Free Raptor by Gary Jennings Page B

moment before I said, “Another thing, Nonnus Clement. That warning you speak every Sunday—about the people taking care not to let the consecrated bread be eaten by a person not a Catholic Christian. Are you speaking of woefully errant Christians? Or merely tepid Christians?”
    He gave me a long, appraising look, and at last said, “They are not Catholic Christians at all. They are Arians.”
    He said it quietly, but I was inexpressibly shocked. Remember, during all my life I had been taught to hate and condemn the Arianism of the Goths. And I had let myself learn well that hatred and contempt, not so much for the Goths themselves (since I probably was one) as for their odious religion. Now, suddenly, I was being informed that real, living, breathing Arians could be found within a few stadia of where Dom Clement and I were conversing. He clearly realized my astonishment, for he continued:
    “I believe you are old enough now, Thorn, to know. The Burgund people, like the Goths, are mostly of the Arian persuasion. From the brother kings, Gundiok in Lugdunum and Khilperic in Genava, down through their princelings and nobles and courtiers, to the majority of their subjects. I would estimate that about a quarter of the villagers and peasants here in our Ring of Balsam are Arians, and another quarter are still unregenerate pagans. Those include even many of the people who raise crops or livestock on land belonging to St. Damian’s, and who pay our abbey a share of their harvests.”
    “And you allow them to be Arians? You let Arians work side by side with our Christian brothers?”
    Dom Clement sighed. “The fact is that our monastic community and our congregation of Catholic faithful constitute something like an outpost in an alien land. We exist only through the toleration of the surrounding Arians and pagans. Look at this sensibly, Thorn. The rulers of this kingdom are both Arians. Their administrators and soldiers and tax collectors are Arians, At Lugdunum, in addition to our bishop’s Basilica of St. Justus, there is another, even loftier church, on the cathedra of which sits an Arian bishop.”
    “They too have bishops?” I muttered, dazed.
    “Fortunately for us, the Arians are not forever vigilant against the least divergence from what they consider their true faith, as we are in respect to what we know is the true faith. Nor are they forever ready, as we are, either to convert or relentlessly to extirpate the unbelievers. It is only because the Arians are so lackadaisically lenient about others’ beliefs that we Catholics can live and work and worship and proselytize here.”
    “I can scarcely comprehend it all so suddenly,” I said. “Arians everywhere around us.”
    “It was not always so. As recently as forty years ago, the Burgunds were merely pagans, the ignorant victims of superstition, revering all the teeming pantheon of pagan gods. They were converted by Arian missionaries from the Ostrogoth lands to the eastward.”
    I may still have been thunderstruck, but my usual curiosity had not been diminished. “Excuse me, Nonnus Clement,” I ventured to say. “If the Arians hereabout are so many, and we Christians so few, is it remotely possible that the Arian god is of some worth and—?”
    “Akh, ne!” the abbot interrupted, raising his hands in horror. “Not a word more, lad! Never even speculate on the legitimacy of the Arians or their beliefs or anything else about them. The councils of our Church have declared them evil, and that is sufficient.”
    “Can it be wrong of me, Nonnus, to wish to know the adversary better, so that I may the better contend against him?”
    “Perhaps not wrong, son. But one must not even do right if it is the devil who provokes one to do it. Let us now leave that ugly subject. Come, take up your tablet.”
    I obediently bent to my exceptor work, but I was not yet ready to abandon the “ugly subject” Dom Clement had so abruptly thrust into my consciousness. When