Pope Joan_ A Novel - Donna Woolfolk Cross [163]
The drinking had a predictable effect: his gout returned with a vengeance; to ease the pain, he drank even more. He slept badly. Night after night he woke screaming, tormented by nightmarish dreams in which he was visited by the vengeful specter of Benedict. Joan feared the strain this was putting on his already weakened heart.
“Remember the penance to which you agreed,” she reminded him.
“It doesn’t matter now,” Sergius replied despondently. “I have no hope of Heaven. God has abandoned me.”
“You must not blame yourself for what happened. Some things are beyond all mortal power to remedy or prevent.”
Sergius shook his head. “The soul of my murdered brother cries out against me! I have sinned, and this is my punishment.”
“If you will not think of yourself,” Joan argued, “think of the people! Now, more than ever, they look to you for consolation and guidance.”
She said it to hearten him, but the truth was otherwise. The people had turned against Sergius. There had been sufficient warning of the Saracens’ approach, they said, plenty of time for the Lord Pope to have transported the holy sarcophagus inside the walls. Sergius’s faith in God’s deliverance, which at the time had been universally praised, was now universally condemned as the result of a sinful and disastrously mistaken pride.
“Mea culpa,” Sergius responded, weeping. “Mea maxima culpa.”
Joan reasoned and scolded and cajoled, to no avail. Sergius’s health deteriorated rapidly. Joan did everything she could for him, but it was no use. Sergius had set his mind on death.
Nevertheless, the dying took some time. Long after reason had departed and he had lapsed into unconsciousness, Sergius lingered, his body reluctant to relinquish the final spark of life. On a dark and sunless morning he finally died, his spirit slipping away so quietly that at first no one noticed the passing.
Joan genuinely mourned him. He had not been as good a man or a Pope as he might have been. But she had known, better than anyone else, what demons he had faced, had known how hard he had fought to free himself from them. That he had lost the fight in the end made the struggle no less honorable.
He was buried in the damaged basilica beside his predecessors, with a minimum of ceremony that bordered on the scandalous. The required days of mourning were barely observed, for the Romans had already turned their minds impatiently toward the future—and the election of a new Pope.
ANASTASIUS stepped out of the blustering January winds into the welcoming warmth of his family’s ancestral palace. It was the grandest residence in all of Rome, save of course the Patriarchium, and Anastasius was justly proud of it. The vaulted ceiling of the reception hall rose over two stories and was constructed of pure white marble from Ravenna. Its walls were painted with brightly colored frescoes of scenes from the lives of the family ancestors. One depicted a consul making a speech before the Senate; another a general seated on a black charger, rallying the troops; still another a cardinal receiving the pallium from Pope Hadrian. A panel of the front wall had been left blank in anticipation of the long-awaited day when the family would finally achieve its greatest honor: the coronation of one of its sons as Pope.
Usually the hall was the scene of bustling activity. Today, but for the presence of the family steward, it stood empty. Scorning to acknowledge the steward’s effusive greeting—for Anastasius never wasted time on underlings—he went directly to his father’s room. Arsenius would normally have been in the great hall at this hour, engaged with the city’s notables in the devious and gratifying politics of power. But last month he had been stricken by a wasting fever that had drained his formidable energies, confining him to his room.
“My son.” Arsenius rose from his couch at Anastasius