The Codex Lacrimae, Part 1: The Mariner's Daughter and Doomed Knight

Chapter 7: The Labyrinth and the Ravens

A month after Clarinda's meeting in The Wayfarer—and within moments of his entry into the Krak—Jacob hesitated. He'd neared the last of the three hallways on this latest attempt to follow Ibn-Khaldun's instructions, but still felt confused.

The interior of the Krak des Chevaliers seemed a labyrinth. Ibn-Khaldun had told him that the scriptorium wasn't far from the medical ward, but in his eagerness to explore the castle in his search for Ríg, the scholar's apprentice, Jacob must have taken a wrong turn.

The boy had already passed through many wrong doorways, and he'd ducked past fast-moving Hospitaller knights moving to and fro in preparation for war. He'd gotten shooed out of what looked like an armory by a couple of irritated looking knights, and he had stepped into a chapel during a morning mass. Now, by retraced steps and process of elimination, he'd worked his way back to the infirmary area and had opened the third door.

Morning sunlight shone strongly through a large, open window upon a brown-robed man who sat at an immense, grey-stone table. A feather quill was poised in the man's right hand, and the table was cluttered with a variety of writing implements and reading material: a silver inkwell, scrolls of vellum and parchment, and ornately decorated books. Jacob quelled a rush of excitement when he saw the shelves behind the man that contained books and rolled tubes.

He realized that the man had spoken to him.

"I'm looking for Ríg," Jacob said.

The monk smiled thinly and waved toward a doorway in the far wall.

Jacob bowed and moved forward, keeping his hands crossed politely in front of him as he glanced at the books and parchments along the way. He ignored an impulse to shelf browse and then he gasped when he realized that the room was but an antechamber to a couple vast halls beyond. What a library! Amazement coursed through Jacob when he saw the shelves of books and rolled parchments in triangular slots that hugged the walls from floor to ceiling. A mound of gold as high as a man's height wouldn't have impressed Jacob half as much as this library before him. Transfixed by the sight, he tried to take in everything at once. Robed monks and priests sat at long oaken tables or stood at oversized lecterns, peering closely at texts as they all seemed to be busily scribbling on parchment sheets unrolled everywhere. The monks worked in a cavernous silence, and the scritching and scratching of the men reminded Jacob of animals' claws scraping upon stone.

Ibn-Khaldun had told Jacob to go to his living quarters at the very back of the scriptorium. Moving again with what he hoped was more confidence than he felt, Jacob kept close to a bookshelf on the western wall and chose the sunniest of the two doorways.

"Ti sei perso, giavanatto?" a dark-robed Hospitaller asked him in Italian when he reached the doorway. "These are private quarters." The maturity in the man's voice didn't match the youthful features of his face.

The question snapped the boy's attention back to the object of his search.

"Sì, Signore," Jacob replied in Italian. "I mean, no." He stepped fully into the room. Sunlight blazed through two windows whose shutters were ajar.

An enormous Persian carpet with a thick woolen pile warmed the spacious chamber furnished with cedar cabinetry, reading lecterns, and a small writing desk near one of the larger windows. Jacob knew from the profusion of bottles, tubes, dried herbs, and vials on the polished sycamore table that he must have finally reached Ibn-Khaldun's sanctum.

Apparently only a few years older than Jacob himself, the stature of the tall youth made Jacob think of the Norsemen rather than most of the monks he'd passed in the library. He wore a deep blue surcoat over a light chain-mail shirt, his forearms protected by leather braces, with black military hose that stretched over his heavily muscled legs to well-worn leather boots.

Golden brown eyes regarded Jacob with curiosity from beneath a tousle of sandy brown hair. The knight's chiseled jaw line, aquiline nose, and high cheekbones seemed as liable to smile as to wear the kind of frown that presently marked his well-tanned brow. The youth didn't appear to be a scholar, one of those frailer sorts who walked about scriptoriums hunched over from the very weight of their robes and whose greatest feats of strength were reserved for hefting a tome from a shelf to a table top. No, Jacob thought, this young knight seemed to belong more to the marbled halls of an imperial palace, not in the dusty hallways of a frontier crusader garrison.

The boy's arrival had obviously interrupted this man at work.

With a finger capping the aperture, the knight delicately held a wooden funnel filled with an ocher powder in one hand, and a light green bottle in the other.

"Who are you trying to find?" the youth asked, returning his attention to pouring the powder into the bottle.

"A squire named Ríg. He's needed in the infirmary, quickly."

The knight nodded and ignored the boy's urgency as he carefully tapped the tip of the funnel against the bottle and corked it.

"You're not lost. I'm Ríg." He extended his hand across the table and Jacob gripped it in a firm shake.

"Oh. Oh, hello, I'm Jacob. My mother and I met Master Ibn-Khaldun near the castle. He sent me here and told you to hurry."

"Today? Khajen's back?" Ríg said excitedly, before checking the table again. His face hardened with resolve. "That's wonderful. Wonderful. Hold on a moment while I sort these herbs. I was just heading back to the infirmary, so we'll go together."

Ríg secreted two bottles into a leather satchel on the table, walked to one of the cabinets and pulled one bottle after another from some slim drawers, murmuring to himself, "Mandrake, henbane ... ah, there's the hemlock. Hartstongue, other poultice supplies—no, no time for that. There's the camphor. Excellent."

The knight grabbed two leather pouches from a recessed shelf, a deep blue vial filled with a milky substance, and a handful of what appeared to be dried weeds. After he'd stored all the supplies in the satchel, he picked up some blankets and looked at Jacob.

"Do you mind carrying these?"

"No, not at all," Jacob said, grateful to be of use. He cradled the blankets in his arms and watched as Ríg retrieved another satchel that had been out of sight behind the table.

"Let's go," Ríg said.

"Are those your birds?" Jacob asked, astonishment in his voice as he looked past Ríg to the enormous window. Ríg followed the boy's gaze.

Two gigantic ravens perched on the stone slabs of the sill. The black-feathered birds were as still as statues, but their corvine eyes challenged the human beings and their curved beaks were a tangible threat: large enough to slice a man in half or easily split a person's leg in two.

Jacob's admiration shifted to terror as the ravens burst screaming into the chamber.