by Linda Howard
She should have hurried through the shower. She knew she should, but she didn’t. She stood under the spray of water, feeling the grit wash off her skin, feeling her greasy hair soak up the moisture. She shampooed twice, and scrubbed herself until her skin was bright pink all over, and still she didn’t want to get out of the shower. She stood there even when the hot water began to go and the spray grew chilly. She didn’t turn off the water until it was so cold she’d begun shivering, and she did so then only because she’d been cold for three days and she was tired of it.
It was such a relief to feel clean again that she almost wept. Almost, because somehow the tears wouldn’t quite come. Had she cried for Ford, for Bryant? She couldn’t remember. She had crystal-clear memories of a lot of things about that horrible night, but she couldn’t remember tears. Surely she had cried. But if she hadn’t… if she hadn’t cried for them, then she couldn’t cry for something as ultimately mundane as being clean. Crying for less would minimize them, and that she couldn’t bear.
Roughly she rubbed the towel over her bare skin, then wrapped the damp fabric around her head. She didn’t want to abuse the owners’ unknowing hospitality any more than necessary, and using two towels instead of one was a definite luxury.
Then, almost trembling with eagerness, she unzipped the duffel and took out her new clothes. The jeans and sweatshirt were very wrinkled, the denim jacket less so. Grace peeled the hard plastic bubble away from her kitchen knife and tested its sharpness by cutting the tags off her purchases. The knife easily sliced through the plastic loops and she thoughtfully regarded the shiny blade. Not bad.
She tossed the garments into the clothes dryer to get out the wrinkles, and brushed her teeth while the dryer did its thing. She eyed her reflection in the mirror, a little puzzled. She looked different, somehow, and it wasn’t just the exhausted starkness of her expression. The pallor was expected, as were the circles under her eyes. No, it was something else, something elusive.
Shrugging aside her puzzlement, she turned her attention to more practical matters. Her long hair took forever to dry on its own, so she used the blow dryer lying next to the sink.
Her thick braid was too identifiable. She should cut her hair. She thought of looking for scissors, but the thought didn’t transfer itself into action. Ford had loved her long hair, he had played with it—
The pain was like a mule kick in the chest, destroying her. She sagged against the wall, her teeth clenched against a keening wail as her body doubled over from the impact. Oh God oh God.
She could feel herself shattering inside, the enormity of loss so overwhelming that surely she couldn’t keep living, surely her heart would simply stop beating from the stress. Except for the savage need for vengeance against Parrish, she had no reason to live. But her heart, that sturdy, oblivious muscle, didn’t feel her grief and continued without pause its preordained pumping mission.
No. No. She couldn’t do this. Grieving was a luxury she couldn’t afford; she had known from the beginning it would tear her apart. She had to put it away until after she had taken care of Parrish, when she could approach Ford’s memory, and Bryant’s, and say, “I didn’t let him get away with it.”
Drawing in deep, shuddering breaths, she straightened her aching body. The pain was real, so intense it actually permeated her muscles. With shaking hands she finished drying her hair, though she was at a loss what to do with the thick mass except rebraid it. For the time being she left it loose, hanging down her back, and retrieved her clothes from the dryer.
The garments were hot, almost too hot, but she relished the heat. Quickly she pulled on clean panties and socks, then dressed before all the heat could dissipate. The sweatshirt felt like heaven; she sighed as the warmth enfolded her. Her bra was in the washer, but she didn’t really need one. She’d never been bosomy, and the sweatshirt was thick.
The jeans were loose, almost too loose to stay up. She’d chosen her usual size, but perhaps the label was wrong. Frowning, she unzipped the fly to check the inside tag. Nope, the size was right. The cut must be unusually large, unless she’d somehow lost about ten pounds. Realization dawned. After four days without food, without much sleep, walking all night long, under constant stress, of course she had lost weight.
Reminded of the need to eat, she got her loaf of bread, now sadly mashed, and the jar of peanut butter. After resetting the washer to put her filthy clothes through one more sudsing, she sat down at the battered kitchen table and smeared the peanut butter on one slice of bread. An entire sandwich would probably be wasteful, because her throat was closing up at the prospect of eating half of one.
With the help of a glass of water, she doggedly began eating. Swallowing was an effort, and her stomach, accustomed to emptiness, lurched in sudden nausea. Grace sat very still and concentrated on not vomiting. She had to eat or she wouldn’t be able to function, period.
After a minute or so she took a sip of water, and another small bite.
By the time the washer had gone through its cycle again, she had managed to eat the half sandwich.
She washed the glass and returned it to the cabinet, cleaned the table of any crumbs, washed her knife, and put the bread and peanut butter back into the duffel. The knife… she tried putting it in her belt loop, but the handle wasn’t big enough to prevent it from sliding through. She didn’t want to put a naked blade in her pocket, but neither did she want to wrap it up so securely that she’d have to waste precious time unwrapping it if she needed the knife in an emergency, such as fighting for her life.
She needed one of those knife scabbards, the kind that slipped over a belt. Come to that, she needed a belt with or without a scabbard, because the jeans were seriously loose.
What she really needed was a switchblade, so she wouldn’t have to worry about belts or scabbards.
It struck her that she had come a long way in four days, and not just the distance between Minneapolis and Eau Claire. Four days ago she couldn’t even have thought of using a knife on anyone, even to defend herself. Today she wouldn’t hesitate.
Going back into the kitchen, she unrolled a couple of paper towels and folded them twice before wrapping the bulk around the knife blade and sliding it into her front right pocket, leaving the handle sticking out and covered by the sweatshirt. If she needed the knife, it would slide right out. She’d have to be careful and not puncture herself before she could get something safer, but for now she felt better.
That done, she put her clothes in the dryer along with the bath towel she had used, threw in a sheet of fabric softener, then returned to the bathroom to do something with her hair. As she passed the open duffel she automatically glanced at it to reassure herself of the computer’s safety, and the sight of the bulging bag stopped her cold. A hunger grew in her, a need that had nothing to do with food or warmth. It wasn’t physical at all, but it gnawed at her just the same. She wanted to work. She wanted to sit for hours poring over text, making notes, referring to her language programs, tapping in information. She wanted to find out what had happened to Niall of Scotland, all those centuries ago.
The battery pack was weak, almost depleted. She could have been recharging it while she showered, but she’d let an hour go by. Still, she could set up the computer and work on the household current, just until her clothes were dry.
She resisted the urge. She might have to leave in a hurry, and she didn’t want to make things more difficult by having her belongings scattered about. If she began working she might lose track of time, which had happened more than once, and she had things to do today. She had been traveling at night and hiding during the day, but that had to change. They were hunting her at night, they knew that was when she’d been moving, so she had to alter her habits as well as her appearance.
Using some bobby pins she found in the bathroom, she twisted her hair up and pinned it on top of her head. Knowing from experience that the slippery strands would soon slide right out of the pins, she jammed the baseball cap on h
er head to hold everything in place.
It wasn’t much of a disguise, but added to the change of clothes it just might do. She needed sunglasses and a wig, two items she intended to acquire as soon as possible, and she would be able to vary her appearance. She made a mental note to look for a knife scabbard, too.
The men following her would expect her to keep moving, to follow her previous pattern. She didn’t intend to do so. After bettering her disguise with a wig, she would rent a cheap motel room there in Eau Claire and stay for a couple of days. She needed to rest, she needed to stabilize, and she needed to work. More than anything, she needed to lose herself in work.
The plan worked. After tidying the house, removing all signs of her invasion, she let herself out and locked the door, then tossed a rock through the window to provide an explanation for the broken glass. It took her a while to find a store that sold cheap wigs, and an equally long time trying them on before she managed to slip the frizzy blond one under her sweatshirt. She bought one, a dark red pageboy, and while the clerk was ringing up the sale she slid the money for the blond wig under the edge of the cash register. If the men following her were really good, they might connect her to the red wig, but no one would know about the blond one.
She was wearing the blond wig when she rented a room. The motel was only a step above sleazy, officially in the rundown category, but the plumbing worked and the bed, though the mattress was lumpy and the sheets dingy, was still a bed. Except for her nap under the car she hadn’t had any sleep, but she resisted the urge to lie down. Instead she took off the itchy wig and set up the laptop on the rickety table and forced herself to stay awake by plunging into the intricacies of language use that had died out before Christopher Columbus was born.
Grace loved her work. She loved losing herself in the challenge of accurately putting together the torn or shattered remnants of early man’s painstaking efforts to communicate thoughts, customs, dreams—reaching out to the future with hammer and chisel, or with quills dipped in dye, and in the act of creation going beyond the forever now of time, setting down the past for the sake of the future, uniting the three dimensions of existence. Writing had begun when mankind began thinking in abstracts, rather than just physically existing. Whenever she studied a worn, broken piece of stone, puzzling over the figures so roughly etched into the surface and almost worn away by time and the elements, she always wondered about the writers: who had they been, what had they been thinking that was important enough for them to crouch for hours over a bit of stone, legs cramping, back and arms aching, as they cut the images into the stone with little more than the sharpened edge of another piece of stone?
These documents about the mysterious Niall of Scotland were much more sophisticated than that. They had been written with ink on parchment, parchment that had survived the centuries remarkably intact, though not unscathed. She would love to get her hands on the originals, she thought. Not because they would be any plainer; no, it was always best to work with reproductions, to avoid additional damage to the ancient parchment. There was just something unusual about these papers, though in archaeological terms they were far too recent to be of interest. Seven hundred years was nothing to a science devoted to deciphering life from millions of years ago.
There was such a hodgepodge of languages here! Latin, Greek, Old French, Old English, Hebrew, even Gaelic, yet the documents all seemed to be connected in some way. She wasn’t proficient in Gaelic, and deciphering the documents written in that language would take considerable research and study on her part. She was better in Hebrew, better still in Greek, and completely at ease in the other three languages.
She had worked before in the Old French sections; this time, after inserting the CD, she pulled up a section in Latin. Latin was such a tidy, structured language, extremely efficient; easy reading, for her.
Five minutes later she was rapidly making notes, her brow furrowed in concentration.
She had underestimated the age of the documents by about two centuries. The oldest of the Latin papers seemed to have been written in the twelfth century, which would make them almost nine hundred years old. She whispered a phrase, testing it on her tongue: “Pauperes Commilitones Christi Templique Salomonis.” The syllables rolled with a measured cadence, and a chill ran up her back. The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon. The Knights of the Temple. Templars.
What she’d read in the library’s files came back to her. The Templars had been the richest organization in medieval society. Their wealth had exceeded that of kings and popes; they had, indeed, operated the first rudimentary banking system in Europe, handling the transfer of funds and extending loans to kings. Their original reason for existence had been to protect the Christian pilgrims on their way to the Holy Lands, and the warrior monks had become the best-trained, best-equipped fighting force of their time. They had been so feared and respected on the battlefield that they were never ransomed when taken prisoner by the Muslims, but put to death immediately.
They had, for a time, been quartered on the site of King Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. During that time, they had evidently done extensive excavation on the site, and from that time until the Order had been destroyed, they had been the most powerful and wealthy force in Europe. Their treasure, supposedly taken from the ruins of the great Temple, had been rumored to be enormous.
Their treasure had been their downfall. Philip of France, in debt to the Templars, had devised a unique way of repaying the debt: he and Pope Clement V conspired to have all the Templars arrested and condemned for heresy, a charge that allowed the property of the charged to be confiscated. In a surprise move against the Knights on Friday the thirteenth, in October of 1307, thousands of Knights and their retainers had been arrested, but no treasure was found—or had ever been found. Moreover, shortly before that, the Grand Master of the Knights had ordered many of their records destroyed.
Or had he? She seemed to be looking at some of them right now.
The name jumped at her again. Niall of Scotland. Her pen dug into the paper as she wrote out the translation. “It has been ordained that Niall of Scotland, of Royal blood, shall be the Guardian.”
Of royal blood? She hadn’t been able to find a Niall in Scotland’s history, so how could he be of royal blood? And what had he been guardian of? Had it been a political position or a military one?
She needed a library. She would prefer the Library of Congress. She could get into it with her modem and computer if the motel room had a phone, which it didn’t. Tomorrow she would find a library in Eau Claire and do what research she could, make notes of the books she would need. She would like to find a Gaelic/English dictionary, because the papers written in Gaelic would likely be the most informative about this Niall of Scotland, but the Eau Claire public library might not have such an exotic item in its inventory.
The Chicago library system probably would, though, given the Irish heritage of such a large part of the city’s population. New York, Boston… those were other likely places accessible by computer.
She ejected the CD and carefully stored it, then exited the program. The computer was great, but she wanted the feel of paper in her hands, to give her the illusion of handling the originals. She pulled out the thick sheaf of copies, tracing her finger over the slick, smooth texture of modern paper. These too would fade over the centuries; sometime in the future other people would puzzle over the remaining scraps, trying to piece together what twentieth-century life had been like. They would try to restore videotape and retrieve the images from it, they would have CDs, books, disks, but only portions of the vast number would survive the centuries. Languages would have changed, and technology would be vastly different. Who knew what present time would look like from a distance of seven hundred years?
She stopped at a sheet written in Old French. Taking her magnifying glass to help her see the faded marks more clearly, she began reading. This page was an account of a battle; the handwriting was thin, spidery, the w
ords crammed together as if the writer had wanted to make use of every inch of paper.
“Though the enemy numbered five and Brother Niall was but one, yet he slew them all. His mastery of the sword is unequaled among the Brethren. He fought his way to the side of Brother Ambrose, who lay sorely wounded, and lifted his fallen fellow Knight onto his shoulder. Burdened by Brother Ambrose, he slew three more of the enemy before escaping, and bearing the wounded Knight to a place of safety.”
Grace sat back, restlessly running her fingers through her freed hair. Her heart was pounding. How could an ordinary man have done that? Outnumbered five to one, Niall had nevertheless killed all five opponents and rescued his fellow Knight. Then, carrying a grown man who had been wearing chain mail and probably weighed, armor and all, more than two hundred fifty pounds, he had still managed to kill three more opponents and escape with his burden.
What kind of man had he been? A powerful one, both in battle and in authority, but had he been mean-spirited or generous, jolly or dour, quiet or boisterous? How had he died, and, more important, how had he lived? What had led him to become a warrior monk, and had he survived the destruction of his Order?
She wanted to keep reading but a yawn took her by surprise, and weariness swamped her. She checked her watch, expecting to see that about an hour had elapsed, but instead more than three hours had gone by. It was late afternoon, and she didn’t know how much longer she could stay awake.
Why should she? This was the safest she had been in four days, hidden behind the disguise of a blond wig and a fake name. She was clean and warm; there was water to drink, food to eat, and a working bathroom. There was a bolted door between her and the rest of the world. The sheer luxury of it made her almost boneless with relief.
