Devil's Lair (19 page)

Marco did not argue the
point. “He let me choose one from the others.”

“How did you choose?”

“Blindly. I found it on a
little table in the hall. One of those iron heads without a shaft. When I
touched it, I thought I felt something.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. A chill,
maybe. A ripple in my soul.”

“The Holy Spirit?”

The words meant nothing to
Marco. He let them die on the wind, and said, “Whatever it was, I have not felt
it since.”

Rienzo returned to his
theme. “Will you join me in Rome?”

“I’m tired. Let me think on
it.”

“Think quickly, Marco. We’ve
done great things together, you and I, but there is much to be done. I’ve been
too long on the mountain. Now this drought. Now this pestilence. The world is
weak without me. Rome is a ruin. No more. Even Moses came down from the
mountain. It is time, my friend. Time for action. Time for old partners to
forge new dreams.”

When he returned to his own
cell, Marco spent hours pondering which course he should take: the pilgrim’s
path or Rienzo’s revolution. He fell asleep without an answer, and woke the
next morning without the Lance.

“It’s gone,” he said.

William set aside his
porridge bowl. “What is?”

“The Lance. The Holy Lance.”

That brought the friar to
his feet. “How?”

“Rienzo took it in the
night.”

They hurried to Rienzo’s
hermitage and found it empty. Marco saw the writing on the wall:
mane thecel
phares.
The words were
scratched into stone. “What does it mean?”

William studied the
markings. “It means the empire will fall. Rienzo lost his power, but not his
ambition.”

“Now he has the Holy Lance.”

“If we hurry, we can catch
him.”

Marco was first to reach the
shepherd’s hut where they had stored their supplies. Ash, his grey destrier,
was tied to a tree near Nadja’s palfrey, the packhorse, and the donkey.

Giovanni’s horse was
missing.

Marco saw tracks leading
northwest around the mountain, hoof prints that did not retrace the spoor
rising up from the valley. If Rienzo had been more clever than impatient, he
would have followed the old tracks down, then split off from them at the river
crossing.

He’s a fool.
Determined to prove it, Marco mounted his
destrier and gave chase.

Before noon he spotted the
thief watering his stolen horse in the river valley. Marco dismounted and led
Ash quietly down, hoping to get close to his quarry before Rienzo was alerted.
The destrier was tired, the palfrey better rested. Rienzo’s horse would be
faster, and bore a lighter burden, but could not match the strength of Marco’s
mount. In a flat race the palfrey would win, but in this valley, with only deer
trails wending the craggy hills, both horses would be slowed. If Rienzo chose
to climb out of the valley, Ash’s strength would prove decisive.

Rienzo stood at the
riverbank with his back turned to Marco. The man spoke to an imagined crowd,
rehearsing some oration. Marco did not catch the words. Occasionally Rienzo
raised his arms high, with the Holy Lance in one hand, shaking it with
righteous indignation.

Ash kicked up a stone.
Rienzo turned with a start. Marco raised an open palm. “Hello, down there!” He
smiled and kept walking the horse at an easy pace.
A little closer.

Rienzo seemed unsure for a
moment, then he jumped on the palfrey and raced away, following the river down.

And so it begins.
Marco let him go. Reaching the river’s
edge, the knight and his mount drank together. It would be a long pursuit,
Marco knew, and he did not want his horse to die beneath him. He walked ahead
of Ash for the next half hour, scanning the hills to either side, looking for
signs that Rienzo had taken another way, but the quickest route was down the
valley and Rienzo’s fear would keep him riding fast.

When the stream ran straight
and the ground was good, Marco picked up the pace, jogging on the trail with
the reins in his hands and the war horse trotting behind him. After an hour
Marco’s legs grew tired and he mounted up. The destrier felt strong beneath
him, well-rested despite the miles behind. Marco kicked the horse’s flank to
put the wind in his mane.

The valley spilled into a
rough plain that stretched for a mile before dropping in the distance. Not far
into the field a rider urged on a sluggish horse, which had wearied to a walk.
Marco could not tell if the horse was blown.

Let’s find out.

Ash was a war horse bred to
carry armored knights in short battle charges. He was unaccustomed to long
runs. Marco wore no armor, but Ash was already sweating.
Still has some kick
in him,
Marco thought,
hoping it was true. He had not yet tested the charger’s top speed. He did so
now, giving the horse his stride, using the last of the downhill slope to
propel them together across the plain.

Rienzo’s horse was slow to
start, and did not reach full gallop until Marco was nearly upon them. The
palfrey kept half a length ahead, lathered and panting hard. Dry grass whipped
past both horses in a blur.

Looking ahead, Marco saw
where the field ended, giving way to open sky, but he did not know what lay
beyond the edge. Heedless, he kicked his horse harder and screamed into the
wind.

The two horses were nearly
abreast, with Ash on the left closing the gap when Marco grabbed the palfrey’s
tail and gave it a yank. The horse cried out but did not slow.

Rienzo looked back. Marco
saw something flash in the sun. The point of the Lance came straight at him, a
jab that might have killed him or knocked him from his mount, but Marco leaned
back from the blow and the Lance pierced the air.

Marco grabbed where the
wooden shaft joined the iron head. He tried to wrest it away but Rienzo held
on. They struggled with the Lance between them, each trying to knock the other
from their steed. Marco’s left eye nearly caught the point of the weapon, but
he dodged and it only grazed his cheek.

Looking back, Rienzo could
not see where the field dropped into a ravine. Marco saw it. So did the horses.
The palfrey, not waiting for a command, turned sharply to the right. Marco
reined his horse to the left. The knight had a better grip on the contested
weapon, and when the horses separated the Lance came with him.

So did Rienzo. The mad
hermit gave up the horse for the Lance, and was dragged over rough ground. The
resistance pulled Marco from his own horse, and the two men went rolling
together to the edge of the ravine.

Rienzo tumbled into the
chasm, holding the Lance. Marco nearly went with him, but clawed the ground to
a stop. When the dust blew past him, his head jutted out over the cliff. His
right arm was over the edge, the Lance in hand. Rienzo dangled from the shaft.
The drop was no more than thirty feet. A man might fall and live to tell it in
a tavern, but Marco liked his chances better where he was.

“Climb up,” he shouted.

Rienzo got a toehold and
Marco pulled him to safety. Rienzo did not release the Lance. Marco put a boot
to Rienzo’s throat, choking him until the madman let go, sputtering.

Ash grazed a short way off.
Marco went to fetch the horse and heard Rienzo at his back: “Traitor! Thief! To
the Devil with you, Marco! That’s what he wants! That’s what he’s waiting for!”

Marco left him there. He
walked the horses back across the field and up the river valley, harried by the
echo of Rienzo’s curse.

CHAPTER 19

The pilgrims spent a night
in the abbey of Monte Cassino before continuing south on the forest road toward
Cumae.

“Look,” said Nadja.

William glanced up and saw
corpses in the trees: m
en, women, and
children dangling from nooses, their flesh consumed by scavengers and time.
The friar thought of a chandler’s daughter in his home
village of Ockham. He had just arrived at Oxford when he heard the news of
Evette’s death. She had hanged herself from the tree that had sheltered their
first kiss.
Mea culpa,
he
thought.
Peccavi.

“Twenty-four by my count,”
Giovanni said.

William stopped counting at
one. He had witnessed such horrors in Bavaria after the onset of the
pestilence. Too many people had been burned or hanged or stoned by mobs. On
Saint Valentine’s Day, in the city of Strasbourg, more than two thousand were
burned alive.

Marco dismissed the corpses
with a word. “Thieves.”

“No,” said William. “Jews.”

They rode in silence through
the forest of the dead.

“Maybe a mile to the lake,”
Giovanni said as they rode down the somber streets of Cumae.

“What’s that smell?” Nadja
asked.

“Solfatarra. Boils up from
the lake. The horses might get skittish. Better to leave them here and walk the
last mile.”

They stabled the horses in
town and transferred what was left of their supplies to the donkey. Giovanni
cut the coins from his shoes and offered to buy his friends a drink in Tavern
Avernus before they set out.

The taproom was crowded and
noisy. William called to the tapman, “Beer! Have you any beer?”

“No beer,” the tapman said.
“Not since the troubles. Are you Hungarian?”

“English by way of Bavaria.”

The man shrugged. “German
merchants don’t get this far south. Not these days.”

“What are you serving?”

“
Lachryma Christi.
”

“Tears of Christ,” said
William.

“You know the story?”

“I know Latin. What’s the
story?”

The tapman said, “When
Lucifer was cast down from Heaven, he fell to Mount Vesuvius.”

“That’s the big mountain
across the bay?”

The tapman nodded. “From
there the Devil began his reign of terror. Jesus wept. A single tear fell from
Heaven and landed on the mountainside. From that one tear grew a vine, and from
that vine the blessed grapes, and from those grapes:
Lachryma Christi.
”

“A fine story. Pour me some
tears.”

Christ’s tears were flowing
freely when William began to bellow a drinking song:

Meum est propositum
in taberna mori

ubi vina proxima
morientis ori.

Giovanni joined in:

Tunc
cantabunt laetius angelorum chori:

Deus sit
propitius isti potatori, isti potatori.

Soon they were both on top of the
tables, Giovanni leaping from one to the next as William stomped his feet and
rattled the cups, dancing to music from a minstrel who had caught the tune.
When the words ran out, the singers sat down laughing.

The tapman offered another
round, but Giovanni said the money, too, was at an end.

A smile died on William’s
lips and he asked with a sudden sobriety, “How do we get to Lake Avernus?”

“Avernus?” The tapman looked
skeptical. “Nothing there.”

“The temple of Apollo,”
Giovanni said.

“The cave of the Sibyl,”
Nadja added.

The tapman shook his head.
“Stay away from that place.”

Marco asked, “Why?”

“It’s evil. Poison in the
air. Venom in the wind. A foul miasma lingers in those hills. Nothing survives
in Avernus. Ground without grass. Lake without fish. Sky without birds. A dead
place. An evil place.”

William downed the last of
his tears, wiped his lips with a tattered sleeve, and thunked his mug on the
tabletop.

“So how do we get there?”

Nadja followed Giovanni and
the others into the cave. The entrance was not what she had expected. In her
dreams she saw a trapezoidal tunnel. This was cut from the rock in a wide arch.
She whispered to Giovanni, “It’s not the right cave.”

“We’re not there yet,” he
answered. “This tunnel connects Cumae to Lake Avernus.”

“You could move an army
through here,” Marco noted.

“They did. Octavian built it
during Mark Antony’s rebellion.”

The tunnel was a mile long,
at least. Nadja saw Latin graffiti. Giovanni swept his torch along the walls,
laughing at the dirty jokes and naughty verses, which William urged him not to
translate. The pictures, however, spoke for themselves. Nadja tried to look like
she wasn’t looking.

When they emerged into
daylight, her nostrils were assaulted by sulfurous fumes. She could see Lake
Avernus below: a circular pool in a volcanic crater.