Authors: David Wisehart
Myself,
abandoning the true and straight.
William watched Nadja, who
stared into the campfire, listening to the poet’s incantation. During their
long trek down from Munich, William had taught Nadja all the Italian he knew.
Enough for the marketplace, perhaps, but insufficient for the subtle inventions
of Dante Alighieri. Giovanni was raised on Dante; the Tuscan dialect was both
his mother tongue and his art. In the two weeks since Giovanni had joined their
pilgrimage, Nadja’s Italian had improved considerably.
The poet read of the meeting
between Dante and the shade of Virgil, who was saying:
Therefore
I think it best, and recommend,
That you
should follow me. I’ll be your guide
And lead
you through eternal dark, to wend
Where you
will hear despairing shrieks: inside,
Where all
the ancient and tormented souls
Bewail
the second death, the burning tide.
We’re close to the gate,
thought William.
A few more days to
darkness.
If they could find the gate.
If it existed at all. The friar had his doubts. His only guides to the abyss
were Dante’s
Inferno
and Nadja’s visions: the testimony of a dead man and the dreams of an
epileptic. These did little to bolster William’s confidence. True, Nadja had
led them to the wounded Templar, but the knight was already on the bourne of
death. Perhaps they had arrived too late. Perhaps they should not have come at
all.
Perhaps I should stop
worrying so much.
William had spent a lifetime
trying to reconcile faith to reason, but he understood now that reason and
faith were not on speaking terms. This pilgrimage was an act of faith which
reason could not warrant. For all his days of learning and discussion, for all
his nights of quiet contemplation, he had become at last a superannuated fool,
guided by a dead poet’s pen and a young girl’s delirium.
I will know the truth of
it soon enough.
The gate
would be there, or it would not. Hell would open, or it would not.
Giovanni continued reciting
the dialog between Dante and his spirit guide:
I said to
him, “Poet, I beg of you,
By God,
of whom you pagans do not know:
So I may
flee this wood of darkest rue,
Please
guide me down into the world below,
That I
may come to see Saint Peter’s gate
And those
who wallow in the fields of woe.”
He went.
I followed him to meet my fate.
Giovanni closed the book.
With his thumb he traced a cross on the cover and kissed it, then glanced at
the wounded knight. “He may get there before you do.”
“He will live,” Nadja said.
“God has plans for him.”
William saw blood seep
through Marco’s bandage, a scarlet bloom that darkened as it dried. “He is a
living miracle. That blow should have killed him.”
“And the man standing next
to him,” Giovanni said, stuffing the book into his satchel. He withdrew a
blanket from another bag and asked the question William had not dared to speak
aloud. “What if your champion does not survive?”
“He will,” Nadja insisted.
The poet shrugged and
wrapped the blanket around himself. “You see farther than I do.”
William heard the wailing of
the wolves on the battlefield, half a mile behind them. The pack had acquired a
taste for human flesh. They were sated now but by tomorrow, or the day after
tomorrow, the corpses would be too far gone and the wolves would hunt again.
“We’ll keep moving south,”
William said. “If Marco has not returned to himself by the time we reach the
gate...well, I suppose we can make a final decision then.”
“We cannot descend without
him,” Nadja said, in a voice devoid of doubt.
William crossed himself.
“Then let us pray he makes it to the morning.”
CHAPTER 3
William woke before sunrise
to find Nadja already risen. She sat on a stone by the ashes of the evening
fire, a brown blanket wrapped around her legs, her hair tousled by sleep. In
her lap was a piece of paper on a small wooden board. She held a charcoal
stick, worn to a nub, and scratched it against the paper.
The friar sat up slowly and
mumbled his morning prayers—twenty-four paternosters, by the Rule of
Saint Francis. The air was cool on his face. The breeze coaxed him to his
senses, and then to his feet. He stretched his limbs and took several deep
breaths. His back was stiff from lying on the ground; his knees crackled like
burning wood; his right leg tingled. Pacing about, he worked some life into the
old joints. They had served him well for three score years and five. He hoped
they still had a few good years in them. His exercises failed to arouse Nadja’s
attention, so he said in a low voice, “Good morning.”
“Almost done,” she answered,
eyes fixed on the drawing.
Marco da Roma was alive but
unresponsive. His breathing was slow, shallow, regular. His pulse seemed weak
but no worse than the night before. William checked the bandage, sniffing the
wound for a hint of corruption, and left the dressing in place. Last night he
had given up his only blanket for the wounded man and slept in nothing but his
own tatterdemalion robe. Saint Francis would have given up the robe as well,
but William was no saint and the evenings were chilly.
Giovanni, on the other hand,
bundled himself in more clothes than the friar had ever owned. The poet
continued wheezing softly, chanting the refrain of sleep.
After shuffling over to the
little stream, William scooped cold water into his hands. He drank his fill
before splashing some on his face and on the top of his tonsured head.
Returning to camp, he looked
down at Nadja’s sketch. She limned a manticore in thick black lines: a man’s
face, but the body of a lizard; lion’s paws, but the tail of a scorpion. It
looked malignant, like something out of Dante, like some hideous creature born
of the dark. Giovanni might recognize this demon from the cantos, but the friar
did not wish to wake him yet.
“I saw this in a falling
dream,” Nadja said.
William crouched down next
to her, placing a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I did not see
you fall.”
There was little he could do
for her dormition, except to be there when she came back to herself. Nadja’s
epilepsy was beyond his powers to heal. For this he commended her to Christ,
who had once healed an epileptic boy, a lunatic child who fell into fire.
William told her the story often, explaining that if she had the faith of a
mustard seed, she too would be healed. But William, who had contemplated
scripture since before he could read, knew the true meaning of the text: Christ
had chastised his disciples. They could not cast out the devils from the
epileptic boy because they had so little faith. It was the disciples who needed
faith, not the boy. It was William who needed faith, not the girl. He did not
tell Nadja these things. He prayed for her and taught her to hope.
She waved his concern aside.
“You were asleep,” she said, “and I was lying down already. No bruises this
time.”
William smiled, waking his
cheeks. “I’m glad to hear it.”
He rubbed the blur from his
eyes and studied Nadja’s drawing with renewed interest, trying to make sense of
it. In Munich, before Nadja’s trial, William had taught the girl to record her
visions on paper. Those drawings had nearly gotten her killed. He blamed
himself, but found consolation in the knowledge that her art might yet save
them. Nadja had been sent by God to William. He needed to know why. If her
visions came from God, as he believed, then William must see these visions for
himself and divine their meaning. Her dreams were vivid, but the messages were
seldom clear. “You saw this thing, this demon?”
She set aside her charcoal
stick and blew the fine black dust from the page. “You will see him, too. In
the dark place.”
The dark place.
Nadja could scarcely bring herself to say
it. William had urged her not to shrink from what she saw, not to hide
difficult things behind easy words. He needed to know the truth of it. He
needed her to acknowledge the dangers of their descent. The
Inferno
might prove a useful guide, but their
path through Hell might not be Dante’s path. Nadja was gentle by nature,
reluctant to trouble others, but kind words could get them killed. William
needed to know the road ahead.
“What will happen when I
meet this demon?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
The easy answer. He studied
her face. The furrows in her brow said more than her voice. She stared down at
the sketch, avoiding the friar’s gaze.
“Nadja? There’s something
you’re not telling me.”
“I don’t know.”
“What is it?”
She shook her head.
“Say the thing you will not
say.”
A wolf howled in the
distance. Clouds scudded across the sun, throwing darkness upon the world.
“A message,” she whispered,
soft as the wind.
“From this demon?”
She nodded.
“What did he tell you?”
“A name.”
“He gave you his name?”
“No,” she said. “He gave me
yours.”
William felt a chill. He
crossed his arms against the morning air. “Why?”
Nadja looked up at him with
sadness in her eyes. “He is waiting for you.”
CHAPTER 4
Nadja sat in the two-wheeled
cart as it rattled on the road, heading south through the low mountains of
Campania, passing stands of holm oaks and service trees.
Next to her, Marco da Roma
lay half-dead. He was longer than the little cart. His legs, bent at the knee,
dangled over the back. Nadja held his cold, rough hands and prayed over him, whispering
the
Ave Maria.
The
words were in Latin, God’s language. She did not know what the words meant
exactly, but she had heard them often enough, and had taught herself to say
them. They were a comfort to her now.
“
Ave Maria, gratia plena,
Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui,
Iesus....
”
She gazed down at Marco’s
scarred, angular face. He had fallen forward on the battlefield, had been
robbed of his clothes and armor, and had lain a day or more with his naked back
and half his face exposed. Now, with the right side of his face sunburned, he
looked like two men sewn together, one pale and the other red. The bandage,
wrapped about his head like a linen casque, was stained with blood above his
right ear. His head jounced and swayed as the wheels of the tumbrel bucked
along the narrow dirt road, but Marco remained unconscious, his eyelids closed.
He appeared to sleep, as if drowsed by a dwale, like in the children’s story of
the knight and the princess, only now it was the knight who was ensorcelled by
a spell, and Nadja was no princess. Her kiss would not save him, though if it
could she would deny him nothing. Nadja knew his face better than her own, for
she had seen it often in her falling dreams. She had sketched his features from
memory, in charcoal on paper, but had done scant justice to his savage beauty.
As the sun crested the
doddered trees, Nadja began to fret. Marco’s burns would soon worsen. He needed
shade. She had an idea. If she could get the other blanket out from under him,
it might serve as a canopy. Lifting his left arm to free a fold of the blanket,
she discovered a stab wound in Marco’s side, just below his armpit.
Odd.
The site of the wound, shielded by his
upper arm, could not have been an easy target. If the blade had plunged deep it
would surely have pierced his heart. Somehow, it had not.
Another miracle.
She thanked God and repeated her prayers,
then held up the blanket to shadow the face of the fallen man.
The road was narrow and
treacherous. In some places it ran to the edge of the drop, where one good
bounce might send the tumbrel down the mountainside. Nadja preferred to walk,
as she had done for most of the journey, trusting in her own two feet, but
someone needed to watch over the wounded man. God, she trusted, would watch
over her.
William and Giovanni ambled
together ahead of the sumpter. The friar thumped his walking stick at a steady
gait, poking at the road. A dotted line trailed behind him. Giovanni led the
donkey, holding the reins in one hand, a long switch of hazel in the other. He
glanced back to see what Nadja was doing with the blanket, then addressed the
friar. “He’s too young, Father.”