ave in his mind, he followed.

      The forest thickened, then thinned. Suddenly they stood at its edge, between two of the outermost trees, facing a field of herbs and gravel. Across the field, a stone church, seen from the back, blocked Felipe’s view of whatever lay beyond. The shadow of its spire and cross, falling backward over the slate roof, pointed to a row of pits. How large they were he could not quite judge, but that they were freshly dug he guessed by their sharp lines and the darkness of the clods heaped up between them.

      A strange machine appeared with a dull, roaring noise, sped fast as a running cat to the corner of the church, and lurched to a stop just short of the building. This machine looked like some strange and immense wagon, covered over with walls of dull-painted metal and resting on wheels that appeared to be encased in black cloth almost as stiff as wax. Yet it had moved with neither oxen, horses, nor any other creatures to pull it, but with only a little bump or proturberance at its front, windowed after the manner of certain watchtowers.

      “What thing is that?” Felipe asked, coughing at an acrid stench that might have been its breath.

      “We call it a truck.”

      Out of the church came men dressed in close-fitting black. Each bore strapped near his waist a small leather sheath curiously bulky in shape, and most of them also carried long, thin rods with paddle-like swellings at one end. All these men wore on one sleeve a band marked with a vivid gamma-cross.

      The back end of the truck opened into a pair of doors, spreading like the wings of a beetle, and people filed out…an endless procession of people, men and women, children, youths, and grown folk in the pride of their strength, babes in arms and elders hobbling upon canes, all clad in strange garments: the women in gowns of many colors and little fabric, barely covering their knees; the men mostly in trousers and doublets stark in cut and somber in hue. Several of the men wore their hair in locks much like those the laws of Felipe’s own time had come to prescribe for Israelites.

      A very few people came naked from the truck. The rest paused and stripped themselves to the skin, helping the very old and very young where necessary, dropping the garments into piles. Two men armbanded with gamma-crosses emerged from the windowed front of the truck and began gathering up the piles of discarded garments, loading them back into the truck. The naked people, shivering a little in the chill morning wind, filed to the edges of the pits.

      The black-clad men lifted their rods, each placing the paddle end against one shoulder and pointing the narrow end at the waiting line of naked people. Those who lacked long rods brought strange little handles out of their sheaths and pointed them instead. Small tongues of fire licked momentarily from the tips of the rods, a thunderous din enveloped all things, the first rows of naked people fell into the pits, and a faint veil of blue smoke started rising over the scene. The naked procession shuffled forward to fill the empty places beside the pits.

      “Guns?” cried Felipe. “Mother of God! They are hand-held cannon!”

      Again they spat quick fire. The next rows of victims fell.

      “But armies should use such weapons against one another,” the priest protested. “Why turn them on naked people?”

      “War isn’t chivalry, grandfather,” his guide answered. “It’s killing. Killing as much of the other side as possible, and demoralizing everyone who can’t be killed right away.” Watching the people fall dead into the pits, she added in a voice bereft of all passion, “And every last one of them with a story just as valid as yours or mine.”

      The small guns roared a third time, and more people fell, still twitching. Some of the black-garbed men sat down on the edges of the pits, aimed their tiny, hand-held cannon downward, and made them spit again and again.

      “But why do they not resist?” Felipe beseeched. “With so many, even unarmed and weaponless, they might rush their enemy!”

      “Or sit down and refuse to take their clothes off,” Rosemary added. “Make the soldiers work harder for every corpse.” She uttered the word “soldiers” as the worst of epithets. “I don’t know, great-grandfather. Why did the priests of Baal just stand there and wait? I don’t think I would’ve, but who knows?”

      The truck rolled away, its roar lost in that of the guns. Another truck passed it and stopped in its place beside the church, to disgorge another crowd of people for the pits, which must be very deep. One of the blackclad men paused to yawn and stretch, as if already tired and bored with his work.

      Felipe woke. Mercifully, the memories of his dream trickled away at once through the sieve that lies in the first turn of the body between sleep and waking.

      He remembered only that this coming day he would receive his priesthood.

      Chapter 5

      The Italian Procurer

      The step was taken. At the age of twenty-one, Felipe de Alhama de Karnattah—or Granada, as more northerly tongues pronounced the name—now bore within himself a soul wearing the indelible mark of a priest of God and Holy Mother Church. The young man had set his hand to the plow, and there was no longer time to turn back had he wanted to.

      After the momentous events of the days just past, he sat down to refresh himself a little in the wineshop of Giuliano Abruzzi. Had not our Lord Himself often eaten and drunk with sinners? Moreover, Giuliano’s was a quiet place, in which a man might eat and drink alone, resting and meditating on the peaks he had scaled and the path he found suddenly before him.

      His father, no doubt, would have preferred him to follow in the cloth trade that had proven so lucrative over the years. Still, the epistle over which Felipe had labored for weeks, and which he had not dispatched until almost too late for any messenger to return to him with a reply before the day of his ordination, had brought only parental congratulations and hopes that, when these troubled times for the kingdom of Karnattah were over, Don Felipe might revisit his family. His mother had even added the wish, in her own gentle hand, that her priestly son might in the due course of time officiate at the marriages of his dear sister and his younger brother.

      He guessed, now, that his father had already laid the money aside for his university education, that his love for Morayma had merely precipitated the moment of leavetaking. No doubt his parents had hoped for him not only to broaden his view both of letters and of the world, but to make influential connections in Italy. He wondered…if he had come home boasting of personal acquaintance with the greatest Italian merchants and bankers, prepared to follow his father in business, would he have found his way cleared to a mature courtship of his friend’s sister?

      Ah, but no! They had not even thought of waiting.

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