The Wrong Sword Page 4

  Henry knew about the Rule of Silence. One desperate winter he had taken shelter with a bunch of Carthusians near Montrieux, bringing them food in their cells and emptying their chamber pots in exchange for not dying of starvation and exposure. He’d been grateful to be alive, but as soon as the snow melted, he had fled to Paris, where he didn’t stop talking for three days.

  So he knew that even the Silent had ways of getting their point across if they had to, a whole language of signs, if you were really chatty. Henry waited, and after a moment, Scarface turned and walked up the wide, mist-covered steps, slowly enough for Henry to follow.

  The steps ended in a high, arching corridor that dwindled into the distance. It was bright with sunlight, but Henry couldn’t see any windows. When he stepped inside, he gasped.

  Every inch of the walls and floor was covered with carvings, more crowded with pictures than a book of hours. Here were nine pagan gods, Helios in the center, holding court in an oval coliseum; over there were the numerals from I to X, set equal to a cluster of characters Henry did not recognize; below his feet, what might have been stars mapped out a constellation unseen in any skies he knew.

  He heard a soft shuffling sound, and from a corridor on his left came a troop of monks, dressed in white, each with a stone brooch pinned to one shoulder. They crossed in front of him, turned left, and proceeded down the corridor without a glance back.

  The scarred monk didn’t stop; after a moment to gape, Henry scuttled forward to keep up. They passed corridors on left and right, and crossed the chapel’s dining hall, where a few monks, wearing black tunics embroidered with the sign of a cauldron, scrubbed the floor and cleared tables.

  Finally, the monk led Henry to a cell that held a cot, a table, a loaf of bread, and a candle. Henry shrugged off his cloak and sat down, his mind whirling. Scarface turned to go.

  “Wait!”

  Scarface stopped. Henry groped for his next question, remembering to frame it in Latin. Why bother? Even if he does understand, it’s not like he’s going to answer.

  “So…Excalibur. You know where it is?” That’s it! Ya gotta be subtle!

  Scarface didn’t respond. Well, at least he didn’t leave, thought Henry. I’ll take that as a “yes.”

  “How do I find it?”

  Again, nothing from Brother Silent.

  Okay, let’s try the big question. “Do I really have a month?”

  The monk glanced at a figure chiseled into the wall of the cell. Henry examined it. Two ovals, a larger and a smaller, touched at one point and were divided into hundreds of sections. A tiny bead of sunlight shone through a hole in the ceiling and illuminated one of the sections at the top of the design.

  Hundreds of sections…Henry made a quick estimate. There were more than three hundred divisions. Want to bet it’s three hundred and sixty-five divisions, one for each day of the year? The ovals were a sun calendar. And twenty-eight notches away from that sunbeam was a small stone marker. Four weeks from today, he’d be hanging on the tree.

  “So…can you take me to the books?”

  The monk turned in the doorway and waited. Henry grinned. That would be a “yes.”

  The doors opened, and for once Henry had nothing to say.

  The library was enormous, bigger even than the one at St. Benedict’s in Paris. Like the rest of the abbey, every inch of stone wall was covered with carvings—but here the most important stones were the slender columns that supported enormous panes of leaded glass, letting in an ocean of winter sunlight. It was dry as a bone, and clean, free of the smells of rats and rotting parchment that were the terror of most bibliothecae. Beautifully carved tables supported rows of graceful writing stations.

  The stacks ran down the middle of the hall, arranged by subject, language, and author. They were even decorated by topic: a statue of St. Catherine presided over the legal works, St. Jerome over the histories, St. Cosmas and St. Damian over the materia medica.

  Well…time to get to work. Brissac had given Henry a scroll from Geoffrey. Now Henry sat down and broke the seal. It was a list, in elegant handwriting, of all the sources Geoffrey had used to search for Excalibur: Robert Boron, Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Annales Cambriae…

  A list of failures. Henry tossed it aside. Geoffrey hadn’t found the sword—so the sources he had used were worthless. That left the sources the prince had heard about but never found, and the ones, if any, he had never even thought of. But the grandmothers in Henry’s village had been telling “Arthur tales” for hundreds of years before the Normans had adopted Arthur as their own—so if Arthur had ever existed, he’d been a Brython, a Celt, like Alfie and Henry, and he had fought the Saxons. That meant the best sources would be in Welsh, Saxon, and British Latin. Henry found the shelves decorated with the image of St. David of Wales, and started to read.

  Within minutes, he had filled up his first writing tablet with notes and moved on to another. Each lai or chanson mentioned an older one; each chronicle referred to a second, or third, or fourth. Henry filled first one, then two, then four wax tablets with the names of new scrolls to examine. When he reached the end of the sixth tabula, he gave up and just started pulling scrolls from the shelves.

  The days raced past, and Henry lost himself in a maze of clues and sources.

  There is a grave for March, a grave for Gwythur,

  A grave for Gwgawn Red-sword;

  The world’s wonder a grave for Arthur.

  The Red Book of Hergest. The White Book of Rhydderch. The Black Book of Carmarthen. Strange bardic three-line verses, hints and riddles, scribbled out in the lls, wys, dds, and chs that made Old Welsh the terror of anyone with a speech impediment.

  Three Worthies of Britain,

  Cai the Fair and Gwalchgaur, Pryderi the Fearless;

  Not one a match for Arthur.

  There were stories upon stories. Stories within stories. The characters stayed the same, but their actions changed from version to version, like details in a dream. Arthur left Britain to fight the Emperor Lucius, and died far from home. Or Arthur defeated the Hun Attila, saved Lucius, and ruled in Rome as Lucius’ heir, the Emperor Maximus. Arthur was childless, or he fought his son Medrawd and they died in each other’s arms. Arthur had a queen, Gwynhafr; or Arthur had a different queen, also named Gwynhafr; or he had another queen, different from the first two, but still named Gwynhafr. Arthur’s sister was the Morrigu; Arthur’s wife was the Morrigu; the Morrigu was the mother of Arthur’s son.

  And the sword: It was Caliburn and Cadvaladych; it was found in a stone or it rose from a lake; it was finally thrown into Dozemary Pool, or the river Severn, or the lake of Llyn Lydau.

  If the sword had been thrown into any of them, Henry was out of luck. There was no way they’d ever retrieve it, but Brissac would drag them across the Welsh hilltops in the dead of winter to give it a try anyway. Of course, even Wales in winter was better than hanging on a tree.

  Not that it matters, Henry reminded himself. Because he was not going to wait like a lamb for the slaughter, thank you very much. It had been a week. Henry looked out the window. Once again, the sun was at its height. Once again, something boomed in the chambers below, to announce the hour of Sext. Henry stood, stretched, and grabbed a handful of candles, a flint, and a knife. Once again, it was time for Plan B.

  In the seven days he’d been here, Henry had made a point of learning everything he could about the layout of the Chapel…and its exits. Not that he’d found any of those yet. So far, Scarface had managed to herd him away from anything that looked interesting. But one of the things the brother couldn’t hide was the procession of monks for prayer.

  The monks were one more of the chapel’s puzzles. Judging by the robes, with their crosses, stones, and other knickknacks, there were at least half a dozen different monastic orders sharing the chapel, all of them Silent. It was an arrangement Henry had never seen before—not that he’d ever seen any of these orders before, either. When the time came for prayer, each group tr
aced a different route to a different room. As far as he could tell, it was never the same room twice. Henry had found that if he tagged along with one of the groups, he was safe from Brother Scarface, who usually marched with his own order. It was only when Henry struck off on his own, before or after prayer, that he ran the risk of being caught and dragged back to the library. But the midday gong marked one of the longer prayer sessions, long enough for Henry to do some serious scouting.

  So as the Brothers of the Boat (dull blue robes, medium tonsures, boat insignia) chanted their Kyrie past the library, Henry joined ranks with them and strolled down the corridor. After a few hundred yards, they encountered the Brothers of the Book (black and white robes, wide tonsures, image of a book on the right sleeve) and Henry jumped processions. That took him down two flights of stairs and deeper inside the tower.

  Four processions later, and Henry was as deep as he’d ever gone—by his own count, at least three floors below the central courtyard. The last of the monks had entered their prayer rooms, and the hallway stretched out before him. Even without windows, sunlight played on the walls and floors. Where was it coming from? Henry ran a nervous hand over the candles in his pouch and started walking.

  He kept time in his head and by counting his footsteps. The noon liturgy lasted to a count of about two thousand. If he wanted to stay safe, he needed to turn back by fifteen hundred at the latest. Every few yards, he’d scrape a candle high on the wall to mark a trail back. Each door he came to, he tugged open if he could. He found storage rooms, sleeping cells, and…other things.

  One vast room was nothing but friezes—wall carvings of different buildings and cities. There were the Pyramids. There was the Giants’ Dance, the Stonehenge of Salisbury. There was an island city, ringed by canals. On the floor was what seemed to be a giant map, with points of interest indicated by gold stars.

  The next room over was empty, but it burned with sunlight. Was this the source of the light in the halls? Hmm…he still had a little time before he had to get back. And there weren’t any stairways leading down and out from this hallway…Henry entered for a closer look.

  The light blazed. The heat seared his skin. His clothes were burning. He was blind! He was on fire!

  A hand yanked Henry out of the inferno, threw him to the ground and rolled him over, beating at the flames with the folds of his robe. Finally the heat subsided, and Henry risked opening his eyes again.

  “Ave, Brother,” said Henry. “So, uh…this isn’t the way to the garderobe, then?”

  Scarface yanked him to his feet and frog-marched him back upstairs.

  With green and purple afterimages playing across Henry’s eyeballs, and his reddened skin peeling like a snake’s, they returned to the library, where Scarface stood watch over Henry for the rest of the day. Henry didn’t bother to tell Scarface that it wasn’t necessary. He had learned his lesson thoroughly: Following “Plan A” might be boring, but at least you wouldn’t burst into flames.

  The sun fell, and rose, and fell again. Chastened, Henry threw himself into the research. He huddled in the library, leaving only for the privy and for the bread he got from the dining hall, then diving back into the books. The days raced past—three, five, another week. Henry was deep into a Latin account of a general named Ambrosius when he came to with a start.

  Something was wrong.

  He stamped the pins and needles from his feet and stood up. He’d been at it all night, making a serious dent in the monastery’s candle supply. Now it was long past Matins, and his breath glowed in a sunbeam as he tried to warm his frozen hands. He wondered what Mattie would have made of all this—some “hero of the revolution” he was, dying of frostbite and loneliness in a far northern library, working for The Man.

  His mouth tasted like the Seine at low tide, and even his patchy beard was starting to itch. Sixteen days. He was getting closer. He had to be. He had read almost all of the scrolls in the Welsh collection. If he couldn’t find Excalibur in what was left—

  Something was wrong. Frostbite and loneliness…

  Henry gasped in dismay. How could he have missed it?

  He was alone.

  But a library like this, filled with books and well designed, should have been packed with monks. A normal monastery used its scriptorium from sunrise to sunset. Even if the books weren’t meant to circulate, there would still be monks studying them, or making copies to sell or to keep safe…

  Unless the books weren’t important.

  The library was a set-up.

  Which meant that the answer to the riddle of Excalibur was elsewhere—wherever the monks were, wherever they tried to stop him from going. Henry glanced down at his notes, at the scrolls. Sixteen days. He had wasted sixteen whole days. In less than two weeks, he would be hanging from the tree!

  Stop it. Panic would get him nowhere. He had to think. Okay. First, assume that the answer is here in the chapel. Because if it isn’t, I’m dead. Henry started to pace, past the useless books, past the windows. The map room—the room with the friezes. It was important. He was sure of it. But why?

  He thought about the carvings, picturing them again in his mind. Stonehenge. There had been something about that picture of Stonehenge…His eyes popped open. Stonehenge had been a ruin for time out of mind—but the carving had shown it complete, and with more pillars and altar stones and details than Henry had ever heard anyone mention.

  The sculptor had seen Stonehenge when it was new.

  The two great pyramids were shown without the Sphinx. Because the frieze was carved before the Sphinx was built?

  Henry felt the age of the Chapel press down on him like a lead weight. Before the Normans. Before the Romans, before Jesu himself…

  The Chapel Builders must have known what happened to books over the centuries. They must have seen the libraries of Alexandria and Rome go up in flames. One spark from a conqueror’s torch, and the great books were nothing more than kindling for a bonfire. And the Builders wanted their knowledge to last.

  So they had carved it in stone. Stone wouldn’t burn, wouldn’t rot, wouldn’t be stolen by some freelance librarian with a taste for clove oil. It would last the ages, for those with eyes to see. The books were in this room, but the real library was all around him, carved into the Chapel’s walls.

  Somewhere in this giant archive was the answer he was looking for. But where? If each carving represented a bit of information, how did you find what you needed, let alone find it in the right order? It was like the problem you faced with any book. The letters were run together without spaces, so it was up to you to sound them out and find the words buried in the alphabet. You used your finger and your voice, so the actual text was like a partnership between the book and the one who read it.

  The Brothers of the Cauldron walked past, on their way to afternoon prayers. Henry wondered idly which room they would choose for their prayers this time. Which room—

  I am brilliant! BRILLIANT! Second time today!

  Henry left the library and followed the monks. After marching a few hundred feet down the corridor, they turned right and entered a large room facing west. If Henry were right, a carving in this room would tell him everything he had ever wanted to know about pots, grails, cauldrons, and kraters. He looked around.

  Illuminated by the day’s last light, the room’s friezes seemed to glow. Carved over the lintel of the door, the largest frieze in the room showed a dozen men gathered around a richly decorated cauldron, burying it in the earth.

  The next day Henry was up before dawn. Choosing which brothers to follow had been easy. The only ones who seemed close to what Henry was looking for were Scarface’s monks, and that was only if the symbol Henry had assumed was a cross was actually…a sword.

  The sky brightened. As the sun rose over the horizon, light flashed through the Chapel halls, just as it had for the past two weeks, and the monks began their chanting. Henry waited until Scarface and his order walked past, and then fell into line.


  The oratorium for Lauds was a wide, open room facing east, with only a low stone wall to keep you from taking your last step over the edge. As the monks began to sing the Benedictus, the rising sun played over the carvings, highlighting the images of a king, his armies…and his sword. Henry grinned. Thank you, St. Dismas, I’m going to live!

  The Brothers of the Sword prayed five more times before the sun set, each time in a room featuring the exploits of a hero with a sword. Whether the hero was Arthur, Henry couldn’t tell. To be honest, he didn’t care. It was Excalibur, not Arthur, that would save his life. So Henry scanned the walls for clues, and gradually assembled a story: A sword was carried across the sea from…a giant island? Avalon? A ringed city? It didn’t matter. The sword was placed in a stone in a lake, a cave. A hero drew it forth. With it, he led a band of warriors and established a pax. There was a great castle, a source of order and justice in the land. A final battle…

  But here the carvings let him down. They showed the battle in detail—A fight between father and son, betrayal, the hero’s return to the Otherworld. They showed the sword restored to the stone. But they didn’t show where.

  Well, there was still the Compline prayer. He didn’t particularly want to get up at midnight, but if that prayer service held the answer, that’s where he would go.

  As the Vespers service broke up, Henry noticed Scarface and a few of the other monks glancing at him. He had a hunch that the brothers would be passing by his cell that night.

  9. The Last Room

  Candles, flint, knife, rope, tabula, and stylus. Henry was as ready as he’d ever be. The hour candle by the bed had burned down to midnight; the brothers would be coming at any moment.

  Henry heard the slap of sandals on rock, saw torchlight, and Scarface and the brothers appeared. This time, they didn’t chant or sway past. They waited until Henry joined them, and began the march.