Scarlet From Gold (Book 3) (5 page)

“Will we be checked at the city gate?” Sophia asked as they approached the city walls ten minutes later.

“No, heavens no,” Saul said.  “They don’t want to turn any paying customers away.  It’s easy to get in, I imagine, but probably harder to leave, as long as you have any money left,” he smirked at his own cynical observation.

There was no barrier to entering the city; Saul was correct in that, as they walked in amidst the other traffic.  Dex moved out front and led the group forward, until he stopped at a street vendor, and bought small bundles of violets for all six travelers.

“These are the symbol of the pilgrims in the city,” he explained, as he handed a bundle to each of his companions.  His father nodded comfortably, familiar with the ancient pilgrim’s practice.

Each member of the group held their small cluster of green leaves and purple and white blooms as they followed Dex down streets and around corners for several minutes, until they emerged in a small plaza, one side of which was taken up by a red brick wall penetrated by an ornately beautiful, carved limestone gateway to the cathedral.  The gate was open, high and wide, its arched opening the home of carved stone images of miraculous events and saints.

The sides and interior of the entry to the cathedral grounds were festooned with pillars of polished marble, and guards stood at attention in humble monks’ gowns.  There were vendors with carts and blankets and tables clustered around the gate, imploring visitors to the cathedral to purchase holy water and relics and more flowers and scraps of paper to write prayer requests upon.

Dex strode straight into the plaza and through it, entering the cathedral grounds by heading through the gate without a glance at anything else, and the others immediately followed.  As soon as they were within the sanctuary of the cathedral’s domain, he turned to his father and the two men wordlessly hugged in joyous celebration of their arrival at the destination of the pilgrimage.

“Let’s start at the Velvet Chapel this year,” Pivot suggested.

“I haven’t changed my mind; I still think that’s the nicest passage through the stations,” Dex agreed.  He turned to Marco and the others.  “It has been such a pleasure to travel with you; thank you for sharing the road with us.  It’s been entertaining,” he said as he grinned over at Saul, “and interesting,” he put his arm around Marco’s shoulders.

“We’ll stay here for three days, and we always stay at the Gatehouse Inn just a block outside the gate.  If any of the rest of you are staying, we’d enjoy your company at dinner time,” he told Saul, Mary, and Sophia.

“I know you’re ready to go on to Barcelon,” he said to Marco as he gave him an affectionate hug.  “But you can wait until tomorrow to start that journey.  You need to spend today inside the cathedral saying your prayers and visiting the stations and observing the rituals.  You can spend the night in our room and we’ll buy you dinner tonight, won’t we father?” he asked Pivot, who nodded.

“Thank you,” Marco replied.  He felt compelled to go inside the cathedral and pray.  It was important to do, he knew.  Thousands of people made the journey every year; dozens of miracles were reported in the building every year.  Millions of prayers and hopes were lofted towards the cathedral, the relics, and the great church’s reputation for solving intractable problems.  “I’ll stay with you for the night, if you’re sure you don’t mind,” he decided, and felt no compulsion within himself telling him to change his plans.

“Since you’re here for the first time, you ought to do it the traditional way,” Pivot told Marco.

“What is the traditional way?” Mary asked.

“We’ll lead you over,” Dex offered, and the six of them strolled through the crowd to the great entrance of the cathedral property, six doors wide, and receiving visitors through every portal.  The group climbed up the broad steps and entered the building, then passed through the vestibule and came to the back of the narthex.

The light inside the cathedral was diffuse, scattered about from its origins, as it came streaming in from high above, through the many windows up there, some of them colored with stained glass, while others were transparent.

“Marco, and Saul, you go over to where that priest is standing,” Dex pointed to a small cluster of people on their left.  “Mary and Sophia, you’re entitled to go with the special pilgrimage group for those who are in orders,” he pointed to a door on the right.

“Remember, we’ll meet you all at the Gatehouse Inn this evening,” Dex told his companions.  He and Pivot went around shaking hands with the others, then walked straight up the center aisle of the nave.

“Be sure to pray for me,” Saul told his sister and mother, as the ladies prepared to go to their destination.

“We constantly do, Saul, we constantly do,” his mother said in a mournful tone, then she and his sister laughed, and made their departure.

“Even here at a holy place, no respect Marco!  Let that be a lesson to you,” Saul said.  “Let’s go start the process of cleansing our souls,” he suggested, and the two of them walked over to the priest.

“Welcome, welcome.  You’re pilgrims here to pray through the stations of the cathedral, I presume?” the priest welcomed them.

He proceeded to give his group of a half dozen gathered pilgrims directions of where to go around the cathedral in a process that would lead them on a multi-hour progression toward the great altar that marked the resting place of St. James.  “You should look for the stones that are marked with the violets, like this one,” he pointed at a keystone in the arch above his head, in which the petals and leaves of a blooming violet were clearly etched.

“Stop at each of the stones you see, and pray to the church, to the Holy Mother; if you’re praying for healing, follow the path of violets to the left, when you come to the Chapel of Candles.  If you’re here to pray for indulgences, take the long route, straight ahead; if you’re praying for something else, follow the path to the right,” the priest instructed them.

“Go in peace, and may the Lord grant you what you seek,” the priest gave them his blessing, then departed, and the pilgrims found themselves ready to finally undertake the actual mechanics of the visit to the cathedral.  A pair who Marco didn’t know dropped to their knees in front on the very stone that the priest had used as an example of the violet stone markers.

“I’ll see you at dinner,” Saul gave Marco a gentle squeeze on the shoulder, then walked down the side aisle of the church, searching for the next marked stone presumably.

Marco stood alone.  He didn’t think he needed to pray at the stone the priest had pointed to; it was more like an example than a station.  The area didn’t look like a chapel or place for prayer.  He started walking along the left hand side of the long, large, beautiful nave of the cathedral.

He found the first violet-marked stone, not by seeing it directly, but by seeing three figures kneeling just inside one of the side chapels.  Marco stepped inside the arched opening, into the dim interior of the recessed niche, where a statute gleamed with the color of gold as a pair of candles flickered in front of it.  He knelt to begin his prayers.

What was he truly praying for, he asked himself.  Was he praying for the restoration of his memories?  Were there memories awaiting him that he might find he preferred not to hold?  For the first time he was struck by the notion that he might be better off not knowing his past.

He checked himself.  He didn’t seem to be a bad person; he hadn’t tried to lie or cheat or harm anyone.  He didn’t think it was likely that he had a bad heart to worry about.  Maybe there would be no harm in recovering his memories after all.

He began his prayers, imagining the wavering flames of the candles were lit just to raise his prayers up to the attention of the saint who was memorialized there.  “Help me find the right way to Barcelon to Folence, and let me be pleased with what comes after,” he prayed, not able to formulate anything more meaningful to his situation.  He followed with a ritualized prayer that sprang to his mind, one that he was sure was a standard prayer, as he realized he heard snatches of its words murmured by other penitents

He rose from his knees, and returned to the nave, then fell into the thin stream of other pilgrims walking along the route inside the cathedral.  A few yards down was another collection of kneeling travelers, and Marco noted the stone next to the large stained glass window; the stone had the violet etched in place.  Marco dropped to his knees and prayed again.  He remained in place when the prayer was finished, and looked up at the stained glass window, an image of a saint standing by a doorway, holding his hand out and seeming to extinguish a fire that was frightening away others.

There was a curious doorway behind the saint, and a set of stairs through the door.  Above the glass image of the door Marco noted three violet-etched stones set, as though the stairway portrayed in the window was an actual part of the pilgrimage experience.

He rose, and began to follow the path around a corner, to another chapel recess, and prayed, then continued on to three more stations of prayer, growing more relaxed and focused on his feeling of prayful supplication while time passed and he grew calm and contemplative as the words of the prayers rolled off his tongue more and more easily.  He felt as though the pilgrimage experience was sedating, him, calming him into a semi-hypnotic state.

He reached the Chapel of Candles, the station in the prayer cycle that Dex had mentioned was where supplicants seeking different outcomes were to travel different ways.  He wasn’t praying for indulgences, nor really for healing, so he chose not to go left or right afterwards, but instead went on the path straight ahead, the one on which he saw the fewest other pilgrims progressing.

Marco abruptly stopped his journey when he turned a corner as he walked further and further into the cathedral.  Nearby there was a staircase, and above the doorway opening he saw three symbols of the violets.  The staircase appeared to be the physical embodiment of the stairs he had seen portrayed in the stained glass window that had been a station earlier in the prayer journey.

Marco looked around, and was surprised to see that the area in the cathedral around him was inexplicably deserted, despite the numbers of pilgrims in the holy building.  His curiosity diverted his attention, and he walked over to the staircase.  He was standing, he told himself, in the same location where the stained glass scene had shown a saint - a holy man - had stood, and he felt a shiver of excitement run through his soul.

Cautiously, he looked up the stairs.  They began to curve immediately, and with only a moment's hesitation, he began to stealthily climb the stairs.  He feared that he might be intruding on some part of the cathedral that was closed to tourists, but he felt a burning desire to know the staircase better, the steps that had been portrayed in the stained glass window.

At the top of the stairs there was a large, arched, clear glass window, allowing light to stream into the interior of the cathedral more directly than anyplace Marco had seen during his visit.  The polished marble gleamed, and the dusty floor clearly indicated that no one else’s footsteps had crossed the space in quite a while.  Marco looked left and right, then went to the right, into the dim interior away from the window. 

He found another stone marker with the violets etched delicately into its surface, and he went down on his knees as he looked up at the large tapestry that hung on the wall.  He stared at the tapestry, noting that it was a beautiful woman standing on a beach, with a mountain in the background behind her.  She was holding a small cluster of violets in her hand as she smiled at the viewer.  She was extraordinarily beautiful, with long blond hair, and the portrait displayed her with an innocent sensuality that seemed unusual for the church, he thought.

“Who are you, my striking icon?” he muttered as he stared up at her.

“I am the spirit of the Island of Ophiuchus,” the tapestry replied, and then the cloth began to change shape, bulging out where the woman’s figure stood, and Marco hurriedly scrambled backwards in panic across the marble floor, frightened by the supernatural occurrence that was unfolding before him.

“So you find me striking, do you?” the flesh body spoke to him as its bare feet touched the floor, just five feet away from where he sat sprawled all akimbo.  He had a fleeting glimpse of a memory of himself, drawn from the past that he was no longer actively aware of, in which he sat in a similar position upon a paved plaza surface, looking up at a trio of women standing in a doorway.

“That’s kind of you, Marco, my young champion,” the woman said.  She strode forward towards him, and then surprised him by bending and offering her hand to him to help him rise to his feet.

Marco reached up with his golden right hand, and as his fingers and her clasped one another, he felt a powerful surge of energy that coursed through his body as he felt himself lifted easily to his feet.  The energy lasted only for the pair of seconds that the two hands touched, but it carried with it a vitality, and a knowledge of the vitality of everything around them, as well as a sense of how to heal and improve and preserve all the living entities that were within a wide area nearby.

“Who are you, my lady?” Marco asked again.

“As I said, I am the spirit of the island.  You and I are old friends, it seems, doesn’t it?” she asked in a voice that had an earthiness and strength that Marco realized was the voice he had heard when he had been in caverns beneath a mountain, though he had no particular memories of a specific event.  “I had to invite you here,” her arm swept around to indicate the empty space they alone occupied, “so that I could have this opportunity to talk to you.

“Why Mitment let you drink from Lethe I’ll never know, but I suppose it was the only option,” the spirit sighed.  “That poor girl; I wish I could have handled that situation a little better.”

“Who?” Marco asked in confusion.  “What do you mean?”

“You’ll understand in good time, Marco, don’t worry,” Ophiuchus answered.  “For now, I simply needed a way to tell you that things are changing rapidly on the island.  Despite my efforts to delay the inevitable, Iasco has fallen.  Folence has gone to the isle to assume control and hold things together.