The Devil's Piper

by Sarah Rayne

  Moira asked if people from outside often used the library.

  ‘Well, we get post-graduate students working for doctoral theses or sometimes people writing books on local folklore, but we try to be a bit careful because some of the manuscripts are very old and irreplaceable. Now, Brother Ciaran said he’d leave you out some notes, but I can’t see—oh yes, look, over here. And you’ll like a cup of tea later, I expect? No, it’s no trouble at all, a pot’s always made about four o’clock, it’s one of Father Abbot’s little indulgences, I’ll fetch it along myself.’

  Moira did not in the least mind being left on her own, although she had been secretly looking forward to seeing Ciaran. Brother Ciaran. The library was narrow and rather dim and there were latticed windows that looked out over a small quadrangle with a stone bench at the centre. The walls were lined with books and there was one of the little wheeled contraptions that you pulled along while you were searching the top shelves. There were two or three leather-topped desks placed directly under the windows, but it was still necessary to switch on the wall lights.

  The books were stacked a bit haphazardly. Moira wondered if she should suggest making a catalogue like they had had at St Asaph’s so that things could be found more easily. Perhaps it would be better not to; it might sound like a criticism, or even worse, it might sound as if she was asking for more work.

  As the afternoon wore on she became absorbed. Ciaran had left a list of books he thought might be of help, and scribbled a quick note to say please to reach down anything else she wanted. It was nice that he had taken the trouble to do this. Moira thought it would be best to take the books down one at a time in as chronological an order as possible and scan them for musical references, making notes as she went. She would allot one page of her notebook to a century and see if that was enough.

  It was fascinating work. You did not know where, or how far back you might find mention of the Ambrosian plainchant, which was earlier than the better known Gregorian chant, but which the monks here always used. There were the different versions of the Mass: the missa dominicalis with the chants from as far back as the fifteenth century, and then the missa brevis which was a short Mass with Lutheran elements in it which had been prevalent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There were the Good Friday ‘reproach’ chants, sometimes called Improperia.

  Moira began to think there was enough material here for something far more exciting than a flimsy leaflet which would be stuck in a church display with a dozen others, and for which tourists would pay 50p in the belief they were helping church funds, and then never read. Was it being naive to wonder about writing a proper book on religious music? How learned would you need to be? It did not need to be a huge dry tome: it could be informative but chatty, so that it would appeal to all kinds of people who liked music and history and found religious pageantry interesting. You could have illustrations to jazz it up a bit.

  Seated in the Abbey library, making notes, plundering the monks’ manuscripts and folios and finding such a wealth of information, the idea seemed not only possible, but within her capability.

  Ciaran had looked up a transcription of their Founder’s chronicles: Brother Simon’s himself, which Moira suspected was going to be the most interesting thing of all. The original was probably under glass somewhere, but this was a translation made around the seventeenth century, so that it was fragile but fairly easy to read. Simon had travelled widely before coming to Curran Glen, and there were accounts of his journey through Italy, and his stay in the little town of Cremona. Moira bent over, liking the fusty smell of the old paper and the sensation that you were opening up a door into the past. She would have to be extremely careful, because although the manuscript was not the original, it was still very old and precious and valuable.

  There was a passage on how Simon had visited the house of a Cosimo Amati whom he referred to as a lute-maker, and there was a description of how Cosimo had sought Simon out one night in a panic, running under cover of darkness to the monks’ house in Cremona’s oldest part.

  ‘The man was very distressed,’ Moira read, ‘and together we hurried through the night streets, our footsteps ringing out on the cobbled pavements, he turning every few steps as if to make sure that nothing came after us.’

  Moira went on reading, feeling a bit guilty because she was supposed to be researching the Abbey’s musical history, not giving herself shivers by uncovering somebody’s twelfth-century horror story. She allowed herself the excuse that a lute-maker might have something to contribute to the Order’s musical history.

  The account was extraordinarily evocative. Moira could almost see the monk and the lute-maker going together through the dark streets – ‘the shadows clung to the sides of the houses, and my companion started at every movement’.

  It was second-hand reporting, of course, and would have to be regarded with due suspicion. Brother – what was his name? Moira looked to see – Brother John Joseph, that was it, had been translating Simon’s own story for the benefit of the seventeenth-century monks, six hundred years after the events. Monks were supposed to be eminently truthful, but most of the monks here were Irish and you couldn’t trust the Irish not to embroider a good story. John Joseph had better be taken with a pinch of salt.

  Simon had given a description of the Amati house, which John Joseph had probably not tampered with at all. It was, ‘larger than that of most artisans and plainly quite prosperous, with the upper storeys overhanging the street a little, and embellished with corbels. At a lower level than the street were the workrooms, and a dull red light emanated from them . . .’

  You could see it as plainly as if you were there. You could hear the ringing out of the footsteps, and the frightened scurrying of the man Cosimo Amati. What had he been frightened of? Moira read on, scarcely aware of the thickening dusk outside the library, or the shadows creeping across the quadrangle beneath the window.

  ‘As we passed through the doorway, Amati’s lady came to meet us. She was clad only in a thin bedgown, and her hair streamed over her shoulders, the colour of molten copper . . . She had a remarkable beauty, and I heard later – although not from Cosimo – that she was known to be something liberal of her favours . . .’

  As twelfth-century bodice-rippers went, this was terrific stuff. ‘Something liberal of her favours.’ Moira grinned and wondered had Ciaran read this bit. Imagine that: old Simon, the monks’ revered and holy Founder, dashing through the cobbled streets of Cremona, probably bearing a crucifix with him and solemnly anticipating the performance of some kind of religious rite or maybe a deathbed, and then finding a red-haired hussy undulating towards him in a nightie.

  The bit about their footsteps ringing out on the pavements and Cosimo Amati turning to see if they were being followed was amazingly descriptive. You could very nearly see it: you could very nearly hear it as well . . .

  Cosimo had not waited to see the creature that cast its sinister shadow over his workroom floor; he had flung down the bone-lyre and scrambled out of the workroom, using not the door that led to the street and was barred by the creature, but going up the little winding stair that led back into the main part of the house, and tumbling into the street outside.

  Shadows lay thickly everywhere – yes, and what crouched within those shadows! – but he had gone on, running blindly through the town, heedless of the noise he made, terrified lest the thing should be following him, making for the narrow tall stone building on the outskirts of the town.

  Because I have called to the devil tonight and the devil has answered and I need God’s help to vanquish him!

  The door of the monks’ house was opened almost immediately by the young dark-haired Englishman – Cosimo thought his name was Simon – who had been travelling through Italy but was staying here for a time. He remembered with relief that Brother Simon spoke Italian.

  Simon listened to the gasped-out story, really listened, thought Cosimo gratefully, because even to his own ears, it sounded re
markably far-fetched. The ancient chant, the ritual that Isabella’s family had guarded for so many centuries, and that Cosimo himself had pronounced tonight in a moment of weakness, well, all right, in a prideful attempt to sweep the plague from Cremona! He would admit to the sin of pride, said Cosimo, struggling to regain some of his lost dignity. But it had been a worthy and selfless act, he said, tucking his chins righteously into his neck, and it could have rid them all of the wretched plague. The trouble now—

  ‘The trouble now, Brother, is that there is something in my house—Something has entered it that I think might be—’ Here he faltered, because you could not tell this lean-faced, rather austere young man that you thought you had summoned the devil and that the devil might even now be sitting in your home.

  Simon was not unaccustomed to troubled people requesting help at all hours of the day and night. Usually it was prayers for dying children or parents or family. It was remarkable how even the most hardened sinners panicked at the end. But this appeared to be a bit different. This appeared to be a deliberate attempt to seek not God, but one of God’s adversaries. And to have succeeded.

  ‘The Nameless One,’ Amati called him, dribbling a bit in terror, his plump unhealthy-looking face white and his eyes bolting from his head. Simon thought him disgusting, and then reproved himself. One of God’s children, no matter what he had done.

  He scooped up a crucifix and took Cosimo’s arm firmly as they went back through the night streets. It was a pity that these manifestations always had to take place by night, but they nearly always did. Why could people not summon the devil in the middle of the day when you had everything to hand and you could see what you were doing? Quench this ill-placed humour, Brother!

  Simon made a quick survey of his pack as they rushed through the streets. Bible and crucifix. Stoppered flagon of holy water. All there. It was a pity they had not been able to bring a fragment of the consecrated Host, but it would have meant waking Father Abbot and Simon would prefer to see first if the story was genuine.

  Cosimo Amati’s house was unexpectedly large and prosperous-looking, and there was a little painted sign hanging outside, depicting a musical instrument – a lyre, was it? A respectable trade. A respectable man, as far as Simon could tell. Had Amati’s imagination simply run away with him? Had he been drinking or – this was nasty – was he in the first stages of plague himself? Sometimes it began with a fever.

  Cosimo pushed open the street door, and on the stair, looking down at them, was the most beautiful woman Simon had ever seen.

  The minute Ahasuerus saw Isabella Amati he recognised her.

  Susannah. Here in the underground room, standing on the stair, one hand going fearfully to her throat. Her skin was as white and as translucent as he remembered, the spill of copper hair falling about her face exactly as it had done in the Temple that last day.

  For an instant the recognition was so absolute, that the shadowy workroom with its odd unfamiliar scents wavered and blurred, and he was back in Jerusalem, Susannah was slipping through the little side door into the Temple and standing before the altar waiting for him. Naked beneath the concealing cloak . . .

  This was Susannah cast in a slightly different mould; a little younger, a little more rounded of face. But the curve of her cheek and the look in her eyes was unmistakable. The eyes of a saint but the mouth of a sinner.

  The woman moved down the narrow wooden staircase towards him, and at that minute, Cosimo Amati burst back into the house, with the monk, Simon, at his heels.

  Simon experienced his own instant of shocked recognition as well, but it was an instant filled with such cold horror that he felt his vitals slither with fear.

  The Nameless One, Cosimo had gabbled in terror, the Nameless One answering the music’s summons. But to Simon, the creature standing in the candlelit underground workroom, looking over its shoulder at them, was not nameless.

  Ahasuerus. Ahasuerus the murdered High Priest of the Temple of Jerusalem. The renegade and the rebel; the butchered Scribe who had betrayed his vows and dishonoured the Sacred Altar and been stripped of every honour before being put to death.

  Simon’s mind was reeling, but he struggled to formulate some kind of physical or mental attack on the silent figure before him. He knew that he was confronting the very one whose body the founders of his Order had brought out of Jerusalem centuries earlier. He knew how the Fratres Cruciferi had bargained with the Temple Elders for the High Priest’s body and how they had carried it out of the Holy City with the blessings of the people ringing about their heads. And, thought Simon cynically, with the payment of the Temple Elders weighing down their packs.

  The monks had travelled slowly and apparently haphazardly, but at last they had come to the little town of Cremona, with its history stretching back to the Romans, the Roman wall which still stood firm and the mosaic pavements. And the catacombs winding deep into the hillside . . .

  They had not precisely been searching for catacombs, but the catacombs had served their purpose very well indeed. As night fell they had lit torches and carried their grisly burden deep into the tunnels. They had buried Ahasuerus’s stone coffin far below the surface and they had sealed the openings.

  Because towards the end, when he had been almost beyond speech, Ahasuerus had looked down from the execution gibbet to where his Judges stood and made again the anguished threat.

  I shall return . . .

  And although no one had quite believed him, no one had quite dared disbelieve either . . .

  And now it had happened; somehow he had risen from the coffin and found his way out of the catacombs.

  Ahasuerus, the murdered High Priest, who had defiled the Temple of Jerusalem with his harlot, had returned.

  Ahasuerus shrank into the shadows and wrapped the concealing cloak about him the instant he saw Susannah. She would not recognise him, of course she would not recognise him . . .

  The monk was standing before him, and when he spoke, he did so in Latin: not the old pure language they had used in the Temple but a coarser more clipped form. But it was understandable.

  ‘Why are you here? What do you want?’

  ‘You called to me. I answered.’

  It amused Ahasuerus to see the fear go through them and a portion of his mind noted the words and tucked them away for future use. He waited to see what they would do next, his mind absorbing details: how they spoke, how they behaved. Because I may have to blend with this unknown world; I may have to live here for some time. The woman he recognised as Susannah – Isabella, had they called her? – had not spoken but Ahasuerus knew she was watching him. She did not know yet, not quite, but she nearly did.

  Cosimo Amati was feeling better. He could see that he had been a touch foolhardy – well, he had been very foolhardy indeed – but it was beginning to seem as if this cloaked stranger might not be the menace he had feared, and he thought it was time he took an active part in things. He puffed out his chest a little, and copying Simon and using his best Latin, he said,

  ‘We want you to rid the city of plague. That’s why I called to you.’ And saw you obey, said his manner. Ahasuerus thought him a ridiculous little man. ‘We have plague here in Cremona,’ said Cosimo, tucking his chins into his neck and looking solemn at the enormity of the thing that had come to his town.

  Ahasuerus said, ‘What manner of plague?’

  ‘What manner? What do you—’

  ‘Locusts? Pestilence? Death of the first-born—?’

  There was a sudden silence. A shiver of purest awe went through the two men and then Simon, staring at the motionless Ahasuerus, said very softly, ‘The Ten Plagues of Egypt. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?’

  Ahasuerus said courteously, ‘I know of no other.’

  ‘But that was—Brother Simon, he can’t possibly—Oh dear me, do something!’ cried Cosimo, wringing his hands and lapsing into his native tongue in his distress. Ahasuerus listened closely, noting the inflections, thinking he could almost guess
at the meanings.

  There was a movement from the stair, and the three men turned at once. Isabella moved lightly down to the floor of the workshop, her little bare feet scarcely touching the polished oak as she came. Ahasuerus, his every instinct alive, felt her mind brush his, and when she spoke, he experienced a swift surge of purest delight. Oh yes, that is exactly how her voice sounded.

  Isabella Amati looked towards him and said, in Latin fully as good as Simon’s, ‘The plague that my husband summoned you to fight is pestilence.’

  ‘Disease?’

  ‘Yes. Brought in largely by rats.’ And as Cosimo and Simon turned to look at her, she smiled the three-cornered smile that several of her admirers had likened to a cat, but that her detractors said showed her true nature.

  ‘We want you to rid the city of rats for us.’ She smiled again, and Ahasuerus felt time splinter and re-form in a different pattern, because it was exactly the way that Susannah had smiled in the Temple that afternoon.

  That afternoon . . . Silent, drowsy, the entire city bathed in a shimmer of heat haze, no one knowing quite where anyone was . . .

  Susannah’s thin concealing cloak sliding to the ground . . . His own body betraying him instantly because she was naked under it, and she was dazzlingly beautiful. And that was the moment when I forgot who I was and I forgot what I was. That had been the moment when his mind had spun out of control, and he had pulled her to him, his body so violently aroused that he had cried out with the pain.

  I took her there, he thought, staring at Isabella Amati in the little candlelit workroom. I laid her down on the floor of the Temple – actually the sacred High Temple – and I tore open my robe and entered her body with mine. Her thighs closed about me and her body was purest silk, drawing out the seed . . . And I was helpless before her. I am helpless before her now.