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Chapter 6

The Dream of Hypatia

He stood on something slippery as ice, in the midst of swirling black fog. Somewhere, a woman’s voice was calling: “Grandson! Great-grandson!”

At length he discerned a brightening of the fog in the direction of her voice. Sliding his feet with extreme caution, he inched his way into the beam of light. Mist still clouded his vision, as though he swam through milk; but now, at least, he saw that the light had a source. He climbed toward that more than toward the voice, which he recognized and feared.

“Great-grandson!” she called one last time.

The fog fell away, and he found himself on the edge of a sort of raft of icy stuff, near the outer wall of some great building. The top of the wall was roughly even with his waist, but between his raft and the stonework was a deep chasm. His heretic ancestress waited at the edge of the stonework, extending her hand to him across the gulf.

He drew back.

“Will you drift?” she pleaded.

“How anchor myself to heresy?”

“Great-great-grandson! You are anchored in your priesthood, and your bishop has named you his Ordinary, to tie him with the Inquisition. Are you so loosely anchored in your own Faith that the mere touch of my hand might shake free your soul?”

The chasm was widening. His choice was to accept her help or drift back into darkness. Reluctantly, he stretched forth his arm.

She clasped it. There came a kind of soft, creeping shudder, and he stood beside her, his feet firm on the stone. Her touch was warm, human, and very gentle. Horrified in himself to find it so—should not a heretic’s touch burn the skin?—he pulled free of her and stepped back.

“Beware,” she cried sadly.

He saw that he had stepped too near the edge. One of his heels rested on empty air. Stepping forward again, though keeping his distance from her, he peered around.

The place where they stood was like a piazza overlooking a great seacoast city. Sunlight danced in large bright flakes on the blue water, and salt breezes blew the commonplace stenches of any great city away inland. Distant roaring, as of mobs or the sea, reached his ears; but up here all seemed peaceful.

On the other side of the piazza white smoke rose, swirling in the breeze, from a huge basin he guessed to be some roasting pit or giant incense burner. Indeed, the smell of incense teased his nostrils. Many people, most of them brown-robed monks, stood grouped about the basin. Several bent over their work at something that Don Felipe could not see. The rest chanted a strange chant, like none he had ever heard, but clearly meant for Christian rites.

He walked forward for a closer look.

One of the workers stood up, waving something above his head. It appeared to be a small white hand. He threw it into the basin. The smoke turned dark, and cheering interrupted the chant.

Now Felipe saw one tall monk, cowl pushed back upon his shoulders, standing at a pulpit raised above the burning pit.

“Bless you, my brothers!” this monk declaimed. “God blesses you, Christ and His great Mother Mary most holy bless you, for this holy work which you have done today in purifying our city of the Pagan philosopher and her baneful teaching!”

In a few steps, Felipe covered the remaining distance and gazed down between the workers. He beheld a woman’s body, naked, bruised, and covered with blood. Once, he guessed, she had been beautiful, but she must have been stoned to death. One eye was gone, the other stared up blindly at nothing. Even as he watched in stunned silence, a monk hacked off her other hand and rose to throw it after the first, into the fire.

Raymonde had come up at Felipe’s shoulder: he felt the brush of her inexplicable martyr’s palm.

“Hypatia of Alexandria,” she murmured. “By both your creed and mine in life, great-grandson, a Pagan steeped in false doctrine; yet great Christian churchmen—though not including the bishop Cyril and his toadying monks—called her friend, respected her learning, and had hopes of her wisdom. She deserves to be remembered for more than the manner of her death.”

Raymonde dropped her own martyr’s palm down upon Hypatia’s body. A monk pushed it unseeingly aside as he swung his axe into the dead woman’s elbow.

Don Felipe turned away, sickened, but as quickly turned back. “Is this fit work for monks?” he shouted at them. “The woman is dead! You have murdered her! She was unbaptized—you had no right to judge her—and yet you murdered her! At least return her body for burial!”

“And leave her soul to the good, merciful God,” Raymonde added, so softly that even Felipe heardly heard her.

The rest of them paid the two no attention whatever. Instead, they listened enrapt to their preacher, who was going on:

“Yet the greater part of your pious work remains to be done! The Pagans merely deny God—the Jews murdered Him on the Cross! Have we not suffered God’s murderers to live among us long enough?”

“Who is that man?” Don Felipe demanded.

“His name is Legion,” Raymonde answered mournfully. “Every age has many such.”

Felipe could no longer see the corpse of Hypatia. They must have burned the last of it for incense in the burner which now sent up fragrant curls as it swung, golden and clanking, in the acolyte’s hands. The great church wherein they stood was a converted mosque, its Moorish architecture clear to Don Felipe’s eyes. Gone were sky and seacoast, and the crowd of listeners had greatly increased in number. Only the preacher in his pulpit remained the same.

“Think of how those accursed Jews howled for Christ’s holy Blood!” he ranted on, lifting both his hands. “Let it be on our heads and our children’s, they themselves vowed in their shameless guilt! Is not God enraged with us for failing all these generations to root them out?”

Don Felipe guessed, “That man is not…Fray Vincent Ferrer?”

Raymonde shook her head. “It is the sixth day of June in the year of our Lord 1391, and we are in Seville, where this time the horror begins.”

“Is this not why He struck our parents and grandparents down by the thousands forty years ago?” the preacher thundered, “In what man may call the Black Death, but I tell you solemnly was the holy wrath of God! Elsewhere in the world, did good Christians not take warning and drive them out then, purging the sickness with fire and sword? And we—why have we been lax? I tell you, if we purge not the vile Jews from our midst, God Himself will purge us with fire and plague to make men forget that of forty years ago!”

“His name in this age and place,” Raymonde said, “is Ferran Martínez. But his words mean less than the way in which his hearers receive them.”

The crowd of worshippers cheered. In that moment, Don Felipe watched them turn from congregation into mob.

“Was not Ihesu Himself a Jew!” he screamed at them. “His holy Mother—was she not a pious Jewess? Saint Joseph—the blessed apostles—”

“The king, the archbishop, the pope himself,” said Raymonde, “all have forbidden Ferran Martínez to say these things that he says. He, however, claims a higher obedience to God, and continues to say them. Great-grandson, can you stop the mob where your own pope has failed to stop their leader?”

He turned on her. “They are ignorant, but you are heretic!”

And, as he turned, the roar of the mob broke upon them, overwhelmed them, churned them under as the beast with a thousand heads and twice as many feet stormed over them and out of the church to the Jewish quarter…and there was blood, fire and blood, the screams of maidens, and limbs of children flung everywhere, and Felipe screamed and half awoke.

But as he lay trembling, before all memory of the dream had faded, he dozed again. Now the great massacres of 1391 were over, and he stood in a place that he understood, though he had never seen it with his waking eyes, to be the huge new cathedral of Seville, begun in the year of grace 1402 and already, after not even a century, nearing completion. He heard a loud voice saying, “Fifty thousand killed, but hundreds of thousands baptized, to the glory of God!”

“No!” answered the preacher in his pulpit, and if he was no longer either Ferran Martínez or the monk who had led them to martyr Hypatia, he might have been brother to both. He went on, “For these were no true conversions, and in their vile hearts and behind their filthy doors these so-called New Christians remain secret Jews, more to be despised and feared than their ancestors.”

Don Felipe opened his mouth to argue before the preacher could rouse another mob, and in so trying to speak, woke himself, and remembered nothing of his dream save that it had concerned the great religious zeal of almost a century ago, which had inspired the new cathedral of Seville, the great efforts of Fray Vincent Ferrer, and other noble works.

He also remembered, with a frown, that there had been mobs and massacres. But these had been akin to those of ancient times. The old Romans and Greeks had understood very well that mobs were mad beasts seizing upon any excuse for violence, and that the role of religion was only to quell them.