‘It is lauds, even now the services are in progress. I think he hit you with your helmet.’ I showed him the helmet, which I recognised as his, beside him on the floor. There was a dent at the right eye-slit.
‘Blast!’ he cried with annoyance. ‘Was anyone missing from the service?’
I was too ashamed to say that I had closed my eyes, and in the time it took to say an Ave, the service had finished. I shook my head.
‘Blast! In any case, I shall have to see the brother blacksmith, but not just now, firstly you must take me to Eisik . . . By St Peter of Spain! That savage monk nearly cracked my skull in two!’
‘You say ‘monk’? So you did see him?’
‘Who else would it be but a monk, Christian? We are in a monastery, after all. Besides, I only saw his shoes.’
‘Oh, that is good,’ I said, ‘were they singular in appearance?’
‘No . . . just shoes, like any other shoes,’ he snarled.
We walked to the stables slowly. It had been snowing heavily and the ground was covered in a thick layer of powdery white – a detail that I had not noticed in my anxiety to find my master. Now my feet were numb and the hems of my habit wet. What misery!
Eisik was in his little cell above the animals reading the Talmud, absorbed in the content of talmudic lore, when we entered.
‘Oh, holy Abraham!’ he exclaimed, immediately deserting his precious scrolls to come to us. ‘What has happened?’
‘Do not fuss, Eisik! I need you to see that I have not cracked my skull, for I cannot tend to my own wounds. By God, if only I had a mirror!’
Eisik was horrified but also angry. ‘Oh, by the beard of Moses, someone has hit you with a sharp object.’ He inspected the cut and the lump that was now quite blue and sizeable. My master showed him his helmet, and Eisik was seized by a second, terrible anxiety. ‘You are lucky to be alive!’
‘I don’t believe luck had much to do with it, Eisik. Whoever hit me was not in the mind to kill me, otherwise he could easily have done so. I merely disturbed him in his work.’
‘Do not tax the faculties of an old Jew. What work did you disturb?’
‘He was leaving another note in my room when I entered, looking for my compass, and he hit me rather hard in order to get away. Elementary.’
‘Oyhh!’ Eisik slapped his forehead, his big black eyes widening with fear. ‘No! Do not tell me what the note said! I do not want to know it! I do not want to know anything, nothing at all.’ He walked over to a basin of water beside his bed, moaning dire omens under his breath, and soaked a clean cloth in it. After placing the cloth on my master’s bruise, he continued, agitatedly. ‘I swear by the Talmud, Andre, this will come to no good! You should have listened to me from the first.’
My master ignored Eisik’s comment and said, ‘We found the entrance to the tunnels.’
‘I do not want to know, I tell you!’ he reiterated, and dressed the wound with a little square of muslin cloth, but after a long moment he asked – because I believe he could not help himself – ‘Well? I suppose you think that I want to know who told you . . . but I am a Jew, and if a Jew knows anything, it is that he is wise if he knows nothing.’
‘Brother Daniel told us.’
‘Another old brother?’ He raised his thick black brows in unison and became thoughtful, ‘I suppose I cannot stop you from telling me what you found?’
My master grinned. ‘I thought you didn’t want to know anything, Eisik?’
‘And I do not . . . do not tell me anything . . .’ He waved a hand, shaking his head, but a moment later, ‘How is the accursed thing reached then?’
‘That is the mystery. There is an inscription. A kind of coded formula which when deciphered will, I am hoping, open a panel. All is possible.’
‘Yes . . . yes . . . it is very common for such panels to lead to a crypt or an ossuary, that is to say, the place where bones are kept for all eternity, beneath the graveyard.’
‘I believe so,’ my master affirmed.
‘But do not tell me the inscription. I do not wish to know it . . . there is nothing more foul on this earth than an inscription. Evil things . . . however, if it is encrypted it is true that perhaps only I can help you.’
My master showed him the parchment on which he had copied the strange symbols and words carved on the stone of the panel. Eisik looked at it reluctantly, but I believe that he was fascinated.
Mors Fiensque DC and beneath, a strange wheel of sorts.
Eisik became excited, ‘Mors Fiensque . . . You know, in such cases letters are more than symbols, they are vessels, manifestations of concealed virtues!’