Daughters of Babylon (34 page)

“Now I understand why Viv never mentioned him,” Gavriel said.

“Why?”

“Because names carry vibration, and vibration is power. The work we were doing, she didn’t want him knowing…it explains the old desktop and why she printed off the poems for me to take away.” Gavriel’s expression shifted like clouds moving fast over the sun, like a deck of cards being riffled. And then he looked at her, dead somber. “You shouldn’t stay in that house. I’m going to phone Toinelle, see if she has—”

“NO!”

He jumped at both her volume and vehemence. Silvina had scared herself a little too. But the shout from her gut had cleared the nausea and the fatigue and the icy chill.

“I’m not going to leave the house. Blythe told me the same thing. At the first mention of…him, come to think of it. I’ve since been flooded out of a 27th floor apartment by a freak storm, and now, with your warning, that makes three. But I can’t keep running, I can’t keep allowing people to push me out. I’m not fifteen anymore. I’m not afraid of foreclosure.”

“Foreclosure? Silvina, we are not talking about a mortgage. This is a sorcerer’s maneuver. Witchcraft. You have no idea what you’re dealing with.”

“You’re right, I don’t. But I know what to do, when I don’t know what to do.” She slid off the rock, tipped onto her knees and planted a kiss on Gavriel’s cheek, feeling only the slightest tug to linger, to slide her kiss a little to the left—
yes, that way, sweetie! He’s willing enough; he wouldn’t disappoint you.

“Where are you going?” asked the poet, while she brushed off her knees and stood.

“Home. And thank you, Gavriel! I owe you big-time.”

Silvina turned and ran across the looping pathways, through and around the community of pup tents and caravans and into the poplar woods. Inside the house, she packed all the notebooks and journals labeled “Inklings by boh” into two cardboard liquor boxes and drove, encountering nothing four-legged and fleecy on the way, to La Croix du Cinq Diamants winery that had a business centre with photocopiers. And through all that, not a single deer fly buzzed.

Back at the house, armed with coloured pencils, paper, highlighters, sticky notes, and rolls of masking tape, she set to work. On the center island in the
foganha
, she laid out the four stacks of documents Gavriel had given her: the poems he’d translated from Galician; pages of random phrases in assorted languages; Gav’s newest work, written since meeting Vivian; and the poems written by someone he disliked whose name was Wiley Forrest. There were also two more stacks: the photocopied pages of “Inklings” by a much younger Blythe Pendaris, nee. Haggerty and pages from
The Light Stalker’s Handbook
, sliced from their double spine. She colour-coded each pile with a small mark in the corner.

If she were in Toulouse or Toronto, or pretty much anywhere but here, she’d be using a spreadsheet program developed by Tri-partite and wouldn’t require vast expanses of horizontal space. Viv’s house was half emptied, but expansive it was not. By eight in the evening, pathways of paper were snaking around the parlour chairs and up the stairs, along the corridor to Viv’s study where books on the craft of poetry and a volume by Alain C. Dexter, fellow Canadian, joined the queue, relevant pages sticky-noted; then back into the hall to the bedroom where the final sheet reached the claw feet of the mirrored dresser, weighted with the small framed photo of Daughters of Babylon and company.

That was the first step.

Silvina went downstairs and boiled a pot of noodles in the blue speckled saucepan that matched the smaller dipper at the sink. She poured the drained noodles into a bowl, stirred in butter and asiago cheese, then washed the pot and returned it to its peg on the wall, amongst the copper-bottomed pots.

She ate while she walked the path of pages, pausing now and then to highlight with the neon markers she carried in a shopping bag over her arm. Sometimes, she’d rest on her heels and read more deeply and attach a sticky note with comments before moving on. She traveled the full circuit fourteen times, and with each lap she rearranged pages, sometimes, but not often, clear across the house. By 2 a.m., she felt satisfied with the sinuous order and sequence. In Tri-partite lingo, she had isolated head, thorax and abdomen of a single body of thought with clear divisions between them.

That was the second step.

Silvie brewed a pot of French roast and came across the mini-bottle of Courvoisier Alphonse had given her for a night when the house felt ready to share her secrets. She poured the cognac into the coffee and went upstairs to the window seat and wrote single-word headings on sheets of coloured paper. There were no campfires and no lights burning in the orchard; the poets were asleep. She wondered if Gavriel dreamed his poems, the way she had dreamed her FST procedures in spectral bits and pieces over the years.

Having climbed the stairs in Vivian’s house often enough with packing boxes, garbage bags, and recycling bins, she knew how to divide the stairwell space evenly into seven. At each interval, on both sides of the stairs, she taped the fourteen headings, seven going up, seven going down. Then she sat at the top step, with all the lights on, and enjoyed her spiked java.

“C
e soir, ma maison
. Your secrets, please.” She entered the bedroom and sat crosslegged at the poem nearest the goalpost, the photo of seven adults and one boy in a happier time. She picked up the page. It was one of boh’s short pieces from an early volume, called “The Decision”.

Silvie read the poem and she read it again. Her mouth fell open, and her thoughts turned toward the kitchen, the
foganha
, directly below the bedroom. Layers of her mind folded back, one after another, like the petal folds of a woman in her most secret places, and with each progression, each new reveal, her mind grew more still, and then she switched into some kind of overdrive, where furrows rushed past at dizzying speed, and if she didn’t keep her eyes fixed straight ahead, the collision, the obliteration would be more than her central nervous system could withstand. And when she reached what appeared to be a destination and slowed, bobbing like a cork on a wine dark sea, she murmured, “Sweet mothering Jesus...”

The County of Blois, five days’
journey southwest of Paris
JULY, 1173 A.D.

Sherurd and Pascal called themselves soldiers of fortune, though they’d known little of soldiery in recent years and even less of fortune. Sherurd was a German veteran of the Second Crusade, who’d singlehandedly dispatched eighty-seven Saracens until a surprise attack by Turks nearly wiped his king and countrymen off the map. Pascal, a Breton, had enjoyed a cushy post as palace guard in Antioch until that city too met its foul end. The two men met in a veterans’ hospital and enjoyed each other’s humour. Once their wounds were healed, they set out to follow tournament routes across France and Germany, taking sword work wherever they could find it. For the past few years, Count Theobald of Blois had been paying them two pounds of dried lentils and a slab of pork belly per month as reserve guards and extensions of the royal ear, but lately the bellies were growing lean and the pounds lighter than they used to be. Then, at the festival of St. Barnabas last month, Sherurd was told by a sibyl that he would become a man of means on the day he let his soup grow cold. He’d been eating lentils cold ever since, which meant that he and Pascal didn’t sup together anymore. It also meant that Sherurd, whittling at the roadside, waiting for his pease porridge to congeal, was at the perfect spot when a disabled wagon clackered into view.

Two men in coarse garb stepped down from the boxy, four-wheeled cart, pulled by a pair of swayback grays. Sherurd set down the half-finished whistle, tucked the knife at his waist, and ambled toward them.

“That’s a lot of cartage for a pair of nags,” he remarked.

“They’re sturdy enough,” said the driver, who stooped to examine the front axle and wheel.

“Retired war horses?”

“So I’m told. They’ve taken us twice as far as the last pair.”

The second man, wearing a cowl so Sherurd couldn’t size him up, had crossed the road and was pulling up handfuls of timothy grass. “So what’s the problem?”

“The bearing is cracked. We’re in need of a blacksmith, but we’ve passed no villages in two days—none, that is, with people in them.”

Sherurd felt the tips of his ears twitch. “Yes, well, there’s been some trouble last couple years. It’s like that everywhere these days, inn’ it?”

The man looked up briefly. “Yes, I suppose it is.”

Darkish, swarthy—maybe Jewish, maybe not.

“I don’t recognize your accent,” said Sherurd. “Where did you say you’re from?”

“We’re Basques from Navarre en route to the Basilica of St. Denis.”

“So you’re Christians then.”

The man pulled a rag and small jar of neat’s foot oil from his tunic and rubbed the rag in the emollient with small circles. “We are. And you?”

Arrogant son of a bitch. “Everyone hereabouts is Christian. The father of our Count, may he rest in peace, was a personal friend of Abbot Suger—may he, too, rest in peace.”

Sherurd saw no need to point out that the dearth of villagers and unanimity of faith had a common source in the blood libel of 1171, wherein Count Theobald oversaw the burning at the stake of thirty-one Jews. No one likes to hear about the blood of Christian babies baked into matzoh.

The driver finished greasing the axle and stood up, wiping his hands. “So how far is it to the nearest smithy?” His companion, by this time, was feeding the sweet grass to the horses, but Sherurd still couldn’t catch more than the tip of his nose and his height and his slow way of moving.

“Given the state of your wagon,” he replied, “about three hours too far. You won’t make it before nightfall, which is when they close the city gates. But my friend and I have a small forge. We may be able to rig something up, and we’ve a barn if you’re content with straw bedding.”

The driver looked toward his companion, who nodded and said in a most unexpected voice, “We are fortunate to have come upon a Good Samaritan, and we shall accept your hospitality.”

The old knight, if he’d been a rook, would have fell right off his perch. “You’re a
maudit
woman! In a man’s hose!”

“Mind your language,” growled the driver, reaching for the very place at his waist that Sherurd kept his own knife.

“No harm done.” She drew back her cowl enough for him to see the straight nose and strong jaw of an older but still handsome woman. “I am the widow of a shepherd. What you see is my working garb. The man you’ve been speaking to is my brother-in-law, Atze. We travel in this fashion because two men are safer than a couple, with fewer questions asked.”

“I see.” The questions he’d intended to fire withered at the back of his throat. Still, Count Theobald, if he were here, would be having none of this cross-dressing—not in his county, and a full report would earn them, at the very least, a fatter slab of belly. “Well then,” he said, “our home is up the hill here. If you’re willing to unhitch the horses, Ma’am, you can walk them along the path just past that stand of oaks. Your brother-in-law and I will deal with the cart.”

“Thank you.” She unbuckled the harnesses and, gathering the reins, moved the horses away from the wagon shafts. “We haven’t much in the way of funds, but such as we have, we’ll pay.”

The sybil’s prophecy flew into his head.
You’ll become a man of means when…

Apart from refinement in their speech, the couple displayed no outward signs of wealth, but no one in their right mind would travel these days with gold jingling in their pouches. And he knew for certain that his soup, by now, was cold. “It’s the first cluster of buildings you’ll come to,” he said, with a tickle in his belly the size of a fist. “My friend’s name is Pascal. Tell him that Sherurd of Saxony invited you.”

As hosts of potential windfalls go, one would be hard-pressed to imagine a more butter-fingered, tongue-tied oaf than Pascal, the Breton. “I know that woman,” he hissed to Sherurd, while the pair from Navarre refreshed themselves at the water trough outside the barn. “As soon as I saw her walking those horses, as soon as our eyes met, I said to myself, I know that woman.”

“From where? From where do you know her?”

He scratched the ring of gray curls around his bald pate, setting off a halo of displaced fleas. “I wish I knew. I also wish we had more to feed them than beans and pork fat. Do we still have that cabbage?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Parsnips?”

“I don’t keep track of the larder. That’s your job. I’m going to fire up the forge.”

“Duck eggs. I buried a dozen last month, and there’s a hardy patch of chives…”

While the two knights ironed out domestic details, another couple were settling in at the castle they’d not seen for months. Count Theobald V of Blois and his wife, the Countess Alix, had returned from Chartres out of season to attend the nuptials of an old friend. Alix had been feeling poorly with nightmares and rashes and outbreaks of sweat, which the physicks had dismissed as nervous instabilities, not untypical for a woman her age. Treatments of fortified wine and bleeding were recommended, as well as taking care not to overtax her mind with unpleasantries.

“I’m going to get some air,” she told her husband in the dining hall. Not that he noticed, absorbed as he was poring over ledgers, lamenting the money that had flowed out of Blois in his absence.

She walked the stone path along the dove and pigeon cotes, soothed by the cooing of brood hens. “What I would give for your peace, mother birds.”

Her own mother, Eleanor, duchess of Aquitaine, queen of England, wife of Henry, was nowhere to be found. She had gone missing, and the Courts from Rouen to Toulouse were in high gossip. “They say she’s fled to Greece…I hear the King of Aragón has granted her sanctuary…I have it on good authority she’s drowned herself, despondent with the shame she has brought on womankind.”

Meanwhile, Alix’s four half-brothers, whom she scarcely knew, were guests, uneasily so, of her own father, King Louis, the poor boys never knowing from day to day whether they would see their dear
Maman
again. And the homilies from pulpits, inspired by that noxious Latin scholar, Peter of Blois, were united in their condemnation of women who revolt against their menfolk, “violating the condition of nature, the mandate of the Apostle and the law of Scripture…being the cause of widespread disaster…resulting in ruin…the head of the woman is the man [Ephesians 5]…for every kingdom divided against itself will be destroyed [Luke 11].”