Ysabel

by Guy Gavriel Kay

  Ned opened the brochure. There was a map at the front. The light was dim, but his eyesight was good, he could make it out. As best he could tell, from the map key on the facing page, this place had been built in a dozen stages over too many centuries by too many people who didn’t care what had been done before they arrived. A mess.

  That was the point, his dad had explained. The facade they were setting up to shoot was hemmed in by Aix’s streets and squares. It was part of them, entangled in the city’s life, not set back to be admired the way cathedrals usually were. The front had three styles and colours of stone that didn’t come close to matching up with one another.

  His father had said that was what he liked about it.

  Remember why we’re doing this shot, he’d reminded everyone as they’d piled out of the van and started unloading. Perfect cathedral facades like Notre Dame in Paris or Chartres were snapped by every tourist who saw them. This one was different, and a challenge—for one thing, they couldn’t back up too much or they’d crash through a window into a university classroom and ruin a lecture on the eternal greatness of France.

  Greg had laughed. Suck, Ned had thought, and reached for his earbuds.

  That was when Melanie had fished the brochure from her black shoulder tote. The tote was almost as big as she was. The running joke was that half the missing objects in the world could be found in Melanie’s bag, and she had a good idea where the other half were.

  Alone inside, Ned studied the map and looked up. Where he was sitting was called a nave, not an aisle. I knew that, he thought, inwardly imitating Ken Lowery’s exaggerated voice in science class.

  As best he could tell, the nave had been finished in 1513 but the part just behind him was four hundred years older, and the altar ahead was “Gothic,” whenever that was. The small chapel behind that had been built around the same time as the nave where he was sitting. If you looked left or right, the dates got even more muddled.

  He stood up and walked again. It was a little creepy being alone in here, actually. His footsteps, in Nikes, were soundless. He approached a side door with two heavy old iron locks and a new brass one. A sign said it led out to the cloister and listed the times for tours. The black iron locks did nothing any more, the new one was bolted. Figured. Couldn’t get out. That might have been a cool idea, sit in a cloister and listen to music. He didn’t have any religious music on the iPod, thank God, but U2 would have done.

  The cloister, Melanie’s map informed him, was really old, from the 1100s. So was the side aisle where he was standing now. But the chapel up at the end of it was eighteenth century, the newest thing here. You could almost laugh. They could put a Starbucks somewhere in this place and it would fit as much as anything else did. Chapel of Saint-Java.

  He walked towards that late chapel by the steps to the altar. Not much to see. Some fat white candles had burned down, none were burning now. People weren’t allowed inside this morning: Edward Marriner was at work out front.

  Ned crossed in front of the altar and worked his way back down the other side. This aisle was from 1695, the map told him. He stopped to get his bearings: this would be the north side, the cloister was south, his father was shooting the west facade. For no good reason it made him feel better to work that out.

  This was a shorter nave, hit a wall partway down. Ned found himself back in the main section, looking up at a stained-glass window. He found another bench near the last side chapel by the bell tower. Saint-Catherine’s, the brochure advised; it had been the university’s chapel.

  Ned imagined students hurrying here to confession five hundred years ago, then back across the road to lectures. What did they wear to school in those days? He popped in his buds again, dialing Pearl Jam on the wheel.

  He was in the south of France. Well, forgive him for not doing cartwheels. His father would be shooting like a madman (his own word) from now to the middle of June. The photographs were for a big-deal book next Christmas. Edward Marriner: Images of Provence, accompanying a text by Oliver Lee. Oliver Lee was from London but had lived down here for the last thirty years, writing (Melanie had told him all this) six novels, including some prize-winners. Star English writer, star Canadian photographer, star French scenery. Big-deal book.

  Ned’s mother was in the Sudan.

  The reports were of serious fighting again, north of Darfur. She was almost certainly there, he thought, leaning back on the bench, closing his eyes, trying to let the music envelop him. Angry music. Grunge.

  Pearl Jam finished, Alanis Morissette came up next on his shuffle. The deal was, his mother would phone them here every second evening. That, Ned thought bitterly, was going to for sure keep her safe.

  Doctors Without Borders was supposed to be respected and acknowledged everywhere, but they weren’t always, not any more. The world had changed. Places like Iraq had proven that, and the Sudan was real far from being the smartest place on earth to be right now.

  He pulled off the buds again. Alanis complained a lot, he decided, for a girl from the Ottawa Valley who absolutely had it made.

  “Gregorian chants?” someone asked.

  Ned jerked sideways along the bench, turning his head quickly. “What the—”

  “Sorry! Did I scare you?”

  “Hell, yes!” he snapped. “What do you think?”

  He stood up. It was a girl, he saw.

  She looked apologetic for a second, then grinned. She clasped her hands in front of her. “What have you to fear in this holy place, my child? What sins lie heavy on your heart?”

  “I’ll think of something,” he said.

  She laughed.

  She looked to be about his own age, dressed in a black T-shirt and blue jeans, Doc Martens, a small green backpack. Tall, thin, freckles, American accent. Light brown hair to her shoulders.

  “Murder? T. S. Eliot wrote a play about that,” she said.

  Ned made a face. Urk. One of those. “I know, Murder in the Cathedral. We’re supposed to study it next year.”

  She grinned again. “I’m geeky that way. What can I say? Isn’t this place amazing?”

  “You think? I think it’s a mess.”

  “But that’s what’s cool! Walk twenty steps and you go five hundred years. Have you seen the baptistry? This place drips with history.”

  Ned held out an open palm and looked up, as if to check for dripping water. “You are a geek, aren’t you?”

  “Can’t tease if I admitted it. Cheap shot.”

  She was kind of pretty, in a skinny-dancer way.

  Ned shrugged. “What’s the baptistry?”

  “The round part, by the front doors.”

  “Wait a sec.” Something occurred to him. “How’d you get in? The place is closed for two hours.”

  “I saw. Someone’s taking photos outside. Probably a brochure.”

  “No.” He hesitated. “That’s my dad. For a book.”

  “Really? Who is he?”

  “You wouldn’t know. Edward Marriner.”

  Her jaw actually dropped. Ned felt the familiar mix of pleasure and embarrassment. “You messing with me?” she gasped. “Mountains and Gods? I know that book. We own that book!”

  “Well, cool. What will it get me?”

  She gave him a suddenly shy look. Ned wasn’t sure why he’d spoken that way. It wasn’t really him. Ken and Barry talked that way to girls, but he didn’t, usually. He cleared his throat.

  “Get you a lecture on the baptistry,” she said. “If you can stand it. I’m Kate. Not Katie, not Kathy.”

  He nodded his head. “Ned. Not Seymour, not Abdul.”

  She hesitated, then laughed again. “All right, fine, I deserved that. But I hate nicknames.”

  “Kate is a nickname.”

  “Yeah, but I picked it. Makes a difference.”

  “I guess. You never answered . . . how’d you get in?”

  “Side door.” She gestured across the way. “No one’s watching the square on that side. Through the cloist
er. Seen that yet?”

  Ned blinked. But he couldn’t say, after, that any premonition had come to him. He was just confused, that’s all.

  “The door to the cloister is locked. I was there fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Nope. Open. The far one out to the street and the one leading in here. I just came through them. Come look. The cloister is really pretty.”

  It began then, because they didn’t get to the cloister. Not yet.

  Going across, they heard a sound: metal on metal. A banging, a harsh scrape, another bang.

  “What the hell?” Ned murmured, stopping where he was. He wasn’t sure why, but he kept his voice down.

  Kate did the same. “That’s the baptistry,” she whispered. “Over there.” She pointed. “Probably one of the priests, maybe a caretaker.”

  Another scraping sound.

  Ned Marriner said, “I don’t think so.”

  It would have been, in every possible way, wiser to ignore that noise, to go see the pretty cloister, walk out that way afterwards, into the morning streets of Aix. Get a croissant and a Coke somewhere with this girl named Kate.

  His mother, however, was in the Sudan, having flown far away from them, again, to the heart of an insanely dangerous place. Ned came from courage—and from something else, though he didn’t know that part yet.

  He walked quietly towards the baptistry and peered down the three steps leading into that round, pale space. He’d gone right past it when he came in, he realized. He saw eight tall pillars, making a smaller circle inside it, with a dome high above, letting in more light than anywhere else.

  “It’s the oldest thing here,” whispered the girl beside him. “By a lot, like 500 A.D.”

  He was about to ask her how she knew so many idiotic facts when he saw that a grate had been lifted from over a hole in the stone floor.

  Then he saw the head and shoulders of a man appear from whatever opening that grate had covered. And Ned realized that this wasn’t, that this couldn’t be, a priest or a caretaker or anyone who belonged in here.

  The man had his back to them. Ned lifted a hand, wordlessly, and pointed. Kate let out a gasp. The man in the pit didn’t move, and then he did.

  With an air of complete unreality, as if this were a video game he’d stumbled into, not anything that could be called real life, Ned saw the man reach inside his leather jacket and bring out a knife. Priests didn’t wear leather, or carry knives.

  The man laid it on the stone floor beside him—the blade pointing in their direction.

  He still didn’t turn around. They couldn’t see his face. Ned saw long—very long—fingers. The man was bald, or had shaved his head. It was impossible to tell his age.

  There was a silence; no one moved. This would be a good spot to save the game, Ned thought. Then restart if my character gets killed.

  “He isn’t here,” the man said quietly. “I was quite sure . . . but he is playing with me again. He enjoys doing that.”

  Ned Marriner had never heard that tone in a voice. It chilled him, standing in shadow, looking towards the soft light of the baptistry.

  The man had spoken in French. Ned’s French was very good, after nine years of immersion classes at home in Montreal. He wondered about Kate, then realized she’d understood because, absurdly, as if making polite conversation—with a knife lying on the stone floor—she asked, in the same language, “Who isn’t here? There’s just a Roman street under there, right? It says so on the wall.”

  The man ignored her completely, as if she hadn’t made any sounds that mattered in any way. Ned had a sense of a small man, but it was hard to tell, not knowing how deep the pit was. He still hadn’t turned to look at them. It was time to run, obviously. This wasn’t a computer game. He didn’t move.

  “Go away,” the man said, as if sensing Ned’s thought. “I have killed children before. I have no strong desire to do so now. Go and sit somewhere else. I will be leaving now.”

  Children? They weren’t kids.

  Stupidly, Ned said, “We’ve seen you. We could tell people . . .”

  A hint of amusement in his voice, the man said dryly, “Tell them what? That someone lifted a grate and looked at the Roman paving? Hélas ! All the gendarmes of France will be on the case.”

  Ned might have grown up in too quick-witted a household, in some ways. “No,” he said, “we could say someone threatened us with a knife.”

  The man turned around, inside the opening in the floor.

  He was clean-shaven, lean-faced. Dark, strong eyebrows, a long, straight nose, a thin mouth. The bald head made his cheekbones show prominently. Ned saw a scar on one cheek, curving behind his ear.

  The man looked at them both a moment, where they stood together at the top of the three steps, before he spoke again. His eyes were deep-set; it was impossible to see their colour.

  “A few gendarmes would be interested in that, I grant you.” He shook his head. “But I am leaving. I see no reason to kill you. I will replace the grate. No damage has been done. To anything. Go away.” And then, as they still stood there, more in shock than anything else, he took the knife and put it out of sight.

  Ned swallowed.

  “Come on!” whispered the girl named Kate. She pulled at his arm. He turned with her to go. Then looked back.

  “Were you trying to rob something down there?” he asked.

  His mother would have turned and asked the same thing, in fact, out of sheer stubbornness, a refusal to be dismissed, though Ned didn’t actually know that.

  The man in the baptistry looked up at him again and said, softly, after a moment, “No. Not that. I thought I was . . . here soon enough. I was wrong. I think the world will end before I ever find him in time. Or the sky will fall, as he would say.”

  Ned shook his head, the way a dog does, shaking water off when it comes in out of the rain. The words made so little sense it wasn’t even funny. Kate was tugging at him again, harder this time.

  He turned and walked away with her, back to where they’d been before. By Saint-Catherine’s chapel.

  They sat down on the same bench. Neither of them spoke. Across the echoing, empty space of the dark cathedral they heard a clang and scrape, then a bang again. Then nothing. He’d be leaving now.

  Ned looked down at the iPod on his belt. It seemed, just then, to be the strangest object imaginable. A small rectangle that offered music. Any kind of music you wanted. Hundreds of hours of it. With little white buds you could put in your ears and block out the sounds of the world.

  The world will end before I ever find him in time.

  He looked over at the girl. She was biting her lower lip, staring straight ahead. Ned cleared his throat. It sounded loud. “Well, if Kate is for Katherine,” he said brightly, “we’re in the right place. You can do the praying.”

  “What the . . . ?” She looked at him.

  He showed her the map, pointing to the name of the chapel. His bad joke.

  “I’m not Catholic,” she said.

  He shrugged. “I doubt that matters.”

  “What . . . what do you think he was doing?” She’d seemed pretty confident, assertive, when she’d first come over to him. She didn’t seem that way now. She looked scared, which was reasonable.

  Ned swore. He didn’t swear as much as some of the guys did, but this particular moment seemed to call for something. “I have no idea. What’s down there?”

  “I think they’re just grates to let you look down and see the old Roman street. The tourist stuff on the wall also said there was a tomb, going back to the sixth century. But that’s something I . . .” She stopped.

  He stared at her.

  “What?”

  Kate sighed. “This is gonna sound geeky again, but I just like this stuff, okay? Don’t laugh at me?”

  “I’m nowhere close to laughing.”

  She said, “They didn’t bury people inside city walls back then. It was forbidden. That’s why there are catacombs and cemeteries in Rom
e and Paris and Arles and other places—outside the walls. They buried the dead outside.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Well, the info thing posted over there shows a tomb here from the sixth century. A little over from where . . . he was. So how did . . . well, how did someone get buried in here? Back then?”

  “Shovels?” Ned said, more out of reflex than anything else.

  She didn’t smile.

  “You think that’s what that guy was? A tomb robber?” he asked.

  “I don’t think anything. Really. He said he wasn’t. But he also said . . .” She shook her head. “Can we go?”

  Ned nodded. “Not through the front, we might step into a shot and my dad would kill himself, and then me. He gets intense when he’s working.”

  “We can leave the way I came in, through the cloister.”

  A penny dropped for Ned. “Right. That’ll be how he got in, I bet. Between my seeing it locked and your finding the two doors open.”

  “You think he’s gone out that way?”

  “Long gone by now.” He hesitated. “Show me that baptistry first.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “He’s gone, Kate.”

  “But why do you . . . ?”

  Ned looked at her. “History lesson? You promised.”

  She didn’t smile. “Why are you playing boy detective?”

  He didn’t have a really good answer. “This is a bit too weird. I want to try to understand.”

  “Ned, he said he’d killed children.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think . . . that means what we think it means.”

  “And that sounds like a line from a bad movie.”

  “Maybe. But come on.”

  “This where the creepy music starts?”

  “Come on, Kate.”

  He got up and she followed. She could have left by herself, he thought later, sitting on the terrace of the villa that evening. They didn’t know each other at all that first morning. She could have gone out the way she’d come in, saying goodbye, or not, as she pleased.

  They walked together down the three steps into the baptistry and stood above the grate, beside that inner ring of pillars. The light was beautiful after the dimness of the cathedral, streaming down through windows in the dome above the shallow well in the centre.