Enoch's Device (38 page)

“But you’re hurt,” Ciarán pleaded.

Orionde’s eyes were barely open. “The journey begins and ends with sacrifice,” she said. “This is the way it has always been.”

“Is it over?” he asked her.

The Fae shook her head. “Now the prophecy’s focus turns to the journey ahead.”

“But . . . how will I know where to go?”

“Trust in everything you have learned,” Orionde said, her voice weakening, “and in time, you shall find your way.” As her words trailed off, the mist grew thick, like a dense, pale smoke filling the gaps between the trees, until she and the fallen Nephilim faded from view.

Ciarán lifted the sword from the ground. A flash of white fire still burned within the gem in the pommel. Lightning flashed overhead with a loud crack, and a raindrop brushed his cheek. A second drop splashed onto his hand. Ciarán looked where the drop had fallen, and his eyes grew wide.

For the rain was as red as blood.

“What’s happening?” Alais asked fearfully.

As the rain began a steady fall, staining the grass, Ciarán watched it in awe, recalling the scripture clearly. “
The first angel blew his trumpet,
” he recited, “
and there came hail and fire, mixed with blood, and they were hurled to the earth.
”

The color drained from Alais’ face. “Did we fail?”

Ciarán shook his head. “No,” he said. “I think it’s meant to be this way. The cycle has begun, but we’ve won the first battle. And we still have time to end it.”

Brushing the red rain from her eyes, Alais reached for Ciarán’s hand, and together they walked into the open field, watching the rain form crimson pools across the uneven ground. Ciarán wondered about Dónall, and Isaac and Khalil. What Una had asked of them was madness. The Dragon had not come, but had that victory cost them their lives?

The red rain poured down as if the sky wept blood for Orionde and all those who had fallen today, both in this world and in the Other. Then the pounding of hooves to Ciarán’s right snapped him alert. Five horsemen rode furiously toward them, one of them bearing the blue banner of Anjou. Another, larger than the rest, wore a familiar black beard, now slick with red rain, and the bloodstained armor of an Angevin noble. Fulk the Black waved his sword, while a crazed look burned in his eyes.

Ciarán stepped defiantly between her and the horsemen, ready to do whatever he must to protect her. He held the sword above his head, and white fire flared from the stone in the pommel, gleaming upward to the tip of the blade. Heat surged through his limbs, and an Irish cry rang from his throat:

“Columcille!”

Fulk stared in horror, and his lips opened in a terrified scream, as if Ciarán, brandishing a blazing sword in the bloody rain, were the Angel of Death, conjured from the Apocalypse of John and made flesh.

Fulk wheeled his mount, unable to look at the apparition that challenged him. His panicked riders also turned and fled, and as the five riders retreated toward Castle Brosse, Ciarán’s heart began to calm.

Alais embraced him again, and they strode unmolested across the battlefield, heading west. In the distance, a crimson banner flew from a cluster of retreating men. “That’s William’s banner,” Ciarán observed.

“Then he lives,” Alais said with a grateful sigh.

As the red rain continued to fall around them, another figure approached on foot from the forest. Ciarán wiped the rain from his eyes, and his heart warmed at the sight of Khalil’s exhausted face. The grim look on the Persian’s face said it all: Dónall and Isaac were dead—two more lives given for the cause.

Ciarán strode toward Khalil, and the two embraced. “I figured you were dead,” Ciarán said.

Khalil shook his head and gave a faint smile. “Thank Allah that I am a hard man to kill.”

Alais kissed his cheek. “Thank God indeed.”

Khalil told them of Dónall and Isaac’s heroic final act. The Dragon never did rise from the death pit, and Lucien and all his sorcerers were dead—Khalil had seen to that before the surviving Fae arrived and opened a gateway allowing him to leave the Otherworld. Ciarán choked up at the loss of the man who had been a father to him since childhood. But the tale of Dónall’s bravery made him proud. He found himself grateful that he had not betrayed Dónall’s faith, and confident that Dónall’s courage would live within him until his own dying day.

“Where do we go now?” Khalil asked.

“We’ll find our way,” Ciarán said, “just as Dónall would have done. But you don’t have to go. The rest of your life is free.”

Khalil clapped Ciarán’s shoulder. “Like Fierabras and Maugis, we are brothers now. You have my word—and my sword.”

Grateful tears welled in Ciarán’s eyes. He slid the weapon into its scabbard and nodded to his brother in arms, then took Alais’ hand and pulled her by his side.

“I know this,” he said as the red rain fell. “Whether it’s fate or the choices we’ve made, together we have hope.”

HISTORICAL NOTE

O
bviously, this novel is a
blend of history and myth, but there may be “truth behind those old myths,” as Dónall would say.

One event that is both history and myth is the rain of blood around the year 1000 in Aquitaine and elsewhere in France. Reports exist from the early eleventh century of a blood rain that “fell upon the clothes of many men, and so stained them with gore that they shuddered at the sight of their own garments and tore them off.” Fulbert of Chartres wrote that account in a letter to King Robert of France, after the worried king received a report from Duke William V about a rain of blood that fell in Aquitaine. Scientists today believe that historical reports of blood rain may have been due to dust containing iron oxide, or the presence of microorganisms in the rainwater, but back in the Middle Ages many perceived this event as a sign of the end times. The blood rain joins numerous other portents identified around the year 1000, including reports of meteors over England and Germany, earthquakes in Saxony, and an eruption of Mount Vesuvius, all which fueled millennial fears in Christian Europe. The extent of these fears that the world would end one thousand years after either the birth of Christ or his crucifixion is still debated by historians, but such fears undoubtedly were inflamed by the words of Revelation 20:7: “When the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison . . .” For its part, the late tenth century provided enough war, famine, and plague to make even the most reasonable people wonder whether the Four Horsemen of the apocalypse were indeed charging across Europe, or whether the armies of Gog and Magog, in the guise of the Vikings, Magyars, and Moors, had been sent by the devil to wage war against Christendom. Historical accounts of these apocalyptic fears became the backdrop for
Enoch’s Device,
although the blood rain comes several years early because it’s convenient to the story.

The novel features a number of real historical events and characters, yet a certain degree of artistic license figures in their presentation. Around the year 998, Duke William V of Aquitaine, later known as William the Great, led an army against the castle of Brosse, held by Guy of Limoges, an ally of Count Fulk the Black of Anjou. While there is no evidence that Fulk participated in the battle, it did end badly for William, whose forces were tricked into besieging the castle and then soundly defeated in the open field. William would go on to earn a reputation for piety within the Roman Church, but only after he and his own ally, King Robert of France, suffered a number of military defeats against forces aligned with the aptly named Fulk the Black. Known for his ferocious temper and extreme cruelty, Fulk was a man untroubled by violence or murder, willing to ravage the lands of any who opposed his will. Yet Fulk also had an enduring fear of hell, which led him to perform numerous acts of penance throughout his life. Still, his fears of the afterlife did not prevent him from having his wife, Elisabeth de Vendome, burned at the stake—in her wedding dress, no less— in December 999, after suspecting her of adultery. Fulk the Black seemed like the perfect ally for Adémar of Blois, who is an entirely fictional character. In fact, Blois did not become a bishopric until 1697, but it seemed a better idea to move this up seven centuries and create my own bishop rather than besmirch the name of some real French bishop who lived a thousand years ago.

If France in 998 was plagued by a weak king and warring magnates, the southern realm of Al-Andalus was ruled by a single man with an iron fist. Muhammad Ibn Abi Amir, known to the world as Al-Mansor, was the self-proclaimed “noble king” of the Moors. He rose to power after the death of the great caliph Al-Hakkam II, by murdering his rivals, including the vizier of Córdoba and the general of the Moorish army. Al-Mansor accomplished this coup with the aid of his lover, Subh, Al-Hakkam’s beautiful and most favored wife, all the while keeping Al-Hakkam’s son, the new caliph, sequestered in the palace city of Medinat al-Zahra. During Al-Mansor’s reign, Córdoba was the most spectacular city in Western Europe—a shining jewel of learning, tolerance, and prosperity, many times larger and far more sophisticated than any other city west of Constantinople. As proof, the great library of Al-Hakkam alone contained hundreds of thousands of books at a time when the largest library in France might hold fewer than four or five thousand volumes. The infamous burning of books depicted in the novel was ordered by Al-Mansor to appease some of the more fundamentalist imams and suppress dissent by free-thinking scholars. Many historians consider this the most terrible act of Al-Mansor’s reign.

Of the two books featured most prominently in the novel, one is completely real, the other based entirely on legend. The Book of Enoch is an ancient Jewish text, which indeed elaborates on the cryptic verse from Genesis 6:4: “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterwards—when the sons of God went into the daughters of men.” While scholars disagree about when the book was actually written (with some putting it at ca. 300 B.C.), the book is cited in the New Testament Letter of Jude and the First Letter of Peter, and copies of it were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The book was clearly known to first-century Jews and Christians but was considered apocryphal by St. Augustine, among others, and disappeared for more than a thousand years. By the tenth century, the Book of Enoch would have been considered a lost work of scripture, only to be rediscovered centuries later, in 1773, by the Scottish explorer James Bruce during his travels in Abyssinia (Ethiopia).

The Book of Maugis d’Aygremont finds its origins in the legends surrounding Charlemagne. Maugis is considered one of Charlemagne’s twelve paladins, or peers, although there is no evidence from the eighth or ninth centuries that he actually existed. The first reference to Maugis appears to come from French
chansons de geste
in the late twelfth century. Maugis becomes a prominent character in Renaissance epics about the paladins of Charlemagne, in which he is depicted as both a belted knight and a magician known for using a book of spells. This inspired the Book of Maugis featured in the novel. It is portrayed as containing the secrets of the Fae based on another medieval legend associated with Maugis: his tutelage in the magical arts at the hands of Orionde le Fae, who supposedly lived in the tower of Rosefleur with a sisterhood of faeries.

If a copy of the Book of Maugis were to be kept anywhere in Europe, the Cathedral School of Reims would have been a likely hiding place. By the late tenth century, Reims had become the intellectual center of Western Christendom—an oasis for scholars amid the violence of medieval Europe. The scholars of Reims treasured the classic works of Aristotle, Cicero, and Virgil, while others, such as the monks of Cluny, deemed these pre-Christian works poisonous and corrupting. The school’s most famous member was Gerbert of Aurillac, an ambitious monk who had studied in Barcelona and brought knowledge of Arabic medicine, mathematics, and astronomy to Reims. Gerbert was ahead of his time, believing that the earth was round, creating both an armillary sphere and an abacus, and using sighting tubes to observe the stars. He is precisely the type of man Dónall and Thomas would have been drawn to while studying at Reims.

As Gerbert’s fame grew, rumors spread that he was a sorcerer who had sold his soul to the devil. Some even had him associating with a brotherhood of evil magicians, including fellow monks, while others told of a secret book of spells that held all Gerbert’s magical knowledge. These rumors would follow Gerbert throughout his life, but they did not impede his ambition or success as he became a counselor to French and German kings and rose up the clerical ranks from monk to abbot, to bishop, to pope. As Pope Sylvester II, Gerbert celebrated mass on New Year’s Eve of 999, when thousands gathered in Rome at the basilica of Saint Peter, weeping, praying, and wondering whether the end times would arrive at the stroke of midnight. So, it would seem, Gerbert of Aurillac still has a role to play in this drama, as Ciarán mac Tomás, Alais of Poitiers, and Khalil al-Pârsâ race to fulfill the Arcanian Prophecy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joseph Finley is a writer of historical fantasy fiction. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with his wife, daughter, and two rescue dogs. He also posts regularly at Fresh-scraped Vellum (
fresh-scrapedvellum.blogspot.com
), a blog devoted to historical and fantasy fiction. God saw fit to make him Irish, at least in part, so he comes honestly by his fondness for the Irish and their medieval monks.
Enoch’s Device
is his debut novel.

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