Devil's Lair Read online

  "Devil’s Lair is by far the best book I have read in years!"

  — USA Today bestselling author Rebecca Forster

  "A fantastic book and I commend Mr. Wisehart on such an incredible novel. Highly Recommended."

  — Debra L. Martin, author of The Quest for Nobility

  "Beautifully told, full of vivid details. Brilliant!"

  — Christa Polkinhorn, author of Love of a Stonemason

  From Devil’s Lair:

  “I’ll go first,” Marco said.

  He moved to the front of the group. The crack in the floor was wide enough to step through. Marco paused at the verge of the abyss, surveyed the entrance, then took the first step. William entered second, bracing against the walls to ease himself down. Nadja went third. Her hair caught the light rising from the Lance.

  Giovanni watched them go.

  When the others had vanished, their footfalls continued to echo up to the chamber where the poet stood alone. Light dwindled in the lower passage.

  You wanted to be another Dante, he chided himself, and took a deep breath to summon his courage.

  He peered into the dismal maw and felt a warm draft on his face. The hole in the ground seemed to breathe. He sensed no sulfurous odor, merely the smell of damp stone. The echo of footsteps diminished and died. The only sound remaining was his galloping heartbeat and his panicky breath. It taunted and shamed him.

  Giovanni crossed himself, muttering, “Libera nos a malo,” and followed the others down into Hell.

  DEVIL’S LAIR

  David Wisehart

  Devil’s Lair

  Copyright © 2010 by David Wisehart

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or distributed without permission.

  Kindle Edition

  January 2011

  http://www.davidwisehart.com

  http://www.kindle-author.com

  in dimidio dierum meorum vadam ad portas inferi

  In the middle of my life, I go to the gates of Hell.

  — Isaiah 38:10

  CHAPTER 1

  Campania, Kingdom of Naples

  Anno Domini 1349

  William of Ockham walked barefoot through the carnage. Slaughtered knights and fallen horses festered on the battlefield. A thousand naked corpses lay broken upon the earth, and in that multitude a few unlucky men survived, weltering in their own blood, crying out for God. The fighting was over but the dying would go on for days.

  Half the world is dead, thought William, and still they kill each other.

  He searched for one man in a massacre of men, and carried a charcoal sketch to identify the face, though some of the men were so disfigured by violence, so brutalized by retribution, they would not be recognized by their own ghosts. The corpses had been stripped bare, their clothing and armor scavenged. A few of the bodies were sunburned. Most were not. William wondered how the sun could redden some men and leave others pale, but on closer examination he understood: only the living burned and blistered. Heartened by this discovery, William checked the sunburned bodies first, comparing his sketch to the faces of the lingerers. A thought murmured, like the whisper of an angel: There is still hope.

  Carrion crows feasted on the dead and the nearly dead. Birds scattered as William approached, and gathered again like shadows in his wake. Pawk pawk, screamed the crows, pawk pawk. The conclamation was deafening. The malodor of gutted bowels and corrupting flesh pervaded the air as blowflies settled in open wounds. Long months of drought had parched the earth, which now drank the blood of the fallen. A few low places caught more spillage than the ground could take. Scarlet pools dried into black scabs that cracked and crunched beneath William’s bare feet.

  A hand grabbed his ankle. William stumbled, recovered, and looked down at the soldier who would not let him go. The tip of a broken lance protruded from the man’s chest. Nervous eyes looked up, pleading. The piteous soldier was not long for this world. Another world awaited him.

  “I have sinned,” the man said.

  William knelt beside him. “Who is Marco da Roma? Is he here? Marco da Roma?”

  “I want to confess.”

  William showed him the sketch. “Do you know this man?”

  The soldier coughed blood. He gripped William’s grey cowl with trembling fingers. “Bless me, Father.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Please.”

  I’m not a priest. Not anymore.

  Excommunicated by a heretic pope and hunted by the Inquisition, William had fled the papal palace at Avignon for the safety of Bavaria. For twenty years he lived in exile. That pope was dead now, but the ban was unabated.

  Devil be damned. A false pope might leave a dying man unconfessed. William could not.

  A leather pouch dangled from the white rope belt that identified William as a Friar Minor. He had worn that belt for forty years. It bound him to his oath. He opened his pouch and withdrew an ampule of oleum infirmorum, consecrated olive oil. “I will hear your confession.”

  “Bless me, Father.” The soldier said no more. Death rattled in his throat. His eyes lost focus. His hand relaxed its grip and fell to the earth.

  With the oil, William traced the sign of the cross on the soldier’s forehead, saying, “Per istam sanctam unctionem et suam piissimam misericordiam, indulgeat tibi Dominus quidquid deliquisti. Amen.”

  He closed the soldier’s eyes and moved on.

  William glanced about for his fellow pilgrims, Nadja and Giovanni, but the summer heat made things shimmer at a distance. His cohorts had wandered beyond his ken. Hours ago the group had separated to hasten their search. William regretted the decision now. Surrounded by so much death and decay, he longed again for the company of friends.

  At nightfall a dozen wolves came down from the hills to feed on the slaughter and sing their praises to the moon. They gave William’s torch a wide berth, their yellow eyes candent in the firelight. The wolves growled when he came too close. The friar respected their wishes. His torch brightened the proximate field but blinded him to the horizon. He surveyed the darkness in all directions, hoping to see Nadja’s rushlight, but beyond the watchful lupine eyes and the penumbra of his own weak flame the black night enveloped him. The friar crossed himself, recalling how, with God’s grace, Saint Francis had tamed the wolf of Gubbio. The story calmed William’s fears as he continued delving in the dark.

  It was well after compline before he found the body he was looking for. The soldier lay face-down on a shallow declivity at the south end of the killing field. The body appeared lifeless, but the skin was sunburned. William examined the man’s bloody scalp and saw a gash above the right ear. Someone had used this skull for a butcher block. The friar turned the body face-up, then wiped fresh blood from the man’s temple, which was warmer than the night air. The man appeared to be twenty, maybe twenty-five, too young to die for nothing on this blood-encrusted field. William compared the man’s visage to the charcoal sketch. The resemblance was unmistakable—angular face, strong jaw, heavy brow—like the statue of some pagan god.

  “Marco da Roma.”

  The man did not answer.

  William put his ear to the man’s chest, but heard no heart; he cupped a hand over the cracked lips, but felt no breath; he checked the throat for a pulse—nothing.

  All this way for nothing.

  He gazed up at the stars. “Deus obsecro sana eum.”

  And then he felt it. A faint thump of life, a marching rhythm beneath the skin.

  “Deo gratias.”

  Marco’s bare chest was caked with blood. If he bore the expected sign, the friar could not see it. William gathered the selvage of his greyfriar’s robe and used it to clean away the gore, revealing a red tattoo, emblem of the lost brotherhood. He felt
a sudden rush of tears. For this he had walked barefoot across five hundred miles of blighted woods and plague-infested hamlets. Here, at last, was the sign of the prophecy: a crimson cross tattooed above the heart.

  The secret mark of the Knights Templar.

  CHAPTER 2

  With a keen dagger and a steady hand, William shaved the knight’s scalp, adding wisps of long black hair, flock by flock, to a tangled heap on the dry riverbed.

  A campfire crackled in the gloom. Marco lay supine and comatose, wrapped in a blanket made for a much shorter man. Blood wept from the scabby laceration in the knight’s skull as William shaved carefully around it. He was no surgeon but had spent a lifetime ministering to the sick and the poor, the damaged and the destitute.

  Giovanni Boccaccio sat reading a book by firelight. He was a Tuscan poet in his middle thirties, and his fashion flouted every sumptuary law: his hose were crimson and buttoned to the tops of his calfskin shoes; his overgown, a black cioppa of silk brocade, was cloaked by a dark grey mantello that draped from his shoulders; his hat was a red cappuccio with the foggia falling to the left in the Neapolitan style—a rich display for a poor man. His clothes were vestiges of the courtier he once was, not of the vagabond he had since become.

  Nadja collected deadfall at a distance, making noises in the dark. William heard her stepping on dry leaves, upsetting small rocks, dropping sticks, and picking them up again.

  A streamlet trickled nearby, a sign that God had not abandoned them, that even in this drought some part of the mountains still felt the touch of rain. A chill threaded the evening air, carrying the lamentations of tawny owls and the incessant gossip of cicadas.

  With Marco’s head now shaved and the injury revealed, William set the dagger on a flat stone next to the campfire so that the steel tip pierced the jittering flames. He retrieved the pot from the fire, dipped a rag in the steaming water, and cleaned the gash in Marco’s skull with short, gentle strokes. The cut was deep. William probed with his fingers and discovered a shard of skull bone that had broken loose and slipped beneath the skin. He inserted two fingers into the warm, moist cut. Feeling the jagged edge of the fragment, he gripped it between his fingers and eased the bone back into place.

  He washed his hands in the pot. From the donkey cart he retrieved a leather costrel. He had filled it at a tavern in the mountain town of Corona Corvina, but only a little wine remained. Blessing the libation, he poured a dram over the cut. He put the wine to his own lips for a quick taste—strong vintage—then stoppered the costrel and set it aside.

  The steel blade was now hot. As William drew the dagger from the flame, the haft felt warm in his hand. He pressed the flat of the blade to Marco’s cut. Skin hissed as he cauterized the wound. The air reeked of nidor, the smell of burning flesh. Marco tensed—neck, jaw, hands—but did not wake to the burning pain, which would have tortured a healthy man to a quick confession. Marco’s eyes remained closed. He did not cry out. When the metal cooled, William checked to see that the wound was sealed before he wiped and sheathed the blade.

  Nadja returned from the shadows with an armload of sticks and branches. She wore an olive-colored kirtle over a white chemise, the colors dulled by the dust of the long road behind her: some part of her homeland still clung to her skirts. Circling for a better vantage to the fire, she fed the deadfall to the flames.

  William felt her hand on his shoulder as she stood behind him, leaning close. “He’ll live,” she said.

  “I have my doubts.”

  “But he has your prayers.”

  Nadja sat down next to Giovanni, her back to the fire, her knees tucked to her chest. She tugged her skirt down to cover her legs, clutched her hands together at her ankles, and placed her sharp chin on one knee, rocking slightly. Her blonde hair was wet from the stream, her skin lambent in the firelight.

  She was a peasant girl just shy of twenty. Her head was uncoifed, for she had no husband. The falling sickness kept her unmarried, despite her beauty and a soul that could only be the work of a loving God. William had met her in Munich at the height of the pestilence, and had saved her from the torches of an angry mob. A rash decision, rescuing a woman accused of witchcraft, but he did not regret it. God moved his heart, and he obeyed.

  Nadja reminded him of another girl, a chandler’s daughter in his home village of Ockham. Evette. The name still held power over him. Evette was his first love, his first loss. She was the promise of a different life, a better life, a life that had died to him more than forty years ago, before he took his vows.

  He purged the memories from his mind to focus on the task at hand: bandaging the knight’s head wound with a clean linen cloth.

  Giovanni paid no attention to Nadja, but kept his eyes on the leaves of his open book.

  “Are you reading it?” she asked.

  The poet grunted an affirmation.

  “Your lips aren’t moving.” She watched his lips intently.

  “Not everyone mumbles when they read,” he said.

  “William does.” She glanced over at the friar.

  “Some people read without talking,” said William. “Saint Ambrose was famous for it.”

  “Giovanni is not a saint.”

  The poet glared at her.

  Undaunted, Nadja tilted her head to inspect the cover. She reached over and tapped the title. “What does it mean?”

  Giovanni sighed, then translated the title from ink to air: “Inferno of Dante Alighieri.”

  He closed the book and offered it to her. Nadja stared at the Inferno one moment, at Giovanni the next.

  “Have a look,” he said.

  William watched her pluck it like forbidden fruit from Giovanni’s hand. Nadja held the book with reverence, as if it were a relic. She passed her fingertips over the cracked leather cover, which was scuffed and scored by years of reading and the abuses of hard travel. She opened the book to peek inside, parting the foxed pages, turning them delicately and without comprehension. The markings were a mystery.

  The friar envied her innocence, as he had once envied learning. Books had captivated William as a young boy in Ockham: his parish priest had let him touch a Holy Bible, let him turn the lambskin pages, let him study the pictures and the bright colored letters. The tome, resting on a stand, had been too big and heavy for him to lift. The priest picked him up so he could see the words. He was then six or seven—a dozen years younger than Nadja was now. Had his eyes glowed like hers when he touched his first book? Did her heart race now like his did then?

  William possessed no books of his own, save for the few he had committed memory—the Gospels, the psalters, the works of the Philosopher—and time had begun to divest him of those. Giovanni, untrammeled by vows of poverty or any hint of moderation, traveled with seventeen books in his donkey cart. Most were familiar but a few, like the Metamorphoses of Lucius Apuleius, were new to William. He felt blessed to share the road with such a formidable library.

  Giovanni said to the girl, “I’ll read it to you, if you’d like,” meaning the Inferno, and he answered her smile with one of his own.

  There was a hint of seduction in that smile, William noted, and Nadja seemed to feel the force of it. She brightened, then glanced away, as if dodging a sin. Giovanni had a reputation as something of a rakehell. William was beginning to see why.

  “Is it a romance?” Nadja asked.

  “A poem,” Giovanni said.

  “I like poems.”

  “This one will give you nightmares. It’s a guide to the underworld.”

  “Then yes,” she said, “I think you should read it to us.” She returned the book to him. “We need a guide.”

  Giovanni glanced at the friar. “You’ve read the Inferno?”

  The questioned surprised William. They had discussed this once already. Hadn’t they argued over Dante’s Commedia in that Roman tavern, the night they first met? William was sure of it. He remembered Giovanni claiming that, despite what the simple folk believed, Dante had never j
ourneyed to the netherworld, that his Hell was an artifice, his katabasis a fiction, like the descents of Orpheus, Ulysses, and Aeneas. Now Giovanni seemed not to remember the debate. Perhaps the poet had been too deep in his cups.

  “I attended a reading at Oxford,” William reminded him.

  “I studied at Naples,” Giovanni boasted. “This copy was a gift from Master Cino da Pistoia.”

  William smiled at the name. “Cino was a great poet.”

  Giovanni opened the book again. “He knew Dante personally.” His tone was envious. “Can you imagine?”

  “I met him myself, you know.”

  “Master Cino?”

  “Dante.”

  Skepticism flickered across Giovanni’s face, distorting it, giving him the twisted features of a gargoyle.

  William chuckled.

  “Where?” Giovanni asked. “In Italy?”

  “Merton College.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “Oh?”

  “Dante never went to Oxford.”

  “I assure you he did.”

  Giovanni snapped the book shut. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Yes, I can see that.”

  William rinsed the rag in hot water, dipping and squeezing. Steam spiraled off his hands in pale flames that infused the air with the smell of blood. He took his time, letting Giovanni stew in his doubts.

  Nadja gave the poet a disappointed look. “When a priest tells you something, you should believe it.”

  “I’m not a priest,” William said.

  “Of course you are,” said Nadja. “Don’t be silly.”

  William considered refuting her logic, but then thought better of it.

  Giovanni’s doubts erupted in an question. “Oxford? How is that possible? I know everything about Dante. I’ve read everything he wrote. I’ve been everywhere he went. I even know his daughter, Sister Beatrice. She serves in the monastery of San Stefano. We talked about her father. If Dante went to the islands, I would have heard about it.”

  “Now you have.”

  The poet brandished the book like a mummers prop. “He traveled, yes: Rome, Padua, Forlì, Verona, Lucca, Ravenna—possibly even Paris. But Oxford?”