Enoch's Device (8 page)

T
hat night, Dónall slept fitfully.
During the long hours he lay awake, he prayed the rhythm of the sea would quiet his thoughts, but nothing could overcome the haunting memories of that terrible night in Reims. So many years had passed since then, yet in his mind’s eye the images remained as vivid as yesterday.

He stood outside the city on one of the surrounding tree-crowned hills thick with autumn leaves, as the sun began to set. He was young then, a man of just twenty-five. Thomas was with him, dressed in his Benedictine habit, his angelic face clean-shaven and his dark hair rustling in the breeze. The treetops shimmered with a faint flicker of blue light as Dónall and Thomas swung their leaf-shaped swords, playing with the wind.

The blustering breeze whirled a pile of yellow and orange leaves high into the air. Thomas had arranged the leaves into a birdlike shape, which he directed with his sword, causing it to soar and dive and then rise back up, borne aloft by the complicit wind. His creation moved with grace and beauty, for Thomas was an artist, and he smiled and laughed as it flew. “What should I name him?” Thomas asked.

Dónall glanced at the swan-shaped creation gliding in circles above the trees. He had summoned his own wind, swirling leaves into a serpentine ribbon. Following the flicks of his sword, the ribbon coiled and looped above the ground. “Call him Icarus,” Dónall said.

“Icarus?”

“Yes, because as soon as another thought invades that brain of yours, he’s going to plummet from the sky.”

Thomas laughed. He banked his creation and pitched it into a dive. The leafy bird pulled back its wings, like a hawk stooping on a hare. It plunged through Dónall’s swirling ribbon, scattering its leaves in every direction. Then Thomas’s bird beat its wings, climbing skyward.

“Icarus got hungry,” Thomas quipped.

Dónall smiled and shook his head. Concentrating on his sword, he whispered a Fae word and waited. Around him, the wind whistled. Icarus soared above the trees before Thomas pitched it into another graceful dive, but halfway through the dive, the avian shape collapsed. Its wings crumpled into its body, which spun wildly amid a swirling funnel that churned leaves and dust, blasting them across an acre of wooded hilltop.

Thomas looked dumbfounded.

“Icarus shouldn’t have flown into my cyclone,” Dónall said with a grin.

Thomas shrugged. “We’re getting better at this, you know.”

“That we are.”

“Do you think we could ever harness the wind to make a man fly?”

“Like a bird?”

“Not exactly, but I think it could be possible.”

“There you go again with that unfettered imagination.”

“Do you want to try?” Thomas asked with a mischievous grin.

“It’s past dusk,” Dónall said. “We need to get back before they close the gates. Besides, I’m worn out.”

“So far, fatigue is the only untoward effect. Maybe tomorrow we’ll try to fly.”

“You really do want to be like Icarus, don’t you?”

Thomas just shrugged. They stowed their swords in the sheaths hidden beneath their habits. They had had the blades forged secretly, based on a diagram in Maugis’ book. As far as they knew, these twelve blades were the only ones like them in all the world—one for each of their brethren, the keepers of the mysteries of Maugis d’Aygremont.

Dusk faded to night by the time they reached the Porte de Mars, the three-arched gateway flanked by the towering Roman walls that surrounded the city. The two monks entered as the guardsmen were closing the gates, and made their way toward the cathedral, passing through cramped neighborhoods of thatch-roofed hovels. Beneath the eaves of several houses, oil lanterns dimly lit the narrow streets littered with offal and waste. Dónall ignored the stench, but he and Thomas could not help noticing the prostitutes who called out to them. The women wore scant clothing and were quick to bare their breasts—some plump like golden melons, others slight with dark nipples. Dónall and Thomas passed them by, though Dónall felt certain that these women had serviced their fair share of priests.

The school was part of a cluster of buildings that surrounded the cathedral. Many of its ivy-covered walls had fallen into disrepair, which had been a constant gripe of Archbishop Adalbero, especially when the winter wind whipped through the chinks, sweeping parchments from desks and chilling fingers till they could no longer hold a quill.

When the two monks arrived, they found the gatehouse empty, so they entered the school through the unlocked gate.

The foyer was quiet. In sconces on the walls, rushlights flickered with the breeze that hissed through a crack in the old slate roof. A wiry monk ducked through an archway from the common room. It was Nicholas, and his eyes were as wide as if he had seen a ghost.

“Something horrible has happened!” he exclaimed.

“What is it?” Thomas asked.

“Canon Martinus,” Nicolas said, his jaw quivering. “He’s . . .
dead.
”

Dónall looked at him, stunned. “How?”

“He’s there, just past the common room, in the hall.”

Thomas bounded through the archway, with Dónall on his heels. In the common room, some thirty black-robed monks and priests had gathered at the entranceway of the corridor leading to the cathedral. Many bore looks of shock; others wept outright. Some clustered in small groups, whispering or praying.

Another of their brethren, Lucien, slumped against the archway from the foyer. His normally cherubic face was ashen, and tears welled in his eyes. “You didn’t tell us it would come to this,” he moaned.

Thomas looked at Lucien, puzzled, but Lucien stared through him as if he were an apparition.

Dónall touched Lucien’s shoulder. He didn’t flinch.

Thomas backed away and then started working his way through the crowd.

“He didn’t tell us it would come to this,” Lucien sobbed again under his breath.

Dónall shook his head and left Lucien there. And at the entrance to the wood-paneled corridor, he saw the body.

Canon Martinus lay sprawled on his back. A long red gash ran from one side of his throat to the other, and the crucifix around his neck lay submerged in a pool of blood that filled the hollow of his throat.

Brother Omer stood beside the dead priest. Dónall gripped Thomas’s shoulder. For the heavyset monk was pleading with upturned, bloody palms before a forbidding man in crimson robes—Archbishop Adalbero of Reims.

“I found him like this, I swear,” Omer stammered. “As God is my witness . . . !”

Adalbero glared accusingly at Omer, while another of their brothers, Gerbert of Aurillac, whispered in the archbishop’s ear. Gerbert’s thin face was fixed with a grim expression. He glanced briefly at Dónall and, for an instant, caught his eye. But the glance betrayed no thought or feeling, and his attention quickly returned to the archbishop.

“We must go,” Thomas said. “Now.” He ducked back into the crowd, and Dónall trailed him, wending his way through the monks and priests, praying he did not draw attention to himself.

Free of the crowd, Thomas rushed back into the foyer. He held his head in his hands before drawing them nervously from his face. “Didn’t you see it—the hidden door? Canon Martinus must have found the Secret Collection.”

“He couldn’t have.”

“The door was cracked! All they need do is examine that panel, and they’ll find it.” The color drained from Thomas’s face. “What if they know about the book? They’ll have damning evidence against us . . .”

Dónall could taste bile in his throat. “There’s a rather bigger problem.”

Thomas gaped at him. “Bigger than
this
? Bigger than the revelation of our secrets?”

“Yes,” Dónall said with a sigh. “Because one of us has murdered Canon Martinus.”

T
he sun set behind the
low hills backing the tiny village of Selles-sur-Cher, painting the sky with a salmon glow behind the cross-shaped gravestone of the man Alais loved.

The stone stood in the cemetery south of the abbey, where the lay abbots were buried beside their family members and where the few monks whose prominence warranted burial outside the underground crypts were also laid to rest. Alais knelt beside Geoffrey’s grave on the damp patch of grass where she, too, hoped to lie when the time came to join her husband in the afterlife. Two weeks had passed since his death, and each time she came here she wept—for him and for herself. For not only was Alais burdened with the loss of the man she loved, but she found herself alone—terribly alone.

The year after she and Geoffrey wedded, her father fell victim to a hunting accident, bleeding to death after being gored in the thigh by a wild boar. Within the year, her mother remarried a wealthy lord in Lombardy. Alais had written her since Geoffrey’s death, but Lombardy was halfway to Rome, and it could be weeks before she received a reply. Still, Alais prayed that her mother would write back or even journey north, for she had never come to visit Alais in Selles. Nor had her sister, Adeline, who had stopped writing years ago.

Alais held the strangely shaped pendant at her throat, the cross with a handle, and whispered the last words of a prayer. Then she kissed the tips of her fingers and touched Geoffrey’s gravestone. “Good night, my love,” she said. She had risen to return to her manor house when she heard footsteps at the graveyard’s edge. She gave a relieved sigh, realizing that it was Brother Thadeus.

“Remember, child,” he said, walking toward her, “this was but the first death.”

“Whatever do you mean, Thadeus?” she replied.

“The book of Revelation speaks of two deaths. The first is the death of the flesh, which we all suffer. But a second death falls to those souls who, on the day of judgment, are cast into the lake of fire. Yet the Lord spares the souls whose deeds warrant entry of their names in the book of life. They suffer only the first death. Geoffrey was a good man. His only death is behind him, I think. His soul is in heaven now.”

Alais tried to smile, but she couldn’t manage it. “What about those left behind?”

“Some say life is a gift, but I think of it more as a test. And tests were never meant to be easy.” Thadeus placed a hand on Alais’ arm. “May I walk you back home?”

“Certainly.”

The two of them left the cemetery and started down a path through the fields. Puddles of mud from the morning’s rain dimpled the path. The grass on the hills had begun to yellow as winter neared, and the farmers had retreated to their homes. The smoke wafting from their thatch-roofed cottages tinged the air with a familiar dark sharpness that was indelibly linked in Alais’ mind with winter and cold and gray.

“Have you received any word from the king?” Thadeus asked when they had gone some distance down the path.

Alais shook her head. “Nothing.”

Thadeus’s brow wrinkled in the way it did when something concerned him. “I know that Geoffrey sent him a message. What about your cousin?”

He referred to William, whom she had known well when she was a child, even though he was eight years her senior. She had not seen him since her wedding, two years before William succeeded his father as count of Poitiers and duke of Aquitaine. After Geoffrey died, she had sent one of his few remaining men-at-arms to Poitiers to tell William. Although Poitiers was only thirty leagues southwest of Selles-sur-Cher, the roads were in such abysmal condition that even on a good horse, the journey would take five days. Yet nearly twelve days had passed since her messenger departed. For a week now, she had hoped to see a unit of horsemen carrying her cousin’s standard emblazoned with its crimson lion, or the king’s blue banner with its golden fleur-de-lis, riding to the aid of Selles. But no one came.

“The last I heard,” she told Thadeus, “he was on campaign with King Robert in the south.”

“I heard the campaign did not go well. Your cousin has made a few military mistakes of late. I had hoped his focus might return to things closer to home.”

Alais just nodded. She feared that William had forgotten her. The king, too.

“Keep the faith,” Thadeus said. “Help will come.”

As they climbed the hill to the manor house, Alais realized how lucky she was to have the old infirmarer. Since Geoffrey’s death, Thadeus had always been there. He was not judgmental like Prior Ragno, or frightened of an attractive woman as many of the monks were, or overly deferential like the village women, who were uncomfortable with her noble station. He was simply supportive, one of the few people who did not want something from her. He was perhaps the only person in Selles she could trust completely.

“Will you be all right?” Thadeus asked when they reached the manor’s door.

“Yes, thank you,” she replied.

“Very well, then.” He bowed slightly before turning to walk back to the abbey.

“Wait.” She found herself fingering the pendant Geoffrey had given her. Something about it had been troubling her since his death. “Have you ever heard of a secret kept by the abbey—a treasure, perhaps?”

The old monk smiled and shook his head. “We are a poor abbey, child, with only a few relics of Saint Eustace, I’m afraid.”

“Not a saint’s relic,” she said, “but something that would be locked in a small chest—a secret passed down by the lay abbots.”

His eyes narrowed. “Would this chest be large enough to hold a book?”

“I think so.”

Thadeus chuckled under his breath. “There were rumors of an old tome, a rare book of knowledge, but we have so few books, and it’s been so long, I had stopped even thinking such rumors might be true.”

“What if I told you I am certain it’s true?”

“But . . . how so?”

“Come inside,” Alais said. “I’ll show you.”

The manor house that she had shared with Geoffrey was a simple structure. At times, Geoffrey insisted on calling it a castle, and he always had grand designs for its expansion, yet to Alais, having grown up in the palace of Poitiers, it seemed rather small. Unlike the villagers’ wattle-and-daub cottages, the house had buttressed limestone walls, which made it the sturdiest structure in Selles, aside from the abbey. The house consisted of three main rooms: the hall, by far the largest room, where Geoffrey had held court and they ate all their meals on the trestle table in its center; a tiny garderobe; and the bedchamber. A kitchen stood adjacent to the house, along with a wooden stable.

Alais led Thadeus through the hall to the bedchamber. It was a small room with a canopied bed, a clothes chest, and a table with a basin of fresh water under the single window.

“We need to move the bed,” she told him.

“Why?”

“It’s hidden underneath it.”

Thadeus looked perplexed. “Why isn’t it in the abbey?”

“I got the sense from Geoffrey that the lay abbots had hidden it here forever.”

Thadeus shrugged but did as she asked, grunting as, together, they pushed the heavy bed aside along with a small pile of rushes that had been laid over the floor. He started at the sight of a long sheathed dagger that had been hidden under the bed.

“I’ve not felt safe since Geoffrey died,” Alais explained, picking up the dagger and tucking it under a pillow. “It helps me sleep better.” She cleared away some more rushes where the bed had been, to reveal an old wooden plate on the stone-tiled floor. She knocked on the plate.

“Hollow,” Thadeus remarked.

She nodded and then knelt, using the tips of her fingers to pry the plate out.

Beneath was a small, dark cavity. Something glinted inside—the warm glint of gold.

“Help me lift it,” she said.

Thadeus knelt before the space and helped her lift out a small oak chest. His eyes grew wide at the chest’s lid, which was inlaid with gold in a pattern of a seven-pointed star, within a circle containing twelve odd-looking symbols.

“Do you know what it means?” she asked, pointing at the pattern.

The monk stared in awe—perhaps of the symbols, or of the prodigal amount of gold. “The symbols may be astrological,” he murmured, “but I can’t be sure. Can you open it?”

“Yes,” she said, taking the pendant-key’s chain from around her neck. The base of the cross fit perfectly inside the keyhole. She turned it until she heard a click, and then carefully opened the lid.

Inside was not a book, but a scroll wrapped around two carved wooden spindles. Its dark-stained surface looked unbelievably ancient to Alais, as it had the first time she saw it.

“It is not written in the Roman script,” she told him. “I don’t know it.”

Thadeus lifted the scroll from the chest as delicately as if he were lifting a baby chick from its nest. He unfurled it slightly. “The words are Greek.”

“Can you read it?”

But Thadeus was already tracing a gnarled finger under the text. Within moments, he seemed lost in the old scroll. She brought him a candle and waited at the edge of her bed as he read, slouched over the table. His face was intense, even troubled at times, but she could not tell whether he struggled with the language or with the writing’s content. Afraid to disturb him, she said nothing.

He read for what seemed like an hour. When he finally looked up, his face was ashen. “This speaks of dire things, my dear.
Fascinating
things, to be sure, but terrible.”

His hands trembled as he rolled up the scroll. “I cannot say more.” He gently laid the scroll back in the chest and closed the lid, then hastily lowered it into its hiding place.

“Why not?” she asked.

“There was a reason this was kept from the monks. I’m certain of it now.” He replaced the wooden plate over the hiding space and began covering it with rushes. When he was done, he sighed with relief.

“Tell me, please,” she begged.

“It is heresy,” he said. “Even blasphemy.”

“Then why is it here?”

Thadeus looked at her helplessly. “I wish I knew.”