Quest of Hope(164)
Heinrich finally found his way through Innsbruck and followed the rising Sill valley until he arrived at the white cliffs of the Brenner Pass. Here he found himself suddenly crowded by many others urgently pressing toward their destinations. Merchantmen, legates, men-at-arms, and pilgrims from all parts of the Holy Empire met to face the toll keepers.
Heinrich thought the toll a bit pricey for one man with only a rucksack and a satchel. But standing in the queue he heard something that was worth the half-shilling toll—he learned that a caravan of Syrians had just been slaughtered by a band of rogue knights returning from Palestine. Their bodies were found stripped and their wagons burned. The only evidence of the “crime” was a torn sash bearing the crest of a Norman lord.
From Brenner, Heinrich hiked with a company of legates and couriers in a rapid descent into warmer environs. One fellow traveler was a longwinded messenger from Rome who was able to give the man some idea of where he might locate the church he was seeking. “Ah, si. Santa Maria in Domnica. Si, it is on the Caelian Hill. I know it well. It is a bit south of the Coliseum and not so very far to its west is the basilica of St. Giovanni and the pope’s palace in the Lateran. Si, my friend, I know it well. But how do you?”
Heinrich grew more excited. His cheeks felt warm and his veins pumped. A miner in Hallein had told him many things of the ancient Romans. He knew something about the Coliseum and its horrors. Heinrich explained his need to present a letter to the superior of that particular church.
The man loosened the fur collar of his shin-length tunic and laid his cloak over his arm. He removed a silk cap from his head and tossed a head full of long hair in the warm sun. “My matrona left me at the door of Santa Maria’s while I was yet a babe. This church … it serves the poor well. It stands where St. Lawrence once gave alms to the needy. Ah, good stranger. Wait until you see the mosaic! ‘Tis, ‘tis beyond words.” You see, the church’s art is Greek. It is a church made beautiful by rebels!” He swallowed a draught of red wine from a flagon slung from his shoulder. “Have you any interest in these things?”
“Aye! Indeed I do. I’m rather fond of the work of rebels!” Heinrich’s eye beamed. “Please, we’ve days ahead; go on!”
The traveler nodded. He was cheerful and had been well-schooled by a wealthy Lombardian family who had adopted him from the church when he was six. Now a man of middle age, he was fluent in Italian, Latin, German, English, and French. In the following days, he taught Heinrich much of the history of Rome and its influence on all of Christendom.
Heinrich was intrigued. He had known no more than what legends were passed from the elders in Weyer, or what little news had come from passersby. Suddenly, he was beginning to realize that his life was but one story told in a moment, yet an integral part of others gone before and more yet to come.
The travelers descended quickly through the hardwoods of the Tyrol, past Balzano, Trento, and Verona. By mid-December Heinrich was striding through the warm, flat plain of the Po Valley. Here he marched past fallowed fields of rich soil made fertile by centuries of erosion from the Apennines and the Alps.
In Bologna, Heinrich bade farewell to his fellow traveler and thanked the man profusely for the wealth of knowledge he had imparted. This effusive man had taught the simple baker that the world was an intricate tapestry. “It is textured,” he had said, “with Creation’s mountains and valleys, deserts, rivers, oceans, endless forests, and fertile fields. It is hued by colors born under the sun; it is sprinkled with the races of man and the creatures over which they are given dominion. As time turns, this great tapestry is revealed in greater dimension, while fingers of the unseen Weaver deftly add more wondrous threads to this Story of Stories.”
The Apennines Mountains arc in a long, sweeping turn from Genoa’s Ligurian Alps in the northwest through the length of the Italian Peninsula. Somewhere in the stunted forests of these rounded hills Heinrich huddled beneath his cloak and waited patiently for the end of a heavy, pelting rainstorm. Indeed, he took the inconvenience in stride and soon found himself pressing southward around Firenze, through the olive orchards and birch forests of Umbria, by numerous villages of rose-hued stone, and beneath the uncomfortable watch of cliff-topped castles. At last he spotted what his informative friend had told him to seek: a Roman aqueduct! Stretched before him was a long, multi-arched, bridgelike structure that filled the gap between two rolling hills and disappeared from sight far in the distance. “Follow the aqueducts to Rome!” the man had said.