We left by a narrow door at the far end, not quite looking at each other. But I at any rate, and I thought the rest, felt that we had truly reached the goal of our pilgrimage.
“The duchess and I should try to be here at Easter,” said Ascelin a little louder than necessary as we came up a flight of steps into bright daylight.
“We haven’t been to the Mount of Olives yet,” said Joachim, his solemnity falling away in the sunshine. For the last week or more he had been as eager and enthusiastic as a boy, as all the towns we passed began to be places mentioned in the Bible.
On the long overland trip from Xantium to the Holy Land, in spite of watching constantly for mages, for Ifriti, and for bandits, we had seen very little except an increasingly dense number of pilgrimage churches, all of which the chaplain insisted on visiting. Once we had entered David’s Kingdom, and especially the last few days here in the Holy City, we had done little besides visit churches.
“And we still need to see Solomon’s Temple,” said King Haimeric, “although I understand it is not actually the temple Solomon built himself but one rebuilt after the return of the Children of Abraham from the captivity in Babylon.”
“Of course,” said the chaplain. “It was to the Temple that the child Jesus was brought by his parents on the fortieth day after his birth.”
“And while you’ve been looking at all these churches,” said Maffi unexpectedly, “you still haven’t gone to look at the Rock.”
“The Rock?” asked the chaplain.
“Of course. The rock on which God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.”
Maffi stood next to Ascelin, the tall prince’s hand resting on his shoulder. Even though in the month since he had joined us the boy had shown no sign of trying to escape, Ascelin, Dominic, and Hugo had tacitly agreed to take turns in keeping close to him. Ascelin seemed to be growing oddly fond of him.
“The Rock isn’t in my guidebook,” said Joachim, leafing through, “but it certainly sounds as though we should visit it. Maybe after we see the Mount of Olives.”
I had already noticed this. For three days he had led us through the Holy City, a bustling, modern capital, much cleaner and better laid out than Xantium although also much smaller. The entire time it appeared that to him nothing built in the last fifteen hundred years, since the later days of the Empire when Christianity had become fully established, even existed. The city was sacred to three religions, but the chaplain had looked only glancingly at the sites holy to the Children of Abraham, taking us by the spired castle of the royal Son of David without a real look, and had not even slowed down when passing those sites holy to the People of the Prophet.
I wondered briefly if Maffi too considered this a pilgrimage, then remembered Arnulf’s agents telling me that the true pilgrimage goal for those who followed the Prophet was somewhere deep in the desert, very far to the south. I was afraid I had not paid very close attention.
“I realize what struck me as strange about this place,” said Hugo to me as we stood on the Mount of Olives, looking across the Valley of Josaphat at the tangle of city roofs on the steep slopes across from us. We had already seen the little church on the Mount which sheltered the stone from which Christ had ascended into heaven. “This city isn’t built on the water.”
He was right. The City back home and Xantium were both major ports, and even the small cities that dotted the western kingdoms tended to be built on rivers. “It’s probably because it’s never been a trading center,” I suggested. “It’s been a place for kings and priests, but never for merchants.”
“It also seems,” continued Hugo in a low voice, “too, well, wholesome a city for you to expect someone to disappear. If there really were rumors here last year about Noah’s Ark-and no one seems to have heard anything about it-then that too should be exciting but not perilous. Yet the last message my mother had from my father was the one he sent from here back to the City by another pilgrim, that he would go south a little way and then start for home.”
“Then we’ll go south as well,” I said, squinting into the distance. “The Wadi that Dominic’s looking for should be off in that direction somewhere.”
“I’ve tried drawing that boy out,” added Hugo, “and he won’t say anything definite, but I keep getting the impression he met my father’s party when they came through Xantium last year.”
“The mage Kaz-alrhun had also met Evrard,” I said, glancing toward Maffi. He stood beside Dominic now, quietly listening as the chaplain pointed out all the churches one could see from here, churches built on the sites of important events in the life of Christ and the apostles or of the martyrdoms of early saints, most of which we had already visited. “I don’t know about you, Hugo, but I keep feeling there are too many coincidences here. Everyone, except of course us, seems to know what’s been happening and what it has to do with Dominic’s ring and with your father.”
“Are you ready for the Temple of Solomon?” called the chaplain to us happily.
But that evening when we went to the room we shared in the pilgrims’ hospice, he seemed oddly subdued. The white-painted halls were full of other travelers with crosses sewn to their shoulders. The hospice itself was very austere, the rooms small and undecorated, the beds hard, and the dining room serving only flat bread stuffed with lentils and cucumbers.
I tried to read more of Melecherius on Eastern Magic, but in the dim light of a single candle it was difficult to follow. More and more I had the feeling Melecherius had profoundly misunderstood what the mages had tried to teach him. I closed the book and glanced over at the chaplain. He sat on the opposite bed, leafing through his guidebook with even less light than I had, but then he did not seem to be reading.
“So have we seen all the pilgrimage sites, Joachim?” I asked, kicking off my shoes and stretching out, hands behind my head. There were no chairs.
“I’m not sure,” he said slowly. “I don’t like to admit this, but there are two or three churches in here, which I myself marked that we visited yesterday, but which I now have trouble remembering.”
“They do all tend to run together after a while,” I agreed.
“But they shouldn’t!” he said with a flash of his dark eyes. “I’ve longed to visit the Holy Land all my life, to walk with living feet on the streets where Christ trod. Now that I’m here at last I can’t have the holy sites all ‘run together’!”
I pushed myself up on one elbow and looked at him. “Read the descriptions again,” I suggested. “I know you won’t have forgotten the Holy Sepulchre, so just concentrate on the smaller churches. Think about each one individually. It must say in your guidebook which ones have monks, and that will help differentiate them. You should be able to pick out the one where the porter didn’t want to admit Maffi, and the one where Dominic banged his head. If you can picture all of us standing inside and think about whatever we saw first-mosaics, altar, candelabra-you’ll then be able to get the rest of the details.”
Joachim closed the book and flopped down. “I’m not an overly-ambitious tourist,” he replied gloomily, “getting different picturesque sites confused. I’m a priest who has visited the places where Christ lived and died to bring us salvation, and who yet who still finds himself thinking about supper at the end of the day, gets sore feet from walking and standing, and needs to consult a guidebook when the experience should be burned into my soul.”
I thought about this in silence for a moment, knowing better than to offer any more of the memory tricks that had allowed me to squeak through the wizards’ school without ever being properly studious. I had, just barely, managed to save the chaplain’s life, but it was going to be difficult if he now expected me to save his soul as well.