The Festival of Bones: Mythworld Book One (2 page)

CHAPTER ONE
The Scholar

As unusual days go, Michael Langbein had seen more than his fair share, but this particular Spring day had capped off a full week of unusual days, every one of which would have skipped even Olympic-rank amateur status and moved directly to take spots in the pantheon of indisputable move-over-Michael-Jordan professional unusual days.

On Monday, he had rolled out of bed and made his way to the front stoop to retrieve the morning paper, only to discover that one-quarter of page three had been neatly clipped out. Sneaking a look at his neighbor’s paper, he not only discovered that they had been struck by the same vandal, but was then accused of attempting to steal the paper, which resulted in a flurry of protestations and a thwack on the head with an umbrella.

As the day progressed, Michael discovered that the letter-shaped hole in his morning read was not an isolated incident—every paper in every newsstand and coffee shop between his apartment and the University was missing at least a portion of one page: page three in the German papers, page seven in the British ones, page twelve in the French, page twenty-three in the American, and page one of the
Ontario Daily Sun
, which was waiting in the mail drop at his office, and which he imported because his daughter occasionally worked for them as a freelance photographer. He hoped the article clipped had not been one of hers—it had been more than ten years since they’d spoken, and he looked forward to the slight if incomplete contact keeping up on her professional work afforded him.

On Tuesday, twenty-eight students from various schools at the University of Vienna (where Michael was the visiting Professor of Ancient Literature and Historical Studies) were discovered experimenting with trepanning, which is to say they were drilling holes in their skulls. Apparently, someone had put the notion in their heads (among other things) that the ancient belief of unlocking one’s consciousness by poking holes in themselves would somehow be a valid study aid. The faculty disagreed, as did the authorities, who arrested the lot of them—then had to release all twenty-eight after no specific law could be found which forbade the grisly practice.

Immediately thereafter, the newly-freed trepanners threw an impromptu parade celebrating students’ rights, during which some seventy-odd other students, not wanting to miss out on what was apparently becoming the Hot New Thing, promptly drilled holes in their own heads.

On Wednesday, thirteen bodies were found at various points throughout the University, victims of apparently unsuccessful attempts at trepanning.

On Thursday, purely by accident, an assistant administrator for the faculty of the Economic and Information Science school was discovered in the act of pounding a thin steel bar into the skull of a co-ed who had been jogging to class. The quite irate and foamingly mad staffer was apprehended, during which it was revealed he had always harbored aspirations of being a serial killer, and had found in the students’ recent fascination with trepanning the perfect opportunity to broaden his horizons. Pending the outcome of the formal investigation, he was suspended with pay.

On Friday, two of the department heads of the school of Catholic Theology suddenly found themselves in trances and channeling the spirits of twenty-thousand year-old Mages claiming to have lived in Atlantis. They set to arguing, whereupon one of the Mages departed from his possessee and promptly took up residence in the Vice-Rector who oversaw the school of Protestant Theology. The Vice-Rector/Mage then declared open hostilities against the Catholics, and for a few tense hours it seemed as if the whole campus would self-destruct, until a third Atlantean Mage possessed one of the Social Sciences professors and threatened to bring in the Mormons, which brought the entire conflict to a halt in a matter of minutes.

On Saturday morning, every item in Michael’s apartment shifted a sixteenth of an inch to the left, and he spent the rest of the day dusting and moving everything back.

On Sunday, every item in his apartment shifted to the right, and he suspected that rather than a mirror image of the previous day’s event, it was more likely that the first incident had merely reversed itself. The tracks in the dust revealed the first movement, which he had not seen; the second time he witnessed it while in the act of replacing a teacup in its saucer. The resultant spill caused a large stain to form on his pile carpeting, that when viewed from the front door looked like a cow, or a large dog with a gland condition.

On impulse, Michael decided to phone his estranged daughter, only to discover after a very brief and characteristically tense conversation with her grandmother, that she had suddenly chosen to move to the United States. Michael hurled the telephone through the window and went to bed.

Now, here it was Monday again, and apparently (if in a much less conspicuous fashion) it seemed the weirdness of the last week was going into overtime. The day’s classes had gone without incident, but arriving home he found in the study at his apartment, sitting patiently among the off-white overgrowth of paper foliage on his cluttered desk, a small, plum-colored envelope, addressed simply to Professor Michael Langbein, no other writing evident, no return address. Michael set down his overstuffed briefcase just behind the open door and pocketed his keys, then picked up the stationery intruder. He turned it over in his hands, and slid a fingernail inside the flap, tearing along the edge. Inside was a simple notecard of the same paper as the envelope, folded once. He opened it and began to read the brief message within:

Professor Langbein -

A matter of the utmost importance, both academic and historical, would benefit greatly from your advice and counsel. If you would be so kind as to attend my performance this evening (ticket enclosed), I will afterwards present to you the situation at hand, at which point you may take your leave at your pleasure.

It was signed with an indecipherable scrawl, and neither the notecard nor the envelope bore any other identifying marks. Michael chuckled and tossed it aside, then took a look at the ticket. It was a common orange concessions ticket—the kind sold in rolls of five hundred to be passed out at charity functions for raffles of items that no one would actually exchange money for if it weren’t for charity. On the backside were scribbled the words Rutland & Burlington’s—Monday, 8:30.

He knew the place—a nightclub just a few blocks away that had become quite popular among the students. However, he had much more serious matters to attend to, and there was little time to spare for entertaining a mysterious invitation which was in all likelihood a ruse for a sales pitch selling timeshares in Switzerland.

On the desk underneath the plum envelope was a thin letter on very expensive stationery which bore the University’s seal and the office address of the Rector. Michael sighed and flopped down in the battered overstuffed chair facing the windows as he fingered the letter. Thin letters from universities never meant good news. If you were an applying student, you hoped for a thick admissions packet; a thin letter always began, “
We thank you for your application, but …
” followed by a number of sugared lies designed to make you believe that another school will find you a great prize —notwithstanding the fact that a few lines earlier you’d been told you were gum on the bottom of their shoes. A thin letter to a faculty member was usually only one of two things: a paycheck, which this wasn’t, as payday had been last Thursday; or some form of bad news which no one had wanted to tell him directly, but which was too insubstantial to be handled by a mid-level committee.

Michael scratched his nose with the envelope for a moment, then ripped open one side and unfolded the letter.

Dear Professor Langbein,

While we have greatly appreciated your contributions to the curriculums of the University, we regret to inform you …

The remainder of the letter outlined a proposed meeting with the Rector, two Vice-Rectors, the Administrative Director, and three faculty members of the school’s representative Senate, during which he was to present his case for continuing the funding of his department—Michael did a double-take, there: he was to argue not just for his own job, but for the future of the whole of the department.

Ah, me,
thought Michael
. I should’ve listened to my mother and become an accountant.

* * *

Michael Langbein was tall, the sort of tall that could be called lanky without making it come across like an insult, and was muscular enough that no one would call him lanky to his face no matter how it was taken. He had a pleasant, clean-shaven face, a thick shock of curly brown hair, and a propensity for going everywhere on a bicycle. Considering he could do a two-hundred-mile round trip in a day and still have time for a leisurely dinner and attend a lecture after, no one made fun of him for that, either.

For the better part of his professional career, he had been teaching philosophy in high schools, but as fulfilling as that was personally, it didn’t compare to the kind of give and take he got at a teaching college, or the chance for field work or publishing he got at the University of Vienna. The official title—which he made up on the spot when they asked him which department he was applying to, which didn’t actually exist yet—was Visiting Professor of Ancient Literature and Historical Studies, but no one ever called him that. Michael never had a great love of formality; most of his students called him by his first name; the ones he was closer to, “Long-legs.”

The University, the oldest in the German-speaking world, was composed of eight Faculties which were broken down into one-hundred and seventy-two departments, and the reason that the proposed meeting involved several more administrative officials than would normally be consulted in a departmental review was that with the exception of the Natural Sciences and Medical schools, Michael had in three years managed to outspend and out-requisition every other department in the entire institution.

The department of Ancient Literature and Historical Studies (named by default) tended to concentrate the use of its budgets towards the acquisition of manuscripts—very, very, old manuscripts; not merely old and brittle Victorian novels that looked as if they’d been bought at Christie’s auction house in a rash of bidding type manuscripts, but rather those found through research and field work that made Indiana Jones look like a slacker type manuscripts—most of which were in the vein of Noah’s to-do list or zoning plans for the tower of Babel, which of course had to be smuggled (exported) out of countries governed under martial law and at a cost approaching the annual budget of a decent-sized third-world country.

The main problem with acquisitions of this type is that they fell under the heading of Basic research, which would be fine if they hadn’t been acquired for sums approaching the mid-seven figures; at best, they would be explainable as subject-specific research, but the budget constraints for that were even worse. To actually support his argument for continued funding, Michael would have to at the very least demonstrate that the purchases were going to be used as aids to Applied research, or even better, that they could be utilized by another department in Transdisciplinary research. Unfortunately, he had no idea how he was going to do either of those things.

Michael had been receiving warnings and cautionary notes regarding his playing fast and loose with the University’s filthy lucre, everything short of formal reprimands, but he supposed that the apple which finally upset the cart was probably the Æthelbert Document.

* * *

Æthelbert was the West Saxon King of England for the first half of the seventh decade of the ninth century, following the rule of his equally aesthetically-name-challenged father Æthelbald, and his grandfather, Æthelwulf (sadly, as is often the case with unfortunately named children, Æthelbert felt the need to inflict the patriarcally-passed torture on his own son, whom he named Æthelred. Æthelred, however, would have none of that, and in defiance of family tradition named his son Alfred).

What Michael had begun referring to as the Æthelbert Document was actually a roll of vellum made from sheepskin, which had been discovered in the ruins of a mosque in Cyprus. From what the archaeological team supervising the excavation had been able to surmise, the document had been taken to the island approximately three centuries after Æthelbert, just a few years prior to the Third Crusade. What was difficult for historians to accept, particularly the British ones, was that according to fragments of other documents at the site and correlating historical data, the document was left on Cyprus deliberately, and by no less a luminary than Richard the Lionheart.

The reason for the outrage among the scholars was established at a symposium in Vienna Michael had hosted, soon after the discovery and his subsequent purchase of the document. The translation revealed it to be concerned with the lineage and biographical details of a quasi-historical figure who was quite literally the archetype of English royalty: Arthur Pendragon—King Arthur of Camelot. Needless to say, it was less than flattering. According to the document’s author (who was unidentified, but revealed information allowing it to be dated to the mid-ninth century, hence the nom-de-plume the Æthelbert Document) Pendragon did gather a collection of men to Camelot, but his purposes for doing so were less than chivalrous and more than a little unsavory. It also described a far different relationship with the knight historically known as Lancelot DuLac. The document further describes someone who could be interpreted as the much-romanticized Guinevere, but considering the next passage in the narrative described the knights roasting and eating her, she really didn’t enter much into the discussion.

The fact that Richard tried to hide it far from England’s shores supports the document as authentic—the Lionheart was a historian himself, and would not have destroyed such a work, especially if he believed it to be true; he also could not let it remain within reach of any scholars, especially if he believed it to be true. Thus, he abandoned the document on Cyprus, which he had captured as a stronghold against the Muslims, and then negotiated a right of passage to Jerusalem along a narrow coastal strip—which eliminated the need for any English, scholars or otherwise, to ever want to go to Cyprus.