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- Herausgeber: Corvus
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Serie: The Antichrist Series
- Sprache: Englisch
Adam Sabir has discovered the missing quatrains of Nostradamus, and the events they foretell are coming true. But there's one prophecy he can't fully decipher, and it warns of the imminent arrival of the Third Antichrist. Sabir's every move is the Corpus Maleficus, an ancient cabal devoted to serving the Antichrist. Disfigured, orphaned, groomed for cruelty and violence, they are prepared to do anything to stop him. As Sabir puzzles over the riddle, a descendant of the Mayans embarks on a dangerous journey. He must deliver a sacred codex to the Palace of the Masks. Only then can the secret of Nostradamus' prophecy be revealed...
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The Mayan Codex
Mario Reading is a multi-talented writer of both fiction and non-fiction. His varied life has included selling rare books, teaching riding in Africa, studying dressage in Vienna, running a polo stable in Gloucestershire and maintaining a coffee plantation in Mexico. An acknowledged expert on the prophecies of Nostradamus, Reading is the author of seven non-fiction titles, as well as the bestselling novel The Nostradamus Prophecies.
Copyright
This paperback edition first published in the UK in 2010 by Corvus, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.
Copyright © Mario Reading, 2010. All rights reserved.
The moral right of Mario Reading to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
ISBN: 978-0-857-89058-0
First eBook Edition: January 2010
Corvus
An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd
Ormond House
26-27 Boswell Street
London WC1N 3JZ
www.corvus-books.co.uk
Contents
Cover
The Mayan Codex
Copyright
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
EPIGRAPH
PROLOGUE
PART ONE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
PART TWO
PROLOGUE
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
PART THREE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
For my beloved wife Claudia de Los Angeles,la guardiana de mi corazón
Mario Reading 2010
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Just as with the Gypsy lore in the first book in my Nostradamus Trilogy, The Nostradamus Prophecies, the Maya lore, language, names, habits, and myths depicted in this book are all accurate. I have merely concatenated the customs of a number of different Maya tribes into one, for reasons of fictional convenience. The barbarities perpetrated by Friar Diego de Landa, as recounted by Akbal Coatl – aka the ‘night serpent’ – have not been tampered with in any way. These horrors happened, and in just the way I have described. The bulk of Maya written history was destroyed in one all-encompassing pogrom.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’ve been very lucky indeed in the people who have aided and abetted the production of this book, and this is my opportunity to thank them. Firstly, my agent, Oliver Munson, of Blake Friedmann, who has championed my work – both fiction and nonfiction – for a number of years now, and to whom I am deeply indebted for his dedication, judgement, and endless good humour. Thanks, also, to my publisher, Ravi Mirchandani, for encouraging me both ‘onwards and upwards’ (to filch one of his favourite catchphrases). Also to my former editor at Atlantic, Caroline Knight, for her wise suggestions on the text, and to Laura Palmer, my present editor at Atlantic’s new imprint, Corvus, for making me feel so instantly at home. Thanks, too, to Henry Steadman for his outstanding jacket design for both my recent novels, and to my perennial copy editor, Shelagh Boyd, for her tact, insight, and wisdom in suggesting improvements to the text without alienating its author – a neat trick when one can pull it off! Also to the nameless Maya man who guided me on his triciclo around the site at Kabáh, and explained to me so patiently how and when one might hunt iguanas. Finally, deepest thanks must go to my two ‘secret sharers’: to my wife, Claudia, to whom this book is dedicated, and to my good friend Michèle O’Connell, for casting her invaluable eye over my work-in-progress and always telling it like it is.
EPIGRAPH
Eat, eat, while you still have bread
Drink, drink, while you still have water
A day will come when dust will possess the earth
And the face of the world will be blighted
On that day a cloud will rise
On that day a mountain will be lifted up
On that day a strong man will seize the land
On that day things will fall to ruin
On that day the tender leaf will be destroyed
On that day dying eyes will close
On that day there will be three signs seen on a tree
On that day three generations of men will hang there
On that day the battle flag will be raised
And the people will be scattered in the forests.
From The Nine Books Of Chilam Balam
Translated by the author
PROLOGUE
1
Le Château De Monfaucon, Montargis, France 25th October 1228
The young King knelt and prayed a little before the hunt – God, after all, was on his side. Then he and his fifty-strong entourage clattered out of the Château de Monfaucon towards the domanial forest.
It was a blustery autumn day, with fine leaves churning in the wind, and a sufficient edge of rain to dampen the cheeks. The twelve mounted Cistercian monks who always accompanied the King were finding it increasingly difficult to adjust their chanting of the hours to the wind’s hullabaloo. The King glared back at them from time to time, irritated at their swooping and swelling.
‘You can all go home. I’ve had enough of your caterwauling. I can’t make out a word of it.’
The monks, used to their master’s whims, peeled off from the hunt procession, secretly relishing the prospect of an early return to cloisters, and to the roaring fire and plentiful breakfast that awaited them there.
Louis turned to his squire, Amauri de Bale. ‘What you said about the wild boar. Yesterday. When we were talking. That it, too, is a symbol of Christ. Was this true?’
De Bale felt a sudden rush of exultation. The seed he had so carefully sown had germinated after all. ‘Yes, Sire. In Teutonic Germany the boar, sus scrofa, is known as der Eber. I understand that the word Eber may be traced directly back to Ibri, the ancestor of the Hebrews.’ Via a peculiarly convenient false etymology, de Bale added silently.
Louis hammered the pommel of his hunting saddle. ‘Who were known as the Ibrim. Of course!’
De Bale grinned. He offered up a private prayer of thanks to the phalanx of tutors who had ensured that Louis was even better educated than his effete sodomite of a grandfather, Philip II Augustus.
‘As you know, Sire, in ancient Greece the boar was the familiar of the goddesses Demeter and Atalanta. In Rome, of the war god Mars. Here in France, the boar might be said to stand in for you, Sire, in the sense of encapsulating both valiant courage and the refusal to take flight.’
Louis’s eyes burned with enthusiasm. His voice rose high above the wind’s buffet. ‘Today I am going to kill a wild boar with my axe. Just like Heracles on Mount Erymanthus. God spoke to me this morning and told me that if I should do so, the attributes of the boar would transfer themselves to me, and my reign would see the permanent annexation of Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Bethlehem by the Holy Mother Church.’
De Bale raised his eyebrows. ‘By the Holy Roman Emperor, you mean?’
‘I mean by me.’
De Bale found himself temporarily at a loss for words. This was getting better by the minute. The King had even made the suggestion himself. He checked out the horsemen surrounding them – yes, they’d heard the King all right. He could almost hear the surreptitious tightening of sphincters as the King’s entourage realized they were to hunt for wild boar – and not deer – that day.
De Bale glanced across at the King. At sixteen, de Bale was a full year older than Louis. Physically, he was already fully formed, whilst the King, at fifteen, was only incipiently pubescent. In terms of height, however, Louis towered over de Bale by more than a head, and he sat his horse with the confidence of unchecked youth.
‘Dente timetur,’ said de Bale.
‘Rex non potest peccare,’ riposted the King.
The King’s entourage burst into spontaneous applause. Even de Bale found himself moved by his monarch’s elegant jeu d’esprit. He bowed low in his saddle. De Bale had simply intended to protect his back – dente timetur was a well-known Latin expression for ‘you’d better watch out for the teeth’. But the King had countered with rex non potest peccare – ‘the king cannot sin’. By the most delicate of hesitations, however, between potest and peccare, Louis had transformed the phrase into ‘you cannot sway the king, wild pig’.
The pun had been so magnificent that de Bale was briefly tempted to ignore his orders and spare the King’s life – where else but in France could you find a fifteen-year-old king with the wit of a Peter Abélard? But a wise man thought twice before antagonizing a kinsman as powerful as Pierre Mauclerc, Duke of Brittany. De Bale was nicely caught between the Plantagenet rock and the Capetian hard place.
He eased his horse closer to the King’s, then darted a look back over his shoulder to see how the other squires were taking his arrogation of the King’s attention. ‘I know where you can find one, Sire. He’s a monster. The biggest tusker this side of Orléans. He’s four hundred pounds if he’s an ounce.’
‘How’s that? What did you say?’
The fool’s been praying again, thought de Bale – he should have been born a priest and not a king. If he carries on like this they’ll have to sanctify him. Either that, or he’ll finish up the bloodthirstiest, most vainglorious, most self-acclaiming tyrant since Nero.
As if in echo of his secret fears, de Bale’s very own version of a solemn prayer flashed, uncalled for, through his head. ‘May it please you God that after what I am about to do, this whoreson doesn’t end up as a martyr, and I a disembowelled, disjointed, discombobulated regicide.’
De Bale bowed in belated response to the King’s query, a sickly smile plastered across his face. ‘I’d actually been reserving him for myself, Sire. My servants …’
‘How can you reserve him for yourself? All wild boar belong to the King. Who do you think you are?’
De Bale flushed. God protect me from men who are my masters, he mouthed to himself. He was already beholden to Mauclerc, and here he was crossing swords with his other liege lord, Louis IX, whom Mauclerc wanted dead. De Bale could feel his brain spinning on its axis. He groped around for the right approach – the right way to jump.
‘The animal is well outside the royal forest, Sire, and therefore legally mine. And I have not killed him yet. I merely instructed my people to build a wicker barricade around his lair, and to keep him in place with a charivari. I know he’s in there. I just haven’t seen him. I was going to dedicate him to Our Lady and then slaughter him. They say he has twelve-inch tusks.’
‘Twelve-inch tusks? Impossible.’
De Bale knew his man. He shrugged, and looked away into the distance.
‘Then he’s the Devil, not a boar. Four hundred pounds, you say? And twelve-inch tusks? He’s an impostor. It’s inconceivable that our Lord Jesus Christ should be reflected in such a monster.’
De Bale edged in for the kill. ‘That could be so, Sire. You are doubtless right.’ He crossed himself with an extravagant gesture, almost as if he were sprinkling holy water over an invisible assembly. ‘What more suitable opponent, then, for a Christian king?’
2
It took the King’s party five hours to reach the de Bale manorial forest. Spare horses had been called for, and de Bale had ordered food, and a pavilion to be set up, just outside the monster’s bower. He had also sent ahead to excuse his tenantry from their work for the day, ensuring himself the widest possible audience for what he trusted would be an earth-shattering, realm-transforming event.
When the King eventually rode in from the St Benedict marshes, five hundred of his eager subjects fell to their knees in welcome.
‘Would you care to rest first, Sire?’ De Bale caught his steward’s eye. The man bowed, indicating that everything was in place for the King’s comfort. ‘Or shall we get straight to it?’
The King was staring out over the wicker enclosure. His face was ashen.
He’s losing his nerve, thought de Bale. The poor fool’s had five hours to think about the thing and he’s losing his nerve. ‘May I be your champion, Sire, and axe the porker on your behalf?’
Louis threw his leg up and over the pommel of his saddle. A servant skittered around the horse’s croup, making a table of his back so that the King would not need to dirty his boots. ‘Did God speak to you this morning, too, Amauri?’
‘No, Sire. Of course not. God only speaks to kings and to popes and to the Holy Roman Emperor.’
The King grunted. He beckoned to his equerry. ‘Bring me an axe. I shall kill this boar, and then we shall eat.’
De Bale offered up a fervent prayer of thanks that none of the King’s mature advisors had bothered to attend the hunt. True to form, the whole lot of them were off scheming and plotting with the Queen Mother. He had the field entirely to himself.
He raised his gauntlet, signalling to his venerers that they might begin the drive. They, in turn, motioned to their flaggers, who transmitted the order through to the waiting beaters at the far end of the covert.
‘The boar might emerge at any moment, Sire. May I suggest that you take up your position?’
The King stepped through the gap created for him in the wicker barrier. Ahead of him was a deep clump of thorn and withies. A channel had been cut through the mass of vegetation, via which the boar would, in theory, be funnelled.
De Bale raised his chin to one of his men-at-arms. The man threw him a pike. De Bale took his place to the right of the King, and a little behind. ‘I will only intervene, Sire, should your first blow be deficient.’
‘You will not intervene. My first blow will not be deficient. God has spoken to me. I am his anointed vessel.’
De Bale bowed his head in ostensibly reluctant surrender to the King’s wishes. The King would not see the movement, but everybody else would. ‘So be it, Sire.’ He leaned on his pike and waited.
Soon a clamour could be heard over the peak of the hill. The battue had begun. De Bale had ordered the approaching line of beaters to march at no more than one-yard intervals – the last thing he wanted was for the boar to double back and eviscerate one of his own men instead of the King.
‘Sire, remember to keep your legs together when you strike.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘A boar scythes upwards with his tusks in order to disembowel his victim. If you keep your legs together, Sire, you will be protecting not only yourself but also the future of France.’
Louis burst out laughing.
Good, thought de Bale. Yet more evidence to the surrounding witnesses that all is well between me and the King. And if he keeps his legs together, the fool is that much more likely to botch his stroke.
A crash came from the underbrush, followed by a howl of excitement from the crowd. A boar burst out of the funnel of thicket and made straight for the King.
‘Not that one, Sire.’
De Bale sprinted forward and speared the boar with his pike. The animal shrieked and fell on its back, kicking with all four legs. De Bale waved to his venerers, who ran forward, slit the pig’s throat, and dragged it away. A pungent scent lingered after the carcase.
‘Less than two hundred pounds, Sire. Your boar is more than twice that size.’
Louis’s eyes were wide. He seemed transfixed by the still steaming blood-pile left by the slaughtered animal.
Come on, de Bale muttered silently to the King’s back. Don’t lose your nerve now, man. You’d never live it down. People would make up songs about you. You’d go down in history as Louis the Weak. And fate would no doubt dictate that you’d live to be a hundred years old.
There was a communal moan. A white hart had emerged from the plantation. The hart fell back a little on its haunches, and then sprang through the line of venerers, cleared the wicker fence in one bound, and galloped off into the surrounding woodland.
De Bale allowed a string of expletives to trickle silently out under his breath. ‘It is a white hart, Sire. Its presence signifies that your goal is unattainable. We may as well go home.’ The words stuck in de Bale’s craw. But the symbol was so specific, and the significance of the white hart so well known to everybody, that it would have been folly for de Bale, given his status as the King’s host, not to have acknowledged it.
‘As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.’ Louis readied his axe. It was clear that he intended to prove both de Bale – and the hart – wrong.
There was a shriek from the back of the approaching line of beaters. Then a hullabaloo of voices. It was clear that someone had been gored.
The King was looking everywhere at once, his face livid in the sudden flare of the sun.
The boar emerged from the extreme flank of the thicket, red streamers hanging from its tusks.
At first the King did not see it. But the enraged boar – the first of the pair to taste blood – now saw the King. It glanced towards the line of venerers. No gaps there. Then back towards the King, who was surrounded by nothing but air.
The boar charged, twitching and flapping its snout to rid itself of the tangle of intestines obscuring its vision.
The King saw the boar and drew himself up. He stretched the axe back and waited.
‘Run at him, Sire! You must run at him!’ De Bale had not the remotest idea why he was trying to help the King. He wanted the man dead, for pity’s sake, not transformed into a legend.
The King began a lumbering trot towards the boar, his axe raised for the kill.
The boar jinked, and swept his tusks sideways at the King.
The King screamed and fell.
The boar twisted, and started on his second pass.
Without stopping to think, de Bale rushed towards the King, slashing downwards in the direction of the boar’s path with his pike. The pike sliced through the boar’s shoulder. Arterial blood jetted in a crimson fountain over the King’s recumbent body.
The blow had shattered the pike’s shaft, leaving de Bale with only a slivered piece of wood in his hands.
The great boar was crawling towards the King, intent on finishing what it had started.
The venerers were approaching, daggers drawn, their mouths agape in shock.
De Bale saw all of this as if in slow motion. It was clear that he had only one choice left.
He threw himself onto the boar, grabbing its razor-sharp tusks with his hands. His last conscious memory was of the knife blows of his venerers raining down beside his head.
3
Amauri de Bale, Count of Hyères, spent the next sixteen years of his life in involuntary exile from the Court.
The Queen Mother, Blanche de Castile, had never forgiven him for what she saw as the encouragement of her son, the King, to commit an act whose folly was only outweighed by its pointlessness. The fact that de Bale had saved the young King’s life at considerable risk to his own counted for little in the Queen’s estimation – although it had undoubtedly protected de Bale from a regicide’s agonizing death by quartering.
The King had been forbidden by his mother ever to communicate with de Bale again, and he had acceded to this request out of duty and affection for his mother, whilst stopping just short of agreeing to the actual administration of a formal oath.
But the King was a profoundly pious man, and renowned throughout Europe for his sense of fair play. Over the years of their enforced separation he had become increasingly convinced that Amauri de Bale had been marked out by God to save him from the machinations of the Devil. And furthermore that the great St Benedict boar, far from assuming the guise of one of the very symbols of Christ, had in fact been Lucifer himself.
In the late summer of 1244, and following a near mortal illness, King Louis, to his mother’s horror, had unilaterally declared his intention to take the crusader’s vow. After considerable soul-searching, and with the guidance of his confessor, Geoffrey of Beaulieu, and of his chaplain, William of Chartres, it was decided that it would be impossible for the King to take the cross without first acknowledging God’s part in his decision. And this, in turn, could not be done without recognition of some sort for the man who had clearly been chosen by God Himself to protect the King from the Devil.
The problem was further aggravated by the fact that a number of the King’s squires – many of whom, sixteen years on, were now holders of important Offices of State – had clearly heard the King, that morning back in 1228, explaining to Count Amauri de Bale that he, Louis, Rex Francorum and Rex Christianissimus, Lieutenant of God on Earth, Lord High Protector of France (the Eldest daughter of the Church), had been personally instructed by God that if he ever wished to secure the permanent annexation of Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Bethlehem to the Holy Mother Church, he must first go out and kill a wild boar with his axe.
Thanks to his ever more profound understanding of the scriptures, the King – and via the King, his counsellors – now understood that God had had a further and less obvious motive in mind that day. And that this motive involved the selection of Count Amauri de Bale to be the King’s sole champion. To act for him and on behalf of him, in other words, in the gratification of God’s wishes.
As a direct consequence of this fact, and in the teeth of the Queen Mother’s vigorous disapproval, the King issued a formal summons to de Bale to present himself at the Basilica of St Denis, next to the tombs of the King’s father, Louis VIII, and of his grandfather, Philip II Augustus, on the exact day, and at the exact moment, of the sixteen-year anniversary of his God-driven intervention.
4
At first Amauri de Bale had been tempted to avoid what he suspected was a trick invitation by impulsively volunteering to serve in the army of Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor. But he knew that if the Queen Mother truly wanted her revenge on him, she could reach him in Germany just as easily as she could have reached him at any time during the past sixteen years within the tenuous security of his chateau and estates.
That he owed his life – and the non-severance of his extremities – to the King’s grace was in little doubt. De Bale shuddered to think what the Queen Mother would have ordered done to him had he not changed his mind at the very last moment and leapt in to save the King’s life. His – on the face of it – perverse decision that day had not been prompted by any unlikely eruption of random human charity, however, but rather by a trained warrior’s reactive instinct, twinned with the sudden realization – triggered by the King’s sublime jeu d’esprit – that Louis might yet prove to be a credit to France, rather than merely another Capetian burden on its soul.
The upshot, of course, had been that de Bale had fallen foul of the Duke of Brittany, with all that that entailed in terms of loss of influence, a less advantageous marriage, and a dramatic narrowing of his political ambitions. But he had decided, in the general scheme of things, that this was the lesser of two evils – Mauclerc was bad, but the Queen Mother was awful.
De Bale knelt, therefore, before the King’s father’s sarcophagus, his head bowed, his forearms resting across his single upraised knee, and waited for the King’s pleasure. His entire life had consisted of a series of often impulsive gambles, and he now felt a fatalistic sense of his own insignificance in the magnificent new Rayonnant Gothic setting of the St Denis Basilica.
The King, flanked by his confessor, Geoffrey of Beaulieu, and his chaplain, William of Chartres, watched de Bale from the lee of one of the twenty statue columns adorning the portal of the Basilica’s west façade.
‘Look,’ said the King. ‘It is Our Lady.’
The two counsellors fell back, staring at their King. ‘We see nothing, Sire.’
The King turned to them. ‘You see nothing?’
‘No, Sire. We see nothing. What do you see?’
The King turned back in the direction of his father’s crypt. ‘I see Our Lady, the Mother of God, raising my champion’s cloak and laying it tenderly across his back so that he should not take cold.’
The two men covered their faces with their hands. Then they fell to their knees and prostrated themselves on the flagstone flooring of the nave.
The King, after only a brief hesitation, strode towards the kneeling figure of the Count.
De Bale heard the King’s approach, but chose not to look up. The King’s words had carried to him through the echoing Basilica, and de Bale understood that, at this exact moment, his own and his family’s future was being decided forever.
He felt the tip of the King’s sword touch him on the back of his right shoulder. ‘You saw the Devil, de Bale?’
‘I did, Sire.’
‘And you protected the King?’
‘With my life, Sire.’
‘And you will always protect the King?’
‘Always, Sire.’
‘And this realm of France?’
‘I and my family, Sire. Throughout eternity.’
‘Then you shall be my Corpus Maleficus.’
Louis turned away. He raised his voice, so that it echoed throughout the Basilica. ‘I have the Bishop of Reims to crown me. The Bishop of Laon to anoint me. Langres to bear my sceptre. Beauvais my mantle. Chalons my ring. And Noyons to bear my belt. I have the Duke of Normandy to hold the first square banner, and Guyenne to hold the second. I have Burgundy to bear my crown and fasten my belt. I have the Count of Toulouse to carry my spurs. Flanders my sword. And Champagne my Royal Standard. But who do I have to protect me from the Devil? Who to be my champion?’
De Beaulieu and de Chartres had risen up from their prone positions. Both men recognized a fait accompli when they saw one. ‘You have the Count of Hyères, Sire.’
Louis nodded. ‘The Count of Hyères is now the thirteenth Pair de France. My father’s and my grandfather’s bones are witnesses to this fact. Bring me the Seal and my crusader’s cross.’
PART ONE
1
Le Domaine De Seyème, Cap Camarat, France Present Day
Ex-Captain Joris Calque, grateful recipient of the Police Nationale Française’s early-retirement plan for officers injured in the line of duty, had long ago accepted that he was built for comfort and not for speed.
It was for this reason that he had bribed a notorious local poacher to build him a camouflaged hideout on a hill overlooking the present-day Dowager Countess of Hyères’s private estate on the St Tropez peninsula, almost exactly 765 years after the events at the St Denis Basilica.
The hideout came complete with battery-operated fan, blow-up armchair, and high-density, polyurethane insulated, safari-style picnic box. From his eyrie on the opposing hillside, the newly retired Calque intended to monitor the comings and goings of the group of individuals he now knew as the Corpus Maleficus, and, in his own time, to secure proof of their involvement in the death of his lieutenant earlier that same year.
Calque had done his homework well. He had spent the first fortnight of his retirement trawling through the records of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the French National Archives at Fontainebleau, researching everything he could about the history of the de Bale family. And he had come to a number of inescapable conclusions.
Firstly, that the de Bales had managed to thrust their fingers into just about every slice of religious, political, civic, administrative, governmental, socio-religious and socio-political pie that France had contrived for itself – or had contrived on itself – since the early Middle Ages. And secondly that, almost without exception, the de Bales had abused whatever power they had thus managed to grasp.
Across a span of nearly eight hundred years, the de Bales could count three marshals, one seneschal, and two constables of France amongst their number. They had bought archbishoprics, infiltrated the college and orders of the Cardinalate, and even manipulated popes, without ever having quite achieved the papal tiara themselves. They had started wars and engendered riots. They had conducted massacres, espoused revolutions, and incited assassination attempts. They had weakened kings and queens, suborned dauphins and minor princelings, seduced foreign princesses and even, on one occasion, a Mademoiselle de France. They had fomented bastards, and undermined the principles of fair play at every opportunity. Far from protecting France from the Devil, the de Bales appeared, at every opportunity, to have eagerly encouraged her towards his fold.
The history of the de Bale family, via even the partial records available to Calque through the exclusively public sector access open to him, showed a family so intent on the pursuit and enjoyment of power, that it had ultimately ended up so diluting itself and dispersing its seed that, by the time of the Great War, it had lost virtually all influence. Lord Acton, thought Calque, had hit the nail squarely on the head with his ‘power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.’
This had led to a situation where the last remaining direct holder of the de Bale name had found himself – via the misfortunes of war – incapable of procreating and of continuing his direct line, whilst at the same time being titular head of a fast diminishing cabal that was unravelling itself at the speed dirty water flushes down a drain.
Nearly thirty years later, in the age-old way of such things, and in one final, desperate grasp at life, this elderly man had then procured himself a much younger woman, of lesser lineage, perhaps, than his own, but who was possessed of that inestimable compensation – a greater fortune. The family of Geneviève Odilonne de Moristot had been more than happy to trade her youth, her beauty, and the astonishing fortune she had inherited thanks to being the only daughter of a minor nobleman with a phalanx of elderly female relatives widowed in the Great War (and now gradually dying off in their coddled eighties and nineties), for a countship, a marquisate, and one of the oldest names in France.
The fact that the de Bale line could not be continued in the direct fashion that might have been expected had proved no hindrance to the new Countess. Using the example of Italy, in which the per se continuation of great names often takes precedence over strict genetic purity, and of France’s very own ‘Maman toujours, Papa peutêtre’ – ‘Mummy always, Daddy only perhaps’ – dictum, she had persuaded her elderly husband to allow her to adopt thirteen children from her family-funded nunnery orphanage.
When Calque had first confirmed that this number was true, he had reared back from the microfiche newspaper he had been reading just as if a poisonous spider had landed in front of him and flashed him her claws.
But upon further consideration, he had begun to see the logic behind the Countess’s actions. What better way to rebuild the Corpus’s influence? She had had both the money and the leisure – thanks to her extreme youth in relation to that of her husband – to use it. If one accepted that the nature/nurture debate was something of a moveable feast, what better way to gain power over your adopted children than by the use of titles, influence, and, last but by no means least, virtually unlimited funds? The old Count had chosen his partner well.
So was Achor Bale simply the exception that proved the rule? As far as Calque could tell, he had been the only one of the thirteen children adopted by the Countess old enough for his character to have been significantly formed before the fact. Was he the simple one-off freak that he seemed, and that Calque’s Commandant insisted he was? Or had all the Countess’s children been similarly groomed? Freed from the pressures of bureaucratic interference by his premature retirement, Calque now intended to find out.
The jobbing farmer on whose land Calque had planted his semi-permanent encampment had been easy enough to persuade. Before vacating his desk at the 2ème Arrondissement, Calque had contrived to mislay his Captain’s badge and shield amongst the maelstrom of his boxed-up belongings. He had been a police officer for thirty years. Calque reckoned that the desk sergeant, embarrassed at having to say farewell to a man he had taken orders from since he was a wet-behind-the-ears rookie, wasn’t going to quiz him any too closely about the loss.
In the event all Calque had needed to do was to promise to drop the badge and shield off the next time he visited his old friends at the precinct. It was with exquisite satisfaction that Calque had noted the desk sergeant solemnly ticking off the box marked ‘Identification Returned’ on his retirement checklist. He had plans for that badge, the first of which was to use it to silence the farmer.
Calque hadn’t been that badly injured, of course, in the car accident the Countess de Bale’s adopted son, Achor Bale, aka the ‘eye-man’, had contrived on him and his assistant, Paul Macron, earlier that summer. But Macron’s brutal death at the hands of Bale a few days later had damaged more than merely its victim – it had undermined Joris Calque’s rock-solid sense of his own vocation.
It wasn’t that he mourned Macron unduly, or even felt guilty about his death – the man had been a bigot, for God’s sake, and as thick as a navvy’s bicep. It was more that he had lost the urge to explain himself anymore to superior officers who were both younger than himself, stupider than himself, and seemingly incapable of seeing or imagining anything beyond the confines of their own little time capsules.
This new breed of men and women infesting the upper echelons of the police department had no earthly sense of history – no earthly sense of what was seemly or appropriate in terms of their behaviour. When Calque had told the Commandant of his initial suspicions about the Countess and her baker’s dozen of adopted children – Calque had briefly been tempted to call them by the more accurate medieval term of a ‘Devil’s dozen’ but had thought better of it – the man had as good as laughed in his face.
‘Achor Bale was a freak. A one-off. What do you think? That someone as respectable as the Countess of Hyères – who must be seventy if she’s a day – has been grooming a family full of killer orphans to fulfil her late husband’s 800-year-old sworn duty of protecting the French Crown from the Devil? Captain Calque, this may come as a surprise to you, but there is no Devil. And there is no French Crown any more, either. The last King of France was Louis-Philippe. And he was got rid of in …’ The Commandant had hesitated, a vague sense of betrayal suffusing his face.
‘They got rid of Louis-Philippe in 1848. But he wasn’t the last King of France. He was the last King of the French. The last reigning King of France was Charles X. You’ve heard of him, surely?’
‘You’re skating on very thin ice here, Captain.’
‘I know that the Countess was running Bale while he was cutting his murderous swathe across France. That she had ordered him to harry the American, Adam Sabir, and his two Gypsy friends, Alexi Dufontaine and Yola Samana, to death. That she was convinced Sabir knew the identity of Nostradamus’s Third Antichrist. A secret the Corpus Maleficus needed to secure if it was to continue with its sworn duty of protecting France from the Devil.’
‘Pah.’
Calque was fleetingly tempted to throw in the information Sabir had vouchsafed him, in the strictest confidence, about the possible existence of the Second Coming, but decided that discretion was the better part of valour. The situation already sounded terminally far-fetched. Why aggravate the issue even further? The Commandant was probably an atheist anyway – he was certainly incapable of any significant degree of lateral thought. ‘Achor Bale took his orders directly from the Countess, his mother. That makes her an accessory before the fact. In fact I would even go so far as to say that she was a joint principal.’ Calque realized that he might be stretching the point a little. ‘A great deal more than a simple conspirator, anyway.’
‘Have you any proof of that?’
‘He called her from the Maset. When he was in trouble. He asked her if he could come home. She told him to finish the job. To kill Sabir.’
‘No he didn’t. He spoke to that butler of hers…’ The Commandant ransacked his memory, unconsciously pandering to Calque’s notorious pedantry. ‘ … Millefeuille.’
‘Milouins.’
‘Milouins then. And Milouins replied to him partly in German. He used the word Fertigmachen. Which could have any number of meanings. From “go away and off yourself, you murderous bastard”, to “let’s make an end of it here and now”. But Bale never spoke to the Countess personally – the evidence that the order came from her is purely circumstantial. But we’ve already been over this, Captain.’
‘I’ve seen that hidden room at the Countess’s house, Commandant. I’ve seen the document she keeps in there. The one that mentions a secret society called the Corpus Maleficus.’
‘But the document was indecipherable. Written in an unknown code. You’ve acknowledged that much yourself. Damn it, man, the thing was dated 1250. What earthly connection can it have with a crime committed today?’
‘It wasn’t dated 1250. It was post-dated 1228. We know this because it contained the non-coded signatures and seals of three men crucial to King Louis the IX’s realm. One man, Jean de Joinville, would have been four years old at the time of the signing. An impossibility, of course. So the document was clearly enacted retrospectively – possibly in appreciation of an act whose real significance was only recognized later.’
‘For pity’s sake, Captain. We all know about your absurd pretensions to a classical education – you made Paul Macron’s life a misery with them. You’ve no way of knowing this, but a week before his death Macron put in an informal complaint against you for psychological harassment.’
‘Psychological harassment?’ Calque wanted a cigarette badly, but, thanks to the new ruling, he knew that if he dared to light up, his superior would probably call in the Paris Fire Brigade to put him out with a hosepipe.
‘We persuaded him that it was in his own best interests to shelve the complaint. Your long service with the department still counts for something, you see. But the complaint can easily be resuscitated – even from beyond the grave – and all the more damaging for that. However, we are straying off the point. From here on in you will leave the Countess and her children alone. Do you understand me? The case is over. Bale is dead.’
‘You mean she’s too well-connected to tangle with?’
‘In a nutshell, Captain? Yes.’
It was at that exact moment that Joris Calque had decided that his injuries from the car accident were a good deal more severe than he had ever let on. A stumble or two in the office, followed by a full-on fall had been quite enough to start the ball rolling. He had then found difficulty remembering simple things. Been forced to acknowledge to the Chief Medical Officer that he had been suffering from blackouts ever since the accident, and that he had recently been entertaining thoughts of suicide because of his guilt at Paul Macron’s death.
The whole process had proved surprisingly simple. He had only had five more years to serve out anyway until forcible retirement – in the event they had been glad to be rid of him. Clear up the office. Out with the unregenerate males. Bring in new blood.
Calque had left the building without so much as a backwards glance. The icing on the cake had been that his ruinous-to-maintain ex-wife would now be deprived of her legally sanctioned monthly tranche of his pay cheque. Because he had been invalided out of the service with full honours and an unblemished record, and had, in consequence, been deemed incapable of functioning at 100 per cent of his usual competence thanks to the injuries – not to mention the post-traumatic stress – he had suffered whilst on active duty, the State would now be taking up a significant portion of the financial slack on his behalf. And the State, as Calque knew only too well, didn’t go in for guilty consciences.
Grinning to himself, Calque leaned back in his blow-up armchair and focused his binoculars onto the front entrance to the Countess’s house. He had been watching the place, day in, day out, for five weeks now. The routine had become a way of life for him. He had banked everything on his belief that the Countess would quite naturally have sought to maintain a low profile for a month or two after her adopted son’s death. No muddying of the waters. No gathering in of the clan. And so far he had been proved right.
But Calque had known that it wouldn’t last. The woman was reptilian – as cold-blooded as a coral snake. It was inconceivable that she shouldn’t contrive some sort of revenge on Adam Sabir for the killing of the demented Bale. And Sabir had proved on more than one occasion how blind he was to any potential danger.
So Calque had decided to spend the early part of his unanticipated retirement doing what he had always done best – protecting the public. Except in this case the public consisted of precisely one individual, the errant American writer Adam Sabir. And the forces of law and order were no longer officially sanctioned, with the full panoply of the State’s legal mechanisms backing them up, but merely consisted of one overweight, overeducated, and terminally underfunded former policeman.
Why was he doing it? Boredom? Sour grapes? Resentment at the truncation of his decreasingly high-flying career? None of that. The truth was that Sabir had touched a surprisingly sensitive nerve in the usually unsentimental Calque with his mysterious tales of the Second Coming and of the rapidly approaching Armageddon predicted in the 52 lost verses of Nostradamus – verses that Sabir had managed to memorize before his final reckoning with Achor Bale. Calque’s intellectual vanity had been aroused – and his latent republican ire had been triggered – by the Countess’s inbred assumption that she and her aristocratic ilk would always win out in the end.
This new, knight-errant version of the formerly cynical Joris Calque had attended Achor Bale’s funeral, therefore, and had noted with satisfaction the absence of Bale’s twelve remaining brothers and sisters. Only the Countess and her near-ubiquitous personal assistant, Madame Mastigou, had bothered to turn up.
But the Countess would have to convoke them at some point. Bring them up to scratch. And the telephone or the internet just wouldn’t do – far too many loopholes and opportunities for covert surveillance. That meant that her children would have to return to the domaine de Seyème – and to the secret room one of his officers had unexpectedly discovered behind the library – in person. That was where the Corpus Maleficus held its meetings, wasn’t it? That was where they hatched their schemes?
And that was where Joris Calque had illegally hidden a voice-activated tape recorder whilst he was busy conducting his entirely legal search of the Countess’s house nearly eight weeks before.
2
The recently entitled Abiger de Bale, Chevalier, Comte d’Hyères, Marquis de Seyème, Pair de France, primus inter pares, bundled his twin brother ahead of him up the steps of the TGV. ‘Go on, Pollux. Move your arse.’
‘Stop calling me Pollux. My name is Vaulderie.’
‘All right then. I’ll call you Vaulderie from now on. Vicomte Vaulderie. How’s that? Now you sound like a sexually transmitted disease.’
The twins threw themselves down in opposing seats in the first-class carriage. Vaulderie kicked out at a cushion. ‘Why should I be a mere vicomte when you’re a fucking comte? Why should you be the one to snaffle Rocha’s title?’
‘Because I was the last one to emerge from our mother. That’s the Napoleonic Code for you. Last out, first conceived. Enlightened primogeniture, mon pote. Christ. Just think. If it wasn’t for King Clovis, our fallen angel of a sister would have inherited instead of me. She’s two years older. Maltho ti afrio lito.’
‘What the hell does that mean?’
‘Salic Law, dummy. Male primogeniture. It’s what saved our bacon.’
‘No. The other bit.’
‘It’s the only full sentence left in Old Frankish. “I tell you. I free you. Half free.” Complete gobbledegook, of course. Be thankful you’ve got a title at all. If Rocha hadn’t let that pig of a policeman loose off a shot at him, you’d have remained a commoner all your life. Now you’re a real vicomte you can flash your chevalière ring at all the girls and their pants will automatically fall down. Just like I’ve been doing for years.’
Vaulderie launched another kick at the seat cushion, but harder this time. ‘It’s not fair. If we’d been born in England, I would have been the senior of us two. First out is considered the eldest there.’
‘Lucky for me we weren’t born in England, then. We’d have had an idiot as head of the family.’
The brothers, despite the fact that they were all of twenty-five years old, began to wrestle. Watching them, the off-duty railway security inspector – who was availing himself of his free first-class travel privileges – thought yet again how lucky France was to have a Republic. It was always these young blue bloods, off for the weekend, who caused the most trouble on his trains. He could see their signet rings flashing as they fought for control of each other’s throats.
‘That’s enough. I’ll have no rough-housing here.’ He eased his way up the central aisle and flashed his badge at the boys.
Both young men straightened up and smoothed back their hair. ‘Sorry, Colonel. It won’t happen again. We were only mud-larking.’
The inspector was rather taken aback. He had expected trouble. These two had all the earmarks of their class. Absurdly well-cut hair. Double-breasted grey flannel suits that fitted them like a second skin. Not an ounce of excess fat on the pair of them – fencing, probably, or some exclusive tennis club with a five-year waiting list. When he looked at them more closely, he was astonished to realize that they were identical twins.
He shrugged, not a little disarmed by their unanticipated courtesy. ‘I won’t take your names this time, as we’re nearly at my destination. You’re lucky – you’ve both got off more lightly than you deserve. But remember.’ He pointed above his head. ‘There are security cameras on this train.’
‘Yes. We noticed those.’ The boys grinned at each other, as if in echo of some telepathic joke.
The inspector hesitated, tempted to say more – to make his mark on these gilded hooligans. Then he shrugged a second time and moved back down the aisle. He was due off at the next station anyway. In twenty minutes’ time he would be home with his wife. Why complicate matters?
‘Shall we?’ Abiger gave his brother a playful nudge with the toe of his shoe.
‘Are you crazy? We’d be forced to change trains. We’d be late for Madame, our mother. She might even ask us what we were doing that was so important we missed the beginning of her gathering.’
‘Oh come on, Vau. Live dangerously for once. We’re too old to be thrashed with a wooden clothes hanger anymore. Anyhow, I’m head of the family now.’
‘Madame, our mother, is head of the family. You’re merely its technical figurehead. And a plug-ugly one at that. That much I’ll acknowledge.’
Abiger de Bale lurched forwards as if he intended to trigger a rematch of their wrestling competition – but then, with the movement only half-completed, he changed his mind. Grinning, he allowed his gaze to slide away from his brother and follow the line of the inspector’s retreating back. ‘That worm insulted the CM, Vau. I say we do it.’
For twenty-five years Vaulderie had followed his brother’s lead in everything. Gone everywhere he had gone. Even taken his punishments for him. It was far too late to turn back now. With the death of Rocha de Bale, their adopted brother – the man now known to the outside world as the murderer, Achor Bale – everything had changed. What had been hidden was now open. What had been obscured was now set to be revealed. The Corpus Maleficus would finally be taking its rightful place as the driving force behind a new order.
Vaulderie gave a defeated sigh. ‘I say we do it too.’
3
At first, after leaving the train, the boys worked in a zigzag formation behind the inspector’s back. That way, if the man had a car, one of them could break away from the stalk and procure a vehicle, whilst the other could mark the direction taken and keep in touch via his cell phone.
But the inspector didn’t have a car. It soon became obvious that he lived within walking distance of the station – a railwayman through and through. Instinctively, intuitively, the boys decided not to take him en route. Far more sensible to deal with him at home, well out of the eye of the storm. Far more fun to wait.
At one point the man stopped. He cocked his head downwards and to one side, as though he were listening to something passing underneath him. The boys froze in their respective positions, visible, but not visible, maybe fifty metres behind him. In their experience, marks never turned around. People simply didn’t expect to be followed – not on a suburban street, mid-afternoon, in la France profonde, with mothers collecting their children from school, and yellow postal vans busy on their last collection of the day.
The boys converged again when they saw the inspector hesitating at the communal door to his apartment block – feeling for his keys – tapping his pockets for cigarettes. Would he turn at the very last moment and head for the Bar/Tabac on the corner? Have himself a quick snifter before facing his wife? In that case both twins knew that they would be forced to abandon the hunt and head back towards the station.
For despite all their bravado, each, in his own way, feared Madame, their mother, as they feared nothing else on earth. She was like Agaberte, daughter of the Norse god Vagnoste, who could transform herself from a wrinkled old crone into a woman so tall she could reach up and touch the sky – a woman who could overturn mountains, rip up great trees, and dry up the swollen beds of rivers. Abi and Vau’s childhood had been spent entirely in her thrall, and no power on earth could entirely break her dominance of them.
The inspector reached forward and unlocked the door. Now the boys were hurrying, not wishing to be faced with an unknown, untested lock. Vau caught the door just before it clicked to, and Abi slid through the crack his brother made for him, one eye fastened on the stairs above him.
Shoes in their hands, they padded up the concrete stairwell behind the inspector. How could people bear to live like this? Money and power were there to be taken. All you needed was the nerve.
The inspector was stepping into his apartment – calling out to his wife.
Abi reached out and touched him on the arm. ‘Colonel. A word.’
4
Some years before, the brothers had had a series of telescopic, lead-weighted, fighting batons designed and made for them. Eight inches long, the batons fitted comfortably inside the forearm sleeve of a jacket, where they were secured in place by the simple expedient of a loop and a double button.
Although principally made of rubber, the batons were not able to pass through a metal detector by dint of their lead content, and therefore had to be transported separately on an aeroplane as part of hold baggage – or secreted, for instance, inside a travelling fishing-rod case, where they could be passed off as fisherman’s priests. By train and by car, however, they were perfection itself. Once liberated from their housings, the batons extended with a simple flick of the wrist to a total of two feet in length, retaining more than enough rigidity to guarantee a quite remarkable hand-to-target action.
They would kill, of course, if used aggressively, but their principal function was defensive – they were designed as pacifiers. In ten seconds a man could be crippled, his legs worse than useless, by the simple expedient of a scything stroke behind the knee. The twins, being two, found this the best resort in all but the most extreme of circumstances. One would monopolize the target’s attention whilst the other struck him from behind. It had never failed them. A frightened man on the floor, one leg unmarked but useless, was a very different animal indeed from an angry man in possession of all his physical faculties.
The inspector curled up in the foetal position at the entrance to his apartment and began to dry retch, like a cat attempting to bring up a fur ball. His wife came hurrying out of the kitchen, where she had been preparing their supper. Vau gave her two for good measure, one behind each knee. She dropped to the floor and then stretched out, like a postulant at some Easter confraternity ceremony.
Abi closed the door. He and Vau dragged the couple through into the lounge.
Vau switched on the television. ‘Gas explosion or double suicide?’
The inspector tried to raise himself from the floor. Vau flailed him behind the other knee. ‘Silence. You will both remain silent, faces to the ground. Do you understand me?’
The woman was unconscious – shock, probably. The boys were used to people responding in disparate ways. Women were particularly vulnerable to sudden explosions of violence, whereas men would often struggle, requiring further pacification.
Abi snapped his fingers triumphantly. ‘No. No. Listen. I’ve got another idea. Kill two birds with one stone.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Wait for me here. I won’t be more than ten minutes. A surprise.’ Abi was staring out of the window now, his expression speculative. He snapped the baton shut and secreted it back inside his sleeve. He had scarcely even broken into a sweat.
5
Abi had passed the Jaguar Sports on their way in from the station. The car had captured his attention even then, as It had seemed so out of place in a street full of Peugeots, and Renaults, and six-seater Fiat run-arounds. A pimp’s car, probably, or the vehicle of some chancer who had made it good and couldn’t tear himself away from the old neighbourhood. Perhaps the owner was visiting his elderly mother?
It took Abi less than a minute to bypass the alarm system. He had been breaking into cars ever since his early adolescence, and considered it one of his primary skills. During their teen years, Madame, his mother, had arranged for him and Vau to serve as apprentices to one of the best auto thieves in the business. It was something he was infinitely grateful to her for. It had given him power.
He drove the car to the front of the inspector’s apartment building and triggered the trunk mechanism. Vau was watching from the inspector’s window. Abi mouthed a few words and pointed to the trunk. Vau nodded his head.
He emerged, less than a minute later, supporting the inspector like a man will support his drunken friend after a night out on the town.
Abi had closed the trunk by this time, and was holding the passenger door open, with the seat pulled forward. He checked around, then nodded. Speed was of the essence in such cases – any hesitation could prove fatal. Neither he nor Vau appeared on any police records, and he intended to keep it that way. ‘Get in there. Keep your head down.’
