The Sacred Stone

by The Medieval Murderers

  Magote had made good use of the inn after her whore-mongering goat of a husband abruptly and mysteriously departed this life. Innkeepers always know what travellers have in their purses, and what the pedlars and camelots will buy with no questions asked. But Magote had her rules: guests in the Grey Goose were left unmolested for just as long as they remained in her inn enjoying her hospitality. As she told her lads, only a fool plucks a bird while it’s still laying eggs, but once it’s finished laying, then it’s fair game.

  Magote narrowed her eyes. The lads were too quiet, shifty. There was something they weren’t telling her. She folded her huge muscular arms across her ample breasts. ‘Well, where is it? Hand it over.’

  Gamel looked in mute appeal to his friends, but they were staring fixedly at the rushes on the floor as if they’d never seen anything so fascinating before.

  Gamel swallowed hard. ‘The old man, he’d nothing on him . . . nothing. Searched him and his horse too.’

  ‘What!’ Magote spat the word out with such venom that all three lads cringed. ‘Did you lose him, let him stop off somewhere in the city? Did he speak to anyone?’

  ‘Never out of our sight, he wasn’t, from the time he came in through the gate,’ Gamel protested.

  ‘Don’t lie to me, you miserable little pig’s turd. The old man left with a full pack. Rumour was he was to sell his finest books. This was to be his last trip. He’d have brought back enough gold to see him through for the rest of his days. So where is it?’ She seized a hank of Gamel’s greasy black hair, twisting it and pulling his head back until she forced him down on his knees. ‘If you’re trying to cheat me, boy . . .’

  ‘I swear there was nothing . . .’ he squealed. ‘Nothing except a lump of stone, that were all, a lump of black stone.’

  ‘Heavy?’ Magote demanded.

  Gamel nodded as best he could with her fist still gripping his hair. Magote slowly raised her calloused hand. Gamel saw what was coming, but had no way of avoiding it. She struck him so hard across his cheek that it made his head ring.

  ‘Mutton head! Haven’t I taught you anything? These Jews cover gold in black wax or tar, even dip it in lead to disguise it from cod-wits like you. That trick’s so old, Adam was pulling it.’

  Gamel’s eyes were watering with pain. ‘But it didn’t feel like—’

  ‘You couldn’t feel your own arse unless someone kicked it for you.’ Magote spat in disgust. ‘Now you get out there and find out who’s got that stone. You fetch it here, and I promise you’ll be living like a lord on your cut of the gold. But if you fail I’ll be taking my cut from you, and I don’t mean in coins.’

  Judith peered out of the casement on the upper floor of the synagogue, checking that the garden below was empty. Few men came to study this early in the evening, especially on a weekday, which is why her brother and his friends met here. Satisfied that she would not get caught, Judith laid down her broom and tiptoed across the wooden floor towards the tiny study chamber at the far end.

  Her brother and his friends had entered the study chamber from the outside staircase at the back of the building. They didn’t dare risk coming in through the main synagogue entrance in case the rabbi or one of the elders should see them. A year ago Rabbi Elias had closed the Talmudic school and forbidden the study of the Kabbalah after their teacher had been forced to flee abroad with his wife. It was dangerous to provoke the Christians, Rabbi Elias said; they were already suspicious enough of the Jews, and regarded the mystical symbols and charts of the Kabbalists as sorcery.

  Besides, Rabbi Elias did not approve of these new ideas from Spain and Germany with their strange meditations, which had been known to drive young men into states of dangerous melancholy or mad ecstasy, which was almost as bad.

  ‘Read the Torah, pray and work hard to earn a living. That is enough to occupy any young man,’ he declared.

  But Judith’s brother Isaac and his three friends, including the rabbi’s own son, Aaron, had continued to study in secret in defiance of the rabbi’s instructions. Aaron swore that he for one was not going to be intimidated by the Christians even if his father was too cowardly to stand up to them.

  Judith edged her way along the wall of the chamber until she found the familiar spot where there was a small hole in the wooden partition. She hunkered down and pressed her ear to the gap. She did not need to squint through it to know who was talking. She’d been eavesdropping on this room for months, listening to their fierce debates, and by now she had learned almost as much as they had.

  Her brother Isaac was speaking. ‘But Jacob must have told you why he wanted the stone. He was no fool, not when it came to business, anyway.’

  ‘What more can I tell you?’ Judith heard the exasperation in Nathan’s voice. ‘His old friend in Exeter sent him a message, and the next thing I knew Zayde was setting off. My mother told him it was dangerous to make such a journey at his age and with such valuable books, but he said when Moses saw the burning bush he went to it without hesitation, and where would our people be if he had not?’

  ‘Now you’re telling us he thought he was Moses?’ Aaron said mockingly. ‘That proves the old man was crazy.’

  ‘You talk to me about crazy,’ Nathan snapped. ‘Last week you were certain that a new prophet had been born that hour, because the fish you had for dinner had a glass bead in its belly.’

  Judith heard the scrape of a chair as if someone had pushed it violently backward.

  ‘Enough!’ Benedict’s voice rang out hard and commanding. Benedict was only eighteen, two years younger than her brother Isaac, but he had a certainty about him that made others listen. ‘We’ve tried every test of the alchemist’s art on the stone. It transforms nothing, and it will not itself transform into anything but what we see.’

  Benedict was already a skilled apothecary, having learned the trade from his father, but since his father had been hanged, Benedict had been forced to learn what he could from books. He could read Latin, German and French as well as Hebrew and, according to her brother, Benedict’s room beside the apothecary’s shop was stuffed with books on every subject from alchemy to brewing cordials for coughs. Not that Judith had ever seen them, of course; an unmarried girl did not visit a man in his chamber, not even her future husband.

  She and Benedict had been betrothed for two years now, and Judith had not thought it possible to be more infatuated with a man than she was on that day they gave each other their pledge. But as the months passed that youthful adoration had matured into a deep and solid respect, and a love that sometimes burned so fiercely in her she thought she would be consumed by it, if they did not soon become man and wife.

  ‘So,’ Aaron said, ‘if Benedict is right, and the stone is not valuable, then what . . .’ Suddenly his voice took on a new excitement. ‘This scroll, what is its value?’

  Judith put her eye to the hole in the partition and peered into the room. The rabbi’s son was brandishing a small leather scroll under the nose of Nathan.

  Nathan tugged at the small wisp of hairs on his chin which was struggling to proclaim itself a beard. ‘Three, four shillings,’ he hazarded.

  ‘No, I mean what makes it worth three shillings? Is it the leather?’

  Nathan snorted. ‘What? An old piece of leather like that? A penny or two at most. It’s what’s written on . . .’

  He broke off as Aaron snatched up the stone from where it lay between them on the table. Trembling with excitement, Aaron pulled a candle towards a solid-glass globe to intensify the light of the flame and tilted the stone upwards. The others crowded in to peer over his shoulder. For a long time all four men stared at it.

  ‘Is that . . .’ Isaac began. ‘No, it’s nothing.’

  ‘Wait . . .’ Aaron turned the stone around. ‘There! There! Do you see it? Where the blood lies. It’s the Hebrew letter – Shin. And that mark there. It’s the letter Mem.’ The stone was wrenched from hand to hand as each of the four young men pored over its surface.

  �
��And there . . . there’s another. Is it . . . could it be a Hay?’ Nathan cried out, almost dropping the stone in his excitement. ‘Shin, Mem, Hay, or is it Mem, Shin, Hay? Moses! The letters spell Moses in Hebrew.’

  ‘You are useless, Nathan,’ Aaron yelled, ripping the stone out of his hand. ‘That is a final letter Mem. It can only be written at the end of a word. Hay, Shin, Mem. Don’t any of you see it? The letters spell HaShem. It means The Name. That is what is written on the stone – The Name. That is what the Eternal One was called at the climax of creation when He made Adam; only when creation was complete could HaShem, The Name, be known. And it is the title that the Eternal One used of Himself when He gave us the Torah on Mount Sinai. I am HaShem that brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of slaves. Don’t you see this is a sign that He is going to deliver us from those who oppress us. A sign written on stone, just as the law was written on stone. And tomorrow night Shavuoth begins, when those tablets of stone were given to Moses. It all fits.’ Aaron grasped the white strips on the front of his cloak. ‘This badge will no longer be our badge of shame; it will be our symbol of triumph.’

  In the distance the church bells of Norwich began tolling for the evening service of compline. Aaron was prancing around the room holding the stone above his head like a banner.

  Isaac caught his arm. ‘It’s late. Your father will be here soon, Aaron. We’d better go before he arrives for evening prayers.’

  Aaron grimaced. ‘Prayers! “Have patience and pray for the Messiah to come, my son”,’ he mimicked. ‘All these centuries watching our people get slaughtered, and we are still waiting. My father will still be praying when the Gentiles are setting light to the bonfire under his feet. The Jews of Norwich will never stand up for themselves as long as my father is rabbi. We have to find a way to destroy our enemies before we all end up like poor Jacob. And this! This—’ he brandished the stone again ‘—will show us how to do it.’

  ‘Not if your father finds us here with it,’ Isaac warned. ‘Does your mother know about the stone, Nathan?’

  Nathan nodded miserably. ‘But she won’t tell anyone. She thinks the old man was tricked into giving away his wealth for nothing. She couldn’t bear the shame of her friends and neighbours thinking her father had lost his wits.’

  As he spoke, Nathan took the stone from Aaron’s hand and began to wrap it in wool.

  ‘What are you doing with it?’ Aaron demanded indignantly.

  ‘I’m taking it home,’ Nathan told him, ‘where I should be right now. I shouldn’t have let you talk me into coming here. I should be sitting with my poor mother in mourning.’

  ‘But you can’t take the stone,’ Aaron protested. ‘I need to spend the night studying it and meditating on the letters. I told you letters are only the sign, but there is a message hidden in them, something that will show us what to do.’

  ‘You don’t need the stone to meditate on the letters. You know what they are.’ Nathan thrust the stone firmly into his scrip.

  ‘But suppose your mother finds it and throws it out,’ Aaron said.

  Nathan pressed both hands tightly against the leather scrip. ‘It belongs to me. I am Jacob’s grandson. I’ll keep it under my pillow at night and with me all day. If my zayde thought it was worth giving everything he had for it, then I won’t part with it for a king’s ransom. This stone is all I have left of him.’

  Aaron’s face was flushed with fury. ‘But it’s wasted on you! Jacob would want it to go to the person who can use it. You haven’t the wit to discover the riddle in it. I’m far more advanced in the mystic path than any of you. I’m the only one who can read it.’ He tried again to wrest the scrip from Nathan’s grasp, but Nathan fought back. Isaac and Benedict stepped in to separate them.

  ‘It belongs to Nathan,’ Benedict said firmly. ‘It’s stained with the blood of his family. Besides, it’s safer in his house than in yours. Your father may be set in his ways, Aaron, but he is not stupid, and if he found it in your possession he wouldn’t rest until he found the letters on it. Now make haste. Let’s separate and get out of here before the elders arrive.’

  Judith didn’t wait to hear what Aaron replied. She fled across the room and resumed her sweeping. Footsteps clattered down the back steps, and moments later the door connecting the study chamber to the synagogue opened and Benedict emerged alone. He stopped as he caught sight of her.

  ‘Cleaning at this hour, Judith? It’s very late,’ he said with a frown.

  ‘I was late arriving,’ Judith lied. ‘I had to walk to the far end of Fish Quay to find good herring for supper and then there was such a crowd.’

  Benedict stepped closer, taking the broom from her and bringing both her hands to his lips, kissing each hand in turn.

  ‘You work too hard,’ he told her. ‘But as soon as we are married, all that will end, I promise. Just a few more months and I will have the money.’

  Judith sighed and tried to force a smile. Marriage had been set to follow within a year of their betrothal, but a year ago, just weeks before the wedding, Benedict’s father had been hanged along with two other men. They were three of the sixteen men and women accused of the forced circumcision of a convert’s little son ten years before. The whole Jewish community had raised the money demanded to pay for a mixed jury of Jews and Christians. But the King had taken the money, then declared that Jews were barred from sitting on the jury, because they would not convict one of their own.

  Judith’s own parents as well as the Kabbalah teacher had been among those accused, but they had wisely fled to Germany before the trial and could never return for they had been declared fugitives, but at least they were alive. Benedict’s father had foolishly put his faith in the King’s justice, and now he was dead and all his property forfeit to the Crown. Benedict was forced to work for a Christian master in the shop his father had once owned and rent a tiny chamber between the shop and the storeroom to sleep in.

  Judith had repeatedly assured Benedict that she would gladly wed him without a penny between them, for she loved him more than her own life, but Benedict was too proud to accept that. When he could afford to marry her, he said, he would, but as Judith lay awake at night with every fibre of her body aching to be lying in his arms, she began to fear she would be wearing a shroud before a bridal gown.

  They heard the sound of laboured footsteps on the wooden stairs below. Benedict grabbed Judith’s cloak and thrust it around her shoulders as Rabbi Elias shuffled into the room. The rabbi stared in puzzlement at the sight of the young couple alone in the synagogue. Judith could see the question forming on his lips.

  Before the rabbi could ask it, Benedict said quickly, ‘Judith’s brother couldn’t come for her tonight. He was concerned that she shouldn’t walk home alone, so he asked me to escort her.’

  The rabbi’s frown relaxed. ‘Troubled times, troubled times.’

  Benedict hastily ushered Judith towards the stairs.

  ‘You are a close friend of the boy Nathan?’

  Benedict turned. The rabbi was gazing not at him but at the closed doors of the ark where the scrolls of the Torah were kept.

  Rabbi Elias continued without looking at Benedict. ‘I know that Jacob ben Meir went to Exeter to bring back some special object for this community, something he believed would protect us, give us hope. That much he confided in me before he left. Jacob said he was willing to give everything he owned for that chance for us all to live in peace. I believe that had he known what that object would really cost him, he still would not have hesitated to bring it here. Yet the universe is created in pairs. For every light there is a corresponding darkness, and what brings peace can be used to bring destruction, if it falls into the wrong hands.’

  The rabbi turned and fixed Benedict and Judith with his piercing blue eyes. ‘I am only in my forty-second year, and if it pleases the Eternal One I might live for some years yet, but my son is not willing to wait until I am old to replace me as rabbi. He believes that like our forefathers
, the Maccabees, who rose up against the occupying Greeks, we can rise up against our masters and overthrow them. But this is not Israel and we cannot fight the whole of Christendom! If we try, they will utterly destroy us. Our only hope is to put our faith in the Eternal One, as we have always done. Benedict, you are a man known for keeping your own counsel, so I will not ask you if you know what object Jacob brought back or where it is, but ask you this – do all in your power to ensure it does not fall into the hands of my son, Aaron, and those like him, or it will mean the end of all of us.’

  Thursday 23 May, the fifth day of Sivan, the eve of the Festival of Shavuoth

  The flames in the oil lamps guttered each time the synagogue door opened to admit more men and boys hurrying in from the chilling rain. The benches around the little tables were filling up fast, and Nathan found himself squashed between Benedict and a stout red-faced butcher who, though he had washed, still stank of blood and dung.

  ‘Have you brought the stone with you?’ Benedict whispered.

  Nathan nodded reluctantly. He hadn’t had any choice but to bring it. Aaron and Isaac had both arrived on his doorstep as dusk was gathering and insisted on watching him put the stone in his scrip before escorting him like a prisoner to the synagogue.

  ‘I don’t see what good it will do you,’ Nathan told them. ‘We can’t discuss the meaning of the letters this evening. Every man in the community will be in the synagogue tonight.’

  But Aaron had exchanged a knowing wink with Isaac, and Nathan realized at once that they were planning something. Whatever it was, he wanted no part of it. So it was much to Nathan’s relief when Aaron and Isaac left him at the synagogue door and went to join the other groups of men.

  It was the tradition for the men to gather on the eve of Shavuoth to study all night, until dawn proclaimed the time for morning prayers and the main services of the festival would begin. Debates over the holy texts were always lively, as each man deliberately offered a counter-argument to that of his companions so that all possible interpretations of the verses could be explored.