Daughters of Babylon (18 page)

“I can recall only two high points throughout our eleven years of marriage. There was the original confusing thrill, of course, to find ourselves wed and escorted to a chamber perfumed and strewn with rose petals. The second was at Vézelay, when Bernard of Clairvaux conferred the
oriflamme
, charging Louis and me with leading the Second Crusade. What a spell caster of words he was, that Bernard! I’m not sure that either Louis or I desired years of discomfort, danger, and travel, but we loved the sense of being desired by something holy.”

“You know that Louis wants to carry on to Jerusalem.”

“I do, and he still believes that he can persuade you to supply funds and men.”

“It will not happen. I can’t afford to divide our forces. Threats from Noor-ud-din grow stronger every day, and the Moorish occupation of Aleppo more brutal.”

“I understand.” She blew lightly on the dragonfly, and the creature tightened its grip. “I hope you know that Louis’s support of your intention to invade Aleppo would not necessarily work in your favour. He has never recovered from events at Mount Cadmos, and the physicks sedate his nightmares with the juice of poppies. All this talk of penance, long hours spent in prayer and mortification, is not what it appears.”

“Then what does he hope to achieve in Jerusalem? If anything, the unrest in that city is greater than all of Asia Minor.”

“I have tried to tell him so, reminding him of his empty throne in France, but his cocoon thickens by the hour…and I no longer have the interest or strength to tear at it.” The dragonfly shivered and lifted off. Eleanor watched her soar in great loops toward the waterfalls.

“I hope you know that you have sanctuary in Antioch for as long as you need it,” Raymond said.

“I do, and thank you for it, but my presence as the estranged queen of a foreign land does not serve you either. I have been to see the Bishop and believe I’ve found a way to relieve all our tensions.”

He looked at her with alarm. “Beware of extreme measures,
ma nièce
. Weak and thwarted men can be the most dangerous.”

“What have I to fear? Death? When I am not in these glades, surrounded by Nature’s perfection, I almost welcome it. Our daughter, Marie, lives in Paris and scarcely knows her parents. As queen, I have achieved nothing, and I come away from my rare occasions with Louis feeling even smaller. How much can a woman shrink, how little must she think of and for herself before her captor relents?”

Raymond wrapped an arm around her shoulder and drew her close. “My sweet Álienor, you are captive to no one, and what you describe is not the destiny that awaits. I remember you at four years old when Father and his beloved held court at Poitiers. The musicians were still warming up, and you were already on the dance floor. In the wee hours, when most of the palace slept from exhaustion, you would creep downstairs to catch the final, off-tune verses of the troubadours. Love rules your soul, my niece, not penitence.”

Eleanor rested her head on his shoulder, imagining herself as the dragonfly at the moment of departing. “If that is so, then I should like to know what rules my heart, for the bars around it strain.”

“We all feel that strain, but please, be careful in the matter of your husband.”

“I will.” She sat up and rotated her ankles while the lyrics of a farandole skipped through her memory.
I met a man who made me feel when I would rather think. He danced for me a pretty reel before I could scarce blink.
“What news have you of Grand-mère?”

“None, for some time. Receipts used to arrive with notes from the prioress, but with these latest hostilities, I suggested she refrain from sending anything that might be intercepted.”

“The Queen of Heaven will look after her, and so will Grand-père.”

Le Prieuré de la Reine du Ciel
Pyrenees, Southern France
PRESENT DAY

“There are two ways to enter the Priory grounds,” Gavriel Navarro said, as he and Silvina stood in the driveway. “We could take the road toward Cerabornes about half a kilometer. There’s a parking lot and an old shepherd’s trail. Or we could shortcut through the poplars, three minutes to the orchard.” He gestured toward the back of the house.

“I’m all for shortcuts.”

He pulled a digital camera from his jacket and tested a few settings. “Poplars it is, then.”

They walked past the shed and outbuildings of stone and shingle that looked as though they might have housed chickens once. The coin-shaped leaves jingled like soft applause, like arboreal tambourines, and their smooth, gray trunks reminded Silvina of elephants. They had trees like these at Twice Past Sunset, her father’s fishing lodge; she’d loved the sound and feel of them then, too.

“So you’re a poet,” she said, adjusting to Gavriel’s long-legged stride.

“I am.”

“Published?”

“Yes. Several books.”

“That’s amazing. I know nothing about poetry or poets. Do you write anything else?”

He paused and snapped five or six photos of a bright red cardinal that Silvina hadn’t noticed. “Have you heard of
The Light Stalker’s Handbook
?”

“Um, sorry, no.”

“Well, that’s my something else. Part autobiography, part inspiration. I wrote it to help fund a project, but so far it’s proving to be a royal pain.”

They came out of the grove into a shallow, bowl-like valley with scattered stone buildings in varying degrees of ruin. Most of the buildings were roofless, except for a few beams and crumbling red tiles. Small, gnarly trees were just beginning to leaf out, and the rocky soil and last year’s grass created an aura of sepia.

“This is it?” Silvina asked.

“It’s only the beginning. The priory grounds are laid out like beads on a string. This is the first bead. Excuse me, there’s something I need to photograph.” He wandered off about twenty feet, toward what looked like a stone fence. He got down on one knee, tilting the camera this way and that, moving in for close-ups.

Nothing prevented Silvina from wandering the grounds on her own; the land was open enough they could hardly lose each other. But the bead, as he called it, felt, not threatening, not unwelcoming, just…guarded, like the Ojibway lands in Canada where Dad used to buy tax-free smokes. She waited for the clicking of Gavriel’s camera to slow before joining him.

“Do you know what all these buildings used to be?” she asked.

“Some, yes.” He’d been photographing a patch of iridescent moss with tiny, star-shaped yellow flowers that draped over the graystone like velvet brocade. “This moss only blooms one day a year. I was afraid I’d missed it.”

Silvina examined the ruins they grew on. The fence turned out to be walls of a circular structure about twelve feet across with enough broken graystone to suggest there may have been a second floor once. “So what was this?” she asked. “Some kind of silo?”

“It was a trysting place.”

“Oh.” She looked around. “Did you say trysting?”

“Mm-hm.” He got up and brushed the dirt off his knees, then scrolled through the photos he’d just taken.

Gavriel’s English was flawless, but she wondered whether he’d meant to say gristing… or int’resting. “This was a religious community, wasn’t it?”

“I asked Viv the same question. She said it was a lay priory.” The corner of his mouth twitched. Apparently, his comprehension of wordplay was flawless too.

“I see.”

“Shall we continue?”

“Yes.” They walked through clusters of small gnarly trees that seemed to have been planted in conjunction with the buildings as wind screens, shade, and, perhaps, beautiful views through windows. “Are these all fruit trees?”

“Fruit and nut. The priory was famous for apricots, walnuts, and pecans, with most of the root stock dating back to the time of Eleanor of Aquitaine, about eight hundred years ago.”

“Cool. My employer used to live here, and she said the apricots in their peak years were larger than peaches, and always sweet, never woody.”

“She was one of the Daughters?”

“Yes, her name is Blythe Pendaris. You may have read about her. Did Viv ever talk about those years, what it meant to be a Daughter of Babylon?”

“She talked about the friendships, the closeness, the creativity. There were guys too, you know. Everyone pitched in. That name the women took comes from old shepherd legends that say this land was first developed—no, that’s a poor word—in Basque, they say
dinamizatzen
, made dynamic, energized, by refugees from Bab-El when the Tower fell and language splintered, and the group, they say, was led by daughters of the last high priest.”

“You really know your languages.”

“I wish I could speak them all.” He laughed. “Frustration of a poet, I guess.”

“Who is this poet you’re translating?”

“The Galician? We don’t know much about him. His name is Arturo. He may have been a knight, a squire, or just a regular plowman. Viv spent years gathering fragments of his poetry from villages in northern Spain, Aragón, all through the Pyrenees, and she always visited the shepherds. Even the young ones could quote Arturo’s verses. She believed that shepherds may be our last living, oral archivists.”

They walked through narrows, high elevation passes she presumed to be the string between beads, and they felt colder than the open grounds. There were swells of land that rose so gradually that Silvina wasn’t aware until she felt exertion in her calves, and vast meadows that appeared to be empty until suddenly a new cluster of buildings would appear. Sometimes, she saw flocks of sheep in the distance that kept to the slopes and not the valley.

Walking over a small rise, Silvie snagged the toe of her purple Keds on a tree root, and if Gavriel hadn’t been walking half a step ahead and gazing in her direction, he wouldn’t have caught her like a toppled pine. She laughed and thanked him.

“
De nada
,” he said. “Sometimes, we’re walking on old aqueducts. The timelessness of this place is amazing.”

“So you are Spanish,” she said.

“I am from South America.”

Gavriel had large, dark eyes framed by thick lashes that were somewhere between chocolate and forest green. His eyes reminded her of the north woods of Canada, layered, impenetrable, potentially dangerous.

Spider bites of fear moved up her spine, collecting in a knot at the back of her neck. Blythe had warned her less than three hours ago:
Get out of the house
. She’d come home to find a man
in
the house, and now she was out here in the middle of absolutely nowhere with him.

“We should be getting back,” Silvina said. “It’ll be dark soon.”

“There’s still hours of daylight, and you haven’t seen anything yet.”

“What more is there to see?”

“Did Vivian tell you about
La Tapiada
?”

“Not that I recall. What does that mean?”

“Come over here, I’ll show you.”

Silvina glanced back the way they’d come, wondering how long they’d been walking and how long she could outrun him, if it came to that.

If Gavriel was aware of her paranoia, he wasn’t showing it. He trod on what appeared to be the same ordinary grass, only now he followed some kind of arc. “It’s best if you walk where I walk,” he said. “Until you know what to look for, the path is easy to miss.”

“What path?”

He didn’t answer. He did slow down occasionally to snap photos of small things close to the ground.

La Tapiada
. Silvina rubbed the knot at the back of her neck and reviewed her internal Rosetta Stone for some clue as to its meaning. Tapioca was the best she could do, absurd enough to relieve her tension a little.

Sure enough, there was a path. A petal design of packed earth looped out and in, with contours of buildings that fit the flower shape. Once she saw that, Silvina noticed bits of cobblestone amidst the grass and gravel, some of it still tightly fitted, nearly pristine. Following Gavriel, she came toward what must have been the center of the flower, and she wondered with a jolt how she could not have seen it.

It was, by far, the largest and most intact of all the buildings. Hewn stones, three to four feet high, beveled on the edges, formed a long wall, and in the middle of the wall was an arched doorway.

“We’re standing now at the heart of the priory,” Gavriel said. “This building contained the refectory, the chapel, private apartments of the Mother Superior, and cells for the protected.” He indicated a row of crumbling pillars that ran parallel to the wall. “This is the cloister gallery. It ran the entire length of this building as an enclosed courtyard, the kind you’d see in Moorish architecture, like the Alhambra.”

Silvina wandered toward the pillars and stooped to inspect them. They looked Grecian in design with concave grooves like the Doric columns of the Parthenon. And beneath her feet were fragments of mosaic tile in geometric and floral motifs in deep and brilliant blue, like the
azulejo
tiles she’d ordered for her kitchen backsplash at home.

“I shouldn’t be walking on these.” She rose and lifted her feet, one after the other.

“It’s all right. Frost and winter melt do far more damage, and villagers repair it with new tiles every spring. This would kill archeologists.” He made a beckoning gesture. “Come and look from here.”

She went to stand beside him at the priory entrance, and from that angle, even through the detritus of weeds, the pattern of the grounds revealed loops and whorls that wove through triangles and circles with an almost three-dimensional, star tetrahedral effect. The top of Silvie’s head buzzed and tingled, as if someone were trying to fit a skull cap with hundreds of little suction cups. “Who designed this? I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“This was all part of a Goddess culture, even the narrows, which weren’t built for defense as you might think but as a means of directing energy or intent.”

“What Goddess are we talking about?”

“Demeter, Ceres, Artemis, Inanna, even Mary, they’re all aspects of the same Goddess. At the height of
Reine du Ciel
, they say, there was no competition, only abundance. You know how in the Old Testament, Jacob’s sons would go to Egypt during seasons of drought, where there was always surplus? This was one of those places.”