The Sixth Key Read online

  I dressed and ventured out to look at the cemetery in the daylight. It was cold and eerie at this early hour, with the sun rising and the fog lifting between the shadowed cypresses. As the light melted the night away it fell on monuments of astonishing variety: classical marble statues and headstones pointing the way Heavenward for the souls of the dead to follow. To my surprise, many plots were decorated with fresh bouquets of daisies and roses, carnations, gladiolus or chrysanthemums. On quite a few headstones there were even coloured photographs of the deceased behind glass or Perspex – strange disembodied pictures of life on dead stone. I stopped to read a few: a young dancer; a father of six; and a young man who died in a motorcycle accident. Every inscription a summary of a life lived all too briefly.

  I followed the grassy track without aim. The cemetery was a labyrinth, divided into many parts, each with its own nationality and religion and character. The most humble section included long rows of tombs set into drawers stacked one on top of the other that were accessed by rolling ladders; a library of bones! What looked like the wealthier section was filled with large, stately, unattached family chapels adorned with neoclassical ornamentation. I saw some that were good examples of modernist architecture, and here and there caught a glimpse of freestanding sculptures by well-known artists. I passed into a section that housed a number of nineteenth century–style Gothic ruins hidden by a tangle of shrubs and trees. Overgrown paths almost indiscernible in the long grass led to cracked, fallen stones of famous residents. Among the neglected, the poet Ezra Pound was still lovingly remembered.

  I paused to take in the wistful sadness of the place – after all, was there a happy way to die? It was cold and so I kept walking, the leaves crackling under my feet and the trees rustling in a stiff breeze. Without noticing it, I found myself in the French section, where I came upon an old monk sweeping a grave. It was hard to say who was more startled, he or I.

  ‘Proibito! Non permesso!’ he shouted. His ancient face was a tempest of wrinkles beneath the monkish cowl.

  I told him in my best Italian that I was a guest, though I couldn’t give him the name of my host.

  ‘It is forbidden for you to be here,’ he said, waving. ‘Go away! Go away! Do you hear? I won’t tell you anything, nothing at all! I don’t want anything to do with you!’ He turned away and began walking hurriedly in the direction of the monastery, looking over his shoulder once or twice to make certain I wasn’t following him.

  The man was eccentric and no wonder, living on an island with only the dead for company. The grave he’d been cleaning was marked by the figure of a lion man carrying a staff and a key, and entwined by two serpents.

  ‘This is his favourite grave.’ The Writer of Letters was behind me, looking rested and calm but his eyes were penetrating. I wondered how long he had been standing there.

  ‘Do you know what that figure is?’ he asked me.

  ‘It looks like a cross between a Hermetic and a Mithraic symbol. The staff of Hermes also has two snakes entwining it, and I think this figure, the lion man, is Mithraic, am I right?’

  ‘It’s a Leoncetophaline, the guardian of the World of the Dead, and you’re right, it is both Mithraic and Hermetic.’

  ‘There’s no name and no date on this grave.’

  ‘No. Do you see the inscription?’

  I recognised it. It was part of an alchemical verse attributed to the famous alchemist Basil Valentinus. But before I could answer, the Writer of Letters appeared suddenly aware of the time and the fact that the cook had prepared breakfast and we should not delay. Obviously, he wanted the mystery of the grave to hang in the air between us, creating suspense, and he achieved his aim.

  Later in the library, he took me to the shelves full of ancient books bound in leather. Some books were covered in studs; others had studs only on the bindings. One exquisite manuscript was decorated with a great rosette of gold over a large raised cross; its spine was covered in gilding and its fore page was emblazoned with the title written in impeccable calligraphy:

  El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha

  Primera edición Mexicana Conforme a la de la Real Academia Española, hecho en Madrid en 1782. Además del análisis de dicha Academia, se han añadido las notas críticas y curiosas del Señor Pellicer, con hermosas laminas…

  ‘That’s the Mexican edition that Rahn and La Dame were looking for when they first met,’ the Writer of Letters said. ‘I mentioned it yesterday. It is very rare – there are only three copies, one in the Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid, another in the Biblioteca Nacional de Mexico; and this one, of course.’

  At this point the Irish monk entered with a tray on which sat two glasses of mineral water.

  ‘Do you know,’ the Writer of Letters said, ‘many people fall into the pit of thinking that Parzifal, the Grail knight in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s poem, was more important than Don Quixote to Rahn. But this is only because they didn’t know him like I do.’

  There was no need for a mental calculation. The Writer of Letters didn’t look old enough to have known Rahn. Still, I decided I would play along. ‘Are you saying you knew him?’

  His grey eyes widened a little. ‘I know him perhaps better than anyone else.’

  ‘Do you mean he’s still alive?’

  He hesitated for just a moment. ‘That depends on what you mean by “alive”.’

  I didn’t know what to say to this oddity.

  There was sudden amusement in his voice. ‘You were wondering if I wanted you to ghost write his story, am I right? Don’t be so surprised; it is a logical conclusion but an erroneous one. You see, logic is useless sometimes.’

  ‘What am I doing here then?’

  ‘I told you that this is for you to tell me. This is your story – remember? I’m just a character, your mouthpiece. Isn’t that what characters do for their writers, answer their questions? Exorcise their demons? Writing books is better than psychoanalysis, and cheaper too if you ask me. Perhaps that’s why the first natives who saw written words were terrified. They believed that letters were evil spirits dancing on the page and their primitive intuition was quite correct, for at times they are exactly that – the tormented soul content of writers! That is why I call this my garden of good and evil, my cemetery of thoughts, the angels and demons of men’s souls,’ he said, with a wave of the hand.

  He was right about one thing: the library did remind me of the cemetery outside. Its atmosphere was weighed down by time and nostalgia. After all, the authors of these books were long dead, their words lying on shelves like the broken fountains and fallen angels of better days.

  ‘So, what haunts an author like you?’ he asked.

  I found myself inarticulate. ‘I don’t know; failure, I suppose. Sometimes I feel life is just an endless attempt to remember something that is doomed to lay forgotten . . . like these books.’

  ‘Well, the ancients knew how to open and close the door of memory,’ he said, ‘but the best we modern men can do is to try to pick the lock. Speaking of which, shall we?’

  I looked at him questioningly.

  ‘Shall we pick the lock?’ He gestured to the two winged chairs.

  Before sitting down he poked thoughtfully at the fire until it blazed. ‘I hope you don’t mind but I’m going to diverge for a moment,’ he said.

  ‘Are you taking me to one of those galleries you spoke of?’

  ‘Yes, to that dimension where everything that has ever occurred in history, exists in space. You see, in order to understand Rahn’s predicament, his love of the Cathars, his attachment to the south of France, we have to look in the gallery called Matteu,’ he said, and once again, with impeccable diction, he began.

  11

  Béziers

  ‘. . . there is nothing so subject to the inconstancy of fortune as war.’

  Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

  Béziers, 1209

  Matteu found himself in the city of Béziers on the eve of the Feast of Mary Magdalene
. The boy, only twelve years old, belonged to the company of routiers, the mercenaries who were recruited from every low place for the Crusades against the Cathars of Languedoc. His master was known as the King of the Mercenaries, a Basque for whom all felt a repellent awe. He and his men had already entered the town of Béziers ahead of the armies of the northern knights, and the boy, having fallen behind, looked for him, walking the streets in the wake of his master’s advance to observe, for the first time in his young life, men killing any living thing that crossed their path.

  Fearful, he hid behind some wine barrels near the stables and watched the routiers drag the town’s citizens into the streets.

  Children were cut from their mother’s arms; a small babe was skewered on the end of a sword and thrown a distance towards the walls to split open like a watermelon; an older one was struck in the back as he ran off; another was taken up to the saddle to have her small neck broken with a twist. Old men were run through or gutted or had their heads lopped off. The women, if they were old or ugly, had their faces beaten in or their throats cut from ear to ear.

  The young pretty ones suffered more.

  Near where Matteu hid, routiers brought forth two girls and held them down as they kicked and screamed. Matteu looked to see if these Cathars were the Devil’s spawn: half calf and half goat, grotesque creatures, covered in boils, as the priests had said. After all, these were the dreaded heretics who thought the world was created by the Devil and who did not believe in the Holy Cross and the Resurrection. But he saw only plain girls, as plain as could be – girls who were terrified and hunted.

  Matteu could barely watch as each man took his turn upon the girls. One was already dead from loss of blood; the other, who had fought and kicked and bit, had a boot stomped into her face and her head dashed onto the cobbles. Sated, the men moved on. Their festival of carnage and rape over, they now turned their business to plunder.

  Matteu’s mind was hollow – even his life in the violent hovels and bars of Barcelona had ill prepared him for the sight of so much blood and savagery, and he felt gall rise to his throat, which he tried, with all his might, to stifle.

  The mercenaries were hauling great chests and barrels and trunks out of the houses to prise them open, overturning them and spilling out their contents: bolts of green silk shimmered in the sun; bags of grain, pepper or salt came open and overflowed onto the cobbles; parchments were scattered about. Clothing was ripped up and thrown around; furniture was broken to pieces; pots and pans and iron candlesticks were tossed onto the blood-soaked bodies of the dead. The routiers trampled over the carcasses, slipping on the blood and tripping over the dismembered parts to get at what they wanted. They beat at one another with fists or sword butts, fighting over the spoils. Pilgrims and camp followers, themselves looking for plunder, were run through if they happened to get in the way. The men were like wolves, their faces dark with war lust.

  A thunder now came from the city gates: it was the sharp-edged hoofs of the great French warhorses. Upon them were the Crusaders who had by now bested the city garrison and were seeking their plunder with a fury, beating pilgrim and routier alike with their swords or boots or shields. After ordering the mercenaries to take anything of value to the French camp or face the sword, the Crusaders galloped away towards the upper parts of the city. The world was drowned out by the solemn ‘Te Deum’ they sang as they headed for the churches where the people of the city had fled in their desperation.

  The routiers, angered by this insult, proceeded to put the city to the torch. After lighting the houses, they too moved closer to the upper city and now it seemed there was a moment of quiet, the only sounds the groans of the dying and the burning and crackling of the fires. Matteu came out from his hiding spot into the long, narrow street. It reeked of faeces and was buzzing with flies. He walked among the blood and brains, legs and arms and trunks either ripped up or stove in that lay in the infested gutters, littering the ground as though rained down from Heaven.

  He looked about him at the tide of pain and misery and houses on fire, to the great panels of smoke that were blocking out the sun, attacking his dust-filled nostrils and snaking into his aching lungs.

  He realised he was standing near the corpses of the two girls, splayed out, naked, on the cobbles. He tried to look away but could not prevent his eyes from finding their faces. They were his age, he was sure of it, or a little older: fifteen, maybe sixteen. Their eyes lifeless, the soft milky parts of their young bodies stained red and blue with bruises, violated and exposed. To see it filled him with vacant loss. The mouldy bread he had eaten for breakfast began to turn cartwheels in his guts and the world made its rounds over his head and the buzzing grew louder in his ears. In a rush, a sour plug of gall rose up to his lips and he bent over, coughing and retching until the beast in his stomach unclenched its jaws and he stopped, his tongue a bed of fiery acid, more acid dripping from his nostrils.

  He lay on the ground and waited for the world to stop spinning and for the misery of this new understanding of war to settle into his bones, where it might hurt less. Such was his state that he did not notice until too late that a knight on horseback was galloping in his direction with sword held high in one hand and a shield in the other bearing the device of the Temple. The knight was standing over him before he could get up and he pierced the skin on the back of Matteu’s neck with the tip of his weapon.

  ‘Who are you?’ the great and awesome knight said loudly, letting the sword’s tip draw blood. ‘Well?’

  Matteu trembled beneath that blade and found to his utter terror that he was unable to speak.

  The tall knight told the boy to turn over and he put a foot to his chest. He pulled up his visor. ‘Are you Cathar or Christian?’

  Matteu’s words, dammed up, came tumbling out like wine out of a barrel: ‘My master is the captain of the Mercenaries . . . I came to see the war . . .’

  Something flickered in the knight’s pale eyes, a passing thought, perhaps an estimation of the boy’s worth. The Templar sheathed his sword then and made for his horse. ‘Now you have seen it,’ he told Matteu, pulling himself into the saddle and looking about at the slaughter-ruined streets. As if he were speaking not to Matteu, but to some aspect of himself to which he must answer, he said, ‘There is no glory in it.’

  By now the fire in the city had taken hold of every building. Already the roofs were alight and he could hear the rafters letting go here and there. Matteu turned around to see that grey plumes were reaching upwards to the vaults of Heaven and a thunder of destruction came from every building.

  ‘They will come looking for blood, boy!’ the Templar said. ‘Get on or join the carcasses in the streets!’

  At that moment there was a splitting and crackling, a spurting and bursting of wood and rafters and beams giving way and collapsing, feeding the fire and causing the flames to rise higher, and the heat to grow in intensity. Matteu could see almost nothing except smoke and more smoke.

  The stallion reared up but the Templar held firm; it made a dance of its terror and then calmed down. Matteu stood, uncertain. He caught a hold of the stirrups but began to cough and cough from the smoke. The inferno was spewing out the acrid smell of burning hair and incense and suddenly there were sounds of horn blasts rising above the roars of the falling timbers and the growling, bellowing sounds of the conflagration.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Matteu asked.

  ‘The church is gone and likely all in it!’ the Templar told him fiercely. ‘The killing will go on for days. They believe that God will recognise who belongs to Him in heaven, for they do not know heretic from Catholic. If you do not hurry, it will be your fate as well, and I will run you through to save them the trouble.’

  It was true. They would take him for a Cathar. He thought he could hear the rumble of the warhorses and the cries of the knights and routiers. His heart, his breath, his muscles, his thoughts, all of him grew terrified. He tried again to put a foot to the stirrup and with help
from the knight he lifted himself behind the great man, barely managing to stay on the horse because of his fear.

  The knight pulled down his visor and dug heels into the horse’s flank. The animal left a trail of dust that mingled with the smoke all the way through the gate.

  And so it was. His master would not miss him, there were plenty of boys to take his place. Likewise he would not miss the temperamental, violent ways of a man who liked to box him in the ear for sport. What this Templar wanted with him Matteu could not guess, and though this did not sit easy on his brow, he told himself that he had always been good at following his ‘knowing’. This alone had saved him in the hovels of Barcelona after his mother’s death; this knowing had taken his feet to that boat in the harbour and had showed him to hide in that French galley; and it was this knowing that directed him now, out of the howling pit that was the city of Béziers and into a future unknown.

  He hugged the horse with his knees and held tight to the Templar as they rode over the bodies of the dead but before they reached the bridge, the Templar said to him, ‘Take one last look, boy! The God of the church that you once knew is now dead for you!’

  Matteu looked behind him: he saw nothing but a trail of smoke. Ash fell from above, like grey snow. He knew he would never be able to walk into a church again.