The Burning Road

by Ann Benson

  “They have stolen everything from these peasants,” he said cynically. “Jacques Bonhomme, the good peasant. The worst sin among these unfortunates is the sin of unprivileged birth.”

  “We are all born in sin,” she said. “But it is no sin to be born poor. The only sin lies in doing nothing to improve one’s lot.”

  “The lords of France have made it impossible for their subjects to do that.”

  “Then I too should rise up, had I been treated so,” Kate said, “or I should not be able to face my God. I cannot understand why He has not allowed you to prevail.” She shook her head in bewilderment. “This failure of your army must be part of some plan, some greater design, for your cause must surely be just in God’s eyes. We cannot always know why He works as He does.”

  Her remark seemed to make Guillaume Karle angry. “It was not the work of God, it was luck, pure bad luck! But for the chance arrival of her champions, we might now be holding the wife of the king’s son and negotiating with her head.”

  Kate gave him a hard look. “Surely you would never consider taking the lady’s head.”

  “And why not? Shall it be left on her neck simply because she is born royal? Should she be spared the same treatment that her husband’s subjects have suffered, often for the most trivial reasons? If her head could buy a thousand plows, would it not seem a reasonable thing for her to part with it?”

  The young woman whose capture would buy a thousand plows and more put an uneasy hand on her neck and said, “Perhaps to you this seems a fair exchange. But I assure you, the lady would till all the fields in France with her own hands to save her neck.”

  Karle snickered. “Perhaps to see such a sight it might be worth sparing her life. Now that she is under the protection of Navarre, I shall not have the opportunity to decide. For the moment. But we shall see if another opportunity presents itself.”

  Alejandro’s only real distraction from increasing worry was his work on the precious book Kate had bought for him, and even that did not bring perfect respite. One minute the pages captured him with their promise of revelation, and the next his gaze was drawn to the busy street below, his heart pulled by the hope of reunion. He sat hunched over the ancient tome in the light of his one window, looking out at ever shortening intervals to scan the street with a furrowed brow. His eyes would dart anxiously from one young woman to another, driven by the dream that the next girl he saw would be the one he sought.

  He felt dulled by the disappointment of looking at stranger after stranger and never seeing what he longed to see. Still, his work of words moved forward almost of its own volition, and it soon became his one joy. Line by line, he pried the meaning from the symbols, and the words they formed began to burn themselves into his memory. But this too added to his worries: of what use would this freed and then memorized wisdom be to those Jews dispersed by the will of God in Gaul, if the things they needed to know remained locked inside his head? And what if … he thought with a shudder, what if I should die before these words can be shared? Once unlocked, they should be preserved. Of that there could be no doubt.

  He had bought a quill and inkstone, but he had nothing on which to write his translations as he made them except the pages themselves.

  A sacrilege! his conscience admonished him. To mar such beauty with your own scribblings! It belongs to those unfortunate Jews for whose benefit it was intended.

  Then his reason cried indignantly, Am I not one of them myself?

  His reason finally triumphed. But for my efforts, it would be lost to them for all time.

  So, he thought, allowing himself a brief moment of amusement, this argument is settled, and happily it has gone in my favor. And as the sun neared its peak in the sky, he realized that he still had not spoken one audible word that day.

  “Dear God,” he prayed aloud, “please grant me at least someone to argue with, that I may be spared the ignominy of doing so with only myself.”

  With painstaking care, he began to write the translations on the facing leaves. The Hebrew was archaic, of a style that a poorly educated Jew would not be able to read. French, he decided, would be best, for surely French would always be the most important language in the world, and there would always be a Jew who would understand it.

  How had the apothecary obtained this treasure? Surely not from Abraham himself, for the book was very old. Alejandro had no doubt that the manuscript’s shrewd author was long gone and dwelling peacefully with the shades of his ancestors. Had the wretched man who sold it to Kate for a gold crown stolen it from some charred satchel, or had it first been sold to him, perhaps for a handful of pennies, by some widowed mother desperate to feed her children?

  He sighed in the distressing realization that he would never know the intricacies of its journey into his own hands. He knew only that it had been well worth the gold crown exchanged for it, and more. Ah, Abraham, he mused, may God grant you peace, for you have left a work that merits the sweetest reward. And it was brought out of hiding by a Christian girl, who somehow had the wisdom to know what it was. This, he knew, would be a surprise to the ancient and long-dead priest, should he be watching from his seat at the side of the prophets.

  Yet the revelations of this Levite were not entirely sweet, for after his initial, benign greeting Abraham had issued a string of stern admonishments against misuse of his wisdom. Maranatha! he wrote, a word Alejandro could not translate, though the physician-cum-scribe found himself greatly impressed by its sound. It was peppered repeatedly on the page among the harsh warnings, but try as he might he could not decipher its meaning from the words around it.

  Woe shall be to anyone who casts his eyes upon these leaves and is not a Sacrificer or a Scribe. Maranatha!

  This worried him. Surely at present he could consider himself a scribe, he thought, but what, exactly, was a sacrificer? Was it wise for him to proceed without this knowledge? What woe might come to him by way of this ancient text?

  In truth, what woe has not already befallen me, that I should fear any other woe? he thought.

  His eyes were beginning to smart, so he rubbed them for a moment to ease the strain. He thought of Kate, and of how she had offered his own advice back to him—take care not to ruin your eyes with too much reading. He ran his fingers through his hair to push it away from his face. A single strand came loose and floated down. It settled in the thin space between two of the papyrus pages. He tried for a moment to get it out, but his fingers were too thick.

  It will come to nothing, he finally decided, and left it there. He placed the book carefully in his bag, and with one last look out the window set out to find someone who might reveal its secret word to him. And though he considered them all to be parasitic charlatans, he thought it likely that a priest could tell him. They know the names of all their enemies, he remembered. Surely one would know this word. He could ask without engendering too much interest, if he asked discreetly. He could claim to be a scholar of some sort—Ah, there is a thought! Perhaps there is a scholar I might ask! He would find no lack of them at the university, only a short walk away. Surely there he could engage in an intellectual inquiry without seeming at all conspicuous. Perhaps I will even find someone to argue with.…

  Kate would come sooner or later, he knew it in his heart, and neither his worry nor his will could change the moment of her arrival. He would not be gone long, probably only a few hours, and she would wait if she came to their meeting place while he was absent. He knew he need not watch for her every moment. It was only his great longing to rejoin her that made him want to do so.

  8

  The expression on Caroline Rosow’s face when she glanced around the computer bar was an incongruous mix of curiosity and disdain. “This isn’t what I expected,” she said.

  Janie leaned closer to her and said, “What did you expect?”

  “I’m not exactly sure. But not this. This is—sad.”

  “Among other things,” Janie said. Then she added quietly, “I’m glad you�
�re here. I was afraid you might have changed your mind.”

  “I almost did. Michael was in a state when he got home, and I wasn’t sure he was going to settle in for the night. If he went out again he’d miss the palmbook.”

  Janie frowned and said, “Did something happen to him at work today?”

  “Not to him, specifically. But something did happen.” She was quiet for a moment before saying, “They brought one in today. That hasn’t happened in a while. He came home very upset, saying he’d forgotten how gruesome they could be. Apparently, the guy hadn’t sought any medical treatment.” She sighed heavily and flexed her fingers. “He said the man’s fingers and toes were pretty much gone by the time he died.”

  “Ugh,” Janie groaned. She wondered if Michael had been privy to the victim she’d seen near the supermarket, and kept it to himself. “Where was he from?”

  “Kendall.”

  “God, that’s close.”

  “I know. But Michael said this particular victim was from a community where they eschew medical treatment except under the most dire circumstances.”

  “DR SAM isn’t dire?”

  “Maybe it came on quickly.”

  “It always does.”

  But even someone stupid enough to let himself die for his irrational beliefs evoked sympathy. Hail Mary … she felt herself beginning, when she heard the door open. She cast a quick look backward.

  “Oh,” she said quietly as the prayer slipped away, “this looks like a good one, maybe.”

  Janie stepped back into the anonymity of a shadow and observed as the little drama, one that was repeated innumerable times each day all over the world by people of every shape and size and color, unfolded before her in uniquely American style. Caroline, dressed to kill, perfectly made-up, and seductively coifed, flashed a smile at the entering young man as he passed. His step hesitated slightly and he smiled back, then looked her up and down appreciatively. He continued on, and made his way with obvious determination to an available terminal.

  Caroline did the same. Janie noticed she was limping a little, then looked down at her friend’s feet. She gasped when she saw that they were encased in a pair of old but great-looking high heels.

  “Shit,” Janie muttered under her breath. “Caroline, what are you doing?”

  But Caroline wasn’t focusing on her feet, as Janie would have liked. The young redhead was quick and efficient in logging on to her terminal once she was settled in front of it, and it wasn’t three minutes before she scratched her ear, the prearranged signal that she’d been contacted by someone at another terminal. Then a little smirk told Janie that it was the guy she’d exchanged glances with at the door.

  Janie watched as Caroline said something soft in what she assumed was a sexy voice, though the bar was too noisy for her to hear. But predictably enough, across the room, the young man rose up from his own terminal and strolled casually toward her, wearing a victorious grin on his face and carrying a bottle of wine in one hand. He pulled up a chair and sat down next to Caroline, then extended his hand in greeting.

  “No, don’t take it,” Janie whispered.

  But Caroline did. Janie gasped. There could be traces.

  Good Lord, Crowe, you’re being paranoid.…

  She closed her eyes for a moment and tried to shake off her growing sense of trouble, and when she opened them again Caroline and her catch were interacting quite successfully. The young man was unusual-looking, extremely tall and quite thin, but handsome in a funny way, someone Janie found attractive herself. He appeared to be in his late twenties or early thirties, and had a halo of tight strawberry-blond curls and a ridiculous-looking beard, a goatee of the type that had gone out of style shortly after the turn of the century.

  “Now just keep him occupied for a few minutes,” Janie whispered.

  She slipped off her shadowed stool and walked across the bar to the now-abandoned terminal. She sat down a few feet away and pulled Michael’s purloined Biopol palmbook out of her purse. With the flick of a thumbnail, she opened it and logged in using the number Caroline had given her, a number that would allow her access to just about any database she wanted, a number without which she would be the target of immediate arrest. She aimed the infrared broadcaster in the direction of the abandoned terminal, and in a few moments had the palmbook blended electronically into its signal.

  She looked at the timer on the screen. It would be only three minutes until the terminal went into hibernation mode. “It’ll have to do,” she whispered with quiet determination. She tapped the keys carefully and deliberately, for the palmbook would not respond to her voice. But in just a few seconds, the palmbook screen showed the familiar yellow warning page for Big Dattie.

  She’d memorized the necessary commands and entered them as if she were trying to disarm a nuclear bomb before the timer went off. Biting her lip as her fingers flew, she probed deeper and deeper into the database until she had the material she needed.

  The screen was filled with file names. There were so many—she wondered if the palmbook’s memory would hold them all. But she cast that worry aside, because she would do what she could with what she got from the database. There were no other options, no other viable plans. Whatever came out of this illegal incursion would have to suffice.

  The timer ticked downward, and finally, when there were fewer than ten seconds left, the last of the files crossed over the airwaves and settled into the palmbook.

  Six seconds remained when she closed the cover on the little unit.

  “He was cute,” Caroline said.

  “Unusual-looking,” Janie said.

  “And he seemed like a really nice guy. He was a computer major, but now he’s one of the assistant basketball coaches at the university.”

  “Funny. That doesn’t fit with his image. The height, maybe, but he looked very smart.…”

  “Oh, he is, I think,” Caroline said. “I liked him. A lot.”

  As Janie dumped the stolen data files from the palmbook into her own laptop, she gave her friend a chiding smirk. “That will be all now, Mrs. Rosow. You had a nice little interlude, but you’re a proper married lady again.”

  A sultry smile came over Caroline’s still-red lips. Mae West–style, she pouffed her hair with one hand while perching the other seductively on her hip. “And how should a proper married lady act?”

  As she closed the cover on her computer, Janie sighed and said, “I don’t remember very well. But probably not like that.”

  Through the miracle of caffeine, Janie was still awake at two A.M. as the data she had stolen were sorted and arranged and developed in her own biostatistics program. It would have been easier and faster to use Big Dattie’s own filtering mechanisms, but there was something very powerful about having the raw data, unsullied by someone else’s notion of how they ought to be interpreted. The numbers and lists and DNA codes spoke to her in a language all their own, saying There’s something in here. You just have to look.

  Janie waited for the compiler to do its job. She loved being surprised by what the data had to say. It gave her a kind of gambling high, a sense of anticipation that was hard to come by in any other way. Such work always brought to the surface some ancient wrathful goddess that lurked deep inside her psyche, waiting after millennia of suppression for the moment when her creative fury could be unleashed in pursuit of some evasive truth.

  She was tweaking the answers out with forbidden digging, and they were emerging pattern by reticent pattern, but at a certain point she found herself stymied. None of the boys’ parents seemed to show any sign of abnormal breakage or a repeated history of fractures as their sons had.

  She glanced at the wall clock. Bruce would be awake in London and in the middle of his morning routine.

  She called him directly on the telephone, bypassing the conference mode of the computer. He listened, as always, with patience and consideration to her musings over the dilemma at hand. “I thought it was genetic,” she told him. “But now
I’m not so sure. The parents are all pretty normal. Maybe it’s environmental.”

  “Did you manage to get the demographic information in the download? Where they all live, what their activities are?”

  “Yes. I’m amazed at what I got out of there in such a short time.”

  “Post them on a map,” Bruce said. “You might see something there.”

  It was an extremely logical suggestion. “That’s a great idea,” she said. “I knew there was a reason why I love you.”

  “We make a good team, even if we are transatlantic.”

  Janie sighed, wishing she could embrace him through the phone, needing badly to be touched all of a sudden. She could hear water running in the background. “Are you shaving?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I wish I could smell that stuff you use.…”

  “I wish you could smell it too.”

  “Iceland,” she whispered.

  “I can’t wait,” he replied.

  When she’d called Tom at home the next morning local time after a night of thin sleep, Janie heard the same water-running, blade-scraping noises, and found herself wondering what his morning routine was like.

  But when he sat down at the table in the diner where they met for breakfast, the scent of his shaving lotion was very real, and it smelled wonderful.

  Janie gave him a big smile of greeting, trying to hide the slight blush that was rising unbidden on her cheeks, prompted by a scent that her nose was apparently more hungry for than she’d realized. Think of him as a priest, she told herself. That ought to shut down those leftover urges pretty quickly.

  She took a deep breath and confessed what she could. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

  “Oy, Janie, I hate it when you start a conversation that way. Okay, what did you do this time?”

  “I went digging again. Not in the ground, though.”