There was a shuffling behind him, and two girls, perhaps three and four respectively, silently joined the boy.
“How many of you are there?” Rainard asked.
“Us, and two more, both girls,” said the boy. “Please, we have all lost our parents, and are hungry. Will you feed us?”
Rainard and Aude shared a look. They were poor and had barely enough to feed themselves, but they also had souls, and cared deeply for children. God knew there were few enough left in this time of pestilence.
“We’ll take you,” Rainard said, pointing to the boy, “and one of the girls. The others can find homes soon enough with some of the other families.”
The boy smiled, his face almost angelic. “I do thank you,” he said.
He moved over to the cradle, and both Rainard and Aude stiffened.
But the boy did nothing more than reach in and gently touch the sleeping girl’s forehead. “She will lead a charmed life,” he said.
OVER THAT night and the next two days twelve villages in the region north of
Nuremberg found themselves sheltering hungry orphans. No one was particularly puzzled by the appearance of the children: communication between villages was poor, and there was no one to learn of the somewhat surprising number of hungry, soulful-looking children who appeared at doors asking for shelter in the time of the Nativity in the year of the black pestilence.
This was a time of unheard-of disease and death, and there must surely be orphaned children wandering about all over the land.
All the children were taken in and nourished, and loved, and raised. None of these children bit the hands that fed them; to these work-worn hands they gave back love and gratefulness and good works.
All of these children eventually left their adopted homes to lead particularly bounteous lives.
None of them were what they seemed, and, despite the outward success of their lives, all of them wanted but one thing.
The destruction of everything that God and His angels stood for.
ROME
“Margrett, my sweetest Margrett! I must goe!
most dere to mee that neuer may be soo;
as Fortune willes, I cannott itt deny.”
“then know thy loue, thy Margrett, shee must dye.”
A Jigge (for Margrett)
Medieval English ballad
CHAPTER ONE
The Friday after Plow Monday
In the forty-ninth year of the reign of Edward III
(l6th January 1377)
A DRIBBLE OF RED WINE ran down Gerardo’s stubbled chin, and he reluctantly— and somewhat unsteadily—rose from his sheltered spot behind the brazier.
It was time to close the gates.
Gerardo had been the gatekeeper at the northern gate of Rome, the Porta del Popolo, for nine years, and in all of his nine years he’d never had a day like this one.
In his time he’d closed the gates against raiders, Jewish and Saracen merchants, tardy pilgrims and starving mobs come to the Holy City to beg for morsels and to rob the wealthy. He’d opened the gates to dawns, Holy Roman armies, traders and yet more pilgrims.
Today, he had opened the gate at dawn to discover a pope waiting.
Gerardo had just stood, bleary eyes blinking, mouth hanging open, one hand absently scratching at the reddened and itching lice tracks under his coarse woolen robe. He hadn’t instantly recognized the man or his vestments, nor the banners carried by the considerable entourage stretching out behind the pope. And why should he? No pope had made Rome his home for the past seventy years, and only one had made a cursory visit—and that years before Gerardo had taken on responsibility for the Porta del Popolo.
So he had stood there and stared, blinking like an addle-headed child, until one of the soldiers of the entourage shouted out to make way for His Holiness Pope Gregory XI. Still sleep-befuddled, Gerardo had obligingly shuffled out of the way, and then stood and watched as the pope, fifteen or sixteen cardinals, some sundry officials of the papal curia, soldiers, mercenaries, priests, monks, friars, general hangers-on, eight horse-drawn wagons, and several score of laden mules entered Rome to the accompaniment of murmured prayers, chants, heavy incense, and the flash of weighty folds of crimson and purple silks in the dawn light.
None among this, the most richest of cavalcades, thought to offer the gatekeeper a coin, and Gerardo was so fuddled he never thought to ask for one.
Instead, he stood, one hand still on the gate, and watched the pageant disappear down the street.
Within the hour Rome was in uproar.
The pope was home! Back from the terrible Babylonian captivity in Avignon where the traitor French kings had kept successive popes for seventy years. The pope was home!
Mobs roared onto streets and swept over the Ponte St. Angelo into the Leonine City and up the street leading to St. Peter’s Basilica. There Pope Gregory, a little travel weary but strong of voice, addressed the mob in true papal style, admonishing them for their sins and pleading for their true repentance… as also for the taxes and tithes they had managed to avoid these past seventy years. And while Gregory might insist he’d returned to Rome only to escape the vile influence of the French king, every Roman knew the true reason: the pope wanted his Roman taxes, and the only way he could receive them was if he was resident in Rome itself.
The mob was having none of it. They wanted assurance the pope wasn’t going to sally back out the gate the instant they all went back to home and work. They roared the louder, and leaned forward ominously, fists waving in the air, threats of violence rising above their upturned faces. This pope was going to remain in Rome where he belonged.
The pope acquiesced (his train of cardinals had long since fled into the bolted
safety of St. Peter’s). He promised to remain, and vowed that the papacy had returned to Rome.
The mob quieted, lowered their fists, and cheered. Within the hour they’d trickled back to their residences and workshops, not to begin their daily labor, but to indulge in a day of celebration.
NOW GERARDO sighed, and shuffled closer to the gate. He had drunk too much of that damn rough Corsican red this day—as had most of the Roman mob, some of whom were still roaming the streets or standing outside the walls of the Leonine City (the gates to that had been shut many hours since)—and he couldn’t wait to close these cursed gates and head back to his warm bed and comfortable wife.
He grabbed hold of the edge of one of the gates, and pulled it slowly across the opening until he could throw home its bolts into the bed of the roadway. He was about to turn for the other gate when a movement in the dusk caught his eye.
Gerardo stared, then slowly cursed.
Some fifty or sixty paces down the road was a man riding a mule. Gerardo would have slammed the gates in the man’s face but for the fact that the man wore the distinctive black hooded cloak over the white robe of a Dominican friar, and if there was one group of clergy Gerardo was more than reluctant to annoy it was the Dominicans.
Too many of the damn Dominicans were Father Inquisitors (and those that were not had ambitions to be), and Gerardo didn’t fancy a slow death roasting over coals for irritating one of the bastards.
Worse, Gerardo couldn’t charge the friar the usual coin for passage through the gate. Clergy thought themselves above such trivialities as paying gatekeepers for their labors.
So he stood there, hopping from foot to foot in the deepening dusk and chill air, running foul curses through his mind, and waited for the friar to pass.
The poor bastard looked cold, Gerardo had to give him that. Dominicans affected simple dress, and while the cloak over the robe might keep the man’s body warm enough, his feet were clad in sandals that left them open to the winter’s rigor. As the friar drew closer, Gerardo could see that his hands were white and shaking as they gripped the rope of the mule’s halter, and his face was pinched and blue under the hood of his black cloak.
Gerardo bowed his head respectfully.
“Welcome, brother,” he murmured as the friar drew level with him. I bet the sanctimonious bastard won’t be slow in downing the wine this night, he thought.
The friar pulled his mule to a halt, and Gerardo looked up.
“Can you give me directions to the Saint Angelo friary?” the friar asked in exquisite Latin.
The friar’s accent was strange, and Gerardo frowned, trying to place it. Not Roman, nor the thick German of so many merchants and bankers who passed through his gate. And certainly not the high piping tones of those French pricks. He peered at the man’s face more closely. The friar was about twenty-eight or -nine, and