Midnight Snack and Other Fairy Tales Read online

  “But—”

  “If you do not honor it, I will first go to the Bishop,” the lady said. “I will tell him that you have refused to pay a bearer draft. He will not care very much about the circumstances. He will, properly, be very concerned. So will all the businessmen and merchants in this city, when they hear about it—in a matter of hours, I should think: the Bishop is not as restrained as he might be in whom he talks to—and many others all up and down these coasts will become just as concerned. It would be only a very short time before word got back to Europe, for messages of this urgency certainly travel by more means than just the searoads. Should confidence in Templar banking be undermined in Europe because of your actions…then you personally, sir knight, would have much more serious concerns than the state of the treasury of Tortosa. And I doubt you would have those other concerns for very long.”

  De Burgh thought of that little cell in London, and swallowed.

  “What then, lady, is the amount you are seeking?’

  “I would hope to have your advice on that matter,” she said. “I need a quotation for the cost of about four hundred thousand cubic ells of stone. Removed.”

  His mind was already doing calculations, which started and then had to stop again as she pronounced the last word. “An excavation?”

  “Several of them.”

  “But for what purposes—”

  “Well,” she said, “I suppose you must know that in a general way, for the sake of the calculation. I am acting for a man who is about to be in a position of some influence in Ethiopia. He is building… a fortress, a place of protection.”

  “By excavation.”

  “There are valleys in his domains suitable for such use. The total amount of stone to be removed is as I have specified. More must be carved and fashioned after that work is done. My principal estimates that several thousand workmen and artisans will be needed for at least five years.”

  He shook his head, dazed. “A fortress,” he said. “In the middle of nowhere. For protection against what?” Ethiopia was a vast desert, hiding nothing of value: not since the ancient kings and queens of the place had stripped it bare and then vanished themselves. Nomadic tribes roamed there, tending their few lean cattle…

  Or so de Burgh had heard. Was there possibly more that could be said about the place?

  Or was he being colossally tricked?

  “Who is this man?” he said.

  “He is a King,” she said. “Or is about to be.”

  Oh Lord in heaven, de Burgh thought, I am going to give her— he went over the figures in his head again, for that kind of labor, for that kind of time, and found the answer not at all improved— just about all the money in our treasury!—for what? Some obscure dynastic war, most likely. This isn’t about any building, any fortress, this is insane!

  Her eyes rested on him, serene.

  And yet there lay the draft, genuine.

  Apparently.

  He stared at it. He knew it was real, by every test he knew how to apply to such a document. The only thing wrong with it was the amount. No one had ever drawn up a draft in such a way.

  But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t, he thought.

  De Burgh looked at the draft.

  What do I do now?

  Should he trust to his professional assessment, even though it flew in the face of everything he knew? Or should he deny his own judgment, and possibly bring his world crashing down around his ears as a result?

  No one would think it unreasonable, the thought came suddenly to de Burgh, if you held this woman in Tartosa, just for the few days until confirmation came through. The situation is so irregular, and the—

  “If you are thinking of keeping me here,” said the woman, “I would advise against it. There are people waiting for me, and they know where I have gone, and on what business. News that the Order was interfering with a legitimate business customer—no matter how odd you mayfind the circumstances—would spread as quickly as the news that you had failed to cash a draft. With similar results. The whole success of the Order’s financial side lies in the fact that they can be trusted not to sell the passengers their ships carry into slavery… that they can be safely entrusted with things of great worth… that they can be trusted. Hold just one poor woman against her will, while you reassure your own fears for yourself and your position… and who knows if the King of England will ever deposit the Crown Jewels with you again?…”

  He looked at her.

  I am good at my job, de Burgh thought. That’s why I was placed here. What if this draft is genuine, and I don’t cash it?

  But if it’s not—

  He took a long breath.

  “I must ask you to unveil,” he said. “Should this—I mean—”

  “You must, of course, be able to describe me to your superiors,” she said. “I understand.”

  She reached down and lifted the veil. She was dark, very dark indeed. The face was a little sharp, the high cheekbones perfectly setting off the long, elegant, aristocratic nose. Her looks were eloquent of good blood; perhaps even Ethiopian, though it was hard to tell. Her eyes rested on him, serene.

  “Well,” she said. “Will you have faith in me?”

  He breathed in, breathed out. “It is one of the commodities,” de Burgh said, “in which bankers do not commonly deal without security.”

  She simply sat and looked at him.

  Lord, he thought, perfectly poised between terror and indecision: send me a sign! What should I do??

  Nothing happened.

  …Trust. Do you trust your instincts enough to bet your life on them?

  He breathed in. Breathed out…

  Then he reached across to the draft, pulled his pen close, and his inkwell, and inked the pen, and signed the draft. His hand shook: he had never had so much trouble writing the word “Executed”.

  De Burgh turned toward the door, and said, loudly enough for it to carry, “Jacquelin?”

  Footsteps on the stair. He came in, waited. He looked rather pale.

  De Burgh entirely understood why. He swallowed. “First, go down to the gates and let the warders know that no one is to be admitted or let out of the fortress until this lady leaves. Then you will take care of her needs. She will require armed escort to her ship, and a small pack train. Have the grooms get five mules ready—no, six. Tell Gironde and Malplaquet to go to the main treasury and pack all the high-denomination coin, and approximately forty pounds of plate gold in addition. Pack it all up securely and try not to be too obvious about it: and be quick—if the gates are closed too long, people will start talking.”

  “Sir. All the high-denomination gold?”

  “All of it. Go swiftly.”

  ***

  And swiftly it was done. When word was brought that the mules were ready, de Burgh got up, and said, “You will pardon me, lady, but if I go down to see you off, that will attract attention. Otherwise, you might be carrying any sort of trade goods in those coffers: we get a certain amount of redemption in kind, and I see that Jacquelin has given you a few bolts of silk to make up the final tally, and confuse the unwary.”

  “So I see. I thank you for your thoughtfulness.”

  “And if you will now kindly sign this receipt.”

  She signed it in a long flow of characters which de Burgh recognized as a Hebraic cursive: then she stood up, and bowed slightly to him as she let her veil fall once more. “Until we meet again,” she said. “Though that will not be here.”

  “No?”

  She shook her head. “You will not be here that much longer,” she said, calm-voiced, as if reporting yesterday’s news rather than tomorrow’s. “Time brings its changes…”

  She went out of the room, after Jacquelin. A while later, the gates boomed closed, and the sound of them made de Burgh shudder.

  ***

  He saw no one else all that afternoon. With his tiniest and most delicate pen, a mere sliver of metal, de Burgh spent the afternoon copying out the
document on a sheet of the very thinnest of paper, almost exactly as the original had been written, except for the size. It was tedious work, but he was good at it: in his training, to teach him how to recognize counterfeits, he had been well trained in making them himself. He carefully noted the codings and marks that appeared on the seals. He noted, and copied in small, the coding in the pattern tattooed into the parchment. And when that copy was made, he made another one. At the bottom of each of them he made a record of the transaction, and a copy of the woman’s signature on the receipt.

  He sat gazing at his work for a long while: and finally had to stop, since the sun was starting to get low. “Jacquelin?” he said, and the young man came in with a pigeon in a cage, one of their trained carriers. “Jerusalem, sir?” said Jacquelin.

  “That’s right,” said de Burgh.

  They folded the delicate paper small, and packed it into the capsule which would be fastened to the bird’s foot. While Jacquelin was making it fast, de Burgh held the bird, stroking it, and then looked it in the eye. “Don’t get killed,” he whispered.

  “She won’t,” Jacquelin said. “She’s our fastest.”

  “Not half fast enough for me,” de Burgh said, and threw her out the window. The bird found her wings, circled once, and then shot off eastward, quickly lost in the still-blinding day.

  ***

  De Burgh spent three awful nights during which he did not sleep, and three days during which he avoided his paperwork. He had never done such a thing before. But if he finished his paperwork now, he would have to write down the fatal total at the bottom of that parchment. Coward, coward, part of his brain railed at him, as he paced around the table, unable to sit at it and write down that one last string of figures. Where are your oaths, to serve your Order faithfully? But he simply could not do it.

  —and on the third day, as he paced, staggering, in the thin light of dawn, de Burgh saw the flutter out over the water: not a gull. He leaned on the windowsill and watched the brown-and-white bird come. It flew straight to the accustomed window, further down in the fortress. As it ruffled its feathers back into place, and bobbed and cooed on the sill for a moment before a hand came out and snatched it in, de Burgh felt his tongue cleave, dry, to the roof of his dry mouth, as if he saw the sword coming toward him and was unable to stop it, the way he had seen it come when he had been fighting in Egypt under Amalric so long ago.

  He stood there by the window and trembled: it was all the response that was left in him. Some few minutes later, young Jacquelin, looking nearly as haggard as he did, came pounding up the stairs and lurched into the room. He handed de Burgh the capsule.

  His hands shaking, de Burgh cracked it open, extracted the small piece of paper, unfolded it, stared at it.

  Authorized, said the first word.

  He stuck there for a long time, unable to read past that word, lost in a welter of conflicting emotions: relief, shame at his own fear, astonishment. Eventually he made his way to the next sentence.

  Counterfoil matches. Transshipment of funds to support pending transactions is being arranged: expect first shipments early next month.

  Jacquelin was shifting from foot to foot. “Sir?” he said. “Sir?”

  “Approved,” de Burgh whispered. “Oh, my God, approved…”

  And he passed out.

  ***

  There were a thousand questions he wanted to ask about the transaction, as he finally finished up his paperwork for May. When a ship came in with documents from Jerusalem, three weeks later, de Burgh looked all through them for any mention of the draft. There was none.

  De Burgh was not a foolish man. The funds he had been promised arrived two weeks after that: and even in the documents accompanying them, there was no mention of the draft. From this he gathered that those high up thought the matter was better not mentioned again; so he did not mention it, or the lady, to anyone.

  For a while he thought of her often: then, as a year passed, two years, less often: then hardly at all. Then 1188 rolled around, and the dust clouds on the horizon and the lateen-rigged sails in the harbor suddenly told the world that change was coming again. The occupants of Tortosa had had some warning: but even advance warning did not make it any more pleasant when Saladin and his armies stood at your gates and began banging on them.

  Tripoli was shattered in the assault, though Tortosa stood, too well-defended and well-built, with its back against the sheer sea-cliffs, to fall. Young Jacquelin went out to fight, along with many another Templar who used the pen more frequently than the sword. He did not come back. De Burgh did, though with another wound which laid him up for months: and finally they sent him back to Jerusalem, where the doctors, supposedly, were better.

  He was not so sure of that himself. The fever associated with the wound kept recurring for months more, no matter how they bled him, and he would lie for days and rave, and waken feeble and confused, to lie that way for days more. The dreams were very strange.

  She walked into one of them, one still and baking-hot night, when no breeze came in through his sickroom window from the sea. But it was not his sickroom: it was the old room where he did his figuring in Tortosa, the room which had had the wall knocked out of it by a stone-cast during the siege. It was unhurt now, though, and his old table stood where it had before, and his chair. He sat in the chair, and across from it, she sat again, veiled, and under the veil, smiling.

  “Tell me now,” he said. “Tell me who you are.”

  “I am a guardian,” she said. “One of many.”

  “What do you guard?”

  The answer to the question was there on the table before him: and staggered by the blazing brilliance of it, he turned his face away, closed his eyes, covered his eyes. It did no good. He could still see the cup. The ferocious light of it, as if it were carved out of lightning instead of olivewood, struck as relentlessly through his flesh as if through air or water.

  —and was gone. He would have slid out of his chair and to his knees, but was too weak to move.

  “And it will be kept—in the place that money built, in that ‘fortress’ you spoke of?” he whispered, when he could find the strength.

  “I would not say ‘kept’. But it will always be there. Even when it seems not to be… or when it seems to be somewhere else.”

  He shook his head, bewildered.

  She laughed. “Omnipresence,” she said, “is an attribute of godhead, so they say. And how can something which God has touched, not become God? How can the making fail to be part of the maker?…”

  She lifted the veil again, shaking her head a little as if the heat bothered her, and she was glad to be rid of it. “There may sometimes seem to be more than one of what we guard,” she said. “There’s purpose in that: a wise guardian knows how to misdirect the search for his change, when the wicked come hunting it for their own ends. Counterfeits…” She smiled at him, a slightly wicked look. “Yet it would be cruel to toy with those who truly seek. The true searchers do find what they seek…no matter which one they stumble across at last.”

  “But that one…surely that one was real—”

  She laughed, looked out the window at the hot white sun and the stark blue shadows, the unforgiving, concrete landscape, all hard edges and blinding color. “In this world,” she said, her voice amused, “what makes you think the word ‘real’ applies at all?…”

  He was bewildered: but the Order had its own mysteries, which had often bewildered him just as badly, and he had learned over time not to waste time trying to unravel the subtleties of philosophers. The riddles would come undone in their own time, or not: and this dark sibyl was plainly not going to sit down and undo the knots for him.

  “Still,” she said, “you had faith. And it lives, now, in what you built…”

  —which towered, or rather yawned, before him. Fortresses, indeed, he thought in the dream, amused: for though they could have been held as such, in case of attack, that was hardly their purpose. They were churches. In
this desolate and seemingly uninhabitable place, a great empty plain of red stone all cracked with great fissures, massive churches had been cut out of the ground. First the red volcanic rock had been excavated, in great trenches, from the fissures, leaving, in each one, a huge central block of stone untouched. Then the blocks themselves had been hollowed out for apses and chapels, halls and hermits’ cells and colonnades and cloisters: all delicately ornamented, graved and carven and painted with countless holy images. Again and again de Burgh saw the cross patée, in paintings on ceilings and walls, carven into the stone of the floors, embedded in massive columns. Not just decoration: acknowledgement. Among the columns, robed figures moved, chanting never-ending prayer to the Maker of something which was housed there…or seemed to be…and, there, would always have a safe place to which to retire.

  The dream passed. De Burgh woke weak again, but it seemed that the worst of the fever had passed with that last bout of madness. He improved enough to be able to travel: and the doctors thought it would be best if he went home to France. When he was recovered enough, he made his way to Acre to take ship for home. There, since the party with whom he travelled had a couple of days to spare before the ship sailed, he went with them to see the celebrated ebony image in the church there.

  He had not realized that ebony is not usually black unless treated in certain ways. This image, surrounded by an elaborate gilded reredos to protect it from the smoke of the church, had kept ebony’s true color, that deep rich brown with the hint of the equatorial sun in it. The color struck him instantly as familiar. But what astonished him—struck him silent for many minutes, so that his host thought he had become lost in artistic appreciation—was the image’s face: a little sharp, the high cheekbones perfectly setting off the long elegant, aristocratic nose: the face eloquent of good blood, very good blood, in the recent past….and, as he now recognized, in the distant past as well. Very good blood indeed: for the woman was crowned with the stars, and the crescent moon peered out somewhat apprehensively from under her long plain gown: and under her heel, a serpent’s head was crushed.