The Tenth Saint (32 page)

An Aksumite foot soldier stumbled toward them. Blood trickled from his forehead into his eyes, and his armor was split at the shoulder as if by an axe.

As the soldier’s knees buckled, Gabriel held him up. “Quick. Into the infirmary.”

“No.” Blood sputtered from the soldier’s mouth. “I bring a message from the king.”

“What’s happened?”

“They have closed in. The king is wounded. He calls for you. You must ride now to the river.”

Gabriel calmly wrapped his sword belt around his waist and secured his helmet. In his deepest meditations, he had foreseen being called upon to fight. Though he knew nothing of the ways of the sword, he trusted his instinct, his best weapon. He mounted his horse.

On the way to the northern front, his horse trampled hundreds of corpses, both Meroan and Aksumite. The battlefield was a graveyard, and the sands were stained crimson with the blood of the fallen. All around him was carnage. One young Aksumite who couldn’t have been more than sixteen was beheaded directly before him. Gabriel felt the warm blood spray on his lips.

In the distance appeared the king’s first regiment, Ezana included, encircled by a swarm of Blemmyes. These creatures of legend were not headless, as their reputation promised, but their shoulders were raised so high that their heads seemed to be tucked into their chests. They were almost apelike. Gabriel had never seen people like these. It was as if evolution had skipped over them.

Their war tactics were as ugly as they were. They had a taste for blood and were not beyond biting off chunks of their enemy in hand-to-hand combat. They clearly placed little value on life, others’ or their own. Their purpose was singular: to kill.

Even from a distance, he could see that Ezana’s sword arm was weakened from an injury. At the command of one of the lieutenants accompanying him, Gabriel spurred his horse to a gallop. The strategy was to ride into the thick of battle, remove the king from danger, and deliver him to safety where he could be treated.

It was a mission for the brave, but for Gabriel it was not a question of courage. It was his duty as a man to serve his fellow, be he king or slave. His deepest, most basic instinct sustained him as he rode against the wind to the riverbanks.

The Blemmye who clashed swords with the king struck another blow where the armor was weak, piercing Ezana’s left side and sending him tumbling from his horse. The king got to his knees and continued to wield his sword with fierce determination despite his injuries. But the Blemmyes, not unlike hyenas, waited for their prey to be debilitated and then went in for the kill. The monster-warrior raised his sword with both arms to deliver a final blow to the stunned king’s head.

Gabriel, riding past, drove his sword through the center of the Blemmye’s rib cage.

The apeman growled in agony and fell from his horse, expiring in convulsions on the bloodied earth.

Gabriel met Ezana’s raven eyes for a single moment: a king and a man on equal ground.

“Gabriel … behind you,” Ezana muttered.

A spear penetrated Gabriel’s armor and left rib, sending violent spasms through his entire abdomen. A white light overpowered his vision, and he felt himself sailing through the air before he hit the ground.

Twenty-Three

My dearest Bernard,

The king has signed the papers for my execution. It will be only hours before I face the gallows. The other prisoners spit on me and call me a witch, yelling the foulest profanities day and night, saying I deserve to burn for my heresies. But I am neither tormented by their insults nor afraid of feeling Death’s savage grip. you see, I died a long time ago. And now I must speak the truth and hope the wise man in you will understand and forgive me.

I am not who you think me to be.

When we met in the year of our Lord 1340, you knew I was not of this place. Night after night you asked if I was an angel sent to guard you. How I longed to tell you then. But I could not. I feared you would flee when I confronted you with the truth. This I could not risk. I needed you. I need you still, even though I am in the grave as you read this. But now, as I face the end, the time has come to reveal what I have longed to tell you since that cold winter day when you took me in and showed me kindness even though you had every right to despise and fear me.

I am not a witch. I am not a prophet. I am not even wise to the world. The truth is I have seen with my own eyes the destruction men can cause, for I have lived in another place and time. As difficult as this may be to believe, I have traveled to your France from a country that does not yet exist and a day that has not yet been lived.

I was happy once, a wife and a mother. And then the world collapsed. It shouldn’t have surprised me. Things had been in a fragile state for some time. But the truth is you don’t think such days will actually come, at least not on your watch.

It started with smoke. I thought nothing of it at first, but the fumes became thicker, more pervasive. I looked outside my window and froze, my senses violently seized by the furious dragon before me. Flames were boiling with urgent, terrible rage. A wall of fire engulfed the pines and turned the forest of my youth into a graveyard. As the tongues of the flames licked my own house, I knew soon every wall of my ancestral home, every memory, would crumble into a pile of ash.

I ran through the house, calling for my son. Smoke seeped through the cracks, gripping my throat so that I could not scream. I found him lying facedown on the floor, and I knew. At that moment and forevermore, grace left me.

It is impossible, until it happens, to know what it feels like to hold your lifeless child in your arms. you feel as if your luck has
j
ust run out, that no matter what good may come, the scales will never be tipped in your favor again. I died at that moment. And I thought: Why not finish it? Why not incinerate these bones and liberate the soul to the beyond lands where it can drift in a place devoid of sorrow and ambition and the longings of the greedy flesh? I lunged toward the belly of the beast, offering whatever remained of my feeble presence on this earth. But it was not to be. I felt a hand pulling me back. It was my husband, saying that what we had feared most had come to pass. The fires were advancing like predators from north, south, east, and west, devouring all that stood in their path. We knew this day would come. We had prepared for it.

It was time to activate the escape plan. I gazed one last time at the place I’d always known as home and saw nothing of it but the ashen effigies of trees and the charred ground stripped of all life. In the gathering smoke, we wrapped our son in his favorite blanket and laid him, along with all of our dreams, to rest in his tiny bed. We were ghosts, the walking dead. There was only one thing left, a final act of decency: to tell whoever would listen what had befallen us. And that is how I came to be here.

My country lay to the west of France, beyond the great ocean. Decades before I was even born, the land was in a state of collapse. For centuries, men had been multiplying at dizzying rates. During my lifetime, I saw the number swell to eleven billion. What place would not buckle under so much weight? Weather changes began to take place. Temperatures rose. Storms came with a greater speed and fury. Crops scorched, causing famine. Shorelines were engulfed by rising water as ice melted in the viking lands. And yet men continued to rape the land and hasten our annihilation.

When I was a young girl, the wild forests had vanished, burned to make space for more dwellings and farms and places of commerce. The solution did not come until many years later. A plant was dispersed into the oceans to breathe in place of the trees. For some years it worked, and men congratulated themselves for being more clever than Nature. But catastrophe was a single event away.

A powerful machine broke down, and its waste spilled into the oceans and caused the plants to multiply in great numbers. Men’s attempts to stop the beast were futile. In a matter of months, it had spread to all the seas and grown so thick it blocked the sun from entering the water, thus killing all sea life. But the worst was still to come.

Great fires erupted on all the land. Eternal fires burned, consuming houses and farms and bridges. Nothing and no one was safe from their wrath. We saw our brothers and friends die in the inferno, howling as their skin separated from their bones and turned to ash.

This was the end of ends. The last moments of the lands we knew as home. That horrible autumn day, three of us escaped in a ship designed to transport men to other realms. The future melted into the past, and we were deposited in unknown places and times with nothing but our mission: to stop men from forging their own destruction.

Think me mad if you wish, but I promise I speak the truth. I said earlier that I needed you still. What I must ask of you is a leap of faith. Believe my words, for all that I write in this letter is true. Finish the book you started, and safeguard the manuscripts for future generations. The people will see them as prophecies. Only you and I need know they are the truths, spoken by me to you, of a history yet to be written. Mention nothing of me. I am insignificant, a mere whisper in your ear. It is your talent for the written word, your good standing in society, and your erudition that will cause men to take notice—perhaps now, perhaps long after your time here has expired. I pray you will hear the pleas of this dead woman who cared for you, so that time may vindicate me.

If you think me mad, then so be it. But know this: you have been the only source of light in a world I lost faith in long ago. I cannot tell you how many nights I awoke from a terrible nightmare, only to be consoled by your warmth. you have made me believe again in the goodness of men.

Do not lament my fate. I am where I belong, in the realm of grace, at last touching the peace that eluded me in life.

yours eternally,

Calcedony

Sarah was numb. Everything was suddenly clear. Gabriel’s escape from a destroyed world to which he could never return, the “beast” that would cover the sea with a blanket of darkness, the air that gives not life but takes it away. She finally understood the enigma of the intact dentition: the plastic polymer in Gabriel’s teeth could not be identified because it had not yet been invented.

She asked Marie-Laure for another cigarette. The sweet menthol tobacco was like a lace veil over her racing thoughts, and she inhaled deeply again and again, lost in a surreal world becoming indistinguishable from her own. If everything in the letter was true, if Calcedony and Gabriel were indeed partners separated in a doomed world, then the discovery would take on a far deeper dimension. This wasn’t a prophetic foretelling of the apocalypse but an eyewitness account by not one but two who had been there.

The thought chilled her.
This is what’s coming, then. This is our future.
She knew the gravity of the proof she beheld; she also knew the Calcedony letter wasn’t the final puzzle piece. Both Gabriel and Calcedony had mentioned a third time traveler. This person was still unaccounted for.

No one in the scientific world would take this seriously. A set of prophecies inscribed on a cave in Ethiopia and a letter, supposedly written in the fourteenth century and kept under wraps all these years, conveniently released in tandem with the Gabriel prophecies. An alleged third party whose identity remained elusive. Who would believe any of it?

And yet she did.

She had no doubt she was meant to come into this knowledge. But what to do with it?

The church clock delivered its deep, resonant chime twelve times. “I should be going. Early flight tomorrow. This has been most illuminating.” She took Marie-Laure’s right hand in both of hers. “Thank you. For trusting me, I mean.”

“I would rather this remain between us … for now.”

“You have my word.”

“Before you go, I must give you something.” Marie-Laure pulled a newspaper clipping from her handbag. “I cut this from the
New York Times
about a year ago. I had a feeling it would be relevant one day.”

Sarah unfolded it carefully and scanned the headline: “Environmental Firm Unveils Global Warming Plan.”