Thirty-Three: Of the Pope’s Garden

In Clement’s walled garden, the pope uses a lesson on pungent tansy to draw out Robert Hanicotte’s purpose. Robert, still unsettled, admits he has had a vivid “dream” in the vineyards, carefully omitting waking in dew-wet clothes. Clement guides Robert to recount it, keeping eye contact and encouraging candor.

Clement suggests the troubling vision is not mere dream but the work of witchcraft deployed to discredit the papacy as it readies a crusade and purges perceived enemies. He frames their struggle as a cosmic contest, asserting the Adversary fears their designs on Jerusalem and the expulsion of Jewish “agents.”

Pressed, Robert identifies the girl from the dream as masquerading as page to Chrétien de Navarre, the Comte d’Évreux. Clement praises Robert’s loyalty and insight, promises him elevation to an unspecified position, and instructs Cardinal Cyriac to act as a father to Robert, vowing to repay every kindness to him tenfold.

As Robert and Cardinal Cyriac leave through the pope’s menagerie, Cyriac notices something impossibly wrong: the two lions, normally in separate cages, now share one. The black-maned newcomer sits dominant while Misericord cowers, and the newcomer stares at Cyriac, tonguing its teeth as if counting them, seeding dread of a hidden, possibly demonic, presence in the papal household.