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. They had married her only two years after his departure to one of her own religion. The young priest could never have been other to her than her loyal knight, worshiping her honor from afar.
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,
