Prospero Regained (24 page)

“That must have been Abaddon!” I said.

“Never thought to ask her what else the Angel of the Bottomless Pit might have gotten her to do,” Erasmus mused. “Makes sense that if he made a play for Theo and Gregor through Ulysses, he wouldn’t leave Miranda and me out entirely.”

“Bet this has something to do with that cavern of undead Italians,” Mab crowed, delighted at having his suspicions proven true. Several of the others gave him startled looks, but Erasmus merely chuckled.

“Those are intended for Aerie Ones, such as yourself.” Erasmus’s tone was light and cheery, as if he spoke of some obvious thing that everyone knew.

So, I was right about the bodies! Yet, my pleasure was short-lived. I may have figured out Father’s plan, but Erasmus had been privy to it all along. And to think that I had believed I was the one in whom Father confided!

Thinking back, I realized that Erasmus had never liked me. It was not until the early 1600s, however, just after Logistilla and Gregor came on the scene, that he became intolerable. But then, it was about that time, as well, that he stopped studying art and swordplay and threw himself into sorcery. That could hardly be the fault of the then young Logistilla.

If these dolls dated from the period of Logistilla’s youth, then they might indeed be the cause of our enmity. If they were recent, then they were of little interest, for, by now, they would merely be icing on the cake of mutual hostility.

Could Logistilla have been setting us against each other all her life? The idea of young Logistilla behaving in such a fashion was laughable. What would have motivated her to do such a thing?

I ran my finger through the dust. “I don’t think this could be Logistilla’s doing. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Titus looked relieved. “Miranda’s judgment is always good.”

“No,” Erasmus drawled maliciously, “
Eurynome’s
judgment is good. But the Unicorn no longer informs our sister’s decisions.”

Erasmus was right. Without my Lady to guide me, my judgment had proved faulty. I hesitated, uncertain.

Gregor leaned over and gave my shoulder a comforting pat. He said hoarsely, “It is for the best. Your soul is safer now that you have put that blasphemy behind you.”

That was the last straw. I was in Hell, in the midst of dust and ash, having scattered my family and lost my Lady, and my brother had the nerve to be less than respectful to Her!

I screamed. “My Lady is a loyal servant of your God! The one and only God! There are more things in heaven and earth, Gregor, than are dreamt of in your theology!”

Taken aback, Gregor stepped away from me. His face betraying his startlement.

“Whoa!” Erasmus threw up his arms as if to ward me off. “The wildcat has unsheathed her claws.”

“Enough with you!” I turned on him. “Didn’t you see the vision in Mephisto’s globe? Don’t you realize you are being manipulated by magic? You would think that, upon learning this, you might make some kind of effort to restrain yourself. But no! You’re just as malicious as ever! What is wrong with you, Erasmus?”

Theo’s firm grip came down on my shoulder. “What’s wrong with him is that he’s under a spell, just as I was. Forgive him.”

I shrugged his hand off and continued, glaring at my family. “As to Logistilla, I say she is innocent! She is petty, and she turns people into animals, I grant you that, but I do not believe she would do something like this to us. Nor do I believe—” I turned on Theo—“that Father would cast a spell upon me, or any of us! I believe in our family! We might fight. We might annoy each other, we might even fake each other’s deaths or turn each other into bears, but when it really comes down to it, we are faithful, loyal!”

The others were staring at me as if I had sprouted wings from my ears. My tirade had impressed them, so seldom had they seen me get truly upset.

Erasmus spoke in his calm, oily voice. “I’m sure Father felt the same way about Antonio.”

If he had slapped me, I could not have felt more shocked.

He was right. Surely that betrayal had been as shocking as Logistilla’s would be to me. More so, for Father and Uncle Antonio had once loved each other dearly.

*   *   *

WE
walked until Mephisto dropped midstep onto his face and lay snoring gently, as the dust formed puffs about him. The rest of us were too exhausted to drag him back to his feet, so the others insisted on making camp. I argued that we needed to keep pushing onward, to reach the others, to save Father, but Theo pointed out gently that if we dropped from fatigue before we made it to Father, we would not do him any good.

Mab snuck the crystal ball out of Mephisto’s pocket and asked it to show him the date. It was still the third of January. We had three days left, and the distance from Ulysses to Father did not seem very far. The only question remaining was how long it would take to rescue the other three—Ulysses, Logistilla, and Cornelius. But as the others were already falling asleep, the point was moot.

Gregor took off his crimson robes and insisted that I, being the lady, rest upon them. I spread them out so that I slept upon one side, leaving the other side open for someone else. None of the men wanted to be the one to take the softer surface while the rest of them proved their manliness by sleeping on the hard ground. Finally, they dragged the sleeping Mephisto onto the robe and went off to make up their own beds with their jackets and bags.

We lay upon the hard ground, our mouths dry with dust. Except for Theo, who merely looked tired, and Mephisto, who was asleep, the others were looking gaunt and harried, as if haunted by personal ghosts.

“So much time lost,” Gregor murmured hoarsely, from where he lay, his head resting on a broken helmet. “Tell me, Brothers, Sister, Spirit with a Soul: what have I missed during my absence?”

We all spoke at once, eager to dispel the gloom by describing how the world had changed since 1921. There was so much to say. We touched on a few highlights: the First and Second World Wars, the Space Age, Hollywood, the Internet, improvements in technology that had changed the world. Gregor listened to these matters impassively, then turned the discussion to the matter of most interest to him—the Catholic Church and how it had fared during his internment.

Most of us had little to say about this topic, not having kept track of such things. It was not a subject I had any interest in. Titus went as far as to sneer with distaste, displaying his loyalty to his native Scottish Protestantism. Theo, however, was able to answer many of Gregor’s questions, albeit in layman’s terms and not in the detail Gregor would have liked. Erasmus had not been a religious man in many years, but as a scholar, he kept abreast of the times and could fill in explanations or offer background that Theo did not know. And from time to time, Caliban, who lay on his back with his head resting across his club, spoke up, surprising everyone with the answer to some esoteric question that Theo and Erasmus could not answer.

Much of what was said distressed Gregor. He was horrified to hear of recent scandals and the loss of faith among the modern public, though he was just as horrified to hear that mass was no longer being said in Latin. He was cautiously hopeful to hear that the church had taken a gentler tone toward heretics, but withheld his final judgment, saying that until he saw how the documents were worded and how their mandates were being carried out, he could not give his approval. Certain niceties of the relationship between the bishops and the pope caused him great distress, until he sighed and shook his head, smiling sadly.

“It is not meet for me to trouble myself about these things. Especially now, when I have only hearsay to go on. If I should survive to see the light of day again, I will investigate this matter myself. God willing, I will find myself at peace with it. If not, I can always hover nearby waiting for a cardinal to die and, with Logistilla’s help, work my way back up to being pope again.”

“I don’t suppose it would occur to you to work your way up, like everyone else,” Erasmus asked wryly.

Gregor eyed him skeptically. “What past would I show them? Do you plan to turn me into a baby and have me grow up again? The life of a pope gets scrutinized. I can hardly come forward and present myself as a member of the heretical and blasphemous witchcraft-practicing Prospero Clan.” He settled back again, his arms crossed behind his head. “Besides, while it is true that I rose to power upon the laurels of a better man the first time, the second time I started as quite a young man and worked my way up to pope on my own merit. But enough of this. Tell me more about this new modern world.”

We talked some more, describing some of the wonders that mankind had wrought in the last century.

“Television?” Gregor interrupted after a time. “Is that the same as ‘telly’? Ulysses furnished my prison with a fancy magic lantern containing moving images which he called by that name.”

“The very same!” Erasmus had taken off his long, green outer justacorps to use as a pillow. He lay on the dust in his shirtsleeves and waistcoat. “So, Ulysses gave you a television, did he? I’m glad to hear it. Maybe you are not as far behind the modern world as I first feared. Did what you see seem shocking?”

Gregor grimaced as if pained. “The women acted brazenly and dressed outrageously. I prayed constantly that this pageant was worse than the reality it sought to represent.”

“Might be it was, if it was MTV,” Erasmus allowed. “Though the reality is pretty bad nowadays. Do you remember the name of the program?”

“Ulysses called it,
I Love Lucy.
”

“Dear Jesus!” Erasmus bent over and pressed his hand against his mouth to restrain his mirth. Mab lowered the brim of his fedora until it hid his face in shadow. Theo, Titus, Caliban, and I were not so lucky. We burst into laughter.

“Do not take the Lord’s name in vain,” Gregor snapped. “Something I said amuse you?”

“Only that
I Love Lucy
is tame by modern standards,” I replied, chuckling sadly.

“Ah, so those prayers went unheeded.” He nodded.

Erasmus chuckled. “I fear you will have to weather a few shocks when you get home.”

“You think it a laughing matter, Brother?” Gregor frowned. “I pity those who walk the earth today. So many of them will be led astray by false promises and vice masquerading as virtue. And this”—he gestured out over the dreary battlefield—“will be their reward.”

Gregor’s words were harsh and chilling. In their wake, I found myself considering the modern world in a new light; many things that had formerly struck me as quaint or eccentric took on menacing overtones.

“I have missed so much.” Gregor sounded slightly stunned. “The loss of time, of opportunity … the sheer waste! And yet, I am not sure I would alter events, were I able. I would never have come to grips with my hatred had I not been forced to confront my own thoughts for years on end. I would still be as angry and as bitter as I had been before my captivity.”

“Were you as bad as that?” I asked, very curious about what had caused this amazing change in my brother. I leaned forward, eager to finally learn what had caused his transformation.

“I was,” Gregor admitted. “The worst of it came after I had been on Mars for about eight years. My confinement had begun to oppress me, and I was seized by hatred, loathing, and wrath such as even I had never suffered before. I hated the Protestants for stealing from us! For robbing so many of eternal life. If it had not been for Luther, Calvin, and others … or perhaps, if it had not been for the Borgias, who gave them the fodder they needed to sway the masses … we, the Church, would have had the Puritans!”

“I beg your pardon?” Erasmus leaned forward.

“If the new Puritanical order,” Gregor continued hoarsely, “had been embraced by the Church—as it had other orders had before it: the Benedictines and the Jesuits, the Dominicans and the Franciscans—I could have participated. Instead? What happened? This good human impulse slipped through our fingers, all those virtuous folks who followed it were lost to Hell, and the Council of Trent, which was supposed to conciliate the dissenters, made things more opulent and ceremonial! The purity and simplicity I craved were forever forbidden to me!”

“This makes sense of many things,” Erasmus murmured.

I felt the same way. Gregor had always reminded me of the Puritans; I had wondered why he had not joined their movement. Now I saw: he had wanted to be a Puritan … but only so long as the Puritans were under the jurisdiction of his beloved Catholic Church.

“My hatred and rage grew so great that I became ill,” Gregor continued, sitting up, a black form against the dull gray skies of the plain. “I grew feverish and delirious. Days passed. Ulysses sometimes forgot me for months at a time, so I began to fear that I would die of my illness before he returned to aid me. I lay there, fretting about the Reformation and the sins of Luther and Pope Alexander II. Then, in the midst of my delirium, I beheld a vision.”

His voice became hushed, awed. “As I lay within my bed, a woman descended from Heaven clothed in a robe woven from the sun. She stood upon a crescent moon, and upon her head was a crown of twelve stars. She revealed to me that she was the embodiment of the Great Church, the Church our Lord the Savior founded upon the rock of Saint Peter.

“‘Rise up!’ I cried in my rabid state. ‘Seize the malefactors! Rend them! Reveal to them the error of their sinful ways!’

“Gazing at me with pity, she pointed at her sun-bright robes and asked me sternly if I could see any rents in her garments. I acknowledged that there was none. She then announced that she took no cognizance of the split caused by the Reformation.”

Gregor paused and shook his head, astonishment evident upon his face. “Can you imagine? She thought the differences between the Lutherans and the True Church was no greater than that between … between the Benedictines and the Jesuits! As if our great religious wars were nothing but a squabble among children, in which their mother took no side! It was utterly astonishing!”

“And you believe this to have been a true vision?” Erasmus asked from where he lay stretched out on the dirt, atop his coat, his arms crossed behind his head.