The Lake of Learning (Cassiopeia Vitt 3)

La Vertat.

The Truth.

Which meant nothing to him. It carried no value. No importance. No significance. The whole thing heretical. All that mattered was that it was important to Simone. She’d spent her life searching for it.

And now it lay in reach.

But she would not have it.

Simone followed the trail through a tangled mass of leaves and shrubs. The sun slow-baked the ground, casting hard-edged shadows, coating their arms and faces in a thin coat of perspiration. Surely the trail was popular with hikers, but not today. She and Vitt were alone.

Or were they?

Could Roland be out there? Watching? She could not underestimate his resentment. Not this time. That was why she’d brought her gun, safely tucked in her backpack, ready, just in case. She would not be led to slaughter like her ancestors.

Far from that, in fact.

They kept walking, deviating from the path, heading for the valley’s northwest corner. What had once surely been a steep slope, elevating land from water, had been shaved down to a slope that descended on all sides from a small wooded promontory. They climbed the incline of soft soil and scree and crested the lip of the rock shelf. The rhythmic tapping of a woodpecker greeted their arrival. Birch, pine, and scrub were thickly sown across the shelf.

“Let’s spread out and see what there is to find,” Simone said.

They both dropped their backpacks and headed off in separate directions. Five minutes later she spotted a dove carved at the base of a gray boulder, its body and wings visible in the stone’s discoloration. Time had eroded most of it away, but there was enough to see one thing.

The image had been prepared upside down.

She was about to call out when Vitt yelled, “I have something.”

She hustled over and saw another inverted dove at the base of another boulder.

“These are carved all over this region,” she told Vitt. “But none are upside down. And if you were not privy to what we know, that anomaly would not be important.” She gently traced the image on the gray rock face. “We have two landmarks.”

And she told Vitt about the other.

They were close. She could feel it. The Cathars had been a simple people, possessed of simple thoughts. The whole idea of their religion was to keep it simple. So this quest would not be complicated.

“I’d say my dove and yours are about twenty meters apart,” Simone noted. “Mark this with something we can see, and I’ll go do the same.”

She hustled back and laid a branch from the ground atop the boulder. Then she fanned out and, a few minutes later, found another chunk of rock with another upside-down dove down near its base partially buried in the ground.

She’d almost missed it.

Vitt had headed off in the opposite direction. She played a hunch and called out, telling her to explore to the right of her initial find. She watched as Vitt followed the instruction.

“Come about parallel to me,” she said. “But stay in a line off the first dove you found.”

Vitt seemed to adjust her course. If she was right, there should be another marker near where her companion was looking.

“I have it,” Vitt called out.

“Mark it where I can see it.”

Vitt did and she tagged her boulder too. A quick look through the trees showed that the four doves formed a rough square, about twenty meters long on each side.

“Stay where you are,” she said to Vitt.

And she hustled back to the first dove she’d found.

Now Vitt stood diagonal to her.

“Walk to me,” she called out.

She did the same, avoiding some of the underbrush and trees, but staying in a relatively straight line to Vitt.

The two women met.

“You think the four markers lead to something in the center?” Vitt asked.

“I do. We need to be close to the line formed by the other two markers.”

They readjusted their meeting spot, trying to intersect that imaginary line.

“This is it,” Vitt said. “Or as close as we can get without string.”

“Arnaut had no string.”

She stared down at the ground. Hard. Solid. A layer of scree and soil above a rock base. Together they cleared off the surface with their boots. Vitt hustled back to where their backpacks were located and returned with them, finding a collapsible shovel and starting to scrape away.

Then she saw it.

A notch in the stone, extending in both directions along a roughly straight line. Not deep. But there. And noticeable. Vitt stopped her efforts and concentrated on the line, using the shovel blade to scrape it clean and reveal more.

A corner came into view.

She stared at Vitt and said, “That’s not natural.”

“No, it’s not.”

Chapter 19

Beláncourt approached the promontory from the opposite side that Simone and Vitt had used. The sun was slowly reaching its full burning height. He climbed the incline slow and careful, making no noise and finding cover as soon as he reached the top. He could see the two women as they moved through the trees and brush, hearing the excitement in their voices. Then he’d listened to digging and the shrill sound of a metal blade sliding across hard rock. He decided not to tempt fate and approach any closer. Instead, he’d wait to see what happened. He had no direct line of sight on Simone or Vitt, but they were in front of him, about fifty meters away, among the foliage.

He recalled listening to Simone years ago talk about the mythical Lake of Learning. She’d always believed that the Cathar who escaped Montségur was a messenger of God and that divine providence had guarded his every move. Proof of that conclusion was the fact that what he’d hidden away had remained hidden for eight centuries. Of course, few had ever really gone in search of it, and this whole place, for the past sixty years, had been a protected national park. A bit difficult to engage in a full-scale treasure hunting expedition. Yet Simone and Vitt were here, among the mountains and trees, zeroed in on one particular spot. Why? Had the Book of Hours truly revealed the Path to Light? Was the whole thing real?

He hoped so.

Because he’d derive no greater pleasure than in depriving Simone of its joy.

Cassiopeia stared at what her shovel had revealed.

An indentation in the rock floor that formed an oblong-shaped square, about a meter wide on each side. She stamped her boot atop its center. Nothing moved. She tapped it with her shovel. No hollow sound. The indentation itself had long filled in and was more a shallow u-shaped groove in the rock than a true seam.

The Cathar version of X marks the spot?

“Is it a way down?” Simone asked.

An excellent question.

“This was an island. Once a big limestone rock sticking out of a lake.” She glanced around at the mount. “It’s possible that the way to go is down.”

She’d anticipated the contingency that whatever they were after might be buried, particularly in a cave, as southern France was littered with them.

“Let’s find out.”

Inside her backpack Cassiopeia found the blasting caps she’d brought. At the castle site they were sometimes used to loosen stone at the quarry, one of the few violations of the only-tools-and-materials-from-the-past rule. She returned and used the shovel to chip away four small holes at the corners of the indentation. The caps came with their own detonators that were radio controlled. Not overly powerful explosives, but concentrated and quite effective. She slipped a cap into each hole and filled in the cavities with rock and soil.

“Let’s get back,” she said.

And they retreated twenty meters away, seeking cover behind a large boulder. She activated the transmitter and hoped there was nobody nearby to hear anything, especially one of the park rangers.

She pressed the button.

Beláncourt Felt the rock quake under his feet and debris flew out in every direction. He’d wondered what Vitt

had been doing with all the digging.

Now he knew.

It took a few moments for the dust to settle. He was still on the incline, near the crest, safe behind a cluster of rock, able to see what was happening. Vitt and Simone flitted in and out among the trees. He calmed his breathing, listened beyond his adrenaline, and approached where the explosion had occurred.

What was happening?

Cassiopeia stared in astonishment at the hole in the ground.

The blasting caps had shattered the stone, which was apparently some sort of plug over an underground cavity, revealing a black yaw about three quarters of a meter in diameter. She bent down, lifted a small chunk of rock, and dropped it into the hole. It hit the ground a few seconds later.

“That’s not all that deep,” she said. “I brought rope.”

She found a tight coil of thick nylon and tied one end to the nearest tree. She then tossed the rest into the hole. She’d brought along two flashlights.

“Let me go first,” Simone said.

She was going to argue, but decided it would not do any good, so she simply nodded. Before Simone stepped into the hole, she shined her flashlight down. The bottom appeared about four meters below.

Simone slipped on a pair of thick leather gloves.