...of ceremony

The din of conversation hushes suddenly as five people enter from a side-door near the platform and step up behind the red-draped table. The first two carry a big red book. One is a dishevelled brown-haired woman in a long white tunic and peplos, the other a slim young man in a black soutane with two narrow rectangular black bibs twice edged in white, whose extreme pallor only enhances his extreme beauty.
Emma catches her breath. It is the young man from the aerobrain. She is sitting in front, in her golden dress and ivory mantle, between Phillip II and the lady in the voluminous peachy skirts, also from the aerobrain. The young man in black and the dishevelled lady in white place the red book carefully upon a lectern on the table, then stand followed by a small, vacillating and very wrinkled old man, dressed in black robes, who has bright eyes and a bald head, except around the temples, and a sparse pointed white beard. He carries nothing. Behind him walks a tall, handsome man with greying hair, in a shabby grey cutaway coat, who precedes a small papal figure in white with a red shoulder-cape edged in white fur and a gold-embroidered green stole crossed over his chest. This last arrival takes his place at the centre of the table, flanked on his left by the pale young man and the dishevelled woman, on his right by the old man and the man in plain clothes.
The small white red and green priest raises his arms in welcome, then lowers them, to Emma's relief, who thought he was going to bless them with a sign of the cross. Felipe Segundo, next to her, is surprised that he does not, and crosses himself. Who are these two men on the left, he asks himself, not Protestants surely! And a woman at the altar! The silence is total now. What will he say? Emma wonders, Dearly Beloved Brethren?

[Textermination, Brooke-Rose, C.]