by Nina Post
Bernard didn’t mention the royal hound alone on the street. It may not be an omen, but it certainly wouldn’t help lift Thomas’s spirits.
They went back to work to put the finishing touches on the oracle. Then, not long before prayer at prime, Thomas placed the final piece in the oracle and gave it a firm twist.
They stepped back in anxious anticipation, expecting movement.
Nothing happened.
Thomas made an adjustment and tried again.
Nothing happened. Again. “Oh, limb of Satan,” Thomas swore.
Bernard sighed and lowered himself onto a bench. He was a little ashamed for his countenance, knowing they should continue, but if this didn’t work … oh, they were fooling themselves. And they were prideful, thinking they could build such an arrogant thing that put their very souls in peril, believing they were able to create something they had only heard of in tales. They would all likely perish, perhaps the very next night, or the night after that.
Bernard stood and approached the oracle, staring balefully at the many small convex mirrors distorting the reflection. He thought they had done everything right, and now he was just dispirited and confounded.
At that moment, he heard a flutter and a coo sound at the window. He turned and saw three pigeons fly into the large room, right at him. He cried out and shielded his face, then stumbled and fell against a part of the oracle, certain he was ruining any chance to fix what was wrong. When he righted himself, the pigeons were sitting in a row on the windowsill, quiet and still, eyes blinking slowly.
The oracle lit up and began to make noise. He whirled around and met Thomas’s eyes.
It worked. Whatever he fell against made it work. Bernard believed that God was present in many things, in signs and portents and messengers, and he was flooded with relief.
Thomas, as always taking the lead, immediately asked their oracle if this horrible pestilence could be cured. Bernard, hopeful and relieved only seconds before, felt a bone-deep fear as he watched their machine seem to come to life. He would never forget the sound, the look of it, or how he felt watching it. What had they wrought?
Then, a blinding light. Bernard felt as though his head were being torn apart from inside. He thought he might have screamed, but couldn’t hear it.
The apartment, Thomas, everything was gone and there was only an image. Many images. An unseen presence seemed to hold him tight in its grip, hold him in his head, silently demanding he keep his eyes open and see. And every image he was shown seared into him. They were images from the future, because he saw wondrous and terrible things he couldn’t even understand.
This meant there was a future. It meant there would be enough of them left to carry on, which told Bernard that the pestilence wasn’t God’s punishment, since He could easily cleanse the earth of His creation if He truly desired to.
Just when he thought it was over, Bernard was shown something that felt like God Himself was reaching in for him, and when the images stopped, he was curled up on the cold wood floor in a sweem, doubtful he could ever recover.
“Bernard.”
“Bernard?”
“Bernard!”
Bernard stirred and moaned. His whole body ached, especially his head. Isabelle stood over him with a worried expression. Jean sat on the floor, arms wrapped around his legs, eyes wide.
Isabelle pulled him up — she was much stronger than she appeared to be — and Bernard nearly fell over. She steadied him and led him to a bench, then returned to Thomas, shaking him awake before taking his hands and pulling him to his feet.
They couldn’t speak. What they saw overwhelmed them, and Bernard was sure they would have been lost in their own thoughts for days, unable to function except at the most basic level if Isabelle hadn’t drawn it out of them.
“You must tell us what you saw,” she insisted, and gestured to Jean to ready his quill and parchment.
Slowly, haltingly, they began to speak, and soon realized they had both seen the exact same thing from beginning to end, though it was nearly impossible to describe many of the things they saw. Jean wrote quickly, in his precise cursive script.
“Try drawing it,” Isabelle suggested, and handed them both some paper and pens. After they sketched a number of things poorly, Isabelle had Jean, a talented illustrator, improve upon them. Both stared wide-eyed at the finished result.
Thomas asked Jean if he had seen it also, but the knave shook his head. In her lovely French, Isabelle said, “It was frightening enough to watch the two of you.”
Bernard and Thomas knew their vision was of the future, and that for as much as they saw it must have covered more than a hundred years, but they did not know how far off it was. Were they like Bede’s Caedmon, the cowherd who received his gift of a vision through heavenly grace, or were they possessed by a demon, a game-gobelyn? They were petrified they would receive the punishment of the augurs, who looked into the future, and then after death were denied forward vision in Hell.
The fate of their souls was in question even more so than before, but Bernard was comforted to not be alone.
Now that their oracle had worked only too well, Bernard and Thomas had a new purpose: to preserve what they saw, make sure it remained safe and did not fall into the wrong hands.
Bernard heard Isabelle’s mellifluously accented voice from the bed: “Create a language, a secret tongue. I can help you.”
Thomas said he had a sister, also facile with languages, who taught him when he was younger. After nearly an hour muttering and arguing and planning, they decided to do as Isabelle suggested — something they did not think had ever been done before.
Thomas asked Jean for the Bible, and Jean wasted no time in bringing it. Bernard and Thomas placed their hands on the book. They swore on the different parts of God’s body (“Arms!”). They swore on the solemn bond of their friendship. They swore on the honor of their families. They swore on the symbol of the dlame.
“Oyez! Arrête!” Isabelle shouted in French. “Stop this! What is next, you swear your oath on Prometheus’ coilons?”
Thomas and Bernard looked at each other and shrugged. Then they swore on the coilons of both Prometheus and Alfred the Great.
They vowed to create a language to preserve their vision for safekeeping. They vowed to pass the language down their family lines, if any survived, entrusting it to the protection of one worthy descendant in each generation. They vowed to complete it before the pestilence claimed them, or “die in the pain,” a popular oath.
Bernard was grateful to have even more work ahead of them.
In the late winter, after the pestilence claimed so many in the city, they moved into an empty house, tall and narrow, empty for the taking. Thomas had found a wife before the new year on Easter, and both Thomas’s wife Isabelle and Bernard’s wife, Elizabeth, were with child.
They spent the good part of a year developing the language. Bernard was partial to one of the first phrases they crafted — “I praise the pigeon,” which translated to huþ tiriva viþen.
The three of them worked so hard that the next time they looked up, it was spring, and the pestilence was wreaking its horrors a second time. Traveling monks passed the word that it had ceased, but they barely took notice. The arguments over how to describe what they saw, though it was the same thing, were vehement.
Both children were born around the time the pestilence had started in Paris the year before. Isabelle, Bernard, Thomas, and even Jean took turns wearing the lappe. When the leaves turned color and the air turned chilly, they finished the language. To celebrate, they opened Thomas’s bottle of Saint-Pourçain.
They wanted to discourage successive generations from translating the books too early, before it was absolutely necessary. After much quarrel, they agreed to write the code that unlocked the original vision — consisting of a poem and several accompanying lists of words — in English, rather than in the official Norman French or Latin. Thomas was against using English and Bernard and Isabelle were in favor of
it. When the two won out, Bernard knew Isabelle had swayed the vote, not him.
The poem and lists would be the only way to access the details of the vision after their deaths. The poem would be passed down the Lyr family line, and the lists would be kept by the Severn family line.
Isabelle said that they must preserve the vision and the corresponding documents on material that would survive long beyond their own lifetimes. Thomas told Jean about a large supply of fine calfskin vellum in the offices of the Duchy of Lancaster. Jean didn’t quite understand until both Thomas and Isabelle stared at him with slightly raised brows.
“Oh,” Jean said. “I see.”
They rationalized the enormous theft with their belief that the future of the human race depended on quality vellum.
Once they had the vellum, Jean transcribed the written account of the vision Thomas and Bernard shared onto the expensive skin. Their scribe commandeered a large table for this, clearing off worn copies of De nvptiis Philologiæ et Mercvrii, and laid out the vellum flesh side up. Jean then cut a new piece of vellum into two smaller sheets, upon which he transcribed the poem and the lists.
Jean sat down at the table with his swan quill and the animal horns that held his carbon ink and mineral-sourced colored inks, and wrote the language’s writing system onto the supple vellum. He worked as hard as Thomas Bernard had on the oracle, pausing every so often to recut the quill’s nib. He could not employ his usual method of abbreviations, but soon became proficient at writing the system of letters and the strokes that shaped the letters. To guide the lines of his formal-style script, Jean used a wood ruler and a punctorium, and erased his few mistakes with a scraper.
Jean loved the letters themselves and the singular quality of the shapes. He created illustrations that enhanced the Yesuþoh and embellished them with illuminations of gold and silver. With those, he outlined a drawing with ink, then painted the inside area with sap. He laid down the leaf, rubbed it gently to make it shine, then applied minerals and organic dyes for the colored paint.
After more arguing, Thomas and Bernard and Isabelle agreed that an impartial third party should be responsible for the safekeeping of the vision in each generation. They also decided that one child in each generation would learn the language.
Isabelle suggested that Thomas’s line learn how to actually converse, and that Bernard’s line be able to read the characters. If the original vision ever needed to be accessed and translated, the two families would need to work together to decode the poem, and then to interpret the books of the vision itself. “That way,” she said, “our two families will be connected.”
There was enough vellum and leather to make three of the books, and the vision was so expansive that three were barely enough.
Once Jean was done with the writing and illustration, he folded the vellum sheets into ordered gatherings, then turned it over to Isabelle, who deftly sewed the gatherings onto cords. When she finished sewing, she laced the ends of the cords through carved channels in the oak boards that served as front and back covers. Then she nodded to Thomas, who produced three of his best leather-bound books from his personal collection. Each book had metal corner pieces and raised medallions inset with dyed parchment pieces of red, blue, and green. Thomas winced before he relinquished them.
When Isabelle and Jean were done covering the binding with the repurposed leather, they proudly held up the three intricately bound books that comprised their vision in the language they created.
Isabelle named the language Væyne Zaanics, and its character set the Yesuþoh.
Bernard felt hope again.
Chapter 3
San Francisco — October 2013
At the entrance to the Lyr house, perched cliffside on the tip of Belvedere Island, was a massive stone platform supporting a statue of a celiveh caught mid-roar. Its claws were a symbol of merciless predator strength, particularly since one of them was holding up a lamb to devour. As a child, Cate would sit under the lion and read in the shade of its paw. She never thought it would swipe her and draw blood.
“Park down the road, please, on the right side.” Cate waited until the driver of the Town Car got farther ahead. “Here.”
Once the driver pulled off to the side and parked, she checked for cars on Belvedere Ave then got out and walked closer to the house, stopping across the road from the high entrance gate. The grounds were quiet — there were no cars, no workers trimming the shrubbery, no people.
A garage door rose in the distance, and Cate heard the silky roar of the engine all the way outside of the gate. A black Ferrari, dark as squid ink, oozed down the loop of the drive like spilled oil. The gate swung out by the time the car reached the lip of the road as though fearful of the approach, and the car swept around to stop right in front of Cate, its powerful motor thrumming.
Cate’s heart veered into tachycardia that she willed to slow. Ridiculous, how at thirty, after five years away from her oldest sister, she still had the fight-or-flight response when she saw her. Would that ever change, or would she always be the ifeh, the frightened mouse, to Gaelen’s fearless celivoh? Just when you thought you were strong …
The driver’s side window of the Ferrari lowered with a soft rrrr, and a gleefully smirking, red-lipped Gaelen, her black-and-cherry hair pulled back in a high ponytail, looked Cate up and down. “Long time no see, sister.” She plucked a card from her wallet and slapped it on Cate’s palm. “My facialist.” Gaelen put her hand up like a phone and mouthed, “Call her,” as she gave Cate a false look of sympathy. She brought the window a quarter of the way up and slid on her black sunglasses. “Oh, if you’re here to save the company from our pernicious clutches, you’re too late. I’ve already redecorated. Ta, little bitch!” Cate heard her laugh as the window whizzed back up.
“Ta, little bitch?” Cate muttered as she headed back to the car. Once she settled into the backseat again, she laughed. The driver was a total pro; he glanced at her briefly and his expression simultaneously conveyed just the right amount of empathy and professional distance.
“Wait here a minute, please.”
She had used this car service many times before. Most of the drivers were musicians who played in local bands, but they were all professional drivers who could do things with a large black Town Car that took her breath away, though it was more a matter of finesse than daring.
“Could you turn on the air conditioning?” she asked the driver.
“Sure.” Nothing about how it was barely fifty degrees outside, which Cate appreciated. She leaned toward the vents, turning them all the way up. Then she stared at the entrance to the house and called Benjamin. “I’m here,” she said, as though she’d rather be at the dentist’s.
There was a beat of silence.
“So am I, ontologically speaking,” he replied. “I am here, where I am.”
“Saw Gaelen,” she said. “Driving a black hole with wheels.”
“I’m sure she had some words of wisdom for you.”
“You could say that.” Cate hesitated to ask about her father, but couldn’t stop herself. “You haven’t heard anything about awnoh, have you?”
“No.”
“Aren’t you the man who sent a local errand boy to my door at a non-disclosed location, with a message that someone else wrote, not a minute after sending me an IM? But you have no idea where your employer is?”
“As I mentioned, he is no longer my employer.”
“Tell the truth,” she said.
“I’m not trying to mislead you, my dear.” He sighed. “Gaelen has the house up for sale, so he’s probably not there.”
It hit her like one of her other sister’s Joan Crawford-esque slaps — not that they were sisters anymore — but of course they put it up for sale. Nothing was dependable. “I didn’t know.”
“I would have mentioned it if you were planning to stay there.”
A red Tesla roadster approached around the curve and zoomed quietly past the parked Lincoln like a ni
nja wearing red.
“I don’t like this, Benjamin.”
“It’s necessary, my dear. You need to take the reins of Zaanics. This isn’t something I can do.”
What she wanted to say was how hard it was to get herself to this point. How he was putting all of her hard-fought efforts at risk. Because everything still felt as tenuous as a rickety suspension bridge.
She said goodbye then gave the driver the address of the small hotel near Fisherman’s Wharf, a venue she liked because it featured a nautical theme and was close to the ocean. What was it Isak Dinesen had said about salt as a cure? Tears, sweat, or the sea. She could use a cure. Seeing Gaelen, even for a minute, was starting a cascade of psychosomatic reactions.
She looked forward to hiding in a corner with a bowl of hot chowder, a glass of riesling, and a book. But first she’d have to drop off her bags in the room then go to the store for some groceries. When she arrived at the hotel, she paid the driver then dropped her bag by the check-in desk. La Dolce Vita was playing on a small TV at the side of the check-in desk. She must have watched it a little too long, because the desk clerk, a red-haired man in his twenties, said, “Have you seen it?”
“Do you know Fellini’s original title for that movie?”
He furrowed his brow. “Original title?”
“Although Life Is Brutal and Terrible, You Can Always Find a Few Wonderful Moments of Sensuality and Sweetness. A little long, maybe.” She glanced at his name tag. Ferdinand. Like the bull.
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“There’s nothing else you need to know about life.”
Cate stepped into the door by the floral and gifts section of the Safeway, holding the list she’d made on the walk over. Her first stop was the topical ointments section. Her skin had broken out in about a half dozen rashes since she saw Gaelen. She dropped two bottles of an anti-itch gel into her basket, two bottles of generic Benadryl, and some vitamins. The in-store audio played a Beatles song she softly sang along to.