Fieschi set his shoulders against the back of his niche to get more comfortable. He opened and closed his right hand slowly, keeping the aching paralysis of his recent exertion at bay. Quoniam fortitudo mea et refugium meum es tu, he prayed, et propter nomen tuum deduces me et enutries me.
Fieschi recalled a sermon St. Augustine had delivered on the thirty-first Psalm—in particular, a portion of the homily concerning Abraham. The patriarch was justified by the virtue of his faith; his good works came second. God is my rock and my fortress, and I am unshakeable in my faith. “Exsultabo, et laetabor in misericordia tua,” he whispered, knowing that God would hear him, “quoniam respexisti humilitatem meam; salvasti de necessitatibus animam meum.”
By destroying Somercotes, he had saved the Church. Were such trials not part of God’s love and kindness? Surely God would forgive him of his transgression.
The fire, incendiary agent of Satan, eagerly devoured the combustibles in the narrow room. It had licked the walls and found them wanting, and so it had fallen upon the dead body. Fueled by the cloth and the flesh, it had grown larger, sending out creeping tendrils of fire that wormed their way through the cracks in the walls. It was no longer a single blaze by the time Capocci approached Somercotes’s room but a string of fires, prancing with unholy glee, in a number of the tiny rooms the Cardinals had been using.
Most of the smoke came from Somercotes’s room, rolling off the huddled mass that popped and crackled as the fire joyfully burned fat and flesh off bone. Capocci ducked his head, breathing through his mouth; he knew that smell. Years ago, when he still believed in Gregory IX, he had led papal troops into Viterbo and besieged the citadel of Rispampano. The Roman troops resisted for a few days, hurling everything they could haul up to the battlements down upon his troops, including burning pitch. The screams of dying men and the smell of their burning flesh had only hardened the resolve of his soldiers.
Somercotes’s body lay curled near the center of his room. Not on his bed and not near the door—two places that Capocci would have expected to find the body had the fire been an accident. He pushed aside the inquisitive thoughts that crowed his brain, and waddled slowly into the hot room. His beard crackled as strands of his capacious whiskers began to curl and burn from the heat. Blinking heavily to clear the smoke from his eyes, he reached out with his gloved hand.
Somercotes couldn’t still be alive. The fire danced too merrily along his frame, and the crackling, sizzling sound of burning meat was so loud. And the smell... Capocci grabbed something—an elbow, perhaps—and clenched his teeth as the fire gnawed through the heavy leather of his gloves. He pulled, intending to drag the body out of the inferno, but there was no resistance and he fell back on the floor.
Clutched in his hand, covered in writhing tendrils of fire, was a spitting piece of charred meat. The entire arm.
Spitting out an oath that he would have to beg forgiveness for later, Capocci tried to hurl Somercotes’s arm away, but the fire had fused the meat to the leather of his glove. Orange tongues of flame licked at the cuff of his sleeve. Using his other hand, he stripped the glove off—both of them, in the end—and scrambling backward, he fled from the room and its grisly pyre.
Capocci leaned against the hallway wall, coughing and choking as he tried to catch his breath without inhaling the fouled air. He knew he should check the other rooms. Hopefully they were empty, but what if they weren’t? Would their occupants be any more alive than Somercotes?
He wanted to run away. He wasn’t such a prideful man that he couldn’t admit when he was afraid. Fear was a powerful emotion, and giving himself up to God meant letting go of the fear. But such a sacrifice did not make him invulnerable or fireproof.
It made him cautious.
He had to be sure, though. He had to be sure there was no one else. Only then could he listen to the voice in his head—the one that telling him that Somercotes’s death was not an accident.
Rodrigo had dreamed of a dragon once. It was sinuous and long, and covered in red and brown scales. When it roared, a great billow of black smoke issued from its mouth. There were great furnaces in its belly, stoked by infernal spirits, and in the wake of that smoke came the fire. The brilliant, burning fire.
He ran from that fire. To stand his ground would be to be burned, and while he had faith in God—while he believed that God watched over him and that God’s love was enough to protect him from any such foul denizen of Hell—another part of him was broken and fearful. That part of him fled, dragging the rest of his spirit with him. The rest of his body and mind. Running from the fire...