The Book of Q (27 page)

The boy continued to chant, his mind wandering as the words flowed freely. For as long as he could remember, he had committed the prayers to memory, the rituals that had prepared him for today, his father as guide. Always in strict isolation, so different from the shallowness of Sunday, when he would watch his father play the role of minister, stand behind his pulpit and preach words that seemed so far from the truth.

As his mind drifted, so, too, did his gaze, faces all around him, many of which he recognized from neighboring towns—Davenport, Kenton, Elmsford—none of which he had ever associated with the private world he and his father had shared.

Until today.

The journey north to the elect. The day of illumination. Entrance into his cell.

Everything would change now. He had been told as much. How, he didn’t know. Standing among his brothers, reciting the “Perfect Light,” it didn’t seem to matter.

Éeema, Éeema, Ayo.

The fruit was all but gone, the bowl of
loukoumi
licked clean. He’d been hungrier than he’d realized, the confection far better than he’d expected.

Waiting for the last of the paraffin lamps to flicker out, Pearse donned the robe and stepped out into the open-air corridor, a tree-lined atrium three stories below. The sleeves hung a bit too long, though an ideal spot, he discovered, to conceal the notes he had with him. Not that he was anticipating anything, but best to have the pages out of sight should someone appear. Looking to minimize that chance, he kept his lantern dark as he moved past the other cells, the monks either asleep or
oblivious
to his late-night wanderings.

With one hand flat against the wall, he inched his way back to the stairs, the moon having broken through, making all but the last few steps relatively painless. Once outside the dormitory walls, he found a darkened nook and fired up the lantern, careful to keep it low at his knees. No bonnet, no beard, but at least with the lantern shining out—and not up—he could see where he was going without casting any light on his upper body.

As quickly as he could, he began to retrace his steps through the various alleys and courtyards, one or two cats leaping out at inopportune moments to accelerate an already-lively heartbeat. But no monks. Even so, he found himself moving ever more stealthily, reduced to tiptoes for the last twenty yards or so, the area by the fountain far more exposed than he’d remembered.

Reaching the protective shadow of the great doors, he paused to reorient himself.

The collection of buildings he had seen earlier now appeared to meld into one another, a kind of flattened crescent, the moon offering just enough of a gloss to bring them into focus. Likewise, the water splashed in an ivory white, its lapping reflection trapped within the fountain walls, the area just beyond its reach somehow darker by contrast than the rest of the courtyard. Drawn in by the tranquillity of the scene, he began to feel far more attuned to the design of the monastery. Granted, he had only a small portion of it in front of him, but the discrepancies between Angeli’s map and the actual layout seemed to melt away, the spacing far less compact, readable, a growing sense that perhaps he might be able to locate the signposts specified in the scroll. Or maybe it was just faith. Or the fact that the mist had lifted. Either way, he retrieved the pages from his sleeve, glanced at the first few, and set off.

It was remarkable how much she had teased from the text, or rather, how much the Manichaeans had been able to hide within their prayer. Half the notes on Phôtinus detailed landmarks chosen for what was, no
doubt, their staying power: bends in the outer wall, ancient pieces of stonework planted deep in the earth, rises and falls in terrain that no amount of building or digging could disrupt. Those things that they knew would endure.

And, of course, as Angeli had promised, the distances between them.

Following the line of the wall to his left, he counted off the prescribed thirty-five paces to an arched hollow directly across from a small olive orchard, just as the notes described. Truth to tell, it had been thirty-one, but given the likelihood that he was a good deal taller than his
tenth-century
counterpart, Pearse quickly reasoned away the disparity. With that in mind, he shortened his gait, and arrived at the next landmark with extraordinary precision—“time placed in stone”—the first of two sundials situated at opposite ends of a garden at the orchard’s center. Both sprouted an assortment of paths, only one of them leading up a short incline. It was the one he was meant to take, out beyond the orchard fence, past a natural spring, to the edge of the monastery’s outer wall.

It was there that he met his first setback. For several minutes, he couldn’t find a series of steps described as “notches in the great partition.” His hands traced the wall face as Pearse became more and more concerned that he was somehow overlooking something. Struggling with a thick matting of overgrown saplings, he finally unearthed the first step, then the second, the rest of them so cleverly imbedded in the wall that had he not known what he was looking for, he would have missed them entirely. Even as he climbed, he needed his hands to feel out each one in front of him, lantern light insufficient to the task. Halfway up, he slowly realized that if not for the steps, he would never have been able to find his way past a group of buildings—thirteenth- or fourteenth-century, by his estimation—situated along the wall. How the Manichaeans had known to avoid what must have been open land back in the tenth century was anybody’s guess. He continued to climb.

A gust of wind swept up as he reached the top of the wall, his hand quick to the stone face to steady himself. Momentarily staggered, he found it impossible not to stare out at the horizon, an explosion of stars so vast that he was forced to drop to one knee lest he lose himself over the edge. The Aegean swelled some three hundred feet below, its rhythm in strict counterpoint to the endless array of glitter quivering above. He tried to regain his feet, but his body refused, once again beguiled by the perfect synchrony of light and darkness. For all his
doubts—his fears of a Manichaean ascetic—Pearse had, at least, come to appreciate its singular truth, palpable at a moment like this.

As close to heaven as they could get
.

The echo of Angeli’s voice roused him from his meditation. He forced his eyes back to Phôtinus and spotted the second set of steps just on the other side of the buildings. His body low, he traversed the top of the wall, then made his way down.

A courtyard opened up at the base of the steps. Scampering across it, he came to a bridge no more than ten feet across, a tiny rill below—more rocks than water—its trickle heard, not seen. He checked the notes; there was no bridge mentioned. Evidently, this was a “recent” addition. Instructed to follow the water upstream, he placed his hand on the bridge’s stanchion and leapt down the five or so feet before
making
his way along the sod and mud, careful to keep his lamp high. The footing grew more and more tricky, slick rock causing him to keep one hand almost in the water so as to maintain his balance. Forty yards along, he pulled himself back up the bank.

What had appeared as a collision of trees and stonework from his cell window now opened up as the onetime heart of the monastery, the buildings retreating further and further into the past. And yet, the deeper in he moved, the more he sensed a loneliness from those he passed, too many of them abandoned, remnants from a time when Phôtinus had boasted five hundred monks within its walls. Now it held barely eighty, the rate of apostasy increasing with each year, the malady of “
teddy-boyismos
,” as Nikotheos had called it—the lure of Salonika—having grown to epidemic proportions. The old monks were dying off, the novices fleeing, leaving the buildings to stand empty and alone.

Pearse felt only token sympathy. The fewer monks around, the less likely he might run into one.

All such concerns quickly faded when, at the top of a steep rise, he came face-to-face with a double row of columns, the facade for a cloister peeking out through the gaps.

This time round, he needed no cats to set his heart racing.

“Twin rows of eight will guard the Vault.”

Somewhere within those walls waited the parchment.

Staring up at the building as a whole, he quickly understood why the Manichaeans had chosen it for their hiding place. He reckoned it stood almost at the center point of the three outer walls. More than that, it had been designed in such a way that, as far as he could tell, access to it
was possible only from the route he had taken. The back and side walls seemed to grow out of the mountain, a half-chiseled sculpture tearing itself from the rock. Only the front colonnade was fully realized, the “twin rows” revealing an archway at the center. Pearse removed the last few sheets from his sleeve and started in.

Four portico walkways flanked a narrow quadrangle to form the interior, a courtyard of dusted earth and wild grass at its center. Unlike anything he had seen up to this point, the cloister clung to a late Roman past, a building that might very well have predated even the Manichaean presence at Phôtinus. Bringing his lantern to eye level—and relying on a suddenly lustrous moon—he followed the line of archways that extended to his left. The stone had softened over the centuries, but the rigid lines of each column could still be seen even in the half-light, the pedestals beneath linked in a continuous low wall. The arcade itself had not faired so well, the flagstones chipped and cracked, clumps of vegetation pushing their way through, odd mounds of dirt scattered throughout, the mark of animal scavenging. Every so often, a window or door would appear along the walled side of the arcade, the rooms within showing equal disrepair, some, though, with hints of long-faded mosaics—a partial crucifix here, the hand of the Virgin there—all shining back at him in the lantern light. From the varying sizes and shapes of the cells, it was clear that the place had once housed a virtually independent community within Phôtinus, far more than just the simple cloister it purported to be.

Further confirmation awaited him at the third corner of the quadrangle—access to a subterranean level, highly unusual for a cloister of its age. Nestled within a miniature rotunda, he found a set of circular steps leading down. Eighteen of them. The notes were, once again, right on the mark.

Trouble was, it was the last of the detailed entries. The final two “clues” were far more cryptic, abstract phrases, with no directions of any kind. Even on the bus, they had struck him as out of place. “Those who enter may see the light,” followed by the equally vague “The one unmoved takes wing.” He had recognized the first as a biblical passage, somewhere in Luke his best guess, but pinpointing the source had done little to explain its meaning. The second had baffled him altogether. He had hoped that by now something would have appeared to clarify at least one of them; otherwise, why make the map so specific, only to leave the most crucial bits indecipherable? He was faced with two possibilities:
Either the Manichaeans had thought the phrases obvious enough on their own or they had decided to throw in one last bit of “hidden knowledge” to keep things interesting. A touch of the gnosis at the bitter end. Had he been a betting man, Pearse would have opted for the latter, which meant that if he was going to find the parchment, he had to start thinking like a Manichaean.

Reaching the bottom of the steps, he could make out little more than ten feet in either direction, the lantern light only sharpening the vacancy beyond. It was enough, though, to see that the lower level was a virtual carbon copy of the cloister above, save, of course, for the central
courtyard
, which here had become a mass of solid stone. A pair of corridors branched out from the corner stairwell, the first legs of the quadrangle disappearing into a dusted emptiness. Gone were the sounds of the night that had accompanied him thus far, the absolute quiet matched only by the unrelenting darkness.

Lamp at arm’s length, he started down the corridor to his left, his focus on the side walls, uneven rock chiseled from the mountain. From time to time, a rusted torch holder would appear, centuries beyond use, bits of stray iron hanging precariously from eroded pins. As to the cells, they came at regular intervals, six to eight paces between each, tiny hovels drawn of all air, dirt floors beneath. Surprisingly, several of them retained the faint aroma of burned leaves—why, he couldn’t explain—instant memories of long-ago bonfires quickly erased by the immediacy of the place. More difficult was determining what most of the rooms had been used for—storage, prayer, perhaps even ritual—bits of mosaics once again scattered throughout. He spent several minutes studying the tiles, hoping to find something that would invite him to “enter” and “see the light,” but there was nothing. Only a neat pattern of cells to bring him back to the stairwell, no farther along than when he had set off.