If I were any less old, your constant assumption that we are here just to use you in some incredibly contrived deception by now would have offended me—enough to tell you all to go fuck yourselves, and leave. After all, as the Mother explained, if the doors of the underworld crumble, you humans would become like the herbivores in the Serengeti: no matter how you might migrate, or how tight your herds might stay, now you would have nowhere to run. We would first exterminate you, and only then, prey on one another.
So what is it going to be? Are we all on the same team, and we shall work together; or you’d rather try to solve your wind problem with a few fans or simethicone? I’m perfectly ready to leave now and let you all face the music on your own. And, by the way, simethicone is medication for flatulence, for any of you who might have missed the implication.
In any case, dawn is getting all too close for my own comfort. Decide now! If I leave now without a clear answer, I will not come back. Enough nonsense! Decide!”
“I will get a tallit gadol and sew the stones myself, if need be,” said David frustrated. “At some point we have to trust him or part company. I’d say we trust him. He has saved our asses—figuratively, and literally. Or did you guys already forget Bucharest?”
“No, at least I haven’t,” said Tony. “I for one have known Severian for longer that either you or Haim. Severian has saved my life seven or eight times already—once from an Odessatron commando, by the way. He has exposed his true nature to our hosts, who thought him nothing more than an eccentric financial advisor and art dealer. By calling Lilith, he also perhaps endangered their lives—which someone who is ‘on his own side’ wouldn’t do, risking his valuable business, to help our quest. I’m not a trained psychologist for nothing; and the training we specifically receive before doing what I do, now tells me the logical thing, the fair thing as well, would be to trust him. And, if that were not enough, I’d say I have a hunch that is what we should do.”
“I’m not a psychologist but a trained diplomat,” said the Countess, “one who has had more than a few ‘demelées’ with my noble peers because of my interest in the occult; and I have known Severian, for decades. I presume the ‘man’ I thought was his father, whom my father knew, is the one and same Severian. And, after coming back from exile with my grandparents to rebuild much of what had been bombed, and recover what they couldn’t ship to Algeria fast enough, when time came for me to take charge of our enterprises, my father told me to trust Severian’s ‘father’. For at least three generations, ‘father’ and ‘son’ have helped us rebuild and enlarge our family’s fortunes. So, I would trust Severian and stop the madness once and for all.”
“All right,” admitted Haim. “My apologies. Of late, there is too much which is sacred to us,” he said signaling both him and David, “being defaced, twisted, misused, hanging on the balance, for me to take these things lightly. On the other hand, after so much death, so much suffering, so much horror, we can’t let these abominations continue. We owe it to those gone, to those alive and to those who shall come. It’s time we unite and stop this ‘madness’.
So, the symbol that unites us, the one we were considering not so long ago, if I’m not mistaken is the Ark of the Covenant, isn’t it?”
“Yes!” agreed Tony. “Where is it, though? Theories put it in all sorts of places, from the Hill of Tara in Ireland, to the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Axum, Ethiopia.
After Solomon’s First Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians, according to Maccabees 2:7, the prophet Jeremiah hid the Ark in a cave under Mount Nebo, in a place that “shall remain unknown until God gathers His people together again, and shows His mercy."
There are stories of the Ark being hidden near Jerusalem, in Mecca, or even New Guinea. The “Treatise of the Vessels” says the Ark "shall not be revealed until the day of the coming of the Messiah, son of David"; and Revelations 11:19 says the Ark won’t be seen again until the End of Times.
So, should I call our travel agency, or some kind of diviner? The world was supposed to end—among other times, which I might miss—in AD 800, 1000, 1600, 1926, 1941, 2000; and now, we’re expecting another end in 2026, unless some idiot with a small dick decides to press a red button and kills us all with nuclear bombs. Or, yes, David, the most likely scenario, global climate collapse proves Malthus right.”
“The science is clear. Soon we might see headlines saying: ‘Sargasso seaweed surrounds Saragossa’ and no one would see anything strange to such statement. So 2026 sounds plausible. Now, unless, you prefer to wait seven years to decide if we need to do this, I’m all ears as to how we get to the Ark now.”
“I have to go now,” said Severian, “Dawn is getting too close. Tomorrow we shall talk. I might know someone—almost twice my age—who might know where the Ark is hidden.” And saying this, before anyone could ask questions, he vanished in a swirl of haze.
“This is all well and good,” admitted Haim, “…but about the tallit, yet again, in case any of you don’t know: before putting it on, we have to examine the four corners, check the eight threads, four and four, on each tzitzit, make sure they are all the same length, unblemished, and recite the prayer, put it on so that the four corners point to the four corners of the body, front and back, left and right of each. So…is, whoever has to put this stone-enhanced abomination on the Ark, going to follow this precise same sequence, with a tallit which has thirty-six stones sown to it?
Who is going to this? To me, that looks sacrilegious, suspicious, outrageous.
Who would handle the splinters of the Tables of the Law if none of us is ‘without malice’? Plus the Ark is not supposed to be touched. This…this…this is the stuff of nightmares. This is a living nightmare. I can’t…I can’t…I can’t…
I’m sorry. I have to go pray and then will try to sleep.
It is, indeed, very late, ” he finally said, and left.
18—Conrad, the Crusader
The next day was strange.
Everyone woke up absurdly late. Even the help seemed to drag their bodies, trekking like zombies, vacillating, dropping the occasional object here and there, the clatter startling both visitors and even Pierre’s dog. As Pierre put it to Irène while she was carrying Tony’s breakfast tray to his room at one o’clock in the afternoon: “We now know what the night shift really means, n’est-ce pas, ma chère?”
On that same sweltering afternoon, since Countess Chloé liked to, once in a while, have some fresh lavender cuttings dropped on the swimming pool—her only concession to the gardeners being that lavender sprigs be tied to pieces of cork, for ease of retrieval—in the pool’s shallower section, the water felt like tepid lavender tea.
Nevertheless, that day, once again, now less afraid of bats and spider webs, still mindful if not afraid of the yellow Languedoc scorpion, David challenged himself to go explore the dark, moist recesses of the Grande Grotte, to consolidate his victory on claustrophobia, take advantage of the cool air and also enjoy the privacy that place afforded, to ponder about recent events and nap unmolested.
Yet again, Siegfried and Sól had an extended premarital honeymoon—even though something didn’t seem quite right, after they emerged from it, visibly exhausted.
The Countess spent time at one of the larger castle’s libraries, dealing over the phone with art dealers, foundations directors and what not, frustrated she had been outbid for a Matisse and, perhaps even more that, out of sheer courtesy for late sleepers, forced to refrain from stirring up a storm on her piano, to vent her irritating loss.
Disturbed by the perspective of what they might have to do, horrified by having to go on a tour of those fields of death, remembering with pride the members of his family who resisted anyone who had misguidedly helped to orderly and systematically take people to their deaths, Haim had been praying often, and sleeping very little. Awake and asleep he was still seeing the faces of those who did what they could to stop the Shoah, and paid a price for it. Awake and asleep, he was remembering
those who had helped print the pamphlets the Scholl brothers distributed, pamphlets saying Hitler was a murderer. “The human mind is strange,” he told David that same day, when the finally had lunch at 5PM, “I am afraid I might see those souls, the souls of those denied a decent burial, pointing fingers at me, cursing me because I didn’t prevent this, even if I wasn’t born yet then.”
“I think if they are still there, swirling in despair, anger and sorrow, they would order us not to fail, nothing more, nothing less,” David had replied. “What I dread is that my own reaction to those places, my own doubts, not knowing if what we are going to do is right or wrong, might make me fail…but nobody knows how to deal with this…”
“Well,” had interrupted the Countess, “maybe Severian’s acquaintance knows. I suppose if he is almost twice his age, almost twelve hundred years old, he was alive at the time of the Crusades.
And although I’m not Achille Poirot, I’ve always been curious about our ancestors the Druids and the occult. If my hunch is correct, perhaps the book “Les Mystères de la Cathédrale de Chartres” by Louis Charpentier might end up being of some utility. I skimmed over it after I went to bed. Maybe your Ark is closer than we think, after all.
But if it is, there are many who have dug the parvis, you would say…the square, the esplanade, in front of the cathedral—and yet, found no Ark. So maybe yes, maybe not.
On a more practical note, who is going to go collect stones to all twelve deathcamps? It’s not just an unenviable task, it is also an illegal task; and some would also consider that an outrageously immoral task. I, for one, surely am not going there again. The ones I visited were plenty enough to make me dread humans for a few lifetimes.”
“The butchers were inhuman, ‘only human in appearance’, Ehud said,” said David.
“The mechanism itself was not human. We cannot rehash this thing about compliance, or even cooperation, all over again. It was hideous. It was a lesson. Am Yisrael Chai, sorry, ‘the people of Israel shall live’,” replied Haim. “In my home I have a long tapestry with the phrase ‘never again’ in Hebrew, Yiddish, and the official languages of countries where extermination happened. Watching it every day is heavy enough a burden to bear, but Ehud said ‘a necessary reminder’.”
“My father”, said David, “was always weary of that. He said, if we remember too much we’re accused of not being Americans like all the rest, a sort of fifth column. We can love America to pieces. We’re born, grow, live, study, work and die in America. We have families in America, and go to wars and die for America—but there is always some anti-Semitic asshole who will say we’re more Israelis than American.”
“That sort of thing, mind you, happens almost in every country in the world,” objected the Countess. “I’ve seen it happen here and in Germany, to several of my friends. One of them showed me the Croix de Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, and told me once: “That thing…it seems…is not enough to be really French? I think if I wear Napoléon’s hat maybe?”
“It doesn’t surprise me,” continued David. “No need to have double citizenship, like me. In America, the fact we are entitled to it, and we, at times, worry because Israel is in a very unfriendly neighborhood, is enough. But there, during WWII, anyone who looked Oriental enough—might be ‘Jap’—could end in a concentration camp. On the other hand, one can be dual citizen of Hell and American, and the same people would see no problem, nowadays. Russian and Ukrainian double citizenship are apparently two of the least problematic. Conversely, if we forgive and forget, History repeats itself and we’re screwed,” he finished, with a long sigh.
“And if we say that, we’re drama queens. In any case, for better or worse, we’re now in this dance. Let’s wait until Severian comes back,” suggested Haim, “and then we’ll have to decide how we do it, but dance we shall.”
“The sun is setting,” interjected Siegfried, “Let’s use our waiting time to plan our next moves: how we get your tallit. Fastening thirty six stones to a undershirt-type one, following the stickman pattern, would be very hard so we will need a tallit…gadol?” Haim nodded. David smiled. Siegfried nodded and continued: “How do we collect those stones and avoid getting into trouble—are those stones to be taken from anywhere, closer to the gas chambers, or some other special places? Should we trust this new vampire, twice as old as Severian, assuming he accepts to help? And, more importantly, assuming he knows where the Ark might be, since the Ark hasn’t been seen—except by the Ethiopian monks in Axum, who don’t let anybody else see it, anyhow—since 587B.C., when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and Solomon’s Temple, how do we get to it?
Some say it’s in Mount Nebo, or Babylon, or even New Guinea. Charpentier said in Chartres, brought by the Templars; but Chartres has been dug—the entire Beauce region has, in fact—excavated as if by rabid moles, looking for Roman, and Gallic, ruins—and no such thing has ever been found. I wonder who this millenary vampire might be…”
“His name,” said Severian, suddenly emerging from the shadows, “is Conrad of Montferrat.”
“Conrà ëd Monfrà?” said Sól, in disbelief.
“Yes,” replied Severian. “Very good. You know your Crusades, don’t you, Sól?”
“I think it’s a fascinating period in Europe’s history. A rather depressing period for your feminist Mother, Lilith: then, women were married for money as a matter of course, thrown and exchanged like dairy cows who can’t give enough milk, raped every so often, and ignored most of the time, except in famous cases like Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard the Lionheart’s mother, who was quite promiscuous and domineering and feared, if not well respected, all the same…
“So, who was this Conrad of Montserrat?” asked David.
“Montferrat…” corrected the Countess. “Since we mentioned Richard the Lionheart, Conrad was a brave crusader who became King of Jerusalem for a short time—against Richard’s will—by seducing the married heiress to that kingdom, and forcing a divorce on the grounds she had been married when she was too young to consent.
Apparently, the original husband was more interested—like many a Crusader—in men than women; and this Conrad was not only mister macho, but also quite the eye candy, well connected by family, and had more than enough ‘physical attributes’ to satisfy a voracious wife. Chroniclers suspect he had been in cahoots with Saladin because of his démêlées with Richard, who favored Guy of Lusignan’s claim to the throne of Jerusalem: Richard would rather have Guy in Jerusalem than send him back to Poitou, in the armpit of France, where he was quite the rebel.
At the time, in France—then little more than Île de France and a few movable crown fiefdoms—enemies and friends used to change allegiances, wafting like gusts of wind. Philippe Auguste, the king of France was a nephew-once-removed from Richard, and they slept together, when they were adult men. They even went together to war; and then things went bad. Richard too, by the way, was seemingly much more interested in men than in ladies. Poor man! He had an horribly domineering mother…”
Sól coughed, Siegfried blushed, and, for a brief, tense moment, the Countess’ eyes become frozen emeralds hiding behind them glowing embers.
To diffuse the storm, Haim cleared his throat, waited until the Countess turned to stare at him and asked: “So why would this king of Jerusalem, if that is what he is or was, be of any use to us?”
“Well,” replied Severian, before the Countess could, “he was king, but only for a short time. Against Richard’s wishes, Conrad was elected by unanimous vote of all the barons of the kingdom of Jerusalem, in mid-April 1192. The news of his election reached Tyre, where he was, on April 24. On April 28, his pregnant wife Isabella stayed late at the hammam. So he went to have lunch with a friend. But the friend had already dined, so he went back home. On his way back, two henchmen, Hashashin—Nizari Ismailis, a branch split in the XI century from Ismailis, a form of Shia Islam—ambushed and mortally wounded him, front and back. The Hashashin lived rather independently in the mountain
s between modern Syria and Iran from about 1090 to 1275, the year the Mongols decimated them.
When Richard Lionheart was captured by Leopold V, Duke of Austria—his enemy, and Conrad’s cousin—on the pretext of having ordered Conrad’s assassination by the Hashashin, instead of killing him, Leopold sold Richard to the German Emperor, who used him as hostage for ransom.
The then Hashashin Grandmaster, Rashid-ad Din Sinan, also known as the Old Man of the Mountain, wrote a letter to Leopold, taking credit for Conrad’s assassination, and exculpating Richard completely.”
Arrived at this point in Severian’s narrative, the others were clearly lost, wondering where the history lesson might be going, if anywhere. However, well aware of his mind-reading ability, they attempted to follow. “The important thing,” Severian continued impassibly, “is what History books don’t tell: The first Old man of the Mountain, Hassan-i Sabbah was born in 1050, and supposedly died in 1124. Rashid, the second, was born in 1134, and died in 1193, the same year as Saladin. The letter on behalf of Richard was written in 1193.
However, had the two Grandmasters been one and the same, that ‘man’ would have lived 143 years—unless he instead…was a vampire, who didn’t die until much later?
Of the two Hashashin who killed Conrad, one was killed on the spot. The other was captured and, under torture, confessed Richard had ordered Conrad’s killing.
Badly wounded though he was, however, the day of the attack, Conrad lived past sunset—and that, changed history: Having much respect for Conrad as a warrior of extraordinary bravery, the Old Man of the Mountain, a brave warrior himself—but also a responsible ‘operator’—after fulfilling the terms of his contract with Richard, was free to offer, and indeed did offer, Conrad a chance to live on.
Quest for the Ark Page 19