The Codex Lacrimae (13 page)

He'd been told by Ibn-Khaldun to go to the very back of the scriptorium where his living quarters were situated. Moving again with what he hoped was more confidence than he felt, Jacob kept close to a bookshelf on the western wall and chose the sunniest of the two doorways. Amazement at the size of the place coursed through Jacob. Books lined the walls from floor to ceiling and rolled parchments filled triangular slots. A mound of gold as high as a man's height wouldn't have impressed Jacob half as much as this library before him.

“
Ti sei perso, giavanatto
?” a dark-robed Hospitaller asked him, speaking in a dialect of Italian that Jacob recognized, thanks to his time in Constantinople. “These are private quarters.”

The question snapped the boy's attention back to the object of his search.

“
Si
,
Signore
,
” Jacob replied in Italian. “I mean, no. I'm not lost now. I was earlier, but I don't think I am now.” He stepped fully into the room. Sunlight blazed through two windows whose shutters were ajar.

The chamber itself was another spacious affair, warmed by an enormous Persian carpet whose woolen pile was thick and comfortable even to Jacob's leather slippered feet. From the cedar cabinetry to heavy polished sycamore table, reading lecterns, and a small writing desk rested near one of the larger windows, Jacob knew from the profusion of bottles, tubes, and vials that he must have finally reached Ibn-Khaldun's sanctum.

Jacob found himself looking again at the man who had greeted him. In an instant, the boy realized that he'd mistaken everything about the man, from the color and nature of his robe to his age and features.

Apparently only a few years older than Jacob himself, the youth before him was a gigantic young man, of a stature that made Jacob think of the Norsemen rather than most of the monks he'd seen in passing through the library.

The tall youth wore a deep blue surcoat over a light chain-mail shirt, his forearms protected by leather braces, with black military hose that stretched comfortably over his heavily muscled legs to well-worn leather boots.

What threw Jacob the most, though, was the disconnect between the maturity in the man's voice and the youthful features of his face.

Golden brown eyes curiously regarded Jacob from beneath a tousle of sandy brown hair, even though the same eyes kept returning to the table to check on the miscellany of bottles and herbs there. Jacob noted that the knight's chiseled jaw line, aquiline nose, and high cheekbones seemed as liable to smile as to wear the kind of frown that presently marked his face. His well-tanned brow was furrowed in concentration. The youth simply didn't appear to be a scholar, one of those frailer sorts who walked about scriptoriums hunched over from the very weight of their robes and whose greatest feats of strength were reserved for hefting a tome from a shelf to a table top! No, Jacob thought, this young knight seemed to belong more to the marbled halls of an imperial palace, not in the dusty hallways of a frontier crusader garrison.

The boy's arrival had obviously interrupted this man at work.

With a finger capping the aperture, the knight delicately held a wooden funnel filled with an ocher powder in one hand, and a light green bottle in the other.

“Who are you trying to find?” the youth asked distractedly, returning his attention to pouring the powder into the bottle.

“A squire named Ríg. He's needed in the infirmary, quickly.”

The knight nodded, and ignored the boy's urgency as he carefully tapped the tip of the funnel against the bottle and corked it.

“You're not lost. I'm Ríg.” He extended his hand across the table and Jacob gripped it in a firm shake.

“Oh. Oh, hello, I'm Jacob. My mother and I met Master Ibn-Khaldun near the castle. He sent me here and told you to hurry.”

“Today? Khajen's back?” Ríg said excitedly, before checking the table again. His face hardened with resolve. “That's wonderful. Wonderful. Hold on a moment while I sort these herbs. I was just heading back to the infirmary, so we'll go together.”

Jacob watched as Ríg decided on two bottles, secreting them into a leather satchel on the table and walking to one of the cabinets. He pulled one bottle after another from some slim drawers, murmuring to himself, “Mandrake, henbane...ah, there's the hemlock. Hartstongue, other poultice supplies — no, no time for that. There's the camphor. Excellent.”

The knight grabbed two leather pouches from a recessed shelf, a deep blue vial filled with a milky substance, and a handful of what appeared to be dried weeds. After all the supplies were stored into the satchel, he lifted the blankets and looked at Jacob.

“Do you mind carrying these?”

“No, not at all,” Jacob said, grateful to be of use. He cradled the blankets in his arms and watched as Ríg picked up another satchel that had been out of sight behind the table.

“Let's go,” Ríg said.

“Are those your birds?” Jacob asked, astonishment in his voice as he looked past Ríg to the enormous window. Ríg followed the boy's gaze. Tall wooden shutters opened inward to let sunlight and morning air into the study, but those panels now framed two gigantic ravens perched on the stone slabs of the sill.

Both youths were taken aback by the waist-high size of the black-feathered raptors. The birds were still as statues, their corvine eyes deliberately challenging the human beings in the room, their threat tangible with their curved beaks large enough to slice a man in half or easily split a person's leg in two.

Jacob's admiration shifted to terror as the ravens burst screaming into the chamber.

Chapter 8

A Knight in the Scriptorium

The two ravens' wingspans filled the room. Jacob saw fluttering plumage everywhere as the cawing and screeching of the birds disrupted the quiet cloister air.

The boy dove under a table to dodge the madly beating pinions, but he stopped short when an almost total silence ensued once he passed out of sight of the birds.

A stillness fell hushed on the chamber, as complete and absolute as the madness that preceded it.

Then, almost magically, a whistling and twittering that reminded Jacob of music replaced the avian screams. He raised his head to peer cautiously over the edge of the table to see what had calmed everything down.

Ríg stood completely still, his arm still upraised protectively across his face, with one of the ravens perched on his shoulder and the other on the table before him. The youth's legs were shaking from the strain of standing upright under the gigantic bird, whose talons seemed to reach completely around the young man's upraised arm and upper part of his back.

The ravens' singsong vocalizations were steady, melodiously in harmony as if one bird continued a tune when its brother trailed off. Ríg moved only his eyes, remaining calm even as the pressure of the now-friendly raven on his shoulder threatened to drive him to his knees.

Both ravens ceased their sweet-sounding warbling and cocked heads to sides as if listening to a command. They then erupted away with surprising speed, the action throwing Ríg backwards against the cabinetry.

Ríg scrambled upward and rushed to the window, the glassware clinking precariously in the leathern bag still over his shoulder.

He watched the birds swoop low over the southern ramparts of the castle and then gain momentum as they caught a current that sped them high into the sky.

“They were beautiful,” Jacob came to stand beside Ríg. “They're not messenger birds, are they?”

“Good Lord, no,” Ríg replied, noticing there were two riders on the southern escarpment, one of whom loosed an arrow at the ravens. The projectile flew through the air, but missed its target, and then both birds were gone. Besides feeling irritation at the unprovoked attack, Ríg wondered what the ravens were doing, and why the two Hospitallers were straying so far from normal patrol routes. “Rather large for ravens, weren't they?”

Something odd was happening on the horizon. A cloud of dust was roiling across the Syrian plain, a seeming sandstorm in the making. Ríg looked again at the two men on horseback and, in spite of their apparent Hospitaller garb, a feeling of dread swept through him. He instinctively knew that they weren't his brethren.

“Advance scouts, with an army behind them,” he assessed, turning quickly from the window.

“Yes, Master Khaldun has already let the guards and your preceptor know,” Jacob offered, “but there's really two armies coming.”

“What?”

“That one from the south, but there's another coming from the east, too.”

“Indeed?” Ríg returned to the table and laid the satchels on top of it, his face thoughtful. “No trip back to the infirmary now, I guess — need to find out what Arcadian wants to do,” the youth murmured. “Your news changes things, Jacob — we've got to hurry.”

Ríg pulled a silken cord that hung near the entryway. A bell tinkled somewhere in the farther part of the library.

Within a moment, a brown-robed monk appeared in the doorway.

“Ah, Demetrius,” Ríg said, carefully extending the bags to the man, whose bald head was so suntanned it highlighted the crown of white hair and deep wrinkles in his aged face.

“We've got an emergency, and I need your help because I can't be in two places at once. These are medicines for the expedition members in the infirmary. If Master Khaldun
is
there, could you also tell him that I'll be heading to Father Arcadian's chambers?”

“Of course, Brother Ríg,” the monk said with a slight bow and departed.

The Jewish boy was astonished at the exchange between the two men, and unsure if his surprise lay in a lack of knowledge about Christian customs or monastic protocols.

Ríg had just casually given orders to a man at least twice his age!

As with his initial distrust at Ríg's physical appearance being so at odds with this scholastic area of the castle, now, too, the boy couldn't reconcile the easy air of authority that Ríg seemed to have in the presence of one who was so obviously an elder.

That feeling became even more pronounced when Ríg emerged from the inner chamber garbed in a long black Hospitaller robe, a fighting garment with white cross emblazoned on it.

Ríg placed a scabbarded sword and dagger on the bench, and then began lacing one of his boots.

Jacob watched the young man before him casually getting ready for war. The boy felt confusion slow his thoughts like a dense patch of reeds to a river current.

Hadn't Master Khaldun called Ríg a squire? No, Jacob corrected himself, he'd used two terms almost interchangeably, although each word had vastly different meanings. At one point, the aged scholar had called Ríg his ‘apprentice,' and at another time — especially when inside the castle walls — he'd called Ríg a ‘squire.'

Jacob might not know a tome's worth of facts about
nazaro
culture
,
but he knew enough to discriminate between the two very distinct roles of a scholar's apprentice and a knight's squire. If Ríg were a student, then shouldn't he have been wearing the same kind of monastic habit worn by all the other monks in this section of the castle? If a squire, then perhaps a tunic and leggings with
soliers
similar to Jacob's own?

Yet, there on the bench before the boy lay the weapons of a veteran warrior.

But, it wasn't the dagger that amazed Jacob — that awe was reserved for Ríg's scabbarded falchion sword. Almost three feet in length, longer than any other he'd seen!

He followed Ríg back through the entryway and turned immediately left into the main scriptorium area.

“Would you mind checking something, Ríg?” a monk asked, his voice strong in spite of the long decades of life that wizened his face and left him in a perpetually stooped posture.

“Not at all, Jeremiah,” Ríg replied, coming to the lectern and peering over the man's shoulder to look at the parchment folio page on the polished mahogany table. It was an illuminated manuscript, interwoven throughout with intricate designs and richly colored figures. In the central part of the page, an eagle with red-tipped pinfeathers perched on top of a robed monk, its talons plunging into the writer's eyes and mouth.

“It's coming along beautifully, Jeremiah,” Ríg murmured.

“Thank you, Ríg,” the monk replied, “and I think we'll finish ahead of the date that we planned for returning it to Saidnaya.”

“Well, we might not have a choice,” Ríg said. “Instead of a Christmas visit to Damascus, we might have to make it Easter. There have been some developments.”

“Oh?” Jeremiah said with a raised eyebrow. “That trip completes your training, Ríg. I've told you that many special things will be revealed when you finish the text. If you will, it's literally the grail at the end of our scholastic quest.”

“I know, Jeremiah, I know — how couldn't I? You've had us decorate almost every page with scenes from Arthurian legends and the Grail…” the youth's voice trailed off, then he frowned. “I also don't know what to tell you, Master. We're under siege again. It looks like two armies are coming from the east
and
south.”