The Nameless Day by Sara Douglass
A Jigge (for Margrett)
AUTHOR’S NOTE
TIME TRAVEL is not only theoretically possible, travel into our future has already
been achieved (albeit on a tiny scale of a few seconds or minutes). Travel into our past is more problematic. How would interfering with our past affect our present?
Some physicists argue that sending someone into the past creates a “parallel universe”—the mere presence of someone in a past time alters that world’s future to such an extent that a different future is necessarily created: a parallel universe (or world) to the one we live in.
The three books of “The Crucible” are set, not in the medieval Europe of our past, but in the medieval Europe of a parallel universe: the insertion of even one fictional character among a host of historical characters necessarily creates that parallel world. Thus, while there are many similarities between our past and the world of
“The Crucible,” there are also many differences. The entire period of the Hundred Years War, for example, has been compressed so that the Battle of Poitiers is fought at a later date than in our past, and Joan of Arc appears at an earlier date.
Although some dates and “facts” have altered, the spirit of “The Crucible” remains identical to that of our medieval Europe. Something strange happened in the fourteenth century … something very, very odd. The fourteenth century was an age of unprecedented catastrophe for western Europe: widespread famine due to climate change, economic collapse, uncontrollable heresies, social upheaval, endemic war, and, to compound the misery, the physical and psychological devastation of the Black Death. In all of recorded history there has never been before or since a period of such utter disaster: one half of Europe’s population died due to the effects of famine, war, and the Black Death. As a result, Europeans emerged from the fourteenth century profoundly—and frighteningly—changed. Medieval Europe had been an intensely spiritual society: the salvation of the soul was paramount.
Post-fourteenth-century Europe abandoned spirituality for secularism, materialism, and worldliness. Its peoples embraced technology and science, and developed the most aggressively invasive mentality of world history. Why this profound shift from the internal quest for spiritual salvation to a craving for world domination? Was it just the end result of over a hundred years of catastrophe … or was there another reason?
“The Crucible” presents an explanation couched in a medieval understanding of the world rather than in terms more familiar to our modern sensibilities. Medieval Europe was a world of evil incarnate, a world where demons and angels walked the same fields as men and women, a world where the armies of God and of Satan arrayed themselves for the final battle… we now live in the aftermath of that battle, but are we sure who won?
Sara Douglass
Bendigo, 2000
PROLOGUE
The Friday within the Octave of All Saints to the Nameless Day In the twenty-first year of the reign of Edward III
(7th November to Tuesday 23rd December 1348)
— ST. ANGELO’S FRIARY, ROME —
“BROTHER WYNKYN? Brother Wynkyn? Sweet Jesu, Brother, you’re not going to leave us now?”
Brother Wynkyn de Worde slapped shut the weighty manuscript book before him and turned to face Prior Bertrand. “I have no choice, Bertrand. I must leave.”
Bertrand took a deep breath. Sweet Savior, how could he possibly dissuade Brother Wynkyn?
“My friend,” he said, earning himself a sarcastic glance from Wynkyn. “Brother Wynkyn… the pestilence rages across Christendom. If you leave the safety of Saint An-gelo’s—”
“What safety? Of the seventeen brothers who prayed here five weeks ago, now there is only you and me and two others left. Besides, if I choose to hide within these ‘safe’ walls a far worse pestilence will ravage Christendom than that which currently rages. I must go. Get out of my way.”
“Brother, the roads are choked with the dying and the brigands who pick their pockets and pluck the rings from their fingers.” Prior Bertrand moderated his voice, trying to reason with the old man. Brother Wynkyn had ever been difficult. Bertrand knew that Wynkyn had even shouted down the Holy Father once, and Bertrand realized there was no circumstance in which he could hope for respect from someone who was powerful enough to cow a pope.
“How can you possibly overcome all the difficulties and the dangers roaming the roads between here and Nuremberg? Stay, I beg you.”
“I would condemn the earth to a slow descent into insanity if I stayed here.”
Wynkyn lowered the book—he needed both arms to lift it—and several loose pages of closely written script into a flat-lidded oaken casket bound with brass. It was only just large enough to take the book and the pages. Once he had shut the casket, Wynkyn locked it with a key that hung from a chain on his belt.
Bertrand watched wordlessly for some minutes, and then tried again. “And if you die on the road?”
Wynkyn shot his prior an angry glance. “I will not die on the road! God and the angels protect me and my purpose.”
“As they have protected all the other innocent souls who have died in the past weeks and months? Wynkyn, nothing protects mankind against the evil of this pestilence!”
Wynkyn carefully checked the casket to ensure its security. He turned his back to
Bertrand.
“Rome is dying,” Bertrand said, his voice now soft. “Corpses lie six deep in the streets, and the black, bubbling pestilence seeks new victims on every breath of wind. God has shown us the face of wrath for our sins, and the angels have fled. If you leave the friary now you will surely die.”
Still Wynkyn did not answer.
“Brother,” Bertrand said, desperation now filling his voice. “Why must you leave?
What is of such importance that you must risk almost certain death?”
Wynkyn turned about and locked eyes with the prior. “Because if I don’t leave, then it is almost certain death for Christendom,” he said. “Either get out of my way, Bertrand, or aid me to carry this casket to my mule.”
Bertrand’s eyes filled with tears. He made a hopeless gesture with his hand, but Wynkyn’s gaze did not waver.
“Well?” Wynkyn said.
Bertrand took a deep, sobbing breath, and then grasped a handle of the casket. “I wish peace walk with you, Wynkyn.”
“Peace has never walked with me,” Wynkyn said as he grabbed the other handle.
“And it never will.”
WYNKYN DE Worde had undertaken the journey between Rome and Nuremberg over one hundred times in the past fifty or so years, but never had he done so before with such a heavy heart. He had been twenty-three in 1296 when the then pope, the great Boniface VIII, had sent him north for the first time.
Twenty-three, and entrusted with a secret so horrifying that it, and the nightmarish responsibility it carried with it, would have killed most other men. But Wynkyn was a special man, strong and dedicated, sure of the right of God, and with a faith so unshakeable that Boniface understood why the angels had selected him as the man fit to oversee those yearly rituals whereby evil was thrust back into the Cleft—the gateway into hell.
“Reveal this secret to any other man,” Boniface had told the young Dominican,
“and you can be sure that the angels themselves will ensure your death.”
Already privy to the ghastly secret, Wynkyn knew truth when he heard it.
Boniface had leaned back in his chair, satisfied. Since the beginnings of the office of the pope in the Dark Ages, its incumbents kept the secret of the Cleft, entrusting it only to the single priest the angels had said was strong enough to endure. As this priest approached the end of his life, the angels gave the pope the name of a new priest, young and strong, and this young priest would accompany the older priest on the man’s final few journeys to the Cleft. From the older, dying priest the younger one learned the incantations that he would need… and he also learned the true meaning of courage, for without it he would not endure.
These priests, the Select, spent their lives teetering on the edge of hell.
In 1298 Boniface informed Wynkyn de Worde that he was the angels’ choice as the new Select. Then, having learned from his predecessor, Wynkyn performed his
duty willingly and without mishap for five years. He thought his life would take the same path as the scores of priests who had preceded him… but he, like the angels, had underestimated the power and cunning of pure evil.
Who could have thought the papacy could fail so badly? Wynkyn had not anticipated it; the angels certainly had not. In 1303 the great and revered Pope Boniface VIII died, and Wynkyn had no way of knowing that the forces of darkness and disorder would seize this opportunity to throw the papacy into chaos. In the subsequent papal election a man called Clement V took the papal throne. Outwardly pious, it quickly became apparent to Wynkyn, as to everyone else, that Clement was the puppet of the French king, Philip IV The new pope moved the papacy to the French-controlled town of Avignon, allowing Philip to dictate the papacy’s activities and edicts. There, successive popes lived in luxury and corruption, mouthing the orders of French kings instead of the will of God.