On the day of his ascension, the pope-in-waiting watched as his predecessor was thrown from the highest roof of the Cathedral of Utmost Height.
It was very simple. He took the three steps forward, took three steps backwards, hesitated, and was pushed by his cardinals. His arms flailed like a little insect’s for one million years and then he landed on the ground and died only a few feet away from the pope-in-waiting’s feet, splashing them with his blood.
On the roof, the cardinals were bent low, peering at the stones, trying to determine which of them the dead man’s foot had touched last. Trying to find his new spouse.
The pope-in-waiting contented himself with watching the blood seep across the cobbles of the cathedral square. It was hard to tell which was occurring faster: the red staining of the stones or the dust clotting the liquid. This seemed oddly important to him.
At last the search of the men on the roof bore fruit, and they set to work with crowbars, levering free the sacred stone from the peak of the building. It was hoisted in the air, and so was he, and both were carried into the grand hall of the cathedral and many chants were conducted and much incense was burned and so many words of God’s Tongue were spoken that he couldn’t tell his head from his feet and then he was dubbed the new Pope Apex, just like the old one except not as old.
VERY not as old. They must have been running low on pope material, what with the war drawing away all those potential novitiates to bleed and die for the glory of home, and land, and more land to call home. So why not use up one of the few they had left? Thirteen wasn’t old enough to fight properly but it was probably old enough to be holy and bless things. Waste not, want not.
***
After his induction he was spirited away through a maze of little tunnels under the cathedral, all alike, and after that a ceremonial meal of bread and water was fed to him personally by his highest cardinal, Lofty, and after THAT he was introduced properly to his spouse, who was a large and somewhat careworn slab of unidentifiable stone.
“Do you know what this is?” asked the cardinal.
“No,” replied Pope Apex, truthfully. He had not been raised to understand masonry or geology.
Cardinal Lofty sighed and smacked him on the side of the head. “This is the material manifestation of the church, and you are wedded to it. Preserve its wellbeing at all costs. Now go to bed.”
Pope Apex went to bed, and his spouse followed him with the aid of several large and muscular escorts, who dropped it in the middle of his mattress and left.
The pope had spent much of his youth sharing quarters with others. He knew what to do in this sort of situation. Softly and slowly, with the care of one trying not to alarm another, he wrapped the careworn stone in most of his blankets. Then he took his pillow and spent the night in a peculiar (if cold) sort of peace.
The next day it was removed from his bed and placed on a little dais in the center of his chambers, to remind him of his vows, and he was a little grateful for this because his back hurt from where it had bumped him. This shamed him, and he spent some time apologizing to his spouse for his insensitivity.
***
Being a pope was much easier than being a novitiate had been. He got more sleep, scrubbed fewer pots, and the cardinals only hit him when he did something wrong, which was much less often than the underpriests had.
And there was his spouse, who he spoke to as much as possible. It never talked back, but that just made it a good listener, which was very precious to Pope Apex because almost nobody else ever seemed to listen to anything he said.
Maybe there weren’t as many differences from being a novitiate as he’d thought.
***
Victory had come!
Well, not final victory. Just a victory. But it was a good one! An entire city burned down.
Not a perfect victory, Cardinal Plummet told him. They hadn’t managed to burn down its inhabitants too.
But the victors had earned themselves some sort of spoils, and so Pope Apex was taken to the new frontlines to walk through the charred buildings and the toppled towers and the seared timbers to have a great banquet-feast on this very new and very holy day.
It had been a big city. The entire Holy Army fit inside it, even the more mobile casualties with their stumps and splints and crutches and bandages.
“-got it?” Cardinal Lofty was saying to him.
Pope Apex shook a little, and knew he’d be getting lectured about that later. Shaking was for the tremulous and uncertain and those things weren’t permitted. “Yes,” he said, which was true. He’d very much memorized the very short speech he’d been given very many days ago.
He looked down at his feet, and saw stones smeared with ash and charcoal. Then he thought about stones red with blood, and about a particular stone, and its smoothed, calm surface.
His back ached.
“Do it,” said Cardinal Lofty.
Pope Apex stepped to his seat, waited for the noise to die down, chanted out the speech in God’s Tongue, and then spoke for the many rather than the educated.
“May this feast strengthen our limbs and make hearty our hearts, may it fill our stomachs and our souls, and may this terrible war end soon.”
There was a little pause around the table at those last words, as if everyone’s ears were checking themselves, but then the escorts took Pope Apex by his shoulders and gently steered him away, and it was decided that everything was alright again.
That night he was lectured with both words and fists, and to a degree he’d never imagined even as a novitiate. This war was not terrible, it was noble. It was just and correct.
He tried to explain what the stone had suggested to him, but every time he opened his mouth he was screamed at until his small words were drowned in a vast din, and so in the end he wasn’t able to tell anyone at all.
***
There were no more public appearances after that, just public public appearances, the kind where he was placed on top of a high structure and waved at people while they cheered. It made the cardinals happy because it prevented issues, and it made Pope Apex happy because it made him think on what it would be like to throw himself off a high surface and if the next pope would have to marry whatever he was standing on at the time and if they would be as kind and helpful as his own spouse was.
If he slipped on his bathmat, would someone have to marry it? He almost got the giggles.
***
The campaign continued, but no more cities were burned. This was a clear problem, and so Pope Apex was recruited to correct it personally. Clearly their blessed and holy armies weren’t the problem, so it must be their tools.
The weapons were laid out before him to be blessed, a shining field of dead-bodies-to-be, and Pope Apex felt as if he couldn’t lay eyes anywhere without them being sliced right out his skull. Every surface was edged for a very particular purpose.
“Begin,” whispered Cardinal Lofty in his ear, and so he walked up and down the long long rows of steel and thought of the rows of the dead and he chanted as he walked.
“Please don’t hurt anyone,” he murmured, mangling it through as many layers of half-forgotten, half-mangled God’s Tongue as he could manage, “please don’t hurt anyone, please don’t get anyone else killed, please please please.”
Though he didn’t get the thrashing the banquet had gifted him, he was berated for some time on his awful pronunciation. But the stone softly shone at him whenever he glanced at it, and so he endured it with as much earnestness as he was able.
***
Neither the blessing intended nor the blessing assumed appeared to work all that well; maybe they’d cancelled each other out. The war was still going and the bodies were still piling and from out his window the pope could just barely see the edge of the cemetery where the most esteemed and important people actually got their own private graves. It had expanded itself very quickly since his installment.
The cardinals weren’t happy either, which was why Cardinal Plummet had come up with the most ingenious plan of poisoning the city’s river, seeing as the besieging army downstream needed it. That they wouldn’t be able to tell the rest of the city’s populace for the sake of secrecy until half of them had already drank from it and died as well seemed to be something Cardinal Lofty considered a marked downside, but endurable.
One thing hadn’t changed since Pope Apex’s novitiate days: people didn’t much care what they said in front of him.
That night, he stayed up very late talking with his spouse. The stone told him it wasn’t his fault, and he tried to believe it. Looking on the stone also told him something else, something he could do, and the more he thought about it the more impossible it was NOT to believe that.
So he did it.
***
It wasn’t very difficult for him to find the besieging army’s encampment, but it WAS very difficult for him to get to its commander, both because he didn’t know the woman’s name beyond Cardinal Plummet calling her ‘that little shithead’ and because it took a full hour for anyone to confirm he was Pope Apex.
After that, though, all he had to do was tell them about the passages under the Cathedral of Utmost Height, and they were happy to listen to anything he said. They were so happy that they listened to his requests, which were really quite simple.
***
The cathedral square cobbles were buried in the cemetery, with the cardinals. But there needed to be something there in the plaza for people to stand on, and so the cathedral itself was taken apart, brick by brick, stone by stone, and it filled in the gaps and gave everyone a firm foundation to brace themselves on, softened by air and water and a hundred desperate sets of feet.
The former pope kept his spouse, though. It was a little selfish, but he appreciated its advice.