Devil's Lair (25 page)

I can’t fight like this.

“Look at me,” Medusa said,
sweet as a temptress. “I am beautiful.”

She held out her arms to
him. A snake slithered from her shoulder to her wrist, then reared it’s head
and struck. Marco evaded it. The snake snapped over his right shoulder as the
knight stepped away.

“All men desire me,” Medusa
whispered. “But I desire you. Look at me. Tell me I am beautiful.”

“You are the Devil’s
harlot.”

Another jab.

The Lance found flesh.

Medusa screamed. Marco saw,
in the reflection, a black viper issue from her mouth. It dropped to the
ground. Marco leapt to one side, to no avail. Long fangs sank into his calf. He
sliced the snake in two. The severed tail writhed at Marco’s feet. The snake
head clung to his leg. As he reached down to dislodge it, his shield was yanked
back, nearly ripping his arm from his shoulder, and Marco’s body spun to face
Medusa.

He shut his eyes. A snake
bit Marco’s right hand. His fingers spasmed and he dropped the Lance. The
shield was wrenched from his arm. He heard the metal discus land with a clang
on the stone bridge.

Without his shield he was
blind. Without the Lance he was dead. He stepped back. Medusa grabbed him, drew
him to her, and hugged him with arms like icy tongs. Marco struggled in her
embrace. He felt her breath on his cheek. And then her lips: cold, soft, wet.

She whispered, “Look at me,
lover. Look into my eyes.”

Her icy tongue flicked his
earlobe. Marco flinched from her affection. He lifted his feet to lend her his
weight, but she held him easily in the air. Marco felt the urge to look at her.
He resisted the temptation.

Through his closed eyelids
he saw brightness below.
The Lance.
It lay on the ground. He gripped the shaft between his boots and
swung it around to strike Medusa’s leg. She screamed and released him.

Marco fell, grabbed the
Lance, and rolled away. Opening his eyes, he saw Nadja crouching behind a rock
in the distance, her eyes averted. Limping, he joined his friends behind the
make-shift shelter. Nadja dislodged the snake from his leg.

Medusa heckled him. “Come
back, sweet prince!”

“Blindfold me,” said Marco.

Nadja tore a strip of cloth
from her kirtle and tied it around his head.

Blinded, Marco returned to
fight Medusa. He listened to the music of her serpents, how they darted and
danced. He created in his mind an aural landscape, and saw Medusa in the
darkness as in a dream. He kept a supple, two-handed grip, letting the Holy
Lance move his hands, his arms, like a tavern girl who took the lead. He did
not resist. He heard vipers strike and snap. He ducked and parried, wielding
the Lance with rapid precision. Slice, slice, slice. He felt the blade make
contact, heard snake heads drop like hailstones.

Still they came. Marco gave
ground, regressing to the moat of lava. Heat buffeted his back. With his foot
he felt where ground fell away. He was now standing at the edge of the moat.
There was no going back. He stepped to his left. Medusa cut him off. He moved
to the right and she was there. He stood and fought her, but there were too
many snakes. They found his flesh as Medusa closed the gap between them, coming
at Marco for a final embrace.

He planted the butt of the Lance into
the ground,
grabbed Medusa’s serpentine hair, and
pulled her onto the Lance. It pierced her heart. He pushed up, lifting the
gorgon off her feet, flipping her over his head and into the boiling moat. He
heard snakes curl and crisp as Medusa burned to the bottom.

When he opened his eyes she
was gone.

Poisoned and exhausted,
Marco dropped to his knees, and then into shadow.

He walked in darkness. A
cold mist enveloped him. Through the mist he saw a pair of shimmering eyes,
chatoyant as the eyes of a cat. They looked down at him from an immense height.
The flames of those eyes gave no warmth.

Marco da Roma,
a deep voice rumbled,
do you want to
die?

“I want to live.”

Then open your eyes.

William checked the knight’s
extremities, which were covered with snakebites. If the bites were poisoned,
Marco was a dead man. William could not hope to extract all the venom in time.
All he could do was pray.

“
Deus obsecro sana eum.
”

Marco’s breathing improved.
He opened his eyes, sputtered a cough, and tried to sit. Nadja helped him.

“I’m okay,” he said.

She kissed his neck and
began to weep.

William crossed the narrow
stone bridge to face the furies. “Open the gate.”

“No—”

“Sorry—”

“We’d rather not.”

“You promised,” he said.

“And you believed us?” said
one.

“Where do you think you
are?” asked another.

“‘Abandon all hope!’” said
the third.

The furies laughed and
retreated into the turret.

William returned and told
his friends what had happened.

Giovanni looked crestfallen.
“What do we do now?”

The friar touched the pouch
at his belt, feeling the crystals inside. “Surprise them.”

“With what?”

“Thunder and lightning.”

Giovanni watched as William
knelt at the bank of the bog, adding pinches of littoral salts to a pile on a
tabular rock.

“Have you ever seen a
cannon?” William asked.

“A few times. I was a boy
when they were first brought to Florence. I heard test fire from my father’s
house. A sound like booming thunder. I saw other cannons in Naples.”

“You understand how they
work?”

“A black powder. A fire
drug.”

“The Devil’s distillate,”
said William.

“Very dangerous, they say.”

“What else do they say?”

“You place this drug in a
metal tube, which is open at one end and closed at the other, like a pot or
vase. That’s called the cannon. Then you insert a metal ball or a spherical
stone. When you add fire to the drug, a burst of flame throws the missile. If
you’re lucky, it breaks a fortification or knocks down a castle wall or maybe
takes off a man’s head.”

“Yes, precisely.”

“But most of the time it
just digs a new hole in the dirt.”

William agreed. “Not a
practical weapon.”

Giovanni thought he
understood where this was leading. “But you’re going to make one.”

“A petard.”

“You have the fire drug?”

“Not yet,” William said.
“You need four ingredients to make the black powder.
Charcoal.
” He opened his bag and set Nadja’s
drawing sticks on the tabular rock. “
Brimstone.
” He fetched the yellow crystals and lay
them next to the charcoal. “And
niter.
” He took a pinch of the white salt and sprinkled it over
the charcoal and brimstone.

“What’s the fourth
ingredient?”

William grinned. “A man who
knows the formula.”

Giovanni followed the Styx
until he found the women he was looking for: forty-nine maidens carrying water
from the river. They each filled a metal ewer, but as they walked back to the
nearby cistern, water drained from their leaky vessels.

“Are you the Daughters of
Danaus?” he asked.

One of the sisters nodded.
“We carry water to wash away our sins.”

Which can never be washed
away.
Giovanni knew their
story. Danaus, king of Argos, had ordered his fifty daughters to kill their
husbands on their wedding night. Only one refused. The others, honoring their
father, were eternally damned.

Giovanni walked with them.
His feet were splashed by the constant spillage. When the woman he spoke with
reached the cistern, only one drop of water remained in her ewer. She let it
fall, paused for a sigh, and started back to the river.

“May I see that?” Giovanni
asked. She handed him the ewer. He inspected it. With a little heat the iron
could be reshaped and the holes repaired. “May I keep it?”

“What for?”

“To open that gate.” He
pointed behind him.

“The gate of pain,” she
said. “Pain is all that lies within.”

“Help me, please.”

“Will it ease your
suffering?”

“The suffering of millions.”

“Then I give it to you
freely.”

Giovanni saw that she now
held another ewer which she did not have before, as if she had plucked a
replacement from the dank air. It seemed that no act of kindness would undo her
curse. Giovanni watched her walk away. There was something sad and beautiful in
the way she moved, in her languid steps and the sweep of her dress over the
path it knew too well.

With Marco’s shield, William
scooped up the Stygian water and carried it to the lava moat. Gripping the edge
of the discus through the insulation of his sleeve, he held it over the heat
like a pot over a campfire.

“What are you doing?”
Giovanni asked when he returned with the ewer.

“Boiling the river,” he
said. “When the water evaporates, the salts remain.”

As William transmuted water
to salt, Marco and Giovanni reshaped the ewer to the friar’s specifications.
The knight used the Lance to hold the vessel over the heat until the iron
softened, then Giovanni pounded the iron into a spherical shape with a pair of
stones, leaving an opening at the top for the black powder.

When William had collected
sufficient niter and crushed the brimstone and charcoal into powders, he laid
his ingredients on the tabular rock and in the bowl of the shield he mixed
brimstone, charcoal, and niter.

“A little something I
learned at Oxford,” he said. “The secret recipe of Doctor Mirabilis.”

The friar asked for a drib
of water. Giovanni carried some in his cupped hands, and poured it into
Williams hands.

“Stand back,” the old man
said. “This part is dangerous.”

He added a few drops to the
black powder and worked it with his hands until the granulation satisfied him.
He added the fire drug to the ewer until it was full, and created a wick from
the tattered selvage of his robe.

The pilgrims took cover
behind a heap of rubble. From this revetment they could see the wall of Dis.

William pointed. “The weak
point is there. See where the old stones meet the new?”

“The color changes,” Nadja
observed.

Giovanni said, “The wall was
broken and repaired.”

William nodded. “When Christ
threw open the gates to harrow Hell, the old structure gave way. It will give
again.”

The poet carried the petard
across the bridge and found the section of the wall that William had indicated.
Together he and Marco dug a hole at the base and buried the petard, leaving
only the wick exposed. Giovanni lit one end of a stick in the fiery moat and
waited for Marco to return to the revetment before lighting the wick. He ran to
the bridge. He was almost across when the wall burst in a roar of fire. A hot wind
threw him to the ground. He rolled away, then covered his head with his arms as
shards of stone fell around him. When he looked up he saw a breach big enough
to drive an elephant through.

Thunder and lightning.
Giovanni shook his head, amazed by the
power the old wizard had unleashed.
I should have gone to Oxford.

CHAPTER 27

From the revetment William
saw hundreds of damned souls flee the city through the breach, pursued by a
horde of demons with tridents and nets. Most of the sinners were stabbed and
snared, but others made it to the river and beyond. William knew they would all
be rounded up and returned soon enough, but he had brought them a taste of
hope. More importantly, the demons were distracted.

“Now,” he said.

The pilgrims ran for the
breach. After slipping inside the wall, they searched for cover and found a
vast cemetery. Thousands of open tombs burned in the dark. Many were vacated
but a few souls moaned in their sepulchers. A path veered to the left,
threading between the tombs.

“Where are we?” William
asked.

Giovanni said, “The realm of
the heretics.”

I should pay my respects.
William scrambled from one open tomb to
the next, glancing down at tormented shades, reading names on the lids and
tombstones. “John! Pope John! John the Twenty-Second! Where are you? Devil damn
you, John! Show yourself! Raise your demon-haunted hide! I know you’re here!”