The Black Book

by George Shadow

  Chapter 23: What Happened Next

  MONOCLES looked into the brass cage. “Mathildes,” he said, beaming. “The gods be praised! They will this our second meeting.”

  Nora breathed a sigh of relief, even though only Matthew understood the old fellow.

  “Old man is happy,” Peter chuckled as the three kids stepped out of the fallen cage, but nobody untied him when the others were freed.

  “He saved our lives, Monocles!” Mathildes reminded the Athenian when the old man moved to draw his already bloodied sword. “He is the guard who let us go!”

  “And he has already suffered for it,” Dora provided.

  Monocles relaxed and turned to his men, who had also wasted no time in following his example. Pointing at Peter, he said, “Friend,” and his men nodded, though the Jew-turned-Persian had no such thing in mind when they tried to untie him.

  Peter suddenly shoved back the Spartan behind him and kicked the Thessalian before him in the groin. Matthew realized the mistake and quickly moved to curtail more of such displays. He ended up on the ground with Peter, while several swords of varying shapes covered them both from above. Even Dora wielded one.

  “Traitor,” Monocles bellowed.

  “No, he is not,” Matthew cried. “He is under the influence of a spell from the gods, just like us.”

  But the old man didn’t sheath his sword.

  “You must believe me,” the boy continued. “The gods need him.”

  “I believe you,” Monocles finally agreed. “But he still has Persian blood running in his veins.”

  Matthew picked himself up and dragged Peter to the fallen brass cage, where he propped up the fat boy on one of the broken wooden wheels. “Do not touch him,” he ordered the Greeks, who still had their swords drawn. The Jewish boy would never know what happened when he woke up.

  “You were caught,” Monocles suggested.

  “As soon as we parted,” Matthew agreed, looking for the guy who had snatched the priceless papyrus from him amongst the dead. Dora followed him.

  “What are you looking for?” she asked, joining in the search.

  “A gift from Zeus seized by an enemy,” he replied. Truthfully, he didn’t know where that one came from! “Without it we cannot return to Olympus, and the Persians might turn back anytime soon.”

  “Fear not,” Monocles assured. “We have word that Xerxes can only turn back a small force if he desires to know what happened to this last unit. He cannot stop his onward march now that his whole army nears Athens. What is this . . . gift like?”

  “A scroll.”

  The Athenian statesman joined in the search.

  “Hey, Matthew,” Peter shouted at the boy, and those surrounding him drew back, for he spoke in an unfamiliar tongue. “When will I be freed?”

  “As soon as we are ready,” Matthew replied thoughtlessly in Old Persian and continued looking for his man.

  “He might have joined the units ahead of us before the fight,” Dora called out to Matthew. “Maybe he is not here.”

  “I do not think so,” Mathildes replied. “He should be their leader here.”

  “And how do you know he still has it?”

  “I saw him push it into his belt.”

  Dora had seen this covetous act by the Persian commander when she was Nora, so she was like hearing this for the first time and resumed her search anew with that valuable piece of information in mind. This Persian unit had many armed slaves in its service and the reason for this soon became obvious when the bandits noticed that the wheeled carts in the caravan had piles and piles of military clothing stacked in heaps.

  The slaves were the military’s laundry men! The three kids couldn’t understand why they were left with this party, though. Hard luck? Perhaps King Xerxes had become so occupied with his battle plans to remember that some fugitives he almost killed on stakes at Thermopylae had desecrated the laws of the Medes and the Persians by trying to escape. Perhaps one of the king’s officers had mistakenly placed their brass cage behind this line of Persian laundry. Perhaps not. Truth is they’ll never know the reason for this action, because all those who could have provided an answer were visibly dead. And that answer would have been irrelevant to their present situation no matter what it turned out to be.

  Nearer and nearer the first cart in the lineup they searched. This was slow work since most of the Greeks, including Dora, didn’t know who they were looking for, and thoroughly went through each dead man’s personal belongings while remaining on the lookout for any kind of scroll.

  “Persians,” a sentry suddenly warned from a nearby mountain. “They come like ants.”

  “Dora, look out!” Matthew shouted as the big man charged his sister from the first cart. She almost lost her life despite her swift timing. The man came at her again, but she twisted out of his thrust and buried her sword in his back. “It’s him,” Matthew claimed, quickly coming forward with Monocles. He mistakenly touched Dora and she hurriedly let go of her sword, harshly breathing in deeply.

  “What—What happened?” she stammered, drawing back from the hunk. “Is he dead?”

  “No, just knocked out,” Matthew allayed. He couldn’t find the papyrus on the dead man, who must have been hiding in the first cart. “Try not to touch anybody again,” he warned Nora.

  “We must get away from here, Mathildes,” Monocles warned. “The Persians headed this way outnumber us.” But the boy’s eyes were desperately scanning the length of the Persian horse-driven caravan.

  Then he saw the burning slave.

  Where had the fire come from?

  “Come on,” Matthew urged Nora, grabbing her hand. “I think I’ve found the scroll!”

  “I killed a man,” Nora kept saying. “I killed a man.”

  “I don’t think you did,” Matthew quipped. “Dora did.” He left his sister when he realized she wouldn’t follow him and ran towards the burning slave, only to stop abruptly a few feet from the dead man.

  “What are you doing?” Nora asked her foster brother, running up to where he stood.

  “Mathildes,” Monocles called after them. His son had gathered the others and they were setting fire to the Persian goods and freeing the horses.

  “Do you see them?” Matthew asked Nora.

  “See who?”

  “The . . . demons,” he whispered. “They are watching us from the mountains.”

  The siblings stood close to the burning slave and at first, Nora didn’t understand what her adopted brother had said, but then she did and the new fright became unbearable. The black figures were discreetly hiding in the mountainous shadows all around them. “How did they find us?” she frantically whispered.

  “Don’t know, but I know they won’t come any closer as long as this fire burns.” Matthew edged closer to the burning man, bent down and picked up a sword from the ground. With this he pried out the missing scroll from the corpse’s tangled fingers and, to Nora’s uncomfortable surprise, he picked up the papyrus as its fire still blazed.

  “H-How did you do that?” she blurted out.

  “I-I don’t know,” he honestly said. “It just happened.”

  “You should be burning by now.”

  But he wasn’t even feeling any heat on his outstretched arm. It was all so strange. The caressing flames even felt good.

  “We must leave now, Mathildes,” Monocles warned the boy again, coming up. “We can escort you to Mount Olympus, but that is as far as we can go and we cannot wait any more.” The burning scroll was a curious sight. “I see you have found the Golden Fleece, eh?”

  “The gods helped us,” Matthew told the old man and walked over to untie Peter, who looked forlorn.

  “About time,” the Jewish boy grumbled, standing up. “These friends of yours freak me out.”

  “They’re just from another place and time,” Matthew reminded him. “Here, turn away from the wheel.”

  “Where do we go now?” Peter wanted to know.

  “Up the
mountains,” Matthew said. The scroll exchanged hands before he could untie the Jewish boy. “Please, don’t touch anyone after this,” Matthew begged and Peter nodded.

  “Is that the book?” Peter asked Nora with surprise. “Why is it burning?”

  “To keep away danger,” she candidly replied. The fire from the scroll felt cool. Comforting. “Heartwarming,” she mused.

  As the three kids and their Greek friends left the area and headed up into the mountains, they could see Persian foot soldiers running up to the track below. Perhaps the garments of those fighting for Xerxes were so inconsequential when compared to his impending conquest of Greece that he couldn’t even send horsemen to guard and protect them!

  “We must continue alone from here,” Matthew soon announced to Monocles. They had stopped atop a small plateau which lay within the range of mountains and away from prying eyes now innumerable on the pathway to Thermopylae. The Persians were trying to douse the angry flames since eating away their precious clothes and could never mount an attack against them while so preoccupied. It also appeared the Greeks were preparing to swoop down on their enemies again, despite their small number.

  “For the second time, my friend, farewell,” Monocles declared with a sorrowful voice. “Let us hope we shall meet again when Greece has won her freedom, which I know she will when you persuade the gods to help us.”

  “We must continue tearing Xerxes from the rear,” Monocles’ only remaining son added, taking Matthew’s hand. “We must continue doing this until we win at Salamis.”

  “We have bigger ships than the Persians and can sink them if we can get close enough to hurt them,” Monocles explained. “I must leave you now to wage this war against my country’s enemies.”

  “I wish you well, my friend,” Mathildes said and his sister nodded at the Greeks as both groups parted, reminding herself not to touch any of them like her foster brother had warned her against.

  “So what now?” Peter asked Matthew while trying to evade the angry stares of the Greek soldiers passing him. “Can we use the book while it’s still hot?”

  “They’re still here,” Matthew rather noticed around him. The black figures had appeared across the landscape again and that was unsettling, although the papyrus still had thongs of fire lapping its surface. Matthew was somehow glad that it was taking longer to burn out this time.

  “Who’re these new guys?” Peter demanded from him.

  “The demons.”

  “The demons?”

  “Uhuuuh,” Nora agreed. “They’ve been trailing us since the Native Americans.”

  “Native what?”

  “They’ve been trailing the book,” Matthew corrected. “They followed us to America, where we were Native Americans. I’ve got a hunch all this must be linked to that star.”

  Peter appeared baffled. “Native Americans?”

  “Which star?” Nora demanded.

  “Oh, the one I found on the book’s cover when . . . when it was a book . . .” Matthew trailed off, looking at the blazing papyrus in his hand. “I figured I’ve seen that star on a country’s flag, but I’ve forgotten which one—blue lines on top and below it? White background?”

  “My country?” Peter suggested. “Did you see the Star of David?”

  “And how’s that one like?” Nora asked Peter.

  “Two triangles crossed to form a six-point star?” he replied.

  “Yep, that’s the star I saw,” Matthew agreed. “And which one is your country?”

  “Peter’s Jewish,” Nora told him. “He comes from Israel.”

  “Maybe the book’s a kind of . . . secret weapon your country’s developing,” Matthew intimated Peter with alarm.

  “Maybe and maybe not,” Nora said, wondering where he got that wild idea from, but she had to agree that this was plausible. “Maybe,” she repeated, just in case. “And that’s one good reason to get going, right?”

  “Yep.” Matthew rolled out the flaming scroll but saw no names on it! “It’s—It’s just blank,” he exclaimed. “No names.”

  “What?” Nora stared incredulously at the blank scroll.

  “Maybe it’s the flames,” Peter suggested, intently studying the black shapes slowly growing in number all around them.

  “Then we must quench it,” Nora recommended. They could now hear the Greeks and Persians killing themselves in the distance and felt physically detached from it all.

  “The dumbest thing I’ve ever heard you say, Nora,” Matthew finally berated her, but as if it really heard her suggestion, the fire suddenly died out.

  And the names re-appeared.

  “Quick, hold hands,” Matthew urged the others and found Yung Ji’s name.

  Peter grabbed Nora’s hand. She grabbed Matthew’s left arm and he touched the name, which glowed red and the discomfiting pain quickly died away.

  “Done,” Matthew yelled, but the others didn’t fancy his happiness and weren’t fellow partakers of it.

  “We’re still standing where we were, Noise,” Nora noted dispassionately. “You must’ve lost the touch.”

  “No, I haven’t,” Matthew insisted. “I used my last, little left finger! I’ve never used it before.”

  “Maybe you should give me that.”

  “No way.”

  “Hey, guys?” Peter trespassed, earnestly looking around him. “I think we’ve got more pressing matters?” Their black friends were still hanging around and some where now smoothly gliding forward, making muted, eerie sounds.

  “Yeeeaah!” Matthew shouted at them, brandishing the scroll before him. “Shoooo! Back off! Go away!”

  The demons were undeterred.

  “Fire devour!” the boy tried. “Erupt! Flames! Arise!”

  The bleak shapes kept up their ominous chant.

  “Run,” he whispered.