The Viennese Waltz(65)
Vienna
The message was terse and less than informative. It had been sent before it was even known whether Pope Urban was still alive, but other messages in the same pouch had confirmed that the pope was alive but had fled from Rome. Cardinal Borja was claiming that Urban had fallen into heresy, and half the priests in Vienna seemed to believe Borja’s version. The other half was convinced that Borja was a Spanish pawn who was trying to place the whole church under the Spanish crown.
Over the next several days, the situation clarified some. In fact, there were two versions of events, each very clear and insistent. Even strident. Unfortunately, they were mutually exclusive.
In one version of events, Urban had fallen into heresy, abandoning the true church in favor of the Protestantism that the up-time church had fallen into, and—with great restraint and forbearance—the College of Cardinals had remonstrated with the erring pontiff for as long as possible. But the cardinals had finally been forced to take action to defend the faith against corruption. In this version, the true church had been forced to those measures only by Urban’s insanity and the corruption of a faction of cardinals who had abandoned Christ’s message.
In the other version of events, Urban had been in the process of weighing the issues brought into the world with the care and deliberation required by his position as head of the church, when a clique of ambitious and venal clerics under unknown influences had attempted to assassinate Christ’s vicar on Earth and had succeeded in assassinating a majority of the cardinals. But, through God’s grace, the pope had escaped the vile assassins and was continuing to do his duty. He had not decided the issue of the Ring of Fire and, even with the actions of Borja and his mad men, was not going to rush to judgment.
No one knew where Pope Urban was, but wherever he might be, messages from the Father General of the Jesuits confirmed that he was alive. On the other hand, the rump college of cardinals—mostly the Spanish faction—had, in effect, charged Father General Mutius Vitelleschi of the Jesuits with heresy and insisted that he was not to be trusted. They were, at the least, no longer claiming that Pope Urban had been killed in Rome.
Meanwhile, there had been fist fights and even knife fights between priests of the holy mother church. Fights mostly between orders that were not overly friendly with each other to begin with. The conflict between the Dominicans and the Jesuits had approached riots. Neither faction was all in favor of Urban or Borja, but the Dominicans tended to support Borja and the Jesuits tended to support Urban. According to Ferdinand III’s confessor, Lamormaini was tending toward the Borja faction because of the raising of Larry Mazzare to cardinal, and was feeling somewhat ill-used by Father General Vitelleschi and Pope Urban.
And in the middle of this came the news that Karl Eusebius von Liechtenstein would be arriving within the week, with his fiancée . . . and in an airplane.
CHAPTER 17
A Storm of Bridesmaids
June 1635
Aboard the Jupiter, en route to Vienna
Judy looked at Susan, three seats up and across the aisle. They were all in the Jupiter. It was surprisingly quiet, but not silent, and she could hear the engines faintly.
Susan Logsden needs to get laid, thought Judy with seventeen-year-old certainty. She thought this in spite of the fact that she herself was still technically a virgin and intended to remain one till someone developed a trustworthy means of contraception or she got married. Neither of which looked to be happening anytime soon. But Judy wasn’t Susan, or perhaps more to the point, Susan wasn’t Judy. Judy looked at the prospect of eventual intercourse with pleasant anticipation, but suffered very little frustration over its present lack. There were, after all, other things you could do.
Perhaps something could be worked out in Vienna. The pilot had just told them that they would be landing in a few minutes.
Vienna
Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria, Bishop of Passau and brother to Emperor Ferdinand III, went over the papers and tried to forget that he was at least nominally a bishop. Leo had never thought of himself as overly religious. The church just was. But now the church wasn’t. Urban had retreated from Rome. Borja was butchering cardinals, whether to conquer the church or to save it no one seemed to know. True churchmen, the monks and the real bishops, couldn’t decide which side to be on. Order fighting order, priest condemning priest. He tried to retreat into the facts and figures that Gundaker von Liechtenstein and Moses Abrabanel had provided to ready him to meet Karl Eusebius and his bride.
“It’s here, Your Grace,” Marco said.
Leo looked up from the report. Just as well. There was little good news in it anyway. The treasury was essentially empty. The people who were supposed to be putting money into the treasury wanted things in return. Mostly they wanted products from the United States of Europe kept out of Austria-Hungary. The soldiers wanted to be paid, as did the bureaucracy. “Calm yourself, Marco. Calm yourself,” Leo said, trying to sound like a bishop was supposed to. The title was political, a way of keeping lands that were nominally the church’s in the family. Not that his father would have ever admitted such a thing, even to himself. To his father, Leo had been something of a human sacrifice, a child given to the church to ensure salvation.