Enoch's Device (6 page)

A bearded Frank lunged at Dónall, who bellowed another string of strange foreign words like a haunting song. The staff’s tip flared again as it met the bearded Frank’s chest.

“Now who burns?” Dónall growled.

The Frank’s eyes opened wide as the flame raced up his beard as if on dry straw, spread to his hair, and ignited the jerkin beneath his mail coat. A ghastly wailing cry rose from his lips, and his flesh blackened, and in a heartbeat his writhing body erupted into a human bonfire.

Dónall tossed aside the burned-out torch. “My sword, lad!” he called to Ciarán.

As the remaining Franks backed away in terror, Ciarán handed Dónall the leaf-shaped blade. Dónall pointed the sword at the burning man and uttered another foreign verse. At once, the gentle evening breeze howled into a violent wind that fanned the flames, blowing jets of fire toward the remaining Franks. It was as if Dónall were directing the wind with the wave of his leaf-shaped blade. The hair of one Frank caught fire. Another struggled to shed his brown cloak, now covered with licking, hungry flames.

Ciarán watched in dread and awe. The burning Frank had crumpled to the ground and now resembled a Beltane fire on May Day.

The soldiers began to retreat, but the bishop cried out, pointing a long finger at Ciarán. “He has the book!”

Ciarán’s heart skipped a beat, but then he noticed Dónall, who had thrust his burning staff into one of the haystacks—through the wet outer layer and into the dry stuff—murmuring more of the haunting words in a steady stream. The haystack exploded into flames. Five of the Franks charged, spurred on by the bishop. But then Dónall swept his blade before him, and a screaming wind followed, blasting the conflagration onto the other stacks. Flames rose high in the air, and the first haystack collapsed to form a raging wall of fire at the feet of the charging Franks. A shower of embers erupted into the sky, and Ciarán had to back away from the searing heat as the inferno’s roar drowned out even the panicked cries of the soldiers.

“What about our brothers?” Ciarán asked desperately.

“There’s nothing we can do for them now,” Dónall said. “In a few moments, every monk in Derry will run to put out this blaze. They’ll outnumber these Franks ten to one, but we can’t stay. My display here has given that bishop all the evidence he needs to convict me. And for helping me, you’ll be just as guilty in the eyes of the Church.” He yanked Ciarán toward the woods.

“What happens now?” Ciarán asked.

“I had Áengus send word to Rián mac Fadden. He and his curach will be waiting for us a half league down the river.”

They hurried through the woods while the fire roared behind them. Ciarán stopped to catch his breath. “But where will we go?”

“I must go to Paris,” Dónall said. “And I suppose you’re coming with me now.”

Ciarán stood speechless.

“We have to move, lad!” Dónall barked. “That bishop is hell-bent on getting his hands on the book you’re holding, and he’ll find a way to get his men around those flames.”

Dónall pulled him deeper into the woods, and Ciarán lacked the strength to resist. A tremendous emptiness washed over him as he watched more smoke billow up in the distance, where his friends lay dead. Murchad and Fintan and the twins. And Niall, his dearest friend of all.
Killed for what? A book and the perhaps heretical secrets it contained?

By the time Ciarán and Dónall reached the edge of the bog, his eyes stung with tears. He struggled to catch his breath and prayed that Paris held some answer. For if not, all his friends had just died in vain.

PART II

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went into the daughters of men . . .

—Genesis 6:4

I
n the heart of the
land the Romans once called Gaul, Alais of Selles gazed across the river Cher. A bleak winter was coming. She could feel it.

Even though she was not a year past twenty-one, she no longer felt young, for these past days had worn on her so much that she felt as thin and ragged as a threadbare cloak. She tied back her raven hair to keep it from whipping in the bitter wind, and sighed as she looked back on the small collection of cottages, hovels, and barns. Her husband was lord of this land, and lay abbot of the limestone abbey that stood atop the squat hill across the fields from their manor. But for how long would he continue? She gazed up at the sky, as gray as her own eyes and thick with the coming storm, and felt the constant ache in her chest. When it first began, she had prayed to Saint Radegonde until her eyes were red and swollen from the tears. But her pleas for the saint’s intercession had gone unanswered, leaving her to wonder why the heavenly father let such things happen.

Prior Ragno insisted that Geoffrey’s condition was a sign of pestilence, proof that the Four Horsemen now rode these lands and that the end of days was near. If this was true, Alais feared the day that the pale rider would come to Selles. And at times, she could hear the pounding of his pale steed’s hooves in the borderlands of her dreams.

Even worse terrors would follow as the millennium approached, Prior Ragno had warned. Darkness would cloak the sun, the moon would disappear, and the stars would fall from the heavens. The Antichrist would reign over the earth, and the land would burn with fire until at last Christ himself returned from the clouds, riding his white horse, with an army of angels in his wake. Only then would the living and the dead be judged and the righteous be carried to paradise. Prior Ragno had spoken of this day with trills of ecstasy in his voice, pining for the time when the wicked would finally be punished. But Alais could not fathom such things—or, indeed, muster such hope. The trial she now endured was harder than anything she had ever faced. And as she looked out over the fields of Selles, the horizon held no savior on a white horse, charging to her aid—only a solitary black-robed monk, crossing the field from the abbey.

And she feared the news he brought as she feared the pale rider himself.

The abbey’s infirmarer, Brother Thadeus, climbed the hill to the edge of Alais’ garden. Nearing his fiftieth winter, he was a frail man, whose beaklike nose protruding beneath overgrown brows gave him the aspect of a merlin or a kestrel, though he was perhaps the gentlest man she had ever known. Thadeus regarded her with sympathetic eyes.

“He wants to see you,” he said.

Alais’ heart skipped a beat. “Is he improved?”

Thadeus shook his head. “All we can do is bandage the sores.”

She touched her fingertips to her lips. “What of the salve you made from goat weed?”

“Perhaps it eases the pain, but . . .”

“Brother Thadeus,
please.
” She grabbed his habit. “I feared worse news when I saw you, but now, if he is lucid, if he still has strength?” Her eyes grew wide. “It means he’s fighting it. Geoffrey is a strong man. If anyone could . . .”

Thadeus took her hands from his habit and embraced her. “Alais, he burns with this disease. I promise you, I will use all the medicinal skills I possess, but there is only so much we can do.” He let her go but looked into her eyes, which welled with tears. “Our prayers to Saint Eustace may be the best medicine now. You’ve been praying, child, have you not?”

“I’m all out of prayers,” she sobbed.

“Then you should try to summon a few more, my dear. Sometimes, prayer is all we have.”

She followed Thadeus down the path toward the abbey. Across the nearby fields, smoke wisped from the chimneys of thatch-roofed cottages. Behind the village stood trees with spidery branches, their leaves long since stripped by the autumn winds. Alais noticed the quiet. A dog bayed in the distance, but that was all. Few villagers were about. The fields had been harvested, and the wheat, rye, barley, and beets had been stored for the winter, while the pigs and cattle deemed too weak or too old to survive the coming snows had been slaughtered and their meat packed in barrels of salt.

Not counting the sixty monks who lived at the abbey, there were nearly a hundred families in Selles, with wives and children and elderly folk who needed care. These were the lives Geoffrey had protected against raiders and famine, which had touched these lands twice in the six years she had lived here. Alais could not understand this great burden slipping onto her narrow shoulders, let alone grapple with the terrible loss that would accompany it.

It was never supposed to be like this.

She had been born a child of Aquitaine, the richest province in Gaul. Her grandfather was the third William, called Towhead for the pale flaxen color of his hair. He was both count of Poitiers and duke of Aquitaine, and her grandmother was the daughter of Rollo, then duke of Normandy. Her father, Odo, was cousin to the fourth William, called Iron Arm, who had ruled Aquitaine for nearly thirty years. William Iron Arm had strengthened his alliances by marrying his sister to Hugh Capet, the late king of France and father of the current king, Robert, and by arranging his own marriage to Emma, daughter of the count of Blois, who was lord of neighboring Touraine. Alais’ mother, Adelais, too, had been bound in a political marriage—a gift from her father, the count of Toulouse, who was currying favor with the house of Poitiers. Marriage, Alais had learned at a young age, was the way rich and powerful men enhanced their wealth and power. So it was predestined that she would someday be given in marriage to a man she had barely met, for reasons that had nothing to do with love. And that was the problem she always had with the situation.

Being of noble birth, Alais had lived a carefree life. She spent much of her youth in the palace of Poitiers, her family’s ancestral home. There she would play in the gardens with their tiled Roman fountains and stroll with her family down the streets of the ancient city, in the shadow of its towering Roman walls. Outside the city, Alais and her sister, Adeline, would play hide-and-seek in the vineyards lining the hillsides that sloped down to the river Clain, or amid the ruins of the old Roman baths or the ancient amphitheater just south of the city. The amphitheater, with its archways, tunnels, and broken pillars, provided many of the best hiding places. These gave Adeline, who was often the seeker, fits while Alais giggled under her breath or dreamed of ancient times when poets and actors once graced the theater’s stage, performing for highborn Roman ladies who laughed and clapped and sipped wine from silver cups.

It was during one such game of hide-and-seek, one May afternoon when she was eight, that Alais learned the legend of Saint Radegonde. After wandering far from the amphitheater, Alais sneaked back through the city gate and ducked into the convent of Sainte-Croix. It was the perfect hiding place, she thought—too perfect, perhaps, and she wondered if Adeline would ever find her. But there was also the problem of the black-robed nuns, who walked the convent’s halls in silent contemplation. Alais must hide from them, too, which, in the moment, meant descending a dimly lit stairwell that ended in a dark, narrow chamber. She was not scared of the dark, and this seemed as good a hiding place as any. A large stone slab of some type lay in the center of the chamber, and running her hands over it, she found that it was carved and polished. It was a bas-relief of a woman, slender and beautiful—a woman fit to be a queen.

She jumped when bony fingers grabbed her shoulder from behind.

“What do you think you’re doing here, child?”

In the dim light penetrating from the stairwell, Alais could make out the withered features of a nun as old as her grandmother. But despite all the deep creases and wrinkles, the face looked peaceful, not angry.

“I didn’t mean anything,” Alais said, shaking. She tried to pull away, but the old nun held her firmly.

“You’re one of the children from the palace, aren’t you? Have you come to pay respect to Saint Radegonde?”

Alais looked at her sheepishly.

“That’s unfortunate. A girl like you could learn a lot from her. Do you
want
to know?”

Still fearful about having been caught where she ought not to be, Alais simply nodded.

“Well, child, she was a princess of Thuringia, a kingdom near Saxony, some four hundred years ago,” the old nun said. “But being a princess is not all wonder and magic as you young girls suppose. No, a princess’s life is never her own, and when Radegonde’s father was killed by her own uncle, it was men’s lust for power, not love or romance, that came to rule her life. To kill the king, her uncle had allied with Clothaire, the Merovingian king of the Franks—a monster if ever there was one. Her uncle and Clothaire betrayed each other, but it was Clothaire who won, and as a prize he took Radegonde as his queen.

“Now, one day, Queen Radegonde summoned the courage to flee her husband. He pursued her, of course, his rage burning like an inferno. He stormed across the land on his black steed, but she hid in a field of oats, where she prayed for God’s mercy. And do you know what happened then?”

Alais shook her head.

“A
miracle,
” the old nun said. “The oats, which were already tall and broad, sprang up around her and grew taller yet. They covered her completely, and even the women who sowed the oats could swear they never saw Radegonde in the field. Clothaire rode on. Radegonde was free. And she came here to Poitiers and founded this convent, where she kept a shard of our Savior’s holy cross and protected the city for the rest of her days. But none of this would have happened if not for her courage—her courage and her faith in God.”

That was how Alais came to know the abbess of Sainte-Croix and Radegonde, the “queen saint,” the patroness of Poitiers.

Ever since that day, the abbess had invited Alais to visit the tomb and light candles for the queen saint. There Alais would pray and wish that she might live a happy and carefree life, for it was the only life she knew. And that she would marry a man for love—a romantic love, like that the poets wrote of—and live free of the sort of tribulations that Saint Radegonde had endured.

Alais looked up at the gray sky and sighed, for those had been the wishes of a young girl. And with the passing years, she realized how foolish they were.

*

Carefully stepping over a pat of ox dung as she followed Thadeus up the path to the abbey, Alais thought back to the time, six years ago, when her father arranged Adeline’s marriage to Renaud, a Burgundian lord nearly twice her age. Alais would never forget the man’s arrival at the palace. He was fat and brutish, with oily hair as long as a woman’s, and a stubbly beard that collected the grease and crumbs from his hoggish eating. Alais blanched at his ill manners, for he wolfed his food as indecorously as the kitchen dogs. She shuddered when she imagined Adeline on their wedding night, spread-eagled beneath him for the first time, pinned by his rolls of fat as he ravaged her, grunting like a boar. It was as if Clothaire himself had come to Poitiers in all his monstrous barbarity.

In the days leading up to the wedding, Alais had prayed that her sister would summon the courage of Saint Radegonde and flee. But Adeline never did. She married Renaud at the palace in Poitiers and left with him the next morning for Burgundy. Adeline had written letters since then (for their father had insisted early on that his daughters learn to read and write), but Alais found no joy in those letters, and each one troubled her more than the last. For as the years passed, Alais knew that her own time to wed was coming.

Her time came three years later. The man’s name was Geoffrey, the lord of Selles-sur-Cher, and even though he was not rich, he was a cousin of Emma of Blois, and a supporter of the king. This made him suitable enough in her father’s eyes for the hand of his second daughter in marriage. The Lord of Selles was said to be thirty-four, more than twice her age. In Alais’ mind’s eye, he had already become an ogre—a Clothaire—before he ever arrived in Poitiers. Just the thought of him terrified her. Some days she prayed that when the time came, Saint Radegonde would give her the courage to flee and the miracle she would need to escape. On other days, her hope would fail. She would be better off drowning in the Clain than submitting to a man like Adeline’s Renaud. At times, anger overrode her sadness. Her father and mother had made this decision. They had robbed her of her chance for love, the love of her daydreams at Saint Radegonde’s tomb.
True
love.

Alais would never forget the time she first saw Geoffrey. It was a cold day in late September, when the leaves had begun to turn. Geoffrey and three of his men had ridden to the palace gates. He wore a wool riding cloak over his mail vest, a broadsword at his waist, and heavy leather boots—hardly the pretentious clothing of a man like Renaud. And to her surprise, he sat his horse well and did not seem an onerous burden to the spirited roan charger. In fact, Lord Geoffrey looked rather trim, even slight, atop his mount.

This was not at all what Alais had expected. Nor were his eyes. When he turned to look at her, she saw them: blue like the river beneath a bright sky. But he was old, and his nose was wide and crooked, as if it had been broken more than once. His cheeks were sunken, and his short-cropped beard was heavily flecked with gray. He looked her over, from her face to the toes of her sandaled feet, before opening his mouth to speak. But Alais had nothing to say to him. She
wanted
nothing to say. And before a word could escape his lips, she turned away and hurried down the narrow streets, back to Saint Radegonde’s tomb, for one last chance to summon the courage to make her own destiny.

Hours later, the abbess found her, clinging to the relief of Saint Radegonde, her eyes red from sobbing. “You must go now, child,” the abbess had said. “You can pray for the saint’s protection, but you cannot defy your father’s will. He is outside with his men. You must go back.” Alais shook her head vehemently, but she felt worn. Broken. The abbess lifted her off the sarcophagus, and Alais’ dreams of courage evaporated.

They were married the next day. In the dim and crowded cathedral, the somber rite seemed more funeral than wedding. That night, in one of the palace bedchambers, when he took her as his wife, she trembled and winced at the pain. She fought back the tears when she touched where he had entered her, and her fingers glistened with blood. But through it all, Geoffrey had been gentle, and the experience had been far from the violent ravishment she feared. Still, she felt nothing for this man who was her husband—only contempt for her father. And her mother. And, above all, for herself, for she was not the strong young woman she had hoped to become. She was no better than Adeline.