The guide tugged at John’s sleeve; he followed, bemused by the uproar. They headed for the inner barbican, the priest shoving and pushing to clear a way through the crowd. Against the bailey wall was an added attraction; a line of cages, open to the sky, housed the first batch of prisoners. Round them the crowd boiled and yelled. John, staring, saw a man lashing at his tormentors with a staff he had somehow wrested from one of them; his eyes were suffused, flecks of foam covered his beard. Further on an old woman railed, shaking scrawny fists; her head had been cut, it seemed by a stone, and blood striped her face and neck brightly. Next to her a pretty, long-haired girl defiantly suckled a baby. John turned aside frowning deeply, followed the flapping robes of the priest into the upper bailey. His duties had already been explained to him; he was to record, for the benefit of Rome, all stages in the procedure of the Court of Father Hieronymous, Witchfinder in General to Pope John. His task would begin with the Questioning of prisoners.
The room set apart for the purpose was located beneath the donjon itself, and reached by a spiral stair. John passed through the Great Hall, its crosswall hung now with scarlet in preparation for the work to come. At the head of the recessed stairway a man in Papal Blue stood at ease, halberd grounded on the flags in front of him. He came to attention stiffly as John’s guide passed. The priest descended the stairs stooping, sandals flopping on stone; John followed clutching sketchbooks and a satchel crammed with bottles and jars, inks and paints and brushes, pens, erasers, all the paraphernalia of an artist. The little monk was apprehensive already, trying to quiet his jangling nerves. The room in which he found himself was long and wide, devoid of windows except where to one side a line of grilles set close under the roof admitted livid fans of light. At the far end of the chamber an oil lamp burned; beneath it clustered a group of figures. John saw dark-dressed, burly men with the insigne of the Court, the hand wielding the hammer and the lightning flash, blazoned on their chests; a chaplain was mumbling over trays of instruments whose purpose he did not recognise. There were spiked rollers, oddly shaped irons, tourniquets of metal beads; other devices, ranged in rows, he identified with a cold shock. The little frames with their small cranked handles, toothed jaws; these were grésillons. Thumbscrews. Such things then really existed. Nearer at hand a species of rough table, fitted at each end with lever-operated wooden rollers, declared its use more plainly. The roof of the place was studded with pulleys, some with their ropes already reeved and dangling; a brazier burned redly, and near it were piled what looked to be huge lead weights.
The priest at Brother John’s elbow continued in a low voice the explanation on which he’d felt impelled to embark while crossing the town from their lodgings. ‘We may take it then,’ he said, ‘that as the crimes of witchcraft and heresy, the raising of devils, receiving of incubi and succubi and like abominations, the trafficking with the Lord of Flies himself, are crimes of the spirit rather than the body, crimen excepta, they cannot be judged, and evidence may neither be given nor accepted under normal legal jurisdiction. The admission of spectral evidence and its acceptance as partial proof of guilt subject to confession during Questioning is therefore of vital importance to the functioning of our Court. Under this head too belongs our explanation of the use of torture and its justification; the death of the guilty one disrupts Satan’s attack on the Plan of God, as revealed to Mother Church through His Vicar on Earth, our own Pope John; while dying penitent the heretic saved from greater relapse into the sin of subversion, to find eventually his place in the Divine Kingdom.’
Brother John, his face screwed up as if in anticipation of pain, ventured a query. ‘But are not your prisoners given the opportunity to confess? Were they to confess without the Questioning—’
‘There can be no confession,’ interrupted the other, ‘without compulsion. As there can be no answering the challenges of spectral evidence, the use of which by definition invalidates the innocence of the accused.’ He allowed his eyes to travel to one of the pulleys and its dangling rope. ‘Confession,’ he said, ‘must be sincere. It must come from the heart. False confession, made to avoid the pain of Questioning, is useless to Church and God alike. Our aim is salvation; the salvation of the souls of these poor wretches in our charge, if necessary by the breaking of their bodies. Set against this, all else is straw in the wind.’
The muttering of the priest at the far end of the chamber ceased abruptly. John’s guide smiled thinly, without humour. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Your waiting is ended, Brother.
They will start soon now.’
‘What,’ said Brother John, ‘were they doing?’
The other turned to him vaguely surprised. ‘Doing?’ he said. ‘They were blessing the instruments of the Questioning, of course…’
‘But,’ said Brother John, rubbing his pate as was his custom when bewildered, ‘what I don’t seem to understand is the question of impregnation by the incubus. If as you say the incubus, the demon in its masculine form, is able physically to fertilise its victim, then the concept of diabolic delusion is invalidated. Creation by a minion of Satan is surely -’ The priest turned on him quickly, eyes glittering. ‘I would advise you,’ he said, ‘to understand very clearly. You are on dangerous ground here, more dangerous than you realise. The demon, being a sexless entity, is unable to create; as its Master is impotent in the face of God. But by receiving as succubus the seed of man, and transporting it invisibly through the air, the thing can be arranged; and is arranged, as you will see. I am not a heretic, Brother.’
‘I see,’ said John, white to the lips. ‘You must forgive me, Brother Sebastian; we Adhelmians are technicians and mechanics, mere journeymen not noted in our lower orders at least for learning of such profundity…’
There was a distant flourish of trumpets, muffled by the vastness of the walls.
Brother John left Dubris by a rutted track that wound through the scrubland to the north of the town. He sat his horse untidily, slumped forward in the saddle with his eyes on the ground. The dusty red gown, soiled now and frayed at the hem, flapped round his calves; he held the reins slackly so the animal meandered from side to side of the road, picking its own way. When it stopped, which was often, John made no attempt to urge it forward. He sat staring fixedly; once he lifted his head to gaze blankly at the horizon. His face had lost its colouring, acquiring instead a greyish sheen like the face of a corpse; fits of shivering shook him, as though he was suffering from a fever. He had lost a great deal of weight; his girdle, once tightly drawn, now hung loosely round his stomach. His satchel of equipment still swung from the pommel of the saddle but the sketchbooks were gone, were already if Brother Sebastian was to be believed on their way by special courier to Rome. Before parting, the Inquisitor had complimented John on his application and the fineness of his work, and attempted to cheer him by pointing out the immense setback the hearings had been to the cause of the Devil in Kent; but getting no answer had left him, not without a backward glance or two and a searching of the spirit. For he had become convinced during the weeks of their association that heresy burned somewhere in the heart of Brother John himself. There were times when he had almost felt tempted to bring the matter to the attention of Father Hieronymous, but who knew what repercussions might have resulted? The Adhelmians, in spite of what John himself had described as a certain lack of scholarship, were a valued and respected Order in the land, and the limner had after all held a commission from Rome. Brother Sebastian was a zealot, tireless in the prosecution of his Faith; but there are times when even the devout find it advisable to turn a blind eye…