She stopped talking and looked at him with a far-too-patient sigh. He realized, sheepishly, that he had been staring at her with a stupidly vacant expression.
She glanced up toward the heavens and muttered something; it struck him as an apology to someone absent. Perhaps someone on high. Her own gods? Then she sighed once more and firmly pressed her small, bony right hand against his sternum. Her fingers were dirty and pale and her nails ragged-more ragged than his own, which was saying something.
He was distracted by her hair. He shook his head as she started to speak, and reached out for a gnarled knot of hair. He had thought it was simply dirty and matted, much like his after weeks of traveling, but that wasn’t the case. Her hair had been knotted very specifically, in a way that seemed familiar.
Gasping, he glanced around at the straw, looking vainly for the straw Rodrigo, until he remembered it had fallen apart. He bent and scooped up another long stick of straw and tried to remember the knot she had tied in the hay. It was familiar, of course, because he had seen his mother tie it. It was a basic hitch, used for horses and sacks-the sort of knot one tied unconsciously, when wanting to restrain something momentarily.
Ocyrhoe watched his clumsy fingers with a pitched expression, and as he finished, her eyes widened. She grabbed his hands, holding his wrists tight, and held the knotted straw between them. She squeezed his wrists, several times, her fingers moving in a complex pattern against his skin.
“Yes,” he cried when he realized he understood the rhythm of her pressure. It was tunder magic. “Yes,” he said. “Kin-knot.”
She smiled like sun breaking through a cloud, showing healthy ivory teeth. Just hearing his tone, she understood that he understood. She laughed and squeezed his wrists again.
I know you.
16
The cardinals were like the squirrels in the parks in Paris: they pretended indifference, but as soon as there was a hint they might be fed, they grew animated and friendly. The cardinals milled about in the odd, shadowy courtyard of the Septizodium, attempting to warm themselves in the morning air-and not succeeding. The sun, while risen, had not yet climbed to such a height that its face could look down on the trampled grass of the Septizodium’s interior.
It was, as Colonna had said, a four-walled chamber, open to the sky, but with no visible means of entrance or exit. Other than the rectangular door cut into one of the walls near the base. Rodrigo understood the nature of their confinement now. The Septizodium was their prison and yet was still nothing more than a facade. The cardinals were seemingly imprisoned in this box, but from their vantage point, the Septizodium was simply the way they communicated with the outside world. Their real prison was the confused mass of tunnels and fractured corridors that honeycombed the ruins surrounding the historic facade.
Rinaldo Conti de Segni had sought to lead Rodrigo out to the center of the Septizodium, but Rodrigo had hung back, preferring to remain in the gloom still clinging to the walls. The others were gathered in the open space, and Rodrigo was not quite ready to meet all of them. For the moment, he wanted to assess them without undue influence, without the sort of manhandling that he had suffered at Capocci’s hands.
He was uncomfortably aware that the group was aware of his presence and they were also assessing him. Your vote may well decide the election.
He did not understand why God had sent him here-on a fool’s errand-and the only explanation that made any sense to him was that God was not yet done with him. Perhaps God was giving him direction, even now, through the words of these men. What better way to discover a worthy recipient of God’s message than to be instrumental in his elevation?
In the courtyard, the buffoons, as de Segni referred to them-Capocci and Colonna-had met Robert of Somercotes, the man whom Rodrigo had seen first after awakening last night. Somercotes nodded to Rodrigo; Rodrigo, uncomfortably aware of how much he did not know about everything going on around him, thought it must mean something that Somercotes and those two were friendly with each other-but what? He had no idea.
The three of them were sitting on a makeshift stone bench, a slab of granite that had been laid across the ragged caps of several columns, and Rodrigo wondered if Capocci had been responsible for the ad hoc furniture. Once Somercotes sat, it was easy to mistake him for a graying statue, if it weren’t for the subtle movement of his head as he tracked the others wandering through the dust-laden sunlight. Capocci, in comparison, was a frenzy of movement. He sat, even though he didn’t seem to want to, and even sitting, he couldn’t keep his hands still. Beside his end of the bench was a pile of debris. Anxious for activity, Capocci scooped up a handful of stones from the pile. Without looking at them, his fingers sorted and cataloged them. He arranged them, large to small, between the fingers of one hand, like a juggler.
Nearby, a curly haired man, not much older than Rodrigo himself, plucked random notes on a highly ornamented lute. The courtyard was too big-and the man too indifferent-for the sound to carry far, and his song was like scattered rain on a thatched roof. The man’s eyes were closed, and his lips curled around a private prayer. Or a ribald stanza. It was hard to tell, though Rodrigo might have guessed the latter from the way the minstrel’s lips curved up, as if to punctuate a line of verse.
De Segni followed Rodrigo’s eyes to the lutenist. “That is Tommaso da Capua,” he said in a disapproving voice.
Da Capua, like the musical term da capo, Rodrigo made the mental note. Another easy one to remember.
“As his expression may suggest,” de Segni continued, “he is not the holiest of men.” He lowered his gravelly voice almost to a whisper. “His vote reflects that, of course.” More vulpine than ever, he looked shrewdly at Rodrigo.
Rodrigo tried to make sense of these words. His vote reflects that, of course. Disapproval. De Segni and Tommaso were on opposing sides. But who was the candidate, and why was there dissension? How could men of the cloth, leaders of Christendom, adopt an air of near enmity toward others of their kind?
Rodrigo knew what an enemy was. He had learned on the death fields of Mohi. It was impossible for anyone in Rome to truly be an enemy to anyone else in Rome. If any good Christian behaved otherwise-especially men of the Church-there was only one reason for such behavior.
The end times, Rodrigo realized. The Day of Judgment. The inevitable approach of his vision-his persistent and perpetual nightmare.
His burden.
He kept staring around at the assembly, as they kept staring at him. On the other side of the courtyard sat a small cluster of cardinal, their heads bent together in quiet conference. Two were advanced in age, faces lined and worn like the stones of the Septizodium. De Segni, still watching Rodrigo without appearing to be doing so, noted where his attention had wandered. “You are interested in our more venerable brethren?” he asked approvingly. It was the first time, Rodrigo realized with a start, that de Segni had expressed approval-of anyone.
One of the pair of elders had a drooping face, as if his skeleton were shrinking inside his skin; the other had a mane of white hair and eyebrows to match. The combination lent his face an antique, leonine aspect. “Romano Bonaventura and Gil Torres,” de Segni said, still surreptitiously measuring Rodrigo’s response (and he had none, for he did not know these men). “The two with them, the younger ones, are Goffredo Castiglione and my kinsman Stefano de Normandis dei Conti.”