Devil's Lair
Authors: David Wisehart
"
Devil’s Lair
is by far the best book I have read in years!"
—
USA Today
bestselling author Rebecca Forster
"A fantastic book and I
commend Mr. Wisehart on such an incredible novel. Highly Recommended."
— Debra L. Martin,
author of
The Quest for Nobility
"Beautifully told, full
of vivid details. Brilliant!"
— Christa Polkinhorn,
author of
Love of a Stonemason
From
Devil’s Lair
:
“I’ll go first,” Marco said.
He moved to the front of the group. The
crack in the floor was wide enough to step through. Marco paused at the verge
of the abyss, surveyed the entrance, then took the first step.
William entered second, bracing against the walls
to ease himself down. Nadja went third. Her hair caught the light rising from
the Lance.
Giovanni watched them go.
When the others had
vanished, their footfalls continued to echo up to the chamber where the poet
stood alone. Light dwindled in the lower passage.
You wanted to
be another Dante,
he
chided himself, and took a deep breath to summon his courage.
He peered into the dismal
maw and felt a warm draft on his face. The hole in the ground seemed to
breathe. He sensed no sulfurous odor, merely the smell of damp stone. The echo
of footsteps diminished and died. The only sound remaining was his galloping
heartbeat and his panicky breath. It taunted and shamed him.
Giovanni crossed himself,
muttering, “
Libera nos a malo,
” and followed the others down into Hell.
DEVIL’S LAIR
David Wisehart
Devil’s Lair
Copyright © 2010 by David Wisehart
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reproduced or distributed without permission.
Kindle Edition
January 2011
in dimidio dierum meorum
vadam ad portas inferi
In the middle of my life, I
go to the gates of Hell.
— Isaiah 38:10
CHAPTER 1
Campania,
Kingdom of Naples
Anno Domini 1349
William
of Ockham walked barefoot through the carnage. Slaughtered knights and fallen
horses festered on the battlefield. A thousand naked corpses lay broken upon
the earth, and in that multitude a few unlucky men survived, weltering in their
own blood, crying out for God. The fighting was over but the dying would go on
for days.
Half the world is dead,
thought William,
and still they kill
each other.
He searched for one man in a
massacre of men, and carried a charcoal sketch to identify the face, though
some of the men were so disfigured by violence, so brutalized by retribution,
they would not be recognized by their own ghosts. The corpses had been stripped
bare, their clothing and armor scavenged. A few of the bodies were sunburned.
Most were not. William wondered how the sun could redden some men and leave
others pale, but on closer examination he understood: only the living burned
and blistered. Heartened by this discovery, William checked the sunburned
bodies first, comparing his sketch to the faces of the lingerers. A thought
murmured, like the whisper of an angel:
There is still hope.
Carrion crows feasted on the
dead and the nearly dead. Birds scattered as William approached, and gathered
again like shadows in his wake.
Pawk pawk,
screamed the crows,
pawk pawk.
The conclamation was deafening. The malodor
of gutted bowels and corrupting flesh pervaded the air as blowflies settled in
open wounds. Long months of drought had parched the earth, which now drank the
blood of the fallen. A few low places caught more spillage than the ground
could take. Scarlet pools dried into black scabs that cracked and crunched
beneath William’s bare feet.
A hand grabbed his ankle.
William stumbled, recovered, and looked down at the soldier who would not let
him go. The tip of a broken lance protruded from the man’s chest. Nervous eyes
looked up, pleading. The piteous soldier was not long for this world. Another
world awaited him.
“I have sinned,” the man
said.
William knelt beside him.
“Who is Marco da Roma? Is he here? Marco da Roma?”
“I want to confess.”
William showed him the
sketch. “Do you know this man?”
The soldier coughed blood.
He gripped William’s grey cowl with trembling fingers. “Bless me, Father.”
“I’m not—”
“Please.”
I’m not a priest. Not
anymore.
Excommunicated by a heretic
pope and hunted by the Inquisition, William had fled the papal palace at
Avignon for the safety of Bavaria. For twenty years he lived in exile. That
pope was dead now, but the ban was unabated.
Devil be damned.
A false pope might leave a dying man
unconfessed. William could not.
A leather pouch dangled from
the white rope belt that identified William as a Friar Minor. He had worn that
belt for forty years. It bound him to his oath. He opened his pouch and
withdrew an ampule of
oleum infirmorum,
consecrated olive oil. “I will hear your confession.”
“Bless me, Father.” The soldier
said no more. Death rattled in his throat. His eyes lost focus. His hand
relaxed its grip and fell to the earth.
With the oil, William traced
the sign of the cross on the soldier’s forehead, saying, “
Per istam sanctam
unctionem et suam piissimam misericordiam, indulgeat tibi Dominus quidquid
deliquisti. Amen.
”
He closed the soldier’s eyes
and moved on.
William glanced about for
his fellow pilgrims, Nadja and Giovanni, but the summer heat made things
shimmer at a distance. His cohorts had wandered beyond his ken. Hours ago the
group had separated to hasten their search. William regretted the decision now.
Surrounded by so much death and decay, he longed again for the company of
friends.
At nightfall a dozen wolves
came down from the hills to feed on the slaughter and sing their praises to the
moon. They gave William’s torch a wide berth, their yellow eyes candent in the
firelight. The wolves growled when he came too close. The friar respected their
wishes. His torch brightened the proximate field but blinded him to the
horizon. He surveyed the darkness in all directions, hoping to see Nadja’s
rushlight, but beyond the watchful lupine eyes and the penumbra of his own weak
flame the black night enveloped him. The friar crossed himself, recalling how,
with God’s grace, Saint Francis had tamed the wolf of Gubbio. The story calmed
William’s fears as he continued delving in the dark.
It was well after compline
before he found the body he was looking for. The soldier lay face-down on a
shallow declivity at the south end of the killing field. The body appeared
lifeless, but the skin was sunburned. William examined the man’s bloody scalp
and saw a gash above the right ear. Someone had used this skull for a butcher
block. The friar turned the body face-up, then wiped fresh blood from the man’s
temple, which was warmer than the night air. The man appeared to be twenty,
maybe twenty-five, too young to die for nothing on this blood-encrusted field.
William compared the man’s visage to the charcoal sketch. The resemblance was
unmistakable—angular face, strong jaw, heavy brow—like the statue
of some pagan god.
“Marco da Roma.”
The man did not answer.
William put his ear to the
man’s chest, but heard no heart; he cupped a hand over the cracked lips, but
felt no breath; he checked the throat for a pulse—nothing.
All this way for nothing.
He gazed up at the stars. “
Deus
obsecro sana eum.
”
And then he felt it. A faint
thump of life, a marching rhythm beneath the skin.
“
Deo gratias.
”
Marco’s bare chest was caked
with blood. If he bore the expected sign, the friar could not see it. William
gathered the selvage of his greyfriar’s robe and used it to clean away the
gore, revealing a red tattoo, emblem of the lost brotherhood. He felt a sudden
rush of tears. For this he had walked barefoot across five hundred miles of
blighted woods and plague-infested hamlets. Here, at last, was the sign of the
prophecy: a crimson cross tattooed above the heart.
The secret mark of the
Knights Templar.
CHAPTER 2
With a
keen dagger and a steady hand, William shaved the knight’s scalp, adding wisps
of long black hair, flock by flock, to a tangled heap on the dry riverbed.
A campfire crackled in the
gloom. Marco lay supine and comatose, wrapped in a blanket made for a much
shorter man. Blood wept from the scabby laceration in the knight’s skull as
William shaved carefully around it. He was no surgeon but had spent a lifetime
ministering to the sick and the poor, the damaged and the destitute.
Giovanni Boccaccio sat
reading a book by firelight. He was a Tuscan poet in his middle thirties, and
his fashion flouted every sumptuary law: his hose were crimson and buttoned to
the tops of his calfskin shoes; his overgown, a black cioppa of silk brocade,
was cloaked by a dark grey mantello that draped from his shoulders; his hat was
a red cappuccio with the foggia falling to the left in the Neapolitan
style—a rich display for a poor man. His clothes were vestiges of the
courtier he once was, not of the vagabond he had since become.
Nadja collected deadfall at
a distance, making noises in the dark. William heard her stepping on dry
leaves, upsetting small rocks, dropping sticks, and picking them up again.
A streamlet trickled nearby,
a sign that God had not abandoned them, that even in this drought some part of
the mountains still felt the touch of rain. A chill threaded the evening air,
carrying the lamentations of tawny owls and the incessant gossip of cicadas.
With Marco’s head now shaved
and the injury revealed, William set the dagger on a flat stone next to the campfire
so that the steel tip pierced the jittering flames. He retrieved the pot from
the fire, dipped a rag in the steaming water, and cleaned the gash in Marco’s
skull with short, gentle strokes. The cut was deep. William probed with his
fingers and discovered a shard of skull bone that had broken loose and slipped
beneath the skin. He inserted two fingers into the warm, moist cut. Feeling the
jagged edge of the fragment, he gripped it between his fingers and eased the
bone back into place.
He washed his hands in the
pot. From the donkey cart he retrieved a leather costrel. He had filled it at a
tavern in the mountain town of Corona Corvina, but only a little wine remained.
Blessing the libation, he poured a dram over the cut. He put the wine to his
own lips for a quick taste—strong vintage—then stoppered the
costrel and set it aside.
The steel blade was now hot.
As William drew the dagger from the flame, the haft felt warm in his hand. He
pressed the flat of the blade to Marco’s cut. Skin hissed as he cauterized the
wound. The air reeked of nidor, the smell of burning flesh. Marco
tensed—neck, jaw, hands—but did not wake to the burning pain, which
would have tortured a healthy man to a quick confession. Marco’s eyes remained
closed. He did not cry out. When the metal cooled, William checked to see that
the wound was sealed before he wiped and sheathed the blade.