Eric van Lustbader, page 12
He watched her as she observed the immediate environment with a professional’s eye. After a time, he could see that she was analyzing the pattern of the vehicular traffic, her mind working much like that of a bridge or poker player, who is not only aware of what cards are on the table but also weighing probabilities, what might be held close to the chest.
“Are you hungry?” she said, after a time.
“Yes, but I’d like a shower more.” He said it harshly, but the moment the words were out of his mouth he knew it was proof of his capitulation.
Wordlessly, she led him to a door beyond which was a standard wooden staircase down to the cellar. She pulled the door shut behind them, turned on a light. Below him was visible a swath of sea-green carpet, the rolled arm of a leather sofa, a section of bare pale-green wall. Reaching the bottom of the stairs, he could see that the place was immaculate—the furniture he’d seen, some more stacked against a wall, a refrigerator and separate freezer, a four-burner stove, a large soapstone sink and counter with a row of drawers beneath—but it was also Spartan and deliberately impersonal, like a hospital waiting room. There were no windows, only metal air grilles. The light, indirect and coolly fluorescent, drained all the colors of warmth.
Jenny showed him to a small, metal-walled bathroom. Inside, he stripped off his filthy, half-shredded clothes. As he was reaching to turn on the shower, he caught sight of his reflection in the mirror. He halted in mid stretch, appalled. His face was cut, bruised and unnaturally reddened, his body swollen, abraded and discolored in innumerable places. He hardly recognized himself, but it wasn’t because of the abuse his body had taken. It was the look in his eyes, the particular depthless expression he recognized only too well—it was the look he would see in his father’s eyes when the elder Shaw was about to leave home on one of his mysterious trips abroad. As a child, the expression had seemed mysterious, but now he understood what it signified: his father had tuned his gaze away from society—he was returning to the Voire Dei.
Wincing in pain, Bravo stepped into the shower, but the hot water felt unutterably delicious as it sluiced over his naked body. When he emerged, he found fresh clothes folded neatly on the toilet seat, waiting for him. Part of her dead father’s wardrobe, he deduced. Opening the medicine cabinet, he found antibiotic ointment and bandages, but he was unable to apply them to the cuts and abrasions on his back. He pulled on underwear and a pair of khaki trousers, then opened the bathroom door.
Jenny had obviously taken a shower in another part of the house because like him she was dressed in fresh clothes—black jeans, black sleeveless top, thin-soled boots of a leather as supple as a ballet dancer’s toe shoe. Her face was scrubbed clean and her hair, combed straight back and unbound, fell down to the hollow between her shoulder blades. It was still damp, gleamed with the bronze luster of a helmet. The solid line of her jaw gave her a diligent, almost studious aspect that lent depth and dimension to her beauty. It was the extremely rare kind of confluence that attracted Bravo. The truth was that had he spotted her across the room at a crowded party, he would have found it impossible to leave without talking to her. He had to remind himself that he hardly knew her, had no idea how much he could trust her, save for the fact that his father had trusted her—he’d deliberately steered Bravo to her. That wasn’t quite enough.
She had made sandwiches, and there was a carafe of ice water and two red plastic tumblers on an old-fashioned folding bridge table to which she had pulled up a pair of metal folding chairs.
A part of him didn’t want to talk to her at all. She was so willful and hardheaded. Then, astonished, he realized that it had been those two words his father had often used to describe him. He waited a moment, unsure how to proceed. In the unkind light, the duskiness of her skin turned sallow, her gray eyes receded into pools of dark shadow. Her wide mouth held no promise for him. How long could he be angry with her for the situation he was in? He felt suddenly spent, as if his anger was a candle that, having burned low, was now guttering.
Turning to reveal his lacerated back, he said, “I need your help.”
She hesitated only a moment. Wordlessly, she took the ointment from him. He sat straddling the toilet, bent slightly forward while she applied the antibiotic cream. He was acutely aware of her fingertips as they moved across his shoulder blades.
“Relax,” she said shortly. “It will hurt less.”
At length, he said, “You never told me how you feel about being part of the Voire Dei.”
He heard her let out a breath and wondered if part of her also wished to remain silent.
“I don’t think about it at all,” she said, “at least not in the way I think you mean; it’s my home, just as it was my father’s—and yours.”
“If it means more killing, I don’t know whether it’s a world I can commit to.”
“That’s the billion-dollar question, isn’t it?” The stiffness had returned to her voice, but her fingertips never stopped their motion. “I have to tell you that there are those in the Order who don’t believe you will, they don’t believe you have it in you.”
“Really?”
“Don’t move,” she said sternly. She had begun to apply the bandages. “They don’t like me and they don’t trust you.”
“You don’t trust me, either.”
“Let’s say we don’t yet trust each other.”
He thought about the truth of her words, as well as the promise they held out. Then his mind made an abrupt leap. “Is that why the Order won’t help us?”
“He was the Keeper. Part of his responsibility was to identify and train his successor.” It was not an answer to his question, but for the moment at least it was all he was going to get from her.
For some time Bravo thought about what she’d just said. He had been four when his father started him on his course of physical training, six when his father began to read to him from treatises on medieval religion.
“He chose me.”
“That’s right.” Jenny put away the ointment and bandages, washed her hands. “You can finish dressing now.” She walked out of the bathroom before he could say anything more.
They sat at the rickety table, eating their sandwiches as an awkward silence settled around them. At length, Bravo wiped his hands on a paper towel and placed on the table the pair of glasses he’d found aboard the Steffi.
It lay between them, a symbol both of what drew them together and what had set them against one another.
“Tell me—”
“We can’t go on, unless you commit.” She shook her head. “It’s no good, you know, blaming me or the other Guardians for mistakes we’ve made. Now—this moment—is all that matters, whether we go on or leave it here. If we leave, then all is lost. To you, I may sound terribly melodramatic, but the truth is I’m being as forthright as I can. The continuation of the Order, the safeguarding of the secrets that have been entrusted to us for centuries, is on your shoulders. Only you can find the cache, your father made sure of that.” She took a breath. “It all boils down to whether he was right about you, or whether he made a fatal mistake.”
In that moment, Bravo heard again his father’s voice as if he was sitting beside him. “A ‘mistake’ is something mechanical—a wrong way of acting, maneuvering, thinking. A mistake is a surface thing. But beneath the surface—where loss manifests itself—that’s where you must begin.”
He gazed down at the glasses, trying to sort out the welter of feeling swirling inside him. As if from a distance, he saw his hand reach out, pick up the glasses and feel the weight of them in his palm.
“Jenny, I want to know something,” he said slowly. “Why did you choose to join the Order? Was it because of your father?”
“My father?” A small, bruised sound escaped her lips. “My father did everything he could to stop me, because I was his delicate daughter. He even had someone picked out for me to marry, a nice, dull guy from a prominent family inside the Beltway. It sounds positively medieval, doesn’t it? But there you go.” She swept a wisp of hair off her face. “When he saw he couldn’t dissuade me, he made things so difficult—my training would have broken a lot of men. I fractured my left ulna twice and my right tibula once, and so many bruises… It was torture.”
“Why did you persevere? Was it out of spite?”
She laughed. “It so easily could have been, but, no, it was something else.”
“What?”
“My faith in what the Order represents: a group of sane men working in an insane world for the betterment of mankind.” Her eyes flashed. “I suppose that sounds insipid to you.”
“No, but it does sound idealistic.”
“Maybe it is.” She shook her head. “I don’t know about you, Bravo, but I have to have something good to believe in. I have to believe that what I do in the world is going to make it better.”
So it all boiled down to faith.
Glancing up, he saw Jenny’s pale eyes regarding him steadily, curiously. There was a fervor in her voice—a tiny tremor—he recognized as coming straight from her heart. She believed every word she said to him; now it was up to him to have faith that what she had told him was the truth. It made sense to him. He knew that more than anything his father had wanted to make the world better, despite the odds—or perhaps, knowing Dexter, because of the odds. He knew it because it had been instilled in him.
It seemed to him now that he faced a looking glass that showed him how the world really worked, that shone a different light onto his life up until now. Everything he had experienced, everything that had come before was prelude, had led him to this moment.
He put the glasses gently down. “You said something before about an initiation. I think we’d better get on with it, don’t you?”
“You know what ‘cupping’ is, I imagine.”
“Of course,” Bravo said. “Medieval physicians believed that illness—what they called ‘humors’—resided deep inside the body, that they need to be brought to the surface to be expelled.”
Jenny nodded. They were sitting on the folding chairs, which they had brought over to the stove, along with the card table. Apparently, she had turned on the stove some time ago, possibly when he was in the shower, for there was a pot on it, filled with water at the boil.
“Put your right arm on the table,” she said, “so the inside of your forearm is exposed.”
When he had done as she asked, she took up a pair of long metal tongs. Dipping them into the boiling water, she withdrew three glass items that looked like nothing more than diminutive egg cups. These she set one by one on a paper towel to dry.
“Wouldn’t an autoclave be better?” he said.
Jenny gave him a dry smile. “Sometimes the ancient ways are the best ways.” She brought the three cupping devices over to the table and sat down beside him.
“Ready?”
Bravo nodded.
She put one of the cupping devices onto the inside of his arm, struck a long wooden match and held the flame to the bottom of the glass. The heat from the air inside began to draw, and the skin inside the ring of glass gradually turned red.
“It isn’t ‘humors’ we wish to draw out of you in the initiation, but obligation. Once you are a part of us there is no changing your mind, no going back. You’re a part of the Order for life.”
She snuffed out the match just as the cupping was beginning to burn him, he watched as she rose and, opening a drawer beneath the sink, returned with a pewter phial. Unstoppering it, she turned it over. Three seeds fell out into the center of her palm.
“These are the seeds of three trees—cypress, cedar and pine, all evergreens and in their way symbols of eternal life.” She placed them one by one in his mouth. “When Adam lay dying, his son Seth placed beneath his tongue seeds from the cypress, cedar and pine that had been a gift to him by an angel. Chew them and swallow,” she instructed. As he did so, she said, “It is said—and members of the Order have seen the proof of it—that the cross on which Christ died was made of wood from these three trees. This, the first of the three rites, is a symbol of your death—the severing of yourself from society, the world that you knew. Do you swear that once you enter the Voire Dei you will never seek to leave?”
“I swear,” Bravo said as a wave of dizziness rushed through him.
With a deft corkscrew motion, Jenny plucked the cupping glass from his aching arm and, in almost the same gesture, placed the second one in a spot three inches from the first. She lit its bottom as she had the one before.
As his skin again grew angry and red, she said, “In the Book of Revelation, it is written: ‘Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, and shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the earth, Gog, and Magog, to gather them together to battle, the number of whom is as the sand of the sea.’ The medieval map of the world found in Hereford Cathedral shows the world as a perfect circle with Jerusalem in its center, like a navel. Near one edge is depicted a legend that tells us that Alexander the Great, in his conquest of the world, encountered the forces of Gog and Magog. He defeated them but could not exterminate them. Instead, he locked them away in the Caspian Mountains, defying what the prophets wrote in Revelations.”
She kept the flame against the bottom of the cupping glass even though Bravo’s flesh was raised and puckered. The length of the cupping was three times that of the first one. “This, the second part of the rite, symbolizes resurrection, for our most sacred vow is to be standing between Satan’s hordes and mankind when the day of Revelation arrives. Do you swear this?”
“I swear.” The dizziness returned, more insistent this time. He was beginning to feel like a Sanguinati, the twelfth-century cathedral monks subject to tempora minutionis, periodic bloodletting.
Again, Jenny switched the glasses, removing the second, replacing it with the third, three inches from where the second had been. She opened another drawer beneath the sink, snapped on a pair of latex gloves. This time she returned with a stone mortar and pestle and three tiny glass containers, the contents of which—white, yellow and gunmetal-gray—she deposited into the bottom of the mortar where she began to grind them together.
“Salt, sulphur and mercury,” she said, “the three basic elements of alchemy and, therefore, of transformation into a new life.” The elements mixed, she carefully transferred them into a peculiar locket half as long as her forefinger, fashioned in the shape of a knight’s broadsword.
She looked into Bravo’s eyes and said, “Are you prepared to sacrifice your work, your friends, your family for the greater good of your fellow man?”
“I am.”
She tapped him on the left shoulder with the alchemical sword.
“Do you swear to safeguard the secrets of the Order, with your life, if need be?”
“I do.”
She tapped him on the right shoulder.
“Do you swear to oppose our enemies à outrance?”
À outrance. It had been some time since Bravo had heard the phrase, which in medieval terms meant jousting to the death. Now, uttered in this unsettling tomblike chamber, with all the implications that went with it, including the prospect of his own death, the words were as alive and full of meaning as they had been in centuries past.
“I do.”
She tapped him on the crown of his head, removed the last cupping device, which had been on three times again as long as the second.
“It is done, heart, body and spirit, you are part of us now.”
* * *
Chapter 7
Donatella did not know how long she knelt in the water. Ivo’s head grew cold and heavy between her hands, as if it had turned to lead. At some point a profound sense of unreality set in, so that it seemed to her that she was cradling an effigy instead of a human being. Dimly, she was aware of the fading light, of the world moving around her, but it was as if at the moment she saw Ivo’s head breaking the surface of the lake, his fixed and staring eyes blindly upon her, the entire Voire Dei ground to a halt and was now suspended between them. She wanted to vomit, but she could not; she wanted to die, but she did not. Her body, betraying her, continued to draw ragged breath, sobs pulled from deep in her belly, burning her throat like acid. She began to shiver, the trembling far beyond her control. And though her cheeks were flaming, the rest of her was as cold and heavy as Ivo.
Gradually, she became aware that two long-fingered hands were gripping her shoulders, quieting her tremors. Someone was standing behind her. She felt his warmth seeping into her, and slowly she allowed herself to relax back against his knees and shins.
“I did not believe that this day would come. I did not believe that it would happen this way.” The deep male voice reverberated through her like distant thunder. “I remember the day the two of you came to us. You were hollow-cheeked, emaciated, stinking and crusted in grime, and yet in your eyes I saw something.” The fingers dug into the flesh of her shoulders, lending her strength as well as warmth. “They were going to throw you out, you never knew that. I stopped them. They were not happy, they said you were my responsibility. I was to train you, and after thirty days you would be tested. If you didn’t measure up, you would be thrown back into the street and I would face dire punishment. I smiled at them and accepted. As you know, I love challenges.”
Donatella, listening with every fiber of her being, was cast back to the first days with the Knights of St. Clement.
“I worked you hard—mercilessly—and never once did you or Ivo complain. Instead, you worked all the harder, slept standing, ate in quick, ravenous mouthfuls, and returned to your training as eagerly as pups.”
“You gave us something to live for,” Donatella said thickly. “It was the only gift anyone ever gave us.”
One hand released her shoulder, the long fingers tangling in her hair until she groaned.
“One day Ivo came to me. He was sick of training, he said, tired of—how did he put it? oh, yes—tired of performing like a circus animal. ‘I am like an arrow,’ he told me, ‘whose point has been sharpened to a razor edge, but has never been nocked into a bow.’ And, you know, Donatella, he was right. That was the genesis of your first mission. Do you remember it?”
