The Tenth Chamber (12 page)

Alon held out his hand. ‘I’ll be fine. When I was your age I was commanding a tank in the Sinai.’

Luc started filling Hugo in on the first day’s activities but as he was speaking, he sensed his friend was restless. Suddenly Luc stopped talking and demanded, ‘What is it?’

‘How come you’re not asking me about the manuscript?’

‘Has there been progress?’

‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of a Caesar cipher?’

Luc impatiently shook his head.

‘Well, it’s a pathetically easy code that Julius Caesar used for secret messages. It practically requires your foe to be illiterate since it’s so easy to break, just a shift of say three letters to the right or left. Most of his enemies couldn’t have even read the plain Latin so it worked fine for him. Over time code breakers and code writers competed for rather more sophisticated methods.’

Luc was red-faced with testiness.

‘Okay, okay, well according to my guy from Brussels, one of the Voynich geniuses, our manuscript was coded with something called the Vigenère cipher which by itself is pretty remarkable since it wasn’t thought to be invented until the sixteenth century. It looks like our Barthomieu or a colleague was a few hundred years ahead of his time. I won’t bore you with the details but it’s a far more complicated variant of the Caesar cipher with an additional requirement of requiring secret key words for deciphering.’

‘If you don’t cut to the chase, I’m going to kill you with my bare hands,’ Luc shouted.

‘This morning, before I left Paris, my Belgian geek told me he was close to cracking a few pages. He thinks there are probably at least three sections, each with its own key word. He was crunching numbers, or whatever it is that computer people crunch, and he told me he’d email me when he had something definitive. Is there someplace I can check my mail?’

Luc practically grabbed him by his jacket. ‘The office. Let’s go.’

As they passed the camp fire, Luc pointed at a woman and said to Hugo, ‘By the way, that’s Sara.’

Immediately he wished he’d kept quiet because Hugo sprinted towards her and introduced himself as one of Luc’s oldest friends not to mention the co-discoverer of the cave.

‘I’ve heard of you,’ she sparkled. ‘I can’t believe we never met back when, you know, Luc and I . . .’

‘And I’ve heard of you too!’ Hugo exclaimed. ‘So lovely, so intelligent. Luc, come over here!’

Luc approached, shaking his head in anticipation of what was coming. ‘Don’t be making trouble, Hugo.’

‘Trouble? Me? It’s just that, well, Sara, I’ll be blunt. I met a lady tonight and I’d like to ask her out but a double-date might be less of a challenge for her. How about you and Luc joining us sometime this week? I’m only here for a couple of days.’

‘Christ, Hugo,’ Luc groaned.

‘I’d love to,’ Sara said, taking Luc aback but making Hugo smile knowingly.

‘Then it’s settled. All I need to do is ask this lady and we’re set. Luc will tell you what I think about the countryside. This should make it more palatable.’

Luc switched on the office lights. The floor of the sturdy little building was vibrating along with the rumbling generator. He logged onto the web and let Hugo enter his own email portal.

The dapper man puffed out his chest and proudly announced he had twenty new messages, several from female friends, then spotted the important one. ‘Ah, it’s our code breaker!’

He opened the email. ‘Fantastic! He says he’s got six pages done. The secret keyword for the section was NIVARD, whatever that means. He’s sent the deciphered passages as an attachment and says he’ll start working on the next section soon.’

‘What does it say?’ Luc demanded.

‘Hang on, let me open it. I don’t think he even read it. He’s only interested in the code, not the text! Besides he says it’s in Latin, which for our Belgian friend is just one more cipher, a boring one.’

Hugo scanned the document getting a feel for the language.

With Luc standing over his shoulder he slowly started to read on the fly. He soon cast off the dispassionate tone of a translator. The language was too volatile and Hugo began to ardently channel the old monk’s words.

Hugo stopped to blink and wet his lips.

‘Is there more?’ Luc asked.

‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘There’s more.’

‘Then for God’s sake, keep going.’

Alon drove his rental car the way he did everything in life: pugnaciously. He accelerated hard, braked hard and navigated the short distance from the camp in over-revved lurches. A gravel parking lot had been established near the top of the cliff and when he got there he braked aggressively, his tyres spraying up pebbles. Clouds blurred the edges of the crescent moon and the night sky had tendrils of black, like the veins on the back of one’s hand. The temporary guard shelter that had been erected before the gates were installed was long gone. The CCTV images and telemetry data from the cave entrance and chambers now fed directly to the camp office.

He locked the car and zipped his bomber jacket to his throat. Convections of chilly air rolled over the valley. He felt around in his pocket for the key to the gate of the cave. It was large and heavy, a satisfying implement, almost medieval. He would have preferred complete authenticity, a flickering oil-fed lamp, but the small flashlight in his hand would have to do. He aimed it at the path and headed towards the cliff ladder.

He was eager to spend half an hour on his own, wandering the passages in the minimal light. He’d apologise to Luc in the morning in his own way, plead temporary insanity, but he had to do this. Luc would officially disapprove but the incident would pass, he was sure. The cave was calling out to him. He needed to have a private conversation with it. He’d write about the night. It would shape his thinking, maybe even shake some long-held, stubborn beliefs.

‘Damn the shamans,’ he whispered out loud, the thought escaping his lips.
Could I have been wrong?

He slowed his pace as he neared the ladder. It was a long way down and at his age he was no longer a mountain goat.

A flurry of footsteps! Running.

He startled and spun but never made it full around.

He didn’t see the log that bashed his head, never felt himself being dragged to the edge and at the last moment, at his passage through the membrane, he never heard the urgent fluttering of a pair of black-shouldered kites taking to wing, spooked by the sound of his body crashing through the oaks.

On a crystalline winter morning the great woods surrounding the new monastery were silent. The fields were calm, the flat horizon at peace.

Inside a frigid room with no more than a straw mattress, a piss pot and a basin glazed with ice, the young abbot had cast off his rough blanket because he felt his body burning, despite the cold. His skin was slick, as if freshly dunked in water. The hacking cough that had kept him up all night was quiet for now, but he knew that any minute it would return to rack his body and pound his head. He tried to breathe through his nose to prevent another spasm.

When, as a privileged youngster, Bernard became ill, a gentlewoman would attend him – an aunt or a cousin. But he had banned females from the congregation and as a consequence he was forced to rely on the not-so-tender mercies of men. His feverish lamentations turned to his beloved mother, dead so long. He still had a fading memory from early childhood, lying in bed with a raw throat, being soothed with a song, a honeyed drink and her pretty face. He was a man now, twenty-eight years old and the head of Clairvaux Abbey. For him, there was no mother and no gentle hand. He had to bear his illness stoically and trust in the benevolence of Christ for deliverance.

If his mother had survived to old age surely she would have swelled with pride at how her pious plan had unfolded. At birth she had offered each of her children – six sons and one daughter – to God, and had fully devoted herself to their Christian upbringing.

By the time Bernard had completed his education, his mother was gone. His tutors had identified him as a special talent, a young man who, in addition to noble birth and natural intellect, had a sweetness of temper, a keen wit and the kind of immense charm which blesses a man infrequently. Despite a brief flirtation with the secular seductions of literature and poetry, there was never a serious doubt that Bernard would become a minister of God.

Certainly, the path of least resistance would have taken him to the nearby Benedictine abbey in Fontaines, but he shunned that option with vehemence. He had already aligned himself philosophically with the new men of the Church – Robert of Molesme, Alberic of Cîteaux, the Cistercians who felt the strict observance of the Rule of Saint Benedict of Nursia had been forsaken by corrupted abbeys and their clergy. These Cistercians were determined to strip away the excesses of flesh and spirit that had infected the Benedictines. They would reject fine linen shirts, breeches, furs, sheets and bedspreads. Their abbeys and cloisters would never be embellished by gargoyles and chimeras. They would take their bread hard, without lard or honey. They would charge no burial dues, take no tithes, they would build their communities away from cities, towns or villages and ban all women to avoid all worldly distractions. And they would interrupt their prayers and meditations only by the kind of hard physical labour necessary for subsistence.

With this spartan ideal firmly in mind, the young Bernard was praying one day in a small wayside church, asking God for his guidance, and when he arose, he had his answer. Transfixed by the clarity of his decision, he persuaded his brothers Barthomieu and André, his uncle, Gaudry and soon, thirty-one other Burgundian nobles, to venture with him to Cîteaux, leaving the Kingdom of France for the Holy Roman Empire and leaving old lives for new. Two other brothers Gérard and Guy were away as soldiers though in time they would join him too. Only the youngest, Nivard, was left behind.

‘Farewell, Nivard,’ Bernard had called to this favourite brother the day the party rode off. ‘You will have all the lands and estates for yourself.’

The boy cried out tearfully, ‘Then you are taking Heaven and leaving me only the earth! The division is too unequal!’

These words greatly moved Bernard and there would be a pit in his stomach until the day when he and Nivard were finally reunited.

In the year 1112, Cîteaux Abbey was still all wood and no stone. It had been established fifteen years earlier but the abbot, Stephen Harding, a flinty Englishman, had not received new novices for some time. He was overjoyed by this influx of humanity and he welcomed Bernard and his entourage with open arms.

That first cold night in the lay dormitory, Bernard blissfully lay awake, the crowded room resonating with the snores of exhausted men. In the days and weeks to come, the harder the travails the greater his pleasure and in the future he would tell all novices at his gate: ‘If you desire to live in this house, leave your body behind; only spirits can enter here.’

His abilities were so exceptional and his labour so vigorous that within two years, Stephen had decided Bernard was more than ready to initiate a new sister abbey. He made him abbot and sent him off with his brothers André and Gérard and twelve other men to a house in the diocese of Langres in Champagne.

On a flat clearing, they built a simple dwelling and embarked on a life of extreme hardship, even by their own tough standards. The land was poor, they made their bread from the coarsest barley and in the first year they had to make do with wild herbs and boiled beech leaves. But they persevered and built up their monastery. They named it Clairvaux.

Because of Bernard’s charisma, disciples flocked to Clairvaux and by the time he became ill there were over a hundred monks in residence. He missed the union of sleeping with his fellows in the long open dormitory but it was just as well he had agreed to move to a small abbot chamber adjacent to the church. His month-long coughing fits would have deprived the monks of what little sleep they had.

Gérard was always the most robust of the six brothers. Other than a sliced thigh, a proper soldier’s trophy, he had never suffered a sick day in his life. He fussed over his frail brother and tried to have him keep down soups and infusions but Bernard was slipping away, a slack bag of bones. Too listless to lead the men at prayer, he delegated the authority to his prior but still insisted on being helped to the church to attend services and observe the hours.

One day, Gérard took it upon himself to ride off to inform the powerful cleric, William of Champeaux, Bishop of Châlons-en-Champagne, about the state of Bernard’s health. William openly appreciated Bernard and acutely recognised his potential as a future church leader. On report of his illness, he obtained the permission of the Cistercian order at Cîteaux to govern Bernard for a year as his superior. The decree in hand, he ordered the young abbot to be relieved of all clerical duties and freed from the harsh observances of the order until his body was healed. Bernard was taken by horse cart south, to the warmer climes of a richer and more comfortable abbey where a few years earlier his middle brother Barthomieu had been dispatched. And thus, Bernard of Clairvaux came to reside at the Abbey Ruac.