by Rob Swigart
Lisa touched her place in the document with a fingertip. “Yes, the Delphi Agenda is fine.” She was about to tackle the next sentence when the phone rang and everyone froze. After the second ring she picked it up. “Lisa Emmer.”
“The events this afternoon were… regrettable,” the monk said. “But you now have something of value. We expect a return.”
“Return?” she said. “I believe this book is now mine. You stole it. I have no intention of giving it back to you.”
“Oh, I don’t mean that. I speak of quid pro quo.”
“Or?”
“Or from this day on you will look over your shoulder, Mademoiselle Emmer. This will continue until one day you will die. Rossignol’s man Alain has found out what happens to those who stubbornly adhere to heresy.”
Steve had picked up the extension in the bedroom.
“Heresy?” Lisa said. “A quaint notion.”
“I know you’re not a Catholic, Mademoiselle Emmer, but heresy is something the church takes very seriously. It leads to chaos, as it has many times in history, and cannot be tolerated.”
“It is no longer the second century, Brother Defago, or even the sixteenth.”
He sucked in his breath. “You know my name?” Then he laughed, a short, bitter crack. “It does not matter, you’re pursuing something very dangerous, to you and to the world.”
“What exactly is this danger?”
The monk allowed himself to show his irritation. “Do not play games. You know perfectly well! You saw what happened at St. Denis.”
“Yes, you killed people. The authorities…”
“Don’t concern yourself with the authorities; over us there is no authority but God,” he said implacably.
“Very well. What do you want in return for leaving me alone, then?”
“You will give us the Founding Document of the Pythos, what you call the Delphi Agenda, or, if you prefer, Le Projet Delphe.”
Lisa scribbled on a piece of paper and showed it to the librarians: The apartment’s bugged! Aloud she said, “You can’t be serious.”
“I assure you, Mademoiselle Emmer, I am very much so. That Document has caused untold trouble. It must come under the protection of the Church.”
“Protection?”
“What do you think our Order has been struggling to achieve all these centuries? The Church takes in everything that affects her, the heresies and the heretics, false doctrines, temptations, all that the devil puts forward to seduce mankind from the path of righteousness. The Church takes them in, and studies them, and in this way learns how to defeat them.”
“I see.” She recognized the futility of asking what the Order had against the Delphi Agenda. It was enough that it thought about the future and made forecasts. The Church reserved that right for itself and would suffer no competitors.
“Do you?” His voice had fallen to just above a whisper. “If you truly see, you will give us the Document.”
“You threaten, but why should I believe you?”
His laugh sounded hollow, as if he was in a large, empty place. “History,” he said. “Hypatia. Giordano Bruno, the Great Heretic. Raimond Foix.”
“Threats? That’s all you have?”
“Enough! Bring us the document, tonight.”
“What do I get in return?”
“Besides your life? How about a man named Alain?”
Lisa frowned. “He’s in the hospital.”
“Not any longer. Listen.”
The scream was long and chilling.
“His wounds are bad,” the monk said with evident satisfaction. “Mostly you see, it’s his shoulder. I’m afraid it can only get worse.”
“How do I know that’s Alain?”
She could almost hear the shrug. “Call the hospital. You will find he is gone.”
She let out a slow breath, looking at Steve standing beside Raimond’s bed. He had already cradled the receiver and dialed his cell phone. While he was speaking, the silence stretched. Finally he nodded at Lisa. “What do you propose?” she asked.
In the silence that followed she thought she could hear water dripping.
The monk said, “There’s an abbey some way from Mantes-La-Jolie…”
Steve said, “It’s a trap.”
“Of course,” she agreed.
“They want to kill you. Us.”
“We have to go.”
“We could notify the police.”
“The police are after us. They don’t care about the nun.”
He shifted uneasily. “How do you know?”
She waved the sheet of vellum. “We have to go,” she repeated.
“Don’t forget Bruno.”
She continued skimming the dense lines of Greek. “I don’t forget,” she said absently.
“We have to get going,” Ted said. “Alain…”
“I know, I know. Just a moment.” Finally she looked up and said, “All right, I understand.”
“What do you understand?” Steve wanted to know.
“What to do. We have to go, for Alain, for this,” she lifted the sheet of fine vellum.
“What does it say?”
“It says, ‘If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will kill you.’ ”
“Does it really say that?”
“No, that’s from the Gospel of Thomas. There’s a lot in here and we don’t have time right now, but it says much the same as gnothi seauton, know thyself, what Raimond put in the skytale message, what was carved at Delphi, what he’s been training me to do all these years.” For a moment, looking at him, her eyes were stricken, large and dark and unfathomable. Then she shook it off and managed a smile. “I have to, Steve, and you have to trust me. I know it’s a trap. I know they want to kill us, and won’t hesitate when they have a chance, but they want the Founding Document, and we have it.”
She handed the stiff sheet to Marianne. “Keep this with you.”
“We need a plan, ” Steve insisted.
“We have one.”
“And what is that, exactly?”
“I’m the Pythia.”
“That’s your plan? You’re the Pythia?”
“Of course.”
“Have you seen something, the future? You know we’re going to succeed?”
“Of course not. The future is more… variable than that, but there are things we can do to change the odds. This is a gamble, but the time has come. The Document says so.”
“It does?”
“Yes.”
“She’s armed. We’re not.”
“I know that, Steve.” She smiled, but her face was set and determined. “Please trust me. There is something I need to do. Please, all of you go downstairs. It won’t take long and then we’ll go. If we succeed, this, now, tonight, will see the end.”
“That’s what they want, the end!”
“I’m not talking about the end they want, I’m talking about the one that must come to pass, the one written on that sheet of vellum.”
She added under her breath so no one else could hear, “I hope.”
Lisa took the chair behind the ornate cylinder desk. She knew about the hidden compartment, but now she also knew the desk held one final secret.
It lay on the copy of Le Monde Diplomatique from 2011 in the main drawer, which was unlocked and unprotected. The cover story in the magazine was about the controversy of human-caused climate change and the case for denying it.
She and Steve had paid no attention to the photograph before when they were looking for the disk. Now she took it out and held it up to the light from the window.
There was something so innocent, even unimposing about the picture, something so familiar. She hadn’t paid attention to it before, not even when Raimond showed it to her. He had taken it four years ago when she had really long hair. He had shown it to her the next day, holding it up in the light from the window, just a
s she did now. “Do you see who you are?” he had asked.
Her hair was flaring in a furious spiral or cosmic wheel behind her head. Or, she thought, a kind of halo. She looked carefully for a long time, but she had to hand it back to him. “No,” she had said.
He just nodded and slipped the photograph casually into the drawer. “You will,” he had said. She hadn’t thought about the picture since.
Now she looked again and the afternoon came back to her, first in brief flashes, moments of intense joy, fear, wonder.
She was seated cross-legged on a thick layer of fallen leaves in a wooded glade facing the camera. Dense green in a thousand subtle shades filled the frame behind her. The light struck down from the upper right to the lower center, obscuring her knees. She must have shaken her head because her hair was caught in this wild swirl, catching some of the light in overexposed highlights.
It was difficult to tell that she was naked.
They were in the famous Tronçais oak forest. Louis XIV’s finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert had planted it in the seventeenth century to provide ship’s timbers in the nineteenth. Raimond suggested it was an example of long-range thinking about the future.
She wondered if Colbert could have been a Pythos? Of course not. One wit had observed, “Colbert had thought of everything except the steamship.” He did not see the future though he planned for it.
On the other hand, the oak was now highly prized for wine barrels, so perhaps he could see the future after all.
It was a deeply solemn place that afternoon in late spring.
“I’m going to give you something,” Raimond said. “It may remind you of your fugue states, but you will remember who you are. Not everyone remembers, but you will. In your fugues you go places, and when you recover you are in a different place, a location important to you. When you were young it was the creek near your home. Once it was the Jardin des Plantes. This time it will be somewhere important to you, but it will be unfamiliar.”
“Where?”
“You will tell me.” He handed her a small vial of dark brown liquid. “Drink.”
She wrinkled her nose. “What is it? It tastes disgusting.”
“That is not important.” His voice was a whisper, very far away. She looked up. He was standing beside her. He was also across the glade against the line of diminutive trees, mere shrubs. She knew at the same time these were oaks hundreds of years old, and with that thought a feeling of immense age swept over her, racing along with the clouds that whipped overhead. The trees grew and shrank and undulated, but Raimond remained motionless amid all this astounding speed of change.
As the trees grew and died and shrank and grew again she rose slowly to her feet and with great care began to remove her clothes. This was important, this removal of all barrier, all inhibition, all artifice. She needed to feel the wind of this change on her skin. If she could have removed the skin itself she would have done so then.
Animals came into the glade. Some paused, looked at her, nibbled at the leaf debris, and wandered out. She recognized deer, a bear, an enormous bull. Birds of prey circled overhead while the forest stuttered through seasons, generations, eons. She saw the rhinoceros and the fox.
And still Raimond Foix stood close to her and far away. She could reach out and touch him. Almost. Her arm extended. Her hand reached toward him. He remained just beyond her fingertips.
Suddenly she sat down, crossed her ankles, and looked up. The sun raced across the sky, flickering night and day until they blurred together and the light steadied into a crepuscular gray-blue.
The ground under was turning in a ponderous circle and she struggled to keep her bearings. She kept her eyes on Raimond. He was her anchor. Without him she would whirl away. The ground was flowing in a spiral under her feet, gaining speed.
There was no coherent story in what happened. Objects around her blurred or leaped into sharp focus. A dragonfly hovered in front of her, staring with its enormous compound lenses. It knew her. She wanted to cry.
An ocean broke against vast silver cliffs. A blood sun hung enormous above a canyon. A puddle teeming with life dried swiftly and the mud cracked. Wind blew away the dust. Animals shriveled, leaving bones poking through leather skin stretched taut.
She shook her head and sent her hair whirling, and in that moment Raimond Foix took her picture. A wave of sickness passed into her, descended to her core, twisted hard. She fell over, retching. She tried to cry out but had no voice. The trees loomed over her, toppling; they would crush her. She was suffocating, struggling for breath, pawing at a darkness gathering around her onto her, into her.
A cavernous space she knew was enclosed though she could not see the walls echoed with thick, muffled sounds, water sounds, incoherent shouts, the sizzle of what she thought must be electricity.
Nothing frightened her as much as this. There were people, people she didn’t know, and as they crowded closer they began to pull at her skin, to pluck pieces away.
The pain came in endless waves, over and over. Then she was standing on a hillside looking down at a Greek theater. She knew this place. She had been there before. She would be there again. She smiled. The smile felt weak and thin.
“You’re all right now,” Raimond said.
“I’m naked.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “And a good thing, too. You were throwing up for a long while. I began to worry.”
She was dressing slowly, as if he was her doctor. “You, worry?”
“Very funny. What did you learn?”
She paused. “Learn? Oh, that was a test, was it?” She shook her head, and her heavy blond mane spiraled around her face.
He smiled, handing her the light jacket she had worn.
The trees had stopped growing and shrinking. The sun was fixed in the sky.
And the light still slanted down from the right. She pulled the chair closer to the desk and set the photograph squarely on the leather inset. She cupped her chin in her hands.
What had she learned?
A large, dark place, enclosed, filled with shadows and fear. That was their destination.
She had begun to sing Dowland’s In Darkness Let Me Dwell. The high, pure melody flowed: “In darkness let me dwell, the ground shall sorrow be…,”
She didn’t notice at first that her voice was lingering over the pulsing melody, catching for the repetitions, the meaning of the words. She turned inward, aware now of the lyrics:
“The walls of marble black that moisten’d still shall weep,
My music hellish jarring sounds, to banish friendly sleep.”
A Pythia had to know music, to feel it. Music came before language; it was the soil from which awareness could grow and flourish. She could see clearly: Raimond Foix had chosen her in part because he knew she could stand behind him, hand on his shoulder, and sing to his accompaniment on the harpsichord.
This is what she had learned: first, the drug Raimond had given her that afternoon in the Forest of Tronçais opened her to the future and the past. She could see time, sometimes in grand sweep, sometimes in minute detail. That afternoon she had had no control over what she saw, it swept over her and she nearly drowned. Second, she had no further need for the drug.
This substance, (she thought, this sacrament) was described in great detail in the Founding Document. The recipe was a combination of extracts from three widely dispersed plants. Its antiquity suggested it must have been discovered in the times of mist and ice before history began.
The priests of Apollo at Delphi knew of it, and for some time the Pythia took it, and so could see. It appeared before that in the Fertile Crescent where the Sumerians and Akkadians discussed it. The Israelites knew it as an oil they applied to the bodies of the kings and prophets so they could have visions of what was to come. Jesus had used it, and had given it to his disciples.
Gradually though the unguent, the oil, the medicine, the sacred balm, lost its power. The ingredients were hard to find, harder to distill an
d fiercely difficult to combine. The early Christians used a diluted form, and even that degenerate and partial substance enflamed the lords of the Church, for it was powerful enough to make anyone who took it into a god.
For on that far-off afternoon she, Lisa Sybilla Emmer, had been divine and had merged completely with all time and space.
She put the photograph back in the drawer. She closed it and shook her head as if to clear it. Her hair was shorter now and did not spiral. She was solidly in her present.
“There’s no other way to describe it,” she murmured. She was talking to Raimond, or to his presence in this room, or to his memory. “I saw all time and space. I was a god. Now I am not a god, yet though my vision is partial and obscured, I see what comes. The walls of marble black that moisten’d still shall weep.”
She stood and pushed the chair carefully against the desk. The broad leather inset was empty, a dark green plain. “It’s time to go. No friendly sleep until this war is over.”
52.
Low sun through intermittent trees along the river made Lisa’s face flicker like an old movie. The effect stopped when the river turned more westerly and the sun was directly in her face. She turned away from the river and drove through empty fields either just turning green or thick with blue flax flowers. They might have been a couple on holiday, out for a country drive.
“Not to worry.” Steve clasped his hands behind his head and stretched. “I’m with you.”
Lisa glanced at his side with concern, but there was no blood; the bandage seemed to be holding.
“I still don’t like it,” she muttered. “You’re injured. You shouldn’t have come.”
“Alain’s there, at the abbey,” Steve said, ignoring her concerns. “We heard him. He works for me, for you. We’ll get him back.”
They swept through a small village, no stops. On the far side the road narrowed and wound through open fields. There were no other cars. They were alone.
The light was failing when she pulled behind a small grove of trees and parked. The engine hummed quietly. She shut it off and opened the door. A blast of hot air hit them. A moment later they stood side by side, looking through the trees at the ruins of an abbey and a low town across the river.
