Keeping Faith

It was, as bad writers would have it, a dark and stormy night.

The night deserved the city. It was just cold enough for the wind to bite and the drizzle to sting, and the low clouds gave the air a misty and ominous quality. It was a suitable night to anticipate tomorrow's auto-da-fe.

I was dressed in the robes of a priest. I called myself Father Marko Helenius, a diocesan father of Finnish origin attached to the retinue of the Bishop of Moravia. In a pouch attached to my rope belt, I carried papers that gave proof of my identity. Nevertheless, I was a stranger to this world, and to this faith. My name is Meyer Kaplan.

That name is not an unusual one in the Province of New York, which maintained open immigration even during the worst eras of nativism in the Kingdom of America. Nevertheless, it is an unusual name in the Kingdom - and it would be unheard-of here, where the Inquisition ruled with a ferocity that it had never even approached in my world. That was one reason I should not be here.

There are other reasons. I am seventy-one years old, and I should be retired, sitting with a book and a cup of coffee in front of the fireplace. Certainly Sarah would rather I stayed home and far away from the dangers of other Earths. Nevertheless, something had called to me after my world first made contact with the ITA, and there was finally something for a history professor to do besides teach history.

This was the sixth time in two years that I had left my own world. Still, this was somehow different. The other times had been second-contact or survey missions, where there was no danger worse than accidental insult. This was a rescue, and lives were in the balance.

The Kingdom of America has always made room for refugees, and Queen Marie-Claire saw no reason to distinguish between refugees from other nations and those from other Earths. Any person fleeing oppression can find a home in my kingdom. Sometimes, the Crown has even hastened the process. Such as now.

In a fortress less than a mile from where I stood in the rain, Diego de Landa was imprisoned. He was a poet, possibly the greatest of this or any other Spain. The Inquisition, however, was concerned less with the preservation of poetry than with other things, and it had condemned him for heresy. Tomorrow, at the auto-da-fe, he would be burned at the stake.

But the Inquisitors were not the only ones who had read de Landa's verse. So had Queen Marie-Claire - and so had a literary agent on the Marketplace, who saw a potential for profit in his works. Thus it was that I had been contacted by agents of the Crown and offered, in addition to patriotic satisfaction, a handsome fee with payment guaranteed to Sarah if I did not come back. To be sure, I am well off, and would not have taken on this mission simply for money. But I would never refuse my Queen, and it is no harm if I can become rich in the process.

And besides, it was a chance to strike back, to get at least a slight measure of revenge for all that the Inquisition had done to my people. Admittedly, those who had died on my world were the weak ones, who had preferred to hide their faith rather than go into exile, but they were still Jews. And on this world, the Inquisitors had done immeasurably more.

So I was here, with two of my hired men, come to escort Diego de Landa to freedom. To my left, in the dress of a man at arms, was Sebastian Ybarra. He was from Virginia, the colony of the Virgin Mary, in a world where North America had been settled by monastic orders. As a member of the Church of Mary Mediator, he would be considered a dangerous heretic by the rulers of this Earth. But church Latin was a living language on his world, and he spoke it better than any of us.

To my right was John Callender. He was also a professor, an American from one of the worlds where the English had won the Seven Years' War. His field was the medieval Church, and he was the only one of us who had been here before. He walked slightly ahead of us, leading us through the city to the Inquisitors' fortress.

The other members of the extraction team had been here for a week. They were the Bishop of Moravia and his retinue, here in Seville to witness the great auto-da-fe. As a foreign delegation, any accents which remained in our Latin would be less suspicious, and our identities would be impossible to check during the time in which we would be here. Moreover, we had researched the backgrounds of the local clergymen very carefully, and constructed our fictitious careers to avoid cities which they had visited.

The fortress suddenly loomed ahead of us in the fog, torches and guardsmen framing an iron gate. The sergeant of the watch stepped forward and challenged us, requesting the watchword. "Honorius," replied Ybarra.

We waited in the darkness. A lavish gift to a member of the local Bishop's staff had purchased the night's watchword for us. If he had been wrong, or if he had tricked us... but the guard stood aside, to let us in.

Callender stepped forward. "Take us to see the prisoner de Landa," he demanded. "The Bishop of Moravia wishes to interrogate him before tomorrow's auto."

The sergeant shook his head, a gesture that had the same meaning on this world as on my own. "We have orders," he said. "Nobody sees the prisoners."

"We also have orders," I replied. "Where do your orders come from?"

"From the commander of the watch," he said.

"Ours come from the Bishop of Moravia," I answered. "If you like, I can wake him and bring him here to command you in person. But he would not be pleased."

For the second time, our fate hung in the balance. But then the guard's resistance crumbled. He had seen the Bishop of Moravia, as everyone in Seville had during the past week, and we were here while the commander was not. Immediate orders took precedence over standing ones, and he nodded his head and motioned us inside.

One of his men picked up a torch from a nearby sconce and led us down into the citadel. As he opened the door, I could not hide my reaction to the smell within. I had heard of the conditions inside the Inquisition's fortress, of course, but it is one thing to hear and another to experience. It is the difference, if you will, between being a professor of history and a participant.

Fortunately, my reaction did not seem to be an uncommon one among priests as well as professors, because the guard laughed and slapped me on the back. "It's not so bad, Father," he told me. "And at least you get to come back out."

Yes, at least.

The walk down into the dungeons of the citadel took no more than ten minutes. At last the guard stopped at a door and thumbed through his key ring. The door creaked open at his push, and a prisoner inside stirred and blinked at the torchlight.

"Get up, you," said the guard. "You're an important man today. The Bishop of Moravia wants to talk to you." He took another key and unfastened the rusty chain that bound the prisoner to the floor. As he did so I studied the prisoner's face, and nodded a silent signal to my companions that this was the right man.

The guard hauled de Landa up roughly and brought him out to us. Ybarra took hold of him and marched him up the hallway after the guard. The prisoner looked vaguely puzzled, but walked with us in resigned acceptance. He did not know that he was being released; there had been no safe way to warn him before tonight.

We reached the top of the stairs, and the guard closed the door and rejoined his sergeant. "See, Father?" he said to me. "That's over with, and you're none the worse." He laughed again.

"When will you bring him back?" asked the sergeant.

"In three hours," I answered. That was more than enough time. In three hours the city would be roused looking for us, but in three hours we would be far away. Worlds away.

We walked away from the fortress into the fog, in the direction the guards expected us to go. After four blocks we turned onto a side street, and doubled back into the city's poorer quarters. In twenty minutes we reached a crumbling stone house which gave every appearance of having been abandoned for centuries. Callender detached himself from us and opened the door.

A spark of curiosity appeared at last on de Landa's face. "Surely the bishop doesn't live here," he whispered.

"We did not come from the bishop," I said. "We are here to take you to safety. Stay with us and you will come to no harm."

He may have understood, or he may not, but he accepted.

Vaino Pietarinen was waiting inside. "The others are already through," he said. "They came in fifteen minutes ago." The Bishop of Moravia and his men had made it home safely.

And now we did the same. The three of us and de Landa followed Pietarinen into the interior of the house where the Gridney had been set up. The Gridney was an unearthly contraption even to me, with its incomprehensible web of gears, cables, cogs and wheels - and I had traveled this way before. I could only imagine how it had seemed to de Landa, especially since the stone floor of the house was replaced within the Gridney's circle by the forest soil of my world. Then again, the poet came from a world that believed in sorcery; maybe the Gridney made perfect sense to him.

There was no time to ask. Ybarra whispered something, unheard, to de Landa; that was all the warning we could give him before Pietarinen threw the switch.

The Gridney began to spin up, the low harmonic hum of its operation giving yet more credence to the theory that it was a sorcerous device. It began to twist upon itself, metal warping into impossible shapes and consistencies. Pietarinen carefully adjusted dials, opened valves and pulled levers, fine-tuning his instrument. The outside world vanished into a shimmering silver dome. We were in transit between worlds.

Pietarinen continued to correct our course, while de Landa looked on in astonishment at what had become of his world. He whispered something that I could not understand, and then uttered a fervent Lord's Prayer. Pietarinen smiled, then pushed another lever. The harmonics rose in pitch...

And then we were no longer in the silver dome, but in a forest near a dirt road with a car waiting. De Landa's legs would not carry him; Ybarra got him into the car. "You're safe now," I heard him say. "There has been no Inquisition in this world for more than two hundred years."

We drove away, Pietarinen and the others to their hotel in the city, I to my home in Queens. De Landa got out of the car with me; he would stay at my house until the Crown's agents came to make him an honored guest of the Kingdom.

When I opened the door it was two in the morning. I turned on the light, and found de Landa a seat by the table. Sarah was downstairs in her nightgown; she had not gone to sleep, and she had coffee waiting. She poured for de Landa and me, kissed me, and went upstairs to bed. The smell of the coffee was unfamiliar to de Landa, but when he saw me drinking he drank it anyway.

Despite the coffee, I was suddenly tired, the long day over. I put the cup down, closed my eyes, and uttered a prayer. "Shema Yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai ehad." Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.

De Landa was a learned man. He recognized the words. And despite being a heretic and a humanist, he was still a Catholic. He spoke the first words I had heard him say in this world.

"I will say a prayer for your soul," he said.