Devil's Lair (9 page)

Marco stopped the cart short
of the house and tethered the donkey to the bole of a young oak. With the
friar’s belt he secured the poet to one wheel, then ordered the old man to
climb into the cart and tied him back-to-back with the girl, making sure their
wrists were held fast together.

“Not a sound,” he said,
leaving the punishment implied.

With the dead man’s sword in
his right hand and the dagger in his belt, Marco stepped off the road, into the
forest, and went slinking toward the cottage.

William sat in the cart with
his back to Nadja’s back, their hands tied together. The rope bit into his
wrists as Nadja struggled to free herself. He looked over his shoulder to gauge
her progress. Nadja’s fingers curled and brushed against the knot. She twisted
her hands to create more slack. She held her breath, grunted, then sighed with
frustration. Catching her breath, she tried again.

Glancing down over the
sideboard, William saw Giovanni struggling to untie the Franciscan belt that
trussed him to the wheel. In forty years that belt, made of tough English hemp,
had lost little of its strength. Giovanni would soon discover for himself that
the cord was stronger than the wheel. Marco had looped the rope around the
felly and three spokes. Giovanni could get free if he tore out the spokes and
snapped the felly, but if the wheel broke from the axle, William and Nadja
would tumble to the road. The girl might get hurt. Would they be able to repair
the wheel? Unlikely. They needed to keep it intact if they hoped to arrive at
Lake Averus with all of their supplies. If they wanted to escape, they were
going about it the wrong way.

William was not inclined to
escape. He had traveled too far in search of the last Knight Templar to flee
him now. William did not trust the knight, but he did not have to. He trusted
God. This journey back to Rome was unforeseen, but if God allowed it there must
be a reason.

Marco was a harsh man, but
William did not think him evil. The knight had not raped the girl, who he
obviously liked, nor murdered the poet, who he clearly despised. Marco was
wounded, addled, unsure of his surroundings. He did not seem to know himself.
His impulses were violent, but he seemed capable of regret. In time the warrior
might be gentled, the mercenary reformed. Marco’s injuries would heal. He would
find his better self. It was William’s charge to show him the way.

As Nadja struggled with the
rope, William’s hands purpled. His fingers numbed. If the girl persisted, they
would both lose their extremities.

There is another way,
he thought. He could use the glass
lentil. Roger Bacon had discovered, and William had confirmed, that sunlight
focused through the lentil to a single point burned hot enough to kindle fire.
Just as Archimedes had focused sunlight with a giant mirror to burn the Roman
ships at Syracuse, William might use the glass lentil to burn these knotted
ropes.

The sunlight was inconstant,
dappling the weald in shifting patterns at the mercy of the trees and the
teasing wind. William had demonstrated the lentil’s incendiary effect to Nadja
several times, but always under the fiery dazzle of the noontide sun. Could he
achieve the same effect here?

The lentil was stored in his
leather pouch, which lay near Nadja’s feet. The friar grunted to get her
attention. Nadja glanced up at him. William jutted his chin in the direction of
the pouch. He looked at Nadja, then at the pouch, then back at the girl. It
took a few moments to get his meaning across. Finally, she understood. She
placed her feet on the pouch and slid it back toward their hands. Together they
scooted across the bed of the cart, inch by inch, rocking the tumbrel on its
rickety wheels, until the friar grasped the pouch between his fingertips.
Opening it, he reached in with two fingers and felt the smooth, hard jewel.
With care and concentration he withdrew the glass lentil, his tool of miracles,
his instrument of magic.

Marco sneaked toward the
cottage in quiet steps. Now and again he stopped to clear the ground before
him, easing foliage aside with the tip of his sword before hazarding another
step. Still, he could not clear it all away, and the duff crackled softly
underfoot. After one loud
crunch
he froze and listened for alarm, but no noises issued from the
house, so he continued as before. In this way he made slow and undiscovered
progress.

Reaching the cottage door,
Marco paused to listen but heard no patter of habitation. He moved to the
window. With the dagger’s point he eased the shutter open and waited for as
long as he could hold his breath. No sounds came from within.

Gone,
he thought.

He peeked inside and found
it dark, impenetrable. A fly buzzed past him, pursued by a foul air, the
exhalation of a rank miasma. Something had died inside the house.

Marco circled to the back,
passing a dry midden heap. A trellis, thinly woven with dead vines and
marcescent leaves, had toppled. The haft of an axe lay on the ground beside it.
The blade was missing. Marco discovered animal tracks in the dirt and examined
them closely, but the faint spoor was old and inconclusive. Finishing his round
of the cottage, he returned to the door and opened it without knocking.

William held the glass
lentil behind him, over the sideboard and above the rope that tied Giovanni’s
hands. Looking over his shoulder and moving the lentil back and forth, he found
a thin shaft of light breaking through the forest canopy. By raising and
lowering his body he slid the lentil along the beam’s path until the sunlight
focused to a sharp point on the white rope belt, the lifeline of his order,
which began to blacken and smoke.

Marco stepped inside. The interior was
cool and dim and stank of rotting vegetables and fleshy decay. It was the odor
of death and something else. Something familiar.
I know that smell.
Though
the foulness sickened him, he inhaled like a bellows and held the fetor in his
lungs, savoring it, this taste of lost time, rich and rank and redolent of
memory. There was something in this room that recalled to him his former life.

The smokehole in the roof
was closed. Wind whistled in the thatch. Flies buzzed in shadows. Light fell
from the window and stabbed the darkness, but the wound did not go deep. Marco
could scarcely see a thing.

Something scurried on the
ground: hard claws scrabbled on stone, skittered across the dirt floor, then
fell silent.

As Marco’s eyes negotiated
the darkness, objects around him took shape and form. The cottage had only a
single room, built to be shared by kin and kine. A waist-high fence to Marco’s
left partitioned one end of the room for a stable, which claimed at least a
third of the dwelling. In the center of the stable, amid the straw and the
muck, a dark mass gathered a vigorous horde of flies. Marco saw that it had
once been a dairy cow. At the center of the cottage lay an open stone hearth
where a cauldron hung over a pile of cinder. Opposite the stable, a bed lay
heaped with rumpled blankets. Beside the bed stood a trunk with a lid but no
lock.

He opened the trunk first
and found it empty. Checking the kettle, he discovered the musty remains of
unserved pottage. A dead rat moldered on the slab of the hearth. Marco probed
his sword in the cinders but found nothing hidden there. Crossing to the bed,
he saw something beneath the blankets and stopped halfway.

Someone was in the bed.

Marco crept forward, leading
with his long blade, his dagger in his other hand. He stuck his sword under the
edge of the top blanket and flipped back the coverlet.

A dead woman stared up at
him. Her eyes were wide, her mouth agape, framing the final exhalation which
had long ago escaped her. A dead man lay in the bed beside the woman, his cheek
on her shoulder, his arms curled about her in a last embrace. Their flesh was
livid with black and purple sores.

Marco felt his stomach
tighten. He had seen this before. Many times before. This, yes, this he
remembered.

Plague.

Giovanni smelled smoke. He
was still tied to one of the rear wheels of his father’s cart. Inexplicably,
the rope that held him began to burn. He felt heat rising from the cord, the
curl of smoke against the skin of his right arm.

Moments before, William had
leaned out of the cart to look down and now the old man hovered overhead,
preternaturally still. With no flint, no steel, no lighted torch or lamp,
William somehow caused the kindling of the rope.

What is he doing?

The poet leaned back against
the wheel and looked up. He saw the glass lentil. It was filled with light,
glowing with divine radiance against the black umbrage of the forest. There
seemed a kind of magic in it.

The friar grunted a sharp
rebuke through the rag that gagged him. The lentil went dark as the old man
shook the cart in anger. Giovanni leaned his head forward again. After a
moment, the soft hiss of burning hemp continued.

Casting fire from a
stone.

It was like one of Merlin’s
tricks in the Arthurian tales, or some conjuring of the Persian magi. As a
child Giovanni had heard such stories from Friar Oderic, who had been to the
East and seen many such wonders. As an adult Giovanni had read
Marco Polo’s reports of finding, in the mountains of Cathay,
black stones that burned like charcoal. But William’s stone was something else.
It was clear and made of glass. It did not burn itself but other objects.

The heat at Giovanni’s back
intensified. He was sure he felt flames lapping at his skin. Soon his clothes
would catch fire, then his hair, then his flesh. This crazy old wizard meant to
burn him like a witch. Like a Templar. A vision of the burning brotherhood came
to the poet’s mind.
“Men burned like boars on a spit,”
his father had said.
“For three days the sky was
black as midnight with the smoke from the heretics.”

Giovanni panicked as a ring
of flame circled his wrists. The gag in his mouth muffled his scream. He
strained against the rope. The cord broke. Frantically, he pulled at it. The
rope came loose, whipping through the spokes of the wheel as Giovanni leapt to
his feet and turned. He checked himself for burns, and yanked his gag from his
face so he could catch his breath. The rope smoked on the ground like an angry
serpent.

Relieved, he laughed, then
untied his companions.

Marco stepped outside. He
had come too late to the house; it had been pillaged already. The kettle and
the trunk had value, but Marco wanted nothing more than to put this pestilence
behind him. Returning to the cart, he found his former hostages standing
together, unfettered, studying the poet’s map of Hell.

The old man looked up.
“Ready when you are.”

Marco saw a blackened rope
in the road. “How did you get free?”

William said, “We’re on the
side of the angels.”

No angel burned that
rope.
Had the hostages
freed themselves? They had made a cooking fire, which meant they had flint and
steel in one of the bags. Had they retrieved their incendiaries and gotten
lucky with a spark?
Impossible.
But he could think of no other solution.

He should not have left them
alone. That much was clear. And yet, he could not watch over them at all hours.
Did he need these people at all?
No.
They were slowing him down. He could find Rome by himself.
Forget
them.
He could manage on
his own. He would continue north until he arrived at the city gate, then find
the nearest tavern. Someone would recognize him and direct him to his villa.

“I’m on my own side,” Marco
said to the friar, and unhitched the donkey from the cart. He felt irritated,
but more than anything he wished to be alone.

Nadja strode up to him with
anger in her eyes. She grabbed his sleeve, saying, “You swore to protect the
Holy Grail.”

“Let go of me, woman.” He
swatted her hand away.

“You are bound to our
quest.”

He mounted the sumpter. “I
have a quest of my own.”

“That’s my donkey,” Giovanni
said.

“I’m keeping the donkey. I
give you your lives.”

Spurring the animal, Marco
rode to the light of the glade, and then into shadow.

CHAPTER 10

“Hurry,”
said Nadja.

Giovanni massaged his
wrists.
I smell like a blacksmith.
Hairs on the back of his hands were singed, blackened, curled by
the heat. Red welts appeared where the rope had chafed him, but the skin
remained unbroken. The marks would fade. The memories would not.

The girl was in the cart,
rummaging through the bags. She held her drawing board in one hand, a sheaf of
papers in the other. Her hair swung loose at her shoulders, hiding and
revealing her face in turns as she moved from one bag to the next. She found
her pouch of herbs, set it to one side, and searched for something else,
probably the charcoal sticks Giovanni had made. He had put them in his satchel
when Marco ordered him to load the cart.
She’ll find them,
he thought, and let her go on looking.