Timeline - Crichton Michael. Страница 75

She nodded, panting. "Where's Marek?"

Chris got to his feet, peered cautiously around the pillar. "Oh no," he said. And he started to run down the corridor.

Marek staggered to his feet, saw that the Abbot was still alive. "Forgive me," Marek said as he lifted the Abbot onto his shoulder and carried him away to the corner. The soldiers in the courtyard loosed answering volleys at the bell tower. Fewer arrows were coming down at them now.

Marek took the Abbot behind the arches of the covered passageway and placed him on his side on the ground. The Abbot pulled the arrow out of his own shoulder and threw it aside. The effort left him gasping. "My back… back…"

Marek turned him over gently. The shaft in his back pulsed with each heartbeat. "My Lord, do you wish me to pull it?"

"No." The Abbot flung a desperate arm over Marek's neck, pulling him close. "Not yet… A priest… priest…" His eyes rolled. A priest was running toward them.

"He comes now, my Lord Abbot."

The Abbot appeared relieved by this, but he still held Marek in a strong grip. His voice was low, almost a whisper. "The key to La Roque…"

"Yes, my Lord?"

"… room…"

Marek waited. "What room, my Lord? What room?"

"Arnaut…," the Abbot said, shaking his head as if to clear it. "Arnaut will be angry.. . room…" And he released his grip. Marek pulled the arrow from his back and helped him to lie on the floor. "Every time, he would… make

… told no one… so… Arnaut…" He closed his eyes.

The monk pushed between them, speaking quickly in Latin, removing the Abbot's slippers, placing a bottle of oil on the ground. He began to administer the last rites.

Leaning against one of the cloister pillars, Marek pulled the arrow out of his thigh. It had struck him glancingly, and was not as deep as he had thought; there was only an inch of blood on the shaft. He dropped the arrow to the ground just as Chris and Kate came up.

They looked at his leg, and at the arrow. He was bleeding. Kate pulled up her doublet and tore a strip from the bottom of her linen undershirt with her dagger. She tied it around Marek's thigh as an impromptu bandage.

Marek said, "It's not that bad."

"Then it won't hurt you to have it," she said. "Can you walk?"

"Of course I can walk," Marek said.

"You're pale."

"I'm fine," he said, and moved away from the pillar, looking into the courtyard.

Four soldiers lay on the ground, which was pincushioned with arrows. The other soldiers had departed; no one was shooting at the bell tower any longer: smoke billowed from the high windows. On the opposite side of the courtyard, they saw more smoke, thick and dark, coming from the area of the refectory. The whole monastery was starting to burn.

"We need to find that key," Marek said.

"But it's in his room."

"I'm not sure about that." Marek had remembered that one of the last things Elsie, the graphologist, had said to him back at the project site had to do with a key. And some word that she was puzzled by. He couldn't remember the details - he had been worried about the Professor at the time - but he remembered clearly enough that Elsie had been looking at one of the parchment sheets from the pile that had been found in the monastery. The same pile that had contained the Professor's note.

And Marek knew where to find those parchments.

They hurried down the corridor toward the church. Some of the stained-glass windows had been broken, and smoke issued out. From the interior, they heard men shouting, and a moment later a party of soldiers burst through the doors. Marek turned on his heel, leading them back the way they had come.

"What are we doing?" Chris said.

"Looking for the door."

"What door?"

Marek darted left, along a cloistered corridor, and then left again, through a very narrow opening that brought them into a tight space, a kind of storeroom area. It was lit by a torch. There was a wooden trapdoor in the floor; he flung it open, and they saw steps going down into darkness. He grabbed a torch, and they all went down the steps. Chris was last, closing the trapdoor behind him. He descended the stairs into a dank, dark chamber.

The torch sputtered in the cool air. By its flickering light, they saw huge casks, six feet in diameter, running along the wall. They were in a wine cellar.

"You know the soldiers will find this place soon enough," Marek said. He led them through several rooms of casks, moving without hesitation.

Following him, Kate said, "Do you know where you're going?"

"Don't you?" he said.

But she didn't; she and Chris stayed close behind Marek, wanting to be in the comforting circle of light from the torch. Now they were passing tombs, small indentations in the wall where bodies rested, their shrouds rotting away. Sometimes they saw the tops of skulls, with bits of hair still clinging; sometimes they saw feet, the bones partially exposed. They heard the faint squeak of rats in the darkness.

Kate shivered.

Marek continued on, until at last he stopped abruptly in a chamber that was nearly empty.

"Why are we stopping?" she said.

"Don't you know?" Marek said.

She looked around, then realized that she was in the same underground chamber she had crawled into several days before. There was the same sarcophagus of a knight, now with the lid on the coffin. Along another wall was a crude wooden table, where sheets of oilskin were stacked and manuscript bundles were tied with hemp. To one side was a low stone wall, on which stood a single manuscript bundle - and the glint of the lens from the Professor's eyeglasses.

"He must have lost it yesterday," Kate said. "The soldiers must have captured him down here."

"Probably." She watched as Marek started going through the bundled sheets, one after another. He quickly found the Professor's message, then turned back to the preceding sheet. He frowned, peering at it in the torchlight.

"What is it?" she said.

"It's a description," he said. "Of an underground river, and… here it is." He pointed to the side of the manuscript, where a notation in Latin had been scrawled.

"It says, `Marcellus has the key.' " He pointed with his finger. "And then it says something about, uh, a door or opening, and large feet."

"Large feet?"

"Wait a minute," he said. "No, that's not it." What Elsie had said was coming back to him now. "It says, `Feet of a giant.' A giant's feet."

"A giant's feet," she said, looking doubtfully at him. "Are you sure you have that right?"

"That's what it says."

"And what's this?" she said. Beneath his finger there were two words, one arranged above the other:

DESIDE

VIVIX

"I remember," Marek said. "Elsie said this was a new word for her, vivix. But she didn't say anything about deside. And that doesn't even look like Latin to me. And it's not Occitan, or old French."

With his dagger, he cut a corner from the parchment, then scratched the two words into the material, folded it, and slipped it into his pocket.

"But what does it mean?" Kate said.

Marek shook his head. "No idea at all."

"It was added in the margin," she said. "Maybe it doesn't mean anything. Maybe it's a doodle, or an accounting, or something like that."

"I doubt it."

"They must have doodled back then."

"I know, but this doesn't look like a doodle, Kate. This is a serious notation." He turned back to the manuscript, running his finger along the text. "Okay. Okay… It says here that Transitus occultus incipit… the passage starts… propre ad capellam viridem, sive capellam mortis - at the green chapel, also known as the chapel of death - and-"

"The green chapel?" she said in an odd voice.