Devil's Lair

by David Wisehart

  “It is a picture of one man,” said William, “and one man is what we found.”

  Giovanni did not seem convinced. “I saw a thousand. I couldn’t tell the Neapolitans from the Hungarians. Some had lost their looks, others their heads. I saw more bodies than faces. I left Florence to get away from the dead, and you walk me through a sea of corpses. For what?”

  Nadja spoke up. “This is the man. If he does not look like the picture, it is the fault of my hand, not of his face.”

  “And he has the mark,” William added.

  Giovanni shook his head in scorn. “Mark of a heathen. No Christian would brand his own flesh.”

  “The Templars did,” William said.

  “I’ve read many things about the Templars, but I have never read that.”

  “Then you have not read their secret books.”

  “If you have read them, they are poor secrets indeed.”

  “Their meaning was cloaked in a code,” said William. “I doubt you could have read them. My eyes are not what they once were, but they are better eyes than most.”

  Nadja wasn’t sure what a code was. It seemed to be a kind of spell that made literate men illiterate. Perhaps a code was like a foreign tongue, like Tuscan or Latin, which made people babble until God taught you to hear the words in a new way, and then they made more sense.

  “Code or no code,” Giovanni said, “tattoos are banned by the Church.”

  Even Nadja knew that, and she had read no books at all. Her mother had once told her that the tribes of Germania practiced such devilry before the birth of Christ. Nadja had also heard of merchants who traveled to Christendom from India, Tartary, and Cathay with pagan images needled on their skin, but she had never actually seen a tattoo until her revelation.

  “Tattoos were the least of their sins,” said William. “The Templars were charged with heresy.”

  “On the subject of heresy,” Giovanni retorted, “I defer to your expertise.”

  The donkey began to lag. Giovanni tugged at the reins, and when the animal failed to heed the hint, the poet raised his long switch and whipped the sumpter on the rear. The donkey brayed his rebuttal and resumed his former pace.

  “He can’t be the man you’re looking for,” Giovanni said. “The Templars were burned at the stake more than forty years ago.”

  “You weren’t even alive then,” William pointed out.

  “My father was in Paris on business, staying near the church of Saint-Jacques-la-Boucherie. He saw it with his own eyes. He said that for three days the sky was as black as midnight with the smoke from the heretics.”

  “Yes. More than a hundred were burned. But some escaped.”

  “If any survived, they would be your age.”

  William sighed. “Perhaps the brotherhood lives on,” he suggested. “Somewhere. In secret.”

  “Yes, and perhaps this is the Garden of Eden, and perhaps the sun is rising in the west, and perhaps my donkey here is Balaam’s ass.” He turned to the donkey and said, “Are you Balaam’s ass?” He answered himself in a funny donkey voice: “‘Why yes, pleased to meet you, though I wish you wouldn’t beat me with a stick. Oh, look, is that a Templar in my cart?’”

  Nadja giggled.

  The friar was not amused. “The man you mock is a Poor Knight of the Temple, the last of a sacred brotherhood, defenders of the Holy Grail. He is the one. He will save us all.” William’s voice was stern, putting an end to the argument.

  I hope he’s right, thought Nadja. If not, it would be her fault. She had brought them here. Her visions had led her to William of Ockham, to Giovanni Boccaccio, to Marco da Roma. Her visions now spurred them all south to the infernal gate in search of the Holy Grail, which the Devil had stolen from the world, though she did not yet understand how this wounded man could save them. Her visions were sporadic. She knew the others shared her doubts, but what worried her most was her secret fear: that it was not God who guided her dreams, but something else inside her, something evil.

  She heard a soft grunt, and glanced down at the knight. Marco’s eyelids remained closed, but the eyes flittered beneath their veils. Something was happening. Something had changed.

  Marco da Roma walked in darkness. A cold mist enveloped him. Through the mist a red light beaconed. As he approached it he perceived more of his surroundings: he moved across a field of ice, a vast floe bathed incarnadine by the blood-red light before him. Trapped in the ice were hundreds of human faces staring up, immobile except for their eyes, which tracked his movements from underfoot.

  Walking on, Marco saw the red light divide into two glowing orbs that grew larger as he approached. They became a pair of shimmering eyes, chatoyant as the eyes of a cat. They looked down at him from an immense height.

  He stopped, transfixed, shivering in the dark. The flames of those eyes gave no warmth.

  Marco da Roma, a deep voice rumbled.

  “Who are you?” He recognized his own voice, but felt no vibrance in his throat, no breath upon his lips.

  You know who I am.

  “No.”

  I am the darkness.

  “I don’t know you.”

  Better than you know yourself.

  “Let me go.”

  Do you want to die?

  “I want to live.”

  Then open your eyes.

  The red eyes shut. The darkness shuddered.

  Marco opened his eyes. He came to himself in a storm of light. His skin was on fire. A pulse pounded in his ears like the stampede of a thousand chargers. A silhouette obscured the sky: the outline of a woman, her face in shadow, her hair tinged with gold.

  “He’s awake,” she said.

  But the darkness reclaimed him, and the world fell away.

  CHAPTER 5

  Giovanni’s plan came to him on the push to the summit of the mountain road, a wheel-rutted trail that meandered like a Dionysian through the hills and valleys of Campania. In exchange for company and conversation, he had agreed to take William and Nadja to the Cave of the Sibyl at Lake Avernus, near Cumae, now four days off at a laggard’s pace. Giovanni would then continue on to Naples alone.

  He had traversed these mountains many times on business errands for his father. This stretch of God’s country never failed to inspire him. In those days he would share drinks and swap stories with passing travelers, but now he met no merchants on the road, no messengers on horseback, no penitent pilgrims bound for the Vatican. Pestilence had swept through these hills like the Devil’s rapture, summoning the damned.

  His legs ached in memory of the long trek south. His feet were as sore as a flagellate’s back. His donkey, Apuleius, seemed weary of the cart, which was laden with nine travel bags and one benighted Knight Templar. The knight had briefly opened his eyes, but to no avail. The man remained a burden.

  As the grade of the road steepened, Apuleius slowed to a limacine crawl. William and Nadja pushed the tumbrel from behind while Giovanni led the company up the hill, taut reins biting his hand. He sang a medley of Occitan ballads, his donkey’s favorite traveling songs, and Apuleius caught his second wind. The wheels turned at a steady pace, marking time like the gears of a tower clock.

  A ballad by Guido Cavalcanti came to mind, and Giovanni gave it a melancholy voice:

  As I cannot hope ever to return,

  Little ballad, to Tuscany,

  Go lightly, softly,

  Straight to my lady....

  When his singing lapsed into whistles and hums, he let his mind ramble.

  His new plan was simple: convince William to abandon Nadja’s hellbound folly and come with him instead to Naples, where Giovanni would introduce the famous friar to the court of Queen Joanna, and thereby reap her royal favors. In this way the poet might atone for his youthful indiscretions and reinstate himself in Neapolitan society, where his rhymes had once earned him a following in the court of the former monarch, King Robert the Wise. William of Ockham, famous for his logic, would surely see the logic in the poet�
��s proposal. The simplest plan was usually the best.

  Giovanni’s original plan had been more vague: to seek out his friends in Naples, if any survived the pestilence, and beg them for an audience with the queen. He had known Queen Joanna in her youth, before her ascendency, and had spun some naughty fables for her amusement. Surely the queen would remember him fondly and welcome his plea for patronage.

  He had in mind a new book that Her Highness would be unable to resist, a collection of bawdy tales and witty sketches intercalated with clever bits of rhyme. Already he had composed a dozen novellas like the ones that had made the ladies of the court blush and giggle, stories that would lift the spirits of the queen’s loyal subjects and mitigate the fears of this dismal age. If he could win Her Highness’s support for this admittedly trivial work, it might secure his livelihood and pave the way for his greatest ambition: an epic poem to rival Dante.

  But first he needed to speak with William alone. He resolved to create an opportunity at their next encampment, and devoted the rest of his climb to thinking how it might be done.

  They made camp in a holt of hazel near the verge of a canyon bluff, where the ground was cloaked in leaves and catkins. Giovanni tethered Apuleius to a tree and found clusters of hazelnuts on the branches. August was early for hazelnuts, but a few had begun to brown. He harvested a handful and peeled off the fuzzy husks to reveal smooth round shells, like Roman helmets, which he cracked open with a pair of flat stones. He brushed away the shells and passed the kernels to William and Nadja.

  “Pearl of the poets,” he said, and popped the last one in his mouth. It tasted sweet and creamy.

  Nadja scrutinized the morsels in her hand, then offered them to William. “You will need this medicine.” She traveled with a pouch of herbs, and claimed to know their uses.

  The friar looked skeptical.

  “To ease the pain of the scorpion’s bite,” she added.

  “Scorpions?” Giovanni said. “Not around here.”

  The girl agreed. “Not here.”

  William studied her for several heartbeats, then ate without argument, chewing the nuts one at a time.

  Giovanni had once read in a book of simples that hazel oil applied to the skin could heal a scorpion bite. He did not believe that eating the kernels would serve as a prophylactic, but Nadja spoke as one who knows, giving her words the weight of prophecy.

  He said to her, “Dante does not mention scorpions in Hell.”

  Nadja took a sketch from her pack and handed it to him. Giovanni studied the rough sheet of paper. It displayed a manticore: the face of a man, body of a lizard, paws of a lion, tail of a scorpion.

  “Yes,” Giovanni muttered. Dante had described this creature in Canto XVII of the Inferno. “But I haven’t read you that part.”

  “I saw this demon in a falling dream.”

  Giovanni had his doubts. William believed in Nadja’s vatic delusions, but Giovanni had met too many charlatans to accept her claims on faith alone. Anyone with a minimum of skill and a modicum of practice could draw a beast and call it a prophecy.

  Admittedly, Nadja’s drawings were good. If she had been born a man of Tuscany, she might have secured an apprenticeship and followed the path of Giotto; instead, born to the distaff side, she hoped to be a Hildegard. That famous sibyl of Bingen saw the Devil as a monstrous worm, black and bristly, covered with ulcers and pustules, with the face of a viper and blood-red eyes that burned from within. Of course, everyone saw devils these days. Nadja’s visions were unoriginal. The manticore she drew was not her own, but a demon out of Dante. Someone must have described the beast to her, someone who knew the poem well.

  “You say you cannot read?” Giovanni asked.

  “I can read my name,” she said, “and some of the Church words. Iesus. I-E-S-U-S. That means our Lord Jesus Christ.”

  She cast a glance at the friar, who nodded his approval with a hint of tutorial pride.

  Suspicious, Giovanni said, “Has someone read to you from the Inferno?”

  “You did,” she answered.

  “Someone else.”

  She shook her head.

  “When you were a child, perhaps. Your mother?”

  “She could not even read Iesus. She went to Heaven this year, on Saint Alban’s Day. Now she reads the face of God.”

  The pestilence, thought Giovanni. He, too, had suffered losses in the great mortality: his father, his stepmother, his Uncle Vanni. In Florence, four-fifths of the population had died in the past two years. Now his closest friends were gone: Matteo Frescobaldi, Giovanni Villani, Ventura Monachi, Bruno Casini, Francesco Albizzi, Capo di Borghese Domenichi.

  And Lady Fiammetta, his little flame. He had met her in the shadows of King Robert’s court, and from that day the shadows held no fear for him. When darkness fell she came to him, and he to her. Until the shadows claimed her. Thinking of her now, he felt blood tremble in the lake of his heart. Everywhere and always, love made way for grief.

  He set these memories aside and continued his line of questioning. “Your father, then? He read to you?”

  Nadja shook her head. “I never knew him.”

  “Someone else?”

  “No.”

  “Stories from a wandering preacher, or friends around the campfire?”

  “All my friends are here.”

  William put a hand on Giovanni’s arm. “Enough. No need to torture the girl. What do you know of this demon?”

  Giovanni answered, “His name is Geryon. Dante saw the beast in the abyss, where the river of blood cascades into the lower pit. Geryon guards the descent into Malebolge, the eighth circle of Hell, but Virgil tamed him.”

  “He has a scorpion’s tail,” Nadja said.

  “Yes. I should have remembered that.”

  “A small matter,” William said.

  “Which may prove deadly,” Nadja added.

  The friar swallowed the last of his hazelnuts, then inquired of Giovanni, “How did Virgil tame the beast?”

  “Dante doesn’t say.”

  “What does he say?” Nadja asked.

  Giovanni scratched the nape of his neck. “Well, let’s see.” He brought the scene to mind. “After meeting the sodomites in the seventh circle, Virgil talked to Geryon alone, while Dante spoke to the shades of the dead.”

  “Who?” William asked.

  “The usurers.”

  Giovanni felt a twinge of shame. His father had been a usurer for the Bardi company, lending money at interest—merciless loans that ruined many good men. Giovanni had not told William his dark secret, that he came from a family of merchants and bankers, that he himself had apprenticed as a usurer. He saw no need to confess it now.

  William continued. “So this demon, Geryon, guards the passage down to the Devil.”

  “Yes.”

  “But the demon can be reasoned with.”

  “Apparently.”

  “How?”

  Giovanni shrugged.

  “You must have some idea,” William insisted.

  But he didn’t. “You’ll know when you get there.”

  “I hope so,” William said, and began unloading comestibles from the cart.

  Giovanni helped with the travel bags, most of which were his. Three contained his clothes. One had books and writing supplies. Another held tools from his father’s estate—hammer, nails, rope, and the like. He needed to get a few things out: warm clothes; his ledger, pen, and ink; a trowel to dig a fire pit. Taking the tool bag, he accidentally knocked it against Marco’s elbow and heard a thump of metal on bone. The comatose man did not complain.

  “Sorry,” Giovanni muttered, for no reason, then asked William, “What about him?”

  The old man set down the culinary bag. Wood spoons drummed against an iron pot, then settled into silence. “Leave him be for now, until we get the campfire going.”

  Nadja collected deadfall for the fire.

  “We could make more drawing sticks,” Giovanni suggested. He hoped to
occupy the girl’s attention with this task, then lure William aside for a private conversation.

  The girl brightened. “Hazelwood is best for charcoal.”

  “Also used by witches,” said the friar, casting a glance at Nadja. “For divining water, I believe.”

  She shrugged. “There’s never a witch around when you need one.”

  William laughed.

  In the tool bag the trowel was snared by a skein of rope. Giovanni untangled it and began to dig a fire pit. “Mercury’s caduceus was made from hazelwood. He used it to guide souls into the underworld.”

  “Then we should take some with us,” said William.

  Nadja piled her gleanings on the ground. Giovanni broke the sticks into flinders, arranged them in a pyre, then added dry leaves and catkins before striking flint to steel. A hot spark kindled the leaves. The air roiled with smoke. Giovanni blew into the flamelet until the larger sticks ignited. The drought had been a curse to the foliage, but a blessing to the fire.

  The three of them took Marco down from the cart. The knight was heavy, owing to his height. As they manhandled Marco to the fireside, Giovanni stubbed his toe on a root. He caught himself before they all fell into the flames, and they managed to set the knight down with no additional injuries to the patient or the caregivers.

  At Nadja’s prompting, Giovanni dug a kiln for making charcoal. He had learned the collier’s art as a young boy, and he enjoyed putting his knowledge to use. Explaining the process to Nadja, he piled nine hazel sticks on a bed of kindling in the pit before covering the wood with topsoil. He left a small hole in the center for smoke to escape, and through this opening he lit the kiln with a firebrand. Lacking sufficient air for a flame, the sticks would burn slow, smolder overnight, and be reduced to charcoal by noon tomorrow.

  Giovanni asked Nadja to monitor the smoke, then excused himself from the camp. If he guessed right, the friar would seek him out within the hour.

  CHAPTER 6

  Giovanni took his ledger with him. His quill and inkpot he carried in a holder on his belt, in the fashion of a Florentine merchant. He climbed to a rise above the road and settled in a hassock of dry grass on the brink of the canyon, where he could sit and watch the play of sunset in the clouds: clusters of lemons and oranges that ripened with color before decaying into darkness. Shadows poured like honey into the ravine. The gorge was narrow, less than a bowshot at the widest. A fierce wind skirled below, in fits and starts, though Giovanni, above the howl, felt only a slight breeze that tickled the hairs on his arms. As the wind lulled in the canyon, he heard the purl of a river sounding in the deep.