“What right had you to tell anyone?” demanded Rinaldo Conti de Segni.
“Was there not a two-thirds majority cast?” Fieschi responded. “Is that not a deciding vote? We have been secreted away for far too long-this announcement frees us! Why are you not overjoyed at being liberated from our captivity?”
“But the result…” said Annibaldi. He was seconded and thirded and fourthed by others in the room.
“The result stands,” Fieschi said. “There are no grounds for repealing it.”
“He’s not a bishop,” Gil Torres rebutted. “There has never been a man made Pope before he was a bishop.”
“I don’t think there is a law about that,” Fieschi mused. “But perhaps there should be. Let’s ask the new Pope about it.” He put his hand on the door as if he would open it.
“Wait, wait, wait!” shouted a number of voices from the circular chamber, as others demanded, “Let’s talk this through!”
Fieschi turned his back to the door, his eyes flashing cold gray light. Everyone took a step away from him and fell silent. “What is there to discuss?” he said sharply. “We have voted in a leader of the Church. If we feel he is not up to the task, then we must assist him to it. Is that not our duty as Cardinals of the Holy Church? I certainly intend to do so. I hope you will all join me, but that is your choice.” He smiled coldly, enjoying the moment of drama immensely.
The other nine regarded each other dismally, then stared down at their feet, shoulders slumping, subdued.
“Well then,” said Fieschi after a triumphal moment, and threw up his hands to God. “Habemus Papam!”
And then Father Rodrigo was back in the crypt of St. Peter, in this time and this place, this world-this universe. The vision had ravaged his mind, torn out his senses, retuned his perception of the world beyond insanity… but it was over. It had been a test, and he had survived.
The message he had been given, in that feverish dream in the farmhouse near Mohi-the images and mystic understandings he had scribbled feverishly onto a slip of paper, now lost along with his satchel-he had thought, all these long miserable months, that this prophetic vision contained a message he was meant to bring to the leader of all Christendom.
Now he saw the fallacy of that. How arrogant of me, Rodrigo thought, to suppose I could prophesy the future of the world. There were only a few people who could understand anything as vast as what he had scribbled on the piece of paper. One of them, he sensed, was the kind Englishman, but he was dead.
But understanding the vision meant very little. In the wide world’s larger scope, that vision counted for almost nothing. It was a password, or a hazing ritual, that was alclass="underline" a means by which he was challenged to enter into a realm of mystical insight. The higher powers of the cosmos had asked his unconscious mind to demonstrate that it knew the secret code, and that secret code was no mere phrase of words, but a shattering prophetic vision, to live through with his entire being.
His vision was not the fruits of a mystical initiation; it was merely the invitation to be initiated.
Rodrigo was still trembling. He brought the cool metal of the communion cup to his temple and rolled it gently, side to side, across his forehead. He found the smoothness, and the rolling gesture itself, calming. The metal absorbed the fevered heat he was emitting, yet remained cool. Of course it did, he thought, of course it does. Now at last, he was purified. He was rational. He was sane. He could look back on his strange, fevered behavior since Mohi and see it for what it was, and know that he had come through it. He was challenged, and he had survived.
Having proven he could survive a loss of sanity, at last sanity was restored to him.
First, I must find Ferenc, he thought. The poor boy must be bewildered here without me-he doesn’t have the language, and no experience surviving in a city. And I will need him in what lies ahead. For there is to be no rest for the weary.
He had a responsibility now, a calling; he understood that, just as he understood that until today, he could not have guessed why he was really summoned to Rome. To give a message to the Pope? Ha! What good would that do? One mortal sharing words with another mortal; a transfer of information, nothing more. The spirit of the Christ was far more dynamic than mere words and information.
He looked around the tomb, stood up, tested his balance. He was fine. He felt light on his feet, in fact; his wound was entirely healed, he could not even remember which hip had been wounded. Somebody had changed his clothes since the previous day, and what he wore now was clean and softer than anything he could remember. He had even been accoutred with sandals, a rosary, and a new satchel. Sanity is such a blessing, when your setting is serene, he thought. No wonder he had taken leave of his senses outside Mohi; how else would he have survived?
“Very well, then,” he said to the tomb, quietly. His hand was still clenched around the cool metal, the ever-cool metal, of the communion cup. He tucked that hand into his satchel and smiled benignly around the little tomb. “Thank you, Father,” he said to the coffin of St. Peter. “You are far wiser than the rest of us, and upon this rock, let the new Church, when the time shall come, be built again.”
He turned his back on the tomb, crossed the candlelit room, and strode up the steps with a slow, comfortable assurance he had not known possible.
At the top of the stairs he met a fresh-faced young priest whom he thought he recognized, but he could not figure out why.
“You were down there quite a while, Father,” said the priest. “I was getting worried. I almost came down after you to see if you had hurt yourself.”
“On the contrary, my son,” said Rodrigo with smiling beneficence, “I have never been so well.”
The Cardinals sat around a highly polished wooden table, eating fruit and arguing. They grudgingly acknowledged that the vote was final, now that it had been announced, and that they had, in fact, elected a raving madman to be the next Bishop of Rome. What they could not agree upon was what to do about it.
There were three schools of thought.
First was Bonaventura and the de Segni cousins-Rinaldo and Stefano. They were bound and determined that the vote be somehow invalidated, and had sent junior clergy off to ferret out moldering codices of canon law in the bowels and attics of the church, seeking some justification to excuse them doing just that. They did most of the shouting, because-as far as Fieschi could make out-they wanted to make sure nobody else had a chance to even think straight until they had shaped events to their own liking.
If nothing else, they would probably turn to Orsini for help and ask him to arrange for the Pontiff-elect to be assassinated. This group, in short, was in a dither.
Then there was the group led by Castiglione, who were shocked but not panicked by what had happened. They believed that the vote should hold on legal principles, but that the madman should then be gently induced to decline the honor. This would send all the Cardinals back into seclusion for another vote, but now within the sanctity of the Vatican compound, and not as victims of Orsini’s oppression.
And then there was the unlikely triumvirate of Colonna, Capocci, and Fieschi. For different reasons, these men felt that the vote should hold, and Rodrigo should be enthroned. It was uncommon (but not impossible) to raise as Pope a man who was not a bishop; this was an easy technicality to fix: he could be made bishop, and then anointed Pontiff.
“I am curious. Why do you support the outcome of the election?” Fieschi asked the other two. Obviously the two clowns could not be trusted, but perhaps they would let slip some useful observation that could sway some of the other prelates.