The Psalter Read online

  “You thought of making a, how did you put it, secret archive to house these banned books…only for an historical record, of course.” Anastasius spoke with feigned scorn. “Hence, you need to buy animal skins to replace the scrolls you would put into a secret archive.”

  “Yes.”

  Anastasius appeared to ponder the notion. “You’re not the first to contemplate such an idea. At your age, I told my old mentor, Father Paulus, I wanted to create a hall of blasphemy. He told me that in his youth he had made the same request of his primicerius. He didn’t allow it of me, so I submitted to what he believed was for the good of the church, although I always regretted it. In truth, Johannes Anglicus, I believe through you, I might be able to right a wrong.”

  “You mean to say…”

  “Yes, I give my permission.”

  Johannes leapt out of his chair in jubilation.

  “Sit down and listen well.” Anastasius was stern. Johannes took his seat, leaning on the edge of the desk, focused on his master’s face. “It’s a dangerous game you play. We’re already mistrusted by most, and I was serious when I told you we are watched and now you know why. Find somewhere hidden where you can store the scrolls. I would search for a place outside the city. The building must be dry and well protected. Most of all, tell no one.”

  “I won’t say a thing except to my assistant, and he can scarcely read.” Johannes giggled in glee at their academic conspiracy.

  “You mean Baraldus?”

  “Yes.”

  “Umm, he’s a good man. Keep him close. He was a soldier once, a captain, quite heroic if a little overbearing. A rather unlikely person to become a priest, but just the one to have at your side in a pinch.” The Library primicerius added, “The scripture you were reading…?”

  “Yes?”

  “I call it the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. The pages were missing when I studied the book years ago. I’m glad you found it. I couldn’t destroy it either.”

  14

  Silver Hammer

  The 26th day of Ianuarius in the Year of Our Lord 844

  January

  Johannes stared in disbelief at mountains of scrolls, books, and codices piled around the Altar of the Confession, erected over Saint Peter’s holy tomb. Mounds of documents surrounded the altar, divided by pathways like pie cuts to allow access to pilgrims and priests. “Thank the Lord, Anastasius sent you,” the old priest said. “We have nowhere to put anything else.”

  The archive secundarius lifted a codex from one of the mounds and opened the leather cover. The dusty pages recounted Pope Stephen’s Synod of 764 that ended traditional papal elections by Rome’s citizens, giving the church a monopoly in naming the Pope. Then Johannes opened a small scroll and read a newly appointed bishop’s oath, promising to follow the rules of his diocese—at least, he was newly appointed in the year 609. He skimmed fragments of various documents pulled from the pile: confessions, professions of faith, vows that promised loyalty to a certain pope, as well as vile oaths cursing another. Unfolding a large parchment page, he found a deed to the property of a Duke that had been donated as payment for an indulgence, the price paid for forgiveness of an unnamed sin. Johannes thought such a sin must have been great indeed. “Is there a catalog of what’s here?” he asked the old priest who stood by.

  The frail stick of a priest, Linus, shrugged his shoulders. “No. I’m one of the mansionarii, sextons of the basilica. We guard Saint Peter’s treasures and vestments, but we have no time nor can we fathom what to do with this…stockpile of parchment. They arrive daily, clerics, penitents, kings, and even His Holiness, adding more writings to the mound. These souls have their own reasons that God should bear witness to their words, so they place them at the Altar. Perhaps they feel closest to Him on this sacred spot, but what do we do with all this? And there’s more.”

  “More?”

  The old cleric, wobbly on spindly legs, led Johannes down narrow, stone steps into the grotto beneath the altar. The secundarius made the sign of the cross as he spied the tombs of popes past who, though now in eternal repose, had once reigned over the Holy Church. Papers lay scattered across the cold stone floor, and several sarcophagi overflowed with the unmanageable sea of historical records. Johannes’ mouth gaped.

  “Fear not, Brother,” Linus said. “The tombs were empty before I made use of them. Some of the remains were moved to the basilica atrium and others to churches or the catacombs of Saint Callixtus.”

  Stout Baraldus slid the heavy oak desk against the chilly grotto wall. The thick legs scraped the pavement stone, upsetting the sanctified silence. The acolyte who helped him made the sign of the cross, goosebumps dotting his pasty arms, and sprinted back up the steps. Johannes set his oil lamp on the desk and pulled up a backless chair. “I shall need a brazier to keep the chill off.”

  “It’s not a fit place for you to work, Brother. There’s no window, and your poor lamp provides scarcely enough light to read. Besides, the cavern makes my flesh crawl.” Baraldus shivered.

  “After all the stories you told me of fierce battles against merciless Vikings and outnumbered by dark-skinned Saracens, don’t tell me you’re afraid?”

  “Those were mere mortals and the worst I would have suffered was my miserable death, which I likely deserved. Yet here among the dead, demons and all manner of spirits might be lurking. I fear for my immortal soul.”

  “My friend,” Johannes was sympathetic to his superstitious nature, “if spirits are indeed with us in this chamber, they’re the souls of saints and martyrs and popes who followed in the shoes of the fisherman. No evil can enter this holy place.”

  “Well, maybe that’s worse,” the hefty priest said. “It makes me feel transparent, as if they’re looking right through me.”

  “Does your soul have anything to fear?”

  Baraldus hesitated, then stammered, “I…I’ve committed many sins for which I’m aggrieved. It’s as though someone watches and can see my past crimes.”

  “Someday, we shall each of us stand before our Lord, reminded of our transgressions, and they will be forgiven.”

  “I just don’t want to be reminded today, thank you very much. Besides, in your young life, I’ll wager you have little to confess.”

  The secundarius picked up a document and examined the words. The abbess of a nearby convent had written a curse condemning Pope Stephen II after his election. Johannes shivered. He remembered tales whispered around the patriarchum that after his ascension to the papacy, Stephen suffered a fit of apoplexy. There were rumors of poison delivered by an assassin, sent at the behest of one of the noble families who had opposed him. He died a few days later. His was the shortest papacy in history. Perhaps Baraldus’ fear of ghosts and demons wasn’t so farfetched, after all. Without raising his head Johannes answered the Lombard, “I, too, have my fair share to confess, Brother. Now, go back to the scrinium. I need a large book of blank pages, the largest you can find. We must record every scroll, book, and document before they’re moved.” Johannes studied the texts with care to summarize their contents and list them in his register. He saved a column at the end to note where each one had been stored, but where to put everything? Johannes needed a building, or at the least some sizeable rooms—and lots of them.

  Rome was littered with thousands of empty mansions, temples, and villas, but these had been abandoned for centuries and lay in ruins. In the second century, Rome had been the largest city in the world, with a population of a million and a half. But with barbarian invasions and the plague, only about twenty thousand souls remained. Most of the noble families and skilled workers had moved to the new capital of the empire, Constantinople, or the ruling capital of the Italian kingdom, Ravenna. Peasants fled to the country to farm a subsistence living, leaving most of the city deserted. Rome had become a delinquent backwater.

  To make matters worse, the government sanctioned spoliation: the plundering of buildings, particularly pagan temples, for new construction. Much of Rome was de
relict and dangerous. Johannes needed a building in good repair near commerce or a large church. The Vatican was on the far side of the Tiber, outside the city, far from the populace and away from the wreckage.

  Johannes finished his daily work cataloguing documents. His eyes were red and bleary from the strain of reading and smoke from the lamp. He climbed out of the grotto and plodded past the ostiarius, the basilica’s doorkeeper. A light shower blown by a winter wind struck his face, waking him from his work-induced stupor. He pulled the hood down over his brow and wrapped his frayed brown shawl around as he started down the muddy road to the Papal Palace on the other side of Rome. He had scarcely gone two hundred paces when lofty notes from a hymn reached his ears on rain-soaked gusts. Light from an open door leaked onto the road ahead.

  He peered into a finely plastered room adorned with intricate mosaics and radiant frescoes. A middle-aged, round priest extended his arms wide and pointed his gaping mouth at the ceiling. A bronze-skinned slave boy held a sheet of music in his two small hands raised over his head. Johannes recognized the Archpriest, Pietro di Porca. He had no desire to speak with him and spun on his heels, but before he managed to flee unnoticed, his name echoed off cavernous walls.

  “Oh Brother Johannes.”

  He turned toward the lump of a priest with gray tonsured hair, waiving from the other side of the room. There would be no escape. “Why, Cardinal di Porca,” he greeted the richly dressed priest and trotted across the chill stone floor. “I didn’t wish to interrupt your beautiful singing.”

  “I’m practicing a new hymn. What do you think? I wrote it myself.”

  Johannes was taken aback. He had no idea the Archpriest knew who he was. “I don’t know music well.” That was a lie. He loved music, especially theory, which he had studied as a student in Athens. He found Greek harmonies more melodious and their rhythms livelier than the somber, single-voice hymns sung in Gregorian chants. “Your singing is magnificent, Cardinal di Porca.”

  “What do you think of the composition?”

  “Well…I only listened to a few lines. I’m not sure…”

  “Here, let me perform the whole piece for you. Take a meat pastie and sit, sit.”

  The archive secundarius sat on a cushioned stool beside a table. A plate of small pies lay next to an ewer of aromatic wine. Thinking of Pietro’s nickname, Hogsmouth, the young priest willed his lips not to smile.

  The Archpriest began the hymn in a soft voice that wept with emotion. As the song progressed, so, too, did his volume, and Pietro’s face appeared gripped in rapture. The slave boy stole a glance at Johannes. As he did, one arm drooped, tilting the sheet of music. Hogsmouth cuffed him on the side of the head without missing a note or altering his expression. The lad snapped back to attention.

  Johannes recognized the refrain as the first line from one of the Psalms, the Beatus. Pietro had paraphrased the verse, inserting every word for beauty he could think of. Some were a stretch of the imagination and others superlatives beyond belief. The metaphors were but old clichés. In short, the composition was worse than ordinary; it was a caricature.

  “Well?” Pietro bounced up and down, more like a twittering child than a man of fifty.

  “Eminence, you have the voice of an angel.”

  “But the song, what do you think?”

  “It is….” Johannes put his hand

  on his chin as he searched for a diplomatic answer.

  “Oh come on, out with it.”

  “Um, quite poignant.”

  “I just knew it. My nephew hates my songs, but he’s a cretin. Even the priests in the schola cantorum don’t like them. But with praise from a scholar with your reputation, I shall ask if I can sing the new hymn at Vespers.”

  Johannes had stuck his foot in it. “Perhaps I shouldn’t mention this…?”

  “Yes, yes?”

  “Well, do you think the governing priests are ready for a work of such…sophistication?” Johannes glimpsed a derisive smirk on the slave boy’s lips.

  Pietro di Porca seemed to reflect.

  “I hate to sound snobbish, but a gifted ear cannot be found in the bunch.”

  “Right you are, Brother,” Pietro said. “I offer many of my own hymns, but they seldom deign to let me perform them. Everyone loves to hear me sing, but, alas, not my songs.”

  “Why don’t I accompany you?”

  Pietro’s eyes narrowed. “Can you sing?”

  “Of course, Eminence.”

  The portly cardinal began to vocalize in his high voice. Johannes joined in, but sang his own notes a third higher than the melody, forming a harmony.

  After the first line, Pietro stopped abruptly. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m singing.”

  “Don’t take me for a simpleton. It’s obvious you’re singing, but I’ve never heard such sounds.”

  Johannes smiled knowingly. “It’s called harmony. I learned the technique in Athens. It’s quite a different sound than chanting in one voice.”

  Sergius was atwitter with excitement, hopping up and down, his belly rolling underneath his robes. “Can you teach me?”

  “Of course. The church is slow to change and their ears are dull, but with harmony, you would show our brethren something new. I only added a second tone, but a third might be added as well.”

  The corpulent cardinal was beside himself. “Rome has never heard such music. My songs will be the talk of all society, even in the patriarchum!”

  “Surely music masters will recognize your work for its…innovation. I can also show you which notes make harmonies and how to create them. You could even archive your compositions.”

  “Of course, a music archive featuring my own hymns; why didn’t I think of it? I could compose my own manuscripts and the finest illuminators would illustrate them.” Hogsmouth pursed his lips in a pout. “Would I have to put my music in that dreary library beneath the Lateran Palace?”

  “In truth, Cardinal, that’s why I’ve come: to inquire whether you might have any rooms available for an archive.”

  Hogsmouth beamed. “You wish to make a music archive for me, here in the scola cantorum?”

  “Not exactly, I mean, yes. I need space for the documents stored in Saint Peter’s. Now that you mention it, I could design a place for your music collection at the same time. In fact, a music archive added to the other works would be the beginning of a real library.”

  Pietro di Porca clapped his hands with glee. “We’d hold poetry readings and concerts, and scholars from around the world could study music like in Athens or even Constantinople.” The fat Archpriest arched his sparse eyebrows, “Oh, I love this old place. I was raised here, you know?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, yes. Pope Leo chose me to be an acolyte in this very mansion when I was a boy. I have so many fond memories of the place and to think that this beautiful old building might be a library. Oh, Johannes, you’ve made me so happy. You’re the only one in Rome who understands what I want to create.” Pietro grabbed the boy and held him close. Rolls of soft, flabby flesh pressed against Johannes’ small frame and made his skin crawl. He wondered how to push away from the groping Archpriest without offending him when the peal of a single bell split the evening silence. Pietro recoiled as though God had shaken him with divine hands. Johannes recognized the bell from the basilica of Saint John’s Lateran. Another bell from a nearby church tolled, and yet another replied. Clanging resounded all over the city.

  “Why would they ring the bells at this hour?” Johannes asked. “Something must be wrong.”

  Cardinal di Porca buried his round face in pudgy hands. “I know not!”

  Johannes ran from the schola cantorum into the gloomy darkness, leaping across pools of water in the Vatican countryside, the hem of his robe clutched in his fists. Past the ruined Hadrian’s tomb sacked four hundred years earlier by the Visigoth Alaric, he fled over the Sant’Angelo bridge and crossed into Rome.

  The defenseless wisp of a prie
st should have picked a safer path to the patriarchum as Baraldus had shown him, farther from the river, but the bells urged him to make haste. Instead, he followed the muddy via Maior Arenule that paralleled the Tiber. It was a dangerous, low-lying street that led straight through the Campus Martius, the field of Mars, where Rome’s proud heroes once walked. Centuries later, only the poorest souls lived their meager lives near the riverbank in the unhealthy air. Fortunately, Johannes reached the corridor between the crumbling Imperial Palace and Tiberian’s palace without incident. He lengthened his stride along the paved via Papale from the Colosseum to the patriarchum.

  Mud stained and heaving, he dashed into the scrinium. The door to Anastasius’ cell was closed. The secundarius burst into the room without knocking. Anastasius sat at his desk opposite a deacon, their heads pushed together.

  The archive primicerius bolted from his chair, but relaxed as he recognized his assistant. “Shut the door Johannes,” he said.

  “What news? Is it an attack, the Saracens?”

  “Worse, it’s the Holy Father.”

  “Gregory? Is he…”

  “Vicedominus Adrian tapped on Gregory’s head three times with the silver hammer, calling his name. His Holiness did not reply. He’s gone to his brethren.”

  Johannes’ lip quivered. He had never met the Pope, but Gregory had been God’s emissary on earth and represented everything holy.

  The man sitting across from Anastasius stood, and the primicerius introduced him. “Have you met Deacon John Hymonides?”

  The secundarius dabbed his eyes with his shawl. “No, but I’m aware of your work with the poor and I read your writings.” Turning back to Anatasius, he asked, “His Holiness was old, but seemed in good health. I had no idea he was ill.”

  “He wasn’t ill.”

  “How did he die?”

  “The vicedominus said he suffered an attack of apoplexy.”