“You thought you had destroyed us today. Be grateful that is not true, for if you defeat us you defeat yourself. You think you have won the battle? Look at the altar; look at the troops that routed us in the name of Rome, the crowned serpent. Look. Fight against the true powers of the earth, not against those of us who promise pleasure and poverty in life and purity and forgetfulness after death. Come with us, with us who have nothing. We are invincible: you can take nothing from us.”
“In the name of God, who are you?”
“Try to remember. Ludovico. Do you remember? We shall meet again, Felipe…”
And for an instant El Señor could see two glinting green eyes and hear loud laughter; he dropped to his knees behind the column, hoping to close his eyes if they had been open, or open them if everything he had seen had been a dream; the shouting inside the Cathedral grew louder, and mockery and boisterous laughter outstripped even the loathsome odors. El Señor reached out in the darkness; the specter was not there.
The only light that night came from the sparks of clashing blades; the copiously sweating comrades were waging a battle to the death; the day’s meager victory had not sufficed to consume their energies; that poor victory, won by mercenary soldiers over heretics who proclaimed the paradoxical divinity of sin and the eventual riches of voluntary poverty, was ending a second time in this pagan celebration of blood and excrement before the altar of the crucified Christ, and, crossing himself, El Señor could believe that the instincts of the Assyrians were everlasting and inherent in the blood of man, that the Whore of Babylon sat upon all thrones and all altars, and that theological benevolence lied when it affirmed that all a soldier need do to reach Heaven — even without the intermediary step of Purgatory — was to perform well the duties demanded by his office: war, war against the true heretics, those who had won the battle against the excommunicants only to profane the Communion altar! War, war against the warriors! But with what arms? I alone? Unarmed battle against the arms that had won the day for Christ the King? I alone? The pierced side of Christianity was bleeding; Jesus, God, and true man, born of the Blessed Mother, the always virgin Mary who had conceived without knowing man: I prayed quietly, Bocanegra. The odor of blood was joined to the stink of excrement, urine, and vomit, and to the clatter of swords, the sound of ciboria rolling in the aisles.
Then they tired; they fell asleep before the altar, along the naves, in the confessionals, the pulpit, behind the shrine, beneath refectory cloths. Only one drunken, humming soldier, crawling on his hands and knees, showed any sign of life. The others seemed dead, as dead as those on the field of battle. With his hands, the crawling soldier shaped a mound of excrement at the feet of the crucified figure on the altar. Did he laugh or cry? No one knows. It was the end of El Señor’s vigil. There was no light that night? For El Señor, yes: the excrement shining like gold at the feet of the agonized Christ. The brilliance of that common, anonymous offering disturbed El Señor’s secret prayer.
Over and over he repeated a verse from Ecclesiastes, Omnis Potentatus vita brevis, and in his own life this night he wished to verify it: gold from the entrails of the earth, excrement from the entrails of man, which of the two gifts was the more worthy in the eyes of the Creator who had created both? Which was more difficult to obtain, to offer, to recompense?
Trembling, sobbing, incapable of distinguishing between what he had seen and what he had dreamed, El Señor left the Cathedral and in this last hour of a long night walked through the empty streets of the conquered city toward the ruined bastions. He climbed to the tower where the Banner of the Blood had been set in pulverized sandstone. He looked out over this Low Country dotted with windmills and sheltered by compact clusters of low woods, soft, undulating flat land stretching beneath the light of a pale moon toward a North Sea whose icy, untamed waves regularly invaded them.
As he left the Cathedral, he had longed for the silent companionship of the moon. But when he saw it he knew again he was incapable of judging whether perhaps the brutal mercenaries of the Upper Danube and the Rhine had intuitively made the maximum, the priceless offering of their blood and waste to God Our Father, incapable of understanding whether the true sacrifice of those soldiers had been made there before the altar or earlier during the battle. He thought of the profaned temple and in that instant he swore to erect another, a temple to the Eucharist, but also a fortress of the Sacrament, a stone chalice that no drunken soldiers could ever profane, the marvel of the centuries, not for its luxury but for an implacable austerity and a stark symmetry whose divine severity would have frightened even the hordes of Attila the Hun, the Scourge of God, and it was those hordes, and that cruel chieftain, who were the ancestors of the barbaric Germans who had today won the day for the Faith.
Standing beside the flag fluttering in the stormy gray breeze of the dying night, looking out toward the windmill-spiked fields of Flanders, there amid the debris of the round fortified tower with no company but the silent moon, El Señor uttered these words, his statement of purpose in founding his inviolable fortress of the Eucharist: Recognizing the many and great beneficences we have received from the Lord Our God and every day receive from Him, and recognizing how He has been called upon to direct and guide our deeds and affairs in His holy service, and to help sustain and maintain these kingdoms within His Holy Faith, which by doctrine and example of the religious servants of God is conserved and augmented, and so that likewise they may pray and intercede before God for us, and for our fathers who came before and those who will follow us, and for the good of our souls, and the continuation of our Royal Estate, I shall erect a vast edifice, rich, holy, decorative, beneficial, the eighth marvel of the world in rank but the first in dignity, a retreat for spiritual and corporeal recreation, not for vain pastimes, but a place where one may devote himself to God, where every day divine praises will be sung with a continual choir, with prayer, alms, silence, study, and letters, to confound and shame all heretics and cruel enemies of the Catholic Church and all the blasphemers who with impiety and tyranny have leveled Thy temples in so many lands. Amen.
And as El Señor spoke this prayer aloud, he removed the Banner of the Blood with his own hands: the campaign would end here, the victory would serve as an example, the mercenaries’ armies would penetrate no further into these Low Countries, their villages and crops devastated by fire. Let this example be sufficient; El Señor kissed the ancient banner that had served as the ensign of his father’s victories, and in truth he prayed so that his father’s wandering soul might hear him: Father, I promised to be worthy of your heritage, to do battle as you had done, to declare my presence in the fires of forts and villages in lands unsubmissive to our power and that of God, and like you to fight and sleep thirty successive days in armor; Father, I have fulfilled my promise, I have paid my debt to you and to your example, now I must pay my debt to God: I shall never again go to war, my blood is weak; I am exhausted, Father, forgive me and understand me, Father: from this time forward, my only battles will be battles of the soul; I have won and lost my last war of arms.
He threw the flag of victory into the moat of the conquered city: a yellow and red bird, it floated an instant upon the ashy waters and then sank to join the armed corpses of the conquered.
“And you, my faithful Bocanegra, what are you dreaming? Where were you today when you escaped my presence? Who wounded you? What do you remember, dog? Could you tell me things, as I have you?”
With no intent of hurting him, El Señor softly patted the dressing covering Bocanegra’s wound. The dog howled with pain. In this recollection of danger he returned to the coast, to the black sands.