The head shook; the kitten sensed tension and crouched. “I know about rascals who’ve pretended they were him. No, monsieur, I was alive when Our Lord was on earth, but never saw him, nor knew about him till much later. Once in a while I have passed myself off as a Jew, because that was safest or simplest, but it was pretense, same as when I’ve been a Mussulman.” The mouth formed a grim grin. “For those roles, I had to get circumcised. The skin slowly grew back. On my kind, unless a wound is as great as the loss of a hand, it heals without scars.”
“I must think anew.” Richelieu closed his eyes. Presently his lips moved. They shaped the Paternoster and the Ave, while his fingers drew the Cross, over and over.
Yet when he was done and looked back upon the world, down at the parchment, he spoke almost matter-of-factly. “I saw at once that the verse here is not actually nonsense. It bears a certain resemblance to Hebraic, transcribed in Roman letters, but it is different. What?”
“Ancient Phoenician, Your Eminence. I was bora in Tyre when Hiram was its king. I’m not sure whether David or Solomon was reigning in Jerusalem just then.”
Again Richelieu closed his eyes. “Two and a half millennia ago,” he whispered. He opened them wide. “Recite the verse. I want to hear that language.”
Lacy obeyed. The rapid, guttural words rang through sounds of wind and water, through the silence that filled the chamber. The kitten sprang off his lap and pattered to a corner.
Stillness prevailed for half a minute before Richelieu asked, “What does it mean?”
“A fragment of a song, the sort men sang in taverns or when camped ashore during a voyage. ‘Black as the sky of night is my woman’s hair, bright as the stars are her eyes, round and white as the moon her breasts, and she moves like Ashtoreth’s sea. Would that my sight and my hands and myself lay upon all!’ I’m sorry it’s so profane, monsieur. It was what I could remember, and at that, I had to reconstruct it.”
Richelieu quirked a smile. “Yes, I daresay one forgets much in thousands of years. And in … Pier’s day, clerics, too, were less refined than they are now.” Shrewdly: “Though did you expect that something like this would go a little way toward authenticating you, since it is the kind of thing that would stick in a man’s mind?”
“I am not lying to Your Eminence. In no particular.”
“In that case, you have been a liar throughout the ages.”
Lacy spread his palms. “What would monsieur have had me do? Imagine, if you please, even in this most enlightened of eras and countries, imagine I proclaimed myself openly. At best I’d be taken for a mountebank, and be lucky to escape with a scourging. I could easily go to the galleys, or hang. At worst I’d be condemned as a sorcerer, in league with Satan, and burned. Evil would befall me without my saying a word if I just stayed in one place, living on and on while they buried my sons and grandsons and I never showed signs of age. Oh, I’ve met folk—many live at this moment in the New World—for whom I could be a holy man or a god; but they’ve been savages, and I prefer civilization. Besides, civilization sooner or later overruns the savages. No, best I arrive at a new home as a plausible outsider, settle down a few decades, and at last move onward in such wise that people take for granted I’ve died.”
“What brought this fate upon you?” Richelieu signed himself anew.
“God alone knows, Your Eminence. I’m no saint, but I don’t believe I was ever an especially terrible sinner. And, yes, I am baptized.”
“When was that?”
“About twelve hundred years ago.”
“Who converted you?”
“I’d been a Christian catechumen a long time, but customs changed and— May I ask leave to defer telling how it happened?”
“Why?” demanded Richelieu.
“Because I must convince Your Eminence that I’m telling the truth, and in this case the truth looks too much like invention—“ Before those eyes, Lacy broke off, threw up his hands, laughed, and said, “Very well, if you insist. It was in Britain after the Romans were gone, at the court of a warlord. They called him Riot ham us, their High King, but mainly he had some cataphracts. With them he staved off the English invaders. His name was Artorius.”