Contents

       Cover

       Acknowledgements

      I II III IV V

      VI VII VIII IX X

      XI XII XIII XIV XV

      XVI XVII XVIII XIX XX

      XXI XXII XXIII XXIV XXV

      XXVI XXVII XXVIII XXIX XXX

       Other Books by Martine Desjardins

       Copyright Information

      For Serge Larivière

      and in memory of Major Georges-Étienne Milette,

      Chief-Assistant Surgeon,

      Hôpital militaire de Saint-Cloud, 1916–1918

Acknowledgements

      I owe a debt of gratitude to all those who, of their own free will or otherwise, were pressed into answering my endless questions about the Crusades, land registers, cloisters, oblong shields, Solomon’s Seal, meadowlark nests and tapestries: Mireille Desjardins, Denyse Milette, Laurent Busseau and, most particularly, my head archivist Maurice Desjardins.

      Soliman, of all mortals, most adroit in the divination of rebuses and the solving of charades …

      NERVAL, Les nuits de Ramazan

      … and the monstrous cube of Antonia’s Tower held sway over Jerusalem.

      FLAUBERT, Hérodias

I

      IACTA ALEA EST. Let there be no mistake: the game has begun. I can feel it in my fingertips as I roll the dice, and in the pit of my stomach as they skitter across the baize. Each winning cast causes my stones to constrict with excitement. Nine times out of ten, I win. For the last week, luck has been coursing like fresh blood through my veins. My dice cup has become a cornucopia that repays me one-hundredfold all that I might have lost before.

      Around me, the men mutter that I must have been born under a lucky star, or issued from my mother’s womb enveloped in a fetal membrane of good fortune. The poor losers wonder aloud if, perhaps, I have not rubbed the hump of a hunchback or consorted with the hanged. Few are more superstitious than soldiers in wartime. Meanwhile, I prostrate myself at fortune’s feet and there reap the bountiful harvest of her generosity. Yet behind this unhoped-for run of luck, I detect a design greater than luck itself, the intentions of which are, for the moment, unfathomable. With each roll of the dice I feel I am moving across the squares of an immense game-board, whose ultimate course and whose obstacles I cannot distinguish, whose rules I cannot yet grasp. I have no idea where it will all lead. All I can say with any certainty is that it began last Sunday.

      On that afternoon, a series of coincidences had deposited me at Stonehenge. I was to have been on leave in London with my mates, but on the way to the station my shoelace had come undone, my forage cap had blown off, and I had missed the train—by no more than five seconds. The cogwheels of fate mesh with uncanny precision!

      Determined to make the best of a bad lot, I jumped aboard a lorry heading for Salisbury, where I spent an hour looking for a dice cup at an antiquarian’s, who had little to offer, save a goblet covered in petit point. I took my meal in the town, quaffing a pint of beer to sluice down a slice of mutton stewed to the consistency of boot leather, then struck out on foot across the open fields toward the campground.

      There was a briskness in the air, and the wind stung like pins and needles. The hoarfrost that coated the puddles crackled beneath my heels like barley sugar. I was rapidly drawing near the monuments of Stonehenge. Though my battalion had been in training in the nearby countryside for the last four months, I had never set foot there. I might well have kept going had I not caught a glimpse, from the road, of a white-coiffed head making its way between the megaliths. Beneath it I believed I could distinguish the uniform of an army nurse—a cape the colour of a blue jay’s plumage that had won the ladies the nickname of Bluebirds. Well, well! What would an army nurse be doing in these parts? Turning toward her, I hastened my step.

      Seen from afar, the dolmens of Stonehenge resemble a pile of cubes, but from close up, they tell quite a different story. Some stand a good twenty feet tall and must weigh several tons. The megaliths form an enclosure within which stand two concentric circles of smaller menhirs. Except for the stones, the place appeared deserted. Where could the nurse have gone? As I was wondering if she had not simply vanished into thin air, a rustling of fabric made me raise my head. And so I spied her, perched atop a massive, toppled stele. A thought crossed my mind: when the hens go to roost, the storm cannot be far behind.

      “Have you also come to play?”

      Her voice, like the rest of her person, affected me as would some turbulence in the atmosphere. Her face had a changing quality about it, like a sky filled with rapidly scudding clouds. If you did not like its appearance, you could simply wait a few moments for an entirely different impression to occur—which I was not inclined to do. I had no complaint about her face, except that it had begun to make my head spin.

      “Play what?”

      “Dice! They say the stones of Stonehenge form an immense wheel of fortune that can change your luck for the better.”

      So, the lady was a roller of dice. That, at least, would explain the turbulence.

      “Nothing plays upon fortune like fortune itself. It’s a vicious circle.”

      “Even if you’re not superstitious, there’s nothing to lose by trying.”

      She waved her right hand, and with a languid shiver I recognized the familiar rattle of impatient dice. Her other hand was gloved, and she held it across her waist, as though she were paralyzed.

      “Where I come from, women don’t