Isaac seemed to weigh one last time his decision to tell Sebastian. “Your father wanted you to know,” he finally said. “I promised him I would tell you when the time was right. And I fear that if I don’t tell you now, I may never get that chance. And then it would all be…lost.”
Sebastian’s eyes lit up. “My father?”
The old man blinked a nod. “We found something, he and I, many years ago. Here, in Tomar. In the crypts of the monastery.” He fixed Sebastian with a fervent stare. “A book, Sebastian. A most wondrous book. A book that once might have contained a great gift.”
Sebastian’s brow furrowed. “‘Once’?”
“The monastery, as you know, holds a veritable trove of knowledge in its crypts, chests, and crates of old codices and scrolls dating back centuries, spoils of foreign misadventures and crusades, all of them waiting to be translated and catalogued. It’s an arduous and endless task. Your father and I were fortunate enough to be invited to work with the monks on translating them, but there are so many of them, and a lot of them are mundane records of disputes, personal correspondences of trivial importance…banalities.
“In a dusty crate, one book captured our interest the instant we saw it. It was lost among more worthy books and old scrolls. It was partially damaged by water at some point in its long history, and its last pages and its back were missing. Its cover, however, was relatively unscathed. On it was a symbol we had never seen before, that of a snake, coiled into a circle, feeding on its own tail.
“The book was written in an old Arabic, one that was rather difficult to translate. Its title, though, was clear.” He paused to clear his parched throat and darted a wary glance at the doorway, making sure they were not overheard. “It was named Kitab al Wasifa—the book of prescriptions.”
The old man leaned in conspiringly. “Your father and I decided to keep the book’s existence secret from the monks. We smuggled it out of the monastery one night. It took us months to translate it properly. The Naskhi script it was written in was ancient. And although it was Arabic, it was scattered with Persian words and expressions, which wasn’t unusual when dealing with scientific documents, but it made it harder to read. But we did read it. And the four of us — your parents, myself, and my dear departed Sarah — we made a pact. To try its teachings ourselves. To see if it worked. And if so, to let the world know of our find.
“At first, it seemed to hold its promise. We had stumbled on something marvelous, Sebastian. Then, gradually, with time, we became aware of the flaw. A flaw which, if it wasn’t overcome, meant that no one could ever know about our discovery, as that would lead to a different kind of upheaval, one that would turn the world on its head in a way no sane man would want. And so, it had to remain our secret.” His face winced with sadness. “And then fate intervened, with pitiless cruelty.”
The old man’s thoughts seemed to drift back to a painful time, to the winter when he’d lost his wife and his friends. His years had seemed bleak ever since.
“What was in the book?” Sebastian asked.
The old man looked at him, then, with a vehement glow in his eyes, he simply whispered, “Life.”
Isaac’s revelation wrestled Sebastian’s mind and pinned it mercilessly to the ground for days. He could think of nothing else. He couldn’t sleep. He drifted through his work inattentively. Food and drink lost its taste.
He knew his life would never be the same.
He finally managed to find an opening in his duty roster when his absence wouldn’t raise suspicions and traveled to the hills outside Tomar. He knew Isaac’s land well. It had been seized since the old man had been incarcerated, its vineyards left to rot untended while the Inquisition’s court schemed its way to its inevitable verdict.
Sebastian rode out to the hillock Isaac had painstakingly described. He reached it as the last of the day’s light clung obstinately to the darkening sky. The blossoming olive tree was easy to find. The tree of sorrow, Isaac had called it. In another place, at another time, it would have been the opposite, Sebastian thought.
He dismounted and took twenty paces towards the setting sun. The stone outcropping was there, exactly where Isaac said it would be. Sebastian’s nerves throbbed with anticipation as he knelt down and, using a small dagger, started to dig into the dry soil.
Within moments, the blade struck the box.
His hands dug into the ground, feverishly clearing the soil around the small chest before lifting it out carefully, as if it would crumble under his grasp. It was a simple metal box, perhaps three hands wide and two hands deep. A sudden flurry of crows took flight farther down the hill, cawing as they circled overhead before disappearing into the valley beyond. Sebastian glanced around, making sure he was alone, then, his skin tingling with excitement, he pried the box open.
In it, as Isaac had described, were two items. A pouch, wrapped protectively in an oiled leather skin. And a small, wooden box. Sebastian put the box down and unwrapped the skin, exposing the book and its tooled cover.
He stared at it, his eyes drinking in the curious, mesmerizing symbol on its tooled cover. He opened it. The first pages were made of smooth, strong, and burnished paper. They were filled with beautiful, richly rendered, full-length illustrations of the human body and of its inner workings. Numerous labels of writing swamped them. Other pages were covered with careful and precise Naskhi script, in black ink, with elaborate rubrications throughout. He tore his attention away from the pages and turned it over and saw what Isaac had spoken of. The back cover of the book was missing. Its torn binding indicated that some of its last pages were also lost. The last couple of pages that remained were shriveled and rough, the ink washed away long ago and leaving behind nothing more than an intelligible, bluish smearing.
With a burning ache in his heart, Sebastian understood.
A key part of the book was missing. At least, that was what Isaac and Sebastian’s parents had hoped, once the flaw had revealed itself: that the missing pages would hold the secret, the key to overcoming it. But they couldn’t be sure. The flaw was, perhaps, insurmountable. Perhaps there was no cure. In which case the book was of great danger, and the whole venture was doomed to failure.
He put the book down and picked up the small box. It also had the symbol carved into its lid. Hesitantly, he unhooked its copper clasp and opened it.
The box’s contents were still there.
And on that lonely hill, Sebastian knew what his destiny would be.
He would continue their work.
He would try to overcome the flaw.
Even though doing that, he knew, would place his life at great risk.
Tracing the book’s origin wasn’t easy. Sebastian’s father and Isaac had worked on it for years. The most they’d been able to ascertain was that the book was part of several crates of codices and scrolls that had made their way to Tomar after the fall of Acre in 1291.
The texts had been collected by the Templars during their forays into the Holy Land, when the knights were known to have explored the mysticism and knowledge of their Muslim enemies, long before the order had been suspended by Pope Clement V in 1312. Following the arrests of the Templars in France, their possessions across Europe were ordered to be transferred to the Knights of the Order of St. John of the Hospital — the Hospitallers. Provincial councils, however, were allowed to judge the Templars locally, and in Spain, the Tarragonese Council, led by Archbishop Rocaberti, a friend of the Templar warrior-monks, convened and decreed the innocence of the Catalan-Aragonese Templars, as well as those of Mallorca and of the Kingdom of Valencia. The order would be dissolved, but the brethren would be allowed to remain in their monasteries and to collect a pension for life.