Eric van Lustbader, page 53
Bravo tried not to think about how he’d been just that way with Jenny—felt he knew more, condemned her, and had been proven wrong. Had he done the same with Jordan? “Listen,” he said with mounting desperation, “you’re making a mistake—”
Jordan smirked. “It’s so like you to think that, isn’t it? You see how right I am about you?”
Bravo tried to ignore what Jordan was saying, ignored the accusations that had sunk their barbed tips deep into his psyche. It would be easy to dismiss Jordan as a deluded monomaniac, but the truth was he knew Bravo too well, knew his failings just as Bravo now knew Jordan’s. Still, some font of goodness inside him impelled him on what he now knew was a fruitless course. “Despite what you think, we still have a chance, if you only—”
“Listen to you? I’d rather slit my wrists.”
“I’m offering you a family, Jordan. Why can’t you see that?”
“Why can’t you see that you’re trying to lord it over me again? Not again, Bravo, never again, this I promise you. You’re the one with a past, a history, a family. Offering me a family? No, you’ll come to pity me, if you don’t already. In fact, the process has already begun. It’s pity that has motivated you to make your offer. ‘Poor Jordan,’ you think. ‘I can help him.’ But you can’t help me, Bravo, you’ll only want to take over, to make decisions for me, to tell me what’s right and wrong. You always felt you knew the difference between good and evil, but it turned out that you knew nothing.
“You have what I want, what I never will have. Can you give me that? Would you, if you had the chance? You fucking—”
He leapt at Bravo, struck out blindly, with a rage-filled heart, with the full intent to maim, to destroy what he hated most. Bravo defended himself as best he could, but all too rapidly he was being plowed under by the ferocity of Jordan’s rage. He kept retreating down the passage, further and further toward the shaft of sunlight, until at length, Jordan knocked him partway into the chimney and, with one leg hanging in space, he saw that it not only went up, but down as well.
Blocking Jordan’s next blow, he tried to twist himself back from the brink, but Jordan blocked him with his body, forcing him back against the rim on the rock floor. He could feel the shaft of air at his back. His foot slipped over the edge. How far down did the chimney plummet?
Taking advantage of Bravo’s momentary loss of concentration, Jordan got inside his perimeter of defense, landing a blow to his ribs. Bravo went down onto his knees. Jordan struck out with his foot, but Bravo caught it before it could land, took Jordan off his feet. Bravo fought his way on top of Jordan, swinging his balled right fist into Jordan’s face. In so doing, they both moved further over the edge.
Bravo struck again, but this time Jordan was ready, blocking the blow as Bravo had blocked his kick. Twisting Bravo’s arm, he reversed their positions. Now it was Jordan who was on top. Very quickly, Bravo realized his intention. Jordan was pushing and shoving, trying to tip Bravo over the edge, to push him into the rock chimney, to be rid of him forever.
Bravo’s head and shoulders were already into the chimney. In a moment, he’d be too far over the edge to be able to save himself. It was now or never. He knew he had to put aside his feelings of wanting to save Jordan from himself, of forging by his will alone a new expanded family that would, somehow, expunge the bitter taste of his father’s betrayal. As Jordan had said, it was pure arrogance. He couldn’t do it: he would fail, and if he persisted, he would certainly die trying.
He looked up into the face of his enemy, absorbed his vicious blow, saw a vulnerable spot and, as Jordan drew his fist back to repeat the blow, used the points of his stiffened fingers to jab Jordan in the spot between his sternum and diaphragm. Bravo struck hard and true, disrupting the important nerve bundle.
Jordan reared back and Bravo rose up, shoving him hard so that his head struck the rock wall. He toppled off Bravo, fell forward, pitching over Bravo’s head, down into the chimney.
Bravo flipped over, reflexively reached out in an effort to catch him, but there was no chance, there was never any chance. Jordan was gone.
Jenny grabbed him as he crawled out of the rock passage.
“Jordan?” she asked.
He shook his head. He felt light-headed, his hands cold and bloodless. He reached for her, as a drowning man reaches a line thrown overboard. She winced, bit her lip so as not to cry out, and through his own pain and misery, he realized that she, too, was hurt.
“Jenny, what happened?” Then he saw the tourniquet she’d tied around her abdomen. “You’re hurt.”
“A flesh wound, that’s all. Nothing to worry about.”
But her blood-soaked shirt told him otherwise. “We’ve got to get you to a hospital, or at the very least a doctor.”
She nodded. “But first, there’s something I have to show you.” Leading him over to where Camille lay, she lowered herself gingerly until she was squatting, then she went through Camille’s clothes until she found what she was looking for, which she displayed in her palm.
Bravo knelt beside her. “Your knife.”
“Not quite.” Jenny drew out her own small switchblade.
“They’re identical.” He looked at her. “She had a duplicate made. That means—”
“She found my knife.”
“At the hotel in Mont St. Michel, while you were unconscious. I went to the bathroom, left her alone with you. I didn’t want to leave you, but she assured me it was okay.”
“Of course it was, she was poring through my things.”
He looked down at Camille’s face, pale, porcelain-beautiful even in death. “She slit Father Mosto’s throat, not Cornadoro. She jumped me in the corridor outside his office.”
“I wonder how much she enjoyed it,” Jenny said bitterly.
“Jenny—”
“She must have enjoyed tearing us apart.”
Bravo nodded sadly. “That was her plan all along, I can see it now.”
With a soft groan, Jenny rose. “What a supreme bitch.”
A gorgon, Jordan had called her. In this, too, he wasn’t wrong, Bravo mused. But she had been even more than that. He rose at last to stand with his arm around Jenny, looking down into the face of the devil seen and recognized by Father Damaskinos.
* * *
Chapter 33
Sunset shrouded them in its cool embrace. The sky was on fire, layered with tiers of pink clouds. It was a relief to be free of the cavern, of the horrors that had awaited them there.
“The cache,” Jenny said. “What happened, Bravo? Did your father lead you astray?”
“On the contrary,” he said. “I never read you or Camille his last cipher, because he warned me against it.”
“What do you mean?” In the soft swirl of shadows in the small meadow, she turned. “Wait, he knew you wouldn’t be alone, didn’t he?”
“Well, it was a supposition, one that makes good sense when you think about it,” Bravo said. “You see, the moment the Knight attack began, he’d taken the precaution of moving the contents of the cache out of its original container. But he was adamant that if I was with anyone—anyone at all—I go to the original burial site. This way, I could draw out whoever was against me. Over the centuries, the power of the Quintessence has had the ability of corrupting even those who thought themselves steadfast. My father was told that it was the origin of all the traitors within the Order.”
Jenny looked at him with the sun in her eyes. “He was told? By whom?”
“Fra Leoni.”
An early evening wind had sprung up. All around them, the wildflowers bobbed, bent their heads as if in obeisance.
“He’s still alive.” Jenny’s voice was an awed whisper.
“Against all logic, it would seem so.”
“Logic has nothing to do with it,” Jenny said. “It’s all about faith.”
He nodded. “I understand that now.”
“It’s here,” he said, kneeling by the Cauldron, the sacred spring of the Orthodox Greeks. From the reddish earth in front of him rose the cracked plinth of an ancient pillar. Jenny leaned on his shoulder as she lowered herself beside him. Bravo cleared away a layer of pine needles and leaf mold. Beetles and centipedes scuttled for safety. The smell of decay that fed new life rose up to them like the aroma of a cool morning.
“Are you all right?” Bravo asked. “You can do this?”
She smiled, and all the pain was erased from her face. “I can do this, I have to do this.”
Together, they dug down, lifting handfuls of earth, piling it higher and higher until there appeared beneath the worked stone plinth a small wooden chest. Painted with primary-colored boats, fish and birds, it was wholly unlike the original container she had unearthed in the cavern.
Bravo sat back on his haunches and laughed. “It’s the toy chest I had as a kid.”
“Oh, Bravo.” Jenny put a hand on his shoulder.
Silently, reverently, they went back to work, brushing the last of the earth off the top of the chest, digging out the sides. At last, it was revealed, and they lifted it out.
As Bravo reached out to open it, Jenny said, “I don’t think—” Then her eyes rolled up and she collapsed. At once, he laid her flat, listened for her breath, took her pulse. She was alive, but his hand came away covered in blood. Quickly now, he took off his shirt, ripping it into strips. With a rising sense of urgency, he unwound the tourniquet she’d fashioned out of her own shirt. He was appalled to see the wound. He wiped away the blood seeping out of it. There was no doubt, the wound was far more serious than she’d made it out to be. He bound her again, using two of the strips he’d made of his shirt, making a double layer, tying them both tighter in an effort to cut down on the rate of blood loss. He looked around. Of course there was not a soul in sight. It was at best a kilometer to the Sumela Monastery, and from there a twenty-minute ride to the clinic at Macka. He took her pulse again and was alarmed to discover it slower than it had been before. If it became erratic… Even so, he might not get her back to civilization in time.
He wiped his sweating face, turned to face his toy chest. He knew what lay within. With a trembling hand, he opened the chest. Here were the secrets the Order had been amassing for centuries—documents, secret treaties, clandestine histories, suppressed memoirs, incriminating financial records. And there, among them, was the Testament of Jesus Christ. He touched it, but did not pick it up. Funny, now that he had found it, he had no time to read it. His attention was elsewhere: the small clay phial with its stone stopper.
The Quintessence.
All he had to do was open it, apply the tiniest amount to Jenny’s wound. She would be healed, her life saved. How could he not do it? He picked it up, cupped it in his two palms. It was almost without weight, as if its contents were lighter than air, like angels’ wings.
Open it, apply a small amount to her wound. She would live—absolutely, no question. If he didn’t, there was only faith to go on, faith that he could get her to the clinic, that he could save her.
His fingers curled around the stopper.
And then what? What would happen to her afterward? Would she live to be 150 years old? two hundred? four hundred, like Fra Leoni? Would she want that? Had he the right to do it, to change the natural order? Surely, his father had had the same agonizing decision to make when Steffi grew gravely ill…
And then his father appeared beside him.
“Dad, what should I do?”
“It’s your decision now, Bravo.”
“I love her, I don’t want her to die.”
“I loved Steffi, I didn’t want her to die.”
“But you betrayed her, you slept with Camille.”
“I’m human, Bravo, just like everyone else.”
“But you’re not like everyone else, Dad!”
Dexter smiled. “When you were a child, it was good for you to see me that way, it gave you comfort and security, that’s the way of the world. But now you’re an adult, you have to accept me as I really was, you have to provide your own comfort and security…”
Bravo, blinking away tears, found himself once again alone by the seething Cauldron, Jenny beside him. He heard her labored breathing, looked down again at the vessel that held the Quintessence.
Faith. Was his faith strong enough?
He carefully replaced the Quintessence in the chest. But it was as if the phial were alive, it was so difficult to let it go, to pull his hand away. With an extreme effort he did, closed the lid and lowered the toy chest back into the hole his father had made for it.
The buried Quintessence nevertheless beat like a telltale heart as he replaced the soil, tamped it down, replaced the bed of pine needles and forest detritus. Then, with a fervent prayer to the Virgin Mary, cradling Jenny in his arms, he began the trek back to Sumela.
Eight hours later, in the middle of the night, Jenny awoke in terrible pain. She cried out. Then Bravo had her hand, was bending over her. She could see his face in the soft lamplight.
“Where am I?”
“Macka,” he said. “Next door is the clinic’s surgery.”
“The cache?”
“It was just where my father buried it,” he said. “Breathe easy, Jenny, it’s safe.”
“I want to get out of here.” She tried to rise, moaned. With a rattle of tubes that ran into her, carrying blood and saline, she sank back against the rough pillow.
“Tomorrow or the next day,” Bravo said, “when your fever is completely gone, we’ll move you to Trabzon.”
“We?”
“I called Khalif. He’s out of the hospital and is all too happy to come get us with an ambulance. I wasn’t going to trust you to a car for the three-hour drive out of the mountains.”
He gave her some water, waited a moment while she swallowed. “Go back to sleep now, you need your rest.”
“And you don’t?”
He laughed, but all she could muster was a smile. For the moment, it was enough.
“Bravo, what will happen now?”
“Now that I have control of the cache, you mean?” He watched her eyes, large and serious. The time had passed for joking, he saw. She needed answers, no less than he had, which was why he hadn’t slept a wink since he’d brought her to the clinic at Macka. He’d been too busy thinking, then making a series of calls.
“I’ve spoken to my sister, Emma,” he said. “She’s the networker, in touch with all the members of the Order, at every level. They have voted. I’m the new Magister Regens.”
Her eyes opened wide. “And what of the Haute Cour?”
“It will advise me, just as it advised the Magister Regens centuries ago. New members will have to be nominated, of course. The first one I’ll nominate is you.”
“Me?”
He laughed again, more softly.
“Then you must also nominate a Venetian nun named Arcangela.”
“The Anchorite—yes, I know about her.” He nodded his assent. “It’s past time the valuable women of the Order were recognized, their ideas, schemes and insights brought fully into the fold.”
“And where will we go from here?”
“Sleep now, Jenny. Tomorrow will be soon enough—”
“Not for me. I won’t sleep until you tell me.”
He sat in the semidarkness contemplating her question. It was a good one, the only one that counted, and he had pondered long and hard through the night as to what needed to be done.
“First, you and I will move the cache to a safer place. I’m going to need time to evaluate its contents, determine what our power really is. The Order needs to continue my father’s work. Even as we talk here, the world is changing, and not for the better, I fear. There is a new war coming, Jenny. In fact, it’s already begun. My father knew it, and now so do I. A religious war that will rock every nation unless it can be averted. The fundamentalists on each side—the Christians and the Islamics—are determined to exterminate the other, and neither cares who gets in their way. We can’t let that happen, can we?”
“No,” she said. “We can’t.”
“Then you’ll help me.” His excitement rushed out of him like sparks from an engine. “The first order of business is to make contact with all the elements of the Order’s ancient religious network my father kept alive and running.”
Jenny smiled. It was what she most wanted to hear. But she was already slipping into sleep, and she answered him only in her dreams.
Khalif did not arrive alone. With him when he drew up in the ambulance were two paramedics, who immediately jumped out with a stretcher and went to get Jenny. When Bravo was done directing them, he came out into the narrow street to greet his friend. Khalif’s shoulder was bandaged and his arm was in a cast; nevertheless the Turk seemed remarkably chipper.
“Your call was manna from heaven. It’s good to be back in the game.”
They embraced was if they were long-lost brothers.
Khalif’s face turned sober. “How is she?”
“She’ll be okay, she’s tough.”
It was only then that he noticed another figure standing in the shadows across the street. At first, he seemed unfamiliar. Then Bravo recognized him as the old priest he had first given the coin to at the Church of l’Angelo Nicolò in Venice. He remembered Jenny asking him if he could trust the old man. Somehow, Bravo had known that he could.
The electric blue eyes watched him as they had in the church, with a mixture of curiosity and amusement. But now there was something else in them: he no longer felt a child in the old priest’s eyes.
The paramedics appeared with Jenny on the stretcher. They paused long enough for Bravo to lean over, press his lips to hers.
“I’ll be right next to you,” he said, “all the way home.”
The paramedics put her into the rear of the ambulance, and Khalif climbed in after them. The driver sat behind the wheel, picking at his nails. A dog barked somewhere along the sun-blasted street, otherwise all was still. Not another soul in sight.
