At the far end of the cave room was a great bronze door, inscribed with symbols. There were circles divided into four quarters, with a symbolic animal or god’s head in each. And there were squares divided into smaller tiles, each tile bearing letters or characters from a foreign script.
“The language in the center is Enochian, the tongue of angels,” Astiza said. “The ancients knew it, but we moderns have forgot.”
“I hope what it’s saying is not a curse,” I said.
“An invitation, to the right person.”
There was also a date, in Latin script: ANNO DOMINI MCDLXXXIV, or 1484.
“The date Rosenkreutz was sealed within,” Catherine guessed.
“The Rosicrucians claimed they entered this chamber 120 years later and found the texts that form the base of their organization,” Astiza said. “If true, the tomb beyond may be empty.”
“Unless they didn’t find everything,” I said.
“You think you’re wiser, Ethan?” Catherine teased me.
“Cleverer, perhaps. We’ve come this far under terrible circumstances, so fate wants us to find the Brazen Head, don’t you think?”
“To harness it.”
“Or destroy it.” That had been Thomas Aquinas’s idea, and he was a saint, an honor to which no one has thought to nominate me.
“That won’t happen,” she said.
“The door is locked,” Astiza interrupted. “We have no tools.”
“No gunpowder and no battering ram,” Pasques said, with a note of genuine regret. Bashing things in is what men do.
“You could be our ram, Pasques,” I said.
“With your head the tip,” he replied.
“The lettering could be a code,” Astiza said.
“But we have no time to puzzle one, and no magical incantation,” Catherine responded impatiently. She kicked the portal. “Your wife promised you have a key, Ethan.”
“I will try it.” I was nonchalant, and yet mystified that Astiza had predicted my usefulness so confidently. She believes in me more than I believe in myself, which is one reason I love her.
“You really have one?” Catherine asked. She has occasionally proclaimed my usefulness, too, but then been surprised when I confirm it.
“When Durendal shattered, its rose hilt opened and this popped out.” I revealed to the others what was in my hand. “Hidden for centuries.”
Their intake of breath was audible. “This unlocks this door?”
“Why else all the fuss over an antique sword?” Destiny had become an avalanche, and I was meant to be here and nowhere else. I stepped forward, inserted the key, turned it against rusty resistance, and heard a click. Reforging the sword had allowed it to be swung with power, and the resulting jolt had been violent enough to free the key. People had probably been trying to reunite hilt and blade for a long time.
With a ponderous creak, the great door revealed a chamber beyond. I thrilled to success, and a hundred colors. The others looked at me with respect. Treasure hunting is addictive.
“You’re performing well, Ethan.” Catherine’s praise was the kind used for a hunting dog or stud horse. “My investment in you has paid off.”
“My wife gets the credit. We make a partnership.”
“You and I are partners, too.” She said it lightly, offhandedly, but just slyly enough that it annoyed me. Catherine had been imperiously remote when I first met her, and then dangerously flirtatious when she lived with my entire family. She was instructive yet treacherous, vain yet insecure. Here we were in the devil’s armpit, our escape unclear, looking for a mechanical golem a saint had wanted destroyed, and she dropped sentiments like heedless crumbs. I was baffled. Why insult me one moment and play games the next? The French Revolution had broken something in her, I guessed. Her soul. Her sanity.
It was not my duty to repair it. Nor was I going to allow her to toy with our emotions, batting them like a cat. “Let’s see if the Brazen Head of Albertus Magnus and Christian Rosenkreutz really awaits.”
We stepped inside the new chamber, immediately confused by its complexity.
Then there was a great boom that shook the chamber, a roll like thunder, and a great cascade of rock that sluiced down the lava shaft to bounce down the tunnel at the far side of the room. A cloud of dust rolled out.
Wolf Richter had blown his way from tower to tomb with a blast of gunpowder. He would soon be climbing down to join us.
“We don’t have much time,” I said.
Chapter 36
Trapped,” Pasques repeated.
“No,” said Catherine. “If we find the automaton, it will tell us a way out.”
The room we entered was even odder than the Star Summer Palace, outside Prague. The chamber was made of seven walls instead of the usual four. There was a round stone table on a central plinth in the middle, which could serve as an altar. It was inscribed with designs and pierced on its periphery with oblong slits, like handholds.
“Why seven walls?” I asked.
“The seven planets,” Astiza speculated. “The seven days of Creation, the seven days of the week, the seven sins, the seven virtues, the seven sacraments, the seven seals, the seven pillars, the seven sages, the seven alchemical metals, the seven hills, and the seven cycles for Egypt, representing eternal life. Can you feel the power?”
I did feel something, just as I had in the Great Pyramid, but we’d no time for metaphysical musings. Where was the android?
The room was brilliantly painted. Each wall had forty square tiles, five across and eight up, tinted every color in the rainbow and each bearing an alphabetical or numeric symbol, an animal, or an Egyptian hieroglyph. Making sense of the pattern would take a couple of centuries, I estimated. The circular altar was inscribed with four circles, a symbol within each.
“Earth, air, fire, and water,” Catherine recited.
Lines on the floor made a complex seven-pointed star. There was no golem and no Christian Rosenkreutz. The tomb, it seemed, had been robbed. We stared with disappointment.
“If the Brazen Head ever existed, it looks like it’s gone,” I said.
“No,” Catherine said. “We’d have heard of its use.”
“Maybe it’s a myth. Or maybe it really was destroyed by Thomas Aquinas.”
“You just said fate wouldn’t have led us here unless there was something to find,” said Astiza. “Rosenkreutz carried something to Český Krumlov, and he escaped with it. He had to bring it here.”
I agreed, and yet we stood, baffled. Pasques looked uneasily out the door at the cave cavern, waiting for an appearance by Richter’s men. He swung the chamber door nearly shut, peering through the crack.
“Stand guard with your gun, Pasques,” Catherine told him.
“If there’s no Brazen Head, maybe Richter will simply let us be,” I said, with no conviction.
“He’ll still want revenge,” Astiza countered.
And then little Harry discovered what we had not. “Drawers,” he said. He pushed on one of the tiles and it opened. We tried the same with others, and more drawers slid out. The room was a gigantic cabinet. The one I pushed revealed a rock crystal inside.
Each of the tiles was a drawer a foot wide, a foot high, and several feet deep. They held a bewildering variety of curiosities. There were crystal balls, animal horns, pelts, bolts of silk and velvet, agate bowls, a nautilus shell, silver cups, exotic feathers, crystal stones, tarnished scepters, capes, bone rings, vials of dust, vials of liquid, human skulls, a unicorn horn, splinters of old wood, mirrors, spyglasses, intricate knots, bear claws, a mummified monkey, dried roses, altar cloths, tarot cards, ancient scrolls, and old coins. “Enough rubbish to fill a king’s attic,” I said.
“An emperor’s,” Astiza said. “Some of this came from Rudolf, I’d surmise. And it hasn’t been robbed, which means the Brazen Head should be here, too.”
There were 480 drawers, we calculated, or eighty each on the six doorless walls. But none was big enough for
a man-size automaton.
“Rosenkreutz collected from all over the world,” Astiza said. “His disciples no doubt continued the tradition. Adepts paid homage to the rosy cross by pilgrimage and tribute. This is like an altar with sacrifices.”
Men had died, I thought, in pursuit of clutter in a closet.
And where was my son?
The boy had disappeared. Had he crawled into one of the drawers?
I circuited the room. “Harry?”
Astiza jerked from her trance of speculation and looked stricken. “Ethan, how do we always lose him?”
“He can’t have gone far. Harry!” I shouted.
In answer I heard a dreaded call from across the cavern. “It’s Gage! Come! We’ve got them!” The voice was Wolf Richter’s.
And then my son. “There’s a lever under the table, Papa.”
He was short enough to have crawled under the altar table in the center. Before I could command him to come out, he pulled. There was a clunk. And then the altar began to sink, taking my son with it.
Astiza cried out, but Harry seemed unalarmed. He rode the base of the altar down into the earth as if on a descending chariot, the sinking platform the same diameter as the table it carried. It lowered just ten feet to a floor below and stopped with a sigh. I lay down to peer through the hole it had left in our own chamber and saw a round room beneath us. My boy stoop-walked out from under the altar table and looked up.
“Papa, there’s a man and a doll down here.”
Astiza, Catherine, and I slid over the edge, hung on the lip, and dropped to the altar before hopping onto this new floor. Pasques stayed above to hold off Richter.
The hidden chamber was monochrome instead of colored. Its gray stone was unpainted but engraved with a bas-relief. At first I thought it represented a chain of people, then I realized it was only one. A baby crawled out of a nautilus shell, a spiral similar to what I’d seen represented by the Great Pyramid in Egypt, a geometric representation of the Fibonacci number sequence. A toddler then walked into a forest, and fantastic beasts like griffins and unicorns shared the cyclorama as it curved around. The toddler grew to a girl, the girl to a youthful boy, the boy to a young woman, the woman to a stalwart man, and so on, aging steadily until at the end the figure was stooped, then crawling, and finally sinking into the earth, only an arm straining upward from a pile of dying leaves. The rest was sucked down into the mystery we are all headed for.
“Life’s cycle,” Astiza said.
“Unless one discovers an oracle to elude the tedious tragedy,” replied Catherine. She pointed to the two figures Harry had announced.
One was a desiccated but otherwise intact corpse of an elderly man with long hair and graying beard, dressed in a simple robe and seated on a stone bench, looking across the descended altar. The arid air had mummified him, his skin sunken leather, his eyes closed, his fingers curled.
The other figure, on a bench opposite, was the most curious contraption I’d ever seen. It was a mechanical man with face and breast and backplate of tarnished brass. The android looked serenely back across the altar at what could only be the mummified remains of Christian Rosenkreutz, its guardian. The automaton had legs with a warrior’s greaves and arms with a knight’s gauntlets, but much of the mechanics of the Brazen Head were exposed, as if its metal skin had been torn away and we were looking at sinews and bones beneath. Here, however, the innards were rods, wires, fine chains, and gears: gears by the countless thousands, many tinier than watch workings. They were connected with springs, coils, ratchets, and levers. Some were wood and others ivory, but most were metal, remarkably preserved by this enclosure. They still glistened with oil. What extraordinary artistry had gone into this golem! It looked like the work of not just a lifetime but a thousand years.
Both husks seemed as preserved as the new wax figures in Madame Tussaud’s odd new museum in London’s Lyceum Theatre, which I’d seen when arranging to be an English spy.
Where had the expertise to build the Brazen Head come from? Who had taught Albertus Magnus the art of creating an artificial man?
“At last we are rewarded,” Catherine whispered.
Astiza inspected the corpse of Rosenkreutz, brushing his brown, bearded cheek with her fingertips. I went to the medieval android. It was lifeless as a puppet with no strings, yet obviously built for animation. A wire from its back disappeared into the floor, as if it were chained or tethered. It reminded me of the cable from the lightning rod.
“Does it talk, Papa?”
“I think he might when he has something to say. He needs something to eat as well. Look how skinny he is.” I poked my finger through what would have been the side of the torso, into the innards of the machine. My son laughed at my joke. But how did it work?
For many years I’ve generated electricity with a hand crank, giving sparks to party and a literal jolt to my former enemy Big Ned with an electrified sword. I suspect that tangible magic will be of real use someday, powering any number of devices that inventors like Robert Fulton might devise. Did this automaton draw lightning—not like Roland’s broken sword at the Star Summer Palace, or the great tree I’d found in the Dakotas, but from batteries charged as Ben Franklin had taught me? I saw no crank.
Then I remembered the slits along the circumference of the altar table. They were, I realized, handles on a windlass. I gripped, tugging the table one way and then the other. It rotated clockwise.
“It’s stiff with age, but I think this altar might spin in a circle around its axis,” I told the women. “Grab hold and we’ll march as if raising anchor. You, too, Harry. Pretend we’re at sea.”
He was delighted by this game.
The altar was stiff at first, but when we gave a heave, it started grinding around with a gasp and a wheeze. As we trudged in a circle, the mechanism below loosened and the table began to spin faster. We heard a faint hum. Finally it spun loose as a top, and all we had to do was stand in place and give it an encouraging shove. We looked at the android. The glass eyes of the Brazen Head began to glow sapphire. “We’re waking it up, Harry! I think it wants to talk!”
We were interrupted by a roar from above as Pasques lit loose with his blunderbuss, followed by shouts, cries, and answering shots. Another battle had broken out. There was a pause as both sides reloaded, ramrods rasping in barrels. “Help!” the policeman called.
“Pasques, what’s happening?” Catherine asked.
“They approached like wolves and scattered like puppies,” he replied. “Get the American up here.”
Then more shots, a thud, and finally a yell from the Frenchman and a clatter as his weapon fell. I heard the policeman’s body slide to one side. He was groaning. We heard the others approaching.
“Wait in the cavern,” Richter shouted to his men.
There was a tread of boots and then the baron strode through a cloud of gun smoke to peer down at us, his acid-eaten countenance a vision from hell. He held two loaded pistols.
“It seems you’re useful after all, Monsieur Gage,” he said, looking down at our spinning carousel of astrological images, our mummified corpse, and our glowing automaton. “You found what my Invisible College misplaced. And now I will take back what is rightfully mine.”
Chapter 37
Pasques was groaning. “Have you killed my agent?” Catherine asked. She seemed unafraid of Richter. Two thieves, consumed by themselves.
“We’ll see if he bleeds out. He killed and wounded some of my men.”
A brief cloud on her pretty face, and then nothing. She tried to feel but had a heart that was numb. She pretended to passion but had no idea what passion was. She had appetites, but they were the appetites of an automaton. “So now it is just us,” she said to her opponent.
“It is just me, Comtesse, and the Brazen Head. What happens to you, I will ask the machine.” He leaped lightly down onto the altar. “Pray that its answer suits you. Throw down your pistol. The battle is over, and I have won.”
&nb
sp; “Don’t be foolish,” she tried, attempting to cast beauty like a spell. “You and I are natural partners. The witch has already led us here. Gage has animated the machine and become superfluous. Pasques is disabled. But you and I can use the android for good.” She carefully laid her gun on the altar.
“My good.” Richter glanced at Astiza. “The wife we will take as slave labor. She’s strong enough to carry the android.” Despite his ruin of a face, I could still see lust and longing in his eyes. The man was noble, rich, powerful, a scholar, and here he was with us, grubbing in a hole in the ground for a forecast he didn’t need and love he couldn’t have. Nor did Catherine miss his glance at a rival woman. Contentment makes poor men rich, Franklin has counseled. Discontent makes rich men poor.
And I needed to finish what I had started, which was to destroy Baron Richter. Except that my sword was broken, and my hands empty. I glanced at the gun Catherine had set down.
Richter pointed to me with a pistol. “Your husband, Madame Gage, is the most irritating man I’ve ever met. I’m sure he can be a trial to you as well. I will do you a favor by getting rid of him.” He cocked the hammer, and I stood like beef in a slaughter yard.
“Don’t be stupid, Richter,” my wife snapped back with contempt as stinging as a slap. “Ethan had the key to this place, and he is the only one who knows how to animate the Brazen Head. He’s our sole electrician.”
Richter hesitated. “Is this true?” he asked Catherine.
“Perhaps.” She looked sourly at me. So how could I keep her on our side? How could I use her as she tried to use me?
“Catherine has been our partner since the beginning, Baron,” I lied. “We’re all necessary if you want to operate the automaton.”
He looked from us to the Brazen Head. The machine’s face reminded me of the frozen, sober expression of a Greek mask. Could it really foretell the future? The idea seemed improbable, and yet isn’t that what astrologers, fortune-tellers, generals, and financiers try to do every day?
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