The Burning Altar Page 4

‘I am sure the Vatican’s spies would be immensely discreet and hugely prudent, Eminence,’ murmured Raffael, and de Migli frowned.

  ‘Our people lost him for a time – it’s a very remote area, of course,’ said Fleury, ‘but when they picked the trail up again, the child was with him.’

  ‘And placed in the very private house in Highgate.’

  ‘Yes.’ Fleury leaned forward. ‘But a month ago we learned that the child – now a young man of twenty-three or -four – is no longer there. We don’t know much about him but we think it possible that the League kidnapped him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘That we don’t yet know. But his background’s a bit of a mystery. They might want him as some kind of hostage.’

  Raffael sat back in his chair, his eyes on Fleury. ‘The boy wasn’t kidnapped,’ he said. ‘But you’re right about the rest. He’s twenty-three, and he’s been in one institution after another since he was very small. The Highgate house was actually the last of a longish line of similar places. And his background, as you say, is very mysterious indeed.’ He paused, and then said deliberately, ‘The boy was removed last month – the fifteenth, to be exact. Lewis Chance took him.’ For the first time he smiled properly. ‘He is at the moment locked away in the cellars of Chance House.’

  ‘In the – cellars?’

  ‘Yes. He’s an exophagist,’ said Raffael, and then, as they looked up, he smiled again. ‘I thought the word might catch you off balance,’ he said softly. ‘It’s a word used by anthropologists, and loosely speaking it means a particular kind of cannibal.’ He saw the shocked surprise leap into the two men’s eyes. ‘Frazer uses the expression in The Golden Bough several times,’ he said smoothly. ‘So there’s quite a scholarly precedent for it.’

  ‘The boy is a—’ Fleury stared at Raffael.

  ‘He’s a ghoul,’ said Raffael. ‘I don’t mean a horror story creation. I mean a real one. At some point in his very early life he appears to have been introduced to the ritualistic practice of eating human flesh – that’s why I used Frazer’s word exophagist – and it’s an appetite that has never left him. Between the spells of what Sir Lewis terms the hunger he’s lucid and quite intelligent. Under the mania there’s a logical, even sensitive mind, but the mania is such that—’ He stopped. ‘You would not wish me to become graphic, I think.’

  ‘Dear goodness, no. But that,’ said Fleury, ‘is why you were employed? To – look after him?’

  ‘To act as his keeper,’ said Raffael.

  Chapter Four

  Cardinal Fleury had been merely Bishop Fleury when the young Raffael, newly ordained and still slightly dizzy from the prestige attached to his secondment to the Vatican, stood before him. Fleury’s apartments were the most astonishing blend of the austere and the sybaritic that Raffael had ever seen, and the thought that Fleury had probably had to struggle against the sensuality of the mind rather than of the flesh occurred to him.

  ‘The post is little more than a minor librarianship,’ His Lordship said, eyeing the young man before him. ‘But your scholastic achievements are very good indeed, and I have been thinking how best we can make use of your particular gifts.’ He paused and then said, ‘After you were ordained, you spent a year working in the Ambrosian Library in Milan, I think?’

  ‘Yes. I was one of Cardinal Rustichi’s secretaries.’

  ‘I’m aware of it. In fact I have written to His Eminence about you,’ said Fleury. ‘It’s your work with him that makes you highly suitable for what I have in mind now.’ He paused and then said, ‘Tell me, Father, how familiar are you with the Apocrypha?’

  ‘The secret writings of the Church?’ This was not quite what Raffael had been expecting. ‘I know of their existence, of course,’ he said cautiously.

  ‘Of course. How would you define them?’

  ‘They’re mostly prophecies and prognostications the Church doesn’t dare to make public.’ Raffael made a quick gesture almost of repudiation. ‘The date of the ending of the world or of a holocaust war, or the coming of the Antichrist.’ And then, because he had the impression that this was some kind of minor test, he said, ‘I imagine you don’t expect me to dissimulate?’

  ‘Heaven forfend,’ murmured Fleury.

  ‘Then I should tell you that I’ve always thought most of them attributable to hysterical visions by the Early Saints after prolonged fasting or torture,’ said Raffael. He eyed Fleury levelly. ‘Also, I didn’t think many people believed in them any longer.’

  ‘Cardinal Rustichi said you were a mixture of pragmatism and mysticism,’ said Fleury thoughtfully. ‘It’s an odd mixture to find in a religious these days.’ He gave the word its Gallic slant and Raffael remembered that the bishop was supposed to hail from French nobility of the ancien régime. When he had been reading Theology in Milan he had believed such things did not matter. Facing Fleury in a private wing of the Vatican Libraries he was not so sure.

  Fleury said, ‘You would perhaps not know that within the Apocrypha is a section referred to as the Codex Vaticanus Maleficarum?’

  ‘No. What is it?’

  ‘Well, there are various documents that come into that section – undisclosed portions of the Book of Tobit, of course; and some of Arnobius’s writings from the fourth century which are very explicit, also St Ecgbert in the eighth. Those two were inclined to be rather colourfully descriptive about—’

  ‘Fornication with demons, and bestiality,’ said Raffael, expressionlessly.

  ‘Quite. I see you profited from your lectures on theological history, Father. Or do Ecgbert and Arnobius still rank next to soft pornography for ordinands?’

  ‘I think it’s possible to get pornography easily enough these days without resorting to Arnobius,’ said Raffael politely, and Fleury shot him a sharp look.

  ‘I was told you were also something of a rebel, Father,’ he said frostily. ‘But I understood that it had been curbed.’

  ‘I think I have some way to go yet, Your Lordship.’

  ‘I think so as well.’ Fleury frowned and then said, ‘The Codex Vaticanus Maleficarum is a very small section of the Apocrypha, but it contains some very ancient and very interesting documents.’ He paused. ‘It is this section that is to be your especial province.’

  ‘I see.’ It would not do to say that it sounded enormously intriguing, and Raffael waited obediently.

  ‘Within the section,’ said Fleury, ‘is a document that has been given the designation Maleficarum Decalogue. That roughly translates as—’

  ‘The Ten Malevolent Commandments.’

  ‘Yes. The few of us who know of the document’s existence believe its contents to be half legend, half folklore. It might even be a gigantic hoax. But hoax or not, it’s one of the most dangerous of all the Apocrypha writings. In fact,’ said His Lordship, descending into sudden, slightly disconcerting modernity, ‘the wretched thing is a virtual time bomb.’ He reached into a drawer of his desk and brought out a key. ‘All of the Codex Vaticanus Maleficarum are closely guarded,’ he said. ‘But the Maleficarum Decalogue is so potentially damaging that we keep it locked in the vaults.’ He paused, and then said, ‘Beneath the Borgia apartments.’

  ‘How eerie.’

  Fleury stood up. ‘Come and judge for yourself,’ he said.

  Descending to the ancient secret vaults in company with Fleury was one of the most sinister experiences the young Raffael had ever encountered.

  This was where the infamous Borgia Pope, Alexander, was murdered; this was where the legendary Pinturicchio frescoes, commissioned by the Borgias, had been covered up by the family’s disgusted successors and left to fall into neglect until the end of the nineteenth century. Raffael, following his preceptor obediently through the maze of frescoed corridors and ornate gilded galleries and down twisting staircases, felt the heavy elaborate richness of the place fall about him like Dante’s leaden cloak. Had the Nazarene Carpenter envisaged this sumptuous dark grandeur when he had issued that edict to build His Churc
h on a rock? Some Church, thought Raffael sardonically. Some rock.

  ‘The Maleficarum Decalogue is actually quite a brief document but it’s so fragile we’ve never dared submit it to any dating tests,’ said Fleury, leading Raffael to a low pointed door at the end of a narrow stone corridor and unlocking it. The scent of old leather and crumbling parchment and foxed paper breathed gently outwards, and Raffael stood for a moment letting it soak into his mind, feeling it lay a caressing hand across his senses. Marvellous. There was nothing quite so evocative as this miasma of ancient scholarship and long-ago wisdom.

  Fleury flicked a switch and dim light bathed the small room. ‘The very lowest of lights always,’ he said. ‘Most of the documents are too fragile for anything brighter. But you will know that.’

  Raffael nodded. ‘Also a cool dry temperature,’ he said.

  ‘The Vatican Libraries are never exactly greenhouses,’ said Fleury caustically. He unlocked a lead-lined bookcase set against one wall and drew out a vellum-covered folio, approximately three feet by two, the front and back laced together at the spine by thin leather strips, the whole wrapped in oiled silk. As Fleury folded back the covering, his hands moving with great care, he said, ‘You see the extreme age, Father?’

  The words ‘culpable negligence’ could not be uttered, but – ‘Oughtn’t the inner parchment to be between glass?’ said Raffael, appalled.

  ‘Yes, perhaps. That would be a decision you might make when you’re more acquainted with the contents. But secrecy must be the paramount concern.’

  ‘You think glaziers might talk?’

  ‘I think anyone might talk,’ said Fleury coldly.

  He set the folio on the leather-topped table at the room’s centre, and Raffael bent over it in fascination. Dozens of centuries ago someone sat at a table and wrote this. The aura of age, of some long-dead scribe or calligrapher, brushed his senses, and he was glad that he could look down at the table, veiling his eyes so that his emotions should not show. Even the Ambrosian Library had not possessed anything so immensely ancient as this.

  ‘Is there a provenance?’ he asked, after a moment.

  ‘All we have ever been able to say is that the folio came into our keeping around the first or second century after Christ,’ said Fleury. ‘We think it was during the reign of Pope Linus, who as you know—’

  ‘Succeeded St Peter himself.’

  Raffael was trying to decipher the thick pale hieroglyphs, and as if understanding, Fleury said, ‘Unless you read hieroglyphics you will need to see the translation which I will show you presently, although even that is so old that we have not been able to make it all out. But in essence the Codex seems to set down the story of an exiled tribe of the Bubasti who left Egypt under a cloud in the reign of the Pharaoh Amenemhat III.’

  He stopped, and Raffael looked up in astonishment. ‘But that would be – at least two thousand years ago.’

  ‘Nearer three.’ Fleury indicated the dry curling parchment. ‘This calls them either the damned tribe of Egypt or the lost tribe – it’s impossible to be more precise – and it relates how, as a final gesture of defiance, the tribe stole Ten Stone Tablets which Amenemhat’s High Priests called the Stones of Vengeance. Each Stone is said to be carved with the name of a different sin or an offence – again the translation can only be approximate – and it seems that the tribe carried the Stones deep into Tibet. They settled in a place called Tashkara – it’s supposed to be one of the loneliest, most remote valleys, even today – and practised a worship that seems to have been a mixture of the cat-goddess Bastet and the goddess of fertility and childbirth, Touaris. They used the Stones as a kind of law and order system: if anyone committed any of the carven sins – especially if by doing so they damaged or offended against the tribe or against Touaris herself – then he was punished by the method engraved on the Stone. The punishments varied,’ said Fleury, ‘but they all appear to have been extremely unpleasant.’

  ‘The Ancient Egyptians were no more merciful than the Romans or the Spanish Inquisition,’ remarked Raffael. ‘Is that the reason for the double locks and the cloaks and daggers surrounding this?’

  ‘No.’ Fleury looked back down at the hieroglyphs. ‘Towards the end of the document – I think on the third and final page – is set out the belief of Amenemhat’s rebels regarding the real origin of the Ten Stones.’

  ‘Yes?’ Raffael found that his heart was suddenly beating uncomfortably fast. I’m about to be told something remarkable, he thought. Something that the Vatican has kept locked in a dark almost-forgotten corner for nearly two thousand years.

  Fleury, speaking as if he was selecting each word with extreme care, said, ‘The legend handed down by the Tribe of Touaris is that when Moses received God’s Holy Commandments on Mount Sinai, the devil, not to be outdone, created ten commandments of his own.’ He looked down at the thick ancient parchment sheets. ‘These describe how Satan’s Decalogue was forged in the deepest fire-drenched cavern of hell, and then cooled in the snow-capped mountains of the world,’ he said, and with a gesture of distaste drew the oiled silk back over the vellum sheets as if to veil something disturbing.

  Raffael said softly, ‘So the denizens of hell had their Commandments as well as the Children of the Light, did they?’

  ‘They did. And,’ said Fleury, ‘although it’s no more than a legend, you see the need for the extreme secrecy, Father?’

  ‘Oh yes. If it was ever to be known that the Roman Catholic Church had guarded for two thousand years a document purporting to describe Ten Commandments that came from Satan, every tenet in the Bible would come under question. There would be a huge public outcry. And sadly,’ said Raffael, ‘the Church is no longer so strong that she could withstand such a blow. It would be the severest test of credibility since—’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I was going to say since Alexander Borgia’s day,’ said Raffael, and grinned suddenly. ‘But the Borgias didn’t have to contend with twentieth-century media. The press would make a feast out of this, wouldn’t they?’ He looked down at the shrouded folio.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Fleury. ‘Which is why, Father Raffael, knowledge of the existence of the Maleficarum Decalogue and Satan’s Ten Commandments must never get out.’

  ‘And so,’ said Raffael, sitting back in his chair in the book-lined room of the Bloomsbury house, ‘the knowledge is about to get out.’

  ‘We are afraid so. When Patrick Chance went into Tibet and entered the valley of Tashkara he disturbed something that had been shrouded in immense secrecy for dozens of centuries,’ said Fleury.

  Below them the home-going Bloomsbury traffic was a muted roar. It sounded very far away and the long-ago world of Patrick Chance seemed much closer. Raffael could feel it reaching out to him, and beyond it, like a sticky spider’s web, he could feel the beckoning strands of a much older world. The renegade Bubasti, the damned tribe of the legend, living on in a remote valley in Tibet, once itself known as the Forbidden Realm . . . Guarding the time-drenched Stone Tablets of the Satanic Decalogue . . .

  ‘We intend to destroy the Codex ourselves,’ said Fleury. ‘It’s regrettable but it’s unavoidable, and it will spike this League of Tamerlane’s guns in one direction at least. But—’

  ‘But there remains the Decalogue itself. Could it possibly still exist inside Tashkara?’

  ‘Assuming,’ put in de Migli drily, ‘it ever existed in the first place.’

  ‘You are one of the doubters?’ Raffael thought he should have expected this.

  ‘I am. It’s nothing more than a fable,’ said de Migli. ‘A fairy story for the credulous. But,’ he added, fairly, ‘even a fable can cause damage.’

  Raffael said, ‘I should enjoy challenging you on that sometime, de Migli. It’s a pity this isn’t the time or the place.’ He looked back at Fleury. ‘Eminence, if these people have threatened to make the Decalogue’s existence public they must be very sure of themselves.’

  ‘My sentiments exactly.�
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  ‘They’ve got the real McCoy, haven’t they? The Satanic Decalogue?’

  ‘I am afraid so.’

  ‘And – you want me to find it and destroy it,’ said Raffael, and felt Fleury’s relief at his comprehension.

  ‘Yes. Will you? Perhaps I should say, Can you?’

  ‘It sounds,’ said Raffael slowly, ‘as if I must. But it’s a – an awesome task you’re handing me.’ He frowned, and then with a return to his customary flippancy, said, ‘And even if it takes seven men with seven axes seven years – But I expect I can smash the things to eggshells, if all else fails. But can is different to will. I’m quite happy to take on these jobs of dirty work for the Catholic Church from time to time, but I am quite expensive.’ He caught de Migli’s flicker of distaste, and smiled. ‘I was brought up to believe that it was ill-bred to discuss money,’ he said. ‘But circumstances alter cases and these days I am extremely ill-bred.’

  ‘Also extremely ruthless, we hear,’ said Fleury.

  ‘That also. But the Vatican still trusts me, it seems. What am I – a special envoy or a maverick trouble-shooter?’

  ‘A little of both,’ Fleury said coolly. ‘You may have broken half the commandments and trailed the Church’s reputation in the dust, Raffael, but you should recall that His Holiness gave you absolution and that you are still a son of the Catholic Church.’

  ‘I am silenced,’ said Raffael solemnly.

  ‘And,’ said Fleury levelly, ‘you are one of the most trustworthy men I have ever met.’

  Raffael stared at him. Now I’m really silenced, he thought.

  ‘Also,’ said Fleury, ‘there’s the advantage that you already know about the Decalogue. At this stage, the fewer people we have to bring in the better.’

  Raffael sat back and regarded the two men. ‘Before we go any farther,’ he said, ‘there’s something you had better know.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘There’s something odd going on in Chance House. I can’t explain it, and I’m not sure that it’s any more than my imagination. But several times I’ve definitely been followed, and several times I’ve certainly come across some unexpected people there.’