LITMIR.BIZ

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      And yet, if he had been less violent in his protests seven years ago, if he had merely signified to his father a readiness to bow beneath the parental will in humble hopes for a future chance at the lady’s hand…

      Well, influential connections he had made, though perhaps not in the spheres his father had hoped. He remembered his last interview with Cardinal Borja, the pope’s vice chancellor, whom many called the most powerful man in the Curia.

      “His Holiness has heard good reports of you,” the cardinal had confided, “from certain of his own onetime fellow instructors at the university.”

      In trained humility, the young priest might have dismissed these words as kind flattery, had not his patron gone on to name two of his theology instructors. Both were conventual Franciscans, as was Pope Sixtus himself.

      They had tried to make a Franciscan out of young Felipe de Karnattah, even before they knew his intent to turn priest. Certain Dominicans as well, and at least one Augustinian, had tried to bag him for their respective Orders, so that he had already begun to glimpse the rivalries between and among all these venerable brotherhoods, with their endless squabbles as to processional precedence.

      “The benefice of Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Agapida, in Aragon, is open just at present,” Cardinal Borja had continued, running his long if chubby forefinger down a sheet of notes.

      “Your Eminence is very kind, but I had thought to stay here in Italy. Perhaps in some small parish near Assisi.”

      “A man of your talents?”

      “Well, then, if I were to seek a university post?”

      The vice chancellor had leaned forward, slowly shaking his handsome head with its prominent nose and delicately arched brows. “Listen to me, Don Felipe. The Church can show a proud and unruly face in Spain. I know. By birth, I am a Spaniard myself. We need men there whom we can trust. It is best when they, too, are Spanish, for our fellow Spaniards—yours and mine—all too often balk at having foreign clergy sent to shepherd them. My instinct tells me that God Himself has provided you to help us in the good work of solidifying our ties with Spain. Now: in addition to the benefice of Nuestra Señora, I believe that we can find you a good secretarial post with his Reverence the bishop of Daroca.”

      “I am of Karnattah,” Felipe pointed out. “In the kingdom of Aragon, I would be as foreign as any Italian priest.”

      Cardinal Borja sat back, folding his large white hands over his comfortable middle, and spoke with a companionable twinkle in his eye. “I came here to Italy a foreigner, and now I flatter myself that there are those who consider me an Italian among Italians. You have this advantage: you speak the same language they do in Aragon. Yours is a more southern form, true, but it is my observation that mere accents can be lost or, at least, overlaid.”

      The vice chancellor was a man of great personal charm and persuasive power. It had taken no more than that one interview, and the young priest found his entire life changed for him yet again.

      So now he sat in Giuliano Abruzzi’s wineshop, gazing into the goblet he turned between his hands while wondering whether, and how far, he was being used as a mere tool.

      Nevertheless, as long as the work was worthy, what business had the tool to complain of being a tool? Did a true loom turn upon the weaver, or a needle shed tears over its lot in life? Did the good hammer rebel against the carpenter, or the plow against the plowman? Did not a loyal knight in arms owe unquestioning loyalty to his liege lord here on this sinful earth? And should not the priest outshine the secular knight in obedience to the voice of God as it spoke to him through his spiritual lords? Was not the length of the Spanish peninsula distance enough to worship his lost Morayma from afar, without the additional safety of the sea between? True, the work of a bishop’s secretary might prove much different from that of a village pastor or a university instructor, but he would have the task of finding and approving a vicar for Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Agapida…

      “Hey, my lad!” a jovial voice cut into his meditations. “Do you read the future in that cup, like a witch telling fortunes in a bowl of water?”

      Felipe looked up. A tall and skinny Italian stood before him, perhaps a year or three older than himself, his once brightly-colored cap set to one side of a lean but lively face with thin lips and dark eyes.

      “I am an ordained priest,” Felipe answered stiffly, annoyed at this stranger’s having addressed him as “lad.”

      “Ah! But belonging to none of the holy brotherhoods, as your fine clothes tell me. Well, your priestliness might render you all the more eager to hear what I have to say.” Without waiting to be invited, the newcomer swung his frame into the empty chair at Don Felipe’s small table.

      Suddenly amused, the new priest told him, “Young man, you interest me strangely.”

      “Host me to a good cup of wine, and I promise to interest you still more.”

      Felipe counted out the coins, added something to the amount in honor of the generosity it behooved priests to show, and pushed the money across the table, more or less expecting the stranger to take it and never return.

      Instead, the Italian got his wine and settled himself more comfortably than before.

      “I am listening,” said Felipe.

      “Well, friend priest…” The Italian took a long drink, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and casually pointed at a table near the window. “Do you see that man with the pair of ladies?”

      “Yes.”

      “Do you recognize them?”

      After a moment of study, Felipe shook his head. “No.”

      “Not even when I tell you that the man is a fruiterer of some prominence?”

      “I do not question your word,” Don Felipe replied with growing curiosity. “But I fail to perceive how any of them may concern me.”

      “The man, no, except in so far as he is one of my own satisfied customers. Nor, I fear, should the blonde lady, with whom he is so obviously smitten, concern you. But she who dares to flaunt her tresses in their natural raven black—ah! Is she not a morsel for the very gods?”

      Felipe considered her again. She was indeed a beauty. His gaze traveled over her as appreciatively and calmly as if she had been a fine marble sculpture surviving from classical times. “She is everything you say. What of it?”

      “What of it?” The Italian looked slightly taken aback for a moment. Recovering, he went on, “But perhaps you think she is unavailable. I tell you, no. That lovely lady, that tempting delight, is one of my own sweet nymphs and, at the moment, our fruiterer having opted for her fellow nymph, she is free.”

      “By the way you call her ‘one of your own,’ implying slavery, I take it you are not approaching me to save her soul.”

      A laugh and a wink. “‘Saving her soul’! As good a way as any to speak of it. And popular, I have heard, with the old hermit monks of the desert.”

      The young priest replied quietly, “I will not hear you slander those holy saints.”

      “Saints, do you call those desert fathers? Well, perhaps, in their dotage, when they had no better use for their feeble strength.” Another wink. “Come, come, friend priest! Look around you. Your brothers of the cloth—both in Orders and merely ordained—your bishops, your cardinals, the Curia, the very popes themselves, one after the other…all of them understand that God has given our flesh certain needs, and that the best way to satisfy those same needs is not in a brothel. Now, look again at my lovely Isabella, there. No slave, she! Bred up gently as a lady, ready to be good as any wedded wife—better, indeed, than most wedded wives, for she will never turn shrew, nor give herself airs, nor beggar you with demands for scarves and jeweled trinkets. Priests’ women know their places! ‘A fruitful vine in the recesses of your home,’ as King David tells us. For three ducats only—no more than that—you will enjoy her company

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