The cognomina codex, p.12
The Cognomina Codex, page 12
Evan smiled.
Chance leaned in for a swallowing hug and gave him one last look. “You know, if you have any of your old clothes in that backpack, you would blend in perfectly here. Just a thought.” He surveyed the bleak landscape. “Good luck, brother. Tell him I said hello. I need you to be waiting for me on this tarmac, at this end, in four days, or I will have to leave without you. And you’ll have to walk to Zurich from the Middle East again,” he laughed.
Evan gave him a thumbs-up as Chance climbed back into his sleek jet. Evan looked around the derelict hangars and burned-out maintenance buildings as Chance pushed his engines to a roar and the plane accelerated down the runway. His eyes landed on the hard-packed dirt road winding toward a distant town, and he began to walk under the weight of a midday sun.
If Mocha had been a sleepy town in decline when he walked it nearly two decades ago, it was firmly in hospice now. Its lone minaret stood witness over empty and crumbling earthen buildings. Charred craters and burned-out vehicles dotted with bullet holes decorated the mostly abandoned cityscape. A few men, hardened beyond their years, looked out from open doorways at him as he walked past on his way to the home and stables of the brothers Nusel and Drusel, who looked after Clovis.
He arrived to find the roof was half gone from their livery stable. He heard no animals inside. He knocked on the door and offered the traditional Arabic greeting, wondering how his Syrian dialect would sound to Yemeni ears. A noise rattled inside before the door creaked open. It was Drusel but as a middle-aged man.
“Hello, a friend of Clovis told me you could take me to him. Do you have a wagon we could use to go to his lighthouse?” Evan said in Arabic.
Drusel narrowed his eyes at the young Syrian and took Evan’s hand, looking for the Embe tattoo. “Who are you and what do you want of him?”
Evan hadn’t rehearsed the lie he would need to tell this man to get him to the lighthouse. He paused and thought about what he should say as his ears replayed the man’s words and adjusted to the Yemeni accent. Eventually, he landed on telling the truth as simply as possible. “You are Drusel, yes?”
The Yemeni man took a half step back into his slanting doorway.
“I know that you know Clovis. I know that you and your brother help him. I know that you know he is a special man, and I know that you help other people, special like him, visit him sometimes. Those special people have the mark that you looked for on my hand.”
Drusel’s eyes widened a bit.
“I am one of those people, Drusel, but I do not have the mark yet. I need to meet with Clovis to get my mark. Do you understand?”
Drusel silently studied the Syrian from head to toe. “Can you prove that you are one of them?”
Evan thought back to his first time here. “Your brother is Nusel.”
“Everyone knows this.” The Yemeni man rejected him with a shake of his rugged head.
Evan smiled at him. “You had a beautiful gray horse that you would ride to his tower by the sea.”
“By Allah, it is true!” Drusel exclaimed. “Dead now ten years, Imran was the greatest horse on the coast.” He took Evan’s hand and pulled him inside into the shade. “What is your name, friend of Clovis?”
“I am Yousef from Damascus,” Evan said, deciding that name would be easier for him.
“Welcome to our home, Yousef. Damascus is very far. Blessings on the Prophet for bringing you all this way. Come inside.”
“Can you take me to him?”
“Yes, yes, it is no problem. But too hot now. In a while, after the sun has exhausted itself, we will go. Have some rose water to refresh yourself for the journey.”
Evan blew the dust out of an offered cup before Drusel filled it with cloudy, scented water.
“No one has come in more than a year to visit Clovis. The last was the African giant. He comes still. Others no.” He sipped at his tepid water. “Will you come back to visit him again?”
“Yes, I think so, Drusel. I like it here.”
“Yes, the blessings of Allah are on us here,” he said, looking up through his fractured roof.
“What happened to this place?”
“It is war. Very bad. Brother fights brother. Who knows how long we will suffer?”
“And where is your brother, Nusel?”
“Blessings be upon him, he moved to Aden to be with the rest of the family. I alone am here in our family home.”
“And where are your animals?”
“All taken by soldiers,” Drusel replied and spat on the ground, “used for transport and then for food. A curse on their house for what they have done to this town.”
Evan didn’t want to insult his host, but he did wonder how they would make the journey to Clovis’s remote lighthouse down the coast. “How will we travel to see Clovis?”
“On the road, of course,” Drusel replied, pointing beyond the edge of town.
Evan nodded. “Yes, of course, but since your Imran is gone and there are no other horses or donkeys, how will we go?”
Drusel finished his hazy glass and set it on his chair as he rose with pride. “I have a car, Yousef. It is just outside.”
Evan looked around, not remembering any serviceable vehicles among the ruins. “That’s good.”
“Finish your water for the journey and you can help me prepare it for our travel.”
Evan looked at the murky prospect in his hand and knew better than to spurn any Arab hospitality. The precious rose scent covered the bitterness, but not the grit. “Excellent, Drusel,” he lied. “Thank you for the water, and thank you for agreeing to take me. Now let’s see this car of yours.”
An excited Drusel grabbed a key off a ring by the door and stepped into the street next to the shot-up wreck of a car Evan had seen on the way in. The Yemeni unlocked the trunk to reveal the two missing wheels and a battery. Evan watched in amazement as Drusel reassembled the derelict hulk into a drivable vehicle in minutes. His camouflage of wreckage worked perfectly. “Help me grab some wood from inside the barn. Honorable Clovis likes it when I bring him wood for his cooking fires.”
Murderous intent had shot out all the glass from the small car, and Evan felt uneasy sitting on the bloodstained upholstery as Drusel opened the door for him to enter. Drusel pushed the car to get it rolling down the main street that sloped toward the Red Sea in the distance. “It saves the battery if I clutch start it,” he said in a thin wheeze as he jumped in.
The car barked to life, and they drove through the ruins of the injured and dying town, the peppering howl from the broken exhaust pipe startling villagers toward the safety of their mud homes. Hot wind blasted their faces through the missing windshield as they roared past the last of the abandoned houses and onto the hard-packed wagon tracks that passed for a coastal road.
Evan squinted over at the Yemeni man and could see the toll the last twenty years had taken on Drusel’s weathered and creased face. Hardness and determination lay on him like a mask fashioned from loss. He thought about offering him a cigarette, but the hot gale whipping about their heads made that impossible. Evan looked to the right and let his eyes trace the line where the light-colored sand dropped below the white foam of the crashing waves. He pulled his shirt up to cover his mouth and nose as he looked over to the sight of the surf and imagined he could hear the waves’ repetitive roar over the incessant din of the car’s broken exhaust. He strained his eyes down the coast until he saw the lone spire of Clovis’s ancient stone lighthouse come into view.
Evan had imagined he would have a long wagon ride out here to think about what to say when he first saw Clovis again, but now he would be there in minutes, standing in front of him. Just like the approach to the St. Germain days ago, Evan had approached this tower hundreds of times in his mind. Hundreds of times he had spoken the right words and been embraced by the old man. And now, as the car rattled to a stop at the base of the lighthouse marking the boundary between blue sea and brown sand, his throat tightened with road dust and anxiety.
Drusel left his car running at a loping idle as he hopped out and grabbed an armload of wood from the trunk. “I cannot stop the car for fear I could not start it again out here. I must leave in minutes, as fuel is very precious here.” He dropped the wood next to the sparse garden, where a low line of stones held back determined sand from the struggling green stalks within the perimeter. The weathered wooden door of the lighthouse creaked open against stiff hinges, and Clovis appeared.
He looked older, but he still had a vibrancy about him of an aged warrior still standing at a post. His back stooped more than Evan remembered, and his white hair and beard framed a face peppered with age spots. Drusel embraced him, but Clovis kept his sharp eyes focused on Evan.
“I bring you Yousef from Damascus,” Drusel said, turning to introduce Evan.
Clovis stood like a statue, waiting for Evan to speak first.
“It is good to see you, again,” Evan said in English.
Clovis tilted his head slightly but said nothing.
“I met you before. Here, and in Zurich. I am Evan Michaels.”
The old warrior stared unblinking for what seemed like minutes, then reached down and took Evan’s right hand in his, turning it to expose where a tattooed mark might have been. “We will see about that,” he said in English. “You came here with Chance, yes?”
“Yes, he flew me here from Zurich, where I met with the others.”
Clovis nodded. “Give Drusel half of the money Chance gave you. And tell him it is a gift.”
Evan spoke the Arabic of his youth to the Yemeni man. “Drusel, take this as a gift from me, and please come back here in three days. Blessings be upon you for what you have done for me today and for what you continue to do for this man.”
Drusel hugged him and took the notes. “Three days.” He ran back to his car and started the noisy return back up the coastal trail.
Evan turned back to Clovis, smiled, and looked over at the old man’s miserable garden. “Have your gardening journals from distant Diocletian still taught you nothing of gardening here?”
Clovis put his hand on Evan’s shoulder. “Come in out of the sun, young man. We have much to discuss.”
Evan followed him inside and sat opposite him at his rustic wooden table. Clovis poured water into two clay cups. “I think you should start. Why did you come here—or come back, if indeed you remember my lighthouse?”
Evan considered where to begin the story. “After I left here, I flew to Tunis to meet Samas to do a job for him—a dangerous job. That job cost me my life, that life,” he corrected. “And then almost a year ago, as a teenager in Damascus, I began to remember who I was. After I had put enough of it together to know what I needed to do, I started the long and hard trek to Zurich. I arrived at the hotel, and they received me and agreed to hear my story and judge me.”
“So your Ascension is done?”
“Almost,” Evan said. “I would not let them complete it with the tattoo until I saw you.”
“Who was your advocate?”
“Galen.”
Clovis nodded. “Who judged you?”
“Samas, Ramsay, Auda, and Poppy.”
“And what was their judgment of you?”
“They unanimously affirmed me.”
“All four? Who was your fifth judge?” he asked, and then checked himself as he discerned the reason for the visit. “Aah, I see. Well, if it is you, you were not with us very long, and you had interactions with only a few of us, me being one of the last.” Clovis took a drink of water. “But why come all this way? You have your majority of four.”
“I wanted to be judged by you. I needed to know that you recognized me too.” Evan took a drink to match his and tried to muster some needed courage. “And I wanted to come and apologize for the way I left last time.”
Clovis looked deeply into Evan’s eyes, then waved a weathered, dismissive hand. “We can get to such matters later. Tell me what work you and I have remaining for your Ascension.”
“You are to judge me as you would if you were in Zurich, then write your opinion down and I’ll take it back for them to announce. And one other thing: for security reasons, Ramsay asked that you write your verdict and any notes in a language that you and she understand but that I or others would not.”
“Aramaic.”
“Exactly. So are you ready to begin?”
The older man sensed the urgency within the younger. “When does Chance return to pick you up?”
“Three days from today, at noon. I am to meet him at the airstrip again.”
Clovis nodded. “It is dangerous for him to come here now,” he said, looking out the open door to the contested land outside. “That jet draws a lot of attention. It would be safer if he started coming by boat.” He motioned a thumb over his shoulder to the calm blue expanse. “Where are my manners? You must be hungry after your journey here, and if I have you for three more days, we will need something for dinner. Please get some of the wood you brought and start a fire in the hearth. I will prepare us something to eat.”
Evan returned with his arms full of wood and set about stacking them for a small fire.
The old warrior looked over from his work on two salted fish in the basic kitchen. “The Diocletian reference is a good start, but you will have to do better than that to convince me.”
“Yes, I know,” Evan replied. “I’m ready.”
“We will soon know,” Clovis mused. “Tell me, how many lives do you remember?”
Evan looked back at him from his preparations and knew they were beginning. “Three. I remember three. They were Vasili, Bobby, Evan, and now Yousef.”
“Tell me, what was the name of the camp commandant where you were detained as Vasili?”
“Dukchov. Hristo Dukchov.”
“What was the name of your commanding officer in the army?”
“Captain Hoxa.”
“What were the names of the other men in your company? What was the number of Hoxa’s company? What was the name of your village?” Clovis peppered him with rapid-fire questions as he worked on their dinner, recalling minute details from Evan’s first Ascension nearly two decades before.
Evan looked into the small fire and tended to its needs as he answered.
“How did Vasili escape to Turkey after the second war? Where did he live in Istanbul? How did you meet Poppy for the first time? Why did you leave here without saying goodbye?”
The question jolted Evan’s concentration away from the warmth of the fire. He paused for a long moment before turning to Clovis, still at work on their dinner. “I wanted the golden tower that everyone else had.”
“I seem to remember discussing that with someone before.”
Evan stared into the fire and reminded himself that he had practiced this explanation many times. “Clovis, I cannot explain the joy I felt meeting Poppy, understanding what she was, and through that, learning what I was. I was overwhelmed at learning that there were others like me and then getting to join them, but envy tempered that joy. I envied what the others had accumulated over their lives and how they used that treasure to enjoy life in a way I could not. Being accepted into the Cognomina validated me, but their peerage is a hard one to match. I belonged with them, but I couldn’t keep up with them,” Evan said as he turned to the old master. “Samas offered me an opportunity to get there quickly, and I left to take it.”
Clovis nodded solemnly.
Evan took a deep breath. “But that’s not all. I found your calligraphy—all of it.”
“I thought so. I knew you found them, but I was unsure why it might drive you to leave.”
“I was leaving anyway, but finding the sheets to be the same did alarm me.” Evan walked over to the crude kitchen where Clovis was wrapping up. “I had a long time to think about that and why I reacted the way I did. It was the repetition, day after day, it seemed like you had sequestered yourself here alone, trying to reach perfection on that task. It spoke to me of a solitude and isolation that was too close to the life I led before I found the Cognomina. I couldn’t accept that this new path might lead me back to the same dark place.”
“It is not daily,” Clovis corrected. “It is weekly. I write it once a week. I can understand how you felt.”
“I was not ready for that feeling, trying to imagine your life here doing that. I was looking for exactly the opposite of that, and I ran toward Samas’s offer. I think that is why I left as I did.” Evan stood up to face him. “I’ve been a prisoner twice now, and I—”
“Is that what I seem to you? A prisoner in this tower?” Clovis interrupted in a thin voice, this time turning his unyielding eyes to meet Evan’s.
Evan froze in his gaze, trapped. “What is it? What does it say, this same thing you write once a week?”
Clovis lowered his eyes back to the cutting board. “It is an apology to old friends for what I allowed to happen to them. I write it once a week to them in their native language to remind me of my failing, to remind me of my flaws and the corrections I wish I could have made then. I write it every week, and every week I find some new error in the execution of the work, and I correct those flaws as a meditation on the flaws in the character of the man I once was. But that is a story for another day.” He motioned for Evan to sit. “We are trying to discern who you are, young man, and I have one final question for you.”
Evan sat as the old man placed the two fish onto a rack in the roaring hearth.
“How did it feel to light that fire?” Clovis asked, looking into the flames.
Evan watched the old man hunched over his work on their dinner. “It felt like seeing an old friend.”
Clovis turned to meet Evan’s gaze. “Ironic. I was just feeling the same thing. Welcome back, Evan.”
11
Evan woke to find a hand-carved wooden bowl filled with freshly picked figs sitting on the rustic kitchen table. Eat and join me outside when ready, read the handwritten note in delicate calligraphy. He stepped through the lighthouse’s main door into the bright morning. He walked around the curve of the stone tower and stopped when he caught sight of Clovis on the beach, sword in hand, facing the sun as if in meditation. His first step and aggressive swing of the weapon surprised Evan. He watched the old man begin his exercise and flashed back briefly to when he saw this man work with his sword once before. Evan felt welcome as he watched him this time, like some remembered rift had been repaired.
