Iain Pears - The Dream of Scipio

But it didn’t. Ceccani did not react, merely nodded and thought. “You addressed the crowd this afternoon, I gather. I heard reports of it, but not enough to make sense of it. Would you care to repeat it to me?”

Even Peter found this mild-mannered response surprising, but was not a man to turn down an opportunity to talk. “I told them that the plague is a punishment from God for the sins of the world. It is only through repentance that His vengeance can be deflected. We are penitents. We urge others to repent as well. So doing may show we are sorry for our sins, and may assuage divine wrath.”

“You are not a priest, I think.”

Peter snorted. “I come from Marseille. When the plague arrived there, the priests were the first out of the gates on their donkeys. I spent a week going round houses no one else would enter, giving comfort to the dying. They asked me for blessings, thinking I must be a priest. At first I refused, but then I knew that I had been ordained by God, if not by men. I was sent by Him, to comfort the sick and save the healthy. Who is the greater sinner? A man who gives the sacrament though not ordained, or a man who is ordained yet refuses it through his cowardice?”

Even Olivier knew the answer to that one. Many a man had been hanged for less. But again, Ceccani smiled, almost as if encouraging him to continue.

“And while this continues, what do priests do? They sit in their castles, blockaded in their towers, and give themselves over to debauchery and lust. That is why God has struck, because of the evil of the church itself, which dissipates itself in this town.”

Ceccani nodded cautiously. “You feel that the plague would abate if the pope returned to Rome?”

“The church must mend its ways and repent, and it must take action,” Peter said, looking at Ceccani with level, steady eyes. “All the world knows how this plague is being spread. Everyone knows that it is the doing of the Jews, and that as long as they exist we are all in danger of our souls. And what does the church do? Nothing. What does the pope do? Builds himself great buildings and seduces women in them. Go back to Rome? Yes. But in a spirit of repentance, vowed to sin no more. And that would be only a start. This is God’s warning, and we must do as we are told.”

Olivier almost broke in to point out that either the plague was God’s punishment or the Jews’ evil, but could hardly be both, but kept silent. It was all too incoherent to be taken seriously. And the remarks about the pope . . . many men thought such things. Few were foolish or rash enough to speak them out loud.

The interview went on for some time, Ceccani using all the formidable power of his character, skills normally reserved for princes and cardinals, to win over this filthy beggar. And when it finally came to an end he stood up and embraced him, then offered him his ring to kiss. “You have been touched by God, my friend. There are many who think as you do, but do not have the courage to act. You must be strong, and faithful. You have great work to do. I offer you my protection, and do not think you will not need it in days to come. There are many who fear you, and who hate to hear the truth.”

Peter bowed, and kissed the ring, tamed at last. “Thank you, my lord.”

“It would be as well if you were prepared to take advice, on occasion. I will send messages to you, giving you my opinion, making suggestions. Consider it well, when you receive it, for we have the same aims in mind, and together, who knows, perhaps we can bring mankind and his church to his senses before it is too late.”

He nodded that Olivier was to show him out. As they left the room Peter said, “You are lucky, friend.”

“How so?”

“To have such a man as a master.”

Olivier said nothing. He thought Ceccani had taken leave of his senses.

IN APRIL 475, the day after his encounter with the abandoned urchin on his estates, Manlius Hippomanes traveled to Arles and summoned a meeting of all the bishops from areas threatened by the barbarian armies. His insolence in doing so was extreme; the most junior of them all, and a priest who had never yet given communion, did not even know how the service was conducted; he should have spent the next decade in humble supplication before his superiors.

And yet this was why old Faustus had chosen him, and why Faustus wrote, quite independently, a covering letter to his fellow bishops instructing them to obey Manlius’s summons. So, over the next month, they assembled, some twenty-four of them in all, finding lodgings of assorted quality in the town—some severe and austere, others aristocratic and opulent. Manlius himself stayed as a guest in the house belonging to a relation, and it was in this still impressive residence that the meeting—or rather the series of meetings—took place.

For although they were leaders of their flocks, they were desperate to be led themselves through the maze of this dark and troubled world. They were now well used to raising and spending charitable donations, to looking after the poor, to getting hold of corn in times of hardness, to raising work duties to repair roads and water supplies; all the things that the civil government had once done and could do no longer. They maintained, on the whole, good relations with their brother priests and bishops both nearby and far away. But dealing with the secular powers, with generals and armies—with politics and diplomacy at a high level—was something of which few had any experience, and they were worldly enough to know that skill and dexterity in such matters was now vitally required. They were Romans and they were Catholics; the barbarians—Euric to the west, the Burgundians to the north—were neither.

So they turned to Manlius, who had been to Rome, who had even accompanied a member of his family to the court of Euric’s father at Toulouse, and who, as a result, was considered to have an unrivaled insight into the barbarian mind. Such was the poverty of the empire at this final sputtering moment that this judgment was correct.

To Manlius, looking around the table, it seemed like a sad parody of the great days of the past, when the emperor would summon ministers and councillors to give advice and take orders. Such meetings, glorious and full of pomp, perhaps still took place in Constantinople, although no one was certain anymore; no one he knew had ever been there, not even Sophia. Here, instead of emperors in their purple, senators, generals, and councillors, there was a group of dowdy and anxious men, most of them old, whose main remedy for any political problem was prayer. So let them pray, he thought; it might do some good. It would give him more freedom of action.

Despite their trust, the look of happy confidence in him, he found it hard to keep the brusqueness out of his voice, to remember that he was supposed to be taking orders, not giving them. “Remember,” Faustus had told him, “you are their servant, selected to do their bidding, to translate their wishes into action. They are good and holy people, for the most part, but have a sense of their dignity, which it is unwise to offend. You will not insult them; it cannot be done. But you can so easily insult their office, and the church itself, and they will not easily forgive you for it.”

A wise old man, this Faustus; someone who would have made a place for himself in whatever world he was born into. Even half a century before, he might have advised emperors, perhaps even become one himself, for he had a quick and active mind coupled with membership of a powerful family. Such were the times, however, that he had turned his back on the world that so desperately needed his talents, and crossed the sea to the island of Lérins, there to spend near twenty years as a virtual hermit. He had come back to the world quite against his will, for Riez had appealed to the abbot for a bishop, and he had seen that Faustus had the skills to manage such a disputatious bunch of people. It was the first and only time he had rebelled and disobeyed, refusing for a whole week to accept the order, begging that it be withdrawn, praying to God for a deliverance that the Almighty, in His wisdom, had no intention of permitting. God needed Faustus for more than contemplative prayer, and eventually he had accepted his fate, leaving the island monastery at the age of forty-five for the first time in nineteen years.