The Burning Road

by Ann Benson

  And the curiosity was killing her. “All right, I can be there in about an hour.”

  “I’ll tell the guard to expect you,” Myra said.

  By the time Janie reached the museum, Myra’s excitement had fully infected her. The curator led her immediately to the same workroom they’d been in before.

  “I want you to take a look at this,” she said.

  To Janie’s surprise, there were two books on the table. One was the journal. The other was larger and obviously older, with what looked to be a brass cover, tarnished with age and dented from handling. It appeared to be a manuscript of some sort, and it had a presence nearly as compelling as the journal, though Janie didn’t know precisely why. She only knew that she was as quickly caught up in its spell as she had been with the journal. She reached out instinctively to touch it.

  In midreach, she heard Myra groan. Janie drew back her hand, feeling the phantom sting of some imaginary ruler on her trespassing knuckles.

  “Oh, God, I’m sorry.”

  After letting out her tightly held breath, Myra said, “It’s okay. Actually, it’s a completely understandable reaction. I’d want to touch it if I were you, but we have to refrain from any unnecessary contact with this manuscript, it’s just too old and fragile to be handled.” Then with forgiving hands, she motioned Janie to come closer. “But this is what I wanted you to see—so take a look. Tell me what you notice.”

  She opened it with exquisite care to a particular page. Janie looked, intently, her eyebrows furrowed in a search for something that might be significant. The two tomes were very different in appearance and materials: Alejandro’s was leatherbound, its pages mostly parchment. Scratchy, technical-looking drawings littered the text to illustrate what was written. The other one had beautifully rendered ornate drawings, below which there was text in what Janie took to be Hebrew. On the leaf-facing, there was handwriting, in faded ink, done by some European scribe, if one judged by the look of it.

  “The pages,” she said, “they’re so thin. They almost look like they should be crumbling.”

  “We treated them with a preservative. But that’s not what I want you to notice.”

  It was beginning to feel like some sort of test. C-minus, Janie graded herself. “I give up,” she finally said to Myra. “What am I supposed to be seeing here?”

  “I thought you’d see it in a second,” the curator said, her expression almost pained.

  “I’m sorry, I must be a complete idiot. It’s probably just because I’m tired, I’ve had a busy day, but I just don’t know what—”

  “The handwriting. There’s the same handwriting in both of these books.”

  Janie stared in awe at the other manuscript. Though the inscriptions had almost disappeared through time, she finally saw it. “Alejandro’s?” she whispered.

  “We believe so.”

  Janie felt her knees weaken. “Sweet Jesus,” she said.

  A few minutes later she was sipping a small glass of water and sitting on a stool as Myra Ross explained what she’d learned so far.

  “I didn’t notice it until I put the newer one under a microscope. And then I kept thinking to myself, Where have I seen this before? So we took close digital images from both of them and went through a pretty detailed enhancement procedure we’ve developed for this type of thing. In ancient writings the variables of material are so great that it’s difficult to identify handwriting itself. But there were a number of words that were common to both books, so we enlarged them dramatically and overlaid them on the computer. They were nearly identical. We assume this fellow Canches wrote in both of these manuscripts.” She sighed dreamily, then glanced over at the two books. Then she looked back at Janie and said, “I don’t mind telling you it was a thrilling moment for me when I discovered this.”

  “It’s thrilling for me, so I can understand,” Janie said. “I might have also said ‘explosive, mind-shattering, beyond belief.’ ”

  “All appropriate words. But that’s not all. It gets even wilder. These two books are from entirely different time periods. We know that yours originated in the 1300s, but we haven’t pinned down a definitive date for the other one. It’s quite a bit older, though, perhaps by as much as several centuries. But we can’t tell just how much older. We’ve been through the whole thing, several times over, and there isn’t a date anywhere in the original text. The dating processes we have give a range, but not a terribly narrow one.”

  “Then how could the handwriting possibly be the same?”

  “Alejandro’s writing in the older one is not original text. It was added well after the book was first produced. We’ve come to the conclusion that your Dr. Canches was one of the translators of the earlier book.”

  “There was more than one translator?”

  “There were several. We had a medieval handwriting analyst look at the Abraham manuscript when we first acquired it. It was also clear from the language used in the translation—Canches’s French was Court French, which is an archaic version of what is spoken today, a little like Old English. That’s why you’ve been able to get help in translating your journal. He might have learned it in an academic setting, or maybe in a noble household. At a certain point, the handwriting changes, and when it does, the French changes too. It becomes Provençal, which is more like Spanish than French, really. People who used it were of the lower classes, at least at the time—I really don’t know much about its use today—or they came from smaller cities or towns in the southern sections of France. We think Canches was the first of several who ultimately had a hand in it. He apparently recognized its value and put some time into it.”

  “I know he loved learning, just for itself—but I wonder what would have made this book valuable to him.”

  “That’s hard to say, specifically. But if I were a Jew of the time, I would have appreciated anything that made my way a little easier. And this book is essentially a very long letter of instruction from the author, a man named Abraham, to the Jews who lived in Europe.” Her eyes twinkled with excitement. “He gives them advice on how they ought to live for the first part of the book, but the bulk of it is really an alchemy manual. There are all sorts of detailed recipes for turning ordinary metals into gold. I would guess that this Abraham wanted to be sure that his people had the financial resources to survive. So he gives them a bunch of recipes for how to make their own gold. It’s remarkably fascinating.”

  “But that stuff is all nonsense.”

  “Nonsense to us, but at that time there were plenty of people who believed fervently that it could be done. It was a medieval and early Renaissance obsession, really. These days we obsess over trying to figure out a way to ‘beam people up.’ Back then it was transmutation of metals. It’s quite possible that your Dr. Canches himself believed it could be done.”

  “I don’t think so,” Janie said adamantly. “Alejandro was a scientist, a very good one.”

  Myra Ross’s eyes sparkled. “A medieval scientist. He probably believed the world was flat, if he gave it any thought at all. And that babies were made when little tiny humans—they called them homunculi—swam from the father to the mother during intercourse. So it wouldn’t be unnatural for him to give an alchemy manual serious attention. Alchemists were the first practitioners, in Europe, anyway, of anything even remotely like the chemistry we know today. And it was all bound up in religious ritual—”

  The curator stopped speaking when she saw the unhappy look on Janie’s face. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “I feel a little disappointed.”

  “Good heavens, why? You’re trying to make him into a hero again. Forget it. This is so much more exciting.”

  “From reading his journal I had this notion that he was brilliant.”

  Myra sighed and shook her head. “Hebrew, French, Latin, Spanish, not to mention English, which was a very fledgling language at the time. I’d say he was brilliant. The translation work that followed his was nowhere near as accurate. H
e did a good chunk of the beginning, then he seems to have stopped working on it rather abruptly. Although I will tell you, he made a couple of mistakes. But if I had to bet, I’d say he made those errors deliberately. They were simple words, and he’d gotten them right in other places.”

  “He wasn’t careless like that.”

  “Maybe he was doing this under some coercion and didn’t want the book’s truth to fall into the wrong hands.”

  “Now that sounds more like him,” Janie said.

  Myra smiled and then glanced down at the manuscript. “Mistakes and all, though, it’s fascinating, what it says.” She carefully turned back the pages and read the salutation aloud. “Abraham the Jew, Priest, Levite, Astrologer, and Philosopher, to the Nation of the Jews, by the wrath of God dispersed among the Gauls, sendeth health.” She beamed with satisfaction. “He wrote it on the back side of the leaves. Papyrus, so they literally are leaves. That’s why they’re in such fragile condition. Leaves are supposed to decompose.”

  Janie shook her head in disbelief. “This is too much.”

  “I agree. This fellow got around.”

  “Whether he wanted to or not,” Janie said. With something akin to longing, she glanced back and forth between the two tomes. “I’ve been fascinated with Alejandro Canches since I first saw his journal.” With a look of intensity on her face, she said, “Do you know he understood antibodies in the fourteenth century, and used that understanding to figure out a cure for plague? Plague! If someone in authority had listened to him, if they’d just done a few simple things, it might have shortened the course of the Black Death and saved millions of lives. But they probably all thought he was crazy.” She stared vacantly down at her feet, then looked up again with a troubled expression. “Crazy or not, sometimes I feel almost like I love this man. Across all those centuries. Not romantic love, just this deep miraculous wonder, something like what you feel for a child.”

  Myra’s expression warmed. “Then I declare you an official honorary Jewish Mother,” she said. “Now you can legally say, ‘And this is my son, the doctor …’ ”

  Janie finally laughed and said, “I’m honored. Truly. So, tell me, as one Jewish mother to another, what does this all mean?”

  “It means your little book is worth a lot more than I originally thought. And I’m not just talking about money.”

  The news of the journal’s potential value wasn’t particularly troubling—but it was another recent check-in to Janie’s Brain Hotel, and it would be wanting room service soon.

  And when Janie herself checked in with Virtual Memorial that afternoon, she found another surprise. An evaluation she’d set in motion that morning was complete, and the results beckoned.

  She knew that the second she opened that file, it would own her.

  “I lied the other day,” she said to Tom. “I do need to talk.”

  “Well, you know what? I think you should take a hike.”

  Whoa. She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear and bit her own lip, and was grateful that Tom couldn’t see her nervous little gestures. “Uh … did I forget to pay my bill?”

  His laugh was belly-deep and it refreshed her to hear it. “No. That was just another one of my lame attempts at humor,” he said. “Not my thing, I guess, though I’ll probably never stop trying to be funny. I had some time blocked out for a hike this afternoon. And the weather is cooperating. But my regular partner canceled. I’d still like to go, I just don’t want to go by myself. You can hike and talk at the same time, right?”

  His regular partner. It had an ominous sound, but she didn’t ask. “Today, I don’t know. I’m not making any promises. But I’ll certainly give it a shot.”

  “The number-one thing most hikers do wrong is take too much stuff.” He tugged playfully on her shoulder strap as she stepped up on a ledge in front of him. “This would be easier if your backpack were lighter.”

  “It’s not heavy,” Janie protested. “And I didn’t bring anything extraneous.”

  They made their way methodically up a long, sloped rock surface, more than a hill, less than a mountain, treacherous as a lion’s den. Tom had described it on the way there as an “intermediate trail.” But partway up the going became a little difficult and Janie had to struggle for a handhold. She looked back over her shoulder and scowled at Tom, who was close behind, laughing as quietly as he could under his breath. She saw the amusement on his face and experienced a momentary urge to plant her cleated foot in the middle of it.

  “You think this is funny?” she said. “I don’t. I distinctly remember you saying hike.”

  Once she was on solid ground at the top of the formation, Janie sat down in front of a boulder and, leaning back, let her weary arms and legs relax. She took a long pull from her water bottle. She poured a little water over her face and wiped it off on the sleeve of her shirt, and while she was in the neighborhood lifted up one arm for a quick sniff.

  “Phew,” she said, her nose wrinkled, “between the sweat and the insect repellent, I am truly gross and disgusting.”

  “It’s a basic human right to be that way every now and then. So here we are, exercising our rights.”

  He had such a young-looking grin on his face that Janie forgot for a moment that he was as middle-aged as she. With a bandana tied around his head, she envisioned the full shock of hair he’d once had, though any discerning observer could have seen even in his youth that it would someday go thinner on him. “This is how humans are supposed to live,” he proclaimed to the rocks as he thumped enthusiastically on his chest with closed fists. “Sweat and dirt and muscle aches.”

  “Ugh.” Janie laughed. “Not this human. Show me to the nearest Jacuzzi.”

  “Later, woman. You have to earn it today.” He pulled out his own water bottle and indulged in a hearty drink, then wiped his face with boyish disregard on the sleeve of his T-shirt. “So,” he said matter-of-factly, “talk.”

  “Sure you don’t want to torture me a little more first?”

  “No. You look tortured enough.”

  “Well, that’s appropriate, I think.”

  Tom waited a moment, then said, “It’s all getting to you, isn’t it?”

  A hawk circling overhead caught Janie’s attention. She shielded her eyes and looked upward, watching as it glided with no visible effort in search of its next meal, which it would not have to pay for or cook. She sighed with envy and looked back at her dear and trusted companion. “Yeah, it’s getting to me, all right. Bruce told me a couple of days ago that he thought I should just chuck it all and run away to any place that will have me. Maybe he was right.”

  Tom flicked a mosquito off his arm and let out an ironic little hmph. “Bolivia will have you,” he said. “So will Madagascar. And even someone as inept at immigration law as I seem to be could probably get you into certain central African countries. Or India, if you’re really desperate.”

  “Too bad I don’t want to go to any of those places.”

  “Actually, I’m rather glad you don’t.”

  Their eyes met and held.

  “I’d miss you.”

  Eons of silence went by. Then Janie found her voice again.

  “I think I’d miss you too.”

  The moment suddenly needed adjustment, and Tom, as always, found a way to tune it with a touch of self-deprecation. “I mean, what would you do with all your money if you didn’t have to give it to me?”

  “Probably give it to my new lawyer.”

  He laughed, and it sounded completely genuine. “Well, at least it would stay within the profession. I suppose that’s something to be grateful for.” He neatly changed the subject, saving them both. “Now, you dragged me all the way up here to talk.…”

  Eyebrows raised, she said, “We seem to have different recollections of who did the dragging.” Then she sighed and looked away, eventually letting her gaze fix itself on the distant horizon. “It feels like it’s all closing in on me again.”

  He reached
out and put one hand on her shoulder, and after the slightest hesitation, massaged it lightly. “Your legal problems are all going to resolve themselves in time. Just be patient, is all I can tell you.”

  “I wish my problems were only legal.”

  “My warranty doesn’t cover any other kind.”

  “I don’t need a lawyer right now, Tom, I need a friend.”

  All hints of humor dropped from Tom’s voice. “Janie. You know you’ve got that. You don’t even need to ask.”

  “I know. I didn’t mean to imply that I didn’t. Sorry. How good a friend do you feel like being today?”

  The smart-aleck in him resurfaced. “As good as you want.”

  “Top-secret-type good?”

  “Damn. And I thought maybe I was finally gonna get somewhere with you.”

  She couldn’t help but smile at him. “Well, maybe not top secret. I don’t really know what to make of all this.” She opened her backpack and pulled out Virtual Memorial, and while holding it on her lap told him about the enigmatic Kristina and her bolder-than-brass entry into Janie’s life. She outlined the intriguing challenge presented by this young woman who was way too much like Betsy for Janie’s comfort.

  “It’s like Mission: Impossible.”

  “And it all happens right here on V.M., my new pet. I’m not supposed to leave him alone.”

  “Why not? Does he chew the furniture?”

  “No, thank God, and so far he seems to be papertrained.” She flipped open the cover and the screen flashed to life. “Probably because it could cause a lot of trouble if he fell into the wrong hands.”

  He considered it all for a few moments. “Is this why you’ve been asking about your will and your insurance and bringing in all your valuables to my safe?”

  “Yes. Kristina told me it would be a good idea to ‘set my affairs in order.’ ”

  “Wow.” Tom gazed out over the rocks below for a moment, then turned back to Janie and said, “To borrow a phrase from our youth, this is heavy.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I think too. Tonight I’m going to run through the first evaluation of the collected data. I have no idea what I’m going to find, but I’m hoping some connections will start to appear.”