Chapter 37 Rhys
Rhys
Rhys made a mental note that people in the future use single letters to communicate, like a secret code. He wondered what o-m-g meant but knew now was not the time to ask or tell her how adorable she was when she was huffing in irritation.
“What are you going to say to her?” He increased his pace to keep up as Magellan marched determinedly through a motley crew of scary-looking knights and medieval chaps to reach the abbey’s tents.
He tried not to focus on the grizzly men walking about.
He had yet to buy a sword but would do so right after meeting the musical nun.
“More like what will you say. Not everyone speaks Latin.” Magellan nudged his side with her elbow, and he could feel his chest puffing up with pride.
Ridiculous though it was. Never had he thought his Latin studies would be put to so much use.
Even though finding the song was Magellan’s mission, he wanted to be useful to her.
He still needed to translate the rest of the diary, which he planned to do later today.
She was heading toward the tent, pulling him by the sleeve and speaking quickly. “Tell her I’m a musician from a faraway land, and I heard of her music. Tell her I would like to present the gift of a song.”
Rhys focused on the matter at hand. He agreed that was the best course as far as introductions went and said as much to the woman hovering at the tent’s opening.
Was she a nun too? All the women at the camp looked nothing like nuns.
They were dressed in fine silk robes with fur trim and silver belts.
Their long hair was adorned with flowers for the fair.
The woman at the tent’s opening looked to Magellan and her vielle with a bright smile and ushered them inside.
The interior was roomy but modest, with an assortment of straw beds and simple furniture the women most likely had transported by cart.
In the back of the tent an elderly woman sat at a small table, her hand moving with incredible speed as she wrote on parchment. She looked small and frail but had a quiet strength about her.
The woman who’d escorted them went to her and bent over, speaking softly. The elder woman stopped writing and turned to them. Rhys felt Magellan stand up taller, as if she were meeting a queen, and Rhys knew they’d found Hildegard of Bingen.
The woman making introductions spoke in Latin so Rhys could understand. Hildegard kept her eyes trained on them both and answered with a soft voice.
As Rhys translated for Magellan, his eyebrows rose. “She says she had a dream you would come. She has a song for you too.”
Magellan had told him the legend, how the woman was supposedly gifted with the ability to see the future. Had Hildegard foreseen their arrival?
She beckoned Magellan forward, and Magellan joined her at the table.
Wasting no time, Magellan tucked the vielle under her chin and took a deep breath.
Her eyes darted to the tent’s opening to outside, and a glimmer of fear crossed her face.
Her apprehension made Rhys apprehensive.
He’d tried to ease her worry earlier about what came after she possessed the song.
Had he been wrong to do so? They would hurry to the standing stone first thing in the morning.
It’s not as if he wanted to stay in 1165 any longer than necessary, but they couldn’t just traipse around in the dark.
That would surely lead to their demise. Plus, they had no lantern or compass.
Returning to the inn and locking themselves in the room was the best plan.
He was so busy reassuring himself that when Magellan started to play, it startled him out of his thoughts. She was playing the same music he had heard her play with Fanny Mendelssohn.
The melody brought gooseflesh to his arms, and he felt a deep sense of peace descend over his body. The song was moving and powerful . . . and yet still a part of his intellect wondered, Could this song truly save the world?
The music didn’t strike him as particularly “all-empowering” to produce magical effects or keep the North and South Poles intact. Still, he watched Hildegard listen to Magellan with an intent gaze. Then the woman placed a harpsichord-like instrument on her lap and began to play too.
Magellan knelt beside her, intently listening and watching Hildegard, as if trying to memorize every note.
The two women didn’t seem to need words to communicate with each other.
After the woman was finished, Magellan took the harpsicord from her, sat down in the opposite chair, and miraculously played Hildegard’s part of the song perfectly from memory.
When she finished, the nun nodded and laid her hands on Magellan’s and said a blessing.
Then Magellan stood, looking a bit dazed.
“Is that it?” Rhys asked her gently. “You . . . heard what you needed to?”
Magellan nodded, a faraway look in her eyes, as if she were still hearing the song. “Yes, we can go now.”
To Rhys it all felt a bit anticlimactic. That was all? They were done?
They bowed to the nuns and were shown outside again. The sunlight was blinding in comparison to the shadow-laced intimacy inside the tent. Rhys looked out to the swarming market. He wasn’t sure if it was his imagination, but people were staring at them—or more like glaring.
The world around them suddenly felt incredibly and undeniably wrong.
“Should we head to the inn?” Rhys took her hand protectively in his, again cursing himself for not buying a sword yet. People were staring at them with a clear malice as if they knew he and Magellan did not belong in their time.
A band of those bloodthirsty knights from before were now studying Magellan with a wild lust in their eyes. Bloodlust. One of the men said something to the others, and they started making their way toward her across the field.
“Rhys.” Her voice shook with panic. She had seen them too. “Do you hear that? It’s here. It found us.” She tried plugging her ears and looked to be in pain.
All he could hear was the racing of his heart.
“Now I understand what you meant about plan B.” He did an about-face and dragged her quickly toward the large crowd gathering for a musical performance on the other side of the field.
A group of merry musicians had banded together to play.
One of them was the instrument maker who had sold them the vielle.
The man saw Magellan join the audience and motioned for her to come play with them.
Rhys led her toward him. “Get inside their circle. Play and maneuver your way to the church over there. I’ll go around.” She would be safer surrounded by people. Right now, they were deep in the crowd, and he could no longer see the knights.
“We should stick together,” she said and circled about in terror. It was clear she was hearing something he couldn’t.
“I’ll follow in the crowd,” he urged her. “Meet me at the church. Hurry.”
She nodded and stepped into the circle. In one fluid motion she brought the vielle to her chin and joined the song.
Only she was playing harder and faster than anyone, as if she were dueling with a force no one else could see or hear.
In that moment she was a wielder of music, a force to be reckoned with.
Rhys couldn’t help but stop for a moment to watch her in wonder. People began clapping, not understanding what they were witnessing.
He was so riveted, the snap of the satchel strap on his shoulder took him by surprise. He whirled around in shock to find the small thief running away.
A boy had cut the satchel with a knife.
“Stop!” Rhys called out, chasing after him.
Everything they had was in that bag. All their possessions. His purse. Their food. Her medicines.
The diary.
He ran harder, keeping sight of the boy who was about to enter the market’s maze, where Rhys would surely lose him. He heard Magellan calling to him from behind, but he didn’t dare stop. Stretching his legs farther, he leapt and grabbed onto the boy’s shirt.
What he was not expecting was the boy’s swift turn and the dagger he plunged into his chest.
The abrupt attack froze Rhys in his tracks. In one stark moment he saw the boy’s vicious grin, the evil in his eyes. Then the boy wrenched the knife out of him and ran off. Rhys fell to his knees.
He was too shocked to call out as he watched the boy disappear into the market with the satchel. The world began to sway in his sights. A moment later Magellan was beside him, her hands all over him. She was crying and calling his name.
His vision began to blur. “He took the diary. I couldn’t get it back.”
“I don’t care about the diary!” she said, hysterical, and called out for help.
“No! Don’t attract attention. The knights.” He had to get her away from the knights.
Suddenly his eyes were riveted to the ground. Dark shadows were approaching like an unnatural fog as the sounds around him became muted. He could no longer hear the world.
“What is that?” he whispered, unable to believe his eyes. His voice sounded underwater to his ears. Behind the moving shadows, the band of knights came toward them with their eyes on Magellan as if she was the prize.
She gripped him in desperation and forced him to rise to his feet with a strength he didn’t know she possessed. “Run!”
His body shivering with shock, he grabbed Magellan’s vielle. She would need it. Together they stumbled to the church.
She yelled again, “Run!”
The crazed knights were almost upon them.
He and Magellan ran past the oak tree at the church doors.
The tree must have marked the hallowed ground like a sentry, because the knights would not cross it.
They stood screaming behind its trunk like demons as shadows writhed around them.
The sight was paralyzing. To Rhys they looked like a visage straight out of Dante’s Inferno and the Circles of Hell.
He forced himself to turn away and keep going.
Inside the church was empty. He was halfway to the altar when his body could go no further. Crumbling onto the stone floor, he lay down.
Magellan bent over him. She was framed by the vaulted ceiling of the basilica like a beautiful angel, weeping and begging him to stay with her. The lights around her began to dim as his vision failed.
His thoughts fading, the Arabic word ya’aburnee faintly floated across his mind, and he thought how now he understood its meaning: You bury me. He would die and she would live, as it should be, because he could not live without her.
“Go,” he begged her. “Play and go. You must.”
“I’m never leaving you. Where you go, I go.
Remember?” She straddled her legs on either side of his waist to secure him to her.
“You made me a promise, Rhys Sherwood. Do you hear me? You will not die!” She raised the vielle to her neck and played a long, powerful chord.
The lone note sounded like a wail in the silence.
As she played on, Rhys looked up to see light surrounding her, the glow from the ring on her hand beyond beautiful.
The whole space was transforming into a brilliant prism, like a star being born.
Bathed in ethereal light, his mind and body infused with peace; he thought surely this was death.
He closed his eyes and listened, flying away on the wings of Magellan’s music to somewhere else.