Daughters of Babylon (26 page)

Eleanor turned at the waist and pushed through folds of useless silk, determined to follow the retreating apparition, but as she turned, the dimensions of the cabin revolved around her in clicks and creaks like the tumbler of a Kashmiri locking puzzle, and Bilqees, who’d been creeping across the ceiling cried aloud, “Aaaaiiii! The ship has turned herself. We are upright.”

The Persian dancer filled her lungs from a pocket of air that hadn’t been there a moment ago, then dove down for Catarina, now unconscious. Arturo pushed off from the porthole and caught Eleanor’s hand. They linked fingers, eyes locking for a moment, and together they swam to the surface, to life.

The men who kicked the door in moments later and carried the four survivors to the deck, and thence to a rowboat and nearby ship, were not the crew of the
Santa Clara
. Most of them, including the Sicilian captain, had drowned. Their rescuers were pirates of Greek Byzantium who’d seen the ship hit broadside by a freak wave and capsize. Masters of tempest, they threw two anchors from their ship
Nausicaa
to catch a side of the hull in such a way that the momentum of waves and their maneuvering pulled the boat up again.

The Greeks claimed ship and contents for the Emperor, but when their captain recognized the fair-haired woman in purple as Eleanor, queen of the Franks and friend of Emperor Manuel I Komnenus, they knew the Fates had smiled. The captain assigned sailors round the clock to tend to the hostages, building them makeshift cabins on deck where the air was healthier, and feeding them broth of cod and dried berries, while the sea fell to doldrums, and hot sun baked the upper planks of the towed
Santa
Clara
dry. Try as they might, the pirates could not catch currents to their home port near Hagios Theologos, and they floundered.

Eleanor, regaining strength, found herself once again sitting on the deck of a ship at twilight. She’d forgotten most of the ancient Greek she learned as a child, so she asked Bilqees to translate a conversation with the captain, a terse fellow with palsy that pulled up one side of his leathery face.

“Ask him, please, if he or members of his fleet also overtook a sister vessel called
La Purezza.
”

Bilqees translated and conveyed the reply. “He says they have encountered no Sicilian ships or any other since the storm.”

“Does he have word of any going down?”

“None, milady.”

Scarcely had their conversation finished when a fleet of war ships deployed by King Roger of Sicily bore down on
Nausicaa
and the disabled
Santa Clara.
By nightfall, after a brief combat and surrender of the Byzantine captain at knife point, Eleanor and her entourage became guests, not hostages, on yet a third ship. And still another eight weeks would pass in that freakish season on the Mediterranean before she would hear a sailor cry out,
“Terra
avanti
!”, and watch from steering quarters as they pulled into the teeming port of Palermo. In all that time, she received no news of Louis or of his ship
La Purezza
, and Eleanor thought, surely this ill-fated marriage is now behind me.

The apricot beignet helped. It was probably a blood sugar thing.

Silvina returned to the stacks of poetry, the convulsive laughter behind her, while Gavriel went to the breakfast bar and laid out onions, garlic, tomato, and fresh herbs for the omelet. She lifted random sheets of paper. “So what am I looking for, exactly?”

“Patterns.”

“Of what?”

“
I only need to think of you, a garden grows
.”

“Excuse me?”

Gavriel was examining the blade of a long, sleek cutting knife. “It’s from one of Arturo’s poems, first stack on your left.”

She read the opening lines from the verse that happened to be on top.

If you could hear the stillness of the footsteps of my lover…

“Wow, romantic guy. So we have a knight, probably, who knew his way around the ladies…and we have a satirist, Wiley Forrest. Jester in those days. Offhand, I’d say we’re looking at a court structure, medieval org chart. Toinelle mentioned that Eleanor of Aquitaine supported
Reine du Ciel
financially. Everything around here seems to hold traces of her. Are these people from her court?”

“Most likely, but we have no proof. Hold on.” He set down the knife and went around the breakfast bar to the pile of books she’d noticed earlier. He carried them into the living room, the stack reached his chin, and he placed them on the floor beside Silvina. They were a mixture of fiction and nonfiction, hard and soft covers, library discards with missing dust jackets; many smelled of mildew. “I want to get them out of here, but it’s good you see them first.”

“Where are they from?”

“Viv’s library. They’re all books about Eleanor or from that era, and none of them mention
Reine du Ciel
, Arturo of Padrón, Wiley Forrest, or poetry. There’s almost nothing about the Court of Love and when it is mentioned, it’s dismissed as legend, an exaggeration. Some say it never existed.”

“The Court of Love…is that, like, chivalry, manners, jousting for your lady love, that sort of thing?”

Gavriel returned to the kitchen and started chopping onions. “No. Manners and chivalry were already a part of court life in Spain, had been for centuries. That’s not what they created.”

“By they, you mean…?”

“Her inner circle. The people who surrounded Eleanor.” Wafts of tear-inducing onion crossed the room. Gavriel wiped his eyes and smashed a garlic clove with his fist against the side of the knife blade.

Silvina looked through the pages again. “I don’t get the sense of a king in any of these.”

“I didn’t either. But she was married to two of them—the king of France and the king of England. She had lots of kids, I don’t know how many, with the king of England, Richard the Lionheart being one of them, but the Court of Love was something separate. It was hers.”

“That can’t have been easy to manage.”

“What?”

“All of it.” She watched him slide the onions and garlic into a pan. “So what’s your interest in this? I mean, we have this huge body of work, it obviously came from somewhere, but if it proves something about Eleanor, so what? Toinelle might set up a nice exhibit in her museum, but it’s not like thousands are going to break the door down to come see it.”

He whipped the eggs with a wire whisk and poured them in a spiral toward the center of the pan. “Multiple streams of abundance,” he said. “Appreciation as primary sense. The vibrational power of sound and colour to restructure thought.”

“You’re quoting phrases from the Full Spectrum website.”

“Actually, I’m quoting from the pages in front of you.”

“Where?” She lifted random sheets. “Where?”

“How should I know? I’m cooking.”

Excitement bordering on panic was scrambling her brain. Nothing she looked at resembled what she did with corporate executives, a sign to stop looking. “Okay, let me pull at other threads. You’ve told me this land was settled thousands of years ago by refugees from the collapse of the Tower of Bab-El. Vivian and Blythe called themselves Daughters of Babylon. In the seven years they lived at
Reine du Ciel
, orchards and gardens produced mammoth crops with continuous harvests. Are you suggesting that all of this...” She swept her hand over the table. “…is somehow related to Full Spectrum Training?” Her heart continued to thump like a puppy dog’s tail.

“Now you’re getting it. Your work is an extension of Tri-Partite Academy, is it not, what your boss developed?”

“Yes.”

“Have you never wondered where she found those radical ideas that made her so wealthy? Or, better question, how she found them?” He tipped and shook the pan, set it down, and lowered the flame.

“By following the model of the Court of Love?”

“Bingo! Breakfast is nearly ready. The bathroom is through that door if you need to freshen up.”

“Thanks.” Silvie crossed the room and wondered why, after all they’d talked about and given her current state of agitation, the only word that kept flashing at the back of her eyelids was bathroom.

After they’d finished eating at the dinette table, Silvina was tucking the documents into a backpack Gavriel loaned her when her gaze fell to the box in the corner. A little larger than a bread box, it sat on broken twine with a fedora on top. A sprawling naked lady, flashing neon lights…

“Were you, by any chance, in Toulouse at a print shop about ten days ago?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Across from a student pub, call the Elke Füme?”

“Maybe. I don’t remember what was across the street.”

“You came out of the store with this box. You were wearing the hat and gloves. It was raining, a cold night.”

“Where were you?”

“Across the street, upstairs.”

“But why do you remember?”

She shook her head. “It was a silly thing, to do with French plumbing. You looked up. You didn’t see me, though, did you?”

“I don’t think so. I might have looked up to see if it was still raining. I didn’t want the books to get wet.” He gave the box a kick. “I should have let them dissolve. Waste of gas, waste of time.”

“Why?”

He folded back a flap, pulled out a softcover book, and handed it to her. “These were supposed to be gifts for the translators at the Navarrosa event this weekend. It’s only a draft, but I thought they would enjoy a preview.”

The Light Stalkers’ Handbook: Reflections of an Amazonian River Guide
by Gavriel Navarro.

“You were a river guide? On the Amazon?”

He laughed. “A long time ago, yes. I was very young.”

The cover art featured the kind of pastel forest in which one might find a unicorn or mushroom-capped fairy. “Did you design the cover?” Silvie asked carefully.

“God, no, there are no colours like that in the rain forest. But that’s not the worst of it. Go ahead, look through the book.”

She tried to flip through the pages, but it was spined on both sides. “Oh, no. All of them?”

“All fifty copies. She offered to redo them, but now that I’ve seen the final product, I don’t want her near my work again. I should have designed the cover myself, but I’ve been busy, and she claimed to have a Fine Arts degree from the Sorbonne.”

Silvina squeezed the sides of the mutant book together and peered down into the pages. “This is prose? Nonfiction?”

“That’s right.”

“No poetry?”

“A few stanzas here and there, why?”

“Are you okay with me slicing the book open?”

“If you want, but—”

“And would you have a spare copy of your published poems, something I could take with me and annotate?”

“Sure, hold on.” He went to the bedroom and returned a moment later with a slender volume in soft blues and grays.

She studied the front and back covers of
The Wind and the Sea: Poems and Reflections on a Voyage of No Return.
She flipped through the pages and read a few lines. “This is more like it.”

“More like what? I don’t understand your sudden interest in my poetry.”

“But it’s all connected, don’t you see? My grandmother scrubbed bathrooms in the college where Canada’s most famous poet teaches. You burst through a neon martini glass I mistook for a bidet, and blocked my way to the toilet my first day at Viv’s house. This book you’ve worked so hard on turns out to be crap. You asked me to look for patterns. I’m seeing them.”

Gavriel looked as though he’d stepped in something. “Patterns of what?”

“A suppressed thought system. Something that works—or worked—extremely well at one time and is now being pushed down.” She dropped the two books into the backpack. “It’s quite possible you have something here.”

“You will be careful though, right?”

She slipped the backpack over her shoulders. “Gavriel, no offense…but these are a bunch of poems.”

Le Prieuré de Reine du Ciel
Atlantic Pyrenees
SUMMER, A.D. 1151

Three women and two children waited in the garden of the cloister gallery for the Prioress. They wore plain wool mantels and headdresses of coarse linen; no one had paid them the slightest heed when they stopped at the winery of St. Jacques de la Rivière on the final leg of their journey to purchase a bottle or two. The older child was a girl of five or six with red-gold hair that many called
oriflamme
; she chased a bright blue butterfly. The younger one, just over a year, slept in the arms of a wetnurse. Sister Benedicta came into the garden, and her face lit up.