Himerius’ eyes were shining in the depths of his hood. Betanza remembered the wheeling and dealing which had secured Himerius the Pontiffship, the bargaining. Perhaps he was näıve. Though head of the Inceptine Order, he had been a lay nobleman until quite late in life. It gave him a different outlook on things which at times made him oddly uncomfortable.
“Dawn comes,” he said, watching the glow of the approaching sun in the east. He felt an obscure urge to throw himself face down on the ground and pray; a dread and apprehension the like of which he had never experienced before rose in him like a breeding darkness.
“Do you recall The Book of Honorius, Holy Father? How does it go?
“ ‘And the Beast shall come upon the earth in the days of the second empire of the world. And he shall rise up out of the west, the light in his eyes terrible to behold. With him shall come the Age of the Wolf, when brother will slay brother. And all men shall fall down and worship him.’ ”
“Honorius was a crazed hermit, a Friar Mendicant. His ravings verge on the heretical.”
“And yet he knew Ramusio, and was one of his closest followers.”
“The Blessed Saint had many followers, Betanza, among them a proportion of lunatics and mystics. Keep your mind on the present. We go to meet the Arch-Presbyter of the Knights Militant this morning to talk to him about recruiting. The Church needs a strong right arm, not a perusal of ancient apocalyptic hallucinations.”
“Yes, Holy Father,” Betanza said.
The two resumed their walk around the quiet cloisters of Charibon while the silent dawn broke open the sky above them.
A LBREC had missed Matins, and he did not go down to breakfast. His stomach was as closed as a stone and he was kneeling in prayer on the hard stone floor of his frigid little cell. The dawn light was slanting in through the narrow window making the lit candle he had been reading by seem dim and yellow. On the table before him the pages of the old document had been laid out in orderly piles.
He rose at last, his pointed face deeply troubled, and sat before the table where he had spent most of the night. One hand snuffed out the candle as the rising sunlight stole into the room, and the smoke from the extinguished wick writhed back and forth in front of his eyes in grey wires and strings. The eyes were rimmed in scarlet.
He turned over the leaves of the document yet again, and his movement was as gingerly as if he expected them to explode into flame at any second.
“The winter of a man’s life,” said the Saint, “is the time when all those around him take the measure of all he has done and sought to do. And all that he has failed to accomplish. My brothers, I have set in this soil a garden, a thing which is pleasing in the sight of God. It is yours to tend now. Nothing can uproot it, for it grows in men’s hearts also: that one place where a tyrant’s fist can never reach. The Empire is failing and a New Order begins, one based on the truth of things, and the compassion of God’s own plans.
“But for myself, my work here is done. Others will do the teaching and the preaching now. I am only a man, and an old one at that.”
“What will you do?” we asked him.
The Saint lifted his head in the morning light which was breaking over this hillside in the province of Ostiber; for we had talked and prayed the night away.
“I go to plant the garden elsewhere.”
“But the faith is spread across all Normannia,” we said. “Even the Emperor has begun to see that it can no longer be suppressed. Where else is there to go?” And we begged him to remain with us and live in peace and honour among his followers, who would revere him all the remaining days of his life.
“That is the way of pride,” he said, shaking his head. And then he laughed. “Would you set me up as a wrinkled idol to be venerated as the tribes of old worshipped their gods? No, friends. I must go. I have seen the road stretching ahead of me. It goes on a long way from here yet.”
“There is nowhere to go,” we protested, for we were afraid of losing his leadership in the great trials which still awaited us. But also we loved this old man. Ramusio had become father to us and the world without him would seem a drear and empty place.
“There is a far country which the truth has not yet reached,” he told us. And then he pointed eastwards, to where the Ostian river foamed sunlit and brilliant between its banks, and farther away the black heights of the Jafrar which mark the beginning of the wilderness beyond. “Out there it is night still, but I may yet use the years remaining to me to usher in the morning in the land beyond yon mountains.”
A teardrop dripped off Albrec’s nose to land on the precious page below, and he blotted it at once, angry with himself.
He could see the sunshine of that long-ago morning, when the Blessed Saint had stood in the twilight of his life on a hillside in Ostiber—or Ostrabar as it was now—and had talked with the closest of his followers, themselves grown old in their travels with him. St. Bonneval was there, who was to become the first Pontiff of the holy Church, and St. Ubaldius of Neyr, who would be the first Vicar-General of the Inceptine Order. The men who watched that sunrise break over the eastern mountains would become the founding fathers of the Ramusian faith, canonized and revered by later generations, prayed to by the common people, immortalized in a thousand statues and tapestries across the world.
But that morning, in the early light of a day gone by these five centuries and more, they were merely a group of men afraid and grieved by the thought of losing he who had been their mentor, their leader, the mainstay of their lives.
And who was the mysterious narrator? Who was the writer of this precious document? Had he really been there, one of the chosen few who had accompanied the Blessed Saint through the provinces of the empire, spreading the faith?
Albrec turned through the crumbling pages, mourning the lost leaves, the illegible paragraphs.
That morning in Ostrabar was a day sacred to the Church and all Ramusians. It was the last day of the Saint’s life on earth. He had been assumed into heaven from the hillside, his followers watching as God took to his bosom this the most faithful of his servants. Until Ostiber had fallen to the Merduks and become Ostrabar, the hilltop had been a holy place of pilgrimage for the Ramusians of the continent, and a church had been built there within a few years of the miraculous event.
At least, that was what Albrec and every other member of the Ramusian faith had been taught. But the document told an entirely different story.
He took no companion and would accept no company, and he forbade those he was to leave behind ever to follow him. On a mule he left us, his face towards the east, from whence the morning comes. And the last we saw of him, he was in the lower passes of the mountains, the mule bearing him ever higher. So he was lost to the west for ever.
It was this and the succeeding pages which had kept Albrec up all night, reading and praying until his eyes smarted and his knees were cold and sore from the flags of the floor. Nothing here of an assumption into heaven, a glorious vision of the Saint entering God’s kingdom. Ramusio had last been seen as a tiny figure on a mule headed into the heights of the most terrible mountains in the world. The implications of that made Albrec tremble.
But the story did not end there. There was more.
Among the folk who went to and fro across the borders of the empire at that time, there was a merchant named Ochali, a Merduk who every year braved the passes of the Jafrar with his camel trains, bringing silks and furs and steppe ivory to trade from the lands of Kurasan and Kambaksk beyond the mountains. He was a worshipper of the Horned One, like all those who lived beyond the Ostian river. Kerunnos was the forbidden name he and his people gave to their God, and when he reached the provinces of the empire every summer he would give sacrifice at the roadside shrines of the tribes for a safe passage of the Jafrar. But one summer, some eight years after Ramusio had journeyed east, he neglected to make his usual sacrifices to the Horned One.