477 to 483 AD
There are periods in history that produce no great battles or treaties recorded in thick tomes. Periods that historians pass over with a single paragraph and an inadequate phrase; and then passed a few years without significant events.
I, Aelius Tacitus, refuse to write that phrase.
Because those years were not years without events. Those years were years where everything happened beneath the surface, like tree roots growing in the dark earth while the trunk above appeared unchanged. Years where a boy became a man. Where swords were sharpened without a sound. Where alliances were forged in dark rooms. Where the seeds of war were patiently planted by hands that smiled while sowing them.
Those years were a gift that history offered with one hand, while the other readied a sword behind its back.
Allow me to tell you what happened in those stolen years. Not with the speed and tension deserved by a battle. But with the caution and gentleness deserved by the process of growing. Because growing, more than killing or being conquered, is the bravest thing a human being can do.
THE SILENCE OF THE THRONE OF PETER
Pope Simplicius did not die immediately after writing his last letter to Gelasius. The human body, especially a body that has borne burdens for decades, has a stubborn habit of enduring beyond the limits predicted by anyone, including its owner.
But he did not live either. Not in a fully human sense.
Beginning in the autumn of 477, Simplicius no longer left his bedroom. The canopied bed that was once only a place for him to lay down for a few hours each night now became his new and final throne. He received reports from the bed. Signed decrees from the bed. Listened to prayers from the bed. The world he once explored with strong legs and sharp eyes now shrank into a rectangle of linens and pillows smelling of medicines that cured nothing.
Felix took over.
Not officially. Simplicius was still the Pope. Simplicius's name was still written on every decree, every letter, every decision that came out of the Lateran Palace. But the hand that wrote them was Felix's hand. The mind that formulated them was Felix's mind. The will that drove them was Felix's will.
And Felix, unlike Simplicius, did not believe that patience was a virtue. Felix believed that patience was a luxury possessed by those who did not face a real threat. And the threat facing Rome, in Felix's view, could not be more real.
But as long as Simplicius still breathed, as long as that old heart still beat behind increasingly thin ribs, Felix could not act. He could not excommunicate Theodore because Simplicius explicitly forbade it. He could not declare a holy war because Simplicius still held the ultimate authority that said no. He could only wait. Counting the days, and listening to the Pope's increasingly short and infrequent breaths from behind the bedroom door guarded by two priests who never left their posts.
Those years were called by historians the Silentium Cathedrae Petri. The Silence of the Throne of Peter. A period where the Church of Rome did not speak, did not act, did not move. A period where the Christian world walked alone without the voice of its shepherd.
And in that silence, the existing cracks deepened without anyone sewing them shut.
ROMULUS
The boy who crawled through the sewers in the autumn of 476 became a young man in the spring of 478.
Not a young man who suddenly grew overnight like in ancient Roman legends. This growth occurred day by day, like a rising tide altering the coastline one grain of sand at a time. So slowly that the people who saw him every day did not notice it. Only those who left and returned, like Vitus who frequently traveled to Rome for weeks, would return and pause for a moment at the doorway because the person standing before him was no longer entirely the same person he had left.
Physically, Romulus grew six inches between the ages of sixteen and eighteen. His once thin and awkward body began to fill with unobtrusive but dense and functional muscles, muscles built by daily training with Gisela and by increasingly frequent riding habits. His face lost the softness of childhood and acquired sharper lines, a more defined jawbone, a broader forehead. His golden brown eyes did not change. Still warm and deep. But now there was something behind that warmth, something sharper, like sunlight peeking from behind storm clouds.
Intellectually, lessons with Gelasius transformed Romulus from a sluggish reader into an alert thinker. By age nineteen, he could read classical Latin without assistance. By age twenty, he began writing his own letters without dictation by Spurius or Gelasius. Those letters were short. Inelegant. Sometimes too direct for prevailing diplomatic customs, but very clear. And clarity, in a world where most people spoke to hide their thoughts, was an exceedingly rare currency.
At age twenty-one, Romulus began leading meetings in the Strategy Hall without glancing at Spurius or Vitus before answering questions. His voice was still not loud. It did not thunder like Vitus's. It did not resonate like Gelasius's. But that voice now held a weight that could not be ignored. Not the weight of volume, but the weight of substance. When Romulus spoke in a room full of military leaders and advisors and bishops, people listened. Not because he wore the purple robe. Because what he said was usually worth listening to.
And there was one more change that could not be measured by scales or measuring tapes but was clearly felt by anyone who spent more than ten minutes with him. Romulus stopped stuttering. Not because his nervousness was gone. The nervousness was still there, hiding in the corners of his soul, appearing occasionally in unexpected moments. But he learned to master it instead of being mastered by it. He learned to pause for a moment before speaking, take a breath, choose his words, and speak them at a pace he controlled. A simple technique Gelasius taught in the first year and which took four years to truly master.
At age twenty-two, Romulus Augustus stood six feet tall. His once messy hair was now cut short on the sides and longer on top, a style suggested by Gisela with the comment; you cannot rule an empire with hair that looks like a bird's nest. He wore light armor at official events, rather than the purple robe that used to cover his small body like a giant blanket. The sword at his waist was no longer an ornament. It was a weapon he had used in the training arena hundreds of times and whose use his hands knew in his sleep.
He was handsome. I write that not as excessive praise but as a fact recorded by every chronicle I found from that period. Handsome not because his features were symmetrical or his skin smooth. Handsome because his face told a story. Every line, every shadow, every shift in expression showed that this man had been through things that should have destroyed him and he was still standing. And there is something deeply attractive about someone who is still standing after they should have fallen.
But most importantly, he still cried.
Not in public. Not in the Strategy Hall or before the troops. But on certain nights, when nightmares that had become increasingly rare but had not entirely vanished visited him, he still cried in his bed. Spurius knew this because he still slept in the adjoining room, the door connecting the two rooms was never locked, and on those nights the sound of stifled sobs still sometimes slipped through the wooden cracks.
Gelasius once said; as long as he can still cry, there is hope.
At age twenty-two, that hope was still there.
THE NEW LEGIONS
Upon Romulus's orders, Vitus initiated a project that would change the balance of power in southern Italy.
Beginning in 478, a year after the truce was agreed upon in Bononia, Vitus brought two centuries to Rome and began building garrisons in a city that had hitherto only been guarded by city watchmen and papal troops whose numbers were never sufficient to defend walls nearly twelve miles long.
Rome in 478 was no longer the great Rome. The city had been sacked twice in the last two generations. Half of its great buildings were damaged or abandoned. The Colosseum was used as a dwelling by impoverished families who built huts in corridors that were once filled with a hundred thousand spectators. The aqueducts that once brought fresh water from the mountains had partly collapsed, and the remaining population relied on wells and natural springs.
But Rome was still Rome. Its walls still stood. The name still carried a weight unmatched by any city name in the world. And Vitus saw the potential behind the ruins.
For five years, the Magister Militum spent four to six months each year in Rome. He built three new garrisons in strategic positions: one near the Flaminian Gate facing north, one on the Aventine Hill overlooking the Tiber river, and one near the port of Ostia to secure the sea routes. He recruited soldiers from southern cities. Neapolis. Capua. Brundisium. Tarentum. Young men from poor families who saw the new legions as a way out of poverty, and old men who had served in the old legions and still remembered how to hold a gladius even though their hands were wrinkled.
By 481, the Roman garrisons already housed four thousand trained soldiers. Added to the troops in Ravenna numbering three thousand, and small garrisons in southern cities, Romulus now had about eight thousand swords under his command. Still fewer than Nepos who was estimated to have twelve to fifteen thousand. But eight thousand trained and motivated swords, according to Vitus's calculations, were worth twelve thousand mercenary swords whose loyalty depended on the smooth flow of payments.
And there was one more thing Vitus moved to Rome without the knowledge of many; Theron.
Theron's research center was moved from a small workshop in the east wing of the Ravenna palace to a former military warehouse building near the port of Ostia. The official reason given by Vitus was proximity to the supply lines of raw materials which were mostly imported by sea. The real reason was to keep Theron away from the eyes of Gelasius which were too sharp and too frequently visited that workshop with questions that made Vitus uncomfortable.
In Ostia, Theron worked with a freedom he never had in Ravenna. His new workshop was larger. He had more assistants. And the orders from Vitus became increasingly specific. More clay projectiles, more portable tubes, and something new, something Theron had never tried before. Vitus wanted a version of Ignis Dei that could be used on land, not just at sea or from catapults, but in the hands of individual soldiers on the battlefield.
Theron spent two years working on that project. The result was a small bronze tube that could be strapped to the forearm, with a release mechanism operated by a wrist movement. A short range. Perhaps ten paces. But ten paces of fire spewing from your arm was enough to change close-quarters combat from a probability into a certainty.
Romulus knew about the garrisons. He had ordered them. He knew about the recruitment. He had approved it. But concerning Theron's advanced projects, concerning the arm tubes and the new variations of Ignis Dei, his knowledge was limited to what Vitus chose to tell him. And Vitus chose to tell him very, very little.
Gelasius knew more than Romulus. He had his own spies in Ostia, minor priests who sent him regular reports on the activities in Theron's workshop. But Gelasius, who always chose his moments with the precision of a surgeon, decided that it was not yet time to raise this issue with Romulus. Not yet. But soon.
A WOLF AMONG SHEEP
Gisela did something that no one ever asked for but which naturally grew out of her unique position in Ravenna.
She built a network.
It started with small visits to the barbarian settlements outside the walls of Ravenna, places where barbarians pardoned and freed from the camps by Romulus were to live and farm. Visits that were initially awkward because the people there knew who she was and what she had done. Some welcomed her. Some refused to meet her eyes. Some spat on the ground as she passed, repeating the words that had stuck to her like ink on cloth: traitor.
But Gisela was not one to back down from spit and curses. She returned. Again. And again. Bringing medicines from the palace for the sick children. Bringing better wheat seeds from the Ravenna storehouses. Bringing information about market prices that helped them sell their harvest at a fair price. Slowly, like water piercing through stone, her presence changed from a threat into an accepted reality. Not loved but accepted.
And from those settlements, her network spread. To other barbarian camps in the north that heard about the settlement in Ravenna where barbarians owned their own land and were not chained. To small tribes living on the borders between Romulus's territory and Nepos's territory, tribes too small to be cared for by either emperor but who had eyes and ears and feet that could carry information across lines that Roman couriers could not cross.
With Romulus's permission, Gisela became the liaison between Ravenna and the barbarian world outside the imperial walls. Not an official diplomat, nor a spy. Something in between. A wolf who spoke the language of deer and the language of wolves, who walked between two worlds without fully belonging to either.
The information she brought back to Ravenna was often more accurate than the reports of Vitus's official spies. Because the barbarians spoke to Gisela about things they never spoke about to Roman spies. About their feelings. About their fears. About what they truly wanted, which was often not victory or glory but something far simpler: land. A home. A place where their children could grow up without having to learn to kill before learning to read.
Romulus listened to Gisela's reports with the same attention he gave to Vitus's military reports. Perhaps a little more. Because Vitus's reports told him how many swords the enemy had. Gisela's reports told him what the humans behind those swords wanted.
And that understanding, which came slowly over years of late-night conversations and riding together and training in the courtyard that had changed from combat into a dance, was a weapon sharper than any Ignis Dei.
There was one moment worthy of special note. In 480, Gisela brought news from a small Alamanni tribe living on the northern border of Romulus's territory. The tribe had fewer than three hundred souls, too small for anyone to care about, but its position was strategic because they lived in a mountain valley that was the only overland route a large army could traverse from north to south without passing through guarded cities.
Nepos was trying to recruit the tribe. Offering gold and protection. Gisela, who had built a relationship with the tribal leader over months, advised Romulus to offer something more valuable than gold: status. Roman citizenship. The right to legally own land. The right to trade in Roman markets without the extra taxes usually imposed on barbarians.
And so Romulus agreed to it. That Alamanni tribe became the first non-Roman ally officially recognized by Ravenna. A minor precedent that at the time did not seem important. But which, in the longer calculations of history, became the seed of something much greater. The idea that Rome could embrace instead of subjugate. That the empire could grow not by adding conquered territories but by adding people who chose to join.
That idea was born in a conversation between a Roman emperor and a barbarian woman on a palace balcony overlooking the marshes, and no one else but the two of them knew of it.
Until now.
BREAD AND STONE
The economy of southern Italy, which was nearly dead when Romulus took the throne, slowly woke from its coma.
Not a dramatic awakening. There were no economic miracles that could be proudly told in the pages of imperial chronicles. What happened was something humbler and more important: people began to eat. Farmers began to plant. Merchants began to trade. Money began to move even though its circulation was slow and limited.
Ravenna became a small trading hub that was never rich but was no longer starving. The port of Classis, which had briefly died after Nepos's fleet was burned, once again received merchant ships from Sicily, North Africa, and Greece. Wheat, olive oil, cloth, all came in. In exchange, Ravenna exported something unwritten on any trade manifest but which was spoken of by ship captains in every Mediterranean port: stability. In an era where half of Europe was burning and the other half rotting, a port that guaranteed security and justice for merchants was a commodity more precious than gold.
Rome, under the administration of Vitus's new garrisons, experienced a slower but more symbolic revival. The damaged aqueducts began to be repaired. Not by imperial engineers who no longer existed, but by local residents employed by the garrisons for a modest but regular wage. The broken roads were patched. Closed markets began to reopen. The remaining residents, who for years had lived in the shadow of their ancestors' ruined glory, began to feel that perhaps, just perhaps, Rome did not have to be a ghost town.
The money for all this came from taxes that Romulus, upon Gelasius's advice, carefully reformed. Not too high to kill trade. Not too low to be insufficient to fund the garrisons and repairs. A fragile balance that required constant calculation and unending adjustments. Gelasius, who proved to have a talent for financial administration as sharp as his theological talent, became the unofficial architect of that new tax system.
In the north, Nepos's economy also grew, but on a different foundation. Nepos relied on gold from Constantinople and taxes enforced by military hand. Merchants in the north paid because of swords, not because of justice. Rapid growth but with a foundation as soft as marshland.
THE THINNING ROPE
The truce agreed upon in Bononia in the summer of 477 lasted longer than anyone had predicted. Not because both parties respected it. But because both parties needed the time it provided.
But as the years passed, the rope binding that truce grew thinner.
Minor incidents occurred with increasing frequency. In 479, a Nepos spy was caught in Ravenna, disguised as a wheat merchant from Gaul. In his pockets was found a detailed map of the Ravenna garrison, complete with troop numbers and guard shift schedules. Vitus wanted to hang him right then and there, but Romulus ordered deportation. The spy was sent back north with a fake map deliberately inserted by Spurius, a map showing Ravenna to be much weaker than its reality.
In 480, three merchants from Ravenna were attacked on the road near Parma by an armed group wearing unidentifiable clothing but speaking in a Dalmatian dialect. Their merchandise was seized. One merchant was killed. The remaining two returned to Ravenna with a story that made Vitus pound the table and demand retaliation.
By 481, the situation had worsened. Cross-border trade, which had been the only connecting rope between north and south, began to be disrupted by bandits paid by an unknown party but who always attacked convoys from the south and never touched convoys from the north. Merchants from Ravenna and Rome began avoiding the northern routes. The border economy shrank, and border cities began choosing sides.
In 482, two of Romulus's couriers carrying diplomatic letters to Milan were intercepted and killed. The letters never arrived. Their bodies were found by the roadside with their throats cut and the letters opened and read before being placed back in their pouches as a clear message: we read everything.
Romulus reacted with controlled anger. He wrote a private letter to Nepos, not through envoys but through Gisela's safer channels, demanding an explanation. Nepos replied with a polite and unconvincing denial. Both men knew the other was lying. Both men knew that the other knew. But diplomatic rituals demanded they pretend, and pretend they did with an expertise that became increasingly sickening over the years.
At the end of 482, the most dangerous incident occurred. A group of soldiers from the Roman garrison patrolling the northern border encountered a group of Nepos's soldiers near Ariminum. Not an accidental encounter. They met because both groups were spying on enemy positions. A brief skirmish broke out. Three Roman soldiers were killed. Two Nepos soldiers were killed. Five corpses, each carrying the potential to ignite a war that would kill thousands.
Vitus deployed the entire border garrison to forward positions. Nepos did the same. For two weeks, the two armies stood facing each other on the same plain where, four years prior, the Bononia incident had nearly started a war. This time the distance between the two armies was closer. The atmosphere was tenser. And Simplicius's voice, which had once asked them to retreat, was now only a faint whisper from a bed in Rome that was heard increasingly rarely.
It was Gelasius who saved the situation this time. He wrote directly to Laurentius, the Milanese negotiator he had met in Bononia years before, proposing an honorable exchange of bodies and a simultaneous withdrawal. Laurentius, who also did not want a war Milan was not ready to win, agreed. Both armies withdrew. The bodies were exchanged. And Italy breathed again, but the breaths were growing shorter and heavier.
Every incident was a small prick in the skin of an increasingly thin truce. None were big enough to burst it. But the accumulation made everyone with eyes to see understand one thing: that this was not peace. It was a pause. And that pause was getting shorter.
In Ravenna, Vitus counted those incidents like a carpenter counting nails. Every incident was another nail in the coffin of the truce. And Vitus, who from the beginning believed this truce was only a postponement of the inevitable, waited with the patience of a predator who had seen his prey and only needed to pick the time.
Romulus also waited. But his waiting was different. Romulus did not wait because he wanted to fight. He waited because he knew war would come regardless of what he wanted, and he wanted to be ready when it happened. A thin difference but one which, in my calculations five hundred years later, separated a wise king from a warmongering king.
TWO BECOMING ONE
Regarding the relationship between Romulus and Gisela in those years, I must be careful.
Not because of a lack of information. Precisely because there is too much. Spurius's journal records small observations that accumulated into a clear picture for anyone willing to look. Gelasius's letters mention Gisela with increasing frequency as the years go by. And the palace chronicles, which are usually dry and bureaucratic, occasionally insert phrases like Amicus Caesaris was present at the meeting or the emperor rode to the settlement with Amicus Caesaris, phrases that mean nothing to the casual reader but which scream with meaning to a historian who has studied the context.
They did not marry. Not in those years. A marriage between a Roman emperor and a barbarian woman descended from Fritigern was a political impossibility that even the increasingly bold Romulus dared not touch. Gelasius subtly but clearly explained to Romulus that such a marriage would hand invaluable propaganda weapons to Theodore and Nepos.
But they also did not pretend that what existed between them did not exist.
They trained together every afternoon. Rode together every week. Ate together at the same table, which initially invited whispers but which over time became a custom accepted by the palace as naturally as accepting that the sun rises in the east. They talked for hours about everything and about nothing. About the war that might come. About the books Romulus read. About the Gothic songs Gisela sometimes sang softly as they sat on the palace balcony watching the sun set over the Ravenna marshes.
The song about the she-wolf who found a new herd.
They never touched. Never declared, nor ever spoke a word too big for a place too small. But anyone who saw them walking side by side in the palace corridors, or riding side by side in the fields outside the walls, or sitting side by side on the balcony at dusk, understood that the distance between those two people was not a physical distance that could be measured in paces. It was a shrinking distance, albeit slowly. Day by day. Like a rising tide altering the coastline one grain of sand at a time.
Foolish but worthy, they said to each other, sometimes in the mornings during training, sometimes at night when stars filled the dark Ravenna sky.
And in those words, which were initially just a small joke between an emperor and a prisoner in an underground cell, there was now an entire world. An entire history. An entire future yet to be written.
Spurius watched it all from an increasingly wider distance as the years passed. The old man, who from the beginning disliked Romulus's closeness to Gisela, slowly softened. Not because he stopped worrying. He never stopped worrying. That was his nature. But because he saw Gisela's effect on Romulus, an effect that could not be replicated by any of Gelasius's lessons or any sword practice: the fact that Gisela made Romulus laugh. Gisela made Romulus talk about things other than war and politics and death. Gisela reminded Romulus that he was still young and that youth was not a weakness to be hidden but a strength to be celebrated while it lasted.
In his journal, Spurius wrote in 481: I once feared that the woman would destroy my emperor. Now I fear that without the woman, my emperor will destroy himself. This world never gives me an easy choice.
Gelasius, with his usual wisdom, never commented on the relationship in Romulus's presence. He neither blessed nor forbade. He merely observed, recorded, and waited for the right moment to discuss it if and when that moment arrived. That moment never arrived in those quiet years. There was always something more pressing to discuss. There was always a hotter crisis to extinguish. And Gelasius, who always chose his battles carefully, decided that the battle for Romulus's heart could wait.
Perhaps that was a wise decision.
Perhaps not.
History does not provide answers to questions about what should have happened. History only records what happened. And what happened was two young people falling in love for six years without ever saying it, and that silence, like all silences in Italy during that period, harbored a storm.
THE LAST WINTER
And then, in the winter of 483, news arrived from Rome that would change everything.
Pope Simplicius, Bishop of Rome, Successor of Peter, the unworthy servant of the servants of God, the potter who once dreamed of two tables and two clays and a voice commanding to give it form, finally closed his eyes for the last time.
He died at dawn on the tenth day of March 483, in the bed that had been his world for almost six years. Felix was by his side when the last breath escaped, a breath so soft and so quiet that Felix did not realize it was the last breath until several minutes had passed and the next breath did not come.
The news spread from Rome across Italy like an unheard earthquake shockwave that was felt by everyone.
In Ravenna, Gelasius received the news through an exhausted courier on the afternoon of the thirteenth of March. He sat alone in the library after reading the letter, the last letter ever handwritten by Felix on behalf of a name that no longer possessed a name, and for the first time in his long and controlled life, the Archdeacon of Rome cried. Not a long weep. Only a few drops that fell on the parchment and dissolved the ink, blurring the words announcing Simplicius's death until they were illegible. As if his own tears refused to let those words become real.
In the very same library where he had taught Marcus Aurelius to a boy six years ago, Gelasius took out Simplicius's last letter which he kept in a locked drawer. Shape him, Gelasius. My time is almost up. He read that sentence again. And again. Then he folded the letter and placed it back in a safe spot, between the pages of the Meditationes of Marcus Aurelius whose cover had been replaced twice over six years of intensive use.
Your work is not done, old potter, Gelasius thought. But I will continue it. I promise.
In Milan, Theodore received the news on the same day through his own courier network which was faster and more efficient than any official network. He locked the doors of his cathedral and knelt alone before the altar for an hour. Whether he prayed for Simplicius's soul or prayed for the newly opened opportunities, no one knows. Perhaps both. Theodore could always do two things at once.
In Rome, the church bells began to toll. One church, then two, then the entire city. A heavy and slow tolling of bells sounded only for the death of a Pope, a sound that spread from one tower to the next like a dirge that could not be stopped until the whole city drowned in its vibration.
Romulus heard the news from Gelasius's own mouth. Not from a courier and certainly not from a report. Gelasius walked into Romulus's room at night, his eyes red but his voice steady, and spoke in a short and heavy sentence:
"Simplicius is gone."
Romulus sat on the edge of his bed. He had never met Simplicius in person. The old Pope was merely a name on parchment, a voice conveyed through Gelasius's mouth, a shadow making decisions from a distant bedroom in Rome. But Romulus understood, with the understanding that comes from years of learning to read what is unwritten, that this man's death changed everything.
"Felix will be Pope," Romulus said.
"Yes."
"And Felix does not believe in patience."
"No."
Silence. The winter wind blew the curtains of Romulus's bedroom window. Somewhere in the distance, an owl cried out. A sharp and lonely sound piercing the stillness of the night like a needle piercing cloth.
"Then the truce died with him," Romulus said.
Gelasius did not answer. He did not need to answer. They both knew.
Simplicius's grip on peace died with him. The hands that had held Italy back from the edge of the abyss for six years were now folded across his chest in a coffin inside Saint Peter's Basilica. And without those hands, without the grip that had trembled but was still strong enough to say no, there was nothing left to hold back the storm.
The winter of 483 was the coldest winter in the memory of anyone alive in Ravenna. Not just because of the biting temperatures or the snow falling thicker than usual in the marshes that were typically too warm for snow.
That cold came from within. From a collective feeling seeping through every wall and every blanket and every stone partition that something which had protected them was now gone. A feeling that could not be described with adequate words but which was recognized by every child who had ever lost a parent. The feeling that the roof which had been shielding them from the rain was already leaking, and the real rain was only just about to come.
In his room, on a cold and quiet night, Romulus Augustus, twenty-two years old, the emperor of Rome who never asked to be emperor, stood before the window and stared at the darkness outside.
Somewhere in the north, behind the invisible line dividing Italy, someone was sharpening a sword.
Somewhere in the south, in the Basilica built upon the bones of Peter, someone was trying on the new Pope's robes.
And here, in Ravenna, between the marshes and the sea and the walls that had been fortified for six years, a young man who once crawled through a sewer took a deep breath and prepared himself for the coming storm.
Because the storm would come.
It was no longer a question.
The only question was, whether the clay that had been shaped for six years with patient hands and praying hearts was strong enough to withstand the storm?
Or would he shatter, like the first clay on the first table in the dream of an old Pope who now dreamed no more?
The answer would come.
With the storm.