The Wolves of Paris by Michael Wallace

the corridor that passed beneath the arcades of the monastery’s central courtyard. A young friar with large brown eyes and smooth cheeks, as pretty as a girl, held a lancet in one hand. Montguillon held his right arm out, where blood dripped from a cut and fell in fat drops to congeal on the cold flagstone.
    Montguillon was middle-aged, slender, with ropy muscles. Stripes of old scars ran down his back, and his ribs stood out, as did his hollow cheeks. It was a body devoid of gluttony or self indulgence. He didn’t appear bothered by the chill open air.
    “A maiden dreams of a comely young boy and copulates with him in her sleep,” the prior continued. “The devil’s seed takes root in her womb. When the time is given that she deliver, she gives birth to a cloven-hoofed offspring. You know this is true, you believe this?”
    “I have heard such stories.”
    “Stories? You think they are stories?” Montguillon said, an edge to his voice.
    “I have heard these stories second hand,” Lorenzo said quickly. “But I have not witnessed them myself. That is all I mean.”
    “Do not doubt them. That which affirms the faith is true. That which confuses, clouds, and causes doubt, is ipso facto , error and sin.”
    The younger friar leaned in with his lancet and made a second cut in the prior’s arm. Montguillon closed his eyes and sighed, a sound that was midway between ecstasy and torment. Blood welled to the surface, then fell. Plop, plop, plop.
    After leaving Lucrezia’s house, Lorenzo had followed the two Dominican friars through the streets of the Cité. The two men chanted loudly. People stared. Old women crossed themselves. In front of Notre Dame, he spotted the pretty bread seller. The girl stared at him, wide-eyed. The yellow cross seemed to burn on Lorenzo’s breast with the light of a hundred candles.
    Here passes a heretic. His thoughts are a plague of the mind. Shun him.
    The Dominicans marched, chanting in Latin, across the bridge and onto the right bank. Heading north, they passed into the fields of the monastery of Saint-Jacques.
    The Dominican priory marked the start of the road to Santiago de Compostela, and a handful of pilgrims had gathered in front of the gates. They were on foot, trailed by two donkeys laden with their provisions. A friar chanted in Latin to bless their journey. The pilgrims stared at Lorenzo as he followed the two friars through the gates.
    Lorenzo was tired, but the march had given him time to reflect. It was penance, it wasn’t a second heresy trial. If he faced it with courage, he could emerge strengthened in his faith, not weakened. That was its purpose.
    But any hopes that Lorenzo would fall into the hands of an enlightened prior, a fellow student of Cicero and Virgil, a reader of Petrarch and Dante, fell away as the friars admitted him into the presence of Henri Montguillon in the midst of a bloodletting.
    The prior opened his eyes and must have seen the unsettled look on Lorenzo’s face. “The blood flows too quickly in the heat of the fire. If my humors must be balanced, then do not let it pass too quickly.”
    “Have you been ill, Father?”
    “In a manner of speaking.” He glanced down at the wound, then looked up “Tell me, why have you come?”
    “To do penance. I was a Dominican initiate, but I . . . ” He hesitated, choking on the confession extracted under torture. “I fell into error, Father.”
    “I am aware of your sins. And I am aware that you did not complain as you accepted your sentence under the Holy Inquisition.”
    Complain? As they hung Lorenzo in a gibbet for thirty-six hours? As he walked fourteen times around the city walls of Genoa, once for each station of the cross, the last time naked and flagellating himself until blood ran in rivulets down his thighs? What would complaint have done, but increase the weight of the cross on his shoulders?
    Complaining was not Lorenzo’s problem. His problem was pride. He had never belonged, had