Abu Nuwas picked up one of the books from the table and flicked through it distractedly.
“Something is very wrong. Vadomar would never leave his precious manuscripts exposed to thieves in this way.”
“You’d better come here. I think I’ve found your friend.”
He followed Hervor’s voice into the next room. There, between a narrow bed and a chest, she indicated something on the floor. It was a body, dressed in the Roman style in long tunic and sandals. Where its head should have been, however, was a messy pulp of bone, flesh and gore. The cranium had been shattered into tiny pieces, and most of its contents squeezed out through horrible gashes, so that the skin sagged like an empty bag.
Abu Nuwas knelt to examine the corpse with trembling hands.
“Oh, Vadomar. What have they done to you?”
He turned the body onto its back, and the remnants of a face could just be discerned on the mashed, limp skull.
“Is it him?”
“I believe so.”
Pulling the dead man’s cloak over the shattered head, Abu Nuwas got to his feet.
“He cannot have been killed here. Such a savage beating would have left brains and blood all over the place, and his screams would surely have attracted interest, even in this unneighbourly neighbourhood.”
“Then why take the risk of hauling the body back to the victim’s home, and dragging it up three flights of stairs?”
“Perhaps as a warning. Perhaps for us to see. But who knew we were coming?”
Hervor frowned.
“Angilbert mentioned a spy from the court of the Emperor…”
She was shocked by the snarl of cold hatred that erupted from Abu Nuwas.
“Al-Sifr. It must be. The combination of cruelty and provocation is typical of the man.”
He noticed her puzzled expression.
“Al-Sifr is an old adversary of mine, an agent of the Roman Empire. His name means Void, Emptiness — in your language, Nihil. If the Donation exists, the Empress would certainly want to suppress it. And Nihil would relish the chance to murder my friend, then taunt me with his bloody handiwork. He must somehow have learned of Vadomar’s discovery.”
“Or maybe your friend was playing a dangerous game, seeking more than one buyer for his document to drive up the price. It doesn’t matter now, anyway. Without Vadomar, we have no chance of finding the Donation.”
“No. Vadomar was a scholar. He understood the fragility of knowledge, how easily it can be lost if it is not duplicated. He would have left a record somewhere, some sign to point our way.”
“Then Nihil would have taken it.”
Abu Nuwas shook his head.
“My friend was not so crude as to leave it in plain sight. It will be concealed somehow, perhaps within another text.”
Hervor indicated the profusion of manuscripts in the other room.
“Are you saying we must go through all those documents, looking for hidden secrets, but not knowing what form they take?”
“If need be. Can you read?”
The shieldmaiden bridled at his question, but swallowed her anger.
“Yes, I can read. Latin, at least.”
The grey light from the window was fading fast. Abu Nuwas found candles in the chest, and lit one for himself and one for Hervor from an oil lamp which illuminated the landing. By the flickering light he began to sort through the manuscripts. Those written in Latin he passed to Hervor for scrutiny; those in Greek, Arabic or other, unknown, scripts, he examined himself.
Despite her indignation Hervor’s literacy was functional rather than scholarly, and she struggled to make sense of the complex works of philosophy, history and poetry that composed the majority of Vadomar’s collection. After the first couple of documents she began scanning through the pages, looking for key words like “Constantinus” that might indicate a reference to the Donation. She found nothing though, and as the candle burned down her eyes ached and her head pounded.
“This is a waste of time.”
Abu Nuwas looked up at her distractedly.
“What? No. I know Vadomar, and the key will be here somewhere.”
“Perhaps, but this is like searching for a truffle in a dungheap. Look at this:
‘Garlic.
Sausages.
Wine.
Almonds.
Lentils.
Soup.
Lemons.’
“Either it’s the worst poem I’ve ever read, or it’s your friend’s shopping list.”
She was startled to see Abu Nuwas leap to his feet.
“Give that to me.”
He snatched the list from her hand, and studied it fiercely. Then he began to laugh.
“Vadomar, you cunning old devil. Look, don’t you see? ‘Allium, Botuli, Uinum, Amygdalae, Lenticulae, Ius…’ The initial letters spell out Abu Ali! This has to be it, the message he left for me.”
“Then what about the lemons, ‘Citri’? What does the extra ‘C’ indicate?”
“I don’t know. There must be more, somewhere.”
He studied the document intently in the candlelight, turning it over and examining both sides.
“This is paper, not papyrus or vellum. That in itself should have given us a hint. Paper is still rare in this part of the world, and would not be used for such casual jottings. Yet I can see no other letters or markings.”
“Well, be careful. You’re going to singe it, holding it so close to the flame.”
The kiss which he planted on her mouth was so enthusiastic that she was left rubbing bruised lips. Abu Nuwas was dancing, an unexpected and clumsy little jig.
“Of course! Lemons… paper… fire… it is so obvious!”
“Is it? Not to me.”
“Come here. Watch this.”
He held the paper over the candle flame.
“I shall look very foolish if this doesn’t work.”
As Abu Nuwas waved the candle around, delicate, rust-brown lines began to appear below the shopping list. He drew in breath sharply, and concentrated the flame on that area of the paper. Slowly, the lines formed into letters.
“Such a simple trick. Has Angilbert taught you nothing? Words written in lemon juice are invisible to the naked eye, but reveal themselves when heat is applied.”
“What does it say?”
Together they stared at the inscription.
EXPLICEVLTIMACCABALARESPICE
“Oh dear. I had hoped for something less opaque. That was the problem with Vadomar. He was always a bit too clever.”
Hervor shifted nervously.
“Father of Locks — you asked me just now whether Angilbert taught me anything. One thing he did teach me was never to become so caught up in my own affairs that I forgot about my foes. He taught me always to put myself in my enemy’s place, and ask what I would do if I were him.”
“I see. And what would you do, if you were Nihil?”
“I would let you find the secret, then come and kill you and take it from you.”
In the silence that followed, they could hear a scratching and shuffling from outside; perhaps rats, perhaps a group of armed men trying to keep quiet.
“Very well. We will interpret this elsewhere. Let us go.”
He shoved the paper into the capacious sleeve of his coat, and they headed for the door. There were no armed men waiting for them there, but when they descended to the landing below their candles picked out shapes huddled in the shadows. The youths they had passed previously were waiting for them in the darkness, leaning against the walls in such a way as to block the corridor. The young men’s arms were folded, their knucklebones forgotten, and they clutched vicious little knives in their hands. Abu Nuwas stepped forward, with a confidence that Hervor could not help considering misplaced.
“Good evening, gentlemen. If you would be so kind as to allow us to pass…”
“I don’t recall you asking for permission to go up the stairs. But now you want permission to go down them. Do you
recall them asking permission to go up, Libo?”
The speaker appeared to be their leader, an ugly, heavy-set young man who resembled a cross between a baboon and an alaunt. Libo, who was taller and thinner than his friend, shook his bony head.
“They cross our territory without paying tribute, and they don’t even ask permission.”
Abu Nuwas sighed.
“How much then, gentlemen? How much tribute, to cross your territory?”
“The other man gave us ten solidi to make sure you never leave the island. So you’ll have to come up with twenty, if you want to live.”
Hervor gasped. It was an enormous sum. Abu Nuwas, however, was diverted by another issue.
“What man?”
“The other man. The old man with the sack. I reckoned you must know him. He knows you all right. Now, have you got the money or not?”
“Not on my person. If you allow us to go and get it, we could bring it back for you…”
The leader of the youths snarled.
“Do you think we are stupid? If you can’t give us the money right now, you die.”
Although the young men stepped forward, brandishing their knives before them, they did not attack; and when Hervor pulled out her sword, they wavered visibly. There were five of them, but in the narrow confines of the corridor they could not use their numerical advantage to flank her. She noticed that they held their weapons awkwardly, and guessed that for all their bravado they were unused to fighting anybody who actually fought back. It might be possible to escape without a brawl after all.
Then Abu Nuwas’s arm jerked upward. Libo staggered back, a feathered dart sticking from his face. The youths yelled and hurled themselves at Abu Nuwas, who threw his candle at them and swung a heavy stick from beneath his cloak.
Hervor dropped to her haunches and watched the young men sway back from the poet’s swipe. They took a pace back, stamping and gesticulating, yelling curses and threats, seeking to summon up the courage to attack. The screams of Libo, as he stumbled around clutching his bleeding face, provoked prudent caution rather than a thirst to avenge their injured comrade. With only the flame from her taper illuminating them the youths seemed to be performing an obscene dance, a spastic caper of agony and cowardly violence. In a flash she realised why Abu Nuwas had thrown his candle, and she sent her own after it.
The landing was plunged into blackness, and without a word spoken she and Abu Nuwas charged forward. From her crouching position her shoulder crashed into a young man’s groin, propelling him back so that he collided with his comrade. Beside her there was a crash as someone fell to the ground, but their rush had not forced a way through. She leapt back before the youth recovered enough to use his knife.
There was quiet in the dark, except for heavy breathing and Libo’s whimpers. In the wall between the antagonists a door swung open to reveal a worried face hovering over an oil lamp. The door quickly shut again. Hervor listened for the breaths, trying to judge the youths’ positions and condition. She estimated four still standing, winded but unhurt. The chance of surprise was gone, and their enemies though wary were not in retreat.
A snap and rustle behind the youths, and a faint glow, suggested that someone was approaching. Hervor hunkered down, offering as small a target as possible, while she waited to see how the newcomer might tip the balance.
The newcomer, however, was not human. It was only when she saw orange tendrils scale and writhe behind the youths, flicking long shadows down the corridor that she understood. One of the candles had fallen in a heap of rubbish, where its flame had swiftly sprouted in the fertile detritus. The fire wound itself up the dry rotted beams of the old building, flourishing on centuries of poverty and neglect.
The youths looked anxiously behind them, then scarpered, dragging the unfortunate Libo behind them. Hervor and Abu Nuwas moved to go after them, but a flurry of sharply thrown stones forced them back. Beside them the door flew open, and a woman appeared with a baby in her arms. She looked at Abu Nuwas beseechingly.
“Please, master? May we go?”
Abu Nuwas scowled.
“We are not monsters. Get out.”
The woman ducked past the growing conflagration, followed by a man with a small child holding one hand and a bag in the other. He appeared only mildly shamefaced at having sent his wife into jeopardy first. As the man disappeared down the corridor, a roof beam dropped down behind him, bringing with it a deluge of bricks and shattered masonry. The exit was blocked.
Abu Nuwas spoke with eerie calm.
“The skeleton of the building is collapsing. We could be buried within it any moment. Go through that apartment and climb from the window down to the courtyard. I’ll join you in a moment.”
“Where are you going?”
“To Vadomar’s room, to save his manuscripts.”
“Are you mad? You’ll be killed.”
“The prize is worth the hazard.”
Hervor knew she should take him at his word, save herself and abandon him to the idiotic fate he had chosen. However she found herself reluctant to leave him. She wished she had at least memorised the enigmatic message found beneath Vadomar’s shopping list.
“Come on. Don’t you want to find the Donation of Constantinus?”
Abu Nuwas looked toward the upper floor wistfully.
“But… the wisdom lost to mankind…”
Suddenly she understood what she needed to do. She gripped him by the arm.
“If the knowledge in those documents is true, it will be discovered again. If the words they contain are inspired, they will have been copied elsewhere. But if you die, what beautiful creations will never be brought into existence at all?”
He seemed startled, then nodded solemnly. She hoped that the tears in his eyes had been brought on by the thickening smoke, not by his pomposity. However there was no more time for posturing. She pulled him after her into the apartment.
The room was larger than Vadomar’s but empty of any possessions except a low table and a couple of stools. It seemed that the man had been carrying not just the family’s valuables but everything portable they owned. This impression was reinforced as Hervor burst into a second room which contained only a wide straw bed on which all four must have slept. Fortunately though the room also featured a window onto the courtyard, its shutters hanging open.
Hervor dashed to thrust her head through the casement, but so did Abu Nuwas. There was an awkward moment when they were jammed together in the narrow frame, chest against chest. Then Abu Nuwas recollected himself, and grinned.
“Forgive me. Women first.”
He scraped back out of the frame, and Hervor swung a leg over the sill. As she did so there was a groan like the death rattle of a giant, and the earth seemed to tilt. A choking huff of dust belched out of the window. The roof of the island was crumbling, and the walls falling inward.
Hervor scrambled through the casement, and slithered down the external wall. It was sufficiently aslant to offer safe, if abrasive, passage to the ground, where a few confused residents of the island milled around and stared at her suspiciously. She ignored them and looked back to the window. Abu Nuwas was struggling to ease his lanky frame through the narrow gap, and the buckling of the wall was now rapid enough to be visible. He seemed to climb out of the building as if shedding a garment, pushing it past his hips and down to his ankles.
By the time he popped his feet over the ledge he was able to stand on the wall and run along it. Haste was necessary though, as holes gulfed suddenly in the brickwork near his feet, and debris from the disintegrating ceiling tumbled after him like scree in a landslide. Ten huge strides carried him from top to bottom, and he hurled himself onto the packed earth of the courtyard just as the island finally expired, the five hundred year old edifice subsiding in a gruff detonation of heat, grit and flying rock.
Hervor pulled the poet to his feet.
“We’d better get out of here.”
Occupants of nearby buildings ha
d gathered in scores, to help or to gawp or in the hope of looting the rubble. Abu Nuwas and Hervor scurried between them, seeking to escape unnoticed. On seeing the grime that caked them some onlookers stepped forward with concern and questions, only to back off at the strange, strained faces of the dark man and the golden haired woman. They were several blocks away before they slowed enough for Hervor to catch her breath and speak.
“Well done, Father of Locks. We have obtained a single line of gibberish, and all we had to do to obtain it was to maim a few locals, destroy a block of flats and be observed fleeing the scene by the entire neighbourhood. The only blessing is that Vadomar’s body will be crushed beneath the rubble, and we will not be held responsible for his murder. Perhaps that was Nihil’s intention after all.”
She regretted her jibes when she saw his face. Now that the crisis had passed, the loss of his friend had impacted on Abu Nuwas. He sighed.
“Poor Vadomar. Still, he was always going to get his head battered in one day. Scholarship is a surprisingly dangerous business; at least, it is the way Vadomar went about it. I believed though that he was smart enough to stay one step ahead.”
“We too must stay one step ahead. The penalty for arson is death, and we are not safe from arrest yet. That is to say, you are not. If I were imprisoned, Angilbert would have me released within hours. Nobody in Rome would dare refuse the friend of King Karlo.”
“A friend of King Karlo? Is Angilbert intimate with the King of the Franks, then?”
“You might say that. He’s fucking Karlo’s daughter.”
Hervor was secretly pleased at the shocked expression on his face.
“Really? And I can only assume, since you have not mentioned any contract of marriage, that they are not wedded to each other. Where I come from, such conduct would result in the stoning to death of both parties. If the man was lucky, that is; the Khalifah might choose to have the fornicator’s skin removed from his living body, inch by screaming inch. Does your King not know then?”
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