Devil's Lair

by David Wisehart

  He retied his hostages so they could walk as a group. “Show me where you found me.”

  The friar nodded and led the way. As the pilgrims wandered through the desolation, swarms of flies rose like a black fog over a sea of flesh. Maggots squirmed in every orifice. Marco recognized no faces. He had no memories of this massacre.

  After short distance, he stopped.

  “I was never here.”

  The friar did not argue.

  Marco spat on one of the melting faces at his feet. Staring back at the old man, the knight said, “We go to Rome. If you lie to me again, I’ll kill you all.”

  They descended to the valley floor and came to a narrow bridge guarded by two men. One was tall, the other short. The tall man was hatchet-faced. The other was ruddy and round, with sweat glistening on his cheeks above an unkempt beard. The men wore oddments of armor, ill-fitting sallets and byrnies and boots, all dappled with blood. They carried swords in leather on their belts, but the small man’s weapon was poorly placed: too far back for a proper draw.

  Scavengers, thought Marco.

  The guards stood before the bridge, eyeing the approach. When the friar and the donkey came to within a dozen feet of the sentries, the tall man raised a hand, palm out.

  “Stop.”

  The friar eased the donkey to a halt.

  Marco rose to his knees and shifted his weight to the balls of his feet, ready to leap from the cart. He was not sure his legs would allow it. He felt stronger with every passing hour, but knew he was not yet whole. If it came to combat, his body might betray him. He flexed his fingers on the dagger’s grip, keeping the weapon low, behind the sideboard and out of sight.

  “Toll bridge,” said the taller of the two.

  The short man nodded. “Have to pay the toll.”

  “What’s the toll?” Marco asked.

  “Depends,” said the tall man.

  Recalling something the poet had said, Marco told them, “I’m on a mission from the queen.”

  “Queen Joanna?”

  The name meant nothing to him. “Transporting prisoners,” he said.

  “You don’t look like a bailiff.”

  Good point. Marco was dressed in a torn undertunic. Half his face was sunburned and his head was bandaged. “I was robbed.”

  “Robbed, eh?”

  “My clothes, my sword, my papers.”

  “Papers?”

  “A carnet from the queen.” The words were coming to him now of their own accord. They made little sense to Marco—what was a carnet?—but seemed to impress the bridgekeepers.

  “They take your money?” the short man asked.

  “What little I had.”

  A shake of the tall man’s head. “Can’t trust no one on the roads these days. Pity, that.”

  “Real pity,” echoed the small man.

  The tall man took a step forward, hand on his hilt. “Show us your hands.”

  Marco let the dagger drop to the blanket and raised his empty hands. Even weak as he was, he could take these thieves, but he needed information more than corpses.

  The tall man walked up to the cart and eyed the hostages. “Them ain’t nobles.”

  His partner followed two steps behind. “That one’s got a bit of fashion on him.”

  “You can have that one,” said Marco. “He’s a poet.”

  The short man sneered. “What good’s a poet?”

  “We’ll take the girl,” the tall man insisted.

  Marco shook his head. “The girl’s mine.”

  “The bridge is ours.”

  “The poet, or nothing.”

  The short man spat on the road. “A poet is worse than nothing.”

  “Agreed,” said Marco. “Nothing it is, sirrah.”

  The tall man drew his sword. It was a rusty piece of steel with a ragged edge. Marco was unimpressed. A man who didn’t know how to care for a sword probably didn’t know how to use it.

  The tall man proved Marco’s theory by stepping too far forward and brandishing the point in Marco’s face. That was his first mistake. His second was holding the grip in one hand instead of two, which left a weakness at the fingers.

  Marco raised his empty hands, palms out, as if in submission, then clapped them together on the flat of the blade, his left hand forward, near the center of the blade, his right hand back, near the tip. The hilt popped out of the tall man’s grip. The sword spun through the air, landing behind the cart.

  The tall man, startled, went for the missing sword. Marco took up the dagger as the man passed him. He plunged the tip into the man’s left eye. For a moment the body dangled, twitching, suspended on the upraised dagger. Marco tilted the blade down. The body fell, the eye socket sliding from the steel.

  The short man stood his ground, his own sword drawn and raised and clenched in a two-handed grip. His mouth went slack at the sight of his fallen friend. His eyes grew wide. He had trouble breathing. “You, you, you, you—”

  The long blade quivered in his hands.

  Marco wiped gore from the dagger. “Run away, little man.”

  And the little man ran away.

  CHAPTER 9

  In the heart of the forest, in the depths of the vale, a tangled canopy swallowed the sky. Marco saw a faint light ahead and in that light he saw a house, a meager daub-and-wattle cottage fronting the road. Behind it lay a field where sunlight harrowed a desiccated farm. He saw no animals in the field, no cottars about the house. The door was shut and the window shuttered.

  As the cart trundled toward the glade, Marco studied the house. It seemed ancient and out of place. A memory flickered at the edge of his awareness: a small, laughing boy chasing a dog from a flock of chickens. The dog barked, chickens cackled, feathers flew. Not much of a memory, but there it was. And then it was gone.

  The thought of hens made him hungry. There was little food left in the cart, and Marco was tired of living on porridge and groats. He craved coddled eggs and a flitch of bacon.

  He also needed better clothes. The tall man’s clothes were an awkward fit. The byrnie stank of a corpse. The belt worried his sunburn. The boots were bloody and tighter than torture. If the cottars were home, Marco would ask politely for a hot meal and fresh supplies; if they were away, he would take what he needed and continue north.

  The house looked peaceful, but Marco felt uneasy. Doors held dangers. Might someone else be waiting inside? These hills must be teaming with outlaws. Marco wished he had better interrogated those men at the bridge, especially the one who ran off. Be smart, he thought, and decided to investigate the surround before he knocked.

  Marco stopped the cart short of the house and tethered the donkey to the bole of a young oak. With the friar’s belt he secured the poet to one wheel, then ordered the old man to climb into the cart and tied him back-to-back with the girl, making sure their wrists were held fast together.

  “Not a sound,” he said, leaving the punishment implied.

  With the dead man’s sword in his right hand and the dagger in his belt, Marco stepped off the road, into the forest, and went slinking toward the cottage.

  William sat in the cart with his back to Nadja’s back, their hands tied together. The rope bit into his wrists as Nadja struggled to free herself. He looked over his shoulder to gauge her progress. Nadja’s fingers curled and brushed against the knot. She twisted her hands to create more slack. She held her breath, grunted, then sighed with frustration. Catching her breath, she tried again.

  Glancing down over the sideboard, William saw Giovanni struggling to untie the Franciscan belt that trussed him to the wheel. In forty years that belt, made of tough English hemp, had lost little of its strength. Giovanni would soon discover for himself that the cord was stronger than the wheel. Marco had looped the rope around the felly and three spokes. Giovanni could get free if he tore out the spokes and snapped the felly, but if the wheel broke from the axle, William and Nadja would tumble to the road. The girl might get hurt. Would they be able to re
pair the wheel? Unlikely. They needed to keep it intact if they hoped to arrive at Lake Averus with all of their supplies. If they wanted to escape, they were going about it the wrong way.

  William was not inclined to escape. He had traveled too far in search of the last Knight Templar to flee him now. William did not trust the knight, but he did not have to. He trusted God. This journey back to Rome was unforeseen, but if God allowed it there must be a reason.

  Marco was a harsh man, but William did not think him evil. The knight had not raped the girl, who he obviously liked, nor murdered the poet, who he clearly despised. Marco was wounded, addled, unsure of his surroundings. He did not seem to know himself. His impulses were violent, but he seemed capable of regret. In time the warrior might be gentled, the mercenary reformed. Marco’s injuries would heal. He would find his better self. It was William’s charge to show him the way.

  As Nadja struggled with the rope, William’s hands purpled. His fingers numbed. If the girl persisted, they would both lose their extremities.

  There is another way, he thought. He could use the glass lentil. Roger Bacon had discovered, and William had confirmed, that sunlight focused through the lentil to a single point burned hot enough to kindle fire. Just as Archimedes had focused sunlight with a giant mirror to burn the Roman ships at Syracuse, William might use the glass lentil to burn these knotted ropes.

  The sunlight was inconstant, dappling the weald in shifting patterns at the mercy of the trees and the teasing wind. William had demonstrated the lentil’s incendiary effect to Nadja several times, but always under the fiery dazzle of the noontide sun. Could he achieve the same effect here?

  The lentil was stored in his leather pouch, which lay near Nadja’s feet. The friar grunted to get her attention. Nadja glanced up at him. William jutted his chin in the direction of the pouch. He looked at Nadja, then at the pouch, then back at the girl. It took a few moments to get his meaning across. Finally, she understood. She placed her feet on the pouch and slid it back toward their hands. Together they scooted across the bed of the cart, inch by inch, rocking the tumbrel on its rickety wheels, until the friar grasped the pouch between his fingertips. Opening it, he reached in with two fingers and felt the smooth, hard jewel. With care and concentration he withdrew the glass lentil, his tool of miracles, his instrument of magic.

  Marco sneaked toward the cottage in quiet steps. Now and again he stopped to clear the ground before him, easing foliage aside with the tip of his sword before hazarding another step. Still, he could not clear it all away, and the duff crackled softly underfoot. After one loud crunch he froze and listened for alarm, but no noises issued from the house, so he continued as before. In this way he made slow and undiscovered progress.

  Reaching the cottage door, Marco paused to listen but heard no patter of habitation. He moved to the window. With the dagger’s point he eased the shutter open and waited for as long as he could hold his breath. No sounds came from within.

  Gone, he thought.

  He peeked inside and found it dark, impenetrable. A fly buzzed past him, pursued by a foul air, the exhalation of a rank miasma. Something had died inside the house.

  Marco circled to the back, passing a dry midden heap. A trellis, thinly woven with dead vines and marcescent leaves, had toppled. The haft of an axe lay on the ground beside it. The blade was missing. Marco discovered animal tracks in the dirt and examined them closely, but the faint spoor was old and inconclusive. Finishing his round of the cottage, he returned to the door and opened it without knocking.

  William held the glass lentil behind him, over the sideboard and above the rope that tied Giovanni’s hands. Looking over his shoulder and moving the lentil back and forth, he found a thin shaft of light breaking through the forest canopy. By raising and lowering his body he slid the lentil along the beam’s path until the sunlight focused to a sharp point on the white rope belt, the lifeline of his order, which began to blacken and smoke.

  Marco stepped inside. The interior was cool and dim and stank of rotting vegetables and fleshy decay. It was the odor of death and something else. Something familiar. I know that smell. Though the foulness sickened him, he inhaled like a bellows and held the fetor in his lungs, savoring it, this taste of lost time, rich and rank and redolent of memory. There was something in this room that recalled to him his former life.

  The smokehole in the roof was closed. Wind whistled in the thatch. Flies buzzed in shadows. Light fell from the window and stabbed the darkness, but the wound did not go deep. Marco could scarcely see a thing.

  Something scurried on the ground: hard claws scrabbled on stone, skittered across the dirt floor, then fell silent.

  As Marco’s eyes negotiated the darkness, objects around him took shape and form. The cottage had only a single room, built to be shared by kin and kine. A waist-high fence to Marco’s left partitioned one end of the room for a stable, which claimed at least a third of the dwelling. In the center of the stable, amid the straw and the muck, a dark mass gathered a vigorous horde of flies. Marco saw that it had once been a dairy cow. At the center of the cottage lay an open stone hearth where a cauldron hung over a pile of cinder. Opposite the stable, a bed lay heaped with rumpled blankets. Beside the bed stood a trunk with a lid but no lock.

  He opened the trunk first and found it empty. Checking the kettle, he discovered the musty remains of unserved pottage. A dead rat moldered on the slab of the hearth. Marco probed his sword in the cinders but found nothing hidden there. Crossing to the bed, he saw something beneath the blankets and stopped halfway.

  Someone was in the bed.

  Marco crept forward, leading with his long blade, his dagger in his other hand. He stuck his sword under the edge of the top blanket and flipped back the coverlet.

  A dead woman stared up at him. Her eyes were wide, her mouth agape, framing the final exhalation which had long ago escaped her. A dead man lay in the bed beside the woman, his cheek on her shoulder, his arms curled about her in a last embrace. Their flesh was livid with black and purple sores.

  Marco felt his stomach tighten. He had seen this before. Many times before. This, yes, this he remembered.

  Plague.

  Giovanni smelled smoke. He was still tied to one of the rear wheels of his father’s cart. Inexplicably, the rope that held him began to burn. He felt heat rising from the cord, the curl of smoke against the skin of his right arm.

  Moments before, William had leaned out of the cart to look down and now the old man hovered overhead, preternaturally still. With no flint, no steel, no lighted torch or lamp, William somehow caused the kindling of the rope.

  What is he doing?

  The poet leaned back against the wheel and looked up. He saw the glass lentil. It was filled with light, glowing with divine radiance against the black umbrage of the forest. There seemed a kind of magic in it.

  The friar grunted a sharp rebuke through the rag that gagged him. The lentil went dark as the old man shook the cart in anger. Giovanni leaned his head forward again. After a moment, the soft hiss of burning hemp continued.

  Casting fire from a stone.

  It was like one of Merlin’s tricks in the Arthurian tales, or some conjuring of the Persian magi. As a child Giovanni had heard such stories from Friar Oderic, who had been to the East and seen many such wonders. As an adult Giovanni had read Marco Polo’s reports of finding, in the mountains of Cathay, black stones that burned like charcoal. But William’s stone was something else. It was clear and made of glass. It did not burn itself but other objects.

  The heat at Giovanni’s back intensified. He was sure he felt flames lapping at his skin. Soon his clothes would catch fire, then his hair, then his flesh. This crazy old wizard meant to burn him like a witch. Like a Templar. A vision of the burning brotherhood came to the poet’s mind. “Men burned like boars on a spit,” his father had said. “For three days the sky was black as midnight with the smoke from the heretics.”

  Giovanni panicked as a ring of flam
e circled his wrists. The gag in his mouth muffled his scream. He strained against the rope. The cord broke. Frantically, he pulled at it. The rope came loose, whipping through the spokes of the wheel as Giovanni leapt to his feet and turned. He checked himself for burns, and yanked his gag from his face so he could catch his breath. The rope smoked on the ground like an angry serpent.

  Relieved, he laughed, then untied his companions.

  Marco stepped outside. He had come too late to the house; it had been pillaged already. The kettle and the trunk had value, but Marco wanted nothing more than to put this pestilence behind him. Returning to the cart, he found his former hostages standing together, unfettered, studying the poet’s map of Hell.

  The old man looked up. “Ready when you are.”

  Marco saw a blackened rope in the road. “How did you get free?”

  William said, “We’re on the side of the angels.”

  No angel burned that rope. Had the hostages freed themselves? They had made a cooking fire, which meant they had flint and steel in one of the bags. Had they retrieved their incendiaries and gotten lucky with a spark? Impossible. But he could think of no other solution.

  He should not have left them alone. That much was clear. And yet, he could not watch over them at all hours. Did he need these people at all? No. They were slowing him down. He could find Rome by himself. Forget them. He could manage on his own. He would continue north until he arrived at the city gate, then find the nearest tavern. Someone would recognize him and direct him to his villa.

  “I’m on my own side,” Marco said to the friar, and unhitched the donkey from the cart. He felt irritated, but more than anything he wished to be alone.

  Nadja strode up to him with anger in her eyes. She grabbed his sleeve, saying, “You swore to protect the Holy Grail.”