Quest for the Ark

by Taggart Rehnn

  “For someone almost a thousand years old, you are surprisingly adept to modern technology,” commented David, rather innocently.

  “Indeed,” admitted Conrad. “Let me tell you why: after going from Sours, to Troô, to Villedieu a few times, to find out exactly what the intentions of Melior and the Amauriens and the Templars and a group of Jews who helped them were concerning the Ark, I went spying a bit on Berengaria, and also on Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard’s mother. And in those few months, I learned more about hubris, jealousies, vendettas, intrigues, deceptions, cabals and all manner and mode of human vices than I had in my entire life as a human.

  At a time of sparse population, many personal wars, plentiful darkness, and brigands in every conceivable road, feeding was very easy, and I enjoyed doing it very frequently. A young vampire is like any fast growing animal: one needs constant nourishment.”

  Ignoring a few cringing faces, he continued: “After the 1198 harvest was finished, when the truce between Richard and Philippe was over, I saw again the worst of human behavior—during the events leading to the Battle of Gisors. Two peoples, led by to men of close blood, who had slept together while adults; two peoples, so similar Richard had to come up with the famous watchword: “Dieu et mon droit”, to tell friend apart from foe, those kindred two peoples were lead by their kings to attack one another’s land, and put out the eyes of innocent peasants laboring the other king’s lands, to spite one another—the same kings who had gone, together, to defend the land where Christ was born.

  Disgusted, I left Normandy and moved to Rome—only to watch the spoliation of Rome, brought about by papal hubris. Then I moved to Northern Italy, and saw the end of my family, the Aleramici, in 1305.” His face gloomier than ever, he paused, breathed in, shook his head, and only then, continued. “In 1306, Philippe IV the Fair, also known as the Iron King, good looking but cruel as few others ever, expelled the Jews from France. Guess he made France ‘judenrein’ six centuries before Hitler tried and failed,” Conrad commented, in a sarcastic tone.

  Leaving no time for Haim or David to react, he then continued: “By 1303, the Templars, having lost their foothold in the Holy Land after Acre fell in 1291, had purportedly moved their fabulous wealth to Paris. And, on Friday 13, October 1307, they were arrested, en masse—including the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay.

  On November 22, 1307, Pope Clement V, under King Philip’s pressure, issued the Bulla “Pastoralis præeminentiæ” who declared open season for Christian monarchs to hunt Templars. Like the expulsion of the Jews, this was a barely disguised money grab, to replenish Philip’s treasury, emptied by endless wars—another idea Hitler copied as well.”

  “Indeed,” commented the Countess. “Philippe owed money to both Jews and Templars, so to extinguish his debts, he killed them both, and robbed both, almost at the same time.”

  “Yes,” continued Conrad. “Under torture, Templars confessed to heresy, homosexuality, usury, devil worshipping, fraud, embezzlement, spitting on the cross, witchcraft and what not. And, although some of those charges were true in some cases, many, even those completely innocent, had confessed to anything, preferring to be killed rather than living just to be tortured some more. In those days, needless to say, torture devices were rusty, and there were no antibiotics either. You get the picture.

  Some of those Templars I put out of their misery myself, deflecting the ire of their torturers to some of their ‘incompetent’ henchmen, and making their masters suspect underlings were taking bribes to end their victim’s suffering faster than they should. One of those Templars became my first child-in-the blood, Geoffroy.

  Seething, he and I went together to Vienne, where Pope Clement V had convoked the Eleventh Ecumenical Council of the Catholic Church, to please Philip IV. Its main purposes were to posthumously try Pope Boniface VIII and to suppress the Order of the Temple. During the council, Pope Clement V’s behavior was atrocious, vicious, vile, hypocritical, cowardly—there are no human words to describe such evil. Talking about it conjures up images described in Europe during the Nürnberg trials, or during Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, for example when many in Germany said they were ‘inner emigrants’, ‘conscientious objectors who had never objected’, because anyone who wanted to live could not publicly object. So, to dissimulate their objection to wholesale extermination and plunder, they would hint, required acting more Nazi than the Nazis themselves.

  So too behaved Clement V in 1311-12.

  The entire trial of the Templars was a farce. Torture was savage. My child and I put a few more of them out of their misery. At least during the Second World War, Romanians under Antonescu were vile, savagely anti-Semitic in the open. They put Jewish people in trains and let them die of suffocation and hunger while the trains went about in circles, and then exposed the corpses of their victims in Jewish butcher shops. Perhaps their abhorrent executions explain why the Mother chose to make that cylinder end up in the hands of a Romanian Jew of Hungarian ancestry: a prosecuted amongst the prosecuted, trapped, in the midst of those who Hitler ‘envied’—for they were enacting the “Final Solution” faster and more gleefully than the III Reich ever could.

  Pope Clement V matched that level of inhumane cruelty. Finally, at the age of 71, Jacques de Molay died on a brazier, burned alive, cursing Philip IV the Fair, on March 18, 1314. His charred hand, pointing an accusing finger at Philip was the last recognizably human part of his body left by the fire. That very night, Geoffroy—a brave Templar chevalier himself, who his torturers took for dead—and I, saw the hand. In it, my blood son saw an almost divine command, left by de Molay: a Templar must avenge that outrage.

  Beside himself with grief and anger, after seeing that, my child asked me to set him free of the bond between maker and blood child, and left for ‘the Orient’, as we used to call the Middle East. There, he probably found someone, in the lands of my maker, who taught him how to avenge de Molay and the Order of the Temple.

  Since an undead can afford to patiently wait, making the bitter poison of revenge taste sweeter with every passing day as the perfect opportunity for retribution draws closer, Geoffroy did just that. Seems the tools of his vengeance could only be furnished by the actions of other monsters. And, in 1314, Caligula was, of course, already dead, and John Lackland too; Philippe le Bel and Clement V were still alive, but the task my blood child hat taken upon himself—to fittingly avenge the suffering and betrayal inflicted on the Templars—was then too daunting for such a young undead. So he waited.

  During WWII, Hitler and Antonescu finally committed bad enough atrocities in kind and numbers to summon the Devil, precisely at the time when my child in the blood came of age.

  And now, a hundred years after the death of Guido List, twisting the runes into saying whatever he wants, Geoffroy can deceive a few esoteric neo-Nazis and use them to unleash forces they neither understand nor could possibly control, to finally exact his revenge.”

  21—Tony confides to Conrad

  After a pause, and before anybody could ask any questions, like a conductor calling the orchestra to silence, Conrad simply said: “If you ladies and gentlemen would be so kind to excuse us, I know now Tony wants to talk to me in private. We will be back momentarily.” He than cocked his head signaling Tony to follow him, and the two walked away.

  “Are you sure you he hasn’t planted that idea in your head?” Haim asked Tony, visibly displeased, as the latter kept walking.

  “If he had,” said Severian who had just arrived, “he would have also made you agree or stay silent. So, no, he hasn’t. Conrad could also get inside Tony’s head and read his thoughts, so he could have silently talked to him. If he chooses to talk as humans do, is out of courtesy to him, to spare Tony a hideous headache, and as a token of honesty to you all. So, let’s give these two gentlemen time and space to talk in private, if they so wish.”

  Conrad bowed to Severian, and winked to the Countess. The Countess blushed and smiled, then pursed her lips, as Tony and Con
rad prepared to leave the room. As they were leaving, Tony overheard Severian say to Haim: “I appointed myself Master of Ceremonies, if you need to know,” then chuckled, but kept walking with Conrad towards the castle’s veranda overlooking the waterfall.

  Once there, Conrad went straight to business: “Nobody can hear us now. You can talk about you worries. I can see you fear the ‘Oracle’,” he said.

  “Yes,” mumbled Tony, “For the Oracle, I used to experience nothing but reverence, although I only met ‘him’ in person once, ten years ago. For the Order, I have much respect, even though many of my missions in its name had been…unsavory. As we say, what is necessary and what is right need not be one and the same,” admitted Tony, stopping and sighing. “Our Order is old, supposed to date as far back as at least the days of Martin Luther, the early 1500s or so. The Oracle is even older. No one knows exactly how much older. And ‘he’ can only be consulted at night. After the latest events, I am getting a bit…uneasy.”

  “Understandably,” quipped Conrad.

  “I guess,” continued Tony. “Still, within the Order we have legends; and legends about people who mysteriously die after telling some of those legends, as well.

  The Monsignor who used to be ‘the conduit’, the one capable of leading us to the Oracle, has called me to ask about our quest’s progress. He was the one who last spoke to Father Lajos, whose handler was sick when Lajos last reported to the Order from Budapest. Soon after, Father Lajos was butchered. So I lied to the Monsignor: I told him we were still very confused, unable to make heads or tails of all this yet.

  He said perhaps I should take the cylinder and its contents to our Mother Lodge. But I requested a delay—which he granted, rather reluctantly. He then told me the Oracle seemed impatient with our ‘incredibly slow’ progress, and begged me to get him something soon now that, verbatim, “his neck is on the line”. The Monsignor is usually more reckless than even I am. But he was clearly scared. My procrastination might have killed Lajos, so I need to do all I can not to do the same to the Monsignor.”

  “Understandable, as well,” commented Conrad.

  Tony continued: “Moreover, the Oracle seemingly has recently disappeared, making many members of the Order rather uneasy. Once, two centuries ago, the Oracle was gone for over a decade, without a warning or an explanation. Rumors had it that all the blood spilled during the Napoleonic Wars had affected him in horrible ways. No one knows for sure. Regardless, he returned and the matter was never discussed again.

  In any case, lately the Monsignor has tried to talk to the Oracle but hasn’t been able to—and he wonders if this might have something to do with what we are investigating or how we are conducting our investigation. So, yesterday, when I asked if he would want a detailed progress report, the Monsignor—after asking me to give him something—suddenly said it would be pointless, since lately the Oracle can’t be found and he has ‘complete confidence in my skills, ways, and means’.

  Now, if I keep lying, I might be expelled, excommunicated or exterminated, no matter how exceptional my superiors might keep telling me I am. I know they have the ‘skills, ways and means’ to do either of those things, should they decide to. Moreover, getting resources to find the Ark, even if they just expel me, would then become far more difficult.”

  “Well,” replied Conrad. “I personally could contribute, since I’m not exactly poor. Neither are the Countess, nor is Severian; but it would be preferable if you could not only access the Order’s assets now, but also stay in good terms with them to continue this career you love—assuming there might be a world left standing once we complete our task.

  This said, there is something else you mentioned about ‘legends’, something related to your ‘Oracle’ I’d like to hear about. Your mind is a bit like a beehive now. You were referring to the Luther legends?”

  “Yes!” replied Tony. “Martin Luther supposedly came with the 95 Theses while relieving himself on the chamber pot. He was fuming against the sale of Indulgences by the Catholic Church—but, among us, at the Order, it is said that what inspired him to defy the simoniac hypocrisy of Rome was the Oracle’s mind reaching into his moral core. And then the same Oracle was said to have inspired his later-in-life anti-Semitism, supposedly because the Oracle believes some Jews could have prevented the demise of the Templars— which makes no sense whatsoever since the Templars and the Jews had the same enemies; but if such lunacy were what drives Geoffroy, your blood child, and Geoffroy were the Oracle, that might explain this abomination we’re witnessing. Martin Luther also scorned Rome for its lack of faith, its greed, its absurd imposition of celibacy to clergy—all matters that seemed to have flared up also during the trials leading to the suppression of the Templars.”

  “So,” replied Conrad, “I guess you don’t think it would be a good idea for me to talk to your Oracle?”

  “Get out of my head, please! No, I don’t!” answered Tony “Aside from the Oracle’s sudden disappearance, a direct conflict with him would make my situation at the Order untenable. That would force me to leave, or result in my death, or lead to excommunication. As things stand, I can still go over my direct boss’ head, speak to the Pope himself. If I am dead or excommunicated, I would have no such option at my disposal anymore.”

  “Fine,” agreed Conrad, “so what is it you propose?”

  “Doing all I can to avoid raising suspicions, I will have to keep as much distance from the Order as I can. Still, I might have to go to the Mother Lodge. So…can you do something to my mind to prevent the Oracle from getting there as if I were Luther?”

  “I can. But he might be able to recognize my imprint—and then, decide to kill you, or torture you, to find out what he can’t read,” admitted Conrad.

  “Then, please do it. I’d rather run the risk. Unless I am forced to go see the Oracle at his crypt, he won’t be able to spy on me while I sleep. With such an old vampire, my sword might not be enough…” Tony said, stopping all of the sudden, realizing what he had just said.

  “Sword…?” asked Conrad. “Ah! ‘Quis ut Deus’, the sword of Michael. You’re an unusual man, Tony. Nemo est, verum servi eius,” commented Conrad.

  “You’re an unusual vampire, Your Majesty,” replied Tony. “Here’s another question: what if this ‘kidinnu’ is that ‘divine protection’ from witchcraft I learned about somewhere and has nothing to do with this Kidinnu astronomer Sól mentioned? What if there is another way to get this ‘protection’?”

  “What if the moon is made of cheese? You humans like to explore. I give you that. Now, let me tell you something I heard at a hotel where I was looking for prey: A man who wanted to try something different went to the bathroom to defecate, cleaned his ass with shaving cream, his ears by sticking his toothbrush in them, all the way to the handle, next tried to shave using dental floss, and finally washed his face with bleach. After this exploratory run, he proudly sought his wife, to tell her he had discovered that what they were doing so far in the bathroom could be all done otherwise, since he had tried another way, and did not see—or hear—any difference. But of course, he could not find her, and died before she could find him as well. In short: if we reject the obvious to prove a point, the point often proves itself, without our help. Let’s stick to the obvious until there is some logical reason to doubt our strategy and change it.”

  “Fine. While appreciating your attempt at toilet humor, I understand Occam’s razor, and will stick to the obvious, then,” replied Tony. “In any case, since I still have very solid contacts and good friends within the Order, I can do much while keeping my distance from the Oracle. There is a laymen branch, which deals with logistics. It’s very independent from the religious branch, which concentrates on the scientifically unexplainable. Since I can, I intend to use the laymen branch’s resources to complete our project. So can you help me fend off the Oracle’s mind incursions, in case I should be forced to visit the Mother Lodge?”

  “I shall,” said Conrad, briefly clos
ing his eyes. “Now, even for my blood child, your brain will be very hard to penetrate. There is one small problem, though: Should I die while this imprint is still very strong in your mind, you might become a vegetable.”

  “Thank you…I think!” mumbled Tony, shaking his head. “Did I just stick a toothbrush in my own ears?”

  “Touché! I think not. For one, I do not intend to die and can defend myself rather well. Conversely, you humans, as things stand, might be in grave danger. From now on, and until we complete our quest, Severian and I will have to keep an eye on all of you at the castle, all night long,” added Conrad.

  “That sounds like a sensible idea,” agreed Tony. “And one last thing…”

  “I know. I won’t tell anyone about the anti-Semitic tendencies of your Oracle. Everyone at the castle seems already confused and on edge enough as things are…” chuckled Conrad.

  “Please get out of my head! Didn’t you say you have put some kind of blockage in my mind, made it hard to ‘penetrate’?” asked Tony.

  “No. I said that, from now on, it would be very hard, even for my blood child, to get inside your mind. I didn’t say it would be hard for me at all. In fact, to me, now your brain is completely transparent,” admitted Conrad.

  “Good to know!” replied Tony. “Anything else I should know, now that I am so transparent?”

  “Yes, in fact. Maybe, if you want everyone to work well, stop speaking to David and Haim about their ‘people in the Biblical sense’. They are Americans, one of whom also happens to be an Israeli citizen. You are Venezuelan, French and American. That anti-Semitic ‘fifth column’ does not help. Let Stalin’s creations die with him. They are now where your ‘people in the Biblical sense’ where before Constantine imposed his religion, then that of a minority, on the Roman Empire,” Conrad added.

  “I do that jokingly. Haim and I have been friends for long,” justified Tony.