Episode 3: For the Book, Chapter 4
"Bienvenue à Reims," said Stone as they stepped out of the hotel next morning. "I would love to give you the guided tour, but since I've never set foot here either, we'll just have to follow one of the hotel's tourist maps."
Cassandra watched him frown down at the map for a minute or two before walking over and turning it round in his hands. "He can map out a pentagram in a crowded school hall, but..."
"Hey, I knew where I was!" Stone retorted. "I was just planning the best route."
"It would help if you told me where we were going," said Cassandra, raising an eyebrow at his protestations.
"You'll see," he told her, raising a smug nose in the air.
"It's the cathedral again, isn't it," she deadpanned.
Stone sighed, grimacing in chagrin. "How'd you work it out?"
"Good with patterns," she stated plainly. "Remember?"
He grumbled wordlessly and handed her the map. "I ain't a city boy anyway."
"Aw, sweetie," crooned Cassie, her voiced dripping with fake sympathy. "Were you trying to work out what side of an office block moss grew on?"
"Hey," he frowned, nudging her with his elbow. "It's green and it grows north, don't matter what on."
"Uh-huh," she smiled and wrapped her arm through his. "This way, lover."
He stopped in his tracks and looked at her.
"What?" Cassie frowned in confusion. "Too much, too soon?"
"No, it's not that," he said, shaking his head, a smile tugging at one corner of his mouth. "It's just, the last time you called me that you were very, very drunk."
"I wasn't aware I had called you that," Cassie blinked.
"Very, very, very drunk," said Jacob, the memory replaying itself in glorious technicolour.
"I also don't recall getting even moderately drunk since we got together," she looked away, searching her usually infallible memory.
"Oh, we weren't together then," he grinned, enjoying the petty revenge for the moss comment that had walked straight into his grasp. He almost laughed out loud as Cassie's eyes, once creased in the struggle of remembrance, shot wide open in embarrassment.
"Please tell me I didn't say or do anything else I need to apologise for," she said. He opened his mouth to say something and she held up her hand to stop him. "Anything I don't already know about, Jacob."
"Well now," he began. She glared. He took hold of the warning hand in his own and brought it to his lips. "Nothing at all, darlin'."
They walked, hand in hand, through the streets of Rheims. Tourist orientated shops and patisseries lined streets with their windows stocked full of keepsakes, cakes, pastries and bags of small pink wafers. A wonderful smell wafted from the inner realms of a Turkish restaurant, mixing with the already present odours of coffee and croissants that emanated from every café. Postcards sat idle on their rotating stands. The murmur of conversation from the customers stopping by for breakfast or early browsing was hushed and confined to the interiors of their respective haunts, avoiding the chill morning air.
"It should be left here, straight on until we reach the tram lines then turn right," said Cassandra, looking around her at the four roads leading away from a fountain that looked like a dandelion ready to start telling the time. She glanced back down the one they had walked up, slowly so her beloved boyfriend could stop and admire all the art deco and art nouveau architecture, and everything else in the temporal mixing pot of Rheims, on the way. She looked round when he didn't answer and caught him trying to see further down a side street by leaning sideways. "Hey, you!" Cassie batted him on the arm. "We'll add it to The List. Come on."
The List was something they had both started individually almost as soon as they worked out they had a wormhole at their beck and call. When fate, friends and the occasional Greek myth had conspired to bring them together, they had soon found out about their respective lists and combined them to make The List. One, ever increasing, tally of places they wanted to visit. Properly. They had scored a few off so far, but not many, and they seemed to be adding more and more as the days went on and the missions came and went. If they continued at this rate, Cassandra extrapolated, they would have to live at least as long as Jenkins to do justice to the whole thing.
Now there was an idea she had never thought would cross her mind.
They reached the tram lines and turned. The side of the cathedral towers rose to meet them in breathtaking beauty. She didn't have to call Stone's attention back to the task in hand as they hurried through the wide street to the cobble stoned square in front of the three main portals. Above them the carved tympana and towers grew with an organic elegance lacking in the perfect symmetry of Paris.
"It has two rose windows," commented Cassandra.
"It's lucky it has any," said Stone. "It took a direct hit in the war, like so much of the city. Half the windows in the apse have been rebuilt and replaced. At first just with plain glass, then later with contemporary stained glass. The process of making stained glass windows has changed so much over the centuries there was really very little point in trying to keep to the same type. Besides, so many gothic cathedrals have windows from so many different eras it would be silly to baulk at adding another. Buildings like these took lifetimes to create. Several lifetimes in some cases. If a master mason managed to land a job building one of these he would be set for life, assuming the general lack of modern health and safety didn't intervene. Chartres had the largest and grandest crypt. Amiens was the last and greatest. Paris was the first and most geometrical. Rheims is where the kings of France were crowned, starting with the Frankish king, Clovis I. There should be a stone in the floor of the nave marking where he was baptised."
"So that's who 'he, and all who followed after him', are," said Cassandra, still gazing up at the myriad of faces looking out from the arches and upper façade of the cathedral. "What's the 'sacred vase' and who is 'Charlotte'?"
Jacob took her hand and led her inside. "Before Clovis, the first king to unite all the Frankish tribes, was baptised and crowned, he waged war on the various parts of what we now know as France. Not all of them, granted, but by the time he was done most of them were under his control. It was the custom then for the soldiers of the winning side to plunder the treasures of the city they had just conquered. Call it a salary bonus. Well, one of the items they pillaged was a great vase, which the bishop of Rheims, Saint Rémi, or Rémigius, begged Clovis to return, even if they returned nothing else. The conqueror agreed to this but, legend has it, the soldier in possession of the vase did not, and he cut it almost fully in half with his battle axe. Later, allegedly, Clovis paid that treatment back on the soldier's head, but not before he had been baptised into the Catholic church and crowned King of France, right here."
Cassandra jerked to a halt, eyes still turned upward as she listened. Stone had stopped about half way down the nave. She looked at him, then down to where he was pointing. There was the stone paving slab with the name of Clovis, and a bit more in French, shining out at her in fresh black paint. She looked back up at him. "And Charlotte?"
"Okay, this you're not going to like so much," he admitted.
"It's not some French queen's corpse or anything gruesome, is it?"
"Afraid not," said Stone. "It's in another tower."
Cassandra groaned this time. "How far up?"
"All the way," he said. "It's the name of one of the two bells in the south tower."
"This guy has something about stairs," she said, "I'm sure of it!"
They made their way back up the nave to the south tower. It was easy enough to gain access, but the climb was a slow one. By the time they got to the top, both Librarians had to sit down and get their breath back. It was a good five minutes later before either of them looked at the two great bells. Still catching up on oxygen, Stone pointed to one of the two bells. Cassandra got up and looked closely at the edge of the great iron masterpiece.
"There's something here, but it's in code," she called back.
Stone pushed himself to his knees and leant over. "What kind of code?"
"Looks like Ogham," mused Cassandra, only half listening. "Here, give me a minute."
Stone watched as his girlfriend, letter by letter, transcribed the coded message into her notepad and handed the resulting output to him. He looked down. He looked back up again.
"I feel like a happy strand of mRNA after delivering my message to the ribosome," she said, grinning down at him. "I've transcribed, now it's your turn to translate."
Stone grumbled and scanned the notepad as Cassandra joined him on the step.
She rested her head on his shoulder and looked down. The words on the notepad were accurate, but they made no sense to her. "Is it Greek?"
"Esperanto," muttered Stone, reading. He scribbled down words, changing a few as he went, then handed the pad back to Cassandra.
"I knew its birthplace before it was born,
I walked the streets of a city unknown,
lost but not yet seen.
Where lovers meet to bind their lives
Or risk their happiness on a single question
There you'll find my final word."
Cassandra looked up from reading the translated poem and stared at the wall opposite. "It's not a cathedral."
"Not this time," agreed Stone, eyes fixed on the stairs tumbling away before him.
"And before you get any ideas," she added, still staring at the wall. "That would be too much too soon."
"Duly noted," he nodded, without looking round.