by Alex Archer
Her dream was dark, the worst yet since coming to France. In it she was Joan again…or rather herself in Joan’s place. She was being led through the streets of Rouen, staring at the featureless faces that peered out windows and from street corners. The clanking armor of her escort and the conversations of all those who watched made a blur of sound in which nothing was decipherable, as if a swarm of angry insects was dancing in her ears. The buzz grew painful, punctuated by a thrumming that she realized was her heart beating.
This time she didn’t wear shoes. Her feet felt ice-cold, and the ache intensified with each step, as bits of gravel cut into her heels. Then she felt something soft and warm, heard laughter…. She must have walked through animal dung. She couldn’t smell anything this time.
Her terror rose the closer she came to the stake driven into the crossroads. It loomed taller than ever before, and as she neared it, she made out features that her mind must have put there…barbed wire wrapped around, jagged pieces of glass sticking out at odd angles. She was thrust up against it, all the hurtful things digging into her arms and back and adding to the agony. She stood on wood planks and watched as twigs, sticks and boards were stacked around her.
In the audience she saw Gaetan and Luc, dressed in fencing outfits. They bowed to her and fitted fencing masks over their faces. Behind them, on crutches, was Archard, whose knee she had broken in the tunnels under the warehouse. His face wore its familiar stoic expression. Sarah was several feet away, rubbing shoulders with a vaguely Asian-looking man. Crescendo. The German… Annja looked this way and that as someone put a barbed-wire necklace around her to keep her from wiggling. There he was, standing next to the stocky man who’d wielded the Wallace Sword.
Where was Lawton?
The conversations continued to buzz. In previous dreams she’d heard people shout at her to repent, yell at the guards to let her go, pray to God for mercy. Where was the cross? Someone was supposed to press a crude wooden cross into her hands, weren’t they? And where was her white gown? Or her boy’s clothes? She was dressed in the faded green hospital gown. Shouldn’t her arm be in a sling? Hadn’t she broken it?
Where was Lawton?
The conversational buzz turned into a sustained scream; the faces took on a horrific aspect, looking melted and deformed like the agonized one in Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream, bloodred sky in the background. But the background was not the Oslofjord; it was of the center in Rouen. Annja could see Saint Catherine’s church.
Where was Lawton?
Archard stumbled forward, awkward in his use of the crutches, his leg in a cast covered with hundreds of signatures she couldn’t read. An unlit torch appeared in his hand; he blew on it like a boy puffing on a birthday candle. It caught fire, and despite the cacophony that raged around her, Annja heard the flames.
Archard set the torch to the wood, and the world became a wall of red-orange, the colors writhing and spinning and changing, as if they couldn’t settle on any particular shade. Finally they turned white…which through the ages was a symbol of purity.
Annja poured with sweat.
The fire grew larger and louder and…
“Good. Your fever broke.” Roux stood over her, dabbing her forehead with a handkerchief. She felt a surge of relief ease her tense muscles. “I think they want to keep you for several more days.”
“One more,” Annja said. She healed quickly.
“I brought you some things to read.” He pointed to a few newspapers on her bed tray.
“My laptop.”
His sigh was dry and long. “Of course, on my next visit.”
Annja groaned and settled deep into the pillow.
She’d thank him for that beautiful bouquet of flowers on the stand, too…when he brought her laptop. She waited until he was gone before picking up the first paper.
It was the Guardian, and the lead story was about a terrorist attack foiled at the Tower of London. “Police recovered three canisters of cyclosarin,” the story read. “Two men were taken into custody in a failed plot to steal arms from the crown jewels exhibit.” She skimmed the rest of it, and moved on to the next paper and the next. That morning’s edition of the Parisien carried a small notice inside about a university professor who had committed suicide last night—Archard Gihon. Indeed, Lawton’s paladins had been removed from the equation, Annja thought. Pity, Archard seemed to have a few redeeming qualities, and perhaps he could have made good in prison.
“Lovely flowers,” a nurse said when she came in to give Annja her last dose of antidote. “Rather expensive, I’d say. Your admirer has excellent taste.”
Annja took a closer look at the arrangement. It was large, filled with Casablanca lilies, gardenias, hydrangeas, lisianthus blooms and a few stems of stephanotis. A very expensive arrangement, it wouldn’t have come from Roux….
“May I see the card?”
The nurse handed it to her and left.
“Meet me Thursday, if you are able.”
Thursday was the thirtieth of May.
* * *
SHE WAITED NEARLY THREE hours in the Old Market Square in Rouen, pacing, sitting on a bench. Annja had decided she would wait all day if necessary.
Scents from the open-air market were thick and pleasant. The old buildings along the street looked somewhat incongruous with the Sainte Jeanne d’Arc Church looming behind her. A nearby memorial marked the spot where Joan had been burned at the stake.
“Did you know, Miss Creed, that in the final moments of her life, Joan prayed for the souls of her executioners?”
“And that her final words were ‘Jesus, Jesus’? Yes, I know.” Annja had heard him walk up behind her, his feet crunching over the gravel between the bricks.
“Do you ever hear voices, Miss Creed?”
“Like Joan claimed she did?” Annja shook her head. “Not really.”
“It would have been marvelous, my City of God.”
Annja and Lawton stood for several minutes without speaking, the sounds of Rouen drifting past them. The air was sweet, if tinged with car exhaust. Not a hint of rain. It had rained for so much of Annja’s stay in France.
She finally broke the quiet. “Where is Joyeuse?”
“Where Joan found her sword,” he said. “I figured that would be apt.” He turned so he could look into Annja’s eyes. She was nearly his height. “I got to hold it for a while, feel the history and the divinity of it. The blade…it really was Charlemagne’s. And it really was mine for a few days.”
“Why are you surrendering it?”
He shrugged his big shoulders. Annja could see a difference in the man from when she’d first spotted him in Spain. His color was sallow, his cheeks a little sunken. “I am defeated, Miss Creed—time and my health are my foes, just as they were my ancestor’s. The City of God goes unfinished. Perhaps some other descendant will take up the banner.”
“I hope not.” Her voice was flat.
* * * * *
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ISBN: 9781459245198
Copyright © 2012 by Worldwide Library
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