“I have had to be, monsieur,” replied Lacy quietly.
Richelieu nodded. “You may be seated.”
Lacy bowed once more and fetched a lesser chair, which he placed before the large one at a respectful distance, and lowered himself. He sat back, seemingly at ease, but a discerning eye recognized readiness to explode into instant action. Not that there was any danger. Guards stood just outside the door.
“What is this news you bear?” Richelieu asked.
Lacy frowned. “I do not expect Your Eminence to believe upon first hearing it. I gamble my life on the supposition that you will bear with me, and will dispatch trusty men to bring you the further evidence I can provide.”
The kitten frolicked about his ankles. “Chariot likes you,” the cardinal remarked, a tinge of warmth in his voice.
Lacy smiled. “They say monsieur is fond of cats.”
“While they are young. Go on. Let me see what you know about them. It will tell me something about you.”
Lacy leaned forward and tickled the kitten around the ears. It extended tiny claws and swarmed up his stockings. He helped it to his lap, chucked it under the chin and stroked the soft fur. “I’ve had cats myself,” he said. “Afloat and ashore. They were sacred to the ancient Egyptians; They drew the chariot of the Norse goddess of love. They’re often called familiars of witches, but that’s nonsense. Cats are what they are, and never try like dogs to be anything else. I suppose that’s why we humans find them mysterious, and some of us fear or hate them.”
“While some others like them better than their fellow men, God forgive.” The cardinal crossed himself in perfunctory fashion. “You are a remarkable man, Captain Lacy.”
“In my way, monsieur, which is quite different from yours.”
Richelieu’s gaze intensified. “I obtained a report on you, of course, when I heard of your wish,” he said slowly. “But tell me about your past life in your own words.”
“That you may judge them—and me, monsieur?” The mariner’s look went afar, while his right hand continued as the kitten’s playmate. “Well, then, I’ll tell it in a curious way. You’ll soon understand the reason for that, which is that I do not want to lie to you.
“Seumas Lacy hails from northern Ireland. He can’t readily say when he was born, for the baptismal record is back there if it’s not been destroyed; but on the face of it, he must be around fifty years old. In the year 1611 the English king cleared the Irish from the best parts of Ulster and settled it with Scottish Protestants. Lacy was among those who left the country. He took a bit of money along, for he came of a mildly well-to-do seafaring family. In Nantes he found refuge with old-established Irish trading folk, who helped him regularize his status. He took the French form of his Christian name, became a French subject, and married a French woman. Being a sailor, he made long voyages, as far as Africa, the West Indies, and New France. Eventually he rose to shipmaster. He has four children alive, their ages from thirteen to five, but his wife died two years ago and he has not remarried.”
“And when he heard that I would be in Poitou for several weeks, he went downstream to St. Nazaire and opened the casket that his ... ancestor had left in the church,” Richelieu said low.
Lacy looked straight at him. “Thus it is, Your Eminence.”
“Presumably you always knew about it.”
“Obviously I did.”
“Although you are Irish? And no member of your family claimed the thing for four centuries. You yourself lived almost thirty years in nearby Nantes before you did. Why?”
“I had to be sure of the situation. At that, the decision was hard.”
“The report states that you have an associate, a redheaded man with a missing hand who goes by the name of MacMahon. Lately he has disappeared. Why?”
“No disrespect intended, Your Eminence, but I sent him off because I couldn’t foresee what would come of this, and it was wrong to risk his life also.” Lacy smiled. The kitten tumbled about his wrist. “Besides, he’s an uncouth sort. What if he gave offense?” He paused. “I took care not to know just where he’s gone. He’ll find out whether I’ve returned safely home.”
“You show a distrustfulness that is ... scarcely friendly.”
“On the contrary, monsieur, I’m putting a faith in you that I’ve put in none but my comrade for a very long time. I stake everything on the belief that you will not immediately assume I’m a madman, an enemy agent, or a sorcerer.”
Richelieu gripped the arms of his chair. Despite the robe, it could be seen how his wasted frame tautened. His eyes never wavered. “What, then, are you?” he asked tonelessly.
“I am Jacques Lacy from Ireland, your eminence,” the visitor replied with the same levelness. “The only real falsehood about that is that I was born there, for I was not. I did spend more than a centftry in it. Outside the English-held parts people have a large enough measure of freedom that it’s rather easy to change lives. But I fear they are all doomed to conquest, and the plantation of Ulster gave me an unquestionable reason for departing.
“I came back to where I had once been Pier de Ploumanac’h—who was not a Breton born. Before and after him I’ve used other names, lived in other places, pursued other trades. It’s been my way of surviving through the millennia.”
Breath hissed between teeth. “This is not a total surprise to me. Since I first heard from the bishop, I have been thinking... Are you the Wandering Jew?”
The head shook; the kitten sensed tension and crouched. “I know about rascals who’ve pretended they were him. No, monsieur, I was alive when Our Lord was on earth, but never saw him, nor knew about him till much later. Once in a while I have passed myself off as a Jew, because that was safest or simplest, but it was pretense, same as when I’ve been a Mussulman.” The mouth formed a grim grin. “For those roles, I had to get circumcised. The skin slowly grew back. On my kind, unless a wound is as great as the loss of a hand, it heals without scars.”
“I must think anew.” Richelieu closed his eyes. Presently his lips moved. They shaped the Paternoster and the Ave, while his fingers drew the Cross, over and over.
Yet when he was done and looked back upon the world, down at the parchment, he spoke almost matter-of- factly. “I saw at once that the verse here is not actually nonsense. It bears a certain resemblance to Hebraic, transcribed in Roman letters, but it is different. What?”
“Ancient Phoenician, Your Eminence. I was bora in Tyre when Hiram was its king. I’m not sure whether David or Solomon was reigning in Jerusalem just then.”
Again Richelieu closed his eyes. “Two and a half millennia ago,” he whispered. He opened them wide. “Recite the verse. I want to hear that language.”
Lacy obeyed. The rapid, guttural words rang through sounds of wind and water, through the silence that filled the chamber. The kitten sprang off his lap and pattered to a corner.
Stillness prevailed for half a minute before Richelieu asked, “What does it mean?”
“A fragment of a song, the sort men sang in taverns or when camped ashore during a voyage. ‘Black as the sky of night is my woman’s hair, bright as the stars are her eyes, round and white as the moon her breasts, and she moves like Ashtoreth’s sea. Would that my sight and my hands and myself lay upon all!’ I’m sorry it’s so profane, monsieur. It was what I could remember, and at that, I had to reconstruct it.”
Richelieu quirked a smile. “Yes, I daresay one forgets much in thousands of years. And in ... Pier’s day, clerics, too, were less refined than they are now.” Shrewdly: “Though did you expect that something like this would go a little way toward authenticating you, since it is the kind of thing that would stick in a man’s mind?”
“I am not lying to Your Eminence. In no particular.”
“In that case, you have been a liar throughout the ages.”
Lacy spread his palms. “What would monsieur have had me do? Imagine, if you please, even in this most enlightened of eras and countries, imagine I proclaimed myself openly. At best I’d be taken for a mountebank, and be lucky to escape with a scourging. I could easily go to the galleys, or hang. At worst I’d be condemned as a sorcerer, in league with Satan, and burned. Evil would befall me without my saying a word if I just stayed in one place, living on and on while they buried my sons and grandsons and I never showed signs of age. Oh, I’ve met folk—many live at this moment in the New World—for whom I could be a holy man or a god; but they’ve been savages, and I prefer civilization. Besides, civilization sooner or later overruns the savages. No, best I arrive at a new home as a plausible outsider, settle down a few decades, and at last move onward in such wise that people take for granted I’ve died.”
