Luc approached, shaking his head in anticipation of what was coming. ‘Don’t be making trouble, Hugo.’
‘Trouble? Me? It’s just that, well, Sara, I’ll be blunt. I met a lady tonight and I’d like to ask her out but a double-date might be less of a challenge for her. How about you and Luc joining us sometime this week? I’m only here for a couple of days.’
‘Christ, Hugo,’ Luc groaned.
‘I’d love to,’ Sara said, taking Luc aback but making Hugo smile knowingly.
‘Then it’s settled. All I need to do is ask this lady and we’re set. Luc will tell you what I think about the countryside. This should make it more palatable.’
Luc switched on the office lights. The floor of the sturdy little building was vibrating along with the rumbling generator. He logged onto the web and let Hugo enter his own email portal.
The dapper man puffed out his chest and proudly announced he had twenty new messages, several from female friends, then spotted the important one. ‘Ah, it’s our code breaker!’
He opened the email. ‘Fantastic! He says he’s got six pages done. The secret keyword for the section was NIVARD, whatever that means. He’s sent the deciphered passages as an attachment and says he’ll start working on the next section soon.’
‘What does it say?’ Luc demanded.
‘Hang on, let me open it. I don’t think he even read it. He’s only interested in the code, not the text! Besides he says it’s in Latin, which for our Belgian friend is just one more cipher, a boring one.’
Hugo scanned the document getting a feel for the language.
With Luc standing over his shoulder he slowly started to read on the fly. He soon cast off the dispassionate tone of a translator. The language was too volatile and Hugo began to ardently channel the old monk’s words.
I am certain to meet a horrible and painful death. Unlike a martyr who dies for his beliefs and piety, I will die for the knowledge I possess. There has been blood and there will be more. To lose a friend is not an easy thing. To lose a brother is terrible. To lose a brother who has also been a friend for nigh on two hundred years is unbearable. I buried your bones, dear Nivard. Who will bury mine? I am not a saint, O Lord, but a pitiful soul who loved his knowledge far too dearly. Did it crowd out my love for You? I pray not, but it is for you my God to judge. For my sins I will pay in blood. I cannot confess to my Abbot for he is dead. Until they come for me I will write my confession. I will conceal its meaning in a cipher devised by Brother Jean, a scholar and a gentle soul who I miss terribly. The knowledge contained in my confession is not meant for every man and when I am gone it will disappear. If it is ever found again, it is because Christ has seen fit to make it manifest for reasons known only to Him. I am a scribe and book binder. Should the Lord give me time to finish it, I will bind the book and I will dedicate it to Saint Bernard. If the book is burned so be it. If it is torn asunder so be it. If it is found by another man in its intended hiding place and the words untangled, then I say to that man may God have mercy upon your soul, for the price you will pay will be great.
Hugo stopped to blink and wet his lips.
‘Is there more?’ Luc asked.
‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘There’s more.’
‘Then for God’s sake, keep going.’
Alon drove his rental car the way he did everything in life: pugnaciously. He accelerated hard, braked hard and navigated the short distance from the camp in over-revved lurches. A gravel parking lot had been established near the top of the cliff and when he got there he braked aggressively, his tyres spraying up pebbles. Clouds blurred the edges of the crescent moon and the night sky had tendrils of black, like the veins on the back of one’s hand. The temporary guard shelter that had been erected before the gates were installed was long gone. The CCTV images and telemetry data from the cave entrance and chambers now fed directly to the camp office.
He locked the car and zipped his bomber jacket to his throat. Convections of chilly air rolled over the valley. He felt around in his pocket for the key to the gate of the cave. It was large and heavy, a satisfying implement, almost medieval. He would have preferred complete authenticity, a flickering oil-fed lamp, but the small flashlight in his hand would have to do. He aimed it at the path and headed towards the cliff ladder.
He was eager to spend half an hour on his own, wandering the passages in the minimal light. He’d apologise to Luc in the morning in his own way, plead temporary insanity, but he had to do this. Luc would officially disapprove but the incident would pass, he was sure. The cave was calling out to him. He needed to have a private conversation with it. He’d write about the night. It would shape his thinking, maybe even shake some long-held, stubborn beliefs.
‘Damn the shamans,’ he whispered out loud, the thought escaping his lips. Could I have been wrong?
He slowed his pace as he neared the ladder. It was a long way down and at his age he was no longer a mountain goat.
A flurry of footsteps! Running.
He startled and spun but never made it full around.
He didn’t see the log that bashed his head, never felt himself being dragged to the edge and at the last moment, at his passage through the membrane, he never heard the urgent fluttering of a pair of black-shouldered kites taking to wing, spooked by the sound of his body crashing through the oaks.
TWELVE
Clairvaux Abbey, France, 1118
On a crystalline winter morning the great woods surrounding the new monastery were silent. The fields were calm, the flat horizon at peace.
Inside a frigid room with no more than a straw mattress, a piss pot and a basin glazed with ice, the young abbot had cast off his rough blanket because he felt his body burning, despite the cold. His skin was slick, as if freshly dunked in water. The hacking cough that had kept him up all night was quiet for now, but he knew that any minute it would return to rack his body and pound his head. He tried to breathe through his nose to prevent another spasm.
When, as a privileged youngster, Bernard became ill, a gentlewoman would attend him – an aunt or a cousin. But he had banned females from the congregation and as a consequence he was forced to rely on the not-so-tender mercies of men. His feverish lamentations turned to his beloved mother, dead so long. He still had a fading memory from early childhood, lying in bed with a raw throat, being soothed with a song, a honeyed drink and her pretty face. He was a man now, twenty-eight years old and the head of Clairvaux Abbey. For him, there was no mother and no gentle hand. He had to bear his illness stoically and trust in the benevolence of Christ for deliverance.
If his mother had survived to old age surely she would have swelled with pride at how her pious plan had unfolded. At birth she had offered each of her children – six sons and one daughter – to God, and had fully devoted herself to their Christian upbringing.
By the time Bernard had completed his education, his mother was gone. His tutors had identified him as a special talent, a young man who, in addition to noble birth and natural intellect, had a sweetness of temper, a keen wit and the kind of immense charm which blesses a man infrequently. Despite a brief flirtation with the secular seductions of literature and poetry, there was never a serious doubt that Bernard would become a minister of God.
Certainly, the path of least resistance would have taken him to the nearby Benedictine abbey in Fontaines, but he shunned that option with vehemence. He had already aligned himself philosophically with the new men of the Church – Robert of Molesme, Alberic of Cîteaux, the Cistercians who felt the strict observance of the Rule of Saint Benedict of Nursia had been forsaken by corrupted abbeys and their clergy. These Cistercians were determined to strip away the excesses of flesh and spirit that had infected the Benedictines. They would reject fine linen shirts, breeches, furs, sheets and bedspreads. Their abbeys and cloisters would never be embellished by gargoyles and chimeras. They would take their bread hard, without lard or honey. They would charge no burial dues, take no tithes, they would build their communities away from cities, towns or villages and ban all women to avoid all worldly distractions. And they would interrupt their prayers and meditations only by the kind of hard physical labour necessary for subsistence.