Come Hell or High Water: The Complete Trilogy

by Stephen Morris

  Ivana bit her lip. The crowd in the church had pushed her forward so she was even closer to the pulpit than she had intended. She was so close that her neck was beginning to hurt from being bent back so sharply to see the priest above her.

  “However, my brethren, it is the deceit and wickedness of our families and neighbors that we have seen exposed in these days, not the deceit of the Father of Lies. It is his deceit only insofar as he lured those we love to embrace deceit and cover their sin with the thin veneer of righteous.” There was a shift in the tone of the whispers that rippled through the people listening to the sermon.

  “The Prince of Darkness is not able to change the truth of God’s creation. The created order is fixed by the Almighty and that fundamental order can never be overthrown by any lesser power, even though that lesser power is as great as that of the Prince of Darkness. He can do no more than pull back the veil that is sometimes allowed to obscure that fundamental order fixed by our Creator. The Prince of Lies can no more turn a man into a squirrel or a peacock or a serpent than he can create such a creature from nothingness. He has no real power to alter a creature that was born a human by the will of God and neither can he change such a farm animal into a man if God has made it to be born a squirrel or a peacock or a serpent.”

  Some in the congregation nodded, but others shook their heads in bewilderment.

  “Those at the inn who were transformed underwent no real transformation,” the priest announced. “At least, the transformation did not occur at the inn and it had begun long ago, long before the banquet which they were attending. The men who are now in our stables and the river and scattered about the countryside had become those beasts already in their hearts. They had each embraced sin and wickedness, as we all have done, and the sin they each loved most dearly was revealed by the so-called transformation at the inn. It was not the deceit of the Evil One that was revealed on Epiphany, but it was the deceit of those men that was stripped away, revealing the true selves beneath the cover of righteousness by which they had hidden their greed and lechery and gluttony and pride.”

  Ivana gasped.

  “Those animals lurk within each one of us,” the priest chided the congregation. “If any one of us had been at the banquet on Epiphany, our own deceit would have been stripped away and the truth of our hearts exposed. There is no charm that can protect us from the truth,” Fr. Krystof continued. Ivana turned to look at Jan, who tugged gently on the old, bloodstained shirt he wore as if it were a fine vest or doublet. The innkeeper and his wife smirked.

  “No charm can protect us from the truth but constant repentance and love of God,” the priest in the pulpit repeated.

  Shock spread through the church. “Is he saying that it was their own fault?” one woman near Ivana asked another.

  Fr. Krystof heard the remark and incorporated it into his sermon. “It was not the fault of the men to be transformed, but it was their own faults which were revealed by the transformation.”

  “But I am a widow now,” one woman called from the back of the church. “My husband is gone and I am reduced to mourning and widowhood! Am I the widow of a man damned and for whom there is no hope?” she wailed.

  The priest shook his head vigorously. “I do not say that those men cannot still repent of their sin,” he hastened to add, “and if they repent, then be saved. Pray for your husbands and fathers and ask that they be remembered at the Mass. But it would have been so much easier if they had repented while in their human form, repented and heeded the precepts of the Church. Those are the only true charms that can protect us because these are the ways we prevent such sins from lodging in our hearts.”

  Ivana understood what she had done. Somehow the stew on the table she had intended for Susanna had been mixed into the stew in the pot that had been served at the banquet, and the seeds had done their work as the women at the bathhouse had promised. All the deceit and lies the men had used to protect their reputations and good names had been torn away. That must have been what happened to Susanna. She must have tasted some remnant of the stew in the kitchen with David.

  “Was that what happened to Michael?” she asked herself. “Is that why he disappeared and no one has seen him since Epiphany?” She remembered the mad dog that had jumped onto the table, snarling and frightening her in the kitchen, and she shuddered. Everything was becoming all too plain now.

  “Take heed, brethren, and beware,” the priest concluded. “The creatures lurking in our hearts will be exposed one day—on Judgment Day if not before—and it will be our choice if there is anything in our hearts other than those beasts—anything else but the lechery or pride or wrath and the lies we tell to conceal our sin from our families and neighbors.”

  King of Swords

  (Friday, August 9–Saturday, August 10, 2002)

  A

  s the academics’ lunch broke up on Friday, Fr. Dmitri kissed his wife Sophia farewell as she set out with Alessandro for the Old-New Synagogue. A few moments later, Peter and Sean had also headed to the Old Town to look for the chalice of Prague. Victoria had to go back to her office, so Dmitri, who was to search for the pentacle with her, went into the first of the conference afternoon sessions, the session that was to deal with the villains of the King Arthur tales. Theo and Wilcox told him they were headed into a conference session that was to focus on a comparison of Asian concepts of hell and penal institutions.

  Fr. Dmitri settled into his seat along the tall windows looking out onto the street. Although the first of the papers in that session was well-written and interesting, a comparison of Mordred with Iago from Othello, the priest—having been up half the night witnessing the vision at the Loreto—lost the battle against his urge to slip into a brief post-lunch nap as he sat in his seat. His head tipped forward. His breathing becoming deeper, slower. The applause that greeted the conclusion of that first paper, however, half-woke Dmitri but the second paper, a not-very-well-written examination of Morgan Le Fay as feminist hero, quickly sent him back to sleep, vaguely aware of his own snoring.

  Dmitri became dimly aware of a different voice speaking. A woman’s voice was reciting the trilling R’s and exaggerated diphthongs of Middle English. Half-awake, the clergyman thought he recognized lines from the New Year’s Day encounter of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He half-heard the description of the Green Knight’s arrival in King Arthur’s hall and the taunting of the Round Table’s heroes. The Middle English was difficult to follow, but not impossible since Dmitri had studied the poem as an undergraduate in London before his ordination as a priest in Riga. Besides, whoever was giving the paper had an excellent command of the diction and was simply beautiful to listen to as she recited the lines that were important to her argument.

  Whether hade he no helme ne hawbergh nauther,

  Ne no pysan, ne no plate that pented to armes,

  Ne no schafte, ne no schelde, to schwve ne to smyte,

  Bot in his on honed he hade a holyn bobbe,

  That is grattest in grene when greves ar bare,

  And an ax in his other, a hoge and unmete,

  A spetos sparthe to expound in spelle, quo-so might.

  Having described the Green Knight’s weapons—a sprig of holly and a great ax—the woman quoted the poet’s description of Sir Gawain’s weapons as he set out from Camelot a year later to battle with the Green Knight. Amidst the descriptions of the broadsword that hung at Gawain’s side and the lance he carried, the golden armor he wore set with sparkling jewels, Dmitri caught his breath in mid-snore. His eyebrows shot up, though his eyes remained closed. The poet began to describe the shield that Gawain carried to protect himself from the Green Knight’s blows.

  Then thay schewed hym the schelde, that was of schyr goules,

  With the pentangle depaynt of pure gold hews…

  Forthy the pentangle new

  He ber in schelde and cote,

  As tulk of tale and most trwe

  And gentlest knight of lote.

  Ga
wain’s shield was inscribed with a pentacle! Dmitri had forgotten that detail of the poem over the intervening decades. Although the interior of the shield bore an image of the Mother of God, the exterior bore a pentacle of gold. The five-pointed star within a circle was, according to the poet, an appropriate emblem to protect Gawain for several reasons. The woman giving the paper summarized the poet’s description of the pentacle.

  She announced that the golden five-pointed star in a circle or on a disk, that “endless knot” as the poet described its interlocking lines and angles, corresponded to Gawain’s own five-fold virtues of bravery, fidelity, almsgiving, purity of thought and actions, and brotherly love in addition to his trust in the saving blood shed from the five wounds of Christ.

  “The pentacle’s invention was attributed to King Solomon, the Wise, in the Hebrew Bible as an emblem of truth and purity,” she concluded. “It was reportedly the seal he used to confine demons and djinn in flasks after he had enslaved them to assist building the Temple in Jerusalem. The pentacle was the imposition of order on chaos and the cleansing light of God that ends the rule of darkness.” The Round Table itself, she added as an aside, could be seen as a pentacle since it was an engraved disk that protected the order and stability of Arthur’s court even as it brought the light of chivalry to a cruel and dark society-at-large.

  Dmitri sat bolt upright. His eyes flew open and his thoughts raced. He and the others had assumed the pentacle of Prague would be a platter, probably of engraved silver. But it was Gawain’s shield, not a platter, that had a pentacle engraved on it. If this speaker, a well-known authority on Arthurian tales, thought the Round Table could also be considered a pentacle, that complicated matters further. Was it possible the pentacle he and Victoria were charged to find might not be a small platter after all but some large historical artifact? Or might it be an architectural structure or detail? The object they were looking for could be as small as a dish or as large as a dining room table. Larger, even. Maybe the star wasn’t even, strictly speaking, necessary for the object to be a pentacle, since there was no star on the Round Table that Dmitri recalled.

  Had anything been engraved on the Round Table? He couldn’t remember. But he was wide awake now. He waited for the questions-and-answers portion of the session.

  He wanted to ask about the engraving on the Round Table, the pentacle on the shield, the requirements necessary to make a magically charged pentacle. But how could he couch the question so that it would not sound either naïve or obsessed with Arthurian trivia? He hesitated to raise his hand and when he finally did, the moderator of the session never noticed him. The discussion took on a spirited life of its own and the half-hour allotted passed quickly. As the session broke up and people milled around or slipped out for coffee, Dmitri made his way to the speakers who stood gathering their notes and texts.

  A small crowd buzzed around the table as each speaker was jostled by those who had not had an opportunity to speak during the questions and answers. Dmitri waited politely as two or three others made points to the presenter he was waiting to speak with. The Arthurian expert gathered her things into her shoulder bag and began to step away from the table.

  “Excuse me.” Dmitri blocked her passage, extending his hand. “My name is Dmitri, Fr. Dmitri, and I have a question or two about the pentacle I was hoping to discuss with you.”

  The shorter woman, whose silver hair was tied in a bun and whose narrow glasses had slipped to the tip of her nose, looked at him and smiled briefly in a very businesslike manner.

  “Fr. Dmitri? Yes, well… I would be happy to discuss the pentacle with you further.” Her eyes darted around the room, which was becoming emptier. “However, I need to make a call to a publisher about a manuscript of mine. I need to find a phone.” She looked towards the hallway again and then smiled again at Dmitri, in a slightly more friendly manner. “Maybe later, after the last session. Or at dinner?”

  “That sounds marvelous!” the priest answered. He and Sophia could sit with the Arthurian expert and discuss her ideas not only about the pentacle but perhaps also about the other magical tools. They exchanged hotel information quickly and agreed to meet in her lobby that evening. Then she bustled out the door.

  Dmitri felt very satisfied. He’d gotten both a short nap and discovered a source of potentially very valuable information about the magical tools they were searching for. “A good afternoon’s work!” he congratulated himself.

  After the last session of the day was concluded, the conference participants had scattered—some to drinks at pubs and taverns around the Angel House or elsewhere in the Old Town, some to their hotels for a rest or to freshen up before dinner. Theo was walking with Wilcox through the Old Town and across the Charles Bridge back to their hotel in the Little Town.

  Crowds of tourists filled the Charles Bridge. Artists selling small paintings of Prague, together with leather bracelets, wooden hair barrettes, or other mementos of Prague lined the balustrades of the bridge, with individual musicians or bands interspersed along the way. It was hot. Humid. Water rushed under the bridge as the Vltava coursed through the city, but the air hung motionless under the strangely overcast green-hued dusky sky. A cacophony of languages arose from the bridge and buzzed around the conference organizer from Oxford and his older colleague from Romania and Germany. They made their way slowly across the soaring cobblestone bridge, their suit jackets hooked on a thumb and slung over their shoulders. Both Wilcox’s and Theo’s shoulder blades were damp with sweat. Although the bridge was fairly level, Wilcox especially had difficulty breathing as they navigated the crowds that milled and swirled and paused unpredictably and then started up again.

  Theo saw a crowd-within-the-crowd jostling for position to touch the bronze plaque on the base of St. John Nepomuk’s statue on the right-hand side of the bridge. Others posed under the stone visages of St. Francis Borgia, St. Francis Xavier and St. Francis of Assisi. Nearing the Little Town side of the bridge, Wilcox edged his way to the left balustrade and leaned against the old gray stone. Theo followed him and peered over the stone ledge.

  They stood nearly directly opposite a house with a worn and faded painting of the Madonna on its wall, a glass-enclosed votive light waiting to be lit before it. Another house, with a cracked windowpane in what seemed to be an attic window, also stood guard over the bridge A broad staircase led down to a plaza below. Theo pointed to a stone statue of a knight in armor with a sword held at the ready, standing tall on its narrow pedestal, peering across the river towards the Old Town. The statue was nearly level with the other statues that lined the ledges of the bridge but the pedestal was grounded on the riverbank below.

  “See that knight there?” Theo asked Wilcox. “That’s Bruncvík, the Bohemian hero whose sword is said to be buried in the foundations of the bridge. The sword Hron supposed was most likely to be the magical athame of Prague.”

  Wilcox nodded. “The sword that he will reportedly return to retrieve in Prague’s darkest hour?” He turned to Theo and chuckled. “But if we take it, how will he find it when he comes to claim it?”

  “Yes. That sword.” Theo agreed. “That, my friend, is something Bruncvík will have to sort out.” He chuckled with Wilcox. “Maybe the real sword has a homing device.”

  “Or, maybe,” Wilcox offered, “he could come back now to retrieve his sword and spare us the difficulty of finding it.” He sighed. “But that would make the whole business too simple.”

  Theo looked at the knight keeping his lonely vigil. “It would certainly remove the ‘quest’ element from what we’re doing.”

  “An old mill?” Wilcox asked, nodding to the river below. A small canal branched from the broad channel of rushing water, quietly flowing between a row of quaint, Gothic houses backed against either side of the canal. A waterwheel creaked as it revolved behind one of them.

  “Yes. As far as anyone can tell, there’s been a mill on the river here since before the Charles Bridge was built,” Theo told him.

>   “Too bad we can’t call on the miller who was here then and ask where the sword might be buried,” Wilcox mused.

  “Not sure that would help us much,” Theo reluctantly answered. “Some of the foundations of the Charles Bridge were built to support the Judith Bridge in the twelfth century. Bruncvík lived in the eighth century, according to the legends, and his sword was probably interred in the oldest part of the original supports. The miller here when the Charles Bridge was built probably couldn’t tell us much more than that.”

  Wilcox nodded slowly. “Shall we?” he finally asked, pointing to the plaza beneath them. Theo stepped away from the stone ledge and the two men joined the tide of humanity flowing down the staircase to the Kampa plaza. Reaching the plaza, Theo saw a narrow wooden door in the bridge supports open. Peering inside, he saw a small, circular room filled with canvases of Prague landscapes and cityscapes for sale. More were on display outside, near some benches in the midst of the plaza. People filled the benches, as well as the tables set out by the pubs and restaurants that circled the plaza.

  The professors wandered to the river’s edge under the causeway of the bridge. Water swirled in this pool quietly, away from both the rush of the main river and the quiet, persistent force of the stream moving the waterwheel. Rough stone pillars rose from the water and melted into the great stone span above them. Wilcox leaned over the water and reached out, grasping the stones under his palm. He turned to Theo.

  “So, how do you propose we do this?” he asked. “We can’t very well start digging up the foundations of the bridge here, can we?”

  “No, we can’t,” Theo agreed. “Besides, it could be in any of these pillars and supports. Or even in one of the cellars of these old houses, where the stonework that keeps the river in check are part of the oldest bridge supports.” He gestured toward the houses they had seen near the waterwheel. “We could spend a lifetime digging and delving into all the cellars and basements along the river.” He paused and then added, almost as an afterthought, “From what I’ve heard, the mortar of the bridge is so strong that they needed to dynamite portions of it in order to repair the damage from the 1890 flood. Whatever we could scrape away with a shovel would be paltry. Certainly not enough to expose a sword buried deep in the stonework.”