Pope Joan (45 page)

The long procession crossed the open expanse of the Lateran courtyard and moved out with stately dignity, passing the great bronze statue of a she-wolf,
mater romanorum
, or mother of the Romans, believed by the ancients to have suckled Romulus and Remus. The statue had occasioned considerable controversy, for there were those who said it was blasphemy for a piece of pagan idolatry to stand before the walls of the papal palace, but others defended it with equal passion, praising its beauty and the excellence of its craftsmanship.

Just beyond the she-wolf, the procession turned north, passing beneath the great arch of the Claudian aqueduct, with its lofty, finely proportioned brickwork, onto the ancient Via Sacra, the sacred road that Popes had traversed for time beyond memory.

Sergius blinked back the piercing rays of the sun. His head ached, and the rhythmic swaying of his horse was making him dizzy; he gripped the reins to steady himself.
This
, he thought penitently,
is the
price I pay for gluttony.
He had sinned again, gorging himself on rich food and wine. Despising his weakness, Sergius resolved, for the twentieth time that week, to reform.

With a pang of regret, he thought of John Anglicus. He had felt so much better when the foreign priest had been physicking him. But of course there could be no question of having him back, not after what he had done. John Anglicus was a detestable sinner, a priest who had broken the holiest of his vows.

“God bless the Lord Pope!” The cheering crowd brought Sergius’s thoughts back to the present. He made the sign of the cross in blessing, fighting down nausea as the procession moved with stately dignity down the narrow line of the Via Sacra.

They had just passed the monastery of Honorius when the crowd scattered in sudden confusion as a mounted man rode in upon them. Horse and rider had been driven hard; the bay’s mouth was lathered, its sides heaving. The rider’s clothes were torn, his face blackened like a Saracen’s with the mud of the road. He reined in and leapt to the ground in front of the procession.

“How dare you interrupt this sacred procession?” Eustathius, the archpriest, demanded indignantly. “Guards, strip this man and flog him. Fifty strokes will teach him a better respect!”

“He … is coming …” The man was so out of breath that the words were scarcely distinguishable.

“Hold.” Sergius stayed the guards. “Who is coming?”

“Lothar,” the man gasped.

“The Emperor?” Sergius said in astonishment.

The man nodded. “At the head of a large army of Franks. Holiness, he’s sworn a blood revenge against you and this city for the grievance that’s been done him.”

A murmur of dismay came from the crowd.

“Grievance?” For a moment Sergius could not think what this could mean. Then it came to him. “The consecration!”

After Sergius’s election, the city had gone ahead with the consecration ceremony without waiting for the Emperor’s approval. This was a manifest breach of the charter of 824, which granted Lothar the right of imperial
jussio
, or ratification of an elected Pope prior to consecration. Nevertheless, the move had been widely applauded, for the people saw it as a proud reassertion of Roman independence from the distant Frankish crown. It was a clear and deliberate slight
to Lothar, but as the jussio was more symbolic than substantive—for no Emperor had ever failed to confirm an elected Pope—no one believed Lothar would do much about it.

“Where is the Emperor?” Sergius’s voice was a dry whisper.

“In Viterbo, Holiness.”

Cries of alarm greeted this news. Viterbo was part of the Roman campagna, no more than ten days’ march from Rome.

“My lord, he is a scourge upon the earth.” The man’s tongue was loosed now he had caught his breath. “His soldiers plunder all before them, ransacking the farms, carrying off the livestock, pulling up the vines by their roots. They take what they want, and what they do not want, they burn. Those who get in their way they kill without mercy— women, old men, babes in arms—none are spared. The horror”—his voice cracked—“the horror of it cannot be imagined.”

Terrified and uncertain, the people looked to their Pope. But there was no comfort to be found there. Before the Romans’ horrified eyes, Sergius’s face went slack, his eyes rolled up into his head, and he toppled forward senseless onto his horse.

“O, he is dead!” The cry of lamentation found an echo on a dozen other tongues. Quickly the papal guards surrounded Sergius, plucking him from his horse and bearing him away into the Patriarchium. The rest of the procession followed close behind.

The frightened crowd thronged the courtyard, threatening to break into a dangerous panic. The guards rode in among them with whips and drawn swords, sending them scattering along the narrow, dark streets to the solitary terror of their homes.

A
LARM
and agitation grew as refugees thronged through the city gates from the surrounding campagna, from Farfa and Narni, Laurentum and Civitavecchia. They came in droves, their meager possessions bundled on their backs, their dead piled in carts. All had similar tales of Frankish depredation and savagery. These terrifying accounts spurred the city’s efforts to strengthen its defenses: day and night the Romans toiled energetically to remove the layers of debris that had accumulated against the city walls over the centuries, making them easier for an enemy to surmount.

The priests of the city were kept busy from prime to vespers, saying Mass and hearing confession. The churches were filled to bursting, the ranks of the faithful swelled with a multitude of unfamiliar faces—for
fear had goaded many a fainthearted Christian into newfound faith. Piously they lighted candles and raised their voices in prayer for the safety of their homes and families—and for the recovery of the ailing Sergius, on whom all their hopes depended.
May the strength of God be with our Lord Pope
, they prayed, for surely he would have need of great fortitude to save Rome from the devil Lothar.

S
ERGIUS’S
voice rose and fell in the fluid melodies of the Roman chant, truer and sweeter than that of any of the other boys in the
schola canto-rum.
The singing master smiled approval at him. Encouraged, Sergius sang out more loudly, his young soprano rising higher and higher in joyous ecstasy, till it seemed as if it would lift him into Heaven itself.

The dream receded, and Sergius awoke. Fear, vague and undefined, crowded the edges of his consciousness, setting his heart racing before he understood why.

With a nauseating lurch, he remembered.

Lothar.

He sat up. His head throbbed, and there was a foul taste in his mouth. “Celestinus!” His voice cracked like a rusted hinge.

“Holiness!” Celestinus rose sleepily from the floor. With his soft pink cheeks, round child’s eyes, and tousled blond hair, he resembled a heavenly cherub. At ten, he was the youngest of the cubicularii; Celestinus’s father was a man of great influence in the city, so he had come to the Lateran earlier than most.
Well
, Sergius thought,
he is no younger than I was when I was taken from my parents’ home.

“Bring Benedict,” he commanded. “I would speak with him.” Celestinus nodded and hurried off, stifling a yawn.

One of the kitchen servants entered with a platter of bread and bacon. Sergius was not supposed to break fast until after his celebration of Mass—for the hands that touched the eucharistic gifts had to be free from any worldly stain. In private, though, such niceties of form were often disregarded—especially with a Pope of such prodigious appetite.

This morning, however, the smell of the bacon made Sergius’s gorge rise. He waved the tray aside. “Take it away.”

A notary entered and announced, “His Grace the Archpriest awaits you in the triclinium.”

“Let him wait,” Sergius responded curtly. “I will speak first with my brother.”

Benedict’s common sense in this crisis had proved invaluable. It
had been his idea to take money from the papal treasury in order to buy off Lothar. Fifty thousand gold solidi should be enough to assuage even an Emperor’s wounded pride.

Celestinus returned, not with Benedict but with Arighis, the vicedominus.

“Where is my brother?” Sergius asked.

“Gone, Holiness,” Arighis replied.

“Gone?”

“Ivo the porter saw him ride out just before dawn with a dozen or so attendants. We thought you knew.”

A rise of bile bathed Sergius’s throat. “The money?”

“Benedict collected it last night. There were eleven coffers altogether. He had them with him when he left.”

“No!” But even as Sergius’s lips formed the denial, he knew the truth of it. Benedict had betrayed him.

He was helpless. Lothar would come, and there was nothing, nothing Sergius could do to stop him.

A wave of nausea overtook him. He leaned over the side of the bed, spilling the sour contents of his stomach onto the floor. He tried to rise but could not; pain stabbed at his legs, immobilizing him. Celestinus and Arighis ran to help him, lifting him back and down. Turning his head into the pillow, Sergius wept unrestrainedly, like a child.

Arighis turned to Celestinus. “Stay with him. I’m going to the dungeon.”

J
OAN
stared at the bowl of food before her. There was a small crust of stale bread, and some gray, indistinguishable chunks of meat, threaded through with wriggling maggots; the rotten odor rose to her nostrils. It had been several days since she had eaten, for the guards, whether from carelessness or design, did not bring food every day. She stared at the meat, hunger doing battle with judgment. At last she put the bowl aside. Taking up the crust of bread, she bit off a small piece, chewing it slowly, to make it last longer.

How long had she been here—two weeks? Three? She had begun to lose count. The perpetual darkness was disorienting. She had used her piece of candle sparingly, lighting it only to eat or to prepare medications from her scrip. Nevertheless, the candle was reduced to a tiny stub of wax, good for no more than another hour or two of precious light.

Even more terrible than the darkness was the solitude. The utter and unremitting silence was unnerving. To stay alert, Joan set herself a series of mental tasks—reciting from memory the entire Rule of St. Benedict, all one hundred and fifty psalms, and the Book of Acts. But these feats of memory soon became too routine to keep her attention engaged.

She remembered how the great theologian Boethius, similarly imprisoned, had found strength and consolation in prayer. For hours she knelt on the cold stone floor of the dungeon, trying to pray. But at the core of her being, she felt nothing but emptiness. The seed of doubt, planted in her childhood by her mother, had taken deep root within her soul. She tried to weed it out, to rise up into the solacing light of grace, but she could not. Was God listening? Was He even there? As day after day passed with no word from Sergius, hope gradually slipped away.

The loud clank of metal jolted her as the bar on the door was lifted. A moment later the door swung wide, pouring dazzling light into the blackness. Shielding her eyes against the glare, Joan squinted toward the opening. A man stood silhouetted against the light. “John Anglicus?” he called uncertainly into the darkness.

The voice was instantly familiar. “Arighis!” Joan swayed light-headedly as she rose and made her way through the stagnant water toward the papal vicedominus. “Have you come from Sergius?”

Arighis shook his head. “His Holiness does not wish to see you.”

“Then why—?”

“He is gravely ill. Once before you gave him medicine that helped him; have you any with you now?”

“I have.” Joan took a packet of powder of colchicum from her scrip. Arighis reached for it, but Joan quickly drew it back.

“What?” said Arighis. “Do you hate him so much? Beware, John Anglicus, for to wish harm upon Christ’s chosen Vicar is to place your immortal soul in the gravest peril.”

“I do not hate him,” Joan said, and meant it. Sergius was not a bad man, she knew, only weak and overtrusting of his venal brother. “But I will not give this medicine into untrained hands. Its powers are very great, and the wrong dose could be lethal.” This was not entirely true, for the powdered root was not as potent as she pretended; it would take a very large dose to do any real harm. But this was her chance at freedom; she would not let the door close upon it again.
“Besides,” she added, “how do I know Sergius is suffering from the same ailment as before? To cure His Holiness, I first must see him.”

Arighis hesitated. To free the prisoner would be an act of insubordination, a direct countermanding of the Lord Pope’s order. But if Sergius died with the Frankish Emperor at the gates, the papacy, and Rome itself, might be forfeit.

“Come,” he said, abruptly arriving at a decision. “I will take you to His Holiness.”

S
ERGIUS
lay against the soft silken pillows of the papal bed. The worst of the pain had passed, but it had left him drained and weak as a newborn kitten.

The door to the chamber opened, and Arighis entered, followed by John Anglicus.

Sergius started violently. “What is this sinner doing here?”

Arighis said, “He comes with a powerful medicine that will restore you to health.”

Sergius shook his head. “All true physicking comes from God. His healing grace will not be transmitted through so impure a vessel.”

“I am not impure,” Joan protested. “Benedict lied to you, Holiness.”

“You were in the harlot’s bed,” Sergius replied accusingly. “The guards saw you there.”

“They saw what they expected to see, what they had been told to observe,” Joan retorted. Quickly she explained how Benedict had contrived to trap her. “I did not want to go there,” she said, “but Arighis insisted.”

“That is true, Holiness,” Arighis confirmed. “John Anglicus asked if I would not send one of the other physicians. But Benedict insisted that John Anglicus and no other should go.”

For a long while, Sergius did not speak. Finally he said in a cracked voice, “If this is true, you have been grievously wronged.” He burst out in despair, “Lothar’s coming is God’s just judgment against me for all my sins!”