Vallis Lacrimarum
(Blessed is the man whose help is from Thee; in his heart he is disposed to ascend from this vale of tears, in the place that He hath laid.)
Psalm 83 (84)
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BROTHER MATIAS
It was not always thus.
Do you know the story of the Tower of Babel? You can see it in one of the windows of the cathedral at Paderborn, when the sun shines bright to set the stained glass all aglow. The story goes like this: once, men were united, and spoke a single language. They could do anything. They raised great buildings, and vast cities, and conquered the world. And their pride grew terrible. So they built a mighty tower, seeking to reach Heaven and become like God. But the Almighty smote them, and scattered them in their pride, and confused their language, so that they would scratch a meager living from the unforgiving earth, and live out their days in blood and pain.
We were giants once. Look around! Do you see the crumbling aqueducts, stretching across countless leagues of land, dry as bones for centuries? Do you see the pillars standing lonely after all these ages, and the heathen temples alone on haunted hilltops shunned by the common folk? Have you seen Rome, a village lost amid the ruins of a vast and shattered city, where people walk with their eyes downcast for fear of the shadows that move through the decaying foundations that go on and on forever?
And now look at us. Scattered. Divided. Our speech confused. I can read; did you know that? Sometimes, when I tell peasants that I can read, they kneel and kiss my hand, and ask me to heal their livestock or bring the rain. You are a traveler, aye – but look around! Look at that village over there, near the cloister. How far do you think the people there will ever travel? Five miles, to market? Twenty, if one local lord calls on them to fight another? If they go any further, they will have fled the land to which they are bound, and their lord will have them strung up from a gibbet. So here they live, and here they die. They are born in filth, and suffering is their birthright. They go their whole lives without bathing, or reading, or resting. They shiver in the winter and swelter in the summer and work their hands to the bone and beg God to save them from the callous cruelty of violent men and the terror that waits in the dark beyond their crumbling shacks. They die young, wracked by plague and starvation, without ever having known anything but toil and squalor.
Do I sound contemptuous? It is hard not to be. When people live so much like animals, the line between man and beast grows blurred indeed.
But at least the common folk have innocence, of a kind – the innocence of beasts who do not know enough to sin. Their worldly betters are not so lucky. Look at that tower on the hill above the village. You can see such towers above such villages all across Christendom. There dwells a man like any other, no more literate or wise than those he rules – but well-fed, fat and strong, with meat on the table every night and clean rushes on his floors every morning. And he has a hauberk of steel mail and a sword that is worth more than any peasant’s yearly crop, and he has learned to use it since he was a little boy. He is a brute, a bully, a man whose power flows from fear alone – but he is not without talent. He cannot read or write or do sums, but he can kill with ease and facility and a clear conscience. And that is all he needs, for his serfs will put food on his table and clean rushes on his floor and pretty girls in his bed, and what more does a warlord require than that? Killing is enough to keep the lord in his tower and the peasants in their shacks. It separates the men from the beasts.
The old scholars speak of a great chain of being, ordained by God, in which each man has subjects and a sovereign. The peasant is set above his wife but beneath his lord. The lord is set above the peasant but beneath his king. The king is set above his king but beneath the angels. The angels are set above kings but beneath God. And so on. Each thing in its place.
Perhaps that was true once. I do not think that it is true now. My brother is a merchant. He buys wool from England and sells it as cloth in Turin. He travels every year. He can read and do sums. His yearly revenues exceed the total wealth of many a petty baron. But my brother has no land, and he cannot use a sword, and he must bow and scrape whenever a warlord rides by him on the road – or he will not live to see the morrow. There are more and more like my brother, men of the world who trade for their wealth instead of killing for it. I wonder, where do they fit in the old scholars’ great chain of being? Above whom are the merchants set, and whom do they serve?
They serve kings, I suppose. I have seen many kings in my time, some wise and some foolish, some great men and others petty. Some were cruel by design; the rest, merely by accident. Today, there are only a few that matter.
Henry Plantagenet rules in England, Normandy, Aquitaine, Wales, and more besides. He is an old man now, father to wastrels and fools, lord of an empire that speaks a dozen languages and cannot long outlast his passing. His wife is Eleanor, a great woman in her own right, cultured and conniving. Ten years ago, his wife and sons made common cause with the King of France and the King of Scotland, and rebelled: Henry outlasted them all. Ten years before that, Henry’s knights murdered the Archbishop of Canterbury, Saint Thomas a Becket. England is yet a green and pleasant land, full of wool merchants and powerful barons, and Aquitaine’s courts flow with wine and are filled with troubadours. But Henry is a godless man, cruel and power-hungry; his virtues are cunning and raw will, not piety or mercy.
In France, the young king Philip rules, though his writ scarcely runs outside of Paris. Yet withal, he is a stubborn man, ambitious and brave. He has made war with his vassals, and with King Henry and his sons, and where his law does run, no man dares brook it. He is a great reviler of the Jews, and has cancelled all debts made to them, and taken much of their wealth for himself, to fund his great new wall around Paris. And in the southwest, the territory contested between Henry and Philip, heresy flourishes: the teachings of the perfecti, who say that the material world is altogether evil, and that the God of Abraham is Satan in disguise.
In old Hispania-that-was, King Alfonso of Castile fights a ceaseless war against the heathens of Andalusia. Eight years ago, he achieved a great victory at Cuenca, and he has united all the Christian kingdoms of the peninsula in alliance. He is yet young, a great scholar and warrior, broad-minded to a fault: they say that his true love is a Jewess, and that they meet in secret in the warm Spanish night. His realm is split between Christians and Mohammadans, and though it is heir to much culture and learning, it is also rife with strife and violence. Mobs and fanatics roam the rocky roads of Castile, seeking not so much the infidel as the weak. I fear for Castile; I fear for what this endless crusade will do to the soul of that unhappy kingdom.
Today, though, it is Emperor Frederick who is the most powerful man in Europe, suzerain over the Germanies and much of Italy. Red-bearded and mighty in battle, a man whose intelligence and charisma are equaled only by his arrogance and ambition, he found the Imperial throne a symbolic honor and used it to break the power of all the great lords of Bavaria and Swabia and Saxony. Now he reigns supreme over the endless hills and dank forests of Germania, from the shores of the Rhine to the pagan wilderness of the Wends. But decades of war have not sufficed to allow Frederick to impose his will upon the proud merchant cities of northern Italy; there, the Lombard League inflicted a terrible defeat upon him eight years ago, and forced him to recognize their rights and liberties.
The Italians did not do this alone. At that time, their greatest ally was the Pope, Alexander III. For more than thirty years, he foiled Frederick’s dream of dominion in Italy. But he died three years ago, and this new Pope Lucius is not his equal: though he reviles the Emperor as much as any man, his eightieth year is already past, and he has not the energy or wisdom left to oppose Frederick. He sees the tide of heresy rising in Christendom, and he has commissioned legates to oppose these minions of the Devil and to bring them to justice. But the ancient roads of Rome – built by giants, men say – are a memory, a ruin. And the Pope’s writ runs not far outside of Italy’s pleasant vineyards and bustling markets, where gold carries more weight than a thousand knights. It is not so elsewhere.
And what of the Second Rome? The Empire of the Greeks, ancient and powerful, with its perfumed courts and eunuchs? The years since the Crusade have been kind to Byzantium. For forty years, the Emperor Manuel drove back the Turks from his borders; he traded with the Venetians and Genoese, and was a friend to the Kingdom of Jerusalem; he funded great mosaics and churches, letters and learning. Truly, Constantinople remains the city of the world’s desire, the one place where the glories of the ancients shine undimmed. But Manuel died four years ago, and his ten-year-old son was overthrown by the Emperor Andronikos – for the Greeks feared that the boy was too close to the West. Andronikos massacred every Frank and Latin he found in Constantinople when he took it, and he has spent the last year imprisoning and banishing many great men of the Greeks, for fear that they will overthrow him in his turn. From Epirus to Antioch, in all the ancient forums of the world’s oldest cities, men tremble under the tyrant’s heel.
Worse things still lie outside the borders of Christendom altogether. In Spain, gone are the days of tolerance and wisdom, when Christian and Jew and Muslim lived side by side in cities so filled with beauty and craft that they hardly seemed built by the hands of men. The Almohads, fanatics from deep in the mountains of Africa, now reign in Andalusia, and all the grace and scholarship of six centuries languishes beneath their puritanical rule. In the East, a great lord of the Saracens known as Saladin has united Syria and Egypt and now stands poised to advance upon Jerusalem with a hundred thousand men: they say he is a man of wisdom and chivalry, mighty in battle, and the greatest foe the Crusaders have ever faced. Under his leadership, the scattered lords of the Saracens have united, and now all the wealth and wisdom and power of those rich and ancient lands is turned toward the Leper King in Jerusalem. Meanwhile, far to the north, the Wends and Finns and other tribes still worship their pagan gods in the endless forests of the East, where God’s word is unknown and no Roman foot ever trod. And though the crusaders, Germans and Danes and Swedes, venture ever further into those forests, they are no closer to overcoming the Wends: for I do believe that those pagan woods may go on forever, to the uttermost ends of the Earth.
In the face of such threat, many believe that the sentinels on the frontiers of Christendom must be vigilant against any breath of heresy or compromise. But I have traveled far on my pilgrimages, and I know that it is not so. On the island of Sicily, wrested from the Saracens by Norman knights these last hundred years, Greek and Saracen and Latin and Norman live side by side, each speaking the other’s languages, each suffering the other to worship in peace, each learning by the other’s wisdom. It is so even in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, where Jew and Christian and Mohammadan all pray together in the very streets where our Lord preached and perished. Some say that the men of such places have set aside the very soul of Christendom, and embraced godless ways and Eastern luxuries. For myself, I know only that by such tolerance the peace is kept, and that is rare enough in these years of sorrow.
And what of the Church? Christ’s body is rent by heresy and schism. The Pope in Rome has been chosen by the Italian cities these many years, from the nobility of one petty republic or another. The great monasteries of the Rule of St. Benedict, now many centuries old, have grown fat and lazy and corrupt off their vast lands and flocks. In some cities, the bishops are so powerful as to govern all worldly affairs, and rule from rich palaces; in others, they are but the cat’s-paws of local barons. The bishops' men terrorize harmless midwives and healers, seeking witchcraft while simony and corruption flourish under their noses. Half the priests in the villages of Europe cannot even read the Scriptures; the other half are married, in violation of all canon law. And too many, I fear, still offer secret sacrifice to the ancient spirits of the forest and the mountains, devils from the world’s beginning masquerading as gods.
But in the end, I say, no matter. This world is a veil of tears, and it is soon to end. The signs are everywhere apparent; things move toward completion. Soon Christ will descend, in great power and glory, and every village churchyard shall yaw and gape to give up its dead, and the world shall be purified like iron in the crucible, purged of all sin and made new. The end is near; on this all the wise men of the Earth agree. And so, though it was not always thus, we shall not for much longer be consigned to labor in the ashes of long-lost wonders. I believe, old as I am, that my eyes shall not see death before all things are made new, and this broken world is set ablaze from end to end with the cleansing fire of God.
Quaerens Quem Devoret
(Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.)
1 Peter 5
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PRIOR ARTURO
First and foremost, you must understand that you will never be certain. There are monsters, and devils, and worse things in the dark places of the world. There are also baseless rumors and nameless fears. And the line between the two will never be clear for the children of God who work His will in the shadows.
Some say that there are basilisks, for example, who rule over all the serpents of the world. For one such beast to look upon a man is instant death. I have never seen a basilisk, yet its existence is well attested in the works of Pliny the Elder, to whom all ancient wisdom was known, and so I do believe that they exist. On the other hand, men also speak of dragons high in the mountains above Trent. They descend to burn up whole flocks of sheep with flame from their maws. I have never seen such a creature either, but they do sound very close to some accounts of certain demons of Hell, and so perhaps these are those same servants of the devils distorted in the tales of ignorant shepherds. Such are the ambiguities of our profession.
Some things are less ambiguous. The sea, for example, is full of dangers. Vicious serpents dwell there that can crush a ship in their coils; vast, spiny turtles pose as islands, and devour all those who step onto their shells. All of this is well-reported by multiple accounts. Sirens, too, there are, as Homer attests: half-serpent, half-virgin, whose songs entice sailors to drive their ships onto the rocks, that the fiends might seize upon them and eat them alive. Some say that these are but song and legend, a metaphor for Satan’s wiles – but there are many wise men who say otherwise. Perhaps even Leviathan of the Scriptures still lurks in the deep, that prince of Hell who swallows up the living and whose mouth is a very portal to the unquenchable flame.
Nor, in the depths of night when the clouds veil the moon, are the gates of life and death sealed so tightly as many believe. The spirits of the dead may yet linger, set loose from Purgatory to atone for their sins or to enjoin the living to repent – or even released from Hell for a season, to do frightful service to their master the Devil. Sometimes, great armies of such revenants may even be seen upon deserted battlefields or atop ancient hill forts. If they are sent from Hell, a priest may exorcise them with the proper training and a vibrant faith; but if the ghosts are of Purgatory, then they must be allowed to complete their purposes, which are of God – however terrifying they may be to mortals.
Often, it can be hard to tell the difference between ghosts and spirits. In isolated villages, deep in the woods or swamps or mountains where a priest passes through only a few times a year, men still offer beer and bread to the spirits of rock and water and sky. These are the demons of old, who won all of Europe to their worship before the light of Christ came in the Church: Satan’s most powerful minions, who masquerade under a thousand different names. And in the most remote corners of Christendom, they still demand sterner sacrifices still: the blood of virgins, or even children, shed on stone altars thousands of years old in the name of Perun or Wotan or some other spirit known only in a single isolated valley lost to time.
No darker things than the spirits of the Pit lurk in the forgotten places of Christendom. But…larger things do. There are tales of giants in the frozen north and in the mountains of Persia, monsters more than twice the height of a man that can pick up an armored horse and skip it like a pebble. Surely these are the descendants of the Goliath of the Scriptures. And all across the Germanies and England, men say that hideous trolls lurk beneath bridges, emerging only to demand of passersby a fee for passage. These may not be Satan’s minions, but they are certainly his creations, perversions of man’s frame and stature set to the destruction of good Christians.
There are stranger things still, in some regions of the world: more cunning and devious than any troll. In the isles of England and Scotland and Ireland, there is said to exist an entire realm of faerie, hid just beyond the eyes of men, with its own kings and queens and knights. All are capable of terrible magic, and they steal away children in the night. And in the deserts of Africa and the East, strange creatures are said to dwell: catlike sphinxes and ghostly djinn. All, faeries and djinn alike, delight in riddles and in subtle traps, playing tricks on men that lead them into temptation or captivity or shameful death. Only by prayerful caution and the sharpest of wits may a man escape their grasp. I know not whether these stories are true, but the Adversary is surely cunning enough to employ such wily servants.
Not all of these creatures may rightly be called demons, though all are servants of the Prince of Darkness. But true demons are beings of spirit, fallen angels older than the world itself, the sworn enemies of God whose only desire is to entice His children into damnation. They may take many forms, even the most comely, though they are always deformed by some hidden mark; they may speak with seemingly divine wisdom or eloquence, but their words seek only to deceive. Their true form is horrid, with cloven hooves and leathery wings, and only a weapon wielded by a man of true faith may harm them. The power of these demons is beyond measure, for they once masqueraded as the gods of the ancient world, and they can send plague or famine or sudden death in the night. Only the blessings of God can guard a man against them.
The Devil thinks himself the lord of this world, and there are many – witting and unwitting – who would seek to make him so. The least of these, though the common folk of Christendom are much persuaded otherwise, are the Jews and Saracens. Yes, they have refused our Savior’s grace; and yes, this is a terrible sin, to which they have been seduced by Satan; but they are the Devil’s dupes, not his servants, and even in their blindness they possess much wisdom in the battle against demons. Much worse are the heathens of the Wendish lands, who worship and sacrifice to the Devil all unwitting, for he and his demons have been their gods from time immemorial. And worst of all are the countless cults that flourish from London to Damascus: men and women who freely choose to worship the Devil and his minions, who gather in secret to pray to him by a thousand secret names, who work his evil will by murder and poison and conspiracy. Not all heresies conceal such depth of depravity; many are simply errors of judgment, promoted by false teachers. But some are a veil for the workings of the Devil himself.
And that is why the Church of God has such great need of you: the Inquisition. You are a new thing, created just a few months ago by the Holy Father’s bull, Ad Abolendam. Satan has prospered his work through heresy and cults, because Christendom’s justice is in the hands of barons and bishops, weak and corrupt and ignorant men who do not understand the darkness with which they contend. They put their faith in superstition and not in evidence, and are swifter to enjoin bloodshed than repentance. But you will be different: men of justice, not of blood, bearing the powers of a papal legate to command assistance and assent, and armed with all the secret knowledge of the Church to distinguish devilry from mere mendacity. With the breastplate of righteousness, and the shield of faith, and the sword of the Spirit for the right hand and the left, God will deliver you unto the way of truth: and all the demons of Hell shall tremble at your approach.
Such, at least, is my prayer for you. And you will have need of prayers, where you are going. The darkness has swallowed greater men than you whole. I fear in my heart that the same fate awaits us all.
Venator Coram Domino
(He was a mighty hunter before the Lord; wherefore it is said, Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Lord.)
Genesis 10
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MOTHER ELYSANDE
Yes, I know Alberic de Cerami. Insofar as it is possible to know him. Better, in any case, then I suppose he knows himself. He is the sort of man of whom this new Inquisition was created to make use. I doubt that he will find his place within it comfortable, though. I don’t know that Alberic has ever felt comfortable anywhere.
He was born in Palermo. In the street. The story is that his mother was a whore. Simon of Taranto had knowledge of her – this was the bastard of Duke Roger of Apulia – and left her a dagger as a keepsake. In any case, Alberic grows up in the Palermo street, speaking native Greek and Arabic along with Sicilian and Norman. When his mother died, the Benedictines took him in as an act of charity, and taught him to read and write. It didn’t take. At eight, he ran away and fell in with a travelling qadi, and found his way to Taranto, where he produced the dagger as proof of his parentage.
To the surprise of all, Simon recognized him, but did not legitimize him. Maybe, being himself a bastard, Simon had a soft spot for others. Alberic spent years training for knighthood, learning horsemanship and music and war. But Simon died when Alberic was sixteen, and to avoid any challenge to his title, the new duke had Alberic exiled to a Cistercian monastery in Burgundy: safely out of the way.
It was shortly after that that I first met him, at a conclave when we were both novices. He was angry and confused; he had lived four different lives before he was twenty. But in the Abbey, he found a place where no one judged him on his birth or his wealth, or on aught but what he was. And so Alberic applied himself one more time: learned Latin and Greek, studied the classics, and learned to think – really to think, in that deliberate and rigorous way possible only for the truly educated. He was a prior before he was twenty-five, and the Cistercians sent him to study canon law in Bologna.
It was there, I think, that Alberic really found a reason to devote himself to the Church. He already believed in God – he had found his faith with the Cistercians, grappling with the course that his life had taken – but he loves the Church because he loves the law, because he wants to believe in a world where reason and justice count for more than brute force. That’s what he told me, anyway; he wrote every month. He still does.
I think that love of justice was what caught the eye of the Bishop of Utrecht. He needed an envoy, a man who would find facts for his courts and represent him in legal proceedings. The Cistercians gave Alberic permission to enter the bishop’s service, and he spent the next several years in the swamps of the Low Countries. They say he uncovered a vast conspiracy to breach the dikes and flood hundreds of leagues of coastland: a mass sacrifice to unleash Leviathan. Alberic told me once that the story wasn’t quite right: the truth was less dramatic but more awful. In any event, the trial made Alberic’s reputation: the Cistercian bloodhound of heresy, God’s white dog. And it changed Alberic, too: it made him quieter, more watchful, more haggard.
He spent the next fifteen years on the move. He investigated a series of murders for the Prince of Toulouse, and was almost excommunicated himself when he found that they were the work of a rabid werewolf instead of a Cathar cult. He discovered a village of pagan faerie-worshippers in the English fens, and survived weeks of torture before he escaped. He hunted the restless spirit of an ancient Roman gladiator across Spain, from Christian Barcelona to Muslim Cordoba, and finally managed to exorcise it with the help of a Sufi holy man. He received a mandate from the Archbishop of Magdeburg to travel with German crusaders deep into the forests of the Wends, investigating rumors of devilry. He never told me of what he found, but he ordered the crusaders to burn an entire village to the ground: the only time I have ever known Alberic to command such a thing. And a few years ago, I know that even the Archbishop of Nazareth asked him to come to the Kingdom of Jerusalem to assess the veracity of a purported prophet who was roaming the countryside. Instead, he ended up fleeing the Holy Land after trying to indict the archbishop for necromancy.
Alberic is – not the easiest man to know. He can be arrogant, self-involved, even cynical. He has never truly known a home, and so he is not driven by the same desires as other men. He has lived his adult life on the road, and he writes with exaltation of the joy of new sights and sounds, new horizons. In one sense, he seems entirely fearless, for danger has no effect upon him; but he has seen horrors of which he does not speak to me, and he cries out in his sleep – so his friends say, I mean. I think the greatest reward of travel, for Alberic, is that it feeds his love of knowledge; he is always on the move, learning new things, acquiring new skills and habits, becoming fluent in new languages – he must speak at least a dozen by now, for he has an astonishing facility with tongues. Perhaps his greatest virtue, though it has also earned him many enemies, is that he is truly no respecter of persons: he grew up in poverty with Jews and Arabs and Greeks as his neighbors, and he travels now with rich and poor, Christian and Mohammedan, and treats all alike. I have never known a man quite so open-minded in his approach, and it is this which has won him the loyalty of those who share his road.
Alberic once told me that men who do not know the Devil seek him everywhere; men who do know him understand that there is no need to seek him, since he is ever seeking us. When the Pope issued his bull, Alberic was one of the first men the Holy Father asked to serve as a legate, and I truly thought that Alberic might refuse: though the princes of the Church have long found him invaluable, Alberic has had little love for them in return. In the end, though, he accepted: and when last he wrote, he and his strange circle of friends were riding north from Rome, making for Languedoc before the passes over the Alps close for the winter. That is where you will find him now – and God go with him.