Tales from the Vatican Vaults: 28 extraordinary stories by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Garry Kilworth, Mary Gentle, KJ Parker, Storm Constantine and many more Read online

  Danger, danger, danger. Why did I not see? Because I was blinded by that which lights one’s life but throws all that one does not wish to see into the shadows. Love.

  Love!

  Antonio and I met first in a tavern, where as a brother under the Rule of Saint Benedict no doubt I should not have been; but too many of the brothers knew their scholarship only as a dull, dry thing, unrelated in every way to living. I had to breathe. There in the ancient squares and taverns I found release in conversation with men and women of all sorts and conditions, in rough wine and, from time to time, in women. Some I paid, but most became friends and friendly bedmates.

  In a man’s body I enjoyed bedplay with women; I would have liked the occasional man, for inside I was still deeply female, but there was too much risk.

  In the abbey I could have had a dozen of the brothers; but I would rather have fornicated with a rotting dead pig than touch one of them or have them touch me.

  I sensed Antonio across the tavern, just as he sensed me; our eyes touched across the room. I bought a carafe of wine and wandered as if casually over to the quiet corner he had moved to.

  ‘Antonio of Verona, known as Brother Andrew of Tours.’

  ‘Gerberta, of an English line, known as John of Mainz.’

  We touched hands shyly, eagerly. He knew I was female.

  I’d come across many others of our people over the last few years: the odd young traveller like myself, a few older ones on their twilight Wandering, and families here and there. We’d met, we’d talked, we’d spent evenings together sometimes – but we’d never got close. It almost seemed that I could make friends – shallow friends, anyway – more easily among humans than my own people.

  But Antonio . . .

  From that first meeting there was a power between us, a communication deeper than any I had known before. We were lovers from that first touch between our eyes; and only hours later we became lovers in bed also.

  We made love first as two human men, because we couldn’t wait to change our forms. And then later, the following morning, we made love again as ourselves, in our true forms.

  It was the first time in five years that I had enjoyed the sexual sensations of my female body.

  *

  Oh, how easily are we betrayed!

  *

  And when I moved from Athens to Rome, Antonio came with me; neither of us even considered that he might not.

  *

  Oh, there are times when I wish I believed in God, for then I could cry out in the depths of my despair, ‘Why, why, oh Lord?’

  *

  I taught at the Trivium, in the Greek church attached to the Church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin. I became well liked and well respected for my learning, in that city of influence and ignorance. In time, Leo IV gave me a cardinal’s hat –

  – and when his successor, Benedict III, a holy man whom in other circumstances I might have loved, died, I was acclaimed Bishop of Rome. I said no, of course; I said I was not worthy; I hid myself in St Peter’s. But the crowd would not hear my protests, and said it was God’s will.

  *

  Oh God, I wish I could believe in you. I could beg for your help, or at the least for your solace; I could take comfort in the promise that you would protect me; I could try to persuade myself that all this is part of some great divine plan, that you know what you are doing, that good will come of it in the end; or I could rail against you for what you have done to me.

  But I can only rail against myself, and know that my help cometh only from myself, in whom I despair.

  *

  Antonio and I were careless in our loving, just as young lovers should be. It never crossed our minds that I might become pregnant; after all, we had no group marriage, there were only the two of us, and this gave us – this should have given us – the sexual freedom that our young people enjoy. Sex for fun, sex for play, sex for excitement, sex for friendship, as well as sex for love. Sex with a glorious variety of partners, experimenting with and enjoying the gifts of our bodies and minds and spirits and emotions, the gifts to give as well as those to receive. Sex without the responsibility of children – that’s what group marriages are for.

  I should not have become pregnant, not outside a group marriage; but I did. We were stunned, horrified, Antonio as much as I . . . then over the weeks and months we grew more used to the idea, began to look forward to it. I had never been a mother, and was at the age when I should begin to think about settling down in a marriage group. Maybe my body, fooled by my being with Antonio for three or four years, thought I was in a group marriage . . . a group of two.

  We made plans. The baby was due in June of the year 858, a hot and filthy month when my absence from Rome would be regarded as sensible. We would go to a villa up in the hills, where there would at least be trees to shade us from the blazing sun, and where we would be away from the filth and stench and disease of summer Rome – and from the intrigue, the watching eyes and wagging tongues.

  I had brought Antonio with me from Venice as my priest-attendant, and he still attended me as my cardinal deacon and secretary. It was expected that where I went he would go also.

  *

  Oh, Antonio! So beautiful, my only love, and you are gone. So beautiful, and so close to me, you turned down propositions almost daily from the fat priests and cardinals and dukes and administrators who jostle for position and power and wealth, who bribe and steal and seduce and kill to raise their social standing by one small degree, to move from one sphere of influence into a vying one, to gain another rich jewel or bag of gold, and all in the name of the God of love.

  He wanted none of them; he wanted only me.

  And I lose him, I lose him, and our child.

  *

  You know the place, some of you: between the Colosseum and the Church of St Clement. The day was hot, sticky, sweaty, as so much of that summer had been. The air itself seemed diseased. The Rogation Day procession between the Lateran and St Peter’s wound slowly through the streets, priests and cardinals and choirboys before and behind me, a hundred pious nuns walking together in their midst.

  My bearers stumbled from time to time, exhausted by the heat. I had tried to cancel the procession, the ceremony, but that body of administrators who actually run this hellish place would not allow it. It was tradition, it was custom, it was law. I, as Pope, had no say in the matter.

  My time was near, but not too near: three or four weeks. This was my last compulsory appearance before I could flee this filthy place with Antonio; tomorrow we would go into retreat for the rest of the heat of summer, and I would have our child in peace.

  *

  The pain hits me and my waters break forth, together. I’m soaked from my loins down, and going into spasm; my entire body heaves and thrusts. I scream with the agony. One of my bearers, startled, chooses this moment to stumble; the litter tips and falls, and I with it.

  My body reacts to the emergency without my conscious thought; I feel my vagina, closed with a fold of skin beneath my penis, open up and widen, widen suddenly and agonisingly as the baby within pushes itself into the world.

  Priests, cardinals, attendants of all sorts, rush to my aid, knowing only that their Pope has fallen and is hurt.

  I lie half on the ground, half still in the soaked finery of my litter, my legs wide apart as the thing inside me tears itself from me. And cries.

  That tiny infant sound stills the hubbub around me. Choirboys, monks, nuns, priests, cardinals in their sweat-stained robes, all stop, and stand, and turn, and stare. And then they come for me, for me and for my barely born child, with their fear and their hatred, their boots and their fists, kicking and clawing and tearing and stamping . . .

  *

  Three days, now, three days to repair my ripped and ravaged body, but three lifetimes would not be enough to repair my torn heart.

  *

  Somehow I crawled away and hid, in rotting piles of rubbish in the shell of a half-broken building only a few m
inutes away from my scene of degradation and discovery and despair. Hid, until I could stop the bleeding from my own wound, my womb which had betrayed me, and from the cuts and tears and rough grazes and bone-deep bruises from the mob’s attack.

  And while I healed, I changed my appearance: I made myself a hand’s width shorter, I changed my hair from its distinctive copper – a legacy from an Irish forebear – to black, and I made my face rounder and more anonymous. I remained a man; my attackers, the tribunals of the Church, the entire priesthood, half of Rome for all I knew (though some might secretly admire my presumed audacity) – all would be looking for a woman.

  Now I was safe, at least from recognition, though my weak state would make me more prone to the illnesses of the city.

  I sought out a small family group I knew, and told them what had happened. They were amazed, but they took me in; though we may fight and squabble among ourselves, we will always help each other against human threats, and besides, with my new appearance, there is no danger to them.

  *

  Three days, my children, three days and I have heard nothing. My child is gone, Antonio is gone: my baby no doubt torn apart or trampled underfoot, as they tried to do to me; Antonio – I do not know. I cannot believe he has deserted me. He was in the procession, near to me; if he tried to come to my help they may have taken him, beaten him, killed him.

  There is little value placed on human life in this festering city, when it is not one’s own. His body may be in the Tiber, with so many others; I have asked the Fantonis, the family who have taken me in, to listen for reports.

  I could so easily have been in the Tiber myself.

  There have been popes from our people before, three of them, but none lasted longer than my two years, five months and four days. They fared no better than most other popes. Maybe one day it will come that popes are not ripe for assassination, by knife or strangulation or by subtle poison; but even a pope’s life is cheap when ambition rules.

  All of Rome is buzzing with stories of how the Pope gave birth by St Clement’s, and the greater amazement of the Pope being a woman. Such a thing has never been heard! I do not know if it has happened before; it is possible, though there is nothing in our history, and it would have been still more difficult for a human woman.

  *

  It was another week before Antonio and I found each other. He too had changed his appearance – he was taller, thinner – but I recognised him at once, and he me. Perhaps it is by our scent, that even if subconsciously we can know each other; this is, after all, the main way that we know each other from humans. Perhaps we recognised each other’s individual scent across the piazza.

  But I prefer to think it was our spirits calling to each other in their love.

  You can imagine the joy with which we fell into each other’s arms, even those of you too young to know the love between two adults. Each of us had pictured the other dead, trampled and pulled apart, or else captured and tortured and longing for death. (I still hear the screams from the dungeons of the Basilica in my sleep at night; Antonio will tell you. Those tortured in the name of the God of love know the depths of agony and degradation, if ultimately they know nothing else.)

  Each of us had searched that plague-strewn city; each had listened everywhere for rumour, while hoping desperately we would hear none. Each of us had so narrowly escaped that we could not imagine the other having also such fortune.

  People were beginning to stare, and in a city so leprous with suspicion that was dangerous. We remembered suddenly that we were both male in appearance. We drew back, looked into each other’s eyes, laughed gaily (it was hard, but it was so easy!), and clapped each other on the back like old friends who had not seen each other for a long time.

  ‘I did not even know you were in Rome,’ Antonio boomed.

  ‘I didn’t know you were either,’ I replied. ‘My wife, her sister is dying, and so I brought her. And you?’

  Antonio looked sly. He glanced around as if to see who might be listening, then lowered his voice – but still kept it loud enough that those nearby, straining, might hear.

  ‘I am here . . . on business, shall we say. A merchant friend of mine, he told me of a deal I could make . . . He let his voice fade away as we walked away, across the piazza, through an alley and into the anonymity of a crowded street. Our eavesdroppers, I knew, would smile and shrug; such deals were commonplace, and the reason many came to the city. Some were lucrative, but most came to nothing.

  We walked through the crowds, yearning to touch each other, to hug, to hold, even just to say something to show our love for each other, our joy at finding each other.

  Antonio led me into a small inn, and to a quiet corner. And it was only when we were seated, with a jug of rough red wine between us, that I thought – suddenly, sickeningly, with overwhelming guilt – of our child.

  Antonio saw the change on my face, and reached over, laying his hand on my arm.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘he’s safe.’

  I couldn’t speak. My sight went grey, then white, then black. It was some time later when I realised that Antonio was holding a cold, damp cloth to my forehead and neck.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said, over and over again. ‘It’s all right.’

  I sat back, and the dim interior of the inn slowly came into some kind of focus. Antonio gave me my beaker, his hand steadying mine as I raised it and drained it in one long gulp.

  ‘Our son is safe,’ he said, and my destroyed world, my distraught spirit, were made whole again.

  It was only an hour – it seemed a month – before I held our son for the first time. He had beautifully thick dark hair and deep blue eyes, and his tiny fingers closed on mine. His body was human in shape; Antonio told me he was changing from his natural birth appearance to human almost as soon as he was born. Instinctive mimicry: our deepest survival trait. But at birth he had looked like us, unchanged, and his initial appearance, then the flowing of his infantile features as his body adjusted them to human, had compounded the horror of the Pope giving birth. This was a monster, a demon, devil’s spawn. Small wonder that the priests and cardinals and other dignitaries and their attendants had tried to kill both him and me.

  Antonio had had one moment in which to act, when, horrified by the tiny squirming creature before them, these holy men had turned their attention to a horror they could cope with: me. He snatched the baby, tearing the cord with his nails, and tucked him into his robes, then let himself be pushed back as others pushed forward to get at me.

  He didn’t know, he told me as I sat with our son cradled to my still human, still male breast, how he was able to leave me. But I maybe had a chance, however small; the tiny mewling creature had none without his immediate help, his full attention, his love and care and devotion. Apart from safety, our baby needed food, literally in the next few minutes. His first act in life had been to change his appearance, which drained him of every scrap of energy he was born with. If he were not given food, and then safe sleep, straight away, our son would die.

  Antonio, my beloved one, my darling husband here, saved our son. Like me, he found friends to take him in, and one, who had recently had a litter of three children, had milk enough to feed our baby as well. It was fortunate in many ways that my first birth, as sometimes happens, was of only one child.

  The two families lived at opposite ends of this teeming city, but knew each other well; two of the wives in ‘Antonio’s’ family were sisters of two of the husbands in ‘mine’. Together they helped us away from Rome, to a quiet village three days’ ride away, and to a quiet farmhouse in the hills above the village.

  There, for the next few months, Antonio and I could live as ourselves when we wished, though for the most part we retained our human appearance.

  We both preferred his new, leaner look to his old, so he kept this; I reverted to my old appearance, which I had when I was a girl in Mainz, with a little added maturity we both agreed I suited. He was delighted
with the new me; he told me now that this was how he had always seen me, deep inside –

  – and this is how I have remained ever since, though the lines and wrinkles of added years have given, perhaps, yet more maturity to my looks!

  The Church soon chose a new pope, and new scandals quickly replaced my own story as gossip on the streets of Rome. A woman pope giving birth to a demon is not a tale the Church would wish to be remembered.

  *

  And now we skip some fifty years to bring us to today. My children, my family, the youngest of you will not remember your oldest brother; he left the home first. But we shall see him next week, with joy.

  From his earliest years your brother Simon showed the same leanings that I had: scholarship, philosophy, human theology. We did not discourage him; his life, his yearnings, were his to follow, not ours to dictate.

  He had absorbed everything Antonio and I knew by the time he was twenty. And then he followed much the same route I had done, through the monasteries, before being appointed Bishop of Ostia, then managing to be assigned to Rome to take his cardinal’s hat.

  And now that we have had six popes in five years, fighting and deposing and killing each other, all the priests and cardinals of Rome will soon be meeting to try to find a pope who might last a little longer. Some men of the Church wish earnestly for the fighting to be over.

  There are two likely candidates for St Peter’s throne, two equally strong men who hate each other, and whose followers battle for supremacy with each other, with a passion such as I did not witness even when I lived there.

  Your brother is well positioned, and, amazingly for this place, this Church, he has few enemies. Neither of the favourites will allow the other to take the throne without war following. The Church, however stupid it might at times be, has enough sense not to want that.

  By next week your brother may be Pope, following in his mother’s perhaps ill-advised footsteps. He will have his own problems, but there is one he will not share with me. He will not give birth on the Lateran Way.

  Ω

  Whether ‘Simon’ was elected to the throne of St Peter is difficult to confirm either way; there were several popes of unknown origin (and unknown original name) around this time, none of whom lasted very long. There is, however, no record of a Bishop of Ostia becoming Pope (they usually had the privilege of crowning the Pope), so it seems more probable that he was unsuccessful – in which case his life was doubtless considerably longer.