Timeline (34 page)

Chris was thinking that hesitation was not a part of this woman’s character. He was stunned by her boldness. On the other hand, Marek was looking at her with open admiration. He said smoothly, “Pray forgive him, Lady, for he is young and often thoughtless.”

“Circumstances change. I had need of an introduction that only the Abbot could make for me. What persuasion is in my command, I use.” The Lady Claire was hopping on one foot now, trying to keep her balance while pulling on her hose. She drew the hose tight, smoothed her dress, and then set her wimple on her head, tying it expertly beneath her chin, so only her face was exposed.

Within moments, she looked like a nun. Her manner became demure, her voice lower, softer.

“Now, by happenstance, you know what I had intended no person to know. In this, I am at your mercy, and I beg your silence.”

“You shall have it,” Marek said, “for your affairs are none of ours.”

“You shall have my silence in return,” she said. “For it is evident the Abbot does not wish your presence known to de Cervole. We shall all keep our secrets. Have I your word?”

“In sooth, yes, Lady,” Marek said.

“Yes, Lady,” Chris said.

“Yes, Lady,” Kate said.

Hearing her voice, Claire frowned at Kate, then walked over to her. “Say you true?”

“Yes, Lady,” Kate said, again.

Claire ran her hand over Kate’s chest, feeling the breasts beneath the flattening cloth band. “You have cut your hair, damsel,” she said. “You know that to pass as a man is punishable by death?” She glanced at Chris as she said this.

“We know it,” Marek said.

“You must have great dedication to your Magister, to give up your sex.”

“My Lady, I do.”

“Then I pray most earnestly that you survive.”

The door opened, and the toad gestured to them. “Worthies, come. My Lady, pray remain, the Abbot will do your bidding soon enough. But you worthies — come with me.”

:

Outside in the courtyard, Chris leaned close to Marek and whispered, “André. That woman is poison.”

Marek was smiling. “I agree she has a certain spark. . . .”

“André. I’m telling you. You can’t trust anything she says.”

“Really? I thought she was remarkably straightforward,” Marek said. “She wants protection. And she is right.”

Chris stared. “Protection?”

“Yes. She wants a champion,” Marek said, thoughtfully.

“A champion? What are you talking about? We have only — how many hours left?”

Marek looked at his wristband. “Eleven hours ten minutes.”

“So: what are you talking about, a champion?”

“Oh. Just thinking,” Marek said. He threw his arm over Chris’s shoulder. “It’s not important.”

11:01:59

They were seated at a long table with many monks in a large hall, a steaming bowl of meat soup in front of them, and in the center of the table, platters piled high with vegetables, beef and roast capons. And no one moving a muscle, but all heads bowed in prayer, as the monks chanted.

Pater noster qui es in coelis

Sanctivicetur nomen tuum

Adveniat regnum tuum

Fiat voluntas tua

Kate kept sneaking looks at the food. The capons were steaming! They looked fat, and yellow juice flowed onto the plates. Then she noticed that the monks nearest her seemed puzzled by her silence. She should know this chant, it seemed.

Beside her, Marek was chanting loudly.

Panem nostrum quotidianum

Da nobie hodie

Et dimmitte nobis debita nostra

She didn’t understand Latin, and she couldn’t join in, so she stayed silent until the final “Amen.”

The monks all looked up, nodded to her. She braced herself: she had been fearing this moment. Because they would speak to her, and she wouldn’t be able to answer back. What would she do?

She looked at Marek, who seemed perfectly relaxed. Of course he would be; he spoke the language.

A monk passed a platter of beef to her, saying nothing. In fact, the entire room was silent. The food was passed without a word; there was no sound at all except for the soft clink of plates and knives. They ate in silence!

She took the platter, nodding, and gave herself one large helping, then another, until she caught Marek’s disapproving glance. She handed the platter to him.

From the corner of the room, a monk began to read a text in Latin, the words a kind of cadence in her ears, while she ate hungrily. She was famished! She could not remember when she had enjoyed a meal more. She glanced at Marek, who was eating with a quiet smile on his face. She turned to her soup, which was delicious, and after a moment, she glanced back at Marek.

He wasn’t smiling anymore.

:

Marek had been keeping an eye on the entrances. There were three to this long rectangular room: one to his right, one to his left, and one directly opposite them, in the center of the room.

Moments before, he had seen a group of soldiers in green and black gathering near the doorway to the right. They peered in, as if interested in the meal, but remained outside.

Now he saw a second group of soldiers, standing in the doorway directly ahead. Kate looked at him, and he leaned very close to her ear and whispered, “Left door.” The monks around them shot disapproving glances. Kate looked at Marek and gave a little nod, meaning she understood.

Where did the left-hand doorway lead? There were no soldiers at that door, and the room beyond was dark. Wherever it went, they would have to risk it. He caught Chris’s eye and gave a small jerk with his thumb: time to get up.

Chris nodded almost imperceptibly. Marek pushed away his soup and started to get up, when a white-robed monk came up to him, leaned close, and whispered, “The Abbot will see you now.”

:

The Abbot of Sainte-Mère was an energetic man in his early thirties, with the body of an athlete and the sharp eye of a merchant. His black robes were elegantly embroidered, his heavy necklace was gold, and the hand he extended to be kissed bore jewels on four fingers. He met them in a sunny courtyard and then walked side by side with Marek, while Chris and Kate trailed behind. There were green-and-black soldiers everywhere. The Abbot’s manner was cheerful, but he had the habit of abruptly changing the subject, as if to catch his listener off guard.

“I am heartfelt sorry for these soldiers,” the Abbot said, “but I fear intruders have entered the monastery grounds — some men of Oliver — and until we find them, we must be cautious. And my Lord Arnaut has graciously offered us his protection. You have eaten well?”

“By the grace of God and your own, very well, my Lord Abbot.”

The Abbot smiled pleasantly. “I dislike flattery,” he said. “And our order forbids it.”

“I shall be mindful,” Marek said.

The Abbot looked at the soldiers and sighed. “So many soldiers ruin the game.”

“What game is that?”

“The game, the game,” he said impatiently. “Yesterday morning we went hunting and returned haveless, with not so much as a roebuck to show. And the men of Cervole had not yet arrived. Now they are here — two thousand of them. What game they do not take, they frighten off. It will be months before the forests settle again. What news of Magister Edwardus? Tell me, for I am sore in need to have it.”

Marek frowned. The Abbot did indeed appear tense, chafing to hear. But he seemed to be expecting specific information.

“My Lord Abbot, he is in La Roque.”

“Oh? With Sir Oliver?”

“Yes, my Lord Abbot.”

“Most unfortunate. Did he give you a message for me?” He must have seen Marek’s puzzled look. “No?”

“My Lord Abbot, Edwardus gave me no message.”

“Perhaps in code? Some trivial or mistaken turn of phrase?”

“I am sorry,” Marek said.

“Not so sorry as I. And now he is in La Roque?”

“He is, my Lord Abbot.”

“Sooth, I would not have it so,” the Abbot said. “For I think La Roque cannot be taken.”

“Yet if there is a secret passage to the inside . . . ,” Marek said.

“Oh, the passage, the passage,” the Abbot said, giving a wave of his hand. “It will be my undoing. It is all that I hear spoken. Every man wishes to know the passage — and Arnaut more than any of them. The Magister was assisting me, searching the old documents of Marcellus. Are you certain he said nothing to you?”

“He said we were to seek Brother Marcel.”

The Abbot snorted. “Certes, this secret passage was the work of Laon’s assistant and scribe, who was Brother Marcel. But for the last years, old Marcel was not well in spirit. That is why we let him live in the mill. All through the day, he muttered and mumbled to himself, and then of a sudden he would cry out that he saw demons and spirits, and his eyes rolled in his head, and his limbs thrashed wildly, until the visions passed.” The Abbot shook his head. “The other monks venerated him, seeing his visions as proof of piety, and not of disorder, which in truth it was. But why did the Magister tell you to seek him out?”

“The Magister said Marcel had a key.”

“A key?” the Abbot said. “A key?” He sounded very annoyed. “Of course he had a key, he had many keys, and they are all to be found in the mill, but we cannot—” He stumbled forward, then stared with a shocked expression at Marek.

All around the courtyard, men were shouting, pointing upward.

Marek said, “My Lord Abbot—”

The Abbot spat blood and collapsed into Marek’s arms. Marek eased him to the ground. He felt the arrow in the Abbot’s back even before he saw it. More arrows whistled down and thunked, quivering, in the grass beside them.

Marek looked up and saw maroon figures in the bell tower of the church, firing rapidly. An arrow ripped Marek’s hat from his head; another tore through the sleeve of his tunic. Another arrow stuck deep in the Abbot’s shoulder.

The next arrow struck Marek in the thigh. He felt searing red-hot pain streak down his leg, and he lost his balance, falling back on the ground. He tried to get up, but he was dizzy and his balance had deserted him. He fell back again as arrows whistled down all around him.

:

On the opposite side of the courtyard, Chris and Kate ran for cover through the rain of arrows. Kate yelled and stumbled, fell to the ground, an arrow sticking in her back. Then she scrambled up, and Chris saw it had torn through her tunic beneath her armpit but had not struck her. An arrow skinned his leg, tearing his hose. And then they reached the covered passageway, where they collapsed behind one of the arches, catching their breath. Arrows clattered off the stone walls and struck the stone arches all around them. Chris said, “You okay?”

She nodded, panting. “Where’s Marek?”

Chris got to his feet, peered cautiously around the pillar. “Oh no,” he said. And he started to run down the corridor.

:

Marek staggered to his feet, saw that the Abbot was still alive. “Forgive me,” Marek said as he lifted the Abbot onto his shoulder and carried him away to the corner. The soldiers in the courtyard loosed answering volleys at the bell tower. Fewer arrows were coming down at them now.

Marek took the Abbot behind the arches of the covered passageway and placed him on his side on the ground. The Abbot pulled the arrow out of his own shoulder and threw it aside. The effort left him gasping. “My back . . . back . . .”

Marek turned him over gently. The shaft in his back pulsed with each heartbeat. “My Lord, do you wish me to pull it?”

“No.” The Abbot flung a desperate arm over Marek’s neck, pulling him close. “Not yet . . . A priest . . . priest . . .” His eyes rolled. A priest was running toward them.

“He comes now, my Lord Abbot.”

The Abbot appeared relieved by this, but he still held Marek in a strong grip. His voice was low, almost a whisper. “The key to La Roque . . .”

“Yes, my Lord?”

“. . . room . . .”

Marek waited. “What room, my Lord? What room?”

“Arnaut . . . ,” the Abbot said, shaking his head as if to clear it. “Arnaut will be angry . . . room . . .” And he released his grip. Marek pulled the arrow from his back and helped him to lie on the floor. “Every time, he would . . . make . . . told no one . . . so . . . Arnaut . . .” He closed his eyes.

The monk pushed between them, speaking quickly in Latin, removing the Abbot’s slippers, placing a bottle of oil on the ground. He began to administer the last rites.

:

Leaning against one of the cloister pillars, Marek pulled the arrow out of his thigh. It had struck him glancingly, and was not as deep as he had thought; there was only an inch of blood on the shaft. He dropped the arrow to the ground just as Chris and Kate came up.

They looked at his leg, and at the arrow. He was bleeding. Kate pulled up her doublet and tore a strip from the bottom of her linen undershirt with her dagger. She tied it around Marek’s thigh as an impromptu bandage.

Marek said, “It’s not that bad.”

“Then it won’t hurt you to have it,” she said. “Can you walk?”

“Of course I can walk,” Marek said.

“You’re pale.”

“I’m fine,” he said, and moved away from the pillar, looking into the courtyard.

Four soldiers lay on the ground, which was pincushioned with arrows. The other soldiers had departed; no one was shooting at the bell tower any longer: smoke billowed from the high windows. On the opposite side of the courtyard, they saw more smoke, thick and dark, coming from the area of the refectory. The whole monastery was starting to burn.

“We need to find that key,” Marek said.

“But it’s in his room.”

“I’m not sure about that.” Marek had remembered that one of the last things Elsie, the graphologist, had said to him back at the project site had to do with a key. And some word that she was puzzled by. He couldn’t remember the details — he had been worried about the Professor at the time — but he remembered clearly enough that Elsie had been looking at one of the parchment sheets from the pile that had been found in the monastery. The same pile that had contained the Professor’s note.

And Marek knew where to find those parchments.

:

They hurried down the corridor toward the church. Some of the stained-glass windows had been broken, and smoke issued out. From the interior, they heard men shouting, and a moment later a party of soldiers burst through the doors. Marek turned on his heel, leading them back the way they had come.

“What are we doing?” Chris said.

“Looking for the door.”

“What door?”

Marek darted left, along a cloistered corridor, and then left again, through a very narrow opening that brought them into a tight space, a kind of storeroom area. It was lit by a torch. There was a wooden trapdoor in the floor; he flung it open, and they saw steps going down into darkness. He grabbed a torch, and they all went down the steps. Chris was last, closing the trapdoor behind him. He descended the stairs into a dank, dark chamber.

:

The torch sputtered in the cool air. By its flickering light, they saw huge casks, six feet in diameter, running along the wall. They were in a wine cellar.

“You know the soldiers will find this place soon enough,” Marek said. He led them through several rooms of casks, moving without hesitation.

Following him, Kate said, “Do you know where you’re going?”

“Don’t you?” he said.

But she didn’t; she and Chris stayed close behind Marek, wanting to be in the comforting circle of light from the torch. Now they were passing tombs, small indentations in the wall where bodies rested, their shrouds rotting away. Sometimes they saw the tops of skulls, with bits of hair still clinging; sometimes they saw feet, the bones partially exposed. They heard the faint squeak of rats in the darkness.

Kate shivered.

Marek continued on, until at last he stopped abruptly in a chamber that was nearly empty.

“Why are we stopping?” she said.

“Don’t you know?” Marek said.

She looked around, then realized that she was in the same underground chamber she had crawled into several days before. There was the same sarcophagus of a knight, now with the lid on the coffin. Along another wall was a crude wooden table, where sheets of oilskin were stacked and manuscript bundles were tied with hemp. To one side was a low stone wall, on which stood a single manuscript bundle — and the glint of the lens from the Professor’s eyeglasses.

“He must have lost it yesterday,” Kate said. “The soldiers must have captured him down here.”

“Probably.” She watched as Marek started going through the bundled sheets, one after another. He quickly found the Professor’s message, then turned back to the preceding sheet. He frowned, peering at it in the torchlight.

“What is it?” she said.

“It’s a description,” he said. “Of an underground river, and . . . here it is.” He pointed to the side of the manuscript, where a notation in Latin had been scrawled.

“It says, ‘Marcellus has the key.’ “ He pointed with his finger. “And then it says something about, uh, a door or opening, and large feet.”

“Large feet?”

“Wait a minute,” he said. “No, that’s not it.” What Elsie had said was coming back to him now. “It says, ‘Feet of a giant.’ A giant’s feet.”

“A giant’s feet,” she said, looking doubtfully at him. “Are you sure you have that right?”

“That’s what it says.”

“And what’s this?” she said. Beneath his finger there were two words, one arranged above the other:

DESIDE

VIVIX

“I remember,” Marek said. “Elsie said this was a new word for her, vivix. But she didn’t say anything about deside. And that doesn’t even look like Latin to me. And it’s not Occitan, or old French.”

With his dagger, he cut a corner from the parchment, then scratched the two words into the material, folded it, and slipped it into his pocket.

“But what does it mean?” Kate said.

Marek shook his head. “No idea at all.”

“It was added in the margin,” she said. “Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it’s a doodle, or an accounting, or something like that.”

“I doubt it.”

“They must have doodled back then.”

“I know, but this doesn’t look like a doodle, Kate. This is a serious notation.” He turned back to the manuscript, running his finger along the text. “Okay. Okay . . . It says here that Transitus occultus incipit . . . the passage starts . . . propre ad capellam viridem, sive capellam mortis — at the green chapel, also known as the chapel of death — and—”

“The green chapel?” she said in an odd voice.

Marek nodded. “That’s right. But it doesn’t say where the chapel is.” He sighed. “If the passage really connects to the limestone caves, it could be anywhere.”

“No, André,” she said. “It’s not.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” she said, “that I know where the green chapel is.”

:

Kate said, “It was marked on the survey charts for the Dordogne project — it’s a ruin, just outside the project area. I remember wondering why it hadn’t been included in the project, because it was so close. On the chart, it was marked ‘chapelle verte morte,’ and I thought it meant the ‘chapel of green death.’ I remember, because it sounded like something out of Edgar Allan Poe.”

“Do you remember where it is, exactly?”

“Not exactly, except that it’s in the forest about a kilometer north of Bezenac.”

“Then it’s possible,” Marek said. “A kilometer-long tunnel is possible.”

From behind them, they heard the sound of soldiers coming down into the cellar.

“Time to go.”

He led them to the left, into a corridor, where the staircase was located. When Kate had seen it before, it disappeared into a mound of earth. Now it ran straight up to a wooden trapdoor.

Marek climbed the stairs, put his shoulder to the door. It opened easily. They saw gray sky, and smoke.

Marek went through, and they followed after him.

:

They emerged in an orchard, the fruit trees in neat rows, the spring leaves a bright green. They ran ahead through the trees, eventually arriving at the monastery wall. It was twelve feet tall, too high to climb. But they climbed the trees, then dropped over the wall, landing outside. Directly ahead they saw a section of dense, uncleared forest. They ran toward it, once again entering the dark canopy of the trees.

09:57:02

In the ITC laboratory, David Stern stepped away from the prototype machine. He looked at the small taped-together electronic bundle that he had been assembling and testing for the last five hours.

“That’s it,” he said. “That’ll send them a message.”

It was now night in the lab; the glass windows were dark. He said, “What time is it, back there?”

Gordon counted on his fingers. “They arrived about eight in the morning. It’s been twenty-seven hours elapsed time. So it’s now eleven in the morning, the following day.”

“Okay. That should be okay.”

Stern had managed to build this electronic communications device, despite Gordon’s two strong arguments that such a thing could not be done. Gordon said that you couldn’t send a message back there because you didn’t know where the machine would land. Statistically, the chances were overwhelming that the machine would land where the team wasn’t. So they would never see a message. The second problem was that you had no way of knowing whether they had received the message or not.

But Stern had solved both those objections in an extremely simple way. His bundle contained an earpiece transmitter/receiver, identical to the ones the team was already wearing, and two small tape recorders. The first tape recorder transmitted a message. The second recorded any incoming message to the earpiece transmitter. The whole contraption was, as Gordon admiringly termed it, a multiverse answering machine.

Stern recorded a message that said, “This is David. You have now been out for twenty-seven hours. Don’t try to come back until thirty-two hours. Then we’ll be ready for you at this end. Meanwhile, tell us if you’re all right. Just speak and it’ll be recorded. Good-bye for now. See you soon.”

Stern listened to the message one final time, then said, “Okay, let’s send it back.”

Gordon pushed buttons on the control panel. The machine began to hum and was bathed in blue light.

:

Hours earlier, when he had begun working on this message machine, Stern’s only concern was that his friends back there might not know they couldn’t return. As a result, he could imagine them getting into a jam, perhaps being attacked from all sides, and calling for the machine at the last instant, assuming they could come home at once. So Stern thought they should be told that, for the moment, they couldn’t come back.

That had been his original concern. But now there was a second, even greater concern. The air in the cave had been cleared for about sixteen hours now. Teams of workers were back inside, rebuilding the transit pad. The control booth had been continuously monitored for many hours.

And there had been no field bucks.

Which meant there had been no attempt to come back. And Stern had the feeling — of course, nobody would say anything outright, least of all Gordon — but he had the feeling that people in ITC thought that to go more than twenty hours without a field buck was a bad sign. He sensed that a large faction inside ITC believed the team was already dead.

So interest in Stern’s machine was not so much about whether a message could be sent as whether one would be received. Because that would be evidence that the team was still alive.

Stern had rigged the machine with an antenna, and he had made a little ratchet device that turned the flexible antenna to different angles and repeated the outgoing message three times. So there would be three chances for the team to respond. After that, the entire machine would automatically return to the present, just as it had when they were using the camera.

“Here we go,” Gordon said.

With flashes of laser light, the machine began to shrink into the floor.

:

It was an uncomfortable wait. Ten minutes later, the machine returned. Cold vapor whispered across the floor as Stern removed his electronic bundle, tore the tape away, and started to play back.

The outgoing message was played.

There was no response.

The outgoing message was played again.

Again, there was no response. The crackle of static, but nothing.

Gordon was staring at Stern, his face expressionless. Stern said, “There could be a lot of explanations. . . .”

“Of course there could, David.”

The outgoing message was played a third time.

Stern held his breath.

More static crackling, and then, in the quiet of the laboratory, he heard Kate’s voice say, “Did you guys just hear something?”

Marek: “What are you talking about?”