Devil's Lair (10 page)

William sat on the ground,
head in hands, his breath soughing with syllables, some prayer or private
rumination. Marco was gone. Apuleius, too, was gone.

Not gone,
Giovanni thought.
Stolen.

He had raised that donkey up
from a foal, feeding him, grooming him, sheltering him. How many times had he
picked pebbles from the donkey’s feet? How many times had he filed down the
hooves? Cleaned the saddle rug? Mucked out the stable? How many apples had they
shared? Apuleius had been a constant companion. He had never run off. He loved
to wander, yes, in search of sweeter grass, but would always return to the
sound of a ballad. He was the best listener a bard ever had. Giovanni’s
friends, his family, and his Fiammetta were gone, but Apuleius remained. Until
now.

His stomach clenched into a
stone. He crossed his arms and leaned against the cart. “Hurry where?”

Nadja did not look up.
“After him.”

“After that scapegrace? That
donkey thief? That lying, pillaging, hostage-taking rogue?”

Nadja fixed Giovanni with a
stare. “We don’t have time to argue.”

“We don’t have a donkey,
either.”

“You have two feet.”

“Who’s going to pull the
cart?”

She looked down at the
floorboard and shrugged. “Your cart,” she said, with no hint of concern, and
stepped off the tumbrel with her bag in hand.

“What about all this stuff?”

“Leave it.”

“It’s not your stuff.”

“Nadja’s right,” said
William, glancing up. His eyes looked tired, defeated. “We must go north.”

“After what he did to us?”

“‘
et quicumque te
angariaverit mille passus vade cum illo alia duo.
’”

Giovanni paced beside the
cart. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You’re not going to follow him
all the way to Rome.”

“If we have to,” Nadja said.

“What about the cave? The
gate? The Grail?”

“God will guide us to the
Grail,” she said.

William retrieved a spoon
and a mazar bowl from the culinary bag and handed them to her. These were the
dishes she had carried south from Munich. The rest belonged to Giovanni.

Picking up his burnt rope,
William tied the blackened ends together and wrapped the remaining length
around his waist. Thin though he was, there was not enough rope remaining to
make a knot. He cinched the belt tighter and tried again.

Giovanni gathered his own
rope, which had bound Nadja and William. He offered it to the friar. “Use
this.”

William accepted it. “Thank
you.”

“I can’t find the drawing
sticks,” Nadja said.

Giovanni pulled them from
his satchel and gave them to her. She added the bowl and spoon to her bag,
along with the sticks and the paper, then went back to Giovanni and kissed him
on the cheek. “God bless you on your journey. Naples sounds like a marvelous
city. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

“I don’t know what I’m
looking for.”

“You will find it,” said
William. He pulled his cowl over his head and made the sign of the cross. “
Dominus
vobiscum.
”

“
Et cum spiritu tuo,
” Giovanni replied.

The old man shouldered
Nadja’s bag, then took her hand in his. They ambled north. When they reached
the spill of sunlight in the road beside the cottage, the girl looked back at
Giovanni and sent him a smile. Her hair shone bright in the luster of the
glade. Her eyes glistened. She did not look back a second time.

Giovanni filled his satchel,
consolidating his belongings. He repacked his writing supplies and most of his
food, but kept a hard biscuit and a wedge of cheese, which he chewed bitterly.
He chased the meal with the dregs of his wine.

Brooding, he considered
pulling the cumbered cart himself. Easy enough on the Appian Way, but the hills
between here and the Roman road were daunting, and even if he could pull the
cart to Naples he did not want to enter the city looking like an ass.

The books were a problem. He
could not take them all. Giovanni turned the volumes over, trying to choose
among them. He traveled with his favorites:
Metamorphoses
,
Ars Amatoria
,
Consolatio Philosophiae
,
La Chanson de Roland
,
Roman de la Rose
,
Perceval
, and a passel of others. Some he had
copied himself from the private libraries of his friends and mentors. Others
were gifts. One he purchased from the estate of a noble Florentine who died
with no literate heirs. His own father had given him no such inheritance.

Too many books,
he thought, for the first time in his
life. In the end he kept only his
Inferno
, his
Aeneid
, and a collection of Petrarch’s sonnets.

His personal manuscripts,
his poems and stories, could not be left behind. Giovanni’s rhymes might not be
worthy of Dante and Petrarch, but they were his best hope of a life in Naples.
His second best hope was to play merriment for the royal dancers. There was
always a demand at court for a gifted minstrel. These days, with pestilence
dropping young men like old fruit, an adequate musician might suffice. Giovanni
was nimble on the strings but his music was more suited to the tavern than the
court. Still, if his verses found no favor he would not go hungry.

His rebec had a broken high
string. No matter. He could play with two strings almost as well as three. He
grabbed the strap and slung the rebec over his shoulder, then tucked the rosin
and bow into his bulging satchel.

The rest of his things would
have to be abandoned. What he could not bring he buried in the woods. Using the
trowel from the tool bag, he dug a shallow grave some distance from the road
and interred most of his worldly belongings. His spare clothes went into the
pit, even those that had come from the hands of a king. Most of the tools he
buried, though he kept for himself the flint and the trowel. He promised
himself that once he reached court and found a patron, he would return to claim
the wealth he had left behind.

He pulled the cart to the
cottage and abandoned it near the door. No passersby would imagine, looking at
it, that the contents had been buried up the road.

Investigating the house, he
found two plague-stricken corpses. The countryside was safer than the
towns—many had fled Florence for the Tuscan wilds—but no one could
escape the pestilence forever. One day, when you felt safe in your bed and far
from danger, the Devil’s breath would find you.

As he was exiting the house
Giovanni saw a small block of wood on the lintel above the door. He pulled it
down and examined it: an angel carved in birch, the work of an expert carver.
He took a second glance about the house and saw more carvings grouped along the
beams: saints and angels, Christ and the apostles, Hebrew kings and prophets of
old. They were beautiful and intricate and powerless. They had stood in the
shadows and watched their maker die.

Placing the wooden angel back
on the lintel, he returned to the road and headed south to Naples. He had gone
no more than a hundred steps, pondering his prospects and cursing his luck,
when he nearly stepped in a fresh pile of dung. He stopped and stared. Two
flies had already found the heap. The odor was familiar. It smelled like a
stable he had once built for an animal he loved.

Something rustled deep in
the forest. A bear, perhaps, or a sounder of boars. He waited a long time but
did not hear it again. Dante had faced a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf.
Giovanni could only imagine what waited for him down this road.

What am I doing?

There was nothing for him in
Naples. His friends in the city were surely dead. If not they would be soon.
Years ago, he had fathered two illegitimate children, Mario and Giulio, in the
Angevin capital. He knew little of them now. His letters to their mother had
not been answered, and he feared the worst. The mortal murrain had come up from
the south. It had struck Campania as hard as Tuscany. Was Queen Joanna still
alive? Was there anyone left at court? In the spring he had sent letters to
Niccolò Acciaiuoli, Ricciardo Minutolo and others of his acquaintance, but he
had received no reply. In Siena he had met a wine merchant from Salerno with
news of the south. The news was not good. It was never good.

War and pestilence.

A new thought, sharp and
sudden: what if William and Nadja were his last two friends in this life? He
did not know them well, but they were good company. The plague had not
destroyed their spirit as it had done to so many others. The friar and the girl
had something to live for, something they believed in, even if it made no
sense. They had the one thing Giovanni most needed.

Hope.

His plan had been good one:
stay with William; bring him to Naples; introduce him to the queen. When this
business with the knight was resolved, for better or worse, the friar would
head south again. What did it matter if Giovanni arrived at the queen’s court
in three days or thirty?

Daylight dwindled in the
glade.

Choose.

Adjusting his satchel, he
turned toward the light and followed his donkey’s redolent trail, walking
north.

CHAPTER 11

Marco emerged from the woods
onto a wind-blasted ridge. He glanced back to see the pilgrims a bowshot
behind. For three days they had followed him through the vale, over roots and
rills and rivulets. He had no desire for their company, and wanted nothing to
do with their pilgrimage.

A journey into Hell? To
steal the Holy Grail from the Devil? Has the world gone mad?

His head still felt like a
blacksmith’s forge. Hammers pounded in his skull. Daylight glared off the rocks
and a swelter rose in his face, but there was no help for it. Shade was hard to
come by on this stretch of the trail. He needed to keep moving. At least his sunburn
was beginning to heal, fading from scarlet to russet on the back of his arms
and legs. The skin on his face did not vex him as before.

To keep his mind from these
afflictions, he played the naming game. A bird wheeling in the sky became a
hawk.
A tree beside the road became a
pine.
An animal darting across his path became
a
lizard.
The words
felt right. He could test them later in conversation.

Riding past a bush, Marco
saw tiny black dots in among the tangles. These looked inviting. He stopped,
dismounted, and reached his arm into the bramble to touch one of black dots. It
felt soft and cool, with clusters of tiny bumps. When he plucked it from the
bush it squished between his fingers.

Juice.

He pulled his hand back.
Something pricked him.

Thorn.

But it was not until he
tasted the moist, sweet fruit that he found the word he was searching for.

Brambleberry.

He ate another and another
and another, until his hands were purpled with brambleberry juice and bloody
with scratches from the thorns. When he could reach no more berries without
hacking through the bush, he remounted his donkey and rode north again, naming
a thousand misforgotten things.

As he climbed the stoney
mountain the wind picked up, buffeting his clothes. The bandage around his head
came loose at one end, flapping like a banner. Marco unraveled it and saw that
it was black with blood. He let the bandage go and watched it flutter back down
into the valley.

He crossed an intermontane
field, high and sere and beaten by the sun. On the stubble and stone lay a
flock of dead sheep, their flesh picked clean by scavengers who had left behind
a testament of white bone and dusty fleece. The field bloomed with tufts of
wool, white blossoms on the brown and yellow heath. Marco smelled dust but no
decay.

Dead for weeks, then. Or
months.

The animals had not been
shorn. It was summer now, it felt like summer, and yet the carcasses were thick
with wool. When did shepherds shear their flock? May? June? The world was
coming back to him, but he could not be sure. He remembered sheep grazing on a
mountainside. Not here, but somewhere. Those sheep had been noisy and alive.
These were silent.

Where’s the shepherd?
he wondered.
Where are the dogs?
He felt certain there should be a shepherd and some
dogs.

He saw no broken bones. No
shafts of arrows. No marks of iron or steel or claw. This was not the work of
man or wolf.

What were the words of the
old friar?

Half the world is dead.

The donkey tired beneath
him, so Marco continued on foot, leading the beast around a bend. Before
departing the field he glanced back to see the pilgrims falling farther behind.