by John Lyman
Evita stood and brushed the fresh grass from her clothes. “It’s almost time for Julian’s welcoming ceremony. Let’s get started so we can get a good seat.”
Slowly, Leo lifted himself to his feet, and walking arm-in-arm, the two crossed the stone bridge, stopping for a moment to look at the reflection of the red sunset on the surface of the water before continuing on, walking up a slight incline before passing under the intricately-carved stone archway that framed the entrance to the castle.
Inside the Great Hall, hundreds of candles had been placed in tall iron stands along the aisles and in huge circular chandeliers hanging from the rafters. Their flickering light cast a golden glow over the beautiful tapestries that hung from the stone walls in a medieval tableau straight from the pages of an Arthurian legend. Already most of the seats had been filled in anticipation of the night’s proceedings, for all those who had lived in this magical place for any length of time knew that a speech delivered by Julian Wehling was a treat not to be missed.
Making their way down the aisle next to the wall, they passed the members of Team 5, who, following a new edict from Julian in the wake of their first encounter with Acerbi’s forces, had been allowed to keep their weapons with them, as had Lev’s people and Gael’s men, who were sitting with their families across the aisle.
Further toward the front, they saw Alon and Nava seated next to Moshe and Hadar, and next to Lev, Ariella and John were busy leaning forward and talking to Colette, Abbas, and Colonel Demir, who had all been seated on the front row with their wives and children.
Waving furiously to Leo and Evita, Lev motioned to an open spot next to him on a bench-like seat. “Come on, Cardinal. There’s room for both of you here.”
Squeezing in, Leo and Evita looked to the raised stone area at the front of the room, where a flower-laden dais had been constructed from a long wooden table. Soft music from stringed instruments and flutes drifted from a balcony at the back of the hall, mixing with the expectant hushed voices of the audience. To Leo, the entire atmosphere possessed the aura of an opening night at the opera, a beautiful new opera that no one had ever heard before, and thus every heart beat with greater expectation.
Behind them, they could hear voices rise as Julian Wehling entered the hall and began making his way up the center aisle to the flower-bedecked dais. Ascending the stone steps, he paused to gaze out over a room filled with families, including working fathers and mothers holding infants, while small children crawled under the seats of the stern-looking Israeli warriors.
With every eye focused toward the front, the music stopped as Julian began to speak, his voice circling the towering stone walls and resonating beneath the arched stone ceiling so that even those in the back of the enormous room could hear each word clearly.
“Good evening my friends. Tonight has been declared a night for celebration, and for good reason. We have been joined by others who have traveled a great distance to join us in a common cause, and as I look out upon the faces of the new arrivals, I am warmed to see Christians, Jews, and Muslims all sitting together in the midst of one of the largest gatherings of Cathars since the Middle Ages. As a medievalist, it does my old professor’s heart good to see such a wonderful sight, for this was the way our world was meant to evolve, so please, allow me to welcome you all to a place where you will always have a home.”
Julian paused, his throat tight with emotion as he scanned a crowded hall filled with eager modernity mixed with medieval loyalties.
“As Cathars, we believe in peace, but a few days ago, in a field known to Cathars everywhere, we were forced to fight back against the evil that now stalks the world we live in. With help from some of our new friends, and despite overwhelming odds, we survived what many said would be unsurvivable. Working together, we saved three lives from an unimaginable fate, and our mountaintop home remains undiscovered by those who would see us wiped off the face of the Earth ... but we were lucky. Although none of us fell in our first engagement with Acerbi’s forces, I fear that a long war of attrition lies ahead for us all ... no matter what religion we follow. The armies of Lucifer are once again on the march across the Field of the Burned, and we must be prepared to fight.”
Scattered murmurs went up around the hall as parents held their children close and the fighters looked on with fierce determination. Taking a sip of water, Julian continued. “Over the course of the next few months, we will work to strengthen our fortress home from attack, making it even more invisible to those who seek us out. But that alone will not keep us safe. We face a mighty enemy who is armed with vastly superior weapons and the means of delivering them right to our doorstep.
“Despite our attempts to provide everyone here with the security of a normal life, one small slip of the tongue from anyone who has knowledge of our whereabouts could spell doom for us all. We live a tenuous existence that demands change if we are to survive, and as we grow we must spread out, creating pockets of resistance across the land. Ours will be a war of hide and seek ... hit and run ... kill or be killed ... for whether we like it or not, that is the world we now exist in. We will have to fight in small cohesive groups that come from different areas, but regardless of where we live, we will still be united under the banner of a single cause.”
“Are you asking us to abandon the castle?” a tall man holding a crossbow shouted out.
Julian stopped as he looked out over a sea of questioning faces. “No, the castle will remain our primary base of operations, and no one will be asked to leave our mountaintop home. Only those who volunteer will be sent out to create their own secret communities, and they will have our help. The old saying about safety in numbers no longer applies to our situation. For us, safety lies in small, scattered groups, and to that end we will spread out like the spokes of a wheel, each spoke independent of the other under the leadership of a central hub. Before we all gathered here tonight, Gael and I met with Cardinal Leo, Professor Lev Wasserman, and Danny Zamir, and it was they who made me see that the best way to protect our home here is to develop a strategy involving separate bases, and they have all volunteered to lead the first groups out into the surrounding mountains to begin construction of those bases.”
Evita squeezed Leo’s arm in surprise as he winked back at her.
“Tomorrow,” Julian continued, “we will begin by dismantling Cardinal Leo’s beloved cabins, which will be relocated to a different mountain in a secret location to the west of us. Meanwhile, Professor Wasserman and Team 5 will be leaving for the ruins of an old abandoned castle in a valley on the Spanish side of the border, which will be rebuilt with our help.
“These outposts will be the first spokes of our wheel ... a wheel we hope to use to encircle Acerbi’s forces in the months and years to come. We will also be forming a special intelligence-gathering team that will be specially trained to go into towns and spy on Acerbi’s forces. From now on, these will be the only people allowed to leave the safety of our compounds, for once you are outside these walls you are effectively in enemy territory. We will have more meetings like this in the days and weeks to come, but please feel free to stop by my room or stop me on the grounds if you have any questions. Now, let’s bring on the food.”
Applause filled the Great Hall as platters of vegetarian fare began flowing from the kitchens and people began moving long tables from the sides of the hall into the center of the space. In the flickering candlelight, Leo saw the golden reflection in Evita’s large brown eyes as she sipped her wine and stared at him across the table.
“Are you coming to the cabins with me after they’re moved to the new site?” he asked.
Evita smiled while she made him wait for her answer. “Are you asking?”
“Yes, I am.” Leo pulled a piece of paper from his shirt pocket and handed it to her across the table.”
“What’s this?”
“Something Pope Michael gave me before I left Rome for the meeting at the UN. It’s a papal edict allowing priests to marry.”
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“Does that include cardinals?”
“Yes, we’re also priests, Evita.”
“But I hear there are rumors about you being elected the first pope in the new underground Catholic Church. What do you think people will say if you are married?”
Leo looked through the flickering candles between them. “I hate to say that I don’t care what people think, because I do. But that papal edict you’re holding was written by the hand of a man I greatly admired, and if he believed that the time had come for priests to marry, then who am I to question his decision?”
“So,” Evita said a little too loudly, “are you asking me to marry you?”
Leo froze like a deer caught in headlights as he felt a dozen pairs of eyes looking in their direction. “Well, this isn’t exactly how I had planned it, but yes ... will you marry me?”
Evita shot a coy glance in his direction as everyone at the table suddenly stopped what they were doing to watch the drama playing out next to them.
“Of course I’ll marry you,” she answered in a soft whisper. “I’ve been waiting for this day ever since we first met on Lev’s yacht in Spain. Somehow I knew when I first looked into your eyes that there was a shared destiny for us.”
Taking her in his arms, Leo held her while Ariella and Nava sniffled with Gabriella in the background. “I can’t believe this,” he finally said. “I don’t even have a ring to give you.”
“Of course you have rings,” Abbas said. He was standing behind Leo with two gold rings in his hand. “Here, Cardinal, take these. They are my gift to you.”
“Where did you get these?”
“I found them while I was on an archaeological dig in Turkey. I would guess that they are at least two-thousand years old ... probably from the Roman period. I figured we might need some gold to exchange for gas and food on our trip here after we left Turkey with Colette and our families.”
“Thank you, Abbas,” Evita said, taking the rings into her hands. “They’re beautiful!”
Leo nodded. “Yes, thank you, my friend.” Smiling down the table at his friends, he took Evita by the hand and stood. “I think we’ve both had enough dinner entertainment for one night. If you would please excuse us, I think we’ll go for a little walk.”
Leaving a sea of smiling faces behind them, Leo and Evita made their way from the Great Hall out into the crisp fall air beneath a sky filled with stars. “Do you want to walk out by the lake?” Evita asked. “It’s still warm enough.”
Leo nodded as they walked out onto the grass and looked back at the moon rising above the waterfall. Hanging low on the horizon, it looked twice its normal size, casting an ethereal yellowish glow over the mountains, making the droplets of falling water sparkle as they cascaded down into the stream that fed the lake.
Walking along the sloping grassy embankment that bordered the water’s edge, they noticed a group of children gathered around a woman. To their surprise, they saw that it was Colette, and she was telling a story to a group of spellbound Cathar children. Stopping for a moment to listen, they heard her speaking softly, talking about castles and scrolls and the history of the Cathars.
“And to this very day no one knows what the Cathars who slid down the rope and escaped from Montsegur castle were carrying,” she told her enthralled audience. “Some say it was gold, while others think it was the Holy Grail itself. But whatever it was, they concealed it somewhere in the caves of the Sabarthes, the name given to the mountains that surround us, and it is still hidden there today, in the land of the Cathars ... a land we once called Occitania.”
“Oh, tell us some more, Madam Colette!” one of the children called out.
“Yes, please!” another said.
Colette smiled up at Leo and Evita, her sad eyes reflecting the wisdom gained from a life spent in the academic pursuit of the history of her people. With the dark presence that had once inhabited her body finally cast out forever, she had returned to the world of the living, albeit without the loving embrace of the man she had shared her life with for the past forty years.
“OK, my little doves,” she said, “just one more story before you must be off to bed.” Clearing her throat, she looked right at Leo before she began. “One day, many, many years ago, some of our ancestors lived in a great Roman city. In fact, it was called Rome, and it still goes by that name today. In that great city there lived a very evil man ... an emperor. His name was Nero, and he hunted down Christians and fed them to the lions.”
“Eewww!” a little girl cringed.
“Yes, my dear ... he was a very bad man. At that time, many Cathars lived in the great city.”
“Are Cathars Christians too?” a little red-headed boy asked.
“Yes, we are different kinds of Christians, but that is a subject for your parents and teachers to explain to you. I am just a storyteller. Anyway, as I was saying, many Cathars lived in the great city, and when the other Christians were being hunted by the emperor and his men, the Cathars made a hiding place for their brothers.”
“What kind of hiding place?” another little boy called out.
Collette leaned forward as her eyes grew wide. “A chapel ... a very secret chapel.”
“Why was it secret?” the red-haired boy asked.
“Because,” Colette continued, “it was invisible to the emperor and his men. It was built under a hill from stone that came by boat from the Holy Land, and it protected all those who hid within its walls until they could be smuggled out of the city away from the bad emperor and his men.”
A small blonde-haired girl shivered in the cooling nighttime air. “But why was it invisible?”
“No one knows, but many believed it was guarded by angels who made it invisible to the bad men who lived in the world at that time. The chapel is still there today, in the same spot where it was built two thousand years ago.”
“Can we see it?” the little girl asked.
“Yes, my dear, anyone who believes can see it.” Colette looked up at Leo. “And some of us here have even seen the angels who protect it.”
Leo could feel the ground sway beneath his feet as he grasped Evita’s hand. The Secret Chapel! So that’s who had built it! A question that had haunted his dreams ever since they had discovered the mysterious chapel beneath the Vatican had just been answered in a children’s storytelling session by a woman whose vast knowledge of religious history was astonishing. Maybe that was why she and Eduardo Acerbi had been sought out by the Evil One to raise the Beast, for they were the perfect couple to educate him in the ways of those he would seek to destroy one day.
“Tell us another story, Madam Colette ... another one about treasure!”
“No, Mon Ami, it is your bedtime, and the night grows cold. Tomorrow night I will tell you other stories about the mysteries of the Sabarthes ... about treasures not made from gold, but from ideas.”
“Ideas?” a disappointed child asked in confusion.
“Yes, little ones ... ideas, for they are the greatest treasure of them all.”
As Colette stood, she teetered briefly before Leo took her by the arm. “Thank you for the story, Madam Colette.” Leo smiled as his eyes glistened in the moonlight. “It was very enlightening.”
“I thought you would appreciate that particular tale, Cardinal. Come back tomorrow night. I have more stories you may be interested in hearing.”
Looking up to the sky, Leo watched his breath on the clear mountain air, and as he, Evita, and Colette began walking back toward the warmth of the castle, he suddenly had another thought. Maybe the angels were here now, watching over all of them.
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