Etude and I were searched. Then we were separated. What they did with him, I couldn’t say. I was taken down the mountain and thence the river to the Black Sea, where my captors and I boarded a private yacht that sailed west toward Istanbul and the Mediterranean. I was put in a small bedroom where I marked the time on a brass clock affixed to the wall above the door, which was locked from without. There was a single porthole window, completely opaque except at the very center, which had been polished by the wind. After a day of continuous travel, the engine stopped and the boat dropped anchor. My door was unlocked and I was taken, unrestrained, to a rowboat lashed to the side of the steamer. Both Etude and Beltran were inside, along with a complement of armed guards. Etude sat in the middle. His hands were trapped behind his back by a steel brace that kept his bare palms facing away from each other. His marks were still on my hands. His mouth was covered by a solid metal muzzle affixed by a strap around his head, with only two small holes under his nostrils for breath. I could hear each rasping draw.
“Is that really necessary?” I asked Beltran as one of the younger guards helped me down.
“It is as much for his protection as ours,” he said gruffly.
Knowing well the futility of argument, especially in company, I sat down in silence next to my friend as the rowboat pushed away and the oarsmen took their places. Fog stretched around us in all directions, which could mean only one thing. We were rowed some three hundred meters through a field of boulders that protruded from the surface to a natural island tower made entirely of pale granite. It rose from the lapping water in a giant weathered crag, blunted and round from eons of wind and rain. A stone fortress grew from the top, where a seven-spired castle rested like a crown, as if the pale rocks from which it erupted was the withered, white-haired head of the mage-king Solomon himself. I couldn’t see the castle from the water. It was shrouded by fog. But I knew it well. I had been there before.
The base of the island, crusted in barnacles, was slightly narrower than the rest and worn smooth by the waves. An uneven triangular cave exposed the grotto that was the only ingress to the interior, known as the Keep of Solomon. The approach was magnificent. The pale rock rose before us like a throned god. Bits of greenery erupted in small tufts from the cracks. Seabirds made nests at every hold and circled continuously about amid gentle calls. The sounds of the birds and the waves bounced in echo as the oarsmen took us into the grotto’s archlike passage. Beyond was a cavern, begun by nature but enlarged by men. Much of the roof was built of the same fitted stone as the castle above. There was an L-shaped stone dock and a long ramp into the water with stone steps to one side, caked in ocean slime. At the back were a number of small craft, similar to ours but covered in taut canvases and lashed to metal piers. A solid brick ramp rose up from the dock to the back of the hall, where it passed under a large pointed arch with raised portcullis.
Past the portcullis, the ramp was open to the sky. It turned a sharp 90 degrees to the right, rising steeper to a level platform where it turned a sharp 90 degrees back to the left and climbed to the main gate, which was inside an open stone mouth, part of a giant carved face that filled half the height of the high defensive tower. Between the pair of portcullises in its throat was a set of heavy swinging doors, then open. We were led up the ramp and around the rock island through six more minor holds, each guarded by the open mouth of a different face until finally we reached the top. From the main courtyard, I could see the seven spires of the island keep rising high above. Each tower belonged to a different Master, with one slightly taller than the others. Snarling metal dragons leaned from the corners of the roofs. When it rained, they deposited the water via a snarl of ducts into cisterns, thus providing the Keep with its fresh water.
Inside, it was cold and drafty, as castles are. The hall to which I was taken seemed to have been decorated by Master Thrangely, the prodigious hunter. In addition to the various relics of his native Egypt, the walls were covered in the mounted heads of every kind of ibex and duiker and antelope and dik-dik and oryx and gazelle that could be found, arranged from smallest to largest. My room was spartan but generous, with more space than furniture. I had a bed and a chair and a washbasin which was refilled twice a day. There was a single window out of which I could see the Adriatic and parts of the Keep. I had ample room to pace, and a giant Persian rug on which to do it. I had the call of the birds and lap of the waves to put me soundly to sleep each night. But there was nothing to do. Although my door was not locked, the guard outside prevented me from leaving, and I received no visitors. My only distraction was the small origami dragon that rested on a perch under a dome of glass, like a cake cover. It would flutter its off-white wings when I came near. If I touched the glass, it would breath fire, and I could feel the heat. But if I lifted the glass, it fell as folded paper.
The entirety of my confinement was irredeemably tedious—not because of the boredom, but because it was unnecessary. I knew exactly what would happen. There was no mystery, and so no suspense. I wanted to open the door and scream “Oh, just get on with it!” but I knew they couldn’t. The austerity and solemnity with which they went about it all was half the point—to demonstrate severity. Not for the accused, of course. For everyone else. One sees the same slow pageant in any carriage of law or custom, whose relevant bits last minutes at best. The rest is a dance. The pomp and procession before a marriage is no different than that before a witch’s execution, or the enthronement of a new king. It lulls the participants into unity so that a new reality may be forged among them—a couple is joined, a man condemned, a sovereign raised—without it being questioned. If there is enough seriousness in the doing, then everyone assumes it must be right, for all the effort given, especially if the rituals in question are so old as to have lost all use and vitality, except as ostentation.
Every generation obliterates the past in this way and venerates one they erect in its place. As a being of the past—of many pasts—I have always felt stamped out by such hypocrisy. I could accept change. I’ve often longed for it. But when it comes, it is never imagined as such. If the peoples of the world knew, truly knew, that they had such an animating power, they might use it. Instead, rulers tell the ruled that it is not a change but rather the rediscovery of an old truths, lost in the past and resurrected in the present. I know it is a lie because I lived there.
People never study the past. They study the one thing none of us in the past ever had: the result of it, which is why the lessons of history are never learned. The past is a succession of presents. In each, we never know what will happen. Those who inhabit the present, when it is the present, can’t help but feel privileged. Of all the people who ever lived, they possess the longest view, which is why, at every present, even those hundreds or thousands of years ago, those in it believed that their myths were not myths at all but the best and final truth. By learning only what did happen, and not everything that didn’t, those in the present sculpt a Golem of falsehoods and live in terror of it, the terror of history. It’s as if, in memorizing the score of every contest in a sport, you pretend to know how to play.
In 1848, I was living in Hungary—or what was then Hungary. That was the year people across Europe finally imagined change. There were marches and demonstrations right across the continent, many of which broke into open revolution. It started in Sicily, but we didn’t know that at the time. It was the actions in France and Germany, more rumored than factual, that kindled us. News didn’t spread by wire. It had to be carried by hand or hoof. That year, it came in from everywhere. Nothing like it had happened before. Nothing like it has happened since. Denmark, the Netherlands, Italy, France, Germany, the Austrian Empire. The world seemed on the verge. How could it not be, when so many had risen in protest?
But it failed. All of it failed. We couldn’t believe it. I still can’t, if I think about it. It doesn’t seem possible. I suspect those in the Arab world felt much the same when their Spring turned immediately to winter.
In school, if you learn about 1848, you get a summary of what happened as if observed from space. You learn that tens of thousands of people died but not any of their names. Many more were beaten and exiled. Families were ripped apart—or destroyed utterly—each with a story. And for what? A handful of reforms in the Low Countries? The eventual abolition of serfdom in the lands ruled by the Hapsburgs? I can tell you we imagined quite a bit more. We were beaten and shot and bayoneted and trampled for it. And when we woke the next morning—those of us who did— and nothing had changed, we envied those who had died, for they had died in noble cause. They lost their lives, but we lost our hope.
I remember there was a massacre in the town where I sought refuge. We called it a massacre. Some men started arguing outside a pub. A fight broke out. No one knows why. It could’ve been between a loyalist and a revolutionary but it could’ve just as easily been about a woman, or cards. But there was so much agitation then that soldiers came. There were no police. Only the army. And soldiers can do two things only: shoot or not shoot. So they shot, and four men were killed. A successful keeping of the peace in the eyes of the governor.
The next day, anger having simmered all night—stoked by the fires of rumor—a crowd gathered. They were led by a man we called Montaigne. That wasn’t his real name, but back then everything French seemed sophisticated. Progressive. So we called him Montaigne and he led us like a serpent through the streets so that our numbers could swell. And they did. By the time we reached the hospital, we were hundreds or more. When I say hospital, I don’t mean a house of healing. It was a squat stone building that had once been a monastery. One didn’t go there to get well. One went there to die and not infect anyone else. The crowd called for the bodies of the dead men, for there was no morgue. After whatever bureaucratic necessities had been completed, the dead were carried down the street—in the open on a cloth stretcher—and buried in the graveyard, sometimes in nothing but their skin. But there weren’t any bodies at the hospital, we were told through a crack in the door, not from the massacre. They had already been given rights and interred. The governor’s men had seen to it.
It’s hard to describe what followed with any sense because it didn’t have any. There were shouts that it was a lie and the men’s bodies were being kept from us. Some people thought we should storm the hospital. Others didn’t even understand why we were there.
“What need do we have of bodies?” a grisly old man asked me.
Feeling his control of the crowd slip, Montaigne stood on an upturned cart and addressed us, but there was no electronic augmentation, and it was very hard to hear, especially over the confused chatter, and soon the competing calls resumed. If you believe the history books, these were calls for land reform, or the reinstatement of certain legal rights, or the abolition of aristocratic excess. Standing on the ground, you would’ve heard all of that and none of it. If there was a common theme, it was return—to times remembered fondly. In truth, those days weren’t very good either. Nor did they remember them. They remembered stories told by the elderly, who are perpetually dissatisfied with how things turned out. My old fellow was very put out that the crowd contained several foreigners, which is to say non-Magyars, myself included. For him, the tragedy was not that Hungary was ruled by an aristocracy. It was that so many of his governors and lords were Austrian—or even, by God, Romanian!—and that these foreigners could never be trusted to treat Magyars fairly. He wanted them out. He wanted Hungary for Hungarians, even though such a group, which was just then being invented, had never before existed.
Others in the crowd disagreed, for I heard their chants competing with the rest: an end to conscription, the return of a local pagan festival that had been abolished by the bishop, the eternal dream of fewer taxes—and yes, land reform. It was Montaigne and his men who argued for revolution. I remember his lieutenants circling the crowd like sharks as he spoke, calling out from different places to make it seem that violence was fomenting, or else to shush the dissenters so that the great man could speak. From what I heard his arguments were not entirely unpersuasive. The Hapsburgs, he pointed out, had ample opportunity for reform—centuries, even—and they had persistently failed. How many chances were we to give them before we “took our destiny into our own hands?”
The wording, I’m sure, was intentional. It left everyone free to imagine a different “we.”
But our Montaigne was only a mediocre orator, and a crowd is a slippery thing. We could feel him struggle to hold on. For their part, I’m sure the hospitalers were terrified. Nor could I blame them. In a panic, a body was brought out the front—an older man with a bald top and a stubble of a beard, dressed in simple breeches and a bearskin tunic. A farmer or herdsman. From his perch atop the cart, Montaigne pointed suddenly to the door, a gesture that nearly caused the bearers to drop the body. Men from the crowd rushed forward and grasped the cloth stretcher and hoisted it in the air and the crowd cheered, momentarily elated at their success but unsure what they had achieved.
By chance, the dead man’s wife was among us. Whether she had come out of the hospital or had joined us earlier, I couldn’t say, but she ran to the body of her husband and tried to pull him down. She was pleading with the men, who had broken into slogans and cheers, but I don’t think they heard her. In the jostle, they rebuffed her repeatedly as they carried the corpse of her husband into the street. The body had now become the locus of the crowd, its center of gravity, and everyone swirled in orbit, desperate to touch or merely glimpse the holy martyr who had died nobly for the cause. Montaigne’s followers pushed through the tangle of bodies and practically forced their leader’s hand onto the stretcher. It wasn’t necessary that he support its weight, merely that he be seen touching it. Slowly, the competing calls narrowed to a few and then blended into one.
As the undulating crowd crept down the street, I spotted the old woman on the ground near the upturned cart. The cart’s perplexed owner stared at it with a hand to his forehead, wondering how he was going to right it again, and so his livelihood. The elderly wife was scuffed but mostly unhurt. She just looked confused.
“What are they doing?” she asked me as I helped her to her feet. “My husband wasn’t a revolutionary. He dropped dead castrating a sheep!”
The crowd carried the body of the herdsman to the governor’s mansion, where in a series of short, rousing speeches, he was praised for his courage and sacrifice in the battle against tyranny. The timing was not an accident. The governor was then supping with some guests, dignitaries from another part of the empire, perhaps even the capital. It was because of their arrival, in fact, that the governor had given the army such unusual latitude to commit violence on behalf of peace. It was widely suspected that the purpose of the visit was to coordinate the empire’s response to the civil unrest then sweeping across the whole of Europe. But that was speculation. What we knew for sure was that the men and women inside that mansion were eating well. We knew it because we were the ones who had grown and delivered the feast. In the days preceding the dignitaries’ arrival, two sides of beef, several pigs, four casks of Tokay, and a mountain of fruits, breads, and cheeses had been brought to the mansion. The arrival of the crowd coincided with the consumption of the finer of those goods. We knew it, just as we knew we would be waiting for scraps to be thrown out the back at dawn the next day.
The governor’s response was swift, as if already contemplated. The second- and third-floor windows facing the square, all of which had been covered by heavy curtains, opened simultaneously, and long-barreled muskets jutted out. There was one brief moment of silence before they fired. Then there was only panic. Three were killed instantly. We knew because their still bodies never moved from in front of the gate. Several more, men and women both, had their shoulders shattered or heads cracked by the musket balls. As their friends dragged them bleeding through the panicked crowd, the muskets withdrew and the next set took their place. Another volley was loosed, to lesser effect. Among the victims was the dead herdsman, reborn a martyr and killed again. His hoisted body had been used as shield by Montaigne and his supporters, who huddled underneath as they scurried from the square. The corpse was later found in a stable, riddled with five holes, one each for Montaigne and his lieutenants, who survived and fled to another town, no doubt to repeat the pantomime again, this time armed with stories of their bravery in the face of massacre. I could never say they had caused the fight at the bar the day before, nor do I have any evidence of it. But it wouldn’t have surprised me.
No less than twelve people died, probably more, although there were only three corpses in the square. The rest fell to sepsis over the following days. The morning after, a handful of brave souls, rightly surmising that few of us would dare approach the governor’s mansion so soon, enjoyed the bounty of scraps from the feast, tossed as usual out the back. They ate like kings, they said. The townsfolk decided this was a kind of treason, and the men were beaten to death in their beds. The women were exiled. From there came a quick descent into lawlessness, and the revolution bloomed in full.
I’ve not known anyone to suggest it, but I think the most lasting effect of that year was the birth of communism. Marx and Engels wouldn’t publish their infamous book for another two decades, but that’s only when the idea reached maturity. It was born in the failures of 1848, and everything that happened because of it—the long catastrophe that was the 20th century—happened in a sense because a handful of old men chose to fight among themselves rather than share their bread. But it is very hard to know that, let alone recognize the same forces in our own present, in the view from space.
A knock came at my door.
“Come.”
It swung with a creak and Beltran stepped in. It was shut behind him by the guard in the hall. I was sitting at the window. I had dragged the only chair across the room. He looked at me for the longest time, half pleased, half angry, as if he wanted to enjoy a brief moment of calm before the fight we were clearly about to have.
He noticed the marks on my hands. Then he lifted his palm. Inside was the jewel, wrapped in its chain.
“Do you know what this is?” he asked, his wrinkled face heavy with age and responsibility.
“He called it a ‘jewel of many colors,’” I said.
Beltran harumphed.
“You know it?”
He let the chain fall and turned the cut stone over in his fingers. He peered into it as he moved one of his bracelets underneath. Whatever he saw must have satisfied him, because the corners of his mouth turned down in grudging appreciation.
“Made from the bezoar of the basilisk.” He handed it to me.
I took it and put it round my neck. “I thought bezoars were made of hair.”
“In mammals. The bezoars of fish and snakes are mineral and translucent. Where did he get it?”
“I’m sure you can add ‘trade in rare intestinal concretions’ to his long list of appalling crimes.”
“Your young friend had proved quite resourceful.” He paused. “I suppose I should thank you.”
“For?”
“Making me aware of the recent activities of the Winter Bureau.”
“Ah.” I nodded. “And was Mr. Morgan correct? Does he have the support of your colleagues?”
Beltran nodded gravely. “A few, it seems.”
“I assume, then, that you are busy plotting your revenge, which will be swift, ruthless, and terrible.”
He just looked at me, dour.
I looked away. “I see.” Apparently, it would not be that easy.
I could guess why. My involvement had left him at a disadvantage—which was of course the point. If he retaliated against those who moved against him, they would almost certainly move against me, which they now had legal right to do. He was then still deciding whether he could tolerate that, and if not, what choice he had.
He sighed heavily and walked to the window.
“I was stupid,” I said softly. “I have no defense. I can’t even say with certainty why I did it.”
He watched me. I could tell he was upset. But neither was he furious.
“I can guess,” he breathed.
“Something happened to me in the Handred Keep, didn’t it? Mr. Morgan thinks it was the book—that it did something to me, that looking on its pages corrupted me somehow. But I think he just wishes that were so. It wasn’t the book, was it? I mean, I couldn’t even read it.”
He shook his head slowly.
“And?” I asked.
“All anyone needs to know,” he said, “yourself included, is that you sacrificed everything to complete the mission.” He looked at the rug. “Even your soul.”
I hesitated. “What did I do?” I could feel my heartbeat in my chest.
I waited, but he didn’t explain. I felt my lip quiver. Beltran was protecting me still—from myself. From my past. If I hadn’t been able to handle it once, he was suggesting to me in silence, there was no reason to think I could handle it again.
He took a long breath and let it out. “The woman who came back from Siberia . . .” He shook his head. “She was not the same. You changed, Mila. You were so dynamic before. So strong. So wise. And I was jealous.”
“Jealous?”
“Of Dr. Hunter. Of the way you looked at him.”
I thought for a moment. “Did I know that?”
He nodded.
“We argued about it?”
He nodded again. “Quite frequently. At the beginning.”
My shoulders relaxed. “I loved you, silly.”
“I know,” he said. “I came to understand that. Eventually. Do you remember the children?” he asked, suddenly turning bright.
“Children?” For a moment I panicked and thought I had blotted the memory of my own offspring.
“Yes. Most of your peace in those days came at the orphanage,” he explained. “You were like a mother to them.”
I stood and looked at him squarely. “We were happy. Weren’t we?”
He nodded. “For a time.”
I could bring so little of it to mind. The forest had taken so much. “Do you remember our wedding?” I asked. “How ridiculous it all was?”
“Ridiculous?” He scowled. “What do you mean?”
“Darling, I wore a calico dress.”
“So?”
“And the friar had a cold. He kept sneezing on us.”
“Hm.” He raised his jaw. “I remember it as a day of great solemnity.”
“Of course you do.” I rose from the chair and stood next to him, close enough that our arms touched. “I did something horrible, didn’t I?” I whispered. “Tortured people or killed them or—”
“Stop.”
He waited to see if I would ask again. I wanted to. Desperately. He put his hand on my shoulder and I hugged him. I wasn’t sure how he would react. It was an imposition, I knew. I was the one who was causing trouble. I had no right to ask for consolation. But he accepted me as he always had. I felt his arms around me.
“Why do you want to know these things?” He sighed.
“Wouldn’t you?”
“No. I would leave them where they lie.”
“Well, I can’t. I feel so lost. Like I don’t know who I am anymore.”
He moved me back so he could look me in the eye. “Please don’t ask this of me.”
“Was it that bad?”
“Mila . . .” He stepped away. He sighed.
He walked to the dragon and leaned down to inspect it. My paper companion seemed much less interested in Beltran than me. It didn’t stop preening its folds.
“Master Okamoto,” he said.
“I know you’re only trying to protect me. Still . . . I wish you wouldn’t have lied.”
He was still.
“That was also for your own good,” he said.
“Was it?”
“I tried, Mila. I tried to destroy it. The bindings on it . . . They are ancient. It wouldn’t burn. It wouldn’t be shattered. We even brought in a laser from America. Never once could we get it to work.”
“You could’ve told me. You could’ve told me anything. Why didn’t you trust me?”
“Trust?” His face grew long and pale, like I’d just kicked him in the gut. “Trust . . .” He shook his head. “You don’t remember how things were, do you? My God, you have blotted it out . . .”
He seemed so defeated then. As if the world had finally won.
“After you got back . . .” He sighed. “You were so . . . fragile. Some days, the slightest frustration would send you to tears and I . . .” He stopped.
“You thought it had some hold on me.”
“Well, I didn’t know, did I?” He sagged.
He had hoped that if he destroyed the book, it would bring me back.
Then, his whole body stiffened. He stood straight, shoulders back. The sternness had returned. He wasn’t Beltran anymore. He was Master Yeĉg.
“So,” I said. “What happens now?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Now, your friend returns what he has stolen or else he—”
“Stolen?”
“Yes.”
“Beltran. Darling. It was already gone.”
“BAH!” He threw up a hand. “So someone else took it? Is that what you expect me to believe? That after remaining impenetrable for fifteen hundred years, the forest was broken twice in one week? Mila . . . Don’t insult—”
“I’m not insulting anything! I’m telling you, Beltran, he doesn’t have it. And neither do I.”
I didn’t remember our arguments, or what we did afterward to make up, but it seemed so practiced then. So natural.
“Why would he even want it?” I demanded.
“That part was a mystery,” he said. “I admit. But we have uncovered evidence that he intends to take his revenge on the civilized world for what happened to his people, and the ongoing destruction of the rain forest that is his home.”
“Let me guess. Mr. Morgan’s special agents found this ‘evidence’ when they searched the cafe.”
He scowled at the implication.
“He’s the enemy, darling. He has been the whole time. You’re no fool. Surely you have your doubts.”
“That’s what he says about you.”
“And whom do you believe?”
“Am I supposed to say you?” he barked. “You admitted under questioning to having read the accursed book. His accusations cannot be dismissed out of hand.”
“I’m not worried about his accusations. I’m talking about yours. What is it you believe? That I was misled? Tricked into being an accomplice by a boy one-tenth my age?”
He leaned forward. “Tell me, darling. Were you with him the entire time?”
“Of course I—” I stopped.
“Well?” he asked.
My jaw set. “He may have left for a time after our first encounter.”
“Ah-ha!” He raised a finger to the sky.
“Don’t patronize me, Beltran. He didn’t find the crypt before he made the jewel, and he didn’t make the jewel until after he got back. I will testify to that.”
“And what a witness you will make—a woman who’s blotted clean her own memory.” He glowered down at me. “You can’t remember our marriage, let alone last week! Mr. Morgan would have a harder time impeaching the testimony of a five-year-old!”
I stuck my jaw out. “Don’t call me a child.”
“Bah!”
“Bah!” I mocked. “Bah, bah, bah!”
I wasn’t even very mad at him then. I was mad at myself.
He strode to the door, then stopped. “Know this.” He jabbed a finger. “Your friend would face less peril if he had stolen launch codes from the Americans. This isn’t some stray amulet or ring of invisibility. The is the Necronomicon! It is a well of infinite darkness. You more than anyone else know what it took to end the war. Tell me. How will we win, should it rage again, with the weapons now available to them?” He motioned out the window. “Next time, they will blight the earth! I will find the book, Mila. Do you understand? One way or another. For your sake, for the sake of the world, I will find it. And nothing will stand in my way.” He paused. “Not even you.”
He knocked and the guard outside opened the door.