Episode 2: Verona Veritas

Episode 2: Verona Veritas

Verona.

Italian cities are all alike in that way that they were all built by Italians for Italians – and in that same way they are all unique. Every Italian city is a monument to its people, a testament to their specific triumphs and travails.

Verona is no different.

I half expected Metus to greet us on our arrival. With Metus's flare for the dramatic entrance, I three-quarters expected him to be waiting for us in Padua. But no. In fact, Verona was – and more importantly felt – no different than Genoa the week before Calendimaggio. That is to say as normal and shitty as anywhere else. Perhaps this is why my mind wandered through the trivia stored there about the city – and with my mind, my feet through its streets. Perhaps it was all the time I'd spent the last fortnight in a cart or carriage. Perhaps it's that Verona is an interesting city in its own right. Gods know I had plenty more to think about.

This is something I used to do as a child – wandering strange towns after dark. The Master and I and our coterie of attendants – including but in no way limited to al'Shamshir and his rag-tag group of ten mercenaries. The Master made it clear I shouldn't be alone at night; but he never expressly forbade it – probably because I would have found a way to do it anyway. I asked him about that, once, and I'm thinking about it now, as I move through the duskening streets of Verona – that is, I asked al'Shamshir why he always and only hired ten men. He responded to me with a quote from Heraclitus:

“In any army, 'Out of every one hundred men, ten shouldn't even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back.'”

I laughed at this when he said it. “But you only bring ten.”

“Yes. It stands to reason that in any army of one-thousand there will be ten such warriors, does it not?”

“Well, sure. So you bring bring ten warriors? Why not one hundred?”

“What am I, Xerxes?” He laughed. The sound is clear and crisp in my memory. al'Shamshir may have been a soldier, a killer and leader of men, a tactician responsible for keeping me, the Master, his men, and everyone else who traveled with us alive – against whatever might assault us. He was all of those things – and he was more, no matter what he would have anyone believe about him. He was a great lover of poetry, for instance.

But as I'm thinking about it now, I realize that taking any more men than he needed was folly. We would have to feed them, which meant we would have to carry more food with us – which meant we'd need to be prepared for more carrying capacity, which meant potentially more carts and more donkeys. I'd never really thought about it before – but I didn't really like thinking about war – about killing – if I didn't have to. Not anymore.

It wasn't the bandit attack that ended the phantasmagorical ideas a boy has about warfighting and combat. It probably didn't help, though.

We were pinned down in a mountain range in China. The bandits – I don't know how many of them there were, I wasn't allowed to get out of the cover of our cart and never saw them – had the high ground and crossbows. I am sure their lives ended in the same manner as 4-H bunnies – slaughtered. I was a teenager. I wasn't going to contribute much. But you realize when you don't have any desire to leave safety and are comfortable with letting other men fight and die for you that you aren't the hero you thought you were before. AT least, that's what I did. I cowered behind something. My memory tells me it was a wheel of the wagon – or the overturned wagon itself, but that doesn't make any sense. It must have been a bend in the pass or a rock or something.

Whatever it was, I escaped with my life. But any thought that I might be the kind of character who rushes into danger because that's the thing everyone else is doing... didn't make it. If it left that pass limping along – if, maybe I convinced myself that it was the sensible thing to do, to wait to engage in combat until I was older – it didn't survive Constantinople.

Why am I thinking about this? I suddenly realize.

Because you're headed toward a war.

I don't know that for certain.

Don't you?

You've seen it in two dreams.

It says in the Bible that if you have the same dream more than once—

As for having two similar dreams, it means that these events have been decreed by God, and he will soon make them happen.

Right. So I just take it on faith that because I've had two dreams about Pepin in the mountains killing two-thousand men with a thought it's going to happen exactly like that.

Yes.

No.

They weren't exactly dreams, were they, Child?

I am going to have to learn not to think in the Yaldabaoth's voice – like I taught myself not to think in the Master's voice. I'm kind of proud of myself, actually – I haven't heard his words echoing in my head nearly to the degree I thought I would by now.

Give it time. Good things pass too.

I need to think about something else.

I have, I have decided, learned a few things about whatever is going on with my dreams. Pepin and I are linked in some unknowable way. The sort that maybe he doesn't sleep because when he does he dreams about me and Peitho coming to get him – from my perspective?

Regardless of whether he does, I am not just linked to him. When I am there, I am him – his thoughts, his feelings, his sense impressions – sort of. It is, appropriately, like a dream. You know everything relevant to the dream. You are the space fighter pilot or deep sea diver or the cat sunning yourself in a window. …Until you remember that, no, you're not. You're dreaming. But the dream-you still knows everything relevant to the situation. Unless you're a stress dreamer and dissolution into the dream reality or not, you don't know the relative information and your dreams are hurricanes of Murphy's Law.

Like mine usually are.

But being Pepin is different.

Being Pepin is like... like being dead.

There are things I know I know that I can't know, if I would just access them. It's less like Pepin's mind or whatever I am accessing is a room with chests lying on the floor, Minecraft-style, and if I go and rummage around a bit, I can learn things. It's like a lot of things.

It's sort of like surfing the web with hyperlinks. Like losing yourself down a YouTube rabbit hole – or, more specifically, a Wikipedia rabbit hole. It's like piloting an alien vehicle with unfamiliar buttons and dials and gauges – all of which are considerate enough to send you to a relevant wiki page filled with all the relevant knowledge and the hyperlinks to learn more.

I want to “learn” as little as possible from these dreams. Up until now I have spent the dreams how I have spent being awake – getting through the time unscathed. I don't want to know more about Pepin than I already do. I already know too much.

If only that were all and I could get past this. It is not just sensing what he is sensing, knowing what he knows. The more I look, the closer I get to him. It's the difference in being a passenger with someone in their head, an observer, and being them. I wish this were a metaphor for empathy or for too closely imagining the mind of anyone – and maybe it is. God dammit, they're just dreams!

But I don't think it is.

The closer I get to him, the closer, that is, that I get to dissolution with the dream self, the more difficult it becomes to remember which of us I am.

If madness is a defense against psychic assaults, then his mind is the ugliest, most hateful possible – that is, unimpregnable. Not for all the beer in the world. And I'm all out of weed.

While a novice at whatever is happening, I am not also an idiot. I don't know the risks of fully immersing myself in that Pepin-self. But I can imagine a few. What if our connection is two-way? What if by some insane twist of plot he is trying to permanently switch bodies with me? What if I got trapped as him? What if—? I know enough to know I didn't know enough to be touching anything. So I didn't.

And I got good at it, at losing track of us both in the monotony of the passage of time and space around me. Alive and asleep.

But that does not mean that I did not know that Pepin was hunting again when I saw the city around me.

It means I didn't want to think about it.

I have, by now, a few clear objectives. If I aim to test the veracity of my visions alone, I'm going to need proof of some sort of military action. Yeah – that's why I'm thinking of al'Shamshir and my incapacity for warfighting. It's definitely not because I'm a coward who needs reminding what to do when the slings and arrows of misfortune start flying. Rumors, news, whatever – anything that will confirm for me that Berengar is mustering to defend the Alps west of Turin. Evidence of some sort of conspiracy involving Italian nobles and Charles of West Francia would help. But I already know the Italian nobility are restless.

And I don't want to deal with the kind of people who would give me the proof I need. I don't want to deal with them, and I don't have time.

This is the part of the story, if I were trying to entertain you a la Russel Crowe, where I would discover that my timeframe is not days but weeks, perhaps even months. Communication back then was slow. Maybe Pepin decides to detour in Pavia or someplace else for a while. Maybe, indeed, he does what I would do and disappears with the Rod until things are less... hot, as they say. Whatever contrivance is necessary to get our hero into the interesting part of the civilization, right? We all want to meet the shiny nobles with their pretty faces and their pretty clothes and their pretty boredom.

No thank you.

Not me. I wanted to stay as far away from those assholes as I could. Which includes their servants. People I care about die when I get involved with nobles. I don't even want to interview them about what's going on. Which, admittedly, is going to make verifying whether anything I think I've seen or understood from my dreams is something I could have figured out with the information I had before the Visions difficult to say the least.

I resisted calling them that in my mind. I didn't want to think of them as anything besides dreams. Because if I thought of The Vision as a Vision, then that further divides my life – more than it already is – into moments Before the Vision and those After. Perhaps I'm the only person who finds the BC dating method difficult to comprehend. But I didn't like the idea of there being another Moment in my life after which nothing could ever be the same. I didn't like that I'm in Verona, half the distance west to returning to Genoa – if I wanted. And I didn't want. There was no going back. I'd been gone for more than a week. My wife should have everything, now. If I returned, what would I return to? I would be a ghost, and one suspected of two horrible murders.

I imagine for a second that my wife would be glad to see me, that she would take me in her arms and we could live the kind of life Metus told me to live with her. She would want to fight for my innocence. That's the kind of wife she would be in that kind of story – the supportive, woodcutting-of-a-woman kind. I scoff at myself and shake my head, rolling my eyes and twisting my lips in all the different ways of expressing that something said – or in this case thought – is too stupid to articulate with words. That was impossible. I'd abandoned her – for another woman. Well... not for another woman.

My head turns to either side, as though Peitho might be near enough to hear my conversation with myself – whether it's aloud or not, I don't exactly want that, do I? I don't see anything which penetrates to my consciousness and catches my attention.

You didn't go to Venice hoping you would die in your wife's heart so you could start over with Peitho?

I regard this thought like it's the accusation of my closest friend who knows me too well – mock shock and aghastity.

No! I wanted to get away from her.

Right. That's why you're with her now.

I'm not with her.

You're here together, are you not?

But it's not like... we're together.

Whose fault is that? It's not like she has not offered herself to you – twice.

I'm here because what if they aren't just dreams? What if they're real? Or they're real enough that something bad is going to happen and I'm the only one who knows? What if... what if the Master wasn't wrong?

You are capable of more than you can believe right now—

No. No!

I'm not doing this. I'm not arguing with the Master, too. Not if he's not actually here.

Have to think about something else. Verona. Isn't Verona a March?

A March in this context is one of those decidedly Medieval political institutions or ideas which are not easy for us to understand today, but which evolved into things we take for granted today. A March was a border territory, usually only loosely controlled, or even shared by the Empire – the Empire we're talking here is Charlemagne's Holy Roman. A Marquess or Marquis or Margrave is appointed to administrate the March – to keep it garrisoned and loyal to the Emperor. Sounds a little like Feudalism, I'll bet – because this is the system Feudalism evolved out of .

In the year of our Lord 890 – only ten years ago – Berengar formed the March of Verona, replacing Triuli, his home, as, effectively, his northern subcapital. And that the man appointed to govern it died in 896. I'm not sure whether anyone currently occupies the seat. Does that mean that Berengar does? Little wonder, if he can't trust his nobles.

But how much can one person manage on their own? How much can one person hope to achieve?

I wonder if he's here in the city, now – Berengar. I wonder whether if I tried I wouldn't be able to speak with him directly and ask him what I need to know. But that's crazy. No king would let me just walk into his life asking questions and expecting answers. Not at this time of night.

My mind, when I have allowed it to empty, has taken me back to the Yaldabaoth telling me that I will have to choose a side between Order and Chaos. I 've tried to convince myself that these are just names, just concepts, just metaphors – to little success. What are they, then—? No – what would have happened if I had taken the Yaldabaoth's hand?

I don't really know, yet, what Free Will is. But I do wonder whether I would have lost mine.

What is the Yaldabaoth? Is it a meme? Is it even a being? What if it's a projection of my mind? What if it's me if I take its hand – if I surrender myself entirely to Order. I don't even know what that means.

Ugh. I don't want to think about me and my problems. I want to think about.... Pacificus of Verona – he's from Verona, right? Didn't he found a bunch of schools and write poetry about astronomy? I think he made a clock, too, right? A real Uomo Universalis. He and I seem to be a lot alike – interested in a lot of different things.

You're not that alike. He actually accomplished things.

Like being an Archdeacon for forty years.

“It's beautiful, isn't it?”

I come back to my surroundings to find a man standing beside me. A priest – dressed, appropriately, in a plain black cossack. The crucifix around his neck is wooden and strung from a length of cord. He's tall, a little less than my six feet with dark hair, eyes, and the 5 o'clock shadow sort of beard women will find all the rage eleven-hundred years later. And he's handsome – more than handsome: presidentially good-looking. He isn't looking at me. In fact, he's looking at whatever I'd been gazing at without seeing:

“The Biblioteca Capitolare,” the priest says, giving the somewhat boring, three-story, brown brick façade its name.

“It is beautiful,” I agree. Because it was – and is – if not for its architecture, for what it contained inside – and for what it represents.

“The Library of Verona,” the priest breathes proudly. “It doesn't have quite the same ring to it as the Library of Alexander. But here it is.” His voice is dreamy, optimistic. “Oh, I know it's only a scriptorium, now. But, friend, we are the sanctum sanctorum of scriptoriums.” He turns to me, smiling apologetically. “Sorry, a little Latin/Priest humor, there.”

“It was funny.” I was thinking about what he had said. Vaguely remembering that Charlemagne had endowed a scriptorium. My modern history isn't, apparently, what it could be. Was this it? And being unable to come up with any good questions.

“There are plans. The future is bright. Someday, every book in every church in Christendom will have been copied here. Every text in every noble collection will come from here. That day may already be now. And we grow by the day. You know of Archdeacon Pacificus? Ah, I see by your face that you do. He has been dead for nearly sixty years now, but – what a man, when he was alive. You know that he contributed to the production of at least two-hundred books? Two-hundred! More than that.” He looks at me from the side of his eye. “Seventy books is enough to make a library worth writing about – he produced, himself, nearly three times that many. And you may have heard – we have a copy of Augustine of Hippo's City of God – said to have been copied from the author's original – in his lifetime.”

“This is all very impressive,” I admit. “You... work there?”

The priest chuckles. “No, no. I am just proud of the city. The world is very dark. ...? Friend. But, here, we are a light. We are a beacon to the future. We are a signpost to how things could be, a bulletin of how things should be better.”

“Amen to that, Father. Where do you work?”

“Ah. I serve Our Lord at the Cathedral of San Lorenzo.”

San Lorenzo. It feels like everywhere I've been lately there's been a Cathedral to Saint Lawrence.

“I feel like I've been thinking about Lorenzo, lately.”

“You... feel as though you have been thinking of the Saint, friend?”

“Yeah. I'm not sure what about – I've just been seeing his churches everywhere I go, lately.”

“Is that so? It is a blessing of God that we have met, don't you think? I will be happy to hear your thoughts.”

“That is possible. Or there are a lot of Cathedrals to Saint Lawrence in Italy.” I laugh. He does not.

“You have traveled much through Italy, recently?”

There is a ping, like a snapped string in my mind – a white line flashing across my awareness – a momentary peel of alarm. Then it is gone. Smoothed like a dog's ruffled hackles in a thunderstorm.

“I have. Business.”

“I see. That would explain why a Cymry is in Verona.” He looks at me from the side of his eyes and smiles. “Your thoughts, Child? You were just about to share them with me.”

I get... bashful is the word. I turn my face from his, away and down. A flush fills my cheeks and my foot wants to toe the ground. I feel like a child at his first Confession.

“There's no... thought, not really,” I admit. “It's not even a good question.”

“Speak your heart, Child. God has provided me to help you. Help you, I will.”

I try to look at the priest without peering. I'm sure I do not succeed. He doesn't look like....

Well, he doesn't look like what?

Like a member of a secret order come to derail me from my path?

Or come to influence me in some way I can't predict?

Like he is possessed or a shapeshifter or something?

He looks like a middle-aged priest.

The priest is watching me, his face an image of patience.

“His story – Lorenzo – how does the Church hierarchy not....”

“Look like the bad guy? A greedy tyrant?” He smiles at my difficulty. “I asked you to speak freely, friend. I am no zealot – I feel no need to take offense at your questions regarding my faith. Who is to say that they – the Church hierarchy – are not? Villains, that is, in this story. The story cannot be told and understood without its context.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean many things. If the story were not told in its entirety, we would lose much understanding. The story has meaning because it tells us more than that one man did a selfless and brave and foolish thing and died for the choice he made. Without the corruption of the Church hierarchy, he would not have a reason to choose as he did, and without describing it, the audience will not know why he made his sacrifice, nor be able to recognize either when they must make his choice for themselves or when they have become the ones corrupted by the Devil. We remember the whole story because every player in it has something to teach us – even about our highest and most glorious institutions.”

When you're 25, you feel like you thought you already knew that no matter what the answer is. But you don't. That's why you ask the question.

“So the Church wants people to remember and know that its leadeship are corrupt and capable of Evil? Not that they're holy and just and righteous?”

“Son, we are all corrupt and capable of Evil. That is the Fall of Adam. We are all fallen into mortality. There is no perfection besides God – and the perfection of God, it is not for mortals to comprehend. God is greater than any one conversation, than 900 years of conversations – than five-thousand years of them. He made us, Man, in His image to worship Him – not to know Him. Not to turn Him into a tool for our purposes. The Devil we can know. The Devil tempts us all. Some of us God has seen fit to grant more, that the Devil has greater pull with which to tempt us. We remember Lorenzo's story – the stories of all the Saints – we build churches to his memory – because we all have something to learn from him: The greatest treasures are the people we spend our lives with.”

I swallow hard. These words hit me like a punch to the part of my brain that was working not to think of Genoa. Francis. Regina. Giorgio. The tavernmaster. …My wife. And to disagree with the Yaldabaoth – there has to be another way.

“The call to Christianity is an individual call. We build great churches, erect statues, and hang magnificent pieces of art – but it is all to make a community for those who choose to see in themselves the Christ. Who would wrestle with the Devil within themselves. To bring Light, Order, where there is only Chaos. I see on your face that you are dissatisfied that it should be the Church's place to do this, as poorly a job as it has done at it in the past – and, yes, is doing. Some things are as they are out of necessity – necessarily. The Fall of Rome was the Fall of Adam. The Fall of Lucifer. At the height of Rome, Man climbed as high as he had since Babel. And for his hubris, he was struck down. The finest empire, a monument to Order itself, was beset by plague after plague until, at last, she was pounded into dust by the barbarian hordes. Even her language has been shattered, made vulgar and incomprehensible by God.

“Here, in Verona, no less – if you can believe legends.” The priest winks at me. Then continues as if he hadn't said this:

“And still His church remains. Spared. Her light left to shine. Nobles do not have the wealth any longer, nor do they have the interest, in hiring for their sons tutors, as they did during the Roman days. To be the son of a wealthy noble – or any young man who wished to make himself – or his son – a noble – was to be educated as a ruler: educated to speak, to reason, to administrate, to understand what is understood about the world. Intellectual pursuits are no longer the pursuits of Emperors and Senators and the wealthy elite. These men, the first sons of the best fathers, are taught to fight – to kill – and to pray. Now kings and their kind send their second or less favored sons to be priests – to be educated. It is unfortunate, I think, that I did not find you sooner.”

He looks at me from the corner of his eye. I don't know what it is about the Scriptorum, but he's been undressing it with his eyes the whole time we have stood here together. He smirks – and for the briefest possible moment, it is sinister to my eye. Then he is an attractive, apparently respectable and perhaps overly passionate priest once again. And it floats from my mind like a butterfly going about its business.

“Fortunate, however, are those of lesser means, those who rely on the spending of the Elite to survive, that we Christian priests have convinced the Elite that building churches – and employing those of skilled and unskilled labor that they might both fill their and their family's bellies and take pride in their cities - will save their Eternal Souls. The Son was not speaking coyly when he said that a rich man will find a harder way into the Kingdom of God than a camel through the eye of a needle. And as you may or may not know, Child, the eye of a needle is very small indeed.” He winks at me again. Is he being literal – or ironic?

“If we did not offer our opiate to the masses, who would? Can they be trusted to support the arts, to provide food and shelter for the poor, to protect the world from the greed of the Elite and the machinations of the Devil? I do not know. What I do know is that we – Christian clergy – are the last of the literate, with next to none of the corpus of history's knowledge. An amputation of the body by our own hand. Still, we struggle as we are called by our Savior, to make of ourselves the best that we are able and to do what we are able to the best of our abilities, secure in the faith that God will provide for and support us.”

As he says this, I am imagining the Yaldabaoth as I saw him. And yet I did not think this man means that when he says God. And he wouldn't. He is a thoroughly post-Neo-Plato Christian and educated as such: His God is The One, The All, The Good.

Is that why He lies to the Ninth?

But it was the Gnostics who said the Demiurge was the Liar.

And they were hunted down and killed for it.

By the Venatores Maleficarum.

The Grand Magus of which is being deceived by Lucifer himself to—

To what?

Despite the thought that I am politicking against the plans of a god, I feel... encouraged – yes, by the priest.

“This is what it means to be Christian. To do Good. If you try hard enough, who knows what you'll achieve.”

“I think I should head back to my inn,” I say, turning to do just that.

“Choose wisely,” the priest says at my back. Is it just my imagination, or does his voice echo with a particular power I've heard before? “Robert Longshore. Fulcrum.”

I wheel around, heart racing, skin tingling, expecting— Well, whatever I expect to happen, it doesn't. I'm alone. Like the priest was never there at all.

A cool wind swirls through my jacket.

I am sure that I am losing my mind.

Is the very cosmos teasing me, now?

That thought doesn't make sleeping any more appealing. I know that I'll dream of Pepin – but if I don't, there's no way I'm not dreaming of the Nine and their Leader.