The Religion by Tim Willocks Page B

policed-with unceasing vigilance. Ludovico Ludovici stood nude and sweating in the abbot's gold-and-marble lavatorium. There he cleansed his flesh of the penetrating stench of the galley. As he did so he scrutinized himself. The quality of his mind and the elemental forces of his body made him more vulnerable than most to the abuse of power. And his power was immense. He was not only the plenipotentiary of His Holiness, Pope Pius IV, but the secret agent of Michele Ghisleri, Inquisitor General of All Christendom.
    In Ludovico's hand was a piece of coarse sacking with which he wiped his face and the vault of his skull. He dipped the sack in a barrel of fountainwater, sweetened with flowers of orange and leaves of wild betony. He could have used Red Sea sponges and soft white linens and any number of rare aromatics and balms, for these rooms had been placed at his disposal and the abbot lived in splendor, but luxury was a snare for the weak and unwary. He'd slept on stone for thirty years. He fasted, dawn till dusk, from September to Easter. He wore a goat-hair shirt on Fridays. He ate meat only twice a week, to preserve his intellect. And for all that he loved conversation, he practiced silence unless his work demanded otherwise. Mortification of the flesh was the armor of the soul.
    He wiped his neck and his shoulders. The water cooled him. He was obliged to determine the fate of two human beings. He always gave such matters the gravest analysis, and these two cases in particular weighed on his soul. Ludovico rinsed the sackcloth and wiped his arms.
    Ludovico had grown up in Naples, the richest and most vicious city in the world. Born into a family of courtier diplomats and intellectuals, he was the second son of his father and his father's first wife. He'd entered the University of Padua at the age of thirteen and joined the Dominican Order a year later. He was sent to study at Milan, where his mind won him a chair in theology and ecclesiastic law. Encouraged by his father "to seize all opportunity with shrewdness and daring," he went to Rome in his early twenties and won his doctorate in the same subjects. There he caught the eye, in turn, of both Pope Paul IV, Giovanni Carafa, and the Inquisitor General, Michele Ghisleri. It was to restore the moral purity of Italy that Carafa, in '42, had established the Holy Office of the Roman Inquisition and had thereby unleashed the purges that had kept the prisons full ever since. A young man of Ludovico's brilliance and piety was rare, and Carafa had recruited him with a brief to strike at men in high places, "for upon their punishment, the salvation of the lower orders will depend."
    In a time of dire conformism, in which the tongue up the arse was the most efficient way to prosper, original minds found few spheres in which to flourish. To Ludovico, the Inquisition was just such a realm. He was honored to be an inquisitor. Terror and Faith were its tools, but in his view the Black Legend was false. A tiny handful of executions, inflicted with due diligence on the deviant, and with every juridical right of the condemned rigorously observed, had prevented the deaths of many hundredsof thousands. These figures were not in dispute. Luther had played midwife to a Devil's Era, in which Christian slaughtered Christian in monstrous numbers not for land or power but simply because each was Christian. It was a paradox-an absurdity-that Lucifer alone could have designed. The obscene and constipated monk had drenched the whole of Germany in blood, and that more horror was to come was scorched across the map in letters of fire. In France the carnage had only just begun, at Vassy and Dreux. The Low Countries were a dank pool of Anabaptism. Heresiarchs sat on the thrones of England and Navarre.
    Only in Spain and Italy were people free from being slaughtered by their own countrymen. In Spain and Italy the Holy Office had strangled the Lutheran viper at its birth. The campaign in northern Italy to