The easy part was indeed studying the silver cylinder inside the nitrogen bottle. Not much more than what Severian had seen could be read from it, because—according to Siegfried and Sól—someone had scratched parts of the text, presumably long ago.
Inside the bottle was the big surprise: a rolled, very thin, sheet of gold, very ancient, written in Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform, which Sól said placed this document possibly between 2500 and 2300B.C.—dates of the adoption by Akkadians of Sumerian cuneiform, and Akkadian ascendancy resulting in Sumerian becoming a sort of literary eccentricity, a language used for refinement’s sake, or in documents dealing with the sacred.
“There are references to the gate,” continued Sól, “which might be Babylon, and something about Gilgamesh. However, Babylon was called “Gate of the God”, referring to the god Marduk—but this is the gate of the goddess. Hence, I would need a bit more time to disentangle that part of the riddle.
This hood has a double seal, which would protect its contents from oxygen seepage through the gloves, anyway. And, since it contains a rather unique sheet, but it is made of gold, I doubt oxygen would damage it. Still, it could oxidize the silver in the cylinder. In any case, since it’s almost four in the morning, and I’m sure Severian has to check his croissants as much as we need to sleep, we shall lock the whole thing and keep it that way until tomorrow. This room is a blast proof vault, with NBC filters and weld-free blast doors,” Sól explained, “so theft would be highly improbable once locked.”
“Do you expect a nuclear war?” asked David. “This is a nuclear bunker?”
“Oh, I didn’t know you were familiar with those, Dr. Leib,” said Siegfried.
“David, please. Not really,” David clarified, blushing, “I just watched a documentary. You know in the USA a lot of people have homes ready for nuclear fallout.”
“I see,” commented Sól, looking unconvinced. “In any case, the way many treat this poor planet, you won’t need a nuclear Holocaust to have your End of Days. Anyway, as I was saying, unlocking the vault requires a defined sequence of very peculiar actions. So, once we lock it, your cylinder and its contents will be safer than many masterpieces at the best Swiss banks’ safes.”
“We shall try to wake up as soon as possible, and then work on it during the day. By tomorrow night, we should have something more concrete for you gentlemen,” added Siegfried. “Even if things get extremely complicated, my brother Oskar, who is an excellent archaeologist, could provide valuable assistance—although, of course, not even he would I dare involving without your approval. I suppose this material is of the highest confidentiality, right, Tony?”
“Let’s not be cute,” scoffed Tony. “By now Severian probably has told both of you all there is to know about it.”
“Not really. Perhaps if tomorrow you feel like sharing ‘all there is to know about it’, we might be able to make sense of this, not only faster, but also more efficiently. Otherwise, we will work with what we have. It’s up to you.
For now, we bid you all good night. We’re well aware the castle’s layout is a bit confusing, so Pierre and the maids will guide you back to your rooms. They will also be available, at any time, should you need anything,” he finished.
“Pleasant dreams!” exclaimed Sól, joining Siegfried immediately after in a complicated ballet—involving pressing a number of buttons, breathing each into a different tube, reading from a list of gobbledygook generated by a screen, turning two keys, and pressing their hands interlocked in a rather peculiar way over a tactile screen—to have the vault bolt itself shut, by a system of barely-audible interlocking servos.
As the guests were led back to their respective rooms, through a maze of corridors, stairs, porte-cochères, archway porticoes, inner gardens, and secluded patios, all inside the main building, outside, the night was serene, bucolic, deliciously Provençale.
At first, the pervasive stillness under dark skies pregnant with stars, perturbed only by crickets, owls cooing and wooing in the swamp, the occasional call of wolves on the nearby reserve, and the soothing song of the river—now going back to its normal flow after massive unseasonal rains—had seemed too alien for some of the city-dwelling visitors to easily fall asleep. Eventually, however, fatigue and soft linen won out.
Come morning, early birds, a delivery truck, the mastiffs barking, someone having some trouble riding a horse in an early escapade, gradually woke the visitors, one by one. At the breakfast room, the smell of delicious coffee, the aroma of fresh croissants and madeleines de Commercy just baked, the neatly sliced jambon de Provence, the sweating jars of freshly squeezed juice from local oranges, set everyone in a very relaxed holiday atmosphere. Since the Countess had ordered no one should disturb late sleepers, when Haim finally went to have his breakfast, David, Tony, Sól and Siegfried were already in the basement, studying the cylinder.
To keep him company, Countess Chloé sat, opposite him, at the table and had yet another coffee.
“I hope you had a good night sleep, Haim,” she began.
“Yes, Milady Countess. I wanted for nothing,” he replied.
“Hahaha! That is very good! I am not so old that you need to use expressions from the times of Victor Hugo. And if I can call you Haim, you can call me Chloé. What I meant is I hope anything you might need was made available to you at once and you felt welcome, because you are!”
“Sure, Chloé. I feel almost at home. My home is not as luxurious or as sophisticated as this, though. This place is beautiful!”
“Thank you! My remark is, however, not as innocent as it might seem: Since Tony probably already has prejudiced you a bit about my religiosity, I want to dispel any suspicion you might have any of us could be anti-Semites.
This family has a very long, but also very odd, relationship with the Church. The south of France has seen its long succession of anti-heretic purges, of feudal intrigues. We once had popes in Avignon. France has had a very long list of religious prosecutions, from the Templars, to the Albigensians, to the Huguenots, to blood feuds—the first one in Europe, I believe, happened in Châteudun, near Chartres, a little before Richard Lionheart’s battles with Philippe Auguste. We have seen too much blood and too much hate in the name of religion—and too much blood, and too much hate, following some of us refusing to accept religious overlords: the Commune, the positivists; even de Lavoisier lost his head for being a scientist and a nobleman.
Being infested with zealotry for too long, this country has struggled with republican values, and made no few wrong decisions. And I might have a very strong faith, and freely admit I burn candles like they are getting out of style—and Sól and I have our fights between the traditional cow fat ones, and the beeswax and soy wax and certified palm oil candles—but I’ll be damned if, under my roof, anyone is treated even a bit unkindly because of religion, race, sexuality or anything, anything, that does not impose anything on me,” she finished, looking at her empty cup.
Out of nowhere, a maid appeared and refilled it.
“Merci, Irène,” she nodded. “Do you want some more coffee, Haim?”
“Yes, please. It’s excellent, like everything here.”
“Merci!”
“In fact, I had some apprehension coming here, but I didn’t know so much about your religiosity until we drove the last few kilometers through the chemin d’accès. My apprehension…came from…the names of you son and his fiancée…”
“Ah, yes. Our family has very long legs, as we say. Our family tree more looks like an elephant’s —some say a whale’s—placenta. My son wants to prove we started at least in the days of Theodosius II, the Calligrapher—the Byzantine Emperor who built the walls of Constantinople. He is the same emperor who wrote the Codex Theodosianus, which you might find… disquieting. Also, some our ancestors might have been out there massacring Saxons who wanted to remain pagan, mind you.
At our modest chapel, we have a tombstone said to be Charlemagne’s real one as well. People in Aachen would
disagree. But we were here at the times of Gaulish druids, and during the Plantagenet quarrels, and, until this day, we’re here creating mischief. So, yes, for a long time we have had a foot in France—even before it was this hexagon—and in Germania, apparently even in the days of Ascaric and Merogais, the earliest Frankish kings known. We might have been pagans as well, at some point—who can say that for sure?
While Constantine the Great—the same one who made Christianity the official religion of Rome—was fighting the Picts in Britannia, our ancestors crossed the Rhine and arrived here. That was in 306, seven years before the Edict of Milan. So, surprise of all surprises, since our family has been for centuries a proponent of nobility as a necessary scaffold to a stable society—nobility not just in the blood, but also in the actions—we have also long been quite the positivists, and even had a few dead during the Semaine Sanglante, when the Commune was massacred.
This is why we name a few of our children after our long roots, beyond the Rhine, and we have reasons to mistrust religious zealots, and no reason whatsoever to espouse Wotanism. Have you read Henri Vercors’ “Les Silences de la mer”, Haim?
“I’m afraid not,” he replied, a bit overwhelmed, as much by the history lesson as by the madeleine de Commercy in his windpipe.
“Of course not! You’re American, not French! Pardon my maladresse. It’s a story of a Nazi, a Boche implanted at a French castle during WWII—an odd one, in a sense, since he had left his German girlfriend because she enjoyed plucking the legs of a living mosquito. We had for years assumed stereotypes about Germans—and they about us.
Some of my Jewish friends had horror of even hearing German spoken. Oddly enough since they could not tell Slovak from Polish or Russian, they had no problem listening to them, like a sort of background noise. And the most catholic Slovak government, Hitler’s puppet, killed Jews even when they got baptized as Catholics. Strange. We Europeans are crazy, in a fascinating way, I think.
In any case, I bet you’re anxious to go join the others in the catacombs and see what news Sól and Siegfried have for you.
By the way: if the souls of those who died slaughtered are involved in this witchcraft your friends are chasing after, the Templars, the Commune and few other massacres in France more than qualify for your whirlwinds, even if none was comparable to the Shoah. So, I’d dare make you a suggestion: If that symbol you’re hunting down is not anywhere in Montmartre, or La Rochelle, but say, is present at the Jewish section of the cemetery in Montmartre, then you know it is indeed something exclusively to do with Jews who were massacred—just an idea.
In any case, what a conversation for breakfast! My apologies, Haim!” she said, tapping him repeatedly on the shoulder with her bejeweled hand.
“No, Chloé. Thank you! Those clues might yet turn out to be helpful. Now, if you don’t mind, could you please tell me again how to get to the laboratory?”
“I’ll do better,” she said pressing a button under the table. Less than a minute after that, Pierre, the Countess’ valet appeared again, and guided Haim to the laboratory.
When they arrived, the others were watching this strange dance between Sól inspecting symbols, making notes, uttering words in either Akkadian or Sumerian, saying “genitive”, “oblique”, “no, definitely accusative”, “queen”, “door”, “witch”, “the freer…the freer of souls”, and “the enslaver of souls…of those…that…died…in agony”; and Siegfried, handling the robotic arms, following the signs vertically, sometimes horizontally, backwards when a certain symbol appeared, every so often gesturing for Tony and David to stay seated on the benches provided, instead of craning their necks and breathing behind his back or asking questions when Sól was simply talking to herself, in loud voice, to string her own ideas in a logical sequence.
“What you were saying maybe right, or very wrong,” ventured Haim as he entered the room. “Often Lilith references from the Alphabet of ben Sirath are taken as a joke, because the Alphabet, which is from about 860 CE or so, was supposedly the rabbinical version of the Papyrus of Milan.” Sól stopped translating and turned to look at him, but now her eyes were no longer saying: “How dare you!” but “Tell me more!” instead.
So Haim did.
“Of course, it is written in haggadic Midrash-style—Bible commentary-like—and contains many Talmudic spoofs. It starts with men masturbating in a bathhouse, mocking the interdiction of Onanism; then, it thoroughly analyzes flatulence, urinating donkeys, crows having sex, and similar atrocities. It also contains some useful advice, for example: ‘He who honors those who despise him, is like an ass’.
But then, it speaks of king Nebuchadnezzar’s telling Ben Sirath that, unless he could heal the king’s son who was ill, he would be killed. Faced with the perspective, Ben Sirath prepares an amulet; and to explain the king how it works, then tells the story of Lilith—Adam’s first, quarrelsome wife, who refused to be below during intercourse, because she thought herself superior.
Adam, he says, tried to negotiate, saying both had come from the earth, and they should be equal. But then, Lilith being intransigent, responded by uttering the Holy Tetragrammaton, the Ineffable Name of G-d, and vanishing into the air. So Adam complained to his Creator, Who sent three angels to bring Lilith back.
In short they found her, but couldn’t persuade her to come back. However, she accepted to have a hundred of her children—demons—die every day; and also agreed that, whenever a newborn should wear an amulet with the names of those three angels, she would not claim that new life. Apparently from this stems the belief that Lilith is as much the mother of all vampires as Eve is that of all humans.
I am all for Haggadic Midrash that evolves and improves with centuries and wisdom; and I can’t deny Lucy, in Olduvai Gorge, might be the Eve, if it isn’t one of the females in Hammerschmiede, in Bavaria, unearthed last year; but, until a few days ago, I used to laugh at the idea that there could be a Mother to all vampires…”
“And why is that so, if I may ask?” asked Siegfried.
Tony suddenly had a very bad episode of cough, perhaps the excessive coolness of the place—a cough that made him bend forward so much he almost fell over Haim, right before the latter could answer.
“Ehem. Are you OK, Tony?” Haim said, blushing a bit. “Well, because after all this witchcraft and unexplained deaths and spells and what not, I wouldn’t be surprised if vampires, in the end, turned out to exist outside the realm of novels and films.”
“Well,” scoffed Siegfried, “you might think we are lunatics, but our dogs have silver sheaths in their canines, and wear silver spike collars—a fact we don’t usually advertise. Call it another eccentricity of our unorthodox family, but my grandfather decided there were werewolves nearby, and took some precautions—precautions we have maintained ever since. And since we’re at it, let me take some other matter off my chest: I suppose both you and David are quite knowledgeable about the history of the Holocaust, the Shoah.”
“ ‘People who forget their history often fall in the same ditch again—until there is no one left to fall; or, if there are, the ditch is full, and the survivors are forced to dig a new one’, my father used to say,” said David. “What is your point?”
“You and Haim seem to have a certain apprehension for our names, Sól’s and mine, don’t you?” asked Siegfried.
“I told your mother, the Countess, over breakfast…” began Haim.
“You know what happened in Denmark, when the Nazis tried to send Jews to the concentration camps?” asked Sól, cutting him off.
“It didn’t go so well for the Nazis there, I know,” Haim admitted.
“No, it didn’t go well at all,” she concurred. “When the Germans wanted to start forcing Jews to sew yellow stars on their vests, the King of Denmark said he would sew one on his own vest first. When they wanted to separate foreign Jews from Danish Jews, the Danish didn’t oblige: even though they did not want immigrants, they understood the predicament of those refugees. When
they had to begin transporting them, people at ports and train stations started to go on strike, and sabotaged the operation. When they finally managed a raid, the Danes revealed it in advance to Zionist leaders, and the government only allowed the Nazis to take away those who would willingly open their homes to them during the raid. Only 477 were thus, taken—poor and old people, who, either received the warning too late, or didn’t understand what it meant. Even those trapped were sent to Theresienstadt, the ‘showcase’ concentration camp, the only one Nazis allowed the Red Cross to visit. Denmark, a small country, without mountains or chasms, defied the Nazis, resisted, obstinately, relentlessly—and saved your people, because it was the right thing to do.
Bulgaria, mind you, did something similar.
One of my great-grandmothers, like her daughter my grandmother, and my mother, was given this Viking name, the one that distresses you so much. And my great-grandmother was arrested, accused by some imbecile drunkard—who paid his booze with delations—of providing shelter to ‘your people’. Funny enough, with a name like hers, nobody, in the end, truly believed him.”
“I would add one more thing, one Sól might be too modest to mention,” interjected Siegfried. “Since Sweden was neutral and would take Jewish refugees and give them working permits, many Danish fishermen, at a cost of about a hundred dollars per person, took them, across the Kattegat straits, to Sweden. Moreover, rich Danes paid the fare of even the poorest of those Jews. Sól’s grandfather paid for about fifty people, at a time when the equivalent of five thousand dollars wasn’t an amount to sneeze about, and many rich Jews became destitute paying for the right to escape in other countries.”
Quest for the Ark Page 14