Enoch's Device (14 page)

Bishop Adémar grinned savagely—until Alais thrust the dagger downward with every ounce of her strength, sinking it between his shoulder blades.

The bishop roared. He sprang off her, ripping the hilt from her hand. But the dagger still protruded from his back. The hem of his tunic fell to his ankles as he grasped frantically for the dagger’s hilt.

Alais rolled off the bed and darted for the door, opened it, and burst into the hall. The Franks, who were lounging on the benches to the trestle table, had no time to react.

“
Stop her!
” Bishop Adémar’s voice bellowed from the bedchamber.

Alais fled from the hall and out the manor door—right into a burly chest covered in mail.

The Frank wrapped her in a bear hug. She recoiled at the stench of his breath, and her body went limp. Alais could no longer summon the strength to resist.

Bishop Adémar stormed into the hall. To her horror, he held the bloody dagger in his hand.

This can’t be possible!
she screamed within her mind.
It should have killed him!

“Witch!” the bishop screamed. “She’s a witch! She seduced me with a spell.”

The Franks looked wide-eyed at him.

“Need I remind you, the devil works his way through the bodies of women!” he yelled. “Take her outside.” He leveled his gaze at Alais. “She is a witch, I tell you. And a witch must burn.”

Alais’ lower lip began to tremble.
Saint Radegonde!
she cried out in a silent plea.
Holy Savior, please!

Yet as they took her from the manor down the pathway to the abbey, past the burning cottages of Selles, Alais knew that this time she was truly alone. This time, there was no one to save her.

O
n the outskirts of Remorantin,
the village where they slept on the ninth day of their journey, Ciarán, Dónall, and Remi spied a man hanging from a tree.

Remi started toward the corpse, dangling from a limb of a great oak whose leaf-bare branches clawed at the sky. “Nicolas!” he cried as he ran. Chasing after him, Ciarán grimaced when he neared the hanged man. The face, gazing absently at the ground, was gray except where bleached bone showed through where the ravens had pecked the flesh clean. Ants crawled over the skull, down the neck, and beneath a tattered brown tunic. Ciarán gagged at the stench and tried not to retch.

Dónall strode up beside them. “It is not Nicolas,” he said softly.

Remi pushed up the man’s chin with the tip of his walking staff, carved of alder and stained black like Dónall’s. The dead man’s head tilted sideways, staring back through hollow eyes. “No,” Remi agreed. “Just a thief. Lucky him—thieves hang; heretics burn.”

“We don’t know if Nicolas suffered that fate,” Dónall said.

“For nine days we have been on these roads,” Remi insisted. “I have inquired in every village along the way. No one has seen him.”

Dónall nudged Remi away from the dead man. “There are other roads that lead to Selles-sur-Cher.”

“The enemy is always searching,” Remi said, his lower lip trembling. “I fear that the enemy has found him.” With a desperate gasp, Remi gripped his face in his bony hands and staggered away.

Ciarán watched the Benedictine stray toward a copse of oaks bordering a pale meadow. “What if Nicolas had traveled through Blois?” he asked. “Right through the bishop’s realm.”

“I’ve had that concern, too,” Dónall replied. “Which is why, after we’re through with Selles, I want to check on my old friend Lucien. He evaded Gerbert’s treachery and Adalbero’s inquisition back at Reims, but he never had the stomach for Remi’s quest. I’m told he retired to a small priory in the Touraine, near Saint-Aignan. If Adémar of Blois has threatened Lucien, too, then we are indeed all being hunted, just as Remi fears.”

“There is no way the bishop could know where we are,” Ciarán said. “He didn’t pursue us to Paris, and we’ve seen no sign of his men along the way.”

Dónall smiled faintly. “I trained you to think logically, didn’t I?”

Ciarán shrugged. “I paid attention.” He turned as Remi approached. The Benedictine had regained some of his composure, though the tears left streaks from his eyes to his unkempt beard.

“Let us not linger,” Remi announced, “or forget why we have come. For before this day ends, we may hold the Book of Enoch in our hands.”

They started down the road, a path of trampled grass and dirt that traversed the meadow. Though it was a meager road, Ciarán far preferred it to the old Roman roads they had traveled after Paris. Once paved with stone, they were now littered with massive potholes that became muddy troughs with each rain. Also, miles of road had become overgrown as the forests reclaimed land the Romans had cleared a millennium ago, leading Ciarán at times to fear that they would be lost in dense woodlands where only the wolves might find them. Fortunately, at Saint-Germain-des-Prés they had joined a party of a dozen Benedictines traveling under the abbot’s charter to bring a shipment of illuminated tomes to the bishop in Orléans, an old Roman city on the Loire that rivaled even the grandeur of Paris. The Benedictines knew the roads, and their numbers were great enough to deter bandits and even the violent local lords who plagued travelers in France. South of Orléans, the roads proved better as they journeyed through four more villages, the last being Remorantin.

Although midwinter was just a week away, Ciarán found the last leg of their journey blessed by pleasant weather. Beside him, Dónall walked with his staff, his book satchel slung over his shoulder. A few paces ahead, Remi chattered with anticipation as they neared Selles-sur-Cher. After several hours, they crested a hill topped with winter-brown grass.

“There it is!” Remi announced, pointing toward a winding river below. On its southern bank were fields and cottages, but it was the limestone abbey perched on a squat hill that captured Remi’s attention. To Ciarán, it looked about like half the other villages they had passed through on their way from Paris. He just hoped the lord of Selles was not a bandit.

“Do you see smoke?” Dónall asked.

Ciarán shielded his eyes from the sun and peered across the river. Sure enough, a few tendrils of smoke rose from the far west side of the village. “Chimneys, perhaps,” Remi said. But as he spoke, those threads of smoke swelled into dark, billowing plumes. As they watched, the plumes began to spread, choking the air above the village in an angry black cloud. Ciarán could hardly believe his eyes. Selles-sur-Cher was
burning
.

Remi started down the hill. Dónall and Ciarán, still stunned, could not take their eyes off the burning village. “The enemy knows!” Remi raved, motioning with his staff for the other two monks to follow. “He is upon us! All is in peril!”

Ciarán glanced at Dónall and then darted after Remi, who continued gaining ground, though the river still looked a quarter league away. Downhill, the road ran through a brown meadow to the river, where a ferry dock stood on the bank. Across the river, a swarm of figures moved rapidly through the village. Ciarán realized they were horsemen. The black cloud above Selles swelled, fed by more plumes of smoke as more cottages were put to the torch. Panicked screams sounded across the river, mixed with the shouts of men and the cries of beasts.

Remi reached the dock first, with Ciarán on his heels and Dónall trailing them. In the river, a small ferry with three passengers was nearing the dock.

“Dónall, make haste!” Remi cried.

Gasping for breath, Dónall caught up just as the ferry reached the dock. Ciarán grabbed the mooring line and secured the craft, and three Benedictine monks stepped ashore. One of them was an abbot or a prior, judging from the gold-leaf crucifix around his neck. Fat as a penned hog, he carried an armful of treasure: a golden communion cup, two gold-plated candlestick holders, and a small reliquary that likely carried the tooth or knucklebone of some saint or other. The other two monks, who were much younger, each carried a wooden coffer.

“What is happening?” Remi demanded of the fat monk.

“Fulk the Black,” he replied. “Our blessed abbey is under attack! Flee if you value your lives!” The fat man pushed past Ciarán but bumped square into Dónall, who stood to his full imposing height.

“Move!” one of the fat monk’s companions demanded.

Dónall didn’t budge. “Are you abbot or prior?”

“Prior,” the fat man said. “Our lay abbot is dead.” He tried again to push his way through, but Dónall stood fast. When the prior’s companion tried to muscle his way past, Ciarán grabbed his arm. The man, who was as thin as his superior was fat, gave Ciarán a startled look.

“Why are you being attacked?” Dónall pressed.

“’Tis madness. They’ve arrested the lady under accusation of witchcraft, as a servant of the demon. And they ride with the bishop of Blois, hunting for heretics!”

Ciarán’s heart jumped.
How could this be possible!

Alarmed, Remi looked to Dónall, who nodded faintly, still staring down the prior. “Witchcraft, you say?” Dónall asked.

“Something about a devil’s tome. They were driving the stake as we fled.”

Dónall’s face reddened. “They are to burn her?”

“Yes,” the prior spat. “And if she’s the one who brought this upon us, I say let her burn!”

“Enough!” Dónall grabbed the prior by his habit and hurled him off the dock. Arms flailing, the fat man splashed into the Cher. His golden relics, visible for an instant in the brown water, sunk beneath the river’s depths.

“We’re taking your ferry,” Dónall told the prior’s two stunned companions.

“We’re going
there
?” Ciarán moaned, glancing at the burning village.

“You heard him,” Dónall replied sternly. “Heresy? A devil’s tome? And once more, Adémar of Blois is in the middle of it. I’ll be dammed before I let another innocent die for his misbegotten cause.”

Ciarán did not argue. Neither did Remi, who was already in the ferry, ready to go. A mad smile spread across his face.

“And so came Death!” he crowed. “And hell followed with him!”

The acrid smell of burning thatch wafted across the river, and Ciarán thought back on Derry. The clash with the bishop’s men flashed vividly in his mind, as did the faces of his brothers as they died one by one: Senach and Áed, Murchad and Fintan, and Niall falling to the bishop’s sword—all amid the smoke and fire raging from the haystacks. As Ciarán poled the ferry across the Cher, he could not help but feel that he was heading straight back to the horror that had befallen them back home. The odds once again would be vastly against them. They were but three, yet these attackers must number three score or more.
And monks are not warriors,
he reminded himself.

He glanced at his companions. The wild look had returned to Remi’s eyes. Dónall sat deep in thought, just staring at the village ahead. Ciarán prayed that his old mentor was working on a plan, for if not, they were about to die for a cause that Ciarán was not even sure he believed in.

Nearing the dock on the river’s southern bank, he could see the mail-clad riders gathering near the limestone abbey—twenty or thirty men in all. Ciarán began to whisper a Psalm. “
Deliver me from my enemies, O God
. . .” He stopped in mid verse, for Niall’s battle cry rang out in his mind.
Columcille!
An Irish cry, a call for courage.

And Ciarán prayed that God would grant him a double measure of courage when they reached the riverbank.

*

Outside the abbey, the bishop’s men bound Alais to a wooden stake they had driven into the ground and surrounded with a bed of kindling. They tied her hands behind her back, around the stake, then bound her by her waist and neck and, finally the ankles.

Bishop Adémar watched with a thin smile. A score of horsemen had gathered around, many having dismounted and moved closer to watch the grisly spectacle. Behind them, a group of black-robed monks cowered, though they, too, looked on intently.

Between her pleas to the bishop’s men, Alais thought of Saint Radegonde, but no saint was on hand to save her now. Her thoughts drifted to Geoffrey.
My love,
she prayed silently with what courage as she could muster,
soon—I will be there soon.

If thoughts of Geoffrey brought her peace, it dissolved into panic when the Franks started slinging pitch from a bucket onto the kindling. The harsh-smelling tar stung her nose. A second Frank used a straw broom to brush more of it onto her dress.

“The more pitch,” he said, “the faster the heretic burns.”

Everywhere she looked, there were men: soldiers and the craven monks who had done nothing in her defense, but no villagers. With luck, they had fled, she thought briefly before her heart began to race again.

From the ranks of the Frankish horsemen strode the bearded man who had led the charge into Selles, a man whom Alais had grown to fear by reputation alone: Fulk the Black, count of Anjou. He stood half a head taller than most of his men, and broader chested. He looked her up and down with the clear blue eyes of a man not yet thirty years old. Those eyes were dangerous and lustful and arrogant. She had seen eyes like that before, in her late uncle, William Iron-Arm. They were the eyes of a warrior. But Fulk’s eyes also held another quality: a mercilessness that her uncle had never possessed. Looking her up and down, he gave a lecherous grin.

“Be careful, my lord,” Bishop Adémar warned. “For she is a temptress.”

Undeterred, Fulk brought his face so close to hers that she could smell the sweat on him. “You’re a pretty thing, aren’t you?” he whispered, fondling one of her breasts.

Turning her face from his, she felt his fingers at the base of her neck, followed by a violent jerk and the tearing of cloth. The front of her dress flapped free. Between her bare breasts dangled Geoffrey’s key—the cross with a loop.

“See!” the bishop cried, pointing to the pendant. “A sign of the devil! She’s an enchantress, a sorceress—a witch! She can cast her spell on men and make them do things against their will!”

Fulk backed away, his gaze fixed on the symbol hanging between her breasts, and for the briefest moment, she saw a hint of fear in his eyes. Fulk tore his gaze from the pendant and turned to the bishop.

“Then I swear by the souls of God, the devil’s whore will burn.”

“God will be most pleased,” Bishop Adémar replied.

Fulk turned to his men. “Light the torches!”

Alais gasped when fire crackled from the first torch. The Frank waved his firebrand just inches from her face, and the searing heat bathed her cheek and singed her hair before he dropped the torch onto the kindling. Two more Franks followed suit, and flames sprang up from the pitch-soaked straw. A baking heat reached her toes, then her feet and ankles. Her body shook with ragged sobs as the flames crackled and flared.

Tears streaming from her eyes, Alais looked to the heavens for angels coming to take her from this world, but she saw something else. Ghostly blue flames wreathed the rooftops of the abbey and the tops of the trees, spreading from the direction of the river. All around her, the air sizzled.

And from the banks of the Cher, three odd-looking monks charged up the hill, screaming a battle cry at the top of their lungs.