Doruntine (7 page)

The archbishop, who apparently had not expected this question so early on, sat motionless for a moment as if choking down an explanation that had suddenly proved unnecessary. Stres felt that the prelate was at the point of exasperation.

“This affair must be buried,” he said evenly. “Or rather, one aspect of it, the one that is at variance with the truth, and damaging to the Church. Do you understand me, Captain? We must deny the story of this man's resurrection, reject it, unmask it, prevent its spread at all costs.”

“I understand, Monsignor.”

“Will it be difficult?”

“Most certainly,” said Stres. “I can prevent an imposter or slanderer from speaking, but how, Monsignor, can I stop the spread of this uproar? That is beyond my power.”

The archbishop's eyes glittered with a cold flame.

“I cannot prevent the mourners from spinning their yarns,” Stres went on, “and as for rumor—”

“Find a way to make the mourners stop their songs themselves,” the prelate said sharply. “As for rumor, what you must do is change its course.”

“And how can I do that?” Stres asked evenly.

They stared at each other for a long moment.

“Captain,” the archbishop finally said, “do you yourself believe that the dead man rose from his grave?”

“No, Monsignor.”

Stres had the impression that the archbishop had sighed with relief. How could the man have dreamed that I was naive enough to credit such insanity, he wondered.

“Then you think that someone else must have brought back the young woman in question?”

“Without the slightest doubt, Monsignor.”

“Well then, try to prove it,” said the archbishop, “and you will find that the mourners will suspend their songs in mid-verse and rumor will change of itself.”

“I have sought to do just that, Monsignor,” Stres
said. “I have done my utmost.”

“With no result?”

“Very nearly. Of course there are people who do not believe in this resurrection, but they are a minority. Most believe it.”

“Then you must see to it that this minority becomes the majority.”

“I have done all I can, Monsignor.”

“You must do even more, Captain. And there is only one way to manage it: you must find the man who brought the young woman back. Find the imposter, the lover, the adventurer, whatever he is. Track him down relentlessly, wherever he may be. Move heaven and earth until you find him. And if you do not find him, then you will have to create him.”

“Create him?”

A flash of cold lightning seemed to pass between them.

“In other words,” said the archbishop, the first to avert his eyes, “it would be advisable to bear witness to his existence. Many things seem impossible at first that are crowned with success in the end.”

The archbishop's voice had lost its ring of confidence.

“I shall do my best, Monsignor,” said Stres.

A silence of the most uncomfortable kind settled over the room. The archbishop, head lowered, sat deep in thought. When he next spoke, his voice had changed so completely that Stres looked up sharply,
intrigued. His tone, as polite, gentle, and persuasive as the man himself—now matched his physical appearance perfectly.

“Listen, Captain,” said the archbishop. “Let us speak frankly.”

He took a deep breath.

“Yes, let us speak plainly. I think you are aware of the importance attached to these matters at the Center. Many things are forgiven in Constantinople, but there is no indulgence whatever for any question touching on the basic principles of the Holy Church. I have seen emperors massacred, dragged through the hippodromes, eyes put out, tongues cut out, simply because they dared think they could amend this or that thesis of the Church. Perhaps you remember that two years ago, after the heated controversy about the sex of angels, the capital came close to being the arena of a civil war that might have led to wholesale carnage.”

Stres did recall some disturbances, but he had never paid much attention to the sort of collective hysteria which erupted periodically in the Empire's capital.

“Today more than ever,” the archbishop went on, “when relations between our Church and the Catholic Church have worsened. . . . Nowadays your life is at stake in matters like these. Do I make myself clear, Captain?”

“Yes,” said Stres uncertainly. “But I would like to know what all this has to do with the incident we
were discussing.”

“Just so,” said the archbishop, his voice growing stronger now, recovering its deep resonance, “yes, just so.”

Stres kept his eyes fixed upon him.

“Here we have an alleged return from the grave,” the prelate continued. “And therefore a resurrection. Do you see what that means, Captain?”

“A return from the grave,” Stres repeated. “An idiotic rumor.”

“It's not that simple,” interrupted the archbishop. “It is a ghastly heresy. An arch-heresy.”

“Yes,” said Stres, “in one sense it is indeed.”

“Not in one sense. Absolutely,” the archbishop said, nearly shouting. His voice had recovered its first heavy tones. His head was now so close that Stres had all he could do to keep from leaning back.

“Until now Jesus Christ alone has risen from his tomb! Do you follow me, Captain?”

“I understand, Monsignor,” Stres said.

“Well then, He returned from the dead to accomplish a great mission. But this dead man of yours, this Constantine—that is his name, is it not?—by what right does he seek to ape Jesus Christ? What power brought him back from the world beyond, what message does he bring to humanity? Eh?”

Stres, nonplussed, had no idea what to say.

“None whatsoever!” shouted the archbishop. “Absolutely none! That is why the whole thing is nothing but imposture and heresy. A challenge to
the Holy Church! And like any such challenge, it must be punished mercilessly.”

He was silent for a moment, as if giving Stres time to absorb the flood of words.

“So listen carefully, Captain.” His voice had softened again. “If we do not squelch this story now, it will spread like wildfire, and then it will be too late. It will be too late, do you understand?”

Stres returned from the Monastery of the Three Crosses in the afternoon. As his horse trotted slowly along the highway, Stres, with equal languor, mulled over snatches of the long conversation he had just had with the archbishop. Tomorrow I'll have to start all over again, he said to himself. He had, of course, been working on the case without respite, and had even relieved his deputy of his other duties so that he could spend all his time sifting through the Lady Mother's archives. But now that the capital was seriously concerned at the turn of events, he was going to have to go back to square one. He would send a new circular to the inns and relay stations, perhaps promising a reward to anyone who helped find some trace of the imposter. And he would send someone all the way to Bohemia to find out what people there were saying about Doruntine's flight. This latter idea lifted his spirits for a moment. How had he failed to think of it earlier? It was one of the first things he should have done after the events of October eleventh.
Well, he thought a moment later, it's never too late to do things right.

He glanced up to see how the weather looked. The autumn sky was completely overcast. The bushes on either side of the road quivered in the north wind, and their trembling seemed to deepen the desolation of the plain. This world has only one Jesus Christ, thought Stres, repeating to himself the archbishop's words. The sound of his horse's tread reminded him that it was just this long route that Constantine had taken. The archbishop had spoken of the dead man with contempt. Come to think of it, Constantine had never shown much respect for priests while he lived. Stres himself had not known Constantine, but his deputy's research in the family archives had produced some initial clues to his personality. Judging from the old woman's letters, Constantine had been, generally speaking, an oppositionist. Attracted by new ideas, he cultivated them with passion, sometimes carrying them to extremes. He had been like this on the question of marriages. He was against local marriages and, impassioned and extremist in his convictions, had been prepared to countenance unions even at the other end of the world. The Lady Mother's letters suggested that Constantine believed that far-off marriages, hitherto the privilege of kings and princesses, should become common practice for all. The distance between the families of bride and groom was in fact a token of dignity and strength
of character, and he persisted in saying that the noble race of Albanians was endowed with all the qualities necessary to bear the trials of separation and the troubles that might arise from them.

Constantine had ideas of his own not only on marriage but on many other subjects as well, ideas that ran counter to common notions and that had caused the old woman more than a little trouble with the authorities. Stres recalled one such instance, which had to do primarily with the Church. Two letters from the local archbishop to the Lady Mother had been found in the family archives in which the prelate drew her attention to the pernicious ideas Constantine was expressing and to the insulting comments about the Church he had occasionally been heard to utter. And there were other, more important matters, his aide had told him, but these would figure in the detailed report he would submit once he had concluded his investigation.

Stres had not been particularly impressed by this aspect of Constantine's personality, possibly because he himself harbored no special respect for religion, an attitude that was in fact not uncommon among the functionaries of the principality. And for good reason: the struggle between Catholicism and Orthodoxy since time immemorial had greatly weakened religion in the Albanian principalities. The region lay just on the border between the two religions, and for various reasons, essentially political and economic, the principalities leaned now
toward one, now toward the other. Half of them were now Catholic, but that state of affairs was by no means permanent, and each of the two churches hoped to win spheres of influence from the other. Stres was convinced that the prince himself cared little for religious matters. He had allies among the Catholic princes and enemies among the Orthodox. The principality had once been Catholic, turning Orthodox only half a century before, and the Roman Church had not given up hope of bringing it back to the fold.

Like most functionaries, Stres did his best not to be drawn into religious issues, and he never took the edicts of the Church too seriously. Indeed, he might well have sought some excuse not to respond to the archbishop's summons were it not for the fact that the prince, eager to avoid poisoning relations with Byzantium, had recently issued an important circular urging all officials of the principality to treat the Church with respect. The circular emphasized that this attitude was dictated by the higher interests of the State and that, consequently, any action at variance with the spirit of the directive would be punished.

All this passed through Stres's mind in snatches as his glance embraced the bleak expanse of the plain. The October cold filled the air. Suddenly Stres shivered. Behind a bush several paces off the road he caught sight of the skeleton of a horse standing out in all its whiteness. It was a section of the
ribcage and the backbone; the skull was missing. My God, Stres thought to himself a little further on, what if that had been
his
horse?

He drew his cloak tighter around him, trying to drive the image from his mind. He felt sad, but it was not a painful sadness. The shape of his melancholy mood had been softened in the great stretch of plain, in which winter's approach could be read. What possessed you to come out of the earth, what message did you mean to bring us? Stres was astonished at the question, which had risen like a sigh from the depths of his being. He shook his head as if to clear his mind. He who had laughed so derisively at everyone who had believed that story! He smiled bitterly. What nonsense! he said to himself, spurring his horse. What a gloomy afternoon! he thought a moment later. Dusk was falling as he urged his mount into a quicker trot. All the rest of the way to the village he strove to purge his mind of anything connected with the case. He arrived in the dark of night. The lights of the houses shone feebly here and there. The barking of dogs in the distance broke the night silence from time to time. Stres guided his horse not homeward, but toward the town's main street. He had no idea why. Soon he reached the vacant lot that stretched before the house of the Lady Mother. There was no other house to be seen. The dark and dismal mass of the great abandoned building loomed at the far end of a desolate field studded with tall trees that now, in the
dark, seemed to droop even more sharply than they really did. Stres approached the doorway, gazed for a moment at the darker rectangles of the windows, then turned his horse in the direction from which he had come. He found himself among the trees. A man standing where he now stood could be seen from the door. The night of October eleventh must have been more or less like this: no moon, but not too dark. It must have been here that Doruntine parted from the unknown horseman. When her mother opened the door, he was probably riding off, but perhaps she had already seen something from the window. Something that caused that fatal shock. Stres turned his horse again. What discovery had the old woman made in the half-darkness? That the man riding off was her dead son? (It was my brother Constantine who brought me back, Doruntine had told her.) Or perhaps, on the contrary, that it was not her son and that her daughter had deceived her. But that would not explain her shock. Or perhaps, just before they separated, Doruntine and the unknown rider had embraced one last time in the dark—Enough! Stres said to himself sharply, and turned his horse back toward the road. At the very last moment, with the furtive movement of a man trying to catch a glimpse of someone spying on him in the darkness, he turned his head toward the closed door once more.