Mary Gentle (34 page)

“Signora,” I said. The scent of the leaves, and wet boot-leather, and (from further off) some peasant’s pigs, and the skitter of a pebble as I walked, seemed all to have a rare quality of focus about them. I realised that I must be attempting to perceive time as it passed.
Since this is a point where I must make a decision
. Dear good God, now they have
me
thinking that way!

Suor Caterina patted the fallen tree trunk. I hitched up the scabbard of my sword, and sat beside her. She pointed towards the cave entrance, invisible now behind Spring-grown brush.

“We fell out over what to do with his knowledge.”

I guessed her to be thinking of her stacked heaps of damp paper.

“Both Roberto and I agree that this year, this very year, is the one on which all turns; that the next half-millennium is decided by what we do.”

“Certainly,” I said dryly, “it has been a year not without interest.”

The wind flickered green and bright in the tree tops, and a lark sang. I have never preferred bucolic peace to the court. From her education, I suspected Caterina felt the same.

Which is the more dishonourable: to kill a deluded old woman, or to let her damage other men with the knowledge she has been given?

The woman’s eyes, gazing up at me, swum with brightness; I couldn’t find it in myself to deny her.
And I am not ungrateful to have a few more moments before I must act.

“Is it not presumptuous?” I prompted. “Five hundred years?”

“I am presumptuous. Roberto thought so, when we were students together. But it was I who first calculated the accident that meant King Henri of France should die this year.”

Accident.

The strength of my relief at that word startled me.

“It
was
an accident? Not one of your foretold things, something that you or Fludd contrived to make happen?”

Or contrived to make me the instrument of?

Caterina shook her head. “Henri’s assassination wasn’t contrived—except that I and the London Master didn’t do anything to stop it. His death delays a war; something we both desired.”

She pointed at me with a filthy finger, the nail black with dirt but beautifully shaped.

“And
you
. You had to prove yourself to be the man he thought you were, by bringing that about on your own. And from what happened, the London Master concluded you to be a plain assassin. And concluded that Marie de Medici bribed and threatened you into killing King Henri.”

She frowned.

“Now I see you, I don’t believe that. I hold by my original calculation. That it was by chance Henri died.”

Dry in my mouth, I aimed for sardonic humour. “You allow for chance, do you, in all your foretelling?”

Before she could answer, and before I knew it would burst bitterly out of me, I shouted,
“You could have warned me!”

She slid her bare heels in the tree-bark litter, muttering as she looked down. “Cielo, Valentin! I would have, if I could! King Henri Quatre
had
to die. His taking Jülich-Cleves would have started a war next year, that would spread to all of Europe. A war that would last sixty or seventy years—”

I interrupted her. “I do not expect to be lessoned in politics by elderly Italian nuns! There’s a chance the other German Princes might come in, or the Spanish, but too small a chance to concern a man…. Besides, the waris not dead with King Henri.”

“But it is. Sully can’t carry the Grand Design on his own. Say what you like about the Medici, but she’s not interested in war and conquest. Now that that war’s delayed five, perhaps ten years—”

She grabbed at my doublet-arm with a hand still dirt-ingrained, despite the cold wetness of the underground stream.

“Valentin, I can’t convince you. I know that! I can’t teach you meta-mathematical theory. There aren’t six minds in Europe that could understand it, and you’re not one of them!”

Surprised, I found frustration moving me not to anger, but to humour. I put my hand on my breast and bowed where I sat. “Thank you, Suor….”

“You think yourself a genius?”

“I confess, I have wondered.”

She laughed.

I looked her in the face, as much as I might from above her. “You should let me take you from here. Take you to a convent. Even this benighted heathen country must have a charitable almshouse! Let me put you somewhere out of danger.”

She gazed up at me where I sat.

Made uncomfortable, I remarked, “Madame, I am a little old for you to be looking at me as if I were your favourite grandson!”

She chuckled; a surprisingly deep sound. Her thinness must come from starvation; she had the resonant chest of a woman who is large, in perfect health.

“Heavens! You’re right. You could, however, be my son.”

It was automatic: I replied, “Certainly—if you are much older than you look.”

“Oh, a Frenchman in very truth! Everything my Mother Abbess said about Frenchmen is true!”

The sun burned down. I wiped at my face with my sleeve.
Let Milord Cecil have a report featuring Signora Caterina!
That would amuse
me,
at least. Although I suspect Milord Mr Secretary’s humour would run dry, confronted by a pleasant, but lunatic, nun.

All the same, she may yet be one of Fludd’s traps and devices, and she will be here when Cecil’s King arrives….

I put my hands flat on my knees. “Tell me, Sister Caterina, why is it that you wish the future changed? Or
do
you? And if you and Doctor Fludd are performing the same calculations, do not you and he agree?”

“About the nearer things in Time? We do, we do. Both of us calculate war in Europe, and civil revolt in this England. We differ in what we wish to do about it.” She shaded her eyes with her hand as she looked up at me, the sun far enough over the hill to dazzle her. By her pallid skin under the dirt, she did not see sun often. “The London Master would put off the civil revolt in England as long as possible, establish a line of autocratic Stuart kings under his ‘college,’ and use later wars in Europe to drive the engines of science and industry to his benefit. So that when peasant revolt does come, in forty years, his Henry Stuart can instantly suppress it.”

She began to shred a fragment of bark between her fingers.

“After that, in England…it’ll be idyllic, Valentin. Science and industry together advancing, bringing a golden age where no man wants or starves. But Europe—well, you’ve known France after generations of religious war; all Europe would be like that. Then England will conquer Europe and further dominions. It will bring about a mercantile sea-empire as John Dee desired; but all under absolutist rulers. So that, half a millennium hence, all the Stuart kings need do is give the order to have the unholy comet wiped out of the sky. And wipe out the great extinction that threatens us.”

“Hardly ‘us,’” I said, blinking at the breadth of her vision. I am not much given to considering any future more than a year or two distant. I almost regretted bringing her down to earth. “Hope for a long life as we may, we can’t hope for five centuries!”

She reminded me of a preacher popular at court in the winter of ’02, who spoke much out of Revelation, and amused Henri IV’s nobility by rebuking them for their sins, the end of the world being at hand. Whether it is fortunate or unfortunate that the end of the world was not in fact at hand, I leave other men to judge.

“It sounds utopian,” I added, conscious of the wind warm against my face, and stirring my hair. There are moments when the bucolic life brings content. I looked down at the small woman, willing for this moment to play with her philosophies. “Utopian. But, Signora—you want to
prevent
it?”

Her hands locked together in her filthy lap. “An English empire, and you need to ask?”

I chuckled. I did not feel moved to defend the land whose flies I was currently swatting out of my sweating face. “Signora, you and I will be dead centuries before. Why should we care?”

“Ah, you laugh.” An unnoticed lock of silver hair fell down about her ear, and she did not lift a hand to brush it away. “Valentin, you’ll notice I don’t grieve for King Henri’s death. I don’t grieve for
any
king’s death.”

I might have remarked something cogent about the dukes and princes of the Italian peninsula, but I let it pass.

“Yes,” she said quietly, “Roberto’s future will avert the comet. But at the cost of so many centuries with all countries under the dictate of absolute rulers! And after the comet, they won’t give up power! Despots, warlords, dictators…never any freedom for ordinary men.”

“Kings are a natural evil,” I remarked. An insect buzzed among the brambles of the belt of woodland. I heard, far off, the
k-chunk!
of an ordinary man wielding a wood-axe. To be discussing the apocalypse on a sun-drenched June day…
no wonder such a thing has made her mad
.

Since she is a religieux, and he a doctor of astrology, let me try this logic.

“Madame, both you and Doctor Fludd talk of God—why not leave it all to Him? Or to Fate, or that Destiny written in the stars?”

“You mean, what would happen if Roberto and I touched nothing?” Her face turned up to the sun. She closed her eyes, the brilliance casting deep shadows into the wrinkles of her skin. Without lifting her eyelids, she said, “There’d be war across all Europe, starting next year. Another Hundred Years’ War, but this time between France and Spain. Within five years, England will be lost in civil revolt for generations. And that will slow down progress. Civilisation wouldn’t flower out of this cloddish farmers’ society—” She spoke with an Italian’s contempt for the north, “—for three or four hundred years. And then comes the comet, and then where are we?”

Her eyes snapped open, and I saw them both clear and dark, not filmed over as old women’s eyes commonly are.

“The London Master fears the comet above all. He calculates that the world dies in fire. He’ll do anything to bring mankind to the point where we have devices and machines to protect us.”

“From a comet of ill-omen? The goal seems admirable.”

She shook her finger in my face. “Don’t mock! Cazzo!”

True, I have heard worse language from women, but rarely from nuns. I sat up, spine straight, on the beech-log—realising then that I would bet a considerable sum of money on her having been a teacher, back in her Venetian convent.

“Signora, I apologise.”

“But you don’t know why!”

She visibly drew in a breath.
She has been truly afraid,
I thought.

“Bruno’s calculations are not yet refined to be perfect. At half a millennium, only the greatest and most significant events can be seen. Because of this, two people can differ in their calculations of the most important event, or about the nature of catastrophe itself. Valentin, I’ve seen the world end—but at
Man’s
hands, with dreadful weapons. That fire comes before the comet. Roberto thinks we’ll be wiped out by the hand of God. I think, if there is a comet, we’ll deal with it easily—provided we first survive ourselves! Plautus says it: Homo homini lupus—‘Man is a wolf to man’!”

“And you would do what yourself, Signora?”

She smiled with yellow and broken teeth. “Roberto wants to keep kings on the world’s throne because one man in command makes things easier to control, through that one man. I…Valentin, I see a world without kings at all.”

Perhaps I looked startled. She reached out and closed her small hand tightly over the back of my much larger one.

“When the civil revolt comes here in England, men will debate again: ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’ There will be a parliament of ordinary men in the army. The generals will put them down. But if this civil revolt can be delayed long enough, then men not yet born will come to adulthood for those debates and that army. And they
won’t
be put down. They’ll build a society where no man’s poor, because all property and land is held in common, and no man needs to fight wars, because there’s no king to order him into battle.”

I do not think the orders of kings the only thing to move men to battle.
I made no comment, except to raise my brows and say, “All things held in common, like the Amsterdam sects?”

“Men and women working in a social commonwealth, well-fed, free of fear, equal under the law. Simple, obvious; how is it we can’t yet attain simple
justice?
” She said it as if she had been saying it for a very long time. She added wryly, “Rid us of kings—and popes. Religious and political absolutes; there’s your two prime causes of injustice, Valentin.”

A late woodpecker hammered concussive strikes, away down the slope in front of us. Lightly, I observed, “Given such a case, should you not be out like Fludd, conspiring for your Anabaptist kingdom?”

Her blackened teeth vanished as her smile did.

“You think I don’t? You think there is an easy choice, Valentin? Listen! I think, myself, that Man can live without the injustice we have now, and still make industry and science progress. Not easily. So many pages of my calculations end with an incandescent light dawning over men, like ants, crawling in trenches…. But it
can
be done. However, I…I cannot
absolutely
calculate, to a certainty, that we would then have such science as we need when the comet comes.”