“Odin carried a spear. Not a staff.”
“Odin?”
“The All-Father.” Seeing Raphael’s expression, Vera laughed. “You are a child of Christendom, my friend, regardless of how enlightened you strive to appear. We may appear Christian—like yourselves—but the skjalddis remember our roots too. Our grandmothers and their mothers before them were Varangian, and we remember the stories of the cold sea, of the war between the giants and the Aesir, and the tales of Yggdrasil.”
“Egg—?”
“Yggdrasil,” Vera repeated. “The World Tree.”
Raphael shivered. “What happened to it?”
“Nothing. It stands at the center of the world. The fields of Fólkvangr are supported by its branches, and Hel lies beneath its roots.”
“He said it was cut down.”
“Who? Istvan? He is mad, Raphael. You cannot believe anything he says. If Yggdrasil were to be cut down, Ragnarok would be upon us.” Vera shook her head. “The Mongols are a scourge upon the world, but they are not the end of it. They are just men. They are not...” She trailed off, unwilling to speak of a greater terror. She raised an arm to indicate the open steppes. “This place inspires fear in its endlessness. You cannot let its emptiness rule your mind, Raphael. We all seek guidance, but we cannot invent it where it does not truly exist.”
“What about Percival and his vision?” Raphael asked. “Do you think he is mad as well, or has he been granted guidance?”
Vera lowered her arm and pointed. “Look,” she said. “I see a shadow. A gully. I suspect we’ll find our water source there.” She snapped her reins, and her horse snorted as it began to trot toward the shadow snaking across the plain.
Raphael gathered his reins, but did not immediately follow. She hadn’t answered his question, and he suspected she would pretend to have forgotten he had asked it. She had welcomed his attention, even going so far as to allow him to think that he knew her, but he wasn’t that naive. Like all of them, she wore a great deal of emotional armor.
But it wasn’t her reticence that worried him, nor whether she believed that Percival had been granted spiritual guidance. It was the possibility of such guidance that continued to confound him. If Eptor’s madness had been the Virgin’s Grace, or Francis’s insistence that God had left a mark on his flesh was true, then Percival’s vision could be true. As could Istvan’s.
Ragnarok, he thought. Yggdrasil.
He thought of Damietta, and the zeal with which Pelagius, the legate, had seized upon the idea of having Eptor’s madness interpreted as prophecy. What were the Crusades but zealous men striving to realize some vision they thought they had been given? Pelagius had invented a myth to convince the army to march on Cairo; the Crusaders had been slaughtered because of his lie.
Feronantus had been listening to Istvan, and Raphael wondered again what the old knight had heard in the other’s mad mutterings. Feronantus had been at Tyrshammar a long time. What stories had he heard from the children of the Varangians?
And had he come to believe those stories?
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Cantate Domino Canticum Novum
The custom, as old as the Church herself, was that the names would be announced by the most senior Cardinal. He would draw the names from the chalice, one by one, and read each aloud to the assembled host of Cardinals. He would then hand the slip to his assistant, the second-oldest Cardinal, who would repeat the name. Finally, using a needle, the slip would be strung on a red thread that had been prepared by younger priests and left in the room the night before.
Bundled together on the red threads, the first three had been inscribed with Bonaventura. This came as no surprise, although based on his unexpected standoff with Senator Orsini the day before, the collective assumption was that Castiglione would be getting most of the remaining votes.
When Cardinal Torres read the name on the fourth strip—Father Rodrigo Bendrito—Fieschi noted the reaction of several of the Cardinals. Gloating quietly, they glanced around at the others as if to say, “Ha! Take that!” There was, briefly, an air of repressed amusement in the room.
But when the fifth strip also contained Father Rodrigo’s name, the Cardinals looked startled, glancing almost guiltily at each other. Fieschi raised his hand casually to cover the smile he couldn’t quite suppress. Their expressions were only going to grow more pronounced over the next few minutes.