Temple of the Grail(122)

‘Who are these ‘silent ones’?’

‘They are hermits . . . who knows?’ He shrugged his shoulders and winced with pain. ‘No one sees them, I leave food behind the drapes, I am told to leave inmediatamente.’ He looked at me with his good eye and nodded his head. ‘Because to see one of them is to lose the sight. That is why Ezekiel was going blind . . . they say also that they are transparente, that the bile and blood in their bodies is seen like through glass because they have seen no sun, others say that they are older than this monastery! That they never die! Maria Santa! The day you come something happens that is very suspicious . . . the abbot ordered absolute silencio, forbidding anyone to go out from his cell except for the officio, then the boy disappeared.’

‘How do you know he disappeared if you have never seen him?’

‘Because I always make him a special plate, never meat, only a little fish, the best from my kitchen . . . ese día, that day, the abbot told me, ‘Rodrigo, do not make him any more food’, saying that he was fasting. Everyone knows he is in the tunnel.’

‘Fasting . . .’ my master said, pulling feverishly on his beard, ‘and what does everyone say he is doing there?’

‘María Santa! He is learning the secret that no man can live who knows it. The secret of the hidden manna!’ As he uttered these words he must have recalled that he would soon give credence to them and cried, ‘Please you must help me! Estoy muerto! I am dead!’

‘I will see . . . I will see,’ my master said softly, ‘where is the poisoned honey and wine kept?’

‘In the larder, a clay pot with a crooked handle on the top shelf. The honey is also there in another. María Santa! You will help me? I tell you everything I know . . .’

‘We shall try, but for now we must go . . . Come, Christian.’ He pulled at my arm and we left the poor creature sobbing into his enormous, twisted hands.

‘But, master . . .’ I said as we braved a battering of hail. ‘How did you know he had taken the same substance that poisoned the brothers?’

Once in the kitchen, now deserted, he answered me. ‘Remember when we were in the tunnels I told you about witch’s potion whose principal element is atropa belladonna?’

‘Yes, it makes those who take it feel as though they were flying into the arms of Satan . . . I must tell you –’

‘Do not interrupt my thoughts, boy! Now . . . the day in the kitchen, the herb drying above the fire was the first clue, when he then said that he flew into the arms of the Virgin . . . a natural conclusion.’

‘But flying into the arms of the Virgin and into the arms of Satan are not the same thing, master.’

‘Essentially they are, for if you will remember our discussion on the suggestive powers of magicians, you will know why the cook, under the power of such a drug, sees the Virgin, while a witch sees Satan.’

‘So to understand it a little clearer, the drug only induces the vision that is sought by the organism using it.’

‘To put it another way, the effect of the drug often corresponds to the disposition of its user.’

‘And so I flew into the arms of a woman. I saw bees flying, and eagles . . . I somehow flew to the encampment outside,’ I said miserably because this meant that my dreams were no more prophetic than a sneeze, forgetting how many times they had aided us in our investigations. I told him then of my suspicions about the wine that I had taken.

‘That also explains your strange behaviour . . . Lucky for you, you must not have consumed enough to kill you.’ Seeing that I was sufficiently contrite, he continued, ‘Yes, the flying symptom is the physical one, the other effect has its origin in the mind . . . the wine. Brother Ezekiel drank a great deal of it the night that he died.’

‘But that wine was meant for you, master.’

‘Yes . . . perhaps someone was as careless as has happened with you.’

‘May I ask you another question, master? How did you know that it was the cook who was involved in the murder of Piero?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘So, he implicated himself because he thought you knew? But then how did you know that he supplied the food for the twelve monks of the catacombs?’

‘It is quite simple,’ he answered, ‘even you would remember how that night we inspected the panel in the transept chapel, we were disturbed by a monk whom we later observed carrying something in his hands?’

‘Yes!’ I cried, astounded at my own stupidity. ‘He went behind the drapes then left immediately, just as the cook said. But how did you know that it was food?’