by Nina Post
“That’s it,” Cate said. “Take all of that. And switch the poem.”
Argos pulled the forged copy of the poem from its leather folder and slid it into the original folder, facing front like the original. “Done.”
“You’re all set, then,” she said. “Thank you both.”
“You got it,” Argos said. “We’re gonna drop these off for you, and then we’re going to Sears Fine Foods to clean out their pancake supply. They’ll have to hire griddlers off the street to keep up with us.”
Vulcan and Argos left Gaelen’s and Cate let out a long breath in relief. She could barely keep her eyes open, though normally she was wired with energy after working with her crew. Her sister’s involvement probably quashed any excitement she’d otherwise have, but she also hadn’t been sleeping well.
Before he died, her father frequently appeared in her dreams, and they were all pretty much the same: she would try to talk to him, but he wouldn’t look at her or speak to her. Since she’d been in San Francisco, and since he died, the dreams were different.
In one, he was traveling and she asked him where he was, but they had a bad phone connection. She had to shout and his answers were garbled.
In another, she tried to wake him, like she considered doing at Benjamin’s house, but he screamed and flailed at her.
And in yet another, a lion led her to his grave.
She was sleeping just enough to dream, but it wasn’t restful.
Fifteen minutes later, while Cate took a shower, Noah answered the door to a trim man of maybe 5′10″, with alert brown eyes; bristly, close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, and a mostly gray mustache. After a brief exchange of confirming information, Argos gave him the poem and the book, wrapped in a baby blanket.
Having one of the Zaanics books in his hand was electrifying. Noah thanked him, locked the door, and placed both items very gently on his very clean dining table.
Cate came out a few minutes later, dressed in gray khakis and a blue t-shirt. She passed by the door and sniffed. “Argos was here.” At Noah’s dubious expression, she said, “Smoke.”
“Oh, so he’s the smoke monster in Lost.”
“Argos is more talkative,” Cate said, noticing the book and poem on the table.
She put on white cotton gloves and unwrapped the book. The leather binding had metal corner pieces and raised medallions in the center, inset with what looked like dyed pieces of the parchment in blue, green, and red. She touched it, ran her fingers down the cover.
As striking as the binding was, when she opened the front cover to look in the inside, they both said, “Ohh.” The VZ Yesuþoh was inscrutable, and gorgeous on its own, especially when they saw pages of it for the first time. The intricate illustrations along the book’s border were exquisite and finely-wrought.
“You know how when a kid gets a baby sister or brother?” Cate said. “They don’t like it, they don’t understand why it has to be there, and it poses a threat — but then they pick it up and fall in love with it?”
“No.” He smiled.
“Me neither. But I think that’s what just happened.”
She propped her head on her palm and closed her eyes. “Tired.”
Noah took a seat. “I’m going to start scanning the poem and the pages into my phone. Go get some sleep.”
She checked the time. It wasn’t dawn yet, but Benjamin wanted her to let him know when it was done. “Okay. Let me call Benjamin first.” He sounded wide-awake when he answered. She said, “The swallows have left the barn.” Then, “Weren’t you sleeping?”
“It’s 4:30,” he said, as though this explained everything.
“Right. 4:30 in the morning.”
“On a weekday.”
Cate hesitated. “What are we talking about, exactly?”
“I’m up by 4:30 on weekdays.”
“And on weekends?”
“On weekends I try to sleep until 5:30. Though if you called anytime before right now, I would not have heard the phone. I don’t engage in what you would call ‘vigilant sleep.’”
“Isn’t your phone by your bed?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Benjamin said. “I could tape it to my ear and still not notice, if I’m asleep.”
“On that note, I think I’ll get some sleep.”
“Good.”
“Good?”
“You just finished a job, as you refer to it. You must be tired, and I can only imagine the enervating quality of an added threat of the state pen.”
“California’s state pen is Fisher,” Cate said. “It can write upside-down, but I think a pencil works better for that.” She was already half-asleep, talking on auto-pilot. She was familiar with the underlying tension of knowing she and her crew could go to prison if they were caught, especially after the endorphins subsided. “Also, you asked me to do this, so you can’t work in any underhanded comments.”
“Noted,” he said. “All right, rest up before our trip.”
“What trip?” she asked. Noah looked up at her and scrunched his brow. He was taking a picture of each page with his iPhone.
“You and I are going to Micronesia today,” Benjamin said.
“Micronesia?”
Noah gaped. She shrugged, flashed her eyes wide.
“Make sure you’re ready to go by three p.m. I’ll have the service pick you up at your hotel. Pack a raincoat, and clothes for up to two nights.” He hung up.
“Bring me back a souvenir,” Noah said.
She let the phone drop and curled up around a pillow that had George Washington’s face on it. Her shower hadn’t woken her up. She could barely keep her eyes open. “How’d I get into this mess, George?” she mumbled.
Cate woke up on the sofa a few hours later and found Noah asleep in his bed.
She left a note that said he could meet her at the closest library branch to go over the digital copies, if he wanted. On her walk there, she stopped by a coffee place and got two large coffees, using the names Ghost and Mrs. Muir for her order.
She took the coffees into the library and claimed a large table in an empty room in the back. Then she took out her phone and stared at a digital scan of the Lyr poem that she had created earlier, hoping the coffee would start setting in enough for her to make some sense of the thing and see how it connected to the books. Cate put the phone down after five minutes and adjusted the heat caddy on Mrs. Muir’s cup. She held it by her nose and breathed it in, glancing up when someone filled the doorway.
A man in his late thirties or early forties, wearing jeans and a gray leather jacket, stood at the far end of the long table holding a motorcycle helmet. He was a textbook case of a tall, dark, and handsome stranger, which she had no patience for right now.
“This room is taken.” She briefly raised her eyebrows to indicate, Okay, leave now.
But he walked up to the chair on the opposite side of the table and held the top rung. “Dolne. Are you sure you don’t want company?”
Cate jolted when he greeted her in VZ. How could he possibly know that?
She glanced over at the main room to her right. She didn’t want to deal with this right now, let alone later. Her father was dead and her soul was heavy. So go away.
But TDH sidled over to the side of the table and pulled out a chair right by her. She caught a scent of bergamot and black licorice. He put the helmet on the table, sat, and stretched out his long legs, then entwined his fingers over his flat stomach with a self-satisfied smirk.
Cate set down her coffee. “Seriously? You’re going to sit here?”
“Seriously.” He grinned and turned one of her cups around as she stood and pushed her chair back. “Which one are you? Ghost, or Mrs. Muir?”
She slung her bag over her shoulder, preparing to leave, her trepidation winning out over her curiosity, but then Noah walked into the small room and glanced at Tall, Dark, and Handsome with a confused furrow of his forehead. “Hey,” he said to Cate, then glanced at TDH. “Who’s this?”
TDH gave her a conciliatory smile and held out his palms. “Okay. My mistake. But I’m curious about one thing.” He shifted his gaze to Noah. “How does it feel to read aloud words you don’t understand?”
Noah tilted his head. “Do I know you?”
“I mean, what’s the point of that? You’re saying words, but you don’t know how to speak to anyone and you don’t know what you’re reading. Does it sting, knowing that her family got the lion’s share? I know what that’s like, trust me, but how do you expect to help her?”
Cate leaned in. It was one thing when TDH ambled in there and greeted her in VZ. She didn’t want to be alone in an out-of-the-way room with him, but now he was harassing Noah. “Tell us who you are, right now.”
“A friend.” He pulled something from his wallet and handed a business card to Cate, who glanced at it. The card only had a name, Jake Dumont, and a number.
Dumont … it sounded familiar.
The scribe, Cate remembered. Dumont was the name of the scribe who wrote the VZ Yesuþoh in the Zaanics books. Probably a coincidence, even though Jake Dumont knew at least some VZ.
“Oochenoseh boc huþos inen,” Jake Dumont told her, and Cate changed her mind about it being a coincidence. Jake met Noah’s eyes, then left.
Cate and Noah sat in stunned silence.
“What just happened?” Noah asked, awkwardly positioning his considerable height into a chair.
“I have no idea.” They were both stunned.
“That was VZ, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“How can he know VZ?”
She just shook her head. It didn’t make any sense, and her mind ran though every possible justification. The only thing that made any sense was that he knew Gaelen.
“What did he say to you just now?”
“He said he can help me.”
“With what?”
“Not sure.”
“Are you going to call him?”
“I’ll have to,” she said.
Noah seemed discomfited. “He’s too … flashy. I can picture him holding onto the wheel of a cigarette boat off the coast of Florida, wearing a pastel linen suit and aviator sunglasses.”
She absently tapped her pencil on her thigh.
“What? What are you thinking?” Noah asked.
“Væyne Zaanics and the Yesuþoh was passed down through six centuries,” she said, “and the Lyr and Severn stewards were supposed to keep it protected within the two family lines. I suppose it had to have leaked out at some point. How could it have stayed a family secret for that many generations, right?” Maybe it was foolish to think otherwise.
But she was still incredulous that a total stranger just spoke VZ to her.
Chapter 11
Paris — Spring 1361
In March, the second pestilence rose like a mephitis from the earth, a phantom hell-bent on haunting the rest of their days in this world.
Thomas asked Bernard and Bernard’s wife, Elizabeth, to come and help him with his two daughters. Bernard and Elizabeth took their son, Louis, and moved into the tall Lyr house three doors down from their own. Louis was eleven, the same age as Thomas’s oldest, Clare.
Isabelle had died giving birth to Adelina, now five, and Thomas hadn’t married again, though most men in his position would have. He had hired a wet nurse for Adelina, and though Bernard encouraged him, Thomas was not receptive to the idea of marrying. Bernard could understand why. Isabelle was irreplaceable. She was a devoted and skilled companion, a source of light and humor, and she had possessed a blazing intelligence that surpassed that of any grand master at the university. Bernard was nearly as devastated by the loss of her as Thomas was.
The number of students at the University had dwindled almost imperceptibly since the Queen died in September, but the colleges had closed now that the pestilence had afflicted the city a second time. Bernard and Thomas were teaching masters in the faculty of theology at the College of Navarre. Bernard had attended Navarre with Nicholas Oresme, now Grand Master. Though they both taught there, Oresme had turned into a venerated figure, deservedly so. Bernard and Thomas taught both basic and advanced classes, but Oresme was famous. They all used Abelard’s teaching method, which was to present a problem and find the pro and con statements through debate.
Thomas could see no pro statements in the pestilence or in much else. His spirits had faded since Isabelle died. Bernard tried to make Thomas see the benefit of the pestilence. After all, they never would have built the oracle if not for the first wave of the pestilence, for which they sought a cure. He believed the visions they both received from the oracle were a miracle and a responsibility. The visions led to their creation of the language, which Bernard considered a testament to the triumph of the human spirit in adversity, and Isabelle’s legacy, along with her children. Isabelle had built a purposeful ambiguity into the very name: Zaanics could mean ‘gift’ or ‘curse.’ They made a gift — the language — out of a curse — the visions.
But Thomas had always feared the worst, and tended to look on that side, as well.
Elizabeth worried that Thomas focused too much on teaching the girls the language. Bernard understood her concern, but reminded his wife that they had a duty to pass on the language. They knew life would continue when all signs seemed to indicate it would not, and seemed to be pointing that way again. The oracle gave them hope — enough hope to bring children into a world that seemed to be in its final days. Bernard took comfort remembering Hesiod’s Works and Days, and how hope remained in Pandora’s jar.
Bernard quickly told Elizabeth everything before going to Thomas’s house. He hadn’t wanted to scare her before they were married or right after.
At first she had trouble understanding. “Like Roquetaillade’s Tribulations?” she asked.
Bernard did one last check of the house to make sure they had taken everything they needed. The pestilence could last for months, and they survived the first wave by staying inside. They would not leave the house unless they had to, not until the pestilence passed. They had no idea what caused the horrible sickness, but they intended to replicate their behavior from the first time.
“No, not at all like that.” Bernard rubbed a hand over his face. It seemed to be the fashion to have prophecies of doom. Understandable, with the pestilence, and years of fits and starts of war, and lawless brigands and separatist factions destroying lives and property. “Roquetaillade just expressed what he wished to happen. And to say a plague would eradicate man? That’s nearly happened already.” He thought of the visions then, but for Bernard, the images from the vision were always with him, and were far more complicated and confusing than any of the prophecies going around.
“Man and all hardened sinners,” Elizabeth quoted Tribulations with a twist to her lips.
“Thomas thinks everyone is a hardened sinner, anyway,” Bernard joked.
“Thomas has dowry for two daughters to worry about,” Elizabeth said with a quirk to her lips. “And you? What do you think? Are we all hardened sinners?”
He wrapped his arms around her waist and smiled. “Not all of us.”
“Roquetaillade believes all the strife will lead to a better world,” she said, with a tinge of insecurity, as though wanting him to reassure her.
He reassured her the only way he knew how. “If there is a divine plan, I don’t believe it cannot be swayed by man’s will.” He kissed her. “Or woman’s will, which is much more formidable.”
Bernard and Elizabeth took their son, their food, and some belongings to Thomas’s house and found him in the kitchen, slicing an onion. Adelina, his youngest, was watching her father intently, and he sang her a song in their language, in Zaanics:
Desoh pocra etson yæ þilnon
Pocroh tos
onaw yæ laatsohoh unon
Yepachenawnæ vavernon
Desoh recenaw cor
Ternoh pocra yoþilnon
Wa cornoh recenaw
“That is a very sad song,” Bernard whispered in his wife’s ear. “A girl is cutting an onion, and the onion is horrified that it made her cry. It tries to cheer her up and she doesn’t notice, which makes the onion cry again. But no one notices the onion crying.”
“He is a sad man,” she whispered back.
Thomas noticed them and gave them each a kiss on the cheek. He seemed glad enough to have them, but Bernard could tell his friend still wasn’t sleeping well — he had dark pouches under his eyes and looked wan. Elizabeth went to the kitchen to take stock of what they had available and to store the food they brought with them.
Thomas and Bernard stood by a table where he did his work. “I know this is difficult for you,” Bernard said in his not-so-mellifluous French, questioning the wisdom of saying it. “We’re together again, hiding from another sweep of the pestilence, but Isabelle is not with us.” Bernard worried that sounded stilted, and did not want to upset his friend, but it would be wrong to not mention her.
“I’m trying to teach them Zaanics,” Thomas said, and Bernard knew he meant the girls. “And it is diabolically hard without Isabelle. We were merely plow-horses to her brilliance.”
“That’s true enough,” Bernard said, “but we all created the language. You, me, and Isabelle. You know it backwards and forwards. You can teach them.”
“The language isn’t the hard part, Bernard. They need her. I need her.” Thomas paused. “And the girls’ education — ” he made an angry gesture and raised his voice. “Isabelle would have taught them French, German, Latin. Most of the clerics who taught French are dead, so now the girls are taught in English and I don’t have time to teach them anything but Zaanics.” Upset, he crossed his arms and paced. “I miss her terribly,” he said quietly.
Bernard felt a pit in his stomach. If what Oresme said was true, that God was the infinite void beyond the world, would Isabelle be a part of that eternity? He hated that she was gone — it seemed almost impossible to believe — and he thought about it frequently. As much as he and Thomas had studied logic and theology, as many times as they’d read Abelard and Aquinas, the fate of the soul was still as much of a mystery as the cause of the pestilence itself. Abelard believed that to reach the truth, you should have an open-minded and critical attitude, and said, “The master key to knowledge is to keep asking questions.”
