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Page 22.
Chapter 12. Holy City
 With the Olympus River at my left, I followed the monk who had been shadowing me. The river was a reddish, muddy body of water about 100 feet wide. It moved sluggishly past under a wealth of dense willow trees. On the opposite bank was a narrow street and beyond that the high walls of the Palace. The golden domes overwhelmed the entire scene, even the golden Temple spires, until I noticed the hulking basilica with its dark blue roof tiles among tall golden spires. On the Temple side of the river, where I walked, grassy park gave way to Temple walls. A broad street led into the Holy City. It was a busy place, and I was easily lost in the midst of thousands of robed clergy of all descriptions, plus the Swat Guards in their colorful uniforms and pikes. Dozens of beggars deformed the beautiful vista as they sat outside the gates with their hats on their leg stumps or other deformities. They received coins dropped by monks coming and going with briefcases, like divine business men—not to mention trimly elegant nuns in gray, slate-blue, and black, with box coifs and briefcases bearing the Popess' coat of arms. Everyone here seemed to be in a hurry, with a knowing and self-satisfied smile. I got the idea that all this worked very efficiently and that much of the power and money of the world found their way through these gates and those across the river. No wonder people like Balesso, who craved both power and money, saw fit to kill a Popess and...well, my next thought was, what about the King?
Entering the main square inside Holy City, I lost him, dammit. I stood in the huge square and looked through the thousands of pilgrims, monks, priests, and nuns but all I saw was a milling throng of his clones. There were monks and nuns, priests and priestesses, in brown, black, blue, gray, yellow, green, and all the shades of red from burgundy to scarlet. I soon found out that the ones in red were the hierarchy, and they appeared to be an even mix of older man and women.
I found one of many touristy souvenir stands loaded with prayer beads, prayer cards, prayer wheels, and more bric-a-brac for the pious. Seeing a little bookstand, I picked one out and ran my hand over its solar panel to activate it. The rule is that, if you turn on sound, you buy, so I ran text over its digital face. It was a book of facts about King City, and in it were chapters about the Holy City, about the Palace, and about the King and the Popess. There was a great deal to be learned, and not all of it in this sugar-coated tourist book, but I could read between the lines.
At the moment, the leader of the civil government was a king, though in times past there had been queens. At the moment, the leader of the religious government was a woman, although there had been Holy Fathers in the past. They maintained a precarious balance of powers between them, but nurtured a strong private sector, as it was known, that was the general public and which supposedly had what was called religious freedom. Coming from the so-called Free Domes, I didn't know what that meant, since in our small, tough society everyone had to pull together and if you bent the rules you went over the rail. Here, apparently, was room for a lot of finer points.
The civil ruler currently was His Majesty King Lee Upholder XIII. He had a whole string of names and was the latest in a dynasty that went back over a thousand years. Evidently there were several royal houses with differing political philosophies (and probably one as corrupt in some ways as the others, but each offering certain advantages). Together this pool of royalty owned the state. There were public elections in which all adults in the private sector could vote, so every three years either the king or queen was re-elected, or one of the other houses took its turn. The Upholders had been in the palace for twelve years and looked like shoo-ins for the next election.
I must have gaped when I read down a list of about thirty such royal houses and noticed the name Balesso among them. Apparently, here were a half dozen Venerable Houses who usually took the crown, which included the Upholders, the Steadiers, the Oldbloods, the Fineleathers, the Mariners, and the Godpodders. Then there were about ten second-tier families who occasionally got their leader elected, which included a lot of oldish money like the Greenlords, the Redweathers, the Bluebloods, the Whitetowers, and so forth—each with a color in their name. Finally there were another dozen and a half newcomers who had not yet held office, but held a lot of dukeries and other second and third string offices. These included the Balessos, the Montepythons, the Merrymen, and the like. Pondering this, I wondered if Balesso was already farther along in his game than any of the Free Domers realized. It seemed logical that, to conquer the world, you'd want to capture its two most powerful entities—the Royal state of Olympus, and the Temple state run by the Popess. This led me to the inevitable conclusion that most likely, Her Holiness Gina-Paulina Benedictina XXIV must be colluding with Balesso, who was listed here as a Duke (sort of an assistant king, I gathered).
This was all sheer guesswork, though based on months and years of pondering that suddenly flowed together like the right puzzle pieces snapping into place; and I still had to ponder how an outcast like Timony could be involved in a plot to kill the Popess.
My guess was that there was more, somehow, to the life and times of Timony and his family than I had ever guessed. Glancing through the list of royal and pretender houses again, I noticed one called Eastgarden. Oh yikes. The Eastgardens were a subclan of the Upholders currently in power.
I was about to walk to a public InfoTel and summon whatever information was available in its global relational database index, when a woman's voice beside me said: "Don't look now, but you are in danger."
I felt an electric current of surprise tingle in my entire body. The person standing next to me was a monk in a brown cowl—the very person who had shadowed me—but the voice was that of a woman. She said: "Follow me, and don't look left or right. They have you in their sights."
I waited a moment, put my own cowl up, then followed. What choice did I have? I looked around at the crowds, with the Swat Guards and other police standing among them. The woman walking ahead of me seemed tall with a muscular gait, and nobody would have guessed there wasn't a man under that cowl. She led me across the square. The entire Holy City revolved around this central square, which was large enough to have fit the Graniston 1 dome in it with room to spare. Toward the river, but this side of the wall, was a four story building labeled St. Mercury University. To the right of that, the largest building, was St. Apollo Basilica. To the right of that was a ten story skyscraper, the St. Gemini Administration Building of the Holy Faith. There were lots of smaller buildings but those were the main ones visible.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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