Enoch's Device

ENOCH’S DEVICE

by JOSEPH FINLEY

Enoch’s Device

Copyright © 2012 by Joseph Finley. All rights reserved.

Published by TaraStone Press

Second Kindle edition: 2013

Edited by Michael Carr

Cover and Interior Design by
Streetlight Graphics

Map and Illustrations by
Streetlight Graphics

ISBN: 978-0-9884108-2-4 (Paperback)

ISBN: 978-0-9884108-1-7 (ePub)

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events either are products of the author’s imagination or are portrayed fictitiously.

All rights reserved. This book and parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by the copyright law of the United States of America.

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

A NOTE ON PRONUNCIATION

Much of this novel is set in tenth century Ireland and France, so it contains a few Gaelic and old French names that can be a bit difficult to pronounce. The following is a rough pronunciation guide for some of the trickier words.

Adémar—A-deh-mar

Alais—AH-lay

Blois—Blwa

Cellach—KELL-ahk

Ciarán—KEER-in

Columcille—KULL-im-kill

Curach—KUR-ahk

Dónall—DOE-nall

Dub-dá-leithe—Doo-daw-le-he

Gauzlin—GO-slin

Évrard—eh-VRAAR

Maugis—MO-zhee

Poitiers—PWA-tee-ay

Tuatha dé Danann—Thoo-a-haw-day-dah-nawn

EPIGRAPH

In Aquitaine a rain of blood fell upon the flesh of men, staining their clothes and even the stones, which could not be washed away.

—William, duke of Aquitaine, in a letter to Robert, king of France, c. A.D. 998

The first angel blew his trumpet, and there came hail and fire, mixed with blood, and they were hurled to the earth . . .

—Revelation 8:7

PART I

Who is there like Job . . . who goes in company with evildoers and walks with the wicked?

—Job 34:7-8

O
n the darkest day of
November 997, a black-hulled ship arrived at Derry. It appeared at the holy hour of Sext, which marked Adam’s sin and Christ’s crucifixion. Storm clouds heralded the vessel’s approach, as if God had seen fit to blot out the sun before the ship moored at the ramshackle pier on the river Foyle.

Nearly a hundred monks from the nearby monastery gathered on the riverbank. Among them, Brother Ciarán, a twenty-year-old scribe, craned his neck to get a glimpse of the black-robed bishop and three priests standing in the bow. The others who sailed with them were hard-looking men wearing round helmets and polished mail. Ciarán felt a lump of apprehension in the pit of his stomach. Armed men were rarely seen at Derry, and their presence never boded well.

“Why so many warriors?” Ciarán asked the senior monk standing beside him.

Brother Dónall mac Taidg drew his cowl over his balding head. His close-cropped gray beard framed a rugged face more befitting an Irish chieftain than a monastic scholar. “To intimidate us, I suspect,” he muttered. “The bishop will be the one in charge.”

“I’ve never seen a bishop in black robes.”

“That’s because God didn’t love that man enough to make him Irish, lad. Back on the continent, they dye their robes black—think it’s some grand symbol of piety or some such tripe.”

Ciarán half smiled. “And I suppose you disagree?”

“Are you suggesting I’m disagreeable?” Dónall replied with only the hint of a grin. “I spent enough time over there, lad, to know something about the vanities of the Holy Roman Church.”

“Where do you suppose they’re from?”

“Do you not see the pennant?” Dónall pointed to a strip of blue cloth fluttering from the ship’s masthead. Three golden lilies dotted the fabric. “That ship’s from France.”

“What are Franks doing here?”

Dónall leaned on his walking staff, looking as if he had aged overnight. “I wish I knew.”

Ciarán looked back toward the ship, where a blunt-faced soldier with rope and tackle was lowering the end of a short, wide ramp to the pier. A broadsword hung at his side. The murmur of speculation from the throng of monks grew as two more soldiers emerged from the ship, each with the leash of a huge brown mastiff looped around his wrist. The great beasts, each the weight of an Irish wolfhound, padded down the ramp and sat obediently at their handlers’ feet.

The bishop disembarked next. Taller than the soldiers, he regarded the monks with gleaming, almost feral eyes above a sharp nose and a mustache and beard flecked with gray. A silver crucifix hung from his neck, and a black skullcap topped a ruff of graying hair that only added to his wolflike visage. He strode down the pier as four more swordsmen, each with a mastiff on a lead, came off the ship. The murmuring on the riverbank stopped, and even the breeze died, as if on cue.

In a commanding voice, the bishop addressed them in Latin: “Who is abbot here?”

Dub-dá-leithe, the abba of Derry, stepped from the crowd, his hands clasped over the tip of a waist-length beard as white as limestone. In his eighty-second year, he could well be the oldest man in all Ireland. “
Ego sum abbas,
” he said. “And peace be with you. But who might you be?”

“I am Adémar, bishop of Blois. I have come here on behalf of the archbishops of Paris and Reims—and, through them, on the authority of our Holy Father, Pope Gregory, in Rome. I have twenty-three men and six dogs, who will need food and shelter. I pray the hospitality of your monastery is as good as rumored.”

Abba nodded. “We can house your men. But, pray, why have you been sent here?”

The bishop surveyed the gathered monks as distant thunder growled in the charcoal sky. “I have come in the eleventh hour to warn you all,” he said sternly. “For your lives—and your souls—are in danger. I have evidence that in this monastery, the devil works his mischief. For a sorcerer walks among you.”

A gasp rose from the throng of monks. “Can you believe this?” Ciarán whispered over his shoulder.

But he spoke to no one. Dónall was gone.

*

Lightning flashed, followed by a violent thunder crack that drowned out the chorus of questions and speculations erupting in the wake of the bishop’s pronouncement. The dark clouds flared and rumbled again, then unleashed a torrent of rain, scattering the crowd of monks.

Abba implored them to return to their work and gather again at Nones. “We’ll discuss this then!” he cried over the pounding rain.

Before Ciarán could fumble for his cowl and draw it over his head, the downpour had soaked through his habit, and water streamed down his face. Scampering behind the others through the gateway of the monastery’s earthen wall, he searched for Dónall. Surely there could be no connection between the bishop’s dire words and Dónall’s sudden departure. While it was true that Dónall knew things beyond most men’s ken, such as Arabic medicine and the science of astronomy, these were things he had learned in France, at the Cathedral School of Reims, a gathering place for the greatest minds in Christendom—a place, Dónall said, where Virgil and Cicero lived again as if Rome had never fallen, and where Socrates still walked in the open spaces, posing questions to his disciples. Dónall had studied there years before Ciarán was born, and the fact the school had invited an Irish monk into its hallowed halls remained a source of pride at Derry. And while some of Ciarán’s brethren found the ideas Dónall brought from Reims unorthodox and even a little crazy, no one at Derry had ever equated them with sorcery or the devil’s work. Still, Dónall’s sudden departure left Ciarán with a growing sense of unease.

The monks hurried up Derry’s green hillside toward the monastery, a cluster of buildings with close-jointed dry stone walls and corbelled roofs. Rushing beneath the round tower built two hundred years ago as both lookout and sanctuary from Viking raids, they made for the workshops, granaries, and scores of beehive-shaped cells where the monks slept. A half dozen headed for the scriptorium—one of the larger buildings, with a high-peaked thatch roof. Ciarán followed them inside, out of the pounding rain, and they warmed themselves around the crackling fire in the hearth on the far wall. In the center of the room, the rough-hewn tables were strewn with scrolls and stacks of books, and along the rows of windows beneath the eaves sat the tilted desks of copyists, bearing sheets of parchment, inkhorns, and jars stuffed with brushes and quills. Ciarán removed his drenched cowl as his friend Niall walked up.

“So now the devil works among us?” Niall quipped. He shook the rain from his short-cropped hair, which was a shade of color somewhere between rust and autumn maple leaves. His eyes sparkled with a familiar mischief. “Guess I didn’t notice when he moved his lodgings up here from the underworld. But seriously, who do you suppose that bishop is going on about?”

Ciarán shook his head. “These are our brothers. We’ve known them our whole lives.”
And Dónall better than most.
Back when Ciarán’s mother died of fever, so long ago he could no longer remember her face, it was Dónall who brought him here to the monastery and raised him as a son. That kindness had saved him from a less than promising life as the bastard of a nun from Kildare who had strayed from her vows, and for that Ciarán was grateful. He could not turn his back on Dónall now. “No one here’s a sorcerer,” he muttered.

“I didn’t think so,” Niall said. “But who do these bloody Franks think they are? We don’t need any authority from archbishops in France or popes in Rome.”

“Amen to that, brother.”

Niall brushed the raindrops from his forehead. “And what’s all this about coming to us in the eleventh hour?”

Ciarán smiled and shook his head. “Don’t you ever
read
the books you copy? It’s from scripture—a reference to the end times.”

“Ah yes, the millennium,” Niall groaned. “Only two years before the whole world gets swallowed up into hell. I’ve heard that’s all those priests on the Continent think about. Do you believe it?”

“Saint Augustine didn’t, and I think Dónall finds it all a bit nonsensical. Let’s hope they’re right—we’re a bit young to be dying now.”

“Can’t say I disagree with you there.”

Outside, thunder cracked again, followed by a cacophony of barking. Ciarán jerked his head toward the sound and rushed to the windows, along with Niall and a dozen others.

Ciarán gripped the windowsill and sucked in a breath. Downhill, past the earthen wall, six armed and mailed Franks unleashed their mastiffs, who bound toward the woods that framed the sprawling peat bog on Derry’s west side. The Franks ran behind the dogs as fast as their heavy mail would allow.

“Whoever it was must have fled into the woods!” exclaimed Brother Fintan, one of the junior monks.

“I’ll be damned,” Niall said.

As the scribes around him broke into a flurry of questions and conjecture, Ciarán stood silent, struggling to comprehend everything that was happening. He prayed that Dónall was safe, but shuddered at the thought of those thick-jawed mastiffs and their sword-wielding masters. Ciarán went to his desk and sat down, ignoring the pages of Saint Augustine’s
City of God,
which he had spent the past month illuminating. He was too worried about Dónall and the black-robed bishop’s ominous pronouncement. No one else could work, either, and when the bells rang for the holy hour of Nones, he hastened with the others to the oratory, where Abba had promised they would learn more about this bishop and his troubling claims.

*

Candles dimly lit the oratory, and the scent of burning tallow blended with the mustiness of the 112 woolen-cloaked monks huddled inside. On the altar sat Derry’s treasured relics, all pertaining to its founder, Saint Columcille, and encased in vessels of silver and gold: the Psalter over which the saint fought the Battle of Cúl Dreimhne, a lock of the saint’s hair, and a splinter from his cudgel.

A quartet of monks stood and sang, their voices rising and falling with the rhythm of the verses. At the end of each Psalm, the brethren bowed to the altar and then knelt for prayer. As junior monks, Ciarán and Niall prayed near the back of the oratory, along with several of their friends: Fintan, Murchad, and the twins, Áed and Ailil. Closer to the altar stood Abba and the senior monks, along with the bishop and his three black-robed priests.

At the end of the third Psalm, the brethren knelt and fell prostrate with their arms outstretched on the floor, for the final prayer. When it was done, they stood.

Abba looked reluctantly at Bishop Adémar. “Go on,” he said, “say what you’ve come here to say. Then we must get back to the Lord’s work.”

Ciarán felt himself tense up the moment the bishop spoke. “Brothers of Derry,” he began, “now is the time to fear for your souls. We stand here on the brink of the millennium—one thousand years since our Savior’s birth. The time when, scripture tells us, the enemy of God shall be freed from his eternal prison. When the beasts of the apocalypse shall rise from sea and land to rule over men, while the armies of Gog and Magog gather to punish the wicked.”

A hush settled over the brethren.
“See what I mean,”
Niall whispered to Ciarán, who gave a slight nod.

“The signs and portents of the end times abound,” Bishop Adémar continued. “The Four Horsemen of the apocalypse—the Vikings from the north, the Bulgars and the Magyars from the east, and the Saracens from the south—besiege the kingdoms of Europe, raping, pillaging, and killing. Near Verdun, a convent of nuns saw fiery armies battling in the sky, and a dragon with great wings of flame! In England, a star shot across the heavens, burning so brightly it turned night into day. And near Rome, Mount Vesuvius erupted with brimstone and liquid fire, belching forth the stench of hell that lingered over the city for seven days.”

The rows of gray-cowled monks shuffled uneasily, and a murmur spread throughout the oratory. The bishop regarded them with a cunning gleam in his eyes. “Despite these signs,” he said, “there are heretics who deny these things, who serve the devil through their lies and threaten the souls of those around them. And as I warned you this morning, one of these heretics lives among you.”

“Who?” asked Brother Cellach, a gaunt-faced senior monk.

The bishop let the question linger a moment before answering. “He is known to you as Dónall mac Taidg.”

A gasp rose from the crowd. Even though Ciarán had expected the answer, it stung to hear Dónall’s name. Throughout the oratory, heads turned.

“Where is he?” someone asked.

“As proof of his guilt,” Bishop Adémar replied, “he fled the moment I arrived. But my mastiffs will find him.”

“It cannot be,” said brother Ewan, another of the senior monks. “Dónall, a sorcerer?
Think
about it!”

“Sorcery was his greatest crime,” Bishop Adémar said. “But there is murder, too.”

Ciarán felt the lump in the pit of his stomach harden.

“Impossible!” someone insisted as the murmuring subsided.

“Yet true,” Bishop Adémar replied. “For when Dónall mac Taidg studied at the Cathedral School of Reims he became a servant of the devil. In a chamber beneath the school, he and eleven other monks practiced sorcery, using a forbidden book of spells—a dark and foul tome that is the very conduit to demons and all the denizens of hell! When Adalbero, the archbishop of Reims, suspected this heresy, he sent one of his canons to investigate, but they murdered this man of God to conceal their crimes.”

Niall shot Ciarán a troubled look.

“This is mad,” Ciarán whispered, clenching his fists.

“Seven of the devil’s minions confessed,” Bishop Adémar continued. “They were tried for heresy and convicted of their crimes. But Dónall mac Taidg fled and returned here. And now a heretic walks among you, ready to infect the brothers of Derry with his blasphemies, spreading his heresy—the greatest threat to our immortal souls as we prepare for the end of days.” Bishop Adémar reached out his hands to implore the assembled monks. “We must be the sword of divine judgment in these end times. The book of Revelation instructs us that sorcerers and murderers are condemned to the lake of fire. So on this earth they must burn!”

Ciarán could resist no longer. “You’re wrong!” he shouted above the murmur. “We know this man. He fears God and is our friend.” A chorus of agreement swelled.