“Round?” she asked as if uncertain she had heard aright.
“Seriously,” Ciarán said, “that’s what some of the scholars at Reims believe.” Of course, the theory belonged to the notorious Gerbert of Aurillac, and given the source, Ciarán left some room for doubt. “The Irish claim there’s another land out there, far to the west: Tír na nÓg, the Land of Eternal Youth. It’s where the Tuatha Dé Danann, the Fae folk of my homeland, sailed after they left Ireland’s shores. They say it’s the most beautiful place in all the world.”
“Like a Garden of Eden?” she asked.
“Maybe so.”
“Do you think it’s real?”
“Maybe someday I’ll sail there and find out.”
Alais rolled her eyes, though the smile never left her face.
The sun was beginning to set and soon would cast a rosy glow over the western horizon. Overhead, three terns glided toward the shore. Évrard soon called the crew to supper, and everyone gathered near the mast. Ciarán sat against the railing, next to Alais and much of the crew, while Dónall, Isaac, and Évrard sat on benches. The meal consisted of stale bread and fresh codfish, hauled up by the crew earlier this morning. Ciarán relished the fresh fish, knowing that if the fishing turned bad in the days ahead, they would soon be surviving on the salted leftovers.
Évrard passed around a skin of Spanish wine. After taking a sip, Dónall asked him about events in the Moorish lands.
Évrard drained his cup of wine in one long gulp. “All you need to know about what happens in Córdoba,” he said, “is that nothing happens unless Al-Mansor wills it.”
“Who’s he?” Ciarán asked.
“His title is hajib,” Évrard replied, “but he controls the caliph like a puppeteer making a doll step to his tune.”
Alais raised a curious brow. “How did he come to do that?”
Josua explained. “It was the classic case of ‘be careful what you wish for.’ You see, when the previous caliph died, the caliphate passed to his minor son, and naturally, the boy’s uncle and the palace eunuchs plotted to kill him, hoping to usurp the throne. But the caliph’s old vizier stepped in. He needed to eliminate the uncle, so he found a man untroubled by such messy jobs: Ibn Abi Amir, the leader of the city guard—the man who would become known as Al-Mansor. So Al-Mansor murdered the uncle, but then he slowly eliminated all his rivals one by one, including the general of the army, and finally the poor vizier himself. Now Al-Mansor proclaims himself the noble king of all the Moors.”
“Of course,” Évrard said, “it helped that while he was conspiring to eliminate his rivals, Al-Mansor had the support of Al-Hakkam’s queen, whom he was rutting every night for good measure. And the general’s daughter, too, who ended up becoming one of his four wives! Can you imagine, four wives? And a royal mistress on top of that! I have enough troubles with just the one.”
The crew erupted in laughter. Alais’ cheeks grew flushed, and Josua shook his head and smiled, obviously accustomed to his partner’s crude sense of humor.
“Al-Mansor,” Josua explained, “retains his power through Al-Hakkam’s son, the current caliph, whom he sequesters in the palace and keeps distracted with every form of carnal pleasure.”
“He’s a devout hedonist,” Évrard said, working on his second cup of wine. “But then again, he has a thousand concubines in his harem, so can you blame him? Of course, you monks would know nothing of such things, eh?”
Ciarán glanced at Alais, whose jaw hung open in disbelief. “Seriously?” she whispered.
Ciarán held out his palms. “How would I know?”
Isaac said, “I have heard many Christian monks refer to Al-Mansor as your Antichrist. After all, men like Prior Bernard and Canon Frézoul believe he rules a city whose people worship a prophet called Mahomet. But if Al-Mansor is your Antichrist, I tell you, it is the Christian kings of Spain who created him.”
Évrard shrugged. “A year or two after Al-Hakkam’s death, the Christians sent an army to the walls of Córdoba. But Al-Mansor and his own army fought back and chased them all the way to Saragossa, so the people of Córdoba came to adore him. But he didn’t stop at Saragossa. He declared a jihad, a holy war against all the Christians of Spain.”
“And so went fifty years of peace between the Christians and the Moors.” Isaac sighed.
“He became known as the Illustrious Victor,” Josua added, “Savior of Córdoba and Defender of Islam. Every spring he rides from Córdoba on his black stallion with his great army to campaign against the Christian kings, plunder their cities, and add their riches to his vast treasury. Twice he attacked León and pillaged it ruthlessly. Barcelona was next. Other cities surrendered by the time his army arrived. After every campaign, he returned the victor.”
“But León and Barcelona weren’t the worst,” Évrard said in disgust. “Last July, he ravaged Santiago de Compostela and the tomb of blessed Saint James—the apostle, no less. He razed the whole town, even taking the great iron bells that rang from Saint James’s Church. Those beautiful bells. And you know what he did with them? He turned them into lamps for one of his mosques. Lamps!”
“I’m beginning to understand the whole ‘Antichrist’ thing,” Dónall quipped.
“And we’re going to his city?” Ciarán asked warily.
Évrard winked back. “Al-Mansor won’t give a rat’s turd about you two or our pretty lass. Half his own army is Christian malcontents from León and Castile. He doesn’t care. It’s the kings he hates, but it’s no matter. He keeps Córdoba safe and orderly, which is good for business. And that’s what matters, I always say.”
“Besides,” Isaac said, smiling, “wait until you see her. Córdoba will make you forget about the hajib who rules her.”
“Not to mention the beautiful women, eh?” Évrard said, slapping his knee. “Like flowers waiting for bees like us to dip into their nectar!” The crew burst out in laughter. Alais blushed again. Évrard took another swig of wine. Then Eli ran up and tugged at his sleeve.
“Captain,” Eli said nervously, “there are storm clouds abaft.”
Évrard’s eyes narrowed. “The weather should be clear.”
“They came in fast,” Eli explained.
Ciarán looked to the stern. Amid the growing dusk, black clouds boiled, rapidly filling the sky well before the horizon.
“I swear,” Eli stammered, “those clouds are following us.”
Dónall’s face turned ashen. His gaze reflected Ciarán’s thoughts.
“What?” Alais said, catching the look that passed between them.
“Get in the deckhouse,” Ciarán told her.
“But what’s happening?”
Ciarán jumped to his feet, ignoring her question, as Dónall hurried aft and stared into the face of the gathering storm.
At the forefront of the clouds, three great thunderheads billowed. As Dónall muttered a curse under his breath, a wave of raw fear washed through Ciarán’s gut.
For here at the edge of the Basque Sea, the demons had found them.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
EYE OF THE STORM
“Full sail!” Évrard cried. “We’ll outrun it!” Crewmen hurried to the riggings. Eli darted toward the rudder.
“No!” Dónall shouted. “If you value your mast, reduce your sail. You’ll not outrun this storm.”
Ciarán rushed to Eli’s side, where the young Jew held the tiller in a panicked grip. The storm surged forward, crossing leagues of water in mere heartbeats. The three storm heads, swelling and growing ever darker, billowed into snakelike shapes, dipping and soaring and pulling the force of the tempest behind them.
“What is that?” Alais cried.
Ciarán grabbed her shoulders. “Trust me, and get in the deckhouse.”
Lightning flashed within the clouds, and a chill wind swept over the ship, whipping the lines and battering the sail. Waves crashed against the hull, making the ship lurch violently. Crewmen fought to keep their feet. Ciarán grabbed for
the rail, struggling to stay upright, and reached out for Alais. He caught her hand as frigid water washed ankle-high across the deck.
“Go!” Ciarán told her. Her eyes opened wide at the oncoming storm, but she scrambled for the deckhouse. Amid battering waves, the ship pitched again, the planks of the hull creaking.
Ciarán glanced at Dónall. No longer ashen, his face was that of the man who had unleashed destruction against the Franks at Derry and the Angevins at Selles. “Captain,” Dónall commanded, “help your first mate with the tiller. The rest of you get in the deckhouse or the cargo hold!”
“We’ll need the crew to keep her on course!” Évrard bellowed back through the roar of the wind.
Dónall grabbed Évrard by his tunic. “This is not a natural storm.”
“What do you mean?” Évrard demanded.
Isaac tugged at his arm. “Do as he says, my friend, and pray to your Christian god.” Isaac looked Dónall in the eyes. “But I am staying with you.”
Another wave lapped over the railing. Around them, the wind crescendoed to a deafening howl. Évrard grasped the tiller as his men reduced the sail and battened the hatch to the deckhouse.
The ship rode on the edge of the storm. Dónall steeled his gaze and unsheathed the sword hidden under his habit. “Listen for my command,” he told Ciarán.
Dónall crossed the deck in a deliberate pattern, tracing a shape with the tip of his blade, chanting a hymn in the graceful Fae tongue. Ciarán recognized the pattern at once. A flicker of Saint Elmo’s fire followed the tip of Dónall’s sword like ink from a quill, stretching from bow to stern and starboard to port, until Dónall had traced a seven-pointed star, encircled by the frame of the potbellied ship, faintly glowing with wisps of blue fire.
Eli’s hands shook with fear. “What is he doing?”
“He has a plan,” Ciarán said, praying under his breath that it would work.
The wind shrieked savagely as the clouds loomed over the ship’s stern, billowing thousands of feet high, like a giant gaping mouth threatening to swallow the ship whole.
“Dónall!” Isaac cried. Rigging snapped, and Eli let out a terrified scream.
“Now, Ciarán!” Dónall yelled. “Show them your talisman!”
Ciarán nodded warily and pulled the talisman from his habit. A hint of blue fire flashed across the silver disk. Dónall raised the face of his own talisman into the mouth of the storm.
“Megaera!” he cried, “By the power of the Fae! The angels, your masters! You and your sisters will not harm this ship!”
The massive storm moaned before the cloud crashed down onto the vessel, and in that moment, Ciarán expected the mast to snap. He could not hear his own screams amid the storm’s fierce wailing. Then suddenly, dense fog engulfed them, followed by driving rain. But as the raindrops hit the deck, they sizzled into steam. The symbol across the ship’s deck flared, and the fog began to burn away. Évrard and his crew looked on, awestruck, at the curtain of rain surrounding the ship, none of it reaching the deck. Without warning, walls of water exploded skyward from the sea, drawn toward the boiling storm in three churning spouts that roared with the same fury as the cyclone at Selles-sur-Cher. The three waterspouts, terrifying in their height and breadth, whipped toward the ship.
Then Dónall began to laugh.
Blue flames flicked over the talisman in Ciarán’s hand, and the waterspouts writhed away like snakes fleeing a grass fire. The ship rocked with the waves, but the mast held, and despite the chaos raging around it, the vessel stood becalmed in the eye of the storm.
“Megaera!” Dónall cried. “I defeated you before; I’ve done so again! Tell your masters, we will not be deterred!”
A piercing wail erupted from the storm. The rain around them ceased, and the waterspouts collapsed into the churning sea while thunder exploded above. And as quickly as the winds blew in, they died. The sea grew calm, and the storm billowed backward, as if some inexorable force were sucking it toward the horizon, and vanished from sight.
A smile crept across the astounded captain’s face, and Isaac and Eli raised their arms triumphantly. Only Ciarán and Dónall looked at each other warily. For in the core of that thunderclap before the storm dissipated, they both had heard it, a haunting promise shrieked in unison by a trio of voices: “Revenge.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
THE BRIDE OF ANDALUSIA
Alais cowered in the deckhouse with the panicked crew. A violent gust had torn open one of the wooden hatches, giving her a glimpse of the black cloud crashing down upon the ship, consuming the deck in swirling darkness. She feared that the raging winds would rip the deckhouse apart. Her heart pounded with terror beyond the merely physical, for she sensed in that black cloud a presence that was cold and evil and not of this world.
The ship pitched, followed by a roar of water, as if the sea itself were rising into the sky. But then she heard Dónall crying out to the storm, challenging the very winds. And to her utter astonishment, the sea grew calm, and the storm retreated! Whether this was sorcery or some other magic that the Church condemned, she could not say, yet three times now it had saved her life—this time, she knew in her bones, from something wholly unnatural.
She ventured out onto the deck, where the water was steaming away like raindrops off hot paving stones. Dónall and Ciarán looked on triumphantly in their wringing-wet robes. The mast had not snapped, and the sail looked unharmed. Évrard hugged Eli, and Alais smiled with relief. Only Isaac appeared troubled.
“Dónall,” he said, “you have not been candid with us. You owe us an explanation.”
Dónall insisted on waiting until the crew calmed down, for they were giddy with joy. They gathered around Eli, who could not stop chattering about how Dónall had turned away the storm. A few of the sailors crossed themselves or knelt, muttering prayers.
Évrard and Josua demanded the same answers as Isaac. But what the monks finally told them shook Alais to her soul. “The storm was the work of demons,” Dónall said bluntly, “summoned by sorcerers who wear the robes of the monks of Saint-Bastian’s.”
Alais shuddered. Could it be true? Beside her, Évrard and Josua had turned pale, though Isaac’s expression remained unchanged.
“I, too, sensed the perversion in the air,” Isaac said. “The Song of Moses warns of demons. In Hebrew, they are called mazzikin and ruhin—bringers of storms. Do you think they seek the Urim?”
“They want to keep us from finding it,” Dónall said grimly.
Puzzled, Alais glanced at each of them. “What is the Urim?”
“A gemstone,” Ciarán explained. “But you’ve heard us call it by another name, I think: ‘Enoch’s device.’”
“The thing mentioned in my husband’s scroll? But . . . why should they want to stop you from finding it?”
They told her about the prophecy. “It was discovered by a king of long-lost Atlantis,” Dónall began. “A prophecy embedded in the twelve constellations of the zodiac.” She had heard about Atlantis in the songs of the jongleurs who performed in the palace when she was child, but she knew little of the constellations that so fascinated the astrologers. Then Dónall’s expression turned gravely serious. “The prophecy speaks of the apocalypse—a conflict waged every thousand years to determine whether the end times will follow.”
Alais ran her fingers nervously through her hair. “The Four Horsemen of the apocalypse now rode these lands,” Prior Ragno had said. A chill ran through her veins.
“But the prophecy tells how to prevent the end times,” Ciarán added. “To survive the first conflict, a champion of men must wield a weapon against the enemy. That weapon is Enoch’s device.”
His words struck like lightning. She remembered what the monks had said on Christmas Day, about a champion’s bloodline, the line of Charlemagne. But surely they did not think she was this champion. For while some infinitesimal fraction of Charlemagne’s blood may course through her veins, she was no hero—she felt as certain of that as o
f her own name.
Isaac remained silent during the monks’ explanation. Finally, he spoke. “Astrology is no secret to our mystics,” he said. “When you first mentioned this prophecy, I did not think much of it. So many Christians obsess about the end of the world. But now, with the emergence of these ruhin . . .”
“Even worse,” Ciarán said, “we’re running out of time.”
“What do you mean?” Isaac asked.
“One of our murdered friends, Brother Remi, believed that the first conflict will come when Mars passes between Scorpio and Sagittarius, on the fifth of March, just seven weeks from now.”
Isaac sighed. “This is much to ponder. I would like to see the reference to this prophecy in Maugis’ book.” Ciarán glanced at Dónall, who nodded. Évrard and Josua slumped against the ship’s railing. Their faces betrayed what Alais felt: overwhelm. She rubbed her fingers over her eyes. Had Geoffrey believed in this prophecy? Was this why he and his ancestors had protected the scroll?
Soon, they retired to the deckhouse. She lay next to Ciarán but tossed fitfully. Her thoughts drifted across a field of wheat, to a vision of a woman in white. The woman’s face was beautiful, ageless. Alais recalled her haunting command.
Choose.
And Alais had chosen. She chose Geoffrey—and, with him, the secret that set her on this voyage. As she drifted off to sleep, she wondered, had the woman in white had been the hand of fate, reaching out to her?
*
The next morning, Isaac emerged from the deckhouse looking pale and shaken. Dónall glanced at Ciarán, clearly concerned.
“He’s still troubled by what happened,” Dónall said under his breath.
“Wouldn’t you be?” Ciarán replied. “Especially after what we told them.”
“You are both right,” Isaac interjected. “But there is more. I had another dream.”
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