Monk's Maze

Chapter 3-4

She rubbed her finger across the first and like a genie popping out of a bottle, the words faded away and more writing appeared. So neat and orderly it could only have been placed there by a machine. Just like the books from before The Pulse.

March 5th, 2012, upon Iona

These are the original thirty folios that I uncovered at the monastery on Iona. They appear to indeed be the missing folios from the Book of Kells following the theft of that book in 1007. When the manuscript was recovered from a ditch some eighty days later, they were not returned to Kells Monastery. A careful match was made and indeed the inks and paper are of the same age and spectrographic content.

Ten of the folios are obviously portions torn from the gospels. The treasure is the remaining twenty sheets. The illustrations so famed in the general pages are totally absent in these pages. Each line of Latin was scribed in an elder hand, or perhaps copied in haste though I think not. I think someone was copying a significantly older document, perhaps even Columba himself scribed these.

A note I found in the same chest as these pages indicate that the purpose of the theft of the book in 1007 was to recover these pages rather than the famed golden cover. The original thief, a Brother Andrus, was waylaid by highway robbers who took the gilded and bejeweled cover before casting the treasure of the words aside. Being left for dead, the good brother, too weak to move the complete book, tore the crucial twenty folios free plus ten to spare and left the balance to be found by others. That it rested in a roadside ditch for ‘twenty days and two months’ is no fault of his.

Whereas the balance of the Book of Kells is a mundane, albeit beautifully executed, copy of the four gospels and some auxiliary though equally mundane lists of names, the additional pages, as you will see are quite different.

I found these pages during my work with the Community of Iona in their effort to restore the abbey. It was buried in the center of the cloister, beneath the bronze Lipchitz sculpture of modern era. The sculpture was tilting due to the decay and compression of the buried chest holding these folios.

RB

Meghan flipped the page over, but there was no more writing on the back. At the end of the text were repeated the squares with the words: Folios, Translation, Interpretation.

The Community of Iona, later the Order of Iona. Every school child knew the history of the destroyers of the Earth. The ones who had sent The Pulse that destroyed all electrics on the planet.

April 15th, 2072. The day the world had died.

Colin insisted it was not The Order’s doing, but historians told otherwise. There was perhaps something in these pages that gave The Order the power to destroy a civilization.

The signature. RB.

Meghan jerked to her feet before she could stop herself. Those initials must be Robert Brude. The leader of The Order who had twisted world politics to his own advantage before leading his followers off the planet. The man who had killed the world.

The day of their departure, vehicles ground to a halt or fell from the skies if stories were to be believed. No machines worked. Electric communications died, the very air became silent. People with medical implants, which numbered in the millions, had fallen as if struck down in mid-stride.

Over time, irrigated fields reverted to dusty wastelands. And large cities disintegrated into chaos and starvation before they burned. It was then the real dying began.

Meghan was crouched behind the woodbin by the stove with no memory of crawling there. She’d spent much of her first two weeks in this little nook, as she suspected many Watchers had over the centuries. It took twice a dozen minutes before her revulsion was overruled by her curiosity and she returned to the table. That much time again before she could sit.

Ready to leap aside if necessary, she slid her fingers across the word Folios. An image rippled onto the page. An illustration of a great sun filled the page. Small petals pressed outward to a circle encompassing the sun like a flower. She recognized it as the central symbol on St. Martin’s cross except it was vibrant with color. The sun was a vivid yellow and the petals were brown, light blue, red, and dark blue in succession. She puzzled over it until she recalled Colin’s statement at the base of the cross, “earth, air, fire, and water.” She wanted to feel the hot/cold stone again but when her finger touched the page, another image rippled into place.

Dense writing, heavily vertical in stroke filed the page from edge to edge. It was in some script that looked as if a great fount of black blood had been unleashed by a monk who had dipped his quill deep into the mortal pool and slashed it in broad vertical runes down the vellum. Though she could identify several of the letters, she could make no sense of it. Only the slightest red ornamentation along the outer edge contained the words from spilling off the page. Tapping the paper again made more writing appear. She quickly tapped through the pages, accidentally bypassing an image near the end. Not knowing how to reverse, she had to tap through the whole series from the beginning once more.

The third page from the end was an elaborate drawing of a maze. Dozens of choices and turnings snarled it into a mass of confusion. The meaning of “labyrinth” must have changed through the ages, for a labyrinth was a single path with no junctions, used for contemplation. A maze had dozens of turnings, false leads, and choices. This map was definitely a confusion of lines.

It was badly water damaged as several of the other pages had been, but most of the details could be made out. She tried to trace the course with her finger, but the page changed and in frustration she had to tap through the twenty pages for a third time. When it came back around, she stopped and sat on her hands. She leaned in, her hair slipping off either shoulder and sliding forward like curtains isolating her in the world of the maze. Colin slept on and she studied a new world beneath the flickering oil light radiating from the lamp.

No matter how she tried to go past the water spots, turning right or left or going straight, it never worked out. She always ended up in a dead end.

She squinted at the few words that were scattered on the page, clues perhaps. But she could still make no sense of the language. Then she spotted the word “translation” at the bottom of the page. When she pressed it, the water damage and the wandering pathways remained intact, but the words shifted to English.

Wind. Donn’s Lair. Branwen’s Hair. The Harp of Angus.

She touched the phrase “Harp of Angus” and a yellow square formed beside the words. Within its bounds there were more words.

Angus is assumed to be Angus Mac Og, the Irish God of youth, love and beauty. His harp made irresistible music. Folio 13 notes that a simple ascending scale of majors opens a decision threshold at this stage of the Marriage Set.

RB

She touched the yellow square and it disappeared along with its words as if it never existed. She left her finger where it had come to rest upon a smear which blurred two walls of a straight passage. A blue circle shimmered to the surface before she could remove her finger.

The damage to the drawing of the third hall after the 5th turning of the Heritage Path is considered insignificant. The walls shimmer at this juncture, but that was discounted by Columba and I am forced to concur.

RB

Meghan pressed the blue circle again and it cleared from the page. “RB” could only be the master of The Order, Robert Brude once again. “Heritage Path.” “Decision threshold to Marriage Set.” Was it possible that the maze on Iona could link to the real world?

And the damage. Something about Brude’s explanation didn’t feel . . . right. That was ridiculous but she had no better word for it. She inspected the smudges more closely. What if they weren’t water spots?