Authors: David Wisehart
“And strong,” the friar
said, as if in agreement.
“You know what I mean.”
“Do I?”
“He’s too young.”
William fell silent for a
dozen paces. The walking stick thumped along, punishing the earth. “It doesn’t
matter,” he said. “He’s the man in the picture.”
“That picture could have
been a dozen soldiers on that field.”
“It is a picture of one
man,” said William, “and one man is what we found.”
Giovanni did not seem
convinced. “I saw a thousand. I couldn’t tell the Neapolitans from the
Hungarians. Some had lost their looks, others their heads. I saw more bodies
than faces. I left Florence to get away from the dead, and you walk me through
a sea of corpses. For what?”
Nadja spoke up. “This is the
man. If he does not look like the picture, it is the fault of my hand, not of
his face.”
“And he has the mark,”
William added.
Giovanni shook his head in
scorn. “Mark of a heathen. No Christian would brand his own flesh.”
“The Templars did,” William
said.
“I’ve read many things about
the Templars, but I have never read that.”
“Then you have not read
their secret books.”
“If you have read them, they
are poor secrets indeed.”
“Their meaning was cloaked
in a code,” said William. “I doubt you could have read them. My eyes are not
what they once were, but they are better eyes than most.”
Nadja wasn’t sure what a
code was. It seemed to be a kind of spell that made literate men illiterate.
Perhaps a code was like a foreign tongue, like Tuscan or Latin, which made
people babble until God taught you to hear the words in a new way, and then
they made more sense.
“Code or no code,” Giovanni
said, “tattoos are banned by the Church.”
Even Nadja knew that, and
she had read no books at all. Her mother had once told her that the tribes of
Germania practiced such devilry before the birth of Christ. Nadja had also
heard of merchants who traveled to Christendom from India, Tartary, and Cathay
with pagan images needled on their skin, but she had never actually seen a
tattoo until her revelation.
“Tattoos were the least of
their sins,” said William. “The Templars were charged with heresy.”
“On the subject of heresy,”
Giovanni retorted, “I defer to your expertise.”
The donkey began to lag.
Giovanni tugged at the reins, and when the animal failed to heed the hint, the
poet raised his long switch and whipped the sumpter on the rear. The donkey
brayed his rebuttal and resumed his former pace.
“He can’t be the man you’re
looking for,” Giovanni said. “The Templars were burned at the stake more than
forty years ago.”
“You weren’t even alive
then,” William pointed out.
“My father was in Paris on
business, staying near the church of Saint-Jacques-la-Boucherie. He saw it with
his own eyes. He said that for three days the sky was as black as midnight with
the smoke from the heretics.”
“Yes. More than a hundred
were burned. But some escaped.”
“If any survived, they would
be your age.”
William sighed. “Perhaps the
brotherhood lives on,” he suggested. “Somewhere. In secret.”
“Yes, and perhaps this is
the Garden of Eden, and perhaps the sun is rising in the west, and perhaps my
donkey here is Balaam’s ass.” He turned to the donkey and said, “Are you
Balaam’s ass?” He answered himself in a funny donkey voice: “‘Why yes, pleased
to meet you, though I wish you wouldn’t beat me with a stick. Oh, look, is that
a Templar in my cart?’”
Nadja giggled.
The friar was not amused.
“The man you mock is a Poor Knight of the Temple, the last of a sacred
brotherhood, defenders of the Holy Grail. He is the one. He will save us all.”
William’s voice was stern, putting an end to the argument.
I hope he’s right,
thought Nadja. If not, it would be her
fault. She had brought them here. Her visions had led her to William of Ockham,
to Giovanni Boccaccio, to Marco da Roma. Her visions now spurred them all south
to the infernal gate in search of the Holy Grail, which the Devil had stolen
from the world, though she did not yet understand how this wounded man could
save them. Her visions were sporadic. She knew the others shared her doubts,
but what worried her most was her secret fear: that it was not God who guided
her dreams, but something else inside her, something evil.
She heard a soft grunt, and
glanced down at the knight. Marco’s eyelids remained closed, but the eyes
flittered beneath their veils. Something was happening. Something had changed.
Marco da Roma walked in
darkness. A cold mist enveloped him. Through the mist a red light beaconed. As
he approached it he perceived more of his surroundings: he moved across a field
of ice, a vast floe bathed incarnadine by the blood-red light before him.
Trapped in the ice were hundreds of human faces staring up, immobile except for
their eyes, which tracked his movements from underfoot.
Walking on, Marco saw the
red light divide into two glowing orbs that grew larger as he approached. They
became a pair of shimmering eyes, chatoyant as the eyes of a cat. They looked
down at him from an immense height.
He stopped, transfixed,
shivering in the dark. The flames of those eyes gave no warmth.
Marco da Roma,
a deep voice rumbled.
“Who are you?” He recognized
his own voice, but felt no vibrance in his throat, no breath upon his lips.
You know who I am.
“No.”
I am the darkness.
“I don’t know you.”
Better than you know
yourself.
“Let me go.”
Do you want to die?
“I want to live.”
Then open your eyes.
The red eyes shut. The
darkness shuddered.
Marco opened his eyes. He
came to himself in a storm of light. His skin was on fire. A pulse pounded in
his ears like the stampede of a thousand chargers. A silhouette obscured the
sky: the outline of a woman, her face in shadow, her hair tinged with gold.
“He’s awake,” she said.
But the darkness reclaimed
him, and the world fell away.
CHAPTER 5
Giovanni’s
plan came to him on the push to the summit of the mountain road, a wheel-rutted
trail that meandered like a Dionysian through the hills and valleys of
Campania. In exchange for company and conversation, he had agreed to take
William and Nadja to the Cave of the Sibyl at Lake Avernus, near Cumae, now
four days off at a laggard’s pace. Giovanni would then continue on to Naples
alone.
He had traversed these
mountains many times on business errands for his father. This stretch of God’s
country never failed to inspire him. In those days he would share drinks and
swap stories with passing travelers, but now he met no merchants on the road,
no messengers on horseback, no penitent pilgrims bound for the Vatican. Pestilence
had swept through these hills like the Devil’s rapture, summoning the damned.
His legs ached in memory of
the long trek south. His feet were as sore as a flagellate’s back. His donkey,
Apuleius, seemed weary of the cart, which was laden with nine travel bags and
one benighted Knight Templar. The knight had briefly opened his eyes, but to no
avail. The man remained a burden.
As the grade of the road
steepened, Apuleius slowed to a limacine crawl. William and Nadja pushed the
tumbrel from behind while Giovanni led the company up the hill, taut reins
biting his hand. He sang a medley of Occitan ballads, his donkey’s favorite
traveling songs, and Apuleius caught his second wind. The wheels turned at a
steady pace, marking time like the gears of a tower clock.
A ballad by Guido Cavalcanti
came to mind, and Giovanni gave it a melancholy voice:
As I
cannot hope ever to return,
Little
ballad, to Tuscany,
Go
lightly, softly,
Straight
to my lady....
When his singing lapsed into
whistles and hums, he let his mind ramble.
His new plan was simple:
convince William to abandon Nadja’s hellbound folly and come with him instead
to Naples, where Giovanni would introduce the famous friar to the court of
Queen Joanna, and thereby reap her royal favors. In this way the poet might
atone for his youthful indiscretions and reinstate himself in Neapolitan
society, where his rhymes had once earned him a following in the court of the
former monarch, King Robert the Wise. William of Ockham, famous for his logic,
would surely see the logic in the poet’s proposal. The simplest plan was
usually the best.
Giovanni’s original plan had
been more vague: to seek out his friends in Naples, if any survived the
pestilence, and beg them for an audience with the queen. He had known Queen
Joanna in her youth, before her ascendency, and had spun some naughty fables
for her amusement. Surely the queen would remember him fondly and welcome his
plea for patronage.
He had in mind a new book
that Her Highness would be unable to resist, a collection of bawdy tales and
witty sketches intercalated with clever bits of rhyme. Already he had composed
a dozen novellas like the ones that had made the ladies of the court blush and
giggle, stories that would lift the spirits of the queen’s loyal subjects and
mitigate the fears of this dismal age. If he could win Her Highness’s support
for this admittedly trivial work, it might secure his livelihood and pave the
way for his greatest ambition: an epic poem to rival Dante.
But first he needed to speak
with William alone. He resolved to create an opportunity at their next
encampment, and devoted the rest of his climb to thinking how it might be done.
They made camp in a holt of
hazel near the verge of a canyon bluff, where the ground was cloaked in leaves
and catkins. Giovanni tethered Apuleius to a tree and found clusters of
hazelnuts on the branches. August was early for hazelnuts, but a few had begun
to brown. He harvested a handful and peeled off the fuzzy husks to reveal
smooth round shells, like Roman helmets, which he cracked open with a pair of
flat stones. He brushed away the shells and passed the kernels to William and
Nadja.
“Pearl of the poets,” he
said, and popped the last one in his mouth. It tasted sweet and creamy.
Nadja scrutinized the
morsels in her hand, then offered them to William. “You will need this
medicine.” She traveled with a pouch of herbs, and claimed to know their uses.
The friar looked skeptical.
“To ease the pain of the
scorpion’s bite,” she added.
“Scorpions?” Giovanni said.
“Not around here.”
The girl agreed. “Not here.”
William studied her for
several heartbeats, then ate without argument, chewing the nuts one at a time.
Giovanni had once read in a
book of simples that hazel oil applied to the skin could heal a scorpion bite.
He did not believe that eating the kernels would serve as a prophylactic, but
Nadja spoke as one who knows, giving her words the weight of prophecy.
He said to her, “Dante does
not mention scorpions in Hell.”
Nadja took a sketch from her
pack and handed it to him. Giovanni studied the rough sheet of paper. It
displayed a manticore: the face of a man, body of a lizard, paws of a lion,
tail of a scorpion.
“Yes,” Giovanni muttered.
Dante had described this creature in Canto XVII of the
Inferno
. “But I haven’t read you that part.”
“I saw this demon in a
falling dream.”
Giovanni had his doubts.
William believed in Nadja’s vatic delusions, but Giovanni had met too many
charlatans to accept her claims on faith alone. Anyone with a minimum of skill
and a modicum of practice could draw a beast and call it a prophecy.
Admittedly, Nadja’s drawings
were good. If she had been born a man of Tuscany, she might have secured an
apprenticeship and followed the path of Giotto; instead, born to the distaff
side, she hoped to be a Hildegard. That famous sibyl of Bingen saw the Devil as
a monstrous worm, black and bristly, covered with ulcers and pustules, with the
face of a viper and blood-red eyes that burned from within. Of course, everyone
saw devils these days. Nadja’s visions were unoriginal. The manticore she drew
was not her own, but a demon out of Dante. Someone must have described the
beast to her, someone who knew the poem well.
“You say you cannot read?”
Giovanni asked.
“I can read my name,” she
said, “and some of the Church words.
Iesus.
I-E-S-U-S. That means our Lord Jesus
Christ.”
She cast a glance at the
friar, who nodded his approval with a hint of tutorial pride.
Suspicious, Giovanni said,
“Has someone read to you from the
Inferno
?”