The Breath of Suspension (13 page)

The night was cold enough for frost, and the grass crunched beneath my feet. My still-damp clothes began to freeze. I was starting to give up on the idea of ever being warm again. There was a half moon in the sky, which provided enough light through the clouds for me to see my way to the cathedral. It was so silent that the sudden hoot of an owl in pursuit of a mouse somewhere out in the fields made me jump a foot in the air. The towers of the cathedral loomed above me.

The main difference between this thirteenth-century Notre-Dame de Chartres and the one I’d visited as a tourist in the twentieth century was the north tower. From what I could see in the moonlight, it was a permanent-looking structure of wood. It would have to wait another three hundred years before it was replaced by the stone Gothic Flamboyant tower I remembered.

I made my way around to the south side of the cathedral. Much of Chartres had burned down in a disastrous fire some forty years before. Even with the enthusiastic assistance of workers from all over France, which included great lords and ladies pulling wagons of stone from the quarries, it still took a long time to build a Gothic cathedral, and the southern part remained under construction. I checked, reflexively, for guards, but there didn’t seem to be anyone around. Chartres was miles from a city of any size, and daring midnight thefts of half-ton chunks of dressed stone were apparently not considered a serious risk. Somewhere, in the village of the hundreds of workers who still labored on the cathedral, master masons slept, dreaming of making heavy rock fly. I hoped none of them were dedicated enough to sleep on the construction site.

I looked up at the south transept. Lashed-together poles made up the scaffolding, and several ladders consisting of a single pole with pegs stuck through it leaned against the wall. A couple of windlasses stood at the top of the wall, their dangling ropes making them look like gibbets in the moonlight. I grabbed a ladder and started climbing.

The south porch, with its triple doorway, was well along to being carved, and the lower stained-glass windows were in place. Where the upper ones eventually would be, on either side of the rose window, were blind, staring holes. Climbing the ladder was, because of the central pole, like riding a barrel in a fast-flowing river. When I made it up to the window opening, I was shaking. I looked in. The feel of the hard marble floor far below pressed cold on my forehead, even though I couldn’t see it. I poked my foot in experimentally, but couldn’t find any support. I sat down, half in and half out, and thought about going back to bed. If it had been silk sheets and a fire in a palace in Provence, I might have done it. Unfortunately, the thought of rough straw reinforced my sense of duty. I didn’t want to walk into that cathedral unprepared the next morning.

I climbed up farther, to the windlass, and pulled out its rope. It was heavy, and friendly as a python. It tried to pull me off my precarious ledge down to the ground, and before I finally managed to wrestle it down to the window, it almost succeeded. I tied it securely and threw the other end down into the darkness. There was no sound of its hitting the floor. I didn’t stop to consider things any further, because I knew that if I did, I would just give up, straw or no straw, and so I started climbing down. When I reached the end of the rope I held on and lowered myself, feeling with my feet. I was just about to confront the possibility of having to let myself drop toward a floor an unknown distance below when my searching toes finally touched, and I let out a breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding.

I began to pussyfoot around the nave. Above me were the famous stained-glass windows of Chartres, newly installed and undimmed by the corruptions of time, but I couldn’t see a damn thing. It was just as dark as it had been in the hostel. It is testimony to the perseverance and energy of humanity that anyone ever managed to commit crimes at night before Edison. It was too dark to do anything but sleep. A noise, somewhere, made me turn quickly. A pillar that had crept up behind me, waiting for that very moment, smashed me on the side of the head and knocked me to the floor with a nice furtive crash. I lay there, cursing myself for an idiot, when I saw two torches bobbing along the west end of the nave. I took a second to pull my shoes off, then came to my feet and zeroed in on them like a moth. The stone floor was cold. Of course.

I snuck up close enough to see, then hid behind a pillar. If anyone had been looking for me, I would have been spotted immediately, but no one was looking for someone prowling around the cathedral in the small hours of the morning. The man in front wore fancy robes and a big gold pectoral cross, and looked to be the Bishop of Chartres himself, though he wasn’t wearing a mitre or carrying a crosier to make him easier for me to identify him, which was slightly inconsiderate. In paintings, bishops always wear mitres and carry crosiers, so that you can tell them from the princes and the angels.

The Bishop wasn’t wandering around his cathedral in the middie of the night just to make sure all the doors were locked. He walked like a man with business to attend to, night business. His face was intent. Behind him walked a bent old priest in a simple cassock, looking, with his long white hair and beard, like a recently converted druid. The cross around his neck was made of wood, on a leather string.

The Bishop pulled a large key from his robes and unlocked a door. The heavy metal mechanism of the lock clattered like a machine shop. The door opened on a set of stairs that, from their position, must have led to the north tower, the wooden one. I mentally flipped a coin, ignored the way it fell, and followed them through. The addition of my stealthy bare footsteps was inaudible above the clatter of the loose wooden stairs. I did get a couple of splinters in my feet.

The Bishop unlocked a second door, and they entered a small room. I knelt on the stairs and peeked in, ready to run for it if anyone spotted me. Sure. I could tumble down the stairs and run frantically around the pitch-black cathedral, pursued by priests who were intimately familiar with every corner of it, and finally play a game of hide-and-seek among the bones in the crypt. That was just what I needed to get my blood flowing. All I could really do was hope that they wouldn’t see me in the first place.

The room was set up as a monk’s cell, but like that of a monk who was a scion of a noble house. A straw pallet with a linen cover lay in a corner. A cross hung on the wall. An ornate illuminated Bible was open on one small table; a missal, also illuminated, on another. Their rich colors and gold leaf gleamed in the torchlight. The little room, which must have been right under the octagonal roof of the spire, had windows, but instead of being covered with oilcloth or shutters, as I would have expected, they were filled with small panels of stained glass. Even granted that this tower was going to last until the end of the fifteenth century, which still made it “temporary” by medieval standards, it was strange that someone had bothered to put stained glass in this little private room while the rest of the cathedral was far from finished.

The Bishop took the cross off the wall and brought it into the circle of torchlight. It gleamed, and he seemed to have trouble holding it. I wasn’t surprised. It looked as if it was made of solid gold, encrusted with jewels.

“He’s left us, Martin,” the Bishop said sadly, looking at the cross. He set it down on the table, which rocked with the added weight. He was a straight-backed serious-faced man with a long curling beard, filled with gray. “Just as he was ready to take holy vows, at last.”

“He wasn’t ready,” the priest Martin said flatly. “He will never be ready.”

“A harsh judgment.”

“The duties of the priesthood are severe, my lord. And the vows are hard. Chastity,” a smile creased his face, “would have been easy enough for him. Poverty was perhaps more difficult. Obedience was much too easy for him.”

“He was so fervent! More than once I had to restrain him, lest he harm himself in his devotions, with vigils, fasts, and self-mortifications. He prayed and saw visions. He may have looked like an imp of Satan—”

“Which perhaps he was. We would have had much trouble with the Inquisition on his account. But obedience, as I said, was too easy. He drank thirstily of the faith, like a drunkard pulling at a wineskin. And now that the wineskin is empty, he has thrown it aside. When morning comes, he will piss it away.”

“Martin!” The Bishop, even obviously familiar with the blunt honesty of his colleague, looked shocked.

Martin was not deterred. “He was as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal, for he was without charity. I don’t know by what means he came to us...”

“And you won’t, Martin. It is not for you to know.”

“...or where he went. These may well be secrets beyond me. But I know when he found the Word wanting. The Word is never wanting. Only we men are.”

It was interesting that the priest Martin saw right through Kin-barn’s deceptions, whereas the Bishop was entirely taken in. High ecclesiastics often think they’re smarter than they actually are. All that incense, I think. Kinbarn was clever, as addicts often are, and could convince almost anyone to supply him with what he needed, since most like to share their faith. It was a rare man, like Martin, who could distinguish between love and need.

“I fear for you,” Martin said suddenly. The Bishop looked up from his brooding. “You have strange... ambitions. Perhaps, as you say, they are not for me to know, and perhaps they are, as I know you, all in the cause of the Faith. But they are dangerous.”

The Bishop smiled gently, though I could see that Martin’s direct statement had disturbed him. What, in fact, did our Bishop have to do with Denebian religion addicts running about through Time? He was obviously not wholly innocent. “You put up with much for my sake, Martin, and I am grateful. But the ways of God are more mysterious than we can imagine. I hope he can find his way.” He sighed. “Let us say a prayer for him, Martin. And light a candle for St. Josaphat.”

“St. Josaphat? A most minor saint.”

“And as such, greater than you or I, Martin. Light a candle to light his way.” He paused. “I will leave on a journey tomorrow. It should not take long.”

Martin shook his head. “These matters are dark.”

“That may be. But we must not shrink from them on that account. It is late.”

That was my cue. I retreated down the stairs before them. This was a disappointment. Kinbarn had been here, as I was told, but he was gone. I mentally reviewed the wormholes in the vicinity, to see if I could guess his destination. Wormholes are literally that: the tracks of Hoontre, hyperdimensional worms that seem to find the space-time matrix around Earth particularly delicious. It took some effort to get my mind, modified by Marienbad, to work properly. First I remembered, in excruciating detail, the geography of the island of Naxos in the third century
BCE
, a place I had never been. Then I found myself repeating the king lists of Lagash and Ur. My brain was like a dusty junk-filled attic. Finally I was able to narrow the wormhole possibilities down to seven: Oklahoma, 1921; Manchuria, 406; Egypt, 1337
BCE
; Ceylon, 810; Sicily, 478
BCE
; a hundred miles north of the Aral Sea, 9565
BCE
; and the bottom of the ocean off Hawaii, 1991.1 eliminated the last possibility, which left only six.

I needed more information. The Bishop, I decided, could bear a little interrogation. In the morning. Just then I had to sleep. It took me a damn long time to find the rope.

❖

The cathedral was awe-inspiring in the daylight. The stained-glass windows glowed with their rainbow of colors, brought out best by the diffuse light of the cloudy sky, and the roof vaulted high overhead. My group of pilgrims was taken in hand by a man named Brother Benedict, who turned out to be an accomplished tour guide. He pointed out bits of grotesque carving that might otherwise have gone unnoticed, and gave a lively account of the various miracles the Virgin had performed here over the centuries. The climax of the tour was the actual Tunic of the Virgin Mary, the relic that was the original reason for the cathedral’s existence. It lay in an ornately decorated reliquary, behind a thick sheet of glass. I moved ahead with the rest of the pilgrims to kiss it. When it came to be my turn I leaned forward—and stared. After the fire that had virtually destroyed the cathedral, the Tunic had been feared lost. Someone had finally pulled it out from under a pile of rubble, miraculously undamaged, except for a slight scorching. I could see the little bits of melted thread where the cloth had been burned. I turned away, alarm bells ringing in my head. Things were becoming more serious than I had been led to expect. A relic such as an authentic Tunic worn by the Blessed Virgin Mary 1200 years ago in Palestine had to be a pious fake, but I somehow doubted that such a fake would, in the thirteenth century, be made out of what was obviously polyester.

Then I spotted the Bishop. He wore a traveling cloak and boots, and would not have been recognizable as the Bishop if I had not seen him in the uniform of his office the previous night. He stood with his legs apart and his hands clasped behind his back, looking up at the construction of the north transept like a lord regarding his domain. I slipped the chain of Brother Benedict’s discourse and headed toward him.

He tried to ignore me. Pilgrims were a sou a dozen, and known to be morally lax besides. And while bathing was not a popular activity of the century, pilgrims did not wear perfume. I had considered and discarded a dozen methods of approach, and finally settled on the one that had been the most successful over the years, the approach direct.

“My lord Bishop,” I said in a conspiratorial tone. “There has been a difficulty with the Denebian.”

“The what?” His brows came together and he started to look angry. “I have no idea of what you are saying.” He raised his hand and made a gesture in the air. I noted it, and memorized it, but it had no conventional Christian meaning that I could remember. Time is full of such secrets.

“We have no time to waste!” I hissed. “I mean this one.” I showed him the picture. It was a clever little thing, done by some agency of Marienbad’s to which I have no personal access, a photograph of Kinbarn, altered to resemble a small painting in egg tempera, complete with brushstrokes and an accidental thumbprint in the left-hand corner.