The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [74]
“Then is all—is everything I know a lie?” he asked.
“No,” the fratrex said. “It’s history. The question you have to ask about any version of history is, Who benefits from that version? Over the course of a thousand years—or two thousand—the interests of the powerful change often, and thus, so do the stories that hold up their thrones.”
“Then shouldn’t I be asking who benefits from your version of events?” Stephen asked, feeling a bit sharp but not caring.
“Absolutely,” the fratrex said. “But remember, there are absolute truths, things that actually happened. Genuine facts, actual bodies in the ground. Just because you’ve accepted some distortions, it doesn’t mean there’s nothing real in the world; it merely requires that you use some method to discover truth, wrestle it out of things.”
“I’ve never been so naïve as to believe every opinion I hear,” Stephen said. “There are always debates within the Church, and I’ve been among those who argued them. It isn’t merely a matter of hearing and believing but of understanding how each proposition fits with the whole. And if I’m told that something doesn’t jibe with what I know, then I question it.”
“But don’t you see? That’s just using one questionable source—or, worse, a body of them—to evaluate another. I asked you about the revolt against the Skasloi, the central fact of our history, and what did you have of substance to tell me? What sources could you refer me to? How do you know that what you’ve been told is true other than that it confirms other things you’ve been told? And what about the events of the last year? You know they happened; you witnessed some of them. Can you fit those things into what you’ve been taught?”
“The original sources from the time of the revolt have been lost,” Stephen said, trying to wave aside the larger issue with the smaller one. “We trust the sources we have because that’s all we have.”
“I see. So if you lock three people in a room with a knife and a bag of gold, and when you open the door again, two of them are dead, do you accept the witness of the third merely because his is the only testimony available?”
“It’s not the same thing.”
“It’s exactly the same thing.”
“Not when the testimony is inspired by the saints.”
“And if there are no saints?”
“Now we come full circle,” Stephen said, becoming weary. “And you still leave me with the choice of supporting a faction that tortures and sacrifices children or one that cooperates with cannibals. Are you telling me there is no middle ground between the Hierovasi and the Revesturi?”
“Yes, of course there is. There’s the largest faction of all: the ignorant.”
“Which means me.”
“Yes, until now. But you would have been approached, eventually, by one or both of the factions.”
“First you tell me all the Revesturi were slaughtered in a civil war I’ve never heard of, and now you tell me they are a powerful cabal operating in the modern Church. Well, which is it?”
“Both, of course. Most of us were slain or banished during the Sacaratum. But while you can slay men and women, it is much more difficult to slay an idea, Brother Stephen.”
“And what idea is that?” Stephen countered.
“Do you understand that name, Revesturi?”
“I presume it comes from the verb revestum, ‘to inspect.’”
“Just so. Our very simple belief is that our history, our notions, the very world around us are properly subject to our own observation. All accounts must be considered and weighed; all facts must be included in any debate.”
“That’s a rather vague mandate to die for.”
“Not when you consider the particular debates it inspires,” the fratrex said. “To debate, for instance, whether there are actually saints isn’t acceptable, is it?”
“Was that the debate that led to the civil war?”
“Not exactly. The simple fact is that that particular debate was so well suppressed that we actually don’t know what it was about. But we do know the cause of it.”
“And what might that be?”
“The journal of Virgenya Dare.”
For several seconds Stephen couldn’t think of anything