Hieroglyphic
The envoys from Rome had read the Jesuit interpretation of The Bishop’s Message and came prepared to understand: they arrived at the palace with an escort of twenty-five men. When the signal came, when Von Knepper’s creature wrote the forty-two words dreamed up in Ferney, there was no need to ask for an explanation:
Do not look for the bishop in these hands.
I am in an unmarked grave,
With no purple or scepter,
Because an impostor has taken my place.
The abbot has written my words until now.
This time, however, I speak for myself.
I heard a commotion in the distance and, through the window, saw monks fleeing from the Roman soldiers. Doors that were being ripped open and slammed shut in the distance called out to Signac, the keeper of the keys. My guard understood his duty lay elsewhere, and he was faithful to the end.
Darel paid no attention to what was going on outside but focused solely on the task he had been given. I admired his infinite concentration: not once did he turn his head to look out the window. He was indifferent to it all—and simply wrote.
Down there, in the geometric garden, the keeper of the keys, in bloodied clothes, obliterated all symmetry. Staggering, he battled four men whose daggers had already wounded him. He mortally injured one but lost his weapon in the thrust and very nearly his hand. Just when it seemed he had lost, he pulled out two colossal keys, destined for who knows what unimaginable doors. True to their purpose, they opened two skulls. The only foe left standing leaped on the giant, who tripped over one of the wounded and fell into the black pond.
Signac tried to remove the weight that was pulling him down, but the keys never ended: once he had undipped the keys to the main doors, there were still those to the cellar, not to mention the great doors to the garden, the chapel, the secret chambers, the museum, the catacombs, the calligraphy hall, Darel’s office. It may have been a gust of wind that blew from one end of the palace to the other, but the moment Signac hit bottom I heard distant doors slam in what sounded like a funereal salute. A school of disconcerted sturgeon swam in circles above the fallen giant.
Darel was prepared to discover my lie but, inspired as it was by the truth, never saw the final stroke coming: my quill leaped from the page and plunged into his neck. I stood prepared for his response, but he never even looked at me. Darel knew how to recognize the stroke of a pen; he knew this was the last word. He covered his wound with a white hand that was soon red and walked to his desk. With a tremor that would surely have mortified him, he drew the same symbol he had earlier drawn with a steady hand on my face.
In the years that followed, every time I looked in a mirror, I envied the hand that had written that symbol. At the time it seemed to have no meaning. Whenever I suffered from insomnia, I would copy it over and over until I was sure I was about to solve the mystery, but then I would fall asleep.
Only years later, here in this new land, did I discover its meaning in an old newspaper, when the truth about Egyptian hieroglyphics came to light: it was the hieroglyph for the god Thoth, who invented writing. But how could Darel have known that? It was then I remembered the story I’d heard at Vidors’ School: the story of an ancient tradition of scribes that had continued uninterrupted across continents and through catastrophes.
Sometimes, when I look at my face by the light of the moon in a small, broken mirror that hangs on my wall, I tell myself that Darel marked me so I would know something grand and secret ended with me.