“No, Pottsy. It just means Sharf Eltür, with no Christianity, cares nothing about disputes internal to the Church. Therefore he is free to negotiate.”
A few days later, the glee of Filpeo Harq surpassed all bounds, and he danced a three-second jig in his private quarters when his uncle Urion came to him with the news that Sorely Cardinal Nauwhat had defected from the service of the false Pope. His jig-dancing stopped when he realized that he should have heard the news about Nauwhat before his uncle heard it.
“Why didn’t the commander who accepted his defection report it to me?” he demanded.
“I made arrangement with Sorely while he was still in Valana, and I made the border guard honor it. I had advance knowledge he was coming, because he agreed to cross over only if my archdiocese granted him sanctuary.”
“Bastards! You subvert my own military. Heads are going to roll. And he wants sanctuary from whom, me?” Filpeo barked.
“Of course. And I don’t think you’ll take Father Colonel Pottscar’s head or mine.”
“Damn! Why, with me the cardinal is completely safe. I’d give him a state dinner.”
“That’s what he’s afraid of. And from you, he would be safe from harm, but not from interrogation.”
“What has he got to hide?”
“Everything! He is here to separate himself from this maniac in the western mountains, not to betray him. He will give no aid and comfort to either side. He is neutral, but only under my protection.”
The Emperor tugged at his nervous earlobe and paced for a time. “By God!” he said at last. “When this is all over and you elect a real pope, who to choose?—who better than a cardinal who remained principled but neutral?” He turned to watch the Archbishop’s face, and immediately laughed. “Uncle Urion, you stand accused of too many bad habits to be the next Pope. I’m sure the accusations are false, but—” He shrugged.
“Yes,” said Benefez. “I suppose Sorely has thought about Hoydok’s slander.”
“Treat him well, Uncle, even if you fear his ambition. And let me visit him in your palace. Invite us both to dine with you.”
“Not unless he is comfortable with the idea. If he is comfortable with it, I’ll invite you. Otherwise you won’t even get an explanation.”
The invitation to dine at the Archdiocesan Palace came to Filpeo after only three days. The Emperor eagerly accepted, and warmly welcomed the dissident Nauwhat to Hannegan City. But he began to question him as soon as his uncle briefly excused himself after a whispered message from the subdeacon Torrildo.
“Brownpony is under a suspended death sentence throughout the Empire,” Filpeo told the Oregonian as soon as Benefez was out of earshot. “His election itself was an act of war by the Valanan Church against Texark. If he is caught, he will go to the chopping machine. He should not blame you for turning your back on him.”
“No, Sire. But you call his election an act of war by the Valana clergy, and I helped elect him. I did not—we did not—think of it as declaring war on you, I can tell you that.”
“The Valana clergy elected him, you say? Not the Sacred College?”
“Sire, in exile, the Valana clergy is the clergy of Rome. The Sacred College is the clergy of Rome only because each member maintains a Roman or Valanan Church. But in an emergency situation, the clergy of the Roman diocese elects its own bishop. The College was a later development in Church history.”
“Oh, I wondered how you justified that so-called conclave!”
“I believe it was justified. But afterward, it was Brownpony who abandoned the Curia. You may think of this war as his alone, although others do claim it and do pursue it. I was in Valana, and was not consulted before he proclaimed a crusade. I am not even sure his war is just, let alone holy.”
“And yet I am told that there was a council of war before the election, and that you attended. And how is it that you joined Chuntar Hadala’s attempt to bring arms to the Valley?”
“I merely accompanied him across the Plains, Sire. I left him before the battle started.”
“Yes, well, tell me this. How long ago did Brownpony begin to pile up an arsenal in the Suckamint Range?”
“Did Cardinal Benefez not tell you that I would give no reply to questions about military matters? I am not a spy.”
Archbishop Benefez returned to the table and, having heard the last exchange, began berating his nephew for breaking his promise not to badger the cardinal from Oregonia.
Nevertheless, the Emperor went away happy that night. The defection of Sorely Cardinal Nauwhat, now a guest in the episcopal palace of his uncle, added respectability to Filpeo’s cause. Even though Nauwhat declined to be interviewed by intelligence, and made it plain that he considered himself the equal of his host, the Emperor was delighted at the prospect of establishing good relations with the Oregonians, who were Nauwhat’s people. It was the odd move of a knight on the continental chessboard: two squares west and one north. Oregonia was not far from what the Emperor had concluded to be the west-coast source of Brownpony’s arms. The man owned land there, and received revenue from it. Filpeo would bestow gifts upon the Oregonian ruler as soon after victory as possible, whoever that ruler by then might be.
To the east, while Hadala was preparing his expedition from Valana, before the time of harvest, the King of the Tenesi had taken advantage of the Mayor’s problems with the Grasshopper and with Brownpony’s army in the Province. He attacked the Texark puppet state of Timberlen on the east bank of the Great River. Filpeo Harq sent his regulars across the Great River to drive back the Tenesi from his burned and looted ally. But the Tenesi were expecting them; they retreated into impenetrable mountains, which the Texark general then decided to penetrate.
Brownpony in due course learned about these battalions, which constituted a regiment of cunning mountain fighters; the Pope sent a courier to express his wish that the Tenesi might encourage the Texark troops to extend their stay in the east until spring, by a minimum of necessary hostile engagements. The courier carried the message as a coded tattoo in his crotch, and he was too fat to lean over far enough even to see it himself without a mirror, and he did not have the key to the code anyway. Brownpony did not worry about him; there seemed to be no point in torturing the messenger. Nevertheless, agents from Imperial Intelligence caught and tormented him into revealing that the tattoo was a message to the Tenesi, and tormented him some more to establish his ignorance of the code. The I.I. men decided not to kill him, but they strapped him to an operating table and removed the message with a skinning knife. He was then free to go, but could not walk because of the pain between his legs. They salted the skin, tacked it to a board to dry, and sent it to Hannegan City for study. The skinning knife had not been sterilized, and the Pope’s fat courier died of septicemia.
Upon learning of his messenger’s fate, Brownpony could only heap more ecclesiastical sanctions upon an already excommunicated and anathematized Filpeo Harq Hannegan and his uncle, the apostle of Platonic friendship and other deviations from orthodoxy.
Wooshin did his best to console his master. “It seems to me, ’Oliness, that the Tenesi will be doing what you asked them to do anyway.”
“So my message needlessly sacrificed the messenger?”
Wooshin was silent, remembering that his master, even if he did share the warrior’s indifference to life and death, would never allow himself to realize it.
“How simpler it must have been to manage a war with the methods of communication of the Magna Civitas! Our generals receive our commands—if at all—weeks after we send them, and by then the situation has usually changed!”