Enoch's Device (3 page)

N
iall looked to Ciarán for
an answer. “Do you think this Brother Remi knew the bishop was coming?”

Ciarán glanced around the scriptorium to confirm that they were still alone. “Why else would someone go to such lengths to hide a warning?” He pondered his own question. “But this can’t be all there is to it.” He searched for more hidden words in the illumination’s every tiny detail—the feathers of the angels’ wings, the patterns in their garments, the flames surrounding Saint Michael’s sword, the stars the dragon swept from the sky—but found nothing.

“There are a lot of pictures left in this book,” Niall pointed out.

“True . . .” Ciarán leafed through the pages until he found the illumination of the demons crawling out from the pit. The ghastly creatures, the billowing smoke, and the terrified monks were every bit as intricately wrought as the war in heaven, but he saw only the strokes of the artist’s brush. “There’s nothing in this one.”

“Go forward a bit,” Niall said.

Ciarán turned the pages. In one illumination, a seven-headed beast emerged from a boiling sea. Each of the beast’s heads resembled the dragon’s, and its body was like a leopard’s, yellow with clumped black spots. On the adjacent page, another illumination portrayed a horned priest with black venom dripping from his mouth. Still Ciarán found nothing hidden in the pictures. He thumbed through more pages. Even those without pictures had illuminated margins positively acrawl with vines or ribbons, tiny cherubs, animals of all kinds, and beasts from myth and legend: a unicorn, a cockatrice, and every manner of imp and devil. Ciarán sighed. “Whoever wrote the warning couldn’t have expected Dónall to pore over the entire book.”

“Do you have another solution?”

“The bookmark was a clue to the first words. What about the rest?” Quickly he paged back to the war in heaven, this time focusing on the verse that accompanied the painting:
Michael and the angels fought against the dragon . . .

The illumination depicted it aptly: Saint Michael defying the dragon, the angels stabbing it with spears.

The great dragon was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.

“All the images fit the verse,” Ciarán said. Except for one, in the bottom right corner: the white horse with the flowing mane. “Everything but this horse.”

Niall cocked his head. “What has a horse to do with the apocalypse?”

“Of course!” Ciarán said. He flipped toward the front of the book, searching through lines of Carolingian script for the verse. He found it in the chapter on the seven seals and read it aloud:

Then I saw the Lamb open one of the seven seals, and I heard one of the four living creatures call out, as with a voice of thunder, ‘Come!’ I looked, and there was a white horse! Its rider had a bow; a crown given to him, and he came to conquer.

“One of the Four Horsemen of the apocalypse,” Ciarán said. Unlike so many others, this page did not bear the image of horses or riders—only a thorny vine that snaked across the margins. “The Four Horsemen are one of the most notorious images of the end times, yet the artist omitted it here, instead putting it out of place in the illumination of the war in heaven.” Anticipation mounted as Ciarán read the next verse.

When he opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature call out, “Come!” And out came another horse, bright red; its rider was permitted to take peace from the earth, so that people would slaughter one another, and he was given a great sword.

“We have to find the red horse!” Hurriedly Ciarán skimmed through the pages.

“Stop,” Niall said. “Look.” A charging red stallion decorated the left-hand corner of a page otherwise covered with script. The adjacent page, however, displayed another illumination of the dragon. Thick chains were coiled about the dragon’s red-scaled torso, and angels tugged at the chains, pulling it toward a bronze tower with a massive door, which one of the angels unlocked with a golden key. Intricate details filled the rest of the painting: a curtain of stars above a hill blanketed with green grass and violet flowers, all of which swirled into flowing patterns that washed against the landscape like a tumbling sea. And that was where Ciarán looked.

“More letters,” he said, pointing to a “P” hidden within the color-flecked grass, followed by seven more letters, then two more hidden words. Together they completed another phrase:
PROPHECY HAS BEGUN.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Niall asked.

“Who knows. We have to find the next horse.” Ciarán returned to the passage on the Four Horsemen and read the remaining verses. They spoke of two more broken seals and two more horses, one black and one pale green. They needed a black horse.

Ciarán found it near the back of the book, as part of another sprawling illumination. Like the painting of the war in heaven, this one consumed two entire pages and depicted the seven bowls of wrath, poured by seven winged angels. From the first bowl flowed a black liquid, which fell onto a small island with two penitent monks whose faces were disfigured by pox. The next two angels poured blood into a churning sea around the island, where the lines of the waves cascaded into chaotic designs. From the fourth bowl rained fire, from the fifth billowing smoke, and from the sixth spilled a swarm of green frogs. From the last angel’s bowl, lightning arced into the blood sea. And there in the bottom right corner, a black horse galloped down the margin of the page.

Ciarán started with the blood sea, whose lines of churning waves reminded him of the grass on the meadowed hillside. Sure enough, he found seven hidden letters forming the first word. He spelled it aloud: “
N-I-C-O-L-A-S.
”

“Who’s Nicolas?” Niall wondered.

Ciarán shook his head. There was no Nicolas at Derry. As he let his eyes drift out of focus, more letters, and then a question mark, stood out from their camouflage of billowing smoke swirls. Added to the first word, it formed a troubling question. He detected the third word in the chaotic sea, right where the lightning struck from the seventh bowl. The word made the phrase more ominous yet:
NICOLAS CAPTURED? KILLED?

Niall scratched the stubble of his chin. “Do you think the author believes this will happen to Dónall?”

“I don’t know,” Ciarán said. He ran his fingers through the hair that ringed his tonsured pate. “Let’s find that green horse.”

A few pages past the bowls of wrath, there it was: a gaunt horse painted in pale green, bucking in the margin of a frightening illumination that covered half a page. The scene depicted a monstrous beast covered in olive and brown scales, its mouth agape. The beast bore a single gigantic eye, its iris wreathed in flame. Yellowed fangs jutted from the beast’s maw, into which a mass of humanity spilled from the wreckage of a burning city. And yet, as terrifying as the image was, the details were exquisite. Among the victims were kings and bishops and women, some clothed in rich robes, others naked and screaming. Scattered among them were red-hued devils and bestial horned and furred men wielding whips. A beard of flowing hair adorned the chin of the gigantic beast, each hair a serpent with its own terrible eye and fearsome fangs.

Ciarán combed through the painting. “There’s a word hidden in the beast’s mane.
F-E-A-R.
” The furry hide of one of the beast-men concealed a second word. “
F . . . O . . . R,
” Ciarán breathed. He searched for more letters, first in the red and yellow flames that engulfed the city, then in the shapes that decorated the robes of the beast’s wellborn victims, and finally in the scales of the beast. He found nothing more. He ran his fingers over his face. “Fear for
what
?” he muttered aloud. He scoured the image again, and then looked up at Niall. “What’s left?”

Niall’s face had gone pale. “You missed it.” He pointed to the first letter, formed by the dark spaces between the victims falling into the beast’s mouth. The gaps between the dying people shaped each succeeding letter. Ciarán stared in disbelief at the completed phrase:

FEAR FOR CIARÁN

“How is this possible?” Niall asked. But Ciarán barely heard him. For next to the warning, the image of the pale horse stood like an exclamation mark. A shiver crawled over his skin as he remembered the Horsemen’s final verse:

When he opened the fourth seal, I looked and there was a pale green horse! Its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed with him.

C
iarán left the scriptorium in
a daze. “What has any of this to do with me?”

Niall shook his head. “I don’t get it. A prophecy? Someone named Nicolas? Did Dónall ever mention a Nicolas or a Nick?”

“No,” Ciarán said. “But the warning suggests
I’m
in danger. And now here is this bishop, who somehow knows who I am.”

At the sound of honking, Niall glanced up as a chevron of geese glided above them. “You know, there were always those old rumors that Dónall was your father. Maybe they figure they can get to him by threatening his son.”

“But Dónall’s not my father,” Ciarán insisted.

“
They
don’t know that,” Niall said. “But I’ll tell you what: if we chase these bastards from our shore, then no one’s gonna be in any danger.”

As they walked up the green hillside, past the cluster of cells belonging to the senior monks, Ciarán began to wonder if his friend might be right. All the cells were round, hive-shaped huts of corbelled stone flecked with moss and lichens, and many had been patched with so much peat and mud, they looked like little hillocks.

“Aw, hell,” Niall said when the door to one particularly moss-laden cell flung open and Father Gauzlin emerged, yelling at a Frank who followed him.

“Have you looked everywhere?” the priest snapped in Latin.

“Yes,” the Frank insisted. “And we’ve searched this one twice now. It’s not here.”

“It must be! The Irishman couldn’t have had it when he fled.” The priest gritted his teeth. “Shall you be the one to tell the bishop it’s gone?”

The Frank didn’t respond but nodded in the direction of Niall and Ciarán, standing some twenty paces away. Father Gauzlin glared at them. “Move on, you!” he cried.

Niall balled his fist. “How I’d love to beat the sneer off that sneaking stoat’s face!”

Ciarán grabbed Niall’s arm and nodded toward the mailed Frank with the broadsword hanging at his side. “Not now,” he said, nudging him toward their own cell across the monastery. When they were out of earshot, Ciarán turned to Niall. “That was Dónall’s cell.”

Niall glanced back to make sure they weren’t being followed. “What do you think they were looking for?”

“I’ve no idea,” Ciarán replied. “But I think tonight we should try to find out.”

*

Ciarán and Niall waited a full hour after Vespers, certain that all would be quiet in Derry until the midnight bell signaled the holy office of Nocturn. The monks prayed at these offices seven times each day—four times before dusk and three times before dawn—which made for a fairly regimented life. And a predictable one, too, for now everyone in the monastery should be asleep.

Ciarán lit one of the tallow candles that the monks used upon waking each night to go to the oratory for Nocturns and Matins. “Do you think that’s a good idea?” Niall asked, drawing his cowl over his head. “You could see that candlelight from the riverbank.”

Ciarán pulled on his own cowl. “How else are we supposed to see what’s inside Dónall’s cell?”

“You’re the one always wanting to be so cautious,” Niall said with a shrug, and stepped outside. Ciarán followed him into the night air, where a half-moon pierced the haze of fading clouds. A biting wind soughed through Derry, so that Ciarán had to cup a hand to windward of the candle’s flame to keep it lit. Around them, the monks’ cells stood quiet.

They padded across the dew-damp grass toward the senior monks’ cells, until Niall stopped abruptly at the first one. “Look,” he whispered.

Outside Dónall’s cell sat an armored Frank, half-asleep, slouched against the cell’s stone wall, while near the door stood another, arms crossed, watching alertly.

“They’re afraid Dónall might come back for whatever they’re searching for,” Ciarán said. “So what do we do now?”

A familiar look of mischief sparkled in Niall’s eyes, and a devilish grin spread across his face. He reached down for some palm-size stones. “You’ll hide for a moment, and then you’ll find out what’s inside that cell.”

Ciarán stared wide-eyed at the stones in Niall’s hand. “Where are you going?”

“Don’t worry about me,” Niall said with a wink. “I’ll meet you back home.”

Stepping out from behind the cell, Niall hurled the first stone. It struck the standing Frank’s helmet with an audible clang. The Frank jumped, fumbling for his blade, as a second stone pegged the half-asleep Frank in the cheek. With a yowl of pain and outrage, the second Frank put his hand to his face and scrambled to his feet.

“Columcille!” Niall yelled defiantly, darting from behind the cell and sprinting toward the oratory. The enraged Franks lumbered after him as fast as they could in their heavy mail.

The beauty of the diversion was not lost on Ciarán. Niall could run like a hare, and he knew every stone and footpath of the monastery by heart. To these Franks, though, it must seem a maddening maze of hovels and sheds, thrown together without any semblance of a plan.

Ciarán waited until the clanking and muttered oaths of Niall’s pursuers grew faint, and then scurried to Dónall’s cell and ducked inside, where the pungent bouquet of dried herbs filled his nostrils. Dónall’s wooden cupboard, which held his collection of medicines, had been torn from the wall and smashed. Ciarán closed the door. His heart sank at the sight of the devastation. The shards of earthenware flasks and mortars were strewn across the floor, amid the bundles of dried laurel, mint, mugwort, juniper berries, hops, and chamomile, all crushed to useless debris under the searchers’ boots. A leather book satchel, ripped open at the seams, sat crumpled against a wall, and the two books Dónall kept in his cell—Pliny’s
Natural History
and a tome on Arabic medicine—had been flung to the floor. Even Dónall’s straw pallet had been torn apart, its remnants scattered across the room. Amid the tatters, a goose quill pen lay crumpled on the hand-spun wool rug, now ruined by a smashed pot of ink and ground-in herbs.

What were they looking for? At first, it occurred to Ciarán that these ignorant Franks might have viewed Dónall’s medical texts and cache of herbs as evidence of witchcraft, but if so, why destroy them instead of confiscating them as evidence for a trial? No, they were searching for something else. So if Dónall needed to hide something, where would he put it?

The candlelight reflected off the only artwork in the cell: a cross with a ring surrounding its intersection, made of tiles cemented into the corbelled stone wall above where Dónall’s pallet once lay. Most would recognize the symbol as a Celtic cross, introduced by Saint Patrick when he brought the Christian faith to Ireland. But Ciarán also knew of its second meaning, one that Dónall was particularly fond of. For it was an emblem of Ireland’s pagan past—the symbol of the Tuatha Dé Danann, who ruled Ireland and built the ringforts of Aileach and Brú na Bóinne long before the coming of the Gaelic Celts. They were the mythical Fae folk of Ireland, and as Dónall often said,
“There’s truth behind those old myths.”

“Of course!” Ciarán whispered. The answer was right before his eyes. To see it, one had to know Dónall and his love for Irish legends. Maybe that was why the Franks had found nothing: they lacked that knowledge of the Irish and their corbelled stones.

Ciarán began feeling around the wheel cross—for that was the symbol’s original name—searching for a loose stone. Sure enough, there beneath the foot of the cross, he found one that wiggled slightly. Corbelled stones, fitted together without mortar, were like a puzzle. And if one found the keystone, the puzzle could come apart and the stones be removed. Ciarán knew that his tinkering would not threaten the structural integrity of the cell, for the walls were as thick as a man’s arm was long. But under these finely jointed stones, one could hide things, just as the Tuatha Dé Danann had—which was precisely how Ciarán knew where to look. For when the Gaelic Celts defeated them, the Tuatha Dé Danann became known as the Sidhe, and according to legend, they hid beneath their hill forts and stashed their treasure under the stones.

Using his fingertips, Ciarán winkled out the first stone beneath the cross . . . and stared into blackness. The space beyond was hollow! He found the next loose stone beside the first and carefully slid it from the wall. Then, stone by stone, he lifted out the interlocking pieces to reveal an opening the size of a bread basket. He lowered the candle, and its flickering light caught a glint of metal. Reaching in, he felt leather and the weight of steel. He pulled it from the hollow cavity, and his eyes grew wide, for he found himself gripping the hilt of a short sword. The candlelight gleamed down the length of the blade, which was shaped like a leaf: wide in the center and narrowing toward the tip and the hilt.

Why would a monk need a sword? he wondered.

He set down the sword and peered back into the hollow space. Something else was down there—wide and thick and made of leather. It looked like the book satchel that the Franks had destroyed. Setting the candle on the stone shelf where Dónall’s cupboard once stood, he drew the satchel from its hiding space and was surprised at its weight.

Carefully, he unlatched the satchel and removed its contents. It was a wedge-shaped book, thicker at the spine and closed at the narrow edge by a leather strap and metal clasp.

The dark leather cover had featherlike patterns pressed into its surface, but it was the image dominating the cover’s center that captured Ciarán’s attention. Cross-shaped with a looped head, the symbol was a
crux ansata
—a cross with a handle. But he had seen the symbol elsewhere, too, in the margins of Greek texts, where it had a very different meaning. Egyptian in origin, it was called an ankh, a symbol of life—or was it death?

He studied the closed tome. The vellum looked old and weathered. He ran his thumb across its edges. The pages were dry and cracked, leaving a hint of dust on his thumb. This book was at least a century old.

An unexpected anxiety welled up in him as he unfixed the clasp and opened the tome. The cover page was unilluminated and bore no title—only a sentence that had been scrawled by hand rather than penned in Carolingian or Irish script:

I, Maugis d’Aygremont, write of the Mysteries that were revealed to me, which cannot die.

Who was this Maugis d’Aygremont? Ciarán wondered. Below the sentence was a verse from scripture, also handwritten:

For when people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair. And they took wives for themselves of all that they chose. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days – and also afterwards – when the sons of God went into the daughters of men, who bore children to them. These were the heroes of old, the warriors of renown.

—Genesis, Chapter VI

“That’s odd,” he said as he began skimming through pages, concerned the Franks might return at any time.

The book appeared to be some sort of journal. The Latin was not in any form of ordered script, and Ciarán struggled to make out some of the characters. It was not the sort of painstaking work done by monks. Like the cover page, the margins were curiously unilluminated, and the text was dense, with words scrawled in the margins, many of them dangling with no apparent meaning or referent, as if the author had been struck by madness.

The pages that followed contained less text, and a number of drawings. They were not the work of an artist of any merit, but more in the nature of diagrams. There was a picture of a key, and another of a tree with a blackened trunk. A third appeared to be a ring. Scattered among these were other characters—letters perhaps, though not Latin or Greek. These characters appeared to be the only artfully drawn things in the entire book. They were flowing in style, with broad arches and wispy strokes. Some had curling tails; others jutted with crosslike appendages or strange dots that floated like little moons above the body of the character. He wondered if the characters were Egyptian Coptic, or maybe a form of runes like those carved by the Northmen. The characters, or symbols perhaps, were arranged in rows and sometimes divided by strange lines as if grouped into tiny boxes. They filled whole pages, while other pages were entirely blank and others yet were dominated by pictures. A staff, a human skull, and then a sword—one with a leaf-shaped blade. Ciarán glanced at the sword lying on the ground. Its blade looked identical to the one in the picture. A feeling of unease knotted in the pit of his stomach.

With growing trepidation, he turned the page. The curls on the symbols now appeared as tiny horns, and the appendages jutting from many of the characters looked like daggers or hooked claws. As he ventured deeper into the tome, the symbols and images grew more ominous. He turned another page . . . and gasped.

An alarming image dominated the vellum: a circle surrounding a seven-pointed star filled with heptagrams and symbols. They filled the outer circle and the spaces within the star. And there was something threatening in their arrangement. Were they glyphs or sigils—or some form of sorcerers’ script adorning a witch’s circle?

The bishop’s accusation flooded Ciarán’s mind. According to him, Dónall and eleven other monks had practiced sorcery with a forbidden book of spells!

Ciarán gazed in horror at the sword.
And they had murdered a canon to conceal their heresy!

He shoved the book and satchel back into their hiding place and dropped the sword in after it. Fumbling with the stones, he replaced them as quickly as he could and then staggered to his feet. Glancing once more to make sure the wall was sealed, he snatched up the candle and fled from Dónall’s cell.