Pope Joan_ A Novel - Donna Woolfolk Cross [211]
The light grew stronger. Smilingly she went toward it as the sounds and colors of the world dimmed into invisibility, like the moon with the coming of dawn.
Epilogue
Forty-two Years Later
ANASTASIUS sat at his desk in the Lateran scriptorium, writing a letter. His hands, stiff and arthritic with age, ached with every stroke of the quill. Despite the pain, he went on writing. The letter was extremely urgent and had to be dispatched at once.
“To His Imperial Majesty the most worshipful Emperor Arnulf,” he scrawled.
Lothar was long dead, having died only a few months after leaving Rome. His throne had gone first to his son Louis II, and then, after his death, to Lothar’s nephew Charles the Fat, both weak and undistinguished rulers. With the death of Charles the Fat in 888, the Carolingian line begun by the great Karolus—or Charlemagne, as he was now widely known—had come to an end. Arnulf, Duke of Carinthia, had managed to wrest the imperial throne from a host of challengers. On the whole, Anastasius thought the change in succession a good one. Arnulf was smarter than Lothar, and stronger. Anastasius was counting on that. For something had to be done about Pope Stephen.
Just last month, to the horror and scandal of all Rome, Stephen had ordered the body of his predecessor Pope Formosus dragged from its grave and brought to the Patriarchium. Propping the corpse up in a chair, Stephen had presided over a mock “trial,” heaped calumnies upon it and finished by cutting off three fingers of its right hand, the ones used to bestow the papal blessing, in punishment for Formosus’s “confessed” crimes.
“I appeal to Your Majesty,” Anastasius wrote, “to come to Rome and put an end to the Pope’s excesses, which are the scandal of all Christendom.”
A sudden cramp in Anastasius’s hand shook the quill, scattering droplets of ink over the clean parchment. Cursing, Anastasius blotted up the spilled ink, then put down the quill and stretched his fingers, rubbing them to ease the pain.
Odd, he reflected with grim irony, that a man such as Stephen should succeed to the papacy when I, so perfectly suited to the office by every qualification of birth and learning, was denied it.
He had come close, so close to gaining the coveted prize. After the shocking revelation and death of the female Pope, Anastasius had occupied the Patriarchium, claiming the throne for himself with Emperor Lothar’s blessing.
What might he not have accomplished had he remained on the throne! But it was not to be. A small but influential group of clerics had adamantly opposed him. For several months, the issue of the papal succession had been hotly debated, with first one side, then the other appearing to prevail. In the end, persuaded that a substantial group of Romans would never be reconciled to Anastasius as Pope, Lothar chose the expedient course and withdrew his support. Anastasius was deposed and sent in ignominy to the monastery of Trastevere.
They all thought I was finished then, Anastasius thought. But they underestimated me.
With patience, skill, and diplomacy, he had fought his way back, eventually winning the confidence of Pope Nicholas. Nicholas had raised him to the office of papal librarian, a position of power and privilege he had held for over thirty years.
Having reached the extraordinary age of eighty-seven, Anastasius was now revered and respected, universally praised for his great learning. Scholars and churchmen from all over the world came to Rome to meet him and to admire his masterwork, the Liber pontificalis, the official chronicle of the Popes. Just last month a Frankish archbishop by the name of Arnaldo had asked permission to make a copy of the manuscript for his cathedral, and Anastasius had graciously agreed.
The Liber pontificalis was Anastasius’s bid for immortality, his legacy to the world. It was also his final revenge upon his detested rival, the person whose election on that black day in 853 had denied him the glory for which he had been destined. Anastasius obliterated Pope