Quintessence Sky (6 page)

RAMOS should have reported Antonia to the
Inquisition. It was his duty as a priest and a Christian. The
Inquisition was overwhelmed with reports of demon activity,
however, since hundreds had been taken with fits in the night. Most
of the afflicted were now mad, babbling nonsense and falling down
repeatedly with the shaking fits. A rumor spread that the madness
was contagious, and fear overcame reason. Several of the mad were
dragged from their homes by mobs and stoned or thrown into the
river.

Ramos kept Antonia hidden and tried to keep
her madness secret. He stayed at home, feeding and caring for her
himself. Her babbling was sometimes cheerful, sometimes despairing,
and she often cried. Sometimes it even seemed to make a strange
sort of sense, but never had any relation to the people or things
around her. If he led her by the hand, she would walk along with
him, though he had to lead her around obstacles. When she
convulsed, he made sure she didn't knock into hard or sharp edges
that could hurt her.

Pope Julius III declared the madness a
judgment from God, directed at those who had harbored secret
heresies in their hearts. The Inquisition started burning the mad,
twenty or thirty at a time. The mass public trials drew thousands,
both from the city and the surrounding area, to see the spectacle.
Death always drew a crowd, but even more so the death of something
the people feared.

As a Jesuit, Ramos had taken a holy oath to
obey the Pope in all things. He had always taken comfort in the
Church, where truth and falsehood were so clearly defined. As the
founder of his order, Ignatius Loyola, had put it, "I will believe
that the white that I see is black if the Church so defines it."
But how could he believe that Antonia had harbored secret heresies?
She was sweet and innocent, more so than many priests he knew. She
had never heard the corruptions of holy doctrine taught by the
Protestants, or seen the vile practices of the Musselman infidels.
And even if she had . . . he loved her. How could he give her up to
the fires?

On his own, a mere royal astronomer, Ramos
had no political influence to bring to bear. If King Philip had
been there, it might have been different. Philip was a devoutly
religious man, devoted to the Church, but he was also practical and
not given to superstition. He valued Ramos's intellect, especially
on matters pertaining to the heavens. Ramos would never presume to
think of the king as a friend, but Philip trusted him—a rare thing
in a royal court—and he was fiercely protective of those few he
could trust. The king, however, was still in England marrying Queen
Mary, and was not due to return for months. Spain was in the hands
of the Inquisition.

All the while, the hole in the sky grew.
Ramos wasn't the only one to notice it. It sucked more of the
surrounding stars into its maw, spinning out their light like
thread from a spool, leaving them dim specters of their former
brightness. Even those with no astronomical knowledge pointed and
gawked and cowered in their homes. Many fled to the Church for
protection, and the monasteries and convents doubled in size.
Everyone could see that the sky was not the same as it had been.
They began to refer to the hole in the sky simply by the Latin word
for new.
Nova
.

Few people thought to consider any reason for
the nova's appearance beyond the judgment of God. Events in the
heavens occurred because God decreed them, just as things did on
Earth. Ramos, however, wasn't satisfied with that. God might have
been punishing the mad, but what if there was another cause? A
cause that explained why some had been afflicted but not others? He
was determined to find out.

Ramos left Antonia in Carmela's care and
began interviewing the families of the afflicted and recording
their answers. He made a map of the homes of the mad, hoping to
find a geographical pattern. He studied his notes long into the
night, barely admitting to himself the secret hope he harbored. If
there was a pattern to the madness, then there might be a physical
cause. And if there was a physical cause, there just might be a
cure.

Word came from Madrid that the madness had
struck there, too. When pilgrims arrived from France and the
Netherlands, it became clear that the phenomenon was worldwide.
Eventually, a pattern did emerge in Ramos's records, a simple
strand that linked the thousands of people who had fallen to the
madness. They had all been born between May 21 and May 25, the
first five days of the constellation Gemini. The constellation in
which the nova had appeared.

This provided no cure, of course, since he
could not change Antonia's birthday. It did, however, suggest that
it wasn't because of heresy that she was afflicted. It also
suggested another possible catastrophe for the kingdom of
Spain.

King Philip II had been born on May 21. No
word had come from England. Was he marrying Queen Mary as planned?
Or was he secretly raving in a palace room in London?

If the king was mad, then perhaps it was time
for Ramos to take Antonia and flee the country. Spain had not been
a unified nation for long. Even the suggestion that Philip might
have lost his mind could spark a civil war, nobles vying with each
other and with the Church for power, maybe even the division of
Spain back into the independent kingdoms of Castile and Aragon,
Navarre and Leon. It would mean bloody war and Spanish dead on a
massive scale.

Not only that, but King Philip was the
Church's greatest champion, the man whose strength held back the
growth of Protestant heresy in Saxony and the Low Countries and the
ever-fiercer armies of Musselman infidels to the south. If he had
fallen to the madness, what would become of Christendom? The
Netherlands would be overrun by Protestant rebels; Turkey and then
Italy itself would fall to the Musselmen; perhaps even the Vatican
would be overrun, its treasures plundered.

Ramos told no one of the pattern he had
found, afraid of what the consequences might be. He stopped asking
questions and stayed home with Antonia, quietly preparing to leave
the country. He wasn't fast enough. Perhaps a neighbor, peering in
a window, had seen Antonia in one of her fits, or maybe someone had
marked his odd hours and behavior. In the middle of the night—as
they always did, for maximum surprise and intimidation—the soldiers
of the Inquisition came knocking.

Ramos was instantly alert. He threw off the
blanket and went to rouse Antonia, but she was already awake. He
helped her up and threw a cloak around her. There was no time to
dress, no time to pack. He led her to the back door and opened it
quietly, but the soldiers had anticipated him. Two of them pushed
through, swords drawn. Antonia fell to the floor, her body
convulsing. Ramos tried to go to her, but a soldier yanked his arms
behind his back.

"Let me go to her!"

The other soldier slapped him, and he tasted
blood. Two other soldiers came through from the front door,
dragging Carmela with them. She was shouting at them, but when she
saw Antonia on the floor, she started to cry.

"We'll go with you," Ramos said, trying for a
reasonable tone. "Let me help her, and we'll go with you
peaceably."

The biggest soldier, a scarred man with a
broken nose, laughed. "You and your demon child will come with us
whether you want to or not." He wrapped his thick fingers through
Antonia's hair and yanked her to her feet. She made a high-pitched
keening sound, confused and in pain. Carmela tried to intervene,
but they knocked her to the floor, where she stayed, whimpering, as
they dragged Ramos and Antonia out.

The soldiers threw them into a makeshift
dungeon of brick and lime mortar, constructed in the Moorish style.
Ramos wasn't even sure where in the city they were. The royal
dungeons were in the Castillo de Mota, fifty leagues distant in the
old city of Medina del Campo—too far away to bother bringing
prisoners who would just be burned in a few days time. Ramos knew
that neither his standing as a priest nor his royal connections
would save him or Antonia from being convicted in a public mass
trial. His home and possessions would already have been seized by
the Church to pay for his incarceration and execution. At least
they had not been brought to the Catedral and its torture chamber.
He held Antonia and stroked her hair. She didn't know what was
happening, but she was frightened nonetheless and moaned softly and
clung to his arm.

The others in the dungeon were mad as well.
They babbled, sang, or simply stared into the distance. They did
not seem malnourished, which simply meant they had not been here
for very long. The wheels of the Inquisition were turning
quickly.

There was a little light coming through
cracks in the ceiling and around the door. Ramos traced a circle in
the dirt floor and added the lines of the ecliptic. This time, he
used his own date and latitude of birth as a basis, because it was
his own horoscope he wanted to calculate. He thought he could
predict the rest of his short life without such a tool, but there
was nothing else to do while he waited to die.

He didn't have his astrolabe or star almanac,
but he had done this so many times he didn't need them. The nova
lent a new variable to the figures, subtly changing them, twisting
them in surprising directions. He moved to a new section of floor
and pressed on, surprised at the complexity of the figures
surrounding his own life. He almost gave them up as unsolvable, but
finally the associations began to emerge.

They were nothing like what he expected. The
nova was prominent, with links to madness and danger; no surprises
there. But there were figures for treason and heresy, for the love
of a woman, for crossing an ocean, and others so unfamiliar he
could not understand them.

Ramos scuffed out the figures with his foot,
feeling strangely encouraged. Perhaps he and Antonia would escape
at the last moment, just as the boy Luis had done. Antonia. He drew
another circle in the dust, suddenly afraid again. Just because he
would escape didn't mean she would.

Before he could begin, however, the door to
the prison burst open with a creak and a bang. The light from the
lanterns brought in by the guards seemed unbearably bright, and
Ramos covered his eyes. Antonia whimpered, and he wrapped his arms
around her. Surely they weren't here to take her away from him
already?

When his eyes adjusted, Ramos saw a military
officer wearing half armor, an ornate morion helmet with red and
white plumes, a red sash, and very white hose. He had a rapier in
his belt and a grim expression on his face.

"Father Ramos de Tavera of the University?"
he demanded. By voice and bearing, he was an aristocrat, probably
highly placed in the army. He seemed quite out of place in the
filth and stench of this makeshift dungeon.

Gently, Ramos extricated himself from Antonia
and stood to meet the stranger. "I am he."

The officer clapped his heels together and
held out a rolled paper tied with ribbon and sealed with red wax.
"A letter from His Majesty."

Ramos took it, dazed. "Then his Majesty is
not mad?"

"Mad?" The officer looked appalled. "Of
course he is not mad. He is married to the Queen of England. He
sent me here to gather more ships and soldiers to sail to England
and solidify their reign. I regret to inform you, however, that
your brother Diego de Tavera died in the king's service."

Ramos's first thought was for Antonia, and he
glanced back at her to see how she would react. Now both of her
natural parents were dead, though in her mad state, he doubted she
even understood the news. "How did he die?"

The officer told a fantastical story, of how
Diego had traveled at the king's command to a far-off island in the
Western sea, chasing improbable rumors of vast golden fortunes. It
was bizarre. Diego was no explorer. He was a priest with political
ambitions, a passion for the Church, and too much of a taste for
power. He gravitated to thrones and cathedrals, not disease-ridden
islands far from civilization. Ramos had never been close to his
brother, but the news unsettled him. At least Diego would never see
his daughter's madness.

Perhaps the king's letter would shed some
light. It must be a letter of condolence, a rare display of
generous emotion from a monarch to a member of his court. He tore
it open and found that it was nothing of the kind.

To Father Ramos de Tavera, Universidad de
Valladolid:

Your presence is required for a matter of
utmost urgency. Depart immediately with the bearer of this letter
and proceed by ship with all speed to Whitehall Palace, London. He
will provide you with anything you require. Neither illness nor any
other responsibility should delay your swift obedience.

Sincerely,

Juan Barrosa, Court Secretary

On behalf of His Grace, Philip II, King of
all Spain, Portugal, Naples, Sicily, England, and Ireland

Astonished, he showed the letter to the
officer, who showed it to the chief jailor. Ramos lifted Antonia to
her feet. "We're leaving now," he told her. "We're going far
away."

The jailor blocked his path. "That letter
says you," he said, pointing his finger in Ramos's face. "It don't
say nothing about her."

"She's my daughter. She's my responsibility,
and she's coming with me."

"Look at her," the jailor said in disgust.
"Mad like the rest of them, ain't she? Going to burn like the rest
of them, too."

Antonia clung tighter to Ramos and tried to
hide behind him. Ramos felt his anger rising. He pointed to the
letter still in the officer's hand. "That's from the
king
,
you fool. It says I leave with anything I require. I require
her."

"She's demon-possessed. You can't take her
back up to the streets."