Palais des Papes Conclave Hall

Chapter 4 ~ Holy See Conspiracy | Grotesque ~ A Gothic Epic | G.E. Graven

City of Avignon - May, 1347

The afternoon air hung thick with the smell of rain; the western sky lay black. Cardinal Lean arrived in Avignon, from England, blustering into the courtyard of Chateau Mallow in a heavily guarded carriage. Dust churned from the assemblege’s stride only to swallowed up by whirling dust clouds that gathered from an encroaching storm. As the coach neared the entrance, Lean sat forward, peered out of a window, and discovered that some members of his advance guard wandered about dazedly.

Lean’s escort captain spurred his steed forward whilst scolding his shambled guards, "Stand to attention! Stand!" None heeded his command. The captain reigned in his horse and grabbed the nearest one. "Sergeant! What goes on here? Explain this - at once! Answer me now!" The sergeant looked up groggily, as though swooning in a drunken state - his eyes unfocused, his mouth struggling to form words.

"Enough of this ridiculous charade!" thundered the cardinal. Lean bolted from the carriage, holding a hand on his wide-brimmed hat as he tipped it against the wind. The captain and three other escort guards joined the Cardinal and Lean’s party entered the chateau. Upstairs, the noise of a steady hum intensified as they neared Cardinal Basiliste’s bedchamber. They swept into the room and froze. Several of them moaned and averted their gaze. Cardinal Lean pulled out a handkerchief and covered his nose and mouth as a guard ran to the open window and retched.

Before Lean, a black and bloated Basiliste lay in bed whilst his face entertained a clinging mass of yellow jackets. The insects streamed back and forth through the open window, lugging stung maggots away from the hollows of his head. The dead cardinal was none the more concerned, as he lay rigid and putrid, his eyes drying upon the floor like a pair of dirty coins.

However, Lean was not a man to dote upon such intricacies. He examined the room, his eyes coming to rest upon the parchment leaf lying on the desk, and stepped forward in haste to inspect it. Lean lifted the parchment of the cardinal’s last words, which were addressed to him. Shortly after, the party exited the chateau as hastily as they entered. Lean scanned the letter as he marched. "The Apocrypha! Rush like the wind!" he growled whilst ducking into the coach. "Mount, at once!" the captain bellowed to his guards as he leapt into the saddle. Men hurried for their steeds. The captain spurred his mount to the head of the party. The carriage lurched and catapulted forward. Lean tore his eyes away from the letter and shuddered. With a charging army of twenty-four troops, the cardinal rode west over the Rhone River Bridge, away from Avignon, toward the Apocrypha and toward a monstrous thunderhead swallowing up the horizon. Lean’s attention, however, was consumed with his grave responsibility to the Council of the Apocrypha - and to Pope Clement, who remained ignorant of all matters concerning the Council.

With Cardinals Xavier and Basiliste murdered, Lean was the last surviving Upper Councilman. Everything that the Council kept cloistered for nearly five centuries now rested on his shoulder. And though canonical law decreed that the Vicar of Christ - the ruling pope - was the highest ranking member of the council, Lean knew that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to approach Clement directly. Previously, as a cardinal, Clement had argued fervently against any proposition to which, in his eyes, stood to strengthen the position of the Council of the Apocrypha. Clement had always felt that the Council undermined the authority of the College of Cardinals. Lean entertained no hope that the man had changed his colors after becoming the ruling pope. Nevertheless, he was determined to secure a visitation with Clement even by force, if necessary. And if it came to that, he was prepared to justify such act of insubordination by doing something that had never been done before in the history of the Apocrypha Council - by removing the evidence from the archive of the Apocrypha and presenting it directly to Clement in person.

Lean and Clement were opposites in their character; they clashed. Both knew it. Lean was a man of few words: modest, apprehensive, and sincere. Clement was tactless and impatient, enjoying the luxury and social lifestyle; as pontiff, his demeanor was more that of the debonair monarch than the austere messenger of God. When conversations between them did occur, they were formal, brief, and largely uneventful. In the four years since the advent of Clement’s ascension, Cardinal Basiliste had approached the pontiff repeatedly regarding matters of the Apocrypha. Each time, he had been refused an audience on the grounds that, other, more urgent matters demanded Clement’s immediate attention, such as new palace construction, affairs of state, finances and taxation. Clement had neglected to appoint new members to the Upper Council, even after the death of Cardinal Basiliste, and his inaction had caused the once-powerful body to wane, on his part almost certainly deliberate neglectfulness. Yet, Lean now had little choice but to force himself on Clement and remind him of his responsibility to the age-old body of the Council of the Apocrypha.

The Council’s Apocrypha Archive had been constructed in 1334 by order of Pope Benedict XII, who, despite voicing aspirations to return the papacy to Rome, removed all papal records from the Vatican to the new stronghold in France. The tomblike building lay in the vast, damp valley of the Rhone, surrounded on three sides by steep ravines that lay shrouded in second-growth woods and thorny brush. To the East, the ramparts of Avignon towered over the river valley gorge, yet just to the west, the grandeur of the city dwindled ~ along with its stench.

Less than an hour elapsed before the heavily guarded coach, bearing the seal of the Church of Rome, labored up a steep, rutted path, screened by tall stands of evergreens. The stone battlements that rose darkly beyond the trees had an equal shade of black as the sky behind them. The sky thickened as floating ash; the winds reversed and turned to ice. Flashes; thunder - in only moments, fat raindrops paved a way for torrential rains. Lean’s entourage struggled up the narrow mudslide of a road, with several dismounted and mud-caked guards pressing against the back of the carriage in combined effort to urge it forward. They heaved it out of puddles; onward, inch by inch, foot by foot. Lightning illuminated the road ahead whilst outlining the ever-looming silhouette of the Apocrypha.

No window interrupted the stony exterior of the imposing block fortress. Its single entrance was attended, day and night, by watches of Council guards, men hand-picked by the Upper Council for their strength of body and will, and unwavering loyalty. Even the rigid protocol of King Philip’s Royal Guard was lacking by comparison. Within those guarded walls lay words of scripture known but to few living men ~ from the complete once-scriptural books of Enoch, Jubilees, Giants, Solomon and others, to ancient scrolls written in tongues not heard on earth in a thousand years. And from artifacts of the long-destroyed Grecian Library of Alexandria to Assyrian clay cylinders that detailed the years following the Great Flood and confiscated from Jewish temples in the earliest crusades, the Apocrypha’s archives held all the existing secrets of the Church, and held it close.