Enoch's Device (27 page)

At the forefront of the clouds, three great thunderheads billowed. As Dónall muttered a curse under his breath, a wave of raw fear washed through Ciarán’s gut.

For here at the edge of the Basque Sea, the demons had found them.

“F
ull sail!” Évrard cried. “We’ll
outrun it!” Crewmen hurried to the riggings. Eli darted toward the rudder.

“No!” Dónall shouted. “If you value your mast, reduce your sail. You’ll not outrun this storm.”

Ciarán rushed to Eli’s side, where the young Jew held the tiller in a panicked grip. The storm surged forward, crossing leagues of water in mere heartbeats. The three storm heads, swelling and growing ever darker, billowed into snakelike shapes, dipping and soaring and pulling the force of the tempest behind them.

“What is that?” Alais cried.

Ciarán grabbed her shoulders. “Trust me, and get in the deckhouse.”

Lightning flashed within the clouds, and a chill wind swept over the ship, whipping the lines and battering the sail. Waves crashed against the hull, making the ship lurch violently. Crewmen fought to keep their feet. Ciarán grabbed for the rail, struggling to stay upright, and reached out for Alais. He caught her hand as frigid water washed ankle-high across the deck.

“Go!” Ciarán told her. Her eyes opened wide at the oncoming storm, but she scrambled for the deckhouse. Amid battering waves, the ship pitched again, the planks of the hull creaking.

Ciarán glanced at Dónall. No longer ashen, his face was that of the man who had unleashed destruction against the Franks at Derry and the Angevins at Selles. “Captain,” Dónall commanded, “help your first mate with the tiller. The rest of you get in the deckhouse or the cargo hold!”

“We’ll need the crew to keep her on course!” Évrard bellowed back through the roar of the wind.

Dónall grabbed Évrard by his tunic. “This is not a natural storm.”

“What do you mean?” Évrard demanded.

Isaac tugged at his arm. “Do as he says, my friend, and pray to your Christian god.” Isaac looked Dónall in the eyes. “But I am staying with you.”

Another wave lapped over the railing. Around them, the wind crescendoed to a deafening howl. Évrard grasped the tiller as his men reduced the sail and battened the hatch to the deckhouse.

The ship rode on the edge of the storm. Dónall steeled his gaze and unsheathed the sword hidden under his habit. “Listen for my command,” he told Ciarán.

Dónall crossed the deck in a deliberate pattern, tracing a shape with the tip of his blade, chanting a hymn in the graceful Fae tongue. Ciarán recognized the pattern at once. A flicker of Saint Elmo’s fire followed the tip of Dónall’s sword like ink from a quill, stretching from bow to stern and starboard to port, until Dónall had traced a seven-pointed star, encircled by the frame of the potbellied ship, faintly glowing with wisps of blue fire.

Eli’s hands shook with fear. “What is he doing?”

“He has a plan,” Ciarán said, praying under his breath that it would work.

The wind shrieked savagely as the clouds loomed over the ship’s stern, billowing thousands of feet high, like a giant gaping mouth threatening to swallow the ship whole.

“Dónall!” Isaac cried. Rigging snapped, and Eli let out a terrified scream.

“Now, Ciarán!” Dónall yelled. “Show them your talisman!”

Ciarán nodded warily and pulled the talisman from his habit. A hint of blue fire flashed across the silver disk. Dónall raised the face of his own talisman into the mouth of the storm.

“Megaera!” he cried, “By the power of the Fae! The angels, your masters! You and your sisters will not harm this ship!”

The massive storm moaned before the cloud crashed down onto the vessel, and in that moment, Ciarán expected the mast to snap. He could not hear his own screams amid the storm’s fierce wailing. Then suddenly, dense fog engulfed them, followed by driving rain. But as the raindrops hit the deck, they sizzled into steam. The symbol across the ship’s deck flared, and the fog began to burn away. Évrard and his crew looked on, awestruck, at the curtain of rain surrounding the ship, none of it reaching the deck. Without warning, walls of water exploded skyward from the sea, drawn toward the boiling storm in three churning spouts that roared with the same fury as the cyclone at Selles-sur-Cher. The three waterspouts, terrifying in their height and breadth, whipped toward the ship.

Then Dónall began to laugh.

Blue flames flicked over the talisman in Ciarán’s hand, and the waterspouts writhed away like snakes fleeing a grass fire. The ship rocked with the waves, but the mast held, and despite the chaos raging around it, the vessel stood becalmed in the eye of the storm.

“Megaera!” Dónall cried. “I defeated you before; I’ve done so again! Tell your masters, we will not be deterred!”

A piercing wail erupted from the storm. The rain around them ceased, and the waterspouts collapsed into the churning sea while thunder exploded above. And as quickly as the winds blew in, they died. The sea grew calm, and the storm billowed backward, as if some inexorable force were sucking it toward the horizon, and vanished from sight.

A smile crept across the astounded captain’s face, and Isaac and Eli raised their arms triumphantly. Only Ciarán and Dónall looked at each other warily. For in the core of that thunderclap before the storm dissipated, they both had heard it, a haunting promise shrieked in unison by a trio of voices: “
Revenge.
”

A
lais cowered in the deckhouse
with the panicked crew. A violent gust had torn open one of the wooden hatches, giving her a glimpse of the black cloud crashing down upon the ship, consuming the deck in swirling darkness. She feared that the raging winds would rip the deckhouse apart. Her heart pounded with terror beyond the merely physical, for she sensed in that black cloud a presence that was cold and evil and not of this world.

The ship pitched, followed by a roar of water, as if the sea itself were rising into the sky. But then she heard Dónall crying out to the storm, challenging the very winds. And to her utter astonishment, the sea grew calm, and the storm
retreated!
Whether this was sorcery or some other magic that the Church condemned, she could not say, yet three times now it had saved her life—this time, she knew in her bones, from something wholly unnatural.

She ventured out onto the deck, where the water was steaming away like raindrops off hot paving stones. Dónall and Ciarán looked on triumphantly in their wringing-wet robes. The mast had not snapped, and the sail looked unharmed. Évrard hugged Eli, and Alais smiled with relief. Only Isaac appeared troubled.

“Dónall,” he said, “you have not been candid with us. You owe us an explanation.”

Dónall insisted on waiting until the crew calmed down, for they were giddy with joy. They gathered around Eli, who could not stop chattering about how Dónall had turned away the storm. A few of the sailors crossed themselves or knelt, muttering prayers.

Évrard and Josua demanded the same answers as Isaac. But what the monks finally told them shook Alais to her soul. “The storm was the work of demons,” Dónall said bluntly, “summoned by sorcerers who wear the robes of the monks of Saint-Bastian’s.”

Alais shuddered. Could it be true? Beside her, Évrard and Josua had turned pale, though Isaac’s expression remained unchanged.

“I, too, sensed the perversion in the air,” Isaac said. “The Song of Moses warns of demons. In Hebrew, they are called
mazzikin
and
ruhin—
bringers of storms. Do you think they seek the Urim?”

“They want to keep us from finding it,” Dónall said grimly.

Puzzled, Alais glanced at each of them. “What is the Urim?”

“A gemstone,” Ciarán explained. “But you’ve heard us call it by another name, I think: ‘Enoch’s device.’”

“The thing mentioned in my husband’s scroll? But . . . why should they want to stop you from finding it?”

They told her about the prophecy. “It was discovered by a king of long-lost Atlantis,” Dónall began. “A prophecy embedded in the twelve constellations of the zodiac.” She had heard about Atlantis in the songs of the jongleurs who performed in the palace when she was child, but she knew little of the constellations that so fascinated the astrologers. Then Dónall’s expression turned gravely serious. “The prophecy speaks of the apocalypse—a conflict waged every thousand years to determine whether the end times will follow.”

Alais ran her fingers nervously through her hair.
“The Four Horsemen of the apocalypse now rode these lands,”
Prior Ragno had said. A chill ran through her veins.

“But the prophecy tells how to prevent the end times,” Ciarán added. “To survive the first conflict, a champion of men must wield a weapon against the enemy. That weapon is Enoch’s device.”

His words struck like lightning. She remembered what the monks had said on Christmas Day, about a champion’s bloodline, the line of Charlemagne. But surely they did not think
she
was this champion. For while some infinitesimal fraction of Charlemagne’s blood may course through her veins, she was no hero—she felt as certain of that as of her own name.

Isaac remained silent during the monks’ explanation. Finally, he spoke. “Astrology is no secret to our mystics,” he said. “When you first mentioned this prophecy, I did not think much of it. So many Christians obsess about the end of the world. But now, with the emergence of these
ruhin
. . .”

“Even worse,” Ciarán said, “we’re running out of time.”

“What do you mean?” Isaac asked.

“One of our murdered friends, Brother Remi, believed that the first conflict will come when Mars passes between Scorpio and Sagittarius, on the fifth of March, just seven weeks from now.”

Isaac sighed. “This is much to ponder. I would like to see the reference to this prophecy in Maugis’ book.” Ciarán glanced at Dónall, who nodded. Évrard and Josua slumped against the ship’s railing. Their faces betrayed what Alais felt: overwhelm. She rubbed her fingers over her eyes. Had Geoffrey believed in this prophecy? Was this why he and his ancestors had protected the scroll?

Soon, they retired to the deckhouse. She lay next to Ciarán but tossed fitfully. Her thoughts drifted across a field of wheat, to a vision of a woman in white. The woman’s face was beautiful, ageless. Alais recalled her haunting command.

Choose.

And Alais had chosen. She chose Geoffrey—and, with him, the secret that set her on this voyage. As she drifted off to sleep, she wondered, had the woman in white had been the hand of fate, reaching out to her?

*

The next morning, Isaac emerged from the deckhouse looking pale and shaken. Dónall glanced at Ciarán, clearly concerned.

“He’s still troubled by what happened,” Dónall said under his breath.

“Wouldn’t you be?” Ciarán replied. “Especially after what we told them.”

“You are both right,” Isaac interjected. “But there is more. I had another dream.”

New concern gathered in Dónall’s brow. “Like the one about the dragon and the Urim?”

“The dream felt equally as real,” Isaac said, “but this one did not concern the Urim. Instead, I saw Goliath, standing on the battlefield in all his fearsome glory. He was dressed like a Greek warrior and led an army of pale-skinned giants.” The rabbi closed his eyes as he spoke, as if reliving the dream in his mind. “The army marched from great ships with many oars, across a desert plain. I could feel the air, as if I stood there among them. It was not hot like the deserts of the east, but very cold. And then my vision whipped over the barren land, as if I were but a feather blowing in the harsh wind. Across the desert, I saw a woman, beautiful and dressed in white, looking like an angel. Behind her, billowing up in the distance, was a black cloud, like those that pursued our ship last night but far larger and in the form of a great beast with broad wings and a long, craning neck. It was the spirit of the Dragon. I could feel it, like death itself, drawing closer until the blackness enveloped all my sight. And I awoke, shaking with dread.” Isaac opened his eyes. “What does it mean?”

“You dreamt of the Nephilim,” Dónall said. “Perhaps it’s a connection to the demons that attacked us. The Book of Enoch claims that demons are the spirits of slain Nephilim.”

“Goliath was a Nephilim,” Isaac said with a sigh. “Scripture makes clear that many of the giants survived the Deluge. But the message of the dream . . . I agree, it must confirm that the demons who attacked us—these Nephilim spirits—serve the Dragon.”

Dónall’s eyes narrowed. “The book of Revelation states that after a thousand years, when the Dragon is freed from his prison, he will gather the nations of Gog and Magog for battle. Some believe that Gog and Magog were kings among the giants.”

Isaac shook his head. “This is deeply troubling.”

“I know,” Dónall said. “But I can protect us from the demons.” He tapped the talisman around his neck. “And having a few more of these around wouldn’t hurt.”

“You can
make
these?” Isaac asked.

“It’ll take some time, but we may as well get started.”

Ciarán had turned to go with them when he saw Alais standing at the threshold to the deckhouse. Seeing the troubled look on her face, he realized that she had overhead everything.

“I’ve seen a woman in white as well,” Alais said.

“You had a dream?” Ciarán asked.

“No. I
saw
her. This was no dream, though it felt like one. It happened years ago, in a field of wheat. She was like an angel standing on the wind. It was she who told me of my choice, she who brought me to Selles-sur-Cher.”

Ciarán saw the sincerity in her gray eyes. “If you had never been in Selles, you would never have learned your husband’s secret . . .”

“I know,” Alais said. “It’s as if she set me on this path.”

Ciarán could not imagine how her story was connected to Isaac’s dream, yet somehow, it must be.

Alais smiled at him. “Let’s eat something,” she said, “even if it’s only stale bread.”

*

Dónall spent the rest of the day and much of the next crafting seven talismans from silver coins donated by Josua. He gave the first three to Isaac, Josua, and Eli. Confident that the addition of a Hebrew symbol would not weaken their power, he had etched a Star of David in the center of the heptagram that dominated each. The remaining four talismans he gave to Alais, Évrard, and two members of his crew, who were so shaken after the sudden storm that, every night, they redrew the heptagram Dónall had traced across the deck. The talismans and the heptagram seemed to calm the superstitious crew, who had been terrified by the storm yet strangely accepting of its supernatural origins, perhaps because the sea had always held deep mysteries.

Although the seas remained calm in the days that followed, the storm clouds frequently gathered on the horizon, trailing the ship to the Moorish lands, and Évrard and his crew never doubted that the demons were following them. Ciarán sensed this as well, though somehow, Dónall’s magic was keeping the demons at bay. Dónall believed it was the collective power of the Fae words embedded in each silver disk, fueled by the life-bearing essence of the human soul so long as the talisman made contact with its wearers, that was warding off the demons. But he suspected that if the talisman were removed from the wearer’s body, its power would fail. Perhaps that was what the demons were waiting for: a careless moment when the talisman might be removed. But he could do little beyond sharing his theory with everyone who wore them.

*

After crossing the Basque Sea, they rounded Iberia and sailed along the coast of Andalusia for more than a week before reaching the river that wound its way through the land of the Moors. Évrard and his crew navigated the waterway, which the Moors called Guad al-Quivir, or “Great River.” By the second day of February, the crew spied Córdoba, rising above the river’s north bank.

Even from a distance, the city seemed a sprawling marvel of human construction. Its stone walls rose over a sea of sand-colored buildings shaded by date palms. Behind the wall, atop a hill, stood a gigantic structure whose grand spire towered above the city of the Moors like an ornate spear.

“Unbelievable,” Ciarán breathed.

Spanning the river ahead of them was the grandest bridge he had ever seen. A chain of stone archways supported it, each archway tall enough for a small boat to pass beneath, though not a ship the size of Évrard’s cog. At the river’s south bank, scattered buildings emerged from the palms, as if a whole other city existed across the river, and atop the most prominent hill, leagues beyond the urban sprawl, stood a palace with gleaming white walls and a golden dome glistening in the sunlight.

Alais looked on, wide-eyed. “That’s all one city?”

“I told you she was amazing,” Isaac smiled. “They call her the Bride of Andalusia, whose necklace is strung with the pearls of learning.”

Dónall leaned over the rail, agog. “Not even Rome . . . !”

“Not even Poitiers and Paris combined!” Ciarán said. “And throw in Rouen, too!” Indeed, nothing in all Ireland, nor anything he had seen in France, approached Córdoba’s grandeur. The Moors must surely be the most skilled builders in all the world—maybe the most skilled who ever lived.

“How many people live here?” Alais wondered aloud.

“Ten times more than in any city in France,” Évrard said, smiling. “Which, of course, makes for
very
good business.”

*

Évrard guided his ship past fortified water mills to a crowded harbor east of the bridge, where the crew tossed ropes to a gathering of half-clothed men, who pulled the ship to the docks. Eli spoke to these men, whose skin had been bronzed by the sun, in a throaty foreign tongue—Arabic, Ciarán presumed. After the ship was unloaded of its cargo of wine barrels from Bordeaux, Josua led the two wide-eyed Irishmen from the docks up a flight of stairs to the bridge, where they entered the city through a towering archway that, he explained, was one of the city’s seven gates.

Beyond the gateway, Moors bustled through the streets. They were an exotic mix of people, some with skin that gleamed black as ebony, others of a deep bronze hue, and many others of a rich olive color. The men wore robes of striped cloth, or else shirts with flowing sleeves, baggy trousers, and soft boots. Many wore head cloths, while others wore round hats of wrapped silk, which Isaac called turbans. The women dressed in shimmering silks or full-length robes. Many wore veils covering their faces beneath eyes lined with kohl, or head scarves that concealed everything except their eyes, while others wore no veil or scarf and let their beribboned black hair spill down their backs. Many women wore jewelry in their ears, and silver bangles adorning their arms. Others wore anklets of silver above slippers with upswept toes. Ciarán found many of the women stunningly beautiful—Évrard had not exaggerated when he boasted of the city’s feminine treasures.

Ciarán looked in awe at the graceful iron posts and hanging glass lanterns that lined the streets, which were free of mud and dung and paved with brick. But most of all, he noticed the air. “What’s that smell?” he asked.

Isaac laughed. “A lack of refuse.”

“How can that be?”

“It’s carried beneath the streets in something called a
sewer
. It has always amazed me that you Christians never got around to it.”